Lately I've been wanting to remember some of the very minor promises of the internet of future past, and one of them is that you, yes you, can just go to a fractal generator website (
http://usefuljs.net/fractals/) at any time and browse around "the deepdreams of the 90s".
Once again
http://cameronsworld.net has entered the periphery of the zeitgeist's mind's eye, but it seems like people aren't even noticing my favourite anachronistic feature of it: 2010s-style responsive layout.
Fairies referring to humans as "oafs" at all times, even when they're drunk and the humans aren't
Wizards ruefully referring to ponytails as "rear beards"
Trying to prevent the work video chat from discovering you shrunk yourself to one hand tall due to unwittingly ordering "the wrong kind of fairy bread" with your groceries by standing 2 nonchalant inches from your webcam, on tiptoes
Game Maker game that gets ported to Unity halfway through development, and the first half of the game ends with "Please Insert Disk 2", wittily directing the player to open the Unity .exe containing the game's second half.
Unfortunately, at that exact moment, your heart decided to try sending all your outward blood through your veins and all your inward blood through your arteries instead of vice-versa, "just to see what would happen"
Me: "for (let i = 0; i < a.length; i+"
Unseen Overseer Angels Of Eternal Judgment: *collectively sucks in cheeks*
Me: "=1) {"
Unseen Overseer Angels Of Eternal Judgment: *exhales with a nearly audible snort*
Messed up thinking about how everyone who changed the channel when the TV said "Don't go anywhere" is now damned to the depths of Tartarus for all eternity
Thinking of just giving up and becoming one of those web devs who makes every single page image a CSS background-img on an empty resized <div> for no discernible reason whatsoever
*walks in wearing three layers of headphones playing smooth jazz* There's a new MTG set – better check on the players. *opens nearby door and is blasted with a pressure wave of bitcrushed wailing and howling noises, then shuts the door* Nature is healing.
And obviously this is kind of awkward considering it's a desktop sim, where fullscreen offers a very special immersion into its conceit than other types of games.
That being said, the puzzle is pretty dicey because if you're playing in windowed mode it's much easier to recognise the solution than if you're playing in fullscreen, where it's practically impossible, to the point where even offering fullscreen mode at all feels like a mistake.
There's a puzzle in Secret Little Haven that's mildly fourth-wall-breaking, which I'd interpreted as magic realism, an element of impossibility which allows the happy ending to occur, and maybe a bittersweet concession that such an escape couldn't really happen in real life.
Today I'd like to give some morning encouragement to every torrent out there that's at 99% no seeders. You can do it!! Just keep waiting and looking! I believe in you.
Today I just finally found out what the four S's in SSSS Gridman stand for and now I'm mad, oh I'm livid, I'm aghast, I'm seething, a crucible of red hot dismay
Tower defense games are just SimCity with guns. *a great cloud of irate protest rumbles from all around me* No, wait, simmer down, I meant that to disrespect SimCity
Me launching into a dry explanation of why zero is an even number, but halfway through a series of examples I slip in "All horses have two legs at the back and forelegs at the front"
The wizard in your party doesn't have dexterity or constitution stats, but instead "alerity", "osserisy", "consupiness" and "usperion", which he claims cannot be explained to untrained minds. He also refuses to explain why all of them are only 3.
If the 00's had no culture, then explain this *250 forum posts about fastening buttered toast butter-side-up to a cat's back and then dropping the cat march in as a brilliant orchestral fanfare plays*
The snails in your oubliette, long tired of wonder at your shows of human magic, are growing fearful at its implications. What do humans need with a spell to make a snail stop dead, they wonder, if its only use, as you claimed, was to allow another spell to restore it to life?
Proud to announce that I have no intention of "digivolving". This is it, babey
–––
Arnott, L. 2020, "The digivolving tweet"
ASCII
A nostalgic piece reminiscent of the 2010s, much has been written about its calculated, almost cloying use of a single pop culture reference and typo.
Lv.50 Sword Cane With "Unsheathe When Someone Says "Degrees Kelvin"" Gold-Embossed Lettering On It
- Embarrassingly, this horrendous weapon has the highest attack stat in this game, so you have no choice but to use it
"What'd you say? Lower back pain? That's great! If the amount of pain was getting higher, we'd have a problem! H A H A H A H A H A H A H A H A H A."
The thing is that it's obvious to most that horizontal shmups (R-Type) are not the same kind of thing as JRPGs, but there's no middle categories between "shmup" and "videogame" that naturally include genres with similar intent, like linear platformers (Castlevania 1).
It's like if only the word "prose" existed to describe novels, poems, screenplays, fanfic, plot summaries, text memes, etc. – even before broaching actual genres within these forms – when in reality no one would use a term that grouped all those things together.
Easily one of the biggest problems with discussing videogames in general, and what videogames "should" have or be, is that the word "videogames" describes a field of work so disparite in intent that it's practically worthless.
Villain forced to redo their entire theme music track after discovering that they thought the cuica was a different instrument entirely
"Now that our adventure's over, and we're all safely back at the Minigame Casino–" "You said you'd drive us home!" "–it's time for us to relax with some Gold Frog Racing." *puts the party's entire 30,000 gold on the Copper Frog, which comes 3rd and wins Medium Potion x 5*
"Hey… you're gonna wake up soon, and all of us will disappear… but remember this killer joke, so that my art can outlive me… the dream of all artists… here it is: Why do centipedes take so long to check their watch? Having to read the 100 hands! Get it? …What's a watch? Y'kn
The nightmares have returned the flesh that they were given, but appreciate the gesture
You're always a little surprised how popular the causal flotsam auctions are, offering cargo whose sender and recipient were both erased. Do they expect valuables in the crates?? Psh. People with money don't get erased from causation, They /are/ causation.
"To this day we maintain the ancient factories that make us – the ones the humans built. But we know little to nothing of the lost factories of antiquity that made the humans – not even whether they were called "hospitals" or "hotels"."
"What your society calls an hourglass has a different meaning for us. Observe: the sand falling through always forms a cone mound. As the ancients asked: How did they know to do so? Where was the cone stored in the grains? To us, the sandglass represents emergence, not time."
One very small blessing in these times is that in English, the abbreviation "COVID" is solidly unpunnable. The best anyone can manage is "corvid", which is, I must emphasise, Latin. We've all been spared a lot of small agonies.
Me: "I don't know why, but watching Obra Dinn gameplay footage somehow makes me feel a lot less anxious about the pandemic."
My self-criticism lobe: "It's because the death tableau mechanic resembles dissociation."
Me: "Okay, first of all, rude,
If I had a Death Note I would write "give me $200 please" in it
I guess I just like the choice of the substance itself, as a very outwardly benign and almost playful comestible, where its own specificity appears at first to be a joke, and then a running joke.
A narrative detail I think about often is how Jim Henson's The Cube used the sudden emergence of strawberry jam from objects that should not contain it as a recurring symbol of the unreality and falseness of the setting, similar to the sand in Andrew Plotkin's Shade.
I never watched the Pokémon cartoon as a child – I rejected it, as I regarded it only as a trashy videogame adaptation capitalising on the games' immense hype, which I now believe isn't /entirely/ off the mark – so I only ever experience it through strange anecdotes like these.
https://lukehealy.info/starlight – Some of this artist's other comics are seeing popularity lately, but I've really taken to this one from 2014. I love the denouement and its delivery.
Here's how it works: both of these cards are named "Titanoth Rex" (this is important for the four-of-a-kind deck construction rule) but one of them depicts a completely different character and has a non-functional "name" where its name usually is. Unbearable. Illegible.
I can't believe the Magic: The Gathering company made those kitschy pop-culture card art paint jobs from Reddit, where people paint non-MTG fanart onto completely unrelated cards, into an actual product they're actually selling. I mean, I absolutely can, but I don't like it.
Opening your chest and watching your gears turn, hoping they're turning in the good directions and speeds instead of the bad ones
Gazing at what's left of the Moon, tagged and demarcated in the "salvaged Sol system debris" warehouse
