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[kjorteo]

For six weeks, now, I have been doing a Let's Play-esque Livestream ... er, streaming of this completely demented bird photo dating sim, and saving the session videos in my Livestream library so anyone who wasn't there at the time can still catch them later.

http://www.livestream.com/kjorteo

Normally I'll just make a temporary post on a Friday or Saturday night about how it's pigeon time, which I will then delete when it's over. However, this one I'm going to leave up, because I want to give a very special thank-you to feralmuse for guest hosting this week. We had conspired to do this for some time, now, and I had very carefully refrained from saying anything so as to preserve maximum surprise when this week's episode started and we both started talking.

All in all, it was a tremendous success. feralmuse proved to be all kinds of awesome. Our exchange was great, and you can tell this because my "Kjorteo stopped and lost it and cracked up in the middle of reading a line" count/score was probably as high as ever this time, despite having absolutely zero lines that were absurd enough to do that to me with just the line itself. It was all her fault, you see.

While it will be back to business as usual for the upcoming weeks, this one was a special and unique treat, and on top of the usual thanks to everyone who watched (which remain as true as ever! I love you guys and your support and wouldn't have kept this going for nearly this long without this good of an audience,) I especially want to thank feralmuse for how awesome she made everything this week, as well.

I mean, I deliberately (I had seen this scene before and she hadn't so I steered her directly into it without her suspecting until it was much too late) tricked her into doing Okosan's solo recital, and she actually did it. That's just being a good sport, right there. <3

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

On a whim, I checked out Feralmuse's LJ account, and saw something that made tonight's earlier case of mistaken identity a bit more shocking...specifically, this post from 2 years ago.

That shocked me on 2 counts.
1) I was a member of that same guild for a better part of the Burning Crusades expansion, before moving myself into the middle of oblivion forced me to give it up due to catastrophic lag.
2) If memory serves, so was the person I mistook her for.


So, quick question to Feralmuse: Are you sure you're not really stryck in disguise?

[kjorteo]

That person has almost 40 icons and one of them is a dragon. If I know Feralmuse at all, that pretty much rules that possibility out right there!

[xaq.livejournal.com]

That, and the fact that Albuquerque's a little ways away from Norfolk...still, it's been a few years since I've had a bizarre run-in with someone from the past like this. After running into a high school classmate at a Staples in DC and a Boot Camp division-mate while visiting the friend I mistook FM for (amongst many other examples), I was starting to wonder if such a thing was ever gonna happen up here.

Guess I can say it has now! :D

[feralmuse.livejournal.com]

Unbroken? On Sisters of Elune? O_o What was your character's name?

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay...same guild name, different server; I was on Steamwheedle Cartel. (Main's name was Sczerenade, if you're still curious.)

My mistake! XP

[feralmuse.livejournal.com]

Not a terribly uncommon guild name, I suppose. Ah well!

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Whow, Feralmuse is a girl?>?!??!?? Oh internet, you're always full ah surprises.. :)

[kjorteo]

So is moa810, the person who made Hatoful Boyfriend in the first place! That one actually made me feel silly in retrospect for incorrectly referring to her as "him" in some of the earlier episodes, but my stance on her his deserving everyone's support for making such an incredible game is still just as true.

(There are many potential definitions of "incredible," from good to WTF to everything in between, depending on the context, and this game is really notable for achieving all of them.)

[davidn]

That was fantastic, and a real surprise - thanks for organizing it! After I almost thought you had got used to the game's sanity level, the two of you played wonderfully against each other and found routes that I never realized the game had up its sleeve. (When we saw Ryouta at the transvestite cafe and then at the hospital, I seriously thought that he was secretly planning a change of sex).

I edited a couple of the highlights together here for some reason - your indignant rendition of "Dot dot dot" was the first thing that made me spill my drink that evening, and finally getting to hear Okosan's solo... that really was the best episode since the second one :)

[kjorteo]

Man, a sex-change route would have been awesome. Especially since I could easily see the option of being super accepting and everything of Ryouta Cooleen's new life and everything leading to romance from the "you've always been so supportive" angle. Alas, as much as I really want to see that now, it would appear that the actual game went in a ... somewhat different direction with the hospital, and banished that idea back to the realm of questionable fanfiction.

The indignant "dot dot dot" was another thing for which you can thank Feralmuse, though a bit less directly; obviously that is far from the first time we have been through that scene, and normally I just let that particular "......" line pass without observation. I mean, obviously it's at the part where he's not saying anything, so I just mindlessly click to advance and keep reading, as always. This time, I had given Feralmuse complete control of everything, including the mouse, so I no longer had that power. For whatever reason, she hesitated just long enough right there to give me a "wait, she's waiting for me to read this, she's not going to advance until I actually say something" reaction, at which point I improvised. (And then got her back with the solo.)

[feralmuse.livejournal.com]

I was looking forward to supporting Cooleen's new lifestyle, but instead everything was horrible and sad T_T

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I personally look at it this way:

Who's the only birdy we know in the whole game with A) any kind of medical knowledge and B) any kind of sharp instruments?


...Yeah, I don't think such a route would have gone as well as hoped.

[kjorteo]

Yeah, but ... on the other hand, note that Ryouta only went to the infirmary for stomach issues until you pretty much point-blank told him "Murderbeaks is evil, keep away," and by the time the gender identity questions came around he was spotted at actual real outside hospital. That's what I call progress, if anything. So it could have been okay, if only because you stepped in and indirectly saved him!

[kjorteo]

The fact that I have totally adopted this whole line of thought into my own personal head-canon somehow only makes it even sadder. I WILL ACCEPT YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE AND FOR AS LONG AS I HAVE YOU COOLEEN ;_;

[kjorteo]

Sign that this game has done something horrible to your sense of sanity and your perception of reality itself: you are playing through a visual novel in which you date pigeons, complete with the difference in human/pigeon lifespans actually being the focal point of one of the endings, and to that you add in a made-up personal interpretation about a character being transsexual on top of everything else, and somehow all of this is perfectly serious and sad.

Angie Gallant's epic LP thread covered this, and I actually greatly admire this game for the reaction it was able to bring out in her, which is basically the same reaction it brought out in all of us: it started with "dating pigeons, what is this, I don't even" and then the sheer level of WTF only rose from there, until it suddenly turned extremely sad and heartfelt. The presenters in each case, who had been laughing at the madness this entire time, suddenly got caught up in the tear-jerking turn, to the point where they were willing to admit that they had somehow become emotionally invested in their stock photo pigeon boyfriend. (Hell, I just said "I WILL ACCEPT YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE AND FOR AS LONG AS I HAVE YOU COOLEEN ;_;" and meant it.)

As Angie said in that linked post, that's just good writing. The combination of "this is ridiculous, wait hold on now I actually care ;_;" eventually reduced Angie to being able to say little more than "THIS GAME" at so many turns that it almost became a catchphrase, and I fear that I am dangerously close to that point myself. As I've said elsewhere, there are many connotations for the word "incredible" ranging from "really good" to "what is this madness am I reading" depending on the context of the sentence/how sarcastic you're being/etc., and moa810 deserves everyone's recognition and commendation for making a game that covers all of them. This game is incredible. This game.