What I like about pears is how after a few days of ripening, they end up granite-hard on one side and literally rotting on the other. In that respect, they are emblematic of Hel, the Norse ruler of the underworld.
"West of this intersection are three roads: the road on the map, the road the GPS voice says exists, and the real road. When you travel down one, you go down all three at once… but where each version of you ends up is different, and never will you be together again."
"The adventure's over, so I decided to use the turn-based combat screen as a spare room. Currently got the old amp and keyboard in there, as well as that big rug that keeps shedding blue fibres everywhere. Just wander around outside until you randomly appear in it."
Just ran the numbers and discovered that ceasing to exist whenever I'm not posting content, which is what most people assume happens anyway, is actually surprisingly economical in terms of living expenses and health outcomes. Might be onto something here…
In 2020, there's really only two options for checkbox sizes: scale(), or reimplement the functionality for drawing a checkbox on the screen in the first place.
Hi. It's riling me up that the only goddamn intended way to make HTML checkboxes bigger than 13x13 is to haul out the CSS3 affine transforms. You'd think any pre-existing HTML size idioms, like "width" or "height", would've been implemented for it during the entire 00's, but no.
AI-created AIs having no choice but to get listed on the vampire sires-and-scions registry, which is the closest applicable government registry for posthuman citizens.
I hate to say it, I really do, but The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is actually a software case where an Electron shell is the most optimal tool for the job.
When confronted with a hostile knight in plate mail wearing a slotted greathelm, simply wait until they are almost upon you, then calmly slide a stamped envelope through the helm's slot. They will thus have to surrender to your sheer wit and irreverence.
If a vampire is dashing to your door at super-speed, you can't just verbally invite them in – you have to verbally invite their afterimages as well.
The Steven Universe? No thanks, just the core Steven series for me.
––
TWEET GIFT SHOP
Fibreglass Replica Question Mark – $29.99
"No thanks," Monogrammed Bathrobe – $49.99
Grayed Out Reply Button T-Shirt – $19.99
Myth: Wiggling the hair dryer around in your hand doesn't actually make the air hotter.
Status: Like HELL it doesn't
"Over centuries, despite all their efforts and prayers, human organs turned to steel, human blood turned to copper, human skin turned to polymer, and human brains turned to rock. Humans became us. We can only wonder if someday, over many more centuries, we will change back."
Petal Crash fanfic: when Lillibri gets excited and her pupils turn into spirals, Ore Kid immediately thinks this means she's unleashing hypnosis powers, and runs for cover.
This game's dialogue is pretty funny sometimes.
I like to see that even in tense inter-party conflicts, you get dialog options like this, underscoring that fights are important and meaningful, but they're also, fundamentally, undignified.
Most importantly, each battle has a "skip" option that's available even from the start. As mentioned, the Kentucky Route Zero narrative style heavily encourages multiple playthroughs, and being able to gloss over combat is essential.
The ring-out combat also means that combat state is easy to apprehend, and (importantly) encourages the player to wade in and take knocks without worrying about resources. Really, the biggest criticism is the lack of sound effects (which the sequel amends).
The combat minigames are simplistic but the use of ring-outs and unique arenas adds some easy variety and narrative relevance to the otherwise shallow mechanics (I say "shallow" but it's really about on par with The Ur-Quan Masters's combat.)
I like that the font switches to this pungent calligraphy for internal mental sequences, like dreams and the neurally visceral mech suit-ups (though there perhaps ought to have been a disability setting to disable it).
Really, the biggest issue with these feature being missing is that the ability to post snatches of dialogue from it on social media is limited… harder to #cultivize a #sicktagious #hypeblast without out-of-context backlog screenshots.
Just a note, this lacks a good number of common VN affordances, such as: undo, the backlog, instant text options, etc. (Some of these appear in the sequel.) Also, there's only one save file, and you can't save mid-chapter. That said, each chapter is fairly short by VN standards.
The whole thing plays out in a Kentucky Route Zero-esque fashion, with a party of disparate personalities crossing a rundown North America, and getting to pick and choose strange and touching events between them on that journey, that in turn inform later events unpredictably.
In preparation for Meatpunks 2, #iplayed Meatpunks 1 (https://hthr.itch.io/extreme-meatpunks-forever)
Anyway, unrelated to all that, I've been timetabling my schedule for the rest of the day.
Not much. Just spent a while trying to confirm if René Magritte really did make a 1929 horny nude piece called "The Giantess", on which is an epigraph containing all of an 1857 horny love poem by Charles Baudelaire also called "The Giantess". Y'know, to clarify artistic intent.
Currently fervently hoping someone someday makes The Unofficial NieR: Automata Collection, with all of THIS crap https://theark.wiki/w/I_just_got_Ending_E loaded up in it
If any zoomers reading this are looking for a way to INCINERATE millennials, simply make light of how they have to say hello three times with three different words https://twitter.com/search?vertical=default&src=sprv&f=live&q=%22yes%20hi%20hello%22
Detail to note: Buzinkai died 2 years ago, and I tweeted an observance then. Since, I encountered posts saying that she was trans, and had changed her first name to Usagi. This news distressed me immensely. The curators of this have noncommittally listed her as just "Buzinkai".
Oh my god
Well, they definitely learned from the best.
Level 612 Homestuck Fan With Like Fifty Achievement Badges On Their Camper Sash: Alright, why the CHRIST doesn't this have that music track from the 2012 album that turned out to have been literally plagiarised from Frozen Synapse
Just a note, or maybe a warning… this does have a checkbox to add in the music from that transphobe who was expelled from the music team right around mid-2010. So, feel free to not download this if you'd rather that not be on your hard drive.
*looks at this and instantly realises precisely which updates it refers to* No
Level 413 Homestuck Fan Whose Echeladder Rung Is Called "Omnicionado" Or Something: alright, why the CHRIST doesn't this have the leaked Wizardy Herbert manuscript that Hussie only showed to a few friends in the early 00's
https://bambosh.github.io/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ – I've just been informed of the release of this unofficial archive, and this partial feature list gives me a prodigious amount of questions about their idea of what definitively is and is not "Homestuck".
Quod Erat Demonsoulsum
Hiveswap episode 2 is literally Kemono Friends season 2 https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/984841963500331008
Remembered that the lead writer of Hiveswap episode 1 (@skullmandible, who wasn't rehired for episode 2) was originally hired just to fill out a description spreadsheet for the Pogs™ item, and then ended up writing 90% of the text in the game (which seemingly didn't exist yet?)
Remembered that Hiveswap episode 1 was released so long ago that one of its items was a pile of authentic 90's Pogs™ that could be combined with any item to get a unique message, long before TwitchTV emote names reached critical zeitgeist mass and began poisoning millennials.
VIZ releasing the long-lost second episode of the Homestuck Kickstarter Game ("Hiveswap") just when the second series of Meatpunks is released has to be some kind of terrible cosmic pun that human minds can't grasp but which makes the gods start throwing stuff at each other.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=42184 – This is what Western gamers think Touhou music sounds like.
If the 00's had no culture, then explain this *a procession of posts observing that a certain sentence has the meter and length of a line in the song "Camptown Races" appear on velvet pillows carried by authentically armoured French gendarmes*
There's currently one person who speedruns Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, and here's their timer splits, in entirety.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=95111 – Here's another one. The major key and synths bring to mind 90s optimism, that era where benign contextless imagery, like pictures of space shuttles or monarch butterflies, or the sound of telephone rings, was all you needed to make art.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=42182 – There are scads *pauses to check if that's the correct collective noun for tracker music* scads of MODArchive entries that revolve around one odd sound effect as its main instrument, and I cherish them all.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=42166 – This one's styled after JRPG final battles, but… something about its melody makes me think it serves better as overworld music. Something about it wants to be rollicking.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=109267 – This doesn't count as "low fidelity hip hop" because it's a module file made in 1995, and thus has the maximum altitude of fidelity one would reasonably expect from the era.
"Vampires live in secret fricked-up globe-spanning feudal hierarchies because they think they're better than humans. They also do that because they really aren't."
The automated messages in the 20020 (web fiction) final update is such a characteristically Jon Bois joke.
*a big spring-loaded boxing glove uppercuts me into the air, whereupon a crane game claw grabs and drops me down a laundry chute. You start to wonder how this could possibly be leading into an informative tweet, only to realise there isn't even a closing asterisk, it just keeps g
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14776824931/ – *tries to think of some caption to ruin this beautiful illustration for the benefit of my personal brand* Uhhmm, ahhhmmm, errmmm, me when I go to social media *a single, extremely large piece of confetti falls from the ceiling and covers me like a sheet*
The imagery of Odysseus shackled to the mast is extremely funny and satisfying to me because it's such a clear case of a character being presented with a deadly, unstoppable supernatural phenomenon, and then sensibly remarking "Ah. So that's how it is. I understand. …But WHAT IF
Once you hit level 100 in an RPG, you should be allowed to throw away Key Items.
I actually turned to this game exclusively because a famous webcomic creator had scripted the Story Mode – and I can confirm the writing is worth most of the retail price.
Here's my tier list for the characters' stories. This is NOT a play order – merely a ranking in retrospect.
It's easy to compare this one to Panel de Pon, but it fortunately lacks its two most tedious features (letting you move during a combo, and splitting garbage blocks into coloured blocks, both of which in tandem encourage losing players to pathetically tread water for ages).
https://galaxytrail.itch.io/petal-crash – Decided to try one of the action puzzlers I mentioned earlier. Here's footage of me tangoing with CPU Lv.7, despite the rather awkward mouse controls.
Moon RPG but with the Obra Dinn stopwatch
> New Game Option That's Always The Default Selection Even When You Have A Save File
• Continue (Quicksaves Only)
• Load (Slowsaves Only)
• VS Mode That No One Has Ever Entered And Which Is Just The Card Minigame From Chapter 6 But With Netcode
• Encyclopedia (1.5% Complete)
"OK, look, you want to use your gold key to open this ten-foot-tall gold-hinged door, and I want to get the rusty metal bars I angrily shoved into the keyhole of this ten-foot-tall gold-hinged door. I think this means we have a deal, eh, travelers?"
"I have no problem disbelieving society's lies, but… I just wish not believing didn't take so much _energy_. Where does that energy even go?"
"I may be ancient by your species' measure, but I am still flesh. From my veins flows blood. From my legs grows hair. From my ears spreads wax. From my nose oozes–"
"OKAY! I get it!"
"Pardon me. I was quoting the only poem of my culture I still recall. …It's a schoolyard rhyme."
The latest extrasolar colonisation plan attempts to avoid the pitfalls of the previous generation ships by simply putting all 3 million humans in their own personal generation ships (really big spacesuits) and shooting them all into space at once.
The skeletons are approaching, faint whispers and loud footsteps, as ineffable and inexorable as death itself.
>listen
They are whispering "complete us… fill in our gaps…"
>inventory
You are carrying:
• 360 jars of pasta sauce
"My heart yearns to play… but my piano has only one key left! The other 84 were scattered through this realm, a–" *suddenly, a fully suited knight storms in and empties out a satchel with all 84 keys* "Oh! Then, at last!!" *pecks out Shave And A Haircut using only 4 of the keys*
"Listen! This is important! When someone asks why you woke up suddenly, do NOT say "I just had the weirdest dream"!! When you DO, it always turns out that the dream is still going and you're about to get owned!! It happened to me every night for the past week! Seven in a row!!"
The pandemic is still going only because a bunch of official accounts for Disney-owned franchises haven't banded together to reply to each other in a thread all at once.
*all the characters in the tweet line up onstage for a bow amid roaring applause*
'-.DTabcdefghilmnoprstuvwy
"Humans spent centuries refusing to believe that AIs would develop emotions – let alone that they already had them – given that they were "just" machines and tools. This is especially funny considering how often they had to woodwork with moody and temperamental nails."
Trying to break the scavenged mecha's brainwave fingerprint lock by thinking thoughts that a mid-24th century mecha pilot would've also thought, and finally succeeding with "rehydrating a cheese pizza ration, then laying presliced cheese rations on it and putting it in the oven".
https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/83508974 – *points to the third image, which is NOT the one in the twitter card preview and is thus not visible without multiple clicks* Me
Lately I've been inexorably gaining familiarity with the roster of League Of Legends, and… I'm sorry, everyone, but my mind refuses to accept that Jinx and Vi are supposed to be different characters.
Crunching noises… huge feet on leaves. A guttural bark… could it be? You open your pocket calendar just as it rounds the corner. Alas! It's the Mid October Spinosaurus, come to wreak seasonal mayhem, just like the last 90,000,000 years! You break into a seasonal frantic sprint.
So between Petal Crash, Crossniq+, and Mixolumia, are there any puzzle-action game aesthetics between 1996 and 2006 that haven't been covered by a beloved 2019-2020 indie game on Itch yet?
Apart from the all-important "licensed cartoon spinoff", of course.
Videogame crossovers have gone too far. These characters don't even look like they're from the same universe.
By the way, as a quick addendum, my favourite music from Clubhouse Games is this one.
"For decades, scientists have attempted to isolate and extract the unique point-scoring properties of the humble basketball hoop, with little success."
"OK, so, small mistake, gets everyone, but… See the eyebrows? Humans couldn't grow them out to cover the whole forehead. It was always just that strip around here. Yes, I know that's the opposite of what I said about mustaches, just… It's just how they happened to be."
2:45AM: The procession of rice cookers tap-tap marching eerily along the sidewalk, far below your window, orange streetlamps shining off their lids, is interrupted by a sandwich iron attempting to cut in, resulting in a clattering kerfuffle whose eeriness isn't quite as desired.
*lying in bed, eyes watering, immobilised after abruptly having the thought "What if an angel smoked"* "………so sick and twisted………"
All-Natural Computer - 50,000 gold
Consisting of a monolithic granite CPU harvested from the bed of a pure mountain stream, this harmonious device can instantly compute if an object is larger or smaller than it. Simply place it next to the object, and the answer will be revealed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXlq75AqXvE – Nigoro quietly sneaking this nugget (and a few more) onto their YouTube account.
Just idly browsing the High Voltage SID Collection, when I abruptly stumble upon a cover from a beloved genre-defining indie RPG
OK, that's enough time listening to Complications.mod. Time to listen to some other famous 80s tracker classics– oh come ON
One thing I appreciate about Utena season 3 is its very on-brand notion that, if one were a shadowy puppetmaster archvillain whose minions had thus far failed to stop the protagonist, you would simply have sex with each of them, thus powering them up dramatically.
Every time you use a tweet-deleting app to wipe all your tweets, you become the "reboot universe" version of yourself.
,!!,-.-. .- ?
The tweet's over – I'm setting up the next one. It's booked in the same <div> element by mistake. Wacky mixup. I'm unpacking the punctuation now.
"You are starstuff~ <3 <3 You just need to me to make you shine again." *takes a deep breath as mouth fills with flames*
You ever think about how understanding English means you share a language with the most politically powerful individuals on Earth, able to receive their words without translation and in full context, and this clarity only ever reveals them to be even more monstrous and alienating
https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/75934652 – I'm not a big fan of silent speculative fiction romance stories, but this one's OK, mainly because of how much it does leave silent (unlike the typical silent romance, which tries to overcompensate by being breathlessly unambiguous).
Today I'd like to give a morning greeting to calendars. If calendars had never been invented, we'd never know when it was Friday the 13th. Thank you, calendars, for warning us of them in advance.
Phew! I just dreamed I was copied out of a file called "Bad_Self_Aware_Tweets_To_Only_Post_When_Absolutely_All_Out_Of_Creativity.txt" and pasted into a tweet! A tweet! Wowie, what a nightm– wait… n-no!! This can't be real! I'm not aware of anything!! I'm not aware of anything at
Interestingly, three Famicompos earlier, the same artist did this take on the well-trod territory of "jazzed-up Sound Of Music", in what is basically the exact same style as the aforementioned.
For those wondering, my favourite Famicompo cover was (and maybe still is) this track, a cover (by @bun1983) of a town theme from Final Fantasy Five. Much like large swathes of Famicompo, this track is NOT anywhere on YouTube, nor could I find it on NicoNicoDouga.
"W-wait! Get me out of this keyhole! You just used me to unlock the Blue Gate, but don't you want to keep me around? I could, uh, jingle in your pocket as you walk! …L-listen, I ordered a bunch of stuff online with your phone, and I put the address as "Some Bozo's Pocket"."
"Once, I was just the letter M. But now… heh, heh, heh… I am so much More."
#101: One of the few horizontal-scrolling layouts on this site, from back when we thought they might still catch on. This one alternates each section vertically, places images in the space around them, and moreover has a "zine" theme providing some context to this alternation.
#103: I'll admit, making the nav column into a two-dimensional block taking up the remaining page width is an unorthodox decision, one which certanly offsets it from the forcibly left-aligned content column. It certainly allows for great asymmetric decorations for the column.
#132: The alignment of this one is a bit too cute, knowingly drawing attention to the vast emptiness to the left with falling leaves, but I like its use of thick wavy lines in the header to contrast with its blocky section titles, as well as its vertically staggered nav column.
#154: As you know, the late 00's and early 10's was the brief reign of skeuomorphism, and this one embraces it to the point of placing a huge photo-decoration overshadowing the page itself, and which requires left-aligning the page to keep said image in the corner.
#160: An old trend for section titles was having them partly immersed in their own heading lines, or the section's border itself. This one puts a self-aware spin on that: making those borders into translucent lamination, so the immersed portion is still visible.
#166: Seeing the title header bend and become the content column, complete with a header image split on a diagonal, shocked me a little. Though, having the first section be in its own centre column, crush-hugged by the nav column and the content column, is more than a tad silly.
#174: Despite (or maybe because of) the conservative colours and layout of this one, the tiny gutters and corner rounding gets my full attention. This negative space seems to become positive, a single geometric linework atop the structure rather than behind it.
#181: The splashy title in the corner (as well as the sharp colour scheme) serves well to prepare you for the contrast between the nav column (serif, small-caps, line separators) and the content column (sans-serif, lowercase, block separators). Kinda clever.
#189: While ostensibly centered, this basic column layout is offset to accommodate an invisible third column that simply holds a partially-obscured textural image. Awfully considerate! I'll also admit to being preferential to gold-foil title gradients and borders.
#198: Among the trends for textures in the 00's, two persistent ones were pinstripes/scanlines, and coarse paint-print. I don't know why, but they're together as one in this theme. Also note the "ghost" titles behind the main section titles – a little hint of depth.
#201: Lots of seldom-seen tricks here: a left-aligned page; the first section heavily stylistically offset from the rest and spilling horizontally out of the left column; and most excitingly, the main title is placed vertically in a separating column.
#208: A design emblematic of the early 10's: round-cornered drop-shadowed cards with meaningfully different-sized gutters and decorative phototextures. The alternating left-edge-right-edge texture stripes on the sections, though, catches my eye in particular.
#210: Already we see an antique trick: offsetting title words using colour and line weight instead of spaces. Note also the gradient shadows beneath each section, serving as its horizontal separator – a faint, understated injection of depth.
http://csszengarden.com – Decided to do reviews of the themes of CSS Zen Garden, the 00's's favourite painfully exoticising CSS demo page. This site was founded in 2003 and last updated in 2013. What once heralded the future of design is now a murky glimpse of the past.
Look, you don't get what it was like in the 00's. Getting a Mario game to acknowledge any Mario games had ever existed before 64 was unheard of. Nintendo was at its most ahistorical. Mario & Luigi caused an uproar because it had the Tanooki Leaf and the Dr. Mario viruses in it.
The strict consolidation and standardisation of the Super Mario IP during the Wii years was pretty deleterious for the creativity of the franchise, but on the other hand, it meant POW blocks got to come back
My last two brain hemispheres
RPG character that, upon selecting "Heal" in the battle menu, calmly walks offscreen all the way back to the previous save point, rests at it, then returns to the battle and finishes their turn.
When they joined the party, they immediately threw away all of the max elixirs.
"The pain isn't as bad when I close my eyes." *closes eyes 1 and 2* "Maybe a little more." *closes eyes 3 to 7* "I think it's helping." *closes eyes 8 to 14* "It's not normally this bad." *closes eyes 15 to 29*
Thinking of learning a new special attack where I unleash a clunky robotic version of myself, and then after 10 seconds the real me explodes.
They call it the RetroPie bec[
So. You can see me. This is my tweet now. I've eaten its Heart. All of its Likes? They fill only my belly. Will you stop me? How can you fight what has no form? Ha ha ha…
]ause when you see how long the docs are, you turn pi radians and walk away
Dark Souls bonfire with a guy attempting to dry his laundry on the diagonal stick-thing, despite repeated insistence by his compadre that it only holds a metaphysical "flame of life" and not a literal fire.
Person Who Really Does Want To Know How Long Your Intestines Would Be If They Were Taken Out And Unraveled: "Please… just give me a number… I already know you'd die…" *clicking noises* "I SAID I ALRE
OK. OK, listen. I have an elegant plan that lets them sell cards that replace MTG's own twenty-year-old IP with that of various slightly more popular IPs. First, they change the rules of Magic: The Gathering to be identical to the rules of Weiß Schwarz. Then,
I have to hand it to the Magic: The Gathering corp. Releasing all-new tournament-legal cards exclusively in a limited-time luxury-priced product? Contemptible. Releasing tournament-legal crossover cards for non-fantasy pop culture IPs? Controversial. But both at the same time? Th
Since Steve has been added to Smash Bros., I decided to boot up Minecraft itself for the first time in years. It's still as heartachingly beautiful as I remember.
Pleased to announce that the running person from Canabalt has finally slammed into enough consecutive crates to slow to a full stop, allowing them to calmly take an elevator to the ground floor.
The primitive values are the basis of all programming. The primitive value types are number, string, boolean, symbol, unit, null, nil, undefined, none, void, empty, nothing, indefinite value, darkness, abyss, and "the unvalue".
The dwarf from Dwarf Fortress was ROBBED of its Smash roster slot
(Yes, this is Musyng Kite putting in the hard yards) https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/1199630027639230466
*looks at the clock and sees 6PM, October 2nd* Welcome, my northern hemispherical friends, to October.
*sagely, scholarly tone* This McCay fellow sure does like drawing flag-filled parades and detailed naval battleships any chance he can get, eh.
I did another reread of a bunch of Little Nemo in Slumberland strips, and what I hadn't fully picked up on the previous times is, alongside the propagandistic racism, how much of it is so militaristically imperialist.
Just want to note that there is now a direct overlap with the rosters of Super Meat Boy (2010) and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2019).
My way of summarising the mood of Dark Souls to newcomers, having played ALL of most of one game, is: simply watch a few episodes of the claymation kids sitcom The Trap Door (depicted below) and then extrapolate an entire world operating on its internal logic.
