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It's ether this or "HOLD" for those that still have good coverage.
Update from the r/bald subreddit.
Reblogged crowscriven
Traditional European Christmas time monsters, photographer across the Europe by Charles Fréger.
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Good morning fellow Dragon Age enjoyer. Your posts talking about characters and lore and whatnot are A+++. so I wanted to ask: how do you feel about DAI as a whole?
(I started the year doing replays of both DAO and DA2... 16th and 17th runs respectively lmao. But well... I don't think I can bring myself to do a DAI replay because that game is so... open world)
dragon age inquisition is bad ❤️
it has its moments: truly beautiful art & design, the quest in your heart shall burn, and characters with potential. but for me personally, the bad easily outweighs the good. the gameplay is very poor with drawn-out fights that amount to nothing, vast empty maps with thoughtless and uninteresting side quests, and tedious crafting that trivialises anything you can loot. i honestly think the graphics have aged the worst out of the series; the landscapes are pretty but so many of the close-up textures are ugly, shiny, and grating to look at. the inquisitor is flat and empty to roleplay, with the backstories needlessly restrictive and yet flavourless.
i could probably get over a lot of those technical flaws for a story i love but i disagree with dai, i don’t believe in it. thematically, it poses law, order, and stability as moral good to be preserved over chaos, change, and rebellion, insisting on the preservation of empires & oppressive institutional religions as a necessity for the peace and happiness of ordinary people. everyone good and normal believes this, and anyone else is a selfish malcontent or just “crazy”. it forces this narrative on you rather than letting characters disagree & the players form their own opinions. in a series that is at its best when it plays with unreliable narrators and differing perspectives and complex truth, it just tells you what to think.
in terms of a world to explore, dai puts you back in ferelden for no real reason at all and then wastes orlais on tired, childish jokes about accents being funny and fashion being weird. dwarves are sidelined into near non-existence, the elven lore updates and the open mockery of elven culture and religion are appallingly racist to the real cultures who the writers used as inspiration, and the qunari companion’s good ending is to be Saved from his own culture by the enlightened west south. social and political conflicts that have dominated the entire series are brushed out of the way as quickly as possible by a game that seems deeply embarrassed to be in the fantasy politics series and rushes to assure you that it knows how dull and pointless fantasy politics are. the party is bloated with too many companions, most of whom could be completely cut from the story without changing it, and in a game constantly patting itself on the back for its lukewarm feminism there’s two male companions for every female companion. after a cool introduction the antagonist is shallow and meaningless. the plot pacing is bizarre, with the bad guys constantly on the back foot and the open world full of trivial quests ruining any sense of pressure or tension, and most choices are ultimately meaningless, only hinting at payoff in future installments that i guess they just imagined they would figure out how to deliver later. (spoiler: they didn’t.)
i have lots of hours in it. i actually have more hours in it than my beloved da2. but that’s because as someone invested in the series i’ve always wanted a solid complete worldstate, and it was easy to get a rewarding playthrough out of da2 that satisfies my narrative needs, whereas i’m constantly revisiting dai to try and make it “work”. but while i eventually beat the base game twice i’ve never struggled all the way to the end of the dlcs (which ironically everyone tells me are the best part lmao). i beat jaws of hakkon once but honestly by the end of dai all i want is to play something else. i go back because i have maladies of the brain, do not follow where i lead
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no one ever told me what the german word for the end piece of bread is and I honestly never thought to google it, so i've been calling it the "Brot po" which is "Bread butt" because in English thats what I call it, the butt of the bread. And none of the native germans in my house or life have corrected me, they've all just adopted it and let me think it was normal. 😂🤦🏾♀️
das Anfangs- oder Endstück des Brotes
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It’s the fact that. Part of Alistair’s emotional arc is that he cant fucking let go of this One Revenge. He can’t let it go so bad he fully abandons his duties as a warden if you let Loghain live(his duty to end the blight that is). Like. This man spends the whole entire game telling us how much the wardens mean to him, how they saved their life, and he is willing to forgo the most basic warden duty of seeing a blight through. Because he can’t let go of his need for revenge and mind you, receiving Loghain is ABSOLUTELY what the wardens would do but Alistair refuses to see that.
And idk man. It’s interesting. Alistair is NOT a paragon of virtue, he is not 100% good all of the time and ignoring his less then great traits only serves to flatten the character
tbh the best part of it too is that it makes absolute, 100% sense for Alistair's character too. this is somebody who's spent his entire life mired in resentment actually, just constantly hiding it behind unpleasant news and witty one-liners. he's been rejected his entire life, was only even allowed to compete in the tournament for Duncan in the first place because Duncan pressed the issue, and then he got picked?? to join this first ever group that said he might be worth something?? and by the guy who stood up and said "no let this kid compete too"?? of course Alistair idealized the wardens for it and refuses to see recruiting Loghain is exactly what Duncan would do
(because tbh he doesn't really know Duncan as well as he thinks he does either - can you imagine the betrayal and crisis of faith he'd have if he found out Duncan not only knew who he was the whole time, but also knew his mother, was friends with his mother, and never told him??? but I digress)
interestingly if you talk to Alistair about the king and Loghain before the battle at Ostagar, even he admits that he thinks Cailan isn't going to win the battle, Loghain's strategy is. Loghain is the one "keeping the lid on the pot," I believe he puts it. he might not necessarily look up to Loghain or anything but he completely understands that Loghain is an incredibly valuable tactician, he KNOWS what letting this man live would mean for the Wardens!
but letting Loghain live to Alistair is his equivalent of a Tabris letting Vaughan live, or a Cousland letting Howe live, or depending how you play it maybe even an Aeducan letting Bhelen live. it's offering a second chance to someone that destroyed the life he had, that killed his friends and adoptive family, that tried to kill Eamon even though he's still all kinds of conflicted over Eamon no matter how much he says it out loud. this is somebody that broke his life into pieces again after he'd for the first time started to have one that he actually felt was his and not something imposed on him by his father's identity, and yeah!! even the guy who's let you make all the decisions the entire time is too stubborn to do that, even if it is logically the call that gives a better chance of defeating the blight, because it hurts him personally too much to be a bigger person than that. is it selfish? absolutely. is it understandable? entirely! and half the potential wardens at least literally have the exact same kind of grudge, yet don't get shit on the same way for their crusades of vengeance...
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Kinda feel like there's some untapped meme/reaction image potential from old horror movie trailers...
Since this is gaining traction again, here are the final ones. These had been on separate posts but I suppose they'll be more likely to be noticed here.
I doubt I'll post any more after this but I highly encourage others to go find more. YouTube has tons of old movie trailers and there is PLENTY of gold left to find.
Reblogged crowscriven
The Butterfly Boy: a Fairytale.
A fairytale about the feeling of waiting on the edge of massive existential societal tragedies you are powerless to prevent, the way that we scapegoat the victims of broader societal failures as if they were the Cause, and the way that we treat children who will never grow into a "conventional" adulthood.
Thank you to everyone who followed along as I was sharing the pages for these past couple months! <3 :_:
Oh it’s lovely!
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Every time I'm forced by circumstance to hand-sew something, I remember a fairytale I once read. There are lead-up shenanigans as the humble protagonist helps small animals and meets the princess and all that, but in the climax, the princess rigs a contest for her hand by setting her own task: sew her a dress in a single night.
The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.
The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don't tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.
I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.
I then ignore that piece of wisdom passed down through who knows how many years and proceed to cut the longest damn length of thread I can manage because I hate tying off beginning or ending knots and I will not subject myself to more of that even if it does mean more tangles along the way.
