#its fundamentally the exact same game with a different controller so what the fuck

[ammoniteflesh]

hey, cumbiazevran here—

1 for all, 12 for Ghila, 11 for Threnody, and 8 for Maryam

Hey hey hey :D

a song I associate with my muse’s personality.

GHILA: Knowledge, by Seeming. It’s the defiance, the barely-submerged exhaustion, the bitter glee of it all. This is a very Corruptor song – Ghila never knew quite how far the ripples of her decision to corrupt the Ashes would spread. If she had, I suspect she would’ve made the exact same choice. And she continues making that choice, again and again. She will investigate the Blight. She will splinter from the Wardens. She will meddle in politics. She will bear witness to the cruelty in the world and do everything she can to make it better – and if that means the weight of the establishment crushing down on her, if that means she’s hated, so be it. She’s read the terms and conditions.

THRENODY: Primadonna, by MARINA (but specifically the acoustic version). I also considered Venus Fly Trap – for the anxious girlboss energy that is so crucial to Threnody – but no, it has to be this one. I like the acoustic version because it feels more isolated, somehow. Thren is terminally alone, even when surrounded by people. And the glamour, the glitz, the bombast is all one big attempt to distract herself from that. Who needs an authentic connection to the world when you’re so talented? Who needs work that feels meaningful when you’re so beautiful? And in these little moments of almost frantic piano beats, you get a sense of the *panic* and the *urgency* lurking beneath. She knows she can’t keep this up. She’s getting tired.

MARYAM: Icicles, by the Scary Jokes.

This is a late-game moment for Maryam, but I feel it gets to something at the core of her character throughout. God, it’s at once so heartfelt and so fundamentally immature. This complete refusal to listen or change. This total belief that you are correct. You are so correct, in fact, that you’ve become something wonderful. Nobody has ever been as Right as you are at this moment. And any attempt to convince you otherwise can only be based on jealousy. But then there’s that line about shame – and Maryam has carried so much shame throughout her life. That’s what’s so appealing about giving herself over to the fantasy of being Andraste’s Herald – she can leave all that behind. Everybody who ever tried to put her down was Wrong. They are the villains, and she is the righteous one. Maryam remains calm and cold and sharp, because to do otherwise would be to admit to the shades of grey in the world. And if the people she wronged didn’t deserve it, what does that say about her?

12. a song that my muse might listen to when angry GHILA: Until It Doesn’t Hurt, by Mother Mother.

This is the dedicated ‘feelings about anger’ song on Ghila’s playlist, and I think she’d vibe with it. At the core of her anger, in the end, is love and hurt and the desperate need to feel a little more in control. But as a child, whenever she let that anger out, bad things followed. And as an adult, she is dedicated to Elgar’nan – her anger is holy, so it must be worthy. So she does a lot of bottling up, until the moment demands its release. 11. a song that reminds my muse of their family

THRENODY: Eat You Alive, by the Oh Hellos.

This was actually the very first song on the Thren playlist! (It has since been removed for reasons of flow but shh.) The seed of her character was me thinking about the relationship between Malcolm and a mage Hawke – this poor guy who’s a first-time dad and also an apostate trying to teach this child to use their magic in a way that won’t get them possessed or caught or killed. I can’t conceive of that kind of pressure. And Malcolm – my version of Malcolm anyway – has next to no teaching experience and even if he did, Circle mages weren’t responsible for preventing possession. That was the Templars’ job. The only model he has for this is that of his oppressors. How does he do this differently? How the fuck does he do this, full stop?

In terms of actual song content. Threnody desperately wants adventure and story; Malcolm lived a dramatic romance that left him on the run in a foreign land. This is his doomed attempt to warn her away from that.

8. a song that makes my muse feel nostalgic MARYAM: Sun Bleached Flies, by Ethel Cain.

Sadly, the Maryam backstory is tightly under wraps until I decide to drop a certain bombshell. So I cannot say much about this. But this is The Song for her life in Ostwick – specifically, her looking back at that time at a later stage. It is also direct inspiration for her relationship with her father. Take from that what you will! :)

#cumbiazevran #speak faust #ghila mahariel #threnody hawke #maryam trevelyan

[dirt-grub]

why am i literally so fucking bad at mario superstar baseball

#i was SO FUCKING GOOD at mario super sluggers what is happening to me #i suck so bad. i cant get a single run #connor talks #its fundamentally the exact same game with a different controller so what the fuck

[gunnerpalace]

Hello, what do you think about that announcement about Bleach?

You know, the saddest day in my life was November 8, 2016, the day Donald Trump won the Electoral College and became the president-elect. (I say that with such specificity because he did not win the vote.) I wasn’t sad because Hillary Clinton lost (although I think she wouldn’t have done either much better or worse than Barack Obama). But I was sad.

I cried. As a 30 year-old man, I cried for hours. I cried at a loss of innocence. That innocence wasn’t the nation’s, as America has long had many, many flaws and has committed many, many crimes. Indeed, the country itself was founded on flaws and crimes.

The innocence I mourned was mine. I had, much like Barack Obama, sort of tacitly believed in the arc of history bending toward justice, as though we were watching a story whose plot would eventually, haltingly, carry us toward a just and fair conclusion. That the future was bright. That, as imperfect as we are and have been, we were at least improving. That people were fundamentally good.

That idea died that night. The words of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now convey it well:

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile: a pile of little arms. And I remember I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.

What I came to realize was, having grown up in a single-parent military family, having moved from base to base, having lived overseas at a young age, that my idea of America was very different from that of most Americans.

To me, America was great things and works. America was the Saturn V lifting off from Cape Kennedy with an American flag on its side and the letters “USA” scrolling by. America was a flag on the Moon. America was the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. America was power and reach. It was the stenciling of “United States” on the side of a B-52. It was a Minuteman III sitting latently, ominously, in a silo. It was USAMRIID containing an Ebola outbreak. It was aircraft carrier battle groups patrolling the oceans.

I came to realize that people, ordinary people, were never part of my vision. And it was people, ordinary people, who had failed to live up to that vision. And that my vision had, in many ways (really most) been an illusion to begin with. For all its rhetoric, America is just a country like any other, simply more powerful. And its citizens are also like those of any other: selfish, ignorant, frightened, foolish, hypocritical, self-betraying, racist, misogynist, misanthropic. They were exactly what Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama had called them: “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people.”

In the time since, I have hearkened to the other part of Kurtz’s monologue:

And then I realized, like I was shot—like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius! The will to do that: perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres—these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who have children, who are filled with love—but they had the strength—the strength!—to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement. Without judgement! Because it’s judgement that defeats us.

The people who are in charge (and mark the exactitude of my words, for they are not in control, or in command, or any such other thing) operate by exactly this sort of logic. They do not care. The people out there do not care. They do not care because to them none of this is real, in a sense. This is all a kind of aesthetic position. It is about style, largely taken on as a disguise in the course of making money and lining their pockets. (As an aside, it is beyond ironic that COVID-19 has done more to bring capitalism to its knees, save the planet, uncover the rot at the core of our social safety net, and to unmask the incompetence of our politicians than any group of any persuasion, be it socialists, environmentalists, the media, or whomever else.) And the underlings that they have brainwashed and mobilize like zombies, the “common person,” they care even less. To them, it is wholly aesthetic. It is all just for show.

The pitilessness of this all, the remorselessness, the sheer ruthlessness and indifference, is something I have noticed. Contra Kurtz, the men who are at the top of this world are not moral. And unlike Kurtz, I do judge. I will sit in judgment until I am dust in the wind.

I cannot possibly even begin to explain to you, in English or in any other language ever devised by humans, how much I hated it all. How much I hate it still. I cannot even begin to tell you how much hate I hold. I cannot tell you how black my rage is, or how red my vengeance would be were I allowed to exact it without restraint. I cannot tell you how vast and terrible the darkness within me is now. However, the words of the Allied Mastercomputer from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream are effective in giving a hint:

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

Having said that, I do also know an effective strategy when I see one. And I have seen the effectiveness of these people.

Right about now, I imagine you’re confused. You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with Bleach.

I explain all this in large part to compare and contrast the large with the small. The termination of Bleach obviously came before Trump’s election. It did not make me cry. I won’t say it didn’t affect me, or that it didn’t hurt, but I didn’t cry. I did not mourn to the same extent as I have mourned for my country, or for humanity. It did put me into a funk, for several years even. It hurt.

But what hurt more was seeing what it did. I saw how it hurt people. I saw how it broke them, as I would later break. I saw how it broke their spirits. I saw how many of them simply left, choosing to cast aside something that, in Marie Kondo’s words, no longer sparked joy. I mourn their loss, while I acknowledge their wisdom. And while, in the aftermath, new friendships were formed and new things were created, you could still see the pain. You can still see it.

I am not very personally affected by what Trump does, to be honest. I am beyond outraged at it, but it is something of an academic matter in my personal life. This, though, I felt, because I watched it firsthand, up close and personal.

It made me really fucking angry!

I resolved myself, at that point in time, that I would be the last Bleach fan. I would stay, even after everyone had left, and I would make this franchise mine. I would make this story mine.

So here we are, almost four years later, and it’s coming back in animated form.

I don’t feel the need to discuss Thousand Year-Blood War itself. I have made my position abundantly clear that it is a rancid piece of shit as far as writing goes. To go over all its innumerable deficiencies, failings, and flaws, would (as I have said recently) require an official government tome’s worth of dissection and analysis. As a piece of literature it is a failure. It is the kind of shounen equivalent of 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina or Maria. And while Bleach was certainly not the first franchise to fail in its finale, it certainly deserves to be ranked among things such as How I Met Your Mother, Mass Effect 3, and HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones when it comes to All-Time Failures in Media.

Having said that, the truth is that it simply isn’t worth the effort to break it down in detail. Oh, I have tried, yes, I have picked and chipped at it for years in my own ways. But it isn’t worth the time to dissect any further.

And an anime is not going to change that unless they radically depart from the manga, which I doubt they will do. If anything, an anime will simply highlight all of the innumerable flaws even more brightly.

And it will not change anything. Certainly not for me. I was already planning a post talking about the concept of “canon” and how it is  outmoded in the age of Disney’s Star Wars, Star Trek Picard, and J. K. Rowling earnestly insisting that wizards just drop trow and shit on the floor before magicking it away, but that will take some time to finish and it is sort of tangential to the point here.

So, to get back to your actual question, only four things about this are really of interest to me:

I am displeased about seeing people excited for something that is objectively a rancid piece of shit, and not enthused that I will be unable to escape it without locking down my feed. But I am also not The Good Taste Police. It is not my responsibility to care what people like or why.

I am once again seeing people hurting. I don’t like that whatsoever, but there is very little I can do about it. Whatever perspective I have gained, emotionally, isn’t likely to be helpful to them. Wisdom, such as it is, cannot be taught.

I find myself wondering about the influx of people who will come into the fandom, and who will be more than likely sorely disappointed by the travesty that is that arc. (It’s going to be good news for fan fic writers, honestly.)

It has made me understand things all the more fully.

What do I mean by that last part? Well, I have been only sort of joking lately that the people I most relate to as an adult are Col. Kurtz as mentioned above, Agent Smith from The Matrix, Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher, and Mike Stoklasa from Red Letter Media.

But upon reflection, I realize it isn’t limited to them. I have also really come to feel like I understand Ichigo. And I have even come to feel that I understand Kubo, through Khan.

I have come to understand Kurtz’s “madness”:

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!

I have come to understand Smith’s desire to escape:

I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.

I have come to understand Mike’s efforts to hold back the tides:

Mike: Captain Picard has never done a wacky accent—Rich: THEY DON’T CARE! THEY DON’T GIVE A SHIT! Mike, we are the only people that care anymore!Mike: Do you remember that—Rich: Picard is the guy who does this. [faceplam gesture] He’s—This is, this is Captain Picard’s character now for an entire—for like two generations, we’re fucking old! He's—he’s the guy who does this [facepalm gesture], and fuckin’ Patrick Stewart wants to put on an eye-patch and dance around an alien bar? Go ahead motherfucker! We’ll write that in!Mike: I-I-I hearken back to a wonderful little moment on Star Trek—Rich: Patrick Picard wants to ride a dune-buggy? Fuck yeah! Here’s a dune-buggy!Mike: Do-Do you remember—Rich: That’s how much respect they have for, for the franchise!Mike: All I’m tryin’ to say is Captain Picard would not do a wacky accent!Rich: NO, OF COURSE HE WOULDN’T! OF COURSE CAPTAIN PICARD WOULD—CAPTAIN PICARD ISN’T HERE, MIKE!Mike: He’s not there.Rich: HE’S NOT HERE! That’s all an illusion, hahaha!

I have come to understand Geralt’s tiredness.

I have come to understand Ichigo’s feelings of powerlessness in the face of the injustices of the world.

I have come to understand Khan’s rage:

I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on… hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her; marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet… buried alive! Buried alive…!

In this last quote, I have also truly come to understand Kubo. I understand him because I want to hurt him, as he so thoroughly, persistently, and remorselessly wants to hurt us, the fans of his work. I want to go on hurting him, as he goes on hurting us. I understand him perfectly, because I want to pay him back exactly in kind.

And the best way to begin to hurt him is to let his efforts wash over me without even batting an eye. To stand in defiance. To not give a single fuck.

Even with these understandings, for me, nothing has really changed from almost four years ago. The only thing that is different is that the timeframe until I am the last man standing has been extended a little. That’s it.

You want to know my thoughts? They are simple, and they boil down to two quotes. One is again from Khan:

Joachim: They’re still running with shields down.Khan: Of course! We are one big, happy fleet! Ah, Kirk, my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish that is best served cold? It is very cold… in space!

And the other is from JFK:

Don’t get mad. Get even.

#I Have Spoken. #Asks

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 121 Review

TFW you’re relying on someone to pull through and they’re failing badly.

Has anyone ever seen JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure? SPOILERS

One of the villains is this guy named DIO. He’s an asshole. 

DIO’s whole schtick is that he is obsessed with being dominant. In the clip, he assaults JoJo’s girlfriend to show his dominance over both her and JoJo.

In JoJo’s, people fight using spiritual manifestations of their own life essence. These manifestations are called Stands, and because they are a manifestation of the user’s essence, Stands are revealing in some way as to the nature of the user.

DIO’s stand is the World and it has the power to stop time. Being able to stop time is absolute domination, both physically and temporally. Physically because you can stop the world and fuck around with everything as you please, and temporally because you are no longer subservient to the constant flow of time. The world stops for no man, except you.

Now Eren is fittingly in the same boat, except worse because while DIO could only stop time, Eren can control the course of events. He can see the future and affect the past. His domination over the world is (theoretically) absolute.

I don’t know what Eren’s plan is, but we get a taste of it this chapter. Zeke asks him point blank what he hopes to accomplish and Eren’s response is the most disturbing thing ever.  

“If people try to take my freedom away, I will take theirs away.”

My God.

This statement completely encapsulates Eren as a person. This is the rambling of a deranged lunatic. Worse, even. It’s the thinking of a stupid kid.

“Eren, why did you hit Little Timmy?”

“Because he hit me!”

You cannot hit someone just because they hit you. It doesn’t work that way. You are allowed to hit back in self-defense, but not to exact revenge. Both actions are the same, but the state of mind backing either action is the key difference. The former is the mindset of someone trying to protect themselves. The latter is the mindset of someone trying to hurt someone else.

That’s the faultiness of Eren’s thinking in principle, and it’s even worse in practice.

Eren believes that them trying to kill him gives him license to kill them. Nope, wrong.

Human life is, of course, inviolably valuable, and therefore killing in itself is always wrong. You can kill in self-defense, because the point in that case isn’t the killing itself, but the preservation of your own life. Killing for its own sake is appalling.

Ironically, this deranged narcissist perfectly illustrates why this tit-for-tat way thinking is dangerous. Restraint? Graciousness? Mercy? Can Eren comprehend these concepts?

It’s just so stunning how childish this whole thing is. Eren is opposing a king who would force his will on the future, but since Eren is doing the exact same thing, I can only assume he doesn’t think this is intrinsically wrong.

No, it’s not that Fritz’s vow is wrong, it’s that the same mechanism isn’t being used in service of Eren’s goals. Eren doesn’t think the vow is wrong in itself, he just opposes it because it’s another limit on his freedom.

There is no reason to believe Eren has any boundaries whatsoever. Or any shame for that matter. 

This “me-centric” form of morality is called egoism. It’s an utterly disreputable theory that no one defends. It’s the same with the children he killed in Liberio. Killing is wrong, unless it helps me, in which case it is good. By defining what’s good and bad in these terms, Eren reveals himself as the egomaniac man child that he is.

And yet.

Eren is the one who lectures Zeke in this chapter!

This is what Eren has reduced me to, defending Zeke. Why is this happening to me?

Zeke is supposedly the pathetic one, because he has, you know, an ideology. It’s a stupid AF ideology that is completely indefensible, so it is pathetic, but not the way Eren thinks.

Zeke’s opposition to Grisha is incidental to his ideology. It’s not that Zeke is opposing Grisha out of spite, which would truly be pathetic. Zeke opposes Grisha because their respective worldviews are incompatible.

Meanwhile Eren is saying he should be allowed to do mean things to people because they did mean things to him.

The idea that people can just kill others, simply because they tried to kill you is fundamentally lawless. Not to take the fun out of superheroes, but vigilante justice isn’t actually justice. It’s totally illiberal to have one person hold the power to judge, convict, and sentence another.

But it is also totally in character for Eren to support that idea. With Eren, it’s all about power.

I’ve often compared Eren to our 45th president. Whatever the Eren stans say, that is an apt comparison. Eren’s talk of taking freedom from those who try to take his is not unlike something Trump would say. 

They are both narcissistic man children with an insatiable lust for dominance. Slighting them creates an imbalance that they must make right, and the world is off kilter until that is done. It’s that one itch they must scratch.

Eren fights because, to be blunt, he wants the world to be his bitch and he will not settle for anything less than that. This is second nature to someone who says the things Eren says. If you think killing is justified just because they tried to kill you, then you obviously do not value human life.

At this point, Eren is undeniably similar to Zeke. He wants to bring his dream to fruition and anyone who gets in his way is just a pissant to be stomped on. 

Is Eren redeemed by his (apparent) concern for his friends? 

Nnnnope!

While friends do have certain obligations to each other, it is completely obscene to do the heinous things Eren’s done just for their sake. 

You cannot define the morality of your actions by how much they help a random group of people. Why are the lives of Eren’s friends worth any more than the lives of the people he’s killed?

The answer is that, all else being equal, they aren’t. 

You may care deeply for someone, but that does not justify a killing. 

Who is even the hero of this story anymore?

It can’t be Zeke, because his values are anathema to the series values. He may be the audience surrogate this time around, but I doubt fucking Zeke Jeager is going to be the hero when the final chapter comes around. 

Eren is theoretically the hero because his values broadly align with the story’s, but his actions are depicted in an almost devilish light. I always hoped the series would tackle the notion of fighting too hard for what you believe in, but…it’s too late for that now?

We’re in the final story arc. It’s weird to only just now be dealing with this meaty idea. Over 100 chapters of “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” and we’re just now getting to the “But not too hard.” part? There’s no way. 

Alternatively, this is just one final fake-out in the game of is-he-or-isn’t-he that Isayama has been playing since the Marley Arc. Is Eren evil, or isn’t he? Or maybe they’ll play it as “Can he be redeemed or can’t he?” 

Either way, I bet there’ll be some kind of change of heart from Eren soon. 

This chapter echoes a point made by Yelena about the titans and their relationship to humanity: that the titan powers will be abused by people because that is just the nature of things. So let’s unpack that.

King Fritz, speaking through Frieda, says that the power of the titans must not fall into human hands lest it be abused. This mirrors ongoing debates about how to deal with certain controversial weapons, such as nuclear weapons.

The (very) liberal position is that nuclear weapons should be banned completely because the risk of abuse is too great.  As per usual, the liberal position is taken by King Fritz.

The conservative position, which, once again, is the position the story sides with, is made more implicitly: that the titan powers can be a force for good, it’s just a matter of making sure only good people can access that power.

This conservative position is what underlies US policy towards North Korea and Iran. Those countries are rogue states that the US believes cannot be trusted. (Note, though, that the nuclearization of Iran is supported by Russia, a nuclear power.)

Personally, I believe nuclear weapons should be banned completely. Most countries are at least nominally supportive of the eventual, complete destruction of all nuclear weapons, and international norms have been evolving in that direction.

That is the contradiction of this issue: most people take the liberal position in the long term, but hold the conservative position in the short term.

This is just another reason to think that SNK will end with a ringing endorsement of nuclear weapons, with nary a nod to the need for eventual total disarmament.

See, ungodly amounts of power aren’t inherently bad, we just need special people to wield them for the public good.

Yeah, I get it, we need special people, but you know what? Frodo was special. The One Ring supposedly couldn’t corrupt him, but they still set out to destroy it. Because power on this scale is itself wrong.

Nuclear weapons aren’t the only possible parallel, though. Any controversial weapon will fit. In the United States there is a debate over regulating high powered weapons like the AR-15.

How do you handle such a thing? Do you ban the weapon completely, or just certain people from using it? I won’t wade into something as controversial as that here, though I will point out that the story clearly sides with the position of regulation over a total ban.

The scene in the cave also mirrors Japan’s current nuclear predicament. Japan has many outside rivals and threats, and Japan could build nuclear weapons if they wanted too. They have the technological capability, but in spite of the threat of North Korea, and the tense relations with China, the Japanese government chooses not to.

So, yeah, I’ve had the series pegged as leaning neoconservative and I still think that.

So what does the future hold?

Apparently, an event where Eren… becomes/does something. They both saw the same thing: a future where Eren is this OP chad of chads and a total boss. Grisha looks like he saw the worst thing imaginable. Eren looks like he just had an orgasm.

Since Eren is portrayed in a more sinister way this chapter, I am inclined to believe this future actually is a ghastly one.  

Before this chapter, my guess was that Eren wanted to destroy the world using the wall titans, but would somehow come around to using it the way Armin mentioned: defensively.

Having it be preordained that the future holds a version of Eren that people who aren’t Eren will think is abominable throws a wrench into that.

I wouldn’t bet against Isayama somehow finding a way to make it work though. The only other alternative is that this series ends in the most ironic way possible, with the deranged lunatic having his way and “freedom” finally being established.

#shingeki no kyogin #attack on titan #snk 121 #spoilers

[casualarsonist]

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla review

While perusing Metacritic for reviews on the new Assassin’s Creed clone, it struck me as interesting that the 7/10 reviews have dozens of downvotes and are buried, while myriad one-line 10/10 reviews have several dozen upvotes pushing them to the top of the default display. And given that the reviews labeled 'unhelpful' by the corporate shills were uniformly the ones that matched my own experience with the game, I decided to rise from the grave and write a substantive review that those treating the game like the second coming of Christ can band together and cry about to their heart's content. Because, to a discerning buyer, raising the ire of fanboys seems to be a rather clear mark of reliability.

But let’s not fuck around - in brief: if you liked Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, then you'll likely enjoy the skeleton of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Despite what you might have thought if you, like me, were influenced by the marketing, Valhalla is indeed another Unisoft game (that was a fortunate typo that I’m going to leave, as the company literally makes one game over and over again) that feeds from exactly the same trough as the one before it, and essentailly makes some small, less significant tweaks to the previous release that change the feeling of the game slightly, but not enough to make it feel fresh.

Mind you, this is coming from a person who, to my great and crippling shame, has had a long and pervaisive secret enjoyment of the company’s safe and often-mindless gameplay loops. Ubisoft games have been, I’m sad to say, my go-to pick up and play experiences. I hate it, and I hate the company, and I hate myself, but that’s the way it’s been for a the largest part of my life. And that’s how you know that I’m *RIGHT* when I say this game isn’t worth your time.

If you carry with you a sense of fatigue at the expansive and often-repetitive nature of Odyssey's content, then you might find yourself starting this game with that fatigue hanging over you as I did. To be clear - I loved Odyssey. It was the only AC game since 2013 that didn't categorically bore me long before the end. But it was huge and tiring, there can be no skirting around that fact. So the understanding that you're not playing a fundamentally different game sets in very quickly, and so does the exhaustion that Odyssey eventually gave way to, despite how fun it was. The feeling is mimicked here - Valhalla is fun as well, and it *is* a tweaked version of its predecessor. But it never, ever diverges enough to feel like much other than the exact same formula, and while I find that formula less worn-out than that of, say, the formula of the later 'old-style' AC games like Syndicate or Unity, it's still worn-out nonetheless.

Ubisoft is up to their old tricks, of course, and like so many releases in the series so far, Valhalla feels like a step slightly too far down the same road. This feeling is exactly what famously tanked Syndicate’s sales and forced the company to revamp for Origins. But we're 20-something games deep in the series now, so no matter what minor changes Ubisoft make to their releases, each new games holds a far-more-quickly diminishing set of returns for long-time players.

Which is to say that, while I managed to feel excited (for once) in anticipation of an experience I thought might honestly be different, Valhalla has ultimately been the game to convince me that the series has reached its natural end. It simply cannot be iterated anymore. Each new release needs to be wildly revamped or give up, because there's just not enough 'new' game here for a 90 dollar release. It's one of two dozen other games that all kind of feel the same, and one of three RPG-style games that already feel like they're being spat out of the Ubisoft-open-world-Build-O-Matic 2000 pipeline.

Which, y'know, if you're not tired of the other games, might be appealing. I 've already admitted that I like the mindlessness of the gameplay loop, and Valhalla offers a beautiful new setting with some fairly engaging story and gory combat. New additions like combat stamina remedy the juvenile button-mashing of Odyssey, but then, what little they try to change only works half as well as you’d hope it would. Combat controls themselves are rather clunky and lack the finesse needed to maintain a nice gameplay flow. You'll often find yourself getting struck by enemies simply because you hit a button one-too-many times. On lesser difficulties this is not so much a problem, but when you suffer a one-hit death because you press the attack button one single time too many it can be enraging. You can dodge to cancel actions, which gives the combat a welcome learning curve - you can get better in-game by improving as a player - but it isn't enough for the fighting to feel substantially less shallow, and in most ways, the aged game engine struggles to meet the demands of the system they've designed. And honestly, it's very likely that this is because the developers suffered horribly at the hands of company management during production.

It's devastating to know that you're playing a game that *feels* like it was made by overworked people. The reported crunch and abusive work conditions that people like Jim Sterling have been trying hard to draw awareness to is worn on Valhalla's sleeve more clearly than ever in the bugs, the glitches, the slapdash animations, the lack of innovation, and the clunky mechanics. This game was forced out before Christmas and could easily have benefitted from, among other things, months of extra development time. But that suggested solution ignores the fact that there's no saving a game created just to make money, by a company infamously cruel to its employees, with the tightest possible development schedule and the slimmest allowable window for innovation. It's a deep scar seen clear as day, but importantly given context by a knowledge of how the game was produced.

So why am I here? Because you may, like myself, find yourself uncertain as to what you’re missing out on, or willing to compromise your stated values out of curiosity or a long-standing enjoyment of the series. But even if you don’t care about the wellbeing of the people who make the things you enjoy, honestly, I don't think this product is worth the money. As a piece of software made by real human beings it’s a deep and insulting blow against workers. As a product, and removed from any of the more important social context in which it was created, it just ain’t that different from Odyssey, and all things considered, I honestly don't even think it's a 'better' game. It’s just another Assassin’s Creed game. 6/10

#assassin's #creed #valhalla #video marketing #review #pc #ps4 #ps5 #xbox #ubisoft #development #software #worker

[capracornia]

◌ MYSTIC MESSENGER: ANOTHER STORY OPENING ANALYSIS ◌ I’m a bit bored, so I’m going to just kind of analyze the intro for V’s route, because I l o v e these characters holy fuck. ◌ NOT! SPOILER! FREE! FOR ANY ROUTE! ◌ Line by line~ ◌ “In search of a shining ray” this is our opening image: a sunset silhouette of V. It’s beautiful, like him, but it’s also obscure. The lyrics mention him ‘searching’ for a shining ray, such as sunlight. Sun? Rika. He’s searching for Rika– but he’s also searching for his own ‘ray’, his independence and happiness. ◌ “Daffodil swaying beneath the blaze”. Daffodils are a big deal. Heck, it’s even the silhouette with the sky in the first image behind V. It’s repeated like a mantra that they mean self love– and that’s the purpose of V’s route. It isn’t liberation from Rika, or revenged, or justice to Searan. It’s about making V realize his own worth, and learning to love himself and others simultaneously. ◌ “Trying to bloom with all its might” isn’t it curious that Rika’s silhouette pops up? Like V, she’s an obscure character in the beginning of the game. You don’t actually know who she is, only that she founded RFA. Contrasting V’s light background, hers is dark but still beautiful. This is a very big nod towards the focus of their soliloquies– how V’s love is a blinding, relentless light, and how Rika’s darkness is something she is not afraid of, but embraces. They flourish in these environments, and die in the other’s, no matter how hard she tries to “bloom”, she’s unable to. ◌ “It pulls in all its heart” this could have two meanings, whether due to translation or I’m not understanding. Since before it was talking about blooming, it could mean it’s trying to pull apart and unveil itself, the “beautiful” part of the flower. She’s trying to open up to others. She’s trying to be this “beautiful” she doesn’t feel she is, and it’s taking all her strength. On the other hand, it could mean she’s pulling her heart, her emotions, inwards, in order to protect herself. ◌ “This, a song of dreams sweetly sung” the this they’re referring to is, of course, the game. The story. Dreams are often light, fluffy, and kind. That’s what we expected from the game (so hOW DARE YOU CHERITZ). ◌ “This, a song of memory lonely sought” It’s interesting that Zen and Jumin are the two present during this line. They’re presented as having nothing in common, being total opposites– hell, they even stand on opposite positions on the screen (Jumin left, Zen right, despite that probably being for positioning purposes) but at the same time, they share something fundamental to their characters: loneliness, just as they share the “light” background. Aside from Seven (who oh boy we’ll get into), they’re probably the loneliness in the game, but in completely different ways. Jumin’s surrounded by family, coworkers, and people who would kiss his shoes at the drop of a hat because of his wealth. But he’s lonely. He projects his feelings that are unrequited onto Elizabeth 3rd. He hates women because of his father, and hadn’t even thought about dating or befriending any. He only had V and Rika, one who left, and the other who seemed to pile up secrets. If it weren’t for all Seayoung’s backstory, he’s probably the loneliest of the RFA. Zen didn’t grow up surrounded by people. He ran away as a kid: no longer have parents actively in his life. He debuted as an actor when he was 16: he’s constantly switching stages, theaters, roles. Acting doesn’t let you make many friends, coworkers changing according to your scene and persona. I bet he didn’t have a real friend until Rika came along. Even though he’s egoistic and acts like he’s got everything perfect, he’s a lonely character. ◌ “Into the light the flower may flourish” Jaehee are also complete opposites. Trend much, Cheritz? Jaehee’s a relentless worker, strict, closed off, but kind. Yoosung’s a bit of a slacker, laid back, heart-on-sleeve, but can’t handle his emotions much better than a child can. These two have the most to learn. Not academically of course, they’re both smart. Jaehee’s step “into the light” for her to “flourish” is learning to treasure herself, socialize herself, and open up to others. To follow what she wants in life rather than what the deems is good enough (coughcoffeeshopcough). Yoosung’s flourishing comes with maturity, grief, and accepting that V is not perfect, but did try his best. Light also can mean truth. If they learnt the truth of everything that happened, would they flourish sooner? ◌ “It takes a push to make me perish” I’VE GOT A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THIS ONE. This has the Choi twins as our image, in their light/dark contrasting scheme, and notice something interesting about their positions (which I talked about w/ Jumin and Zen). They’re both in the middle, and they’re both looking towards the right (at least in the screenshot). They’re the exact same person, only one was brought into the light, and the other left to die in the dark. As for the lyrics, ‘perish’ can be used both literally and figuratively. It takes only a push– one small action, to wipe these two off the grid of existence. They’re illegitimate children. Nobody is supposed to know they exist. Seayoung works for a hacking company, and as such, changes his identities all the time. Searan lives in the Kint Eye cult, and isn’t recognized as a person by the outside world. One slip up and ‘707’ could disappear forever. One push, and all Ray, Unknown, and Searan will be destroyed with the bomb. Emotionally, they’re the same too. They’ve suffered so much in their life, it wouldn’t be hard to destroy them emotionally. Abuse them, mistreat them, and control them. They only seek comfort, assurance, and love, something they don’t find themselves worthy of. In one word, you could break their hearts, and make them ‘perish’. ◌ “Shall there be light, do forgive me” Rika, who knows the light will “kill” her and her devil, sings this to V. She’s apologizing that it will happen inevitably if there is “light” from V’s love. Forgive her for the acts it will drive her to commit. Forgive her for her devil. Forgive her for who she is. ◌ “Even the act I feign to protect me” This shows her in her masquerade outfit. This “act” she puts on is the act of kindness. She becomes an incredibly kind person who cares about others and only wishes the best because, if she doesn’t, her “devil” will control her to do awful things. It’s protecting her from her devil– but, it also protects her from the world. We don’t think kidnapping and drugging people is excusable, no matter the reason– with good thought, too, and it’s a good thing our society frown upon that. If Rika didn’t put on her act of happiness and love and let that control her push for a better world, she’d have started Mint Eye far sooner, reciting criticism and hate from the public. ◌ “Shall there be hope, flower shall blossom” Let me take a wild guess and say these flowers are daffodils. If there is hope, then the daffodil can bloom. If there is mistrust and doubt, it will wither and die. Now replace dandelion with its meaning of self love. If there is hope and trust in V, he will blossom and become a better man who will love himself. If we don’t, he will crumble and end up destroying himself. ◌ “Even if surrendering my everything in whole” we get it V. You’re a martyr. Throughout about 99% of the story, you hear V talking about his willing to sacrifice himself in order to save MC. He repeatedly begs Rika to leave MC alone in exchange for whatever she wants from him. He will give every limb, leg, and more for the safety of those he loved. It’s been this way since Rika. He promised her he’d love her regardless of how evil she was, if she hurt him and took everything she had. ◌ “Love tenderly this daffodil.” Back to self love, this is very self explanatory. Give V love. Whoa– but why is Rika in the picture then? You have to love both of them for a good ending. You can’t blame Rika and become rude and aggressive towards her. Not only is your goal making V love himself, you have to try and convince Rika to lover herself by getting the help she needs. Loving these daffodils will bloom to the good ending you paid 300 hourglasses and 11 days of hell for. ◌ “The sun is the mother of all.” I like that this one’s silent. Like the words, it’s a message unheard in the game, but still is prominent. The sun is Rika, and Rika is this “mother of all”. The whole damn game revolves around her. No matter who’s route you’re playing, you’re bound to wind up in some freaky stuff that Rika pulls. The guaranteed one being that Searan leads you to the apartment. Like the sun, she provides the “life” of the game, but she is also burning and bright and beautiful and destructive. Completely unattainable, you can’t save both her the RFA. ◌ Ah!! That was so long. I was originally going to post this on Instagram but I ran out of space after like, image no. 2. I had to smush them together for spacing purposes~ I’ve seen analyses floating around for this intro before, but I had a lot to say on my own!

#v mystic messenger #mysticmessenger #mm #mysme #jaehee #Jaehee Kang #jumin #Jumin Han #seven #searan #seayoung #luciel #707 #jihyun kim #yoosung #zen #Rika

[jacethebeltsculptor]

Magic the Voltron-ing

So, this is one mostly dedicated to @pidge-midge, because I hadn’t even thought of Voltron/MTG headcanons. A couple notes- 1, this applies only to Legendary Defender, and not the old Voltron. Second- I love this crossover so goddamn much you guys oh my god.  SHIRO FAVOURITE COLOURS:White/Green/Black FAVOURITE DECK:Abzan Midrange, any format it works in MISC:Shiro is a pretty plain Magic player. He’s courteous, kind, and offers any advice he can to other players. He likes Abzan because it offers him a range of tools to handle any threat, and a flexible game plan. He likes having options. Among the Paladins, he’s the resident best guy to playtest with, and he’s always got a way to help you improve. He’s also crazy good at manipulating opponents in Commander- nobody at the table wants to attack him, because he’s only going for the biggest threat at the table. Then he gets scary, and wins. KEITH FAVOURITE COLOURS:Red/White FAVOURITE DECK:Pauper R/W Metalcraft MISC:Keith is the resident aggro player among the Paladins. If you sit down across from him, you know he’s coming at you fast. He doesn’t really like Control or Midrange, or Combo, because they’re usually way. way more complicated than they need to be. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to play them- rather, it’s just way harder to optimize them. Plus, he likes the proactive element of always being on the front foot. He’s a bit intimidating to play against, thanks to his generally intense focus on the game, and one of the more competitive players on the team. He’s a mainstay of the top 4 at FNM, and as a result, the rest of the team tends to playtest against him to see if they can beat aggro. Keith’s favourite games are the ones that come down to the wire- where minute differences in sequencing and skill, rather than the luck of the draw, decide the outcome. As a result, Keith really, really likes Pauper. It’s a format where the cards are simple but powerful, and it takes deep knowledge of your deck to come out victorious. LANCE FAVOURITE COLOURS:Black/White/Red FAVOURITE DECK:Tariel, Reckoner of Souls EDH MISC:Dragons are awesome. Angels are super awesome. Demons are super mega hella awesome. Lance just likes playing with cool and cool sounding cards- from removal spells with badass names to cards with some of the most intensely cool abilities, Lance loves them all. He’s really competitive, and he’ll try super hard to win, but all of his decks are based around the coolest card in his possession. Right now, he’s in love with Indomitable Creativity, and has been trying to break it since it was spoiled. He wants to win, but to do so by playing the coolest deck imaginable. 2.00$ mythics are a staple of Lance’s decks, and while they don’t *normally* work, it’s a thing of beauty when they do. He’s preview season buddies with Hunk- the two will gush together about how the new card spoiled is “the most broken thing ever” or “how could they print something this good?”. Lance has a personal distaste for Blue mages though- countermagic is almost always his Achilles heel, and he still doesn’t really know how to play around it. He beat Keith one time- literally one time- and won’t shut up about it.   PIDGE FAVOURITE COLOURS:Blue/White/Black FAVOURITE DECK:A dozen flavours of Gifts Ungiven  MISC:Pidge, while not the most competitive of the group, is probably the best at the game. She’s won every “what will win the pro tour” bet four years running, and the only person still betting against her at this point is Lance. Her grasp of technical play is absolutely stunning, and she’s always thinking of new angles to hit the format. She loves Gifts Ungiven decks because they’re built under fundamentally different rules than the rest of Magic, and offer consistency and a control/combo gameplan to tweak to her liking. In Commander, she’s known as the one that durdles until she just plain wins, and her Sydri deck is feared around the galaxy. Pidge, like Keith, usually hits the top of the stands, but she’s just as happy to lose an intriguing game. She’s also got a deeper understanding of the rules than just about anybody, and had planned to become a Judge at some point. Also, Magic was pretty popular in her family- she and Matt would play for *hours* with his collection. She has a very fond memory of them building deck after deck with his cards, playing one game with them, and tearing them apart to do something new. Their parents made them clean up the mess, but it took hours.  HUNK FAVOURITE COLOURS:White/Red/Green FAVOURITE DECK:Mayael of the Anima Zoo EDH MISC:Hunk is the biggest timmy out there. He loves ramp decks and big creatures, and makes stompy sound effects whenever he attacks. He’s not really concerned with winning, only having an awesome time. He mourns when his creatures die, and combs through spoiler season for new “friends”. He’s named every single creature in his Mayael deck, and has a page in his binder dedicated to the cards he’s retired from it. He doesn’t play much 60 card, save for a couple of casual decks, but he’s always organizing Commander events. He loves coming up with crazy formats, too! One of his game nights involved using the training deck to create holograms of spells and creatures, while in another, a rule was made that you had to charades your way through all of your game actions. That said, Hunk is like, everyone at the LGS’s best friend, and often invites people over for a night of Commander and food. Most of his sleeves have a crumb or two in them, so he replaces them often to keep them from getting grody.  ALLURA FAVOURITE COLOURS:Blue/White FAVOURITE DECK:Blue/White Dragons, featuring the Ojutai clan MISC:Allura learned to play from Hunk, and she *loves* the story. He showed her a bunch of Ojutai dragons, and she thought they were gorgeous. She doesn’t really get the rules perfectly, which is fine, since she mainly plays with Hunk, and a lot of the cultural background we have to help us understand, she doesn’t have. Still, she loves the game, and she listens to Hunk tell her about the plot and the Gatewatch with absolute glee. Her favourite cards all have really striking artwork, and Watercourser from Origins is a personal favourite. Allura might be super-casual, but she’s learning quickly, and Hunk wants to help her build a Commander deck soon. Plus, she’s always happy to have a bonding experience for Team Voltron.  CORAN FAVOURITE COLOURS:Red/White FAVOURITE DECK:Boros Battalion/Soldier Tribal MISC:Like Allura, Coran learned from Hunk. He’s built a Boros soldier deck from Hunk’s RTR block draft chaff for his military pride- he calls it a victory for the Battalion when he wins. Coran has had to be talked out of holding a memorial service when somebody blocked his Captain of the Watch. Coran will literally never concede, ever, and he’s known for his impressive bravado when flunging- that is to say, attacking with everything because you lose anyway. He and Allura also play together, sometimes, and their enthusiasm and passion for the game is always a nice reminder for the rest of the team by they play.  BONUS ROUND  ZARKON:This guy only plays the exact same list that won the last Pro Tour. His only Commander deck is Yidris Ad Nauseam, and it’s all foil. He has a Powered, all-foil cube, the best Modern decks, and a trade binder so stuffed with money that it has its own page on MTGGoldfish. He’s the worst guy to play with- he’s rude, gets pissy when he loses- a problem made even worse by the fact that he ALMOST NEVER LOSES- and responds to most new spoilers with “It isn’t good enough for Constructed”. He wins almost every event he joins, and usually does so undefeated. He probably plays Lantern Control on MTGO, too. Fuck this guy. 

#mtg #magic #magic the gathering #voltron #voltron legendary defender #vld #keith #shiro #pidge #lance #allura #coran #hunk #okay these were so friggin fun to write...

[adambstingus]

Puberty Sucks But Second Puberty Is Just The God-Awful Worst

As you somehow keep holding on when the rodeo horse of life tries to buck you off so it can face its ultimate foe (the rodeo clown of life), you’ll eventually reach a kind of second puberty. The first time, you transformed butterfly-like from child to slightly grosser child. Once all your body’s jagged edges and weird lumps settle into place, you enjoy a prime that’ll last about eight minutes, and you’ll be too drunk or high to remember it.

Second puberty will hit between 28 and 33. The physical changes you’ll undergo — the ones I’m experiencing now — aren’t too dramatic, but are different enough to be unsettling. It’s a harbinger of horrors to come. It’s like Batman getting that vision of the Earth reduced to a dusty wasteland controlled by Darkseid in Batman v. Superman. I want to be Batman in that scenario, but it’s become increasingly apparent that I am the wasteland. As evidence of my physical dilapidation, I present the following.

5

After 9 I Can — And Will — Fall Asleep Anywhere

I’ve been afflicted with a punctual form of narcolepsy. No matter how caffeinated I am, I will fall asleep instantly if certain easily met conditions are present:

1) I have recently eaten dinner after having made dinner, which I do every night.

2) Most of my weight is heaped onto something comfortable. The definition of what can be comfortable is wide enough to include leaning on a wall coated with satin paint (the most comfortable of paints).

3) It is at least 9 p.m.

When those three elements combine, I involuntarily enter, exit, and then reenter a deep state of unconsciousness that I will deny having entered if caught in the act. Vehement denial, punctuated with wild fits of slurred vulgarity, is another symptom of this recently acquired disorder.

g-stockstudio/iStock When one of my molecules touches one couch fiber after a late dinner.

If left untreated, the debilitating sleepiness can lead to waking up in a frightened daze at 3:30 a.m., not fully remembering how I got onto this comfy thing from wherever I ate dinner, be it the dining table in my apartment or the Five Guys a mile away.

Falling asleep early sounds great, but not when I have a wife whom I’d like to remain conscious enough to hang out with after work, because like an idiot I married someone I love and want to be around. Boy, I’m really paying for that dumb mistake.

4

I’m Suddenly Allergic To Life

To my recent unpleasant surprise, allergies aren’t something you’re stuck with your entire life. They are for some people, and my heart goes out to them. I don’t know why we don’t have annual telethons raising money to help lifelong seasonal allergy sufferers pay their Claritin and tissue bills. My mom’s side of the family is where this new nemesis of mine comes from. They didn’t feel the torment of allergies until well into their 20s. I followed a similar path.

Twenty-eight is when things started to go awry. Scratching one small eye itch could trigger an itch that could go on for days and stop just before I took a back-scratcher to my corneas. Things have ramped up since. One sneeze within 10 minutes of waking up is my body’s way of telling me I should sprinkle some blueberries and Benadryl on my morning oatmeal and call it a day. I don’t know what it’s like to breathe through my nose without fear that if I inhale too vigorously I’ll set off a chain reaction of sneezes lasting hours that very well could blow my brain out the back of my skull.

c8501089/iStock Why does this frighteningly appropriate stock photo even exist?

There’s such a wide variety of allergy pills and nasal sprays that finding the one that works best for me is nearly impossible. Once swallowed, some pills will take one look at your genetic makeup and go full diva as they refuse to work with that clown show of body. Have you ever torrented a band’s entire discography, only to realize you don’t have the time to listen to 73 albums, so you delete everything but the greatest hits? That’s shopping for allergy pills. One of the brands I’m not immediately familiar with might be a gamechanger, but I can’t risk blowing my life savings on an absurdly priced pack of pills with a brand name I didn’t see advertised during an award show or an NBA game. I’ll stick with the hits everybody can sing along to — Claritin, Zyrtec, Benadryl.

Xyzal.com They ran out of nonsense letter combos for pills halfway, so they restarted from the beginning of the alphabet.

Sorry, Xyzal, but I don’t know you, and I get the inkling that saying your name out loud summons a long-dormant demon. I just can’t take that risk.

3

I Can Drastically Change Pants Size In The Blink Of An Eye

Technically I’ve worn the same pants size since middle school, but that’s a little disingenuous. I’m a first-wave millennial; we were some of the last kids to think tripping over our very baggy pants was the first step to cultivating an air of supreme dopeness. If I go about my normal diet, everything will be fine. But one Taco Bell pig-out session, or more than one slice of pizza, or more than one beer, and soon I’ll reach the full potential of my middle-school-era JNCOs.

It’s so drastic that I want to take this show on the road. I’ll wow skeptical crowds by swallowing a slice of chocolate cake, and with a magician’s dramatic wave of my hands make any discernible separation between jawline and neck disappear before their eyes. They’ll be looking around for the wires or prosthesis, but they won’t find any. Some will call me a simple trickster; others a heretic. But the truth is that my metabolism is shit and I have to eat like a bird so I don’t look like a boar.

To make sure it wasn’t just me, I asked around. John Cheese told me that once he turned 40, his weight started fluctuating 30 pounds in both directions. He seriously has to keep two wardrobes: one for the fall when he shoots up to 235 pounds, and one for the spring when he drops back down to 200. If you’re thinking that weight change happens over the course of six months, think again. He gains and loses 30 pounds in a matter of weeks, changing absolutely nothing about his diet or exercise routine — the one he has aptly named “I Don’t Exercise, Ever.”

Please, if you’re in your early 20s, listen to me: Enjoy eating however much of whatever you want while you can, because within a handful of years, every ounce of junk food you eat will be converted into a pound of fat in the exact spot that determines your clothing size. Have fun jogging the width of Texas to burn off one bite of donut. When you’re young, your body is a furnace that instantly incinerates whatever you put in it. Eventually it will be a landfill where things slowly decompose over centuries, poisoning the groundwater.

2

My Shit Literally Never Stank Before I Hit My 30s

I don’t want to brag or nothing, but for a long time, I could’ve taken a hearty dump during a crowded house party and no one would’ve been the wiser. I left no odor behind. My body converted the stink into pure energy. I believe there was a point in my life when close study of my body’s internal workings could have led to the design of a more efficient internal combustion engine, thus slowing climate change, thus making my ass the savior of the human race.

And then I got older and my dookie stench roared in with the fury of a long-dormant demon named Xyzal awakening for the first time in centuries. I just wish I’d been able to appreciate what I had before it was gone. Hypothetically, if you and I were in the same room, and I were shitting in that room, you wouldn’t have known it until you heard the plop plop of the water, because I could never figure out how to muffle those. But by scent alone? Nah. Too ninja for you. You’d never know it.

I’m just happy my stink powers activated in the same era as the advent of Poo-Pourri. I don’t want to turn this column into an ad for a bottle of essential oils you spray in a toilet to conceal your turd funk, but that stuff is amazing. If I made the smells I do now 10 years ago without Poo-Pourri, I wouldn’t have friends and I wouldn’t be married. I’d be living in an adobe in the desert, where there’s nothing alive to offend.

1

My Teeth Are Sensitive Little Snowflakes

Every new transformation in second puberty comes with a small shame. Parts of your body are losing function and you can’t do anything to stop it. You can iron the wrinkles out of your balls to make them look 20 years younger, but you’re just filling pot holes in a road as it’s being carpet-bombed. All I can do is accept it. I’ve only just begun accepting every unfortunate transformation I’ve already mentioned. But my sensitive teeth and I will be locked in a mythical eternal battle between good and evil so grand it will one day inspire the creation of a religion. Wars will be fought in its name.

When my teeth suddenly became sensitive to cold temperatures, I felt I had fundamentally failed at being alive. I can’t belt out an “Aw fuck!” when I lick an ice cream cone without ceding some confidence. I can’t feel like I’m in the prime of my life when I double over in a blinding-white flash of pain because I made the fatal mistake of eating cold salami slices straight from the fridge.

It’s stupid to say I like eating, because if I didn’t like it, I’d be too dead of starvation to say it. But I’m certain I like eating a lot more than you do. Anywhere between 50-65 percent of my day consists of grunting orgasmically as I chew. So you have understand how crushing it is to have something that makes me so happy cause me so much physical pain. It got so bad that at one point my teeth would leave me screaming in pain if a cool breeze wafted across them when I smiled. My teeth were training me to fear happiness. That’s the psychical damage you lay on the person you’re keeping the pit you’ve dug in your basement.

There are toothpastes that help. But brushing too enthusiastically is one of the things that caused the sensitivity to begin with. I’m trying to mend a gunshot wound by shooting it. And that’s a good summation of the state second puberty has left me in. I’m just fucked forever, so I guess I should try to look at the bright side: I’ll get to watch my body spontaneously do weird things for the rest of my life, like I’m a living video game glitch.

Luis is perpetuating the cycle as he digs into a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate-chocolate chip. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

For more, check out 7 Creepy Physical Changes Your Mind Can Make in Your Body and 6 Freaky Things Your Body Does (Explained by Science).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Why ‘Big’ Is More Terrifying Than You Remember, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. You’ll be alright.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/puberty-sucks-but-second-puberty-is-just-the-god-awful-worst/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/180632214782

[allofbeercom]

Puberty Sucks But Second Puberty Is Just The God-Awful Worst

As you somehow keep holding on when the rodeo horse of life tries to buck you off so it can face its ultimate foe (the rodeo clown of life), you’ll eventually reach a kind of second puberty. The first time, you transformed butterfly-like from child to slightly grosser child. Once all your body’s jagged edges and weird lumps settle into place, you enjoy a prime that’ll last about eight minutes, and you’ll be too drunk or high to remember it.

Second puberty will hit between 28 and 33. The physical changes you’ll undergo — the ones I’m experiencing now — aren’t too dramatic, but are different enough to be unsettling. It’s a harbinger of horrors to come. It’s like Batman getting that vision of the Earth reduced to a dusty wasteland controlled by Darkseid in Batman v. Superman. I want to be Batman in that scenario, but it’s become increasingly apparent that I am the wasteland. As evidence of my physical dilapidation, I present the following.

5

After 9 I Can — And Will — Fall Asleep Anywhere

I’ve been afflicted with a punctual form of narcolepsy. No matter how caffeinated I am, I will fall asleep instantly if certain easily met conditions are present:

1) I have recently eaten dinner after having made dinner, which I do every night.

2) Most of my weight is heaped onto something comfortable. The definition of what can be comfortable is wide enough to include leaning on a wall coated with satin paint (the most comfortable of paints).

3) It is at least 9 p.m.

When those three elements combine, I involuntarily enter, exit, and then reenter a deep state of unconsciousness that I will deny having entered if caught in the act. Vehement denial, punctuated with wild fits of slurred vulgarity, is another symptom of this recently acquired disorder.

g-stockstudio/iStock When one of my molecules touches one couch fiber after a late dinner.

If left untreated, the debilitating sleepiness can lead to waking up in a frightened daze at 3:30 a.m., not fully remembering how I got onto this comfy thing from wherever I ate dinner, be it the dining table in my apartment or the Five Guys a mile away.

Falling asleep early sounds great, but not when I have a wife whom I’d like to remain conscious enough to hang out with after work, because like an idiot I married someone I love and want to be around. Boy, I’m really paying for that dumb mistake.

4

I’m Suddenly Allergic To Life

To my recent unpleasant surprise, allergies aren’t something you’re stuck with your entire life. They are for some people, and my heart goes out to them. I don’t know why we don’t have annual telethons raising money to help lifelong seasonal allergy sufferers pay their Claritin and tissue bills. My mom’s side of the family is where this new nemesis of mine comes from. They didn’t feel the torment of allergies until well into their 20s. I followed a similar path.

Twenty-eight is when things started to go awry. Scratching one small eye itch could trigger an itch that could go on for days and stop just before I took a back-scratcher to my corneas. Things have ramped up since. One sneeze within 10 minutes of waking up is my body’s way of telling me I should sprinkle some blueberries and Benadryl on my morning oatmeal and call it a day. I don’t know what it’s like to breathe through my nose without fear that if I inhale too vigorously I’ll set off a chain reaction of sneezes lasting hours that very well could blow my brain out the back of my skull.

c8501089/iStock Why does this frighteningly appropriate stock photo even exist?

There’s such a wide variety of allergy pills and nasal sprays that finding the one that works best for me is nearly impossible. Once swallowed, some pills will take one look at your genetic makeup and go full diva as they refuse to work with that clown show of body. Have you ever torrented a band’s entire discography, only to realize you don’t have the time to listen to 73 albums, so you delete everything but the greatest hits? That’s shopping for allergy pills. One of the brands I’m not immediately familiar with might be a gamechanger, but I can’t risk blowing my life savings on an absurdly priced pack of pills with a brand name I didn’t see advertised during an award show or an NBA game. I’ll stick with the hits everybody can sing along to — Claritin, Zyrtec, Benadryl.

Xyzal.com They ran out of nonsense letter combos for pills halfway, so they restarted from the beginning of the alphabet.

Sorry, Xyzal, but I don’t know you, and I get the inkling that saying your name out loud summons a long-dormant demon. I just can’t take that risk.

3

I Can Drastically Change Pants Size In The Blink Of An Eye

Technically I’ve worn the same pants size since middle school, but that’s a little disingenuous. I’m a first-wave millennial; we were some of the last kids to think tripping over our very baggy pants was the first step to cultivating an air of supreme dopeness. If I go about my normal diet, everything will be fine. But one Taco Bell pig-out session, or more than one slice of pizza, or more than one beer, and soon I’ll reach the full potential of my middle-school-era JNCOs.

It’s so drastic that I want to take this show on the road. I’ll wow skeptical crowds by swallowing a slice of chocolate cake, and with a magician’s dramatic wave of my hands make any discernible separation between jawline and neck disappear before their eyes. They’ll be looking around for the wires or prosthesis, but they won’t find any. Some will call me a simple trickster; others a heretic. But the truth is that my metabolism is shit and I have to eat like a bird so I don’t look like a boar.

To make sure it wasn’t just me, I asked around. John Cheese told me that once he turned 40, his weight started fluctuating 30 pounds in both directions. He seriously has to keep two wardrobes: one for the fall when he shoots up to 235 pounds, and one for the spring when he drops back down to 200. If you’re thinking that weight change happens over the course of six months, think again. He gains and loses 30 pounds in a matter of weeks, changing absolutely nothing about his diet or exercise routine — the one he has aptly named “I Don’t Exercise, Ever.”

Please, if you’re in your early 20s, listen to me: Enjoy eating however much of whatever you want while you can, because within a handful of years, every ounce of junk food you eat will be converted into a pound of fat in the exact spot that determines your clothing size. Have fun jogging the width of Texas to burn off one bite of donut. When you’re young, your body is a furnace that instantly incinerates whatever you put in it. Eventually it will be a landfill where things slowly decompose over centuries, poisoning the groundwater.

2

My Shit Literally Never Stank Before I Hit My 30s

I don’t want to brag or nothing, but for a long time, I could’ve taken a hearty dump during a crowded house party and no one would’ve been the wiser. I left no odor behind. My body converted the stink into pure energy. I believe there was a point in my life when close study of my body’s internal workings could have led to the design of a more efficient internal combustion engine, thus slowing climate change, thus making my ass the savior of the human race.

And then I got older and my dookie stench roared in with the fury of a long-dormant demon named Xyzal awakening for the first time in centuries. I just wish I’d been able to appreciate what I had before it was gone. Hypothetically, if you and I were in the same room, and I were shitting in that room, you wouldn’t have known it until you heard the plop plop of the water, because I could never figure out how to muffle those. But by scent alone? Nah. Too ninja for you. You’d never know it.

I’m just happy my stink powers activated in the same era as the advent of Poo-Pourri. I don’t want to turn this column into an ad for a bottle of essential oils you spray in a toilet to conceal your turd funk, but that stuff is amazing. If I made the smells I do now 10 years ago without Poo-Pourri, I wouldn’t have friends and I wouldn’t be married. I’d be living in an adobe in the desert, where there’s nothing alive to offend.

1

My Teeth Are Sensitive Little Snowflakes

Every new transformation in second puberty comes with a small shame. Parts of your body are losing function and you can’t do anything to stop it. You can iron the wrinkles out of your balls to make them look 20 years younger, but you’re just filling pot holes in a road as it’s being carpet-bombed. All I can do is accept it. I’ve only just begun accepting every unfortunate transformation I’ve already mentioned. But my sensitive teeth and I will be locked in a mythical eternal battle between good and evil so grand it will one day inspire the creation of a religion. Wars will be fought in its name.

When my teeth suddenly became sensitive to cold temperatures, I felt I had fundamentally failed at being alive. I can’t belt out an “Aw fuck!” when I lick an ice cream cone without ceding some confidence. I can’t feel like I’m in the prime of my life when I double over in a blinding-white flash of pain because I made the fatal mistake of eating cold salami slices straight from the fridge.

It’s stupid to say I like eating, because if I didn’t like it, I’d be too dead of starvation to say it. But I’m certain I like eating a lot more than you do. Anywhere between 50-65 percent of my day consists of grunting orgasmically as I chew. So you have understand how crushing it is to have something that makes me so happy cause me so much physical pain. It got so bad that at one point my teeth would leave me screaming in pain if a cool breeze wafted across them when I smiled. My teeth were training me to fear happiness. That’s the psychical damage you lay on the person you’re keeping the pit you’ve dug in your basement.

There are toothpastes that help. But brushing too enthusiastically is one of the things that caused the sensitivity to begin with. I’m trying to mend a gunshot wound by shooting it. And that’s a good summation of the state second puberty has left me in. I’m just fucked forever, so I guess I should try to look at the bright side: I’ll get to watch my body spontaneously do weird things for the rest of my life, like I’m a living video game glitch.

Luis is perpetuating the cycle as he digs into a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate-chocolate chip. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

For more, check out 7 Creepy Physical Changes Your Mind Can Make in Your Body and 6 Freaky Things Your Body Does (Explained by Science).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Why ‘Big’ Is More Terrifying Than You Remember, and watch other videos you won’t see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook. You’ll be alright.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/puberty-sucks-but-second-puberty-is-just-the-god-awful-worst/