#they ARE playing the long game

[jlf23tumble]

Diff anon about Louis career. I agree to all your points but I also want to say my problem with his promo so far has not been about chart success/streaming numbers at all. It's just that they made close to none effort to expand his fanbase. Soccer Am, Le resistance were a very welcome addition. But other than that especially in US none. And if as louis says he wants to make 5 albums and tour for 10 years, it's impossible with his current fanbase. A fanbase where majority of them throw a fit if he simply mentions his kid or others who like to criticize his every career move. Like there's too much friction. Majority these ppl are going to get exhausted one day and simply leave cuz let's be real he is never no longer going to fit in their theories. He/his team have way too much faith in this fickle fandom. It's not sustainable.

I just want him to have some casual fans. Outside of this nonsense. Who got no interest in his personal life but are just happy with his music. Enough with larrie/rad/ solos can he just have louies instead.

See, I don't think that's strictly true--I very much think he can and will bring in new people, casual fans, and you know how I know? Because he's literally doing it, lol, and maybe they aren't millions of people coming to him from my dentist's office playlist, but they are coming in, albeit in smaller numbers and with a delayed start and from different vectors. I think he and his team know what they're doing, I think they *have* made the effort to expand his fanbase (it's in the negative space, if you're asking me), and if their goal is to shed the ickier bits of his current fanbase, the whingey ones who can't handle the concept of a kid or other facets of his life, then GOOD, shed away, my liege. He has name recognition for life, if he wanted to tour for the next twenty years based on his discography to date to a smaller crowd, sprinklin' in a new tune every now and again, he could, and quite easily (soooo many bands do that to this day). I think a lot of his fans need to face the fact that he's not Harry Styles, nor does he seem to want to be, that he's not going to have that level of crazy, nor does he seem to aspire to it. I also question if he really DOES want to be touring in ten years' time--he could change his mind, he could just be saying that to placate the nervous nells in his core base, but at the end of the day, he doesn't owe anyone the truth about where he'll be in a decade. Who among us even knows that for a fact for ourselves?

[chloesimaginationthings]

This could be a kart if FLAF wasn't fucking around..

[ratanarchist]

james marsters deliberately playing spike in a more sympathetic way to avoid his character being killed off after season 2 so he could keep his job is so funny. guy was literally scheming his way into job security by turning a throwaway villain into emo boy audience bait and it WORKED. gotta say i respect the grind

[sleepy-bebby]

From the Chinese dating game show 非诚勿扰 (Fei Cheng Wu Rao), If You Are The One.

[factual-fantasy]

Ya'll.. hear me out-

[cup-o-stars]

All Straw Hats!

(New Images: Chopper, Franky, Brook, Jinbei)

This was ultimately quite fun and made me push my colors harder than I have in a very long while! This last batch was definitely my favorite.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The musical episode.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[jennaflare]

So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked

I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)

In Stars and Time

In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.

In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.

The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.

Roadwarden

In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.

Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.

The Longing

The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.

The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.

Papers, Please

Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.

Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.

The Return of the Obra Dinn

From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.

I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.

Outer Wilds

In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?

The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.

If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers

In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.

This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!

Pentiment

Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.

The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.

Other games you might wanna check out

Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)

[shripscapi]

The darkness always ends, Magdalene. We must remember that.

[mokeonn]

I am trying to decide what I want to draw today so I think I'm gonna make the Mane 6 in the sims and see where it goes from there

[kafus]

how i caught entei in leafgreen in the most ridiculous way possible

SO last week i started a pokemon leafgreen file on my childhood cart i've had since my 5th birthday, and one my goals ended up being getting every owned dex entry possible in JUST the one copy of leafgreen without connecting to any other game… and i did. except i forgot one. ENTEI!!

like probably a lot of you reading this i COMPLETELY forgot that one of the johto roaming beasts is in every copy of FRLG. i never even caught any of them as a kid. which roamer you get is based on your starter (squirtle = raikou, bulbasaur = entei, charmander = suicune) and i happened to pick bulbasaur so my roamer was entei. it does actually ROAM in kanto, aka whenever you change locations, the pokemon moves to a new route. obviously this is a pain in the ass, but it gets even more painful because roamers can flee from the battle and they will the instant you encounter them. you get the chance to throw one ball or use one move and that's it… so like in most pokemon games, you would use a trapping move like mean look to keep the roamer in the battle and turn it into a normal legendary encounter, right? HAHA WRONG

raikou and entei are affected by the ROAMER ROAR BUG in FRLG, which means if they use roar to escape the battle (yes, even in mean look, it doesn't stop roar from working) they just disappear from the game. permanently. forever. you can never capture it. suicune is not affected by this because it doesn't have roar, but my roamer was entei, so uh. the odds were stacked against me. did i want to repetitively encounter the roamer over and over, never trapping it, just throwing one ball each time? or did i want to set up a mean look pokemon only to have to soft reset every time entei used roar? neither option sounded fun and i was going to just give up and master ball it despite REALLY wanting it in a luxury ball like all the other kanto legendaries i had already caught… UNTIL!

i am a moderator of the ribbon master discord (a different pokemon challenge) and i was just sorta liveposting my thought process about this annoying roamer when gen 3 rng manipulation extraordinaire ddeeffgg crashes into the chat and suggests this fucking bonkers idea. and his bonkers idea is galaxy brain LET ME EXPLAIN

ariados is available in leafgreen's post game by catching spinarak in pattern bush, and of course electrode is a fairly common kanto pokemon. ariados gets access to spider web, which is basically just mean look with a different name (and i completely forgot it existed), it traps the opponent in the battle. but IMPORTANTLY, it ALSO gets access to BATON PASS… which, in gen 3, passes the trapping effect! usually if you were to use spider web and swap out ariados, the opponent would no longer be trapped, but baton pass solves that! and then electrode has the ability soundproof which prevents roar from working, and it even gets thunder wave (paralysis) and sonicboom (consistent 20 damage with no chance of accidental crits) to assist in easier capture of entei! nice!! awesome!! but getting this setup in order is the most ridiculous shit i've ever done in leafgreen

PROBLEM #1: ariados gets baton pass through egg move. in gen 3, egg moves are only passed down by the father and not the mother, so i had to grab a male ledyba, grind it to a high enough level to learn baton pass, then grab a female spinarak and breed them together. unfortunately this means my ariados would be level 1 and i'd have to train it up quite a bit, which leads into my next problem…

PROBLEM #2: ariados is SLOWWW. its base speed is a measly 40 compared to entei's whopping 100! ariados needs to outspeed entei to use spider web first turn so entei can't just run away! i would have to get ariados to a very high level to outspeed entei, grinding all the way from level 1. the one plus side is that the roamers in FRLG are bugged to always have a 0 IV in defense, special attack, special defense, and speed, which means unless entei has a +speed nature, its speed would always be a predictable and relatively low 105 at level 50, which is what it's encountered at. so i had to get an ariados with a speed of 106 or higher.

to get around both these problems as efficiently as possible, while breeding spinarak, i bred quite a few to get one with a +speed nature, and ended up with a jolly spinarak. everstone doesn't work in FRLG unfortunately, so the nature was completely random each time. soon my DAUGHTER WAS BORN after like 2-3 hours of breeding because FRLG eggs are SLOOOW and i was being stubborn about the nature, which i was getting unlucky on LOL

then i maxed out her speed EVs real quick by fighting picnicker susie on route 13 over and over, who gives 12 speed EVs per battle, 24 with the macho brace, which i was using. this was just to make sure i would reach 106+ speed as fast as possible. then i grinded her levels by repetitively fighting the two trainers right outside the weird chansey dance guy's house in sevault canyon on seven island, right above tanoby ruins. using the vs seeker on them is the best grinding spot in the game since they give 20k experience per fighting both of them and there's a healing spot Right There. i was using exp share and leading with my level 100 jolteon named Egg who i adore with all my heart. ariados, now named koolaid, ended up crossing the speed threshold at level 62! yes this took a while lmao

as for electrode, i wanted one at as high of a level as possible so i hopefully wouldn't have to grind levels. i lucked out as electrode is found at a whopping level 64 in cerulean cave's bottom floor. a 5% encounter rate but as i had already caught numerous 5%s for the pokedex, i didn't really care. however it DOES have explosion and i'd rather not have the electrode explode on me before i could catch it which would then send me on a wild goose chase for ANOTHER 5% electrode… so i grabbed the random level 24 poliwhirl with the damp ability, which prevents explosion from working, out of my PC, and gave it a smoke ball from the celadon game corner so i could lead with her and easily run from each encounter that Wasn't Electrode.

now you may be wondering how i was going to handle capturing electrode once i was actually in the battle because SURELY it would just use thunderbolt or something and instantly murder my poliwhirl. however funnily enough electrode only has two attacking moves at level 64, swift and explosion. explosion obviously doesn't work, and swift is a physical attack in gen 3 due to all normal type moves being physical, this was before the physical/special split in gen 4. electrode's physical attack stat is a garbage 50 and swift only has a base power of 60 so i honestly wasn't concerned. and best of all, poliwhirl gets the move hypnosis, so i could easily put electrode to sleep and start chucking ultra balls… and the smoke ball ended up being useless because i somehow ran into electrode first try what the fuck LOL

anyways i named them gatorade to match with koolaid. truly the dream entei capturing team. i didn't even feel the need to grind any levels on gatorade, level 64 was more than enough, so i just slapped the two moves i wanted on them - thunder wave through the one-use tutor in silph co, and sonicboom through the move reminder on two island, costing me two tinymushrooms which i thankfully already had and did not have to go out of my way to grind.

however the hours worth of prep ISN'T DONE YET! because uhh…

PROBLEM #3: ariados has to be above entei's level to outspeed it (yes, even if it had a 31 IV in speed AND a speed boosting nature AND maximum speed EVs, it still wouldn't be enough at level 50), which means the repel trick can't be used to encounter it. tracking down the roamer is practically impossible without using repels to cancel out all other wild pokemon, and in gen 3, unlike later gens, you can't put a fainted pokemon in the front of the party for the repel trick instead. and if i DON'T lead with ariados, entei will run away when i try to swap into it. SO i decided i would have to run into entei once first through the repel trick method, which marks it as "seen" in the pokedex, and then i would track its location through the pokedex to encounter it while leading with ariados.

to accomplish this, i simply ran in and out of the building on route 16, going in and out of the grass in the process, which would constantly be randomizing entei's location until it happened to randomize onto route 16. i caught a staryu with illuminate as an ability to raise the chance of entei appearing, which does work while staryu is fainted (wouldn't want to go in and out of the grass while entei was on route 16 without encountering it!) and otherwise led with my level 50 magmar that was on my elite four team named Torch for the repel trick.

i bought a whopping 100 max repels for this task but i ended up getting entei within just a few lol. torch was holding the smoke ball just to be able to run away safely without any shenanigans!

and now entei was in the pokedex and able to be tracked that way!

however, there was still ONE more problem...

PROBLEM #4: luxury balls are a pain in the ASS to get in this game! they can't be bought from any shop. the only way to repeatedly get luxury balls in FRLG is to show a pokemon to selphy, a rich girl who lives in resort gorgeous on five island.

i will mostly skim over this because it's boring, but TLDR i had to continuously talk to her, fly back to the pokemon center, get the pokemon she wanted to see out of the PC because the step limit is 250 before she gets sick of waiting which is like nothing (i already had a living dex of every mon obtainable in leafgreen otherwise so this wasn't hard), surf to her, then spam A through dialogue with her butler in which i had a 70% chance of receiving a luxury ball. i did this over 40 times until i had 30 luxury balls, and sold off all the nuggets and other items she gave me. good lord this took a while

and now with ALL of that setup i was FINALLY ready to capture entei in a luxury ball. this took me literally all day and i was really excited. to consistently encounter entei, i saved in cerulean city and tracked it in the pokedex from there, opening it over and over after changing to any of the four routes connected to the city, and moving to an adjacent route from entei's location when it was close in the hopes of walking onto the same route it moved to when i did. i was following a map made by hangarofroam, he has a video tutorial on how to shiny hunt the FRLG roamers and encounter them as quickly as possible, and i highly recommend looking it up if you want to capture these roamers yourself, but tldr this is the map i was using:

and once i encountered entei i was finally able to use the strategy i had prepped so long to do... and it worked without a hitch!! entei can't try to use roar first turn because it wastes a turn trying to flee, which is prevented by ariados outspeeding and using spider web... then if it tries to use roar the next turn, i've already switched into electrode to block it with soundproof. so from there it's just a matter of whittling down entei's HP to the red with swift/sonicboom and paralyzing it with thunder wave, then tossing luxury balls until success!

and i GOT IT after 3 encounter attempts and 73 luxury balls thrown. and FINALLY i have all 171 national dex entries possible in a single copy of leafgreen with no connection to other games, and all the legendaries are in fancy ass luxury balls. i am winning.

this was ridiculous. please be proud of my accomplishments. i've had this file for less than 2 weeks and i already have over 70 hours of gameplay in it after doing all this AAAAA

also barely related but look at Egg my jolteon he had like no purpose in this story but i took a pic of him in front of entei before going on to capture entei because i love him so much pleas

thanks for coming to my fucking ted talk i am SOOO normal about pokemonsdfjkfds (joke)

[onebizarrekai]

random userbase data time

(listed almost every/every game as one option in case you skipped out on some of the multiplayer ones)

please reblog after you vote for Maximum Data, even if you voted no! if you voted for one of the other options, tag your favorite game(s)!

I am just very interested in the presence of the zelda fanbase :>

please note that, for the sake of this poll, remakes count as one game. so like, if you've played the original ocarina of time and master quest and the 3ds version, that counts as one game.

[christadeguchi]

have some couth babygirl

[zhukzucraft]

=> Martyn: Have a flashback

Your adventure started, as they often do, with some daring exploration. You gave Jimmy the good old soulmate punch test and felt nothing. And yet, it felt only natural to stick together.

The two of you happened upon some fortuitous surface iron, which you bartered for some provisions for the road.

The provisions ran out sooner than you expected.

...But with your soulmates, whoever they were, seeming more than ready to eat for two, your adventure didn't have to end there.

Unfortunately, wood isn't something that can be shared through the soulmate bond. You had to leave, pronto.

Martyn: Phew! Was that a productive trip or-

Jimmy: Martyn I'm not healing!!

Martyn: Wha-

Jimmy: The hearts!! They're not going up!!! What if something shoots at me now??

Martyn: Damn, really? Hold on, let me get us into a boat at least

Jimmy: Oh man oh god oh man

=> End Flashback

Start Over -- Go Back

[pealooza]

need a monster gf sooooo bad (theyre both the monster gf)

[mkstrigidae]

Backgrounds? *puts on sunglasses* I don't know her.

My favorite girl Sansa, here to eat lemon cakes and take names.