Komma @KommaChameleon@awoo.space

My mind immediately jumps to “things you can do to a door” and now I’m having a galaxy brain thought that western RPGs are about doors in a dozen ways.

I tried playing Wasteland a little bit. I was surprised at how effectively I can fit my furry OCs into a post-apocalyptic “tough nickname” vibe! And the game itself is quite interesting, though way archaic.

The surprising core of the game is the “Use” verb; it lets you directly apply any skill, item, or attribute onto a square adjacent to you. This creates a big possibility space that it probably can’t satisfy, but also lets them hide alternate solutions to the same situation in plain sight.

Mascot platformer starring a cute moth

The game's fun but she's a little buggy

why are so many video games a "cover" for straight guys to get their softcore pornography, ugh

Soooo this game just has softcore porn in it, which is contextualized as softcore porn, that you watch in an adult movie club.

I’m. I feel bad about being part of this now?

We are like 2 steps away from Trump declaring himself the first Gamer President

I shouldn’t put transient media down too much. Heck, I make it. It exists for many reasons, and it is very comforting. You don’t go into every conversation with a friend thinking you’ll remember it forever. I do sometimes worry that I, and we, am not making the right kind of curated archive of good work.

I guess the most negative way of saying this is that I’m anxious because I’m a memoryless vessel of a person living through awful times and inundated by microblogs and streams and YouTube videos that are lightspeed and transient by default. And a lot of the “real” media is also bad and transient, sometimes with really awful labor conditions backing it up.

I think I like retro media partly because it’s a greater escape from the awful present but also because it lets me feel like I’m helping us collectively do a better job at remembering things. There are technical concerns too, like “hey, does this game become forgotten if there’s no way to circulate the disc images or repair the computer that runs it, etc”. So programming matters too. But anyway...

You can’t change the past, but you can change history. The things we see looking at the past are informed by our present situation—both as individuals and as a culture. The person I was as a teenager might be totally different from the person I think I was as a teenager. My memory is not raw data; it is a reconstruction.

Note that I’ve never had trouble getting good grades and never compared this to other people’s episodic memory; I think it’s just part of the human condition. However, it is one that doesn’t sit comfortably with me, especially when you start looking into research about how open to suggestion our own memory is.

I know I worry more when it’s late at night and I should be sleeping instead. But I think maybe a large part of my personality is driven by my struggles with media, archival, memory, and ephemerality.

Like there’s “fear of missing out” but beyond that there’s a fear that I’ll just forget things I’ve actually experienced in media and in my own life. I’ve always felt bad at committing events to memory.

Komma is shaped like a big

Dethroned!
Dragomon Hunter
Dungeonland
Firefall (good riddance!)
Hawken
Marvel Heroes
Might & Magic: Duel of Champions
Rise of Incarnates
Super Monday Night Combat
TOME: Immortal Arena
Warside

and soon, WildStar

Props to those games that aren't blockbusters but manage to keep the lights on!

Will obviously need to try some of these characters to narrow things down, but this is my feeling going in!

Me last night: Hmmm, I have a good time with Deltarune but I wonder if it was totally necessary for me to prioritize it over everything else on the first day

Me, today, glancing at twitter: yes, that was absolutely necessary

sleep? I have none

(And this is why emulation is neat/necessary)

Anyway, this is why I like to keep track of and talk about old games, plus point out when there’s a neat oldie that you cannot possibly buy and run on modern hardware.

My stubborn refusal of exploitative monetization means there’s really not much to play on my phone.