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memryse · 3 years

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The magic of 3rd Life, or why such a simple hardcore miniseries works as well as it does

For a series which only lasted for eight sessions, 3rd Life has had a profound impact on the MCYT fandom. While it did go comparatively unnoticed on Twitter (as is consistent with YouTube-based Minecraft content as a whole, admittedly), Tumblr and other platforms have fallen in love with this series, and it’s become a vector for many fans to familiarise themselves with Hermitcraft and Empires SMP as well. But at its core, 3rd Life is a simple vanilla survival series with a gimmick. What about it resonates so much with so many people?

I would argue that its simplicity, its small cast, its vanilla gameplay “with a twist” is certainly part of it. It’s an easy series to consume, with many POVs totalling four hours or less, and it doesn’t require any prior knowledge of any of the members. Its mechanics are easy to understand. As a standalone, it functions perfectly – it’s immersive and can be followed easily by anyone, regardless of any prior knowledge they may or may not have. However, these factors alone don’t quite encompass what makes 3rd Life so special. Its true charm point lies in the format of the series, and how well it utilises improv.

[more below the cut; this is a fairly long post about 3rd/Last Life meta and my love of its improv. I'm mostly talking about 3rd Life here as it's a completed series, but this most definitely does apply to Last Life as well]

3rd Life is an entirely improv-based series. Whilst members may have a brief concept of the direction they’d like to take their series in – how heavily they want to roleplay, for example – the actual content of each session is fully improvised. Each episode is recorded in one three-hour block, and members are not allowed to play on the server outside of the allotted time other than specifically to finish builds. This time constraint prevents any planning from going into each episode, and interactions between players are completely spontaneous. Players simply run around the map looking for others to interact with (which is significantly easier with the limited world border) and chat about various events on the server, form alliances or deals, etc.

By definition, this almost completely negates the possibility of bad writing. Each player’s reaction to any server event is spontaneous, a legitimate reaction; they aren’t trying to play any specific roles or shoehorn in any specific events (with the exception of the Red King/Hand of the King roles, who were still completely improvising). Even the finale – a distinctly heart-wrenching and tragic scene – was improvised without Grian or Scar attempting to tell any specific story. According to Martyn, they weren’t roleplaying, they didn’t have any aims with that scene. It just happened to turn out in the way that it did, and they were legitimately sorry to one another. The server progressed in this natural way, and every person’s perspective tells a completely different story. It’s hard to identify any specific heroes or villains – fans of the Dream SMP can surely relate to this feeling, but I would argue that 3rd Life takes this one step further. 3rd Life is a tragedy from all perspectives, a tragedy which tells one cohesive story in its entirety before stopping as abruptly as it began.

3rd Life hinges entirely on its interactions between its members. Whilst solo content does exist – base building, for example – the majority of each session is spent interacting with others. 3rd Life is carried by its dialogue; nothing else drives the story, and yet many episodes are between 30 minutes and an hour long. It’s that dialogue-heavy. Members of the server have expressed trouble with even editing their videos because there is so much key dialogue that they don’t want to cut. People don’t watch 3rd Life for the actual gameplay, at all – there’s so little of it! They watch it for how each member interacts with the people around them. This is something not found in any other SMP I’ve encountered. SMPs livestreamed on Twitch have plenty of downtime, and people will happily watch streams on that SMP no matter what’s occurring on the server; people often watch them for their interest in specific members. Other currently popular YouTube SMPs, namely Hermitcraft and Empires, are well-balanced between solo content and interactions, and all server content hinges on the members’ various skills like building and redstone. 3rd Life is, to my knowledge, the only SMP which does not rely on building or redstone skills (what’s the point, when they’ll be dead the next week?), it doesn’t rely on the creator doing solo work talking to their chat, it doesn’t rely on planned roleplay. People legitimately just want to hear various members talking to each other. It’s a fascinatingly unique series in this regard. This dialogue-heavy aspect of 3rd Life ties back to my earlier point about 3rd Life feeling like a completely different series from all perspectives; with all of this dialogue being conveyed through proximity chat, so many events are entirely left out of other POVs, or presented in very different lights.

The pure improv format also helps significantly with worldbuilding, whilst also leaving plenty to the imagination. MCYT fandoms always require a significant amount of imagination to become invested in them, let alone make fan content of them, and 3rd Life is no exception to this. As discussed in this post, which was incidentally the inspiration for me to write this one, 3rdLife is full of lines which flesh out the series, which illustrate what happened better than can be shown in Minecraft. These lines are improvised on the spot, and are often complete throwaway lines in the creators’ eyes. In the fans’ eyes, they make 3rd Life feel alive, they provide plenty of material on which to base headcanons. Again, this isn’t necessarily unique to 3rd Life, it’s a common aspect of all Minecraft series, but I think this is where the rather angsty nature of 3rd Life comes into play. A dramatic survival game, entirely unscripted, with all events hinging entirely on your interpretation of them? It’s not hard to see why 3rd Life fans are so creative with character designs and fanfiction – hell, a lot of 3rd Life fics simply narrate canon in their own more dramatic light. Canon-compliant fics are significantly more common for 3rd Life than other fandoms I've encountered, because people hear these simple lines and want to dramatise them, put their own spins on them. I don't feel that this would be possible with any other series, not to the extent that 3rd Life fans do it. Other series' canon is either already dramatic, and so rehashing it can feel repetitive, or so lighthearted that people write AUs/new storylines. 3rd Life strikes a brand-new balance.

The development of its characters is also bolstered by improv. As no events on the server are pre-planned, members have to react completely spontaneously to anything that occurs. They don’t get time to think – only to react as though they genuinely were in that situation. As I said at the start, 3rd Life inherently lacks bad writing, because it’s not written. Ren, for instance, began 3rd Life as a kind and harmless person, with others often walking right over him. His reaction to his death by Grian and Scar’s trap spurs him to become the Red King; he raises an army and goes to war, and ends the series having taken countless lives, becoming hardened by war. He begins Last Life by isolating himself from others, seeming jaded and unwilling to form alliances, ready for another war to break out. Being improvised, it’s impossible to say how much of this was deliberate, or if Ren just started building his base without thinking about continuity from the previous season. This improv is what makes it feel so natural. It isn’t planned beforehand. This is Ren’s natural reaction to starting Last Life. It makes his character feel so much more real than it would if this was all scripted beforehand.

3rd Life is, overall, a testament to the power of improv. It manages to be compelling and dramatic without any acting feeling forced or wooden. Its characters’ arcs feel natural, because they are natural. Placing such a heavy emphasis on dialogue, with the gimmick of the server being a vehicle for interactions to happen rather than the sole appeal of the series, makes it truly feel as though we’re getting a glimpse into the characters’ lives, rather than watching a story which has been written beforehand. We get to watch everything unfold in real time. 3rd Life has a magic to it that, to my knowledge, no other SMP has been able to recreate.

#3rd life smp #last life smp #trafficblr #mae analyses #THIS IS REALLY META BUT I JUST <3 I HAVE SO MUCH LOVE FOR HOW WELL 3RD LIFE DOES WHAT IT DOES #THERE'S A *REASON* IT'S SO COMPELLING #it has this different feel to it #one that i've never encountered before because there is NOTHING like 3rd life out there #ohh i love 3rd life a normal and reasonable amount

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kiingocreative · 2 years

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Ready to edit, format, or publish your book? We offer editing and coaching services! Send a DM or go to https://kiingo.co/services

The more immersed I’ve become in the world of writing and the writers community, the more I’ve learnt. And that learning has been as much in terms of grammar, style and genre as it has been about the many logistics of being a writer.

I get a sense that there are a lot of misconceptions around what being a writer is like. I sure keep coming across them when I talk to non-writers and see the surprise on their faces when I talk about what my experience has been like.

In truth, I love the writer’s life, with all of its joys and infuriating moments. But I do also think that there’s a lot people don’t tend to realise about it…

It can take a long time.

When I tell people it took me three years to write No Pain, No Game, they’re often surprised. If I’m honest, I used to think that it mainly took me that long because I wasn’t very disciplined back in the day. But, as it turns out, even when I’ve been working at it diligently, my second book will likely have taken me a good couple of years by the time it’s published.

In fact, when I published No Pain, No Game, I had this grand idea that I’d release The Dhawan Brothersexactly a year later. I’m not entirely sure where that arbitrary deadline came from. I suppose I liked the symmetry of releasing a book a year on or around the same date. That timeframe, rather than invigorate me, ended up discouraging me, because I just couldn’t fit everything I needed and wanted to do with the book within a year. I’d set myself up for disappointment before I’d even started.

I see other writers release a book a year and I’m in awe of them, because that just doesn’t seem to be me. I need time and space to be able to create.

And that’s just it. Writing (for me at least, and for others too, I’m sure) simply takes time. Some pieces will take you less time than others, but ultimately, you can’t really escape it. It’ll take howsoever long it takes you to write the right story.

…and that might be longer than you or anyone else might imagine. And that’s ok.

It can feel lonely.

It doesn’t have to be, but it can feel that way at times. I imagine that a lot of writers love their craft partly because it gives them that sense of independence and all that me-time—my guess is a lot of us tend to enjoy being alone with their writing, without it necessary feeling lonely.

But, as with everything one does by themselves and that relies only on their own abilities, there are moments where it can vacillate from being contentedly alone to feeling a little lonely.

Anything can trigger it. A scene that’s not coming out quite right. A character that’s got us stuck. A plot hole that’s leaking so badly it’s making us question the whole story. It can be something that’s writing-related, something that has nothing to do with it, and anything in between.

Before I found the writing community on Instagram—before I knew that I wasn’t the only one to go through such phases—I used to try and ride those waves as best I could, mostly aiming not to drown in them.

Now, when I feel a little isolated, I pick up the phone and ping a fellow writer, and I share what’s going on. They may not have the right fix for my plot hole, but knowing they can relate to my struggle makes a whole world of difference.

It can be discouraging.

I used to get to the end of a draft and all I could see would be how much still needed to be done. In my work as a beta reader and editor,I’m always mindful that, by pointing out areas for growth and improvement in someone’s manuscript, the writer on the other end risks only hearing one thing: that they’re so much further away than they might have thought from the finish line.

What I always tell writers is what I’ve trained myself to focus on in these moments: that the work left to be done on a story should be exciting.

That the distance left to cover before a book is ready is where the story gets polished and gets a chance to shine.

That all these things we didn’t get quite right in the previous drafts are as many opportunities for us to learn and grow as writers. To improve. To fine tune our tale until it’s the best it can be.

We can look at a mountain in front of us and wonder how we’ll ever get to the other side, or we can rub our hands together and smile, because we know the view from the top will be more than worth the climb.

It can feel vulnerable.

Writing is such a personal endeavour. It’s the act of pouring your soul out on paper and channelling your inner most desires, fears and insecurities. At its core, writing is very much like therapy: you get unlimited sessions during which you give everything you’ve got on the page. It can be healing in so many ways, but the fact that it’s so vulnerable is also what makes it scary. Sharing our writing is sharing layers of ourselves that we may not often show others.

It’s no wonder letting someone else read your work can be daunting. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in saying that showing your writing to anyone feels like handing over a piece of your heart and praying no one crushes it.

The reality of it is, whatever you write, and no matter how good you are at it, there are people out there who are bound not to like it. The most cliché of all examples is that of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter: as successful as it was (and still is, over a decade later!) there are people who hate it so much they go around burning copies of it on the street. True story.

So let us be vulnerable. Let us pour our hearts out into our work and let us accept that, just like with everything in life, we won’t everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s ok. These people were never meant to be our tribe anyways.

It can be a lot about NOTwriting.

My biggest misconception about writing? The one that definitely caught me unaware? The fact that writing can actually be, well, a lot about NOT writing.

It’s one thing to write, and it’s quite another to let the world know that you have something to say. If you don’t let people know your work is out there, it’s unlikely they’ll ever find out about it.

In comes social media, marketing, networking… All these things that are not actual writing but still very much all about your writing. A large portion of my time leading the ‘writer’s life’ has been focused on building a social media presence, nurturing a network, and putting my book out there in front of the right readers.

And that, my friends, takes a lot more time, effort and energy than one might think.

It is a pain sometimes? Yes. A hundred times, yes.

Can it be avoided? Afraid not! Not if you want people to find out about you and your work (or unless you can afford the luxury of hiring someone to do it all for you—hashtag: life goals).

…Why bother, then?

And here comes the Catch 22 question. If there are so many sides to writing that are painful, vulnerable, scary and cumbersome… why even bother with this whole writing thing?

Great question! I’m glad you asked.

And I’ll tell you why:

We bother because we love it. We do it all because we can’t not do it. Because there’s no way in hell we can go too long without writing. And I’m not talking about the word count you clock in every day or every week. I’m talking about the writing you do even when you’re not physically writing—when you’re washing the dishes whilst fixing plot holes, when you’re in the shower designing your next main character or when you’re about to go to sleep and the perfect idea for a great scene occurs to you.

We take it all in our stride, the good, the bad and the ugly, because there’s no way in hell we can picture our life without it. We put up with the annoying bits, the terrifying bits, the downright eye-roll-worthy bits because writing isn’t something we merely do: it’s who we are.

#writingtips #screenwriting #creative writing #writers on tumblr #writers #writing #writerblr #writing advice #writing community #writing resources

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myhockeyworld87 · 3 years

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Not So Dangerous Liaison - Sidney Crosby - Part 27

Word Count: 3,429

POV: Reader

Warngings: Language, NSFW, Smut

Notes: Here we are again. I think you all might kill me in future chapters so for now, let’s enjoy this one...haha. As always love your feedback and Happy Reading! Let me know what you guys think.

Not So Dangerous Liaison Masterlist

It was less than two weeks after your conversation with Mario that you and Sid were traveling to Los Angeles for the All Star game. Geno and Anna were supposed to be with you, but because of an injury, they had to back out. It was better for him to rest up anyhow. For Sid, it was more work than fun, though he did have a more carefree attitude than when he's normally on the ice. The two of you did sneak in some nice alone time over the few days.

Once you were back in Pittsburgh, it was business as normal. Well, maybe normal wouldn't be the right word for you, as you were busy helping with the Stadium series game that would take place at the end of February against the Flyers. Your hours were a little later when you were in town, which Sid didn't mind as he just spent extra time on the ice or watching films while he waited for you. You insisted that you could just take separate cars, but he wouldn't hear of it. It was really quite cute of him.

The days leading up to the game were packed. The guys were doing media and squeezing in practices with their new equipment, while you worked behind the scenes with the rest of the crew setting things up. You wanted Heinz Field to feel just like PPG Arena did for them. The weather had everyone in a tither as Pittsburgh had got a bit of a warm front. Days leading up to the game saw temperatures in the seventies which was almost unheard of, for a February in Pennsylvania. In fact, on the day of the family skate, you were all literally wearing jeans and lightweight sweaters as you stood around watching the guys practice.

"Will you hold Scar for me?" Vero asked. You were watching the guys practice with the ladies today, instead of by the bench. It was a rare occurrence that you got to take a game in with them, so it was a nice change of pace. She handed baby Scarlett off to you while she bent down and put on Estelle's skates.

"Hello, sweetness," you said to the one-and-a-half-year-old, kissing her little cheeks in the process. "Do you see daddy out there?" You pointed out where Marc Andre was and Scarlett smiled.

"Hi, daddy!" She yelled, but you weren't entirely sure he could hear her, as he was all the way down in net. "Unc Sid!" She exclaimed when Sidney came by and tapped on the glass.

"Hi Scar!" He waved at her then gave you a look. One you weren't entirely sure you'd ever seen, before skating away leaving you to wonder what was going through his head. Practice ended soon thereafter and you all joined the guys out on the ice. Though most of them shed their pads due to the heat of the afternoon sun.

"Ice looked a little slushy," you commented to Sid when he skated over to you.

"It's not bad. They said the temperature's supposed to drop tonight and tomorrow so we'll be ok. Come on." He grabbed your hand pulling you out onto the ice with him. It was something you still weren't comfortable doing. Sid could literally skate circles around anyone, while you still had to concentrate if you wanted to go backward. He recognized that and always made sure he held onto you so that you wouldn't fall. "You looked good out there." He said offhandedly as you made your way around the now shiny surface of the ice.

"Huh? I wasn't doing anything. I'm pretty sure I should be saying that to you."

"That's not what I meant."

"Obviously," you said hitting him playfully and losing your balance at the same time. Sid righted you with ease so that to the casual onlooker they never would've seen you stumble.

"I meant holding Scarlett."

"Oh well, she's easy to love that's for sure. I'm going to miss them when they go." With the expansion team coming to Vegas, it was already widely known within the team that Flower would be the member they would choose. It was crushing, not only to you but to Sid as well. Your friendship with the Fleury's was one of the things you both treasured most; they were the reason you were with Sid right now. And while they would always be some of your best friends' things wouldn't be the same in Pittsburgh without them.

"I know," Sid replied wistfully. "But we've still got them for now." You skated around a few more times, before he let you go, only so that he could wrap his arms around your midsection and skate with you from behind. It was definitely intimate and you were surprised with all the media around that Sid was into such a public display of affection. Sure there had been the parades, but usually, he tried to keep your relationship out of the public eye if he could. "I just think you really looked good." He whispered in your ear.

"You've seen me in this outfit before."

"Not that, you know…" You had to crane your neck back to look at him, but you noticed he was turning a bit red and it had nothing to do with the unseasonably warm temperatures. "Holding Scarlett." He finally spit out. "It makes me think about having our own."

"OH!" The word came out a little louder than you intended. Of course, Sid had confessed that he wanted kids with you. It just seemed like something that was further away in the future and not something that he'd been thinking about recently.

"I know you're going to tell me it's too soon, and maybe you're right. I just can't help but think about it on days like today." You looked around then, watching all the guys skate with their significant others, some with kids while others had kids on the way. You could see the allure. As the two of you continued to glide around the ice, you let your mind wander to what it would be like. It was easy to picture, especially after watching Sid this summer with his Little Penguins camp. He'd be holding your son's or daughter's hands, much like Flower was doing now with Estelle, helping them navigate the ice. When Sid's hands tightened around your waist you couldn't stop yourself from wondering what it would feel like to be growing his child inside you. You found yourself relaxing more into Sid's embrace as you daydreamed about your future.

"It's definitely a nice picture," you finally sighed, letting him know that you weren't opposed to the idea.

"Yeah, yeah it is." His voice took on a dreamy quality and you knew he was imagining the same thing as you. It seemed like one minute you were caught up in your little fantasy and the next you guys were having to leave the ice and it was back to reality. Not that your reality was a bad one, you still had Sid and for now, that's all you needed.

Sid was right temperatures definitely cooled down. By game time the following day, it was barely thirty degrees and falling. You were bundled up in a coat with the team logo on it along with a matching tossle cap on your head. Sid had been mad that you hadn't worn the one all the ladies got with their guys' number on it, but you had insisted that when you were on the clock you were rooting for the entire team and not just him. At the moment you were wishing you had it so that you could put it on top of your current one. Your teeth were chattering and you kept bouncing on the balls of your feet to keep you warm.

Midway through the first Sid scored, which had you jumping up and down and cheering along with the team as well as the thousands of fans in the stadium. It did little to help get you warm and you were practically running to the locker room tunnel by end of the first. You grabbed a cup of hot tea while the players went over the first period and where they could make improvements. It went pretty much the same way in the second, even though Nick Bonino scored early the Flyers were able to cut the lead in half with a goal from Jakub Voracek. Again, you raced off to get warm as soon as the horn sounded.

Your feet were numb by the time Cully scored a goal early in the third, and though the Flyers scored on a power play, Chad Ruhwedel sealed the Pens victory with over five minutes left in play. The stadium erupted with the win, though it did little to warm you up. You stayed long enough to watch the team skate around in their little victory lap, then headed back down to the nice warm locker room.

Of course, Sid had to do media, which meant you were there even longer. He was afforded the luxury of a nice hot shower before the two of you headed home. "Can you please turn the heat up?" you whined once you were in the car. "I'm freezing."

"It was a bit cold out there, eh?" Sid commented as he turned the heat on your side of the vehicle to max.

"Ya think? I thought I was going to freeze to death when the snow started to fly."

"Babe, it's all part of outdoor hockey." He grabbed one of your hands in his. "Fuck, you are cold. You should've worn thermals or something."

"Trust me I will next time. I think it's just worse because of how beautiful it was yesterday."

"Well, as soon as we get home, we'll get you in the tub."

"Uh, yes, please." The ride through the city, while mostly traffic free, seemed endless.

"Head upstairs, babe and I'll bring you up a cup of tea as soon as I get rid of my gear." Not having to be told twice, you made your way up to your shared master bath and started running the water. You hated stripping out of your clothes, as it felt like the only warmth your body had at the moment but as soon as your toes touched the steaming water, you sighed as the warmth heated your skin. You were fully immersed up to your neck by the time Sid came up with a steaming mug full of tea. "Better?"

"A little," you answered taking a sip of the drink he'd prepared perfectly for you before setting it back down on the ledge of the tub. "Still a bit chilly."

"Well in that case." Sid started to strip out of his clothes. Divesting himself of his suit that he'd worn to the game. He folded it over the chair you used to put your makeup on, so that it didn't get any wrinkles, then made his way over to you and the tub. "Scooch up, babe." You did and he scooted in behind you, easing you back against him once he was comfortable in the water. His arms wrapped around you instantly and you felt engulfed in his heat. "This better?"

"Mmm much." You were completely content wrapped up in your boyfriend's arms with the water lapping around you both, so you rested your head against his chest. "You played really well tonight," you mused shutting your eyes and just giving yourself over to the warmth that was Sid.

"It was a lot of fun. I love playing outdoors. It's so authentic." Only Sid would put it like that, but you knew what he meant. "Though I wish you would've dressed warmer baby."

"I'm fine now." You took another long sip of tea, the temperature perfect.

Sid kissed your temple. "Good, can't have you getting sick on me."

"God no, I'll have to sleep in the guest room, if that happens."

"Why?"

"I'm not going to be responsible for getting the star player sick." You told him, turning your head so that you could look him in the eye. "You will not be missing a game because of me."

"I'd still probably end up missing a game because I wouldn't be able to sleep without you in our bed." His arms tightened around you, almost as if you were going to run off to the guest room right then. "But we're not worrying about that now, because we are definitely sleeping in the same bed tonight." His lips captured yours then, stealing your breath away and heating your body all the way to your core. You could feel his erecting grow against you as the kiss went on. It was nothing to reach behind you and wrap your fingers around his length. He moaned into your mouth, before gently sucking on your bottom lip as he broke the kiss. "You know two can play that game." His hand stole down your stomach and slipped between your folds, the water making it easy for him to caress you there. Your hand stuttered on his cock as he slid two fingers into you. Sid took the opportunity to grab your wrist with his free hand so that you could no longer manipulate him as you liked. "Lean your head back and enjoy this for a bit."

"But…"

"We'll get to that." He told you as he settled you against him once again. He shimmied his legs so that they were in between yours but only for a moment so that he could spread yours wide; your legs now splayed on either side of his. Sid's fingers continued to toy with your pussy, alternating between pumping in and out of you and rubbing circles on your clit, while his other hand tweaked your nipples into taut little peaks. Before you knew it you were panting with need, the chill of the evening game completely forgotten as Sid stoked a fire deep within you. His lips came down on the nape of your neck, his tongue driving you wild just as his fingers were. It was all too much as the water gently lapped at your skin. You felt your body gently rise into his touch, yet he held you firm working you towards that peak you craved. It didn't take long for your orgasm to hit. It washed over you like a wave cresting on the sand as your body trembled, this time not from the cold but the pleasure of Sid's touch. "You're so fucking sexy when you cum." His warm breath sent a shiver down your spine.

You were so sated you almost didn't want to move, but then you wanted him to experience the same ecstasy that you'd just felt. "We should…" you went to tell him that you should move to the bed but Sid had other plans.

"We'll be fine here, just kneel for a second." Your legs were already on either side of him, so it wasn't hard. He adjusted himself a bit, sitting more upright in the tub, before bending his knees slightly for you to lean against. You turned your head to the side to see him stroke himself a couple times, before lining himself up with your pussy. "Now just come back a little." You did as instructed; your pussy engulfing his cock as you basically sat reverse cowgirl on him. With his knees bent you leveraged yourself against them and started to ride his cock. "Fuck baby, you feel so good." His hands were on your hips making sure you wouldn't slip in the tub, but controlling your pace as well.

Water sloshed against the sides of the tub, some of it spilling over the sides. "Oh shit," you moaned out knowing that you were making a mess of the bathroom floor.

Sid could see where your thoughts were going. "Forget it, (Y/N). We'll get it later." He accentuated his words by thrusting up deep inside you. The action making you groan with desire. "That feel good, baby?"

"Yes," you cried out as he hit your g-spot again. "Right there," you panted and he hit the spot over and over again until you were convulsing around him in your second climax.

"Jesus, (Y/N)," Sid moaned as your pussy gripped him like a vice. The grip he had on your hips tightened as he rammed into your cunt. He was so close to falling off the edge and cumming with you but he wanted to hold off, make it last longer, give you one more orgasm before he sought his own pleasure. Sid slowed his thrusts then, as you relaxed momentarily against his knees. "So fucking beautiful." It took you a moment to catch your breath before you started to move again. His thrusts weren't as deep as before, giving you a moment's reprieve before he went at it again. You knew Sid, knew he could keep up this leisurely pace all night if he wanted. The water was cooling though, and even though your body was still on fire after two orgasms you had no wish to be cold again. It was then that you decided to move your hips, rocking in a motion that you knew would drive him wild. And it did. It wasn't long before he was bucking up into you again. The water going everywhere now. Some of it even hitting his designer suit which rested across the room on the chair. "Fuck, (Y/N)," he hissed out and you could tell he wouldn't last much longer at this pace. He let one hand snake around to your clit. His fingers applying just the right amount of pressure there, as he rubbed circles into the little nub.

"Sid, I'm gonna…"

"Yes, baby, yes," he groaned on the verge of hitting his peak as well. You were both there with a few thrusts. His hot cum filling you up as you quaked around him. The pleasure so intense you swore you saw stars. Sid collapsed against the back of the tub and while you wanted to follow, the position you were in did not make it that easy. It took a little maneuvering on both your parts, but soon you were back to lounging against Sid.

"We should get out." The water was definitely cooled now and this time you shivered from it.

"You still cold?"

"A little."

"Well, let's get you in bed then." The towel you had laid out was completely soaked, so you just laid it across the floor as you moved to get out of the tub. "Careful," Sid warned as you stepped out onto the shiny marble floor. You moved quickly yet cautiously to the cabinet and grabbed both of you a towel while laying down a few more to soak up the water.

You'd just finished wrapping the fluffy white towel around your body when Sid scooped you up and headed towards the bedroom. "Sid, stop! I need to clean up that mess."

"It'll dry." He must have been anticipating how the night would go for the bed was already turned down as he placed you in the middle of the mattress. He scooted in behind you, discarding his towel in one swift motion, before sweeping the covers over both of you. His hands made quick work of ridding you of the wet cloth that was helping you dry. "They say body heat is the fastest way to warm someone up."

"Hmm, is that so," you said turning in his embrace.

"Mmmhmm. I'm sure I read it somewhere."

"I'm sure you did. I'm just wondering what else this book said."

His hands were roaming up and down your back and gliding across the globes of your ass. "Oh, lots more."

You kissed his neck wanting to return the favor he had given you a while ago, then you moved to his chest before saying, "such as?" You continued your path downward over Sid's abs.

"I'm sure there was…" he sucked in a breath as you placed a warm kiss on his pelvis. "Fuck I can't think of a word."

You grinned up at him from beneath the covers. "Let me see if I can make you forget all together." Sid lost all train of thought as your lips connected with his cock. The night continued on like that for a few more hours before the two of you were so sated you could do nothing but sleep.

#Sidney Crosby #not so dangerous liaison series #nsdl #Sidney Crosby smut #sidney crosby imagine #sidney crosby imagines #Pittsburgh Penguins imagine #Pittsburgh Penguins imagines #hockey smut #hockey imagine #hockey fanfic #nhl smut #nhl imagine #nhl imagines #nhl fanfic

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cheri-translates · 3 years

Text

[CN] Shaw’s Creative Date

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for a date, 创意之约, which has not been released in EN! 🍒

This date features S2 Shaw, but contains no spoilers for S2!

[ This date was released on 13 May 2021 ]

Removing the VR headset, I rub my slightly sore eyes. Seeing the familiar modern furniture leaves me in a momentary trance.

MC: I finally cleared it - this game about the ancient times is pretty immersive.

Aside from completing missions, the game also has a rich plot written in a classical literary style. As a “workshop apprentice”, I successfully created a string of wood carved persimmons.

Rotating my aching wrists, it’s as though the sensation of carving products is still lingering on my hands.

MC: It’s a shame that I could only do that in the game...

Just when I’m about to continue grumbling, my phone suddenly rings.

Tapping the answer button, a familiar voice drifts lazily to my ear.

Shaw: Not a sound from you even during the weekend. What are you up to?

MC: I just played an immersive game, and it’s pretty fun.

At the other end of the line, Shaw makes an “oh” sound, then continues asking.

Shaw: Are you planning to stay at home today?

MC: Mm. I finally finished a big program, so I’m pretty comfortable playing games at home.

Hearing my response, Shaw’s tone lifts slightly at the end.

Shaw: It’s just a game. You can play it anytime, can’t you? The weather outside is great. Staying at home is such a waste. Why not take a stroll outside?

My gaze sweeps over the VR headset. While I’m hesitating whether or not to agree, a thought suddenly flashes across my mind, and I have an idea.

MC: Shaw, why don't you accompany me somewhere?

Shaw pauses for a moment, his subtle breathing drifting over the phone along with the electric currents.

Shaw: Where do you want to go?

MC: I’ll keep it a secret first. You’ll know when you get there. It’s definitely a place you wouldn’t expect.

Shaw chuckles softly, and he seems to stretch.

Shaw: All right. Since you invited me with such magnificent hospitality, I’ll reluctantly keep you company.

Soon after, the both of us stand at the entrance of a wood carving studio. Shaw tilts his head, looking me up and down.

Shaw: You sure we’re not at the wrong place?

I nod my head.

MC: How is it? I already said you definitely wouldn’t expect it.

Shaw arches his brows, a somewhat surprised expression in his eyes.

Shaw: When did you get a new hobby?

Not giving Shaw a direct response, I lift my hand, raising my phone to his face. The picture on the screen features the string of wood carved persimmons I made in the game.

MC: Look at this string of persimmons. I carved it bit by bit in the game. Looks good, doesn’t it? I plan to carve a replica based on this later.

Shaw leans closer to give it a sweeping glance, his expression a little subtle.

Shaw: ...the object in the picture isn’t too bad. But do you like it that much that you must carve a string of persimmons?

MC: Don’t underestimate this small string of persimmons. Slow work yields fine products. The smaller something is, the more patience and carving skills are tested. Also, this is the first wood carving I made in the game. Furthermore, “everything will go according to one’s wishes” is a wonderful message and well-wish. Making it myself will feel very meaningful.

[Note] For the translation of “everything will go according to one’s wishes”, What MC says is “柿柿如意”, which is a pun based on the popular well-wish “事事如意” (“everything will go according to one’s wishes”)

“Persimmon” is 柿 (“shi”). “Everything” is 事事 (“shi shi”)

Shaw: But based on the level of complexity, you can’t make it without having a foundation in carving.

Predicting that Shaw would say this, I make a fist, lifting my head up confidently.

MC: Don’t underestimate me. I think I’m naturally talented in handwork. If I can make it in the game, I might be able to in reality.

Hearing my “lofty aspirations”, the corners of Shaw’s lips hook upwards, and he elongates the tail of his sentence coolly.

Shaw: Fine, I’ll wait and see.

Probably because it’s the lunch break, only the boss is in the shop.

After telling the boss my purpose in coming, he very quickly prepares the wooden block and burin, then comprehensively explains some matters I should take note of.

[Trivia] A burin (刻刀 - “ke dao”) is a handheld steel tool used for carving metal or wood

MC: Draw a design first, then trace a copy onto the wooden block, then...

Hearing me mumble to myself, Shaw can’t help but arch his brows.

Shaw: It’s no use simply memorising the steps. You’ve got to get started to get the feel of it.

...that make sense.

Very soon, I successfully draw a design based on the picture. However, I keep sensing that something’s missing when I look at the picture of the string of persimmons in my hand.

Darting a glance at Shaw, who occasionally looks at the drawing paper in my hand, I turn my body to the side, displaying the drawing paper in front of him.

MC: Shaw, didn’t you brag about being the “best in hand-drawn sketches” in your department? Want to take a look and make adjustments for me?

[Note] For those who are unaware, Shaw is the only graduate student in the archaeological department of Loveland University, so... of course he’s the best in everything LOL

Shaw’s brows arch slightly. Grabbing a pen on the table casually, he starts making amendments quickly.

Shaw: Done.

Unexpectedly, with just a few strokes, the fullness and lushness of the persimmons are outlined, and the entire picture instantly becomes much more vibrant.

Once all the preparatory work is done, the next step is to saw the sides of the wood carving. Placing the wooden block on the machine, I test out suitable positions.

All of a sudden, Shaw presses on my hand.

Shaw: Didn’t the boss mention that it’d be safer to place it a little beyond the peripheral line?

While saying this, he pulls on my wrist, causing the wooden block to shift to the side slightly. After verifying that it’s in the right place, he releases my hand.

Wood carving in real life is much more difficult than I imagined. The more I tell myself to be calm, the more my hands refuse to obey.

I take a deep breath -

Shaw: Tch, aren’t you going a little too fast?

Right after he finishes speaking, my hand suddenly trembles, and I saw a small hole into the wooden block.

Shaw pauses for a few seconds, then bursts into laughter mercilessly.

He leans over, pointing at the small hole, his eyes gloating over my misfortune.

Shaw: Heh. Did someone take a bite out of the persimmon? It’s actually pretty creative.

Faced with Shaw’s mockery, I pout without saying anything. Then, I mimic his usual tone and glare at him.

MC: Why are you laughing so loudly? My hearing is good, okay.

Shaw casually props himself on the table with his elbows. He turns his head to the side and watches me, eyes filled with interest and a smile.

Perhaps because we’re too close in proximity, I seem to feel his warmth encasing my surroundings.

Smelling the scent of peppermint at the tip of my nose, I subconsciously turn away, muttering softly.

MC: Stop crowding over here... it’s a little warm.

The corners of Shaw’s eyes lift upwards slightly, and he sweeps a gaze over my face. He chuckles, sitting down on the chair behind in a wilful manner.

Not long after, I painstakingly saw the overall outer shape of the wooden block. After that, I start using a chisel to carefully craft the outline and thickness.

Probably because I’m unfamiliar with the techniques, the thickness of both sides of the wood carving are very different despite me putting in a lot of effort into correcting it.

I steal a glance at Shaw who is behind. After some hesitation, I clear my throat.

MC: Erm, could you help me with a little something?

Shaw loosens his shoulders.

Shaw: You want my help?

MC: Since you look like you don't have much to do, why not adjust the thickness of the outline with me?

Shaw doesn’t respond immediately. He folds his arms and leans against the wall, both legs placed casually.

Beneath the sunlight of the scorching afternoon sun, the corners of his lips tilt upwards, revealing a mischievous smile.

Shaw: Someone made a solemn vow earlier that she could do it by herself. So, in order for you to experience this fully, I refuse.

I don’t even spare Shaw half a glance after this, heart sinking as I lower my head in silence, focusing on the wood carving alone.

Perhaps grasping some tricks, my actions are gradually much more proficient than before, despite slow improvement.

The doors to the shop are suddenly pushed open. A parent walks in with a little boy.

The boss greets the new customers. Shaw suddenly lifts his arm and waves, walking over to the boss.

Shaw: Boss, give me a burin too.

Thinking that Shaw was suddenly “pricked by his conscience” and is planning to help, I lift my head to look at him in anticipation.

Unexpectedly, after getting the burin, Shaw picks up the leftover linden wood that I had sawed off earlier.

He stands near the window, lifting his hand leisurely. Against the light, that head of bluish purple hair is even more eye-catching.

Shaw: It’s boring to wait. I’ll try it with you, and give you some competitive motivation.

He reveals a confident smile, his tone not at all humble.

Shaw: I’ll also show you what it means to be “naturally talented”.

Shaw deliberately sits down at a table that’s further away from me.

Seeing that my gaze continues to linger on him, Shaw lifts his eyes, asking teasingly.

Shaw: Why are you staring at me?

MC: ...you already know the answer. Also, you’re pretending to be mysterious. What exactly do you plan to carve?

Shaw: You want to know? All the more reason not to tell you.

With this, he lowers his head, the tip of the pen making rustling sounds. He’s likely drawing a design on the rough paper.

Pursing my lips with a “hmph”, I decide to throw myself into crafting the wood carving.

Just as I strive to painstakingly carve the appearance of the wood carving, the little boy who accompanied his parent here seems to be restless.

He runs around the shop, and finally scuttles to Shaw’s side.

Little Boy: Big Bro, your hair’s really cool!

Shaw releases a “hmph”, paying no attention to the boy. But the little boy is fearless, and continues curiously.

Little Boy: Big Bro, what are you carving?

Unintentionally hearing this, I hurriedly perk up my ears, turning my body towards Shaw secretly.

Shaw glances at the boy from the side, placing the prototype wood carving on the table and leaning it from side to side.

Shaw: Make a guess.

The boy stares at it for a while, then exclaims excitedly.

Little Boy: I see it now - it’s a fish! Big Bro, did I guess correctly?

Shaw doesn’t deny it, revealing an expression which says “you’re pretty knowledgeable”.

Shaw: [aww he sounds so affectionate] Little Imp, your eyesight isn’t bad.

Little Boy: But why do you want to carve a fish?

The boy doesn’t seem to understand, and is also slightly disdainful.

Little Boy: Fishes are so unimpressive. If it were me, I’d carve a big tiger. It’s the king of all creatures, and it’s so impressive!

While the boy speaks, he chuckles in satisfaction.

Shaw laughs, then purses his lips.

Shaw: A wooden carved fish is much more interesting than your big tiger.

The boy has an expression on his face which reads “nonsense”. Shaw casts a sidelong glance at him, scoffing softly.

Shaw: Forget it. You wouldn't understand even if I told you.

Little Boy: Who says I wouldn’t understand? I’ve already learnt many things!

The boy grumbles in dissatisfaction, his arms akimbo, pestering Shaw unflinchingly.

I try my best to control the smile at the corners of my lips, and suddenly have an idea. Clearing my throat, I pretend to be a bystander, inserting myself into the conversation.

MC: What this little boy said is correct. Young man, you can’t look down on others just because you’re older by a few years.

Little Boy: Hmph! That’s right!

My “encouragement” enables the boy to be even less willing to back down, and he purses his small mouth.

Shaw: Oh?

Hearing my response, Shaw lifts his eyes, a mischievous smile curling the corners of his lips upwards.

Shaw: What is it? You also want to know?

MC: Since you started it, it’s only right for you to talk about it more.

Shaw: Since the both of you are pretty eager to learn, I’ll broaden your knowledge.

Next to the window, the rays of light are bright. Shaw arches his brows wilfully.

Shaw: To put it simply, this is related to the history of “fish culture”. Since ancient times, fish have represented auspicious signs and well-wishes.

Little Boy: I know about this! Is this how people wish each other “may you have abundance year after year”? I heard my teacher mentioning it before. It’s because “鱼” and “余” are homophonic!

[Note] The well-wish the boy is referring to is “年年有鱼”, which is a pun based on the proper saying “年年有余”

“Fish” is 鱼 (“yu”), while 余 (also “yu”) means abundance

Shaw: In that case, your teacher only told you half of it.

Shaw fiddles with the burin in his hand, spinning it casually.

Shaw: Fishes are an embodiment of luck. Patterns of fish can often be seen on antiques.

MC: What’s the origin of wooden carved fishes then?

Shaw pauses for a second before responding.

Shaw: Over seven thousand years ago, the most ancient wooden carved fishes were in the Hemudu culture. Based on conjectures, they were likely used for praying and well-wishes.

[Trivia] The Hemudu culture was a Neolithic culture spanning from 5500 BC to 3300 BC, located south of the Hangzhou Bay in Jiangnan in Zhejiang, China

Shaw speaks indifferently, but the boy listens at the side, his eyes wide.

Little Boy: Big Bro, you really know a lot! You’re even more incredible than my teacher!

The corners of Shaw’s lips hook upwards with pride.

Shaw: I guess so. Little Imp, remember to read more books and learn properly.

The boy runs away contentedly. My gaze lands on the wooden carving in Shaw’s hand that I can’t see quite clearly yet.

I didn’t expect the wooden carved fish to have the same symbolism as the string of persimmons. I tilt my head, feeling slightly emotional.

Time flows by as the seconds and minutes pass. Before realising it, the sky dims, and the studio lights are bright.

Swinging my hands which have almost lost all physical strength, I release a long sigh.

At the other side of the table, Shaw lifts his chin towards me.

Shaw: Progress isn’t going smoothly?

Looking at the half-finished product with uneven contours next to my hand, I shake my head a little despondently.

MC: Looks like I won’t be able to finish it today, and would have to come back next time. Also, the actual wood carving is light-years away from what I expected...

Hearing my soft grumbling at the end, Shaw arches his brows.

Shaw: Just by looking at it, the string of persimmons isn’t easy to make. But you dug this pit yourself, so I’ll wait and watch you fill it up.

Ignoring the teasing tone in his voice, I purse my lips.

MC: I definitely won’t give up. What about you? Are you done with the carving?

Shaw has an expression which reads “of course”, and he nods unhesitatingly.

Shaw: It was done a long time ago.

I’m stunned for a moment, both surprised and curious.

One hand supports Shaw’s cheek lightly. With a stretch of his long arm, the wooden carved fish is brought before my eyes.

This is a bright coloured wood carving of a fish. It has a roundish head and a chubby belly, and looks extremely adorable.

I lift up the wooden fish sculpture with both hands, as though instantly struck by its adorable shape.

Shaw: Excellent workmanship with profound symbolism. Your goal has been overtaken by me.

Behind the table, Shaw arches his brows in satisfaction, casually twisting the burin, his pose utterly flamboyant.

Even though his carving is indeed not bad, the moment I lift my eyes and see Shaw’s insuppressible pride, I can’t help but remain silent.

With the sudden impulse to sing a different tune, I deliberately purse my lips, speaking calmly.

MC: It’s just like this I guess. In terms of exquisiteness, I’d give a passing mark at most.

The smile on Shaw’s lips retracts slightly. While looking at me from the side, he releases a “hmph” from his nose.

Shaw: You have the nerve to criticise me? Why don’t you look at your own standard. Also, this is my exclusive design. It’s much more creative than you making a duplicate from the game.

Hearing the unwillingness to back down hidden in his tone, I can’t help but smile secretly.

Shaw glances at me indifferently. He seems to catch the secret smile on my lips, and an indiscernible light flashes across his eyes.

Shaw: Hey, shouldn’t you return it to me after touching it for half a day? You don’t like it anyway.

MC: Who says-

Almost making a slip of the tongue, I hurriedly change my words.

MC: Actually, on closer inspection, it seems that your carving is pretty okay.

Shaw: Just “okay”?

MC: ...I’ll add one mark for its symbolism and origin then.

Pleased with this, Shaw rolls his shoulders, chuckling softly.

Shaw: You still have some taste.

He crosses his leg over the other, his eyebrows suddenly furrowing. He seems to blurt out what’s in his mind.

Shaw: But the head of this fish seems a little too round... Hm, it’s a little irksome. Looks like I need to make some corrections.

MC: No it isn’t? It looks just right like this!

Afraid that Shaw would snatch it back, I hurriedly fold my hands over the wooden carving, and notice a hint of slyness in his eyes.

He leans closer abruptly, instantly closing the distance between us.

Shaw: Looking at your posture... What is it? Can’t bear to return it?

Specks of bright light reminiscent of daytime dance on Shaw’s bluish purple hair, outlining his expression and making it look even more triumphant.

I blink my eyes.

MC: Since you’re already done, I think I should observe it for a while longer, and have some “luck” rubbed off on me. I might even be able to quickly and successfully finish my wood carving too.

Shaw turns his head, the corners of his lips turning upwards relaxedly. A pondering smile surfaces in his bright eyes.

Shaw: You’ve got taste. If you really like it, it’s not that I can’t give it to you.

My heart stirs, eyes widening as I look at him. But I have the feeling that there should be a second half to his sentence.

Shaw leans back relaxedly, stretching casually.

Shaw: But I need to make up for the costs.

...just as I guessed.

Cradling the wooden carving in my hand, I lift my chin towards Shaw.

MC: Go on, what’s the “fee”?

Shaw lowers his head, pretending to deliberate for a few seconds. Then, he lifts his eyes, meeting mine.

Shaw: When you’re done with your wooden carving...

Shaw: It belongs to me.

[Note] There are actually two ways one can interpret this line because it’s kept purposefully vague. It’s simply “归我”, which means “belong to me”. This means we can’t be sure if he’s asking for the wooden carving or MC herself :>

Shaw: How is it? Isn’t it very fair?

Light falls on the tips of Shaw’s hair, reflecting a bright and sly smile in his eyes.

Before I can react, he has already stood up.

Shaw: All right, that’s how it’d be.

🐟 Phone call: here

🐟 Support the cafe by dropping by the tip jar!

#mlqc #mlqc cn #mlqc spoilers #mlqc shaw

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pink-flame · 3 years

Text

Like You Could Love Me

So...the Angry Flower Squad was making me SO soft over gifs and @mamirugbee wanted porch fluff with kissing and I remembered that @thedeathdeelers and @missjoolee liked my idea of using this post as a Juke prompt and here we are. I wrote this from 12-2am so it’s quite possibly incoherent and I’m not checking for mistakes until tomorrow so take it for what it is, a late night labor of love. Enjoy! 💜

Julie hadn’t slept for almost 48 hours.

Her school was hosting a Los Feliz High After Dark event for the lower grades who didn’t get to attend prom. It was pitched as being just as exciting as the dance but in practice was known to be little more than a glorified sleepover in the school gym with PTA members for chaperones. Flynn had been determined that that year would be different, and had talked Julie into joining her on the planning committee.

The good news was that Flynn had a real flair for party planning and decorating when she was actually invested (see the difference between the dance they tried to forget and the way she had helped Julie’s dad throw together an epic garage party in less than 24 hours). So by the time Julie and Flynn and the other volunteers were done the gym was fully immersed in a carnival theme full of cute booths filled with potential activities and cute backgrounds to take pictures in front of. It was definitely an improvement over the year before which had been an under the sea theme which had consisted mostly of a few blue streamers and Mr. Weaver walking around in an inflatable Nemo costume.

The bad news was that it had taken a lot longer than they had anticipated and they hadn’t fallen into bed the night before the event until close to 2am. Julie hadn’t been able to sleep even after she slipped into bed next to Flynn and heard her best friend start making the small whistling noises that indicated she was out cold. Julie had been kept up with thoughts of what her bandmates were up to without her and if they had lingered a little longer on what Luke in particular was doing right then, well that wasn’t that surprising.

She loved Alex and Reggie but neither of them had attempted to hold her hand and remarked on their “interesting little relationship” or suddenly developed the ability to touch her and instinctively joined her in reaching out to gently cradle the other’s face.

No, Luke was different, not that she wanted to say that in front of him unless she was sure he felt the same overwhelming feelings she did Oddly enough she was much more concerned about the possibility that he didn’t than she was about the fact that he was still..well, a ghost. It wasn’t that she was unaware that his ghostly status could lead to heartache for her later on, of course she was. It just didn’t seem so important suddenly. After what had happened with her mom, what had almost happened with the guys only a couple of months ago...anything could happen at any time. Tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed anyway so why deny herself happiness now if she could have it? If she could have it. Because that was still the question.

Because Luke obviously liked her but did he like her? That sounded so juvenile but to call it anything else...well, that was really scary. Evil ghosts and the looming possibility of their return had nothing on the insecurity that came with not knowing exactly how the boy you lo...liked felt about you.

So Julie didn’t get much sleep that night, Flynn’s alarm seeming to go off only moments after she finally drifted off. She had dragged through school that day, trying to match Flynn’s excitement for the night’s upcoming festivities though her own enthusiasm had quickly drained out of her altogether along with her energy. In the end it had been as fun a night as it could be with Julie spending most of it in a semi-exhausted haze. She and Flynn had played some of the games they had set up, and danced to the music they both agreed would have been better if it had been either DJ’d by Flynn or performed by Julie’s band, and when Carrie had sneered something about how tacky the theme was even that had been half hearted and without any real bite.

So it was a pretty good night all things considered and Julie was in a good mood despite her complete exhaustion by the time Flynn’s mom dropped her off early the next morning. Ok, so maybe part of her good mood was actually because of her exhausted state by that point as she found herself feeling giddy and her mind had gone sort of pleasantly fuzzy. That was her excuse for how she found herself half-skipping up the path towards her front door, singing to herself.

We create...perfect harmony

“Somebody had a good time.”

Julie’s head snapped up to take in the figure of the boy who leaned against the pillar of the porch in front of her, a small smile bordering on a smirk tugging at his lips.

Luke.

What was he doing there?

Was he waiting for her?

She had to play it cool.

She had to be normal.

She had to not give away all the feelings that had been swirling around inside of her for the last couple of months since they first gained the ability to touch each other whenever they wanted and promptly both became too awkward to touch each other at all.

She had to…

“I missed you,” She blurted.

One of Julie’s hands flew up to cover her mouth as she took the last few steps up onto the porch, trying and failing to ignore the way Luke’s eyes widened even as that vaguely infuriating smirk grew larger.

“I didn’t mean that,” She insisted once her hand had dropped back to her side. “I mean...I didn’t not mean it but...I just meant it would have been fun if you could have come. Any of you. All of you. Um...yeah.”

Luke let her dig herself deeper, waiting until her stream of words had come to a complete stop. When they finally dried up he pushed off of the pillar with one of his signature little bounces, letting his momentum carry him to within a step of where she stood awkwardly on the porch.

“Did someone spike the punch at this dance?” He asked her, amusement clear in his tone.

Julie shook her head a little too fiercely, indignant despite the fact that she couldn’t exactly blame him for suspecting that she was drunk.

She felt a little drunk.

Not that she knew what it was like to be drunk but she was pretty sure it was similar to this.

Not the point.

“It wasn’t a dance it was a school sanctioned slumber party,” She corrected, focusing all of her energy on not slurring her words or otherwise embarrassing herself. “And nobody spiked anything. And actually nobody drinks punch anymore. Just so you know.”

Luke held up both hands as though he were surrendering but that smirk of his was impossible to deny at this point, a fact that both made Julie incredibly irritated and simultaneously fighting the urge to lean up and kiss it right off his stupid face.

Ok, that was not helpful.

“Not a dance, no punch. Got it,” Luke said, his voice just soft enough to keep her annoyance more or less at bay.

“Why are you out here anyway?”

Julie hadn’t meant to ask that but it felt like any filter her brain generally had was long gone at this point.

Luke tilted his head slightly and reached up to scratch at the back of his neck.

“Oh, you know, just taking in the view.”

Julie frowned skeptically.

“Taking in the view?”

“Yeah,” Luke said, gesturing out at the plant filled yard. “Just communing with nature you know? Honestly, I forgot you were even out last night.”

“Oh.”

Julie dipped her head a little so she didn’t have to look directly at Luke as disappointment rushed through her. She was pretty sure she was too tired to keep the evidence of that emotion from being completely visible. She was so frustrated with herself for caring at all. He wasn’t her boyfriend after all. Why would be be waiting for her?

“Julie.”

She reluctantly raised her head to meet Luke’s gaze which was fixed insistently on her. His smirk had fallen away leaving behind a look at once more open and somehow harder to read at the same time.

“I’m kidding,” He told her as he took a half-step closer to her, so close that she had to tilt her head up further to maintain eye contact. “I was waiting for you.”

“Oh,” She said again, very aware that she seemed to have lost the ability to say anything else.

She reached deep down inside and mustered up the strength to pull out one further word.

“Why?”

His eyes somehow managed to soften even more and his voice was oddly breathy when he answered.

“Because I missed you too.”

And Julie knew that the most prudent thing to do was tuck that phrase away as something warm, and happy and precious to examine more closely when she had slept and had the mental prowess to actually determine what it meant for their interesting little relationship.

She knew that.

But she was exhausted not only from lack of sleep but from months spent questioning where they stood. She was happy to hear him say that he had missed her, of course she was. But she also found herself feeling strangely...angry.

How dare he look at her with those big soft eyes and stare at her like that if he wasn’t ever planning on actually putting her out of her misery by telling her how he felt or didn’t feel?

“I wish you wouldn’t look at me like that,” The words burst out of her without her permission.

Luke was clearly taken aback by her words, his eyebrows shooting up his forehead.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,’ She hesitated, just enough awareness seeping back in to make her realize what a truly stupid thing she was about to say. “Like you could love me.”

She watched as a whole range of emotions rushed over his face too quickly for her to decipher exactly what all of them were.

“Julie…”

“Forget I said anything,” Julie interrupted, turning towards the front door with every intention to flee the situation. “I’m just really tired.”

“Julie!”

He said her name more forcefully that time and she froze. She didn’t turn back to face him though, the pounding in her chest and the heat spreading across her face giving her all the incentive she needed to keep her head facing away.

Luke wasn’t having any of that though.

He reached out to gently tug her back towards him, one hand settling on her cheek while the other rested on her waist.

If she hadn’t been blushing before she certainly was now.

“Do you not want me to look at you like that because...because you don’t feel the same?”

Luke’s voice shook a little as he gave voice to that question, his thumb seeming to stroke across her cheek without his permission.

Julie was reeling, everything feeling surreal and dreamlike anyway because of her lack of sleep but when combined with Luke’s gentle actions it felt more and more unreal. She couldn’t help but remember the last time he had touched her face, how they had clutched at each other thinking it was the only chance they would ever have. Now they had new chances every day and they had been wasting them.

Why had they been wasting them?

“Wait...feel the same as what? Feel the same as who?” She asked as her brain finally caught up with what he had actually said.

He visibly swallowed and she took some comfort in the fact that apparently he was nervous too.

“The same as I feel,” He paused. “About you. I...I love you, Julie. And if that makes you uncomfortable I never have to say it again, ok? But it’s how I feel and I just wanted to say it. Once or whatever.”

“But…” Julie felt a giggle rising up inside of her as exhaustion and the pure absurdity of the moment settled in. “But I love you too.”

Luke’s thumb froze on her face as his eyes lit up with something close to hope.

“You do?”

Julie nodded, the giggle finally bursting out of her only to be met with a grin from Luke so radiant she wished she could capture it in a photo to look at later.

“You love me,” Luke said again as though he needed to confirm beyond any shadow of doubt.

“I love you,” Julie repeated agreeably. “And you love me?”

Luke nodded, bouncing a little on his heels as he somehow managed to step even more into her space.

“I love you.”

“Well…” Julie sighed happily. “Well, that’s great then.”

Luke let out a bark of laughter that probably would have been loud enough to bring her dad to the porch if anyone but her had been able to hear it.

Before she had time to remark on how obnoxiously loud he could be he was crowding her back until she bumped into the pillar he had been leaning against when she got home. The moment her back made contact with its firm surface he was bringing his other hand up until he was cupping both of her cheeks. She barely had time to adjust to that very much welcome sensation before he was lowering his head and aligning his lips with hers, pressing them together in a chaste peck that was still enough to send her heart racing. He started to pull back as if to gauge her reaction but she was having none of that. She had been waiting for this for so long and as previously established she had absolutely none of her usual ability to deny herself what she wanted.

And what she wanted was her hands on Luke Patterson right then.

She reached up and latched one hand on the back of his neck and the other threaded deep into his hair giving it a little tug just because she could. She had been wanting to touch him so badly ever since that night in the garage when she’d almost lost him and she’d been wanting to touch his dumb, messy hair ever since “I’m Luke by the way”. So she did.

He let out a little pleased sound that was cut off when she stretched up to press her mouth back to his, this time with twice as much force and no intention of separating anytime soon. To his credit he took the hint pretty fast, his hands dropping from her face to wrap around her waist tugging her body to press against his as he moved his lips insistently against hers. And wow...that was something, the sensation of almost all of her pressed up against almost all of him.

He wasn’t warm, not exactly, but he wasn’t cold either like she had feared he would be. It was more like his body was mirroring back exactly her own temperature, leaving it hard to determine where one of them began and the other ended when her eyes were closed as they currently were.

Or maybe that was just them.

Maybe it was like that quote she always saw floating around online about souls being made of the same stuff.

When she was well rested and thinking rationally she had always rolled her eyes a bit at stuff like that but now...she was beginning to see the appeal.

Julie massaged absentmindedly at the back of his neck as she drew his lower lip into her mouth, the sound he made in response enough to have her pulling back with a giggle.

“Come back here,” He mumbled, his lips chasing hers even as she turned her face away leaving him to press soft, wet kisses to her cheek.

“Now you sound drunk,” She told him, turning back to face him and looping both arms around his shoulders. “My dad will be up soon and I have no idea how I’d explain...this...when he can’t even see you.”

Luke groaned as he leaned down to rest his forehead against hers.

“You’re right.”

“I’m right,” Julie echoed.

It was true but that didn’t mean she was happy about it.

They stayed like that for another minute or so, just enjoying being this close to each other with nothing to hide. They might have stayed like that longer but Julie suddenly let out a yawn she couldn’t contain directly into Luke’s face.

Luke pulled back sharply but the soft smile that seemed to always be reserved just for her remained in place.

“You need to get some sleep,” He told her firmly.

She wanted to argue but all that came out was another yawn.

Ok, so there was no arguing with that.

“Goodnight,” She told him, suddenly feeling shy as she backed towards the front door wanting to keep him in her sight just a little longer.

Luke gestured around them to the soft light spilling around her yard.

“Good morning,” He corrected with a grin.

Never one to let him have the last word, certainly not when she was too tired to be embarrassed, Julie leapt forward to press one final lingering kiss on his lips, retreating before he could do more than return the pressure.

Julie backed towards the front door, the grin now firmly on her face and a rather dumbstruck one adorning his.

“Band practice later,” She reminded him. “Don’t be late.”

Then she slipped into the house and up to her bed, incredibly tired and pretty sure of exactly what she would be dreaming of.

#I blame the #angry flower squad #for this #and also my other friends who encourage me to see juke everywhere #you know you are #and I love you for it #feels so good to write dumb fluff honestly #Juke #Jatp #my fics #fanfiction

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kuiperblog · 3 years

Text

Deathloop sure is a video game

Every October, there's pop-up entertainment venues like "haunted houses" (or other haunted attractions) that attempt to artificially recreate the motifs common in horror movies, complete with live actors who are dressed as vampires or zombies or serial killers or whatever who leap out and scare the guests who squeal in delight, if only because it gives them an excuse to tightly cling to their partner. It's more exciting than going to a horror movie, because it's a more tactile experience, so you're mostly just there to experience the various horror motifs without being concerned about a plot.

The thing is, there are actual horror movies that are set in haunted attractions. And while this does make for some fun early reveals (like when the teenagers laugh at the knife-wielding man who they assume is an actor and part of the attraction, only to realize that he's actually a homicidal madman), the very idea of a horror movie set in a haunted house kind of feels like cheating. Haunted attractions are, in a way, a simulacrum of a horror movie, which I suppose is an odd thing to say considering that haunted attractions are real and the events in horror movies are not, but I think that is the main level on which most haunted attractions are designed: a haunted attraction is a "horror movie IRL," so to then make that the setting of your horror movie “horror movie IRL but in a movie” is like a simulacrum of a simulacrum. It’s shortcutting past the part where you would ordinarily come up with some kind of lore-based explanation for why the teenagers are hanging out in a creepy house and why there’s a demented killer or vampires or whatever who are trying to kill them.

I sort of feel this way about one of the first levels I played in Deathloop, which is a video game both in medium and form. It's a bit like Dishonored (one of Arkane's earlier titles) in the sense that the core objectives boil down to identifying an assassination target, and hunting them down in their mansion or laboratory or whatever. The first target I assassinated was a fellow by the name of Charlie Montague, who is obsessed with games, and has populated a section of the world where you can speed-run an obstacle course to be rewarded with a gun, because this is a first-person shooter video game that is set on murder island, where everyone's favorite hobby is killing each other because they’re in a timeloop where everyone will revive the next day. However, when I found Charlie Montague, he was in the middle of a LARP session. This is literally how the game describes it: Charlie is hosting a game where he invites guests to participate in a game somewhat akin to a murder mystery, or maybe more like Among Us. When I arrived, Charlie announced over the loudspeaker to all of his guests that the killer monster (me) had arrived, and the objective was now for them to hunt me down. (I, for my part, did my best to avoid the guests, but I had to gun down the entire party before finally getting to Charlie at the top floor.)

So, this is a video game level that felt very much like a video game level. Which I don't really mean as a knock against it -- it was a fun environment, I had fun hunting down the game designer Charlie Montague and murdering his LARPing buddies, and the environment was set up in a way that made the confrontation with Charlie himself interesting, since Charlie possesses the blink power that lets him teleport across gaps and between floors. But it kind of feels like cheating to have a video game level where the setting premise is, as explained by the game's fiction, literally a game created by a game designer (as opposed to trying to sell you on the idea that the level you're traipsing through is just some rich dude's mansion, or a military base, or whatever). It is the video game equivalent of setting your horror movie in a haunted house attraction.

As an Arkane Studios fan (who started with 2006's Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and counts Dishonored among my personal top 10 games of all time), I quite enjoyed Deathloop. But it is by far the most video game video game that they've ever released.

Games like Dishonored and Prey (2017) exist in what is sometimes described as the "immersive sim" genre, where there's a big emphasis on player choice and giving the players a bunch of tools to approach objectives without giving them a prescribed route through the game. Dishonored pushes you in the direction of being stealthy and quiet (with a "chaos" system that causes the world to become more desolate if you kill too many enemies in each level), but there are many routes through the levels -- and sometimes, you'll find your way to an objective through what feels like it isn't a prescribed "route" at all. The objectives are often quite simple -- "infiltrate, kill a dude, exfiltrate" -- but a level that could be completed in just a few minutes might take an hour to complete the first time you play it as you spend time scoping out the target, gradually getting a feel for the environment and learning which parts of the level have lots of enemies and which parts are safe and easy to stealth your way through.

The immersive sim's emphasis on carving your own way through levels leads to a phenomenon where a lot of the progression that you make is "meta" progression that exists entirely outside of your avatar -- you might spend an hour prowling around a level, and your character hasn't gotten any stronger (apart from maybe finding a few optional collectibles), but you as a player have "leveled up" to the point that you now know the level like the back of your hand, which is how you have people who spend hours exploring a level in Hitman so that they can do a perfect 5-minute speedrun of that level.

Sometimes, this sense of "meta-progression" is further emphasized by making some of the collectibles information that you as a player can store. I remember a part in Dishonored where I found a locked safe, and I had to root around the game environment and find the code to the safe before I could come back and get the goodie inside. But if I wanted to, I could write that number down so that on any subsequent playthrough, I could just go right to the safe and open it right away -- which feels a bit like cheating, but it's no less cheating than sprinting through a specific route through a level because I know from previous playthroughs that the path I'm taking has no guards.

Deathloop isn't quite like that: the game is filled with combinations and whatnot (in one "puzzle" I had to insert specifically-labeled tapes into a machine in a specific order), but all of these are generated randomly: you can't take that information with you across playthroughs, and you can't look the number up in a walkthrough like some older immersive sims would let you do. But Deathloop takes this meta progression and makes it actual progression: it's a time-loop story, and your character (Colt) remembers everything that he encounters across playthrough, so when you find the combination to a door, Colt will make a mental note of it (no need to bust out your pen and paper), and the next time you come to a locked door that requires that combination, you don't even have to punch in the numbers: just hold the triangle button on your Playstation controller and Colt will automatically punch in the numbers that he learned during an earlier loop.

Deathloop is full of little things like this that, on first glance, almost just feel like QoL improvements. But there's something that feels very different about how things are done in Deathloop: in gameplay terms, it basically boils down to, "Go to this place and press square to read the password, then go to this other place and unlock the door," which is really not that different from "go to this place and press square to pick up the key, then go to this other place to unlock the door." The "passwords" that exist throughout this game are basically just keys that Colt can store in his brain and take with him whenever you advance to the next loop.

And to be clear, that's not necessarily a *bad* thing. In fact, immersive sims are kind of a niche genre that don't have a very big audience, so anything that helps streamline and make it more like, well, what you'd expect from a "video game," is probably going to make the game accessible to a lot more people. And they streamline a *lot* in this game. The game is all about planning the "perfect loop" where you manage to kill the 8 big baddies in a single day, and everything before that point is just preparing for that final loop. Even though that seems like an abstract thing that might require you to hold a bunch of disparate information in your head, the game is actually *really* good at making it so that Colt is already mentally mapping out the game plan as you go, to the point where you can just go into the quest book, select a thread, and then just follow the waypoints. Colt is planning for the "perfect loop" and collecting all the information he needs (including passwords, and memorizing information about how to get certain bosses to go to certain areas where they'll be vulnerable), and Colt is so good at remembering these things that the player never has to: you can play the entire game from start to finish just by traveling from waypoint to waypoint and stealthing or shooting your way past anything that stands in your way.

That is, of course, incredibly reductive. The process of getting from point A to point B in Deathloop is fun for the same reason that getting from point A to point B is fun in any other game. The guns feel good to shoot, the levels are interesting to navigate, and the game lets you earn the ability to take certain pieces of gear with you between loops so it always feels like there's forward progression. But I think that there's a critical thing that's missing:

Immersive sims aren't just about getting from point A to point B. Before you can get to point B, you have to discover where point B is. *Where* in this mansion is the assassination target? Better spend some time skulking around and listening to his staff gossip about his daily habits so you know which parts of the mansion he's likely to appear in. Oh wait, I don't want to just get in the same room with this guy, I want to get myself in the same room with him *when he's not surrounded by his guards*. How do I do that? Better do some more snooping. And in a sense, Deathloop *sort* of does this. Before you can follow the waypoint objective marker to your target, you have to find out where they are. But the "find out where they are" is often, "follow this *other* waypoint objective marker to find the slip of paper that tells you where they're going to be, at which point you can follow the waypoint objective marker to their exact location!"

And to be fair to Deathloop, it's not *all* like that. There are some times where the game sort of just points you in the right direction and leaves you to figure it out, like one dude who has hosted a masquerade party where he and his guests are all wearing the same masks, and so you have to figure out a way to ferret him out. (Or you can just murder everyone at the party to figure it out by process of elimination -- which is actually much easier said than done, because this is murder island and everybody is packing heat, and this is an exclusive party so his guests are the type of people who carry around heavy weapons.)

Another way that Deathloop takes the "meta progression" inherent to immersive sims and makes it explicit in-game progression is by having a time loop where you can encounter and kill the same targets over and over again. That's the kind of thing that tends to happen in immersive sims across multiple playthroughs -- Hitman doesn't *require* you to play each level multiple times, but you generally want to, because each level is filled with tons of different routes to explore and different ways to deal with each of the targets. But that's all on the player: it's not as if in the fiction of the Hitman universe, Agent 47 is repeatedly murdering a bunch of people who magically revive so that he can kill them again, whereas in Deathloop, that is very explicitly what is happening.

The thing is, because Deathloop is kind of designed with the assumption that you'll kill each target multiple times, the first time you encounter them and blow their head off, it doesn't feel like the grand emotional climax. In fact, in a way, it feels like the *start* of a relationship. "Goodbye, Charlie Montague. I hardly knew ye. But I'm sure I'll know you better by the third time I'm leaving your LARPing session with that slab upgrade you're carrying." I feel like that robs the kills of some of their impact, and maybe that's just inherent to what kind of game this is: in Dishonored, you feel as though over the course of a level, you get to know your target as you snoop through their quarters, overhear what their staff have to say about them, read the journals of their rivals while looking for possible weaknesses, and so on. Because it's a stealth game, it makes sense to hide in the background and learn about their life. Stalking a character through a level while waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike can actually feel incredibly intimate, because as the eponymous Visible Man in Chuck Klosterman’s novel says, to truly know who someone is, you have to see them when they’re alone at home; their behavior anywhere else is just a performance.

But when I'm chasing down Charlie Montague with an SMG in one hand and a pistol in the other, the only thing I really know about him is what he's announcing over the loudspeaker. (I don't really remember exactly what he said, but the subtext is that he's mentally unstable, and he's obsessed with games.) And even though Charlie Montague was shouting at me what kind of person he said, I feel like I never really got to *know* him like I got to know some targets in Dishonored. In fact, the moments when I got to know Charlie best weren't when he was yelling at my over the loudspeaker as I ran through his level as Shooty McFPS guy, but the moments when I got to read his notes or chat correspondence (which is *entirely optional*, because even if I don't learn the relevant facts from Charlie Montague's notes, Cole will -- and he'll verbally narrate the cliffsnotes version of them as I'm headed to the next objective)

Despite feeling like a clear descendant of Arkane’s earlier titles, Deathloop feels neither "immersive" nor "sim." It's constantly doing things that remind me that I'm playing a video game -- which, to be clear, is not a bad thing! It’s fun to be Shooty McFPS guy without worrying about hiding guards bodies or making noise. More than any other Arkane Studios game, it does everything it can to minimize player frustration, whether that means feeling lost, or feeling like you're not making forward progress, or feeling like your progress is being gated by a huge spike in difficulty.

Dishonored is a game that rewards patience. This is one of my favorite things about it, but the fact that it rewards patience so generously means that it also *asks* patience of the player in order to get its best moments, which means that some players will never experience them. Deathloop asks very little from the player. Deathloop is a very "even" and "smooth" experience, but that's both for better and for worse. The lows aren't as low, but the highs aren't nearly as high. Deathloop is a good game. And it will probably be a "good game" to a greater number of people than Arkane's previous titles, but it didn’t have nearly the same impact on me.

Anyway, more than anything, my time with Deathloop has convinced that I should go back and play Prey (2017).

#deathloop #arkane studios #I apologize for such a long letter #dishonored #prey 2017 #immersive sim #video games

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prettywordsyouleft · 4 years

Text

Band Sessions: Jae

Pairing: Jae Park x reader

Genre: best friends to lovers au / band au / fluff

Warnings: none

Word count: 2037

Index: Jae | Sungjin | Young K | Wonpil | Dowoon

The band’s studio space had become more than just a home for the multitude of cords that attached to equipment and instruments cluttering up two-thirds of the room. It was a designated hang out most days. The five members of Day6 would practice their music, eat meals, share ideas, cram in study sessions and even sleep there.

You were no different, given you had tasked yourself with becoming their manager ever since they won at Band Beats last month. Before that, you had only gone by the title of Jae’s childhood best friend, although to him, usually dubbed the annoying thorn in his side.

“Must you follow me around everywhere I go?” Jae whined as you shut the door to the studio behind him, throwing down his backpack beside one of the couches that resided along the long wall. Ignoring his complaint, you slumped down on the couch and retrieved your phone.

“Someone has to make sure you actually get some practice done.”

“I’m offended, what did you think I was going to do after coming here?”

Smirking lazily, you didn’t lift your eyes from the social media app you were scrolling through. “Game.”

“I would never!” Jae announced dramatically, and you arched one of your eyebrows as he let out a preposterous laugh. “Unless you’re keen to?”

“Jae!”

“Fine, okay, I will practice. God, I liked it better when you were just the friend who came to cheer us on.”

“I am still the friend cheering you on. Encouraging you forward to improve at your skill so when you go to regionals later this year, you win.”

“Is it all about winning for you?” he grumbled and you grinned as you confirmed a venue for the band to play at in two weeks time that you had been organising for the past couple of days.

Putting down your phone, you finally gave Jae your full attention. “Don’t you want to?”

“I’m just having fun with my friends playing in a university band. I can’t even guarantee I’m going to wake up on time for my lectures most mornings, let alone pull off a riff awe-inducing enough to take home another trophy.”

“Well, there’s no better time than the present to start working on that,” you stated with a bright smile, gesturing for Jae to pick up his guitar. He rolled his eyes and then collected the instrument, bringing it over to the couch and sitting down beside you. Nudging his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, Jae then positioned the guitar more comfortably, mindlessly strumming through some exercises to warm up.

You smiled, even if he talked a lot, Jae was more dedicated to his craft that he would ever admit.

You were able to get through some of your assignments whilst Jae practised. You had grown up with him playing his guitar in every situation that you found yourself more productive whenever he was around doing just that, relaxed by the tunes he would play. Two hours had easily passed by with you working and Jae strumming just like that, both completely engrossed in your own tasks. Shifting a little to remove your cardigan, you tried to return to your studies, reaching blindly for your water.

It was getting hot in here.

“Jae,” you called, your eyes nor hands tearing away from your laptop. He didn’t answer. “Jae!”

“What?”

“Open the window behind you,” you instructed and he grunted in response. You soon forgot your request, and when you realised there was still no air circulating around the room, you finally shifted your gaze. Jae was fully immersed in his intricate music and the window behind him was firmly shut.

You groaned and turned sideways towards him. “Jaehyung!”

“Oh what?!” he cried back, lifting his eyes to yours indignantly. You slapped his arm and he gaped at you. “What are you hitting me for?!”

“I asked you to open the window like forty minutes ago! It’s hot in here!”

“I’m fine,” he retorted, going back to playing.

Clamping your eyes shut to push away your growing annoyance at his dismissal of your request, you reopened them and placed your laptop aside before getting onto your knees, stretching towards the latch on the window.

However, Jae was directly in the way.

“Move.”

“I’m busy.”

“I need to open the window.”

“So stretch around me, I’ve just stumbled into something good,” Jae retorted, leaning forward a little, his only compromise to the current situation. Huffing out a breath, you leaned further, your fingers brushing over the latch. You managed to twist it after half standing up on the couch, pushing the window out wide.

You promptly lost your balance in the process.

The sudden screech to the guitar was all that filled the air once you landed haphazardly in Jae’s lap, his instrument the only thing between both of you right now. You had attempted to reach out to stabilise your failing balance, hands now resting on his shoulders, your leg bent weirdly underneath you over one of his thighs.

You should have been able to right yourself immediately. Chuckle it off with your best friend as you had done many a time when either of you had been clumsy like this. However, it felt as if time has stopped entirely. As you stared into Jae’s round eyes that showed the surprise scratched deeply within them, you couldn’t stop the feeling that you were sinking.

Sinking in his gaze, into his lap further, into his heart. Or at least, your heart sure was falling despite how still your bodies had become.

It wasn’t often when you felt like this, but you could admit it wasn’t the first time. Somewhere you had fallen in love with all the nagging banter, the flippant remarks and his soulful singing voice. That was why you hung around at the studio these days, and why, despite having a full academic year, you had opted to help promote the band.

You yearned for those moments where he’d stop being the awkward meme kid from next door and reach into your soul with every breath he made at the end of his lines, his lyrics and voice melding into one.

And yet, Jae hadn’t been singing all afternoon. You had no reason to be this affected and you finally blinked, slowly at first. Realisation dawned on you that it had been over a minute of you sitting in his lap like this and you laughed airily, trying to dislodge the intense feelings you had been drowning within.

“Oh!” you exclaimed with another airy laugh. “Whoops.”

“Whoops?” Jae echoed softly, scrutinising you with his unwavering stare.

“I’m okay!” you announced, still laughing, albeit sounding a little desperate now. You also needed more air than what the window was gently blowing into the room. “Thanks for catching my fall.”

You removed your hands from his shoulders and it was only then that you realised his own were at your waist, holding you upright. It had all happened so quickly, you didn’t even notice that he had actually saved you from slipping further. But unlike your retreat, Jae’s hands remained on your sides, the pressure digging deeper. You bit at your lip, wondering why he had saved you when his precious guitar was between you and could have been at risk.

You gasped with the thought process. “Is your guitar-”

“Are you okay?” he intervened and you nodded softly. “Really? You look like you’re about to cry. Your skin is turning blotchy.”

Trust Jae to kill the mood. Yanking free, you put space between you and him, taking in a deep breath. You were surprised to see Jae do the same, your eyes narrowing on him slightly.

What was he affected by?

“Practice,” you blurted out, waving your arms about at him. “You need to practice.”

“When do I get to do it for real?” he asked and your head snapped back in his direction, your mind more than frazzled now.

“Do what for real?”

“What will all this practice do for us, Y/N?” he repeated, his eyes firmly attached to yours. “I want to know when the real deal is going to come along for us.”

“Well, regionals is-”

“Us,” Jae reiterated, placing his guitar down on the space you had once been seated at. Standing up, he walked to where you stood; licking his lips a little to moisten them.

You cursed the giant somersault your stomach did in reaction to such a simple action.

“Us?” you said, and Jae nodded. “What about us? I’m not in the band.”

“We came before the band,” he stated, nodding along with his statement. “We existed before it.”

“What riddles are you talking about?” you breathed uncomfortably, tearing your gaze away from Jae’s. You really had no idea. Or, you didn’t want to believe in it.

It was better that way.

“I saved what was more important to me just now,” Jae told you and you turned once again back to his face. He was hesitant despite speaking about what was on his mind. As if he had held back one too many times now. It surprised you, and you sighed quietly, shaking your head.

“I could have broken your guitar.”

“I could have fixed it,” he replied and you blinked rapidly.

“You love your guitar!”

“I love you too,” he murmured, stilling once the words were out. Except for the pink tinge to his ears, he seemed unaffected. Jae then smiled with relief. “Did you hear me?”

“I think I did.”

“I love you too,” he told you again, this time with more conviction. There was no way to hide your growing smile, soon grinning at each other.

And then Jae whined. “Why aren’t you telling me back?!”

“Huh?”

“I said I love you! You’re supposed to say it back if you feel that way too!” he explained, voice laced with accusation. His eyes popped behind his glasses. “You don’t feel the same?!”

“Of course I do, you idiot!”

“Then say it!”

“I can’t just say it on the spot, Jae!” you complained, moving to go around him. However, he pulled you back in front.

“I just did!”

“Well, good for you, I’m feeling under pressure about it now!” you grumbled and Jae chuckled, tugging you with him as he returned to the couch. You squeaked when he yanked you down onto his lap, his smile mischievous.

“So let’s go back to this then.”

“You’re feeling too good right now,” you observed and Jae nodded.

“I told you how I feel. It’s kind of liberating, you should try it.”

“Nice try, Jae.”

“So I need to keep trying?” he murmured, brushing your hair back from your face, his smile growing. “Dude, you are so much work.”

“You can’t tell me you love me and then call me dude!” you said exasperatedly and Jae shrugged.

“It’s me, Y/N. Some things might be changing between us, but I’m not going to change.”

“Fair call,” you responded, your hands finding their way to his chest. Jae watched you intently, his ears turning pink again. “Oh! This is a new thing about you.”

“So some things might change about me,” he confirmed, leaning his face closer to yours. “I might be inclined to do things like this more often.”

You frowned. “What, have me sit in your lap whilst we’re in the studio together?”

“Nah,” he breathed, his mouth dangerously close to yours now. “More than that.”

Finally, he kissed you. It was soft, barely moving. Your eyes fluttered shut as you pressed into his lips, seeking more from him. Jae responded, pulling you into his upper body, supporting your weight against his chest as he anchored a hand at the back of your head, soon kissing you with demand.

You were seeing stars when you finally pulled away, galaxies forming behind your eyes. When you finally looked at your best friend, you grinned at him. “I love you, Jae.”

“What was that? I barely heard you.”

“I. Love. You.”

He smiled possibly the best smile you had ever seen graced his lips in your entire existence. And then he kissed you again briefly. “Now that’s more like it.”

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Next: Sungjin

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lazyyogi · 4 years

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Tantric Trauma: A Yogic Revelation of Release

Something truly special happened during my yoga session today.

When I first started practicing yoga asana eight years ago, I was surprised to discover all the strange places within my body that I held tension. My hips were an area of particular tightness into which I learned to relax and create space. As I discovered these areas and worked with them, I started feeling very different.

We all hold tensions in our bodies and some of them are the result of the postural idiosyncrasies formed from habit. But plenty of those tensions are also stagnated emotional energies. Traumas from the past can be internalized in this manner. We also may have the tendency to direct stress into parts of our body, such as clenching our jaw. The repeated stress-charged tensions build up over time, clouding our experience of our bodies and even distorting our anatomy.

As I found and then worked on releasing, relaxing, and strengthening those areas, a natural happiness would lightly bubble in my body. There would be moments in which I felt years younger, finally experiencing parts of my body as I had before they were distorted by the confusion of human incarnation.

It had been several years since I had experienced such a breakthrough until today.

Typically I experience daily shoulder tension and frequently my shoulders would feel asymmetrically aligned. If I reached to grab something above shoulder height or if I swung my arm in an arc, I could feel and hear cracking in my shoulder joint.

Before my yoga session today, I attempted to stretch my arms and shoulders and yet none of the techniques were working to my satisfaction. Maybe I had intuited that I was ready to be free from something within them.

In yoga, there is an important distinction between trying to make your body conform to how a pose is supposed to appear and trying to make sure your body is in correct alignment while not worrying about how it appears.

A classic example is touching your toes. Many people can touch their toes by rounding their back yet this does not give you the proper stretch and benefits of this posture in yoga. In fact, it can do harm to the back over time. Whereas if you were to focus on keeping your back straight and knees slightly bent while touching your toes, your would derive immense benefit while also protecting your back even if you don’t come anywhere near touching your toes. With time and patience, eventually you will touch your toes. The real beneficial process of yoga is in getting to that point, not being at that point in and of itself. Touching your toes is nothing special, but opening the space behind your knees, stretching your hamstrings, and creating more space in the back body are what really benefit you.

As I immersed myself in today’s yoga session, eventually we came to a sequence that involved a shoulder opener. I clasped my hands behind my back, took a moment to create length in the spine, and then folded over while allowing my clasped hands to fall over my head. I had done this pose countless times before but this time I noticed something. My shoulders would come up out of the sockets and towards my ears when I did the pose. I realized that I was using the loose connective tissue in my shoulder to obtain that range of motion without engaging my actual shoulder muscles. It was the equivalent of rounding your back to touch your toes.

Feeling like I had stumbled onto something important, I stopped following the yoga video on my laptop and shifted my attention more fully into my shoulders. Coming up out of the pose, I activated the muscles in my shoulders deliberately and squared them into alignment. Clasping my hands behind my back once more, I folded over and slowly tried the pose again.

At first my clasped hands reached the same point they always do, albeit with a better feeling of alignment. But then, as I relaxed, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, they began to move further...and further. They moved well beyond any point they had ever before. It felt similar to when you are walking down stairs at night and think you have reached the bottom but then take one more step and suddenly fall a level. Space that I didn’t know existed suddenly opened up. Sensation gently rushed into the backs of my shoulders and through the surrounding areas.

As all of this happened, I realized I had never truly stretched my shoulders before. This area had never been opened. A deep relaxation immediately permeated my whole body. A layer of defense made out of tension and induced by stress melted away.

Returning to the yoga session, it was as if I had unlocked a whole new aspect of my body. My arms were physically longer and my reach noticeably extended. The range of motion in my shoulders was effortlessly boosted. Even more than that, the clicking in my shoulders was entirely absent! The range of motion in my neck when looking from side to side was beyond anywhere it had been before, as I could easily look behind each shoulder. My entire upper back felt different, more spacious. As I did crow pose I even noted improved efficiency of strength and control throughout my arms.

All of this is no doubt a game changer for me. I know I store tension from stress and worry in my shoulders. I know I likely have stored more than a few traumatic experiences there as well. And now I know how to let it all go. While this initial opening was impactful and liberating and blissful, I can tell it will be a few more sessions before it settles in more thoroughly. And I very much look forward to it!

Yoga asana is a gift meant to restore our bodies to the place of natural wisdom the body had when we were children. It is a precious tool on the spiritual path.

Namaste, sangha. Much love :D

#yoga #asana #trauma #stress #anxiety

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missfangirll · 3 years

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Ad astra per aspera

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

Fandom: Guardian Relationship: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Da Qing/Ye Zun Tags: Fluff, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-it, Getting Together Words: 3001 Summary: The revelations keep coming.

Read on AO3

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Da Qing heaved a long-suffering sigh as he bent to pick up his crumpled t-shirt from the floor, throwing a glance at Ye Zun from the corner of his eye. The other was busy sorting the laundry into three large piles and Da Qing couldn’t quite suppress an eye-roll at the sight. Ye Zun had, naturally, never used a washing machine before he moved in, but had spent hours reading the manuals online - because Da Qing didn’t have them anymore, who keeps stuff like this anyway, Ye Zun? - and was now very confident about the correct way to use it, which included the perfect amount of detergent and the fact that certain colours weren’t allowed in the same wash. Da Qing had barely managed to bite back a comment on how that was exactly how his brother dealt with things he didn’t understand, but secretly he was a tiny bit impressed how fast Ye Zun adapted. Still, his obsession with cleaning was… something.

Sighing, he threw the t-shirt onto one of the piles, making Ye Zun startle, then furrow his brow. Indignantly, he grabbed the offending item with two fingers and placed it onto another pile, all the while staring at the cat. Grinning, Da Qing stuck out his tongue, sauntering off to the kitchen to make tea.

Living with Ye Zun had proven to be… interesting, to say the least. Zhao Yunlan and Da Qing were kindred spirits in many things, so naturally they agreed on their take on cleaning, too. Which meant that, before Shen Wei’s merciless cleaning sprees, they had been very happy in their own mess, but now he discovered Ye Zun had more in common with his brother than he admitted. He had Shen Wei’s penchant for a spotless environment, liked the apartment to be neat and tidy, but combined this with an obsessive streak his brother didn’t have (or didn’t show, at least). Ye Zun had a manic aura around him in almost everything he did, and Da Qing teased him relentlessly for it, even though he was secretly glad to have someone clean the fridge and throw out spoiled food when he forgot to do it again.

Additionally, he was a surprisingly good cook, moving about the small apartment kitchen with a graceful ease that always reminded Da Qing of his deadly precision on a battlefield. He couldn’t for the life of him operate a microwave or an electric rice cooker, but showed astounding intuition when it came to actual cooking. (Da Qing had tried to wheedle out of him where he had learned it, but he had stayed stubbornly silent and ignored the cat until he gave up.)

Grinning to himself, Da Qing turned on the kettle, then portioned the tea into the pot, when he felt someone flick the back of his head hard. Startled, he whirled around to complain when he saw the other’s eyes. Sparkling with mischief, they looked even more radiant than usual, and suddenly he had to swallow. Ye Zun smirked, then forced his face into a stern frown, glaring at the cat. His eyes still sparkling, he raised the hand he had been holding behind his back, shoving the object in it into Da Qing’s face. Spluttering, he took a step back, only to see the dirty sock fall down between them. Ye Zun cackled. “That’s for leaving them everywhere,” he said with a wide grin, then turned around to leave for his laundry pile. Da Qing pounced. When he hit the other’s back and threw his arms around his shoulders, Ye Zun stumbled, his arms flailing. After two staggering steps, they both toppled headfirst into the laundry, their fall somewhat cushioned by the clothes.

Laughing, Da Qing pressed his whole weight to the other’s back, trying to immobilise his arms as well, while Ye Zun sputtered indignantly and tried to shake him off. They rolled down from the pile, and even though Ye Zun had lost his dark energy, he still was agile and strong, and thus managed to pin the cat effectively under him, grinning down with a dangerous glimmer in his eyes.

Before he could say anything, however, they were interrupted by a loud knock on the door. Startled, they looked at each other, then at the door, then hastily scrambled away from each other to get to their feet and to the door. Upon opening it, a middle-aged woman glared at them, and before they could even manage a greeting, started yelling. “I don’t know what exactly you are doing,” she spat, the emphasis on the last word making it sound suggestive, “but you have to stop doing it on the floor.” She looked knowingly at their dishevelled state and huffed, but before she could continue, Ye Zun interrupted her. “We are not,” he had to clear his throat, “not what you… seem to think.” Sensing that he started to flounder, Da Qing chimed in. “We are roommates,” he clarified, “and we just moved in, so we apologise for disturbing you. It won’t happen again.” He bowed slightly, nudging Ye Zun to do the same. Straightening up again, Da Qing noticed that the woman’s gaze had changed somewhat. “Roommates,” she said slowly and gave Ye Zun a strange look, who nodded hastily, glancing at Da Qing. Before either of them could add anything, the woman nodded to herself, then bowed quickly and left. Da Qing turned to look at Ye Zun, who looked equally confused. Shrugging, he took a step back and closed the door.

Da Qing had almost forgotten the whole incident, until two days later he stepped out of the apartment and stumbled over something in front of the door, barely able to prevent a fall. Cursing loudly, he turned to look at what had caused his almost-accident, when he stilled. On the doormat, there was a huge pile of neatly wrapped gifts in different sizes, some flowers, stuffed teddy bears and chocolates, all of it in various shades of pink. On closer look, he noticed a name tag on one of the larger presents: To the pretty cat-owner with the silver hair. He snorted, first indignantly at the thought of Ye Zun as his owner, then with the mental image of his roommate’s middle-aged fanclub. Giggling, he scooped up the presents and stepped back into the apartment where he dumped them unceremoniously over an unsuspecting Ye Zun who sat on the couch. “What the…?”, he began, but Da Qing just snorted, “From your fanclub,” and turned around to leave for the SID.

After this, they kept finding little gifts and trinkets on their doorstep on a weekly basis, never signed, but always addressed to Ye Zun in various degrees of admiration. Ye Zun never acknowledged them, just took the chocolate to the SID and threw the rest away without a second glance, but after the third week Da Qing began to feel irked. He stubbornly avoided thinking about that fact (and what it meant) and kept teasing Ye Zun with his fanclub, but somehow he felt more uneasy the more gifts they found.

He didn’t want to investigate these feelings further, he decided when he found yet another teddy bear on the threshold, but couldn’t bring himself to tease Ye Zun when he silently handed him the gift. However, Ye Zun didn’t even look at it, but kept his eyes on Da Qing, slightly raising one of his dark eyebrows. “What?” he asked, but the cat just shrugged. Then he added, “Why don’t you keep them?” Ye Zun’s eyebrow climbed even higher. “Why would I?” he asked, sounding incredulous, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “I don’t know,” Da Qing tried to explain, “they are gifts from someone who obviously wants to meet you. And it’s probably the neighbor’s daughters who keep sending them, not their mother, so why….” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely. “Why don’t I want to meet someone who apparently has no boundaries and likes me because of my looks?” He blinked at Da Qing, who just shrugged again. “Are you serious? I don’t even like them. I probably would keep the gifts if they came from someone I like, I don’t know, you or my brother, but not these creepy women.” He shook his head and got up to discard the teddy bear, not noticing Da Qing’s frozen face. The cat just stared after him open-mouthed.

Someone I like.

Someone like you.

Oh. - - - - - - - -

Thinking back on his previous life in the Rebel camp, Ye Zun found that he’d had some vastly different ideas about living with other people. For once, he had never lived with someone he trusted, except from his brother of course, and found that it improved his life significantly.

Da Qing was, objectively, a lousy roommate: He was undeniably messy, loud, and demanding, also left his dirty laundry everywhere and couldn’t be bothered to clean after himself, at least not without Ye Zun nagging him about it.

Objectively, it should have been a nightmare. It was anything but.

Yes, they had regular fights about dishes and laundry, some of them ending with Ye Zun shouting and throwing things at Da Qing (which had made one neighbor so angry that she had to be bribed with some home-made cupcakes, which in turn just added to Ye Zun’s gift pile the next morning), but he secretly enjoyed their banter. Da Qing gave as good as he got, but he never aimed to hurt, keeping the teasing light and in turn, Ye Zun kept nagging about the state of the apartment and nothing else.

They had reached a mutual understanding of things the other didn’t want to talk about, and kept to these boundaries. Da Qing never mentioned Ye Zun’s powers, while the other avoided the fact that Da Qing sometimes felt abandoned by his master, even though he only admitted to this while drunk. They trusted each other, entrusted each other with their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and even though he wanted to strangle the cat twice a day, he felt himself get closer, open up to him. It was exciting and frightening at the same time, to let another so close, but he felt safe with Da Qing, safer than he had ever before in his life.

Their truce held until one night of drinking.

It had started rather unremarkable, with Da Qing immersed in the game on the screen and Ye Zun playing on his phone, but then Ye Zun had made a snide comment on Da Qing‘s favored team, which had made the cat first bristle and then declare that when his team lost, he would never drink anything again, but in case of a win Ye Zun had to play a drinking game with him. Ye Zun had known this was a bad idea, but the score was 0:3 and so he had agreed to this proposal. They had won 4:3, of course, and Da Qing had been very smug about this as he handed Ye Zun a glass with a dubious mixed drink.

Some refills and embarrassing stories later Ye Zun felt pleasantly fuzzy and ready for bed, but Da Qing was really out of it. He had been a few glasses ahead when they started and now looked worse for wear. With a slight smile, he tucked the grumbling cat in on the couch and went for the bathroom. He couldn't be bothered to look for his pyjamas, and returned to the bed in just a t-shirt and briefs.

He staggered to a halt in front of the bed, his fuzzy brain too slow to process the sight.

Normally, Da Qing slept in cat form on whatever surface he deemed worthy of his furry butt, and they even had shared the bed before, but Da Qing had never been in human form for it. Now, however, the cat wasn't a cat, and lay sprawled on the bed, face down, arms and legs spread, still almost fully clothed.

Ye Zun‘s treacherous heart skipped a beat. Stomping down on the strange feeling that had begun spreading in his stomach, he contemplated his options. The couch was not that comfortable: Since Zhao Yunlan had moved his giant leather monster to the new house, he and Da Qing had bought a new one, which was great to spend a relaxing evening, but not wide enough to sleep comfortably on. So, the bed… He looked at the other, taking in the almost unnervingly still form. Da Qing had somehow lost his shoes, but still wore his pants and a t-shirt, his hair in a messy halo on the pillow. He had his head slightly turned, so Ye Zun could see his dark lashes fanning his cheek, his mouth slack with sleep. He swallowed hard, looking back to the sofa. If he slept on it, he’d most likely wake up with a sore neck, not to mention his back would kill him in the morning. Plus, they had shared the bed in the past, he tried to convince himself. No big deal.

Exhaling with a deep sigh, he bent down. “Move over,” he muttered, and as Da Qing didn't move, he shoved at his shoulders to get the covers from under him. Draping it over the cat, he crept in as well, facing the room.

He felt Da Qing’s warm breath on his neck, followed the soothing rhythm and was almost asleep himself, when the cat stirred. In a clumsy motion, he put an arm over Ye Zun’s waist and drew him closer, nestling his face in the other’s neck. Wide awake, Ye Zun didn't dare to breathe. His heart fluttered like a hummingbird in his chest, he felt the heat spread from his neck over his whole body, but at the same time his stomach tightened in… in what, panic, shock, distaste? He didn't know, but it made it hard to think straight. Frozen he lay there, unable to breathe or move, his whole body thrumming in sync with his heartbeat, every point of contact burning his skin through the thin fabric of his shirt.

He didn’t know when he had fallen asleep, but at some point he had, because he woke to someone poking his shoulder. Blinking slowly, he took in the sight before him, his brain not fully operative. They had gravitated towards each other in the night, it seemed, because he now had Da Qing’s hand in his, clutching it to his chest, while their noses almost touched. As realisation sunk in, he recoiled with a start, letting go of the other’s hand as if he had burned himself, eyes wide in panic. Da Qing just grinned at him. “Good morning,” he said, showing his teeth in a wide yawn. Without a response, Ye Zun scrambled out of bed and fled to the bathroom, his heart pounding in his ears.

A knock on the door startled him. He had been staring unseeing at his image in the mirror, when he heard a soft question from outside. “Are you alright?” He inhaled shakily. Not trusting his voice, he just hummed, hoping the other would take it as confirmation and leave. But of course, his obnoxious roommate wouldn’t budge.

“I made you coffee,” he heard, no trace of the teasing tone he had come to expect. Da Qing sounded soft, gentle, almost unsure, and somehow that made his stomach tighten even more.

Closing his eyes, he turned on the faucet to splash his face with cold water, hoping that would help clear his head and maybe also make the cat leave. Unfortunately, neither of these happened, and with a sigh, he turned to open the door.

Da Qing stood in front of it, two mugs in hand, wordlessly offering one to him. Careful not to touch the other’s fingers, he took it and made his way to the couch, not able to hold his gaze. Hesitating for a second, Da Qing turned and made his way over to the couch as well, sitting on the other end. Ye Zun felt his eyes on him when he asked again, “Are you alright?”, but couldn’t meet his gaze, stubbornly staring into his mug. “Hm,” he replied vaguely, trying to find something to say that would make the situation less awkward.

Da Qing sighed. “Are we going to talk about it?” Ye Zun blinked at him. “Talk?”, he managed to press out. The other sighed again. “Look,” he began, and Ye Zun’s heart stuttered and came to a stop. “I don’t know what you think this means,” Da Qing continued, motioning to the bed, “but as far as I’m concerned, it can mean anything, or nothing at all.” He fixed Ye Zun with a look the other couldn’t quite place. There was hope in it, but also defiance, stubbornness, and vulnerability. Ye Zun swallowed. “What.. What does what mean?”, he managed eventually, sounding hoarse. Da Qing closed his eyes in frustration, then bit out, “What do you want, Ye Zun?” Averting his eyes, he couldn’t find an answer to this. Sleeping next to the cat had been equal parts exhilarating and terrifying, he had felt held and confined at the same time, the other’s embrace suffocating, but also safe, his touch burning, but also soothing. It had been the best and worst experience of his life, and he still could feel the other’s touch, his warm breath, and he wanted. But at the same time, he was so afraid of it, of the burning closeness of another’s soul. He didn’t know how to voice any of this, if he even wanted to, and so stayed silent. Da Qing let out a low groan, then forcefully placed the mug on the coffee table. “Okay,” he said with finality, “then it means nothing.” With a look at Ye Zun, who had slumped into the couch, he stood up, changing into cat form, and leaped out of the open window. Ye Zun drew in a shaky breath, his eyes burning, his stomach in a tight knot.

Previous Chapter - - - - - -

Some notes: Maybe you noticed, but I changed the chapter titles. It was supposed to be six chapters, corresponding to the phases of grief: shock, anger, guilt, grief, and hope, chapter 6 being love.. I thought that made sense, since the title is "Through hardship to the stars", so he would have to overcome hardships. But Ye Zun decided he was done grieving in the second chapter and wanted to enjoy life 😁 (Or I discovered I write better fluff than angst, ehem 😁), so the whole thing changed its course a bit... I still keep the general plot idea (did someone mention the Regent?), but it's going to be lighter and happier, I suppose... (Can't promise anything tho, Ye Zun is a moody bitch 😁😁) Until I can come up with some good names, the chapters won't have individual titles. If you want to suggest some, feel free 😁😁

#镇魂 guardian #guardian #zhèn hún #da qing #ye zun #dazun #my writing #guardian fanfic #ad astra per aspera

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ronnytherandom · 3 years

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I started Writing My Thoughts On Things Again, I'm Sorry

15/8/2021:

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (Whole trilogy w/ all dlcs, Adept Class, Hardcore difficulty, 68 Hours):

Still brilliant! I adore this series. The first Mass Effect was one of the first games I ever played back in 2010 and Mass Effect 2 is one of the games I’ve played the most accruing several hundred hours over multiple playthrough from 2010 onwards, while Mass Effect 3 is a game I greatly appreciated but have more mixed feelings towards. Retrospectively as much as I liked the first Mass Effect, I did not nearly appreciate it enough back in the day. For a first entry in a new IP it is incredibly fleshed out with interesting Lore, an intriguing story and a cool galaxy to explore. I appreciate its combat far more now than I did back then but would still argue it is relatively weak in comparison to more modern titles and its own successors. Though the VA is rough in some places it is excellent where it matters, especially in the case of Sovereign whose iconic dialogue on Virmire is etched into my brain. A key element of the first mass effect I felt was sorely missing from the later entries was its exploration. While the galaxy grew routinely larger no game after the first had a drivable Mako, a vehicle I adore, and further lacked the opportunity to land on and explore the terrain of alien worlds for resources and side missions which I feel lends a lot to the atmosphere of the setting and could be made even more compelling using updated technology and a larger selection of assets and interiors which might have emerged from the higher budget successors. As it is I appreciate its inclusion in the first game. Mass Effect was also my first encounter with impactful choices in a video game and this is certainly something I appreciate but leads me to a major criticism specifically targeting the dialogue wheel layout as it is strange to me how you can puzzle out all of these possible dialogue outcomes but put exactly all of the positive outcomes behind the Upper Left dialogue option. While this is less pronounced in the First entry as the Renegade dialogue fills roughly the same purpose while sounding more badass, it becomes truer throughout the series as renegade options routinely just become nasty and exclusionary.

Mass Effect 2 innovates in some key ways which I have grown to appreciate more in the past 20 hours of play than I did when it launched. Primarily, its focus on characters and your relationships to them. Barring a couple of notable exceptions I found myself greatly invested in every single member of the Normandy crew and I think it’s a remarkable feat that each crewmate could be written to be so sympathetic, relatable and interesting in a world so full of appreciable elements. I would go into specific examples but id end up listing every character except Miranda and Jacob. This of course plays well into the Suicide Mission narrative which is perhaps my favourite overarching plot within the trilogy as it incorporates not just all of these incredible characters and plays upon your investment in them but also relies on the threat of both the Reapers and Collectors which are two excellently designed enemies which I find significantly more compelling than Saren and the Geth or Cerberus and the Reaper Husk Armies. Mass Effect 2 has a powerful horror element composed of the Collectors phobic horror and the reapers cosmic horror and it does wonders for the game’s atmosphere. I remember at this moment the Collector soundtrack which, like the rest of the soundtrack is absolutely excellent. Inasmuch as I would criticise it from a purely musical perspective for being simple at times and perhaps overly repetitive it perfectly fits the camp space opera that is mass effect. Galaxy Map and Suicide Mission are absolute bangers. I would hesitate to call the combat great. Playing the game as a weapon heavy class is superior, I’d argue as even with an armour build dedicated to decreasing ability cooldown it is too long to adequately utilise the powers of ability heavy classes like the adept. Additionally, ability play feels far more limited than in the game’s predecessor due to the limitation of this games skill tree elements which are frankly a step too far in simplifying the interface. It doesn’t massively affect enjoyment of the game but I couldn’t help but note every time I visited the abilities menu how much I missed Mass Effects abilities menu. So while I would say Mass Effect maintains a very well balanced game with regards to combat, roleplay and story, Mass Effect 2 eschews combat and mechanical roleplay in favour of an excellent story. Additionally while lacking an exploration aspect the more structured side-missions found by scanning planets throughout the galaxy create a lot of fun moments and interesting gameplay, emblematic of the fact that mission design vastly improves between this game and its predecessor.

Mass Effect 3 goes some way to resolve its predecessor’s imbalance as the majority of the game possesses enhanced combat, a much better abilities mechanic and an excellent story. First the addition of more mobility, loadout and engagement options benefits the combat greatly, while the addition of more complex enemy types than previous games pushes you to fully utilise these new options. A massive reduction in ability cooldown combined with liberal cooldown reduction bonuses in the skill tree means that abilities are very useful and versatile and you generally feel very powerful. Sometimes too powerful if you’re thinking from a balancing standpoint but given it’s a single player game this criticism is much diminished and being powerful is fun regardless. The skill tree system in this game forms a synthesis between its predecessors’ systems and comes out the better for combining a regular sense of empowerment with interesting choices within your own character build. All of this contributes to a much-improved combat experience, especially over Mass Effect 2. This also lends itself to the old multiplayer system which I honestly enjoyed when it launched (who cannot love a playable biotic Volus?) and feel is sorely lacking from this legendary edition. I would argue the only real problem with the multiplayer was requiring a player to engage with it in order to achieve the best story outcome; the actual multiplayer gameplay was thoroughly enjoyable and it gave players the opportunity to experience combat as an STG agent or a Krogan Warlord which were both fulfilling experiences from my memory. The aforementioned story is truly excellent and successfully builds off events in previous games but primarily succeeds due to Biowares exceptional character writing which persists from Mass Effect 2. Even in the case of its worst side mission content but especially in its primary missions the stakes and outcome of events are thoroughly compelling and the involvement of beloved Normandy crewmates is bound to incite intense emotions. This is possibly the only game that makes me cry multiple times throughout a normal playthrough. Unfortunately my goodwill often runs out when it comes to consider the ultimate ending of this series which I do not approve of. I admit there are mitigating factors: you should not play the mass effect series for the culmination of its plot. This series lives and dies with its characters and all of the major character arcs reach satisfactory endings before the final moments of Mass Effect 3, so the final moments have no real meaning as the thematic purpose of the series is achieved by galvanising the galaxy and uniting all these disparate races into a single force to fight the Reapers. Thematically the game is a success but the extent to which it utilises the choices the player has made, upon which the series builds its reputation, is limited in scope. This can likely be laid at the feet of the leaks of the original story ahead of the games launch which pushed the developers to create a new ending to avoid spoilers, but the quality of that ending is poor as it boils all the choices made throughout the series down to selecting the colour of a space laser. To make an odd comparison, this is why I think Game of Thrones’ and Mass Effect’s endings are different kinds of bad. Mass Effect reaches a fully satisfying conclusion in the moments immediately after launching the final mission, whereas Game of Thrones built its whole series asking the question “Who Will Sit The Iron Throne” With the final answer being “Actually, no one” after slogging through multiple series which did not live up to the quality of the first. Mass Effect answers its dramatic question of “Can Shepard Unite The Galaxy Against The Reapers” satisfactorily following sixty hours of excellent content and the colour of the space laser doesn’t actually matter. It just hurts to think that the finale could’ve been so much grander and more interesting. I would recommend the games, the disappointment of the finale doesn’t even come close to outweighing the grandeur that is the rest of the experience of Mass Effect 3, let alone the whole series.

There are only a few pieces of content I had not encountered prior to this Legendary edition playthrough. The Mass Effect DLC Bring Down The Sky is fun in that it adds an interesting combat experience with incredible stakes and immerses you in a stellar scale event, but the experience is very short. As part of the legendary edition I recommend it but having to pay extra for it at its time of launch I would have found it disappointing. Mass Effect 2s Overlord DLC is very good, introducing fun combat encounters, an opportunity to operate the fairly fun Hammerhead vehicle (even if it doesn’t live up to the Glory of the Mako) and explore a nice open environment with a truly haunting ending which is a kind of non-choice but it is gratifying to make that choice anyway. Additionally the visuals in the final station when interacting with the VI elements are very nice. The Arrival DLC is also quite fun, with a pseudo stealth section to open it, something which I believe occurs nowhere else in the series. The general element of operating solo is quite novel for mass effect as I believe outside of this moment, the opening of the Citadel DLC and the final moments of Mass Effect 3 there is no point where you fight alone. The indoctrinated nature of the project team does not come as a shock but regardless the dlc is enjoyable as a combat experience and the scale of destruction shown necessary to even slightly inconvenience the reapers lends a lot to the scale of their threat. I do not believe I played any DLCs in Mass Effect 3 before, insofar as I did not consider From Ashes DLC content as it was already on the disk and all buying the day one dlc did was activate it. Leviathan is very interesting from a lore perspective and does interesting things with its investigative process but I find it to be a relatively passive and uninteresting experience for the most part. Omega was more my style with a lot of good combat and interesting new enemies and a bit of bombast besides but still left me largely unmoved. Citadel was excellent but mostly for its “endgame” content rather than its story content. Despite featuring many hilarious moments throughout the actual plot it failed to interest me but I was definitely there for all of the fun character moments and the party is absolutely hilarious.

Ultimately a hearty recommendation but with tempered expectations for the finale.

Deaths Door (True Ending, 13.7 hours):

A Delight. Deaths Door is a charming little game about a bird that stabs things and I love it. It is incredibly impressive that this was made by a team composed of two people. The gameplay is fun in all regards. Navigation is a good time especially when all of the environments are lovely and full of personality. Obstacles come mainly in the form of puzzles and these are at a sweet spot between ease and frustration without being at all complex. Combat could’ve used a bit more work, primarily to create more meaningful distinctions between weapons or add a little depth, but it is still engaging and good fun. While the main bosses are challenging and satisfying to defeat, I worry over the side bosses; perhaps something could’ve been done to make them more distinct from one another? But a small gripe. I like the world, the aforementioned environments are well realised, the general aesthetic is artful and distinct and the story is good if slightly sparse. One notable element is the dialogue which is very good with a quick wit. The finale of the main game has the right amount of spectacle and weight while the endgame is cool and fantastical, with an ample supply of secrets and collectibles to find. Over all the music is incredible, soundtrack full of absolute bangers. I really enjoyed completing this game and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s into action adventure and souls-like games.

The Bad Batch (season 1):

This was Allright. To open I cannot overstate how good the animation and art of this series is. It is routinely beautiful and well-choreographed. Visually there are no complaints. The problems begin with the opening episode which I feel overpromised on a relatively dark take on the Star Wars universe by immediately dropping us into an Order 66 plot full of death, danger, brainwashing and the threat of an emergent empire. Now granted this series never explicitly promises that all of this would continue but I enjoyed these elements of the first episode and I was dissatisfied by their limited usage throughout the rest of the show. This is not to say I disliked the show, I did enjoy the characters who are all good fun, and most of the plots were good. This series I felt had a lot of filler episodes, which I’d simply describe as episodes I enjoyed less due to underwhelming plot or conflict, but they were still enjoyable despite what id perceive as a lesser quality. The show also “suffers” from what I’d called Star Wars Syndrome of Filonitis which is how Everything Must Be Interconnected, with regular cameos from extended universe characters which I feel is beginning to get a bit much. These features feel to me more often like nostalgia grabs rather than organically featuring a character in service of the plot and development. For example, I appreciate the Captain Rex feature as that served to highlight the inhibitor chip problem and drive the characters to seek a solution, however I appreciated Rafa and Trace’s feature less both because I’m less attached to those characters (especially Rafa) but also because the episode didn’t serve any particular purpose or create any particular set piece which couldn’t have been achieved without those characters. This is a similar issue I have with The Mandalorian, I adored season one as it was relatively self-contained and only featured vague or subtler references to the wider canon: to contrast season two is full of cameos from the wider universe sometimes for no reason other than to have a cameo when those roles could easily have been filled with new and creative content which doesn’t rely upon nostalgia to make something interesting. Ultimately Bad Batch is worth watching for the characters and the good episodes, it is fun and entertaining, it just has its issues.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 1: The Phantom Blood:

Its uh, its not good. Now that’s a very broad statement, as to assess this show critically at all is to take it far more seriously than you should, but to be more even handed the show certainly has a bunch of fun elements. Only from a story perspective, there isn’t really that much there; and from a pacing perspective it needs to be seen to be believed. I’m certain that if you condensed the show down to a reasonable size for the amount of content it has, you’d probably have a movie with a two-hour runtime at most which would be quite enjoyable but on a whole this first part wastes about 80% of its time on overlong drawn-out internal monologues and the dilated timeframes of the show’s fights. It also has an annoying habit of overemphasizing the weight of a moment or the genius of a characters unexpected action usually with no less than three people commenting on any slight manoeuvre which ruins the pacing beyond belief. Now I understand this is a staple of the Jojo series, only part 1 handles it very poorly in comparison to later parts. The fighting is especially hindered by this as most actual combat usually involves only four or five punches but they tend to take twenty minutes getting to each one. Additionally, Johnathan Joestar is pretty boring as a character with no notable qualities aside from being good both morally and at fighting. The intrigue of the stone mask is cool but this part deals in that very little. Like I say though, Part 1 is still fun to watch if you can disengage your brain and admire the potent meme quality of the series. It is not “good” from a critical perspective but it is incredibly amusing and the campness gives it a degree of charm. If you just want to watch a bunch of beefy men shout at each other and perform magic punches this is a good time. Speedwagon, despite being the worst offender of the “Explain Everything Twice and Ruin the Pacing” category, is still entertaining for the awful accent and endearing character. He’s also definitely in love with Johnathan and I will not be taking questions on that. Baron Zeppeli has a cool hat. Theres a lot of fun to be had as the show embraces the weirdness of everything that’s going on. So, check it out, it might just be a So-Bad-Its-Good Masterpiece.

300 (film):

This film was not so great in my eyes. I think there was one particular shot of the landscapes around Sparta which I felt was visually cool but everything else about the film lacked quality for me, barring practical effects which have aged significantly better than the graphical effects. The visuals are largely uninspiring, the washed-out colour pallet doesn’t help. Perhaps the dialogue was amusing at release but for me it’s all been memed to death. I can’t say any of the performances are particularly compelling, nice to see Magneto and Faramir though. The action could’ve been good and there are certainly moments where it has impact, but the constant application of slow motion I feel reduces the sense of power that should be there, like watching people fight on the moon. Ultimately, I can’t stomach it for two primary reasons: Historical inaccuracy and Racism, which feed into each other. The values of the Spartans do not accurately reflect ideas that historical Spartans held to and I must ask why? Historical accuracy is the default state, so to usurp those ideas in favour of others means the author of the graphic novel Frank Miller and director Zach Snyder replaced those ideas with purpose, in order to make the film more appealing to a mass audience or to express their own ideas perhaps? And the values they chose for the Spartans were freedom, justice and democracy which were things the slaving and monarchical Spartans did not believe in at least in the modern sense. This reeks of an imposition of the propagandised values of western nations on a historical society. This in itself would not be so much of an issue without the demonisation and perversion of the Achaemenid empire and the peoples therein. To establish the primary conflict as one of Civilised white westerners against barbarous non-white easterners, when historically the conflict was between two nations of a broadly similar heritage both possessing facets of good and evil, in the early 2000s? It feels as though some reactionary interpretations of the War on Terror have simply been recreated here with classical history as window dressing. Add to that reactionary attachment to the battle of Thermopylae as a representation of the western world’s struggle against the eastern world, in addition to other more problematic interpretations, and this film plays straight into extreme right-wing ideas of race. Cannot recommend, there’s a lot more better things you could be watching.

18/08/2021: Darth Vader (2015) comic (incl. Vader Down event):

This was really cool. The first comic I’ve ever actually read so I don’t have much frame of reference but I certainly enjoyed this. It was compelling, I’ve blitzed through this whole run in a single day. I think it serves a valuable purpose of demonstrating Vader’s potential and development between Episodes IV and V, as well as the nature of internal conflicts within the Empire. A side note, it is amusing that Palpatine identifies infighting as a factor in the fall of the Sith Empire and yet encourages it for his own political purposes anyway. I felt that the art and style was very good and fit well with the Star Wars aesthetic, though I couldn’t say if it is truly excellent or just standard: it certainly wasn’t bad, though I think a few designs such as Dr Aphra’s ship were hard to read as it were. Speaking of, I think characters new and old were well portrayed. The titular Vader is unmistakably the same character as appears in the classic trilogy, similarly for Han, Luke and Leia etc. And it was a pleasure to see Chewbacca absolutely destroy someone. The aforementioned Aphra I thought was fine but she lacks distinction to my mind, the real star was Triple Zero and by extension Beetee who I thought were excellent comic relief in addition to being a genuine threat, something I can’t necessarily say I felt with regard to the antagonists. This latter part doesn’t matter overmuch, I think the purpose of these antagonists was more to present Vader with pressure to fulfil his personal goals rather than actually oppose him and they work well in that regard, but are unmemorable beyond their basic attributes. What I think this comic does particularly well is create a kind of puzzle narrative and its almost thrilling at moments when Vader’s plots might be discovered. As a result of this I am looking forward to reading more comics in future.

The Suicide Squad (2021): Highly enjoyable! A big step up for the suicide squad as a franchise and a lot more fun, playing into a brighter and more humorous genre than its predecessor to good effect; This time with good editing, soundtrack, direction… well good everything in comparison. I enjoyed all of the characters and their acting particularly the rivalry between Peacemaker and Bloodsport and Margot Robbie is still fantastic as Harley. They all pale before King however, who is endearing beyond belief and a lot of fun to boot. The “villain” if that term is applicable is very interesting and actually threatening, no mere beam of light into the sky! And the willingness to engage in more mature elements such as gore and character morality is of immense benefit, serving to distinguish it from generally more childish superhero media and reach towards more interesting themes around colonisation, foreign intervention, America and such. Only a reach towards however as I don’t think it ultimately says anything beyond “This thing, kinda bad and dumb”. As I saw noted, it observes the theme but doesn’t comment on it which is a shame as that would bring it all together quite neatly. I feel it can drag a little at times and sometimes the dialogue and specifically its humour don’t hit right but the rest is of such quality that it hardly matters. It looks good, sounds good and offers a chance to engage in a little mindless and bloody violence. I hope Harley keeps the javelin.

27/08/2021: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 2: Battle Tendency: TW: Mention of Nazism, Discussion of Sexism

This is MUCH better. Part 2 covers most of the problems I had with Part 1. The Monologues are less egregious so the pacing is much improved; the lore is fully integrated into the story and creates a genuinely good narrative and Joseph is a much more compelling and interesting protagonist with a quirky and entertaining personality. The Pillar Men are excellent villains and the fights are fully engaging. Even when you know that Joseph will pull out a “And next you’ll say” twist at the end of a losing fight it’s still surprising simply by dint of the strange and wacky solutions he creates. And these adventures are even more bizarre, playing into the weird camp of the series which works so well. All in all, the quality is excellent here HOWEVER there are some highly problematic elements. The show being set in the 1930s is a neat part of the travelling through time factor of the series but when you’re globetrotting around Europe you need some solution to the problem of Nazis popping up everywhere and this show does not provide one, and fails so drastically to offer even a slightly critical perspective on the fascist characters. The noble sacrifice of Von Stroheim and his later resurrection and heroism serve to idolise a Patriotic German Nazi Officer, which is not good, and this unchallenged perspective on an Actual Nazi is troubling especially when the character himself is an unrepentant mass murderer. Additionally, the show has a horrible attitude towards women, who exist almost exclusively for sex appeal and romantic interest in this show. Lisa Lisa does demonstrate ability and character but when presented with genuine combat is relegated first as a bit of eye candy during the fight with Esidesi (notably eye candy for Her Own Son) and later as a Damsel in Distress during her fight with Kars. Women are frequently used as objects in this part; Caesar Zeppeli uses women as props by controlling them with his Hamon powers and Suzi Q exists only to be rescued from Esidesi and then to be romanced by Jojo. It’s pretty ridiculous to be honest. I am informed that this improves over the course of the series but as for this part in particular it is a lot of fun just so long as you can ignore some incredibly troubling portrayals.

13/09/2021: Rick and Morty Season 4:

There is ultimately not much to say as Season 4 is simply more Rick and Morty and operates as such. It is good, even very good. It’s still very funny. Its voice acting is still the pinnacle of such work. It is still smart and has a lot of interesting ideas, only not to the extent of the copypasta fan boys. Its sci-fi universe is cool and its design and aesthetic are still excellent. I feel the show has passed a threshold however as there’s only so much time you can spend on the “dysfunctional family is dysfunctional theme”. I hope season 5 proves me wrong once I get to it, but season 4 is fun and I’d recommend it all the same, it’s just more Rick and Morty and I think that’s enough.

Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings: Spectacular! Very easily amongst the best if not The Best Superhero Movie (aside from Into the Spiderverse). To begin with complaints as they are limited, the colour grading was a bit dark in a couple of the fight scenes and in some moments of the climactic fight the CG effects are a little Too Much and distract from the central action of Shang-Chi, Xialing and a Dragon owning the shit out of a multiversal super spectre, which incidentally is fucking epic. Additionally, the standard MCU comic relief dialogue is a little meh at times but what’s new there? They still need to get a handle on that, especially because this film was really strong when it was serious. As much as I love Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery, he was just a tad much here. Aside from a few moments of weak dialogue however the rest of the film is excellent. Acting is good, effects are good, the film is quite beautiful primarily once Ta Lo is reached and the score is bangin. I appreciate most of all the fight sequences which to me look well-choreographed with interesting arenas which were always appropriate to demonstrate the characters abilities; the sequences serve to develop character and plot at key moments also. The way the camera is handled during the fights is also a big step up, with wide perspective and long shots rather than the snappy close shots of old which serve to really show off that choreography and don’t muddy your understanding of the flow of combat. There is a good thematic line throughout the film of reconciling the bad and the good of your familial and personal history, to understand yourself better and channel that into developing and achieving your ambitions and I adore how that ties in with Shang-Chi and Wenwu’s final confrontation due to the nature and treatment of the Ten Rings themselves. They are a very interesting fantastical element especially once Shang-Chi acquires them and the way that he utilises them create a very cool combat style I can’t wait to see more of, even considering that their full potential is yet to be unlocked. I additionally approve of how they have been differentiated from their comic counterparts which to my understanding are just slightly weaker infinity stones; thus, a one-to-one reproduction would’ve been a boring mistake to make. It’s a fantastic film, go see it.

26/09/2021: Sable (20 hours, 99% complete) Sable has the makings of an absolutely fantastic game, it just has a few hiccups and hurdles to deal with. Thankfully most can probably be dealt with by patch as there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the game; but a game should never be released in a state where it needs a patch to function normally. This game is incredibly buggy. Probably one of the buggiest games I’ve ever played at launch, and I preordered Skyrim. Most of my complaints are with the menus, which simply do not work properly sometimes, but there are other documented issues with collision detection and weird bike movement among others including one annoying persistent issue with the soundtrack being replaced by random ‘bong’ noises. For these reasons I cannot recommend the game Right Now until it is patched or if it is on a significant sale. However, once the bugs are fixed this game will be a stunning achievement. The story is good and leads to powerful emotional moments, aided along by an excellent atmospheric soundtrack and beautiful visuals. The style and colour give this game an exceptional look, though diminished by a fairly rapid day/night cycle. I understand that this creates a visual contrast to make the daytime feel more vibrant and impressive, but I would also hold the sun still in the sky if that were an option. The world is well built, with interesting lore and cool design work. Varied environments show off a range of colourful landscape all with their own distinct atmospheres and landmarks which are good both for navigation and exploration, this being the bulk of the game. Exploring these environments is satisfying for curiosities sake but also offers collectible Chums that I adore and an intriguing backstory and world history to consider. Riding a hoverbike is cool and fun, and the customisability is nice though I would take issue with the “balancing” of bike parts as the best bike can be acquired only a few hours in and must be bought, where bike parts earned through long quest chains pale in comparison. This annoys me as I believe players should be rewarded more for great deeds than for acquiring currency, besides which the quest bikes look cooler. This is of little importance however as the game is a very casual and chill experience, keeping an excellent balance where it is not strictly challenging but does maintain your focus and attention. This world is full of strangeness and a little sci-fi magic; though I would argue it could use more of this I think that would threaten to overwhelm the player when even this world’s most mundane elements are still stunningly cool. I think a thick coat of bugs covers what is ultimately a magnificent game with many cool things to explore and even marred by its worst features I still had a great time playing it.

27/09/2021: The Matrix

Brilliant. A very cerebral action movie which definitely earns its place as an iconic work of cinema and its clear to see why its influence is so widespread. Fantastic action with a clear and open perspective which utilises the interesting and dynamic cinematography that runs throughout the movie. I particularly enjoy how over the top the fights are in terms of environmental destruction and gestures as a whole, with a great deal of emphasis added by practical effects which I enjoy. Cool characters, good dialogue and excellent performances across the cast. And, an interesting world well-built and designed. The robots particularly are quite intimidating and I like their arthropodal form. All of the design works well to create the feeling of a greasy industrial post apocalypse which contrasts sharply with the boring homogenous simulation, the latter having its own value as a setting due to its familiarity which would’ve been especially prevalent when this film first released. I love the soundtrack, especially the final feature of Rage, but most of all I love how deeply you can read into this film and its meaning. Having watched many videos about it I was primed on the trans allegory going in and it is very clearly a present part of the narrative before even considering the context around the Wachowski sisters and their own experience. It is a very interesting part of the story and plays well into other themes built around deconstructing the illusions pressed on us by our society, drawing strong parallels between the struggles of living as a trans person and fighting against an imperialist capitalist society. It is worth watching for any of its constituent parts but together they form a magnificent work of art.

28/09/2021: Star Wars: Visions

The series is a bit of a mixed bag. It definitely overpromises with its first episode which is of a remarkably distinct style, is incredibly cool and has great wacky moments in addition to tasteful call-backs to the wider Star Wars canon. I love the umbrella sabre, it’s a fantastic idea and there needs to be more of them. From there a few episodes are fantastic, The Elder and the final episode, and id rank the Ninth jedi just below them, but the rest of the series is definitely not to my taste. The wide variety of styles on show are all fantastic and the animation is universally very good, just some of the plots are more childish than I would appreciate and the rest are simply not engaging for me to the point that despite a great deal of spectacle occurring I would often be distracted. It’s worth a look if you’re into animation and unique takes on star wars but I find generally lacking.

Django Unchained (2nd Watch) TW: Discussion of Racism and Slavery

Red Flag: Tarantino Movie is good. Very good. Stellar performances from Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leo Di Caprio, Christoph Waltz and everyone else in the movie to be frank; a special note for the trivia about Leo Di Caprio’s cut up hand during the dining room scene, a lot of respect for a man who can keep working through that kind of injury. We can go through a Tarantino Checklist say the film is well shot with beautiful environments; has excellent and witty dialogue with good attention to detail and mannerism; and finally has great and gory action which does not flinch from terrible injury and really appeals to a perverse bloodlust that seems to crop up from time to time in normal people. Strangely enough however, I could not recall if Tarantino indulges in his predilection for feet here. This film does indulge in Tarantino’s other predilection however and that’s the N-word, but here I respect it. Unlike his non-period works, the use of the N-word is a facet of slavery just as chains, whips and plantations are and slavery is the subject of this film which seeks to be historically authentic. If anything, the absence of the N-word would be very wrong in this case despite being the project of a white man as without it the film would lack the context of a key form of oppression that still exists today. I think Django does an excellent job documenting and commenting on the institution as it existed in the pre-war period. Django experiences every level of status a black person would encounter in this setting: first a slave, then a freedman, a black slaver and finally a Liberator and the final message of the film is that slavery deserved to be destroyed and any argument made for its return is horseshit which is kind of a “Duh” statement but with the state of modern politics and the state of education in the US it’s something that needs reiterating. You can interpret this beyond the bounds of slavery itself in addition, by arguing that there are existing powers in this world which seek to discriminate based on skin colour amongst other factors and create oppressed minorities for the benefit of a wealthy few with power and should the systems that create this environment be completely destroyed it would be cause for celebration. Beyond this I particularly enjoyed the historical authenticity of the environments, of the very varied biomes of the wilder parts of the US at the time, and the contemporary outfits especially King Schultz’ coat which I desire more than any item of clothing I’ve ever seen. The film is good at building suspense both in the moment to moment and through longer story arcs, particularly the second act, but I do feel like the 2nd act lulls a little, perhaps spends slightly too long reaching its climax. This is a great spectacle of a film which looks and sounds fantastic, puts excellent performances on show, tells a great story and has quite a bit of meaning bundled into it.

29/09/2021: The Road to El Dorado (Unfinished)

Despite not finishing it I think this film is actually really good. It certainly has a few elements which don’t fully gel with me but I enjoyed my time with it; I only felt like I should really be doing something else and that I wasn’t fully engaged with it, potentially as I’m not keen on cons and high stakes acting as it feels like a form of vicarious embarrassment for me which makes me immensely uncomfortable. Personal hindrances aside most everything about this film is excellent, I loved the animation and the very colourful world. The characters were fun, the voice acting good, the constant horniness was a great bonus also. I take issue with the music, much as it’s not my right to criticise Elton John, I feel it would’ve been better fully incorporated into the film. I enjoy animated musicals more when said music is diegetic and I think them beginning to employ non-diegetic music is part of what led to their downfall, outside of market saturation. Additionally, I was not a fan of The Trail we Blaze, just not a song that worked for me. I also appreciate the integration of 3d and 2d animation here as I felt the styles were reconciled better here than in most movies, especially for the time. I might take issue with what seems to be a plot about two Spanish men of the colonial age coming to central America and “enlightening” its people through humanitarian acts and music as that would reflect some troubling attitudes but I hold out hope that by the end of the film they decide to come clean about the lie, return the gold and help defend El Dorado from Cortez and his troops. Its enjoyable, I don’t feel drawn to finishing it though.

30/09/2021: Hunters Moon, Ghost

Here’s a new one, music reviews. This single is pretty good I enjoy it a lot. Opens slow and gentle and rapidly builds into some strong rock with a very 80s feel which scans with Ghosts whole historical rock and metal style they’ve always employed but have gone in extra hard on since Prequelle. The lead riff the track opens on is really nice and I would love to have seen it explored further, but the heavier style that ramps up progressively as the song continues is still great climaxing on the 9/4 post chorus riff which goes hard as fuck and I love that bit especially. It feels like it would be spectacular to witness it live. The bridge is a moment I’m not so keen on, the initial bass work is a little bare bone and overly repetitive but it definitely picks up once the guitar and vocals come in, even if just for the final moments. The final chorus leads into a good finale though I think it’ll serve better on an album version with a transition into another track, as I usually prefer to be fair. Technically I enjoy all of the different sounds and effects employed on all the instruments, especially in that leading riff, all of which are played well with good time. The vocals are great as usual. It’s a great track, I feel it was maybe a little short and could’ve explored some of its musical ideas or given them a bit more time to breathe; perhaps less time could have been given to overrepresented elements like the bridge and given over to work more into the very atmospheric leading riff but this is still a hard and heavy rock track and I enjoy it greatly.

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lesvegas · 3 years

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My Mod List for Fallout: New Vegas

Some months ago, I answered an ask regarding FNV mods I’d recommend. Over the past few months, I’ve tried many more mods since, and have even removed several mods from the original list. I decided to remake the list, both in this post and also in this doc for the sake of documentation.

These are both for my own reference and for anyone who’s looking for mod recommendations. Keep in mind my preferences for mods tend to be smaller-scale, quality of life and immersive mods, and I’m not super into big story mods.

This is a long one, so I’m putting it under a readmore.

You’re gonna wanna start with this mod configuration menu, which helps to manage mods in-game.

Fixes & Script Extenders

Most of these are necessary for a stable game and for the rest of the mods listed here.

New Vegas Script Extender (NVSE) - You’ll need this for most of these to work at all.

Yukichigai Unofficial Patch (YUP) - A compilation of vital bug fixes with no further additions. Just bug fixes.

Unofficial Patch Plus - A collection of supplementary bug fixes to be used alongside YUP. Includes improved versions of popular NVSE bug fixes.

New Vegas Anti Crash (NVAC) - Says it right there in the name.

JIP LN NVSE Plugin - An extension of NVSE that restores broken features and supplies bug fixes; read through this one before toggling anything.

JohnnyGuitar NVSE - Another NVSE extender.

FNV 4GB Patch - Simple patcher to make Fallout New Vegas 4GB Aware.

Throwable Weapon Fixes - A collection of fixes for throwable weapons and projectiles.

Overhauls

New Vegas Character Expansions (NVCE) - Probably the only character overhaul that just makes everyone look a little less potato without making them look hollow inside. (NOTE: This may make some characters have white faces. If this happens, the fix that worked for me is at the bottom of this post)

Water Overhaul - Overhauls various aspects of water, making radiation-free water more scarce and allowing you to refill bottles anywhere with a water source.

Starting Gear Overhaul - Adjusts the gear you start with to be more sensible and catered to your tagged skills. Recommended using along with JSawyer Ultimate.

Mojave Raiders - Adds more raiders to fight and balances their loot.

Mojave Wildlife - Adds hundreds more levelled, vanilla-friendly creature spawn points throughout the whole Mojave, based off unused vanilla levelled lists.

Mojave Arsenal - Adds ammo variants, reloading parts, and weapon mods as loot; fixes item naming conventions; improves recipes; and adds options for configuring GRA.

The Living Desert - Adds hundreds of NPCs and several scripted events; people patrolling the roads, travelling between towns, occupying locations.

Faction Map Icon Overhaul - Changes faction-related icons on the Pip-Boy map, for example Camp McCarran and the Mojave Outpost’s icons are the two-headed bear, the Fort and Cottonwood Cove are the bull, etc.

Immersion

New Vegas Enhanced Camera - Enables visible body and player shadow in first person, will let you remain in first person when you would otherwise be forced into third person (death/knocked down/etc).

Barton Thorn Acts Normally - Barton Thorn seeks out the player himself to ask for help with the geckos.

Clarity - Removes orange/blue tints.

Harvestable Cave Fungus - Self-explanatory.

Better Pickup Prompt - Makes several improvements to the HUD pickup prompt that appears when you look at an item. (NOTE: This mod has been discontinued, but seems to still work).

Realistic Safehouse Upgrades - Gives every safehouse a workbench, reloading bench, camp fire and more containers to make them feel like home.

Eddie Hears And Explosion - Fixes one of the clunkier moments in the game, near the end of the Powder Ganger questline.

Neck Seam Concealer Necklaces - A wide variety of necklaces that perfectly conceal the seam connecting characters’ heads and torsos.

Vanilla Hair, No Shine - Makes the default hairstyles have less obnoxious white shine.

Light Step ED-E - This mod gives ED-E the Light Step perk, preventing him from setting off mines and floor traps.

Hi-Res Vanilla Posters and Graffiti - Posters and graffiti have x2 upscaled resolution, with no ugly blurring or sharpening.

Mojave Nights - Mojave Nights combines my Enhanced Night Sky mod with a brand-new, highly detailed moon replacement for complete night-time realism.

Functional Post-Game Ending (FPGE) - Adds a fully functional post-game world to the game, where you will realise the consequences of your choices.

Just Vanilla Sprint (JVS) - A simple vanilla sprint mod. Requires JIP LN Plugin (scroll up to Fixes & Script Extenders).

Animated Maize Fields, Park Equipment, Poseidon Energy Signs (personal fave), Sunset Sarsaparilla Rotary Entrance, Rotating Brahmin Rotisserie, and Foliage. This mod maker has tons of immersive little animation mods; I recommend looking through all of them.

JSawyer Ultimate Edition

JSawyer Ultimate Edition - JSawyer's popular mod, fully re-implemented from the ground up. A ‘meant-to-be’ mod which changes elements of the game to how they should have been from the start.

JSawyer Ultimate Edition Patches - Patches for using several popular mods alongside JSawyer Ultimate Edition.

JSawyer Mod Vanilla Number Of Perks - Changes the final total number of perks acquired by level 34 from the JSawyer default of 17 to the vanilla default of 25.

Perk Every Level, Cap at 100 - JSawyer Ultimate Edition caps the player at level 35. Once I reached level 35, THEN I installed this mod, which was the only increased level cap mod that worked for me. It doesn’t add perks after that, though; I have to add perks manually.

Restored Cut Content

Uncut Wasteland - Restores a huge amount of scenery and little random things which were patched out of the game post-release.

The Moon Comes Over The Tower - Restores the rest of the quest given by Emily Ortal, which requires you to go H&H Tools Factory, Camp Golf, and North Vegas Steel.

Vanilla Intro Plus - Restores the bit of the intro where Victor pulls the courier out of their own grave.

Classic Fallout Floaters - Adds Floaters into New Vegas based on information and cut content found within the files. Can be found where Centaurs lurk.

The Strip Open - Removes the gates and excess loading screens within the Strip.

Legion Quests Expanded - Provides more Legion content by adding or expanding several Legion quests. Needs compatibility patches.

Karma and Reputation

Karma Changes - Changes the karma alignment of some NPCs, like making Caesar Very Evil instead of Neutral.

Lonesome Road True Faction Allegiance - The parameters for your allegiance has been altered to reflect on your quest status, rather than reputation. This is reflected in Ulysses’ dialogue and the courier duster.

Powder Ganger Rep Fix (Ghost Town Gunfight) - A quick and easy fix that removes the Goodsprings Powder Gangers from the PG Faction.

Negative Karma for Gravedigging - Gives the player bad karma every time they dig up a grave.

Quests

Autumn Leaves - A DLC-sized quest mod in a centuries-old library inhabited by sentient machines with a mystery to solve.

Boom to the Moon - A short but sweet quest investigating a moon base featuring some of the best interiors I’ve ever seen in a video game. Walkthrough required, though, and be sure to install the failsafes.

Snow Globe Quest - Adds quest markers to all the snow globes you find for Mr. House.

Benny

Benny Returns - Returns Benny to the game as a companion. Be sure to read through the mod description carefully before saving him from the Fort.

Bi Benny: The Re-Bennying - Edits Benny's Black Widow dialog to work with Confirmed Bachelor couriers, with altered working voiced + lip sync dialog. It’s a little rough but it works.

Save Benny Without Angering The Legion - This mod makes you able to save Benny at The Fort without angering the Legion or breaking their questline.

Less Serious Mods

Benny’s Aid - Funny Simpsons reference.

Mr. House Portrait Fix - Gives the portraits of Mr. House the Platinum Drip.

I Got Spurs - Adds a set of lucky spurs to Doc Mitchell's house that can be worn with any clothing. They can be found on top of the Vigor-Tester.

Legate Caravan Showdown - Allows you to duel Legate Lanius in a game of Caravan rather than combat.

NVCE Pale Face Fix

Literally copied from some forum, the usual .ini fix didn’t work for me but this one did:

Another .ini fix, but this time the file is FALLOUT.INI, found under "C:\Users<your Windows username>\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV". Open it up in your text editor of choice, and search for the line:

bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=0

and change the 0 to 1, so it looks like:

bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1

In the page on the Nexus it actually says to change that value in both a Fallout.ini file AND a FalloutPrefs.ini file, both in the My Games\FalloutNV folder.

#fnv #fonv #fallout #fallout new vegas #mods #mod list #fnv mods #fallout mods #mod

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vallonde-laid-bare · 4 years

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DM Tip #3: Signposting and Player Autonomy

On player hand-holding and plot advancement

One discussion I see pop up time and again in tabletop gaming circles is the classic "Open-world Vs. Railroading" argument. Do you run your games open-world and allow your players to influence that world, or do you run story-heavy games where the players move along a predetermined path to experience a story you've meticulously crafted? While both of these are legitimate styles of play with their own pros and cons, I think many people miss the fact that you can, and in my opinion should, incorporate both of these into how you run games to best fit achieve what you and your players want out of a campaign. Let's run over both extremes and then we'll talk integrating both fluidly into how you run session. This discussion will probably be most useful for inexperienced DMs since most of this is fairly basic, but feel free to read on regardless.

OPEN-WORLD, PLAYER-DRIVEN PLOT: This is a very enticing style of game for a lot of players. Getting dropped into a whole fantasy world with little more than your wits and your companions to keep you alive and win your fortune is very fun, and getting to explore and effect the world as you see fit can be exhilarating. These games often involve a large number of smaller plots happening simultaneously, sometimes with a larger plot tying them all together, many of which directly involve the players or are affected in some way by what they've done. There are obvious pros to running this style of game:

- You have the freedom to include a lot of different things, from plots to monsters to organizations, which is great for DMs and players who have tons of ideas or get bored of doing the same thing easily.

- Player choice is given a high priority and this can greatly improve immersion and player investment.

- When properly run, open-world games can truly feel alive. Story-driven games may tell a great story, but feeling free inside that story is much more rare.

- It's great improv experience!

But, while there's a lot of good to go around here, there are also cons to consider:

- Open-world games are a LOT of work for the DM. Where plot DMs usually start a campaign already knowing where things will be going at any given time, open-world DMs will usually be writing the plot as it happens which means drastically increased amounts of prep if you don't want the stories you tell to come off as shallow and unrefined.

- Not all players do well in these types of games. Some need direction and purpose otherwise they'll just feel lost and listless.

- As the DM of an open-world game, you HAVE to be able to improvise. A DM that isn't a skilled improviser is going to make plot and interactions incoherent and stilted. Names, backstories, connections to people and places within the setting, you need to be able to come up with this stuff on the fly, even more-so than in a standard story-driven game.

- You'll need a fleshed out world to make this work. Even as a skilled improvisor, if you don't have a large world with compelling details and realistic interactions between its people, places, and events, your players will feel it as a lack of compelling choices

STORY-DRIVEN, PLOT-CENTRIC: On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have campaigns that are plot-driven. In these games, players follow a path that takes them through a pre-written story and are generally discouraged from moving beyond the boundaries of that plot. Modules and official campaigns follow this formula, which makes it the "Default" mode of play for a lot of people; when you think of D&D, plot-centric games tend to be what you imagine. As with open-world games, there are obvious pros and cons to playing like this

- The story told will almost always be better, or at least more coherent and sensible, and usually more well-paced. Knowing what is happening and where your players will go with what you give them makes writing compelling content worlds easier. Your twists can be readied far in advance and tweaked to make them perfect. Your NPCs can be fleshed out and perfectly placed. Story pacing will be less difficult to maintain and often more intriguing.

- Campaigns like this are much easier on the DM. You have less prep and the prep you do will be more focused and effective. Instead of trying to flesh out 10 plots in a week, you can focus on making the story you tell the best it can be. A lot of prep time is wound up in moving plot forward and maintaining coherency, and if you already know where things are going that's a far easier mountain to climb.

- Players have less decisions to make! This may seem like a negative, but a lot of groups suffer from choice paralysis or become split on what they'd like to do at any given point. By giving them an obvious road forward and making it the only viable road forward, you bring your players together and give them unity of purpose which is something you can't discount.

Since this is real life and nothing is perfect, let's go over what I see as the major cons of this play style:

- It's narrow and doesn't encourage creativity and player initiative. When your players are given the obvious path forward on a silver platter, they often become complacent and let the plot happen to them instead of guiding the story with their actions.

- These games aren't always good for those of us (player or DM) that doesn't focus well. If your players aren't connecting with the plot happening around them or you're not having fun with the direction things are going, too bad. As a DM running a homebrew game you can fix this if you're not enjoying the path you've laid out for the campaign, but as a player you have little recourse other than petitioning your DM for some sort of shakeup. This is especially difficult with published campaigns because everything is already written down and finalized. If you change things much, that book is no longer going to help you run your game.

- In a lot of circumstances, running these games can make your world feel small. Adventure may be just over the horizon, a new civilization just beyond that border, but those aren't for you. You've got other things going on.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate the drawbacks and play to the pros of both styles, but there are two things to consider before choosing one for your campaign.

1.) What do your players want? This is a session 0 or pre-session 0 question. If you start with a foundation your players will enjoy, you're already on your way to running a successful campaign. What you want is important as well, but if what you want doesn't align with what the players want maybe you should reassess the viability of running that game with those players. Even if your players are having a great time, if you're not enjoying yourself it will become obvious and the game will feel tedious. Remember, D&D is a collaborative game; EVERYONE should be having a good time, not just the players and not just the DM.

2.) What are you and your players equipped to handle? Do they have the motivation to push a plot without hand-holding? Do you have the time to effectively run that game? Does your world have the content for that kind of game? Even if you and your players want to run an open-world game, if you can't commit to making it work then the odds are it will fall flat fairly quickly.

From my experience with both game styles, I can say with some amount of confidence that some degree of hybridization of the styles will usually be the answer to this question. Since every group and every game is different, the best I can give you a couple of pointers and let you take it from there.

- The illusion of choice is a powerful tool. Even if there’s a choice of ten different towns for the players to go to, you only technically need to build one; the one they choose to visit. If you build a dungeon and then your players choose not to check it out, they’ll never know if you reuse it later on. This can help you keep up with the large amount of prep that open world games require while preserving the experience for your players.

- Figure out how important the story, alongside other elements of game play, is to your players. The more important they find the story, the more you should consider playing a linear game. When beginning a campaign, I have my players rank these different categories from 1-7 in order of importance to them, 7 being the most important and 1 being the least. By doing this I can get a numerical ranking of different aspects of the game and build sessions that will best cater to their desires and expectations. - Combat - Social encounters - Puzzle solving - Dungeon crawls - Story - Side-quests - Loot

- Build the beginning and end of the story, but let your players fill in the middle. A gentle guiding hand can connect even the most random events with a little finesse, so even if your players are choosing where to go, the fact that you’re influencing your player’s choices may as well mean you’re calling the shots.

- Even if you hand-hold your players at every turn of the story, you can give them choice in the form of non-essential side quests. Sprinkle these bad boys throughout the story and have the outcomes of the party’s decisions have some call-back further into the story. Proper management of side quests can go a long way toward making a railroad seem more scenic.

- Have your players visit somewhere exotic at some point in the campaign. Doesn’t matter if it’s only brief, moving beyond the boundaries you’ve set for the campaign can make the world feel much larger.

Ok so that was very long and rambley and probably nothing the pros out there don’t already know, but I hope there was something in the non-sense that may help a new DM decide how they want to structure their first game. Being prepared for what you’re getting yourself into can make actually getting into it a lot easier lol. (Art by Grimley Fiendish)

#DM Tips #Dungeons and Dragons

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dungeonmalcontent · 4 years

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Thoughts on Encounter Balancing and the Meat Grinder

I’ve talked about running a meat grinder, and given a brief description of what that entails. But I want to go into detail on the matter. Below the cut there will be some visuals and ttrpg philosophy discussion for how to run good and balanced encounters in 5e d&d, primarily through the use of Roll20. This is a long post. I would put it on my Wordpress blog, but that’s getting some work and requires more effort.

So what is a meat grinder?

A meat grinder is a combat only one shot that allows for variety of play at high speed. Key aspects of the meat grinder are challenging encounter composition, terrain (re-positionable), and increased difficulty with every encounter round with the players leveling up between each. Ideally, the players have pre-planned how they want to level up their characters, have a different character ready for every level, or use a character manager tool like Aurora Builder, Fight Club 5e, or DNDBeyond (which I had my players use, because they could randomize and build widely varied characters) to facilitate fast level ups.

So how did I run the meat grinder? What does it look like? How do you even start this sort of project?

Well, let’s look.

This is the setup I used on Roll20. This is without FoW on, and I’ll zoom in on various aspects as I go on, but it isn’t that complicated. At the top we have a waiting room, where players can pick a token that speaks to them, and a “lion cage” with the tokens for each planned encounter (I deleted a few during the game I ran). Below that is the “arena,” which by itself isn’t all that special, as it was emptied out completely at the end of every encounter. At the very bottom, and pretty much never visible to the players, is the terrain room where I have shapes or tokens with terrain. My terrain was essentially just columns of various size that ran from floor to ceiling and either made walls or obstacles, but that was only because I put this together in a couple of hours.

Lets start with the waiting room.

At the start of the game, this is all the players should be able to see. There are a variety of tokens and instructions for how players can pick theirs; which in Roll20 you will then have to assign to the player (and then ideally color code as shown with the last four). All the tokens I threw on there, and I picked for variety, were pulled from the free assets on Roll20 (though I have plenty of my own, this was faster than uploading to my library). You can add on player/character names to help differentiate, but that also takes some extra time. The important part is that the players use this space to get used to what is about to happen. I also used an airlock room attached between the arena and the waiting room, just to give them a little more immersion and warning when the next round was ready, but that’s not really necessary.

Next is the “Lions Cage,” and I call it that in the spirit of the Roman Colosseum.

This is where I kept the tokens for each encounter. I had then arranged in rows with the first being at the top (which was deleted after it was beaten, but contained an Evil MageTM, two zombies, and two skeletons). I started at CR 1 (with four level 1 players), and went to CR 2 (animated armor and dragon wyrmling) and so on, following basics for balancing encounters based on CR. I will get into monster selection more later, but this is the room where I had all of that laid out. It is always blacked out for players. (I also had two spiderman PNGs and a barrel to use as variety tokens like Spiritual Weapon or familiars, they’re a running joke in my games.)

Now, the arena.

This is a big empty area. Every round I add in the tokens for the encounter monsters, the terrain, and I adjust the lighting as needed. The lighting is probably the biggest brain thing I’ve ever done on Roll20 and I encourage the use of this system for any arena or massive dungeons you build on the platform. You write out “Lighting” as well as “bright,” “dim,” and “dark.” You add this text to the background layer (along with all the boxes and things you don’t intend to move). Then you get boxes big enough to cover whatever lighting options are not in use. For bright rooms where there is enough light for all characters (save those with aversion to bright light) to see clearly, you cover up “dim” and “dark.” It’s that simple and it does so much for the players too, because it gives them actual use of their darkvision and they don’t have to ask you what the light in the room is like, they can just see. If they have disadvantage due to lighting, they can see the precedent based on the setting. It’s a good system and I am quite proud of it.

As a secondary note, FoW is interesting in this room. For after round cleanup and next round setup, it is recommended to black out the arena. When starting out a round, particularly if you are using sneaky creatures, it is advised to reveal the room gradually as the characters move about it. This is a great place to use the token lighting feature thing you get with a premium Roll20 subscription, as this feature enables rapid revealing and occluding of space in the arena based on the token’s given sight range. But that costs money. I got along just fine doing it manually.

Lastly, the terrain room.

This is just an empty space below the arena map, used to store terrain pieces. For my meat grinder I used six objects. Three squares and three circles, made to equilateral sizes with the shift function (should use high contrast colors and have both line and fill colors selected before making shapes, hence the purple and green). More shapes would have been ideal, but weren’t necessary. And shapes aren’t even required, you can add in terrain features from whatever map builder you use, but shapes are the easiest to prepare and move.

Another good option might be to add in one big solid black square to cover the whole arena and use other colored squares to represent platforms (possibly even color coding certain platforms to indicate height from a base level like the precipice of the waiting room). This adds an additional challenge to navigating the room and rewards characters with mobility based abilities like flight, or spells like spider climb. Alternatively alternatively, the room could be indicated to be submerged and the players given potions of waterbreathing, as this allows for underwater combat and aquatic monsters.

So what might an encounter look like? Here’s an idea for CR 4.

It doesn’t look that hard, honestly. Nothing in the lineup is actually even CR 4. But you also have to remember that most classes don’t get anything interesting or impactful at level 4. Level four is the designated ability score improvement level. So they aren’t going to be able handle anything much more challenging than before, even if they all take super useful feats instead of score ups (if you use those rules). The challenge of this setup is the terrain and the cube. Gelatinous cubes are a menace in group fights with small spaces, and gargoyles and werewolves have a lot of basic damage resistance and high speed.

So, suppose you open the room like this.

“The room is dark. You can see several pillars in front of you and not much else. There are vague shapes near the tops, as though they are ornamented with some statuary that you can’t quite make out. The room smells foul, like decay, and you can hear an uncomfortable squelching noise coming from further in.”

The players guess: Well, something is clinging to the tops of the pillars, and there’s some form of ooze in there. They probably won’t split up, so they can avoid getting taken out by falling creatures, and they expect to gang up on the ooze to take care of it quickly. But the cube is a tank and they have no clue the werewolf is hiding in the shadows. They are going to get ambushed, boxed in by the cube and divebombed by gargoyles. Now, if they’re smart they will take advantage of the tight spaces between pillars and act like tunnel fighters. The center middle or the bottom right are ideal for using the cube in their favor, as it will likely absorb the werewolf or careless gargoyles on accident if they don’t all have enough space. Worst case scenario, they all fail to see the cube (which I’ve made a size larger, arbitrarily), they stay in the open and split up to get picked up by big swooping maneuvers (which I would play out to the sound of Roundabout by Yes playing in the background).

So say, you run a round and the players win easily. Then what?

When the players win a hard fought battle I give them loot. One item from each killed monster, and there is usually at least one monster per player. I used the donjon random loot generator set to uncommon magic items. In the case of an easy victory you can adjust to no loot or less loot, or maybe just non-magic loot.

The players beat an encounter. I move them to the waiting room to level up and sort loot, cover the arena back up, move tokens and terrain around, and start again.

How did I select the encounters? Why certain creatures and why put them together?

The answer isn’t satisfying. Gut feelings, matching mechanics, and CR. I like thematic encounters for the meat grinder, though those themes are sometimes very arbitrary. My CR 3 lineup was themed “This looks like the dumbest and best hippie van art ever” and consisted of a gnome bard riding a gryphon and three centaurs. It used mounted combat, high speed, and mobile casting. Terrain would be sparse and likely against the walls to make crevasses for players to trap or get trapped in. If it felt like it was going to be too tricky, I could drop one or two centaurs from the encounter.

Generally speaking a creature of a certain CR is balanced for a party of 4-5 players of the same level as the creatures CR, with “boss” monsters being occasional outliers. So typically, an encounter consists of a high CR monsters (at or just above the PCs level/CR) and some fodder minion of a lower CR. Some monsters are also designed as fodder monsters, however, so putting just a lot of fodder monsters of the same CR as the players level is also an option. The beauty of the lions cage is that it allows you to also mix and match lineups on the fly, you can add or subtract monsters easily to make it harder or easier for your players. My players got wiped out by the animated armor and wyrmling, and had I used one less armor, they would have definitely survived, but it might have been too easy if they had picked up on the theme of the round (high armor, low health, so using save spells and abilities was the most effective method).

When putting together an encounter, I start by looking at the donjon creature index (another great tool you should have bookmarked) and browsing for a key creature for the encounter. This is usually the same CR as the players level. I pick one and then build up complimenting creatures from the same or lower CR. And that’s most of it.

The beauty of the meat grinder is its simplicity. It’s perfect for practicing combat balancing, getting new players used to the mechanics of combat, or running a quick one shot with little prep. You can even adjust it into a sort of tournament arc sort of narrative or a game show sort of last man standing operation (with killed players running pvp fights).

If you read this whole thing, holy cow. You’re a trooper. I hope you learned something useful or got some ideas. If you run a meat grinder of your own, I wish you all the luck in the world. It’s fun and can be very rewarding. Think of it like the infinity train (the one from Adventure Time, not the show [I haven’t watched the show and probably should]), lots of possibility—itty-bitty living space.

#dnd #d&d #5e #gming #dming #dungeons and dragons #meat grinder #combat #encounter balancing #monsters #arena #pvp #options for running a quick one shot

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