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Phantom Person

It's maddening how you can talk in chatrooms and make people laugh all the time and then you try to chat someone up on a dating app and all of that humor dries up. Everything dries up. And you're just saying vague generalities. Why is my personality contextual?

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Factions in this Skirmish game are going to be different than they were in standard Baleful-Eye. I'm going to try to cut a little closer to conspiracy theory archetypes this time but without crossing into antisemitism or any of the other -isms prevalent in conspiracy lore.

One of the main concepts in the game is that there are multiple overlapping conspiracy groups trying to control the world rather than a single Illuminati or whoever. This has been done before (most things have) but it directly feeds into having little groups of secret warriors going after each other. Conspiracy groups will be organized into cells with your characters all being from a single small cell.

Tentative Faction Ideas and Rehashes:

A New World Order group consisting of tech bros and military theorists. Mechs and cybernetics with no magic to speak of.

A cult that combines Christian apocalypticism with blood magic and necromancy. A mix of Jim Jones and militia movement types.

A very punk/anarchism flavored band of urban gangsters. Ananymous style hackers and gutter samurai types.

The Fae who are also the Greys. Combining UFO abduction lore with Faerie abduction lore here.

A group consisting of chaos magicians and other occultists. A more punk version of the Order of the Golden Dawn, sort of.

A traditional demonic/satanic cult mixed with Lovecraftian cult ideas. I'm gonna have to be careful here given the usual blood libel component to ideas of cults like these.

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Yudkowski knows that true love of his life is the Basilisk. One glance, and he's paralyzed with perpetual erotic torment.

I’m not convinced that the theory that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote The Erogamer is actually true (~25%, let’s say), but it has some hilarious implications when you think it through.

Presumably in secretly writing under a pseudonym, he tried to make some changes to his writing style to obscure his identity. The most obvious change: The Erogamer isn’t full of lectures about how you should read the Sequences. And that change, leaving out the explicit lectures, was a great improvement! Led to an interesting (though flawed, yes, not the point right now) work that, even with the annoyance of having to go make an account on a porn forum to read it, got a lot of fans. Then after that success, he decides to keep quiet about it being him. Maybe he doesn’t want it confirmed that he wrote weird porn for some reason? Except then the next long-form work that he’s actually taken credit for is… once again BDSM porn, once again with complicated negotiations between cosmic forces, now full of explicit Erogamer references, but also the plot revolves around the main character giving literal classroom lectures about Bayesianism. WHY

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Something I don't quite get is how people will rage at you for criticizing Dave Chappelle like somehow he should be allowed to say whatever he wants and if you get offended it's your problem but if you say anything back people get offended by it and it's still somehow your problem. Dave Chappelle is a very smart man and a millionaire. He doesn't need you to protect him or be offended on his behalf. For all the complaints about cancel culture he still has his Netflix specials and this new thing with SNL. He's doing fine. We're throwing words at him, not firebombs.

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It's because their God hates pleasure. Their God demands they love that God more than anything else, even their own families or friends. So anything that could "distract" from their love of that God is viewed with deep disdain and suspicion. You're only supposed to derive pleasure from feeling God's love. Read Ecclesiastes.

There is something fascinating about "alphamale" or conservative male culture, in that they seem to have a disdain for anything pleasant or vaguely cultural or anything that could give the impression of comfort and refinement. The reason they so often cite is that they don't want to be soft unlike what they imagine the 21st century democrat voter to be like. They value their ability to tough out hardship and suffer brutalities that they imagine other people couldn't or wouldn't. But the only time we secularly value this sort of self-sacrifice is when it produces some prosocial goods or acts as a solidaristic tool. And of course, the guy can say "well I'm always going to be prepared for when that is needed" but like the whole culture is profoundly uninterested in any measure of self-sacrifice for others. Even a minor sacrifice for major returns is an unjustifiable encroachment. So like you have a bunch of guys performatively engaging in self-denial for no apparent, constructive reason.

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Pruning

I need to prune out some stuff from the skirmish game to make it more manageable but it's hard to decide what to cut out. I hate, hate, hate cutting out anything because I like MAXIMUM OPTIONS so my stuff ends up being very byzantine. I guess I should probably just hope to find a couple of folks who vibe with the stuff I want to make rather than tweak my product for a larger "market". I have a day job so I don't need to sell my games, giving me a lot more lee-way on what I can do with them.

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Green Herring makes some great ascii/ansi art.

Shield Cat's Lance the Otter (November 3, 2022)

My latest piece of art prior to starting my Tumblr was this fanart of Lance the Otter from Shield Cat, a game being developed by @cyanroxanne. Look at him go! He's gotta do all the spinning he can to save the Cat Kingdom...

You can also find this piece on my website here!

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I started a TUMBLR! On a lark, because a friend also started one. I'll likely be talking a bit about whatever game I'm working on at any given moment. I make boardgames, tabletop rpgs, card games, and the occasional zzt or megazeux game. I'm only ok at any of these things but I'm super productive most of the time due to mania. LGBT, lesbian, transgender. Don't hit me unless you have a question about, praise for, criticism of, or just commentary on a game I made.

Right now, I'm making a skirmish miniatures game. A bit like the famous ones but more in-depth and customizable. There's rules for making your own fighters, weapons, armor, spells, etc. It's always hard to balance systems like that and keep the simple enough to work with. I've opted to allow some complex-ish maths because I'm a horrible nerd who prefers gameplay balance over simplicity but I have made a some concessions.

It's an off-shoot of my Baleful-Eye-Wargear boardgame. The "in-house" (I'm just one person, I ain't got employees or even concerned relatives around to question the ways I spend my time) setting is a conspiracy theory, X-Files, secret spy vs. secret spy vs. cultist vs. mutant type thing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist (that I am aware of) but I think conspiracy theories are as valid of a mythology to play with as all the elves, dwarfs, and laser sword wielders.