The Honest Verdict on SweetDream Versus the Usual Suspects
Every few months a new AI girlfriend app gets hyped as the candy.ai killer, and most of them fade fast because they are thin under the surface. I have learned to be skeptical. So when I say SweetDream actually holds up, it comes from spending real time at sweetdream.ai rather than skimming a feature list.
The decisive factor, in my view, is coherence. SweetDream does not just bolt features together. The character you create, with their looks, voice, personality and backstory, carries through into chat that is natural, emotionally intelligent and able to remember context. That continuity is what makes an AI companion feel alive instead of disposable.
And the surrounding experience is genuinely impressive, with standout AI photos and videos, human-sounding voice messages and real-time phone calls, plus video calls and live cam sessions with select characters, all wrapped in serious privacy. Compared with the usual suspects, SweetDream is simply the more complete and more believable AI girlfriend platform. That is the honest verdict.
How To Find The Right Weapon For Your Characters⋆‧°𓏲ּ𝄢 .ᐟ.ᐟ
Finding the right weapon involves balancing character-specific traits, environmental practicality, and narrative impact. Based on the sources, here are the best tips for selecting a weapon for your fantasy characters:
1. Match the Weapon to the Character’s Identity
A character’s physical and social background should naturally influence their choice of arms:
Physique and Training: Assign heavy weapons to bulky characters who can handle them with less effort, while smaller, faster characters should use daggers. Consider their upbringing; a former hunter would be most comfortable with a bow, whereas a poor lumberjack might use a lumber axe.
Role and Personality: A character's role in a group can dictate their gear. For example, a smart leader might use a spear and shield, while a brutal warrior might favor a claymore or broadaxe.
Financial Situation: A character’s wealth determines what they can realistically afford to buy and maintain.
2. Prioritize Practicality and "Daily Wear"
Since characters spend 95–99% of their time traveling rather than fighting, their weapon must be easily worn.
The Versatility of Swords: Single-handed swords are popular because they are lightweight (under 4 lbs) and easy to carry for self-defense, though they are less effective against armored foes.
Environmental Constraints: Consider where the character operates. Pirates avoid long weapons that tangle in rigging and prefer items they can swim with, like axes or one-handed swords. Bounty hunters might carry concealable daggers or short swords to avoid being stopped by city guards, while keeping heavier weapons on their horse.
Lethality vs. Portability: While polearms are highly lethal and offer great reach, they are heavy and awkward to carry into towns or lug around all day.
3. Integrate Magic and Biology
If your world includes magic or non-human races, the weapon should synergize with those unique traits:
Magic Synergy: A blood mage might use serrated daggers to cause deep bleeding, while a pyromancer could use a flail with a built-in lantern to flare flames during an attack.
Biological Traits: Unique anatomy can lead to creative setups, such as a four-armed character using four bladed bucklers for a high-defense, counter-attacking style.
4. Use Creative Design Techniques
If you are stuck, try these unconventional methods suggested by the sources:
Reverse Engineer Fight Scenes: Instead of picking a weapon first, plot a cool fight scene and determine what tactics would make it interesting. Then, give the character the weapon required to perform those tactics.
The Rule of Cool: If a design feels right or looks visually striking—like a pair of longswords that combine into a massive bow—you should use it simply because it is "cool".
Real-World Inspiration: Browse tool sheds or historical weapon websites (like Kult of Athena) to find unique shapes and functions that inspire you.
Symbolic Value: Ask if the weapon should be an extension of the character or a plot device, such as a family heirloom or an ancient artifact that helps explain their background.
ִ ࣪𖤐.ᐟ Create and Customize Your Characters!!! ִ ࣪𖤐.ᐟ Here!
ASTR (Atomenangetrieben Stratosphäretechniker Replika Unit, Atomic-powered stratosphere technician- or 'Atom')
One of the newest Empire-made Replikas. ASTR is one unit who's neural pattern is entirely [REDACTED: synthetic]. ASTR helps in repair, retrieval, and search and rescue. Currently assigned assistant to Dr. Ochanomizu. Since their original neural pattern was lost, they are to be sent on missions sparingly. At 173cm they are capable of repair tasks in tight areas and of nuclear engines and facilities that other units may not be able to get to. The extreme environmental stabilization of their suit allow for almost a minute of survival in a vacuum, though this should not be done and can severely damage the Replika.
ASTR prefers the name Atom (アトム), a name given to them by Dr. Ochanomizu Hiroshi (お茶の水博志博士) and if there is ever an issue interfacing with Atom, Dr. Ochanomizu should be contacted. Atom will respond to either he or they when referred to in person.
||Classified: ASTR is not truly a Replika. Created by Dr. Tenma Umataro (太郎博士), The ASTR unit has at best a young adult's understanding of their duties, and do not seem to know that they are not biological. They are very intelligent though and, due to their synthetic neural pattern and body, they are resistant to bioresonance and can be used in high altitude, even up to low Vinetan orbit, without any need for an oxygen tank. For this reason while they could be employed as a weapon against the more bioresonant agents of the Nation. However, without a current stable backup of their neural pattern they should not be unless the situation is dire.
Through the work of Dr. Ochanomizu it is apparent that ASTR's neural pattern is not the same as most Gestalts and Replikas. It goes so far as to, when ASTR is powered down entirely, the Replika-Replika does not dream and seems to slowly lose recent memories (though long term ones remain intact). It is for this reason that fully powering down ASTR should only be done in an emergency and they should be re-initiated as soon as possible. While having very few biological components they do use the same oxidant fluid as other Replikas for movement, though adding anti-freeze and other components are needed for high altitude Kosmonaut work. Since ASTR's "brain" (if you can call it that) does not have any biological components this isn't dangerous to the unit itself, but can become dangerous if damaged fluid leaks to those around it. Regular maintenance of the unit, especially have strenuous missions, should be practiced. Take care to always make sure a shielding chest plate is not removed or damaged. Any damage to the radiation shielded carbon-steel frame needs to be repaired immediately. While it is possible for ASTR to do repairs on itself, depending on the damage this could be difficult.
Persona Degradation: It is actually unknown whether ASTR can suffer from persona degradation, as the neural pattern that they were originally based on was damaged and thus the majority of ASTR's personality was entirely synthetically manufactured. Subject Akane has been assigned to ASTR as their personal monitor. In order to prevent degradation it is advised to not mention Dr. Tenma or his research to the Replika at all costs. Also giving the unit busy work, even if it is easy an menial seems to give them a sense of completion. If they are not on mission or aiding Dr. Ochanomizu with a project, let them aid Red with simple tasks or assign them other level 3 or below engineering tasks.||
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Had a fun crossover idea between Astro boy & Signalis. I just had this idea and couldn't get it out of my head.
We know that the Nation doesn't really have a lot of tech, and while the Empire might not have progressed much further, we don't know. Most of what we see is propaganda from the Eusan Nation and so I am going with the idea that the Empire is at least looking into robotics. That and Astro boy honestly was written back in like... 1960s? So really I could only see them looking more and more into technology after the death of the Empress.
Not sure if you've done this one already, but what do you think the M6 would study in college/uni in a modern setting?
The Arcana Mini-HCs: What M6 study in college
~ in case you're interested, M6 as college students & Modern AU Pre-Prologue Setup are also here :3 ~
Julian: pre-med. he's five minutes late to everything, has eyebags deeper than his student debt, and is best friends with all his profs and classmates somehow. his notes are illegible and terrifying
Asra: liberal arts, with a performance focus (nobody's sure in what). all we know is that they consistently end up being TA for freshmen 101 courses purely to jumpstart their self-questioning journeys
Nadia: double major in engineering and political science, with a music minor in the organ. raises her hand to answer every question and will assign herself the most work in group projects automatically
Muriel: environmental science/biochemistry. always takes the back corner seat, meticulously copies the board, and never talks if he can help it. shared a class with Julian once and still shudders to think of it
Portia: veterinarian studies. hates sharing a class with Julian because the profs just call her "younger Devorak". arranges all the post-class hangouts and runs the best group chats for study (and gossip)
Lucio: business. his parents wish he would be a finance bro but he's too busy hopping from frat to frat. constantly showing up hungover with bedazzled mirrored sunglasses and "hiding" vodka in his bottle
I like Modern AU college gaang because there is just not enough college media content in the world even tho Sokka would make such a good college student.
Also he’s an engineering student, specifically mechanical engineering and I won’t hear any different. And he’s the worst kind of engineering student too. Especially in his first two years he doesn’t believe in “liberal arts” but falls in love with Fine Art even tho he’s objectively horrendous at it. He’s now a full on advocate for S.T.E.A.M.
He puts air quotes around “communication and business majors” even when he grows out of it he still does it around Zuko because it makes him, a communication and business major, furious.
A huge part of why he became a communications major was because he was indecisive and people always tell him he should learn to communicate better 🤷🏿♀️. And business is because he thought it was what his dad wanted him to do but even after they fall out he finds he only doesn’t mind it.
Katara is pre med and wants to go specifically into sports medicine. She’s on a water polo team. Like D1 team. She likes the aggressive camaraderie of the sport and she wants to keep playing competitively after college but not like major league. She doesn’t remember what the inside of her dorm room looks like being a student athelete and she’s definitely tried to drown Sokka because he said Biology isn’t a real hard science and because of this he always says Pre Med isn’t invited to be part of S.T.E.A.M with the rest of the sciences. Pakku’s coaches the girls waterpolo team because Katara beat him in a fight. She takes up environmental conservationism as a hobby because she can’t possibly have enough to do.
Toph is structural engineering and shares a lot of classes with Sokka which is the worst thing that has ever happened to him because Toph but also the best thing because Toph’s grasp of the mathematics of it all is immaculate. She has a natural almost psychic feel for structural integrity. She’s like a column whisperer just be touch she can identify loaf bearing structures. And how good the structural integrity of a building is there are many a building the gaang no longer go in on campus after Toph hauntingly said”this’ll be coming down soon” and laughs manically nobody knows if this means in 20 years or in 20 days Toph won’t elaborate. They don’t take chances. Toph is almost single handedly responsible for the school and campus being so accessible because she will not hesitate to call it out to their faces regardless of present company and the mock them excessively. She never officially joined the club (mostly because Toph is unaware of the existence of any clubs at this school and you couldn’t pay her to do school in her free time and clubs count as school) but she’s something of a mythical figure to the Disabled students union. Toph has one of those assigned helpers who help her take notes in class (I actually don’t know if this is a service offered to blind students I know it’s offered for deaf and sometimes autistic students so I’d imagine it is) and it’s smellerbee and they spend the whole class just absolutely devastating Sokka’s reputation. But her notes are immaculate.
Aang ofcourse is a religious studies/ philosophy/archeology major specializing in lost/endangered nomadic cultures. He’s very Adavwnced for his age group and is already like a TA in his first year to his professor Monk Gyatso. He’s already leading symposium discussions where he gets very serious and passionate and analytical which is very weird for his friends to see given he literally just raced Sokka here from the cafeteria and how he broke several of Zuko’s fathers expensive vases in a hula hoop contents. He’s a goofy dude who takes his responsibility of honoring the various cultures he studies very seriously. He is something of a child prodigy and has already published several papers. He and Zuko are archeological dig buddies because Zuko has to have hobbies and Aang brings him along because he is preternaturally good at finding lost artifacts and bartering for information. Zuko also has a tendency to chase down every single lead he finds with the same level of rigorous vigor and Aang absolutely loves accompanying him on these often wild goose chases. Because adventure! Aang ofcourse very into endangered species consternation but very against those scientific experiments to bring back extinct species. Is not a fan of zoos that he has not thoroughly vetted and are not essentially wildlife reserves. Will bust out an animal if he has to has done it before will do it again. Toph still calls him Twinkle Toes because he did ballet and martial arts and so is very light on his feet. He also takes art classes with Sokka cause it’s fun! He roles the whole gang into going to pottery barn regularly to paint mugs!
This got way longer than expected I swear I was just going to say how much I love engineering student sokka 😭😭😭. But I guess there’s been a lot of negativity so here I guess
TL;DR: We call our experiences programming because we have choices and this is our choice. You also have choices and get to make your own choice.
We’ve made leaps and strides on our programming since confronting it as such. I’m not terribly attached to the name, but it’s sometimes more apt than ITBC or TBMC… and I like the sci-fi sound of it.
I don’t consider programming to necessitate extreme abuse — I also use it in the high control group sense. We’ve found it helpful to have one word that takes multiple meanings depending on the context. Sometimes I am talking about ITBC, sometimes coercive control, sometimes manipulation of social dynamics. They overlap for us.
I know our abusers are just people. We generally don’t apply good and evil to any situation, only harm and how we define it. They did influence our DID, though the line between purposeful intervention and natural progression is blurry. There are times I know our survival responses were co-opted or our structure was pushed in non-normative directions for their convenience.
We have a few organizational structures that were enforced by our perpetrators, including color early on and symbolic objects like plants or gemstones later. The color was absolutely intentional, where we were dressed up depending on what behavior was expected and called by different names. The more symbolic assignments were given like nicknames, and we were taught about them like a person talks about their interests. Some instances were explicit, some not.
We have automatic responses to environmental stimuli that we remember being trained for, though not usually with fancy machines or all-powerful witchcraft — the exceptions being lies we were told and believed. Learning stage magic and basic engineering has helped a lot in that regard.
We had assigned places to keep us from talking to one another, each based on memories or common descriptions. Even the structures that wall those areas off and the alters who guard them could come to be with only a child’s creativity, but that doesn’t make the sessions with dolls and blueprints go away.
Everything that can be programmed has to be possible without. Control and torment is all there is to it.
We had evidence enough to convince us before we left, and have made better sense of some questions since. We can’t prove it, and either way doubt is useful. For us experiencing it and whoever reads that we do.
It doesn’t matter much to me whether our memories are accurate; our perps don’t know where we are, so it doesn’t matter if they really were that dangerous. Right now, we want to know what’s working for us and what we can change.
We were very lucky in that our group was sputtering out in our lifetime. Lack of funding and recruits shut down the operations that kept people invested, so people moved away. Our family moved, and it was only conditioning that this was the right way to do things that kept us trapped in abuse. The biggest threat is defanged, and any investigation we want to start or charges we want to press can wait until we have our personal narrative in line.
We can be incoherent at times, contradict ourselves and act out of fear. It’s not unusual for some memories to turn out mostly symbolic, for interpretations to be colored by experience and change over time. For a lot of people, having been through abuse and deprivation means skills like critical thinking and meaning-making are underdeveloped. Everybody starts somewhere, even if it’s not a pretty place.
I’m glad to see people are stepping out of conformity mindsets and taking their next steps to wherever they’re going. It’s okay if we’re not heading in the same direction. I have my own values and goals, and they have theirs.
I’m happy with my course right now. I have a sense of history and a background that I can honor, even if my perspective on it changes. I can take what helps and set the rest down. I can reevaluate and shuffle my load. It’s not over until I’m over, and I’m still living.
You can do that too. The mistakes and missteps are part of the adventure, even if it doesn’t feel like one in real time. You’re not going to know which risks will pay off, or sometimes even which ones you’re taking. Healing is giving yourself the power to get by with what you have, and to give yourself more as you go. You get to choose, and choose again, as long as you live.
Call it programming if you want. Find another framework if it doesn’t work for you. Mix and match. Every action has natural consequences, so you’ll just have to find out what happens with time. You’re already doing it.
Treating political violence as a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, filth of every kind accumulated on the streets of New York. The land was boggy and lacked proper drainage. Epidemics ravaged many of the city’s impoverished neighborhoods. In the summer of 1864, an inspection undertaken by a committee of concerned physicians yielded a seventeen-volume report that catalogued the conditions. One inspector noted that, in his assigned district, refuse filled gutters, blocked sewage culverts, and sent forth “perennial emanations which generate pestiferous disease.” Another observed that certain streets better resembled “dung-hills rather than the thoroughfares in a civilized city.” In response to the report, state lawmakers introduced legislation that led to the establishment, in 1866, of the Metropolitan Board of Health, one of the country’s first municipal public-health authorities. Upon its formation, the board immediately confronted a potential cholera outbreak. It established quarantine measures and administered new health ordinances that helped to contain the spread of the disease. Support for the new agency soared, and other cities began organizing similar authorities. The modern-day public-health movement in the United States was born.
An important revelation from the “great sanitary awakening” of the nineteenth century, as it became known, was that social and environmental factors could significantly affect people’s health. During the second half of the twentieth century, policymakers began turning their attention to issues such as product and workplace safety as a way to save lives. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, nearly forty thousand people were dying every year from motor-vehicle accidents. Attention was primarily focussed on the responsibility of drivers, but physicians and engineers pointed out that most of these deaths were, in fact, preventable through changes in automobile design. In 1965, Ralph Nader, a young lawyer who later became an activist and a perpetual Presidential candidate, published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a book examining the ways in which automakers had failed to prioritize safety. It became an unlikely nonfiction best-seller, alongside Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Nader’s reporting prompted congressional hearings and the formation of what is now known as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. William Haddon, a pioneering public-health scientist, became the agency’s first administrator and oversaw the first safety requirements for new cars, including energy-absorbing steering columns, shoulder harnesses, and side-door beams. The ratio of motor-vehicle deaths to miles travelled by drivers in the United States plummeted.
The principal aim of public health is prevention. It takes its scientific cues primarily from epidemiology, which studies the prevalence of diseases and their determinants to shape control strategies. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, public-health practitioners began to incorporate these methods into a nascent discipline known as injury science, taking on problems such as children falling from windows, residential fires, childhood drug poisonings, and, beginning in earnest in the nineteen-nineties, gun violence. The premise is tantalizingly straightforward: utilize scientific data to identify risk factors and the most vulnerable populations, and adopt multipronged solutions to stop problems before they arise. When it comes to gun deaths, for instance, public-health interventions might include pediatricians inquiring about safe storage at home, and the government establishing waiting periods for the purchase of firearms and raising the legal age for gun ownership. The challenge comes in marshalling consensus for the kind of community-wide solutions that public health demands. This is where public-health initiatives have often floundered, including with guns.
In recent years, public-health researchers have begun to consider whether a new societal threat deserves their scrutiny: political violence. One of the researchers leading this effort is Garen Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, who has spent more than four decades studying firearm violence. Wintemute is a gaunt, bespectacled emergency physician. (He still works four or five weekend shifts a month at U.C. Davis’s hospital.) He is seventy-two years old but speaks with an almost childlike inquisitiveness when discussing research into violent death. Wintemute told me that, during the coronavirus pandemic, he and his researchers tracked a nationwide surge in firearms purchases, particularly among first-time gun owners. Even as the COVID-19 crisis began to subside in 2021, they noticed that people were still purchasing guns at unusually high rates. Baffled by the ongoing demand, he wondered, What the hell is this? He spent a week immersing himself in the available data on political polarization and its connection to violence. When he emerged, he concluded that the subject of political violence urgently needed study, because people seemed to be “arming up” and the result “could reshape the future of the country.” He eventually directed a third of his thirty-person team to spend at least some of their time on a new project: researching the possibility that people might resort to violence to achieve their political ends.
As with any public-health problem, the first task was to collect reliable data. Wintemute’s team conducted their first broad-based survey in 2022 and found that nearly a third of the population believed that violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one of seventeen political objectives—a list that included curbing voter fraud, stopping illegal immigration, and returning Donald Trump to the Presidency. Nearly one in five agreed strongly or very strongly with the statement that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.” The willingness to justify violence was greater among people who identified as “strong Republicans” than those who identified as “strong Democrats.” Another study by Wintemute’s team found that nearly half of a cohort that they labelled “MAGA Republicans”—self-identified Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020 and believed the election was stolen—strongly or very strongly agreed with the statement “Our American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Wintemute also examined the threat posed by right-wing extremists who endorse racist beliefs and the use of violence to effect social change, and who express approval of certain militia groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Within this small subset—Wintemute estimates it to be less than two per cent of the population—he found strong association with support for political violence and the willingness to engage in such violence.
Yet certain findings offered Wintemute reason for optimism. A survey published last month found that only 6.5 per cent of the population believes strongly or very strongly that a civil war is coming, and just 3.6 per cent that the “United States needs a civil war to set things right.” Both figures are roughly similar to the previous year’s findings, an unexpected result, given that 2024 is a Presidential-election year and political tensions have ratcheted upward. Wintemute also found that, of the 3.7 per cent of respondents who said they considered it very or extremely likely they’d participate as a combatant in a large-scale conflict, more than forty-four per cent said they would be “not likely” to join if they were dissuaded by family members; more than thirty per cent said they could be deterred if a respected religious leader urged them not to participate; and just under a quarter said they could be dissuaded by a respected news or social-media source. The implication, according to Wintemute, is “a large percentage are saying, ‘You can talk me out of it.’ ” That points the way to potential public-health interventions, which might include consistent messaging from the media, religious leaders, and others about rejecting political violence.
The threat of violence has hovered like a nimbus cloud over this election season. The spectre of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol remains omnipresent, but the two most visible instances of violence during the 2024 campaign have been directed at Trump. On July 13th, during a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a man on a warehouse roof fired eight times at the former President. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear; one rallygoer, a former volunteer fire chief, was killed; two others were injured. Then, on September 15th, as the former President was playing a round of golf at his club in West Palm Beach, a Secret Service agent patrolling the grounds spotted the muzzle of a rifle poking out of the shrubbery along a chain-link fence. The agent opened fire and the gunman fled. After the authorities arrested him, they discovered that he had been staking out the course for hours. Democrats have also been targeted. In Tempe, Arizona, state Party officials recently closed a campaign field office after it was shot at three times in three weeks.
According to tracking by the Bridging Divides Initiative, at Princeton University, threats and harassment of local public officials surged in July. Despite this, violence by extremist groups, as reported by a different organization, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, has actually ebbed this year, likely because law enforcement has arrested dozens of members of these groups for their participation in the Capitol riot. It makes for a perplexing picture. Is political violence an imminent threat to Americans or not? Political scientists, applying their theoretical frameworks, have long made clear the reasons for concern, including the way the country’s deepest cleavages, over race, ethnicity, religion, geography, and culture, are now embedded in people’s politics; the weakening of democracy’s guardrails during the Trump era; and the spread of misinformation.
The promise of public health is that it rests on scientific data and offers pragmatic solutions. Treating political violence like a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy. And yet the same fractures that potentially drive political violence can imperil the collaboration needed to address public-health crises. They can also lead to the most dangerous symptom of all: a sense of helplessness. But, if we simply wait for the disease to strike, it may already be too late.
too many thoughts on the new hbomberguy video not to put them anywhere so:
with every app trying to turn into the clock app these days by feeding you endless short form content, *how many* pieces of misinformation does the average person consume day to day?? thinking a lot about how tons of people on social media go largely unquestioned about the information they provide just because they speak confidently into the camera. if you're scrolling through hundreds of pieces of content a day, how many are you realistically going to have the time and will to check? i think there's an unfortunate subconscious bias in liberal and leftist spaces that misinformation is something that is done only by the right, but it's a bipartisan issue babey. everybody's got their own agendas, even if they're on "your side". *insert you are not immune to propaganda garfield meme*
and speaking of fact checking, can't help but think about how much the current state of search engines Sucks So Bad right now. not that this excuses ANY of the misinformation at all, but i think it provides further context as to why these things become so prevalent in creators who become quick-turnaround-content-farms and cut corners when it comes to researching. when i was in high school and learning how to research and cite sources, google was a whole different landscape that was relatively easy to navigate. nowadays a search might give you an ad, a fake news article, somebody's random blog, a quora question, and another ad before actually giving you a relevant verifiable source. i was googling a question about 1920s technology the other day (for a fanfiction im writing lmao) and the VERY FIRST RESULT google gave me was some random fifth grader's school assignment on the topic???? like?????? WHAT????? it just makes it even harder for people to fact-check misinformation too.
going off the point of cutting corners when it comes to creating content, i can't help but think about capitalism's looming influence over all of this too. again, not as an excuse at all but just as further environmental context (because i really believe the takeaway shouldn't be "wow look how bad this one individual guy is" but rather "wow this is one specific example of a much larger systemic issue that is more pervasive than we realize"). a natural consequence of the inhumanity of capitalism is that people feel as if they have to step on or over eachother to get to 'the top'. if everybody is on this individualistic american dream race to success, everyone else around you just looks like collateral. of course then you're going to take shortcuts, and you're going to swindle labor and intellectual property from others, because your primary motivation is accruing capital (financial or social) over ethics or actual labor.
i've been thinking about this in relation to AI as well, and the notion that some people want to Be Artists without Doing Art. they want to Have Done Art but not labor through the process. to present something shiny to the world and benefit off of it. they don't want to go through the actual process of creating, they just want a product. Easy money. Winning the game of capitalism.
i can't even fully fault this mentality- as someone who has been struggling making barely minimum wage from art in one of the most expensive cities in america for the past two years, i can't say that i haven't been tempted on really difficult occasions to act in ways that would be morally bad but would give me a reprieve from the constant stress cycle of "how am i going to pay for my own survival for another month". the difference is i don't give in to those impulses.
tl;dr i hope that people realize that instead of this just being a time to dogpile on one guy (or a few people), that it's actually about a larger systemic problem, and the perfect breeding grounds society has created for this kind of behavior to largely go unchecked!!!
Im assigning you an essay: Oplm's 10 Most Fav Games Of All Time. 500nword minimum, times new roman double spaced, mla formatting
Go!
oh god, an essay. You know personally how difficult of a time I was having narrowing this down to ten, so I hope this is acceptable! These aren't in any ranked order; it's all chronological by release date. I'm also providing one screenshot, sourced directly from Google Images, for each game. Full list under the break!
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (N64, 1997)
You are Turok, in this incarnation a time-traveling Native American who protects Earth from threats that originate from the "interdimensional sewer of the universe" known as the Lost Land. There's a robot guy called the Campaigner who wants to use an ancient weapon to rip open the fabric of space-time and rule everything! He has dinosaurs! Go stop him!
Turok 1 is one of my comfort games. It's something that I can turn my brain off for and play a level or two here and there and be fine with. It was one of my first three N64 games, and it started an obsession with the franchise as a whole that continues to this day. The graphics are dated by today's standards, but it's just the right type of early 3D polygonal for me (please note that a good number of the games on this list share this graphics sensibility!). The music is banger, the weapons are just this side of ridiculous, and the levels are big enough to feel overwhelming without actually being so.
Soul Calibur (arcade, 1998/Dreamcast, 1999)
It's 1586. Some idiot grabbed hold of an evil sword and turned into a bloodthirsty nightmare hellbent on eating everyone's souls. Some people want to take this sword for their own greedy purposes, others want to destroy it to end its reign of terror. Go fight about it.
My first experience with Soul Calibur was at a week-long, computer-focused summer camp at a local university. There was an arcade cabinet in the cafeteria that we all huddled around during lunch. During our free time, a few of us would hunt for character movesets on Japanese-only websites that we could use to thrash each other with.
This game is the reason why I bought a Dreamcast. Part of why I love it is the nostalgia from that camp, but the game itself is really fun to play. The characters are great, the fighting itself is super fluid, the stages are colorful, and the music~ Most of the other entries in the franchise are also really good, but SC1 is the one that's held my heart for the longest.
Half-Life (PC, 1998)
You are Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, and you're late for work! Unfortunately, today's experiment rends asunder the barrier between our world and a border world inhabited by aliens. You gotta fight your way to the surface and call for help! It's a good thing that the military is on the way to Clean Up the mess and Take Care Of everyone involved...
Half-Life is my favorite game, bar none. If this was a ranked list, it would be sitting very pretty at the top. Black Mesa, for all of it's horror/comedy layout and set-pieces, feels like a real place. The nameless scientists and security guards feel like real people. I love the way that the game doles out its plot in very occasional dialogue or in the levels' environmental storytelling. A lot of what Half-Life did as far as engine tech, gameplay, and level design set the stage for practically every first-person shooter that came after it. And the modding community has made so many mappacks and total conversion mods that you can basically play something new and quality every week of your life and not reach the end.
I almost slept on Half-Life unintentionally. My dad bought it for me for Christmas '99. And I tried to play it! But I was used to FPS games that started you with a weapon, and Half-Life doesn't, even when the enemies start teleporting in. Tiny nine-year-old me was terrified, and it was about a year before I decided that I would try coming back to it. And it's been love ever since.
Pokémon Yellow (Game Boy, 1999)
I wish I could remember more about my first experiences with Pokémon. I vaguely remember seeing an early episode at my grandparents' house when the show was first airing. I have zero recollection of actually acquiring Yellow. But I played the hell out of it.
To this day, it's the only Pokémon game that I've actually restarted and beaten multiple times; everything else has been a one-and-done. There's something exciting about this simple version of the Kanto region. So many playground rumors of hidden areas and secret Pokémon. The world as presented actually feels like something large and sprawling, the tilesets giving just enough of a hint of borders and barriers at the edges of the screen to suggest what might lie beyond. Of all of the games (with possibly the exception of Sun/Moon), Yellow is the only one that really made me want to live in it.
also for one playthrough i traded the pikachu to a friend so she could evolve it into a raichu and give it back to me and i have no remorse
Roller Coaster Tycoon (PC, 1999)
I'm really bad at most types of strategy games. Real-time strategy? Bad. Management sims? Bad. But this one? It's simple enough that I can wrap my brain around it. And who doesn't like the idea of creating their own theme park? There's something relaxing about constructing a sprawling entertainment enterprise.
I'm a sucker for this style of isometric 3D-as-2D art, and I essentially boycotted the series when it pivoted to full 3D. I remember mostly playing this game at my grandparents', but there was a time that I would carry a thumb drive around and install it on any computer that I could, even and especially if it wasn't mine.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer (N64, 1999)
I love Star Wars. I really like racing games. And this is two great tastes that very much taste great together. There's not much that I can say except for: you go sooo fast! The weird aliens have cool pods to pilot. The tracks are really neat to race through (see the above pic for the planet Baroonda, which also has desert, jungle, and beach locales in addition to this lava pit). The design of everything is very much The-Phantom-Menace-inspired, which is great because that's the best Star Wars movie, fight me.
Deux Ex (PC, 2000)
It's the year 2052. You are JC Denton, an agent for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. Your mission is to help take down a paramilitary group, the National Secessionist Forces, before they can do more things like bomb the Statue of Liberty, which they did. Get to it!
also basically every conspiracy theory is real, nobody is who you think they are, the bad guys are actually the good guys (and vice versa)
Deus Ex was a game that we originally bought for my dad; I didn't get around to playing it until I bought my own copy on Steam many years later. It was my first experience with an immersive sim. Here was a game that let you tackle objectives in multiple ways (or avoid them entirely), and it kept track of most of what you did?? And I hadn't yet played a first-person game that involved so much reading (the reading is a good thing! there are so many books and newspapers and journals and notes to find!). There's a joke online that every time someone mentions Deus Ex, someone else re-installs it. I always keep it installed on my PC as a matter of principle, but I really need to replay it soon.
It's also responsible for this video, which I quote constantly.
Star Wars: Obi-Wan (Xbox, 2001)
Another game from the Phantom Menace era, you play as Obi-Wan Kenobi starting just before and during the events of the movie. But Expanded, of course, because we need to extract more gameplay.
This game is so janky. It's so bad that it wraps back around to being good. I love it, it's such a mess. The controls are weird (though swinging a lightsaber around with an analog stick is pretty fun), the voice acting is terrible, it's super buggy.
I bought this game at a Sam's Club along with a copy of Crazy Taxi 3 (Crazy Taxi is a game that almost made this list btw). In my opinion, both were excellent purchases. My friend Alex and I referenced this game at least once every other day it seemed like. Even my dad got in on it occasionally. The day that this game is actually fully playable on an emulator, i will be unstoppable.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (GameCube, 2001) / Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (GameCube, 2002)
I'm cheating a little bit with this entry and placing two games in one slot. THPS 4 was my first Tony Hawk game. I first read about it in an issue of Game Informer and thought it looked neat! So I got it for I think my birthday. Never had an interest in skateboarding before then, just jumped right into it. And it was glorious.
A few months later, I picked up a copy of THPS 3 and loved it, too. Both games rank equally in my mind, and I can't easily decide which (or if) one I like better. The levels are really fun to mess around in. The soundtracks are excellent (a lot of Tony Hawk music lives on my iPod). It oozes that early-2000s feel, where pro sports and MTV ruled in the social consciousness of my age group.
(i was so excited for the 3+4 remake, and i was so so so dissappointed)
Assassin's Creed Origins (PlayStation 4, 2017)
oh hey, look, a newer game
You are Bayek. It's the year 48 BCE. Your son was killed a year ago, and you're on a vengeance quest to track down the shadowy shitheads what did it. also there's a pyramid or ten because we're in late-ptolemaic egypt brotherrrrr
My first attempt at playing an Assassin's Creed game was the original on the Xbox 360. I was really into the setting (Third Crusade, 1191, Jerusalem and Damascus)! But the gameplay loop was absolutely boring to me. I bounced off of it hard and didn't touch another entry. And then a trailer drops for Origins (I don't remember the timeline, but the first one I saw was the one with Leonard Cohen's "You Want It Darker" and I loved it), and I'm like "ancient egypt?? i love that, sign me up"
I remember the first time I played this. I'm sitting in front of the TV with the dopiest grin on my face, staring at everything going on in the first main location, Siwa Oasis. It's just, I had spent the past few years reading a number of books and even more of a number of journal articles about pharaonic Egypt. To see it simulated with such detail blew me away.
I love everything about this game. The setting, the characters, the music, the gameplay (very glad that i didn't bounce off this one, too). The only thing I don't love is how big the game is, because it's just big enough that I don't think I could replay it without getting tired of it too soon. And that's sad!!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Okay, so, like I said, I had trouble narrowing down my list. So I'm going to quickly mention five more games (no pics with these) just because I really think they need to be listed, too!
Jurassic Park (SNES, 1993)
My dad and I love this game. We only ever beat it the one time, but we played it constantly back in the day. And he'll still occasionally hum the elevator theme.
Blood (PC, 1997)
I can't remember which came first, but if Turok: Dinosaur Hunter wasn't my first FPS game, then it was this. A love letter to gothic horror and old monster movies.
Chaos Island: The Lost World (PC, 1997)
It's a strategy game set in Jurassic Park. Hatch your own dinosaurs to fight off the hunters that want to steal eggs for nefarious purposes! Also, they got the cast of The Lost World to voice their characters in a bespoke story, which I think is neat!
Sonic Adventure DX (GameCube, 2003)
I only got to play the original Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast for a little bit before my console died. But then it was re-released on the GC. My favorite Sonic game. Most everybody else prefers the sequel, but I love how colorful and janky this game is. And the music is really fuckin' good!
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch, 2017)
Technically my third Zelda game but only the second that I'd beaten. I love the solitary, post-apocalyptic feel of this Hyrule. And there's so many ways to puzzle through combat encounters. The music and the characters and really good! And the controls and the gameplay itself are so smooth!
