#five million words

[delcat177]

So let's talk fiat currency and economics

and video games AND VIDEO GAMES GET BACK HERE

I want to preface this by saying I've spent a lot of cash on dumb, functionally useless things in video games.  Most of us have.  I'm not judging players or companies, I'm just fascinated.

So Steam has had items you can sell for Steam cash (actual money used to buy games on Steam) since before I was on there, and games that drop trading cards specifically to buy, sell, or create status symbols with for about as long as I've been a user.  It's fun to see them drop as you play, and with trading cards selling for ten to thirty cents on average, it's a nice little incentive to keep active.

Time's marched on, though, and with overall value of items and especially trading cards dropping as more and more users own and play the same games, the market has devalued.  Steam created a release valve on this (hurr Valve) by instituting a system to "recycle" items into Gems, a fiat currency doler used to craft booster packs for more items or bid in a holiday auction.

And as with all dolers, things get a little crazy sometimes.

One of the necessary hooks that makes Gems a fiat currency is that while they have actual monetary worth, it's limited.  You need 1000 Gems to stack them into a saleable item.  Right now, those are in high demand, at $1.19 a pop.  As bids in the sale are public, we can take an easy peek at what people are spending.

Pulling to my standard example and OF COURSE Satan has the highest bid OF COURSE.

Anyway, the high bid is 11,800 gems.  Divide that by 1000 to separate it into gem stacks, multiply it by $1.19, and the amount Satan is paying to torment Wilsons is...

About $14!  Not bad, considering the game sells for $15.  It's close to the edge there, so he probably has the highest bid, and we can assume he had enough extra gems kicking around that he didn't have to buy a 15th sack to cover it.  Well done Satan, you saved a dollar.

Now what everyone's been waiting for:

THE RIDICULOUSLY OVERPRICED AND FUNCTIONALLY USELESS ITEM (PRICE IS RIGHT CROWD ROAR)

This showcase of a gold tint to your avatar and persona name...that's it, that's honestly it and I really hope to GOD it doesn't actually expire in a month...for this showcase, what would you bid?

Is that your final answer?

The highest bid for this item is...

Well, you probably didn't go over.

When I pay for something that I know the company spent a fraction of a fraction of the percentage of the price of and can distribute endlessly for free, it's because 1) it's a company that is free to use, like Neopets or Flight Rising, and 2) the content has some use, even if it's purely cosmetic.  And that's GOOD cosmetic, like $2 for an animated background on Neopets.  Steam has free server use, but they're a retail company making money on every game sold and every item sold.  And cosmetics...542 clams is a lot for a gold tint, is what I'm sayin'.

The thing is, there's no one to blame here.  If people are willing to pay this, Steam is obviously providing supply to meet demand, and, well, people are willing to pay this, so that's their own business.

It just boggles me, is all.  It's a fascinating microcosm of dolers, and I've been watching it go by the past couple of days and trying to learn from it.  It's from studying examples like these that we can get a better idea of our society's perception of money and how our economy works on a large scale.

...oh who am I kidding I WANT A CHUNK OF IT SOMEONE TELL ME HOW TO GET IN ON THIS I WANT A PIECE OF THE PIEEEEEEE

[delcat177]

cryingalonewithfrankenstein said: The Berenstains were so great.

I shelve the books on a regular basis, and they remain solid in terms of captivating and teaching children, probably because they were written by people who showed every sign of remembering what it was like to be a child.  They went outside of usual protocol back in the day to highlight things that were just as important (if not more so) than the morals parents wanted: Bully trouble is bad, but bullies have reasons for being like that (and can be any gender).  Taking on too many activities is bad, and parents can get just as swept up and overwhelmed as kids.  Excluding other is bad, but if you were excluded because you were being a dick you need to cut that shit out.

Probably my favorite was when they did a book on strangers, which was absolutely obligatory at the time, but addressed something that barely any other messages on the subject did: What happens when your kid starts freaking the fuck out and seeing molesters everywhere because holy shit are you listening to the news everyone wants to kidnap me.  This was a very real fallout from Stranger Danger fearmongering, and Mama talking Sister Bear down about how most people are okay and you just have to use common sense was an important and ballsy move.  Equally ballsy was addressing that people could look dangerous on the outside and be fine on the inside and vice versa, which is as close as they could probably get to the fact that most kids are harmed by people they know.

TL;DR these books were and are important.

Or, uh...they were until the original authors died of the Olds and their son started using them as an evangelical vehicle.

Not often you see a series DE-evolve like that.

[delcat177]

if you think this is bad now remember i'm getting ready to watch it in HD while high

[delcat177]

Well, what are your OCs for? Do you usually create them with a narrative in mind or do they exist independently of that? Who's your favorite right now, and who's your latest creation? What would happen if the two of them met?

Oh man, you really aren’t screwing with me!  This is awesome 8,D

Okay, lemme break it down.

…what are your OCs for? Do you usually create them with a narrative in mind or do they exist independently of that?

It’s variable.  My oldest OCs date back to a one-on-one roleplaying campaign that’s been running on and off again for over ten years now.  The ones I just refer to are from a piece I started a long time ago when my friends and I were challenging each other to break into the Kindleporn market—my efforts were sunk by my actually liking them and thus ruining my chances of keeping it simple.  I also write one-off horror stories and the occasional bowl of creepypasta.

As far as vectors go, the characters from my horror stories are strictly cut off (except the monsters, who get everywhere), but the others move in and out of each other’s worlds fairly casually.  This is largely because of an inn-between-worlds called The Wings, which allows for a lot of crossover, and crossovers for that matter.

Who’s your favorite right now?

While I honestly can’t play favorites, Leon has been kind of my mascot for a while now.  He was supposed to be a walk-on in the Kindleporn thing, but he’s proven likable not just to me but a couple of friends, and he’s definitely part of the family now.

Who’s your latest creation?

Technically I’m toeing the line with a character in a fanfic I’m working on, but my last true OC was the Problems Man from the creepypasta I wrote for Bogleech’s Creepypasta Cookoff 2013.

What would happen if the two of them met?

Aaaahaha.  I keep my horror stories cut off for a reason.  Providing Leon got out without any…modifications, he’d spend at least four hours wrapped around Giacomo gibbering before he could be coaxed down, probably with a lot of candy (it’s a bug thing).  Leon is a good and loyal friend, but he can be very excitable and grabby and you have to be prepared for a lot of bruised ribs.

Thank you for asking these |D  I hope this is okay?  I…don’t get asked this stuff often 8,D

[delcat177]

okay so

I have Cereal Killer stuck in my head, and I was thinking about how the "Toucan, Son of Sam" earworm chorus doesn't make any sense because David Berkowitz only killed men as an incidental part of his drive to kill women and all the mascots in the song are male and it hit me

Where are all the female cereal mascots?

Cereal is, like, a thing for me.  I think it is for most people that grew up within range of a television, or at least before they started takin' the prizes out of the box (the fuck was up with that, anyway?).  It's nostalgia, or at least the kind of Stockholm nostalgia you get after seeing the same commercial roughly 6,000 times a day and forcing down an entire box of Quaker Oats just to get a dinosaur sticker.  But for all the ads that have been drilled into my brain over the years to replace things like remembering to turn my cell phone on, I can't remember a single female cereal mascot.  Not one.  The closest I can get is the grandmas in...I think it was Golden Grahams, but they were antagonists and also they clearly didn't make too much of an impact.

Fuck's up with that, man?

[delcat177]

okay despite my level of coherence

I gotta do my endgame spiel or I'm not gonna feel satisfied going to bed

I went into the game knowing almost nothing about it, and I think that's the best approach.  It generally is.  I had a feeling of what was going to happen, but the open atmospheres in the beginning and end of the game were surprising and oddly disturbing.  Horror games have conditioned me to enclosed spaces, and I actually feel safer there.  It hadn't occurred to me, but a lot could be done with more outdoor areas.

The initial game reminds me very, very strongly of Clive Barker's Undying, which I really should replay at some point.  The rest of the game didn't have the same feel because they split ways at eldritch abominations, and frankly, I couldn't be happier.  As much as I enjoyed the original Amnesia, even back in 2009 I was starting to feel like anything Lovecraftian was silly by proxy.  It's gone camp, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (see: Welcome to Night Vale), but should retire it from straight horror, at least for a while.  The flesh-and-blood approach was refreshing, to say the least.

That having been said, it did fall into some regrettable tropes--namely, using creepy children as a driving point.  It came together in the end, and there were certainly some nice visuals, but waifish British voices just aren't eerie anymore.  It was also distractingly blunt at times, seeming like it couldn't decide between knowing the gamer knew full well what was going on in the factory and wanting to play coy anyway.  The personal journal entries were especially wink-wink nudge-nudge, and I honestly don't know what they were going for with that angle.  Did they seriously think at any points we needed hints about the "twist"?  'Cause we didn't.  Really.  If you did this is probably your first horror anything, welcome, pull up a chair.  Your first protip is that elaborating on events every five seconds is fucking annoying and takes away from the atmosphere.

However, that and a few physics problems (running canceling out crouching and one instance of falling through the map, although that was a bug I accidentally forced, to be fair) are all I can complain about.  The game is completely straightforward and made of total mindfuck ambiguity at the same time in such a bizarre, graceful manner that I think they might have been trying to use the bluntness of the "mystery" on purpose, even if it didn't quite work.  They never explain just the right things.  The original Amnesia went out of its way to tie things together at the end, this one grabs you and shakes you back and forth between clarity and surrealism until you puke nightmares.  I have honestly never experienced anything quite like it before in a game, ever.  The closest I can think of would be Deadly Premonition, but that has a very different feel to it and actually manages to make more sense.  This game makes less sense than Deadly Premonition and it does it beautifully.

I don't really have much to say about the pigs as monsters.  After my first encounter, I questioned whether I was going to be able to handle it in one session or if I was going to end up slamming the eject button and sleeping with the lights on like I did with the first game, but the game downplays it after that almost pointedly.  This is not a monster-based game, and they made that painstakingly clear.  Given the potential to try to be the first game over again and fail miserably, this was the best possible move on the team's part.  That's not to say there weren't some tense moments, and I only found the exit to the piston room because I was chased into what I thought was a corner and was leaping blindly around trying to escape and literally fell into the next area, which was simultaneously one of the most triumphant and most embarrassing gaming moments I've had in a while.  The inconsistent lantern flickering was especially unnerving (and happily never explained!).

Okay text is getting pretty blurry and probably horribly pretentious, lemme see if I can wrap this up with some (not terribly) quick takes.

--I hate and love that you never see the Tripery.  Tough love.  Unless I missed it in which case FFS SOMEONE TELL ME HOW TO GET THERE.

--Picking up the first sow I saw and turning it around in my hands made me reconsider eating pig products for the zillionth time.  Being mauled by the pigs made me switch sides to DEVOUR HAM BEFORE IT DEVOURS YOU.  Reading the "my lungs are in my vomit" note and thinking that it was written by a pig, not a human, made me reconsider again.  It doesn't actually matter because I can never ever give up pork, it's too delicious, but it made me think.

--Speaking of picking things up, I love how few things you can manipulate.  I saw people whining when I was looking for a walkthrough about how they liked throwing brooms and apples around to "lighten the mood" in the first game.  That's why you can't now.  That's the point.

--I was also pleased by the significant cutting down in puzzles, since the ones in the first game were so much obnoxious filler.  The team had a very clear goal of streamlining this into an experience instead of a game--no consumables, limited action, limited puzzles.  That having been said, I got stuck multiple times because of unclear paths, which was a pain in the ass.

--I seriously wonder who was responsible for giving Pewdiepie an advance copy and if they're aware of his reputation, with Amnesia in particular.  Apparently a lot of BNFs in the LP community got one, so they probably just didn't do their homework, but it's unfortunate.

--Near the endgame, when the twins rush out of a door at you and it's supposed to slam shut, I somehow managed to run inside before it did.  I spent a good few minutes being confused and increasingly irate in what seemed like the former house model without stairs (but with a banister, which tipped me off) before noticing a black gap and stepping on it, falling through the map.  It appeared as a blue circle above me that grew gradually smaller, disappeared and reappeared as a ring a few times, and then I died and was reset to my checkpoint.  Not particularly notable, although part of the bug landscape was a small shed or doghouse I could crouch into with the opposite door blocked off by brick, which was weirdly unnerving.

In conclusion, I will never fully understand this game, and instead hold the sense and atmosphere of it cupped in my hand like a stone egg, and that makes me very, very happy.  The rest is just set dressing.

Absolutely gorgeous set dressing, mind.  But set dressing.

[delcat177]

FIVE MILLIONS WORDS SH:R POST

ONLY HIJACKED ONTO ZARLA'S JOURNAL

I'm sorry I fandalized your space Zar I can't help myself I have no sense of proportion

[delcat177]

when I'm exhausted I say everything that pops into my head instead of shutting up

because I lose all inhibitions and suddenly everything is interesting

see previous post about fatigue = the dope mary jane weed marajahoobie joint...bastard.