My Impressions of the Playable Final Fantasy X Characters (as of the Chocobo Eater fight)
tidus: absolutely the most fucked up fictional character ever conceived in the entire history of all literature. COMPLETELY unpredictable. i have NO fucking clue what is going on in his head at any moment. any time there’s a cutscene with tidus i am on the edge of my fucking seat through the whole thing because i genuinely have no clue what he’s going to say or do
yuna: very nice lady. ideal apartment neighbor. i know she wouldn’t be too loud or throw parties. we would have pleasant conversations while i check my mail
auron: almost cool but he looks like a dude who’s way too old to be cosplaying at an anime convention so unfortunately he is NOT cool
rikku: seems like she would go absolutely apeshit if you put on a spice girls song
wakka: the middle school soccer coach figure i never had in my life. i wish he was my dad
lulu: i would drag my d*ck through a mile of broken glass just to hear her fart through a walkie talkie
kimahri: afraid to search his name on google images
anyone know where i can find that post with the video of that one guy playing that terrible skyrim romance mod story because i need to watch that shit again
Steve Irwin travels back and forth between heaven and hell to make the most watched TV show as of yet: The Crocodile Hunter vs. Satan’s Abominations
Transcription of Celestial T.V. Spot: Steve Irwin’s Abyssal Creatures, #S15-2. Location: The Abyss, Layer #66, the Demonweb. Starring Steve Irwin, Directed by Inias, Produced by Metatron, All rights reserved: Celestial Broadcasting Center (CBC) and The Lord, He Who Is On High. Reproduction and/or distribution without express permission is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 or eternity in Hell.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION
Steve Irwin crouches beside a gnarled tree covered in thick webbing.
STEVE: G’day, I’m Steve Irwin. I’m here in the Abyss today, on layer 66, which you may know as the “Demonweb.” Come on over here. Let me show you a real beauty. (indicates creature). That big fella right there is called a bebilith. She must be four and a half meters tall. Now look at those legs! Those legs! Wow! Those legs could skewer me in one bad step. Or a good step if she’s looking for it (laugh).
The bebilith drinks moaning souls from a steaming cesspool, then scuttles over to a stone spire to begin covering it in webbing.
STEVE: She’s got eight legs like an arachnid, but she’s no ordinary house spider, I can tell you. She’s also got those big old claws. See that curve at the end like a fish hook? Or I guess pry-bar is a better comparison because she’ll take those wicked beauties and put them right here (indicates sternum) and tear me open like a bag of crisps. We’ll try to avoid that today (laugh). Come on, let’s try to get a closer look.
Steve carefully stalks closer and pauses when the bebilith looks at him.
STEVE: Here we are. She’s taken notice of me. Get a look at those eyes. They’ve got the visage of damned souls in there, and she’s trying to bind me with fear, because that’ll make me easy prey. If I’m afraid, I’ll freeze. I’m not that easy mate. Nice try. I’m making small movements to show I’m not paralyzed with fear, but I’m still taking it slow so she doesn’t perceive me as a threat. That’s it, mate. That’s it, mate.
Steve moves closer.The bebilith produces webbing from its backside and flings some at Steve. He dodges and circles the bebilith slowly.
STEVE: Boy! What a right trick she’s got. (laugh). Did you see what she did there? That webbing’s not actually all that dangerous. None of the toxins you’ll see in the Nest Shriekers, and nowhere near the tensile strength of a Derragon. She’s just trying to pin me down, even for a moment. But if she’s got that moment, she’ll charge and then it’s all over for old Steve. Let’s not give her that moment, what do you say? (laugh). Come on, Mate. That’s it. Come on.
Steve approaches to within arms length of the bebilith. It remains stationary, but watches him.
STEVE: She’s still trying to figure me out. I’m not all that bad. You’re a beauty. Wow, look at that chitin. Imagine a Archon’s Sword on that armor. She’s like a tank. (bebilith shifts). Whoa, mate. Let’s keep away from those claws. Whoa, mate. Come on, mate. There we go. (laugh). That’s right. I’m trying to put her at ease. A lot of people think demon’s are composed of pure chaos and evil, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. They’re just the lovely little gifts we get from the Abyssal Maw. They just need respect. Don’t take that to mean you should walk right up and pet one, though. Don’t forget, I’m a professional. Just look at her. Wow!
BEBILITH: (Abyssal curses)
STEVE: Listen to that. Doesn’t that just amaze you? What a commanding voice. What a majestic sound. She’s got a real range of vocalizations that she can use to warn off intruders or plant the seeds of madness in the mortal mind. It’s a beauty. Wow. Now, you may notice I’m keeping to her side right here. That’s for good reason, friends. I told you about her claws, but I’m also keeping some distance from that wicked pair of mandibles she has there. Look at them. Wow! Must be 20 centimeters long. If she bites down on me, she’ll pump a good half-liter of poison right into my veins that’ll seize up my muscles in the blink of an eye. (laugh). Then I’m ripe for the picking. Boy, what a bad day that would be. You’ve got a thousand ways to kill, don’t you, mate?
The bebilith turns away from him and begins etching arcane runes into a bleached human skull with a sharp claw. Steve wraps his arms around a leg in a hug-like embrace.
STEVE: There we go, girl. There we go girl. (petting her). I can call her “girl” now because we’re in love. She knows I’m not here to hurt her, and I know she’s not interested in laying a clutch of eggs in my intestines. She may look like a giant spider-crab made of spines, but I know she’s just a big softy. We were lucky to find her today. Here in the Demonweb, bebiliths are becoming harder and harder to find. Layer 66 in general is shrinking as other infinite layers grow and spring into existence. It could get squeezed down until our girl doesn’t have the habitat to sustain her soul harvests any longer. What a shame. But that’s just the way of life in the Abyss.
Steve touches the bebilith for a moment longer, then carefully backs away towards the camera.
STEVE: In a few millennia we might see the layer bounce back, and hopefully our girl here will still be going strong. Until then, we’ll let her be. Oh, look at that beauty. Wow! I hope you had as wild a time as I did here with this beautiful bebilith. I’m real excited we could make the trek all the way down here. The Abyss can be an amazing place if you know where to look. Thank you for joining me, and I hope to see you again soon on “Steve Irwin’s Abyssal Creatures.” G’day!
Wow! You had me smiling the entire read. I love the story @drrove
More please.
Well, since you said “please.” This one’s a bit longer, so make sure to hit “Keep reading” for the whole thing.
Excerpt from “This Heavenly Morning with Archangel Gabriel,” Steve Irwin fiendish creature spot. Original air date: 10 March, 2015. Property of CBC, all rights reserved.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION
GABRIEL: Our next guest this morning truly needs no introduction. You’ll know him from his hit series here on CBC, “Abyssal Creatures…” It’s Steve Irwin!
AUDIENCE: (applause)
Steve enters stage left, shakes Gabriel’s hand, and sits with one leg under him.
GABRIEL: It’s great to have you back, Steve.
STEVE: Oh, it’s always an honor. It’s a pleasure.
GABRIEL: You look great. It’s a rare delight to see you on the Heavenly Mount. For someone granted eternal bliss, you sure spend a lot of time in the lower planes.
AUDIENCE: (laughter)
STEVE: Oh, it’s always an adventure. There’s just so much that the lower planes have to show, and it’s always such an honor to get to bring out that other side of fiendish creatures that so often gets overlooked. It’s a wild ride.
GABRIEL: Your show’s doing great. You’re on your eighth season now, is that right?
STEVE: Eight seasons. That’s right.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
STEVE: And there’s still so much more we can do.
GABRIEL: We actually have a clip from your latest season. Would you like to set it up for us?
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia – including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents – and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.)
During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve.
And the thing about Australia – there isn’t the coverage that America has. Not even in our own country. It’s hard to find out what’s happening – visas for journalists to visit Nauru are prohibitively expensive – and … no one really cares. It’s so entrenched that it’s the status quo, and when I called my MP and senators to go, WTF guys? the response was like, “…oh yeah, thanks for your feelings, cool, bye”.
I honestly tune out a lot of the coverage because, at this point, I don’t know what to do. Both major parties support these policies, so I vote for the Greens. I contacted my representatives. I walked in protest marches. I donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and other charities.
So I guess, if I have advice for Americans, it’s to not let this become the status quo. Because you’ll wake up one day and it will have always been like this.
Holy shit, I knew it was bad here but I didn’t know it was that bad. Why don’t we hear about the depth of these things in Australia, how can they keep us so in the dark?
What you can do to help the Human Rights crisis in Australia:
If you are Australian:
Keep up to date and informed. The only major media outlets that routinely reports on this issue is The Guardian Australia. They are free online but consider donating if you can to keep it free access.
The Saturday Paper is another independent online news source that reports on this.
Follow or sign up to GetUp!. GetUp! is Australia’s largest progressive grassroots activist group and has lots of campaigns and information about this issue and many others, such as climate change, economic justice, and democratic and civil rights. Donate if you can, sign their peritions, follow their campaigns.
CONTACT YOUR MPs AND SENATORS. This is really important, especially if they are supporters of the policy. Keep public pressure on then, make them feel it. Letter templates are good, but personally written letters/emails are better. Call them if you can. And respond to them with your displeasure if they send you a cookie cutter response of their party’s policy on “stopping the boats”.
SHOW UP TO PROTESTS. Another really important one. Even if you just show up and march, your physical presence counts. They’re not as scary as it might seem.
DONATE. I really cannot stress this enough, if you can afford it, donate.
WHO SHOULD I DONATE TO?
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) provides financial and legal support, as well as counseling and community services, to refugees already in Australia.
Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) are a group of state-based advocacy groups that support refugees in Australia and advocate for those trapped in Australia’s offshore detention regime (link is for the Sydney group but contains links to other states).
GetUp! is one of the best to donate to for political action. They have options to donate to the organisation as a whole, or to specific campaigns.
If you are a member of the Australian Labor Party, please do what you can to bring up this issue and pressure the party leadership to change its policy.
If you are NOT Australian
Do what you can to contact your government and representatives to bring up this issue and pressure Australia to change their policy.
SPREAD THIS POST AND OTHERS LIKE IT. Australians do not have the numbers and influence on his site that Americans and British have. Please spread this information and resources so that other Australians might see it and feel like they have some power to change it or even know about it.
If you are a New Zealander: please continue to keep the pressure on your government to call out Australia and offer to take refugees.
#CloseTheCamps #BringThemHere
I was looking for a summary like this, absolutely excellent. you know your country is fucked when there are several slurs for refugees in common vernacular
The Colin Mochrie story? Gladly. This is a good story.
So I go to this college, and it can best be described as a little weird. It desperately wants to be Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge, so it takes out its frustration with not being Cambridge on weird collective mockeries of Cambridge stuff. So far so good.
One of these weird mockeries is the debate club.
It’s hard to even properly call the Literary Institute a debate club – it is a club, and it does debates, but the debates are 100% stand-up comedy in a parliamentary format and the other half is bullshit pantomiming. For instance, every year at matriculation, the club drunkenly rushes the stage, interrupts the ceremony, and calls everyone in the audience a horse’s ass (occasionally while quoting Dune). It also puts on a yearly event called ‘Tuck-Ins’, in which people in the dorms can sign up (or sign their friends up) to have the entire LIT burst into their room, give them bedtime snacks, give them bedtime beer, sing some bedtime songs, and tell them a bedtime story. Except, the LIT never does anything seriously, so the bedtime song was always Barrett’s Privateers and the bedtime story was almost always something we called ‘The Rat Story’. Let me tell you about the Rat Story.
The Rat Story was a piece of… literature… that a LIT member dragged out of the dregs of the internet many years ago. Nobody knows where it came from, and my efforts to find it again were unsuccessful, but good lord, it was bad. It was a page-and-a-half-long Hermione/Wormtail (rat form) smut fic and it was awful.So awful. I’m cringing just thinking about it. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read, and at this point I basically know it by heart. We read it aloud, from the poorly worded introduction to its horrible closing line (AND HE SCAMPERED AWAY WET! STUNNED! AND THRILLED!) dozens of times in a single night to unsuspecting students. It was an experience.
Now you might be wondering how Colin Mochrie fits into this.
So, one of the other things my college does powerfully and often is pretension. We are the most pretentious college you will ever see, and our college clubs are proof positive of this. Every year, various college clubs send out dozens of official-sounding letters inviting our various favourite well-known-people to attend our meagre college events (I, as president of the James Bond Society, personally invited Barack Obama, Sean Connery, and the Queen to our AGM). However, this year the Comedy Club was riding particularly high, and it sent out quasi-sincere invitations to speak to a variety of Canadian comedians.
And Colin Mochrie showed up, one fateful Tuck-Ins night.
He gave a talk, which was very good, but noticed as the talk finished that many students were rushing away to something in an awful hurry. We explained that it was the night of Tuck Ins, an important and sacred college tradition and that
We would be delighted if he would join us.
And that, my friends, is the story of how I found myself crammed in a dorm room with 20 other people, listening to Colin Mochrie describe Peter Pettigrew’s rat boner to a couple of second years who had no idea what they were getting into.
Because I am a researcher and because I have NO LIFE, I think I may have tracked down The Rat Story.
Today’s webcomic recommendation is “the property of hate”, which is by the person who does those Gladstone Gander fancomics you may have seen scooting around tumblr, if you’re in any way duck-adjacent. It’s parked about midway between Sandman and Pixar – or maybe the Phantom Tollbooth would be a better referent? Let’s go with that. Regardless, it’s good clean fun, if not the most subtle/original thing I’ve ever read, and I suspect it’s going to culminate in the protagonists murdering the author, which is something I always enjoy.
I think the thing I find the most interesting about it is the way it personifies television – I’m used to seeing it cast as a villain in stories which acknowledge it at all, and this one does acknowledge that it’s a monster, but it’s a useful monster, a well-intentioned one. This feels like a more honest way of talking about it in for people of my age, for whom even our most transgressive dreams generally arrived via the tube. Crow Cillers is in part about the struggle to acknowledge the formative influence that TV had on the most important parts of ourselves while still acknowledging its meanness and venality, and I suspect that’s where Property of Hate is going as well, albeit in a significantly more G-rated fashion. It ties those themes in with identity and sacrifice, focusing on ideas about giving up bits of yourself to keep going. Solid stuff.
I suspect that this is journeyman work and the next thing the author does will be the one everybody’ll notice (as tends to be the case for stories about the creative process) but might as well get on board here, and read the duck comics while you’re at it, for all your duck needs.
callanswall 