droqen

-were flooded and absolutely devastated by "it's cool to make money, actually", and washed away in the rain... almost like it never existed. i gotta say, weirdest feeling in the world.

this hasn't been my experience but i also grew up in a bizarre internet bubble where it was incredibly normal to be intrinsically motivated to make games. and then i think containment broke when the gold rush happened - pop culture got a bit of "it's cool to make games", and my precious communities-

(it's not quite as simple as this and i'm sure people can avoid the issue and some never even run into it, but the effects are also very subtle & surreptitious, so i'm also sure lots of people think they're outrunning it when they're actually not)

"oh, i want to make a game! and ALSO, i COULD make MONEY!"

nope, dead

and imo this is a very very good way to lose sight of the deep internal motivation to pursue [thing A], especially in a case when it's moving upstream like this - from a smaller more private niche interest to a larger more mainstream evaluative force

also, something i really wanna say is that the goal of 'influencing popular culture' is a DEATH TRAP!!! you're not explicitly saying it here and not suggesting it's even your opinion, but i see the idea a lot that [thing i want A] is actually legitimate/valuable according to [other thing B]

i'm reminded of keogh's "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist" -- been a while but i would summarize the core thesis as relating to how a larger culture essentially harvests/exploits a smaller (and less profitable) culture for value. more negative cast than 'tap into', but exploring that same idea.

ah, the hermeneutic circle in action! what do you mean by 'enriched'?

it's still worth sharing original thoughts in public ofc! but i hope everyone is out there making and participating in weird small communities as well, ones that are relatively out of touch with "popular opinion".

p.s imo a profit-prioritizing body can never rly be out of touch with popular opinion

addressing @danthat.bsky.social 's original point, it's worth considering what further underlies the "doing it right" mentality that underlies the production of generic safe-mush games. hello! we're on bluesky! this kind of public arena is a place where, through growth and exposure, thoughts 'mush'.

rather than being concerned about changing the popular opinion i think it is time to start making oases for this kind of discourse to actually thrive. i've been thinking about this for a while and the very nature of popular opinion will always prefer a hypersmooth 'works-for-everyone' approach.

for bitten dorito

so you're saying... read the orange guidance soapstone and summon phantoms for difficult parts

xylophone qitten zaga

GAARL! by MatthewLacker, pancelor Gabe's Action Arcade RogueLike! (Demo)

I have a demo! GAARL is a single screen arcade-y platformer roguelike about climbing chains. My name ended up in the acronym (Gabe's Action Arcade RogueLike) but Pancelor also put a lot of work into this. It is playable in the browser, check it out!

matthewlacker.itch.io/gaarl-demo

pizza oven funeral... landfill funeral... these are amazing lol. normalize naming *more* things in the scariest/weirdest way possible 😌 then nobody can scaremonger us! and we can have fun with words in the meantime

would have really appreciated an 'as i said in my last book'-type heads up so that i could read the chapter without having a lingering voice in the back of my head going: "this sounds awfully familiar... why is it not acknowledging its extremely strong similarities to things you already know about?"

stylistically i prefer a clearer distinction so that i can set aside some analytical power and not read so hard when it's something that is SO similar to past literature that i have already formed an opinion about -- the way the chapter is written is so straightforwardly lacking in any citation??

i found it difficult to read the chapter 'striving play' because it felt like i was reading stuff that i had already read before more than once, and at minimum this is because it is him rehashing some of the same descriptions and arguments from 'agency as art'

2. okay i had previously made an unverified claim, so rewriting my second point. it's potentially less obviously serious than i thought.

in some cases nguyen does not sufficiently, for me, describe the relationship of present writing to past writing (his and others')

when i read this i find it difficult to engage with because i have to navigate through the haze of "i'm being told that i react this way, i see things this way, etc", detangle the language to understand it as *nguyen's position*, and only then become able to study and regard what is being said.

a specific example of this, pulled from pg 295

"All the high arts, the really respectable ones, seem to be the ones where a singular genius broadcasts their art . . to us lowly masses, and we just soak it up in relative passivity."

1. i noticed that nguyen uses a lot of this type of presumptive language that positions him and the reader in the same place. what i mean is sentences like "we feel this way." i've generally become not a fan of this but it's especially troublesome for me when the familiarity feels forced.

i'm still trying to figure out how to not let this stuff get in the way of actually examining a work but the big two things are as follows

omg haha don't mind me, i'm just a curmudgeon when it comes to this stuff. i will someday come to better understand my specific complaints!!!

i must say i have grabbed the book from the local library and it is Not For Me! i don't think i expected anything less but i have a better understanding of where nguyen's style doesn't gel with me now.

(it is SIGNIFICANT. i can hardly get through a chapter without getting super irritated! argh!!!!)

@beho.dev i was reading your blog and the fizzbuzz post sniped me so here's my one-line python solution (very much borrowing from your logic)

def fizzbuzz(v):return[v,"fizz","buzz","fizzbuzz"][[3,0,0,1,0,2,1,0,0,1,2,0,1,0,0,][v%15]]

at last, the bespoke blur is complete.

bsky.app/profile/droq...

a red pixel art "0" the smoothness is set to 1.0

a red pixel art "0" the smoothness is set to 0.0 (it is pretty similar, but different)

a red pixel art "0" the smoothness is set to -1.0 (look at this strange beast! i love it! it doesn't look as distinctive once you zoom out, though.)

a red pixel art "0". the smoothness is set to 5.0

it's not as strong as i know a blur can be, but that minor disappointment set aside to solve another day, i am very happy with the outcome. i have a blur which can be tuned to achieve some relatively distinct looks! including some unexpected ones.

finally, the blur has yielded to my will. here is me intentionally tuning it wrong