Getting a headstart by collating this as time progresses rather than trying to go through a backlog way at the end of the year, though this in no way means I'll keep up with doing this each month. Going to be missing a lot of good posts (and probably including the same people a fair bit) simply as a consequence of what crosses my timeline.
Black History Month series by @alyaza
At the most banal level, we live in a time full of moral panic about Black studies, efforts to ban critical race theory, and attacks on even token DEI efforts. So to learn about Black history is—however small—an act of defiance and rebellion in such places. It is, in a sense, standing up and saying "will not let the past, and the struggles that brought us into the present, be silenced!"
Adult Analysis Anthology by @bigg, Yarrun, @Unangbangkay, @JuniperTheory, @bearington, Callisto Jupiter-Four, @iyane-agossah, @mrhands, @MorganH
We who make porn games NEED the same level of critical scrutiny and archival obsession that all other genres of game enjoy. We need people who can articulate long, complicated thoughts about our work in ways that make us reconsider how we approach our development processes. We need excited, invested people who want to elevate the genre who can seek out and place a spotlight on unique new projects, helping them find their fanbases. We need people who care enough about why porn games are the way they are that they investigate and document the games of yesteryear. We need resources, dev diaries, genre-specific tutorials for new devs so that every new project doesn’t have to continually reinvent the wheel. We need people to CARE about porn games and the people who make them rather than just quietly jacking off.
Slowly learning the precise form of cranky person I'm going to become as I get older by @natescape, @bruno, @lokeloski
Ultimately, I feel it's about maintaining an emotional distance. So many of us are trained to find comfort in distance from our bodies, from our faculties, from perception and relationship to the world around us. Skill-building is so much about re-finding that connection, an engaged curiosity ubiquitous in children then worked out of us in a thousand thousand ways.
untitled post on accessibility and disability by @amaranth-witch
This is about 35 years of escalating disability and marginalization in a world where even good people do not recognize the pain and friction points unless they fall into a highly specific socially understood framework of "oh, this is REAL disability", and navigating minefield after minefield of "oh, just concentrate harder". "Oh, well if you CARED, you would obviously...". Of "oh, don't worry, you just DO it". Of "you'll grow out of it". Of "when you come back from summer camp, you'll be a changed boy". Of "that doesn't sound like a disability, that sounds like you simply aren't applying yourself". Of more and more and more, and it's everywhere.
Positionality, not Identity: On the Validity of the Transphobic 'Non-Binary' Cis-Presenting Cissexual White Women by @shel
It is not about being the recipient of a privilege by way of a flowchart derived by the interiority of their feelings about the words "man" or "woman," but about where they sit in a structure and how comfortably they sit there and what it says about what team they are on when they decide to kick the ladder out from under them.
They say "don't do it in public" so we're forced to gather in private by @DecayWTF, @ValerieElysee, @ann-arcana, @estrogen-and-spite
They want us to take it off the streets so they can target us in the alleyways, they want us to take it out of the light so they can hunt us in the darkness. "Be respectable" is saying "be out of sight", and atrocities thrive when they are not seen.
🎶everyone knows that...🎶 by @two
It's a unique sort of frustration, to be so close and yet so far from an answer, while memories you can't name swim in your mind or clear evidence of something that once existed taunts you. The specific thing you're searching for probably isn't even as good as you want it to be - you just want that the closure that comes from finding it.
Persona Doesn't NEED Teens by @mint
But this idea that adults just become static, unmoving monoliths of conservatism is so wild to me. In what world? Being an adult is nothing but change. If I look back at who I was when I was 18 compared to 29 now, I get light-headed. And the themes still resonate in other important ways - as a teen you're led to believe that when you grow up you'll finally have agency. Imagine turning my age and realizing that you're still unable to make the changes you want to in the world because of capitalism or politics or whatever. The agency that I thought I'd get is nowhere to be found.
I feel like I'm watching one of my games slowly become a meme (not derogatorily) by @CHz
Random links like this from reddit and whatnot continued intermittently until the start of this year, when things escalated. I got a bunch new followers in January, well not really a bunch in absolute terms but definitely compared to how many I normally get in any given time period (0), which seemingly corresponded with the game being included in this list of "the best puzzle games" that someone made. Which is a really bizarre inclusion to sit aside every other game in that list, but the guy said he just liked it a lot.
untitled post by @geometric
One evening, there was a knock at the door, a local reporter. Here to talk about my friend. Oh you haven't heard? I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, he was killed by an IED just outside Fallujah. We haven't been able to contact his family for the story, they moved at some point and we don't have their current address. Another friend gave us your info, he said you knew him better.
moving to the country to start a farm will not save you by @NireBryce, @alyaza, @Jama
I do not miss having to go out into the woods in a foot of snow to collect wood to run the wood stove so we didn't freeze. I do not miss having to get up and take an hour to get to school on the bus. I do not miss having to go past a farm that constantly smelled like pig shit (the WORST) when we went into town. I do not miss cleaning the barn on a hot summer day, because the layer of shit is so tall cows are almost hitting their head on the ceiling. I do not miss sitting in the sun hooking and unhooking the trailer so we can look at it up with 4 games of hay, unload it, and then do it again, with thousands of hay seeds sticking to every inch of your skin.
theses on the philosophy of cringe by @bigstuffedcat
You might say that the solution to this debate is the destruction of "cringe"-- in common parlance, "killing the part of one that cringes". While this is a liberating position (one I support wholeheartedly except in rhetorical instances like this essay) it is not a solution to our dilemma, because neither philosopher necessarily upholds the institution of "cringe".
english probably is not a creole - unless you want it to be by @queerinmech
there is a vast history of abject unabashed racism around the taxonomies and descriptions of certain languages
it is absolutely fucking wild to describe a language like Mandarin of all things as "linguistically inferior", holy shit
"broken English" has never become a national language, and as demonstrated by many researches such as Michael DeGraff and summarized by David O'Neil: pidgins and creoles are complex linguistic phenomena with equivalent expressive potential as any other language, and the taxonomy itself is problematic
Quality Broadcasting, Social Media, & The Pandemic by @Sheri
It’s hard to get a production crew if you’re such a toxic person that you drive away everyone you work with. But being toxic alone, platformed by algorithm, launders the poison into just another filmed-from-home cell phone video, which looks more or less indistinguishable from an expert who simply didn’t bother their resources for such a simple video.
Whiteness and homogeneity by @AtFruitBat
What I'm saying is that it's very easy for any place to stay predominantly white. And even places that consider themselves as being for leftists, or progressive, or caring about diversity, or whatever. It's a lot easier to make some partial, surface-level gestures towards "diversity", and to stop at that, than to ask: How have we made an industry, a culture, a social space that historically excludes people who aren't like us? Or: What discomfort are we avoiding when we historically exclude people who aren't as similar to us?
Combat Encounters Are More Than The Monster by @smuonsneutrino
Enemies that take advantage of murder holes, superior knowledge of corridors, cliffs, debris, windows, doors, and any other terrain feature can be both interesting and challenging to work around. When you get your hands on a stat block, think about the kinds of locations that make that stat block interesting.
The Roman Empire had dozens of different, semi-compatible coinage systems, and it's as confusing and unclear as it sounds by @Fel-Temp-Reparatio
Rome still wanted specific amounts of silver, and they based this on their own coinage system. Those few cities allowed to strike silver would adjust their silver coins to convert easily to denarii (probably under Imperial direction). Like the one silver coin above is a four drachma coin from Alexandria in Egypt from the reign of Nero, and it had the silver content and value of one imperial denarius. However, one city's drachma wasn't necessarily worth another city's drachma, and if I recall correctly, Antioch's 4 drachma coins were trading as 3 denarii of value at this time.
You Know, Game Stuff by @crushed
While the Everblue titles had been rather obscure, Endless Ocean was a first-party release from Nintendo. It had eyes on it, so the news that one of the premiere English-speaking outlets had outright declared it beneath them set off a minor wave of vitriol online in forums and comments sections, from those offended by this slight by those dastardly anti-Nintendo journalists, to those cheering that Nintendo's baby toy was finally getting taken down a peg by real man gamers.
What would it take to make a good noir game? by @DeusExBrockina, @calliope
The thing about hardboiled fiction that's hardest to gather up in our hands, but most important to import into a ttrpg, is that sense of isolation and purpose. The PCs would, I think, need to be doggedly pursuing something that would, by virtue of their insistence, put them at odds with multiple groups.
It's Not About Yellow Paint by @Kayin
If we design our games with the assumption that the player is an idiot, then they will feel that resentment when we hold their hand.
best kept to oneself by @Partheniad
you are not your worst moment. and while your partner may not mind the emotional weight you place on them, it is still an extra load. learning to sort the shit you can handle by yourself and what you need support for is part of growing up.
I realize now that you have to be kind of a freak by @kylelabriola
Every person I know who gets good at something or keeps up dedicated practice does it because they channel that obsession and go through with it. They're not embarrassed.
Two Dollar Demographic: Nielsen & The Ad-lined Telly TV by @Sheri
screens are seen as no different than newspaper: what percentage of the available space can we get away with making advertisements? can that percent go up by convincing viewers these things are necessary for the medium to exist?
Talkin about a TTRPG I struggled to understand by @TalenLee, @Inumo
I think it helps to understand that PbtA games (and, to some extent, games in that lineage like BitD) are generally built for people w/ a very particular understanding of narrative. To be an academic for a moment, Hiroki Azuma in Otaku: Japan's Database Animals called it the "database model" of consuming media. In short, the database model atomizes media down to its component parts – first to the individual characters, setpieces, and events, then further into the individual tropes or mannerisms. Think like TVTropes or fan wikis.
The most common mistake I see in game dev: Exiting pre-production before the game is good enough by @ctmatthews, @mikejwitz
If you were an artist, you would make sure that your sketch is good before you spend hours painstakingly rendering your final piece. You wouldn't just doodle something that looks like it has some promise, then go "ehhhh I'll improve this as I go" and immediately jump straight into rendering. So don't do it in game development either!
hey i want to talk about how you should be promoting your work as an erotic author/illustrator by @taylor-titmouse
you must always assume 75% of the people seeing the thing you are advertising have no fucking idea who you are. and that includes a huge chunk of the people who already follow you. they do not know who you are or what you've been working on for two months or why they should care about it. they just got here. somebody just reposted it. they are seeing it for the first time. most people are only looking at social media for a tiny chunk of their day. they are not keeping up with you. you cannot get cute about what you are trying to sell because nobody knows what it is until you tell them.
kink and salacious content by @anderjak
fiction, likewise, is a tacit agreement between the creator and the participant that the boundaries of fiction are to be respected; narrative exploration is not indicative of approval of behavior.
ask response by @kaara
you have to root your ideology and activism in love and support and mutual aid, not fear and hate. consider the actions you are taking and what they might accomplish. think about the harm you might cause. think about what you're doing and more importantly, why you're doing it and what you might accomplish. if someone else did it, consider their angle.
"It's nice to be nice" by @kylelabriola
There’s nothing more fun now than a quick, casual exchange with someone online where we respect each others’ boundaries and gush over a shared interest. Or reaching out to actually leave a nice comment on something instead of just scrolling by, etc. etc.
Want to learn about (real) trains? Starting from zero knowledge. by @InterurbanEra
Finding out what KINDS of trains you like is a lifelong journey, but there's lots of fun ways to learn about them.
Deconstructing Hitman's Mission Stories by @MOOMANiBE
Mission Stories in Hitman are basically telegraphed opportunities. In a game that's by-and-large a wide-open sandbox, they carry a lot of responsibility as some of the most-bespoke content - They loudly announce themselves to the player when 47 approaches their start location, and it's clear that the game's design team expects them to be the first things you pursue when entering a new level for the first time.
The Crying of AI 21 by @kojote, @NireBryce
This dysfunction is an example of what happens when LLMs are inadvertently trained on AI-generated data. When that happens, those models develop bizarre behavior, which is difficult or impossible to diagnose because the algorithms are, by design, black boxes that conceal all kinds of idiosyncrasies and unintentional learned patterns.
Confidence is a Drug; or, Cis Men are Just Overgrown Children. by @hootOS
the modifications i've done to my body are transgressive. they violate the norm. it's punk rock, and boy howdy do i love being punk rock. i got tattoos, i want more tattoos, and i don't have piercings but i want piercings. i got small tits, but they're my tits. i want the whole trifecta. I want White America to look upon me in horror and disgust, because White America is horrifying and disgusting to me, too.
grifts, again by @vaudevilleghost
When you are so deeply trapped in a narrative, the choices you make are not your own; they are not the product of conscious thought; they are driven by a sense of inevitability, by the sense that the choice has already been made, and you just missed the turning point.
Magneto & Redemption by @Partheniad
And to be clear to people, no that doesn't mean that people are owed forgiveness either. If you hurt someone, they don't need to forgive you or be part of your life. But you don't need their forgiveness to do better, you don't need their permission to keep going. I don't think people should give up or lose their lives for their worst days when they are willing to try.
the gameboy camera of theseus by @splodeybaloney
apart from just buying a different console, this has been one of the greatest innovations to gameboy camera photography. the community has been able to completely redesign the cartridge experience with a new shell that allows for c/cs mount lenses, a custom flash pcb, and even a third-party camera app with increased functionality above what is on the original cartridge.
As An Addict™ by @sitcom
like dis/ability, "not an addict" is not a permanent state. an accident, or catching a virus with longterm effects, or even just aging can shift you from "not disabled" to "disabled". likewise, it might take really big changes in your circumstances, but if you aren't currently "an addict", you could absolutely become one. it isn't something you just inherently aren't. i'm not saying this to be a big scary "don't experiment with shit oh my god doing one drug could flip a switch in your brain forever!!" person. that isn't something i believe. i just want to really drive home the point that addicts are not fundamentally, as a whole, Different from non-addicts.
