#also this is kinda the lite version of it anyway SO JUST IMAGINE THIS BUT LESS FUNNY

[cairavende]

Worm Arc 18 thoughts:

Well that sure just happened

I'm fine

Noelle ate my daughter. But I'm fine. It's fine.

Her girlfriends are gonna save her!

I'm fiiiiine

Anyway, that's like, the end of the arc so there's a lot of other stuff that happens!

Taylor casually drops that she's mostly blind in conversation and Brian kinda freaks out. Understandably.

She got eye drops that she is supposed to be doing but never mentions doing them. I'm very disappointed in her. I'm also worried her eyes aren't going to ever get better.

I do love that the moment Dinah says she only has a 58% chance of going home and Taylor realizes it's because of her, she forces the situation by taking Dinah home right away. She is far from perfect, but she does have her moments.

RACHEL LET DINAH PET HER DOG!!!!! AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! LOOK AT THE GROWTH!!

One of my favorite lines, when Taylor asks Dinah the chance of trouble before they go into the medical clinic "When there's trouble, it's you.  Eighty percent of the time." Just, kinda embodies the spirit of Worm I think.

I'm still fine.

Taylor sure thinks about Rachel as Rachel a lot now, instead of mostly as Bitch. GAAAAAY.

I really want to know what's on those papers Dinah left for Taylor. Triumph saw them but didn't seem to react. One might have been a message for him, since Dinah would know he would see it. Something that will come into play later maybe.

I love Parian making a giant wiener dog for everyone to ride on. Like, it is a definite upgrade in transportation from "door with glass stuck in it dragged down the street" but it doesn't have much of a supervillain vibe to it.

Noelle just starts it off with grabbing possibly the strongest cape available in Brockton Bay. At a minimum, one of the most versatile to clone. No big deal. Not like even just normal Vista could become very dangerous if she wanted to be evil.

Freaking PRT all "this is a Class A instead of a Class S cause Eidolon is a big man baby and needs to punch something all on his own to prove he's strong". Sure are helping people Alexandria. Good job. What a hero.

I think Eidolon is Bargain Bin Scion. Scion Lite. Blue Light Special Scion. A shitty version of Scion created by Cauldron basically.

Clockblocker is so fucking fascinated with Skitter it's amazing.

Tattletale made Eidolon maaaaaad! I love her.

I'm perfectly fine.

The scene with meeting the Chicago Wards, oh god I loved it so much! Skitter tells Bitch to clear the plywood out of a window and she just instantly fucking kicks it open, then a giant swarm comes in and swirls around everyone and covers Skitter, making her hair move and trailing bugs behind her like a gown, and then starts speaking with the swarm. And Tattletale waits until the perfect moment before asking the Wards their names and powers, very clearly backing Skitter up as her 2nd. Just such a "ok I was playing nice but now I need you to know who you are working with!" power move. Fucking amazing. Also it was Skitter being assisted by Bitch and Tattletale! GAAAAAAAAAAAY!! LESBIAN SUPERVILLAIN POWER POLYCULE!

I think Grace has neat powers but could have been more creative with her name. I fucking love Tecton though, assume tinker. Dude has got to love fights like this, where he is allowed to do all the property damage he wants. He'd make a good villain.

The other two are kinda neat too but they didn't last very long.

Every time they are going anywhere Bitch specifically offers Skitter a ride. GAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!

I love seeing the range of power adjustments the clone Vistas get. Some are pretty basic - can do stuff from farther away or not be slowed down if a lot of people are around - but then we get ones like Paper Mario Vista and Imagine Dragons Vista, with much more wild powers.

Everyone stand back while Eidolon goes and shows us all how strong he is! God.

I'm 100% FINE.

Side effect of being blinded probably, but it is neat how good Taylor is getting at listening, and sometimes even seeing, through her bugs! Just listening in on Eidolon and Noelle from blocks away.

Imp almost gets crushed to death by Eidolon's gravity power cause she ignores warnings from Skitter to run. Sounds about right.

Noelle making rat clones and bug clones (that Skitter can't control) is fun.

Fucking projectile vomit attack suddenly! Did Noelle absorb the girl from the Exorcist??

Texas Wards kinda getting their ass kicked. (Also what the hell is going on in Texas that the whole state apparently just has the one Wards team, vs most places have a Ward team per city?)

Fight is going kinda poorly. Travelers show up to help! And then Trickster betrays everyone to feed my daughter to Noelle! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm fine.

The Most Powerful Man in the World Interlude thoughts:

Scion just really is empty in there isn't he?

Not a person, just a construct of the entities in 3 dimensional space. Sphere moving through Flatland and being seen as a circle style. No mind, just does what this guy tells him.

Duke is a very good dog.

Kevin talking about Scion 100% sounds like someone talking about a lover that has been lots of trouble for them but that they just can't quite.

Lisette is having a weird day.

I really wonder how the next Endbringer attack is going to go now that Scion has been told to kill them. Wonder if it'll be different.

Crusader Interlude thoughts:

Shockingly, it turns out that the Nazi is an asshole. News at 11.

Night and Fog were basically constructed by this Gesellschaft group. Seems like a branch of Cauldron pretending to be Nazis for more control over things. Or maybe not directly a branch of Cauldron, but they get powers from Cauldron. Maybe not related, but they make weapons, which is very much what Cauldron can do, and we haven't seen anyone else yet reliably make powers with control over the outcome.

This poor TA is having a bad day.

Taylor triggered 2 or more times in that locker. I was 100% positive of that the second the TA said "You can’t really distinguish a single trigger event from having two in quick succession." I probably should have realized this earlier.

Really curious where Theo and Aster's stories are going. I could see one or both of them being a major part of the end of the world (based on stuff from Trickster's visions on stuff from Noelle's interlude I'm thinking a 3rd or 4th generation cape might play a part in it), but I could also see them being red herrings.

Theo is upset but realistically getting abandoned and left with the PRT is the best option that could have happened to him.

Jessica Yamada Interlude thoughts:

This poor woman

Faultline Interlude thoughts:

OH MY GOD Gregor and Shamrock are super fucking cute together!!!!

Faultline is amazing and very organized and detail oriented and an assertive leader who wears a dress shirt with slacks and cowboy boots and threatens to get a bullwhip and I would really like her to tell me what to do k thx.

Not positive I would trust the minor precog abilities of Shamrock to make me Simurgh proof, but it's better than nothing.

The quarantine zone of the city of Madison is doing great!

Wasn't expecting to get to see Matroyshka again, that's neat! She should probably stop eating people but otherwise she's fun.

Faultline just not being able to stand Tattletale is wonderful. I hope they bother each other for years to come.

I like this crew, so I was not happy that they got really fucked up by Contessa. But I also want to like Contessa (as much as I can like someone who works for Cauldron) and this did make her seem really badass.

Noelle Interlude thoughts:

I'm fine.

Regent keeping up the jokes under pressure, good for him.

Finally got some good descriptions of Noelle's powers doing stuff which was very good.

I'm fine.

Also fun to see various clones and their powers.

AND THE VISION! OH MY GOD THE VISION! So much good info from that. It helped me get a much better idea of things and confirmed a lot of things I already thought. (Like Cauldron has basically hijacked an entity, more or less. Not the details on how though.)

I'm fine.

The fact that Noelle can let the god dandruff take control is interesting. Like her connection never got fully closed compared to other people. Which is what I assumed only taking half a vial did. Really curious to see if we ever get more info on Oliver.

Her Earth Bet self is like, 15 years younger. But still has the same name. Kinda wild.

I'm fine.

Also her Earth Bet dad gave her the name Echidna, which like, I get it's the mother of monsters or whatever, but I can only think of the cute adorable little creature!

I'm fine.

I obviously wish Eidolon had been able to defeat Noelle and save my daughter but him having a big sad about it not being fair that he can't get stronger is pretty funny too. I do not like the guy.

I'm fine.

I'm sure Tattletale has a plan and everything will work out.

I'm fine.

I'm 100% absolutely fine.

[the-golden-ghost]

For OCverse asks: 8, 12, 16, 25?

8.) what inspired your world building, if anything?

Okay so I KNOW this does exist, but I was just kinda thinking... why does so much fantasy either take place in Medieval England (Europe) Lite (but not even a very historically-accurate version of it) OR Just The Modern Day But There's Magic? Like there's SO many time periods I'd love to see covered in a fantasy-verse that are criminally underused. Even medieval-based ones are less Truly inspired by the middle ages and are more just direct ripoffs of Tolkien.

In any case, I picked the (19)20s although I've been debating whether it's really the right way to go. It's definitely going to be US-centric just cause... well, I'm from there. I thought for a ghost story too, the culture of the 20s where they're recovering from a world war and massive epidemic and still spiraling into even worse events to come would be kind of on the nose. I guess it hits home a bit with the modern day, too.

It's not intended to be a bleak story, though. Just a little dark.

12.) okay be honest. pick a favorite oc from this ocverse.

DIFFICULT it changes? I usually say Faith, she became the protagonist after being cast as the antagonist in the last variation for a reason - I just love her a lot.

But Davy grows on me sometimes. He's probably the closest one I have to a self-insert which means sometimes I don't especially like him because we're just too similar, but he's got Vibes. Occasionally he overthrows Faith in my brain for Favorite.

16.) imagine the entire story takes place but in the meantime the characters all also have tumblr. what kind of (terrible) tumblr posts would happen?

Faith is DESPERATELY trying to Do Numbers as a Tumblr Funnyman and it isn't working. Every carefully-crafted shitpost she makes gets 10 notes or less. She doesn't seem to realize that there's no prize for getting famous on here and it's in fact a hindrance.

Davy has a main blog but he doesn't post and gets reported as a bot a lot. He also has a sideblog he runs where he posts as Smudge and it has 50k followers

Lilah has a decent if somewhat niche following and does mostly music recs, songs she's working on, life advice, and aesthetic photos. She has a few fandom blogs as well and has to be careful not to post on main cause it'd be embrassing.

Sam is dead and posts glitchy illegible posts into the void. His blog cannot be followed, but the posts will show up on your dash anyway, somehow. None of them have visible notes.

25. best scene you havent yet written, but have an idea for?

Faith and Davy re(?)union at the beginning hell yeah! I have two separate ideas depending on whether to make them Childhood Friends (the standard) or strangers (new idea, playing around with it)

[dragontamer05]

Whenever I hear anything about people either wanting a new console release or whatever in regards to the Switch I just hnng, I mean I’m glad you’ve got the money to want and be able to purchase anytime new one is popped out but I’m happy with what I got.

Now I get it, new console means likely updated/upgraded hardware which means increased performance and all that so I’m not saying its bad for a new one to be a released or that Nintendo shouldn’t eventually have something new but my main concern- as is often what happens with new consoles are released is

- Will the old Switch games work on it / could I still run any new games released after on my old console even if it means having a slightly lowered performance rate?

Because lets be real consoles are expensive, not to mention the fact that they’ve now merged the home and hand held console to one which brings its own problems personally. Now for the switch they did eventually release the Switch Lite - which the fact that they chose to release it and people bought it (I’ve got one and so does my sister) and I think it did pretty well I think kinda proves that while people love having a plugged in console to play on their T.V

there are people who either can’t afford or simply don’t want that and just want and enjoy the portability of hand held gaming.

Look I’ve got a Wii have enjoyed playing games on the T.V. but I also like my DS and having gaming I take on the go and personally anyway if I had a Home console type version of the Switch the hooks up to the T.V I can’t imagine ever daring to take that with me on travel (especially cause doesn’t it need to be docked to charge where as even if its not the best choice I can technically charge my Switch lite with my phone charger)

The only thing I’d want from the new switch is let me idk some how Copy? share? my Switch profile with another while still keeping it on my original device. or at the very least idk share game file data.

Look I don’t know how that would or even if it could be programmed to work like that only that right now you can which is kinda a downer because lets say I did want and could by a Switch right now or maybe let’s say I got the special Pokemon SV one or I got really lucky someone gifted me one or won a contest whatever

With everything saved to the Switches memory now all my games now that I have sure I can still play them but it would be all fresh new saves, I wouldn’t be able to carry over my old saves without like removing them off my current switch- I have no idea if like saving stuff to a memory card and just swapping out would work though I assume not.

If such a thing could be programmed I’m not even saying you have to be able to do it an infinite amount of times. I’m just saying keep they already available transfer option of data off one device to another but also what if even if it was just like a one time deal or idk I’d imagine there’d be some other condition attached to it or something instead of transferring everything off it would copy whatever current data you have on there and basically paste on to the new one.

Maybe you can only do it once or because its copying your already existing data it won’t necessarily automatically update with any new changes you’ve made-in terms of downloads n stuff (on what’s basically viewed as your main console where it copied from) so to keep up to date you just have to synch up the two consoles now and then like regular save data might be fine but if say a game had some kind of patch /update to it or you bought and downloaded some new dlc on the main console if you want to share it to your profile on the secondary you gotta sync it up.

Basically how you sync an old phone up to a new one if you want to keep the stuff that was saved there. But like it doesn’t like wipe the old phone clean of that data either (unless you choose to like factory reset afterwards)

At minimum being able to do that would mean being able to back all your saves and things up on another console and not just SD cards or the cloud- which not all games use anyway.

--

Tbh the only other thing I’d want out of a new console change the controllers I can’t even say specifically in what way but I look at them and all I can wonder is exactly how user friendly are they for left handed people? Now the switch light for the most part I’ve never had too much trouble with so maybe it wouldn’t be to bad or I’ve just been lucky with the games I’ve played so uh hey any other Left handers out there that’s got a plain ol regular switch or a pro I guess- you know not a Switch Lite pls share your experiences would love to here.

(in the tags, reply or just reblog and comment whatever floats your boat)

--

[herecomesmk]

sorry, kid. well, you know what they say about meeting your heroes..

         " Oh okay sorrey... " Unknows you and goes back to being only a noodle boy. No one ask for any hero stuff he's no longer a hero.

[vldkeith]

13 & 19 (kin)g

13. Them in formalwear 

i sort of wrote a fanfic abt this once? kind of. anyway lance loves the chance to dress up bc his normal style is straight boy lite™️ and it’s a nice contrast to that gfksdhgksd he looks really good in suits too, very dapper, very lean, very polished. the suaveness is kinda ruined when u see him being all blushy and grinning and picking at his clothes, but lance mcclain in a suit makes a very fine silhouette. he draws looks of interest from everyone he passes!

keith is eternally uncomfortable in anything but a shirt and skinny jeans, but he can look good in a suit if it’s tailored to him well enough. it kinda gives him a dark, mysterious air, very different from lance’s approachable one; he’ll stick to corners if he’s put in formal wear, or trail behind lance or shiro if they’re there as well. think revenge era gerard way, that’s keith’s look gfdjkghsk

19. Them drunk

ok i have an ask from kenzie sitting in my inbox from new years eve asking for drunk hcs so i’ll just keep this brief! lance gets bold & giggly & and ten thousand times more flirty; if he knows you he’ll sling an arm around you, talk close to your ear, laugh at everything, etc etc. honestly he’s kind of cute when he’s drunk, just a more intense, less coherent version of himself gkdfsghsk he’s also very honest! if the night goes too long he can get to be a little emotional, but mostly regarding how much he loves his friends. i’d imagine drunk flirty lance absolutely destroys keith if he’s around tho lol

keith...honestly? i think he gets more giggly as a drunk too, which is a lot more fun to play with since it’s so different from his general persona gkfdhgfksd i think he’d also be more direct about feelings he generally hides (like how hot he finds lance) and more touchy than usual, willingly leaning into someone’s shoulder or touching their arm as he laughs. i think he’d generally stay like that for the whole night, i don’t see him transitioning into emo or w/e at any point nfdkghsdk

[elusive-roetato]

eeeeee,,,,,,gender rant

ok so I changed my pronouns yesterday (technically 2 days ago) to she/they and literally the second I changed my bio, I got so excited that I had to step away for a second and walk off the happy jitters. So like I definitely was correct in doing that

BUT I’m having a little difficulty because like... Knowing the they/them is there makes me feel really flipping good and every time I think about it I get a burst of good vibes! But I’m also really used to she/her pronouns, obviously, and I still like those pronouns and feel like they apply to me!

SO THEN the issue is like... I’m almost nervous about the idea of people using they/them pronouns for me?? ig cause I’m just used to she/her? But like... AGH ok so through text the idea of someone being like “this is Roe, they do ___” is like... fuck yeah, dude!!! I’m they!!!! but I almost feel weird when I imagine someone using they/them for me verbally? augh idk!!!

Maybe it’s just a matter of like... my identity online vs off? Because offline, I have been raised as [Real Name] the girl, and that’s kinda ingrained in me. But then online I’ve created my own persona and had the freedom to define myself and explore who I am? So it’s kinda like I identify with they/them pronouns less when I’m in a space where I didn’t get to completely control the version of me I presented?

Which is really interesting but also really frustrating! Because how do I explain “my pronouns are she/they, but only when you are calling me Roe or Blu” 

And you know, it’s really probable that as I use the they/them pronouns more online, I’ll feel more comfy with them irl! But as stands it feels a lot like my new pronouns are a shiny rock I found and took home. I don’t know what to with it, but I like that I have it now!!

I also don’t know how/if to label my gender at this point! Because I do identify strongly with my agab, but like... not exclusively? Ik that there’s a really harmful perception of nonbinary identities that frames them as just being “woman-lite” but I... kinda really like that for me? Cause my own view of gender is a pretty straightforward “humans made it up anyways so everyone should just do what they want with it” and for me that’s kinda just... acknowledging it and then chucking it out the window.

so like... idk if I’m even cis? and tbh I don’t think I need to know, but it’s just been really interesting (and kinda confusing ngl) to think about. 

Anyways, that concludes my long-winded 4 am gender rant that I literally just made to try and think all this through. And now I’m gonna post it because if nothing else, Tumblr is really good for screaming into the void when you just want to put your thoughts into the universe

also pls forgive the amount of “like”s, run-on sentences, and random question marks. I’m like 99% sure t’s a regional thing and this is just legitimately how I talk irl

[cupidquinn-moved]

Consider: Harleen Quinzel is a budding musician that moves from the suburbs to Gotham in order to get her break. She’s technically impressive but performs relatively bland and innocuous music. However, Harleen is pretty and blonde, plays the guitar and keyboard very well, and easily books small shows in coffee shops and bars. I kind of imagine her style during this period as Tori Amos lite. Like if someone really liked Kate Bush and Tori Amos and wanted to write a movie or TV show about an artist that made similar music but had to make it for the Disney Channel.

The concept follows Harleen’s persona changing. She starts using the stage name Harley Quinn, experimenting with electronic music, more aggressive lyrics, and starts dressing herself more provocatively (I don’t necessarily mean sexy by noting this, just literally, she wears eye catching colours, unusual styles, and outfits. Very much the style from BoP. However I’m a little conflicted with how to go about it. On one hand, something I like to do with AUs is to mirror canon somehow. Obviously, that brings up the Joker question. Do I fit him in at all? Is a version of him still in his life? Is Gotham still Gotham Gotham or just Gotham, a big city with all the joys and downfalls of a big city. And if it’s still Gotham Gotham, what’s the same? Is there still a Batman and all his rogues? As a narrative, is it hacky to fundamentally change Joker for the sake of mirroring the canon relationship if all parts don’t change? (ie: There’s still a Batman and the rest of the fam. All the rogues aside from Mr. J). Having lived in big cities, I can honestly say, danger is a part of life depending on where you live in said cities. Being relatively poor most my adult life, I usually lived in the “bad parts” and I’ve been visited by violence more than once. I guess what I’ve trying to say is though I don’t believe big cities are the virtual war zones from the minds of conservative fear mongers, I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that living in a large, dangerous city like Gotham (which I believe is based on a cross between the pre-gentrified NYC of the 70s and 80s and some of the high crime cites in New Jersey) can change a person. Even without engaging in a relationship a criminally insane clown. (continues under cut cuz it got stupidly long)

So. Here’s two ideas:

1) Harleen catches the attention of the guitarist of a local rock band called Joker. They recently lost their singer and the guitarist in question, Jay (see what I did there?), thinks she has a certain je ne c,est que, and flatters her into the job. In order to fit the band’s vibe, he forges a new persona for her, encourages her to change her style, her attitude, and basically enables a part of her she’s always repressed (basically call it commentary on how women are discouraged from being loud, taking risks, and drawing attention to themselves). Sliding seamlessly into her new role of Harley Quinn, her wild onstage antics and raw talent, Joker began to experience real success. There’s a relationship between her, but he’s very manipulative and emotionally abusive, always eager to remind her that she’d still be performing in coffee shops and the underground if he hadn’t discovered her. Eventually, though, Jay becomes jealous of the attention Harley gets as Joker begins to make real gains in the fame game. Previously, he had been the one that garnered all the attention and he wasn’t one to relinquish it so easily. Also, you know, sexism. So anyway, Harley liked to drink and partook in a drug or three from time to time, but was far from an addict. Knowing that there would have to be a democratic vote to get her out, Jay begins to encourage her into crazier stunts both on and off stage, framing her habit with substances as much more self-destructive. Eventually, Jay’s machinations pay off and she was kicked out of Joker. So she goes solo....

2) Harleen is changed by both Gotham’s danger (in this case, everything is the same aside from her) and the music industry. Basically, a commentary on how it treats women and her frustration with the constant insistence that she’s talented but she needs to be more to make it. More glamourous or a sex pot. There’s no such thing as respect in superstardom for female artists, after all. Maybe Harleen scores a manger that tries to groom her into being the next Lady Gaga or Kesha. They keep pushing and pushing her to do things she’s not entirely comfortable with. Eventually she fires him after a particularly traumatic event (idek, maybe he crosses a certain line in his treatment of her or after a performance that pushes her boundaries to the breaking point), and having been under so much pressure to present and act in a certain way, Harleen kinda just snaps and decides ‘fine, you want a provocateur sex pot, I’ll give you a provocateur sex pot’ but  only on her own terms. She remakes herself as “Harley Quinn” and y’know, does just that.

In my mind, the one with the Joker band is a more fuller AU and maybe there’s no Batman. The second one, everything is the same except for Harley. Maybe. Idek, I kinda leave that up to my partner, especially if they’re part of her canon, giving them room to either dream up a new identity within an AU or stay the same. *shrugs* Anyway, I’m very sorry that this got so lengthy and if you read all this you’re a champ.

[smashjourney]

Super Mario 64

To start things off, i thought I’d play a game i played a lot of as a kid, but never quite finished - When i was a kid, i had a DS and Super Mario 64 DS, which i played an absolute TON of. I’m pretty sure it was the only DS game i had for a very long time, so you can imagine i played the crap out of it.

That was, until i ended up accidentily destroying my DS lite and cartridge with water. I was pretty heartbroken, though i did eventually get a DSI (which to this day, is my baby) but I never got a new copy of Mario 64 DS, and it always ate away at me in the back of my mind that i never finished the game.

So, i figured now that I have 3D All stars, and I’ve decided to do this whole Smash Journey thing, it was finally time to finish it, even though I’m playing a port of the original rather than the DS version. I’m sure there will be a few things I’m going to miss from the DS, but that’s okay.

Anyway, now to talk about what i actually thought of the game. I still think it’s a really solid 3D platformer even to this day, although a few parts of it are quite a bit frustrating, for example I really don’t like the majority of red coin stars, and i absolutely hate using the wing cap, but those aren’t enough to really taint the experience for me, this is a great game.

I guess i should go over each level individually, so let’s start with our hub world. Peach’s Castle is pretty good as far as hub worlds go, though i do wish it was more clear what the actual purpose of each room was. Like, we have a few things like the aquarium, but what is the room with the Bob-omb Battlefield painting supposed to be? I think it would be a lot cooler if we knew what these rooms were for, like if there were furniture to make it clear that Bob-omb Battlefield’s room was supposed to be a study, or something. Still, though, I love how everything feels appropriately regal but not too snooty - it does actually feel like it belongs to Peach.

Bob-omb Battlefield is a fantastic first level. It looks cool, it’s all pretty and green, and the boss has an absolutely magnificent mustache. I remember just playing around here a lot as a kid, even after i had gotten all the stars here. Just a nice place, and i think one of the first areas people think of when they think of Mario 64.

Whomp’s Fortress is a pretty good level, not too much to say about it. What i can say is that i wish Thwomps and Whomps would get more spotlight in Mario, because they’re kinda neat and i wish i could see more levels built around them outside of Mario Maker.

Jolly Roger Bay. THAT GODDAMN EEL GAVE ME SO MANY DAMN NIGHTMARES AS A KID. As for the actual level... well, it’s a water level which I’m not usually a fan of in 3D games, and despite it being called “Jolly Roger Bay” there isn’t a whole lot of piratey stuff here, aside from the ship. I wouldn’t call it bad, but it’s far from the best level in the game.

Cool, Cool Mountain is alright. I had a pretty rough time racing the penguin down the slide, so i got pretty excited when i finally beat it.

Big Boo’s Haunt is a ghost house, and i personally LOVE ghost houses and other spooky stuff, so this one is one of my favorite levels. Boo are some of my favorite Mario enemies, too, so I’m always happy to see them.

Bowser in the Dark World is... Meh. Just a series of platforming and then you fight Ol’ King Koopa for the first time. Like Jolly Roger Bay I wouldn’t say it’s bad, but not my favorite.

Hazy Maze Cave was weirdly a lot of fun for me, despite the fact i remember hating it as a kid. Probably actually one of my favorite levels in the game, actually. I love the Metal Cap, too, easily my favorite power-up in this game.

Lethal Lava Land was pretty damn good too, it just feels a lot better to jump over lava than it is to jump over an empty void. The Bullies are another under utilized Mario enemy that i wish we could see more of.

Shifting Sand Land is okay. I’m not usually someone who really likes desert levels all that much unless they’re doing something unique, and this one really isn’t. Nothing really wrong with it though, aside from that.

Dire, Dire Docks was actually good despite it being a pretty generic water level. I think it has to do with the way it was designed, the stars here just feel particularly satisfying to collect.

Bowser in the Fire Sea is what i like to see from a Bowser level. Lava and Fire everywhere, lots of perilous jumps and enemies. I vastly prefer this to just a weird void.

I absolutely HATE the Snowman and Penguin in Snowman’s Land. I had so much trouble getting past them. Otherwise the level is pretty good, but i despise those two so much.

Wet-Dry World is pretty frustrating and confusing and is my least favorite level in the game. I also have a lot bad memories of playing this level as a kid, so I’m not a fan of it to say the least.

Tall, Tall Mountain is a lot of fun, though I struggled far more than i should have with that damned Monkey.

Tiny-Huge Island is my favorite level in the game. It’s got it all - a fun gimmick, good platforming, and great stars to go after. I adore this place.

Tick-Tock clock was fun, but I’ll admit i found the gimmick kinda annoying because i kept getting my timing off when jumping into the clock.

The last regular level in the game, Rainbow Ride. This place might just be my second favorite level, it was just a good fun challenge.

And finally, Bowser in the Sky. Like Bowser in the Dark World, i felt this place was pretty mediocre. Not great, not terrible, but for the final level it should’ve been a lot cooler.

And i guess that concludes it! Overall, i think this game still holds up alright even after this many years, though i do miss certain levels from the DS version and the other characters. Next up, I’m going to tackle THREE really short games one after the other (Kind of.) 

Thank you so much for to reading my thoughs!

[sally-mun]

BIRTHDAY PARTY TIIIIME!

TIME TO TALK ABOUT MY AWESOME BIRTHDAY PARTY~ below the cut since it’s a biggie!

So as is tradition in our household, I’m sequestered in my room while the party is set up downstairs. I mostly spend the day watching Dance Moms (shut up) and playing Animal Crossing, amusingly to get my birthday party there as well. Eventually @fini-mun​ comes to my door and summons me, and says if I want to record it I should start. I got my phone out and recorded the “First-Person Leda Experience” as I called it. I’m glad I did, because THIS WAS AN EXPERIENCE.

So right outside my door is this chufty motherfucker:

Deebs explains that this is a time machine that’s powered by imagination, and we’re going to take a journey through time. At this point I’m a little puzzled, because the time traveling thing makes me wonder if the theme is Doctor Who, but this clearly isn’t a Tardis so I guess not??

Turns out, I’m correct that it’s not a Tardis; it is, in fact, a Time-A-Tron. Deebs first says we’re going to go into the future and encourages me to turn the dial clockwise. And, well...

WELL THAT DOESN’T BODE WELL. Deebs and I abort this idea and I turn the dial the other way. It turns out, we were going back to the 80′s and 90′s! This was SUCH a great idea for me because I whine all the time about how much I miss these two decades, so I’m very excited to do my time warp!

Deebs sends me on ahead to go back in time, mentioning that they’ll catch up because they want to check out that apocalypse first. So, I head through alone.

There’s a pretty cool warpy swirl on the door ahead of me to give me the full time vortex experience, then I head downstairs. There’s lots of 80′s and 90′s themed swirly banners hanging from the ceiling, balloons with various animal prints all over the floor, and garland in the kitchen doorway featuring boom boxes and sunglasses and lightning bolts and all kinds of nostalgic icons! My friends are waiting for me and I quickly realize they’re dressed for the past too: Jay is wearing overalls and Ivan is wearing a Metallica shirt.

As I’m descending the stairs music suddenly starts -- music from the 80′s radio channel on our TV, and I can’t help myself from bopping around, so the camera got a little shakey at this point (sorry, future!me). We have a little mini dance party at this point while waiting for Deebs to catch up. I even flip my phone around to do my best at filming myself dancing, and upon reviewing the video as I write this I KINDA DID SHOCKINGLY WELL.

(Yeah I normally don’t post pics of myself but I just HAD to show off how well I did for filming myself completely blind.)

I also used the opportunity to teach my young friends the Hand Jive, proving once and for all that even in my prime I am nothing even remotely resembling “cool.”

So finally Deebs rejoins us, and now also has a great retro shirt! It’s got “Totally Rad!” written on it with lots of color splashes. Deebs then explains that in the future Water World is how the world ended, and as a result the survivors elected Kevin Costner as Godking due to his experience making the movie.

We then move into the kitchen and review the food: McDonald’s chicken nuggets, which I loved as a kid and still do to this day! Macaroni and cheese, for the same reason! Little weenies wrapped in bacon, which I only discovered last year but are fucking delicious! Faygo Red Pop, which I practically drank intravenously as a wee one! And of course, ZEBRA CAKES!

The plates and other food vessels are all retro and neon, and I can see that the party’s goody bags (which have become a tradition of our parties at this point) are all very neon as well.

Then Deebs brings out the cake: A DIRT CAKE~ I haven’t had a proper dirt cake since I was like 12 years old!! Deebs even went the extra mile and got rock candies and gummy worms to mix in to enhance the delicious dirtiness~ Deebs also mentioned worrying about having gotten the recipe right, but I pointed out that there are like a thousand “recipes” for dirt cake and there’s no single right way.

I’m so excited and already having such a good time, and I make a passing comment that I’m glad I wore a neutral shirt since it’s not something that would clash with our time traveling. Deebs says it’s funny I should mention that, then hands me a present and tells me to go to the bathroom and change. I obey, and I find that I’ve been given this shirt to wear!!

IT’S SO AMAZING AND I LOVE IT!! It’s like THE essence of what I love about the 80′s~

We all get food and go sit down to hang out, and Deebs mentions we should watch a retro movie. My mom starts flipping through the TV guide, and I can hardly believe my eyes: Coincidentally, THE WIZARD IS ON!! I direct my mom to go to that channel, and it’s actually still pretty close to the beginning of the movie. I just CANNOT believe that this happened to be on during my party, I’m fucking stoked.

We watch the movie and make some pretty great commentary over it, though I notice that one of my guests is spending a lot of time on her phone and the other is preoccupied with a book he brought. OH WELL, THIS IS MY PARTY AND WE’RE WATCHING THE WIZARD. DEAL WITH IT. Besides, I can’t fault them TOO badly because let’s face it, most of us just watch that movie for the game battle at the end anyway. (Speaking of the ending Deebs and I got each other going and eventually concluded that the actor playing the host of the game tournament spiked several small children into the floor. It’s a long story.)

So once we’re done eating Deebs hands out the goodie bags, and holy shit they’re amazing. They’re so smartly put together: A slap bracelet, a pencil and mini-phone book (because we don’t have cell phones yet so this is the only way to save numbers!), some Pop Rocks and Bazooka gum, and we each got a miniature version of a classic 80′s toy of some sort: Mini Rock’em Sock’em robots for Jay, a mini Rubik’s cube for Deebs, a mini Etch-a-Sketch for Ivan... and guys, I nearly rocketed through the roof when I saw I got A MINI LITE-BRITE!! I legit lost my mind for a minute, I didn’t even know this EXISTED as a mini and I was SO EXCITED because I fucking loved my Lite-Brite as a kid and I couldn’t believe Deebs found something like this for me!!

So after we have dirt cake and the movie wraps up, Deebs brings me the rest of my presents, and I was not prepared for how many there were. The gifts carried through the theme very well, as I got some new classic Sonic dolls, an officially licensed Genesis controller for the PC, and 80′s/90′s-themed card games! Ivan was also very shrewd in getting me a couple of Rurouni Kenshin graphic novels, as I’ve not only mentioned to him several times that it’s my favorite anime but also that I have a very, very strong preference for 90′s anime in general!

After that Jay had to leave, so Ivan, Deebs, and myself went up to my room to unwind from the excitement by watching Youtube for a while. We did what we call a “friend pile,” aka where we all try to cram onto my little-ass twin bed and just sort of watch TV and cuddle and hope our limbs don’t all go numb. We took turns suggesting videos to watch, which exposed us all collectively to a lot of new stuff. Some of the videos were fucking insane.

All in all, it was a pretty fantastic day XB I’m very satisfied with my time traveling adventure! Thank you SO SO MUCH to @fini-mun​ and my friends for showing me such a great time!!

[thefudge]

TLJ thoughts, post-viewing

sooo, i have a lot of feelings about a lot of things. also the subtitles didn’t prepare me. for a lot.

this movie is made up of many quiet, non-verbal moments and rian johnson lets those moments sink in and dwell with you and that’s great

rey exploring the workings of the force, for example. there’s a really cool sequence where she’s trying to find out who her parents are and she lowers herself in the embodiment of the dark side and it’s very trippy and cool. it’s not rushed and it’s v atmospheric. she gets the incentive to do that thanks to kylo. his revelations about luke and his general aura of “troubled darkness” inspire her to dig deeper.

i think what i liked most about reylo was its sense of gratuitous intimacy. what i mean by this is that they seemed to connect without effort, without having to manipulate the plot to make it fit. they seemed be in their own little movie, dealing with things beyond the usual surface level of star wars ‘good vs. evil’. kylo’s philosophy about letting the past go is definitely flawed, but the way the movie frames reylo, they do seem to “let go” of their surroundings and circumstances when they’re together. it’s sort of timeless. 

i will say, i don’t think the romance was that "romantic”, if that makes sense? and i think it’s a good thing. their bond is very real, but it goes beyond “romantic drama” and your usual hero/villain trope. it has shades of that, ofc, and there is palpable sexual and romantic tension, imo. but i sensed something more mature and interesting between them. it could go either way. do i want reylo to have a future in ep 9 and after? yep. is it possible they won’t? also yep. mainly because kylo let rey down. and here’s the kicker: it’s not rey that really rejects him. it’s him that rejects rey. because she tries quite a few times to bring him over to her side, and i think her anger and sadness stem from the fact that, ultimately, kylo didn’t choose her, and ergo the light. he’s still v much conflicted and i think she can sense that. but rey is hungry. she wants all or nothing. she can’t have half of him. so she doesn’t reject him as much as tell him straight up that she won’t stand for being second. for instance, she expects him to fold to her side immediately after taking down snoke. when he doesn’t, she’s quite literally in tears. this hurts her on a deeper level than “oh no, the dark side won and the resistance lost an important ally.” no, this feels like her parents all over. leaving her, deserting her. that’s how i read it, tbh. 

and kylo does some reprehensible shit in the latter quarter of the movie, lol, like i won’t woobify him, since i like my antiheroes to be antiheroes.  but he's not quite villain level?  if u look at snoke, if u take that cool, collected snarky asshole - that’s a villain. he knows who he is, and what he wants. kylo is hopelessly confused and always looking for validation. he tells rey that she’s the one always looking for father figures - but oh, benny ben. it’s actually you. he wants someone to really see him, and that’s why he’s drawn to rey. but just to clarify: he doesn’t have it in him to kill his mother. he has an open, unambiguous chance and he stops. he is willing to destroy her when she stands behind walls and is shielded by the resistance. yet when she’s in the open, no. that was my read on it. 

his fight with luke is...very much one-sided. luke appears as a force-hologram to fight him and kylo just wants to obliterate him for very, very personal reasons. kylo is not the cool, collected new emperor who is going to “kill the past”. he lives so much in the past that he doesn’t even realize luke isn’t even there. 

and btw, kylo doesn’t kill luke, though he wishes he had. early on we get this foreshadowing. when the first force-bond happens between him and rey, he goes “no, you’re not doing this. the effort would kill you.” meaning that, to transport yourself through space via force (without a bond) takes a looooot of energy. luke goes on a suicide mission, basically. he knows using the force like this will kill him. he’s almost having fun toying with kylo at the end. 

when kylo realizes he’s a force-hologram, luke smiles and says “see you around, kid.” not exactly anakin vs obi-wan, if u know what i mean.

and then back on the island, we see luke peacefully give himself over to the force and vanish. it’s v tranquil and quite satisfying and the original star wars theme is used so well, imo. do i think we could’ve had more of luke? sure. but he went out on his own terms. that’s the whole point - kylo didn’t kill him. he killed himself.

again, i want to emphasize that kylo is still very much an antihero, dipping his toe into villainy (and failing - which makes him more angry, which only makes it harder to be the villain he wants to be haha). he’s not a Good Guy. many posts will crop up in the tag about what a poor, lost soul he is. yes and no. rey actually understands him when she closes the falcon door on him. she knows him and appreciates him. he will never really be ben solo and that’s a good thing. trying to be ben solo so hard is what got him in this mess. he isn’t supposed to be a Good Guy. so no, i don’t want him to “turn” (see my thoughts on “turning” below). i want him to truly move beyond the past and reform himself on his own terms, just like luke. because hey fam, luke isn’t a Good Guy in this movie either AND THAT’S GREAT. anyway, i certainly won’t be romanticizing him (kylo). he’s a compelling antihero who definitely has baggage and trauma (luke did try to kill him as a boy, though he has a wildly dramatized version of the event lol) but he is also someone who has to help himself. ultimately, rey’s goal isn’t to “save” him but to push him to save himself. honestly, if kylo had followed her and “turned” and reluctantly joined the resistance, it would’ve been a total let down and a betrayal of his character. him “turning” wouldn’t help him. he’d still have that darkness and that anger inside of him, multiplied. boy needs therapy - aka working through his issues, not ignoring them and joining the Good Side. 

Other things I liked: 

- admiral holdo’s arc - beautiful, well-done and surprising. laura dern kills it. 

- benicio del toro!!!!! no small parts with this man. he is delightful. imagine rick from “rick and morty” but way hotter lol. he was probably my favorite addition, after rose. he’s the middle-ground guy, he’s more han solo than fucking han solo. he doesn’t believe in good guys vs bad guys and he shows both finn and the audience that the two sides err because they believe their path is the only path. he perfectly encapsulates the very real contradictions in modern-day ethics and how our “pure and wholesome” activism often shields us from some terrible truths. he does have a semblance of a heart underneath his cynicism but i love that in the end he doesn’t suddenly discover the power of friendship with finn and rose. he’s a jaded asshole with shades of good, who’s probably seen some rough shit. BUT, he has this super cute moment with rose before things go to shit regarding her necklace and it’s !!!!!! it shows how much he understands human nature. i kinda ship them. aaaanyway. i definitely think he will return, his arc is not done. 

- ROSE TICO SMILING AND BEING HAPPY. ROSE TICO RIDING THAT KANGAROO CREATURE AND ENJOYING LIFE. i treasured those scenes a lot. she’s a great combo of feisty and childlike, tough and innocent. gosh, she reminds me of bonnie bennett so much ;___;

- general hux. yall, it’s true. it’s all true. hux may have won me over. hux in TFA was just a lite over-the-top villain imo. but here??? he’s such a fun, dynamic character, rian gave him a lot of fun, humorous moments. and honest to god, he’s also given some humanity. when kylo takes over, he is genuinely affected and disturbed by his level of aggression. and he’s....idk, much less evil in this one. probably because of the humor. he just seems like a man dead-set on fulfilling his mission, brainwashed to the core. and underneath the brainwashing, he seems to be your average overwhelmed white dude. i don’t think he’ll be redeemed or anything but...it’s weird how at the end of TLJ he is probably the MOST reasonable dude from the first order???

- there’s this great little message about failure. i think here TLJ was inspired by Rogue One. because a lot of the characters in this movie learn to let go and accept defeat. you can’t always save everyone, you can’t always fight back. sometimes, the brave thing is to retreat and treasure the ppl you love. so i def liked that.

- GODDAMN GHOST YODA. i honestly thought i’d hate it because...gimmick, amirite? but that scene with luke was SO emotional and also funny and visceral and just - i was a bit teary-eyed, ME, THE GRINCH. i was suddenly nine again, watching star wars for the first time. ANYWAY. 

- luke skywalker deserves a separate entry. mark hamill did so much with this character in the last few scenes. also some of the stuff he says about the force in this movie is legit beautiful and i love how he criticizes the vanity of the jedi - because this was what was missing from the prequels. anakin fell because the council was tone-deaf. the jedi are often responsible for their own doom and so they must always be vigilant - which is a goddamn thankless job. i love that luke acknowledges this. 

-luke/leia moment. GAAAAH. HE KISSES HER FOREHEAD GOODBYE AND SHE KNOWS HE’S NOT COMING BACK FROM THIS. I DIED.

- in that order of business, leia finally FIIIINALLY gets to show off a bit and use the force in a pro-active manner. it’s also clear to me that episode 9 would’ve been the story of her and “ben” and i think she would have been the catalyst for his eventual development. but sadly, we’ll never see that ;____; 

-there is some gorgeous cinematography and visual direction in this movie. particularly in the third act, on that salt planet? the red trails? shivers. 

-i didn’t hate any of the new creatures like i thought i would??? probably because they were used sparingly and with a sense of humor.

Stuff i kind of didn’t like:

- phasma. phasma, phasma, phasma. WHAT was that??? like tell me that wasn’t anticlimactic as hell. she was, sadly, a pointless character. unless she somehow survived the fire and destruction, which i doubt, i really don’t see the point of casting wonderful gwendolyn christie just to stand there in armor. 

- MAZ KANATA. is barely in this. i call bullshit. 

-sigh, okay so i loved rose to death, but her arc revolved way too much around finn. on the one hand i get it, on the other hand.... i was hyped because ppl were saying she gets this big moment to shine. and granted, imo, she shines every moment she’s on screen. but i think her climactic scene was... *fart noises*. it’s completely centered around finn. she saves him basically, and it’s definitely heartfelt and lovely but also...it’s finn’s moment 100%. because it’s him who has to learn about his own worth. i do think they make a good team and i ship them a little bit, but the one-sided kiss was not satisfying and i’m tired of having to watch my darling woc give their love and devotion freely, only to be  tertiary characters in their own story. like, imo, it should’ve been rose who flew straight into that cannon and tried to take it down for her sister. she should’ve been the one determined to take it down. and it should’ve been finn to save her and tell her they must find meaning in other things. finn definitely cares for her and in the last scene we have of him, he’s tending over rose and waiting for her to wake up BUT. will rose ever be number one for anyone, like the white girls, i wonder? eh, i’m probably just grumpy old aunt. she does get to have an internal world, she’s a believable human being, she matters. the thing is, white girls in these movies can bend their little finger and they’re considered worthy and complex. rose has to jump through hoops to be seen the same way. anyway.

- i liked poe dameron’s arc, which is “hey, maybe i should stop posturing and listen to women more lol” which is “learn when to retreat and stand down” but...honestly, you hire gorgeous oscar isaac who can give you real emotional weight and you just...kinda under-utilize him. yes, he did a lot of stuff, but he...didn’t take time to internalize it. this dude feels like he’s got a lot of demons and conflicting desires and a rich inner life, yet we only skim the surface of that. like, he’s aways in go-mode, we rarely get a quiet moment with him. like pls fix this, episode 9. 

-luke’s reaction to han’s death is pfffffffffffff. maybe we’ll get more in a deleted scene? 

- also....can we stop pussyfooting and legit talk about han as a dad? because they keep hinting he wasn’t a good one, nor a very good husband to leia. but...it’s very unsatisfying to keep hearing about it without good storytelling to back it up. 

- the world-building & the origins of the first order. i had problems with this in TFA and, big surprise, i still have problems with it here. basically, why has the first order taken over the new republic? how did they gain support? were there remnants of the old empire that survived and thrived as the first order? what about the knights of ren? luke mentions kylo took some students with him when he destroyed the jedi temple, so....what about those guys? like, this very fraught and war-torn landscape doesn’t have a solid history. how did A become B? why is every corner of the galaxy oppressed? why are some planets thriving more? are they all arm-dealers??? i find that hard to believe. yeah, we have the expanded universe for that, we have books and comics etc. but i need these movies to give us a sense of their own universe. i’m...still not convinced. 

-lolol, snoke dies like a bitch. and it’s so anticlimactic and duuuumb. dude, a five-year old coulda seen that coming but your ancient super powerful ass couldn’t? laaaame. he’s like “oh, yes, i sense no more conflict in you, kylo ren. just a deep certainty”. YES FOOL, because he’s decided to remove u, because he’s confident he wants rey, and not you, by his side. it was soooo lame. but i guess we had to remove him to make the audience think kylo was turning good for a second there.

-which reminds me... and you probably saw this coming, i hate the idea of “turning”. rey keeps talking about ben turning to the light. and this verb annoys me to no end. it’s made clear that they both already have a lot of light and darkness in each other. it’s about finding balance. where’s my grey jedi??? episode 9 pls????

Extra Reylo stuff i didn’t see mentioned which i adored: 

- during their first force-bond moment when they sense each other, kylo ren runs out of the medical unit and into the corridor like a goddamn luckless teenager, expecting to see rey pop up in a prom dress.  it’s precious. i love awkward!kylo. also rey tries to shoot him bc she thinks he’s actually there and kylo bends down, thinking he was shot. it’s a rly cool moment. and it doesn’t feel malicious like, he doesn’t expect anything less from her. 

- there’s so much charged electricity between them and it’s not all sexual. it’s kinda mystical and i dig it. i’m weirdly reminded of xavier and magneto??? as in two enemies who have such a rich history and whose bond transcends human morality. 

-OKAY. i saw no one talking about this but THAT GODDAMN SNOW WHITE SCENE. so rey decides she’s going to turn kylo to the light because that’s their one hope of defeating the first order etc. luke tries to stop her, but she’s like i’m going after my man. okay. she gets on the falcon, then she puts herself in this casket-like pod and AND. we get this lovely, breath-taking sequence of her arriving at the first order base, slipping gently into the hangar in her casket. and she’s def nervous. AND THEN. she looks up through the glass and there’s steam at first and through the steam we see kylo’s face, looking down at her wistfully. IT’S SO WEIRDLY FAIRY-TALE WTF. and then ofc the guards come in to shackle her. BUT JESUS. the prince looking into the casket to find snow-white WHAT ARE THESE AESTHETICS. it felt like a nod to the infamous scene in TFA where he carries her bridal style. it’s very fairy-tale-esque. 

- i love that in the scene with the multiple reys, when she reaches through the mirror to see her parents, the shadowy figure who appears and touches her hand seems at first to be kylo and then she realizes it’s herself. i also love that she talks to kylo about that experience. GAH. 

- i just rly loved that there was so much humanity in their interactions.

Reylo stuff which sort of bothered me/left me wanting more: 

- like excuse u rian,  during the praetorian guards fight, i needed more moments where kylo looks at rey and is worried for her sake. i needed that fight to be a bit more visceral and about the two of them and their survival. they do fight together and it’s great but then...they’re sort of separated and carry their own small battles (i did love how rey saved him with that lightsaber throw)

- the whole “you come from nothing, you are nothing.” yea yeah, he’s a dummy who doesnt know how to express his feelings, he’s mr. darcy x 1000 of faux pas. but i still think adam driver’s acting went a little much there. the way he delivered that line was a bit off for me. ofc, he follows it with “but not to me”, because he’s basically proposing to her, but i needed a bit more, an extra line from him confirming her importance. or maybe no extra line, but a bit more feeling. did i mention i love wrecked!kylo? the “please” killed me haha. 

Final thoughts:

- enjoyed it more than i expected to, and it does operate with way more nuance than TFA but it stiiiill fell short with some characters. it didn’t have the weight of rogue one for me, but it’s more lighthearted and entertaining, which i appreciate, cuz it reminded me of my childhood. and ultimately, whether we like it or not, disney does operate on nostalgia. all in all, it’s a worthy star wars movie, 8/10. rian deserves an A-. (he also wrote this thing and whoaaa...i wonder how much more ambiguous and dark this movie woulda been if he’d been given full non-disney freedom)

[marypsue]

@blogg-saron Just remember: you asked for it.

Reincarnation Blues (95,096 words, published April 2, 2015, completed September 26, 2015)

This fic was the product of an idea that absolutely would not leave me alone. I’ve mentioned before that originally Rosa was the centre of the piece, with Ian as a supporting player and partner in crime in her bid to take over the world by being adorable and popular. Rosa Darling, Taylor Swift’s Evil Twin, crawled fully-formed out of the first time I heard Delta Rae’s ‘I Will Never Die’, at least two months before I ever wrote a word of Reincarnation Blues. 

Ian didn’t actually have a name until I decided to write a short fic based on these characters who just wouldn’t get out of my head; he was a generic, grinning-evil Devil Went Down To Georgia reference with a fiddle but no name playing backup in Rosa’s band and lending her supernatural firepower when necessary. As originally conceived, he knew exactly who he’d been and used it to his full advantage. I decided on 'Ian’ after considering ‘Liam’ as a name that referenced ‘William’, but not as obviously as a ‘Bill’ or ‘Will’, and then deciding that would give the game away too soon. I also just plain didn’t like the name ‘Liam’ as much. It was only later that I found out that the man responsible for the absolutely stunning art direction on Gravity Falls is named Ian. And I just found out now, looking up Delta Rae to see when ‘I Will Never Die’ was released, that one of the band members is named Ian. This is...typical of the experience of writing this fic.

Mira came into the picture after I gave up on finishing the fic I was working on at the time before giving the RB characters free rein on my imagination, and decided to write just a short one-shot, just to introduce them. (Hah.) I’m not sure, exactly, when or why I ended up deciding that Ian shouldn’t have any knowledge of his previous incarnation (I think it was somewhere between Brown Bird’s ‘Blood of Angels’ and the short burst of Alex!Bill popularity), but it ended up being a good decision. It would’ve been around that time that I decided I needed to put him into Alcor’s path in order for his previous incarnation to come out, and that the best way to do that was to put him into the orbit of a Mizar. Deciding to have them date was purely a ‘hey, wouldn’t it be funny if...’, with an added touch of ‘oh man, Dipper would hate that’. Mira basically started out as an amalgamation of Mabel traits and fashion that I like, and a lot of her arguments with Dipper came out of my trying to figure out just what the heck was going on in her head. (Also, her social media presence is a little bit based on Manzi, who Alex was dating at the time, because I followed her on here for a short while before realising we had practically no interests in common and she posted a LOT of stuff that wasn’t cosplay. )

And now that the stage is set:

Chapter One

This began life as a one-shot that was meant to exorcise these characters from my head. Ninety-six thousand words later, we can all see how that turned out.

I wrote a good chunk of this chapter from Mira’s perspective, but it just wasn’t working, and I realised around the point where Dipper flips out that if I wanted to keep it as a short, I needed the readers to know whether Ian was really evil and scheming like Dipper suspected, or if he was just as clueless as Mira was. Now, I think I might have stuck with my original plan and left that ambiguous, because that would be a nice, tight little horror story. On the other hand, ninety-six thousand words later...

Given the opportunity to do a complete rewrite, though, I would adjust Mira and Ian’s introduction as a couple. Their first interactions seem really, really stilted and forced to me now. 

Chapter Two

I actually wrote a short fic for the TAU blog based on a prompt about Ian and Dipper learning to tolerate each other and Ian pitching a show based on Dipper and Mabel’s experiences in Gravity Falls before I decided I was going to expand the, at the time, one-shot into a full multichapter fanfiction novel. It actually was part of what convinced me that I still had a lot of stories to tell about these characters, and that it should be expanded. That short fic also introduced Ian’s prosthetic eye, which he didn’t, at that point in Reincarnation Blues, have. I got to answer a couple of asks with axolotl gifs and feel like a real creative mastermind.

There were a couple times while I was writing the climax that I actually considered killing Ian off, because it seemed more likely with the state of each of the characters and also just so that the Toby plot could still work, but because I had made this short fic of events taking place after the events of RB and Ian was still alive in it, I decided that meant I’d made a tacit promise that he’d survive. I didn’t really want to kill him off anyway, so it made a good excuse when I was weighing my narrative options and they all seemed to be sliding towards Death.

A lot of this chapter was influenced by the surge of human!Bills in the fandom at the time, and especially of human!Bills (and human-shaped!Bills) who had flashy, obvious, fire-based powersets. I felt like Bill Cipher’s real power lay in misdirection - the flash and the fire, in canon, always only distracted the main characters from Bill’s real objectives, and, arguably, what he was really getting out of their interactions. To my way of thinking, it was far more likely that a human Bill Cipher would have some kind of mentally-based powerset, if they had a ‘powerset’ at all, and weren’t merely very quick cogitators who could think big and put themselves one step ahead of everyone around them. At the time, there were precious few authors and illustrators who seemed to have come to the same conclusion - none that I ran across, anyway. (There still aren’t, but the flood of billdip-based Cool Human Bills With Fire Powers seems to have slowed to a trickle.)

It also came in response to Toby, who was invented by the Transcendence AU’s very own Mod Z and exploded in popularity almost instantly. He was a sweetheart, a genuinely good, kind, little kid, who was facing enormous cosmic retribution for a millennia-long previous lifetime as a liar, monster, and snappy dresser. Toby is great, his creator manages to milk all the hilarious irony out of the situation, and there are some authors who’ve done really good and clever things with him. I’ve just never been all that interested in purely Good characters who just keep getting kicked in the teeth by a cruel world, and it struck me that Toby was the perfect setup for Bill to sneak in close to Dipper and do...something vicious. (I don’t think, at this point, that I knew exactly what Bill was planning to use Ian for, but I definitely knew that Bill was planning something, and it was going to blow up spectacularly in everyone’s faces.)

With those things in mind, I tried to imagine some realistic flaws or weaknesses that a near-omniscient, immortal demon forcibly bound to a decaying, imperceptive meatsack might potentially develop. Ian’s anxiety and nihilism(-lite?) and self-destructive tendencies all come from there. I settled on the feelings of insignificance and impermanence as the two major issues Ian had to face mostly because those were two things that Bill had never had to consider, would never have had to consider if he hadn’t ended up human himself, and would never have been able to satisfactorily reconcile with his own omniscience and indelible influence on human history/trail of destruction across several dimensions. It was not long after I settled on this and really committed to it (I believe it was a few chapters later than this, though) that Alex did a twitter Q&A where he talked to a fan with anxiety and...basically laid out that he suffered from very similar fears, and had developed very similar coping mechanisms to the ones I’d decided to give Ian. I initially only made Ian look like Alex for the sake of the joke, but as the fic progressed it became more and more clear to me that, by writing a version of a character who Alex Hirsch had once gotten in a ‘which character are you’ online personality quiz, I had inadvertently tapped a vein of similarity that was only gonna get wider. 

If you’re reading this, Mr. Hirsch: I am so sorry, and I swear that I did not and do not stalk you. I know my icon of cartoon Dana Terrace kinda makes this harder to believe, but still.

Chapter Three

The first Mira-POV scene! Also the first appearance of Rosa!

I think this was the chapter that really cemented for me that I was doing this, that this 'short one-shot' was now a fully-fledged multichaptered fic and I was in it for the long haul. This is the first chapter that starts to set the plot in motion, and the first chapter where I really knew that there WAS an overarching plot thread and where, in a more specific sense, it was going. I believe this is also the chapter where the fic got its title (the previous two oneshots had been posted without titles). 

...her punk-bluegrass act, the Savage Peace...

Oh yeah! I never mentioned these guys again. This was the duo that Ian and Rosa played together in, before Ian left to go into animation and Rosa went solo. The name is a riff on the Civil Wars, another excellent bluegrass duo who split up due to differences of opinion on their future direction. I love the Civil Wars.

I searched last.fm for 'punk bluegrass' after this chapter, because I had a very specific idea about what Rosa's music sounded like (like Delta Rae but with more electric guitar and bass, pretty much) and I wanted to see if anyone else had made it a reality. I did not find what I was looking for, but I did find Wood Spider, a band that plays bluegrass music with screamo vocals. I recommend 'Is It Strange?' because it is a very, very Ian song.

In case you hadn't noticed yet, a lot of the making of this fic was heavily influenced by music. I really need to make another playlist for it at some point.

Also, there's been some confusion amongst TAU peeps regarding Rosa's hair. I intended it to look like P!nk's blonde fauxhawk. Word Of God has spoken.

"He knows what I like and don't like, what matters to me, even things I don't tell him. He pays attention to what I say and do, and he remembers. He just does nice things for me sometimes when I'm least expecting it, and it's always exactly what I didn't even know I wanted."

This line was meant to show how Bill's 'ALWAYS WATCHING!' shtick might, under a very different set of circumstances and put to a different use, actually be a good thing. Post-Escape From Reality and Mabeland, it also takes on a vicious irony which I really appreciate. Successfully predicting what'll be ironic in the most painfully angsty way before canon even gets there: The Mary P. Sue Advantage!

I think this scene is where Mira actually coalesces into her own character for me, rather than 'a Mizar who is dating an r!Bill'. This is where she gets to show some of her own strengths and values, and to oppose and conflict with Dipper on her own terms, rather than because of Ian. I made a conscious effort to make sure this fic passed the Bechdel test, but I feel like even though this was a conversation with a dude, it was equally important in giving Mira a voice and an interior life separate from the men (well, okay, man and demon) in it. It also shows off the two sides of her - she's picked up a lot from Dipper, as evidenced by her nonchalance about cult-busting, but she's also still empathetic and compassionate, as shown by how she handles the kids. She's stuck between Dipper and humanity, and this is the first place where that's really shown, rather than talked about. It's one of my favourite scenes in the fic for exactly those reasons.

The last scene in this chapter is also where Mira and Ian start really feeling real to me as a couple, too. I really think this is just the chapter where I found my stride and all the pieces started to come together.

Chapter Four

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this chapter. It mostly exists to set the scene for what comes later, to get the reader more familiar with the characters, to set the cogs in motion. I am very pleased with Ian and Rosa’s friendship in the first couple scenes, though - I think it’s pretty natural.

Rosa looked up at him, her expression completely neutral. “Beale, I am goin’ to steal your girl.”

At the time I was writing this, there had been - I remember it as several, but it really must’ve been like, three - Gideon reincarnations (and preincarnations) in TAU who had gotten weirdly possessive about Mizars and had caused All Of The Plot in their respective fics by trying to make her their own. We’d also - if I recall correctly - received an ask basically proposing that Gideon’s soul would always do that, any time it came into contact with a Mizar’s, no matter what else might be going on. I...wasn’t a fan of that idea. I believe I’ve mentioned in a previous thing-where-I-talked-too-much-about-RB that Reincarnation Blues’ major theme is determinism versus individual identity. That was why I felt like this was the perfect place to kind of deconstruct that idea that there could be no r!Gideon who wasn’t an epic jerk. Right from the beginning, I intended for Rosa to get fixated on Mira, to set events in motion by doing a bunch of stuff that was beyond the pale to try to ‘steal’ her from Ian, and then to have to face the consequences of her actions. The goal was to see if she could grab a clue, if knowing what was going on and what she had done would give her a chance to look at her life, look at her choices, and make better ones the next time.

That’s right. I was redeeming Gideon before it was canon cool.

(There’s a whole lot I could get into about what I’m meaning when I say ‘redemption’ versus ‘apologism’, but...I won’t, here. Suffice it to say that I wouldn’t have wanted any kind of redemption plot for Gideon - or, indeed, any character, anywhere - that didn’t acknowledge that they started out in the wrong, and, though I usually disagree, I completely understand people not wanting to see certain villainous characters get a second chance.)

“... So - noose joke. Think that can ride, or are the censors gonna flip?"

I made a Mistake here. I was referencing the cut storyboards from Scary-oke where Dipper finds Ford’s ‘Zombie Survival Kit’ and all that’s in it is a noose. It was a suicide joke. (Well, I mean, suicide wasn’t the joke, but - well, whatever.) I should have referred to it as a suicide joke, or chosen a different deadly weapon. Instead, I referred to it as a ‘noose joke’ and it became a meme on the TAU blog, that Ian would be hiding nooses in the backgrounds of scenes all the time.

It was only, like, a month into this that I realised what the noose has historically, in the States, been a symbol for, and that without the context of a cut storyboard presented at a con (which might not necessarily be widely known) and then taken out of the context of a scene where the character is making storyboards (thereby removing the storyboard reference link)...yeah. I have to apologise for this one. Nobody has said anything to me about it, but in hindsight and with some consideration, I would word this differently if I were to rewrite the fic today.

I had a loooot of fun writing sleep-deprived Bill-like Ian here, and I hope to do more of it at some point.

Chapter Five

The introduction of Sun-mi! Sun-mi was a last-minute addition because I realised Mira had no female friends and panicked, and also because NWHS came out and I fell even harder in love with the character of the Author, and figured that tossing an r!Author (we didn’t at the time know that he was named Ford) into the mix with an r!Bill would be fun. This...is why Sun-mi’s role is small (though, I think, still important enough to justify her inclusion) - it was added to the plot post-outlining.

While I was writing Sun-mi, I was thinking of her with a voice much like April on Parks & Rec. This is not particularly relevant information to anything, I just see her as being very deadpan in that same way.

“So, not that one. How about Tam Lin?”

The mention of Tam Lin - one of the Child Ballads, in which a girl rescues her fairy lover on the night his soul is to be sent to hell as a tithe, and restores him to humanity, by holding him fast, and fearing him not - was a blatant nod to how the fic was going to end, and nobody picked up on it. It is also just a great, classic fiddle tune, though, and apparently it's not widely known that it's in the same time and key as St. Anne's Reel and so the two can be played together?

(I also answered a question about what each of the characters would have on their iPods, and said that Mira would have the Kerli song ‘Chemical’ on hers. If anyone had looked it up, they would have found out that it’s got a refrain that goes ‘This love is more than chemical’, which also directly references how the fic ends. I took every opportunity to hide spoilers for this fic in plain sight. It was so much fun.)

Stamped into the starry void around them like an artificial horizon was a massive ring, parallel lines glowing red like gashes cut into the dream to reveal an inferno on the other side. And between those lines, all around the horizon, burned familiar symbols.

Most of Ian’s nightmare is based on what I thought Bill’s experience of the Mystery Shack, from the mindscape, must have been like. This bit, though, is based entirely on a nightmare I had which involved Bill Cipher. I was practically contractually obligated to include it here.

Chapter Six

I have to preface any comments I make about this chapter with a disclaimer. Normally, I loathe miscommunication plots, especially ones where characters who ostensibly love and trust each other just flat-out refuse to listen to the other's explanation of a situation that looks bad. However, that's...exactly what I've written here.

I feel like the saving grace of this first scene is that, one, it doesn't constitute the entire plot, and two, it's more of a symptom of larger, deeper problems that they're having, rather than manufactured drama so that there can be some conflict and a tearful reunion in the third act. Sure, things end up hinging on Mira and Dipper trusting one another, but things are already strained between them, and this one miscommunication isn't the only problem they face, it's just the straw that broke the camel's back. Clearing up this one particular misunderstanding also doesn't magically solve all of their problems. I could, of course, be totally wrong and this miscommunication plot could be exactly as painful as every one I've ever seen on a made-for-TV romcom.

Had this whole thing been a colossal waste of time?

And here we see the product of Rosa's machinations! My thinking behind her slightly-absurd recruiting of Sun-mi to investigate Ian's past lives in an earlier chapter was that she thought that, any negative information Sun-mi turned up, she would share with Mira, and it wouldn't look like Rosa herself had deliberately sabotaged Ian and Mira's relationship, so she'd still have a shot with Mira. Devious.

(It occurs to me that both of the two characters who were the initial inspiration for RB started out as evil masterminds in concept, but ended up being sympathetic characters who got redemption arcs in the actual fic. There's some kind of irony about this.)

Trying to work out how the historical record might represent the Shack so far in the future was also a lot of fun. I know that the worldbuilding on this fic isn't sufficient for something that's meant to take place a full thousand years in the future, that the rate of change is so rapid that the society - and even the landscape - of the world Ian and Mira live in ought to be near-completely unrecognisable. On the other hand, I just wanted to write a fun story about character interactions, and I couldn't really set it any earlier or I'd risk 1) Dipper still having a clear thread of niblings around to anchor him, 2) things not having progressed far enough to actually have something like preincarnation testing, and 3) it being too early for Bill to have recovered from his 'defeat'.

(Also, I'm pretty sure that this, here, is the first use of the word 'preincarnation' in the TAU.)

He was still himself, more or less, he wasn't like Bill - !

Dipper is a little (or a lot) less human in this fic than in some of my others, but the thing is, he isn't really aware of that. This is the scene where it gets hammered home. It was a lot of fun constructing the scene where he eats Ian's nightmare so that it could be deconstructed here, to put all of the pieces of his real motivation and plans on display and show just how much like Bill's his modus operandi has become. (It also explains how he's able to get into Ian's head to offer the deal he does right at the end of the fic.)

Chapter Seven

aka "Shit, Meet Fan".

If you asked Dipper what seeing the future was like, he'd probably say it was like a beach.

I lifted this metaphor from Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, a book which I strongly suggest for anyone who is interested in high fantasy, slightly deconstructed, and set among a race of teeny-tiny people living in the hairs of a carpet. He wrote it at seventeen and then came back and edited it as an adult. The result is...not quite A Terry Pratchett Book, but also not your average Extruded Fantasy Product Tolkien knockoff. He deploys the metaphor a little differently, and I can't remember how exactly he phrased things, but the concept of seeing possible futures as grains of sand on a beach came from him initially.

"I'm Alcor and I was wrong

I'm singing the Alcor Wrong Song..."

Dipper's apology is, of course, based on the Stan Wrong Song, which I thought was a nice touch to show that he was still thinking of Mira in terms of his life with Mabel in Gravity Falls. You gotta give the boy credit, though, he's trying.

I also think that Dipper will never be over his fear of puppets, partly because of Sock Opera, but also partly because we never got the Labyrinth episode. Until Dipper and Mabel have a siblinghood-affirming adventure in a giant, glittery maze with a mess of Muppets and a David Bowie guy, Dipper Pines will forever fear all puppetry.

"Well, we're all going to die."

Ian is really, really, profoundly bad at being comforting. (Unless you're worried about having embarrassed yourself or messed up your future, in which case, your ultimate insignificance in an eternal and uncaring universe and the inevitable certainty of your eventual complete eradication can sometimes be comforting.)

Ian hummed along as he turned on the faucet. "Dream a little dream of me..."

Annnnd here we go.

I decided that Ian would like folk and bluegrass music, partly because of the initial character concept and the Rosa connection, partly because I thought it was a genre that would remain resistant to introducing synthesised music even in the hypothetical future, partly because then I could make 'The Devil Went Down To Georgia' jokes. I decided he should also be into jazz music mostly because of the incredible His Name Was Billy Mischief, which is probably one of my favourite GF fics of all time and also highly recommended for anybody who liked RB. The author's inclusion of 'Someone To Watch Over Me' was both inspired and led to me looking up more jazz music, which led to finding a surprising number of songs that could be easily read as referring to Bill. It's not jazz, but Alex's inclusion of 'We'll Meet Again' in the finale still made me kick my feet in vindicated glee.

This scene was in the works from chapter 2 onwards, and it's another of my favourites - I think with good reason. I've had a lot of feedback from people that this was the most viscerally effective scene in the whole fic, and somebody drew me fanart for it! It was a little challenging to get into initially, because I was so excited to write it and I had to restrain myself somewhat to keep it taut and tense and simmering, instead of just explosive from word one. I think - I hope - that it succeeded.

Chapter Eight

“I’ll be looking at the moon,

but I’ll be seeing...you!”

I found Billie Holiday's version of 'I'll Be Seeing You' somewhere around chapter three or four and I instantly knew I had to write this scene and use it as a backdrop. I'd love to see this on film; Mira looking through the empty apartment, the slight and subtle wrongnesses adding up as a sinister bass note slowly builds from under the song to nearly drown it out, only to vanish on the final line as the camera overlooks the sink abandoned in the middle of a task and the phone left docked on the wall, letting Billie's voice echo, alone, over the unnatural stillness, before the song ends and all is left in perfect, fragile, ominous silence -

Anyway. Sometimes my mind is unnecessarily cinematic, and sometimes I profoundly regret not being able to score and soundtrack my fics.

“Do y’all mind?” Rosa asked, holding her phone away from her head. “Can’t hear a word my friend’s sayin’.”

This scene was originally even longer and more obnoxious. I really wanted to give people a reason to like and root for Rosa. Okay, so I also thought it would be badass. Thankfully, I have long trained myself to sacrifice cool awesome character stuff when it needs to be sacrificed for the sake of the story.

Are you done laughing yet? No? Okay, I’ll give you a couple more minutes.

Please ignore literally everything I had to say about the wards, because it is all bullshit. I think I said that anything less than an SS-class demon would be bounced back from Mira's wards, and that Ian, once 'active', shattered one of them completely on his way out, but that Dipper could go past them without having any effect on them at all? Which would require him to, like, probably use his powers to recreate them after he passed through...? I don't know how any of that was supposed to work.

I am, however, very, very pleased about opening a scene with Dipper missing Mabel's absolute faith in him, and immediately taking it into Mira accusing Dipper of murdering her boyfriend because Dipper's just such a demon. Juxtaposition!

The 'highlight reel' is equally if not more bullshit than the wards. I think this chapter is where I just gave up on trying to give Dipper a balanced powerset and decided to just go with whatever best served the emotional, character-arc thread. Sometimes you just have to play to your strengths.

Dipper didn't like other people knowing things he didn't. ... If he wasn't that guy, then - well, what was he?

A good brother! A real scrapper with a heart of gold and a will of adamantium! A sarcastic little shit! Dipper's focus on being The Smart Guy getting deconstructed and his realising that that isn't the be-all end-all of who he is was a wonderful good awesome character arc, even if it ended up being kind of understated in comparison with some of the more in-your-face character development that, say, the Stans got. TAU kind of does a similar thing with Dipper's arc, giving him All The Knowledge but making it come at the price of his family, which makes him reconsider its value...but it doesn't address that particular thing in the same way as canon, so I can see Dipper still getting hung up on this even thousands of years later. (Also, there are a lot of interpretations that indicate he may be kind of mentally frozen at the age he 'died', which I kind of love and subscribe to.) Hence, this line!

(I bet Dipper haaaaaaates when, like, The Slang and memes change. He has all kinds of arcane knowledge, but just what exactly the kids are talking about when they say something that looks like a random combination of syllables is beyond even his eldritch comprehension, and he can't figure out the nuances of how the new words are used, and - argh.)

"I tried to set things up so you'd find out something awful about Ian and break up with him so I could date you instead!"

There was a beat.

"That's it?" Mira asked, carefully.

One, I personally still think this is hilarious. 

Two, this is the thing about Gideon - in a world of supernatural, outsized threats, he's really quite mundane! His whole shtick is something that can and does happen in real life! And he's the second-worst antagonist in the whole show! I front-loaded the redemption arc in this fic and gave Rosa a little more self-awareness and a quicker leap to recognising that what she was doing was shitty, so how funny the mundanity of 'I want you to be my girlfriend and I don't care what you think' as compared to 'a literal demon is going to try to blow up the whole of reality' is can really shine, but, like...it's still terrible, and giving it outsized supernatural consequences doesn't make it worse or better than it is when it happens in reality. Do any of these words make sense? Who knows.

My one explicitly lesbian character in this fic being manipulative and predatory in her affections? Mmmmmmaybe not a choice I'd make again. But I do like how this storyline played out.

Chapter Nine

I'm still not entirely sure who knows what about Bill and why. That was another thing that I'd change, given a chance to do a rewrite - I'd solidly establish Bill's position in history, myth, and public consciousness in this particular future right up front. That way, it might actually make a lick of sense when the characters react to hearing his name when there's not...like...any evidence that they have any idea who the fuck he even is.

Don't set your stories in a future where magic has been real for a thousand years if you don't have a lot of experience or interest in worldbuilding, guys.

This is the chapter where Mira is just completely fucking done with absolutely everyone's shit, and I love it.

"...They used to have to take my pulse manually every time. ..."

I decided that Ian wreaks havoc with medical technology because his Ooo Weird Demon Soul Energy is, like, an actual electromagnetic weirdness that hangs around him. This is also why the viewscreen for the peephole goes all fuzzy on him in chapter seven and why, in some extracanonical material, he can't get his storyboard files from his tablet to talk to literally any other piece of technology. It's also why Rosa can tell his energy's 'weird' and why Mira's mom thinks his aura's like a hole.

"... Remember Paloma Heart?"

... "I don't."

I should have mentioned Paloma earlier. That's all.

Brown really did think that he had Ian figured out, that he knew Ian back to front, just because he knew Bill Cipher. ... He wasn't expecting Ian Thomas Beale.

Ian, here, is thinking he's making Brown nervous, making Brown think that he's up against some semi-omniscient, potentially-omnipotent extradimensional being who knows more than he does and can do more than he can, in hopes that Brown will get scared and angry and slip up, give away information that Ian doesn't actually have yet (like how Bill sent Ford that nightmare in the beginning of TLM that really had no purpose except to send Ford running scared for his defenses against Bill, and which also led to the brainwave-encryption machine being destroyed and Ford taking Dipper into his confidences and growing closer to him and ultimately seeding the rift between Dipper and Mabel that ends with Bill getting the rift...). Just how in control is Ian of his own actions here? Debatable, since what he ends up actually doing is getting Brown scared and angry enough and believing enough in Ian's 'powers' to, eventually, let Bill out. Oh, the irony.

Area 51! For someone who's never been big into aliens, I sure have put this dang place into a lot of fics.

(I also wanted to give Mira a chance to one-up Dipper in the Smart Guy department. And do something nice for Dipper. He deserves a bone thrown his way.)

Chapter Ten

Mira is one of the only people - if not THE only person - in this entire fic who has exactly zero ulterior motives. She does exactly what she means to, goes for exactly what she wants to, directly and without hesitation. I kind of love that about her, it's a breath of fresh air.

Here, however, it does probably make her immediate job a little harder.

"It just kills you, doesn't it?" he said ... "Not knowing?"

#getrektIan

I am unreasonably proud of the jet-skate Ladies of English Lit roller derby team as a method of mass destruction.

This scene originally had Dipper taunting Mira about killing mooks lead into the 'mooks' turning out to be magically mind-controlled people, which Mira found out very graphically and horribly when she wrenched the helmet off the guy who tried to choke her out to jam her fingers in his eyes and saw the sigil on his forehead - but that dragged me down a rabbit hole of Is Mira Actually A Good Person etc, and it was both too late to introduce this thread and would have muddled the plot. I might revisit the idea sometime, but then again, I might not.

Chapter Eleven

Janice!!! Janice is one of my favourite backgrounders and I almost wish I hadn't killed her off so quickly. Almost.

I have a boatload of headcanons about how the Society of the Blind Eye worked, how it was originally a secret society designed to stop Bill but Bill used Fiddleford to co-opt and disable it and then used Dipper to destroy it, most of which ended up finding a home in Raising Stakes. This is one of them. There's just no way, in-universe, that the Blind Eye is so deliberately similar to Bill's in design just by chance. (Out of universe, of course, it makes perfect sense for the gravi-team to maintain a consistent aesthetic, but still. My convoluted headcanons can still be supported by textual evidence!)

There was a circle in the middle of the room.

Goodbye, Ian. It was nice knowing you.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and his outstretched wings flickered with stars, surveillance footage, images of the fight that had just happened, an apple tree in a forest of pines, a blueprint, a wide-eyed alien-looking creature...

Dipper's wings flickering is meant to parallel Bill's face flickering in Dreamscaperers, and, like Bill's face flickering in Dreamscaperers, it contains spoilers! The surveillance footage refers to how he and Mira eventually find Ian (through the central control room, on a security tape), the apple tree in a forest of pines is a reference to Henry's antlers and his tree over his grave in Gravity Falls and also a metaphor for him being part of the Pines family, the blueprints refer to the wards on the structural components of the facility, and the alien's just a reference to the fact that it's Area Fifty-freakin'-one.

"For the love of - are you actually twelve?"

Nyahahaha.

I love the bounce castle. I love Mira and Dipper's dialogue immediately post-bounce-castle. I think I have Dipper rip the doors to the soul tree room off their hinges and then later have Mira say she should've closed them, whoops.

I have nothing particular to say about the last scene except that I'm very proud of how it turned out.

Chapter Twelve

The summer Ian had turned fourteen, one of the artists his mother represented had gone triple platinum, a record-breaking heatwave had hit the West Coast, and Ian had tried to kill himself.

I like this scene too. I like montages, bullshit experimental purpley prose, and expressing emotion through place. I also like that this nods to what they're trying to do to Ian - they can't bring Bill back proper, but they can dredge up all his memories, theoretically creating a powerless, more controllable human with all of Bill's borderline-infinite knowledge and no requirement of making a deal or dealing with demonic senses of humour to get at it. All of Ian's own memories bubbling to the surface is part flashback, part the spell dragging up something old and dead and long-buried and dislodging Ian's memories as it rises.

I also should've established Ian's father's death earlier, I think, though now that I'm staring it in the face again I don't dislike it as much as I did just considering it as a concept. I could've mentioned it more concretely earlier on, but bringing its full impact on Ian out here, where everything he's tried to forget is being dragged out of him and everything he is is being stripped bare, is not the worst narrative decision I've ever made.

The soul tree (or ‘tree of knowledge’, as Janice calls it, because haha, it bears apples and it’s a research project) is a product of me looking at what they’re doing to Ian and trying to work backwards, to see what kind of other things they might be doing to research souls, if this is how they decide to deal with Ian. It was also a nice opportunity for a great big hunk of angst, and a good excuse to give Dipper the powerup necessary for all the heavy magical lifting he’s going to have to do. Three for the price of one cool-looking plot device!

“We’re not going anywhere,” Brown said, taking his hand away from his earpiece. “We’ve still got -”

Janice gave him a pitying look. “It’s Alcor,” she said.

Janice is...probably a little bit of an Alcor fangirl. (Not the Twin Souls kind. The watches-doumentaries-about-serial-killers-on-her-days-off kind.) She is perfectly aware of, and starstruck by, the fact that he can kill her with barely a thought. She would just love to get him under a scalpel or energy blade of some description, but she’s also not a complete idiot. No one who’s ever tried to summon Alcor for anything like the kind of research she does has ever lived to tell the tale. She probably just has a wall of newspaper clippings all about Cool Shit Alcor Has Done.

“Wanna know what your future has in it?” ...  He blinked, once, slowly, deliberately, and said, “Exactly three minutes!”

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also probably wouldn’t have worked if Ian hadn’t already played at being Bill for Brown earlier. BAM. PLOT. 

Ian glanced over at the timer as Brown brandished the tablet. The last few seconds drained away just as Brown pressed a finger down on the screen.

The house from Ian’s nightmares crashed down around him.

This is another one that I can see as a scene, animated or filmed; the room beyond, the ‘real world’ with the circle and the magitech and the terrified people suddenly vanishing from Ian’s viewpoint when a wall drops in front of it, no, slams down in front of it, shaking snowglobes and pine-tree trucker hats off the shelves and putting huge cracks between the boards, settling slowly into place like it was just dropped by a tornado even as blue light starts to spill up through the floorboards and the cracks start to widen as gravity fights for every board and nail...

Man, I wish I could make the moving pictures. (Though I guess if I’d put my time and energy into learning to make the moving pictures, maybe I would know less about making the words go. And, like, I’ve managed to just blither some seven thousand words about Making The Words Go. So I might actually have some modicum of skill at that by now.)

Chapter Thirteen

Mira hadn’t said anything since they’d left the room where Henry’s soul had been imprisoned, and Dipper was starting to worry.

TAU’s creator and Mod Z mentioned to me after this chapter was posted that I could’ve held off naming Henry as the owner of the soul until Dipper is forced to admit it, out loud, to Mira, and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t think of that before posting the chapter because it’s a great suggestion and would have been very effective.

“See, at least we just kill people.”

Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t get into the ‘moral dilemma of Mizar’ aspect in this one any more than I did.

“You’re my best friend, you know? And I don’t want to lose that.” She glanced down the hall, back the way they’d come. “But if this is going to work, then sooner or later, you’re going to have to trust me.”

WHOOOOA THESIS STATEMENT

Everything from Mira and Dipper breaking into the control room straight through to Mira landing in the hospital was pretty much written in one straight shot, without stopping. This was the part I'd been itching to write since, like, chapter two, and it was GREAT to finally have it all fall together. The reactions I got to Bill's appearance - even though I think everybody was kind of expecting it by the time we got to this part - were all awesome and priceless.

I do want to make sure it's clear - the whole Bit in Area 51 was set up to approximate the circumstances under which Dipper became demonized. We had 1) an enormous, elaborate spell being worked, 2) ancient spells in the foundation of the building which had been in place for more than a thousand years, 3) all of which were destroyed, releasing all that pent-up power while 4) demonic energy and knowledge was being forced through and into a fragile puny human with an intrinsic tie to the physical plane.

It seemed like it made sense at the time, okay.

"AND PUBERTY! REMIND ME TO GIVE THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS THAT DREAMED THAT ONE UP A SWIFT KICK IN THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST!"

I love writing dialogue for Bill. That is all. Most of my favourite lines did actually make their way into the fic, but I still ended up having to scrap some that I really liked, just because I couldn't make the dialogue work with the plot and the other characters. A shame.

I honestly don't think I could be happier with how the scene with Bill in the centre of the circles with Mira turned out. Choreographing it was a bitch, though.

"Give Ian back, you son of a -"

"AH AH AH, LANGUAGE!" Bill interrupted, with a wink. "TRYING TO PRESERVE THAT Y-7 RATING HERE!"

this is my favourite fucking joke in the entire fic

can you imagine how much funnier it would've been if I actually had kept the entire fic Y-7 rated

"Why does everyone keep forgetting I'm Mizar?"

#getrektbill

Chapter Fourteen

I really don't have anything more to say about the rest of the scene in Area 51. I think the writing actually says exactly what I want it to say, how I want to say it. It all flowed easily and beautifully, and I barely had to edit it at all. I was and still am pleased as punch about how it came out.

Everything was floating.

This fucking scene, on the other hand.

I rewrote this entire scene from scratch no less than three times (and it was probably actually four). This scene was a righteous pain in my ass. I had one goal with it - I had to get Dipper to offer Ian the deal that would remove all outsiders' memories of Ian being an r!Bill, in exchange for eating all of the Bill-memories left in Ian's head. Usually, that's a good thing. Usually, knowing the purpose of a scene makes it pretty easy and straightforward to write. 

This motherfucker, though. This scene was like pulling teeth. I'd get about halfway through Dipper explaining the deal to Ian and why it was important, and then I would just stop. I couldn't go any farther. It was like I was on the end of an imaginary rubber band of Actual Ability To Make The Words Go that I could stretch only so far, but no farther, and only with a great amount of struggle, before I'd be snapped back to the beginning and have to try to start again from there in a direction where maybe I could make it to the next scene before I ran to the end of my rubber band again. I tried over and over and over with no luck, no success, and no small amount of frustration.

I don't know what tipped me off to the fact that, one, I had to actually deal with the demons I'd pulled out of Ian's head, and two, there was so much more I could do with the mindscape than the literary equivalent of talking head panels, but once it clicked into place, it was like that imaginary rubber band just vanished and I wrote the whole thing all the way through in forty-five minutes without stopping. It also required minimal editing, and it is now one of my favourite scenes in the entire fic.

A little while after I finished this chapter, I saw a quote (from Clickhole, so obviously fake, but) attributed to Haruki Murakami, which basically said, "If you can set a scene in the basket of a hot-air balloon, do." It was a joke, of course, but I also, since writing this, think it's genuinely excellent advice.

Also, I managed to sneak in references to used-car-salesman!human!Bill, stylised-skinny-smirky-pretty-boy!human!Bill and how I felt he was kind of a caricature and a lot of versions of him that looked like that also flattened out the depth of the character, and to the apocalypse tapestry, which I actually don't think I've seen mentioned anywhere in the fandom since Escape From Reality aired! Huh. Too bad, it was cool.

Chapter Fifteen

...and the forest outside with all of its eyes is burning, burning - 

I just really like this line, I don't know.

The news story about the Nordwext group that's playing when Ian wakes up for the first time is, one, yes, a reference to the Northwest family, and two, a callback to the girls in the factory who Dipper hadn't been able to help back in chapter five. This is him trying to do something that will actually help them and make a difference in their lives, instead of just lighting people on fire from inside out and getting them in trouble for summoning demons.

"... another such facility located under the former Ellens Air Force Base in Idaho."

Ellens Air Force Base is entirely fictional. It was invented for an episode of the X-Files, Deep Throat, where Mulder actually sees a UFO up close and personal (before having it wiped from his mind by the government). I couldn't resist.

I actually researched eye removal for this chapter. It took a lot of psyching up and then realising I could probably start with Wikipedia and click though to their sources without ever having to brave the minefield of Google Suggested Images.

He'd never seen this ring of trees (aspen? Birch?) in his life...

When I wrote this, I had the clearing where Gideon first summons Bill in mind. I also deliberately used descriptors, when Ian looks over and sees he's holding hands with himself, that could apply to either Ian or Bill.

"Oh, demons ... We can deal with demons."

I love Mira's parents.

Guess whooo put in a Twin Peaks reference without knowing basically anything about Twin Peaks!...okay, I could not pass up the opportunity. Besides, you know Ian watched Twin Pines at a formative age, and nearly flipped when he found out they were resurrecting it as Twin Pines: The Returnening.

He’s also a big fan (and friend) of Lauren Mephistopheles, but there is absolutely nothing that will make him actually watch more than ten minutes of Friendship is Prestidigitation. Sorry, Lauren. Some things are too terrifying even for an ex-demon in human skin.

And here we have the culmination of the Rosa Darling Redemption Arc! Ian telling her that Bill played all of them is, as she correctly deduces, a test - if she took the out as offered, played off her own responsibility, he’d know that he really couldn’t trust her to recognise what she’d done wrong and try to fix it. At that point, he probably would’ve had to ask Dipper to remove her memories, too. It’s a lucky thing for both of them that she got a clue!

“State-of-the-art prosthetic.” Rosa clasped her hands behind her back. “This model’s so new it’s not even on the market yet. Which, uh, would mean that technically you’d be part of a clinical trial -”

“A guinea pig,” Ian said, softly.

Just like Bill made Dipper into! I’m a genius.

“You’re not my father,” Ian says at last.

Ian’s father shrugs. “Does it matter, if I’m right?” He puts his glasses back on, light hitting the lenses just so that Ian can’t see his eyes. “Does any of this matter?”

Ian thinks.

“Yes,” he says.

Hi, my name is Mary, and I love Terry Pratchett’s writing.

“You know what,” Ian said, still looking up at the ceiling, at the hoist that dangled over the bed and the dark bulb in the reading lamp, “it’s been - three days? Four days? A couple days since we narrowly escaped death and you haven’t kissed me even once.”

“You haven’t kissed me either,” Mira said, with an affronted look, but there was a hint of laughter in her voice.

Remember how I said they started out forced and stilted? Yeah. I think that was just inexperience and a lack of familiarity with the characters. Let this be a lesson unto me: write the whole damn thing, then go back and rewrite the first, like, until it starts sounding natural again.

“Mira, don’t call me nerdface,” Alcor grumbled, coalescing out of the dark and fussing with his cufflinks.

“Okay, dorkbreath,” Mira agreed, just to hear Alcor’s long-suffering sigh.

Case in point.

Epilogue

Toby!

Everybody loves Toby. I guess I’m no exception. I am a sucker. Also I really wanted to show how the whole Ian thing affected Dipper’s relationship with Toby, while not actually causing it to deviate at all from what had already been established as TAU canon.

“Fragile neurological attachment, huh?” Dipper said, under his breath, and then, loud enough to hear, “Well, now you’ve got me.”

That’s all, folks!

Some more RB-related song recs, before I go: 

- The Garden, by July Talk (This ain’t Johnny Carson/I got thoughts that ain’t my own/I’m talkin’ black souls dressed in red and things that I shoulda never known)

- I Run Roulette, by Boots (I’ve been tricked into a thousand different ways/to slide myself away right down the drain)

- Better Not Wake The Baby, by the Decemberists (make your moan of your lot in life, split your mind half-crazy/gouge your eyes with a butter knife)

- Tic Toc, by Mother Mother (the Sandman told me, there’s no use in listening)

and because shush, it’s a great song and I had it on repeat for writing a decent chunk of the middle bits

- Out Of The Woods, by Taylor Swift (but the monsters turned out to be just trees/when the sun came up you were lookin’ at me)

[ramen-y-cajal]

Vitamin D and aging--Lite

Hello, it’s your local Australian Shitposter here back with some more Exciting Content. This particular post will be the non-biologist-friendly version of a vitamin D paper I just read, which will just detail the behavioral studies. If that catches your fancy, I’ll be posting a biology-heavy (ish, I’m only undergrad after all) post about the study, detailing genetics and proteins behind the behavioral affects seen.

SO! It’s no secret that as you age, your cognitive abilities (executive and/or memory) decline. So a big emphasis in research lately has been on preventing or improving these deficits. This is the case in the study I’m posting about today by Latimer, et al. They theorized that there is a connection between Vitamin D levels and learning and memory, specificially that cognitive decline with aging can be slowed or prevented by higher vitamin D intake.

Research has long known vitamin D, specifically its active form 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, did play a roll in the brain, however it wasn’t until recently that vitamin D receptors (VDR) were found in the brain. Not only that, but the brain itself is capable of synthesizing it.

So how do we go about finding out whether or not there’s a connection? Well, first you need an independent variable, varying levels of vitamin D equalling the human levels ranging from deficient-sufficient, subjects, middle aged rats, (far cheaper and easier to manipulate than actual middle-aged people. Probably less racist, too, but I digress) fed the diet for 5-6 months, to mimic years of aging in humans during which cognitive decline would occur, and a way to test the dependent variable: a maze to quantify learning and memory. 

So, the behavioral test used is the Morris Water Maze (MWM). Animals don’t like water, as you can imagine, so they swim around until they find the platform. They do this for days 1-3. Day 4, they test how quickly and directly they get to the platform they learned to find. These days asses hippocampal-dependent memory. Day 5, they move the platform location which as you can imagine, confused the fuck out of the rats. How quickly a rat gets unconfused by this shit-show is an indication of their executive function, aka, reversal learning, used to detect deficits in executive function, as detailed in another post of mine. Days 5-7 they work through this bullshit so that hopefully by day 8 they’ve gotten over the old rules and are just as proficient in this new platform location as they once were with the original.

So! I’m going to explain each of these graphs. A... obviously is the schedule I just described. B) Latency on training days. As you can see, all the lines are about the same for days 1-3. This is good, because it means it isn’t affecting the rats’ ability to learn skills, which is not what they’re testing so it’d be a bit awkward if they found something about vitamin D and learning... actually also useful but ANYWAYS we’re glad we don’t have to worry about this additional variable. As for day 4, you can see there is no significant difference between the three, from this one would conclude that vitamin D doesn’t create an extreme deficit in memory, as would be indicated in day 4. C) Bar graph form of day 4 on the line graph still showing there isn’t significance, but you can more clearly see here that low vitamin D does show a trend towards requiring longer and more distance to find the platform. Not significant though, so graph D digs deeper) Performance on reversal learning, Day 8, as you can see, low and medium vitamin D diet subjects required quite a bit of time and distance to find the platform, while the high vitamin D diet subjects were able to unlearn the old location and learn (more importantly, remember) the location of the new platform. The reversal learning task indicates a greater performance of executive function in the higher vitamin D diet subjects. 

Bar graphs and line graphs not your thing? How about just a picture!

All these data points were taken from day 8. You can see the High VitD3 animals went pretty much immediately to the platform, which Medium and low showed a tendency to wonder, creating visual evidence of greater memory performance of High VitD3 animals.

Conclusion? Kinda: Sufficient vitamin D levels may prevent cognitive decline in aging rats... and thus, maybe eventually, in humans.

HA! And this was the light one... anyways, sorry for the lack of snark, I’m sleepy it’s 9:14 in Australia and 6am in Ohio soooo... yikes. Good night/morning everyone!

Source: Latimer, C., Brewer, L., Searcy, J., Chen, K., Popovic, J., Kraner, S., Thibault, O., Blalock, E., Landfield, P., and Porter, N. (2014). Vitamin D prevents cognitive decline and enhances hippocampal synaptic function in aging rats. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. E4359-E4366.

[yelloskello]

so. I bought Fallout 76 on launch. I also have been keeping up with the shit about it every single day. Here are my thoughts on absolutely everything:

1: In terms of gameplay, FO76 isn’t bad.

I’m one of the lucky people who actually haven’t experienced much in the way of bugs. That isn’t to say I haven’t experienced any, but at no point have they been so bad that the game has literally been unplayable for me. Beyond that, with the patches that Bethesda is actively dropping like every week, i’m hopeful that these bugs will actually be fixed pretty quickly. It’s an optimistic view, but right now it’s looking good, and i’m sticking with that. I cannot speak for the people who *have* been experiencing such huge bugs that they can’t play, but i’m hoping that within the next few months, it’ll be fixed.

Outside of bugs, there are definitely some issues just in terms of gameplay and UI that make it... Frustrating, but once again, i’m hopeful that Bethesda is actively going to be tweaking this and making it better. They’re already adding new features to make base-building less annoying, increasing the stash size, etc. So long as they keep up with that, I can live with some features being mildly frustrating for now.

All this being said: this shit should’ve been fixed before launch. I’ve been saying since the moment they announced the release date that the beta was mindbogglingly short, why would they run such a short beta, and... I stand by that, because i feel like what we’re experiencing now is what the beta should’ve been. I’m a chill person. I’m okay with shit getting fixed as I play it. I don’t mind. But objectively, what they’ve done is a poorly thought out and outright bad business practice. I do not blame people for not supporting that.

But anyways. Gameplay.

In terms of what the game is actually supposed to BE... I think it’s fine. If you want to play a lite survival game where you explore a super cool setting and build a neat house for yourself, with the occasional bit of storytelling, it’s good. If you wanna be a bog witch with electric powers and talons who goes on long walks to collect wood to sell to the local robot vendors, play a post-apocalyptic slice-of-life game, it’s good. If you wanna live out the life of Jeff Goldblum, Post-Apocalypse, it’s good. If you are playing this game because you wanna play a fallout game, you’re gonna be disappointed, but that’s just... Expectations. It’s taking a sip of water and expecting it to be coke - of course it’s gonna taste like the worst coke you’ve ever had, it’s water. If you know what you’re getting into, the game is totally fine for what it is. Multiplayer hasn’t been an issue. I’m one’a the people who wasn’t at all stoked for the idea of multiplayer, and i’m still not, but honestly this multiplayer is so unobtrusive that I don’t mind it. I RARELY see other people, and when I do, it’s usually just quickly running by each other. I’ve only been griefed by someone once - and getting away from a griefer is as easy as logging out and popping onto a different server, never to see them again. On the other side of the coin, if you’re a person who *does* like multiplayer, hilariously, the game currently isn’t great for it - mostly because quests don’t sync up with your party, so one person completing a part doesn’t complete it for everybody in the group. I can’t imagine this is a feature that will be around too long. Nukes aren’t an issue either. If a spot’s getting nuked, the game tells you, and you have 2 minutes to get outta dodge. If you have your house built on a spot to be nuked, once again, all you gotta do is log out and back in and, boom, on a different server, no longer getting nuked. That also fixes the issue of if you have to do some quests somewhere that’s been nuked - can just go to a different server. Surprisingly, I also don’t mind the lack of human NPCs either, and actually feel like the utter, destitute loneliness of the game fits fallout’s setting well. It’s different - again, if you’re going into this wanting the storytelling of 3, NV, and 4, you’re SOL - but it’s a new aesthetic that still kinda works. ...Even so, if Bethesda decided to retcon the no-human-NPC’s and pop them into the world, I wouldn’t complain either. The perk card system is actually really cool and lets you be successful at the game in a myriad of different ways - and the fact that they’re letting you respec your SPECIAL points in the near future is awesome. The survival mechanics are neither too difficult or so simple they’re just tedious. Even though there are no human NPCs, there’s still a number of very charming robot NPCs and really interesting quests. (That being said, the ‘main’ questline is pretty weak.) And the world is just... Cool. It’s probably cooler than any fallout game i’ve played before. They just included a lot of really cool places. A few days ago, I described the experience to my sister, and she said ‘so it’s like subnautica’. I haven’t played subnautica, but I guess? Like a currently unrefined subnautica that, with any luck, will get refined. So if you like subnautica, you’ll probably like this. But I haven’t seen mothman yet, and i’m very unhappy about that. 2: Bethesda PR what the FUCK are you doing This shit is an absolute clowncar shitwreck and I literally just google ‘fallout 76′ every day to see what the hell they fucked up today. Offering 500 atoms as compensation for the dropped price difference + the nylon bag is downright insulting. Like, offering in-game currency alone is insulting, but if you’re gonna do that, do something more than the equivalent of five dollars, what the fuck.  Whoever the hell they got handling Customer Service needs to... Not. I have literally never seen customer service handled so badly for a videogame.

They need to be WAY MORE TRANSPARENT with a LOT of their policies and changes. Before I bought the game, I dug my way through their refund policy just in case, and came out with only a vague guess that if I bought the game and actually played it I wouldn’t be eligible for a refund. While they sort of touch on digital purchases/digital codes, it was not stated nearly as clearly as it should’ve been. Talk to me like i’m FIVE, Bethesda. C’mon. Obviously the changing of the bag is a huge fuckup too, they need to communicate or plan shit better. Like. Watching them stumble over themselves feels like this is babby’s first venture into actually communicating with their audience, which I guess? It kind of is? Which is embarrassing when they’ve been making games for how long, again? Maybe stop relying on your fanbase to fix all your problems, Bethesda. I think the lawsuit shit isn’t going to actually have anything come of it and it’s being blown out of proportion. I think the ‘cardboard card in the physical PC case’ is also being blown out of proportion - PC games have been doing this for a while, and as my friend pointed out, lots of computers don’t even have CD drives anymore, and console versions are indeed getting actual CDs. For every person who has been denied a refund, there’s another who said they got their refund just fine, it’s just that the people getting denied are going viral and shit’s getting worded like absolutely nobody’s getting their refund. That doesn’t mean this is being handled well - there’s a LOT more to say on how Bethesda’s fucked up their policy and the intricacies of how this shit works - but it’s not going as a lot of people are painting it. Basically, holy shit, get your shit together Bethesda. - Basically that’s what I got at this current moment in terms of thoughts: Bethesda’s fucking up bigtime at PR, the game is a mess but is fixable and otherwise is fine for what it is so long as you know what you’re getting going in. I don’t blame people for vehemently being against it and fighting Bethesda’s bullshit, and I don’t blame people for enjoying it.