[K]ayinworks

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

Someone asked F1nn why it was that on her larger branded social media accounts she still listed herself as a femboy in some places while in more intracommunity spaces she more readily and comfortably identified as transfem.

Now, depending on who you ask that kind of question to you'll probably get a meandering answer on the complexities of how one defines their own identity. But instead F1nn gave a very quick and simple answer.

I have type 2 Narcolepsy. Studies have shown that serious viral infections can cause people to develop Narcolepsy if they are already genetically susceptible to having it. This includes covid. That is what happened to me.

Yall, I can’t believe that I have to do this, but I am going to say this in as clearly as possible

The anon was very confused.

Her first 28 years are fairly tame, until we reach 1987's Canadian Mountie Barbie. Reasonable odds for a cop, even if they're not a USAmerican cop.

in 1991, we get US Air Force Pilot Barbie, US Marine Corps Sergeant Barbie, US Navy Petty Officer Barbie. There's also 1992's US Army Barbie, if those guys were feeling left out. I'm also ignoring the 1989 US Army Barbie because that one is 100% a stolen valour runway look, not a uniform.

Going to run my autism over those four.

US Navy Petty Officer Barbie is wearing quartermaster's rating insignia, so no combat for her.

US Army Barbie is wearing an airborne maroon beret with no rank insignia that I could see, but she's loaded down with medical supplies, so I'm gonna say combat medic, but only as many kills as her other medical endeavours.

US Air Force Pilot Barbie is wearing a jacket that looks like a Top Gun tie-in. The unit patch is just the USAF coat of arms, and the name patch says she's a Captain. VERY confusingly, the plane on the box art is an F-5, which had just recently been retired. But its USAF usage was almost all in the OPFOR Aggressor squadrons, which is... "come play enemy planes for our training exercises".

US Marine Corps Sergeant Barbie is wearing E-5 Sergeant's insignia, and three medals (she's in dress uniform). To my eye, and allowing for badly printed colours, looks like Navy and Marine Achievement Medal, Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, and the South West Asia Service Medal. The first two are fairly obvious "Barbie Is Well Behaved" stuff, but uh. That last one though?

USMC Barbie was in Desert Storm.

Only got some experience playing by myself with guilty gear and blazblue (mainly Blazblue, playing Continuum Shift on my vita). And a single afternoon of 3rd strike with a friend (which iirc was much more fun than all of the time I put into GG/BB). Haven't played a fighting game in years.

It depends! Anything with a community is a pretty decent choice but I'll just throw some out there that I know and have thoughts on. Guilty Gear X2 +R: Great game, great netplay, great features, great lobbies, easy to find games in. Hard to play, but it's hard for everyone so as long as you're not playing people who spent 20,000 hours doing on combo, you're all dropping shit and fucking up your Oki. Characters are absolutely insane. Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2 is like "I like +R, but I really like an input buffer and I wish the characters weren't AS crazy". Problem is, some people got some DIALED IN tech in this game because of that input buffer, so the bar before you feel competent is actually higher. Characters are less insane, power wise, but the system mechanics of YRC are stronger, for better or worse. Lobbies kinda suck, training mode feels lacking without mods. ... No real flattering thoughts on BB because I'm a hater so don't listen to me. 3rd Strike great game up until a point. When you reach that point you either become a true 3s lover, or you realize a lot of the game is actually kinda ass. Parries go from "sick" to "stupid" to "potentially sick again". Game has problems, but you can always find people to play. Super SF2 Turbo is my preferred older Street Fighter. Also easy to find matches on fightcade. Extremely groudy, high damage game. Execution is hard, but you don't need to do hard combos. Sometimes a round is just throwing someone four times. Balance is fucked, but very fun. VERY high paced, and very high character power. You'd think the old SF2 would be slow and honest, but the people who claim that are liars. A game for scoundrels. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighter for the SNES. It's like a bit of a slicker Super Turbo with a bit more 'anime mechanics'. Super fun game, but top tiers are dumb as hell. Also SNES netplay is sketchy. Akatsuki Blitzkampf is my favorite 'easy' fighting game. Strike/Parry/Throw mixup game, combos are fun, not too hard, and scale fairly. The difference between optimal and unoptimal combos is kinda small. Was easy for its time, but now feels a little trickier to play than modern games. Other downside is the game makes you think it's a game for nazis. Don't worry, even the skull tank that looks like a nazi things fascism is a loser ideology. Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code rules. I've been back on it recently. Practically free, just look for the community edition. It has better netplay and other support than the steam version. Concerto gives it lobbies and better button config and stuff. Awesome mods to extend training mode. Real 'air movement' game. High ceiling for execution, but for most characters you can get away with just knowing how to do launcher into j.BC dj.BC Airthrow. Downside is none of the concerto lobbies have any people usually. Generally just a "discord fighter" at this point.

Okay, lemme give this a go while also trying to be fair. Also this is of course very gameplay minded. I have no real thoughts about BB's story, and the aesthetic is fine (outside some personal-taste qibbles), and honestly the music is real ass good stuff… but as far as GAMEPLAY.

For context, I think BB is kinda the "First Modern Fighting Game" and also solidified what an "Anime Fighter" (or less, though not completely misleadingly, "Air Dasher") "is as a gameplay genre. CT was the first mainstream 2d fighter with an input buffer, and it was the first one that really had to deal with the ramifications of that kind of design.

The input consistency that comes with buffers doesn't just make a game easier, it changed fundamentally how the game is played. It moves the bar of expectation. BB combos are longer than their GG equivalents, because they can be more reliably executed. The type of combo-video only relaunch combos and full screen carry combos you'd see people most of GGX2:Accent Core at the time was the type of shit that would become almost Bread and Butter style routing for Blazblue. Xrd, designed years later, had to do a LOT to keep things running away as far as BB did, in its goal to try and be a modern "GGX2 #Reload', but that type of routing still pops up. Now, the style isn't a problem -- it's just a fun observation -- but the length definitely is, for my taste, kinda a problem. And you see later anime games influenced by BB going even farther in that direction. While GG is thought of a lot as one of the first 'anime fighters', it sits on this weird line of being 'half Street Fighter' and 'Half anime'(again, using anime as a gameplay genre, not aesthetics), and I realized over time that my taste leans more on the SF half of GG. But anyways, BB…

First off, I just hate its normals. So many stubby normals, and the normals that aren't stubby and huge but massive. Some characters with classically good 'mid range buttons' pop up as the series progresses, but if you compare so many Guilty Gear far slashes to the equivalent BB button and the difference is crazy.

I hate that it's more of a 'flag' game than a hitbox game. Not that hit boxes don't matter obviously, things like Anti Air tend to become really binary in a game like BB, or the later modern games built in its shadow. Like this reaches all the way forward to SF6 which is a very "flag heavy" game (like 'extended hurtboxes vulnerable only to jump attacks for fireballs' levels of flag tweaking). I'm a big fan of raw hitboxes -- like you can have a few exceptions, but once the foundation of your game is "the anti air button always anti airs", you lose a lot of nuance in those interactions. Not that you have none -- SF6 tends to give AAs very narrow hitboxes so spacing still matters, and some BB Flag shenanigans can lead to funny stuff like Nine blowing up AAs with an air approach that's technically a projectile -- but BB generally has a movement toward very 'binary' interactions and play states compared to older GGs which are way more vibes driven to play. The binaryness of a lot of the interactions I think is actually whats appealing about it to a lot of people. It can reward a very structured, obsessive kind of knowledge.

Since consistent execution leads to overly consistent oki, BB introduced a teching system that I just hate. To be fair, it was smart of them to do something. They knew what was going to happen because of their system design and had to account for it… but it feels gross to me personally. Doing nothing is suicide and you have all these rolls, half of which will get you killed if you're not doing them with intentionality. It just extremely punishes casual players who don't understand it, and who can't just be like "Lemme just get knocked down and block" once they get punished a bit. I'm sure it's interesting as hell for people who love the game, but it's just too weird for me to like.

I hate block/hitstun throws. I hate having to be constantly vigilant of my opponent trying to do the laziest reset in history I should never get hit by. They're not interesting, and they're just there because people get upset when they whiff throws by doing them too early so now you've made their skill issue MY constant problem!!! It's the reason alone I've never bothered with Uni. It's one of those design patterns that are a red flag for me.

So for me, and this is 100% bias as a Guilty Gear first player, I see BB as "Guilty Gear, but we made things worse to be different". It's hard for me to get over. The games are so similar in the macro sense, but so unbelievably different in the micro sense. You do get people who play both, but a lot of people have extreme reactions because it's kinda a whole 'uncanny valley' thing. "You too closely resemble the thing I love, while not being the thing I love'. It's easier for me to play something like P4U than BB because while P4U has a lot of the same 'problems'(from my perspective) it's different enough that it doesn't feel like my loved one has been hit by the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.