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It should be illegal to require that any device or software connect to the internet just to run. I shouldn't need to log in with microsoft to open any of their programs on my local computer. All games should be playable without access to an online server. All media you pay for should be downloadable to local disk as a raw file and if they don't like that because they know you'll share it and upload it, tough shit. They took your money already, they'll live.

#one amendment is that certain games’ appeal is getting to play with other people #more people than would ever work in split screen #and those games are always gonna need to connect to the internet #but all other games should have offline modes #the fact that they don’t is absurd

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If you are watching a TV show, it can be live action or animated.

But not when you're reading a book. Much to think about.

#i generally use a mix of real actors and made up actors

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Take the test

You can only do 12 options in a poll so if you tie choose which one you prefer???

#interesting test #but the test writer and i disagree about some things #like a lot of questions would contain two phrasings of what the author clearly thinks are the same question #but don’t necessarily go together in my mind? #eg ‘i am humble—i believe true greatness come from helping others’ #a person can be prideful and also believe in helping others #and i know because i am #i have at times been prideful of my capacity to help others #(and then burnout happened but that’s a separate thing) #but the test did give me paladin which is fairly consistent with both other tests and my understanding of myself #so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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how can you eat the fried hearts of something that once was alive and had a beating heart? do you feel any guilt? i hope you do.

please google what an artichoke is

#ok 1. incredible punchline #2. why would a heart be worse to eat than any other muscle? #like have i eaten heart? no. because i have qualms but they’re mostly founded on ‘unknown texture’ #and i know my qualms are silly #but this take is dumb #i don’t care if they’re coming from a vegan ‘all meat is murder’ stance #singling out the heart like this is still dumb and emotionally manipulative instead of making a real argument

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#if i see a spider that is more than a couple feet away from me or in any room besides my bedroom/bathroom #i do my best to ignore it #it can do its thing. over there. away from me #the moment they get into my personal bubble or i find them in my room/bathroom #i squish #(if i have to enter their space i try to let them be #it’s more if they approach me or breach my territory) #i know spiders are important to the ecosystem and it’s better to leave them alive and so on #but this cerebral knowledge does nothing to quell the visceral discomfort of being to close to one

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rlly baffling to me that people will love the dishonored games and hate deathloop bc to me deathloop is a crystallization of the ideas arkane began exploring in dishonored. low/high chaos is traded for narrative choices. smoother combat mechanics in terms of not having every weapon on a single scrollwheel. honestly way better character writing bc on this dishonored 2 playthrough i felt like the script was a little wooden? while deathloop characters feel like real people having conversations.

#ok so i like both games #but i hate this comparison that implies narrative choices is more refined than the chaos system #the chaos system is one of the best things about dishonored #because it means that the shape of the story is defined by how you approach problems in general #rather than picking a specific and clearly telegraphed option #games were doing that before dishonored #and were doing it afterwards. dishonored was the one who said #‘no actually it matters how you treat the minions too’ #now #deathloop has already crystallized into a pretty high chaos state by the time we enter the game #the loop bringing out the worst parts of everyone until that’s the only part left #deathloop is in conversation with dishonored #and is way tighter than dishonored 2 #but just because it made different game design choices doesn’t make it more refined #the smoother controls and better ai make it more refined #but refined isn’t the only metric by which we enjoy games

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i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father 

#1. don’t humanize the wiretap and get attached to that fiction wtf #2. imma choose to believe these people are kidding #3. why would the robotic servant be a family member???? #like i don’t have family members where all my interactions are based on asking them to do things for me #that would not be healthy for either person

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People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

#people traditionally go mad when faced with the eldritch because lovecraft was #(to paraphrase osp) #a pile of problems and fears in roughly the shape of a man #i imagine he felt like sanity was a precarious thing #and sometimes it is #but sometimes it isn’t #and regardless i love this post because it’s one of the best analogies for cosmic horror i’ve ever seen

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hi yes hello a friend gave my baldurs gate 3 for my birthday and is now painstakingly teaching me how to use the controls

Meet my little cosmic horror protagonist Luvtröja!! They are just a little guy!! They like sitting in chairs :]

#bg3 #this is adorable #also now i want a mod for tiny dragonborn

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#i want to get clean before i climb into bed #that way my bed stays clean for longer and the main contaminant is just dead skin #instead of whatever i picked up during the day + extra sweat #i have very short hair so it’s mostly dry between the time of the shower and the sleep

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It's not just that finding an actor who Looks Like Another Actor and a VA who Sounds Like That Actor is more ethical, it also looks and sounds better than the ghoulish deepfakes and AI voices

Like in Halloween Kills they just had a crew member who looked a lot like Donald Pleasence put on some extra prosthetics to look more like Donald Pleasence, and then had a guy who could do a Donald-Pleasence-in-Halloween voice doing the voice. They had people angrily accusing them of using CGI but it legit was just prosthetics and some look/soundalikes. There was a guy in the 80s/90s who built a whole career out of looking like Humphrey Bogart, we can find Guys Who Look Like Guys if we try

#i’m gonna disagree slightly #but #only for the fact that it’s better for the person acting on set to also be the voice for the character #you can get away with it if they’re wearing a helmet or something? #but otherwise the sound will often not match perfectly to the environment #a good va and a good sound tech can help #but it’s much easier to just use the actor’s voice from set whenever possible

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i really believe that discussing the character with someone who shares ur interpretation is the closest u can get to modern day philosophy. we are like plato and aristotle but talking about a fictional guys trauma

#discussing characters and stories is an important thing to do #at least i believe so #because stories give us space to explore complicated questions of being and morals #which is in fact something philosophers do as well. they just might skip the buffer of the story #but plato used a lot of stories in his socratic dialogues in order to explore things and i think that’s neat #that said the knife cuts both ways #because sometimes you’re discussing a seemingly innocuous story with someone #and it can get abruptly heated because you’ve stumbled into a worldview clash #which is fascinating but not very fun

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#i have ridden horses a few times but always with oversight #so i dont consider myself proficient like i am on a bike #like. getting back up the hill not withstanding #i could bike to the nearest starbucks without much stress #i cannot ride a horse solo without being very worried that i’m doing it wrong

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Feel free to explain how you sort in the tags

#towels and bedding are separate from clothes #but beyond that i don’t bother

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ugh the artprize entry form wants me to submit a headshot and I hope they're prepared for an out-of-focus, from behind at a distance blurry pixelated mess because I continue to not take any fucking selfies and I'm not a fan of putting my face on the gotdamn internet

you can have my art but I'm having nothing to do with it

#i think this is part of why i struggled with john green’s books #i knew him first as a vlogger #and so whenever i tried to read his stuff id read it in his voice #which in retrospect was incredibly distracting #(his books are pretty good! at least the two i read. i just don’t like them much) #so i fully support art by faceless entities #i would love for death of the author to be truly attainable

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I've been rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender because why not and I'm losing my mind at Zuko's proper introduction. I don't know if it's hindsight, shifting characterizations, or just me not watching this in a long time, but this was amazing.

We start off showing he's an impatient and very angry kid. Reasonable, and the sort of flaw we might expect to see in a villain. Kinda funny that he expects to go up against an adult and fully 4-Element realized Avatar, but the kid is desperate and Iroh clearly expects his nephew to get the banishment-denial kicked out of him.

What's important here, though, is Zuko's introduction to the Southern Water Tribe.

Here, we have a very intimidating entrance where his entire ship just sails through the ice right up to the village's front door. It's quite ominous and this is our first proper introduction to how the Fire Nation interacts with a foreign people.

Sokka charges, I'm assuming fully prepared to die, and Zuko casually knocks him out of the way. Okay, so clearly the Water Tribe are entirely outgunned.

He asks "Where are you hiding him?" and the people of the Water Tribe go silent. I assume they're either just too scared to talk or actually protecting Aang.

Whatever the case, it's important to note that the Southern Water Tribe know the terror the Fire Nation can inflict. We have a whole episode dedicated to tracking down a division of raiders. Sokka was able to not only identify the ash-mixed snow as signs of an incoming attack, but estimate how many ships the amount of ash measures to. These are a people who have experience being terrorized and are probably expecting something terrible to happen.

And then, after they don't answer, Zuko grabs Gran-Gran. There was a horror sting to it, and everything the tribe knows about the Fire Nation suggests that Zuko is about to threaten or straight up hurt her to get answers. Classic "terrorize the elderly" bad guy stuff.

And then...

He goes "He's (the Avatar) be about this age and is a master of all four elements!?" and lets her go.

And all of a sudden, the tension that was built up is shattered as Zuko went "I know, I'll give them a reference for the person I'm looking for because clearly they're confused and I wasn't specific enough."

This went from a show of villainy to a show of Zuko being totally socially awkward and misreading the situation entirely. Not helping is that when he does try to menace them a moment later, his fire is slow and angled quite safely.

It still worked on the Water Tribe because they're understandably scared, but all I could think of is that this was the equivalent of a playground bully trying to make someone flinch with that fake-out lunge thing.

Because the fact-and something we'll come to learn-is that Zuko is TERRIBLE at being a Fire Nation oppressor. He's capable of doing morally dubious things and is a competent fighter. But he's lousy at terrorizing people and cruelty-that's kind of the point of his banishment.

And while we can see the story paint this picture of Zuko's true character as the story goes on with hints of good and conflicting loyalties, here we get to see just how bad he is at being "the bad guys".

#i think this is part of what gets missed when people want a zuko style redemption arc for a character #zuko is set up in episode one to be not as bad as he could be #and in episode two (i think) gets his own antagonist that is clearly the greater villain (zhao) #who then goes on to be the main villain for everybody in book one #zuko is a protagonist from the word go and his arc was in motion the whole time #his heel face turn is the result of a lot of character growth. not a replacement for said growth #and even then he fucks it up! he falters and then needs to build back to it again #(albeit much quicker and much more purposeful this time) #people want the emotional payoff in their stories without the work of setting it up #so then you just have nasty villains who have an abrupt change of heart without the process of learning where they were wrong #and guess what! people don’t swallow that very easily

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ffs companies need to stop trying to make me subscribe to music streaming services.

i have my music, i’m very happy with it, i am not interested in paying continuous money to dilute it with random other tracks i don’t like as much.

#amazon and apple especially need to stfu #spotify doesn’t know i specifically exist and therefore doesn’t bug me so much #but gdi how did we allow subscription music streaming to become such a thing??? #it’s bad for artists it’s inefficient for users #just get a radio! #or listen to mostly the same music forever with carefully made playlists like i do #this middle muddy ground is pointless and overpriced