#Stop trying to be twee and do something functionally useful

[nikkisticki]

Hey @staff instead of being stupid little faggots and making jabs at twitter you could actually fix your website or stop with the insane porn censor or stop considering trans women existing to be porn or handle your serious terf problem or handle your serious Qanon problem or handle your serious extremist problem or improve your website without making it functionally worse or actually listen to your users

Or you can keep being cute until the website explodes because you're too preoccupied with stupid shitty changes to realize you're one wrong move from losing your userbase

[antoni-anxiety]

HE HATH LITHP (^///^)

okay so for context, i wrote this in the midst of february at like 2am, please ple a s e, tell me if you wanna see the conversation i had at the bottom of the document with my co-writer @woffleinthebasement

He hath lithp.

Philza’s POV- 3RD PERSON

Phil had been living with Techno for quite some time now, so of course he knew about his friend's regression. However, he had yet to experience taking care of his younger friend; Techno had previously, reluctantly, agreed to having Phil take care of him if he ever regressed. This seemed to come in handy when Techno was having an especially difficult day dealing with his voices. Phil came back to their small cottage after cutting down some trees for a barn; they decided they could use some animals near the house, it would be easier. Phil’s intentions of relaxing next to a fire were quickly interrupted by a soft sniffling coming from Techno’s room.

Techno’s POV- 3RD PERSON

The voices were being absolutely intolerable today, so much that Techno could barely function. He was sat upright in his bed, trying his best not to regress on the spot; his mind was so exhausted from all the nagging that came from the voices, he just needed something to help reduce the stress, and his only safe coping mechanism was, unfortunately, this. The more he tried to stop himself from getting smaller, the more his mind got foggier. It was safe to say that within the first 10 minutes of this behaviour, Techno was deep in his headspace. The boy couldn’t help but start crying, he was in babyspace and the voices weren’t calming down one bit, the experience was terrifying to Techno, you couldn’t blame him. His eyes shot up as he saw his bedroom door slowly open; the only thing on his mind now, other than the voices, was making himself look presentable, however, being in such a young headspace, that was pretty difficult to do. He slightly calmed when he saw that the person before him was Phil, but he was still embarrassed, this would be the first time that his friend had seen him regressed, and ,hopefully, took care of him.

Philza’s POV- 3RD PERSON

Phil entered the room calmly as to not worry his ,very clearly, regressed friend. As much as he wanted to get right to fixing the issue, he couldn’t help but stare in utter awe at how adorable Techno looked. Shaking his thoughts off, Phil warily made his way to sit next to Techno and started rubbing his back which seemed to help the younger. Once Phil deemed Techno calm enough, he asked him how old he was feeling, just to get a grip of how he’d have to treat Techno. Techno, adorably, replied with ‘ ‘m twee’ as he held up two fingers. Phil just couldn’t help but chuckle to himself at the youngers actions, and that was when he noticed what he heard, and audibly gasped. ‘You have a lisp!’. Techno shyly nodded and hid his adorable blushing face in his sleeves. Phil sat the boy on his lap and watched as he played with his fingers, his heart practically skipped a beat when Techno started counting on his fingers, ‘ one, two, twee, fouw, faib, thith, thebin, eigh, nwain, tin’. Phil hugged Techno with as much force as he could, ‘I love you so much Techie you’re adorable.’. Techno, once again blushed and tried to hide his face but Phil lifted his chin and..

BOOP!

Techno felt a finger smush against his snout and it was like a button, it made him giggle for minutes on end, especially when Phil started tickling his sides. The sight was adorable to see, just a father-like guy helping his upset friend.

BONUS!!

Techno awoke to a sweet smell coming from their kitchen, Phil was probably making pancakes again. Techno stumbled out of his room to see Phil, infact, in their kitchen, making..waffles. Well darn he was close, when Techno yawned was finally when he noticed what he was wearing, an oversized hoodie and sweats, that only meant one thing, he must've regressed. Blush covered his cheeks as he realised that Phil must have been there too. ‘Uh.. hey Phil O-o’, Techno awkwardly said, to which Phil replied with ‘Oh hey Techno mate, how are you?’. Techno said that he was fine and decided that he should ask about what was bothering him in that moment. ‘Hey Phil uh.. So last night was I-’, Phil cut him off with a nod and a smile on his face. ‘So you know about my l-’, he said, to which Phil responded the same way. Techno sighed as he prayed that Phil wouldn’t tease him about it in the future; Phil was a good guy but, you can never know. Phil just patted his head in response and assured him that it was okay.

IM ACTUALLY SO PROUD OF THIS FIC LMAO

[aion-rsa]

What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

With an announcement from collectible maker VeVe, the world was introduced to the first officially licensed DC NFTs. “What is VeVe?” you might ask. Or possibly “What is an NFT?” 

Excellent questions, friends! We will do our absolute best to explain them in clear, concise terms to you right now. 

Here are simple answers to complicated questions: NFTs are ecologically devastating vaporware created to part very dumb, very wealthy collectors from their money, made by stoned libertarian math nerds trying to prove a point they think is profound but is actually just very banal. Veve is no different than any other secondary huckster that springs up around a particularly successful snake oil economy.

As for why DC is getting in bed with them, it’s hard to know if the company is trying to just be cutting edge or if it’s because AT&T took on a shitload of debt buying Warner, and like anybody with creditors breathing down their neck, they need to make several quick bucks or else. 

THE NEXT EVOLUTION IN COMICS HUCKSTERISM

Two full decades after Metallica teamed up with record labels to make sure we didn’t own anything we purchased digitally, a group of rejected Captain Planet villains came up with a workaround: NFTs.

NFTs use blockchain, a distributed AI accountant that requires ENORMOUS amounts of processing power to work properly, to assign certificates of ownership and record transactions. Accepting the pitch behind blockchain technology requires one to step back to an absurdly abstract level, then a zoom back into the extremely micro. 

Every transaction between two people is built around trust: I trust that you are giving me the thing I’m paying for, while we both trust that the currency I’m handing you has a (relatively) absolute value which will allow it to be traded for other things. Blockchain purports to eliminate that trust: it uses a distributed ledger that anyone can see and confirm to record our transaction; it uses an algorithm to make sure every copy of the ledger is the same; and it assigns tokens to each transaction that can be given a value. 

NFTs add in an absurd additional abstraction: ownership of digital media. I have always had the ability to, for example, produce an animated reaction gif from a television show and sell that animated reaction gif to you for a fixed sum of money. You would be an idiot for purchasing that reaction gif for several reasons: anyone else could make the exact same gif and you could find it in iMessage’s search engine, for one. But nothing in the past has ever prevented this transaction from occurring. 

The “innovation” around NFTs is that it uses blockchain technology to “prove” “ownership” and “authenticity,” a sentence that is so heavily caveated that to express it correctly in writing makes the writer look like a conspiracy theorist. The NFT assigns a ledger value to the piece of digital artwork, and then that ledger value is what is sold between parties. It is a non-fungible token – unlike Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, the idea is these art pieces’ tokens’ inherent value doesn’t change (hence the non-fungible), while cryptocurrency is a token whose value is relative to other less imaginary currency. 

This has led to some frankly embarrassing sales online. Jack Dorsey, the vacuous and bizarre founder of Twitter, is auctioning off his first tweet, something that already happened, that you can find with one simple Google search, for millions of dollars. Beeple, an artist the internet assures me is real, auctioned off a digital JPEG collage of all their previous works for $69 million. Jose Delgo, a comics artist from the ‘70s that very few people remembered until this happened, has made almost $2 million selling NFTs of his own artwork, spurring DC to email freelancers to remind them that they should not be using DC characters to try and skate atop this obvious bubble. Not because of the catastrophic environmental impacts caused by the blockchain algorithm, mind you. No, it was because AT&T needed to get some of that sweet, sweet tulip money.

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS MOSTLY POOR PEOPLE

Joanie Lemercier, a French artist and climate activist, has sold six NFT pieces so far. The act of accounting for those sales – assigning a token, then transferring ownership of that token from Lemercier to the purchaser – was 8.7 megawatt hours of energy. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire energy consumption of his studio for two entire years. 

The algorithm used for NFTs, like the one used for Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency, and all blockchain transactions, requires computers perform a certain volume of complex activity to access the ledger. That’s how it prevents fraudulent transactions – by making the barrier to writable access so high that it’s functionally impossible. 

Of course, as demand for these transactions increases, so too does the computing power needed to record them. Hence the massive power consumption from Lemercier’s sale. Bitcoin transactions, especially since Elon Musk invested heavily in them to drive up their price (presumably the “pump” part of “pump and dump”), now use more energy annually than the entire country of Argentina. 

Here’s the catch: in a perfectly green, zero emission energy environment, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. Unfortunately, as anyone who has gone outside in the past 18 months has noticed, we’re not quite there yet. And while adding another Argentina to global power load isn’t the same as adding another China, it is still a significant drain on existing grids, and if it’s not timed and sited right, it’s using very dirty power (it’s fairly complicated, but the short version is electricity generation generally gets dirtier as demand increases).

So when Grimes auctions off a certificate of creation for her digital artwork, she’s triggering a set of computer actions that put a massive stress on the power grid that churns out oodles of negative environmental consequences, which according to study after study fall disproportionately on poor people and people of color. 

Or! Instead of auctioning off something that clearly doesn’t exist, maybe she’s just using fracked natural gas as laundry detergent for mafia cash.

DIGITAL MONEY LAUNDROMAT

Let’s say I was a certain very sadistic, very fictional, black mask wearing crime lord of an American city and I have $1 million in cash lying around that I made from my operation’s drug business. If I suddenly bought a house with that million dollars, the authorities would notice that large transaction (probably through transaction reporting from the bank handling the sale, or the property exchange paperwork that runs through City Hall) and start sniffing around to find out where that money came from. 

The same goes if I were to purchase IRL fine art through an auction house. The auction house would ask questions about where that money came from, and if it didn’t like what it found, it would report it to the authorities. Same for buying cars, or businesses, or lots of other real life transactions. 

Now replace bank, city hall, and auction house with “a bunch of computers playing tic tac toe against each other on a 1025 square board” and try and guess where the reporting comes in. We don’t have to wait for an answer, that reporting doesn’t exist. 

NFT transactions are the perfect confluence of the shadiness of art dealing with the shadiness of off-book dark web money-moving. They’re not all money laundering, but they are easy enough to use as money laundering that the authorities are getting concerned. 

PRECARITY, PANDEMICS, AND COMICS ART

So why are comics people doing this? To start with, we mean actual people, and not people in the legal sense of the word (corporations).

It’s not hard to see the eye popping amounts of money changing hands and understand why at least some of them are getting involved. But it’s equally easy to look at the economics of the pandemic era of comics creation and at least sympathize with the pull. Comic page rates have been largely stagnant since the 1980s – penciler page rates in recent years are actually lower than the modest demands made by creators during the abortive effort to unionize in the 1970s.

With that money being so limited, most artists relied on the sale of original art, sketches, and sales at conventions to help make ends meet. So the last year has been exceptionally tough on them. Add to that the trend towards digital art, where there’s no actual physical page produced for the comic, and it’s not hard to imagine a hard up artist, one year into not seeing another living soul except for when the grocery clerk brings a bag of food out to their car, seeing someone coming along waving a conservative five figures at them and not explaining the extremely convoluted yet catastrophic environmental impact of the proces, saying yes to the quick cash.

To their credit, many comics creators are repulsed by the idea. Several have expressed serious concerns with NFTs on Twitter, with Doomsday Clock artist Gary Frank expressing “bewilderment” at the idea of his art being used to sell one of these things, and Marsha Cooke, widow of New Frontier great Darwyn Cooke and manager of his estate, going so far as to ask DC to stop using his art in them. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Hopefully the companies involved (or thinking of getting involved) with NFTs listen to their creatives. Nothing more honors the spirit of Batman than using his image to help give a pallet of Bratva money a quick scrub. 

The post What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2P393DK

[stompsite]

Autopsy: Mass Effect Andromeda

Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them “good boy” and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyone’s a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and you’ve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.

Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where you’re photographing what already exists, or a book, where you only have to use words to make things happen, a game requires loads of people to work extremely hard to build an entire reality. As a developer, you have to create spaces. You have to create physics. You have to control lighting. When two objects touch each other, you, the developer, have to ensure that they don’t simply clip through each other. As a developer, you might slave away for years of your life, working impossible hours alongside dozens, even hundreds, of other people, to ship an entire hand-crafted universe.

Games are places you get lost in, and places you call home. Only in games can you travel places, talk to people, and live the impossible. It’s why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. It’s why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel you’ve been waiting years for. It’s why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. It’s why you part with your hard-earned cash. You want to go there. You want to live that. You want to experience something new.

Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad dog, and I hate that I have to say that. Hundreds of people  put five years of their lives into Andromeda, but the end result was a disappointment. Due to a lot of complicating factors, they weren’t able to make the game they wanted to make. There’s a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when you’re eating ramen every day in college, you want an escape. You save up. You budget. If the game is bad, you have no recourse. Good reviews don’t necessarily mean you’re happy with what you got; after all, there’s often a big disconnect between reviewer tastes and player interests.

So it makes sense to lash out. It makes sense to want to have some fun at the expense of the game that caused you so much trouble. It makes sense to want to joke and mock and scream about just how bad it is, and how mad you are that you wasted your time on a game that the publisher spent years promising you was amazing as fuck.

The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games. It was so good, I found myself swimming around the game’s oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldn’t have to leave. I didn’t want it to be over. With Andromeda, I finally gave up on the side quests, focused on the critical path, and installed as quickly as I could after the credits rolled.

Developers have a tendency to be defensive, and it’s completely understandable. No one wants to feel like their time was wasted. The secrecy of development mean a lot of myths arise. Sometimes leadership makes poor decision, technology doesn’t work like it ought to, pressures to hit deadlines lead to compromised work. You, the individual developer, do not have nearly as much power to make or break a game as players think you do. It’s a miracle any game gets made. Even something like “opening a door” is incredibly complex. And there’s no guidebook, no science behind it, no easy way to simply have an idea and make it work.

I say all this because I want set the ground rules. We’re here to talk about why a game didn’t work. We’re not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and we’re not here to complain about the developers. It’s human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and it’s just as human to want to avoid the blame. I’m going to avoid human nature, cut through the bullshit entirely, and try to diagnose the product.

Andromeda had a metascore of 72. It sold so poorly that it went on sale today for $15--that’s 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If you’re one of the two people I know who loved the game, I’m not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didn’t work for most people. I think we ought to find out why.

This is not a review, this is an autopsy. I am not here to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. I’m here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, I’m working on the assumption you haven’t played the game, but I won’t be avoiding spoilers either.

So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s look at the game.

1. Narrative

Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. There’s some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, it’s completely its own thing. You, a human, and a bunch of aliens from the Milky Way have flown to the Andromeda galaxy in search of a new home. It took 600 years for your ships to get there.

Somehow, the Andromeda Initiative--that’s the organization running everything--had the ability to see what the Andromeda galaxy looked like at that point in time, despite the fact that light takes about two million years to travel between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. At some point between the time you set off and the time you got there, a catastrophe occurred, and some weird, uh… like… energy coral spread throughout space.

On one hand, it’s sci-fi, so we don’t need everything to be perfect. On the other hand, Mass Effect has always leaned a bit more towards hard sci-fi than most games. They acknowledge relativity frequently throughout the series--ships can’t travel between worlds without using these big ‘mass relays’ that were seeded throughout the galaxy millions of years before the story starts. Bioware created an element, Element Zero, to explain how how a lot of the tech in their universe functions. It was internally consistent.

Andromeda suddenly decides that ships can fly at something like 4200 times the speed of light, we can see a galaxy in real-time somehow (but only looked once), but we can’t use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though that’s a technology that’s been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the series’ own rules to get to where it is.

This alone does not make Andromeda a bad game, but it does do a good job of illustrating a big problem: everything feels thoughtless. I’m not sure how a game spends five years in development and has a script that seems so… careless. Nothing in Andromeda feels logical or natural. In writing, there’s this idea called the ‘idiot ball.’ It comes from the writer’s room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the ‘idiot ball’ one week, making bad choices that lead to the story’s drama. It works in a comedy. Not so much in a game that wants us to take its narrative seriously.

The idiot ball is why the crew of an Andromeda Initiative Ark, the Hyperion, wakes up next to a planet that wasn’t inhabited 600 years ago to discover that the planet is now uninhabitable and the aforementioned weird energy coral thing nearly destroys their ship.

Scientists are generally pretty careful. Don’t get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but you’d think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I don’t know, stopping just outside the galaxy, using their recon tech to see if anything had changed in six hundred years? Heck, why not stop outside the solar system to see if it had been colonized, or situations had changed? Of course they end up in a bad situation, because everyone in the game holds the idiot ball.

This isn’t a new problem for the series--remember when a giant robot attacked the Citadel and destroyed most of the Council fleet, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, on the Citadel saw it and the robots murder lots of people… and then pretended the giant robot threat wasn’t real? Mass Effect, starting with 2, has always had stupid people making stupid decisions that make no logical sense.

But--and this is incredibly important--they still worked, because they created dramatic moments.

Drama is the tension created by the conflict between a character, their goal, and the thing keeping them from attaining that goal. It’s difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told they’re the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesn’t match the premise. Great drama has stakes that feel important and make sense. Characters who constantly make poor decisions lose sympathy, which reduces dramatic tension, and we, the audience, stop caring.

The Council’s ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isn’t surprising, since the entire game is a terribly-written mess. But at least it rings true! We can believe the government would ignore an imminent threat to our lives (see: global warming), and it makes us feel like we want to take action. Mass Effect 2’s “Oh yeah? You don’t believe in an alien menace? Well, I’m gonna prove it to you!” is exactly what makes a game work, even if the setup is poorly done. As long as it delivers its dramatic payload, it works.

Andromeda has nothing like that. Everything is twee. There’s some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and it’s obvious who he is as soon as you meet him, even though he plays it coy. This Charlatan fellow vies for control over a tiny little spaceport on an uninhabitable planet. He’s trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of “guards! Seize them!” I don’t remember why I cared. I can remember every quest, every reason for doing anything in the first Mass Effect (Saren bad, Protheans cryptic, learn more about protheans, find Saren’s base, interrogate Saren’s sidekick), but in Andromeda, uh…

Yeah. I just finished the game and I’ve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Don’t get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.

What’s the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says “hey, it’s me, your brother! I’m being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!” You wouldn’t believe him. It’s a case of someone telling you that they’re important, rather than the person actually being important to you. I felt nothing saving the Earth. I felt a lot more when I lost Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 3. Bioware makes this mistake frequently in its A-plots, but it usually makes its character interactions matter so much more in the B-plots that we can overlook the main plot shortcomings.

Andromeda does the A-plot thing: everyone’s lives are at risk unless you, the single most important human in the story, save them all. It just forgets to do the B-plot thing. There are nice little conversations between characters on the ship and in your party, as you might expect, but conversations with the characters are a drag.

It’s a problem with the game’s dialog on the whole. When you talk to anyone, they… well, they remind me a lot of that great liartownusa photoshop of a fake Netflix movie, “The Malediction Prophecy.”

“It's been 3,000 years since the Malediction, the spirit-plague created by The Order, a fabled army of immortals seeking to unravel the genome of the were-shaman Erasmus Nugent, who seeks to rebuild La Cienega, a bio-weapon capable of stopping Honcho, the deathless vampire king who sseeks to conquer the Fontanelle, the mythical fortress of demon hybrid Gary Shadowburn, who seeks to unleash angel-killer Larry Wendigo Jr., who seeks to release the Bloodfroth, a terrifying evil that seeks ot return the world to darkness.”

People don’t talk like people talk. They talk like fanfiction writers write. Have you ever seen one of those cringe-inducing tumblr story ideas that is just so bad, because everyone’s got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very “I’ve only ever read YA fiction in my entire life”?

Andromeda’s like that. People talk weird. They say things like “excuse me, my face is tired,” and make jokes without charisma. I have this urge to be really critical of the writing team, because they had, I presume, five full years on this game, and they work at a company that is literally built to make story-driven games, and the end result is an experience worse than Dragon Age 2, a game that was rushed through development in 18 months.

I don’t know how this script made it through editing.

This is the kind of writing we tore apart in our sophomore screenwriting classes back in the day. I can understand narratives not working on a larger, more plot-based level, because that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of teams. But basic dialog? How is it so bad?

Seriously, what is this? How did someone write this scene and go “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” How did this make it past animators and editors and marketing? How did this scene make it into the final game?

When your father sacrifices his life for you in the opening of the game, bestowing his role as Most Important Person to you, a character, apparently his friend, demands answers. She looks like Marge in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer uses a shotgun to apply makeup to her face. She asks you “what happened?” Your character, for some unknown reason, replies “to who?” Addison responds “it’s ‘to whom, and your goddamn father.”

I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guy’s Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say “your goddamn father” in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is “a dude we all care about just died.” It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go “uh, this makes no sense”? What the hell happened? How did this make it into the game?

The game presents us with a myriad of unlikable characters who do nothing but screw things up--Tann, Addison, Kelly, and so on. I can understand that disaster can stress people, but I also know that, in the face of disaster, most animals, humans included, have a powerful tendency to stick together in order to face off against a greater threat. In the case of Andromeda, the vast majority of living beings you encounter in the game are Milky Way characters who chose to abandon the colony and become criminal scum in the process. That Sloane Kelly lady, whose name I only remember because I just looked it up? She was the chief security officer of the program. No one should be more highly vetted than she is, but no, after a few months, she cracks and starts a criminal empire.

Why is this story important? Game design is the art of getting players to perform specific tasks that bring about some form of emotional fulfillment. In other words, it’s about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, it’s hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyone’s an idiot?

How does a game, from a studio known for its stories, suck this bad after five years of development time? How does that happen? I’m exasperated with the game. I feel insulted by the script. I genuinely want to know how this game got as far as it did, because so many core ideas feel rotten from the get-go.

2. Technology and Presentation

Much has been made of Andromeda’s many animation glitches and bugs.

So, uh, just watch this vid if you want to understand how the game ended up:

Personally, I struggle with Frostbite, as an engine. EA’s doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EA’s development times have skyrocketed since switching from Unreal to Frostbite, and developers have complained at length about the engine. That Kotaku piece linked earlier indicated that wrestling with Frostbite was a big reason Andromeda took so long to develop.

On my computer, Frostbite games are among the buggiest, most unstable games I have. People complained about the load times in the Unity-powered ReCore, but I’ve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. It’s a big issue with the engine. The lighting seems to work really well in the hand of DICE artists, but nobody else seems to have the hang of it.

Suffice it to say, the technology has been called out by a lot of people by now. The animations--in a game that was in development for five years--look worse than they do in an Unreal Engine 3 game from last gen. From a technical perspective, Andromeda needed more time on the cooker. Maybe six months of crunch would have done it, but that team was crunching for a while as it was. The end result was a game that simply does not compete with any other AAA game on the market.

But then there’s the art.

Great fiction often relies on the power of its iconic imagery to engage the audience. Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies. There’s nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Bioware’s first three Mass Effect games were fantastically realized.

Mass Effect Andromeda seems like generic sci-fi art you can find anywhere. The alien Kett have some really cool Geiger-influenced stuff, but I couldn’t begin to describe the other two alien species. One’s a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like I’ve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh… pretty normal. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

It’s all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities won’t surprise you. Seen the Giant’s Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.

Again, I don’t really understand how, in five years, the art design ends up looking like… well, this. You know how people made fun of the suit design in Bioware’s other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. It’s weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesn’t have any creativity put into it.

And it sucks to say this.

It sucks to be so harsh. I wanted this game to be great. They were saying the right things about trying to nail that sense of exploration, and early plans for the game, as mentioned in the article I linked earlier, make it sound like they were going for a much more ambitious, exciting game, but they were hamstrung by the technology. That doesn’t explain the writing or the art design, though.

As some of you may know, I’m working on an indie game codenamed G1. I created it, wrote the plot, did most of the design work, stuff like that. Anyways, I wanted to create a really cool, distinct sci-fi universe that sticks in players minds as strongly as Star Wars or Half-Life does. Being a volunteer-only project for the time being (I’d love to pay people, but I am so poor I literally went homeless this summer and am now staying with some family members who are in danger of losing their home as well!), we’ve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the game’s entire setting to a much less interesting, more generic environment. Later, we had some guys who were big fans of Ghost in the Shell and wanted to make our character art reflect that instead.

My point is, I get that a lot of people want to do what seems and feels familiar, but I think, for a big, AAA video game, distinctive is what people remember, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. Nothing looks like The Witcher 3, or Dishonored, or Halo, or the original Mass Effect trilogy, Half Life, or… well, you get the idea, right? Distinctiveness rules. Sameyness drools. And for whatever reason, Andromeda is the least-inspired AAA video game I’ve seen in a long, long time.

3. Design.

This, for me, is the big one. I can deal with bad storytelling in a game, because almost all game storytelling is garbage. I can put up with bad technology, because I grew up gaming on the PC, where modding could often turn my games into an unbearable slideshow, and sometimes, I’ve found games that were fantastic despite their poor presentation. But if the design is bad… then we got a problem.

And the design is bad.

As much as I want to speculate on why the design is bad, the truth is, nothing productive can come of that. I don’t know why it’s bad. I don’t know who made what designs, or how much the technology is to blame, or anything like that. All I know is that the design is bad, and I’m going to tell you what makes it bad, so if you decide to develop a game in the future, you at least can be armed with the knowledge of what Andromeda got wrong, and hopefully avoid it yourself.

If you asked me to use one sentence to describe Andromeda, I’d probably call it “a waste of time.”

I mean this literally. I’ve never played a game that wasted more time than Andromeda. Like… holy crap. So much time wasting. People complained so much about certain time-wasting aspects of the game, Bioware patched some of it out.

Here’s an example, and I’m going to italicize it so you can skip reading the whole thing if it gets too boring. Because it is super boring.

If you want to go explore the planet of Kadara, you have to go to the star system, which involves an unskippable cutscene as you ‘fly’ from where you are to where you were. Then, in the star system, you click on the planet, and you fly over to it. You fly too close to it, then zoom back out (this happens every time you move between planets in the game; I have no idea why). Then you rotate the planet on your display until you can select the city, which is on the opposite side of the planet from you.

Now click on that landing zone. You must then verify your loadout, because the game won’t let you change it without seeking out a loadout station, rather than just letting you open your menu and swap gear. You will be faced with an unskippable cutscene showing you landing on the planet. Then you will spawn somewhere that’s nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the “go to slums” option.

You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. It’s a big, empty field, so this takes like 20 seconds to do. Jump over the fence. Run another 100 yards or so to a big terminal that lets you summon your car. Congratulations, you have finally spawned. Now spend ten minutes driving wherever you need to be around a planet that’s a pain to drive around.

Every planet is this bad. You’d think they might let you spawn wherever you’d like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, that’s not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points aren’t in convenient spots, but there’s nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, you’re usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. You’re going to spend a time walking across flat surfaces to get to where you need to go.

Contrast that with a game like Destiny 2, which has multiple spawns on each planet, and keeps the social areas with vendors nice and small, so there’s not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the game’s joyful movement system, as opposed to the flat, empty space in an Andromeda.

There are other ways it wastes your time as well. Consider the UI, which decides to put everything in a list. I do mean everything. There are something like 10 distinct tiers of weapon, for every single weapon in the game. Like the Dhan? Cool, your crafting list will include the Dhan I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, which is weird, because it’s a straight upgrade every time, so there’s literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.

Chances are the Dhan X won’t be craftable, because there’s no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldn’t get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, it’s weird that they’d put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. That’s like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you can’t sort between any of them.

Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), you’re just stuck with a gigantic list, and for some reason, you have to carry them on you, even though the game only lets you swap them out at various stations. Wouldn’t it make more sense to store the mods in the stations themselves?

You end up wasting so much time just navigating menus, trying to find the one thing you want, or being forced into seeking out the physical locations in game that will let you access the menus, because you can’t swap items out at will… it’s frustrating.

There’s this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isn’t a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I don’t want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. I’d much rather just press a button, open a menu, and swap my loadout there. Destiny got it right. Fable 3 did not. For some reason, Mass Effect Andromeda wants to be like Fable 3, if Fable 3’s weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.

It’s awful. And I don’t know how the game shipped like that.

But the worst thing of all is the mission design. If you've played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you know that the mission design was extremely repetitive. Every location you went to would have the same few basic missions, no matter where you went. It got predictable. Andromeda is the same way. Go to two big towers on the map, solve a puzzle, go to a vault, press a button, run to the end of the vault, voila, you’ve done it. Scan a bunch of corpses on a planet. Pick up some rocks and plants. Go find the glowing orbs on the planet, and you’ll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but don’t look for the variety found in Inquisition, where every dragon had something unique going on that made it kinda cool.

On and on it goes. Every planet, the same thing. There’s a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and it’s not actually Meridian, but you don’t know that until you get there. To proceed, you must go to two different towers, solve two puzzles, and then go to a third puzzle, and do a new thing. When you fight the final boss, you will have to engage two similar phases, followed by a third, more unique phase. Every single fucking quest in this game seems to be “do two things, and then the third thing will be different.”

Find out who did a thing? Talk to two colonist, then the third one will say something different. Get artifacts for a museum? Three things. Every quest. Every single quest. Do three things, then move on.

I don’t want to be the generic internet gamer type here and accuse the developers of laziness, but I can say that the end result feels lazy. I remember, years ago, a Bioware writer saying on their forums that Bioware had decided that three was the ‘perfect number’ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but you’re wrong. Doing everything with the rule of threes sucks.

You know why? Because it robs the player of dramatic tension. Yeah. It all comes back to that. When you teach your players that they’re going to do two meaningless things for every quest, the player stops giving a shit about your game. When you claim to be making a game about space exploration, but there’s settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesn’t feel like you’re exploring, it feels like you’re a space janitor.

The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games don’t have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.

If players can predict what’s going to happen in your game, the tension is lost, and the desire to continue is dampened. Word of mouth dies, nobody recommends your game to their friends, and your sales dry up and you can’t even justify making DLC for your game.

Rule of three design is garbage. It is that simple. There is no case where it is great game design, ever.

I have no idea why Bioware decided to make a game with nothing but rule of three design, but they did. And even when they try to make it interesting, it’s not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me “I need a thing,” giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldn’t help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasn’t there. That’s two places where I wasted time not completing the objective. At the second place, I was told about some big bad gangster dude at the third place. I killed the big bad gangster dude without even realizing it at first. Got the part, went back to the first location, and ended the quest.

The stakes never matter in Andromeda. You’ll always be forced to do something pointless before you can do the thing that does matter. Once, I found a place on a map, but the door was locked, and I could not get in. I finally found the quest that let me in that location, but I had to go to someone’s office. I went there. I tried to interact with a crate that obviously had loot in it, but I could not. Scanning something else gave me a map marker to the original location. I returned there. The door was open. It wasn’t like I’d found a key or anything, the door was just open. Then a vendor from the other side of the map showed up. We had a conversation. The next quest step was to see her… all the way on the other side of the map. Couldn’t we have had the conversation while she was still at the first location? No? Anyways, it was only after this point that the chest became interactive, and I could sift through its contents.

Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin 2, where my excessive exploration has got me into numerous areas I shouldn’t be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say “yeah, take the reward, it’s in that box over there,” but you stole it hours ago while you were sneaking around.

The game forces you around empty and pointless maps for no real reason at all. At least Bethesda places its objectives far across the map as a means of taking you through interesting and distracting landscapes. That’s part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.

I’m not gonna lie, I’d love to sit down with some leads at Bioware and talk about how to make their games better, because right now, their games seem formulaic as hell--Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda are virtually identical games in their broad strokes, with the only real differences being the result of the setting.

If you’re a professional writer, you’re probably going “why is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?” Well, I’m being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what it’s like to play Andromeda.

It’s a waste of time, and it’s broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I don’t know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I don’t know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I don’t know why anyone recommended this game to me, because it is quite literally the worst AAA gaming experience I have had in years.

Ultimately, it comes down to drama. Nothing Andromeda does is dramatic. It tries to use dramatic music and awful cliches to make things feel dramatic, but it doesn’t earn anything. The art isn’t inspiring, the stakes are rarely, if ever, high, the quests are so predictable that all tension is gone.

And it sucks that I feel this way. It especially sucks because the game actually starts out being interesting, making you curious, prompting you to ask lots of questions. By the second planet, you realize just how predictable it all is. By the end of the game, you’re wondering why you stuck with it this long. That 40-or-so gigs of hard drive space would be better off empty.

There are so many other problems with the game. Why do most mods either have negatives that outweigh their positives, or positives so miniscule there’s no point to using them? Does a 5% recharge timer in a 5 second timer really matter? Does a 3% damage boost on a gun with three shots have any perceivable effect? Nope. We could dive into the problems with dozens of quests, more specifics about the writing, and so many other things. There’s so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking it’s better than it is.

Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. That’s what gets players playing and talking. That’s why they spend money. If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother making video games.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Why I Hate Houses

Digital Elixir Why I Hate Houses

I have had, up till now, the good fortune to live in apartments, ranging by urban standards from nice to really very nice. I now live in a house that most would likely consider to be somewhat better than mere “nice”. It’s on a ridge, with nearly a full acre plot, in quiet tree-filled neighborhood with reasonable amenities all a short driving distance away, including a well-kitted out gym and quite a few good restaurants. Bonus points for it being only 15 minutes from the airport. Nearly all the routes take you past other pleasant-looking-to-glam houses, or the country club, or the golf course, or twee shopping areas.

I’ve discovered that I hate the house part of this equation, as in dealing with the day-to-day time demands of home ownership. I find it stressful and unrewarding. And it’s made worse in my case by finding that this house has a lot that needs to be addressed pretty soon, to the degree that that plus moving-related tasks (like plenty of boxes yet to be unpacked) is cutting into my blogging time.

There are bona fide reasons to have problems with this way of living, namely the environmental cost. Free-standing buildings take more energy to heat and cool than multi-unit structures. Car ownership is pretty much unavoidable, since even in those few suburbs with decent public transport, it’s designed for going in and of the city center (as in for commuting), not for provisioning, transporting kids, or running other errands. And if you decide to fit in, as a recent post pointed out, “Lawns, in general, are pretty much the enemy for healthy insect habitats.” And don’t get me started on leaf blowers.

Now I could pretend to not like houses out of reasons of conscience, or a preference for living in high-density areas (which I do have). But my big reason for not liking houses is the inefficiency and time sink of maintaining them.

There’s a reason that biggest-single-family-home owner in the US, Blackstone’s Invitation Homes, is widely regarded as an upscale slumlord by virtue of not doing adequate maintenance on its properties and even failing to deal promptly with problems that will clearly damage the house, like leaks. Keeping up free-standing homes doesn’t scale. And that imposes a big tax on the time of owners.

Think about it. As a tenant or owner in a condo or co-op, the building is responsible for taking care of the public spaces, the heating, plumbing, and electrical systems, and sometimes even cleaning the outside windows. Maybe you have to provide your own air conditioner. Maybe you make a lot of improvements and some of them don’t work so well (like using a stylish bar sink in a bathroom and having to regularly have it snaked because the drain pipe is a bit narrow). But the general point is if Something Happens or Something Needs To Be Done, you can call a superintendent who knows the conditions in your unit and either is required to fix the problem or can refer you to someone (“the building’s electrician”) who may not necessarily be the cheapest or the best, but is probably fairly priced (to get repeat business from the tenants in that building) and actually can be efficient in how he goes about his work because he knows the conditions in that apartment complex.

The fact that a building manager is responsible for core systems and has incentives to minimize costs over a long-term horizon means (unless they are stupid property owners or self-conscious slumlord types), they’ll do at least an adequate job of maintenance.

By contrast, as an individual homeowner, unless you are the sort that likes carpentry or plumbing or other stereotypically manly tinkering, maintenance is a time and cost sink. My brief experience is it is far more frustrating trying to deal with various home upkeep pros, first because there seem to be so many to deal with, and unless you have a service under contract, they are usually dealing with the particular conditions at your site afresh. That is less efficient from a macro perspective (more one-off or somewhat customized work), plus it can also leave the homeowner wondering whether the service professional was giving you the straight scoop (did you really need that mini-rewiring job, or was he taking advantage of the fact that you couldn’t determine that all you needed was a new socket?)

The individual homeowner also has greater incentives to defer maintenance because upkeep is a nuisance and entails outlays.

I am more acutely aware of this than I’d like to be because I am having to deal with a maintenance backlog, including replacing rotten wood under the gutters, investigating electrical issues, having two stoves that only kinda-sorta work fixed (they broil but won’t bake at higher than 350 degrees), getting the carpets cleaned, and fixing a sink and counter ruined by a home health care aide (the last also ruined my day).1 And there are other reminders of what as an former urbanite feels like excess….like the necessity of having a yardman.

I imagine many of you detest apartments for good reasons: you lived in one or more as a young person and they were cramped and noisy. From what I saw in Manhattan, the stock of rental apartments was markedly inferior to the ones for purchase, and in most cities, you have more rented than owned units, meaning most of what is out there is skanky. But that is a function of how we do housing in the US, and not of the inherent merits of apartments. It’s perfectly possible to have more generously proportioned apartments with decent height ceilings and heavy enough walls so as not to hear your neighbor’s music. It’s also possible to have very clever designs. I was struck, for instance, with how much good layout mattered when I became a volcano refugee in London and a planned two-day stay with Richard Smith turned out to be a twelve day visit. He lived in an 800 square foot apartment in the Barbican. Yet even though his wife was also there a fair bit of time, it never felt crowded even when all three of us were there.

Now I am sure many of you have defenses for owning homes, such as:

Kids needing a yard. Maybe, but that is a less compelling argument than when I was a child and kids were allowed to have unstructured time playing with other kids nearby. With children now shuttled to and from school and to their activities and play dates, yards seem way less useful

Gardening. There are urban gardens and we could have more of them, but for some reason, this practice hasn’t taken hold in America.

Necessity. Where you work doesn’t have decent apartment stock.

Fear of or distaste for urban living.

Wanting to be close to the countryside. A strong reason if you love the activities like hiking and water sports.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to think hard about the time cost of your house, if you have a free-standing house, and how much more leisure time you could spend on your favorite activities if you didn’t have the millstone of property maintenance. Unless, of course, you are rich enough to have staff to do this sort of thing for you.

____

1 This is what happens when you have people in the house and you can’t watch them all day, particularly since you also aren’t supposed to, as in they should stick to their job duties and not play amateur professional.

One of the bathroom sinks was draining slowly. The home health care aide came back from the grocery store with a bottle of Drain-O. I told her not to use it, the pipes in the house are old and we already had one serious problem with them. I had her boil a big pot of water and pour it down the sink. She did that twice and the drain seemed fine after that. I noticed nothing amiss with the drain the next AM when I turned in late.

When I got back up (mid PM, so the home health care aide was on a new day), I went into the bathroom and saw the sink about 1/3 full of black, and I mean black, water. I stupidly stuck my hand in to see if there was an obstruction and got burned. I then went and got paper towels to sop up the water and put the wet paper towels in a steel pot.

The water was so caustic that it stained the steel. It had also stained the sink, which was beige resin and part of the bathroom counter (as in it had been fabricated as a single unit). The grey marks were bad enough that I thought it needed to be replaced, although one could make a case for living with the eyesore.

The home health care aide was out taking my mother to get her hair done and pick up lunch. I was ripshit and assumed the home health care aide had used the Drain-O contrary to my instructions (she’d been muttering about putting some in the sink after the boiling water treatment despite that having looked like a success). I was also dumbfounded that she’d left the black water in the sink to corrode it. I called the service to complain.

The home health care aide got back much later than usual. I suspect she was trying to avoid me and having my mother see the damage she had done. I chewed her out. She said she hadn’t used Drain-O and found the bottle to show me it was full.

She had instead gone to the Dollar Store and gotten….drumroll… a sink plunger.

In all my years of living in different apartments and more than occasionally having stopped up the drain, no super every used anything like a plunger on a sink or bathtub. They always snaked them out. This sink, had the health care aide bothered to look, had the classic S-curve pipes underneath. No way would this itty bitty shallow plunger be able to create enough pressure to move an obstruction through that curve. I could not believe what an obviously bad idea this was, compounded by the fact that “plumbing” was not part of her job spec.

It gets worse.

The home health care aide disappeared (she does that an awful lot) and then came back and reported she’d used “Lysol towels” on the sink, as if that had reduced the grey stains. I started to think that maybe this wasn’t as bad a train wreck as I’d thought.

I went back shortly thereafter, which was also after she’d left, and found the sink again 1/3 full of black water. I nearly hit the ceiling. This was not the result of it backing up but her running the water from the tap and doing God knows what else (pouring Lysol down the sink, perhaps?)

I again sopped up the water. The sink was now extensively and badly stained. It has to be replaced. And the plumber is coming in four and a half hours, so I am sure to be cranky and sleep deprived.

But I had to go back to the service and withdraw my complaint because my mother had given a go-ahead to this bad idea. And that means we’ll have to eat the likely $1000+ cost of a fix, which would also never match the rest of the bathroom well. Plus finding the contractor and working through the choices would fall on me, when I don’t have time for distractions like that. And on top of that, this was the best home health care aide my mother had gotten from the service (despite her tendency to disappear way too often, she at least would clean the kitchen and bathrooms well). I can guarantee she’s going to do something like this again (she falls in the category of “stupid and industrious” which in the schema attributed to German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord is dangerous). That means we’ll need to get rid of her. That likely means the service will get rid of us (they already regard us as unreasonably demanding by virtue of expecting health care aides to do more than sit next to my mother when the service advertises that they will run errands and do light housekeeping and cooking), which will create another round of stress and time sinks. Welcome to the joys of home maintenance.

Why I Hate Houses

from WordPress https://ift.tt/33mHjfR via IFTTT

[rock-and-compass]

Okay my thoughts on the season finale… (as posted in the ABC advisory group)

If this wasn’t Jennifer Morrison’s (as good as) Last episode I would probably be fine with it, another rinse and repeat finale with a one group of people occupied doing one thing in one place while another group is kept busy elsewhere doing something else. It was very like what we’ve seen in the season finales in recent years – very formulaic. And I guess, with so many of the cast members departing and this being touted so heavily as “the final battle” I guess I just expected more. And that’s my mistake; I own that. I’m starting to think that Once Upon a Time is not a show that should be thought about on any level. It is fast food storytelling. You enjoy it at the time but ultimately, it’s not very satisfying and if you think about it too closely you’re likely to feel regret. I think you’re supposed to enjoy the surface level of the show but not concern yourself with the depth. And this is a huge and sad realisation for someone who has watched the show from the beginning and spent the last four seasons writing about and analysing the episodes in depth – sometimes writing thousands of words about one episode. It wasn’t always like this though and it makes me sad.

My biggest problem with the episode was the disconnectedness between the two sides of the story. We see the people transported back to the Enchanted Forest do various things – there’s collapsing worlds, there is a hunt for a bean, Regina is trying to do magic for …reasons. But ultimately nothing that those stuck in the Enchanted Forest does has any purpose whatsoever – it’s mindless busywork to keep them occupied and out of the way. Why didn’t Hook use the bean? Why didn’t he throw it on the ground and create a portal and get back to Emma quickly like Snow told him to? How nice it would have been to get a pay-off on Emma’s brief flashes of memory of her wedding day, Hooks image burning in the book, with him coming through a bean portal and Emma feeling a strange stab of recognition for this man and then them Kissing to restore her memories. Then Emma and Killian would have gotten their TLK! I feel so sad that so many couples got one, some that didn’t really deserve one (Hades and Zelena, I’m looking at you!) except for Emma and her true love. They still could have had their season one inversion of Henry giving Emma a TLK to save her life after the fight with Gideon (even though I think, and I am a mother, it’s really, really weird for a child to give their parent a true love’s kiss.). It would have connected the two parts of the story beautifully and it would have given purpose to the Enchanted Forrest side of the story and just improved the whole episode overall. I can’t help but think the episode would have been more entertaining and more of a parallel to season one if the curse had kept everyone in Storybrooke and robbed them of their memories – Henry still could have been the sole believer (I guess it was the book or his author role that kept him exempt?) and given him more purpose, more people to try to get through to… And maybe Emma wouldn’t have had to do the strange and oddly fast (8hour round trip!) visit to Boston. Ultimately, I felt there was no connection between why it was so important to separate Emma from her family and the realisation that she was never alone and the battle with Gideon and the curse . . . and yeah.

The Black-fairy was a big anti-climax. I knew she would be. She literally functioned as a Regina-substitute and I can’t help but wonder if, as this was the ending that A&E envisioned from the start, it was supposed to be Regina in the end. It would have made a hell of a lot more sense! I really believe the show was derailed from its purpose with, not by the befriending of Regina as a tactic to defeat her … but that that tactic worked so efficiently and without question. Regina’s redemption felt like a slap-up whitewash and somewhere along the line the writers became too scared to challenge the character. She got away with everything she ever did with no consequence. It’s hardly a satisfying story. Fairy tales are about good versus evil. With good supposed to win after trial and hardship. It’s a shame that Regina was never put through the same trials and challenge that say, Rumple or Hook or even Emma and the Charmings’ were put through. Seeing the dwarves paint “Queen” on her door and bowing to her was sickening. She is not a queen, she is a usurper. At the very least she should have admitted this as part of her “redemption”. The very least. All I could think when there was the shot of her looking at the red apple at the end, was that she must be very pleased with herself. She Won. She won everything. Her evil plans and schemes paid off big time – she’s rich, powerful, she apparently “owns” a town, the people now love her, she has a son, friends and a sister and she never had to pay the price for any of the terrible things she did. It’s not logical to expect people would just ‘get over’ decades of abuse and torment. It’s not fair on the people she hurt. Not to mention that her clone also rides off happily ever after into the sunset? Of all the unnecessary inclusions in the finale the presence of Regina 2.0 was the worst. She dominated and nearly killed the show; I seriously hope that this is the last we see of her. In this new-look season seven, I really hope that they make Henry’s nemesis, whoever that may be, his nemesis. And keep it that way. Don’t make Henry befriend him (or her)! Enmity is a good thing to keep between enemies. It drives a story, it gives purpose – it gives the audience someone to root for. And as ironic as this sounds – it doesn’t divide. People may love a villain but they love them for being a villain and they love the hero for standing up to them. It makes a much better story than making your protagonist sweep the past under the carpet, and put their blinkers on about every questionable thing that their nemesis is doing. And don’t turn Henry’s archenemy into a sainted Mary-sue (or Bobby-Stu) who is annoying and sanctimonious while at the same time being self-centred and selfish and boring and rendering themselves superfluous to the point where every appearance in the story feels like a shoehorn…

The ending of the episode was nice, but a bit twee. Everyone got a happy ending. Yay. I guess. Whether they deserved it or not. Belle, why wouldn’t you have taken that newly babyfied Gideon and run for the hills? I liked that Rumple did the right thing in the end but it was too little too late for that marriage – and with Belle not coming back next season, surely a melancholy bittersweet parting of the ways would have been more appropriate for them? As it is, it feels very much like all these Happy Beginnings that have been gifted to everyone are going to be ripped out from under us with the departing characters. Its’ inevitable. I will be incredibly sad if Emma Swan is killed off to move the story forward. But I won’t be surprised. I’m not sure the writers gave us enough of a hook to pique our interest with the duplication of the original story at the end… the show felt very much done. I felt a sense of relief that it’s over. That I can finally stop thinking about and worrying about these characters. Before the finale, I was fully intending to keep watching – I like Colin O’Donoghue and the Character of Killian Jones so I am predisposed to continue…. But that ending, it made me feel a sense of ambivalence. I’m not sure I can be bothered re-investing without the guarantee of a decent return. If Emma was back, I would be back. No doubt. But with how I’m feeling at the moment, there will have to be some very interesting information released over the hiatus to get me back and they will have to tell us something, some crumbs, instead of this nonsensical evasive “wait and see” discourse.

[rosalindrobertson]

“It’s Uter-Us, not Uter-I”.

(*my lovely friend, Supriya Diwedi, March 2016, when I was sick of explaining all the things wrong with my uterus to a whole panel of medical practitioners)

it’s fucking ridiculous how something the size of a pear will run your entire life and how many people have an opinion on its activity and use. 

I’m writing this after waiting about a year on a waitlist for someone to come fetch the beleaguered thing. It’s basically a crime scene by now- after so much blood loss in my mid 30s they went in and scorched its interior and it responded by Making All The Painful Things Happen. (if you’re a geek and into doctor gyno-google: I have endometriosis, adenomyosis, hyperplasia, polyps, fibroid tumours, a 95% septum across the bottom third, and cysts, and also issues from ehlers danlos syndrome II/III)

When you’re still a kid, this thing shows up and kicks you right in the gut. I grew up in the 80s to parents who did believe “the more I knew” and it wasn’t a surprise. At school the girls would get sent to Health Class where we were basically told about flowers and a wonderful passage to adulthood and given very twee pink boxes with what can only be described as diapers inside. No real information about what was going to happen. And what happened was just gross. And then it happened again and again and again.  

When I was eleven, this menace started. And despite being doubled over, unable to move, like I’d been kicked, with a river coming out of me, it was just “girl pain” and deemed an excuse for skipping school by administrators. 

Thus ensues decades of wondering whether the maximum dose of advil is there for legit reasons (it is) and learning to wash everything from your favourite jeans to an antique quilt with cold salt water and figuring out how to hide pads and tampons in all your purses and jackets.

This is the introduction that you are mortal, you are trapped in a meatcage that will do what it wants, where it wants, and when it wants - and you are simply along for the ride. It’s unfortunate only half the population gets this instruction in life, and maybe that’s why people who don’t have this instruction like to legislate it. Because it seems everyone who doesn’t have a uterus has an opinion on what this angry badger living in the core of your being should be doing. That it should basically have its own rights - like controlling your entire bloody life wasn’t enough of an inate constitutional right. I mean, I was on the pill for years not to control my fertility but to control my life - to quell the crushing anemia, the migraines, the agonizing pain, the sobbing, and the unpredictability of it. 

I didn’t want to have sex, are you kidding me??? I wanted to not be in screaming pain and dropped like a sack of sand at sometimes extremely random intervals. 

Eventually the chemicals weren’t enough to stop the force of this tiny little pear. Turns out I couldn’t have children even if I wanted to, SURPRISE! and that the thing has always been useless and broken, but try to tell that to a “there, there, you might change your mind” doctor, and having to agree to a compromise (an ablation) that made things worse, not better. 

I don’t need a legislative committee to weigh in on what’s right for me. 

Now? Now I’m waiting and in perimenopause. The thing no one talks about because of the whole “dried up spinster” thing. We just can’t win. Either we’re too sexy or not sexy enough. I don’t actually care anymore. My angry little pear has decided to do ALL THE THINGS now, including put me into a flop sweat when it’s -20 and turn me into a popsicle. And you’d think you’d get less periods, but you can have more. And this apparently can go on in my family for FIFTEEN YEARS. 

I always wondered why my aunt had air conditioning installed and used it. 

In winter. 

In Canada. 

Meantime I can feel tissue pushing back into my pelvis, because the ablation left it with no place to go but UP. (It’s called a “septum”) And if you think that’s nauseating to read, trust me, it’s worse in real life. My last year has been like dragging a corpse around. I’ve got vast, ridiculous medical complications that make daily living difficult, but the ongoing distension, the burning, the feeling like I’m in a boxing match when I’m just trying to be in a meeting, the rip the legs out from under you sensations... 

And constantly reading politicians - politicians without these angry pears lodged in their cores - how they “Feel About It”. Because it’s all about the sex, controlling the sex, the obsession with sex. Fucketyfuckery. 

If you cut off access to birth control pills and IUDs, if you smack down legislation on D&Cs and access to abortion, and funerals for early miscarriages, you’re doing more than preventing fertility control. These are how-do-I-function controls for hundreds of millions of people. 

Here’s how it works: I do what’s right for ME and MY quality of life in a dungeon of flesh and survival that I did not get to choose and you politicians saying whatever you think will keep you in power sit down and stfu. 

Meds? Ablations? Abortions? Hysterectomies? None of your business, elected official. Until you’ve had the sensation of your core being ripped from your body, once a month, every month, since you were still a *child*, you don’t get a say. And even if you have? That’s your experience. You have no idea what’s going on with the person next to you. Simply? You don’t get to say what anyone else should have to go through with their own little angry pear. 

I have full autonomy over my meatcage. I am the captain of this ship. And yes, I’m going to have a nice little party when the angry pear is extracted... I will celebrate a goodbye to thirty five years of life-ruining pain. 

I even bought post op party shoes. 

[tristanledesma-blog]

4 Actions To A Promising Flower Garden

Do you have an embarrassing garden? Or maybe do you have much more harsh phrases for it? Do you Gardening For Beginners In Tamil discover your self getting a great deal of no-exhibits at your backyard events? You do not have to really feel like this anymore; altering the landscape of your yard can go a long way. Read on to discover suggestions which can assist to renew your yard and produce a welcome outside retreat. Make certain your new footwear are made of extremely sturdy materials. You will want them to stand up to the mud that you trudge through. Shoes that are durable will also help prevent damage to your ft from such things as branches, thorns, and even the unexpected gardening tool. Calculate how a lot it expenses to preserve your old home. Consist of the costs of taxes, insurance, utilities and interest on your home loan payment. As soon as you know how much it expenses you will know exactly how much extra money will be heading out of your pocket to purchase a new house prior to you sell your old 1. Armed with this information you will be better equipped to make the choice whether or not it's really worth slashing the price on your house so you can get out of it fast. Create a yard that will diminish weed development. Weeds will develop where they have the space to do so. Focus on creating a healthy and dense cover. Weeds won't be in a position to grow and overtake your garden if they don't get the sunlight or vitamins they require to endure. If you drinking water and fertilize the groundcover constantly, it will thrive. Gardening For Beginners In Tamil are aware of the cash they have place into their backyard resources. Simply because of this, it is essential to consider treatment of these resources so that they are helpful for many seasons to come. Most of the treatment these backyard resources need can take location during the winter months, giving the gardener something to do when it is impossible to spend time in the garden or it just is not time to get out there and work. Renovating and fixing garden tools are not difficult tasks and can be carried out by just about anybody who has the gumption to merely do it. It might sound a small twee nevertheless the organic gardener is a lot more at 1 with character than the chemical reliant Gardening For Beginners In Tamil. Instead of throwing the chemical stuff all over the place and waiting around for the garden to develop the giant proportions as if by magic, rather function with character utilizing natural ingredients and options which also help to put back again in to the environment what you have taken out. I have been to community watch conferences. One police officer stated the best home invasion deterrent is a canine. If a burglar hears a canine barking within a home they might have second ideas about invading it. It is easier to hit a house that does not have a dog. If you do not have a dog put a large bowl of water out entrance with a few canine toys. And place a Beware of Canine signal on your aspect gate. I have seen steel types with a growling Doberman. Just tell your Gardening For Beginners In Tamil or pool man, if you have one, not to be frightened of the canine. You can also believe about putting a dog dish on the side garden with a big dog bone next to it. 1 senior, who did not have a dog, told me she had "Big Daddy the Best Great Dane" put on a canine bowl for her. She place this bowl on the aspect of her house. Herbs bridge the gap in between Gardening For Beginners In Tamil and chef as they bring boring recipes to lifestyle. Try sprinkling some new dill into those scrambled eggs. Enhance the flavor of your spaghetti sauce with some fresh oregano. Toss a delicious mix of aromatic basil, oregano, and garlic into your subsequent do-it-yourself pizza crust. It'll be a scrumptious addition to a regular recipe. Keep your vegetation and shrubs groomed. Trimmed shrubs not only appear good, but they will grow much more healthily. Maintain the shrubs in front of your home trimmed beneath the lowest stage of the windows to allow the maximum quantity of mild in your home and stop your plants from looking overgrown. In the previous ten years or so, haven't you observed that the produce just doesn't taste like it utilized to? When was the final time you little bit into an apple or a pear, and the juice ran down your chin, and the style tantalized your taste buds? It's been awhile, hasn't it? This garden work bench is available in numerous designs, designs and dimension. Some have easy designs while other models are constructed with ornamental designs and styles. There are also little potting benches for children so your small girl can also make her own small backyard. It is made of a number of materials like wood, plastic and wrought-iron or steel. You might be surprised to learn that performing some gardening burns a astonishing quantity of calories. In reality, some individuals are able to use up to seven hundred energy in an hour in the backyard, based on the type of task they total! The first factor you should believe about is how large you want your rooster coop to be. If you plan on expanding it any time in the future, you should usually build larger than what you need. If you don't, you risk getting to rebuild it completely.

[californiacoastparent]

Hurt Children Hurt – Silly And Child Parent Violence

‘Hurt children hurt’ is a truism but hurt children do hurt and though it’s a snappy term it will not quite encapsulate the reality of being hurt from your kid. It echoes those memes that haunt me and Facebook feeds declaring ‘Adopted children develop in your heart not the tummy’. Not really my cup of java, all a little distant and twee from the fact of my adopted family. However, hurt kids is a fact for most adoptive families also it will not fit with the joyful adoption story which purveys ethnic consciousness. That the most vulnerable children lash out and perpetrate violent acts against their parents and carers is the embarrassing fact for society. Violence from children isn’t frequently discussed or a subject to increase company but the truth is it does happen. For many households, the violence of their homes is a continuing and overwhelming trait of their lives.

Obviously we all could love that toddlers have tantrums or that teens sometimes lash out. I am sure we have all looked on as a flustered parent has fought with a kicking and screaming two year old at the local supermarket distraught over something they’re not allowed. I have been that parent, it is not fine, but generally dangerous.

What should you do when are more than mishaps or the normal, though challenging, toddler tantrums? Imagine if it’s violence? Violence that’s daily, unleashed by the slightest perceived provocation, personal and sustained, yelling and hitting, physical and verbal abuse that bruises and injures body and finally mind?

As our family grew we began to experience this type of violence. I composed a site at 2014 about some of our family’s adventures, not accidents or tantrums but sustained bodily assaults which were having a significant effect on us. Admitting that you’re fighting to oversee your child’s behaviour is really a taboo. To acknowledge that you’re fearful of your child or that their violence has reached a strength and frequency that it’s impinging on your ability to function as a household unity is perhaps too much to elongate. I was worried as I published the post, I had checked it with my wife and she agreed that we had to poke our heads over the parapet.

Like a nerve touching, the response was immediate and loud. Comments, tweets and messages all echoing my experience with adoptive parents, carers and foster carers sharing their own stories of violence and assaults. One together with families seeking to share their adventures the stories came after the next for times and days. Drawing these together in a study on the effects of violence on teens, according to a survey I released at the end of this past year, it calms the challenges and adventures that lots of adoptive parents face. There’s limited research into child and that which there’s focuses on teens. Parents advised they had from children as young as four. Hard to imagine but that’s exactly what they said and also the reluctance was compounded by the age of these children.

For many children that have experienced trauma, loss and separation they are wired to react to stressful or challenging situations using a flight, fight or freeze answer. If your child’s response is fight that’s what you’ll need, perhaps not a tantrum however a struggle. It is. Request any adopter exactly what they believe of sticker charts and I guarantee you it will not be pretty.

The majority adopters and were concerned for the welfare of families, their families as well as their children. It was obvious that most were however prepared to be adopters they had never heard the term ‘Child on Parent violence’. If they’d awakened the courage to speak to Social Workers, GPs or educators that they were disbelieved or their worries as ‘normal behaviour’, at worst their ability to parent was questioned. Within the adoption area there is limited study on the prevalence of child on parent violence but what there is suggests it is almost as large as 30% and by the number of parents that contacted me I would have to agree with this figure. There are hints that it might be greater depending on how you measure it or specify child. Regardless, the figure is greater than in the general populace, which is projected at 2 to 4 percent, also raises concerns of the groundwork that we give adults as they come to adopt. With just one in three parents undergoing child on parent violence then we need to construct moral preparation which educates prospective adopters and provides families resources to manage.

Children that are adopted and endangered represent some of their children in the society. They have been hurt and this hurt is beyond what most of us will ever experience, it’s trauma, loss and separation all at some time when they are overly vulnerable. That hurt succeeds in frustration, confusion, fear and grief. That compels them to try and keep their world in an arrangement that stops them being hurt. Violence is occasionally involved by that strategy.

Adoption isn’t a model of caring for children but it’s a model that’s preferred for children that have experienced the aspects of the society. Should we be so surprised that they express their own adventures through violence? Equip and we need to ethically prepare families for this challenge and be sure that our children’s workforce know this hidden phenomenon. Children that are hurt hurt.

from california coast parent http://www.californiacoastparent.com/hurt-children-hurt-silly-and-child-parent-violence/