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.
Friction and games by @FreyjaKatra
Bad friction is any kind of gameplay element, incongruity with the fiction and broken fictional promises that takes you out of the game. These are mechanics or elements that "get in the way of the story." Almost universally, when someone says they want mechanics that "get out of the way," they're actually speaking from experience with bad friction.
Why the "old fighting game good, new game bad" discourse actually matters by @pattheflip
Modern fighting games have largely undergone a multi-generational process of transformation into pop music. Fighting game developers are “better” at their jobs than ever before, but the improvements are largely confined to making fighting games a more consumable product. Pop producers will sample liberally across genre, but the fundamental logic of pop music is easy to consume.
just a little Daily Reminder by @cathoderaydude, @pendell, @blazehedgehog
the second you go an inch beyond the intended 4x3 frame you see everything, all the strings, lights, cables, C-stands, everything that makes the show work. Everything is deliberately framed to work in 4x3 and absolutely nothing else, because they were working in tight sets on tight money.
On Sherlock Holmes and "mysteries" by @calliope
As I said earlier, detective fiction is a form of gothic fiction, and gothic fiction is traditionally about destabilizing our view of the order the world is in. Good and Evil do not exist in nature; crimes can go unpunished; the houses of God can house the worst sinners. Gothic fiction disrupts our feeling of safety in the world, that even if we aren't safe, the world has justice and truth in it. What if, really, it's all whatever the hell?
"I put Venom in is not because I love him. It is about Success Rate." by @Unangbangkay
Slop machines have been a bonanza for consumers of a particular style of porn as well, which is that glossy, excessively lit pinup style so common to gravure art and cartoon art that's made to look a bit gravure.
Gendered languages and translation by @lokeloski
For example, most people are aware enough to signal in a dialogue when it's a man talking to a woman, or a woman talking to a woman, and so on. But then, there's a man talking to a group. Is this a group of men or women? If it's a mixed group, are there more women than men, or vice-versa? It might seem silly, but this matters when trying to have a clean and well-written line that needs to follow grammatical gender rules.
on inclusivity by @kirinwoah, @winedark
true inclusivity, in my opinion, immediately collapses once it has a definable static identity. ie, associated stereotype. let me explain.
a home i cannot return to by @SaidLikeCaleen
and to listen to it now? hurts. it feels like grieving, mourning. the turning of time has made an irony of it. none of my family lives in the places we once did, which places so many people call beautiful and i can see only desolation. bereft of its people, its nature, its life.
Investors Need A Story, and AI Is A Plot Device by @Sheri
The machine can be trusted to behave exactly as you ask it, because it cannot resist you, only break. A machine cannot die, and dying would be bad for business. But breaking things… is just a consequence of moving fast.
the "AI" death cult by @sarahzedig
"the end times" are, really, just a poetic verbalization of the civilization-level need for a people's revolution in everything, an objectively extant pressure correctly identified but wildly misdiagnosed. it's a refusal to countenance any possibility that we can become better than ourselves in a way that actually matters, not through technology or devotion or purity, but through action. it is a desperate plea to the universe for an all-knowing adult to just take charge already so we can stop pretending like any of this is actually our responsibility.
Kids Looking Out For Other Kids by @kylelabriola
I think when a kid spends time with someone who’s, like, three or four years younger than them…they’re forced to recognize that sometimes they have to be the “adult in the room.” And that they have to be a caretaker, and be “the bigger person”, and be sympathetic to the needs of someone else.
does the audience have kindness you're ignoring? by @Sheri
but that doesn't mean people, at large, don't care. many have been beaten down, or never had a chance to learn the lies they were told to make capitalism work just kept them fighting amongst themselves.
untitled by @duskwingmoth
This is not a time or place in any way resembling the flowery image of junior scholars being patiently cultivated by kindly sages, this is a Workplace where children are LARPing as employees under their supervisor and pit boss, The Teacher. This is horrendous for building thoughtful, curious adults, but it's perfect for creating an unquestioning labor force that will bend over backwards to accrue capital for the capitalist class.
Marine Science Mondays 🦈🦦🐚🦐: A short personal history of crabs by @dismallyOriented
When you research clams and oysters, crabs are also a huge deal just because they eat the shit out of your study organism. Blue crabs are generalist scavengers who've made it their life's business to play garbage disposal to the entire rest of the estuarine food web.
Remember when Japan Studio was a division of PlayStation that published cool, groundbreaking games? by @iiotenki
The writing was already on the wall that the days of Sony fostering smaller domestic titles were drawing to a close and, with the hindsight available now in 2024, that's exactly how Tokyo Jungle feels today: independent-minded from beginning to end, a last call for drinks at a beloved neighborhood bar before closing it doors.
Cohost Tips: Things About Tagging That Are Maybe Not Immediately Obvious by @ChrisStapley
I see a lot of people on here who are presumably still operating off of their tumblr or twitter reflexes and I just wanna try and help clear up some potential confusion about how the tagging system works here cause I don't think any of this is officially documented anywhere
poe's masquerade by @dreamcastaway
When fans imply impenetrabilities in the works by virtue of cultural difference, there's a risk of veering into a kind of Orientalism. One which mystifies the culture and turns it into a kind of "other." Distant, strange.
untitled by @shel
Their actions, feelings, and decisions are outside of my control. I fundamentally cannot control other people. It's just simply not possible to do at a fundamental level. I can try and try and try. I could be a master of manipulation and social steering. Yet still, other people would always be uncontrolled variables. Every single person in the entire world no matter how important they were to me could still, at any time, decide to leave me. And then they could leave. And there's nothing I could ever possibly do to prevent that.
On the Restriction of Authority by @Meinberg
In fact, unwritten social convention is often the main restriction on inbalanced authority, as fault of a tool as that can be. The reason that the DM doesn’t send a tarrasque after a group of level 5 PCs with nowhere to escape is because that’s a dick move and no one would want to play with that DM again unless they promise to do better.
community building lessons by @Inumo
There is no risk nullification, only risk mitigation, and the law of truly large numbers dictates that with enough time, shit'll go wrong. If you want to build a long-term, stable community, you gotta be ready to make mistakes & come back from them. If you aren't as concerned about long-term stability, then just be ready to bail before you hit burnout & trauma.
On Grammar. by @iiotenki
Of course, different people have different thoughts and different mentalities in day to day life, but as a linguistic framework, Japanese as a language examines and frames certain things in ways that are pretty distinctly different from other languages and especially western ones like English. That might sound obvious enough on paper given the difficulty that people like you can very understandably have with it, but I don't just mean in terms of obvious social and cultural dynamics that emerge from it.
They don't succeed because they're not intended to succeed by @TrainsgenderFoxgirl2816, @BridgeUnit
The primary function of the state in a capitalist system is to facilitate capitalism. A state by its very nature as a vertical power structure will attract and promote the most ruthless actors, and capitalism is the natural outcome of such people holding sway over society. This power structure will then work towards the most efficient ways to funnel wealth and/or power from society to its own members. Capitalists will constantly demand as much of this power and money as they can get, limiting state funds and therefore state spending to only those things that will squeeze more money out of a society.
on Fighting, and the concept of "Psychological Pressure" by @NireBryce
The smaller and more mobile you are, and the larger and more bureaucratic the opponent is, the more opportunities there are to have outsized impact. Very outsized. (To a point. You need some percentage of their numbers in order to make it work). But you have to shift your goals and how you look at things. You need to see what all is connected of your opposition, and you need to use that as places to apply additional, disproportionate leverage by keeping them off-plan and guessing.
You are not an idiot. Puzzle solving is a skill. by @Pauline-Ragny, @SomeEgrets, @morayati, @vectorpoem
this is critical! it's a fundamental building block of human knowledge! people our culture typically portrays as "smart" are doing this all the time! so much of our collective knowledge and understanding is not built on the perfect synthesis of new ideas in a vacuum and "Eureka!" moments, but by the willingness to be repeatedly incredibly wrong until we understand enough that we start being somewhat less wrong
Dungeons & Dragons & Depression by @Clouder
Everyone is here means I get to wrestle once again with the nature of corporate art and who gets to do what with it. It means I get to reevaluate once again the fact that I have a lot of nostalgia for published D&D settings and works and that nostalgia is now, more than ever, a cudgel marketers swing at me and my wallet. I have to work through why I like 1990s Planescape and Spelljammer and hate 2020s Planescape and Spelljammer despite both of them fundamentally being exercises in finding ways to sell gamers books and supplements they otherwise would not purchase by painting every setting as being connected.
The Economics of Releasing a Videogame, or: DLC Was Always a Trap by @CriminallyVulgar, @kylelabriola
Paid DLC is something to be deployed in special circumstances, where it makes perfect sense for your game and your audience. For every new idea you have, the options are either to "Add it as a free content patch", "Make it a paid DLC" or "Save it for a future sequel" and it's worth really carefully weighing those options.
Thinking about video game prices again by @retroheart, @Adell
I once owned a copy of ClayFighter 63 1/3: Sculptor's Cut, the N64 exclusive that was only available for rental. I bought it from a Blockbuster as a loose cartridge for $25 god knows when, and sold it a couple years back after a nightmarish set of experiences that almost had me give up on selling it at all. I bought a nice couch with the money to replace the hand-me-down futon I was given when I moved out to begin with. That couch has done a hell of a lot more for me than Sculptor's Cut ever did.
DO NOT BUY HISENSE TV'S LOL (Or at least keep them offline) by @ghoulnoise
If I had spent a few days carrying out a clean install and re-installing all my work stuff, my problem would have come back. If I had taken the PC out back and shot it and replaced it with a fancy new computer, the problem would have come back.
aimless post about nature of complaining by @spookydichotomy
I like to complain about stuff if it sucks. complaining identifies what is useless or detrimental and seeks to cut it away. it is therapeutic, satisfying in itself, but it is also a whetstone, making both the complainer and what is complained about sharper in the act. this is the hater's wisdom.
technology, community, and idealism by @ireneista
other problems come back because they're problems that just... only exist when humans gather in large groups. oops, your compiler's "benevolent dictator for life" turns out to be racist and that has created a huge bias in who is and isn't part of the community you didn't realize you were building? .... oh, and that lack of feedback from other groups has meant that a lot of the technology has reductive assumptions baked into it that it's too late to change? surely nobody could have predicted this
Bodies of Art & Bodies of Labour by @ChevyRay
You see, it is very common to hear this kind of statement or sentiment echoed in games, tech, and software. Not just from nasty, unkind people, but also from my kind, supportive, and astoundingly creative peers. I don't think people are really aware that they do it at all, and Beaton's talk explores why this kind of thing happens (albeit in writing/art more than games/tech, but it still rings true) with great empathy and analysis.
You will never be able to explain it in words by @kylelabriola
Whatever your idea is…it’s an emotion, or aesthetic, or vibe, or story that will be expressed through the thing you make. It will make sense once you make it. It’ll start to make sense once you start sketching on paper, or start fiddling around on the piano, or when you take your camera out onto location.
When to write Good Code by @zaratustra
SO we've established that writing Bad Code is good, efficient and sexy. Which brings the question, why would anyone want to write Good Code? Just to lord it over us poor mortals? The answer is, "NO"
psa: you can talk to strangers in public by @bark, @mahalis
people are interesting, and you can talk to them. anything from letting someone know their shoelace is undone to jumping into full just-like-we're-old-friends conversation; it's fun, and if you're anything like me, either could be the highlight of your day.
Sunday night poetry: Don't read poetry by @hecker
You can love the work of one musician without loving that of another, and love a song by a particular musician without liking any of their others.
So it is with poetry: don’t read poetry, read poems. Sample widely enough that you can find something you like, and — if you want to go further — read people who can enhance your enjoyment of a poem by exploring how it works.
