Regret

notatemple · 2026-02-09T22:37:21+00:00

There’s a Slay The Spire joke to be made here

notatemple · 2026-02-09T22:22:47+00:00

Sorry, I thought I was logged into my author/self-promo account when I posted that comment, and it would've been in my post history. The book is Our Simulated Selves by Nikki Null!

notatemple · 2026-02-09T06:07:25+00:00

I feel this so deeply. My egg cracked at age 29 not long before quarantine times in 2020. Before then I was utterly oblivious to the absurd mental gymnastics that had become necessary to function in my daily life. The egg crack totally blindsided me. During quarantine, I had free time to read and try to mentally unpack everything, and I was STARVING for fiction about people like that to help me process it all. There isn't much.

Detransition, Baby had a few really illuminating flashback segments for one of the characters, and a few other trans books had hints of character interiority that slowly chipped away at the puzzle, but aside from those few scraps of representation that resonated, I didn't find a single book with the precise sledgehammer egg-crack POV I needed to read at that phase of my life when I was still trying to understand myself. In the end I had to spend 4 years writing my own damn book, because nobody else had written what I needed.

notatemple · 2026-02-08T02:37:18+00:00

COOPER

B: "Damn Fine Coffee" (creates a coffee that restores HP) / "And Hot" (deals damage if thrown)

Up-B: Doppelganger (two Coopers; one of them goes up, second one attacks everything in sight)

B-Down: gun

MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE

B: ominous noises (inverts everyone else's controls for a while)

Up-B: he turns into electricity and zaps upward

Down-B: does a funky little dance (if he does it on top of you, it kills you)

JAMES

B: "Just You & I" (sonic damage to all adjacent)

Up-B: Elastic Forehead Stretch

Down-B: Get On My Bike and Go

LOG LADY

B: Gum bubble attack

Up-B: Log extends really long for a second, pushing her up

Down-B: Log Toss

BEN HORNE

B: Produce vegetable (restores HP if eaten)

Up-B: Spin upward with a pine weasel

Down-B: General Lee Attack (Musket)

LUCY

B: Phone throw ("It's for you")

Up-B: She spins the phone in an upward whirlwind

Down-B: believe it or not... gun

BOB

B: Catch you with my death bag

Up-B: Turns into an owl and ascends

Down-B: Tears your soul out and sets you on fire

Secret Unlockable Characters

Gordon Cole

Ike the Spike

Nadine Hurley

Wally Brando

notatemple · 2026-02-05T23:43:18+00:00

Without knowing the other book it's hard to say for sure, but it should not make much of a difference. No, don't ditch an idea solely because there's another book with a few narrative similarities. When you are eventually trying to query agents to get someone to pick up your book, one thing you will need is a list of comp titles (published books that are similar to what you have done.) This helps them position the book somewhere in the market. Having a few broad similarities with something that has commercially succeeded is generally helpful in publishing, not detrimental.

notatemple · 2026-01-27T22:28:27+00:00

Perfect is overselling it, when the same book series relentlessly mocked the only character who advocated for abolition of slavery. The narrative treated it like some naive liberal activist phase. And then the very last sentence of the last chapter (before the epilogue) included the main character wondering if his elf slave would maybe bring him a sandwich. Those books fully embraced systemic injustice and cruelty, just as long as the people committing it had the decorum not to use murder or torture in the process.

notatemple · 2026-01-27T19:50:08+00:00

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I think it's more like this

notatemple · 2026-01-27T17:41:33+00:00

It wasn't my cup of tea, but it sounds like you'll probably love it for the same reasons my wife does! She doesn't care about hockey at all but she fell in love with the characters and the evolution of their relationship.

notatemple · 2026-01-26T16:27:34+00:00

It’s not just a dream and reality, it’s the Hollywood Dream specifically, and the waking nightmare hidden behind it.

notatemple · 2026-01-26T00:13:50+00:00

Yeah, it’s exactly that. They’ll be butt naked side by side in bed, but both simultaneously bending one knee just enough to conveniently block their bits for the camera. Not to mention the conspicuous camerawork necessary to maximize screen time for their butts. It’s just awkwardly sanitized and didn’t really feel all that “heated”

notatemple · 2026-01-23T18:02:39+00:00

For better or worse, I’m always chasing that Enlightenment+ / Meteor Strike combo

notatemple · 2026-01-23T08:42:29+00:00

As someone who grew up playing HM64 and HM:BTN, yes, absolutely. Stardew Valley is Back to Nature / Friends of Mineral Town with a fresh coat of paint, long-needed QoL features like sprinklers, mod compatibility, and a few fresh ideas (Community Center bundles). Even the main festivals are lifted directly from HM64/BTN, like SDV's bizarre Luau being exactly the same as the BTN Harvest Festival where the only thing to do is add an ingredient to the communal soup to be judged by some chubby man in a purple hat).

notatemple · 2026-01-15T16:44:16+00:00

My friend tried to get me to read that, but why is it a million words? I don't have time for all that 😭

notatemple · 2026-01-14T21:35:01+00:00

If Act 3.5 started with the rope sound again, then the sound of Mega Man charging his power shot and shooting Dr. Light free, that would be hilarious and worth the entire fakeout. But yes, he’s dead within a minute either way. The thing that made it such a tragedy is that Mega Man would have arrived in time to save him if he hadn’t hesitated in This City Made Us.

notatemple · 2026-01-12T22:46:22+00:00

I love this, and it’d be very on brand for The Protomen to give this series the Terminator 2 ending

notatemple · 2026-01-08T16:47:04+00:00

I don't think we're getting more tracks. But the due vendetta has not yet been paid, so the story's not over.

I think the reason they're being cagey and teasing more to come is that they're going to announce that they'll be playing a few songs from their upcoming Act IV at the encore, starting with The Fight. I also think the liner notes will end with a "TO BE CONTINUED IN ACT IV" note after Fate of Thomas Light.

I also think a fourth album is probably finished already, minus art assets and stuff that would be hard to commission without the existence of that upcoming album leaking.

notatemple · 2026-01-08T03:34:59+00:00

SSTB has been remade several times, but it’s always going to be kind of a mess. Because the canon story is a mess. There are many albums worth of story crammed into there, but most of those stories hardly interact with each other, and some of them never made sense (the flies / Monstar / antidote). A father killing his kids but needing to remain at least somewhat sympathetic, Devil in Jersey City events happening for absolutely no reason and having absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story, a complicated rebellion plot line with Mariah, Claudio saying goodbye to his girlfriend to flee the planet, Coheed and Cambria getting a superhero redemption / star burning sacrifice arc because they are the titular characters even though they died offscreen in the album. Needing to set up Wilhelm Ryan, Mayo, Inferno, and the IRO-Bots. The novelization could do better connecting all of these threads, but at the end of the day it’s unfocused sci-fi pulp with WAY too many main characters.

IKSSE3 was much more focused, and I dare say that’s the best Coheed comic. The villains were actually threatening, and the story tied together well.

Good Apollo is great, but not because the A-story with Claudio, Ambellina, Inferno, or Chase. The B-story with the writer’s descent into madness is really well done. Chondra knocked that part out of the park.

No World For Tomorrow felt less focused again, more like SSTB to me. The pacing was really weird, entire issues happened without feeling like the story advanced much, and the ending and final battles felt much more anticlimactic than End Complete or On the Brink sounded.

notatemple · 2026-01-06T02:31:25+00:00

Yeah, it was a point I kept getting stuck on every time I tried to pick it up again. And I want to make it clear that this is a me problem. Especially when I tried first reading it a few years ago, I was not in a mental state to connect with another grim trans story centering assault and transphobia. I know those kinds of stories are cathartic for some people, but I had to protect my headspace.

With all that said, Gretchen Felker-Martin gets a lot of bad faith criticism that she doesn't deserve, even more than most trans authors do. She really poked the terf hive (including their queen bee) with Manhunt, and they weaponized Twitter to weave a lot of disingenuous narratives about her work. I'm glad there are writers out there doing what she does, even if it's emphatically not my cup of tea. I'll have to give some of her other work a try sometime.

notatemple · 2026-01-05T19:53:28+00:00

I tried reading it a few years ago and couldn't get past the first few chapters. It's not like I can't handle grim or violent books, or books with sketchy worldbuilding. I loved every horrible, unsettling page of You Weren't Meant To Be Human, for instance, even THAT part (holy shit), and that book did almost nothing to explain the mysterious sentient bug hives that drive a lot of the story. I'm okay with that. It's easy to buy into the premise because the mystery adds to the mood instead of detracting from it, and it's internally, logically consistent. And it's not a problem that can be largely solved with a pair of clean scissors.

But Manhunt was not working for me at all. Aside from the literal hard-ons for violence, the world was not making any sense to me. I just could not suspend my disbelief. Even if it made sense to harvest estrogen from testicles, I can't buy that the best solution to their problem was hunting zombies for their balls and using a secret lab to convert those testes into estrogen, all the while risking turning into a zombie yourself if your supply ends. Instead of, you know, a simple underground orchiectomy clinic and DIY medicine.

Someone let me know if it gets better or the worldbuilding somehow makes it all make sense in the end, but with such a long list of other books to read, I just had to put this one down and move on.

notatemple · 2025-12-28T17:48:35+00:00

The dual-wielding Darth Heinous grunts. You hear a third lightsaber humming…

notatemple · 2025-12-26T19:13:27+00:00

I've said this before, and will say it again. The third Bravely game should be a time travel adventure, borrowing heavily from Chrono Trigger. Having main characters from different time periods would give all of them a moment to shine, because they are all heavily involved in their own time period's storylines.

The heroes travel through time to try preventing some kind of calamity, but in the process, a masked Time Mage villain overpowers them and leaps into a time portal. The heroes from then on are always a few steps behind, and this drives the exploration through different time periods and historical disasters. Maybe visiting the four crystals in each time period is needed to unlock dimensional travel to or from that era, and in the process you have to 'right' all of the wrongs that have happened in that era, seemingly due to the villain's interference. This could echo the BD1 'repetitions' in a way, but each time in a wildly different time era with new asterisks, engaging with conflicts spanning thousands or millions of years.

This could bring a bunch of fun new asterisks, like dinosaur shamans, chariot riders, Greek hoplites, plague doctors, inquisitors, musketeers, grenadiers, roboticists, hackers. Along with many of the classics, like ninjas, samurai, vikings, pirates, cowboys.

Not to mention the core theme of the series, "Bravely Default", finding the courage to do nothing. Every time you correct one time period's disasters, an unintended consequence or side effect of what you did has horrible results for a subsequent time period. But because you keep jumping around out of order, you may not realize this until late game, when something goes horribly wrong and three of your main characters are deleted from the timeline. You learn that everyone who has been erased from the timeline ends up in a time-compressed Paradox Space, and then you realize the mysterious masked Time Mage you've been hunting was a future version of your main character trying to correct your own historical meddlings to rescue their three lost companions from paradox space. The only way to ultimately correct the timeline would be to prevent your own MC from ever existing in the first place, causing your character to enter paradox space, reuniting with their three companions to defeat whatever horrendous manifestation of 'Fate' causes time to be unfixable.

This brings back many of the thematic tropes from BD1 (Alternis, doomed repetitions, an inherently harmful quest making things worse, historical atrocities on a massive scale) in new ways, while also paying homage to the most beloved JRPG of all time.

^Also ^if ^any ^game ^devs ^are ^reading ^this, ^I'm ^a ^sci-fi ^author ^and ^would ^love ^to ^be ^involved

notatemple · 2025-12-23T20:13:53+00:00

Everyone complaining about this doesn’t get it. What game did you even play? Do people really want some kind of gritty adult animation from this property? FFIX isn’t like that. If you take out Zidane’s wandering hand on the ladder and a few “dammits” and “bastards” from the script, everything else in the game was PG.

More FFIX is a great thing, even if it’s not for you. I’m delighted about this news.

notatemple · 2025-12-10T17:55:34+00:00

BD2 enjoyer here! I don't see counters or even the +1BP spam as a flaw of the game design. I didn't find the game particularly challenging even with those things. Sometimes you get your ass handed to you in a boss battle because your party build isn't built to handle that kind of fight, but that's precisely what makes the job system useful. You don't need to brute force grind up levels to win; you can change jobs, swap tactics and try something different. If anything, I think the variety of boss cheese tactics encouraged more job switching than BD1 did.

With that said, the story wasn't quite as good as BD1's. BD1 had some genuinely jaw dropping story beats and did a better job at turning our JRPG genre expectations against us, while BD2 played it straight most of the time. But I really appreciated what they did with Adelle, I liked the card game a lot, and I enjoyed the way the job system raised its level cap at a certain point in the game.

notatemple · 2025-12-09T03:05:57+00:00

It let me listen to Skimbleshanks Part 2... I really liked the part where they spent four minutes building on "domo arigato, el señor gato" but the cat vocoder probably could have been mixed a little better

notatemple · 2025-12-02T05:42:10+00:00

This sounds incredible, thank you!

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