Our current system of corporate ownership of intellectual property, and the way corporations take advantage of their ownership of patents, copyrights, etc, is damaging to the ability to not just experience art, but make art - and use many other tools, besides.
A fun website for looking up technical information on specific RGB colors, as well as simple palettes calculated from their analogous and complimentary hues.
But the thing that really disturbs me is the artistic sanitization. SUPERHOT VR was a work that had disturbing elements. It had the potential to make people uncomfortable. It disgusts me to see things like “discomfort” treated as objectively harmful in art. A self-destructive spiral leading to suicide is disturbing and uncomfortable, but I also found it to be a profound experience. It’s good to consider and interact with discomfort! The death of an unnamed fictional character is not so obscene that it cannot be allowed to be depicted, no matter how immersive the depiction is. Is it okay for these stories to exist? The answer to this question must be yes, but with the SUPERHOT VR cuts, someone is clumsily trying to answer no.
An article about a metanarrative game being stripped of its entire narrative post-release, by its own developers.
Do you just need to clip a specific segment of a TV/anime episode, or other MP4 on your hard drive, but not really any other editing? This is good for that.
...There's new secrets on the Spamton Sweepstakes.
Read more about it on this google doc, I suppose, as people discover what's been added.
Some of which (this page) include cat gifs that are the perfect dimension for DW icons, if you care.
The first five cats (non-angels), cat #8 (red/orange angel), and "cat" #9 (spamton?) are all under the file size limit (60kb) for a Dreamwidth icon.
Cat #6 (rainbow angel) and cat #7 (white angel) are NOT within the file size limit, however. If anyone can figure out how to get them within the DW icon file size limit with minimal sacrifice of quality, I'd love to know!
Potentially usable with Glass, Ice, or Metal bootlegs of Bansheep and all of its remasters. More specialized versions would narrow down species or typing.
The idea is that I want to use the "unique" tools of Bansheep, which are largely focused on avoiding hits. Two of these moves (the ones with sheep pun names) are exclusive to the Bansheep line, while Cotton On is only learned by one other species line.
Battering Ram is a 3-AP attack that lowers the opponent's accuracy on a hit.
Shear Luck is a passive that increases the user's Evasion the less AP they have.
Cotton On is a 4-AP move that forces all moves targeting the user to miss.
I am genuinely unsure as to whether I want Custom Starter: Dodge as a self-buff, or the attack Desperation (1-AP, becomes more powerful the less HP the user has).
Jagged Edge is a passive that automatically inflicts damage when a melee attack misses the user. Neither branch of the Bansheep line learn it in their standard typings, but Glass, Ice, and Metal bootlegs can.
Berserker + Neutralise is a funny combination that isn't exclusive to the Bansheep line, but does pair well with its passive evasion. Berserker inflicts the "berserk" debuff while raising melee attack when the monster hits 50% or less HP; Neutralise cures all debuffs when the monster hits 50% or less HP. Desperation, Battering Ram, and Jagged Edge all count as melee attacks.
Unfortunately, I feel at a loss as to how to theorycraft more "specialized" versions of the build, that take advantage of the differences between Ramtasm and Capricorpse, or the differences between Glass/Ice/Metal bootleg movepools.
The library where I work gets regular donations of eggs from a patron who raises chickens. They're stored in the break room fridge. They're intended for any staff who want them; any employees are free to take the eggs home, but many of them don't. When I ask, my coworkers say it's because they already know people who raise chickens, or raise chickens themselves, and so don't really need the eggs. For the first year or two I was working at the library, I didn't bring eggs home, either. I live with my parents, and they were already buying eggs from the grocery store on a regular basis. But I kept note of the opportunity, in my back pocket.
Then the price of eggs went up this year, and I noticed the eggs were still piling up in the break-room fridge. So I brought up the Library Eggs to my mom. Ever since, I've brought home two dozen eggs every week.
It's funny. Because these eggs are free, rather than being bought with my family's funds, I feel more free to actually eat eggs, instead of leaving them all for my sister and dad under the feeling that "I would be stealing from them if I ate them." I haven't had fried eggs, really, since I stopped visiting my Grandmother's house on weekends, where she would make me eggs and pancakes every morning as a kid and teen. Last year, she died - and before that, was undergoing a decline from some form of dementia that started slow and accelerated as time passed. She hadn't been able to cook for herself for a while - and now, I'll never have her eggs ever again. So, I figured, it was time to learn some self-sufficiency. It was time to cook eggs for myself.
I keep screwing up - the first few times I did it perfectly, the pan unscathed and the whites and yolks in perfect platonic form. Then I got cocky, and now seem to end up not greasing the pan properly, or making mistakes as I flip the eggs over. Even though I end up making a mess, though, they still taste good. I cook three or four at a time. Not for breakfast - I don't have the time to spare in the mornings. For dinner or lunch when I've gotten home. I make some pancakes, too - using the same pancake mix brand my Granny fed me. The recipe on the box makes a whole batch of little pancakes, but my Dad taught me his adaptation for just making a single, thick pancake. Dirty dishes by the end? One pan (reused for eggs and pancake), one measuring cup (pancake mix, water), one spoon (mixing the pancake mix), one spatula, one plate, one fork.
I think a lot about "renewable" animal products - the kind you get without killing the animal. I love the taste of meat, I'll admit - but for so much of history, beef and pork and chicken were not everyday foods for the average person. I'm only able to enjoy them as much as I can due to relative luxury - and, honestly, a deeply fucked up system of industrialized modern agriculture. You sink so much into raising an entire animal for meat. Eggs, milk, honey. Fruit trees and berry bushes of the animal kingdom. We've built entire types of food that don't exist in nature off the backs of eggs, milk, and honey, mixed with our domesticated plants and yeasts. Cheese doesn't exist in nature. Cakes don't exist in nature.
My ideal farm sim doesn't really exist, because quite frankly Stardew Valley stops being a cozy pastoral fantasy once you're grinding for endgame rewards. I want to keep my farm a relatively small operation, chickens I pet every day, not create some kind of massive automated plantation where junimos harvest crops for me en masse and I create massive grids of monoculture crop space of the Single Most Profitable Crop as I grind towards the Golden Clock that I need to buy to achieve "perfection" to 100% the game. I hate "perfection" as a mechanic. I hate that the golden chicken is locked behind achieving "perfection", when one of my goals on literally every save file prior to it being introduced has been to acquire one of every variety of livestock.
I want an in-depth chicken simulator. Or a dairy animal (cow, goat, etc) simulator, or beehive simulator. I want a sim that's focused on managing the health and mood of a particular animal. A pet simulator with a side of profit, more than a business simulator. Use the money I acquire from selling their product to acquire better creature comforts for my animals, peruse a catalog of real breeds and landraces as potential future stock. Those eggs I get every week - the patron has chickens that carry the "easter egger" gene, introduced relatively recently to the hobby-chicken genepool from a Chilean strain, mixing greens and blues into the common browns and whites. They're exciting to bring home - nothing says it's not a grocery store egg like that. One of my coworkers mentioned that she used to have a hen who laid exceptionally blue eggs, robin-egg bright - then one night she forgot to shut the coop door, and a fox got the hen. I want to manage my animal's feed (or flowers, for bees) and genetics to influence the characteristics of their product. I want a game that asks me to pay attention to my animal's health condition in the same way that the 90's fishtank simulator Aquazone included real world fish diseases. I want to breed for particular colors. I want achievements for breeding healthy members of rare and endangered varieties of the specific domestic animal, like how Zoo Tycoon rewards me for conserving endangered species.
I don't think I can convince my family to keep chickens for real - managing just cats and a dog seems to be a handful enough for us. But I eat my eggs, I think about how they came from a chicken. An animal just as varied in personality and form as our mammalian pets, perhaps the most common domesticated avian on earth - unless that's the pigeon, long past its prime as a kept animal but omnipresent in its feral form. What a marvel of biotechnology, that we live in a world with chickens! We don't appreciate it enough. We take it for granted.
Pure subsidence farming is unpleasant and awful - romanticized mainly by those with enough distance to not truly remember it. But I wonder if more Americans are going to start supplementing their diets with locally-raised, home-raised, and neighbor-raised foods. After all, all our national food quality control is being dismantled at the same time that prices are raising. Will the FDA even meaningfully exist, by the end of the Trump administration?
This is a combination of moves only known by 3 monsters: Mardiusa, Anathema, and Pawper/Pawprince. These are the only three monsters that have access to Dual Wield, AP Steal, and Two Heads simultaneously. Removing Two Heads opens the build up to more monsters.
At the start of turn 0, all monsters start with 2 AP. By the end of turn 0, the Custom Starter/Dual Wield/AP Steal combo adds 2 more AP at no cost, and the Multistrike buff is applied. During turn 1, the player uses AP Steal twice in a row at no cost thanks to Multistrike, adding 2 more AP. At the end of turn 1, all monsters gain 2 AP. This leads to a total of 8 AP by the start of turn 2. Multi strike-affected Dual Wield -> AP Steal has a net AP gain of 0, but one can use this quadruple application of AP steal to severely hinder the opponent's AP economy in a single turn if one likes, preventing them from using powerful and expensive moves like Nurse, Headshot, or Ritual.
And because a Cassette Beast has eight move-sticker slots (barring stickers that have the affect of +1 slot), you have three spaces left to put whatever moves or passives you want. :)
I should be working on the next chapter of my fanfic, but I've been addicted to Caves of Qud instead...
I don't know how to describe it to people who haven't heard of it. It's a roguelike, but to most people "roguelike" refers to a genre modifier rather than a genre in itself, and CoQ is very specifically a "roguelike as genre" game inspired by old ASCII dungeon crawlers...
I love the tantalizing ambiguity of old, low-res spritework. As a fan of the Mother series, I think people don't appreciate enough how Mother 1 has a lonely, eerie feeling that's enhanced by its technical limitations. It is frustrating in those limitations in a way that hurts it, sometimes, but the large expanses of empty wilderness between settlements, the lethality of even ordinary wildlife like bears amidst the aliens and robots, the strangeness of the pink seashell world of Magicant, the inability to fully parse out exactly what some objects and creatures even are. Qud has so much quality of life improvement over genuinely old games while still leaning into the sense of danger and mystery that very old RPGs are good at.
on susumu hirasawa’s birth certificate, it says he was born on april 2nd. in his heart, he says he was born on april 1st, head first onto the earth’s surface. in my heart, it is because he wanted his birthday to be even closer to jun togawa’s, his longtime friend, on march 31st. nisu aniki, the touhou cookie delegate who first recirculated p-model’s “LAB=01” for MAD fodder, now covering the song with teto for her birthday, exists at some impossibly satisfying intersection of these things.
A blog post about Kasane Teto ruminating on Kasane Teto's modern identity as an "anti-idol" relative to Hatsune Miku and the many other voicebank idol-characters in Miku's shadow. The blogger compares her place in the voicebank-character scene to a real musician who satirized idol culture in the 80's and 90's. The blogger also ruminates on how her 2chan-assigned character settings that were originally meant as cheap shock gags, such as her ambigious gender/sex of "chimera" and age of "31", have given her a humanized, relatable quality with her current audience.
First, some special April 1st additions to the Miku-centric *Project Voltage* Vocaloid x Pokemon crossover. The first new art is "April Fool's" by KEI, designed to match a the Project Voltage announcement artwork made by the same artist for Project Voltage in 2023. The second artwork released was of Kasane Teto as the rival to Hatsune Miku's protagonist, by the artist "take", made to be a counterpart to take's earlier Project Voltage artwork of Miku as a Psychic-type trainer. For context, I'll include the corresponding Miku art (the originals) next to the new, Teto pieces.
Obviously, in the original Miku artwork by KEI, she has Pikachu because it's the Pokemon franchise mascot, not much deeper than that; however, the more quirky inclusion, Farfetch'd, is there because it's associated with spring onions/leeks, just like Hatsune Miku is. There's some really cute details here in the matching Teto image, regarding her origins as a "fake vocaloid" and 2chan trolling scheme. As I've mentioned before, Kasane Teto is deeply intertwined with lies, mimickry, and trolling; she was born out of 2channers from the VIP board trolling the still-new Hatsune Miku fandom on 2chan by inventing a fake new bank and character for Crypton Future Media's "character vocal" product series, complete with a website and NicoNico video announcement. Her original character design, the one still used for her UTAU voicebank, deliberately mimics design elements of the CV series' characters: Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin and Len, and Megurine Luka. Nohkara on Bluesky notes:
Wow the amount of symbolism. “Sudowoodo” is called ウソッキー which means “lie tree” in Japanese. Mimikyu comes from “mimic you”. The pokeball she’s holding is a lure ball. In Japanese trolling or baiting is called 釣り(lit. “Fishing”)
i find it slightly funnier how sudowoodos japanese name also has the ッ for the glottal stop (?) but coincidentally that specific character becomes "tsu" when full sized, so you can totally misread "usokki" as "usotsuki" which is straight up "liar"
In the "protagonist" and "rival" images of Miku and Teto that take drew, they actually have the same Pokemon - Meloetta! However, Miku's shown using the Normal/Psychic "Aria forme", while Teto's shown using the Normal/Fighting "Pirouette forme." Miku's image color has (especially early in Vocaloid fandom's history) sometimes been identified as green, instead of or in addition to blue; Teto, likewise, has been treated as both a "pink" and a "red" character depending on context. So matching Miku with the blue-eyed, green-haired Aria forme and Teto with the Pirouette forme is cute.
Finally, 23ki (the producer of Mesmerizer and Obsolete Meat) released a song for Project Voltage, using both Miku and Teto (UTAU) vocals.
The other Teto birthday news is that she's getting added as a voice bank to VoicePeak, a text-to-speech software by the same developers as SynthV! (SynthV, of course, being the software her newest, "professional" voicebank runs on. Don't forget, though, that Utau!Teto is still available and always free to use.) They've given her a cute new outfit to go with the new product, as is customary for different product releases of the same vocal synthesizer "character." VoicePeak!Teto releases April 24th.
I think... I want to make a Princess Tutu fansite. There's a whole lot of official material that isn't properly compiled or linked to, and I also want somewhere to host my meta about the show.
I don't know what kind of color palette to give it, though.
Any suggestions? I feel like a dark blue or purple background might work... but I don't want any light elements to be too eye-searing next to the dark colors.
The main thing getting in the way of writing as much meta as I want to write, other than lack of time or energy, is that a key part of my process involves, like... throwing ideas out to other people, discussing those ideas, rotating them like a rock tumbler as we polish the idea, as they offer criticisms and I explain myself.
I've really been wanting to write meta about Mytho from Princess Tutu. However, it's hard enough to find fans of the show to talk to - harder still to find people who are passionate about this specific character, rather than brushing him off as "boring" and nothing more than a prop for the development of the "real" characters: Duck, Fakir, and Rue. I also will need to directly cite parts of the source material, and I'm unsure of how to do it. Hand-transcripting the subtitles is a pain, and I'm never sure where to put line breaks. How do I balance space efficient readability, and communicating the pace of a character's monologue or dialogue? In addition, sometimes the characters' facial expressions or body language are important, and I feel the need to include screenshots because I don't know how to properly describe these things in text. People definitely did include screenshots for some meta back on Livejournal, but I still worry about overdoing it. And what do I even begin with? I have textual evidence that Mytho's "emotionless" state fuctions is actually severe alexithymia, but I'm unsure how to properly introduce my argument and line up the evidence. I feel like I have something to say about how Mytho reads as a character with a dissociative trauma response (and I don't just mean season 2's unfortunate invocation of Evil Split Personality stuff, I'm talking season 1 stuff like the Fear Shard episode), even though his condition is textually magical in nature - but I'm worried I'll get something wrong and it'll feel disrespectful. I have thoughts about little bits of dialogue with implications about his thought processes and personality, about the existential horrors of his existence as (in-universe) a fictional character manifest from a tragedy into the real world. About how Mytho reads as disabled, about how Mytho reads as mentally ill, about how Mytho is objectified by other characters and his relationship to femininity despite being the manifestation of a male "prince" character archetype. But they're a formless stew in my head that I don't know how to refine on my own.
It's really hard to explain why my post-canon fanfic is the way it is without explaining how I see Mytho. One can argue that there's no point in interpreting the character that deeply, but isn't part of fandom supposed to be that we find value in both finding and inventing depth? It's what always drew me to the subculture, not shipping - analysis, theories, that sort of thing. We're supposed to interpret characters! I'm thinking a lot about T. H. White's notes on his interpretation of Lancelot, specifically the version of Lancelot that exists in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. The Once and Future King, T. H. White's own telling of the Arthurian cycle, uses Malory's work as its primary source. A transformative work, if you will. White's notes on Lancelot remind me a lot of the sort things a person in fandom might say about a character they're deeply fixated on (in Tumblr parlance, a "blorbo"), right down to the completely undisguised projection where White lists himself in a slew of people he thinks Lancelot as a character resembles. I'm thinking about this commenter's description of White's notes:
I'm touched by the seriousness with which White takes Malory. I've read Malory as a grad student, taught him, and read a fair pile of scholarship in preparation for teaching him, but I've rarely seen anyone so thoughtfully explore Malory's Lancelot as a coherent character rather than a mere series of actions—but then, White appreciated Malory with a simplicity that I suppose isn't permitted to many grad students and scholars.
It's very soul-crushing to see a whole bunch disillusioned, bitter ex-fandom Tumblr users describe deeply identifying with fictional characters, wanting to explore their psychology, and even openly projecting on them as... a sort of perversity, a moral sickness caused by Late Capitalism, and in a better world these impulses just wouldn't exist. It makes me feel shame about caring so deeply about frivolous things. But when I don't care about anything but the serious and terrible things in the world, I can't stand to live. But I struggle to explain what's important to me about my little things! The words turn to worms in my mouth before I can fully articulate them.
Interesting how the "Marsh Taur" build (and its corresponding unique sprite) has seemingly sort of become a mascot for Caves of Qud?
On the title screen's background art, a green-bodied centaur (the Marsh Taur) is shown alongside a more typical humanoid in a trenchcoat, resembling the generic sprite for custom built characters with the "gunslinger" calling.
Tutorial mode has the player select and play as the Marsh Taur preset.
On the Taskbar, Qud's application icon is the Marsh Taur sprite. (Its icon on Discord, though, is the "gunslinger" sprite.)
It's not uncommon for games with customizable protagonists to have a sort of "default" version of that protagonist for the purposes of official art and other materials; however, usually that default is centered around "normal": a generic everyman with no particularly striking visual qualities. I think it speaks to Qud's sensibilities that it represents itself with the Marsh Taur, instead of any of the non-preset mutant player sprites (which are more conventionally human in appearance than the mutant preset sprites are) or any of the True Kin (non-mutant human) sprites.
Sometimes it’s – crossing a physical line. Touching in a way they have no good reason to be touching. Or touching over the objections of the kid in a way that is in no way justified by therapy goals. Sometimes sexually, sometimes not. Sometimes in ways that are against ethical standards of practice, sometimes not. But intimately, invasively. And if you say no, she patiently, lovingly, explains that you have nothing to be afraid of and that everything is ok. And that if you just trust her, you will have fun and get better. And when her profession has professional training about boundaries and appropriate touch, she thinks or even says “women don’t do that.”
Some male therapists do many of these things too, but there’s a gendered version of it that usually comes from women. And that can cause a problem for people with disabilities who are recovering from this. Most things about trauma and abuse of power are about misogyny in some way. They’re about men hurting women, and taking advantage of power dynamics that favor men to do so. Those descriptions are important because that pattern is common. But it is not the only abuse pattern, and it is not the only gendered abuse pattern.
Female therapists are subjected to misogyny and the power of men just as much as any other women. But they also have tremendous power over people with disabilities, many of whom are deeply dehumanized. The assumption that women have neither the power nor the ability to hurt anyone gets really dangerous really quickly for children with disabilities receiving therapy.
And it also means that people with disabilities often have a different relationship to gender than most nondisabled people. If you’ve been harmed by women over and over and assured that you liked it, it complicates things. If you’re a girl, it can make it hard to see a group of women as a Safe Space, especially if they think the thing making it safe is keeping the men out. If you’re a boy who has been repeatedly harmed by women who believed they were powerless, it can be hard to understand that the gender hierarchies that feminists and others talk about actually do exist.
This article is from 2014, but I think it's still relevant today. It feels frustratingly difficult to talk about how the sexist positioning of women (specifically cis white women - trans white women, cis women of color, and especially trans women of color are usually not afforded this kind of assumption of passive, doe-like innocence) not only enables the abuse of women by men, but also allows specific kinds of abuse by women (to other women, to certain men) to be taken less seriously or assumed nonexistent.
It makes me uncomfortable when I see people position women and girls as "more good" or "more pure" than men and boys, and that's Why We Need Feminism - rather than that oppression and gender essententialism is fundamentally wrong. (And let's be real - when nonbinary or genderqueer people are even acknowledged, they're arbitrarily sorted back into a binary box based on the speaker's own biases.) Because I was mostly physically abused by boys and mostly emotionally abused by girls - that's what bullying is, it's abuse of children by their peers. (Though I was also physically abused by a girl a grade younger than me, in first grade. I considered her a friend at the time because, unlike other girls, she was willing to be physically near me.) And I don't think the abuse the girls did caused less damage just because it didn't leave visible bruises. I don't think my kindergarden teacher locking me in a dark closet (a thing I don't even remember, but that people in my life remember me telling them about at that age) is made better because it was done by a woman. When a next door neighbor, or second cousin's dad, was physically and/or emotionally abused by their wife, I remember hearing adults implying it the man's fault for being weak-willed and spineless, for letting her walk all over him.
I don't really see myself as having a gender, but I was assigned female at birth, and I let people perceive me as a cis woman because it's easier to not assert myself. If I started taking testosterone, and was perceived more as a "man" than a "woman", would the things I've experienced suddenly become less serious? Would they have turned out, retroactively, to not have been serious? I already feel like such a burden on other people, like I take up too much space, being perceived as a girl. When I make characters for TTRPGs, I gravitate towards small characters - kobolds and the like - I want to take up less space, that's my power fantasy, not being strong or sexy or popular. Or I gravitate towards being the token non-humanoid, because it's easier to be a mascot or a pet than a person. It feels less bad if I don't know how to relate to my peers or be taken seriously if I'm just everyone else's crusty little white dog. I'm only afforded any grace as a human (a failed human, autistic, a dog trained to walk on its hind legs) in that I'm perceived as harmless, despite all the ways that I know I'm not.
Places that used to feel fun feel like ghost towns. Internet too. I try creating - drawing, writing - but I feel dissatisfied. I look at my most recent work and find it lacking some unnamed quality. I want to beg people to prove it's not garbage, I want to prove I'm right that it's garbage, I want to not impose on anyone and crawl into a small quiet hole. I spend all day having fun with friends and then immediately once it's over I'm lonely. I want to talk to people. I'm scared to talk to people. I'm scared to put myself out there because what if I find them lacking, what if they find me lacking. I don't have the energy to care about anything. I don't have the energy to be passionate. The Internet used to be a place you can meet people with common interests but I've forgotten how. I'm drained but I can't sleep. I feel guilty for not writing. I feel guilty for not drawing.
It's strange, I went to a convention today and had a good time, but then I did chores afterwards and started feeling like this. The con doesn't even feel like it happened today. It feels like it happened yesterday, or maybe even years ago. It's so hazy. It doesn't feel real. Why do my good memories have to slip away so fast?
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nex3's grid generator
