#I haven’t figured out how to render on my ipad yet

[spicysucculentz]

my beloved oc Wheels has made his return!! I’ve been neglecting him I haven’t drawn him in so long but he’s just a guy he deserves attention🫶🏻

Taglist (dm to join):

@sexy-rex @sunshinesdaydream

[tylerbiard]

Y and Z

Do you guys remember when analysts, insiders, and marketers were trying to “crack” the Millennials (Gen Y)?  It wasn’t even that long ago when articles on figuring out how to connect with my generation were vogue.  My dad even attended a conference on how to integrate Millennials into the workforce, circa 2010.  It still happens from time to time, but now, things are shifting towards figuring out my successor, Gen Z.  Makes sense, I guess, considering they’re almost as large as the Millennials and the Boomers, and despite the oldest members being 21 (born in 1996), people haven’t really been looking at the differences between those my age and those born a decade later, largely because they’ve often been lumped in with Millennials.

I’m towards the tail end of the Millennials (born in ‘93), and so I have some friends that are at the beginning of Gen Z, but overall, my friends tend to be Millennials, both younger and older.  In some regards, I find more similarities with early Gen Z members than older Millennials, but altogether, I’d say my affinities are definitely more with the Millennials than Gen Z.  That’s not a slight against Gen Z, rather just a noted difference, which will probably become blurred as we all get older anyways.  Going back to school well past when most people do also puts into perspective a bit of the difference; many of my classmates in first year courses were fresh outta high school (born in ‘98) and it does make me wonder where things are headed as Gen Z grows and matures, and where the generation follows it takes us as a society.

With the Millennials, Boomers and Gen Xers had to learn how to professionally work with a generation that grew up with the Internet in its infancy, with a generation that was given so much from its parents, including growing up being told we’re each our own “special snowflake” and that we should reach for the stars, and so long as we got a degree -- any degree -- we’d be happy.  We were considered idealistic, liberal, and tech-savvy.

Well, now, everyone’s used to it, and perhaps because Gen Z is also very tech-savvy and educated and grew up being given participation ribbons, nobody sought out the difference until more recently.  But there are differences.  Gen Z is more conservative apparently (I don’t see it in terms of social issues), more into “branding” oneself and generally more consumerist.  Gen Z is also way more immersed in digital technology than I ever was growing up.  I remember into junior high knowing people who still didn’t have Internet or a cell phone; I can’t see that really happening now except in extreme scenarios.  Furthermore, they grew up with high speed internet, not that dial up shit I had. 

I’m still one to prefer browsing on a stationary, desktop computer, rather than on my phone.  The phone is often more handy when I’m out, but if I have a choice, I’ll always go for the computer.  Which is partly why I loathe mobile-specific social media for not being more browser-friendly.  Being a photographer is no doubt an influence here, as I like being able to view visual media on a larger screen.  But I also grew up with desktops, and was used to having to physically go home to chat with people on MSN, and when I was out, I was basically disconnected.  I had a cell phone, sure, but I wasn’t texting on it (which was expensive) or browsing the ‘Net on it (which was even more expensive).  None of that happened until I got a Blackberry in 12th grade.  Millennials grew up around the PC; Generation Z grew up around iPads and iPhones.  Apparently, on average, Generation Z does not value time offline, while I personally value being disconnected on occasion (not permanently -- I’m not that much of a luddite).  I know when I’ve spent too much time in front of screens.

Gen Z is also more visual.  Well, I’m a photographer, so I’m naturally a very visual person, so this works for me on some level.  And as a Millennial, I’m not unaware of short attention spans among my cohort.  As digital technology continues to make inroads, it only makes sense that attention spans continue to wane.  But even still, I’m here, writing long blog posts and I enjoy photoblogs which are more long-form as well.  They aren’t easily digestable, though, which is why there are less viewers.  It makes sense that social media, then, has moved towards less politicized, more mobile and visually-orientated platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, while Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are waning, especially among Gen Z.  I’m not too happy about that, to be honest.  I find value in political discourse and believe that if we don’t fight for rights we may as well not have them.   You’re not getting discourse if you’re busy posting aesthetic selfies on Snapchat.  It seems like youth (including Millennials) have kinda accepted things as they are, and, perhaps due to overstimulation, are a bit fatigued at all the information out there, and so there is a certain sense of complacency.  The general mood of memes seems to be “yeah, the world is shit, I’ve accepted it doesn’t make sense and therefore I’m gonna shitpost rather than do anything about it.”  Maybe I’m reading into it too much but I’ve seen others corroborate this mindset.  It’s quite a different mentality from 7 years ago, when Twitter was at peak, which is all about discourse, often political.  I don’t think the interface of many websites now helps, which bombard you with ads and offers before you can see anything.

It’s a bit early to say, as the youngest Gen Zers are between 0 and 7, depending on who you ask, but I hope one thing that Gen Z and its parents (mostly Gen X) learn from the Millennials is regarding education.  It seems like the eldest members of Z were brought up with the same ideas as us, though.  I hope that they realize that it is important still to follow what you’re passionate about and you do need to find something of a career that you will enjoy, but I hope that there is more of a practicality about it.  My generation was told we’d be set as long as we had a degree -- any degree -- and I can tell you that that simply isn’t the case.  It isn’t that there are “worthless” degrees, but that there are degrees which require you to market yourself harder than if you got an Engineering degree and then becoming an Engineer.  I already know a few older Millennials who went down that path, and are or have gone back to school later for something more practical yet still enjoyable.  Academia works for certain fields, certainly, and the program I’m in is practical, but we’ve flooded universities too much because we’ve imbibed the idea that we need a degree to succeed, which is utter poppycock.  A lot of people in university would be better suited to a technical school or a diploma of some sort, which often yield great success without having to pay back a mountain of student loans.  I don’t know if Gen Z will learn this, as I know parents of Gen Z kids who’ve really imbibed the post-secondary ideal as much, if not more, than the Millennial’s parents.

I guess if you’re reading between the lines, I’m a bit sardonic about the future.  It’s nothing to do with Millennials or Gen Z specifically, as we’re both products of the time we grew up in.  A friend of mine joked that I was “born too late” and, considering how slow I sometimes I am with accepting technological trends and how much I like late 20th century pop culture, maybe he’s got a point.  But it’s always easy to romanticize the past.  The ‘50s were great, if you don’t factor in how close we were to nuclear annihilation or how discriminatory the hegemony was.  Furthermore, I’ve definitely become far more aware of things due to being able to access the Internet than if I grew up in an earlier time.  Despite the overstimulation, I think we can take for granted how much more aware we are able to be now; friction of distance has been reduced to rubble.  Also, my earlier comments about Gen Z favouring visual, favouring mobile, really apply to us all.  Millennials have orientated towards these formats, as well as older generations.  It definitely seems like my grandparents are more into their smartphone than they ever were Windows 98.  It’s just Gen Z is the generation that has no basis of comparison to a pre-mobile era, just like Millennials can’t compare to a pre-Internet age (except maybe some of our eldest members), and both have an influence on their respective generation.

Still, I’m not only curious how I’ll survive progress, but how society will as a whole.  America is in late empire, and there is no new Western power to take the helm like after Britain.  It’ll be interesting how that plays out for still-maturing Western countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but it seems like we’re shifting to a pre-Columbian paradigm dominated by the East.  As with any change, there’s uncertainty, although America will likely remain a major player in geopolitics for the long term, even if less hegemonic in scope.  I’m even more curious about what will become of us once those degrees we hammered thousands upon thousands of dollars on are rendered obsolete by AI.  Some say the singularity is nigh, some say it already happened and we were too busy tweeting to notice.  But I don’t think it has happened in the Kurzweilian sense, and once that happens, it’ll be interesting to see where things go.  If we can “survive” it, we’ll probably be better off.  But then there’s still climate change.  Maybe once we become a (hypothetical) Kardashev Type 1 civilization, we’ll have progressed towards not killing ourselves over differences and will have finally survived progress. 

But for now, I still have to live in a world ruled by filters and brands, all-the-while we became increasingly connected yet disconnected.  Maybe I’ll fuck off to Dawson City before having to bear the full front of our digital future.  Sounds nicer for someone unwilling to embrace digital advances like so many of my peers.  Then again, how different, really, is seeing a bunch of people, disparately glued to their phones, from seeing a different bunch of people glued to their books.  Despite being social animals, we’ve long desired our own “space” and privacy, at least in the Western world.

[chubigans]

Cook, Serve, Delicious iPad/iPhone Update 2.5+ Available Now!

An “emergency” update has been released for iPad/iPhone, and is rollin’ out to the app store! There’s not too much in this release, save for one major fix.

What’s New

If you’ve booted up CSD on iPhone/iPad you’ve noticed the annoying “This App May Slow Down your iPhone/iPad” message, and in fact in the next big OS update the old version of CSD (and all other 32bit apps) will cease to work completely. This new update adds 64bit compatibility with CSD, which means no more slow down messages and ensuring that this game will work on iOS 11 and beyond! (Apparently as someone informed me on Tumblr compatibility of apps was going to change even earlier with a future iOS 10 update, so I wanted to make this update available as quickly as possible.)

Since I needed to update the game to the latest Game Maker Studio 1.4 release, I thought I’d do some quick changes and fixes. The game would crash if you started a brand new game and entered the Active Menu without buying foods, which has been fixed. I’ve also updated all the old Vertigo Gaming logos to the newest one, and updated the icon. So long ol’ chef (left), and hello Chef Risotto!

This also changes the icon for the app itself, as Apple has new guidelines that strongly encourage the icon to be the same on the store and in the install.

I’ve also improved the rendering of text on the iPad version to be a little more cleaner thanks to the new font rendering features on GMS 1.4. Other than that, it’s the same ol’ CSD that you know and love! If you haven’t bought it yet on mobile, wait until Monday as I plan on doing a 60% off discount for both titles for a few days.

CSD for Android

Later this year I plan on doing an Android update that has similar upgrades. The only reason I’m pushing this update on iOS first is so that the game continues to work on the newest OS updates, as I had originally planned for this update to hit in the fall. 

Dev Notes

Man, it is tough to get back into GMS 1.4 after using GMS 2 for the last few months. I mean, man, how did I ever make games before GMS 2, haha. Its so good!

It’s also cool to see how the app dev scene is faring after not releasing a mobile update for 2-3 years now. Devs can finally reply to reviews now on the App Store, something that Android has done forever and was a feature I’ve wanted for a long time. The new TestFlight system that allows beta testing is really cool- again, nothing new for those who used the third party app before Apple integrated it, but very easy for me to set up beta tests should I release a game on mobile in the near future. I was pretty much the only beta tester on the iPad when it first came out since it was difficult to get beta copies distributed, so that makes me pretty excited cause I love a good beta test.

It was also remarkably easier to publish from GM Studio to my Mac- I had figured it would be a nightmare like it was back in the day but everything more or less works now without a hitch. Whether that’s GM Studio or Apple improving things, I’m not sure, but it was nice to get this update turned around for iPad/iPhone in a day.

Anyways, be sure to let me know if you run into any bugs in this release. Well, gotta get back to making CSD 2!