italian futurism was all about how theyd just discovered the feeling of driving drunk and the artistic vision really doesnt click mentally until you understand this

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

Tools

Non-Games

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

on some level it makes sense that when i ask an LLM for a book rec on a given topic it will just make one up, like, "which books exist" is a totally arbitrary fact, its crazy that somehow predicting the most likely token correctly identifies books that actually exist much of the time. but it's such a bizarre experience. the idea of someone giving you the title, author, and publishing year of a book, with some specific details about it too, and the book being totally fictional, is kind of freaky. like. if someone did that to you in real life, that guy would be real weirdo

It's actually a somewhat well known subtype of compulsive lying. Obviously, as with all psychological diagnoses, you have to take this with a grain of salt. I think it's been removed from more recent editions of the DSM. But if you want to read about it you can look at chapter 3 of Burkheim's Compulsive Disorders, where he talks about compulsive lying and describes this subclassification in a bit of detail. I don't think he's a Freudian but he says some Freudian-ish stuff (the book is from the 60s or 70s I think so you could get away with that), like he describes people who compulsively talk about not just books but films, magazines, etc. that don't exist, and basically claims that the motivation is to protect the ego by "positioning oneself as a bearer and arbiter of obscure knowledge, always with a hand on the gate, as it were, by virtue of its fabricated nature and therefore its inherently internal locus". Interesting that he kind of preempts the notion of "gatekeeping", if nothing else.

i guess before the internet this was a much more viable strategy like. how is someone gonna call you on it? it's in the library back home. at my house? no. in the city i grew up. many miles away. its a rare and treasured book. thats why all the libraries youre checking dont have it

Max is doing a bit here afaict there is no Burkheim Compulsive Disorders

oh my god. oh my god they got me. goddamit. im high but i totally would have fallen for this sober. i was kind of excited to read about this disorder..

In 1998, a team of physicists discovered that the wrinkles on a pig's brain unexpectedly formed perfect six-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds when mapped in superstring space. This led to the controversial "Porcine Geometry Hypothesis" which suggested that hogs had evolved to unconsciously solve complex string theory equations through their neural architecture. The paper "On the Emergence of SU(3) Symmetry in Sus scrofa Cerebral Folding" claimed that a sleeping pig's brain could theoretically be used to model particle interactions in 11-dimensional space. The researchers even proposed that the characteristic spiral shape of a pig's tail might serve as a biological antenna for detecting quantum vibrations from parallel universes, though this was largely dismissed as "hogwash" by the physics community.

All Seeing Axolotl

Remember when I said I wouldn't draw anymore blursed axolotls? I lied.

Part of my blursed axolotl series, because I guess it's a series now...

"poltergeist" just means "noisy ghost" so ultimately this is a question of whether a deceased goose would be noisy and I think we can all agree that yes

The poltergoose is the single noisiest kind of poultrygeist.

conlang idea: check digit conjugation

so, in this language, every word root has an associated numerical value. you add all those up, mod it by 11, and then the verb (which is at the end of the sentence) conjugates into one of 11 forms depending on it.

this leads to a literary flourish where you can get this conjugation wrong intentionally in order to imply that there is a slightly different version of the sentence that would actually pass the check, which is the one you actually meant.

Consider the relationship graph of a complete binary polycule (complete = every person is in a relationship with every other person, binary = contains people of only two genders). call an edge in this graph gay if both the people in that edge are the same gender, and call it straight if the people in that edge are different genders.

We will say that a binary polycule tends straight if it has more straight edges than gay edges and that it tends gay if it has more gay edges than straight edges.

Show that if a complete binary polycule contains an equal number of people of both genders, then it will tend straight.

In terms of the size of the complete binary polycule, what is the critical gender ratio for straight tendency? (when the ratio of genders is above the critical gender ratio for straight tendency, the polycule will tend straight)

Do there exist complete binary polycules that trend neither straight nor gay? What about binary polycules that aren't complete?

Research problem: are there other conditions on the relationship graph besides completeness that also result in the existence of a critical ratio?

unlimited redemption

My poem "I once saw the face of god" spotted in the wild! This time on this pro wrestler's twitter and instagram. Looks like his gimmick is nihilism. Love that, Mr. Warhorse. If you ever want to talk about like the Fermi paradox or ethical realism or anything, HMU.

Funniest picture on iNaturalist

NOT EVIL JUST HUNGRY by silvatooth, 2024

Acrylic, rhinestones and glue on canvas

40 x 68 in

Untitled

dalton day