anymoretastelessdemands

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a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.

care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.

connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims

gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme

glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.

ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme

life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure

taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies

the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care

islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support

baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies

gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.

hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste

anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care

palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon

dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram

certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.

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I miss games conveying a sense of Bigness

As you know if you watch my twitch streams, I play a lot of games, and games from a lot of eras, and there's a whole bunch of industry trends you pick up on from certain time periods. The one I really feel like talking about was a definite thing from oh... 1998 through... 2010 or thereabouts? Basically the aughts, give or take a couple years. Or if you prefer, the first two Playstations' run and a bit of the third. It was a period where games in general were really committed to feeling Big.

It feels a little weird to say that when major releases are priding themselves on stuff like measuring how much disk space they need in terrabytes and maps that sprawl out everywhere, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Games trying to feel Big is more of an attitude thing, and ironically enough I'd say it fell out of fashion almost immediately when Open Worlds became the new big thing. We hit a point where people actually made the maps for their games super big (even if most of that space was just kinda vast stretches of unremarkable rocks) so there's no more need to fake it, right? But faking it was kinda great.

I was thinking about this a lot playing the Resident Evil 2 remake, and comparing it to the original PSX game. See the original Resident Evil was set in a spooky mansion out in the middle of nowhere, but RE2 was the Bigger Better Sequel. So now we have a zombie outbreak happening in a whole major city, not just this single mansion. And how do we accomplish that? Do we actually model hundreds of buildings and have a big meandering adventure through all of them, or even a good swath? No not at all. Let's compare the actual maps side by side...

[There WAS a full map of RE2 here it was causing the post button to bug out. Look it up on your own?]

It's a little bigger. There's maybe a dozen more total rooms? But mostly, it's a smoke and mirrors thing. We've still got one big primary location, an animal-filled hike to a side location and back, and an underground science facility, but it feels like we've increased the scope to an entire city. The first playable moments have us out on the streets of the city, objectively in a few quick hallways, but presented as streets packed with dozens of crashed cars, raging fires everywhere, dead bodies littering the streets, and what again feels like innumerable zombies feasting in scattered packs. Once inside, arms of several zombies outside will reach in clawing at you, or later in the game finally breaching through. The remake completely loses that feeling. It feels like there's maybe a dozen zombies out on the streets.

Not to focus on just the one game though. How about GTA3? Remember how even when you're just on the first island, it feels like you're exploring this vast sprawling city?

Here's a more elevated angle from about the same point. I'm looking at this with noclip.website by the way, it's a really cool little toy.

The actual map is LAUGHABLY small. But it FEELS huge. They were really careful to avoid straight roads, and place a couple big vision blocking buildings, even if they're basically just a cube or two so that when you're actually on the ground, it always feels like there's so much more around you. Have another side by side, and a rough estimate of what's visible on the ground in the bird's eye.

RPGs around this time were also having a lot of fun playing with scale comparisons. FF7 is the obvious go-to. The world map is on par with any other in the series, but Big Cities are presented as such, making it very clear that you're just seeing parts of a single district in Midgar, really just the main street in Junon. Dragon Quest 8 had this very bold idea to keep the same visual scale on the world map as in the streets of the towns, with forests made of actual individual trees.

And I'm not even getting into the biggest elephants in the room. Are you old enough to remember how mind-bogglingly sprawling Hyrule Field felt? Maybe a bad example when sequels have kept that focus on selling their worlds as staggeringly Big. Shenmue? Objectively, looking at this map, there's not much there, but damn if I don't feel like this was a real town I lived in for a while 20 years ago. It's the way the detailing gets finer and finer the closer you get to Ryo's bedroom, where you can open every drawer, turn on every light, turn that orange in your hand, you know? I believe that bus you take to the docks has to stop in several other neighborhoods like this one.

And of course, then there's the one other series, maybe worth mentioning, perhaps.

Years later I'm still just speechless.

Again though, I don't actually WANT games with worlds as big as some of these feel. There just isn't the time and the money and the ability for a creative team not to burn out to fully realize that in a handcrafted caring way. I want some kind of inverted Plato's Cave, where it feels like there's a vast breathing world out there, but I'm really in a small cozy space watching masters of the craft put on a shadow puppet show.

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In a monumental discovery for paleontology and the first of its kind "Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia"

Abstract The frozen mummy of the large felid cub was found in the Upper Pleistocene permafrost on the Badyarikha River (Indigirka River basin) in the northeast of Yakutia, Russia. The study of the specimen appearance showed its significant differences from a modern lion cub of similar age (three weeks) in the unusual shape of the muzzle with a large mouth opening and small ears, the very massive neck region, the elongated forelimbs, and the dark coat color. Tomographic analysis of the mummy skull revealed the features characteristic of Machairodontinae and of the genus Homotherium. For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied. For more read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-79546-1

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some highlights from hugh grant answering the proust questionnaire in vanity fair.

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it would've been cooler if those animals they sent into space came back with superpowers

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and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

no tumblr this doesnt need tags im releasing it into the wild as god intended

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stuck between "psychological horror statement" and "objectively the funniest thing you could say to your real flesh and blood dad" in the father's day card aisle

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hey yall guess what

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