#and like why automate something that is supposed to be fun

[orriculum]

Sometimes I listen to my coworker talk about how she's gonna be the next big literary fiction whatever and then in the next breath she's going on about how chatgpt has saved her so much "creative energy" because she doesn't have to do her own writing anymore and like on one hand it's kinda satisfying watching a certified dumbass shoot their own foot but on the other she does this like once a week and I am tired of it

[the-timewatcher]

A disgruntled Tumblrina (gender-neutral) made a website and why you should too.

Or "reject social media, return to personal websites".

PART 1: THE PART WHERE I CONVINCE YOU TO MOVE TO PERSONAL WEBSITES

So, the Web 2.0 social media infested landscape seems to be crumbling before our very eyes. Reddit's leadership is increasingly greedy, Twitter is sinking under the weight of Elon's massive, yet increasingly fragile ego, Tumblr is slowly turning into another lifeless corpo-fest, complete with the layout, Instagram continues to be vapid and soulless and Facebook seems to be going the way of MySpace.

(feel free to check the alt text on these, btw)

In these troubling times, where everything looks the same and you're expected to be milked for every dollar you're worth, what is a disgruntled Internet surfer such as yourself to do? Move to an untested alternative that's bound to get overrun by fascists thanks to poor moderation? Stay the course on the sinking ships you're used to?

Well, what if I told you that we've solved this problem way back in the 90's and early 2000's and were merely duped by the Big Zuck into forgetting our legacy? What if there was a cure for the sanitized, dull social media hellscape?

It takes a bit of work, when compared to just using a social media site, but even if your particular use case makes switching difficult (ex. an artist looking to promote their work), it's still a good secondary option to consider.

The core appeal is the ability to customize and individualize, make a corner of cyberspace unabashedly yours,

It can also be an exciting avenue of creative expression, giving whatever you want to say a unique coat of paint,

Most website hosting services are a bit more lax about what you can do on them, due to changes in the profit structure (rather than depending on advertisers and investors, they either have a premium option to give supporters perks, have another product, or, in the case of paid services, you renting that space IS the product),

If you want your website to be more accomodating and accessible, you don't have to file tons of feedback - do it yourself,

If you'd like to connect with other webmasters and promote each other's websites, we have webrings - sets of circular links that connect websites with something in common, be it a topic, aesthetic or friend group,

You're less likely to have your stuff purged by an ill-advised change in policy (especially if you have a backup of your files somewhere),

The more people do it, the less power those massive social media corpos have over the internet,

It can be a load of fun!

If I have you convinced, keep reading into part 2. If you just wanna see what I did, skip to part 3. If neither, feel free to continue scrolling. I won't hold it against you. You'll be missing out, that's all.

PART 2: SO, YOU WANNA MAKE A WEBSITE!

Good choice, here's some resources!

sadgrl's absolute beginner's guide to Neocities - what it says on the tin!

W3Schools - a more in-depth tutorial site, a learning resource so excellent it substituted for what I was supposed to learn in technical highschool (because our teacher just told us to go on W3Schools instead of teaching us shit)

A list of free layouts for your website - whether to use as a base to learn from or to simply take for yourself,

Neocities - the posterchild for free website hosting for personal websites. Doesn't allow video or audio, but you can get around that by linking those files from elsewhere. Beginner-friendly to a fault - once you have an account just drag and drop your files in,

Gitlab (& Gitlab Pages) - a more advanced option, but it has a few advantages of its own. Gitlab is a website hoster second and a version control service first - which is programmer speak for "keeps track of changes in your code and stores a backup of it online". it helps a lot when working on multiple devices or co-writing with a friend. And secondly, you can use Gitlab Actions to automate putting your website up (even on Neocities, like I do!)

My askbox - I am not joking, if you have any questions about any of this, I'd love nothing more than to help you out!

But with most of my indie web propaganda out of the way, it's time.

PART 3: Welcome to Timewatcher OS.

Of course, because I couldn't be normal when it comes to making a website, I had to turn it into a fake operating system. Each subpage is an "app", opened in a separate embed window. It has unlockable wallpapers (no pay2win, prommy). There's bideo games on it! I even made a music player for it so I can share my incongruent music tastes!

Like I said in my Tumblr bio, if I ever go radio silent for more than a month, it means I've gotten fed up with this hellsite and moved to my own homepage permamently. And I highly advise you make an option like this for yourself too! Lastly, if any of y'all would like to start a webring, do let me know in the askbox - I'm down to manage it if I'm not alone in there.

Anyways, I hope I convinced you to make a website, or at least check out some of the cool sites you've been missing out on! Hope to see you on the Old Web!

[thankskenpenders]

So I wrote a whole long thing about Amy's tarot cards, but what about, you know... the rest of the Sonic Frontiers DLC? The new alternate story route, the hours of new gameplay, all that?

Having now played it, I'm not sure Sonic has ever had this specific combination of good ideas that make the future of the series look bright, and execution that I fucking hate.

(Full spoilers ahead.)

The good

There's a lot to like here, conceptually.

First and foremost, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are finally playable in a new mainline 3D Sonic game for the first time since 2006! Seventeen years! We've been begging for this for so very, very long. Nature is finally truly healing from the fallout of Sonic '06. Early on I hedged my bets and expected them to be locked to Cyber Space or something like that, assuming that there was no way they'd be fully playable in the Open Zone. But sure enough, while they're a bit limited compared to Sonic, they're still all full-blown characters with skill trees to unlock and lots of exploration to do.

We also got a more bombastic alternate final boss fight, after the first take on The End kind of underwhelmed. And it's obvious that Sonic Team has listened to our pleas to focus on the 3D platforming over the forced 2D sections, and to reduce the amount of automation in the level design. This update is chock full of Actual Platforming. Wow! I can only pray this means we never get an area as agonizing to explore as Chaos Island again.

Sure, there's still some jank - especially with Knuckles' movement, which is kinda rough. But if this is the stuff they're trying out so that they can refine it further for the next game, then I'm really excited.

On the other hand, good fucking lord is The Final Horizon tedious. And that tedium sapped most of the fun out of it for me.

The frustrating

The new scenario massively increases the difficulty over the base game, seemingly out of a desire to give the hardcore players who were posting speedrun videos and whatnot more of a challenge. It's the Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels of Sonic. This difficulty comes in many forms throughout your playtime, some worse than others, and continues to ramp up over time.

Rather than giving you a tutorial level, the new scenario dumps you directly into a remixed version of the final island and makes you do some fairly precise platforming with Amy, Knuckles, and Tails - new characters with new movesets that you won't have any experience with. You'll also need to find character-specific Koco that give you free levels, because Sonic's friends all start at level one and certain locked moves in their skill trees will be mandatory to progress. They don't even have Cyloop unlocked at the start. And because they're all low level, that means you'd better steer clear of the beefed-up bosses scattered around the map, which will absolutely annihilate Sonic's friends. (I honestly just avoided them and never bothered beating any of them, not even with my high-level Sonic. I have no idea if they're beatable with the others.)

None of this is explained to you particularly well. I spent my first few minutes with Amy wondering why the attack button did nothing, only to eventually think to check her skill tree and realize that I had to unlock her basic attack. If you don't bother to take the time to read through the skill trees, you'll very quickly find obstacles you have no way of getting past with no clues as to what exactly you're supposed to do.

Adding to this confusion is the fact that objective markers often tell you to go half a kilometer into the sky, and you'll have no idea how to get up there because all of the relevant platforms are out of your draw distance. Many objects seem to only pop in for me when I'm within about 60 meters of them, which isn't a long distance for a high-speed open world platformer like this. I was having this problem running the game with high graphics on PC, so I can only imagine how obnoxious it is on Switch. I'd frequently find myself poking around nearby clusters of platforming objects and praying that they'd lead me to a spring, rail, or cannon that would eventually point me in the direction of the floating objective marker.

There were always complaints about the art direction in Frontiers and the way it relies on floating rails and prefab platforms that are visually disconnected from the natural scenery of the islands, but it's even more dire here. The new platforming sections are dense and complex, but they seemingly didn't have the budget to change the topography of Ouranos Island at all, so it all takes the form of these prefabs. It very strongly gives the vibe of a Forge creation in Halo 3, back when there were no blank canvas maps and people just had to make "new maps" by jamming a bunch of shipping containers and barricades together in the sky above one of the default arenas.

I was still more or less having fun, though, despite the jank. It's a big creative swing, I told myself! They're trying stuff out! They're experimenting!

And then I hit the towers.

The towers are agonizing because they're SO close to being great. The logical part of my brain understands why some people love them, but god, I just fucking hate them. The platforming there IS cool! These layouts are cool! The individual challenges along the way are a bit tough, but totally doable. You know what's not cool? Making one mistake and slowly falling 800 meters all the way back down to the ground, forcing you to start over. Because none of these towers have checkpoints. For me, this one decision transforms what should have been a fun set of platforming challenges into a massive, unfun difficulty spike.

I enjoy some masocore platformers, but those are typically games with quick deaths and restarts like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, or VVVVVV. Hell, the Mario games tend to get way more difficult than the average Sonic game, and those are obviously all great. Quite frankly, unlike those games, Sonic Frontiers is nowhere near tight or polished enough to make this difficulty feel fair. Bits of jank that I could ignore in the base game due to its lower difficulty are now matters of life or death. Missing a jump because I boosted off an incline in a way the game didn't like for reasons I don't understand is not fun. Falling off a tower because the camera was pointing in the wrong direction while I was in midair and I couldn't see the next thing I was expected to homing attack is not fun.

And it's such a jarring spike when moving from the base game to the DLC that it feels like the game is suddenly quizzing me on skills it never bothered to instill in me. Maybe if you've spent the last year labbing out the movement tech in this game this is all a no brainer, but for the average returning player it's a kick in the dick.

I'm sure I could've beaten these towers normally if I gave them enough tries. They aren't the hardest thing in the world. But I very quickly decided I had better things to do with my life and turned on easy mode, which adds tons of extra springs and homing attack balloons to make all of the platforming piss easy. I wish there was a middle option between Only Up: Sonic Edition and this extreme hand holding, but when given the choice between the two I gladly picked baby mode. I just wanted to see the story.

(The new Cyber Space levels are also long, challenging, and devoid of checkpoints, not unlike the towers. But I only ever found the entrances to two of them. So I only did two. They're theoretically required, because they give you "Lookout Koco" that you need for... some reason? But in a rare act of mercy, Sonic Team put Cyloop treasure spots that give you free Lookout Koco all over the map.)

As I continued, so many little things started adding up to piss me off. Why do you only reveal like five tiny squares of the map at a time? I would've loved to find all the new 1-on-1 dialogue scenes, but not if I had to do dozens of hard mode versions of the stupid little puzzles and challenges to reveal the whole map. Why does every character need their own unique collectibles? What is this, Donkey Kong 64? Why can't I just grab this EXP for Amy when I find it as Tails? Why can I only manually swap characters by talking to an out-of-the-way NPC unlocked right before the final boss? Why is fast travel disabled? Why are the new vocal themes you hear when playing as Amy, Knuckles, and Tails so monotonous, with a single verse repeating over lo-fi beats ad nauseum? Why is the jukebox feature completely disabled throughout the DLC, even after rolling the credits? Why can't Tails homing attack? Why do I have to wrestle with the camera so much while also holding the jump button to fly as Knuckles and Tails? How many right thumbs do they think I have? Why is this animation for picking up animals in the Cyber Space levels so incredibly slow, and why can I still take damage while it's playing? Why does the stupid starfall event have to make it so hard to see what I'm doing when climbing these towers? Why does this shitty combat trial have a popup that makes it seem like I should be using the Cyloop when the actual strategy revolves around repeated parries? And on and on and on...

The story

What about the new story? Well, there sadly isn't much to chew on here. Most of the DLC has the cast running around and finding different macguffins for arbitrary reasons, as part of some sort of plan to divide up the work on the last island so that Sonic can go train with the spirits of the Ancients and harness the power of his cyber corruption. What the fuck is an Impact Form? I don't know, but Knuckles needs something to do, so go find one.

It's a thin excuse plot meant to make you do platforming challenges around Ouranos Island, with little room for Ian to add any real flavor of his own, even though he certainly tries. Having Sonic meet the spirits of the Ancients who controlled the Titans, who are revealed to directly parallel the personalities of him and his friends, is kinda neat, I guess? It's something. The optional conversations seem to have some fun bits, including both conversations between the supporting cast and additional lore. But again, I only found a few of those because of how tedious filling out the map was.

The writing is also let down by the voice acting - or I guess the voice direction, because I know this cast can do better. Roger's voice continues to be weirdly, distractingly deep as Sonic, which was clearly something that was requested of him just for this game. (For a recent example of him going back to his regular Sonic voice, see this LEGO trailer.) The performances of Sonic's friends are also WILDLY mismatched. This is most clear when they start feeling the effects of the cyber corruption. Knuckles seems to be barely affected at all, Tails sounds like he's moderately hurt and low on energy, and Amy starts completely overselling her pain out of nowhere. The extremely strained performance makes it sound like Cindy's literally being tortured in the fucking booth. I have no idea what's going on over there.

The final challenges

People have debated whether or not things like the towers and the new Cyber Space levels are fair challenges. What's not up for debate is the fact that Master King Koco's Trial is complete and utter bullshit, and I can't believe they shipped this.

Before you can fight the new final boss, the game forces you to do a boss rush of the first three Titans - INCLUDING the pre-Super Sonic climbing sections - with a hard limit of 400 rings. For all three lengthy, heavily scripted fights. Back to back. You can't even cheese it with the leveling system, because you're forced to do this at level 1. This all but forces you to look up speedrun strats for the Super Sonic fights so that you don't run out of rings and fail the trial.

And the real kicker? They changed the parry just for this trial! Originally, you could just hold down the bumpers endlessly and Sonic would ready himself to parry the next attack, whenever that may hit. Now it requires you to do a "Perfect Parry" with specific timing. And you HAVE to hit those parries if you wanna clear this trial and get to the new ending. Miss a few and you're probably fucked. You just have to reset. Time to go through all those fights, all those climbing sequences, all those QTEs, and all those unskippable mid-fight cutscenes all over again. This is by far the most egregious example of the DLC deciding to quiz you on new skills that the base game never required of you, and it's one of the most absurdly unfair things I have ever seen in a Sonic game.

Easy mode does make this trial easier by making the timing window for Perfect Parries much more generous, but that's all the help you get. It's still easy to lose time failing to parry Wyvern's hard-to-read animations, or to lose rings by getting hit on the climb sections, or for things to just fuck up because these fights were always kinda jank. I gave it a few shots. I looked up guide videos. I tried the Quick Cyloop and stomp combo strat that seems all but mandatory. But I quickly decided that, again, this wasn't a worthwhile use of my time. It just sucks. And I really, REALLY didn't want to overwrite all my fond memories of these Titan fights, some of my favorite setpiece moments in any Sonic game, with memories of this shit ass boss rush.

So I cheated! And if you're on PC, you should too.

With the worst hurdle out of the way, I turned cheats back off and moved on to the new final boss. It was pretty cool. It's much flashier than the original fight against The End, that's for sure. It's still kinda annoying, and it requires you to do very specific shit without properly telegraphing it, but it's nowhere near as bad as the preceding challenges. I was hoping for one last new metalcore song to go with the new fight, which we sadly didn't get, but at least the new version of I'm Here is good.

The ending is... mostly the same, with a couple altered scenes that don't really change anything in the long run. But overall the new finale was pretty good. I just wish it hadn't been such a slog to get there.

Closing thoughts

Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon wants to be three things:

A patch that adds a new alternate ending that was probably supposed to be in the base game in the first place.

An experimental take on making Tails, Knuckles, and Amy playable again, presumably testing things for the next game. And...

An official Kaizo Sonic Frontiers mod for the sickos.

The thing is, the people showing up for #1 and #2, the main things that Sega hyped up about the update, are not necessarily going to be down for #3. If they had announced some uber-hard new Cyber Space levels for the arcade mode or whatever, I'd be like, neat! And then not play them. I would never touch Master King Koco's Trial if it was an optional challenge. I would leave that for the sickos. But instead, they made the hardest content mandatory for anyone who wants to see the new Good Ending where the final boss gets an actual budget.

I'm mostly left in a state of shock that it shipped like this. I cannot believe they playtested this and decided this was the state The Final Horizon should be released in. That this should be the note Frontiers ends on. That this should be how we remember those Titan fights. That this should be the lingering taste in our mouths as we wait however many years for the next 3D game.

Armchair devs always love to say that things would be "easy to fix," but like... there really would be easy fixes for the insane difficulty and general tedium here! Add a few more tutorial popups explaining what the game expects of you with Sonic's friends. Give the Cyber Space stages and the towers a couple checkpoints. Give the combat trials more generous time limits, especially on the lower difficulties. Remove half of the map puzzles, and make the ones that remain uncover twice as many squares. Skip the startup animation for Knuckles' glide. Let me turn on the goddamn jukebox. Since so much of this update was designed around fan feedback, I can only pray that Sonic Team is still listening, and that they tweak at least a few of these things with a balance patch.

But still, after those many, many paragraphs of complaining... this still somehow makes the future of 3D Sonic seem pretty promising?

Sonic's friends are FINALLY playable again, and the focus is back to proper 3D platforming, rather than railroading players into awkward forced 2D sections in what's otherwise an open world. These are the things that they hopefully want to carry over to the next game. The difficulty? Well, that's just because it's the postgame DLC that's supposed to be the toughest challenge in the game. It's just an unreasonably cruel one of those - an example of how designing and balancing for a vocal minority of your fanbase can really hurt your game. But Sonic Team is onto something here, and I hope that they can learn the right lessons from this expansion and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[physalian]

There’s this unskippable Google AI ad on YouTube where this girl consults the robot about how to cancel dinner plans with the people across the table in the most annoying voice (likely because I have seen this ad now and had to listen to her asinine questions 20 times at least) and this ad, right here, speaks to my frustration around AI:

It disincentivizes critical thinking.

I know the ad is a joke and meant to be lighthearted and I’m only this annoyed because it’s unskippable and irritating af, but every time I see it all I can think is “if you can’t manage enough creativity and critical thinking to come up with your own excuse to cancel on your friends, maybe you shouldn’t have those friends.”

I have a relative who is firmly in the ChatGPT camp and, for example, yesterday I was trying to figure out how to compress a video file and was venting to them about it. They sent me back something I didn’t read from ChatGPT. Meanwhile, I looked up a YouTube video and figured out how to do the rest on my own, and getting the file compressed was immensely satisfying. Far more than mindlessly and thoughtlessly consulting the robot.

“It’s just like a YouTube video!” They’d told me.

No, a real person put time and effort into that video. That robot stole their content without their consent, didn’t credit them, and spat it back out. I used to patronizingly refer to ChatGPT as "the magic conch" and now I can barely do that anymore because that metaphor is becoming all-too real.

While I can understand the barriers it lowers—like if you struggle with writing the robot does it for you, or if you need a piece of art and are too poor, you can generate it for free. Mindless, repetitive tasks that eat up creative juices that can just be automated by a robot, too (even though everyone can tell when a response is canned and artificial and no one appreciates talking to a machine).

If you keep consulting ChatGPT for how to articulate what you want to say, or just straight-up having it do the hard work for you, you’re never going to learn. Yes it’s taken me 8 years to reach the quality and skill of writing I have but as another Tumblr post out there said: The time will pass anyway.

I can’t draw to the skill level that I’d like to. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep practicing until I get there. I thrive off that sense of accomplishment. There’s no little hit of dopamine from typing in a prompt and clicking a button and I certainly don’t appreciate the final product scalped without consequence from real artists.

Or, like when I had to fire a beta reader for flagrant abuse of AI in her work: I can copy-paste my manuscript into ChatGPT, too. I’d paid her for a human response, not garbage feedback that couldn’t understand what I was writing beyond that there were words on the page. I wanted so badly to ask her why she does a job in a creative field if she's just going to have a robot do all the fun parts? I beta read at a great loss of profit because I enjoy beta reading and it's a fiercely competetive market. Surely if she wanted to scam people, she could have done so in so many other ways. You don't need to know how to pen complex prose in your every day life, but by god, you do need to know how to effectively communicate, contextualize, and argue your perspective and this ridiculous ad joking about cancelling dinner plans sure is funny, until it isn't.

And I know the people who made AI probably did so with the best of intentions but people can be lazy and cheap and we love taking shortcuts to save money and I stand by this: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

So. Yeah. This is a writing advice blog and this post has almost nothing to do with it, but that ad annoys me to no end and I had to say something somewhere about it. Bottom line: Robots were supposed to make the hard jobs, the monotonous jobs, the overcomplicated jobs, the belittling jobs easier, not make us all into pudding-boned Wall-E people. If you want to write, learning is absolutely free - write on the back of your grocery receipts for all I care. If you want to draw, pick up a notebook and pack of pencils from the local dollar store and start drawing.

What you made will always mean more to you than something that didn't cost you time, effort, brain power, or even money to obtain.

[blueper-saiyan]

I’m overanalyzing something that’s canonically not meant to be thought about, for fun, so here’s a speculative Saiyan biology question: how often do they actually need to eat? I’ve sort of joked about the possibility that it’s like large predators irl where they gorge themselves occasionally and then wait until the next big kill. This would balance out the amount they’re eating to closer to a normal human, just a surprising amount in one sitting, and dodge the thing I’m about to go off the deep end about. But I think they’re probably supposed to need that amount frequently? Which is like, rodent levels of frequency and portions, but unlike a small mammal, a huge amount of actual food consumed. It’s fine if there’s only a handful of Saiyans on a whole planet but how did that work when there was a lot of them? That’s a massive amount of food, where is it coming from? Are they mostly feeding their army by taking food from conquered planets? They’d still need to be producing enough for their homeworld. Is it being farmed automatically and that’s how they can have the majority of their whole species be soldiers? But like, Gine has a job processing meat, so it’s clearly not entirely automated. Stuck thinking about Saiyan agricultural production and supply logistics help.

Unfortunately, I can also say that almost immediately after finding out the amount that Saiyans eat, the back of my mind did jump to “how fast do they starve?” Like, is that a much bigger threat for them than a human or do they have about the same amount of reserves, even if they’re eating more? If it is way faster, how does that affect how they view food/hunger? As a fun irl example, hummingbirds have such an insane metabolism that they would potentially starve to death if they slept at night. So they don’t sleep like normal, they enter a state that’s more like hibernation to slow their metabolism down enough to survive. Many hummingbird species are fiercely territorial because they need access to their food source or they starve. I imagine a theoretical hummingbird society would be thinking about food differently. And because this is my indulgent post where I get to talk about animals, I’m also going to bring up vampire bats, which could also potentially starve if they can’t feed within two days or so (I did not go deep into scientific literature to find original numbers and sources for this estimate I’m sorry true bat fans. Actually same goes for the hummingbird estimate but I know more about birds.). Unlike the more territorial hummingbirds though, vampire bats roost together during the day in colonies, with the same other bats repeatedly. And their food source can’t be guarded like a flower patch can, so there’s less purpose to territoriality. So they can form long term friendships with each other by interacting in ways like grooming each other. Within these friendships, when one bat gets a meal during their few-hour-a-night feeding window, but the other one doesn’t, the one who got enough food will often share with their friend to keep them from going hungry. Then their friend returns the favor when their roles are reversed, keeping them both alive, along with the rest of their friend network.

So those are some very different responses to needing food nearly constantly. If I were deeper in ecology mode I could probably try and come up with explanations based on the types of food source and territory and other factors for why, but I’m here to apply this to Saiyans lol. Honestly, a cooperative strategy would make more sense given that they’re pretty human-like, but that’s certainly not the sense we get given of their society. Were they always super individualistic or is that a recent development? Are they even actually individualistic or is that fully a societal role thing (elites are different from lower class warriors)? Or is the idea that they don’t cooperate partly a lie made up after their deaths anyway? Speculative biology for intelligent species get the extra layer of culture just to make things more messy and fun. We also know pretty much nothing about their original home planet and the actual context that shaped them, so I don’t get to apply other factors, like how easy it is to defend food sources or how important it is to stick together. We probably won’t ever get to know anything more about their original homeworld/Sadala, which is disappointing given that we got hints about it, but it does leave more room for speculation.

[therummesoccupied]

IDW'S SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, ISSUE #77 - THOUGHTS

It's been a bit of a long break, but there's finally a new issue coming out tonight, so it's finally time to review the most recent one to date!

Issue 77 marks the second part of what the Trade Paperbacks are calling the Cause and Effect arc. The solicitations call it part 2 of Scattered Pieces. I think the reality is that Scattered Pieces is going to be a longer arc, and so they're splitting it into two parts for the TPB releases - I think this might also have been the case with Phantom Riders, which was why we got Extreme Competition and Collision Course.

This issue follows up on the first set-up story we got in Issue 76, in which Sonic joins forces with the Chaotix to investigate Clutch's whereabouts as well as the continued operations of Clean Sweep Inc. and potentially the location of the Chaos Emerald stolen from Tails' lab.

Lines this time around are done by Adam Bryce Thomas, with colors by Leonardo Ito de Oliveira, formerly just Leonardo Ito. I suppose it's only fair that Aaron Hammerstrom and Min Ho Kim would get a break eventually, and Adam's art is always good stuff, especially in more action-heavy stories.

That being said, this issue... doesn't really have all that much action. There's a short little scuffle with Rough & Tumble, who now seem to be in charge of Clutch's old base of operations, White Park Chateau.

Other than that, though, this issue's a pretty quiet one that focuses, at first, on comedy over action or drama. The comedy's not bad, though, and it's always fun get Sonic, the Chaotix, and the Skunk Bros. in the same place. The setup seems tailor-made (heh) for goofs and gags.

The story is not without it's more reserved moments, though, and they're used to make it sink in just how off-putting White Park is when there's nobody there.

Last time we saw this place, it was a bustling resort, so seeing it all empty like this gives it kind of a creepy, liminal feeling.

The issue truly takes a turn for the more grounded and dramatic, with the return of Clutch.

This opens up a whole ton of questions. Last time we saw this guy, he was being hauled away as a prisoner of Dr. Eggman - who isn't exactly known for his merciful touch.

It isn't long before we get the answers to this and many other questions, as Clutch explains that he simply waited for Eggman to get distracted before making his escape, and that the remnants of Clean Sweep are all just automated systems continuing to follow their programming until they ultimately fall apart.

Of course, all these answers seem a little too convenient, and those among you with keen eyes might have noticed the fancy new cane Clutch is rocking - one that is distinctly different from his old one.

One thing is clear, though. Whatever position he finds himself in, Clutch is absolutely miserable. And it's not long before we find out why.

While Sonic and the Chaotix take off to investigate one of Clean Sweep's supposedly automated facilities, Clutch sneaks off to a secret chamber to converse with his new employer, Dr. Eggman.

Yes, Clean Sweep Inc. is now a front for the Eggman Empire, allowing the doctor to discreetly spread his influence and recycle his fallen forces.

The story also wastes no time in showing us exactly how Eggman is keeping Clutch in line, as the second Clutch tries to withhold information from the doctor, Eggman becomes insistent, causing Clutch to remove his hat and show us this weird, mechanical spider-thing clamped to his head.

Now, we don't know what this thing is - could be some kind of mind control device, or an electric shock administrator, or even something as simple as a bomb. Whatever the case, it's apparent that Clutch does not like having it there.

This really sucks for Clutch.

But this rules for me.

This is exactly the kind of thing I've been missing since the old Archie days - moves like these that really show off Eggman's boundless cruelty, and the stakes having him in play imposes on every other figure on this world's stage.

This also seems to be the first step toward something I've been hoping we get for some time: Eggman having semi-independent minions.

Back in Archie, I liked the Dark Egg Legion and I loved the Egg Army. The Chapter-Masters and the Egg Bosses were such a neat element, because, in addition to Eggman and his usual badniks, you also had other villains working under him who had their own personalities, their own agendas, their own approaches to solving problems. It helped sell the idea of the Eggman Empire as an actual, functioning empire because you got to see how Eggman's influence affected different places in different ways.

I'm very excited to see where this goes. even if I'm likely going to have to wait a while.

All-in-all, pretty decent issue. I enjoyed it, though significantly moreso once Clutch hit the scene. Hopefully the next few issues give us just as many neat implications to chew on.

I do plan on talking about Chaos Crisis, the Sonic/DC crossover, at some point, but I think I'm gonna wait until the whole thing is out to tackle that one.

Till then, though, the new issue's been out for about a half hour for me, so I'mma go read that!

Thanks for reading, and I'll catch ya next time!

[tempest-toss]

Weed Killin'

Quill made their way to the chem lab. While it might be more fun to use a weed whacker, there were undoubtedly many threats laying in a garden. After all this place is owned by some dude who can like, talk to plants and shit. That's already a red flag!

The chemical laboratory was very sterile in design. Silver, grey, and white colors with blindingly bright lights. The design was very much a standard college lab, with several tables spread about lined with microscopes, vials, and safety goggles. Quill made their way to the back that held all the chemical cabinets. Quill reached for the one in front of them and pulled. Nothing. Another pull. Nothing.

With a heave the door finally popped open and a body came tumbling out! Quill hurriedly shoved the corpse off of them. Some red goggles clattered across the tiled floor, making this cadaver an Insurgent. The body had blood leaking from the eyes, and part of the jaw was exposed as if it had acid poured on it. Upon further inspection, Quill could identify this body as belonging to Nathaniel Abernathy, the Chem expert for the Bravo Team. In his death, he seemed to have clutched onto a bottle: Weedkiller X with a note crumpled onto it.

"Pipe valve. Pull microscope oran-" the note read before the rest of it had been seemingly destroyed. Quill stepped over the body of their fallen comrade and went looking for what the note described. Finding the orange-looking microscope, (such an ugly color), they pulled it down, which emitted a loud clank. A panel of the wall slid open, revealing an insert for a liquid to be poured into. Quill poured all of the Weedkiller X into the insert and hurried back to the main hallway.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The large door appeared to have not changed, the large stalks and vines from the plants still wrapped tightly around the door. Perhaps something is blocking the pipes? Quill recalled a door they passed between here and the chem lab and made their way to it. Upon entering the room they were hit with a blast of humid air.

The room seemed to be a botanical garden of some kind: Planters filled with vegetables filled the rooms as scattered tools were haphazardly placed along the walls. Occasionally misters sprayed a light tinge of water across the room. The main focus of the room, however, lay in the back. Sitting in two large plots were even larger venus-flytraps, however, they had eyes and were drooling. A man wearing Insurgent gear tried to run towards Quill, but had his legs snagged by the plants, and was pulled in between them. By the time Quill clocked him as Field Photographer Traysen, the plants had used their vines to pull the poor guy in two, which the plants happily shared as they crunched down on his bones.

Quill wagered that these two plants were the ones impeding their progress. Out of their peripherals, they spotted a valve for the sprinklers in the room. They slowly shifted over, not wanting to alert the feasting plants to their presence. They just wanted one fucking set of rooms without a death. Softly stepping over the large, exposed roots they made it to the valve and quickly began turning it.

The misters began to spray out a harsh pinkish liquid over the room. The two plants began to wail and cry as their leaves turned brown and died. They flopped down onto their planters as they started to shrink in size.

"Pipe blockage alleviated. Resuming normal flow." An automated voice from a vine-obstructed wall monitor chirped. Quill quickly ran out of the room, slightly sliding across the wet floor. They made it to the large set of doors to see the broken pipe splurting out herbicide, quickly disintegrating the vines and stalks. With a giddy smile, Quill pushed open the doors and ran through.

Something was weird though. The walls were like rocks, and Quill could feel their ears popping. Had they magically dropped in elevation? Weren't those doors supposed to lead to a sky bridge? Why were they underground now? Those questions faded as they spotted something supremely useful: A train!

The unlocked doors invited Quill in, who quickly made their way to the engine room. It seemed to be a modern electric, given that it had a handle to control the direction. There were two options: Forward and backward. They seemed to have time now to think, and think they shall.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Death Counter: 5

Personnel Counter: 8/12 accounted for

Note(s) Acquired: Venus Mantrap

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[skibidirizzlergyatohio]

We Love Money

CHAPTER 2 FRIENDS

TW: MENTION OF DRUGS

POV: SHIMIZU NOZOMI

I watched as that red head and emo boy left the office. what the hell? “that was stupid. why the fuck did you take that deal? It’s probably going to fail?” Unmei stared blankly into the distance for about 30 seconds before responding, “Hm.. I’m not sure.” “You’re so weird.” “Don’t belittle me.” “Aww, you’re no fun.” “Stop.” “Geez, fine.”

A few more people came in to propose their ideas and try to make deals with Unmei. Honestly, she’s the one that needs to do all the thinking, which she does ALL the time. I mean, christ i can’t even have a simple conversation with her without her already having thought out all of the possible scenarios and having automated responses like a robot or something. I, on the other hand, have one of the easiest jobs known to mankind. I just stand in the back of a room all day, look cool and intimidating, and get paid. I was doing much cooler things before my accident. Of course, that’s confidential information. so i technically got ‘demoted’ but i literally get paid to do nothing now. actually, now i think about it, i’m probably the only person on this planet who knows about Takeda Unmei’s personal life. i’m with her 24/7, so ya gotta learn something from that at least. one thing i’ve never been able to figure out though is how that head of hers works, that i’ll never understand, nor anyone else. because if anyone knows Unmei, it’s me.

“Pathetic.” she sighed, rubbing her temples. it was around 8 o’clock now. she got up from her chair after hours of sitting there, and headed for the door. i followed close behind, as i usually do. “Hey, Unmei.” “Yes?” she sounded tired. “Do you think maybe tomorrow we can.. go out to lunch..?” she paused, and looked back at me, confused. “..Why?” “I dunno, i just thought it would be nice.” she cocked her head to the side, before turning around again. she sighed “I suppose.”

POV: Takeda Unmei

One thing i will never understand are humans. such odd creatures, they seem almost brainless considering how quickly they assume or come to false conclusions based on flimsy logic, reasoning, and evidence. for example, they conclude that their business proposals are always going to succeed, just because they have the will to make it happen. how foolish. that is all i can think about all day. honestly, it’s exhausting knowing that you will never quite find someone who is an intellectual equal to yourself. i know that i sound arrogant, but it’s true. maybe some think it is.. uncanny or inhumane that i view every person i’ve ever met as some sort of evolved dog or something similar to that nature. never as an equal. because they are simply not.

Shimizu is a very interesting specimen to me. Despite where she comes from, and what she’s done, and what she still does.. she manages to act like a normal person when we’re alone. suggesting friendly activities. because we are friends. my only friend, actually. i guess i never really thought of Shimizu as my friend, but maybe that’s because i just never knew what that meant. to have a friend.

That’s all i could really think about on the drive home. yes, Shimizu comes home with me, she’s not just my bodyguard at work. the whole reason why it’s necessary that i have a bodyguard, is so that i don’t get assassinated or hurt. my family is incredibly wealthy and powerful, therefore can be controversial. that still applies in my home. Shimizu sleeps on the couch that’s in the room that connects to mine. i should really get a bed put in there for her. but i don’t think she minds.

POV: Ohtori Michitaka

I was working late in the station. it getting close to midnight. lately, there’s been a lot of drug related crimes and overdoses in the area. specifically cocaine. everything seems to lead back to this weird, unstable looking circus. i think it’s barely made any money in years. maybe they have something to do with it, or know some useful information? i’ll have to ask the chief tomorrow for permission to investigate. i have a strange feeling about that place..

[chrysoula]

Why Do the Gods Exist?

(circa Little One and the Volcano)

This Genshin Impact Theory is an answer to the question: "Why do the gods exist anyhow?" This question has vaguely occurred to me before, when looking at the mystical cosmology: The Primordial One came, beat up the Sovereigns and stole their power, then terraformed the world and created or decanted humanity (like humanity was the point of the whole exercise.) In order to manage, guide and look after humanity, the Primordial One created the Seelie/angels. The Primordial One also created the Four Shades, who seem to outrank the Seelie; three of them oversaw Time, Life, and Death.

Where, then, do the gods come in? Eventually, they took over the 'guide and manage humanity' role from the Seelie, but that doesn't seem to have been the point of their existence. The Archon War was a battle royale, as far as I understand it. It killed off most of the existing gods, leaving only a very few to do a job they once had many for. (Why? Budget (resource) cuts, maybe, or maybe all the empire building.) I didn't question it much back when I believed that all or even some of the gods were ascended native elemental life. But I no longer think that's the case. Instead, I think the gods started out as terraforming and environmental management machines. They may not have even had sentience at first. Why would 'the thing that manages the leylines under Liyue' need to be conscious? And indeed, Azhdaha seems to have slept entirely at first. Why would the new heart of the Primordial Sea need a consciousness? And yet…

But that's Teyvat all over, when I think about it. It's a world where nonliving things eventually come to life and start buzzing around. So maybe these machines also achieved sentience, and started making decisions and doing things on their own and shaking off their chains and wandering around. And as long as they also kept basically doing the jobs they were created for, that was… all right. As long as they didn't, you know, cause trouble or rule kingdoms or start empires HEY WAIT A MINUTE WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE ANGELS UP TO WITH HUMANS?

Anyhow, after the angels were fired, there was a too-slow re-org, some hostile takeover attempts, rebellion in the ranks, etc, but finally, we get to the Archon War, which is only possible because they figured out a new way to accomplish what the gods had been doing previously. (It probably has something to do with Visions, or maybe better automation.) What's fun is that we do know that gods seem to have familiars (in various forms), and familiars can become gods in the process of becoming Archons (because apparently _anybody_ can become an Archon). Which, well... _we_ know a machine who briefly became a god, and I'm not sure he was ever supposed to be conscious either...

[clonerightsagenda]

Ok last 'the gang is working at Goddard now' post from discord before I call it a night, assuming tumblr will let me post this one

Kat only loosely related, but although the Hephaestus doesn't have a CAPCOM (too far away) I wonder if closer low Earth orbit Goddard installations have one and if they, like NASA CAPCOMs, are all former astronauts. Probably not, I would think, since if you've got 1 person filtering all communication you'd probably want it to be one of Cutter's more… informed people. now imagining Jordan doing a CAPCOM stint since she's comms Jordan: What, you say the hull isn't damaged but you were hit by something. Was it round? Perhaps…. melon-shaped? Klein who's up doing a satellite launch from a station or whatever: I'll kill you Gill Klein’s just never gonna live that down huh Kat unfortunately he literally didn't Gill Rip Kate : ) but also :’ ( Also remind me what CAPCOM means because I’m like “the video game company?” Gill Concept: the Hephaestus crew doing a shift or two on CAPCOM to unwind after a long day of dismantling Goddard Futuristics from the inside out Kat capsule communicator basically they're the single line of communication between astronauts and the ground, to streamline stuff and they're usually astronauts because they know what the crew is doing more personally "In the context of potential crewed missions to Mars, NASA Ames Research Center has conducted field trials of advanced computer-support for astronaut and remote science teams, to test the possibilities for automating CAPCOM." hm. Maybe Goddard has AI capcoms Gill The Sensus series’ predecessor line, perhaps Kat Some poor asshole on a low orbit station: We've got an ammonia leak Automated CAPCOM: Please choose from the following options. Press 1 for a personnel issue. Press 2 for a maintenance issue Astronaut: We're dying Kate Pfff Kat someone: we've got some crew hostility in one of the low orbit stations Minkowski: Put Eiffel on CAPCOM for a few days. Either they'll calm down or they'll unite in being annoyed by him instead. Win win Kate Their secret weapon Gill Minkowski likes doing CAPCOM to unwind but Lovelace finds it stressful bc she’s way worse about being a backseat driver Kat Minkowski: Finally normal simple problems to solve. It is usually a pretty simple, boring job. Until something goes wrong Gill meanwhile, Lovelace: What do you MEAN you've never had to duct-tape a water reclamation system back together?? Kat Haha yeah. Former astronaut capcoms have creative solutions LEO crew who can get new supplies shipped up basically whenever: We could just… trash this broken part and order a replacement Lovelace: Why when you can mcgyver this solution with only moderate risk to life and limb Gill the Hephaestus Mission and the crew themselves gain such a reputation that when the rumors start circulating that Minkowski got her current job by killing Marcus Cutter ("and did you ever meet Marcus Cutter?") half the company is lowkey terrified of her Kate “Ohhh look at YOU with your cushy life, you can just order a NEW part. Back in MY day my boss came up there personally with a gun and shot at us” Kat Haha It’s a very different life being right next to earth easy mode Gill LEO crewmember whispering to another one while their commander is on the phone: God, I hope we don't have to go through a teambuilding exercise run by Isabel Lovelace… Kat Although I suppose it makes it even easier for cutter to send goons up to harass you Kate True… “Hey, can we have a new part?” “No, but you can have Victor Riemann! Have fun!”

Gill Alternatively: "Uh… we think we need a new part… ma'am." Minkowski: …okay? Let me get the word out to the supply team. "You're… not gonna send Warren Kepler and his minions with them like Mr. Cutter used to, are you?" Minkowski: What? No. Most of them didn't even come back from Wolf 359. "/sighs and other noises of audible relief, oh thank god!" Kat now imagining SI5 showing up for no goddamn reason on a resupply shuttle and the mission commander being like "i didn't order you" and closing the hatch crewmember: don't those burn up on re-entry commander: not my problem Gill Telling command you need help? Admitting human weakness? That's a Kepler-ing. Kat Yeah well does it admit human weakness to have to be let onto the station before you burn up with all the dirty laundry and other garbage when the capsule gets sent back thru the atmosphere Eiffel hearing about life on LEO stations: I can't believe this. They got new underwear sent up to them though it's a dangerous game… .Terry Virts had two consecutive underwear shipments explode thanks space x Cutter: The Andromeda station's psych evals are too far in the green. Blow up their next three laundry shipments.

[animehouse-moe]

How I'm Tracking My Manga Reading Backlog

I'm bad at keeping up with reading sometimes. I'll read newer releases while still forgetting about some, want to re-read something even though I haven't started on another series, and leave droves of titles sitting on my shelves staring at me.

I got tired of that, and also tired of all these different tracking websites and apps that don't do what I want. So, with Notion and a few other tools, I've set out to make my own, and I like it! So I thought, hey, why not share how I'm doing it and see how other people keep track of their lists, so that's why I'm here. Enough rambling though, let me lead you through why I decided to make my own.

So, the number 1 challenge: Automation. In truth, it's far from perfect and is the price I pay for being lazy. But, I can automate a significant chunk of the adding process. I've yet to find a proper way to go from barcode scanning on my phone to my reading list, but I can go pretty easily from an amazon listing to the reading list. With it I grab: title, author, publisher, page count, and cover image.

So what do I use?

Well, it's a funky and interesting thing called 'Bardeen' that allows you to scrape webpages (among other things), collect and properly structure the desired information, and then feed it right into your Notion database. It's a little odd to try and figure out at first, but it's surprisingly intuitive in how it works! Once you have your template setup, you just head to the webpage (I've found Amazon the best option) and hit the button for the scraper you've built, and it puts it into Notion.

It saves an inordinate amount of time in populating fields by hand, and with the help of templates from Notion, means that the only fields left "empty" are the dated fields for tracking reading.

Thanks to Bardeen, the hardest (and really only) challenge is basically solved. Not "as" simple as a barcode, but still impressively close. Now, since the challenge is out of the way, how about some fun stuff?

Data visualization is incredibly fun for all sorts of people. Getting to see a breakdown of all the little pieces that make up your reading habits is very interesting. Sadly, Notion doesn't have the ability to build charts from your own databases, so you need a tool.

The one I ended up settling on was 'Grid.is', as it has a "direct" integration/embed with Notion.

Sure, it has its own "limitations", but they pose absolutely zero concern as to how I want to set up my own data visualization. You can have (as far as I know) an unlimited number of graphs/charts on a single page, and you can choose to embed that page as a single entity, or go along and embed them as independent links. Either way, the graphs are really great and there's a lot of customization and options in regards to them. Also, incredibly thankful for the fact that there's an AI assistant to create the charts for you. The way that Notion data's read in is horrendous, so the AI makes it infinitely easier than what it appears as at first.

And yes, all those little popups and hover behaviors are preserved in the embeds.

Well, I suppose rather than talking about the tertiary tools, I should talk about what I'm doing with Notion itself, no?

Alright, so, like all Notion pages it starts with a database. It's the central core to keeping track of data and you can't do without it. Of course, data is no good if you can't have it properly organized, so how do I organize it?

With tags, of course! I don't have a massive amount of tags in place for the database, but I am considering adding more in terms of genre and whatnot. Regardless, what I have for the entries currently is: Title, Reading Status (TBR, Reading, Read, etc.), Author, Format (manga or LN), Date Started, Date Completed, Pages, and Publisher.

In addition to those "displayed" tags, I have two tertiary fields. The first is an image link so that entries can display an image in the appropriate view. The second, and a bit more of a pain, is a formula field used to create a proper "title" field so that Notion can sort effectively (they use lexicographic, so numbers end up sorted as letters instead). This is the poorly optimized Notion formula I used, as I don't have much experience with how they approach stuff like this. It just adds a leading zero to numbers less than 10 so that it can be properly sorted.

Of course this list view isn't my default view though, the calendar from the top of this post is. Most of the time though, I don't have it set to the monthly view, but rather weekly. Following up that view though, I've got my "up next" tab. This tab's meant to track all the titles/entries that I'm about to read. Things I'm planning to read today, tomorrow, or the day after. Sorta a three day sliding window to help me keep on top of the larger backlog and avoid being paralyzed by choice. It's also the only view that uses images currently.

Following that, I've got my "To Be Read" gallery. I wanted to use a kanban board but notion will only display each category as a single column, so I chose this view instead, which makes it much easier to get a better grasp of what's in the list. I've been considering adding images to this view, but I need to toy around with it some more. Either way, the point is to be able to take a wider look at what I've got left in my TBR and where I might go next.

So overall, I've ordered these views (though the list view I touch on "first" is actually the last of the views) in order from "most recent" to "least recent", if that makes any sense. Starting with where I've finished, moving to where I go next, what I have left, and then a grouping of everything for just in case.

It's certainly far from a perfect execution on a reading list/catalogue, but I think personally speaking that it checks off basically all of the boxes I required it to, and it gives me all the freedom that I could ever want - even if it means I have to put in a bit of elbow grease to make things work.

[ryqoshay]

Putting on Hairs: Post Production - Ticket, Please

Primary Pairing: N/A Staring: A thief and some puppets Also Starring: Tsubasa, Anju, Erena Words: 654 Rating: T? AU: Theater, Monsters, Puppets, Tickets Time Frame: Sometime after the main story (?) Prompt: Puppet Content Warning: Puppets

---------

Author's Note: Bonus 2nd entry for the 19th

Summary: Someone enters without a ticket

---------

Ktchack!

The man flinched as bright lights suddenly snapped on. The Hell? His partner was supposed to have cut the power. And they hadn’t seen a generator when they cased the place earlier.

“Welcome! Welcome! One and all!” A cheery voice cried. “Step right up and get your tickets!”

Oh, some silly animatronic in a colorful ticket booth. He’d read about the theater putting on a children’s event, which apparently was ongoing.

“Uhm, excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but you need a ticket to enter.”

The man paused and turned. He shivered as his gaze found a pair of googly eyes staring directly into his sou… No. This was absurd. It was just a puppet. There was no place for a person to hide and work the stupid thing, so it was definitely automated. And there was probably some sensor somewhere that caught him moving past without a ticket.

“I ain’t got one.” He found himself grumbling.

“Oh dear…” The puppet’s voice gained a concerned tone. “They’re not going to like that…”

The man scoffed and pushed past a curtain. He just needed to meet up with his partner, find the ancient artifact or whatever they’d be hired to steal, and get the hell out of this creepy place.

What was that?

Movement just outside the beam of his flashlight. And… did he just hear laughter?

“I hear you entered without a ticket” A voice giggled next to his ear.

He spun. And caught a glimpse of button eyes and a stitched smile before it slipped out of the light.

“Won’t you please buy a ticket?” A different, deeper voice pleaded by his other ear.

This time a tuft of blue fur evaded his light.

From behind, he heard what he could only describe as tiny, padded feet running. He turned again and shown his light on a fast-approaching rag doll. It had the same face he thought he had seen a second ago, and… it was running… on the wall?

“I have a ticket for you!” The giggly voice declared as the doll held out a roll with a long streamer of tickets flailing behind.

“But there is a penalty for purchasing late.” The deeper voice intoned.

A mountain of shaggy blue fur shambled into view. Tickets sloughed out of the hairs as a giant paw reached for the man.

The man nearly dropped his flashlight as he spun and ran down the hall. He rounded a corner and came to a halt. The rag doll was somehow ahead of him, now approaching along the ceiling. And a twin beside it. He dodged into a nearby door, trying to ignore a growing chorus of cries about tickets. He slammed the door, locked it, turned, and…

There was his partner, wrapped head to toe in… tickets? The other man’s eyes widened, seeming to see something to his side.

The man turned.

Oh… hell…

“Ticket, please.” An infernal felt beast demanded as flaming tickets belched out of its mouth.

The man screamed.

---------

“About the break-in last night.” Tsubasa spoke to her friends in the car. “The police said the thieves kept babbling about living puppets and tickets.”

Anju smiled knowingly.

“Why can’t we just have a normal security system?” Erena groused.

“We work in a theater, my dear.” Anju replied. “Everyone who enters deserves a good show. Besides, we can’t let Phoby-chan and the opera phantoms have all the fun.”

“You make them sound like a band.”

Tsubasa chuckled at the reminder that a fallen angel’s familiar and a handful of century-old ghosts watched over the theater up the street.

“Anyway, thank you Anju.” She said. “But my contact at the precinct also mentioned that the thieves were hired for the job. Whoever employed them may make another attempt.”

Anju’s smile grew. “I shall anxiously await their arrival.”

“Just… don’t overdo it. Remember, no physical injuries, just SAN damage.”

“Of course.”

---------

Author's Note Continued: I had fun with this one. And I kinda wanna expand it a bit when I include it in the main story, even if it ends up stretching out the joke longer than some might find necessary.

Also, yes, the content warning is somewhat of a joke, but I do actually know people who are afraid of puppets, so...

[asoulofatlantis]

I can not recommend it enough to play something cozy and relaxing for a bit, after finishing a huge JRPG and before jumping into the next one, even if one or both of these games are ones you have been played before. Something I had to learn the hard way is that games like Trails can really drain you to the point of feeling a Gamer-Burnount. So just like with work, other hobbys and your usual regular obligation in real life, it is important to take your time to relax a bit... or take it a bit slower. My friend is an artist, for example, and she loves bringing her own characters to life this way (she is writing her own book series right now...) but sometimes after a huge picture with many, many characters she has to work on for weeks if not months she needs a break. And its not like she stops drawing. But instead, she draws sketches of her favorites characters or scenes. Nothing big, nothing fancy, nothing she wants to really show the world. That is her "slowing down and relaxing" - part of that hobby. (Many people think hobbys don't need that, because they are supposed to be fun, but even fun things can exhaust you at some point.) And I recommend doing that as a gamer too.

Now I like to play cozy farming games, or Sims 4 or anything slow that doesn't require too much thinking and reading and strategizing or some sort of pressure to get things done fast... and I would also prefer games without serious fighting - those random monsters in the mines of most farming games are usually fine tho, as you mostly just hack and slash through them. Other people maybe prefer other kind of games. City building for example. Or... a simulator of some kind. Or what I also like is building Zoos and the likes of that. You do not have to stop gaming overall (I tried, it wasn't my thing...) you just need to find a slow and relaxing game that you like.

I just played Fields of Mistria for the past week. Its still in early access but if you are into farming games I can really recommend it. Maybe wait until its done tho, because if you play it on two week off with plenty of time to play, you will be done with everything that can be done in around if not less then two weeks. (I rushe thought the mines with cheating ((because I HATE mines)) and this is why I am mostly done in a week.) But if you don't mind that and than look forward to continue playing when the next big update comes out, then it certainly is one of those games that deserve to be among the ones that will relax you for a while, if needed.

Anyway... I need to make some notes for when I play it again after the next update, so I do that here really quickly.

I have to replace all Barns and Coops with large Barns and Coops

I have to make and add more of those automation-thingies and their energy-surces

Ones I am done with plenty of Watering-Thingys I can make the field bigger for more profit.

Do NOT forget that you need space for Capibaras and Iliamas! (And that you kinda need a horse... no idea if I keep the small Coop for that as I really do not need more than one.)

I still miss one more house upgrade because I couldn't be bothered to collect all that wood and silver AGAIN!

My house is so fucking empty! Buy/build furniture for gods sake!

I still haven't found a freaking Tuna yet.

[frostehburr]

Echoes of Why Nintendo Games Are Difficult to 100% Complete

So I had gotten Echoes of Wisdom and had played it for the past week and I think I managed to 100% it.

I say I think because I went over a check list to get all echoes, side quests, smoothies, automations, stamps, and outfits.

Nintendo game completion is different than the achievement/trophy completion. In order to determine if you 100% a Nintendo game or not; the game either has a type of percentage in a pause menu much like Pikmin, gives you a cosmetic reward much like Mario Odyssey, or nothing and you just keep going until you assume you're done.

For Echoes of Wisdom, there were no rewards or percentages to track my progress so I just kept going until I was sure I was done.

Most of my aim was to fill the empty spaces in the pause menu. So jars from side quests and stamp tickets. Everything else was unlocked through main story progression. The echoes I had to loop around to make sure I got all of them and deal with some very durable enemies. Lynels are a bane no matter which Legend of Zelda game they're in.

Same with side quests. I scoured around each town multiple times to make sure I didn't miss anything. Double checked Dampé's journal to be sure there weren't any more automations. And walked back and fourth on interesting looking parts of the map just in case something was there. Mostly a lot of heart pieces and stamp stones.

I think the prime reason I managed to finish the game so quickly was due to three decades of experience with video games. Of course, there's always those who say Nintendo games are supposed to be easy enough a child could complete it but I know several adults who have extreme difficulty figuring out how to plug a charging cable into a portable charger. Stupidity has no age and neither simple puzzles.

There's also the Tears of the Kingdom esq method to the puzzles in Echoes of Wisdom. That being the "use what you have in whatever way you want" method everyone loves. Whether it's summoning a murder of crows to peck a monster hoard to death or creating a bed staircase, the way you solve each puzzle can change depending on how you process it. Which may go much faster for some people than others.

Like I said, I have three decades of video game experience so my type of thinking is bizarre. I'm not a speed runner but I do know how to abuse a glitch or bug when I see one. Or they're not glitches and are just features the developers didn't notice.

I'm not entirely certain I really did 100% complete Echoes of Wisdom but I can't find any more to do in the game. It is very fun though, so I am more than likely to go back in an complete it again because I enjoyed my time in the game.

[esmeralda-anistasia]

#there's literally so many ways AI and machine learning could be genuinely useful like this#i wish mega corpos weren't giving it such a bad name with generative AI because AI that can recognize patterns could be game changing#now whenever people hear 'AI in healthcare' they think they're gonna like. replace doctors with chatGPT#but AI that can learn from giant databases of medical scans to identify abnormalities#or AI like this that can monitor vital signs continuously and alert doctors of any concerning changes#or AI that could even be used in medical studies to recognize links between certain symptoms and conditions#are all ways machine learning technology can be used to help humans do their job. because AI is a tool and can never be a replacement.#it also pisses me off because companies don't understand how it could actually save them money if they use it as a tool#but they still have to pay humans to do that and they can't just use AI and nothing else#but if they let humans use it in a way that is useful it could actually save time and money and prevent serious mistakes#but you can't use the same tool for every job. pattern recognition can only take you so far. that's just one aspect of a job that has many.#you can't use purely pattern recognition AI to replace a doctor or make a finished animation or compose a song or anything like that#but a human can use it to supplement their own pattern recognition. for example with doctors#who sometimes miss things because they make a mistake or are tired and their job is tedious#so if you use AI to notice those mistakes then yes it can be genuinely useful and even a major innovation#i personally think AI doesn't have much use in art because generally you don't make art with the goal of repeating a pattern#because a heavily derivative artwork or story or song tends to be pretty boring and AI can only be derivative. so what's the point.#but i could see it being useful for like. miscellaneous background animation or other minor tedious things in specific circumstances#but once again even if you're asking it to do something basic you need to have a human there to interpret the results and tweak it#I don't think AI can make GOOD art. but as long as a corporation isn't trying to use it to replace humans so they can lay them off#then I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with it morally even if I don't see the point of it.#but my main point is that people are trying to use AI for the completely wrong industries.#why are we using it in entertainment when we can use it for doctors or weather tracking or smart vehicles or etc.#entertainment is supposed to be what humans do for fun. the whole point is that we automate the boring stuff so we can do the fun stuff

"When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.

At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.

In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffering brain damage, with long-term effects including developmental delays and cerebral palsy.

Doctors reclassified Kaphamtengo, who had been anticipating a normal delivery, as a high-risk patient. Using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software, further testing found that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. A stress test showed that the baby would not survive labour.

The hospital’s head of maternal care, Chikondi Chiweza, knew she had less than 30 minutes to deliver Kaphamtengo’s baby by caesarean section. Having delivered thousands of babies at some of the busiest public hospitals in the city, she was familiar with how quickly a baby’s odds of survival can change during labour.

Chiweza, who delivered Kaphamtengo’s baby in good health, says the foetal monitoring programme has been a gamechanger for deliveries at the hospital.

“[In Kaphamtengo’s case], we would have only discovered what we did either later on, or with the baby as a stillbirth,” she says.

The software, donated by the childbirth safety technology company PeriGen through a partnership with Malawi’s health ministry and Texas children’s hospital, tracks the baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities. Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%. It is the only hospital in the country using the technology.

“The time around delivery is the most dangerous for mother and baby,” says Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician with Texas children’s hospital, who is leading the programme. “You can prevent most deaths by making sure the baby is safe during the delivery process.”

The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers. Regular foetal observation often relies on doctors performing periodic checks, meaning that critical information can be missed during intervals, while AI-supported programs do continuous, real-time monitoring. Traditional checks also require physicians to interpret raw data from various devices, which can be time consuming and subject to error.

Area 25’s maternity ward handles about 8,000 deliveries a year with a team of around 80 midwives and doctors. While only about 10% are trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, most can use the AI software to detect anomalies, so doctors are aware of any riskier or more complex births. Hospital staff also say that using AI has standardised important aspects of maternity care at the clinic, such as interpretations on foetal wellbeing and decisions on when to intervene.

Kaphamtengo, who is excited to be a new mother, believes the doctor’s interventions may have saved her baby’s life. “They were able to discover that my baby was distressed early enough to act,” she says, holding her son, Justice.

Doctors at the hospital hope to see the technology introduced in other hospitals in Malawi, and across Africa.

“AI technology is being used in many fields, and saving babies’ lives should not be an exception,” says Chiweza. “It can really bridge the gap in the quality of care that underserved populations can access.”"

-via The Guardian, December 26, 2024

[omegasquire]

Rose Gold: Ch 21

Cloud’s gaze was on the outer window of the elevator, once more taking in the sight of Midgar as he and Aerith were making their way back to Zack’s place. A quiet had settled between them, strangely comfortable unlike before.

He would’ve been content to pass the rest of the time in silence, but like a demon that shows up when you start thinking about them, Cloud’s quiet space was interrupted with the sound of an automated voice announcing their arrival. At first Cloud thought they had already made it to their floor, but when he looked over at the doors, he saw two unpleasant faces.

Tseng and Reno.

Cloud met Tseng already, but this would be his first time with Reno. Unlike his boss, Reno didn’t seem to be all that different. He still walked with a cocky swagger and wore his expression openly, clearly looking to stir the waters.

Cloud’s brows knitted and held his tongue. It was almost instinctive for him to bite the bait Reno was laying out with his provocative words, but he tried to hold his tongue. 

Reno studied him a moment before snickering. “Well at least you don’t lash out like the other one. But you’re supposed to be older right?”

“Yeah.”

He wanted to tell Reno to go find another elevator. Much to his chagrin, both Turks stepped in and the doors closed behind them.

Reno sized him up. “Definitely better than talking to a kid. But y’know, ya gotta do something about those younger brothers of yours. It’s common courtesy to call before you drop by someone’s house.” 

It seemed that the Reno here also had a bad habit of saying provocative lines. He probably liked using taunts and sarcastic remarks to get under his opponent’s skin too. Cloud always had a problem with Reno, though it wasn’t out of blind hatred. Their personalities just didn’t mesh well. 

“They’re not my brothers.” 

“Sure, sure.” Reno flapped a hand. “I wouldn't want them over for dinner either. They seem like they wouldn't be any fun.” 

Reno slid into the space next to him. Aerith frowned when she saw this but couldn't interject as Reno looped an arm around Cloud's shoulders. 

Tseng pressed the button for a different floor level, sending them up once more. 

Cloud shrugged off Reno's arm, frowning. “If I could send them away, I would.”

Reno put his arm back around his shoulders again. “I have an idea.”

Tseng glanced their way. “Reno.” 

Reno ignored the other man's warning tone and kept going. “Why don't you, I dunno, disappear? They're here for you, right? If you're gone, then they'll leave too.”

Cloud scowled and pushed the redhead’s arm off again. “What do you mean disappear?”

He knew what Reno meant. He knew the ugly hidden message in the Turk’s words. What he hated about it was that he had thought about it himself before, even if it was only for a split second. 

The redhead gave him a pointed look, only smiling in that usual careless manner he was known for. 

Aerith’s eyes widened as she caught on. “Reno! You don’t really–!” 

Reno shrugged, still looking at Cloud. “Just a suggestion. What do you think?”

Cloud knew Reno was doing this on purpose to get him agitated, and it was difficult for him to ignore the trap. It was laid out in clear view, all he had to do was step in it. 

He gritted his teeth. “And if it doesn’t work? Are you going to take responsibility for the aftermath?”

Reno’s gaze lazily rolled up to stare at the ceiling as he pretended to think. “But at least then we wouldn’t have to deal with Jenova turning your brain into a breakfast smoothie. That’s one– no, that’s two targets down right? Three to go. The family tree will be neatly trimmed.” 

Cloud’s grip tightened on the bag he was holding. 

Before he could respond, Reno was suddenly yanked away from him. Tseng had a fistful of Reno’s uniform in his hand as he dragged the redhead back to his side. 

Tseng glanced at Cloud before glaring at Reno. “Enough.” 

Reno held his hands up in surrender. 

Aerith stepped forward, placing herself between Reno and Cloud. “That’s not funny! Reno, take that back.”

Reno didn’t look apologetic as he looked past Aerith to stare at Cloud again. “Sorry, yo. Don’t take it too seriously.” 

It was clear Reno was still playing his game. It irritated Cloud, but he chose to ignore it. Instead, he touched Aerith’s arm and gave a small shake of his head. He wasn’t going to say he was fine with what just happened, but she didn’t need to defend him. 

It still took time for him to get over the fact that he didn’t have the same relationship he had with his comrades and those he especially cherished, but at least Reno’s exaggerated animosity was the same. 

Just looking at the guy’s eyes, he didn’t see hate. He saw a Turk being annoyingly calculative and testing how far he could poke a sleeping bear. It was the one thing that kept Cloud from snapping back at those abrasive comments.

Though, he still wanted to give the asshole a black eye. 

Cloud turned his attention to Tseng this time and saw a similar calculative look in the man’s gaze. He was silently watching Cloud, observing his reactions and likely making his own judgment about how to handle him. 

For better or worse, at least the Turks remained the same and Cloud didn’t have to be careful about their emotions like the others.

“We were heading to Zack’s. I’m going back to my ‘cage.’” 

“You’ll have to wait on that.” Tseng released Reno and pointed at the display that was showing the floors they were climbing. Rather than stopping on the floor where Zack’s place was, it was going to keep climbing. “We have something important to discuss.” 

“Strife’s little brothers are on the move,” Reno added as he nonchalantly fixed his suit. 

“Where are they now?” 

“As far as we know, on a boat headed towards Costa Del Sol. The rest of the details will be shared at the meeting.” 

Cloud’s jaw clenched. He knew it was going to happen eventually, but he didn’t expect to already come. Weren’t they moving too fast? Shouldn’t it take longer to climb down the mountains? 

Cloud silently cursed. He didn’t like this at all.

~*~

The noise of people chattering could be heard as they moved about the ship. A young man leaned against the railing from the topmost level. He looked like he was paying attention to what was going on below, but he was clearly conscious of what was standing behind him. 

Or rather, who. 

“We were wondering when you would join us… Father-in-law.”

The young man looked over his shoulder, a sarcastic smile curling his lips as his gaze landed on Vincent. Vincent didn’t respond. 

Any stranger that heard the young man’s words would think that the two of them were actually son and father. The young man had dark hair and a lean figure; if not for his eyes being green, he would’ve looked like a younger version of Vincent. 

However, their relationship was far from familial. The young man was actually one of Strife’s lookalikes using magic to conceal his true appearance. It was an illusion that Strife had shown before when Sephiroth and Avalanche had been chasing after his shadow. Whether it was his own innate talent or an ability that he borrowed from Jenova, it wasn’t clear, but it was certain that Strife’s brother had the same skill.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Vincent had been tailing the three brothers this whole time, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell. He knew that the other two were somewhere on this ship, likely blending in with the rest of the ship’s passengers while leaving him space to speak with this one. 

“Why bother disguising yourself?”

The young man straightened up and half turned toward him. “Shouldn’t you be glad? We quietly boarded this ship and haven’t harmed anyone on it.” 

“You could easily man this ship yourself.”

“Yes, we could exterminate the insects on this ship and take care of things ourselves.” Green eyes slanted to look down below once more. “And you would try to fight us and stop it. Many would get hurt or die. But that’s not what you want. That’s why we’re standing here.” 

Vincent said nothing in return because it was true. The only reason they were able to have this conversation without shedding blood was because of the civilians on this ship. They were ultimately hostages, and if he got into a fight with Strife’s brothers, then they would all be in danger. He’d already made the mistake of allowing people to die just while following them down the mountain.

Boarding the ship bound for Costa Del Sol was the closest he could come into contact with them, and still he couldn’t carelessly pull out his gun. 

“Is your objective to take Cloud?” Even if he couldn’t fight, he could still try to get answers. 

Strife’s brother didn’t answer right away. When he opened his mouth, it was to let out a dry laugh. “You make it sound like we’re kidnapping him. Brother belongs with us. Mother misses him, and has asked us to bring him home.” 

Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “He’s not from this world.” 

“Does it matter? He’s one of us.” The young man pointed at his head, then his chest. “We are one. He can’t run or hide from family.”

The answer was unsettling. Vincent didn’t understand what the pointing meant, but it didn’t bode well regardless. “That’s your only purpose then, to bring him to Jenova?” 

A sneer followed his words. “You don’t need to know what we’re doing. Just sit still, Father-in-law. We’ll be in each other’s company for a while.” 

Vincent’s hand curled into a fist. With the situation the way that it was, “sitting still” was the only thing he could do. He didn’t want to agitate things and give Strife’s brothers a reason to start slaughtering the people on the ship. Until they landed, he just had to remain vigilant. 

~*~

“We are looking at a 4-5 days window before they reach Costa Del Sol.” 

Tseng’s fingers moved across a tablet in his hand, manipulating an image on the screen. That same image was reflected on a larger screen that was projected in front of the group. Looking at it, there were dots that charted the expected nautical route of the ship that was headed for Costa Del Sol. 

“Depending on the weather, this timeframe may be shortened or extended.” Tseng tapped his tablet and pulled up a different screen. “Knife departed to join up with Rod at Costa Del Sol. If the timing is right, they’ll be there just before Strife’s party makes it. Tentatively, the plan is to intercept before they board another boat or find some other transportation to head for Junon.” 

Several pairs of eyes were staring at the screen. Displayed on it was a report from Vincent, the very same report he had shared with Reno and Knife was open for the others to read. True to Vincent’s style, the details were succinct with no room for ambiguity to the situation. 

He was currently on board a cargo ship headed for Costa Del Sol. While not many passengers were on the ship, enough were present that Vincent couldn’t make a move on them. He would observe and only take action if they initiated anything. Until then, he wouldn’t be able to provide much communication while out at sea. 

It was Shinra’s and Avalanche’s turn to make adjustments to their original plans. 

“Should they board another ship for Junon, they will make it to the Eastern Continent within approximately three more days.” Tseng pulled up another nautical map.

Luckily, there was no port near Midgar. The closest was Junon, and from there it took time to travel across the mountain range dividing the two locations. This was a strategic choice by the previous President of Shinra and his cabinet. While more convenient from their perspective to have a naval port nearby, that also allowed their enemies easier access to their shores. Junon was the only place with the means to send out large ships and private planes. Civilians who had any business traveling between the two cities would have to take a different, less convenient route.

“If they steal one of the planes at Costa Del Sol, that travel time will be reduced,” Zack spoke up. 

Tseng nodded. “Yes.” 

“Then we can no longer wait.” Sephiroth’s gaze shifted to Rufus. 

The blond-haired man was sitting in a relaxed manner, yet he was attentive to the contents of this meeting. It was the sort of look that only someone in Rufus’ position could wear: a person who always believed himself to be in the seat of power regardless of what happened around him. He exhibited a calm and cool demeanor that countered Sephiroth’s own somewhat cold personality. 

Tseng had sat in on many of their meetings before, acting as Rufus’ shadow and support. He was kept apprised of all important information so as to effectively move the Turks according to the President’s will. It was a position he originally thought he’d never have when he first joined Turks and fell under the supervision of its previous leader, but with his mentor’s passing as well as Rufus’ father’s, Tseng dedicated himself to Rufus and all that surrounded him. 

He would give his life for Rufus. He almost did, when Strife’s threat was at its peak and Rufus nearly died under the structural collapse of the building. One could say it was a miracle that they had escaped with the injuries they now have. Tseng didn’t care whether it was a miracle or not; he was simply glad that he could prevent Rufus’ death. 

He couldn’t quite say that Rufus was “safe and sound,” but a crippled leg was better than nothing at all. Rufus never blamed him for it, and instead treated the injury like a trophy. A sign of victory that defied what should’ve been inevitable. Strife was dead, but he was not. And likewise, Midgar still thrived despite the damage it sustained. 

Tseng looked at that stubborn and proud man right now. 

“Any word from Corel?” Rufus asked, shifting his posture to rest his elbow on the chair’s armrest. 

“Our contact within Barret’s staff went down to find him, but we haven’t heard or seen anything yet.” 

It was always hard to contact Barret once the man went down into the mines. As time progressed, the deeper his crew went, and over the years that he had been working to restore the network, he became busier than ever. It was like he was trying to make up for all the time that had been lost during Shinra’s monopoly over Corel and the manufacturing of materia. 

“Get someone else to fetch him.” Rufus loosely curled his fingers and supported his chin atop them. “He is the closest from your group that can provide support.” 

Support. It was a derisive way for Rufus to define the importance of Avalanche’s role in the incoming battle. 

Glancing at Sephiroth, Tseng saw that the words had easily rolled off the man’s shoulders. It was a familiar scene for the two to have word battles with each other, particularly when Rufus was openly jabbing at those who didn’t directly fall under his control. 

The same couldn’t be said about the others in the room when it came to Rufus’ words. Cid and Yuffie took offense and spat their opinions none too subtly. Aerith’s lips were pursed in clear displeasure, though she held her tongue. Zack didn’t look pleased either, sighing harshly. 

The only other person who remained relatively unaffected was Cloud. It was hard to say if this was because Cloud wasn’t originally part of this world, or if he was avoiding reacting to the comment. Based on their previous encounter, Cloud had negative feelings for Rufus. It was evident they had a rocky relationship in his world as well. 

“And how about our honored guest?” Rufus’ attention shifted to the other blond. The corners of his lips curled slightly in a deceptively genial smile. 

Cloud’s face was obscured by the helmet he had yet to remove, but his next words were enough to express the frown that was surely on his lips. “I’ve shared everything I know with Sephiroth.” 

“Oh?” Rufus feigned ignorance. “I haven’t heard anything. In fact, you have yet to accept my invitation.” 

“Not interested.” 

“Tomorrow. I believe my schedule is free after noon.” Rufus looked to Tseng, ignoring Cloud’s immediate refusal. “This won’t be a problem, will it?”

Tseng bowed his head slightly. In addition to being Rufus’ right hand, he took on certain secretarial duties. Unknowingly, he had become more and more involved in Rufus’ personal and professional life over the years working with him. 

“Not at all.” 

Rufus smiled and returned his focus on Cloud. “Bring along the hand that leads if you wish. Company is welcome.” 

Tseng watched as Cloud’s fist tightened on the bag he was holding. He had noticed it in the elevator and silently questioned what it was about. Surely, it was a product of Aerith’s influence; he knew the young woman enough to tell she was using her own methods to get Cloud to warm up to her. 

“We will use this opportunity to gauge the true strength of Strife’s brothers,” Rufus continued and looked at the screen again. “We will give them a warm welcome.”

“We’ll prepare for immediate departure if it shows that they can’t be stopped at Costa Del Sol,” Sephiroth responded. 

“Good. I don’t like rats crawling around my front yard.” This time, the smile on Rufus’ lips was cruel. If there was one thing he hated, it was someone or something threatening what he deemed was his. This included Midgar and its surrounding areas, all of Shinra assets, and even his own people.

Tseng felt the hint of warmth in his chest as he heard these vicious words. He was quick to suppress it and looked at Reno who lounged on one of the chairs as if he didn’t care about what was going on. The redhead met his gaze and gave a shrug in return, accepting the order that was silently being conveyed to him. Even if Reno could be a pain to deal with at times, he was still smart enough to understand his role and do what needed to be done.

“We’re done,” Rufus finalized and gestured for Tseng to wrap things up. 

Tseng nodded and cut the projection from his tablet. The others started to split up and leave; the objective of their sudden meeting had been achieved and now they were back to a waiting game. 

Holding off until it was just the two of them, Tseng passed his tablet to Rufus as the other man held out his hand and addressed him. 

“President.”

Rufus didn’t say anything, but he was listening. 

“Is it necessary to meet with him?”

“Should tools merely sit on the shelf to be looked at?” Rufus responded easily as he flicked his finger across the screen. “They must be handled. Over and over. Until they have reached the extent of their use.” 

Sharp, ice-blue eyes looked up at Tseng. “I treat my favorites with care.” 

Tseng said nothing in return. That warmth returned, and this time he let it linger.