#finding the good

[fueledbycoffeeandgrace]

[yunithyzt]

Finding the Good Pt 1: Foldy

(What I like about her below)

OG post | Next part

Although I can't say too much about her TPOT self due to her early elimination, Foldy was one of the more prominent characters in pre-split BFB. The show took Foldy's desire for vengeance more serious than they would with other characters at that time. Her reason being related to her eliminated to her best friend's elimination also shows something of her that is ignored a bit too often.

She may not have much friends or be good at making them, but she will stick to those she does have. Her relationship with Marker was fine, but she is especially loyal of Stapy. In TPOT 1, her gasping when she believed she heard his name stuck out to me. And with the whole vengeance thing mentioned above, she clearly cared enough about him to be so strongly motivated.

[m0tiv8me]

Some sun shine today and temps above zero. I’ll take what I can get.

[andrei-svech]

best of the year

new years is almost upon us. 2020 hasn’t been a great year for anybody. as of today my home country has had 19 MILLION covid cases and my heart is broken. my family is still in quarantine, my city is in lockdown, one of my parents is unemployed, my students have gone home and i’m now teaching fully virtually, and my depression and anxiety have been up all year. but today I thought to myself there have been so many GOOD things. here they are! my 10 happiest and most empowering moments of the year: 1. the american public has come somewhat to their senses: joe biden is the president elect. kamala harris is the first woman and first person of color to become vice president elect. 2. I got to march. to stand with Black lives. it was one of the most heartbreaking but empowering things i’ve ever experienced. 3. I got to live with my best friend and her husband, two of my favorite people in the entire world. 4. the colorado avalanche made it to the second round of the stanley cup playoffs, and I got to experience it with my dad.   5. I got a whole new class of AMAZING new kindergarteners to love on. they are our future and I don’t take that for granted for one second. 6. I get to buy a new car! the idea of the payments is looming, but it’s a new step forward. 7. we had two marriages and FOUR new babies through my extended family. 8. my mother was chosen employee of the year for her entire company. 9. I made it halfway through my journey towards getting my masters degree. 10. I started this blog, met so many INCREDIBLE new people and started writing again. there are good things to look back on. i’m tagging some of my favorites in hopes they find theirs too! thank you all SO much for making this year so amazing, I love you all!!! @woah-were-halfway-there @tysjostys @iamtheblondestblonde @sortagaysortahigh @bricksatlandyswindow @nikolajehlers @jasondickinsonss @brockadoodles @jamiedrysdales @kempe @laurenairay @princessphilly @barriesweet @spine-buster @danglesnipecelly @crosbeezinthetrap @kallmekmk @tkachukme @folkloreflyers @babytkachuks @thirteenisles @flaminmtl @hymarners @calesykar @makarkale @matbaerzal

[selves-acceptance]

be positive, even when you don’t feel like it. smile, even when you’re scared. and soon enough, you’ll find you’re a lot happier than you used to be.

[breadknight-likes-things]

Gaming's Biggest Disappointments of 2018,  And Their Silver Linings.

Video games were absolutely incredible in 2018, from bombastic AAA games like God of War to smaller, intimate looks serious subjects like Night In The Woods.  We’ve had an incredible year of games, but with all incredible years come some downsides, and even though this post is about the biggest foibles of the year overall, I think most of them are also indications of improvements big and small that we can look forward to.  So these posts are going to be fairly negative, a thing I try not to do on this blog, but hopefully I can interlace enough positive information in there to keep my usual tone up, so without further ado here they are.

The Telltale Closure: 

So I’m going to open with an event from this year that, frankly despite my title, has no silver lining.  The closure of Telltale games was a gigantic bummer in all respects, hundreds of people lost their jobs suddenly, were given no severance and told their health insurance was only going to last to the end of the month.  All future projects were cancelled and the even their currently running Walking Dead season was left half finished in limbo.  Some employees reported having moved across the country for a job at this well known dev less than a week before, only to more or less immediately lose it.  The higher ups running Telltale kept all of their financial issues so close to the chest that nobody below even knew anything was wrong, so when a new round of funding didn’t pull through at the last minute the only thing they could do was fire nearly every worker. In the end this left only a skeleton crew to finish the contract on Netflix Minecraft, and even they got laid off a couple weeks later!  Telltales death is a cautionary tale, and though we now see that The Walking Dead The Final season will be finished that isn’t what we should be concerned about, if it’s this easy for people in the gaming industry to be mislead about how their company is doing, something is seriously wrong.

Fallout 76, Like, In General:

Alright, Fallout 76 is a mess, and I’ve written before about how I can still enjoy it despite it’s innumerable problems, but almost all events surrounding this games release and it’s bizarre descent from “Buggy but fun” to “just not fun” after it’s patches is something that still needs to be talked about.  I think the most obvious thing to be said about Fallout 76 is that this game simply wasn’t done, I have a feeling it was rushed out to give Bethesda a product for this fall and to match up with the release of the masses of tie-in merchandise, but even so the game just isn’t finished.  As a release, the game is chock full of bugs, some visual like your characters power armor not loading right and you just being rendered spindly and nude and some gameplay affecting like enemies re-spawning in a location seemingly at random, leaving you immediately overwhelmed and dead within seconds. 

Thing is though, that isn’t where it stops, outside the game Bethesda Game Studios has shown an alarmingly tone deaf reaction to the player bases complaints.  I’m not talking about the nylon bag thing(never buy $200 collectors editions everyone, it’s never worth it), I’m talking about leaking peoples personal info and acting like it’s not a big deal or trying to placate anger by giving away paltry amounts of in game currency or collections of old games they didn’t even make.  Despite all this however, if you were to ask me my positive feelings on the thing, at the very least I’d tell you Fallout 76 is a promising blueprint for parts of the franchises future.  Even if this game is deeply flawed, imagine this being reworked more as a co-op mode in a more traditional Fallout or even Elder Scrolls game.  We could be looking at a wonderful future of exploring these big Bethesda worlds with our friends and even if the first attempt is rough as hell, it is ultimately still a first attempt, and hopefully one that portends a potentially great future. 

Metal Gear Survive:

Okay honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about Metal Gear Survive because I didn’t actually play it.  Why I’m bringing it up though is my general feeling that Konami is getting more hatred than even they deserve, based mostly around the ugly mysterious breakup between them and Kojima(though reports of how their employees are mistreated are pretty grim).  Survive is an awful game, and a cynical attempt to cash in on both the Metal Gear name and the boost in notoriety Survival Games have been having in recent times.  What the silver lining in this is however, is that Konami is very clearly not afraid to use their IP’s as some feared after that Kojima breakup.  Castlevania is enjoying success as a much loved Netflix show, two Belmonts and Snake both showed up and were well received in Smash Bros and even Zone of the Enders, which even the biggest Kojima fans seem to forget existed, got a full re-release for PS4.  Though we may need to worry about new attempts at these franchises if Survive is any indication, the scary idea that all those IP’s would just vanish seems to have just been conjecture, so instead of those video game things we all love, lets just watch TV!...Hey at least it’s a good show okay! 

The Response to Diablo Immortal:

This section is not about Diablo Immortal being a bad game, because we don’t know if it is, the thing isn’t even out!  This is about the, in my eyes, stupid, childish and cynical response to the games announcement.  What’s the issue with a mobile Diablo game?  I honestly have to ask myself this question every time I see the horrible response so many people continue to have to this benign spin-off to a much beloved franchise. People tried so hard to be mad about this game they’ve never even played, acting like an innocent nervous joke, one made by a dev after being greeted by a round of disrespectful boos, killed their dog.  Making wild claims that Blizzard no longer cares about their fans or IP’s or that they’re doing this as some kind of bizarre intentional slight against players.  Gaming has a real issue with reactionary anger, and we seem to see it happen for both valid and completely invalid reasons multiple times a year.  

People being angry at being nickled and dimed to death isn’t strange, we can so easily see this in Battlefront 2 from a couple years ago, who wants to grind out 40 hours of an online shooter to unlock one character?  Stuff like that is clearly an absurdly bad choice and the anger it engenders should probably be expected, but Diablo hasn’t actually done anything yet and people are already acting like it’s the biggest affront to video games they’ve ever seen.  What’s the silver lining in this nerd fury you ask?  It’s the game itself.  To be honest even if the game is mediocre having a Diablo game on my phone is an enticing idea, and good or bad I can’t wait to find out how it’s going to play.

We can find the good, we can find the bad, but video games remain a unique medium for stories and entertainment, and I for one can’t wait to find out what 2019 has in store for us!(I mean besides hopefully getting some answers on that batshit twist at the end of Gears of War 4 I still haven’t actually written about, i’ll get to it!)

[fueledbycoffeeandgrace]

This morning’s sunrise …