#I don't want to think its the store but I'm developing trust issues

[chipped-chimera]

Agonising over when to get another Betta for this tank ... I know in my head I should do it sooner than later because the longer I leave it the less choice I have when it comes to the current stock my store has but ...

I'm still ripped up over Fish Karlach's death. I had her for such a short time and I still miss her, and I'm not sure my tank is in the clear. Another Corydora, a more mature one too, passed away but I noticed this one developing a problem around the same time the issue with the Betta started, and after a chat with my shop bought stronger medicine since what I was using probably wasn't cutting it - but I think in the end that was just too much for her. She was on the way out and I probably could have saved her if I went for help sooner but couldn't really do much while waiting to be clear of COVID (absolutely shit timing btw).

I was looking at the females at the shop on that day and just ... I didn't want them. I wanted her back. I know it's just my extremely bad luck, I did just about everything right with the knowledge I had available at the time and literally dealing with COVID, but it just hurts when like, I know there are betta fish out there living in unheated, unfiltered shitty, tiny tanks with plastic plants still live whereas mine, in a carefully managed heavily planted tank had to die. It's not fair.

What also sucks is with this shipment at the store, all the females are just marbles- maybe even from the same spawn and I'm straight up allergic to that gene because I know of its high risk for tumors. I generally don't want a marble. At all. But unfortunately all the other non-marble, specific-type fish are all Males, which I think would be more likely to have a behavioural issue in a community tank considering all the females are still stocked together so they're used to other fish already. I don't really have much in the way of other options unless I take a near 2hr drive way north of my city but even then fish stocking in Western Australia just plain sucks.

Maybe I'll wait a week. Idk. But pretty sure the methalyne blue that went in the tank will have killed off any remaining bacteria (what was theorised to be the cause) kicking around in there. I definitely know there are no parasites, since that treatment ran for like 2 weeks. Not really wanting to do a full course of methalyne blue though since I could tell some of my plants weren't liking it, and the one fish I was treating for died quickly anyway. Still a decent amount in there, just less. Probably need two more water changes to clear it.

I need to move on but goddamn I don't think I could deal with another sick fish.

[rinion-b]

"this is why i have attachment issues" is really not how i planned to start this, but that's kinda where i'm at after a few hours to sit on it all.

this is about the whole limbus/pm situation today, for context (i won't be giving any more because i don't know if what i have is accurate, and i hate the idea of me spreading any misinformation when it's already a fucked situation). purely a word vomit, trying to not give any judgement on anything non-objective since there is still a lot of room for followup from project moon once things settle

my overall sentiments on this situation from just seeing updates every hour or so in between work:

what the fuck!

damn it was that serious?

that's...not a great solution...

well shit, was there any reasonable good outcome to all this?

i do want to clarify, i don't intend for any of this to idolize project moon or idealize the indie developer, as easy as that would be. at the same time, i hate the concept that they should be condemned immediately because they fucked up on responding to this situation (outside the context of some other complaints that i've seen from some illustrators and translators in the past).

there is no 'perfect' indie studio. project moon should not be excused for their own failings, especially not on account of them being a small studio. those things can coexist with the concept that, maybe they didn't have much of a choice with how to deal with this? and i've seen all the comparisons with their commentary on society, i get it, i understand and honestly you have a great point. but you cannot escape the impact of capitalism, and i don't think that yelling about the values they portray in their stories is particularly helpful when the situation might affect their ability to continue operating as a company, or at the very least continue providing more limbus content and running the servers.

now, this is predominantly hearsay, but is a believable heuristic. i have heard from a few different friends on separate occasions that project moon is not the most well off financially, either because of development costs outweighing the performance of their older games, or their older games not being quite as profitable as they should objectively be given their quality (indie games are very undervalued often to compete in a space where the 'value' of a game is fucked over by AAA microtransactions and industry trends squeeze what they can out of a commonly accepted price point, but that's a separate discussion altogether). and limbus is their sort of 'last shot' to break into something sustainable.

assuming that this is true, and despite the issues with trusting hearsay especially in this scenario i would prefer to have reasonable evidence to change my mind on something like this, this puts project moon in a really fun situation when you look at the threat of having limbus taken off the korean app store (i'm not sure if this is The App Store in its entirety? there was a lot going on today so i might be missing details on that).

from my perspective as an observer who can neither read korean nor understand more than a few words of it spoken, the only conclusions i can draw from what i have seen in the short span of time since the announcement is some combination of the following points:

project moon either fired the employee to protect them from harrassment (current and future), or fired them because they judged that the loss of one employee in this state was less harmful in the long run than giving up a major source of revenue. maybe both! who the fuck knows!

i still don't know how to feel about all this

people online suck, gacha addicts suck, and being on twitter (or, well, X now) is terrible for my mental health because so many people act in absolutes on the slightest prompt and i can't fucking stand it

people are going to harrass project moon for responding to the harrassment the way they did and i feel like that says a lot about society

this has somehow not ruined my want to play limbus in the future, but idk if i will have any other inclinations to draw it. i don't want them to perish as a company from this one slip-up.

if limbus ends up dying i will probably never play another gacha game again, because despite everything my standards for game quality are through the fucking roof

i...think that's everything. lightly tagged because it would be nice to know how other people think about all this on a site that can handle conscious thought better but this is mostly just to get things out of my head rather than for conversation purposes.

everything fucking sucks, but at least we're still here to watch it burn, eh?