#Especially after seeing him do BloodSport despite his voice and health and then seeing the entire crew and band rush to him to celebrate

[satari-raine]

I'm still not used to fully talking on here but I just have to talk for a minute about Sleep Token and Wembley.

They did fantastic. After touring so much this year, doing back-to-back shows, dealing with a band member having to take a leave of absence for most of their final tour, incorporating new changes to their routine and style, and with Vessel having hurt his voice during such a huge show, they did fantastic.

I watched along with Discord. Mostly lurked. And everything I saw from the effects on stage, the fun antics, the performances, the playing - guitars, bass, drums, the dancers, the choir - they did fantastic. And Vessel. I said it in chat that he doesn't need to hurt himself or his voice to earn the love of those who listen to his music, but he kept going. He sang, and pushed through when he had every right in the world to put a stop to the show and focus on his health. He kept on going while also giving to the crowd the chance to carry him through, and seeing everyone - from those on stage with him to the crowd to people in chat and what I saw on here - still loving him, loving them?

They did fucking fantastic, and I dare anyone tell me otherwise. As a community, we should be celebrating them despite any differences of opinion - being kinder and supportive of one another is literally everything they've shown with III's situation and in general. It's what so many of us showed back to them with the hand salutes for III and the marked ? on our hands during specific songs. Their new outfits have fan-made decals to them, for fuck's sake. They are absolutely, without a doubt, genuine about making everyone feel loved.

Look, I'm just a stranger on the internet at the end of the day but this band has come to mean so much to me since I found them, to the point where they've honestly kept me going some days - them and the wonderful people I've met through them - and I just need them to know that they did fantastic, their music still brings people together despite hiccups along the way, and regardless of any of those hiccups, they are so loved. Loved beyond belief.

The night didn't just belong to all of us at Wembley, but to them, too.

#Satari rambles #Sleep Token #I'm sorry if this is too much but I just had to get something out #I usually don't swear much either but just #Yeah #Had to ramble #Especially after seeing him do BloodSport despite his voice and health and then seeing the entire crew and band rush to him to celebrate #The way he fell to his knees and bowed so low his forehead touched the stage #I cannot tell anyone how much his strength and emotional depths and just him #What they all have started meaning to me #If anyone needs me I'm going to be throwing love at the Discord mods and vibing with the lovely people here while I try not to keep crying #And people are more than welcome to reblog this too if it resonates #And it goes without saying that they all deserve as much rest and downtime as they want #The band and the crew and the dancers and choir #Everyone #Love you all

[mozambique-and-a-dream]

So I Wrote An Essay about Pathfinder for a University Class

I’m in a creative non-fiction writing class and our essay topic was “a person who has impacted your life” and me being a smart ass not only asked my prof if I could do someone fictional but a robot as well. Here are the results.

I don’t know what it is about happy robots with sad backstories. They always seem to find a way to captivate my attention. I’m always finding a way to obsess over these funky little robots in one way or another. Take the Mars rover, Oppy. Its last transmission was along the lines of, “my batteries are low and it’s getting dark.” I read that and cried. I’m not talking a tear or two. I was straight up bawling. So, when I ran into a video game which featured one of these robots with a sad backstory, I decided that I needed to invest literal weeks of my life into this game. Pathfinder is a robot on a simple mission. Find his creator. A task that sounds so seemingly simple, but keeps proving very hard for a robot as naive as Pathfinder.

While playing the game, seeing an enemy playing as Pathfinder is a terrifying experience, however, the character himself is perhaps one of the cutest things to ever be seen in a video game. Despite participating in a literal bloodsport in order to become famous enough that his creator will reach out, the tall, lanky blue robot is the definition of a ball of sunshine. Whether he is telling his teammates that he loves them in almost all of his lines, to trying or giving high fives to people he is just about to murder, the robot doesn’t really have a sense for what a bloodsport is. On the other hand, perhaps he is well aware of what the dire circumstances are of the games he plays for money and fame and still uses this chipper personality to keep the others happy as well. Either way, it’s clear that being around Pathfinder will always put a smile on your face, even if he doesn’t have a face himself. Technically he has a screen on his chest that is capable of displaying different emoticons that change based on his mood, and this furthers the idea of him as a happy individual. By having a smiley face on his chest ninety percent of the time, only switching to a red angry face when he battles, it’s clear that the robot is capable of expressing  different human emotions almost as good as we are. It’s always really interesting to see a character with such a sad backstory being so optimistic about life, as it is not a trope that is seen often in any form of media, as these characters are usually written as depressed and cold to anyone around them. Pathfinder booted up one day with not a single living soul in sight and decided to set out to find who created him. Now, being a robot rather than a human, in his search, Pathfinder found his niaevity used against him. Humans would lie and take advantage of his willingness to help in exchange for answers and have him do all the work for nothing. However, even after constantly getting used, Pathfinder is still a character who chooses to be bright, happy, and optimistic in everything he does rather than form a hatred for mankind. Because of this happy personality that I needed so badly in my life, I decided that I needed to play as Pathfinder more often. Hearing a positive voice talking to me I found has started putting me in better moods, something much needed when you are a university student with six essays due all the time. 

Video games have always been a way for me to destress, however a while back I started realizing that even those were making me feel worse rather than better as I was too focused on wanting to do well in the game that I would begin to get frustrated when I lost. Because I knew these feelings would not benefit me in any way, and my interest in video games, which had once been one of my best strategies for relieving stress and anxiety, started to fade, leaving me only with my unhealthy coping habits. However, once this game came out, I was instantly drawn in by the diverse cast of characters. Any game that has cannon LGBT+ characters is enough for me to want to give it a try. This one just had the added perk of having a happy robot character as well. The more I began to play with Pathfinder as my character the more I started realizing he had started reshaping how I played video games. Instead of becoming frustrated or angry when a game didn’t go the way I wanted it to, Pathfinder was always there to remind me how much fun he was having, thus making me realize once again that these video games were indeed, just games. My frustrations in video games had soon gone back down and once again I was at a point where they were a stress reliever rather than an inducer. 

After a few months of playing the game I began to realize that not only was this robot helping me while I played games, but that I had started to pick up some of his mannerisms. From calling every person I met my friend to offering high fives all the time, it was clear to me that Pathfinder had begun to impact more parts of my life. Because of this, I had even started making more friends as I played the video game more and more. If you would have told me a couple of months ago that I would meet some of my best friends while playing a video game that I only played because I liked the robot character, I would have laughed in your face. Now however, I play this game with three other people who mean the world to me. Like me, they were drawn into the game by the diversity of the characters, as the game has both a canon gay character as well as a canon non-binary character, leaving the four of us with a rather unlikely gaming squad. The gaming community is made up of mostly cishet males, so seeing just one of our squad mates playing a video game is already defying gaming standards, as we are a Canadian lesbian, an American bisexual, a Swedish trans man, and a German non-binary person. When the four of us group together, though, everything just seems to click. It no longer feels like we don’t belong in the gaming community as we have created our own community. A community I never would have found if I didn’t have an obsession with happy robots with sad backstories. 

Even though the four of us don’t live anywhere remotely close to one another, friends that you know only through the power of the internet are friends nonetheless. In the past few months I’ve had my gaming friends ask me more about my mental health than my friends who I’ve known for years, even though we hardly even know what each other looks like. Sure we’ve all sent the odd selfie but still I have a better idea of what their pets look like then what they do. However there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t need to see someone’s face in order to know that they are my friends, not when I can hear the tone in their voices that can show their emotions. From a concerned voice telling another to go to bed as we are all in different timezones, to playful jabs at one another about the events that go on in the game. None of us even call each other by our real names! Not that we don’t know each other’s real names, that would be weird if we didn’t, but after calling all of them by their usernames since we first started playing if I were to call Biff, Axel or DrowZ, Lynkoln, it just doesn’t sound right. One of them were to call me Renee instead of Fire, I would be genuinely concerned and wonder what I did to piss them off, almost like that feeling you get when your mom calls you by your full name, you know you did something wrong. But so far, the only things these friends have done wrong is occasionally getting me killed in our video game, or stealing loot from my kills, thank you very much Wolfy.

Getting to know people from all around the world is also a fun experience I wouldn’t have gotten if it weren’t for this video game. Just the other day we spent a few minutes trying to explain to our Swedish friend what a tonsil was as he didn’t know the word for it in English, which resulted in a lot of laughter from all ends. Our obsession of the video game goes well with each other and makes it so we all have someone to talk about our thoughts on the game as well as the characters. From sharing different ideas we think the characters would do and how they would interact with each other to thirsting over the attractiveness of others, even though if these characters were real none of us would stand a chance with any of them, especially the one they all seem to have a very strong interest in despite how terrifying he would be in real life, the four of us do things that all friend groups would do. Our group chat is full of memes, we discuss how school is going, the people in real life we are interested in, and so on. A lot of people have tried to tell me in the past that people you meet online can’t be your friends but I beg to differ. Even though all of us are all poor and couldn’t afford one plane ticket between the four of us, we know we don’t need to be in the same room to hangout. Especially when just being in a voice chat with them makes it feel like they are here with me and that I’ve known them for longer than the span of a couple months. 

It’s crazy to think that something positive came out of my video game obsession. I know my mom can’t believe that I’ve gotten more out of video games than a rotted brain and sore eyes. It’s even weirder to think that it all stemmed from a fictional robot, a robot that I now can say has actually changed my life, for without him I would be missing three of my best friends. If I never would have found an interest in this video game it’s safe to say I still would not be playing any games and instead watching Netflix alone on my couch rather than spending time with my new friends. I would only have my mom left encouraging me to attend class every day but only really because she helped pay for them and not three other people yelling at me to stop playing games with them to go write an essay about the robot from the video game we were playing, even if I was doing really good this morning. Hell, without this fictional robot in my life I would probably be writing some boring essay about a real life person, who we all know are less exciting than fictional ones. Because of this I think it’s really important to take stock of not only the real people in your life but the fictional ones, as they can be just as, if not more, inspiring than someone who is really out there. We don’t often think about characters as having a way to affect our lives, but as shown by Pathfinder, my life has become a whole lot happier because of this funky little robot.

#Apex Legends #hasnt been marked yet but still #enjoy I guess????