Baja, 🐸

A weathered board building and fence sit under a sky touched by the pink and grey of the dawn of Samhain.

It’s a beautiful day for the end of the pagan year. Here on the farm we celebrate this as New Year’s Eve, tomorrow being the start of another turn of the Wheel. Blessings to all who also celebrate this day.

we have finally given up getting much attendance at our place and are posting up on a friends porch in NT lol

Yeah I think about this a lot and my slow efforts to unlearn this behavior

See, the trick is that "the GM exists for the players' amusement, whose job is to ruin their plans for fun" and "the GM rules like a king, and the players exist to be their playthings" is that these SEEM like opposite maladaptive approaches to play, but they both result in the GM doing all the work.

This feels like the natural evolution of a ton of social issue arguments from Christian Nationalists that boil down to “the existence of non-Christians violates my religious freedom”

Public ownership of all teams.

Like the random menus arent because they are badly programmed menus. No menus were programmed. Its making the image of menus because menus appearing is a thing that happens in recordings of game footage.

Im actually frustrated at the replies to this in that theres people joking about broken it is in ways that miss how this reflects the nature of LLMs not doing what people say they do. Its not “making a game,” even a bad one, its making a series of images vaguely reflecting what a game looks like.

You can by how no one ever asks if other forms of visual or narrative sensuality are necessary, just the ones they can moralize about.

I think people talk shit on “Gen Z” wayyy to much on the prude discourse but anyone asserting any position on the “necessity” of sex/nudity/intimacy to the plot of anything is full of shit.

Angel hair, gross-textured bad excuse for spaghetti (which is also bad.) Short textured noodles are usually the best. Long noodles belong in broth and nowhere else.

a second day of the same discourse? no. no thank you.

instead I need you to name your least favorite pasta shape

Honestly I just feel like Ive been “strong” for too long and spent too much time and energy “improving” to whatever standard with no actual reward. I need a month or two of being dogshit. Of seeking and getting what I want, selfishly, and being petulant and weak when I cant.

Gone Home
Disco Elysium
Kentucky Route Zero

Honestly that might be it

Also possibly the hottest man alive due to the deadly combination of forearms and infodumping about what evil Tsars probably put into their piroshki

About 80% of the vehicles available to normal retail motorists, including most of the most popular ones, should not be.

The more Ive thought about and seen dev response to discussions about it the more I think the ending of Expedition 33 is utter dogshit that retroactively ruins the game. Puerile pseudo-intellectual nonsense rooted in the same thought processes that make people think depicting evil is endorsing it.

I find that the sort of thought process that leads a writer to considering a “relationship” to their characters is the root rot underlying a ton of media literacy failures as well as the total misunderstanding of what LLMs actually do.

I honestly find navel-gazing around the “nature” of fictional characters exhausting and pointless. They are fictional, components of a piece of art. They can be incredibly resonant, well-realized, and compelling but they are an expression, not an existence.

giving a swifty Divers like presenting a medieval serf with a single cool ranch dorito

AI cannot be trusted because AI will never have to make a sweat-soaked dead sprint across campus to drop off an A- Merchant of Venice thesis and then puke up the third 5 Hour Energy onto the quad

Im generally pleased with writing more focused on Theme than Lore but swear to god not every artsy horror narrative needs to be a tomato-in-the-mirror, actually-metaphorical meditation on grief

When I run Trophy I frame it as “play with abandon.” Fundamentally its horror fueled by people consumed by their worst impulses and players gotta bring those impulses to the expressive fore to get the spiral started.

You cannot plan for this kind of idiocy because it is antithetical to the very nature and purpose of fiction, which is to connect us and to affirm the connection between us through voluntarily stepping away from the self to meet an artist who has done the same.

YouTube video by Youb Tijani You Wouldn't Recognize a Vampire... Cyber City Oedo 808 [Eng Dub] (OVA - 1990)

Cyber City Oedo 808 youtu.be/4ZT94_yTOls?...

I mean sadly yeah a huge amount of interaction with media in the influencer era is just parasocial behavior extended to an appeal to authority.

Its bizarre because theres people who say that about basically *everyone* involved in media crit but, as I point out to them, aren’t you here in the audience because you think someone else might be weirder enough than you are, oh ‘normal’ consumer of media?

I found my copy on a staff recommendations table at a weird bougie little bookstore/gift shop that was part of a upscale retirement community that my in-laws had taken me and partner to visit and we were speculating on the timeline where that single copy did the rounds among the residents.

“I dont care what anyone says, I like that movie.”

As a corollary to the second thing, Fiasco is the kinda game that can run up into folks boundaries/comfort levels really quick so open comms and check-ins are also recommended.