#you know the one part of ANY rpg that people deliberately go back to and spend millennia in because it's fun

[yharnamesque]

The one single BG3 mod I await eternally is the one that will inevitably just unlock the entire character creator in one go

All heads on any body type regardless of whether it's designated male or female, give a dwarf tiefling horns, fuck it find a way to give elves orc tusks, naturally including all the NPC hairs of course

Complete freedom, complete chaos, just as it should have been right from the very start

[ryotaiku]

Short thoughts on every Final Fantasy game

FF1

This game rules. I've played roughly four RPGs of its era (Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, Wizardry) and FF1 is definitely my favorite. Way more of FF is established in this game than most people think, and it's cool seeing where it all started. Its only real annoyance is the grind, which is decently mitigated if you play any version after the PS1 port.

I didn't know this until recently but the PS1 port has a completely optional Easy mode that adjusts EXP gain & shop prices, and every subsequent re-release is based on that easy mode. With this knowledge I'd recommend the PS1 port on Normal for authenticity, but if you hate spell slots I'd recommend the PSP port.

FF2

Awful. Its one and only good quality is the tone & progression path, but everything else is bad. There's a keyword system where you gotta record words from NPCs and say them at other NPCs to move forward, which turns the game into say everything to everyone; often NPCs on the other side of the world. You level individual skills Elder Scrolls style instead of having character levels, which is neat in theory, but you also need to level your health and spells by deliberately getting hurt and casting spells over & over. You can't just let them level naturally, you gotta do it with purpose. Virtually every dungeon in the game has rooms that are just empty dead ends with bullshit encounter rates. It's terrible. FF2 is one of the most miserable RPGs I've ever played.

I don't recommend any version, but the PSP port is supposedly the best one.

FF3

It's decent. It's the first entry to use the Job system, though it gets really gimmicky. Sometimes it makes sense; like a dungeon where you gotta go Mini, which kills your physical strength, so you gotta make everyone a mage to do real damage. Other times it's really forced & boring, like a boss that just doesn't take damage from anything other than a Dragoon jump. The worst part of the game is arguably the final dungeon, which is arbitrarily long with no save points, and a final boss that just does repeated mega-damage with no strategy beyond just healing through it. The beginning is pretty sluggish too, but it's sandwiching a really solid middle.

The best version of FF3 is your choice between the pixel remaster or the 3D remake. I only ever played the latter, but if I were to replay FF3 I'd probably prefer the former. The 3D remake has some weird rebalance quirks due to being made with DS hardware in mind, which didn't annoy me in 2017 but would probably annoy me now.

FF4

Excellent entry. This is commonly touted as the best starting point for newcomers, in part due to its main "gimmick" of ATB becoming a mainstay for the rest of the series. There's no character customization, instead utilizing a rotating cast as you progress, as well as a little bit of gear variety. It's arguably the "purest" game in the series lacking any major gimmick, and ironically it's one of the best entries because of it.

The best versions of FF4 are the the PSP port and the 3D remake. FF4 ports haven't made a lot of major gameplay changes until the pixel remaster, so the PSP has remained mostly authentic. The 3D remake is almost its own game and can be played separately from the 2D variants, but it's also a lot harder; even after the Steam port reduced the difficulty from its initial DS release. It's arguably the hardest game of the series.

FF5

This is the best one. It brings back FF3's job system and refines it into a clear cut diamond, making one of the most in-depth and replayable games of not just the series, but RPGs as a whole. There are so many potential ways to beat the game that you could potentially play it forever. The endgame gets really grindy & frustrating, but it's worth it.

I'm torn between the GBA port or the Pixel Remaster being the best versions. The GBA port has some bonus content that's actually pretty good (a rarity for JRPGs), but the Pixel Remaster lets you adjust EXP & money gain which really helps out in the endgame grind. I'm gonna say Pixel Remaster, but I might change my mind after writing this.

FF6

Meh. This is a lot of people's favorite, and it's arguably the best written, but man I really don't like the Esper system. My first time through I really loved the first act, controlling all these characters with unique classes & abilities, but unlocking the Esper system & drowning out all their unique skills with overpowered spells killed it for me. Even worse is needing to juggle Espers around as characters level up so they get the ideal stat boosts, and now when I play the beginning all I can think about is every level gained before Clock Town being a potential waste. It's good your first time, but subsequent playthroughs feel noticeably worse.

I don't like FF6 enough to really say what the best version is, but from what I've observed fans are torn between the SNES original, the GBA port, and the Pixel Remaster. People swear by Ted Woolsey's original FF6 translation, but the GBA has some bonus content, and the Pixel Remaster has an enhanced opera scene. Take your pick.

FF7

It doesn't have Espers. 7777/10 … Okay in all seriousness FF7 actually does improve on what bugged me about FF6. Materia is basically Espers reversed, leveling independently instead of teaching the spell to the character it's equipped on. They're also fungible, so you can buy multiples of the same Materia to make duplicate casters. It's a much better system, and it's a great game. There's a reason this is the most popular entry of the series.

The best version is the PS1 original, since the PC port (which all subsequent ports are based on) has a variable framerate that gets in the way of the controls in a lot of places. Just be sure to use a translation romhack since the PS1 text borders on misinformation in places.

FF8

This one is... confusing. The spell system is pretty cool, but it seemingly discourages spellcasting since they boost your stats, and everyone's highest stat is strength which discourages it further. This has the potential to be the most in-depth game of the series, but it's also watered down by level scaling so you never really feel like you're getting stronger. When people say FF games are confusing, this is the game they're thinking of.

The PS1 original is considered the best way to play, for the same reasons as FF7. I don't know if there's a retranslation around and I'm not sure if I care enough.

FF9

This is a good game, and it's so tantalizingly close to being a great game, but it's got stuff that bugs me. I'm not a fan of the overworld, the party splitting can get kind of annoying, and the ATB system here is arguably the worst the series has ever been. But if those issues were addressed it'd be one of the best entries of the series.

The port quirks of 7&8 are ever-present here, and as such the PS1 original is the way to go. But I will say the PC port gives you mouse control on menus, which is deceptively rare for JRPGs on PC.

FF10

This was my second ever FF game, and it kinda messed with my perception of the whole series until I played FF7. Not in a bad way, but more in a this must be what the whole series is like way; which it's really not. As a game though, it's got ups & downs. The sphere grid is a fascinating approach to progression that makes me question what an RPG really is, and every party member being a hybrid class (except Tidus & Lulu) is especially interesting. But good gods the endgame is one of the biggest grind-fests of the whole series; far more than FFV was. I cannot stress enough how bad it is, and Yojimbo doesn't help. People complain about its forward level design, but honestly the moment it becomes open world is when it starts to lose me. It's a good game, but not one I ever want to play again.

Play the PS2 original, and do not play the International release. The bosses it adds are not only bad, they're intrusive.

FF11

It's pretty well known that FFXI is an MMO that predates the WoW renaissance of MMO accessibility. What's lesser known is FFXI existed in defiance of what WoW established for MMOs going forward, with many of its worst traits happening concurrently with the Lich King era. But I cannot stress enough that I have never played an RPG with the same layered & intricate character building as FFXI. Excluding equipment loadouts, there are 70 universally viable class makeups out of 462, and including equipment there's far too many to count manually. This is a play it forever game not in replay value, but in virtually endless content… if you can look past its early MMO crust but I swear it's better now.

Retail FFXI is still going strong. Despite some dooming about Square seemingly no longer caring about their Western audience, the game is still getting content updates and people are still playing it. Personally though I've been playing a private server called CatsEyeXI, which aims to roll all of the lv99 content down to lv75. I don't have any opinions on an FFXI "golden era," but I do like not having to pay a subscription.

FF12

I really don't like Real-Time w/ Pause, and FF12 encompases both of its worst traits. RTwP is either automated to the point where you're not playing, or it's a micromanagement hellscape. But FF12 manages to be both at the same time, expecting you to micromanage the hell out of your party members just so you don't have to play as them. I really didn't enjoy it, and no amount of bunny girls made me want to stick around.

I didn't play the original FF12, but supposedly Zodiac Age is the preferred version since the original game used a shittier sphere grid.

FF13

I… don't hate it. I played enough to get past the initial corridor, and yeah that part isn't great, but the levels do open up a bit, and I can see the potential for the combat getting less auto-play. A lot of people say this one "gets better later," and for once in my life I actually believe them.

I think the best way to play this would be the Xbox 360 release, which is backwards compatible on Xbox One/Series, but the PC port with some visual patches is serviceable too. It runs better now than it did at launch.

FF14

Yes, I have played the critically acclaimed Final Fantasy XIV with a free trial that includes all of A Realm Reborn & Heavensward & Stormblood. I started playing in Stormblood, and yeah it's a pretty solid MMO. I've slowed down tremendously during Endwalker since I've done pretty much everything I care about, and it's starting to do the MMO thing where new updates get really formulaic & predictable. But what I've heard about Dawntrail makes me optimistic it'll get better again.

Available on PC, PS5, and most recently Xbox Series

FF15

Man, this game is… rough. I like modern fantasy, which is deceptively rare in RPGs, and I love the DLC. Even if you don't like the main game you should play the DLC. But everything else is just bad. The combat (in main-game) is essentially auto-battle, where you can get away with just holding the dodge button until your party combos & god powers charge up. There's no way to get money naturally, instead making you do beast hunting quests which you need to rank up in to get anything good. The open world is both empty and linear, filled with sheer cliffs & impenetrable shrubbery & invisible walls to the point that it might as well not be open at all. Your fucking spells are consumable and have splash damage against your party members. This game is good until it's not, and it stops hard when it does.

Play the Royal Edition if you must, but not the Windows edition. It's got memory leak issues on Windows.

FF16

I don't have a PS5 so I haven't played it yet. When it comes to PC I'll talk about it.

[retphienix]

hm. Since the last time I played a DS game tumblr seems to have adjusted how it handles awkward dimensions on images because it's not really letting me format this well AT ALL. It looks alright in my drafts but it's a mess while posting so apologies if it comes out messy.

Oh well. I'll deal.

So! After much deliberation, mental anguish, anxiety, holiday fun, and sleep I've decided on what I'd like the next full playthrough to be for the blog and I think it'll be an interesting one. So here's the pre-game ramble!

Final Fantasy Tactics is my favorite game. I've said it before, I'll say it again plenty of times up until that finally changes and based on this and that I kind of assume it simply won't.

Whereas my list of favorite games is a miasma of titles with no clear order; There's no "second" or "fifth" favorite it's all just "favorites"- there IS one game that gets the throne and it's the original Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX and it's PSP remaster.

I say that purely because I'll take any excuse to bring up FFT.

Oh but also because it plays into the conversation on the series as a whole (nailed it).

While FFT has remained my favorite game since I was a kid, the "series" lost me almost immediately.

I was handed a GBA with FFTA in it while hanging out with my cousin one day and I distinctly remember my take away being "Why in the heck is this tutorial snowball fight so long, I'm bored. Wait? We're in like a fantasy world? That's NOT what Ivalice is! This is stupid."

Overly dismissive, but the point was that my first impression as a kid was disappointment that the sequel was some strange childlike dream while the first one was a serious epic with death and intrigue going on. I didn't appreciate the shift in tone, and so it took me many years to finally come back and give it a shot on this very blog.

It's fine.

I don't like it; I find it's gameplay vastly inferior to the original, the classes far less interesting, and the story is just painfully immature; mostly felt like they tried to write child characters but tripped headfirst into 'unrealistic bratty selfish characters' which, whoops, you messed up :/

That's kind of the point though, FFTA was clearly meant to smooth out the sharp edges of the genre for a younger audience (ignore the fact that age wise I 'was' that audience- FFT already got it's mitts on me)- the things I find to be lesser were made that way by design and for many people that game holds an important part in their mind-palace because it simply Clicked with them.

But the thing is, while I was wrapping up my FFTA playthrough for the blog I was told the sequel was simply "Better".

...

I was also told it was worse~ So lord help me if that's the case.

I wasn't really given context- I sure as hell don't know a single thing about FFTA2, but I'm game.

I am more than willing to give it a shot, give it a real honest try where I judge it by its own merits, and who knows?

Maybe I'll really like it, I mean I do like me a tactical RPG from time to time.

I feel like despite me editing this down like 4 times to make it not about FFTA, it keeps becoming me slipping in my annoyance with FFTA. I do genuinely think FFTA is "fine" it's just not for me.

ANYWHO. Time to finally give FFTA2 a shot, y'know?

Right out the gate I think we're doing the "fall into a fantasy world" thing again which isn't surprising. These are both FFT(A) titles and I already knew that A and A2 had a hell of a lot more in common than either did with the original.

I like getting to pick random things on my summer vacation wish list and having my guy toss in a cocky comment about the homework promise and even cap it off with "That sounds convincing"- that already gives me a pretty fun idea of who Luso is, kind of a trouble maker perhaps? I like this :)

[snakeassassins]

Rabbit Dad Theory: A Weapon to Surpass Dad for One

okay so. I know that the theory about local big bad of the series being the protagonist’s father , but I’m pretty sure the real reason that midoriya’s dad hasn’t shown up in the plot is because he’s a rabbit

no really

[ WARNING: LONG post under the cut ]

Part 1: Rabbit Motifs

To get this party started properly, let’s begin with a bunch of the rabbit symbolism regarding Midoriya himself.

The most notable of which being that his hero costume is literally him dressing up as a rabbit

His freckles are even stylized to look like little rabbit whiskers. fuckin naruto kinnie

It bleeds into his fighting style too

Two big innovations he has that aren’t based on previous users of one for all

are hopping from place to place

and his big, rabbit-like kicks.

(which would also go a ways to explain why the plot thought Midoriya having legs was a big deal)

A lot of this goes into his characterization as well. The most notable bit being how much the first chapter of bnha parallels the story of the moon rabbit.

(Sometimes referred to as the jade rabbit which. Green)

Anyway, the story goes that a rabbit, along with a bunch of other animals (it varies depending on region) decided to gather food for the full moon as an offering, believing that the best one will bring a reward from the gods.

All of the animals bring plentiful amounts of food, sans the rabbit, who brings only grass.

Eventually, a starving old man comes along.

The other animals have food to give him, but refuse to do so to meet their own ends.

The rabbit, sympathizing with the old man,throws itself into a fire he was kindling so that he can be fed.

The old man, touched by the rabbit’s actions, reveals himself to be a god and saves it.

In honor of the rabbits deeds, the god imprints his image on the moon, bestowing special gifts to him.

Along with this there are a number of other mild rabbity traits tho.

Such as his skittishness.

Not to mention his general resourcefulness.

The show regularly conflates Midoriya being himself with him looking and acting more and more like a rabbit. This isn’t too hard to understand from a Doylist perspective; Horikoshi blatantly just likes bunnies. (I mean just look at Miruko)

What’s interesting here is that we’ve never been given an in-universe explanation for why midoriya himself identifies this way. In a series that is otherwise really invested in dissecting the ideal versions of themselves that characters want to live up to, the show doesn’t provide any justification for a character motif Midoriya has that is almost as present as all might himself.

Judging from the title of this post, you can probably guess what my reasoning for this choice is.

**Part 2: Hisashi’s Quirk **

“But snake,” you may be asking yourself, “We already know what Hisashi Midoriya’s quirk is. He breathes fire.”

This is true. he probably does. Consider what we know in-universe, though.

Characters with heteromorphic quirks don’t have their physical attributes listed as a part of their quirks if they have a secondary characteristic.

Tokoyami is the most obvious example. He’s a bird person, but his quirk is dark shadow. The fact that he’s a bird man goes unmentioned because as far as anyone is concerned, the shadow monster is his power.

Characters like Spinner have their animal attributes listed as quirks, but that’s only because he can’t do anything a gecko wouldn’t. If he didn’t make his lizard powers his quirk he’d have nothing to put.

If Midoriya’s dad happened to be, say, a rabbit that could breathe fire, the fire quirk would be listed while the rabbit bit went unstated. In fact, in a roundabout way, the fire quirk makes rabbit dad even more plausible.

You see, most of the animal character designs in bnha are actually recycled from an old series horikoshi did called oumagadoki zoo. Mind you this isn’t a knock at horikoshi or anything. A lot of mangaka do this sort of thing. I’m mostly bringing it up because one of the main characters is a rabbit called Shiina

and one of the early gags in the series is him smoking a carrot like a cigar.

This would be very easy to translate to my hero academia’s setting if said character happened to breathe fire.

I should also say for those keeping score at home that I don’t necessarily think Hizashi is a Shiina expy specifically (tbh I kinda imagine him being more like a fluffy spike spiegel). At most I think it’s probably just some design motifs and some VERY loose plot points.

There is also the somewhat mild rebuttal of Midoriya never attempting to do anything rabbit-like while trying to see if he had a quirk, but I think that’s self explanatory. If Izuku was a rabbit he’d notice right away, so of course he didn’t bother checking.

**Part 3: Why He’s Absent **

Of course, another big question that might be on your mind is why he’s not present if that’s the simple truth of his identity. Why have him fail to show himself for what has now been 300 chapters?

I can think of two simple reasons:

1) It’s really funny

Just fuckin. The Mystique of it all. You can’t tell fans a character is going to show up eventually and fail to have them appear without piquing someone’s interest. It’s bound to make fans speculate, especially with the canon dabi twist hanging in the air. Years to imagine what his presence might entail if it was something big enough to be worth planning ahead for.

And then. Boom. Bunny.

Fucking. Hysterical.

2) The themes. Oh god the themes

You might have noticed by now but Horikoshi has a tendency of making like. The Shounen Jump equivalent to that rpg character you make as a joke that then has like. an undeniably tragic life when you’re actually forced to tackle with the implications of your own character building.

I would not be surprised if the Midoriyas ended up falling into that category.

So let’s get into that.

One of the big things that my hero academia attempts to tackle is the concept of normalcy.

Mostly how it’s kinda bullshit and, in many cases, outright harmful.

What makes this bit interesting within the context of Midoriya family is Izuku’s sort of. Artificial Plainness.

He is a character deliberately designed to look as normal as possible. The key word there is look. Basically anyone who’s been following the series long enough to be reading this post knows that the kid often struggles to keep his head down

which also makes it interesting that the only two scenes where Midoriya wears his rabbit cowl are scenes where he is actively questioning the status quo.

Methinks there is some symbolism here.

Which I guess brings us back to square one.

At the end of the day, the concept of Midoriya’s dad being a rabbit is funny because it’s so unexpected. Without him around, the Midoriyas look like a normal family.

But that’s also the kicker.

Without him around, the Midoriyas look like a normal family.

A lot of people are quick to call Izuku’s dad an absentee father, but technically speaking, we don’t quite know that yet. We’ve only been in a position where we don’t see him as the audience.

And, well, when your kid is being bullied for something as banal as being quirkless, you might not want to give society more ammunition to use against him.

It wouldn’t strike me as strange if he just avoided being seen in public with his son to keep him safe in his own way.

They say that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down the most. Under those circumstances, it’s not too hard to understand why the loosest nail might just feel safer wriggling out of the wood altogether.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[leahazel]

More about my morally-grey heroines and their messed-up relationships

I wanted to elaborate on this post I wrote about D&F and BFS, but it turns out that adding readmore links to reblogs is a PITA, and I just now that this is gonna turn into a fucking novelette. 

So here we go.

Time to go into some detail about this!

Let’s define our terms:

“Decline and Fall” is my 120K+ series of loosely chronological, interconnected short fics, set in a tiny fandom for a visual novel that’s been in alpha development since 2015. For the record, the word count disincludes unfinished drafts, and stories that I’m holding back because they’re based on canon spoilers.

“Blood from Stone“ is my 100K unfinished Skyrim WIP, which began as a response to a kink meme prompt, and is not so much a rarepair as a non-existent one.

Both of these stories centrally feature young female protagonists and their sexual relationship with a much older man. Both heroines are... “grey” to say the least.

Let’s compare our fandoms, shall we?

Skyrim is a juggernaut fandom for a super-popular RPG which is part of a 30-yo franchise. The setting is moderately dark and casually sprinkled with murder cults, cannibalism, secret police death squads, and the prison industrial complex. The player character can be a thief and a murderer and everyone just learns to be okay with it because the only alternative is a fiery apocalypse. They also rob graves for the lulz.

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem is a pinkie-toe-sized fandom for a hybrid RPG and dating sim where attractive young people flirt and date for the purpose of brokering world peace. The setting is one where you can actually broker world peace effectively. The player character can perpetrate a fair amount of proxy violence, but maintaining a good reputation dishonestly is legitimately difficult.

Now, let’s compare our heroines:

Corinne is a 24-year-old bounty hunter who became a folk hero, a soldier, and a cult assassin. She’s living alone and working for a living since she was 18. She’s never been in love, but she’s had multiple sexual and romantic relationships in the past. I deliberately wrote her as being very sexually confident and self-assured. She also has combat training, magical training, her special Dragonborn powers, and an incalculable amount of social clout. By every metric, she’s a powerful character. Though she can talk her way out of a tight spot (all my favorite characters can), she can also fight her way out.

Verity is (at the beginning of D&F) not yet 18 years old. She’s a princess from a very conservative kingdom who was raised to become a barter bride in a diplomatic marriage. The values that were passed to her were duty, tradition, and absolute obedience. Her primary skills are social, charisma, eloquence, and persuasion. Then she was dropped into the deep water of a diplomatic summit and had the weight of future history put on her shoulders, without ever having been taught how to make her own decisions or live with her regret.

To sum up, we have one hyper-competent, confident, and independent badass, universally recognized as powerful and dangerous, and then we have someone who’s basically a deconstruction of a traditional fantasy princess.

Okay, what about the more specific setting within the game world?

BFS is set in Markarth, arguably the most corrupt city in Skyrim, and the site of a localized war, on top of the 2-3 other wars that Skyrim has going on. The city is controlled by the cartel-like Silver-Blood family, and their enemies are swiftly and brutally eliminated. The rule of law is a joke. When the player character arrives at Markarth, they witness a chain or murders and are drawn into a conspiracy that sees them sentenced to life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. The ruling elite suppress the native underclass by a variety of inventive methods. The roads into the city are controlled by the remnants of a violent but failed uprising, and this uprising is actually the origin story of Skyrim’s entire civil war storyline.

D&F is set in Revaire, explicitly the most violently war-torn of the seven kingdoms. Once the epicenter of a conquering empire, it was a country full of arts and culture, until a bloody coup slaughtered the entire royal line and instituted a new and more brutal regime. The new regime is on shaky grounds and foresighted people predict its imminent fall to rebel forces. So much, so canon. In D&F, I made a point of developing the new royals and their small coterie of supporters, as well as illustrating their constant struggle to conceal how widely reviled they are by the populace, and most of the former nobility. Their apathy to the plight of the common people is underscored in contrast to Verity’s compassion, which is ridiculed as a sentimental feminine affectation.

I’m attracted to certain themes, as you might have noticed.

Now, we get to talk about love interests.

Thongvor Silver-Blood is rather anemically characterized in Skyrim’s canon, so much of the information that I include in BFS is inferred. From his limited number of dialogues in the game, we know that he’s politically ambitious, a Stormcloak supporter, easily angered, and that he has one legitimate friend in the city. Like most Skyrim characters of his age bracket, he served in the Great War. He’s defined by his relationship to his generational cohort. In BFS, he’s def8ined in contrast to his brother. Thonar is comfortable being thought of as a villain. Thongvor still needs to believe that he’s the good guy. And I’m gonna get more into that in later chapters, too.

As a love interest, he’s initially in awe of Corinne, and always genuinely adoring, but more than a little jealous and possessive. BFS is not a story about love redeeming bad men (don’t get me started), but Thongvor shows different sides of his personality to different people, and the side that Corinne gets to see is much nicer than what most people do.

Hyperion Asper is a character of my own devising, whose existence in 7KPP canon is purely implied. We know his children, Jarrod and Gisette, and we knew that he organized a coup to seize the throne. I posit him as a tyrant and unrepentant child-killer (not directly stated in D&F, at least not yet). He’s ruthless and manipulative and his sole purpose is maintaining a sense of personal power. I structured him as the bad example that Jarrod tries -- and fails -- to live up to.

As a love interest... look, he’s a man who’s cheating on his wife with his son’s wife. He seduces Verity and manipulates her, and takes a special delight in pushing her buttons. All his compliments to her are mean-spirited and back-handed. He’s also jealous and possessive... which is especially pathetic, since he’s jealous of his own son, whom Verity doesn’t even like. His rage is a constant implied undercurrent in the narrative.

And the relationship dynamics themselves?

Corinne kisses Thongvor, proposes marriage to him, and then sleeps with him before riding off into mortal danger. She’s fond and affectionate, but she shies away from intense emotions, whether negative or positive. Since they spend most of their time apart, their marriage has been defined by Thongvor yearning like a sailor’s wife, while Corinne ran around doing violence and crime. They only just had their first fight. It will change when they get to spend some more significant time together... but on the whole, their marriage is fairly happy, and the emotional dynamic favors Corinne -- so far. It’s not a pure gender reversal, but that element is definitely dominant.

Hyperion starts seducing Verity on their very first meeting, and relies on a combination of magnetic attraction and Verity’s inexperience in life to keep her coming back, against her better judgment. Their relationship is mutually defined by a combination of attraction and resentment of that attraction. The danger of the situation is an essential element, to the point where it’s hard to imagine their affair would survive without it. It’s a puzzle and a battle, a source of fascination but not of comfort. There’s lust involved, and curiosity, but not a shred of love or even like. The closest thing to genuine affection is when Verity briefly imagines that there could be a version of Hyperion she actually liked, cobbled from his various, hidden good qualities. Any trappings of a genuine relationship are deliberately discordant.

I have tried, more than once, to imagine an alternate universe in which these two could be happy. It can’t be done. they are a study in dysfunction.

So where’s the similarity, with all these differences outlined?

Corinne’s choice to marry into the Silver-Blood family makes her complicit in their rule of the Reach, corrupt and reactionary as it is. Her reluctance to accept being called by their name reflects a reluctance to confront unpleasant truths that’s fundamental to her character. Choosing to be one of them affects and will continue to affect how other people see her, mostly negatively, and mostly without her being aware of it. Being Thongvor’s wife has gained her enemies. The fact that she doesn’t share his more reactionary views is something that they’ve both chosen to elegantly ignore, but the rest of the world won’t be so generous.

Verity’s choice to marry into the Revaire royal family makes her complicit in their violence against the forces rebelling against them, albeit in a more subtle way. Her personal dislike of Jarrod and the fact that their marriage was purely political will not absolve her in anyone’s eyes. Neither will her compassionate and charitable character, which can only be seen as a fig leaf to the Revaire royals’ general brutality. She has lost at least one good friend -- who will never see her the same way, since she chose to throw her lot in with his enemies. She will go down in history as an Asper wife -- but if she’s lucky, not just as that.

Both Corinne and Verity choose to accept some of the violence of the system that they live under, in order to serve their own lofty, long-term goals. Both of them are more image-driven than they care to admit, and though they are genuinely caring and compassionate, they will readily sacrifice compassion in service on their goals. They are queens (or queen-like figures), one-degree-of-separation members of the ruling class, implicated but not directly in control.

And their relationships serve to highlight what they are willing to accept, even though it goes against their conscience.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn here?

Sort of. I want to write about power, compromise and complicity. For whatever reason, it turns out that yw/om relationships are... a really good vehicle for exploring that. I can’t really explain why that is, just yet. I just... have had these thoughts floating, unstructured, in my head for months on end. I needed to get them out on paper, and give them some semblance of order.

I don’t even know why anyone but me would read this, as long and meandering as it is. But having it accessible might be of use to me.

[utilitycaster]

@geekwiththeglasses sorry to turn what was probably a comment you were just making very normally on my post on why I like Beau’s arc as is into a wholly unasked for diatribe on my Grand Unified Theory of Fandom Discourse but I saw the comment during some downtime at work and had thoughts and also a long drive home during which they could percolate. Feel free to ignore because it’s long and only sort of responds what you’re saying, but I wanted to post it and credit you for sparking that thought.

(also just for anyone else reading this is under a cut because it’s very long, but also, spoilers for both CR campaigns).

Anyway, put simply: People like what they like, they don’t like what they don’t like, and will come up with rationalizations for why they are correct in liking or disliking something that they already liked or disliked for much more basic reasons. I fully include myself as guilty of this but anyway we’re all dealing with a different internal ruleset for what is “correct” to like, disagreement is inevitable, and that’s okay.

So: I like Fjord. I like paladins. I like vengeance plots. I like boats, which is a thing I did not realize was a thing I liked in rpgs until I looked at characters I was really enjoying and was like hmm whole lot of sailors in here. I like charisma casters and swords and the trope of What You Are In The Dark and people realizing they’re way in over their head and having to do the hard work to get out of it. So like, this is in general a plot that is going to appeal to me, and I have biases in that direction.

With that said I don’t see how it’s not integrated into the overall plot? To be fair this reminds me of a lot of things I’ve said, about how CR has always been a character game vs. TAZ which was much more clearly a story one. Actual play, especially with a fairly open world and especially truly live/unedited actual play, ends up having to be a character game by default because you’ve deliberately introduced a random element that you cannot cover up; you’re going to get unexpected deaths and victories that don’t totally seem earned. Which is something I think is a feature, not a bug; if I wanted something to fit a particular narrative there’s countless movies and books and TV shows that will do that.

But back to the idea of plot: The Mighty Nein is a group of seven people and they all have things going on; in Fjord’s story, this is the normal narrative: make a deal with an unknown being in a desperate moment, slowly learn about this being, eventually learn just how high the price is, reconsider, get punished, reject that being, find a new path, the being you betrayed is now your mortal enemy and will continue to be so until it gets what it wants or you kill it. This is a very straightforward redemption arc. It’s just that Fjord isn’t alone, and those encounters with the enemy he betrayed happen to occur while all of the group is on a boat going somewhere else.

The thing it’s this is how the vast majority of arcs are. In the middle of chasing down Yasha and the Angel of Irons cult the party went into an extraplanar space (from an item that popped up randomly thanks to a stowaway that happened in the middle of the pirate arc) to save Yussa, with absolutely no knowledge that said action would end up tying back into the Angel of Irons. And even then, there were clear points within that space where Caleb and Veth’s stories were the ones being served, rather than the party’s search for the Angel of Irons.

When do we decide something is integrated or not? Vax had his promise to the Raven Queen and the subsequent story of that  interrupt the Chroma Conclave; while Vax is a fictional person I bet Vax would consider it a disruption. We split long-running actual play games into arcs, because it’s hard to refer to things otherwise, but life and stories are rarely just a series of tasks we complete and learn from and then are finished with, and “integrated” ends up meaning less “does it make sense from what has happened already, even if it’s not narratively pat” and more “is it what the viewer wants”, (ie, is it narratively pat).

I would also argue that Percy’s arc wasn’t any more or less integrated into the plot than anyone else’s. It was self-contained, because the story it was telling was about specific people who corrupted a specific space, (we can say the same about the Travelercon arc being about specific people in a specific space) but even then it wasn’t really. Ripley popped up when the party was chasing down leads for a vestige in Ank’Harel, and the Briarwoods ended up resurfacing for the final arc with Vecna. I mean, Percy himself told Vox Machina prior to everything going down they didn’t need to get involved! It’s not like the Chroma Conclave, when dragons attacked the party’s home! It was a choice! The party could have said “you know what? We’ll deal with the Briarwoods in Emon, but we’re not going to Whitestone.” But of course they didn’t, because what is D&D if not a story about found family, and what is a found family if you’re not part of each others’ stories?

Anyway the point is no one needs to have a logical reason why they’re frustrated by one character’s arc, or wish they had more content about another character, or like or don’t like certain characters/ships/plotlines, and honestly I find a lot of reasons people come up with involve twisting canon (the ruleset for ‘correct’ I tend to use) or cherrypicking or even just having wildly different interpretations of material to make that choice somehow justified when you are allowed to just...have preferences. Like people are allowed to just be tired of Fjord because it’s not what they want to watch right now, and that’s fine! I don’t agree, but I don’t think they’re wrong for having different preferences!

It also means that if someone comes into my inbox and gives a reason for why their dislike is valid and I don’t find the reason valid within canon, I’m going to dispute it because I’m generally argumentative and contrarian and pedantic and so on, but none of this changes the fact that they’re still allowed to dislike the thing and my opinion ultimately doesn’t matter.

[secretgamergirl]

We really need 1:1 time passage in games.

I play a lot of games. I particularly play a whole lot of RPGs, strategy things, survival games, and these all tend to be games that try to create an extra sense of immersion with hunger, thirst, and a day night cycle. And WOW do they ever end up doing the exact opposite with the implementation!

Like, let’s just start with food. If I am playing a survival game, and I choose not to eat for a while, my little hunger meter will bottom out, and I will start taking damage then eventually die. This tends to take like, one real life hour/in-game day, give or take to kick in, and then death comes within like, maybe 5 minutes if they’re generous? And I stave this off by... usually finding, killing, cooking, and eating, 2 entire turkeys per real hour/in-game day.

So... what the hell is any of that!?

So we have hunger, and we’re representing it as this slowly draining meter you have to keep an eye on. Already, that’s just weird. In my experience, you can go an entire day, not eating a damn thing, and not feel a thing out of the ordinary. But when you do actually get hungry, it can be overwhelming and impossible to ignore (have you eaten yet today by the way? My meal schedule’s gotten totally weird). Nothing about that makes sense to simulate as a slowly lowering bar. If you want realism, you have absolutely no onscreen hunger meter, and then like every 4-24 hours or so you have some incredibly distracting hunger indicator kick in and stay kicked in. Like, activate rumble packs and leave’em going at a steady pulse sort of annoying. And it gets worse when you’re actually preparing food.

Also feeling hungry is not an early indicator that you are going to suddenly die of starvation, or even that you’re anywhere near that point. I had dinner 6 hours ago, I’m a little hungry now. It varies a lot, but actually starving to death can take upwards of going TWO WHOLE MONTHS without any food at all. Like if we’re representing that as a meter, “hungry” kicks in when it drops to 99% full. Starvation is not a particularly common cause of death. If you’re dying of starvation, either someone is intentionally starving you to death, or some horrific catastrophe has just wiped out completely absolutely every potential food source in an area you somehow cannot wander your way out of even if you have months to do so. Relevant real world fact- Any time you see stuff about people dying of starvation, that’s never “farming just is not a thing that works in this area,” it’s “some malicious tyrant is actively preventing these people from accessing food in a deliberate effort to cause them to starve.” It’s really not actually a concern in any sort of survival story, unless we’re going real long term.

Meanwhile, have game designers ever actually, like, eaten food? Like I said, 2 whole turkeys per real hour/game day seems to be the going standard and like... have you had a turkey? I live in America, there is this tradition on Thanksgiving to go get a turkey, spend a day cooking it, and serving it as part of a meal served to one’s whole extended family. You’ve got that one turkey (granted, generally with a lot of side dishes) feeding like... a dozen people, easily. And at the end of the day, you’ve only MAYBE collectively made your way through like half a breast. You carve up a bunch more and send everyone home with a ton of leftovers. Then you’ve still got this giant mountain of turkey left, and you’re eating it for like the next week until you’re completely sick of turkey and throw the rest out, with plenty of meat entirely uneaten on the bird. Or hey, do you eat hamburgers? You know how the standard for a really kinda too big to responsibly be ordering it hamburger is “a quarter-pounder?” Which refers to the 0.25 lbs. of meat on the bun? Just quickly googling “beef weight” and copying the preview text from the oddly named first hit, on beef2live.com... “An average beef animal weighs about 1200 pounds and has a hanging hot carcass weight (HCW) of about 750 pounds.“ I can’t honestly say I know what “hanging hot carcass weight” is and I kinda doing want to, but I’m assuming that’s how much you have to work with after stripping out all the bones and organs and such. Multiply that by 4 to get how many oversized burgers you get out of one “beef animal” (why does it not say cow? I’m growing increasingly unsettled)- 3000 burgers. Give or take. You go smack that one Mnecraft cow with your sword, you should be fine for like 5 years. At least assuming we’re not simulating food spoilage. And if we are, HEY THAT TAKES SIGNIFICANTLY LONGER THAN ONE DAY, 2 IF YOU SALT IT!

And I mean, on top of that, we’ve got this whole standard I keep citing of 1 real world hour/1 in-game day. That kinda seems to be one of the more common standards for the passage of time video games use. That or 1 minute=1 hour. And I... really don’t understand why we have these scales?

Like, the earliest example of a day/night cycle in a game is Dragon Quest 3, where 1 steps on the over world map=12 minutes passing, or 120 steps=1 day. That’s a weird scale I’m having to use, but that’s because as the most traditional of JRPGs, DQ3′s sense of both time AND space are super abstracted and walking a short distance across the world map is this super compressed and simplified conveyance of a big long epic journey through the untamed wilderness. The first games I can think of offhand to really do it as a real time elapsed ratio thing are like... The Sims and GTA 3? Let me look at each of those in turn in a bit here.

So, The Sims has to pass days pretty quick, because that’s like, the whole idea. We’re watching this little household drama unfold in a compressed time scale... but the scale is really messed up? Like, we start off pretty simple. Sims work their shifts of like 9-5 on the in-game clock, need an appropriate amount of sleep... but then MOST things have timing based off having animations play at a reasonable pace, which is to say, 1 to 1 time, not 1 to 60. It takes like 3 in-game minutes for a Sim to get up out of a chair, several more minutes to walk to the kitchen and even start cooking, altogether just getting up, making a meal, cleaning up, and sitting back down is going to end up being this hours long affair, most of that being travel time from one room to another. It’s weird, and practically speaking you end up having them eat one meal, use the toilet once, and take a shower once per in game day, because less than that problems occur, and more than that, it’s a huge pain. And forget conversations. Those are like 12 hour commitments.

And then we have GTA3, where 1 real minute=1 in game hour... and this isn’t tied to anything in-game at all really. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, nothing really has business hours to deal with, the whole day/night cycle is just there to give you a nice cycling change of scenery... and also again, breaks immersion, because the animation speed is 1:1. According to a video I just watched, walking end to end across the map of GTA3 takes a full 48 in-game hours (121 in GTA5). And I mean... there’s races, and high speed chases, and all this other stuff that according to the in-game clock are at such slow speeds you can barely tell anything’s moving. It’s weird and arbitrary! And also unnecessary! Like, I’m pretty sure I sank at least 80 hours into my first playthrough of GTA3. I definitely spent enough time cruising around any given island that if time passed in a 1:1 ratio, I’d still see what everything looked like at every time of day. And hell if you rigged it up to a real world clock I could plan around that, do all the cool missions right at sundown.

But I mean, also, there’s these things called movies and TV shows? You may have heard of them, because it’s where games get a whole bunch of terms they use all the time. Like camera, and scene. So the thing there is, when, say, a movie switches to a new scene, they’ll often arbitrarily jump the day/night cycle ahead by several in-movie hours, or even days, so the lighting is appropriate to what’s going to happen in that scene. You can actually just... do that in games, too. It’s OK. Nobody’s going to stop you or say it’s breaking immersion. I talk to this guy to start this mission at what’s clearly noon, then we fade to back, and I come back out onto the street late at night so I can do this daring nighttime raid. That’s.. OK. You can do that. Honest. No need to have the sun doing crazy fast laps in the background.

Anyway, other games since have all copied that time scale, because blindly copying things from GTA3 was kinda... how people made games for a good stretch of time (and yeah yeah yeah, Elder Scrolls was probably already doing it, whatever... hell so was Robinson’s Requiem I’m pretty sure, and Drakken I know was paced something like that). But anyway, we mixed that sort of time scale with Survival Gameplay and we’re just kinda mashing these problems together. We’re doing everything in this one to one time scale, but the in-game clock is running at like 60 times that, and our already ridiculous food intake needs are downright absurd, and suddenly we’re destroying absolutely all life on sight to sate our ever-present ravenous hunger (and possibly never sleeping).

And like... survival games don’t actually need that? Like the interesting bits of the angle are finding sources of things like clean water and shelter so you don’t die of exposure once the sun’s down and stuff. And these are things you really just need to do once and you’re set. You could... basically set up a whole game, running in real time, where these are early potential fail states. Get some kind of shelter set up within the first 5 hours or so, sleep to advance straight to the next day after pulling that off, then you have like 3 days total to find drinkable water, and... honestly at that point we’re talking like a good 45 minutes of gameplay and you could really end it there, or start your last goal. But instead, no, we’re making some kinda crude axe/bow and killing everything to eat.

Not only is it not realistic, not only does it take me out of the experience by checking the math, the whole affair feels kinda like I’m being put through someone’s weird hyper-masculine cargo cult fantasy of what it would have been like if they grew up Hunting With Dad and like.... OK people who actually do that still kill like one animal, then drag it home, throw it in a big fridge, and eat it for quite a long time, or sell it, or leave it to rot because they’re just really into ending the lives of innocent creatures and don’t want weird gamey meat at all.

So yeah, just let time be time, and don’t ever actually make me eat if we’re trying for some kind of gritty realism thing. I really don’t get hungry nearly that often and fill up quick.

[missmaxime]

Ahem let's try this again - 14, 23, 27, and 43!

Yes thank you for these!💕💕 And also for these:  I think you've answered all the questions already - so I'm gonna come up with some of my own! What's one non-Brio pairing that you'd love to write? What's one fic you'd love to write but know you won't? What's one fun fact about any of your fics? What's one non-Brio pairing that you'd love to write? Okay, so yesterday I woke up in this ongoing dream where Rio and Joan Holloway were dating in Mad Men AU and I can’t shake that pairing off (and, y’know, the last time something like this happened I wrote Beth/Turner). So there’s a chance that I might write that one in the near-ish future. While I don’t think I will write a main pairing not involving either Beth or Rio, there’s a few side-pairings I might write into fics someday. Like I’d like to write Annie/Amber because that sounds like all the fun and drama. Another one, for a very non-outlined, non-existent ISYTT follow up is Marcus/Emma, even though it’s again about Jane. What's one fic you'd love to write but know you won't? When we all did the Fake Title Meme, I got this one from @foxmagpie I think. And while I still like the set-up, I’m not really into writing teens. But then again, every time I tell myself I won’t write something, I end up doing it anyway at one point. It’s a pretty good incentive actually. But I don’t see it happening soon-ish, because I already have a lot of WIPs.

Never is a Promise Beth and Rio met in their teens/early twenties at a holiday or summer camp - Rio’s single and Beth and Dean are on a break. When they parted they’d told each other they’d keep in touch, but all kinds of circumstances prevent them from following up on that. Years later, when Beth’s divorced, she finds a stack of letters Rio wrote her in the garage, that Dean managed to hide from her. His final letter says something like ‘Never is a promise, and I’ll always be waiting for you’, and Beth sets out to find Rio again.  

What's one fun fact about any of your fics? I’ll give a few about some: - Before I wrote Ain’t No Sunshine, I was telling myself I couldn’t really do angst and kink, and then I got the idea of writing that pairing and I did exactly that. - I really thought I See Your True Technicolors was going to be this fun weird thing nobody would read but the prompter, and hopefully at least they’d be happy with the result. Now that blew up! - Originally I intended for The Girlfriend Experience to be a full Pretty Woman AU, but it ended up being a wildly different story. There’s still a few bits and pieces in it, like the shopping scene (even if that’s a Rio POV, I was kicking myself over that so much!!) and the assault scene (I really played that down in the fic compared to the movie), and the price negotiation was a little inspired by the movie, but even more by the Rio/Beth negotiation over Eddie. 

ACTUAL QUESTIONS from the list under the cut:

14. Do you have a personal word minimum that you hold yourself too? Why or why not?

No, absolutely not. I do like chapters being roughly the same length, but I don’t mind if it’s under 2k off (my chapters are usually on the longer side, so it’s not that much in comparison). Since I don’t outline every single scene, it’s never a dead given how many words will make up a scene or a fic for me. For the Reality Tv AU I’m starting to write I think I will aim for chapters to be around 4-5K, just because I personally like reading (at least) that length. When I read other people’s fic who post like 2K chapters a week, I can easily skip 2-3 weeks just to read more in one go. So I would like to give an audience the amount I would like to read. 23. What’s your absolute favorite trope to write? LIKE YOU DON’T ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS LAUREN!! It’s obviously fake-dating. It’s my all-time favorite trope ever. I love to write it, and to read it. There’s just so much space for comedy, yearning, UST, bed-sharing, banter. It’s got potential for everything I love. 27. Do you like to give your readers some warning of what might be coming or just slap them in the face with content at random? I do warn in the tags for future events I think might trigger someone (and also ask people to tell me if they feel like I didn’t do that enough). But I don’t tease a twist or something in my Author’s Notes. Especially for a fic like The Girlfriend Experience, I was very deliberately choosing my tags to still warn, but not give away the twist in that fic. I don’t think the impact would come across if I already teased it beforehand. 43. Talk about a positive experience with fanfiction or the fanfiction community that you will always remember.

Back in the days, like between 2005 – 2010, I was a member of a very close-nit (like 15 people) Harry Potter RPG forum. I had been involved with fandoms before, but I was super young and most people in those fandoms were 25-35 back then. And I never really had an opportunity to really make friends online, I was like orbiting around them, sometimes making some Ava’s or other artwork. But on that board we were all between like 14-18, and it’s the first time we didn’t just bond over the fandom, but also wrote together and created. This was MSN Messenger time, so we were in a group chat, but also discussed creatively which storyline we were going to play out, in between bonding over typical teen troubles and just our personal life. We mostly wrote our RPG, but we also started writing fanfic. And it was a super helpful and kind experience, because we knew each other so well that everyone could point out both good and bad parts about the fic, without there being hard feelings.

When we got older and went our own ways the forum died down. We had a brief revival, but the RPG is officially dead (the board that hosted the site is completely gone), but I still keep in touch with a few members on the board from time to time. It’s pretty fun to see what the people are doing in their real life now that you met fifteen years ago on a HP board. The GG fandom hasn’t even existed that long, and I haven’t been a part of it for even half of it. But hopefully I can feel a similar way about this one if it comes to an end.

[skelecola]

The Hero’s Journey and Why it Makes No Snense™ For DA4 to Have a Protagonist Who Isn’t The Inquisitor

ah yes, the hero’s journey, or the monomyth. 99.9% of the good stories you hear will follow the pattern. and, tbh, the ones that don’t have deliberately gone out of their way to avoid it because it’s literally just How Humans Tell Stories.

for those of you who don’t know, the hero’s journey is the basic path of every hero in a story. think of literally any heroic story and i would bet money it fits the bill. harry potter, star wars, lord of the rings, literally any classic disney movie, all of those follow the monomyth.

to sum it up, there’s a hero living in the “Normal World” which faces a change or threat. the hero is called to... be a hero. they say “i’m no hero” or “i’m not strong enough” or whatever. but they meet someone who helps them and eventually they get on with being a hero. then the hero travels into the unknown (a threshold) and overcomes an obstacle, and returns. this cements their hero status. they overcome trials and tribulations, gain allies, defeat enemies. but then the hero must descend into “the underworld.” this is different in every heroes story but it’s typically one of two things: the hero has to fight an almost impossible challenge and nearly loses-- or they do lose. the hero is defeated and beat down into their lowest point. it is at this point, the lowest point, that something must bring the hero back. perhaps it is magical intervention or simply their friends support. but the hero must be returned from their lowest point by a deux ex machina. it is at this point that the hero rises again and saves the day.

sometimes, stories contain smaller versions of the monomyth within one big monomyth. with the inquisitor, their “death and return” at haven happens too early to be the true thing. at that point, the inquisitor can also continue to refuse their heroic call. the “death and return” at haven is also not the inquisitor’s lowest point in the story. it’s a low point, but it’s not rock bottom-- and that’s what the underworld is.

the inquisitor’s lowest point is at the end of trespasser. the find out that they were being manipulated by someone within their ranks, and they either must continue to try to wrangle the wild bull that is the inquisition or give it up entirely. they’ve lost the anchor along with their entire arm, robbing them of their special heroic powers. not only that, but they discover that the threat they worked so hard on beating before was not the real threat. corypheus was a small fry compared to the dread wolf. he was a warmup.

so it makes no sense from a story point of view to have the hero of the story drop off after they hit rock bottom-- unless you are planning to complete subvert the story a la george rr martin in game of thrones/a song of ice and fire, where robb stark is slowly emerging from his lowest point only to be betrayed and killed. but this doesn’t work unless the hero is actually dead. because at that point, the hero is not going to stop and go home, even if they say they want to.

the only way to stop a hero at this point in the story is to kill them off, and the inquisitor is not dead.

the inquisitor’s story isn’t over. it’s only halfway finished. to abandon the inquisitor for another protagonist at this point would be confusing as hell because it would leave a big chunk of the story unfinished and it would mean that dragon age: inquisition was not important to thedas’ overall story.

dragon age origins was important to introduce the player to thedas, the complexities of the existing factions, and to introduce the blight. dragon age 2 was important to further establish the political situation and to expand on the mage/templar conflict. dragon age inquisition is important to establish the inquisitor as a world-protecting hero, backed by “the maker,” and give them important development with the Big Bad Wolf. do they hate each other, are they friends with the wolf, or did they make out on the couch with the wolf man?

but if the inquisitor isn’t a part of the next installment of the story-- then inquisition only sets up the Big Bad Wolf to the player, which doesn’t mean as much. bioware has already had a problem with this type of thing-- like writing the inquisitor grinning like a fool and being happy to see morrigan, when morrigan is a complete stranger to them and in fact they have been receiving information from trusted allies that morrigan is bad and evil. but because the player might recognize morrigan (only if they played da:o) then they wrote and scripted the inquisitor to be happy to see this stranger who they have been told is a dangerous maleficar. 

the player =/= the player character. in RPGs, people are going to play their character according to who they are. the player character doesn’t know morrigan. the player character has no reason to distrust michel de chavin, even though the player probably knows he’s a horrific racist. the player has no reason to want to reconnect briala and celene, and from the tidbits that are scraped together about them in inquisition, it would make more sense for them to be completely opposed to it.

[orime-stories]

2, 16, 25?

Thank you! :) Asks here. Answers to 14 and 18 here, and 1, 7, 8 and 13 here.

2. What writing taboos do you break consistently?

Probably a fair number, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. My eyes glaze over when I see something claiming “you should always X” or “you should never Y”. Writing is just a hobby I do for fun, so I’m more concerned about enjoying myself than creating something ‘good’ or ‘polished’ in a technical sense.

16. What do you do with your rough drafts once you write a new draft?

I mostly redraft through a series of many small tweaks over time, so I don’t usually have distinct drafts as such. All the tweaking and changing happens in the same file, so the discarded parts are saved over and gone. I really enjoy going back into old works and having a little tinker, changing a word or two here and cutting a sentence there. I’m still doing that semi-regularly even to the works that I have published on AO3. I’ve yet to get to experience producing something that I’m confident I’ll never want to touch again, which is why I’m so hesitant to call anything I make ‘finished’. I don’t want it to be finished. I want to keep playing!

25. How do you figure out character motivation and backstory?

My absolute favourite part of storytelling and something I could probably ramble on about for a very very long time as a total character-driven pantser. It always starts with one initial hook - What interests me about this character? What do I want to explore with them? Maybe a certain race or class or lore point is calling to me and I want to shape my character around that. And sometimes that might involve following associated stereotypes whereas other times it might involve deliberately going against them. Or maybe I want to try out a character that has certain key personality traits or values. And that might be because I want to give voice to a part of myself - a trait or a value I already have, or it might be because I want to explore something very different to myself for a change.

Then once I have that hook, that start point, it all just kind of explodes out from there as I keep playing with it and daydreaming about it and answering further questions. Why are they that way? What does this feature mean to them, or to their culture? How might people react to it, especially other established characters? How is it likely to interact with the story? Can I think of any key events that have shaped this feature or are examples of it in action? It’s never as structured as all that, just thoughts and ideas rabidly bouncing off each other until they settle into something coherent. But that’s the best approximation I can make of my process.

And it’s a process that I particularly enjoy with game OCs because they give me the perfect mix of freedom, surprise and structure. I’m free to latch on to whatever features catch my interest and run with them in a certain direction, but then the game’s lore and story provide some constraints and trail markers that I can use as a skeleton to build from. And then I absolutely love when a game takes my character in directions I never would have considered through plot points or revelations that I didn’t know were coming. It’s more fun when not everything is completely under my control and I’m having to react to what the game is giving me, trying to make it all fit together in a way that feels ‘right’. That’s my favourite kind of creating (and why I love the collaborative storytelling you get in tabletop RPGs).

If anyone is interested to hear what the ‘hook’ and ‘bouncing of ideas upon ideas’ was for a particular character, let me know and I will be over the moon to gush about this further.

[scripttorture]

1.) For a character, which can be as similar or different from yourself as you want. They're from the country of Imptula (based on England, with influence from China), and work as a healer. Once had a good relationship with the Archmage Chromain Baker, but after he starts having people tortured for information on the Wrathlanders, they stand their ground and fight his agenda in every way they can without putting themselves in unnecessary danger. Beyond that too, if you'd like.

2.) So, character creation questions: Name? (1st, last, middle, nickname?) What race? {for story purposes, they’d need to be one of these: Human, Mithu (rabbi- elf people), Draeken (lizardfolk), or Catfolk } Hair? (length, style, color, texture) Skin tones? Height? Body type? Age? Sex/Gender?3.) were they trained as a combat medic or a hospital doctor? Or a potion-maker/ pharmacist type? Affinity for what element? (Fire, water, earth, air, life/death?) Personality? (key traits, or a meyers briggs quiz if you want) Likes? Dislikes? What would they do on a day off/ in their free time? (hobbies, how they wind down, places they’d visit)

-

I feel like this is a question that’s more about how I’d write a character involved in this kind of activism then what people like this are ‘typically’ like. And I’m happy to indulge. (Though for the record I’m not sure if there is a ‘typical’ anti-torture activist in real life.)

 With tabletop roleplaying games (which is what this sounds like) I tend to build a character starting from the race and culture they’re from.

 I do that because I found looking at the stat bonuses for different rpg races was helpful for narrowing down the class I played.

 But if it’s just writing and stat bonuses aren’t a factor- I personally go by what I think is interesting.

 And what’s interesting to me is in-betweens and boundaries. If I have a setting with a lot of cultural differences then I want to show them. I like writing different characters navigating cultural differences in as many different ways as possible. I like code switching. I like exploring how people relate to their cultures and why.

 I don’t tend to write a lot of non-human races in my fantasy.

 I tend towards writing non-white characters. Partly because I feel like the genres I write in are completely saturated with white, Europe-based stories. And partly because it’s an unfortunate fact that I’m more likely to get published as a white person and the lack of representation is harming kids who aren’t white.

 Looking at this list of character features I am struggling to put anything together. Because- well I don’t create characters in isolation. I create them for the world they inhabit.

 In my own stories I’m creating them as I create the culture and other characters. I pick traits based on contrast to other characters. I pick backgrounds and inherent features based on what they add, what they bring in to the story.

 And I do a similar thing in rpgs. I pick my character’s race because of what the world lore says about them and how that would effect them navigating the world. I pick their personality and age based on the other characters around them.

 I also tend to hand out neuroses to my characters like sweets.

 So you know what? Since we’re talking about how I would do this let’s put aside the list of features and focus on what I’d find important: the relationship with the Archmage.

 This opposition is important, it’s character defining for both of them. I’d want someone different but not a complete inversion. I’d want to create a strong sense that these characters have different backgrounds, different roots, but enough similarities that they’d have been friendly. I’d also want to create as much diversity in the story as possible.

 He’s a man. So my first instinct is to make a female character to oppose him.

 He’s probably at least middle age if he’s occupying a position of power that requires promotion. I’d either make the activist much younger, in her 20s, or much older, in her 70s.

 I’ll talk about making an older character because I feel like having a younger character would be more… typical. It’s a common fantasy trope to have the young good-hearted apprentice turn on their evil mentor. It’s a lot less common to have a good-hearted mentor stay alive and try to take down their evil ex-student.

 An older character means you could have a wealth of experience. You could potentially give a character that age experience in every single area you’ve mentioned at different periods in her life. And that breadth of experience in turn means that she could have a lot of connections, hundreds of old friends.

 That means that setting up an organised opposition wouldn’t be work. It would be a few letters or phone calls.

 ‘Lee my dear, how are you pet? Now I’m ever so sorry to bother you but I don’t suppose you’d be able to let me and a few friends into one of your warehouses tomorrow night? Oh well of course not dear! They’re very well behaved-’

 ‘Josephine, darling how are the children? I’m very happy to hear that, and the Mother’s Union meetings are they going well? How wonderful! I knew you’d be able to manage it- I don’t suppose the members would be interested in-’

 ‘Georgie love, how are the orchids doing? I am so glad to hear that, now I don’t suppose you know a Dr Cheng of Rainwrights Street? It’s ever so important I get to speak to him-’

 One of the wonderful things about writing older people as activists is the place in society they occupy. A lot of cultures have traditions of revering the elderly as the holders of communal wisdom and history. And in practice a lot of older people have deeper and more wide ranging ties to their community; they know a lot of people and they know them well.

 This makes them a natural fit for a communal movement. They can capitalise on respect they have already earned.

 This also shifts the narrative away from big singular acts, making it about a collection of smaller sustained actions. I personally think that’s more true to life, and it leads to a different kind of story.

 Having an older character as a focus also creates an easy way to introduce disability in a naturalistic way. Arthritis, cataracts, heart disease and cancer all become more likely with age. Since the character’s strength is in her social capital there’s a great opportunity to write a powerful disabled character.

 Age and disability could even create an advantage for her. Even if the Archmage is comfortable having a bunch of strapping young men arrest, or even beat, a frail old lady with a cane other people won’t forget it.

 Acting openly against a character like that, especially a loved member of the local community, would create a backlash. It would inflame opinion and help turn people against the Archmage. Because how dare he treat a sweet old lady with such disrespect.

 To flesh this character out further, adding to her personality and hobbies, I’d simply look back over what I already have and think about what that suggests.

 If I want the character to be someone with ‘soft’ communal power then I’d concentrate on the sorts of hobbies and traits that support that image. That make her above reproach in the cultures she’s part of.

 Depending on the culture that can mean participation in religious rites and various institutions.

 Thinking about England now I’d make a character like that the head of a local WI group. I’d make her a good cook and the kind of person whose door is always open to her neighbours. She’d make jams and pickles and cakes and have three types of tea blends in the cupboard. I’d make her a very good listener, patient and compassionate. She might do a little bit of gardening and grow flowers.

 In essence I’d deliberately pick hobbies and traits that have particular associations in that culture: things that emphasise her status as a respected pillar of the community.

 I don’t know what these would be in the cultures found throughout China. I also don’t know what they’d be in the setting you’ve created which has blended English and Chinese cultures. But you should be able to figure out what they are by thinking about the culture you’ve rooted this character in.

 Alternately you might want to give her hobbies that are useful for the plot later on. Perhaps they establish a connection to a particular character, or establish the character’s capacity to cope well with a particular problem.

 Rounding this off, you do not have to use the character I’ve sketched or the type of character creation process I do. There is no ‘correct’ way to approach writing. This is just the way I’ve found that works for me personally.

 I hope that outlining it will help you think about your own character creation process and what you want out of this character.

 Anti-torture activists really can look like anyone. They can be ‘mavericks’ operating outside the system. They can be traditionalists deeply entrenched within it. They can be any age, gender and race. They can be disabled.

 Think about the kind of character your story needs. Think about what’s typical for the genre and whether sticking with that norm benefits your story.

 Above all practice. Writing does become easier with time.

 I hope that helps. :)

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[takeiteasypeasybaby]

Save Me: Chapter 2 - Who?

~Hey Guys! This is the second chapter in ‘Save Me’. This is Molly’s first encounter with the Saviours and the elusive ‘Negan’. Hope you enjoy and make sure to follow my page for new chapter releases every Sunday! ~

A crisp Autumn morning. Molly is getting ready for another supply run with Sasha and Abraham. She packs lightly, thinking that she will only be gone a couple hours.

That morning was so beautiful, cool yet crisp. It felt as though change was coming and I hoped it would be for the better.

Sasha had asked me the night before if I would come on a supply run with her and Abraham and of course I agreed.

It was always refreshing to get out and kill some walkers and come back with the bacon.

While Abraham was loading up the car, I asked Maggie if she needed anything, maybe some more prenatal pills.

She thanked me, we hugged and I told her I would see her soon.

I remember being so happy about Maggie's pregnancy but with Glenn still not having returned after going on a supply run with Nicholas, Maggie was already stressed enough and she told me she needed me to stay here.

But I promised her I would only be gone a couple hours and then I would be right back.

So we three set off on the road in the search of meds and food and basically anything we could scavenge.

It took hours before we came across anything that looked remotely untouched when we stumbled along an office.

Apart from stationary and water there wasn't much else.

When we tried to leave we saw too many walkers blocking the exits so we decided to wait until they went away.

I saw that Abraham and Sasha had some talking to do so I made myself scarce to look for meds on the first floor of the building.

Not only did I feel like a major third wheel, but for the first time in a long time I felt a longing.

I longed for a relationship like theirs or something close.

Eugene had tried to flirt with me, he'd already done the same with Tara and while I love Eugene like a brother I could never date the man as I don't understand him most of the time.

Spencer had also flirted with me and seemed to want to follow me around like a lost puppy most of the time but I could never be with someone that spineless who never accepted responsibility for his actions.

So, for now I would be alone.

After all this pondering of my thoughts, checking drawers in the office cubicles I found some aspirin and prenatal pills.

There was a part of me that felt sadness for a moment for the person to whom these pills once belonged and the life that probably didn't make it into the world.

When I made my way back down the stairs, I noticed that the walkers were gone and Abraham and Sasha had finished talking.

We tried to get in touch with Daryl via the walkie talkie but no answer.

Daryl was out hunting and told us he would join us soon.

Little did I know at the time that Daryl had just met Dwight and Sherry.

Abraham was now wearing a blue army blazer with an array of medals attached which he found in one of the offices.

As Abraham used to be a member of the US military, he said it made him feel closer to his past which was lovely.

When it was time to leave, as the walkers had dispersed enough for us to shoot them as we went through, a bunch of guys shot at us as we hopped in a truck and drove off, following us in their cars.

Once we managed to lose them we continued back to Alexandria.

It started to dawn on us that those guys shooting at us had backed off, possibly deliberately and there was an uneasy silence in the truck as we kept on.

All of a sudden we stopped dead in the middle of the road as there was a group of guys on bikes pointing guns at us.

He asked us to step out and talk, we hesitated but complied nonetheless.

'Why don't you come on out, join us in the road' the leader of them said.

He was a short man and surprisingly looked the least threatening out of all of them.

So, we stepped out slowly.

'Ah that's great, going well right out of the gate!' he said.

'Now step two, hand over your weapons' he ushered us closer.

I asked sternly 'why should we?' to test them.

'Well they're not yours' he stated in a questioning manner.

Sasha looked across at me and then asked 'who's are they?'.

He walked closer to us and in a quieter but assured voice said 'your property now belongs to Negan'.

We looked at each other for a moment in a questioning manner until he said 'now if you can get your hands on a tanker, your people, our person wants to know'.

He walked closer again and asked 'so let's get those sidearms shall we?'.

He walked over to me first and beckoned with his hand when I refused, 'right now' he said.

I looked at him for a second and took out my gun which I had carved my initials into.

He took it and said 'thank you' with a egotistical smile as though he had already won.

Sasha took out her gun ready, he thanked her with a smile again.

Abraham hesitated for a minute until the man sighed and said 'if you have to eat shit, best not to nibble. Bite, chew, swallow, repeat. Goes quicker'.

Abraham slowly took out his gun and handed it over, the man smiled and mouthed 'thank you'.

Sasha sighed and asked 'who are you people?'.

'I get the curiosity, but we have questions ourselves and we'll be the ones asking them while we drive you back to wherever it is you call home...take a gander at where you hang your hats' the man said as he smiled excitedly.

That was it.

That was it for all of us, no matter what we had to do we had to protect Alexandria.

He spoke again, 'first though your shit, what have you got for us'.

My nose curled up as I stated 'yeah you just took it'.

'Come on, I mean can we not, okay theres more, there is always more' when he spoke, every syllable landed on that last part.

'T, take this gal to the back of the truck, start inside the back bumper work your way to the front' I hoped he meant the truck but knowing these thugs I feared the worst.

I could tell when I looked at Sasha and Abraham that they did too.

The man called 'T' pushed me as I fought back.

As soon as the man brought me round to the back of the truck, I appeared to be obliging showing him where everything was.

Once he bent down, he predicted my movements and tried to cut me but only nicked my arm when I slit his throat.

I tried to make as little noise as possible as I set the body down.

We had no guns in the back apart from an rpg that Abraham found when looking for cigars so I set it up and waited for my moment.

The leader carried on speaking to Sasha and Abraham and reminded them 'bite, chew, swallow, repeat'.

'Who's Negan?' Abraham bellowed.

He pointed a gun at Abraham while singing 'ding dong hells bells’.

‘You see usually, we introduce ourselves by just popping one of you right off the bat, but you seem reasonable people. You're sporting dressed blues for christ sake!...like I said we're gonna drive you back where you were. I mean do you know how awkward it is car-pooling with someone who's friend or friends you just killed? oof’ the man spoke slowly.

‘But, I told you not to ask any questions and then what does this ginger do? So thats that...I mean, I don't want you to get the wrong impression of me' he said readying his gun.

Sasha pleaded, 'wait!', 'wait' she said this time more controlled.

'You don't have to do this' she continued. At this the leader grabbed out another gun now pointing them both at Abraham.

Abraham mouthed 'shut up' to Sasha, 'I am talking to the man' she replied through gritted teeth.

'No you're not' said the leader, 'But, I'm not going to kill you'.

He then smiled and rolled his eyes, 'wait, wait, you know what yes I am!'.

Hearing this I fired the rpg from the back of the truck straight at them.

The blast caused Abraham and Sasha to fall backwards onto the road.

'Those sons of bitches are tougher than they look' I said walking towards them.

Sasha looked at my arm and asked concerningly 'did he cut you?'.

'A little...what a bunch of assholes' I replied.

Sasha and Abraham chuckled and we got back into the truck and drove for home.

'Let's get you fixed up at home' Sasha said, 'mhm' I replied in relief as I put pressure on my arm.

Molly thinks about Maggie on the way home and how she told her she would only be gone a few hours and already it was almost a day later. She had already tried to get in touch with Rick but to no avail, not knowing what was going on back home...

As we pulled up at the gates they were wide open with dozens of walkers roaming inside and seemingly all ganging up on one person.

'What the shit?!' I said to Sasha and Abraham as we hopped out the truck.

We rushed to get inside when Abraham suggested we climb up top and help from there.

We climbed up and we saw that it was Glenn they were after.

It was a strange feeling seeing him, relief that he was back and alive but nervous because he could get bit at any moment.

Maggie was on the watchtower which looked very unstable and Enid was up there with her.

We later found out that Enid and Glenn had come back after Nicholas had killed himself and Glenn had almost died there as well.

We rushed to line up our assault rifles and Maggie's screams bled through my ears as she thought he might die.

All three of us mowed down those walkers around Glenn as he was crouching on the ground.

We smiled and Abraham shouted 'nice to have you back pal!'.

Glenn smiled and we got down from the gate and shut them behind us, all of us now tackling the rest of the walkers which got in.

None of us slept that night, each one of us being so close to death. I had asked around after Daryl but everyone said he was still out there.

I wasn't too worried, he liked to go off on his own for days on end, then he would just show up at the gates one morning completely fine.

I tossed and turned, worrying about that group we met on the road.

Knowing that in the morning I had to talk to Rick about what we heard and someone called Negan.

[thevagueambition]

5 video games! :D

okay I AM going to ramble way too much about each of them haha ;;

the top 3: 

Disco Elysium: I firmly believe the innovations of Disco Elysium are going to affect the future of non-combat-focused RPGs quite a bit. It captures, better than any other video game I’ve played, the non-combat elements of pen & paper roleplaying. It’s so responsive to how you choose to play your character and the idea of thoughts as essentially euipment that gives affects your stats... it’s fucking brilliant. It’s the exact sort of game I love, mechanically, and of course story-wise it’s also very well-written -- if also VERY Old East Bloc Depression(tm) in its disillusioned marxism and the occasional sort of failed ironic sexism -- and the way it used an outside character to motivate the player to act in a certain way/to work as essentially a morality meter and how well that works because everyone loves Kim is also just... brilliant. I love Disco Elysium so much. Even if you don’t normally play games, please play Disco Elysium. The first time I played it I died 2 minutes in because I had put my endurance stat so low that when I failed a roll to grab my tie I died. I love it so much. 

Dragon Age II: The Dragon Age series was a huge part of what got me into gaming in a more... shall we say deliberate sense. I had always played games growing up, but mostly either as a social activity or on a handheld. Dragon Age: Origins was my first “serious” game, so to speak, and I love it a lot to, but Dragon Age II is the one that really owns my ass. I know part of it is when I played it and its role in me figuring out my sexuality -- Dragon Age II is just a group of Disaster Bisexuals with an asexual dad friend and a straight mom friend thrown in for colour -- but certainly also both as a story and in terms of how it did dialogue I also really love it. There’s a real feeling of cammaraderie with the characters and the fact that you essentially play as a refugee is a really interesting way to be positioned within the world. I think, more so than the other Dragon Age games, in making you take on a specific role within the fictional society, you get to roleplay in a much more meaningful way imo since where so many RPG characters are positioned a bit outside society because they’re some sort of chosen one, in Dragon Age II, Hawke is, at least for some of the game, Just Some Weirdo, subject to the same societal rules as everyone else. 

Frostpunk: So, shifting from RPGs to citybuilders, Frostpunk is my favourite citybuilder/management game. My brain finds these types of games incredibly soothing, balancing production with what is needed, managing production chains, setting things up just so... it’s the exact sort of thing that occupies and quiets my mind. Unfortunately, a lot of games like this run into issues in the end-game because at a certain point there isn’t really more to build towards, or maybe building towards it goes so slowly that it ceases to be interesting, etc... Frostpunk escapes those issues by being campaign-based, with a set amount of time to get everything up and running smoothly, with various events and goals throughout. I don’t know why, but a lot of other citybuilders just feel annoying when they set specific goals or use a campaign approach, but for Frostpunk it really works. Actually, where the endless mode is usually the better one in citybuilders, in Frostpunk, the campaigns are definitely better. Maybe it’s a difference of where the focus was put, idk. Frostpunk is also an Old East Bloc Depression game lol, idk if those hold special appeal to me or if it’s just a coincidence. 

Other two:

Sunless Sea: It took me a long time to actually get into this one since it has a pretty steep learning curve and is very unforgiving if you fuck up (ie a roguelike). Still, the core mechanic of sailing around discovering different ports, picking up different goods, progressing different stories... it works.  It’s interesting, how in the beginning so much of your energy is focused on learning to bring the correct amount of fuel and rations for a trip, but once you learn it/have enough money that you can overstock, the focus becomes an entirely different one. It essentially becomes planning out voyages, I found myself sometimes writing down what my plan was between sessions since accomplishing things often takes quite a few trips to different ports. I like the world, as well, the sort of ... absurdist take on a steampunk-ish, Lovecraftian-ish setting. It was super satisfying, finally having discovered most of what there is to discover in it, although given that the discovery of new places, characters and stories in the world is sort of what drives it, it also means that I’m not super likely to go back to it any time soon. 

Darkest Dungeon: Listen I just like some good turn-based combat. This one is actually similar to Sunless Sea in terms of 1) being a roguelike 2) having Lovecraftian-themes, although Darkest Dungeon certainly takes itself a lot more seriously than Sunless Sea does. I think the really cool thing about Darkest Dungeon, though, is how it makes you really care about these people you’re sending into battle by giving them little quirks, letting them experience stress and having them react to that, etc. It’s not actually, from a purely mechanical standpoint, disasterous when you lose one of them, but often you’ve beome very emotionally invested in your favourites and it truly DOES become a thing where you hurry to flee if you’re doing badly because you don’t want to lose them. 

[codenamesazanka]

I know this is a really vague thing to ask, but do you have any tips for writing Shigaraki? I know Echodrops made a whole meta about fanon Shigaraki vs canon Shigaraki but do you personally have anything in particular you'd want to mention yourself about the portrayal of Shigaraki in fanfics?

(Here’s the link to @echodrops‘s post! It’s really, really good, and helped me figure out Shigaraki a lot in the first place. thank you!)

oooh! Not at all a vague thing, this is a great question. I started all this meta because I wanted to figure out how to write Shigaraki as well. A word of caution tho, because this would be my personal interpretation of Shigaraki, though I’ll try to use as much manga examples as I can. As always, super long post. 

Note: images are edited to fit exact quotes to relevant and reasonable sized images, instead of a whole manga page

Here’s some hand man characteristics/traits that I think are overlooked:

Shigaraki Tomura, in his beliefs/values, has a tendency for all-or-nothing thinking, to be extreme in his actions. In all three of his incarnations - the oneshot Tenko, the draft Sazanka, and this current one - a core of the character is 1) finding something flawed/bad/had hurt him somehow 2) completely loathing it 3) vowing to destroy it. 

Tenko despised samurai and their warring, and wishes to rid the world of swords. Sazanka is on a quest to kill quirk-users with quirks he deems too dangerous for society. And Shigaraki has decided that the Heroes and justice system is a farce, and is out to destroy it. 

Kinda fitting for a guy with his quirk - he either doesn’t destroy something, or destroys it completely. The moment he makes his decision, it’s fast and permanent. 

For Shigaraki, murder is murder, destruction is destruction, violence is violence, no matter how you dress it up. That’s why he couldn’t see the difference between him and Stain. That’s why he can’t see that Bakugou, as aggressive and vicious as he is, still wants to be a good guy. 

Now this is my take, but I think his mindset is: Because All Might can’t save everyone, he’s a fake, he’s trash; because everyone will say they condemn murder yet go about their lives carefree even though they know logically someone is out there getting killed, morality and justice is an illusion; because justice is so fragile and flimsy, I will expose it and destroy it. 

Not in any goodwill or for a better society, mind you. He just hates it. 

He also has no illusions about himself or his actions, he knows he’s evil.

Shigaraki is a lot more sarcastic and sardonic than usually portrayed in fanon. He’s very rude and can be foul mouthed, but the real insult comes from his tone and behavior. He condescendingly calls Eraserhead cool. He calls Stain the ‘Great Senpai of scoundrels’. He points out to Overhaul how a wakagashira/underboss like him should be more polite. Just about half of everything he says is dripping with mockery, and he’s very breezy and irreverent. So a bit less ‘I hate you, fuck off’, and more cheek.

Adding to that, if I’m reading my Japanese right, Shigaraki can change how he addresses people depending on the person and situation. His default speech is rude, but he’ll talk somewhat (barely) politely-ish if needed; it’s just it’s very obvious he’s not taking it seriously. 

Related, I feel like Shigaraki says a lot of things he doesn’t really believe. He tries out concepts, half-heartedly, on a whim. There’s that infamous speech at USJ about Heroes and Villains both using violence - which does seem to have some semblance to the actual ‘two sides of the same coin’ that even Best Jeanist talks about. 

And here’s him considering Stain’s effects on heroes, with gusto, before ditching it.

I know it’s Smash!, but here’s him reciting some sort of pseudo education philosophy he picked up somewhere??? to Kurogiri to get out of exercise. 

He’s a total smartass 

Of course, this brings up the question, is he genuine in his speech to Bakugou, or to Toga and Twice? 

 Like Echodrop notes, he can be in a good mood. He can be (seem?) happy, he can smile, he will acknowledge when someone does a good job of something. 

Sure, it’s got a manic edge to it, it’s probably not coming from a place of good, fluffy, innocent feelings, but he can laugh, enjoy the moment, be psyched about something. 

I really like this scene because he actually giggles a bit. He squeezes Midoriya, and he really does seem excited for a chat. 

He’s quick to go back to being default cranky tho. Quick to enjoy, quick to get irked.  

Shigaraki is a weirdo and I love him.

 My boy is smart. Really, Shigaraki is smarter than he looks. In the Ultra Archive, his profile lists his intelligence as ‘A’, ranking him above most characters, including Midoriya. I get that Deku’s whole thing is being the strategizing main character, but Shigaraki’s just as analytical. Even the Smash! Comic points this out. 

His room is filled with books, so either he reads a lot or he hoards them to look smart. I think it’s the former. Well, it’s not mutually exclusive, I should know.

He thinks and reflects and questions. He was super pissed about Stain, but he realized Stain was right and tried to figure out why. He went on a walk to calm down and just ruminate. He sought out Midoriya just to get second opinion. Afterwards, he quickly sees the bigger picture and realizes the issue is systemic and he’s gotta attack the structure. Of course, kinda shaky on the specific details and it’s not endgame long term, but still impressive. 

There’s a lot of Villain!Deku fanfics - and I like them a lot! - that turns Deku into the criminal mastermind or makes him the brains behind Shigaraki’s operations. Which is fair, Deku could totally be one! And also a lot of fics where Shigaraki is dismissed, with everything he does being AFO’s machinations. Again, fair. But Canon Shigaraki is AFO’s successor and leads the League for a reason.

This also means, I think, that Shigaraki isn’t as clueless to the fact that All For One is manipulating him. This point is entirely debatable, though. All I have to back this is how Shigaraki wondered if he was lied to in the USJ.

Even tho he’s facepalm crusty boi neet, Shigaraki is still a very dangerous S-ranked villain. I feel like sometimes people forget this. 

 He’s not that childish. He can be immature, he’s still learning the ropes of being a supervillain, he’s got an irritable and sullen disposition, but he’s not a five-year-old. He’s also not completely unhinged. 

When things don’t go his way, his first response usually isn’t to shriek or whine or immediately snap. He’s got a clear head and a good sense of what he can and can’t do. Kurogiri is down, All Might escaped their grasp, but Nomu’s still active? Cool, we got this. It’s only when Nomu gets team-rocket-ed that he panics. Stain stabs him? Doesn’t start a fight right there and then, asks Master for some Nomu, is patient enough to wait until he decides he really can’t stand Stain, then finally gives the go ahead for a rampage. 

Shigaraki knew from the start he can’t handle All Might. That’s Nomu’s job. As much as he hates All Might, he doesn’t jump at the chance to kill the hero personally. He’s not ruled by impulse or easy distractions, not really. And he will back down if Kurogiri reasons with him - see accepting Stain as a party member, see letting Toga and Dabi live. And after he got his motivation, he’s been very restraint since. 

He doesn’t immediately destroy his things in anger - we only see him destroy only few items pre-mall talk. He decays binoculars, a photo of Deku, maybe a newspaper, all quiet and deliberate. Kurogiri’s bar is intact and clean, despite being the long-time hang out spot of the destructive Shigaraki Tomura. Would he decay a controller after losing a game? Maybe, but also just as likely maybe not. 

Shigaraki will complain and bitch and sulk and hold a grudge, tho, yeah. He will lose it after a series of stressors/things gone wrong. He can be moody, cruel and sadistic, bloodthirsty and mayhem-loving. But he’s got himself under control more often than not. 

Finally, video games: My biggest pet peeve about portrayal of Shigaraki in fanfics: He’s super obsessed with video games, to the point that he plays them all day long, and he can’t stop using video game slang for everything - or so a lot of the fandom believes. 

I’ve pointed out before that we’re more likely to see him reading the newspaper and we’ve never actually seen him use a console ever in manga or anime. True, he likens scenarios to games frequently, but not all the time - the USJ fight was when he did that the most, then in his other appearances only once or twice during the whole scene (Doesn’t want Stain as a ‘party member’, none at all when meeting Dabi or Toga and then at the mall, camp arc has him seeing himself playing a Sim instead of an RPG, calls All Might ‘last boss’ during the raid, then nothing for his next appearances). At least not out loud. As fun as it is to imagine him as a geeky gamer, and he is, but he does more than just that. 

I think Shigaraki uses video games and media to create mental scripts for himself to understand/interact with the world, but it serves as a skeleton. He fleshes it out, always adding to that mental model to create a more complex one. He calls his change of strategy as playing a Sim game, but it’s a good analogy that works for him, and we see how layered his plan is - dealing a blow to UA that works whether the Vanguard succeed or not, kidnapping Bakugou and Ragdoll, in order to bring about the media and public criticism of UA/heroes, and had it not been for the raid, something would’ve happen to Bakugou that would’ve demoralized everyone. 

He def is grounded in reality enough to know what he’s doing is more than just a game. 

And that’s all I got for now! There might be a part two. idk, but I hope this was helpful! 

[beanzybrandon]

High School! PRETTYMUCH — Austin Porter

A/N: this isn’t even important i’m just overly amused by the fact that you can see my writing slowly devolve as this goes on

like, proper capitalization and punctuation who?? we don’t know her

literally, if it wasn’t for grammarly there wouldn’t even be apostrophes pFFT

• LOOK • I'm not saying Austin Dale Porter is the biggest nerd to walk this planet but that is exactly what I'm saying • Everyone and their grandmother knows that he watches more anime than any healthy individual should, but his interests delve far beyond the realm of Japanese animation • He's also extremely fond of all sorts of games • Computer gaming? Yes • Console gaming? All the better • RPG fantasy games? Ohmanohman, now we're getting excited!! • Magic and monster intensive card games that bring on more anxiety and competition than they should? Say no more!! He's right there screaming with the best of them • Given his penchant for these types of activities, he's actually one of the founders for the schools’ gaming club which includes, but is not limited to, various types of electronic gaming, card games such as Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, and tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons • The thing that makes him the happiest is knowing that he's able to share his interests with like-minded individuals with whom he can share educated discussions and formulate genuine relationships • It's actually kind of interesting to see how much effort he places in the club. He cares so much about everyone who has joined and does his best to make sure that he listens to all the ideas and concerns that are presented to him. He does his best to ensure that each meeting is enjoyable and that special gatherings are well-planned and running smoothly • The club is lowkey like his baby and he's very proud of how wonderful things have turned out • Though a great deal of his time is spent focused on these types of activities that is not to say that they are his only priority • He's actually an active member of several other clubs, including robotics and the book club (mayhaps he made it a point to try and coax the president into incorporating manga into some of their group readings. it didn't exactly go the way he wanted it to, but it was a valiant effort indeed) • It's in the latter of these that Austin meets you • It's not uncommon for the group to get walk-ins throughout the semester, curious students wanting to sit in on a meeting to see how things flow or to pose whatever questions they may have • More often than not, those who wander past the doors of the senior-English teacher's classroom don't make a second appearance, but you and a few of your friends had proven to be part of the exception • The initial excitement he felt upon hearing that four students had come to join them melted into mild astonishment when his gaze came to rest upon you for the first time • If love at first sight is a thing, he was certain cupid had hit him with more than one expertly aimed arrow • If it were possible for it to do so, he was sure that his heart was about to beat out of his chest • He's a bit shy so he doesn't talk to you right away • If we're being completely honest, even doing so much as sparing a glance in your direction has his face flushing a shade of red he didn't even know existed • His friends have noticed what's going on by this point (in fact, the entirety of the club seems to have put two and two together...the exceptions being you, of course) and after some not too gentle coaxing, he's shuffling over to you and your friends, hands buried in the front pocket of his paint-stained hoodie • Seeing as though the giggle your friends let out upon seeing him was something you didn't quite understand, you chose to ignore it

• "Mind if I sit with you guys?" He asked, motioning toward the vacant chair beside you • You'd merely nod in response, shifting your own seat to the right some to accommodate his frame as he slipped between the chairs and sat himself down. A relieved smile would break out across his lips the moment the seat of his jeans met the rough plastic of the chair • "I'm Austin," he'd continue, offering his hand to everyone in the rough circle that had been formed. He seemed nice enough, and it wasn't long before all of you were chatting like you had known each other for years. Conversation flowed easily amongst everyone, and you found that you quite liked the adorably-awkward young man on your left • Time passed rather quickly, and before you could present the argument you had as to why Jonathan Joestar was the best JoJo in the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure universe (how ya'll ended up on the topic on anime is beyooooond me. It's totally not like it's some sort of mutual interest) the groups coordinator was standing, calling out that it was time for things to come to a close • "This discussion is far from over," you'd quip as you shoved your things back into your backpack, slinging it over your shoulder as it stood • "You're right," He'd answer, an amused lull clinging to his words. After a moment of two of silent deliberation, he'd hit you with a "You should give me your number. I've still gotta crush your argument and I don't think I can wait a week to do that." • And did you? • The only correct answer is yes • A cute boy with mutual interests and a great personality?? You'd be dumb not to

• The smile he offered you after tucking his phone back into the pocket was so sweet you could practically taste the honey on your tongue • You weren't really expecting him to reach out to you later that night, but he did, and sure enough, the argument the two of you had found yourselves in the midsts of earlier that afternoon kicked up, stronger than ever • The capabilities of fictional characters weren't the only thing you found yourselves discussing, though.   • As the night drew on, it became clear to see that you guys had more in common than you had anticipated • And goodness was he full of jokes • The better part of about five hours was spent wheezing into your pillow in a feeble attempt to keep from waking your family • You were insanely tired come the next morning, but that was okay with you • Because you made a new friend and couldn't remember the last time you had had so much fun just texting someone

• The progression of your relationship was a quick one. In a matter of months, the two of you had become the best of friends and were doing quite literally everything together. You were prettymuch (HAH) attached at the hip • By the time the year had come to a close, Austin was certain the feelings he held for you ran deeper than the fleeting crushes he had experienced thus far, and you were growing to realize that you liked him more than you let on • Had either of you mentioned this, though? • Of course not • Because high school is weird and what are emotions and literally how do you convey these things to other people without coming off weird or them looking at you like you ate their first born child • It's never really that intense, but that's what it fEELS LIKE and neither of you wanted to subject yourself to that type of humiliation • Or ruin the relationship that you had built

• the fact that your relationship had gone from being platonic to romantic at all was surprising • but not undesirable in the slightest • it had happened rather spontaneously. he had come over for your weekly movie-marathon, a bag of snacks in hand and a warm smile on his face • the night had followed the same pattern of those that had come before them, but the air that had fallen over the two of you as you huddled together on the couch was different • neither of you could quite describe what it felt like, just that it was odd and left you with a dry throat and a small knot in the pit of your stomach

• every so often, Austin would shift a bit closer, muttering something about being cold and you hogging all the blankets • which very well may have been true but?? You had laid claim to it first • After enough pestering, you'd let out an exasperated huff and throw your arm up, holding the blanket open • "Hurry up and get under it before I change my mind and let you freeze" • He wouldn't need to be told a second time

• honestly, he's not even watching the movie • he's pitching little glances in your direction every so often, gaze softening when it falls across your features • oh man • thisismorethanacrush.jpg • he's not exactly subtle about his staring, so it isn't long before you've caught him • uhoh.exe

• "why are you staring? is there something on my face?" • uHOH.EXE • ABORT MISSION • poor boy is broken though, he doesn't even know how to answer • "seriously, is there snot hanging out of my nose or something?" you'd ask, wiping fervently at your face with the sleeve of his your hoodie • nope, just beauty • but he doesn't say this • because his brain is BROKEN and all that's inside of his head right now is a pile of GOO • so what does he do instead? • the only thing any logical teenage boy would do, of course • he kisses you • and maybe it's his first kiss so it's rushed and unsure but it's a kiss all the same • and maybe, just maybe you kiss back • and then maybe dating doesn't seem like it would be so bad after all

• boyfriend Austin is honestly the softest thing in the world?? • like, being in love with someone is already a phenomenal feeling but sharing that type of relationship with your best friend is immensely better because you've already established a strong bond and you know each other better than anyone else • that doesn't mean he doesn't still love to learn more, though • if you thought he was interested in your hobbies before, you should see him now • he does his absolute best to learn about the things that intrigue you that way you're able to do more together •  has asked you to teach him how to do some of your favorite things on more than one occasion • it doesn't always turn out (you tried to show him how to bake a cake once and he had flour in his hair for at least three days afterward) great but he's making a genuine effort and the look that fills his eyes when he's working with you is easily the sweetest thing in the world • you being happy makes him happier than he knew possible • he loves showing you his favorite things, too!! • taught you how to skate, likes to paint and game with you whenever time allows

• 110% okay with you stealing his clothing • if we're being honest, he kind of encourages it?? his hoodies practically swallow you and he thinks it's the cutest thing in the world • he's also very fond of skinship • like, it doesn't matter what it is, he just wants to touch you. he loves how perfectly your hand fits in his, the warmth that rolls off of your body when you cuddle up to him, the way your lips feels against his

• spEAKING OF KISSES • they're this boys' biggest weakness?? • like, give him kisses and he will instantly become a pile of goo • he's especially fond of the sweet little kiss you press to the corner of his lips, or the ones he gets on his forehead and the tip of his nose when he has his head resting in your lap • he has no issue with pda whatsoever • he's not one of those dudes that try to shove his tongue down your throat in the middle of the hallway or anything like that, but he does like to show people that you're his • it's not even a possessive thing, he's just really happy to have you • his entire mentality is literally "lOOk aT mY pArtNer!" • "aRenT tHey So DOpE?!" • "iM DatIng LItErALLy The MosT aMaZInG PeRsOn In thE wOrlD!!" • kisses between classes • kisses after school • soft lil kisses just because • walks you to all your classes • carries your books despite you telling him it's cheesy and unnecessary • "it's cheesy but you love it" • you do love it, you can't even argue

• absolutely head over heels for you • and you for him • the likelihood of the relationship lasting until graduation is very high, and it's almost guaranteed you'll be together well into your young adult years • in short, you're the sweetest of high school sweethearts