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weebeestie · 5 years ago

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Anonymous said:

Oct 16 · 13 hours ago

Hi, I’m pretty sure I feel the same way about spn right now as you do. I wish very much for a deancas something at the end, but am very doubtful anything will be acknowledged... One of my least favorite things about the later spn seasons has been that there are so few meaningful character interactions or dialogue exchanges... like there’s episodes are filled with plot basically just to keep characters apart? It’s so boring? I live for interesting character interactions/dynamics.

Hey there. I’ve been generally satisfied with the deancas interactions this season (esp. compared to the norm) and was frankly shocked by the amount of focus on their “breakup” and reconciliation given how this show usually goes. That being said...while I want an unambiguously romantic ending for the two of them, I also strongly doubt we’ll get anything close to that. Even if they do bring Cas back in some fashion after his likely departure in 15x18, I think the best we can reasonably hope for is a recognition of their “closeness” with enough left unspoken that there’s plausible deniability. More subtext.

What’s pissed me off is more about Cas specifically rather than his dynamic with Dean. This show has always played notoriously fast and loose with this poor guy’s character, and over the years one of my biggest frustrations with Cas is just how unevenly he is written depending on the writer(s) of the episode. You had writers like the Edlund, who was great about keying in on the perspective of this cosmic being who can’t help his attraction to humanity and all it entails (har har har--but also seriously, not just Dean ‘Humanity’ Winchester--though part of what made that line so maddeningly, frustratingly perfect was that there is that conflation there--and that’s part of what’s so interesting about deancas, that Dean is a representative of all that is beautiful and terrible and perfectly flawed about humanity but he’s also just Dean, and what does that mean for this angel who is new to even the concept of emotion, let alone desire?), and then you have writers who are like “ok well he’s awkward and doesn’t understand things” and play on that for a weak laugh rather than actually demonstrating any real understanding of his deeper character. And it’s inconsistent. Sometimes they’ll show Cas speaking in a way that’s very human and wise and emotionally complex--he can be insightful, he can make jokes, he can be snarky and sarcastic--and sometimes they’ll give him these weakass robotic speeches that they imbue with this weird, flat sincerity that just feels regressive, like they’re reaching for an emotional beat but not even really trying to make it real. And this specific idea that Cas had a purposeless existence and blind faith before Jack came along is just...it’s just so regressive? It makes no sense. He’s a rebel. He defied Heaven, threw away blind faith, a decade-plus worth of seasons ago. And as we learned from Naomi in season 8, it wasn’t just Dean and Sam who made him that way. He always had a “crack in his chassis,” he never obeyed, he had to be reprogrammed who knows how many times. So what about that? Is all that just retconned? And even apart from his “missions,” Cas has consistently demonstrated an appreciation for what Hannah called “human things.” This isn’t some robotic toy soldier with wings and he never has been. I have further issues with the specific emphasis placed on the father-to-Jack theme (not that it exists--I enjoy it--but the specific weight they’re giving to it in terms of character resolution) that I already alluded to. But in general, meh on this jettisoning of Castiel’s character.

Also, back to your point about them being kept apart: yes, this has always been extremely annoying as a viewer, even though I understand it’s a reality of their production schedule and the needs/contracts of the actors that they just have to work around. SPN has always been a spin on the procedural cop show, which I don’t usually care for exactly due to the boring “filled with plot” thing you mention. This was less irritating when it was just Sam and Dean as the core characters because you saw them together every episode. Once they introduced other core characters that we cared about--particularly Cas--routinely not getting to see these core characters interact became extremely dissatisfying, especially considering that the separation is considerably more pronounced in this show compared to most where your core cast are together in most eps. I’m glad that they’ve at least started acknowledging onscreen where Cas is when he’s gone in recent seasons, but even then they often come up with the stupidest reason. I couldn’t believe in 15x14 (which I otherwise really enjoyed!) when they had him off “tracking down his angel contacts.” Excuse me, what? The angels are basically all dead, right? There’s like five angels, and they can’t leave Heaven or the lights go out, right? Did I make that up? So if Cas just needs to go to Heaven, why tf is he gone for like weeks on end “tracking down” angels? It just doesn’t make sense. I hate that kind of shit, it just comes across as sloppy.

Sorry to rant! I should add that I have been mostly enjoying this season. I finally rage-quit after season 13 after several seasons of becoming increasingly annoyed with the show, but was so pleasantly surprised when I checked back in for 15 that I went back and caught up. There’s just nothing I hate more than wasted potential, and it absolutely kills me when I feel like something that so many people care about that has so much potential to be so good is treated in a way that feels sloppy or careless or like they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel rather than swinging for the fences. Five episodes left. After 15 seasons. C’mon, ya’ll can do better than that!

#btw anyone else's replies not working?#i can type in the message box but there's no post button #replies #deancas #castiel #15x15 #sorry this is so long i was drinking my morning coffee while typing lol

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jjnonken · 6 years ago

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TL;DR: Yeah, uh, bought one of these Because Reasons. Long story behind why I feel I need it. Short version: muscle memory sucks, getting old sucks, programmers suck.

So I’ve got this weird keyboard layout thing going on that I’ve been using forever, and I’m reluctant to change. Muscle memory of three decades (... OK, two-and-a-half) being difficult to retrain and all that. Especially at my age.

It started with the Doom layout and went downhill from there. At the time we were using Gateway 2000 Anykey keyboards at work, so I was able to use a cross-shaped cursor key arrangement (unlike the inverted “T” of other keyboards, which persists to this day). Since then the Anykey has gone the way of the dodo, though I snagged a few that were being binned, and still have at least one working one. For one thing, it doesn’t have a Windows key, nor any way to create one, so it’s of limited use. For another, it’s got an AT or PS/2 connector, depending on its age. My working one has a PS/2 connector; but you can’t really hot-plug a PS/2 keyboard. It doesn’t harm anything, but the system needs to be rebooted. Fortunately I have a PS/2-to-USB adapter (two of them, actually) and also AT-to-PS/2 adapters (fortunately just a form factor change; electrically they’re identical) if I want to make the other one work. Problematic, since I only have one full set of keycaps for some reason.

Yeah, so. What do I do? Well, I use the numeric keypad and reprogram the Num Lock to be “E” (and reprogram the Windows Menu key -- the one to the right of the spacebar, not the main Windows key -- to be “Num Lock”) using Keytweak. Which requires a reboot after a remap, so I can’t just casually re-tweak the keyboard layout and switch games.

Over the years I’ve managed to keep this layout by considering it a functional mapping. During my WFA years I was putting precise-fire weapons (sniper rifles) on one key; rapid-fire weapons (usually hitscan) on another; shotguns and other CQB weapons in a third; and melee in a fourth. Then there are the grenades. There’s more, including special layouts for TF-type engineer (whose emphasis is on building and maintaining machinery), but you get the idea. With a functional layout, the exact weapon that a specific player class uses for a particular purpose is unimportant; you simply determine which class it belongs to and map it to the appropriate key. If something doesn’t fit the standard then you come up with alternate mappings, but try to keep things as close to the standards as possible.

Of course, every game has its own way of doing things, and sometimes the weapons categories of a game (*cough*Killing Floor*cough*) don’t fit into my neat categories (tier 1, 2 and 3 weapons are about relative power), so over the last decade my system has been bent and beaten into various odd-looking shapes. But a few key, um, keys have always been the same.

But there’s a problem.

For most games that have a sprint function, the sprint key is a toggle. Tap it once while you’re moving forward and you start sprinting. Sprinting may stop when you a) stop, b) strafe (I don’t like that one), c) jump, d) tap the Sprint key again, e) any of a bunch of stuff, but usually reasonable reasons to stop sprinting. Killing Floor did something different, which was to let you run a bit faster when you switch to a melee weapon, which is why sometimes you’ll see me switch weapons when I’m running (I’ve got something over 2,000 hours on the game, so it’s a pretty well-ingrained habit, even years later). KF2, on the other hand, gives you a separate sprint key -- but requires you to hold it down.

Most of my other fingers are busy when I’m moving and shooting, so I tend to use the PG DN key, which is fairly convenient to my left pinky when I’ve got the rest of my fingers on the numpad home row. Which works great when it’s a tap to sprint. But when you have to hold it down with your pinky, suddenly a lot of maneuvers turn this arrangement into a game of Twister without any of the fun.

Well, I found this keyboard, a Logitech K330 (usually comes in a combo), which rearranges the home/end/etc. cluster to narrow the keyboard a bit -- and the PG DN key is suddenly next to the home row instead of a row above it. No more cramping positions!

It’s an unusual layout, though, and difficult to find keyboards that have it. So far I’ve found... basically just the K330, though there are a couple cheap wired ones out there. I think Dell or somebody ships one with their computers. Fortunately I was able to find a batch of four on eBay for cheap when my first one became a victim of the Pepsi Syndrome, so over the past few years I’ve accumulated a few extras.

Yeah, so that. But there’s another problem: not every game will let me map what I need. because everybody uses WASD, so of course I would use WASD. Only muscle memory and old age; remember those? So they’ll let me remap my keys, which of course they do, only the remapping is limited, because nobody is actually going to use the remapping function. I had a whole thing over the keyboard mapping in 7 Days to Die because they have a tremendous amount of function overloading plus fixed functionality, so I ended up having to completely unbind the mouse scroll wheel and I still can’t really use the mouse to steer my vehicles.

Num Lock was a problem for a bunch of games -- either they simply won’t let it map or tapping it would toggle the Num Lock function and make the keys work sometimes, but not others. I resolved that by remapping it as described above.

Enter is another one. A lot of programs won’t let me map that, which is kind of awkward, because that’s my Crouch button. Motherfuckers. Mostly it’s games that assume that Enter is Enter and won’t let you map the main Enter key only. There are some, though, that will let me map the Num Enter but not the main Enter, which I can live with. Philosophically I dislike it, but it doesn’t affect me directly. (But still... it should be possible.)

I’ve never played Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, though I own a copy. Why? Because the motherfucking ratfuck bastard morons won’t fucking let me fucking remap to the fucking num pad at all. I cranked it up, tried to map my keys, gave up and uninstalled it. Will my mapping make sense in a game that has a very different control paradigm? No fucking clue, because I’m not allowed to try.

Lazy fucking asshats.

Destiny 2 is one of the “can’t remap Numpad Enter” games. There might be one or two other keys, I’ve forgotten. I was determined to try, though, so I dusted off my Gateway 2000 Anykey keyboard and reprogrammed enough keys to get it working.

It’s awkward. I’m not used to the keyboard; it’s HUUUGE; it’s heavy; and it requires rearranging my desk a bit because I kind of need the other keyboard nearby, too. Actually it’s more convenient in one way: using the Numpad with my left hand means I have the keyboard pushed waaaay to the left, which is really inconvenient for typing normally. Entering text fields usually means shifting the keyboard back and forth. So I can put my regular keyboard in front of me... only now I have to change habits, because I’m in the habit of moving the keyboard, not changing to a different keyboard.

Yeah.

So for that and some other reasons I’ve not been playing; none of my friends actually want to play with me; I could use some guidance while I learn the game, but it’s not easy when all your friends have already leveled way past you. Especially when said so-called friends have communications and patience issues. S___ tends to say something; if I ask him to repeat it because I had trouble hearing, or because I didn’t understand, he shuts up and doesn’t say anything. (And I don’t mean Snarb. Different game; really great guy.) A great teacher never ever repeats himself because, you know, repetition isn’t the key to learning, or any such shit, right? Sorry, rant over.

Once in a while I try to find a standalone programmable keypad or keyboard that has buttons in what are blank space in a regular keyboard. In other words, I want a button in the home row, immediately left of the Numpad, because that will let me hold Sprint down without (as much) cramping. A week or two ago I found the one you see at the top and put it on my wishlist. I added a set of red-and-white keycaps because, well, I’ve inadvertently started a bit of a red-and-white theme with my equipment, which I won’t go into here -- this shit’s already too long. Also stuck on my Amazon wishlist.

Yeah. So. Destiny 2 is being shifted from Blizzard to Steam in October. Meantime apparently they’ve gone to a free-to-play model, which I should resent because I paid for it? Apparently? I dunno, when TF2 did that I figured I’d gotten more than my money’s worth out of the game. Here I feel a bit more cheated, seeing as how I haven’t played it more than a few hours. But still, whatever. I went through the motions of getting it transferred to my Steam account. It should show up soon. I guess. Beginning of October.

And now my friend Blacksix (another great guy, and one of my oldest current gaming buddies, hailing back to my Urban Terror days) wants to play. Last night he texted me and said he wanted to try it, was preloading it, and encouraged me to preload it too. I went ahead and did that, reasoning that my account should migrate into that if they didn’t fuck things up, but I don’t really have anything to lose -- never played enough to accumulate any resources. Like, any. Not like, any significant resources; no resources. Just the initial playthrough on a few characters. No money or manna or coins or credits or tokens (or whatever this game uses for commerce) or weapons or, well, anything. Blacksix is going to want to do an initial playthrough anyway.

And then I had to decide: am I going to follow through with this? I found this nifty keypad that should solve all my mapping problems. But it’s $90. But I can afford the occasional $90 purchase. It may even let me play Metal Gear if I really want to try. It’ll apparently let me set up specific mappings for specific games and swap them easily.

So, I figured, what the fuck. Last night I put in an order for this keyboard (the 46-key layout, since it starts with the numeric keypad layout I’m used to and the left side is all individual keys; and Cherry MX switches) and this replacement keytop set. And while I was at it, a copy of Twice Upon a Time, because damned if it’s not one of the best movies EVAR and more than $25 entitles me to free shipping.

So now I’m all a-quiver with anticipation.

#7dtd #7 days to die #urban terror #tf2 #weapons factory #koolertron #keypad #cherry mx #programmable keypad #metal gear soild 5 #gateway 2000 anykey #doom #killing floor #destiny 2 #twice upon a time

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