Cleretic, FFXIV Lore Dork 🏳️‍⚧️

Not necessarily. The Tories basically weren't running, so Reform got all the right-wing votes.

Their general existence isn't great, but them coming second in this context isn't a huge deal or a huge surprise.

I have DESPERATELY needed good news all this week, due to both personal stuff and... y'know, general horrifying global news, and thank you so much to the UK Greens for successfully delivering some!

Holy shit, it wasn't even fucking CLOSE, that's a goddamn landslide.

Also, guarantee those people do NOT base their reading of Nael on the original intention, because there's no fucking chance they were actually playing 1.0 enough to be more familiar with that than the later canon.

They just picked a talking point to pretend to have opinions about.

A secret element of crossovers is 'what's the funniest possible first impression of this thing that an outsider could have', and Gaia is a FANTASTIC choice for a Dissidia game for exactly that reason.

The life cycle of every big sci-fi franchise includes dying every few decades and only living on in weird licensed novels, anyway. We can let it happen to Trek again.

Having been going through the job application wringer for the past year or so, I'd actually PREFER to get this rejection instead of the ones I actually get.

Oh, there wasn't 'someone with more experience' this time? It was just pure act of rampant nature? Cool, I can accept that!

Peoppe are split on if this is intentional or a glitch.

Maybe the decomp will answer that, nobody's really been able to look into how the event flag works before.

And here in Australia, the main thing protecting us is just broad-spectrum incompetency from the people trying to do Trump's playbook here.

Australia would eat this hateful, heinous shit up if it were being pitched by people with better charisma and strategy than a slightly gross rock.

Yeah, that's the 'reptillians running the world' conspiracists, the alien abduction/Area 51 types were on something totally different.

I miss the fun conspiracy theories. What are the alien believers up to these days?

Also, just for reference: FFIII was released in 1990, three years before Aladdin!

Sometimes it's just helpful to remember that some images we associate with Disney were around well before they took their swing. This general vibe for djinn goes back centuries.

The new variant dungeon's mount is based on the Amano art for the Final Fantasy III Djinn boss! (Real III, not VI.)

Swapping out the chest hair for the ornate chest crystal and arm markings is new, but I think it improves the design here, make it more mystical and less 'just a guy'.

I would also accept 'western-developed fighting games in the few years after Mortal Kombat'.

Sevestre!

I'm not sure if I'd say 'more obscure', but it's definitely a different reference pool.

You can see a bunch of, like, old sci-fi and British comedy in Endwalker, for instance.

While it's hard to say for certain who's responsible for what because a lot of the team is invisible, at the time the localization lead was Kate Cwynar.

Incidentally, you can tell when Koji Fox moved to FFXVI because the Simpsons references stop.

Had an excited, two-hour conversation about alchemy and Thavnairian religion and spirituality, and there's a good chance Nidhana's the reason Ein uses 'akasa' as a term instead of 'dynamis'.

They both forgot to exchange names in that entire time, and did not realize until it was too late.

Probably not likely, thanks to her writing that book AFTER the events of the Alexander raids.

But, y'know, time machine, that's not a 100% certainty.

Thanks to a weird chance trip to the First once, she has likely met Cylva, but probably had like, fifteen seconds of 'service industry' interaction total.

Unukalhai, NO chance and she'd probably hate him for Ascian adjacency.

Ein's written a book on Alexander, and the Ironworks were core primary sources!

Nero she knows as that loud weirdo she had to kick out of the interviews.

(A copy of said book is in the First's Crystal Tower and was a major component in the Tycoon project, but neither of them actually know that.)

They'll talk extremely highly of each other and their work all day!

...unless they're in the same room. Then it's petty sniping at best and a shouting match about academic integrity and alchemic methods at worse.

Ein respects what Godbert does for the refugee community in Ul'dah and hates him for everything else. And being a Duskwight alchemist, is ALWAYS suspicious of the guy who took Eolande Quiveron's seat after she died.

Hildibrand she's pretty sure is a failson who's just jetsetting and making shit up.

Briardien thinks Ein's interest in primals--particularly Shiva, given the guy's Ishgardian--is too suspicious to completely let her off the hook, but not QUITE so suspicious as to pursue on its own. He's constantly got a just-in-case eye on her.

Ein has no idea who he is.

And yet it's the gameplay that really seemed to catch on in a traceable way.

Both Ein and Tataru are Ul'dahn, and while they've definitely met, they more know each other in that way that local small business owners are all on a first-name basis with each other.

Ein's feeling about her is 'I don't like the game we have to play, but I respect someone who's good at it'.

Some fights aren't too bad--Valigarmanda was a cakewalk compared to Emerald--but you do just have to learn the entire fight and all its tells yourself. You don't have the time to follow someone else.

I genuinely think Hades was a destructive influence on roguelikes as a genre, and itself isn't even a very good one.

Ein briefly worked with the Scions on the lunar primal situation, so she probably knows the B or C-list Scions moderately well. Coultenet likely more than Hoary Boulder, because mages.

They're probably 'wave and catch up on the street but don't have each other's phone number'-level friends.

The first Extreme I ever did was Emerald Weapon. On 'Australian on a US server' ping.

There was a while where I could tell raiders that and they'd actually agree with my call to not do more of that.

You know what, this one seems fun! (And reposting to fix BAD typos!)

Fair warning, Ein is not the WoL, so she's not exactly someone who's met everyone. More likely to know OF a lot of major characters than to actually KNOW them.