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thought-bubble-doodly-doo · 1 year

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I feel like Yandere Simulator should’ve been a visual novel.

Like, just ignoring all the moral issues people bring up about the game and its developer, this post is not about that.

I feel like a huge amount of the problems with Yandere Simulator were the super stringent, time-sensitive events that made it very difficult to progress the story without a literal walkthrough. Like in order to kill someone in a certain way, you had to do X, Y, and Z and only X, Y, and Z were able to produce your desired outcome.

Originally, Yandere Simulator was just a sandbox where you got to go around killing people in strange, fun, ridiculous ways before things got significantly “harder” (i.e. more needlessly complicated), and the game wasn’t as much fun anymore.

Also, he tried to add like six million things to the game that were just as a concept, but really, really, really dragged out the actual coding of the game that’s never ever gonna be finished.

So I feel like he just should’ve made a visual novel. I think it would solve a lot of the problems.

1. If you want to basically force your player to do certain actions at certain points, just make their options linear. You can only progress as much as you read through the story. Have branching paths sure, but don’t give the illusion of choice when really there’s a very limited number of things to do.

2. Visual novels eliminate most gameplay elements of games, so that would remove a lot of the coding issues. Like, even I could use renpy to make a game. Also, since you don’t need to pay Info-Chan for ridiculously overcomplicated step by step playthroughs, you could probably get rid of the panty shot mechanic that everyone found so distasteful, and just get rid of that controversy entirely.

3. Honestly, I feel like the dude juts wanted to tell a story. Whenever I used to be super duper into the game’s development, all the substantial updates or youtube videos were never about gameplay. It was all “I’ve added X character! Isn’t their design cool? I had a concept for backstory. Look at this hint to a larger narrative. Look at these dynamics between players. Isn’t there so much personality to the cast?” Like, just tell a story about these characters. You don’t have to program a sub-par slasher game around it. Just write a book!!!

Because as muddled and troubled as Yandere Dev’s storytelling is, I do feel like he had good concepts and ideas to at least a chunk of what he was going for. And I know this, because the most fun I EVER had with Yandere Simulator, BY FAR, was not the playing of the actual game. It was the consuming of fan-made content that built upon the ideas presented by the Developer.

All those fan-fics about Budo and Ayane, the struggle between justice and friendship, nature vs nurture, overcoming desire, trust, and betrayal? I ATE THAT UP AS A TEENAGER.

All the fan comics that just shipped the rivals with each other? Cute girlfriends being alive and cute? Ideal content.

The backstory that being a Yandere is a genetic trait, and the relationship exploration between Ayane and her mother, some people interpreting it as a hostile, because the father loved Ayane genuinely, where he only loved the mother because his spirit was broken. And some people interpreting it as a genuine family affection, because the love she felt for the father opened her up to new emotions? Very interesting!!!

Heck, the whole backstory with the mother and the Saikou CEO, and the unrequited love and the covering up of her crimes, and the etc. etc. etc. I WAS SO INVESTED in people exploring that!!!

Heck, sometimes the fandom pumped out the most horrendously abusive scenarios between characters and the sickest fanart I can remember, but sometimes you just wanted to see something fucked up every once in a while. Makes life interesting.

My point is, no one ever liked the game. They liked the idea of the story it was telling and the characters contained within.

#yandere simulator #yandere dev

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humanwheatleyslefttoenail · 2 years

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i HIGHLY doubt there will be a portal 3 (though i hope i'm proven wrong) but that post made me remember some ideas/speculation for what the plot of portal 3 could be

- Prequel similar to Portal Stories: Mel in Old Aperture or maybe immediately post GLaDOS activation where you're trying to survive in an unstable facility and a very young, volatile GLaDOS

- Something to do with time travel. A few mods have already implemented this in different ways as game mechanics, but it could also be used plot-wise. Maybe GLaDOS finds Cave Johnson's old time experiments, which then bring all the characters back to Portal 1 or 2 with their old memories and a chance to change things around a bit, despite some new antagonistic force trying to stop this. Or maybe GLaDOS wants Chell to come back, and time travels to convince her to stay in Aperture as a very confused audience has to figure out that it *is* a sequel and not a strangely familiar Portal 1.

- Exploration of the consequences of portals. There was this one star trek tng episode where the characters find out that warp drives are making dangerous rifts in space, maybe portals make similar distortions in space time. This could feed back in to the time travel thing or even let us have something along the lines of into the portalverse essentially. we might get to see rattmann, alternate versions of characters, or maybe some of the old cores from portal 1. it'd be a cool way to integrate the multiverse cave thing from the DLC into something more plot substantial.

- Wheatley is a fan favorite so if they're doing a continuation story, I don't think Valve would leave him out. I don't think they'd ever do a human wheatley/blue sky type thing and honestly I'm glad. if anything i think they'd play his redemption mostly for laughs.

- you could conceivably do a half life crossover but given it'd be a portal game i don't know how inclined valve would be to do a canon crossover. i think it'd probably be there'd be a few half life elements, like references and some black mesa technology, but i don't think you'd have chell meet gordon and alyx or anything

- people have had the idea of portal 3 taking place on the surface, which i think would be interesting. you'd have the chance to mix old aperture aspects of the testing environment, but then it'd add a new layer to the puzzles because you'd also have to improvise with outside elements. i think that could open up some really cool open ended puzzles with multiple ways to solve, which would be neat imo

- if it did take place on the surface, i think the plot would probably have something to do with GLaDOS asking Chell for help doing something only Chell could do, or maybe using both the surface and Aperture as game locations to complete a goal. Maybe they have to rescue Wheatley for some reason. Either way, it could definitely expand the game's environment.

- There's a scrapped idea that Portal 2 was about Chell bonding with various personality cores, that'd be such a cute idea if we can see more cores or maybe even get the Portal 1/2 cores back. They're adorable and I want to see more of them, it'd be so so so cute if they each had a section of the game they accompany you through

- also also more GLaDOS character development. not necessarily going back to being Caroline per se but opening herself up to Chell more as well as possibly other people, which she's already starting to do with the birds and atlas and p body. just her and Chell generally having more friendly interactions while she still maintains her sarcastic, morally bankrupt nature would be both cute and hilarious

- one of the missions in the game could be to wake up rattmann. i find this a little less plausible since rattmann is a human and the portal games shy away from showing models of human characters, but if they put him in a core (or... companion cube perhaps?) that's more plausible to me. i think it'd be cool to learn more about him that way but it might also take away part of his mysterious nature as a character who existed before the narrative. it could work but valve would have to be careful about it's execution

- cave cube. if you know what i'm talking about, you know what i'm talking about.

#ugh now i'm just giving myself fic ideas fml

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antialiasis · 3 years

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More actual writing! This time, a rewrite of my 2012 one-shot Butterfree, about a trainer and their Butterfree.

Some rambling about this story and the way it’s been altered in this version below the cut.

When I first wrote Butterfree, the idea behind it was based on my own experience with my original Pokémon Yellow save - where I beat Brock with a Metapod-turned Butterfree, and Butterfree was amazing and an instant favorite, only to somehow tragically start to lag behind after a while. I ended up ditching it on the PC and replacing it with a different team member, but always felt a little bad about it. (On my later games, though, I’ve kept Butterfree on my teams basically any time I’ve had the chance.)

So originally, writing out the memories portion just came very naturally, putting that feeling in-world. The continuation, though, I had a bit of trouble with. See, obviously this trainer is laden with guilt and regrets about what they did, hoping to finally release Butterfree from where they’d kept them unjustly trapped. But the idea of actually ending with Butterfree just leaving felt... incredibly unsatisfying, after the story has been consisting of this buildup about the trainer’s intense guilt regretting what they did and them finally owning up to it and letting Butterfree go. It’d just be “We tell you this thing needs to happen, and then exactly that happens.” It felt kind of like the “and then... they successfully catch Mew!” ending of TQftL. I couldn’t actually end it that way.

At the same time, though... could Butterfree actually stay, after that? They were trapped in a box for six years. If they ultimately just shrug and don’t mind somehow, isn’t that kind of bad and unsatisfying, too? We can’t just act like everything’s fine now, right?

What I ended up with was an ending where Butterfree wants to stay, and the trainer, still guilt-ridden, accepts that - but is left wondering if Butterfree stayed out of some blind devotion that they just wouldn’t admit, or if maybe Butterfree just didn’t have a concept of betrayal, and they would’ve been equally happy to stay if they’d been actively abusive, or had never shown any guilt at all. In the final abrupt scene-paragraph, the trainer concludes surely Butterfree’s happiness is genuine - but this was meant to read as kind of desperate, that they manage to convince themselves in the end but really who knows.

I was just about satisfied enough with this - an ending where Butterfree stays, but everything isn’t fine. But I was never properly happy with it. The final paragraph was super abrupt. The angstiness of it felt vaguely tryhard in some way I couldn’t quite articulate.

So, fast-forward eight years to me, in 2020, wanting to finally post an actual fanfic on the Thousand Roads forums. Butterfree was probably my most successful one-shot, so it was an obvious first candidate. I reread it; I mostly liked it, but the ending still bugged me. I concluded you know what, I’m just going to let Butterfree be happy. Half of the people who read it had taken the last paragraph at face value anyway and apparently liked it that way, so really, why shouldn’t I just have the ending be actually happy. It wouldn’t have to be that big a change; I’d just replace that last paragraph with something a bit more substantial and convincing.

So then I got started on actually editing it... at which point I became less happy with it. I realized that really what was bothering me was that it really wasn’t at all obvious why Butterfree stayed; the buildup didn’t work with Butterfree leaving, but it also didn’t properly build up to Butterfree staying, didn’t make that the logical conclusion - and the narrator’s self-loathing never properly improved.

Moreover... why weren’t they just talking to each other.

As I’ve grown up I’ve become increasingly convinced that radical communication solves a whole lot of human problems, and suddenly it just stuck out to me, super hard, that the trainer didn’t just communicate better. They even had a line early on where they lamented not having talked to Butterfree, and yet still didn’t! Towards the end of the release scene, the trainer thought about how they weren’t sure there was any one thing they should have done here - and now my brain was just screaming TALK TO THEM, GODDAMN IT! THAT’S WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE!

...So I rewrote the ending altogether. The alternate ending where the trainer communicates. Some of basically the same stuff still happens at first - they do communicate a bit in the original, with a kind of kludgy bit of sudden psychic powers - but then, you know, the trainer actually tries to make a best possible effort to ensure Butterfree is choosing this because it’s what they actually want. Both Butterfree, the trainer, and their other Pokémon end up so much happier in this version, because the trainer communicated about their feelings, and made sure Butterfree could communicate back, too.

What I went for with the Butterfree’s actual character here, which I hope gets across, is that Butterfree really is just a bit excessively selfless and loyal - but their relationship ends up better and healthier from both ends, with the trainer becoming a more considerate person who really does listen to their Pokémon, and Butterfree learning to actually express what they want (and have those preferences recognized and respected).

And so, this originally mostly angsty one-shot is now more a bit of angst that then just becomes happy and wholesome. A strange direction for me to go in, and in a way I sort of miss the old second-to-last scene and its musings, but. C O M M U N I C A T I O N

#pokemon #pokemon fanfic #butterfree #actual writing #ramble #art #writing

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the-ashen-gm · 5 years

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How I think Lycanthropy should work in D&D 5e (Part 4: But Doctor... isn’t there a cure?)

I can’t believe I forgot to talk about the cure for lycanthropy when I first made this series!

In my games, I like to make a cure for lycanthropy hard if not impossible to come by. This varies by setting, but I’m of the mind that lycanthropy should be one of those curses that has persisted for millennia and has resisted most attempts at a cure.

The Monster Manual puts the cure as a mere remove curse and wipes its hands of the matter. Just imagine how anti-climatic it would be to hunt down a werewolf and then the party cleric casts one 3rd-level spell and it’s all over. Just “boop” and the werewolf is no more. The MM has a little sidebar were it describes a band of knights who were transformed into werewolves and how no one, even when offered a hefty amount of coin, will dare hunt them or try to return them to normal. Sure, getting close enough to touch them would be hard but that is all it requires. Yes, 3rd-level magic isn’t super common but it’s common enough to most players to be unexciting. We can do better.

Funnily enough, Van Helsing (2004), while also being a wonderful piece of campy horror cinema, provides a solution to this narrative problem that is just begging to be D&D-ified. So let’s use that as a template to inspire ourselves!

A story about curing one’s curse requires a few different elements to be exciting (to me, anyway, feel free to drop any that don’t suit you. And don’t think that these examples are exhaustive or perfect for every game! You might come up with something totally different):

Time-sensitivity. As in you can only cure yourself if you do so before something else happens. In Van Helsing, a werewolf can only be cured by injecting them with a vial of the antidote before the midnight of their first full moon, after which they are a werewolf forever. Could the werewolf avoid this fate by hopping on a plane to a different time zone, thus avoiding the moment of midnight? I don’t know nor do I care, but the premise is perfect for a mini-arc in a campaign. You might also say that the werewolves in your game are undead, and the curse only truly takes hold when the PC dies at which point they transform into a zombie werewolf! Or maybe the curse is only permanent once the PC eats another humanoid while in their hybrid form? Get creative, and find a trigger that works for your story!

Difficulty. The aforementioned cure can only be retrieved by breaking into Dracula’s castle, which itself can only be located via a centuries-old riddle being solved to open a portal to a demi-plane of dread. Also, Dracula lives there with hundreds of undead servants so you should probably watch out for them while you’re there.

Rarity. Like you might guess, only Dracula holds the cure. No one else in the world knows it. This might lead to a situation in your game where the cure is lost forever, trapping your PC in their cursed state. That idea might frighten you, but I encourage you to embrace it. Losing the cure might suck, but it’s dramatic as hell to know that the struggle was hard-fought and real. If a DM makes the cure all but inevitable, what was the point of the curse?

Permanence. This is something Van Helsing didn’t do because it was just one movie that never got a sequel (RIP), but something I’d like to do is have werewolf PCs retain some element of the curse even after the cure. Maybe they still eat all their food raw, maybe they’re still inexplicably hairy, maybe they still transform physically at the full moon but retain their humanity? Or maybe it’s the reverse, where they lose their humanity at the full moon but don’t physically transform? It’s fully up to you (and the needs of your campaign’s story) how severe the after-effects are, but in any case I think a curse like lycanthropy should be a life-long thing that never fully goes away.

I get why people make stuff like this easy: it’s tempting to play into the players’ hands and give them everything they want. But sometimes, to make a good story, you gotta make it a bit of a challenge. Think about all your favourite adventure stories: the victories are hard-won and there is much to be sacrificed along the way. Unexpected things happen and sometimes things go wrong. It’s all in the service of drama!

That’s all folks, until I inevitably remember I forgot a crucial part of the myth and have to make another post on this subject.

In case you missed it:

>>>Part 1 - Never A Blessing (an introduction)

>>>Part 2 - How To Not Die (a brand new mechanic to make lycanthropy more exciting)

>>>Part 3 - What They Don’t Tell You (a round-up of the miscellaneous mechanics that aren’t substantial enough to make a whole post about each)

#D&D #5e #homebrew #lycanthropy #werewolf #werebeast #cure #the cure #not the band

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a-student-out-of-time · 4 years

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(Mod, can this anon just say I really appreciate how much self-control you have? When that Haiji defender showed up on your blog, you just said "get off my blog". This anon really appreciates how you didn't scream at them, accuse the person of secretly being a pedophile themself, tell them to kill themself or to choke on broken glass, encourage your followers to harass Haiji fans, etc. Today's generation of pop-culture-fandom could learn from your example.)

//Now that you bring this up, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk for a bit about fandom toxicity.

//There is, in a way, a feeling of entitlement and ownership when it comes to characters or properties. That, because these things hold a special place in our hearts, that they belong to us and that our interpretation of them is the correct one and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.

//So when there comes creative decisions or opinions made by others with those properties, even ones by the actual creator of the work, that don’t match up to our own, there can come a feeling that these are a direct attack against us as well. With that comes a lot of the worst parts of fan culture: harassment, insults, bullying, threats, and even actual attacks on these people.

//But the truth is, these people were probably just expressing their feelings and emotions about the same work, because they enjoy it too. They were never trying to directly or indirectly attack you, they just simply had a different opinion. It’s important to keep that in mind: the people you talk to online are human beings with thoughts and feelings of their own, and those feelings are rarely going to be the exact same as yours.

//An unfortunate part of the problem are the inherent psychological biases that we all have, and confirmation bias especially. Where we’ll focus on information we agree with (even if it’s factually wrong) and ignore anything that conflicts with that (even if it’s factually correct). This goes beyond just fandom, but I’m going to stay on topic.

//There is not a single human being at any point in history who hasn’t been guilty of these biases. You, me, everyone you’ve ever met, we’ve all done it at one point or another. The issue is when these biases get us to leap toward intolerant conclusions about those whose viewpoints we disagree with. “You don’t have the same opinion as me, so you must be stupid/evil/bigoted/brainwashed/etc.”

//It can be so easy to draw those conclusions about people, especially when the arguments aren’t well-structured and you’re in the heat of the moment. But let’s be real: we’re never all going to 100% agree on everything. And that’s okay. Hell, if we did, that sounds more like a dystopian nightmare scenario where free thinking has been suppressed.

//And thinking is an activity I’ve always encouraged. Toxicity is ultimately at odds with critical thinking, where any dissenting opinion is hunted down and suppressed and anyone who speaks up is bullied into silence. That is not what my blogs are about. It does kinda make me sad that I’m being praised for not being a toxic asshole, because I don’t really feel like that’s praiseworthy. I want that to be a normal thing.

//Here’s an experiment: take your favorite DR character and ask yourself why you like them. What is it about them that drew you to them? Their personality? Their backstory? Their role in the narrative of whichever game they were in? When you have those reasons in mind, consider the following: what about this character is flawed? What about them is inherently dark or troubling? Why might someone else dislike them?

//And then work backwards from there: take your least favorite DR character and ask yourself why you dislike them. Then find all the ways why someone else might like them without diving straight into intolerant conclusions. Look past the surface and dig a bit deeper to see what exactly makes them tick.

//That’s not me asking for essays, that’s something I want you all to consider for yourselves.

//I’ll be the first to admit I really disliked Junko. I didn’t consider her all that interesting of a character or a villain, and she just cames off as very annoying and overblown to me. I considered everything that she sets in motion to be far more interesting.

//I have, however, seen a lot analyses and in-depth looks at her as a character and after going through those, I came away with a lot of insights I didn’t even consider before. My opinion hasn’t changed too much, but I can definitely see (DR3 notwithstanding) all the way she can and does make for a interesting villain.

//So the takeaway is, even if you don’t end up changing your opinion, you can at least say “I still disagree, but I’ve gained some perspective into why someone would feel this way and I’m better for it.” Critical thinking does not mean you have to give up your opinions, and there does exists a very wide middle ground between total agreement and toxic harassment.

//But critical thinking is at odds with the idea that it’s best to retcon, ignore, or fabricate details of canon that we disagree with to justify those opinions. This is why I got so mad at the anon who claimed Haiji was talking about fictional underage girls, something that is not at all substantiated by evidence in the game. You can’t simply ignore these details because you don’t like them.

//Critical thinking is about being able to either say, “Okay, I fully acknowledge that these details about this character I like are problematic and I understand why it might upset people, but they’re not the sole or central reason why I like this character”, or “Okay, after careful analysis, maybe I was wrong about what I originally thought about them.”

//Me personally, I look at these details and ask “Okay, but how can we build off of this? Can we tell a new story with it?” For example, while SDRA2 Chapter 0 left a bad taste in most everyone’s mouths, I didn’t want to just retcon it. Instead, thought Kokoro being regretful over her actions and wanting to reconnect with her daughter would make for a very interesting story.

//But the most important part of this that I’d want anyone to take away is that it’s important to listen to others and consider their viewpoints as well, and again without immediately jumping toward conclusions and talking over them before they make their case. Listen to people, ask them questions, and remember that on the other end of the conversation is another human being with thoughts and feelings of their own.

//Now, there is that invisible fear that “understand that others have different opinions” is shorthand for “just accept that some people are into r*pe/inc*st/p*dophilia and let them make content of it.” I promise you that is not at all what I’m suggesting here. I hope my previous angry rant about Haiji cemented that fact.

//What I am saying is that we need to be acutely aware of both the thoughts and feelings of others and those of ourselves. That it’ll be better for us as well as others to apply critical thinking and careful insight into our opinions, not taking them as inherent fact simply because we hold them, and understand that others will not always enjoy the same content the same way we do.

//And most importantly, being able to separate those who are willing to listen vs. those who’ll prefer to stay toxic, bitter, and unmoving is a very important skill to learn. There is no shame in withdrawing yourself from any sort of talk with a person who upsets people for fun, and it will be better for your health in the long run.

//Finally, let’s be real, what’s gained from arguing with people online? People who you never have and probably never will meet? Not much. But if someone is not going to budge and only wants to share their toxicity with the world, it’s better for you to simply walk away, block them, cut yourself off, and move on. Their toxicity is their deal, and it doesn’t have to be yours.

//But I also think there are people who are willing to listen, who may simply not know that they’re engaging in things that are hurtful or toxic. And some frank but kind insight as to why can change their opinions. A willingness to listen, not to just defend their position, is what’s important.

//I’ll be completely honest here and say I was in that position once. I’ve said and thought some awful things before, and I feel so fortunate that I met the right people who stopped me from going down that road before I got too far. Not with hostility or arguments, but honest and kind discussions and insights.

//As fans and as people in general, we can, should, and need to be better. That’s why I don’t want my space to be full of hate and bullying, but just storytelling and creative discussions, where people are welcome to express their opinions, and even if we disagree, that’s alright. We’ve at least gained some insight into each others’ views ^^

//Compassion and wisdom are what I consider the most important virtues, and being more critical of ourselves is how I think we can solve the issue of fandom toxicity. That’s what I’ve tried to apply here. My goal is just to tell a good story for you all to enjoy here, and I appreciate each and every one of you who’ve followed, liked, reblogged, or even just considered any of my posts worthwhile to read

//And if you made it all the way through this, I hope you’ll consider everything I’ve said here as well. You can’t change every single toxic person out there, but you can change yourself for the better and encourage others to do the same.

#mod talks #mod rambles #a student out of time #I didn't have any bad experiences recently I promise #this has just been on my mind for a while and I felt like sharing #Anonymous

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ponett · 5 years

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Welp... it’s over. After nine years, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is over. I just got done watching the series finale with Anthony and, just like I knew I would, when the credits rolled, I cried my eyes out

I should probably say something, huh. I’ve been sharing thoughts like this mostly on Twitter lately, but I started using Tumblr to blog about MLP, so I don’t think it would be right to post this anywhere else

I have a complicated relationship with MLP:FiM. It’s a show that got really hit or miss after the second season, and it has a fandom so toxic and so full of edgy libertarians that it scared me off from formally participating in fandoms for the rest of my life. But it’s also probably my favorite TV show of all time. There are other shows that are much better written, that have more to say, that are more consistent, even including several other cartoons from the same decade. But I think I’d be lying to myself if I said it wasn’t my favorite show

No other piece of media has had as massive of an impact on my life as My Little Pony

I grew closer to some of my closest high school friends because of our shared enthusiasm for the show. I started PonyPokey with Jake and Derek and made a bunch of bad videos and got invited to be on a wildly disorganized BronyCon panel with Jenny Nicholson in 2012. (We went on stage immediately after Lauren Faust’s panel. I barely said a word due to stage fright.)

After years of being too afraid to share my art online, I started putting more effort into learning digital art so that I could draw ponies. It started out rough, but with the drive to improve, I quickly got better. I started Fluttershy Replies. For the first time, I had an audience. I had people who cared about my work and supported me. Even as times have changed, many of you have been following me since way back then

Around the time I came out as bi in 2012, I got really into MLP shipping. Writing sappy comics and drawing sappy art became an outlet for my years of pent up feelings, and helped me sort out a lot of stuff. My Little Pony also completely changed the views on femininity that had been beaten into my skull since childhood. Suddenly, it wasn’t this strange, alien thing to be afraid of. MLP, at its heart, is a show about how there’s no wrong way to be a girl. That’s an incredibly powerful message. Rarity wasn’t a vapid snob. Fluttershy wasn’t a background character who got made into the butt of the joke. Pinkie wasn’t a ditz. These were characters written to be empathized with. And writing about my own feelings from the perspective of Fluttershy felt... right. It took me a few years to fully process those feelings, but eventually, I realized the truth. I was a trans woman. And a cartoon about horses was the first step on my path to realizing this

In 2013, one of the roughest years of my life, I decided to download RPG Maker on a whim to give myself a distraction. Naturally, my first instinct was to make a game where Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash kiss. What was initially supposed to be a short, Fantastic Game-esque playground of silly little jokes spiraled out of control and became Super Lesbian Horse RPG, a game that I poured my heart and soul into over the course of a year. And then, a couple years later, my desire to preserve the ideas from my copyright-infringing fangame also spiraled out of control, as all my creative projects do, and became SLHRPG’s successor: Super Lesbian Animal RPG. SLARPG isn’t really a reskinned MLP fangame anymore--it’s more like a new game inspired in part by my old project. The story has been drastically rewritten, the characters changed, the levels and gameplay redesigned. Most of the cast of the new game wasn’t in the original project in any form. There’s much, much, much, much, much more new content than old left in the game. And the original game had already strayed so far from the canon anyway. But I’m also not sure it would exist without MLP

I made a bunch of friends online, including close friends I still have to this day. I met the people like Bee and Thomas who I’m still working with on SLARPG. Most importantly, because we both blogged about MLP and had some mutual friends, I met Anthony, the love of my life. We’ve been together for five years now and supported each other through good times and bad. This is the lamest, corniest, stupidest thing I will ever say in my life, but he’s the Rainbow Dash to my Fluttershy

...

So what about the finale itself? (spoilers, obviously)

I have... mixed feelings on the finale. There were some things that really annoyed me in there. But also, like I said, I cried, so I think it’s safe to say they did good overall

I think the thing that stuck in my craw the most was Discord. Which I guess shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve been saying for years now how I hate Discord, how he spits in the face of everything the show stands for. He’s an obnoxious elderly manchild who constantly causes problems on purpose and torments his so-called friends the second they stop paying attention to him. But they have to put up with him and give him infinite second chances, because he’s a god and Celestia said they had to reform him

The overarching plot of the final season is that Queen Chrysalis, King Sombra, Tirek, and Cozy Glow (a Darla Dimple-esque filly villain from season 8) had teamed up with Grogar, a “new” villain taken from G1. While this goes on in the background, Twilight is making her preparations to become Celestia’s successor, as we’d known would be her destiny since the day she got wings six years ago. The villain team-up stuff was genuinely fun, and a highlight of the season for me. But then, in the three-part finale, it’s revealed that Grogar was actually Discord in disguise, and that he’d been intentionally trying to orchestrate a big attack on Twilight’s coronation so that she and her friends could save the day and get a big confidence boost going into her reign as princess. This is like... one of the most bafflingly stupid plot twist of all time. It’s literally the end of the show, and Discord has learned nothing. He’s “nice” now, but he’s still intentionally causing huge problems and putting everyone’s lives in danger to solve his problems. He freed four different villains they’d already defeated just so Twilight could beat them again, and in the process they literally blew up the goddamn castle in Canterlot and nearly killed everyone. And yet... they still forgive him, because they have to

I did, however, think that the last two-part adventure episode was fun overall. It tied a nice bow on much of the series, bringing back a bunch of old friends (including cameos from the movie cast!) to band together and save the day. Of course, in the end, they beat the bad guys with a big rainbow laser and sealed them in a statue. You know, even though a previous season finale was all about how solving their problems with a friendship laser and sealing the villains away never worked. Also, Cozy Glow might be evil, but she’s still literally a child? And now her petrified body is on display in the center of Canterlot? What the fuck????

I’m complaining a lot, but again. It was fun overall. It was nice to have one last big adventure, and to have the mane six reflect on how they’d grown since Twilight moved to Ponyville

...

And then we got the actual final episode. And boy did this one hit me HARD

I’m so glad that they ended on a quieter episode about the main cast’s friendships, because that’s what the show is actually about. The two-part adventures to save Equestria every season are fun, but that’s not the real show. We all came back every week for Twilight and her friends

There are things I can complain about here, too. Spike being a buff adult dragon with the voice of a child is fucked up. I’m still not used to seeing Twilight be Celestia’s size. But more than anything, I was always worried that we’d get a Harry Potter ending, where all the characters are paired off into arbitrary marriages so they can all have kids. Thankfully, this didn’t really happen. The only one who had a kid was Pinkie, who apparently got married to Cheese Sandwich (Weird Al’s character) at some point. Like, they literally shared two episodes together, with no hint of romance? But then they got married and had a kid off-screen??? What the fuck???? A lot of people also think that Fluttershy ended up with Discord, and I know I’m massively biased against that ship, but... I mean, they teased the FlutterCord shippers, but there wasn’t really any actual textual evidence that they were any closer than they had been previously. Y’all weirdos who ship Fluttershy with an obnoxious elderly man can interpret that as being “canon” if you want, I guess, but it’s not

The other relationship that shocked everyone in the finale was Applejack and Rainbow Dash, who... appear to be a couple? It’s definitely hinted at. I have... very, very mixed feelings about this. I mean, okay, obivously I’m the big FlutterDash fangirl. But I think AppleDash is cute, too! The problem is that, like... they’ve barely interacted in years? Like, they had a lot of episodes together in the first two seasons, but then the writers barely ever had them interact past that point. I can’t even remember when the last time we got an actual episode focusing on them was. And no, the one where Rainbow takes Granny Smith to pony Vegas doesn’t count

Like... yeah, it’s cute. It’s a nice gesture. Lyra and Bon Bon getting married in the background was also cute. But we can do so, so much better in 2019. We have so many explicitly canon lesbian couples in cartoons. Couples that actually kissed, or got married, or showed feelings for each other. Rainbow and AJ barely even fucking talked to each other in the final few seasons. I dunno, it just feels very hollow to me. Even the Equestria Girls crew admitting they were pushing RariJack felt more substantial to me, because at least they were given on-screen chemistry and lots of canon interaction

But in the end, complaints aside, the finale was about Twilight moving back to Canterlot, and worrying that her friendships would fade because of it. Honestly, I think this is what the finale of the show always would’ve been. It was the perfect story to end on. And boy, it hit really close to home

And then the last song happens, reflecting on how things have changed, but how they’re all still friends. And we see all the other friends they made along the way. And the camera zooms out, and the book from the opening of the very first episode closes, bringing the entire nine-year saga full circle

And then I started sobbing really hard in Anthony’s arms

...

I dunno. I just got done nitpicking a lot, but I still think that the last episode was a good and very emotional ending for the show

I’m going to miss this show dearly. I know it will be back in a new form, and that the leaks indicate that it’ll still star slightly different versions of the Mane Six. I’m also used to shows like this getting rebooted. Hasbro cartoons are honestly lucky to last past three seasons. FiM, on the other hand, got over 200 episodes, a theatrical film, a few specials, some shorts, a bunch of comics (which I still need to read), and a spinoff human AU series that was also really great. There’s no shortage of content, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to the series for years to come. I’m also glad that the show managed to go out on a high note

But still. It was a constant presence in my life for nearly nine years. Even as the quality got really hit or miss, even as they took the premise in strange directions, even as the crew of the show grew more and more dominated by men, it was still a show I could rely on to always be there, 26 episodes a year. I’ll miss it. I hope what comes next is just as good, if not even better. I also hope it’s gayer

I was going to end my ask blog, Fluttershy Replies, around the time the show ended. I’m not sure if I’ll do that just yet. I don’t know. I think that might be a bit much for me to process emotionally. Too many doors closing in my life in quick succession. But I do want to do more with it. These characters will be special to me for the rest of my life

I mean shit, I haven’t even drawn StarTrix yet. I’ve still got a lot of work to do with these horses, folks

#bobby thinks about horses

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brokingyoking364 · 3 years

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How to connect a gaming router to a modem

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blubberquark · 4 years

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Why Puzzle Platformers?

Why are there so many puzzle platformers? Was everybody simply copying Braid, hoping for the same level of success? And more importantly, now that Braid has been out for over a decade, why are people still making them?

If you make games, you already know why there are so many puzzle platformers, but I haven’t found a comprehensive answer to this question anywhere I can conveniently link to.

There are different ways to read that question:

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

When it comes to jam games or small shareware projects, we should first ask “Why platformers, puzzle or not?” Part of the answer is probably “because platformers are easy to make with GameMaker“. Another part of the answer is “Because in a platformer, the player character interacts with the level, items, and NPCs, but these do not, for the most part, interact with each other, which makes a platformer comparably easy to implement (compared to an RTS game) and design (compared to RPG games), and platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.“

But beyond that, when you can add other mechanics to games, why puzzles?

The two obvious candidates to add to games are combat/stealth, and puzzles.

You can could also add multiple-choice dialogue, inventory, RPG elements (quests, skill points, classes), or procedural generation to any sidescrolling game, but none of these cannot carry a game on their own when you tack them on to a platformer. If the dialogue is actually substantial enough to carry a game on its own, the 2D platforming may stick out as “tacked-on” instead.

Strategy or economy (building, trading, tactics and management) are better served by a mouse-based UI. Dialogue-heavy or text-based games usually don’t have platforming sections, but platformer games can have some dialogue. In both cases, the pacing and movement of a platformer undercuts these game mechanics, and a different UI would be a better fit.

You can give your platformer a theme like horror, romance, science fiction, or medieval fantasy.

Puzzles are something you can add into a platformer game, either in between difficult platforming sections, or in combination with them. You can even alternate between stealth/combat and puzzles. Puzzles can be easy or difficult, and you can use them to break up levels or slow down the pace of an action platformer, or centre your whole game around them.

It takes some skill to design a puzzle mechanic that stands on its own, but it’s much easier to design an simple and easy one-off puzzle that you can throw into a platformer level. Easy puzzles are easy to balance: They have a binary win condition and an intended solution, but often no explicit failure state.

If adding another mechanic to a platformer makes it a puzzle platformer, is Speer a puzzle platformer? Is Super Meat Boy a puzzle platformer because you sometimes have to push buttons and the levels are self-contained? Is Outer Bounds a puzzle platformer? It’s not a bright line, but many action games that are lumped with “puzzle platformers” are still about jumping and running, but with a move set that isn’t 100% copied from Mario Bros.

If the main appeal of a game lies in the platforming, then as long as it’s solvable and doesn’t get in the way, it’s a good puzzle. Puzzles in platforming games can present their own platforming challenges, and rely on a slightly different kind of platforming execution skill, instead of puzzle-solving as a core aesthetic and source of difficulty. Players can be forced to traverse the same terrain back and forth along different paths. This can squeeze more gameplay out of fewer designed levels. Combined with traditional platforming obstacles like enemies to avoid, spike pits, moving platforms, one-way platforms, this can lead to more varied and difficult platforming challenges. Instead of getting in the way or breaking up the platforming bits, puzzle mechanics can go hand-in-hand with the platforming, without presenting a challenge in terms of puzzle solving, but only in terms of executing the solution.

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

For commercial games, the answer is more complicated. Maybe the premise of the question is not even true. Trine, Fez, Limbo, and And Yet It Moves all can in one way or another be described as “puzzle platformers”, but no two of them are in the same genre. If you cast a wider net, you get games like Mushroom 11, Owlboy, The Cave, Starseed Pilgrim, and Gunpoint.

Like “Action Adventure”, the phrase “puzzle platformer” has become a catch-all term for sidescroller games that aren’t punishingly difficult.

Of course, many commercial long-form games are classical puzzle platformers. Braid, Vessel, Closure, The Swapper, and Snapshot. These games are about puzzles, not about platforming.

Many smaller games like WarpSwap, ElecHead, Ministry of Synthesis, or LegBreaker are just exploring one puzzle mechanic to exhaustion in a series of one-room puzzles. Larger or long-form games often expand their repertoire of mechanics to create puzzles based on different mechanics held together by common themes or a story, or they focus more on platforming.

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Simple Controls and User Interface

If you see a puzzle platformer, you don’t need to figure out the controls or UI first, you can just pick up the controller and start running around. In their simplest form, the controls for a puzzle platformer are four directional buttons plus one for jumping and one for interacting the with puzzle mechanic, but more complex controls schemes are common.

The controls make writing a puzzle platformer for a game jam much easier than a mouse-driven puzzle game: You just need to check six keyboard buttons. If you are making a big commercial title, ease of implementation in terms of programming is not really a factor: After a day or two at most you’ll have implemented whatever mouse picking, widgets and UI elements you need. What’s much more time consuming is figuring out where to put the buttons so they don’t obscure the scene, or how to communicate which objects are clickable. Getting user interfaces right requires playtesting and iteration. A puzzle platformer might only need a context-based prompt that says “press X to interact“ or “walk into a boulder to push it“.

Game Feel, Embodiment and Characterisation

Another benefit of puzzle platformers over abstract puzzle presentation is game feel. The player controls the player character, and feels like a the player character existing inside the space of the level, increasing immersion compared to the feeling of a person sitting at a computer thinking about a crossword puzzle.

Many big-name 2D puzzle platformers like Braid and Snapshot have a rather zoomed-in view that focuses the level player character and the immediate surroundings, instead of showing the whole level. This allows the game to present important characters, items or places in great detail, and lets the camera pan to frame the most important parts of a scene. Animated movement in a two-dimensional space can give weight and character to the player character, and connect the gameplay to a story. NPCs can live inside a level, next to their home, their things, and their friends.

Imagine the same thing in a tower defence, or a racing game: You’re walking around in a level, and suddenly you meet an NPC, you’re having a conversation, and then you go on your merry way. Characters and environmental storytelling are not unique to platformers, but it’s more difficult to pull off in a game without a player character existing in the world with the NPCs. Puzzle platformers keep all options open.

Of course, this is not the only way to connect characterisation and puzzle gameplay, and it can be done in abstract games. Just in the most recent Ludum Dare, I played the game Interstellar Connection, a puzzle game with a rather abstract, disembodied presentation, in which the characterisation was delivered through dialogue. (I should briefly remark on two aspects of Interstellar Connection here, even though it has very little to do with the rest of this post. First, the game is at its heart a bunch of mazes that can be solved by backtracking. Every puzzle is equivalent to a maze graph, but the presentation makes use of a quirk of human cognition to prevent you from seeing the solution the way you would see the solution in a small maze. Second, I don’t think this mechanic can support a long-form game. If it weren’t for Ludum Dare, this would have been a forgettable minigame, not the main meat of the game, motivated and contextualised by the plot.)

Characters living inside a world could also be achieved with isometric graphics, first- or third-person 3D, or in a text-based game, but they don’t work well in self-contained or grid-based puzzle levels. We’ll get back to other aspects of more open level design later.

Puzzle Design

In a puzzle platformer, you have a player character, and you can have different kinds of obstacles, like pits filled with spikes, ledges, and doors. In a top-down platformer, you can of course also have doors, but you won’t have the same dynamics of gravity with falling down, of dropping things. It’s easier to get down from a ledge, or to drop something than to lift it.

With a visible and embodied player character instead of an abstract cursor, every puzzle can be complicated by combining manipulation of the puzzle environment with traversal of the level:

The level has an “obvious” solution, but the real challenge is navigating the environment to get there.

The challenge is to manipulate the environment to open a path for the player to jump to the right place to implement the solution.

The level has a “red herring” solution that solves the main puzzle but leaves the player trapped behind an obstacle, unable to progress without undoing it.

Level Design, Progression

Multiple puzzles can be placed in the same platformer “level” or “room“. In a “pure” puzzle game, puzzles are self-contained, with a beginning and an end, a starting state and an explicit solution condition. In a platformer, the goal can be implicit: You want to go from left to right and traverse the obstacles.

If a puzzle has an obvious missing piece, it can be a prompt for the player to explore the surrounding areas, to look for a tool, or for a certain puzzle piece that is exactly shaped like the gap that needs to be filled in the puzzle.

Strange Keyworld is a puzzle platformer, almost a puzzle metroidvania. Every so often, instead of reasoning through the puzzle that is currently shown on the screen, you need to explore the adjacent rooms to find another piece and bring it over. Although the puzzles in Strange Keyworld are mostly self-contained, they are still embedded in the larger world.

Most levels in Braid are bigger than one screen, and they have more than one puzzle. Often the first order of business is to get your bearings and explore. Then you learn to traverse the level to get everywhere, identify and separate the different puzzles, and only then can you think about solving all the puzzles by manipulating time and level state to get everywhere.

An interesting twist on this happens in Recursed: Levels are always on one screen, 20x15 tiles... but you need to explore inside all the chests to see what the level actually looks like!

Of course, you could have the same kind of dynamic in an abstractly presented puzzle with a mouse-based UI, where you can zoom in and out, drag the viewport around, or enter doors (and Recursed-style chests) by double-clicking. Then you’d lose the sense of exploration and progression, and the challenge of traversing the space via platforming. Exploring a large level would be easy, but tedious. You would need to program (as the developer) and then learn (as the payer) a new user interface, or you can just move a player character in a world. This ties back into the very first point: Platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.

tl;dr “Puzzle Platformers” are actually a bunch of genres in a trenchcoat. Character-focused 2D side-scrolling graphics are compatible with many different mechanics and game designs. Character-focused 2D platforming can counterbalance the abstractness of puzzle games.

#game design #puzzle platformer #puzzle game

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a-dinosaur-a-day · 5 years

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A Dinosaur A Day, Tumblr, and the Future

Things are Changing on ADAD

This blog is coming up on its 5 year anniversary, which naturally means I want to change everything about it. I’m kidding, of course, but we are going to have some big changes in the new year (2019). First, let me go over the purpose of this blog:

ADAD has Four Primary Goals:

To be an encyclopedia that covers every. Single. Dinosaur. In current scientific thought, we classify animals based on their ancestry (so, common descent). Dinosaurs are defined by the first two animals ever dug up as fossils and called dinosaurs - Iguanodon and Megalosaurus. This means that Dinosaurs are the most recent common ancestor of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus (the last ancestor they had in common) (also of Diplodocus but let’s not get into that today), and all that ancestor’s descendants.

If you want to picture it a different way: your grandparents are the most recent common ancestor of you and your cousin. Now, you both also have your great-grandparents as ancestors, but they aren’t your most recent common ancestor. Furthermore, when you have kids, they’ll still be a part of that family group, even though they’re a new generation.

This group includes birds, because birds evolved from dinosaurs (the evidence is substantial). This means that birds are dinosaurs, and I have to cover every bird.

This is actually a novel goal - most dinosaur encyclopedias only cover the dinosaurs as we classically defined them, or all dinosaurs that lived in the Mesozoic (which includes some birdy dinosaurs since birds evolved in the Mesozoic, the “age of reptiles”). And most bird encyclopedias don’t cover extinct ones to any extensive degree. And there certainly isn’t an encyclopedia that covers both (apart from, well, regular encyclopedias). So, one of the main goals of ADAD is to cover birds as well as non-avian (not-bird) dinosaurs (and their closest relatives).

To be an encyclopedia that is accessible for all readers. So many scientific blogs and other resources use fairly complicated language and bad formatting. I try to make my articles with the simplest language possible, while still making it interesting and fun for all readers of all levels. Still, this is a place where we have to grow, especially since the head author (Meig) and all the other members of the ADAD team have their own accessibility issues to grapple with. This encyclopedia also allows scientific knowledge to reach groups that are typically disenfranchised by traditional education (such as those with disabilities, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and people of color). We have actually conducted statistical studies on this and the results are promising! We are making a difference, though we have a lot of room to grow.

To bring fun to scientific education. Memes, silly posts, silly competitions, jokes, rants, all of these are fair game on ADAD, because meme culture makes learning fun, at least, and it keeps things interesting. Plus, taking things seriously is against my programming.

FLUFF. Recent discoveries have indicated that many dinosaurs had feathers or almost-feather covering on some or most of their bodies - especially the closer you get to birds on the dinosaur family tree. However, paleoart (art of prehistoric life) is slow on the uptake when it comes to new discovery, and people still tend to lean on the scaly side for dinosaurs - even to the point of being wrong. As such, a major purpose of this blog is to lean on the feathery side instead! Sometimes this means being accurate where others are not, and sometimes this means representing dinosaurs in ways that are implausible. We never, however, represent dinosaurs more fluffy than is possible, so none of these reconstructions are inaccurate. We just fill a void in how dinosaurs are represented, to help bring balance to the images of dinosaurs on the internet.

Tumblr was the correct platform for this blog to exist on, primarily due to happenstance (how I got the url in the first place was sheer dumb luck), but also due to the ability of the platform to bring dinosaurs to people who don’t usually have access to science, in combination with fun memes and jokes as is typical on the site. It also allowed for some leeway for the earliest days of the blog when it came to images - I credited every piece of art I used, but I didn’t have to ask for permission in most cases, allowing me to have images for articles where otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything to accompany the text.

So, this leaves ADAD with some current problems:

There are about two years’ worth of entries that need updated art, made by the people I pay, that I have permission to use, that are also as fluffy as the blog requires. Unfortunately, the artists do not have time to update these entries, because there is very little being brought in from the Patreon and already scheduled entries every day.

Leaving New Users Behind. Because I go by order of evolutionary relationship, I have finished non-avian dinosaurs, so anyone new following is literally in the middle of Bird Hell. I could do throwbacks, of course, but it’s not quite the same, and I can’t throw back to those posts that don’t have art (so everything from the first two years of ADAD; I’ve only had the Patreon for three years. Oh my Gd. Three years. What is time.)

New Discoveries. Because of the complete and utter inflexibility of the current schedule (evolutionary order + weird special weeks = I can’t shift the schedule around easily), we haven’t covered newly discovered dinosaurs in a shameful amount of time. And that sucks! Because they’re super cool!

Stagnation. Going in taxonomic order means that yeah, we get a bunch of cool dinosaurs that are all related in a row, but also every, single, crappy, dinosaur, from, that, group, that, isn’t, different, from, the, previous, one, at, all. And this is boring - for me to write, for the artists to draw, and for you guys to read.

The sheer multitude of birds. This kind of ties in to 2 and 4, but for every non-avian dinosaur there are 2.26 times as many birds (in terms of genus. It’s actually even more than that, but, I’m not doing it by species, so). This is insane. This is literally insane. But I’m not backing down on goal one, so…

Tumblr is Terrible. Over a year ago, it made it so that posts with external links (such as those for my patreon and ko-fi, you know, funds I need to live; as well as my sources for my information) don’t show up in search results. This means that the blog has stagnated in terms of follower growth. This is bad enough, but now the website is probably going to go kaput because of all this NSFW crap going on, so if anything we’ll be losing readers.

So what is our solution?

ADAD is starting over in the new year, and with a different organization system.

This might seem crazy - there are 12 years worth of dinosaurs total - but there are a lot of reasons to do this.

This will allow us to bring variety to the blog

This will allow new users to see non-avian dinosaurs

This will allow us to update old entries in terms of written content and the art

This will allow us to finally do new dinosaurs

I will start over on Tumblr, and start completely on Wordpress, so if Tumblr implodes I still have the blog somewhere else, and I can start to grow the community more elsewhere in addition to Tumblr. I WILL stay on Tumblr as long as it exists, but this gives me an exit strategy if it implodes.

The wordpress blog will be ADAD sans memes, but it will bring in a new audience, more recognition, and hopefully more Patreon money, so the blog can grow further! Also, restarting will allow me to change the format of the posts, which will make them more accessible and hopefully show up in the Tumblr search results.

I’m not bitter, you’re bitter.

So, on January 1, 2019, we’re starting again!

What’s the new organization system?

Random, with themes for each day of the week.

This gives us flexibility in the schedule - to break up monotony, help us maintain our workload easier, and add in new taxa to the schedule. It also allows for us to regulate it so that there are a healthy mix of birds and not-birds every week.

What are the daily themes?

Mesozoic Monday - Dinosaurs from the Mesozoic

Terrestrial Tuesday - Dinosaurs that mainly make their living on the ground

Water Wednesday - Dinosaurs that mainly make their living in the water or near water

Theropod Thursday - Theropods: meat eating dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor, also birds of prey

Flying Friday - Dinosaurs that can fly!

Songbird Saturday & Sunday - Passerines, which by species make up half of dinosaur diversity

This will give us a very nice mixture of nonavian and avian dinosaurs every week, as well as interesting diversity and differences between each one. This will help us to mix up living and extinct animals, long and short entries, things we can just copy over from ADAD’s first run and things we have to write from scratch. There can even be theme weeks! And requests can come back! Random doesn’t just mean random number generator, it also means we can change things to our fancy if we want or need to.

So, we hope all of these changes will solve many of the problems that ADAD faces. We have read your responses to the survey, and we hear you - we think this solution will solve everyone’s complaints and help us go forward into the future in a better way.

If you have concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us via FanMail (yup, it still exists) or an ask. We recognize this means ADAD will go on for many more years - but let’s be real, because of new discoveries, that was going to happen anyway.

Thank you all for your understanding! We’re really excited about this change, and we hope you all will enjoy it!

#announcement #palaeoblr #a-dinosaur-a-day #dinosaurs #birds #birblr #a dinosaur a day #long post #bold text #italic text #all caps #accessibility #blog goals #feathered dinosaurs #PLEASE REBLOG!

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noelclover · 5 years

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Off the Cuff: 09/08/2019

Mild frustration involving taxation talk because people don’t quite understand income generation and spending.

People who know economics better will probably read this, groan and go “NOEL BLYAT”, to which I must apologize because I’ve only got some basic knowledge that’s honestly kind of rotting away in me head. So apologies for whatever mistakes I make in this. EDIT: This is not how I wanted to spend my break from work before I sleep.

So I read about someone going, with some paraphrasing, “I pay taxes, you pay taxes so we all should get free health care”, which is tremendously idealistic but sadly, like most ideals, a bit rough to work into reality.

Consider this:

Taxes collected enter a pool alongside trade revenue to be distributed among various things. Note that this is the case because the government’s source of income comes from the people and various “non-taxation revenue”, which covers various fees, contracts, trade revenue, and, well, basically any source of income that doesn’t come from tax. Now this sounds like a lot of money, and it is, in truth, a lot of money.

But a lot of people forget that the cost of running a country is tremendously high. To put things into perspective, let’s apply a very simple and, in all honesty crude, example: Let’s assume that we have 10 citizens around, each paying $100 in taxes. They generate $1000 a month, which is enough to pay a single civil servant who’s pay grade is, well, $1000 a month. Working on this, again, crude model, we can see that things don’t really scale particularly well: 100 civil servants with the same pay grade require 1000 citizens paying the same amount of taxes. This of course, ignores that the civil servant can get raises, allowances and requires a pension when they leave, along with whatever other details I forgot about. Yes, the civil servant will pay taxes themselves, but we’re working on a rough theoretical idea and I don’t wanna spend 2 hours going on about this.

Now, the whole idea of the crude model is to show that things don’t scale well and not that civil servants are a burden (you need them to deal with the boring day-to-day bureaucracy which most of us don’t want to ever deal with). Now of course, there’s still the fact that there��s non-tax revenue, but the point here is: Your tax is generally going to cover a lot of stuff and is probably being stretched pretty thinly because there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be covered.

Education, health care, the military (which is still important. Not sure if they should get the lion’s share as is portrayed by media regarding the US, but you do need military strength. Even Japan still has it’s JSDF.), road maintenance, and so on and so forth, there’s a lot of ground to cover after all.

Unless you’re willing to pay more tax (and before you lot go “OHMERGERD TAX THE RICH” please note that the rich are likely paying their taxes, though probably gaming it a bit through smart usage of their corporations. Rich people fear the tax man.) to create better safety nets, it’s going to be a bit difficult.

And before any of you go “Well, I’m willing to chip in”, which is a commendable act by the way, please note that you have no idea how much you’ll have to pay so please do not make claims that you’re absolutely willing to. Please keep in mind the story of Astrid Lingren who had to pay 102% in taxes way back when to fuel the Swedish safety net. I’m absolutely not saying that that will be the case. I’m saying that it’s a possibility and unless you actually sit down, talk and figure out how to go about something, that can (and let’s be honest, most likely will as per Murphy’s Law) happen. That aside, we now get the question of: Why doesn’t the government just prioritize the people first?

That’s a great question, but sadly, like most worried, fierce and loving parents, the government (sometimes) does care for it’s people by way of caring for the country, which you know, it governs. Which in turn means that the government most likely tries to think up of ways that would “better” the country, which in turn would “better” it’s people, but sadly, said government is generally made up of people, who are tremendously susceptible to mucking up and corruption. (NAJIB, GUA PUNYA DAGING KAT MANA? TU 1MDB PUNYA LEMBU KAT SINGAPURA DUDUK APARTMENT SAMPAI BILA?)

Cough. Sorry about that.

There’s also the fact that the government is a highly inefficient creature when it comes to spending money, often providing a service that does not generate revenue because such services are required. An good example would always be the post office in the middle of a small town. Not a lot of people will use it, which means not a lot of money will be generated by said post office, which more often than not leads to a net loss in revenue, but it’ll be kept open because such a service is required. Which of course is bad, because you could’ve put said income into more productive uses, but is, again, necessary.

So in short, there’s a lot of factors that go on in the financial part of the government and no, just because you pay taxes doesn’t mean everyone gets free healthcare. Sometimes it’s just not mathematically and financially feasible, sadly.

(And no, taxing the rich isn’t the silver bullet. There’s a lot more factors to this than just that. Also, because I’ve seen a small number of people recently have had this genius idea: No, printing infinite currency does not solve the problem.)

However, one can consider alternatives to propose and argue for:

In Malaysia we do have government hospitals which provide treatment for a substantially lower cost than you’d get in a private hospital. Note however, that government hospitals aren’t always the most pleasant and comfortable of places, a decision most likely made due to the fact that they’d have to prioritize more practical concerns. Private hospitals can be astoundingly expensive, which could be due to a lack of competition coupled with a weaker currency.

I recall reading that Sweden opened up it’s markets and went full on free-market, which in turn fueled competition and allowed for prices to be lower and services more accessible, which may be the way to go, but that requires a lot of questioning and debating around the question of: Should the government be the ones providing the healthcare service in the first place?

Which is something I won’t take sides on because I’ve seen the argument progress, got tired and decided to fuck off from.

4AM.

#don't mind me #off the cuff

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hopevalley · 5 years

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What did you make of the new synopsis for ep 1 of s1 that is doing the rounds? Gowen and Bill are going head to head to buy the saloon - interesting?! Also who do you believe Abigail was best suited to....I think she and Bill could have gone somewhere if the fallout between them had been written differently. I mean come on, you've got people believing she and Henry are a thing and he is responsible for the death of her husband son! Bill could've been forgiven his drama with Nora too.

First, this is almost 3,000 words long. I’m so sorry..

I assume you meant S6E1—and naturally I have a lot of opinions!

I’m into the general concept of that plotline. It’s so easy to picture. I imagine it’ll happen something like: Gowen makes a comment about buying the place and Bill is instantly like, “Or I could prevent you from doing that” and then it escalates almost instantly into a competitive irritation-fueled bidding war. It’s perfectly in character for both of them.

Bill has proven he can be jealous (see S2) and petty (see S3), sometimes to the point where he can be cruel (see S5). Henry is a very competitive guy who will do what it takes to get what he wants, often at the expense of others (see pretty much every season). We also know there’s absolutely no love lost between them. Despite the short moment where Bill was almost friendly to Henry in S5 (when Henry turned in the woman who offered him a job if he betrayed Lee), it’s clear Bill and Henry are bound to be…well, I don’t want to say “lifelong enemies” so maybe: lifelong personal antagonists?

Their history is complex and interesting, and it goes back at least 20 years. They’ve known each other (or of each other) longer than they haven’t. Think about that. And there’s that whole mess with Nora getting pregnant, Bill marrying her and raising Martin, the comment Bill made about how Nora “always had a weak spot for [Henry]”—and the fact that Bill has investigated the mining company Henry worked for more than once, both ending in prosecutions; but the first time he did this ended with Henry being spat out as a scapegoat for the company: banished to Coal Valley.

So Henry blames Bill for a lot of the things he’s had to deal with. On the opposite side of things, Bill has known Slimy Gowen for so many years that it’s hard for him to really believe the man is capable of change, especially a drastic change. Neither of them…are really wrong, though; to a certain extent, it’s a matter of perspective. Bill thinks Henry is a scumbag, and Henry thinks Bill has always had it out for him.

And, sure, Henry didn’t let Ray Wyatt shoot Bill, but 1) he’d be implicated in that, and 2) all it really says about his character is that he has a moral line he won’t cross. He sicced his goons on Bill in S1, worked to ruin Abigail’s livelihood for literal years, and used Nora. He wasn’t a good man. But he knew who he was and he knew how far he’d go.

I like to think he’s still that guy, just…maybe better—or at least willing to try to be better?

And you know what? I like that even though Gowen has been making an effort to be a better person, the series hasn’t tried to push the two of them into some kind of happy friendship. Their history together isn’t good, and neither is their present. “You testified against me, Bill. Now, I see you taking a stroll down the boardwalk with my co-conspirator” (S5).

It’s just nice to see that “second chances” don’t always have to be these grand gestures of love and friendship and closeness; they can be just…staying in your own lane? I mean, even if Bill absolutely hates Henry, he mostly just ignores him/leaves him alone/lets him do his thing—and vice versa. That’s a form of giving a second chance. It doesn’t have to be on a personal level, and I think with these two characters, any kind of “wholesome, wholly-trusting” resolution would just feel…really bad. They need to retain their integrity as people, which means they’ll probably never actually like one another.

So of course they’d get into a bidding war over the saloon.

The only real question I have about it is…uh…where’s Henry getting the money? That must be some promotion Lee gave him, huh? I love the plot, but this is a huge oversight.

Look, Bill can theoretically have a lot of money. We don’t actually know how wealthy or un-wealthy he is. He’s been working an unpaid position off and on for the last two years as the sheriff of Hope Valley, but he also owns half of Abigail’s Café.

And this can’t be overlooked, either: he worked at a very high-profile and no doubt high-paying job before this. Does he pay alimony to Nora? We actually don’t know. It’s possible the café ownership keeps him afloat enough that he doesn’t have to touch his savings, but he could have a substantial amount of them, even though it’s obvious he used some of those to buy out Gowen’s half of the café. Still, early-seasons Bill was something of a workaholic, so even when he was making a lot of money, it’s doubtful he had the time or inclination to spend it. He could still have a sizable amount of it left after 30 years in the field!

But Henry? He’s poor. We’ve established this. He more or less came crawling back to town and had to take what was offered to him: a position at the bottom of the lumber mill totem pole. But he worked it and he didn’t complain.

So again, my question: where’s the money coming from? How can Henry competitively bid against Bill at this point?

Are they both intending to take out a loan or is part of Bill’s offer that he can pay in cash? I’m curious to see how they juggle it, but I really hope Henry’s stint as being poor isn’t just…overlooked. If he has to take out a loan for it, I’d be fine with it; I really love the idea of Henry getting that businessman spark back and taking a risk because of it! But I guess we’ll have to see.

As far as Abigail’s best suitor goes: my answer is Frank. I feel pretty sure that he was just about everything she needed in a partner. He wanted to communicate, he worked through things, he was good at talking about his feelings, he brought her flowers, he spent time with her, he had family meals with her and Cody… The list goes on. They were a great match! It’s unfortunate that he was written off the show.

As for Abigail and Bill…I have to agree with you.

But I should disclaim my post.

I don’t see them as romantically inclined toward one another at all—in fact, I can’t watch their dating scenes in early episodes without cringing because it just feels awkward and performative to me. But if the show can will-they won’t-they with Henry and Abigail, it feels kind of yucky to me that we never even got a sincere discussion between Bill and Abigail about what happened between them, let alone a genuine apology and acceptance scene.

Don’t get me wrong; they make amazing friends. I loved the end of S5 when he went to Abigail because he knew she’d get it—she’d get him, even the things he couldn’t make himself say.

But there’s something to be said for attraction and what a person wants in a relationship at different times in their lives, too.

Let me explain.

When Abigail met Bill, she was just starting to move past the grief of losing her husband and son. That’s not an easy thing to do. But it’s like she says in S1: “Life goes on for all of us.” Abigail didn’t want to steep herself in grief forever. She wanted to move on. And Bill, unrelated to the accident but in town to help solve it and give her peace of mind, was the perfect…I don’t know. He wasn’t a “rebound guy” but for lack of a better term, let’s call him that. He wasn’t that well-suited to her but he was available and she needed…some of what he was capable of offering right away—especially assurance and (lawful) action.

She was married from the cusp of womanhood until her husband died, so it’s doubtful she had a line of beaus on a string in her youth. Abigail never played the courting game. But here she is years later, a widow ready to try and move on…and Bill shows up and is nice to her, respectful, kind of charming, and sincerely helpful…and at this point in her life, that’s exactly what she needs! She needs someone who feels dependable and can take care of her in the way she needs taken care of, which at this point was…bringing her peace of mind/bringing justice to the town and the men who died: her immediate needs (that could be fulfilled by a non-suitor Bill, too, by the way).

But Abigail was having a nice time. Again, a good-lookin’ guy comes to see you and talk to you and tells you that your cooking is great and that you look nice…and you’re not wrong and it’s okay to want justice and he’s gonna make sure you get it…

It’s flattering and confidence-boosting. And hey, except for the whole…lying thing, he was the perfect rebound guy. He didn’t want to rush anything; he respected her space; and he actively worked on the things he promised to work on (getting justice for the dead men).

But there were other aspects of Bill that just…didn’t work for her and probably still wouldn’t. He’s an emotional husk most of the time and he’s not a Romantic Man. I don’t know how to explain it, but for an example, let’s go with flowers.

Bill gives her flowers “for the café, to brighten things up.” It’s a romantic overture, but we’re not shown him actually giving them to her so it feels…kind of disconnected. Frank brings Abigail flowers and not only do we see it, everything about it is intended to be romantic. He brings her favorites, demonstrating he knows what she likes; he smiles a lot; he wants to touch her and be touched; he hovers around after and offers to help her with what she’s working on…

Bill does these types of things because it’s expected of him.

But it’s like, you can’t forget the kind of person Bill is, either.

He’s a workaholic at this point in the series. All he does is work. And he was in a marriage for an indeterminate number of years (anywhere from 15 to 25 of them) with someone he didn’t love. “I married her as a favor to her father.” Bill never had to romance his wife; he married her out of obligation—because her father made sure he got his schooling.

Bill is the guy who, at least at this time, did things because “that’s what you do.” It’s almost like he’s following a manual. You give flowers to the woman you’re courting. You offer your arm. You say romantic things. Or in the case of his job, you follow the rules, you fill out the proper paperwork in the right order. You submit cases on time. In the case of Nora and her father, too. He did you a life-changing favor so you need to do one for him, too.

Because he’s just doing what’s expected, the things he does don’t feel romantic when you have time to think about them (and compare them to others). It’s like taking out the trash because it’s expected of you, or doing the dishes. That’s what these kinds of things seem to be to him, at least when he’s low-key courting Abigail: they’re tasks. He’s just doing them to check them off the list; there’s not much feeling in them and personal preference isn’t taken into consideration.

Which brings me back to Bill’s, uh, emotional constipation.

He was definitely lying in S1/S2 when he didn’t admit he was Divorce Pending. But even at moments where Abigail was trying to communicate feelings to him, he was just…completely avoidant. Remember this scene?

Yeah, the way he just…segues away from feelings or attachment is cringey. It’s hard to watch a second (or third, or fourth) time. Bill is Bad At Feelings (dealing with the ones he has AND admitting when he doesn’t have them), and Abigail needs someone who is good at them: at understanding what they’re feeling and why, and a person who is willing to regularly and effectively try to communicate them with her.

(Just quickly here I want to point out that Bill’s emotional constipation may have been why he and Dottie didn’t work out, too, though the writers sort of dropped the ball on that one… And it’s why he was so mean to AJ in S5; this man literally can’t talk about his feelings short of an actual breakdown, and that is NOT the kind of thing most people are equipped to deal with. And to be fair to the Dottie/Bill relationship, him cooking for her was a marked improvement in him trying to court a lady, but there are aspects of it that just feel like he’s just checking off boxes.)

This is mostly why I prefer that Abigail and Bill just…stay friends. Because neither of them need to settle for a romantic relationship they’re not wholly into, but also…they both need very different things in a relationship; they just don’t seem compatible to me that way.

So sure, Abigail thought he was pretty good-lookin’ when he showed up, and he’s nice to spend time with, but everything beyond that isn’t really her cup of tea: he doesn’t forgive easily; he holds grudges; he’s extremely independent; he doesn’t like asking for help; he’s terrible at communicating feelings; etc. So I mean, even if he improves in the feelings department, it’s probably not going to matter enough.

Bill’s needs matter too, of course, and Abigail fulfills some of them, but not all of them: he really needs someone who’s gonna call him out, keep him on his toes/things from getting boring or stagnant; he needs an opinionated complaining partner; he needs someone who knows their own heart well but who will also understand his without him having to spell everything out/their feelings getting hurt when he doesn’t spell it out for them; etc.

And I mean, it really sucks because they do have a few things that are good for one another. And for what it’s worth, I think they could make a relationship work if they had to/felt inclined to. Bill isn’t very good at compromising, but Abigail’s better at it. Still, would they both be happy, or would it ultimately just rob them of their ability to be and feel independent? Bill doesn’t like being told what to do and he’d HATE having to, say, be home at a certain time. I think when he met Abigail, that wasn’t important to him, but now it is. He likes being able to do what he wants, when he wants to do it.

(Which reminds me of Frank, who spent a lifetime extremely independent but was more than happy to have someone to answer to; the issue between he and Abigail was that he needed that expectation communicated to him; that was it! I feel like Bill would find it stifling and ultimately it could breed resentment.)

Anyway, I don’t disagree with your message. I think if things had been written differently, if Bill’s character had gone in a different direction maybe, they’d be more suited to one another right now.

As far as Abigail and Henry goes… I pretty much loathe the idea of them as a romantic couple, so if you’re ever down for a good rant: feel free to hit me up privately. That said, I want to be fair to the characters in terms of like, feeling attraction…or uhhh the lack thereof if you interpret anybody as asexual!

At the end of the day, it’s not unreasonable to think that Abigail could be attracted to Henry.

Maybe she was attracted to Bill at one point, but no longer is (mainly because she’s realized they’re just not that romantically compatible, even though they get on great as friends). And maybe she finds Henry attractive even despite the things he’s done, because, uh… I don’t know, he looks THAT GOOD in a hat and scarf.

I still think the writing surrounding Henry and Abigail is weak, though. Like you said, he was complicit in the deaths of her husband and son. He’ll need a lot more redemption material before I’ll buy into Abigail being romantically interested in him. An attraction? SURE. She’s not blind! But more than that? I hope it doesn’t happen.

Actually, right now I’m kind of hoping Abigail just stays single for a couple of seasons while they focus on other romantic plots that are in town, like Jesse and Clara, and Rosemary and Lee. Abigail needs a little less focus for S6…and I’d prefer it remain romantic-free.

(Don’t forget, we’re getting a storyline for her that’s a two-parter about someone from her past! I’m still hoping it’s one of her brothers, though. That’d be SO cool.)

But that’s just personal opinion, y’know? I’ve noticed that over on Instagram, the fans are really divided in the different Abigail-relationship camps. It’s kind of cool that everyone gets something different out of each type of relationship presented…and of course, seeing everybody’s different interpretation of the characters is fun, too.

So I’m not saying, “you can’t ship X” because you can enjoy whatever it is you like. This is just my interpretation. ♥

(Sorry if there are any mistakes, I didn’t really proofread this multiple times as usual. Let me know if you see anything glaring!)

#when calls the heart #answered mail #anonymously asked #abigail stanton #bill avery #henry gowen #character studies and information #analysis and meta discussion #to be clear again this is just my interpretation of the characters

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crystalelemental · 5 years

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homestuck-and-the-monomyth replied to your post: I believe that, barring my loss of Lift last night...

Congrats, nice job! I remember seeing you frustrated by AR a while back, so it’s cool to see that you’ve pushed through.

Thank you! Truth be told...I am still frustrated with it. Kinda. I’m gonna be posting a lot of thoughts under this cut.

When it comes to Aether Raids, I think my biggest frustrations are the same as with every other game mode: rewards are too minimal for 90% of players, they don’t scale properly until you’re really high ranking, etc. It bothers me a lot. I really wish they’d start resources with higher amounts and give more incremental scaling as you improve. “But Steve, why would anyone whale for the top spots if it’s not that much better?” You...have never had the mental drive to spend all your monthly income on a banner solely because you like the character, have you? There are other motivations to whale, and most prominent is just the desire to be at the top. Rewards are often secondary in that case.

Beyond that though, I have come around to kinda liking Aether Raids. Kinda. I think a game mode that’s more about using any possible unit is way more interesting than Arena’s plan of BST, total merges, and high-cost skills determining your placement. Yes, let’s oversaturate that meta with the same boring armor units no one knows shit about because those games weren’t released in the west, then tell everyone to spend all their hard-earned feathers on these characters they neither know nor care about, THEN make them give awkward builds to solely for scoring purposes. Very clever, Arena, well done. Fuck the Arena.

AR at least offers variety. Even if that variety is...occasionally obnoxious. Lynhardt is a known thing that annoys everyone, having Brave Veronica running around and shutting down Vantage strategies can be annoying, and Ophelia is incredibly hard to stop barring my +Res Caineghis with two Eir buffs and Archer Lucina’s Attack/Res Link buff letting him hang on. But you know. I’ll take that. I’ll take the occasional match where someone set up their Firesweep/Lunge cavalier to throw my unit backwards into the bolt trap to then be annihilated by Duma. Because at the end of the day, that’s more interesting than another run of Steady Breath/Lightning Breath Fae/Nowi/Tiki.

That said though, Aether Raids has unbelievable problems they desperately need to fix. As much as I’ll shit on Arena, at least getting to tier 21 is possible, given enough play time. AR? AR may as well be impossible for a lot of people. Unless you’ve got the right tools, I don’t think you can even gain enough points in a week to get to tier 21. I think it’s only possible right now in Light season thanks to the one free Eir. And even then, you need pretty much perfect play all season. I have two Eir, because I really wanted to merge and would have if someone hadn’t reminded me to keep the free neutral one for F2P guides as needed, which meant I could get 160 points per match instead of 140. That’s actually a substantial difference, and one of the main reasons I could get this far in the first place. I was stuck at tier 19 until someone pointed out two Eir doubles the bonus. And so, here we are. And that’s not even getting into the fact we’re missing the Astra mythic, so every other week is a standstill for every player, sitting around and hoping to just break even without dropping a tier.

There’s also the issue of needing the right tools to take on all the variance you’ll see here. This isn’t competitive Pokemon, where you can just waltz out and pick up a counter to add to your team. You have to summon for it. Caineghis is another huge reason I was able to make it this far, but I initially wasn’t going to pull for him, and only did so to get DD4 fodder for F!Morgan. Which...okay, probably not gonna fodder him off anymore, but imagine if I’d backed off of that plan. I probably wouldn’t have made it, because I didn’t have a strong answer in Light season to all those ranged units. I feel like that’s a huge flaw in your game mode. Yes, the variance of what you’re facing is great, and I really appreciate that. But I appreciate it as someone who’s spent money on the game about every month to have access to these tools.

Then there’s the other major issue. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you want to get your favorite 5* to +10. That’s your goal. Well that’s great for Arena, but +10 barely means shit in Aether Raids. It’s actually a quality I enjoy. But the tradeoff is, success in AR is about how many different teams you can build to counter-pick the opponent. So now you run into a conflict of interest. Wanting to do well in AR necessitates having a wide variety of strong units, but unless you’re spending money, that does generally mean you’re giving up hope on getting a favorite to be fully merged, which then interferes with Arena. You kinda have to pick which one is most important, and focus on that. Or, you can just run a bunch of highly merged common units, in which case I hope you enjoy Hero Merit farming for all those feathers.

Bottom line: as someone who likes variety more than a balanced metagame, I actually like Aether Raids at this point. You know. Now that I understand how the Fortress works, and which facilities are actually useful, and what a bonus facility does. It can be fun to see what other people have got. But I also recognize it is a heavily flawed game mode, necessitating spending of orbs for a wide range of good units, and still not having a mythic to increase Lift on Astra seasons. I know that second part will be solved with time, but it’s kinda the same as Pair Up mechanics. You have one unit that can do it. One. Maybe...I dunno...don’t implement this thing until you’re ready, and have enough options to work with? Like, if you don’t have Eir, good luck with AR. You’re basically done.

But really, all this is less the fault of the game mode itself, and more the fault of gacha in general being exploitative and shitty by withholding characters and options behind a $75 paywall.

#homestuck-and-the-monomyth #aether raids

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henrymidfields-blog · 5 years

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Review: Review: Persona 4 Dancing All Night - Atlus's MeToo response? - SPOILERS

Originally posted in Serenes Forest - Link

Last month saw the first anniversary of what marked the beginning of the MeToo movement, which were the sexual abuse accusations against Harvey Weinstein. From there, the #MeToo movement spread amongst women in showbiz across the United States and eventually other countries as well. Well, except Japan. Japan (my home country) did not see the same level of activity in the MeToo movement, where the wrong kind of conservatism prevails. However, there are three cases that spoke out against it (and possibly more that I am unaware about). The first, and ongoing one is a journalist named Shiori Ito who was raped by a senior journalist. The second, and more relevant to this, was Perfect Blue, an animated movie which is a story of an ex-idol's desparate attempt to further her career in showbiz, and discussed sexual exploitation in showbiz years before MeToo did. The third one, which basically dropped the same anvil as the second one was Persona 4: Dancing All Night.

The Gameplay

Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a rhythm and dancing game with a "Where are they now" story after the canon epilogue of Persona 4 Golden. As a persona who has only passing interest in dancing games, this was perhaps the only one that I actually was interested in, and played fairly extensively.

Considering that, the game was easy enough to get used to. The interface and controls were intiutive, with the notes spreading outwards, indicating which outer buttons on the PS Vita I need to press or hold down, and it was easy to follow the notes. You can play the various songs from various Persona 4 entries, with many remixed by various Japanese artists, in which they appear at certain points in Story Mode, or as a score attack in Free Mode. Bonuses for high scores and story mode progressions appear in the form of extra costumes which you can buy using in-game currency in this game's versions' Tanaka's Amazing Commodities, or pay and download via DLC.

As for the difficulty of this game, it is very easy to get used to (as mentioned before), yet very difficult to master. There are four modes in score attack, which are Easy, Normal, Hard, and All Night. Easy is very much for beginners to the genre, while Normal is also managable. The former two settings are also the modes available in Story Mode, which means that you can enjoy the story without having blisters on your fingers. On the other hand, Hard is quite challenging, while only the best rhythm gamers will be able to even have a go at All Night, let alone master this difficulty setting.

So far, this sounds like what a good rhythm game should be. So why did I pick up this game and not, say, Dance Dance Revolution, PaRappa the Rapper, or even Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight?

Story Part 1: Overview

What Persona 4: Dancing All Night had which others generally lacked is a story - while less substantial than the main game, was nevertheless a story very much worth watching, and was the main reason I got into this game.

So, Rise Kujikawa, the J-Pop idol who went back to the city (presumably Tokyo) after her adventures in Persona 4 (Golden), and was going to join an all-star concert with the upcoming Kanamin Kitchen as her comeback debut. And she wants Yu Narukami and his friends from their old school (who all solved the serial murders together) join in as backup dancers for her debut. However, the game soon takes a darker turn which focuses on the other idols gone missing, and it is up to the Yu and his Investigation Team to solve the case.

Yes, sure, there is quite a lot of fanservice in this game, but the story is much more than that; not only did its take on tatemae and honne resounded with my mind, it also helped me appreciate some of the basic aspects of the #MeToo movement. Zhiqing Wan has wrote a review that I almost wholeheartely agree with, so expect a number of quotes from her. (I strongly urge readers to read her review too.)

Story Part 2: Being ourseleves and acceptance

One of Dancing All Night's discussion is the dark side of people's true self versus people's perceptions. Wan wrote:

Dancing All Night follows a slightly different path and instead deals with issues like meeting the expectations of others, and putting on a façade or adopting an entirely different personality so as to be accepted by the majority. ... [omission]

[omission]...How many times have we felt unappreciated or unloved for being ourselves? And how often have we tried to change who we are just to fit societal expectations? Persona 4: Dancing All Night tackles these questions with finesse and, just like Persona 4, proves to be a very human game that we can latch onto easily.

I can very much relate to the above paragraph that Wan wrote, as I had a similar issue with my classmates. Back in 1997, my family and I returned to our hometown of Tokyo from San Francisco, where my dad worked as a bank's branch manager. And the conformist Japanese classroom was as such that I felt punished for acting assertive or even honest, whether it was through the regimented curriculum, or the bullying I experienced from my classmates. It felt like Atlus questioned the usage of tatemae (the veneer we all have in our lives) versus honne (our real opinions) in modern Japanese society, and how we should be not afraid to be more honest with ourselves.

Story Part 3: J-Pop Idols and sexual exploitation

The other, more timely, moral that Atlus explored was the lives of Japanese pop idols. This is the industry where older people (mainly men) are attracted to the idols, which we see has some of the strictest lifestyles of Japanese professionals (both private and public). Wan described it succinctly here:

...Dancing All Night doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to exploring the lives of Japanese pop idols either. There are a few narrative sequences in the game where we get to witness the emotional turmoil of the four Kanamin Kitchen girls, and the struggles they face within the industry. These sequences are all incredibly stylized within the game, of course, but just like in Perfect Blue, it’s shockingly easy to draw parallels between the in-game events and real life itself.

The story's critique got me curious and I had a look at some of the stuff that idols had to go through. Many of the idols have to follow codes of behaviour that demands a high level of politeness and purity: the extent that bans having boyfriends and requires prior permission to marry. One idol member from AKB48 shaved her head and made a public apology for going out with a boyfriend - something many of us do as part of our teenage lives. Even worse, unlike stars on the Disney Channel which at least has the justification that they are starring on a children's show, the situation surrounding the J-Pop idols are basically the hypocrisy of the managers and audiences alike. Hannah Lee, a Law/Asian Studies student from Australian National University writes, for example:

Most fans who follow groups like AKB48 are middle-aged men. The idols themselves are teenagers, who begin performing at around 13 years old. Idols are often presented in cute school outfits and perform in synchronised groups. Whilst sexualisation of women is not limited to Japan, Japanese idol groups specifically pander to a young girl fetish, which is encouraged for the sake of record sales.

But what young girl would ever consent to this? If consent is ‘free and informed’, there is simply is no way that a girl, at 12 years old, can knowingly consent to being sexualised by men four times her age.

Equally disturbing is the fact that this idol fad came as the counter-response to the first wave of Japanese feminism in the 1970s (referenced from the link). Japan Subculture Research Center describe's AKB48's founder, Yasushi Akimoto, as:

...a Zegen [sex merchant] with a vision – having never been popular in high school himself, he recognized the deep sexual frustration and vast need for sexual fantasies festering in the educated and dateless Japanese male. When he came out with “Onyanko Club” in the mid-1980s, people were blinded by the sheer genius of this man. Here he was, peddling quite ordinary high school girls on TV, who all got up on the studio stage to teasingly sing “oh please don’t take my school uniform off, no-no-no!” to an audience who could never hear such titillating pleas when they were 18 so was totally stoked to hear it now...

And the above mentioned are just the articles written in English - there are more on that on Japanese news sites. As for myself: While I enjoyed watching the so called gravure idols in their swimsuits (and to some extent still do), this has made me have second thoughts about the stuff they possibly have to go through. The game (and the subsequent research) was quite enough to make me feel uncomfortable about myself, and acknowledge that I have my fair share of misogyny that I may have contributed.

Story Part 4: Ashly Burch as a mature Rise Kujikawa

And my thoughts do not end here. I also noticed that this game was released a couple of years before the Weinstein scandal had its cover blown last year. Granted, it probably did not have the effect in kicking off the MeToo movement anywhere near the level of other factors, and it definitely has not in Japan, sadly. But I cannot help but think about how the release had such perfect timing.

The other thing is that the English localisation had a response in implying a possible reconstruction of the idol's role. While a lot of people seem to miss Laura Bailey as Rise's English VA, I actually welcome the more mature treatment of Rise by her new VA, Ashly Burch. It seems like Rise asked her agency for permission to assume a more mature persona for her new idol role, allowing her to shed her airhead-ish role of her old idol persona, and it seemed like she did so assertively too. It's a very good thing, considering how idols should be able to grow up and be more independent like the rest of us.

Conversely, it's to my high disappointment (and my only disappointment in this game) that the Japanese original of the game did not do so in the first place - either Rie Kugimiya (the Japanese VA) should have toned down the chipmunky voice Rise turned out as, or Atlus should have casted someone else to sound more in-line with Ashly Burch.

Story Part 5: Other comments

There are also some interesting tidbits to read from the characters speeches as well. The characters don't get much character development per se, partly because the story only takes 2-3 in-universe days at most, and also because I think, understandably, everyone in general wants to be more like silly, carefree teenagers after their harrowing work in solving the serial murders in the prequel. This particularly applies to Yosuke, Chie, and Yukiko, as they are in their final year in high school and will be having their university/job entrance exams soon - this is their last opportunity before they need to get serious again.

However, there are many retrospective reflections that come into play when they interact with each others, and with the idols they are saving and befriending. Many are very heartwarming and awesome to see, precisely because of how they reflected upon their own issues, and how their generally honest interactions with each other over the past year in the prequel strengthened their friendships, and how they became more confident with each other.

The majority of the story piggybacks the prequel which is Persona 4 Golden (the main story) - as such everyone should play before this game, as they won't be able to appreciate Dancing All Night's story otherwise. (See here for my reviews of that game.) Both this and the prequel are on PS Vita, so if you can play this game, you practically have no excuse to not get Golden! Special props goes to Uncle Ryotaro and Nanako Dojima:

Back in Persona 4 Golden, Ryotaro was unable to come to terms with his late wife (killed in an hit-and-run accident) and how he has to raise his daughter Nanako on his own, therefore himself emotionally fleeing into his work as a detective. Nanako, on the other hand, was lonely at home, having to do many of the house chores by herself, until Yu and his friends started to befriend her. Here, Ryotaro does his detective work just as his duty, and yet still enjoys his time with Nanako. Nanako, on the other hand, fully trusts her father, and is even befriending Kanami the idol.

Conclusion

So there you have it. If there was a game that not only wrote a story worth reading, but highlights some of the social issues Japan's biggest fad has tucked away conveniently, this is the game. I encourage everyone to either borrow a friend's copy of Dancing All Night (or even better buy a copy, but not before understanding the story of Persona 4 Golden) and look up "the dark side of japanese idol industry" on Google. And maybe spread the word. I'm not sure how I myself can do to address the issue that Dancing All Night rightly raises apart from acknowledging my contribution to misogyny, but at least I can say that Atlus has done a great service in raising the social issue, and they should not be ashamed for it.

Verdict: Buy the game. (But play P4G first!) Other recommendations: Look up the info on the social issues.

#Persona 4 #Dancing All Night #MeToo #atlus #j-pop

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Will Call of Duty: Vanguard Finally Fix Warzone’s Hacker Problem?

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While the full reveal of Call of Duty: Vanguard is currently stealing all the attention, the biggest news for Warzone players everywhere at the moment is that the free-to-play battle royale title will finally get an anti-cheat system later this year.

“Warzone is set to make Call of Duty history with a brand-new main map launching later this year,” reads a blog post on the Call of Duty website. “With development led by Raven Software, Warzone will also feature a new PC anti-cheat system across the entire experience when it launches with the new map.”

There isn’t much information available about the new anti-cheat system at this time, but the CoD team says that “more information on the new anti-cheat system” should be available in the “coming weeks prior to Vanguard’s launch.” As Vanguard is set to be released on November 5, that means we should probably expect to learn more about this system sometime in October.

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The fact of the matter is that most Warzone players will consider any news about a new anti-cheat system to be good news. After all, Warzone‘s current cheater problem can best be described as overwhelming. While high-level Warzone players are more likely to encounter cheaters, the game’s also controversial SBMM matchmaking system and Activision’s loose existing anti-cheat system that is essentially built around manual reviews means that too many players have encountered hackers who are able to shoot through walls, see everyone on the map, take advantage of perfect aim, and generally make it nearly impossible to win a game by playing “fairly.”

So will this new anti-cheat system fix all of that? It’s a little difficult to say at the moment given how little we actually know about the new system, but there are already reasons to doubt that this is going to “solve” Warzone‘s hacker problem.

First off, you need to understand that there is no such thing as a perfect anti-cheat system. Even games with the best anti-cheat systems in the world (such as Valorant, PUBG, and Counter-Strike), still have hackers. Nobody has developed a universally successful anti-cheat system, and even companies that have had more success with such systems in the past have had to invest a ton of time and money into keeping them updated and trying to stay one step ahead of the cheaters. It is not an easy process.

That’s what makes the Warzone situation so interesting. At the moment, Warzone utilizes very basic review and security authentication systems designed to ward off the absolute simplest cheats and hopefully catch hackers before they can do too much damage. Historically, it has been a pretty bad system, and it’s contributed to an environment where hackers and cheat system manufacturers see Warzone as an incredibly lucrative playground.

That being the case, it’s going to take a considerable effort to turn that ship around. Games are more likely to attract hackers if they are free-to-play, incredibly popular, and lack more substantial anti-cheat measures. Well, Warzone currently checks all of those boxes. There’s no world in which Activision implements even the best existing anti-cheat system and is able to seriously dissuade hackers and cheat manufacturers from finding new ways to invade the game. There is just too much money on the line for cheat manufacturers to simply walk away from Warzone. That is a big part of the reason why so many people feel that Activision should have been on top of this from day one.

There are also some reasons to be concerned about the upcoming anti-cheat system itself. The wording of that blog post seriously suggests that Activision is developing a new anti-cheat system for Warzone, which isn’t inherently a problem but does mean that they’re going to have to do a lot of “live” testing regarding the effectiveness of that system while hackers are out there doing the same thing. From there, it’s a race to the finish, and history tells us that the hackers have a pretty good shot of staying ahead of the major game development studio.

Activision could turn to third-party cheat systems, but that is also not a perfect solution. Either they utilize a pretty simple third-party anti-cheat system (like Easy Anti-Cheat, which Apex Legends and other major online games partially rely on), or they turn to a more advanced anti-cheat system and find a way to integrate it into an older in-game engine without completely ruining performance. Even if they’re able to figure that part of the process out, there are still security concerns to consider. For instance, Valorant utilizes one of the most effective anti-cheat systems in the world, but the nature of that system has sparked a debate about user privacy that Riot Games is still working around to this day.

The fact of the matter is that any Warzone anti-cheat system that offers some level of automated, foundational protection and doesn’t completely break the game is going to be better than what Warzone currently has. However, we may be dealing with a kind of “putting the genie back into the bottle situation” in which the Warzone team will forever have to live with the fact that they created an incredibly popular free-to-play competitive shooter without a built-in anti-cheat system and that every decision they make beyond this point will be made in the shadow of that one. Maybe this is one of those cases where “better” is simply “better,” but the real question may be whether or not “better” in this instance is ever going to be “good enough.”

It’s certainly difficult to think about Activision Blizzard as simply a video game company at the moment given the stunning details of the lawsuit that they’re facing and the ways that the company’s subpar responses to that lawsuit so far remind us of the very real human horrors of the video game industry, but it’s going to be fascinating to see whether or not the Call of Duty teams are able to maintain Warzone‘s incredible momentum by addressing one of Activision’s most notable video game design mistakes in recent years.

The post Will Call of Duty: Vanguard Finally Fix Warzone’s Hacker Problem? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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brianzwerner · 3 years

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Making Money in Youth Sports

By: Brian Zwerner

I have been involved in youth sports as a dad, coach, team manager, startup founder, and investor for the last twelve years. I have two kids in high school now. My son played pretty much every sport. He started with soccer before he hit elementary school, then transitioned to football and basketball for the next five years, with a short detour into baseball and lacrosse. When he hit middle school, he was hooping on high level AAU teams and traveling around the country. He’s a senior in high school now and is totally burned out on basketball. He won’t be playing in college, even though he probably could’ve. He was even on a travel team with Anthony Edwards, the first pick in the 2020 NBA Draft.

My daughter came to sports late. After one pre-school year of soccer, she focused on drama, but she picked up volleyball in middle school. She got good quickly, played on a travel team, and won a state high school championship last year. I share all of this to say, I have seen a lot of different parts of the youth sports ecosystem.

In 2017 I decided that I wanted to build a business in the sports market, and I launched a company called Sportal. We started with a simple idea to solve a problem I had seen a ton of times with my own kids’ teams. On the travel programs, we typically had to find a gym we could rent for practice and training. The experienced coaches usually had a few hookups with people at schools, rec parks, or churches. However, we would frequently lose access to our normal gym for one reason or another, and a mad scramble would ensue. A bunch of parents would be calling around to find a replacement gym, usually at the last minute. It was a huge hassle, and most of the time we struck out.

Our big idea at Sportal was an online platform that would be the OpenTable for renting gyms and also fields for outdoor sports. We launched this platform at the end of 2017 and quickly got over 70 gyms and fields onboarded. Unfortunately, we never got enough scale and could not figure out how to break through with the school districts in my hometown of Atlanta. Also, many coaches would use our site to find a location and just call them on their own. I shut the platform down after a grueling six months when it was clear it would never scale. A handful of others have tried similar platforms in other parts of the country. I don’t think any have fared much better than Sportal.

We tried pivoting the Sportal business a few times after that. We built a basketball tournament and camps business, but the events we held barely broke even. We got set up to sell uniforms and gear to high school and travel teams, but the competition was fierce and we quickly abandoned that path. We ended up creating a media company covering high school sports in Georgia. We sent reporters and videographers to hundreds of football, basketball, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, softball, and volleyball games. We also started livestreaming games with a professional commentary team. Nothing worked. The schools wouldn’t pay for anything. The parents were pretty much tapped out. There wasn’t much of an audience to watch high school games. Ultimately, we shut the business after a difficult 1.5-year battle.

In my role as head of the investment committee for Beyond The Game Network, I see tons of companies trying to disrupt the youth sports market. Some of these founders are traveling over the same ground that I covered at Sportal. Some are trying other areas like college recruiting or team management software, both areas which we investigated but decided to stay out of.

I’ll break down a few of the key areas here.

·Team Management: Hudl has been the long-time leader in software to the high school coaches. The last meaningful competitor to Hudl was Krossover, and Hudl bought them in 2019. This is an area that could be productive for new entrants. There are two big leaders in software for youth sports team management – Sports Engine and TeamSnap. I’ve seen at least a dozen people try to break apart this duopoly. The software is hard to build and expensive to market to a disparate market. I generally agree that the two leaders don’t make a great product but stealing share from them is really hard. I don’t know if there is a venture scale business in team management.

·Media: There are several meaningful media platforms focused on high school sports. MaxPreps is a great tool for scores, rosters, schedules, and more. It is owned by CBS Sports. Rivals and 247 Sports provide media coverage of high school sports with a focus on recruiting news. Rivals is owned by Yahoo! Sports, 247 is also a part of CBS Sports. PlayON! Sports operates the NFHS Network, where they livestream high school games. Overtime does short form highlights and docuseries on high school sports, mostly basketball. Both PlayON! and Overtime have raised substantial venture capital and are growing. I think there is room for new entrants in this space. High school athletes are growing huge followings on social media, so there is interest in what they are doing on and off the court/field. Access to the top talent is key, and the offering needs to find a home in a crowded media field.

·Recruiting: NCSA is the market leader at connecting high school athletes with college coaches. As a parent, I had some exposure to this company and hated it. They charge a ton of money for a dubious service. There have been a bunch of companies that have tried to do this better, and I generally agree there is room for improvement here. The problem is the massive scale needed to connect with thousands of high schools and hundreds of colleges. If you want to go after this market, you need major dollars to compete.

·Coaching: This is definitely one of the more interesting spaces in youth sports. There is really no market leader nationally. Most coaching is done at the local level by individual coaches. CoachUp is a platform that helps youth athletes find a coach. HomeCourt has basketball training in an app. Diamond Kinetics and Mustard are doing cool things with baseball training. We have seen startups using connected devices or clothing and computer vision to try and systemize sports training. I think this will be an interesting space to watch in coming years. The biggest challenge is finding something affordable for the parents and then getting the word out to a dispersed youth sports audience.

Overall, the youth sports market is a big one. In 2017, Time Magazine called it a $15 Billion industry. I think there is room for disruptors and challengers, but based on my personal experience it is a difficult market to compete in. If you are going after it, do your homework upfront. Understand the incumbent players and make sure you figure out if they are really making money. Do a meaningful amount of customer surveying to figure out whether your idea is likely to find a receptive audience. Stay niche and solve a problem that someone is willing to pay for, and then expand to bigger areas.

See prior Consumer Gems posts here

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#youthsports #vc #startup

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