#2024 post mortem

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

I've talked before about postmortems of the 2024 elections and what Democrats need to do to pull their heads out of their asses. But one thing I forgot to mention and its arguably the most important is that they need to get rid of the neocons and war hawks within their own party.

Ever since Trump was elected in 2016 the Democrats began to suffer from TDS and joined with the neocons to beat Trump. (Which is funny given Trump isn't much of a dove despite what the media says about him.) To the point the Democrats became more hawkish in foreign policy and allowed former government war hawks onto places like CNN and MSNBC to be uncritically heard. They just swallowed all the bullshit the war hawks were spewing. They never bothered to push back on them at all. They also vote in favor of more war and hawkish foreign policy. And often the people who praised these war hawks were often the very same people who were critical of George W. Bush during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, it's incredibly hypocritical. And their endorsement of these horrible policies has made the world a worse place with war and violence.

This has done damage to their party as a lot of postmortem polls revealed that many Americans were motivated by foreign policy for this election which is rare since Americans usually aren't. So not just for the sake of their base but for the sake of the world they should ditch the neocons and war hawks. We need doves now more than ever.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Trump didn't win, the Democrats lost.

As I write this on Friday November 8th at 10:29 AM, there are still votes yet uncounted but the overall shape of things is clear and they provoke interesting questions.

This was a low turnout election. Not 2016 low, but much lower than 2020. Even after all of Wednesday and Thursday to finish counting high population states, Harris is still trailing Biden's 2020 tally by about 10 million votes. Which is not as bad as the 15 million that internet arguments on Wednesday and into Thursday will be using, but its still quite bad.

Even Trump, while the winner, is still several million votes shy of his 2020 tally.

The temptation to blame Biden is real and I agree with it. I think he was a good President in the sense that he had some notable and worthy achievements despite intense opposition, but the failure to have the humility to honor the implicit promise to be a transitional figure and not seek reelection I personally feel is unforgivable. Its hyperbolic often to say unforgivable, but at least at this moment I do not foresee a Jimmy Carter style rehabilitation in Biden's future.

I think this is a shame, not just because Trump won, but also because I did like Kamala Harris at least as a person. I soured on her as the finish line approached but I recognize that she was presented a no win scenario and tried to make the best of it. She had to run a campaign in which she could not meaningfully go rogue without provoking questions about why she'd stayed in the administration if she held strong dissenting opinions or making Biden into even more a lame duck than he already was.

What does her heart truly hold? Would she have meaningfully distanced herself from Biden on any issue of consequence? I guess we'll have to wait for the inevitable post election rebuttal book.

Maybe the fact that I did find her charming is a reflection of myself. I've not liked every answer she's given to every question but as someone who is sometimes inarticulate and a bit of a wonky dweeb, I get it. This doesn't present as authentic outside the college educated liberal set, clearly. Which means I'm likely even more out of touch than I know but all I can do is explain my values and how they connect to my preferred policies and issues and hope for the best.

Its all any of us can do.

And we can do that better.

The moral cooties theory of communication and association needs to die. Now.

Harris should have gone on Rogan.

Walz should have gone on Rogan.

This would not have likely changed the outcome, because in reality liberals, progressives, and socialists should have been doing on Rogan for YEARS.

Rogan says transphobic, misogynistic, racist, and downright scientifically stupid things.

All true.

So fight him.

Don't outsource this to shitposters in the comment sections, go on his program, and make the case to his audience.

A host can be acting in bad faith but still be the gatekeeper to a large audience that is not reachable with a sit down on The View or the Ezra Klein Show and Harris didn't even go on the Ezra Klein Show! The most respected liberal intellectual pundit, one who burned a lot of credibility to say what everyone was already thinking: that Biden should drop out and he did it months before that stupid debate with Trump, someone Harris almost assuredly owes quite a bit to for creating the permission structure for people to advocate for dumping Biden and she didn't go on the show.

We cannot keep having candidates do this.

Enough "safe" interviews.

Enough "platforming" or "legitimizing" discourse.

Go argue with the transphobe on his own show. If you persuade even 0.1% of his audience, maybe that 0.1% will be in districts you need to win.

Having these millionaires go talk to unfriendly millionaires doesn't mean you're legitimizing them, you're using them to access their audience. Period.

And knock it off with the "platforming" discourse around media and allowing unfriendly people an opportunity to talk. If the electorate comes away with an interview with JD Vance or some other grifter weirdo liking them instead of seeing them as liars code switching for a more moderate audience, then we have bigger problems than the media doing a "both same."

And for the rest of us, tolerating misogny, transphobia etc. is not what's called for, but learning to talk to people outside our group chats is. We were wrong after 2016 to double down on "my labor isn't free" "its not my job to educate you" "Google is your friend" - you don't have to feed trolls, but its clear that after almost a decade, "cancel culture" and "platforming" discourse has failed. Completely and disastrously. The very people these ideas were supposed to protect are now going to get hurt the worst by the lazy virtue signaling of the rest of us who had the emotional and physical safety to make GOOD arguments on their behalf.

[nyaaamato]

AKATSUKI ASSEMBLE! late day 1 pic for @obito-week 🎉

[radliftist]

While we’re all talking about the election from the points of policy, the major issue here is turnout. 2020 won for Dems because of vote by mail. 2024 happens and people are standing in line for five hours again in dense, blue areas. Would you wait in line for five hours to vote for Kamala Harris, when she isn’t bringing anything new or exciting to the table and can’t even promise an arms embargo?

I would not. There’s nothing exciting there that people want badly. No rent relief programs, no healthcare relief programs, only a weak, moderate vision for how to improve the lives of her constituents. And Liz Cheney was supposed to be exciting?

The left needs to include young men.

[everydaym0nstrosity]

Owen Davis - Morbid Pathology (2024).

[skyshard13]

I wrote up an blog post/postmortem for my last game, GUARDIAN ANGEL. I go in depth about a lot of the design decisions in that game, as well as a lot of things I wished I could have done better. Go check it out here!

[artbysupercres]

Been working on a lot of different things this year, but the thing I am proudest of is starting to write again. That being said, I think I'll share some of the paintings I was most proud of this year. Starting with this one: Franna's House.

Since writing has become a significant part of my non-work life again, I have also gotten back in touch with horror in a big way. Lots of great movies and books (new and old). It feels like a good time to love horror. Here are some of the designs I liked, and one actual complete piece Expect more <3

In more personal news, I got engaged this year! Weird times!

[filosofablogger]

The XYZ States of America

This nation’s very name is a misnomer, a cruel joke.  The United States of America is no longer ‘United’ in any way, shape, or form.  I’ve long called for civil discourse, for listening to those with differing viewpoints and trying to find a space in the middle for compromise.  But those days are gone.  There is no middle ground, there can be no compromise, and this country must find itself a new…

[bitchinyoga]

Election Post-Mortem

Written and buried November 6 2024 Rain breaks over broken brittle earth scarred by months of drought. Why break now? Sunshine would be too ironic. Dear nature you hid the sun and dampened our fire. The absence of light suits our mourning this post-mortem morning. Shock waves whitecaps in my veins. We are not the people we believed we’d be. The second election of Trump is undeniable…

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

I was originally more optimistic they will learn because they can't keep doing this shit forever. A lot of the media that traditionally supports the Democrats like the NYT, Washington Post and a few others have decided they needed to tone down their rhetoric. That and the fact the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris is a sign of that. That and there are some post-mortems from more Democratic establishment types realizing where they went wrong.

But then I see the reactions online from the people on the ground. And it's usually middle to upper class white women losing their shit so maybe they didn't learn a whole lot. Seeing the white women go ape shit like that feels like a repeat of 2016.

Hopefully, this is in the short term and in the long term they do realize where they went wrong because, the people of America deserve to have better political candidates than what we have been getting for the last 8 years.

The more Internet™ I read today, the more convinced I become that democrats are Going To Learn Nothing™ from this

[super-kristuff]

Frontline Factory - Postmortem

I made a game for GMTK gamejam! I waited this long to post anything mostly because I was absolutely drained by the end of the 96 hours. This ended up being my lowest rated GMTK submission at #4312 out of 7,639; however, I feel like this is my greatest game yet. I feel like the game received the rating it did because of a tricky control scheme, poor tutorialization, and a punishing learning curve. I think the most interesting part is that elements 1 and 3 were actually somewhat deliberate on my part.

So, the original plan was to have the game be a top-down puzzle game like Overcooked. I wanted the player to be hastily running around with robot parts in hand and the element of scale to be enforced by the size of the robots the player had to make and the complexity of the builds. Obviously this was somewhat large in scope, but I felt getting the game to a playable state would be achievable.

Pretty quickly in development, I realized it would be faster to test features with a click and drag system. I justified that the player would be able to grab and drop in a similar manner, but I never got around to that. I decided that the player could just be a crane floating on the screen, and the drag and drop could be the primary mode of interfacing with the robots.

This wasn't super outlandish considering Last Call BBS and Mech Builder were both big inspirations for this project; however, I think the deviation from keyboard to keyboard AND mouse is a huge reason why players found my game to be confusing. I really wanted to challenge myself and build something more than just another 2D platformer, and I really think that I accomplished that goal. I'm not really sure how to describe the genre of my game, and that weird exploratory space is something I've been building towards for the longest time.

HOWEVER, I think by accomplishing this goal, my game is now outside the standards of videogame literacy. Everybody has some experience with a 2D platformer, but unless a player has played Last Call BBS or Mech Builder, it is safe to say that this would be a new experience. This isn't exactly a negative, but it does mean that I couldn't lean on players 'figuring it out', and I really needed to have any kind of tutorial at all.

Playing a lot of games during the gamejam, it's kind of embarrassing that I didn't have any kind of tutorialization in game. I wrote all the instructions on the floor of the main level, and even hid some behind the robot thinking "they'll have to move the robot now!". In retrospect, having some picture instructions on a dedicated page from the main menu would have been much more helpful and just as easy to implement.

I saw a shocking number of games with opening cutscenes, and I feel like I could have maybe pulled that off? It would have been a crunch from time pressures, but I don't think it would have been impossible to do something simple. Optimally, I think making an introductory level or two, where the player just needed to connect a single piece or submit an already completed robot, could have helped break down the complexity to a digestible amount.

Finally, I think my original motives of an Overcooked style game amplified my mistakes from lack of instruction. I added a timer and a bit of screen shake to make the player feel like they were under a bit of pressure, and I think this clashed horribly with the confusing atmosphere I had created. When I finally had the chance to pass the game to my little brother for playtesting (a couple days after submission), it took him two or three game-overs just to finish reading the instructions.

This was actually a concern of mine during development, but because I was able to beat the game in half the time, I assumed most players would have a bit of challenge to beat it within the time. I actually still feel like the amount of time is fair if only I had a better system in place for player instruction.

The timer also clashed horribly with my brother's prefered gaming setup: a school issued chromebook. The game is basically unplayable with any kind of touchpad, fullstop. I've always had a wireless mouse for my laptop, so I didn't even consider the play experience without it. Which, was a huge blunder on my part.

I think that about sums up my thoughts on the game. I was thinking about maybe expanding the game into something more akin to the original vision, but I thought that making this postmortem would not only be easier but also help to sort out my thoughts. I honestly feel like the amount of polish I've accomplished with this game is unparalleled by any other game I've made up to this point.

In conclusion, I think Frontline Factory is a game that lost its original intent somewhere along development. I think a lot of reasonable microscopic choices led to a lot of macroscopic consequences. I'm extremely happy with how well the game turned out, and I'm impressed with how much I've learned.

This is kind of a lot, so I don't expect anyone to have read the full thing, but thanks if you did.

[theriverbeyond]

Rated E (18+) | 4.8k words

“I’m not a child, Pyrrha,” he says. Cam’s face is pulled into a scowl, and you like the way the skin between his eyes furrows. It’s different from how Cam does it, and you think it’s cute, and painfully endearing. “I’m—shit. I’m twenty-two, if you count the years post-mortem. Twenty if you don’t, and House age of majority is eighteen regardless.” “I was twenty-two long before the Resurrection, ten thousand years ago,” you reply. The eggs you’re trying to cook sizzle. “You’re too young for me, Sextus."

This fic was written for Fandom Trumps Hate 2024 (@fandomtrumpshate) as a gift to thank @beyoncesfiancee for her donation to Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

FEATURING:

Pal/Pyrrha, ft background Cam/Pal/Pyrrha dynamics!

What if we were both stuck in a body that didn't fit our gender OR necro/cav alignment.... and we were both on New Rho👉👈!

Notable Cougar Hunter Palamedes Sextus!

Psychosexual roleplaying AND bad meals!

Background Nona antics!

Wild speculation on how DIY hormones might interact with a Lyctoral Body!

The ever present shadow of grief!

[voxina]

By their own admission, 2024 was a rough year for the Black Keys. After releasing their 12th studio album, Ohio Players, the band was looking forward to a North American arena tour following successful shows in Europe. Instead, they canceled the entire tour, reportedly due to low ticket sales, and subsequently fired their management — which included industry heavyweight Irving Azoff — and PR team. Two weeks later, in a since-deleted tweet aimed at Azoff, drummer Patrick Carney wrote, “We got fucked. I’ll let you all know how so it doesn’t happen to you.” (In another deleted tweet, Carney sarcastically wrote of Azoff, “So great to know you are always looking out for the artist.”)

Short of a few shows — more on the group’s “America Loves Crypto” gig in their hometown of Akron, Ohio later — the band went relatively quiet, establishing a semi-frequent Nashville residency for their all-vinyl “Record Hang” dance parties but not speaking publicly on the fracas that both fans and the music industry watched closely.

Last July, the duo did what they usually do when faced with adversity: They hit the studio, spending the better part of last summer and fall writing and recording more than 15 songs for their upcoming album, No Rain, No Flowers. (The group is still deciding how many tracks will make the final cut and will release the album later this year.) On first single “The Night Before” (written with Daniel Tashian, who co-wrote and co-produced Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour), the group leans into its upbeat pop-rock side. “It was very organically [done] in the studio together,” singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach tells Rolling Stone. “The three of us just came up with it together on the spot.”

Earlier this week, the duo announced their long-awaited rescheduled tour dates, swapping arenas for smaller amphitheaters and theaters. “The whole music industry obviously has changed over the last 15 years,” Carney says. “We’re still trying to figure out how it works and feels authentic.”

In their first interview since the tour cancellation and management split, Carney and Auerbach spoke to Rolling Stone from the group’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville for both a post-mortem of the past year and optimistic look ahead.

Can you talk a little about the significance of the album title No Rain, No Flowers? Dan Auerbach: Well, we wrote the [title] song with [Grammy-winning songwriter] Rick Nowels, and it was just an expression that I’d heard, and we turned it into this tune that seemed to sum up how we envisioned ourselves getting over the situation that we’d just been through.

Patrick Carney: Rick likes to start with a title, and that was the title Dan had written down in his phone. You got to take it on the chin sometimes to move forward, and that’s kind of what the last year was for us.

How would you sum up the past year for you guys? Carney: Pretty enlightening and eye-opening. Dan and I have a pretty good grasp on the music industry, but to be exposed firsthand to how things have changed, it was pretty shocking to understand what’s actually going on. I think trying to avoid getting jaded and totally flustered, we took the opportunity to reassess how we’re doing things and to make a record that’s mostly on this positive tinge.

What specifically was shocking to you? Carney: To generalize: to see how consolidated the industry has gotten and how connected things have become. It’s mind-blowing. And there’s just a lot of shared interests across the business side of this. When you’re an artist trying to interface with that and trying to receive helpful and constructive strategy and business input, you realize that that whole world is more deeply connected than I had ever really thought.

Dan, how would you categorize the past year? Auerbach: A lot of ups and downs, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of 2 a.m. phone calls, a lot of worry and stress, a lot of heartache, but also an incredible amount of creativity. I feel really excited about the music we’ve been making. It feels like the creative juices are flowing in a really positive way, and I’m kind of loving it.

Let’s get into some details. Two weeks after the tour was canceled, a rep for Azoff Management said the split was “an amicable parting.” Is that how you would characterize it? Carney: [Pauses.] I mean, we fired their ass. Shit happens. We spent a lot of time making Ohio Players and turned it in in October 2023 and had all this time to plan how we were going to tour. Things got off to this weird start where I was waiting for these European dates to pop up because our plan was to go to Europe first. We ended up getting nine shows sent to us [on] a three-week tour. There’s absolutely no way to make money [from] that.

We kept having to move shit around for a Manchester show because there was a venue that our management company co-owned and wanted us to play, and it wasn’t ready. After going to Europe 30 times in our career for tours, this was the most poorly orchestrated tour we had been on. The shows were incredible, but [it] just became the first sign that maybe there was some poor organization happening.

When did the relationship with Irving Azoff sour? Carney: The ultimate answer to this is that it’s a broader thing. I don’t even want to mention that guy’s name. I want to look at this from a bigger perspective. The essential thing that we learned here was how many management companies are directly connected to a company that runs every single aspect of promotion in this country. This whole industry is so intertwined from ticketing to promotion to the management company. But essentially as artists — and this is the thing that we care the most about — it’s almost impossible to talk about this…. You’re dealing with management companies that co-own festivals with this other company. You’re at the [whims] of these people who have other interests.

So when you’re called into a manager’s office and he suggests something to you, I was naive enough to think that that was on the up-and-up. And more and more, it’s just not. So it’s a hard thing because I don’t think Dan and I want to sit here and look like whining bitches. But we got a little bamboozled here.

Patrick, last year you tweeted: “We got fucked. I’ll let you all know how so it doesn’t happen to you. Stay tuned.” How do you feel you got “bamboozled”? Carney: Well, I had to delete it, so I didn’t get sued.

Who threatened to sue you? Carney: No one threatened, but it was a big no-no to even talk about what’s going on here. There’s a concentration of connectivity that eliminates competition. [For] a capitalist society to function, there has to be competition. And if everything’s connected and all the interests are shared on one side, there’s no way to compete. Our tour, we had about 10 [arena] shows that were not doing great. They were just in rooms that they shouldn’t have been in.

So in any situation like this tour, we might’ve had to take one on the chin and find new venues to play in certain cities, but instead we were advised to cancel the whole tour. We were told … there were other venues being booked, and it was all going to get into more intimate rooms, and it would be great. But that wasn’t accurate. That didn’t exist.

It’s all very fucked up, and the bottom line is that we can’t even really talk about it because we won’t be able to work.

Dan, did you know Patrick was going to tweet that? Auerbach: No, I woke up to that one.

How did you feel when you saw it? Auerbach: I understood the intensity of it.

Anything else? Auerbach: No.

Did you two ever personally consider scaling down the tour rather than cancel, or are you claiming that wasn’t even an option? Carney: No, it was told to me by someone that we ended up parting ways with that the dates were being rebooked into rooms that were scaled down. So we could cancel this tour and we would re-announce dates in a couple days in these better rooms. But the plan wasn’t there because there were no holds on rooms. It was bullshit. I don’t want to use the term “lie” because I don’t want to get fucking sued, but what was presented didn’t exist.

There’s certain cities where we know we can [sell] … but you want to look to your management to make these decisions. We spend so much time making the music [and] figuring out promotional shit. This is what you lean into for management, and you hope that there’s decisions that are made on the up-and-up so that they help everybody. That’s just harder and harder to come by.

Now I’m curious about your thoughts on the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Live Nation, claiming the company is a monopoly. (Live Nation vehemently denied the claim when the lawsuit was filed.) Carney: When [the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger closed in 2010], Obama said, “This is so close to a monopoly. You need to watch this.” And the reason why it was allowed to go through — because it was a monopoly — the argument was artists aren’t signed into long contracts. The artists can always just opt to go to someone else … But at this point, if you don’t work with a certain company, where are you going to work?

The thing that most people don’t understand is that when you control ticketing, promotion, and all this stuff, and then you get into owning the venues and then having shared interests with management, it just becomes harder and harder [for artists] to do business. This isn’t something that’s unique to the music business. All across this country, things are getting so intertwined [and] so consolidated that it’s harder to compete in general.

It was widely reported that ticket sales for the tour were weak, with The New York Times saying last year, “Some tours like the Black Keys may simply be a matter of the band overestimating demand.” Is that a fair statement? Carney: I don’t know, but all I know is this: After the tour was canned, I went through my email, and I had one email from Ticketmaster about the tour on the day it was announced and nothing else in my inbox for six weeks. When I finally went through the numbers after the tour was canceled, we had sold nearly $10 million worth of tickets, and we had four months till the first show. We just had to take one on the fucking face.

After the tour was announced, more than a few fans complained about high ticket prices, and it’s the artist that typically sets those prices. Nosebleed seats were reportedly going for $100 at some venues. Carney: We weren’t even asked about the ticket prices on the last tour. We didn’t set them. On this [next] tour, we realized that we have to be more involved in this. The last thing Dan and I want to do is gouge a fan on a ticket.

But in retrospect, would you have tried to lower the ticket price? Carney: Yeah. This is this ongoing thing where it’s like when we did the El Camino arena tour [in 2012-13], the average upper bowl ticket was $40 or something. And then after scalping and stuff, those tickets were $65, so scalpers were making more money off those tickets than we were. Which I think is disheartening because the fans are paying it and it’s not getting to the band.… The cost of going on tour now versus 2012 is 3.5 [times higher]. Our ticket prices haven’t gone up that much.

You fired your management and PR team after the tour was canceled, but not the agency that actually booked the tour. Why is that? Carney: [Pauses.] Because I think a lot of these deals are done between management and another bigger company.

You did play a few live shows last year, including a show called “America Loves Crypto,” whose goal was to “rally the 5 million crypto owners that might just decide the 2024 election.” How did that gig come together? Carney: It was very simple: We had lost all of our income for the year. We had retainers for people that we were working with. We got offered a lot of money to play a show, and we saw that the Black Pumas had done the same event and we were like, “Book it.” It’s that simple, bro.

I was going to ask if you guys consider yourselves crypto enthusiasts. Carney: We’re Crisco enthusiasts.

You did get a fair share of criticism, though. The top comment on your own fan Reddit is, “LMAO. It’s a PAC that has endorsed all the worst candidates from both parties. What the hell are they even doing?” Did you talk about the optics of doing this gig? Carney: Of course we saw all the shit coming in, but it was like, “What are you going to do?” We were told it was a bipartisan thing. It was what it is. It was very small. It was in our hometown, so we got to go home and see our folks. I’ve definitely seen my name in bad light in the press before, so it wasn’t anything fucking new … If us playing a concert for 300 people is going to sway the whole state’s vote, then we have bigger fucking problems, bro.

Given the past year, does your mindset change going into the next tour? Carney: The most important thing for us right now is to just put on good shows that the fans enjoy. We’ve been looking to bands whose records maybe don’t chart well, but they connect with their fans in a deep way. We’ve been on this creative streak where we’ve released four albums in five years. We might just be saturating the fucking market, but it’s like while it’s happening, you just have to do it.

We’re both in our mid-forties. We’ve been doing this for 20 years. We have a greater appreciation now for what we have together than ever before. And over the last year, we’ve seen people we care about get sick. Life isn’t a guaranteed thing. So if you have this thing that’s working, why not just fucking move on it?

It’s important for people to know we got a little bit complacent with the business shit because we’ve been so busy with the creative shit, and so we just got reminded that we have to pay attention to both things.

When you look back on the five-year period between 2014’s Turn Blue and 2019’s Let’s Rock, when you guys weren’t really speaking, do you think it cost you any momentum or potential success? Carney: I looked at it like this, dude. Back then, we were literally printing money, and we were miserable. Now we’re just making tons of songs, and we’re in a much better place. The gigs were coming in, and we weren’t able to make music as often as we wanted, and that’s where the break came from … We just wanted to make some music, and so that’s where we’ve been trying to navigate that road since. We’ve picked out rooms that seem like the fans will enjoy the most, that we’ll enjoy the most, and we’ll just see what the fuck happens. Hopefully, people show up.

Patrick was always the more business-minded end of the group. Dan, did the events of the past year make you want to become more involved in the business side? Auerbach: We just have to focus on what we do best, and each of us have talents in certain areas. We just put trust in each other, and that’s the most important thing right now, and that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s funny because it’s probably a direct result of all this trauma that we just went through the last year, but we’ve been hanging out together more than ever. We’ve been getting obsessed with music and collecting records, and hanging out more is making the music better and the business better. 

What exactly do you mean by “trauma”? Auerbach: Going through all the work to put this whole thing together to be able to present it to our fans, and then going out and supporting it on the road and playing shows for our fans, and then to have all of that taken away and mess up the connection that we had to our fans for so many years right when we felt like we were really in a great place. Like we said with those shows in Europe, even though the business side of the tour was so bad, the actual shows were amazing, and we expected the same when we went back to the States.

We’d been opening up our sets, doing covers, and we had plans for doing more of that too. And to just have all that completely pulled out from under us, it was not something we’d ever experienced before in 20-plus years of doing it. So yeah, it was traumatic. But I guess we’re feeling more thankful than ever that we’re able to go out on the road and play shows and be able to see our fans again.

It sounds like mentally, you guys are in a better place than you were six or nine months ago. Carney: Yeah. We’re competitive, and we like to work. And when it seems like the rules have been changed to the point where the game isn’t winnable, that’s when we start getting fucking flustered. We’ve been looking to people who play a different game. They don’t get caught up in that bullshit. Their version of winning is more about how they connect with their fans. That’s the inspiration.

[Full article here]

[foxglovegames]

DEV LOG: 2024 Recap

Helloooo everyone!

This year genuinely flew past us. As a studio, we had our ups-and-many-downs, but we're feeling more positive going into 2025. Let's start with what we got done this year before moving onto our plans for the future! :)

⭐Released Trouble Comes Twice: Bonus Stories!

Feels like we released this ages ago, but it hasn't even been a year yet! Back in April, we released the first (and only) public DLC for Trouble Comes Twice. For us, Bonus Stories was a satisfying goodbye to these characters after spending years with them; we hope that players who decided to give the DLC a chance feel the same.

It'll always be a bit bittersweet moving on from a project you've worked on for so long and dedicated so much towards. There's always going to be what-ifs, but we're mostly just proud of what we did achieve and kind of relieved we made it to the finish line haha. If you're interested in reading more about our experience working on Trouble Comes Twice and what we learned, do check out this post mortem we wrote! We hope it offers some insight for players who might be curious and other vn devs who'd like another dev's take.

⭐A tumultuous start for our next visual novel Burn the Midnight Oil

Since the end of 2023, we've worked on and off on our next visual novel Burn the Midnight Oil. The plan was to launch a Kickstarter campaign and demo before the end of 2024 - since it's now Dec and that never happened, you can imagine things did not go as planned ahah... Unfortunately, we experienced several setbacks, one of the biggest being that our lead artist had to leave the project some months ago due to health issues.

It took us a minute to find the right person to step in and take over the character art, but we recently welcomed a new lead artist whom we're incredibly excited to be working with!

So, where does the project stand right now?

Our new character artist is chipping away at the sprites and CGs for the game, which are the main assets we're still missing to finish the demo.

Script is written, edited and coded in

BGs are completed and the UI is close to completed

We're planning to tackle the soundtrack in the coming months, but our composer BellKallengar has already finished an amazing main menu theme! We can't wait for you to hear it.

For our own sanity and the expectations of our players, we're not making any promises or guesses on when you can expect the demo, Kickstarter, or official announcement until we know for certain. The only thing we can confidently confirm is that it's coming in 2025 (unless we're struck by the worst bad luck ever).

We're going to resume regular monthly updates when the game has been announced, but until then, we're sticking o quarterly updates instead so the next one would be in March. (Unless we manage to announce the game before that! A dev can dream.)

⭐PLANS FOR 2025

There's only one concrete plan - officially announcing Burn the Midnight Oil, releasing the Kickstarter demo, and launching our crowdfunding campaign! Melli and I already finished the demo script earlier this year, so we've been working on outlining (and writing) the routes for the full game. We hope to make as much progress as possible on that before the Kickstarter launches. Hopefully, that should save us a lot of time in the long run.

We hope everyone's having a fantastic holiday season! See you all in the new year! 🥂

[embraceweird]

The post mortem addition to the Bad Kid's parents' polycule was not on my 2024 bingo card

[skyshard13]

I've finished putting together a (somewhat belated) postmortem for my Velox Fabula 2 entry!

You can read it here: