#this video was unreal

[iwantoceans]

Love wins all

[ai-dream]

[dansemacabre]

(tw unreality!)

ayo new theory just dropped and bad news! the implications are cosmically horrifying

in the bulletin from time baby in book of bill, he says bill is a “danger to narrativity”, and that he risks the fourth wall. this kept bothering me. why reference the fourth wall here? why have time baby reference it? yeah the heaven page and shit is a bit meta, but thats just how bill talks, right? Well i was a fool

when you put “seven eyes” into the lost files site, this warning pops up from the oracle question mark? from journal three:

the therapese at the bottom translates to “set coords for dimension: r34lity”.

and putting r34lity into the website gives us this image:

the text below it reads they found a new home. those are “real” fucking images. the henchmaniacs are in our “reality”. the cryptids page might not have been a goof goof bit- they were “real”. (“real” meaning our reality in the book of bill sense of it but still our reality. is that tracking.)

none of the rest of the cast actually references us as a specific audience, or the fandom, or acts like we know them at all. the cast addresses everything they write to a mystery “reader” who needs to be saved from the book’s influence.

meanwhile, in the book of bill:

because bill’s not talking to a mystery “reader” who’s reading this book.

bill fucking sees us.

bill sees reality. REALITY reality. like this earth the one with alex hirsch and gravity falls the show and tiktok and shit. book of bill is a book in our reality for us the reader. (ie. there’s a reference to “they both reached for the gun” if you put gun in the website, which would only make sense if bill was sentient in this “reality” right now.) and someone is trying to get here to hide from him. maybe they’re already here.

[foone]

AAA games? Pfft. Indie games? Double pfft.

I only play games from the alternate history where Hillary Clinton was elected in 2008 and banned all video games. You can only imagine how weird their underground gaming scene is. People like to call unlicensed games "bootlegs" but they've got actual bootlegged games! I've played games about helping your grandmother in hospice care realize she's a lesbian by reading Sappho to her, at 2am in a speakeasy in Baltimore. The cops raided it the next night, hundreds of Gamers were arrested. They posted pictures all over Friendster of the Baltimore PD destroying the arcades with axes.

I nearly got busted once because I was imaging old disks from a 386 and someone tipped off the gaming cops that there was a copy of Commander Keen in there. I had to prove that I didn't know it, I was imaging the disks blind and then indexing them later, and I would of course turn over any contraband to the proper authorities.

I was already on a watch list because I'd been known to have some gamedev-related activities pre-ban. They can't arrest me for making games back in 2007 when it was still legal, but they do want to keep an eye on me since I have the skills to break the law.

Anyway that universe's bootlegs are mainly PC games. Can't really have console games if there hasn't been a console release since the Wii/PS3/360 era. At one point Nintendo threatened to release the Wii SDK so game devs in the US could make unlicensed games, but that didn't happen as there were quickly no functional Wiis left in the US, except for very rare holdouts that never move. PC games are easy to distribute samizdat and hide on a USB stick or CD-R labeled "nickelback".

Japan's games industry is still going, so the later Nintendo and Sony consoles still exist, but Microsoft got out of the business of course. They sold the franchise to Sega who were hoping to release the 360 successor (the Xbox One in our universe) as the Sega Phoenix but it never materialized, either through their own financial incompetence or because of pressure from the US. There's a lot of international treaties that the US has pushed "and this aid only goes through if you ban games" clauses into. That would have been an official UN resolution if the USSR hadn't vetoed it. For once, thank God for the security council, eh?

I mainly get my gaming news through Japanese gaming sites (through a set of VPNs, since they're blocked at the border firewall), and some tor onion site run by a weird guy in Minnesota who is obsessed with documenting all the underground US games.

There's a lot being worked on, but it's always a tricky trade off. Too much attention and the police might be able to track down the creators, and it's basically impossible to fund underground games, as the VISA/PayPal etc funds get seized immediately. There's a whole task force for that.

Anyway one of the weirdest differences between our two time lines is that they've gone back and edited out gaming from a bunch of movies. Those that they can, of course. War games was just banned because they couldn't remove the tic tac toe ending. The Net just removed the scene at the beginning where she's playing Wolfenstein 3D, by recording some new screen footage and a new voice over. She's fixing a spreadsheet in the new edition.

(Yes, I've seen The Net from this alternate timeline. On Laserdisc, of course. I'm just that kind of person!)

They even edited Star Wars. You know that scene where R2-D2 is playing holochess with Chewie? They edited it to be a board game instead of holograms, because that made it too "video gamey".

Technically it's not illegal to show gaming in a movie, but it needs to be an 18+ film and you have to show the deleterious effects of gaming and/or the gamesters coming to a bad end.

This has affected films less than you'd think, to be honest. They were never great about showing video games even before they banned them.

Anyway, go have fun playing your AAA games with hundred-million-dollar budgets. I only play indie games made by people under a constant threat of arrest for their art.

[theotherhappyplace]

Hahaha milkwalker you scamp

[carmen-berzattos]

Hozier performs I, Carrion (Icarian) for Amazon City Sessions

[vancityreynolds]

Goncharov to himself: Will you be here when I return?

To this day, that line gives me chills.

[jaubaius]

undefined

Source

[lifemod17]

Hi hello I am once again extremely unwell

The way he stood back to admire the crowd like he can't believe it? During Like Real People Do? The way his eyes LITERALLY SPARKLE?!?

Forest Hills night 2 || 05 / 06 / 2024

[aromantic-goldfishdeactivated202]

[ai-dream]

[aetherean-alchemist]

QSMP 3AM CHALLENGE GONE WRONG

OMG SUPER HAUNTED

NOT CLICKBAIT (BLOOD SACRIFICE) (CUCURUCHO SPOTTED???)

[prokopetz]

More favourite stupid video game tropes, Hallowe’en edition:

Games where you start out playing as a character who’s presented as a totally plausible protagonist, but then they’re horribly killed and the actual player character is someone different  

Tutorials that describe the basic mechanics from an in-character perspective in a way that seems like a silly fourth-wall-breaking joke, then much later this casual blurring of the fourth wall is revealed to have horrifying narrative implications  

Fakeouts where it looks like you messed up and died, but really it’s a puzzle and you have to do something during the fake gameover screen to “solve” it  

Reality-warping powers being represented as the ability to fuck with the game-mechanical substrate; e.g., teleportation in a 2D action game being represented by letting the player screen-wrap  

Brainfuck segments where you’re suddenly playing as the monster and you have to have a boss fight against your own player character or something  

Puzzles where the obstacles are the appendages of some unfathomably huge unseen creature, and you have to, like, poke its tentacles in the correct order to get them to move out of the way  

Subtly impossible level layouts, like a corridor that makes four or five left turns in a row without intersecting itself  

When a game whose narrative has heretofore acknowledged no diegetic separation between the player and the player character suddenly breaks its own rules and addresses the player directly  

When you’re in a suspiciously calm and peaceful area, then something happens to alter your perceptions and it’s revealed that it was all an illusion and the Happy Shiny People were secretly zombie demon ghosts all along, and they all turn to face the camera and go “EEEEEEEE”  

When there’s a guy with a detachable head