Some More New Screenshots From Trails In The Sky The 1st! Can't Wait To See My Favorites In This New

I was looking at the math for one band (KOVEN, they're great, check them out) I like so much Youtube thinks I'm in the their top 0.1% of all listeners. If I listened to them on repeat for basically an entire summer - 8 songs an hour, 8 hours a day, for 90 days - the world's loudest Introvert-Extrovert tag team would have earned $1.15 from me. (Websearches gave me a 0.0002/stream rate currently). That's obviously an over-estimate, even in brain-rewiring obsessions I listen to other stuff occasionally - but you see the point, right? Life-altering levels of love of their music, and I wouldn't even have gotten Katie and Max a cup of coffee each. Buying one of their EPs probably got twice that to them, immediately. You can see why Katie's always on the road doing DJ stuff - that pays actual money.

one of the more bleak things to acknowledge is that if you pirate literally all of your music and then set aside a spotify subscription's worth of money each month to spend on a single pay-what-you-want album, it would almost immediately amount to you supporting those musicians more than streaming does

rpg setting with multiple competing units of damage/resilience used in different regions. you gotta worry about the conversion between hp celsius and hp fahrenheit

note* I will not reveal which side I am on until the poll is over to avoid bias

“Why is snoop dogg at the Olympics-“

WRONG QUESTION!

WHY ISNT MARTHA STEWART THERE WITH HIM?

One of the things I like about Trails is how mundanely it treats some forms of magic, and how magically it treats swordsmanship. It's known that trains work though gravity manipulation gemstones that just slide the train at great speeds. Fine, normal magical-tehcnology stuff. Combat mages throw fireballs, sure, and almost anyone can learn to toss out lightning or healing spells. Streetlights run on mana, it's all presented as normal technological development, the domain of universities and corporate R&D divisions. But swords? Swords are magic. Swords are real magic. The sort you train your entire life mastering one small school of. You look at Laura there and think "that sword is far too large to be useful", and you're right! Unless you're trained in the Arseid school. If you're a Arseid student, yes, you can throw around a 7' long great sword like it's a regular old claymore. You learn strikes that cause a localised earthquake. You can just spontaneously manifest glowing wings and attain a combat-focus that lets you cut a tank in half. And the Arseid school is brutally simple and mundane next to the nonsense that comes out of Nord spear dancers, who spin tornadoes up with a pointy stick, or the catastrophic, time-dilating, nonsense the Eight Leaves masters get up to.

The fun thing with it being a neurological thing is that some of the symptoms are closer to glitches in the ol' brain meats. Sometimes it's classic brain fog. Sometimes it just hurts like fuck. Sometimes I can't stand bright lights, sometimes loud noises. Once or twice I've had the 'aura' thing where a chunk of my vision is blocked by jpg artefacts. Sometimes I get show-tunes stuck in my head until I can find some Ibuprophen.

Migraines are crazy because you walk around thinking that just means when your head hurts really really bad but it's actually a whole neurological thing and it turns out the dull pressure/sensory overload/brain fog you get are migraines and once you start noticing it you realize you're having them like every other day and you think to yourself Hm! That's probably not good

Rean is both the most realistic and most absurd of the Trails protags.

He's got two different, unrelated, protagonist secret powers. He's got unexpected ancestry! He's one of less than a dozen people who know Eight Leaves sword tech! He's a champion snowboarder, excellent fisherman, and unbeatable at Magic:the Gathering! He is the Maryest Sue at the ball.

...and he is deeply, realistically, clinically, depressed. His primary drive to help people comes from not being he can, or even should, help himself. He has a breakdown any time he spends more than a day by himself, constantly needing to be thinking about other people - as the alternative, thinking about himself, is too. damn. much.

I like Rean. I really hope he learns to like himself better.

sidequests in most trails game: you are basically a do-gooder for hire. doing these requests is how you put bread on your table and how you move up in the world

sidequests in cold steel: the cute student council president asked you very nicely if you could help her with some stuff and you are incapable of saying no to anyone

honestly it could go either way

(might be posting that fic soon btw 👀)