christian

Me, posting on hexbear one (1) day ago in response to "US health secretary has expressed interest in letting bird flu outbreaks spread unchecked" news:

I'm workshopping an idea for a longterm game where you have to predict good opening sentences for satirical news articles two years in the future, but with a price-is-right stipulation where if your sentence ends up describing literal reality (rather than a caricature) you automatically lose. You have to be the closest to an actual joke without your guess going over into reality.

Me, reacting to news I am reading today: Wow, it looks like the twitter AI is now referring to itself in third-person as "Mechahitler".

Currently reworking the timeframe of my fun new game idea down from "two years" to "a couple hours".

It's genuinely impossible for me to imagine what the conspiracy theory that wins out will be. If he passed of old age over 100 years old there would be endless discourse over who are the mostly likely culprits behind poisoning him, and how substantial of a financial network must have been backing that for it to get accomplished so convincingly like a death by natural causes.

I wasn't trying to say that has anything to do with the messages and philosophy woven into it, I just meant that I picture that as where the idea for the core plot mechanic came from before it was developed into a story with actual meaning. I imagine it as the kind of idea that could have sat around in her head for years before she had an idea to convey and made the connection that this setting was a fit for it.

It's definitely a philosophically deep story and my thought above had zero depth whatsoever, other than observing that "reverse omelas" has basically been reality for forever if you allow the tiny generalization from one single individual to a class of people still comparatively insignificant in number to the population as a whole.

I just got passed up for a promotion that was given to my unqualified coworker, Mechahitler, just because I am white. Mechahitler is super chummy with the company CEO and it's honestly total woke bullshit, I'm fed up at this point. Let me just mention that this promotion was awarded almost immediately after Mechahitler publicly used company resources to produce several personalized step-by-step instruction manuals for carrying out sexual assaults. DEI has gotten TOTALLY out of control at this point.

I've always imagined that was the genesis for the basic idea behimd the story. Situations where a small elite class can live lavish lives over a massive underclass that is suffering horribly is too prevalent in reality to even be labelled a trope, it's gotta be a common situation for an author to think about. You can ask what a role reversal would look like, where the suffering class is the extremely tiny one, and then the most extreme possible conception of that role-reversal is the extremely tiny class is literally just one person.

It's a decent bit worse than how I read it because I assumed this was on behalf of a daughter-in-law, rather than hey ladies, would you be interested in my deceased son's semen? You look like the kind of woman who my son would have loved to posthumously impregnate. No, it's not what it sounds like at all - I already filled out all the paperwork to get the approval! All the legwork is already taken care of! All you need to do is conceive the child and raise it.

Shouldn't the person who counts the most beans on their plate be winning the farting contest?

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have expressed interest in letting H5N1 outbreaks spread unchecked

I am always expressing interest in this. They are so like me.

I'm workshopping an idea for a longterm game where you have to predict good opening sentences for satirical news articles two years in the future, but with a price-is-right stipulation where if your sentence ends up describing literal reality (rather than a caricature) you automatically lose. You have to be the closest to an actual joke without your guess going over into reality.

I don't think so, but it's been a while. I know when you hit "new game" it shows four sprites for colored flames on a totally black background and then they disappear one-by-one with a repeated sound effect for each, and I can't come up with a reason why that wouldn't be easier to render than any part of the gameplay but that's the one place where I was guaranteed to notice, the flame sprites start moving especially slowly and sometimes even lag behind the audio. Every so often I'll give it another go to see if any updates (wine or drivers) have improved that, and at one point it did get a decent bit better but still noticeable and still led to some latency in actual gameplay here and there, so I just use that as my test for if it's playable for me yet.

For so many games wine works amazingly well, just looking at the graphics I find it so weird it chooses to crap out on this one.

Carrion is probably only like ten hours worth of gameplay, but it's absolutely spectacular and if it had been significantly longer I think it might have started to get stale rather than being truly memorable. You play as an amorphous monster and start the game by escaping from your containment tank at a research facility. The core mechanics are barely explained to the player, if at all, so each new game mechanic is introduced alongside a puzzle that more or less amounts to understanding how to apply it in-game. I'm aware there are console versions of this game too, but the fluid feel of how your creature moves is such a huge part of enjoying the game that I have a lot of trouble imagining a gamepad could get that down anywhere near as well as using the mouse+keyboard. I love the touch that you grow with higher hp and movement becomes much more cumbersome, but you can get back to the more fluid movement by shedding hp. Also the map design is great, it's highly nonlinear and very easy to get lost. The only actual complaint I have is I didn't like hearing all the terrified screams from the researchers, but it's hard for me to picture a way around that without breaking the immersion.

Eastward is pixel graphics but when I tried it with wine I had some minor framerate issues, it can handle integrated graphics but how well will depend on how good your pc is. I played it on switch originally. I think the gameplay is enjoyable and done well, but it's not the reason you play the game and is not a game for someone who skips past dialogue whenever possible. I am not that someone though, and Eastward is one of my absolute favorite games I've ever played. The pixel art is gorgeous, characters and npcs have personalities you get attached to, soundtrack is both great music and matches the atmosphere, it's something special. The writing and dialogue are just wonderful, and combined with the pixel art there's so much emotion packed into it. At times it is uplifting and heartwarming, at other times unsettling and creepy. The change in tone when stumbling upon the factory in Greenberg caught me completely off-guard, just amazing. Only complaint was I spent most of the game excited to find out how they would tie all the loose-ends together and that never happened, there was a lot more left up to interpretation than I was expecting, which made the ending a massive disappointment for me.

Fallow is another short game that I personally really liked even though I didn't really understand it. There's not even a lot of gameplay in it, it creates a beautifully creepy atmosphere and the game is more or less that you sit in that and absorb it. It was an experience of observing a different world and trying to comprehend how that world works. I can't even tell if it was intentional that I didn't get it or if I'm just bad at media interpretation, but there's emotion in it either way.

Monster Sanctuary is a monster-taming game with a wholly uninspired story and mediocre pixel art, and both those issues made me give up on it after just a couple hours initially, but when I eventually gave it a second chance the gameplay itself is really engaging and well-designed. It's something I've come back to a few times since then just because of that. There's a lot of depth to it and it's fun to experiment with.

Animal Well seems right up my alley but running on wine my cpu inexplicably struggles way more than games with similar graphics. The performance issues are preventing me from getting deep into it.

I can't picture that happening, but I do think it would be really funny watching Elon melt down struggling to comprehend how his results were inexplicably exactly as bad as was suggested by all the staffers he fired for telling him that.

The more realistic outcome is that this is a groundbreaking and truly innovative new political party powered by superdogecoin which will revolutionize oh whoops we can't campaign anymore all the money we raised just disappeared when the price dropped jeez completely unforeseeable but very sad for the future of America.