#Zarkonnen

[iloveabunchofgames]

#JakeReviewsItch

Airships: Conquer the Skies

by Zarkonnen

Price (US): $24.99

Included In: Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

Genre: Strategy, Simulation

Pitch: Build airships. Build cities. Conquer the world.

My expectations: Despite its slightly underwhelming art style, my first impression is very positive. It looks almost like my beloved SimTower, except the tower is a floating war machine bent on world domination. I can tell you right now that if I can name the pilot, she's going to be Wendy O. Koopa. My big worry is not with the game, but with me. I am currently being weaned off of one prescription and replacing it with another. My brain is mush. I'm look at screenshots covered in tiny text and numerous numbers. I don't know if I can handle anything too complicated today.

Review:

My fear that Airships: Conquer the Skies would be too complicated for my feeble brain was unfounded. Thanks to smart layout and clear indications of what issues require attention, it only took a few minutes for me to find my bearings. That’s when the trouble began.

The trouble: I’m committed to reviewing a new game every day. I don’t have space in my life for a new addiction.

The tutorial focuses on combat. Learn to fly a ship. Learn to fly a ship within range of an enemy, and let the crew fire away until your target drops. Learn to modify a ship. Build a ship from scratch—engines, fuel, crew quarters, safety features, reinforced hulls, and every weapon in your budget—and see how it does. Got all that? Now let’s talk tanks.

An hour-long tutorial is usually enough to drive me away from any game, but most of that time is spent playing, and it’s a blast. I started the main game, expecting more of the same, with a little connective tissue between battles. I was wrong.

Combat and ship-building are only slivers of this grand strategy game. Research! Diplomacy! Town development! And it’s all shockingly intuitive.

+ As dense as it is massive, and yet it's the most intuitive, approachable grand strategy game I've ever played. + Researching new parts and building for a purpose within a budget is RollerCoaster Tycoon-level addictive. + Randomly generated scenarios (that can be tailored with a million options), 100-ish different starting perks (I lost count), scenario editors, importing and exporting designs, mod support, and multiplayer that's as cooperative or competitive as you want it to be—this game is infinite. + Memorable music. The right level of bombast for a friendly game of world domination.

– Even with the UI bumped up to the largest setting, the text is a little too small, especially with the difficult typeface. Still, props for including UI scaling and a dyslexia-friendly font. – The default keyboard shortcuts are... They're all over the place. You can remap them, but there are so many. WASD moves the view, which makes sense. I wish they'd stuck the most useful commands on nearby buttons, but instead, it was up to me to figure out that swapping M and E makes life easier. – Hotkeys aren't necessary. The whole game can be played with mouse (although hotkey shortcuts are listed beside everything that can be clicked, making text even harder to read). Action scenes can be paused, so quick action isn't required, but the in-game mouse speed is slower than my Windows setting. Maybe I could dig into a config file and change it, but y'know, I'm used to my mouse moving the way I like. Why change it? – Even playing at double speed, idly waiting for money to accumulate and vehicles to be built can drag on for a bit too long.

🧡🧡🧡🧡🤍

Bottom Line: If Airships: Conquer the Skis has been an overlooked part of your Itch library since you got the Bundle for Racial Equality and Justice in mid-2020, download it right now, even this isn't your genre. I think you'll be surprised. I know I was. I can't give that kind of blanket recommendation at full price, but for the right person, we're talking about hundreds of hours of quality entertainment for $25.

#JakeReviewsTwitch is a series of daily game reviews. You can learn more here. You can also browse past reviews...

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[chocolateteapotthinksfanfic]

April 2024 Fanfic Recommendations

April was rather busy, and I didn’t get much reading done.

The Locked Tomb

As Yet Unwritten by Marks

A continuation, inspired by “As Yet Unsent”, written before Nona the Ninth. Judith is wonderfully pathetic and I loved her relationship with Corona.

the beach episode by TheFlirtMeister

Gideon takes Harrow to the beach. This hopeful post-canon drabble made me smile.

Sunless Sea

Is There A Bee More Bunless? by Zarkonnen

Very atmospheric collection of Sunless Sea snippets. I particularly liked the dealings with the alarming scholar and I wish the Enthusiastic Arachno-Syndicalist all the best.

[eludin-realm]

I found a VERY useful planet generator on itch.io by Zarkonnen here... Gives you an image of the planet, a description, habitability - you can even switch between image/map mode, download the image of the planet, the text description, generate new planets, etc. Super fun to play with and for me who already has an alien OC in her lists of endless OCs and possibly more on the way now, this could be useful. Thought I’d throw it out there for those who are interested.

[katzenfabrik]

General stuffness update

I’m going to queue up some photo posts I’ve previously posted on Twitter, because I think I’m really funny and wouldn’t it be a shame if anyone here had missed them?

I’m a bit afraid I still can’t really spend much time on Tumblr for mental-health reasons -- that is, the infinite scroll + so very many cool and creative artistic works + (this one’s kind of on me) the fandoms I’m into being generally about miserable bastards having emotions = me sometimes getting quite tangled up and sad and frustrated, also it being past my bedtime all of a sudden, how on earth did that happen? Still dipping into the stream now and then, though! I feel like I somehow need to make myself feel that NOT catching up on posts completely is a desirable outcome. There’s got to be some mental jiu jitsu I can perform to accomplish that.

Life is pretty good at the moment in general, though. I have AD/HD meds and they seem to be working pretty well! I’m busy, but mostly with things that are fun and/or good for my ... idk, career or personal branding or something. I gave a presentation on Friday evening and was introduced as a ‘formidable contributor’ to the Swiss Open Data hack events. So nice!

I am working on a game about concentration with AD/HD, which is partly also a way to learn JavaScript (suuuuuper early prototype playable here) and have been doing a lot of plotting work for The Cold Shores, the vampire novel I’ve been ‘working on’, for various values of working, since ~2013. This time I think I stand a greater chance of actually writing the thing, since I finally have (a) a full plot with multiple strands (thanks @zarkonnen for all the workshopping!) and (b) an AD/HD diagnosis and meds (seriously omg omg).

We went to Pride yesterday and it was wonderful. There was a beautiful drag unicorn on enormous stilts, with a fuschia beard full of glitter; there were tiny baby queers wrapped in flags and gorgeous elder same-sex couples still in love; there was a teenager with a hand-painted bi pride flag; there was a row of leathermen carrying a banner demanding protection for gay men in Chechnya; there was the Regenbogenfamilien (rainbow families) group with one of those ‘trains’ that drive on the road for all the families with little kids to ride in; there was a group of wheelchair users at the start of the parade with a huge disabled queer pride banner, and multiple disabled people just marching in the crowd on their own; and there were people giving out free rainbow-flag cookies. It was sunny the whole time and though I didn’t manage to find a lot of my friends, I walked with David and three new friends and just felt my heart fill with love for all of us in this community.

My stepdad is still dying and my mum is caring for him and that’s a whole thing, there you go.

I have a lot of summer plans for travelling and writing and being my own person, and I’m going to do them.

[arundelo]

Alien idea: Co-domestication complexes

David Stark / Zarkonnen:

A common question in science fiction is what humans are like relative to other sentient life-forms. Because we only know life from one planet, Earth, we have insufficient reference points to know how we might compare.

Perhaps the most popular trope that answers this is “humans are average” - we’re medium-sized, medium-smart, medium-aggressive, medium-everything. This sometimes gets extended into “humans are flexible”, a kind of earthling boosterism wherein we come out on top exactly because we’re more well-balanced than the aliens.

Other stories ascribe some particular virtue or deficit to humanity that’s often transparently influenced by the beliefs and cultural ideas of the author. Projecting American-style rugged individualism onto the entire species certainly used to be a popular one.

But really, we can pick whatever we want, because there’s no way to tell. Perhaps humans are absurdly huge, and all other sentient species are about the size of a fly. Maybe we have uniquely bad eyesight, or completely lack an electromagnetic sense near-universal in other species. Perhaps we have a really weird body plan compared to everyone else.

So: Domestication of animals was a major part of human development. Dogs in particular played a very important role, being used as hunting companions, pack animals, guard animals, and more. They’re so important to us that we bred them to have more human-compatible facial expressions: dogs’ facial expressions are very different from wolves’, and much closer to human ones, something that helps a great deal when you’re trying to communicate. Likewise, dogs tend to be very attuned to their humans’ mental and emotional states.

So in a sense, our civilization isn’t a human one, its a human-dog one, with dogs as junior partners, and other domesticated animals like cats as more minor ones. Nor did all of this domestication necessarily go one way. If dogs form an integral part of your lifestyle, being able to interact with them well is a distinct advantage.

My idea is that co-domestication could be the norm, and humans are actually an outlier in how little of it we did. Sentient species from other planets all “grew up” in complexes of a handful to several dozen species that learned to cooperate and communicate, co-domesticating each other and fulfilling particular roles. In terms of intelligence, most species in a complex tend to have an intelligence somewhere between that of a dog and a human, with some outliers.

For the aliens, this co-domestication is the generally accepted model of how sentience and civilization arises. Humans are really confusing to the aliens because we have such an impoverished set of species around us.

When the first human spaceship finds aliens, and they come on board, we’re amazed that they’re four quite different creatures. We assume that this must be some kind of interstellar alliance. The aliens are quite confused why they’re only being greeted by one species. When the ship’s cat saunters in a little while later, they get really excited and wish to be introduced, and insist that the cat be present for all major diplomatic events...

[kingroot-apk-stuff]

from Flesh-Coated Technology https://ift.tt/2y4UVRw for more please visit Read More

Seven-Factor Authentication

1. Something you fear 2. Something you are trying very hard to forget 3. Something that lurks just beyond your comprehension 4. A buried hope 5. Something that will never go away 6. The thing you see when you close your eyes 7. What you cannot admit to yourself

[miimstream]

http://ift.tt/2jYBFfi

[mechfried]

Playing as Lady MacBeth. My favorite character. But the handwashing is bugged out. The animation happens but then the blood is still there.

David Stark 

[untoldgaming]

A has been published on GamersFTW

A has been published on GamersFTW - http://bit.ly/1DkjB18 - Airships version 6.3 is out, bringing many improvements to graphics and many bug fixes. They’ve covered the major items in previous blog posts, so the changelog and screenshots can speak for themselves: Graphics All graphics subtly redrawn with cleaner colour palette. Nicer backdrops,... #News, #PC

[indiegamehunt-blog]

Airships

"Airships is a real-time strategy game where you design airships and then fight with them. Ships are put together out of modules, and the layout of modules matters a great deal: everything on board is done by individual airsailors who need to run around, ferrying coal, ammunition, water and repair tools - and sometimes their fallen comrades." -David Stark (Zarkonnen)

Homepage

Early Access

Greenlight

[katzenfabrik]

⭐️

Once at a goth festival in Germany (I think it was M'Era Luna), I bought a bright blue absinthe cocktail from a van in the camping area. @zarkonnen and I were walking back towards the stages when, before I’d had more than a sip of it, I tripped over the rail for the little park train and threw the whole thing over my face. I was so cross about wasting €5 that I made him lick it off me.

(Bonus factoid: a few days later, Z and I got back to Cambridge in the middle of the night, sunburnt and black-clad and tired from travelling and The Most Goth. We found all our housemates in the kitchen making jam from elderberries they had harvested from the graveyard under the full moon. We immediately relinquished the title.)

[katzenfabrik]

Hope you're having a nice weekend. Have a star: ⭐️

Thank you! I did a bunch of drafting for my novel and helped @zarkonnen out with running a game jam in ẗhe Museum of Digital Art, so it was a great weekend. I hope yours was nice too!

Here is your fact: ... okay, this is actually very hard and I am now convinced that any fact about me is one of 1) not interesting, 2) something everyone knows because I livetweet my life, 3) nonexistent or 4) all of the above!

I am convinced that brown sauce is the best sauce, particularly when combined with cheese and most of all on pizza. Z doesn’t understand this at all and watches with undisguised bemusement when I cover an entire pizza vegetariana with brown sauce and devour it. As a teenager, my go-to snack was a cheddar cheese and brown sauce sandwich, and I would still be up for eating one at pretty much any instant. I also like cheese and jam together. Delish.

Here’s a link for my non-British followers. Earlier tonight, I tried to explain brown sauce to @cal-cla and could only read out the ingredients list and hope they understood. I read an article once denouncing it as a colonial invention designed to show off all the exotic spices of empire and at the same time camouflage the deadly blandness of British food and, like ... that’s not wrong. But it is still The Best.

(If you leave a star in my inbox I will blather on about a similar triviality in lieu of any self-examination! Such a bargain.)

[mechfried]

I opened the latest dev-post for the game Airships by @zarkonnen and this song started in the same moment. it is sign of god, to add haroons with the monster.

[katzenfabrik]

What I meant to say: Would you like me to help you trim your moustache?

What I said: Would you like me to cut off your face?