#addictive emptiness

[addictiveemptinessvn]

this song is so him guys trust

[the-alpha-doodle-dome]

It couldn't have been anyone but You.

[nenoname]

stan replacing beers with a severe addiction to soft drinks to the point where he keeps manifesting it in his own mindscape

+ something that's not pitt cola

[ninyard]

planned to have a quick scroll before i sleep (first mistake) thought about coke addict jeremy (biggest mistake)

[aquanutart]

"little miss prairie faerie" is a cute name actually... (but I won't use it if she doesn't like it)

[visceravalentines]

drowning is only as hard as you make it

bo sinclair x gn!reader

2k words. weird melancholy freak behavior. author's thinly disguised smoking fetish. established relationship (lol). Ambrose is lonely. that's it that's the fic.

He always manages to find you.  Every time.  It’s not a game anymore, not really; there’s no use keeping score when only one side is allowed to earn points.  There are no rules, no satisfaction in the victory.  You’d make your way back to the house even if he never showed up.  Today you’re not even hiding.

The row of vacant windows across the street catches the last lazy rays of sunlight.  A few eager fireflies pantomime shooting stars just above the freshly cut grass.  He mows the lawns regularly, every last one of them, dripping sweat in the sticky air.  You think it’s nonsensical.  He doesn’t care what you think.  At least it smells nice.  Nostalgic.  Painful.  

On an evening like this, there should be kids out.  Riding bikes, running through the neighbor’s yard.  Parents watching from their porches.  People chatting, relaxing.  Hell, maybe a dog or two.  But there is only you, and the fireflies.  

The heat of your cigarette creeps dangerously close to your fingers but you wring one last pull off the thing before you crush it against the step.  Scorch marks dot the woodgrain like initials carved in a tree, only better, because they’re anonymous.  Could've been left by anyone sitting sulking on these stairs and pondering ways to disappear.  Plausible deniability.  

Too bad you're the only one here.

You set your hand on the pack beside you, work another one out with your fingers without looking.  It’s all reflex.  It’s all muscle memory.  That’s all you are anymore, something that survives without thinking about it.  

In that shadowy place called Before, you only ever smoked on rare occasions. At parties or bars, always with friends, always a little drunk. You'd never admit it aloud but a part of you used to pride yourself on your restraint–you could stretch a single pack out over a month or more, until the tobacco had gone stale and the cigarettes tasted like dusty paper. Until it was less of a treat and more like a chore to get through the last few.  

Now you drop butts through the grate of your days like maybe you can fill up the emptiness with smoke.  

You sigh and light up, take a drag and let it sweep you up above the gutters.  You imagine the town might almost be pretty from up high.  Hard to tell from here.  

“Didn’t know this house had a chimney.”  

Some part of you remembers what it felt like to flinch when he got this close.  Another part remembers the way you buried your face in his back before he got up this morning.  You exhale nice and slow.  “Thought you knew everything.”  

“Now, we’ve talked about this.”  He leans against the rickety railing, white paint flaking off at the slightest disturbance.  “You know nothin’ good comes from thinkin’.”  

As a matter of fact, you’ve talked about everything already, but that’s never stopped him before.  You’ve heard all the stories sixteen times, could recount his childhood from memory one miserable year after another.  You know where he got that scar.  He knows all about your first kiss.  Eighth grade was hard for both of you for vastly different reasons.  He’s never been to your hometown but he could probably find your old house.  You’ve never met his mother, but you hate her just the same.  Favorite movie, worst fear, where were you on 9/11?  In a zombie apocalypse, he’d choose an ax.  You’d take the shotgun with exactly two shells.  It’s almost romantic, except, well.  

“Hey.”  He slams the heel of his hand against the railing and somewhere along the line, the wood splits with a crack.  “What’d I just say?”  

You look up, jarred loose from your spiral, and he’s shaking his head.  

“Damn fool.  Gimme those back.”  

He reaches out a hand and you slip one last smoke from the pack before you give it to him.  

“Lighter too, baby, c’mon.”  

You hesitate for a second, long enough he has to flex his fingers to make the point.  You hand him the lighter, keep the spare cigarette, tuck it behind your ear.

He peeks into the pack and his lip twitches. “Fuckin’ glutton.  This was full this mornin’.”  

“Sorry,” you deadpan.  

“Sure y’are.”  

You’ve had this conversation too, in just about every house on the street.  You wonder if he ever feels crazy, playing it all out over and over again.  Probably not. He's composed of repetition, a record that skips in the same place every time it's played. You feel crazy, fucking listening to it.  

You watch him work a cigarette loose, watch him hold it in his lips, watch the tendons flex across his knuckles as he lights up. For all the fucking smoke he blows, you still think he looks damn good as he exhales up towards the fading sun. One of life's little cruelties. 

“Y’know, supper ain't gonna make itself,” he says casually. Like he’s trying to piss you off.  He probably is.  

“You sure?” you shoot back, like you’re trying to piss him off.  You definitely are.  

He chuckles, unbothered. “I dunno, baby. Been wrong before.”

“Yeah?  Tell me more.” You're bold these days. Stupid. Dangerous, and not in the same way as the surgeon general's fine print. Dangerous in the present moment. Shaving seconds off your life like taking a pocketknife to a good chunk of wood. But games are more fun with two players. 

He doesn’t want to play, though.  Probably worn out from mowing all those fucking lawns.  He shrugs.  “Nothin’ more to tell.”  

“Pantry’s empty anyway,” you mutter.  The grocery list on the fridge has wrapped back on itself twice over.  He’s been cagey lately, reluctant to venture into town.  You’re down to canned goods old enough to read chapter books.  

“Guess we’ll starve.”  

“Guess so.”  You flick your rapidly shrinking cigarette and watch the ash fizzle frantically down and disappear. The chorus of crickets crescendoes to a dull roar in the silence.  

“You like these, huh?”

You're not sure what he means for a second before you realize he's talking about the cigarettes. You take another drag like you have to mull the taste over, really consider the question. He’s not a patient man, but he waits for your answer.

“Yeah,” you say finally on the tail of your exhale. “Best ones in a while.”

It’s the truth.  He's got his own brand and you like it too, but he's a fucking skinflint, and he only buys himself a pack when he's really hard up. Most of the time he scavenges off corpses and out of glove boxes. And you live off his scraps, so. 

Regretfully, you stub yours out as the flame hits the filter. Your throat is raw, tongue wrapped in the taste of tobacco. Everything in this town is racing to kill you and you wish something would win already. You can feel him watching you, now and always. 

“Somethin’ you need, sugar?”

“No.”

“Hmm.”  

He exhales with relish.  You think about the taste of smoke on his tongue and tobacco on his fingers and you grit your teeth.  He’s a vice in every sense.  

“You pissed at me?”  

What kind of question is that?  You peel a chunk of paint off the stair near your shoe.  “I’m always pissed at you.”  You mean it and you don’t and you’re braced for retribution either way, but none comes.  

“Fair enough.”  

You steal a wary glance in his direction.  He’s covered in flecks of grass.  He shed his overshirt in the heat of the day but it’s back on now, unbuttoned, the tee underneath smudged with green.  He lifts his hat, rubs his brow with the heel of his hand, tugs it back into place.  His face is a little sunburnt in spite of the thing.  

“You wanna fight?”  

You stop breathing for a second, sit very still.  He looks down at you, cocks an eyebrow.  He’s really asking.  

You think about it, really think about it.  Broken skin, broken glass.  No neighbors to scandalize.  You shake your head.  “No.”  

He shrugs, goes back to staring holes in the house across the street.  You almost want him to be disappointed, but his face is placid, expression impassive.  “Alright then.  ‘Nother time.”  

You furrow your brow, look at your shoes.  You pick at the paint, feel it slip beneath your nail like a splinter.  You’d bet five bucks you don’t have that he’ll be back to repaint these steps within the week.  It makes you want to rip them apart so he’d have more to do.  You’re not sure if he’d take that as a gift or as sabotage.  You’re not sure how you’d mean it.  

“How ‘bout we head inside, feel each other up?  See what happens?”  You look at him sharply.  He’s really asking.  “We can do it how you like it.”  

How you like it.  How do you like it?  Does he know?  Do you?

Your expression must be a funny one because he grins.  “What?  You a prude all the sudden?”  

No.  No, but.

You find the words wedged behind your teeth.  “You a gentleman all the sudden?”  

He snorts.  “C’mon now.”  He gives the railing one last yank, almost pulls it loose.  As he rounds the steps he drops his spent cigarette and crushes it underfoot.  “Scoot.”  

You make room on the stair and he sits down heavy beside you, takes up more than his fair share of space, same as always.  He smells like sun and sweat and grass and smoke.  His sleeve rides up and exposes the pink of his wrist.  He pulls it down without thinking about it.  You almost–almost–pull it back up.  

“I’m just tryin’ to figure you out.  Don’t know what the fuck you want.”  

Now that's a dumb fucking thing to say. You want a thousand things.  A meal.  A clock that works.  Cable TV.  An article of clothing that doesn't reek of mothballs and someone else's fear. A normal conversation with a normal human being. Half a goddamn hour to yourself without the urge to lock the doors and set the house on fire. 

Anything.  Anything.  

“A light,” you say bitterly. 

To your surprise, he digs the lighter out of his pocket.  Holds it up to show you, like a peace offering.  He moves his boots down a step, pats his thigh.  “C’mere.” 

You straddle his lap and it’s like you’re walking in and out of a room at the same time.  Your hands find their place on either side of his chest and he’s warm to the touch like a dog lying in the sun.  His fingers play at the small of your back.  You can escape into the maze of abandoned homes or the pattern on the ceiling but you can’t slip away from those eyes at this distance.  They catch you like barbs on wire, as distant and cold as the sky.  

This is how you like it.  His head tipped back, looking up at you.  You run your thumb along the edge of his jaw and he almost–almost–smiles.  

He plucks the cigarette from behind your ear, flips it in his fingers.  You open your mouth.  He sets it on your tongue.  He flicks the lighter, brings it close, and when you breathe in you feel it–the poison of this place, yellow-green, permeating your lungs and all the rest of you.  No use in pretending.  No use fighting the current.  Drowning is only as hard as you make it.  

You wonder if he knows you’d come home even if he never came to find you.  Maybe that’s why he comes anyway.  Maybe that’s why you keep hiding.  So you both have something to look forward to.  Games are more fun with two players.  

It’s not worth thinking about.  Nothing good comes from thinking.  

You start to exhale and he tugs you close, sucking the smoke from your mouth, because he never can let you keep anything to yourself.  Maybe you don’t even want to. 

Your lips touch.  Tangerine thrums behind your eyes.  You’ll go to bed hungry tonight and so will he.  One shotgun, two shells.

“Don’t say I never gave you anything,” he murmurs.  

You’re already working his shirt off his shoulders one-handed.  “Nothing I want.”  

He laughs once, almost breathless, leans back on the stairs so you have to lean with him.  “C’mon now.”  

You toss the cigarette into the dirt to free up both hands.

[grailknightmonty]

bdubs’ sleepin through the nighttime glimmering tide but its ok he's not really there to fish

[heartbreakscars]

i was never inlove with the first boy

or the second

or the third

just like i was never addicted to the drugs

or the drinking

or the sex.

its always just been

the addiction to feeling

i want to feel

[trendingdrama]

POV : HONG HAE IN as tumblr user in APRIL FOOL's boop edition

QUEEN OF TEARS 눈물의 여왕 (2024)

[addictiveemptinessvn]

Guess whoooo!!! ....

[delusionshearts]

[ashipikaur]

BACK TO MY ROOTS 🙇

[idontmindifuforgetme]

i need to go about my digital detox in a slightly different way. i feel like i'm only ever capable of being fully off my phone when i am so distracted that i cannot be on it (reading a book, on a run, w friends, doing a task etc etc). but i just want to be okay w the silence. i want to sit at a rooftop bar and look at the night sky and not feel compelled to check my phone or supplement the silence w something else. i want to be sitting on my bedroom floor doing nothing and still feel okay that i'm not on my phone. being off your phone can get intense bc after a certain point it actually feels like withdrawals (you get anxiety, fomo, antsiness) but i just want to feel those things and let them come as they may. it's not that i want to be off my phone completely so much as i want balance, but this interim of just letting go has been so tricky and kind of hard to beat. i seriously just need to be okay w the silence

[metashard]

robots in disguise

[manglechan1204]

I can't stop thinking about that old grumpy man. Why do I like Swansea so much when I know I would hate it if an old man talked to me like how he talks to the crew.

Obviously there is the fact that he is the only one actually doing something against Jimmy which I gotta stan.

But more than that I find his story really touching and tragic in such a realistic way. The fact that he went through getting ride of an addication, being sober for multiple years, getting a steady job and building a family. All of this hardship to get somewhere in his life that should have bring him happiness and it just left him feeling unfulfilled. So much so that when looking back, the highlight of his life was his time passing out drunk on his couch with his only concern being the empty bottle in his hand.

More of my incoherents thoughts on why I love the old man below :

His situation happens because he took the path that was given to him by society without thinking twice since everything told him to do so, as we can see in one of the video on the Tv that shows capitalist propaganda of the perfect man, balanced between his job at the factory and his family. This is what was shown to him as how to achieve happiness, how to be a good man. So he started to work to get there and every achievements he reached, getting a jobs, a credit card, a family, which didn't bring him the feeling of fulfilment he has been promised. So he just thought that it wasn't enough and kept working toward the next goal because the clock is ticking. He never took the time to sit and think about his life because of that, or even to appreciate what he already had. To realise at the end, that he never once felt the content this life was supposed to bring him. This tie into the critics of late stage capitalism of the game because we can imagine that maybe he would have been happier if he didn't force himself into that mold after getting clean.

Next, I want to say that it's so unbelievably hard to get completly ride of an addiction all by your own ( which seems to be swansea case ) and the fact that for him it wasn't even worth it. The fact that for him in his last moments, getting ride his alcoholism was the wrong path because being an alcoholic is the only other option he ever known since he never had the time to consider that there was other options ( also maybe he would have never ended on this ship if he hadn't stop..). It's horrifying to me. I don’t think he has been living his whole life thinking that, maybe a thought here and there, but the fact that it's the fear of dying alone in some ditch that makes him take this turn in his life and that at the end he realise, after all of that, he'll still die alone in some shitty crashed spaceship, must be why this is his last thoughts.

To finish, there is the fact that Swansea is not a good guy, and he knows it, he acknowledged that he is still a drunkard at heart, that to some degree he prefer the carefreeness of being an alcoholic that having a loving family. Yet he still always try to do good things for other and put effort into it. He regret his drunk past and yet never get back to it because he knows people relay on him now, the devs even said that he celebrates his soberversary by buying himself expensive snickers. It shows that even if his heart say otherwise, he knows that this decision, at least, was the good one. The most telling example is how he wanted to give a way out to Daisuke by hiding the only working cryopods for him. The fact that the only regret he choose to voice on his death bed is not being able to save this "annoying kid" even though he has a whole life of regret before meting him. That he is willing to do the horrible but necessary act of putting Daisuke out of his misery himself while reassuring him when doing so.

And this is were his relationship with Daisuke is even more tragic to me because what he meant by Dai "could have a taught him a thing or two" is he could have taught him about enjoying the little things that you have in the present moment. Daisuke is described as someone who didn’t have anything going on for him, "no vision for the futur, no talent" but it didnt prevent him from having a blast learning something new, being helpful or just eating something sugery. Since Swansea strikes me as the "it's too late to change" type of person, I don't think he would do something drastic to change his lifestyle if he had the opportunity to do an introspection. This is why I think the kind of mindset Daisuke had, could have brought some peace to Swansea mind's in this late stage of his life.

anyway

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy

I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.

Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.

I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.

I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)

I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.

But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.

So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.

This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.

Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.

But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.

There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.

And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).

I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.