Lurker > MrMallard

Yeah, Final Fantasy is big on crystals and crystalline imagery. FF1 had crystals, sure, but FF5 and FF9 rely heavily on crystals storywise and there are spinoffs called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

Crystals don't appear in every game, at least not to an equal extent from game to game. But crystals are a big part of the Final Fantasy playbook - the unique thumbprint Final Fantasy has left on the JRPG formula is basically steampunk/anachronistic technology mixed with fantasy elements, surrealism, and crystals. Maybe body horror too.

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It was a part of a budget game series called the Simple 1500 series - extremely budget games made for pennies, which occasionally got localisations that were just as cheap. If you look for Simple 1500 Boxing it comes right up.

If the name sounds familiar, it might be because the line graduated to the Simple 2000 series for the PS2. That's where you get infamous games like The Sniper and Oneechanbara.

Another Simple 1500 game with an overseas release was an RC helicopter game that was apparently really good. Also, other Simple 2000 game you might have heard of are Demolition Girl and Earth Defence Force.

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Jesus Christ, I didn't know he was still alive. Ford and Reagan are both long dead, but he survives.

Great man, probably the last president to truly work towards world peace. He went against his advisors who were telling him to bomb Iran, and I think it was under his presidency that saw America in its last period of peacetime... ever. America has been in some degree of conflict from Reagan onwards, bouncing from conflict to conflict. Jimmy Carter was the last peacetime president to my knowledge.

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I mean maybe I got a bit too sanctimonious, but what I wanted to get across was something akin to

HagenEx posted...

Is he even acting anymore?

I say leave him be, people get old and fat, deal with it.

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We've been through this news story before. Just leave the man alone with his piles of money, Friends was his big thing and he wasn't in a lot of other stuff after that. It's not surprising that he'd let himself go and age to the degree that he has, and it's not like I can really blame him. People age differently, and it's shitty to go "WOW look how UGLY this former star has gotten!" - it's sick and intrusive, and I don't support it.

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One more bump since this topic seemed to go over so well the first time

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Spider-Man.

Web Batman's ankles and string him up, then keep coating him with webs faster than Batman could ever cut them away. Web up his face and his head until he suffocates.

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https://youtu.be/OG44We-SXAI
https://youtu.be/rWGetzLJV_g
https://youtu.be/O7YQR27lykA

Singing on the last one is a bit iffy, but the drumming is god tier imo

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There's a post online, I have no way of verifying whether it's true or not, but it spoke about how it's known in the furry community that one of the furries who spends the most money on art commissions is one of the leading heart surgeons in the US. There's also a story about a person who was complaining about a research grant they'd been jumping through hoops to get because it involved a lot of busy, powerful people in their field, and after being queried by someone about what they were doing, they got a confirmation for the grant like a day later.

On one hand, this is all typical internet "my dad works at Nintendo"-tier stuff. But I find it immensely engaging and entertaining to imagine some of the most skilled, renowned pillars of our society - top surgeons, pilots etc. - having secret double lives as prominent furries and using the excessive cash they rake in to essentially fund the furry community. It's more fun that way.

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Yeah, have you never been so unwell that you've gotten the poop sweats? where the pain in your guts is so unpleasant that a clammy bead of sweat forms on your brow, and you need to make a beeline for the toilet so that whatever terrible brew is causing your eyes to glaze over and bug out of your head can be expelled violently and unpleasantly?

or is it just me

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The only thing I know from Bright Eyes is First Day of my Life. The music video for that was years ahead of its time, and it's just a really great saccharine love song. The world needs more of those.

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nah, it'd be nut if it was stimulated by some sort of deliberate arousal. Light is a byproduct of a chemical reaction within the sun's core - if anything, sunlight is equivalent to sweat.

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The reason I went off so hard is because of these two responses I got to a post about getting vaccinated. I admitted to being scared of symptoms like fever and stuff, even though I understood the process behind those symptoms being positive and natural, and I also mentioned putting it off due to a fear of needles - which I admitted was wrong of me to do. I urged people to swallow whatever unpleasant feelings the process gave them and to get vaccinated, because it was time to be responsible.

I got these stupid antivaxxer fucks in response:




Please, tell me why I should pay equal credence to scientists and public officials who are billed as experts, and the fucking shit for brains telling me that I've turned my immune system into a subscription service owned by big pharma by getting a vaccine.

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I realised I was playing into some dumb rhetorical shit instead of enunciating the point I was actually trying to make.

Mr Hangman picked two things he could harp on from parts of my post that are admittedly a bit weaker than the rest - I began to run out of steam after I write the part about The Bell Curve - and it derailed the entire rest of my post into an irrelevant discussion.

So I want to pose a more relevant question:

MrMallard posted...

When the people trying to undercut your message are so brazen in trying to push junk data to affect public perception in favour of their goals, what leg do they have to stand on to then say that you're being a fraud for not quoting them?

When bias exists in all journalism, with the main difference between bias in journalism boiling down to speaking truth to power vs trying to undermine the truth for your own ends - what obligation does a principled writer have to platform people who undercut their intended point?

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The way I interpreted this topic is that we shouldn't be putting lies and misinformation on the same pedestal as truth. "Ivermectin/Hydrochloridequinine or whatever the fuck it's called is better at fighting COVID than the vaccine". There's this push to "tell both sides of the story", but news and informational media like documentaries have always involved bias and the best news and informational media have spoken truth to power by platforming strong, emotionally resonant truths and deplatforming disingenuous attempts to cast doubt on them.

For example, you make a documentary about gun violence. You put in figures like gun homocides, suicides, murders, all that stuff to discuss the rise in gun violence. You interview people who survived shootings, both individual shootings and mass shootings, to illustrate not only how painful and terrifying it is to be shot but to illustrate the physical, mental and emotional aftermath of being shot. Your thesis is that gun violence is bad, and to that end you talk about ways that guns have proliferated in America and how shootings have grown more commonplace. Your ultimate point is that things would be better for a lot of people if there were less guns.

Are you a propagandist and a con artist because you didn't go to the NRA and broadcast their party line of "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"?

Because there are a thousand different people billing themselves as experts trying to dispute those figures to further the proliferation of firearms in America. A lot of them are paid by the gun lobby. A lot of them have a vested interest in disputing figures that paint guns in a bad light. And as someone producing informational media about the rise of gun violence and the effects of gun violence on people, there are people who are chomping at the bit to undermine your message to maintain a status quo that's beneficial to them.

So as a documentarian, you have to decide what you want to broadcast - the point, the focus of your piece - and what you want to exclude. What speaks truth to power. Because when you go to juggle every viewpoint, the final product is a choppy compromised mess that doesn't say anything - and a lot of the time, that's what a bunch of those opposing viewpoints are out to do in the first place.

Your job isn't to cover every point of view and broadcast everything on an equal playing field. It's to discern a theme, a focus, and to speak to its relevancy. Great journalism touches on a resonant truth, but it doesn't always cede itself to a counterpoint that serves to instill doubt and undermine the point of the piece out of a sense of robustness.

And a propagandist is going to cover their own point of view, their own fallacious science, willful misinformation to legitimize whatever they want to say for their own ends. Take "The Bell Curve", a conservative non-fiction book about differences in intelligence between different races.

The figures in "The Bell Curve" are misinterpreted and misrepresented to such a gross degree that they gave racially biased test scores from 11 disadvantaged test-takers the same weight as the first half of a test of 83 factory workers (dismissing the second half of the test, conducted after the first half to determine how much they had learned since the first test), and used those figures to paint a generalised image of intelligence across the entire African continent. The way the authors create their bell curves is by changing the parameters of the data to just barely resemble what a bell curve looks like. And the book uses those figures to further an agenda of cutting social safety nets like welfare in America, using alarming and entirely misconstrued data to insist that there's a mental disparity among people of African descent compared to people of European descent.

When the people trying to undercut your message are so brazen in trying to push junk data to affect public perception in favour of their goals, what leg do they have to stand on to then say that you're being a fraud for not quoting them? For not covering a PR statement from a pro-gun lobby alongside testimony from people who have been shot, who are trying to speak to a message of growing gun violence and the legacy of pain, chronic illness and trauma that it carries?

I've probably handled this in a clunky way, but what I'm trying to say is that it shows how one project to portray a point of view can come from an effort to speak truth to power, while another can come from the wilful misinterpretation of data to speak to a deliberately skewed point of view. And the people who want to project that skewed viewpoint will cry foul when their efforts to undercut an opposing viewpoint is rejected.

A journalist or a documentarian's job is to cut through the obfuscation to the truth of the matter. Platforming the horseshit people throw out to cast doubt on the truth is antithetical to that goal. Or, as I originally said ITT:

MrMallard posted...

"represent all sides!" - not when your side is calling themselves "purebloods" for refusing to get vaccinated.

There is no duty to give a bunch of lying fuckfaces and their brazen horseshit the same exposure and weight as decades of vaccine data from dedicated scientists at the top of their field. There's no need to undercut the testimonials of people who have survived painful, traumatic shootings with "maybe if they had guns, they could have protected themselves instead of becoming victims".

Misinformation and flat-out lies have no place being given the same weight as scientific research and peer-reviewed testimonial/theory from experts. The only reason people have painted this as an issue of political censorship and imbalanced reporting is because their goals directly undermine the truth, and by framing it in a way that puts them at a disadvantage and paints the other side as intolerant and rigid, they can get their dirty fingers into the mix and fuck everything up.

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Xavier_On_High posted...

Now that I can actually see what the fuck is going on, it's one of my favourite Castlevania games.

I know, and the art is so good.

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I thought I had to get a slide upgrade later in the game, but I stumbled onto a slide move by accident. Press Down + Jump to slide.

This could have just been me being an idiot here, or maybe it's from playing A Robot Named Fight too much where sliding is an upgrade you have to find. I thought I'd post it here just in case in case any other Advance Collection players didn't know this.

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"represent all sides!" - not when your side is calling themselves "purebloods" for refusing to get vaccinated.

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Kitt posted...

Man, I never got it. I always thought it looked cool.

Does he look like a Power Rangers villain? Sure. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily.

I never heard this complaint. I love that shit.

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Ragnarok Thor looks like a powerlifter. Like has no-one ever seen those strongman contests where dudes carry logs and chop through wood and shit? They look fat as shit, but it's all muscle. They're built like a brick shithouse.

This is why alt-right/MRA styles of thinking has completely poisoned the well for men, and why their intent was never to defend or represent men at all. They're like "ideal men are under attack by the wokescolds and the feminazis", but their image of the ideal man is a mix between old-school action heroes and surface-level philosophy students for the sake of "rationality and intelligence".

Fat men? Feminized beta cucks who have male breasts due to increased estrogen in chicken - look at their fear grimaces, they might as well be women. A real man is lean and fit, or totally ripped. The Norse Gods - blond, blue-eyed Adonises - are the ultimate representation of the ideal man, and that's being taken from us.

They've bought into that bullshit so hard that they don't realise what a real strongman looks like. What pure, undiluted muscle looks like. The most physically powerful men in the world fit the "feminized beta cuck" body shape they've filtered an entire type of person into, because that's what they've deemed abberant and ugly. So when they see it reflected in designs like this, they call it "woke" and "SJW pandering" and "historical revisionism".

And I'd imagine that making Thor a redhead plays into it as well, because again - the blond, blue-eyed, Charleston Heston model of masculinity is what they idealize about the Norse gods. Not only is Thor built like a barrel full of cement, but he's a ginger. I mean, let's criticize the practice of "racewashing" a white, ginger character to be a PoC and call it "ginger erasure", but when you start fucking with the blondies and turning them into fat gingers, that's equally as much of a woke move by SJWs in the entertainment industry.

This was always going to be the endgame of MRA ideology. Their idea of the peak male form, the former standard of masculine greatness that the SJWs were taking away from them, is Rambo - and any depiction of a positive fat man is watering down masculinity and jeopardizing public health because they want to make fatties ashamed of themselves again. But they're so deluded that when they see a character design like God of War Ragnarok's Thor, they don't see power. They don't see a mean motherfucker who'll crush the cartilage in your nose and give you brain damage with a single punch. They just see a feminized beta cuck that the SJWs made to pander to the soyboy fatties to make them feel better.

I'm so fucking sick of what this hobby has become.

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nothanks1 posted...

I think she's, like 30
This saddens me

the fuck? that makes it better.
your takes are the equivalent of a room temperature grilled cheese that someone spilled water on.

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Sometimes I like a good endless game, like a roguelike or a simple multiplayer game where you can turn off the sound, listen to music and zone out.

Other times, I want to play Pokemon Emerald for like the 15th time, or play a new linear game like Castlevania. I don't think I could bear to play one style of game over the other without that other option being there to fall back on.

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I don't mind the latter, like the end of Catherine where you marry Catherine and become the new ruler of Hell, but I don't like the former because it always feels so mean-spirited and edgy.

Like sometimes you want to be a do-gooder and see your earnest attempts to make the world a more positive place bear fruit. I fucking hate when a game will be like "your narrow-minded attempts at do-goodery have had far-reaching consequences that have doomed the world, try again and be more level-headed this time". LiGhT iS nOt GoOd, PrAgMiTiSm iS mOrE rEaLiStIc, PaLaDiNs ArE jUsT eViL iN ThE oPpOsItE DiReCtIoN - those stories and themes have their place, but when a game is on rails and doing the "good" choices just completely and utterly fuck the game for the sake of subversion - without giving you the option to account for the short-sighted issues it charges your do-gooder character with - it really gets under my skin.

Like okay, if you don't speak to a certain NPC and miss out on essential dialogue, you do what you think is best but it has consequences that you could have avoided. That's fair. But if you speak to that NPC and have that additional information, you should be able to do the right thing while accounting for the fuck-up, and it should count towards a better ending. Without that second step, this sort of thing is the fucking worst, because it comes across as this faux-enlightened horseshit that acts so above it all.

Like you know the person making that storyline is the sort of person who goes "Batman would totally beat Superman because he's always so prepared and Superman is actually a giant fascist while Batman represents the human condition in the face of tyranny", ignoring the humanity of both characters and the optimism that their mutual goals can provide when you're not pitting them against each other. Moral greyness isn't a detriment, but when a more virtuous approach is instantly shot down for being too "childlike" or "perfect" in the face of "pragmatic realism", it really shits me off.

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Existential or visceral/primal, you can be Shakespeare or a Neanderthal in here.

It's stupid, but I'm scared shitless of lightning.

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Von Bismarck

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The issue with capitalism is that it's all about expansion and growth, but there's no way that this will last forever because there are objectively limited resources on the planet which means that there's a breaking point that we're going to reach. Infinite growth is impossible, but infinite growth is what capitalism currently demands.

No company can grow forever, but everyone wants more growth and more profit year after year - and a failure to grow exponentially is seen as a failure of the business itself and a sign of trouble, because despite being impossible to maintain forever, exponential growth is what we perceive as financially healthy and being able to break even is seen as failure.

If more businesses were happy bringing in the same figures with the same costs year after year, capitalism might be sustainable - everyone's happy with the little bit of profit they're getting, everyone's getting paid, consumers are getting what they want and companies aren't trying to obtain and produce exponentially more shit from year to year to feed an ever growing desire to make millions and millions more dollars. Less expansion means that not as much is being produced, which gives us time to replenish the resources we need to create products sustainably.

The way we're doing it now - where to be successful and to stave off outside parties trying to sabotage you and seize your assets, you need to produce more product, create more waste and double your profits every few years ad infinitum - is completely unsustainable, and it will almost certainly fall apart by the end of our lifetimes.

But considering how companies like Nestle have been arguing against water being a human right, the chances are that before that happens, the PR line companies will begin to feed us is that impoverished people are less important than the system that keeps people employed and puts food on the table, and that if impoverished people - characterised as stupid, selfish and inherently inferior to anything above the working class due to their inability to hold an increasingly menial and unaffordable series of laborious jobs - have to die to make life better "for the rest of us", that's a sacrifice worth making.

If companies are properly regulated to prevent monopolization and unsustainable growth, and production is balanced with sustainability and conservation of resources, we might be okay and capitalism will probably be able to survive. But the way things are now where you're a failure for breaking even is a death sentence for the working class, any class of people below that, and probably the world at large if we let it get too far out of hand.

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Nah, over here we have mild, medium and hot salsa. Mild is barely spicy, medium is a bit more kick and hot is where the real kick is.

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That shit hurts TC. You're not being a bitch for being hurt, everyone has different thresholds and no-one can define how stuff like that makes you feel.

I originally went into way more detail, but if you're cool being friends and stuff, I think so went way over the top. Good luck with this TC, hope you don't get hurt again.

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Ehh. There's room for everyone at the table, but I definitely prefer the Igavania games.

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Some of it was me straining, it was a little broken up at the end. But for most of it, it was a long, uninterrupted burp from the bottom of my stomach.

What's some of the gnarliest burps you can remember?

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I thought this was about Magda Szubanski. idk why someone on GameFAQs would be talking about a lesbian Australian celebrity from the mid-2000's, but that's who I think of when I hear the name Magda.

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One more bump

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:)

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to 97 degrees

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I can mine runite ore now. I've been neglecting my smithing level, so I can probably get some straggler runite ore to sell at the Motherlode mine as well as the mithril and adamant ore I need to train smithing. I can use the proceeds to pay for coal in order to smith the other bars

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For a sec I thought you were saying the boy was cuter than the girl, I was like "whaaaaat"

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Anyway, then the

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You touched on some solid points. 7th g en tech was full of growing pains, everything looked better and it made everyone want to do a serious war shooter that's all grim and brown and awful. It had early motion controls with both SixAxis and the Wii, and then the PlayStation Move and the Kinect. Framerates seemed to go down the fucking toilet, at least on PS3 - the opening of Killzone 2 is this awful choppy mess, and the Mass Effect ports are always sub-30. This was the generation where the games could be as choppy as possible as long as it hit a high level of graphical fidelity.

After a handful of watershed moments in the past two gens regarding online fps multiplayer, this generation birthed a ton of shitty or otherwise unnecessary multiplayer modes, which fed into Sony and Microsoft's paid online subscriptions - which is an almighty fucking blight on games to this day. About a hundred bucks a year to play games online, but only on consoles - what a fucking rip-off. Might have started on the original Xbox, but this gen is when online became everything and that monetization was here to stay. As for the online multiplayer itself - did anyone need a Max Payne 3 multiplayer mode, or a Last of Us multiplayer mode? Mass Effect 3 multiplayer kicked metric fucktons of ass though, so I'll give that a pass.

And it's well-known at this point that this was a particularly rough generation for Japanese devs. JRPGs stagnated - Final Fantasy XIII took forever, and when it came out it felt like a total chore to play despite looking gorgeous. Dragon Quest had a good game and a bunch of good spinoffs, no surprises there - but they were all handheld games until Dragon Quest X came out on the Wii and then other platforms later on. Any decent RPG of the time, outside of a handful of notable exceptions like Blue Dragon, Nier and the other Xbox 360 exclusive by the original director of Final Fantasy, were mostly confined to handheld titles.

I got into 7th gen games super late, and I enjoyed having my pick of the bunch for obscenely low sale prices. But I think looking back on it, the PS3 and Xbox 360 represented a transition into the current online-focused model, the fruits and consequences of which we're reaping today, and it was an extremely rough, gimmicky time for games baked directly into the consoles of the time. From the DS introducing touchscreens to the consumer market, to the shitty PS3 SixAxis, to the Wii printing money for Nintendo and the Kinect promising the world and delivering the worst sales pitch for Microsoft's 8th gen console - the 7th generation was rough going.

There's something to be said for the ambitions of the era, but the good stuff that has carried over to this day was in its infancy back then and hard to deal with, and a lot of the bad that came from that period has carried onwards as well. Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry now, I think games produce more revenue than movies do at this point - and that truly started with the 7th generation of gaming, not only by cementing itself as an all-ages medium where dads can play shooters while their kids play platformers, but through the bevy of monetization streams that generation enabled that has continued to weed its way into contemporary game design as time goes on.

Japanese devs had a tough time, there was a period where even the goofy, bright studios like Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch and Insomniac were producing grim, depressing shooters and acting games as opposed to the bright, snarky franchises that captures a generation of gamers, and it was the entry point for a lot of gimmicks and a lot of ways to manipulate people into spending more money. 7th gen consoles had some all time GOAT games, but looking back at it in the rearview mirror, there were a lot of caveats to get them.

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Frolex posted...

Armstrong def top tho

For real. Hence why I specified Solid, and not just Metal Gear lol

Honestly I think Big Boss would skew more towards being a top as well. But he gets sad sometimes and needs to be held.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

Vulcan Raven is a top

If we're going by sub-bosses, I'd say that Vamp is a switch. I didn't specify, but what I was going for was main antagonists - the dudes you fuck with at the end of each game.

I think Solidus was asexual, Ocelot was like 900% a bottom for Big Boss, Hot Coldman put on a big front but dude is absolutely pathetic and couldn't actually handle having power over someone who's stronger than he is, and while Skull Face coerces and forces sexual violence upon Chico and Paz, I maintain that he would submit to a stronger force if confronted by it. He's a sadist and a voyeur, but he's not so much of a big shot that he wouldn't capitulate to a worthier leader.

But Volgin? Rock hard man meat, baybee

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g0ldie posted...

didn't he rape Eva?

Ah, you've got me there. Good one.

I still maintain that he didn't fuck The Boss because he's a sadist, sexually as well as generally, and I don't think The Boss is his type. Ivan Raidenovich or whatever is, who he views affectionately, and Eva is because she can be dominated. The Boss isn't someone he could break, so I don't think he'd go so far as to try and fuck her.

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Frolex posted...

Volgin is a switch, The Boss is a top

The Boss is 100% a top, but I posit that Volgin didn't sleep with her because he was 100% openly gay. And when he fucks, he doesn't receive.

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VitalGetPrank posted...

Uhh... Liquid Snake?

Are you kidding? Liquid is like Julius Caesar: husband to every woman, and wife to every man. That man takes it.

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Discuss.

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I'm gonna burn it all down today, and sweep all the ashes away
Now Playing: Pokemon HeartGold, Minecraft, Oldschool Runescape

I was watching their Sonic Heroes playthrough recently, it was the first game they played over Discord while isolated due to the pandemic. I found that Arin was actually pretty focused in that set-up, though it was less "haha funny rage man" and more "wow the anxiety is palpable". It was definitely a vibe.

I'll occasionally check out their newer series, like the Game of Life episodes. Otherwise I've been watching a lot of compilations. At this point, I'm here for them rather than the games.

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I'm gonna burn it all down today, and sweep all the ashes away
Now Playing: Pokemon HeartGold, Minecraft, Oldschool Runescape

I bought the Advance Collection, it's pretty good.

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I'm gonna burn it all down today, and sweep all the ashes away
Now Playing: Pokemon HeartGold, Minecraft, Oldschool Runescape