#time remapping

[rushil57]

time remapping

[myuniverseinabox]

Wanted to make something unapologetically edgy httyd 1 toothless nation rise 🔥🔥🔥🔥

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[robo-dino-puppy]

aloy, no!!! 😱

if this was a known thing, i hilariously never came across it! apparently if your jump and swan dive are mapped to the same button, aloy is forced to swan dive whenever you jump anywhere near water. or, apparently, lava.

and the game didn't think to warn me that those buttons were a conflict...?

[elftwink]

this is fully a me issue but my thing with video games is if i don't understand the controls within 2 minutes of starting the game im quitting. and i don't care how good the story or graphics or gameplay or whatever is. i'll give it one (1) good ol' college try, and after 2 mins i will look in the options to see if i can look at the button mapping, and if i do not understand it immediately i am moving on. there are literally thousands of games that can accomplish the very simple task of telling me what buttons control what actions that i do not believe in "figuring out" the controls. frankly im at the point where if the menu is too annoying to navigate im quitting. once i quit a game because the [!] markers didnt go away when i went to that inventory tab. i do not believe in sticking it out for video games. video games are for fun leisure time and sticking it out is a resource i reserve for shit that actually matters. video games have exactly one (1) shot to immerse me in the game and if literally any aspect of the game prevents that im ditching it forever #realwinnersquit

[blighted-elf]

Infinity Nikki is so fun <3 Still haven't got a fucking clue how to navigate the UI <3

[incorrectskyrimquotes]

theres a daggerfall unity port??

[solitudefears]

❛ OF COURSE! are you stup— ❜ GUNSHOTS.

[parab0mb]

We're so back, with our tales from underground.

[dorkousloris]

imma say i really enjoy how i play as a warrior with controller but. oh my god i have to remap some buttons bc i got used to right triggers ( L1 & L2) for light & heavy attacks from other diff games for a long while now 😭

[volivolition]

truly if anymr f t lttrs f my kybar brak tis inclus svral numbrs an n f t parntsis btw) im fr ral gnna run ut f kybins t rplac tm wit </

[truly if anymore of the letters of my keyboard break (this includes several numbers and one of the parenthesis btw) im for real gonna run out of keybinds to replace them with </3]

[nippoisalien]

HYAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *THROW THEO INTO THE VOID*

BEAT CHAPTER 5 B-SIDE!!!

[llumimoon]

cracking my knuckles i think its time i work on the polywagon hanahaki fic

[lochingbird]

Oh, never gave an update. The Windows 11 updated didn't brick my computer. It did tell me after a day(14+hours) of 'downloading' that I needed to free up space on my drive, because I didn't have enough...which...I thought installations were supposed to, you know, reserve the disk space needed beforehand so that you don't go through this exact scenario?

Anyways it recommended ways for me to clear up space, including clearing out the temp files folder (would give me enough space on it's own). It's auto clean up feature did...nothing. It's fine, it never worked before either(why it gathers so much junk I guess), so to hand cleaning it I went (i've done this before, no issues).

Important temp files and ones actively used by processes (windows update is still active on my computer, asking me to clear up space in the middle of it's installation, so it's update files should be fine, right?) and you can click a button to skip deleting those.

so I delete what is allowed in the temp files folder and have space to finally finish the update that I didn't want in the first place.

Go back to the windows update screen and ask it to look for space again.

It goes 'sure'

then pauses

Then it goes 'Downloading'

windows temp update files don't survive the 'skip these important or actively used files' prompt

amazing I managed to finish the update at all.

[vivy-nx]

hi!! look at my cool kirby walking simulator fangame i made over the course of last year!! i worked very hard on it!! it's downloadable for windows and linux!