#random stuff I'd make a compilation of for no reason

[dawdlecentric]

Every time Nijika says Daijoubu / 大丈夫

[pudding-parade]

Get to know you - Sims Style

@rstarsims3 tagged me for this a while back, and I'm finally posting my answers, which took me a while to compile because 1) Blabbity blab blab blab, as usual, and 2) Still needing lots of rest and stuff, so no sitting at a computer for hours on end.

But here we go! I'mma put my blabby answers and my tag list behind Ye Olde Cut.

What’s your favorite Sims death? What an odd question, especially to lead off… Well, I guess if I had to pick one, it'd be the one from TS2 where cloudwatching occasionally brings a satellite down on the cloudwatcher's head. But generally, mine die of old age, if they manage to get that far. I play with long, but realistically proportional, life stages, mostly because I'm almost always playing "experimental" saves where I'm "road testing" rulesets and such, so I need a lot of time to work out kinks and test ideas and stuff.)

Alpha CC or Maxis Match? I land on a combination of more-realistic (but not ultra-realistic) stuff for CAS, but for everything else, like with furniture and deco and stuff, I tend to prefer CC stuff that visually fits in with the EA stuff in terms of style and textures and whatnot, so that the CC doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when combined with EA stuff. In fact, my "go-to" CC for build/buy is stuff that adds on to EA stuff, like more doors/windows that match an EA door/window.

Do you cheat your sims weight? What, to make the fat ones skinny? The skinny ones fat? The skinny ones buff? No. I don't see why I would. It's easy enough to make a sim gain or lose weight without cheating, which I'm assuming means just using the sliders.

Do you move objects? Is there anyone who doesn't? That's a serious question. Is there any one who doesn't? I want to know.

Favorite Mod? I'm leaving aside the NRaas mods because I don't see them as mods so much as things that are just essential to make the game playable in the often-weird ways that I play. There are others that I also consider just essential for when I'm playing in certain styles, especially for more primitive settings. But for ones that are optional and just pure fun, I'd nominate all of @thesweetsimmer111's baby- and toddler-related ones.

First Expansion/Game Pack/Stuff Pack? I know for TS2 it was Seasons. For TS3…For a long time, I had just the base game, which I got when it came out, but didn't play beyond trying it out and then going back to TS2. Then, years later, I got a new computer and decided to give TS3 another try, but I couldn't find the CD or DVD or whatever it was, so I bought a combo pack with the base game, Late Night, and the High End Loft or whatever it is stuff pack, so I guess it would be Late Night. Other than that, I bought all the other TS3 EPs in one go when EA had them on sale for 50% off via Origin, which that combo pack forced me to install. (But which I am now free of again. 🏴‍☠️)

Do you pronounce live mode like aLIVE or LIVing? As aLIVE. Because that is when the game is live. Games do not live, but they can be live. See, this is one reason why English sucks.

Who’s your favorite sim that you’ve made? Here's a thing about me: I don't really get attached to the pixel people. For me, they're just tools. I'm guessing it's because I'm not a storyteller when it comes to Sims, so I don't see sims as characters. Sure, sometimes I find one endearing for one reason or another. Usually, they have traits that make them assholes, and I like to watch them create chaos and ruin wherever they go. One of the founders of the Random Legacy that I will get back to one of these days is one of those. But I find I like other people's sims more than mine, though that's more of a testament to those simmers' story-telling skills than anything else.

Have you made a simself? Only by accident. A few times I've just been randomly moving sliders around and somehow I ended up with something that looked like me at some stage in my life. It stayed that way for a minute or three, before I yelled OH GOD NO! and quickly slidered the horror away.

But to be honest? I find the entire concept kind of creepy, at least in terms of putting a self-sim in the game and playing them as a character. That would just feel weird to me. That said, I suppose it might have been something that would have appealed to me if I had played when I was a kid, but the game didn't exist when I was a kid. Computers didn't exist when I was a kid, at least not in a form that regular people could own and that could fit on a desk. I was in my 40s when I started playing the game. My daughter played TS2 when she was a kid, and she had a self-sim inserted into the stories she would play, so…yeah. Maybe it's a younger-person thing. Or maybe I'm just weird. Yeah, it's probably that second option.

Which is your favorite EA hair color? Probably the black, but even with that I have to add some highlights to it because otherwise the hair just looks like a creature from the void eating the sim's head.

Favorite EA hair? None of them. They all need to DIAF.

Favorite life stage? I don't have one. I have a least-favorite, babies, because they're basically just objects, but once they're actually sims, I enjoy playing sims of all ages equally.

Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? I originally bought TS2 just to build in it, and for a couple of years, that was all I did. I only started actually playing the game later. Now, I enjoy both building and actually playing the game, depending on my mood. Usually, I'll have a binge of building, but I eventually come to a point where I'd rather do anything other than build. Then I play the game. Then, eventually, the urge to build comes back. So it's a back-and-forth.

Are you a CC creator? I made lots of stuff for TS2, mostly object retextures/recolors. I've made a few minor things for TS3, and I retexture hairs and add preg morphs to clothing for my own use, but I wouldn't consider myself a CC creator for TS3. In fact, I'm actively resisting learning how to make stuff for TS3 because I really don't want to go down that rabbithole again.

Do you have any Simblr friends or a Sim Squad? Friends in the sense of "people I enjoy talking to and sharing ideas with and sometimes arguing with here on Tumblr?" Sure. Are those the same as friendships that develop face-to-face in the real world? Nope. But, sometimes I like talking to my Simblr friends a lot more than talking to my real-life friends, so make of that what you will. Y'all are less draining sometimes. LOL

Do you have any sims merch? No official merch, but my brother-in-law is into making pottery, and several years ago he made me a big stoneware mug with a plumbbob on it. Which is ironic because when I play the game I turn off the plumbbobs because I hate them. LOL But I love the mug. It's heavy enough that neither cats nor wagging dog tails nor giant snakes (though he could do it if he focused all four of his brain cells on the task) can knock it off of tables, but not so heavy that I can't comfortably lift it. I use it for eating soup and the occasional mug cake, and also for drinking the awful herbal tea my husband makes me drink, though since the recent surgery, I don't have to drink that anymore! *dances* So now it will just be my soup or cake mug. Or one for tea that I actually want to drink.

Do you have a YouTube for sims? I don't have a YouTube for anything. Well, OK, I have a YouTube account for watching other people's stuff and making playlists of things I want to watch, but I don't post videos on it, and I don't really watch video game-related stuff on YouTube, either.

How has your “Sims style” changed throughout your years of playing? It hasn't, really. I've pretty much always just come up with wacky scenarios to play and see how they go. In fact, for me, coming up with the scenario and figuring out how to make it work in the game and then inventing a ruleset to govern it is sometimes more fun than actually playing the scenario. LOL

And my Sims all look like the game made them because…the game makes all of them. I just poke the random button until it produces something that doesn't look too much like a freak of nature, then I hit up a couple sliders to remove or tone down any remaining freakishness. (Though I confess that I will spend an inordinate amount of time sculpting the titties of those who have them. Why? I have no idea, other than I just like me a nice pair of titties. Too bad there aren't any sliders for male titties…) Then I just slap on a different hair, maybe change the eye color, and slather on some makeup and facial/body hair and shit until they don't look too stupid, and then off I go. From there, they're all born in the game, and I just leave them as-is, mostly because I can't be bothered. "I can't be bothered" is pretty much my philosophy of life.

Who’s your favorite CC creator? I hate this kind of question. I feel like all they do is disappoint and discourage people if they're never picked. I refuse to do that over something so trivial. So, my favorite CC creator is you, the person reading this. Yes, you. Even if you don't make CC. It doesn't matter. You're the best.

How long have you had Simblr? I started my TS2 one in 2013. (I can remember that only because I know that I started it the same year I met my husband. LOL ) I started this one….2 years ago? 3? Something like that.

How do you edit your pictures? Other than basic cropping and resizing and maybe adjusting brightness/contrast a bit if the pic is too dark or whatever, I generally don't. I don't even use Reshade all the time anymore, only in certain situations, though I do have an NVIDIA profile for the game that adds ambient occlusion and better antialiasing and shit like that. Sometimes, though, I'll decide to photoshop scenery pics, and then I just kind of stab at it with various tools and filters and layer blends and shit until I like I how it looks. There's no actual process involved. I'm random like that.

What expansion/ gamepack is your favorite? I gotta go with World Adventures. Bits of it are a bit, shall we say, culturally problematic, but man, I never get tired of doing those stupid, stupid tombs. LOL Plus, I love that NRaas Traveler allows you to "travel" to any world, and I don't think that mod works without WA, so…. Yeah. WA.

Tagging: I have no idea who's done this, so I'll just tag a few random people, off the top of my head. Feel free to do or ignore, as you choose. No pressure from me! So...@nectar-cellar, @happy-lemon, @erasabledinosaur, @esotheria-sims, @lilleputtu, @littlefrenchsims, @anamoon63, @lazysunjade, annnnnnnnd @papermint-airplane.

[semi-sketchy]

Frontiers writing really does feel like "okay let's grab what people love talking about online" mixed with hazy memories of what happened in past games without anyone bothering to, you know. ACTUALLY look at what happened in them.

And then a lot of new stuff being added that then, isn't expanded.

Yup. It's dangling keys in front of my face when I know exactly what those keys go to, and it's not what you're telling me. Like I'm not an encyclopedia and I've got an awful memory, but even I know off the top of my head that Eggman didn't stop Neo Metal in Heroes. Considering how much Flynn loves that storyline I'm honestly surprised he got this wrong.

The cutscenes in general are quite shoddy and miss a valuable piece of writing advice: be careful about including normal conversations.

True, people DO talk this way, but the reason we don't write about it and instead condense it to a "they chatted about the weather for a few minutes" is because it's boring.

I feel like I should give the side stories more slack since they're optional, but they're really so meaningless. Well, they're SUPPOSED to mean something, they're meant to build up this mystery, but just asking mundane questions about random stuff isn't really what I'd call "building a mystery." It's just characters speculating about tiny little details surrounding the ancient culture that doesn't loop back into the overall mystery. They're not good foreshadowing and add nothing of value, not even entertainment. They're all so impersonal since they don't even use these little scenes to show how well the characters bounce off each other.

If you want an example of this done well, there's TONS of optional discussions in Xenoblade 3 where the gang just talk about regular stuff, but it's so funny because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. There's one where Sena accidentally invents zoos, it's great and I'm mad no one has compiled them on YouTube yet Of course, there's also stuff to expand on the lore and world building, but they're mostly reserved for everyday antics that highlight the excellent dynamics these characters have.

And that's what makes them good. It's not just "Everyday conversation #16" because it gives the characters a chance to make something a little more personal to them.

Frontiers misses that mark by because it needs these characters to be informational mouthpieces to move the plot and that destroys the concept of character voice.

Tails uses big words to signal that he's the smart one when his actions spoke well enough for him before. Eggman is literally just sitting on the sidelines for 80% of the plot and instead of pulling any strings, he's reading textbooks into audio logs. Like buddy. You have an AI that is totally obedient, why is your order "find me a way out of here" when you're studying this place? YOU are the one coming up with answers and connections everywhere, why aren't YOU looking for a way out yourself instead of sitting on your ass and relishing in a robot punching Sonic? Fucks sake, Sage can activate these ancient weapons, have her USE THEM to GET RID OF SONIC so he can't UNLEASH THE BEAST. This is such a simple and easy way to make the plot more interesting I will not stop harping on it

I wonder if this story will sour on people over time or if in 10 years it will still be praised it as one of the greats.

[5eraphim]

(Feel free to ignore this if you don't want to share, but I'm so curious!) What the HELL was that phantom of the opera fic about that made someone write an entire essay about 😭😭?

(while i'm alright mentioning that one time someone linked me a google drive multi-page document that was critical of a 5k word phantom of the opera x reader insert i wrote when i was 16, (i think i delete the original post for some reason? but i still have the SRB vers. with an extra note) bc like i said, i didn't read the doc bc even as a dumbass teenager, i knew if i tried to be fair and read the doc i'd just upset myself, and realistically learn nothing (and this whole event is extremally funny 7 years later) i would also like to reiterate, people who were in creative spaces online around the early-mid/late-mid 2010s know how freakishly normal it was to see grown ass adults compiling random ocs and fanarts and making lengthy videos railing on them for the sake of "constructive criticism" (i watch those videos too, i'm not saying i didn't participate/or that i'm above this or whatever) but it was really just so needlessly meanspirited, and made fandom-spaces, like y'know, hobby spaces so lame.)

ANYWAYS- i don't remember what exactly i wrote (bc thank GOD everything i wrote before this account has basically been lost to the sands of time, and i'd rather run into a burning building than try to find my old stuff and be face-to-face with whatever the hell i was writing back then)

but from what i remember the plot was basically phantom watching reader sleep and just having a big dramatic monologue about it. and also i'm pretty sure thought about cutting her head off in her sleep? like i remember vaguely writing a tangent while he was wondering how hard it would be to cut through the cervical vertebra that was like, "if you gave me the chance to pluck the bones from your neck, i'd cherish holding them with my bare hands. i wish i could cradle every little piece of you like that"

that's honestly the one part i really remember, it was like that and a lot of "i'm such a monster, how could she stomach sharing a bed" and other such emo, incel-y ramblings. i think i just wanted to write something about sharing a bed with a girl and wanting to rub my grubby undeserving hands through her hair and kiss her neck and shoulders. (and the fact it took me over a year later to realize i was bi, makes this so much funnier to me)

it was that sentiment but with much edgier, very chuck palahniuk-pilled prose.

(i'm not saying i didn't DESERVE an essay-length take down of what i wrote, i'm saying im just glad i didn't read it)

[little-peril-stories]

Happy STS!

I was a bit curious myself, what is your usual method of writing? Do you have different scraps of paper you've written stuff down on compiled in various notebooks or all neatly organized on your computer? Do you prefer a solid outline or conspiracy board of random scenes that you eventually string together? I'd love to know!

Hi, happy belated STS, and thanks for your patience! :)

I am a bit of everything kind of gal. I keep sticky notes by my bed for 'just as I'm falling asleep' ideas, I currently have two notebooks on the go, and I write both on the computer and on my phone. I like writing in pen when I'm out and about, typing on the computer when I'm on a roll, and on the phone when I'm on the subway or too tired/lazy to grab my laptop+keyboard. 😅

I’m also a big fan of scribbling on paper to get an idea out/explore options/make a mind map. There’s just something about scribbling for me that helps ideas take form!

I like to think it's all neatly organized on my computer but I don't have a perfect system, especially since I've been switching between Docs and Word for a few months, trying to decide if I want to go back to Word. I use Scrivener for backups, editing, and sometimes compiling.

I have turned into an outline person (I flesh out my characters' internal conflicts and motivations, then use a combination of the Save the Cat! and 3-Act Story Structure story beats to plan out the shape of the narrative), but I wasn't always. The last novel I tried to 'pants' my way through was fun and interesting but didn't have a solid narrative, and the lead dude had zero personality. Actually, if I’m being honest here, both the leads had zero personality. The side characters (the girl's cousin who was looking for her and the antihero [who was also looking for her for Vaguely Antagonistic Reasons] who were eventually going to fall in love) were much more compelling. This is probably part of what led me to try a heavier plotting/outlining method and it's been working pretty well. I do deviate from my outline if needed, though!

I kind of want to try pantsing again, but I'm afraid to, lol.

[broke-on-books]

✒️ please!!

Send me a ✒️ and I'll pick a poem I think you'd like

After flipping through my notebooks I decided to go with my first instinct for you, which was "A Toast to the Alchemists" by Laura Gilpin. This poem hasn't been published online officially, so they're aren't a ton of sites that have it that I could find with a quick Google search. However I've attatched photos of a reddit post with it along with my version in my journal.

I picked this poem because of its themes of time and the passage of time, as well as magic and giving emotional significance to the most mundane and clinical of things (atoms and elements). In other words, taking magic from the world around us, especially through a lens usually seen as lacking wonder or whimsy. Also vibes, I mainly did it based on vibes.

Some other poems I considered in my search/additional recommendations are listed under the cut:

If you liked the writing of this poem, and haven't read it already (or have) I definitely recommend "The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin. It's by the same author and is her most famous poem and is fairly well known and also soooooo good. So good.

Poems with similar themes:

Poems with similar themes to "A Toast to the Alchemists" are

"Dusting" by Marilyn Nelson 💘 (literally cried to this. To be fair it was 10 minutes after I finished the HDM finale so it was mainly because of that but still. Great poem.)

"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth

"Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (90% sure you've read this one its the time theme but inverted and it's great if you haven't)

Rejected picks/Poems that gave me Anu vibes (many for no particular reason):

Poems by Ted Kooser for some reason??? NO idea why they're very different from the ones above but some of my faves are "Selecting a Reader", "In a Country Cemetery in Iowa", "The Constellation Orion" and "Flying by Night" (I'm v much questioning this pick now but I'll keep it up here just in case)

Honestly a bunch of random unrelated stuff was popping out at me ("Listen" by Miller Williams, "Cartoon Physics, Part 1" by Nick Flynn, "Snow" by David Berman) and like a million billion more which I all got from the same anthology (Poetry 180, edited by Billy Collins) so if you want to read a bunch more poetry, based on vibes alone, I'd say look for the book, the website, or the sequel. The poems from that book aren't too similar to the one above but it's really one of two books I generally recommend people right off the bat (it was my lit teachers favorite lol) because it's meant to get young adults and teens into poetry and introduce contemporary poetry in general. Idk how much poetry you've read whatever but even if you aren't new to it it's still a good compilation of late 90s/early 00s poetry that makes you think but isn't super long/totally incomprehensible

Anyways that got WAY longer than I anticipated or anyone probably wanted but poetry is an obsession of mine and recommending poetry is much more complicated and harder that it looks, even for the people you know best in the whole world AFTER interviewing their opinions on poetry, not to mention how difficult it would be for internet friends on tumblr. But anyways there's a couple poems, I got the vibes as close as I could with the poems I had on file. (Although i do feel like I'm missing something big 🤔) Anyways thanks for the ask Anu! Hope you thought my pick was alright!

[lostluminesence]

OOC rambles / campaign stuff

our campaign is on an indifinite hiatus due to conflicting schedules (among other things) to to cope with the fact that i am dying to play i figured i'd go ahead and drop some notes about the campaign so far and cahya's experiences, thoughts, and other things i just wanna note before i forget even more of what we've encountered. also ngl partly making this solely so i have something to actually be a place holder in my campaign notes tag cause i'm trying to compile a masterlist lol

✧ currently playing the lost mines of phandelver but our dm's are adding a lot of personalization to it with the plans to do our own thing as soon as we finish that part of the story

✧ cahya was just sorta wandering around the sword coast by himself before he joined the party that we're now playing in our campaign, attempting to remain as undercover as possible from solvekh/the ring leader while also trying to obtain knowledge about his arcane and bardic abilities (which is mainly a point since we started this campaign at lvl 1 and are still only lvl 2. outside of the campaign setting, i see him as a level 4-6 bard, but i digress)

✧ the main reason Cahya joined the party was the promise of gold and a curiosity over what exactly it is that Gundren has found. he figured he could potentially learn of some useful lore/information, or at least he could say he was a key figure in any local gossip about the event. once he realized Arezah was a part of the party though, he felt more inclined to take it seriously and stick around, given it was the first time they had been truly reunited after the loss of Zholl

✧ homeboy failed nearly every single roll in our first combat EXCEPT for the final blow and 10000% felt some kinda way about it which was only exasperated by his party's insistence that he "did a good job" (my guy does not like pity, and will be cringing over the exchange that went down there for a while lmao)

✧ idiot man just had to pick up a random, seemingly useless little frog statue with golden gems for eyes. now he's coughing up LITERAL FUCKING FROGS and Arezah is simply making jokes about it and no one but him seems disturbed by this. is he gonna get rid of the frog statue tho? prolly not. why would that have anything to do with it, afterall?

✧ in true bard fashion he succesfully convinced an innkeeper that he is the sibling of one of our half-elfs. him. a 6'4 (6'7" if we include horns), indigo tiefling old man and bellamy, a tiny, 5'0 half-elf cleric who's only similarity is that she has white hair and his his silver, nearly white. genuinely had that innkeep rethinking her whole life and questioning her biases which i am still laughing about. however that did not help us when it came to preventing the half-elfs from being kidnapped. whoopsies.

✧ on that note, he also spent a solid like 15 minutes just. rolling around in a mud hole for no reason. which Bellamy also joined him for, and by the time they got to the inn, he was able to get them both a bath for free simply from being so filthy that the innkeeper was practically begging them to bathe.

✧ also grown very protective and fond of Bellamy (has no idea that they've met before but after she is kidnapped, our rouge Balasar found her hairclip on the floor and brought it to Cahya... a hairclip he recognized immediately as an accessory he often wore during his time in Solvekh in his youth. he is completely thrown off by this and terrified about the implications of it, and why Bellamy of all people has it)

✧ after helping an NPC named Silvdar escape from the first battle, he gave the dude his cloak and the rest of our party who had only seen him draped in a shawl at this point had the jarring realization that he is, in fact, ripped as fuck and sorta hot LMAO everyone was a bit discombobulated by it and according to our dm's Silvdar has an attraction to him which is just. hilarious to me.

trying to remember more but very little is coming to me atm. tis the curse of not taking proper notes during sessions. hopefully by the time we return to playing i have a better notetaking system for during the actual game. i'm usually such a note-taking kinda person but i struggle when playing with note taking while trying to keep up with the story/combat and roleplaying! think i might have to use a different note taking system somehow, or maybe dedicate a specific journal/notebook to it... for now i am simply wallowing in the fact that i desperately want to play again and am sad as fuck bc i have no idea when that will be oTL

looks like i'll just have to start really posting my solo work for him here in the meantime heheheheh *rubs my hands together like an evil little fly*

[ultraphobic]

Hiya Lane! Another day - another message from Santa! 🎅🏻

Today is a bit of a sad day for Hanoi Rocks fans, but I love watching All Those Wasted Years (Live at Marquee) concert, it lifts my spirits. Maybe you also have a favorite Hanoi Rocks performance? Today I started with a sad damn thing. It turns out to be some kind of depressive Santa lmao

Omg!! The glam festival is wonderful! Which groups are already known?

It sounds pretty funny about national holidays! The King and two birthdays hehe

Oh, I'm sorry that your work week was quite busy :( If it's not a secret, who do you work for? I work in a vinyl store and sometimes it can be too boring lol

Wow!! What's your cat's name?

And I'm sorry for your loss ❤️‍🩹

Wow, this is an amazing top album! Ultraphobic, in my opinion, is very underrated. Your playlist is very cool and diverse! I like it!

🎄 Do you have a favorite hobby?

🎄 Where would you like to travel and why?

🎄 Your favorite time of the year and association with it?

Your Santa ⛄️ 🎄

hey santa!

i was a little confused on the hanoi rocks thing until i remembered time zones & it's probably still the 8th wherever you are! i haven't watched any live performances of theirs, i can't seem to do that for any groups i like for some reason? theres one single faster pussycat live cover i listened to from last years glamfest in my country that i listened to, but only because it was an inxs song that i really connect with

i do have some favourite hanoi songs though: don't follow me, a million miles away, cutting corners, & underwater world to name a few

the few artists they have already announced for glamfest are jetboy, janet gardner, the cruel intentions (all international), and ablaze, sisters doll (local acts). i'm hoping for michael monroe as he is in japan the week before which would make travel easy and would line up with the hints we've been given! i'm also hoping for firehouse and also a newer aussie band called southern river band who i actually saw earlier this year, they're awesome!

i can't say the company i work for just for online safety reasons but i work as a piercer! i'm still training so i am an apprentice but it's super fun!! it's so cool you work in a record store tho i feel like that's something i could see myself doing in an alternate reality

my cat's name is bandit!

thank you! i do pride myself on my spotify & my music taste and i have probably over 200 playlists at this point just from getting random ideas for silly little playlists that i think huh that would be fun (and then i end up having three songs and abandon)

ultraphobic is soooo underrated and i am SO upset that it (+belly to belly) isn't available at all to stream in my country! i'm even blocked from listening on youtube! i had to buy copies on cd (from overseas mind you, they only sell the first three albums and then the best of compilation here) and download the files from there and add them as local files so i could listen with the rest of my stuff.

okok question time i love this part

i have a few hobbies; i've recently been doing a few art classes and discovered i'm kinda ok at drawing so that's fun! i also do a bit of photoshop and make stupid t shirts n stuff (those were my christmas gifts to everyone last year)

i'd like to travel more within my own country as i've only been to one other state, and one territory, i'd also like to visit some of my online friends in the us & canada! and also just europe in general for touristy stuff

i used to say i hate summer and to a degree i kiiinda still do? like i don't like australian summer weather and the heat BUT i kinda have to let up on that and realise that i end up being the happiest at this time of the year and somehow all my stress happens around the middle of the year (and my birthday and christmas both happen in summer so....)

nice to hear from you!!!

[sauntering-down]

another dream post compiled from discord

ignore this lol i just like to have them all under one convenient tag...

i had an extremely detailed and vivid dream right before i woke up this morning, and for once i woke up AFTER it finished rather than in the middle... so ofc now i can only remember a few random bits

like the possibly-magical rose hips this dude got from another world

and my tattoo sleeves which had been hidden via magic and when some kind of potion was poured over my arms they all came back

and also my cousin and i wanted to go to the beach alone but i guess we couldn't?

and at the end, when the "adventure" was over, i was packing all my stuff into plastic bins to take home and i had so many i didn't think my dad could fit them all into the car...

-----

anyway i also had this delightful little dream where i took a train home from my old elementary school? like there was a station there... the entire school looked bizarre, but dream-me rationalized that as 'oh, i haven't been here since i was 12 and they've added onto it since then, i shall allow Lauren to guide me since she has younger siblings who went here post-renovation'. so we walked through the halls and to the station on the far side of the school. we had to wait for train 398 - there was another that came before it, but according to Lauren (a childhood friend who lived around the corner from me) that one didn't stop anywhere near our houses. mind you, i think our train stopped somewhere near the library, which is further from our houses than the school... but whatever. we let the first train pass and got on the second. sort of. mostly we clung to these poles on the outside and stood on the steps like it was some kind of trolley. i dimly remember thinking this was dangerous but not really caring lol. then the next day i took the train home alone and was very proud of myself, although i think i might've left something on it. there was also some later bit where i was in class at that same school and i'd been absent the previous day, so my teacher had moved my desk somewhere weird? he told me to move it back if i could, and it wasn't heavy so i could lift it and put it in place easily... idk. the end.

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hate it when i have interesting dreams but only remember snippets of them!! in one i was involved with some huge battle to decide the future of humanity or something world-changing like that... and it took place in a shopping mall for some reason. in another i was a boy named Nim who was sixth of eleven children - or, as he put it, "five on each side" making him the true middle child of the family, lol. they lived on this big wooded lot somewhere in Hawaii, apparently... most of his siblings also had weird Dweep names (there were two boys named Zolt and Melk) but some got away with normal ones, like the brother just older than him who was called Liam. last dream, my family had moved into a new house somewhere. we went to eat at this nearby restaurant several times and my brother and i kept inexplicably taking a table that these two older men liked? sometimes they'd sit with us anyway and we'd just ignore one another?? but then one time my grandparents (including my long-dead maternal grandmother lol) came too and some of them sat with us and suddenly the men were super chatty and nice and fatherly, it was weird. then we went back home and i showed my mother how much the lighting in my bathroom sucked, but at least the view from the windows in my bedroom was GORGEOUS - one faced a bunch of fields and rolling hills, the other looked out towards the ocean. i wanted to get some pictures or like a short video panorama to show you. and then i woke up.

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i had the weirdest fucking dream early this morning, right before i woke up. i wish i could explain it but it really was an incoherent mess. highlights include me actually going to a party a girl i knew back in school was throwing, her living in a place in Oakdale called 'Halloween', sliding headfirst down a hilly street at extreme speeds and somehow being fine, some sort of music or vocal contest at my school kinda like NYSSMA but some people were treating it like a gala and brought champagne and shit, some OTHER kind of school competition where we'd designed mascots and stuff for our teams, the school itself looking half like my high school and half like a Target or grocery store, buying an insane amount of expensive merch for this contest featuring our weird mascots... god it was so bizarre

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meanwhile i remember two dreams... one was the typical "i need to go to school but i have so much stuff to pack i'm running late" dream. in the other i was in this little town where a bunch of people i'd known as a kid lived... i went skateboarding with some of them, i think? i was bad at it lol. and one friend had a cool scrapbook of all the stuff our old friends had done since high school, which was a nice little "everyone's succeeding and achieving their dreams or at least LIVING and You Are Not", thanks a lot, subconscious. there was also this hotel called the "World Star" up atop this very steep little hill in the middle of town, which is funny because that exact same hill/hotel has shown up in my dreams from time to time and in this one i made a point to LOOK for it and there it was! it was a nice town though

it's ALWAYS atop that small but very steep hill

i've never been inside it but once or twice i've walked/biked up the driveway (which takes Effort because it's so steep lol)

i think this is the first time it's actually had a name!

thrilling development in my life

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dreamed my family and i were taking the cover off the aboveground pool at the old house and there was a cobra lurking in it. when we realized that we started ushering everyone (because there were a whole bunch of people there for some reason) inside, along with the cats who were inexplicably out. unfortunately the cobra followed us onto the deck and tried to get inside? since i hadn't made it in yet, i grabbed the snake behind the head, planning to toss it into the grass, but it twisted around just enough to bite my thumb. it also bit some random dude somehow. i kept holding it but now i was yelling for my mother to grab a knife and behead it, which she TRIED to do, but it took a really long time until she'd like... sawed through the snake enough that i could let go of it... it was gross lol. and then i was like "hm, should i actually worry about this bite? i know cobras are venomous but i don't feel much of anything. maybe my thumb is a little numb. skin looks sorta pink and swollen around the bite. eh, might as well pop over to the ER and make sure." so then i grabbed a tote bag from under my bed and started packing it in case i had to stay a day or two at the hospital - taking my phone and laptop and chargers and whatnot - and then woke up. honestly better than the previous night's "it's time to go to school but i haven't packed my bag yet and i have so much stuff it's taking forever to pack and i keep finding more stuff and i'm going to be late" dream.

The funny thing is I remember the other bitten dude being like “if it’s serious they might have to airlift you somewhere else” and I went “oh cool I’ve never ridden in a helicopter before! :D :D :D”

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good morning, i had a dream where i went to the dentist supposedly to have a tooth extracted, but we never actually got around to it... first i had to do some treatment that involved chewing what appeared to be a piece of red clay that was all gritty and sandy? and then the dentist and assistants were making sausage in the lobby and there was meat and casing everwhere??????

(Mary: ...now...hear me out on this...but i do feel like that's a huge red flag)

"dentist removed my broken tooth and also an unbroken arm. sent me home with some delicious sausages that gave my daughter a prion disease. 2/5 stars, dentist was very pleasant but i couldn't get past the mess in the lobby-slash-sausage-factory and also my daughter is terminally ill now."

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i had some rather bizarre dreams... one was a very weird little thing where my girlfriend (whoever she was) died of anaphylaxis after accidentally eating something she was allergic to. but that was just like, a premonition or something? so i was trying to prevent it??? except i failed to stop her from eating The Thing, so her mouth started getting super swollen and all - and also we had this dog who was sick i guess - and i immediately went to call 911 so hopefully we could get to the hospital in time. the 911 operator was basically like "lol sounds like nbd" when i told him about my girlfriend, so i told him about the dog too and he was like "oh okay, i'll send a helicopter to airlift you to the vet by the railroad." hung up like ?????? because i had no idea if he was serious... but then a helicopter landed outside? so i took the dog and my GF (who at some point along the line became my IRL cousin. wild.) onto the helicopter, thinking i'd call 911 again from the vet and maybe get someone who'd listen about my girlfriend-cousin's allergy. we make it to the vet, which looked more like a weird hostel or something, the dog is whisked away, and i'm about to call again when girlfriend-cousin is like "eh, i feel better, i'm just gonna go take a nap." and went to some little back room to do so. i was VERY confused and kept checking on her to make sure she was alive, and then woke up

also there was another part of the dream where i was back in my hometown, on a road supposedly near Vets Highway that definitely doesn't exist. i was riding my bike and took a shortcut through like... a video game store or a Best Buy or something??? idk why haha. but i wound up on a residential street where there were a TON of fruit trees. i saw a huge pear tree first, followed by a bunch of others, all loaded with fruit - several of them were like, banana and mango trees, which i'm pretty sure don't grow on LI but i didn't notice then lol. i was snapping pics with my phone, but i don't remember anything else

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k i had two dreams before i got up this morning... the second one was a really depressing dream about visiting an old university i'd supposedly been to at one point, so let's not. but the FIRST one? i went up to the Honda in Cocoa because i guess something had happened to my car and it was time to go pick it up. i get there and the guy's like "oh yeah, we had to do some body work but it's fine :)" and i was like :) and then... he shows me this tiny white car which is NOTHING like my actual car. and when i say tiny, i mean child-sized, like one of those battery-powered toy Jeeps kids can ride around in at 2 mph. i just shrugged and rolled with it lol. my dad texted me like "just got the bill and the repairs only cost $95 👍🏼" and i did not know how to explain what those repairs had done. so i get in this car and my legs do not fit. they literally dangle over the hood and almost to the ground. i had to sit on the BACK of the driver's seat in order to keep my legs in so i can work the brake pedal (the gas was controlled by this weird handle on the steering wheel??). there was no windshield or roof. it still accelerated like a normal car so i went "hm, not safe, whatever" and just hoped i didn't tip over or anything.

drove out onto the road. it was daytime at this point, but by the time i made it to the corner to get on route 1, it was like, midnight. didn't see anything wrong with this. car only gets to 40 mph max. i am getting passed a lot. finally decide maybe i should drive on the sidewalk for my own safety and immediately after that, the car slooooowed way down, then died completely. my childhood friend Lauren was there for some reason - we inspected the car a little and concluded it wasn't going anywhere. i said i was going to ask my dad for a ride and she didn't have to wait with me, she was like "...okay" but didn't seem too happy to leave because i was stranded in the middle of the night in a rough area, though i guess she did leave because poof, gone. just as i'm about to text my dad, a car pulls up behind me - it's my brother, who asks if i need a ride. he makes me remove my jacket and shoes first so i don't get his car dirty. his car is inexplicably really cluttered - he had a tea kettle on a burner in there and everything - but finally i was allowed to get in. we stuck my car in his trunk, lol, and that's when i woke up.

also at some point i was in this huge mall where i might have worked in the Hot Topic? not sure what that was all about... maybe connected to the university dream

the only bit of THAT dream which was funny was the part where i was in a dorm and elected to take a shower in this tub that was weirdly placed in the middle of a hallway, right next to the stairs. it was very inadequately hidden by two small shower curtains. people kept walking by and going "who are you and why are you in our shower????" while i'm just casually using all their hair products. or stealing them. literally walked out with a few.

and at the end one of the girls i met wrote me this little story and drew a picture based on some tale i'd told her earlier, and it was adorable and i was so happy i took a photo of it with the other girl's phone and sent it to my own so i could keep it

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god i just remembered the freaky-ass dream i had last night

where i was in some house vaguely resembling my old one and i glanced into another room and saw a man climbing in through the window

and i freaked out and ran to alert my brother, who was kinda going to help me but then... didn't really? and this dude's chasing me through the house, trying to hurt me, and i kept throwing things and hitting him and it wasn't slowing him down?? and at one point i managed to get away, went downstairs, and found my dad and brother. my dad was half-naked. not the half i would've preferred. anyway he was all concerned when i told him what was happening but when the guy showed up again he just... forgot?????? and didn't help me at all? so i gave up and got my hands on a knife and cut the dude's throat so deeply i almost severed his neck. no blood. it didn't kill him and he had what looked like layers of bacon and lettuce and tomato instead of bones and arteries and whatnot. my dad took a piece of tomato from his gaping-open throat and ate it. i think i willed myself awake at that point because what the fuck.

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i've been trying to explain the dream i had last night, but i'll be damned if i can actually put it into words. it started with a 'let's get the team together for a heist' scene which rapidly deteriorated into 'we're actually going to hunt a giant buffalo who killed my dad' and went downhill rapidly from there. the Google Maps screenshots... the weird side-trip into LotR where Legolas and Gimli were strolling through the woods... the main female character's Russian little sister also hanging out in the woods... building weird traps... finding out the New Guy we'd recruited had actually heisted something and was going to jail... except he didn't go to jail, he was just on house arrest... driving 75mph through a residential neighborhood... New Guy claiming his neighborhood was a slum but it was really gorgeous (though it may not have had electricity??)... the backwards mahjongg game... the $20,000 gold-encrusted piece of chocolate... the woman and Russian sister going on a Christian TV channel to promote watches... little sister hitting on the also-female TV presenter and casually flashing her boobs on live TV (she was like 13/14 so this was. weird)... something about Deadpool at the end and little sister getting an actual badass girlfriend... god it was a mess.

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right before i woke up this AM i had a dream where i was like... some kind of live-in babysitter or au pair for a family on an island in Canada? i was 18 - this was specifically mentioned - and i'd taken this job because of something to do with Pokemon. don't really remember the explanation. anyway the family was Mom, Dad, and a son around 7; he had a French name i don't recall. nice kid. their house was pretty but i don't remember that either. i just know they lived in a semi-suburban little area (there were also a bunch of really skinny townhouses) right on the edge of a forest. after we had dinner i said i was going to take a walk, and i followed this path that ran behind a bunch of other houses' backyards before curving off into the forest. kept thinking i should grab my phone and take pictures to send you, but i wanted to get some in the woods so i headed that way. right after you reached the forest, there was actually a clearing to one side where the local school was, this really gorgeous brick building... ofc just as i got there, a couple of cops kicked me and some other people walking around out of the forest, because apparently there'd been a murder?? idk i was really disappointed because i wanted to take pictures for you, but then i woke up

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can't remember much from last night's dream... my family lived in this little house and there was a sort of shaved ice or snowcone shop attached to it? i guess that was our business? only part i remember clearly was my brother and i sharing a bedroom and i left the window open one night and a guy climbed inside. i think he was planning to hurt or kidnap me but i started yelling and he escaped back out the window.

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weirdass dreams last night. one of them had something to do with Brambleclaw (he had a different name i don't recall - Leaf-something?? - but i still knew it was him) and i think StarClan was sending him shitty visions that made him have seizures. also dreamed there were a bunch of huge blisters on my left thigh and beneath the thin bubbly blister-bit was like, NOTHING. i could see straight down this HOLE in my leg at all the fat and muscle and shit. they stung really badly and i finally went to my ex-nurse mother and asked if i should be worried about this, but she was like "nah nbd". didn't believe her. thanks a lot for the help, mom

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had a fuckin... uncomfortable dream where i was on this hill that had a chairlift to get to all the houses for some reason. there was also a really nice park by a school - i went to the park and hung out for a bit, and apparently there was some event happening at the school at the same time, because when i left, there were a few cops directing traffic. one of them stopped me and asked if i had been at the school and if i lived around here. when i said no, just chilling in the park, he made me get out and pretty much grope-searched me?! for some reason he thought i'd gotten surgery to hide a gun under my skin and was suspicious of these "scars" i don't actually have???? it was really really weird... luckily i think eventually his partner told him to let me leave, i clearly didn't have a weapon...

didn't even MENTION the part where my dream-boyfriend and i were sleeping in a double bed and some rando aunt of mine inexplicably joined us and may or may not have died there??? dream-BF either made her go elsewhere or just. disposed of her body if she was dead lol, and in doing so spilled Oatmeal Square cereal all over my floor

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had boba tea in my dream!! got it from this little stand in the shopping center across the highway from my old house. shopping center actually exists, but the stand does not... anyway i was extremely nervous because i had no idea how/what to order, but eventually i got myself a black tea (in frappuccino/milkshake form) with boba! they were also pretty busy so the guy also forgot to charge me for it lol. i wanted to take a pic to send you, but it was taking FOREVER for my phone to focus because it was so dark - btw it was like 10pm - so i decided to walk to the other end of the shopping center where the McDonald's was, in search of better lighting. had to go that way anyway since i'd left my car in a parking lot further down the highway (WHY i did this involves the earlier part of the dream, which made 0 sense, so we'll skip it). the Chinese takeout place we used to get food from was still there, but now it was a freestanding restaurant; i was going to walk through there, but couldn't find the door out once i was inside. had to go back out the way i came. someone might've been held captive in there, not really sure. kept going along towards the well-lit McDonald's, drinking my tea... i think i woke up around then

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woke up this AM and fell back asleep and had a short but awesome dream... i guess my family had moved to another house and my new bedroom was HUGE. had gorgeous French doors leading outside and everything, plus this massive bathroom that had two separate tubs - one was just a regular if large bathtub, the other was a hot tub i think? and whoever had lived in the house before us must've left without taking everything, because their stuff was still all over my bedroom. i was sorting through my things and finding so much of theirs in the process... i tried on a dress that didn't fit... found a bunch of posters in a box beneath the bed... there were all sorts of unfamiliar books... also found photo albums in the wardrobe and i was about to check them out because i wanted to know WHO had lived here, but then my cousins arrived and i had to go hang out with them instead, and then i woke up

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had this dream where i was in the front/side yard of my old house (which didn't look very much like my old house, but whatev), digging up all kinds of Legos from the dirt?? like, i have no idea why they were there or who buried them, but there were TONS and i was digging them out, cleaning them off, and putting them in a bin. finally realized it was getting late, so i went inside to wash up... and then found out it was the night of my graduation from junior high (properly called the 'Moving Up Ceremony' lol). cue panic because we were SUPER late and i didn't have time to do anything but wash my hands. so we drove over to the school, which again looked nothing like my actual junior high, and my parents and brother went to the LGI to sit down while i met the rest of the 9th graders backstage. everyone's all dressed neatly and the girls have purses and whatnot; meanwhile, here i am in dirty denim shorts and a tank top, carrying an empty ziplock bag????? i was deeply self-conscious about this but nobody really seemed to care, or at least they didn't tell me about it lol. the ceremony started, but for some reason they decided to split it into two halves - sat through the first half, then we were dismissed for like an hour to go have a meal in this enormous cafeteria, then we'd have the other half and get our 'diplomas'. met up with the fam in the cafeteria, but i wasn't really hungry, so instead i went outside and found a friend of mine named Liam. fyi, Liam is an OC i made up for something once.

anyway, he'd come in a golf cart and we hopped inside and drove off along a path through a bunch of hills until we reached a HUGE stone building. inside was very dimly lit and the floor was just a giant mess of sand. bunch of other people were digging around - apparently there were TONS of archaeological artifacts buried in this place and everyone was finding stuff constantly. i was like "hell yeah, finally my Lego dig experience comes in handy" and started digging through the sand too. found a gold coin almost immediately, followed by a couple other random trinkets. i also found these two stone boxes that had to be EXPLODED open - i inexplicably had a bomb on me, and Liam had a lighter and offered to blow them open for me, but i was like "no, let's wait until we're done, we might find more of these boxes and i only have one bomb. also people might panic." and then i woke up, so i have no idea what was in the boxes or if i ever went back to school for the other half of the ceremony.

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hmmmm dreamed i was walking around some little town at night, when it was kind of cold - not LATE at night, there were places open and a bunch of people milling around, and it would've been nice except i was inexplicably carrying Jazz with me and she wasn't at all happy about it. and in another part of the dream, i had a twin brother named Jakub (because i guess 'Jacob' is too mainstream? come on, at least make it 'Jaiykub'!). he died when we were kids, though; he either fell or got hit with something and fractured his skull so badly it killed him. RIP

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dream last night was weird... in one part i was at school and this dude and i went into a classroom together because he was supposed to be sort of a guide for a new student, a guy who also happened to be blind... anyway they're all sitting at a table working things out and meanwhile i'm just in the background loudly sharpening a pencil??? and somehow i screwed that up so i showered myself and the new student in pencil shavings??????? idfk... different part i was playing with Legos, yay. someone had built a huge house and i was messing around with it and suddenly realized there was a whole hidden section in the attic above the garage. except then i was really there and as i tried to get back down through the hatch in the floor i slipped and fell into the garage and broke my leg.

and the house (not the lego version, the actual one?) belonged to an old lady named Samantha who had all these sculptures and miniatures and tiny replicas of stuff in her yard... not sure why i was messing around in her secret attic, but i think i was looking for a photograph

AND there was also a part where my mom and i went shopping at some department store and i found a skirt i LOVED - it had a bunch of patches and pins on it - but it was $100, SUPER short, and probably wouldn't fit me anyway. i was trying to take a picture of it but failed miserably.

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hmmm last night's dreams... in one i was in my grandparents' old house in Deansboro, though it looked pretty Wrong lol. i went down to the basement where the garage was (except irl it was not) and was looking for something in the middle of the night in the dark?? and then suddenly i saw a door opening and someone stepping inside, and i freaked out and slammed the door into the guy???? he fell on the floor, groaning, and my grandfather came downstairs just as the guy jumped up and ran away... apparently it was some neighbor kid who kept breaking into their garage lol. and there was something else about finding these 'uneven arrows' (arrows with one side longer than the other i guess) carved into things to lead me to a box buried by a guy named Troy, who'd hidden his journal in a box underground... /shrug

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most of what i remember of my dream was living in this really pretty neighborhood somewhere in New England, very rural, with this little abandoned building down the road that was being turned into a cute post office, and another building just a bit further that had a couple things in it, and one was a cafe that sold bubble tea - i was going to get some boba and send you a pic and i was all excited about it, but that was the end of the dream

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can't really explain my dream except i was taking some kind of class that could only be summed up as "Capitalism: The LARP" but also we were all playing Warrior Cats

we were all these business owners and shit, except like half the class was given a leg up by having their business ready to go when we started, so they could just start making money. meanwhile the rest of us had to decide what we were doing and get our offices together and dig tunnels (????) so we could get from place to place... and THEN we could start making money... but also we were cats

that'll be the next series, just you wait

you thought cats with magic powers was bad... wait until they start dodging taxes

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you were in my dream! i was visiting you or something! we went for a walk on this wooden bridge over a narrow but deep river and you decided we should go for a swim, so you jumped in. i was unsure.jpg but once you proved it was pretty deep and i would probably not be harmed by all the random bits of wood floating in it, i left my headphones (?) in a geode-shaped box on the bridge (but held onto my phone i guess??) and jumped in too. we swam down the river a little ways until we reached the cave it flowed into. the opening was REALLY small and i was like "hell no", you went in a bit but turned around before it got too narrow and came back out. then we swam back to the bridge. then i woke up because the fucking emergency alert test thing blared through my phone at 4:45 am.

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had a dream last night where i had a bunch of relatives visiting, so my whole family went to an amusement park (i recall a sort of children's rollercoaster which inexplicably had entire parts of the track separated so the train could 'jump' between them, but it was actually closed down and the track was being properly connected because i assume someone realized that was batshit insane), and then we came home and i went to bed. next morning i got up and it was the last day my relatives were visiting - one of them noticed an ad in the newspaper and we decided we'd all go to some local carnival because admission was half-price. and instead i went off into the foggy woods with a bunch of friends and we explored a creepy abandoned bunker we'd found and, ofc, were attacked by the terrifying shapeshifter who lived down there. @ myself this is why, when faced with the choice between 'creepy abandoned bunker in the woods' and 'carnival', you always choose the carnival.

[hikaruklaus]

Heya, my name is Klaus. I'm a hentai artist and professional game developer. This post acts as an introduction, as well as a semi-incoherent rant.

... Enjoy?

I'm in a bit of a rut at the moment, I haven't been happy for a while now and I feel like I need some sort of space to write about my thoughts and stuff. I know very little about tumblr and how it works, which is part of the reason I picked it as my little "vent space". I've never been fully active on social media, but I know that I really hate Twitter, Facebook is frustrating to use, TikTok is overwhelming and irritating, and Reddit has a lot of unnecessary negativity floating around constantly. Hopefully this place is a little bit better. I'm not expecting people to follow or even see the stuff I post, but I hope the environment is less hostile and irritating than its competition.

I'm in my early 20s, and I'm a real goddamn nerd (you know, in case the whole "game developer and hentai artist" introduction didn't make that obvious). I love Nintendo games, heavy metal, cats, and vtubers. I have an off-beat sense of humour, don't know how else to describe it. Earthbound and Monkey Island kind of stuff.

I'm definitely on the weirder side (again, in case that wasn't obvious), at least partially because I'm autistic. I doodle ahegao faces while waiting for meetings to start, I have a compilation of various Hololive vtubers screaming as my alarm in the morning, and I have a Spotify playlist that jumps from Metallica's recent "Screaming Suicide" to the full version of that "Japanese Goblin" song that went viral like a year ago.

I'm a massive degenerate (in case that wasn't obvious [3× COMBO]). I have the whole starter package, a daki, an oppai mousepad, and like a dozen physical doujinshi.

They say tattoo artists shouldn't be tattoo artists unless they themselves have been tattoo'd, because they should know what the experience is like.

...Let's just say I'm glad the same doesn't go for hentai artists.

I speak a variety of languages, but I'll primarily be posting in English. Might throw in some Japanese dialogue into a drawing or something if I'm in the mood, it happens.

I've studied both art and game design. I'm a character artist/animator, and a generalist game designer. Don't feel like I'm particularly good at either one of them to be honest with you. : P

I use Clip Studio Paint EX to draw, and I'm slowly getting used to its animation tools as well. (I've mainly used OpenToonz, Krita, and FireAlpaca in the past, but I love the CSP brushes and layout so much that I'm trying to switch over entirely.)

I have experience with a lot of game engines, ranging from the Unreal Engine (aka my mortal enemy) to the much more simple and comfortable GameMaker Studio. I've worked on a variety of projects, some solo, others with different groups of people. Very unlikely anything you've played though.

I'm probably going to be posting a hentai drawing or three here. I tend to draw lewd shit when I'm sad, dunno why. Never had a place to post them before. I might just post a quick 5-minute sketch, or maybe a rough animation. I don't really know yet. Might do it daily, might do it once every few months.

Like I said, I haven't been happy for a good while now. I jump in and out of depressive episodes pretty often but this one's managed to last for a little longer than they usually do. I would love to tell my friends about it, but I just feel like I'd be a massive nuisance to them.

There's a lot that's bothering me, and I feel like I have to express it somehow. I'm not really a fan of "venting" on the internet, maybe because it reminds me of my teenage years, I don't know for sure- but posting it here feels "safe", it's in some random blog post no one will read, not an alarming message on discord or whatsapp, so I won't have to worry about bothering anyone, and I'll still get to write about how I feel.

Nothing I do feels right. My drawings look bad. My conversations are stale. My sleep schedule is fucked. My code is messy. I know things will get better eventually, I've been through this before, but it's hard to convince myself that that's actually the case and not just something I'm making up.

I've been feeling extremely lonely lately. As you can probably imagine if you've read all the stuff written above, I'm not exactly what you'd call a "chick magnet". I haven't been in a relationship since I was in my mid-teens, and the one I was in back then was long-distance. I haven't held a girl's hand since I was five or so and we were practically forced to do so in kindergarten. I've never kissed anyone in my life. I'm awful at nonverbal communication, and I get really jumpy whenever someone touches me, neither of which are great in a relationship. Finding someone with the same interests as me is practically impossible. I googled a whole bunch of statistics a few months back and came to the conclusion that every time I meet someone in the country I'm currently in, there is a 0.000773% chance that we have some interests in common, are both attracted to each other, and that they are single. (Oh yeah, I like numbers. Forgot to mention that.) That 0.000773% is obviously just an estimate, but I tried to be as "fair" as possible with the calculation. I very rarely leave my house, my eyesight is really rough so driving is out of the question, which means meeting new people is a rare occurance. At this point I feel like the best move might just be to give up and accept that I'll be alone forever, but that just makes me even sadder.

My real name isn't Klaus. It's an alias I came up with a few years ago that I only ended up using once to post a drawing. The drawing in question was on the lewder side of things, and I didn't want it to be associated with my other alias because no one knew about my "un-seiso" drawings. I've improved a lot as an artist since posting that old drawing and decided to pick the alias back up.

My reason for this isn't that my drawings are some kind of "DEEP DARK SECRET" that I have to keep from anyone- to be completely honest with you, I don't really care if anyone finds out what my main alias is. I just want to keep my hentai drawings separate from my more, ahem, "family friendly brand", that's all.

Sorry for rambling so much. It's very, very late, and I should be asleep by now. Bless your heart if you actually read all that crap. Cheers.

PS. Unless I decide to change it in the future, I realised right before posting this that I never set a profile picture, so I doodled an ahegao face as fast as I could, and for some reason I actually kind of like it. Really wish it weren't off-center though, might fix that tomorrow.

[sparklingpax]

super random & well, clearly no one asked for this but gahhhhhh I want to ramble 😳

I was thinking again....about Masterforce lmao when will I stop? Who cares? Why even? Beats me 😅

Oh yes! This is canon talk, I'm saving all my lengthy Reverie-related rambling for a later time 😙✨

And ummm. Typos. I'm really sorry if you come across any, I wrote this out on my phone & it's usually sloppier when I do that 😳

///

so of course, we know that Minerva does (or it looks like she does?) handle medical stuff for the Autobots from when she starts as a part of the team/becomes a Headmaster JR with her friends. But like, say things happened and the kids never joined the Autobot team.

Did,,,,,did they have anyone else in mind as a medic of sorts? Was there anyone already in that preexisting role?? Like, even during the events of the series, were there any adults who could have served that role or was Minerva the only actual "medic" there? And again, if she wasn't part of the team, were they all gonna chill & hope no one got any potentially fatal wounds/otherwise while they fight against the Decepticons??

Nothing that I can remember was explicitly stated about that....

So returning to my thoughts! Because I wanted to come to a conclusion of my own with this!! Even though this is like, so pointless, I wanted to muse my thoughts here. In case,,,anyone at all cares 😳

My thinking is one of three things.

One:

-the first thing I suggested is true; none of them rlly know how to deal with this stuff and they all try their best Not To Die. And reference whatever they can find in their computers.

-Since being on Earth, when it comes to human stuff, they're grateful for Google (which of course would work since Google and other search engines are obv a thing by 2020 😹)

Two:

-All of them have basic training in medical stuff--both Cybertronian and Human-related

-this includes things they learned while in the Military Academy they trained in/graduated from back on Cybertron; then coming to be stationed on earth (and taking on human forms to integrate into human society) they compiled basic info on human beings and all their biology, sciences (everything they could study and document) over many years of observation and firsthand encountering the need to treat wounds and other stuff while in their human bodies/for other humans around them

-since any of them is more or less fully equipped to handle any medical situation then they agreed amongst themselves there wouldn't be an explicit need for one designated medic, and that was the end of that matter.

-Then Minerva joined the team and most of those duties ended up as her own

Three:

-Only one person received said basic training, the others rely on whatever information they have on humans or anything in their computers/databases if that one member isn't present to deal with what's happening.

-My theory is that the leader of any team on Cybertron would have receive enough training in every field possibly required to run a functional team, especially one being sent on an assignment far from Cybertron (as is the case with them being stationed on Earth). This would be the main qualifying reason a bot would be assigned as a team leader in the first place, and so naturally that makes Hawk the aforementioned "one person."

-plus!! Taking other medics from other TF series, they seem to play the group "science-oriented person" role too; Hawk is specifically stated to be an astrophysicist and as we see, he's in charge of when they build the Godbomber, it's he who takes the Godmaster bracelets and analyzes them with Ginrai, etc. He's clearly!!! Shown to be more scientifically inclined than the others!! So idk, going off that, it just. works??

-After Minerva takes on medic duties, it's clear she's better at handling it than he is but his training still stands so...the Autobots have two people who can handle what the team will need.

-If there was a second member, then I would guess Waverider, and I'd gues he learned on his own either in the academy as well or while on earth (or both) and volunteered to help with that role. My reason is how he has a day job that seems to consist of working at different aquariums and ocean-related research centers (it's never really specified if he has one type of job, he just does a lot of things 🤔) so...he seems like the type of person to be interested in something like this enough to learn it. Plus, Landmine doesn't seem the type, and Cloudburst always seems to be busy with his day job so...they wouldn't & don't. Their fortes lie elsewhere 💫

...

Also, unrelated and hanging onto the topic by the thinnest thread (lol 💀), but I also had a thought that Hawk probably handles a TON of stuff for the team & is overworked as heck (I can make another smol discussion post about this I have examplessss and thoughtsss 👁️ just lmk and then it'll be sooner rather than months from now lmaoo 😳) like, yes, everyone does what they must, but he does a lot more and a little bit of everything. So I'm thinking part of the reason he gave up leadership of the Autobots to Ginrai stems from this; he can have just a bit more time and headspace to handle everything he has on his plate. He's still commander of the Pretenders, as we know, but now the responsibility of Autobot leadership falls on Ginrai. Hawk perhaps disagrees with the decisions from higher-ups that demand a team leader to practically have to do everything, and feels that a team is better off with a second-in-command that has those skills, and in command, a leader with different strengths.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[andmaybegayer]

Hello, I'm a fool who knows nothing about computers with a couple questions. For reference, I'm on Windows, for no reason other than I prefer it. I want to make a video game, a very very large video game. I'd be making it out of the love of my heart and for people to play, and not for any other reason. It would be a third-person 3D game. Now, I've heard that RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 was built in Assembly, and is thusly able to run just about anywhere, though I don't know the truth of that. 1/2

Hey yeah tl;dr you should Not try and make your game in assembly, especially as a beginner. Your best bet is to learn a modern game engine and start with that. Especially nowadays if you can get your head around Unity or Godot or any other similar game engine making a 3D game is, while not ~easy~, much easier than it ever was in the past when you would have had to roll your own engine from scratch.

The guy who made Heat Signature and Gunpoint recently started a tutorial series for “Make a game in Unity with no experience.” which may interest you. From there you’ll want to learn how to design 3D objects in something like Blender or Wings3D so that you can build your world and texture it.

I’d recommend starting small, Big Game Projects are ambitious but you’ll want to put out a few small things first, something like a game where you walk around, say, A Single Building with a garden and talk to NPC’s in the building, maybe have a combat system, etc. to really get the hang of your tools before attempting a project where it won’t seem like anything works for potentially weeks of work.

I have tons of little dead-end projects that were dedicated to figuring out simple things like “How do I create randomly generated terrain” or “How do I make Gun.” There’s plenty of YouTube tutorials basically dedicated to stuff like this, Sebastian Lagues’ Coding Adventures are basically all videos dedicated to exploring how to create common interesting things in Unity that you might want to use in a game like random terrain, portals, weird gravity etc.

You’ll have to pick up A Language but it’s honestly not that hard. One thing you will want to do if you’re doing game design is brush up on your high school trigonometry because a truly ridiculous amount of the maths you will do in the process of making a game is just finding relationships between angles and coordinates in space.

Rolling your own engine is a good learning experience if you’re interested in how to write optimized code, designing a scripting language, and writing really wacky dynamic code, but if you just want to Make A Game for your friends to play then it’s a waste of time.

The long explanation for this is:

Assembly is a very powerful but extremely specific tool that’s only useful in the modern day in a very specific handful of situations.

The lowest level of programming that you can do (more or less there are some lower levels that don’t count) is Machine Code programming, which is where you write the binary instructions to a program out by hand. This can be done and is indeed how we used to do it in Ye Olden Times but even in Ye Olden Times programmers quickly got bored of this and invented Assembly.

Assembly is a very simple mapping from raw binary code to a somewhat human readable system. Talking about what that binary code looks like without a firm grounding in processor basics is hard but needless to say that binary generally represents something like Operation, Data1, Data2, Data3, for example you might have a set of codes that correspond to Add A, B, C where that adds A to B and stores it in the address at location C. That instruction in binary will be like 0110 0001 0010 1001, but that’s a pain in the dick to write so you write a simple program that can read in you writing “ADD A B C” and convert it to the right binary code.

In contrast to more high level languages, the mapping between assembly and machine code is pretty direct, usually 1 to 1 or almost 1 to 1. You can’t really do an “if X is true then do A” in assembly, instead you have to do “Compare X to True, check if the True flag was set, if so then jump to the location in memory containing A.”

This has some advantages, like, if you’re very familiar with the processor you’re using and where you’re storing everything in memory, you can skip certain steps you know you don’t need and dramatically speed up your software. Old games, especially for games consoles like the GameBoy and PlayStation, would be partially or wholly written in Assembly so that they ran fast on very limited hardware (the original PlayStation had a stunning 2MB of system RAM) . There’s lots of programming libraries for doing extremely fast maths written partially in Assembly for this very reason.

The DISADVANTAGE is that you have to be really good to write faster code than a quality optimizing compiler. Even fairly barebones languages like C have a lot of creature comforts that make programming nicer, faster and more readable, such as having language constructs to create loops, systems to help you create structures in memory, etc., and once you put that code through a modern compiler it will add in its own very smart optimizations that can make even fairly amateurish code run extremely quickly.

in Assembly you have to do all of that by hand, and doing so requires tracking a lot of things manually. It’s not something for the faint of heart and building a modern game entirely in assembly is something you wouldn’t really do if you could avoid it.

That’s not to say it can’t be done. Since ultimately all programs boil down to machine code, there’s nothing stopping you from making a full 3D game in assembly. Rollercoaster Tycoon is almost all assembly, as you said. Indeed plenty of old 3D games are written partially or mostly in assembly for performance reasons, and if you use a game engine like Unity, some chunks of the engine will be written in Assembly for speed. Especially when it comes to things like realtime physics or very fast AI and the like.

On modern computers for even fairly complex games, the performance of well-optimized compiled code in a normal language is plenty for most games. The benefit of using Unity is that you can leave the heavily optimized engine stuff to a team of skilled programmers who’ve been writing game engines for years and you can deal with the unique things that you need to make your game happen. If you were to start writing a game in Assembly you’d first have to design your own engine, probably write your own scripting system, etc. which would require a robust basis in programming language design, parser design, and a firm view of what you want to create. Tooling around in Unity experimenting with things as you go is much easier.

Learning Assembly and getting good at it is a valuable skill if you want to write crazy optimal code and get a robust understanding of how the internals of a computer work (although not actually but I’m not going to talk more about microcode beyond linking this video lecture) and fi all you want to do is make Video Game your best bet is to learn Unity because it’s what everyone is using.

Pitches for other engines I like but that might not be for everyone:

Godot: Basically a fully open source baby unity that is a little easier to use but a lot less powerful and with a much smaller community, I really like it for experimenting

LÖVE2D: Not a 3D engine, but a really minimal 2D game engine that uses Lua for scripting. It is extremely bare bones but gives you a lot of room to program all behaviours yourself if you feel like making extremely fast demos, I mostly use it to write graphical simulations.

LÖVR: A 3D game engine heavily inspired by LÖVE with a focus on VR game design, shares the same bare-bones, lua-scripted design that makes it very suitable for quickly throwing demos and experiments together but less suitable for large projects unless you pull in some libraries.