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.
Nothing Doing is One Year Old by @horseonvhs
It took some time, some conversation and some particularly striking words, but eventually I was able to make peace with the idea that I wanted something much smaller than all that. I don’t work in graphic design anymore; I have no desire to pursue creative work as a career. Nothing Doing is made on a really loose schedule, and if I feel like dropping it for awhile or forever, that’s my choice. It’s not my life, and I’m able to love it because of that.
Remembering The Realms: R.A. Salvatore Part 3 by @Bigg
I'll offer Drizzt the most tepid of defences here by saying that they aren't usually THIS bad. But hoo MOMMA is this ever a bad look for Mister Do'Urden. Not with a gun to my head could you get me to admit that I fled weeping from a drug-fuelled fuckpile with an auditorium filled to bursting with horny drow priestesses. This is LITERALLY what zero pussy does to a motherfucker!!!
thread on localizing plurals by @lokeloski, @lizbushouse, @Osmose
So you either have to find a way to write around it vaguely enough, or hope that the devs will either give you context or implement a variable system to accommodate for singular/plural variations. Otherwise you can end up with stuff like "You got 1 apples!"
untitled post on hidden constraints by @kstarling, @NoelBWrites
This was in the context of climate change: solving climate change is complicated only of you have the hidden constraint of "nobody should lose money about it." You know how we get to stay under a 1,5°C increase in global temperature? We stop using fossil fuels. That's so complicated! Except it isn't.
Bunny Garden has no Metacritic score, so here's a pro datesimmer's thoughts on a kinda sorta dating sim taking Japanese vtubers by storm. by @iiotenki
Bunny Garden is not ashamed to be a Dream Club clone in much of how it looks, feels, and acts in the same way that, say, Duke Nukem 3D has always been upfront about the game to which it pays its dues. If scores of Japanese players and particularly vtubers seem taken with the game, it may well be simply because Dream Club always existed in the periphery, a niche in the already shrinking twilight years of the Japanese dating sim as the genre was on its last real legs, never to garner much in the way of mainstream attention.
untitled post on social interactions by @oriananonexistent
people are weird! and it's okay that they're weird. even neurotypicals are weird. understanding that weirdness requires flexibility and an open mind, and recognizing that maybe you will never truly know what someone else is going through at the moment but you can still be there, you can still care, and support, and be yourself while letting them be themself too
I just accidentally made someone realize a lot of things so I'm going to reproduce it here: by @NireBryce, @exerian, @SomeEgrets, @bytebat
Failure teaches you that some part of your approach didn't work. Failure teaches you about your assumptions. Failure gives you information. Failure is data. But only if you build the habit of listening to it.
so a post-apocalyptic mode 7 car combat rpg with a kids show vibe, a yuzo koshiro ost, and a cute girl in overalls walks into the GBA by @canon
freak's games you have to engage and accept their weird designs and learn to breathe their air; in Car Battler Joe I fully believe that you can do that if you wish, but you can also just merely gaze upon its list of thoughts that all begin in "wouldn't it be cool if..." and think. it's right! it would be cool!
Battles as a point of friction in RPGs by @lokeloski
In the end, the best way to play Wasteland 2 is to know, ahead of time, how your engagement is going to be and build your party for it. The player has to use meta-knowledge to overcome in-game challenges because the game doesn't hint at them or give ways to mitigate choices with bad outcomes – like, for example, being able to leave the AG Center to scavenge for ammo. And although it's possible to play blind and finish the game, it becomes more of a test of patience and mental resilience against the lack of mitigations than of preparedness and strategy.
thread on social media behavior by @shel, @kda
Someone can call you "a horrible person" or whatever, completely mean it, and still be full of shit, because they're coming from a completely inaccurate or totally self-serving perspective on a situation. Someone can declare that everyone who's (not) having a given emotional response to a given subject or situation is ontologically evil, and be totally wrong, because their underlying values and assumptions are deeply flawed.
Trust but verify, or "sometimes the internet just makes shit up" by @deergrace
It's amazing where checking citations gets you, isn't it? Here, in "Bambisexual," we have what's clearly a term of derision (reclaimed by at least one letter-writer!) applied to insufficiently kinky gay men, when it was in common enough parlance to be mentioned in a community news source in 1979.
Should game controls become more standardized? by @kylelabriola
I can’t help but be nostalgic for this era because a lot of games were designed experimentally, designed in a way to work for THAT system specifically. The World Ends With You was designed specifically to work with the DS. Elebits was designed specifically to work with the Wii. Stuff like that.
Microsoft Doesn't Want Your Game To Be Good Enough by @Sheri
Churn is the default state of the industry, for if developers were allowed to rest, they'd unionize. And then creating content units at scale per stakeholder expectation would be impossible.
Contradict-inns by @Scampir
By starting the game at rest, players are denied their first opportunity to express agency. In a group dynamic, players have the opportunity to be experimental by choosing different things than the rest of the players. The first choice they have in the inn start for “What if I made a different choice than everyone else?” is “what if I didn’t pursue the game and just stayed at rest.”
Another strategy for overcoming suicidal impulses by @shel
Like sure putting out cigarettes on my hand seems all cool and romantic but it doesn't hurt nearly as bad as eating an entire small domino's cheese pizza and if I really wanted to hurt myself then that's what I'd be doing instead of giving myself tiny burns. But actually I hate it and clearly don't actually want it.
untitled post on ways to play by @amaranth-witch, @caffeinatedOtter
But there ARE wrong ways to play the game, and thoughtlessly jettisoning elements that cause friction just because you don't like 'em has a ripple effect.
media analysis 2: dialectics boogaloo by @Partheniad
if you are openly engaging in dialogue with someone else, you have to be open to having your mind changed. this can definitely make things scary, because hey i like a thing, i don't want to lose that. i get it. i am never going to judge anyone for that. and it's also perfectly fine to hear arguments, take them in, and realize "i still love this thing." but you gotta be willing to engage.
untitled post on game criticism by @BunchesOfBees
Taste is politics, and therefore the idea that taste is purely personal is, like most political positions involving pure atomized subjectivity, impossible because if you don't make an assertion there are lots of people more than happy to make it for you.
The 1989 Australian Grand Prix (and why tech workers need unions) by @plumpan
So, drivers want to delay the race because it's not safe. It might very well be safe if they wait. Everyone in charge of holding the race wants the race to start, so they don't have to give back any money they were given. In the half hour or so during the delay, almost all of the drivers were out of their cars and walking around, talking to each other or the teams and trying to figure something out.
The Mechanics of a Metroidvania are Tools, not the Destination by @Kayin
But Mario 64 wasn't about collecting stars. Stars were a tool to make you move through fun environments and inspiring play. Their "enhancements" of the formula slowly made the whole genre worse, missing the heart of what made Mario 64 fun and turning it, again, into a checklist.
untitled post on BBSes by @jeffgerstmann
In larger networks you might be communicating with boards that were four or five hops away, and depending on when you sent a message and when each board did its regular network call, things could take even longer. Impatient sysops would force multiple network calls a day, just to force their amazing messages out as fast as possible, though this was frowned upon in some networks since most boards only had one phone line and didn't want you jamming it up.
Reading and College by @lcsrzl, @ewie, @M00se0nTheLoose
From last minute scheduling changes, to expecting you to be free any time during the week for assignments, going to school while working is tough. I often felt so frustrated because when I would try to go to administration at my school, or professors, about what to do to get extra help, the answer was to simply work less so I'd be more free for professor office hours or tutoring. But, without working, I wouldn't be able to afford school.
A Mario character is trans; I can't possibly be happier. by @Cleretic
The fantasy I want to see isn't of a world where problems don't exist. It's a world where those problems are defeatable. Where the trans woman can escape, and even fight back against, the transphobia that haunted her life.
Welcome to Snyderville: The brief, bizarre story of a Hoosier dystopia by @shadsy
Among locals, Roseland quickly went from "the gateway to South Bend" to "mile-long red flag." I remember friends and family slamming the fucking brakes as soon as they entered Roseland and driving through that mile of US 933 like it was a funeral procession. Sometimes we would avoid going through Roseland entirely if it could be helped.
Valve Wants To Believe In Meritocracy by @kylelabriola, @vectorpoem, @MOKKA
A system like this wants to claim that there is no cheating, no bias, and no favoritism. It wants to claim that it’s only “a store” and not a platform that spotlights interesting games. But there is obviously favoritism built-in: it favors the types of games that are good at making a lot of money.
Heretical Complexity by @mammonmachine
If there was a tendency to think of old games as diamonds in the rough that just needed to be polished and understood to be perfected, now there is much more of a movement to go back to older games and look at everything that seemed broken and unnecessary and treating those parts as valid artistic goals and intentional design choices.
reliability inflation, or: the escalating knowledge demands of the internet by @morayati
So now you know where to read about air purifiers and dog stuff. Great! You now have intel on exactly two product categories. Look around your living space. Suppose something in it were to break tomorrow, which is likely. Where would you shop to replace it, and how would you know where?
the winner of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war was DVD by @cathoderaydude
VHS was unbelievably complex. I mean, it's been stated many times, but it bears repeating: it's astonishing we ever got it to work. The bandwidth of video just exceeds that of tape, and this is an ironclad fact that we never worked around, so we had to do this fucked up helical scan nonsense that required players to have hundreds of parts, even after decades of simplification.
Where the Wild Things Are, morals for kids, and queer art by @jesncin
This book has stayed with me because it's pretty to look at, it scared me, understood me and as I grew older I learned that the author, Maurice Sendak was queer. Sendak was also the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants escaping the Holocaust. He never told his parents he wasn't straight.
"How do we learn how to code?" by @NireBryce, @eramdam
if this advice seems like a brutal learning cliff, you're overthinking things. you don't need to know the deep language features until you need to actually use them, and you'll learn them from reading others' code once you're there. The important part of programming is this breaking impossible problems down into smaller and smaller pieces until you can implement each one and stitch together into a whole. That's it. Everything else flows from that.
thread on GMs dictating player emotion by @Jama, @Partheniad
I think the fear of railroading characters goes so far in the opposite direction that we get situations where nothing can be done to influence a player unless you're a skilled GM. And I think this makes some players really afraid to let the GM have anything about their character, plans, motivations, and so on, because the GM might undercut them or thwart them.
1000xRESIST is a game for a post-2019 Hong Kong protest generation of diaspora children that doesn't exist yet. by @highimpactsex
The trauma seeps into everything it touches: families, societies, politics, childhood, food, dreams, love, and so on. Everyone overseas wants to recreate their Hong Kong identity as much as possible, even if it means perpetuating the cycle of violence.
critical literacy: Knowing Which Part of the Curve We Are At by @vectorpoem
When someone has a vested interest in the line going up forever, they will do anything in their power to get you and everyone else to believe that a past period where the line went decisively up is the important indicator, a story that will continue happening indefinitely into the future.
ask on dating sims in English by @iiotenki
So while dating sims might appear straightforward to localize in some ways compared to other genres because you're not having to, for example, come up with a bunch of bespoke terms from scratch, etc, they're absolutely test a translator's ability to write natural, engaging, and humanizing dialogue. And not just dialogue that ticks all of those boxes, but also dialogue that makes those characters relatable across cultural and social boundaries.
how i've written so much this year by @Barquq
Whatever it is, jot it down. You don't have to outline them or even add context if you want to. The fact that you've put them somewhere means that you have ejected the idea from your brain.
OBS Audio Tips from an audio producer: Part Two by @hootOS
While everybody's recording environment and equipment will be different, generally speaking it's a good idea to perform a technique colloquially labeled in the audio industry as "scooping the mids." This can create a warm, comfortable sound to your voice that some in the industry liken to sitting in front of a campfire. HOWEVER, not every audio rig will respond well to scooping the mids.
Notes on Devil Blade's Amazing Visuals by @boghog
Even things like a huge laser bullet changing directions & the player getting close to enemies have their own sfx and vfx. When boss ships move on screen, they don't simply float around. They do an active banking turn in the direction they're moving in. Everything moves and shakes, the game feels alive and dense, even when not much is happening.
Compulsory Heterosexuality in 2024 by @shel
Especially when she first wrote the paper, female-dominated fields like airline stewardess, waitress, secretary, teacher, etc. were the only jobs women could generally get. They were rarely economically stabilizing careers. They were seen as places where young women would work and inch by temporarily until they met a man to marry her. And within these jobs, performance of heterosexuality was required as part of the job.
Engage with Media but don't Overthink it!! by @Kayin
Mundane thoughts have value. Funny thoughts have value. Don't be ashamed to share them!
