openworldadventurer

[openworldadventurer]

We should have an entire pantheon of city animal spirits, whose mantle is born by various avatars, and whose favor we call upon as needed:

Big Pidge — the fattest city pigeon in any flock — called upon by those who must survive and thrive in a city, especially when it has betrayed them.

Doc Crow — any corvid willing to make eye contact with you until you look away — a keen observer of the patterns of the city and how to best use or defy them.

Skritt the Guest — any rodent in a fancy place — champion of those who seek succor from those who have much more than they need.

Polydactus — the cat with the highest total of toes and scars in a city — the spirit of wearing your flaws and imperfections with style and pride.

And of course, Matapacos — any stray dog hunted by animal control — the spirit of resistance against unjust and abusive authority.

I think the fattest wild pigeon in a given city should be venerated as a sort of civic deity.

[openworldadventurer]

Basically every big studio should be doing this, making smaller side-games and experiments with younger devs at the helm. It should be considered essential R&D and skill development.

And most of them pay lip service to the idea. But it’s always the first thing cut the moment there’s ever some sort of budget worry, which is basically always.

Short-term thinking to appease the investors and publishers. And it hurts us all, gamers and developers.

I get a little defensive when I see comments disparaging Elden Ring Nightreign being "the cheap trendchasing Fromsoft B-team game" since it's got a first time director and is obviously done with reused assets, but like, you don't get senior devs without junior devs.

In this ridiculously risk-averse industry where no project gets signed unless you convince a board of investors who have never touched a game in their lives that your idea will generate 1 Soulsbillion dollars, the fact that a Fromsoft dev that's never directed a game before can pitch a concept to Miyazaki and Miyazaki goes "Let's make it happen, oh but you're the director now, since it's your idea" is pretty amazing.

Most of the assets are already made, the world of Elden Ring is already made, they're not exactly putting the responsibility of the next big Fromsoft title in untested hands here. They're letting their junior developers cut their teeth on a spinoff project! We should be getting WAY more of these actually, they're an investment for the future

[openworldadventurer]

when e.e. cummings said “i’ll live my life if it kills me”

[openworldadventurer]

Happy Pride, monsterfuckers.

[openworldadventurer]

yeah im “transitioning” *dissolves into tiny pieces as i click to the next slide*

[openworldadventurer]

This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8

[openworldadventurer]

After deciding to go back and listen again for old time's sake, I see that far too many online sources for this album put all of Fingertips into one big track, making it impossible to relive the proper listening experience.

Thankfully, someone on YouTube has compiled the individual versions and put them all into an Apollo 18 playlist. So, for those who can't recreate the lost technology of the compacted disc, I recommend listening to this playlist on shuffle. Finding a way to prevent the ads from interrupting is left as an exercise for the listener.

And then buy a ticket to the next TMBG live show that comes near where you live. (and maybe some merch after the show.)

[openworldadventurer]

I don't know how many of the younger folks on this site know or remember this, but Apollo 18 (the album that included Fingertips) came out when CDs had the relatively new ability to shuffle tracks randomly. I vaguely remember reading an interview where one of the Johns said the purpose of this surreal set of micro-songs at the end of the album was to act as little snippets of songs that would get shuffled at random into the rest of the album and break up the pace and variety of the album, like croutons in a salad.

And, by god, I tried it and it changed my entire listening experience.

Fingertips is neither 21 micro-songs in a row nor one big song. Fingertips is a set of musical tendrils reaching through the cracks in your usual songs and into your shuffled listening experience to musically tickle you and keep you delighted and disoriented.

Like fingertips, indeed.

[openworldadventurer]

For a change of pace, let’s talk about karaoke, why it feels fun (even if you can’t sing), and how to make it better for everyone.

[openworldadventurer]

fuckin based and also really fuckin funny, thank you FBG

[openworldadventurer]

this is fred, the dot.

fred wants to grow into a beautiful tree, but sadly has no branches

reblog to give fred a branch

i will post fred status updates as he grows

[openworldadventurer]

It's damned near a decade since I last played Stellaris, yet this is exactly the sort of thing I want from my 4X games, so I guess I'm gonna reinstall and get all the DLCs.

I've been playing Stellaris for 8 years and this is absolutely the wildest fucking galaxy I've ever seen

I'll try to explain this so people who don't know the game will understand it.

my empire, the Fen, spawned in a totally isolated part of the galaxy, sandwiched between, on one side, an ancient empire with technology centuries ahead of mine and no interest in letting me through their borders, and on the other, a "devouring swarm" species that kept trying to eat me. so I basically hunkered down behind a whole bunch of defense platforms and didn't meet anyone else until halfway through the game.

that situation lured me into a false sense of calm.

about an hour into the game, another ancient empire from the other side of the galaxy "awakened", slaughtered the devouring swarm in less than five minutes, and started closing in on my borders right around the time a violent warlord popped into the middle of my territory through a wormhole.

shortly after this I accidentally imploded my home planet into a black hole.

then, because apparently I had accidentally set the "crisis" option to "ALL", the galaxy was attacked by:

ghost invaders from the dimension where telepathy happens

a rogue AI that made half the robots in the galaxy turn evil

a "scourge" from outside the galaxy intent on consuming everything, including my ships

another rogue AI that wants to erase all consciousness from the universe

in response to this I leaned hard on my bioengineering technology and created a sort of space Godzilla the size of a planet. the entire galactic community then decided that makes me the real problem, and every single civilisation declared war on me.

I evolved my space Godzilla until it got big enough to eat planets, at which point a sort of space Cthulhu emerged and started rampaging through the galaxy trying to challenge it for dominance.

so now, I'm just running around eating planet after planet trying to make my space Godzilla strong enough to fight space Cthulhu, basically doing ranked competitive genocide with the other remaining crisis factions. the galactic population has dropped by like 70%. a dozen empires have fallen. my economy is crashing because apparently this situation is bad for trade and general citizen morale. somewhere there's a planet that keeps sending me notifications because the indigenous species is about to achieve FTL travel and I'm just like. oh buddy. pal. you do not want to be out here.

[openworldadventurer]

My great grand-uncle or something was Lawrence Zeleny, which means nothing to you if you aren’t in the Audubon Society, but he was credited with being one of the big reasons bluebirds are still in North America.

I have practically no memories of the man except for one time when I was kid and I accompanied him on rounds checking on his bluebird boxes. And I remember with that perfect clarity of kid-surprise when he found one of the boxes had been taken up by a European Starling (invasive species, often takes up residence in bluebird boxes).

He reached in, took out the starling, casually snapped its neck, and threw it on the ground. Then he told me he had a great recipe for Starling Pie and continued his rounds.

So yeah, maybe also look for an ornithologist.

everybody is drooling for the blond guy from dungeon meshi. that guy is 100% real and I know like six of him, what you are looking for is a marine biologist

1. spends a long amount of time doing something weird far away from society

2. will not stop talking about their animal

3. has definitely eaten their animal and has strong opinions on how to cook it best

[openworldadventurer]

Why are all the anthropomorphized concepts hitting on me, and why do they all think “I knew your dad” is the way to do it?

s/o to this skeleton babe from 1936

[openworldadventurer]

However, SICK WHEELIES counts as a subset of Conquest, so it counts.

(Yes, even if the “horse” is motortrike.)

MY TOP 4 HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE! #3 WILL SHAKE YOU TO YOUR VERY CORE

[openworldadventurer]

"Ah look, he's making himself all big. Wonder what that's f---FFFFUUUCK!"

[openworldadventurer]

Damn right, you do. I don’t go into it in the article, but the writing for this game is just plain beautiful and mature in a way that I rarely see in good movies, much less in games. I recommend it highly!

How a single game mechanic radically changes the nature of the standard JRPG. Or, in this case, the FRPG.