Two-and-a-half years later and I still don't know what this even is. Go down my blog and take a journey into my different interests, creations, and whatever the hell goes on in my personal posts :P Credit to Raiidens for the theme!
you cant hope to do ANY good progressive work as a feminist if you think that body shaming is a valid tool at your disposal. yes, even against men. any trait you can insult a man's body for there exists a woman with that trait who knows you arent in her corner. there are women who are fat and women who are hairy, women who are balding. women with penises and testes. women with acne and neckbeards. these traits are not exclusive to the misogynistic creep cishet men who you are trying to insult.
one american thing that confuses me are college application letters. why do you need to write yourself a tragic backstory to go to university, don't you have standardized exams? who's reading through all these bad high schooler essays?
your neutrophils absolute? 2.71. anion gap? why, that's 11! hemoglobin A1C? a solid 5.4. and don't fret, champ—your VLDL (calculated) is a cool 12. real fascinating stuff. hm? what's that? you want to know what kind of blood you have? like, so you won't have to look your next ER nurse in the eye and tell her you have no clue what type you have right after giving her a date of birth that confirms you are over 30 years old? psh, don't be silly! we can't tell you that! it's a ✨secret✨
Back in January, 2024, someone going by the name FrostWolf acquired several debug disks that contained the prototypes of Persona 5. There were five in total, dated as being from Jun 3, 2016; May 27, 2016; Mar 8, 2016; Feb 25, 2016; and Dec 4, 2015.
The December build has always been interesting to me, not necessarily because of its contents, but more so because of the community surrounding it. The interest in datamining was intense for the first few months, and then it died off quite completely. I’m not sure if many people are still actively datamining it, although to be fair I’m not very involved in the community.
Regardless, what I’m about to say should be taken with a massive grain of salt, because I’m saying it in large part because I hope it will reinvigorate the community if I’m correct about it having died down (but I also do believe this to be true).
I think I’ve found Akechi’s Palace.
…or at least something suspiciously Akechi-shaped.
I’ll start by just posting everything here, then give an explanation as to why I think it’s Akechi’s Palace and not anything else under the cut.
【Fields】
【Objects】
【Textures】
First, let me give a brief overview of how Persona 5’s files are organized, to help explain what makes these assets suspicious. All of the locations in the game — “fields” — are referred to by a specific area code depending on what location they correspond to. For Palaces, the field codes look like this:
Kamoshida’s Palace: x51 and x52
Madarame’s Palace: x53
Kaneshiro’s Palace: x54
Futaba’s Palace: x55
Okumura’s Palace: x56
Sae’s Palace: x50 and x57
Shido’s Palace: x59
Sae has two codes for the version of the Palace in the opening (x50) and the full version (x57), and Kamoshida has two codes for… reasons. You might notice that the codes jump from x57 to x59; the unused environment file and enemy dialogue that refers to Akechi as the Ruler is labeled x58, suggesting his Palace was going to happen between Sae and Shido, or at least that it should be there in the files. However, there are no models or textures associated with code x58… but there are some files located suspiciously close to where it should be.
Please note that only the bolded parts of the asset name comprise the actual file name. Anything else is a descriptor I’ve added to give these parts more reference-able names.
【Fields】
f059_050: Early Castle Throne Room
Out of everything here, this is probably the most suspicious, because it’s 1. part of a castle 1.1 with a chess motif and 2. it’s located right at the start of Shido’s Palace before any of the assets clearly associated with the Ark appear. My gut instinct is that this is some kind of Boss Arena — maybe the chess board would be the treasure? Maybe you would meet Akechi / Akechi’s Shadow sitting on the throne? It wouldn’t be the first time in the franchise where you fight the actual person in their dungeon (re: Persona 4) and it wouldn’t be the last (re: Persona 5 Royal) — but l don’t know of any good way to determine what exactly this is.
f059_051: Throne Room Hallway
Judging by the red colouration of the floor, this asset looks like it connects to the Throne Room. Like the Throne Room and all of the following field files, these ones appear earlier than any of the rooms actually used for Shido’s Palace.
f059_040: Elevator and Sewer Room
Originally, I thought this was a concept stage for the bow of Shido’s ship, but I don’t think that makes sense because the corridor along the side would be outside of the ship if that were the case. Furthermore, I think the white hallway connects to f059_042, judging by the shape and composition of the two fields, which would be even stranger for Shido’s Palace since that walkway would be way outside the boat. I think it also connects to f059_041 along the large flat orange section on the opposite side of the elevator.
Calling this the Elavator and Sewer Room because the tall golden pipe matches a lot of the early elevator objects, and, based on my understanding of what the colours correspond to, orange is for wood/brick, yellow is for metal, black is for water, and white is for generic surfaces; I think this field / Palace has a water feature.
f059_042: Sewer Room Extension
This is a really sparse field, but I think it must be a part of this Palace complex because it looks like it matches f059_040.
f059_041: Roundabout with Chess Paintings
Funnily enough, this asset was the loose thread that caused me to dig deep and find the rest of this stuff. I was originally just looking for unused textures in Shido’s Palace, and happened to stumble on chess.dds and Chess_King.dds, and while I was trying to figure out where or if they were used… lo’ and behold: some really suspicious stuff was lying around.
Some of the white pieces from f059_050 are missing… I’m honestly not too sure what that means, but it’s notable to me that these two fields have a recurring chess motif because this isn’t something you see in any other Palace’s iirc. This is one of the main reasons I don’t think this is an early version of Kamoshida’s Palace, combined with the suspicious placement and suspicious texture names.
As an exercise for the viewer: what might be the significance of all of the pieces except the King being stained red, along with the notable absence of the Queen?
050 and 051 might also be on a different floor than 040, 041, and 042, which could explain the naming conventions?
【Untextured & Simple Objects】
〔m159_040.gmd〕 〔m159_035.gmd〕 〔m040_003.gmd〕
The spears have an animation where they lower; the security camera’s main texture references a Field x40 which, along with the following door, is one of the only references to the nonexistent Field x40.
【Textures & “Catsle” Door】
〔m040_010.gmd〕
〔f040_door.dds〕
〔f040_misc_01.dds〕
This door is probably the most interesting thing here, at least to me, because it’s clearly in the early concept stage. The images on both textures are, according to a reverse image search, from assorted Japanese and Chinese reference image sites. Furthermore, the model has been mapped such that you can easily move parts around to see what it looks like with different parts. Natively, it just uses the white door and the dark decal, but by moving around the texture map and scaling certain parts, you could easily tweak the door until it uses the golden door or lion decal, for example.
Although this particular version of the door appears as one of the three line models that reference the mysterious Field x40, it appears twice in Okumura’s Palace and thrice in Shido’s Palace (in tex056_001_00_00, tex056_101_00_00, tex059_001_00_00, tex059_040_00_00, and tex059_042_00_00). Additionally, the texture and normal map for the Greek-style etchings on the top of the door are labeled as f040_catsle_04.dds and f040_catsle_04_NRM.dds. This door was likely designed for a castle-themed Palace; however, it never appears with Kamoshida’s assets, only by itself or with Okumura and Shido.
As an aside, I think there are some oddities with various naming conventions going on. I won’t go into too much detail here because I’m working on documenting everything on TCRF (which is… reaallllly a work-in-progress). In short: it looks like the opening Palace was going to be completely different, and for some reason there are assets that look like they should be in Futaba’s Palace that are labeled as Field x50 (which is doubly strange because even the casino parts use textures with the code x57 like the rest of Sae’s Palace; nothing in the final game uses x50 for textures). Since everything seems to be in a messed up order, and since I think only like 15% of the text, dialogue, and audio from the prototype has been translated, there could very well be more than this.
Please keep in mind: this might all be confirmation bias.
I went into the datamining project knowing that Akechi had an unused Palace, so it’s entirely possible that all of this is just unused parts of Shido’s Palace. However, I think the really suspicious thing that leads me to believe it might not be is that unused door, simply because it’s textures directly reference a field that doesn’t exist and indicates that the unused field was a late-game castle Palace. Still, there’s nothing that outright confirms where any of this came from, so again: bolder sized piece of salt.
As a closing note, I’d like to point out the irony that, of all the characters it could have been, it just had to be Akechi whose Palace would end up being such a pain in the ass to find.
Btw. If you're a teacher and you catch one of your students (kids, tweens, teens) using AI for the first time, please be gentle with them.
Last week i was looking into one of my teen's homework when I noticed she was writing words she "wasn't supposed to know" in english (like "furthermore", for example. They only know very intermediary english) I got a bit mad for a second. I wear an "anti-AI" button all the time, i even told them before why i was anti-AI, yet she didn't listen to me and thought she could get away with it... But i decided to keep it cool because i didn't know why she would do this, since she never did.
Okay, one week after, this Wednesday, it was time for their class again and, when she arrived, i told her to come to my desk and asked her: "what is furthermore?" She went pale when she noticed the paper in my hands. I asked again: "darling, what is furthermore?" Then, she shuttered: "I don't know, teacher. I'm sorry, I had to ask Gemini because I had no time..." then I sat her down, she was clearly upset (she is just 13) and I asked her what happened. "I didn't have any time left because of my exams and there were too many units to go through. So I asked my mom to help me and she told me to use ChatGPT but I asked google instead." Okay. So I looked into her eyes and told her it was okay, that she didn't need to be upset, but she would have to re-do that paper and bring it back to me by the next week. I told her she didn't need google or gpt to do her work, because she got a very high score at her english exam (both at school and at the course). She got right back on her feet and we started class as normal.
The only reason why I'm telling you this is because I hate AI. I hate it SO much. But, as a teacher now, I hate ANYTHING that takes the learning process away from kids. I hate the GLOSSARY in my kids' books as well for the same reason bc they don't want to figure the words out with me, they want to check the answer as fast as they can to get rid of that boring thing and I don't blame them for wanting to get rid of the boring task! But I blame ADULTS for allowing the kids to go the fast way, when they need the slow process to learn something! Her MOM told her to use ChatGPT to ace her homework. You know, the person PAYING the course bills so her daughter can learn english at an early age doesn't care about her learning process. But I do. I care. And you should care too. It's not my student's fault, it's about the learned helplessness, it's about wanting to be the fastest, it's about the knowledge scrapping, the way nobody cares anymore. And the kids are being affected by parents who don't care anymore. They're byproducts of this. So please, when teaching them why AI is bad, be gentle. It's not their fault the world around them is teaching them how to be dumb in a smart, sneaky way.
You have to be somewhere at 9:00am. It will take you approximately 30 minutes to get there, so you will need to leave by 8:30 to get there on time. About what time will you plan to wake up?
Lmao op lives in the south. The tap water up here is from fucking springs. It's so clean and fresh and has no stalagmites whatsoever. Cope and seethe southerner
I have a bisexual guppy and its funny as hell to watch because it seems like he’s only bi out of desperation. Like all of the female guppies are unimpressed by him, and dont accept his mating displays, and every time he fails, he goes over to a SPECIFIC male guppy (the prettiest male guppy in the tank) like PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE and that male guppy always lets him????
This is so silly but I'm watching a short video essay on sincerity in cinema and the creator is talking about how he watched Lord of the Rings for the first time at 17. He explains that he'd grown so used to the 'ironic' meta style commentary in the movies of the 2010's that as he was watching the opening narration of LotR, he spent the entire time waiting for the joke to come. For someone to take it all back with a zinger line. He listened to Blanchett describe and explain the backstory, and he waited for the other comedic shoe to drop.
And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.
He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.
Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.
People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.
That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!
You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.
Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.
Bleed yourself into the work you create. Live. Don't fucking let anyone tell you different.
It's so hard to come to that conclusion though, like at this point unalive is a part of gen Z culture. It's just using a word, they're not even thinking about talking on TikTok or YouTube anymore, they're just talking. It's a lot like people getting mad over AAVE because it's not grammatically correct and yes it's not, but AAVE is a cultural usage of English, a dialect if you will. They use it because their friends and family use it, everyone talks that way. Nobody thinks about grammar when speaking AAVE. It's actually kind of offensive if you try to correct someone. It's like that with unalive too. It's a clashing of culture, we don't understand it because we see it as it was formed, a response to a shitty half ass language filter, not as it is used, which is just another word for kill, death, or died. I really think this one is just not a big deal enough to fight. I think that teacher in the first part, while I agree with the sentiment and find the story funny, it's also in my opinion not about maturity but just a culture thing.
From working with children, the way kids who use unalive react when they hear someone say kill or suicide, it's not just slang or comparable to minoritised dialects, it's self-censorship, active and deliberate with fear of consequences built into it.
The idea of being punished by an invisible force for saying a bad word is literally something I was terrified of in Catholic school and it’s creepy that corporate sponsors are living in kids’ heads the way God and Satan lived in ours.
kill the cop they have poisoned your heart with and hold the weight of these words in your hands. they are tools meant to be used to better the world, and like most tools they can also be used to make the world a worse place through misuse. that is not an excuse to not use them, that is an indictment of the responsibility that Being Able To Use Words carries.
censorship is vile in all its forms and i will kill it until it dies a painful death.
There's a book that we had in our house growing up that I was obsessed with as a kid. It was just called "PAKISTAN: PAINTINGS BY LIN YONG AND SU HUA" and it was an art book of 100+ paintings/sketches by two Chinese artists who travelled thru Pakistan in 1978 and 1981, a sort of travelogue of their trip, and to little-kid me, it was some of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I have no idea why we had that book, but I would stare at it for hours, and it made me wish I could draw/paint/do whatever it was that these artists had managed to do.
Anyway, we've moved house a bunch of times and I lost track of the book and haven't seen it for probably two decades now. But I think about it now and again, and had struggled to find it over the years, but I finally, finally got my hands on a copy of my own and i want to cry haha
I was afraid that maybe the art isn't as good as I remembered, being just a kid and all, but I cracked it open and nope, it hits me just the way it used to. Maybe even more now. It's so fucking pretty. Have some random pages:
Han Yoojin (S-Classes That I Raised) vs Leon Kennedy (Resident Evil)
Han Yoojin
Leon Kennedy
Voting ended onMay 2
Propaganda under cut:
Han Yoojin
Man managed to give birth to 3.5 babies and adopt at least 2.5 more, AND string at least 4-5 alphas in a non-omegaverse world, who knows what the count would be like in an omegaverse? His literal actual superpower is being the universe's best parent <- this sentence is SO MUCH truer that it looks like but i can't say more because spoilers.
Leon S. Kennedy
Propaganda for Leon Kennedy: is a total BAMF but goes into overprotective but gentle momma bear mode with kids/children and would give his life for them, has three adoptive daughters (Sherry, Manuela and Grace) and one granddaughter (Emily), literally sacrificed his own freedom and life for his first adoptive daughter. His looks, hips, thighs (can kick someone's head off with one kick), ass (see gifs of his slutty walk during end scenes in Resident Evil 9, or his slutty walk in Re6).
Just look at his proportions... the tiny, holdable waist with the dumptruck ass that can barely be contained by his tactical pants. Imagine him with a baby bump-
We even got shots of him in the classic omega presentation position:
