FiMFlamFilosophy

ninto55 asked: That's why I like keeping up with you on tumblr, we get our own secret videos kind of. But why do they have to be so creepy? Why would you do this to us?

It’s a sneak peek at the next Let’s Play of this game. This is just an unusual thing I caused to happen while I was purposefully abusing it, and it isn’t supposed to happen.

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I’m actually playing a new game of Final Fantasy along with this Let’s Play and seeing what glitches and weird behaviors are still shared between the two. It turns out most of them, except for those that are widely known to make the game easier.

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For example, in the original game, a mistake in programming caused magic evasion and physical evasion to be determined by the same statistic, and this sort of screwed up a few intentions. Namely, if you cast vanish on a character, he can dodge only physical attacks, but because of the messed up programming, it was made so the same character can now be hit by ALL magic attacks, including death spells. That means that when a boss turns invisible, he can be killed by a death spell, and you can genuinely clear the whole game at level seven with enough preparation.

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There’s other silly things that can happen depending on what version of the game you play. For example, in some versions, trying to sketch a rare monster called Intangir could cause the game to glitch out (sketch is a move that temporarily creates a monster and uses one of its attacks on an enemy), and you’d wind up with bizarre effects, like party members wearing magitek armor. You could also get stuff like that by letting Relm get muddled after being told to do a sketch, which would cause her to sketch herself.

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This thing with the Scootaloos is something I caused on purpose. Basically, all I did was trip the game up and make it forget who was actually in my party. The game went to check who should be at the house with Applebloom, and it went, “Uh… um. SCOOTALOOS SHOULD BE AT THE HOUSE.”

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In the original game, this bit of confusion would have turned up moogles, but in this version, we wind up with Applebloom surrounded by Scootaloos. It’s weird enough that there’s a gaggle of them acting like chickens, but when they start holding normal conversations and surround the only character that isn’t a Scootaloo, it just gets plain creepy.

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That said, the Scootaloo glitch is on a separate game file. If I wanted to, I could do a lot of the Let’s Play as Scootaloos’ Adventure 6. The only normal character would be Twilight, but the Scootaloos would have the same dialogue as the characters they’re replacing. Sprite changes are permanent too, sadly, so one Scootaloo would spontaneously look like Trixie after the Opera section of the game and then would stay that way, and later on another Scootaloo will look like Celestia because her sprite changes.

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Also, you can’t equip the Scootaloos. Their armaments are static and they have no unique skills. It is an exploit with no net benefits except, you know, lots of Scootaloo.

toksyuryel asked: I wasn't "passed", it's only gone through the house so far. It still needs to go through the senate with enough votes to override the veto Obama promised.

Ah. Well, truthfully, I really just want there to be another J. Edgar Hoover, and then I want not to be in his cross-hairs. Things like that are always interesting to read about after the fact.

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I think a lot of media outlets tend to be looking for the next big conspiracy, so they report on every mildly suspicious thing that happens. We wind up, then, just being given details in innocuous chunks, and the problem may be stamped out in pieces without most of us realizing it. It’s not until a decade or two later when somebody compiles the whole fiasco in an exciting narrative that we realize, oh wow, we were living under the reign of a crazy person for a while there.

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Bureaucracy is terrible for a lot of reasons, but if we ever dropped it, we’d probably notice oversights in government a lot faster and for the worst possible reasons.

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In any case, it’s probably true that our politicians are passing laws about the internet without having the slightest clue what the internet is. They don’t realize it’s become television, the phone, the local library, and everything else. They probably don’t realize the Pirate’s Bay is, if you’d like to argue, nothing but the world’s largest library. After all, prior to Autocad successfully initiating a lawsuit against people who enacted their first sale rights with Autocad’s software, libraries used to keep software and music for people the check out!

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World’s changing! The US has been showing a widening disparity of wealth between upper and lower classes too, for that matter, which isn’t good. Honestly, though, I don’t know what to say about most of it. Portents of doom have been a staple of daily life since man first learned to worry.

Anonymous asked: CISPA was passed. What does this mean for DawnSomewhere?

I think we’ll be fine so long as we don’t upset the next J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a bill to make online espionage easier for the government, not so much a means to regulate copyright laws. Could it create problems? Well, yeah, but they’ll go ignored until someone important realizes that an organization somewhere has four thousand petabytes of personal dirt on every prominent politician.

Silly, sometimes, how when they write these laws, they never think, “What if one person in power winds up crazier than usual?”

We released a new album today! It is, of course, named with thoughts on recent events. I was thinking about “Salt City Sinkhole” as an alternative name, because building a city out of crystals has those sorts of implications and the Crystal Empire makes me laugh. However, the old man in a dress won my heart!

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It’d be great if you guys would like to buy an album, and it will help keep our stuff going. Like the last one, when you buy it you’re free to re-use all the songs in it for your own projects.