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It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

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look i just need more people to talk about Sandrock with

I started playing My Time at Sandrock about two months ago. I'm a cozy game veteran (not to shameful-brag but I have over 1k hours in SDV on Steam alone -- sorry fellas, I'm taken) and I even played My Time at Portia for a couple hundred hours after it came out. (My review was always "it's fine, don't pay full price".) But I can't remember a game that has both simultaneously captivated me while also contributing to an overall improvement in the quality of my actual IRL life. (My actual in real life life, yes.)

Anyway here are way too many thoughts about why I love this game.

My Time at Sandrock fits the cozy gameplay loops we come to expect from the genre: you move to a new place, start out small, make some friends, gather a frankly alarming amount of raw materials, etc. But whereas games like Stardew Valley or Coral Island have that gameplay loop mostly centered around your farm (with some later quests to improve the community), Sandrock's gameplay feels more like an RPG: you get actual main story quests, it's just instead of killing a monster you have to construct a bridge. (Although you do sometimes kill monsters.) This does mean you can fail missions, but I never really felt any pressure to get them done in time.

The game does the expected nightly autosave while also allowing for manual saves. This means I have a built-in regular checkpoint to break the ADHD hyperfocus cycle: am I done playing for the day? Do I need to use the bathroom? With a regular RPG/MMORPG, there's literally nothing that'll feel like a stopping spot and I end up playing fewer hours of video games overall when I play a cozy game. But since there are manual saves as well, it also means that in a pinch I can just save wherever the hell I am and exit out.

The game has a desert setting which is absolutely breathtaking (pictures below), and one of the core mechanics is conserving water. This means that I've tricked my brain into taking a sip of water any time it's mentioned in the game. I did not know what it felt like to be properly hydrated.

Sandrock also feels more unique because the world really changes as you play. Yeah, I know you get the Community Center and the theater in Stardew, but the Community Center just results in Shane being unemployed and Clint being even MORE useless, and by the time the theater is out, I've basically maxed out whatever relationships I wanted to max out anyway. But in Sandrock, you literally build a bridge or fix up a railway station and then those changes persist in the game. It's not just big things -- I had a romance mission to make a stack of rocks (long story), and the stack of rocks persisted after that event. Even after I broke up with that character and fell for another person, that heart sculpture was just there.

And driving all these changes in the environment is a story that is ridiculously complex and unexpected, all set in a "cheery post-apocalyptic" world. And I DESPERATELY NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE PLOT WITH PEOPLE OK, I want someone to play through this game and then send me a DM with their reactions.

ok i've rambled enough, thank you for coming to my beth talk

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pop pop!  👊 💙

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marisha ray using her notebook as a hat

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people in youtube comments: Taliesin's always trying so hard to make percy look cool and badass, it's annoying.

Taliesin: Matt I don't like heights can i roll to have a panic attack and throw up.

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The more I think about it, the more I realize just how good the reveal of Beau’s first boyfriend was, because it says so much about her and the environment that she was raised in.

Consider Thoreau Lionett, who was told by a hag that a “Beau” would take on the business and continue the bloodline. He, of course, interpreted that to mean he would be granted a son, and prepared himself accordingly.

But then he didn’t get a son.

He got a daughter, instead.

But, you know, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t take on the business, and continue the bloodline. 

It’s not hard to imagine that Beau’s parents, even as they tried to conceive a son, put expectations on their daughter to find a nice young man and marry well. Even if it wasn’t overt (which, given the environment, it probably was). Comments like “one day you’ll get married and you’ll understand,” or “one day you’ll find a man that loves you.” Things like that. Beau might not have even been exposed to the idea that she might be able to marry a woman instead of a man until she was a teenager, or so.

So if a decent, not actively unpleasant boy comes along, young Beau might have been like “oh. well, okay, he’s not the worst.” Given that her main role models for what marriage is supposed to look like are her parents, who at best, seem like they have an okay relationship (Whether or not they were happier before Thoreau became obsessed with superstition, who knows).

Then along comes Tori. Beau’s introduction to the realisation that it’s literally quite possible to be gay and do crime. Beau mentioned that Tori had been the first person that she’d really loved, but I think that it was more than that, in the sense that Tori was the first person that opened Beau up to the realisation that she could be more than what her father wanted her to be.

There’s a lot of really interesting nuance in that single comment that I could write paragraphs about. It just makes me think (over and over again) that despite having arguably the most mundane backstories of the M9, it is consistently one that delivers every time.

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ah, i miss tanking on my paladin

He’s helping

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one of the most amazing things that has been said to me in therapy is that self esteem doesn’t exist.

and that floored people and the psych went onto say that what she meant was that self esteem is a concept that actually includes a vast array of things and labelling them all as one thing is really limiting and prevents actual improvement

you could have real strong pride in the things you create and hate your body

you could hate your creations but also want to share them with people

you could not hate yourself at all but not take care of yourself, engage in reckless self endangerment

thats all bundled under ‘self esteem’ but saying ‘i need better self esteem’ doesn’t mean anything

whereas if you say ‘i need to work on ways to keeping myself safe, refusing to act on destructive urges’ or ‘i want to be in a place where i believe compliments trusted people give me’

thats concrete, thats a goal.

having it said in therapy helped a lot of people in my group stop saying ‘i have low self esteem’ and start specifying about the actual issue they have

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If you ever feel bad about taking a longer time than someone else to accomplish the same things, just remember that during the 1912 Stockholm Olympics Japanese marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri passed out in a garden party along the marathon route and, instead of notifying race officials of his inability to finish the race, he went back to Japan without telling anyone and was considered a missing person by the Swedish authorities for 50 years.

He didn’t finish the race until 1967 when a Swedish television station offered to help him complete the run, and he finished with a final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.379 seconds.

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Happy Equinox Jast Remember The Dark Strange Months Of Uncertain Fortune Have Begun. Enjoy Nice First Day Of Autumb Dont Forget Ghosts Now Exist In Your Home

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GQ Encyclopedia of Matt Damon, his Bourne co-star Julia Stiles begins to tell the story of their encounter with Prince:

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119 degree heat index what what

Imagine this:

Being able to play Pokemon Go during Fall when it’s chilly and breezy. Wearing big hoodies and sipping some hot coffee.

Imagine being able to enjoy the outside for more than 10 minutes without actually dying in a pool of your own sweat.

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Pokemon Go is a huge security risk

Quick update - this seems to be inconsistent. It only seems to happen on iOS, but it doesn’t happen for everyone on iOS. If you fancy helping out join the conversation on Twitter!

I figured I’d post this because I don’t see anyone else talking about it and it bothers me. If you didn’t know, Pokemon Go is the latest in the long running series of games from Nintendo (although Go is actually made by a developer called Niantic). It’s also the first (I think) to run on your phone. Needless to say, it’s a huge hit. And it looks like a ton of fun - pretty much everyone I know is playing it. 

But there’s a problem.

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