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hitsuackerman · 4 years

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Unpredictable (Overhaul x Reader) pt.28

a/n: aye have mixture of fluff and angst~ sorry for uploading late :c MY SCHEDULE IS SUCH A KILLER I CANNOT STRESS IT ENOUGH huhuhu

warnings: this cannot be read solo

Links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 20, part 21, part 22, part 22, part 23, part 23.5, part 24, part 25, part 26, part 27, part 29

Masterlist to my other fics: here :) (that has not been updated for how many months now... proceed with caution~)

“Is that really you, Inspector (l/n)?” The hero asked. With each step she took, you made sure Chisaki’s face wouldn’t be seen. “It’s late.”

“Hey, Enigma~” Lowering his head to rest on your shoulder, you smiled at the small quiet hero. “It is late~ We’re not causing a disturbance are we?”

“Of course not! But I don’t think this is the place to be…” She scratched her cheek and avoided your eye contact. “You know…”

“I know~ I apologize. He’s typically busy and we don’t get to hang out much.” You patted his back and continued. “He’s also very shy and doesn’t like to be seen in public.”

“Oh! I’m very sorry! But, if you don’t mind, would it be alright if the both of you continued elsewhere?”

“It’s fine! We were just going separate ways.” You consoled her and knew that her reaction was safe enough. At least you were fast enough to cover his face. “I told you, Shinoda-san. Heroes patrol these times of the night.”

“Forgive my rash decision.” He rested his head on your shoulder. Embarrassed that he had been this close to kissing you. Disappointed that it was barely a few centimeters and yet even such trivial things like these, the heroes would always disturb him. For now, all he could do was to wrap his arms around your body.

“Don’t wear your mask.” You whispered to him. He merely hummed. Gliding your hands on to his chest, he looked at you with cautiously eager eyes. Feeling how you pushed him he let you lead the way till the hood of his car hit thighs. “Enigma’s gone. You can turn around now.”

“I apologize for my actions.” Overhaul said as he took out his mask and wore it. “I was not expecting those bastards to roam this area at night.”

“You come here often?”

“Many years back. That apartment building, the third one.” He pointed it out. “Before the Shie Hassaikai was established, Kurono and I used to live there.”

“Wait, wait, wait… You and Chrono were roomies?” You stared at your companion, to the building, and back at him. A small pang of pain hit your forehead just as he had overhauled his glove back. “Well, no need to flick me, Chisaki.”

“Whatever it is your mind was thinking, no. We weren’t roomies.” He pinched your cheek and leaned on to the hood. “Neighbors. Pops owns that building. It’s one of the properties not involved with my business.”

“You know, I’d ask but perhaps we can schedule another meeting for that.” You took the vacant area beside him. With a bit of space in between, you placed your hand beside his. Just a reminder that the invitation still remains open.

“Of course.” Looking at your figure beside him, he furrowed his brows and shook his thoughts away. “Then again, we really should go separate ways. I hate having to take my mask off.”

“You know, you don’t have to take it off when you’re with me.” Elbowing him gently, you chuckled. “Don’t get me wrong, though. I like looking at your face. I just don’t want people to see you. Especially not with how things are going.”

“Nah.” Not expecting that word to come out of his mouth, the both of you met eyes at the same time. Adjusting the cloth, he tried to hide the slowly creeping heat on his cheeks. “You’re rubbing off on me, (y/n). That aside, it isn’t really bothersome if I take it off when you’re around. Your expressions are worth breathing the horrid air.”

“Ugh. Smooth talker.” You pouted. Taking a peak at your watch, the time was now quarter to one. As much as you wanted to stay and get to know more of the man behind the name, he was right. Flinching at the sudden weight on your hand, you looked down and found his on top of yours.

The kiss may not have happened but if it were compensated with this small act of intimacy then perhaps it wasn’t that bad. Carefully interlacing your fingers, you were more than relieved when he moved along and held on to your hand tightly. Maybe it was fine if you were to lean on to his arm and rest your head on his shoulder?

Just as you were about to attempt, Chisaki pulled you closer to him.

“You’re too obvious…” He said as he rested his head on yours. “We already have to leave in a few minutes. If you won’t do it then I will.”

“I swear this feels like a fever dream…” You commented earning a ruffle to the hair with his free hand. “Alright, alright. It’s real. You better not bug me Chisaki or I swear I will block you.”

“Well, now that this has happened, shall we take our leave now?”

“Is it bad to say that I’d rather stay here?”

“Are you suggesting we sleep in the car?” He poked your cheek.

“And have you drowned in your car’s germs? I’d rather not.” Standing up straight, you took a few steps and only then realized he still had not let go of your hand. “If you don’t let go, I’ll have to rethink sleeping in the car. And frankly speaking, sleeping in cars is not the most comfortable experience.”

“Right again.” Letting go of your hand, he too stood up. “In that case, I shall send a message when I get back to the base.”

“And I’ll message you when I arrive home.”

“Fair trade.”

To which you did not. Right after both your cars went separate ways, your phone vibrated with a message from Tsukuachi. Parking at the nearest allowable area, you grabbed your device and read the message. Rereading the text, you clicked dial.

“Are you for real?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to read it now.” He stifled a yawn and continued. “Unfortunately yes. If you can drop by the precinct, I can hand them over to you so you can get a head start.”

“Nao, it’s 1am.”

“And yet here we are, talking on the phone like the rats we are.”

Letting out a sigh, you ended the call. Rubbing your face, you leaned your head on the steering wheel and stared at your hand. Chewing on your lip, you began to recall the moment that had happened a mere minutes ago. Being able to hold his hand out in public had a different tingle.

Not long after, you were now seated beside Tsukauchi. Accepting the small cup of coffee, you waited as he filed through some documents. Taking small peaks at some of the letters, you saw how some names of villains you knew of were written down and crossed out. When Tsukauchi stopped at a particular piece of paper, he handed it over.

“Damn. It really is happening.” You set the paper aside and took a sip of your now cold beverage. “Do you need any help for the preparations? I can pull an all nighter if needed.”

“Would it be alright? It’s bad enough the schedule keeps changing.” Glancing at the paper and to the calendar, Tsukauchi stared at your tired eyes. “With this, the Fukuo Kai case will commence a week from now. Are you ready to focus on Nighteye’s?”

“From the middle, I have been focusing on their case. I just didn’t expect it to happen too soon.” Playing with the hems of your sweater, you rested your elbows on your knees and covered your face. “Wanna go to the rooftop?”

“Not thinking of bailing now, are you?” Tsukauchi said as he began to clear his desk and stand up. “What’s on your mind, hmm?”

“I just met with 2 people I shouldn’t have any business with.” You weakly chuckle as you lead the way to the rooftop. Opening the doors, you felt your breathing grow heavy. The sudden claminess of the narrow pathway was not good for your running mind. Holding onto Tsukauchi’s sleeve, you were more than thankful he was willing to listen.

Taking the final step, Tsukauchi unlocked the hatch and granted access to the rooftop. The night sky was still dark and barely held any stars. Light pollution framed the horizon while the street lamps casted a yellow-orange glow to the roads below.

“What happened?”

“Levi specifically told the heroes not to mess with my work.” You began. “It went well but not for long. I had to bug the Shie Hassaikai after a few days Levi left. Only an idiot would refuse knowing my stance with the two parties.”

“Was it successful?”

“It was. The anon tip we had from before was Chronostasis. He gave me Overhaul’s sim card and I kinda just took the opportunity to let him plant the chip for me. It was going smoothly till a few hours ago. Nighteye told me that they were still getting feedback even though Chrono destroyed the device.”

“Where did things go wrong? It just seems like a loyalty test to me.”

“I don’t even know if I passed at this point.” Taking your phone out, you opened the gallery and showed him the picture of the hidden camera. “They bugged me. I’m not certain if they saw what went on inside my unit but the fact that they saw him entering and exiting as he pleases makes my blood boil.”

“Then it means they saw his face?” His eyes widened.

“As far as I know, he only took his mask off around the living room area, his room, or mine.” Trying to recall, each time he entered the kitchen he used the other door connecting to the living room. Thank the quirk gods your apartment was designed that way. “I don’t even know if it transmits audio.”

Squatting on the floor you rubbed your face once more and raked your fingers through your hair. Pulling on the clumps a bit, you released a small shaky sigh.

“I’m guessing the second person you met was the reason for all this?” Tsukauchi took the initiative and sat on the empty space beside you. “What happened with him?”

“He knew about Chrono helping me and about the other bug running around. Told me that heroes needed to have fun too. Bastard.” No matter how much you twisted your views, Chisaki Kai was always Overhaul first. “I… I just don’t know what to do anymore, Nao.”

Closing your eyes, a small whimper left your mouth as tears began to fall.

“Things are just so fucking complicated that I… I don’t even know what step I should do next. I want justice to prevail but no matter what I do…”

“You’ve really fallen down the rabbithole, huh?” Tsukauchi commented as he gave soft pats on your back. “Then again, who wouldn’t? You’re literally stuck in the middle and have to be on edge more than usual. Other than that, you held up pretty well.”

“I can’t even clear my name at this point. If things ever go wrong in the Shie Hassaikai raid, my name will definitely make it into the possible accomplice list.” You bit your lip and clenched your fists. “Gods I hate this so fucking much. I told him I had it under control when in reality I’m as stuck as a rat on a glue board.”

“Don’t go using that analogy.” Tsukauchi still continued to pat your back. “Think of us as hamsters. We’re pretty cute and intelligent. Just give it a bit of time and I’m sure you’ll think of something. I bet you wouldn’t want your dad to partake in any of your problems so best not to pop up in your estate.”

“I know it’s a law for heroes not to kill but what if…”

“I doubt he’ll die in battle. Overhaul is a B-Rank villain. The most that’ll happen would be for him to be knocked out unconscious or bloody at the end of the day.” Yet even as he said those words, Tsukauchi wasn’t too confident. It would be a lie on his part if he said things would be fine. “Who knows? He might have some sort of magical epiphany and surrender to lessen his charges.”

“Now that you mention it,” You wiped your tears away and sat down properly. “I’ve never really read what happens to higher rank villains after they get captured. The highest I’ve handled was just D-ranked ones.”

“Hmmm…” Now that the topic was open, he too hadn’t really thought too much about it knowing his and your department weren’t incharge of what happens after the dirty work. “Standard procedures. They’ll search the area once more and take proper inventory. Say that Overhaul is merely strained, they would pat him down and once he’s clear and in the precinct or designated area, he’ll have to sign a document signifying that the given list is all that he owns. He’ll be then taken to a private area to have his fingerprints, mug shot, and other necessary information.”

“He probably won’t get a hearing.”

“Right you are. He’ll most likely be sent to Tartarus if that’s what you’re asking.”

“If he does, who do you think would handle it? The HPSC?”

“Most likely. Still, they have a lot on their hands so his case would surely collect dust.” He paused and let out a yawn. “If it were you, would you grant him a second chance in life?”

“Heh, If it were up to me...” Looking at the now starless skies, you felt a chill run down your spine. “Personal emotions aside, of course not.”

“But?”

“You really think I’d break into Tartarus just to save one villain and give him a better life?” You smirked and stood up.

“Of course not.” He chuckled and stood up as well. “Even the dumbest person knows that’s suicide. Go home and get some rest, (y/n). We’ll handle this later in the day.”

Giving you some privacy, Tsukauchi excused himself first. Hearing the door latch click, you took your phone out and dialed a number. It only took 3 rings before the other line picked up.

“Well now,” The cheeky voice said. “What can I help you with dove?”

- - - - -

Overhaul’s waiting list: @jjk-biased @infinite-universe-love @dirtypride @blackymomo03 @azzie @purple-rabanito @meximorrita @awesomeee19 @celestial-kanzakii @laure-lo @team-wang-puppy @aydience-world @choros-main-hoe @colorseeingchick @franko-pop @o-dragon05 @but-kairis-not-that-smart (i cant seem to tag again :( hope this lands in your timelines!)

I hope yall liked this chapter annnd if you want to be tagged feel free to comment :’) your comments make my day and make me happy huhu <3

#overhaul x reader #chisaki kai x reader #overhaul #bnha overhaul #mha overhaul #bnha chisaki kai #mha chisaki kai #shie hassaikai #bnha x reader #long fic #i hate my schedule so much

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artificialqueens · 4 years

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Lemon's Misadventures in Dating, Chapter 5 (Lemon x the world) - Mermelada

A/n: Hej hej hej! I’m very late in posting this to AQ after Ao3, so please forgive me! I hope you all like *~* filler chapters *~* because there’s a couple of them coming up! I’ve already written the next couple of chapters, but PLEEEAAASSSEE let me know if you have any requests or suggestions! Namely, should I attempt to write smut or not lol! Thank you again for all your lovely words about the fic, I love you all massively <3 <3

Having not slept in her own bed for the last two nights, Lemon decided to take a well-earned evening for herself, partly because she was running out of excuses for her parents as to why she’d been out so much lately, and partly to give the various bruises and bite-marks on her body time to heal. With Gus the dog snuggled into her side, she waited for The Sims to load on her laptop as Chromatica blared from her phone. She pressed on its screen to check the time, and saw she had received a new text message.

Dr Rita <3 [16:45] “I hope you survived your walk of shame, mon petit citron! Thank you again for a great night and day :-) x”

Rita was amazing. She was the epitome of a dark horse: she was so kind and patient with Lemon during her panic crisis, as she had so adorably put it, and made her feel all the safety and love she needed all morning. Yet not long afterwards, after some lazy chatter which had made Lemon inexplicably horny, she was once again fucking her to within an inch of her life. Speaking two languages was far from the only thing she could do with her mouth. They had even gone for lunch together after round 2 – and round 2.5 in the shower – before reluctantly parting as Rita prepared for her nightshift at the hospital. It was over lunch where they both agreed that pursuing anything serious wouldn’t be worth it, but they would definitely like to work on a friendship. Lemon had, however, still managed to charm her way into borrowing a hoodie from the older woman, both of them secretly pleased that it gave them a reason to hang out again. She quickly sent off a reply, thanking her once again for her help that morning and wishing her luck for the long night ahead in kidneyland with her love interest from the ward.

Looking back to her laptop, the loading bar appeared to have frozen. Rolling her eyes, she held down the device’s power button to restart it. The snoring lump beside her clearly wasn’t going to entertain her as she waited, so she bit the bullet and opened up her new favourite app.

She grinned upon seeing that her most recent message was from Kyne.

[16:20] Remember I told you about my roommate who works in a porn studio lol? She came home just now with a box of those custard tarts you were telling me about, they are so good!!! 🤤 You really do have the best taste 😘

That’s a lot to unpack, she laughed to herself, she’s persistent, fair play to her! Plus it turns out she actually WAS listening! I just hope they were clean… I’ll reply later. Now what about Kiara, eh Gus-bus? She was nice, let’s see what she’s said!

[09:12] How was the party? 🙂 I hope it was tudo bem!!

Lemon and Kiara had continued chatting yesterday until Lemon had to leave for her date, a ‘family party’ being the first reasonable sounding thing that came to mind when having to end their conversation. She hated lying, she really did, but how acceptable was it really to tell one Tinder-match that you were going on a date with another Tinder-match?

[17:03] It went well, merci! But I was too hungover to function all day lol 🤯

[17:03] How has your day been? 😊

Right, who’s next? Two new matches and a message from Boa! Let’s see what she has to say about me spamming her before she blocks me. Clicking on the girl’s message from last night, however, Lemon was pleasantly surprised that her texting blunder wasn’t the end of her chances.

[20:55] Lololololololololol no YOU’RE fun!!!!

[20:55] Clock the good grammar

[20:55] So what’s a girl like you doing on an app like this?

[20:56] 🍆🍆🍆

Now that was a question Lemon still occasionally asked herself, and she didn’t even know if she had an answer. So the best she could do was be honest.

[17:07] Well I’m recently single so I’m just seeing what happens, really, a few dates here and there to get me back on my feet again! To quote the great Kelly Rowland, I am down for whatever 😉

[17:07] How about you?

She had, once again, been well and truly sucked into the Tinder vortex. Closing her laptop and placing it on her bedside table, she nuzzled her face into Gus’s head, the dog making no effort at all to reciprocate the sudden attention. Squishing a kiss to his head, she turned back to the app, and her new matches: Scarlett and Ilona. They had both matched at around the same time, making their chat windows sit neatly at the bottom of Lemon’s screen. Sending them both standard “Hey gorge! What’s up? 😊” messages, she went back to swiping through profiles, although within less than a minute, a reply from Scarlett flashed at the top of her screen.

[17:13] Hey gorge! I’m doing much better now that I’m speaking to you 😉

[17:14] What’s up with you?

A bit of enthusiasm goes a long way, she smiled, maybe Scarlett is the one? Or maybe she’s too into me and I should be worried? Surely not!

[17:15] I’m glad I can help! I’m pretty good thanks, having a lazy night in tonight! Are you doing anything fun?

Lemon debated giving the girl more details of her night in, but she was worried about what she might think… She’s covered in tattoos and eats fire, for god’s sake, there is no way she likes Lady Gaga or The Sims. She probably listens to death metal and drives a motorbike and has a pet snake, I could never compete!

Fortunately, Scarlett was charming and very easy to talk to, and the two exchanged details - both mundane and exciting - through quickly typed messages. She learned that the other blonde was a lawyer, but had gone to circus school at weekends throughout university - which explained a lot - and was currently in an open relationship with her girlfriend. Lemon had never been ‘the other woman’ before, but as long as she wasn’t hurting anyone, surely it’s not that bad! Eventually, though, one message made Lemon’s anxiety start to creep in again.

[17:57] So I know this probably seems WAY too fast, so don’t worry if you don’t want to

Time seemed to stand still between this message and the next one. What does she want to do that’s fast? Sex? That’s not that big a deal, it must be more than that. Unless she’s into super kinky shit, which wouldn’t surprise me, does she want to piss on me? Does she want her girlfriend to piss on me? Does she want me to be her fake girlfriend at her sister’s wedding where we have to share a bed before eventually realising we loved each other all along? Finally, right on cue, the follow-up arrived.

[17:59] It’s my birthday on Saturday and I’m having a party at my house before heading out on the town, it’ll hopefully just be a few friends, and it would be cool if you could make it 🥳

[18:00] You can bring a friend if you want! But again no pressure!!

Wow, that wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. She started blankly at her phone, letting her heart rate settle back down to its normal speed. A party, cool. I can do that!

[18:02] You had me worried for a second there! But that sounds fun, I’ll be there! 😀

Exiting the app, she hastily composed a message to Jan. Jan loved parties, she had such a natural charisma which she exuded effortlessly whenever she entered a room. She was able to chat to anyone about anything, and Lemon was always responsible for getting her out of tricky situations on nights out where her natural friendliness had been mistaken for something else. She would be the perfect person to deflect any potential awkwardness that may occur at a Tinder-date-she’d-never-met-before’s birthday party. As she awaited Jan’s reply (Please please please say yes, Jan, you’re my only hope!), she checked on the app again, swiping through countless samey-looking profiles. Until she reached one that she’d definitely seen before.

Priyanka, 29

Within 10 miles

I already swiped for this girl, look! There’s her in her lengha, there she’s at pride… Oh she has new pictures now, how weird! Priyanka did indeed have an additional two photos on her profile which Lemon hadn’t seen before: a professional-looking black and white image of her face and torso, showing her dark waves flowing down her shoulders, and her eyes directly piercing Lemon’s soul; and finally, a picture of the dark-skinned girl wearing a blonde wig, cowboy hat, and appearing to be screaming into a microphone… I do like a Hannah Montana fantasy, get it girl!

Just like before, Lemon swiped Priyanka’s profile to the right, but unlike last time, the notification she’d been hoping for appeared straight away.

Congratulations! You have matched with Priyanka!

Buoyed by the excitement of matching with somebody so quickly - and someone so gorgeous - Lemon jumped straight off the bed and started dancing, ‘Rain on Me’ blaring beside her for the third time that evening. Even Gus seemed to pick up on the change of energy, running up and down the bed, wagging his tail merrily. As the pair danced, the familiar ‘ding’ of a new notification sounded through the room. And again.

Briefly pausing to pick up her phone, she saw the two messages she had received. Firstly, from Kiara.

[18:12] Unnggghhh work today was the worst, but I found a really cute Portuguese café on my walk home! I have eaten so many natas lol. We could go sometime if you want to? 🙂

Before replying (yes, obviously… I didn’t download Duolingo yesterday for nothing!), she went to check on the second message, which was from her recent match, Ilona.

[18:12] See you on Saturday bitch! xox

Well that seems ominous.

#rpdr fanfiction #drcan #mermelada #lemon #rita baga #kyne #kiara #bitch on arrival #scarlett bobo #ilona verley #priyanka #submission #lmid #can1

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yourrealitybeyondtime · 5 years

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More OCs!

Thank you again @technoxslayer360 @dasjansel @corvid-moon @incoherentmoose @cake-and-roses and @teeny-weeny-ducklings for your lovely responses! Unfortunately, the characters I've shown are from THE story, so it will probably be years before I have it complete. I will, however, post excerpts, and I'll write scenarios that you request, like "tol and smol," "person A and person B," AUs, or general shenanigans. I encorage all pairings, minus sexual ones with Uri since they're asexual.

In the meantime, and to help me practice my writing, I started writing my first "fanfiction," if you will. I love yaoi, yuri, shoujo, and dating sims, and I wanted to make a story that pokes fun at the flaws of those tropes, and also have a much more realistic take of it. It was first just meant to be only for my eyes, but it's sort of become it's own thing. I've written 70k words in about 2 months, which is novel length. I realize now that it's a little too important to keep to myself. It's about discovering your sexuality, finding self worth, the lines of consent, enduring abusive relationships, battling severe trauma, learning to stand up for yourself, and learning to accept yourself. It's heavily based off of things that have happened to me irl and has been surprisingly cathartic to write.

I need beta readers, especially since I'm so inexperienced. I would like to ask you if you would consider becoming one. However, this is an incredibly graphic story. There is s*x, there is r*pe, there is a little blood, and there is a lot of psychological abuse. It is not a gentle story. It will have a happy ending, though. I totally get if you don't want to be a beta reader and respect if you say no and won't pry as to the reason why. If you could spread this around and help me find more beta readers, I would GREATLY appreciate it. Now, onto the OCs!

Devin Quinn (The Adventurer)

Age: 18

Height: 5'6"

Gender Identity: Male

Pronouns: He/Him

Sexuality: Bisexual

Ethnicity: Chinese/Irish

Other: Depression, severe anxiety, PTSD, dyspraxia

Description: After being terribly picked on in high school, Devin is excited to start his social life in college. However, the glow up he had over the last summer gets him into far more than he had bargained for. Overwhelmed by the sudden attention from his peers, the sheltered boy who hasn't even had his first kiss is now scrambling to decipher the ins and outs of the dating world. Problem is, he realizes he's not so much the innocent school boy he's led himself and everyone else to believe. Devin has to come to terms with this crisis of character while trying to figure out how not to get taken advantage of. Devin is a sweet bean with way too many problems.

Jaxon Rutherford (The Evil Prince)

Age: 19

Height: 6'0"

Gender Identity: Male

Pronouns: He/Him

Sexuality: Gay

Ethnicity: Spanish/Welsh

Other: High-functioning sociopath

Description: Devin's old middle school bully. Jaxon doesn't seem to remember Devin, but he's intent on bullying him again. This time, though, it's a very different type of bullying. Jaxon is not even remotely shy about claiming Devin as his own whether Devin likes it or not. Flopping between being being patient, understanding, and giving, and aggressive, possessive, and scary, Devin is completely confused by Jaxon's behavior. Does Jaxon actually care about him or does he just consider Devin his plaything? Either way, Jaxon seems to never get in trouble, no matter what he does.

Hannah Johnson (The Knight)

Age: 17 (Don't worry. Nothing sexual happens with her until after she turns 18.)

Height: 5'3"

Gender Identity: Demigirl

Pronouns: She/Her

Sexuality: Pansexual

Ethnicity: African American

Description: Devin's best friend since middle school. They kept in touch when Devin went to Ireland for high school, but Hannah has no idea how bad Devin's high school life actually was. She is almost the complete opposite of Devin in every way. Extroverted, outgoing, a social butterfly, cheerful, and always ready to have the time of her life, Hannah is a cherished light in Devin's life. She has had a crush on him since middle school, but, despite her frank nature, she seems to already have made up her mind not to date him. Instead, she spends her time standing up for Devin when he won't stand up for himself, and serves as the voice of reason when he gets too wrapped up in his anxiety.

Abigail Kingsley (The Good Queen)

Age: 21

Height: 5'5"

Gender Identity: Female

Pronouns: She/Her

Sexuality: Straight?

Ethnicity: Danish/Finnish/Swedish

Description: The lead of the most popular sorority on campus. After breaking up with her ex, Jeremy, at the end of last school year, Abigail initially takes an interest in Devin as the safe rebound. Unexpectedly, she develops feelings for him as she gets to know him better. Devin initially assumes she's just some party girl, but finds out she's a level headed and down to earth person trapped in high societies expectations. Unfortunately, Jeremy is intent on getting Abigail back and will more than just push aside anyone who gets in his way.

William Hartsfield (The Good? Wizard)

Age: 54

Height: 5'10

Gender Identity: Male

Pronouns: He/Him

Sexuality: Gay

Ethnicity: German/Scottish/Dutch

Description: Devin's English teacher. He seems very stern and old fashioned, but he shows a softer side when it counts. When Devin hears rumors about Mr. Hartsfield being caught in bed with a student, he's reluctant to see him after class. He's surprised to find that Mr. Hartsfield is another ally who provides Devin a safe space. Once just teacher and student, they become fast friends as Devin finds comfort in a protective older male. However, when Devin finally opens up about his situation with Jaxon, William offers himself as a safer alternative. Is William really trying to be protective, or is he just someone else attempting to take advantage of Devin?

Damon Godswin (The Ice King)

Age: 36

Height: 6'2"

Gender Identity: Male

Pronouns: He/him

Sexuality: Mostly Straight

Ethnicity: Welsh

Description: The dean of the college. A serious and controlling man. Devin is warned to not go to the dean if he can help it, but as Jaxon becomes more brazen, Devin doesn't know where else to go. Unfortunately for him, the dean takes an interest in him and is far more cruel than he expected. To both of their surprise, Jaxon comes to save Devin and promises to protect him, but at what cost?

Thank you for taking the time to read through all of this! Whereas my fantasy is completely plotted out, this story was started with no end in mind, so please suggest character ideas if you have any! (ie, for The Princess, The Joker/Fool, etc) I'd really like to include someone trans, someone who's non-binary, and PoC. Thank you again for reading! I'm looking forward to your feedback!

#write #writer #writeblr #writers #writing #story #oc #ocs #my ocs #bisexual #bisexuality #pansexual #pan #bi #pansexuality #gay #mlm #my story #axiety #depression #ptsd

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maximelebled · 6 years

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Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year.

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

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There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

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A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

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I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color).

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold.

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

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Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

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At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world. (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

#video games

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omg-puddingpie · 6 years

Photo

57 facts about OMG-Puddingpie

Tagged by @twistedsimblr

1. I am going to be 30 years old in 4 months! :0 Gettin’ old folks. XD

2. I was born January 5th and EVERY YEAR on my bday, my mom tells me the same story regarding my birth, the weather and so forth. (I just let her do it. XD)

3. I have terrible depression but I’ve learned how to handle it and find healthy alternatives for those bad days.

4. My wife and I have been together for 10 years, married for 3 and have 4 beautiful children: 3 girls and a boy. (We’d like more but we want to wait until our youngest is at LEAST 2 or 3. XD)

5. I will only date women with a ‘thicker’ body type. We ALL have our preferences, so don’t wave your damn finger at me. :P

6. I am Graphic Designer and freelance artist but always wanted to have my own tattoo shop and be a tattoo artist.

7. I never show too many pictures of myself. (I’ll do the Simself and draw it but that’s it) There have been a few times and people often ask why....what are you hiding? And the answer is the same: I’m not hiding a damn thing but I don’t need to showcase myself in every which way, to be honest. The internet is an ugly place at times.

8. I’m a cat person and if I had it my way, I’d live on a farm and allow all kinds of Cats to roam the lands!

9. I’m an Xbox man myself but I’m not against Playstations or other platforms.

10. I’m in love with the video game Overwatch and I’m a Junkrat, McCree, Hanzo, Mercy, Roadhog and Ana main. (I try to play all the heros, though.)

11. I started drawing at 9 when I kept complaining I was bored. Guess my mom got tired of it and told me to find SOMETHING to do, so I did. XD

12. I do not like people bugging me with requests: Can you draw this, can you draw (insert character’s name) can you draw my Cat, can you draw my boyfriend and I, etc. I’ll only do them for certain people and I MUST approach you. If not, prepare to be ignored.

13. I’m Portuguese, A little Italian and a TAD German.

14. I love disney movies and could care less that I’m a grown ass man: I will SING ‘Colors of the wind’ from Pocahontas until my heart is content! XD

15. My very 1st car was a 2007 Mustang

16. I inherited the name Puddingpie from the wonderful game ‘The Wolf Among Us’

17. ‘Fables’ is my favorite non-marvel comic

18. I love Supernatural creatures: Werewolves, Fairies, Vampires....you name it.

19. I love the holiday season and can not WAIT for the Fall to finally set in. (I live in Cali and it can get....pretty....damn...hot!)

20. My parents have been divorced since I was 5

21. Can not wait for the remastered Spyro trilogy! I was pretty bummed when they pushed the release date to November but yay: Early Christmas present to me! :D

22. People assume I’m gay or bi because I draw naked dudes, play same sex sims, etc and to be honest, I like to have different options and I’m open.

23. I got into my first fight when I was 12.

24. I’d do anything for my children. They mean everything to me.

25. My wife is African American and we use to HATE one another, before we officially became a couple. (Hilarious, I know. XD)

26. To @twistedsimblr Your drawings are amazing and I wish I had the time (and patience) to make poses like you can, girl! :D

27. I use to write A LOT of fanfictions during my college years. (Like, 4 or 5 years ago?)

28: I personally do not know this person but @emmypess and I go waaaaaaaay back in the writing community and use to write stories all the damn time in the same forum. Her stuff is still amazing!

29. I love Las Vegas. I mostly go for the shows and food, though.

30. I love Pizza and will drive in the rain, snow and end of the world, just to get one. :P

31. I love listening to the oldies. (70′s, 80′s, 90′s. Old country songs are the best)

32. I am estranged from my father and it’s been the best damn thing I could have ever done.

33. I can make a pretty good Pecan Pie.

34. My Vinyl Pop figure collection has become an addiction and I MIGHT need help. XD

35. I have an issue with Beer and hard liquor (meaning I’ve been known to over drink) so I limit myself or avoid it, if possible.

36. Never been fired from a job

37. I’ve been playing The Sims since 2001. It was included with our new computer at the time and I fell in love with it.

38. People assume I live by the beach and surf, just because I live in California. Although I USE to, I’ve recently moved to a town surrounded by factories, Dairies and some pretty decent eateries.

39. I love Vans and Converse shoes

40. One day, I will complete a Sudoku puzzle without the help from my wife.

41. Facebook is overrated and although I have one, I rarely use it these days. (Mostly to post photos during the holidays)

42. I have a foul mouth and it’s be a struggle keeping that at bay. XD

43. I hate large crowds and they make me very nervous

44. I’m not much for television and prefer watching youtube or stream shows on my tablet, if I need that entertainment.

45. I have music playing every time I draw. It helps me concentrate and the lyrics often help push out what I’m trying to doodle.

46. John Gardner’s book ‘Grendel’ is one of my all time favorite reads. (And not just because I’m a fan of Gren. XD XD)

47. Metallica is the shit

48. I eat Peanut Butter like it’s never coming back to the shelves

49. I can be very mean and say hurtful things. (Get this from my father) And although it’s an ongoing battle, I’d like to say I’ve made progress

50. I have a tattoo of Otto from ‘The Simpsons’ on my right leg. He is my spirit animal. :P

51. I love Black Cats

52. My wife and I TRIED to grow our own produce, like Onions, Tomatoes, etc and well.....it failed. BIG time. XD

53. SPEAKING of Tomatoes, I hate, hate, HATE them on sandwiches or Burgers but I need Ketchup for my Fries. Go figure. :P

54. I use to smoke cigarettes

55. I’ve been told when I make Coffee, it’s almost like drinking oil. It’s pretty damn strong but I need it!

56. I’m currently obsessed with Weezer’s attempt at the song ‘Africa’ and have replayed it well over 100 times by now.

57. This year, I’m going to take a week off from EVERYTHING job related and just be a lazy bum. I need some me time, dammit! XD

I tag….

EVERYONE…

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justasmallbloginabigklainefandom · 6 years

Text

Old glee spoof liveblogs

Yuè [glee spoof 4] so yeah i decided to watch all of simgm's glee stuff (glee spoof, glee minisodes, gleedo) and i am at spoof 4

Yuè Oh this one has no captions Yuè MICHAEL IS HERE!!!! Yuè "THE FUCKING AUDITORIUM FINN" Yuè I've been singing the Obsession with Finn song at the top of.mylungs today cause what a jam Yuè IT IS MY BOY BLAAAAAAAAINE Yuè there were a lot of guest stars Yuè GO EMMA Yuè TATER TOTS Yuè "Nice mugshot Mercedes"

Yuè [glee spoof 5] time for rachel's nose job

Yuè ah.. no captions Yuè "but we'll pretend that never happened cause we're good at doing that with storylines" Yuè YOOO WILLIAM IS HERE FOR SAM Yuè AND ALSO SCOTT (I think that was the name of the actor before Kyle) AS PUCK Yuè glee did Wannabe in an episode but it wasn't the same because Brother's riffs weren't in there Yuè "is that all you ever do?" TRUTH Yuè I love it when Hemo smiles in the background Yuè thanks Emma for slamming Will and his "teaching" Yuè "what in the fuckity fuck fuck was that shit??" Yuè nickname one: lemon drop Yuè I love this part Yuè "where did that piano come from?" Yuè SORRY SIMGM BUT CHECK PLEASE JUST GOT UPDATED I NEED T READ IT Yuè okay okay I am going to continue cause it hasn't blown up yet so I can't blog about omgcp yet Yuè I don't like Santana faking the sexual harassment claim tho Yuè ZOOMBA Yuè thanks simgm for pointing out the double standards between male and female characters Yuè "a sad attempt of giving me a storyline" Yuè damm Sister did great job on the performances Yuè "Nice choir Mercedes"

Yuè [glee spoof 6] WHERE'S MA CROWN? Yuè "isn't that what you did" "yeah but.. I'm Finn" Yuè "THAT'S WHY YOU BETTER ROLL" Yuè "I can't believe we're stupid enough to believe that" Yuè "wow... misjudged that one" Yuè thanks simgm for pointing out so many plot holes Yuè "you can't fight the power of Brittana" Yuè I FORGOT ABOUT JESSE FALLING DOWN THE STAIRS Yuè I can't believe Michael did Jesse and Kurt's voice Yuè *voices Yuè YES YES YES THE BLAINE SONG IS STILL MY JAM WHY ISN'T IT ON THEIR SPOTIFY? ?? Yuè "yeah if you're gonna fight at least hit each other" Yuè THIS S.MY FAVORITE PART OF ALL OF GLEE SPOOFS GO FOR IT KURT Yuè nickname two: sugary plumb pie Yuè THIS ENTIRE EPISODE IS WONDERFUL Yuè "ONE MORE TIME" Yuè "Nice poem Mercedes"

Yuè [glee spoof 7] This is over 30 minutes long that's what I call dedication

Yuè " half of the stuff that happens to us makes no damn sense" Yuè I still can't believe Boss built the entire New York set herself Yuè "I HAVE BIG PLANS" fuuuuck I should wear my I have big plans t-shirt Yuè well Quinn.. Cats is back on Broadway now aka Rachel was just 6 years early Yuè "it's no time for logic Kurt" Yuè SAVE THE HORSES Yuè "I regret nothing" I love the glee spoof Artie Yuè I just love the entire glee spoof Yuè "I HAVE BIG PLANS" Yuè I am just in constant amazement of the New York set Yuè I'm now wearing the Big Plans t-shirt just around the time Quinn goes crazy about her big plans Yuè Oh god after six years I finally get the "Bootay" thing Yuè "well this could've been a lo-" Yuè "shut the fuck up Finn" Yuè I remember Boss saying Michael worked really hard on the song Yuè Boss sounds so much like Lea it's unreal maybe Boss should be on Elsie Fest this year Yuè why doesn't the Sims 4 have spiral staircases yet? Yuè "you know you're probably gonna change your mind by the end of the episode, right?" Yuè "PLANS! Big ones!" Yuè "Okay first of all: breath mints. You needs on" Yuè Brittany is the only sane one here Yuè quite frankly. . Sunshine beating Rachel up is more believable than Rachel's sudden change of heart Yuè "I'm Finn" Yuè "that might change by the end of the episode though" true true true Yuè SMACK THAT Yuè I like this song more than Pretending but honestly I just really don't like Pretending Yuè there's so many great music in this episode Yuè I actually used to have Simgm music on my phone including this song Yuè the part with Santana and Rachel is my favourite Yuè nickname 3: pancakes Yuè nickname 4: gingerbread dough sprinkled lightly toasted graham cracker bunny" Yuè "who got tad more songs than me" "WHAT?" Yuè aaaah my Brittana shipping heart Yuè "NOW MARCH MOTHERFUCKER" Yuè "oh and. ... Tater tots" Yuè woah Brianna voiced both Terri and Sunshine?

Yuè [glee spoof 8] (Jim Cantiello voice) SEASON 3. The season where we appreciate Tina.

Yuè JUDGING YOU WRITERS Yuè "I don't have any (smile)" Yuè "We appreciate you!" Yuè "cinnamon toast" "Finn!" Yuè nickname 5: Pop Tart Yuè honestly Blaine should've just fucked stayed at Dalton Yuè what happened to Dianna's dog? Yuè "... than Kurt dropped Mercedes" oH SHIT Yuè THIS IS THE START OF UNICORN Yuè nickname 6: Candy Cane Yuè GOD BLESS THE BLAINE SONG AND BOSS'S BROTHER'S VOICE Yuè "I didn't do it" Yuè ah the angry student is back Yuè Oh wait is this where Jordan started voicing Sue? Yuè "Because they don't know what else to do with my character" Yuè good thing that glee spoof continues the hair jokes Yuè "We appreciate you!" Yuè this song was also on my phone Yuè I think I had Breakout, Tonight, Blaine song, Faith, Gotta Be Love With You and another one on my phone Yuè OH THE CELL BLOCK TANGO Yuè watching this really makes me want to play the Sims 2 again but... I have a storyline on the Sims 4 aka a fifth generation family Yuè QUINN FALLING GETS ME EVERY TIME Yuè name of Beth 1: Carol Yuè "holy crap I can't believe I'm actually saying meaningful lines" Yuè nadiacreek actually made a ranking of parents in glee and she put Shelby on it twice Yuè good for Beth and bad for Rachel Yuè "IHBBP. I have big baby plans!" Yuè "Damn, you Brittana"

Yuè [glee spoof 9] and we appreciate Tina Yuè Oh I love this song Yuè "Asian" "Asian F" "stereotype" "stop doing glee club" "no" "I'm glad we talked this out" Yuè BRITT IN A MONKEY SUIT Yuè name of Beth 2 and 3: Susan, Mary Yuè name of Beth 4: Jessica Yuè THEY SAY THAT LIFE IS TATER TOT AR R Y OU FOR REAL?? Yuè RORY UM IRISH Yuè I love the cast list Yuè and I also love Mercedes's riffs Yuè was Nathan actually Irish? I don't think do cause he was in one of those chats Yuè "I was told you are too" True Yuè "We apprecia-" "Shut the fuck up" Yuè "COURAGE" Yuè I actually wanted the courage t-shirt before I got the I have big plans one Yuè Oh man I miss the old crack days of jokes of Finn telling Blainers to sit down Yuè AND THERE IS BRIANNA AS SUGAR MOTTA Yuè "what the f-" Yuè "H-" "stop you're embarrassing yourself" Yuè I LOVE THAT FINN SMILE Yuè "Told you"

Yuè [glee spoof 10] that time a parody handled Santana's coming out story better than the actual show

Yuè I love the warning Yuè "I've been working in keeping my eyebrows still" Yuè "I think I'll go wax my lasagna" is one of my favourite lines ever Yuè OH B OY SEBASTIAN Yuè nickname 7???: snuggle toes Yuè a background sim is wearing a fez I love it Yuè FUCKING HELL THE VEGAN THING Yuè "Tina what the fuck" "Bitch" Yuè Y'ALL IT IS TIME FOR THE CELL BLOCK TANGO THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE Yuè also who the hell did these sometimes inaccurate captions? Yuè kudos to Boss for all these dialogues Yuè "Found out he couldn't handle BIG PLANS" Yuè damm I'm still in awe bc f the Cell Block Tango Yuè "we're here to save Rachel's virginity" Yuè nickname 8: Watermelon Lips Yuè KLAINE DID WATERMELON BEFORE IT WAS COOL Yuè I've drawn so many Stop the violence things Yuè Lauren is creepin Yuè GO SIMGM GO SIMGM GO SIMGM YES YES YES THANKS FOR THIS SCENE Yuè I love the big camera and also them saying the storyline is stupid Yuè also we needed more of Brittany supporting Santana during this come on fuck off glee Yuè I HAD TOTALLY FORGOTTEN ABUT TIS SONG Yuè Quinn is just smiling while Santana is beating the living shit out of Finn Yuè "Can't say I didn't warn you" Yuè FINN SINGING WHILE DRUNK AND NAKED IS MY FAVE Hannah sebbbbb Yuè Hannah: did you watch simgm ????????

Yuè [glee spoof 11] time for simgm to do it right

Yuè it is true tho bc Santana suddenly got suspended for violence and I'm like... FIGGINS HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THESE KIDS DO ON A DAILY BASIS? Yuè Man the actual episode was such bullshit Yuè "then we're all in the wrong club" Yuè Brittany saying the truth Yuè the entire Quick storyline is so weird Yuè "CHEESEBURGER" Yuè tbh this song is as boring as the song they actually sung on glee so congrats simgm Yuè I'll never get why Santana was so offended by Klaine singing Perfect to her in support bc they know how hard it is in a straight world Yuè whereas the straight dude who outed her sang a boring ass unnecessary song and Santana was crying because she was so ///moved/// Yuè "unions and ass????" Yuè nickname 9: Dolphin Nose? Yuè "I'M KURT BITCH" Yuè Brittana should've sung in the actual glee sigh glee this was such a disappointment Yuè BRITTANA DANCING THE SMUSSLE Yuè honestly suspending Rachel was the best that could have happened because it gave us a killer Rachel free setlist Yuè "Do you people know math???" Yuè "Not completely. I have big plans" "there she goes again" Yuè ZISES Yuè "and clap like a seal" Yuè "It's random and out of character" Yuè glee and its writers suck at romance Yuè "QUINN HEEL" Yuè THIS IS THE SONG THAT WAS ALSO ON MY PHONE Yuè "I can still remember when I was 18. and here I am at 17, a woman"

Yuè [glee spoof 12] there weren't any songs in it

Yuè NVM I WAS WATCHING EPISODE 13 THERE ARE SONGS IN EP 12 Yuè "oh you know me and my big plans" Yuè "we hold hands, ran into Kurt and Blaine, and I moved two weeks later" Yuè unfortunately the old channel doesn't have captions Yuè "allow me to show you my excitement. ..... " I actually use that quote in real life Yuè why can't Shue do anything by himself Yuè "it always freaks me out when he decides to actually teach" Yuè I love these moments Yuè "my cat will eat you alive" Yuè I just remember how uncomfortable it was to watch Finchel suck face on glee like they didn't even look like loving kisses it was full open mouth on open mouth and making out Yuè "you would know all about announcing things wouldn't you" Yuè I also liked this song Yuè "no I only do that in cars" Yuè nickname 10: chocolate turle Yuè *turtle Yuè to quote Darren Criss: "it's cool I'm back" Yuè after taking a break to help dad wth dinner I'm gonna end this episode Yuè Oh the slushie Yuè "do my eyebrows look okay?" Yuè "that building was already on fire when I got there" Yuè "what happens in the bathroom stays in the bathroom" Yuè "aren't we supposed to be rehearsing" "DO WE EVEN KNOW HOW TO DO THAT?" Yuè GAY PIRATE Yuè "oh wow we actually accomplished something" I love Quinn s snark in these spoofs Yuè so much snark Yuè "oh sh-" Yuè WAIT JORDAN ALSO VOICED GRANT?

Yuè [glee spoof 13] Finn doesn't know how to wash his balls

Yuè really.. Will and Emma suck at their jobs Yuè BLACK SUE Yuè "by the way I'm having a baby" Yuè Mercedes was actually the only one in canon that handled differently when she cheated Yuè "where do I sign to get you fired?" Yuè there were no songs in this ep... Yuè Oh yeah Boss voiced Sugar cause Brianna was ill Yuè poor Puck Yuè ZISES Yuè "sure let's go with that" Yuè "okay who the fuck is this guy?" Quinn once again spilling the truth Yuè "FINN YOU SON OF A-" Yuè "my girlfriend my girlfriend politics and Latino Brittany is my girlfriend equal rights if I wanna kiss my girlfriend I can rainbow flag" Yuè nickname 11: crayola monkey Yuè wait isn't this Scott's last episode?

Yuè [glee spoof 14] what a nice episode title

Yuè "I'm sorry we don't speak bitch" Yuè "and you make a two dollar hoe look classy" Yuè Sam is wearing simgm merch Yuè "I don't here Finchel when Finchel speaks" same Yuè respect for simgm to not make fun of the suicide storyline Yuè I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE TEY PUT A STARKID REFERENCE IN HETR Yuè "MY CAT IS PART OF THE CIA" Yuè in which the girls are fucking sensible Yuè I love the glee version of No Scrub but man what a jam is this Yuè "you suck at motivational speeches" Yuè "do you feel the 'I don't give a fuck' I'm throwing in your direction" Yuè I ASKED FOR DEVELOPMENT AND THEY GAVE ME A WHEELCHAIR Yuè "I have-" "give it a rest Quinn" Yuè "he didn't call me a nickname today" "OH SHIT SON" Yuè "since five seconds ago" Yuè THESE PARTS BETWEEN SIBLING OH GOD Yuè damn Quinn is being inspirational Yuè duck bless this song Yuè AH BRITT Yuè "If there was a chair to kick right now I would" Yuè well well well simgm Yuè nice song

Yuè [glee spoof 15] at this point Boss and Co were so done they put 4 episodes in one spoof

Yuè True about Damian and the glee project thing Yuè waot there are no captions Yuè Mr Schue is such a dick Yuè ah... Quinn's face Yuè for real tho in 4 eps Santana changed her opinion on college too many times Yuè "this got disturbing really fast" Yuè UNIQUE Yuè "knock knock" "who's there?" "go away" Yuè THE WAY RACHEL'S FACE JUST FELL Yuè ZISES IS IN THE CHOIR ROOM Yuè the Quoe boner thing was so gross Yuè I also use "and I wanna go to college" in real life to basically say WTF Yuè fuck Chandler Yuè Oh jesus Yuè btw welcome Kyle to the cast Yuè "I can do that now. I see you're dressed as Lea Michele today" Yuè SANTANA VISION Yuè "dinosaurs" "shut the fuck up Mike"

Yuè [glee spoof 16] this is the end

Yuè throwback to the first ep Yuè Rachel is a selfish as Yuè *ass Yuè and Tina is right Yuè THE BODY SWAP Yuè nickname 12 kinda: winky fairy Yuè ahhh I'm getting all emotional Yuè TATER TOOOOOOOOOOOOTS Yuè another throwback because they're all wearing the outfits they wore in the first spoof Yuè "good luck with that" Yuè EVEN ZISES WAS HERE Yuè the unicorn magic!! Yuè "my big plans are-" (title song) Yuè ... and it's over AGAIN

Yuè [glee spoof minisodes and others]

Yuè mini 1Glee Spoof Minisode 1 | Kurt's Problem with Blaine Yuè this is the video that led me to Simgm because of Michael's awesome voice work Yuè nickname 1: cutiepiedumplingsugartwinkledove Yuè I love that nickname Yuè nickname 2: kurtsie wurtsie Yuè mini 2Glee Spoof Minisode 2 | Santana Exposes All Yuè TATER TOTS YEAAAAAH Yuè "Penises and Winecoolers: a dangerous combination" Yuè "you've been a bad girl Santana" oh lord Yuè mini 3Glee Spoof Minisode 3 | Fondue for Two Yuè wait Yuè this isn't minisode 3 Yuè this is the other Fondue for Two mini Yuè okay in other words minisode 3 has disappeared so let's just move to Yuè mini 4Glee Spoof Minisode 4 |The Glee Cast Discover the Gl... Yuè this s where it gets real Yuè "SAVE THE HORSES" Yuè this is the first time the actual sim "actors" were in a video Yuè "am I really that tall?" "YES!" Yuè mini 5Glee Spoof Minisode 5 | Quinn's Summer Before Senior... Yuè I actually ripped the audio off of this one and put it on my phone so that I could listen t it Yuè "you have too many messages fr me to count" Yuè "BLAINE HOW MANY TMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU NOT TO SING DURING-" Yuè quinn's face when Finn tries to order a pizza Yuè "..." "that must've been Tina leaving a message" Yuè mini 6Glee Spoof Minisode 6 | The Glee Club Gets Tested Yuè "you know I'm gonna flunk" Yuè Oh Santana Yuè "cow ass no. 5?" Yuè "you're all fucking crazy" "we didn't need a test to tell us that" Yuè mini 7 for realGlee Spoof Minisode 7 | Fondue for Two Part 2 Yuè "do you enjoy being a lesbian?" Yuè nickname 3: puffy-bear Yuè again.. oh Santana Yuè "you do like tossing things" "yeah like..." "my girlfriend out of the closet" Yuè mini 8Glee Spoof Minisode 8 | Brainstorming with the Creat... Yuè RIB is at it again Yuè "is Obama available?" if only Yuè Ian does no shit Yuè hey it's a Zises Yuè I love the Sim cast Yuè "what the fuck did I just read" after the IKAG script is gold Yuè mini 9Glee Spoof Minisode 9 | The Glee Cast Auditions Yuè Sim cast is back wohoo Yuè "my name is-" "you've got the part" Yuè "no way that's HELLA cool!" Yuè mini 10Glee Spoof Minisode 10 | To Catch a Pedo Will Yuè you know that's also HELLA cool? Yuè more of Brianna as sugar Yuè "Because my boyfriend is super awesome" Yuè Sue knocking Schue down always gets me Yuè mini 11Glee Spoof Minisode 11 | Favorite Moments Yuè TIME FOR SENTIMENT Yuè I agree with Michael. "Where's ma crown?" is my favourite part as well Yuè the Christmas crap festGlee Spoof Christmas Special | Holly Jolly Crap Fest Yuè honestly I haven't seen this one in ages Yuè "this Irish dude" Yuè "????????????????" Yuè this was very weird tbh Yuè they never released that song Yuè comic conGlee Cast Comic Con Spoof Yuè I thought it was very cool that actual viewers could send in audio questions Yuè fucking mcgustin Yuè never forget mcgustin Yuè save horses and coffee 2k17 Yuè Oh shit Lea's laugh Yuè LEA Yuè go for it Darren Yuè sneak peek Behind the Scenes of Glee Spoofs Yuè this is like one minute long but it points out so many glee flaws it's hilarious Yuè "I asked for development and they gave me a wheelchair" Yuè btw I am watching all the little glee spoofs and other bts stuff but I'm not gonna live blog them

#lb 2018 #lb watching #lb glee #plurk adventures

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junker-town · 4 years

Text

The start of Western Illinois’ NCAA tournament run in Year 22, continued

The Leathernecks enter the NCAA tournament as a No. 11 seed with an impossibly tough draw.

Welcome back to our simulated dynasty with the Western Illinois Leathernecks in College Hoops 2K8. You can find a full explanation of this project + spoiler-free links to previous seasons here. Check out the introduction to this series from early April for full context. As a reminder, we simulate every game in this series and only control the recruiting and coaching strategies.

We pick up with the Leathernecks in the first round of the 2029 NCAA tournament, but first here’s a recap of everything that’s happened so far this season.

Coming off a disappointing loss in the round of 32 to No. 1 seed Xavier last season, the Leathernecks enter the new year ranked No. 19 in the preseason polls. We have three new starters.

We went 6-5 in the non-conference schedule before sweeping the Summit League and winning the conference tournament once again. We earned a No. 11 seed to the NCAA tournament, entering at 27-5 overall.

We recruited for one scholarship, but didn’t land anyone yet.

Read: Western Illinois, Year 22, 2028-2029

Here’s a look at our roster heading into the NCAA tournament:

No one can doubt the overall talent level of this roster. We’re rated as a 100 overall for a reason — we have a great combination of experienced top-end talent plus depth. It is fair to wonder who are takeover scorer is going to be, though.

I have full confidence in Kevin Brazzle, the 7’2 junior center and projected top pick in the NBA draft. He’s put up numbers all year and figures to give a consistent scorer and rebounder inside. Who steps up on the perimeter is a better question. Wilbur Ager, our lone senior, has had a good career thus far, but he’s never had to be the man in the shadow of Allen Cunningham and others. Now we need him to play like a star. Does Ager have a Wilky Henry-like run in him? The spotlight is also waiting for Mathew Alloway, now a junior and a starter every year he’s been eligible. Alloway has the size (6’7), he has the shooting, and he brings it defensively. We’ve had him circled as a future star for years. The future is here.

Point guard Jamie Burke and power forward L.F. Neal, both first-year starters as juniors, are less accomplished but still talented. Our bench has a 300-pound center in Artie Snipes, a 6’10 wing in Jitim Dupree, and our best three-point shooter in 6-foot guard Koko Reeves. We’re good enough to lean on a star-by-committee approach, but someone is going to have to step up against an incredibly formidable UConn team.

The Huskies have been killer throughout this sim, one of only four programs to win two titles (the others: Louisville, Maryland, UCLA) while we have three. UConn knocked us out in the Elite Eight back in Year 18. They have a loaded roster once again. Both teams enter the game rated as a 100 overall:

Maryland is likely waiting in the round of 32 and top-seed Xavier is likely waiting in the Sweet 16. Our Leathernecks are used to getting shafted by the committee, and it happened in a major way this year. This might be our toughest draw ever.

We watched this game on Twitch together on Sunday night. As always, I’m not controlling Western Illinois during the game, we’re watching a simulated game. Unfortunately the video transfer to YouTube is taking forever and still isn’t fully uploaded even after 12+ hours. I’ll add videos in this post when it’s complete.

Let’s go!

***

Win, 103-89! Second half team!

This was getting dark for a minute there. Led by my long-lost relative Donny O’Donnell (36 points), UConn opened up a double digit lead late in the first half. That’s when I switched us into a 1-2-1-1 zone full court press defense. We started forcing turnovers, which led to easy offense, which led to us taking control of the game. We dropped 65 damn points in the second half, which is just amazing.

twitch_clip

I loved what I saw out of Alloway, finishing with 19 points on 3-of-3 shooting from three-point range. Ager struggled to shoot the ball from the outside (1-of-5 from three) but still found a way score 17 points and also had four steals.

twitch_clip

Our front court gave us a great complement next to our guards. Neal played the game of his life: 20 points, 11 rebounds, and five stocks. He’s had a quiet career so far but we don’t win that game without him. Brazzle continues to be the picture of consistency by going off for another fat double-double of 17 points and 16 rebounds.

Less good: point guard Jamie Burke, who finished with eight turnovers turnovers and 0-of-4 shooting from three.

We absolutely would have lost this game without the switch to a full court press defense. The final scoreboard says we won by 14, but man does it feel like that’s a game we easily could have lost. Even still, it feels great to beat UConn in the tournament. Unfortunately, it isn’t getting any easier from here.

Our next opponent in the next our is No. 3 seed Maryland, who beat No. 14 Samford in their opening game.

No. 11 seed Western Illinois vs. No. 3 seed Maryland, round of 32, 2029 NCAA tournament

Maryland has been one of the better programs in the country throughout this sim. Like UConn, the Terps have two national championships while consistently being a factor late in the tournament.

Maryland enters the game as a 100 overall — the same rating as us. Here’s a look at their roster:

You can see that Maryland doesn’t have a ton of size, with no one taller than 6’7 listed on the first page of the roster. In a lot of ways, this Terps roster reminds me of the Xavier team that knocked us out in the round of 32 last year: lots of dynamic guards and wings who can knock down shots. Like us, they have six players rated in the 90s.

Let’s cut down on the turnovers, defend the three-point line, and feed Brazzle inside when we have the ball. We’re going to need to play better than we did against UConn to win this game.

We watched this game on Twitch on Sunday night. Once again: it’s a simulated game; I’m not controlling Western Illinois on the court.

This group knows the pain of losing in the round of 32 because it happened to us last year. A win here and we likely get a rematch against Xavier, who knocked us out last season. We want a rematch. Let’s go!

***

Win, 95-91! We juuust had enough to hang on there in the second half.

We were in control for most of that game and I was feeling pretty good about it. We took a nine-point lead into the half on a Wilbur Ager tip-in. We pushed that lead to 16 points early in the second half, but credit Maryland for refusing to go away. The Terps went on a run in the last five minutes and hit a three-pointer with 17.5 seconds left to make it a three-point game. It was a two-point game with 4.5 seconds left when Jamie Burke missed the front end of a 1-and-1 at the foul line. Fortunately, Alloway grabbed the offensive rebound and iced the win at the line.

While I didn’t switch to a full court press defense in this one, we actually had more steals (12) than we did vs. UConn (10). I thought our defense set the tone once again. It had to be that way considering we couldn’t get a good look from behind the arc all night. Maryland hit 10 more three-pointers than us — 13 to three — but we were able to stay alive by attempting three times as many free throws. It wasn’t a pretty offensive performance for us, but it was enough to get the win.

Brazzle was a monster and really does feel like the trump card during this tournament run. It is so nice to have a 7’2 center we can consistently go to when we need a bucket. He was excellent to finish with 27 points and 14 rebounds on 13-of-20 shooting from the field. That performances locks him in as a top-five center in program history, I think. We lose without him because no one really got going.

twitch_clip

Alloway, Ager, and Neal were all solid but unspectacular. Maryland’s star wing Ross Pasco ran all over us, going off for 33 points on seven made threes. That’s two wings putting up massive individual scoring games on us so far. Something to monitor.

Ager still made big plays when we needed him to.

twitch_clip

I am officially worried about Burke at this point. We’ve had so many subpar point guards over the years and there’s no way to really know until you see them out there. Burke was a very solid four-star recruit at No. 71 overall in his class — the type of player we’d take every time. He has succumb to the same issues as Armien Amous and Angel Keita before him though: too many turnover. After eight turnovers against UConn, he had five or six this game. We need to take better care of the ball.

As we sim to the next week, we have some shocking news: No. 7 seed Richmond stunned top-seeded Xavier in the round of 32! That means we face the Spiders with an Elite Eight trip on the line!

No. 11 Western Illinois vs. No. 7 Richmond, Sweet 16, 2029 NCAA tournament

Every deep NCAA tournament run requires at least a little bit of luck, and there’s no doubt we got it in a big way with this matchup. Xavier appeared to have the most players rated in the 90s — seven — of any team in the tournament this year. They also demolished us on this stage last year. I am feeling so much more confident against Richmond.

How the hell did the Spiders beat Xavier? Xavier was a 100 overall and Richmond is a 91 overall. Here’s a look at Richmond’s roster, with only one player rated in the 90s.

This is a game we should win, but I’m sure Xavier thought that, too. One win away from the Elite Eight, let’s get it.

We also watched this game on Twitch on Sunday night, the first time we’ve ever streamed three games on the same night. Why stop now? Standard disclaimer goes here: I’m not controlling WIU, we’re watching a simulated game.

Let’s go!

***

Win, 136-71. Absolute domination out of our ‘Necks. We’re going to the Elite Eight!

This was a beatdown from the opening tip. We got out to a 10-point lead in the first seven minutes and never looked back. We were up 30 by halftime and had already pulled our starters.

First things first: shout-out to our embattled point guard Jamie Burke. who finished with an exquisite line of 12 points, 11 assists, zero turnovers. He also hit 4-of-6 shots from three-point range. Exactly what we want out of our point guards. Just a textbook great PG performance.

twitch_clip

Ager was also awesome to finish with 19 points. He was super aggressive from the jump and it looked like he knew no one on Richmond could match his physicality. That was tight. Alloway also played an efficient and wonderful game with 14 points on 6-of-8 shooting, all in the first half I think.

How about our defense? We had 17 steals, a new high for this tournament run. Unreal.

Looking back through the records, that’s our biggest win ever. 65-point win! The bench also beat Richmond by 30 in the second half. Just ridiculous.

I thought the future of the program was on full display as the bench got some run with a big lead. Wow, were they great. Jitim Dupre: 22 points, 10 rebounds, four steals, three makes from deep. Edwin Wolfe led us in scoring!?! I never would have guessed. The former five-star JUCO recruit is now a RS sophomore and rated an 80 overall. That’s disappointing by our standards, but he played so much better than his ratings in this game. Wolfe finished with 26 points on 10-of-16 shooting from the field and 6-of-12 shooting from three.

twitch_clip

Artie Snipes also deserves a shout-out with 20 points off the bench. He’ll be our starting center once Brazzle bounces to the draft after this year and it feels like we won’t be losing much at center with him in the lineup.

That sets up a game vs. No. 8 seed Tennessee. The Vols stunned No. 1 seed Stanford in the round of 32 and then took out defending national champs BYU in the Sweet 16 to force their way into the Elite Eight. If you had this game on your bracket, more power to you.

No. 11 seed Western Illinois vs. No. 8 seed Tennessee, Elite Eight, 2029 NCAA tournament

The Elite Eight has been a nightmare round for us in the past — most memorably when we saw three straight seasons end in this round from Year 16, Year 17, and Year 18. The allure of the Final Four is so strong that guys start to get tense. You can’t really blame them, but we need to be better today.

Tennessee looks solid but not overwhelming from a talent perspective. I think this is the first time we’ve ever played them? Here’s a look at the Vols’ roster:

Guess what? We playing this game out too. A four-game stream. Win or lose, this will be our last game of the night.

I’m not controlling WIU, but you know that by now.

Final Four on the line. Let’s goOoOoOoO!

***

Win, 100-92! We’re going to the Final Four for the fifth time in program history, and we will be looking for our fourth national title once we get there.

Ohhhhh my gosh, that was close. The second half felt as tense as any game we’ve ever played in this dynasty. Tennessee refused to go away, hitting threes, getting and-ones, forcing steals — they really made us work for it. Shot of the night goes to our senior, Wilbur Ager. With our Leathernecks up two points with 18 seconds left and about five seconds separating the shot clock from the game clock, Ager fired a catch-and-shoot three-pointer that was cash to seal the win.

I was so nervous when he shot this, and elated when it went in.

twitch_clip

What a shot. If he misses, the Vols have the ball and a chance to win the game on the last possession. Instead, it goes in, Ager is the hero, and we advance to the Final Four. Wow.

I felt like Nick Nurse in this game: I was riding my starters until the very end. All of them were excellent. Burke went all 40 minutes and only scored one point, but he finished with 13 assists and limited his turnovers. Alloway played like a flat-out star with 28 points on 12-of-17 shooting. Ager hit a very nice 6-of-9 shots from deep. Brazzle had another ridiculous double-double with 25 points and 15 rebounds.

L.F. Neal also made two super tough field goals in crunch-time to help seal the win:

twitch_clip

Unreal. I never thought this team would make the Final Four, not after losing three starters and potentially the GOAT Leatherneck in Allen Cunningham. I thought our tournament draw was far too difficult for a run like this. I’m so happy I was wrong.

We’ve been to the Final Four four other times. Three times we won the national title. Let’s go back banner No. 4.

Our opponent in the Final Four is No. 1 seed George Washington. GW has a created player at center in former bracket contest runner-up Steven Frye. We made Frye as a three-star recruit back in the day but he’s really developed into a great player. Frye vs. Brazzle will be a signature matchup inside. GW is rated as a 98 overall, so this won’t be easy.

We’re going to stream this game on Wednesday, September 16 at 8:30 p.m. ET on Twitch. Here’s how you can watch the game:

How to watch Western Illinois vs. George Washington in the 2029 Final Four

Game: No. 11 seed Western Illinois vs. No. 1 seed George Washington, Final Four, 2029 NCAA tournament

How to watch: My Twitch channel

Date: Wednesday, Sept. 16

Tip-off time: 8:30 p.m. ET // 7:30 p.m. CT. The stream will start a little earlier.

If we win: The national championship game against the winner of No. 1 Kansas vs. No. 9 USC will follow immediately after.

What about the bracket contest?

Bracket contest results are up on Sean’s app — which works on desktop and mobile. Someone named Doop is currently winning. Way to go, Doop. Thanks to Sean again for running the bracket contest — follow Sean on Twitter at @hoopsinsight.

I’ll see you Wednesday night. Let’s hang banner No. 4.

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toldnews-blog · 6 years

Photo

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/united-states-of-america/state-of-the-union-trumps-address-will-be-postponed-claims-pelosi-aide-live/

State of the Union: Trump's address will be postponed, claims Pelosi aide – live

2.59pm EST14:59

Two senators have introduced legislation to require the special counsel to directly submit a report to Congress rather than simply to the attorney general.

Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand)

Dem Sen. Blumenthal and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley have introduced The Special Counsel Transparency Act, which “requires that a Special Counsel submit a report directly to Congress and the public at the conclusion of an investigation,” or if he/she is fired or resigns. pic.twitter.com/2x1WbC72DL

January 28, 2019

2.17pm EST14:17

Another Democratic presidential candidate will enter the fray tonight.

New Age author Marianne Williamson will announce her bid.

Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson)

Join me tonight as I formally announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Live in Los Angeles, the Saban Theatre 8440 Wilshire Blvd. 7:30PM, or livestream at https://t.co/zVBvuNdwg8

January 28, 2019

Williamson travelled to Iowa last summer exploring a bid.

1.51pm EST13:51

Gwyneth Paltrow has a podcast?

Allan Smith (@akarl_smith)

Schultz told Gwyneth Paltrow on her podcast there’s “a lack of civility” and “a lack of respect” in the U.S.

“We are imprinting a young generation with a lack of civility and hate and fear – and I don’t think we’re going to know the consequences of that for quite some time.”

January 28, 2019

1.34pm EST13:34

Trump ‘very pissed off’, ‘really hopping mad’

According to Politico he is, anyway – over claims made by former aide Cliff Sims in the new book Team of Vipers.

Sims’ book is due out tomorrow but was scooped up by the Guardian last week. It tells the now familiar tale of White House chaos, bickering and skullduggery. And apparently it has really upset the president.

From Politico:

President Donald Trump is “very pissed off” and “really hopping mad” at former aide Cliff Sims’ new book that reveals firsthand the chaos and infighting that is ever present in his White House, according to several current and former White House officials.

Trump is asking aides: “Who is this guy? Why is he writing this book? He wasn’t even in meetings,” the sources said. He also dismissively refers to Sims – who served until last May as director of White House message strategy and a special assistant to the president —as “the videographer” because he also helped Trump with the weekly video and radio addresses, according to three current and former White House officials.

Trump: mad. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Updated at 1.39pm EST

1.20pm EST13:20

Potential billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has thrown some shade at potential billionaire presidential candidate Howard Schultz, claiming an independent run for president would “end up re-electing” Trump.

Schultz announced this weekend that he is considering running for the White House as a “centrist independent, outside of the two-party system”.

On Monday Bloomberg, who is considering running as a Democrat, said he has crunched the numbers – and all an independent run would do is split the anti-Trump vote.

It’s no secret that I looked at an independent bid in the past. In fact I faced exactly the same decision now facing others who are considering it.

The data was very clear and very consistent. Given the strong pull of partisanship and the realities of the electoral college system, there is no way an independent can win. That is truer today than ever before.

In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the president. That’s a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can’t afford to run it now.

Bloomberg: don’t do it, Schultz. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Updated at 1.22pm EST

1.03pm EST13:03

Poll! Poll! Poll!

This one is from Marquette Law School, who have surveyed Wisconsin voters. It seems 42% of Wisconsinites approve of the job Trump is doing, while 52% disapprove.

That approval rating is better than the national average, but it’s down from October, when 47% approved of Trump’s performance.

Worse news for Trump – who narrowly won in Wisconsin in 2016 – is that not many people say they will vote for him in 2020:

Among all registered voters, 27% say they would definitely vote to reelect Trump if the 2020 elections were held today, 12% say they would probably vote to reelect him. Eight per cent would probably vote for someone else and 49% would definitely vote for someone else.

Updated at 1.13pm EST

12.38pm EST12:38

Sanders to give White House briefing

Martin Pengelly

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is due to give an on-camera press briefing at 3pm ET.

Ordinarily that would not be news but these are not, as many eminently qualified people have observed, normal times. Sanders last briefed the White House press corps on camera on 18 December, Trump recently tweeted that he had told his press secretary “not to bother”, and the general dwindling of this once-glorious illustration of the power of the first amendment/blast of sound and fury signifying nothing has become a story in itself.

Amid the usual economies with the actualité and tetchy exchanges with grandstanding reporters with on-camera presences to think about, Sanders will doubtless be asked whether Trump is going to shut down the government again if he doesn’t get his money for a wall. On Sunday, the president spoke to the Wall Street Journal and said he thought the chances of bipartisan negotiators producing a deal on border security funding he could accept were “less than 50/50”.

The president also said he doubted he would accept less than the demand for $5.7bn for his border wall that caused the last shutdown, and doubted whether he would accept any deal involving a path to citizenship for young undocumented migrants, a Democratic priority.

Earlier the same day, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney went on the talk shows and was duly asked if Trump was prepared to shut down the government again in three weeks’ time, if his prediction proves accurate and no deal is produced.

“Yeah, I think he actually is,” Mulvaney said. “He doesn’t want to shut the government down, let’s make that very clear. He doesn’t want to declare a national emergency.”

Most observers assume Trump will in fact do the latter, in an attempt to bypass Congressional budget control altogether.

“The president’s commitment is to defend the nation, and he will do it either with or without Congress,” Mulvaney told Fox News Sunday.

Acting without Congress would likely trigger both legal challenges and intense political and philosophical debate about the extent and/or abuse of executive power.

So that will be fun.

Updated at 1.16pm EST

12.05pm EST12:05

An early endorsement for Kamala Harris, from Congressman Ted Lieu:

Ted Lieu (@tedlieu)

I endorse @KamalaHarris for President.

Known Kamala for many years & worked together on various issues. She embraces the future, not the past, and is the person we need to move America forward.

Watch the #HarrisTownHall tonight at 7 pm PT / 10 pm ET to learn more about Kamala. https://t.co/P4ywl9U3Op

January 28, 2019

The Iowa caucuses are just 12 months away! Could this be a game-changer?

Updated at 12.07pm EST

11.57am EST11:57

Will Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, mount a presidential primary challenge against Donald Trump?

Probably not, but it hasn’t stopped news organizations from speculating. CNN is particularly keen on the idea, noting that Hogan “enjoys high approval ratings” in Maryland.

But CNN adds, a little underwhelmingly: “There’s been no indication of any concrete steps toward a primary bid and a spokesperson for Hogan did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.”

Larry Hogan, applauding about something or other. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

11.24am EST11:24

There’s nothing like a bit of Brexit news to make one feel better about US politics.

The latest development in the ongoing shambles is that a top EU official believes the risk of a “no-deal Brexit” – which essentially amounts to the UK crashing out of the EU with no clear plan forward – is now “very high”.

The Guardian’s man in Westminster Andrew Sparrow has the latest developments.

Shakespeare. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

And if you’re still confused – like me – about terms like “backstop”, “Norway plus” and “SuperCanada”, then here’s a handy guide.

Updated at 1.15pm EST

11.17am EST11:17

Shutdown cost the economy $11bn, says Congressional Budget Office

The border wall-inspired government shutdown cost the economy $3bn in the fourth quarter of 2018 and is expected to cost $8bn in the first quarter of 2019, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Some of $11bn that will be recovered once federal workers start getting paid again, the CBO says. But not all:

Although most of the real GDP lost during the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 will eventually be recovered, CBO estimates that about $3bn will not be. That amount equals 0.02% of projected annual GDP in 2019. In other words, the level of GDP for the full calendar year is expected to be 0.02% smaller than it would have been otherwise.

The CBO says the cost to the economy is due mainly to “the loss of furloughed federal workers’ contribution to GDP, the delay in federal spending on goods and services, and the reduction in aggregate demand (which thereby dampened private-sector activity)”.

Trump wanted $5.7bn for the border wall, in exchange for ending the shutdown.

Updated at 11.26am EST

10.46am EST10:46

Pelosi: no State of Union on Tuesday

Donald Trump will not give his State of the Union address on Tuesday, according to an aide to Nancy Pelosi.

CNN reports that the address – Trump’s second – is not going to happen as had been scheduled before the shutdown.

The back-and-forth over Trump giving his State of the Union speech in the House chamber was a running sidenote to the government shutdown.

Pelosi asked Trump to postpone the address until after the shutdown ended, citing security concerns. Trump rejected that, saying he was going to do it anyway. Pelosi again said he would not be allowed to. The master dealmaker then caved, agreeing to postpone the speech.

It’s now unclear when Trump will address the nation.

Updated at 11.59am EST

10.19am EST10:19

There’s more bad news for Trump today – in the form of a Washington Post-ABC poll that finds the president “has largely underperformed the even modest expectations that Americans had for him as he took office”.

Nearly six out of ten Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump as a person, according to the survey. A majority of people also “doubt his empathy, honesty and ability to make political deals”, according to the Post.

The poll compares the expectations people had for Trump in January 2017 to current views of the president.

The Washington Post (@washingtonpost)

Midway through first term, Trump is failing to meet the public’s expectations for his job performance, Post-ABC poll finds https://t.co/ukVYXSIcWc

January 28, 2019

When Trump took office 50% of people thought he would do a good job on reducing the federal deficit, according to the poll. Now only 33% think he is doing well.

The federal deficit was a longtime rallying cry for Republicans under Obama, but McConnell and co were strangely silent as Trump’s tax cuts caused the deficit to balloon to $779bn in 2018 – an increase of 17%.

Updated at 10.20am EST

9.37am EST09:37

Martin Pengelly

Howard Schultz. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Howard Schultz’s announcement that he is considering a run for the White House as an independent has caused consternation among Democrats, who fear a third-party run from a candidate with many of their policies – Schultz himself told CBS he’s a “lifelong Democrat” and listed some progressive-ish policy positions – could split the vote and hand a second term to Trump.

Trump himself duly tweeted about the former Starbucks chief executive on Monday morning, saying that Schultz is not “the smartest person” … because he is. No presidential nickname has yet been coined.

Schultz himself acknowledged that his ambitions are not for everyone, telling the news site Axios he knows he is:

going to create hate, anger, disenfranchisement from friends, from Democrats.

Axios reports that the billionaire businessman is, however, convinced he is doing the right thing. He’s certainly doing the write thing, releasing a campaign-oriented biography today with a launch in his native New York.

It’s called From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America. Before you rush to the store to order it, consider this from the Guardian’s Lloyd Green, on the often (if not always) dubious pedigree of the presidential campaign book:

9.09am EST09:09

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the day’s political news.

In Washington and around the country, hundreds of thousands of federal employees will return to work for the first time in 2019 as museums and national parks prepare to open. A surprising climb down by Donald Trump ended the longest shutdown in US history on Friday, but it could be a several more days before employees receive their pay.

Congress has less than three weeks to present Trump with a border security plan he likes. A bipartisan group of members were selected to lead the negotiations but Trump has already dismissed the prospect that they will come up with a proposal he would sign. In that case, Trump has vowed to declare a national emergency to build his wall along the south-western border. And on the talk shows on Sunday, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the president could shut down the government again.

Trump has no public events scheduled today but that doesn’t mean we haven’t heard from him and won’t be hearing more.

Already this morning he has tweeted about tarrifs and bible study classes. He also taunted former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, saying he doesn’t have the “guts”’to run for president.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!

January 28, 2019

#Democrats #Donald Trump #Republicans #Trump administration #Trump-Russia investigation #US elections 2020 #US federal government shutdown 2019 #US news #US politics

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team-skull-admin · 8 years

Text

My favorite 40 games of all-time

Made an arbitrary list of my favorite games of all-time cause I wanted to figure out where Breath of the Wild is on it. It’s, uh, pretty high. Assload of text below the break.

40: Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow I'm not the world's biggest Symphony of the Night fan (outside of the incredible soundtrack) and I think this is where Iga's seamless platformers found their footing.

39: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger I love goofy, experimental games like this and Far Cry: Blood Dragon, but I think the schtick in this (an unreliable narrator bragging about their heroic exploits) works better than Blood Dragon's dorky 80s nostalgia.

38: Rayman Origins A beautiful platformer with incredible level design. The music for the diabolical secret level is seared into my memory.

37: Cibele A short, story-centric indie game that captures the essence of playing MMOs in the mid-2000s and long-distance relationships. The awkward conversations in this game made me think about my WoW years for an entire weekend.

36: Mario Kart Wii It's not technically the "best" Mario Kart, but I actually enjoyed the motorcycles and I have fond memories of crushing my brother while we downed beers and talked shit.

35: Guild of Dungeoneering I'm usually not super into "We made X game, but added CARDS!" even though I love card games, but they nailed the loop here. I vaguely remember one of the decks being super busted, though.

34: Tropico 4 Adding a political slant to Sim City by making you the leader of a banana republic was just the slant to that formula I was looking for, and I lost a weekend circa New Year's '13 just delving into this hard.

33: Gran Turismo 2 My brother bought a PS1 off a friend when they upgraded to a PS2, and I grabbed a copy of this cheaply at the local EB Games. Once I wrapped my mind around the simulation, upgrading cars and havin fun with them here might have more to do with me being somewhat of a car person than anything else.

32: Metal Gear Solid 4 I should really put the whole series on here, but MGS4 deserves special note for making the core stealth actually fun and somehow tying all the loose ends of the insane plot together while dialing up the insanity even further.

31: Sim City 2000 I figured out how to make a 50,000 person city when I was like, 8. I still have no fucking idea how I did this. It took me till my 20s to crack 100k.

30: Pokemon Black/White People are torn on this game, but the contentious design decision to hide the old Pokemon in the postgame made every new encounter incredibly exciting in a way the series hadn't been since the orignals. The writing also shows signs of the maturity that Sun/Moon would follow through with.

29: Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 I think most would deride this series as a soulless Pokemon cash-grab on the surface, but they're actually roguelikes with a crazy monster breeding system and the most rote of stories to get you into the core loop of exploring new keys to breed ever crazier monsters.

28: Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Diablo 3 vanilla's reliance on the auction house created design issues that were hard to look past, but Blizzard abandoning it for the expansion made the game into an incredible dungeon crawler. I never laddered, but had fun for hundreds of hours chasing loot with friends.

27: Fallout 3 I'll never forget the feeling of walking out of the vault for the first time, and feeling like I could go anywhere. I also think this is the only Bethesda game that regularly pays off when exploring - weird shit like the Republic of Dave or the man stuck in the tree are fantastic rewards for poking at the less inhabited edges of the map.

26: Bassin's Black Bass featuring Hank Parker I'm honestly wondering if the rest of the world has picked up on this game's low-key genius since I saw it for 15 bucks at a retro game store recently, but this game's arcadey fishing is incredibly satisfying and snappy. It has some major, obvious, irritating mechanical issues, but the core gameplay loop is so good I don't care.

25: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor I still remember my nemesis. This motherfucker was right at the beginning of the game, inside the first quest area, and was like level 5 or 6, but had a defensive ability that made it harder for me to gank him easily. So he killed me. Twice. And leveled up each time, becoming a level 12 badass who could literally sniff me out when I hid. But he was weak to fire, and I lured him to a campfire and set him ablaze, getting my revenge.

24: Super Metroid I feel like most people would have this game higher on the list, but I think the controls are floaty and Meridia is overly confusing. The rest of the game is incredible and I can't believe they pulled it off on a Super Nintendo.

23: Pokemon Sun/Moon After XY and ORAS were disapointments I was cool on Pokemon, but Sun/Moon challenged a ton of series conventions and got a lot right in the process. I can't believe how deftly this game handles dysfunctional families.

22: A Link Between Worlds This was Nintendo's hit at what was to come with Zelda - a smart, experimental take on the franchise that's easily its best 2d outing.

21: Muramasa: The Demon Blade Vanillaware's magnum opus, a gorgeous Metroidvania where everything is hand-painted. The combat's loop of mixing launchers with sword management is also incredibly fun, if not particularly deep. But fuck I loved looking at it so much and it felt good.

20: The Walking Dead Only time a video game made me cry.

19: Banjo-Kazooie The only 3d collect-a-thon platformer from that era that still holds up, it combines cheeky humor and an incredible soundtrack to craft a world that's always surprising.

18: Borderlands 2 is better crafted, but I enjoyed the dry wit and more grounded guns of the first. I've replayed this like 4 times and I'm not entirely sure why, but I have a blast each time.

17: Doom (2016) Apparently the secret to making this license work in a modern context is to give Halo combat arenas a healthy dose of cocaine and play Meshuggah riffs over it. It so fucking works.

16: Saints Row: The Third I think the writing in GTA is usually sophomoric at best and its attempts at commentary are eye-roll worthy, but having a game say "FUCK IT" and just Mel Brooks that experience is such a wonderful idea. It's also hard to pull off, and SR3 totally sticks the landing (unlike the sequel).

15: Super Mario World The best traditional Mario game. I replayed it recently, and it struck me how much secret exits add to the level design versus 3, and how freed Koji Kondo is by the new hardware. The castle music's classical overture sticks out.

14: Monster Hunter 4 I liked Monster Hunter 3's various iterations but I hated swimming. Taking out swimming and replacing it with mounting was enough for me to sink hundreds of hours. I actively avoided getting Generations because I knew it would interfere with school.

13: Mario Golf (GBC) The perfect portable game. Golf works well on the platform, and adding basic RPG hooks was enough to make a rote story totally engaging.

12: Super Mario Maker I think the real triumph of Mario Maker isn't the levels (which are usually terrible), it's how Nintendo imparted the feeling of being creative in such an easily digestible and satisfying way. It's an achievement that ascends past Mario design (which still works here) into something greater and more profound.

11: Hearthstone I fucking hate this game and I keep playing it because the Arena is like literal fucking crack and every time I have an opponent at 1 life and they beat me they can eat fucking dicks.

10: Super Mario RPG Clever writing and a strange world grabbed me way harder than Intelligent System's later Paper Mario games. It's too easy and doesn't look as slick now, but the writing still holds up.

09: Mass Effect Trilogy You can't really separate these, as the experience that makes Mass Effect great was carrying your Shepard and their decisions from one game to the next. Everyone will remember Garrus, Wrex, and co. Shame about the ending.

08: Tetris I am weirdly good at Tetris. I know what a T-Spin is. I sank hundreds of hours into it on Facebook. I don't regret it.

07: Persona 4 Describe a game to me as a mix of a J-RPG and a slice-of-life anime and I'll run to the hills, so the fact this game's sharp, mature writing and "just one more day" calendar mechanic combined into one of my favorite games of all-time is a shock. They also put in Pokemon with fucking demons, how cool is that shit?

06: Ocarina of Time I can't believe this game came out in 1998. The world is still fun to traverse, and the dungeon design (especially as an adult) still holds up at the top of action-adventure puzzle design.

05: Magic: the Gathering I wish it was less expensive otherwise it'd be higher.

04: Breath of the Wild I can't believe Nintendo reinvented the wheel so well that I'm putting the game so high on the list. Every design decision in this game is carefully considered to make exploring this iteration of Hyrule that much more satisfying. And its incredibly clever chemistry engine, where every object in the game has chemical properties that can be manipulated as well as physics, creates a ton of emergent gameplay scenarios where you're constantly asking "Can I do that?" and the game almost never lets you down.

03: World of Warcraft Sometimes I regret the 4000 hours I spent in Azeroth, but I'd have a hard time giving up the friends I made there. I could probably shred and like, speak another language though.

02: Pokemon Red I was the perfect age for Pokemon mania, and the fact that the core game was literally designed to appeal to me didn't help. I still love collecting the things and min/maxing ways to beat the Elite 4 with minimal grinding.

01: Mega Man X I think this is literally the perfect platformer. Moving X feels incredible. There's nothing in any of the levels I think is out of place. The soundtrack is a masterpiece. And the game's hidden secret is so insane you'd probably call bullshit on any kid who told it to you at recess. I'm really glad the rest of the world picked up on it after Arin Hanson did a Sequelitis about it, because I've been beating this drum for decades.

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adorkablephil · 8 years

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Phil's YouNow 1/19/17

Note: This isn't any attempt at a comprehensive summary of Phil's live show, just some of my personal reactions.

He seemed relaxed but energetic, with no hint of discomfort with the additional audience coming from YouTube. In fact, he was being particularly funny and goofy and kept making me laugh out loud, which doesn't usually happen. Maybe that is what he's like when he feels more "on stage"? Maybe Dan gets a bit more stressed and Phil gets a bit goofier?

He told a really funny story about another 2017 attempt to kill him. He was making chili and left it on the stove while he went off to look at something on Netflix, but he got distracted and lost track of time and when he finally made it back into the kitchen the chili was on fire and the room was filled with smoke. He had left a spatula in the chili (who uses a spatula when making chili? Weird!), so he grabbed it to take it out, but the handle had become extremely hot and burned him, so he flung it across the room, spattering chili all over the place, and now he has a painful, ugly blister on his index finger. Someone in the chat said he's a hazard, and he totally agreed.

He and Dan made two gaming videos today, including a Sims one in which Dab becomes a toddler. The other gaming video should be going up tomorrow. LessAmazingPhil has hit 1 million subscribers, so he got another big plaque thing from YouTube, though he still hasn't even found somewhere to hang the AmazingPhil one. The DanandPhilGames one is hanging in the "gaming room."

It seemed like he talked about Dan a lot more than usual, including another cute story about how they went into a bakery and ended up buying all kind of stuff they didn't want because they were both too awkward to turn things down when the salespeople suggested them. Sometimes I think Dan exaggerates how awkward he is, and then I hear stories like this and realize no, no, he really is that awkward.

He said he's been having trouble falling asleep lately because his brain is spinning with so many creative ideas. This made me do a little happy dance, because I can't wait to see where these creative ideas lead him!

He talked about Sherlock, the Harry Potter play, and "La La Land." An artist he likes has made a large "thumbs up" statue that's in Trafalgar Square, so Phil ordered a miniature replica, but when it arrived, he found that it was much larger than he expected and so he doesn't know what to do with it. The thumb is bizarrely elongated, looks extremely phallic, and is of an ... um ... "appropriate" size ... so it was kind of funny how Phil kept grabbing onto the statuette by wrapping his hand around the thumb. It looked suggestive enough that someone in the chat even commented on it.

Anyway, nothing else really struck me. He seemed very cheerful and funny, and it was an enjoyable live show to watch, even if his don't tend to be as thought provoking as Dan's. I've been having more thoughts about Dan's most recent live show and may post about them later.

#amazingphil #phil lester #phil's live show #phil's younow #live shows #i love phil

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mrhotmaster · 4 years

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Poco M2 Pro Detailed Review

Is it the best Rs. 15,000 phone in India now?

Poco has been particular about its cell phone portfolio. The Poco X2 (Review) was spun from Xiaomi over one year after the Poco F1. Instead of discharging 'leader executioners', for example, the F1, the organization is presently concentrating more on the spending portion. With the new Poco M2 Pro, it expects to take on the sub-Rs. 15,000 value section. Poco says it has seen a huge accomplishment with the X2 and would like to duplicate that recipe. The Poco M2 Pro beginnings at Rs. 13,999 and taking a gander at its particulars, it appears as though it could be a solid adversary to the Redmi Note 9 Pro and Realme 6, which are two brilliant contributions with comparative evaluating. In any case, numbers on a paper aren't generally a precise portrayal of genuine execution. It's an ideal opportunity to scrutinize the Poco M2 Pro, to check whether it's comparable to it's portrayed. Poco M2 Pro Structure: Deja vu Poco needs to commute home the way that the M2 Pro is made in India, with unmistakable names on the front and back of the container. While this ought to absolutely mollify a few people, the packaged charger has a 'Mi' logo on it and you're welcomed by MIUI when you boot up the telephone, so make of that what you will.

The Poco M2 Pro has an appealing structure and is manufactured well, however it likewise looks fundamentally the same as the Redmi Note 9 Pro (Review). On analyzing the two telephones one next to the other, they seem to have precisely the same body. Everything, including the catches, ports, opening punch in the presentation, and the back camera knock, lines up consummately. Poco has utilized another rakish striped example on the last seventy-five percent of the telephone. The camera module has likewise had some restorative changes. The M2 Pro shows a P2i water repellent cover, which is supposed to be checked with sprinkles. The Poco M2 Pro feels somewhat robust and huge in the hand, yet I became accustomed to the weight following a couple of days. A unique mark sensor is installed in the recessed force button, on the correct side, and it validates you with a straightforward tap. I do wish the volume catches were on the contrary side, as they are somewhat difficult to reach. The SIM plate on the left backings two Nano-SIM cards and a microSD card. The earphone jack, USB Type-C port, and speaker are at the base, while on the top, we have an optional mouthpiece and an infrared producer. Poco has utilized a full HD plus LCD Display of 6.67-inches with a pattern for the selfie camera. You likewise get Gorilla Glass 5 on the front, back, and the back camera module. I generally find pre-applied screen defenders truly irritating, yet the one on the M2 Pro isn't nosy. The showcase gets splendid, hues are punchy, and the Settings application lets you change the shading profile. One element that is missing is a high revive rate. A 120Hz board is one of the most characteristic highlights of the Poco X2, but a standard 60Hz is provided for the lower cost M2 Pro. The purpose behind this, as I was told by Poco, was that a decision must be made between quick charging and a high invigorate rate, so as to hold the cost down. The Realme 6 (Review) keeps on having the high ground among telephones estimated under Rs. 15,000 with its 90Hz showcase. In general, the Poco M2 Pro feels all around constructed and glances great in blue. It's likewise accessible in dark and green. In the crate, you can expect a silicone case, charger, link, and SIM discharge apparatus. Poco M2 Pro Programming: MIUI with Poco Launcher The similitudes to the Redmi Note 9 Pro proceed with the product. The Poco M2 Pro sudden spikes in demand for MIUI 11, which depends on Android 10, and my unit had the June security fix. Aside from having the Poco Launcher as a default, the highlights and usefulness are fundamentally the same as what you jump on Redmi gadgets. The full set-up of Mi applications is available, including Mi Music, Mi Video, Mi Browser, and so forth, and a large portion of them can't be uninstalled. There are likewise a lot of outsider applications, for example, Helo, Facebook, and some fundamental games, and these can be uninstalled. Regardless of all the stock MIUI applications, I was amazed to not perceive any spam messages from them in the warning shade. Certain areas of some applications despite everything push arbitrary advanced substance, however, this can for the most part be incapacitated. Poco M2 Pro Execution: Reliable MIUI and application execution were great all through our audit. This is to a great extent because of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G SoC. It's a similar one utilized in the Redmi Note 9 Pro and Realme 6 Pro. I am attempting the Poco M2 Pro central variation with 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM, and 64 GB of UFS 2.1 storage, and an estimated price capacity of Rs 14,999. There's a lower variation with 4GB of RAM and a similar measure of capacity, which costs Rs. 13,999, and a top-end variation with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of capacity valued at Rs. 16,999.

Exploring through MIUI's interface felt smart, performing various tasks functioned admirably, and applications when all is said in done rushed to stack. Gaming execution was generally excellent as well. I played the standard substantial hitters and all ran easily with great designs. I didn't see any warming issues either, significantly in the wake of playing for extended lengths one after another. Game Turbo is a helpful utility that gives you alternate ways for screen recording, and so forth while messing around. Recordings looked great on the Poco M2 Pro's presentation. Notwithstanding, the single speaker isn't exceptionally great. You can empower programming improvements for sound on the off chance that you utilize wired earphones, yet there's nothing to help the volume of the speaker.

Poco M2 Pro Cameras: Good, Yet Not Incredible The Poco M2 Pro has four back cameras, which incorporate an essential 48-megapixel sensor, an 8-megapixel sensor with a wide-edge focal point, a 5-megapixel large scale camera, and a 2-megapixel profundity camera. You get a 16-megapixel opening punch selfie camera. The M2 Pro has a similar adaptation of the MIUI camera application as the Redmi Note 9 Pro. From what I could tell, the main genuine contrast between the two telephones regarding usefulness is that you can utilize Night mode for the selfie camera on the M2 Pro. There are some intriguing highlights, for example, the capacity to record full-HD video with the large scale camera, and the outcomes were shockingly acceptable. Expert mode likewise underpins video recording, permitting you to physically set the presentation for a shoot and furthermore the capacity to record in LOG position, which can be shading evaluated later. For what it's worth, the Redmi Note 9 Pro has precisely the same highlights now.

In light, the Poco M2 Pro's essential camera caught gorgeous photographs. Subtleties were commonly sharp in scene shots, and hues were distinctive. The Pro shading switch lets you catch increasingly immersed hues, if necessary. Close-ups looked great as well, despite the fact that the camera application lit up hues more than they were in the real scene. The wide-point camera delivered recognizably more fragile hues and subtleties, contrasted with the primary sensor. Representation mode functioned admirably, and the degree of foundation obscure could be balanced. In low-light circumstances, the principle and wide-edge cameras battled with introduction and subtleties. The camera application worked admirably of stifling commotion, yet the photographs for the most part looked underexposed and zooming in uncovered feeble subtleties. Night mode wasn't too powerful either, scarcely successfully improve the picture.

Selfies shot under splendid light looked great. Subtleties and skin surfaces were commonly very much spoken to. Shots were average, as long as there was sufficient surrounding light around. The M2 Pro backings video recording at up to 4K 30fps. Recordings took shots at these goals had an exceptionally warm shading tone, and hues looked very misrepresented. There's no adjustment at these goals. Venturing down to 1080p, recordings looked better gratitude to adjustment and hues had an increasingly common tone. Low-light execution wasn't incredible, and recordings by and large looked a piece underexposed and grainy. Generally speaking, the cameras of the Poco M2 Pro performed appropriately under great light, however, attempted to convey palatable outcomes in low light. Poco M2 Pro Battery: Long-Enduring I found the battery life of the Poco M2 Pro to be generally excellent. The 5,000mAh limit effectively went on for a whole day, even with heaps of gaming and camera use. With lighter outstanding tasks at hand, I had the option to utilize the telephone well into the subsequent day. The telephone additionally ran for somewhat more than 17 hours in our HD video circle test, which was acceptable. The packaged 33W quick charger works superbly of rapidly charging the battery. I had the option to charge this telephone to around 95 percent in 60 minutes.

Decision: Is The Poco M2 Pro Worth Purchasing? I think the Poco M2 Pro is a decent expansion to the sub-Rs. 15,000 cell phone portion and I experience no difficulty suggesting it. From multiple points of view, you could consider it a Redmi Note 9 Pro with snappier charging at a comparative cost. In addition, it ought to be significantly simpler to purchase contrasted with Xiaomi's glimmer deal framework. The M2 Pro offers great form quality, a sharp presentation, strong battery life, and great execution. The cameras are not all that terrible either if you're shooting during the day. Notwithstanding, not at all like the Poco X2, I don't see the M2 Pro disturbing this value section just on the grounds that it's so like the Redmi Note 9 Pro which has been selling here for quite a while. The Realme 6 keeps on being a strong other option, as it's as yet the main telephone with a 90Hz showcase under Rs. 15,000.

REVIEWS

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SOFT

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SHOW

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✘BAD

☞ Great Build Quality

☞ Sharp Display

☞ Nice Processor

☞ Great Battery

☞ Great Daylight Camera Show

☞ Little Heavy

☞ Photo Quality Is Not Good At Low Light

KEY SPECIFICATIONS

DISPLAY

6.67Inch

AndroiD 10

RESOLUTION

1080x2400P

REAR CAMERA

48MP+8MP

+5MP+2MP

FRONT CAMERA

16MP

STORAGE

64GB

RAM

4GB

BATTERY

5020mAh

PROCESSOR

Snapdragon 720G

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Vivo Y15 2019 (4GB RAM, 64GB), Burgundy Red – Click Here To Go The Page

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Oppo A5 2020 (4GB RAM, 64GB), Mirror Black – Click Here To Go To The Page

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Redmi Note 9 Pro (4GB RAM, 64GTB), Interstellar Black – Click Here

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#poco m2 #poco m2 pro #poco m2 pro detail review #poco m2 pro detailed review #poco m2 pro full revi

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frontproofmedia · 6 years

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Srisaket Sor Rungvisai-Juan Francisco Estrada II Finalized for April 26

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Published: February 26, 2019

Srisaket Sor Rungvisai and Juan Francisco Estrada will meet in a rematch for the WBC and Ring magazine Super-Flyweight titles and WBA and IBF Super-Bantamweight World Champions Daniel Roman and TJ Doheny clash in a unification battle on a blockbuster night of action at The Forum, Los Angeles on Friday April 26, live on DAZN in the US and Sky Sports in the UK. Rungvisai (47-4-1 41KOs) and Estrada (38-3 26KOs) clashed at the LA venue in February 2018 and delivered a memorable all-action affair that saw Rungvisai defeat Estrada by Majority Decision to retain his WBC Super-Flyweight title. Pound for pound Thai star Rungvisai, who recently penned a promotional deal with Matchroom Boxing USA, successfully defended his title for the third time in October on home turf against Iran Diaz, while Mexican ace Estrada enters the bout on the back of wins over Felipe Orucata at The Forum in September and Victor Mendez in Carson, California in December.

“I am extremely excited and honored to be back fighting in the US again,” said Rungvisai. “Estrada is a great fighter, and we had an amazing fight last year. Our round 12 was awarded Round of the Year by WBC. That is an evidence of how entertaining the previous fight was. “I believe that this fight on April 26 will be even more entertaining. I am training extremely hard in Thailand. And I am confident I will be the winner on April 26th. “Thank you to Matchroom Boxing and DAZN for this amazing opportunity, it's such a great honor to be fighting for them. I also would like to thank WBC, NKL Team, and 360 Promotions for making this possible. I can't wait to give a great fight to all the fans on April 26th!” Roman (26-2-1 10KOs) and Doheny (21-0 15KOs) clash in a unification bout that is certain to entertain. Roman was one of the standout fighters of 2018, winning a wide points decision in the first defense of his WBA crown in Japan over Ryo Matsumoto in February and followed that with another authoritative points triumph over Moises Flores in Frisco, Dallas in June. The LA man then punctuated his year’s work by stopping Brit challenger Gavin McDonnell in the tenth round of their clash on the first American boxing bill live on DAZN in October, and now looks to make a flying start to 2019 against IBF king Doheny. Doheny’s path has echoes of his opponents as like Roman, the Australian-based Irishman travelled to Japan to land his first World title when he took the strap from Ryosuke Iwasa in Tokyo in August.

The unbeaten 32 year old signed a promotional deal with Matchroom Boxing USA in January and swiftly made his first defense in New York against Ryohei Takahashi, stopping the Japanese in the 11th round at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden, with Roman watching in the crowd. “This is the biggest and most important fight of my career," Roman said. “I haven't been shy about wanting to unifying the division. This is the fight that I've been asking for since I became a World Champion. I need to deliver on my goal of becoming the best and a win against another World Champion puts me in that conversation. “It will be a new experience for me because I'm not fighting a challenger, I'm fighting another belt holder. It's exciting in a lot of ways. I'll be at my best because I'm planning to add another title on April 26.

“It feels pretty damn good to fight in front of my hometown fans. My last five fights have been away from home, but I don't feel any added pressure in this homecoming of sorts. I know I have a job to do. Nothing is easy at this point. It's going to be a heck of a fight. Two World Champions fighting for control of the division. What more could you want?” “Danny is one of those rare boxers that is motivated and committed to fighting the very best," said Ken Thompson, President, Thompson Boxing Promotions. “He understands the risks that he is taking, but that's what drives him. Against Doheny, he gets to show the world what he's made of. It will be a tough fight, but one that Danny is more than capable of winning. We expect him to fight his fight and come out with another win and another World title.” "This was my ideal scenario," said Doheny. "Get the voluntary defence out of the way, then go straight into the unification, so great work from my team, and Eddie Hearn with Matchroom Boxing USA for getting this fight on. It’s unbelievable, it would mean the World to me. It’s just another boxed ticked, after I won the World title, the next goal was to become a unified Champion. I’m looking forward to achieving that.

"We met in the ring after the fight in New York, and there was a lot of respect for each other. That’s the way it should be. We’re two World class fighters, two World Champions in the division. A fight like this doesn’t need any false hype, I think that when you’ve got two World class fighters like this that’s enough of a selling point for a high-calibre fight like this.

"Danny’s a great fighter, he adds a lot of pressure, he’s a great puncher, great punch selection, he’s got it all really. It’s going to be a great fight between us, and I won’t be surprised if the fans get to see a bit of a war. Fighting Danny in his home city, that doesn’t bother me. I’ve been fighting on the road my whole career, so it will be no different to me. It’s me and him in the ring, and it’s going to be all action."

A stacked card in support of the huge World title double-header is led by Jessie Vargas’ move to 154lbs. The Las Vegas-based LA man (28-2-2 10KOs) headlined the aforementioned Chicago show in an entertaining clash with Thomas Dulorme, a draw the outcome after 12 pulsating rounds for the WBC Silver Welterweight title, where a last round knockdown cost Vargas the win. The 29 year old will start the journey on becoming a three-weight World Champion on April 26 and will have a new but familiar face in his corner with the bout marking his first fight under hall of fame trainer Freddie Roach. Roach will be a busy man on the night, with former Super-Bantamweight World Champion Scott Quigg returning to action. The English star (35-2-2 26KOs) returned to winning ways in Boston in October with a spiteful second round stoppage of Mario Briones, and will be on familiar ground in LA where he trains with Roach and shared a bruising fast-paced battle with WBO Featherweight ruler Oscar Valdez last March. Unbeaten Super-Middleweight talent Anthony Sims Jr is set for a breakout year and will fight for his first title on the bill. Sims (17-0 16 KOs), who is in action in Peterborough, England on Saturday night live on DAZN and Sky Sports, clocked three stoppage wins in the second half of 2018, and will look to convert that momentum in style in first the UK and then in LA. Shakhram Giyasov (7-0 6KOs) and Diego Pacheco (2-0 1KO) landed wins in Tijuana, Mexico this weekend and will fight on the bill, while Eddie Hearn’s latest addition to his blossoming stable of young USA talents, Houston’s Austin ‘Ammo’ Williams, will make his pro debut on the card. “I’m proud to announce this huge card for our first show in LA,” said promoter Eddie Hearn. “Rungvisai vs. Estrada was one of the fights of the year in 2018 and fans can expect another war on April 26 for the WBC and Ring Magazine World titles. “LA’s Danny Roman attempts to unify the division against IBF champ TJ Doheny and two division World Champion Jessie Vargas returns under his new trainer Freddie Roach as he begins his quest to win World titles in three different weight classes. “Former World champ Scott Quigg returns to LA after his war with Oscar Valdez and unbeaten Super Middleweight star Anthony Sims Jr challenges for his first title. This is one of the cards of 2019 to date and fight fans can expect a wonderful show at the Forum and live on DAZN and Sky Sports.”

(Featured Photo: Matchroom Boxing)

#HF #Srisaket Sor Rungvisai #Juan Francisco Estrada

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