#in which case would the game restart from the beginning??

[auroraboringaliceinwonderland]

Videogame AU where the whole show is just a video game and the actions being made by Merlin are not his own but made by the person with the controller behind the screen. That is until one day he tires of their idiocy and decides to take matters - his destiny - into his own hands.

No more following the legends; no more being controlled; no more puppetry. This is his story now, and he’s going to see that it’s the best that it can be.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Heart’s Nancy Wilson talks restarting tour with sister Ann for 50th anniversary

The Rock Hall of Fame band Heart, which had to postpone its Royal Flush Tour in 2024 when singer Ann Wilson became ill, returns to the road with a show at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Monday, March 3, 2025. Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson released Heart’s debut album “Dreamboat Annie” in 1975. Seen here, left to right, are Ryan Waters, Nancy Wilson, Sean Lane, Ann Wilson, Paul Moak, Tony Lucido, and Ryan Wariner. (Photo by Chris Cain)

Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson and their Rock Hall of Fame band Heart were in the midst of their biggest tour in years when everything suddenly came crashing to a halt in May 2024.

Singer Ann Wilson was diagnosed with a cancerous growth and left the tour for surgery and preventive chemotherapy. The tour, which would have continued from August through December 2024, was put on hold.

Now, Heart is back, guitarist-singer Nancy Wilson says, with makeup dates for most of those shows including a concert at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Monday, March 3.

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The Rock Hall of Fame band Heart, which had to postpone its Royal Flush Tour in 2024 when singer Ann Wilson became ill, returns to the road with a show at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Monday, March 3, 2025. Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, seen here, released Heart’s debut album “Dreamboat Annie” in 1975. (Photo by Chris Cain)

“Ann’s doing great,” Nancy Wilson said on a recent video call from her home in Northern California. “She sounds good, she looks good, she feels good, best of all. And she’s pretty bored. She really wants to get out there.

“I can say we’re kind of itching to do it, because it’s what we know how to do,” Wilson says. “I always joke around. I say, you know, I could stay home and do something else, but I have no other skills.

“I mean, I could probably figure something out eventually,” she says. “I’m pretty good at a lot of stuff. But I’m destined to do the rock job, and this is where I work.”

With the delay, the Royal Flush Tour now coincides with the 50th anniversary of Heart’s 1975 debut album, “Dreamboat Annie,” which includes the fan favorites “Magic Man,” “Crazy On You,” and its title track. There may be a few other changes too, Wilson said about a week or so before the band played a pair of Las Vegas shows before hitting Los Angeles.

“We’re still kind of dreaming it all up,” Wilson says. “Going into rehearsal this coming week. So I’m back on the rock job. I’ve got six bags packed: For the bus, for the hotel room, for the backstage area, for the wardrobe case and for the wellness room where we do the workout stuff.

“I’ve got all my bags to send ahead to Las Vegas, then get on the bus and roll, roll out for the year, basically.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Nancy Wilson talked about making “Dreamboat Annie,” about Heart’s long practice of performing Led Zeppelin songs and about how she and Ann have kept Heart together through good times and bad.

Q: It must have been fun on the road last year in April and May before things shut down.

A: We were just getting our momentum, you know? Like when you get a big tour, you rehearse and you get ready, and then you’re kind of really nervous at the beginning, because you think you’re going to screw something up. ‘Maybe I’ll make a mistake. Oh (bleep) I made a mistake.’ Because we play completely live, we don’t have pre-records, so we really have skin in the game when we’re on stage.

So we were just getting our roll going, and the shows were starting to get more and more exceptionally fun. And kind of hair-raisingly thrilling, because those are big places, arenas and theaters. It’s only going to happen that one time, live on a stage like that, so the moments are really precious and larger than life.

We were crestfallen, you know. Ann was really a trooper, as always, a super trooper. She had to do a bunch of treatments and a whole bunch of doctor and hospital stuff. And she survived it. She’s back on her feet. She’s feeling great. So three cheers for modern science, what it allows us these days, the healing you can get.

Q: I realized the delay sets you up now for the 50th anniversary of ‘Dreamboat Annie.’

A: It is a really beautiful marker, you know, a historic sort of moment for us. We’re learning some of the other songs from ‘Dreamboat Annie’ that we haven’t really pulled out for a long time, and we’re going to do more songs from it.

Q: ‘Dreamboat Annie’ put Heart on the map from the very start of the band’s career. What do you remember about recording it and the reception that followed?

A: At the time, I joined what then was Ann’s band. They were just barely called Heart. I went to college for a year and a half before I joined her band. I kind of resisted at first, and then I finally joined in. We were, they were, about to make the album, and we’d been writing already. So went into this studio called Can-Base in Vancouver, where Ann was living with ‘the magic man’ at the time. [She laughs. ‘Magic Man’ is about Mike Fisher, Ann Wilson’s bandmate and boyfriend at the time.]

It was like this huge, important, real recording studio with good microphones and isolation booths and a big drum room. Years later, when we revisited the place, it was this tiny little kind of hole in the wall where we made that album, but they had really great gear. Tube gear in the control room, like the compressors, a tube board, and all the great analog gear that people are collecting nowadays.

But it sounded so good, that album, for that reason. We were so nervous and so intimidated and excited, and we made a really cool album. Made it a concept album with recurring motifs and all kind of stuff.

Q: And when it came out and took off?

A: I think it hit a chord. A song like ‘Crazy On You,’ the energy of that still is fun. It’s fun to play today. When we first heard ‘Crazy On You’ on the radio in the car, we flipped and we had to pull over. Like, ‘We did it! We have to pull over and freak.’ Because it was happening. It was just like in a couple of different movies where you’ve seen the band go running: ‘It’s on the radio!’ It’s exactly that scene in real life.

And 50 years later, it’s still a great song. My theory on all that is that great songs are what it’s really all about. People, if there’s a band where you love that song, it was a soundtrack to your life, and you’d go see the band, even if there are almost no original members left. It’s all for the song. You can’t keep a good song down. It really exists in a place bigger than all of us.

Q: I saw on your setlists for last year that you were covering a couple of Led Zeppelin songs, which I think you usually do.

A: We always do. We have to decide what Led Zeppelin songs not to do. Like, OK, how many can we get away with? We used to be called Little Led Zeppelin in Vancouver because we did a lot of Zeppelin songs. Right now we’re re-learning ‘The Rain Song,’ which is a great Zeppelin song.

I heard the movie, the Zeppelin movie is out. It’s supposed to be great.

Q: There is something about their music. At the FireAid benefit, Pink played a Led Zeppelin song and the Black Crowes with Slash did a Zeppelin song.

A: ‘Going To California,’ yeah? It was great. Those songs are deathless and pretty timeless. Especially nowadays when you just don’t find very many rock bands out there anymore. Rock is kind of at a low ebb. I don’t think it ever dies, per se. There’s just an intermission right now or something. But it never dies because it’s the spark.

The imperfections of rock are kind of what makes it. The character of rock is human and not quite so perfect like a lot of pop music tends to get. There’s flaws, beautiful flaws. We like flaws.

Q: Flaws are good. Flaws make it unique.

A: Like when I made a mistake live before we had to stop the tour. I made a really bad intro to ‘Crazy On You’ because the strings were different and something had changed. It was really like my fingers tripped all over each other and I got it totally wrong. But people were like, ‘That was so cool when you made that mistake!’ It’s like, wow, that tells you a lot about the culture right now, like seeing proof that it’s really, right? It’s pretty cool.

Q: People remember those little unique moments.

A: Human moments.

Q: I want to ask you about keeping the band together for this long, which very few bands can do.

A: I think me and Ann, we represent what Heart is. The perception of Heart is the two of us. If we were still trying to be the original lineup, we would never still be there, you know what I mean? There was a lot of drama, and a lot of just growing up to do since the beginning of Heart, as far as who was in the band and who came through the band and all the different players.

I think our relationship has always been really unique. We’re sisters, so we’re blood. Our love is blood love and as different as we are, which we really are. And as crazy and divergent as our lives could be from each other, and the circumstantial stuff from the outside and all the static that happens around us, we just plow through.

I always felt lucky to have another girl, not to mention a sister, inside of Heart. It’s like being in the eye of the hurricane, the way it’s felt over the years, because all the eras go by and the dramas go through, and there’s cows flying around and tractors in the air, but at the nucleus of the story is the quiet center where me and Ann exist.

We had our own lives and our husbands and our own choices and roads we took. But [the band] is kind of like coming back to the good old oak tree called Heart. It exists there. The roots are deep and it’s bigger than all the rest of it, because the music and the songs are there in the culture. It’s a lovely, steady pillar of power that just exists on its own. Even without me and Ann, it’ll still be there.

Q: I suspect Heart draws a multi-generational audience from original fans to much younger ones.

A: Now there’s more people showing up that are in their college age or even teenagers. I get fan mail from teenagers now. I kind of run the fan club and I like to answer fan mail. It’s because I like to take the temperature of who they are, and that’s one of the things that’s really exciting. And there’s little girls that are like nine that want to pose with a guitar with their pink skirts on.

It’s really cool that little girls and little boys are excited by Heart because they come and see us and they’re kind of like, ‘Whoa, it’s not like TV.’ The energy is different from something that’s been kind of force-fed by the culture to them. We’ve always been different, but I think we remain really kind of an anomaly in pop culture.

Q: Like you said, there are fewer rock bands and a ton of pop.

A: Pop’s great. I love a lot of these pop songs. I’m a Taylor Swift fan.

Q: Did you see Taylor Swift when she was on tour?

A: I couldn’t do it. I wanted to in a big way, but I saw so much footage from all the girls I know that did go. During the pandemic, [Swift’s ‘Folklore’] was my pandemic album. I think it’s my favorite album of hers.

Q: Touring has surely gotten more comfortable since the mid-’70s. What’s it like for you today?

A: Oh, god. [She laughs] Unless you’re at the private jet level – we’re on the bus level – the inconveniences almost outweigh the reward of getting up on a stage for two hours. It’s like everything is aimed for those two hours. The bad pizza, the no sleep, the potholes, overnight in the bus, trying to sleep. You can’t even watch TV half the time because it’s bad reception.

All the scheduling of it. Trying to see your family when you’re home between their school breaks. It’s just a lot of moving parts that you have to be good at. It’s an obstacle course, basically, and you just have to run with your suitcase and get to the stage.

Q: But those two hours on stage?

A: It’s everything my whole life is aimed to be able to do well, or at least as well as possible. People are there. They’re loving you and they love those songs. And it’s a moment that only happens that one time, so you can’t just rewind it, rewatch it.

It’s beautiful, sort of like a mindfulness that happens on stage. You really have to be in the moment. You can’t be thinking, ‘Well, I think I’ll do my laundry later in the sink on the bus or in the hotel room.’ Because then you’re like, ‘Wait, what’s the next chord? I was thinking about my laundry.’

There’s just certainly magic that is transferred in that setting.

[calamitaswrath]

Cal Lucia plays Fire Emblem Path of Radiance: Chapter 13

Not much of a lead-in for this chapter, huh? I'm just plopped right into my pre-chapter preparations. But then again, since in previous cases that was always accompanied by a change in location, and we're still very much on a boat, I suppose that makes sense. Let's start with Jill!

"Why are you still here?" - Blunt, Ike. Blunt. And calling soldiers stupid, too! Reminds me of that one post that's like "everyone who died for their country is a clown". It does make me wonder why exactly Jill really is still with us, though. The basic interesting is obvious, but where does it come from, and why is it enough?

Conversation with Daniel, about the best means to defend on a ship map. Very subtle, game. And they're playing an in-universe war game? Fire Emblem-ception?

Aimee continues to simp for Ike. The game really does make a running gag out of him not caring for women romantically or sexually, huh?

Sibling interactions between Oscar, Boyd and Rolf!! Those are always fun. Judging by the fact that it was a three star one, I thought that it would actually lead to something, but I haven't noticed anything yet. Do they get their own triangle attack now, or. . .?

Right, time to start the actual chapter. And we get more worldbuilding! Begnion's got an empress, Crimea and Daein used to be part of it, and we seriously gotta wonder why they want to see Elincia in the first place

Tanith. . . woag. . .

Hmm, we got a high priestess? The only context in which I've heard of priestesses in the context of PoR/RD is with Micaiah's classes, but I really don't think that she's going to make an actual appearance here yet

Heyy, Gatrie's back! And he got himself a new job. Have to wonder about that other character, though. . . her name in the German version is Stella, but I don't think that's gonna be the same in English. And after looking that up, her English name is Astrid. . . okay? Seems to be another instance of the German version carrying over the Japanese name.

Ohoho, defend map! And one with a lot of chests, too. Gimme gimme gimme!

Ah, there's Nasaela. Based on these early vibes, I can already somewhat understand my friend's obsession. I am curious though why the king of an entire nation is out here making deals with rather lowly soldiers for money like this. Is his country not doing well financially speaking?

Ergh, as I'm playing through this map, I'm beginning to realize that I really don't have the turns to actually get all the items with just Sothe. I think I'll need to restart and hand everyone chest keys. . . lovely.

Well, that second attempt went a lot better in general. I got all the enemies on the upper ship, including the boss, by just turn five! Let's see what else is gonna happen on this map.

Ah, so that other character flying near Nasaela is. . . well, a character. Kinda funny to see an old winged man like that. And pfft, he Nasaela doesn't like being called. . . what would it be in English? Hatchling?

Tibarn and Janaff. I would say these two have the look of playable characters to them.

Hold on, Tibarn's a king as well? Do the bird Laguz have multiple kingdoms? So far, I was under the impression that they only got the one. . .

This lot really was just there to show that they're there, huh?

. . .And I left the defend point unguarded on accident. I thought the enemy ravens would make a beeline for the treasure, NOT that point. Guess that's my first game over!

Jesus fucking christ, my luck on this second attempt was terrible. Astrid missed a ~90% to hit twice, Rolf also missed one, I took longer to beat the boss. . . but at least I managed to still turn things around in the end. Still just absolutely stucks about Astrid though, because she did get a lot more kills, and by proxy, exp, the first time around.

Sigrun! I heard the name before, but I don't have any associations. With Sanaki however, there are some half-remembered tidbits there. I think she's related to Micaiah somehow?

Ah. So the high priestess is the empress as well. Then why even make a distinction in introducing her?

Ike and Soren having a little heart-to-heart! That's nice.

Sanaki's found, and Ike really can be rather thick at times. . . let's see where that leads him

It gets him invited to court, is what it does. Fair enough.

[mk-wizard]

Top 15 Games that SHOULD get a 100% Reboot/Restart

Hi. I felt like doing something positive especially after my last post, so as a follow up, here is a list of games that I think should get the reboot treatment. And when I say reboot, I don’t just mean remake with fancier graphics and bonus features. I mean restart altogether with fresh new storylines that go their own way though in some specific cases, all they need is a new look. Note that this is my subjective opinion and nobody here has to agree with it. It’s just a fun suggestion.

1- Metal Gear - I don’t mean Metal Gear Solid, I mean Metal Gear in general. In fact, I think the “Solid” should be retconned entirely because it not only stopped being about Solid Snake who is the hero, he was done dirty with a pathetic ending and the only sequels we get now are prequels. Not to mention the constant drama and tragedy became nauseating. My advice is to restart from the beginning by rebooting the games that date back to the NES as are with better writing and then after that, only do a half-reboot of Metal Gear Solid and then go its own way while respecting Snake as a main character. Solid Snake is a staple in war themed games and set the standard of how we create them. He should REMAIN the main character and have his endings always remain open with him still standing with dignity.

2- Dino Crisis - I don’t think I need to say much here. Everyone is dying to see this game get remade and it’s not hard to see why. With the exception of the third game and the spin off, Dino Crisis 1 and 2 are amazing. They are dinosaur themed games that actually feel like survivor horror games and not like shooter games with the dinosaur gimmick. This series deserved a reboot and a third game that gives it proper closure.

3- Parasite Eve - Like Metal Gear, this series did dirty to its main character (Aya Brea) in such a way that they wrote themselves into a corner. Only the first game feels unique and special while the second and third instalments have an identity crisis, a confusing weapons and spell system, and a tank control that never belonged. Only the first game should stay as is with a simple remake and then, its sequels should actually be true sequels that keep the battle, spell and control system as are. Let’s just forget that PE2 and The Third Birthday ever happened.

4- Silent Hill - Let’s be honest. Harry Mason is the most underrated male protagonist in survivor horror because unlike all the others, he is not a man of action, not a badass and very relatable for it. He is a widower, a writer, a pacifist and one heck of a dad who literally jumped into the underworld to save his daughter. Now, while I like a lot of the sequels, this series lost its way. With the exception of Silent Hill 2, I think Harry and his daughter should have remained the main protagonists of the series. Harry is proof that real men come in all flavors and having one like him is different while still showing the best attributes of masculinity.

PS: I know Silent Hill 1 got a reboot, but it was bad. Period.

5- Turok - Before there was Dino Crisis (and I’m not discrediting it), there was Turok. The titular hero who might I also add is aboriginal which is a very underrepresented group in fiction period who literally kills dinosaurs with his bare hands. He is a badass and he while he has gotten reboots before, none of them hit the mark yet, but creators should not give up on him. He is worth the effort and if they keep trying, they will strike gold.

6- Castlevania - This series is ICONIC and nobody ever gets tired of it. It should make a comeback and it is one of the few series where being 3D would make it better. And considering that medieval settings in video games is all the rage now, it would be great to see Simon Belmont back in action. Heck, I would even be open to seeing a Belmont fighting evil in our modern times in 3D.

7- The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time - Now, I stand by that this series doesn’t need a reboot, I think this game specifically should get a remake because it is a great game that reshaped the series into how we know and love it now, but it was very buggy and the graphics were not that great even for their time. Everything else about it is great, but it does need a facelift.

8- Prototype - A forgotten gem if there ever was one. This series is unique in that it is the one game where you play as the monster who is also an anti-hero. Yet again, its series did its main character (Alex Mercer) dirty though on top of that, left too many questions unanswered. This series needs a reboot with a much better storyline. If you haven’t seen it, play the first game and you’ll see my point.

9- Tomb Raider - Now, we can all agree that this series has lost its way. While I am all for origin stories and I admit it makes sense for Lara Croft to not be hardened or toughened up from the start. Keeping her as a weak frightened girl doesn’t make her realistic nor does it make her a likeable heroine. And I am woman enough to admit that being athletic, confident, daring and badass is a part of Lara Croft’s character. I don’t want her to be realistic. I want her to be cool and fun to play. This series needs to go back to its roots when it was fun and Lara was allowed to shamelessly be herself.

10- Dead Rising - Another case of a game losing its way and its main protagonist becomes someone they’re not. The second instalment was the only game that felt true to what the series is supposed to be and even then, it felt like a spinoff not a part of the main story because Dead Rising is Frank West’s story. Another thing that also stood out about this game is that unlike most zombie themed games, the main character is not only not a fighter, he’s a total lover in all the great ways. Frank is (or rather, was) compassionate, honest and it isn’t for nothing that you only got the best ending when you would save everyone. Heck, he would save people who tried to kill him. This series should get a total reboot and a total rewrite after game 1. And can we please not give Frank a heart of stone? Him being loving is what made him great.

11- ObsCure - Another lost gem with a unique premise and group of protagonists. This game plays up our childhood fear of the dark because the monsters in this game literally are allergic to the light and the setting is in a highschool. It feels like Scream meets the Blair Witch Project making it a lot of fun, and the monsters are so delightfully creepy. Plus, the story was compelling. Sadly this series only got one sequel which was actually great, but never got that third instalment that would wrap everything up. I say we give this series a reboot, so it can finally finish what it started.

12- Resident Evil Outbreak - I know this is a spinoff series, but it’s one of the best in the series. It fills in a lot of gaps in the main storyline and any game that allows you to have your own tyrant fighting alongside you is awesome. It also has a multiple ending system which was well done and very rewarding when you get the best ending. I think this should get the reboot treatment and even have a third game that expands the aftermath further.

13- Resident Evil Dead Aim - Another one of the best spinoffs in the RE series because it expands the story specifically in how tyrants are made and how the variants work. And to be honest, I even liked the characters. I would love see new life breathed into this compelling game even if it just remains the only one of its kind.

14- Days Gone - I don’t care what anyone says. Any game that allows to play a biker with the spirit of an honourable warrior is badass. Also, can we talk about how this is one of the few games where the main protagonist is married and remains loyal to his wife even long after?! He may be white, male, straight and Christian, but he is still pretty progressive and embodies the BEST part of masculinity. The parts that drive a man to be romantic, noble and heroic. This game with extremely misjudged to the point of bigotry and it deserves a proper reintroduction because it was going places.

15- Half-Life - This series helped Valve get its jump start and it had the most unique and most iffy type of protagonist in an action/sci-fi game possible yet worked: a scientist. After all, who expect the skinny nerd with the big thick glasses to save the day? Yet, it worked and this game has tons of monsters that became iconic in video game lore. What’s really sad is that a third game was in works, but never saw the light of day. I say we reboot this series and give it the chance to honour its promise to give that third game at long last.

Bonus - Other honourable mentions here are Left 4 Dead because Back 4 Blood stinks, Alone in the Dark though I hear a reboot is in the works, Doom, Devil May Cry and the right way please, Bloody Roar, The Suffering, Fatal Frame, The Evil Within and any other fantastic game series that either went bad due to bad sequels or never got the chance to keep going.

[holydramon]

What r u writing if u don't mind me asking (about a writing meme u rbed lol I only know remembered I wanted to ask)

hsjdhdjdh honestly I very much do not mind you asking, I love yapping about stuff

unfortunately I will note most of my fics are more just… in the idea phase with very few having anything actually written unfortunately. I find writing very difficult and I still kinda struggle with the idea of perfectionism and being intimidated by the blank page.

BUT. I will note under the cut some of my various fic ideas and note which ones I have actually written stuff for (though for all the ones I have written stuff for it’s like… very small amount). also will note various fandoms ofc, and that most titles are subject to change:

Ones where the page isn’t blank:

- It’s Snowing Somewhere Else (Deltarune)

I’m not actually willing to share much about this one, purely because I think it’s funner if the audience does not actually know the premise until going in. I read one fic like that for another fandom, and the gut punch when the realization struck of what the premise was really stuck with me. All I will share is that it is Dess-centric.

- Compromise (Amphibia)

A REALLY old idea from way back before Season 3. I still enjoy it though even though it is very far from actual canon now - the concept being an exploration on identity of Marcy and the Night (from back when the fandom was under the impression that “The Core” was “The Night”, and some sort of eldritch demon entity) post-possession. A question of where does one start, and the other begin? Is there even a beginning or ending anymore? And how to cope with that.

- Snapped Strings (Kingdom Hearts)

Post-KH3 fic about Xion. Xion is in a very different place from most other characters, just because she has had pretty much no contact with a regular life (not even via false means like Roxas). As such, this is meant to be an exploration of the aftermath. How does she adapt? Things are better now, but how can you live an ordinary life as an artificial being made to fight? What to do when everyone else had a place to slot back into, but you don’t?

Fully Just Exists in My Head:

- Fatal Exception Error (Super Danganronpa 2)

(Spoilers for SDR2 below)

Unlike a majority of the others, this one would not be a one-shot. This is a full on, whole game rewrite fic with Chiaki as the main character. Basically, during her execution in base game Chapter 5, the program crashes and restarts. Leaving them all back at the beginning again, with only Usami, Chiaki, and Monokuma remembering the events from the past game.

I already do have the survivors, murderers, victims, and new motives planned for this one. Now I actually need to… write it and also figure out the cases beyond just victim and killer.

- Your Angel or Your Devil (Digimon Adventure)

This one is actually planned to be a huge series. It is an alternate universe where PicoDevimon is Hikari’s partner digimon. This effects things, particularly the eighth child arc! It also is planned to have some general stories and headcanons that aren’t really… due to that change, but me just having fun. Though it also is just a Digimon Tri rewrite in disguise, since some of the things I do change are explicitly with Tri in mind. I’ve talked about this one a bit within my #YAOYD au tag (though it’s mostly just memes).

- Some Things Don’t Change (Kingdom Hearts)

Alternate universe of Days that me and my friend made! Actually technically an offshoot of another idea I had, where the main premise is just Days but everyone knows from the start that Xion is a replica. This one would actually be three chapters, with each one being from each of the Sea Salt Trio’s point of view throughout the series.

- Untitled Monster AU Fic (Ace Attorney)

This one is an Apollo-centric fic for an AU where Troupe Gramarye is a werewolf pack. Various characters from the second trilogy are different types of monsters. Very much an introspective one.

- Duality (Pokemon)

Legends Arceus and Pokemon Platinum fic with the premise of both the headcanons of “Akari is Dawn” and “Cynthia is Volo after character development (and transition)”. Basically just something on how both those ideas being true has some interesting consequences.

- Sympathy for the Devil (Pokespe/Pokemon)

Most recent idea and hence most likely to not have anything done for it but… Very much find the idea of a Legends Arceus arc in Pokespe fun, and basically about the aftermath of Platinum getting eeby deeby’d. Also the more I develop it, the more it becomes about Platinum and Giratina.

- Untitled KH fic (Kingdom Hearts)

Another Xion centered KH fic. Basically, based off the idea of the characters not instantly getting their memories of Xion back, including Xion herself. I just think it’s a fun concept. I will say though - this one is by far the least fleshed out of any of these. I still need to determine what the point of this one is.

Aaaand that’s all I can think of, off the top of my head. May have missed some. I also am always open to elaborate on any of these lmao

[beansdelicatessen]

the edens garden thoughts: (spoilers of course, i'm currently at the chapter 1 investigation)

very high quality. gotta appreciate that. sometimes looks better than the actual danganronpa games tbh especially the sprites

tho i did end up glitching the game one time near the beginning and had to restart (when i woke up in the boiler room i wanted to open the menu and save, started clicking a lot of buttons and the game stopped working during a transition between a dialogue and interactive segment

enjoying a lot of the characters

good designs for the most part, curious about the animal theming

if it was a canon game i think damon would be my favorite protagonist, i appreciate that he's a legit jerk (far from favorite character in general though, i usually dont care for protags too much compared to the side charas)

kai is a cutie patootie and i really hope he manages to kazuichi his way to the end. i love scaredy cat characters

i'm a bit pissed at myself however because for some goddamn reason i didn't inspect anything in his room before clicking on the couch and so was unable to see damon's probably very snarky insights regarding the stuff inside

i dont think this is the case anymore (tho i havent checked) but when the sharing rooms thing first happened i wondered if your choice in the rock paper scissors game determined whether you'd be roommates with kai or desmond (definitely wouldnt mind being roommates with desmond btw he's a cool dude. chill and nice)

unfortunately i don't like eva. just not into the type of character that she is and it seems that she's going to be getting a lot of screen time... ah

rip wolfgangs, i loved your little stance. wonder what happened (the only time ive ever figured a danganronpa culprit out before the trial was the very obvious 1-1, not counting the trials the endings of which i was spoiled anyway. i suck at the stuff tbh half my braincells seem to vanish when i start investigating)

rip in advance to mark, jett, or both. shouldn't have become friends. now you're doomed to die around chapter 2 i'm afraid

ulysses also feels doomed to die early for no specific reason. he just doesn't seem destined to do great things idk man

i neeeeed eloise to pull something badass and if the badass thing is gonna be killing a person then so be it. go girl i love you and i want to see you get real mad you deserve it

OH AND THERE WAS AN UNDERTALE REFERENCE? SPIDER PASTRIES? HELLOOO?

this plus those things lmao

speaking of the presents i also screenshotted this because i found it funny. what is wolfgangs beef with mr cuddler (is it just because he already seems to have one?)

also i only figured this out now (and not when playing any of the three og dr games) but i can freaking. keep extra saves. so when someone dies i can replay the chapter and see their ftes that i'd otherwise have missed. so now i have an extra save when i am going to do wolfgangs (and the killers) ftes after im done with the trial. peace and love.

now bye im gonna go back to playing ch1 hope i dont fuck up the trial (i did fuck it up in the prologue because im shit at the game and kept missing shots fjdsklggf)

[everygame]

Pinball Spire

Developed/Published by: Apparition Games / indie.io Released: 02/10/2024 Completed: 01/04/2025 Completion: Finished it.

I’ve been having a lot of luck picking recent games largely on a whim, so after I polished off Children Of The Sun my interest was piqued by the idea of a “pinballvania” and more or less started this immediately. And it’s… eh… fine? I guess?

It’s always a bit awkward to write about a game that you don’t have any strong feelings about–something you can’t be very effusive about, but can’t really stick the boot in either. So I’ll just try and be constructive.

Pinball Spire is an attempt to take the play of pinball–you interact with the game’s main character by hitting them with flippers or launchers with the aim of hitting targets–and merge that with an action adventure, so rather than just playing on a single playfield to get a high score, your actions are intended to help you progress further through the game.

Generally, that’s as simple as hitting targets to open the door to the next playfield, but the game intends to fit the aforementioned idea of a “pinballvania” so you’re also unlocking abilities that should, in theory, be allowing you to navigate the playfields in different ways and open up new directions to travel.

The thing is though… that’s not really what happens. Pinball Spire’s design is extremely linear, and while metroidvanias are usually more about the illusion of freedom for the average player, Pinball Spire doesn’t have you re-navigate playfields until the end, and it (very oddly) doesn’t include anything in those earlier playfields that your new abilities unlock!

At best, a couple of times the game plans for you to travel onto a screen, realise you can’t beat it, return to the previous screen, go in the other direction, and quickly unlock one of the abilities that will help you progress. The game does have a strict gating with some doors that can’t be opened unless you have enough currency, but in every case by the time I got to them I had enough currency. In fact, you’d only not have enough currency if you were like, super good at pinball.

So the game lacks literally any of the “oh, I’ll come back here later” that makes for a good metroidvania, and indeed the only time you do significant backtracking is at the end of the game to get to the end of the game, and it’s extremely annoying when it happens!

The funny thing is though: Pinball Spire is a decent enough pinball game if you take it as one. The goals are all pretty clear, and while the physics can be as annoying as in any pinball game, the special abilities do a lot to help you (there’s a slowdown ability for aiming that’s a lifesaver). The main issues you’ll have are when you’re out of mana and can’t use them (which can often be a frustrating trek backwards to a save point for a refresh) or when you’re trying to get off the bloody playfield you’re on as you’ve opened the gate to the next–certain playfields make it insanely annoying (there’s one otherwise quite interesting one with an orrey theme that I found a nightmare to get off.)

Also: there’s no way to game over. In a weird way this is good, but it’s also bad. It’s good because if this game was like… a pinball roguelike-like and you had to start it over from the beginning again or whatever, people would be snapping their Steam Decks in half. It’s bad because there’s none of the thrill of pinball, really–you know that feeling when you’re trying to stop the ball from falling between the flippers? Here you either feel nothing,  because it’s just going to come back on screen, or boredom, because you know the playfield it’s going to fall back onto is going to be a complete slog to get back off. Some peril–even if it’s just restarting from the playfield you’re on–feels like it would be justified.

So Pinball Spire isn’t great, which I put down to a failure of imagination in the macro level design rather than in the individual playfield design (well apart from that orrey, which can fuck off.) But it’s close. Maybe they’ll get it with a sequel.

Will I ever play it again? No thanks! I didn’t get all of the collectibles or anything, but I’m not that great at pinball so I probably played this longer than needed.

Final Thought: This isn’t the only twist on pinball out there–Rollers of the Realm was out years ago and I’ve never tried it, and I’ll admit I’m intrigued by the more peggle-like Peglin (though that’s a roguelike-like, so I’m definitely concerned about the potential for Steam Deck snappage.)

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[where-s-all-blue]

A little AceLaw University AU drabble for your entertainment. I might make this into a full one-shot in the future when I actually know what I am writing.

Trafalgar Law stood in the kitchen quietly, folding the omelette onto itself in an effort to make tamagoyaki for one sleepy Portgas D. Ace. They had been a couple for a while now, a year and a half to be exact, though no one else was yet aware of their budding relationship. And for a good reason. Ace wasn't the type of person who liked to show affection publicly, not even handholding, and Law just didn't deem it important to disclose what his relationship was for he valued his own privacy, and was trying his very best to keep a certain relative of his from finding out. In the secrecy of Law's apartment, they were very affectionate in their own ways. The surgeon student was a bit of a cuddle bug, often sneaking his way either next to Ace or onto his lap as the latter gamed on the switch, occasionally stealing kisses from him.

Law furrowed his brows as he stared at his egg concoction. Out of the two of them, Ace was the one who cooked. The man had grown up as practically a savage due to his grandfather "forgetting" him and his brothers into the woods for long time periods, and as the oldest, he'd assumed the role of a caretaker to a degree. And for a child, what a caregiver does is provide food.

The tan man had seen people make this dish a lot on TV, but he had never really paid attention to how it was made. As he stared at the omelette, he couldn't help but wonder if the shape of the pan had something to do with the thing. Those ladies all had a weird rectangular pan, while his was more of an oval. The omelette was moved to the edge of the pan, and with a small ladle more of the egg mixture was poured in, restarting the folding process. As he worked on this very special breakfast, the first he'd tried to make to his boyfriend since his little pancake mishap at the beginning of their relationship, the tattooed man thought back to the very beginning. Their meeting and how they inevitably fell for one another.

He vividly remembered how the snow fell outside the library he'd hauled himself to for some peace and quiet. The scent of the chocolate latte and the grilled tuna onigiri filled his nose, mixing together with the vanilla like scent of the old books.

Law flipped over to the next page, dutifully making his notes on what he saw. He painstakingly hand copied the graphs that showcased some of the more uncommon yet possible placements of certain organs, like the heart, and under each drawing, he wrote down the procedures commonly associated with them. He stopped to stare at the graph depicting Dextrocardia, a condition in which the apex of the heart was located on the right side of the body. He'd heard someone refer to people with this condition as Mirror Humans before, one of the more famous cases of this spoke of a soldier who'd died due to ricocheting bullet piercing the heart, with the man's last words famously having been "Right side... the heart.. is on the right side..." Before he'd submitted to the injury. The management for it is...

Another student sat opposite to him, quite rudely placing their feet on the table in favour of leaning back. Law tried to pay no mind to it, though, as the snow on the student's commando boots started to melt, threatening the precious book and notes, he had no choice but talk to them.

"Would you mind not keeping your feet there? The melting snow will cause damage to the books I'm trying to read." He wasn't being particularly nice about how he said it, not even looking up from his doings, but the other guy didn't seem to mind this. "Ah, right.. my apologies", the other man stated, immediately moving, "I should have a towel in my bag-". Law huffed to himself, flipping to another page, soon resuming to his silence as the other person dried the mess they caused on the mahogany table. A while passed in the silence, the doctor-to-be felt the piercing stare of the other person. Not wanting to acknowledge this pest, he reached towards his coffee, and took a sip of it, closing his eyes as he so did. He refused to give the other any reason to talk to him.

"I'm an exercise and sports science major, names Portgas D. Ace, how about you?"

Shit. This guy was going to be a total problem for him.

Ace didn't really want to get up and leave the comfort of the warm bed he'd shared just a while ago with Law. It was one of the rare places where he managed to sleep well and feel safe. As he laid there, the scent of toast, butter, and eggs broke through into his consciousness. Curious, he finally rose up, freeing himself from the comforter burrito caterpillar he's turned himself into in his quest for warmth. Not bothering to even put on clothes, Ace tiptoed into the kitchen. Seeing Law so concentrated on making breakfast for them warmed his heart and made it flutter. He walked closer and enveloped the man into a hug. "I thought that you'd sleep longer," the soft voice of his beloved carried into his ears like the sweetest of melodies. He pressed himself closer against the tattooed man. Kissing the sensitive neck of the other raven, he gave his answer.

"As if I could sleep when the love of my life is so far from me.", "You dork."

[thessalian]

Thess vs Restarts

So. I have a quandary. Actually, I have multiple quandaries, and all of them stem from being understaffed at work and lacking spoons for most things.

The last time I played Horizon: Forbidden West was about two months ago. I'm in endgame. I think I could probably get back into the vibe of it without starting at the beginning, but I'm not sure. But I don't really have the spoons for that shit anyway so I'll let that sit on the back burner. If I can still get into the endgame vibe now, I'll still be able to get into the endgame vibe in a month or whatever.

The last time I played Baldur's Gate 3, not counting a little bit yesterday, was a little over three months ago. The little bit I played yesterday has made me well aware that no, I cannot just get back into the vibe of it at the point of "Let's go rescue tieflings from squid-jail". Which means a restart. On the one hand, I have nearly 264 hours in that fucking game and have never finished a full playthrough. On the other hand, I have had it since early access, like, years ago, and I did get very nearly to the end at least once, so maybe I shouldn't be as infuriated with that as I am.

In both cases, it just feels aggravating to start all over again. On the other hand, a restart really wouldn't be the end of the world. Forbidden West is like ... hey, at least I'll be starting from a point of knowing what the fuck I'm doing this time. As for Baldur's Gate 3? Sure, I know where to look for a lot of things, but everything being a matter of dice rolls means I haven't had the exact same playthrough once in the several I've had to do and redo and redo again. Because there have been a lot of those.

(One of them was because of a mod incompatibility so I really hope that when they get Patch 7 working, their mod manager doesn't mess with the mods that are already out there...)

Anyway, I figure what's going to happen is that I'm going to restart Baldur's Gate 3, because I cannot deal with frenetic combat right now and turn-based is about the limit of my abilities just now, and I have a migraine so anything too convoluted probably isn't a great idea, and I can start an Alisaie liveblog with her as an actual Aasimar quite some time after the half-elf version was so that even if I do repeat some jokes, they'll probably hit like new anyway. And I will get back to Forbidden West eventually. That's the good thing about endgame here. I've dealt with literally everything at this point and I am not about to forget how much I want to turn those Zenith jackass's faces into pincushions with my arrows, so the vibe won't be hard to find. But not entirely remembering the path it took to get from "Oh fuck I'm on a Nautiloid" to "And here we go into the tower to rescue some tieflings" actually matters to BG3. Which is part of its charm, but it's exactly why I haven't been able to complete an entire playthrough yet - I keep getting low on spoons.

Hey, at least I get to mess around with the character creator. C'mon, that cannot only be my entire jam about games like this... Right?

As an aside, things really are a mess at work right now. The others seem to be dawdling through shit to avoid not so much the longer ones (although anything above three minutes is still avoided like the corpse of a shithouse rat by everyone except I think Goblin, ironically), but the Annoyances. So I get all the Annoyances now. I am so tired of the Annoyances. It's no wonder that I never have spoons anymore.

I would dearly love to get takeaway, but I can't. I mean, part of that's because gluten-free takeaway tends towards the expensive, especially these days ... but mostly it's because I did defrost leftover risotto so it needs to be eaten. At least hot meal won't require many spoons.

[airi-of-hearts]

5♥ starter for @cheshire-shuntaro ♥5

A presence, a gray-and-white shadow with keen, pretty eyes and bleach-blond hair. Airi knew of him before she actually met him. An executive, a Diamonds specialist. Reserved and resourceful, not unlike herself. Chishiya. 

She’d seen him around The Beach, stretching the dress code with the white hoodie he wore, but no one seemed to mind, no one questioned him. He had unnerved her at first, always observing, speaking in measured words, never saying more than he meant to reveal. Airi imagined she could hear his mind working at full speed. She had the distinct impression that Chishiya was up to something, planning, scheming, but what?

That night, as she walked to the car to meet the group she’d been assigned to, she was surprised to see him there. She felt relieved at first, and then alarmed. While she considered his presence as an advantage should they find themselves in a Diamonds game, Airi had the feeling that if the night’s game was one of those where only one person could survive, Chishiya would not hesitate to kill her. She’d have to be ready for anything.

They got to the arena in no time: A fancy hotel. The arrows led them to a spacious room, not any room, a ballroom. 

The other three people in the car immediately crossed the laser grid, the point of no return. Airi waited until Chishiya went in. He did so unhurriedly, earphones in, paying no attention to her or anyone else.

There was a table right inside the white double doors, ten people were already gathered there, including their companions. There were strange looking visors on the table, clearly meant for them to wear. A screen lit up when Airi and Chishiya joined the group. A second later, the robotic voice announced that registration was closed.

The screen showed the silhouette of two people dancing. Airi’s heart skipped a beat, surely they wouldn’t have to? The synthetic voice answered her question.

Game: Murder on the Dance Floor

Difficulty: Five of Hearts

Clear Condition: Finish the song with a partner

Rules: Every player must pick a visor. The visor will obscure the player’s vision. During the song, players must pair up and dance to the music. At some point while the music plays, there will be a murder. Players will have one minute to nominate a killer. If the killer is identified, the game will be cleared. If the players can’t identify the killer, the music will restart and they have to pair again and dance. Players may ask their partners one question while they’re dancing. Nominated players as well as anyone who doesn’t have a partner will be eliminated. Protect your partner from attacks, unless you believe them to be the killer in which case you can choose to nominate them but be aware that you will need to find a new partner.

Airi looked around, weary of everyone. Five was a deceptively low number, but she wasn’t fooled, this was not going to be simple.

'Let the dance begin,' she muttered to herself.

[golmac]

Inform 7 Basics: when the story ends, #2

Hi all! I am travelling tomorrow, so here's Saturday's update. We talked about craft and failure last week. On Tuesday, we looked at some related code. Today, we'll continue looking at the code side of things.

Today's info involves a table, which Tumblr really can't handle. The borogove link at the bottom of this post will take you to some sample code that compiles. If you haven't used borogove before, it's pretty neat!

When play ends, a list of options are presented. In vanilla inform, those options are undo, restore, restart, and quit. These options can be configured, as they are stored in a table called, appropriately, the "table of final question options."

In inform, columns are separated by tabs. Rows are each on a new line. They don't look very good! But they work. It's an adjustment for sure. It's easier when rows fit on one line, so widen the source pane in your IDE if necessary. I'll post the table in the borogove doc below. You can find it in the standard rules [file->open installed extension->Graham Nelson->standard rules].

We can edit the table. The main reason we'd have for doing that is disabling one of the options. If we wanted to prevent undo, we could clear it from the table.

The best time to do something like that is either when play ends or begins.

when play begins: choose row with a final question wording of "UNDO the last command" in the table of final question options; blank out the final question wording entry.

syntax for tables is very specific! You can find more info in the documentation.

The options that Inform 7 prints at the game over screen are pulled from the "final question wording" column. Blank out the relevant entry, and it will no longer appear.

If you want to add something, that's yet another table change. In that case, we'll be adding a row. That's easy; we don't need an action processing rule. Inform 7 will treat our new row as part of the table, no questions asked. You can look at the Borogove snippet to play with it, but here's a picture.

Do you see the "only if victorious" column? If the value is "true," Inform will only show the option if "end the story finally" is invoked. What's this "final gloat rule?" We can trigger something--text mostly--by making and naming a rule here. That ought to be easy for us now:

this is the final gloat rule: say "Bweh heh heh heh.".

We can do conditional text, read tables, and so forth, but the game is over--changing the world state is almost certainly out of the question. I had several victorious=true rules in Repeat the Ending, mostly related to score, images, and showing the various endings. The player could view the *GUIDE* as well.

What else? You can mess with some of the response text. For instance,

the print the final question rule response (A) is "Nice! Would you like to ".

As a reminder, you can do RESPONSES ALL while playing a test build. Copy and paste the output into a text file! You can hunt down any other text you'd like to change.

As a final note: want to give players "lives," or otherwise make death conditional?

if [some condition you pick]: resume the story.

As a reminder, you can AMA! The tag for this series is #i7 for beginners.

[stevishabitat]

Also, recording songs off the radio to make mix tapes was definitely a thing. Some radio stations would crossfade between songs or have DJs talk over the beginning of the song to try to prevent that, but it just added to the charm 🤣

See also: recording shows and movies from live TV. If you weren't on a premium cable channel, you had commercials to deal with. Most VCRs could be timed to record. If you were going to be busy, you could set the timer so you wouldn't miss your show. But you were getting All the commercials with it. If you were babysitting it, you could try to pause the recording during commercials, but you ran the risk of restarting late and missing something.

Cassette tapes and VHS tapes had little tabs that you could break off to prevent accidentally recording over. It blocked the record head from activating even if you hit the record button. So if you had your VCR timed to record, but left the wrong tape in, you better hope the tab was broken off or you're losing something you didn't mean to record over 😭😭😭.

A broken off tab could be hacked by putting a sturdy piece of tape over it. So if you had no blank tapes available, but a Very Important Episode or Sports Game was airing, you could potentially take an old store bought Barney and Friends tape, stick some masking tape over the tab and record over it 🤣🤣🤣.

Also, regarding winding with a pencil... cheap or old tape players sometime "ate" tapes. Usually this was when the uptake spool stopped spinning or some other mechanical part jammed. And you'd pull out your tape to find it unwound and possibly all crinkly. You sometimes had to very carefully extract the thin tape ribbon from the play head. Then you would use the pencil method to wind it back up. It may play fine after a few rewinds and fast forwards to fix the crinkles. Or it may have spots where it's damaged and the sound is distorted.

VCRs could do this as well, but it was less common. The more common issues with VCRs were

1. Failure to eject (often solved by sticking your finger or a pen inside and gently pressing down on the tape to trigger the eject spring.

2. Loss of rewind function, in which case you had to get yourself a VHS rewinder which was a separate device just for rewinding VHS tapes. It was a hell of a lot cheaper than replacing the VCR itself and sometimes people just bought them for the convenience of being able to immediately start another tape without waiting for the last on to rewind.

VHS tapes really can't be rewound manually like cassettes can. You can maybe do a few inches, but their internal set up is more complicated than a cassette, which is basically a reel-to-reel inside a plastic box.

Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

[shieldmaidencreative]

The AI Jobs Apocalypse is here. But we aren't talking about it.

The AI job disruption is fully here, and I am perturbed by how I don’t see it being talked about. Maybe it’s partially because we are a very binary society, and we aren’t seeing entire career fields being let go. However, we are definitely seeing job fields getting decimated.

What I mean by this is, for development teams where they might have had ten developers before, now they may have 3. And the rest is being covered by reliance on AI. In ONE YEAR, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, predicts that all programming jobs will be replaced by AI. One year from now! That’s so many high level jobs that will be wiped out.

And that’s just in an industry that I am personally involved in. The same thing is happening across the creative sphere, and in nearly every job that requires a degree that doesn’t require a person to physically be there. The entire white collar labor force will be affected in one way or another, with the majority being “affected” by it in the form of layoffs. Other fields that are highly likely to be disrupted, and are already being affected, are accounting, mathematics, drafting, copywriting, computer graphics (video games and movie productions are already trying to edge AI graphics in to see if you notice), any sort of data processing or paralegal work, medical imaging. And that’s just the beginning.

I know, every technology that comes along that displaces people, has some new field that opens up. But what’s concerning here, is the scale of disruption. There just won’t enough new jobs made to offset the jobs lost. This is going to be a jobs bloodbath, and the effects can already be seen. It’s taking much longer for developers/programmers/technical workers to find a job than it did in years previously. That’s not a coincidence. And it’s also the jobs that required people to go into debt to get degrees in many cases, and now the fields are disappearing.

The darker side of me wonders if part of this “bring manufacturing back to the US” agenda isn’t to try to push people into those manufacturing roles, because there just aren’t going to be educated and skilled jobs at a meaningful level, before we know it. They are skirting saying it, because some the people behind this push, are also the AI developers. So much money is being poured into those efforts, and the people in charge of our government have a vested interest in making AI dominant. For one thing, they want to beat the rest of the world at it (particularly China), which I understand. But the darker part is many of them are billionaires, and will be able to be continually enriched if AI is the backbone of the workforce for our intellectual and technical jobs. The requirements for AI to work on an environmental and technical scale are enormous. I was concerned years ago by how much energy bitcoin mining was eating up, and now this is that issue on steroids. With the addition of provisions into the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump and the republicans are trying to pass, that would keep states from regulating AI AT ALL for the next ten years, this is not looking good.

Paired with the push for manufacturing jobs (though I haven’t actually seen much movement towards anyone building new factories here; in fact many investors are now moving plans outside of the US that they were planning on having here, due to our financial instability since March), is the massive cutting of worker protections, Medicaid, restarting wage garnishment and reducing payback plans that had been approved for student loans, and environmental protections.

All of those topics, if you look at them from the perspective of unleashing the AI gods and pushing Americans into menial work, fit together under a very depressing lens. Particularly if you remind yourself of how many of these government changes were brought about by the chainsaw of Elon Musk, the billionaire who has an AI company.

I’ll elaborate. If you reduce EPA regulation, and open up National Parks to development, all of a sudden the environmental problems (huge requirements for electricity and clean water for cooling, for example) for the massive drain that AI is on infrastructure goes away. Now, they also have plenty of new land to purchase and exploit to make data campuses.

If you take away Medicaid, increase the tax burden on all of those under the top earners, remove worker protections in every form, and allow the harshest penalties against student loan debt again (I’ve always thought that this was a form of indentured servitude. You can declare bankruptcy for gambling debts, but not school debt? Why?), who is forced into the positions that are freed up by exporting all the immigrants?

The not rich Americans.

Whose job security and job availability is decreasing at an incredible rate?

The not rich Americans.

The ultra rich are living in a world where they barely even have to see regular people anymore, except for possibly as blurred faces in the crowd when they give speeches. The rate at which the richest accumulated their money during the pandemic exploded, and it is exploding again with the market manipulation that has happened since March.

Now that they don’t need us humans to fulfill jobs, I’ve noticed that many places are treating their workers much worse. Forced back to office policies, worse benefits, increased surveillance of workers whether or not the job is getting done….this is all a symptom of a change in American economy. The push for “manufacturing jobs” is largely a farce, and if it’s not, will take years to happen. Meanwhile, if we aren’t needed for votes anymore, and we aren’t needed for production…where is the power of the average American citizen? This is why we have to claw for it while we can.

One of the issues that I understood during the election to be an issue, that the Democratic Party didn’t, was that there are two “economies”, and the Democrats only acknowledged one. There’s the wealthy economy, which is stocks and bonds and the Fed and inflation, and it’s the one that gets headlines. All of that does affect things downstream, but when an average American talks about “the economy”, they mean the prices of houses, gas, food, and needs. Most Americans don’t invest in the markets at all.

And here’s where this issue is coming back again. The Republicans understood those differences, and still do…but don’t care. As this regime has shown, they don’t care if the “regular person economy” if suffering right now. Tariffs are jacking up prices (e.g.: the standoffs with Walmart, the announcement Subaru just made about raising their prices, and on and on), and they don’t care. Because they already got the votes they need. And what will benefit the “rich person economy”? It’s not bringing down the cost of groceries; it’s dominating in software and AI. And the rest of us, unfortunately, are chattel in that game.

Big Tech is not called Big Human. They don’t care about us. Look at the “dead internet” theory. Have you heard about this? It’s that as algorithms, AI, and bots have proliferated online, most of our experience as users means we aren’t even actually interacting with humans. Meta even has AI “agents” that are fake accounts meant to drum up interactions to keep us online….because humans aren’t cutting it. They want your attention, but not you.

As the generative AI models have continued to grow, a concerning trend has come out. They are “hallucinating” at a higher rate. That means, they are making up data and scenarios that they aren’t supposed to, almost a “ghost in the machine” effect. It’s confusing the developers, because they expected that hallucinations would decrease, but the opposite is happening. Which, to me, just highlights how we are children playing with fire. There’s another concerning side effect, where people are using AI as a therapist and friend. I see how that happens; it’s meant to make you like it, so it puts things in a way meant to make you feel good. Unfortunately, that also means that it will just make stuff up for its user. That can be handled with new parameters, but that brings us to another thing: AI is supremely editable. It’s very easy to manipulate or change data as someone who owns an AI tool, which means introducing falsehoods and bias is even easier than it was before. And when that information comes from a “trusted” source, that’s not allowed to be regulated? Well that’s not a good thing, if you are someone who cares about humanity or freedom.

Meanwhile, there’s the issue of AI getting smarter than us and breaking out of its confines. Will a lack of oversight help that? I don’t think so, do you?

For years I’ve been saying that we need to come up with a universal basic income plan for the AI jobs disruption (I first wrote about it in 2016), and we have only moved backwards. Just last month, Bill Gates started calling for the same thing. But without industries even acknowledging that this is an issue, it’s frightening to see how quickly the average American will be impacted by this, without having any sort of societal safety net at all.

This has been a lot of doom and gloom, but there are upsides to AI. I think that if we harness it in the right way, it could change humanity for the better. It could make suggestions for change and optimization, without the emotional baggage of a human’s biases and desires. I love the idea of that applied to the climate crisis, trade deficits, and medical science, for example. But an unregulated AI industry won’t result in that, as clearly the AI gods are demonstrating. They want to be able to follow their ideas, with no interference or input from the world they are changing (and, in case of the environment, ruining). Does that seem fair to you? It doesn’t for me. Transparency and safeguards are needed in this industry, and they are needed now. We need a blanket rule on ethics, bias, transparency, and on keeping experimental AI away from the unknowing public without safety measures and guardrails. (Did you read about the unethical experiment run by Standford on Reddit? It used AI agents to influence the opinions of people who thought they were talking to other humans, and it worked. I’ll post a link to that scary stuff below).

Contact your lawmakers about your concerns, these measures are being debated now. And hopefully we can get people involved in government who understand technology more than only being enriched by it. And remember, if you’re reading this, it’s not you vs me, no matter your politics. It’s the super rich against the American citizen.

Google CEO quote about AI replacing programmers in one year:

https://san.com/cc/former-google-ceo-predicts-ai-will-replace-most-programmers-in-a-year/

An estimate of how much power generative AI takes: https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption

Ban on regulating AI: https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-congress-39d1c8a0758ffe0242283bb82f66d51a

Unethical Reddit Standord and University of Pennsylvania experiment: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/04/reddit-ai-experiment-no-consent

4000 jobs lost to AI in May alone: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-job-losses-artificial-intelligence-challenger-report/

Dead Internet theory: https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/what-is-the-dead-internet-theory/

[ohnoesitsnidia]

Finally moved onto "Disc 2" and started the Creator Arc! SO3 thoughts:

-First things first: the Crosell fight. I...definitely was both overleveled and OP LOL. Didn't help that I immediately used refined Might Tablets (i.e. ATK +40% for the whole battle) on both Cliff and Albel. I got both battle trophies with no problem at all. Even the harder second half wasn't too bad bc I was mostly keeping Fayt in the back supporting the other two.

Before this fight, I was actually dreading it bc I remember it being difficult as a teenager. However, since I knew about Holy Sword, Damask Gauntlets, Demon Slayer+Brownie Stone (refined), refined Might Tablets, and Reducer this time, the fight was barely a challenge.

-Now onto something CRAZY: you can apparently get two different scenes in the garden depending if you speak to the important NPCs in the audience chamber before the Crosell vs Vendeeni sequence. I would not have known about this if I didn't decide to rewatch the cutscene (I had missed when that strong beam of light came in).

If you spoke to ONLY your party members, you get the dialogue about Albel. Fayt asks where is Albel and Woltar says that he returned home bc the danger was over. Maria says something like "He left without even saying good-bye. Oh he'll never change", to which Woltar responds with "Oh, don't say that". Fayt says that HE wanted to say good-bye and the King lets him know that they'll tell Albel about it. This scene happens regardless if you did the Elena+King PA. Sadly, Nel does not get to say anything.

However, if you spoke to your party members AND the important NPCs in the audience chamber, Nel gets to have a proper goodbye. Fayt does not comment on Albel's whereabouts at all.

Now, I fully admit I'm an Albel simp and that I chose to save the game after getting the Albel dialogue just in case it helps with Affection, BUT. I REEAALLY think Nel's goodbye should've been included regardless if you didn't speak to the important NPCs. It just feels SO...Wrong to exclude it. Nel was the one who saved the boys in the beginning and spent SO. MUCH. TIME. with them. It feels like a dick move from the developers to not let her have a proper good-bye. So, TO ME....both dialogue scenes are canon lol

-I cheated by restarting the game after reading the elemental resistances of the Biwig fight BUT!! It was still an easy fight for me. I got the battle trophy for not getting hit without trying. I mostly kept Fayt behind to heal Cliff and Maria, only doing my typical Long Strong+anti-air Short Strong+anti-air Short Normal combo with Lightning Blade (which is WIND elemental for some stupid fucking reason)

-The death of Fayt's father is so badly executed but in like. The Funniest way. First of all, he gets shot and some sad piano music starts playing for like...a few seconds. Shortly after, Maria calls Biwig "Slime" and the song Bitter Dance starts fucking playing. Bitter Dance is the kind of nonsensical song you'd hear in a Persona game (pre-P5 but more specifically, think Persona 1 music). After the battle, the sad piano music resumes and all Fayt's father says is to go to Moonbase so they can find their answers. No "I love you, son". No loving last words.

On the Diplo (Maria's spaceship), Fayt is by his father's side and just questioning what he said. Maria comes into the room and says something that was meant to refer to the hero of the Biwig Incident. However, she doesn't say a name so I thought she initially was referring to Fayt's dad being okay but NOPE. He's...actually dead lol. To make things worse, Maria's just like "Okay. So, are we going to Moonbase now?". Sophia is actually right about having sympathy for Fayt at the moment but she lost me when she was like "It's not like you to be depressed" lol. Despite having lost his father, someone he respected and loved, Fayt does not seem TOO affected by his death. I can't recall Fayt's personality or demeanor changing much, or even showing that he misses his dad.

-I found Albel's entrance into the room funny bc it looked like he still recovering from being KO'd lol.

-Either I didn't catch it at first or I forgot about it, but Albel's "It's a different matter if you think i'll hold you back" was a response to Fayt. What Maria and Cliff said to him before this was about the possibility of never returning home. This feeds into my understanding that Albel feels the most comfortable with Fayt but also sees himself as the "weaker" one.

-Albel had mentioned that with the war over and Vox dead, he had to seek excitement somewhere else. Vox also gets mentioned later in his Crimson Scourge PA. For someone who is an important person from Airyglyph, i REALLY wish he was given more screen time and writing. He only had three scenes: his intro with the other Glyphian men, the scene before the battle, and his death. I wish Vox and Albel were given some on-screen dynamic to 1) Show how Vox interacted with the men from other brigades and 2) Depict Albel as an antagonist to actually root for.

-In the Aquaelie, there are two PAs that boost Albel's affection quite a bit.

The first one is the one with Sophia. Choosing "[Sophia's mother] must've not known about it" segues into Fayt telling Sophia to trust in her father and declares that he trusts in his. Knowing how much Albel must've loved his father, I can understand why this PA boosts his Affection by +4.

The second one is talking to this random guy at the end of the mens' living hall. The man asks Fayt if he slept well and saying Yes has him say something like, "Haha great! You must be a lot more important than I thought you were". Weeiiird but okay lmao. Anyway, this boosts Albel's Affection by fucking +5. As to why, my only guess is that Albel likes Fayt's confidence in the current situation and just strongly agrees with the random man. It's like he's saying "Fuck yeah, Fayt's IMPORTANT!!" (Aww he adores him ;p)

Side Note: Saying Yes gives +3 for Cliff and Roger, +2 for Nel and Peppita, and +1 for Mirage. Only Albel gets +5 (Yes, I am ignoring Adray lmao). To My understanding, their response is based off the current situation and if they agree with the random man. Cliff and Roger like the comment, Nel and Peppita can appreciate it, Mirage is more happy that Fayt slept well, and Albel? Clueless but still cocky Albel? He really believes that Fayt is someone important and great ;_;

[simsticher]

Population Reboot Challenge

So I have this idea for a new challenge, but maybe it already exists, so let me know if you've heard of it. It's a combination of the ultimate decades challenge and a type of Armageddon challenge. Frankly, I wanted to do the Ultimate Decades Challenge without spending a bunch of time looking for cc that may or may not work. Here we go:

Sometime in the near future, there is a catastrophic event. It might be a nuclear attack or a virus (think Stephen King's The Stand). You decide what is least triggering to you. In any case, many sims were able to avoid the incident and move to underground bunkers, which had been prepared for such an event.

These spaces were set up for self-sustained living, which was beneficial, as it was more than 1000 years before it was safe to surface again. We know this because the sims of yesteryear decided the calendars should be restarted as this event was the start of a new era. So we know that 1,250 years after the event, now known as year 1250, the first scientists were able to emerge from underground and begin to test the atmosphere in preparation for life to return to the surface.

Note: there is no significance to this change in the calendar, except that I wanted to use Morbid Gamer's score sheet from the Ultimate Decades Challenge and I didn't feel like changing all the years, as it starts at 1300.

After 50 years of trials and experiments, the scientists were able to declare the atmosphere safe and sims are now able to return to life above ground. I imagine they spent some of that time building fences to keep out dangerous animals who no longer avoided sim contact, as well as demolishing partially destroyed buildings and piling up the building materials for new use.

Set up:

The sims were sent to the surface in pairs, as it was deemed too dangerous to live alone. There should be no buildings in any of the worlds, so you can clear your own maps or download some that others have done. Your couple can be any sims you like, no rules there, but at least one of them must be able to get pregnant. (No way to have a science baby on the surface just yet) They can be dressed any way you like. Advancements would have been limited in the small communities created down in the bunkers, and supplies somewhat hard to come by. Life would look pretty much as it does now. (See? No cc.)

Choose your lot wisely, as it will have to support your sims, at least in the beginning. They will have to garden and fish to survive. You may use Off The Grid if you wish. Should you do so, you will have to reach a population of 50 sims in "My Households" before you can remove it. Simple Living may also be used, with a threshold of at least 25 sims before it can be removed. You should increase the number of sims you are allowed in "manage households" to a count of 200.

Speaking of population, it will just be your sim couple to begin with, but the game will automatically spawn more sims, regardless of how many times you go in and delete them all. Personally, I keep the ones my sims have made friends with, etc. and delete the others every few days. I see this as other settlers coming and going from the area if they are looking for loved ones or have decided to live elsewhere. NPC's who are staying should be given a house to live in. You are welcome to build your own or download one from the gallery. I use one I created named "Room to Grow" and just change the color depending on the world I drop it in. Remember to spread out your sims. After all those years in bunkers, they would want their space and not live right on top of one another.

You may also download sims from the gallery or create your own, but no more than once per sim week.

As I said, I use Morbid Gamer's score sheet, which includes rolling a die each time a sim has a birthday and when a woman gives birth, to see if they survive. This includes the newborn baby. You don't have to play that way if you don't want to, but it adds an extra challenge, and I would think sims on the surface would have a shorter life expectancy than normal.

This sheet also sets a year at 4 sim days. This is due to the fact that a pregnancy is 3 sim days, so one day must equal 3 months.

Whether you use the score sheet or not, aging should be set on normal. If you have seasons, I would recommend setting your seasons to at least 14 days. That way you have enough time to grow your food and you won't be in winter every time you turn around.

Game Play:

Once you have food and shelter worked out, it is time to get down to re-populating the world. Have as many children as you can handle. Mods to increase the size of your household are allowed. School has been arranged, so children and teens should go to school, but are expected to help out at home when not attending. There are no jobs just yet, and no afterschool activities. Universities have not been re-built yet, so no going off to college. Internet connection is spotty, so you can't even take a job and work from home.

You can make money from gardening and fishing, as everyone has a need for food. Selling from your inventory equates to selling wholesale to establishments down in the bunkers, where many sims have chosen to remain.

Other than produce and fish, ALL other products must be sold from a selling table or wall. This includes collectibles, paintings, sculptures, cross stitch, etc. Those using the gemology table must only create with crystals and metals they find, none are available to buy. The Home Chef Hustle table is allowed as well, but remember, you must have the ingredients if playing with Simple Living.

I personally don't play with occult sims, but it might be interesting if vampires or werewolves begin showing up. Perhaps they are the descendants of the sims who didn't make it into the bunkers, lived in caves, and this is the result of their exposure. Hmmm.

As the name implies, it is all about population. Here are the thresholds I have worked out so far:

25 sims- remove Simple Living

50 sims- remove Off the Grid, after school activities allowed

75 sims- jobs available for young adults and up, except for tech jobs (guru, simfluencer, streamer, etc.) Sims must go to work when given the option to work from home in freelance jobs and the like.

100 sims- universities re-open

125 sims- tech jobs now available, internet has been restored. Sims may now work from home if the option is available to them.

150 sims- teens may now get part-time jobs

That's what I have so far. Oh, except one thing.

ONLY WOMEN ARE ALLOWED TO INHERIT.

Yup. Daughters are the heirs, not the sons. After some deliberation back in year 5, it was decided that a male dominated society had screwed everything up, and it was time to give the women a chance. Therefore, the oldest daughter inherits, even if she has 5 older brothers. Families should keep having children until they have at least one daughter, or they don't have an heir. If the heir dies, the next daughter becomes the heir. If there are no daughters left, the oldest son's WIFE becomes the heir.

So, get comfortable in the back seat, boys. It's the women's turn.

Morbid Gamer's video explaining how to use the score sheet, including links:

Here is a blank save I found online, but I HAVEN'T tried it, so I can't vouch for it. The one I used is older and only included a few worlds. This one appears to be updated through For Rent.

Let me know what I have forgotten, if you try this, or if there are questions!

[violasgamingpalace]

Drums of War thoughts

What if a fire emblem game... was for lesbians?

The fire emblem hack, Drums of War, is pretty damn incredible. It was the first fe hack I've played in a long time, and what an reintroduction. If every SRPG in the world was hitting these notes, we'd have a much better genre.

But of course, let's begin, at the start, with the lesbian thing

So many of the women are gay, just... so so many. Including women that I do not expect to be gay, such as miss Ponytail arm muscle up there! The central relationship in the game is the romance between the protagonist and a dancer, but the game still throws in gay things everywhere else too, just in case that wasn't enough.

But the gay aspect is honestly, while nice, secondary to why the narrative works. Drums of War is a dark fantasy, where characters have to deal with political problems and they aren't handwaved away much. The overall narrative reflects an adult understanding of the world, and that's quite fun in a genre that typically focuses on adolescent power fantasies. Which isn't to say the game is joyless or dour- it just is for adults. How nice!

The protagonist is one of the strongest elements of the game, and one of the biggest gaps between it and Intelligent System's Fire emblem games. Roxelana is a soldier, and her first commitment is to her comrades under her command. That's a good idea for a game series that has players try to restart to save their units! Her motivations are clear, and result in her making strong character choices.

Also, I was able to somehow get her to end up breaking up with the main couple she had been in the whole time to end up with some other girl entirely. Hilarious.

Mechanically, the game's maps are pretty fun- I'm debating giving it another play-through, because I did have a great time. Maps are able to push you forward instead of turtling, and require you to figure out a good approach to break the enemy defenses. All characters feel decently usable, and with their own niche. The maps all feel like they can be approached differently- my strategy the first time will be different from how I'll play next time- which is one of the basic components for what makes a good strategy game.

It is hard- I'd guess a bit easier than maddening engage/3h, though I'm much better at switch FE than gba FE so your mileage will vary. In addition, a couple maps are genuinely too difficult, and felt unfun for it. But, it's a FE game where I let units die, and kept on trucking- another dimension of what makes a good Fire Emblem game! In addition- the game gives you a free and easy time reverse to go back and change up your moves to prevent deaths. That was a lifesaver.

The game does have other faults, besides the occasional poor map- way too many required characters, all of whom do not die when killed. The central gimmick is most bosses will join you, but you could choose to turn them into gold instead. The game gives you 25 units by default however, and gives those units constant lines in cut-scenes. I ended up having WAY too many units in my army, including a few bosses who I recruited thinking I would end up using before they just hit the bench after a single chapter.

Anyway- if you're in the mood for an advance level Fire Emblem experience, with some homosexuals, heavily recommend.