kataspace

level 99 trip report 9/28/24

2024-10-02T15:15:20.543893+00:00

for my birthday this year, i had one pretty clear goal. i hadn't done a proper birthday get together with friends in some time, i moved to boston, i've got IRL friends now, let's go do something wacky that i can only really do with a group. preferably, that thing should be some sort of weird themed entertainment, for which i am a known sicko.

so i took a group of friends to level99 and boy howdy do i have a lot of thoughts about this!!

i have no idea how i would even describe this place. i want you to think about some combination of a gastropub, an escape room, an arcade, an art gallery, double dare physical challenges, and the magic bands at disney world.

it is an "arcade", in that there are games. the games are very much not what you're thinking though. they are physical spaces that rely on either clever set design or augmented reality or both to deliver a very tactile gaming experience.

there are 3 categories of game:

duel
hunt
quest

duels

a duel is a battling game between 2 players. i tried three of these:

lightning, a duel where two players are attempting to hit light up buttons on either side of a dynamic lightning bolt sculpture, and whoever hits the most wins
blast, a duel where two players each operate a gun that shoots rubber balls and are attempting to light up the most targets on the opposing side of the arena
a third which i forget the name of, which is a rock climbing wall that is also pong. it uses a kinect unit hooked up to the kinect for windows sdk to detect which rock climbing holds you're touching with your hands and feet, and a projector displays the ball going back and forth, redirecting to the opposing side if your limbs touch the right hold.

hunt

the hunt is the hidden object game built into the space. every art piece in the space, done by commissioned local artists with credits and everything, has hidden objects inside of it. you are looking at art, writing down the hidden objects you see, and going to a terminal to input which objects you find and gain points for them.

quests

quests are the majority of the experiences in the space. they are built for 2-6 players. some quests are puzzle boxes, mini escape rooms where you're trying to solve a quick puzzle.

one of the quests was really similar to the silver monkey puzzle on legends of the hidden temple back in the day, where you've got these cubes with specific combinations of colors and you're working together to assemble the correct pattern.

some quests are physical challenges, like walking across a balance beam trying to dodge swinging axes, or crawling underneath of a net covered with foam balls that you are trying to hit at various glowing targets on the wall.

and some quests are a mix of both. a favorite example here was the 'alien egg incubation' game. you enter through a mock airlock, and inside there is a massive bin, full of tiny balls. there are four or five scoops, and a series of containers that represent different stages of egg collection, incubation, and growth. you need to work together to scoop the eggs into the first bucket, which makes them light up, and then scoop the light up eggs into a second bucket, then a third, then finally a fourth (there might be five). the scoops are heavy. this one is hard.

everything you do is tracked with an NFC wristband. you earn points as you play, and points can then be used to unlock profile cosmetics (because you get a profile that is then tracked even in subsequent visits) and real life goodies (like snacks at the gastropub or water bottles or shirts).

all of the experiences are pretty well themed. the duels can be a little sparse, but the quests in particular are each in intricately decorated boxes with gameplay and obstacles that match the theme.

a door with a giant INSERT COIN logo on it and a novelty quarter sticking out opens and leads you into a massive pinball table where you and a team throw balls at glowing targets in skeeball type fashion. a room surrounded in minesweeper iconography contains a projected floor full of coins and mines for a brief few seconds, before your team attempts to traverse the path of coins without stepping on a mine. a museum facade with faux art exhibit posters hides a heist minigame inside, where you have to avoid and dodge the lasers to get to a piece of art.

some of the game design doesn't work as well as i'd like it to. a lot of the games are kind of obtuse, and they encourage you to go in without instructions first and play it blind, which unfortunately leads to quick failure more often than not.

this would be fine, except every time you want to play the game again you're waiting 5 minutes for the group behind you to do it, which means if you jump in and fail in the first 10 seconds that's just time wasted.

the instant failure state is absolutely the most frustrating part of this experience. it is a bummer to go into a game after waiting, have a less flexible person of your party enter first, have them stumble on accident, and have that just be an instant failure before you even have a chance to step in the room yourself. i think there are ways to balance against this, like a dedicated "countdown to start", a forgiveness system of some kind, or adjusted finish time balancing, that i do hope they explore. the space is still pretty new, after all.

there are instructions on the tablet in front of each quest or game, and you tap your wristband to queue up for a game, sort of like putting quarters on the edge of an arcade cabinet back in the day, so it could be worse. at some point we just defaulted to getting instructions.

additionally, the games do have a "physical" symbol on the tablet when they require a particular level of athletic finesse, but i do wish that they had also indicated the overall level of physicality required. there is a difference between "crawling under something" and "balancing on a series of very small foam blocks" or "traversing across multiple thin beams suspended by colorful ropes".

finally, i do also have to note that this place is just by nature overstimulating as fuck. it's full of neon colors and loud sounds and weird art and themed entertainment and also there's food and oh my god there are so many children. i had fun, and did not have to wait very long for many things, but i did not get to do everything i wanted, and i would absolutely go back on a weekday, while school is in session.

the games that work, though, work remarkably well. there is a corner of the arcade themed basically entirely to spaceships, full of what i would classify as among us tasks. those are, far and away, the best games i had a chance to try–though i will note that i didn't try everything, i had two hours and there's like 40 games in here!!

my favorite game was a game in which you entered a dead spaceship, and you and your crew had to work together to charge the batteries of the ship by plugging big chunky plugs into corresponding color holes on the wall. primary colors can usually be done solo, but it often asks for mixed colors, so you'll have to grab one plug and shove it in the red hole while another player frantically plugs one into a blue hole.

we played this twice. it was insanely fun. the plugs were just heavy enough and the holes were spaced just far enough that it was physically demanding without being exhausting, and the time challenge was balanced just right in that it was possible to win but required a lot of skill and finesse.

we won once, and lost once, and it was fantastic each time. you do also get points for getting close to winning, so any loss is some degree of progress towards a fancy profile effect that shows up when you tap into the screen, or a free pretzel.

the thing that astounded me the most is that everything just... even when the game design didn't hit, the technology just worked. the most trouble i had with a game's functionality was the rock wall driven by the kinect unit, in that if you cast a shadow the wrong way it wouldn't detect your foothold.

outside of that? the NFC chips presented no issue, every game functioned well, there were enough games that the most we waited for anything was 5 minutes, the space was really clean, no games were down for maintenance or whatever, all of the lights were functioning, like. everything literally just worked!

there are two of these now. natick was the first, they just opened a second in rhode island, and i swear these things are going to be everywhere in 5 years. if you're in new england, or if one opens up near you, get some friends and make the trip out. it is genuinely cool, and the absolute best use of dead mall real estate that i can possibly think of.

on bradley, and cohost

2024-09-30T19:00:56.847763+00:00

i don’t think i expected cohost to outlast bradley. i’ll be honest about that one.

jae and i used to say that bradley would live forever. he was an exceedingly healthy cat, and we kept him very active. sure he was a little bulky but he would run and jump it off. even just 5 or 6 months before he got sick we brought him to the vet and they said he was in top form, blood test results were great, eyesight and hearing were great, everything you’d want from a 10 year old cat and then some.

and then he started thinning out and slowing down, and it hit all at once. he went from the healthy silly guy who would run into my bedroom first thing every morning for snuggles to the guy who didn’t want to hang out anywhere except the flattest, most solid possible surfaces because movement hurt pretty much overnight. and we kept him as happy and healthy as we could while looking for options, we even got him back to laying in laps for a while, but then one morning in august he didn’t want to eat anymore and that was it. he told us he was done.

cohost wasn’t like that. the end wasn’t sudden. the numbers were sinking for a while, and it’s not as if hope got lost, y’know? multiple hail mary funding rounds, an attempt at building well-loved user facing features to bring in MAU after eggbux stopped making sense. jae’s talked about this some—themes were almost ready, the new post editor was in active user testing, they were waking up really stoked to tell me what they were working on next. but the funding story was still what it was, and ultimately now we’re here, on the last day.

but bradley and cohost were similar in that they were incredibly well loved. and bradley (@soupconsultant) was one of the site’s first users. he’s baked into the site! there are pictures of him hidden all over the place, from the homepage to the codebase.

he was my cat. i adopted him in 2013 when he was 9 weeks old, in garden grove, california. that’s why he’s called bradley!! we listened to sublime on the way home, and he’s named after their lead singer, bradley nowell (Z''L).

we took this trip to garden grove / it smelt like lou dog inside the van, oh yeah

(fun fact, the syllables work out well enough that you can place “bradley” instead of “lou dog” and i need you to know i do that every time i listen to that song)

jae moved in with me in february, 2016. they knew bradley from online, a lot of people did!! he was a very popular cat, at least in some circles. they first met bradley in november 2015, and it was there that they passed The Bradley Test, which is to say that if he hung out on top of you in any capacity the first time you met him, that means you were a good person worth keeping around. not everyone passed that test, though admittedly a lot of people did because he liked people a lot. and jae was excited to live with him!

i was always his favorite, because he was a certified Mommy Liker Supreme, but whenever i was out of town, jae became his favorite instead, and he’d hang out on their lap and cry at their door and come see them in the morning, all the things he’d do to me when i was around. even when i was in town, if we were both gaming, he had a preference for jae’s lap. maybe it’s just because jae’s skinnier, and so he had more room in that position, but he also had a preference for jae’s desk chair. either way, eventually, and by eventually i mean within like a year of us moving in together, bradley was our cat. he was our guy!!

and so when jae built this thing, they wanted to put their guy everywhere, and it always meant so much to me that this dude i adopted from a garage in garden grove became the first mascot for something that i thought was really special. that my wife had grown so attached to my cat that he became their cat, too, and that they wanted to put his face in their life’s work.

bradley’s face isn’t going away in read only. it’ll still be hidden in a lot of places, and it’ll still exist in the #bradley tag. it isn’t going away when the site goes down, either—between jae and i, i think there are well over 2,000 photos of that dude throughout his life, and that’s amazing.

(a cursory search of my phone and our shared library gives me 1720 photos of bradley, which is pretty close)

and like bradley, cohost isn’t actually going away, either. sure, this website is going away. definitively. but its impact on your life isn’t. the friendships you built here aren’t either.

i’m not trying to imply that cohost is as significant as my dead cat—this is probably obvious, but i love him way more than i do a website, and he meant more to me than pretty much anyone who’s going to read this post, because as much as i think y’all are great y’all never laid on my chest purring and meowing stinky fish breath into my face. BUT,

bradley changed my life, and he also got to be a part of this, which changed a lot of your lives, too. when bradley passed last year, i didn’t suddenly let go of the impact he had on me. don’t let that change go away because the site is. if you’re less addicted to the internet because of Numbers? hold onto that. if you post differently because of how this site was better for longform writing? keep doing that. if you post more risqué art, if you think less about algorithms, if you express yourself more authentically, if you prioritize commenting on people’s work to let them know it mattered to you, if you spend more time talking to your friends and less time tweeting at them? keep that when you go.

bradley was an eleven year old, 13 pound (at his best) tuxedo cat with half a mustache and a tiny goatee and the loudest meow you’d ever heard. bradley is, currently, about 1,720 photos, a small wooden box in my house, a small glass jar containing a clump of fur, and eleven years of the best memories i have. he is my improved photography skill, he is part of why i care so deeply for the needy and the disabled, he is dozens of songs that i can never sing the same (try listening to the bluey theme without saying BRADLEY! instead), he is my joy and my laughter. he’s the reason i’m still alive and i mean that very sincerely.

cohost was a website. it is, in fact, like a website in here. it’s also a group of people that truly believe in a better, more open, more friendly internet. it’s people who believe in healthier online relationships, it’s over 1,000 eggbug plushies hanging out in peoples’ homes, it’s 3D printable models of the mascot, it’s the friendships you formed online or even IRL, it’s the dozens of wakes happening around the world right now, it’s thousands of pieces of art, not just about the website but all the art that was made because this place existed to share it, it’s the way you are going to use the internet differently going forward because of the time you spent here.

i’m going to post a lot of pictures of him today. i might even post more text later, but for all intents and purposes, this is the last big thing i have to say. and i’ll close out with this.

you’re gonna remember both of them. they’re going to stay with you forever. everything will be okay. see you around.

dgotd 9-18-24 (the beyblade one)

2024-09-19T02:09:58.768155+00:00

today we're taking a break from transformers an entering the exciting world of GEAR SPORTS, an exciting new world where battling tops with names like AERO PEGASUS and COBALT DRAGOON are cooler and more important than any other sport, and where toys are METAL and VIOLENT.

yes, today's desk guys are BEYBLADES. four of them, even--driger slash 4-80P in the back, phoenix wing 9-60GF on the left, wizard rod 5-70DB on the right, and unicorn sting 5-60GP in the front. these are all specifically from the newest series, beyblade x, and i've been antsy for an opportunity to talk about just how cool beyblade is now, so here it is.

i alluded to being 8 in 1999 earlier. this means on top of being a linkin park kid, i was absolutely a beyblade kid. i watched the anime, i collected the tops, i went nuts. that had me hooked for a minute, but then transformers: robots in disguise (the 2000 one, not the 2014 one) came out, and FUCK these tops i want these dues that turn into cars!! even though it was a bit of a flash in the pan for my brother and i though, i always had sort of a soft spot for letting it rip, and over the years i've always had that urge to just grab a big ol mixing bowl and some cheap tops at target and battle it out--but i never acted on that.

until now, obviously! i'd seen rumblings online that "beyblade was good again", as much as that is a thing that's possible. that the tops are all metal, that the stadium was designed to encourage wild battles, that takara was genuinely trying to push it as a "competitive sport" adjacent to a trading card game, and the battles i saw on youtube did look cool, so i got the starter set and tried it out. and y'all? we're so fucking back.

there's a few things you'll see above that make beyblade x as cool as it is. the tops themselves are all metal, and weigh generally around half a gram each, and they glide around the stadium with all kinds of different performance aspects thanks to the variety of parts which i'll go over in a bit. most importantly, the stadium is surrounded by something takara tomy calls the xtreme line (known as the "x-celerator rail" in the us), a line of green plastic with gear teeth that interact with the tops to create frenetic boosts of speed that are called "x dashes". when a beyblade top approaches the edge of the stadium, the teeth on the top's spinning bit can connect with the teeth on the xtreme line, causing it to rapidly speed up along the edge of the stadium before being launched at high speed back into the center of the arena. when you throw two metal tops at each other at high speeds, tops which are regularly reaccelerated by the gears within the stadium, it results in unpredictable clashes which are wildly fun to watch and can cause some serious impact.

the effect is pretty pronounced when looking at a top like phoenix wing up there. phoenix wing is an "attack type", which means it comes with the kinds of parts that result in heavier collisions and promote contact with the xtreme line for higher speed battles. unlike the majority of beyblade x tops, which are generally just unpainted metal with neon transparent plastic accents, phoenix wing has a painted metal coat, and the raw speed and impact of the battles results in what you're seeing above. it's not just missing paint chips, either–after any given set of battles, the bowl of the stadium is frequently lined with tiny flecks of metal and plastic, the result of toys slamming into each other over and over again, sometimes so hard that they literally burst apart–which, for what its worth, gets you extra points.

on top of the frenetic action, the tops are just gorgeous. takara tomy is very much going for a "sports" angle, even down to the current anime being a relatively straightforward sports anime with a sponsor arc and everything. the animals that adorn the center of the tops, now called gear chips instead of bit beasts, are like sports team logos–spinny colorful mascots of horses and dragons and lions and birds and all the cool things that sports people like. the metal blades on each top are striking, with all kinds of spikes and shapes and little embossed details that are vaguely reminiscent of the gear chip within. the blades rest upon colorful candy-like ratchets in all sorts of shapes and colors that look like delicious little gummies, and all of that is loaded onto an equally colorful plastic bit at the bottom. the effect is pronounced in play, a dance of metallic imac-type tops smacking into each other and leaving behind rainbowy streaks as they speed around a neon-rimmed bowl. they've even got some tribute beyblades that look like the old ones from my childhood, because beyblade is apparently 25 years old now!

so the toys are violent, and fun to watch. but the actual game of battling the tops against a friend actually has a shocking amount of depth, thanks to simple to grasp customization and a pretty interesting points system. in beyblade x, the typical tournament format is a "first to 4 points" match. each player brings a "deck" of 3 beyblades to a match. you build each beyblade in advance with no repeating parts, and you progress through each bey in three rounds of battling top combat. opponents only reveal tops to each other at the start of each round. first to four points wins–and if no one gets it after 3 rounds, you have a choice to either resequence the beys and try again, or play a draw match between the last two beys in your consecutive decks.

let's talk about how you actually get points first. there are four kinds of finishes in beyblade x:

a "spin finish", in which you simply spin longer than your opponent, is worth 1 point. this is the kind of beyblade finish you are likely most familiar with if you've ever played beyblade before.
an "over finish", in which you knock an opponent into one of the stadium's two corner pockets, is worth two points. this is the sumo wrestling type finish.
a "burst finish", in which your beyblade hits the opponent's so hard that its three components break apart from sheer force, is also worth two points. this is apparently based directly on the previous beyblade format, something called "beyblade burst," and it's genuinely very cool when it happens--especially when the burst parts go flying out the top of the stadium, and that's why it has a domed roof now.
an "xtreme finish," in which your beyblade rides the xtreme line and subsequently smashes the opponent's bey into the dedicated "xtreme zone" in the middle of the bottom of the stadium, is worth three points. this is the coolest finisher you can get, and is very much a high risk high reward play--if you aim poorly, and attempt for an x dash into an xtreme finish, you risk launching yourself out of the xtreme zone instead of your opponent.

the reason why this point system is so detailed is directly inspired by just how much control you have over how your bey performs in the field both through clever customization and skillful aim. in beyblade x, tops come in four varieties: attack, made for offense, speed, and heavy hits; stamina, made for outlasting the other opponent's spin at the expense of attack power and speed; defense, tops made to withstand the hard hits of an attack bey at the expense of some stamina and power; and balance, tops that combine aspects of all three other types but generally do everything a little bit worse. these performance attributes are driven by three distinct parts–the blade, the ratchet, and the bit–which you can mix and match at will.

a blade refers to the metal part at the top, with the gear chip. an attack type blade, like the red phoenix wing blade, is on the heavy side, and has sharp, aggressive edges (typically three of them) that result in fierce collisions. a stamina type blade, like the yellow wizard rod blade, goes for smooth round curves over aggressive contact edges, resulting in better sustained spin while in play.

a ratchet refers to the candy-like inner portion that connects the blade to the bit. the numbers in their names–"4-80" or "9-60"–refer to the number of contact sides and the height profile. unicorn sting, a balance type bey, comes with a teal 5-60 ratchet, a 6.0 millimeter ratchet with 5 plastic protrusions that can make contact with other beys. stamina type beys like wizard rod perform better with a round ratchet for sustained spin and a balanced height profile, which is why it comes stock with the 5-70 ratchet. attack type beys perform better with ratchets that are lower to the ground, so 60s or 70s, with either pronounced contact edges like 3-60 or ratchets like phoenix wing's 9-60 that are so round to the point that they offer higher burst resistance. defense type beys generally want to be higher off the stadium, like driger's 8.0 millimeter 4-80 ratchet.

a bit refers to the plastic tip at the bottom of the bey that makes contact with the bowl of the stadium. this is perhaps the most impactful to overall performance, with a variety of shapes and material's. wizard rod's disc ball bit (the "DB" in "wizard rod 5-70DB") is a rounded bit that offers insane stamina performance, with a weird round propeller like protrusion surrounding the bit to promote balance. driger slash's point bit is almost flat at the bottom, save for a tiny round point protruding slightly off the bottom. phoenix wing and unicorn sting both come with gear point, which is very similar to point save for the fact that the gear teeth that connect with the xtreme rail line the bit all the way to the bottom rather than just the top half of it, promoting contact with the xtreme rail and making high speed attacks far more likely at the expense of predictability and stamina.

in the combos above, i built out a unicorn sting 9-60DB and a phoenix wing 5-60P. swapping unicorn sting's 5-60 out for the super round 9-60 ratchet should promote stability, and that combined with the insanely stable disc ball bit should make for a bey that will easily outlast its opponent. putting phoenix wing on a 5-60 ratchet will allow me to regain some points while avoiding potential hits to performance, and swapping gear point out for point means i still get that speed and precision offered by point without the potential risk of throwing myself out of the arena with gear point. if i combine smart parts swapping with skillful launch aim and launch angle, i might just be able to get an xtreme finish early, and take 3 points off my opponent quickly.

now hang on, i mentioned "regain some points". what's that all about? well, the parts system has a flaw–in that some parts are obviously going to be a little overpowered by their nature. phoenix wing, for example, is near universally considered the best blade in the game, particularly given it is currently the heaviest at .38 grams. the disc ball bit is insanely performant, and has resulted in wizard rod being the winningest bey by far in tournament settings, outlasting pretty much every other opponent unless it's knocked out by blades like phoenix or aero pegasus (which likely only isn't at the top of the charts because it's a prize bey from rare bey get battle, a particularly weird aspect of the japanese releases that i'm not going to get into here).

so how do you balance a "meta" in a battling top game? easy. you create a limited parts list, and you add a penalty handicap for each limited part used. each limited part you use grants your opponent a point to start off the match with. for example, phoenix wing's default configuration contains two limited parts: the phoenix wing blade, and the 9-60 ratchet. if i brought both into the same match, my opponent would start off the match with two points by default. if i built out something like phoenix wing 9-60DB, that grants my opponent 3 points right out the gate, and almost guarantees a match loss–but that's still an almost, and it can still be advantageous to take the handicap in order to build with limited parts given how strong they are. that said, creative bey construction to avoid limited parts while still maintaining performance is a key game strategy.

and... again, this is me talking about a game that is played by using a ripcord to hurl a metal object into a bowl at high speed in order to make it smash into another metal object so hard it explodes. it's the best. seriously. i am honestly going to finish this post as soon as i possibly can so i can go let it rip with my partners and watch our tops explode because it's just so fucking cool.

so, yeah, that's beyblade. as a bonus, they're really fun to fidget with. the dissasembly reassembly process is weirdly satisfying, and if you spin the bit on the bottom while it's assembled, the whole thing makes this nice little clicky and the gear chip spins too. it's just really nice to futz with them, so, they get to be desk guys sometimes!

it's 2024 and i'm obsessed with linkin park

2024-09-18T19:30:10.418450+00:00

so if you've seen my last.fm, you'll know that i have listened to a lot of linkin park lately. i've got a long history with their music–i was 9 years old when hybrid theory dropped, which means i was just the right age for that music to come out and entirely change my life.

my older sister meghan (love you sis!) was a huge nu metal dork, and we hung out together all the time. she had a shitty old toyota that she'd put a massive speaker set up into, and whenever we went anywhere, she'd be driving down the 405 N blasting korn or limp biskit or papa roach as loud as possible (and also n-sync sometimes! she had an eclectic taste!). but when hybrid theory dropped? that was the only album we listened to. we'd be in the car screaming to crawling, or points of authority, or in the end, and it was the best.

about a year and change later, i'm watching MTV, and a video i've never seen before drops. the artist box says linkin park, and that's weird because i've seen all their videos, and holy shit ARE THOSE GUNDAMS?! in a MUSIC VIDEO?! on a channel that people watch?! i LOVE gundam!!!! and i love linkin park! and this song BANGS!!!

and then meteora drops, and changes my life again. and my older sister buys us tickets to see them at the forum in LA for my 12th birthday. it ended up being my first concert ever, and i loved every single minute of it–especially since hoobastank was one of the openers, and my god was i into them at that time.

but then, as with all things around that time, i turned 14ish, and everything i loved became cringe. even when linkin park dropped a song for transformers, i couldn't tell people that i liked that! it was cringe and therefore the band was cringe and i fell off. i'd listened to their newer stuff here and there, i knew the lyrics to pretty much all the transformers-related songs like what i've done and new divide because i watched the hell out of those movies, but i didn't sit down and listen to any of their albums over again, and i definitely didn't go see them live again either. high school was my chiptunes era, college was my beatles and prog trance phase, and then i grew up and started liking all the stuff i used to like, but i still never really returned to their music.

and then chester bennington died. i grew up with his music imprinted on my head. i related so hard to those songs, and the passion he sang them with (in retrospect, i probably related a little bit too hard to points of authority, and i definitely know why, now). even the stuff i'd deemed cringe had an artistry to it that no one else really ever brought to the table. only chester sounded like that. i listened to hybrid theory a few times for old times' sake, i reminisced on social, i called my sister about it, but... i moved on. and the band went away, and sure i sang in the end and crawling at karaoke like any good 90s kid but for the most part linkin park wasn't really a factor in my life anymore.

and then macstories' federico viticci makes a post on the fediverse about linkin park having a new singer, and a new song, and how she's amazing, and how we're so back, and obviously i'm intrigued, so i click through. and. holy shit. we're so back.

i watched the entire secret show they released to announce the band's comeback, introduce emily armstrong, and to announce the release of from zero, and then i watched it again. i texted my sister, and i told her that emily's performance on faint reminded me of the way she used to sound while screaming at the top of her lungs in the car speeding down the 405. i texted my friends and family, and told them they needed to hear this, i read the lyrics over and over again, i glanced at the discourse and immediately got mad about it, and then i listened to hybrid theory and meteora, and watched the show a third time.

in the days since, that's been my routine. i've watched multiple full live recordings of chester's old performances with the band, alongside the live recordings of the band's latest shows in LA and new york. the show in LA happened to be at the forum, where i saw them, and hearing emily sing points of authority at the forum brought me right back to where i was 20 years ago, singing where she did without knowing how much it'd mean to me later. i've relistened to a bunch of their music, though admittedly most of it being the two albums i love the most, and i've been practicing my LP karaoke in the car on the way home from dropping off my partner.

most importantly, i am insanely stoked for from zero. i think it's going to be something really fresh but also really familiar. sure, i wasn't the hugest fan of LP's later music, but songs like burn it down do admittedly slap–and crucially, i think emily's bringing something fresh to the band. a different perspective. the best music in linkin park's repertoire is about things that happened to them as people. points of authority, which i've settled on as my favorite track of theirs, is pretty unsubtle about being a song about chester's experiences with child sexual abuse. and emptiness machine? buddy that's a song about rejecting a childhood cult.

there's this whole "controversy" about emily armstrong having been part of the church of scientology and how it's "not clear that she left" when in reality, she was born into it, groomed into it by her (incredibly awful) parents and siblings. when people leave and speak out, their lives are systematically destroyed by a wealthy, emboldened church–not to mention the impact on any sort of family that remains. but when you read the lyrics to the song, a song whose initials "E M" pretty clearly parallel an e-meter (which would in this interpretation be the emptiness machine in question), it's... pretty fucking unsubtle.

Already pulling me in / Already under my skin / And I know exactly how this ends, I / Let you cut me open just to watch me bleed / Gave up who I am for who you wanted me to be / Don't know why I'm hopin' for what I won't receive / Fallin' for the promise of the emptiness machine

and the fact that people are hearing this, and reading these lyrics, and hearing her insanely rich tone of voice, and the way she delivers chester's lyrics on the older tracks, and are hating on her? what the fuck man. c'mon.

so, yeah. i'm currently stanning linkin park. i feel fucking great about it, and you should hop on this train with me, because the vibes are great and the music's better. kill the part of you that cringes.

what do you mean they're doing a new digimon adventure our war game dub

2024-09-18T02:02:53.403669+00:00

discotek media announced a collection of the first 3 digimon OVAs remastered in HD with some pretty weird shit going on.

so if you were a digimon kid (i was 8 in 1999, obviously i was), you remember digimon the movie. saban took the digimon adventure 01 prequel OVA, our war game (the OVA that fucks severely and later was expanded upon in the ever brilliant summer wars), and digimon adventure 02 hurricane landing/transcendent evolution and smashed them together into a weird edit with catchy pop music, threw an angela anaconda short at the beginning for some reason, and put it in theaters. it was amazing, especially when you were eight years old, but it was really mostly amazing because of how good our war game is, and all three of those OVAs are much better on their own.

but because you were a digimon kid, watching the sub is hard, because tai doesn't sound like that, and ishida's name is matt in your brain, and it's just plain weird, sorta like watching subbed dragon ball z. so, good news, discotek's release of these things has all 4 options--the original three OVAs, plus the saban digimon the movie edit complete with the original soundtrack--with fresh dubs from the saban cast. meaning you can go watch our war game with a dub track and the jp soundtrack at the same time.

this is incredible. i love this. i am insanely stoked for this. i am wildly compelled and i will be forcing my household to sit their asses down and watch these OVAs dubbed with me.

desk guy of the day 9-17-24

2024-09-18T01:05:14.283679+00:00

in another episode of the long running tradition (i started it yesterday), here's a guy that i put on my desk. today, it's mirage from rise of the beasts. AKA Transformers Studio Series Deluxe Class Rise of the Beasts 105 Autobot Mirage.

mirage is a... unique figure, is how i'll say it. played by known ball shaver pete davidson, mirage was set up in rise of the beasts (a movie i thought was y'know, pretty okay) to be the new bumblebee, the audience insert/kid friendly character who gets all the good jokes and is the human character's best friend and/or destined magic hero machine (something something the car picks the driver). and sure, he's that, and he becomes the 86 movie daniel witwicky's robot suit homage at the end, but the combination of his twinky ass design and that one gay joke means he's also human/transformer ship bait, which, unfortunately, gets me every single fucking time.

so the design's good, and i thought the movie was pretty okay, which means i collected every single autobot from the film, and so here he is on my desk. he doesn't look like pete davidson, and he doesn't really look like his movie design, either! sure, he's got the chest thing going on, and the weird knees, but he's not quite spindly enough to pull off the movie model design, and he's got some weird bits that compromise the look. the headsculpt looks pretty great, and is flexible enough to hit the weird cocky expressions like the one i tried to put him in here--though without some kind of smirk it falls flat. but there's some stuff here that bugs me, especially the transparent plastic arms. so what gives? why is this guy so compromised?

three words: licensed. vehicle. mode.

this is what you're buying this figure for. there are certainly some good robot modes in the rise of the beasts studio series line--SS-100 bumblebee and SS-102 optimus prime i'm looking at you--but like SS-108 wheeljack, this dude is all about the vehicle mode.

volkswagen group had a notorious streak in the aughts for turning down transformers toys for years--clearly they're past all the unpleasantness (of course), volkswagen doesn't make weapons, what are you talking about? this was a problem for takara and hasbro, who had been making dudes who turned into volkswagens and porsches since 1984. but then around the early 10s or so, volkswagen realized there was a ton of money in the transformers brand, and lightened up the restrictions. the rise of the beasts toyline was the first to really benefit from this, given we got to see some realistic depictions of some relatively rare vehicles.

our buddy mirage is a 1994 porsche 911 carrera rs 3.8, sporting a stunning silver and blue paint job with a matching crisp blue porsche label on the side and a pretty little autobadge on the hood. this is impressive on its own in the movie--porsche only produced some 55 units of the 964, and one of those 55 is actually in the film. there were three used during production, two of which were built as repros from other early 90s 911 carrera models.

movie aside, as a toy car that happens to turn into a robot, he's stunning. sure, he's got the little panel lines that make it obvious that something is going on in there that isn't just "toy car", but the shape is so dead on! the paint job is fantastic, and i haven't done any work to this! don't you just want to get inside him?

it even has the tiny painted tail lights, and none of them do that anymore! even the toyhax does very little here in vehicle mode--fills out the tail lights and headlights, covers up the contentious transparent plastics, adds a tiny license plate, and bang you're done. now, getting him back and forth between both of these modes just outright sucks. it's fiddly as all get out, everything feels like it's going to snap on you, and the sheer amount of transparent plastic on here means that the plastic is far more fragile than it would be otherwise.

but, really, how much can i hate a dude who turns into a car that looks this good on my shelf? i'll just, y'know, keep him in that mode, and only transform him once or twice a year to keep the dust off of him.

desk guy of the day 9-16-24

2024-09-16T23:06:15.013311+00:00

talen lee's excellent post about shellformers reminded me that i can just blog about the hundreds of little guys that live in my house, most of whom turn into cars and/or animals, so consider this the start of a series.

every day, i select a guy from my shelf, transform it, pose it, and put it on my desk. i'll share pictures and thoughts about each guys in the #dgotd tag on here. today, it's two guys.

it's technically three guys--more on that in a bit

these two gay idiots are chromedome and rewind. if you want to be formal, technically, these are Transformers Generations Titans Return Deluxe Class Titan Master Autobot Stylor and Chromedome and Transformers Generations Titans Return Legends Class Autobot Rewind--but honestly, who does that?

why is it technically three guys? because chromedome's head is a guy! that's what a "titan master" means! these were called "headmasters" in G1 (🎶 ヘッドマスターズ~! 🎶), and they represent one of my favorite transformers tropes, which is "dude inside of little dude" or "dude piloting another dude". chromedome turns into a vaguely cybertrony sports car and stylor turns into a little dude that can drive chromedome. you'll see this in the gallery below--which you can click into for full images!

i just think they're neat. rewind's also a little dude inside another dude, technically! he turns into a cassette tape, and is bros with blaster, the autobot tape deck. he also turns into a... tank... thing???? it's weird. technically rewind in titans return turned into some sort of "spy tablet thing"... which never worked for me, so he got a complete redo with some toyhax reprolabels, as did chromedome! in the gallery below, you'll see rewind's tape mode, rewind's "tank" mode, chromedome's vehicle mode, and one of my favorite little toyhax traditions, the tiny license plate.

as toys, they're both... y'know, fine. the titans return line, and really the entire "prime wars" trilogy that they belong to, had a lot of cheap feel to it. sure, the toys scale with the older chug (classics/henkei/universe/generations) stuff well, but to retain that scale, they've got cheaper plastics and weaker articulation. the transformations aren't super great, they lack detail without paint or toyhax, and the joints are really basic. even still, they're fun to mess with thanks to some simple transformations, and admittedly, they can cut some fantastic poses if you futz with them right.

but really, i didn't get these two because of the toys. i got them because they're BOYFRIENDS!

not just like, "fandom speculation" boyfriends, actual real life boyfriends! the car dates a cassette tape! they're in love! it's CUTE and they have a PROBLEMATIC SIZE GAP and i ADORE them. idw transformers was gay as all get out and i can only hope that the new energon universe stuff gets even a fraction as gay as idw got, especially during lost light.

so! they're gay, and they occupy the neublous "tiny dude piloting big dude" play pattern that i was all about as a kiddo (and really still as an adult), so i'm a huge fan.

five years agohost

2024-09-13T23:21:22.965826+00:00

five years ago my brilliant, funny, gorgeous, insanely talented wife (jkap) came to me and said that they wanted to do something else. that the mainstream industry was killing them, but that they had been talking to a friend lately, and that they and said friend (colin) had an idea. they were going to leave their jobs and build a company together, sustaining themselves off their savings to start off with. i told them i wanted to support them, because i believed in it, and i meant it.

we weren't even married, then. we got married a couple months later. we invited about a dozen close friends and family to disneyland in california, bought them all tickets, hopped on a raft to tom sawyer island, parked up on an area of the island where the kids don't hang out and where there were a couple benches and a nice view, and we got married. jae's mom officiated. it was beautiful, it was cheap, and it was ours. we exchanged birthstone matching copies of pokemon to each other--i gave them a pokemon sapphire cart, and they gave me a pokemon emerald cart. and then we went home, and jae kept working on the plan.

their idea, notably, was not cohost. it was something else. but the root of that idea was to build a product for creators that was different from the rest of the tech industry's products, by means of building a company that was different from other tech companies. in march of 2020, the rest of the world learned some of that vision in the form of the antisoftware manifesto, a document which i still feel so blessed to have contributed to in any way, shape, or form.

covid became a pandemic, aidan came into the picture, we moved across the country, the product vision changed a couple times, and yet they kept working. eventually, they built what they thought was a better vision for an online shared community space, and it's the best community i've ever been a part of on the internet. it was built by 3, later 4, incredibly hard working people, who devoted massive chunks of their life to building something safe, something different, something funny, and something for people to make and share shit, not something for them to make money off of.

that i could stand by jae's side while they built this thing has been an honor and a privilege. but it's also been... hard. really, really hard. seeing them push themselves like this, all 4 of them, has been brutal. i care about these people a lot. obviously i have a bias towards my literal actual wife, but i care about these people a lot. kara was one of my first friends over at discord. colin's my friend, too. aidan's my friend by proxy, even if we've never properly hung out.

assc cares so much about building a better internet, a better place for communities to thrive, and the reward has been... relatively low pay, regular criticism, 24/7 work for at least three straight years, and the fear that it's going to collapse and all have been for nothing--and, at least for jae, the reward has also included grayer hair (which i think is very sexy so it works out).

which is why i'm so fucking proud that they were able to decide how and when to end it, together. i'm proud that the end still means standing on their principles about what the internet should be and who it should be for. i'm proud that they're ending it out of care for one another, while still trying to care for the people who rely on this space for themselves. i'm proud that they tried, and that so many people felt the way i did about this place.

i have too many things to say and i don't have a proper ending for this. at some point i'll tell folks where to find me, though the reality is i'm gonna be kadybat wherever the fuck that is so just look for me wherever and i'll probably be there, even if i post less and less over time. most importantly, i wanted y'all to know how much this matters, and how proud i am of my wife and their friends for making something really cool, even if it didn't last forever.

why i love fursuiting

2024-09-16T14:35:00.739053+00:00

i love fursuiting so fucking much. i feel so much more like myself. when others see me as a colorful dog, not as my human shell.

this is who i’m supposed to be. everything else is a facade. i kept getting little reminders of the mask all weekend, fingers from reality reaching in and tapping on the glass. i do not look forward to returning to that version of myself on tuesday.

it’s easy to forget how authentic it feels. distance and time separate me from that feeling, from the feeling of being aqua. even the first hour or so feels so… tenuous. difficult. focused solely on the physical sensation, the wear and tear on the body.

but then the euphoria kicks in. you get your sea legs. the extended distance of the eyes becomes second nature. the fuzzy pinpricked windows blur together into something that feels correct, something that feels real. you learn your new turning radius, your new gait. your proper gait, really. you take your own muzzle for granted, and the you underneath disappears. you find yourself retreating to lounges to hydrate and rest, lest others see that it’s simply a mask and not you.

i wore aqua for a cumulative 12 or so hours this weekend. it was physically taxing, very demanding, and yet i crave more so desperately it hurts. i don’t want to take her off. i want to be her.

i cannot tell you how much i want the rest. paws and a tail, digitigrade legs, all of it. i want to be what i feel like i am. i want others to see that. i get these scant (and rather expensive) moments of time where i get to express my rawest and realest self and then i have to shove it back in a box and pretend im satisfied any other way.

on all levels except physical i am a dog. woof bark.

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

2024-09-16T14:41:08.334391+00:00

kadybat

Kinds of Kindness2024
★★★★

Watched Jun 28, 2024

1) what if jesse plemmons had the most toxic lifestyle dom of all time and the lifestyle dom is willem dafoe would that be fucked up or what

2) what if your wife got lost on an island and the woman who was found was a skinwalker who fed you her flesh would that be fucked up or what

3) what if willem dafoe had a polyamorous cult where the followers drank his tears and sweat while searching the nation for a woman who could revive the dead would that be fucked up or what

*sings woefully* how deep is your love

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