#and SUPPOSEDLY they just suddenly get it whenever you actually get to 100 in-game

[greyias]

As a follow-up on Ari's never-ending musical tour, it appears Steam just decided to stop counting my progress at 17/100, and refuses to update it past that, because the morning after the romance scene, I decided to go ahead and try to hit up the Underdark (and the Blighted Village) that I had forgotten to serenade while in Act 1, and got so many gold pieces from people who she had not played for previously.

Unlike those plebs in Moonrise Towers, mushroom people are really into the lute.

As is this doomed wannabe kidnapper from the Society of Brilliance:

(don't worry why Astarion was hiding. I was trying to save her and her asshole friends' future asses by stealing back the owlbear egg I'd swindled her into taking, but even when Astarion succeeded and started to sneak away she was like "BITCH GIMME THAT BACK" so have fun dying jerk! But... at least she tips better than the Harpers)

Then headed back to the Blighted Village, which I somehow had missed completely while dragging my feet in Act 1, and performed for all the goblins. They enjoyed our traveling show, and had some, erm. Interesting suggestions.

I, uh, am sure it makes an interesting xylaphone-like sound. But I think I'll pass.

Confirmed: Ari's lute playing is more entertaining than watching ogre porn

Thanks I guess? Also we might be forever banned from the Emerald Grove for reasons, but don't worry about that. It's not important.

[yupuffin]

Why I love Nezumi

I’ve now had a week or two to digest the tail end of Juuni Taisen, and I have another week or two ahead until I watch it again (actually for the third time) when Funimation releases the dub, and of course Juuni Taisen is all that has been on my mind since then. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings swimming around in my head so it might help to write them down into a slightly more coherent mess.

Spoilers ahead! I recommend you finish the whole anime before proceeding!

(also just a quick warning this is a lOT LONGER THAN I INITIALLY INTENDED ;7;)

The vast majority of the time, when I watch an anime or read a manga, I will have one favorite character out of everyone, who I quickly latch onto visibly more than the rest. It’s not always easy to tell who will become my favorite when I start a new series. Especially not with the storytelling in Juuni Taisen, in which we barely get exposed to a character until they get one episode of “me” time and then promptly die. A few episodes in, I thought Dog was cool, Ox was cool, and Rat was okay (if only because I still have some mad respect for rats after watching/reading No. 6 a few times).

I semi-jokingly pondered to myself a few times that the only character I’d really get attached to was the one who got the most screen time and thereby won the Zodiac War -- in other words, the only one who didn’t die. Obviously, that’s what happened, although for additional reasons I hadn’t initially anticipated.

A few days after I finished the anime, I said to myself, “I was prepared for 99 things, but that ending was not one of them.”

By the time I started episode 11 for the first time, I hadn’t gotten full-on attached to Nezumi yet, beyond thinking he was kind of a neat character (mostly due to him surviving this long). But then, that STORYTELLING.

At the end of high school, I wrote an essay on another anime (Free! for anyone who’s curious) about the “hesitation effect,” a device used in writing to indicate a surreal, dreamlike and uncertain state. Put shortly, writers employ the hesitation effect via ambiguity and situations that are only just strange or unrealistic enough to make the reader stop and consider for a moment that maybe what’s happening isn’t 100% reality after all (hence the name).

Duodecuple launches into “Will you stay for an interview?” mode. Nezumi refuses, quietly gets up and heads for the elevator. In the middle of the descent, the elevator malfunctions, and Nezumi plunges to his death.

But then... it REWINDS! We’re back at Duodecuple going “Will you stay for an interview?,” followed by Nezumi refusing, quietly getting up and heading for an elevator - exactly as before. This time, foreseeing the elevator accident, Nezumi takes the stairs, only to be shoved from behind, (apparently) plunging to his death (again).

But then... it REWINDS! Again!

After enough iterations, I’m getting really sick of Duodecuple asking for an interview in the exact same tone, and it’s starting to give me a seriously creepy feeling. Moreover, watching Nezumi die several times in different, gruesome ways is far from pleasant. I’m laughing, but not because it’s funny - it’s that confused laugh that you get when a situation is really tense and strange and you want to dispel the pungent aura of anxiety from the air. I have no idea what’s going on, but what is certain is that this anime is making me feel exactly what it wanted me to feel.

Finally we get to Nezumi explaining how his special ability, “The Hundred Paths of Nezumi-san” (or “Hundred Click,” its Japanese name), allows him to read one hundred different outcomes of a situation and make his choice accordingly.

A few different lightbulbs go off in my brain at once. First is the satisfying “click” of the link bto the repeated death sequences. But perhaps more appealing is the second lightbulb moment. I’m brought back to one a quote from my favorite manga, Wild Adapter, written and illustrated by a genius named Kazuya Minekura. It goes something like: “There’s no point in regret -- no point in wanting to turn back time -- because there’s no guarantee that any choice is the right one.”

The genius of art is that two very different pieces can express the exact same notion. In this case, the two situations are opposite: as for Nezumi, he can find out exactly which choice is the right one, idealizing any situation to avoid regrets (supposedly!!). In the case of Wild Adapter, the character who thinks this quote went down a less-than-ideal path in life and ends up in a bit of trouble, but decides to think positively anyway precisely because he does not have Nezumi’s foresight ability to tell him “if I had made this choice differently a little while back, this is where my life would be right now.”

As Nezumi mentions later, there are some situations you could do-over one hundred times and still not have them work out. Things like that are just out of your control. Even if you think you slipped up somewhere, there’s no telling for sure that doing something different would have helped you come out the other side any better off. Regret can only do so much, so in a lot of cases it’s better to live without it.

That was just episode 11. That had me thinking hard for a long time. Fortunately, I was late enough for the hype train only had to wait a couple days for the final episode.

Knowing Nezumi was charged with coming up with one ideal wish out of one hundred possibilities, I started wracking my brain for real game-changing wishes that might make sense. Maybe he’d wish the Juuni Taisen would never occur again? Perhaps he’d wish away his special ability so he didn’t have to use a ton of effort just to overthink everything?

Most of the final episode was an anticipatory buildup. It was nice -- even a bit emotionally disarming -- to see all of the previous characters again, getting reminded why they existed and what they brought to the series. By the moment Nezumi was considering a hundred different wishes simultaneously, I was a nervous wreck. You’re totally overthinking this! I inwardly shouted at the screen. Just pick something! (My mindset is, if there’s so many good potential wishes, there isn’t really a “wrong” choice!)

Nezumi faced Duodecuple. “I’ve decided.”

I was leaning forward in my seat, staring almost accusingly at Nezumi as though doing so would make time move faster.

“Just let me forget.”

Feeling my tension evaporate, leaving behind an aching hollow feeling, I sat back down, essentially crouching in my seat. “Okay.”

As the episode drew to a close, I was feeling two very opposite feelings. One half of me was delighted, relieved, and felt like doing a happy dance because Nezumi was finally free of his trauma. The other half was grieving and wanted to turn off my computer and just have a good cry. Of course, the two of them conflicting and at a stalemate, I just sat there and stared at the wall for a while.

I was sad because such a simple wish felt very anticlimactic. If Nezumi forgot that the entire Juuni Taisen ever happened, then what was the point to the entire anime? Surely there were countless things he could learn from experiencing it, let alone one hundred separate times? Why wish for something dumb like “forget it happened?” Moreover, Nezumi was a level-headed, apathetic character throughout most of the series -- suddenly, in the final minute of the final episode, we have him crying right in front of our faces: a reveal of the unimaginable stress he hadn’t even hinted at until just now. I don’t know about you, but unexpected displays of emotion from serious characters tend to tug at my heartstrings quite a bit.

Which leads to the reason I was happy. Put most simply, it was refreshing and cathartic to see Nezumi finally content at the very end of the series, still alive, but having forgotten everything he and the reader had invested in the prior twelve episodes.

The thing is, “forget it happened” is far from a dumb wish. Sure, “I want a penguin” is probably a better wish from my standpoint, but when I think back to how anxious I was watching mere second-long clips of Nezumi dying while attempting to escape Duodecuple’s interview, I can’t imagine what Nezumi experienced dying -- probably violently -- ninety-nine other times in the failed Juuni Taisen “routes” and remembering every single one. I didn’t pay much attention when he first said it, but thinking back, his indication that those ninety-nine other deaths are still burned into his memory, even though they never happened, is crucial.

Another quote from Wild Adapter: “Sometimes it’s better not to remember.”

At a convention earlier this year, I gave a lecture-style panel on memory and trauma in the manga Deadman Wonderland. Long story short, my conclusion was the following: remembering traumatic experiences can be downright excruciating. In many cases, there are indeed things you can learn from them, but the question is whether this benefit outweighs the drawback of having to carry those memories with you as long as they last.

From Nezumi’s point of view, I would much rather forget dying 139 (99 plus the other 40) times than remember whatever satisfying tidbits on life I got from the experience.

As much as I would rather Nezumi have an emotional support penguin, forgetting trauma really is the best choice for him. Freed of the burden of overthinking one hundred outcomes of choices that can risk his life or death, he can go back to being a (relatively) normal high school student whose only expectations are to survive society, rather than a brutal war to the death among twelve fighters -- and then just use his ability whenever he thinks is necessary, like asking out a cute girl.

That being said, after all that, I’m sure if one of Nezumi’s top 100 wishes really is to have a girlfriend, or even a best friend, I’m sure there are plenty of members of this fandom -- including me -- who would be willing to oblige.

[lhs3020b]

If you’re in the mood for some political schadenfreude, read on...

There’s been some weird stuff in the news and on my Twitter recently. First of all, Boris Johnson had another bizarre outburst of Boris-ness during President Macron’s recent visit. BoJo was randomly raving about building a bridge across the English Channel so we could have closer ties with France.

Now better relations with France is actually a good idea - but, we could just, you know, cancel Brexit?

Also, there are actually some very good reasons why there is no bridge over the Channel. Basically, a construction project in the middle of one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet? Yeah, that’s gonna run into problems. Problems with a capital-P. Basically that’s why we have a tunnel instead - it’s actually safer and cheaper!

Thing is, BoJo has these eruptions when he’s feeling pressurised. It seems to be a sort of stress-response, rather like Trump’s 3 AM tweetings. (BoJo is, essentially, the British version of Trump - a bit less overtly-crass but every bit as chaotic, poisonous and self-interested. And they both have dreadful hair, so there’s that as well.)

But what everyone was puzzling over was, why is BoJo stressed now? He’s unsackable because the Prime Minister is a passive sack of spuds, and he and his faction are getting everything they want, on a plate - even though their position is more extreme than both public opinion and the balance within Parliament. So why, exactly, does he seem so upset?

This week, we may have got a hint of an answer.

It appears - and this is hilarious - that the Tories had a near-miss on accidentally no-confidencing themselves.

Yes, you did read that right. They almost blew themselves up. By accident.

Let me see if I can unpack this a bit. Under Tory Party internal rules, it is only possible to trigger a challenge-vote against the leader if 15% of MPs write to the chairman of the 1922 Committee to request a motion of confidence. (Note that this is an intra-party thing - it’s entirely separate from the constitutional no-confidence process within the House of Commons.)

In theory, what happens next is that if the Leader loses the resulting motion of confidence, it automatically triggers a leadership election, in which the deposed leader is barred from standing.

The Chairman of the 1922 Committee is an individual called Graham Brady. Apparently, in the past, trigger-letters used to have a built-in expiry date of one year. For some reason, though, he apparently randomly declared a rule-change whereby the letters don’t expire.

So, imagine your average stereotype of a Tory MP, who is still reeling from their unexpected near-death experience in June last year. (Even in the seats they still won, their majorities shrank alarmingly. The sheer psyhcological shock of what happened does seem to have rattled them, perhaps in greater proportion than the actual events!) Said Tory MP has too much to drink one night at the Strangers’ Bar and fires off a “disgusted of Tonbridge Wells” letter to Graham Brady. Said Tory might not even remember doing it the next day. (They do have a reputation for hard drinking, even by British standards.)

But, Mr Brady now has another letter. And unless its writer actively-revokes it, it won’t expire. Ever. (It’s not actually clear if they even expire with the parliament in question - yeah, I know, mad, isn’t it?)

((This is one of the dangers of playing procedural games - you can get your way in the short term, but change the basic rules carelessly, and it can come back to bite you when you least expect it.))

Apparently, letters have been dribbling in to Mr Brady’s office throughout the year.

Mrs May just keeps making messes - there was the failure to act against BoJo or Davis, the inability to contain the Europe Research Group, there was her utter failure to deal with Grenfell, there was the shambles that was the Party Conference, there was the recent fiasco of the bungled ministerial reshuffle ... I could go on and on. The key point is, whenever she has to make a decision, she gets it wrong. (And this is what they’re like when the economy is growing and unemployment is falling - fuck only knows what they’d be like if a recession hit!)

So, letters keep dribbling in.

And it would seem that Mr Brady is now sat on at least 40 of them. Supposedly 48 is the vote-triggering threshold. It seems that he recently woke up to the fact that they were perilously close to triggering a motion of confidence against the leader. And it seems that a panic started up.

There have been rumours in the press that Brady has been running around like a mad thing, trying to persuade backbench Tories not to send in any more letters.

Umm, whoops?

My suspicion is that Mrs May would probably win a confidence motion, if it happens. But I’m not 100% certain of that (nor, it seems, is Graham Brady - which is interesting, because he’d presumably know the mood of the Tory Party). Also, in electoral politics, you can sometimes lose by winning - something similar happened to Thatcher in the late ‘80s. When Anthony Meyer challenged her, she won - but the fact that the challenge happened at all began to destabilise her administration. (Without that prior wobble, she might possibly have survived the Poll Tax debacle.) And more recently, there’s the chain of events that engulfed John Major in the ‘90s. Survival is probable, but not certain - and it could end being a strategic loss, leaving the PM in an over-extended and more-isolated position.

If the Tories did manage to accidentally no-confidence themselves, I will just point and laugh.

These events could also explain why BoJo is suddenly so stressed again. You see, he desperately wants to be Tory leader (it’s the surest ladder up to Number 10). But, his star is sharply in the descendant. He has essentially no friends left anywhere. One of the sole few things that unite both Leave and Remain is that we all now think he’s a contemptible, incompetent buffoon. Basically, if a leadership contest happened tomorrow, he’d be crushed. I mean, he didn’t even win in 2016, when there were still some people who didn’t hate him, so he’d be screwed if it happened now.

[writingbeautifullyblog]

“The Ones We Love Hurt Us Most of All – The Story of My Life Spent With My Abusive & Mentally Ill Senior Mother & Drug Addict” by Lesley Patterson AKA Lady Opaque It’s ironic and incredibly depressing to think that those who are supposed to love us unconditionally, such as our family members, are so quick to flip the script on you just because things didn’t go their way. Hence, they throw a fit, and suddenly you’re the bad guy. Fuck man… So, my own mother turned on me and literally filed false police reports that caused a Detective to need to meet with my husband and me regarding supposed Debit Card Fraud charges. On top of that, she lied her ass off to get a Temporary Protection Order Against Domestic Violence. Despite telling us that it didn’t matter if we showed up to the Hearing for the Extended Protection Order, the Order has awfully affected us. It portrays my husband and me as abusers who get off on the abusive acts that she falsely stated we’ve committed. In all of its forms from physical to verbal to mental and emotional. Whatever my own mother could say and think up, she said because the Courts took her so seriously that we are a threat that they attached a Firearms Addendum to the Retraining Order. Neither my husband or I may own any firearms anymore for the whole period of a year while the Restraining Order is active and in effect. This is just because we weren’t able to get out to where she is as we don’t have our own car or a means of transportation right now to travel there. We all used to live out in the boonies in Fallon, NV., with the whole family, but the situation kept on getting worse and never let up or got any better, so I took the next logical step and did something about it. I was swift and decisive in my actions when I decided to speak with my mother on August 27th, 2019. “And why did she do this,” you may be asking. It’s quite simple, really. She’s played this game ever since the early 1980s when she claimed that I was molested by my father (of which I have no memories of having occurred ). She went the whole 9 yards with him, too. At the end of the ensuing Custody battle, my mom had everyone believing that my father was a pedophile and a deranged, evil man and drug addict. I, in fact, now actually do not think that I was ever even molested by my dad. I genuinely believe that my mom just wanted to get back at him for the issues they had in their relationship. She’s deranged, and it was quite convenient for her to lie so that she could be granted a TPO, which turned into the same thing that we were served with due to her lies, a Restraining Order Against Domestic Violence. Needless to say, I never had a relationship whatsoever with my father or with his side of the family due to my mother’s influence, and now I see why we were treated as the black sheep of the family and continuously scapegoated by family members. It’s because my mother is fucking lying, shameless and horrific bitch that no one, not even her own blood relatives, wants anything to do with. It was hard for me to understand that as a child and a young adult. I knew my mother was mentally ill and on drugs, but I never really saw all of the abuse and tactics for what they indeed were until I’d summoned up the strength and guts to finally leave her to her own devices. It’s all very simple to her. I’m sure; she wants to hurt my husband and me for no longer wishing to live with her after over 17+ years of living together with her constant drama, untreated mental illnesses, and everything else. It compounded with her incessant nit-picking and family fight, causing ways along with her daily wants, needs, and unreasonable and abusive demands. Her behavior and false allegations about and towards my own father drove him to literally insanity. The poor man went bat shit crazy and finally broke down, brought the lawnmower into the old family home, set an accelerated fire with the gasoline inside of it, and prepared to sit down and burn himself alive. I shit you not, this is 100% true! That’s what really happened to him as a result of what my mother had done, she had broken him and permanently damaged his reputation, and he felt there was no going back or moving forward left for him. I find that quite sad… Finally, I think he just wanted relief from the torture, the pain, and the relentless agony and angry depression that he suffered from. Supposedly my dad was Schizophrenic, but I’m not sure I buy that one anymore either. (Straight from the horse’s mouth, if you know what I mean…) My mother is a drug addict and a big drama Llama who enjoys picking and picking at you, slowly eroding your sanity and your calmness until she’s got everyone upset in one way or another. I hadn’t known this had happened, but my own mother tried to turn me against my very own daughter. She had manipulated me into believing that it was her who was the disruptive one and caused all of the household’s problems and fights, but the whole time it was her slithering snake ass. I even put my own daughter on probation and had gotten the law involved with police and everything due to my mother’s tricks and deceit. It wasn’t until very recently that my daughter confided in me how her own grandma used to beat the holy living shit out of her whenever my husband and I left her home with her. I feel terrible about it, and it’s something that I can’t apologize enough for having had happened to her. My mother is a hardcore pain pill addict and takes handfuls of opioids daily. (Not counting how often she runs out early due to her severe abuse and misuse of them.) She was supposed to love me and to want the best for me; to raise me to be someone who succeeds in life, but I got the short end of the stick and, lastly, blatant betrayal. I am honestly shocked that she filed false accusations against us, especially on me. Well, I was blown away at first, but then my husband and my daughter told me that they couldn’t believe that I didn’t see that bullshit coming over a mile away. I felt a bit stupid, because the more I mulled it over privately, the more I knew that they were right. Then again, who would want to believe that their own mother could be so heartless as to use the law along with her tall tales and illegal perjury to harm them in such a retaliatory fashion? No one, that’s who and neither did I. I was thinking the other night, and before my mother had gotten myself and my daughter removed from her custody and put into foster care through DCFS back in 2001. She got in trouble for meth use, pain pill abuse, and charges of blatant Child Neglect at the time. I finally came down to the quite painful and heartbreaking realization that I was so much so not a priority to my own mother that she had us living in motels ever since we moved to the Reno, NV. area in 1997. In case you didn’t know this already when you live only in motels, you are legally considered homeless. My mother made me homeless in 1997 when we left my hometown of Sacramento, CA., to move here to Northern Nevada. Back then, also due to her use of methamphetamines, she had so recklessly not planned the move at all or what we’d do once we got to Reno. This inaction on her part caused us to lose the UHaul we’d used to move, and shortly after that, all of the belongings inside of it as well. Everything I’d ever had my whole entire short life at that point, was auctioned off by the company due to her non-payment. It resulted in that because instead of being an adult and doing the right thing and working with them on payments, she fucked up badly and decided it’d be better to try and hide the Uhaul van that we’d used and parked it in secrecy. She couldn’t even do that well enough because she was so drugged out, and the Uhaul company came and picked up their van within just a few days. I was upset about it for the longest time, about losing everything that I’d ever owned. There was a bag of crank in the Uhaul van, and when my mother did have the opportunity to get a few things out, she opted instead to find the meth. She sent me to school and didn’t allow me to come to get any of my stuff out of the van. I lost literally everything I’d ever loved and many important memories like family photos and keepsakes from passed on relatives. It still makes me literally sick to think about it. My mother is the kind of woman who attracts the biggest loser in town, and it always gets exceedingly violent and then ends terribly. The man she chose was a bigger addict than she was and an awful person. He’d beat her often, even right in front of my then-boyfriend now-husband and me. He then started beating me and attempted to choke me out once, but my husband stopped him from succeeding in his attempt. In retaliation, the man threw my baby kitten out of the second story motel window resulting in what was a white kitten with Grey spots appearing like he was brown. I only found this out because I was pregnant with my daughter and searching everywhere for me kitten whom I thought had escaped somehow from the house. Turns out, Animal Control was called to pick him up because he couldn’t move from the spot where he fell and was injured so severely that he appeared brown. This gave me great heartache as it means he was hurt so badly as to bleed a great deal, and when it dried, it caused him to appear brown in color. My main point of this blog post is that no human being deserves such treatment. No one deserves this kind of abuse, yet sadly it’s committed all over the world, every single day by horrible people who enjoy harming others. It’s terribly ironic that my mother has turned her tactics of abuse onto my husband and to this extent, especially when you consider that we were the ONLY ones who were ever there for her, and this is the thanks that we get? Intimidation, harassment, threats, attempted Criminal charges, and a Restraining Order? Neither my husband nor I have ever once been in trouble with the law, and yet somehow, they believe this cunt who has a pension for pulling these stunts on people to get back at them for decades??? Breaking away from abuse is always a scary endeavor. If you stayed, at least you’d have the surety of knowing how it’s likely going to turn out, but many people really fear change, especially big ones. It took a lot of thought and courage on my behalf to decide that myself and the other members of the family no longer should be treated so abusively and taken advantage of by my mother. I did get away, finally, after many years of relentless maltreatment. Things are starting to get better for us rather quickly now, too. I have a new job, and my husband can finally get the knee surgery that he’s needed for years. My main point here is that there is hope! There are loving, kind people in the world, and you shouldn’t ever give up and stay in an abusive situation because it’s never going to get any better, only much worse. Worse yet, you’ll waste all of the days, months, or years of finding yourself and actually living and enjoying life if you stay with your abuser. It can be done, you can leave, and things can start to improve, it just takes a leap of faith and a bit of work, but you never have to stay in those circumstances, it’s unhealthy and only leads to stress, sickness, and precious time wasted. Work on yourself instead, take the first step and tell yourself right now, make a promise to yourself, that if you’re ever being abused by anyone you love, you’ll leave. The name of the game is to “love thyself” and believe me, you ARE worthy of love, and you ARE worth it! By Lesley Michelle Patterson AKA Lady Opaque of www.WritingBeautifully.com https://www.facebook.com/The.Official.Author.Lady.Opaque https://www.writingbeautifully.com/blog

#LesleyPatterson #LesleyMPatterson #LesleyMichellePatterson #LadyOpaque #TheOfficialAuthorLadyOpaque #TheWritingBeautifullyBlog #WritingBeautifully #TrueStory #True #Autobiography #MentallyIll #DrugAddict #Addiction #DrugAddiction #MentalHealth #Abuse #DomesticViolence #DomesticAbuse