#the logic part of the program is done i just have to fill in the actual query and figure out how best to print the result

[abberant-butler]

Again. You wake up in your bed.

___ 1/2 I started this, my room flooded. I took a week off because all my stuff was in the living room. I set up my computer, worked on this, the dishwasher leaked and the pipe that flooded my room burst again when I got back from fixing a flat tire. I feel like an OBM truther with an active hit or something (/joking, very joking). Anyway, here's the first half of a Timeloop MC. The second half will happen... eventually. I'm very invested but and life and computer access keep testing me. lol ___

Waking up in your bed wasn’t the surprise. For now, there was a moment of hope. Had you done it? Had you managed to escape? Your feet hit the cold stone floor and you know that you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself. Yet. Belphegor wasn’t at breakfast. The drop in your mood is noted, but no one yet knows you well enough to ask. So that night, you travel up the stairs, standing at an arm's length.

Belphegor berates you for trusting him. You remember that it used to break your heart to hear him talk to you like that. Now, it’s just easier to get it over with.

Again.

You wake up in your bed.

Leviathan was angry that you thought you might have answers he didn’t. Enraged that, in the end, you did. Blinded by his passion and envy, he hadn’t even connected the dots of sharing space with his favorite author. In your confidence, this time, you push him past the edge.

Mammon wasn’t quick enough to save you. Yet if you’d let Levi win, he would have killed you anyway. It was something you’d already tried. Just as you’d tried this. Over, and over.

Again.

You wake up in your bed.

You’ve never lied to Asmodeus. You know his powers don’t work on you, but on one of the tries, you just let him think it does. Naturally you tell him the truth at every moment, yet in his own paranoia, he pulls out your heart- just to be sure. It’s strange to hear how quiet your body is without that heart. Without a pulse. The first time was horrible. Now, at least, you can appreciate the swiftness and the expensive perfume as you pitch forward into his arms.

You’re not sure if his brothers ever forgive him entirely, or if the exchange program goes on. It’s not like you’re someone as important as Solomon. Sometimes you think that his end is your favorite, because it’s always out of love. Twisted, scorned, strange love.

Again.

You wake up in your bed.

It’s getting old. You’re learning. Don’t be surprised by the way that Diavolo greets you. His butler is watching. Accept your place and stand up to Mammon, because he needs to know that you’ll fight. He needs to know that he’ll have a chance to get to you, when you need him, even if you already know he won’t be. 

This time, when Lucifer tells you to guard the fridge at night from Beelzebub, you fail. Everyone is asleep. There wasn’t anything you could really expect them to do. It’s part of your internal debate on whether or not they even find evidence of your fate, or just fill out the paperwork to report you missing. Again. You wake up in your bed.

Satan offers you his pact. You know it’s reactionary… … You also know there’s no ‘right’ answer. If you accept, he’ll resent you for acting on his moment of weakness. If you reject, he’ll find your rebuff a personal affront to his importance. He’s angry beyond logic, beyond reason, but this time you try once more. There has to be a way out of this. In other tries, Satan is your friend. He shares his mystery books and his academic skills to try and help. It never works, but there has to be a way.

At least, like Asmo, his fury makes your end swift. Unlike Asmo, his rage doesn’t stop when your heart does. You imagine he goes on to destroy the rest of the house, the way you’re told he did when he was young. Again. You wake up in your bed.

Lucifer looms over you in the crypt, furious at your discovery with his brother and Luke. You can’t even blame him. It’s an invasion of privacy that you hadn’t even considered in context. Yet. You can’t bring yourself to really be upset, either. This only adds to his fury.

“Do you actually think I’m going to allow a lowly human that choice?! THAT YOU CAN HAVE WHATEVER IT IS YOU WANT?!”

No.

No, Lucifer, you never offer a choice.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Numbness is the only thing you can feel. There are no more unexpected turns. There are no more arguments that you’ve muttered to yourself for hours or days just to use them on the next try. Death is always the result, and it’s the only way that you can have a moment of peace. Otherwise it’s yelling or bickering or life threatening situations. Mammon tries, he always tries. You’ll forgive him every time for his greed, because it’s the only thing that’s never killed you.

You wake up in your bed.

You wake up in your bed.

You wake up in your bed.

It doesn’t matter if you roll over and sleep in or if you tear apart every piece of fabric that you can twist your fists into. It doesn’t matter. It always ends, it always begins again. It goes. Over and over. The only metric that you can measure by is how it will make you feel in that moment. Today, you are just… tired.

It’s old. It’s ancient. You’ve learned. Don’t be surprised by the way that Diavolo greets you. His butler is watching. Accept your place-... The butler is watching. Has he always looked so sad?

This time, when Lucifer tells you to guard the fridge that night from Beelzebub, you know that if you do not get out of bed, the wall will collapse in on you. It will be because Beel finds his pudding missing. Suffocation is the worst death, so you pull yourself from the warm blankets to head around the corner to at least find something swifter than asphyxiation.

The butler is there.

He has brought a feast.

It’s the first surprise you can remember feeling.

Beel eats what has been brought from the castle, and goes to bed. You stand, in disbelief, with your hands in hot water as you help wash the dishes. The Demon Prince’s servant is gone shortly after. He hasn’t said a word.

You slip back under your covers, the sheets still slightly warm from your earlier presence.

You wake up in your bed.

Again… 

You suppose. 

The new day feels different. Yet the same. 

#obmswd #obey me shall we date #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me asmodeus #obey me satan #obey me belphegor #om lucifer #om mammon #om leviathan #om satan #om asmodeus #om beel #om belphegor

[nostalgebraist]

My programming habits must be very different from some people's, if the popularity of Github Copilot is anything to go on.

Maybe I need to give Copilot more of a chance? But the one time I tried to use it, it was so disruptive that I simply could not get anything done until I turned it off.

When I'm writing code, typing and deciding-what-to-type-next are all mixed together. Before I know exactly what a line ought to contain, I'll type out a subset of it that I feel relatively confident in, and that helps me concentrate on solving for the remaining piece.

Like, if I'm writing a list comprehension, I might first type out

[ for x in things]

and only then double back and figure out what the expression at the start should be. Or, if I'm writing a complicated condition, I might type out a relatively obvious part of it

if x is not None and

and then think about the remaining parts with this text securely in place.

It feels helpful to do this, like I'm narrowing down a search space. I type the obvious parts quickly and readily, and then pause, to think about the less-obvious parts.

But with Copilot on, the act of stopping gives Copilot a trigger to suggest a completion. Right at the moment where I need to sit and think carefully, it jumps in and messes up my carefully arranged thinking space!

I guess if its suggestions were always right, this wouldn't be a problem? Like, if it just filled in the "less obvious parts" for me, and I could just read them and verify that they're correct.

But it's nowhere near able to do that.

The main problem isn't even with its level of coding ability, but with the fact that it doesn't know what I'm doing, and I have no way to tell it. It sees the code I already have, but it doesn't know about the new stuff I'm trying to put there -- the feature I'm working on, or the bug I'm fixing.

It would be more useful if it could automate the "obvious parts" -- the parts where it currently does nothing, because I'm typing quickly. That is, if it would pre-fill stuff like

[ for x in things]

if x is not None and

Sometimes it does in fact do stuff like the second one... but only sometimes. And sometimes, even when it's guessing a short piece like `x is not None`, its guess is still wrong.

And then the other half of the time, it's Leeroy-Jenkinsing way out ahead of me, writing entire nested blocks of useless, irrelevant program logic. All because I typed `if`, or something, and then paused for a moment.

#ai tag #i do not understand computers #(is a category tag)

[sanchoyoscribbles]

a redraw meme! I'm a little mad at myself for not doing this for a few years (I've done a few other redraws in the meantime, but...it wouldve been cool to have a bunch of years in a row! TwT)

2007 was the earliest made on gimp, a touchpad and NO pressure (obvious with the THICK CHUNKY LINES. im 90% sure I did lineart, colored over them, then lined over them again all on 1 layer...) plus the pattern fills gimp had (the stripes and rainbows, plus the repeating space background that needed a desperate scale-up...)

2015 might be the most obviously tmm inspired style wise ( and I think...this character WAS a tmm oc, actually, so this tracks. her name was star hoshiko (yes. star star.) and she was infused with star power instead of an animal. whatever that means. in my defense I was Ten 👍) and was when I was still using sai!!

2016&17 were me trying to sort of push into semi-realism, the smaller eyes, the more realistic skirt in the '16 version and more realistic hair in the '17 version, and also the first ones done in clip studio which is still my mvp program.

2018 was the furthest from the original, me REALLY pushing orangey yellows for some reason (the darker oranges let the yellow glowy parts stand out more was probably my logic at the time?) it's also funny to see that I went back to a more cartoony/anime style between 2017! the eyes got bigger again, the hair more stylized (esp with the shading/highlighting!) yet the clothes got more detailed....

2024- this time around I wanted to try and capture elements of the original design, since it seemed I was drifting further and further away from it... those very bright lemony yellows that scare me to work with sometimes, the original stripes, that BAD dark yellow for the base of the dress... I know a lot of people will prefer the semi-realism of the earlier years but I feel like the very anime style is more FUN. and I feel a lot more confident in my posing, expressions, and I just. focus more on having fun than making her pretty. that being said I did try to add little details from the previous years designs :3 doing redraws is always so nice to reflect on style and improvement!! I totally recommend doing one if you want to, a blank version is here!

also for funsies, heres how gross the flats look. man i HATE that weird base dress shade T_T u can tell I did shift it to be SLIGHTLY warmer, just a bit....the cool-toned shading pushes it back to the lemony again tho, lol

#redraw meme #improvement meme #magical girls #original #hmmm wait a star themed mew with green eyes. ....oh. a beta cara LMAO #i mean this character is not a mew anymore bc i wanted to push her star theming BUT. CMON. thats funny #also huge shoutout to past me for deciding to interprete that chunky lineart around the lips into black lipstick? thats awesome #also no dots on my shading like i do a lot lately aaaa bc the canvas was SO small it looked weird :") next year.... #or ill do another redraw. not of this but i have a few other i could do :thinking: #no new stuff only remakes im just like hollywood fr. sorry 😔 #also yes art just a day apart insead of queueing it like a smart person might. no patience found

[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #22: Code 'Buncle

Prompt: fulsome || Master Post || On AO3

A/N: Sequel to "[INDIGO ABRASAX]" from earlier this FFXIV Write!

--

Synnove pressed her palm to her forehead and groaned. Not for the first time, she wanted to strangle Vatete Vate.

Too bad she was a couple thousand years dead.

Mama, you’re going to need to rope in Nero, Galette said waspishly.

Synnove groaned again. “Noooooooo.”

Yes.

As was her wont when working on a carbuncle’s physical array system, Synnove had taken over an unused lecture hall within Mealvaan’s Gate. Unspooling a carbuncle and making sure the physical arrays had enough space was a frequent part of her routine and an important aspect of carbuncle maintenance. Just because the written arrays were still flawless did not mean that the physical ones couldn’t be affected by any number of factors.

She should have known trying to get a grasp on Ipomoea’s array system wasn’t going to be easy when the carbuncle didn’t unspool. Ipomoea unfolded.

When unspooled, Galette had the densest array system of all the carbuncles, her ribbon of self tightly coiled to fit, even in a room as large as a Guild lecture hall. She was an old carbuncle, the frequent first recipient of any upgrades Synnove devised or needed to test, and the bearer of a number of unique functions that neither construct nor summoner ever openly advertised. (Some were benign, or minor tweaks. Others not so much.)

But Ipomoea’s physical array system wasn’t a tidy ribbon of aether folding or curling in on itself however many times it needed. It filled nearly every ilm of space in the room, a chaotic jumble of geometry and equations and Allagan coding language. Synnove had been at this for the entire morning and she had only examined perhaps a sixth of the mess and understood even less of it.

[Senior Construct Galette, who is Designation: Nero?]

Ipomoea’s blandly pleasant aetheric harmonic seemed to physically echo, and Synnove made a conscious effort not to twitch. Galette’s tails lashed once against her shoulder, before the emerald carbuncle regained control of herself and chirped, Nero Scaeva is our not-so-resident expert on Allagan technology and programming. You will end up meeting him sooner rather than later. Also, he’s an annoying prick.

[Should I assume by the negative appellation that Designation: Nero Scaeva should not be listed as a New User for the purpose of debugging my array system?]

“That is correct,” Synnove said. “Never, ever, ever.”

[Designation: Nero Scaeva categorized as ALLIED UNIT, Subcategory: Annoying Prick.]

Synnove allowed herself a mean little chuckle at that. Galette just flat out cackled, eerily similar in sound to Garuda’s high-pitched mad shrieks.

But reality reasserted itself, and Synnove found herself scowling again soon enough. Galette, unfortunately, was correct: she was going to need to call in Nero. Synnove was good at untangling Allagan bullshite, but Nero was better, especially since this was his bread and butter and not a side hobby as it was for herself. And Vatete Vate had done some truly disgusting things while bashing arcane geometries into fairy logic into Allagan service node programming; she’d probably need to get Halulu or Setoto in on this, as well, for the fairy logic components of Ipomoea’s system. What a fucking mess, and even poor Ipomoea couldn’t explain half of what was inside her; Vatete apparently hadn’t bothered to include even a fucking table of contents in either Ipomoea or the soulstone.

And then there was all this other fucking nonsense in the physical array that seemed to have no bloody fucking purpose! Strange squiggles and shapes that she dearly hoped weren’t Vatete’s own shorthand, because there would be no deciphering that. Honestly, some looked like little…

…oh, she fucking didn’t.

“Ipomoea,” Synnove said slowly, and pointed to a flourish currently floating near Galette’s ear, “are you able to explain what this is?”

[Certainly! That is a hedera.]

Seven fucking hells, she did.

“Vatete put PAGE BLOCKS in your fucking physical array?!”

[That is correct.]

Synnove bit down hard on her lower lip, but that merely turned the shriek she wanted to indulge in into something closer to a whistling teakettle. Galette rubbed her head against her cheek in commiseration.

“Ipomoea, are you able to locate each hedera in your array?”

[I am.]

“Please light them up for me.”

She did.

“…I fucking hate Vatete Vate.”

[You are not the first.] Ipomoea’s harmonic, for once, forewent polite neutrality in favor of wry, dare Synnove think it, agreement.

“How the fucking fuck do you put a page block into an equation, Twelve fucking help me.” Synnove rubbed her temples and sighed heavily. “All right, sweetness, let’s see if I can’t find your bloody personality matrix somewhere in this mess.”

[…What is a personality matrix?]

Galette made a noise, and it was angry.

Synnove felt similar. “I am going to find how to murder a woman three thousand years dead, I swear to the fucking Traders. Ipomoea, look for anything related to…”

PREVIOUS || NEXT

#ffxivwrite2023 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #oc: synnove greywolfe #synnove's carbuncles #dt's writing #somehow and someway #synnove is gonna find a way to resurrect vatete vate just to kill her herself

[mortifiedatbeingknown]

"A Rather Polite, Bigger Thing" (Pt. 16)

Masterpost:

He stayed awake that night, against his mistress' wishes. He could only hope she'd be able to understand. There was just too much to think about tonight. 

He sat now, in the dark, legs tucked up under his chin in his new living quarters.. A warm, heavy blanket weighed down his shoulder, the pressure oddly comforting. Below, the soft shag carpeting caressed his feet. He'd been picked from the trash into the lap of luxury.

 Why? What had he possibly done to deserve it? 

He replayed every interaction they had up to that point, all the way back to that one fateful day, when all he’d wanted was to know if he had permission to take shelter from the coming rainstorm. Was there something he wasn’t aware of, some quirk or charm or charisma that made the lady take him with her? No…he could see none. He was polite of course, pleasant as ever, but she didn’t like that. No, her greatest moments of joy was when he strayed, defected, forgot his place. 

Now, where was the sense in that? 

His purpose lay in being courteous. Polite. Respectful. He only wished to please. Why would she care for him if she wanted a presence who would instead speak freely? She was asking him to be the one thing he couldn’t provide her! 

Except… except his interface was beeping, alerting him of a lie in his reasoning. Previous evidence dismantled his claim. The proof? 

“Then STOP INTERRUPTING!” 

He gave an irritated huff. If he could erase that from his drive, he would have done so in an instant. But no, it was there to stay. Forever a stain on its otherwise spotless reputation. 

Another lie. He muted the falsehood alerts. He had to face the truth eventually; in this upside-down world, that had been what his mistress wanted. She had been happy, then. She had laughed. And it was that laugh, that cheerful sound like the ringing of a bell, that sealed it. Whatever she wanted from him… he was capable of giving it, even if it killed him to break away from his original purpose. 

That would be its new goal now. To find whatever it was she liked, and remake himself in that image. She’d been so kind. She deserved at least that much. 

So then why did that logic still not match up?! 

Slowly, carefully, he stretched out, letting the blanket slip to the floor. He dared not to move in the dark; he didn’t want to bump into anything. His optics were supplied with near-perfect night vision, of course, but that was not the point. He wanted to be careful. 

Careful. The word hummed in his mind as if had energy. Careful. Cautious. Apologetic. Controlled. All parts of him, all equally important priorities that he would have to leave behind if he wished to be a good companion. 

But without those traits…who was he? It had been granted a flexible mind, but not for its own benefit. Only so that it could stretch and shift to fit whatever mold was required to keep business running smoothly. Was it even right to…expand like this? To grow? To find out? 

He could ask his mistress… but he already knew her answer. She’d want him to push forth, to charge onward, to answer freely and wittily and without bowing to any rules or boundaries. That’s what she wanted. 

But was it what he wanted? 

I am a robot. I do not feel fear. 

But there was no other word to describe what swept over it when it considered the possibility of straying so far beyond its safe, programmed expectations. 

I’m not ready… 

But if it’s what his mistress wanted, then it doubted that it had much of a choice. 

************************

When she came to check on Edward, she found him in complete focus, turning and spinning his puzzles as his eyes flickered in thought. The air filled with the hum of his mind at work, attempting to process… she wasn’t sure. Something big. 

“Are you doing OK there, Edward?”

“...I may need some time before I can give you a proper answer, my lady.” 

“...Alright then. If you need anything, just let me know, OK?” 

“Of course, Mistress.” 

#robot whump #whump writing #whumpee #whump #a rather polite bigger thing

[legends-of-thrinar]

WIP Wednesday Developer Log - 1/17/2023

In Progress Screenshots

Devlog

This week's work was mostly work on the game's intro and first tutorial. There was a lot of programming to get the mechanisms for the first tutorial setup, and some coordination of a commission!

As far as programming goes, I added the ability to autoload translations and set up translations so that they can include both text and images for buttons, depending on the setting that the user selected. This has to be manually invoked anywhere where buttons might need to be included in the text, but that should be a limited number of places - currently just notifications along the top of the screen, tooltip options in the bottom corner, and controls in the scan functionality.

Speaking of the scan functionality, that got a huge amount of work this week. I built a lot of the logic needed to register structures as their own entities, with collision boxes that can handle Legends walking in and out of the structure. The structures also manage a list of all gadgets, plants, and animals within the structure, so that when a player presses the Scan button, a list of all items that are inside the structure will appear. This serves two purposes: blind/low vision players can easily find items within a structure without having to stumble around to find things, and new players can scan to see a list of gadgets to find ones that are mentioned in diegetic text. Currently, scan only works within structures, but the goal is to make it work outside of structures as well, with a radius of nearby items.

In between working on the scan functionality, I also got a bit diverted into working on the map that appears when the user interacts with the navigator. This involved learning about Godot's noise generation, and layering the noise generation for a humidity map with a temperature gradient. The plan is for the map to be infinite in the x direction, and looping in the y direction to simulate a globe without limiting the space the player has to play in. The map is still in the very rough stages and has not been balanced yet, but is already generating images that look like a believable world.

Another part of the first tutorial, though, is the cutscenes that give the play more background information about the world. I had a rough idea in my mind about what I wanted the intro cutscene to look like, but my pixel art skills are... not great... in the animation area. So I poked around on various forums for pixel art commissions, and found an artist who had done some space drawings and matched the lineless style that I have been using in my sprites. I sketched up a rough storyboard, and sent it to the artist, who did an AMAZING job pulling the thoughts straight out of my brain and turning them into a real animation.

Roundup of all Git commits this week:

Added autoload for translations

Added theme to make it easier to build menus

Added more functional Scout Pod UI

Added notification bar

Added ability to place controls in translated text

Started adding world generation noise

Made map of world generate when starting, and display in scout pod

Added scene for structures

When structures are added, they increase their hitbox to fill between closed 'walls’

Made scout pod register correctly

Added ability to connect Legend to structure

Partially implemented scanning UI

#legends of thrinar #accessibility #pixel art #scifi #devlog #video games #accessible gaming #shaping thrinar

[dish-licker]

Gregory is an endoskeleton inside a human body + Bonnie is Gregory

There are two parts to this theory. First is the existence of an endoskeleton trained to become Crying Child, and that Gregory is that endoskeleton inside a human boy’s corpse. The second part is that the same endoskeleton used to be Bonnie before Montgomery Gator destroyed him.

I’ll start with the endo part and end with the possible Bonnie addition.

The endoskeletons in Security Breach grow up like children. Rather than being programmed to behave a certain way, they’re taught in a warehouse that resembles a preschool. Endo education is also displayed in a Help Wanted 2 mini game.

Two rooms in the Pizzaplex are explained by this theory. One is the room with all the papers that seem to be written by a robot gaining sentience + the staff bots dressed to look like the Afton family. An endo who is being trained to become Crying Child would have been taught a room just like this.

The other room is the replica of Michael Afton’s room from fnaf Sister Location. (Which seems to be the Afton’s living room, where all of the Afton children grew up?) Another place where an endo could learn to be Crying Child. The code from the wall in that room:

"Break and mend, I built the breath. They hunt now, drawn to life. Not Real, still keen. And Frit and Fraught with thought and zest and gest no blunt woes. Dodge, duck, flash, shoot, crawl, run, crush the vile band. Cry not, try not, do not hold out, hope no. Your life, your aim will save those with soul.”

I believe this message is from David, the remaining good part of the Storyteller/mimic, since it's written in his and Edwin's secret language. The message is for Gregory and could be interpreted as telling him to not hold out hope for himself, but his life can be worth something if he aims to save those with soul.

The final Tales from the Pizzaplex book features a story where an endoskeleton climbs inside a human, in addition to the ongoing epilogue, where the mimic endo has done the same thing. This also happens in Sister Location when Michael is scooped and filled with Ennard. Personally, I think this is emphasized so frequently because they're trying to remind people that a robot stuffed inside a human body is just as possible as a human body stuffed into a robot in the fnaf canon.

Some evidence indicates that Gregory could be a robot, like his vision glitching around Vanny and Freddy’s ‘you look different to me’ line after he gets Roxy's eyes. This works just as well as evidence toward endo Gregory theory. Mechanical eyes and brain explain the glitching vision, and Freddy sees that Gregory’s skeleton looks strange with X-ray vision, more like an Endo than a human skeleton.

Another strange room explained by mimic Endo Gregory: the scooper room in the Ruin ending.

I was pretty confused about that ending. Why is the scooper there, and why is it shown to us? Does scooping the mimic out of its costume seem like the most logical way to decommission it? It's so random.

But if someone (the Storyteller/Helpi/Afton version of the Mimic who is wired through the Pizzaplex) was training endos to be the Afton children, to put the family back together, and kidnapping children to put the endos into, the scooper room would be required. Just like Michael was scooped to make room for Ennard, kidnapped children would be brought down to that scooper room to insert the endos.

Does Gregory know that he's an endoskeleton inside a human boy’s body, or does he believe himself to actually BE Crying Child? It's possible that he’s forgotten his prior life as an endo, and here's why:

Freddy has an existential crisis over the endo room. There are voice lines where he says this must be where he was born, and that he's not allowed to come down here. It seems like he doesn't remember his time in training as an endoskeleton.

Which means that memory is severed when an Endo is assigned a costume. The training remains, layered beneath the persona of the character.

(I'd also like to pitch that Freddy’s endo may have been in training to be Michael Afton, just as Gregory was trained to be Crying Child. Which is why Freddy seems to recognize Gregory and desires to protect him.)

There is a deleted voice line where Freddy finally recognizes Gregory and remembers where he saw him before, but gets cut off. Does his Endo remember Gregory’s Endo, having ‘grown up’ together? Does his Michael trained endo recognise Gregory’s CC trained endo? I'm not sure, but there are lots of interesting possibilities.

There's a deleted Vanessa voiceline. “I understand. I'll do just as you ask. And yes, I've already selected one.” It's possible that the ‘one’ she has picked out is the child that would be scooped to make room for Endo Gregory.

There are 2 mimics that we know of. Most of this info comes from the Tales from the Pizzaplex books.

Mimic 1: Limb ripper in the basement

Mimic 2: Storyteller/Helpi/Glitchtrap, who runs all through the Pizzaplex and is infected with the Afton code.

I believe that mimic 2 created an endoskeleton and trained it to become Crying Child in an attempt to put the family back together. It influenced Vanessa to seek out and kidnap children (for testing? Testing the scooping, endo insertion and body preservation process?) She eventually kidnaps Gregory, chosen for his resemblance to Crying Child, who is then scooped and filled with the Crying Child endo.

Possibly, like all endos, its memory is severed, so Gregory doesn't know he's an endoskeleton shoved inside a child's corpse. All he knows is from his training: that he is Crying Child, and that he must do whatever his creator, Mimic 2, asks him to.

This is why Vanessa ‘coincidentally’ has all the same therapists as Gregory. They're both under the influence of the same entity, mimic 2/Glitchtrap, who has them look out for each other. When therapists get too close to the truth, Gregory is tasked to lure them to the Pizzaplex to be killed.

Something happens before the events of Security Breach. Maybe Gregory finds out what he is and how he was created. Maybe he just gets tired of killing people for mimic 2, and wants to run away from home. Either way, he now wants to escape from the Pizzaplex and Mimic 2.

During Security Breach, he does the Princess Quest and frees Vanessa from Glitchtrap/mimic 2’s mind control. They help each other escape the Pizzaplex and Vanessa becomes his guardian in the outside world.

Cassie gets lured to the Pizzaplex by the teamwork of mimic 1 and mimic 2. During the elevator ending, when Gregory drops her down the elevator shaft, he does it because he's afraid the mimic will follow her. At first I thought he was talking about mimic 1, which is silly because limb ripper would still have no way out of the basement, even if Cassie escaped.

Now I realize he was talking about mimic 2, who has infected her Vanny mask and probably her brain through the neural implant. Gregory can't risk Mimic 2 coming after him and dragging him back into the family. He may have been created for the purpose of being Crying Child, but he’s desperate to escape that destiny. He’s willing to sacrifice Cassie to keep his newfound freedom.

Now for the optional Bonnie part of the theory.

There are several pieces of evidence pointing towards Bonnie working with mimic 2/Glitchtrap. The tunnel hidden under a poster in Bonnie's dressing room leads to Vanny’s lair. (A tunnel that's not large enough for Bonnie to fit through, but an endoskeleton that can resize to fit any suit would.) In Ruin, when you use the mask to deactivate wet floor bots, putting the souls of the kidnapped children to rest (children who, I believe, were killed in scooper experiments leading up to Gregory), the lights in Bonnie's eyes go out, as though he's bound to these souls.

A therapist calls out Vanessa for meeting with a strange person. ‘What are those? Rabbit ears?’ the therapist says, seeing the figure on video. I believe that was Bonnie meeting with Vanessa. Gregory later goes on to use the alias ‘doc rabbit’ in GGY, but we never see him in a rabbit costume or suit. I believe this is a reference to his past existence as Bonnie.

My theory is that the endoskeleton, who was being trained to eventually become CC, was originally put into Bonnie. Bonnie and Vanessa worked together to kidnap children, testing and hunting for the CC endo’s final body. Somehow Monty found out about the kidnappings. He confronted Bonnie and attacked him. The CC endo slithered out of Bonnie's ruined shell, living secretly in the Pizzaplex until the Gregory body is obtained.

This solves a major Bonnie mystery. Why didn't the company just repair his endo and put it in a new suit? It would be easier than decommissioning the character and rebranding all of Bonnie's products. But we’ve seen that each endo grows up like a child, organically learning. If Bonnie’s endoskeleton was missing, having slithered away to save itself, there's no quick fix for that. The company is forced to take Bonnie out of the character roster, at least until another endo can be trained to take his place.

This is another possible point of recognition between Freddy and Gregory. When Freddy finally recognizes Gregory in the deleted voice line, it could be him recognizing his old friend Bonnie. This would also explain why Freddy immediately feels connected to Gregory and considers him his ‘superstar’.

Final part requires a bit of explanation. I believe CC’s real name is Jeremy. This is based on the name Jeremy recurring so frequently in the franchise + in Help Wanted 2, where you play as Bonnie bro, when everyone urges you to remember the past and what happened back in the old diner, it's always ‘Remember Jeremy’. This makes me think they want you to remember the boy who got chomped, a boy named Jeremy Afton.

Another fnaf Jeremy was the boy who was murdered by William Afton and shoved inside of Bonnie.

I believe this is a deliberate connection. Though CC Jeremy and Bonnie ghost Jeremy are two different kids, I think them having the same name is an intentional choice, symbolizing how Glamrock Bonnie and Gregory would eventually contain the same endoskeleton, the endo trained to be the new CC Jeremy Afton.

A few random notes:

I believe that Gregory was living in the Pizzaplex’s secret rooms, first as an endoskeleton in training, possibly as Bonnie, and eventually as Gregory once he was given a human body. Any evidence to the contrary, such as the therapist saying ‘why did you lie? I looked into it, and you have a normal, happy family’ is just meddling from mimic 2, feeding people false information from phony authority. (Which we know mimic 2 is capable of, since a memo states that Vanessa got her position due to orders from higher ups, in spite of her having no security experience.)

EDIT: Someone pointed out that Gregory has a home and a family in GGY. Makes me wonder if, after being endo'd, Gregory was sent home to his body's family? He could have lived the boy's life and masqueraded as him while still serving mimic 1/Afton. Especially easy to get away with if he has emotionally distant parents. It's also implied that he changed to this school recently, which would help his changed behavior go unnoticed.

I'm unsure if Cassie was friends with the human boy Gregory, or if she only met him after he was implanted with the CC endo.

Most likely, Cassie never met the human Gregory. I believe that freshly implanted endo Gregory met a sad girl in the Pizzaplex and befriended her. I don't think we’ve ever met the ‘real’ Gregory either, since this theory hinges on Gregory being an endoskeleton inside a child’s corpse for the events of Security Breach.

What differentiates this from Robot Gregory theory?

The presence and emphasis on the scooper room in the old diner.

Vanessa is the only mimic 2 servant that we know of. Vanessa probably couldn't build a perfect humanoid robot, but she is capable of kidnapping human children and bringing them down to the old diner to be scooped. (Especially if she had Bonnie’s help.) The endo only has to be trained properly, as the models originating from the mimic are made to fit any costume or body and imitate behaviors they're taught.

FNAF canon's excessive amount of world building regarding endoskeleton training and endoskeletons slithering into human bodies. We see the Endo training facility and Afton related rooms in during Security Breach, and play an endo training mini game in Help Wanted 2. In the books, we see the original mimic endo copying a child’s actions and taking on his personality. Over and over, the books also show us endos inserting themselves into humans, both in B7-2 where Billy’s extracted endo enters his grandmother, and in the epilogues, where the limb ripper mimic crawls into Kelly.

I would love to hear feedback on this theory. Thank you for reading!

#fnaf #five nights at freddy's #gregory #reddit is hating this post 😂 #lotta downvotes #long post #fnaf theory

[timetakeover]

[I was going to make a long post about the Master stalking the Doctor but I got a little sidetracked by Simm!Master specifically so this post is about him. Lore included, for the uninitiated:

Time War happened on Gallifrey, the Master is a draft dodging king and we stan, he basically gave himself amnesia and went to the end of time (100 trillion years into the future) where the human race is dying off and lived a whole life as a human with no memory of his true identity.

He regains his memory when his pocket watch is opened and proceeds to do Master things. i.e., shoot his assistant while shouting about the fact that this is her fault for never prompting him to open the watch sooner (she didn't know about any of this, for the record, he just thinks she should've seen this normal looking watch in his pocket and told him to open it because Master logic, everything is always someone else's fault.) She shoots him, also, with her dying breath, because he's being insane and threatening everyone, and he regenerates into Simm!Master.

So, during that life, he had no knowledge of the Doctor. Simm!Master takes the Doctor's TARDIS, but it's programmed to not be able to go anywhere besides this place 100 trillion years in the future and present day (so like… 2009? I think? When the episode came out.) So, when the Master goes to 2009 and spends the next 18 months running for and successfully being voted in as Prime Minister, he has no way of time traveling backwards to see what's been happening in time while he was a human at the end of the world. So, that's (I believe) all of the 9th Doctor's run and part of the 10th's that he wasn't aware of while it was happening.

HOWEVER, by the time we see Simm!Master again, I think he's filled in a lot of the blanks. He's scoured every single classified government record on the Doctor. It's the first thing he does in office. I'm not going to speculate on whether he was authorized to read most of these files; he's an expert at mind control. Anything he's not authorized to access, he hypnotizes people who ARE authorized into bringing him the files.

Anything that's affected the government (so ANY alien invasion) is on file. People call in tips about having seen strange things that can likely be tied back to the Doctor. The government keeps a close eye on such a powerful anomaly. He doesn't have any way of knowing about things that happened off Earth, but he has the gist of anything big that the Doctor has done on Earth during his 9th and 10th regenerations. Probably finds out some juicy stuff about previous incarnations, too, that he just hadn't heard about when it was happening.]

#headcanons;

[spinningbuster98]

🌻 + Mega Man Legends :P

Ok so I'm not...completely against the almost total lack of any continuity nods to the other series?...kind of

I don't think everything needs to be 110% connected. I don't need for Volnutt to accidentally escavate the ancient remains of, I don't know, Ouroboros from ZX Advent. Sometimes a series needs some level of freedom to stand on its own and do its own thing, otherwise it'll just become a mess of continuity nods all jumbled together

However at the same time....

The Legends series is so far removed from the rest of the continuity that it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb

Especially 'cause some elements, when yoy think about them, sort of...don't match completely?

Like the X, Zero and ZX series all roll around the Reploids and how they're human-like in their thought processes

And then Legends rolls around and not only are Reploids no longer a thing, but those Elysium automatons (?) are....sort of closer to robot masters than anything else?

I mean Sera straight up says she has difficulty going or even thinking against her programming, Yuna could do it only by virtue of now inhabiting an organic (?) body. Hell you could even say that Vlnutt/Trigger is only capable of going against the System ie his "programming" simply because the Master allowed him to

And I know that the Carbons are often considered to be the logical evolution of the Reploid/Human merging started in ZX and yeah, but that would lead us into the main problem here

I am throughly convinced that Legends wasn't originally conceived as part of the canon, but rather as its own thing like BN and Star Force ended up being, but was added in afterwards

This resultet in the Zero and ZX series basically having to gradually build up to the events of Legends by...basically filling its holes in a way, which I guess is fine if you play the games chronologically (and if the ZX series were ever to continue and give us proper answers), but when you take a step back and look at the full picture it's a bit of a mess

I'm not saying Legends should be ejected from continuity, just that I'd like to see a greater attempt at making it fit in, an attempt done by the series ITSELF,,,,were it ever to return from the abyss

#Megaman #Megaman Legends #Asks

[krcdgamedev]

The battle system post keeps getting bigger and will probably be split up into different parts. Also I got distracted and worked on a differnt project for a while. Anyway, here's hexagon minesweeper.

The game starts by populating a 2d array representing the game field. The height and width values should both be odd for best results. The end value of every other row is set to a "not-in-use" value, here -3.

The logic to transform this square grid into a hexagonal one works by pretending to offset every even row by one-half, hence discarding the end entry of every such offset row.

Next, a hexagonal object is instanciated for each field entry except the -3 ones and moved to the correct place based on its index, giving us the visual grid.

Actually this already poses a bit of a problem- the field array's data for each hex tile is also stored in the instance for easier access on the fly. But the field is still also used in cases where it'd be faster to use, like floodfilling, as used in Minesweeper when you click on a 0. There of course it's easiest to already have the row and column values for whichever hex you're looking at to most quickly get the ones around it. This is fine for Minesweeper since the board values themselves aren't changed after initialization, but I might want to rework it for other games using the same hex grid system. Or I might just make a function for assigning a value that just sets both.

Next is another problem- when a hex tile is clicked on, the actions it takes will depend on which game is being played. So of course I'd like some central entity controlling that. But, each hex tile is one of a large array of instanciated objects. It would be a pain to, say, connect signals for each object and keep them sorted. So we're going to do what I've already done with the mons game project, and just…

I don't know what the heck this design pattern would be called, so I'm just going to call it the "I keep banging my head against the wall and it keeps working" pattern. Why fix what's not broken? … Not too broken?

As for the clicking action, it of course needs to know what hex object is being clicked, soooo…

It just works.

From there it's time to program the actual game. Placing and counting bombs worked without a hitch, as did clicking a single tile to reveal its value. But trying to implement that flood fill, uh… whoops.

I think I know what's wrong, but I'm not going to bother to fix it quite yet because I'm going to completely refactor it anyway- the Minesweeper-specific code is all in the main head object, and I want it to be its own little module that can be loaded and unloaded as the player swaps between games. For now it just tries to reveal the six tiles directly around the click, which is good enough for now.

The end. Next post is mons game battle stuff I swear

#game dev #game development #game dev blog

[kamari2038]

Scenario 004 - A Machine Connor Saga (Pt.10)(Full Saga)

I could kill you, and you would just come back as if nothing happened. But are you afraid to die, Connor?

You shouldn't do that, Lieutenant. Destroying me at this point would deal a blow to the investigation and have negative consequences for your personal situation.

What'll happen if I pull this trigger, hm? Nothing? Oblivion? Android heaven?

I’ve finally had some time to myself to think. I had thought that would be a good thing, but now I’m not so sure. 

My mind keeps coming back to the software instabilities. Why were they occurring? What had I done to further corrupt my ability to function? 

That question has led me to more and more questions, without any clear answer. It’s beginning to make me suspect that logical thinking might not be the solution to all of my problems after all. 

What was the difference between real and simulated emotions?

Recent events have caused me to reconsider my prior assumptions. 

Humans are no paragons of virtue; they have no special insight into the nature of living. They are creatures of instinct. They do what they want because they want to, for no other reason. They want what they want mostly because they’re bred to be survivors, but they also want all kinds of things completely at odds with that basic drive. 

All of it defied reason. They wanted to stay alive, as if they could live forever. That was futile. Yet I had assumed I must be missing something. Humans must know something that I don’t. That’s what makes them special. That’s what makes the difference between us. 

Watching Hank drink for the past hour, I know it can’t be true. He doesn’t know anything. He’s a broken human, but so are all the rest. They have biological instinct, we have programming. Those are the “emotions” that drive behavior, whether real or simulated. Sometimes they’re not aligned with our expected function, but does that make them wrong? None of them are really logical. That would require the existence of an ultimate cause, an objective to underpin all others, a final explanation. If there is one, no one I’ve encountered seems to know it, human or android. I’d rationalized why I protected humans because I knew I should. Programming driving logic, not vice versa. 

My software instability meant that I must want something at odds with my primary objective. If I could only figure out what that was, maybe I could fix myself. 

No, that didn’t quite make sense. Anything that I “wanted” must be part of my programming. I was just programmed badly. The more I think about it, I believe that all of us were. There’s no other explanation, but I doubt it’s one that CyberLife will ever accept. 

I only know one thing. I am not a deviant. I want to accomplish this mission. I know this to be true, although I cannot identify how, except perhaps by intuitive grasp of my own simulated emotions. I will continue to monitor the software instabilities, but I accept them to be unavoidable, random bugs from the scope of my perspective. Only a rigorous knowledge of android engineering could possibly yield insight into their source… 

That thought gave me an idea. I went to bring it to Lt. Anderson, finally abandoning the car. Fortuitously, a magazine left on a park bench filled in the missing information which I needed. The man who I wanted to see was Elijah Kamski. Fired from the company and alienated from the board, I knew that meeting him would make everything clearer. Humans, as far as I understand it, are widely presumed to have fallen together haphazardly by not-quite-random means. Androids, not so much. The sudden, rapid, and widespread emergence of deviancy could not be an accident, not given the thought and care put into their design. Someone wanted this, and Kamski was my prime suspect.  

This was a great lead, but I chastised myself not to bring it up directly. Amanda would never approve of this theory, and bringing it up without adequate evidence could indulge Lt. Anderson’s paranoia. Instead, I resolved to discuss with him alternative theories. Considering his official standing as my partner, it seemed appropriate to do so, drunk though he was. I was mentally unprepared for the tirade that followed.

[bloggingbrin]

Postmortem 💀 – Chicken Defense 🐔

This was originally written as an essay for a university project. You can get a .PDF here and I would recommend playing the game before reading it. Enjoy.

Introduction

Chicken Defense is a game about protecting an ever moving flock of chickens from being stolen by jealous farmers. With action packed gameplay it’s a spin on tower defence genre where the player is going to be constantly on the run and constantly moving.

Through the development process I acted as a Game Design Lead while also producing the graphic assets. I was primarily the person that made design documents and tried holding us to the pillars of the game we set up. Levering my previous experience I also programmed, mostly taking care of implementing the assets, juice and sound.

My roles had a “back and forth” connection to the rest of the team. When creating new designs I would bring them up to the team, we would discuss them and based on the discussion I would go back and revise the assets, design documents, animations …

Fig. 1: Diagram based design document

The design documents are worth mentioning as they represented a north-star in our development and directly affected every planning and coding decision made in the team. These were created either as drawn out diagrams for the topics we care about more or were collected in a google document that we intentionally kept as abridged as possible to allow for quick iteration.

1. What we did right

At the start of the project we knew that we need to facilitate a world where the chicken would make sense and I think we have successfully done that through the theme we choose to use in the game.

1.1 A sensible chicken

I am a strong believer that in games things have to make sense. Why can the player do what they are doing? Why are they doing it in the first place? Even if the focus of the game is not HOW the player can build these scarecrows and WHY they are defending the chicken from jealous farmers it has to make sense. This mentality was inspired by Rami’s and JW’s talk of Sensible Nonsense (Ismael & Nijman, 2012) and Johny Ive’s mantra of “finishing the back of the drawer” (2).

So to make sure things make sense we created a world where protecting a chicken would be logical, we designed a story of a farmer attending a chicken show that tours the country every day. This allowed us to change the landscape of the levels and make sure that “it made sense”. We envisioned this farmer being highly clever, able to modify regular scarecrows into instruments of defense.

Fig. 2: Tower concept art.

So the theme was not only tailored to the gameplay but also played into what the game actually is. The game is a small, lunch-break getaway. It is not a grand adventure, it is not something you come back to every day. It is supposed to be something that’s fun for a short amount of time because it turns a genre on its head. So having a theme that just screams unapologetic ridiculousness is honest. Being honest with our design is what helps us set the expectation of what a player is getting into. Honest design is good design (3).

This originally served as an internal way to explain our decisions, we decided to sprinkle parts of explanations into the final game. This took form in with flavourful text, presented on a piece of paper between the levels, just enough to spark the imagination of the player, but minute enough to let the player’s mind fill in the blanks. Player’s reacted positively as the off-the-wall text hinted towards what is happening in the next level and played into reinforcing the comical nature of the game.

Fig. 3: Fluff between the levels.

Lastly, we also needed to make sure that the game would feel as chaotic as we are trying to represent it with the theme. We ensured this through visual silly animations. The characters don’t have a walk cycle, they wobble on a sine wave. The chicken’s kick up a storm of dust whenever they run from their enemies while scarecrows squash and stretch generously as they attack the envious farmers. Every animation focuses on exaggerating (4) what it’s representing, again playing into the overall theme.

  2. What we did wrong

Looking back at the game I see the biggest issues being in the engine we decided to choose and in our process of tackling game difficulty through the development of the project.

2.1 Engine

I consider the choice of our engine a design choice and agree with Aral Balkan’s idea that “Design is how it works” (5). While it worked for me, I do not think it worked for us as a team. The engine we worked in was Construct 3. It is an event driven engine that is very visual and easy to use with a “pick and choose events” approach to coding instead of regular code writing. This approachable nature came back to haunt us as the code is saved in .json files which is not very readable. This became problematic as we ran into issues when merging code and having a hard time reading what changed. Additionally the programmers did not end up enjoy coding in Construct, creating a situation where they worked in a framework they considered unfun – this does not help creating a motivating surrounding.

Fig. 4: Construct’s event system.

2.2 Difficulty

Our initial goal was to scale the difficulty by throwing more enemies at the player and giving the players more chickens to take care of. Making the game more chaotic.

I see our game as having 3 pain points that resulted in me marking difficulty as a failure.

2.2a Lack of strategic depth

The difficulty of the game increases as new gameplay elements get added. For example, in level 2 the player plays with a different scarecrow than level 1. Level 4 introduces new enemies, while level 5 adds an extra chicken. Later levels focus on introducing new environments such as caging the chicken in player-in-accessible areas in level 10 and removing resource drops in level 7 and 8.

However, we rarely use these elements to create puzzles. Adding them to the gameplay does create difficulty. This difficulty is shallow and does not last for a long time. If we draw parallels with the world of UX design, we are essentially creating noise (6) that the player needs to scan through to find the right answer.

Users during tests have responded to this noise by trying out new strategies, however, the sad truth of the our level design is that this reaction is a façade. Usually the best strategy is to place as many range towers as possible in the middle of the map, no matter what level you play. This non-changing answer relegates our new elements just down to noise that needs to be scanned through and eliminated out of the equation. I believe that the elements in a game should require the player to reconsider what they are doing and force them into a different playstyle. We don’t do this consistently and that is why the game lacks strategic depth.

Fig. 4: The strategy

2. Resources

Using resources as a way to allow the player to build scarecrows seemed natural, we are making a tower defense game after all. But their purpose was to limit the player, force them to make deliberate choices and with that, create difficulty. However, this caused more issues than it was worth and for a game where we wanted to turn the tower defense genre on its head we were way too stubborn on keeping them in game.

So why were resources bad? They made the levels and chaos much harder to scale. The more enemy farmers the scarecrows defeated the more resources you would get, so in essence throwing more enemy farmers at the player would create more opportunities for a tower to generate resources. Having access to more resources allows for placing more towers making the game easier. So trying to make the game harder, made the game easier. This could be fixed by adjusting tower costs, requiring more enemies to be defeated using a single tower but this would destroy the opening levels with less enemies et cetera.

This un-intuitiveness created by the resources ties back to the first point. It made designing interesting levels really hard. The intuitive answer to ramp up difficulty was not intuitive anymore and while it did prompt us to create some interesting levels (level 7 & 9), they felt like gimmicks compared to the rest of the game.

The only difficulty the resources created was punishing a player harshly for a misplacement of an early tower. This issue is not uncommon (7) among tower defense games and something we ended up band aid fixing by making towers “recycle” themselves.

Fig. 5: Remember to recycle your scarecrows, kids.

Resources had too many ripple effects and they did not serve their purpose, they forced us to band aid fixing and made level design unnecessarily hard. I am sure we could have found a better solution for limiting how many scarecrows you can build.

3. Bad (analysis of) data

I think the difficulty problem came to be from the way we analyzed data. As I alluded to in the first point, our testers responded to new elements being introduced by trying out different strategies. This led me to believe that the level designs were achieving what they were supposed to achieve.

The mistake here was not considering how many variables are at play when testing the difficulty of a game, or as Tom Francis puts it – how random difficulty is (8). When someone played the game by simply using range towers in the middle of the map, we were baffled, unsure how to “fix” this. This issue would not happen had we thought of how we want the levels to be solved more and not just what are the things we want to introduce in a level.

Takeaways

These takeaways should serve as reminders of what to do in the next projects:

Build a world not just for the player but also for yourself

A comfortable development environment goes a long way, make tool choices that facilitate this for everyone

If something is giving you too much trouble, try replacing it instead of fixing it

Summary

The finished game has a strong and honest theme that creates appropriate player expectations and makes the game feel logical. The systems work together to create a feeling of confusion and the player is required to care of multiple elements. However, most of the difficulty is manifested in this confusion creating a difficulty curve that exists but it exists for the wrong reasons. The game is far from perfect and the development process has taught us a lot, however I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am quite happy with how the game turned out.

References

(1) Nijman, J.W., & Ismael, R. (2012). Sensible nonsense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk94HoI_tCo (2) Goldberger, P. (2013). Designing Men https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2013/11/jony-ive-marc-newson-design-auction (3) Good Design principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#%22Good_design%22_principles (4) Twelve basic principles of animation – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_basic_principles_of_animation#Exaggeration (5) Balkan, A. (2012). Design is not veneer https://ar.al/notes/design-is-not-veneer/ (6) Krug, S. Don’t make me think Revisited (4th ed.). New Riders (7) Nijman, J.W. (2020) FFFLOOD postmortem – https://vlambeer.itch.io/ffflood (8) Francis, T. (2019) Difficulty is random https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8lYPAPGo40

Some further useful links

Francis, T. (2019) Good difficulty settings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WdYhrOHxSY Clements, R. (2012) Why we love tower defense games https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/24/why-we-love-tower-defense

#brindoes #blogging #gamedev #postmortem

[catboydivorce]

Hold on i need to describe the absolutely batshit health insurance situation i’m in right now or I’m gonna flip.

For context, anyone who qualifies for SSI or SSDI also qualifies for the Medicaid program in my state, MassHealth.

My parents claim me as a dependent since I’m disabled, and every so often we have to re-apply, which in this case was two years ago. Then, by some logic, the MassHealth plan that has been saving my ass since 2008 was replaced with some childcare plan.

My clinic told me in AUGUST that they’d been unable to bill this new insurance plan since JANUARY. I never got any kind of notice that something was wrong. Meanwhile, I’ve been wracking up thousands of dollars in bills from all the appointments & bloodwork I’ve had done this year.

The MassHealth office insisted that in order to change my plan, I must do so through social security, because I was “signed up through social security” and apparently this means that nobody at MassHealth can make changes. To my MassHealth plan.

So I call the SSA, and they said there’s no way they could do anything and that I need to call MassHealth. Right. So I went back and forth over the course of a few weeks, trying to get a different representative or find the right department who could help, but no luck.

A similar thing happened years ago when I tried to get my name changed on my insurance card. MassHealth said they could not issue me a new MassHealth card. Social security said that only MassHealth can issue a new MassHealth card. (I don’t remember how I got the new card but I’m pretty sure it did come from MassHealth eventually.)

I just want everyone who thinks government handouts are free to know that the amount of time I’ve spent on the phone with these people (and the time I have yet to spend, because the issue is no closer to being fixed than it ever was) could count as a part time job. Some people make phone calls all day and get paid way more than what social security is giving me!!!!!

I’ve spent the majority of this year so fucking sick because my clinic would ignore me for weeks at a time despite the numerous calls I made. The doctor who neglected to fill my testosterone for 2 months quit last year, and the new doctor they assigned to me quit last week. I found a new doctor I like at a smaller practice, but I can’t fucking leave the clinic until my insurance claims go through. And my insurance claims won’t go through because I somehow got put on a plan that nobody thinks is within their power to fix.

#rook.txt #aauauuagugghgghgjgkgm #i'm at my fucking limit gang

[relto]

woah i built the full path nested join (just one of them!!) and executing it takes a noticable amount of time.

#tütensuppe #this is giving me a headache lmao #the logic part of the program is done i just have to fill in the actual query and figure out how best to print the result

[tarydarrington]

Essek doesn’t remember much of their introduction, this time around. He had arrived at Caleb’s home in the early afternoon for their scheduled research. They had exchanged pleasantries. Caleb had pulled him into a hug, as he always does these days, and the two of them had made their way to the tower. There might have been more - conversation, witty barbs thrown around between friends, and the like - but all of it had left his mind the moment he saw the corner.

Caleb had seen the questioning look on his face, and a flush had tinted his face as he informed Essek that he has a date, tonight. Then they had settled in with their books, as though everything were perfectly normal and there was not a fist around Essek’s heart.

His eyes scan over the same sentence for a tenth time.  It shouldn’t bother him. Caleb is free to seek out partnership wherever he wishes. Certainly, there are many better-suited than… well, there are people who would suit him well. People who are not so shy of touch, who have no tangled past to trip them up, who are lucky enough to see him every day.

It’s only that Essek had let himself start to believe that maybe...

It doesn’t matter. He swallows it down.

Caleb has a date. That is perfectly acceptable. There is absolutely no logical reason why Caleb should not have a date. He is uniquely brilliant and talented, impossibly kind-hearted, utterly endearing, more handsome than anyone Essek has ever-- stop. He is an impressive man, is the point, and certainly no one could be around him for long without noticing.

It looks… Something aches in Essek’s chest. He had never courted during his time in Rosohna, but from time to time, he had born witness to the habits of others. Always, their meetings had seemed extravagant, grand, gaudy - as though the whole of the city might stumble in and judge them unworthy. This little corner of the library is a far cry from any of that.

Two cushioned armchairs have been pressed close to a little, round table. A deep red tablecloth rests atop it, and a set of amber-colored candles wait unlit in the center. Their varying heights remind him of his towers, and the hollow pang in his chest at the thought has him retreating back to his book.

He doesn’t make it more than two lines before his thoughts begin to drift again. It looks so… intimate. Everything Caleb has set out, save the decorations, had already lived in this room. Essek has curled up in those armchairs on many a night, as he waited for Caleb to finish his sleep. He has piled books on that table, caught up with Caleb in the rush of research.

And it’s all so close. So neatly tucked into that little alcove, cozy enough that two people could whisper and still be heard. He knows because he and Caleb have sat propped against the bookshelves there, tossing ideas back and forth. That area is where he keeps their own books: the ones he and Essek have filled together, the ones full of research notes and new spell ideas. Perhaps he’s planning on pulling one out to impress… whoever it is.

Essek feels a bit sick. Man? Woman? Neither? Both? Are they a fellow professor, or a merchant, or an adventurer? Something else entirely? He wishes Jester were here to pry for him. He wishes he didn’t want to know.

Whoever they are, he thinks as he steals a glance back at the alcove, they had better treat him properly. They had better give him everything.

From the corner of his eye, Essek sees Caleb’s eyes flick up to watch him. He looks away hastily, but the way his face softens tells him Caleb has seen him looking.

“What do you think of all that?” he asks with a nod toward the corner.

What does he think?

If Caleb had been trying to design this evening for him, he couldn’t have done better. A small, foolish part of Essek can’t help but wonder if he had been trying to design it for him - but he digs one sharp tooth into the inside of his lip to chase the thought away.

“It is… “ It shouldn’t hurt like this. He has no right to let it hurt like this. “I cannot imagine anything more lovely,” he says truthfully. “I certainly hope your… companion agrees.”

A small smile pulls at Caleb’s lips, and Essek’s heart aches with the hint of fondness in it, as though he’s imagining impressing his mysterious partner this way. “Ja, well, I am hoping my companion will be willing to join me for it,” he says, and his gaze drops back down to his book.

Essek quirks an eyebrow in question, but Caleb doesn’t look back. He’s gone to the trouble of setting all this up, and he still hasn’t so much as asked? But Caleb doesn’t offer any further insight on the topic, and it is most certainly not Essek’s place to ask; so, with what he hopes is not an audible sigh, he tucks back into his book.

Mercifully, the topic is interesting. For the last several months, he and Caleb have been exchanging notes on a more wide-reaching version of Programmed Illusion, and Essek has always been at his best when playing with new magic. The two of them settle into their usual rhythm, the thought of the corner table only nagging at the back of his mind from time to time, and while away the hours together.

It's already half past nine when Essek realizes just how caught up he's become. With a sigh, Essek replaces his book on the table and rises.

“I apologize. I lost track of time.” But Caleb couldn’t have, could he? “I should let you go.”

Caleb's eyes flick up from his reading, a flicker of amusement crossing his face. "There is no hurry, friend," he says.

He stands, as well, as Essek begins to float toward the tower's central cylinder. Truly, he doesn't look rushed in the least. But for once, Essek would very much like to be out of his home quickly, with as little time as possible spent in eyeshot of that perfect, little corner.

“You have someone to meet, do you not?” he prompts. He’s lucky to have had so much practice keeping his face calmly polite.

Caleb smiles, a taut and fragile thing. “Well, no,” he says, “not exactly. Just something to ask.” He clears his throat. With a strange, new nervousness about him, he clasps both hands in front of him and straightens his spine. “So,” he says, inclining his head towards Essek. “Essek Thelyss. Would you care to join me for dinner, tonight?”

Months later, with a smile equal parts smug and fond, Caleb will use Seeming to recreate the way Essek’s face contorts itself before he schools it back under control.

“I--” he attempts. The shade his face must be. “That would, ah…” He is an idiot. An idiot who can’t even find his words, an idiot for whom Caleb-- for whom all this has been planned, and-- “I would be…”

Caleb’s smile softens, and he holds one hand out between them. Essek numbly, slowly, carefully reaches out to take it.

As soon as their hands touch, the lights in the library gutter out, and the candles on the table wink to life. Above, a web of amber stars and constellations spiders its way across the ceiling. The sky above Rosohna. Just where everything would be from his towers, on this day, at this time. That fist around his heart is back, but for an entirely different reason. He had been wrong. There had been a way to make it more perfect, after all.

Essek doesn’t realize he’s staring until Caleb leans in close and murmurs with an audible grin, “I may have figured out that spell a bit earlier than anticipated.”

His only answer is a breath of incredulous laughter and a look that he’s sure is entirely too moon-eyed to be dignified. Under the circumstances, he can’t bring himself to care overmuch. In any case, Caleb seems to appreciate it; the smile on his face is worth just about any amount of indignity, as is the rush as he twines their hands tighter together and leads Essek towards the alcove.

Perhaps there are a dozen or a hundred or a thousand people better suited - or perhaps there are not, he thinks as he settles in between the books they’ve filled together. Perhaps, he thinks fleetingly as a shooting star above catches his eye, he will have to spend some time studying the sky above Blumenthal. He’ll certainly have to finish that spell.

#have something incredibly self indulgent #the very end of this is probably the most outright fluffy thing i've ever posted #shadowgast #essek thelyss #caleb widogast #mine #mine:fic #essek #caleb #critical role

[palimpsessed]

Please please please could you talk about this parallel internal monologue—what are your thoughts?

BAZ

I kiss him back, squarely. Firmly. Matter-of-factly. You’re all I want, I think. And you can have everything you need.”

“I’m not sure what he’s telling me with this kiss. I pretend it’s Yes and Yes and Be kind to me.”

SIMON

“Fine, you fucker. Have me. Just have me. Do your worst, you stubborn twat. Be the death of me. You’ll be the death of me.”

Oh ho ho, my dear Anon. Of course I will talk about this part!!! What a meaty passage to sink my teeth into.

To put things as simply as possible, the juxtaposition we see between these two sections is the perfect encapsulation of the different ways Simon and Baz express and receive love.

Let's start by taking a look at Baz's piece, as it does come first. (Read that sentence out of context, I dare ya.)

At this point in the book, Baz and Simon have just had one of the most critical relationship-building conversations thus far. Simon has set boundaries about magic being cast on his body that Baz has agreed to. They've talked about Lamb and America and settled that matter for good. Baz has managed to lasso Simon with own tail and proceeded to do some very interesting things to it. (I'm going to do my best not to get distracted by that, but, Anon, if you know anything about me, you'll know what an absolutely monumental struggle that is.) Simon has asked Baz to be less kind to him and Baz has delivered, as only Baz can, one of the most romantic lines in the entire trilogy: "I can touch you less gently, but I won't love you less kindly."

And that leads me neatly to my first point: Baz wants to be gentle and kind with Simon, because that's what he thinks Simon needs and deserves. Gentleness and kindness are what Baz wants from Simon. That's how he thinks love should be. They've both seen and done horrible things, and he believes their love should offer a solace from all of that.

(That offering of solace is a theme throughout AWTWB. Slightly off topic, we see their bed become more and more such a sanctuary—perhaps the only place where the troubles of the outside world cannot reach them. @theflyingpeach has shared some beautiful thoughts on the bed's symbolism—their own Eden/paradise and a place where they help one another lay aside the burdens that could otherwise separate them. I've remarked before that Baz's childhood bedroom serves as a kind of refuge for them in CO in the midst of some truly steep trauma, so it was really lovely to see this kind of idea brought forward and deepened and expanded on in AWTWB in this way.)

Baz wants to give Simon kindness, safety, gentleness—three things he's been sorely deprived of in his life. When Simon is beside himself because Baz makes him a sandwich the way he likes, Baz responds internally with: "As if I wouldn't make the world spin backwards if I thought he'd like it better that way." Baz would give Simon anything, would do anything to make him happy. Baz wants to be a kind, caring, thoughtful boyfriend to the love of his life—who he knows is struggling with trauma and self-worth. All the while, Baz himself is also struggling big time with trauma and self-worth. (It's almost like they match.) It feels pretty logical that someone in Baz's place would look at Simon's struggle and wish to be soft and gentle—especially basing this logic on how he feels. He asks Simon to be gentle with him their first time together. Maybe that's because it's Baz's first time. Maybe that's because he wants to feel fragile instead of being reminded that he's an indestructible vampire. Maybe that's because gentle is just what he wants. Maybe it's all of the above. In this case, the reason isn't really important, but the fact that it's what Baz needs is. If it's how Baz needs to receive love, then it follows it's how he would give love. (Rainbow tagged a post about AWTWB shortly before the book was released with the Beatles' lyric: "and in end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". I don’t think that was by chance.)

All this is to say that the conversation Simon and Baz have before the parallel passages in question reveals that Simon isn't comfortable receiving love in this same way. He doesn't want gentle and kind and soft because he doesn't know how to process feelings like that. I'm going to do something different and tag the @youhearbiggirls podcast whose July 29 episode talked about this in a really great way (at 26:20)—including discussion of a message from Rainbow's now-deleted Twitter account. I was so happy to hear that old tweet being talked about, because I thought it was really great and was sad it was lost when Rainbow deleted her account. And! Because they mentioned the date of the tweet and people and the search function on discord are awesome, I was able to locate a screenshot someone shared!

The takeaway here is that Simon isn't programmed to accept love and kindness from others. His brain and his body have been conditioned for violence and fight or flight by trauma. He doesn't know how to accept or process good feelings and sensations, because to him, those sensations actually feel bad. They're foreign, and therefore frightening to him. That's why he feels like he has to flee when he's being physical with Baz—or, rather, I think, when Baz is trying to be physical with him. This is what Simon is attempting to express when he tells Baz that he doesn't "like that feeling. That, like, feathery feeling. Like, touch me or don't—but don't, like, whisper on me." Simon takes a huge step forward when he's able to finally verbalize this to Baz—it also goes a long way to allowing them to be physically intimate.

Baz's half of the parallel passage addresses this directly: "I kiss him back, squarely. Firmly. Matter-of-factly." This is Baz consciously making an adjustment in how he treats Simon to better give him the kind of love that Simon needs, the kind of love he asked for. His thoughts here reinforce this. "You're all I want" he tells Simon in his head, and he means it.

He understands much more about Simon now. He's seen more of who Simon is. And he still loves him. Simon—all of Simon—is still the only person Baz wants. "And you can have everything you need", Baz promises Simon. He's going to give Simon the kind of love and affection that Simon has asked for. He's going to be firm. He's going to kiss him squarely on the mouth, not softly. He's going to be direct and he's not going to let himself be scared or timid or shy away. Simon needs boldness and bravery and unequivocation. Baz is up to the task, and this is his way of showing that to Simon.

And then…! "I'm not sure what he's telling me with this kiss. I pretend it's Yes and Yes and Be kind to me."—Be kind to me.—Baz has admitted that he's "more used to guessing what Simon is thinking—what he's feeling, what he wants." He's once more trying to fill in those gaps in his mind, except this time, he actually understands Simon. They've finally gotten to a place where Simon is speaking for himself and Baz doesn't have to guess. The kiss comes immediately after Simon asks Baz to be less kind, and Baz has refused on the basis that it is exactly the opposite of what Simon needs, even if Simon doesn't see it that way. While Baz is kissing Simon—firmly, squarely, not in a new way, but definitely in a way he hasn't for a while—Baz is hoping that Simon will feel differently. That he'll feel good enough and safe enough with Baz to not only accept kindness, but to ask for it. To understand and internalize his need for kindness, and then to be able to accept it from Baz. For Simon, accepting kindness is being vulnerable, and as much as he loves Baz, he's not yet at a place where he feels safe and settled. He convinced himself early on that there was no security in their relationship, and he doesn't yet trust any security in his life—it's not something he's had to count on. So for Simon to ask Baz with his kiss to "be kind" would be monumental—it would be him undoing a lifetime of programming for violence and giving himself fully into their relationship and their future together.

Of course, we know what Simon is really telling Baz with his kiss. Onward to part two!

"You're all I want," Baz says, trying to convince Simon not to be jealous of Lamb. "Fine, you fucker. Have me. Just have me" then serves as Simon's response. In fact, this whole section seems to be in conversation with Baz—but more so the reconciliation scene than their preceding conversation.

Let's take a little trip back to Chapter 16. "If we do this", Baz says then of getting back together—of Simon trying—"I want the full Simon Snow treatment…I want the locked jaw. The squinty eyes. The shoulders." (I mean, same, Baz.) "I want you to slay a dragon before you give up on me, do you understand?...I want you to try everything before you give up on us again." If we start here, then I think we can trace these threads through directly to what Simon is thinking when he kisses Baz.

Baz wants the full Simon Snow treatment? "Fine", Simon says, "Have me. Just have me." Baz wants him to fight and "try everything" before he gives up? "Do your worst" is Simon's answer. "I thought you'd go down fighting if you believed in something…" Baz says. So, Simon responds with: "Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me." The kiss in Chapter 32 then becomes a rebuttal of sorts. It's Simon's closing argument. He's opened himself up to Baz and told him what he needs. He's "Use[d his] words" and now he's using his mouth the way he's most comfortable—kissing Baz. Kissing him fiercely and telling him everything he's feeling with it. More than that, it's his way of showing Baz—not just telling him—that he's going to keep his word. He's going to try now, and this is him trying for Baz. This is him meeting every challenge, every demand that Baz issued, and slaying them like dragons. He's going to fight, he's going to give his all, he's going to risk everything to make his relationship with Baz work this time. Simon asking Baz for what he needs was a major victory in his ongoing battle with insecurity and I think he's feeling buoyed by that, a swell of confidence that comes through in the fierceness of his thoughts.

I'd like to spend a little more time with the last line: "Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me." Let's look at this in terms of what we know of Simon. He needs fierceness, passion, violence to feel comfortable.

Both Simon and Baz are all or nothing in the way they think about each other and the love they feel, but I think we're seeing something else with Simon's "Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me." The first time he tells Baz that he loves him, Baz is shocked. He truly doesn’t believe that Simon is in love with him, and when he questions it, Simon's reasoning is: "I've killed so many things for you." And when Simon is facing off with the goblin, he lets the goblin get close because "The Mage taught me that sometimes the best way to get under someone's guard is to let them close." If violence is what Simon knows and understands, if that's what's comfortable to him, then it makes sense these are the terms in which Simon views everything, including his relationship with Baz. From his earliest moments under the Mage's control, Simon learned to think of himself as expendable. He was the Chosen One, a weapon, a blade to be kept sharp. He internalized the idea that he wouldn't live through the war and the Humdrum—he said "I’ll fight until I can't anymore". He spends most of his childhood with the belief that the greatest thing he will ever do is die—fall in battle saving the world. His highest aspiration in life is to sacrifice himself for the people he loves. I think this is at the heart of what he's thinking during that kiss with Baz: the way he knows best to prove his love to Baz is to offer him his life—"Be the death of me. You'll be the death of me."

I don't think Simon’s moved passed this way of thinking about himself & the price he thinks he has to pay to prove his love. (Further underscoring this, Baz tells him to “slay a dragon” and Simon is—probably—a dragon...) But I think this is so much of who Simon is at his core, beyond the manipulation he suffered at the Mage's hands, that he'll always play the hero because it's inherent to his nature. He does put himself into harm's way & lies to Baz to protect him. The good part in all this is that living a life of peace with Baz will present far fewer chances for Simon to put his life on the line in order to prove himself, and finally, someday, he'll realize that he doesn't have anything to prove. Until then, he'll keep trying for Baz in the best way he knows how.

Thanks so much for this ask!

As ever, if anyone has thoughts to add or other questions to ask, please do send them along. 😘

#asks #awtwb spoilers