Getting a headstart by collating this as time progresses rather than trying to go through a backlog way at the end of the year, though this in no way means I'll keep up with doing this each month. Going to be missing a lot of good posts (and probably including the same people a fair bit) simply as a consequence of what crosses my timeline.
<== August 2024
The lesson was learned. Brazil wouldn't be able to support another military dictatorship without international support. Far-right pundits immediately started working towards building that support as soon as Lula got elected. The plan was to frame Brazil as a nation that abandoned democracy to become a left-wing dictatorship. Now every move the government did to enforce it's own laws against hate speech or punish those responsible for the coup attempt, would be denounced as an act of authoritarianism and violation of human rights.
And I think my greatest bugbear (yes, the creatures known for reaching) is the inescapable trend of people mutating D&D into something unrecognisable with their homebrewing and added mechanics that are virtually side games in and of themselves... and then still going on to credit D&D, WotC, for any good times they had
And so ironically this misinformation about the contents of this book has created an entire theoretical concept being references on tens and tens of web pages with very little human involvement and none of which are actual creative or new texts utilizing this theoretical concept. They're just phony encyclopedias claiming this is a notable theory of Talcott Parsons' that he simply never created, as far as I can tell, doing the research I can.
So just this one version of this one kind of system is closer to the equivalent of if people considered Avengers Endgame literally the only movie to exist, and the only way movies and anything movie like should be made.
Also if Avengers Endgame was literally half of all box office sales of now until forever.
And more importantly, you can free yourself from a dream that might be hurting you. I also felt the suffocating pressure of wanting to write a novel when I was in college. It felt like the only way to become a writer, and it felt financially unattainable, too. Then I wrote one, and I was proud of it... but it kind of dispelled the mystery. It's just one way to write. There is so much more out there, and so many places where you don't have to deal with Novelists.
when there's no pianos left to tune, the smart piano tuner now buys them off craigslist and goodwill solely to tune up and then throw out. when that supply dries up, well, they just might start bringing home tuned pianos and detuning them. and you can't exactly say that the audience isn't getting what they "paid" for. saying it out loud however would inject that bitter note, reminding everyone exactly how the sausage was made.
Honestly I can’t comprehend how people can’t see the difference between “This wasn’t for me” and “This is bad.” There’s nothing wrong with not liking something! There’s nothing wrong with trying something and realizing it’s not for you!
the way dogwhistles work is due to their element of plausible deniability, the fact that a lot of people wouldn't pick up on things, the fact that the connections can be opaque, the fact that they maintain acceptable to post, engage with, and circulate.
the fact that they are so widespread & so innocent-seeming that people calling that shit out seem paranoid or getting worked up over nothing.
...Yep, all the Japanese text in this game is completely in katakana. For those of you who don't speak Japanese, I guess the closest equivalent in English would be like writing everything in a really funky font. It's technically still readable, but it takes a little extra brain power to process. Normally, speech written entirely in katakana is reserved for robots or otherworldly characters in Japanese, but I assume some sort of restriction forced them to use all katakana here.
Your purpose is made work. If you're home and you have free time, you should be thinking about work. If you have friends, they should be work friends. You want fulfillment? Go buy something. The fact that these endeavors don't actually provide satisfaction, purpose, or comfort is the point.
This isn't me going deep into the woods and splitting hairs over "why I find Shadowrun easier to DM than Neon City Overdrive" or the like, but has been me musing on "because so many rules-light games lack their own textual identity, they rely on extra effort from outside and thus, paradoxically, can be more difficult, more draining, and ironically HARDER to run than a game which puts in the effort to "right-size" its text and rules to support itself, and particularly for new/un-practiced/don't-meet-the-vibe DMs/groups".
With this limitless narrative space, it becomes impossible for a player to think analytically beyond the most immediate surroundings, to consider more than the moment, except for when the table agrees to limit the fiction more broadly. By accepting the limits of the system as limits on narrative, rather than having a free roaming narrative, it is possible to create games where analytical decision making is more possible.
I've been spending my whole life trying to make weird spellblade builds work? Buddy, the Cleric is the native, natural, prebuilt spellblade. It gets heavy armor, it can get martial weapons, its support magic is perfect for buffing yourself or debuffing enemies and setting you up to hit them with your weapon good! And hey if you want to shoot lasers, Clerics usually get a few variants of Shoot Lasers spells anyway! It just does the stuff! Why was I running??
In that sense it perfectly reflects most other “critical” media we get these days, in that they are all very good at unearthing the numerous moral failings of out present days, but never manage to offer meaningful solutions, because they fundamentally look at them through the lens of individual, “rational” actions, and not the results of systemic pressures and failures.
So I think this is something designers should think about as we're building worlds and composing and tuning experiences: what forms of attention are we asking, allowing, encouraging our players to have? How do our decisions around what interactions are supported influence that?
In a tactics game, one can classify enemies into 8 broad categories. These will be called "Enemy Roles."
An Enemy Role defines, in some way, an enemy's behavior, what abilities they have, their threat level, and their survivability.
I decided to get back into painting my nails and searched "How you paint your nails" on YouTube, which got me watching a bunch of Simply Nailogical and Kelli Marissa. The algorithm reassigned me to white cisgender heterosexual feminine girl aged 16 to 30 and now I am constantly exposed to fashion, makeup, "deinfluencing," "trend reactions," and far less often am I encountering left wing video essays about the necessity of global militaristic revolution.
I would go so far as to say that the content of games (as opposed to its formal elements) provide templates to things that could be created. D&D presents a different variety of potential creations compared to Apocalypse World. The formal elements of the game then, theoretically, should provide guidance to creating the things that the content points towards. They shouldn't show how to draw a circle and then ask the players to draw the rest of the owl.
Thus, despite being a loudmouth who would shit-talk people to their faces regardless of their status on the yard (I have no idea how I'm still alive), I had a good reputation with every race, which is why someone from the chicanos approached me on January 15th, 2019, and whispered that I should probably stay inside that evening.
There are people who I follow, who I could never carry a conversation with in a chat. And people who feel the same about me. But we still mean something to each other. That meaning has worth. It can be a force for good, when it's understood.
To discuss the topic more abstractly then, player solipsism approaches TTRPGs as a story the players are experiencing first and foremost. From this perspective, what's happening off-screen doesn't really matter unless it somehow affects the players. They may not have power within the game world, but they are the ones that drive the plot & decide where it goes. Frequently this design also comes with turning rolls into story beats rather than tests, because it ensures no player's action goes to waste.
Two years ago I wanted to make a set which actually represented a variety of rarities (instead of concentrating around rare). Last year, I wanted to make a ‘set’ (two sets really) that actually used flavour text on every card possible and avoided shuffling. This time, building on that, I want to design a set that fulfils those goals, and also includes another new thing for me: New Keyword mechanics.
It leaves us to have to decide what our checkpoints will be. Life isn’t going to hand us one that is obvious and world-changing. We’re going to have to find a way to mark time ourselves, using whatever we think is appropriate. There might not be a clear Before and After of adulthood.
seriality, frequent updates, &c have always been a part of webcomics culture, but the way these sites centralize and make visible popularity rankings pushes production in an ultra simplified direction--simplified cliffhanger and dramatic twist based storytelling broken into small chunks, simplification of the comics form so instead of complex breakdowns of the metaframe into frames you take in as a whole composition they orient towards one digestable panel or lexia (a text unit), simplified reading patterns so instead of passing back and forth over a page or across pages you hurtle towards the next shocking twist, simplified art that can be cranked out quickly possibly (probably, increasingly) with assistants.
focusing on technology first often locks you into a particular sort of social structure without even realizing it - the way tools are designed influences how people are likely to use those tools, and social structures do coalesce around the most frictionless way to use the tools given to the community
This is the great societal ill of masculinity. The complicated, double-edged sword of reality. Men have had it too good for too long. Patriarchy should be demolished. An equal and equitable society absolutely is a goal for which we should all strive. And, yes, this does require shattering the columns. Yet at the same time, we leave destruction in our wake. An unchecked entropy follows our path, wreaking havoc in the shadow of our every swing of the pick.
Those original games were made over a period of seven years by somewhat distinct groups of people with an evolving idea of what making an RPG meant, what they were doing, what these kinds of games could be - but to Square in the 2020s it's more valuable to have an idea of what pre-3D Final Fantasy means, to reduce the concept of "Final Fantasy" down to a singular object that can be presented and sold. So it seems only natural that Square doesn't sell the original games anymore, just the pixel remasters. These are the versions they'd like you to play.
Planescape sought to build out more of that structured universe and then in each structured space, fill it with interesting notions. But the structure is a little odd, in that it's hard to make an infinite number of chairs organise neatly, someone is always putting out one more where they shouldn't. That means there are tidy diagrams of the Planar cosmology, and then you look inside any of the bubbles in that diagram and find it's full of gibberish.
If you treat all media that people make as 'content' you lose the ways those things are different. Reading my articles aloud makes it clear to me how much my rhetorical delivery plays into how the reading feels. My Carrion article and my Carrion video are not meant to be experienced the same way, and my reading of the video is not the normal way I read my articles. You can tell, because I did it differently.
I don't know what I want from the internet. A forum to share ideas and knowledge? No, it feels like we're in a bunch of dying shopping malls, opening new stores and waiting for the day when the municipal government steps in and says, "Sorry, we've got to tear this place down because we have to build condos here." And all we can do is post on our Instagram about how well our stores are doing.
This was traumatic not just—not even primarily—because of the specific facts of the lockdown. It was traumatic because it forced people to confront just how thin the barrier was between them and someone who could only enter the grocery store masked at 1am even before COVID. And that knowledge was, broadly speaking, intolerable. People could not bear the enactment of themselves as part of a category that they considered to be lesser, weaker, broken.
In Buddhist philosophy, impermanence, no-self, and unwanted stimuli are called “the three marks of existence.” But they aren’t objective truths of the world, so much as they are subjective truths that your brain has tried to prevent you from realizing. To obscure them, it has built these three illusions in turn: that there is something knowable that will last longer than you, that there is a central fixed “self,” and that it is somehow possible to avoid unwanted stimuli. These illusions come from a well-meaning place, a place of not wanting you to get hurt. Unfortunately, they are very expensive to maintain and ultimately do more harm than good.
The Japanese release is more like buying a model of a fighter jet in a hobby store. A colorful action scene on box that rattles with possibility. The model you build will never live up to reality. Models are, after all inherently deceitful... but with stories, and world building, and art, a lot of power comes from the lie. They want us to believe that these crude pixels are something greater. That you are controlling Mario, the plumber. That the fighter jet isn't made out of plastic.
I drew up my protagonists and assigned them aspects of my own personality as their guides; one character might have my optimistic Heart and my fatalistic Mistaken; another my nihilistic Full Moon and my peaceful New Moon. I gave them their Themes, Values, and Blessings, sketched their relationships to one another, and then, sitting alone on the floor of my bedroom, I lit a candle and said the phrase that marks the start of play;
“Long Ago, The people were dying at the end of the world.”
It isn't just the mountain valleys or cliffs that invoke the sublime, but the ten floors of Delkfuut Tower or the vacuous halls of the Yagudo's mountain-fortress-metropolis of Castle Oztroja. Often when I play video games I get the feeling that I'm pushing into the unknown that feels limitless like I'm on a trapeze without a net. I love that feeling, and it ends when I have explored everything. But I don't have that feeling in Vanadiel. It is simply too huge to fit into my brain.
You have to be kind and empathetic and you have to love. God, you have to love something. Be a pervert, if you have to, I certainly am. You have to find joy no matter how dire the circumstances because otherwise this world will break you. It is such a beautiful feeling to love and be loved, and there is no way to achieve that through force, no matter how many people delude themselves otherwise.
So operational refers to things like "How much MP should I spend on healing after the battle I just won? Do I try fighting for more victory points now, or more resource points? Do I fight this boss now, or try looking for gains in other parts of the dungeon? I'm losing this battle- do I retreat to save certain units, or try to inflict as much damage on their army as possible so they lose certain units or can't beat my next layer of defenses soon? Do I need to reposition my army to defend my supply lines? I just partially beat their army - do I siege their forward military base, or harass their economic base?"