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★ 【门徒】 「 arknights 」 ✔ republished w/permission ☆ follow btt’s fanart twitch stream!

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also calyx feels to me like he exists purely because whoever designed him is trying to use the playerbase to crowdsource porn of him. hey here's a sickly young boy genius who talks massive smack and wants to experiment on your body. next patch we're showing you his underling who is a huge man with faceless hentai guy bangs and a locker full of photos of this kid. no we're not telling you more about his motivations beyond the fact that he's a sickly young boy genius, go run this dungeon with duty support sphene even though sphene not being able to fight whatsoever is like very significant to her character actually and she's not even a healer even though we established that previous patch as the one thing she was actually passable at. look the keys are jangling. one calyxilion doujins please.

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final fantasy fourteen dawntrail post in the wake of patch seven point three

dawntrail through gulool ja ja presents a fantasy of "a perfect ruler that can unite the many peoples on the continent through the power of open and equal dialogue" as something that could possibly exist, and buying into this fantasy to at least some degree is basically the price of entry for getting to enjoy the journey of wuk lamat trying to follow his example. if you can't suspend your disbelief enough to accept the premise that such a ruler Can exist, then everything presented as consequence of his achievements and anything wuk lamat does to repeat his success will feel equally bogus.

I think it speaks of (base) dawntrail's vision that this ideal philosopher-warrior king is still going to die eventually, and his kingdom will fall apart if he doesn't prepare for a future beyond the reach of his own glory. after wuk lamat wins the rite of succession it's revealed gulool ja ja was literally half dead already - even if you believe the perfect ruler is something that can exist, it is is not something that can be sustained indefinitely, and less-than-perfect individuals will have to continue the work. we're then introduced to alexandria and sphene as a further extreme of this: even if you could make the perfect ruler last indefinitely, that still isn't sustainable!

while gulool ja ja is wildly successful and widely beloved, it's not like there are no dissidents whatsoever in tural. there's the faction of yok huy that never recognised his authority and saw the succession as their chance to reclaim independence, and the faction of mamool ja that feel like he sold them out to #woke. these two issues are ultimately diffused with a wuk lamat friendship speech, probably far too easily for some people's tastes, but i think they're reasonable enough plot beats for a story that, particularly in its first half, really hammers on the importance of open and equal communication as the foundation of a peaceful future of cohabitation. wuk lamat's show of goodwill resolves these conflicts because dawntrail offers this fantasy that any conflict can be talked out with the right mindset as extension of this fantasy of the ideal ruler that can talk anything out.

i can understand people who simply cannot suspend their disbelief for this fantasy of a peacefully unified uncolonised fantasy continental america when any meaningful knowledge of its real world counterparts will tell you it's not that simple, and when earlier expansions did not shy away from depicting national and international strife. but to me it does not feel like dawntrail (at least not base dawntrail) is unaware that what it is presenting is an unrealistic and unsustainable fantasy, because sphene's intrusion in the second half challenges the premises of the fantasy in multiple ways. it's possible that you could encounter the kindest gentlest most amicable person ever and you still cannot talk things out with her no matter what. how does your fantasy of peaceful cooperation hold up to that? for that matter, how does the reputation of the ideal philosopher-warrior king who could talk out any conflict hold up to the reality that his son went insane and tried to hyper genocide his own people in his attempt to break away from the expectation that he also become a perfect philosopher-warrior king, and the king both didn't notice this was brewing and couldn't stop it once the situation exploded? what about sareel ja cooking up whatever it is he's doing in the alliance raids out of his own ideas of what being the perfect ruler entails? this fantasy is unsustainable, the very concept of an ideal ruler can and will drive people to ruin.

that said, it does get excruciatingly awkward to have to read through shit like the yok huy COLONIALISM = BAD murals. dawntrail is trying to strike a balance between the abstracted human condition stuff that shb-ew dealt with while also taking a careful step back into the political stances with real world analogues the game had previously sworn off in stb postgame, and it is playing it safe on this front to the point of occasional absurdity. this too can make it harder for people to buy into the fantasy enough to get to enjoy the story for what it is.

dawntrail repeatedly hammers on how it is memory of the past that shapes the way people live in the present, for better or worse. koana initially wants to replace all turali traditions with sharlayan technology because he believes the old traditions abandoned him first. bakool ja ja makes a complete ass of himself because he was born in the sunk cost factory. wuk lamat and the other succession candidates have to learn about the how and why of every local culture to pass each part of the test, because they need to understand where these people are coming from before they have any right as a leader to decide where they should be going. ffxiv, as a whole, cares a lot about showing you the history that lead up to where we are now, else it would not spend as much time on the ancients as it does. the past guides the future, remembering the past is necessary to meaningfully shape the future, be it to respect or break free from the hopes of the past. wuk lamat makes sure to get to know the people in living memory before shutting the place down because she has no right to decide alexandria's future without knowing its history first.

notably alexandria is a complete monoculture even after many former turali moved in, because they quite literally have no cultural memory. they do not remember the dead, their history lies abandoned outside the walls, their culture consists of neon malls and billboard ads and a theme park where the present never ends (very striking to me when everkeep is supposed to be this last bastion of safety in a world torn apart by war and climate crisis). it is a lifestyle of convenience: it is more convenient to forget the dead than to have to mourn them, it is more convenient to assimilate and conform than to actually overcome one's differences, it is more convenient to paste over all the electrope with a hologram than to actually build something real.

it is, also, a parody of the fantasy of joyous coexistence presented in the first half of dawntrail. the people are united under their benevolent ruler not because they have reached an agreement despite their differences, but because their differences have been erased for the sake of the convenience of the dominant culture. the people of yyasulani were formally given the choice of whether to move into everkeep and wear regulators or not, but the alternative for those who would have otherwise preferred to stick with their old traditions was dying in the thunderstorms alexandria brought to the region. once the regulators are on and the past is forgotten, there's no need to engage with anything but the superficial present in front of you. the only method sphene can think of to avoid going to war with wuk lamat and tural is offering them the same assimilation into alexandria, because alexandria's present culture cannot actually abide or overcome differences.

again, to me, it did not feel like base dawntrail was unaware that gulool ja ja and the consequences of his presence are a fantasy. the comforting convenience of that fantasy is directly challenged by the existence of alexandria and its rulers, it is more subtly challenged through the various assertions that even if such a miracle ruler existed, it will take the joint efforts of many more less miraculous people to maintain the results of that miracle. wuk lamat is not actually able to save sphene with the power of friendship, she is only able to insist that it is worth the effort to try all the same, because even if the fantasy of being able to talk anything out is not realistic it's still worth striving for.

however, as the repeat specification of base dawntrail might have clued you in, it feels to me like dawntrail patchquests are conceding to this emotional convenience. koana's distrust towards the nomadic traditions of the hhetsarro after he was abandoned as a child turns out to have been unfounded, it was actually because of the Problems Dinosaur all along, neatly sidestepping any potential interpersonal or ideological conflict. human sphene's misgivings about waking up to a completely unrecognisable alexandria and being mistaken for the version of her that actually made it this way are resolved with an easy "oh we knew you're not her, we just like you anyway :)" before any real tension around this can arise with anyone who still holds an image of the digital sphene. the distance between sphene and wuk lamat in 7.2 is completely forgotten, sphene is suddenly all clingy about wuk lamat despite barely even having talked with her on screen (because we're just forgetting that there's a difference between sphenes I guess?), and wuk lamat's blatant remaining attachment to the digital sphene has no impact on her relationship with the living one whatsoever. alexandria's cultural memory hole was actually reversible all along, sparing them the effort of rebuilding their understanding of the past from scratch, and living memory's metallic gray remains get plastered over with its pleasing holograms again.

in a way it feels like dawntrail, after carefully dipping its toes into some material politics again, is now recoiling and going back to talking exclusively about an abstracted human condition, very clumsily so at that, and completely abandoning its initial premise and emotional impact in the process. the (alexandrian) fear of death has been spotlighted to an extent where the state of alexandria's relationship to its people let alone the people of tural has become an afterthought. human sphene, so far, functionally exists only to give alexandria its miracle ruler back, without any examination of the pressure of this expectation that drove her digital counterpart to lobotomise herself. gulool ja lives in the shadow of two generations of once in a lifetime rulers and yet nobody questions that this little ipad baby should become king of alexandria one day just because his dad married into the position before. after many tacit acknowledgments that the fantasy is impossible to sustain but is worthwhile to strive for all the same, the fantasy is now not only achievable, it is the status quo that must be returned to as fast and unquestioned as possible. shit dude, we're status quoing so hard here that even the fucking ascians are back somehow.

personally i still think "human" sphene should have been the personal memories that were suppressed to create the image of the perfect ruler, leaving "the real sphene" as a fundamentally unknowable entity that can only be extrapolated from the various biased records of her. but if we must insist on exposing the real person then the least she could do is refuse the expectation that she return to her role as beloved princess.

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very funny how the church of iberia as a branch of the lateran church has all the classic "indulgence is a sin" kinds of doctrine that understandably took hold in a nation struggling for survival and some kind of meaning in the aftermath of a disaster far beyond the average person's means to grasp and then you go to laterano proper and they're like no moderation for us please we eat ice cream every day and blow up buildings on a whim because we can :D

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TUESDAY AGAIN NO PROBLEM

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MASOCHIST MUTUAL: ouhhh I need to receive a botched execution where they try for a gutshot but they miss and hit my steel dog tags instead and it shatters my solar plexus shredding my lungs with bone fragments and they kick me into a ditch where I slowly asphyxiate to death choking on my own blood and bone,,,

SADIST MUTUAL: [picture of newspaper cat] I should fuck a girl who is scared of me

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One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

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Explorer, ore collector, and also a famous content creator on the video side of Columbia's intercity net. Contracted Oripathy due to inattentiveness on a geological excursion, and came to Rhodes Island seeking treatment.

Original Tweet

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the original got flagged with no way to appeal it when every contributor is deactivated but I will never let this post die. it's monday and we are getting on it cunts

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A year or so ago I went to wood carving club with a bruised eye from my dog slamming his nose into my eyesocket and like every old lady there pulled me aside at some point to ask if my partner hit me here are some of the solutions they had in case he did.

-Replacing his vitimens with poision

- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.

- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.

-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?

- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.

-One lady just cheerfully informed me she had a gun and only a few years left anyway

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Title: Ghost Ship

Arrangement: 敷き紙

Album: Vivid Blue Sky

Circle: Over The Coffee

Original: Captain Murasa

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yknow one of the reasons i am so adamant about the genai stuff is that, yknow, to me, if someone goes all-in on the moral panic--not, like, makes legitimate and honest criticisms of how evil all the companies involved are, or how they mistreat the workers in the global south necessary to make their product, or their deceptive and outright malicious marketing, but, like, starting twitter pile-ons against random indie devs for using it for background assets and calling it the death of art and the herald of cognitive degeneration--it indicates to me that they've only opposed other moral panics not because of any set of consistent political or analytical principles, but by sheer brute chance of being on the nasty end of them