talenlee

[talenlee]

kill the shift manager in your brain

[talenlee]

Talen's Birthday, 2024

Somehow this one feels less of a big deal than last year. I dunno, maybe it’s because turning forty has been a big monument in my mind, turning forty-one feels just like turning forty again.

I had a fanciful idea that I could do something with the fact that 41 is a prime age; that I have turned 1, 3, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37 and now 41, and then I thought it’d be interesting to see if I ever turned a prime age in a prime year. Now, if you’re at all good at math you’d be able to point out that by being born in 1983, every year I turn an odd age, the year is even and vice versa, meaning that for roughly half the population at any time, they’re never a prime age on a prime year, since no even number is a prime.

It’s not a complicated math puzzle here.

Making a birthday post on my birthday doesn’t feel that special now. It’s not a milestone, it’s not important. Comically, because City of Heroes is burned into my brain, I do think of 41 as a level where you used to get access to your first Epic Power Pool choice (except now you get them at level 35, which is cool). It’s good though: This was a good way to fight the anxiety of the birthday. I remember when I turned 35 I had a real horrible moment thinking I was done, that I had wasted my entire life up to that point. I remember part of what made it okay was seeing Adam Savidan on Youtube, playing Magic: The Gathering and saying ‘I’m thirty five or thirty four years old and I don’t need this.’

A thing about Loading Ready Run that makes me feel a tiny bit bad is that it’s this big long project that a bunch of friends have been making and running for twenty years, as an ongoing hobby that became a job and then became an institution managing multiple people creating things. Sometimes I get sad thinking about how what got that big project to happen was, in part, two dudes with supportive parents and supportive school supplies in the late 90s were able to work on a project, together, for long enough to become very good at it.

How do you do something for twenty years?

Well, you start.

You start, and you keep working on it while you work on things.

The internet of today is poisoned. The internet of today demands you create for it, it wants you to produce Content. Your status updates, your pictures, your everyday drama, your existence, they are all things that are being fed into advertising machine to space out the ads in the name of being ‘content.’ It isn’t how it used to be. It used to be people had websites for their special interests, the interest being the primary thing. My first website I can remember was an Animorphs fanfiction space, and I remembered how when I stopped trying to host other people’s fanfiction, and instead just hosted my own, the one author I took down got sad at me. She was probably also like, fourteen like I was.

It used to be that people made things because they wanted to share them. It used to be that people were making websites and stories and web-novels and web-comics and diaries and blogs and vlogs and microgames and RPGs and they were making stuff. It was stuff. It was not for consuming in its own continual sense, it was not being part of a pipe of things that were fed to you, it was not content, it was a lot of different stuff and that difference gave everyone a reason to do things.

But now, it’s Content.

Now, your effort, your creative material, is being pushed into a single tube for four companies who suck and you know they suck and you don’t like them and yet you make things for them anyway. Because that’s where it is. That’s where the habit forms.

Arbor Day - The Lads // Arbor Day

Watch this video on YouTube

I’m fond of this song, Arbor Day by a band that can be politely described as ‘pretty good, for a Church choir.’ The song, very simply, is that hey, do you need a reason to make a change in your life? Well, today is Arbor day, that’s a good enough reason.’ It’s been an idea bubbling around in my head that yeah, Arbor Day is a nearly arbitary reason to make a big change in your life, but that may be all you need. Sometimes you just need something, anything to mark the psychological change between ‘before I tried this’ to ‘after I tried this.’

Here’s my request for you, on my birthday.

There is something you want to make. There is something you care about. There is something you are interested in trying. Today is a day to do that. Today is a day to even just describe a plan, or a hope. Do you want to write a book? Write a description of what that book is about. A series of books? Describe all of them! Do you want to make games? Start, download one of the programs you need to use today.

Don’t waste money on things for this post’s sake, but you know there are steps you can take to make things, and I want you to make them. I believe in a world where people make things because we like making things, I believe in a world of creative people playing with creativity, and I believe that the important thing of online spaces ie being able to share them.

So please, make something, and show it to me.

No matter how small it is, no matter how little progress on it you get to make. Just spend a little time today starting something, continuing something or finishing something.

I’ll be proud of you, no matter what.

I promise.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Diary #Making

[talenlee]

this stupid baka life isn't going according to keikaku

[talenlee]

Game Pile: Sheriff of Nottingham

Sheriff of Nottingham is one of my favourite games that I will probably never get to properly play.

The core mechanism of Sheriff of Nottingham is a simple game of bluffing. It’s hide-and-seek with a deck of cards. The group are all playing merchants, and in each round, one player takes turns being the Sheriff of Nottingham. The Sheriff gets to inspect each of the players’ offerings, with a penalty if they inspect someone innocent and a reward if they find someone guilty.

That is the core of what goes into the game. Things like tallying scores, the distribution in the deck, burn cards and comparative weight of contraband, that’s all stuff that’s there to lend it texture, but in its absolute heart of hearts, this is a game where one player watches as two to five other players all line up to not tell them lies, honest, officer. Complicating it from just a straightforward ‘do you believe me?’ vs ‘do you not?’ is that players can wheedle and negotiate during the phase where the Sheriff is deciding whether or not to bust your chops, but also complicating that further is the way that the game is set up to have a clear and distinct boundary between whether you’re being investigated or not.

See, you could just have this game built around a deck of cards; you set say, four cards in front of the Sheriff and say ‘hey, this is all apples, please don’t look,’ but they pick it up to look at it – when in that process is it too late for the Sheriff to turn back? How quickly can you blurt a bribe that’ll stop the whole affair out? It’s a really interesting thing where when you deal with physical, material objects, truly binary boundaries between two game states can be very challenging to maintain cleanly.

What Sheriff of Nottingham does to facilitate this is a little purse in which you slip your cards. Once you do, you’re committed; there’s no almost-in, or not-quite in cards. You choose, you put them in, and then you close the purse with a clasp. That clasp is a push-clasp, which also means that pulling it open is a little bit of effort. The player commits when they submit their bag and the Sheriff commits to searching the bag once they pop that clasp.

It does not escape me that this effort creates an access problem for players with weaker hands. This is along with the way that this game of pretty much pure bluffing discourages players who don’t like to lie or can’t lie, and the way that the whole game presents real challenges for players who struggle with on-the-fly mathematics. See, one of the complaints of Sheriff of Nottingham is that the actual resolution of the game is a bit fiddly; once you get to the end of the game you work out how your score works based on the number of cards you got, and to facilitate that, you get a little paper pad. Trust me, a game that ends with everyone doing complex math has to be satisfying at every step of the way, or, you know what, no, it has to be Wingspan. Wingspan can end the game with fiddly math and note taking, that’s how good a game has to be in order to make this not a pain.

Sheriff of Nottingham is an introductory game in disguise. You don’t need to buy into an elaborate fiction to understand it, even though the narrative supposes a modest connection to a Robin Hood kind of story. The fiction of the game is that the players represent traders who are moving into a market, in irregular groups, and each time they move in, they get their carts checked (or not) by the local sheriff who is of mercurial mood and disposition. In fact, buying into the fiction creates a question of why bribing the guards goes into the pockets of another player, so really, it’s for the best you don’t. The gameplay loop of trying to fool one another presents itself very obviously and by pushing all the scoring complexity to the end game, nobody needs to track exactly how well they’re doing while they learn.

I think that a scoring system that doesn’t rely on doing math but instead relies on dividing your end-game cards would be the best way to do things. Make it so it’s not that apples are worth 2 points and the player with the most apples gets a bonus, but instead, you keep every third apple card, and have scores be much lower. Numbers would need tweaking to ensure that the coinage scores weren’t that important – the fiction clearly indicates that

The problem of course is that when the game is this simple, built around a mechanism so tightly defined, is that it’s essentially, a tension engine. Not only is it a matter of a game where you have to lie to people – even if only to not seem completely honest! – it’s a game where you’re presented with a non-stop sequence of tense experiences. It might as well be Shoplifting Simulator for the way the game’s mechanics inspire people to start sweating!

And therein lies the barrier for entry.

I love this game. I love watching this game. We use it in our classes to teach students who have never played a board game before how to go from ‘nothing’ to ‘proficiently playing.’ It has a beautiful, almost predictable arc where poeple play the first rounds in quiet silence, then someone gets away with their first lie and suddenly there’s a layer of tension and people start to laugh. Then someone bribes someone else to investigate another player and suddenly there’s a new source of laughter.

I love to see it! I love to see the way players learn to tease one another, the way players learn to mess with one another.

Now remember that my play group often involves children and my mother.

This is not a game that fits my playgroup! And that’s okay to know and it’s okay to remember it! But then I get to enjoy watching people play it, either on the internet or in class.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Game Pile #Games

[talenlee]

this guy gets it

[talenlee]

Tragic! This American Did Something Cool And Then Was A Fuckin Yank About It, Meaning My Heart's Only Response Was 'Go Fuck Yourself, Arsehole'

[talenlee]

this guy gets it

[talenlee]

Tragic! This American Did Something Cool And Then Was A Fuckin Yank About It, Meaning My Heart's Only Response Was 'Go Fuck Yourself, Arsehole'

[talenlee]

Tragic! This American Did Something Cool And Then Was A Fuckin Yank About It, Meaning My Heart's Only Response Was 'Go Fuck Yourself, Arsehole'

[talenlee]

Any thoughts on the grownup versions of Mayoi in Kabukimonogatari and Zokuowarimonogatari?

hang on gotta google some things

turns out no

[talenlee]

Bluey's Diggers

The Australian character, it is said, was shaped by World War 1. The diggers, the soldiers we sent to Turkey to buy breathing room for Russia so it could push on Germany and reduce the impact on France. That is a good and comforting myth to have in which we get to do something cool and impressive and tough (partake in a war) while also thinking everyone involved is stupid (because they were) and conveniently ignore the complete lack of our own agency in it (why didn’t we say no?). It sort of crystallised the Australian character as liking and being impressed with war and death, accepting death as a potential consequence, and all that good grim military fantasism that paints us as hardworking even to the point of death, and also quite stupid in that we didn’t once consider if maybe the people we should be shooting at are the ones telling us to get shot.

But thing is, I have complicated feelings about Bluey.

If you’re not familiar with it, because you are somehow off the internet and also don’t have a four year old, Bluey is a Homestuck spin-off series about a kid named Bluey and her sister as she and her dad and mum and related family and friends get along. It is beautifully animated, charmingly expressive, deeply resonant, wholesome in ways its genre often struggles to express, and filled to the brim with thoughtful, attentive character work. In the ways that a kid’s cartoon show can be good, it is great.

This isn’t some sort of ‘waiting for the backhand’ way of things, like, not ‘it’s good for,’ or ‘it’s good but,’ or some secret interpretation thing. Bluey is just a really impressively well-made version of what it is and it underscores how many things like it do not exist and are often making media for children without the same mindset that these shows can be good.

But Bluey is also a show that deserves attention for how it is Australian. How exceptionally Australian it is. The characters all have Australian accents, as voiced by Australian accents. They reference Australian versions of things, Australian buses and trains, Australian wildlife, Australian sports, Australian school structures, Australian public works, Australian music, Australian infrastructure. It is a very Australian series.

In the episode that earns a lot of critical acclaim, Cricket, there is a shot of one of the dog’s dads,

This isn’t my observation. I knew about this before I ever saw Cricket, from the poem by Omar Sakr, called Bluey in the genocide. It’s a great poem, it’s a beautifully phrased piece of simple critique about the assumptions present in the work. Because this, this is where people want to put the brakes on the Australian-ness of Bluey. This is where they want to say, hey, okay, yeah, alright, we don’t know where this guy is, but if this is an Australian story about Australian characters, then where in the world that’s hot are you going to find an Australian soldier?

(The answer is the Middle East.)

It is an omnipresent normal that Australia likes our military, a service that has been called to defend Australia kinda, once, and called to other nations by the people who live there about two times and the rest of the time we’re being roped into the adventures of other empires. We are a colony that colonises, the normalised and included white-enoughs.

And this is part of the thing with Bluey, the complication of the Australian-ness of it all. Because like, this is a show for four year olds. This is a show that nonetheless, represents a kid’s interest in army, and makes the very realistic point that the kid’s interest in army is tied to that kid’s dad being in the army. That is extremely Australian, too. And then, while we’re accepting all these obvious things that are obviously about Australia and the obvious followup, that’s where we jerk to a halt.

Because we know we don’t want to.

Like, this dog being in the Middle East brings with it a lot of assumptions about the real world. This implies that there’s a Dog 9/11. It implies there’s a Dog Financial Crisis. It implies that there’s Dog Curtin Line and Dog Coolies and Dog Skeletons from Chinese Dogs underneath the Dog Sugarcane fields just an hour’s drive from Bluey’s House.

And like, that’s a bummer! That’s a bummer to think about! That’s not how we like to think of our history. We were crystallised by the Diggers, but only the good bits, only the bits that weren’t about a willingness to go and kill people who didn’t care for no good reason! It’s a better crystallising event than, say, the Eureka Stockade, where we fought against police trying to crack down on and control workers (and we burned down Chinese hotels) or the story of the Kelly Gang, where we fought against police abusing and controlling the poor. The crystallisation of Australian-ness is instead about the diggers.

About our military.

The military that reached across our country and has stories in it like the time we rioted against American soldiers with whom we were allied. Stories like the time we claimed someone was too European to avoid the draft, stories like the sinking of the Centaur, which was a hospital ship. Stories like Billy Hughes being racist at the treaty of Versailles, literally a subservient agent of racism for the community of powers above him.

We think of our military as normal, and not that bad, just like we think of ourselves as normal, and not that bad. We will always have the example of the empires we serve as being worse, so whatever we did is not so bad, because we’re not like those people we are working for and whose orders we follow. They’re the real bastards. They’re the ones who are benefitting from all of this. Right? We’re not so bad, we’re just doing what we’re told and really, we’re not even getting that much out of our obedience, right?

Happy Anzac Day.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media #Politics

[talenlee]

Hey! Here’s a little five page comic I did about boot blacking and kink. I had a lot of fun with it, and talked to some really cool people.

[talenlee]

T-Shirt: Hazbin The Hotel

Hey, turns out that new cartoon for cool youths is something I really like. But I couldn’t just draw fanart of sometihng, no, that would be too sensible and good, noooo, so instead I decided that what it really needed was a reference to a 35 year old videogame logo from a time when that game was not yet a punchline.

I am so happy with how this looks? It’s simple and crisp and I really like how Vaggie looks with her happy smile at Charlie like ‘oh, that’s my idiot.’ If you want it on something, you can get it on a sticker, or coasters, or a t-shirt, or, you know, normal Redbubble stuff.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#shirts #Making #Media

[talenlee]

for those of you saying 'oh same!'

your ocs and my ocs should be friends

Have you ever come up with any character concepts you felt you just couldn't make in the system or venue you wanted to play them in? If so, what was one and what was the sticking point?

A few! normally they get to live in storage until I get a platform for them. Like, I don't have a current open space to make a lot of fantasy characters/D&D style characters because I'm our current DM, so any time I get a hare for that kinda thing I just put it in a box.

[talenlee]

it's like, 25 bucks

This story went and said the woman is 5'1" (155cm) and then referenced her "long legs" in the next sentence. How you gonna have long legs if you're only 5'1"? Is she just legs and a head?

[talenlee]

ah, that one friend reblogged something

[talenlee]

eureka's really interesting

the ttrpg in development, not the uh show in canada