The thing I like about the Blood Moon mechanic in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is how it affords game-mechanical transparency to the player.
Like, we all know the reason it exists is because, like any complex open-world game, BotW and TotK periodically need to hit the reset button on all non-trivial changes to the world state; in games that don’t, your save file has unbounded growth due to the need to keep track of every little thing you’ve ever done, and eventually the system runs out of memory, save/load performance goes to shit, or both. It’s basic software engineering constraints dictating the shape of play.
The thing is, most open world games try to do this subtly, perhaps by setting individual timers for the consequences of different actions to expire, or by linking world-state cleanup to proximity to the player character, but in practice it never works – trying to be sneaky about it paradoxically makes it more obtrusive to the player by rendering it opaque and unpredictable, often prompting the development of superstitious gameplay rituals to work around it.
BotW and TotK take precisely the opposite tack and make it 100% transparent and 100% predictable. Once a week, at exactly the same time of day, there’s a spooky cutscene and an evil wizard undoes every change you’ve made to the world that doesn’t have an associated quest log entry. Why everything at once, and always on the same schedule? A wizard did it. Why exactly and only those changes that don’t have quest logs attached? See again: a wizard did it.
And this isn’t just a gameplay conceit. Everybody knows about the evil wizard! The fact that the evil wizard keeps resetting everybody’s efforts to fix the befuckening of the world is a central plot point. There are organisations whose chartered purpose is to go around redoing stuff that’s been undone by the wizard.
It makes me wonder what other potential synergies between fantasy worldbuilding and mechanical transparency are going unexploited.
Absolutely losing my mind here. Like it’s not just the INCREDIBLE art, it’s every single detail incorporated into Crowley’s presentation driving me insane with both History Nerd Hyperfixation and The Genders.
The ruff was worn by both men and women. (See Aziraphale in ep3). This one’s larger, as if it were meant for a dress perhaps, but it’s deliberately hard to tell what upper garment that is. A doublet or a bodice? The pearl chains are feminine; the buckle and strip across the chest are not, to my knowledge, or at the very least not commonly. The adornments on the sleeves are anyone’s guess; the flattened chests of the era only contribute to further questions. The hair is long, but the style could only be feminine in a private context at odds with the formal clothing. Men wore their hair down; women didn’t, as a rule (again see ep3, but this time Crowley). That bonnet/cap (? Trying to find the proper English word) is also pretty ambiguous, but funnily enough it reminds me of descriptions made of Rosalind’s cap in her male outfit (from As You Like It). Which, in Shakespeare’s time, would have been a young man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. How’s that for gender fuckery? The kind that Crowley has a penchant for?
Specifically, it reminds me of the description Dorian Gray makes of Sybil Vane wearing that outfit, the “dainty little green cap with a hawk’s feather caught in a jewel” (only, obviously, in Crowley’s color, and with what appears to be an Angel’s feather instead, supremely interesting that; we don’t know if the jewel is there or not, as it would have been at the back), which was a heavy nod to queerness since he specifies “she had never seemed to [him] more exquisite” than crossdressing as a boy, and that she reminded him of a male Tanagra figurine in Basil’s possession. That style of pearl earring was all the rage during the Elizabethan era, both for men and for women, but it was much more common for men to only wear one. That seems to be what’s happening here, but due to the way that Crowley’s hair is arranged we can not know whether it’s one or two being worn. That makeup is not regular makeup, at least not around the eyes: the lily white skin and rouged cheeks and lips may well be worn by an affluent woman, but not those heavy dark shadows and shapes on and around the lids. It’s theatrical makeup. Women weren’t allowed onstage, but there’s also plenty of theory about individuals we would today categorize as some flavor of transfem taking to the profession and the female roles. The “fair youth” the artist references is established to have been a man, but who that young man was is anyone’s guess, a subject of contention, and of plenty of theories, one of the most popular being that it was one of the actors in Shakespeare’s own company, whose age and physical description as per the sonnets would have made him suited for the female roles. And let’s not forget the centuries-long erasure and insistence that Shakespeare could only be talking about a woman.
In short: the portrait manages to capture an almost perfect androgyny and plaster a giant question mark over Crowley’s current gender while simultaneously visually referencing the mystery and misdirection applied to the inspiration for said portrait, this “fair youth” of the sonnets that, in the Good Omens universe, could very well have been Crowley themself, andcreate a visual impression that is nothing short of masterful both in those regards and in its sheer beauty, and my little queer history nerd Crowley-loving nonbinary heart couldn’t possibly be more thrilled.
Wow, thanks so much for writing such a long analysis!!! It’s so spot on. Indeed this portrait is all about gender fluidity and a mix of men’s and women’s styles of the era (Crowley seems to like dressing themself this way in the TV Series). I also thought about the fair youth in the GO universe could very well be Crowley themself! Whee!
I’ll just add a few portraits I used as references for Crowley’s style here. The sitters’ dates are pretty close together but I wasn’t being too strict…
The Earl of Southampton (1573 - 1624). Known for his beautiful long hair. He is also a popular candidate for Shakespeare’s ‘fair youth’.
The Duke of Buckingham (1592 - 1628). He was James I’s lover and seemed to have a penchant for pearls (which were indeed more commonly worn by women), as he was painted with LOTS of them in two of his portraits.
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552 - 1618). No reason, I just really like his little bonnet in this portrait.
anyway normalize women not wanting children as a happy ending
its NOT a happy ending, for a majority of women. Having kids, especially for women, is an intrinsic biological desire. If you are a person who genuinely has no desire for kids or god forbid dislikes kids, that is an anomaly - you might have some trauma or mental/emotional hangups that you have to work out of, or you could be autistic or some other thing. But Its not normal to not want kids. Living childless does and will make women miserable. Dying without kids in, in fact, a bad ending for the vast majority of women.
there is something so deeply wrong with you baby girl
So IDK if people will understand this concept but I made “corner pins”
Basically they are tiny pins with TWO posts on them, and you use them to hold up mementos like instax/photos/tickets etc without having to puncture them, and without having to pinch them with the metal or the push pin edge etc. You can simply rest the corner of the item between the posts gently!
These are the cute ribbon/bow ones, I also made some others that i think would be really cool on your mementos ToT
Let me know what you think about this concept?? I don’t know how to market it but i really thought it was a nice idea T_T. You can find them in my store here
thinking about supernatural when castiel said “i’m considering disobedience” GIRL. be MORE autistic about this. i haven’t seen the show in years don’t correct me if i got the quote wrong i don’t want to hear it. but i just think it’s so funny that he spent half his time on earth trying to kubrick stare dean “the d stands for DSLs and uhh. daddy issues” winchester into taking his pants off and he didn’t even get a canonical blowie out of it. you hate to see neurodivergent girlies losing :(
i want all of you to know you can unfollow me for anything at any time and i will completely understand. i think they should have been putting High Shine lipgloss on jensen ackles and docking his pay whenever he breathed through his nose on camera.
castiel’s staring at dean like he wants to put him in some sort of scary sex labyrinth of his own making and dean’s like “dude are you mad at me? :/“ and instead of taking a moment to process what’s happening castiel says some shit like “my angel dick is the size of a parking garage”. and dean winks and says “i bet you say that to all the girls” and then goes off and immediately sacrifices his life at the first available opportunity. so fucking normal.
Very Silly Concept: a show called “Accessibility Nightmares” but it’s structured exactly like Kitchen Nightmares. An accessibility specialist goes to different establishments and helps them make their businesses more accessible.
The accessibility specialist asks why the door at the top of the small set of stairs has a wheelchair symbol on it. The owner replies that’s the accessible bathroom. The camera zooms in on the specialist as they process this information.
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A customer with a service dog comes in to a restaurant. The hostess tells them they don’t allow dogs. The accessibly specialist looks over at the hostess like
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And there are web accessibility episodes too. The accessibility specialist stares at the white text on the light pink background of the home page like
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The specialist asks why not a single product picture has alt text, and the business owner says “Well I mean, it’s makeup, why would a blind person be shopping for makeup?” The specialist just
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The specialist asks the web designer how a screen reader user is supposed to complete the captcha portion of the password reset process when there is no audio alternative. The designer admits they don’t know.
this, but only if we get to yell at them like Gordon does.
Oh, 100%. In my head the accessibility specialist is actually still just inexplicably Gordon Ramsay. I was having a delightful time the other day imagining “your videos have auto-generated captions?” being said in the exact same way Gordon says “you’re serving them frozen fish???”
But having the specialist be Ramsay-esque would be crucial, I think. On all accounts; just as Gordon is always patient and polite with the waiters and waitresses, the specialist would be patient and polite with the store staff answering questions about the accessibility options they do not control. But on the flip side, if the person who is in charge is being unnecessarily difficult or just straight up ableist, there is likely to be some yelling and dramatic background music involved.
Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn’t committing to the bit
I mean, we’re talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.
“Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week.”
Look, there’s this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. “Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze” no they don’t, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.
The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive “philosopher’s cocaine.”
what if there was a small version of a destruction staff that could cast firebolt, but like only a small amount of them and it was called a six-shooter–
im so passionate about skyrim gun.
ok well my Skyrim gun was way cooler than. The fortnite one
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