Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

While perusing discount exploration games on Steam, I ran across a perfect dragon game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/331870/AER_Memories_of_Old/

Its a short game where the protagonist can shift from human to bird and back again instantly. Deceptively simple, yet I’ve never seen it done so fluidly or able to capture the visceral feeling of flight quite so well.

There’s a plot, and it’s decent, but I spent most of my time careening through the air at unsafe speeds. Recommended. 🐲👍

I wonder if there’s a tabletop version of this. Betrayal at House on the Hill and the Quiet Year are close, I suppose, but this blends the two nicely.

While nosing through my Steam collection, I realized I had bought and never played The Yawhg (https://store.steampowered.com/app/269030/The_Yawhg/) several years ago. So I booted it up.

After a slightly mediocre first run (“mediocre” involving animate furniture, eldritch horrors, and at least one grisly murder), I accidentally rolled a vampire and a werewolf that fight crime and save the town together.

Huh.

@Oasus@snouts.online I’m not on Z1 rando’s Discord, but dumb question: does anyone other than me use Voice Attack to do ZHelper annotation? Seeing mouse and hotkey annotation into brackets and elite 8 surprises me a bit.

Also, nice seed.

The other sprites from the four streamers shown being Link, Zelda (who is saving Link), and the protagonist from Crystalis.

Someone made a Yoshi sprite for Zelda 2 randomizer. It replaces Link’s sword strike with a Yoshi tongue animation. And I think that is one of the best things I’ve seen today.

... and then I got to spend an extra 20 minutes manually fixing Slack’s dark theme on my machine again, because Slack.

Apple: *bugfixes, performance enhancements, all these zanny new productivity-assisting multitouch gestures I will never even use*
Me: *yawn*
Apple: And we added a dark theme.
Me: *SLAMS THAT UPDATE BUTTON*

Which I guess is a good reminder to be skeptical about what personal data to give corporations, even ones with relatively good data handling hygiene at the time.

Oh hey, Google+ is shutting down after it was shown to be exactly the privacy and accountability tar pit I was concerned about. And oh cool, people that provided their “real name” and real info had their data scraped by parties unknown, too.

I totally did not see that coming at all. </s>

(As a reminder, I work for a Google competitor, so opinions my own. None of these observations are based on privileged info.)

Speedrunners: Here are all of the ways I figured out how to break each of these and look amazing. I will now clip into the fifth plane and end the campaign before it even begins.

All DMs ever: *sigh*

Adventure games I’ve played lately as D&D DMs:

Tomb Raider 2013: Here’s a puzzle. You glitch into a wall. You die.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: Here’s a puzzle. The orcs three rooms away hear you solving it. You die.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Here’s a puzzle. You try to jump down from a ledge. You die.

Breath of the Wild: Here’s a puzzle. You rolled what now? Cool!

Celeste: Here’s a puzzle. Here are all of the ways you die before succeeding. You climbed that mountain. It was _amazing_.

And I guess I'm writing that here, in part, to get it out of my own head and so I take my own advice. Please take care of yourselves and remember that it is okay to just be you.

While it's important to remain engaged and present while all of this is happening (also, for the love of everything good, please vote), it's a good reminder that you don't need to constantly be immersed in what's happening.

It's entirely fine to be yourself, to protect your sense of self, while bad things are happening. And it's pragmatic to plan for a better future, instead of putting life constantly on hold because of situations outside your control.

When I was in an emotionally abusive household (with parties I will not name, as their situations have changed substantially since that time), my way out of the abusive pattern was limiting my exposure to it and planning for my own future. I spent a lot of time reading fiction, and many of my art projects focused on building a better world than my day-to-day lived existence.

It's taken me awhile to realize that that isn't escapism. It's pragmatism when existence takes on an unreal quality.

The K nomination battle this week is the first time the news has physically made me ill enough that I couldn't function. As before, I've had to disengage from the news for my health.

Some parting words on it: this is not "just how the world works." Our leaders have chosen dysfunction and power consolidation as their only viable strategy for weak governance.

It's easy to become cynical, when this is the closer to how abusers convince you there is no alternative to an abusive pattern. There is.

@Oasus@snouts.online Heh, I’d wondered if it was you when I saw the commentary tracker on Speedgaming. I’m assuming so, and I hope it’s been a blast!

Twitter just changed its policies to prevent distribution of dox materials, hacked content, and fake accounts (among others):
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/an-update-on-our-elections-integrity-work.html

This appears to be for US elections, but if they implement this generically, this might also help block some of the common targeted harassment scenarios.

Which doesn’t entice me to return, but I’ll be interested in how they roll this out.

TIL: there is a game named Pet the Pup at the Party, and it is the best thing ever.

I’ll append more if I can, but those are the big ones I can think of for now. Feel free to add your own to this thread if you know of any I missed.