I went back to work on my writeup, I will return to finish this tomorrow.
Work in progress, cws for hitler, nazis, the holocaust, and a couple dick jokes
"A sensationalistic thriller about Hitler." - The New York KKKrimes
Books are a terrible medium for "so bad its good" media. The Room, one of the most notorious "so bad its good" movies only takes an hour an a half to get through and will reach its conclusion unaided by the observer. Conversely, something like Sonic's Ultimate Harem can only be completed through 100's of manhours spent in rapt attention, analyzing the material in question. Moreover a shitty wordsmith can fail their reader through errors and confusing lexical choices. Worst of all, bad writing is usually boring.
Siegfried, with its short length, competent writing, and novel but absurd premise, does not have these problems. I describe it as a self-insert Hitler fan fic that boldly asks "what if Hitler had a secret son and his foster parents told the best author ever (who is totally not me)".
Harry Mulisch was one of the most celebrated European authors of the 20th century. The son of a Jewish mother, Nazi collaborator father, and the grandchild of holocaust victims, he has been quoted with saying: "I didn't so much experience the Second World War. I am the Second World War." He has a few dozen awards to his name and was almost granted the Nobel prize for literature a couple times (allegedly). In the anglosphere he is best known for The Assault; a novel about a boy who's family was massacred during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and how his life played out afterwards. It is (was?) frequently used as instructional material in advanced level highschool literature courses. Its a beautiful novel about the lasting impacts of violence, Europe, and how pickles are just like crocodiles.
Siegfried in a nutshell:
Hey guys, my name is Rudolph Herter, I'm the bestest, coolest, most awesomest author of all time! My life is amazing! I just wrote the most important novel to ever be written, I have a hot, sexy wife, and everyone loves me! BTW I'm totally not Harry Mulisch haha :) Anyways I got a huuuuuuuge problem on my hands! Remember how I said that I just wrote the most important book ever? Well now I have to top that with something even better!!!! You see, big dick authors such as myself are suuuper important because only we can make sense of this craaaaaaazy world for the rest of you guys! I went on this talk show and told everyone that my next book was gonna figure out just how Hitler was so evil! Which no one has ever done! Ever! No one! Then everyone clapped! Then after the show these two old people came up to me and were all like "eyo we raised Hitlers son." and I was like "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA????" and then cough cough
Okay, using that (writing) voice was starting to hurt so I'm gonna do this normal now.
The self-portrayal of Mulisch is self-aggrandizing to the point of it being masturbatory and it is incredibly funny at times. Not-Harry Mulisch is giving talks on an award tour where he announces that his next book would be an attempt to comprehend the evil of Adolph Hitler. Immediately after the show he is approached by an elderly couple who confess to being the foster parents of Hitler's secret son, Siegfried. The rest of the story has chapters that swap between this alternate history of Hitler's family life and Not Harry Mulisch reflecting on his life, art, and career. Without spoiling too much, the Hitler fanfic portion is actually fairly compelling. Siegfried calls his father "Uncle Adi", because the secret must be kept from him too, despite how much Hitler wishes he could be his dad. I feel that this is a reflection on the way fascism drains its practicioners of their own humanity, leaving them alienated, depriving them of what could have been normal lives.
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Achievement hunting in Terraria! This tool now lives on my third monitor. Going for Trash Compactor (research 50% of all items in terraria in Journey mode). Researching means you can create infinite amount of that item. I'm hoping by the time that's done my world is well along and I can pick up lots of the other achievements I'm missing. A lot of them are missing because I did them on modded worlds so I need to get them again.
1/8 done, just killed Skeletron and explored my dungeon. Got a lot of the low hanging fruit.
Ooo fun! Terraria is one of my fav games
Mine too! 500+ hours. Somehow missing like 30 achievements still. But I'm going to get it locked in and 100%'d.
Fun! It's one of the only games on steam I bothered to 100%, it's not too difficult.
RetroAchievements has a set for Terraria now with subsets for collecting rare items, completing different seeds, doing hardcore playthrus, etc. I was getting the bug lately and was eyeing those lol
I haven't 100%d anything else yet. I am eyeing staydew valley though, after. Yea I wondered if it would be? A couple of friends I played with were acting like it was a while thing, "oh you don't know what you signed up for". But looking at the achievement list nothing jumped out at me as being impossibly difficult idk. I've played a lot so that helps. The fishing is going to be a pain I haven't fished or done quests hardly at all.
Oh really! I didn't know retroachivements did new games. Well, newer. I'll have to look into how to pair it. I've done it a tiny bit for gba games.
Nothing is too hard, some of it can be time consuming like the one where you have to encounter every creature/enemy which includes the gold critters. Fishing is boring but at least it doesn't take much thought.
All they have for PC currently is FF11 and Terraria. They're working on Undertale sets though! For Terraria you just use tmodloader. Forum post explaining how
Oooh okay. That one might be a bit rougher. Does it include the gem creatures too I'm assuming? DIdnt see that. Can probably just set up a farm of some kind though.
Oh very cool, thank you. Shame I can't work on both sets of achievements at once.
Gem critters yes, though all you gotta do is put a town underground with like 3 npcs, a ton will spawn. Other things that kinda suck are getting all variants of enemies (including halloween/christmas themed ones). This is a pretty good guide to find everything
Yeah it's be nice to knock everything out at once but I get that it's hard to track stuff without modding support. At least there's some allowed mods for hardcore achievements (and any mod you want for softcore)
I've gotten perfection in Stardew twice now. It's very doable imo. The first time was on my own and the second time was with a friend. I'll probably do it a third time in the future.
Its just a bit intimidating for me, mostly because of all the items required. Like, just so many individual little things. There's quite a few on this list that look like a lot. Although with the save viewers to see what I'm missing it might not be too bad. I've played to year 3~ twice, gotten to ginger island and done a bit of stuff but then got bored. I think I'll just pick up where I left off and figure out what I need to get.
Something I found helpful was doing a skull cavern run any time the perfection grind wore me down a bit. Warping there on a high luck day with bombs, ladders, and plenty of food is my favourite thing to do. If there's something you really like in the game, maybe that can break things up.