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I'm still going to finish all of my current projects out of sheer spite even if it takes me the rest of my life, but there are very few creative burdens more exhausting than even building up the energy to post much on a site where:

the average person can cite one card game not made by wizards of the coast, blizzard, konami, or project moon (when unfortunately mega crit's ended up defining an entire subgenre in terms of confinement)

(yes the average deckbuilder is worse off than two screenshots put under a drowning filter from any of those, but that's not my point)

the average person has zero experience with a single traditional rl not made by nintendo or mister tarn adams (much less one worked on this millenium)

and where the average person acknowledges digital game design beyond the superficials primarily as a medium for rhetorical shitpost

I know my usual manners of speaking are usually about as parseable as the patterns on a shredded scarf, but I'm not sure I've literally every gotten a conversation past an exchange of two lines on this site. when all social media hyperprioritizes this medium being funnelled into solely surfaces, thirst, and punchlines, I'm not sure I ever will.

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this is going to be a bit of a drift in the usual topics for this tumblr, but: I can believe how the standard dilettantes and drama tourists can't be remotely bothered to even watch an eight minute video where she talked about being so stressed out by the unexpected spotlight (and becoming literally the most-subscribed in her medium) she couldn't eat or keep down food. I can believe how people would miss her co-workers repeatedly talking about how "disagreements with management" are a generic catch-all phrase to keep things private and shift the blame away from rabid fans blaming their interchangeable content machines for being vulnerable adults, and how the obvious disagreement with management in this was them trying and failing to comfort their biggest star enough for her to stream more than four times a month for the past two years. I can even believe people demonizing the idea of the company keeping an IP and not noticing how Kson, Matara, Kuro, Doki, Mint, Quinn, Michi, Dooby, and Nimi all inherited large parts of their former fans with minimal effort. (even Namie's doing fine aside from streaming itself for very long being bad for her health.) it's not surprising, really, when even the majority of people who engage with this medium can't be bothered to watch streams versus clips.

what I can't believe is how those tourists would see a selection of people open about massive prior social anxiety and major prior health issues working the same people-facing job for four to six years, all letting their contracts expire in one go, and immediately assume the company in question must be bad as the company who literally fought legal battles to cover up an attempted suicide over garbage paperwork.

though as per usual, it deeply disappoints me.

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so there's this thing in dcss where ghosts aren't completely harmless compared to nethack ghosts and they got to keep as much power as they could turning from players into monsters, and this was eventually decided as dissatisfyingly spoilery in terms of ghost threat levels and unrewarding natures. they were all tossed into small non-randomized optional sealed boxes that take up the chance to otherwise place forests and castles and all other sorts of prefab handmade far more variable pieces. most of the time for the far-less-reckless they just end up being backtracking fodder, and their functionality has decidedly decayed a fair bit.

for the year or more I've been back I've planned to convert those boxes into options for chambers for an otherworldly necropolis, rather than trashing the work of these previous devs and contributors outright. when I finally finished enough work elsewhere to start this project, actually looking at the pieces here and converting them over has felt like:

building a wardrobe out of different colours of used garbage bags

writing fanfic for a book where the planet was just the top twelve d&d monsters people on the street can name each living in separate tupperware containers

christmas shopping and walking into a pet store filled with nothing but blood-stained rocks

making marching band uniforms out of a pile of dirty socks

cooking a banquet for twenty out of cat food and salt

planting a botanical garden solely with shredded plastic lawn flamingos

building a tower to heaven with gum and gum wrappers

the worst part is, of course, that I can make this work in the end, and I will.

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Was playing dcss for the first time, fell in love with it, searched the tag and saw that you were on tumblr, congrats on being a major contributor to dcss!

Major contributor, one of the only two content developers for the past year with the other one being my life partner, potato, potahto.

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one of the curious things about being one of the two main content devs in the past year of an open source project is having to go clean up the half-done efforts of other devs' given projects. decoupling transformation magic from spellcasting into various talismans did make it so many more character builds can access transformations than prior, but by tossing out the prior connections to other schools of magic it also left a relatively plain set of transformations rather isolated and singular in its progression. having every troll and octopus end up aiming to become storms and statues is substantially less varied than earthshapers and weather witches of all sorts possibly dabble into the corresponding [earth | air] + transmutations form.

after a lot of brainstorming with my partner about the needs of variety and with the makeshift art compositing capacity I've picked up, actually coming up with enough forms to provide reasonable spread-out options then clashes strangely with the need to match the prior species-

-resulting in the absurdity of depicting a spine-coated cephalopod, a two-headed snake with cat ears, or vampire and werewolf armadillo-taurs. it does mean, also, in comparison to That Other Roguelike's permitting immense bodyhacking for a steadfastly genderless player-perspective, a character can actually divest experience towards transitioning into a traditionally-feminine mythological feline with a chest and an armoured skirt. who knows how popular that'll be compared to becoming a walking hive, though?

(will still need to get volunteer artists to cover a few remaining things- no compositing really will get a werewolf cat- but it's not too bad for preliminary art compared to other programmer-art.)

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thank you lesbians that make strange & unmarketable art

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for all that people make fun of comics adaptations for either having to presume one knows nothing or everything about a work's setting and premise, they actually remembered to tell individual standalone stories, which disappointingly shows off how much other mediums continue to lag behind when the majority of episodes of Secret Level (2024) forgot knowing how to be more than an isolated games advertisement. the sci-fi bias just makes me want to edit the Nozaki-kun panel to say "you should watch some Expanse and Pluto and develop some emotions".

like, really, considering one of the most singularly episodes was for yet-unreleased dark souls pac-man, it just shows the standard continues to be below sea level.

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fantasy game gamedev with your gay girlfriend working on the same project is about making her laugh deeply with the phrase "more consistently blunk".

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it's so deeply alien to constantly hear about how so many programmers write almost nothing for patch notes or commit messages, when working on a new monster's lore for a two-decades-old open source project has literally lead to me writing more words defending it than there are individual pixels in the chimeric art I've prepped for it (which is to say over 600). not that I'm sure who creates and handles the greater burden, really.

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the deep irony of having not touched pronouns in a codebase before and then screwing up the c strings

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Just constantly churning out quick remixed graphics from the early '00s to fill baffling-unaddressed needs or help establish future manufacturing magic on the regular here, really. Two decades and nobody bothers to make magma blasts look different from fire, when there's a mechanical distinction between the two? Baffling.

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Screw the need for dramatic 𝔪𝔢𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱𝔲𝔞𝔩 𝔴𝔞𝔫𝔨𝔢𝔯𝔶 to justify weird vfx. Even with using stock assets, video game magic doesn't need to look like the exact same four explosions, directionless particle sprays, and encircled hexagrams over and over again. One of my project's more of a deckbuilder-rpg than a jrpg, but it won't take more than an hour per run for both sides to be throwing around buffs and debuffs and damage visually all-

-which admittedly are no longer simple effects, but also don't need any consciousness parasite or time eater or digital divinity or skin flakes of an elder god to justify it, just "this is what youkai do when bullet dodging's been abstracted to rpg mechanics. of course this is what e.g. 'you break a crystal flower on their head for 4x10' damage looks like".

RPG with an EarthBound-style combat system where all attacks are both narrated textually in the status box and displayed as simple animations. Certain special attacks have narrative descriptions which differ conspicuously from their animations; this occurs in a way which initially could plausibly be ascribed to use of stock assets, but eventually becomes the key to a major plot point.

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The problem is that America has beaten down its people for decades and gotten them weak and desperate and now promises a way out, a way to transcend and rise above, through selling out their fellow man. They encourage contempt and hatred as one way ticket to not being included with the masses being death marched to poverty or imprisonment or whatever other bitter end surely awaits the people they’re told are beneath them. An embarrassingly large chunk of white men are just straight up nazis these days as a way to dissociate from the rest of the carnage around them, even if they’re broke and uneducated and from an impoverished background themselves. They’ll vote for and align themselves with anything for a taste of power and control that makes them feel a little less helpless. The same goes for minorities. They’ll punch down if they think it’ll get them somewhere, even if in reality they’re punching sideways. I don’t know what else to say, really. Everybody is so incredibly hateful. We are a loveless, disrespectful nation. We are so spread thin by our government that we would sell each other out in a heartbeat for an ounce of relief. This is what we’ve come to.

It’s not even about Trump at this point. He’s gonna get in office and do whatever he does and it’s gonna be a mess but whatever. This is indicative of deeper problem. This is just the ugly consequence of the already present reality in this country that we all just despise each other. There is no solidarity and there is no love. Trump being in office or not doesn’t change the fact that America is a breeding ground for violent hatred. Trump has given people a shining example of how to give in to the worst parts of your human nature and make it the problem of everyone around them. I don’t even know what we’re supposed to do about that. I don’t know if that’s something we can come back from. And if anything COULD be done about it, Trump certainly wouldn’t do it. Honestly, Kamala probably wouldn’t have either. We are so deeply fucked.

However, I must say, if you voted for Trump, I hope that peace never finds you. Instead, I hope clarity strikes you someday like a clap of lightning and you have to live the rest of your life with the knowledge and guilt of what you’ve done and who you are as a person.

Love yall. Shit is so bleak but the world keeps spinning until it doesn’t, I guess. We can’t count on the government for literally even a shred of progress or hope so just keep up the good fight in your own personal lives. That’s literally the only thing to be done at this point. Stay safe out there. Maybe buy a gun.

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tbh foreign policy was listed as the least important issue for exit polls, arab and muslim heavy states like minnesota and michigan are not what lost harris the vote, and jill stein got under like one percent. everyone making this about leftists who didnt vote either pro or against is making something out of basically nothing. americans are fundamentally boring and apolitical and above all completely self centered. they do not give a fuck about the suffering of people in palestine or ukraine. they just know that gas was cheaper 4 years ago or whatever. the amount of incredibly normal people i know who arent even right wing so much as just sort of uneducated and incurious about any issues / had no interests beyond like big ten sports or binge drinking or getting ahead at work and getting rich are voting for him not people who agonized over a single thing ever. this is unfortunately a non issue bc americans dont care about anything but themselves, you just happen to be around small groups of the exception

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New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.

UPDATE 4/11/2023:

I swapped out the colloidal silver nasal spray info for xylitol nasal spray info. I originally included colloidal silver spray because of the linked study and recommendation from RTHM, but I don't want to be pointing people toward something with notable health risks. Xylitol spray (Xlear) is also cheaper and more widely available!

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sometimes you come back to a group project and find somebody made a reluctant bomb design of an enemy for a bonus postgame level, that could be prematurely detonated from throwing a random 1 damage stone off the ground, and takes several dozen turns to randomly decide to actually walk forward enough to detonate on a player running back and forth in its sight

and then you remove the entire "barely moves unless you're close to it" mechanism, multiply its health over a hundredfold and its damage by x1.5

and even then in testing, it just feels like "oh, this thing technically kind of exists for variety's sake" due to its low damage, but at least it's not an active insult to have exist alongside piles of archfiends in the hells that had nearly every other harmless threat taken out of them