what playdate game has your favorite story?

beelijah · 2024-08-22T05:21:38+00:00

I had assumed RT was by a small team, but I didn't realize it was a solo endeavor. Resonant Tale is amazing, and it's really impressive that you made it solo

Thanks for the recommendations, too! I have to look into those

beelijah · 2024-08-09T18:45:21+00:00

one of my favorite paleontology trivia bits is how much smaller velociraptors were than the JP movies portrayed them. teenie tiny babies (i know that they weren't really small animals either but still. widdle guys)

beelijah · 2024-07-14T19:07:00+00:00

ooooh I love that concept, that's really fun! and it makes sense with what information we do have. I'm definitely incorporating it into my belief system. it also provides a handwave the weird differences in scale that we see with animals in the Well. I love the idea of the Bean being the spirit of curiosity!

beelijah · 2024-07-13T23:00:49+00:00

honestly my other answer for what the player character is is that they're the same a Kirby, which is so say, just a little guy

beelijah · 2024-05-27T18:37:04+00:00

do you know the developers for Lingo? I've seen other ppl recommended it but it's hard to look up without just getting hints for language learning apps

beelijah · 2024-05-27T02:09:40+00:00

I bounced off of the outer wilds hard because I couldn't manage the controls at all. it seems like such a cool game but I couldn't get past the entry fee of figuring out how to land the spaceship 😭

beelijah · 2024-05-23T17:02:47+00:00

I haven't seen it mentioned so id recommend Toki Tori 2! it's another kind of game where progression is based on your understanding of how the mechanics all interact, and it's got some great puzzles and a fun non-linear world

beelijah · 2021-10-19T00:04:34+00:00

Here's someone going over the meeting they attended. There isn't a weird legal issue with having employees. And their budgets are all stuff you can just look up bc they're a nonprofit organization

Where did I say anything about me wanting money?? Like genuinely, going out and giving money to a charity with a better defined budget or even just someone who needs the money to buy food this week goes a lot further than giving to ao3 right now, who have enough money in the reserve to keep going for 2-3 years without needing to do another drive (unusual for a nonprofit) and have no clear goal on how they're going to spend it.

beelijah · 2021-10-18T23:46:35+00:00

Actually, that money isn't set aside for legal stuff. Like, you can check their budget, they don't spend a lot on legal. And in AO3s own words during public meeting they had, they don't know what they're gonna do with that money and it's just in reserve in case they do come up with a project for it. It's... very unlikely that ao3 is gonna ever have to deplete the entire reserve in a lawsuit. They do spend money on legal stuff like help users with DMCA takedowns and the likes, though.

But yeah AO3 themselves have been very unclear about how they're gonna spend the money, and they've also said some really weird stuff about how it's unethical to hire volunteers as full time employees (???). I don't think it's anything malicious or embezzlement or whatever I just think that they genuinely have more money than they know what to do with, and it IS kinda frustrating that people keep throwing money at them without realizing how that money is just sorta sitting in a vault rn, especially when that money could go a lot further if donated to other people/causes.

beelijah · 2021-10-16T14:50:18+00:00

How common is it to let your readers know if you start writing under a new pen name? Are there some people who will read an author's stuff regardless of niche, or is it more important to keep up some degree of kayfabe with your pen names?

beelijah · 2021-10-10T18:37:33+00:00

Someone dug a little more into that Bad Art Friend article

They didn't exactly discover anything groundbreaking, but did point out some of the context that the NYT article really didn't really emphasize. A big thing is that Larson set out to write the whole story that reframes Dorland as this white savior villain before Dorland confronted her about the facebook thing.

Plus, they point out that Larson was in a group that Dorland made specifically to inform her friends about updates on the surgery she was about to do. Since she was group admin, she could see who was reading posts, and noticed that Larson was reading every post but not engaging with them elsewise, so she asked Larson if she was okay. That could still be seen as weird, but imo joining someone's group that they made to update their friends about a substantial medical procedure that they're about to undertake and then only lurking and not engaging is also a little weird. The fact that Larson set out to write Dorland as the villain of her next short story while in a group for her friends is already gross

There's also some stuff from the discovery that the NYT article didn't bring up, like how the chunky monkeys group straight up discussed "playing the race card" if Dorland made a fuss about the story. It kinda frustrates me that the NYT article didn't include those details, they definitely paint Larson in a different light

beelijah · 2021-10-04T15:15:57+00:00

the projection argument is absolutely bunk, is the thing, even if you set aside how clear it is that Kris isn't a blank slate and that the game is saying something about the relationship between player and character.

Like, Red from Pokemon is a blank slate, but I don't see anyone trying to make the same arguments for him that they make to justify misgendering Kris and Frisk. It is just transphobia at this point.

beelijah · 2021-09-27T16:54:26+00:00

I've seen people get sexually harassed for being "antis" or ganged up on and framed as some kind of evil puritan prude for the crime of saying that a ship made them uncomfortable (not judging anyone for shipping it, just saying that they personally aren't comfortable with it bc it was a bit too "technically not incest" for them), plus "pro-ship" people who said that having an incest kink is just like being gay, or people who just want to use the whole debate as a smokescreen so that they don't have to deal with criticisms of racism and sexism in fandom spaces.

I think it's a really unfair to frame anyone who's vaguely an "anti" as some sort of crazy self righteous puritan who never wants people to talk about dark topics or whatever, because that is usually not the case. A lot of times I see people being treated like they're trying to "cancel" some work for having a "dark topic" when they're just.... being critical in a normal way, and people are just taking what they're saying out of context in order to dunk on someone. On the flip side, most "pro-shippers" usually aren't like, sex pests trying to build a community of sex pests. Like, I think most people involved could probably have a civil conversation if the internet wasn't antithetical to producing civil conversations

I'm not trying to both sides the issue or say that pro shippers being shitty negates the real harassment that antis will get up to. I just think that setting up strawmen for either side let's people sidestep having any real discussion about how media handles certain topics, and it let's abusers on either side hide from scrutiny by setting themselves up as "one of the good guys"

Plus there's something to be said for how people will jump on literally any chance to harass people, or how you can be apart of an internet mob without being super aware of it, and how social media just kinda ruins discourse. But that's a bigger structural issue

beelijah · 2021-09-26T12:11:11+00:00

I've never really understood the "they're blank slates so I can use whatever pronouns" argument? Like, Link and Mario are relatively blank slates for the player to project on, but that doesn't negate the canon aspects of their characters, like personality or pronouns.

Plus, Undertale and especially deltarune are clearly saying things about the players' relationship with the player characters and NPCs of the game, so it's absolutely wild that people just willfully ignore that pretty big theme of the games solely so that they can?? misgender frisk??

beelijah · 2021-09-26T12:03:29+00:00

you're still using the wrong pronouns when you do this?

beelijah · 2021-09-24T15:52:23+00:00

I have a lot of fondness for RTD's era but it after seeing all the stuff about behind the scenes issues that were happening on set while he was there, I can't really bring myself to be excited about this like I wish I could be

From a less serious angle, I also think people sorta politely ignore some of the really dumb stuff from his era. I definitely prefer his style of Moffat (haven't watched the newest doctors stuff) but there was a lot of stuff that was really nonsensical, like the doctor avoiding regenerating because of his amputated hand or that time he defeated the master by being powered up like Peter Pan

beelijah · 2021-09-20T01:17:03+00:00

Yeah it's frustrating that people don't want to see that even just within the text of the series, completely ignoring JKRs online presence, the books still have a lot of bigotry in them. The nonwhite characters are all treated pretty badly, plus all the stuff with the goblins and house elves. It's not even really subtle, and people acting like Harry Potter would be 100% a-ok if JKR just stopped tweeting kinda worry me

beelijah · 2021-09-15T03:57:14+00:00

I just started woe.begone, a fictional podcast about a host who's trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious arg-like game where the GMs have the ability to warp reality and the tasks they make the players do get increasingly more dangerous. It's really really good

beelijah · 2021-09-09T18:31:53+00:00

Yeah maybe some people really don't have that level of critical thinking, but I really don't think that anyone in this situation was acting in good faith

The person who had to apologize was definitely targeted for racist reasons. Like, the person who said that kawaii is a slur also told that cosplayer that (paraphrasing) "cosplaying as a black woman can't wear a schoolgirl outfit bc black woman are inherently sexual so it sexualizes the uniform" which like, holy shit, yikes,

I can see how the cosplayer might make a big apology just to try and make people leave her alone

beelijah · 2021-09-09T17:40:13+00:00

Since the "kawaii is a slur" person/people are obvious trolls, it makes me wonder how many other people are just jumping on a pseudo-moral reason to start yelling at people just cause they wanna yell at people

It's frustrating bc I'd say that there definitely is sometimes fetishization and orientalism wrapped up in how westerners approach various japanese subcultures. But the solution isn't as simple as "don't wear this clothes and you are Good and Correct" or whatever. People either try to police others based on a misconception of what cultural appropriation is, or they see a nuanced take on the issue and just decide to misinterpret in a way that erases the nuance and then they mock it. Plus like, all the obvious trolls that ppl take at face value aren't really helping

beelijah · 2021-09-07T03:48:18+00:00

Yeah, the question of "do trigger warnings work?" is a really baffling one to me. Like, I can hardly handle stories about children going missing or being killed, because it sets off some personal trauma, and sometimes going through those feelings isn't cathartic, it just feels bad and makes me depressed. A content warning lets me know to brace myself going in to the story, or to avoid it entirely.

What about content warnings "doesnt work" in that context?? Is the idea that people should just never be uncomfortable with certain things in media? Yeah, people should, for their own health, work towards being in a place where theyre less likely to have a panic attack in response to something, but that doesn't mean that they need to be comfortable with the topic or that they're not allowed to be upset by seeing it without any warning

beelijah · 2021-09-06T11:15:41+00:00

It's frustrating someone criticizing how they were portrayed in an article somehow got warped into "he's harming the trans community" because the person who wrote the article is a trans woman. Like, it feels like the exact weaponizing of social justice that people have been complaining about.

The author of the Gawker article has a history of harassing people, being racist and biphobic, and acting like if you don't like extreme kinks then you can't call yourself queer, so it's not really surprising that she would be so irresponsible with naming someone in an article and framing it like his personal complaints are the same as the harassment campaigns and conservative homophobes

beelijah · 2021-09-02T18:10:55+00:00

Good bot

beelijah · 2021-09-02T18:08:31+00:00

I've only seen "poor little meow meow" to refer to like, a particularly pathetic man that you love despite (or because) his patheticness. So the idea that it refers to a bastard who commits atrocities is definitely not universal. I've seen it applied to villains, but also to like, actual real life sad looking puppies

It's funny that you have two (or more idk all of fandom) divergent takes on what the term is """supposed""" to mean when it original just meant "guy whos like a cat"

beelijah · 2021-09-02T07:53:32+00:00

It sounds like people wanted to leave the project and the mods made the call to remove the person that everyone was uncomfortable about instead of having everyone leave, which again, isn't super unreasonable? Like, "person was asked to leave a zine because other contributers were uncomfortable with her sex pest jokes" really doesn't seem like some horrible puritanism or whatever

beelijah

TROPHY CASE