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johnrossbowie · 4 years

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LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat. Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

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aharris00britney · 5 years

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ASKS 16

haha remember in July when I said I was gonna answer stuff every month... yeah me neither 🙈🙈 anyways lots of stuff under the cut

Anonymous said: You should get along with other Simblrs and start a new cc group now that PTS is disbanded, your hairs and clothes are always amazing! :D

Firstly thank you! Most of the clothing in AxA is 99% ayoshi with me going in after and cleaning/adding some stuff. So I give him props for the clothes :P As far as a ‘new PTS’ style group idk, there are a lot of amazing creators on simblr but I think the reason PTS was such a special thing is because the bond they all had. I feel that when working on collabs with some of my really close friends (such as the one coming out this month with @dogsill and @ayoshi) because we have known each other for over 2 years now. A group of friends built only for collabing purposes would be more of a hassle than an enjoyment imo. <3

Anonymous said: HELLLOOOO! just curious bc why not but what is your favorite creation that you have made??

It varies every month to be honest lmao. If you asked me to pick a favorite hair from each month? Easy, always the last release of the month. But favorite hair ever? Awwww shucks 🤠 lmao I would say my Madison Hair is one of my favorite hair releases, I am planning to revamp it soon to work with my Mia ombre accessories and tidy the mesh up some.

Anonymous said: hello, when will this collection be free for public download please? /post/186706149526/patreon-08-19

That came out in August luv, go to my downloads page and click AxA 2019

Anonymous said: Hi! Idk if you do wcif!!!! But if you do, wcif the freckles on the girl with the short hair on the BOP AHOOB collab?? If you know! Thank you much in advance!!!!!

Hey! You’ll need to send Bowl-Of-Plumbobs a message for that WCIF, that was his Sim otherwise I would link you. Sorry hun

@lumalinrose-sims said: Not a question, but you are like so cool I can't even--

thank you lmao I appreciate it, your profile pic it pretty cool :P

@ang3lba3 said: sarah is so pretty!!! is there a way to download how she looks in its entirety, or no? (sorry if this is a silly question im pretty new to the sims)

not silly don’t worry :P the Sarah hair is for download on the post, the sim can be downloaded here but she is a bit outdated as I have changed her somewhat since then.

Anonymous said: Hihi just stopping by to tell you how much I love your hairs!!

thank you so much! I appreciate the love<3

Anonymous said: hi! i just wanted to say that i love your cc so much i and always look forward to your posts! you make the cutest cc ever and honestly you're probably my favorite cc maker. you also seem like such a chill and genuine person we truly stan.

fgvhbjn thank you lmao I am literally TOO CHILL irl lmao I let people run over me so much but it’s whatever. Thank you again for the super sweet message. Have a great day if you’re reading this :)

Anonymous said: Heeeey we have the same name

Austin club :P great name til you’re trying to sign something and it looks awful (at least for me I can’t do my signature for shit)

Anonymous said: the collab with bop is so boring and dull it’s drier than a cracker it’s a no from me

well not everything is going to be someones cup of tea lmao I’m sure there is someone that enjoys it which counters you’re negative view <3

Anonymous said: Hi I love your cc! I have almost all of it in my game and I love your tropical punch palette so much I was wondering if you would ever consider releasing the palette.

If I ever make an ombre accessory tutorial video I will release a set of actions for the palette. If you wanna use the palette feel free to grab the hex codes from S4S.

Anonymous said: How did you become a ea game changer? Was it through Tumblr or youtube?

About a year ago SimGuruKate was the community manager and had applications for Tumblr Game Changers, I applied and got accepted. Follow SimGuruFrost on Twitter to stay up to date on when new applications are open.

Anonymous said: Are you going to upload the hair you made on your livestream? I literally love your work and am a Patreon subscriber!!!

Hey! The hair will be in my October voting (I think) and if it wins, release will be November. If it doesn’t win I will put it in November voting and so forth til it wins. Also thank you for watching the stream and supporting me on Patreon

Anonymous said: hello!! i just wanted to see if knew is there’s anyway i can save my cc and save files somehow where i can download them again if my computer breaks so i don’t have to download it all again.?

zip your Sims 4 folder and upload it to Google Drive/SimsFileShare/OneDrive. Then when you install Sims 4 again you just replace the folder made in Electronic Arts in your Documents.

Anonymous said: what face do you make when your in love with a bee?

this is an old anon so I doubt they’re gonna check for this, and I can’t find the joke on Google so.... anybody know it?

Anonymous said: i love these collab sets they are honestly gifts from above

mhmm gifts from above for every collab except those in October... those are from below 👹 😳

Anonymous said: the pack is sooooo cute i love everything omg!!!! The male stuff is so adorable i can’t wait to download

Anonymous said: you guys are the only ones i go to for packs i would love to see build buy items in the future we don’t get a lot mm stuff like that

Anonymous said:i just want to say thank you for putting in so much time and hard work and dedication to creating cc for us. i hope there's never a moment when you feel unappreciated, and i want you to know we all love you!

@primadonnaliferiseandfall said: all hail you and ayoshi for the cc pack its so pretty omg!!!!

Anonymous said: omg the kings have delivered!!

Anonymous said: since we got axa 2019 and 2018 will there be an axa 2020? 👀

Anonymous said: Great job on the pack! Everyone's items look gorgeous! Thank you for making this, you talented human being.

Anonymous said: ilysm! that’s all 💓💫

Anonymous said: just wanted to let you know that your content is absolutely amazing and i love it all :) sending love from the uk👍

Anonymous said: would you and ayoshi consider sharing the psds for some of the stuff in your collab? please?

thank you guys so much! Me and Ayoshi were super super happy with the AxA 2019 release and we are so happy with how many people have liked it. AxA 2020 will be a thing, yes. Also I have been working on PSDs that are super easy to navigate. I will get those up soon hopefully.

@graphicpickles said: Hey um, I dont know if you were aware of this but your discord link is broken ^^"

hey! this is super late sorry, discord link should be working now. If not: https://discord.gg/CtQR9tb

Anonymous said: Why would you include a cc hair in a preview for a cas review

because I liked the hair and wanted to use it 😗

@goddesssimmerina said: I just stopped by to tell you how much I LOVE your content. *_* I just went through and downloaded soooo much! xD I actually just switched to using MM hair and i'm so glad I did because I'm finding so many of you amazing creators and I thank you all sm! :*

awe thank you!! I appreciate it. Welcome to MM hair world :P

@moonbrightsims said: whats ur origin id?

AHarris00Britney

Anonymous said: how are your photos/screenshots so high quality? seriously, do you use a mod for it or idk editing? or maybe your settings?

Ultra Settings, and I use SRWE for HQ pics.

Anonymous said: if you don’t answer this ask you’re straight

It has been answered. I am no longer straight. Was a hard two months not answering this 😔😔😔

Anonymous said: Hi, would you mind teaching us how you make the LoDs of your hairs? I opened one of them in S4S and found out your LoDs are great looking. I use decimate tool in blender and they look really bad.

I edge split everything before I decimate in Blender, I also delete the hairline and extrude the mesh inside the head before decimating as well. Really confusing to explain in words sorry. Might make a tutorial.

Anonymous said: omg ur cc finds blog has apink namjoo as icon and header. i'm.. sCREAMING. austin knows royalty

yes ma’am now where is the comeback

- it was at this point I realized I have caught up with my last asks post and have answered 4 things over again from Asks 15. Well... I guess that’s it folks

see yall in asks 17 in 2 months.... maybe the end of October idk

#asks #nonsims #saviorhide #i dont even know why i decided to answer stuff tonight it is 1:32AM now and i started an hour ago #let me go be productive and do something like lay in bed playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp for 2 hours til I pass out #actually let me post a teaser idgaf its 2am but when else am i gonna post it

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murasaki-murasame · 7 years

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Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 5 [Chapter 2 - Daily Life]

Thoughts under the cut.

I knew I said before that I expected Ryoma to die, but I’m kinda sad that it happened so soon. Though in hindsight it makes sense, since he got a lot of focus up to this point. Honestly I was bracing myself for it to be Kaito, since basically everything about him in this chapter thus far feels like death flags galore. It’s kinda the main reason why I’m immediately suspecting him to be the killer, even though it doesn’t really make sense in terms of his personality and his whole attitude about the killing game.

Before I say anything else, I just wanna say that this whole part nearly took me five hours and to be honest I think about an hour of that was probably me just doing stuff at the new casino the game opened up. It’s kinda addictive. I at least got some new skills out of it. Mainly the ones that max out my influence and focus, which will be appreciated in the next trial. I got closer to losing the first trial than I was expecting, so any extra bit helps. I think I got one or two other ones, but I can’t remember. I at least didn’t have any room to equip anything other than the first two. In addition to the skills I had previously, that is.

If I keep using the casino, I think I’ll probably just work toward getting skills and stuff, before getting any cosmetics. We’ll see. The casino is surprisingly fun, so I might do a session of it once per chapter.

Anyway, moving onto this chapter’s story itself, I like it a lot thus far. Though before I forget, I just want to say that that beginning scene is super incredibly suspicious, and makes me feel like we might even be setting up for some kind of ‘they’re all in purgatory’ twist or something. Who knows. My guess as to what this game’s overarching story is going to be in the end kinda got thrown off in general in this part, mostly with how the game decided to spell out at least part of the whole Ultimate Hunt thing. Thus far it’s as I suspected, more or less. There was some sort of social push against the Ultimates that lead to all this. I wasn’t expecting them to already explain the whole thing of everyone being hooked up to machines, though. So they all decided to voluntarily wipe their memories in order to avoid prosecution. I vaguely remember that in the ‘first loop’ before the game properly began, nobody knew they even had talents, so that makes sense. I can’t help but be suspicious of all this since we’re being told it so early in the game. Especially since they’re being really vague on the details, and so many little parts of the game keep alluding to the idea that none of this is real somehow. The whole ‘I want to die with everyone’ line also makes me lean toward this being some sorta purgatory, but that feels almost too obvious.

The transition into Shuichi being the new protagonist is going pretty well. I still really like him as a character, especially with the character development he’s undergoing. I like that he’s still understandably depressed about things, but is still moving forward in his own small ways. I feel like his design is sort of incomplete without his hat, but I appreciate the idea behind him abandoning it.

His new-found friendship with Kaito is also a big reason why I like how this is going. It just feels kinda refreshing and unique to have another character be the more pushy, outgoing one who sees the protagonist as their sidekick. I really hope that Kaito can at least survive past this chapter, so that we can see this dynamic play out for a good while. It’d also feel a little . . . predictable and depressing if Shuichi goes from trusting one person who immediately dies to trusting ANOTHER person who immediately dies. We’ll see.

I liked Kaito before, but this chapter’s making me really like him, especially since I got to do his first free time event [it was the only one I did, since my other two were spent unsuccessfully talking to Kaito, and unsuccessfully talking to Keebo]. He’s just a really good dude, even if he doesn’t go about everything well. But he’s still trying to keep everyone happy and confident, especially Shuichi. At least someone’s trying to reach out to him. I already kinda ship them. It was also a good thing I did his first free time event, since it helps establish how hard-working and educated he is. Which we kinda knew before, but this helped contextualize it a bit.

I should probably just keep talking about the characters before I get into stuff with the motive and murder and my vague preliminary speculation.

To be honest, I still don’t know if I like Kokichi that much. He’s definitely a good character, and he’s really central to the group dynamic and whatnot, but I just can’t help but be kinda annoyed at his chronic lying and overall attitude. I’m aware that it’s probably covering up some kind of tragic backstory, but still. I’m pretty sure that he’s a fan favourite, considering how many twitter/tumblr icons I’ve seen of him, but he hasn’t fully warmed on me yet. I don’t exactly hate him, I just think he’s a bit annoying. He’s also really creepy at times in ways that I was not expecting. On top of that one goddamn disturbing expression from the last trial, I think he did a variation of it with a creepy black/white filter, so that was kinda terrifying. Not to mention that part where we get a really zoomed-in close-up CG of his face when Shuichi wakes up in Gonta’s lab. Though while I’m talking about him, I just wanna say that even though it’s unlikely, I’m pretty heavily speculating that he’s actually lying about what his talent is. Considering how much of a compulsive liar he is, it’s incredibly hard to trust his absurd claims about being an evil supreme leader. It also feels like he makes smaller lies every time he says that, to make the basic concept seem more realistic in comparison. I feel like this might be easily verifiable though, especially when we see his lab, so I’m not entirely sure about this. [On that note, if we eventually find Rantarou’s lab, I wonder if it’ll reveal anything about his talent]

I really like how much this chapter’s giving screen-time and development to Tenko, Himiko, and Angie. They’re a trio I wasn’t quite expecting to see form, especially in the exact way it’s playing out here. I think I said before that Tenko was my least favourite character, but she’s really growing on me. I can’t quite pinpoint why, since she hasn’t exactly changed, but still. I at least like seeing her be so incredibly awkward and blatant about her crush on Himiko, and her contrast between believing in Himiko’s magic while being skeptical of Angie’s belief in Atua.

And on that note, I wasn’t expecting to see Himiko become converted to Angie’s religion like that. But it makes sense. She’s obviously struggling a lot with stress and anxiety and fear, but Tenko isn’t really doing a whole lot to help, in spite of her crush on her, which is also clearly making Himiko uncomfortable. So it makes sense that she’d turn to someone else for comfort. Considering that Himiko is probably going to be a huge suspect in this chapter, I wonder how Tenko will be during the trial.

Angie still disturbs me a little, honestly. It’s just getting creepy how little she seems to care about the idea of people dying, and how if anything she seems to enjoy the prospect of it. In general her eternally upbeat and smiley attitude is the sort of thing that just feels unpleasant in this sort of situation.

Gonta is still precious and I adore him. It’s kinda sad how he’s just constantly being lied to and kept at arm’s length by everyone. Especially since chances are he’s gonna die sooner or later. Maybe not. We’ll see.

I’m pretty intrigued by Maki during this chapter. She’s certainly being suspicious. But since she’s so suspicious I at least doubt that she’s the killer. I want to try and have a free time event with her next chapter, if I can. I wonder what the deal is with her being so defensive about her lab. It’s hard to tell what’s up with her in general.

Keebo still feels a little odd to me as a character, so I dunno what to say about him. I did feel pretty bad seeing him get tossed into the water tank though, and it was cool seeing him get his moment to shine and derail Kokichi’s plans.

I hope that Tsumugi, Kiyo, Kirumi, and to a lesser degree Miu get some focus soon. I mean, at least Miu got a bit of focus in chapter one, but the other three definitely feel like the least important people thus far.

I kinda want to do everyone’s free time events, just to learn more about them, but you really don’t get much time to talk to people. Oh well. I’m pretty sure that there’s a bonus mode you get after beating the main game that lets you do everyone’s routes really easily. I never really looked into the ones for the past two games though, so I forget how they work exactly. But I’ve heard that some sort of mode like that exists in this game. I think it’s literally called Dating Sim Mode, which is kinda hilariously on the nose. Though I wonder, would Kaede be the protagonist in it, or Shuichi? I guess if it plays out like an alternate timeline where no murders happen, it’d logically be Kaede. But it’d be amusing if you could at least choose to play as Shuichi for it.

And on the note of free time events and stuff, it’s hard to tell, but I THINK that the number of friendship fragments you had technically stays the same? I’m not sure. It said I had one fragment in my skill screen. But I don’t think I had an option to look at Rantarou’s detailed info screen. Oh well. It’s not a big deal, so nobody needs to tell me. But the way chapter one played out makes me think that I should have just tried to fit in two sessions with Rantarou, since talking to Shuichi was kinda pointless.

Speaking of Rantarou, this chapter’s making me wonder if instead of gaining the memories of his talent, he gained the memories of the Ultimate Hunt that we saw everyone else get here. He at least knew enough to know the name. I’m getting more and more curious about him. Especially since we still don’t know exactly what his plan was when he went to the basement.

To bridge over to discussing the murder, I should say that I still really like Ryoma as a character, and I wish I could have talked to him more before he died. But there were other characters I was prioritizing over him. I just really like his whole grizzled, realistic, but self-deprecating attitude. I wasn’t really expecting him to feel like such a big voice of reason, but he really was.

Though before I talk about his death specifically, I want to talk about the motive this time around. I really like how it’s technically the same motive as the first one in DR1, but it plays out really differently because everyone’s motives got mixed up. Which is why it’s going to be REALLY interesting to see how the hell someone got motivated to kill Ryoma if they got somebody else’s motive. It’s a really simple twist on the idea, but it does a whole lot to change the situation and make the motive less clear.

I feel like there was probably some tablet-swapping going on in the background that we didn’t get to see, even counting for how Kokichi’s plan for doing one big binge-watching party failed. The fact that he spent some amount of time alone with Gonta, and that he got caught up in some unexplained event while he was getting the tablets, is making me really suspicious about what’s going on. Maybe someone just managed to find and view their own motive and decided to kill, but that seems a little . . . simple. I wonder if the exact situation of who got which person’s motive will play into the logic of solving this case. Other than Shuichi having Kaito’s motive, all we know is that everyone had a different person’s motive, and that Gonta had Tsumugi’s. And I guess we also know that Maki never looked at whichever one she got. The fact that we got Kaito’s motive is really interesting to me, since it seems like it was done to make him less suspicious, since we as the player would know that Kaito never saw his motive, and so we’d assume that he had no motive to kill. But it still felt like this chapter was signalling his death in an almost Stephen King sort of way. I hope not.

As for the murder itself, it definitely seems that the issue will be more to do with figuring out how Ryoma’s body got into the water tank, than how he actually died. It’s fairly obvious that he died sometime during the night, or right before the magic show, and was drowned in the pool. The game just about spells that out though, with how Shuichi immediately guesses that the time of death being hidden meant that he probably died elsewhere. I mean I guess it could be, like, a double subversion, but I doubt it.

I feel like anyone who was present at the magic show is probably largely free of suspicion since I’m not sure exactly how anyone could have moved his body into the tank if they were standing elsewhere in the room. Since we saw the contents of the tank before the curtains got drawn over them, he had to have been actively moved into the tank during that one-minute time frame.

From what I remember, the characters not present at the magic show, excluding the currently dead people, were Kokichi, Maki, and Kaito, from what I remember, so those three are pretty suspicious, but Kaito seems like the only one of those three who probably did it, in a metagaming sense. I just can’t see Kokichi dying so soon, and Maki’s being set up as a suspicious character, so by process of elimination Kaito seems like the most suspicious of the group. I feel like it’d lead to a more interesting mystery if the killer was someone physically present in the room during the magic show, though. It almost feels too easy to suspect the people who weren’t there. And honestly I almost feel like them not being in the room at the time would have made it harder rather than easier to set the body where it ended up.

At least in terms of the people in the magic show, Himiko is obviously really suspicious. Funnily enough, Kokichi even spelled out the whole ‘she seems suspicious, which almost makes her seem NOT suspicious, but maybe that’s what she WANTS us to think’ thought process that I had in mind. It’s really easy to fall into that sort of loop, especially when you try and metagame it. Realistically speaking, she obviously had the best ability to physically set up the body, since she was in the tank at the time, but I doubt that she’d try and murder someone in a way where it’d be so easy to pin it on her.

Obviously a major part of the mystery here is going to involve her being stubbornly silent about explaining how the escape trick worked because she wants to tell us that magic did it, and so it’ll be hard to figure out the mechanics of how a body could have been moved there.

Though, wait, I guess it’s actually pretty easy to guess that Ryoma might have been hidden inside the small piranha tank, and got dropped into the water tank along with them. I’m not sure how they would have kept him from being eaten before the drop happened, but still, it’d be a convenient way for him to have gotten into the tank, especially since, as a timer-based mechanism, the killer didn’t need to be the one to, like, drag him into the tank. In which case literally anyone could be a suspect, whether they were in the room at the time or not, but I guess a big question then is figuring out how someone got the body there in the first place, especially if they weren’t involved in the preparation of the magic show.

I wish I could remember where Ryoma would have been during the night and morning before he died, and who would have had alibis and whatnot. Although, come to think of it, since even touching the pool water during night-time is forbidden, then if he was drowned in the pool I guess it must have been during the morning, since he would have died via the Exisals if he’d broken a rule. Which narrows down the time-frame to between 8am and whenever the magic show happened, which I think was very soon after that.

I wonder how much of a puzzle there’ll be to figuring out the exact mechanics of how he got drowned, though. The pool’s overall layout, and the detail put into describing the exact dimensions of the pool itself, and the detail about it being only half-full, make it seem like there must have been something more to it than just ‘someone dragged him there and shoved his face under the water until he died’.

If it’s Kaito, then it almost feels too easy, in a way. Especially with how I think he didn’t do a training session with Shuichi the night before the murder, and how he wasn’t there at the magic show. And as I said, the thing with Shuichi getting his motive feels like it might be a way to mislead the player from guessing that he did it. It really would confuse me if he did it though, since he didn’t see his motive. Unless Monodam actually gave everyone their correct tablets when he returned them all. We’ll see.

I think my main issue is just that I have no real idea who ELSE could have done it. Nobody else seems genuinely suspicious. I haven’t done the investigation yet, but as of now, we mostly just have a few characters who are being immediately framed as suspicious people, which feels like shorthand for ‘they didn’t do it’ at this point, and a whole bunch of people who have the same amount of evidence pointing at them. Kaito’s the only one who has any amount of signs pointing at him, though a lot of that’s me using a metagaming perspective, since I have no clue why he’d do such a thing.

I guess the only other particularly suspicious people would be, I dunno . . . Angie and Kirumi? Since Angie was working with Himiko on the magic show, and Kirumi helped with the curtains. That’s about it. I’m curious to see if my guesses might change once we have actual evidence. I hope it’s not quite as simple as that. I know that there’s no real chance of it being as much of a mindfuck as the first case, but it’d be lame to go right from that to a case where I immediately guess it correctly.

Oh, and before I forget, I have no goddamn clue what’s going on with that writing Gonta found. I just can’t even begin to formulate a guess about that. I don’t even know if it’ll be relevant to this case, or if it’s a hint toward a future plot point.

I think that’s about everything worth going over. Judging by how chapter one went, I might do the same thing and play both the investigation and the trial tomorrow [with a break in-between to write about the investigation before I do the trial], but I might take a break tomorrow and do it the day after since I have something else I need to do sometime over the next few days. It might work better to take a break after the end of this chapter, though. We’ll see.

#murasaki rambles #danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers #I probably shouldn't be surprised that these posts are consistently turning out to be pretty long

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pinelife3 · 7 years

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Montezuma 2EEE

This is MF DOOM on the Jake One track 'Get 'Er Done':

Make no mistake son, it's Jake One, he makes beats well like I likes my steaks done with sauteed onions and hella worcestershire, a gush of beer to wash it down.

First of all, whew that internal rhyme! Worcestershire//gush of beer. Yes! I feel like only MF DOOM can do this shit. I read a really interesting write up on MF DOOM from Ta-Nehisi Coates recently. Coates seems like the nicest guy ever - he's so smart but also completely unpretentious. He writes for Marvel and The New Yorker and seems to easily move between those worlds. (I was in a comic book shop today and feeling kind of out of place but the bald, bearded goth guy behind the counter was super nice, and declared the book I put on the counter an “awesome read” and then he recommended some other stuff to me as well. This is a wildly irrelevant anecdote - was just thinking about comics.) Anyway, Coates talks about DOOM, but also his own experience as a hip hop fan:

I kept the assembled works of Wu-Tang Clan on repeat and stewed, convinced that somewhere around 1998 hip-hop had run out of things to say. I was not alone. Disaffected music fans began to refer to the halcyon days of the eighties and nineties—when every rapper had a d.j., and label owners didn’t vamp in videos, confusing themselves with artists—as “the Golden Era.”

We were the kind of fundamentalists that haunt every genre of popular music. By the end of the nineties, we had started seeking a sound that offered something other than guns, girls, and drugs. Some of us found neo-soul. Others got lost in our parents’ jazz records. And still others were radicalized and turned to U2 and Björk.

Not to be picky, but I feel like Wu-Tang talks about guns, girls and drugs plenty. But they also talk about the Shaolin, martial arts and poverty and I guess that's the difference. Anyway, I never knew why DOOM wore the mask, but he says:

I wanted to get onstage and orate, without people thinking about the normal things people think about. Like girls being like, ‘Oh, he’s sexy,’ or ‘I don’t want him, he’s ugly,’ and then other dudes sizing you up. A visual always brings a first impression. But if there’s going to be a first impression I might as well use it to control the story. So why not do something like throw a mask on?

Huh. This other musician I like, Brock Berrigan (he makes really nice beats -you should check him out), always wears a chicken head mask - possibly for reasons similar to DOOM's. For me, that reasoning doesn't check out though, because aren't people obsessed with unmasking? I guess if nothing else it creates an iconic image around your act without that having to literally be your face the way it is with most other artists. ANYWAY, I guess lyrics don't need to be technically amazing like DOOM's to be entertaining - this dude Open Mike Eagle has some good lines. From his track "Ziggy Starfish (Anxiety Raps)":

I log into my Twitter page And start bending over like Gollum This dumb cred is like crack rock And I never seem to hit bottom

Sweet Gollum reference - I had to look this one up. The "bending over" kind of threw me: I thought he was maybe saying something about hoes on social media but then why would he be bending over? Then I thought maybe he was saying he was gay and hoeing on social media himself but it still seems weird to invoke Gollum in that context, right? I like Gollum as much as the next person (i.e. a lot), but I would not be super keen to draw comparisons between his appearance and my own (although we do share the same sickly pallor and blue eyes - plus, I too have spent many years living in a cave). According to Rap Genius (and the line's context - I am truly an idiot for not getting it sooner. Maybe I just wanted it to be something sexual to do with Gollum) he's just saying that he's addicted to Twitter and the praise/attention it affords him, similar to how Gollum is addicted to the ring (and crouching).

From age 18 - 21 I was super into Fleet Foxes (I think they hold up. They're pretty irresistible, right?). They have this song "Montezuma" which finishes like this:

Oh man what I used to be Montezuma to Tripoli Oh man oh my oh me

I guess I'm an idiot because when he sings "Montezuma to Tripoli" I always heard "Montezuma 2 Triple E" and imagined it stylised like this: Montezuma 2EEE. Tripoli obviously makes more sense but it never even occurred to me that he was saying that. I thought he was referring to something mysterious and abstract. (Writing it out like EEE makes it look like a bra cup size. I don't know if they do triple cup sizes (they do!). Even doubles make no sense to me. Okay, so I've quickly Googled it. If you're curious: it turns out that a double or triple letter cup size indicates that the boob being cupped sits somewhere between two cup sizes - so a DDD breast is bigger than a DD breast which is bigger than a D breast, and all of them are smaller than E. That's what this website says anyway. But this whole framework really falls down with the AA cup, because a AA is smaller than an A. It should at least be consistent. I've been wearing bras for years (big shot coming through) and am only now learning about all of this. To be honest, I am incredibly guesstimate-y with my bra shopping: band size is pretty consistent but cup size swings wildly across the alphabet. Should probably get fitted but I feel awkward being fondled by a shop assistant. Plus, it's not like I walk into a bra shop and immediately think that the shop attendants have great breasts - why should I take their advice?)

Montezuma 2EEE: I imagined some weird website which was techy and totally opaque to me, but also somehow involved Aztec emperors. I kind of want to make a weird, pointless website ("isn't that what this blog is, Kath?") because I have pinelife.net and nothing is happening there - I post all my Pinelife blog posts there too (which I know is a real waste of effort - my time is worth nothing so I don't mind wasting that) but I kind of prefer Wordpress' text editor to Tumblr's so it has that advantage. I found this really weird website (please please check it out) a while ago via the House of Leaves subreddit and found it so intriguing and exciting. I don't know why, but I had this insane rush of adrenaline while I was exploring the website. It was cool. Maybe I should make a weird, labyrinthine, pointless website of my own: it'll have shitty navigation, the font and background will be the same colour, possibly other things will be wrong with it too. It'd be something to do anyway. Maybe instead of making a book object I could make a website object - is that a thing? This might be a good way to waste some (more) of my time anyway. I do kind of want to make something. I’ve been bored with blogging for a while. Or, I don’t know - I enjoy doing it and looking back on my old posts (out of the vault: remember this one about cynicism and church? I was so proud of that. Weirdly, my favourite post from last year is this stupid one about pizza which was really low effort) but I don’t know if there’s anything I’ve written in the last year that I’m that proud of. The year went really fast and I feel like I’ve change a bit (or maybe a lot, I’m not sure).

Montezuma2eee.com is available. Hmmm. I already have pinelife.net. Is it greedy to want another domain? I doubt Montezuma2eee is going anywhere (but I’d feel like quite the fool if someone did take it from me - I can’t really be the first to think it’s 2EEE - it literally sounds exactly like it). Anyway, I should play around on pinelife.net for a bit before making the $0.99 commitment to a new domain.

Urgh. I’m an idiot. I nuked pinelife.net and all of the images I’ve uploaded to Wordpress there are gone and I’m lazy and never bothered to upload them to stupid tumblr, I just copied them and now they’re gone. I hate myself. Why didn’t I think for like half a second before deleting everything? Plus, there must be a better way to delete Wordpress beyond FTPing in and trawling through all my folders and deleting anything with a wp prefix. What happens if I just delete everything, like all the folders, and just start from scratch? I’ve forgotten how all this works. (This blog post is a real, rambling steam of consciousness. If I had any editorial credibility I would not publish this thing.)

Hey, talking about me trying to be creative: I was just hunting around my writing folder (basically untouched since 2015) and found this monstrosity I made to mourn the demise of Google Reader (wtf is/was wrong with me?). Jesus I have no memory of making this. Troublingly, I feel very pleased with this thing and its weirdness (obviously if I was genuinely embarrassed I wouldn’t share it here). This would have been 2013.

Also, I won’t post this, but I found an old poem I wrote (lame) in 2012 for uni which is all bullet points and features the word “pre-cum” in the first line. 22 year old me: why?

More? This is the start to a novel I was writing when I was 22/23:

Sirens by the swamp. The river doesn’t move in the summer heat: green carpet of scum across the surface. Two police cruisers are parked on the grass, another blocks the footpath. An officer unfurls yellow tape.

In a local 7/11 the Slurpee machine releases its hold on life and a stickiness of Cola flavoured low calorie slush spills forth. Potato salad is left to putrefy at a hundred backyard barbeques. In a thousand shitty sedans the steering wheel is too hot to hold. In a million armpits sweat prickles through dark hair to find cool air.

The body is partially submerged in the swamp. Obscured by slime and dark water, her hair is tangled in water grass, an eel nuzzles her cheek. From the waist down she is naked, seething with ants and flies. There is a tattoo of a dragon on her hip. If there was a lot of blood it’s now vanished into the mud. Someone has performed a riverside hysterectomy: it was not tidily done.

Sirens by the swamp. Five girls stand in the shade under the bridge: jutting hips, bare feet, iPhones, string bikinis, denim shorts. One pops gum as a police officer asks her preliminary questions. Another discretely photographs the crime scene with her phone. Their families are not expecting them for lunch. It’s Werribee and it’s Christmas day.

****

ppl made a new word for wh@ happened. they said th@ she had been uncunted. 2 b fair it was pretty bad nd even sum of tha sirens said they thought a line had been crossd. dead girl wasn’t even from werribee. actually th@s probably why she was dumb enough 2 go down by tha river

the thing th@ made me haha was th@ channel 10 made such a big deal about her being found by tha sirens b/c theyre young girls and tha news ppl tried to make out like its not a safe town 4 girls nd like girls shouldnt go out alone nd they tried to use tha sirens as an eg of young women in peril. but it was like oh man have u got it wrong. those river girls are bad

honestly werribee is fine so long as ur not fool enouf 2 go down by tha river. th@ is the ao for sirens nd eeeeevery1 nos not to go their less they want they dick sucked nd there future ruined. haha 4 real the news crews + police r lucky they didnt get uncunted 2

#MF DOOM #Jake One #Ta-Nehisi Coates #Gollum #Google Reader #Fleet Foxes #open mike eagle #Brock Berrigan

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