#cohost archive

[wet-from-water-water-from-wet]

[originally posted to cohost 1 month ago]

the most bizzare thing about human domestication guide to me is that it made me want to be domesticated but not even for sex reasons. I thought it would be for sex reasons. interacting with hdg puts me in this weird state where I feel like I'm on drugs and yet despite the seemingly erotic nature of the feeling, I would not describe it as horniness. never before have I ever felt such an intense yearning for something nonsexual.

[2nd post]

like yeah, I would want my mistress to do sexual things to me, but that all matters so much less than the bliss of her loving embrace, her taking care of all my needs, my being entirely without worries or obligations except to be a good pet for her, all those things matter so much more that the sexual part which I naïvely assumed was going to be the whole thing

[taffywabbit]

oops i accidentally wrote a review for zelda II: the adventure of link

(originally posted to Cohost on Feb 22, 2024. you can ignore this if you want, i just wanted it archived somewhere before that site disappears)

Finally beat Zelda II for the first time last night (I forced myself to finish it before starting Splatoon 3's Side Order DLC, because I knew if I didn't push through to the end of the Great Palace THIS time then it'd be years before I tried beating it again. This is probably my 4th or 5th attempt at this point). Not that this is a particularly hot take by most people's standards, but I don't think it's all that good, at least from a gameplay standpoint.

I don't regret playing it though, because I think I'm finally able to put my finger on the stuff I actually disliked about it vs the stuff that was honestly fine, or even (very rarely) actually good? I'm kinda fascinated by it, honestly. Sequels where they immediately screw around with the first game's formula (to mixed results) are neat! FE Gaiden is another example that comes to mind (hey they should give Zelda II the Shadows of Valentia treatment, that could be really cool actually).

Obviously Zelda II has a reputation for being kind of a rough experience. It's an NES game, and NES games are often susceptible to being frustrating, buggy, hard to control, or overly punishing. Sometimes, all of the above! And for what it's worth, the original Legend of Zelda was a tough and sometimes very cryptic experience as well. But I feel like the two games are challenging in drastically different ways, and I think TLoZ ended up being the formula that was retained in the long term primarily because its method of challenging the player overall did a better job of inspiring curiosity and exploration. Despite narratively being a direct sequel (with a really badass story premise that is unfortunately not really conveyed at all in-game) Zelda II took a different approach to nearly every element of the original's gameplay, which is a pretty bold move I suppose. Whether or not it succeeds at anything is fairly subjective, but it's undeniably had a lasting impact on the series, as well as the people who grew up with it (and then they went on to make some really excellent mid-2000's flash games inspired by it that I frankly enjoyed a lot more than this... and also a weirdly solid licensed Adventure Time game on the 3DS? I should go back and play that sometime, it's really fun).

Where to start with this...? Uhhh, the EXP-based leveling system where you choose what stats to put your points into is interesting! It creates a risk-and-reward system for fighting enemies instead of avoiding them, whereas in most other Zelda games besides BotW/TotK, the only reward for killing monsters is "they are no longer bothering you while you solve puzzles, and also sometimes they drop rupees/hearts/ammo". It also introduces a bit more player choice in what areas you'd like to get stronger in first, which is cool! I just wish it actually mattered in a way that let you feel powerful for even a moment. Instead, leveling Life (which is functionally just defense) is never enough to actually make you feel like you can afford to take a hit - the expectation seems to be that leveling Attack, Life, and Magic is something you do purely to keep up with how badly every single thing in this game wants to stomp you into the ground and soak up a million hits and waste all your magic. You CAN skip out on leveling one stat to prioritize another, or even try to evade tough combat situations entirely, but if you aren't leveled enough and in the exact things the game expects you to be WHEN it expects you to be, you'll immediately bump into some new asshole who jumps out of nowhere and can cut you down in 2-3 hits. Leveling doesn't make you tangibly stronger, it merely keeps the game barely playable.

This actually ends up being the core problem I have with Zelda II's design, far more than just the combat being clunky and overly punishing or the levels being visually samey and super hard to navigate. In most Zelda games (and also in a lot of other RPGs!), you get a better sword or a new power or item, and it opens up exciting new options for both exploration and combat. In Zelda II, you level up or earn a new item/spell, it's useful for maybe 20-30 minutes, and then it's immediately nullified. Wow, you got the Fire spell! Now you can finally deal with Tektites and Basilisks (which are immune to all other attacks) on the way to the next area! Well, I hope you had fun with that, because Fire doesn't work on most things you run into afterwards.

Easily the biggest game-changer is when you unlock the Downward Thrust sword technique, and finally have another option for combat besides just crouch-hopping and poking monsters with a dull butter knife. It's satisfying to use, it looks cool (by this game's standards), and it even has some utility for crossing hazards or defending yourself against swooping enemies! Cool! Unfortunately, they don't let you play around with that for long either, before nearly every enemy you see starts rolling up with helmets or shells that make them immune to attacks from above, and you never really get anything like that again (the Upward Thrust exists later, but it's far more situational and frankly not very fun or intuitive to use). Rather than feeling like you're being given tools to overcome challenges and stay above the difficulty curve, it feels like you're constantly just slightly underequipped for everything (even if you grind to earn extra stat levels) and any edge you're given is swiftly taken away from you. (Except the Reflect spell, which is ALWAYS a banger after you get it because it makes your shield Actually Do Its Damn Job after nearly every enemy starts shooting projectiles you can't block. Good work, Reflect spell.)

I feel like I grew up hearing plenty of people talk about the overall difficulty of Zelda II, though most of the complaints about its puzzles were surface-level jabs about the short cryptic NPC text, and none of that prepared me for just how ridiculously obtuse its mandatory puzzles/secrets can be. I genuinely have no idea how anyone would EVER find the Life spell - pretty much your ONLY source of healing outside of towns, since there are no hearts to pick up in this game - without some kind of guide. I was FURIOUS when I finally looked up where to find that lady's mirror and discovered that you have to walk into one of the houses, go over to the table that looks EXACTLY like every other table in every other house in the entirety of Hyrule, crouch, and press B, and you'll just pull the mirror out of nowhere. This type of interaction does not exist ANYWHERE else in the game and there's no in-game hint to indicate that you should try this. Absolutely maddening.

This and its predecessor are both games that seemingly expect you to have the physical manual on hand to help you find secrets, but at least in the first game, the way the game was designed was consistent enough that you COULD feasibly find your way to the end of it without a guide. Bombable walls in dungeons always being located in the center, things like that. It had rules and it could generally be trusted to follow them. Zelda II, in comparison, has a final level (the Great Palace) in which there are numerous rooms that look IDENTICAL and if you make one wrong turn you can go through the entire [very difficult and dangerous] dungeon on a path parallel to the one you need to be on, only to hit a dead end and be able to see the spot you're supposed to be reaching on the other side of a wall. Except you would also never KNOW you need to get there, because it looks like another dead end full of monsters but there's actually a completely invisible hole somewhere in the floor over there that drops you into the hallway leading towards the final boss. Also there is no map. TLoZ had a map. I don't know why this game doesn't have a map. Possibly because if you try to look up maps online, most of the dungeons feature non-Euclidean spaces? Idk, even a Super Metroid-style grid map would've done wonders here.

The combat is... fine? I truly don't understand how anyone thinks it's GREAT though. Zelda II is kind of like a version of Castlevania where you don't have a whip and instead have to stab everything at extremely short range, and also sometimes enemies have shields so you have to crouch sometimes to stop them from blocking you. It feels tense and high-stakes but only because, as I mentioned earlier, you really cannot afford to take stray hits in this game. Most enemies chew through your health at an alarming rate, even with the Shield spell active, and there's almost no way to replenish it unless you use a Life spell (which costs a huge chunk of your magic, possibly softlocking you if you end up in a place that requires other spells to progress). I got better at the combat over the course of my playthrough, but I never felt like I got good at it - most of my victories against strong enemies felt like pure luck and there were rarely consistent strategies for success. All of this combined with the fact that Zelda II has limited lives (and I mean LIMITED - there are only six 1-UPs in the entire game, which can each only be collected once) and getting a Game Over anywhere outside of the final palace will send you all the way back to the starting area, and it makes for an incredibly stressful experience. Even making use of savestates to lighten the fear of death can only do so much to improve it.

Overall, I think that Zelda II is a game that has a lot of really promising ideas, but then just absolutely flops when it comes to the execution. I didn't have a better way of organizing these but here are a few examples of elements I DID particularly like, even if they didn't always stick the landing:

I like the idea of the RPG leveling system in theory, but wish it was more empowering in practice and actually let the player make meaningful choices instead of just being required to survive. Choosing to hold off on a Life upgrade and instead save up just a little longer to boost your Attack feels awesome, until you time one of your inputs wrong and get destroyed. In a game with better-tuned difficulty and combat, this system would be great!

I REALLY like that Zelda II introduced a magic system to the series! I think it's cool as hell to have Link learning and casting spells to protect himself, solve puzzles, and exploit enemy weaknesses, instead of relying purely on items. (It's honestly weird to think that a system I associate so strongly with classic Zelda gameplay has only actually showed up in 4 of the games?? I guess you could consider the runes/hand abilities in BotW/TotK to be kind of like modern spells, or the slowly-refilling energy gauge in ALBW to be the most recent iteration of a Magic Meter, but both are highly debatable. Anyways I just think they should let Link shapeshift into a fairy again, that was cool.) But most of the spells in this are fairly situational and your access to magic refills is so limited that you rarely have the freedom to experiment with the spells' secondary functions (hey did you know the Spell spell turns most enemy types into slimes? that's wild. I wish I'd known that sooner).

The overworld functioning like a traditional JRPG, with top-down exploration broken up by semi-random enemy encounters, was something I honestly didn't hate. It's a little weird for Zelda, sure, but I could see it working well to support other systems in a more polished game. Overworld encounters that switch you into a type of gameplay other than turn-based JRPG combat are something I've always been fascinated by!

Anyways, weird game! I'm glad I finally got closure so I could figure out how I personally feel about it, independent of whatever the random youtubers I watched as a teenager thought. And now I never have to play it again :)

[sssunshinebreeze-plural]

The pluralflux be pluralfluxing

(Cohost archive, 2024-06-17T14:26:39.373Z)

I have sworn the last time here and on discord that plural framework has no longer served me and have accepted that I may not be pluraflux but just singlet with one (1) plural experience due to experiencing really bad time in consensus reality.

That is, until, yesterday I actually met a new headmate! Now they (she?) could very well be just a daemon, or maybe not, but I feel like they're "not me" in some ways while still not fully separate from my own concept of self. So I shall label them a new median headmate.

The thing is, she (they???) came and then front and then leave in less than 10/15 minutes, very short time. I also don't immediately feel "whole" (read: singlet) even after she left front. In fact i think i was still sorta connected to her for the whole night. Weird experience.

But anyways. Yea such is the pluralflux life eh?

[weirdcreaturefeed]

Weird Creature of the Day: Red Triangle Slug

Thank you for the wonderfully positive response yesterday! Today we're checking out Triboniophorus graeffei!

Red triangle slugs are a common air-breathing slug found along the east coast of Australia. They are considered part of the Athoracophoridae family, also called the leaf-veined slug family. Measuring up to 15 cm/5.9 in, they are Austalia's largest native land slug!

Like most slugs, they love damp spaces such as forests, shrublands, gardens, and, on occasion, your bathroom. They primarily eat algae off of eucalyptus trees, and also sometimes mold, if they're visiting your home. You'll know if this guy has recently had lunch by the telltale circular marks their radula (mouth) leaves behind.

The iconic jaunty red triangle around their breathing pore reminds me of 80s/90s fashion and/or bowling alley carpet. And! It matches the red edge they have around their foot-- very fashion-forward. They don't develop this pattern until adulthood.

Some individuals have markings that are more red or orange, and their main body may be yellow, grey, white, pink, red, or even green. Research is still being done to determine if these variations merit classifying them into separate species.

While they may be considered common, red triangle slugs have one hell of a defense mechanism that sets them apart from other common slugs. While all slugs secrete a slippery mucus that helps them slide around, red triangle slugs can ALSO secrete a highly adhesive mucus that can pin predators down, sometimes for days at a time! Perhaps you will not find her common now!

Coincidentally, this slug lives in the same place that the fictional cartoon dog Bluey does (Brisbane).

[mil-doo]

Shin Evangelion

So I’m rewatching the rebuild movies with some friends who are more into them than me both for funsies and in hopes of gaining a more positive perspective of them. We just finished 3.0 last week and I’ve got some thoughts so far.

I really appreciate the story they’re trying to tell here. It feels like each character has an inch more autonomy and assurance than their Neon Genesis counterparts. It’s a story where the characters are able to hang on to some of the lessons they learned in NGE and EoE and take them along to this new continuity.

That’s an interesting story! I like the idea of our friends from Nerv learning a little while still clearly struggling with the areas that are still too sore to heal and with the areas where they still need to grow. It would have been really boring if we had the exact same copy and paste characters as before.

I really appreciate how early Misato starts to rely on Shinji and be transparent with him about the machinations of Nerv (to her knowledge). Similarly I love the breakdown of that trust between her and Shinji (and everyone else and Shinji) in 3.0 —a movie whose conflicts could never have happened without a failure of communication born out of long pent up and still raw emotions.

Where it doesn’t work for me is I think primarily an issue of preference. The rebuilds, Shin Eva, etc. feels excessive to me. Maybe that just comes down to my obsessive love with the 90s television series and subsequent film ending, but both the aesthetic choices of the rebuilds, as well as what they choose to use their run time on, don’t work for me as well as I would have liked (Thrice Upon a Time aside, I still want to give that one a fair shake again).

So much of the run time of both 2.0 and 3.0 is dedicated to massive bombastic battle sequences, 2.0 especially feels like it refuses to slow down for longer than a moment or two, while 3.0 has some beautiful character moments sandwiched between what feel like two massive and kind of exhausting 45 minute battles.

Don’t get me wrong, 3.0 especially is visually stunning. It has some of the most technically impressive animation out there, it really shows how well Khara has mastered CG animation in their almost 20 years of making these movies. But Evangelion to me was never really about the flesh mech on abstract terror action, that was always important and appreciated and often had a lot to add to the story but it was always in aid of it and not the central feature.

The aesthetics of 3.0’s final act also kind of looks like someone trying to do EoE again but BIGGER (and a little Micheal Bay-ified). MORE Adams, MORE lances, BIGGER cosmic crosses, a sea of eva skulls, a million billion floating blood red evas! Just give the CG team a bunch of work and make sure the frame is absolutely gushing with objects.

I’m probably sounding harsher than I intend to really come off. I do like these movies, and I respect them more on this viewing than I did before! There’s a lot that they do have to offer and while I don’t like every decision made here I am excited to revisit 3.0+1.0 in a week or so!

I went into Thrice Upon a Time the first go around in 2021 hoping it would resolve every hang up I had with the rebuilds up to that point. This time I’m willing to let the rebuilds be their own thing, with their own goals, and I’m really excited to see its final film with that mindset.

[wet-from-water-water-from-wet]

[originally posted to cohost 1 month ago]

something that I think plays a big part in how human domestication guide is so effective is that it has this constant theme of "give in, it's inevitable and it will be so much better" on every level of the story. the affini are just so much more powerful than the terrans such that defeat was both inevitable and probably a good thing, the way the characters pointlessly attempt to battle the effects of the drugs despite the very physical chemical reality that it will inevitably spread through their body and make them feel better, and obviously elvira's doomed attempt to deny the care of her mistress. but also, the relationship that the story forms with the reader fits this theme, presenting a scary but obviously invulnerably ideology and asking you to just give in. the story is about giving in to some kind of benevolent higher power on every level. no matter what part of the story you're focusing on, you will be watching someone or something give in, and then inevitably you do to. it's better this way.

[wet-from-water-water-from-wet]

[originally posted to cohost 1 month ago]

having read human domestication guide, yeah I want to be domesticated and all that horny stuff, but to me even more than it is erotic or horrific, it's just so incredibly philosophically and poetically interesting. the only thing that remotely compares to the sheer speed at which I adopted the ideology of the story is what happened to me after "on the ethics of boinking animal people". I went into the story knowing that a human was going to be domesticated but I was not expecting to do a ideological 180 like that (more like 90 I guess, I wasn't really opposed to the idea to begin with).

to me the most interesting thing is that it essentially tells the exact same story twice, once with elvira and then again with kazia, but it feels so much different the second time, now that I'm not just invested in "what's going to happen to her? is she going to give in?" and was fully thinking "I hope she gives in soon. it'll be so much better for her, I've just seen it." there are very few differences between kazia's story and elvira's and yet they accomplish very different things, and it just fills me with a sense of admiration at the poetic efficiency of it all. the repetition forces the reader to contemplate the difference between how they felt the first time compared to now, and it feels like it's the story's way of teasing you for accepting it's ideology so quickly just like akash does to elvira.

[wet-from-water-water-from-wet]

[originally posted to cohost 1 month ago]

if you're anything like me, you've at some point pondered something like "if some kind of massively powerful entity sought fit to capture every human and pump them full of drugs such that they're physically incapable of being unhappy, would that be fucked up or what," but you've never been able to really find an answer.

it's a situation that feels so obviously wrong, and yet you cannot shake the fact that "you would be happy anyways." you try to invoke ideas like freedom or nature that don't really mean anything, but you cannot deny the seemingly impenetrable fact that no matter what, you would be happy. no matter how much you wouldn't want to be happy, you would be.

if you are anything like me, then I am so serious I urge you to read human domestication guide if you haven't yet. I would describe it as a combination sci-fi horror erotic fiction that is about exactly that. I just read it yesterday and houugh,, waghh,,, I htink my brain is different now