Aether (moved) @Taylor@awoo.space

Together.

Happy birthday to Trask. <3

https://times-eclipse.tumblr.com/post/685105582830698496/together

Brains are mean. I want air or space in my head instead. ... though having said that, maybe space would be just as brain-rambly too.

Milky Way comes up with perspective on enlightenment and then Andromeda kicks her into the dirt and calls her a loser.

Meanwhile on Twitter:
https://t.mwx.ca/art/2205/asmallbee1.png

I had a nap earlier with a dream that was definitely influenced by Turning Red, which I watched earlier, in at it was traditional chinese culture/architecture themed.

• A woman/mother probably influenced by Ming was being led over a traditional bridge towards a city by an unseen protagonist. I was kinda there, but then kinda not. I was more panned out. The mother was talking about improvements the place could use, maybe?
• The dream kinda gained game-dev elements, in that I looked over different tiles for the sides of the bridge. Tried swapping them out for ones that added more blossoming trees along the sides. The mother walked back across the bridge, inspecting the (now 3D/real) trees, but was now concerned about allergies.
• The mother talked to someone sweeping some grounds/temple that now laid at the other end of the bridge at some side, I don't remember what was talked about before waking up.

We wrote a thing about the hell that was game programming last night.

https://times-eclipse.tumblr.com/post/683768316022702080/multi-hit-adventures

I think the problem we have online at the moment is people need to learn to compartmentalise themselves again. We don't need to be sharing our entire lives, every aspect of ourselves, all on the same platform. Alt accounts on the same website fall under this too.

I get that it's extremely convenient to simply have one place to hang out and see everyone's lives, but that sort of convenience is what has turned the internet into an unpleasant school playground in the first place. When everyone is all on the same site, everyone can see you.

I miss IRC, I miss forums, I miss various IM services, not because we had to have multiple accounts or multiple clients, obviously that shit's inconvenient. But that compartmentalisation creates spaces with specific purposes, and insulates individual circles from causing widespread apocalypses every few months when something goes wrong.

The other great thing about the old internet was that we had moderation and muuuuch smaller scopes. 10,000 or so members pales in comparison to millions and millions. This is what's great about Mastodon - that moderation on a smaller scale and the compartmentalisation of spaces - Mastodon's fault lies in people treating the biggest instances as the place to be. It's how we have .social as without moderation or how snouts became a cesspit of outrage puritanism.

I'm online to share a general vibe with people I care about. Massive conglomerations frequently make this difficult either because of their own interests or because there's simply too many people on them. I don't want to share the same website as some TERF.

I know the big place is kinda Discord now, and I don't strictly hate Discord's UX compared to the likes of Skype, but the treatment of it as a replacement to forums is misguided. Forums work with their various sections because, as websites... like, actual websites, not web 2.0 web apps - there's less pressure to engage with the whole thing. Discord is a chat app, it's designed around interacting with every facet of it, and servers with 12+ chats or something are just too much.

I've been thinking about going back to Tumblr and dropping my Twitter, even before this whole thing happened. But Tumblr shouldn't become the new big thing either. Tumblr has different functionality to Twitter, or Mastodon, or whatever, and putting aside how much Tumblr hunted down my friends, it's functionally better for me since it allows more breathing room for making big posts like... well, like this, for starters.

We need to learn again to use different sites for different purposes. We can't keep putting our entire livelihood in one thing owned by some guy who does not care for our queer furry asses.

They told me I could be anything, so I decided to become everything.

*walks into living room*

On TV:

INFLATION
UP 6.9%

*... walks out again*

Suppose that the universe was made by a singular being. Suppose also that this being/god made everything, and isn't strictly focused on Earth.

At the most fundamental level, do you think "God" would have its own name? Would a being that predates conscious thought, predates language, especially human language, have a name for what it understands as "itself" as distinct from "not itself"?

If that god isn't the only one of its kind, like we're just one universe made by many gods just like how our world is full of stories and games and such... then sure. That god would have a name likely given by those around it. Or chosen by itself, if "God" is self-defining like a lot of us are too.

But in the case of "this being is the Ur Anything, the Initial One", then such a being maybe wouldn't self define in the same way, it would even only be able to distinguish its "I" from "not I" relative to its own universal creation. Perhaps not even then.

Game genres are really unhelpful categories when it comes to defining games nowadays.

You have things like "metroidvania" which is predicated entirely on being named after two other games, like we haven't moved past "Doom-like" or something. If anything, we ought to call stage-based platformers "series platformers", and maze-based "parallel platformers".

And then we have the ubiquity of RPG stat growths and mechanics in games that aren't strictly RPGs. One could argue JRPGs and WRPGs are distinct genres that happen to share similar inspiration, just taken in different directions.

You could possibly call a JRPG a "narrative game", as the draw to them can often be the story, without a self-insert element, but that would itself be muddied by the fact plenty of kinds of games now have heavy story elements.

I'm not even sure what you'd call the levelling/RPG systems in games that aren't "RPGs" in ways that wouldn't make them sound like school homework.

Frankly at the end of all this, clearly we should be giving games genres like we do other media. Just call them dramas, comedies, sci-fi, and so on. Maybe it would encourage people to experiment more with different kinds of gameplay, though it's understandable that the player-interaction part is an important part of how a game feels.

Gonna go so beyond gender my visibility goes into negatives, overflows to max, and everywhere you look I exist.

So anyway, pooltoy dragons.

Identity, when you get down to it, is just a pile of Vibes.

https://t.mwx.ca/art/2203/roaragain1.png
You ever just wanna be able to roar like a dragon... just tilting up your head and flaring out all that might and energy...

My gender is soft pooltoy dragon with printed-on scales and squishy claws

~ via DiaPooltoyDrgn

I guess I never really shared this here, but I got this fun tarot card commission from hr. on Twitter.

Original link.

The rational side of me looks at my transition from a wolf to a dragon as merely a shift in my interests and tastes over time. People should be allowed to change.

The romantic side of me though wants to believe I've always been a dragon, as there's always been traits I've been drawn to having or liking (dragon tailsss), I'd just end up designing away from them if they didn't click right. I've also always felt drawn to my dragonkin friends for some reason, even before I went dragon myself.

The problem with that perspective is that kinda leans into the idea of an unchanging fundamental self, and that's all well and good if you like that self... but if you don't, you're just giving yourself like, soul dysphoria.

An article on the state of user-hostile software design.
https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/

There's a tweet going around of a hyper-realistic close-up of Horizon 2 protagonist's well-rendered teeth, comparing PS4 and PS5 graphics, with a difference in the roundness of said teeth.

Why the hell do we need games to go this hard on realism and detail if we're all playing on 20-25-inch monitors with the camera pointed at the protag's back anyway? How often are we going to be centimetres from her lips?

Why is so much money going towards tongue bump-mapping. To fucking teeth textures.

I played the new Kirby game demo recently, Neo TWEWY yesterday, and I await the release of Soul Hackers 2 and Live-A-Live. Can we please have more games with an actual art direction instead of trying to make things realistic, my aversion to looking at faces can't deal.

It's almost like Japan isn't afraid to go all out with style and direction visually, and the only time the western side of things does anything different is indie games and Tim Schafer.

This isn't to say there won't be some design language to Horizon 2 or whatever. Deus Ex Mankind Divided had a metallic colour palette to everything despite being generally a realism-fest. You can have a visual personality and realism.

But it really does remain quite tiresome.