talenlee

[talenlee]

Don't Guy Right

Hey, how often do you get to hear a slur that’s totally new to you?

Content Warning and Spoiler Warning: I’m going to talk about a character and a plot point from the series Loving Yamada-Kun at Lv999!. It’s going to necessitate a spoiler, but bonus, that spoiler involves a conversation around slurs.

This isn’t, in my opinion, particularly worrisome. I always find learning about slurs in other language doesn’t bring the same venom – any time someone has to explain to you something they’re saying is hateful, it certainly pulls the punch out of it. Nonetheless, due diligence: I’m going to talk about slurs, and I’m going to have to spoiler you to do it. Now you’re duly equipped to determine if you want to keep reading…

Shall we?

Loving Yamada-Kun at Lv999! is a show that makes me glad I have the useful term of ‘mid’ to describe a show. If you asked me about it an hour after I finished watching it I would have had some reasonably robust praise for it and then a week later I wouldn’t remember anything that happened. Even now, reconstructing the plot in my head and notes with a wiki on hand I’m left looking at whole episodes thinking ‘so basically nothing happened here, huh?‘ and the initial premise in the first episode and its ostensible relationship to a pro gamer is as much about the story as the colour of the wallpaper. I would not write a Story Pile article about it because I can’t imagine having more than this paragraph to say about the whole show.

In that show, however, I was introduced to a new word.

It isn’t a nice word.

Some framing for those of you with better things to do in your life than to watch Loving Yamada-Kun At Lv999!: The story focuses on a girl named Akane, who after a terrible breakup becomes more integrated in the social scene of her MMORPG guild. The only specific thing you need to know here is that there’s this character in the guild, Princess Ruri, who runs the guild, and there’s a face-to-face meeting midway through the story. At this face-to-face meeting, Akane finds that Ruri is not played by a cute teenaged girl based on assumptions of looking at the character, but is in fact, get this, a guy, and he’s all of like, two or three years older than she expected.

Anyway, she calls him a ‘nekama’ when she finds out about this, and he is upset at the implication.

Now, for me, the subtitles helpfully explained that a ‘nekama’ is a term for a boy who pretends to be a girl on the internet. That made sense to me instantly, because I was already familiar with the Japanese term okama. I was familiar with it because it shows up in one of my favourite series, Ranma ½, and it shows up there because it’s a thing the characters shout at Ranma, a boy who changes gender. See, okama is a slur!

Literally, okama means ‘cooking pot.’ It’s ostensibly a term used to refer to gay men, due to some associations with the shapes of their bums, which you know, whatever, etymology is weird. These days it has more of an association with crossdresser culture and trans people, two things that get conflated together and, oh boy, that is not a particular patch whose threads I feel equipped to pick at. It seems that regardless of who ‘properly’ is addressed by it (and trust me, slurs do not care about linguistic cladistics), okama is a term used for all sorts of queer folk who are ‘wrong.’ It seems to be currently connected to trans people, crossdressers, and gender non-conforming males, but, you know, gender is super complicated and so the terms for the groups that do and don’t relate to one another in this space aren’t that important. Instead the point of the term is the outgroup addressing people they can lump together for some perceived wrongness.

Which in this case is being okama.

A nekama is a net okama: Someone whose gender presentation online is not male, but their real life presentation is male. You might be familiar with a form of it in English, the term G.I.R.L., or Guy In Real Life. Now, odds are good that you aren’t familiar with that term because you’re not forty and spent time on the internet dealing with absolute goobers who would try and diagnostically guess someone’s gender over the text-only medium of USEnet. It’s a longstanding, well known idea, of people talking on the internet with the assumption that internet users are by default male, and therefore, anyone who is performing identifiable femininity is likely doing something as a ruse or act of chicanery.

Now, nekama is a new term to me, but it’s not a new term at all. In fact, it dates back to before the internet, to the channels and bulletin board systems used in Japan back in the 1980s. The term wasn’t created for the modern internet of Web 2.0, it was a thing that happened organically because it turns out we’ve always been policing gender, in almost all cultures.

Ruri’s player, Eita, responds badly to being called a Nekama, and even asks others in his guild to help address that. It’s not that he’s weird or nothing, etcetera, and then everyone sort of just moves on. It’s seen as yeah, our guild leader is a Nekama and we all clearly think that’s not good but we don’t care about how that’s not good. It’s just oh well, his thing.

The rest of the episode moves on and focuses on Akane’s love story. I don’t know, again, I watched this show and I can’t care enough to double check. Point is, the show goes ‘hey, here’s this ‘secret’ about this character they know, and then moves on… only to reveal at the end, in the post-credit scene, back in the MMO, that Eita’s character, Ruri, is the way she is because he’s based her appearance on his little sister, and then he does a fashion show.

Which is to say, after the show communicates that his guild thinks he’s a weirdo, they then also say, don’t be confused, he is a bit of a weirdo.

That sucks!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

[talenlee]

(Some) Season 10 Hermits!!! <3

These are just some quick(er) drawings trying to come up with some designs for their skins. I might change a lot next time I draw them but for now I think these are quite nice :3

If anybody is interested in the timelapse pls lemme know!! I'll post that one too ^ _ ^

[talenlee]

[talenlee]

Dev Pile 2025-26 - How Did I Make Lysen Co?, Part 4

Hey here’s more of the plain-text case study of Lysen Co.

Abstraction

Lysen co constructs its fiction through the aesthetics in the game, the type of game language it uses to describe scoring conditions, through the names of the cards the game uses, and through the supplementary game material (the rules leaflet and box text). 

The rules leaflet is a single page, folded to fit in the card box. It includes a number of phrases that are meant to evoke empty corporate speech, also while borrowing phrases from Stalinist propaganda. Some key examples are:

Commissioned Human Resource Dispensation

DO Your Best For The Betterment Of All Mankind

‘Tiger Team’, specifically in quotations

Full-time distribution of actualised test partners

Team Pro PartnerTM

Personnel Optimisation (Internal New Trainee) ScoreTM

Culture Fit CheckTM

The logo of Lysen Co, the fictional corporation, includes this abstraction. Over its logo, it includes the corporate motto “Where Nobody Doesn’t Belong.” This is meant to be threatening in a non-obvious way; not that the company excludes nobody, but rather, that anyone who does not fit in the company’s ruthless environment is excluded from personhood. This is to express the process of the game’s Stalin Sort mechanic, where people who don’t fit in based on an algorithm aren’t given chances to negotiate or redress their failings, they are immediately and completely ejected from the company. 

The game cards have nine titles; junior and senior members of the Admin, Marketing, Research and Tech teams. Of these cards, these construct fiction through how they relate to one another:

Junior Marketers want to be part of the largest team of Junior Marketers, referencing the way that people who communicate and engage in creativity can benefit from a large community.

Junior Admins improve if they have a number of Senior cards to reference, suggesting administrative work is best when it can connect to a number of authority sources.

Junior Techs just give two points, guaranteed. I imagine the Junior Tech is completely content just doing their job and leaving work. 

Junior Researchers care about successfully having been involved in breakthroughs.

Senior Marketers are capable of discarding mistakes you made, such as memory-holding traitors.

Senior Admins make each other Senior Admin worse. This means that while one Senior Admin is worth 5 points, two are worth 8 points, and 3 are worth 9 points, 4 are worth 8 points, and 5 are worth 5 points. I imagine this as the way that too many administrators with authority create problems for one another.

Senior Techs are worth 2 points alone, but if you have only one Senior Tech they’re worth 5. 

Senior Researchers are worth 2 points, but they’re improved by +1 for each Junior Researcher. This mechanically reflects that Senior Researchers don’t care about breakthroughs the way Junior Researchers do, but they do care about having a number of Junior Researchers to command.

In this, Seniors have institutional power and care about the organisation underneath them, while Juniors care about the institution above them, and the work the company is trying to do.

The game card are material objects players interact with, and are designed to look, aesthetically, like they are corporate objects with a flattened, non-sophisticated presentation. There are no outlines and solid colours and shading doesn’t use gradients. The cards represent dossiers from the corporate offices, with all information boiled down to a compatibility number. 

Enrollment

The game obscures player intention through the use of face-up and face-down cards and a concealed hand of cards. At the start of each hand there’s one piece of public information and one public player choice; there’s the number from the leading player’s hand, and the direction the player has chosen to send the trick.

This information presents facts that players can derive, but their proximity to that player increases the range of possible options they have. The player who is immediately after the leading player has the best chance to guarantee their card is playable. 

In a small player count (3), the first player needs to ensure that they have a last card that can contribute to the trick to hopefully guarantee the trick succeeds and they get their cards. In this case, a player who plays a card into a trick probably wants to play their highest card counting down, or their lowest card counting up, and other players may want to force as wide a gap as they can to diminish that player’s chance of success.

Players want to accumulate cards, to build their history. The easiest way to win the game is to have a high score, and getting as many cards in your history as you can is the easiest way to get a high score. There are some cards strategically you want to offload, like traitors, trying to put them in other players’ tricks, and sometimes when you are ahead you want to try and ruin tricks, if you can.. 

This creates opportunities for counterplay to assumed strategies of players. The information in players’ hands is hidden information, but so to is any goal the players are aiming towards. A player may want to try and collect Senior Administrators or Breakthroughs, and a player may be sandbagging an opportunity for a Senior Marketer, potentially protecting them from a Traitor in the end-game.

Stuffness

The game’s physical components are designed to be minimally intrusive. Players do not need to do much to set up the game; you grab the box, you open it up, you take the rules out and you shuffle the cards, you deal, and the game begins. The point of the design is to be minimally intrusive, the deck is even small so that it’s easy to shuffle.

The material presence of the game is small; each stack is designed to sort itself out well and easily, so nobody needs to remember difficult information like a sequence of cards. 

The pieces are breakable and delicate inasmuch as cards are. There is some delicacy about the stack; it’s possible if players set down their cards unreliably and untidily, the order they hit the table can be confused by the players’ actions.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Being the only bi cis guy amongst almost exclusively trans friends and peers is wild because in theory its like im living in a horny manga where all of a dudes friends turn into hot babes, but in reality they are hunting me like the last bison on the prairie. 5 years ago I mentioned bionicle and one of them asked when I was starting estrogen.

[talenlee]

not at all kidding you genuinely need to get comfortable finding the friends who are willing to talk to you about your creative interests and help you make things like this because if you think all your friends will think your interests are cringe you might need a few friends who don't

Every unhinged fic writer needs an equally unhinged friend who "yes ands" their ideas and encourages them to write all their most far fetched and insane stories.

[talenlee]

y'all Neocities is so cool everyone should go make a Neocities and bring back websites and web rings

or host a site another way!! Neocities is very accessible however ♡

[talenlee]

help girl i drifted out to sea [x]

[talenlee]

[talenlee]

Do you think Naomi Novik ever looks at AO3

sees some incest mpreg

and whispers to herself “I never wanted this.”

[talenlee]

I Love My Sister

I’m not really talking about pride today.

One of the unfortunate coincidences of my life is that whilst many months of the year are pretty boring and my blog material can always be sculpted around whatever I feel like, there are two months where basically everything happens. The tail end of March and the start of April is a dense packed period of family birthdays and trying to coordinate around things like work schedules and the movement of Easter. The other is June, which starts almost with my wedding anniversary and then has Fox’s birthday in it, an increase in work, and then, trailing out towards the end, it has today.

My sister’s birthday.

I try not to talk too much about my family in a specific way on the blog. I’ve made references to problems I have with my dad and I’ve talked at times about how great my niblings are, b ut I haven’t actually made much of a fuss about the rest of my family because for the better part of my life, it’s never been stuff that you share on the internet. I have stories about my father, my mother, my cousins, and yes, my sister, but I don’t share them here for the most part because they’re unverifiable and they’re not necessarily interesting. I’m interested in them and if I can tell it to you personally, to tell you about me and the people I love, then yeah, I’ll do that, but that’s not what this blog is for.

When it comes to my family and my relationships to them, if it’s not something that’s useful and translatable to you, then why should I bother writing it down? Writing about game making, that’s to demistify it. Writing about fiction or lore to share with you, that’s to see if it excites you, that’s because I find it interesting. Writing about Christianity and the problems it presents for society? That’s venting dark gas that builds up inside me and threatens to turn uglier at all times. But when it’s just a thing about my family? Why should I bother sharing it? I do not think my life is inherently novel. It’s new to you, since you haven’t lived it – but then, who has?

Almost nobody.

Still, part of the point of this blog to me is the practice of writing, the practice of putting down words and seeing what in me wants to be said. Ever since the corpus of this blog blew past a certain point, I realized I found myself rereading old articles that I’d written, leafing through my digital diary; not just to check what I had said, but to appreciate the ways I’d said them. I have found myself laughing at my own jokes, in private, which is a pretty big move for me.

Then to talk about my sister without telling you anything about my sister, to not divulge her life nor to make knowing her necessary to read this, is something where I have to breathe on a mirror and let you see the smile that was drawn in a fingertip there, when the temperature was different.

I have a sister and I love her very dearly.

My sister is someone I am breath-takingly proud of. In the context of a family environment without a doubt, I am confident I was not a good brother. Oh, I was probably just an ordinary little twerp of a kid, but I don’t have memories of being happy I was hanging out with her, that there was ‘our thing’ that we did, or common interests we shared. Growing up, I was, I’m sure, dreadfully unpleasant to be around at the best of times, an obnoxious little loudmouth and completely unwilling to attend to the fact that my sister was a person with her own interiority and her own life and who was probably just as lonely as I was in the barren godful landscape of our church environment.

Since becoming an adult and realizing that my sister is also an adult and that my sister makes choices and my sister has opinions and my sister is not just part of this mechanistic organism that is my family but is a whole human has made me realize that for all the travels and pains of my own childhood that sometimes yet overwhelm me, that propel me into googling names from my past and checking to see if they’re unhappy (and most of them are, in ways I feel happy about), that there is someone who was right there alongside me for the whole time and who I never heard complain to me about it. Someone who bore things I did not and someone who has been shaped into a person that I can look at and be awed by.

Back when I cared about Twitter numbers, I saw one of those questions: Who’s the most famous person who went to your school? It was a weird answer to give but at first, I said it was me. After all, it was a tiny cult church that never produced anything good, and I, one of its only escapees into the real world, had at the time a thousand followers on Twitter. This is a pretty novel answer and draws the conversation into my cult background, which I like doing if only to disarm anyone who wants to try and point out that I’m a big weirdo or I somehow don’t know something they think is obvious.

Then I found that my sister had more Twitter followers than I did and then I found that she had been given the opportunity to become verified.

I talk to my sister about her job, about the things she deals with, the structures above structures above people that are involved in trying to make things better and the kinds of things that frustrate her. I hear the things she prioritises: People who are vulnerable, people who have no redress, the people who don’t get to sit in an office and do spreadsheets. I can tell you that I’m proud of her, in all those moments where a vent about some colleague or coworker will divert into why it frustrates her – not because she doesn’t want to do anyting hard, but because of how it impacts someone outside them, someone who needs help.

Someone she wants to ensure has help.

There’s always someone who’s been on the road alongside me. There’s someone who knows how hard it’s been and is making things better, even through things I don’t think I could endure. Someone who knows it gets easier because we make it easier because we make it better for people who need it to be easier.

I love her so much and I’m so proud of her.

And if that makes for a particularly uninteresting story today, then I’m very sorry.

Not because, ah, one day she’ll be gone, oh, one day I’ll have lost this opportunity, but just because getting in the habit of reminding the people you love that you love them is one of the most important things you can do to realize how much love your world is and can be.

I love my sister, I’m proud of my sister.

I don’t think I have to be worthy of being her brother. I got that as my first birthday present. But I hope that I can live up to her example.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

there's an article about it going up sometime later, but I have this much I am sure of, the greatest lesson the Locked Tomb ever taught me is that I need to be more obviously non-American online. If I'm not making yanks uncomfortable then I'm not obvious enough

[talenlee]

Obviously trans boot camp would be about finding if you're a high heel pink boots trans or a big stompy clomp clomp boots trans or a soft stay at home ugg boots trans

[talenlee]

Obviously trans boot camp would be about finding if you're a high heel pink boots trans or a big stompy clomp clomp boots trans or a soft stay at home ugg boots trans

[talenlee]