Allamorph

Just over nine years, so right about the point where the Chief's Mess starts plying you with phrases like "oh man, that's almost ten, and if you do ten, you might as well do twenty!" lol. I was attached to the Connecticut for sea duty, and its overhaul took roughly half a decade, so the most ports I got to see were Pearl and Ketchikan during Sea Trials and shakedown runs, unfortunately. I did have a full deployment on one of the Ohios, but since their entire mission is to go lurk somewhere in case a weird world leader decides to get froggy, it was basically three months of Five Knots To Nowhere with a permanent forecast of 60°F and fluourescent, haha. But I did get to see far more of the country than most of my family or friends back home ever have or will, and in the process fell in love with the Pacific Northwest, so I count myself fortunate in that regard. How about you?

Bit of a lag, so updating with things I have played in the past while. Control – Very interesting, very well-written (in my opinion) paranormal action/adventure from the makers of Alan Wake. I've loved weird, twisting stories ever since I watched Event Horizon and Ghost In The Shell, and Control certainly takes some oddball turns. The Foundation DLC was decently challenging and also well-written, as was the AWE tie-in to Alan Wake (although it was a tad short, I thought). Fire Emblem: Three Houses – I sort of let this one languish a bit while I was transitioning out of the Navy because the series does tend to take a fair bit of mental involvement, but I'm picking it back up and starting to work through it again—mostly because I convinced someone I know to pick it up as well, and I need to get farther in it so they can pick my brain without me looking like a Big Dumb lol. This one's a weird one in the franchise for me, even taking into account the absolutely heinous offenses to the title that Awakening/Fates were. I actually like a lot of aspects of it; and I can overlook the fact that, once again, the main character is a self-insert. The part I'm having trouble getting used to is that, after a certain point in the story, your roster is hard locked, as far as I can tell. You still have more people available than you have map slots, generally, but recruiting additional characters is a bit of an effort investment, and after a certain point it's basically no longer possible, which ... presents some interesting tactical scenarios, I think, which is fine. I'm just not used to having this little flexibility or depth in my bench. Edelgard is a bamf tho Endless Space 2 – Oh my god, this game is hands-down The Most Visually Gorgeous RTS I have ever played in my life. The overall empire-building mechanics are really interesting, and include not only resource management but population-distribution optimisation. The maps are ******* beautiful and genuinely feel enormous when you make them enormous, which is a recurring problem I've had with the Civilisation franchise, specifically 5 and 6. The various playable species genuinely feel distinct to play, and the developers even experimented with unique colonisation mechanics: one species simply buys colonies instead of having to send a colony ship there; another has to have a specific type of ship in system orbit to initiate control and only receives partial benefits if the ship is moved; and another slowly spreads across the galaxy in a network of metaphysical kudzu vines, providing movement bonuses to itself and allies, and impairments to other players. Each game has a campaign-style quest system that automatically progresses as the game goes on, as well as a random-event system that can affect one or more empires in various ways, and each species has its own internal campaign which can also be progressed independently of the main quest line or the game itself, and is written to the flavor of the specific species to provide additional lore about them. Arknights – It's like Fire Emblem, to me, except tower defense instead of chess.

Can't believe I'm a week late for this thread's one year anniversary. smh

Fun fact here, I just finished my enlistments two months ago. Cropped out your rank tab, but not your surname, I see. =P But also, congratulations for putting in the effort to get your warfare qualification. I know it doesn't mean as much to the surface community as the submarine warfare does to ours, but it still takes effort and knowledge, so good on you. Enjoy the new PT standards lol

If you were going to do one, I think the setting would be pretty malleable, honestly. What kind of story style would you be looking to do, though?

Yeah, I saw that. This past year has been quite revealing about the reality of who we are.

Good to know the good old U S of A is still leading by example.

I haven't posted here in quite a while, and I know no one else really has, either. But I got hit with a super hard wave of nostalgia today, and since this is the closest thread to the topic I could find, it shall do. When I first showed up here, I was kind of a lurker. It was the Anthology and the Theater that drew me out, and in particular I remember the Event Coordinator competition, where White and Sandy hosted competing events, swapped control of the events halfway through, and the community voted on who was the better dude. I was a part of White's game, Mafia. I don't remember whether the mafia or the citizens ended up winning; the most I remember about the event now is that, as part of its course, I ended up striking up a pretty long-running dialogue with a member by the name of Tekkaman, who had a habit of posting in grey text and highlighting user's names in a dark violet color—which, actually, is precisely where I picked up my own habit of black text with crimson names. And, long story short, I was browsing around on a P2P musician garage sale site when I ran across this bass, and he was the first person I thought of. I honestly spent twenty minutes considering buying this bass just for the memories of that color scheme alone. And I don't even like painted bodies. Both of mine are natural stain. Just ... whew. You know?

Holy necromancy, Batman. Let's put you back in your cell.

Jason restored—and went immediately alert. For the first time in his life, he could feel nothing about his surroundings. His incoming environmental image made no sense. It wasn’t simply one or two informational oddities, or even a lack of existing data to interpret. The data itself defied interpretation. Which was impossible. A retrograde analysis of his passive sensory log indicated no hostile presence nearby—in fact, it indicated no presence of any kind whatsoever, anywhere in range—so Jason opened his eyes. The addition of visual input provided him little more than he had known already. He was in a … place, he decided to call it. He could see no identifying features through his entire field of vision. It was lit, at least, but there was no discernable light source. Nor were there any shadows, he noted, glancing down the length of his body. He tried to determine the kind of light he was seeing, but that, too defied analysis. The most he could conclude was that it seemed to be somewhere between off-white and a soft yellow, but the exact hue remained elusive. It wasn’t gaseous, he decided, as there were no detectable particulates in the atmosphere. If there even was an atmosphere at all. There was something, he knew, since he was still breathing normally, and all the appropriate chemical reactions were still occurring, but beyond the boundary of his body, any sense of air motion in the Place simply stopped. Annoyed, he abandoned the exercise. Maybe exploration would provide him with something useful. He sat up pitched forward hung down lifted “–augh.” The groan escaped him unbidden. An empty cough followed, threatening to become a gag, and he froze, forcibly controlling his breathing until his stomach stopped attempting somersaults. This was a new sensation. It had overwhelmed him in a fraction of a second, and it was unbearably unpleasant. He examined it for a long moment and realised with surprise that it was nausea. Motion-induced nausea. He was the first Nephilim to experience vertigo. Jason sighed. In keeping with the Place’s ubiquitous lack of everything else, he could detect no gravitational trends at all. He wasn’t weightless; or rather, he still felt heavy. But he couldn’t feel any direction to his weight, and combined with the absence of a fixed point of reference, he had no idea if he was standing, reclining, lying, suspended, inverted, sideways, tipped, twisting, rotating, spinning “Guh.” He turned off his gyro synapse. No more of that. Deciding for the moment to assume he initially had been vertical, Jason straightened and, pacing forwards, attempted an exploration of his surroundings. Almost at once, however, he was tempted to abandon the idea as futile, for the frustratingly ambiguous landscape lay unmarred and uniform in every direction. Only his ability to precisely track his footsteps lent Jason any sense of direction; otherwise he might have wandered the Place aimlessly for hours. This thought led Jason to the discovery of yet another oddity: his internal clock was faulted. It was still running, and a quick battery of diagnostic checksums returned true, but its outputs made even less sense than the Place in which he now found himself. Or, more accurately, it wasn’t outputting anything. It was executing exactly as scripted, but when it incremented, it simply … didn’t. It even registered the increment as successful, but the flagged data target wasn’t there. Jason checked the timestamps on his previous observations and found himself baffled even further. All of the markers passed checksum, but every single one decoded to garbage data. Which was impossible; data couldn’t be junk and still verified true. It was as if reality no longer supported the concept of time. Exasperated, Jason sighed again and tossed his arms. His hands flopped up and back down to smack against his legs, the clap echoing faintly behind him. He stopped. An echo? There had been no echoes before. There had been nothing for the sound to bounce off; he wasn’t even sure there had been an atmosphere to transmit the wave. Quirking his head, he snapped his fingers once. Sure enough, the snap returned: the faintest whisper of a click, barely even a few decibels, but loud against the prevailing silence. And with the time delay, he even had a precise distance. Intrigued, he turned to face it, and was met with…. …a rock. A boulder, judging by size and distance. Jason’s eyebrows scrunched together. That hadn’t been there. He was certain. He had surveyed every direction. Thoroughness was second nature to the Nephilim; even his blinks had been corrected by precisely localised muscle seizures. He had seen everything, everywhere, and his entire sphere of awareness had been uniform in its bewildering blandness. There wasn’t a way possible for him to have overlooked the rock; and yet there it was, defying what little reason this Place had left to it, and at a location that matched his aural calculations. He took a careful step towards it. It appeared to be a careful step closer. He took another step. A step closer again. Jason chewed on his tongue. The rock seemed to be an ordinary rock, and the fact that its adherence to normalcy conflicted so strongly with the inherent abnormality of the Place bothered him tremendously. He refused to let the staggering amount of nonsense get to him and, leaving the unresolved processes to hang in the background, set out for his newfound bastion of sanity. He covered the dozen and a half meters easily—although precisely what ground he was covering remained inscrutable—and, after rapping his knuckles against it, was pleased to find that it was, in fact, a real rock. A little over a meter tall and with a blocky, tri-leveled top, it appeared to have broken off from some larger face and fallen, partially burying itself in the nonexistent ground. A pass of his fingers and a quick data analysis determined the stone to be marble, and suggested it had lain here for a few years, judging by the weathering and assuming wherever it had come from possessed recognisable weather. (Jason decided the best approach was to assume anything real came from somewhere Not Here. The idea was still nonsense, but the degree of nonsense was welcomingly less.) And now that he was standing over it, he could see a second, smaller rock a couple of meters past it, also buried in the … whatever, and similarly weathered. Satisfied and relieved at his discovery, and having nothing better to do, Jason decided to experiment. The boulder had appeared when he wasn’t looking at it, and it had remained relative while his attention was fixed on it. What would happen if he stopped observing it? Ignoring the noise-solutions attempting to submit themselves, he strode around the marble block and past it, walking steadily and directly away from it and snapping his fingers sharply in precise one-second intervals. With each click, he listened for the corresponding report and matched the distance to his distance traveled, marking the rock’s location as he left it behind. He was almost two kilometers away, and the echoes so faint even his ears strained to hear them, when the data failed to sequence properly. His next snap didn’t echo. He turned around. Sure enough, the rock seemed to be gone. He magnified his vision so that it should have been clearly visible, but the result was the same: there was no longer anything in the Place but him. Jason nodded, shoving aside his disappointment at once more being the sole connection to reality. At least it had behaved somewhat reasonably. It was a start. He merely had to take things as they came, and more bits would fall into place. His spirit somewhat bolstered, he turned back to continue on. There was the rock. Not a different rock. The same rock, exactly the same distance away as when he had first seen it, but on the exact opposite side. Jason sucked his teeth.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is amazing and I want everyone to know. I may have someone you should get to know.

I am a master of tact.

That wallpaper is giving me flashbacks to Timmonsville, SC. Props to you for putting up with it. Also AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH TINY HUMANS

Hey, and welcome. As you can probably tell, there isn't a whole lot goes on on these boards any longer. Its heydey was about a decade ago now, and all the old active people have gone on to newer and brighter futures—but none as shiny or fun. Also I went ahead and merged your thread with the general intro thread.

This is what he should be apologizing for. Oh. My god. Ew.