#while also playing a browser game and a mobile game

[starlit-mansion]

is it just me or is it like crazy easy to follow/unfollow people on mobile browser tumblr

[0sbrain]

here's a list of mozilla add-ons for all of you tumblrinas out there to have a better internet experience

also, if you like my post, please reblog it. Tumblr hates links but i had to put them so you adhd bitches actually download them <3 i know because i am also adhd bitches

BASIC STUFF:

AdGuard AdBlocker / uBlock Origin : adguard is a basic adblock and with origin you can also block any other element you want. for example i got rid of the shop menu on tumblr

Privacy Badger : this add on will block trackers. if an element contains a tracker it will give you the option to use it or not

Shinigami Eyes: this will highlight transphobic and trans friendly users and sites using different colors by using a moderated database. perfect to avoid terfs on any social media. i will explain how to use this and other add-ons on android as well under the read more cut

THINGS YOU TUMBLINAS WANT:

Xkit: the best tumblr related add on. with many customizable options, xkit not only enhances your experience from a visual standpoint, but provides some much needed accessibility tools

bonus: if you are into tf2 and wanna be a cool cat, you can also get the old version to add cool reblog icons

AO3 enhancer: some basic enhancements including reading time and the ability to block authors and tags

YOUTUBE

Return of the YouTube Dislike : pretty self explanatory

Youtube non-stop: gets rid of the annoying "Video paused. Continue watching?" popup when you have a video in the background

SponsorBlock: gives you options to skip either automatically or manually sponsors, videoclip non music sectors and discloses other type of sponsorships/paid partnerships

Enhancer for YouTube: adds some useful options such as custom play speed, let's you play videos in a window and most important of all, it allows you to make the youtube interface as ugly as your heart desires. I can't show a full image of what it looks like because i've been told its eye strainy and i want this post to be accessible but look at this <3

PocketTube: allows you to organize your subscriptions into groups

YouTube Comment Search: what it says

FINDING STUFF

WayBack Machine: you probably know about this site and definitely should get the add on. this allows you to save pages and access older versions with the click of a button. while you can search wayback using web archives, please get this one as well as it allows you to easily save pages and contribute to the archive.

Web Archives: it allows you to search through multiple archives and search engines including WayBack Machine, Google, Yandex and more.

Search by Image: allows you to reverse image search using multiple search engines (in my experience yandex tends to yield the best results)

Image Search Options: similar to the last one

this next section is pretty niche but... STEAM AND STEAM TRADING

SteamDB: adds some interesting and useful statistics

Augmented Steam: useful info specially for browsing and buying games

TF2 Trade Helper: an absolute godsend, lets you add items in bundles, keeps track of your keys and metal and your recent trades, displays links to the backpack tf page next to users profiles and more. look it tells me how much moneys i have and adds metal to trades without clicking one by one oh may god

IN CONCLUSION: oooooh you want to change to firefox so badly, you want to delete chrome and all the chrome clones that are actually just spyware and use firefox

HOW TO USE MOZILLA ADD-ONS ON YOUR PHONE

if you already use firefox on android, you'll know there are certain add-ons compatible with the app, some of them even being made just for the mobile version such as Video Background Play FIx. while most of them are pretty useful, some more specific ones aren't available on this version of the browser, but there's a way of getting some of them to work

you need to download the firefox nightly app, which is basically the same as the regular firefox browser but with the ability of activating developer mode. you can find how to do that here. once you've enabled it, you need to create a collection with all the add ons you want. i wouldn't recommend adding extensions if the creators haven't talked about phone compatibility, but XKit and Shinigami Eyes should work

also, don't tell the government this secret skater move, but you can try using both the regular firefox browser and nightly so you can have youtube videos in a floating box while you browse social media.

see? i can block this terf while Rick Rolling the people following this tutorial. isn't that tubular?

[perfectlovevn]

Is there any like. Tidbits we can know about the Milo's? Especially manipulation Milo I'm going feral over him- anyway, love your game! I've played it idk how many times at this point and I think I've found everything. All within a week of finding it but that doesn't matter hdhgsh

Here is a big list of Milo facts I made before.

Let's see if I can think of some more, probably just for Manipulation Milo then since right now its really hot and I can't think.

Manipulation Milo:

Probably owns like a ton of clothes for different occasions. Suits, dresses, headbands, trousers, shorts, whatever. He keeps up on trends and knows what works together well.

Sings very well in karaoke, probably has a soft yet playful voice, but when he gets desperate it becomes much softer, similar to how he is in PreMilo form.

Probably keeps up with a lot of shonen manga and whatever the latest anime is. Has a soft spot for anime about cats or romance animes back from when he was PreMilo.

Goes out of the way to talk to people who are loners quite often. Even if they don't particularly want to talk to him, he believes its important to leave some sort of rapport with them. Plus, the quiet ones always seem to know things they shouldn't. He should know, he was one of them before.

For some reason, I can imagine him lying down in a sunbeam like a cat does. Probably looks up at the MC and watches them every now and then.

I can imagine him always carrying snacks in his pocket and eating them through the day. Be careful if he offers you something, you never know whether or not it's drugged.

Manipulation Milo, I think I've mentioned before tries to mimic Eris in the way he talks. I think that unlike Eris who when speaking while walking is very pointed and decisive, he tends to sway gently from side to side, allowing his jacket to move back and forth.

Given the opportunity and the expertise, he does also have those kinds of malware on our computer, but only just for recording things like keystrokes, watching the camera or looking through your browser history. It's weird how he knows these things, am I right.

He's pretty good at rhythm games, and somehow never misses a beat when it comes to them. And fashion games. Inspired by that one post about mobile rhythm games. Hums along to the songs as he plays.

Physically much weaker than Violence Milo, but still is fairly strong for his height. Still, he is far less likely to use forceful methods and actually will feign getting hurt to gain sympathy.

[adrianthevampire]

A Somewhat Comprehensive List of Horse Video Games

I will be editing this original post with new games, new information, and so on. If you see a reblogged version of this post, it is worth going to the original post to see if updates have been made.

Ahead will be a list of games that either were released recently and/or are being actively maintained. I have not personally played all of these games. Do not take this list as my personal recommendations.

If you have games you would like to suggest for this list, please let me know!

Some games are listed in both the Single Player and Multiplayer sections. This is due to them having the capability for either.

Single Player

The Ranch of Rivershine [Steam]

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch [Website, available for PC and consoles]

Rival Stars Horse Racing [Website]

Astride [Steam, Website]

Horse Club Adventures [Steam, also available on consoles]

Horse Club Adventures 2 [Steam, also available on consoles]

Wildshade Unicorn Champions [only available on consoles]

Multiplayer

Rival Stars Horse Racing [Website]

Astride [Steam, Website]

Horse Isle 3 [Website]

Alicia Online [Website]

Star Stable Online [Website]

Star Equestrian [Website]

Browser

Horse Reality [Website]

Ropin' Ranch [Website]

Wild Horses Valley [Website]

Hunt and Jump [Website]

Mobile

Wildshade

Equestrian The Game

Star Equestrian

Rival Stars Horse Racing

Star Stable Online

Equestriad World Tour

Honorable Mentions

These are games that are not horse games technically but may have good horse gameplay, either in the base game or via user created content.

Red Dead Redemption 2/Red Dead Online/RedM

Minecraft

Roblox

The Sims 3 Pets

The Sims 4 Horse Ranch

Black Desert Online

Upcoming

Some but not all of these games have demos or paid beta testing, though none are officially available yet.

Fernhoof Grove [Trailer]

Unbridled: That Horse Game [Website]

Tales of Rein Ravine [Patreon]

Horse Life Simulator [Patreon]

Canter Crossing [Steam]

Pro Show Jumping [Steam]

Horse Project [Website]

Horse Trainer [Video]

Details about some of the games:

Rival Stars Horse Racing

Rival Stars has two versions. Desktop via Steam and Mobile. While the gameplay itself (e.i racing, breeding, etc) are identical there are massive differences in how it functions. Mobile has micro transactions and limits on how much you can do a day without paying money. The desktop version has no micro transactions and no limits on how much you can do at any given time. Desktop, however, does not get updated as often as Mobile. I could go on and on listing various pros and cons between the two versions, but ultimately I personally prefer Desktop due to the lack of micro transactions or wait times and in addition Desktop has the ability to make custom horses, which is quite fun. It's worth checking out the mobile version first, however, so you can see if the game appeals to you as the Mobile version is free to play.

Astride

Astride is in "early access" on Steam, though that can be misleading. What is currently available is little more than a tech demo. You can create a horse and ride around an area on it, utilizing Astride's unique jumping system, and you can given play with friends. However, it is extremely glitchy, the lighting looks awful right now, and overall it just... isn't good. That said, it is still in progress and I personally have hopes that it will become a full fledged game as promised someday. That day is not today and so I personally recommend not purchasing it until it has gotten a few good updates, unless you just really want to financially support the developers.

Horse Isle 3

Oh boy. I'll just point you towards this article about some of the issues with the community management of HI3. Be warned if you intend to play, moderators are inconsistent about the rules they enforce and you can very easily get banned for saying harmless things. Personally, I stay out of the chat and I'm careful with what I name my horses. Horse Isle 3 is a one of a kind game, sadly, that allows for extremely detailed breeding. Realistic genetics combined with the ability to breed for all sorts of shapes makes it a very compelling game, which is why so many people continue to play it despite... the issues. It is free to play, though there are paid aspects to it. However, you can earn the premium currency within the game and utilize paid features without ever paying your own money.

Minecraft

Minecraft can be a fun horse game using mods or server plugins! The mod SWEM adds a lot of content that makes for good realistic horse roleplay, though doesn't fit well in survival style gameplay. The mod Realistic Horse Genetics actually doesn't change much of the horse functionality, making it a really good fit for survival gameplay, but adds lots of realistic genetics and a better system for inheriting stats than vanilla minecraft. The mod Genetic Animals will be adding horses soon.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online, and RedM

While it is not intended to be a horse game, RDR2 has horses that feel so very real. They are well animated so they feel alive and they respond to their environment in realistic ways. Many people purchase the game purely because of the horses. There are mods you can use to improve the horses in Single Player, though I've never used any so I can't offer suggestions. Personally, I really like Red Dead Online for the horses because the horses can't die and there are a few more breed options. You also can look into joining a RedM server. There is one called Rift that is specifically meant for horse enthusiasts.

Roblox

I know nothing about Roblox personally, but I know there are several worlds (games? I don't know what they're called) in Roblox that revolve around horses.

I will add to this as I think of more. If you are viewing this as a reblogged post, it's worth checking the original to see if it has been updated.

Please feel free to request more information or suggest games or add your thoughts.

[sixxysidepiece]

Hrmm...the Matsus ain't super tech-savvy, but I wonder what kinda video games they would play?

Karamatsu you'd think would play dating sims, and he does, but that's 100% for research purposes. His actual favorite are racing games like GTA (Mario Kart is too competitive, his brothers always beat him) or other open world games.

Choromatsu tried Sims once cuz he thought he'd get to live the life he always wanted, but there was still too much RNG for him. He finds Rollercoaster Tycoon and the like calming.

Todomatsu goes on all the wikis so he knows exactly what is what for all the popular games so he can seem 'with it' but never played a single one. exclusively mobile games, like Wordscapes or Tetris, or Idle Games. The kinda stuff that he can just turn his brain off while still doing something.

Jyushimatsu plays FIFA Baseball, and is the bane of EA Sports cuz he is SUPER active on the forums and clogs their inboxes with emails about his (correct) opinions on how to better balance his favorites to win or who they should add to the roster. He also adores the WWE games, and has made extremely elaborate backstories for all his wrestlers. every one of his creations is a monster

You'd think that'd mean he'd like rpgs but they're too structured and too slow paced for his liking. Has a surprising amount of gamer rage and has destroyed the most controllers outta the brothers.

Osomatsu...plays steam porn games lolol. He strikes me more of a window browser, who'll just scroll endlessly and buy stuff that's on sale then never play them. he's got 3,000 games in his Steam library

The only one I can't pin down is Ichimatsu. Possibly psychological horror games, but rpgmaker or 'lower quality' games; Corpse Party and Ib and Misao and Off. Witch's House was also on the list but when it wanted him to do that to the Frog he probably smashed the TV/computer and swore never to play it again he was so upset.

He gets suuuuper attached to all the characters and gets real upset whenever something bad happens to any of them but he doesn't want his brothers to see him like that or know he likes stuff, so he never gets to play but that's fine he doesn't like games anyway (<- liar)

[deescade]

Genshin Impact ("Your Yandere" Series: Your Yandere Lover VER. 1 + husbando ver.) click and drag game!

warnings: [16+] yandere behavior (killing, stalking, manipulation, blackmail)

characters included: (all adult males up to v.3.2) zhongli, childe, diluc, kaeya, arataki itto, thoma, kamisato ayato, dottore, pantalone, pierro, capitano, scaramouche, gorou, heizou, albedo, kazuha, xiao, dainsleif, baizhu, cyno, kaveh, al-haitham, tighnari

op's notes: this is also basically the drafted version but I'll just call it "version 1" while I work on the final one :>

Game notes • How to Play

Please use a browser other than Google Chrome to play because the GIFs always lock onto their first frame on Chrome. Safari and Firefox work, please try those

If you're on mobile, screenshot the gifs either as a set or individually

[moodr1ng]

i need ppl to know that

1. you can install an app called "youtube revanced" to have youtube on your phone with no ads and with background play as well as other useful features like sponsor skip (the app isnt on the app store bc obviously google doesnt want you to have it - look up "youtube revanced apk" to find the download file. you can find tutorials on setting it up on reddit or just by looking it up.)

2. speaking of that, you can use the addon "sponsorblock" for firefox or chrome (but, like, come on. switch to firefox.), and it will automatically skip past sponsor read sections in most youtube videos. the timecodes are inputted by other users, so you dont depend on some kind of shitty recognition algorithm to detect the sections, and you can modulate which sections it skips or not (no, this does not hurt the youtubers revenue - manually skipping sponsors is the same and also does not impact revenue)

3. for many mobile games (such as puzzle games and other cozy games), they work offline and either only need to access the internet once in a while for updates, or not at all. you can see if a game works offline by just turning on airplane mode then booting the game. depending on your device, you can either go into the app settings and remove its access to wifi and data, or use an app such as netguard to block wifi/data access from specific apps, and only turn it back on if and when the game needs updating. for any mobile games that work offline, this will stop the game for playing ads between levels/at startup/etc entirely and leave you with only gameplay.

it is a bit harder to get away from ads on mobile because you cant just add an ad blocker to your browser and block everything, but you definitely can avoid ads even in apps that seem to have ads built-in. if you just take the time to download a couple apps or change a couple settings you can just stop seeing ads in many places without needing to pay for any premiums or whatever.

[inkykeiji]

chatplots interest check + beta testing!

hey, pssst! touya-nii would like to have a little chat with you. well? what are you waiting for! go talk to him!

note: currently, chatplots works best on a mobile device! you can find the faq beneath the cut! <3 please read through the entire thing before sending in any questions or playing the game; there's a lot of important info in there about how the game works!

click here to submit your feedback!

WHAT IS CHATPLOTS?

chatplots is a simulation game where you can enter into various situations with specific characters and 'message' them. each chat has multiple choices for the player to choose and at least two endings. your choices and behaviour throughout the chat will influence how the character reacts and responds to you, and will ultimately determine which ending you get! it is essentially like a playable oneshot! chatplots IS NOT AI. it is a game that was written by me and developed by my boyfriend. each conversation was painstakingly crafted by me; it is all my writing, and it will always be completely and entirely written by me.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

chatplots can be downloaded as a web app on your home screen if you'd prefer to have it on your phone! (this is the option i personally recommend hehe) but chatplots can also be played on any device in any mobile or desktop browser, accessible through this link: https://chatplots.inkyclari.com.

how to download it on ios:

go to chatplots.inkyclari.com

tap the share icon (on safari: the little square with the upwards arrow, in the middle of the bottom of the screen, next to the bookmarks option; on chrome: the little square with the upwards arrow at the end of the address bar)

scroll down and select 'add to home screen'

you're done!

how to download it on android:

go to chatplots.inkyclari.com

on chrome, press the three dots in the upper righthand corner

click 'install app'

you're done!

here's how it'll all go down once the chat is open:

touya-nii will send a message (or several messages)

the response button (the button with the little paper airplane) will begin pulsing when you can respond back to him

pressing the button will open up all of your available response options. you can then choose which one to send back to him.

this will continue until you reach the end of the game. the response button will begin pulsing with your ending, which is a piece of prose 700-900 words long. the chat takes about 10-15 minutes to play though once.

notes:

touya-nii will refer to you by name. the name you input at the start of the game will be the name he uses, though this name can be changed at any time in the settings (the little gear in the bottom left corner!). also! check out the settings while he's still typing for a cute lil surprise ehehe c:

touya-nii will behave like a real human throughout the duration of the chat. he takes a moment to read your message before he responds, and the time it takes him to type out a response is akin to that of a real person—meaning if his response is longer, he will take longer to type it than a response that is only a word or two.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND:

this is a beta, which means it is not the finished product.

the chat you are playing is technically only half of what the full chat would be; you are only playing one route with a few different branches and two variations of the same single ending. (in other words, there are several different ways to reach the same ending, and each branch has slight variations).

a full chat would have at least two separate routes within the same scenario/setting, and at least two different endings.

we encourage you to play through the chat several times to discover which choices yield which results, and to explore all touya-nii has to say!

WHAT IS THIS SHORT KEIGO CHAT?

the short keigo chat is a sfw test chat i made specifically for my best friend. it only takes 1-3 minutes to play through and has options that are specifically tailored to my best friend's personality and tastes. you are welcome to play through it as well if you'd like! just bear these things in mind hehe

WILL OTHER CHARACTERS BE ADDED IN THE FUTURE?

yes, of course! any of my iterations of ANY character has the potential to be added to the game in the future. i am also open to taking suggests and prompts from you all for future chat scenarios!

HOW MUCH WILL THE FULL GAME COST?

chats would either be sold on an individual basis, where you can buy each chat separately for $4-$6 USD depending on the length, complexity, number of endings, etc OR through a monthly subscription of $7 USD, enabling you to have continual access to the entire catalogue of chats as it grows, with the minimum number chats being released at least two per month. please let us know which option appeals to you more right here! <3

WE NEED YOUR FEEDBACK!

after you've played through the chat a couple of times, we would be extremely grateful if you would take a moment or two to answer a few questions in order to help us gauge interest and further determine the direction we should move forward in. you are also, of course, always welcome to send your feedback and thoughts through my ask box!

we can't wait to hear from you, and we hope you enjoy the beta! <3

[oneknightstand-if]

Hello, I sent an ask earlier about not being able to access the new content. While I’m not entirely sure why, using my phone ( ios/Safari) brings me to the non-updated version of the game, but with my computer I was able to reach the updated version and now I am able to enjoy the new content! Hope you get well soon!

Yeah, that's because a new browser will automatically use the current code uploaded to the site while some browsers *stares at Chrome* will insist on using the old cached code if you've already played the game on it.

Usually clearing the cache will force the browser to use the new current code, but I had some people still having random old scene files popping up after supposedly clearing their browser's cache. 🤦

I've got Safari for iOS myself and when I boot it up...

Oh god, what the hell is that?!

The 'Sepia' background is actually a different color on mobile?! On Desktop it's just the same white as the White background only with the blue light wavelengths supposedly removed. All my images with white backgrounds look like %^# like that!

Why is the rose randomly turning gold like that? There's not a single pixel of yellow in that animated png!

Also the script error that makes saving in the game impossible. Can't forget about that.

Well, it looks like I won't be working on Merlin's Guide today after all.

[tmgstudios]

Tips on Consuming Podcasts for Those With Short Attention Spans

hi there! your local podcast guy with adhd here! for a while i struggled to consume podcasts because of my short attention span, but over time i have developed a few tips and tricks and am now absolutely in love with the medium. these aren’t in any specific order, and hopefully some of these can be useful to others as well!

1. check out podcasts that have visual aspects

whether its the occasional visual bit or a set thats super interesting to look at, visual stimulation is key! i personally love the sets of tmg studio’s podcasts, so that plus the occasional visual bits mean i don’t get under-stimulated as quickly! this doesn’t always work however, so feel free to take it to the next level;

2. engage in something else visually stimulating while listening to your podcast of choice

for me this is usually video games. something like minecraft, that requires attention but not reading, tends to work the best personally, but i’m also definitely not against plowing through something like dead cells or hades as i laugh along to my favorite podcasts! it doesn’t have to be video games for you, whatever media/activity will allow you to be visually stimulated while not blocking your audio should do the trick. some of my friends like to play mobile games like subway surfers, and others like to play something on their browser like flight rising (specifically the coliseum. podcasts are a great way to get some coli grinding in)

3. listen while in motion

so this one might be a little confusing on first glance, but i literally had no other idea on how to write it. essentially, this means listening while physically in motion. whether you’re on a walk, folding laundry, or eating dinner, being physically in motion can help stimulate your brain.  this can ALSO extend to listen while in a moving vehicle, like a car or a plane. i personally love listening to podcasts as i stare out the window on road trips or plane rides. i have a ton downloaded just for this purpose. some people like to listen to podcasts while they drive, so that’s another thing you could try, just be careful it doesn’t distract you from the road to much!

4. take breaks

podcasts can be long, and you absolutely do not have to listen to them all in one go! 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there, break it up however you need to. 

5. listen to podcasts you know are going to hold your interest

this might go without saying, but be sure you’re finding podcasts that cater to your interests. if you try to muscle your way through a podcast you aren’t interested in just because it’s popular/your friends like it, you won’t have a very good time. you like horror? listen to a horror podcast! dnd? find a dnd one! are you like me, and story-based podcasts stress you out? find a comedy podcast! the possibilities are endless

if you’ve got any tips & trick to add on, please please do so!!! i really love podcasts and the amount of people i’ve talked to who say they want to get into podcasts but just can’t sit through them, and it makes me sad. 

podcasts definitely aren’t for everyone, so if these tricks still don’t work for you, that’s ok! there are plenty of other forms of media out there. but that said, i hope anyone who’s wanted to get into podcasts but been unable to due to the medium gives these tips a shot!

if you’re not sure where to get started in terms of what podcasts to listen to, hit me up! i absolutely love podcasts, and while i tend to be a comedy guy myself, but have plenty of friends into other kinds of podcasts, and with all that knowledge combined i’m sure i can find you some good recs

good luck and happy podcasting!!

[thesoulofthebeautiful]

Plugging my passion-project Firefox extension for ChoiceScript games again, I don't want to spam either my followers or the tags but I've made some pretty significant updates! I've also renamed the project as it's drifted pretty far from my original idea and the old name didn't fit very well.

New features include:

Dashingdon games now save your current status the same way ChoiceOfGames games do, so if you leave the page and come back your progress is saved (although your history will be lost). The save/history system in general has been massively improved and should now work without exception on any CS game.

A few minor fixes and upgrades for the modals, including the ability to hover over them to prevent them from disappearing.

There is now a "code" button that will pull up the ChoiceScript code for the exact page you're looking at, with the starting line for the page highlighted in green and the line the interpreter paused at highlighted in yellow. Additionally if you highlight any text on the page prior to clicking the code button, the line(s) of code that generated that text will be highlighted in blue!

The big one in my opinion: your saves on both Dashingdon and ChoiceOfGames games will sync across browsers! This is limited by the speed at which the browser syncs data (about once every 10 minutes) but in my opinion it's really nice to be able to play a game on my laptop then transfer it over to my desktop, and I don't have to worry about losing saves due to a browser failure or cache cleanup!

Anyway, if any of the above sounds interesting please do check this out, I'm open to feature requests and feedback about every part of this.

Future plans:

Syntax highlighting in code window

Better mobile support (not that Mozilla really lets you install extensions on mobile but w/e)

Settings window to customize some behaviours

Comment parsing from the source to enable/disable some features (some authors don't like people code diving, and as this tool makes it really easy I'd like to add a way for them to indicate that they don't want it to happen. I think the disable-able features will be the modals and the code window, while the saving functionality will be always-on).

[mcgclock]

Text-based Interactive Fiction games recommendations from Itch.io

This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the rights to any of these IF's; we are just recommending them to people as we believe they deserve more recognition and people might actually end up enjoying them. The list was made on itch.io and so, unfortunately, will have to be accessed from there for anyone wanting to access them from here. The list also had to be split into separate parts as we ran out of characters to use. All the IF’s are completely text-based, a few using some visuals and/or images, but none of them are full Visual Novels. Almost all of the IF's are made in Twine, with a few being made in ChoiceScript, Ren'py, or some other engine. Most of the IF's are free-to-play, some are pay-to-play, and some are free until they're completed and/or a price is decided. Some of the IF's have extra DLC's or bonus side content on their itch.io page or on the author's patreon, which are either free-to-play or pay-to-play. Most of the IF's can be played in a browser (works best in the itch.io app, Chrome, Firefox and some other browsers. Not guaranteed to work in every browser) with some also having a download option, but there are some IF's that only have a download option and no browser one. Most of the IF's can be played on PC and mobile, but some are not compatible for mobile. A lot of the IF's are also unfinished WIP's (Work In Progress); some of them are already completed, close to completion, just started, or may have been discontinued. Some of the links of the IF's also don't work, stop working for a while before working again, or ask for a password to access; perhaps due to being discontinued, shut down for maintenance, or for some other reason. We will continue to keep updating the list as we find more IF’s. We also have a discord server, a subreddit, and a cohost page dedicated just for this. If you, or anyone else have any IF’s you want to recommend, feel free to share them on here by submitting a post on the blog or replying on this post, the three itch.io topics, the discord server, the subreddit, or the cohost page (They have to be text-based IF’s from itch.io and need to have at least some kind of interactivity. IF’s from other sites, Visual Novels, or some other type of game will not be accepted). Or if you just want to talk, or ask me for some suggestions on which IF's to try, then feel free to do that as well. Anyway, thank you for your time, and I hope you have a good day, folks. Cheers!

r/TextbasedIFRecs

[acesandwords]

Find the Tumblr Basics here

Now You know the basic functions of the site. But how do you find content? You have a few options to choose from.

On mobile, you'd locate the little magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen when you tap it you'll get a page that suggests the current trending tags/posts and recommended accounts. If none appeal to you just start searching up fandoms, video games, tv/movies, etc.

Desktop is mostly the same, the search bar is on the top left, and on the right side next to the home button there's a compass that will give you the current trends.

You'll notice the search bar will offer the 'go to # ...' or a little magnifying glass next to the 'go to ... ' they will result in similar searches but the # can only be sorted by Latest and Popular whereas the other can be sorted by that and by the time period it was posted, and by the type of post it is.

Next, and this is only if you're on desktop, you want to install the browser add-on Xkit Rewritten: Chrome Firefox. This add-on is a godsend and allows for an absurd amount of extra customization.

If you're making a post and want to mess around with the text a bit just highlight what you want to change and you'll get some basic options for the size, bold, italics, and small, and inserting links and colors!

Gradient Text [1] [2] [3]

Coding a custom theme [1] [2] [3]

Prefab custom themes [1] Please note some of these ones cost money - but plenty of free ones exist!!

Under the read more I've posted about community labels, and some settings you may want to play with! As well as how to spot and report porn bots.

What are Community Labels: [1] you can change them in your settings tab top right portrait on desktop under the 'account' section and bottom right on mobile, then gear icon top right and scroll to 'content you see'.

Play with your dashboard settings there's a lot you can do there!

While your messing with settings you will also see a section for tumblr Labs, this area has features they're testing so go see if any are appealing to you! You can enable and disable them at any time.

Now, what does a porn blog typically look like here? well like this:

They tend to use a lot of strange tags and varying degrees of explicit imagery. This one is fairly tame, but they can be much much worse so use caution and try to avoid going directly onto the blogs.

When reporting you will go up to the three little dots in the right corner and there's a report option, click that. Then select 'report sensitive content' and flag and block.

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

You have a poll about a woman changing a line but 0 context of what that line was and what was that changed to. From an outsider perspective it just looks like you are complaining about a translation but without saying why, and the twitter link doesnt work on the phone app , so whats going on

I mean if you can't access the link I have no idea what to tell you.

However it's a long know fact that localization for Games and Television coming out of Japan has been riddled with mistranslations. Intentional ones. In the picture she talks about having created a line in an English dub of an anime and also approved of said line after writing it. Then proceeded to voice said line. The line in question is as follows:

Japan is not exactly what I would refer to as a "Patriarchy". Certainly aspects of it exist, but Lucoa is very likely having things said about her by older Japanese women as they tend to very vocally gossip around people so they are intentionally heard by others. I have had friends in the country actually experience it.

However there is more to this scene than that. Lucoa is kind of an airhead. And while she can be serious when she needs to be, it's EXCEEDINGLY rare.

What Jamie Marchie did here was intentionally change dialogue that did NOT mention patriarchy and add it to the show. What's more they changed the relationship between Lucoa and Tohru here as well. Tohru is pretty spicy a lot of the time and she's rather sarcastic. When she first saw Lucoa in human form and at other points in times she's made pretty clear looks at her given the size of her assets.

In this SAME SCENE Tohru is making a jab at her body. HOWEVER, this scene takes that dynamic away fully and just goes, "Oh well funny you changed your clothing due to patriarchy because they secretly like your tits and like seeing them". That's the subtext of the new line. And this is far from the only example. And far from the only person who has done it.

Like this for example:

Where the English Studio decided "Let's remove ALL the dialogue from this fully so they don't talk to one another because it would be cooler" rather than develop the characters like the scene is MEANT TO DO, where they show respect for one another in the only way they know how. Talking about their profession.

Or in this:

In which they took dialogue in a game, and decided to put anti capitalist propaganda in a scene where NONE existed in the first place. If you need a more comprehensive list copy this link into your mobile browser because if somehow the twitter link isn't working then this is a long threat in which there are a number of examples. Also the video from the tweet.

Twitter Link

>Video Link< (If you can't see it and it doesn't play)

So long story short. I provided everything I needed.

As to the picture in question, it explains itself. She claims to have wrote a line, then backtracked when she couldn't handle the criticism. The change she made was not needed, and completely changed the tone of the scene and the dynamic of the characters. And with the other link I sent with the list of changes, they actually go out of their way to turn a gay guy who likes to cross dress into a "trans woman" instead of a gay guy. And if I was a gay guy and I saw that shit, I'd be hella pissed.

Hopefully this fully expands on my point.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Revenge of the Linkdumps

Next Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

If you’ve followed my work for a long time, you’ve watched me transition from a “linkblogger” who posts 5–15 short hits every day to an “essay-blogger” who posts 5–7 long articles/week. I’m loving the new mode of working, but returning to linkblogging is also intensely, unexpectedly gratifying:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/13/four-bar-linkage/#linkspittle

[Image ID XKCD #2775: Siphon. Man: ‘Wow, it’s true — the water doesn’t flow up the tube anymore.’ Woman: ‘Honestly, it’s weird that it ever did. Why did we ever think it was normal?’ Caption: ‘Physics news: the 2023 update to the universe finally fixed the ‘siphon’ bug.’]

My last foray into linkblogging was so great — and my backlog of links is already so large — that I’m doing another one.

Link the first: “Siphon,” XKCD’s delightful, whimsical “physics-how-the-fuck-does-it-work” one-shot (visit the link, the tooltip is great):

https://xkcd.com/2775/

[Image ID: A Dutch safety poster by Herman Heyenbrock, warning about the hazards of careless table-saw use, featuring a hand with two amputated fingers.]

Next is “Hoogspanning,” 50 Watts’s collection of vintage Dutch workplace safety posters, which exhibit that admirable Dutch frankness to a degree that one could mistake for parody, but they’re 100% real, and amazing:

https://50watts.com/Hoogspanning-More-Dutch-Safety-Posters

They’re ganked from Geheugenvannederland (“Memory of the Netherlands”):

https://geheugenvannederland.nl/

While some come from the 1970s, others date back to the 1920s and are likely public domain. I’ve salted several away in my stock art folder for use in future collages.

All right, now that the fun stuff is out of the way, let’s get down to some crunch tech-policy. To ease us in, I’ve got a game for you to play: “Moderator Mayhem,” the latest edu-game from Techdirt:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobile-game-to-see-how-well-you-can-handle-content-moderation/

Moderator Mayhem started life as a card-game that Mike Masnick used to teach policy wonks about the real-world issues with content moderation. You play a mod who has to evaluate content moderation flags from users while a timer ticks down. As you race to evaluate users’ posts for policy compliance, you’re continuously interrupted. Sometimes, it’s “helpful” suggestions from the company’s AI that wants you to look at the posts it flagged. Sometimes, it’s your boss who wants you to do a trendy “visioning” exercise or warning you about a “sensitivity.” Often, it’s angry ref-working from users who want you to re-consider your calls.

The card-game version is legendary but required a lot of organization to play, and the web version (which is better in a mobile browser, thanks to a swipe-left/right mechanic) is something you can pick up in seconds. This isn’t merely highly recommended; I think that one could legitimately refuse to discuss content moderation policies and critiques with anyone who hasn’t played it;

https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Or maybe that’s too harsh. After all, tech policy is a game that everyone can play — and more importantly, it’s a game everyone should play. The contours of tech regulation and implementation touch rub up against nearly every aspect of our lives, and part of the reason it’s such a mess is that the field has been gatekept to shit, turned into a three-way fight between technologists, policy wonks and economists.

Without other voices in the debate, we’re doomed to end up with solutions that satisfy the rarified needs and views of those three groups, a situation that is likely to dissatisfy everyone else.

However. However. The problem is that our technology is nowhere near advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic (RIP, Sir Arthur). There’s plenty of things everyone wishes tech could do, but it can’t, and wanting it badly isnlt enough. Merely shouting “nerd harder!” at technologists won’t actually get you what you want. And while I’m rattling off cliches: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Which brings me to Ashton Kutcher. Yes, that Ashton Kutcher. No, really. Kutcher has taken up the admirable, essential cause of fighting Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, which is better known as child pornography) online. This is a very, very important and noble cause, and it deserves all our support.

But there’s a problem, which is that Kutcher’s technical foundations are poor, and he has not improved them. Instead, he cites technologies that he has a demonstrably poor grasp upon to call for policies that turn out to be both ineffective at fighting exploitation and to inflict catastrophic collateral damage on vulnerable internet users.

Take sex trafficking. Kutcher and his organization, Thorn, were key to securing the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, a law that was supposed to fight online trafficking by making platforms jointly liable when they were used to facilitate trafficking:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and-surveillance-fosta-privacy.html

At the time, Kutcher argued that deputizing platforms to understand and remove which user posts were part of a sex crime in progress would not inflict collateral damage. Somehow, if the platforms just nerded hard enough, they’d be able to remove sex trafficking posts without kicking off all consensual sex-workers.

Five years later, the verdict is in, and Kutcher was wrong. Sex workers have been deplatformed nearly everywhere, including from the places where workers traded “bad date” lists of abusive customers, which kept them safe from sexual violence, up to and including the risk of death. Street prostitution is way up, making the lives of sex workers far more dangerous, which has led to a resurgence of the odious institution of pimping, a “trade” that was on its way to vanishing altogether thanks to the power of the internet to let sex workers organize among themselves for protection:

https://aidsunited.org/fosta-sesta-and-its-impact-on-sex-workers/

On top of all that, SESTA/FOSTA has made it much harder for cops to hunt down and bust actual sex-traffickers, by forcing an activity that could once be found with a search-engine into underground forums that can’t be easily monitored:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/09/more-police-admitting-that-fosta-sesta-has-made-it-much-more-difficult-to-catch-pimps-traffickers/

Wanting it badly isn’t enough. Technology is not indistinguishable from magic.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Kutcher, it seems, has learned nothing from SESTA/FOSTA. Now he’s campaigning to ban working cryptography, in the name of ending the spread of CSAM. In March, Kutcher addressed the EU over the “Chat Control” proposal, which, broadly speaking, is a ban on end-to-end encrypter messaging (E2EE):

https://www.brusselstimes.com/417985/ashton-kutcher-spotted-in-the-european-parliament-promoting-childrens-rights

Now, banning E2EE would be a catastrophe. Not only is E2EE necessary to protect people from griefers, stalkers, corporate snoops, mafiosi, etc, but E2EE is the only thing standing between the world’s dictators and total surveillance of every digital communication. Even tiny flaws in E2EE can have grave human rights concerns. For example, a subtle bug in Whatsapp was used by NSO Group to create a cyberweapon called Pegasus that the Saudi royals used to lure Jamal Khashoggi to his grisly murder:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-used-to-target-family-of-jamal-khashoggi-leaked-data-shows-saudis-pegasus

Because the collateral damage from an E2EE ban would be so far-ranging (beyond harms to sex workers, whose safety is routinely disregarded by policy-makers), people like Kutcher can’t propose an outright ban on E2EE. Instead, they have to offer some explanation for how the privacy, safety and human rights benefits of E2EE can be respected even as encryption is broken to hunt for CSAM.

Kutcher’s answer is something called “fully homomorphic encryption” (FHE) which is a theoretical — and enormously cool — way to allow for computing work to be done on encrypted data without decrypting it. When and if FHE are ready for primetime, it will be a revolution in our ability to securely collaborate with one another.

But FHE is nowhere near the state where it could do what Kutcher claims. It just isn’t, and once again, wanting it badly is not enough. Writing on his blog, the eminent cryptographer Matt Green delivers a master-class in what FHE is, what it could do, and what it can’t do (yet):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/05/11/on-ashton-kutcher-and-secure-multi-party-computation/

As it happens, Green also gave testimony to the EU, but he doesn’t confine his public advocacy work to august parliamentarians. Green wants all of us to understand cryptography (“I think cryptography is amazing and I want everyone talking about it all the time”). Rather than barking “stay in your lane” at the likes of Kutcher, Green has produced an outstanding, easily grasped explanation of FHE and the closely related concept of multi-party communication (MPC).

This is important work, and it exemplifies the difference between simplifying and being simplistic. Good science communicators do the former. Bad science communicators do the latter.

While Kutcher is presumably being simplistic because he lacks the technical depth to understand what he doesn’t understand, technically skilled people are perfectly capable of being simplistic, when it suits their economic, political or ideological goals.

One such person is Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “father of AI,” who resigned from Google last week, citing the existential risks of “runaway AI” becoming superintelligent and turning on its human inventors. Hinton joins a group of powerful, wealthy people who have made a lot of noise about the existential risk of AI, while saying little or nothing about the ongoing risks of AI to people with disabilities, poor people, prisoners, workers, and other groups who are already being abused by automated decision-making and oversight systems.

Hinton’s nonsense is superbly stripped bare by Meredith Whittaker, the former Google worker organizer turned president of Signal, in a Fast Company interview with Wilfred Chan:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90892235/researcher-meredith-whittaker-says-ais-biggest-risk-isnt-consciousness-its-the-corporations-that-control-them

The whole thing is incredible, but there’s a few sections I want to call to your attention here, quoting Whittaker verbatim, because she expresses herself so beautifully (sci-comms done right is a joy to behold):

I think it’s stunning that someone would say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now — which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera — that those harms aren’t existential.

What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.”

I think we need to dig into what is happening here, which is that, when faced with a system that presents itself as a listening, eager interlocutor that’s hearing us and responding to us, that we seem to fall into a kind of trance in relation to these systems, and almost counterfactually engage in some kind of wish fulfillment: thinking that they’re human, and there’s someone there listening to us. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you’re telling ghost stories, something with a lot of emotional weight, and suddenly everybody is terrified and reacting to it. And it becomes hard to disbelieve.

Whittaker sets such a high bar for tech criticism. I had her clarity in mind in 2021, when I collaborated with EFF’s Bennett Cyphers on “Privacy Without Monopoly,” our white-paper addressing the claim that we need giant tech platforms to protect us from the privacy invasions of smaller “rogue” operators:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

This is a claim that is most often raised in relation to Apple and its App Store model, which is claimed to be a bulwark against commercial surveillance. That claim has some validity: after all, when Apple added a one-click surveillance opt-out to Ios, its mobile OS. 96% of users clicked the “don’t spy on me” button. Those clicks cost Facebook $10b in just the following year. You love to see it.

But Apple is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher. Even as it was blocking Facebook’s surveillance, it was conducting its own, nearly identical, horrifyingly intrusive surveillance of every Ios user, for the same purpose as Facebook (ad targeting) and lying about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Bennett and I couldn’t have asked for a better example of the point we make in “Privacy Without Monopoly”: the thing that stops companies from spying on you isn’t their moral character, it’s the threat of competition and/or regulation. If you can modify your device in ways that cost its manufacturer money (say, by installing an alternative app store), then the manufacturer has to earn your business every day.

That might actually make them better — and if it doesn’t, you can switch. The right way to make sure the stuff you install on your devices respects your privacy is by passing privacy laws — not by hoping that Tim Apple decides you deserve a private life.

Bennett and I followed up “Privacy Without Monopoly” with an appendix that focused on a territory where there is a privacy law: the EU, whose (patchily enforced) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the kind of privacy law that we call for in the original paper. In that appendix, we addressed the issues of GDPR enforcement:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy#gdpr

More importantly, we addressed the claim that the GDPR crushed competition, by making it harder for smaller (and even sleazier) ad-tech platforms to compete with Google and Facebook. It’s true, but that’s OK: we want competition to see who can respect technology users’ rights — not competition to see who can violate those rights most efficiently:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/gdpr-privacy-and-monopoly

Around the time Bennett and I published the EU appendix to our paper, I was contacted by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology to see whether I could write something on similar lines, focused on the situation in India. Well, it took two years, but we’ve finally published it: “Securing Privacy Without Monopoly In India: Juxtaposing Interoperability With Indian Data Protection”:

https://www.ijlt.in/post/securing-privacy-without-monopoly-in-india-juxtaposing-interoperability-with-indian-data-protection

The Indian case for interop incorporates the US and EU case, but with some fascinating wrinkles. First, there are the broad benefits of allowing technology adaptation by people who are often left out of the frame when tools and systems are designed. As the saying goes, “nothing about us without us” — the users of technology know more about their needs than any designer can hope to understand. That’s doubly true when designers are wealthy geeks in Silicon Valley and the users are poor people in the global south.

India, of course, has its own highly advanced domestic tech sector, who could be a source of extensive expertise in adapting technologies from US and other offshore tech giants for local needs. India also has a complex and highly contested privacy regime, which is in extreme flux between high court decisions, regulatory interventions, and legislation, both passed and pending.

Finally, there’s India’s long tradition of ingenious technological adaptations, locally called jugaad, roughly equivalent to the English “mend and make do.” While every culture has its own way of celebrating clever hacks, this kind of ingenuity is elevated to an art form in the global south: think of jua kali (Swahili), gambiarra (Brazilian Portuguese) and bricolage (France and its former colonies).

It took a long time to get this out, but I’m really happy with it, and I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant and hardworking research assistants from National Law School of India University: Dhruv Jain, Kshitij Goyal and Sarthak Wadhwa.

I don’t claim that any of the incarnations of the “Privacy Without Monopoly” paper rise to the clarity of the works of Green or Whittaker, but that’s okay, because I have another arrow in my quiver: fiction. For more than 20 years, I’ve written science fiction that tries to make legible and urgent the often dry and abstract concepts I address in my nonfiction.

One issue I’ve been grappling with for literally decades is the implications of “trusted computing,” a security model that uses a second, secure computer, embedded in your device, to observe and report on what your main computer is doing. There are lots of implications for this, both horrifying and amazing.

For example, having a second computer inside your device that watches it is a theoretically unbeatable way of catching malicious software, resolving the conundrum of malware: if you think your computer is infected and can’t be trusted, then how can you trust the antivirus software running on that computer.

Back in 2016, Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden released the “Introspection Engine,” a separate computer that you could install in an Iphone, which would tell you whether it was infected with spyware:

https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/2

But while there are some really interesting positive applications for this kind of software, the negative ones — unbeatable DRM and tamper-proof bossware — are genuinely horrifying. My novella “Unauthorized Bread” digs into this, putting blood and sinew into an otherwise dry abstract and skeletal argument:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Then there are applications that are somewhere in between, like “remote attestation” (when the secure computer signs a computer-readable description of what your computer is doing so that you can prove things about your computer and its operation to people who don’t trust you, but do trust that secure computer).

Remote attestation is the McGuffin of Red Team Blues, my latest novel, a crime-thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. The novel opens with the keys to a secure enclave — the gadget that signs the attestations in remote attestation — going missing.

When Matt Green reviewed Red Team Blues (his first book review!), he singled this out as a technically rigorous and significant plot point, because secure enclaves are designed so that they can’t be updated (if you can update an enclave, then you can update it with malicious software):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/04/24/book-review-red-team-blues/

This means that bugs in secure enclaves can last forever. Worse, if the keys for a secure enclave ever leak, then there’s no way to update all the secure enclaves out there in the world — millions or billions of them — to fix it.

Well, it’s happened.

The keys for the secure enclaves in Micro-Star International (AKA MSI) computers, a massive manufacturer of work and gaming PCs — have leaked and shown up on the “extortion portal” of a notorious crime gang:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/leak-of-msi-uefi-signing-keys-stokes-concerns-of-doomsday-supply-chain-attack/

As a security expert quoted by Ars Technica explains, this is a “doomsday scenario.” That’s more or less how it plays in my novel. The big difference between the MSI leak and the hack in my book is that the MSI keys were just sitting on a server, connected to the internet, which wasn’t well-secured.

In Red Team Blues, I went to enormous lengths to imagine a fiendishly complex, incredibly secure scheme for hosting these keys, and then dreamt up a way that the bad guys could defeat it. I toyed with the idea of having the keys leak due to rank incompetence, but I decided that would be an “idiot plot” (“a plot that only works if the characters are idiots”). Turns out, idiot plots may make for bad fiction, but they’re happening around us all the time.

In my real life, I cross a lot of disciplinary boundaries — law, politics, economics, human rights, security, technology. I’m not the world’s leading expert in any of these domains, but I am well-enough informed about each that I’m able to find interesting ways that they fit together in a manner that is relatively rare, and is also (I think) useful.

I admit to sometimes feeling insecure about this — being “one inch deep and ten miles wide” has its virtues, but there’s no avoiding that, say, I know less about the law than a real lawyer, and less about computer science than a real computer scientist.

That insecurity is partly why I’m so honored when I get to talk to experts across multiple disciplines. 2023 was a very good year for this, thanks to University College London. Back in Feb, I was invited to speak as part of UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law’s annual series on technology law:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2023/feb/recording-chokepoint-capitalism-can-it-be-defeated

And next month, I’m giving UCL Computer Science’s annual Peter Kirstein lecture:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/peter-kirstein-lecture-2023-featuring-cory-doctorow-registration-539205788027

Getting to speak to both the law school and the computer science school within a space of months is hugely gratifying, a real vindication of my theory that the virtues of my breadth make up for the shortcomings in my depth.

I’m getting a similar thrill from the domain experts who’ve been reviewing Red Team Blues. This week, Maria Farrell posted her Crooked Timber review, “When crypto meant cryptography”:

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/05/11/when-crypto-meant-cryptography/

Farrell is a brilliant technology critic. Her work on “prodigal tech bros” is essential:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

So her review means a lot to me in general, but I was overwhelmed to read her describe how Red Team Blues taught her to “read again for joy” after long covid “completely scrambled [her] brain.”

That meant a lot personally, but her review is even more gratifying when it gets into craft questions, like when she praises the descriptions as “so interesting and sociologically textured.” I love her description of the book as “Dickensian”: “it shoots up and down the snakes and ladders of San Francisco’s gamified dystopia of income inequality, one moment whizzing up the ear-poppingly fast elevator to a billionaire’s hardened fortress, the next sleeping under a bridge in a homeless encampment.”

And then, this kicker: “it’s a gorgeous rejection of the idea that long-form fiction is about individual subjectivity and the interior life. It’s about people as pinballs. They don’t just reveal things about the other objects they hit; their constant action and reaction reveals the walls that hold them all in.”

Likewise, I was thrilled with Peter Watts’s review on his “No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons” blog::

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10578%22%3Ehttps://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10578

Peter is a brilliant sf writer and worldbuilder, an accomplished scientist, and one of the world’s most accomplished ranters. He’s had more amazing ideas than I’ve had hot breakfasts:

https://locusmag.com/2018/05/cory-doctorow-the-engagement-maximization-presidency/

His review says some very nice and flattering things about me and my previous work, which is always great to read, especially for anyone with a chronic case of impostor syndrome. But what really mattered was the way he framed how I write villains: “The villains of Cory’s books aren’t really people; they’re systems. They wear punchable Human faces but those tend to be avatars, mere sock-puppets operated by the institutions that comprise the real baddies.”

One could read that as a critique, but coming from Peter, it’s praise — and it’s praise that gets to the heart of my worldview, which is that our biggest problems are systemic, not individual. The problem of corporate greed isn’t just that CEOs are monsters who don’t care who they hurt — it’s that our system is designed to let them get away with it. Worse, system design is such that the CEOs who aren’t monsters are generally clobbered by the ones who are.

So much of our outlook is grounded in the moral failings or virtues of individuals. Tim Apple will keep our data safe, so we should each individually decide to reward him by buying his phones. If Tim Apple betrays us, we should “vote with our wallets” by buying something else. If you care about the climate, you should just stop driving. If there’s no public transit, well, then maybe you should, uh, dig a subway?

[Image ID: Matt Bors’s classic Mr Gotcha panel, in which a medieval peasant says ‘We should improve society somewhat,’ and Mr Gotcha replies, ‘Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart.’]

This is the mindset Matt Bors skewers so expertly with his iconic Mr Gotcha character: “Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

(Which reminds me, I am halfway through Bors’s unbelievably, fantastically, screamingly awesome graphic novel “Justice Warriors,” which turns the neoliberal caveat-emptor/personal-responsibility brain-worm into the basis for possibly the greatest superhero comic of all time:)

https://www.mattbors.com/books

Watts finishes his review with:

I’ve never fully come to terms with the general decency of Cory’s characters. Doctorow the activist lives in the trenches, fighting those who make their billions trading the details of our private lives, telling us that they own what we’ve bought, surveilling us for the greater good and even greater profits. He’s spent more time facing off against the world’s powerful assholes than I ever will. He knows how ruthless they are. He knows, first-hand, how much of the world is clenched in their fists. By rights, his stories should make mine look like Broadway musicals.

And yet, Doctorow the Author is — hopeful. The little guys win against overwhelming odds. Dystopias are held at bay. Even the bad guys, in defeat, are less likely to scorch the earth than simply resign with a show of grudging respect for a worthy opponent.

I often get asked by readers — especially readers of Pluralistic, which is heavy on awful scandals and corruption — how I keep going. Watts has the answer:

Maybe it’s a fundamental difference in outlook. I’ve always regarded humans as self-glorified mammals, fighting endless and ineffective rearguard against their own brain stems; Cory seems to see us as more influenced by the angels of our better natures. Or maybe — maybe it’s not just his plots that are meant to be instructional. Maybe he’s deliberately showing us how we could behave as a species, in the same way he shows us how to fuck with DRM or foil face-recognition tech. Maybe it’s not that he subscribes to some Pollyanna vision of what we are; maybe he’s showing us what we could be.

Got it in one, Peter.

And…

It’s also about what happens if we don’t get better.

Writing on his “Economics From the Top Down” blog, Blair Fix — a heterodox economist and sharp critic of oligarchy — publishes a Red Team Blues review that nails the “or else” in my books, and does it with graphs:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/

Fix surfaces the latent point in my work that inequality is destabilizing — that spectacular violence is downstream of making a society that has nothing to offer for the majority of us. As Marty Hench, the 67 year old forensic accountant protagonist of Red Team Blues says,

Finance crime is a necessary component of violent crime. Even the most devoted sadist needs a business model, or he will have to get a real job.

[Image ID: A chart labeled, ‘With more plutocracy comes more murder. As countries become more unequal (horizontal axis), their murder rates go up (vertical axis).’]

Fix agrees, and shows us that murders go up with inequality.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/#sources-and-methods

Which is why, while the average private eye is a kind of “cop who gets to bend the rules of policing”; Hench is “a kind of uber IRS agent who gets to work in ‘sneaky ways that aren’t available to the taxman.’”

[Image ID: A chart labeled, ‘Was the US prison state the inspiration for cyberpunk? The term ‘cyberpunk’ (which describes a genre of dystopian science fiction) became popular in tandem with mass incarceration in the US. It’s probably not a coincidence.’]

This observation segues into a fascinating, data-informed look at the way that science fiction reflects our fears and aspirations about wider social phenomenon — for example, the popularity of the word “cyberpunk” closely tracks rising incarceration rates.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/#sources-and-methods

(It’s not a coincidence that the next Marty Hench book, “The Bezzle,” is about prisons and prison-tech; it’s out in Feb 2024:)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

I’m out on tour with Red Team Blues right now, with upcoming stops in the DC area, Toronto, the UK, and then Berlin:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/04/26/the-red-team-blues-tour-burbank-sf-pdx-berkeley-yvr-edmonton-gaithersburg-dc-toronto-hay-oxford-nottingham-manchester-london-edinburgh-london-berlin/

I’ve just added another Berlin stop, on June 8, at Otherland, Berlin’s amazing sf/f bookstore:

https://twitter.com/otherlandberlin/status/1657082021011701761

I hope you’ll come along! I’ve been meeting a lot of people on this tour who confess that while they’ve read my blogs and essays for years, they’ve never picked up one of my books. If you’re one of those readers, let me assure you, it is not too late!

As you’ve read above, my fiction is very much a continuation of my nonfiction by other means — but it’s also the place where I bring my hope as well as my dismay and anger. I’m told it makes for a very good combination.

If you’re still wavering, maybe this will sway you: the blogging and essays are either free or very low-paid, and they’re heavily subsidized by my fiction. If you enjoy my nonfiction, buying my novels is the best way to say thank you and to ensure a continuing supply of both.

But novels are by no means a dreary duty — fiction is a delight, and after a couple decades at it, I’ve come to grudgingly concede — impostor syndrome notwithstanding — that I’m pretty good at it.

I hope you’ll agree.

Image: Robert Miller (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/12463666@N03/52721565937

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A kitchen junk-drawer, full of junk.]

[atwas-creations]

With the insanity that Unity's recent decisions have caused, I, as an aspiring game dev/designer, am looking to see what else is available. We all know about RPG Maker, GameMaker Studio, Godot, and Unreal. But if you're like me and have little to no understanding of code and limited finances, here are alternative indie engines I've scrounged up:

Idle Game Maker, the one I'm currently working with, built by Orteil of Cookie Clicker fame

Bitsy, and an associated pixel art tool called Pixsy

Pocket Platformer, similar to Bitsy, and code-free

Rogue Engine- requires download, but apparently, there's a tutorial

GDevelop- both 2D and 3D engines, has tutorials, and even has an option to playtest games in development and provide feedback (I am definitely trying out this one in the near future)

Heaps.io-requires download, and this honestly looks a little over my head right now, but might be worth checking into when I get a better understanding of code

Stride- 3D games, requires download, has docs and instructions so you can learn quickly

Bevy- 2D games for browser and mobile

LibGDX- now we're getting into engines that can make REAL games, some of the games in their showcase are on Steam

Defold- according to their showcase, this was used to make that mobile game Family Island that you've seen in so many ads

Love- don't be fooled by the childish font on their home page, the games in their showcase look amazing

HaxeFlixel- apparently used to make Friday Night Funkin'???

Armory3D, which apparently uses Blender

Solar2D, and here's their showcase- looks decent enough

Solarus- I didn't recognize the name, but I know I've heard of this, I've seen Zelda fans use this one. You have to download their launcher to play the games on PC.

DOME, which uses its own programming language

FNA, which calls itself a "reimplementation of Microsoft XNA"- if you remember, XNA no longer exists, but Eric Barone used it for Stardew Valley. FNA has been used to make games like Rogue Legacy (it's a real game, I got it on Steam).

Monogame- a direct descendant of XNA, being used for Stardew Valley's updates, and used to make a whole host of other popular indie games including 2 of my favorites: Axiom Verge and Celeste (so yeah, I'm definitely checking into Monogame if it's still around by the time I learn C#)

RPG in a Box, which looks really blocky and rough, but appears to be a cheaper solution than RPG Maker, especially for those new to the field. I already paid for RPG Maker, so I don't know if I'll use this one, but I'm putting it here for anyone else who may want to try it.

Adventure Game Studio- not sure how difficult it will be to use, but I'm seeing some decent-looking games in their showcase

RPG Paper Maker, which, I guess, makes 3D games out of pixel art? Says it's free to use, but if you want to sell your game, you'll need to buy a license. Fair enough, I suppose.

Narrat, another one I am DEFINITELY going to try, at least while I'm still learning. Has its own, very simple, easy to read script that is a step above Idle Game Maker's script, but not quite as complicated as "real" programming languages. Make RPG's and put them on Itch.io.

Ren'Py, for visual novels (apparently Doki Doki was made with this!?!)

Decker, can be used for various kinds of applications, not much for game-making, but maybe with a little imagination....

Engine.lol- I'm, uh, not sure what this is, but could be good for generating ideas.

EbitEngine- describes itself as "dead simple," used to make Bear's Restaurant.

Raylib- no tutorials, no built-in assets, you MUST know how to code- but it looks like a no-frills engine if you do know how to code. I don't, so I won't be using it, but if you do, go right ahead.

PyGame, which apparently uses Python coding language.

And this article listed all these and a few more that I didn't list here because they looked too expensive or too complicated.

There's also a Pixel Game Maker on Steam. It's 90 bucks right now (ouch!) but if you can get it, it looks like it'll be worth it.