That guy who does the stuff

But still, real life death is never interesting or thought provoking. It’s just sad, the end of someone, forever. It’s pointless and provides nothing but loss and grief.

Fiction gives us the possibility to explore death in a way that is more comforting. We can give characters a “last hurrah”, we can use death to imply the intensity of a moment. It grabs your attention, makes you double-take and go “oh shit. OH SHIT.” From a narrative standpoint fictional death is beautiful and frightening. It instills a real fear in us based on our real-life relationship with death. But only based-on, it’s not an exact replica. It’s death we can play around with, and have no severe consequences, because fictional characters never truly die.

This is exactly why deaths that have no narrative value are frustrating. A death that happens in a tabletop campaign in a battle that isn’t entirely important or even difficult is pointless. It takes away the wonder and beauty of fantasy and reminds us of real life: death is random, pointless and scary. And in some ways frustrating.

Just like with so many other things, a vast amount of us play tabletop games (or games in general) to escape. We escape the shitty state of our government, we escape the realities of racism, sexism, homophobia and other things. To a lesser extent, we can escape death too. We exchange that pointless feeling for something much greater: a death you can choose, something great and heroic or, something sentimental and thought provoking.

In an interview with Teen Vogue, Dasha explained what the interview was like. “When I realized I was on Infowars, I was excited because I figured they would say something crazy and funny,” she said. “It wasn’t hard to ‘own’ Ashton because nothing she said made sense or even followed a logical train of thought. I was honestly stunned when she started talking about rats, so a lot of what’s happening with me in the video is sheer bewilderment.”

She also explained her “worms in your brains” comment: “When I said, ‘I just want people to have healthcare, honey,’ one of their reporters said off-camera, ‘That’s what Hugo Chavez said,’” Dasha said. “And when I looked in their eyes, they seemed so sick and crazy, like they had parasites in their brain that were making them say all this stupid, confused sh*t.”

Dasha went on to share why she expressed her support for free universal healthcare, saying, “As an uninsured person, I feel personally victimized by the idea that anyone should be denied healthcare. Poor people shouldn’t get sick and die because they can’t afford to see a doctor, obviously,” she said. She also made a point to distinguish her socialist beliefs from mainstream liberalism.

“When Infowars posted the clip on YouTube, they titled it ‘Liberals Defend Socialism at Bernie Sanders Event,’” she said. “It seems like there is a lot of conservative confusion and conflation of 'liberal’ and 'leftist.’

“I’m a democratic socialist and a Bernie supporter and believe in things like wealth redistribution and socialized healthcare,” she said. “I’m not even an especially political or radical person — I read Marx in college, which affirmed my views that capitalism is evil and responsible for many of our social ills, which feels to me like common sense having experienced poverty.”

An Infowars post appears to indicate that the original video of Dasha has been removed. But Dasha wanted to make sure future generations could see her answers.

And they hate each other.

A playful and friendly child, Samus Aran lived with her parents on a colony until it was attacked by Space Pirates led by Ridley.  The Chozo, a race of bird-like aliens, arrived too late to stop the colony’s massacre, and took in Samus, the only survivor.

Takeaway: Ridley killed Samus’ parents and destroyed her home.

Samus’ upbringing was placed in the hands (talons?) of two of the Chozo, Old Bird and Gray Voice.  To make sure that Samus could survive on the Chozo homeworld of Zebes, Gray Voice spliced some of his genes into Samus’ DNA, making her part-Chozo.

When Samus was only a teenager, the Chozo were betrayed by their supercomputer, Mother Brain.  Mother Brain summoned Ridley’s Space Pirates to Zebes, lowering the planet’s defenses in return for the Space Pirates’ allegiance.  

Samus was only able to escape the Space Pirate siege because Gray Voice sacrificed himself to get her off Zebes.

Takeaway: Ridley killed Samus’ adopted parent, and destroyed her home AGAIN.

Years later, Samus returned to Zebes as a seasoned warrior.  Ridley and Mother Brain were trying to harness the power of Metroids - strange creatures created by the Chozo to be an ultimate weapon against the deadliest creatures in the galaxy.  Samus triumphed.

Takeaway: Samus blew up the Space Pirate base, blew up the Ridley’s flagship, blew up Mother Brain, blew up Ridley, and blew up a robot copy Ridley had made of himself.

What was left of Ridley was recovered by surviving space pirates, who turned him into a cybernetic monstrosity.  Although Ridley never speaks in games, logs written by Space Pirates indicated that he was brilliant, cunning, and cruel, with a sadistic sense of humor.  He fought Samus several times while trying to obtain a powerful substance called Phazon, and eventually fought her with a Phazon-enhanced body. Samus triumphed.

Takeaway: Samus blew up Ridley again and again, regardless of what he did to enhance his body. 

When trying to eliminate the threat of Metroids once and for all by wiping out a planet infested with them, Samus came across a newly-hatched “baby” Metroid that imprinted upon her as if she was its mother.  Feeling compassion, she spared it… and then Ridley tried to kidnap it, but was stopped by Samus.

And then, as soon as she let down her guard, Ridley returned and kidnapped the baby Metroid.  He took it back to Zebes, where Mother Brain had been repaired.  Samus was able to defeat them again, but the baby Metroid was killed in the battle, sacrificing itself to save Samus.  Samus destroyed Zebes.

Takeaway: Ridley kidnapped a baby Metroid that saw Samus as its mother, leading to its death. Samus blew up Ridley again, and then blew up the entire planet he was on.  

(Summary: Ridley killed Samus family, then destroyed her adopted family, laid waste to every home she’s ever known, and kidnapped an alien child that viewed Samus as it’s mother, causing it’s death. Samus has blown him up countless times, even blowing up an entire planet with him on it.)

Ridley finally showed up in Smash.

Takeaway:  

Sure thing. Obviously you don’t have to play each edition exactly as it wants to be played, but each one definitely has some baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played (as all games necessarily do). It’s probably easiest to frame it in terms of what each edition things a dungeon is (in the extended sense of “the place where the adventure happens”), so:

OD&D thinks a dungeon is a logistical puzzle. Basically, you’re running a heist; a team of weirdos with specialised skill-sets break into a secure location to obtain a valuable prize and escape with it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Most of your XP comes from recovering treasures, not from killing monsters, and combat is a high-risk, low-reward proposition - if you ever end up in a square fight, that probably means you screwed up! This is where all those rules about timekeeping and overland travel speeds and encumbrance limits that pop up in a lot of games as legacy features actually matter; the tension between gearing up to maximise your odds of survival and leaving enough carrying capacity to take the treasure with you forces some hard decisions.

1E thinks a dungeon is an obstacle course. Though the rules are notably more complex than OD&D’s, 1E downplays its predecessor’s focus on the logistical “big picture” in favour of treating an adventure as a sequence of largely standalone challenges. Many of the game’s famously baroque magical items find their origin in this edition as part of set-piece puzzles. 1E‘s design sensibilities are strongly influenced by the tournament scene, where adventures would be played competitively at gaming conventions. Though some tournament adventures were played for points or completion time, far and away the most popular format was the survival module, where the winning team would be the party whose corpses hit the ground furthest from the dungeon entrance; consequently, many published 1E adventures aren’t actually intended to be survivable, helping to cement old-school D&D’s reputation as a brutal meat-grinder of a game.

2E is a transitional edition that doesn’t really know what to do with itself. It starts out in 1E’’s “a dungeon is an obstacle course” mode early on, drifts toward 3E’s “a dungeon is a simulated environment” mode late in is tenure, and has a weird detour through “a dungeon is a choose-your-own-adventure story path” in the middle - though that element of choice wasn’t always handled well, leading to many published 2E adventures being criticised for being essentially non-interactive. Still, it’s far and away the most prolifically published iteration of the game, and even if you have no intention of playing it it’s a fantastic resource to mine for weird monsters and magic items; much of the game’s most strikingly imaginative material comes out of the 2E era.

3E thinks a dungeon is a simulated environment. Where previous iterations of the game tended to have different sub-games for different activities, 3E rolls everything together into one big, elaborately interlocking framework that’s intended to provide an unambiguous “by the book” answer for how to apply the rules to any reasonable scenario (and a fair number of unreasonable ones, too). It’s the sort of game where the dungeon walls have elemental resistances and hit points, and if you use a magic spell to make a chicken ten feet tall there’s a chart you can use to look up what its stats should be. It’s been jokingly - albeit not inaccurately - described as D&D for people who enjoy Minecraft (though it predates the latter by a number of years).

4E thinks a dungeon is a series of tactical set-pieces. It has a more constrained scale of action than most other editions (character levels 1-30 in 4E cover about the same territory as characters levels 3-9 in 3E, for example), and the rules zoom in on supporting elaborately staged set-piece battles with no more than half-a-dozen combatants on either side and very rigorous PvE balance. Its narrow focus makes it a love-it-or-hate-it edition - even now, years after it’s ceased publication, it sports a contingent of highly vocal detractors who are very keen on making sure you know that 4E “plays like a video game”, which is apparently a bad thing! That assessment isn’t actually totally off the mark, though the game’s critcs usually pick the wrong video games to compare it to; 4E isn’t hot at doing tabletop World of Warcraft, though it’d be a great choice if you wanted to do tabletop Final Fantasy Tactics, or maybe fantasy Overwatch.

Its going to be summer soon! Seasons change and so has my art style.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is a new NES styled Castlevania-esque game (with 4 playable characters) which will be released on 24th May 2018 for PC, Switch, 3DS, PS4, PS Vita, Xbox One.

Me: oh a b&b is a bed and br–