#they're real players with real feelings

[lover-of-mine]

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[martyryo]

Drawing undertale for the memories

Click for better quality also 😤

[mymarifae]

also this update has more personalized actually voiced lines from stelle periodically and it's making me really happy. because i adore her voice and we are BEATING those stupid "player insert" allegations. i picked "it's time for [march] to become the best swordmaster on the express" and then stelle just kinda tacks this snarky little comment on of her own volition

[blujayonthewing]

SUPREMELY frustrating that we found something actually really cool and intriguing and plot relevant in tonight's session but I'm still so constantly preoccupied with whether the DM is going to 100% kill us with sheer poor game design that I barely have enough brainspace left over to even enjoy it

[b4kuch1n]

Your swsh art always makes me want to replay the game because i love it and its my favorite pokemon game and every time i play another pokemon game i think of it how i miss certain elements from swsh. Then i boot up the game and im once again caught in the 1 hour 40 minutes hand held intro and im like ah- now i remember why i have been playing other pokemon games instead of this one. Happy (late?) birthday!

you don't want to listen to hop? you don't want to hear him teach you about type matchups? you don't wanna let him cheer u on...? 🥺 waa....?

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[cityofduluthmn]

Gonna be really honest here, I'm genuinely worried about a Trump victory in November specifically because of Michigan.

My hometown was extremely pro-Biden in 2020. Aside from a few crazy neighbors, it was very safely leaning Biden and had a historically high voter turnout that year. Nowadays, Biden is viewed and discussed with vitriol, and rightly so given his disastrous policies and complicity in the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Nowadays, all you see around town are some Trump signs and flags, when four years ago it was absolutely plastered with Biden/Harris ads. Our mayor made national headlines for refusing to host the president on a visit.

Biden won Michigan by just over 100,000 votes in 2020. My hometown, now leaning towards Trump by virtue of a huge segment of our population ostensibly abstaining, has about 106,000 people.

Trump could very feasibly take the state of Michigan and 14 electoral votes with it in November because of one single suburb.

I understand that we're fucking pissed at Biden right now, and we absolutely should be because what he's done is abhorrent. But an election isn't a business where boycotts/targeted abstentions are going to hurt the government directly. Even if only five people vote in the election, the person who wins still gets to be the president for four years. Especially if you live in a swing state, you need to consider the entirety of what's at stake with this election.

We need to consider whether we want the president to be a person who's maintained the status quo and participated in genocide, or someone who is going to actively make the ongoing genocide worse and initiate more. Palestine isn't the only thing at stake here (and it's not even necessarily at stake. Trump has been very open and unambiguous about his support for Israel in the past. Biden is not great but trump is going to be so much worse just in that regard) and even though our system sucks actual garbage and doesn't represent the interests of anyone, we can't jeapordize the tenuous little progress we have made over a principle that isn't going to matter in the end anyway unless we have a viable alternative ready.

[hella1975]

hella do you think you could dumb bitchify aftg 🥺

(your making me want to get it but idk yet)

NO. GET HELP

[baravaggio]

just started playing tears of the kingdom & am being reminded of how my favorite thing about playing zelda is the way the game's internal logic feels so intuitive even if you're not a gamer like it's really amazing...idk if people who have grown up with video games more generally pick up on that or see how special it is! kind of hard to explain but so many games feel like they follow a parallel video game logic when it comes to things like visual cueing & puzzles, which can be more or less easily picked up on if the player is someone who's familiar with gaming & game logic, but can be really frustrating if you're not...botw was such a special experience for me because I felt like the game was letting me figure things out more naturally if that makes sense, like even if I was totally oblivious all the hints the game built in to guide me through a puzzle or area (and I often was LOL) I could still achieve what I was trying to by just using my head bc the game is built in a way to make that possible. which is very cool!

[doodlboy]

I've never thought about the game unlocking more areas after someone dies in that way but honestly that makes me really sad

Ikr? It feels so much more cruel and isolating that the characters get more space to live the more they kill each other off.

When they first get there, they all spend time on the first floor, it's easier to find them and interact with them. But as the floors open up, everyone disperses, and you have to actively hunt for characters you want to talk to. [Or just open the menu and just fast-travel nearby, but that's not the same as aimlessly wandering the halls hoping to see them pop up]

It probably doesn't help that the hallways all look like this

Which makes it very easy to get lost and turned around if you don't know where you're going

[aq2003]

the most personally vindicating thing about the hamlet (2009) commentary is doran pointing out the curtains behind hamlet during act 1 scene 5 and how it alludes to the story being a stage production and hints to a sense of theatricality about it all like YESSSSSS that's exactly why i became actively crazy about hamlet (particularly this adpatation) again

[honestlyvan]

👀👀 rlly interesting read on ovan, would love to hear some abt ur hcs on him n corbenik

(Now on DW!)

So it's been a hot minute since I watched Terminal Disc so my memory of the details of the canon are very vague, but I definitely think it's likely that the Epitaphs attached themselves to players in reverse numerical order, making Ovan the first and unintentionally the template for how becoming an Epitaph-PC would play out.

Corbenik is sort of funny as a Phase because the way it's laid out in the Epitaph, Corbenik serves no function until the Wave wipes out its intended target, and it's left behind to observe the void. As long as the system state isn't disturbed and no new AI begins to emerge, Corbenik stays passive theoretically forever -- but once it is disturbed, it rouses the rest of the Wave to come clean up what was left unfinished.

(I recognise this isn't how we see it play out in R1, I'm basing this on the idea that Morganna designed the Wave to be essentially self-propagating against Aura. The stalemate is the point, the rolling waves razing any fertile ground for her to develop on in favour of perpetual despair and the call of the void.)

With Corbenik as the rearguard of the apocalypse, it could have easily been the most active (least inactive?) of the Phases during the period of calm after Aura takes over Morganna's duties -- with no AI competing with Aura available to suppress, it was essentially on standby, latching onto Ovan the moment he showed up and then doing nothing until it registered the AIDA that also attached itself to Ovan.

Which is the thing that really fucks Ovan over, I think. The body timeshare he has with Tri-Edge is stressful enough, but Corbenik is also perpetually making him identify himself as the greatest threat to system integrity. So he's essentially getting a triple dose of the Epitaph "the solution is Fucking Kill Yourself" heightened self-destructive urge -- from the nature of the Cursed Wave, from the Vagrant AI-fication of the Phases and being (in part) his own natural-born enemy.

On top of this, Corbenik is perpetually calling to the other Phases like "over here! I've identified the enemy! Here is an AI we need to stop from reaching self-actualisation!" So candidates are drawn to him, unconsciously recognise him as having seniority, and then immediately identify him as the threat to be eliminated. People keep forming a kind of proxy disordered attachment to him, feeling compelled to follow his orders but also feeling threatened by his presence and become driven by the urge to destroy him.

Haseo is particularly vulnerable to this because Skeith and Corbenik are so intertwined in their roles, the first Phase is the one the last calls the strongest, and his personal sense of betrayal only amplifies the destructive resonance. And the influence goes both ways, the more Skeith perceives Corbenik's host as the main threat, the more Corbenik calls on Skeith as the vanguard to eliminate that threat. Haseo's (perceived) perception of him directly influences Ovan's perception of himself -- with everyone else Ovan is very particular about asserting his own reality, but with Haseo, the way Haseo sees him takes priority over how Ovan sees himself.

[blackvahana]

Well! Well. I shut off Oblivion. I went to annoy Lev in the astral. He has a body chilling on my bed reading something or playing with something or. whatever. Anyway. So I start making Poses at him again because something in my goddamn biology needs to fucking do weird ass bird mating dances at him at every given opportunity. My bed is right beside my desk, head of the bed and back of the desk are in a line. Im sitting at my desk physically. I'm like oh. Sudden strong spirit presence beside me! Said hi to Lev guessing he got up to watch over my shoulder because I closed oblivion and he was asking me about it (so he probably came to look) and then was like. Oh that's not you is it. Because. That's where my astral body is.

Yeah no that was me. Because I could turn around and look through planes into my faces.

It's not the first time I've had a strong presence in the astral! I do that every once in a blue moon. I've dropped the temperature and brightness of rooms before, the spirits possessing my body have felt me before in the way I feel them but

I. don't talk about this because I don't agree p shifting is a thing but this is dangerously close to p shifting type beliefs, but in my and my groups experience spirits can actually physically come here. All planes are connected, it's not about a Veil but about a huge magnetic gap between this plane and the others and it's huge polarisation that means you need a fuck tonne of energy to translate yourself into a body on this plane And to get back out of it so it tends it really just be gods coming here and generally as shit like animals so they don't get Spotted. Generally. I don't care if anyone believes me I don't talk about it for others - uh. double meaning there. I'm not talking about it for others now, and usually I never mention it for others' sakes. This is not about others

But I was thinking that. I get thoughts crossing my mind especially lately about "well if I had a fuck tonne of energy, could I be here in two bodies...." in the way of the theory of it. trying to understand more about how this plane works and whatnot. this.

This was the first time. looking at myself through planes. Where I was like. I have two bodies in the same universe. both real. both exist. both are me. This is not some abstract "I exist and then the astral is some foreign place" I was in another body as real as this one on the fucking other side of the veil and I felt myself there. Like I've felt myself in the astral before, but now I'm like. spirits are not vague fucking things. I know they're real i Know the theory but I never let myself KNOW the theory

[bluupxels]

as much as i enjoy the rancher/cowboy aesthetic the idea of horses in a non open world is so fucking stupid to me like where are we going? cant even go to the neighbors house without a loading screen those horses will NOT be getting enough exercise

[corpocyborg]

Just started a full renegade play through and god some of these choices remind me why I normally play renegon. It’s not the immoral choices that bother me, it’s the inconsistency. Sometimes you come off as a no-nonsense hardass willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done and other times you just come off like a raging psychopath. Full paragon is generally way more consistent with their characterization but full renegade can’t decide if they’re willing to make harsh decisions for a greater principle or if they’re sadistic, if they’re reckless or if they have a stick up their butt, if they’re strong and silent or whiny and accusatory, etc. And this could potentially work if the hypocrisy was acknowledged and incorporated into the story as a character flaw, but half the scenes feel like you’re just terrorizing people and they’re just laying down and taking it. To be fair, they get a lot better about this in later games, but I wish the characterization was more consistent and I wish there were more realistic reactions to renegade behavior. Maybe it’s because game designers know most people don’t do those kinds of routes and they’re worried that if they had genuine consequences for bad behavior, even less people would do it, but in my opinion, that type of narrative works a lot better when it feels like there’s actual stakes and also rationale for the behavior. There’s several distinct times where renegade choices could have easily been presented as “sacrifice for the greater good” or something along those lines, but for whatever reason they put in dialogue where you’re just being an asshole instead. Killing the rachni queen, for example. The base idea is good. You’re unsure if you can truly trust her. Are you mercifully saving a benevolent creature or is it fooling you and you’re unleashing a terror onto the world? That’s a great idea, but the dialogue doesn’t present it right. And then there’s too many times where the renegade decision just seems completely illogical. Like on Feros, what reason do you have to kill the colonists instead of incapacitate them? It’s just as easy to incapacitate them, there is no loss to it, so if you still chose to kill them, you just come off as irrational and totally careless.  The narrative as a whole pushes the whole “renegade shep is ruthless but gets the job done” depiction, but they just don’t actually present it consistently. Which, again, could work if it was played off as Shepard making excuses for their behavior or believing they’re doing the right thing but just going too far due to losing sight of the bigger picture or something like that, but the inconsistency doesn’t come off as an intentional character flaw of hypocrisy, it just comes off as inconsistent writing. I know they’re less motivated to write that story well because it is so much less popular for the average player, but maybe it would be more popular if they wrote it better. Don’t get me wrong, I love renegade Shepard, just... the one that I’ve created in my head and pieced together from the well-written parts of renegade dialogue. Or more like the one that the narrative promises but doesn’t consistently deliver.

[cloudprincesslady]

i'm sure a million people have already said this sorta thing but goddamn this is the most frustrating hour of critical role i've ever watched