#destructure

[luluswallow]

Nouveau clip réalisé en light painting avec ma pote Lulu pour le groupe Short Days ! Merci à toute l'équipe de copaines déter qui nous a aidé, à Short Days pour nous avoir laissé carte blanche, à tous les fifous qui ont affronté le froid des nuits Lilloises pour nous filer la main. C'est le deuxième clip des Lulu'z et on est pas prête de s'arrêter, j'vous spoile pas mais y'en a d'autres à venir. Pas d'ordi sauf pour l'étalonnage, merci à Got pour avoir pris ce temps là.

L'album Direction Nowhere : https://shortdays.bandcamp.com/album/direction-nowhere

[gagande]

PureCode software reviews | Destructuring and Spread Syntax

Destructuring is a feature in JavaScript that makes it easier to extract separate variables from arrays and objects. It improves code readability, especially when importing multiple exports from a module. Rest parameters enable functions to receive an indefinite number of arguments as an array, ensuring flexibility in the functions’ variable inputs.

[zero0virgola0]

Non me ne frega un cappero

Un cappero, il suo fiore e a sinistra, un cappero e il suo fiore destrutturati

[i-gwarth]

btw we do *get* that the worldbuilding of DE parallels the character's arc right? We understand that, right? That Our Guy commits all but a sliver of himself to the oblivion of amnesia in a moment where the only alternative he could see was suicide. And at the other end of that tragic attempt at self-annihilation he gets the chance to reinvent himself and overcome the longstanding, persistent habits that brought him to the cliff's edge to begin with. And that the world itself is presented as approaching an equally definitive precipice, with one of the richest characters in the cast even remarking that Capital is dead, and everything else being 20-odd years away from being swallowed by the pale

And we understand that the pale is forgetting, right? Right? It's informational entropy applied to the world, facts and events and places and memories being destructured and obliderated, reduced to an indistinct soup of whispers, past present and future. That it emerges from humanity's collective inability to imagine a future beyond moralist capitalism, and that this inability to see the horizon inevitably metastazises into Mesque's accelerationist nihilism that ultimately destroys the world. [starts shaking you] WE UNDERSTAND THAT RIGHT??

That the game's splash screen is a view from the bay of Revachol, from the deserter's island. And we know what it shows, right? Revachol, in the distance. And beyond that what? A horizon? No! It shows Pale. Because that's his perspective. Because he has abandoned all hope, lost all sight of the future and has committed to self-annihilation. For him the entroponetic collapse is imminent. We see that, don't we?

That the game is a thesis on hope. That the world has the chance to reinvent itself from the precipice of oblivion just like Harry does, and that the only thing that can do that is imagining the future. A future. Any future, and making it. Piece by piece, day by day, committing to it, and refusing to give in to despair and nihilism. We understand, don't we, that there must be no truce with the f-

you know what, nevermind...

[codemerything]

A structured way to learn JavaScript.

I came across a post on Twitter that I thought would be helpful to share with those who are struggling to find a structured way to learn Javascript on their own. Personally, I wish I had access to this information when I first started learning in January. However, I am grateful for my learning journey so far, as I have covered most topics, albeit in a less structured manner.

N/B: Not everyone learns in the same way; it's important to find what works for you. This is a guide, not a rulebook.

EASY

What is JavaScript and its role in web development?

Brief history and evolution of JavaScript.

Basic syntax and structure of JavaScript code.

Understanding variables, constants, and their declaration.

Data types: numbers, strings, boolean, and null/undefined.

Arithmetic, assignment, comparison, and logical operators.

Combining operators to create expressions.

Conditional statements (if, else if, else) for decision making.

Loops (for, while) for repetitive tasks. - Switch statements for multiple conditional cases.

MEDIUM

Defining functions, including parameters and return values.

Function scope, closures, and their practical applications.

Creating and manipulating arrays.

Working with objects, properties, and methods.

Iterating through arrays and objects.Understanding the Document Object Model (DOM).

Selecting and modifying HTML elements with JavaScript.Handling events (click, submit, etc.) with event listeners.

Using try-catch blocks to handle exceptions.

Common error types and debugging techniques.

HARD

Callback functions and their limitations.

Dealing with asynchronous operations, such as AJAX requests.

Promises for handling asynchronous operations.

Async/await for cleaner asynchronous code.

Arrow functions for concise function syntax.

Template literals for flexible string interpolation.

Destructuring for unpacking values from arrays and objects.

Spread/rest operators.

Design Patterns.

Writing unit tests with testing frameworks.

Code optimization techniques.

That's it I guess!

[littlekiara96]

So I was looking at Reca's outfit and. It kind of looks like he took pieces of various costumes and put them together to make an outfit. The jacket? It looks like two articles that an action and/or detective type protagonist would wear. And given his proclivity for film, it makes sense that he would want to live through his art

Oh yeah, he's totally sporting a destructured trench-coat, absolutely. Even more so when you look at his back.

From the front, he aaalmost looks like he's wearing a three-piece suit, but the whole thing is so deconstructed it gets lost in the details.

He makes me think of your typical film noir detective, but of course, he has aaaaaallllll the film stuff going on as decoration. His whole outfit has a big, BIG emphasis on that, it's unmistakable and undeniable.

And he also got a bit of Art Nouveau, too. I saw those flowery, plant-sy arabesques.

Also also, the brown and beige colours remind me of sepia in particular. And such a dark shade of blue for his shirt and pants... maybe it's a ref to the darkness of a movie theater? Dark as night? Maybe. But it's also just the best colour they could have used to contrast with the rest.

[privilegejunkie]

I propose we destructure Bad Luck Brian to derive Bad Brian and Luck Brian respectively.

[adozentothedawn]

The first time one of them calls him Master he beats them black and blue in the training yard. Afterwards, looking at the gasping and trembling shape of Aedan on his knees in front of him, barely 16, he feels nauseous in a way he hasn't in years. That Aedan still looks at him with admiration makes bile rise in his throat.

He leaves the boy to Montgomery and locks himself in his office, and when that isn't enough he climbs out the window and finds the highest roof in the city outside of the tower. He burns through two packs of cigarettes that day.

The second time it's Leon (Leonid still then, until her second half joined half a year later), 15 and freshly changed out of her bloodied maid outfit. He glowers and sends her out with Aedan to clean out the rats nest in their new base' cellar and puts her on first watch for a month. If anything it seems to spur her on more. He smokes so much that day that Montgomery has to make him a tonic so he can keep leading training without his voice giving out. She confiscates the rest of his smokes for a week.

The third time it's Scott, not one of the new kids, and he doesn't mean anything by it. It's almost casual when he says it, handing over a missive from a new client. Daud nearly tears the paper in half when he rips it out of Scott's hand. He doesn't go to see Montgomery that evening, but the tonic still finds its way to his desk.

That night, after he peels off his blood drenched clothing after a kill gone messy and hurls them into the laundry pile with enough force to splatter the blood over the walls, the Outsider draws him into the void, for the first time in months. But it's not the facsimile of his own bed that he finds himself in.

Instead what greets him when he opens his eyes is the cage where he lost his childhood.

He learns then that while he can retch in the void he cannot vomit.

While he prefers to let the Outsider wait for a while these days, he cannot get out of the room quickly enough, nearly hitting his head on the tiny gate that marked the end of his innocence and stumbling out the door beyond into the destructured realm that is the Void. Vertigo that has nothing to do with the void rips into his mind, tipping his sense of self and forcing him to his knees as he's desperately gasping for breath past the horrible tightness in his chest.

It takes him a few moments, or an eternity, until he can drag himself back up and steel himself against the familiar, deconstructed vision of the hell that shaped him into the man he is today. One transversal after another he gets further away, until all that is left are impersonal blocks of stone and dirt floating next to the whales and he doesn't feel quite so much anymore like he's teetering on a ledge that will maybe not kill him but drop him back into the time he wished it would.

When the Outsider appears and seals his voice he can almost pretend to be unaffected.

"Hello, Daud." Nothing shows on the leviathan's face, as it has always been, but for the first time it fills Daud with a burning hatred. If the Outsider notices, as he has to, as he always does, he doesn't deem it worthy of a reaction.

"You have become a man of titles, Daud." The boy cocks his head and Daud tenses. "They call you the Knife of Dunwall. The murderer who stalks the night. And of course your own people, your collection of children and outcasts who steal, spy, and murder for you, they call you master now, don't they." It's not a question. Daud wants to hurl. Vomit, insults, or fists he can't quite tell.

The Outsider lets him stand there for a few moments, looking over him impassively with those black, uncaring depths pretending to be eyes.

"I wonder, Daud. Will you let them? Or will you forbid them from using the word, punish them the way he punished you for refusing it, and become like him anyway." It's still not a question. The bastard has already decided and Daud has never hated him the way he hates him now. His back stings with the phantom pain of lashes, of beatings, he feels the hot, itching sensation of fresh blood running down his thighs, rope burns flame across his wrists, the world swims in front of his eyes like someone has hit him over the head. Daud doesn't know if it's the Outsider's doing or his own mind's, but in the haze of rage, hatred, and old, long buried panic he cannot bring himself to care.

It feels like an eternity until the Outsider finally releases him and he shoots upright in own bed, drenched in cold sweat. The first thing he does is bend over the side and vomit. Some primal part of his mind that he has long since locked away and buried, has pretended to have killed along with his master expects to be slapped for it.

The sun has risen over the rooftops of Dunwall when he finally drags himself out of bed to clean up the mess and start the day. The Whalers notice, those few that they are in those days, but no one comments on his foul mood. His jacket is returned by Leon, washed of all traces of blood and scrubbed so well it almost shines. Montgomery hands him another tonic without a word. Aedan asks to show him a new maneuver with the knife he's learnt.

Daud doesn't comment when any of them call him Master, let's them call him what they want without reacting anymore. The group grows, some pick it up, some don't, but eventually it is enough of them that he doesn't bother keeping track. He establishes a system of ranks, masters and novices, and explains it is to better manage their tasks to their skill level, as well as provide incentives for growth. It makes sense and no one questions it.

It also makes sense that he would be a master.

It takes Daud years to stop feeling the pain of phantom wounds when he hears the not yet broken voices of children call him Master.

[ahamkara-apologist]

people gotta start thinking critically about destiny's conflicts. of course the vanguard is on the side of the 'good guys' a lot of the time due to the witness going "its shaping time" and witnessing all over the place but there's been a good many times it's just been a war. a bloody, painful war where two sides fought only for survival. both sides did pretty horrible things, because both sides believed the other had to be driven away or killed if there was any hope of survival. I wonder what things would have been like if the factions had come across golden age earth, though- maybe there would have been next to no fighting at all, and the eliksni would have been allies way earlier

no fr, people need to understand that the issue with the Eliksni-Human wars is that they were both about survival, rather than how the rest of the conflicts we experienced worked. With Ghaul, it was about conquest. With the Witness, it was about preventing the total extinction of the known universe. But with the Eliksni, it was always about survival. Raiding gangs hit human civilizations not because of pure malice, but because the Eliksni were just as starved for resources as we were after the collapse. This isn't to say that they didn't also kill out of cruelty, because of course many of them did, but killing human children because the alternative is starvation for your own hatchlings is not some great transgression like people paint it as. It's just life in a time of great scarcity. It's only a step above simple predation, and that does not account for the massive scope of retaliation that humankind did in return. As far as I'm concerned, we're equally matched in terms of awful shit being done to each other

I was just reading the Stolen Intelligence and it starts off with the account of a Hidden agent who was speaking about the need to prevent Eliksni unification, how the near-complete collapse of their society was a good thing for the goal of eradicating them from Sol, and which Eliksni in particular needed to be destroyed to prevent Eliksni reunification. Granted, this was from Season of the Drifter, so it's outdated, but even accounting for human-Eliksni aggression, its fucking horrifying to hear about a people who only came to Sol because of the near-complete annihilation of their home planet. Here are the excerpts.

The recent trending emergence of so-called "crime syndicates" (cf. report #004-FALLEN-SIV) is emblematic of the continuing destructuralization of Fallen society. Likely an artifact of multi-generational colonization of human strongholds, this agent believes that because these syndicates have no relation to indigenous Fallen culture, young Fallen are appropriating and imitating human mythology in absence of a strong cultural heritage of their own. Much like the dissolution of the Kell/Archon theology, this is positive news for those interested in the complete extirpation of invasive Fallen from the system.

This isn't about settling a war, this is about extermination of a species through cultural genocide. But wait, let's hear what this agent has to say about Misraaks. You know, our buddy Misraaks? Our best dude that we're working our asses off trying to save?

VIP #3987, another former confederate of the Awoken, is a lesser-known personality known as Mithrax. Scattered field reports suggest that like #1121, #3987 styles himself a Kell of the so-called "House Light," an otherwise unknown House apparently founded by #3987 himself. We have secondhand accounts that Mithrax has engaged in allied operations with Guardians in the field, though we have not as yet been able to corroborate these accounts with any degree of veracity. This agent is inclined to treat these reports with a healthy degree of skepticism until otherwise confirmed, as they may be propaganda from Fallen sympathizers in the Old Russian and Red War Guardian cohorts. We have requested intelligence records from the Awoken which may further clarify the matter. In addition, whatever the findings of said intelligence records may be, it should be stressed that one or two sympathetic outliers cannot be relied upon to erase the wrongs of past centuries, nor should their good-faith efforts to correct the sins of their forebears be taken as sufficient symbolic reparation.

Charming. This is bad enough, but listen to what they had to say about Eramis. Now try to tell me again that she's being a bitch for not trusting us, when this was how they were speaking about her barely a few years before she was captured by us in Revenant.

VIP #2029, a once-known personality known as Eramis, or Eramis, the Shipstealer. A House Devils Baroness incarcerated during the Wolf Wars, #2029 successfully fled the Prison of Elders during the mass escape orchestrated by #1121. #2029 is a classical Fallen pirate of the old ways: vicious, uncompromising, and possessing cunning of the highest degree. Field reports indicate that she is rallying violent dissidents to reconstruct House Devils from the ground up. This agent believes her to be the most viable candidate for universal Fallen reunification, and would urge the Vanguard and other interested leadership to aggressively prioritize her destruction. We have come too far to pull our punches now.

This goes beyond simple warfare. The Eliksni did not hold any sufficient power to actually destroy the Last City since the Final Attempt. This Hidden agent wanted complete annihilation. This is talking about going around a beaten-down people that barely holds any more legitimate threats to the Last City and systematically wiping out any attempt for them to even reform their society on the minute basis that they might be able to mount an attack. This is calling for the utter annihilation of a society that suffered an apocalypse that was quite possibly worse than what we suffered in the Collapse, after they were already beaten.

Like, idk, maybe I'm just being extra sensitive bc I live in America, but family is Iranian, so I've been hearing our government talk about how they need to eradicate Middle Eastern threats before they ever come to fruition. But like. Holy fucking shit. We were not the good guys in this scenario. This doesn't make the Eliksni the saints, either, but it's very, very fucking clear that we weren't fighting for the greater good, either. There is no reason that military operations should ever go this far when the enemy is already as good as defeated. It's frankly a fuckin' miracle that any Eliksni are putting any faith in us at all, and it's really only because there's no other option at this point than to try to cozy up to our good side to avoid annihilation.

[piratesexmachine420]

what's the ruleset on your PFP?

My xmas avatar? Rule 30! It's not programmatically generated, just thrown together in GIMP.

(My normal avatar is basically rule 60, but black/0 value cells that have never been white/1 are colored red. It's implemented by this bit of rust code:)

(The tuple destructuring made more sense at an earlier stage of tinkering.)

[zackstriker]

surrealism + abstract fiction writing sounds cool as hell dude!! is there anything especially neat you've studied lately? :0

omg i’m so glad you asked!!! i’m actually working on a novella rn that’s told in fourth person POV and it’s super hard.

as far as stuff i’ve learned: i LOVE using the “Ashamed I” pov which is when you use second person POV to tell a first person story. For example: “You had a hard day, counted three accidents on the interstate on the way to work. You didn’t see as many seagulls as normal. Lexi, your assistant, says it’s going to rain but you know she’s wrong. It hasn’t rained in weeks.” In this paragraph the “you” isn’t the you as in the reader, the “you” is a whole fleshed out character.

i’m working on destructuring the idea of the novel in a class rn and we’re reading No One is Talking About this by Patricia Lockwood (i’m actually meeting her soon bc i get to have dinner with her and introduce her at one of her readings as a part of my program) and it’s such an interesting read!! She was a poet before she wrote prose and you can really tell. i’ve never read anything quite like it!!

Anyways i’ll stop there bc i could pop off for hours and hours and hours about Weird Fiction and absurdism and avant-garde literature.

[wet-vermilion-crowd-of-things]

what's a digital garden

I shall start my exploration of the concept of Digital Gardening by sharing the definition of Maggie Appleton:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.1

Digital gardens move along the spectrum of personal notebooks, wikis and blogs, but they transcend their limitations and get closer to the ideal of the second brain by rejecting the idea that content should be organised linearly or chronologically. Instead they are organised like webs of knowledge, connected with hyperlinks of common themes, ideas and thoughts. Not only does it cultivates the gardener's ability to enter in dialogue with the thoughts they had in the past and to constantly grow and rewrite themselves, it also makes for a fascinating user experience.

A digital garden, as I see it, should capture the compelling feeling of following a rabbit hole, letting one's curiosity take the reins. It should be a terrain for exploration for both the gardener and the user. Maggie writes "You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream." 2 It reminds me of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Their non-linear structure allows for a deliberate and individual path to be chosen. They rebel, in a way, against the commercial, advertised, AI-generated internet that is pushed towards us nowadays. Instead, they are an unfiltered, destructured, consciously and humanely built space on the internet, where one can cultivate the seeds of their intellect and imagination.

In the first conversation I had with my boyfriend after discovering digital gardening, I expressed my need to break free from doomscrolling and content that I did not have time to or was unwilling to digest and process. Nowadays, it is so easy to be sucked into a mode of consumption which destroys the individual and aims to replace it was an advertisement machine, a brain-dead puppet for corporations to tramp on. Digital gardening and the process of taking notes and consuming content mindfully breaks from the bad habit of scrolling and offers a space to speak at length and get lost in thoughts.

Indeed, we are all fatigued by fast-paced commercial media, and we forget that the media we consume is what shapes us, not only as artists but also as individuals. Therefore, it is not really about consuming less, but about consuming more mindfully, and taking ownership of the thoughts provoked by the media we consume. We should not only let it change us, we should be critical thinkers who engage in a conversation with the art and the media that goes through us. We should disagree, add onto, reflect, and put in the work to cultivate ourselves mindfully. Anna Howard 3 puts forward the idea that a way to become more creative is to take notes. My main take-away from her video was that her idea of taking notes was akin to creating through thinking original thoughts and writing them down. It is no longer about copy-pasting content from an article or film. It is about digesting, reformulating, conversing with the art. The note taking that she does is less about the actual content of the media and more about her own vision of the world. It is inspired by it of course, but she makes it hers through the act of note taking. It is in my opinion very similar to the process of creation, through which we let ourselves be influenced by the works of others, and "digest them", mash them all down, mix and churn them into something uniquely ours. 

At their core, digital gardens rebel against the idea of what a website "should be" or "should look like". They aspire to be less perfect and performative than the usual blog or wiki, which we have been taught should look professional, official, consistent. But I am not a "tiny corporation" 4 . I am not politically correct, I am not objective, I am not fixed in time. I can choose to revolt against this limited view of humanity. Like ourselves, digital gardens are imperfect, unconventional, ground-breakingly unique, and in constant evolution. We are not are not structured by the subjunctive. We simply are, in all of our messiness and imperfection. This is what makes them so beautiful. Digital gardens capture the experience of picking at someone's brain and unveiling patterns and connections.

Finally, they allow themselves to be incomplete and biased. Writing with a partial and situa voice is a difficult exercise for my perfectionist self, but it is a healthy one. The mythical idea of perfection is against our human nature of evolution and change, and it is founded in authoritarian, objectivist and hierarchical views of knowledge. It is the birth of inequality. We all have a voice and a perspective, and we all grow and let ourselves be influenced by others. As such, no writing should have the pretension of holding the complete truth. The digital garden positions itself as a human piece of writing.

[codomars]

Day 30 — 35/ 100 Days of Code

I learned how to handle JavaScript features (default parameters, spread, rest, and destructuring).

And I finally reached the DOM chapeter, 'The Document Object' which contains representations of all the content on a page. I'm still discovering its methods and properties.

So far, I've learned about the most useful ones: getElementById(), querySelector, changing styles, manipulating attributes, and the append method.

I'm doing some silly practice exercises just to get more familiar with the DOM methods. The more I progress in my course, the more fun things seem to get. I'm really excited to start building stuff with code and combining HTML, CSS, and JS all together.

[schismusic]

In the shadow of the horns: meditations on Team ICO's works – 2. ICO

[Disclaimer: as always, spoilers for ICO are to be expected, and so are spoilers for Shadow of the Colossus since we've already discussed that one. Reader's discretion is advised.]

This one I wrote in a massive rush, because I only realized that I hadn't written anything about ICO yet right about when the time came to actually post this piece on here. I wanted this to be out before Christmas, see, not for any specific reason – I just wanted to make sure I was writing stuff that makes sense, more or less. I'm still taken aback by how much time it's taken, considering my Shadow of the Colossus piece was written more or less entirely between Colossus 2 and Colossus 6. As such, that particular piece contains a glaring mistake, that Tumblr user @crooked-mantis thankfully pointed out. Mantis's intervention is as follows:

While I did know the voice when Wander is transported back to the Shrine was supposed to be Mono's, I did not remember her calling Wander by name, specifically – and after reaching Colossus 9 and Colossus 14, I was pleasantly surprised to hear exactly what Mantis mentioned. So, again, thank you for pointing this out, and I'm glad you still enjoyed this piece that I titled after a song by Darkthrone just so I could make a stupid joke.

The beauty of Ico lies in the fact it seems to disregard the conventions of an average videogame, if you're not looking too hard. The first thing I did after completing ICO again was to put on some Kraftwerk – Computer Love, to be exact – because that same exact comment could be made with regards to their post-Autobahn production almost as a whole. Trans Europe Express and Radio-Activity, at least to an extent, tinker with that divide between their profoundly poppish writing style and that weird, destructured, post-1968 thing where even a pop song's structure can be broken down into something more than just function and role. All the same, ICO (Kraftwerk's music) is tightly designed, with recognizable hooks and welcoming moments that allow the player (listener) to immediately understand what they have to do. Here's a bubbly cursed boy. Here's a girl who's spent her whole life in a cage. They're trapped in a castle and evil shadows want to kidnap the girl. Have you done the math yet?

Right before I went back to the game myself, I happened to catch a friend of mine – @alexswordsman – as they streamed part of their first playthrough on Discord. I was struck by the realization that I had absolutely no recollection of a lot of moments from the game; but what truly surprised me is just how much of the game I did keep in my memory, and not just story bits (that would be easy, considering the campaign's length) but also entire rooms' worth of environmental puzzles, fights against the shadow children, the genuine sense of dread when leaving Yorda alone or when hanging from some iron pole, a good hundred meters above any solid ground. As I spent some time thinking about this, and a good couple of weeks after actually going through the game again in something like two and a half sittings, I realized that it really did take me a loooooong time to realize just for how long ICO was a game about the story, for me. The answer was of course quite a fucking lot – a whole year after my first playthrough or something, specifically. I remember telling some girl in my class about it, back in 2019, because I was an insufferable bastard who felt really alone but could not relate to other human beings on any fundamental level. Poor girl, I think she actually did feel some modicum of attraction towards me, but unfortunately I was very much not prepared to return it. The point being: for the longest time, apart from when I replayed it back in 2020, I genuinely thought of ICO as a story to be told, something to be read off of a Wikipedia page a billion years ago. As the previous piece (and, if you've read them, my other pieces about Team Ico, the Italian ones) might have clarified, of course, coming back to the games with a slightly more informed outlook has worked wonders for me.

Where Wander's core moveset would focus preeminently on violence and hostile action, Ico's was softer, less specialized, harder to describe. R1, which you have to hold down, allows you to hold Yorda's hand (or call to her, if she's away from you – much like Agro and Trico after her, buttons used notwithstanding); Square swings whatever blunt – or edged, or spiked – object you've got in your hand, but Ico is canonically like nine, so it's safe to assume he's not a fighter, or a climber, or a horserider. The one thing he can convincingly is seek out human contact: the one thing he is denied, as a horned kid. Yorda, on the other hand, has no such preconceptions: she may actually have no preconceptions, period, apart from her knowledge of a certain power and a certain purpose assigned to her. At the same time, Yorda starts out basically clueless but learns very very quickly: you explode the pillar holding the bridge up, then next room over you have to blow up some wood planks blocking the way forward and – assuming you've seen the bombs and the open flame right near the entrance – Yorda runs up to them and points at them, which is very clever foreshadowing of the second act's climactic moment. If Yorda is seen by her captors as a machine, built entirely as a means to an end – becoming the Queen's new body – then it has to be a fully functional one, shoutouts to Lieutenant Commander Data, but this has the side effect that she can learn trust. She can learn affection.

No surprise then that R1 would be the key to hold Yorda's hand and call out to her. R1 is where the important stuff is in Team Ico's games. You hold R1 to core-mechanic your character into winning, i.e. into exerting emotional stimuli over the player, and it's no surprise that as such every time you're doing the R1 stuff the games tend to give you incredibly strong and constant sensory feedback. The controller vibrates, almost mimicking a heartbeat, as you're holding Yorda's hand. Alessio called it a "sensory nightmare" and deactivated the feature: not that I blame him, it can get annoying, but I actually sorta love it myself. It's the closest thing they can do to allow the player to perceive warmth, touch, life on their very skin. If Shadow of the Colossus is "a game about letting go", then ICO is a game about holding on. As such, it is necessarily much shorter than SotC: something you can quite literally burn through, like a friend you mad on that one week by the seaside when you were nine and had no mobile phone so you have no idea where that friend is now, what they're up to, what they're doing. You can only replay it, understanding its actions and words a bit better everytime but forever retrospectively, forever crystallized.

It's a short and immensely sweet experience that ends on a bittersweet note to say the least (Fumito Ueda himself refers to the post-credits scene as a dream that Ico has going back to civilization, which means Yorda did not of course escape the crumbling castle) and yet manages to conjure deep feelings of beauty and warmth. It doesn't make any fucking sense to discuss the plot of this game, because honestly as narrative-driven as this game is, it already takes the shape of an experience that prefers player stories as the driving principle for the player to go on with the game, more so than its own narrative. I mean, Shadow of the Colossus is probably better at this – considering the even more bare-boned nature of its plot and the open ended lore that the player is left to to toy with – but something has to be born once already, in order for it to be reborn.

P.S.: yeah, I'm assuming I might have to write something about that TGA trailer, you know the one. Since I'm most likely not going to be able to play it on release – because I will not be buying a PlayStation 5 just for one game, not right now anyway – I figured I should at least put something out analysing the thirty seconds flat of footage we've got. I'll see if I can squeeze out some coherent thoughts after fangirling for another while and report back once I do.

[lazar-codes]

06/07/2023 || Day 46

I woke up this morning completely exhausted and my brain wasn't working. It wasn't until 4pm when I decided to just go on a walk for an hour that I felt ok. Dunno what's up with that...

Remember how I said yesterday that I'd get started on React? Well, I started to watch a video and the person went over the pre-requisites for learning React (i.e. what Javascript concepts you need to know), and I basically had to learn a lot of concepts related to ES6 such as arrow functions, modules, destructuring objects, spread operators, and other stuff, and I realized I knew none of those. So...I watched another video that went over all that, and while the video itself was only an hour long, it took me about 2-3 hours to get through it because I was constantly pausing the video and writing notes.

Anyways, this wasn't the first video by this guy that I've watched and I really like watching his videos for longer introductions to topics, so here's a link:

[silverynight]

What would happen if Tanjiro works in the butterfly mansion as a medical assistant?What if he offers to give destructuring and relaxing massages for the sore muscles of demon slayers?

He becomes part of the butterfly staff after being rescued by Amane and her girls; Nezuko lives there as well, but she's always in a dark room and only comes out at night. All the butterfly girls are really fond of both Kamado siblings.

However, as soon as he starts working there he gets himself a lot of suitors; he has no idea but a lot of slayers and kakushi develop a crush on him.

There's always a line of people begging Tanjirou to tend to their wounds and give them massages for sore muscles because not only Tanjirou is pretty good at it, it also means they get to be touched by him.

Things are very peaceful for a while because even though sometimes the slayers and kakushi fight over him (nothing serious) and most of them try to ask him out, they're (most of the time) very calm about it, just waiting for Tanjirou to choose one of them.

However, that's when the Pillars meet him, they don't usually interact with other members of the Corps a lot because they're really busy and rarely get hurt (when they're not fighting upper moons) but one day they see him on their way to a hashira meeting.

Tanjirou beams at them (because he doesn't know enough to be afraid or intimidated by them) and tells them (as he does with everyone) that he's really grateful for their hard work.

That's when everything goes to shit, at least for the slayers and kakushi because the hashira notice what's going on immediately let everyone know that Tanjirou is off limits from that moment on.

Which is... not fair.