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Asking separately from a thread downstream so I don't derail that topic and because this question will sound very baity, but are any of the Flight Rising staff POC, queer, or disabled? They keep fucking up in ways that make me wonder if they lack, eh, exposure to some life experiences, in a way that would keep them from said fuck ups.
I can't answer your question, but I'm going to try to rerail this conversation by asking what I think you're trying to say
Is there any diversity in the Flight Rising workplace? Because if they do have a Diversity and Inclusion department then they're clearly not listening to them
Thank you so much, that is exactly what I wanted to say. Words hard.
I totally get it, I've had my share of unfortunately phrased comments
Curious what gives you the impression that any of these groups inherently have less life experiences? I guess I can kinda see what you‘re going for with disabled people, but even then only some physical disabilities are bad enough to really impact which life experience you can gain.
The better question would be if they are less-than-super-social nerds, which given that they have created a game has a pretty high chance.
Not that those groups have less life experiences. The FR staff keep making mistakes like the auraboa lore, and their rules on things like scars. It feels like they're very blind to some things like how to handle colonialism, racism, ableism well (or at all). People who are POC/queer/disabled will have had first-hand experiences with topics of those natures. Which makes me wonder if any FR staff are POC/queer/disabled, because they keep mishandling those topics.
what is auraboa?
Ah, I misunderstood which direction you were aiming for, sorry!
No problem, it was very awkward to word so it's easy to read it differently! Edit: more words. I'm going to give up on words for the rest of the day.
Being POC/queer/disabled does not automatically make someone less capable of mishandling a subject, or incapable of looking outside of their own personal experiences. Nor does it grant any sort of immunity to screwing things up or having your own personal biases.
From the sounds of things, I think the bigger issue is if there's any sort of broader editorial control.
That's true, but it does help sometimes.
Where do people buy anime figures? I want to get my BIL one for his birthday but I've never bought one in my life. Looking for Crocodile or Chopper from One Piece ones. Preferably wanting to spend around $50 for one. I tried a site called Tokyo Otaku Mode but those characters were all sold out. There are some on amazon but I don't know how to tell if they are good quality or not.
AmiAmi
What country are you from? America? If you’re Canadian, make sure you avoid anything other than EMS/Air for shipping if you don’t wanna get hit by ridiculous customs “processing fees” from DHL/UPS/FedEx. Even if the base shipping cost for EMS or Air costs more, you save a lot more in the end after taking customs charges into account.
Yeah, I'm in the US.
Americans have a lot more options for domestic storefronts with cheap shipping. At a glance at a figure discord I’m in:
https://www.bigbadtoystore.com
https://store.crunchyroll.com/collections/figures/one-piece/
https://www.glacierhobbies.com
https://shumistore.com
for me AmiAmi is the go to, but that is because most of the local stores that import figures to Aus that i've bought from inflate the final price so its usually way more than AmiAmi's price+EMS or DHL shipping
Thanks!
For secondhand besides what's already been mentioned I like Suruga-ya as well. The English site has free shipping sales periodically and you don't need a shopping service, but if you're okay with shipping and using a proxy the Japanese site has better stock.
Thank you. I'll give them a look.
I like AmiAmi and HobbyLink Japan. For secondhand, I use Buyee as a proxy service.
Avoid Amazon. It's all bootlegs on Amazon.
I found one on AmiAmi. Seems like most of what I am going to buy will be second hand. Do they have the goods in house to know the quality?
Amiami should have a rating for the condition of the item and box, A, B+ etc. The listing name should have the rating, and the chart further down in the item details section. For what it's worth, in my experience the standards for second hand items are much higher in Japan than the west.
I use AmiAmi or BigBadToyStore -- BBTS is more expensive since it has to import the figures itself, but has the "Pile of Loot" thing if you're a regular figure buyer (so if you have a few figures coming out over the space of a few weeks or like a month or two apart, you can have stuff added to your PoL and then shipped to you at the same time for a $4 flat fee)
Mandarake is pretty good.
Seconding mandarake
AmiAmi, HobbyLinkJapan, or Tokyo Otaku Mode are good choices. If you want to buy directly from Japan secondhand, you can use a proxy like Buyee to buy from sites like Japanese Mercari, Amazon, or Yahoo Auctions.
I found personally that unless it’s the official shop from Amazon, I typically get a bootleg.
I find that I rarely need a proxy to buy anything from Amazon JP anymore, at least where I am in Canada. Most official sellers seem to allow for international shipping.
Not sure what a proxy is so a bit worried about attempting to use one.
A proxy, basically, is a second party using your money to buy it, since a lot of JP sites only sell to JP addresses. So they buy it and then forward it to you. Reputable ones like Buyee have been around for ages and aren't scams.
So I just search for the thing on buyee and buy from that site? All I can think of is when I used to buy bootleg WWE PPVs on DVD with cash on ebay. Lol. And everything was a gamble.
The European regular season for football is coming to a close as the Premier League has just ended, leaving Manchester City the four time winner despite having what many argue to be one of their weaker seasons. Turns out being club run by an oil state truly has its benefits. Ignore the whole 115 breaches thing, it really doesn't matter and the reality is they'll probably get a slap on the wrist given who their ownership is, and if any more damage is to occur they'll just punish Everton again or something.
Meanwhile Arsenal did their damned best but just missed out by two points, Liverpool might not have ended the Klopp era on the highest note but got third and won the EFL Cup with a team of youth players early this year, Aston Villa do an incredible run and nab the Champions League although just got cooked by Crystal Palace, and my club of Tottenham miss out because our usual tendencies to fizzle out, although we barely clung onto Europa League. Meanwhile Chelsea's resurgence these last few months with rising star Cole Palmer nabs them Conference League just ahead of newly Saudi funded Newcastle United and the ever struggling biggest club in the country, Manchester United, although they still have the FA Cup final to potential get one off of City in their derby.
The saddest thing this year is the fact all three newly promoted clubs: Luton Town, Burnley, and Sheffield United, are all getting relegated which makes this arguably the weakest trio to enter the Premier League period, which is sort of a sad affair. Leicester despite their financial nightmare and a patchy period managed to win the Championship and is returning to the Prem, with Ipswich alongside. Leeds United and Southampton will soon do battle in the final play-off to decide who is taking the third spot.
Outside the Premier League Real Madrid and Inter Milan win both La Liga and Serie A with relative ease, although nowhere as simply as Leverkusen, who now can claim they not only won the damned thing after a century plus years of existence without doing so, but could still win the DFB-Pokal, DFL-Supercup, and Europa League, which in the best case scenario would give them a quadruple. Still undefeated in all competitions, they are now the European club with the third longest streak of being undefeated behind Scottish Celtic and Belgian Union SG, while being the one with the longest streak in the post-UEFA club competition era.
Coming up soon will be the finals for the European competitions, with Real Madrid vs Dortmund in Champions League which could be a huge chance for the latter to nab it after nearly two decades, Atlanta vs Leverkusen where the Italian club has the task of taking down arguably the best club currently and breaking their streak, and Olympiacos and Fiorentina for Conference League where a Greek club might win a European competition for the first time in history. And course there's the Euros and the Copa America for the international teams of Europe and South America respectively, alongside the Olympics which traditionally is for U-23 players but occasionally we see some big names show up, especially as French President Emmanuel Macron has some weird fetish with trying to goad Mbappe into doing literally everything for French football despite the fact a head of state should not be this invested in an athlete.
Safe to say it's been a hell of a year. It's been a period of giants dominating their respective leagues, barring the Prem which shockingly had a ton of competition for the title only for City to never be punished because God knows that'll never happen. As a Tottenham fan it's been rough, as while we did technically did better than people expected we could have gotten fourth if we played smarter. As for our women's team we bombed out of the FA Cup but I'm just proud we got to the final in the first time in club history, and kudos to Man United for getting their first win there. As a Korean fan it's been awful, the Asian cup earlier this year was only progressed as far as we did because players like Son Heung-Min burned themselves out by forcing the issue, and so long as our FA refuses to take responsibility we'll see more performances like that constantly.
The 115 charges can't come soon enough, I love to see those annoying oil guzzler getting send down straight to national league.
For my team, a bit let down this year. People can argue what ETH done wrong, but the last game against Brighton do show how much we miss Martinez in defense. Hopefully he stays out of injury the next season.
And hopefully Amad, Garnacho and Hojlund can spearhead a win against the oil guzzler
Man injuries were awful for everyone this season. We at Tottenham can comfortably say our incredible start was an over-performance to be sure, but to have it collapse with two key injuries at once in our Chelsea at home game was nightmarish, and we weren't even the worst hit squad.
As for you guys while I will admit I have no clue what will happen to you next week. On one hand you nearly lost to Coventry and survived off pens, on the other hand you effectively broke Liverpool's hopes for the rest of the season. Still prefer you guys to take the trophy home though, and it would cool to see both the men and women have a FA Cup victory, although I am a little bitter about how it went down against us earlier this month.
At the very least I don't have to worry about thinking of Greenwood winning the trophy I suppose.
I don't think we will win it honestly, so I'm not gonna put my hopes up for it
So I've been reading the Blood Lords adventure path from Pathfinder (yes, not a book to be read, yes, autistic, yes, I once literally read a dictionary as a child) and I love this particular part of the setting because its so fundamentally unusual. The nation of Geb consists almost entirely of "evil" (in a D&D sense) people and undead. Setting a whole adventure path there requires the writers to really think about and have fun with how that would work. It ranges from silly, especially early in the adventure, to giving real thought to variety in evil behavior and often mix the two.
Like there's a priest the PCs meet who's goals appear to be good, he wants to support his flock and keep the city safe and has refused the blessing of undeath, but that's because he intends his death to be a tribute to the god of torture. If he's a beloved figure then him dying will cause widespread pain.
In general everyone the PCs meet is evil but many aren't exactly bad people, at least not in any immediate way. It kind of stretches the D&D concept of evil to the breaking point. Yeah these villagers feast upon the living but they need to do that to live and also they're an oppressed underclass who's leader wants your help to free them.
More interestingly to me Geb is a global power because of . . . food production. Specifically grains. Since no undead eat plants Geb uses zombie labor to produce massive quantities of grain that they export at low prices. Zombies work around the clock for no pay and only occasionally eat their handlers to sustain themselves. This means that even though almost every nation and religion in the world thinks Geb should be destroyed it would be a disaster to actually destroy it and even its enemies might be obligated to defend it.
Anyway what is your favorite setting that does something unusual with the evil empire or the undead? Have you ever read a dictionary or an RPG gamebook for fun?
I also did this back in middle school! The RPG gamebook I read at that time is GURPS, standing for Generic Universal Roleplaying System. It's pretty well-known for being "universal" (you can run it for almost any kind of adventure), "simulationist" (tries to be as accurate to RL as possible), and having a lot of (optional) rules, but its main strength is the sheer amount of setting GURPS provides.
My favorite GURPS setting to read is Infinite Worlds, which has the premise of parachronics (their term for interdimensional travel) being invented in 1995, revealed three years later, and now in the setting's present of 2027, the technology is fully exploited by the world and there's this organization named Infinity Unlimited (a kind of crossover between a United Nations agency and megacorporation) who monopolize said technology. Currently, they're fighting a cold war with Centrum, another dimension with English-speaking authoritarian one-world government that also independently discovered parachronics — but due to the nature of parachronics, Infinity can't reach Centrum and vice versa, so what they usually do is influence another timeline's flow of history in their favor, and if they can, prevent the other side from doing the same.
That being said, Infinite Worlds is arguably my gateway to Alternate History genre, and particularly Alternate History cartography — maps of alternate timelines, that you can found in alternatehistory.com, some section of DeviantArt, or in r/imaginarymaps.
I liked the ideas in a Practical Guide to Evil, (a YA web novel). Basically the characters have roles that are ruled by tropes, Evil Emperor/Empress, The Black Knight, The Hero, etc. The Evil Empire has won, and to keep that victory they have to battle against the conditions that create the trope itself. Funding competent orphanages across the empire that care for orphaned children so they don't grow up into a hero, that kind of thing.
It's basically what if we took the Evil Overlord List and rolled some of the ideas behind it into a story and is complicated by the fact that most of the people in power are evil (by design of their trope), so they're battling their own destructive nature as much as putting down rebellions.
I never finished it so I don't know how much of the ideas were fleshed out, but the base idea itself makes a pretty good commentary on the problems inherent to government and human nature.
As someone who enjoyed PGtE, I will say that the story takes the concept and runs full force with it. It does lose a little bit of its grounding but I didn't particularly mind.
Oh hey i remember Geb from the wrath of the righteous videogame adaptation. If you go lich path you have an option to ally with geb.
I'm a big fan of Karrnath in Eberron. Karrnath being a nation who, during the Last War (essentially fantasy WW1) used undead as foot soldiers and later grunt work. They were helped by the Blood of Vol, a religious group which believes that everyone has inner divinity and can ultimately ascend to become deities in their own right.
I find them both to be interesting because they show that undeath isn't inherently evil in the setting. The Undead in the Blood of Vol are viewed as religious martyrs, those who decided to give up their chance of becoming true divinity to help others on their path.
That being said, I also love the undead lore for Pathfinder, and undeath there is inherently a fucked up existence.
Kill Six Billion Demons has amazing world building, and one of my favourite bits of world-building revolves around the devils. They’re (badly paraphrased from really great writing) raw hot cosmic energy that gets individualised when someone slaps a mask on it and gives it a bunch of names to define it as a being. Devils start out weak, and shedding the names forced on them brings them closer to their original source and thus makes them increasingly powerful. The king of the devils is just called… Himself. https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SOT43-44.jpg i mean look at the cool doublespread about Hell
Only correction: that’s not Hell, it’s part of Throne, the city at the center of all universes and resting place of the corpses of 777,777 dead gods. But absolutely everyone should read K6BD
That art is incredible.
That's a fantastically strange way to have a sort of abstract being work. They have to sort of self actualize themselves into unique beings. And wow that's incredible art.
I've read sevearl of their APs, sometimes because i do run the games, other times just to see how something plays out. I think the only one I was unhappy wholesale was Tyrant's grasp. It really just felt like running a party through a very long interactive cutscene to make one of the big changes they needed for the 2e setting.
That's also an interesting way to do Geb. I've always had a soft spot for the millenial emperor idea that came from /tg/ which is a bit more on the good end of the "undead kingdom rules by lich" idea but did try to figure out how such a place views death, what it means economically, and so on. I think one of the 1d4chan wiki offshoots still has it sans most of the chan behaviors.
There have been two so far I didn't like. The 1e Serpent Skull adventure is just so incredibly racist that I think it caused a lot of story changes to be made later. I found Age of Ashes to be too obviously artificial. In other APs the characters move naturally away from low level areas toward high level areas but the way AoA is set up they just coincidentally go in an order that works.
Skulls and shackles also ranks low for me, though that's a combination of it being the AP where tensions boiled over in a couple groups and that it's very poorly summarized. Most just call it the pirate adventure path when it is very specifically the "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" AP. So if that's what you want you'll probably enjoy it, though still plenty to chuck out from the first book. There's a lot in it that just make it frustrating to outright hostile and not in a good way. However if your idea of what a pirate adventure is differs from that, you are not gonna find a lot to hold on to.
CW: Discussions of incest
Some of you may have heard of the game Just Dance before but in case you haven’t, it’s a game where you, well, just dance. The franchise has been going on for almost 15 years now with a new game coming out sometime this year.
The more recent games have added a couple of storylines to accompany the songs within the game. The main one revolves around a group of dancers (called the Just Dancers accordingly) trying to save the “danceverse” from a villain named Night Swan.
A lot of fans liked these new stories but especially took well to the characters Wanderlust and Jack Rose. Wanderlust is the son of a wizard/dimension traveler and an alien (keep this in mind) and has to save the danceverse after some people get kidnapped and corrupted by Night Swan. Jack Rose is Night Swan’s son who is shown to feel repressed by his mother and her constant dismissal of him until the Just Dancers come by and convince him to join them. At some point during the final battle (at 2:43), Jack saves Wanderlust from his corrupted form with a dance move that many have pointed out is similar to a move done by Wanderlust’s parents in a previous game when they’re reunited.
Because of that, JackLust became the most popular ship of the fandom despite the developer's hard insistence on them being friends. Like, really really hard insistence on the fact. The fans didn’t really care though. However, that might not last long.
The 2024 edition got an update of two new songs focusing on the backstory of Night Swan. In “Murder On The Dancefloor”, it’s revealed that she had a romantic relationship with Wanderlust’s dad sometime in the past. Since so far in the game, Jack’s father has not been seen, some people believe that this may be a confirmation of Wanderlust and Jack being half brothers.
Needless to say, a lot of fans are jumping ship though it should be noted that it hasn’t been confirmed if the two share a dad nor does the new routines give any implication that Night Swan had children with Wanderlust’s father. That might change in the future but right now the possibility of JackLust being made up of brothers is 50/50.
But honestly, if it is true then it would explain why the Just Dance team was so adamant on people not shipping them. Never thought I’d see drama like this in a dancing game.
TIL Just Dance has a story that resolves itself through dance battles. Which, I mean, of course it does because that makes perfect sense. I just hadn't thought about it before and now I'm appreciating how clever it is. What a great way to make people engaged in doing the dances.
Luke/Leia for people whose Luke/Leia this is
On a side tangent, maybe this is a little bit of internalized homophobia of my part, but if there is no other reason for this ship to not be cannon, it's really weird that Just Dance of all games would shy away from a gay relationship, even if it was just as a bait.
That's certainly a segue
when i say i almost spat out my coffee i mean it
My brain literally went “oh it’s probably old Supernatural fandom stuff or heyWHAT”
Those two sentences together hit me like a truck
Cowards. Jumping from a ship because of a little thing like incest...
On the flipside, holy shit these games have a story? I'll be honest and say that I've only ever played them occasionally and usually with a group of people, so I never really paid attention. Wizard aliens sounds badass.
I saw a playthrough of the story mentioned by OP. It's a set of like 5-6 songs, it's kinda short but it's interesting and the climax song is kinda great.
Also, there's some small substoties if you look at the song choreographies with attention. For example, the different Lady Gaga dancers had some kind of Spiderverse scenario, and the dancers for Rasputin and Hot 'N Cold had a relationship for a while.
Yeah, kinda funny, that.
Not gonna lie, that's actually pretty awesome. Really neat that they took the time to actually choreograph a plotline to these songs.
I think it’s all kind of funny considering from a design standpoint, they couldn’t have made two more shippable characters. Like the red/blue contrast vibe makes it feel like they were designed in a ship factory, so I’ll be honestly surprised if they confirm any sort of relation.
And Jack Rose’s name is a reference to one of the most famous star crossed lovers in media
Jenny Nicholson's newest video—her first in 18 months—just went live: a four-hour deep dive on The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel
I would so very much love to see a former Disney imagineer give a post-mortem breakdown of just how they managed to screw up this hotel so badly. They had the money, and they should have had the right experience with immersive experience (Jenny even gives an older Kim Possible park as an example of better interactivity created at lower cost), how did nothing work? How'd they release such a buggy, broken mess?
it's genuinely impressive how badly the trip went for her. murphy's law for the one youtuber there that weekend
The same weekend as Munecat dropped a 3 hour video. help.
INB4: THE HOTEL IS PROOF THAT DISNEY KILLED STAR WARS
I remember the Kinect game where the final bosses are dancing against Darth Vader and the Emperor drew comments along the lines of "Disney are ruining Star Wars!" "This is from before the sale, Star Wars has always been like this."
That was the point I was trying to make. The above was a sarcastic comment.
I thought so, hence the reply. Sorry to see the (obvious) sarcasm didn't play well.
I recently listened to a podcast which went through the Star Wars Christmas Special and why on Earth it existed, and I have to say, while I knew it was legendarily bad, I was still impressed by just HOW bad.
Weirdly, I think it was the site WrestleCrap that said something to the effect of "If you want to know just how bad [The Star Wars Holiday Special] is without having to watch it yourself, consider this: George 'Super Ultimate Special Mega Edition I-Never-Met-A-Star-Wars-Related-Dollar-I-Didn't-LOVE' Lucas refuses to officially re-release it to any sort of home video."
Well on the drama side she talks about some of the defenders of Starcruiser (3:24 for those curious). Basically that if you had the money and loved this sort of thing it was absolutely worth it. Jenny points out she did have the money and is super into these things but still didn't like it.
It's interesting to see that immediately after it came out there were people saying exactly those things, clearly before they had even watched the video. It's also funny to me that those exact same defenses were being thrown around for Evermore too.
If you go to the Galactic Starcruiser subreddit (because of course there's one lol) there's a small handful of people trying to defend this failed fucking hotel and make aspersions about her intent. Like, some are claiming that it's because she didn't get involved, or didn't use the app, when there's four hours of a documentary showing her desperately trying to get involved and using the app.
Just by the fact there are billions of people in the world, you're gonna get defenders and likers of ANYTHING. That goes extra for IPs like Star Wars, how Disney advertises their experiences as transcendental once in a life time experiences, and just the sheer amount of money involved. Some people will adamantly refuse to admit they wasted 2 dollars per minute per person for two days.
The potential audience for this always felt really small to me since it had to be made up of people who checked all of these criteria:
Really loves Star Wars
Has thousands of dollars to spend on an experience like this
Doesn’t get a fatal case of the cringies at the idea of LARPing in public with strangers
Is okay with vacationing in a semi-tropical beach town but spending most of that time inside a building with no windows.
That just feels like a really slim Venn overlap, you know? And even if the audience that checks all those boxes is bigger than I think, I still don’t see how it would’ve supported something this expensive to run.
(Then again, I’m not exactly the target market for this. Now, if Paramount opened a hotel where I could spend my vacation living on a TNG-era Enterprise, I’d probably end up robbing a liquor store to afford it…)
To be equivalent, they would do a Discovery
I think part of the problem is a fundamental problem with cruises in general (even though this is a hotel). I think in our head we expect The Love Boat when going on a cruise and to have an exciting, thrilling adventure with a bunch of extras in the background. The reality is you are the extra and you're grouped in with the rest of them playing bingo led by an activity coordinator.
Same with this right? You expect to be the bar lounge from Star Trek: TNG where you have intimate philosophical conversations with people from other planets. Instead you get herded to from spot to spot to watch whatever is happening next on the schedule.
Honestly having watched the video I don't think the concept was ever feasible.
Like one of the expectations is that you'll get an interactive experience with actors. That's only really feasible with a really high cost. But the problem is then if the price is high and there is ever a break in activities I'd feel ripped off. Disney clearly knew this, so their second day at the hotel had an itinerary from 8am to 11pm, which is absolutely exhausting.
Like that was an issue I had with a week long convention at a fraction of the price, the first time I went I pushed myself too hard and ran myself ragged, I had to remind myself I had plenty of time and could take a break, or do more next year. At a $5000 price tag I'd absolutely force myself to 'enjoy' every minute and burn myself out.
Yeah, at a few points Jenny points out that if the price tag were like, 800-1000 bucks per person, then it would feel like you could sit down for a half hour, and any frustration points would be lessened. But because it costs SO MUCH, the pressure to do as much as possible is immense, and any frustrations are absolutely magnified.
Orlando actually isn’t a beach town but that’s just me being pedantic. Still, it’s a Disney vacation where you’re only going to one section of one the four parks and spending the rest of your time doing extremely specific LARPing.