I have absolutely no attachment to Final Fantasy in any way, I have yet to play any of the games. But I feel pretty much the exact same way about the Half Life remake that's on Greenlight right now. I was SUPER late to the Half Life party, but the actual game engine and most of the really old mechanics pretty much ruined the game for me, but I loved the story. So I am seriously looking forward to getting to actually play the game and story without all that frustrating decade and a half ago game weirdness.

Here is the problem guys. For some reason people think Stannis is supposed to be a good guy.

If that's what he is in the books fine. But in the show he is CLEARLY not a good guy. He is horrible human being. Like seriously, this entire time, he's THE WORST.

Every move Stannis has made has been with one single objective. His ass on the iron throne. That is his all consuming need. And he will sacrifice anything and everything to get it, because he thinks he is supposed to be the captial K, King. He's allied himself with dark magic because he thinks it can help him, been willing to sacrifice his entire army to take King's Landing despite having been beat AND is willing to sacrifice his entire army to take Winterfell. I mean he launched a freaking demon sex monster to kill his brother cause the dude also wanted to be king.

By this point he is pretty desperate. Like really. He might be blinded by desire for the throne, but he's not an idiot. he knows they can't make it with what they have now, but he WILL NOT stop. Absolutely not. Even the thought of turning back disgusts him. He's lost too many battles already. So he listens to the witch in his ear, and makes another sacrifice in the name of his throne. It's not easy, it's not fair, but if it's what it takes to get him to the throne, then he'll make it.

As you said Doc, his primary trait is "Does not compromise". Well, his ass is going on that throne. No matter the cost.

Call me crazy, but that does not seem a particularly efficient workflow there Teague.

We have established Writhyn's dictatorship like adherence to rules. Saniss already used that one in the chat.

Also, we are amazing. I love us. Go us.

So.

This movie.

Wow. Yeah. Um. Where the heck do I even start?

The first half hour or so, I was not prepared. I was so completely not prepared. I have never been so disorientated and yet so fascinated by anything in my entire life. The ability to just seamlessly flip between these realities without it just being full on montage time is impressive to say the least. And obviously that only grows and abounds as the movie goes on.

There were tons of times where I had absolutely ZERO idea what was happening or why it was happening, or how it connected, but then there was always something there to connect it or we'd move onto something else and come back to later and everything in the end was for the most part explained.

This definitely feels like it would be one of those movies that if it had a larger release, would be touted as "so deep and confusing", "it's just a maze of a story man" by a lot of people, but in the end it's actually very (well...mostly) simple concepts just told in a non-traditional way, similar to other movies I could mention *cough*Inception*cough*. By the time you reach the end all of those completely disparate threads are pulled together into a single concept, "All of these lives could have emerged from this single moment" and it's like those eye puzzles where you stare at it, cross your eyes and finally just when you think it isn't going to work, your eyes focus and the 3D image pops out at you; everything just sort of focus's and you can mentally run it backwards in your mind and make sense of it.

I'll probably have to watch it again to pick up a lot of the second level stuff that was going on, I'm still not /exactly/ sure what was going on with the Argyle sweaters and a lot of that universe. And just to see a lot of the things that were laying down that pop up again later.

So yes, I absolutely loved it, and might do another post with some more thoughts once I've had time to actually process it. (I'm writing this about 20 minutes after I finished it).

I will second that, I have yet to see any of the other Mad Max's and there was basically nothing in Fury Road that wasn't explained through context or world building. I'm sure there's a ton of references and throwbacks I missed, but if that's why you go to watch this movie, you have some issues I can't help you with.

NAME: Whisper Wind
Alias’: Whisp, Flash, Speedy, Zipper, Lightning
Meta-Type: Human
Sex: Male
Age: 26 (estimated)

His childhood, what he could remember of it at any rate, was normal enough he supposed. Quiet and clean, suburban you could almost say. Although it was less white picket fence and trimmed green grass, and more thirty-seventh story on the outer ring of a Megacorp owned employee housing sector. It had a helluva view though. Both his parents worked for the local megacorp...he could never remember which one… mother as a nurse or something, he had vague memories of her talking about patients and wards. Father worked in some kind of cyberware testing...or research… or development… or something… area. Everything before age nine or so gets a little fuzzy you see. But they were a nice little family unit and things were good.

When he was about five or six, he started feeling...different… and no, not THAT kind of different. The kind of different where he could feel the air around him, alive, pulsing, brimming with energy, just barely out of reach. Mana, although he didn’t know the name at the time, he knew it was something special. As the years went on he started experimenting, playing with it, channeling it inwards. He remembered one night finding a bee, an actual real live bee, okay maybe an escapee from some genetics lab a block over, but still a real bee, almost dead on the balcony. He remembers taking it inside and focusing very hard, until he could feel the crackle of pure energy, the mana flowing through him, he channeled it through his hand. It felt like a torrent of warm water rushing through his veins, and suddenly the bee flickered and burst into life...stung the hell out of him… and then flew out the door. Bitter-sweet admittedly, but hey, he brought a living thing back from the brink of death. That’s pretty cool. He never did tell his parents why exactly he had a bee sting right in the middle of his forehead. As he continued to work with it, he could feel himself getting faster, quicker, more agile. He had always loved to run, usually at the local play parks scattered around the Corp grounds, but now he was getting seriously faster, jumping and leaping from the various bits of equipment...much to the chagrin of his parents… and with more than a few stern looks from the other parents.

One night,when he was about eight or nine or so, he remembered his father coming home, late, later than usual, and even more tired than usual. He remembered him sitting down on the couch and turning on the vidscreen to some sports game. Fifteen minutes later, his father was convulsing. Thing flickers of light illuminating veins and wires under his temple. He called to his mother and she came running. He remembered her trying to get him to talk, a bright flash, and his mother lying unconscious, maybe dead on floor. Shock paralyzed him. A thin aroma of burnt flesh hung in the air. Whisp tried the only thing he had, he focused inward and focused on his father, maybe there was something his mana could do. He concentrated, pulling in energy from around him and sent a stream of it into his father. This was a bad idea, a bright flash, and moments later Whisp was lying face up on the floor slowly regaining consciousness. his father had stopped shaking, now slumped, unmoving in his chair, a dull light still sparking near his temple. He was dead.

From what he’s managed to piece together over the years since, Whisper figures one of the neural implants the corp had installed shorted out, sending electrical current directly into his brain and turning his wired upgrades into a mesh of high energy cables wrapping around his entire body. Not pretty. Whether it was an experimental piece they were testing on his father, or just one of those one in a million mechanical flukes you hear about, he still isn’t sure. needless to say, the entire experience left Whisp with a distrust for cyberware and augmentations on the whole.

So, in shock, frightened, and now very very much alone, a young Whisp ran. Down the hallway, down the stairs, out of the building, and out. He kept running, he had no idea how far, or how long. When he finally stopped he was in a very dark, very run down, and extremely unfamiliar part of the city. Whisp did what he knew best and climbed, up to the nearest abandoned rooftop,  somewhere hidden, somewhere safe. And cried. Til the sun crested the jagged horizon of the city.

Over the years he’s tried to retrace his steps, find his way back to the apartment building where he used to live, but between the brain scramble, and the shock, it’s a lost cause. He can’t even remember his own name from back then, let alone a specific tower of glass and metal amongst a forest of glass and metal. He gave on that hope a long time ago.

So now lost, confused, in shock, with scrambled memories and lacking a name, young Whisp went out into the world. For a few years he got by on petty theft. He was light with his fingers and fast as hell if he ever got caught, so he got pretty good at it. Preferring to sleep on rooftops, he at least never went truly hungry. He always liked the stars, out in the dimmer lit areas of the city, he could almost make a few of them out. He remembered seeing a trideo, one of the few his parents ever let him watch, of the night sky, no lights, no cities, what the sky must have looked like before humans and meta-humans took over the place. It was magical, he could hardly believe that all of those little pinpricks could be out there, hiding in plain sight. Of course nights in the cities were scarcely different from the days when it came to the sky, but Whisp always liked to think that they were out there. Stars, planets, other worlds. All… just out of reach, but if you squinted and thought real hard, you could reach out and just barely touch one. As he grew up he began to see certain tactical advantages to sticking to the rooftops, but the wonders of the universe just out of reach above his head never left.

After a while pick-pocketing and generally surviving on the streets, Whisp started getting noticed by a local… well let’s just call them, underground business opportunists. Called themselves The Dulanga’s, Whisp never learned what it meant, figured it must have been Dwarvish or something, probably “Blood Brothers” or something cliche like that. They needed a runner, someone that could deliver packages discretely and quickly, someone that could blend into a crowd and disappear when he needed to. A young Whisp seemed to fit the bill perfectly. The group was headed up by a middle-aged dwarf by the name of Lugner. Thick built, and pure muscle, a not inconsiderable amount of implanted spikes around his shoulders and brow. Not a guy you’d want on your bad-side, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing too out of the ordinary for the shadows. He headed up a small team, half a dozen men or so moving goods and messages around the city. Whisp figured a bit of drugs, but mostly info, data-disks, cred-sticks, stuff like that. Nothing to hardcore… certainly not for Seattle. But Whisp was good at it, and that’s all that mattered. The group effectively adopted Whisp, and with such came the obligatory nicknames, speedy, flash, ghost, and so on they went. But none of them ever really seemed right, except for what Lagner called him. Whisper. “Soilent as a whisper on tha wind, an just as deadly! Ain’t aat right?” It had always felt right, so Whisper he became. Whisp, to his friends of course.

About five or six years past and Whisp was into his twenties, or as close as he could figure. An expert parkourist, deadly with his hands, even more so with a sniper rifle between em, he was a hawk in the sky. Moving steadily up the ranks of the The Dulanga’s, still serving under Lugner, but now his right hand man. In the years The Dulanga’s had progressed to some more high end corporate work, still moving cash around, just from larger accounts to smaller wallets. To put it politely. Whisp’s job was simple, get the job done and keep everyone alive.

Sometimes it’s not so simple.

On a routine: break, enter, hack, steal and get the frack outta there job, something went wrong. An alarm got tripped when it shouldn’t have, one of the newer hackers, just a kid really; he was talented, just unlucky. The place was swarmed with, well, a private army, to put it honestly. They wound up having to shoot their way out- look... the details don’t really matter, but 3 hours later Whisp was the only Dulanga left alive. The kid, dead, His backup, dead. Lugner. Last Whisp saw of Lugner he had a 59-mil automatic in each hand and about twenty armoured soldiers bearing down on him, shouting his head off for Whisp to get the fuck outta there. So either he’s dead, or went comm’s silent for some reason after blowing all those fuckers to hell and back. Either way, Whisp hasn’t heard from him since, and has dropped off every map Whisp knows of, which is most of em.

Once again alone in the city, his foster family slaughtered, although with significantly more resources than last time, Whisper headed out. He grabbed a cheap apartment on the other side of the city and started trying to work things out. Mostly getting by on simple hack and enter account jobs and the occasional corporate hire out for a man of his talents, he started putting things back together. Although with the only really clear path in his life now destroyed, he was lost. Depression seeped in, things got dark. He doesn’t like to talk about these years. What little people have been able to get out of him paint a very bleak picture. Reckless jobs, jobs verging on sheer insanity, assassinations. Mr. Johnson loved him. And if that doesn't paint a picture of the horror we’re talking about here, I don’t know what will.

A couple years into this, after a particularly unfortunate job, he still hasn't ever said what it was, he was injured pretty severely. He said they had to airlift him out of where ever it was he was. And apparently as the VTOL was flying up, it got high enough that it cleared the worst of the smog, and light pollution, and he saw the stars. Not the dull pinpricks visible from the ground, but the full true majesty of the universe. Now, how much of that was the excessive amount of drugs they were pumping him full of, and how much of that is real, we’ll never know. But either way it worked, after his recovery he turned things around, moving apartments into a slightly nicer place and shunning the worst of the jobs Mr. Johnson had to throw at him. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough. He seems happier.

And so, now we meet up with the present. Whisper is a fairly successful runner, a decent apartment, not that he uses it much, a nice selection of weapons, a great roof to star watch from, and the entirety of Seattle as his playground.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CONTACTS:

Synap (Loyalty:2/Connection:4):

Synap was a fixer for the Dalunga’s. They needed something, he could probably get it. Guns, cars, contacts, he even knew a couple of nice troll girls that were of a more open minded disposition regarding the trade of money for, ahem, personal favours, for the couple of troll guys that passed through the Dalunga’s. Charming in his own way, a tongue that could slice steel, and in the few times that Whisp had met him in person, eyes that could pierce your soul. None of the Dalunga’s had ever known what else Synap did, although a few had guessed, but somehow Whisp doubted he was a gun runner and master hacker for a ring of underground life on mars conspiracy nuts that believed Dragons were actually martians. Unbeknowst to Whisp, most of what Synap was involved in was actually very banal. It was not that Synap had anything in particular to hide about it, most of his dealings were with Shadow groups leaning on the more benevolent side, but nothing wrong with keeping a certain amount of professional mystique about one’s self. In the years leading up to the slaughter of the Dalunga’s, Synap had worked closely with the Dalunga’s second in command, a young man calling himself Whisper. He’d always had a certain respect, some might even call admiration for the young man, a street urchin turned professional operative and leader. You had to like that. After the slaughter, Synap had kept in touch with Whisp, he did what he could to get him back on his feet, and the touch with people who could pay and the kept him equipped the tools to do the job, for a cut of course, but never anything particularly egregious. As Whisp began to slide downhill Synap was… well, concerned, is probably a bit strong, but cautiously watchful. Synap fed him the jobs and kept him in touch, but never giving him anything particularly harmful. It never seemed to matter of course, Whisp had other finders, other people looking for whatever it was he was looking for. One night Synap got a call from a particularly rough sounding Whisp. Something had gone wrong. very wrong. When the call went dead Synap quickly pulled together an extraction team and got him out of there. Whisp was never the same after that, he seemed clearer headed. A couple months later Synap tried to ask him about this, but got shrugged off with something about stars and a girl, he didn’t press the issue. In the year or so since, Whisp has mostly fallen out of touch, occasionally chiming in every once in a while for a rare something or other that needed procuring, but otherwise falling mostly silent.

Dr. Kathryn Marcy (Loyalty 4/Connection 2)
Kathryn is street doc. She runs a small clinic in a rundown section of a rundown neighbourhood, just like the thousand other clinics across the city operated by rundown doctors hoping to make a difference. What most other clinic doc’s don’t have though is an ex-military background and and more than a handful of connections to the shadows. Whisp first met Kath when he was spectacularly drugged up and out of his mind a couple hundred meters over Seattle in a twin vtol medi-vac heli, getting emergency surgery from whatever the frack he just went through. Needless to say, it was not a great first impression. But, for whatever reason, Kath took a liking to Whisp, in that totally platonic, I’m 12 years older than you, sisterly sort of way. I suppose I should also mention this extraction team was put together by Synap personally, Kath has never exactly revealed how she knows Synap, not that Whisp hasn't tried of course, best guess is something going back to her military days. Anyways, after that fateful heli trip Whisp started trying to put his life back together, he moved into an apartment near Kath’s clinic and over the months began helping her. Granted, this isn’t exactly a pair of scrubs and a mop sort of work we’re talking about here; Whisp may have been back on the straight and narrow, but he’s still a runner, so even the straight and narrow tends to veer towards violence. Whisp helped with the worst of it at the request of Kath, taking out a few especially troublesome gang leaders, some of the more violent drug dealers, and routing with a few contacts to get in some much needed meds and tools. It’s not exactly work that pays, but Whisp figures he probably owes Kath more than a few life depts so he’s just happy to help.

I'm still good, but if Shadow wants to just chill for a week between this and waiting for the new mic, I'm cool with that too.

Yeah Writhyn thats how I read it. You think about it theyre both basically children at least emotionally but they kind of find something in each other to hold onto and it starts to become something more.

Oh yeah, my compy was not having a fun time with that one.

Picture Teague.

That is a picture.