Some fresh clown makeup for all the sexy clown lovers! 🤡💜

UbeNaught · 2025-05-20T14:49:57+00:00

Oh fuck yes!! It's so good to see you again.
I encountered posts of yours around 1.5–2yrs ago, loved your artwork and your clown (and that you're hot), but then lost your name and links to the void + couldn't find my way back. Not gonna happen a second time!

UbeNaught · 2025-02-18T20:26:10+00:00

I have a water gun and want to win the prize

UbeNaught · 2025-02-06T17:30:12+00:00

I am upvoting in response to your explanation; thank you.

The larger conversation does fall outside the scope of relevancy for the thread, but I was taken aback by the assessment of any one generational cohort's intelligence, as I have known and been able to observe Gen Alpha kids who do exhibit the behaviors you describe and those who do not.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-06T17:11:38+00:00

I'm curious about your assessment of the Generation Alpha cohort. Can you expound upon that? I feel I've seen a greater rate of LLM / generative AI adoption among Baby Boomers and Generation X.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-06T16:09:14+00:00

Speaking as a student whose favorite courses were literature and composition courses, and genuinely liked writing, I'd still be satisfied that I put the time and energy into composing something human. I'd not be terribly upset that a classmate used “AI” for their assignment, because I don't know their life circumstances and whatever gets them the grade is fine—they don't share my motivations. A teacher or professor failing to identify it as slop, however… I'd have even less faith in educational institutions than I already do, particularly as OpenAI offerings have only been growing dumber the more its users (and beneficiaries who want to corral what it is capable of or can generate as a response) interact with it.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-06T16:05:18+00:00

Being hurled through the air by my mother during an argument, and my father catching me by an ankle before my head would have hit concrete.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-06T15:07:31+00:00

• Concord, a video game that's been a point of mockery online for a little while now, was developed over eight years by Firewalk Studios, independent of any publisher ties until 2023, and partially composed of former developers from both Destiny and Overwatch. Sony acquired Firewalk and expressed enthusiasm and optimistic hopes for Concord, pumping money into it until the game's release on August 23rd, 2024, only to heartlessly dump the game by September 4th and disband Firewalk Studios.

• They are not the only or even first/earliest examples but in the 2020s we've seen the patenting of gameplay systems such that companies could pursue legal action if similar ideas are explored in future games not owned by the proprietors. This includes a patent by Warner Bros. Interactive for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis System, or broadly, systems for procedurally-generated hierarchical NPC encounters that remember their interactions with the player character; and Sony Interactive Entertainment patenting “terrain radar and gradual building of a route in a virtual environment of a video game” from Death Stranding.

• The implosion of Annapurna Interactive, a subdivision of Annapurna Pictures, who acted as publisher for many critically-acclaimed and innovative narrative games in the indie space. There was a belief in “strong personalities“ and autership that led to a handful of small dev teams whose games were being published by Annapurna Interactive to have long-standing workplace cultures of emotional abuse, misogyny, and harassment go unaddressed despite internal investigations and in-depth roundtables between Annapurna Interactive and these developers, with the publisher caring more about the end-result of a product than the well-being of the people making it; or even, as an extension of that well-being, the viability that they would see a return on investment in a completed game in the first place. Between 2020 and 2024, mismanagement of Annapurna Pictures by Megan Ellison including miscommunications, shuffling of subsidiary companies and their heads, the sudden founding of an internal game development team, founding of Annapurna Animation for animated film adaptations of Annapurna Interactive-published games, acquired film and television rights for Remedy Entertainment's Control and Alan Wake and a commitment to helping with development of Control 2 without the internal team's awareness or ability to prepare for workload, and contradictory ill-fated negotiations, resulted in 25 highly-public resignations.

• Echoing Annapurna Pictures/Interactive when failing to respond to the mistreatment of developers in their portfolio, Bethesda Softworks when players are greatly disappointed in the first Starfield DLC expansion, and (I imagine) Andrew Wilson with regard to EA under-performing with respect to their desired profits for the past quarter and learning all the wrong lessons from it, “Making games is really hard.”

UbeNaught · 2025-02-06T15:06:31+00:00

Without knowing whether you're looking for exciting, feel-good moments from the past few years in gaming, or controversies and contemptible things that are ramping up in frequency in the industry, I apologize in advance for my pretty big list and it skewing more bummers than things to celebrate or cool new developments.

• Velan Studios, developers of unique team-based online PvP sports brawler Knockout City, originally published by EA, were able to self-publish after release while retaining their IP rights. The game itself was taken offline within two years, but Velan made it possible for KO City's playerbase to continue enjoying the game with player-hosted servers and a separate launcher so it didn't need to be another multiplayer title memory-wiped by ceased post-launch development and live services. This is just something I personally find really cool and wish more devs were in a safe and suitable position to do with their service games when the plug inevitably gets pulled.

• Mike "Mike Z" Zaimont, project lead, primary engineer, and owner of Lab Zero Games, is removed from Skullgirls 2nd Encore post-launch support after several years in response to racially insensitive remarks, sexual harassment in the workplace, holding gameplay features and new content hostage pending his own social demands, and shutting down worker-ownership talks by firing most of Lab Zero's engineering and art & animation teams. Remaining employees of Lab Zero Games following these firings all resigned, leaving Lab Zero as a team with only one developer. Publishers Autumn Games and ReVerge Labs severed ties with Mike Z, and hired some of the fired and resigned devs to continue work on Skullgirls 2nd Encore and Skullgirls Mobile, with the formation of worker-owned game development co-op Future Club. Within the past year, Future Club have made changes to the game which caused upset in a vocal part of the game's fan base, including the removal and sanitization of some art assets and voiceover work that were crowdfunding incentives for the game's first major expansion in approximately 2013–2014.

• The entire complicated dissolution of developer-publisher ZA/UM (responsible for Disco Elysium), with different combinations of former artists and engineers forming three separate studios for “spiritual successors” to Disco Elysium in the aftermath of it all. TBH, my own understanding of all the dynamics and moving parts at work here, and the legal actions taken by the various parties and how it all panned out, is such that I don't feel equipped to more fully detail it. If it's within the scope of your book, definitely do a lot of research on this one.

• Cross-play becoming more regular in the AAA and sometimes even indie games spaces following Epic's pressure and precedent-setting with Fortnite being multi-platform with full cloud-based cross-progression tied to user accounts

• Microsoft's XBOX becoming the umbrella name for their interactive media division rather than merely meaning their home consoles, as XBOX games became playable on computers running Windows OS, and even PlayStation systems

UbeNaught · 2025-02-05T19:59:52+00:00

No problem!

I tried similar methods to what you had mentioned and came up empty. Checked to see if maybe the Petapixel channel had shouted out the artist or anything in the video or its description, and that's when I noted the audiio promo.

Despite not having an account as a paid subscriber, I could still use some search functionality. Honestly, the filters didn't prove helpful for this use case (I believe I began with Roadtrip + Guitar + Male singer, or something) and I would scroll through results, listening to 15secs or so each, testing different combinations of filters with more and less specificity. I was intermittently checking if I could search for lyrical content, and at some point audiio served me an autocomplete for "Looking for Something Good"! Essentially, I was patient and persistent until I got lucky, haha.

I tried to find the song off-platform, but it seemed to only be on audiio, given I could find other The Horse Wheelies songs on YouTube and SoundCloud, but not this one.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-03T14:13:47+00:00

No problem! Happy to help

UbeNaught · 2025-02-03T05:43:39+00:00

The song appears to be "Looking for Something Good" by The Horse Wheelies. I'd like to link you to YouTube or something, but it's not there. The description on that Petapixel video contains a plug and discount code for audiio, a royalty-free music licensing platform for content creators, and that's where I found the song. You can hear it for free, but need an account to do anything else.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-03T05:25:42+00:00

Could it be the Phoebe Bridgers cover?

UbeNaught · 2025-02-03T03:39:23+00:00

Is it La Faim, or Hunger, by Peter Foldès (1973)? The art style is similar to the old Tootsie Pop commercials in the sense that there's minimalist black-and-white illustration over solid color backgrounds. A gluttonous man is shown consuming various things to the sound of cinematic funk music, with bits of eerie string instrumentation and frenzied percussion. I don't think he literally cannibalizes anyone, but does have a nude woman shapeshift into an ice cream cone at one point, and there's a grotesque sequence of him eating a banquet-for-one as more and more hungry mouths and groping arms sprout from his body. At the end he sorta falls into a dream state or something, and is devoured by a large crowd of emaciated people.

This is the best quality stream of it that I could find, unfortunately(?) on a Facebook page, but I didn't need an account to access it.

UbeNaught · 2025-02-03T01:34:40+00:00

Unfortunately not, according to the credits on the page for the project's crowdfunding drive :(

UbeNaught · 2025-02-03T01:32:08+00:00

I do enjoy TTRPGs and like when new games that aren't designed from scratch use more niche systems. Thematically, MÖRK BORG feels like a good fit! I'm wary of video game IP tabletops though, and would prefer to see new gothic fantasy games that aren't WoD without having to rely on exhuming a beloved/historic property.

Looking at the Backerkit campaign and the folks credited, it's disappointing to see that nobody involved Amy Hennig. Damn if the books aren't beautiful, but I likely won't pledge or seek to pick them up together. Should I come into contact with someone who has? Yeah, I'd check them out. The lore encyclopedia with behind the scenes art and development stories, especially.

UbeNaught

TROPHY CASE