prideknights

    Hey everyone! I am creating a deck of playing cards featuring Pride Knights and I need your feedback. The heart series is animal themed and I need to know whether we should go with frogs or with snakes for the King of Hearts (Gay Pride Knight)? Here is the sketch:

    The circles are a place holder for the small animal companions. Your feedback will be instrumental in creating a deck that celebrates the diversity and strength of the LGBTQ+ community, so please let me know your thoughts! ⚔️ 🌈

    I was reading one of my childhood diaries the other day and there was a whole paragraph saying how hopeful I was that my writing will help the archeologists in the far future. Then it proceeded to describe my lunch that day and how my dog was probably secretly able to talk. 

    halfghostwriter

    In an effort to satisfy her obsession in a way that didn’t involve immune control, Danny encourages Ember to start a YouTube channel in order to spread her music.

    Her first video is a semi-animated music video for her signature song, Ember, that subtly shows exactly how she died. The video blows up in Amity and the surrounding area, with many people commenting about how much they “love such a creative approach to a tragedy.” Ember becomes inspired by this, and starts writing songs that tell the stories of other ghosts— how they died, how they lived, how they live their afterlives, etc— which all become incredibly popular in the area. Songs like “Draining Therapist” and “Boxed In” particularly resonate with the high school.

    It isn’t until she posts the song “Ghost of a Hero” that her songs begin spreading to the outside world. The song, which tells the tale of a teenage boy who died and resolved to use his ghostly abilities to save people, becomes incredibly popular across the country. It isn’t until Ember releases the sequel song, “Melting Clone,” that a bit more research is done into Ember herself, and who she was.

    Needless to say, the world is a bit shocked at the fact that, not only is she a ghost, but all of her songs were based off of true events.

    halfghostwriter

    In Ember’s defense, she did start each music video off with a title screen with the words “Based on a True Story” underneath the title of the song, so it wasn’t like she meant to hide anything. She was honestly pretty surprised when the comment section on her latest video, “Melting Clone,” was flooded with questions about Amity Park and its ghost problem. In the video, she had her animator friend include a lot of drawings of Amity Park and Plasmius’s mansion. She would have used the same imagery for Phantom’s song, but she wanted to focus more on his interactions with ghosts and the Zone to introduce the overarching story in this series of songs she wants to make. Since “Melting Clone” was the next chapter in what she calls her “Hero Series,” she wanted to establish more of the location before her next Dani-centric song, “Wandering Spirit,” which focuses more on Dani’s travels. A nice contrast, of sorts.

    Apparently, some of her fans were also avid players of geoguesser, and pinpointed the exact locations used in her songs. More and more fans tried to research Amity Park, only to find that just about all info on the town is blocked by some pretty heavy firewalls set up by the government, something they complained pretty loudly about in the comments. There were only a few videos of ghost fights online that weren’t blocked by heavy firewalls, and they were only accessible because the videos didn’t actually get the ghosts in camera. (Of course, Ember didn’t have to worry about her own videos getting taken down, what with Technus doing her a favor.)

    When she finally released “Wandering Spirit,” (something she had put off to focus on the “Hero vs the Old King” 3-part series) her fans who used geoguesser went WILD with finding all of the locations used in the video, and the comment section was flooded with people claiming to have actually met Dani when she visited their hometown. Quite a number of people also had photographic evidence, said photos containing poorly taken photos of Dani’s ghost form either floating, going through walls, or just generally hanging out in places she really shouldn’t be able to get into. In fact, so many of Ember’s fans had these photos that #WanderingGhostSpotted started trending on Twitter and Instagram.

    All this attention towards Dani also lead her fan base to ask more questions about ghosts and where they came from, specifically how so many ghosts are coming into the living realm. So, Ember decides to explain in the form of a new song called “Ghost Obsession,” a song about a pair of ecto biologists whose obsession with ghosts leads them to create a portal to the ghost zone.

    Ember is later pulled aside by Danny, who kindly asks her to maybe not use the real names of living people in her songs????? Like the Fentons are pretty well known, can you please???? Not get us in trouble???? With the government?????

    Anyway her entire fan base freaks out when they discover that the Drs Fenton are real people

    (Taglist: @dolfay)

    spekulatiusmuffin

    Maybe she will also sing the "Tale of the white alphabet" (alternative, more angsty: "green stained white")

    Her fans will research. They will ask questions. Someone might try to silence them. There will be a riot.

    The GIW loses. Fangirls are scary

    halfghostwriter

    “Green-Stained White Suits” tells the tale of the Hero Ghost and the Melting Clone being captured by a mysterious ghost hunting organization. It’s one of Ember’s most disturbing videos yet, one of the few that can be considered “gory.” While the Ghost Hero and the Melting Clone come out unharmed, they are shown witnessing the torturous vivisections of other ghosts. At the song’s climax, the two are brought into the vivisection room. Directly before the scalpel is shown hitting the Hero’s chest, the music cuts and the screen goes black. For a solid 5 seconds, all that can be heard is panicked, rapid breathing. The music then cuts back in, and every character that ever appeared in Ember’s music videos are shown tearing the facility to the ground, with the characters from Ghost Obsession each carrying the Hero and Clone in their arms, both young ghosts wrapped tightly in green-stained white sheets.

    (In terms of the song’s sound, think this)

    melonsap

    Fun fact: We know the size of the Pokémon world because Scarlet and Violet has framerate issues

    melonsap

    Video games tend to do this thing called "culling," where they don't render things that aren't in use. In Breath of the Wild, there's no reason for Link to be able to see how many apples are on a tree in Hateno when he's all the way in Tarrey Town, or know how many Bokoblins are running around Hebra Mountain. Link has a radius around himself that spawns in people, enemies, items, etc, so that the player gets the full experience of a rendered world without the game having to keep track of 850 Hearty Radishes sparkling.

    This is good.

    Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.

    Image ID: A screenshot of Scarlet and Violet, zoomed so far out that you can see where things aren't rendered. Only a wedge of landscape is in view, alongside some very simplified rivers. End ID

    The player has a single square that's always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that's visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can't see it, it does not exist.

    You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn't calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.

    We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won't toss garbage data it's not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it's unplayable.

    So what gives?

    Image ID: The player riding Koraidon, swimming in the Paldean ocean. End ID

    This is the ocean.

    It's pretty. It's got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.

    Image ID: A screenshot of Scarlet and Violet, so far zoomed out that you can see the edges of the ocean, which extend about 20 times the length of the entire game map across its diameter. The ocean is a huge pale blue circle labeled

    THIS IS THE OCEAN.

    IT IS NOT CULLED.

    Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It's rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.

    Now, this is usually the part of the post where I'm like "and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!" like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.

    No.

    Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a "skybox." Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:

    Image ID: The Sacred Grove level from Twilight Princess, a foresty area, zoomed out and taken out of bounds to see the skybox. It's a pale blue and yellow texture wrapped around the area. End ID

    This is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can't see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you're looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.

    Image ID: A screenshot of Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field, taken so far out of bounds that the void and background composition is in full view. The blue part in the center, where the sky texture is, is labeled

    Here's another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that's centered around Link when he's in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you're in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.

    More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.

    Image ID: A drawing made in MS paint, with a semicurcular blue dome encompassing a green plane and a red dot. The red dot is labeled

    They tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can't be seen. There's no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there's no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.

    In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There's no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don't need to use more sky to encompass that.

    They did not get this memo.

    Image ID: The edge of Scarlet and Violet's skydome, bright blue, with clouds above it and a night sky. End ID

    You might be thinking to yourself "wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!"

    Image ID: A tiny blue dot in a huge sphere of darker blue. The tiny dot is labeled

    AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!

    Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can't even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.

    Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this "Skysphere" and not "Skydome."

    That's because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.

    Image ID: A picture of Earth from space, with Spain surrounded by a red square. End ID

    Look at Earth. Look at Spain, which Paldea is supposed to mimic.

    Image ID: Earth with Spain surrounded by a rectangle, overlaid onto the ocean Paldea sits in. End ID

    I overlaid Spain over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.

    If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:

    Image ID: A white circle and dot on a navy blue background. The circle is labeled

    HI. WHY IS THIS A THING.

    The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:

    Image ID: A picture of the sun with a little blue ball next to it labeled

    I will be taking this as canon sizing until the Pokémon Company comes out and either CULLS this monstrosity and stops forcing our Switches to render THE SUN, or until the Pokémon Company comes out and gives us a canon planet size.

    nyancrimew

    So, how would you go about killing a false god?

    • assert that they really are a false god and you are not being deceived into killing a true god
    • assess the situation, what kind of powers do they possess
    • hiss at them and show them ur kity teeth
    • they are probably incredibly scared of u now
    • kindly ask them to leave
    • banish them to eternal damnation
    • :3
    you-can-always-come-home

    i cannot believe cecil gershwin palmer has the ability to make music play very loudly wherever and whenever he wants by introducing “the weather”. like it isn’t just during the radio breaks he does it irl to distract a mob in a later episode. this is infinitely funny to me if only because it’s one of the most random and completely useless superpowers a man can have in a town full of angels, talking river rocks and other weird and powerful magic. maureen gets the ability to switch between dimensions and he gets to be a human radio

    samis-side-of-the-story

    That one time Steve Carlsberg offhandedly mentioned how annoying it was to talk to Cecil because everytime he didn’t want to listen to you he would just start talking about the weather and then you had to shout over music comming from nowhere.

    You’ve just created a handheld device that lets you slip into the interdimensional space between space and time. While there, you don’t age and, don’t experience time dilation and can travel long distances instantly. So, since you’re a very smart an imaginative person, you use it to sleep.

    “So who’s Jason?” Sam asked, right on the tail end of the last topic winding down. 

    “Jason?” Tucker echoed.

    Danny winced.

    He had been hoping Jason wouldn’t come back up. It was foolishness. He’d known that, this was Sam, but he had still hoped. He still hoped because… he didn’t know how to explain Jason. 

    your-mighty-words-astound-me

    So we definitely need more positive representation of DID, but you know what would be funny? Mildly inconvenient representation of DID.

    Oh the world is ending and you need to know about this one specific thing? Yeah I have a guy for that but he doesn't feel like fronting right now

    Sorry what's happening rn is this the bad guy? Yeah I just switched in idk what's going on

    I know you're dating one alter but we're currently co-con with another alter who hates you so idk how I'm feeling rn

    And just who do i think I am? It's funny you should ask that I actually don't know right now

    thestarseersystem

    Wait I just remembered this. here u go :3

    munneknight

    honourable mention