me siento muy... excited!

David Lynch’s 80s classic BLUE VELVET

still have 20 achievements before i’ve unlocked them all and they are mostly easy so i might go for that

guys it is such a trip to return to this franchise again and again and see all the ways i love it and all the ways it has let me down

it is so weird to be a Girl Gamer sometimes and think about how much mental energy you put into this hobby that for a long time did not give one dried shit about us

things have sort of evolved now but goddamn playing this game and seeing so many of the ways it simply did not imagine what women might think or feel about it while also putting in the level of effort where every single planet you can view on the galaxy map has a text description about its physical makeup and the history on it that can sometimes also unlock codex entries about the history of entire alien races like it’s baffling

all that and you couldn’t write a little more nuance into some of these romances? you couldn’t imagine anything more interesting for the women to be going through than like, daddy issues that are effectively solved by meeting their new daddy shepard?

i wanna do another playthrough where i romance liara bc i’ve never done a romance through all three games. when i played the very first time i romanced liara and then i went with thane in me2 (the pain route) so i’m a little nervous how that would play out but also i’m obsessed so i gotta

i’ve also never played as maleshep even though i know that’s like the more canon pc bc i can’t help it! femshep is canon TO ME! the story of an extremely experienced woman being given kind of a token assignment and then not being listened to by barely anyone at all when she tries to actually do the job of that assignment feels VERY FAMILIAR!

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.