#so it seems like a very viable platform

[ettawritesnstudies]

Assume you are interested in the book in question, and you could get which ever format you wanted in either situation. (Ebook, paperback, hardcover).

For the preorder: Everyone gets the same rewards regardless of what you order. There might be a larger giveaway that would be won by lottery.

For the kickstarter: You can pick your tier + rewards going up in value for larger items.

In general, the merch itself would be the same for both campaigns, for example, everyone in the preorder gets stickers, and everyone in the lowest tier on kickstarter gets stickers. The rewards would be exclusive to either the preorder or the kickstarter, so you wouldn't be able to get them afterwards, except at special events like book signings or something.

please boost!

[band--psycho]

Zayne x Reader - Umbrella

For my ongoing A-Z Challenge (Requests open)

Please be kind, reblogs are always welcome and greatly appreciated!

Thank you all for the continued support and I hope you all enjoy this! 💛

Requests are open so if you have any ideas/requests, you're more than welcome to send them over.

I do not give permission for any of my works to be copied or translated onto this site or other platforms

Main Masterlist / Zayne Masterlist / Join My Taglist

Today was just not your day. 

You’d already had a pretty shitty day at work; meaning that all you wanted to do was go home and forget that today had ever happened.

But now the last train home (that you’d already been waiting for for over forty five minutes) had just been canceled; meaning that you now had to walk home. 

As annoying as this was, it wasn’t the end of the world, it just meant that you’d get home slightly later than you’d been hoping. 

The problem was, it was raining.

Hard. 

And you had no coat, no hoodie and no umbrella. 

But why would you? 

This morning, the sun was shining in a beautiful, cloudless, blue sky; and you hadn’t heard of any rain forecasted for today…but that was your first mistake. 

You tried calling a taxi, but they were all booked up, you weren’t surprised, everyone else who’d been waiting for that train was doing exactly the same thing. 

You considered staying at the station until the rain stopped; though given by the heaviness of it, it looked like it was going to be going on for a long while. 

You toyed with the idea of staying there anyway, even if that meant waiting until the early hours of the morning and getting the earliest train home, sleeping for an hour and then getting the train back to work. 

But you knew that that idea wasn’t a viable option; you needed to sleep and if that meant that you had to get absolutely soaked beforehand, then so be it. 

You opened the door, watching as the deluge from the sky continued…there was so much rain falling the sound blurred into one long whirring noise.

‘This is going to be a long walk home,’ you thought to yourself, silently hoping that the downpour would just magically stop when you stepped outside; but as much as you hoped, you knew it wouldn’t happen. 

So you took a deep breath, preparing yourself, knowing that you were going to get soaked the second you stepped outside. 

But much to your surprise, you didn’t. 

‘Did you actually make the rain stop?’ you thought to yourself for a brief moment, that was until you looked up to see an umbrella over you. 

“Aren’t hunters meant to be prepared for all types of weather?” a familiar voice said from behind you. 

You turned around to see Zayne standing behind you, holding his umbrella over you, shielding you from the rain. 

“It’s not my fault the weather forecast was wrong,” you replied back, the irritation clear in your voice as you folded your arms across your chest. 

You watched as a small smirk tugged at Zaynes lips, making your eyes narrow in confusion. 

“Would that really have changed your current predicament?”

Quickly you realised what he was referring to. 

When you were both younger, you never used to have a waterproof coat, nor an umbrella, not because you didn’t own any, but because you just never had them on you when it rained.

Only on the very rare occasions you might’ve been seen wearing a hoodie, but for the most part, you were never prepared for weather like this. 

“Probably not,” you admitted with a sigh, shrugging your shoulders. 

It wasn’t that you enjoyed walking in the rain, you didn’t, it just seemed to be that whenever it rained you weren’t prepared for it. 

“I’ll walk you home,” Zayne spoke, taking a few steps closer towards you, making sure to keep the umbrella over your head as he did so. 

“I’ll be fi-” 

“You’ll be soaked from head to toe,” he interjected, ”and as your doctor, I have a duty of care for you,” 

“You sure it’s not just because you want to spend time with me?” You teased back playfully, as the both of you began walking away from the station; the umbrella being the only form of shelter you both had from the rain. 

“Maybe that’s also part of the reason,” he admitted softly with a warm smile.

It felt like it had been ages since you and Zayne had really spent any time together, both of you had been so busy lately with work that your social lives had pretty much become non-existent. 

You missed him. 

And he missed you. 

That’s why he ran from the platform he’d been standing on (patiently awaiting his train, which, unlike yours, hadn’t been canceled, to the platform that you were on. 

Yes it meant he was going to get home ridiculously late, but if it meant he got to spend time with you, then it was definitely worth it. . 

“Well maybe you could have dinner at mine tonight,” you offered, hoping that he didn’t sense the nervousness in your voice. 

It made perfect sense; and it killed one bird with two stones, you both got to spend time together and could eat, which you were pretty sure Zayne had done as little as you had today. 

“Alright,” he nodded, accepting your invitation gracefully. 

You two had had dinner at each other’s apartments loads of times before, it wasn’t an uncommon thing...but for some reason you couldn’t shake the feeling that this time was different.

Tagging:

@xacatalepsyx @book-dragon03 @fangirlsfandomsss @ollieneedsamilkshake @ladyparamount @cheesemachine44 @exactlynuttypatrol @thegalaxysedge22 @girasolcarichuu @popcorn-mochi01 @tasha-1994 @worm-in-a-bug

[copperbadge]

Well, Still Salty.

I was cranky yesterday and I thought a good night's sleep would provide some adjustment in perspective, but unfortunately "spending yesterday not on tumblr" also offered perspective and got there first.

Up front: feel free to comment or reblog on this post (replies may be heavily delayed) but if you feel the urge to Like, I'm going to ask you to take one more step and go to https://www.tumblr.com/support, select "feedback" as the category, and enter a line or two about the new dash. It can be as simple as "Your new dash design is difficult to use and is driving people off the site". I'm not asking everyone to do it, but if you're going to Like this post, that would be a helpful action in addition. You can delete any response they send; no reason to expose yourself to the unique combination of incompetence and condescension with which they handle feedback generally.

Also up front: yeah, if I find somewhere else to go and go there, I will certainly let you guys know beforehand, I'm not going to just evaporate. I'll be broadcasting about Tumblr's replacement on Tumblr very heavily. But I can't deny that it is now an active goal of mine to find a viable replacement for this site. (More on this in a moment.) You will always be able to find me on AO3 as copperbadge, or via copperbadge@gmail.com. (More on this in a moment also.)

This kind of thing is why I refuse to fuck with staff now or ever; I don't trust them and I never will. Watching @wip respond to almost every complaint or suggestion with "but that would be really hard" is telling. Whoever is pushing blocks around at Tumblr wants a lucrative site that's easy to code, but lucrative is hostile to community and code is difficult by nature, and when the architecture of the meeting hall is hostile and cheap, people don't stick around.

I've been watching the site as every change made it incrementally worse, from a buggy post window that doesn't allow ease of editing to the new dash (which is the reason I'm writing this in a text window off Tumblr). I genuinely do not think I can use desktop Tumblr like this unless I can install something that will put it back the way it was, and roughly 40% of the content you guys get HAS to come through desktop. It's impossible to do on a phone or so time-consuming it's not worth it. I cannot code Radio Free Monday on a phone; it's a struggle to code it on a single-monitor laptop (I usually write it on my work computer, where I have two monitors). Even writing image IDs on the phone is difficult and something I rarely do. Tumblr is becoming an actively difficult place for me to make content, introducing friction left and right.

But where does one go? I've tried other platforms and they're either worse to use or they don't have the constituency. The problem with a lot of discourse around internet addiction is that it often points out how glued people are to their phones without asking what it is they're doing on those phones. I'm not addicted to social media; I don't doomscroll, I don't care what celebrities have to say, I don't find 140 characters useful or interesting, I don’t find most “funny” videos very interesting. I create a lot of original content for public consumption, significantly more than many social media users, and if that becomes difficult, then the site suffers more than I do. But it's undeniable that social media, and this social media in specific, is where my people are, and yeah, I like seeing you all every day. It makes it difficult to leave even when Tumblr is the best of a bad set of options.

It seems like a lot of the internet, lately, is the best of a bad set of options.

All that said, Tumblr forced a sudden, unwanted, and unchangeable reskin on me a day after I listened to a two-hour podcast about addiction while working on building a newsletter system for my author site. I spent the evening before this happened in contemplation of my relationship to social media and to my readership and how I might alter it to my benefit regardless of whether that's also to Tumblr's detriment. Their poor timing, I suppose. A lot of the theories advanced on the podcast were, to put it kindly, bunk, but one of the suggestions for people questioning their relationship to an activity was a dopamine fast -- removing something in your life that gives you quick but unsustained dopamine hits, so that you can take some time to level out and examine your behaviors. On the one hand, that's not at all how dopamine works; from the jump it's a bad theory. But on the other, pulling back from something you think may be causing you difficulty is generally speaking a good tactic.

Removing myself from Tumblr yesterday was an active process: because I have ADHD and often will forget something exists if I don't systematize my engagement with it, Tumblr is normally pinned to my browser, with the app on my phone's top screen. Removing the app and closing the window meant that while I occasionally reached for Tumblr, it was less frequently than I expected, and the lack of access reminded me why I wasn't there. I missed you guys, but I didn't miss getting distracted from work by my dash, or the pressure to respond to the volume of communication I receive through the site daily. I don't think my use of tumblr as my sole social media has been unhealthy, per se, but certainly yesterday felt both quieter and calmer after I walked away.

But that's a temporary relief, because you are my community, and not only do I not want to leave my community, it's a resource for me. One of the reasons I do things like Radio Free Monday and the weekly Hug on Saturdays is that I try to make sure that resource is reciprocal. Leadership involves service. Leaving would be easy in the short term, but in the long term, leaving my community without having another place to meet it, or another community to go to, would be harmful to both of us. I'm already someone who isolates, and while I have a strong brickspace circle of friends, they fulfill sometimes different needs.

Though I do appreciate the wild vote of confidence from the comments to my last post telling me people would come with me where I went. That means a lot to me. I will attempt to make it either unnecessary or as painless as possible. Just know, I see your faith and friendship and I appreciate it.

Sometimes at my old job I'd be in very tumultuous meetings where a lot was discussed and not much agreed on, and the most useful thing to me was always to say, "What are our next steps? What would you like me to do because of this meeting?" So what are next steps, all this being the case?

First, I'm going to be off Tumblr, mostly, for another couple of days, because clearly I need the break and a few days won't matter too much. Again, I will be back either to continue on the site or to let you guys know, at length and volume, where I'm headed. The former is much more likely.

Second, I'm going to be actively looking for both a widget I can install to reset the dash (recommendations welcome, I currently don't even use xkit) and a wholly new platform that's a realistically viable alternative. Even if the dash gets reset, the shitty post editor is here for good. Attempts to source alternative platforms in the past have taught me that it needs to have a mobile-friendly site or an app, a similar structure to tumblr, and a reasonable chance of actually attracting users. That's a heavy venn diagram unlikely to be fulfilled anytime soon, but I'm now invested in finding it, instead of just passively waiting for it to happen to me (as Tumblr did when it pulled me off LJ).

Third, I do have an email newsletter in the works! I'm just wrestling currently with setting up how people sign up for it. This wasn't meant to be "my main broadcast platform"; it's meant to be a once-monthly email to share book news, targeted at people who aren't on socials or who just really love content from me, I guess. :D The plan was for me to assure Tumblr users that it was not extra content, just select content repackaged into a digest. But it will be one way to ensure that if I'm moving around outside of Tumblr, you'll know about it. I hope to have a link to a signup page soon. (I'm....dealing with some code issues.)

Fourth, I'm going to be combing through the last ten years I've spent here and pulling anything I think is of value into an archive. For now everything will remain here as well, and I'll let you guys know if I think that's going to change, but it's clear that this space is moving only one direction, towards a place I can't exist, and when/if it crumbles I want to have already evacuated what's important.

So there you go. I'll possibly be posting sporadically (the Saturday Hugs are queued six months in advance so that'll happen) but if nothing else and if not sooner, I'll be back full-time next week starting with Radio Free Monday. I appreciate your patience and your kindness in the meantime!

[glareraw]

Accelerationists are pathetic

Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". “Accelerationism.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 9 Aug. 2024. Link

Let's be so fucking for real.

We are in a hopeful political landscape right now. Trump looks more and more like he will lose, and Kamala Harris alongside her VP pick Tim Walz are winning over the hearts of Americans, and increasingly beating Trump in the polls as he rambles on about how Kamala changed her race or something. And we are learning how to parse the alarmist claims of news media, and deny them ad revenue from scaring us.

But there is a thorn in side of the Democratic Party. A small group of very loud accelerationists who claim to be leftist online act like Kamala is the antichrist. Their two main claims are that she imprisoned over 1,500 people for smoking weed during her time as a prosecutor, and they still act like she fully supports the genocide in Palestine, despite the first claim being a lie told by Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential race, and the second claim a case of "I pretend I do not see it" in terms of the truth.* (see footnote) They seem to forget that a Trump presidency would be FAR worse for Palestinians.

But let's be real. The originators of this argument are cishet white people who live in major cities of coastal blue states and whose parents pay their rent. They have a feeling of emptiness in their life because they have everything given to them, so they argue with LGBTQ+ people and POC online instead of making an actual difference in the real world. They sit behind their screens and convince unsuspecting netizens of their delusions that we could have a viable 3rd party candidate come out of nowhere in less than 3 months, and completely ignore the fact that a candidate with their ideology would absolutely tank in an election. They don't care that the American people are not ready for the nation they want to make.

One of the talking main strategies these accelerationists are trying is to get people to abstain from voting --if they don't get their third party candidate. Their goal is to get less votes for Kamala to make Donald Trump win so the world will go to shit and they can remake society from the ashes how THEY want.

They think that their lives are sheltered from the blatant danger of the republican platform, to hell with the women and LGBTQ+ and POC of the red states! They are totally fine with sacrificing the safety of women and minorities in service of their unrealistic headcanon. They simply do not, or refuse to understand the severity of the situation we find ourselves in. If Trump wins 2024, there's a pretty strong chance there won't be an election --at least a real one-- in 2028 or ever again.

And if they think they will actually be able to start a revolution against the federal government? If they can get past the SWAT team arrests at their peaceful protests and CIA assassinations of their movement's leaders, they will have the honor of battle with the most powerful and overfunded military on Earth. Good luck with that! But these people would be lucky to even have leadership to begin with, because none of them actually have a viable plan or real knowledge of how to make their maladaptive daydreams real and govern their dream society.

If you read all of this and look at the facts and still believe Kamala Harris is a horrible person and you don't WANT to vote for her, then fine. I don't feel the need to argue with you further. But you NEED to vote. Change will have to be made gradually, it can't happen all at once this time. As I said, the country isn't ready for that. But if enough leftists don't vote, and Trump actually wins, it will set us back decades, if not a century or more. The government will not collapse, it will just become stronger under fascist rule. They will not get the chance to make the change they want.

I don't think the ideology of accelerationism poses a huge threat in this election. The overwhelming amount of support for the Harris Walz campaign, combined with the long-expected downward spiral of Donald Trump makes it more and more likely that we will see Kamala in the White House. And the media fear mongering about insubordination from the electorates --and Kamala's defeat in the Trump-appointed federal courts after the election-- is largely overblown. They forget how we won in 2020. AFTER Trump was ousted.

But as I said, overall, I don't think accelerationists will be successful in causing a Trump victory. They just really piss me off.

*She supports a ceasefire and the two-state solution, but can't make that happen just yet as she is just the VP but that's a whole can of worms and a conversation for another time. Just know I personally support a ceasefire and understand that what is happening in Palestine IS a genocide.

[xxpeppermintxx109]

I’m sorry but you’re lying. I have downloaded your fic from a long time when you started wiriting it. You did not tag it as a love triangle. For instance: I would have never started it if I had seen the love triangle tag. We are stupid like you keep insinuating. You are a liar. The only ship tagged was original female character/aemond. I have the proof of it. A lot people in the hotd fanfic community knows this and has seen the proof. That is why you are known in the fic community as an imposter. For almost a year you didn’t tag it as a love triangle. That is why you keep getting criticism: you used aemond/ewan’s fanbase to gain traction and attention for your fic, and then decided to blindside everyone with your own little fantasy of qoren.

Let me make it clear. It is your story and you can write whatever you want. But it doesn’t mean people have to like it. Most people don’t. And people have a right to give their opinion. But you keep crying about it and making yourself be a victim. Just accept it. You write for yourself and that is totally okay. Just accept the criticism that you cheated your readers and that is why ppl got upset and stopped reading your fics. It’s not because we only want aemond; it’s because that is how you advertised your fic and then switched it up. At least have the decency to be truthful.

You did not tag your fic as a love triangle. You added it months after starting it, after you hooked aemond fans in. That’s why people hate your fic now and don’t trust you.

so actually, no the only pairing tagged wasn’t just aemond and oc

From NOVEMBER OF 2022, what like two weeks after I posted the first chapter mind you, Qoren Martell/original female character was a pairing. And there were a TON of other pairings I shouldn’t have tagged cause they weren’t main pairings, as see this screenshot below :)

Betrayal, angst, and tragedy were tagged since the very beginning. Love triangle was tagged in chapter 5, it appears when looking back at all my screenshots of chapter summaries to upload, which yes is my bad it’s not the VERY beginning but jfc, still EARLY. And guess what, I think I had maybe 5k-8k hits on this fic at that point. That is not me sinking my claws into the Aemond fandom like you so accuse me of, and then just doing a bait and switch.

Qoren only became a viable option AFTER Aemond killed Luke, which if you look at all of my old edits over this last year and a fucking half, has always been the plan. Luke was always gonna die, Aemond was gonna get into shit with Shaera for it. Qoren was an emotional decision on her part. Even now she still considers Aemond a lot of the time. AND I HAVE STATED MULTIPLE TIMES THAT AEMOND AND SHAERA ARE ENDGAME, so unclench jfc.

I don’t paint myself as a victim, when I get shit like this all the time being rude. When I was getting Islamophobic comments comparing MY writing of Qoren to fucking 9/11. When I was getting harassed for the simple act of writing the story as it’s always been laid out by multiple anon accounts who spammed my asks and my ao3 comments. And it sure as hell doesn’t seem like this fandom “hates” me and my story as you so claim, cause I still have a ton of readers who enjoy this story and give it kudos on ao3 and read and interact with me on all platforms, so fuck off lol. Shit, it’s hitting 5k votes on wattpad. Doesn’t seem to me like people hate it or my writing decisions??

Get off anon and say this with your whole chest while you’re at it <3

[uselessheretic]

maybe a silly question, but what does the term “izzy canyon” mean? it conjures up a mental image of “the metaphorical place where izzy hands enjoyers hang out/got kicked into” but I dunno if it’s a hashtag or a group chat or a state of mind or why it’s a canyon specifically (I guess con sounds like can?) the mastodon con makes it seem pretty organized!

not a dumb question at all!

"metaphorical place where izzy hands enjoyers hang out/got kicked into" might actually be the most succinct and on the nose description i've heard of it lmao

it is really mostly just a way to refer to izzy hands fans who tend to interact in the same corner of fandom.

the idea started sometime last year when an izzy fan got doxxed after receiving hate mail for a few months. a burner account posted the person's city and possible locations for the chain they worked at, along with a list of other users they said they would target next (seemed to just loosely be people in the same circle as them? weirdly enough my handle was on there too despite not knowing each other)

nothing further developed from that situation and the person was okay, but understandably it kicked off a wave of izzy fans blocking anyone who had a habit of harassing izzy fans, along with running blockchains on the most vocal ones who'd start dogpiles. around the same time, someone made an "izzy haters" twitter and izzy haters group chat which just intensified "okay just block all of them because that is a huge red flag for incoming networked harassment"

tldr izzy fans grew a reputation for being very heavy blockers. it became an in joke within the community that izzy fans didn't ever know what was going on when the general fandom had new memes, or more likely, new discourse because of the huge block wall between the groups.

almost as if they were at the bottom of a canyon, doing their own thing, and not paying attention to whatever was going on outside. hence the izzy canyon. i think it's also at least 30% a joke about izzy's genitals as well.

so yeah, just generally people who like the same character and hang out in the same social circles. i think because it's the part of fandom most vocally anti harassment, it also has a funny habit of absorbing in fans who don't necessarily like izzy, but had been targeted as part of a harassment campaign or in general just tired from fandom in general.

it pretty much functions like its own mini fandom within fandom? and as a group is very enthusiastic and also freakishly well organized so they end up more likely to do things like make regular fanweeks, set up a blog for doing fandom research and polls, organize a boat tour for a convention, or laying out detail instructions for test running mastodon for week to see how viable it is as a platform.

[olderthannetfic]

Tumblr seems to be sliding in a downward spiral, and it feels like the start of the end of a fandoming era for me. I've been through it before; platforms are born then die, and life fandom finds a way. I'm just not looking forward to floundering for a bit, and dreading what the next hub will look like.

AO3 isn't really a place geared or meant for the same thing, and that's fine. My only fandom-related activity took place on AO3 only for a few years between my leaving LJ and joining Tumblr, and I lived ;-) But during that time, I was my own little island in fandom. Reading, leaving a few comments, not being super active. It's only when I found a community again that I was back to being really active in fandom once more.

And it's not that I actually use Tumblr to post about myself, but I do use it to read and reblog cool things - art, gifsets, science stuff, discovering new fandoms, and the like. I'm not sure where else I could find my people, with sameish purposes. The other sites I've tried didn't fill that niche in a way that suited me, in part because of how they look and work, in part because of who and what is(n't) there.

I have DW & PF accounts just to be safe, but I'm not very fond of group chats Discord-style - and without Tumblr, IDK how I'd even hear of new communities where I might pop in once in a while, loins girdled and everything. The micro-blogging platforms are not what I'm looking for either. Sure, I can follow a few DW comms and blogs; I already occasionally do and I will be more consistent about it if I must.

But one of my greatest fear is that the next platform will be phone-based, app-only, or some such BS - and that is something I just won't be able to deal with. Phones are tiny, it's uncomfortable to write anything, I don't like touch screen and much, much prefer a proper keyboard and a mouse (copy-pasting on a screen? (x_x) << it me), art/pics are too small to properly appreciate, a phone isn't comfy to hold for a long time for me, and the app system means you have no control over anything as a user… and that anything there must be Apple Approved, dick-free, blood-free, and tasteless. And I say this as someone who's pretty much uninterested in sex IRL or in my entertainment ;-) I still support and want the tits, the gore, the everything, and as long as I have the tools to curate - oh, wait. Curate things myself? That's not something that's popular these days, is it? It's not going to generate money, if I'm happy ;-)

So… I guess I'll play some more on Neocities, and see if anyone wants to have webrings again? (it would be fun and nostalgic, but not really viable on a large scale; people who haven't known those would just laugh and point and go on the InstaTok of the time).

So here is my little cane-waving rant of the day! I know things evolve and change and that in ten years I'll be rolling my eyes at my moping. It's only that I feel tired of moving from one shitty platform to another, of fearing I won't adapt (or more accurately won't want to adapt given the annoyance/benefit ratio) to whichever new place things will move in a few years. It's saying goodbye to a former home, moving, and hoping you'll make another home elsewhere kind of sniffles today!

--

We already know the next platform. It has been Discord for a few years now.

If you want the one after Discord, I think you're looking at waiting things out for quite a few years (or until Discord makes a major misstep as a company).

True, real time chat is not for everyone, but small discords with well-chosen channels can operate more asynchronously. Just like a lot of people who hated the look of Tumblr early on eventually capitulated, a lot of chat haters have jumped ship to Discord already.

Realistically, 90% of fandom always goes where the action is, no matter how much they claim the features make that space impossible, and 10% disappears.

We might get the 10% back on the next platform or they might leave fandom for good. There were LJ-haters who resurfaced post LJ era.

But as for where you'll find out where people are... probably AO3 author's notes.

[yukipri]

I joined Threads! Unfortunately my reach on Insta is still the most limited of all of my socials, and that’s the account Threads is directly attached to.

If you’re on either Insta or Threads, would love if you could stop by🙏

Direct linking to Threads doesn't seem to work...so here's

my Instagram

through which you can find my Threads account!

Edit: You actually can link to Threads, ironically through the icon at the top of individual Instagram account pages on desktop. Though Desktop viewing is currently limited to individual pages, and you can't necessarily scroll the feed. So here's my Threads page!

~~

Next, some initial thoughts on the platform for those who are kinda curious what this new thing is. Not at all an expert, just some info I've gathered myself, that I'd personally have liked to know before joining:

On Threads

・It launched July 5~6, 2023. Rollout varies by country.

・Twitter's already upset about it, apparently there's a lawsuit. So I guess it considers Threads a possible threat.

・It's run by Meta, same folks as Insta and Fb.

・The accounts are directly linked to Instagram, which has its pros and cons. You need an Insta account to make a Threads account, but if you already have an Insta account, it's very easy to make a connected Threads account. However, once linked, they're linked; you can't disable your Threads account without also disabling your Insta account. You can also automatically follow all the accounts you're already following on Insta, to be activated as they make Threads accounts. You can also share Threads posts to your Insta stories.

・Currently only on mobile app, hoping the'll make it desktop accessible soon

・The current audience mostly seems to be folks who have come direct from Instagram. This means yes, a lot of official/influencer accounts, but also a lot of artists/small creators too.

Functionality

・Right now, the "feed/dashboard" is a hot mess. It's just one massive algorithmic spew, no way to curate it, no way to see just the posts by the folks you're following, not even chronological. These are things that i personally require in a social media, so yeah it sucks rn. HOWEVER, they did state that they're working on a "followers only" feed, much like the one on Instagram. If they implement a Followers Only feed like Insta, it'll at least be much better than Twitter's current "Following" feed. There has been no timeline provided on when this may launch.

・It functions much the same as Twitter, with options to create new posts, and like, retweet, quote retweet, and reply to posts made by others. (There's still a lot of floundering about the exact terminology to use, since it's not twitter so you can't "retweet" etc)

・500 Character word limit per post, which is much more than Twitter, ey!

・Up to 10 images per post, doesn't seem to cause image quality reduction either. Rather than being able to arrange the images like on Tumblr though, they're all automatically in a carousel that you can see by swiping.

・Your bio can be the exact same as what's on your insta, but currently only shows followers. In order to see who you follow, you tap "followers" and then when the menu opens, swipe to "following." Then, you can tap on the individual accounts to view their pages. This is currently the only way to ensure you see the posts from certain accounts, because there's no guarantee they'll show up on your feed, and it's a huge pain. But again, they're hopefully working on a fix for this.

My understanding is that the app rushed to launch now, since Twitter is a dumpster fire and people are fleeing. (why is it a dumpster fire? Well, Musk implemented a randomly fluctuating tweet view limitation, which is dumb af, but means it's essentially become unusable to folks who use the platform a lot)

I'm hoping that there'll be improvements to Threads and it'll become a viable Twitter alternative, but until then...yeah we'll keep an eye on it.

Now that I've probably completely turned you off from downloading the app, if you do, a nudge that again I'd appreciate if you stopped by my account, YukiPri_Art on Instagram, and/or YukiPri_Art on Threads!

[rockingrobin69]

Funny

It was quarter past five, and the flickering electric board announced nothing but ‘further delays’. Up and down the platform stormed a sea of harried faces, of frowns and sighs and constant checking of countless watches. Draco didn’t notice a thing. Leaning against the wall, belly sore with laughter. Hair still damp, didn’t bring an umbrella, how unbelievably fortunate. It meant Potter wasn’t wearing his jacket, hung loosely on Draco’s shoulders. It meant they had to stand a little closer together. Despite the fact it was plenty warm and stuffy in the station, didn’t exactly call for it anymore.

“Funny,” Potter said. “Your hair. How it gets all… curly.”

“Funny,” Draco repeated, slightly dazed. Potter was touching it, gentle with the back of his hand. Careful, like it was something important.

“Oh, I didn’t mean funny. Cute. It’s pretty cute.”

Choking seemed the only viable option. Draco coughed into his fist, hysterical with it. “Begging your pardon?”

“Yeah. Really fucking cute, actually.”

He could feel the blush creeping up his neck. “I’m not cute. Take it back.”

Potter shook his head. His eyes were so big, catching the odd twinkle of light from the notice board. “You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

“Why, Mr. Potter,” Draco managed before he started laughing again. It was all spinning in his chest: the laughter, Potter and his eyes and the way he tilts his head, being slightly drunk on dehydration and excitement, on this joy fizzing inside him like pop candy. Draco wished the train would never come, for them to stay here, in this perfect bubble of a moment a while longer. To Have Potter’s smiling face and his warmth and his cologne, appley-cinnamony-maddening. Before he realised, Draco found himself leaning down to stick his nose in the crook of Potter’s neck, sniffling away.

“What are you doing, you lunatic?”

In lieu of an explanation, Draco dug in deeper. Licked a thick stripe of Potter’s neck.

“Hey!”

His chuckle offered Draco immunity to the staring of other commuters, to the passage of time, to all of it. Just this existed, just them. Potter’s jacket on his shoulders and skin in his mouth, Potter’s laughter in his ears and in his belly and in his heart.

“I’m going to get you back for this,” Potter promised, a whisper between thick curls. But he only wrapped his arms around Draco, securing him tighter. “Oh, you’re going down.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Draco mumbled. Choked on it a little. Potter’s chin  rested on his head, sigh palpable, cascading down his entire body. This relief where tension was before.

“Good. That’s… good.”

It was. Very, very good. It was nearly six, their train was still nowhere to be seen, and the station kept getting busier. They were going to be extremely late. Draco didn’t care one bit: between all the frowning faces and countless watches, him and Potter, laughing and close. Curly-cinnamon, damp and warm and funny. Not funny. Cute, though. Pretty cute.

[mariacallous]

Would you like to do your bit to curb population decline in the west? Fancy a home full of babies with very high IQs and extremely blond hair? Well, let me introduce you to the Donald J Trump Insemination Institute. On a sprawling ranch in New Mexico, women can be impregnated, free of charge, with Trump’s sperm, ensuring that future generations, on Earth and Mars, are blessed with a steady supply of very stable geniuses.

Sorry if I turned your stomach there, but I’m afraid I’m only half-joking. It was actually Jeffrey Epstein – who used to party with Trump – who was besotted with the idea of a ranch where 20 women at a time would be impregnated, in order to seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk, who is obsessed with babies and Trump, may harbour similar fantasies. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that Musk has “volunteered his sperm” to help seed a colony on Mars. (Musk has denied these claims.)

While Trump hasn’t announced plans for a baby ranch of his own yet, he is suddenly a big fan of artificial insemination. Last week the former president announced that he would support free in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments if elected again. “We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said during a town hall campaign event in Wisconsin. He didn’t provide many details about how this would work other than saying that either the government or insurance companies would pay for everything.

Another fuzzy detail? How government-sponsored IVF would coexist with the Republican party’s 2024 platform, which supports states’ rights to pass foetal personhood laws. It is impossible to support widespread access to IVF while also supporting the idea of foetal personhood, which holds that an embryo is a person and destroying one is homicide. I am fairly sure that Trump has no idea how IVF actually works, so here is a little explainer: you typically fertilise multiple eggs because you have no idea how many of them will develop into viable embryos. You could fertilise 20 eggs and end up with no viable embryos or end up with 20. The only way to control how many embryos you create is to harvest a single egg at a time, which is hugely expensive, inefficient and emotionally exhausting. In short: Trump seems to be running on a platform where IVF would be free but also effectively illegal.

While it may be half-baked, Trump’s free IVF policy makes it clear that he is desperate to woo female voters. Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every US presidential election since 1980 and now – for obvious reasons – they are leaning heavily towards Kamala Harris. I’m not sure a last-minute IVF policy is going to cancel out the fact that abortion rights are a key issue in this election and Trump has boasted about being the guy who overturned Roe v Wade. Nor will it cancel out the fact that Trump is a legally defined sexual predator who can’t stop himself from saying every misogynistic thought that creeps into his little head. During a recent rally in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump praised his male supporters for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them.

While Trump is clearly trying to appeal to women with his IVF policy, you also have to wonder whether his buddy Musk – one of the most influential voices in the US’s growing pro-natalist movement – has a hand in this. If the billionaire did get a position in a Trump administration (a possibility that has been repeatedly floated) one imagines Musk would encourage the US to emulate Hungary’s pro-natalist policies, which stem from a racist desire to encourage births and repopulate the country with the “right” (AKA white) kind of children. “We want Hungarian children,” Viktor Orbán said in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.”

Free IVF may sound like a progressive policy on the surface but, for many on the right, it is linked to a belief that women are nothing more than baby-making machines designed to pass on the legacy of men. A future Donald J Trump Insemination Institute may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

[londonspirit]

When Our Flag Means Death first premiered, the pirate comedy series — a novel genre mashup in and of itself — didn't necessarily make a big splash in the streaming landscape. It didn't take long, however, for positive word of mouth and a slowly growing fanbase to lead to impressive viewing numbers, with the first season becoming the biggest new series in the U.S. across all platforms — and its popularity has only grown since. Now, on the precipice of the series' return, over a year after it was finally renewed for a second season, viewers are eagerly preparing to tune in to find out what will happen to Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby), Edward Teach/Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), and the rest of the Revenge's crew now that everyone has been divided into two separated groups.

Ahead of the Season 2 premiere, Collider had the opportunity to speak to creator David Jenkins for a spoiler-free conversation (if you've checked out some of those trailers already, that is!) about what fans can expect. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Jenkins discusses when he found out the show would be renewed, the unprecedented response to Season 1, and why he enjoys engaging with the OFMD fandom online. He also digs into discussing why Season 2 takes a somewhat darker tone, the importance of adding more female characters to the cast, his envisioned story for the show's planned three seasons, and more.

COLLIDER: You made a whole season between now and the last time we spoke!

DAVID JENKINS: It was a long time ago. Here we are!

And I know it was a bit before we even knew that Season 2 was going to be a possibility. How long was that wait on your end?

JENKINS: Yeah, I blocked it out, if I'm honest. [Laughs] It was a minute. We're really lucky that they picked us up, and they've been really wonderful to us at Max. They're just very fun to make this show with. There was a minute where I would call it kind of a slow-burn fandom, and the show just seemed to grow and grow and grow. I think we became more and more viable as the weeks went by after the finale, and thank god we got to do it again.

With the response to Season 1, it felt like week after week, even once the whole season was out, there was just this exponential growth. What was your reaction to that? Has that ever happened to you before, in your experience?

JENKINS: Oh, it’s never happened to me. I don't know if it's happened to other shows. Somehow, I feel like the streaming of it makes this unusual, and then the fact that it is actually a romantic relationship between these two characters. Audiences didn't want to get burned again, and then saw that they weren't going to be, and celebrated it. It just really moved me, actually. I thought that they'd kiss, and people would be like, “Oh, cool, cool!” I kind of thought people would know a little bit more [about] where we were going, but then in hindsight, no, people have been hurt and burned on so many other shows and then made to feel silly. So it was very gratifying to see the show embraced — to see every element of the creative embraced, every element of the production design, every department get their due in attention, was just overwhelming. It's the honor of my professional life. I don't think this happens very often, so I'm just savoring it.

You don't always see creators who are willing to engage with the fandom online, or they try to keep a distance, but it feels like you're getting in there occasionally and interacting with fans. How do you feel about that particular response, the fandom and their passion?

JENKINS: It's an honor. If it were a different circumstance or a different property or something else that maybe had a different tone that brought in a more dyspeptic, less gracious [fandom]... Everyone's been lovely. When people are being nice and normal, easy to be around, yeah, I wanna be at that party. Are you kidding me? And then you're gonna celebrate all the work that we did when we didn't know if the show would be good? Because when you're making these things, you're like, “Well, I know this is just my weird thing. Maybe people like it, maybe they won't.” When people are this gracious and effusive and not weird about it, it's like, “Yeah, let's talk. This is great. You're a fan of the stuff that we were a fan of. We're not different.” So that's really rare.

In terms of the overall tone of Season 2, there's definitely a darkness that it starts with. Was it more of a conscious decision to embrace that side, or did it really inherently come from picking up with these characters after where we left off with them in Season 1?

JENKINS: It's picking up with where the arc is in the story. We're post-breakup, and they're trying to fix it. One of these characters is very, very damaged and has never made himself vulnerable in this way before, and I don't think [he] would react very well to having his heart broken in this way. I don't think it would be cute, and I don't think it would be funny. I think it would be scary as hell to watch a very damaged guy that we've established in Ed, who killed his dad and thinks he's not capable of being loved, deal with rejection and see that Stede really hurt him. It's important to do that, to give him stakes because Rhys [Darby] is adorable, and Taika [Waititi] can be adorable, and sometimes when they're being adorable, they become invulnerable. I want to see a love story between two people who are very vulnerable, for better and for worse. So you have to pick up in a place where there's been damage done and there's a price to pay, and then it's like, “Can they come back from it?”

That's not to say that there aren't moments of levity and comedy. Stede, from his perspective, is this more pining figure writing letters, but he's definitely not in the same mental or emotional space as Ed is at this point because he doesn't realize how hurt Ed is.

JENKINS: The lovely thing about Rhys and about Stede is Stede’s cluelessness. He eventually does the right thing, but he doesn't know his own strength, and that's his problem. Then he does damage, and then he has to repair that damage, and that's the growth of that character. Ed is a guy where you're like, “Wait a minute, you're invulnerable. You’re Blackbeard,” but then you see he's hurt, he's not getting up. To me, those are the natural journeys for those two characters. Then you see Ed come back, and he has to wear a bell around his neck, and he's gonna fix a lock on this door, and he's gonna learn to fish and just be a three-dimensional human as opposed to just a scary drawing. Those are the tensions of those guys, and that's why Rhys has dog energy, and Taika has cat, and that seems to go along with both of those arcs.

I wanted to ask you about one of the things that feels like a really nice addition to Season 2, which is just the number of female characters that we get for the crew to bounce off of.

JENKINS: Good, I’m glad you feel that way.

Leslie [Jones] is back, we get Minnie Driver, and there's a new female pirate captain who shifts the power dynamic, among others. Did that feel like a natural way to expand the cast, or was that a change that you really wanted to make after Season 1?

JENKINS: It felt like both. Watching Season 1 is like, “Oof, there’s a lot of dudes.” We do go into Jim's experience as a non-binary crew member and Jim's relationship with their mentor and mother figure. In Season 2, it felt important and also the most logical way to build the world out. So it was fun to add these characters, even one-offs like Hell-Cat Maggie, and be like, “There are so many different perspectives to bring into this show.” It just felt natural to do that.

What's your favorite needle drop that the show has used so far in Season 1, and which one are you excited for fans to get to in Season 2?

JENKINS: Season 2 is built around [Kate Bush's] “This Woman's Work,” and that was very early on. That was a little bit like [Fleetwood Mac's] “The Chain.” I knew I wanted to use that, clear it, script where it should go in the season. There's a couple of those where it takes a minute to get that song, and there's a lot of back and forth, and if you don't get it, there's not a real good replacement for it. In that first season, “The Chain” really worked. We could have found a different song, but “The Chain,” that really works there. Also, [Cat Stevens'] “Miles from Nowhere” at the end of the first season felt like the Stede Bonnet song with that version of “Miles from Nowhere.”

Season 2, Nina Simone makes a couple of appearances, and I just love the size and grandeur of what she's doing. She seems to fit with a really large fantasy show — obviously, she's Nina Simone — and what she's talking about and how she's expressing it up against this world is really exciting to me. I don't know why it works for me as much as it does, but it really moves me. She comes back at the end of the season with a different track, and I just love having her music up against these pictures.

I've seen quotes from you recently where you talked about how—fingers crossed—if there's a renewal, Season 3 would be the planned final ending for this show. Was that something that you always envisioned, that it would be three-and-done?

JENKINS: I think so. When Taika expressed interest in doing it, I was surprised. “Are you sure?” He was like, “Yeah, man. Yeah, I wanna do it.” I was like, “Okay, but it’s not limited. Can you do it for three seasons?” “Yeah.” “Really? Really, you'll do it for three seasons?” “Yeah, man. Yeah.” So my expectation was we're only gonna get Taika for three seasons. But beyond that, three is good for this show. The first season is about two emotionally underdeveloped men who are at about 14, 15, 16, emotionally. Season 2 is about them getting older and maybe, in terms of the relationship, being around 25 to maybe 30 by the end of the season. And then I think there's one more story to tell, and it's how does a relationship evolve? Where do we find them again in the third season? What are they dealing with? That's very interesting to me, and there is a big story that I'd like to tell there.

Our Flag Means Death Season 2 premieres with its first three episodes October 5 on Max, with two episodes dropping weekly thereafter leading up to the season finale on October 26.

[remnantsofthepast-if]

Monthly Update - January 2024

​ Hello everyone once again! I hope you've had an amazing start to the year. Whether you celebrated it in a big way or with something much quieter, I hope there was no shortage of food! Now, that's definitely something Enid would say, hehe :D.

---

As for the project, after some unexpected complications, I finally published Chapter 8 a few weeks ago! In the end, it turned out longer than I had planned, but I'm getting used to that happening, hahaha! Now it's time to start writing Chapter 9, the last one of this first act! Initially, this chapter seems like it will flow much smoother than the previous one. I usually have a clear image of how each chapter will go and then create a brief summary. In this case, I've expanded the summary a bit more than I usually do, hoping it will help with the writing process. But of course, part of the beauty of creativity lies in the unexpected, both for the good and the bad, so we'll take it step by step each day.

Man, I can barely believe I've reached the end of Act 1. I'm very excited! For several reasons that I can't reveal yet, tempting as it may be, hahaha! I'll just say I have a surprise prepared that I hope you like :D. Besides that surprise, it will finally be time to implement all the changes I had in mind and fix certain things about the characters and the plot here and there, especially in Chapter 2, which I revisited a few days ago, and... let's just say, to all those who read and understood Rayco/Gara and Enid's explanation, congratulations, because I dumped a lot of unnecessary info there for no reason, lol! It's definitely something that needs fixing, and as I mentioned recently, all these changes and revisions will come out alongside Chapter 9.

Finally, there's something important I want to say about this story. Once Chapter 9 is published, a week later, this first act will be available to buy, and the playable demo will be reduced. I still don't know exactly when the demo will be cut, but I was thinking roughly halfway through the story. However, this has brought a small issue too, which is that I don't know how to export it for mobile. I've been experimenting with the Monaca platform, and it looks interesting, but there's something that doesn't quite convince me :/. I've also thought about switching from Twine to ChoiceScript, but it seems confusing and limiting in terms of customization, and no matter how comfortable it is that Hosted Games handles all distribution and such, it’s just a big no for me at first glance. The good thing would be that at least with ChoiceScript you can export your save files from one book to another, which is something you cannot do with Twine or Renpy. Well... you can, actually, but that involves a lot of programming and coding that I have no idea about and if something goes wrong I wouldn’t be able to solve the issues, so it’d be more of a disadvantage than anything else.

Going back to Renpy would be more viable and comfortable for exporting, as I could maintain a single itch.io page. With Twine, I would have to create one for each act to keep the demos separate, and I’m not sure how to feel about that, to be honest :/.

I don't know, I’m just rambling at this point. These are things I'll have to think about since I don't want it to be confusing when playing Remnants. Anyway, I'll do some tinkering and play around a bit with Renpy to see how it feels, and if I'm not convinced, I guess I'll stick with Twine and add an intro for the player to pick all the important choices from Act 1 before continuing with Act 2. I appreciate any suggestions if anyone has them, though :D.

---

Have a fantastic month and see you at the end of February ;)

By the way, I’m making a few gifts for all of you for February 14! Nothing huge, but a nice detail that I hope you like :D.

[copperbadge]

Have we found a tumblr replacement yet? Apparently the latest “live” shenanigans were the thing that it took to break me. I’m not trying to stir shit, I’m just mostly here for you and a couple other blogs, so I’m going wherever you go.

I wish, but unfortunately not so far. I mean, I've talked a little about how I'd like to find one but there aren't really any viable ones right now, and there may not be a fandom mass-migration for years still. I'm more likely to follow the crowd than blaze a trail in this case, so it may be some time. For now my only real tactic is to simply not engage with staff or support at Tumblr in any way, and accept the changes as gradual steps towards the site's demise with as much serenity as I can muster.

I've already accidentally opened Tumblr Live twice while trying to navigate the app, which I'm sure is intentional, given I've now suddenly opened Tumblr Live twice since its inception instead of Zero. Relatedly, I would love to see them redirect that passion into making the "Mute Notifications" button actually work, but mine is not to reason why.

Anyway. There are options available, like obviously there are other social media platforms, but none have quite the combination of "easy to use" and "has a lot of people on it" and "Offers the same functionality" (photo and video hosting, an app, etc) even with an "ease of use" and "functionality" that are as crap as Tumblr's.

For example, Dreamwidth is great, but it's a Livejournal code fork so it's a very different format from Tumblr, more labor-intensive to make and share posts (no reblog function, image embedding can get a bit complicated, etc). CoHost is new and very promising but a bit of a ghost town right now -- I'm there and I've had a bunch of people find me there but still exponentially less than are on Tumblr. Pillowfort I still need to re-investigate; I'm there as well but it's been a while since I looked in, and I was struggling with the functionality previously. I had a look at Mastodon, but as positive as decentralized servers could be for the future of social media, I actively dislike the idea, and it also seems difficult to set up and complex to maintain. Discord is....there, and a lot of fandom stuff has shifted there, but its structure is very different and it's also decentralized, and also I hate it passionately and refuse to use it, so that's a no-go for me, though I suspect it's where fandom might end up.

If you're struggling with accessing tumblr directly, you might consider feeding the blogs you follow to an RSS reader -- I know people who do that and find it pretty functional, because then if they want to comment they can just pop open the specific post and deal with it directly. I don't know how much you know about RSS and I don't have the energy to fully explain it right now, but NetVibes is a pretty decent free RSS reader and it's what I use for certain blogs outside of Tumblr.

In any case, if I do find a place, or if I see the migration beginning, I'll sound the alarm :) In the meantime I'm still reading through my tumblr, stashing away posts to save off when I leave, even if that'll be a while.

[totemsp2blog]

2023 – Some Game of the Year

It occurs to me that a lot of games I played this year were in early access. Either way…

Sons of the forest (early access)

This is one of those games I wouldn’t have played otherwise, but now I have I don’t regret doing so.

What on the surface seems to be a horror survival game, seem to be more like a camping and off-grid living simulator, log homes, nature trekking, caving, and hiking included, now with wacky characters showing up and being uncomfortable to be around… that aren’t myself. Still, I’m they’re very fun to hit with implements.

The sequel to The Forest, now expanded with the ‘Sons of’ Prefix, my friends and I were playing the game during early access, with many plot details not complete. Not that I was paying much attention to that. Unlike my friends, I didn’t play The Forest, but from watching Mandalore’s video, I… know some things?

The plot of the game is not the point for me. Going camping in the woods, exploring the gorgeous forest, and the creepy caves to find cool new gadgets, like a zipline… or a shotgun, or a slightly better axe, working together to construct a log cabin on the lake, and then to construct a zipline system from said cabin, all the way to the top of the mountain, is absolutely the point for me. The game should be out of early access soon, so I’m looking forward to playing it again when it’s ‘feature complete’.

Pseudoregalia

If there’s one thing I was reminded of this year, is that I like 3D platformers. And there is many separate reasons why.

Enjoying the exploration of the wonderful little worlds these games take place in. Or enjoying the mechanics of scamping around a 3D space as effectively as possible.

Pseudoregalia firmly is in the latter category. It is firmly for the fans of movement and traversal.

The game is laid out in a ‘search action’ type of progression, where the items you find in the game add to your options for movement. Not long after you start the game and get past the ‘opening sequence’, and obtaining your slide, and slide jump, your options open up more than you realise at first, but once you know, you find out that sequence breaking using pure movement tech is a part of the game. You really wanna find out what you can get away with.

When I say that the game fits firmly in the ‘about traversal’ side of 3D platformers, it’s also because the exploration is kinda weak, as each area in the world is fairly simplistic and rather samey, while keeping to their theme. Getting lost is easy as there’s not a lot differentiating between most rooms, short of the odd monument. A map would be a small fix for this (and is in the works), but doesn’t solve the issue of the world design itself. Doesn’t make the world any less of a challenge to traverse, however. It’s ‘era-appropriate’ look is sort of grey-box design in a way.

There is combat, but it is easily the weakest part of the game. With how agile your character is, you’d think she’d be capable of brining the pain, but combat is basic, limited mainly to a 3 hit combo, with your other techniques usually used in solving puzzles in the environment. Not even your downward spike you use to high jump is viable, as you just take damage on impact. As a result, combat is infrequent and there’s only a couple of boss encounters.

What you have to understand is for what you get for about 5 bucks, it is actually impressive how much fun this is. I don’t mind getting lost as it means more time with the game. I would call this my top contender for favourite game this year, if only there was more. And all my criticism is because I care about more than most. I want it to do well, and thanks to the barrier of entry being so cheap, I think it has.

In short, this game’s pretty goat butt- sorry, pretty good, but it’s kind of short. Still, not bad for 5 bucks, for the one complete game on this list! And there is pants if you want, but why would you?

I’m of course not referring to the objectively superior professional outfit… yes, even better than nothing at all. So good it’ll give you Covid, yeag!

Volcanoids (early access)

This game’s premise is pretty ingenious, and technically impressive. It’s an open world survival crafting game, with a mobile base!

That said, you’re not there to live off the land and make your own, you’re there on a mission to retake the island from some robots gone wrong, that have been causing the volcano on the island to do a little trolling pretty regularly. So, its laser focused on getting you geared up to take on this threat, rather than living there.

To give you an idea of what kind of operation you’ll have in the late game, you’ll be automating not just processing of resources, but ammo, guns, health, armour, and repair equipment filling dispensers in your staging room, you’ll have mining drones going out to collect nearby ores, gun drones where you can use any of your weapons and deploy them in the field or anywhere on the map, and a really versatile support drone that has cover, health and armour regen, a tesla coil to shoot down projectiles, and a storage area you can put loot in to send back to the drill ship.

Ah yes, the drill ship. Your mobile base is mobile in the sense that you can set up in various locations. To do this, your mobile base can tunnel underground, and pop up in set locations, even into caves. You must do this to avoid the periodic eruptions of the island’s volcano. (Or if you’re out in the open, go hide in one of the many structures.) You can just sit there buried to do some basic prep, and fixes to the internals of your ship, but the modules you install into the slots of your ship require you to be deployed somewhere to function. So, there’s a difference between being safe and finding somewhere safe to get some work done… or having enough defences to protect yourself while you do.

All this comes together to make a technically, and mechanically impressive and fun game. I love pulling up next to an enemy drill ship, assaulting their position, getting inside, and stealing, and breaking everything. And all the tools given to you make taking on the robotic threat a blast!

But not for long. In its current state there is, I would say… about 12 hours of content total. But development is ongoing, and an embiggening of the island is coming in the future. Still, the 12 hours of content, is still plenty of fun, and I’ve certainly gotten multiple runs out of it. I’d call it, this year’s Signal from Tolva in that regard.

I will mention that playing with overseas friends, with all the lag that entails, makes it very hard to land shots… like, worse than I’ve experienced in most other games. But the recently added Tesla weapons do honestly remedy that. Hopefully that’ll improve over time.

Lethal company (early access)

Chances are you’ve played this one, and/or have seen enough to know what to make of it… or are not interested despite (or in spite of) the saturation.

So, I’ll forego the explanation for this one and get to my opinion.

It’s a funny game, that is very early in its days. As such, I feel after 20 hours I’ve gotten everything out of the game I can currently, and I’m not really interested in playing more until there’s a lot more to it.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been playing Zeekerrs previous game The Upturned. Been finding it very enjoyable.

Void crew (early access)

Image source: Massively Overpowered, also how did I not take any screenshots??

Y’know, I ended last year playing a ship crewing game in PULSAR: the lost colony. Seems fitting I finish this year playing something similar.

However, this game is not as it seems on the surface. It’s not a game where a group of friends crew a ship and explore space. a game where a group of friends crew a ship, go out, do some missions, and come back and get rewards. It’s much more like Deep Rock Galactic in that sense. Each ‘pilgrimage’ has a set beginning and end.

The loop is lots of fun, crews will be all doing their own thing, and as an engineer, if I’m not helping shoot stuff, or being the only scavenger available, I can take time to wander around the ship (getting lost if we’re using the big ship), tending to the ship systems, moving items out of the scoop and into storage, or the recycler, which involves tossing them down the corridor a lot of the time.

One part of the loop I’m iffy about is at the end of every mission, in order to maximise our alloy bonus, we usually run around the ship, scuttling everything we built and collected, ship modules, ammo, upgrades, and other bits and pieces, sending it to the fabricator to get recycled one by one. I find this part of the loop to be pretty tedious and I feel like it should get a rework at some point, maybe taking account of your assets, and the value you would have if you had recycled everything. It’s not like you keep anything you find between missions. They made it easier recently with their rework of the void jump, allowing a ship to sit in ‘warp’, so that crews have time to prepare the next move, which at that stage is slowly chew through everything, and set the course for home.

Also, the loot in this game… It’s a random cosmetic lootbox system WITH DUPLICATES. At least it’s not monetized at the moment, I’m… weary, but still… just… no. And I cannot tell you how many crappy little visor gifs I’ve gotten… again, in duplicates of. Just let me purchase what I want with a form of in-game currency, and/or add items to progression.

But at any rate, this is still super technically impressive at this stage of development. After some bad habits are ironed out, I’m excited to see where this game goes.

Inkbound (early access)

I’m not normally a fan of turn based games. Inkbound sets out to take everything I dislike about turn based games, and effectively makes them fair. I suppose this makes the fight one sided in a certain way, but that doesn’t make it any less challenging.

To validate my feelings about turn based games, I have recently been playing through the Hylics series again, and I had my first game of D&D. The takeaway from all that being… preparation is key.

Inkbound allows you to prepare on the fly, as you’re making your move. While you’re doing everything you can, that your energy and availability of your abilities can permit, you know what the enemy is going to do, and you can either dodge, or get ready to take it, perhaps even influence them in some way.

One thing you cannot predict is how your adventure will go. If it plays like rouge, smells like rogue, it must be likewise… like rogue… a roguelike. ehem

The progression of your abilities, and the weird doodads you’ll find are randomised each run. You find yourself having to tend with multiple varieties of your ‘absolutely broken’ build. Oh but once you have one, it’s very funny to, say… do absurd numbers of damage concurrent to how tanky you are, like the harder you are to kill, the easier it is to kill others… which does make sense overall, but in this context… it couldn't be closer to the truth. Or how about the various ways to do DoT, and just watching the enemy die on their own. Or my personal favourite, outright removing the movement cap and literally running circles around the enemy… in a turn based game.

Also, it should be worth mentioning, in the antithesis of what Void Crew is doing, in more ways than one, the game started out having a premium currency to unlock cosmetics with, but they soon done way with that, and now you just earn the currency in game… as it should be. It’s unfortunate that it started that way, but I’m happy it’s where it’s at now. And they’re still offering paid Cosmetic DLC packages. Infinitely better than a random lootbox with dupes!

[nokingsonlyfooles]

One-Third.

Of all the news that's bothered me today, this one bothers me the most. So I'll mention it.

I'm not in the habit of telling people what to think, or do. I'm an anarchist, that's not my brand. And sometimes I don't even know what to think or do.

So! Despite the wall and the crimes against humanity, Trump yeeted fewer human beings back across the border in four years than Obama did in his first four. And being deported in a sweeping, ultranationalist fervour is not the end of one's story. The family pictured above were ejected in Eisenhower's Operation Racial Slur, because brain rot is nothing new in my country of origin. They came back legally, reunited, prospered, and now they make tamales for the holidays like I do. It's hard to crush the people your economy depends on, isn't it? They just won't stay down!

Cartoonish evil posturing is not very effective. Silence, subtlety and charisma are much better at achieving their goals. I am left wondering if fewer people would be willing to let the genocide slide if Trump were funding it, and quoting Hitler about it to the media.

But I shouldn't wonder that. Of course more people would yell about it if Trump were doing it. They know what Trump is! He never lets you forget it! He'd be screaming about eradicating the Arab Menace on Fox News 24/7. When he passes out from lack of oxygen, they'll rerun his greatest hits. Biden, on the other hand - Hey! At Least He's Not Trump. And, judging from other articles, that seems to be the platform he's running on. Again.

I carried water for Obama when he was in office. I was a hell of a lot younger and less cynical, but I bought that a person would not put children in cages if there were any other option. I do not buy that anymore. And I barely remember hearing anything about the deportations until his term was almost up. He was only sending back the criminals, you remember that? Did you accept it as politically expedient like I did, or were you smarter than me?

That water I carried was full of lead, you should not drink it no matter what the nice man in the tan suit says.

This is why I'm not up for choosing the lesser evil. Stories like this suggest that, if we tote up the numbers like soulless accountants, the calculations for most/least harm are fucking fucked. Kant is bullshit and I am not a goddamn utilitarian. I'm not about to vote Idiot and keep my fingers crossed that he's too loud and stupid to do much damage. I don't know what opportunities for damage will occur in the next four years, or who will be in the best position to take advantage of them.

Polling suggests that most Americans don't want to make this choice any more than I do. But we're goin' ahead anyway, and we've already decided two evils will be the only viable candidates, months ahead of the primaries. You'll just hafta guess the lesser one! Have fun weighing all those human lives against each other!

I can only reiterate: Don't ask me this. I don't have the answer. And I'm not going to do the math, the math is evil too. I shouldn't even be TEMPTED to do math like this. Please call me when you have a candidate who doesn't want to harm anyone. I am no longer responding to folks asking me who I'm willing to throw under the bus.

[gemsofthegalaxy]

as someone who only watched Buzzfeed Unsolved and didn't follow the ghoul boys to the Watcher in the first place, i also feel like striking out on their own entire platform maaaaaay not work out very well?

browsing the comments on the announcement video, it seems like the (vocal) audience, anyway, is more interested in the personalities of the cast members and not how high the production value is. coupled with not having as many shows to watch and competing with just so many other streaming platforms, I'm not banking on them being able to sustain the audience

maybe they will have some superfans who get them by, though, who knows!

i agree with some folks that it might have been wise to see if they could join Nebula or something but maybe that wasn't viable either, who knows. i don't wish for their failure but i won't be surprised if they don't get a ton of takers