#and then I see those in a video game

[blood-orange-juice]

Ok, there was a post I never got to write so now I don't get to post a HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT update. But I want to write it anyway.

TMI, weird personal symbolism, etc.

There's a type I rather dramatically call "people of dark water" and it's usually women. Very rarely represented in media. Almost-tricksters with some kind of important personal truth if I try to boil it down to a sentence.

They usually have been wounded by something most people never notice (canary in the mine situation) or have the privilege never to encounter, and then made it into a strength somehow.

(watch me fall for someone like that every time)

I came up with the term when I learned that in Old Irish and in Proto-Indo-European there was a distinction between clear flowing water (danu) and dark deep water (dubros in PIE, dobur in Old Irish specifically). You can still see it in places' names across Europe (Danube, Dover, etc).

In part, Childe excites me so much because he's that. He's like all the women I've ever loved except that he's a guy.

There's also a Jim White's song Still Waters which is exactly about a person of that type if you look at the lyrics. The tone of the music doesn't match at all though. His still waters are Louisiana swamps, not sea or lake depths.

And I always wondered what would a character or an irl person of that type look like.

And when Aventurine came out I sort of nodded to myself and decided that yeah, that's it. He's that type. Nice to finally have an answer.

"Still Waters" became my Aventurine song.

So imagine my surprise when I used Aventurine's overworld skill and saw a "Still waters run deep" status appear.

*pauses for a moment of incoherent shouting*

A coincidence and something about archetypes, I know. It's a popular proverb, it fits him well and there's no way someone in Hoyo even listens to Jim White. Even Americans don't know him, he's a musicians' musician.

Also I'm not sure whether a similar phrase even exists in Chinese and maybe this parallel happens only in English translation.

Still, I feel like reality just glitched ot something of that sort.

Don't you know there are projects for the dead And there are projects for the living Though I must confess sometimes I get confused by that distinction And I just throw myself into the arms Of that which would betray me. I guess to see how far Providence Will stoop down just to save me.

[imperatoralicia]

I get a lot of entertainment thinking about how containers are used in video games sometimes.

[imperial-agent]

The one you gravitate towards the first time playing any cRPGs. Included Pillars of Eternity races and Divinity Original Sin ones.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A new challenger approaches (slowly)

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[bongosinferno]

A devastating and confusing thing about the Fallout setting, when you explore the pre-war aspects, is what the creators think about pre-war America. In the first games we only get hints of the pre-war world, but they seem to be some sort of wild fascist nation invading Canada. In Fallout 1, the first thing we're introduced to of the pre-war society is seeing a soldier shoot civilians and laughing.

Now, for the first 2 games and New Vegas we don't really know much. What we know is that there's a fascist military group known as the enclave who were a sort of US deep state even before the war, and that the government teamed up with corporate interests to preform vaguely MKULTRA-ish experiments with the Vaults. Basically, the government was an extreme version of the 50s American jingoism and McCarthyism.

This is well and dandy, I guess issues come up more when we get to the later games, especially 4, where it seems like none of this extreme plotting and societal civil unrest which would exist is seen. The society as presented in 4 also seems quite progressive, gay people are featured in the opening, and none of the baggage of say, civil rights not existing are included. Now on a baseline, I don't want settings to be more conservative, homophobic and sexist etc., but it becomes a very confusing setting when it's displayed both as this jingoist extreme thing with fascist tendencies aswell as a progressive place where everyone is seemingly equal. If you're focusing on the 50s as your setting, and American nationalism in the 50s, then you can't have McCarthyism spoofs and anti-communism as a societal paranoia norm while also general equality is the norm without misunderstanding why McCarthyism and nationalist jingoism is bad. A massive harm done in anti-communist paranoia is how it degrades and vilifies any progressive movements (women's rights, civil rights, homosexuality) as being morally un-American and therefore connected to communism. To ignore this just makes any critique of MacCarthyism and jingoism weird!

Basically, pre-war America in Fallout 4 becomes this both sides thing where America is both pure and equal and white fences in every instance that we see as the player (the intro), while also supposedly being this dystopic MacCarthyist hellscape that's broadcasting gladly about their war crimes in Canada, and wants to root out communism. I guess the only fix for this issue without getting into the fine print like they had to do is just not to focus too much on the pre-war world.

[theslimeologist]

can we take a moment and ask what happened here? like what did they do to her??

oh.

[stiwfssr]

[temeyes]

i had a revelation

[zevrans]

+ if u want share in the tags your fav thing about them/the romance 💕

p.s. mine's fenris because apparently i love emotionally unavailable characters 😔

[gavidaily]

Gavi and Ter Stegen ❤️‍🩹

[svtskneecaps]

took advantage of what may apparently be the last quiet qsmp night for a WHILE to watch through some day 1 vods, since i didn't hop on the train until mid april. holy SHIT there is gold in those metaphorical hills. one day i gotta make a compilation fr but it is so tedious the way i get clips.

anyway here's a collection of highlights:

[spacedlexi]

finding out the walking dead wiki has full transcripts for every episode and possible choice has been a fuckin game changer for me this is incredible

[tribow]

Why do I tell people to play indie games?

K' so you may have seen that post I made a little while ago asking people reblog and put into the tags an indie game that they did NOT like.

I made that post because I wanted to hear about what indie games people had bad experiences with. There was another post I made saying "Tell me you don't play indie games without telling me you don't play indie games" in response to a ton of youtube videos saying modern video games are no longer fun. A lot of tags would say, "Well indie games can suck too!" This response was extremely silly to me and I wanted to know what games they could be talking about.

I didn't ask for it, but so many people starting explaining why they didn't like a certain game. So I decided to make a little pie chart with the reason people would give in the tags

There are some outliers not here. There were 5 tags saying a game offended them and some responses that were too specific to really count. Half of the posts also gave no explanations so I'm not going to act like this is representative of every response on that post.

Okay so what's the point? Why did I do this?

There's this one 30 minute video by Josh Strife Hayes that does a super good job showcasing all of the bad practices that happen with modern gaming. He talks about each issue thoroughly, but I'll list them here:

Microtransactions, Limited Progression, Invite Boosts, Premium Currency, Loyalty Programs, Selling Power, Battlepasses, and Selling Progression

He doesn't even mention other issues like games releasing in clearly unfinished states, games that are clearly chasing trends, and game developers being restricted by their publishers.

Why is this significant? Well answer me this: Was there a single tag response in my post that complains about an indie game doing these things?

Say what you want about indie games, but I bet you didn't pay $60 and got psychologically manipulated to spend more on that game. I bet you weren't getting manipulated by some free to play model to spend more money than you would on a normal game. I bet the game actually released in a finished state and even if it did, the game clearly communicated it wasn't done.

Sure, you could give me examples of indie games that do have those bad practices, but I guarantee you that you cannot prove that most indie games do this.

So yeah, play indie games. Don't support corporate bullshit unless you know the game was made with the player's best interest in mind.

[uncanny-tranny]

Hey, you're being lied to about what fitness constitutes. If you can't work in an hour-long crossfit slog, but you can work in a five-minute walk, then that is still fitness. If you can't use your legs but you can do arm circles every now and again, that is still fitness. If you're moving around at work, that's still fitness. It can be intentional or incidental, but here's the best part: your body doesn't care if you're dedicating specific work-out times. It doesn't care if the "only" fitness it gets is your nine to five on your feet. It doesn't care, fitness is fitness is fitness. Some of us do it differently, but the end result is more or less similar.

If you can do any type of fitness safely, your body isn't going to care if you're doing it like an Olympic athlete or if you're just a casual.

[liquidstar]

How is tumblr going to ban porn and then show me ads where two triceratops are straight up having sex

[coquelicoq]

actually natori has some kind of tracking talisman on matoba at all times. that's how he knew where to abduct matoba from for Operation: Kitty Cat City. matoba fully knows about it; it's why he wasn't at all surprised to find a paper doll in natsume's hair after the mask youkai debacle (matoba internally as he watched it fly away: classic mother hen shuuichi-san momence 🥰). because this is matoba "boundaries? what are those? can you eat them?" seiji we're talking about, he's not bothered by this "violation" of his "privacy"; rather, he finds it fittingly clingy (it is, after all, only right that natori should be keeping tabs on him obsessively). sometimes the talisman gets confused and sticks to yesterday's outfit, so he always checks to make sure he has it on the way out the door (his pocket patdown is "keys, lighter, wallet, exorcism supplies, shuuichi-san's cute lil tracker he thinks i don't know about <3"). i wouldn't be surprised if he's figured out how to uno reverse it and now uses it to track natori's location as well. this may not technically be canon but it is probably all 100% true in an important way that transcends canon, we just never hear about it because it isn't relevant to natsume's journey 😌