#it’s just this and hinge right now

[liones-s]

when you’ve gotten back all the grades you were expecting and there’s no more short-term validation in your immediate future

[zeb-z]

Love the beef between Gideon and Thrawn. I hope he has no idea who Gideon is

[boasamishipper]

i can tolerate a lot of things from writers and showrunners but outright condescension and disdain for their fans is not one of them

[samglyph]

Growing way too fond of Peter “Parker” Yang, a man who is dead for the entirety of the show and has no speaking lines or flashback scenes to actually give him a personality. But who cares. He’s a nosy bitch who cares too much about strangers and if I think about him for too long I want to cry.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Lord of the Empty Isles

sci-fi/fantasy

set on a supposedly utopian planet recovering from a climate crisis, where bonds between people are able to be seen and manipulated (by some people)

follows a young man whose brother was cursed and killed by an infamous outlaw 5 years ago, and he’s finally able to curse him back - but it rebounds, as he’s somehow fatebound to the outlaw

to find a cure and save them both they have to team up, and he quickly finds out that the resources the outlaw is stealing go to the thousands of people neglected on prison planets, and he has to go against what he thought was right to help them

no romance, aroace MC, focus on platonic relationships

arc from netgalley, out june 6

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Ive seenyou mention wuxia a few times now and i wonder what that is. Would you mind explaining it to me?

not the most qualified person to explain this as i'm not, in fact, from china; but i've read a couple of wuxia so here goes:

wuxia is a genre of fiction from china specifically, about martial artists in ancient china. i don't think a specific time period is like required? obviously some dynasties are more popular but idk how it goes in that front. it just has to be Not Today and probably Too Long Ago. like pre industral revolution i think. again idk if that's a requirement, but most i've seen are from around the same relative murky pre-electricity era.

xianxia is a subgenre of wuxia that's specifically more fantasy-like, and it's not just martial arts, but also spiritual powers and cultivation (which i have no fucking clue how to explain without two hours and three tangents other than chinese magic system. if you've ever heard of chi/qi as an energy, it appears there). so like- genshin is by all accounts a xianxia, it just doesn't use the more common specific xianxia terms like cultivation. some of those are very weird to translate and probably not common for the average non-wuxia reader, so it makes sense why they're going for alternatives.

chongyun and xingqiu and xianyun are very much straight out of a xianxia. xianyun's entire story quest was the closest genshin has gotten to a straight xianxia plot so far. i highly reccomend ashikai's video on unnecessary visions if you want more info on why genshin is a xianxia hahah

cyanide narwhal has some talk of some stuff from xianxia, but that's mostly because well- fucking liyue, that's how it works there. the whole light energy striking down someone who's getting powerful and giving them godhood if they survive the strike is, while not exactly like that, something that happens in some xianxia as well. like the way adepti work in general is just very xianxia. ashikai does a much better job explaining it than i do tbh but yeah

TL;DR: wuxia is chinese martial arts fiction in ancient china, and xianxia is a wuxia subgenre with more magic elements. also genshin is a xianxia

[cowboy-robooty]

no guys you dont get it itager isnt sweet and tender in the domestic gay lovey dovey way theyre sweet and tender in the BRO way

[sevenrs]

WHEEK

weehehHHHHHRRRRRRREEEERK E

[theclearblue]

Help the thoughts of Kenjaku's twisted sense of motherhood displayed towards Yuuji is bouncing around in my brain like a dvd logo

[redbeardace]

I was having fun with that, until a minor thing went slightly wrong and the whole thing cascaded to ruin my night.

[lesbianpegbar]

NO CHENG XIAOSHI GET ON THE BOAT YOU HAVE TO GET ON THE BOAT OR YOULL MESS WITH THE TIMELINE CHENG XIAOSHI NOOO

[fridayyy-13th]

well i'm having an evening, certainly

[shopcat]

i've decided if some sort of theoretical atla animated film about the earth avatar has to be set in the modern verse it should either be like INCREDIBLY different from ours to stop things from being ... bad. and that the spirit world influences have really ramped up so that it still feels like magical realism or w/e. but alternatively it would just be really good if it wasn't set in like the 2020s but very obviously the 70s-90s that would be awesome for me personally

[onboardsorasora]

The apathy is so real. It’s emotionally draining to be on social media, it’s draining to go to work, i’m too tired to care about hobbies all that much. Hoping the next race weekend picks me back up because it’s been a loooooong week.

Its so draining, i'm exhausted to the point where I just havent even felt like writing. and thats what I've been using to like give me serotonin boosts.

I currently don't care about anything- and I second this hope that this race weekend gives us the distractions we're craving because real life is not it right now

also the succulent in my office window thats been dropping leaves had started to like tilt out of its pot... soooo thats 1000% a metaphor for my mental health lmao

[vairiance]

I really think Pokemon should go back to 2D. Not even necessarily like HD 2D or whatever like Octopath Traveler (although that'd be cool I guess), but just what they had going in Gen 4/5, but polished up to modern tech standards.

So much charm was lost in the shift to 3D (not without benefit, of course, but still), and it brought a whole host of space issues, all in the name of making Pokemon look less appealing and having awkward movements. Like, compare these images of Hippowdon:

Leftmost is Gen 5, middle is modern, and rightmost is the (leaked) sprite from S/V.

Gen 5's is awesome! Grainy, obviously, by design, but otherwise it's super cool. You see a fierce looking hippo, posed threateningly, spewing sand to demonstrate its signature mechanic. Perfect.

Modern Hippowdon makes me sad. It's still kind of grainy (beyond what the resolution change of this image did to it), and it just looks like me on a Monday morning. You'd have no idea that this thing shoots sand, and you'd only get to see it look cool for a fraction of a second when it attacks, sometimes.

Then there's S/V Hippowdon. It's just a menu sprite icon, but look how clean it looks compared to modern Hippowdon! Imagine the Gen 5 Hippowdon pose, with the SV Hippowdon style. That'd be ideal for me I think.

3D has its benefits for sure, obviously, but I think 3D should be saved for spinoffs where a smaller scale can be enforced, and thus more care can be put into what is in the game. Comparing the 3D animations of Pokemon Colosseum/XD and what we have now proves this; in the Orre games, the Pokemon really feel alive, because they move in a way natural to what you'd expect, whereas in the modern era, everyone stands there idly and twitches once in a while to attack or get hit.

Move animations suffer as well. Let's compare the animation of Earthquake, a move that's supposed to be a terrifying massive quake of the earth. Here's how it's depicted in Gen 4:

Pretty cool, right? The magnitude of the quake is shown by literally everything shaking violently, with some dramatic flashes and rock effects. Not bad. But this could really benefit from 3D, let's take a look at how a powerful explosion of the earth is shown with the cutting edge graphics of Gen 8:

It is what would be considered a god awful green screen effect if seen in a movie.

Sure, but how much better could a 3D Earthquake animation be? Well, let's turn to the love of my life, Pokemon XD, to see how it's done:

Look, maybe you disagree with my assessment of these images, and that's fine. But I strongly encourage you to go back and play, say, Emerald, or Platinum, or what have you, if you haven't recently. You'll be able to palpably feel the difference between it and the newer games, and the visuals are just the surface of this. They're just what tends to come to mind whenever I think about it.

Idk I just miss when Pokemon games were delivered as strong single player games with multiplayer capabilities meant to last a decent while and then be put down, and returned to in a few years when you're feeling wistful, as opposed to increasingly lightweight multiplayer focused games with increasingly less single player endgame content so that they can push subscriptions of the god awful online pass

[winedark]

my friend booked her visit to the uk soooo close to me visiting her but i don't have any solid dates about when she's visiting my city in particular which is stressful because its approaching and i have to try book off work 2 huge blocks of time. and also try to be reasonable as a coworker