this post rules, but it's even better when you remember re4 was set in spain

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YOU ARE THE REASON

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@samtheflamingomain
this post rules, but it's even better when you remember re4 was set in spain
Life is... whatever, it's double exposure
Unlike the other entries into my review deep-dive on the Life is Strange... Anthology? Saga? Descent into madness? This one will be spoiler-heavy for 2 reasons: firstly, I don't think this game is worth your time, unlike the other 3. Second? I need them. To even briefly explain this game.
It is impossible to describe the gimmick without a major first-chapter spoiler: you will be shifting between timelines, defined as "Living" and "Dead" world, the only difference being, in one your best friend is alive, and in the other, she is dead. Kinda. More later.
For now, let's reign in the basics as a "LAST TIME ON LIS!": Max is a grad student in New England. For... photography, question mark? Fine art? Can one actually obtain a graduate degree in photography? What about a doctorate? Genuinely asking.
For a supposed continuation of Max's story, which I think is quite literally one of the best-told stories in video game history, I sure as shit don't care about 1%er Max's "story" here.
Life ~Before the Storm~ is Strange
Alright, I gotta say, this is gonna be a bit biased because of 2 things: I love Chloe the Brat, and don't find her "backtalk" ability cringey, and I am the child of someone who discovered their dad was cheating on their mom.
Look, Chloe is a child. Her Backtalk lines are a bit lame, but if you came up with them on the spot, especially against a Real Adult, you'd feel cool. C'mon, let's have a bit of fun. That's how I excuse the Backtalk gimmick in this game; she's a child and smart. Let her be a little cringe. You know you were at that age.
Life is Strange is a bad franchise name
There, I said it. If you wanted a Cinematic Universe tm, this was not the way to do it, I promise you.
Why? Because the game "Tell Me Why", made by the same developers as the OG LIS didn't have LIS in the title, and it is absolute 10/10 fire. While "True Colors" is a soggy wet noodle of a game, and certainly not fit to wear the LIS prefix.
Alex is a great character, Haven is a great setting, the twist villain is great, pretty much every supporting character is great. Even the story is mostly pretty good. And LORD the art. Beautiful game.
But uh, did you notice how I didn't mention what Alex's power is? Cuz it sucks and doesn't matter. Here's a quick sketch depicting how I think that meeting went:
[Interior: Board Room] Boss: No, we can't re-use rewinding time! That was a perfect 10, we can't re-use something that worked absolutely beautifully the first time!"
Intern: Oh okay what about, like, feeling emotion?
(Group looks at each other in confusion)
Intern: Okay, imagine if you could like, realize other people have emotions?
---6 hrs later---
Boss: Perfect. Let's make them glow colors and always be mad or sad. No other emotions exist, as we have established.
/Scene
Sorry but it really is fuckin dumb. Sometimes she has mind reading abilities, sometimes she can absorb the emotion but it never carries to the next scene, so like did she even do anything of moral virtue?? The rules are so much more confusing than LIS.
And again, they do not matter. There are no puzzles to be solved or lives to be changed here, you just press A to pay respects. Then in a non-choice-able moment, a strange man lures you, a young vulnerable woman, to an abandoned mine shaft at night while the rest of the town is occupied.
He shoots you down a hole. You're pretty much fine tho, cuz you walk out and go to a town hall meeting and don't stop at the hospital first or anything.
Then it's like the literal "You made x choice" at the end of each chapter but in the form of: how many townsfolk trust you. Luckily I got all but Ryan (understandable tbh) and Charlotte?? (Sorry for saving your child's life after meeting him THAT DAY you dumb bitch).
Bad guy is exposed, you are the town hero and reign supreme. Your face is miraculously unscarred a few days later. You get to kiss pretty girl. Game end.
It left a lot to be desired, is what I'm saying.
But it also had a lot to live up to. I keep coming back to it, but on its own merit, untied to the LIS CU, this would've been a solid title. But trying to brand it as the Next Big LIS Title really didn't give it the nepotism boost they thought it would, in my opinion.
And even though Alex's "power" is just empathy in 4K color, I still think something interesting could've been done with that but they just didn't.
This game is very undercooked. I spent almost an hour in the barn in LIS trying to climb the platforms and open the door before realizing I needed to undo one thing, boom door open. So frustrating at the time but that's cuz I was being dumb. Big dopamine when big door open!
None of that is to be had here.
One last gripe: PACING. LIS is perfectly paced in my opinion. It's less than 8 minutes from opening cutscene to *that First Thing that makes shit real*. This game is a walking simulator with "press x to notice an obvious thing" for about an hour before anything happens. It does this a lot. And yet, from the start to the point where the First Thing in this game is almost a goddamn hour. If you skip a lot of the filler. Maybe even 2h if you try to see it all.
It gets worse: these people talk at 0.25 speed, I swear. I've read the subtitle in 1 second. It takes 45 seconds for it to change. They talk so fuckin slow. And say very little.
I do like the characters... but again, undercooked. Elenor is the flower lady with dementia. Her personality is "the flower lady with dementia". Same with Duckie the Boomer and Mac the Brooding Misunderstood Jock.
I do think the story is passable, if you can suspend a lot of disbelief - not even in a magic way, just a plot-point way. The worst way.
Stay Greater Flamingos. And get True Colors at 90% off otherwise pass.
Life Is Strange is strange
I played the OG LIS for the first time about 2 months ago. I still think about that game every single day. Mostly in the form of "what if I'd done x instead of y?" because the game is that choice-driven. You get a different ending if you befriended the Drone Girl enough to let you fly her drone for 20 seconds than if you don't.
Maybe not literally but you get the point: among games that claim the coveted Steam tag of "Choices Matter", the first Life is Strange reigns king.
Sure, Detroit Become Human technically has more endings, more branches, more... stuff?
But LIS does it a lot less ham-fistedly.
I've since played LIS three times, back-to-back-to-back because I *had to know* how each major choice tree played out.
I breathed a sigh of relief and uninstalled DBH after one playthrough because it was exhausting to see all those damn progress/choice trees and imagine how many playthroughs it would require for me to see every outcome imaginable. LIS is not like that, and you'll know it after one playthrough.
Expressing deep gratitude to find himself surrounded by those so dear to his heart, local crab Dan Herscher told reporters Wednesday that he was just happy to be in a bucket with all his friends. “Yes, sir, there’s nothing better than hanging out in a plastic bucket and clambering all over a couple dozen of my best buds,” said Herscher, adding that the warm, convivial atmosphere fostered by the bucket was such that he couldn’t help but pull back any comrades attempting to escape over the edge and give them a big, crabby hug.
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I love getting comments on really old fics. It's like a little tap on the shoulder that says, "hey the art you create is going to last forever even if you don't think it matters anymore"
Saying he found the activity enriched his life and provided him with a real sense of purpose, local man Martin Berens, 43, spent his afternoon volunteering opinions about the homeless, sources confirmed Monday. “Nothing makes me feel better than heading down to the park in my spare time and serving up a bunch of heated diatribes about homelessness and what I perceive to be a declining work ethic,” said Berens, adding that he truly believed that just one person loudly opining to strangers that the homeless needed to be “rounded up” could make a significant difference in the world.
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it’s easy to forget, so I’ll remind y’all: you can make fantasy versions of anything. yes even things you might not think about. like soil types. I am thinking of fantasy soil types right now
me thinking about fantasy versions of the 2003 Honda Civic
Truly the all time funniest writer thing is when you're doing edits and you think to yourself "omg I've got the PERFeCT sentence to add right here!" and then you stick it in all excited, only to find that literally three lines down you have virtually that exact same sentence in the draft already.
Is it bad that I feel slightly bad that I keep coming to the library to use its quietness and its desk space and its pleasant atmosphere for writing but I never check out books?
Why would you feel bad? You’re using the library for one of its intended purposes. The desks, WiFi, space etc are LITERALLY there for you to do exactly what you’re doing AND each time you go in you add to the foot traffic numbers that prove hey people are coming in to use our stuff mr. government so keep funding us.
Confirmed by another public librarian. One of the stats we track is "WiFi usages"
That is, we track number of sessions/devices using it over time.
The library is not about snooping on what you're doing with that WiFi. Libraries respect privacy.
We literally have a door counter at my library. Congratulations, you just added to our statistics.
I think it's a bit sad that with more and more public spaces vanishing, people are feeling bad about not "buying" stuff to "earn" their time at a library.
A library is like a park, you're allowed to just. Exist in it.
I check out books every 4 weeks, when the learning period from my current books is up, but I go much more frequently with my kid to just sit there and read to them, and that's okay. In my school days, we'd go and do our research for presentations there, just reading, never checking out.
A library is a space to just exist.
I was homeless for a few months, kicked out of the shelter from 7am-8pm. The Library was more accommodating than the shelter.
I had a laptop I used to look for housing and work, and when that was done for the day, I played Neopets.
Then I realized there was a piano for public use in the basement and took full advantage and kinda felt bad cuz I already felt I didn't deserve to exist in public spaces and now I was using?? An instrument?? For my own fun and enrichment??
That piano saved me from going insane with boredom. It was a very short period of my life, but it's one that I remember intensely due to the trauma of it all.
But also because Every Single library employee knew me by name or the more flattering "piano guy", and I'll never ever forget them. A few would spend their breaks listening to me play and lament having to get back to work. One even said they looked forward to my visits.
The Library is one of the oldest public institutions for a reason. It's a haven for people who need a quick Wifi for 10 minutes or need a piano for 30 days.
It makes my heart so damn full to see anyone of any age for any reason in a library. Don't ever feel like checking out books is its only purpose. It's one of the only 3rd places we have left and using it as such is what keeps it alive.
sam in wonderland
I grew up with parents that bought my love, which usually sucked, but once a year, it meant my mother brought me and my 2 best friends to Canada's Wonderland and was too afraid of revealing her abusiveness in public to deny us any purchase we so desired.
I realize there's a lot to unpack there.
Anyway,
I went to Wonderland yesterday for the first time in 9 years. Since my last visit, they dropped 2 new coasters.
I'm immobile today, but it was so damn worth it. I'm going to review the newest coasters - one from 2019, one from this year.
But first, I want to review the park as a whole in terms of someone whose legs turn to noodles after standing for 15 minutes.
It actually wasn't quite as bad as I expected, and I went on a goddamn Sunday like a masochist.
Just lost a few braincells reading an nyt article about gen z "treat culture" and I can't even fathom that this is a thing. We're living in a dystopian hellscape where someone spending $5 a week on a cookie is considered a wasteful brat because they should have just gone for a nice free walk instead and saved the $250 a year that roughly equals four days' rent. That's why these ungrateful kids can't buy a house, naturally.
I am ALL for free treats, like hiking or reading in the park. But at some point you can't budget your way out of poverty, and you will literally go mad if you deny yourself basic pleasures that are literally all around you. They even lamented that little treats could snowball into doing something absolutely unforgivable like learning how to play the guitar or buying concert tickets.
At what point do we just start saying out loud that living an enjoyable and fulfilling life is now only acceptable at a 100k+ salary, and if you're one of the millions of people unlucky enough not to be in that category you should just eat dirt and be grateful?
it's literally millennial avocado toast bullshit all over again, but with nary a pause in between them.
Happy heavenly 80th birthday to the icon, the legend, the activist, Marsha P. Johnson. 🕊️🏳️🌈
Marsha was a fierce advocate for LGBTQ+ youth, unhoused Americans, and those affected by H.I.V. and AIDS. She was also on the front lines of the Stonewall uprising.
On July 6th, 1992, Ms. Johnson’s body was found in the Hudson River off the West Village Piers in New York. She was only 46 years old. 1992 was the worst year on record for anti-LGBTQ+ violence at the time, according to @antiviolence.
May Marsha’s legacy inspire us to stand with and protect the most underserved among us.
some of my favourite comments as seen on chris fleming's youtube recently