d e v o n
Not today Justin
No title available
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Love Begins
will byers stan first human second
Janaina Medeiros
Stranger Things
dirt enthusiast
Kaledo Art
No title available
NASA
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
todays bird
Kiana Khansmith
Product Placement
$LAYYYTER
Sade Olutola
occasionally subtle
almost home
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Denmark
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from South Korea
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Finland
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Israel
seen from Malaysia
seen from Australia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Brazil
seen from Germany
@averageviolette
burning text gif maker
heart locket gif maker
minecraft advancement maker
minecraft logo font text generator w/assorted textures and pride flags
windows error message maker (win1.0-win11)
FromSoftware image macro generator (elden ring Noun Verbed text)
image to 3d effect gif
vaporwave image generator
microsoft wordart maker (REALLY annoying to use on mobile)
you're welcome
obligatory reblog of this after I forgot to bookmark them (again)
euro brady fanart fr fr
No I'm Not A Human episode 2
I can't stop I fear
wizard college is going to kill me I swear to god. I just saw someone without a component satchel reach into their pocket and pull out a handful of LOOSE tapioca to use as a substitute for blood in their fell ritual. and it worked. I've never been so fucking mad.
experiencing microaggressions apparently
exchange
mlp crossover
this is my first ever charthur fanart, I think
CHARTHUR
you know, the more i think about it, the more i'm convinced that UT/DR discussions would benefit a lot from people having played The Stanley Parable. if you wanna discuss the interplay between the agencies of the human player and in-game avatars, it's very valuable to have a handle on what "agency" can even mean in the context of a video game in the first place
wait i just had a bona fide shower thought i don't know how it took me this long to make the connection
these two things are the same. they serve the same narrative purpose
to elaborate
Both the broom closet "ending" and the genocide route of undertale are commentary on how players in a videogame based around choice will almost always stop interacting with the story emotionally, and begin treating the game as explicitly a video game, just so they can exhaust every possible choice and route it has to offer.
The Broom Closet "Ending"
I say "ending" in quotes because it's not even an ending. The game never restarts, and you are always free to leave the closet at any time and get any actual ending that comes after the employee meeting room. It only "ends" because the narrator eventually stops talking (which, granted, is nearly the same thing, see: the Zending and Apartment Ending; also Whiteboard Ending for commentary on what counts as an ending).
In usual Stanley Parable fashion, most of the analysis is done by the Narrator himself, very explicitly, out loud, but easy to miss if you're not engaging with it as analysis. What frustrates him the most about the situation is that there's nothing to do in the closet, assuming you're still engaging with the game's story. There no new choice to be made, no indication that there would be one, not even a prompt to make another choice as it tradition in the game ("He entered the door on his left" and similar cues).
Then the Narrator prattles on about how there's literally nothing to do in the broom closet, etc, etc. What he comes close to realizing but never quite does, is that him ranting about the broom closet is precisely the point of the Broom Closet "Ending". There's nothing relevant to the story or universe or the game here. The only reason people stay in the broom closet for more than 10 seconds is that they've completely abandoned caring about the actual story, and their suspension of disbelief.
Not that the game actually judges/moralizes you for that. The story is paper-thin. Stanley is a non-character, maybe even the quintessential non-character. It's a parable, it's not meant to have worldbuilding or lore beyond what's needed to expose its points. The Narrator and the logic of the world change radically and inconsistently with each ending to better serve its purpose. Interpreting this ending as the devs whining that people would follow a choice they coded in is, I think, doing a major disservice to the cleverness of the writing in this game.
You stay in the broom closet because, on some level, you are keenly aware that games are made by people, with only finitely many paths coded in (sorry, Raphael), and that the Narrator acknowledging you is the ultimate proof of there being something to do. In continuing down this path, you have to completely stop caring about the game on a story level. The devs ensured this by making the broom closet utterly boring: there's literally nothing else to do in that thing (it's a broom closet!).
Interestingly, the Narrator very quickly matches the player's detachment, beginning to addressing them as "you" and implicitly being aware of there being a real person behind Stanley. He then starts going on about how you'll mention this event as "OH, DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVRITE!1 XD" to your friends.
This happens completely without fanfare too, the pronoun switch is done within one sentence and the narrator never goes "oh you're a real person"; there's a whole other ending where the main point is the Narrator reaching that conclusion. But here there's no point, because to reach this dialogue in the first place, the writers know you must have already revealed yourself as a real person playing a video game, so he doesn't need to play coy.
Interestingly, the Broom Closet "Ending" is also one of the very few endings that "reward" you with a lasting effect beyond a restart: if you go back in the closet on the next restart, the Narrator flips out and leaves you without further dialogue. If you restart once more after that, you find the closet very amusingly boarded up. In the Ultra Deluxe bucket version, you get stickers that stay on the bucket for the rest of your save file.
Undertale's "Genocide" Route
I hope the parallels became clearer with my above explanation. The main commentary made about this route is that carrying it out requires the player to, again, detach themselves from emotional involvement in the story and characters (which is a lot more significant here than in TSP), and begin treating it as a mere video game, with XP to get, LV to gain, bosses to beat, and crucially, routes and events to exhaust.
The route is filled with comments that point toward this, and I don't know if it's really pertinent to list them all, so I'll just give a few illustrations.
Flowey puts this almost as explicitly as the Narrator. He recounts how once he got the power to SAVE, he initially still cared about the people of the underground, until that bored him and he started treating the Underground as a giant dialogue/story tree just to see what would happen.
Many characters comment on how the player is not really a human through the route. It's both a way of highlighting their in-universe cruelty and also a correct assessment that if you are motivated to see the route to its end, you've already given up on embodying an actual human within the story of the game, and that you're here to see what happens, to exhaust every path that had to be manually coded in by Toby Fox.
This is also the ending where the SAVE mechanic is the most explicitly discussed. It's still a thing in other routes, and still part of the story there, but it's no coincidence that Genocide draws attention to the video game mechanics you're using to treat Undertale as just a video game.
It is also, very famously, the ending of Undertale that permanently (short of messing with game files) affects your save files and "taints" any subsequent Pacifist endings. Just like TSP, it acknowledges you engaging with it as a video game, by giving you a ""reward"" that crosses over resets and restarts.
Similarly, I've seen people online frustrated with Genocide, interpreting it as Toby Fox putting himself on a moral high ground, admonishing the player's morality for being evil while playing the route. Just like in TSP, I think that's missing the point, and a disservice to the game's writing. I think the route is meant to make you feel bad, insofar as it tries to draw attention to how you remove yourself from caring emotionally about very endearing characters. But I don't think Toby Fox is over there moralizing players for playing a huge route he explicitly and painstakingly coded into his game.
The route makes you feel bad because these are characters you're supposed to care about, and because the grinding gameplay is boring as fuck (just like the broom closet). This is so you realize that your motivation for pursuing it lies outside of the story of the game, and within the fact that you are a real person playing an actual video game made by another person, as opposed to an interactive documentary of the Underground.
Most of this discussion carries over to Deltarune's Weird Route as well, whose discourse is wrought with terrible takes that miss this commentary. However this post has gotten long enough, maybe I'll make another one for it. thanks for reading all the way through
Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."
My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity.
via- @elidyce
One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.
Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever
the art of war is tedious and irritating when you read it as like, immortal prose by the most brilliant man ever to kick ass. but it’s incredibly fucking funny when you realize that sun tzu had to write every single one of those entries because someone somewhere did not know this ahead of time and made a really, really expensive oopsie doodles.
REAAAAL
Hi guys how are we
OKAY I DID A THING! I made a spiky cuff/bracelet thing. Very inspired by @my-chemical-ratz’s post
It has velcro pieces sewn on so that its easy on/off. Spikes made from pop cans. And the fabric is just the waistband of an old pair of jeans :D 🤘
Ask and ye shall receive! I will try my best to give an in depth guide for of how to make them
1. Start with a pop can (clean it first)
2. Cut it up so it looks like this
3. Tape down the edges (I prefer the metallic side up so I can see better, but if you want the sharpie hidden put the designed side face up)
4. Make a stencil. I made mine out of a note card. It took a few tries to get one that worked for me. I tried the one in the original guide and it didn’t work well, so I kept cutting off stuff until it would. Soo uuhhh fuck around and find out until something works for you
5. Trace a bunch of things
6. Cut out said things
7. Roll them up. I find it easier to almost just fold it in and then squeeze it into a cone shape. If that makes sense.
8. Splay the ends
And thats how you make DIY spikes from pop cans :)
"i miss the way we used to get advertised to back then"
._____________.
Like idk imagine this being the thing you choose to get all "RETVRN" "they took this from you" etc etc about. Our beautiful soulful organic ads vs their wicked soulless ai-generated ads.
nothing makes me feel quite as old as seeing teenagers online do this shit for the 2006 How Do You Do Fellow Kids pseudo hip aesthetic. they're calling it Frutiger Metro
this is what my soul looks like if you even care
Before what? bitch still snorting away still sipping red bull about a gallon a day, still rocking chinchilla knowing i didn't pay- drop top pink coupe bitch get out of my way !!!!!!!
Whats good cunt 😈
what do you want from me
Oh you're a queer kid? what's your fav music artist? and don't say...
will wood
will wood and the tapeworms
Tally hall
Miracle musical
mitski
jackstuber
joe hawley
that handsome devil
chonny jash
tom leher
ghost and pals
maretu
6arelyhuman
odetari
penelope scott
rio romeo
cuarteto de nos
riki musso
santiago tavella
laufey
taylor swift
radiohead
marina
weezer
the beatles
tv girl
billie ellish
milk in the microwave
bo burnham
fish in a birdcage
toby fox
lemon demon
sarah and the safe word
asteria
artic monkeys
they might be giants
my chemical romance
green day
gorillaz
ado
melanie martinez
the strokes
evanecense
glass animals
soddiken
the scary jokes
whatever Your favorite martian was smoking
tyler, the creator
the crane wives
the living tombstone
cavetown
mindless self indulgance
the orion experience
hamilton (yeah ik its a musical)
heathers (yeah ik its a musical x2)
ride the cyclone (YEAH IK ITS A MUSICAL x3)
steam powered giraffe
kiuko (i dont remember how its spelled)
21 pilots
Sir Chloe
hazbin hotel soundtrack
paparrapa the rapper soundtrack
sonic soundtrack
or the omori soundtrack
edit: just to make clear that i don't know every queer band on existence
this is a… a bit aimed aha 😅
Listen, staning politicians is bad. We must remain critical of people in power.
However it is funny to watch Republicans act like this man is the devil incarnate.
This is democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz Gov. Of Minnesota. This man looks like if a capybara was a person. He looks like he'd pull over on the side of the road and help you change a flat tire. He looks like he'd offer you hot coco from his thermos if you were out ice fishing with him.
are you still looking for a goth bitch
i love when i get asks like that because how am i supposed to respond honestly here on my official game development blog. what would i look like
