#why can’t he get more love from ubi

[meisakurohashi]

I have to do everything myself

(“New” Echo art based on seeing companions get into Siege for the first time while I was quietly enjoying Extraction after two years of playing Siege primarily solo simply due to lack of mutual interest in friend groups)

I wish Echo had more proper lore so people drew him but I could also say the same about Flores, the other half of my Siege experience. I think I tend to like unpopular guys unfortunately

[wincestreversebang]

2024 Master Post

Title: Soulbound Enchantment Artist: midnightsilver Author: masoena Other Pairing: mention of ofc/omc Rating: Explicit Warnings/Spoilers: Non-consensual groping, explicit canon-typical violence, non-consensual body transformation Summary: Sam and Dean wake up in a lush, green landscape; a world decidedly not where they remember being before. Sam also realizes he is no longer human as they embark on an adventure to figure out where and why they are in this place. The path to solving this case is dotted with tender, angst-filled, violent and scary moments as the Winchesters work together to figure out how to save themselves in more ways than one. Art: Ao3 Story: Ao3

Title: You Circle Me In the Night Artist: morokollisyo Author: theteacupunicorn Rating: Mature Warnings/Spoilers: Canon-typical violence, violence happening to a sixteen-year-old Sam Summary: Dean plopped down next to Sam. “Guess I’ll be taking the cot tonight, huh?”

“You don’t have to,” Sam said at once. “I don’t want you to get kicked out of your bed because I couldn’t dodge some ghost.”

Dean smiled. “Well, can’t say I’m complaining.” He got comfortable in his bed, only a couple inches from Sam, and promptly shoved his pillow in Sam’s face.

“Dean!” Sam sputtered, whacking Dean with the pillow once he could see again.

Dean cackled, but they both froze when John’s stern voice resounded. “Boys, settle down.”

Dean took his pillow back from Sam and tucked it under his head. “Sorry,” he said in a small voice. He looked confused again, like he had in the car when John had told him not to worry about Sam’s injury. Art:Live Journal | Ao3 Story:Ao3

Title: Fixing a Hole Artist: i-already-know-im-going-2-hell Author: amypond45 Rating: R Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2 AU, Wincest (explicit at times) Summary: This story is a retelling of Season 2, starting when Dean reveals what Dad said to him in the hospital at the beginning of “Hunted”. Instead of running off, Sam confesses that he’s had a premonition about this very moment. He already knows what Dean’s about to tell him, as well as their entire, bloody future until the moment Sam jumps into the pit. As he reveals his visions to Dean, it soon becomes clear that they need to find a way to prevent the death and destruction laid out for them in those visions. One thing leads to another, with revelations of feelings long buried deep. Can Sam, with Dean’s help, find a way to avoid the coming apocalypse, just by falling in love? Or are they destined to retravel the road to distrust that leads to their own demise and the end of the world — or the saving of it after years of loss and sacrifice? And if they stop it from happening, what does that say about them as men, as brothers, and as heroes? Art:Ao3 Story:Live Journal | Ao3

Title: Ubi Amor, Ibi Dolor Artist: deeranger Author: hello-starlingfics Other Pairing: past Sam/Lucifer Rating: E Warnings/Spoilers: Rape/Noncon (described and in the past), Violence, Torture, PTSD. Sexual activity between the boys with consent from neither. Summary: While investigating a possible coven, Sam and Dean get a lead: an abandoned factory just outside of town. When they check it out, things go sideways fast. Art:Twitter | Tumblr Story:Ao3

Title: Crafting Happiness Artist: StepicliffeGrey Author: SamandDean76 Rating: Explicit Warnings/Spoilers: Canon-Typical Violence, Non-Graphic Violence, Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Series, Men of Letters Bunker, Canon Compliant, Story Runs For The Duration Of The Series, Pre-Series Sam, Dean, & John, Hurt Sam Winchester, Protective Dean Winchester, First Time Summary: Nine-year old Sam had fifty cents and a mission. To find a hidden treasure in the thrift store that he could make his own. It would end up taking him his entire life, but what he found at the bottom of that dingy bin became a lifeline that helped to guide him on a journey that few others could even begin to imagine. Through all the ups and downs, and with Dean ever by his side, Sam did his best to craft some happiness for not only himself, but all those he cherished. Art:Ao3 Story:Ao3

Title: I Was Born To Press My Head Between Your Shoulder Blades Artist: MidnightSilver Author: TheyDraggedMeInNowIAintLeaving Rating: Mature Warnings/Spoilers: Canon divergence, soulmate identifying marks, reference canon up til season 5, John Winchester’s A+ parenting, description of canon level violence, djinn, allusions to dying of dehydration, pining, men kissing, sappy ending Summary: In a world where only soulmates can see their soulmarks, Dean has one curving around his finger. His soulmate on the other hand doesn’t have one.

Except maybe he does Art:Ao3 Story:Ao3

Title: Vampire Cotton Candy Artist: Bluefire986 Author: Masoena Rating: NC-17 Warnings/Spoilers: Rape/Non-con (not between Sam/Dean), explicit violence, temporary character death (transformation to creature) Summary: In this story Sam hits a wolf at the outset of season 8 causing him and Amelia to meet under different circumstances as he transforms into a werewolf later on. Dean returns from purgatory and immediately figures out what Sam is, together they try and work out this new normal. Dean being kidnapped by vampires turns their already crazy upside down once more as they are both hurt in the process and must fight to be free once more. Art:Live Journal | Ao3 Story:Ao3

Title: Pain In My Heart Artist: bluefire986​ Author: hello-starlingfics​ Rating: Mature Warnings/Spoilers: Canon-typical torture and violence, non-consensual touching and kissing. One mention of offscreen suicides early in the fic. Summary: Post-4x16 On The Head Of A Pin.

Dean stomped back to their motel room alone. This hunt was a bust and Sam had disappeared as soon as they’d realized that it hadn’t been a pair of witchcraft-related murders, but a suicide pact between two people with a history of mental health issues longer than even Sam’s arm. It had been a depressing and frustrating day, and Sam bailing on him made everything worse. Art:Live Journal | Ao3 Story:Ao3

Title: Hollow Pursuits Artist: MidnightSilver Author: Kestra_Tori Rating: M Warnings/Spoilers: Public Nudity, Weirdcest, Incestuous Thoughts Summary: Odd deaths bring the boys to a placed called the Happy Hippie Hollow. To Dean’s chagrin it’s a nudist colony. Sam rolls with it. Art:Ao3 Story:Tumblr | Ao3

[ilikedetectives]

“Eivor is m!Eivor’s skin!”, sweetie, calm down, the dude doesn’t even have a name, he’s just called “M_Player” in the game files. At least Eivor was called Jora.

“Jora is a gender-neutral name!”, honey, how feminine or gender-neutral do you think “M_Player” is? Are you saying Ubi originally planned to give us 2 male protags to choose from? Are you hearing yourself? Just so we’re clear “M_Player” means “Male Player”, not Magnus, lol.

ACK_Jora_Head_DiffuseMap_PC_Ggp_Prospero_Scarlett 1868049798387

Head_M_Player_DiffuseMap_PC_Ggp_Prospero_Scarlett 1868050260562

We don’t know why the devs changed Jora to Eivor (my gut feeling? Probably cuz they wanna make sure there’s no question about female is canon, as if “Let the Animus decide” mode, she/hers pronouns even if you play as male, and Varinsdottir/Varin’s Daughter aren’t enough proof), because Eivor is undeniably a female name, specifically, an old woman’s name. Think of it like Beth for example. So yea, female has always been in the plan to be canon from the get go. If “M_Player” doesn’t show how much the narrative team doesn’t care about him (I’m sure marketing team loves him tho), idk what can; narrative team didn’t even bother consider a name for him lol. 

So yea, the physical attributes of Eivor are definitely intentional as part of her character. Listen, I know it’s trendy to shit on Ubi for reusing base game assets like Helix outfits (have you seen the Roman statues in Alexandria in Origins popping in Asgard lololol?) and Ubi totally deserves it, but it’s not the case here. Eivor walks like a brute. Idk about you but growing up in Nordic winter, walking in knee to waist-high snow, carrying heavy supplies, while riding horses, fighting, and fishing, I don’t think Eivor can walk like Aspasia/Hekate. Even then, Ubi could’ve easily gave Eivor Aspasia’s walking animation, swap and done; shit, they could’ve given her Kassandra’s walking animation, they have all the feminine walking animations in their assets library from Origins and Odyssey to choose from if they want, but they didn’t! I’m convinced that this is intentional. Holy hell, Eivor has arm hair, do you know how rare that is in video games? A female protag with arm hair? Granted the LOD is :hidethepain:, but I see they’re putting in the effort! If someone says she’s men’s skin for her hairstyle, armor, and voice, Imma summon Abby and let her slap some misogynies out of you. Also if you say you can’t relate to a queer character cuz she isn’t strictly attracted to only men, please get your homophobic ass out of my blog. The devs could’ve gone with a more feminine Eivor to “sell” better like what the higher-ups/marketing want, but they didn’t! So celebrate that spirit, instead of shitting on it because your misogynist brains can’t understand the narrative for a gnc, queer woman.

“But but, there are choices!” oh, do you hear that? That is the sound of Ubi making sfm money with turning AC into an RPG that these RPG elements are here to stay, “Let the Animus decide” is a good meet-me-half-way method to let those who want to experience the story as canon, suck it up buttercups.

Conclusion: a lot of us (including me) would love a stand-alone female lead, but that takes progress, especially with Ubi’s culture. Change is not immediate, higher-ups will always be higher-ups. Progress is slow, but I do see some improvements, at least in terms of canon. We go from not knowing Kassandra is canon until the scandal last year to now having multiple explicit proofs from the game and a canon gameplay mode showing Eivor is canon: she is queer, she is buff, her voice is rough, and she has arm hair! I, and a lot of people, like to count this small victory. You want changes, good for you, but don’t shit on the progress made so far that basically lays the foundation for better changes to come, as “lazy” work, because you can’t handle gnc, queer women as women. You get changes by celebrating the small victories, not shitting on it.

[what-ever-happened-to-chip]

The Adventures of Squall

Squall's observations. Hmm. I don't know what Rinoa wants me to do. I guess I'll ask Eli for his notes and just give them to her. *knock knock* "Cheerio good boy, may  I help you with anything?" "Do you have notes on that thing Christian was talking about?" "Ahh you've came to the right residence, just let me....hold on just a moment..." He began digging through piles of loose paper, flipping through notebooks, all whilst mumbling to himself. "Alas! Here is one of my more rudimentary charts, but it shall accomplish what you're intial questions preface." It was hard to concentrate, he was talking very fast and using a lot of words that I didn't know. Akio says because of my ASD I sometimes get what he calls "verbal dyslexia" and it's hard for me to comprehend what other people are saying, especially if they talk different from me. I'll have to concentrate very hard if I don't want Rinoa mad at me again. "But see this is where it gets confusing, we have many great forces here, coincidence? Doubtfully so, but these overlapping characteristics I believe have come here for a reason. Many of our members, including myself, have had interactions with Christos, Christian you call him, and I can't imagine why he would let so many familar faces corner him in the same scenario, unless of course he had a plan for each individual. See, I believe..." He pulled out a chair for me that I sat in. I took out my notebook so I could remember what to tell Rinoa. "If you look here on this chart.." he pulled out a large beige canvas with several pictures pinned to it, threads of twine connecting different ones. "First you see here that Christos comes to my noble world and plants himself as Cyrus, the destroyer of worlds. He taints Noah and I am his right hand man. He tells me a great many things, we can go into later. Do realize this isn't in chronilogical order, I have no way of telling yet the timeline of all our respective worlds. "Next he plants himself as an alien, "Jenova" he calls it on Gaia and and infects the whole planet. The only one to save it was Aerith who possesses extrodainary spiritual powers. She was the last chance tho and aside from her sacrifice Geostigma went on beyond her time..." "His next target, alas, Thomas. A young, troubled boy whom Christian fictionalized a companion for. An alter ego of sorts and made thomas believe it was himself. I believe he might have been weak and needed a human body to recover on. At some point Christian went to Aiden and found him by the Sanguis River, which is the border between our world and ubi requiescit dolor or "where sorrow rests. I haven't been able to spot where he showed up in Harry's world, but I do know he was there at some point. He likely was only a death eater of no great importance. Same with Roxas, Christian probably took the form of a nobody, which of course begs the question...." It was really hard for me to take notes as fast as he talked. I was really tryign to spell words better to get in the habit of it. Reading was easy for me, but writing made me nervous. I'll just get the names and maybe i'll remember. "can one become a nobody without having a form first? Perhaps that's it. He was a formed human on one planet and when he was almost destroyed at some theroetical part, he latched onto Thomas but only came back as a nobody which of course is an allusion. Details, details, but where were we? Oh yes, next on his infamous walk through time was of course Aangs world where he brought the powers of darkness to a seemingly balanced world, probably dating back to around...." I needed to yawn, but it seemed rude. I wonder how he knew all of this. He seemed confused himself. Maybe I should talk to some other people. Rinoa will be mad if I only talk to him. I should have gotten more information earlier.

“And of course Akio’s unfortunate fate with him, presenting himself as illusions to drive the man mad I’m sure. I do believe he could do that, his evil seems endless.” He paused and looked around at all his charts and papers. this will be a good time to excuse myself. "I have to use the restroom, excuse me" He didn't seem to notice me leave, he kept talking and looking at his papers. While I was walking I saw Harry with a plastic cup pressed up to a door. As I walked closer to him he dropped the cup and ran. I went to the kitchen. "Hey Zack" He was drinking really fast out of a big water bottle. Some of it was spilling on his black shirt. "Heya buddy, I broke 20 in 80, my new personal best. Gotta love the summer time." "What?" "Oh 20 miles in an hour and 20, a 4 minute average." "...." "So do you know anything about why we had to go to Camp A and Camp B?" "Ulquiorra seemed pretty on edge, everyone getting riled up like that. Maybe it's time for the old man to retire!" "What about the dark world place?" "I don't know much about that, but I tell you I sure don't know want to get to know it better if you know what I mean. Anyways bud, lactic acid builds on stiff muscles, gotta do my cool down." He then clapped me a little hard on the back, it was sort of uncomfortable, then left the room. I continued walking around looking for someone else to talk to. Rikku is on the couch watching a cartoon called the Powerpuff Girls. She is flossing on the couch? Why isn't she in the bathroom. I'll wait until she's done. I'll wait around the corner so she doesn't know I saw her doing it. After about 70 second she dropped the floss on the ground. There was a garbage can right on the table, but I guess she didn't see it.

"Hey" "Uhhh hey..." Her eyes never left the screen. "Do you know anything about the dark spirit place Christian was talking about?" "Hmmm, there was this one story Buddy used to tell us to scare us, it seems like the same thing and i don't know with all this world collide bs i wouldn't surprised if it's the same. "Do you know the story?" "I don't know ask Buddy, i'm busy." "..." Okay I wonder where Buddy is. I heard a basketball hit the basket outside. Sometimes we play basketball together. "Yo, yo, yo man 3 on 3, pussy slayers vs bitch playas." "AW SHIT" "wooof woof woof" "Which ones which?" asked Aang. "My brutha you knows yous a slaya!" on that they bumped their fists together. "I guess that means i'm with you guys" Tifa said and smiled. That means I'm on Adam's and Riku's team. I played basketball up to 21 points. My team lost. I'm good at making baskets, but not as much at passing and working with my team. "Aight, aight, how bout a smoke break and then maybe we'll give ya'll a rematch." As they all began to disperse, I walked up to Buddy. "Rikku said you could tell me a story about the dark place." "Rikku tol you that?" "Yes. The one you use to tell her." He looked both ways and then straight at me. "I don know nuthin about no story." "Okay, sorry." I guess I better ask someone else. I was getting tired. I should have done this earlier, but I see  Rinoa tomorrow. I think it would be a good idea to ask Thomas. I'll see if he's in his room. *knock knock* He opened the door slow, but wide and stared at me. "Can you tell me anything about the dark place." He looked surprised and happy. Akio tells me sometimes people's facial expressions don't always show what they mean, but it's a good indicator if I'm confused. I think he wants me to come in. He was sitting in his computer chair and he had clothes folded on his bed so I don't want to sit there and get them dirty. "I find it rather odd you're the one asking me this question. Eli wasn't surprising one bit, but it's not like he'd listen if I did tell him anything." "So you don't know anything?" "Don't know anything? Yeah right. I know everything that I need to. And ultimately however this goes, there's nothing left for me to lose." "...." "I must admit it does get rather boring having to hold back such genius in my mind. Feigning ignorance on all matters that go on here just to be able to thrive. This truly is the best case scenario for me and I know i'm not alone." He was frowning now. I didn't say anything so I know he probably isn't mad at me. I've learned that most people just keep talking if you say nothing. It helps a lot because I usually have nothing to say. "Are you looking for the nitty gritty, the gory details, or simple how're you're involved?" "Rinoa wanted to me to ask people about it. She thinks we're being lied to." "HAH. Just now she thinks she's been lied to?? Foolish girl." "Rinoa is smart." "Perhaps she is, all the same it's all clouded by her ego." "....." "So rinoa wants to know about the dark world they've after all this time brought up. You have to know though, Simon wouldn't have brought it up if there wasn't some gain to him, some strategic reason for his timing. He's a puppet master, he probably knew you would be here talking to me. It's all going just to his plan.....or perhaps he thought I would kick you out and that would keep him advantageous. But he knew that i'd knew that he was planning that." I was getting pretty confused. "Who's Simon?"

He frowned at me. "He's Christian." "Okay." "That's right "Christian" has had many names, many forms. He's wormed his way into many of lives and took everything they had with them. A leech. Of course a leech needs to eat too." I had been in his room almost 15 minutes. It was probably time to talk to someone else. "The dark world, purgatory, the eternal space, the fog, every world has a different name for it. Some are ignorant, but most know that not everyone gets the "good death". It's origin is beyond me, but I know what it is now. And I know he wants to go there. He's looking for something. Or maybe he's helping someone else." "I have to go now." "Then go, i'm not keeping you if that's what you thought" Thomas sneered at me. "..." *door shuts* As I left Thomas's room, Zidane came in really quickly from the front door. He looked really skinny these days. He pulled off his knapsack and begin looking for something deep within it. I don't know why he still uses his old knapsack, a good messenger bag would look a lot nicer and be a lot less stressful on his shoulders. "OKAY DADDY'S HOME, who wants to party???" As people began pouring into the dining room, they gathered around as he poured a large bag of cocaine out onto the clean glass table top. I remembered when I went fishing the other day how when I dropped bread crumbs in little fish would swarm to all try and get the food at once. It reminded me of that. I used to do cocaine sometimes with Irvine and his friends, but Akio says that it might make my OCD and ASD worse. I didn't want to mess with it, I had already had a stressful day. That's good enough for now. I'll just go to bed and maybe in the morning someone will talk about it and I won't have to ask. I did my bedtime rituals in the normal order, brush teeth, clean face, comb hair, change out of all clothes into two pairs of fresh underwear, socks, and pajamas. It was nice tonight I could turn off the air conditioner. I rested my head on the pillow. The cocaine was making everyone rowdy and I could hear it. Great I could hear Aiden yelling from his room that was right next to mine, on the side my bed was pushed against. I've asked Garnet multiple times if he could switch rooms, but she says no one wants his room cause it smells like blood and has a bunch of holes in the walls. And I was definitely not going to switch my room, everyone was right in it, it didn't need to change. I don't want to spy on people, but last time I said I wouldn't do what Rinoa wanted she threatened to not talk to me for a month. Instead, she talked, or more so bitched, the entire month at me, never letting me have some peace and quiet. I don't want that again.

I took out my nightly form to see how I’’m doing and filled it out.

Anxiety: 8/10

Mood: 6/10

Insomnia: 2/10

OCD: 7/10

Triggers: Talking to people, missing lunch because no one would leave the kitchen, having to ask questions, shoe lace breaking and not having a replacement.

Medication issues: None

Overall: 6/10

He kept yelling, but I could hear another voice too. He often talked to himself so at least when someone else was there, it was only half yelling. I really didn’t want to do it, but I felt Rinoa demanding me why I didn’t. I didn’t like lying to her.

   I remembered Harry earlier. I poured my water cup out and pressed my ear against the bottom of it. "Denny if that's the case, what do you have to lose?" "EVERYTHING. DON'T YOU GET IT!!! I've been waiting too long for you to FUCK things up." "Well I do admire your dilligence Denny, you truly never give up." "I will never give up, I will never stop until things are right." "Being when you have Jenn back?" "NO SHIT. All you are is a pawn. There is no other reason you're here." "The life of a king or the life of a pawn, really only is affected by perspective. I take my place with pride and am grateful for whatever else life I get to cherish." "I've waited long enough, i'll wait forever, but I sure as fuck don't want to." "Aside from your said goals, I am curious, did J really return from there?" "Fuck if I know. It has nothing to do with me." "There feels as if there is things you aren't telling me Denny." "WELL HOW THE FUCK DID IT GO LAST TIME I DID." "Please.....I want to help." "As long as Christian holds up his end of the deal, I won't need to use you. And he has the same goal." "I get the feeling you two are not alone in your quest. Are there others?" "Yeah but they're not important really. Just gotta an eye on them." "Even more useless than I?" "No one could be more useless than you." "Ahh how appropriate I and Lana are spending our time in this waiting room together, both readily discardable part of the larger schemes of the world. I've never felt quite so zen  before." "haha maybe they should bring Liza around and see how well you two get along." "I believe they would get along splendidly. they like the same music, both androgenous yet stunningly feminine, thrill seeking." "Ur forgetting one thing, cock makes bitches crazy, look at Jenn and Yuna. They'd be the best friends in the world if Yuna hadn't sucked my dick." "And by Jenn, you mean that girl masaqurading as your girlfriend?" "Watch it fucker." "I'm only stating your sentiment seems strangely misplaced seeing Yuna is in real danger whereas "Jenn" is only what you make her to  be" "I don't think anything has to happen to her, but if it does she knew what she was getting into." "Yes, but that was a long time ago. A long time before now I would have sacrificed myself for your well being, do you think things are the same now?" ".......what do you mean..? but you....just said...WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN??????!!!!!!!" "I was only teasing Denny, of course I'm here at your service, seeing of course you are the sole reason I am here. I don't think it's wise to betray our gods." "Heh yeah right, I'm your fucking god." "Indeed I am in religious awe." "heh yeah sure. So fucker whatchu got in the briefcase." "Zidane went and filled my reservoirs, I'm back in business" "Hook it up bitch." "I wouldn't have it any other way." After that they started talking quieter in a way that didn't bother me, Finally I can go to sleep.

[ubcs-dump]

Hell yes, tell us abt Mikhail. I bet you have a lot to say!

Short answer:

Long answer:

Okay so I will get real with all you guys on this one. I’ll start with a bit of a backstory with this because there is a reason why I love Mikhail so much.

!!!TRIGGER WARNING!!! MENTAL ILLNESSES AND SU*C*DAL THOUGHTS MENTIONED!!!

It was about 10 years ago. Imagine a 14 year old me, sitting alone in my dark room. My depression and various other mental illnesses are geting worse every day, they have been dragging me down for years now. I am living with abusive people who love to push me down even further, mocking me and bullying me even though they are considered my family. I was broken. I was in pain. The word ‘s//ui//ci//de’ has been clouding my mind for years now.I just picked up on Resident Evil through parodies of it on youtube. I watched someone play Resident Evil 3 Nemesis online because I remember that we owned that game but I was terrified of Nemesis on the box so I didn’t play it myself.Then I saw Mikhail, how he lay on the seats of the cable car. I could tell he was in pain and I felt deeply sorry for him. But it wasn’t a special feeling because I felt sorry for all the characters in the game. The person who played the game even mocked Mikhail for his looks. At first I laughed along but then there came a specific cutscene.And then Mikhail said something.Just one sentence.One line of dialoge.

It may just be a line of dialoge for most people. Some tiny bit of character developement sprinkled in for good meassure.But boy.I felt that.Suddenly I felt a deeper connection. It felt like I could see myself in Mikhail. He’s been through hell. He watched his men die in front of him. He is bleeding like crazy. He is in pain. Both mentally and physically. He’s expressing survivors guilt and it’s eating him up on the inside. When he said that line I literally teared up.I felt understood.And when he sacrificed himself to save Carlos and Jill, I cried. Hard. I cried because I was touched by his bravery. I cried because he deserved to live. I cried. Because I looked up to him. Without even realizing it, he became my role model. Mikhail is a kind soul, he is brave, determined, always trying his best, righteous, proud, a real team player and a wonderful leader. He is the kind of person I’ve always wanted to be.He quickly became my favorite character. I still watch all of the cutscenes with him every now and again when I need to hear his voice. I also sometimes browse his REwiki page just because I feel like it. When playing the Mercenaries minigame I always pick him.After meeting him I decided to keep going too. I can’t stop, no matter how broken and in pain I am. These wounds can’t stop me from fighting. I’ll keep fighting because I believe that I can get better if I just keep going. Fighting those demons off. Ignoring everyone who tells me otherwise. After all, I can’t stop just because I’m wounded.Also he is probably my biggest fictional crush ever lol. It’s been almost 10 years and I still can’t forget him and I still love him as much as I did on day 1.

Ever since then Mikhail has been a sort of voice of reason. When I’m feeling lost I ask myself what he would do in my situation. When I notice I haven’t eaten all day again, I’d imagine him trying to give me a pep talk. He became a coping mechanism and comfort character. I’ve been looking up to him for almost 10 years now, which is pretty rare when you know that I have tons of favorite characters that come and go, but he has always been my favorite Resident Evil character ever since that day.

I love everything about him. His backstory is tragic and herioc. He used to be an excellent soldier in the Russian SFSR before the Soviet Union collapsed. His wife was part of a minority who he fought for, causing him to be concidered a terrorist in the Russian Federation. After getting arrested he was approached by Umbrella. He agreed to join them but only if Umbrella does everything they can to ensure amnesty for his men.This just shows how much he cares for his comerades and loved ones. Mikhail joined a guerrilla organization to fight for the independence of the minority group his wife was a part of. He joined Umbrella, not because he himself wanted to be free, but because his men would be free.

I also really really like his relationship with Jill in the game. I could perfectly imagine them as very good friends. The way they talk with each other and how Jill tries to calm Mikhail down and helps and encourages him while also perfectly understanding the state he is in and the feelings and worries that are clouding his mind. I just love it and I demand fanart and fanfiction of a cute platonic relationship between these two. They are cute and precious.I sadly can’t say a lot about his relationships between him and the other members of the Operation-Jackal-Trio.Mikhail and Nikolai don’t interact at all. Which is bullsh*t because Capcom actually wanted them to be brothers and interact. That would have been an amazing addition. I want it back. My fav AU, hands down.Carlos mentions Mikhails name a few times (and by a few I mean two times). Once when explaining what happened and once when Mikhail got attacked in the cable car. I’m a bit sad we didn’t see more of them together. Carlos is certainly worried about Mikhails safety but I really wish they had expanded on that a little. I just wanted to see more interaction in general.

Mikhail also influenced my art. My nickname/pen name is Uby Victor. The ‘Uby’ part comes from the way you say the first two letters of the UBCS. And Victor isn’t hard to guess haha. Some people call me Victor too and I love it!! :3I also own an olive green beret in addition to my UBCS uniform. It’s just a prop and I guess just something I’ve always wanted to own haha. Now I just need to find a way to get the patch.I tried drawing him a few times but I’m an idiot and get flustered when I do so I usually stop before it’s even finished. I will probably never be able to draw him well haha. At least not with that attitude.

He’s also the reason I realized I have a soft spot for Russian accents. Even though Ben Campbell isn’t Russian, his accent is okay and I like his performance.

!!HORRIBLY HIGH LEVEL OF HONESTY AHEAD!!

I could probably rant even more about how much I love Mikhails personality. And his looks.

Have you seen those eyes??? That is one awesome dark shade of blue. Unrealistic I know but damn. I love them. And his golden hair. I wanna run my hand through it. And those arms. Mmmh. He could throw me across a football field with those and I’d say “Thanks, daddy, please do it again!”. He looks like he gives great hugs too. He’s like a big teddy bear, hence why I call him Mischka all the time haha. Also he is top notch soft daddy material. I’m not the only one with this opinion. Also his crotch. The bulge is big. Just take my word for it. Or take a look for yourself. His full body picture is at the top of this post. You have been warned.

!!HORRIBLY HIGH LEVEL OF HONESTY OVER!!

All of this is also why I do not like his R3MAKE version at all. The original RE3: Nemesis Mikhail means so so so much to me. I associate him with recovery. I look up to him and I basically owe him my life. So seeing him be changed that drastically in the R3MAKE just broke my heart. I will stick with the original because that’s the one I like the most.

I could tell more but this is already very long lmao

EDITED tl;dr: Thank you, Mikhail. You’ve helped me more than any living human being ever did. I owe you so much. You’re an angel and I love you.

~ Mod Uby

[ezerkenegdc]

Would Joseph's wife have been the first Faith if she survived?

  Great question!!   I cannot speak for every version of Joseph’s wife that there could be, but it is possible.   We are only really given one line about her character where she was described as having faith when Joseph professed to having worries about money and other things.  This does not mean that this would translate to other areas or that his wife would have been receptive to the idea of taking on that role for the entire congregation.  We can’t really know based upon a single line of information and the lack of information as well on the history of the Faiths.  We do not know how many there are and who they might have been.  We only know about the current one and that there may have been three or four others.  Selene, Lana, and a tall dark haired woman ( which hey could have been Hannah because it said she was as tall as her brother and had dark hair.  Hannah is as tall as John and does have dark hair so vague connection, very vague, but possible for my rendition of his wife if I were to explore that route. )   However, ubi does not make it clear if Lana and the tall dark haired woman are the same so, it depends on how you view the situation. 

  In truth,  I think that his wife could have taken it up, but would not have for long.  The role of Faith is not one that has been taken up for long by any of the women in my opinion.  It’s expendable and the person in shuffled out and replaced without any notification to the congregation.  i.e. that note that was found on the washer stated that Faith was described as a tall, dark haired woman, but they had seen a woman instead carrying the name that was blonde, which was Selene.  I don’t think they say what happens to Selene, or of any others, but they mentioned that Lana was disposed of in muck rather thoughtlessly.  Like, she was no longer worthy of their time.  Which has lead me to believe that work is put in to bring the women in to the fold, and then once they have proven incapable or if they have shown doubt, they are disposed of and replaced with someone else the project has groomed for the role. 

  As for the grooming,  we are given one view where Joseph tells the women what they want to hear and inflates them with kindness and worth, and gives them a strict code to go by.  Giving someone hope and a way out of the situation that has severely troubled them  ( such as Rachel’s drug habit )  can give someone a certain kind of hero status even if said person has selfish motives for doing so.  It is not hard to believe that he is capable of this and is rather successful at it so, I think there may have been many more Faith’s in the early congregation’s history, but that is a personal opinion.  He is a charismatic man after all, and has proven to be capable of getting himself anything he has wanted before and has gotten himself out of situations that many would not be able to.  His tactics probably have changed with each person he has wanted to carry the name,  which is also to say,  that he probably also got better at it over time.  Practice makes perfect. 

  On the other hand,  we are given another picture through the notes left behind and through the final moments of Faith’s life.  The disposal of Lana’s body is a good indication that this is not exactly a long lasting loving relationship.  Rachel, at the end of her life, says that he threatened her and she does seem genuinely afraid of him when you burn the personal copy of the Book of Joseph.  Which also mentions that she was given a dose of scopolamine and made pure which allowed her to take on the role as Faith and as their sister.  Tracey is also under the impression that Joseph is reading their letters and kind on controlling when and where Rachel can go.  I would  argue that this is likely true and not just a manipulation tactic to get us to sympathize with Rachel and thus making it harder for us to kill her.  Also, Rachel handed over the entire conservatory and allowed it to be the place of bliss production which is something that would be valuable to the project.  So Rachel would be a prime candidate to take on the name since they would gain so much from her. 

  All of that is to say that if Joseph is willing to bring his brothers into the fold and allow for them to be in such a position that they could be killed or hurt,  then why would he keep his wife from such a position?  She could have been the first when the project was young and they were making the pilgrimage to Hope County.  She could have lost the faith along the way and as her faith weaned, a new one to carry on the role was selected and groomed into the ideal Faith and  thus began the long procession of those who carried it.  Alternative,  if she did not,  he could have modeled the first to have qualitie of his wife and continued to shape women afterwards because he realized that people did need that comfort in some form.  It could be comfort in the form of healing, in kindness, in compassion, in the bliss. The project is full of danger and violence,  there needed to be some sort of softness to ease the blow.   Alternatively again,  no she could not have and simply played the role that I have Hannah playing, a supporting role in the background who wants nothing more than to love her family.  The role was born when there was a need and someone was picked to take the role.  Just depends on how you view Joseph, Faith, and the Project as a whole. 

LONG STORY SHORT: DEPENDS ON HOW YOU WANT TO LOOK AT IT. 

[friedesgreatscythe]

The whole Eli and the whitetails being his family sort of makes him a foil for Joseph and his family. Also in how Eli treats you after Jacob got the deputy with the Deputy being a threat now vs how EDs treats you as a threat

Yeah I’m pretty sure that was absolutely intentional. Dutch also has interesting parallels. He’s lost his family, he’s distant/detached but still nudging the Deputy to do things around the county to undermine the cult; his bunker is… literally right up against Joseph’s lol. He’s been preparing for the end times probably about as long as the cult has been preaching that it’ll happen, but he doesn’t seem to have been taken seriously or even left to prepare in relative peace, unlike the cult. He was part of the same (?) unit as Jacob, has the Bliss chemical formula on the walls of his med bay...

I wish that we had more time to actually talk to Eli or overhear what he thinks about the Deputy, because he’s not a stupid man. He has to know how dangerous the Deputy is, he knows how dicey it is to take them into the Whitetails. The fact that they keep getting taken, conditioned, etc. should make him worry, but all he seems to think about is how the Deputy hasn’t checked in, he’s concerned, etc. I wonder if that’s his way of trying to gauge how far along their conditioning is, or if it’s even taking root–the Deputy’s silence (the fact that they are a silent protagonist) really does take away from any development, honestly. I can’t even really go into any in depth study of the foil thing because a lot of the motivations for Eli, Dutch, and Joseph are still a bit of guesswork, and that sucks. I mean, yeah, it means I get to play and replay and pay careful close attention each time, but honestly? A lot of this would be more satisfying to analyze if the Deputy was a voiced protagonist so she could actually talk to the characters around her.

IMO Ubi shoulda just bitten the bullet and sprung for a specific lady VA so we could have (1) a radass femprotag in a game of Biblical proportions (and all the symbolism that entails–there’s several female figures mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and the Deputy could’ve embodied more than a few [the contrast of the Mother/Whore of Babylon and the Bride {who represents the new Jerusalem}), and (2) actually develop side characters through her interactions with said people.

That aside–Is Eli suspicious of the Deputy’s distance/silence? Does he think that they’re still able to be swayed or convinced to go against their programming, so to speak? Why doesn’t he give them to Tammy to go through the deconditioning?  Does he think that they wouldn’t survive it? That Tammy would just try to kill them? Does he not want to risk the Deputy in Tammy’s care because things are just that desperate topside? Does he realize that taking a risk with a conditioned Deputy like this is an almost certain recipe for disaster? Does he want to try anyway? IS IT ALL JUST LOVE MAKING HIM ACT THIS WAY? BECAUSE I’D BE ALL SET TO BELIEVE THAT. These are all things we could’ve known if the Deputy would just fucking talk.

Similar to how Eli risks a lot by having the Deputy close/trusting them, I do think that it’s interesting that Joseph actually does something similar when he reverses his position on the Deputy being a threat after being all, y’know, hey let them burn after the crash. He catches John trying to drown them and suddenly shifts gears–no, they shouldn’t die, they should be made to Atone. Why? Jacob should capture the Deputy alive, and he praises Jacob for a job well done. Why? Faith blesses the Deputy and waits patiently (in my game, at least) for the Deputy to go to her so she can take them into the Bliss and speak to the Father personally. Why?

Why is Joseph showing this much restraint when he had no interest in doing so at the start? Is it just because of the vision he had of John’s two deaths? Did he have some weird twinge of a conscience and regret what happened, totally reversing his position of “no one is coming to save you” to “I can save you”? Did he realize that for someone to come along and threaten his Project, his family, that means that they are acting all according to the visions he’s seen and the preparation he’s putting his family through? And to kill them is to somehow work against what God ordained? Does he think that they–she, for this argument’s sake–has some special role in it all and he wants to turn her from the destructive ways into one of growth, healing, and (to him) success? Taking the Mother of Babylon, “saving” her so she becomes the Bride of Jerusalem? (see also, the aforementioned women of the Apocalypse)? Does he think showing mercy to the Deputy is his new test? Does he just love the Deputy, like my earlier joke/theory about Eli? Why didn’t anyone else in the Project get the memo that the Deputy should be subdued and not killed? Why does that only come into play when they’re shot with Bliss bullets, or hunted with a Blissed arrow, or when Faith herself manifests in the damn physical realm and snatches us up?

Why did Joseph keep his “save at all costs” feelings about the Deputy a secret from literally everyone, even his own family? Again, if the Deputy had a voice, she could’ve asked him this and even if he gave us a riddled, bizarre answer, it’d still be some answer at all. And we could use it to compare/contrast it with whatever Eli says to the Deputy about her.

Anyway. This answer kinda got away from me and I haven’t had coffee yet.

[theultimateegghead-blog]

Modest Media Game Reviews Disney’s Dinosaur

Game – Disney’s Dinosaur Year of Release – 2000 Developer – Sandbox Studios, Ubi Soft Publisher – Ubi Soft Rated – Everyone Genre – Action Adventure Platform – Game Boy Color, PlayStation, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, PC For all sakes and purposes, I am reviewing the PS1 version.

This is one of the last Disney Interactive action games that were mildly popular since the mid-90s. This game is often regarded as a bad game based off a mediocre movie. However, some cherish it for nostalgia. I was one of the ladder until I played it again recently. Is this game bad? Yes, I will explain why. Now this game might be precious to you, that’s always a possibility. If you love this game, that’s fine, but if you will be upset over a poor rating, skip this review.

Gameplay – Ugh. This game is bad. It controls poorly and clunky. Its easy to get stuck on the terrain, and all three characters have bad movements. The three characters are Zini, a little primate, Aladar, a dinosaur and Flia, a Pteranodon. Each character has their own playstyle, Znini is fast but delicate and attacks by throwing rocks and jumping on enemies. He can’t put up much of a fight and is often better left as a scout. Aladar is slow but strong and is the most combat oriented character. Flia can fly overhead and also scout out the area. While they seem diverse, they all control poorly, especially Flia. Most enemies in the game take a long time to defeat even as Aladar and are more often than not best left alone. The game has an rpg-esque health system. Characters can have their health restored by eating fruit found throughout the levels. Most levels have puzzles to be solved and the occasional escort mission, these are not fun. The boss fights are a joke and are little more than over glorified enemies. There is no saving grace here, this game is overall not fun to play. While not broken, it is so painfully mediocre that it grows tiresome after the first couple levels. Score – 5/20

Graphics – The graphics are bad, like very bad. For a game released in 2000, it looks worse than the majority of 3D ps1 titles. Resident Evil looks better than this and that game came out in 1996. Character models are ugly and poorly modeled. Levels look downright ugly. Menus and icons look bad. Bottom line is this game is ugly. The levels look bland and boring on top of being ugly. Score – 2/10

Story – The story loosely follows the plot of the film but takes some liberties. For example one of the main characters of the game is a dinosaur who appeared only in the opening scene of the movie. Some of the movie’s more significant scenes are told through certain levels and cutscenes. Many characters have a bit of dialogue sprinkled throughout the level. Though it still seems choppy and half-baked in its presentation. Not horrible but far from stellar. Score – 4/10

Replay Value – None, the levels are not fun and house very little in the way of interesting secrets and diversions. Given the bad gameplay, these levels are best beaten once and never revisited. Score – 1/5

Music – Not terrible, but probably the weakest Disney game soundtrack. Most songs are subtle, and sound aged considering the time. No song significantly stands out at all and its actually kind of quiet in game. Voice acting sounds poor and the sound effects seem stock and generic. I wont say this is a bad soundtrack, but it certainly is not memorable. Score – 2.5/5

Overall – This game is bad, it is of low quality. It feels rushed and empty, very little enjoyment can be had from this game. It is so deeply flawed that it would take a full burned slate to make a better version of this game. I cannot recommend this game at all. At least not the PS1 version. The PC version is of higher quality and if you truly want to experience this game, go for the pc version. Score – 2.9/10 – Terrible

One thing this game did well – There is a little bonus part of the game that is unlocked by default that teaches you about the various Dinosaurs present, that’s pretty cool.

[bluewatsons]

Atosa Araxia Abrahamian, Money for Nothing, New Republic (August 29, 2018)

Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck?

Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who’d come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities.

The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too.

One obvious solution would be to separate income from labor altogether, a possibility that two recent books tackle from radically different angles. Give People Money, by journalist Annie Lowrey, offers a measured, centrist endorsement of Universal Basic Income—the idea that governments should give everyone a certain amount of cash each month, no questions asked. The anthropologist David Graeber posits that the link between salaried positions and real work has long been tenuous in any case, since many highly paid jobs serve little purpose at all. In Bullshit Jobs, he tries to make sense of the peculiar yet all-too-common situations in which people are hired, after much fanfare, to do a job, then find themselves not doing much—or worse, performing a task so utterly pointless that they might as well not be doing it.

In the absence of a truly useful job, most people, Graeber considers, would be better off living on “free” money. Lowrey views UBI less as a way to eliminate useless work than a way to compensate invisible forms of labor, such as caring for a relative or doing housework, or to bolster underpaid workers. Cash transfers, she proposes, could also stimulate entrepreneurship and creativity. Either way, the idea of paying people just for being alive is now one that both a radical scholar and a reasonable Beltway journalist can take seriously—though neither author fully reckons with the social reordering that would arise from a world organized around love and leisure, not labor.

Graeber’s book expands on his viral 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” in which he took aim at “employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Eric, who worked as an “interface administrator” at a design firm, found himself in such a job. His responsibility was to make sure the company’s intranet system worked properly, which sounded useful enough. But, it turned out, he was set up to fail. None of the employees used the system because they were all convinced it was monitoring them. It had been designed with the worst, buggiest software. A confluence of office politics and poor management had led the company to hire Eric, who had no experience working with computers. He was to oversee a system that was never supposed to work in the first place.

Eric ended up doing little. He kept irregular hours and explained to the odd employee how to upload a file or find an email address. He started drinking one, then two, beers at lunch; reading novels at his desk; learning French; and taking trips for nonexistent “business meetings.” If this sounds idyllic—a salary with no work and boozy lunches!—Eric didn’t experience it that way. Instead, he acutely felt “how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness.” Graeber suggest two reasons for Eric’s despondency. One concerns social class: The first person in his family to go to college, Eric wasn’t expecting the white-collar world to be such, well, bullshit. Another reason is existential: When faced with it, “there was simply no way he could construe his job as serving any sort of purpose.

By Graeber’s metric, my old gig wasn’t quite bullshit, mainly because I rather enjoyed it and found it meaningful. The term is subjective: If someone thinks a job is pointless, it probably is. There are also many repetitive, grueling, or boring jobs that do not qualify as bullshit because they meet an essential need: If a cleaner or bus driver doesn’t report for work, it hurts other people. (These Graeber terms “shit” jobs.) His method for identifying bullshit is, by his own account, unscientific. He draws from a pool of anecdotes to produce an anatomy of bullshit workers, who fall into five categories: “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct-tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.”“Flunkies” are the modern equivalent of feudal minions who make bosses feel big, important, and strong. Whereas they were once doormen and concierges, they now tend to be receptionists who do little besides answer cold calls and refill the candy bowl, or personal assistants who drop off their boss’s dry cleaning and smile when he walks through the door. “Goons” essentially bully people into buying things they don’t need: Marketing managers and PR specialists do this, as do telemarketers. “Duct-tapers” are employed to fix things that aren’t or shouldn’t be broken or do tasks that could easily be automated—data entry, copying and pasting, photocopying, and so on. “Box tickers” help companies comply with regulation (or offload responsibility for complying), and finally “taskmasters,” or middle managers, spread more BS by assigning it to others.

“The creation of a BS job,” one manager tells Graeber, “often involves creating a whole universe of BS narrative that documents the purpose and functions of the position as well as the qualifications required to successfully perform the job, while corresponding to the [prescribed] format and special bureaucratese.” She explains that her organization’s bureaucracy created odd incentives to retain employees whose work was inadequate. It was easier for her to hire someone in a new position than to fire and replace the incompetent employee. This, she notes, helped BS jobs proliferate.

Graeber attempts to quantify just how much—and after some back-of-the envelope calculations, he wagers that 37 to 40 percent of all office jobs are “bullshit.” He further contends that about 50 percent of the work done in a nonpointless workplace is also bullshit, since even useful jobs contain elements of nonsense: the pretending to be busy, the arbitrary hours, the not being able to leave before five. “Bullshitization” is even infecting the most nonbullshit professions, with teachers overloaded with administrative duties that didn’t use to exist and doctors forced to deal with paperwork and insurance firms that probably should be abolished.

There’s no sure way to verify Graeber’s estimates, but for white-collar workers, they seem basically right. Work backward: How much activity on social media takes place during work hours? How many doctor’s appointments, errands, and online purchases occur between nine and five? In other words, how many of us could stand to work half as much as we currently do without any significant consequences? And yet we insist over and over that we are terribly, endlessly busy.

This state of affairs seems to defy not just human reason, but also basic capitalist logic: Wouldn’t a profit-seeking organization tend to cull unnecessary compensated labor rather than encourage it? Graeber proposes that there is an explicitly irrational reason why such jobs exist—a system he calls “managerial feudalism,” wherein employers keep adding layers and layers of management so that everyone can feel their job is important or at least justified. (They’re “mentoring” young people. They’re helping others develop careers!) The bigger the staff, the more important the company and its leaders feel, regardless of purpose or productivity.

There might be something refreshing about the fact that capitalism has not yet gained full control over its means and ends, and that there are millions of people sitting around getting paid to do nothing all day. Graeber doesn’t buy it. On the contrary: He considers bullshit jobs to be a profound form of psychological violence, a scourge that’s fueling resentment, anomie, depression, and apathy. Patrick, an employee of a student union convenience store, mostly agrees with this judgment. He didn’t mind the work itself; what he resented was being assigned inane busywork, like rearranging things, after he’d finished his tasks six times over. “The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think,” he tells Graeber in an email:

So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive.

Of course, some people can escape by focusing on creative pursuits during the hours they are idle. And it helps if everyone in said job acknowledges, if tacitly, that they serve no purpose by being there. But that’s hard, too, Graeber argues, because of the structure and nature of the modern workplace: the rules, the conventions, “the ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense.”

The existence of bullshit jobs has, further, led to the devaluation of vital occupations. Workers in essential, nonbullshit jobs are constantly told by moralizing politicians that their work is noble and that they ought to be grateful for the often low pay they receive. Even though the middle managers and box tickers of the world can console themselves with the thought that they are “generating wealth” and “adding jobs” by virtue of their “economic output,” they secretly envy the real, human sense of purpose that useful workers—teachers, garbage collectors, care workers—share, Graeber writes, and end up vilifying them out of “moral envy.” This impulse plays out politically: Nurses, teachers, and bus drivers, for example, are constantly portrayed as “greedy” when they bargain for better union contracts, or they’re said to be “stealing” from the state when they make overtime wages. When voters in bullshit jobs hear these words over a campaign season, it can swing legislative bodies to the right.

Would it be better if those workers stuck in bullshit jobs could simply walk away? Graeber isn’t one for policy recommendations, but he does float UBI as a potential salve to our sad professional predicaments. A UBI would “unlatch work from livelihood entirely”: If, guaranteed enough money to live on, people could choose between bullshit or nothing, he wagers that they’d choose nothing and do something more useful and interesting with their time instead.

In Give People Money, Annie Lowrey is less concerned with dissatisfied professionals than with some of the world’s poorest (including those in the United States), who in addition to already being overworked and underpaid—if they are employed at all—will likely face the harshest economic consequences if or when menial tasks are automated. These workers are already up against weakened unions, corporations dead set on extracting maximum value from their workforces by scaling back benefits and slashing wages, the rising costs of education and health care, and other trends that wind up concentrating wealth at the very top. When the robots come, as Lowrey believes they will, there’s little that governments, companies, or other organizations can do to make them go away. The best shot for these people, she comes to believe, is unconditional money.

Lowrey makes a convincing moral argument for UBI, insisting that “every person is deserving of participation in the economy, freedom of choice, and a life without deprivation—and that our government can and should choose to provide these things.” She also points out to great effect the destructive moralizing that Americans, at least, attach to money. “We believe there is a moral difference between taking a home mortgage interest deduction and receiving a Section 8 voucher,” she writes, in a refreshing moment of indignation. “We judge, marginalize, and shame the poor for their poverty.” Gaining support for UBI would mean persuading people to reject those assumptions; convincing a majority to see, as Graeber and Lowrey both urge, that commanding a high salary doesn’t automatically make you a good person.

A further challenge for advocates of UBI today is the lack of definitive, long-term surveys “proving” the mechanism’s efficacy: There have been no truly universal cash transfers within one country for an extended period of time, and there are thus no narratives to follow or macroeconomic conclusions to draw. Thanks to increased interest in the phenomenon, though, there are more and more smaller-scale studies, and Lowrey visits one of them in Kenya with GiveDirectly, a charity that essentially hands out cash through mobile payments in poor places. There she meets a man named Fredrick Omondi Auma, who “had been in rough shape when GiveDirectly knocked on his door: impoverished, drinking, living in a mud hut with a thatched roof. His wife had left him,” she writes. “But with the manna-from-heaven money, he had patched up his life and, as an economist might put it, made the jump from labor to capital.”

More money, Lowrey reports, turns the villagers into good capitalists who invest their savings in education and supplies, start businesses, and help grow the local economy. Her observations recall the breathless and somewhat naïve boosterism that surrounded microcredit programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She even meets three sister-wives who plan to pool their funds and create a small bank to lend to women. In the United States, too, she finds clear-cut potential for success. In separate chapters, she illustrates the promise of cash transfers for the American poor with more clarity and purpose, visiting a family with disabled children and speaking to women whose jobs just don’t pay enough for them to get by. Simple cash could help teenagers finish school instead of working to support their families; it could adequately compensate women who stay home to care for sick loved ones; it could spare the elderly or disabled from the bureaucratic hell of waiting in line to plead for meager welfare benefits.

Ending poverty around the world ought to be a priority, and Lowrey makes a strong case that unconditional cash transfers can help do that. But in the wrong hands, a UBI can do more harm than good. It can serve as a pretext to further decimate social programs and put more blame still on the individual for any mishaps or shortcomings. As Lowrey notes, libertarians love the idea that UBI could replace the welfare state, shrinking big government—a move that could render the whole program ineffective, since it’s hard to imagine a UBI stretching to cover market-rate housing and exorbitant private health care. Meanwhile, cash payments can also reinforce social and racial divisions by throwing money at a problem without addressing its causes. Giving the individual residents of an over-policed neighborhood cash transfers won’t, for instance, make them any less susceptible to unreasonable searches or violence.

That’s why it matters who supports UBI and, more significantly, whose policies it gets attached to. Many of the people funding UBI research or advocating for cash transfers—Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, to name just two—are in fact among those who do best from the current distribution of wealth. A UBI would, after all, benefit corporations: For any company that depends on people having money to buy their products—whether groceries, prescription drugs, or driverless cars—the idea of a jobless, incomeless population presents a threat to its bottom line. Free money lets consumers stay consumers; it maintains the current system. And that’s without getting into the possibility that unemployment and poverty might add up to riots, class war, and mass unrest. In that situation, the CEOs would be the first to go.

Both Graeber and Lowrey struggle with the fact that—for all work’s miseries and for all the promise of UBI—work is deeply ingrained in American society. While many of us might hate our individual jobs, most of us love the idea of a job. Our world is constructed around the idea that a job is not just a paycheck: It’s a status symbol and a form of social inclusion. This, of course, supports the creation of bullshit jobs, which prop up the socioeconomic status quo. Now that a jobless (or less job-full) future may be within reach, the question is how to reimagine our relationship with work.

Lowrey appreciates the extent to which people identify with their work—even if it’s bullshit or shit (in her parlance, “crummy”) work. Having reported extensively on the psychological toll that unemployment can take, she insists that the culture (or is it cult?) of work is most likely here to stay. It might not be the healthiest approach—she dislikes moralizing around the virtue of work almost as much as Graeber does—but she realizes it’s something we have to build in to our short- and medium-term expectations because “the American faith in hard work and the American cult of self-reliance exist and persist, seen in our veneration of everyone from Franklin to Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey.”

For his part, Graeber insists that there’s no value in working for the sake of just working. That often gives the impression that anyone who does want to work for work’s sake must be a bit of a sucker and that the compulsion to work is a manifestation of false consciousness or, worse, stupidity. He thus glosses over the strongly felt benefits, be they professional, social, or psychological, that many people get from their jobs. If Graeber’s unscientific assertions about bullshit jobs feel vital, urgent, and intuitively true, his dismissals of work’s inherent value—not moral, but social—feel incomplete.

With a compulsion to work so deep-rooted, UBI is a solution that will only go so far, even if implemented in a way that truly does alter lives for the better. Giving people money will not make us less moralistic about labor: People used to working will not necessarily know what to do with themselves or with their time. (I certainly wouldn’t.) Such measures represent only a fraction of the socioeconomic overhaul that will be needed to deal—if not now, then for future generations—with this twin utopia-dystopia: a world with less work and less money.

A solution that neither Lowrey nor Graeber spends much time dwelling on is perhaps the obvious: to split the difference. In a 1932 essay titled “In Praise of Idleness,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted that he had come to think of work not as something morally necessary, but as a means to enhance pleasures in the rest of life (after all, would you want to attend a dinner party you could never leave?). While acknowledging that he is a product of a Protestant work ethic and thus a compulsive worker, Russell suggests halving the workday to four hours, which would be enough for a person to secure “the necessities and elementary comforts of life,” leaving the rest of his time to do whatever he wanted.

“There will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia,” Russell goes on. “The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion.”

[anpacgang]

The City of One Thousand Eyes

In the recently refurbished city of New York, where each person is guaranteed a minimum quality of life simply for living, where the ancient smog of the fine precursors lazily licks the window panes, and where images of two eyes, simply watching you without judgment, adorn the landscape as frequently as street numbers, lives a man named Harold.

Harold had nothing to do with the decision to adorn the city with eyes, and in fact, no individual can be held responsible. It was a public effort; Harold had no objection to the installation of the eyes, because the eyes do not record anything, nor are they there to intimidate anyone, nor are they to remind you that the government is “always watching.”

No, scientists simply discovered people are significantly less likely to commit crimes when they feel someone watching them, and merely the presence of two eyes gives them that feeling. Once this very cheap way to prevent crime was discovered, the city government wasted no time in implementing it, and it was expected that nearly every population center on the planet would soon follow suit.

Harold understood this, for rationality is sovereign of all the mental faculties, and Harold took great pride in being a citizen among his peers.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Harold. You’ve known no life outside of New York, nor outside of the vaunted democratic virtues of the United World Government. Like most people, you actively sought out employment; but unlike most people, you found opportunity. It’s important to Harold that no one misunderstands, he was never afraid of being unemployed, for the government readily provides for the unemployed to have all the necessities plus a little extra spending money. Harold works not out of fear of poverty, but out of his internal need to produce wealth for his society.

So when I say Harold puts on his government issued pollution filtering mask, opens the door, and leaves his apartment building to walk through the numbered and categorized streets of New York to work every morning, I mean he does so of his own volition.

You navigate the city streets– hardly paying attention to the great hydroponic processor facilities looming in the distance, for they have become part of the landscape– thinking of work, thinking of home, thinking of family. You have a pretty good life.

Then one day, imagine your life begins to change.

Harold’s arc begins with a simple realization. He doesn’t love his wife anymore. He does the appropriate thing. He waits for the kids to be preoccupied, shut the door to the kitchen, and quietly converses with his wife about their feelings, as adults do. They work through their feelings, and it turns out she doesn’t love him anymore either. They’re not sure how they arrived at this point, but they mutually decide that it would be best to proceed with an amicable divorce.

An epiphany grows slowly over time, of course. He did not suddenly wake up without loving his wife one day. Rather, the feelings, the passion, the fire, which had once possessed them to wed and to enter this very apartment as groom and bride, all smiles, all giggles, all secretive whispers and intimate kisses, was gone now. No one’s fault, really. The human heart is a fickle thing; its wishes and whims wax and wane with the tides. The way of the world dictates that all fires eventually burn out, just as it dictates all young romance eventually gives way to the drudgery of routine, of taking turns driving the kids to school, of once a week designated date night at the Olive Garden.

Still, memories of other people carve homes out of your heart, and Harold had no interest in reliving painful memories, and he agreed his children deserved the stability of remaining in their childhood home, and so he moved out into an apartment as the divorce continued.

I can not stress enough, this divorce is as amicable as such affairs get. There’s a little cold draft between them, but no more than in their loveless marriage, and he keeps the children at his new apartment during his 3 day weekend. He agrees to pay for any child rearing related expenses the mother has, and the mother never lowers herself to spending any of this money on personal pleasures. She, like most people, lives on Universal Basic Income, which provides enough to care for children and for herself, and to have a little bit of spending money left over, but Harold– having a job– makes quite a bit more than that, and extends to his family an appropriately enjoyable lifestyle. Additionally, he has to work the other four days at his job, and so he cares for the children the three days he has off, and cherishes them greatly.

Still, on the days he does work, he comes home to the vacant echoes of a room empty of life. He comes home to darkness, without the soft glow of screens illuminating the soft faces of his children. Without even the cordiality of his wife, cold as it may have been during the later years of his marriage. He comes home, eats a lukewarm meal he picked up on the way, and falls asleep by himself.

This amicable arrangement continues in an easy equilibrium for a little over a year. After the courts have finally completed all the necessary paperwork, he stands outside the court staring at the little paper in his hand telling him his marriage is over. He stares at it for a long time, and suddenly feels a strange anger well up inside him. He wants to kick over a trash can and yell, but when he looks up and sees those two eyes staring back at him, he feels guilty, tucks the document into his jacket, and walks out of the building.

Harold has neither time for himself– nor romance– since on the days he does not work he cares for his children. Granted, the world is not experiencing a shortage of single parents, but putting in the effort to meet people, deal with children that aren’t even his, and participate in a game he’s well over a decade out of practice in, is just too much for him to really contemplate.

Then, one morning, another realization comes upon him. He’s bored by his job. It makes sense he’d be bored, he does the same thing every day and the nebulous hope of a promotion on the horizon through excelling at that seems to have evaporated into fantasy. You most likely know what it is to be bored by a job, or by school. It’s different from being bored by a relationship, a job isn’t just something you can just walk away from one day. Harold could, theoretically, just quit and live on UBI, but doing so comes with a significant salary decrease, and his children would experience a decreased lifestyle quality. He takes pride in how spoiled his children are, he secretly delights in the envious looks from others, and how the other children flock to his to see all of their neat toys. No, he can’t walk away any more than you, or anyone else, can.

So of course he comes to a wholly natural conclusion; if his job bores him, tough shit.

He gets up every morning, same as usual, same as you, and drags himself to work. It’s different now, for he must drag himself, because regardless of how tough your shit is you can’t reconnect what has been severed. Every morning, he walks to work, his head hanging a little lower, his walk a little slower going, a little faster coming home. He starts looking at anything to distract him, the clouds, the smog, anything but the vast carbon dioxide scrubbing structure looming in the background, where he worked. Just like with his marriage, when he started there his mind was on the bigger picture, a part of a grand purpose far bigger than himself. What purpose could be more noble than reversing centuries of damage to the environment?

No higher calling than the return of Terra, the Earth itself, to its once glorious status as a garden, the gem of the solar system, could exist.

In fact, when he started, his job was not only a duty, but a part of his identity. He enjoyed wearing his uniform to work, and sometimes he’d even wear it other places even though he’d had plenty of time to change. People would pay him a modicum of respect, maybe even starting a conversation about it and expressing admiration for the project in depth.

Still, reminders of that fact merely compound his feelings of guilt. He comes to hate being there, hate the files, the desks, his co-workers, and even how looming and monolithic the structure itself was. It just sits there, larger than the largest skyscrapers. You could see it from anywhere in the city. As you get closer, the air gets cleaner, and you can even take off your mask. He began to hate that too. He started wanting to keep his face covered, so no one could look at him and he could sneak in and out as quick as he could. Then, as he’s entering the building, he notices another poster; two eyes, looking directly at him. He banishes his selfish thoughts, takes his mask off, and offers the lady at the front desk another customary smile.

Now, again, picture that you have been single for three years. You’ve come to terms with your divorce by now, but you haven’t really gotten over it, and sometimes you still spend your alone time thinking about what went wrong. This is where you are when your boss walks into your office, starting what would seem a typical conversation.

But it isn’t. He’s there to fire you. You ask him why, you think perhaps your performance has been slacking off due to your steady slide into ennui. Maybe the divorce hit you a bit harder than you thought, and you don’t even really know what you’ve been doing at work. No, he assures you, your performance is fine, they’ve just been steadily automating more and more, and human labor has become significantly less necessary. He’s telling the truth, by the way. He likes his employees, considers them friends despite the awkwardness their hierarchical inequality brings into any social interactions between them.

Harold exits the building at an even more hurried pace than usual. His mind swims like swarming eels, electric with spurts of rage and grief. You should be happy. You hated working there, so why aren’t you happy? He passes through the streets and the eyes following him. He passes through the city, taking advantage of New York’s excellent public transportation, through the clean streets where homelessness has been eradicated. He returns to his house, situated comfortably in that utopia, and grits his teeth in the dark heartbeat.

He grabs the lip of his table. He feels a scream welling up in his throat. He feels the need to flip it, to smash it, to destroy his house, to smash the windows, to burn it all down. He feels like he’s being watched.

He looks around. No one’s there, no one but a single poster of two realistic eyes looking through them, directly at him. Did someone put it there recently? Did they put it there when they knew he’d be fired to watch him, to watch his life crack at its weakest points and collapse into dust, and to remind him that decency and duty demanded he bear his fall from grace with pride?

No, it was always there, even before he moved in. You just get used to them; you stop seeing them. They proliferate, until they’re just as much on the walls of your own skull as on the walls of the city.

You call your wife– ex wife– with shaking hands, you tell her about how you lost your job. Your tears leak through your teeth no matter how hard you try to hold them back. They drip onto the phone, they seep into its cracks, but your ex wife doesn’t acknowledge the taste of salt. She acknowledges the lifestyle changes the news brings, but your inner pain is her business no longer. She tells you to take care, leaving you the last drop of human concern anyone has for you, and you cling to it even as you hang up. Then you put your phone on the table.

You take deep breaths, but even the air inside your house tastes like smog. You throw open your door, and you start tearing the posters down. You rip your hands through the eyes and throw their viscera onto the streets. Passerby become concerned. You ascend beyond noticing as you cover your fingers with the blood and guts of your life’s great lie. You tear until the police finally arrive, and as their batons bruise your body and their boots on your chest make it difficult to breathe, you look up at them through the stains of your own blood, and your darkening vision, and you thank them, because someone is finally being honest with you.

[horny-gold]

Got anymore hornigold headcanons?

 I got a lot of random ones, but I haven’t been in the habit of writing much lately. I’d take them with a grain of salt

Let’s see…

Had no direct descendants but siblings back around King’s Lynn (I prefer that for his hometown between the two AC suggested). His family loved him and he had a decent upbringing around the docks and fishin vessels. Fond memories of cockle gathering in the Wash. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted to die a respectable man of some quality, not bring his family (and name) shame.

BenThatch had a heated argument or two over shifting to piracy once the war was over. Ben came around after being a diva

If someone were to enter the animus and explore Ben’s memories they’d have to utilize memories from sibling lines, Kenway, others he knew + his observatory vial. Abstergo had the vials from the Roberts stash in 2014, but claim Assassins destroyed them. Well you know what? Fuck you, Ubi. They didn’t destroy his.

Generally grew unhappy with his life as a pirate. He had highs and lows and eventually became totally disenchanted. Had his personal code of honor and rules that sometimes got in the way of profit (and success as a pirate).

Lost his hat more than once explaining why he never had one in his scenes

I think he is humorous. Some interpretations make him always serious… Kind of wry and biting humor sometimes, but sometimes just genuinely likes to inject humor and poke fun. We see his humor fade as he reaches wit’s end with his predicament. Also with humor, he gets more ridiculous as he continues to drink and smoke. But it can also lead to brooding. Really depends on the mood before he gets drunk (or high). And yeah, he definitely gets high and still got high as a Templar lol

Naval background, but despite what you might think, his career didn’t last very long before he went privateer. There’s no way he’d go back to the navy. He likes the idea of order, but deep down, he can’t live under such rigid command (ideally he’s in charge amirite). Even as a Templar you see he’s doing his own thing as a pirate hunter. 

Hearing Chamberlaine call him scum hit him harder than you’d expect, as it made him recall his naval days. Having a third option (Woodes & Templars) got him.

He genuinely wanted Vane and Rackham to sign the pardon along with the rest. 

Felt abandoned at Nassau and saw no point supporting a Republic no one else would contribute to. Once Thatch, his best and longest ally left, he was pretty much done with the illusion it would function freely.

Ben went along with Thatch’s ‘Blackbeard’ persona up to a point. More or less like: “Sure whatever tickles your fancy, Thatch” while he knocked back a drink. I think he initially gave positive feedback, cause he also was for theatrics before bloodshed. Thatch went too far, though…

Not a huge fan of Blackbeard’s beard, leading to more drama.

Was brassed off about Thatch and his wives, whether or not they were tall tales or truths. He probably interfered with any of that in Nassau

He grew the sideburns out once he started pirating. He looked more like his concept art as a privateer. 

Usually has his hair down when he sleeps on land. At sea, eh might be better to keep it tied back.

His home in Nassau is the one with the Union Jack on the main street in the middle of town leading to the beach

Was actually involved in improving the fort which we didn’t see in the game as well and would pay pirates with booze to move cannons and do repairs with him. 

Ben is a verbal top, powerbottom, or bossy bottom. I think there’s some room for exceptions, depending on the partner…

Wanted Kidd on his ship, and I think he’d have invited Kidd to serve aboard (idk if it happened). I don’t think we ever saw the two exchange a single word, but I like to imagine they were on decent terms before shit happened.

Egocentric to an extent, and that egocentricity gives way to horrible brooding lows when things are looking down. What makes Ben a Templar is he wants control of himself, his life, his ship. Chaos for too long scares the shit out of him. Losing a few ships and command, for example, was a terrible blow to his ego and would increase his drinking. He’d save himself before Nassau in most projections…

Ben genuinely likes passing on the craft, theory, and strategy of the sea to others. He likes teaching but I think he’s done it so much he comes off as a know it all at times. And yeah, being revered as the man who knows how to board ships so well and seeing his methods used does give him an ego boost.

Isn’t above jealousy and was jelly of Jackdaw and Queen Anne’s Revenge. Dick measuring contest stuff. Knows he can sail better than both though!

Ben doesn’t really share much about his personal life and personal problems except to Thatch and a few other veteran sailors like Cockram and Burgess. I think he opened up to them a lot more.

Did all of this shit for adventure and plunder. In his early dreams, he imagined getting rich and retiring with an estate like one of the 17th-century pirate gentlemen. Why when Kenway is talking about it he looks so amused. He’s been there, he knows it’s a lie and not possible in their century. It’s kind of sad to him.

Died on the beach like in the book, the boat crashed also because it was in a hurricane (Ben could navigate that with ease otherwise. This is  BEN.), but has the cutscene with his final words to Kenway from the game. I think he deserved a death in combat; after all, he was one of the ones who taught Kenway to fight

Grieved a lot for Thatch in private but outwardly was ‘I WARNED HIM, the pillock!’ 

Ben doesn’t always respect personal boundaries and is touchy-feely, especially with those he considers friends ‘and such.’ That includes hugs, pokes, bumps, putting an arm around. 

Had circumstances worked out differently in some ‘ideal’ animus projection, would have helped Thatch in Carolina. Aided Kenway had he been told about Templars, granted he could be convinced early on. There’s other woulda coulda, shouldas…idc

The ‘medicines’ were more than just medicines for Nassau and represented Thatch & Hornigold’s rocky relationship and trying to keep Ben’s interest in keeping Nassau a truly ‘free’ pirate republic.

As far as all the ships he’s had, Ben is the most prickly about the Benjamin getting damaged. It’s a real mystery why he’d do that to himself. He has a gut feeling if the Benjamin goes, then he will follow not long after…

[djkaeru]

Ajay “I’m so done with all this shit“ Ghale. OOOOOOOOOOK, since my brother is back and busy with monster hunter world’s latest update, that mean no video game for me to night, guess it’s a good time to start do this, mostly just my random mumbling about my far cry 5 gameplay . BTW I haven’t finished the game so no spoilers for me please.

Ajay is here because I called my character Ajay, no doodles just my mumbling under the cut.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOK, so I stated before I was gonna call my character Ajay because I’m not over with him yet, I don’t like how his story ended in the last DLC? so I’m gonna pretend Ajay got back from Kyrat safely, get a new job only go get into another chaos again 

BUT my character don’t have a voice (not even when he’s been shot??????) he don’t really show his face, and not to mention the character customization isn’t really that much choice...the only thing I can pretend he’s Ajay is probably the gloves? Also if they’re not giving my character choices that matters (like my warden) or sassy dialogs (like my courier), I can’t really get too involved in the story...ubi??? So like I told one of my friend, FC5 is more like watching a movie then participating in an event like FC4 to me. ( But the Seeds are really great villains to watch so I guess it’s still OK for me?)

I’m so desperate to see more pagan again........then ubisoft give me a pagan bobblehead...mmmm...hallelujah?

I got boomer really early in the game, I thought I’m gonna keep him with me all the game, but alas, I don’t know if it’s just my feeling or what, I got ambushed aaaaaaaaallllllllllllll the time, it’s ridiculous , I once got ambushed non stop by a truck, 2 random dudes in cars, a fxxking bear and a freaking plane in one spot. How is this possible. I died multiple times trying to fight them back but end up fleeing place after revived several times. (Then I called in nick to bomb them all, thank you bro)

NICK. I love you BUT I REALLY CAN’T FLY HELP ME. That mission that I need to chase after some trucks and then to shot a plane? I got killed SO MANY TIMES I ended up calling in Nick (again) to help me shot the damn thing down (I was soooo glad that I got him right after boomer or I’m doomed.

just when I was so relaxed after shooting that sucker down, thinking all I need to do is to land how difficult can that be. WHY IS IT SO FXXKING HARD TO LAND OMG. I swear to god I press the right button at the right time but my plane just kept on crashing  and crashing. I fxxking hate the vehicles in FC i crashed all the time. what’s the physics in these games I see none.

Thanks to Kai who was by my side at the time, she reminded me that I’ve got a parachute why don’t I just jump out of the plane? it’s not your plane anyway and it’s not like the plane will not just heal itself later. Why thank you!!!!!!!!!!! this is like the most helpful advice I got for this game, so my Ajay just jumped out of the plane , let the plane crashed in to Nick’s garage (sorry dude) and walked away from the explosion like a pro because he’s Ajay.

I really want to know if there’s a way to capture instead of shooting John? the mission asked me to get to him so I just shoot him right away :/....he did have a nice voice...

woa it’s almost 1am now so I think I’m gonna stop now, I’ve already defeated Faith as well so maybe I can mumble about her in the next post. night.

[ubcs-dump]

People will hate me for this but

I do NOT like some of the character designs in the RE3 Remake. Call me a nostalgic baby but I absolutely love most designs from the original RE3. I grew up with these characters. They hold an extremely special place in my heart, ESPECIALLY Mikhail. But before I lose myself and talk myself into a mess, let me just rate every chacter’s design to get a bit more of a structure into this (DISCLAMER, I WILL BE EXTREMELY HONEST WITH MY OPINION, AND I AM NOT SAYING YOU SUCK FOR LIKING THESE DESIGNS, I’M GLAD YOU CAN ENJOY IT BUT I JUST CAN’T):

JILL VALENTINE

So. I‘m actually okay with that design. I like the changes they did to her outfit, this makes a lot more sense than her running around like the zombie apocalypse caught her off guard while clubbing. Her face did change quite a bit and I am still not sure if I like it or not. Tl;dr I’m fine with the design in general.

CARLOS OLIVEIRA

Okay now THIS ONE. THIS ONE actually physically hurts me. While they at least tried to stick close to the original design with Jill, Carlos took a whole 180 turn. First of all, does Capcom even know what a 21 year old looks like? This dude looks like he is in his late 20s. But age aside, what have they done to his design in general? Nothing about him says “Carlos Oliveira” to me. He might as well be some random OC they picked out from the internet. Something I absolutely love about the original Carlos are his hair and his skin tone. He is a POC but I can’t see any of that in this design (ORC white-washed him too and I was furious about that as well). Speaking of which, why is Carlos a character that gets extremely redesigned in every single game? I showed this model to multiple people and when I said “This is Carlos Oliveira” they all thought I was joking. Tl;dr Not fond of this at all. I want my cute jokester Carlos back. And No, his “pre-order classic design” is not classic at all. He looks weird in that too. (Also what’s with the extreme redesign of the UBCS outfit?)

NIKOLAI ZINOVIEV

It’s interesting how while Carlos designs seem to get worse, Nikolai is either improved or stays pretty much the same. I absolutely loved his design in ORC. That scar and his constant down-looking gaze, not to mention that sexy voice (remember, this is my opinion only). I really really wished they would have used his ORC design and just changed it up a bit to fit the better graphics. In this he just looks like my dad but with grey hair and lighter skin. Also they didn’t bring back the “Mikhail and Nikolai were supposed to be brothers” thing which would have been awesome but this is Capcom and we can’t have nice things. Tl;dr It’s okay but could have been way better. (New UBCS design still sucks)

MIKHAIL VICTOR

*Deep inhale* *Deep exhale* Why? Why does he look like Bill from Left 4 Dead? I’m not joking, look at them side by side. They look like twins. This is the model that made me break down in tears, I am not joking. Mikhail has always been my favorite character, he had a much bigger impact on my life than you might think. He is not just the name giver for my pen name (Uby Victor) but he has been a sort of mascot for my DeviantArt and YouTube accounts as well. You could say the original Mikhail is my role model. And then I saw this and absolutely lost it. Nothing about this looks or sounds like Mikhail. In the original he was so wounded he couldn’t even talk properly from the pain, which made him even more badass when he actually managed to get up and fight back with all he got left. But here is just hanging around with surfer boy-Carlos and Jill like it’s nothing. Just sitting there, calmly talking about what happened. In the original he is supposed to be one of the reasons the characters wanted to hurry up and get out of town as much as possible, because he is on the verge of pretty much dying. I could probably rant for way longer than this because I am absolutely livid they changed him so extremely but I don’t want to write too much. Tl;dr I absolutely hate this model and will stick with the original because that is the character I love and look up to.

MURPHY SEEKER

You know, I am actually fine with this model. He looks almost exactly like how I imagined him look like. I’d probably give him a tuft of hair sticking out of the hat because his forehead looks massive. Plus change the outfit to the old UBCS gear, FOR ALL OF THEM! But other than that he looks cute. (Although why is it Jill who finds him? It had a much bigger impact when Carlos had to kill him because they were best friends and that helped develop Carlos as a character). Tl;dr I like it. I would want to be friends with him.

TYRELL PATRICK

I’m pretty indifferent about this. I admit that Tyrells old model was very offensive (what with the big lips and such). This model I don’t really mind but since we only see it in the dark, I can’t yet give a full opinion on it. At least they let him keep his glasses and did not white-wash him or anything. But still, that new UBCS ouftit, I do not like. Why are he and Carlos together though? Aren’t they supposed to be in totally different platoons (plus Tyrell is a monitor)? Tl;dr it’s okay I suppose but I can’t give my full opinion because I can barely see him.

BRAD VICKERS

Hmmmmmmmm. Brad, oh Brad, what am I supposed to say about you. He used to be my second favorite character and I remember writing fanfiction about him and my RE OC almost 10 years ago. They kept his original outfit, which I am very thankful for. He also seems to be more involved in the story and that is great imo. But something just seems off with his face. In the original he looked pale as if he was in a constant 24/7 panic attack (which suits his character and is pretty relateable I might add) but in here something just seems... off? I don’t know if it’s the shape of his face or the fact he seemed to have gained a bit of weight (which is NOT A BAD THING, don’t get me wrong!) but I don’t really know if I like it or not. Tl;dr I take it I guess.

NEMESIS

I gotta admit, when I saw that nose I started laughing out loud. It just looks goofy to me. And those teeth man. Nemmy, who’s your dentist at Umbrella? I guess it’s no surprised I prefer the original by a long shot. The old Nemesis on the box art was so scary to me as a kid, I had to hide it in the far far end of my family’s game shelve because I was too creeped out to even look at him with his sharp teeth, noseless face and dead but intimidating eye glaring at me. This new one is certainly creepy to some extent but the OG is way better in my opinion. Tl;dr not my thing. Also what’s with those pipes? Are they trying to fight the tentacle-lovers side of the internet and prevent them from using Nemesis any longer?

BONUS

Capcom, stop trying to modernize this game, especially in regards to the UBCS outfit and the weapons they carry. RE3 is supposed to take place in 1999. You don’t have to make it look like some futuristic zombie apocalypse to draw in people. That also goes for the cable car, oh sorry, SUBWAY as it is in this game. What’s wrong with the cable car? Yeah sure it’s pretty outdated by todays standpoint but, again RE3 TAKES PLACE IN 1999 when cable cars were common! Just making the original again but with much much better graphics and the new controls would have been enough already in my opinion.

Anyways, these are my opinions on the RE3 REMAKE so far. Thanks for reading and remember, these are my opinions. If you don’t agree with me, that’s totally fine!

Special thanks to @therealorigonalguppieniwa​ and @ubcsmercenary​ for pointing stuff out for me and discussing my opinions with me.

[sylvieusedhyperbeam]

the left going forward; corporate media

 all right so

i’ve heard a lot of thoughts about where the left can go forward from here.  and i’m not just talking about the election in november (in fact, that’s not even on my mind right now as i write this).  and while i feel like the first real steps forward from this point on should be the left focusing on local elections, trying to reach out and inform communities of the cause (waking apolitical people up with the possibility of a further extended coalition is never a bad thing), there’s a huge obstacle that we really need to figure out.

and that is, of course, corporate media.

anyone new ‘round here

now for anyone new here, corporate media isn’t just some ‘leftist twitter bubble conspiracy theory!!!’ as some centrists would have you believe.  

when the near entirety of a country’s news stations, outlets and papers are owned by six corporations, and when said corporations donate money to a political campaign?  yeah... i hope you can see the problem there.  a news station owned by a company donating money to a politician probably isn’t going to give fair or neutral coverage throughout that particular election.  

for more information on this, i’d suggest a reading of Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.

now that being said, it’s safe to say that corporate media becoming effective free super-pacs for these establishment picks are... a pretty huge problem that we need to figure out going forward.  

i’ve seen the suggestion of ‘not making the media hate us’ get floated around, but uh... lmao yeah, good luck with that.  long as you stand for people, and as long as you threaten their bottom line, it ain’t gonna happen.  they will ALWAYS hate you.  the coverage will get friendly and fawning once you’re no longer a threat to them, and ONLY once you’re no longer a threat.  that’s when they start gaslighting the left, insulting them for ever thinking there was a bias (lmao we’re in that phase right now where CNN and MSNBC have nothing but good things to say about Sanders now, it’d almost be funny if it weren’t so goddamn infuriating).  so yeah, tl;dr you can go ahead and try to be more media-friendly, but... i just don’t see it happening.  if you ain’t corporate friendly, you ain’t in the club.  period.

just to reassure anyone reading this, no you’re not crazy, there WAS an incredibly insane bias and they’re going to try their hardest to gaslight you into thinking otherwise.  don’t take their bullshit.  never forget.

as for my take on it, i can only think of a few suggestions.

one will have to be labeling/branding.  it sucks that western countries never recovered from the Red Scare and that it’s all but calcified unfettered capitalism at the expense of the labor/working class, but unfortunately, that’s the reality (it’s also why i was facepalming at leftists constantly pushing Russiagate while not realizing how easily that’s going to be flipped on us come 2020 but whatever, hindsight and all that).  

i think one of Sanders’ mistakes was running entirely on the label of socialist.  like i said, western countries never recovered from the Red Scare, you have to go with something more friendly to the culture.  you can’t connect the dots for them if they’re too scared by the word ‘socialist’ to look at the picture.  maybe instead of socialist, run on New Deal Democrat?  it’s ‘less scary’ and potentially creates an inroad with older voters.  like it or not, you have to sell your ideas in an appealing package before you can expect to see any results.  

number two, i think we just need to stop giving a fuck about the spin the media tries to put on us.  like, stop going on the constant defensive and jump to offense.  i think it was another mistake in the Sanders campaign, they spent way too much time on defense, and Bernie didn’t spend enough time drawing contrast between himself and Biden.

and for the sake of context i’ll go ahead and add that this didn’t come without personal shortcomings on Bernie’s end, either. fawning endlessly over Biden, saying Biden was a decent guy that could totally beat Trump, that shit was just politically stupid beyond belief.  i love Bernie to death, but playing nice this time around cost him when he was already on a harrowing path.

but in all fairness, i think Bernie played so nice with Biden BECAUSE he knew that he was talking to, effectively, Biden’s super pacs whenever he was on MSNBC and CNN.  like i get it, he’s trying to play chess, but sometimes you gotta flip the fuckin board over and call it when your opponent is smearing feces all over the pieces.  

running that train of thought, hell, MSM loves ratings a shit ton more than they value journalistic integrity, so maybe sharp-tongued contrasts and statements about the other side will draw attention gradually towards the core issues.  drama sells.  discussing issues invites them to put spin on you, and yes it’s total bullshit, but what people forget about MSM is that they HAVE to make money off of everyone somehow. ‘Senator Jones Has Mathematically Sound Plan for UBI’ doesn’t sell.  ‘Soviet Union Loving Commie Tries to Sell Commie Ideas’ does.  

like, it sucks that the idea of surviving the turgid sea of shit that is neoliberal media is to play their game to an extent and rattle the cages, give them a bit of red meat to bite into here and there, but i honestly think it was a huge part of Trump’s formula.  he kept on giving them red meat to bite into, he stirred up drama, he said outrageous shit in order to draw attention before he utilized that attention to bash into Hillary.  

and like it or not, people listened.  

so yeah, i think going more offensive and drawing contrast rather than being on defensive would work better to our advantage.  we’re not going to get anywhere playing nice.  we’re not going to sell the issues by apologizing for believing healthcare is a human right, or constantly apologizing for shit they’ll go dig up to pin on you (like a stupid off-color joke made in a blog twenty years ago).  it sucks, but it’s the world we live in.  focusing more on offense (and trying not to think about how we’re providing the bread and circuses for these assclowns) might be a better path.

IDK these are just my thoughts and my coffee is gone so time to go take care of that shit.

[putthison]

Why It’s Hard to Get Plus Sizes in Menswear

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Ulrich Simpson, the owner and designer behind UBI-IND Denim. Like dozens of companies, they make raw, selvedge jeans in the US. The difference is that they have plus sizes. While UBI-IND sells your everyday slim and classic fits for the average guy, their jeans go all the way up to a size 46 (most brands stop at a size 38 waist). 

This isn’t just a matter of scaling. In order to get plus sizes that fit, companies have to create patterns that start at a new baseline. A size 36 jean, for example, is likely a scaled-up version of the same model in a size 32 (what the industry calls “grading”). That’s not really possible with plus sizes since you’ll start throwing off proportions. In order to get a larger size to look right, companies have to create new patterns with a different baseline -- getting a size 44 waist from a 42 pattern, rather than trying to derive it from a size 32. If you’re a plus-size guy and find a lot of clothes look weird on you, it might be because of how most companies design and make clothes (assuming you can find plus sizes at all). 

Esquire has an article on why it’s hard to get good, properly designed plus-size clothing in menswear. To be sure, the market has something to do with it -- stores are more likely to move a size medium than XXL -- but it’s also a chicken-and-egg problem. Plus-size guys aren’t coming into shops because they know there’s nothing there for them. Arianna Reboilini, the author of the Esquire article, notes that menswear brands have really lagged behind womenswear in this regard. One possible reason is because menswear companies are hemmed in by gender norms, so they struggle to find the right marketing tone. An excerpt:

As of 2014, the average American male's waist measured 40 inches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet even mainstream stores like Forever 21, Unif, and Urban Outfitters don't make anything above a 38-inch waist. A few companies—Gap, Eddie Bauer, American Eagle—sell some pants with 48-inch waistbands, but often not in stores, and not using larger models to display them. An XXL shirt, meanwhile, is often a medium scaled up without accounting for a longer torso or broader shoulders.

None of these issues are specific to men: women have been fighting for inclusivity in the fashion industry for years. Efforts to diversify men's fashion are much newer, however, and they come with their own unique stigmas. The women's plus-size industry is built on overt body positivity. But that kind of defiant self-love is often seen as outside the bounds of mainstream masculinity—especially by big brands and ad firms wary of striking the wrong tone.

In 2016, the women's plus-size clothing market was worth an estimated $20.4 billion; for three years prior, growth outpaced that of women's clothing sales overall. (There is significantly less tracking of the size of the plus-size men's industry; one research group estimated it totals about $1 billion.) Plus-size women are more visible than ever, with models like Ashley Graham, Tess Holliday, and Nadia Aboulhosn leading the charge on catwalks, magazine covers, and online.

Nick Paget, senior menswear editor at trend forecasting company WGSN, doesn't see similar energy around men's clothing. Men's plus-size options (or extended size, or big and tall; there's no agreement on one label yet) are growing, he said, but not quickly, and not very publicly. "Maybe it's something that people just are doing but don't really chat about, but people aren't really talking about plus-size, which I think is a big miss, really," he told me. "I can't really get my head around why this isn't happening at the same rate that it's happening within women's wear."

[...]

Some men distance themselves from the language of body positivity because they think it's unmasculine, but others feel uncomfortable encroaching on a movement they believe women deserve to own. Every guy I spoke to offered a caveat: I know women have it worse. "For women, the plus-size movement is great," said artist Danny Brito, who wears a 2X and frequently complains online about his limited options. "I don't want to be like, 'What about men?' Women's rights, to me, are more important. Just kick us some plus-size stuff now and then is all I'm asking."

Bruce Sturgell, who founded the plus-size men's fashion site Chubstr, observes a kind of willful silence among many men when it comes to talking about what it feels like to be plus-size. He has found the best way to reach plus-size men is to be as straightforward as possible, with no pandering. "It's not so much about saying, 'We're fat and deserve to be loved,' as it is about showing you can put a bigger guy into an awesome outfit and show that he can look great," he said. "It has the same effect without saying it: these people are worthwhile and deserve the same options."

You can read the rest here. 

[thebipartisanpress-blog]

Andrew Yang’s UBI Could Be Illegal

Andrew Yang went from being ignored by major media sites to one of the most talked-about presidential candidates running in 2020. An entrepreneur concerned about the "4th industrial revolution" (read: machines taking over our jobs), Yang built his campaign around his Freedom Dividend (Universal Basic Income) that gives everyone over 18 $1000 a month. Purportedly, the $1000 a month would, "provide money to cover the basics for Americans while enabling us to look for a better job, start our own business, go back to school, take care of our loved ones or work towards our next opportunity." Funded by a value-added tax, the money would work towards helping people sustain themselves while they pursue other things that they want in life. The fundamental idea of universal basic income may or may not be the right idea, but more importantly, UBI could be unconstitutional. The tenth amendment of the Constitution says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Under the tenth amendment, any power not granted to the three branches of the government and not prohibited to the States are up to the States to implement. In other words, Congress can't make laws regarding things it wasn't specifically designated to govern. Congress's powers are granted under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Specifically, Congress may, "...lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States," among many other things. In order for Yang to implement his Freedom Dividend, he would have to get Congressional approval. However, under the tenth amendment, Congress doesn't have the power to impose taxes to fund the Freedom Dividend, nor does it have the ability to distribute it. On its face, it seems like Section 8 is granting Congress the power to use tax money and distribute the Freedom Dividend ("general Welfare of the United States"). However, Paul Engel from The Constitution Study writes, "There are three nouns used in the Constitution to designate the possessor of powers and over whom they can and cannot be applied: the United States, the States, and the People.  The term 'United States' refers to the union of states and its government.  The term 'States' or 'Several States' refers to the states either individually or collectively.  And 'The People' refers to individuals." In this case, the general welfare clause refers to the "United States." If Congress were to enact a UBI bill, it would be for the welfare of "the People" not "the United States" since universal basic income benefits individual people, not the United States collectively. While the Constitution is written very broadly and open for lots of interpretations, Paul also offers the reasoning behind why "general welfare of the United States" doesn't apply in this case: "...the United States of America is the name given to the union of states.  (Think of a corporation created by stockholders.). Today we tend to think of states as a subdivision of the federal government, but it is, in fact, the other way around.  The United States is a creation of the states to which they have delegated some of their powers.  In this context, the states have delegated to Congress the power to collect taxes for a limited number of things, common defense and general welfare of the union itself.  As James Madison put it, that is a general power.  The rest of Article I, Section 8 are the specific powers that make up the common defense and general welfare for the union.  So things like Foreign commerce, coining money, creating federal courts, establishing post roads, raising armies, etc. are the things Congress can collect taxes for since they are for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.  They are not for the welfare of the states themselves or for the people of those states. " "If the General Welfare Clause gave Congress the power to do anything they could somehow identify as in the general welfare of the people or the states of the United States, then the vast majority of the Constitution, along with the idea of a limited federal government, would be effectively void.  Why create a list of powers if they are already included in the term “for the General Welfare”?  This is confirmed by James Madison in Federalist Papers #41: "It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. — Federalist Papers #41 If giving out UBI isn’t an enumerated power given to Congress under the Constitution, then by the 10th amendment, Congress giving out UBI is unconstitutional and thereby illegal. After all, the United States was founded on the belief of a limited federal government, hence why any power not delegated in the Constitution is reserved for the States unless specifically prohibited, in which case the People hold them. Indeed, even though UBI could be illegal, it wouldn't be the first. Article I, Section 8 has been one of the most hotly debated parts of the Constitution, and possibly even largely ignored. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both agreed that the general welfare clause referred to the power enumerated to Congress later on in the Constitution (to pay debts, to provide defense, etc), while Alexander Hamilton advocated for a much broader view, expressing that the clause granted Congress the power to spend, as long as it was for the general welfare of the federal government. Supreme Court Justice Story sided with the Hamiltonian view in United States V. Butler, writing that Section 8 granted Congress to spend as long as it was for the general welfare of the federal government. Regardless though, UBI would qualify as the general welfare of "the People" not the federal government. Of course, by those terms, most of the federal welfare programs are illegal too, but that's for another day. Read the flip side: Andrew Yang is Different From the Other Democratic Candidates Content from The Bipartisan Press. All Rights Reserved. Agree or disagree with something in this article? Share it in the comment section and see what others think. Read the full article