How To Throw The Perfect Casino Themed Party - Casino.org Blog

Background
A fond memory of playing games with friends as a kid was Luigi’s Casino. We’d play those stupid chance games all the time and it was so fun. Looking back, I wanted to design a tour around Luigi in his casino costume, so I thought where else a casino was present in Mario games. Of course, I immediately came to Hotel Delfino and the Sunshine version of King Boo. This tour idea is a mishmash these two characters put together.
(This tour idea series was inspired by u/WaffleyDootDoot. Please check him out, some of his ideas are great!)
New Track
Wii Moonview Highway: When choosing the new track, I had two themes in mind; night skies and bustling cities. This track is exactly both of those things and more! Not only do you get to swerve along the city roads, but you also get to take in the amazing views off the side of the highway. This course would also be the second from Mario Kart Wii, taking its place alongside Maple Treeway.
New Drivers
Luigi (Casino) (Medium, High-End): Luigi turns up in his casino outfit from the Super Mario 64 DS party games! He handles the riches of the casino, as well as acting as a gamemaster. His special item is the Coin Box.
King Boo (Sunshine) (Large, High-End): King Boo arrives in his Mario Sunshine style! After hiding under the casino of Hotel Delfino for far too long, he’s more than ready to haunt the race. His special item is the Giant Banana.
New Karts
Casino Bruiser (High-End): A black and green chequered variant of the normal Bruiser, this ride is sure to match Luigi’s new costume as he goes from riches to races. Its boosted skill is Slipstream Plus.
Pepper Pedaller (High-End): A variant of the Banana Master which features a supersize chili pepper. Despite his hatred for spicy food, it does match King Boo’s big, red tongue. Its boosted skill is Rocket Start Plus.
Gold Bruiser (High-End): A gold version of the normal Bruiser, this kart is perfect for anyone who wants to express their interest in high fashion. Its boosted skill is Mini-Turbo Plus.
New Gliders
Spicy Glider (High-End): A red variant of the Tropical Glider; instead of bananas, this tree grows… chili peppers? Its boosted item is the Super Horn.
Pipe Spotlights
Pipe 1: Luigi (Casino), Casino Bruiser, Fireworks Parachute Pipe 2: King Boo (Sunshine), Pepper Pedaller, Spicy Glider
Special Pipe
Night Out Pipe: Peach (Vacation), Pauline (Party Time), Rosalina (Aurora), Daisy (Yukata)
This pipe celebrates fashion and the lifestyles of those that visit night-time casinos. Peach, Pauline, Rosalina, and Daisy arrive wearing their best outfits! This pipe starts off with 30 items in it. None of the drivers are spotlights and you only pull a maximum of 3 High-End drivers.
(UPDATE: Of course, Nintendo decided to go and reveal an amazing new Pauline alt as soon as I’m about to publish this.)
Track Selection
The 12 tracks of this tour idea feature starry skies and night-time cities as well as a couple of Boo related courses:
New York Minute 3 Vancouver Velocity RMX Rainbow Road 1 SNES Ghost Valley 1 SNES Rainbow Road N64 Frappe Snowland DS Luigi’s Mansion DS Waluigi Pinball Wii Moonview Highway 3DS Shy Guy Bazaar 3DS Neo Bowser City 3DS Rosalina’s Ice World
Tour Gifts/Gold Pass
Normal Gifts: Ludwig, Bullet Blaster, Parachute Gold Pass Gifts: King Boo, Bull’s-Eye Banzai, Gold Bruiser, Plaid Ribbon
Thank You
Thank you for reading! This tour idea was super unique and some of the ideas took a while to perfect. Of course, my love for Mario Sunshine just had to seep in but there’s nothing wrong with some King Boo love (he needs more alts). I feel like if Nintendo were to do an idea like this, they could pull off something really interesting but it's once in a blue moon we get unique ideas like this.
Thanks for reading and have a great day. :)
Next Tour…
With this hint, you should be able to take a bite at guessing what’s next. I wonder what ideas this plants into your mind…

Ok, so, I was recently rereading The Crying of Lot 49 last night, specifically Chapter 3, and I do feel I have a strange hypothesis about sections of that chapter that may be a complete projection, but the more that I look into the content of the sections I will parse out in particular, and the more research that I do, the more evidence seems to fall in place that sort of freaks me out and confirms my theory. Being freaks yourselves, I thought this would be the place for me to project my world, so to speak, and see if what I’m seeing is in any way based in reality or if I’m instead way off base.
My hypothesis is that Chapter 3 of The Crying of Lot 49, and specifically the Lake Inverity/Bone charcoal/Tony JaguaFangoso Lagoon section might be subtextually about Disneyland. I have struggled to find much about these particular sections of this chapter related to Disney. I own J. Kerry Grant’s A Companion to Lot 49, have scoured the Pynchon Wiki, read the reddit post discussion for Chapter 3 of this book, and tried Googling as much about it as I could, and I haven’t found anything to suggest Disneyland, so this is either a relatively new idea or one that is inaccurate as hell. Oh, boy!
To begin, I will say, I am fascinated and obsessed with Disneyland and Disney World which is maybe why I found some of the information I found within Lot 49 to begin with. One could say I have a perverse fascination with the 2 theme parks which has led me to all manner of revelations. In the same way that Pynchon, being from what I can tell, a heretical Catholic, has a perverse fascination with the sacred through the filter of the profane, I am somehow deeply attracted to and obsessed with all things Disney even though I think they are essentially a fascist, culturally banal, destructive force. Similar to how I believe Oedipa may have with Disneyland in the novel, I “fell in love with it (41).” What can I say?
The first half of Chapter 3 which I will focus on, involves Oedipa’s continued revelations. She gets her first peek at WASTE, the Tristero, the posthorn, and the Boeing-esque Yoyodyne is introduced. The plot of the novel really starts to thicken, or to put it a different way, the tapestry, the maaswork, really starts to come together, narrative threads criss-crossing every which way in all directions at once. A resource that was helpful for much of my understanding of this chapter and even just in how I read much of Lot 49 in general is Charles Hollander’s article on the novel: “Pynchon, JFK, and the CIA.” I’ll post it below.
https://www.vheissu.net/articles/hollander_49.php
Chapter 3, according to Hollander, is where some of the first hints of JFK’s assasination are placed. According to Hollander, this chapter uses allusion, parody, analogy, and enthymeme to encode its secret message about the JFK assassination. Mike Faloppian’s Peter Pinguid Society’s Dallas chapter certainly suggests this. I mention this, partially, to say that, in a way, I could maybe call what I’m trying to figure out here “Pynchon, Disney, and the CIA,” since in many ways what I’m wrestling with is what I perceive to be many hidden references to Disney's shaddy dealings throughout 40s and 50s Californian history. Disney World, in particular, does have a direct history of involvement with the CIA with regard to how it acquired its real estate holdings, for example, which interestingly enough is what a chunk of this chapter is about when it comes to its references to Inverarity (not Disney World, but real estate holdings in general, Inverarity's more specifically).
The first section of the chapter that gave me some strange vibes regarding Disneyland was the section where Metzger, Oedipa, and the Paranoids go to Fangoso Lagoon, “one of Inverarity’s last big projects (40).” I will quote some of these sections below where these vibes first made themselves known.
“Somewhere beyond the battering, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or smell this but it was there, something tidel began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding (40-41).”
This first quote stood out to me because it reminded me of the printed circuit Oedipa sees in Chapter 2. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Oedpia looks out at the landscape and sees it as deeply controlled, planned, almost machine-like or circuit-like. I don’t think this is a wildly different passage from that one. It, like the previous seciton forces the reader to ask the question: how did America come to be how it is now? This is an important question Lot 49 is always forcing its reader to ask. How did the deep conservatism or fascism creep in? Would the answer not be the subject of this book? Communication systems. What company is in charge of some of the most monopolized forms of our communication systems to this day? Disney, of course! Is this an accident? Was it planned? The malignant, magic forces referenced in Chapter 1 may have made it so, may have “urged [the] sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across the dark beige hills (40).” Surely the Walt Disney Company has done as much as any to reinforce suburban 3-bedroom forms of existence that have had a stranglehold on our cultural existence for so many years, than just about any, right? But this was just where I started to get the first inkling of vibes about Disneyland. To continue with another quote:
“They came in among earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry, and eventually, shimmying for the sand roads, down in a helix to a sculpted body of water named Lake Inverarity. Out in it, on a round island of fill among blue wavelets, squatted the social hall, a chunky ogived and verdigrised, Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino. Oedpia fell in love with it (41).”
This is where my paranoia really got going. Much of the description of the passage above does not sound like a man-made lake or lagoon. Far from it. Lake Inverarity is described as “a round island of fill,” that contains a “social hall,” and as a “Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino.” That sounds much more like Disneyland than just a man-made lake created by a real-estate developer? Also with Oedpia being a consistent parody of housewives in suburban America, it would make sense that she would fall in love with Lake Inverarity if it is, in fact, Disneyland. Plus, there might be another hint in the name Lake Inverarity itself, since it is the only holding named after Inverarity specifically, just as Disneyland is named after Disney himself. I don’t believe that Inverarity is a direct analogy for Disney specifically, but I do believe he is instead an analogy for any of the unseen hyper-capitalist forces that have come to dominate our culture, Disney clearly being one example.
And just a side note before I continue with some of my evidence. It would make complete sense, this being a novel about Southern California, its real-estate development, and history, that Pynchon would eventually have to get to Disneyland. It is a property in Southern California, that especially between 1955 and 1965 had to have HUGE influence. How could he not incorporate it even if it was only referred to passively or encoded into the references of the text (much in the same way Hollander argues that Pynchon does the same for JFK’s assassination). There is another passage that REALLY got me convinced about my above theory, the section where Manny DiPresso is discussing the bone charcoal “used in the R&D phase of the filter program. Back around the early 50’s.” Here it is:
“Presently the bodies sank and stayed where they were till the early ‘50s, when Tony Jaguar, who’d been a corporal in an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago diPieta and knew about what was at the bottom, decided among some colleagues to see what he could salvage. All they managed to come up with was bones. Out of some murky train of reasoning, which may have included the observed fact that American tourists beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything; and stories about Forest Lawn and the American cult of the dead; possibly some dim hope that Senator McCarthy, and others of his persuasion, in those days having achieved a certain ascendancy over the rich cretini from across the sea, would somehow refocus attention on the fallen of WWII, especially ones whose corpses had never been found; out of such labyrinth of assumed motives, Tony Jaguar decided he could surely unload his harvest of bones on some American someplace through his contacts in the “family,” known these days as Costa Nostra. He was right. An import-export firm bought the bones, sold them to a fertilizer enterprise, which may have used one or two femurs for laboratory tests but eventually decided to phase entirely into menhaden instead and transferred the remaining several tons to a holding company, which stored them in a warehouse outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for maybe a year before Beaconsfield got interest (47).”
When I read “which may have included the observed fact that American tourists beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything,” I could not think of anything but Disneyland. In his historiographic metafictions, Pynchon often superimposes historical realities onto present ones in order to make political, social, and religious commentary that would otherwise be inexpressible. An easy example is the fact that Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel about 1960’s America set in Britain during World War II. In the above passage, if Pynchon is superimposing the strange, seemingly random history of “an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago diPieta.” and is using this as an analogy, to project a world that speaks to his present day, I don’t know how Pynchon couldn’t be referring to Disneyland. The novel is set in Southern California, the place where Pynchon lived in 1965. Wouldn’t Disneyland, the rise of tourism, how that was changing the landscape of America and hijacking the “family,” its communication systems, propaganda, and culture, wouldn't all that have been on his mind? I have a few more quotes and then a possibly even more major revelation before I feel I can finally feel I’ve made my point.
Later on in the Lagoon, the Paranoids start smoking pot, and the following happens:
“[B]y holding up the glowing roaches of their cigarettes like a flipcard section at a football game, to spell out alternative S’s and O’s, attracted the attention of the Fangoso Lagoons Security Force, a garrison against the night made up of one-time cowboy actors and L.A. motorcycle cops (49).”
I believe this “one-time cowboy actor” reference to be a reference to Ronald Regan, a fixture of southern California and one-time cowboy actor, and yet another thread in the patchwork connections to Disney. On October 24, 1947, Walt Disney and Ronald Regan both testified against communism, naming particular individuals they found nefarious communists within the film industry (another communication industry, one could say) before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Which got me thinking, with all the mob references in the above section about Lago diPeta and the bones, was Disney ever involved with the mafia or mob, with “Costa Nostra?” I didn’t find much, but I did find something extremely interesting, which also led to one final even more strange realization. Read the link below, it lays out the story of Willie Bioff, a mobster who attempted to but failed to help break up Disney’s Union Strike in the 1940’s.
https://babbittblog.com/2016/10/09/disney-and-the-mob-willie-bioff/
This may seem unrelated to Pynchon’s “parable of power,” but earlier in the chapter when Mike Fillopian is discussing Russia and America, clearly also, yet again using a historical detail as a historiographic metafiction, superimposing a historical reality onto a present one, in this case, that of the cold war, when Fillopian mentions “After the confrontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between Russia...and a Union that paid lip service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery (36),” its fairly clear which side of the picket-isle Pynchon would have been during an animator strike of Disney in the 1940s, or any strike for better treatment, for that matter. In Lot 49, Pynchon has written a "parable of power" about the various ways the circuit board of American life has reinforced the indentured servitude of supposed abolitionists, which in our modern world, could easily be a stand in for the structures of neo-liberalism. And nothing on this earth is more an example of banal neoliberal capitalism than Disneyland, nothing (except for maybe Epcot, of course). This is a lot of information, and I may not have done a very good job of connecting it all or being as explicit as I could have at explaining how specific references hint at Disney throughout the chapter, and this has already become too long, HOWEVER, I have one final piece of information that blows my DAMN MIND that is likely coincidental, but which I still could not believe I found.
Inspired by the book and wanting to find more connections in the tapestry, I started doing research into Disney’s involvement with the FBI and found some public records about his direct involvement with them on the FBI's website. Walt Disney was a SAC (Special Agent in Charge) for the FBI, according to these documents, for a period of time, interestingly enough, in the late 50s. There are literal letters to Disney from J. Edgar Hoover himself to Disney in these documents. I’ll post them below along with a number of other links that discuss Disney’s connection to the FBI, the last one being particularly fascinating in its connections to the novel.
https://vault.fbi.gov/walter-elias-disney/walter-elias-disney-part-01-of-03/view
http://www.schaakstukkenmuseum.nl/?p=2195&lang=en
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/F%20Disk/FBI/FBI%20Press%20Use%20Of/Item%2009.pdf
https://www.mouseplanet.com/8987/The_Mickey_Mouse_Club_FBIs_Most_Wanted
I very much suggest looking at the Mouse Planet link above. If you have read The Crying of Lot 49 and know who Baby Igor and Metzger is, I VERY MUCH SUGGEST IT. Upon reading this and looking at all the other material, I discovered that there was a child-star, mentioned specifically in these documents, that was to be the child used in a set of documentaries Disney was to make as propaganda films for the FBI specifically, promoting them to the public in 1958. This child’s name was Dirk Metzger. I shit you not. His name was METZGER and he was a child star whose father was in the military. READ THE ARTICLE. His daddy, his doggy, and HIM! And guess what, look at what his profession became after being a child actor in these films? Guess it was: he became a lawyer!!! Baby Igor himself! In the flesh!? Look at the article. It’s all there. I can’t fucking believe it!? Now, I admit, this is all probably just a coincidence. Being 14 in 1958 would put Metzger at being only 21 or so in 1965 when the Crying of Lot 49 came out, so it is unlikely that this is exactly what I think it is, a direct, real, historical correlation, but who knows? Pynchon lived in California at the time. Who knows whom or what he may have come across...
Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Maybe Disneyland is nowhere to be found in the California of The Crying of Lot 49. Maybe this is all, as Hilarius would say, a Rorsoch blot. Maybe I’m simply hallucinating. I will say though, either way, I do think the political exigence of The Crying of Lot 49 has done its work on me. Even if this is only an ink blot, a world I’m projecting rather than one that is actually there, I have certainly done more thinking about Disney, its union-busting, suburban-infused. McCarthy-ian underbelly than I have, maybe ever, and that power, and Pynchon's parable of power he wrote in reaction to it, is something that is very much alive and with us today, it is a power that is still creating indentured servitude and whose malignant, “formless magic” is igniting all around us. Hopefully I, like Oedpia, have gotten a little closer to understanding how it works and counting its line of force. Maybe,
“If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

Spoilers ahead.
Connoisseurs of film are undoubtedly well-aware of La Nouvelle Vague, aka, the ‘New Wave’—an experimental movement in filmmaking with its origins in the French cinema of the 1950s, with an emphasis on exploration of personal themes such as existentialism, iconoclasm and absurdism. Although the ‘New Wave’ is considered to have met its chronological end in the late 1960s, to be followed by successive movements like ‘New Hollywood’, ‘Cinema Novo’ and ‘Dogme 95’, the influence of la nouvelle vague continues to be keenly felt in the artistic masterpieces of Bollywood production house YRF. Under the skillful hand of renowned auteur Aditya Chopra, the studio has produced a lineup of commercially successful arthouse flicks that continue the French filmmaking renaissance of the ‘50s, successfully infusing avant-garde storytelling techniques with high production values and modern Indian themes. Nowhere is this revolutionary vision more evident than in films like DDLJ (a masterpiece in abstract, absurdist storytelling), Mohabbatein (a sensitive examination of the taboo topic of attitudes towards adolescent self-gratification), Kal Ho Naa Ho (an ambitious adaptation of historian David McCullough’s book 1776), Jab Tak Hai Jaan (a religio-philosophical drama that engages in debate upon the tenets of Christianity, Shaivism, and the cultural taboo of Kala Pani) and, of course, the Dhoom franchise.
As YRF’s most popular franchise, the Dhoom series has, with each installment, made great independent strides in cinematic theory and practice. Although—as read above—YRF films explore a wide, varying range of topics as a whole, the Dhoom franchise focuses exclusively on the examination and discussion of economic and socio-economic matters of policy and practice in the Indian context. Over the course of 3 films, the discourse acquires a rich depth, with the analysis of issues including the economic costs and benefits of national highway construction, the clash between entrepreneurial aspirations and the security of bureaucratic employment, the 2008 economic recession in the BRICS context, and the causes and consequences of non-performing bank loans and a profiling of defaulters of on said loans. Indeed, a first course on Indian economics at any prestigious institution may well be framed around careful viewing and discussion of the Dhoom films. In the careful hands of Aditya Chopra and Vijay Krishna Acharya (Dhoom 1/2/3, Tashan, Thugs of Hindostan), each Dhoom film achieves a delicate balance between the overt cops-and-robbers heist story and the covert exploration of complex economic schools of thought.
As the 1st film in the franchise, Dhoom (2004) establishes the storytelling framework for the films to come, and by itself explores the challenges and opportunities presented by Indian economic policymaking in the early ‘00s. The film features an all-round star-studded cast, with support from Honorary Roadie & Stardust Awards nominee Esha Deol, Star’s Sabsey Award winner Rimi Sen, and Indian Telly Award nominee Arav Chowdharry. At the film’s helm are Lions Club Award winner John Abraham, Sansui Award winner Abhishek Bachchan, and Emmy nominee Uday Chopra. Series regulars Bachchan and Chopra play Jai and Ali respectively, Jai being a policeman and Ali a small-time mechanic with a penchant for fast bikes and disinterested women. Abraham essays the villainous role of Kabir, part-time restaurant waiter and part-time leader of a gang of biker thieves.
The film begins with a series of daring heists pulled off by Kabir’s gang, relying on their high-speed bikes to orchestrate sudden thefts and promptly escape the scene soon after. Their exploits catch the eye of Jai, a lifetime appointee to the post of Assistant Commissioner of Police. Jai, however, finds himself out of his depth and through a series of accidents, makes the acquaintance of Ali, a mildly-seedy mechanic and bike racer. Initially reluctant to be associated with law enforcement, Ali is eventually induced to join Jai’s cause and attempt to chase down Kabir and his merry band of men. Dhoom is slow and deliberate in its setup, and the film’s early minutes are heavy on subtext and detail, therefore, it is essential to take in the plot in small increments, so as to be thorough with one’s analysis.
In an allegorical sense, Jai, as a police officer, represents bureaucratic authority and the security, comforts and powers of government employment. Abraham’s Kabir, as a thief, is a laissez-faire capitalist, relying on his material advantage in the form of fast bikes and his manpower advantage in the form of skilled bikers to partake in a series of one-sided transactions with economic entities such as banks and government funds. In this sense, the act of robbery in Dhoom is merely a transaction between two private parties wherein one side gains an unfair amount at the other’s expense, absent external interventionism. In addition to being a free-market advocate, Kabir is also an employee at a pizza parlour, which seems to be the film’s attempt at exploring both the growing role of the service economy as a share of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the amorphous nature of employment within the modern ‘gig’ economy. Caught between the competing ideas of state-control and free capitalism, Chopra’s Ali is a stand-in for the directionless youth, lured by the safety and dignity of a government job, whilst simultaneously seduced by the potential for greater wealth presented by free-market capitalism. The film’s plot is overt in this depiction, with Ali simultaneously fearful of Jai’s authority, yet desirous of wielding said authority as an employed policeman. Furthermore, in an action sequence set in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar—a flea market specializing in illegally-hawked goods—Jai and Ali get into a fight with goons in the market, and are forced to make a hasty escape after being outnumbered. Ali bringing Jai to the market illustrates his ties to the informal, underground economy—a large, undocumented component of the Indian economy—and Jai’s subsequent fleeing the scene highlights the failed outcome of government attempts to regulate this grey economy by force and bluster.
Initially at a loss for clues, Jai is eventually able to deduce that Kabir’s bikers arrange their heists in close proximity to highways, providing as the highways do quick getaways after. This is no doubt an allusion to the economic importance of the National Highways Authority of India’s flagship ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ national highway construction project. Kabir, the raw capitalist, is empowered in his capitalistic pursuits by the government’s infrastructure investments, and John Abraham’s moody expression throughout the film is in no small part perhaps due to the discontentment within Kabir’s mind about his enterprise’s dependence on resources provided by the state. Having deduced Kabir’s MO, Jai and Ali attempt to catch him in the act. However, Kabir and his gang appear to have substantially faster bikes than Jai and Ali, which is undoubtedly an allusion to the government’s perceived ineptitude and inability to generally compete with private enterprise. Left chafing and chasing the dust, Jai catches a lucky break when an overconfident Kabir offers him a clue about his upcoming crime, with the catch being that if Jai fails to avert it, he must recuse himself from the case and leave Kabir to his entrepreneurial pursuits. Kabir, the staunch capitalist, is here hinting at the idea of termination clauses in Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), agreements between enterprises and governments for mutual benefit. Whilst the government naturally retains the right to sever the partnership at any point, Kabir clearly believes that he, as the private party, is also entitled to terminate the contract should the government, aka Jai, default on the agreed-upon terms. Formally known as the ‘Authority Default’ concept, Dhoom represents this idea in the form of a simple, easy to understand challenge between Jai and Kabir.
Even as this layered conflict plays out between Jai and Kabir, Ali is enamoured by the mysterious ‘Dilbara’ (Esha Deol). Little is known about Dilbara, however, like other characters in the film, it may be reasonably assumed than she is also an allegorical depiction of an economic concept. Ali’s infatuation with her suggests that she is perhaps intended to be portrayed as a vague, undefined avenue of aspirational employment. Furthermore, the fact that she (as is later revealed) is in fact a part of Kabir’s gang, yet also harbours feelings for Ali, leads one to conclude that Dilbara represents a form of compromise between dirigisme, aka restrictive state-controlled economy, and laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism. The filmmakers leave the specifics of this compromise vague, however, Dilbara’s skimpy outfits perhaps represent the scantiness of opportunities presented by this nebulous alternative.
Returning to the main plot, Jai, despite being forewarned, fails to foil Kabir’s next robbery, despite being able to take down one of his gang in the process. Left short of a gang member, Kabir attempts to recruit Ali, left sidelined by Jai following their failure to catch Kabir. The jilted Ali readily embraces Kabir’s neoliberal worldview and the duo jet off to Goa, where Kabir has his eyes set on one final score from a casino. Subtextually, the casino and gambling in general represent what is in Kabir’s eyes an essential component of his brand of capitalism—rampant speculation and volatility that may be manipulated to one’s benefit. There may also be an addition reference to British academic Susan Strange’s seminal 1986 work Casino Capitalism, a critique of unregulated banking and financial systems. However, Kabir is more likely than not to be derisive of such thoughts, and therefore, if this reference was intended, it may merely be made to indicate the filmmakers’ complete mastery over both Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought.
The importance of dance numbers in YRF films cannot be overstated. Even as Bollywood music gravitates towards being little more than catchy jingles designed to elicit maximum publicity, the music and dance numbers in YRF films complement the plot perfectly, serving to both entertain and narrate. Dhoom is no exception to this tradition of excellence. On the eve of Kabir’s final heist, an inebriated Jai shows up at the casino, claiming to have left police employment and moved on. Kabir, however, is rightly suspicious, given as Jai is still a cop, and is merely attempting to lure Kabir into a false sense of comfort as a prelude to catching him in the act. This Jai accomplishes by putting on a song-and-dance in front of Kabir to convince him of his abandonment of state-sponsored socialism and his embrace of Kabir’s unrestrained capitalism. The song is entitled ‘Salamee’, a clever homophone of ‘salami’, a sausage that consists primary of beef. The consumption of beef was, in a landmark 2005 Supreme Court judgement, forbidden on grounds on anti cow-slaughter laws. Kabir, as an opponent of government intervention, would likely have been opposed to the idea of such a restriction being imposed upon him. Therefore, to show his solidarity to the cause, Jai takes to the stage in front of Kabir and sways to the refrain of “Naye kal ko aao kare, hum karein, karein/Salami, salami, salami/Kar le salami…”.
The subterfuge is apparently successful, and a placated Kabir is lulled into a false sense of security by Jai’s reinforcement of his worldview. However, as mentioned, Jai’s conversion is little more than a ruse, and a hoodwinked Kabir is successfully caught in the act by Jai and Ali, who is revealed to have been Jai’s mole all along. The ever-slippery Kabir, however, weasels his way out of Jai’s clutches, and flees with his loot. Although Dhoom 3 would better address the phenomenon of loan defaulters taking flight from the verge of captivity, Dhoom too takes a cursory look at the occurrence, although Kabir does not quite embody a loan defaulter. He is merely the free-market capitalist, the robber baron caught flouting regulations and fleeing from the consequences of government intervention. A long chase sequence ensues, with Kabir fleeing but ultimately cornered by Jai and Ali at the precipice of a sea-facing cliff. Facing a choice between certain captivity and death, Kabir chooses to fly off the cliff with the last of his loot. In a literal sense, Kabir merely dies by falling off the cliff into the sea. In a figurative sense, faced with the prospect of his enterprise being forced to comply with ungainly regulations, Kabir chooses instead to offshore his business, and make for better waters, thus bringing his character arc to a natural and satisfying conclusion. A frustrated Jai bemoans his end, representing the government’s exasperation at ultimately failing to bring a rogue enterprise to heel. Ali, having seen his capitalistic expectations dive off a cliff with Kabir, chooses in the film’s final shot, to finally pursue the path to safe, steady, state-sponsored employment after all, asking Jai if he finally is a bona-fide police officer, as the film fades to black.
The topical nature of Dhoom is a cause for admiration, even a decade and a half after its release. The film successfully ties together strands of economic and socio-economic thought from its time—the ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ project received a major fillip in the first years of the new millennium, the service sector encountered a boom around the same time, as did the contribution of outsourcing to employment and economic growth. The rise of men like Kabir is perfectly timed in the post-License Raj years, as the country embraced capitalism over state socialism. Yet, the lure of stable, ‘safe’ government employment holds true, and powers men like Jai and seduces men like Ali. Dilbara’s unknown fate at the end of the film—left waiting for Ali by the side of a road—is representative of the uncertain outcomes of economic models with time. On a meta note, the Dhoom franchise’s casting of Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra in every film is a nod to the ‘Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’ of 2005, a flagship government initiative that guarantees employment for a certain number of days out of the year, in the form of unskilled labour.
In summation, Dhoom rightly deserves its place as a seminal film in the annals of both YRF and Indian cinema. In its own right, it is a bold, experimental film that marries erudition to entertainment. It is also the progenitor of its celebrated franchise, providing the springboard from which future films would explore similar issues in an equally deft and precise fashion. To YRF, the Dhoom franchise, and Indian cinema, the film Dhoom is nothing short of a bottle of nitrous oxide, that when attached to a bike, propels it into the stratosphere.

So it’s been a few days since the update dropped so I think it’s been a good enough to let the update’s content sit and allow us to play around with everything.
To address the elephant in the room, let’s talk about the island: it is very, very, VERY underwhelming. I already made a post explaining the problems with the island, so I’ll just keep it brief: it’s all run down industrial drug manufacturing and no resort town area thingy for the tourists at the party. It’s quite unrealistic thinking about the people there and where they’re going to stay. If they wanted to make the infrastructure of the island undeveloped, then make it be like Cuba, where it’s all old timey buildings with classic cars on the unpaved roads. It’s all off-road areas, which TBH are pretty cool if you wanted some off-road/rally cars to try out BUT OH WAIT YOU CAN’T BECAUSE THE ISLAND ISN’T ACCESSIBLE IN FREEMODE. I don’t know what Rockstar was thinking when they said “an entirely new location.” When you say it like that, of course people are gonna expect it to be in freeroam so they can have fun with their friends and hang out in their cars and whatnot, and no having tiny portion of the island where you can just do what you do in your nightclub and the Music Locker, and that is to just dance and drink and entertain yourself for 5 minutes. If you try to leave the island, the guards stop you and your character automatically walks back toward the party. You can’t even sneak or swim around the guards you are just stuck at the party until you decide to go back to Los Santos. From what some people say, it’s because of the limited hardware, and that the entire island is free to explore in freeroam on the XSX/S and PS5, but very few of us have those consoles, and those who do say that claim is false. It’s just either the game is old or that Rockstar just wanted to be dicks to us, and if they did know we were expecting a map expansion, then I’d like to believe the. They really did do us dirty like that.
The very first prep/scout might be the worst mission in the entire game. All you do is take pictures of stuff you need for the heist, which is fine, except the stuff spawns in random locations and if you wanna fully complete the prep missions and get your crew completely equipped you have to find 4 of the stuff, like the bolt cutters and grapples. I like the idea of posing as a DJ’s entourage then sneaking out scope out the island. It’s cool, except for the fact the mission is goddamn awful. It’s a mandatory stealth mission, which doesn’t sound that bad, then you remember stealth in GTA is just so, so bad. “So what if it’s a stealth mission, just quietly take out everyone in your way.” That’s the problem: you can’t eliminate anyone in this prep mission, not even punch or judo chop or whatever on the guards. As soon as you get too close to any of the guards, you are spotted and instead of dying and respawning, you’re dragged back to the party (or airport, if you’re doing the prep after the first play through) and have to sneak your way back all over again. It gets pretty frustrating after awhile. To make it worse, if you’re spotted too much, you are thrown off of the island and wash up on the shores of Vespucci Beach, which doesn’t make sense geographically, since Cayo Perico is confirmed to be in the Caribbean and LS is next to the Pacific Ocean. After getting thrown off the island, you have to go back to the Kosatka, restart the prep, and do the mission all over again.
The other prep missions are somewhat of a step up from the Casino Heist preps. For one, there aren’t any missions where you have go back twice for any of the equipment; it’s a one and done deal. The missions utilize different interiors from previous updates, like the CEO office, Import/Export garage, etc. and I find that somewhat cool. The missions themselves aren’t that hard, so they should be able to be breezed through.
The heist itself was in many ways a step up from the Casino Heist, in a way. All the different kinds of approaches, entries, methods, setups, etc. made the heist very unique with different levels of replay ability. As annoying as the guards on the island are, it’s good that they spawn randomly, as to encourage more challenge and thought as to how to approach the heist, unlike the Casino where they all have fixed locations, and after a few play through you figure out the formula and breeze through it like no problem. The guards are still ridiculously hard to all kill, even with all the prep missions to weaken them done. They still have aimbot, not surprised there. There’s a juggernaut in El Rubio’s mansion, but it’s not that bad, since there’s only one that spawns, and you can just use explosives. It is a heist that encourages stealth, and is very unforgiving to those who fuck it up. The enemies are fairly weak if you do the preps, but they just swarm you everywhere, especially in El Rubio’s mansion where they flank you at all corners, and if you’re not careful, you can go through all your snacks and armors quickly.
The amount of content released day one is very underwhelming, and the drip feed line up lowkey sucks. Half of the cars showed off in the trailers and promos were actually released on launch but the rest are to be released weekly over the next few months. I get it, Rockstar wanted to artificially extend the lifespan of this update, but did they really have to make us wait weeks for vehicles we can drive around during the heist? If they wanted to drip feed some vehicles from the heist itself, make it like the Manchez scout or that ATV cause no one cares about those vehicles, well, at least I don’t. Leaving out less vehicles from the heist to be released as drip feed would leave room for some more original cars to be added or different versions of cars that need updating, like the ARENA ZR380 PLEASE JUST GIVE US A CLEAN JDM VERION OF THAT CAR. The line up of original non heist cars is actually quite solid, still fitting the theme of the update. Cayo Perico gives off some Cuban vibes, minus the whole communism thing, so it would make sense some of the cars added would be classic cars from the 50s-60s, like the Fiat 500 (Brioso 300), BF Weevil (finally, they added a better version of the Injection), and Slamtruck (if that thing doesn’t allow us to put cars on it I’m gonna get very mad).
The new clothes and outfits are nothing amazing, but there was a change I appreciate so much, and that is we can finally put body armor on other tops like hoodies, service shirts, other utility tops. Finally will I no longer have to use the merge glitch. The new armored vests tho kinda suck, since they’re just designer and don’t exactly fit anything. The new button down tropical shirts do look cool, I just wish we could unbutton them to give more of a casual tourist vibe. I just appreciate we have more ability than variety.
The weapons were ok. The military rifle looks way too similar to the bullpip and advanced rifle, so it’s nothing really special. The Perico Pistol was a cool unlock for a random event that has a somewhat painful chance to get by finding a body in LS and searching it for a key, but the gun itself is just a golden marksman pistol, needing to be reloaded after every shot. I have yet to find the combat shotgun in the heist, but I imagine it’s just a cooler looking version of the pump shotgun.
The music in this update was very meh. Didn’t like the songs on Kult FM too much, maybe because I’m not into rock that much and kinda used to listening to pop songs and some Broadway musicals here and there. Couldn’t really judge Still Slippin since I need to be in a specific area of the map to listen to it, I haven’t been around Mirror Park in awhile, so I just went back to putting the music on mute and turning on blast LMP on Spotify (Owl House fans you know what I mean). It doesn’t really help that Rockstar is drip feeding radios and music too, since Still Slippin won’t be broadcasted to the entire map until a few more weeks. Maybe when it’s finally released for the entire map then I’ll take a listen. That one Moodymann song they played for the trailer goes hard and I’m sure his other works go hard too; too bad no one goes to the Music Locker, which is literally a stripped down version of our nightclubs under the casino. Come to think of it, music and nightclubs are a major part of this update, making me think Rockstar just wanted to do an After Hours Pt. 2.
Overall, the Cayo Perico was had the potential to be one of the best updates the game has ever seen: a map expansion for us to explore, but we were given a heist with ruthless AI and mediocre to subpar content to make up for it. As it stands, it might be one of my least favorite updates, not living up to the community’s expectations whilst being quite content dry.

King Dice Bets It All!
The right hand man of the devil himself, King Dice is the casino head and leader of numerous gambling-themed monsters whose powers and tricks he'd use in Smash Brothers along with some rubber hose-fighting. King Dice will be a superweight fighter with two jumps and no other movement options
Jab: King Dice will do two straight jabs before ending with a sidekick
Dash Attack: King Dice will transform into a giant version of his head that rolls forward, if you just so happen to hit the foe with the six side of this dice, this will launch the opponent
Forward Tilt: King Dice thrusts an open forward that stops the enemy in their tracks, projectiles included but this has a small chance to fail depending on how fast the projectile moves
Up Tilt: King Dice's head bounces up and spins
Down Tilt: King Dice will stomp the ground in front of him
Forward Smash: King Dice releases a small deck of cards that serves as a short series of weak but fast projectiles
Up Smash: King Dice's head jumps up a higher distance and has three sharp spikes pop out from the top and sides
Down Smash: King Dice will enlarge his gloves to massive proportions to clap the foes
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Grabs: King Dice will thrust one hand to grab the foe by the shoulder and begins grinding their feet
Forward Throw: King Dice will turn his free hand into a mallet and smacks the foe away
Back Throw: King Dice will scoop the foe with his hands and launches them behind him
Up Throw: King Dice has a magic hat pop out under him that sucks the enemy in, and launches them in the air with some confetti flying out
Down Throw: King Dice pulls out a giant 8-ball that crushes the foe
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Neutral Aerial: King Dice will throw some dominos to either side of him as weak projectiles
Forward Aerial: King Dice takes his head and swings it like a flail
Back Aerial: King Dice bends his legs behind him with a buzzsaw spinning between his feet
Up Aerial: King Dice will enlarge his hands to clap the air above him
Down Aerial: King Dice spins down for a drilling kick, moving similarly to how he shifts into the ground
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Neutral Special: King Dice throws a bottle of an undisclosed beverage that serves as a gravity-affected projectile that does basic damage, but will have a chance to be stunned. If it lands on the ground, it shatters and leaves the floor slippery for ten seconds so that dashing enemies will trip
Side Special: King Dice rides a skeleton horse similar to Wario's motorcycle, and will fall apart the moment it hits someone. However, this initial attack does massive damage, even with its large end lag as King Dice is stunned from the loss of his prized racing horse
Up Special: King Dice will use the power of the cruelest gambling machine, a claw game. This has him fling his arm in the air as it takes the form of a catching claw, and this will either insta-grab enemies or latch onto platforms
Down Special: King Dice pulls out a giant spinning di, this will spin around for numbers 1-4. Each number will summon one of his minibosses, but anyone can summon them based on what number faces the screen when it is hit. The glowing di will just disappear after ten seconds.

1. Mr. Wheezy is a stationary summon that shoots fire balls that bounce across the floor for weak damage, but far traveling distance. He can take 15% damage before disappearing
2. Pirouletta spins across the stage for flinching damage, but can also serve as a wall. She takes 15% damage
3. Chips Bettigan will bounce up and down, doing damage by head butting foes above him, or bury foes too close to the ground when he lands. He takes 15% damage
4. Hopus Pocus will teleport between stages and shoots card suits as projectiles that do minor damage but have a chance to launch foes

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Final Smash: Right Handed Royal Smash
King Dice gets a Tommy Gun that he shoots at a short distance to create a smoke cloud that traps any foes caught in it for a cinematic final smash where they are stuck in King Dice's board game where he summons a stampede of playing cards that crush the enemy
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Alternate Colors:

1. Basic colors
2. Black suit and di spots based on the clubs, spades, and devil himself
3. Red suit and di spots referencing hearts, diamonds, and Cuphead
4. Blue suit and di spots referencing Mugman
5. Yellow suit and di spots referencing Ms. Chalice
6. A gray-toned outfit and spots based on the 2nd anniversary poster
7. A green-toned outfit and spots
8. A black and white colored skin

Taunts:

1. King Dice waggles his finger at the camera
2. King Dice shuffles a deck of cards
3. King Dice pulls out two contracts before stashing them away

Victory Animations:

1. King Dice laughs menacingly before swallowing the camera
2. A di falls on the floor, King Dice's head appears on it, and it rises up for him to give a bow
3. King Dice raises a leg as he whips out a cane and top hat and sings a "Hi-De-Ho!"

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Intro Animation:
King Dice spins out from a hole in the ground
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I seriously overestimated how hard it would be to do his moveset, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. So now it's only one more to go..... I wonder if you can do a DLC for a DLC wishlist, give me some ideas please before a dancing %$#@* takes the stage.

1. Centipede
2. The Heavy
3. Cooking Mama
4. Dr. Eggman
5. Jibanyan
6. Gengar
7. Monokuma
8. Tom Nook
9. King Dice
10. Cartoon

Hey all. Here’s another post with another person’s ideal additions to the game. And yes, I want bugs to be fixed, too. I just wanted to write up a list of things besides bugs, since we all know they exist. I’ve organized these by categories to an extent, but some of them certainly overlap.
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Gameplay:
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* Decisions that affect the game. I understand that can be difficult given the multiplayer nature, but it is not impossible, and very much needed.
* Phasing. This builds on top of the former. Phasing would allow us to see different things in certain places depending on where we are in the story and what we’ve done. This was already sort of implemented with Wastelanders and interiors, but it could be expanded upon to really improve the game. If I make a decision that blows up another faction’s town, then the town should look destroyed to me, but intact for someone who did not destroy it. World of Warcraft does this very well. When you enter certain zones, you’re kind of just instantly phased into a zone that is tailored to you and your game. Your party members are still visible on your map, and if they’re at the same point in the story, they remain visible to you and you all see the same things. If they’re not, then they remain visible on your map, but invisible in the actual game and are phased into their own version of the zone. I know the fallout engine is old, but so is WoW’s, and they’ve had to work on it a lot over the years. Phasing was only implemented back in 2014, I believe.
* Mail and banking systems. It drives me insane that I can’t send items to my alts, or even other people. It’s also maddening that I can’t access an account-wide stash. Some of my characters have exactly what the others need, but the only way I can transfer it over is by being a FO1st member and then hoping I can log in and out fast enough on a private server to pick up some stuff that I dropped on the other character. That’s not a great system. Plus, think about how fun it would be to RP as a mailman in Appalachia. Just leave some goodies in mailboxes and skip off.
* Better Survival. I can appreciate trying to balance survival needs without crippling us if we forget to sleep or eat, but… survival adds so much to the game. We’re in a desolate wasteland, trying to rebuild society while also trying to find edible food, drinkable water, and not get destroyed by a giant mutated bat. I’ve always found RPGs so strange in that they rarely force you to actually take care of your character. You’re just this invincible adventurer that never has to eat or drink or sleep or even hit the john. We have to restore mana, but not our bellies? When Fallout started including survival elements, it made the game next-level for me. FNV was so much harder and exciting when I needed to find food without a cazador killing me every five seconds. FO4 was incredible with all the crafting and cooking and dying before I found a bed. FO76 has the advantage of not needing to save, so survival can really be implemented without making the game as difficult as previous entries have been. Recently, the food and water debuffs were nerfed, which is the opposite of what should have been done. With all of these amazing recipes in the game, there should be a need to eat them. We should need our water purifiers. We should need a bed. We should be weakened if we don’t take care of ourselves. Diseases should actually hurt us. Survival has been one of the unique, and brilliant traits in Fallout as an RPG, and it should be expanded upon, not shrunk down.
* Fishing. I’ve seen a lot of people asking for this, with a small amount saying they wouldn’t like it. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to use the feature. Fishing could be so freaking fun. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Action button to cast, action button to reel in. However, with fishing tournaments, unique loot, new food recipes, new weapons, new enemy encounters, and more, fishing would quickly add a fantastic experience to the game. There’s gotta be mutated fish in those waters, and I wanna catch them. It’s always puzzled me that this wasn’t implemented in FO4, honestly. All of Far Harbor was fishy, and yet, there were no fish. We could also have fish nets/traps in our camps; something we can put in the water and use to catch fish over time. I loved the idea of trappers in FH, and this would also allow some great RP.
* Mini-games. Holotapes of games that we can play on our pip-boys are cool! It’d be even cooler if we could place arcade machines in our camp like we could do in FO4. Maybe in a future settlement, there’s a casino. Let’s wager some caps and go for it. Got a deck of cards? Cool, let’s play some Caravan while we wait for an event to pop up.
* Achievements. I love the challenges. I know not everyone does, and that’s fine. I like having to work toward weird little goals. An achievement system could add to the current season passes and challenges. I don’t know exactly what it would do, but I know that I would like seeing a banner pop up saying that I’ve achieved something, and then be able to show off my achievement somehow with a trophy or something. Obviously, Scoreboard does this in a way already, it would just be cool to have other types of achievements to display.
* Better farming. If I can plant a wild blackberry at my camp, I should also be able to plant a pumpkin or cranberry or anything else. Maybe we have to complete a questline to plant certain things, that’s totally fine! I like the idea that certain ingredients and plants are more rare and difficult to attain. It only makes sense that we should be able to plant them in our camp, too, though.
* More maps. This one is obviously something that should grow overtime. I know there's hints that we may be able to go to other states fairly soon, and I really hope that's true. It sounded like they will be places we've visited in past games, which is an awesome idea. I would love to see new areas, though! We've yet to visit really anywhere in the south, but there's a ton of potential for the Fallout down there, I think!
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Roleplay and Combat:
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* More clothes. I dunno about y’all, but I like to make characters based off a combination of name, outfits, “occupation,” and then their build. So, for instance, a mailman as mentioned above would be wearing a postman outfit (model exists in fo4 already) to fit his theme, and then maybe specialize in thrown weapons. I mean, that sucker should be able to just chuck stuff at their enemies (will expand more on throwables later). But, there’s no mailman outfit. For all the gunslinger fun, there’s really not a whole lot of cowboy-esque outfits. The “western” ones are decent, but the pants look pretty weird on the characters for whatever reason. Some more cowboy outfits would be great. More flannels, please, holy moly. We’re in Appalachia. There should be flannels everywhere. I want to run around as a lumberjack and just decimate people with an axe. There’s so many fun possibilities for characters, we just need more clothes to make more unique looking builds.
* Display character names. Please, please, please. What is the point in naming a character and coming up with a story and theme and build if everyone just sees “biscuitlicker42069” in the game??? It makes no sense. There is absolutely no reason to not show character names. If we want to play with people again, we just add them. Still don’t need to know their account name. And, please allow us to rename characters. Other games simply charge a fee to rename your characters. I’d love if this were a free feature, but whatever, do what you must, just allow us to change their names. If we can change everything else on the spot, we should also be able to change their names, especially if their names are being displayed.
* Special/perk resets. Let us go to an NPC and wipe everything so that we can easily rebuild characters. My first character was alllll over the place. Now I’m having to spend twice the amount of time I would by just starting a new character to be able to move his build around and make him actually viable. I don’t want to delete my first character. I just want to rebuild him (and maybe change his name).
* Give us more than 5 character slots. Why???? Why are we limited to 5???? I make alts on alts in every single game. I’m an altoholic. It’s a problem. But usually a game at least lets me make like, 10 characters per server. Not 5 account-wide. There are so many different builds you could try in this game, yet you’re forced to choose 5. I want my throwables mailman. I want my bloodied chef. I want my junkie cowboy. I want my irradiated barbarian. I want my power armored energy heavy gunner that works in the mines and collects ore in his excavator set. I want a stealth archer. I want a sniper. I want a fisherman that stabs mirelurks with harpoons and a pole hook. I want a farmer that runs around with a flaming pitchfork. I want a hippie musician that pacifies animals but demolishes humans with a guitar sword. I want a character that worships cryptids and only uses primal weapons. I want a bartender that just launches molotovs. There’s SO many things that we could do with all the perks and all the very cool weapons out there. We should have more character slots to be able to try these things out.
* Better throwables. As is, throwing knives are great until about level 20. Nothing makes them do more damage. Sheepsquatch quills have poison damage, but that’s it. Throwing weapons are really untapped right now. They could be so much fun. Meat cleavers are so savage, and taking my chef around with a rolling pin, or ripper, or flamer, or meat hook, and then also launching meat cleavers at enemies would be incredible. More perks that improve explosives and throwables in general are really needed to make them usable.
* More Factions. I don’t particularly care for the BoS, or the Enclave. I still enjoyed running around doing errands for MODUS, and I’m sure I’ll still enjoy the BoS quests. I didn’t like Paige’s attitude upon first meeting him. I did like Meg, though. And I enjoyed completing the Wastelanders quest line with both of them. Getting to work with these four factions is great. I’m a huge fan of working with factions and even playing multiple sides in my Fallout playthroughs. With that said, it’d be awesome to see more factions.
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Community:
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* Hub cities. Crater and Foundation were steps in the right direction, but not many people hang out there. Hub cities would be great for trade and teaming up, and make the game feel more alive.
* On the same note, perhaps an Auction House. I love vendors, don’t get me wrong. They bring people to your camps, and that’s awesome. But maybe we could have like themed weekly auctions. You can only auction certain types of items that fit the weekly themes. I dunno. Just a thought.
* Chat so that we can talk in a trade channel in the city, or a zone’s general channel, or with our party, etc.
* Dedicated servers. Now, I love being able to server hop. But the game desperately needs some sort of structure like this. Being able to hit up your friends and say, “Hey, I’m playing on Rob-Co tonight, let’s all head there,” would open up a lot of multiplayer options, including the auction house as mentioned above. It’d also definitely make clans/guilds more of a thing, which is a big plus. This would also!!!! Really!!!!! Help!!!!!! Server disconnection issues!!!!!!! Even if we still D/C, we can just log back into the server we were D/C’d from! No more losing loot or missing events because we got disconnected in the middle of a fight! Just log back in and continue! (That’s not to say that server stability improvements wouldn’t be welcomed, though…)
* Allow more players in the servers. I don’t know if this was a design choice, or a necessity due to the engine, but I really want more players in the servers. Sometimes the maps are depressingly empty, so I server hop, and find a ton of people on a different one. Allowing us to pick dedicated servers and allowing more players on each server would really build an even stronger community.
* This one is probably controversial, but, Level Caps. It’s so unbelievably weird to me that we’re allowed to level willy-nilly infinitely. What’s the point of that? Why are there players in the thousands? We never should’ve been allowed to level past 50. I think we should be reset down to 50, allowed to rebuild our characters for free (then pay caps to an npc to rebuild afterwards), and then steadily increase the cap over time. When “expansions” or DLC come out, then we get an increase, with fresh new (or old if you needed an old one) perks and special points that we can add, instead of having to take a point from somewhere else. This is how pretty much every other online game works, and it would make leveling a lot more exciting when the cap increases.
* Instances/Dungeons. The game really needs more of these. A lot more. Give us more end-game content. Give us a reason to need certain builds. Give us a reason to need a power armored 2H melee build, a stealthy ranged build, a medic build, a commando build, etc. all working together. Currently, teams are just kind of there. They’re almost never necessary. No roles are filled. It’s not like we have a tank, 2 dps, and a healer. But we could, so easily, and it’d be so, so, so tight.
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The game has incredible potential. It really does. It is so unique. It has fascinating, deep lore that most of us have been invested in for years and years. The setting is breathtaking, and I can’t wait to see where else we go. However, it kind of scratches the surfaces of survival, RPG, and MMO, without really developing a solid foundation in any of them. I really feel adding some, if not all, of these things would help counter that. I’m looking forward to playing this game for years to come and seeing how it progresses. I played WoW for around 11 years (and will probably hop back into it soon to try out the new expansion), and I absolutely love being able to invest time into games like that and see my hard work go toward something. WoW felt like a second home. Many of us play video games for enjoyment, for an escape, for the feeling of success, for community. FO76 is a brilliant game capable of doing the same for a very, very long time. And that’s a good thing! We probably won’t see Fallout 5 for another decade. This game will be our wasteland home until then, and sometimes homes need some renovations and additions.
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I may add more bullets or points to this list if I think of more, and will be sure to add a note when/if I do. I would love to hear what you all think, and what additions you would like.
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I want to thank everyone that works on this game. I know it probably hasn’t been even remotely easy. I know that Covid has probably been affecting your lives, too. I know that at times, it probably seems like nothing you do will ever make the players happy. I know that your passion for games may be weakened at times because of the stress surrounding your jobs. Your work is greatly appreciated, though. You are bringing an experience like no other to us. You are providing these moments of joy. These escapes. The setting for our communities. Thank you for everything you’ve done, and everything you continue to do. You are appreciated.

So I just wanted to share some ideas that I've created these past 4 years for a fan Persona game and see if anybody found it interesting. Although this is is mostly just a project for myself, I wanted to share just in case someone out there has criticisms or problems with it.
I'll start with the protagonists of the game. Yes, there's going to be more than one, twins to be precise. You can choose which one you'd like to live the story through, which will definitely change some of the experiences in the story, such as social links, general events, etc. These two are 16 years at the time of the story, just like most other persona protags, but they actually live in the U.S. initially. Due to their father passing though, they leave and live with their mother in Japan, along with her husband and son, their step-family (Their mother and father separated when they were young, the father taking main custody while they visited their mother every summer in Japan).
The school they will attend is based off of the ASIJ school in Chofu, Tokyo, which is an International school (An international school is a school that adopts another country's educational curriculum; ASIJ or American School in Japan is a school that adopts the American school system). So their will be a change in the game's school system, like not having a school outfit requirement for example. This is were the protags will meet most of the main cast, though some will be introduced outside of the school.
*Also another important factor, this sorry is actually going to take place over the course of two years. For story purposes and just a wanting of more character interaction.
Speaking of the main cast, it consists of the two protags, the mascot character (I'm planning on it being a fish ;D), and 8 other main cast characters, leaving a total of 11. All of these characters are capable of having a social link with the main protagonist, as well as being romanced no matter which protag you choose (this excludes the mascot character though because there ain't N O way I'm condoning dating fish I'm sorry). I could write about every main character here, but that would take hours so maybe some other time if y'all are interested.
Here are the main ideas for the respresentation behind the main character's shadows, personas and social links: regret, desire, and change. The way this will work for each character is similar to P4, whenever someone is dragged into the world in which shadows exist, it will create an extension of that person's biggest regret/desire, usually in the form of something familiar to that person. For example, one of the main character's has someone close to him die by suicide. He massively regrets not being there for his friend, and just wants him back. This will take form as his shadow, that being the friend that he lost. (Kinda messed up, right?) The personas will come after the person has come to accept what has happened in the past. Though the complete moving on from the past will likely be shown through social links with the main protags.
For now, the main sort of idea behind personas is drifting. For each game there was a sort of theme for every main characters persona, P3 being greek mythology, P4 being japanese mythology, and P5 being famous thieves (PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG). As of now I'm going with famous figures that suffer from regret. For example, the tale of La Llorona will be the inspiration behind one. (La Llorona or "the weeping woman" is hispanic folklore; long story short it's a woman who mourns her drowned children. There are multiple iterations of this story though, so I recommend looking it up if you're interested).
Although I haven't completely figured out the medium the world of shadows will exist through (I was thinking something technologocial as the color theme will be green), I do know that I want to include the Amanojaku. This is a mythological figure usually represented by a small Oni that is able to provoke someone's deepest desires, which fits in with the representations behind the shadows (Again, the iterations could change). I was thinking that this would be the creature that took people into that world, but I still need to work or specifically how it is going to work.
The Velvet Room is going to be based off of a casino this time around. This is to go along with the regret, desire and change themes, as casinos usually come along with that. I was thinking about involving a gambling system when fusing personas, but it's only an optional things. I still have to work this idea out too, but I just know it's going to be based off of the gambling game 'Roulette'.
Before anything else though, I want to restate that this is just a personal project. It's nothing official, just something that I wanted to create as a "love-letter" to he persona series, and things I wish I could have seen in a persona game myself.
I know this ambitious, don't worry. I can't draw, compose music, create full on stories, code: it's going to be a process. I'm currently working on these skills so if anything it'll probably be a good decade before I can actually do anything with these ideas.
That's it for now! Sorry if this is vague, I just want to GAURD some of my ideas. Not that they are absolutely game-changing or anything, it's either just specifics or things that I'd rather not have other people see until I'm ready.
Thank you so much if you read through all of this! Please let me know if you have anything to say about this idea at all.

Hello everyone ! First post here - I don't know where to post this, so I hope it will be welcomed here.
So I heard about the possibility for a "Battle Royal" themed on R.E. and the few of reactions I witnessed about it were pretty negative - and I could agree as R.E. isn't well known for its PvP content... But I think I have an idea for something that people could enjoy - with originality, re-playability, difficulty and keeping a game close to events happening in the R.E. universe (based on the last "remake" version of the games).
So, let me start: - date & place : 2X september 1998 ; Racoon City - Casino-Hotel Yes, "again Racoon City"; but this time you won't live the last days of the event, but one of the hot-spot at the begining of the outbreak. Umbrella, to test the virus on a bigger scale, tried different methods to spread it in the City. One of them was to infect a good number of patient within the City to release them all at once. The Casino-Hotel, was selected. Opening a good number of events, the building-complex is currently hosting hundreds of people.
The Casino-Hotel: An impressive complex, with several floors of apartments, a great looking casino, a party-room (which is today for a wedding) and an opera-theater. There is also a specific floor for the security & direction of the Hotel; an underground facility & hidden corridors for the maintenance.
- players : 2 to 20-ish? Each player wil incarne a random NPC - like this, no one is supposed to recognize who is a player or not at first glance. Everyone start in their appartment (1 playeroom); equiped with a combat-knife (no durability), on ordinary map of the hotel (no indication of back-doors, restricted areas). But there is still some customisation possible: the dressing allows you to change your clothings to hide better on some areas (tuxedo; tourist outfit; ...).
- objectives : (1) survive the event (duh) - (2) escape by completing one of the multiple-routes. Once the game start, the phone in your room will ring : if you are new / beginer or want informations as a reminder, you will use it. The HUD will show you 3 main faction-quests - you can choose to "select" one (the quest will remain apparent on your HUD) or not. But here's the twist : accepted or not - you can choose to stick with this faction, or to betray it!
The factions: (1) Umbrella's agency - find the spreading devices (2-3 existing on the map); select a way to use it (different possibilities as water-tanks (infect apartments & lodges) & fire sprinkler systems (infect a specific room)); once you get a critical number of infected : rendez-vous at the rooftop for extraction by helicopter (2) RCPD - find clues of Umbrella's terrorist activity; try to catch the devices or to sabotage Umbrella's agents; as the virus will spread anyway (slowly or quickly depending on players' actions) : call the RCPD to quarantine the buildings & for extraction (a timer will be set and you need to defend the exit that some Players will try to open. (3) Mercenaries - your objectives are to get a sample of the virus, steal Umbrella's document and use all the chaos made to exit (the underground should be the best bet) - working alone or in group, you are without any assistances from the outside.
Remember: whether you succeed or not at your quests, the Casino-Hotel will fall to the virus.
Gameplay: If people didn't formed a squad before the game, you start as a lone-wolf without any indication if your neighbor is a player, or not, and what could be its faction/intentions. Some areas are overcrowded (and with a type of outfit; wedding-hall = tuxedo), for you to hide, infect. In the first part of the game: all players want to get to restricted areas; and you decide your strategy : open-violence, taking a Casino's security outfit, stealing a key or simply following an other Player doing the dirty work for you. If you succeed to sneak behind someone, you could have a special 1vs1 melee interaction : during the animation, you will have to smash some buttons to execute the performance. But if you are on the defensive position, it isn't an insta-kill as you will have yourself an interaction to resist. Sadly for both of the player struggling : the animation could be stopped by a third-party, killing one or both. => this sneak-attack will then play a lot in the first stage of the game, but could also create epic moments. For the gun-gameplay: not much to say. All Casino's security is equiped with stun-gun, or 9mm pistol; some rare Hotel's clients could also have a weapon on them / or apartment; the security-floor is also well-equiped and a secret cache in the underground could provide Hunk's style of equipment.
Add to that: you should have the ability to barricade doors; sabotage elevators to stop the Players & Zombies, but it would only slow things down (for them to get in, or you to get out...).
End result: who win? First - the ones who survived ; then you get a result for each Faction's accomplishments: if you're route is linked to the ranked #1 one, you get a bonus in your Total Score.
My guess on the Time per Mission : between 20min to 40min?
Rewards: you should be able to buy with your scores, additionnal clothes, custom appearances for your weapons
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tl;dr : a 3rd person-shooter, on a big Hotel-Casino map; playing like a spy-game at first, you end-up fighting for your survival while innocents are trapped and become part of a zombie-crowd. Help, make alliance, or use & betray other players to get a better score.
Hope you had a good read at my engrish and that you like my idea/concept.

Slothrop's Hawaiian Shirt by Zak Smith (2006).
I just want to begin by thanking u/Bloomsdayclock for coordinating this endeavor, for all of the previous posts thus far, and for the enthusiastic interaction and scholarship that’s been happening in the comments for each post. This group read has rekindled my love for this book and is helping me understand it in so many different ways and in such greater depth that it's honestly like I’m reading a different book at this point. Also, kudos to each previous poster for creating a coherent post! The book is complex enough on its own but once you start going down the rabbit hole, sussing out the references, reading through some of the scholarship, etc., I almost found myself paralyzed by information overload (kinda feeling a bit like Charlie Kelly trying to figure out who “Pepe Silvia” is :) ). When this reading group started, I was like, “damn, I’m trying to read this insanely complex novel and the group posts are just as long, dense, and complex” and now I’ve gone and written some super long and dense post, too. To paraphrase either Blaise Pascal or Mark Twain (or Woodrow Wilson or apparently a rather large number of dead white guys from history): I would have written a shorter post if I’d had the time! Apologies in advance!
Anyways, this post will (attempt to) cover the start of the second section of the novel, Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering. The events that transpire are zany and sinister, titillating and deeply sad. There is a mix of images both gorgeous and disgusting and much of the planning and plotting that took place at “The White Visitation” during the first section are starting to come to fruition in part deux. For each “Episode”, I will provide a general summary of the “action” and then some commentary and we’ll finish this post up with a few discussion questions. Let’s begin!
Episode 22
Summary
Slothrop is on furlough/leave at a casino in Monaco (from what I’ve read...I thought it was France before, still not completely sure) that’s been renamed in honor of the big fat slob that led Hitler’s air force during the war. He’s in paradise but wakes up “...[waiting] for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket” (p. 181). His friend Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and a somewhat suspicious friend of his, Teddy Bloat (“[there’s] something about the way he talks to Slothrop, patronizing? Maybe nervous…” (p. 182)), are staying down the hall. They’re talking about meeting some girls but, as the first song of the section reminds us, Englishmen can be very shy. Slothrop is happy to help his “buddies” out, but tells them not to “expect [him] to put it in for [them]” (p. 183). Classic Slothrop!
Slothrop decides to wear a hideous (or amazing, depending on your sensibilities) genuine Hawaiian shirt that he received from his brother Hogan in the Pacific. The shirt seems to emit a glow (once he steps into the sun, it “blazes into a refulgent life of its own” (!) (p. 184), so Tantivy, “friend” that he is, tries to convince Slothrop to cover it up with scratchy Savile Row coat.
The trio hit the beach and the ladies are on them already. They’ve got food and booze and are ready for a nice day on the beach. The morning seems too good even for a bit of the “early paranoia”. And then Bloat ruins everything by drawing Slothrop’s attention to the woman down the beach being attacked by “the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen outside of the movies”. Slothrop rushes off to intervene and, left without recourse, starts trying to bash the cephalopod on the head with a wine bottle to no avail. Thankfully, Bloat just happens to have a big, tasty crab on his person, which he tosses to Slothrop with the advice, “It’s hungry, it’ll go for the crab. Don’t kill it, Slothrop.” Slothrop uses the crab to bait away the animal from its current prey, noticing that it does not seem to be in good mental health. He eventually tosses the crab, like a discus, into the sea, and the octopus follows. The damsel has been saved, Slothrop is championed as a brave hero and his first thought is where in the fuck did that crab come from.
The exchange:
“Tantivy smiles and flips a small salute. “Good show!” cheers Teddy Bloat. “I wouldn’t have wanted to try that myself!”
“Why not? You had that crab. Saaay-where’d you get that crab?”
“Found it,” replies Bloat with a straight face. Slothrop stares at this bird but can’t get eye contact. What th’ fuck is going on?” (p. 187).
The damsel thanks Slothrop. Her ID bracelet identifies her as Katje Borgesius. Slothrop feels like he knows her and “...voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate….it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in…” (p. 188). How does Slothrop deal with this? By dividing up his present company into a dichotomy: the increasingly drunk Tantivy, “a messenger from Slothrop’s innocent, pre-octopus past” flirting with the girls and Bloat, “perfectly sober, mustache unruffled, regulation uniform [on the fucking beach!], watching [him] closely” (p. 188). And then there’s Katje, who, with her glance, makes Slothrop think she knows something (what?), asking him “Did you know all the time about the octopus? I thought so because it was so like a dance-all of you” (p. 188). Well, fuck me! Katje then tells “Little Tyrone” to be “very careful” and that “Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet…” (p. 189). Now that’s a “meet cute” for ya!
Commentary/Questions

1. Is the casino fully owned and controlled by Them at this point (is César Flebótomo (Spanish for “sandfly”) a(n) (un)willing patsy in Their employ?). Is it the “lab” for this “phase” of the Slothrop experiment. Or is it just secured enough to ensure the results of the experiment aren’t tainted by some unforeseen variable/interference?
2. Teddy Bloat seems like a purposeful pun in reference to the bureaucracy of government/intel agencies
3. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick’s name is also filled with meaning
4. Songs are one way that Pynchon fills his book with “the language of the preterite”, a term from Weisenburger used to describe the “slang, underworld cant, songs, games, folk-genres, and material culture” used by Pynchon to pit “open, unsanctioned, and “low” languages” against the “closed, orthodox, privileged language of a culture”. This idea is expanded on by literary critic/philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who notes that the “heteroglossic” aspect of novels allows them to be radical, open-ended artworks filled with a variety of voices that each embody a particular time and place (his term for this idea is a “chronotope”).
5. The whole episode is just soaked in paranoia, from beginning to end. Whatever Slothrop thought he thought he was feeling in Section 1 has been taken up a notch. He senses a plot but keeps playing along.
6. Is “Borgesius” a tribute to J.L. Borges?
7. “Little Tyrone” echoes “Baby Tyrone” from Jamf’s experiments and maybe is supposed to make us realize that while the antics in this episode could possibly be construed as a “loss” of Slothrop’s “innocence” that was actually taken from him as a baby.

Episode 23
Summary
Dr. Porkyevitch (“Porky the pig”?) and “Grisha” (“[frisking] happily in his special enclosure”) stare back at the “blazing bijou” of the Casino from their ship, contemplating their future now that they may no longer be of use to Pointsman, yearning for traces of the Russia they’ve been exiled from.
To the casino: Katje is a vision in shades of green and is escorted by a two-star general and a brigadier. Is it Pudding? RHIP :) Slothrop and Tantivy in the dining room. Slothrop raises the “The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffic” to get the room singing of his friend’s drunken exploits so that he can speak to Katje who uses the cacophony to invite him to her room after midnight!
Slothrop then probes his buddy to see if he notices anything funny going on. Tantivy brushes him off a bit (“there’s always, you know, an element of Slothropian paranoia to contend with…”(p. 192)) but then concedes that the bastard Bloat is receiving coded messages. Ha! And it turns out Bloat has become a bit of a different man over the last few years, something more than being “Blitz rattled”. He’s also warned Tantivy away from Katje (“I’d stay clear of that one if I were you” (p. 193)) and Tantivy feels used by Bloat (“being tolerated for as long as he can use me” (p. 193)). The encounter ends with Tantivy telling Slothrop to be careful and, should he need help, he’ll be there for him.
At midnight, Slothrop leaves for his rendezvous with Ms. Borgesius, “ascending flights of red-carpeted stairway (Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here)” (p. 194). Arriving, he teases her about her date at dinner and then about their slightly sinister “meet cute” while examining her closet which is absolutely filled to the brim with a variety of outfits. The “Too Soon To Know (Fox-Trot)” before they get down to it. As he is undressing her, he notices “...the moonlight only whitens her back, and there is a still a dark side, her ventral side, her face, than he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are gone and there’s only the red animal reflection when the light comes to strike no telling when the light-” (p. 196). Yikes! As they fuck, she wonders if his “careful technique” is for her or “wired into the Slothropian Run-together they briefed her on”. Either way, “she will move him, she will not be mounted by a plastic shell” (p. 196-197).
Then, a slapstick fight with a seltzer bottle (planted by Them?) that has Slothrop looking for a banana cream pie to toss (classic!) after which they fall asleep, lying like two Ss. In the morning, their post-coital bliss is interrupted as Little Tyrone is rudely awakened by the sound of someone robbing his pants in the room next door. He chases after the thief, first naked, then dressed in a purple satin bedsheet. As he’s chasing, from way down the hallway, “a tiny head appears around a corner, a tiny hand comes out and gives Slothrop the tiny finger” (p. 199). Haha! He chases the thief up a tree only to have the tree cut down while he’s in it. The thief escapes and Bloat and some general find Slothrop a mess.
Bloat takes Slothrop to his room where, “every stitch of clothing he owns is gone, including his Hawaiian shirt. What the fuck. Groaning, he rummages in the desk. Empty. Closets empty. Leave papers, ID, everything, taken… Hogan’s shirt bothers him most of all” (p. 201). Nobody knows where Tantivy’s gone off to. Bloat gives Slothrop a uniform (“a piece of Whitehall on the Riviera” (p. 201)) which doesn’t fit but the book advises, “Live wi’ the way it feels mate, you’ll be in it for a while” (p. 201). Slothrop ponders the meaning of the architecture and design of his surrounds, but “shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room [The Himmer-Spielsaal, no less] is being used from something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical….but, but….” (p. 202). THE WORLD OVER THERE. Against this realization Slothrop issues the only spell he knows, a defiant “Fuck You”. Walking, rainstorm, entertainment at the casino, no one has seen the dancing girls from the drunken breakfast, Slothrop is “finding only strangers where he looks” before freaking out in the casino, then getting wet in the rain, then returning to Katje, the only place he knew to come.
Commentary

1. I love “The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffic” and would like to write a similar tune about the inebriated shenanigans committed by my best friend and I during college.
2. The bit about Oxford and Harvard not really existing to educate was a nice touch (p. 193)
3. “Snazzy” is an “Americanism” in the 40s! (p. 195).
4. Slothrop ponders an impending loss of innocence (but, again, it seems like that has already happened). He has nothing and no one in a foreign country and the sensation that his life is being purposefully, possibly nefariously influenced by forces he can vaguely perceive. “It’s here that saturation hits him, it’s all this playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can’t see...is suddenly speaking out of the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day - terrified, he turns, turns out into the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust, are glaring off the glazed cobbles.” And then, “How did this all turn against him so fast? His friends old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing connecting him to what he’s been, have just, fucking, vanished. How can he meet this with any kind of grace?” (p. 205)
5. The word “holocaust” is used quite a bit in this story
6. Setting this all in the casino is a nice touch: there is the illusion of chance and luck in a casino but the house always wins.
7. The juxtaposition of the comic (seltzer fight) with the tragic (Slothrop alone, trying to understand what’s happening) heightens both effects.

Episode 24
Summary
They wake up with Katje calling slothrop a pig, which responds to by oinking. At breakfast, he is taking a refresher course in technical German and learning about The Rocket. His tutor, Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck (who speaks 33 languages!) aiding his understanding of German circuit schematics by way of ancient German runes. Slothrop understands immediately that Dodson-Truck is in on the plot but not sure how (“There are times when Slothrop can actually find a clutch mechanism between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a power train whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage, feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness… it is not exactly unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won’t mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. But he can’t fit any of it into a pattern, there’s no way to connect somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody like Katje…. The real enemy’s somewhere back in that London anyways” (p. 207).
Back in the Himmler-Spielsaal: “in the twisted gilt playing-room his secret motions clarify for him, some. The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims.
When they choose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean it? What Wheel did They set in motion?
Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something very bad. Something was done to him and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn’t he, in her “futureless look,” found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers?” (p. 208-209). “It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola.”
No more news from London or Achtung. Bloat is gone now, too. Sir Stephen and Katje with their identical Corporate Smiles to dazzle him while they rob his identity. But! “He lets it happen” (p. 210).
Slothrop is getting hardons after his rocket study sessions and then goes looking for relief with Katje. Sir Stephen appears to be timing these erections! So, Slothrop gets the smart idea to get him drunk via a drinking game and many, many people end up getting sloshed on some high class bubbly. Half the room is singing the “Vulgar Song”. Slothrop and Sir Steve get pretty hammered and start walking through a nice sunset, where Slothrop sees robed figures, hundreds of miles tall, on the horizon. Sir Stephen informs Slothrop that he’s got “potency issues” (which makes him the perfect observer for Slothrop’s sexual misadventures… “no nasty jissom getting all over their reports, you know” (p. 216)). He’s about to tell Slothrop the secret of “The Penis He Thought Was His Own”...
...but then starts waxing nostalgic about Sir Stephen’s son and his wife, Nora and her “Ideology of the Zero”. An interlude with Eventyr, Sachsa, Leni… “but where will Leni be now? Either we didn’t mean to lose her - either it was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us even swear is our love, or someone has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept secret, and Sachsa’s death is part of it too” (p. 218). More on Sachsa’s death.
Then, Sir Stephen vanishes (“but not before telling Slothrop that his erections of high interest to Fitzmaurice House”). Katje is pissed that Slothy got Sir Steve drunk enough to dish on the plot. They fight and then fuck. More rocket study sessions. The rocket taking off looks like a peacock, def pfau. Slothrop pressing for more information, Katje rebuffing, warning/advising“Oh, Slothrop… You don’t want me. What they’re after may, but you don’t. No more than A4 wants London. But I don’t think they know...about other selves...yours or the Rocket’s. No more than you do. If you can’t understand it now, at least remember. That’s all I can do for you” (p. 224).
Then, “They go back up to her room again: cock, cunt, the Monday rain at the windows” (p. 224) (Oh, Tom, you romantic!). And finally, a bit of kazoo music, a final night together, and Katje disappears, too.
Commentary

1. Slothrop makes an important connection to his childhood and wonders if Katje knows about it/whether she’s with him because of it (ol’ Pynch even manages to work in the rocket, too!): “You were in London while they were coming down. I was in ‘s Gravenhage while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know” (p. 209).
2. More on the import of setting the action in the Casino: “The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel-where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House does, of course, keep turning a profit…” (p. 209).
3. A beautiful passage: “‘Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset...this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted...of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul” (p. 214). Always dualities in this book.
4. “A pornography of blueprints” (p. 224). is a nice turn of phrase.
5. Foreshadowing: “She has her hair combed high today in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black, only the outboard few lashes missed and left blond.
6. Connection to Nabokov: I really do think “Signs and Symbols” influenced this novel. Lines like this, “Here it is again, that identical-looking Other World - is he gonna have this to worry about, now? What th’ - lookit these trees - each long frond hanging, stuny, dizzying, in laborious dry point against the sky, each so perfectly placed…” (p. 225) remind me so much of the atmosphere in the story (itself about paranoia (“referential mania”)). This is a key excerpt from the Nabokov ditty: “In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.” Obviously this guy is, uh, slightly more clinical, but I still think the atmosphere/tone is similar between the two.

Episode 25
Summary
We begin this episode with a Pavlov lecture about the physiological symptoms of hysteria and one of Pointsman’s poems (which he never shows to anyone). Then to the “White Visitation” chaps (Pointsman, Grunton, Throwster, Groast) rumor-mongering about their future. Things are looking bleak. Pudding might cut off funding, “Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day” (p. 227), and Sir Steven’s got the P.M.’s son-in-law making embarrassing inquiries. But Pointsman is calm. Very calm. In fact, “[b]y facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too, of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires - on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman activities - they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter” (p. 230). And then we find out that Pointman’s figured out how to play Pudding to keep his support (more on that in a bit…) as he’s figured out Treacle, Groast, and Throwster, how to use them and manipulate them to get what he wants. What a fucking devious guy!
Webley Silvernail sticks around after the meeting and imagines the lab animals putting on a beguine performance of a song called “Pavlovia” (right after this realization by Silvernail: “From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze...but who watches from above, who notes their reponses?” (p. 229)). And it’s all song and dance for a bit but since it’s Pynchon, it’s followed by an incredible poignant/tragic moment of clarity: “They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest start. Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death-death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die…. “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday - that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive….” The guest star retires down the corridors” (p. 230). What a soliloquy. [Tangent: almost 50 years later, how prescient is this passage?! This little monologue filled me with so many conflicting emotions: hope (because humans like Pynchon exist to dream this stuff up) and also dread because this paragraph describes a fundamental aspect and egregious flaw (or flaws) in human nature. Reading and re-reading this passage depresses me a little (hence my question about mental health below).
Now Pudding is sneaking about the bowels of “The White Visitation”. He heads past the cells of loonies on his way to a secret rendezvous. It seems like Pointsman may have drugged him at some point to get at hidden desires. We watch as our dear old Brigadier putters from room-to-room, finding items left for him by Pointsman that mock him and describe his descent into a personal hell (for info on the symbolism, the Weisenburger book is quite helpful).
In the final room, Pudding drops to his knees at the feet of his Domina Nocturna (with “her blond hair...tucked and pinned beneath a thick black wig”... “naked except for a long sable cape and black boots with court heels” (p. 233)). Pudding is thinking of the night they first met. He saw “her” “...through the periscope, underneath a star shell that hung in the sky, he saw her….and though he was hidden, she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No-man’s Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her, but she needed no protection. “They knew you, Mistress. They were your own.
And so were you” (p. 233).
And then he offers her a “nice” memory of a legion of Franco’s troops killing and getting killed at a massacre at Badajoz for which he is “rewarded” with her beating and then pissing and shitting in his mouth… … … …
However off-putting this may be for some (most), it does something for Pudding. He needs pain. “They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet….no it’s not guilt here, not so much as amazement - that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiqués of vertigo, nausea and pain. Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth…” (p. 234-235).
Munching down on a hot turd makes Pudding think of the horrible smells of his service during WWI: putrid mud, rot, death, “...the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem” (p. 235). After eating her shit, he jerks off (his release), in a style that Domina Nocturna has learned from watching Captain Blicero and Gottfriend (at this point, it is safe to say, Domina Nocturna is Katje. Will we ever be able to look at her the same?).
Pudding is then dismissed to “...a late-night cup of broth, routine papers to sign, a dose of penicillin that Pointsman has ordered him to take, to combat the effects of E. Coli” (p. 236). So thoughtful, that Pointsman...
Commentary

1. The Silvernail hallucination/phantasmagoria seems like something straight out of “The Big Lebowski” had Jodorowsky had a bit of influence over the Coen Bros. art direction. Many of the songs in this section feel “Lebowski-esque” but this one especially so to me. Maybe its the detailed choreographic notes: “They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whole eye Silvernail poses with a smile” (p. 230).
2. The Franco bit is a nice way of linking facism and death worship
3. Pudding eating Domina Nocturna’s shit really, to quote an earlier passage, gave “de wrinkles in mah brain a process!”. There is so much symbolism there! Instead of ascending to heaven, Pudding heads down to hell. We have so many dualities linked in the act: between young and old, sacred and profane, pleasure and pain, pleasure through pain, WWI and WW2, man and woman, life and death, the general as a slave, even the food transformed through Katje into waste, all linked through the act of eating shit. For a moment they are linked so intimately, so delicately. No parabolas, a circle. And, of course, there’s also the diabolical Pointsman in the background, pulling the strings and manipulating to keep Pudding in line. I remember reading this for the first time and just being shocked and confused and now reading it again and finding so much meaning. That ol’ Pynchon is a devious bastard, hiding such loaded symbolism in such an obscene encounter. The Pulitzer committee had no idea what was coming for them!

So, if you’ve reached this point, congratulations and I am sorry! Here are my discussion questions. Looking forward to future posts!
Discussion Questions Both On Topic and Tangential

1. Why is paranoia described as a “Puritan reflex” in Episode 22?
2. In Episode 23, as Slothrop peruses Katje’s extensive wardrobe, what is the significance of the line, “Aha! wait a minute, the operational scent in here is carbon tet, Jackson, and this wardrobe here’s mostly props” (p. 195)?
3. In Episode 24, what’s the significance of “the watchmen of world’s edge”? Is this an intrusion of the spirit world? Is Slothrop just hallucinating?
4. In Episode 24, when Peter Sachsa gets the blow to the temple from Schutzmann Jöche, why is his last thought, “How beautiful!” (p. 220)
5. In Episode 25, there’s a line in the part where Pudding is sneaking around: “A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones:...” (p. 231). Why us here? Why the change in perspective?
6. How’s this book affecting everyone’s mental health (you know, given that we’re in the end times right now)? Seriously, though, there are times when this book makes me so happy to be alive and proud of humanity and also times where it depresses the everloving shit out of me and makes me think that, as a species, we’re doomed to continue making the same mistakes, over and over again, until we end up destroying ourselves.
7. In a similar vein, do you think people as prodigiously talented and brilliant as Pynchon have any responsibility to counter the evil they see in the world? Is writing books enough or should they do more (lead, teach, etc.) to fight against the awful things they are able to see before the rest of us do?

Resources

• GR Wiki & Annotations - here
• Some Things That “Happen” (More or less) in “Gravity’s Rainbow” - here
• Larry Daw’s reading notes - here
• Weisenberger’s Book at the Internet Archive - here; Zak Smith’s book - here (gotta “rent”/ “borrow” both).
• Notes from a class on GR at Swathmore College - here
• How Pynchon Avoids Cultural Appropriation - here
• “History & Fiction: The Narrative Voices of Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” (2004) by Paul A. Bové
• “A Supernatural History of Destruction; or, Thomas Pynchon’s Berlin” (2010) by Eric Bulson

Super Mario Odyssey 2 takes place directly after the first Super Mario Odyssey.
With Bowser still stranded on the moon (I assume somewhere underneath the ground) Bowser Jr. (and rest of the Koopalings?) rescue him. OR, alternatively, Bowser finds an ancient spacecraft of some sort on/in the moon, and flies back to the planet in that. (Or maybe in his ship that he must have used to get there in the first place?)
Either way, he flies back to the Mushroom Kingdom, where Mario and Cappy are relaxing. Bowser shoots the Odyssey’s balloon, releasing all of the Power Moons, which scatter across the globe (to new kingdoms). Bowser immediately re-kidnaps Peach and Tiara, now more fueled to force Peach to marry him after her initial rejection (of both him and Mario, except she of course accepted Mario back to whatever their original relationship was). Bowser flies off.
The Odyssey now powerless, Mario and Cappy are unable to chase after Bowser. Fortunately, there are Power Moons (or Power Stars) in the Mushroom Kingdom, so you collect some (the Mushroom Kingdom slightly edited this time, for example, there is now a more traditional underground area) to power the Odyssey to embark on another Odyssey!
The Broodals would be in there too, no longer associated with Bowser. They have a personal vendetta against Mario, as well as being enemies of Bowser (because of the events in the first game).
Maybe even just to shake things up and finally break the formula, Bowser DOESN'T kidnap Peach this time (he could be too sore from her rejection to even WANT to kidnap her again) and instead is just trying to achieve world domination. In this scenario, Mario, for once, is fully focused on defeating Bowser to save the world, without having to worry about rescuing the Princess (Nintendo has already given her independence by letting her fight in Super Smash Bros, she even had her own game on the DS! Her powers were based off of emotions, kind of sexist, but yeah...). How about giving her freedom in a main game for once? MAYBE (JUST HEAR ME OUT) EVEN MAKE HER PLAYABLE, USING TIARA TO CAPTURE ENEMIES AND OBJECTS! Just an idea, for potential 2 player co-op, REAL 2 player, not just the second player moving Cappy or shooting star bits.
ANYWAYS, regardless of exactly how the story plot goes, here are some new Kingdoms I want to see!
Kingdoms (in no particular order):

1. Haunted Kingdom- Not from Luigi’s Mansion, but darker and more eery (Luigi’s Mansion is great and dark and eery, I just want to see something new for Odyssey 2).

There’d of course be classic Boos, as well as more unique and terrifying ghosts, like in Luigi’s Mansion. I’m not sure how Cappy, a ghost, could use his capturing powers on other ghosts, but I want to see it happen!
Professor E. Gadd would be there, and instruct you to find King Boo to defeat him and rescue Luigi, as the the two came to the kingdom for research.
There’d be a graveyard, and a haunted shipwreck area, possibly based off of Dire Dire Docks/Jolly Roger Bay, but haunted.
The haunted piano would be here, AND the eel, which would be in the haunted shipwreck area. Both scary mofos from 64 in the same Kingdom!

1. Wild West Kingdom- This one could honestly just be a different part of the Sand Kingdom, outside of Tostarena. There’d be a saloon and a duel (probably with the Broodals, it’d be kinda cool to see a duel with Bowser Jr. though).
   
2. Techtropolis- I got the name of the city, but not the Kingdom. This would be a futuristic city, basically New New Donk City (comment I.C. Wiener if you get the reference!). But, how is this a futuristic city? Some joke about higher taxes funding all the advancement, or Mario and Cappy go to the future for this one Kingdom (in THAT case, make it New New Donk City!)
   
3. Medieval Kingdom- No need to time travel to go to this Kingdom, as The Cascade Kingdom (Fossil Falls) exists in the present. Kingdoms HEAVILY vary on Mario’s home planet, so no issue with time/yeaera there.
   
4. Expanded Cloud Kingdom: The Cloud Kingdom basically only existed for a Bowser battle in the first game, as a barren, cloud island, basically. I want a full Cloud Kingdom, Castle in the sky and stuff. Tempted to make a “Jack and the Beanstalk” reference, and can definitely see Bowser holding a goose that lays golden eggs, but then we’d have to consider making everything giant. Well, it would be cool to find this Kingdom via a Beanstalk (as they existed in the first game to reach high up hidden areas) in another Kingdom (like how you found Kingdoms through paintings, but for this particular Kingdom, a beanstalk would actually make sense). This could work one way or the other.
   
5. Carnival Kingdom- The entire Kingdom is a carnival/theme park! The residents (hopefully not clowns!) would enjoy the carnival as their everyday life!
   
6. Las Vegas like Kingdom- It’d be cool to see Mario running around the city at night with all of the bright and colorful lights, and funny to see Luigi as a dealer in a casino again. Great place for the Tostarenans to open up a new casino too! It could be bigger and grander, a full casino, and they hired Luigi when he and Professor E. Gadd (make these two travel throughout the game like Peach and Tiara did, but during main game as opposed to post-game!) travelled there.
   
7. Some kind of sci-fi kingdom? Maybe involving Mars (as opposed to the moon like in the first game)? I know the futuristic city might be considered sci-fi to some people, but I mean SCI-FI (not counting a futuristic city as sci-fi).
   
8. Dessert Kingdom- Everything is made of sweet! We’ve seen Mario Kart tracks like this, as well lands made of nothing but sweets in other series/medias....
   
9. Lucky/Clover Kingdom?- A Kingdom based off of Ireland. Inhabitants are definitely leprechauns or leprechaun-like creatures, and there is a rainbow leading to a pot of gold coins somewhere....
   

Not sure where these would go kingdom-wise, but I really want to see a giant IKEA-like store for Mario to run around in. Also some snowy area with a cabin, with a snow-globe that Mario has to throw Cappy on to enter into. And, I just want to see Mario in a water park (I guess this could POSSIBLY be part of the Carnival Kingdom). His boxers double as a swim-suit!
Other things:
Yoshi should be present in more than just a couple of kingdoms. All previous costumes should return, plus new ones, especially ones based off of other videogame series, examples. Ness, Link, Samus, Captain Falcon, Pokemon Trainer (Ash Ketchum's clothes) just to name a few. All of these costumes involves caps or hats, making them suitable for Mario to wear in Odyssey!
I honestly think whatever cap Mario is wearing should still default to his traditional/main cap when capturing an enemy/object, simply for being universally iconic, but maybe I'm just too uptight ¯_(ツ)_/¯
That's all I can think of right now.
A lot of people suggest kingdoms feauturing locations from other games, such as Donkley Kong and Luigi's Mansion, but I feel it'd be better to create more original kingdoms for a brand new experience.
On the other hand, it's refreshing to see existing locations in a new way, such as the Mushroom Kingdom in Odyssey 1, but I'd definitely support more pre-existing locations from other games in an Odyssey 3, but generally I think it's PROBABLY best to not make more than one sequel, but if there's enough ideas, it's worth considering. Yes, this includes Galaxy 3.
Oh, and like how the Mushroom Kingdom was a throwback kingdom for the post-game, they should do the same for Delfino Plaza. There is already a Sunshine outfit, which would return with all of the other outfits from Odyssey 1.
So, also:
Sunshine Kingdom (Delfino Plaza)- Like Mushroom Kingdom in Odyssey 1, but Delfino Plaza. And those squid things function very much like F.L.U.D.D., so they would definitely be present there for Mario to capture.
I'd say collecting EVERY SINGLE MOON should unlock something HUGE, but maybe not, as this would SEVERELY punish people who are unable to obtain every moon, by blocking a big part of the game, but I don't know, there has to be some kind of neat thing for collecting every single moon. While the fireworks and cap on the castle are cool, maybe something a little cooler than that?