hal

nintendo is fucking up their public image (to the semi-diehard fans at least) so now i'm just waiting for people to make definitive guides on how to pirate nintendo media

• NES/Famicom/Dendy emulation: FCEUX or Mesen
• SNES emulation: Snes9x or Mesen
• Game Boy + Color emulation: SameBoy
• Game Boy Advance emulation: mGBA
• N64 emulation: P64 seems to have a vulnerability right now, so try using Simple64 or Parallel Launcher
• GameCube and Wii emulation: Dolphin
• DS emulation: MelonDS (You can also play it on android) or DeSmuME
• 3DS emulation: Citra
  • It's actually surprisingly easy to hack your 3DS
• Wii U emulation: Cemu
  • From @nervcorp: nintendo is shutting down online server access for the wii u and the 3ds on march 27th btw - homebrew literally NOW!!!!!! there's not a better time to!!!
• Switch emulation: Ryujinx
  • Rest in peace, Yuzu
• I would love to share ROM sites but I really, really don't want them to get taken down
  • From @fearb33k33p3r: if you want to know where to actually GET roms, do not use a big romsite like emuparadise. the more primitive and direct the download, the better.

please comment for anything else i should know!! sharing will only share it with your followers/passerbys but comments can be seen on any post so please do that!! thanks!!

updated 2024-Apr-16

Also if you still have a 3DS I highly recommend hacking it so you can play a ton of roms and stuff there
Hacking your 3DS. Its fun, its easy, its free

Content Warning: Discussion of transphobia and suicide

Spoilers for Dear Brother, The Rose of Versailles, and Claudine

Ikeda Riyoko—perhaps the most famous member of the “year 24 group” that played a large part in creating the foundations of the shoujo manga genre—is often credited with laying the groundwork for depictions of queer characters in shoujo, and in particular with creating the archetype of the gender-bending heartthrob heroine, or “girl prince.” Building on earlier representations of butch or transmasculine characters in early shoujo manga such as Princess Knight, and the Takarazuka theater tradition of the otokoyaku male role actor, Ikeda’s enormously popular gender non-conforming heroes—Lady Oscar from The Rose of Versailles, Rei from Dear Brother, Julius from the Window of Orpheus, and the titular character of Claudine—helped to establish that there was a major mainstream audience excited to cheer for a hotheaded, androgynous tomboy with a heart of gold. Lady Oscar in particular has fingerprints all over the history of anime and manga, from a gender-bending cameo in Pokémon to serving as the inspiration for iconic characters like Tenjou Utena.

When I first read The Rose of Versailles last year, I expected its depictions of queer and transmasculine characters to be somewhat limited—after all, the comic was written for mainstream audiences and a mainstream publisher in the 1970s. But across Ikeda’s work, I was deeply surprised with the level of care and nuance with which Ikeda approaches transmasculine love stories. While there is obviously a lot about Ikeda’s portrayal of transmasculine characters that feels dated to modern audiences (for example, her comics often do fall back on “biological” ideas of women’s weakness and emotionality, and sometimes psychologize her character’s genders in uncomfortable ways), I was surprised by how much of these comics still hit for me today. What makes them work for me is both the extreme pathos with which Ikeda writes transmasculine character’s experiences of rejection—and, at rare moments, gender euphoria —but also the fact that her trans characters are not simply given a one-size fits all born-in-the-wrong-body narrative. Instead, they are each portrayed as unique individuals with varied personal relationships to their gender, their sexuality, and the historical context of the society they live in.

I've been making games for a very long time at this point, so here are the game development articles and resources that have helped me the most over the years. I kept putting off writing this post because I was worried I'd accidentally forget a really good article or two, but I can always just go back and edit them in when I inevitably remember them later.

Anyway, here they are, roughly organized by topic. I hope they help you as much as they helped me!

Gameplay programming

Sonic Physics Guide - A resource on the Sonic Retro wiki that explains how the classic 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games implemented their movement and physics code. It does a great job of demystifying the whole process, especially for people who have only ever coded platformers using a physics engine's built-in capsule colliders and so on.

Just play games and study them frame-by-frame, either by recording your gameplay and watching the video footage or by using an emulator with a Frame Advance feature. It's an important resource for seeing how things work!

why not channel all your high energy and emotions into making increasingly intricate projects in Decker, the delightful hypercard-esque multimedia platform for your personal computer, developed by cohost's own @internet-janitor!

For example, you could make 18 zines and counting over a period of 15 months, plus work on jam projects such as elaborate synthesizer software and embarrasingly personal visual novels.

anyway, zine 19 is in progress!