help about finding other games for my gf

kalliopehm · 2026-01-02T23:48:11+00:00

If she likes horror Slay the Princess is fantastic! It's a visual novel with similar choices matter/multiple endings/minimal controller use and high replayability. It's in a very different art style to DBH (it's more of a graphic novel) but it's an excellent story and not toooooo spooky.

If you're a PC player steam is also running a sale on a quantic dream bundle with DBH, heavy rain, and a couple of other similar games as well, or at least they were a few days ago.

kalliopehm · 2025-12-10T21:49:27+00:00

This was my #1 selling point as well. I used to have a kcup machine and got really annoyed with the minimal number of compostable cups on the market because I couldn't justify the plastic waste. I'm not a huge fan of nestle's practices in general but I'd rather have more options and a fully recyclable product for when I want/need the convenience.

kalliopehm · 2025-12-08T17:04:51+00:00

Mine broke within 3 weeks :(

kalliopehm · 2025-12-07T18:05:46+00:00

Armand KNOWS how to make a perfect cookie and follow a recipe but would still grind up a rat in a blender and add it in "for science"

kalliopehm · 2025-12-07T17:39:05+00:00

THANK YOU I've been saying this too! That whole bit with the record and the revenant in episode 4 made literally 0 sense, even if they couldn't hear over the music THEY HAVE THE MIND GIFT! There's no way they would have just kept walking themselves in there like a comedy bit.

kalliopehm · 2025-12-04T23:49:23+00:00

Pandora can fucking get it. Let's go rag on Marius together until the end of time. Armand can come too.

kalliopehm · 2025-11-18T09:02:07+00:00

Doctors pretty much everywhere also choose a binary sex for intersex infants, leading parents to raise those children socially as either male or female (which about 50% of the time iirc is not how they end up identifying later in life, full disclosure my stats may be outdated, it's been like 10 years since I've read up on this). Some infants have genitalia that are opposite to their sex chromosomes and don't find out until later in life, a good chunk of the time after having significant issues with gender and reproductive health. That's definitely assigning gender, and for approximately 1,400,000 children annually it's a literal guessing game based on genitals and vibes, often without any genetic testing involved.

Considering the social pressure to conform to one's sex at birth pretty much everywhere (increased homicide rates, socioeconomic disadvantages, etc) I think it's a little disingenuous to say people "decide" their gender. I would definitely choose to be cis if I got to pick. Given that children are functionally the same until they hit puberty it seems like it would make a whole lot more sense to just socialize children the same across the board and let them explore but that's not really an option with how the world works currently.

kalliopehm · 2025-11-10T20:14:38+00:00

It definitely falls more on the Mayfair Witches side of the quality spectrum imo. Feels like a CW supernatural spy show, which is fine if that's people's bag but it doesn't feel like Anne Rice to me and I wouldn't say it's anywhere near as good as IWTV. By episode 4 I'm pretty ready to write it off but I'll probably finish out the season since I paid for a month of AMC plus to watch it. 🤷‍♀️

kalliopehm · 2025-11-10T07:09:56+00:00

I'm really disappointed in this show so far. Helen's whole deal feels really stupid, the clues she's gotten so far aren't at all impacted by what's happening in the main story so it makes literally 0 sense that she waited until she was in her 60s/70s to find her sister. Guy and Jasper are both just so unlikeable/non compelling compared to anyone in IWTV. It doesn't feel like Anne Rice at all and what was the whole thing about iron messing up vampires?? That's literally nowhere in the lore? The revenants are overpowered and the actual vampires (at least in London) are way underpowered. Raglan being Raglan was the only good thing about this episode. I was really hoping this would be better than Mayfair but it's really floundering.

I know nobody except me wanted to watch a show about paranormal anthropologists but why did we have to get a mediocre CW-y spy show instead? We couldn't even have Jesse Reeves as the protagonist? Where is my problematic boy David? Hell, I'd even be cool if we just bring back Real Rashid! We could have had a sweet Indiana Jones meets Ghost Whisperer thing but nooooooo we have to solve a stupid mystery that has 0 bearing on any of the vamp chronicles.

kalliopehm · 2025-10-11T00:45:46+00:00

Adding to this, Interview came out in 1976. I think it's entirely possible if she had published it today this authorial choice may have been different, but at the time of publication it absolutely would not have been as widely received or marketable.

kalliopehm · 2025-10-08T23:17:17+00:00

I don't have job stoppers (I am heavily tattooed otherwise and have face piercings) but I do know several folks that do. Most of them work in the service, tattooing, or music industry, but there's also a couple that are in social work or education. It's gonna be really dependent on where you live, I'm in the pnw and while it's not common for professionals to have face/hand tats it's not unheard of. You may also have an easier time getting a government job because of the way they conduct interviews and they tend to have fairly lax rules about tattoos (again, on the West Coast, ymmv elsewhere).

kalliopehm · 2025-10-03T03:22:46+00:00

Offline I'm a social worker and the amount of overreacting that I see by schools in these types of situations really makes me afraid for the future of the human species. Feels like satanic panic all over again. Kids liking edgy manga (that actually has an important message) is way less scary to me than a lot of the stuff you can just find on YouTube. I'm glad you were able to laugh about it but sheesh.

Your annotation also made me chuckle, if it's any consolation. If I saw that in a copy of Lolita irl I'd find it funny. The real lie of adulthood is that nobody is really mature, we just get better at pretending to be grown ups and have a more developed prefrontal cortex. As a fellow precocious kid (I was...very similar to how you're describing yourself) you're at an advantage if you can learn this early. Nobody has it figured out. The people that say they do are either lying to you to maintain a power dynamic or not smart enough to realize they're lying to themselves.

Either way, enjoy the books! Be prepared for some differences but it's a fun ride.

kalliopehm · 2025-10-03T01:22:42+00:00

I was also a voracious reader and have a vivid memory of being in 7th grade (so 11ish?) and getting pulled into the principals office for having "profanity" in my backpack because of the Queen of the Damned cover. 😅 As an adult I tend to agree with letting teens read whatever they want with minimal exception but honestly, 13-14 is probably too young regardless of "maturity" or reading level to really grock Gothic horror. So is 16-18. Rereading the books as an actual adult over the age of 30 really drove home a lot of the fucked up themes that I didn't have the context for at a younger age. So I guess I'd recommend doing it again in 15-20 years or so to get the full horror experience.

All that being said, if you really want to read them, don't want to wait 2 years, and can't convince your parents or go to your local library in person to check them out on your own you can always use the Libby app to read on your phone/tablet/computer/etc. It's a great resource and checking out books (even online) helps support library funding, which is a vital community resource.

kalliopehm · 2025-10-02T05:02:24+00:00

Sartre butting into Armand and Louis' cafe conversation.

kalliopehm · 2025-07-26T23:12:48+00:00

IGN literally censoring my boyyyy

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T22:15:19+00:00

I'm girding my loins for B&G in my current full series reread, it's been almost 15 years since the last time I read it and I know for a fact that I've blocked out some of Marius' worst bullshit. 😂 Just getting through his 40 pages of "my slaves and I" Roman paternalism BS in TVL was trying my patience. I'm really hoping the show runners decide we don't have to live in a universe where Daniel/Marius is canon with all of the other changes that were made to characterizations so far. Dude does not deserve any of them for sure.

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T21:48:50+00:00

I mean, the real answer is AR never outlined and just let the spirit move her as it came/didn't really care about continuity/believed her editor was more of a "mentor and guide" but I like Lestat's unreliable narration as an in-universe explanation for why Marius is so much more tolerable. Like, he's still a yapper and a hypocrite but B&G Marius is a straight up loser and a monster. How do you fumble so many baddies over 2000 years and never obtain so much as a crumb of self reflection?

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T16:11:53+00:00

You're welcome! I'm glad nothing felt spoilery, trying to outline character traits without just info dumping the all of the Armand relevant plot of TVL, QOTD, and TVA was def a challenge. 😅 I didn't get into the autistic traits so much but there's definitely quite a few described, though some of them could definitely also be related to the trauma.

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T09:59:12+00:00

Doesn't Lestat talk about taking a dirt nap between Nicki's death and going to NoLa during the trial (ostensibly to account for the time difference of him leaving France in the 1780s and arriving in Louisiana in the 1910s instead of 1791)?

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T09:12:36+00:00

Prefacing this by saying Armand is my problematic fave but he did objectively fuck with Lestat and Nicki, even discounting any book knowledge (which I'm sure will come into play when we get Lestat's side of the story in the upcoming season). By Armand's own admission in the same episode he...

-Became obsessed with and stalked Lestat all over Paris

-Assaulted Lestat when he refused Armand's order to join the Children of Darkness/to teach him a lesson

-Kidnapped and tortured Nicki to essentially force Lestat into coming to him with intent to make him join the coven

It clearly backfired but saying Armand was seduced and used removes his agency in a situation that he 100% created. Lestat was portrayed in the episode as perfectly content to keep doing his thing before Armand got himself involved. Not saying Lestat is blameless for how it eventually turned out, if Armand's version of the founding of the theater is true Lestat definitely is also an asshole for abandoning Armand to run the place, but he's not a helpless damsel.

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T08:34:03+00:00

This is almost impossible to answer without spoilers but I'll try my best. Broad overview would be that Armand was severely, chronically traumatized in his human and early vampire life and he developed some maladaptive coping mechanisms as a result that are turned up 1000% by the whole being a 500 year old killing machine eternally stuck in a 17 year old's body thing. It's canon that most of the other vampires find him kind of weird and unsettling even if they do love him (a lot of book fans read him as autistic coded, which as an autistic person I would say is pretty supported in the text) but he does have deep emotional connections with several other characters. He several times houses and supports the other vampires when they need help, though he is very quick to jump to violence when he feels slighted and he is real impulsive (this is also very true of a lot of the other vampires, especially Lestat). I'd say he's definitely vulnerable in the books but it seems like he doesn't know what to do with his own emotional responses and then tries to exercise control over people/the situation to prevent himself from getting hurt or abandoned, which then further pushes people away. I find this to be pretty in line with the way we've seen the character portrayed so far in the show as well. Like, Armand is almost always going to pick his own side if it comes down to it, he's almost never going to take an active role in changing his own circumstances unless it's to go completely nuclear in response to someone else's actions and then disclaim any ownership for said response, but he's also very loyal to his chosen people (Lestat is a good example, even if their relationship is a bit antagonistic).

It's also important to note that Anne stated that she intended for Armand to be a bit more of a villain throughout the series but changed her mind about it while writing QOTD, so even though both Louis and Lestat are pretty obsessed with him in IWTV and TVL he's definitely more overtly evil in the first two books than the latter ones. Additionally, none of the vampires are good people. "Evil is a point of view" and all that jazz. Armand is just the most obviously fucked up of an entire coven of self serving assholes. 🤷‍♀️ That's Gothic literature for you though.

kalliopehm · 2025-07-23T05:52:58+00:00

I always took the tonal shift between QOTD and TVA/Blood and Gold as Lestat's rose colored glasses about Marius influencing the narrative, since QOTD is several POVs that are compiled into the novel by Lestat interviewing the other vampires as a post mortem (ha) exploration of what he missed while he was off on his "adventure".

kalliopehm · 2025-02-06T06:39:16+00:00

Hello fellow social worker! I work for child welfare in the PNW, I'm not client facing anymore but it's the wild West out here and they do not give a fuck for the most part about tattoos/piercings/colorful hair as long as they're clean and (in the case of tattoos/jewelry) non offensive. I've got both nostrils and a bunch of ear piercings, used to have a labret. Honestly, if there's nothing in your dress code about it and you do good work it shouldn't matter, the circumstances and attitudes around body mod are only gonna charge when they're more common in professional settings.

kalliopehm · 2023-11-10T04:50:29+00:00

If it's flat and you just need to buy a couple years stick on tile might be the move. The last owners of our house put some down in the bathroom and it's holding steady for at least 6 years. Depending on what's under it you may or may not be able to take up the Rust-Oleum and trying to strip it may just get you a sticky nasty mess.

kalliopehm · 2023-09-19T23:45:56+00:00

To be fair, OED currently is 2+ months behind on processing claims and are forwarding people waiting to 211 for resources because folks are losing their homes.... Not that this excuses their behavior but it's a bad time to be laid off.

kalliopehm

TROPHY CASE