A Part of Bee @morix@loci.onl

@fribbledom this is the most weirdly cyberpunk thing I've seen all week

I've been playing the new Streets of Rage 4 on and off for a little bit and its just so glorious.

Started on normal mode and got my arse handed to me, dialled it back to easy, learnt how it works, blazed through the story, and now I'm back to normal and slowly working through it stage by stage.

The fighting is very fluid, the looks are beautiful, the difficulty is really nice and somehow its very very replayable :)

@knownrobes I clicked idly on this before reading the full message and it's a fantastic shot for perspective weirdness, at first I thought some kind of bridge, then it flipped around into a tower. Someone else I showed got a downwards well also :)

Lunch with humans got delayed, figured I'd just slack off for 10 minutes to relax my brain and read a book *then* do lunch. Instead I looked at the thing I was investigating for work.

Dammit I think I just nerd sniped myself.

@anthracite I think its because I came to it around 00 at Uni as someone who'd already had a few years of net and bumped into Subgenii, Discordians, Fortean Times , etc and watched stuff like the Xfiles mass popularise conspiracy theories.

To me it felt like a continuation of those sorts of themes, like a whole look behind the curtain that was being waved aside anyway.

Because yeah I was primed by other stuff and didn't think about the fringeyness of conspiracy by post at the time of writing.

So yeah, poor Sawyer I really felt for him, but also fantastic plotting, writing, and foreshadowing by use of boots of all things.

Still not at the end, but damn do I love these books so much. The actually realistic feeling and hopeful view of a possible feature without being preachy and without being silly and giving it no grit or grim or problems is glorious.

The most human scifi I've read in years, I just love this series.

And even at the time I was reading it I was wincing and thinking "daaaamn this is not the time and place to bring a newbie, this is not the environment to practice lax health and safety, I know this crew is being signposted as bad/shitty and this is part of it but holy hell this is dangerous"

And yeah, death by getting hit by an oxygen bubble when unlocking a door is the kind of thing that the spacers would just *know* but Sawyer wouldn't. (cont)

His last exchange with Oates fit that he got to die as not a bad kid but as someone who just wanted to fit in and was doing his best.

What made it beautifully sign posted for me was the clingboots - so the characters were walking through vacuum to scavenge from an exploded colony, and Sawyer had gotten his spacesuit on okay but was having trouble walking using the sticky boots because he wasn't used to it and had to be taught *while out there* (cont)

Okay so I did the first one last year, saved the second for new year, and saved Record for when things got weird/grim/stressful enough and that time is now.

Made the mistake of "just reading a few more pages" last night before sleep and then hit the point where Sawyer dies and just ... wow I didn't really see it coming, except in retrospect it makes beautiful narrative sense (cont)