tiinysatan:

roachpatrol:

Has anyone made a videogame where you’re a princess locked at the top of a tower and have to fight your way down to ground level? Because dang.

Like, think about it: you’re given this nice little room and no objectives at all and when you open the door the guard says ‘stay in there’ so you wait and nothing happens and you open the door again and try and walk out and the guard pushes you back in and says things like ‘you’re our prisoner’ and ‘where are you going, you’re stuck here’ and ‘are you trying to meet your prince? he won’t ever get up THIS high’ and ‘get back inside before I get mad’. But you can pick up a vase of flowers, and you can swing it around. And the thing is all the guards are expecting the hero to be battling his way up, and all this one wimpy little guard at the top is posted to your room for is to push you back into your room, so you can smash him over the head because he’s just not expecting it, and then steal his weapons. And after that you find that the guards are always bigger and stronger than you—and they get bigger and stronger every level down—but you can generally manage to get the first shot in because they’re waiting for the hero, and you’re the princess. And maybe there’s puzzles and stuff too, but you have to solve them backwards, working your way along from end to start, because they’re all set up for the hero. And when you get the bottom and you have the fight of your life because the guards are massed up waiting for the hero, tons of them with awesome weapons and armor and spells and you think it’s the boss battle, but when they’re all dead and the final ground-level door is free to open the credits don’t roll.  And you realize there must be one more fight outside the doors, too, before you’re free, so you equip the best armor and weapons and potions you can find and go outside and you fight this one huge lone badass man on a badass horse in the sunlight. Then he’s finally defeated, and lying in the grass, and his horse is yours, and the credits still aren’t rolling. And you look at his corpse and you see he’s got a locket on, and in that locket is a picture of your face. 

And then you realize that that was the hero. 

And then the credits roll. 

what the fucking shit

I want this, and wish I had the resources to make it.

piefacemcgee:

protocol00:

>saves rare items for the most dire of situations

>gets through the whole game without using any of them

“what if there’s an emergency”

-gets into an emergency-

“WHAT IF THERE’S A BIGGER EMERGENCY”

And this is why I’ve started throwing away or selling consumables. I’ve finally learned (after 10+ years of MMOs) that I’ll never actually use the bloody things.

merinnan:

“I like trigger warnings. I like them because they’re not censorship, they’re the opposite of censorship. Censorship says “Read what we tell you”. The opposite of censorship is “Read whatever you want”. The philosophy of censorship is “We know what is best for you to read”. The philosophy opposite censorship is “You are an adult and can make your own decisions about what to read”.

And part of letting people make their own decisions is giving them relevant information and trusting them to know what to do with them. Uninformed choices are worse choices. Trigger warnings are an attempt to provide you with the information to make good free choices of reading material.

And my role model here, as in so many other places, is Commissioner Lal: “Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”

Trigger warnings fight those who would like to be our masters in another way as well. They are one of our strongest weapons against the proponents of censorship. The proponents say “We can’t let you air that opinion, it might offend people.” Trigger warnings say “I am explaining to you exactly how this might offend you, so if you continuing listening to me you have volunteered to hear whatever I have to say, on your own head be it, and let no one else purport to protect you from yourself.”

…

Or if it’s about a syllabus, put it on the last page of the syllabus, in size 8 font, after the list of recommended reading for the class. As a former student and former teacher, I know no one reads the syllabus. You have to be really devoted to avoiding your trigger. Which is exactly the sort of person who should be able to have a trigger warning while everyone else goes ahead with their lives in a non-political way.

…

They say that “Confronting triggers, not avoiding them, is the best way to overcome PTSD”. They point out that “exposure therapy” is the best treatment for trauma survivors, including rape victims. And that this involves reliving the trauma and exposing yourself to traumatic stimuli, exactly what trigger warnings are intended to prevent. All this is true. But I feel like they are missing a very important point.

YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

Psychotherapists treat arachnophobia with exposure therapy, too. They expose people first to cute, little spiders behind a glass cage. Then bigger spiders. Then they take them out of the cage. Finally, in a carefully controlled environment with their very supportive therapist standing by, they make people experience their worst fear, like having a big tarantula crawl all over them. It usually works pretty well.

Finding an arachnophobic person, and throwing a bucket full of tarantulas at them while shouting “I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” works less well.

And this seems to be the arachnophobe’s equivalent of the PTSD “advice” in the Pacific Standard. There are two problems with its approach. The first is that it avoids the carefully controlled, anxiety-minimizing setup of psychotherapy.

The second is that YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.”