🍃Kasi and Akesi🍃

I have owned Balatro for 2.5 weeks and now clocked in 42 hours. This is enough to call it a severe obsession; in fact, this game started affecting my thoughts and dreams.

Case in point: the deck of cards I came up with one night (yes, literally in a dream) for some kind of Touhou-flavored, lesbian Balatro type of game where there are no kings or jacks, no traditional suits, no numbered cards, and every card is a face card based on a Touhou character.

Instead, it works like this:

• Suits are the Touhou's hair color
• Value/letter is the last letter in the Touhou's name

so for example a Marisa card would be an... A(ce?) of Blondes. Sakuya would also be an A(ce?) but of... Silvers, I guess. And Zanmu would be a U of Purples? Kind of?

...THERE THAT'S IT THAT'S THE IDEA

It quite literally came to me in a dream, it's broken and the suit of Blondes would be very overpowered, but I don't care it's dumb and silly and I challenge someone to build a game from that concept.

There are a few purposes that I love Discord for, but they basically all summarize into "chatting with my friends about shit." On top of ALL of the reasons above, which all resonate with me, there's some additional stuff as a creator and a critic. Seeing everything get walled off there has been brutal.

When I was in media, being asked to join a discord to get access to a game for coverage was always a net negative. Multiple times it led to weird shit from other members of the discord in question, either fans who had an axe to grind with me or peers in the industry who saw this as an opportunity to be weird about shit. More importantly: It really changes the power dynamic between publisher and critic in a way that's hard to quantify but the sense of attempted critic capture is very real. When you go and check out a game at an event, then leave it and share your thoughts, things are temporally discreet. In a discord, you're just like... there. And you know, the second a PR person shoots you a friend request, it's like, welp...

As a creator, it might be even worse. Discords can create a really incredible feeling when you release a project, similar to how a live chat reacts to a great moment during a stream. But the trade off is closing that moment off behind closed doors. Even just in the case of FatT, for instance, there was a time when a new episode drop led to a flurry of posts on Twitter and Tumblr. When we launched our Discord (which we've all now left at this point), and especially as that Discord grew, that activity took a nose dive. It became the place for the most active members of the community to talk--and as such, a lot of our word of mouth growth really dropped off. (This is part of why things like Secret Samol have been so incredible for us!)

Obviously, there's a lot of other stuff here (which I also have big biases about) around how conversations Work in the closed, fast-moving sphere of a Discord versus the more draft-and-send open air of something like G+ (RIP) or Tumblr, but that is more than I have time to unpack during the work day.

thinkin about the two headed dragn puppet again

Okay so you've seen animatronic fursona

And you've maybe seen "it's a mascot suit" fursonas

And I've made "it's a stuffed animal" fursonas

But I have the fucking a plus top shelf weird metasona idea

They're a puppet/visual effect. Like. In the Lion King or a super elaborate Muppet. The kind of big performance that takes five or six stagehands to perform. They do all the normal sona stuff and everyone just POLITELY IGNORES THE PUPPETEERS AND ACTORS

The adult art possibilities are fuckin OUT OF THIS WORLD

Okay so this is going to need work obviously but I had some steam and hammered out a sketch. So this version would have four performers running her - one to be the legs and both heads, one each for her right and left arms/wings, and a fourth for the tail. Maybe a fifth to run a camera and provide a viewpoint for the hidden actor within lol, a la big bird or other Muppet suit performers.

They're a two headed dragon! I imagine they'd be very flirty and cheery, the type that would love to interact with a crowd. The puppeteers would never acknowledge anyone talking to them, and the character would misunderstand or ignore anyone addressing the fact that they're a puppet.

I think this idea has A LOT OF POTENTIAL