Card games take "options" and fundamentally change their surface area.

Imagine you're playing a strategy game. You have literally 100 different diplomatic options for interacting with another country. This is pretty awesome, but it has a lot of implications:

-At any given time you can think about "Oh, should I do this one too?" for a boatload of these. This can make the game take way longer, because there's way more options to consider.

-Depending on the degree to which diplomatic options are constrained by resources/cooldowns/limiting conditions, you may have turns where you're doing a ton of diplomatic options all at once.

Cards break actions like these down into essential units, changing the "surface area" of decision making and changing how you acquire options. Instead of diplomatic options being limited by some sort of resource or conditions or cooldowns or something, cards instead funnel that an emphasized focus on a fundamental distinct action, in a format that is both generalist and also highlights the specific actions you've drawn.

In contrast, options having a sort of omnipresence and not being "mobile" or "interchangable" has some nuanced effects. Also, having such a long list generally results in developers cutting the list down because of the downsides, so turning options into cards can result in more options in practice- more distinct actions can exist without troublesome UI or "choice surface area" downsides or certain types of balance concerns.

Additionally, breaking things into cards is an abstraction that makes it easier to digestibly add permutations- like "oh, this is this variant of this card" or "oh, this card is buffed now."

i want to articulate this more but its difficult and i have so many drafts lmao

I got it up!

it's very barebones but as I kept saying I mostly just wanted to get something online that I could link from here while I still could. gonna be working on getting an RSS feed going hopefully later this week but we'll see. I also kinda wanna write a post about the experience of setting this up, since it's the first time I've put anything with laravel online

and if you wanna see the code I've had my site repo on github forever, just pushed up the branch for all this work here:

since the blog is all markdown-based you can even see my posts right there in the source code! neato!

Unfortunately, a server hiccup nuked my draft of a really nice eulogy for Cohost, and I'm feeling a bit down and can't bring myself to remember exactly what I said.

So I'll keep it short: This was the best place to post for me for a good couple of years, and I'm sad to see it go. Being on cohost and seeing the insanely cool things people were sharing just because they could (as well as the little goofs and nonsense posts and all that cool furry art) really underlined how important it is to:

a) have more than one place to be
b) have places that do different things
c) or the same things differently, even if just by a little bit

So thank you to @staff, thanks to everyone here that made this place what it is.

In the spirit of having more than one place to be, here's where I am at the moment

It's mostly the same as my pinned post and my carrd but I'll hold forth in this post about how I use each platform so you can decide where/if you wanna follow/join/hook up:

**EDIT: Turns out I had a wordpress blog in 2011, so I'll just move my posts to that as well (it's over at https://unangbangkay.wordpress.com ) **

1. Twitter (https://twitter.com/unangbangkay) - lol, lmao. I mostly keep locked, but i'll stay unlocked for a while so you can follow there if you want.

2. Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/unangbangkay.bsky.social‬) - mostly mirroring my twitter posts.

3. Tumblr (https://unangbangkay.tumblr.com) - In posting style overall Cohost was the most like Tumblr, so if I get back into writing longer stuff or move any of the tags I originated (Gacha Character of the Day, Shipchosting), it'll probably be here.

4. Discord - Unangbangkay - Add me! I use it a lot for work, so I'm always online there in some capacity. I'm usually on the RPG Site server. I have my own server but I only really started it so I could use it to look at Twitter videos without the shit-ass twitter codec. If I do anything with it I'll announce it somewhere.

5. Mastodon (@unangbangkay@mastodon.social) - I barely use it tbh but there are a ton of gamedevs there? Haven't really figured out how to make the feed show me what I'm looking to see so I guess I'll figure it out. I'm also on misskey.io (on the same handle) under the assumption that the saucy artists would move there but you have to filter so much lolicon it's kind of a chore

6. Threads (also unangbangkay on there, and on Instagram by extension) - No idea how to make it work, and Instagram scraping everything for training data makes me not want to use it, but i may have to for work if twitter implodes completely, as the "official" accounts are most likely to move there as opposed to any of the other alternatives.

7. LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/djoshuatolentino/) - Mostly for finding work, frankly.

In the spirit of doing things differently, here are some things I'm thinking of trying out

1.) Letterboxd (unangbangkay) and Backloggd (also unangbangkay) - Cohost hosted the longest media thread I managed to keep up, and though it still wasn't complete, I think the logging format works for me, so I may keep things up over there.

2.) A newsletter? Man, I dunno. If I do try it out, I've already got a substack account, so it'll probably be there for a while.

3.) Games I play! I'm on Primal/Lamia as Suzuran Hawksmarche in FFXIV and I'm on Star Trek Online as Selix@Unangbangkay, mainly. Also Unangbangkay on Xbox, PSN, and Steam.

Anyway, it's been really cool here. I hope to see some of you elsewhere.

So in the spirit of convenience, that's where I'll import the posts I wanna keep from here to first, and I'll make an effort to mirror work links and other "longer than a tweet" type of posts there as well.

Still figuring out how to do RSS (or is it added by default on a basic Wordpress), but here's the link if you'd like to bookmark it: https://unangbangkay.wordpress.com/

There's nothing on there but an intro right now, but there should be more coming. I've also edited a link into the above post and my Carrd.