#so i had to go in and add it in manually. which was actually kinda fun? theres sometimes multiple versions for the same audio

[starlitshoals]

Your stone boyfriend is a wrestler?

yes! heres his "hobbies" conversation in roadtrip :) (maybe a loud warning? its loud to me idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

and if you want it, heres all of his dialogue from roadtrip and camp in text form that i edited so i could read it easier (no dialogue itself was changed! just the formatting)

[lj-lephemstar]

Progress Checkup! (Nov. 2024) | Scratchin' Melodii Devlog

​​Hey again guys! Sorry if it's been a bit since the last devlog. With how much I've been up to, it sure feels like it!

Let's get right into it. For starters, the 3rd rival battle of Act 2 is complete! I'll likely be showing a gameplay preview of it sometime soon. This is the first song to use the new framework that I'll be using for all the other stages going forward, which also means I've had to spend the past couple weeks getting the previous songs working with this new system too... Did you know that in the demo builds, if I wanted to change something about the gameplay, I'd have to manually go back and change it for EACH individual song one by one? Well now, imagine all the songs had like a peace treaty to just share one good, clean, and organized system that I can easily tweak and add to as I please. So development is gonna be smoother than ever from here! This is how most games are SUPPOSED to work, but I was a liiittle too stupid to figure out how to do this until recently!

While I was moving Cream Cheese Icing over to this new system, I took the opportunity to make the chart a bit more beginner-friendly! For example, the first line went from this...

To just this!

As you can see, it has less notes, therefore it is less scary for new players. Believe it or not, I actually never intended for Cream Cheese Icing to be so difficult for new players in the first place! Naturally, being too good at my own game can make gauging the difficulty curve a bit tricky at times, but I think I'm figuring it out!​

You may have also noticed that the characters have new UI icons too! I felt like the old ones were too flat and boring, so I did a new take on them, aiming for more dynamic shapes and angles, not to mention how my art style's just kinda grown a bit in general since I last drew the icons. I also ended up leaving out the circles behind them. I was a little worried I was gonna run out of unique colors for all of them at some point, plus SOME of these guys can have really big hair and/or hats that pretty much just cover up the whole circle anyway. (hi rensa)

Speaking of artwork, here's a little look at some of the updated animation I've done for Stir & Mix! (Try to imagine it in not highly-compressed-gif-form. I promise it looks better in-game!)

When working on Stir & Mix related stuff, I can't help but feel a bit of a sense of dread knowing how people may react to it... Honestly, sometimes I kinda wish it never got as popular as it did in 2022. But hey, doing my own thing regardless of what's expected of me is the most Scratchin' Melodii thing I could do!

Speaking of which, Mia learned a ton of new stuff while doing the VOCALOID tuning for the last rival battle we worked on, so we might revisit Stir & Mix's vocals again at some point before release to give it even more style! (By the way, Mia and 2cada are the same person! Sorry if I refer to both names interchangeably! She's been the one doing all the VOCALOID tuning and vocal mixing for the game since 2023.)

Well, I think that's all for now! Here's another friendly reminder that there will NOT be anymore demos of the game. Any new content will be saved for the full game's release. I know I've said it before, but I probably won't stop saying it until people stop getting confused about it LOL. Thanks for reading!! I appreciate you. - LJ

[tj-crochets]

So the company I work for is in the middle of switching to new software, and I have somehow become like the #1 go-to person when *anyone* has issues with the new system for every department but sales and IT. This means I am noticeably slowing down on my work, so today I had a meeting to train two other people (my boss and his second in command) in doing a report I had been doing every day, which got a lot more labor intensive in the new system because I am very much not a tech person and I was able to brute force some filters into working to get the data I need for the report, but not able to refine it so it just shows me the numbers by day instead of a long list of data I have to manually count for 64 different fields every day I showed them how I do this report, and it's really very simple, but the second in command guy was horrified, like you count this by hand??? every day???? and then he saw another column on the report and was like "why don't we just work off of that data" and I had to tell him it's because [people with my job title] are mostly not actually entering the start and end dates, they are leaving it to the paperwork department* to add when we get the "job completed" paperwork. It was very funny because my boss was nodding like yeah, unfortunately we cannot make this department know how to do their jobs correctly, and the second in command (who is new) was so baffled at the idea that a bunch of people in a department just...wouldn't fill out the data So yeah anyway that's why I haven't been crafting as much lately, this software switch has stressed me out a lot *I have my main job title (kinda industry-specific, won't mention it here) but I am also the only person with that job in my company that is also in the paperwork department. The paperwork department is me and one other person, who I am responsible for training, supervising, and correcting their work, so like I am basically the head of the department except if I was I'd have to go to meetings (and also they'd probably have to pay me more) so I am not

[kemendin]

Kem's non-spoilery/non-plot-related impressions on Veilguard:

Now that I finished a first run, I want to just put some thoughts out there - basically likes/dislikes sort of thing. So here we go! In no particular order:

Likes:

This is very subjective of course, but to me it just FEELS like Dragon Age. It's nostalgic in the vibes and mechanics while also being fresh.

Hair physics!! Me gleefully watching my boy's ponytail flipping around like 'yessss gooood'. Every game needs this imo xD

Companions: While I'm personally not going feral over any of them, I do LIKE them all, which is unusual for me. I love the shouted encouragement in combat, and how they move around the Lighthouse and have little snippets of conversations with each other (wish we got MORE of this).

I adore the environments and maps. I love exploring new places in Thedas, they're all so gorgeously detailed, and I love the LAYERS of them. The exploration feels very Assassin's Creed, which is fun for me. Docktown is my favourite I think, but Arlathan and the Crossroads are also stunning.

I'm a sucker for the elven relic puzzles, they make me happy!

Combat: It took a while for me to adjust, particularly coming from BG3 where I had time to deliberate my decisions. But once I got into the rhythm of it, I now find Veilguard combat quite fun. (I played as a sword and shield warrior this first run, I'm excited to see what a mage feels like next time around)

PHOTOMODE!!! At least a third of my playtime has definitely been spent taking screenshots. It has almost everything I want - camera angles, depth of field, field of view. SO MANY SCREENSHOTS! (1800 at last count)

Dislikes:

Save system. Generous auto-saves are great, but I hate how you get bumped to the nearest beacon when you load in, rather than where you actually left off. Also I'm a save scummer so 100 manual saves is not enough lol.

Main menu being the only functional 'pause' button is irritating, especially when trying to get into photomode.

Armour/outfit stuff. I'm sorry but most of the designs are terrible. TERRIBLE. Also there's no dye/tint system, at least Inquisition had SOMETHING to that effect.

Pacing. I feel like the stories in the game had so many good notes, but it felt.... disjointed, like it was just hitting the main beats rather than creating a cohesive narrative flow. Across the board, it felt rushed and shallow in that respect. Also (and maybe this is just a me thing) it felt really difficult to get a handle on the passage of time throughout the game.

Ambivalent: The character creator. Lots of great sliders and options, but also I kinda hate the 'mash three heads together' thing, and I don't know why we need 50 styles of eyelashes instead of, I dunno, more hair options? (also - body hair. Needs body hair)

I may add to this as more thoughts occur, but for now that's what I've got. Overall impression - positive! I had a great time and I'll be replaying for sure.

[lynnbecksart]

Some kinda lady with a ring for a head!

You might notice that her head is kinda. Pixelly. That's because it's actually a 2D prerendered sprite, enhanced with the magic of normal, specular and emission maps to fake directional lighting and shading!

Head textures below, along with a tutorial explaining how to make normal-mapped images.

(clockwise from top-left; colour/alpha, normal, roughness, emission)

Ok so basically. Here's how you make a normal map from a render:

Step 1 - use shift+a to make an object.

In this case, it's the good old Utah Teapot, a version of which is included in the Extra Mesh Objects extension (which you can download from Blender's Preferences -> Get Extensions menu).

Step 2 - add a camera and set it to your chosen viewpoint

Protip: go to View -> Align View and select Active Camera to View.

Then, while in the camera view (numpad 0, if you have one), press N and, on the right-side panel, navigate to View, and under "View Lock", click "camera to view". This allows you to move the camera using Blender's normal camera controls. Be sure to turn it off if you want to leave the camera view, otherwise you can mess up your intended viewpoint.

Step 3 - mess around with the camera and image-size settings

Ok so what you want to do first is change your image's resolution. For this I'm setting it to 1024x1024, but you can make it whatever size you want.

If you want to, you can also fiddle with the camera settings, but I'm keeping them standard because it's easier than explaining what everything does.

If you've been following this properly up to this point, your window should look something like this, and you're ready for the next step;

Step 4 - rendering your image, but also there's some stuff to do before that before that

Ok so go to the search-bar on the right and type "transp", then click the "Transparent" box under "Film" on the Render tab. This will make the render's background transparent; remember this, it will come up again later.

Next, add a Sun (shift+a -> Light -> Sun) and point it away from the camera's position (this is easier if you switch to wireframe); the position of the Sun doesn't matter, just its rotation (since it's a sun, and just kinda. Projects directional light at everything that isn't covered by an object. Kinda like the actual sun does). I also recommend fiddling with the Sun's Angle parameter. Just make sure the light is, like, "even"(?) on the object (since having too many prominent shadows or highlights will look weird once you get the Normal Map set up).

Press F12 to render your base image. I'm using the Eevee renderer because I don't want this post to take longer to make than it probably already will. Save the image somewhere memorable, preferrably a folder dedicated to this project. Save the model there too, while you're at it.

Step 5 - the easy bit

Go to the Render tab and change the Render Engine option to "Workbench".

Change the "Lighting" option to MatCap, and select the second-to-last option on the top row.

Remember the Film -> Transparent thing from earlier? Told you it'd come back. Uncheck it, the next thing requires it.

Go to the World tab, go to Viewport Display, and change the Colour thing to the hexcode 8181FF (or, if you're a nerd who manually puts in their RGB values, 129 129 255).

If you try rendering now, you'll notice it looks kinda off; it's all washed out, and maybe even the wrong hue.. That's because there's one more step before you can start messing around with normal maps!

Step 6 - I had to figure this out myself and good gravy do I wish I knew about it before

Fun fact; Blender has colour-correction! And to turn it off. All you have to do is go to the Render tab, scroll all the way down, and under the Colour Management tab, change View Transform from "AgX" to "Standard".

Step 7 - ok back to rendering

Press F12 again, and you should get a beautiful normal map! Save this to the same place as the base image.

Step 8 - hope you like material nodes!!!!

Switch back to Eevee, and hide the Collection all your stuff is in, and make a new one. Hold Alt and rotate your view so that the little angle gizmo on the top-right shows "-Y". Create a camera, right click it and click "set active camera", and then do the "align active camera to view" thing.

Set the camera to Orthographic. Note that scrolling with Lock -> Camera to View doesn't actually zoom; zooming is instead done via the thing below the Type dropdown.

Add a Plane, rotated 90° so it's facing towards the camera, and mess around with the camera controls until it fits into the camera's view.

On the top tabs, switch to "Shading".

Click "New" on the panel below the viewport to create a new texture (or, if you haven't modified the default texture, use the dropdown next to the "New" button to select that instead). Then, recreate the setup shown in the image.

Add another Sun, and play around with the angle. If you did it properly, the image should appear to have proper shading that changes with the light's position (if it looks weird, play around with the Strength parameter and the dropdown on the Normal Map node).

And you're done! This can be used for a lot of stuff, like I learned about this technique from a YouTube video about Super Mario Bros. Wonder modding.

Anyway I need to sleep. It's nearly 6am in my timezone and I haven't slept. If there are any errors in this post, it's because I was writing this instead of going to bed. Uhhhh good night I guess

Also please ignore that the textures in the bits with the plane don't match the renders I showed earlier; I accidentally messed up the camera's position and forgot to save the normal map, so I had to redo both of them :(

[aromantic-ace]

Humans Are Weirds : Assholes

So, ive been kinda addicted to those Humans are Weirds and Humans are Space Orc fandom and i wanted to bring my grain of salt in it. Please dont be too harsh on possible spelling errors, english isnt my native language.

Now what if Aliens dont have assholes, or what if they naturally have the ability to objectively analyse a situation and pick side with the one that is right and what if the humans were one of the only species that has such a lot of internal conflict, because of that there always were very fews wars, and even less between the same species and then.. here come the humans and their posterior orifice. But the aliens dont know that of course, the Intergalactic Manuals About Humans don't talk about that, it only advice people about the huge diversity in comportement and behavior of the individuals. Now here is an entry from an alien personnal logbook.

Cycle 37 after the start of the Expedition.

Crew member : T'slich of the Kerb System.

The mood isn't great today, everyone feel it, there was an arguing between the Captain and Human Leila. We all know that the decision made by the captain was the best and for the safety of the ship but we all also know very well to not anger the humans. Even Colonel Stabby is quietly hovering around a corner not bothering anyone, it's as if the little robot could feel that today was not the day to do that. What am i talking about ? I think the human started to influence me a bit, this robots cannot have feelings.

But, i know that someone will have to go talk to Human Leila, we learned not to let her alone after a particuliar emotionnal interaction, and since i am the closest one to her i was assigned to go try to calm her. I write this note here in case Human Leila goes into a breakdown and potentially destroy the ship. I know it seem very unlikely since she has only been sweet with us from the start and because of their ability to bond with anything, but i also know that it happened before to another ship of the company, and that an angry human is a dangerous human and must be treated with caution. I will come back later to resume the interaction with Human Leila and finish this entry.

Cycle 37 and a half after the start of the Expedition.

Crew Member: T'slich of the Kerb System.

I am in such shock after what i have learned that i took around half a cycle to process information before coming back to this entry. And i know i will have to send a request to the Intergalactic Counsil so they can add another entry to the Human Manual since this information is so incredible. But for now i prefer to relate the interaction with Human Leila from the start and actually (for once) to make sure that every words we said is correctly written here.

She was already calm when i requested the permission to enter her quarter and that immediatly sent various mixed signals in my brain, it could be a good news but also a bad new since humans are notorious for their dead calm just before doing incredibly violent act, but i was hoping she just managed to calm herself, after all losing a bunch of animal cargo to pirates wasn't such a big deal right ?

Me : "– Human Leila are you alright ? I heard your discussion with Captain Doks was... animated."

Human Leila: "– Yes i'm alright, i don't have much hard feelings against this assholes, he's just following procedure, why do you ask ?"

Me: "– Well the crew was worrying about you and i came here to make sure you were alr- excuse me.. what did you said ? I think the translator made an error."

At this point i had already noted the thing they call "sarcasm" in her voice meaning that she was thinking the opposite of what she said to me, but it was mainly for the second part of her statement which had badly translated.

Me: "– I think it was having feelings for a.. posterior hole ..?"

Human Leila: "– Ooh that ! Do you guys not have any assholes ?"

Me: "– N-no ? Us Kerbian do not have posterior holes, he simply burn the toxin to produce that toxic gas used for hunting and fight-"

Human Leila promptly interumpted me.

Human Leila: "– No no i know that, i don't mean posterior holes.. i mean assholes, you don't have any ?"

Me: "– What is an 'ass holes' then ?"

Human Leila: "– It's.. kinda hard to explain just like that, it's a word we use firstly yes to name our posteriors holes in a less complicated word but that's also how we call the people that annoy us, that don't want to listen, that we cannot sympathise with or won't admit their wrongdoings. People that don't think of others and only about themselves you see what i mean ? We call them that to compare them to our posterior because its not a good thing to be compared as."

At this point i was pretty confused, the Captain wasn't any of what she described, she herself filled one or two of the things she described but i couldn't say that because it apparently was offensive to compare someone to a posterior.

Me: "– I am.. unsure, it confuse me a lot, could you elaborate..?"

Human Leila: "– Like, how do you call people that do that ? How do you call people that do these things deliberatly ?"

Me: "– Well.. these things.. don't happen ? We analyse the situation and act according to the most benefit outcome for the specie or our survival. Very few of us would deliberatly cause conflict... do you.. are the humans not doing that ?"

At this point i was shocked to hear that no, the humans do not act like that and that, in most case they would act according to their need and their need only. We knew that the human survival instinct was extremely strong but to that point ? It was incomprehensible, especially since, apparently it does not rely on survival instinct, some human would just.. cause conflict and chaos ? But why ? For what reason ? What benefit could it have ? Can they not analyse a situation and side with the right choice as everyone would do ? Human Leila told me that no, the majority of human population would side with what they think is right, as ridiculous as it could get, some extreme case include humans that willingly starve others to death just for a financial gain and that.. that scared me.

Human Leila tried to reassure me saying that, very few of those human actually leave their planet as the requirement for being able to go into space are very strict and include something called a "personality check" but she also told me that "if every assholes on Earth were wearing yellow the planet would emit its own light" which is not reassuring at all. I am glad that Human Leila is not one of those "assholes" but i am also deeply shocked that she would call our Captain by such an horrific word. She told me she wouldn't do anything bad for the crew and that her ressentment would go away with the time but i think i will keep watching her in case of any human rage incident.

End of Entry.

(Feel free to give me any feedbacks or possible tips for writing as i am fairly new and wish to improve)

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

ARIIIII HI HELLO HEY !!! i got a bit busy (i hate assessments) but I'm back and I will soon read all the things I added to my tbr that you posted !! soooo excited hehe :3 I wanted to ask how you guys are playing phanpara.... i also want to see all the fun stuff and play.. ☹☹ manifesting the banners for you so you get them easily <333 - ❄ anon

❄️ ANON MY LOVE !! welcome back!!!! :3 i hope your assessments went well…. i’m proud of you for working hard 🫂🫂🫂 AND PLS don’t feel any pressure w the tbr, my fics will always be here when you have the time !!! <3333

BUT YES . phanpara ….. i’m not gonna lie to you anon getting it downloaded on ios was a whole trial of will but 😭😭 it’s actually. fairly simple. it’s easier on android (you just need to download a bunch of apps to emulate it!!) but on ios you need to manually change your appstore region to japan. and then download a vpn app. the biggest downside w ios is that there aren’t really any good translator apps!! :(( on android you can get bubble translate which lets you translate on screen text really easily…. but you won’t get anything like that on ios. so you won’t understand what the characters are saying (unless you take screenshots and throw them into an image translator)….

buuut if you’re still fine with that!! (assuming you have ios and not android)…. then i’ll leave the instructions down below :33 i’ll try to make them as clear as possible but just ask if you have any more questions!! i’d love to help!!! phanpara is sm fun…

ok so . here are all the steps !!

1) make a new appstore account!!

this step is easy :3 … i don’t. remember how i did it tho. pretty sure you just go to the appstore browser page?? or something.., and then you obv just need to add a name and a functional email address!

when you’ve made a new account, make sure that your ios is logged into it . just go to settings -> click your profile -> click on the appstore icon -> log out from your usual account and log in on the new one!! then you just need to press ”show account” to go to the next step.

2) change your region to japan!!

this is the complicated step. it’s not really that complicated though it just took me a while to figure it out 😭😭 you can use this site for reference if my descriptions confuse you lol

when you try to change your region to japan, you’ll be forced to add your name and your address. you can use your normal name (assuming it’s made up of english letters), but you’ll need to generate a jp address!! it’s actually kinda easy. this is the website i used!! it lists all the information you need in the correct order, so just . copy and paste into the settings . (i believe you’ll need to choose the prefecture manually, so just look at the prefecture name on the website and match it with the options ios gives you!!) street name, prefecture, city, zip code, phone number… etcetc. this may or may not be an illegal process but if you’re a gacha enjoyer i’m assuming you like living life on the edge.

you’ll also get the option to add a payment method, but you should be able to skip it by choosing the option at the bottom. this is important because otherwise it won’t let you change your region (unless you happen to have a japanese credit card hanging around)….

when you’ve entered all the necessary information, click the blue text in the top right corner to move on!! if you’ve done everything correctly you should be taken to the jp appstore :3

3) download phanpara + ovpnspider!!

now you’re almost done!!! downloading phanpara should be easy, just search for it in the appstore and. well. download it. when i did this i had to click through some ios popup page..??? but just . click your way through it. trial and error. until it lets you download the app <33

while phanpara is loading, download ovpnspider!! this one is super easy and doesn’t take up much space at all. when it’s finished downloading, just go into the app, go to the ”jp” folder and connect to one of the vpns!! the status has to be ”alive”, but any of them should work :3

4) play phanpara !!

now you should be good to go <33 the only issue is that the vpn can be a little difficult sometimes. phanpara might take a bit to load, and throw you out if the vpn disconnects, but as long as you just exit the app and change the vpn there shouldn’t be any issues. could be a little bothersome sometimes but you get used to it quickly!! just make sure that you’re connected to a vpn, enter phanpara, and play :33 for me it takes up roughly 5gbs of space, so make sure your phone can handle it!!

aaaaand that’s it <333 i’m sorry if this is just. gibberish 😭😭 or if i’m making it sound more complicated than it is …. and pls let me know if it works for you!!! i’d love to be friends in game if you make an account :33 then you’ll be able to use my gojo in battle … hehehe ……..

[welcometoteyvat]

congrats on the photoshop! if u dm talking abt, what’s ur gif-ing process :3

tyty! and you've activated my trap card, I love talking

It usually goes like

1. download the mp4 from youtube or some other place and trim the clip until I get the parts I want

2. import the mp4 into photopea, which automatically splits it into frames for me (haven't tried directly loading it into photoshop actually).

if this step gets messed up and the frames aren't generated properly/smoothly (this happened in one of the hu tao gifs and I didn't realize until about a week ago lmao) I have to use the mkv player method a lot of gif tutorials talk about (I followed this one).

3. crop it to either 960px or 540px (widths), settings below. everyone says use 540 but I've done 960 on several occasions by now just because I like clicking on images and having them actually zoom in. it's supposed to be worse for the normal preview though

4. add adjustment layers and fool around with them. for this I almost always add hue/saturation and selective color, and sometimes brightness/contrast and gradient map as well, and maybe others depending on how I feel. a ton of tutorials add curves layers but I haven't figured out how to not make them look ass lol

this step is super vibes and eyeballing based tbh I use different colors for every gif including ones in the same set. I know coloring psds/actions are a thing but I haven't looked into that

5. sometimes I will also add gradient fill (did this for the lyney gifs and some other non-genshin ones) for more strongly colored backgrounds

6. finally open the file in photoshop and do: make video timeline > convert to frame animation > make frames from layers > delete any blank frames (manually) > select all frames > set the frame delay to 0.05. exactly the same steps as this tutorial, without the reverse frames part

7. tweak the color details until it looks better / finished. I've had to mess around with layer masks for some of the gradient fill parts (to make sure the subject of the gif isn't colored over by the gradient), and that's kinda painful, but I've only done that for ~3 gifs so it's fine

8. add sharpening layers, I think I use the settings in this tutorial? I tend to make the gaussian blur stronger than 15% (usually 40-70% lol) because sometimes the 2 sharpens look too pixelated. idk if that's bc of differences between animation and live action or personal preference

9. squint at the gif a lot when exporting (I usually use adaptive color and pattern dithering, but sometimes I have to use perceptive color instead to lower file size...) and go through at least 3 different minor color or sharpen tweaks before being like yeah that's probably good enough

photopea doesn't have dithering settings which is the reason I switched to actual photoshop (sigh). it makes the gif colors look smoother

also there's a bug where the frame delay you set gets changed (usually increased) when exporting, but often times I'm too lazy to fix it back and export again. idk it doesn't make a difference to my eyes but fyi ig

10. save as draft on tumblr and add alt text. it's fun and my internet is shitty enough that my own gifs load very slowly too, so the description is helpful especially when all I can see is a gradiently colored square

there are a lot of photoshop actions that people recommend and I haven't looked at any of them, mostly I'm lazy and prefer to just wing it myself. also I feel like the main ""trick"" to gifs/giffing and making your """style""" or whatever is in choosing and adjusting colors, but besides making things brighter and more colorful, I don't really have rhyme or reason behind how I adjust things lol

also if you have any other questions feel free to ask! I can also send cracked photoshop and the gif tutorials I've used if you want lmao

[claire-starsword]

Authentic Story of the Shining Force - Saint Fencer Max - Chapter 5

Translation notes:

All enemies so far were recognizable from the game, but here they seem to be original.

This might be Boken?? The only character in the game with a big backpack and hair. And he does show up in Dragonia in-game.

About the Ancient names. Mega Max is clearly alliterative in both languages. Giga Cain is almost that. K sounds in japanese become g sounds once you add a dakuten (ﾞ), so they're associated. And in english it kinda works out accidentally, because a G is basically a C with extras too. Vega Darksol though? No link. The pattern is lost. I'm kinda mad about it.

From an author's comment: "These two also appear in Tanuma-sensei's Shining Force (lol). Are they official members?" Yuichiro Tanuma is the artist for another Shining Force manga, Descent of Great Intention, whose scans I only found today (warning for a lot of ecchi/nudity/nsfw, i'm still going through but what i've seen is pretty horny already). And yes, these background characters also appear there. This manga was published before that one, though, so this is their first appearance.

"But Claire you're dodging the main topic, Cain just did exposition of the whole lore" yes yes, the similarities between it and the GBA version are what made me interested in this manga to begin with, but I've decided there's so much to compare between all versions of Max and Cain I'll make a whole huge ass post about it instead. Look forward to that.

I will mention however that Cain's bodysuit here reminds me a bit of the manual picture with Max being brought into Guardiana for the first time.

I did say we had to talk about Prompt (and then promptly forgot it in the first draft of these notes). Like Waral, Prompt is not seen anywhere in the beta map. And here, it is depicted as only ruins instead of the country it is in the final game. That in itself wouldn't mean much, however, Chapter 7, where Prompt is, has a lot more weirdness in it. It has peculiar unused content implying a whole deleted cutscene with Cain, Adam, Chaos and Darksol in Metapha, and it freezes the Debug Mode's Battle Test any time you Egress (also, Chapter Selection won't even load it from a save file of another chapter, which doesn't happen for any other chapter). Of course, I don't know the actual code of the game, but this gives me the impression that this Chapter 7 had some other Egress point that got removed later. Basically, if there's one part of the game you can expect to have changed late in development, it's Prompt and Metapha, so it could have been only ruins as the manga depicts here, and as I mentioned in the last chapter, some place or machine called Tenochtitlan could have existed.

Oh boy I keep forgetting notes this time! The goddamn chapter title. Both times the Chaos Breaker is mentioned here, it is written with the usual katakana, but also the kanji 対暗黒魔法剣 (Anti-Darkness Magic Sword) as furigana. I felt it was too clunky to mention both sword names in the dialogue, especially when Cain was already pushing the limits of a lot of speech bubbles this chapter. But anyway, yeah, it's supposed to be a bit of a title drop there.

I. forgot. yet. another. note. When Otrant recognizes the robot using an explosion spell, the manga actually says 核爆烈, a mix of 核 (nuclear) and 爆烈 (explosion). However, I couldn't find this exact wording in dictionaries, only fictional works, so it might just dramatic flavor, since nuclear explosions Don't Work Like That. I kept it ambiguous in the translation to not raise questions in the middle of the action, but it's worth noting since both the aforementioned Descent of Great Intention manga and the UK Sonic the Comic version of Shining Force bring up nuclear themes at some point.

[ladysomething]

rushed back home. pretty sure I broke like 7 different basic driving rules from the driver manual in my country that even kids are aware of. also my best friend says he's never letting me drive ever again. he also says you're kinda a mastermind. I may not have a driver license for tomorrow, or a car to drive, but I do have new hatred and also a new level of crush (ness? English-is-not-my-first-language moment) for Max Verstappen. and my brother as well. he also pleged alliance and eternal honor to you, Madds.

5+1!!!!

1. honestly Charles, I get you. cramps are how some criminals should be punished. make them suffer for their wrongs. make them regret ever living. make them feel pain for comitting their crime. (says the lawyer. at this rate, for tomorrow I will loose not one but TWO licenses. who cares)

2. as stated beforehand, the Max crush that you've been cooking in me with this fic is absolutely massive. gigantic. astronomical. and let me tell you something. Max taking care of Charles during his pre-heat melted me. my ex boyfriends should learn from him, because that's the bare minimum and yet they didn't do shit. and Charles here has this lovely dumb idiot (affectionate) while he hates him. honestly goals. where do I buy one.

3. I kinda understand why Max distanced himself from Charles. sorta. actually barely. but the guilt trip that my man has to be going through has to be though. what reminds me

4. FUCK MATTHEW AND FUCK LANDO AND FUCK THE DOCTOR WHOSE NAME IS NOT WORTH OF ME TO REMEMBER. oh and FUCK FERRARI AND FUCK MCLAREN AND FUCK EVERYONE. GO TO HELL PIECES OF SHIT. yeah, that's it I think. my poor baby Charlie (IBEIDNDOSNDLSBDOWHEODIAJS I went batshit with that. just so you know. worried Max might be my favorite Max. maybe slightly behind horny, protective and obedient Max) did NOT deserve that and everyone should rot in the darkest pit of hell for that. no less. cramps for you all.

5. we love Jean-Luc in this house. that was the resolution the three of us got to. my man deserves a cold pillow on both sides, a cup of tea and the chance to see his family anytime and to be happy forever. please don't make me hate him, I love him too much.

+1. if you've told me at the beginning of the year that I would be eating dinner with both my brother and my roomie while we were reading a quite explicit Lestappen omega verse fi in TV, no less, I would've not only not believed you. but died of shame or something like that. my yearly choice of a dead dove do not eat fic (I've been learning about tags!!!) has united this household. who would have thought that.

+2. Max is down BAD. but you know what, so is Charles. they really are exactly like the other. when Charles said that he was feeling lonely all I could think of is how Max said the exact same. and the hospital part had me kicking my feet, jumping around excitedly. then I alarmedly had to go all the way up to see in which chapter we were. and after, I just felt scared. chapter 16 is my worst nightmare it seems. how funny.

+3. hun, how has been your hand? I hope you're feeling better 🩷 as much as I love weekly uptades I can't help but feel worried that you might push your hand a lot. the chapter was absolutely lovely but remember to rest please 🙏🏼 speaking on my behalf and the other two readers' (and I hope everyone else's) we don't want you to be hurt, regardless of the fic.

thank you for the early uptade, even if now I'm a reckless driver to my country's police. at least I didn't read it while I was working. I don't know how I could've managed that.

I will take eternal allegiance wherever I can get it. I am making men kneel before me, one at a time, and so I'm glad to add two more to my collection.

cramps as a form of punishment .... you get it.

no because that whole heat sequence with Max .. melted me. he's so written by a woman coded in this fic (which you'd hope. considering he is. lmao)

he's hurt!!! he's sad!!! Max is going through a phase right now ok

the doctors name is Leo, and funnily enough Charles got Leo the same week that chapter came out and I was like ... Charles reads wygig confirmed

THIS IS A JEAN-LUC STAN ACCOUNT and honestly????? I love that you all love him. maybe he should get his own fic one day. who knows.

+1. the war being over because you've bonded over the lestappen war .... there's something so cosmic about that.

+2. everyone being on the edge of their seats for 16 ... god I'm good.

+3. thank you for the well wishes! it's wayyyyy better now, thank god.

p.s. I think maybe your brother and your roommate would riot if you read it at work without them sooooo

[ghost-kings-court-jester]

So you want to your local tumblr Creator?

Okay with all the AI art things coming out and also some new users I thought I’d show you all good ways to support creators on this platform.

First you’re going to want to go into your settings click into visibility and manually turn off the third party sharing feature.

Yes even if you aren’t an artist or don’t post anything at all. The more users that turn this on the more Tumblr can see we don’t want AI here.

This is literally the bare minimum of what you can do and if that’s all you want to do that’s fine.

However if you want to support creators more you need to understand that likes don’t do anything on this platform. With a lot of new users I’m seeing more and more ratios like this:

Which is fine all notes are good notes we all appreciate your like on our art but this is the reblogging site. There’s no algorithm! Likes don’t boost our art that much, other than maybe bringing us to the top of the tag. What helps is reblogging. This site is built for that and it is quick and easy.

Literally all you have to do is hit the reblog button beside the like button and hit post. You don’t need tags or anything on your own blog. It really is quick and simple. Literally it only takes one second more than liking alone.

Now you might be saying Zee I want to reblog but I don’t want to spam my blog, I’m only on tumblr at 20 minute intervals I don’t want to to clog up other peoples dashes with my reblogs and that’s fine I got you.

Let me tell you about the queue function. Tumblr has a built in awesome system called the queue.

It’s really quick and easy to use all you have to do is hit the reblog button, hit the three dots to the side, hit queue and boom your reblog is now added to your queue.

Now what does the queue actually do? Basically it allows for your reblogs to go out at random times throughout the day without you doing anything. For example mine posts 10 times a day during the whole 24hr period. This is because as you can see I have a lot of art in my queue, you don’t need to have that much but you can. The queue is literally limitless.

To modify your queue can also hit that cog button and modify it to suit your every whim. And boom there you go a quick and easy way to help creators from your mobile without any hassle.

You can even shuffle your queue so on days when discover a new interest and go through the entire tag liking and reblogging things you can mix it around with the stuff you regularly reblog to not overwhelm your followers with your new special interest! It's great!

Now if you want to push this one step further, maybe you like having tags on your posts to keep your blog organised, but you don’t want the hassle of typing out all those tags in 20 mins. Then don’t worry, I got you.

You see I kinda lied, the like button does have a function. It’s great as working as a bookmark. So if your in public and you want to show love for something then go on ahead and like that thing. Then when you get home you’re going to want to pull out your laptop and boot up tumblr and xkit. Which you can get here!

Once you have xkit up your going to want to go to quick tags and set up your tag buddles. These tags are then autosaved and easy edited making reblogging and adding to your queue incredibly easy. You can even add in your own rambly tags and keep the bundle.

Honestly you don't even need to do it everyday, sure it saves some time but I usually try to update my queue once every two weeks or so (I forgot for like a month this time thats why my queue is so big, I had to go very far back, Don't be a me. It's stressful.) By using your likes as a bookmark you keep all the art and then can backdate everything you've liked in past few weeks, but honestly you don't need to do this. I do because I can be very Type A about running a blog but no one is going to hate you for spam reblogging or for reblogging without tags but please think about reblogging stuff to give a creator a much needed boost of serotonin. Remember that most creators are here for free and just want to share the thing they love with other people so keep the cycle alive and reblog stuff.

[cindydartist]

Why I think BotW fits as a sequel to TAoL

My lovely siblings let me rant Legend of Zelda timeline stuff to them and I figured, might as well post it here. Note: this is my own headcanon, NOT what I think Nintendo or anyone else HAS to follow. I know and recognize that neither BotW nor TotK are part of the official Zelda Timeline.

--

Currently, if I had to pick a spot for it [BotW] in the Canon timeline, I'd put it after The Adventure of Link (second released game) with LU nicknamed 'Hyrule' Link. Two main reasons for that:

1) Ganondorf the Man and Ganon the Beast

The Fallen timeline in which TAoL takes place is the only timeline where pig Ganon is the predominant form of Ganondorf. (Despite all the separate incarnations of Link and Zelda, Ganondorf… is kinda just one guy through all of it who refuses to die properly.)

This is due to him gaining the Triforce of Power AND KEEPING IT by killing the Hero of Time (hence why that timeline branch is referred to as the Fallen Hero or Downfall timeline). Ganondorf's beast form is always shown in the games as an overrun of power and a sacrifice/discarding of the 'human' in him. In the other two timelines, he is beaten in that form effectively immediately after transforming, therefore has no time to lose himself. He continues to keep his gerudo form in further sequels/successors. Not so in the Fallen timeline.

By the time we get to A Link to the Past, Ganondorf has been beast Ganon up to/after the imprisoning war, a last-ditch effort by a bunch of sages after the Hero of Time’s death. Some details are unique to Hyrule Historia book, but the sealing war is a key part of history for ALttP (and its sequels) due to the plot-related presence of those sages’ descendants.

Again, Ganon only shows up in beast form in this game and going forward. A secondary factor may be where he was sealed to: Ganondorf keeping the Triforce of Power for a hot minute also keeps the Sacred Realm (where the Triforce previously resided in OoT) transformed into the Dark World (also predominately featured in ALttP)

ALttP’s Link, LU nickname Legend, later has Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. The goal of hidden antagonists Koume and Kotake is to resurrect Ganon. (This isn't exactly spoiler territory for either gameplay, but heads up I guess?) It succeeds -- partially. The Ganon brought back is mindless - only a force of destruction. Sound familiar??

Importantly, this all adds up to a potential Decomposition of Ganondorf the Man.

While Ganon does regain some strategic thinking in The Legend of Zelda I (Hyrule's first adventure), he remains in pig/beast form. And is killed again. Okay, technically it doesn't state killing, so it could be sealing away. Except. One of the most known things about Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is if you die enough times to get a game over, it states Ganon comes back, implied to be through spilling Link's/Hyrule's blood. Quote from the game’s English instruction manual “The key to Ganon’s return was the blood of Link – the valiant lad who overthrew the King of Evil. Ganon would be revived by sacrificing Link and sprinkling his blood on the ashes of Ganon.”

Revive? Blood ritual?? Ashes??? Sounds awfully like a resurrection ritual ta me.

Thus, with further decomposition of self through death and revival, especially if one counts how many times Hyrule’s predecessor Legend defeated Ganon as killing him, it makes perfect sense to me that a logical conclusion would be BotW Calamity Ganon. (Granted, I have not finished TotK’s history plot yet, so there may be arguments/evidence I am unaware of with how he got that way. Like his existence as Gerudo Ganondorf, but from my current info, that is in the far past, potentially after Skyward Sword. Sue me, I have a working theory the Zonai are evolved Remlits)

On to my SECOND reason:

2) My Own Personal Gratification ✨

The world of Zelda I and Zelda II is frankly post-apocalyptic. Ironically more so than ALttP which is the closest to the ACTUAL apocalyptic events that happened.

Perhaps it is important to note that ALttP explicitly confirms the idea that a previous unnamed hero failed to stop Ganondorf. And that years back IRL there was genuine reason to speculate that that previous hero was Hyrule. Now think about the blood ritual.

With the release of the official timeline, that theory is now only fanon. But the potential is still there. Currently there is no canonical sequel to Hyrule’s story. Legend’s adventures give evidence readable as foreshadowing that this is a timeline where the land itself has clearly degraded. The zora are ruthless enemies that will attack on sight. Natural water is acidic and damages. There are monsters who can take the form of hylians so no-one ever knows quite who is safe to trust.

Link’s/Hyrule’s story is beautiful because he is effectively hope that refuses to give up on a land falling apart. A synergy between selfless bravery and survival. One who sees hardiness in the weakened kingdom’s people and inspires them to try a little harder, be a little kinder, trust a little more.

For all we know, as long as there is a monster or member of the Cult of Ganon, he might be running forever. Will have to carry that risk for the rest of his life. For the sake of Hyrule’s people and future, how he lives as a hero is not enough; he must control how he dies.

 Is it strange to wish that the bountiful green land of BoTW is what his kingdom will eventually be? That, even if not in his lifetime, the Kingdom of Hyrule will continue on and find its feet again?

That’s how I see BotW. Even if Ganon manages to destroy Hyrule, it will always live on through its people. You can never take what was never takeable in the first place.

--

tldr; Pigman signifies Dementia and I want Hyrule!Link to have a happy freaking ending, okay?

[lexart-io]

do you have any tips for captioning images for lora training? especially since you said some of your first loras were use using images with a certain vibe, did you still caption them or were you letting sd play in the space for lack of a better term? thanks for your help :D

maaan i had a whole ass paragraph about captions that i deleted in my last explanatory post because i was worried it was too much extra text on a topic that might not matter to the reader. 😅

for sake of clarity, here are some tips in a nice numerical list format (apologies for another wall of text lmao):

do not use an auto-tagger. auto-captioning (like BLIP) adds too many unnecessary or incorrect tags, which will only confuse the training and negatively impact your model (unless you go through and manually remove/correct everything image by image).

use an alpha-numeric trigger word. you want a trigger word that hopefully does not already exist within the model. for example, if your dog is named George Washington and you train a model on photos of him with the trigger word "GeorgeWashington", there is a strong likelihood that your final model will render images of the former US president instead of your dog. using a trigger word like "G3org3Wa5h1ngt0n" will prevent that and would only render images of your dog.

caption your images with simple tags, which are delimited by commas. some folks type out whole sentences describing the image, but in my experience that only confuses the training. keep your tags simple, descriptive, and formatted as "subject, context, tags" (ex: "G3org3Wa5h1ngt0n, sitting, tongue out, full body, green grass").

everything you tag will be considered NOT part of the subject in which you are training. if your dog is wearing a hat in most/all of the photos and you don't specify that it's wearing a hat in the tags, then every image rendered by the model will have your dog wearing a hat. by including a tag like "wearing hat", the hat is now considered a separate thing from your dog. when rendering images, prompting "G3org3Wa5h1ngt0n" will render your dog and prompting "G3org3Wa5h1ngt0n, wearing hat" will render your dog wearing the hat.

everything you do NOT tag is considered part of the subject in which you are training. "G3org3Wa5h1ngt0n" represents everything in the training dataset that you did not tag. so the ai identifies the hat, the pose, the background grass, and considers everything else in the photo (aka the dog sitting there) to be G3org3Wa5h1ngt0n. this is why i don't tag things like "dog" or the color of its fur, because then you kinda run the risk of those things not being implicit to the subject (pro-tip: sometimes you that's a good thing for weird experimental purposes).

based on tips #4 and #5, sometimes it is actually best to only tag a trigger word and nothing else. with those example dataset images from my previous post, there really isn't much to describe. i trained it with ONLY a trigger word and let the stable diffusion training process decide what fundamental similarities / patterns existed within the dataset. this is nice when you know there is a shared vibe between images that you cannot quite put into descriptive words... let machine learning take of it. some of my early droid base models were trained with no tags too, which actually worked fine for the most part. but one downside was that they could basically only render droids, even if my prompt tried using the trigger with other subjects. whereas my latest droid models are fully captioned and so i can still use them to render non-droid subjects that still feature similarities to my droids (like those cityscape images i've been posting, which are all actually rendered using my droid model, and likewise all of the spaceships i was posting awhile back).

hopefully my rambling makes sense haha. let me know if you need clarification on anything! 🙏

[zevdev]

Loz rambles

I started Hyrule Warriors finally. It's the one for the 3ds so what is it Hyrule Warriors Legends? Anyways I kinda got it to see if I would like this before I get it for a console I don't play as much as my 3ds and it's definitely an iffy game but I'm not that far in so we'll see. [current opinions below and yes spoilers]

Starting right off the bat with something that doesn't directly connect to the game[skip this if you just want stuff about the game] but surprisingly with this being a used copy it still has what you could call a manual, but it still has the download codes for a special theme on the ds and extra characters for the wii u game. The used game store I normally get my games from has a copy of the wii u hw but it wasn't out nor priced so I decided to wait but I have a 3ds so I thought to try the code. I got to the theme shop enter the code surprisingly didn't get instantly told it was already used. The ds loads for a bit like it's going to work then error 001-whatever pops up saying basically "oh yeah we are too old for this sorry." Which sucks because of how long it thought for I thought is was going to work and I wanted to add a Zelda theme into my theme rotation because there was none for .99 before the internet died Anyways moving on to actual gameplay.

I like that when you first put in the cartage it's the puzzle completed sound effect so that's cool but sadly the icon doesn't spin when you blow in the microphone. Anyways since this is a used game I had to reset it but why didn't this game get a way to delete software until 1.2.0 like come on was it that buggy? and also the manual is digital so you couldn't put the button combo there instead of just leaving it in the update notes?

One pokemon button combo reset later and we are starting the game. For an nintedo ds game the graphics look amazing and the ds didn't eat them like they do with most games made for those graphics. The first cutscene nothing special just meeting the first few characters but then we get thrown into the gameplay. Before the game starts it asks you if you want Warriors or Zelda controls still can't tell the importance of that but hey I flipped a coin ang got Warriors so here we are [also did the suggested newbie easy mode] and I can't tell you how poorly this game explains controls.

It's a brief pop up on the touch screen and if you're a pokemon player like me you're going to spam that b button. So I did but it's similar to kingdom hearts controls [ds/switch games] so I still don't know what x and a do but I got attacking and dodging down so we surviving. It's like pokemon conquest but not at all at the same time for me [like they are so different I don't know why they seem similar to me lol] So it's basically a mass attack type thing easy enough but any map I have is so hard to navigate it's like I'm using walking directions on a phone. Spinning around hoping it lines up in the direction I want to go. I will say the great fairy could 100% look like any stereotypical youtuber if you took away the questionable sounds.

I also want to say Impa is cool basically kicking around the sword I like them current favorite character. Also you can't convince me Proxi isn't just Navi in disguise I'm completely wrong but this is my headcanon and let me live in denial. I will say the second mission, episode, quest, level whatever it's called was just funny because I'm using Impa so Link is just on his own and he was so determined to progress the story. Like I'm near the start getting distracted by getting all the outposts and so often Proxi is just like "hey here's what you should be doing but Link has it covered." Also Shiek comback is crazy, disappointing how quickly I realized it was just Zelda [for hw not oot] but still crazy. Also we love me half way across the map then teleported for a cutscene only to end back half way across the map is a very me thing to have happen.

But yeah Link was definitely mvp of not letting me sidequest lol. Also any tips on finding the gold skulltulas? Because I'll go to where they are but I can't find them for some reason. [I think I ignored it for the second level though ='] Anyways long story short I still don't understand the teen rating, Link with the guyliner go brr, Navi and Sheik returns are cool I guess even if they aren't legit, Impa is so badas, and the controls meh, and the map is more confusing than the kingdom hearts lore. Have a nice whatever your timezone is and thank you for listening to my Zelda talk.

[northwest-cryptid]

Your opinion of Half-Life's Barney Calhoun?

Okay now this is an interesting one because of all the potential characters I could have gotten I wasn't expecting a Half-Life character and I'm 100% here for it because man I love these games.

I think Barney is a particularly interesting character for a few reasons, some story related some more so like development related.

To get the development stuff out of the way I think it's really cool that he originated as nothing more than a sort of generic security guard. Like he wasn't even an actual character, he was just a generic general use NPC who didn't even really have any importance outside of being a security guard who could open doors for you and such.

Admittedly I've never really played Half Life: Blue Shift though I'm told that's where he actually became the Barney Calhoun we know him as in Episode 1 and 2. It's actually really cool to see that the devs played this all into his backstory of just being a generic guard, like he wasn't necessarily anyone special at first he was just a security guard but due to you know, surviving everything he became someone important.

It's cool to me because that's actually literally what happened with the very character himself, his backstory is an interesting reflection of his development as a character. They literally just retconned him into the story and it works because yea sure, I can absolutely believe that a random security guard who survived the incident at Black Mesa would end up filling that role. Like he was literally a mid-level security officer, he wasn't even one of the top brass or something.

It also makes sense given that he was said to be friends with Gordon and such, of course if you're friends with the key players of the Black Mesa incident you're likely going to have similar views and such, following up with them and continuing to fight the good fight so to speak.

That being said I do kinda think he should have been given a bigger role in Half Life Episode 1 and 2 since if I'm being perfectly honest, he feels a bit forgettable as a character. If you ask me about him now as I've played the games in my high school years and then revisited the lore of the games and their world several times over the past few years; I'd find his inclusion interesting.

The fact he exists at all is pretty cool and I think he's a fine character for how little he adds to the games past the original Half-Life where he had a much more mechanical role.

However I wish we got to carry that same mechanical role, or even new mechanical roles forward into Half-Life 2. Because as a kid in high school I didn't really know who he was or why he was even there. He was just another guy working with Eli and Alyx. I think if you play the games in order, it's weird to see how much he drops off the face of the Earth despite being an important member of the resistance (or at least you know, seemingly being an important member of the resistance.)

To me, it never made sense why a, you know; security officer wasn't traveling with Gordon and Alyx. Sure they can absolutely handle themselves, but you have a scientist and then you have a security guard. If nothing else, having an extra gun around would have been helpful. I understand the reasoning provided, specifically that he's sort of looking after Kleiner and being a sort of leading figure of the Resistance so obviously he's sort of occupied sure; but I feel like he takes way more of a backseat after having had his own adventure.

Like he has a lot more attention placed on him during the first couple of games, and then it's sort of a matter of being there and then gone almost immediately.

I think Valve is actually good at writing characters who feel pretty human, I mean the instruction manual (back when those existed) for Blue Shift actually has little hand written entries that I believe were intended to be from him. Which is a really cool way to get a character's personality across when they didn't have one prior.

I by no means dislike Half-Life 2's methods of story telling and such, but I think it would have been cool to see a bit more of the key players actually being involved first hand instead of a lot of people being conveniently busy with something or otherwise telling Gordon they're doing something important that we don't get to be a part of because we're too busy with our own stuff. From what I understand he's not even really in Episode 2, not even mentioned.

He feels like a character that Valve cared about once, and then just sorta decided they didn't anymore and dropped him entirely.

If anything I think my favorite thing about Half-Life is how most of the characters (save for some of those we meet later on in the series) are just generic people. Like sure Barney has a pretty forgettable design if I'm being honest, he's a rather generic individual. However, isn't that kinda cool? I mean okay this might sound really dumb but when you're literally writing a story about humanity fighting back against some alien threat I love that half the people we're talking to are just normal everyday people. Eli is an old man, hell most the scientists are; they're not some young strapping action hero; they're just someone who happens to have the necessary skills and knowledge to do something. The people who ARE young still aren't these movie hero type characters, they're security guards and scientists with just enough experience fighting the threat that they can help others fight back. If anything I think the fact he's sort of this generic looking dude is a major plus, it's a sort of message that he could have been anyone.

I appreciate the ask! This isn't the sort of game/character I often get to talk about but if the length of this answer is anything to go off, I hope it shows that I do have a lot of thoughts about these games and characters. Even if they originated as nothing more than a generic NPC :P

[hologramblue]

companion. v....ent....not so much a vent as just saying out loud what happened. for the hell of it. for the hell of not dancing around it. some ugly details abt what happened to her medically. mostly ugly in like. a things that are existentially frightening to go through way not a gory way. neuro shit.

when i showed up at the hospital it was wildly obvious she was going to die bc so many things had happened at once there was no reasonable way to treat her. but there was a desperate need for care bc the cancer (colon -> liver) caused hypercoagulation which caused, like, a whole series of strokes. plus i think also clots in her lungs, which happened first? when my uncle called the ambulance she was just very confused and rather weak, then she got less confused, then her vision got fucked up and things just got worse by the day from there

and anyways by the time i got there she couldn't, like, fend for herself at all. she couldn't see, she couldn't move one arm at all and her dexterity elsewhere was scrambled, she couldn't get out of bed due to the neurological shit on top of the rapidly-worsening liver problem. and then the day i got there was when her speech fell off a cliff. people kept coming in and out of the room and talking and i could see her reacting to everything they said in her expressions, but she couldn't make them understand her. someone would ask a question and she'd try to formulate a response but they'd assume she didn't hear them because of the delay. or because she'd fucking...get upset about the whole situation, and she was an aggressively proud person so "getting upset" looked like turning her head away and staring really hard at nothing, or grimacing and laughing between her teeth, or some other atypical thing that i would look at and go "oh fuck mom's pissed" but the nurse would just, like, start kinda babytalking her bc they took it to mean she didn't understand what they said. which made it worse! she hated it so much and clammed up harder!

so that was mainly what i did there. interpretation. mediation. someone would babytalk and she'd tense up and i'd, like, add some snark or dark humor in and she'd snort and untense. guy came in for a neuro test and asked left/right questions and she didn't respond and i went hey uh it's not that she can't hear you it's that she's always had left-right confusion, tap her knee on the side you want. i broke things down into questions she could answer yes/no to bc she could get those out faster than most other words.

idr where i was going with this, there was something specific that i wanted to get to. what the fuck was it.

maybe it was just elaborating on what i meant about how it took her capabilities. like fuck if she had her vision then maybe she could have read and pointed to words. or if she'd lost vision but been able to hold a conversation, or even had enough manual dexterity to press buttons for AAC and pick radio stations to listen to or something. but no, vision and speech and mobility gone.

i'm very glad actually that i don't believe in any afterlife because i was terrified the whole time of leaving her completely helpless, and i did not at any point know for certain what her cognitive state actually was and if i was - okay well a few things i know for certain made it better for her bc she made some expression of approval/relief, but for all the worst things, there wasn't any certainty. so it's very comforting to know that if there was a point at which she was helpless and i didn't make it better or made it worse, that that experience is scrubbed, gone, unrecoverable and moot. probably a bit fucked up but i have to sleep at night.

vent thing about mom death in all its wretched glory. or some of it idk

it came out of fucking nowhere and it was as if someone came up with, like, the most hurtful possible way for her to go. laser fucking targeted timing, right when she had cleared out old obligations and had room to start making plans and chasing ambitions. all over the course of two months, short enough to not be able to jam in any bucket list shit but long enough to drag out the suffering. and it like. it took her out piece by piece and went after her capabilities and made her watch it all vanish. her strength then her mobility then her vision then her speech. and she was fully conscious or not far from it for the whole fucking thing.

i keep thinking about all that periodically and freaking out a bit but like. at least it's over and she doesn't exist anymore to be able to remember how bad it was. rip.

so i'm still here and the fucked up part on my end is that it was also, like, within a year of when i expect to have a stable job with a living wage that will let me make long-term decisions, and i was hoping to start talking to her more once i felt more independent? maybe come up here more often, help out with some of her big plans for her house, get to know the people she hadn't pissed off. idefk. she got a million times nicer once we all split up and it turns out she's actually pretty interesting to talk to and learn things from when she's not mad all the time.

but nah. she's gone and i can try to fucking. archeologically uncover who the hell she was if i have the time to dig through all the stuff she wrote and made and dragon-hoarded. and i could probably try to learn more home DIY and gardening and crafting and cooking and all the other fucktillion things she did but it'll be a hell of a lot slower than asking her. and like theoretically i could aim for a reassignment somewhere around here and try to live around here but with her gone it wouldn't be much different than moving to any other random corner of the country bc i don't know jack about this place actually.

i could also stop being a big baby and talk to her brother more. in spite of us both being emotionally constipated headasses. and it kind of sounds like he might want to move out anyways. but idk. i should still talk to him more