game developer, yuri enthusiast, your beloved problematic girlfriend


email
christine@loveconquersallgames.com
get an email when I make a new game
news.loveconquersallgames.com/

something that I have sort of vaguely felt from social media for a while but both my recent experiments with twitch and cohost adding asks has made very clear: nobody online has any real sense of either my personality or interests anymore. I didn't use to feel this way! there's just something about the last few years of twitter that has made me feel too scared to express things about myself lest they turn into something that anyone malicious latch onto, and while I don't think there's anything wrong with having a private side from strangers, it feels bad to realize that I have apparently managed to smooth myself until there's nothing of interest left. nobody knows what to say to me anymore and it's definitely not their fault!

like, don't get me wrong, I feel like I've been taking stuff that I probably would have just screamed in public in 2013 and instead channelling it into my actual art. I'm a firm believer of the notion that feelings are more rigorously explored when they're abstracted into art than in something as clumsy and literal as online posting, and like, you know, The Fate of Another World is something I'm deeply proud of. the few people who have actually played it know what I'm talking about, there's real blood in that game, my soul is in there.

but also maybe it's bad if from the outside perspective all that's left is generic "queer game developer." I dunno what to do about that. maybe it'll be more obvious when I've recovered more from the past 14 years of twitter, the majority of which were apparently putting me into a hostile and defensive mindset. I really hope so! as much as I don't really know what I want out of social media or public presence anymore, it's definitely not to feel like my character is so ephemeral it's impossible to know


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in reply to @love's post:

we're all re-learning to be ourselves after spending so much time in places like twitter, where the most innocent statement or joke will turn into Discourse and Harassment. anti-social (and in some cases straight up sociopathic) behavior and Branding became such a core tenet of using the Twitter-Era Internet, and many of us (knowingly or otherwise) chose not to participate by simply just not using places to express any sense of self or agency. the social dynamics we've lived in have been so completely fucked, and now that we've all essentially been forced to re-home in a new place, we are forced to adapt, but we are also forced to re-discover ourselves.

i hope that you and the many other of us who feel this way can find comfort in existing in a new space with a relatively fresh start, whether it be something you take advantage of or simply just your new place to check out what's going on. i'm personally looking forward to when you feel comfortable enough to break even more out of your shell and flourish as the person that you want to be.

gamergate obliterated a lot of expression of women online and caused a lot of groups to raise fences and lot of groups to become more isolated and granular. It's depressing. I was in academia at the time researching social movements and just remember...like, entire swaths of people whose literature i was reading just fucking vanish

Its absolutely been a tough time adjusting to a place where earnestness is more celebrated compared to a place like twitter, where it felt like curating your own Brand was essential in engaging with the platform

I feel like Twitter's rigid adherence to the idea that anything that doesn't "do numbers" is a flop is one of the most low-key draining features of the platform. Like you can post about a small source of joy in your life or a little achievement that you're proud of and then walk away feeling that the machine of society has deemed it unworthy because it didn't fit with your established Twitter brand and your followers didn't push the like button. So you stop posting and talking about it. And it's like a slow process of whittling away aspects of your persona to fit into what a group of people who don't actually know you think and want you to be.

I don't know, maybe that's just me. Another reason I'm glad to be spending less time there.

no i was similar. numbers made me not post very frequently because i was always anxious about people not liking my posts or anything. as a result, i would basically never post anything that i wasn’t reasonably confident would “do numbers”, even though i never even had many followers and there wasn’t any numbers to begin with. looking back on it after being on cohost for a little under a year, it feels legitimately insane to me that i just lived like that.

oh man you explained it so well in a way i couldn't properly express into words before. it's 100% morally draining when your OWN perception of your work is reflected by how others engage with it. the numbers game nearly takes out the idea of just simply loving your work/achievements/progress. then when you do talk about your niche (or otherwise) interests, people unfollow you for taking too long to post "content." its so punishing for no reason.
main reason im so glad i decided to come to cohost. i feel a spark of passion that i just couldnt/cant share on on twitter in the same way. always tried not to let numbers affect how i feel about my own art, but it happened anyway lol. orz

super relatable. there's loads of stuff I post here that I never would have dropped on twitter just because some rando asshole would have context-collapsed it

yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I can understand that. personally to me it was less about "doing numbers" and more about, like, wanting to keep things safe, not get into arguments, not get pulled out of context, not talk about something that could potentially get turned into a weapon down the line. which all feels a lot more insidious and harder to remove from my brain.

I think about this sort of stuff a lot. I'm a really shy online person (in part because like... yeah I don't want anyone to use my words against me haha), and I remember on Tumblr I would often use tags to communicate, since they were a convenient no pressure way of sharing things about yourself. Twitter feels like it doesn't allow any room for touches of Individual Flavor, which I always found sad.

absolutely feeling this, especially after Five Years Ago where i kind of stopped posting anything personal or identifiable.

except then i got ten thousand twitter followers who just liked my cracks on NFTs and elon and whatever, and so they also didn't seem to know i was even a game developer

and now twitter is gone too

so now i am kind of

a wisp?

i don't know. it's weird. it feels like starting over. very bittersweet. except i don't remember how to do it so every step feels very awkward too.