Near Symmetry

Y'all working on any games out there?

I wanna hear about them!

Working on a Forged in the Dark game called Voidwalkers! It's about teams of brave souls who make daring excursions into mysterious pocket dimensions.

In tonight's playtest the team stole a bloodthirsty orange sapling, blew up a gummy bear tree, and got matching purple scars (nice!)

I'm also working on a Forged in the Dark game! It's called Protect the Child and it's about Monster Babysitters, inspired by Monsters Inc, the Mandalorian, and Ice Age.

Right now the playtest group is trying to figure out how to revive a local coven of hags, while also keeping little ol' Clementine safe from the Fae courts.

i've been noodling around with a hack of Interstitial 2e (which you should back on kickstarter) called MetaFiction, which is about being trapped in a story about a death game and has playbooks both for fictional characters who don't know they're fictional and for people in the story who either got isekai'd there or otherwise are self aware that they're inside a story

my more succinct pitch is that it's a PBTA game about metagaming that lets you make characters who use fictional tropes/writing conventions/their own archetypes as a weapon. and it has a playbook for "guy who's stuck in a time loop"

I've already talked about it a few times, but I'm working on a new version of my 24XX game Underhills. The new version runs on the resistance engine used in Spire and Heart, and instead of just being about a hotel where crimes happen will have multiple campaign frameworks, from a private eyes to the original hotel setup to muckraking reporters trying to break a big story.

I'm working on a semi-setting-neutral game with percentage rolls as a basic mechanic, although with some twists like Action Points on combat rounds (think Actions in Pathfinder 2e), party-building mechanics, and some fun meta-resources. Doing this mainly in response to Warhammer FRPG, my most played system being a bit of a bore mechanically. I want to have a system that doesn't do much linear progression in terms of character levels, in fact, I am not including those at all, same with classes, (which I decided to call Vocations), the only thing they define is a couple starting skills and basic equipment. I want to have a realistic rpg with percentage based rolls that's also not a complete bore like WFRPG and doesn't require a degree in anthropology and reading through 20 years worth of material (like Runequest). I'm also planning to include traveling mechanics based on the terrain type and elevation of said terrain, weather mechanics, some (as simple as possible) hunger and thirst mechanics and I'm trying to do away with Hit Points as a concept. In general I think I might never truly complete this project, but if I ever do, it's going to be named the Ruins System bc I'm edgy like that :)

Most people probably know about it by now, but I have been working for years on Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and the Kickstarter launched just a few days ago!

i was inspired by my last rb.

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_

Nope! When Chrome first came to popularity, people switched over to it cause it was “faster” (turns out, it just eats through your device’s CPU) but since then Firefox has upped its game in a major way. Chrome just doesn’t measure up anymore. Plus, nowadays Chrome is just a data harvester designed to show hyper targeted ads - so even if Firefox ain’t for you, it’s still worth ditching Google for a different browser.

Legit though I switched to Firefox and it’s so so so much better

i’m gonna keep reblogging this ad infinitum so yall might as well convert now

Also highly recommend Game Master Monday and Bellas Comet!

Bellas Comet uses the ARC: Doom system and is a wildly fun ride with an amazing twist

Game Master Mknday is mostly a one shot podcast channel that uses indie games. There are also a few mini series poured in.

my favorite thing about this post is all the people who chose to use the default icon defending themselves in the notes like no stop it just put a picture up

Loving this energy

*wipes tear* they learn tumblr culture so fast . . . the spite . . . the malicious compliance of it all . . . I'm so proud

I'm not even kidding I think food service jobs are the hardest customer service jobs that exist and if you have them on your resume long enough that it's clear you could maintain them people should be begging on their hands and fucking knees for you to work for them.

Do you have any idea how much goes into any given food service job. Not only is it customer service, it's usually heavy machinery operation and maintaining, sanitation work, handling of money, awareness of allergens and chemicals and EXACTLY where they are and where they go, intense memory games for menu items and all of their ingredients... You deal with some of the absolute worst rushes doing multiple tasks, you can basically never sit down, most of your cooking equipment is extremely dangerous and can hurt you very badly if you lose focus for any amount of time, you deal with insane temperature fluctuations constantly, food service is always understaffed because it's less expensive to pay you to do the jobs of four people, everyone is incredibly mean to you all the time, and you get paid like absolute fucking shit because people think it's "unskilled" entry level labor anyway.

Average sixteen year old working minimum wage at McDonald's is actually a more respectable and skilled worker than any person working a salaried desk job on the planet.

oh you are so young

in 2015 I needed a job really bad for reasons not worth getting into. i was living in ohio for like 6 months & i just applied at every place within a 30 minute drive from me and i got a call from the local Game Stop mere minutes after submitting the online app, which was obviously a red flag but I wasn’t in the position to be picky.

so they tell me when to show up for orientation & I get there the day-of but the store is closed & locked. i text the manager & he says back “oh yeah. i manage two Game Stops and open them alternate days.”

apparently the Game Stop I originally applied to is open Mondays Wednesdays Fridays and the other one is open Sundays Tuesdays Thursdays Saturdays.

They’re 15 minutes apart. I don’t ask whether it would make sense to just have one store locally that is open daily, bc maybe the guy knows something I don’t.

So I get to the other Game Stop and walk in and it seems like there’s no one working there. There’s just a single woman in there wearing an ankle length leather trench coat. She didn’t greet me when I came in & she’s just browsing.

After ten minutes I ask her if she’s seen any employees and she’s like “oh I’m an employee.” She’s not wearing a name tag on the trench coat.

I tell her I’m here for training and she tells me the manager hasn’t come in yet. “he falls asleep playing xbox all the time but if he’s on live we can try pinging him to wake him up.”

I play Xbox and that absolutely doesn’t sound like a thing you can do in the way she’s describing it but once again maybe she knows something I don’t.

I ask if we have an Xbox that we can use to “ping” him and she says “yeah the one in the back we play on.”

She has an English accent by the way, a very specific & posh one which usually wouldn’t be relevant but we’ll get there.

So before she leads me to the Xbox-in-the-back she goes “oh damn. our internet has actually been down all morning, I forgot. We need to call the provider and have them come out and fix it. Can you do that?”

Can I call an unnamed internet provider and schedule them to come do service at a business where I don’t even technically work yet? Idk. She gives me their number and I call them and they put me on hold.

People are walking in and she’s not greeting them. She keeps browsing and people assume like I did that she’s another customer so they’re coming up to the counter where I’m on hold to ask me for help, and then I have to say I can’t help them and to ask the woman in the trenchcoat, and then she says “we can’t sell you anything. internet’s down.”

this goes on for 30 minutes and every time the store is empty she’s chatting at me and I’m on hold and then a man walks in the door and he says “sorry I fell asleep on live again haahaahaa” so this is the manager and the minute she starts speaking to him she no longer has an English accent which has me confused because it did not sound fake.

It was regionally specific and very natural.

the manager asks what I’m doing and I say I’m on hold with the internet provider and he gives me a thumbs up and walks to the back.

so I ask how long she’s lived in the U.S. and say I’m always interested in the way people can sometimes go in and out of accents and she says “oh I’m American. he asked me to stop doing the accent so I only do it when he’s not here.”

Suddenly I wonder what I’m doing here and I tell her I need to leave and I give no excuse but at this point I didn’t feel like I needed one? She said okay! See you later.

The manager didn’t contact me and that night I got offered some other retail job I jumped on.

Three months later the Game Stop manager texts me and asks if I can cover a shift in an hour and I say back “I don’t think I work there? I left an hour into my training. And we never spoke again.” And he texts back “hahahaha right on.”

And you may think wow, what a strange experience that all was but recently I have spoken to friends who did work at Game Stop and when I tell them this story they don’t even blink. Nothing I say surprises them. I was at the average Game Stop

recently I discovered that Kawayoo, one of my all-time favorite Pokemon TCG artists, has some art of Loudred floating around and it's the best thing I've ever seen

I've always had chronic fatigue. I remember being twelve, and an adult mentioned how I couldn't possibly know how tired they felt because adulthood brought levels of exhaustion I couldn't imagine. I thought about that for days in fear, because I couldn't remember the last time I didn't feel tired.

Eventually I came to terms with the fact that I was just tired, and I couldn't do as many things as everyone else. People called me lazy, and I knew that wasn't true, but there's only so many times you can say "I'm tired" before people think it's an excuse. I don't blame them. When a teenager does 20 hours of extracurriculars every week and only says "I'm too tired" when you ask them to do the dishes, it's natural to think it's an excuse. At some point, I started to think the same thing.

It didn't matter that I could barely sit up. It was probably all in my head, and if I really wanted to, I could do it.

When I learned the name for it, chronic fatigue, I thought wow, people that have that must be miserable, because I am always tired and I cannot imagine what it would feel like if it were worse.

Spoiler alert, if you've been tired for a decade, it's probably chronic fatigue.

Once I figured that out though, I thought of my energy as the same as everyone else's, just smaller in quantity. And that might be true for some people, but I've figured out recently that it absolutely isn't true for me.

I used to be like wow I have so much energy today I can do this whole list for sure! And then I'd do the dishes and have to lay down for 2 hours. Then I'd think I must gave misjudged that, I didn't have as much energy as I thought.

But the thing is - I did have enough energy for more tasks, I just didn't go about them properly.

With chronic fatigue, your maximum energy is obviously much smaller than the average person's. Doing the dishes for you might use up the same percentage of energy that it takes to do all the daily chores for someone else.

If someone without chronic fatigue was to do all the daily chores, they would take breaks. Because otherwise, they're sprinting a marathon for no reason and it would take way more energy than necessary. We have to do the same.

Put the cups in the dishwasher, take a break. Put the bowls in, take a break. So on and so forth. This may mean taking breaks every 2-5 minutes but afterwards, you get to not feel like you've run a marathon while carrying 4 people on your back.

Today, I had a moderate amount of energy. Under my old system of go till you drop, I probably could have done most of the dishes and wiped off the counter and then been dead to the world for the rest of the day.

Under the new system, I scooped litter boxes, cleaned out the fridge, took the trash out, cleaned the stove, and wiped off the counter and did all the dishes. And after all that, I still had it in me to make a simple dinner, unload the dishwasher, and tidy the kitchen.

It was complete and utter insanity. Just because I sat down whenever I felt myself getting more tired than I already was.

All this to say, take fucking breaks. It's time to unlearn the ceaseless productivity bullshit that capitalism has shoved down our throats. Its actively counterproductive. Just sit down. Drink some water. Rest your body when it needs to rest.

There will still be days where there is nothing to do but rest, and days where half a load of dishes is absolutely the most I can do. But this method has really helped me minimize those, which is so incredibly relieving.

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1090402436995473408

a great thing about people transitioning is it presents us with scenarios where we have the perfect control variable to undeniably reveal sexism in the workplace. I read about a trans man neuroscientist who was told he was “so much smarter than his sister” (his sister being his pre-transition self)

and damn i knew the gaming industry was notoriously sexist (even more sexist than other stem fields, and that’s saying a lot) but seeing it laid out so clearly like this is so demoralizing.

Ben Barres was that neuroscientist

Barres has been discussed a lot by my peers, and is generally considered an icon for people like me. And his biting statements on sexism are a HUGE part of that. I don’t have much to say other than yes, it’s a big problem and still is.

List of media where the title is significantly more accurate than you expect going in:

- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

- Everything Everywhere All At Once

- The Thing

I think it’s incredibly fucked how capitalism discourages learning for learning’s sake. People will have interests they’ve spent years researching then say it’s “useless knowledge” bc it didn’t go towards a college degree and isn’t part of their job. Learning is never useless! Your brain is growing and developing throughout your whole life! People would never have epiphanies or sudden lightening strikes of creativity if they weren’t learning new things! That goes double for topics like science, politics, and history, which inform your understanding of the world you live in!

Palestinians often smile while getting arrested as a symbol of resistance. They know they will face severe torture, isolation, discriminatory laws, and prejudice without fair trial yet smile to signify their strength.

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

I feel like a lot of people just don't know how to do it or are intimidated by the prospect. I was too, actually, and I couldn't find any good guides on how to do it (beyond basic formatting) and most guides boiled down to "just describe what you see and important details!" I really wanted to add alt text bc accessibility is important to me, but I would always get kinda stumped on how to do it.

But then I saw this image, I think in a discord server, and I immediately started doing it. It kinda broke the ice for me

@muffinlance I know you're a big advocate for people using alt-text, and this seems like a good how-to guide