#building knowledge

[ruporas]

don’t worry about me. goodbye, big brother

[zglib]

Some of the cast members of guess the build, as portrayed and built by the cast members of guess the build

[reality-detective]

World Trade Center 7, a 47-story skyscraper, "collapsed" at 5:20 PM on September 11, 2001, despite not being struck by a plane.

WTC 7 housed the following tenants:

⁃ CIA

⁃ IRS

⁃ Secret Service

⁃ Department of Defense

⁃ NYC Office of Emergency Management

⁃ Securities and Exchange Commission

The BBC reported that Building 7 had collapsed 25 minutes before it actually did. 🤔

[pnfc]

mildly interesting pnf fact of the day: before they came up with the name OWCA in s2 'summer belongs to you' the de facto name for perry's agency was SSSN, the super secret spy network. it only shows up in a few places in the show and never in dialogue - namely the human agents in perry's nightmare in 'p&f get busted' and apparently the tv station hosting the dr. feelbetter show in 'about time'

but it does show up in merch sometimes. also apparently in the 2012 pnf gogurt packets, which have a trivia question that claims perry works for the SSSN. presumably the asset packets they were using to create merch were out of date

[remastered-feedback]

Guilty Gear is great because depending on when in the story you're looking, the main character's weapon of choice is either "A big piece of concrete he stuck a piece of rebar into as a handle so he could hit stuff with it", or "This setting's equivalent of Excalibur, combined with a magical lightbulb that he stole from the UN, creating a magical thermonuclear rail cannon capable of blowing up literal gods, which he built himself because he has a PhD in magical theoretical particle physics" and those are the only weapons he has wielded in the entire series

[icaruspendragon]

he did. my husband tried. he tried to warn them. he did. he said to them, “i’m not as into this as my wife is. i just like looking at cars, but she’s got all the facts and specs and everything. she’s practically a walking encyclopedia.”

and they didn’t believe him. they laughed. they shrugged it off. they shrugged me off. they were warned. and yet they still decided to try and put me to the test. they were warned. they were warned of what would happen to them. and yet they didn’t listen.

their ambition made them icarian. their folly turned my warmth from brilliant to sweltering.

their hubris led to their humiliation.

they were warned. but ambition makes men bold.

this is all just a very dramatic way of saying that grown men decided to play a game of, “oh you’re a fan? prove it” only to have their asses handed to them by their opponent.

this was the opponent btw:

[aroaceleovaldez]

my hot pjo take is that Jason isn't a second Percy, Jason is a second Annabeth. Jason is just if Annabeth was a guy and also a Big 3 kid.

[sunlight-shunlight]

thinking about veilguard and bioware in general, i think we are reaching a point where people need to grapple with the inherent limits of what stories can be told in our Current Society and in AAA gaming companies.

on a labour level: mass layoffs, tons of developers leaving despite previously talking about how passionate and happy they were to be involved, not even paying severance, and crunching employees to the point of burnout. this is unfortunately pretty standard for AAA game companies.

on a cultural level: it is SO white and SO centrist-ly Canadian. i wrote up these asks outlining how. it is a repeated pattern of writing in which they go into tortured racial oppression allegories at best, while constantly peppering in a "but BOTH SIDES were wrong and made mistakes :( :( :(", in between their fictional atrocities that are clearly mirroring irl genocides and enslavement. or at worst, it's "the qunari are radical islamic borg" which has even less nuance. i personally thought, since dai came out in 2014, and a lot has changed since then about the world and in public awareness, that this would have filtered into the narrative and resulted in more satisfying and historically grounded writing. unfortunately not the case. it's shocking if you compare it to how sharp and aware and unflinching something like disco elysium is.

so what does this mean?

under these conditions, it is unavoidable that we get development by people who are rapidly cycled out of the company or demoralized into burnout. we get digestible, easy little soundbites of lore without much substance, because any complexity needs more time and coordination rather than the process of "quick, we have these assets, a lot of people involved in making them just got laid off, we need to make Something by next quarter to show the CEO". we get very little cohesion between games, despite the clear intent from dai to have so many plot points set up to follow through in a sequel, because the team and development are so chaotic that they can't hold onto a vision and complete it.

we also get this inherent caution and "conservatism" from the narrative, because on an ideological level, they're largely white people who want cops to be included in pride. so any major change to even a fictional society is Bad and Scary, and shouldn't be done without making sure that every character finger-wags appropriately at non-state violence. there is clearly not much ideological or even ethnic diversity within the leadership; or at least not enough that anyone there felt comfortable even speaking up on minor issues like the Incredibly Orientalist Isabela Outfit, let alone anything larger.

i don't personally think there's too much value in trying to analyze veilguard's plot or lore at this point. the final product is chaotically developed and does not seem to reflect the goals of the creators as set up in prior games, it's basically a ship of theseus in terms of the people and ideas involved in making it. this is sad for all of us, who were interested in the story, and attached to the characters, and were creatively fulfilled by engaging in the fandom. it's probably worse for the developers who have lost their jobs, burnt out, or feel unhappy with the game that they spent years of their life working on. it's certainly miserable as an indictment of The Industry, as well as the general societal climate of white Canadian centrism.

the solution is to create a society where people can develop games in peace and prosperity and stay on projects for longer, rather than constantly getting turfed out without severance pay. and to get some genuine leftists, poc, and indigenous people on staff who can weigh in and provide significant input, rather than a Council Of Liberal White Edmontonians every time.

in the meantime, at the very least, let's please stop preordering AAA games and supporting companies who notably abuse their employees.

[notbecauseofvictories]

it's not that there aren't enough hours in a day...more like there aren't enough days in a week. I need the exact same amount of sleep and "switch off your brain" time I'm getting day to day, I just need to jam a few more days in the week (or even just in the weekend) to catch up on all the other things I need to get done.

[harbingersecho]

are we the sins we have committed? are we the things we have endured? [...] who are we?

[ref]

[itsahotminuteinbetween]

some gitm sona doodles (because we wanted to practice drawing them and because we need to cope)

gitm is of course by @venomous-qwille (feel free to ignore this sorry!)

closeups under the cut:

[sonicthehedgehoglover2]

You know how Isabeau admitted that he kind of purposefully "dumbed himself down" and that he's actually kind of smart?

How much you guys want to bet that Odile's completely aware of this? Specifically, she always knew Isabeau was smarter than he let on.

Like, she's been keeping tabs on the little things she's noticed with Isabeau. For example, she'll be explaining something complicated, and Isabeau would have no trouble following along. Or, Isabeau would suddenly say something very smart that even Odile doesn't quite understand herself. When she asks about it, Isabeau tries to play it off.

[reality-detective]

Rare footage inside WTC Building 7 on 9/11 after the destruction of the Twin Towers.

This steel framed skyscraper completely collapsed due to “office fires” a few hours later. 

Notice anything interesting? 🤔

[cybertron-after-dark]

Boulder would lose his fuckin MIND over Minecraft.

The landscapes, the crafting, the critters running around (especially the fact that he can befriend some of them), just exploring the big wide world with no restrictions and having the time of his life.

And then he figures out redstone and starts building particle accelerators and shit.

[shitpostingkats]

Until canon wants to prove otherwise, you can pry the rock solid belief that Genesis Rhapsodos fucked right off and is living out his life on an apple farm somewhere, singlehandedly responsible for all the Banora White adverts all over Rebirth out of my cold dead hands.

[turtleblogatlast]

Unironically think that each of the bros (+April) don’t actually get how impressive their feats really are so they just do what they do and on the off chance someone comments on those feats they all react like: