https://xcancel.com/leftistbeard/status/1939115723965833490

If you want to dive right in, here's a link to the Cyan collection in the VGHF digital archive:

https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/22cf9aa2-812b-4f39-b42e-e87a3c153b8c

Video description:

This video is for transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people, and anyone else who has been pushed to the margins.

You face unspeakable adversity. So many voices shame you and want you to be diminished to a more palatable effigy of yourself, and many don't care if that means the material or metaphysical disillusionment of who you truly are. The voices come from your government, from strangers on the internet, from your coworkers, from your family.

One of the voices probably comes from inside you.

Every voice in this video is from someone rooting for you. I'm rooting for you.

When you're too broken to work, too broken to play, too broken to even get out of bed, know this:

Every breath you take is a radical refusal to acquiesce to the voices that want you to be diminished. Your cellular metabolism follows the same basic chemical equation as any other fire. Focus on taking your next breath. Feed the flame oxygen and Don't. Be. Extinguished.

The Video Game History Foundation does some great work, and it's really cool to see this project getting off the ground! Their project to vastly improve OCR for magazines seems pretty awesome--curious to learn about the technical details of that project.

Only poked around a little, but here's a random tidbit: while perusing the E3 2001 Directory I learned that CliffyB (of Unreal and Gears of War fame) used to maintain a website called cat-scans.com which was home to literal cat scans (scans of cats on flatbed scanners). Also Tommy Tallarico was at that year's E3 as part of the "How to Break into Gaming" panel...lmao.

Also, if you're into video game history I definitely recommend their podcast (RSS link)! I thought their most recent episode with a couple who worked at GamePro was a lot of fun.

edit: also perhaps of interest to Hexbears: this collection of zines from Game Workers Unite, which helped spark the movement to unionize workers in the game industry back in 2018

Link to the site (it's a series of 12 strips, so just keep hitting "next" until there's no more Mario)

https://www.noncanon.com/comics/2017-12-12%20Lovely%20Notions.html

This cover is my happy place

The long-awaited sequel to one of my favorite videos of all time, Can you beat Pokemon FireRed while blind and deaf?, wherein MartSnack devises a single sequence of inputs that will beat Pokémon FireRed with >99% probability using clever strategies and a lot of number crunching--definitely check that one out first if you haven't seen it already.

In this video, MartSnack kicks it up a notch and comes up with a winning sequence of inputs for EVERY SINGLE RNG SEED in Pokémon Platinum (he gives the figure as ~4.2 billion--I would have guessed it's 2^32 which is more like 4.3 billion, but perhaps the RNG function is such that there are some sequences which are identical even for different seeds). He gives himself additional constraints like keeping Pokémon levels to a minimum and using Nuzlocke rules to keep things interesting, so he's not just grinding a Pokémon up to Level 100 and facerolling through the game.

There are some incredibly ingenious techniques employed, and it's a wonderfully produced video with all kinds of great visual aids. He gives just as much detail as you need to appreciate the strategies, introducing them as they come up without getting bogged down in detailing every single battle. So while it's a bit over an hour long, it's packed with content--this is the result of two years of hard work, not padded-out YouTube slop.

Was wondering about how Pikmin 2's procedural music works and came across this beautifully crafted video explaining the whole intricate system.

This channel seems like a treasure trove--if you just wanna jam, check out this sick Driftveil City arrangement for starters

There were a few posts showing interest already

https://hexbear.net/post/2909543
https://hexbear.net/post/2955745

so I figured I'd let people know! Idk if there are any scanlations in the works (let alone an official English localization), but if you're decent at Japanese I'd say the first chapter is pretty accessible. My kanji knowledge is pretty terrible but I was able to muscle through with only looking up a few key words and just relying on context for the rest. This is just a setup chapter, so there's not much to go on:

The art is great, IMO--to be expected of the mangaka of Our Dreams at Dusk (highly recommended if you haven't read it already, and a short read at only four volumes!). Also there was a neat touch which I haven't personally seen before: when German is being spoken, it's still written in Japanese but typeset in the typical Western horizontal style which makes it clearly stand out without requiring any annotations. Look forward to seeing where it goes, and I hope it'll get an official localization to maximize its exposure to Western audiences! Also from a raw reading perspective, it's nice to get in on the ground floor since it can feel really daunting to have 100 chapters ahead of you when reading is somewhat slow and effortful.

Love how the rhythmic hitch caused by the "missing beat" makes the bass groove so hard

Oh yeah, post your favorite 7/4 tunes! I went for the low-hanging fruit, but I'd love to hear some others, especially ones with different beat groupings (e.g. 2 + 3 + 2 instead of the 2 + 2 + 3 used in "Money")

This song is somehow simultaneously paint-by-numbers generic anisong #136 and a total banger. Been jamming to it ever since the anime started airing and the full versions just dropped today to coincide with the final episode of the anime!

Honestly, paint-by-numbers is a little harsh; I think it sounds like that at first blush since it doesn't do anything particularly innovative—Cry Baby, it's not (there are English subs!)—but it's well-written and blends a lot of typical J-pop tropes in just the right way such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I love that they did a bunch of different versions--the piano one really allows you to appreciate the voice leading, while the acoustic guitar one emphasizes the rhythmic elements. Maybe it's just because it executes something really well that I'm a sucker for: taking the same melody and recontextualizing it by changing the underlying harmony (the first melodic motif in the chorus is repeated three times, and each time it gets different chord changes!). And the hook is such an earworm:

♫ MAGICAL LOVE, BE WITH YOU! ♪