Rynling R&D

dev patel feeding dandelions to his horse on the green knight set
https://twitter.com/bestofpatel/status/1558557718319099905

Dev Patel should be Ganondorf in the live action movie. Thank you for your consideration.

Also: I saw someone suggest Tony Leung, and 🤔

Given that life is short and each of us only has so many days on this earth, I decided to go ahead and write my story about Calip and Tauro from Tears of the Kingdom. I've been having trouble writing for the past week, but then lo and behold, suddenly words appear. It's actually kind of fun to write about fantasy academia.

In real-life academia, most people either have a drinking problem or are taking so many pills that alcohol would probably kill them. It's the sort of profession where people tend to have multiple therapists. I know this sounds funny, but it's not a joke.

Instead of the reality of what academia is, it's nice to indulge in a fantasy of what I thought it would be when I was younger. The "fantasy" isn't so much magic shrines and floating islands, but rather the idea that Calip and Tauro would actually have enough mutual respect that they wouldn't try to kill one another after every single staff meeting.

My favorite item drop in totk
https://www.instagram.com/p/CuW-mgorXqH/

The best comment: "I don’t know the lore behind the grimace shake and at this point I’m too afraid to ask."

But Kathryn, you may be asking. If Tears of the Kingdom annoys you so much, why do you keep playing it?

The answer is that the vehicles you can build in this game are a true joy. My main hobby is making a fan-powered boat and leisurely sailing between the islands in the eastern ocean. I also enjoy making a little airplane and flying through the western mountains. When I finally get around to clearing the sandstorm, I'm looking forward to building an ATV and cruising across the desert.

And I mean listen. If you want. You can also build a tank covered in missiles and flamethrowers.

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Sorry, I'm not done yet.

Like somehow we all decided to forget how ~~ beloved voice actor Matt Mercer ~~ literally put on greenskin and a prosthetic nose to play Ganondorf as an evil capitalist puppet master at the top of a corporate tower...

which is another point of Nazi propaganda that still exists to this day, like so
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...despite the fact that was fucking disgusting. Honestly if I were a professional actor I would do everything in my power to put as much distance between myself and that character as possible, but here we are.

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Tears of the Kingdom is a remarkably unbalanced game. One of the more annoying sources of this lack of balance is how quickly your bows and weapons break. To give an example, a sword that had an attack power of 12 and took 25 hits to break in Breath of the Wild now has an attack power of 6 and takes 15 hits to break. If you attach something to the sword to give it a greater attack power, the durability will decrease, meaning that it will break in 7 to 10 hits. Likewise, if you attach anything to your arrows, the durability of your bow will decrease substantially. This is especially annoying when the things you attach to your arrows are necessary for environmental navigation (to create light in dark places, for example).

If you stay on the beaten path and do your chores like a good little boy, this is not a problem. If you want to go exploring, however, you're shit out of luck.

I therefore decided to go ahead and do the fire temple, as the ability you get there helps you break rocks and other obstacles "for free." As I wrote earlier, the scenario for this temple bothers me. Essentially, Yunobo the Goron has invented capitalism, but none of the other Gorons wants to work for a corporation. Your job is to get the fat lazy Gorons off their fat lazy asses and force them into a situation in which they're alienated from their labor.

It turns out that Yunobo is being possessed by The Evil Ganon™, who is controlling him by means of a totally sweet luchador mask. (Seriously, I fucking love that mask.) After you have a silly little battle, Yunobo's mask breaks, and he returns to normal. "Normal" means that he's still the CEO of a corporation, of course, but now he's "good."

So I guess, in This Year of Our Lord 2023, we are back to the same bullshit where capitalism is divided between "good capitalism," which is enabled by smart and hardworking individuals, and "bad capitalism," which is a sneaky plot of people who look like this:

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I should probably go ahead and do a dungeon, but every story cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom feels like a punishment. Mostly I've been hanging out and doing sidequests at the stables, which are a bit more my speed.

I finally went down to Lurelin, which is a chill and friendly village on the beach. This was one of my favorite locations in Breath of the Wild, and I had a good time there in Tears of the Kingdom as well. Lurelin was destroyed during a pirate attack, and your job is to help Bolson the contractor rebuild the village houses. You do this by chopping down trees and using the Ultrahand ability to move the lumber.

I really enjoyed the Lurelin set of sidequests. It's fun to feel like you're actually dealing with a real-world issue - helping to rebuild houses destroyed in a disaster - and I appreciate that Link's magical abilities have practical applications.

I also went up to the Great Plateau, where two nostalgic locations from Breath of the Wild have been occupied by the Yiga Clan. The Yiga Clan is unapologetically goofy, and I love them. I love them so much.

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Like I wrote earlier, I’m really enjoying the exploration elements of Tears of the Kingdom, but the writing could use some work. I’m going to take a break from the story and go back down into The Depths. I might even start exploring some sky islands.

I’ve gotten much better at using the Ultrahand to rotate objects in space, but the shrine puzzles aren’t getting any easier.

The problem with the Ultrahand tool is that its attachments don’t consistently snap to a grid. Breath of the Wild was robust enough to allow multiple solutions to spatial puzzles; but, in Tears of the Kingdom, there is (almost) always only one solution, and this solution needs to be precise. When you understand what you need to do but the game insists that you can’t do it without being fussy, this can be maddening.

I’ve been going through two or three shrines a day, and every day I’ve encountered a simple puzzle that’s taken half an hour to complete. I’ll look at guides online that confirm I need to do exactly what I think I need to do, but attaching Thing A to Thing B to Thing C in exactly the right way at exactly the right angle requires a ridiculous degree of precision. In addition, it’s frustrating to lose time exiting and then re-entering a shrine when I make a mistake at the end of a sequence and all the puzzle pieces fall into a void.

Today I plan to do my first full dungeon, the Lightning Temple in Gerudo Desert. We’ll see how it goes.

The reason I’ve been focusing on completing shrines is to get more hearts. I want to spend more time exploring the underground area, an enormous full-dark Halloween playground filled with jumpscares. I think, if I weren't infested with Dark Souls brain fungus, I might be frustrated by how often you die in The Depths. But thankfully, to my Soulsborne-rotted mind, the puzzles implicit in The Depths (ie, try not to die) are much more satisfying than those presented by the shrines.

I decided to stop being a whiny little malcontent and actually do something productive, so I sent an email to one of the curators of The Rec Center, a lowkey weekly email newsletter collecting fandom news and interesting fan art. This is what I wrote:

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I actually think every artist who draws green-skinned Ganondorf in This Year of Our Lord 2023 needs to spend a solid fifteen minutes in time-out, but I'm trying to be more tolerant of accidental antisemitism and Islamophobia. It's just really in the water these days, and there isn't a lot of education concerning where it comes from or how it manifests. In the end, the most important thing is for everybody to be chill and not send death threats over fictional characters.