• Nothing lasts forever, and that's okay. Things don't have to be permanent for them to be good. A beautiful day is not ruined by the sunset.
• Nothing is going to replace it, and that's okay. Anything that tries is going to fall short by comparison. It just means you have to try something different.
• Nothing will fix it, and that's okay. You will have regrets about not savoring your time enough, but the truth is that there's no such thing as enough. To crib from stoicism, if something is truly good, it is good regardless of how it is enjoyed. You did the best you could with the person you were and the time you had.
• Nothing will make it heal faster, and that's okay. You can't control the ocean, only your boat. Do what you need to do to weather the storm.

goodbye cohost i love you cohost

This is, now, more than ever, a good reminder.

The amazing transfem artist behind these words is also struggling to stay housed and needs help to survive. Sharing also helps.

(Words in the piece above by Curse Null, layout by Q.G. Pennyworth)

if I can offer one piece of unsolicited advice in the waning hours of this website: it is very easy to forget (which is socially reinforced, unfortunately) that you can do basically anything that you want to. there are often reasons to not do many things. but a lot of those reasons are extremely fake and live entirely inside of your own head. go ahead and invite your internet friends who live "nearby" to come hang out somewhere. send an email to your college roommate who you haven't spoken to in a decade. jaywalk. make a little free library. download a movie illegally. use your phone camera to record some video and edit it to your favorite song. bake some cookies and offer them to your neighbors. start a group chat with your four different friends who all like the same thing but don't talk about it together. screw something into the wall of your rental unit. draw a cool guy on a piece of paper. draw a cool guy on the wall of a public restroom. seize onto those moments where you remember that society is this thing that we all just collectively make up and that not only is it way easier for you to tell yourself no than other people to tell you no, you'll be surprised at how often other people say yes.

I was doing a fresh rsync backup of the home directory on a laptop I hadn't previously backed up. I noticed that with the verbose option enabled, rsync was reporting about 55 KB/s upload speed -- about as good as dial-up modem speed. I don't know if it's always been this bad for a while, or if I was only noticing it when looking at a program that was continuously reporting the upload speed.

I noticed that when I switched from home wifi to phone tethering, the upload speed went up to about 1 MB/s, which isn't what I would expect. I didn't want to run into some hidden data cap by uploading 100 GB over my cell phone, so I kept looking.

I found the fix on a six-year-old forum page: edit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf" and change the line wifi.powersave = 3towifi.powersave = 2`.

After I did this, and reconnected to my home wifi, rsync started reporting between 2 MB/s and 4 MB/s. Even at the low end of that range, that's a 36x speedup from editing one line in a config file.

I don't know what "WiFi Powersave" is or why turning it on makes your connection 36 to 75 times slower. Nor do I know why the "make your connection 36 to 75 times slower setting" is the default in Ubuntu. Nor do I know why even with the "make your Internet slow" setting enabled, using my phone as an access point was still fast while using my home wifi resulted in dialup speed.

Why is this the default??

New Lancer resource just came out - the Dustgrave investigative mission.

Has a bunch of fun-looking stuff in it. Two mech frame variants, new GMS core bonus and weapons to make full use of it, and three new talents. One of which slots very nicely into a very "Leader"-type unit I thought up a little while back that focused entirely on setting and utilizing the Lock-On mechanic.

For those who are newer to Lancer, locking on is normally a Quick Action that any allied unit can use up to add an accuracy to their attack roll. So, basically, you're helping your teammates land their blows. So this suit is built around applying multiple Lock Ons as well as providing additional bonuses for the team.

Along with supporting them in other ways as well, via other fun little tools and talents.

Target Acquired

The Resources

• Dustgrave
• Field Guide to Suldan
• Lancer KTB

The Build

-- IPS-N PHAROS @ LL12 --
[ LICENSES ]
  IPS-N PHAROS 2, IPS-N OVERLORD 1,
  SSC COMET 3, HORUS BUNRAKU 1,
  HORUS GOBLIN 1, C&H SABREUR 3,
  HORUS COUATL 1
[ CORE BONUSES ]
  The Lesson of the Held Image, ENHANCED SYSTEMS UPGRADE,
  Full Subjectivity Sync, Mount Retrofitting
[ TALENTS ]
  Spotter 3, Centimane 3,
  Leader 3, FIELD ANALYST 3,
  HOUSE GUARD 2, Hacker 1
[ STATS ]
  H:2 A:6 S:6 E:0 SIZE:2
  STRUCTURE:4/4 HP:20/20 ARMOR:2
  STRESS:4/4 HEAT:0/4 REPAIR:6/6
  ATK BONUS:6 TECH ATK:7 LTD BONUS:0
  SPD:6 EVA:14 EDEF:14 SENS:20 SAVE:16
[ WEAPONS ]
  RETROFITTED MOUNT: Harrier Nexus / Colony Nexus // Mount Retrofitting
  FLEX MOUNT: Autopod
[ SYSTEMS ]
  FCS Tacnet Relay, EW/ECM Array,
  Ego Bridge, Whitestar Signal Interceptor,
  H0R_OS System Upgrade I, MITHRA-Class NHP,
  Personalizations

The Breakdown

As mentioned at the start, this whole suit is built around setting and utilizing Lock On. The Pharos itself causes Lock On just by hitting targets out of cover via Payload Guidance, and its Core Power reaction Backseat Spotter helps land a hit or apply Lock-On. Plus Eye in the Sky lets the team use each other for line of sight on a target to further aid landing those hits.

Its equipment just continues the trend, with both the Harrier Nexus and Autopod having special combat conditions regarding targets being Locked On or when Lock On is consumed, respectively. The Colony Nexus is just there to join the Harrier in seeking Centimane value, which Shreds with a critical hit on a Locked On target.

And with the Systems, everything but the H0R_OS System Upgrade and *Ego Bridge involve Lock On in some way, and these two still kind of count. H0R_OS has team utility via moving things around with Puppet System, and the single rank in Hacker adds extra value to tech attacks when Lock On is consumed. Interlocution also technically isn't involving Lock On, but the ally could consume Lock On and then interactions happen.

Everything else? Directly related. FCS TacNet Relay spreads the bonus of a used Lock On around a little, Whitestar Signal Interceptor can Lock On multiple targets at once if they're bunched up, and the Mithra-Class NHP adds extra bonuses to the Lock Ons. And on the flip side, the EW/ECM Array provides defense against Locked On targets for both allies and yourself. And if you want to mix up the load-out a little, there's still the BloodhoundMK3.3 Packet-Sniffer you can slot in to punish enemies who seek to Lock On in turn and the Shield Array Drone for more personal protection from attacks if you want to... say... drop the NHP and Personalizations for the 4SP needed.

Several of the other choices on the Pilot themself is also conducive to the idea. Lessons of the Held Image lets you apply a Lock-On during someone else's turn to help set them up and then a combination of Leader, the new Field Analyst, and Spotter further aid teammates in landing their hits - with or without Lock On in the case of the first two. House Guard is specifically to give Spotter a bit more range, and also let allies use your mech as a bit of cover if needed since you're Size 2 with two Armor and a decent brick of HP.

The concept is a fun one, I think. Especially if you're like me and enjoy having a character whose weapon is basically the rest of the team. Like the DnD 4e Warlord. So you spend most of your turn doing some combination of setting up your teammates by applying Lock On, moving the pieces around the board with Puppet Systems, or just directly having your allies attack on your turn.

And then, even when it's not your turn, you can help out your teammates with Leadership Dice, Superior Intelligence modifiers, Held Image, and the rest of the kit that helps mitigate the chance of missing or being hit.

Special thanks to fellow Lancer pilot @KatelynnParsec for showing me the power of Puppet Systems and Ego Bridge (and just the Goblin in general, honestly - it's a REAL good suit, people), and other pilot Luminaflare who brought the Comet's Lock On kit to my attention.

What do you all think? Does it sound like a fun build? Are there other choices that could work better? I'm all for hearing what other crazy build ideas are out there - I still have a couple more left, myself!

A while ago this random channel showed up on my youtube feed. She's a med student that seems to do "productivity" content, but all her videos are:

"this productivity thing doesn't work for me, and it may not work for you. This is how I do it instead: proceeds to describe how an ADHD brain reacts to certain things and explains coping mechanisms for it, without mentioning ADHD once"

And all of the top comments are "holy shit I have ADHD and this is the only time anyone has ever explained how to do X in a way that actually works with my brain"

Seriously she's more on the mark that 90% of ADHD influencers out there because her goal is not "how to be NT" and it's also NOT "how to do NT things in a more convoluted way" because she just sort of... evades that framing altogether lmao

You're Not Lazy: How to Live a Chaotically Organized Life. This video is about how habits don't work for her and 1% improvements only work if you're consistent and patient and she's not. You know what she does? She tricks herself into becoming hyperfocused interested in the thing and then obsesses over it for a short period of time so she can see big improvements fast, and remain motivated, also cycling through interests is fine.

You're Not Stupid: How to Easily Learn Difficult Things. This one is about how memorization and study schedules are difficult for her, for some unknown reason. Instead she optimizes her studying for context and connections, because it's easier for her to understand things by how they relate to other things. Also, she tricks herself into caring about whatever she needs to study.

You Don't Hate It: How to NOT Quit Everything You Start She used to cycle through lifelong passions and hobbies and what not but now she is able to stick to things long enough to finish them or give them an honest try. How? Turns out external motivation doesn't work for her brain, for completely neurotypical reasons, so she figured out how to make things intrinsically motivating.

I would say "bestie it's time to get tested" but she seems to be doing fine

transfering the "1 like = 1 insight from designing/developing" thread i did on twitter in 2017

part 2
part 3

1. basic one to start with: if the player doesn't see it, it doesn't exist
   this works both for and against you
2. you can take shortcuts in physics and AI and the like if they're invisible
   but they're first to break with new element interactions
3. friends of the game designer: ghosts, islands, lava, things on rails
   they reduce development work and add plot, like amnesia in books

4. when coding alone, keep code small enough to fit in your head
   when coding w/others, keep code big enough that changes don't avalanche
5. how to name variables?
   suggestion: first what it is exchangeable with, then upwards
   like: entityPlayer, xPos, xSize
6. designers will break your engine trying to do novel things with it, then not tell you and break the engine further by setting the speed to 999999 when speed 999 doesn't work
   keep an eye on what data they're inputting
7. people love music in games so much
   many a half-baked game has been saved by good music
8. you'll be tempted to make a game exactly like your favorite game PLUS one thing
   make the game ABOUT that one thing instead
9. you can write all the extensible code you want at the prototype stage
   designers will extend the game in another direction
10. destructive criticism is more common than constructive criticism
    but the most common feedback you'll get is no feedback at all
11. your game's difficulty ramp is very likely too steep at the start
    probably has some weird bumps too in the middle
    ending might be ok as long as you don't suddenly switch mechanics, then it's probably too hard
12. the player always has the option to stop playing and watch the rest of the game on youtube
13. the New Thing to make games more viral: built-in export videos/animated GIFs
14. i don't care if your game is half an hour long add a goddamn autosave
15. flash saved so much time on UI design
    never forgive adobe or apple
16. it's okay to try a new language/library/etc in a gamejam
    just don't expect to complete anything
17. your game physics/UI could probably use a few rounds of polish to make it "tight"
    no i can't give you a definition of "tight"
18. Did you add?

• pause button
• mute button / volume controls if you're fancy
• fullscreen/windowed switch
• joystick support

19. text logs are popular because writing a page of text is really easy compared to anything else in games
20. your game intro is probably too slow
    yeah it's hard to both teach the player and get them doing things at the same time

part 2
part 3

future of games showcase

• New abyss X zero trailer, a fucking awesome game made by the team behind unsighted, trans ppl are making a kickass low poly fucked up game with yuri go for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnYFB1xtfks

• ZodiacXXLeo, insane looking game about piloting a ship with a fast paced soundtrack, just brimming with style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4migTR84Nz0

• Battle Suit Aces, new game from the devs of Battle Chef Brigade. Looks like a deckbuilder roguelike but with a heavier focus on characters and storytelling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IQq3xEg8g

• All Systems Dance, a game thta calls itself a "dance battle adventure". No real reveal on how it plays but you certainly do a lot of dancing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPe80YQouYE

• Yooka-Replaylee, a remaster of yooka-laylee. This makes me feel old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2LgdpzV7A0

• Nova Hearts, another great entry into the "persona rewired my brain I wanna make a game like this", game mixing turn based combat, dating mechanics, and a phone-styled interface https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJyCkLovlz0

• DLC for A Date With Death, a visual novel dating simulator where you're trying to date death to keep him from claiming your soul. Seems to be more content, running a kickstarter now. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabmag/a-date-with-death-beyond-the-bet?ref=5j1679

• LOK-DIGITAL, a wordish puzzle game that seems like it'd be good for people who love like, puzzmo and sudko and that stuff. Demo is out now on steam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSzyc_QsfoI

• Croakwood, a citybuilder where your city is all cute frogs from the developers of parkitecht. This is the first of the FROG GAMES which I will be numbering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_NxvSvT2fQ

• Cozy Marbles. a game about making marble tracks, like the wooden ones you used to have as a kid, then rolling lots of marbles down them and seeing which ones win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7rIQtlxiNo

• Phoenix Springs, a beautiful point and click mystery game with a fantastic artstyle. As a point and click enjoyer i'm gonna play the hell outta this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_6r7VLuC2Y

• REKA, a game where you have a baba-yaga style hut with big chicken legs and you go around being a witch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGYF6cQXwzg

• Sandara, a game that's a... roleplaying deckbuilder? Seems to be similar to Citizen Sleeper but with deckbuilding instead of dice; genuinely this one is so strange I can't figure out how it works. Seems awesome tho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oghxyzSjVNc

• Airborne Empire, a citybuilder where your city is built in the sky, and thus you have to consider things like weight balancing, keeping yourself airborne, and fighting sky pirates. Also it's all cute anthro birds? Demo out now, gonna check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYT9DF0cFJw

• Dungeon Clawler, one of a few a roguelike dungeon crawl games with a funny central mechanic: in this case, it's crane/claw arcade games. the items you grab decide what you do on your turn. Demo out now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXxjSXhCNR8

• N.O.D.E., a cinematic puzzle platformer that looks like Inside or Little Nightmares but instead plays like a programming game; setup commands for your robot and then execute them all in a row. Demo out now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hsvGSf6js

• Copycat, a game where you play as a cat who's home was taken from her by a different cat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRAn77l5Opw

• Light Odyssey, a top down action game about being a little tiny dude killing really really big monsters. Very heavily inspired by shadow of the colossus, it seems. V pretty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zez-kqGK6yw

• Psychroma, a side scroller narrative game where you play as a digital medium exorcising cybernetic ghosts from a house. Watch this one if you like really fucked weird horror visuals. Demo out now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuncdhJbbV0

• NEW EDITION of Slay the Princess, "the pristine cut", with new endings, expanded current endings, new languages, and coming to consoles. Out this fall. Also a fancy collectors edition with lots of funny prizes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6Kg5NCYIkY

• SIZZLE REEL TIME: Echo Generation Midnight Edition by Cococucumber, Rooster by Sticky Brain Studios, Alzara radiant echos by Studio Camelia, Timberborn by Mechanistry, Bubblegum Galaxy by Smarto Club, Retro Gadgets by Evil Licorich, Nomori by Enchanted Works, Margin of the Strange by Future Cat LLC, Rose and Locket by Whistling Wizard, Ra Ra Boom by Gylee Games, Genokids by Nukefist, and Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip by Snekflat. All look cool but I don't have time to grab them all. Timestamped link to the sizzle reel: https://youtu.be/YmTc_jmdLpc?t=2080

I read a lot of gaming zines.

I like Indie Tsushin (https://cohost.org/renkotsuban) which is all about Japanese doujin games.

Indiepocalypse (https://cohost.org/PIZZAPRANKS) is a zine that is really a collection of games. It contains an original game every issue and the game developers actually get paid. Wow!

The Weird Fucking Games zine (https://wfgames.net/games/untitled-zine-game/) is a joy to read with its bite-sized summaries of an immense variety of unusual games.

I edit ChoiceBeat: The Visual Novel and Interactive Fiction Zine (https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/)

Having laid that out, I have two questions: 1) Are there any other gaming zines of interest? 2) How can we, as a community of gaming zine creators, help each other out?

I'm compiling a list of game zines to go in a future issue of ChoiceBeat. I'm also going to start a links page on the ChoiceBeat homepage. But I wonder if there is something BIGGER we could do collectively?

As far as I can tell, sense-making is really loosely defined! I have checked a bit of the papers and books I read and how they cover it and it looks like this:

• Robert Sams' Social Sensemaking sort of initially annoyed me by how high-level it was, but the ideas in it have stuck with me for a long time and really discuss how people socially assign meanings to things in the context of safety. This is the most focused resource I could find to this topic through all my undirected reads, and it's free.

There's resources that give a good spot:

• Dekker's The psychology of accident investigation which is a lot more about how it's used than how it's done
• Klein's Anticipatory Thinking which covers a part of it.
• Klein's The strengths and limitations of teams for detecting problems has full sections of it applied to problem-detection
• The US Forest service's learning from unintended outcomes document gives it a lot of room. They used to have unhelpful guidelines and I believe they had made a full rework recently and there's good stuff in there.

There's also a few high-level references to it in a lot of paper, which mostly use it as a one-word reference for "making sense of a situation" as a sort of "situational awareness" bit, and assigning meaning to events or sequence of events:

• Accelerated Expertise: a big book of literature review around expertise acquisition, with the purpose of applying it to the US military apparatus
• Approaching Overload: Diagnosis and Response to Anomalies in Complex and Automated Production Software Systems, Marisa Rose Grayson's thesis

There's also tangentially related material in decision-making. Here, Gary Klein's Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM) is a really good set of material I like there, in that it tries to study people in the field, in a way that's a bit different from Kahneman's "two-systems" approach of fast and slow thinking (although the theory there was updated between the 90s and late 2000s to incorporate more of NDM as far as I can tell) that covered a lot of Bayesian inference and slammed biases rather than sometimes trying to understand their purpose, it seems. I've listed some of Klein's papers above.

I think Joint Cognitive Systems - Patterns in cognitive Systems Engineering is a solid view of cognitive elements of understanding. I think they almost never mention sensemaking explicitly, they cite papers on it a few times, but a lot of it is really "how do people and organizations figure shit out".

Other keywords could be found in "Organizational Learning" literature I imagine.

There's also The collapse of sensemaking in organizations I've seen cited a bunch in this quick review but that I have not yet read myself. Basically Weick gets cited everywhere with that keyword, and I've read none of it.

…and hopefully feed reader?

want to archive your chosts on your website but have too many for the cohost web component? want something like cohost-dl except you can keep posting?

autost is my take on that. you can see what it looks like on shuppy.org:

it’s pretty much a static site generator that can import chosts. some features:

• perfect html rendering of your chosts and css crimes
  (css things like bounce and spin work too, but not yet 100%)
• include and exclude specific tags or chosts in your archive
• tag your archived chosts without editing them on cohost
• automatically rename and add tags based on the existing tags
• make new posts with mostly-cohost-compatible markdown
  (there’s even a post composer with live preview! but it’s very much a wip)

i’ve only had a couple weeks to work on this, so it’s not the most polished, and for now you need a bit of command line knowledge to get it going.

but my goal here is to make a blog engine with the same posting and reading experience as cohost, where you can follow people with rss/atom feeds, see their posts on a chronological timeline, and share their posts on yours.

does that vibe with anyone? should i keep working on this? let me know!

Hey folks. The internet needs more websites you can check when you log on. I made a site called sortition social that selects a random feed from a database to be featured. Every day a new feed is added, and stays on the page for seven days before it falls off the end of the timeline to be replaced by a new one. It's social media by lottery!

Check it out here!

Click here to submit your RSS feed (please be nice to my web server)

i started posting my Roadhouse Vignettes and my Space Skunk stories, after throwing up my hands and saying: "I'm making this for me and that's enough. If someone likes it' awesome, but I'm putting it out there because it's in me and it wants out." and then, chasing that, I did stuff that made other people's days brighter, and folks told me and that has meant the world to me. This place helped make that possible.
This website was something cooked up by like less than 10 people, just because they wanted to see something done -their way-.
A handful of people decided to make a social media platform the way they wanted it, and folks who used it are in varying degrees, -changed- by the experience. Chill, content, new perspectives on their relationship to social media, New friendships made, new jokes that will stick with folks for years. look at the thousands of folks on here mourning it. Even a 'rival' like Pillowfort expressed their condolences at the end of cohost's run. This weird insolent against all odds project, even with all it's flaws and criticisms, demonstrates that it's worthwhile to make something,

Do it.
Whatever creative venture you're holding on right now, I cannot stress enough -do it-. Even if it doesn't pan out the way you'd hope it would long term you will learn something from doing it. go. Allow yourself to be surprised. If people can love my stuff with all it's flaws, I'm telling you, that you, the person reading this right now, should start making the things you want to see in the world. you've got something to offer. It doesn't matter if it feels a little derivative, it doesn't matter if someone else might do it better, you have got to do -your thing-. warts and all. because you can't see how the thing is going to work if you don't get it out of your brain and into the world.

Early on, i started chosting here with an excerpt of an essay by user @Qwilman, and I feel, it may be perhaps fitting to paraphrase and opine on it again at the close:

You don't need to make a million seller, best of all time, criteron collection, oscar worthy, pulitzer prize winning, PHD granting, overnight sensation gold star from the teacher affair you were conditioned to think was normal and okay in school. We should rejoice that we are free of that paradigm. You don't need to court the meta, you don't need an audience of faceless hundreds of thousands sending you a -like- or a repost, you need a 100 loyal friends and fans who meaningfully engage with what you do. And in order to do that, you gotta make something from the heart, because that is what people respond to. You gotta plant your flag and then you'll find the ones that matter. And let this place show you, even in cohost's difficulties and imperfections, it's criticisms justly earned, This tiny project, is loved. and will be loved for a long long time to come. Let it inspire you, to take action, to stop waiting, and start making and sharing. To start finding those 100 new ride or die compatriots. to build that new community and connection. To make things. Let this spirit that cohost fostered, go with you out into the world.

I'd like to think it's what Eggbug, Tagslug, and Posthog would want.

Thank you, Cohost, and by that I mean everyone on here, from for bringing that little bit of yourself to this space, this earnestness, and this creativity. We can't do cohost again, but whatever folks do next in all it's myriad shapes and forms, will be better for having spent time here with you.

It's been an honor

so I had to take a few days to think about this one

here is the worst piece of advice I can give to an aspiring writer:

Wait.

that idea you have in your head? don't work on it yet. don't put anything down.

wait.

what if you lose interest and run out of steam halfway through? then you'll have wasted all that effort and learned nothing! better to wait it out for a few weeks, to see if the interest is still there. and even then—

wait.

wait before you tell anyone about it. don't get anyone's hopes up! don't give them any ideas, either! better to maximize the force with which your idea will strike the world once it's good and ready and you can just sit down and bring it to life in one glorious go!

but until that day comes,

wait.

this has been a retelling of the biggest mistakes I've ever made as a writer and just so we're clear you should never do this. put your thing out there!! scribble every last little idea, share it, let others pick your idea up and give it a ride somewhere new and help it blossom into something it could never have become if it had been confined to the head of a single person! ideas are worthless, executing on them is the most important part. so let's get to it, as soon as we can. good luck! I'm rooting for you <3

Then, in trying times, when you question your worth and your choices, they will raise their voices to remind you of the difference you have made. And thus will your deeds come to affirm your path."

this is not a eulogy.

cohost has, one last time, made me think, and made me want to write. as it comes to a close, I'm putting those thoughts to... paper? something like that. a fitting sendoff for a site that reminded me how to be inspired.

gather 'round. I'm gonna say something that no one's ever said before:

it really hurts to lose something you care about.

(but I'm sure no one reading this knows anything about that.)

those who know me personally know I've lost a lot recently. cohost is about to be another loss, and another change. I have plans and plans, but the question remains: why bother? it'll all just end again. nothing lasts forever.

this is, of course, not a new question. nihilism has been discussed far earlier than nietzsche's famous lament. in a world where god is dead -- where meaning exists only as a figment of the imagination -- where you are a pile of chemicals arrogant enough to think itself special -- where all that is, means nothing -- what use is there for anything? why bother?

the worst answer is: don't! this is where we get doomerism. it all sucks and nothing matters, so give up and accept that you'll survive until you don't. personally, I hate this answer. it feels nakedly self-serving. convenient, if you felt like not bothering to begin with -- and most people like to talk more than they act. (I'm guilty of this as well, at times. pretty sure it's part of the human condition.)

the second-worst answer is how christians think atheists think. if no golden hand ordained laws of the world, then you can just do whatever you want! rape, murder, golf, it's all on the table, baybee! but hedonism rings hollow, too: when we can, most of us help, regardless of religiosity and even if it hurts us. neither is religion free of sin, even as they cast stones: the worst acts can be justified, even demanded, in the golden hand's human creators' rule book. no, that isn't the answer either.

then maybe we ought to deny the premise entirely: there is meaning, it is real. but I'm unconvinced: everything I see is compatible with a slew of random chance, only there because of a long sequence of coincidences, equally likely as what didn't make it. perhaps that compatibility's part of the point, and perhaps that's why they call it faith. but I find I'm short on that, these days.

albert camus posits: we are the point. we take up arms against the abyss and in so doing end it. only in this rebellion are we defined at all; if we don't, what distinguishes a man from a plucked chicken? if we don't demand and prove our freedom, are we even real?

here is a sort of truth: no thing is real. no ontology compatible with your perception accurately describes the world. chemical reactions complex enough for the arrogance of identity do not understand physics -- we speak it as a second language, and poorly. this isolates us from reality, forces us to come up with abstractions, and these abstractions do not exist. they're inspired by reality, not components of it.

you, the self, exist in a world of things. a world where your pants are a gestalt, distinct from every other, fitting neatly into categorical hierarchies of purpose and construction and color and semantics. but the world of physics is a sea of stochastic particles experiencing no more than four forces. all that we see or seem is but emergent properties of simple systems.

so if meaning is constructed, an invention of all the minds that ever were... so what? welcome to the club. it's as fake as my cargo shorts. and you, dear reader, you delirious ape staring at tiny lights and understanding them as squiggles as words as thoughts, teasing coherence out of the dream, you are qualified to invent it.

you constructed yourself, after all. "you" is as much a figment of your imagination as pants or meaning. "you" is the name you've given an assemblage of nanomachines replaced daily driven by sloppy fat molded by every scrap of culture it's ever consumed and the vagaries of its internal machinery. you invented yourself: invent some meaning, too! who else can?

because god is dead! and we exult: with neither will to defy nor plan to follow, we define ourselves! in what act could there be greater joy? rebel against the abyss, demand everything! seven days is for cowards: spend a lifetime inventing and reinventing and watching it fall apart, and at the end, seeing that it was good.

and it's when we do this together that the strongest magic is cast. you built yourself from bricks of nothing; now build a city. behold a chemical reaction complex enough to behold you back and kiss her full on the god-killing mouth. you built yourself, now build yourselves. construct not one identity, not two, but three, and a million more besides. imagine a self for you-at-the-movies and you-at-that-new-italian-joint and you-in-bed. imagine a self that, too, is yuri.

culture and society and politics and love and every secret shared, all of this binds us together, and builds an identity encompassing us all. no one is an island, but even islands are connected, by ocean and seafloor. it permeates us and everything we think, even in rejecting it. it doesn't define you, but it is the lens through which you define yourself, especially to others. we express it in everything, from language to idiom to reference, in choice of word and form of thought and phrases' meter (good or not).

but as we're shaped by it, so do we shape it: molding, building, destroying, growing out what speaks to us most or cowering behind what seems sturdiest. we do this together, and in doing it we shape each other, every interaction leaving an indelible imprint on the world around us, physical or semiotic.

earlier, I implied a fib. "what greater joy"? doing it together. christians say god made the world, alone and sad, throwing a tantrum when other wills contested his. fuck that: build yours with others, a towering monument to the best of ourselves, and light your corner of this disaster a little brighter for a little while.

so what if it's temporary? we built it on a foundation of sand. when the river of time washes it away, proves it imaginary, renders it a lingering impression in a few slabs of meat and discarded silicon -- it was there. it brought joy.

and that, to me, is why we bother.

good night, cohost.

i've really enjoyed my time on this website. it felt, for a moment, like some piece of the old web had survived. CSS crimes, esoteric longposts, inscrutable typing quirks. the possibilities and culture here reminded me that blogging could be fun, but more importantly that there was a demand for it i'd otherwise stopped seeing. it was nice to have a platform that didn't stress me out to look at, where my work spread and seemed to generate substantial commentary, and where i felt encouraged to respond to other people's work in kind. i didn't always agree with how the site was run, and of course no social media is free from the odd Obnoxious Discourse or two. but at the end of the day, i wanted cohost to exist and fairly understood that no enterprise of man in history has persisted without controversy or hurt feelings. it's good that this place existed. i believe that quite a lot of people will carry their memory of cohost forward with fondness, and there's no telling what ripple effects that may have down the line.

if there's one good thing about the end of cohost, it's the finality. most social media winds down over time, bleeding users to other platforms. if anything goes offline, it happens suddenly, without warning. to have a set death date is a pleasant change of pace. i feel as though there is something to bury, and that i'll miss it when it's gone. i already do.

thanks for the website, everyone. it's been something to write home about.

while cohost may be dying, my desire to continue making things is not. how's that for a crass pivot to self-promotion? sorry, but a girl's gotta eat. please follow me at the appropriate venues below:

mastodon
tumblr
bluesky
twitter (DON'T let this be your only port of call!)
youtube
VIDREV
godfeels
patreon
comradery

As you probably know, Cohost is unfortunately closing its doors in a few weeks.

When I picked the name "Indie Games of Cohost" for this gimmick account, I did so for two reasons:

1. The focus was to share the work and posts of game devs who use Cohost, to make it easier for users to find people to follow and forge a community on here.

2. I told myself that the day when Cohost dies...I would let this whole thing die with it. I will not be trying to migrate, re-brand, and continue this on a different site in the short-term.

I really enjoyed doing short interviews with game developers. I imagine for many, it was the first time they've been interviewed about their creative work. Over the course of this year, the pace of interviews I posted slowed down. The reason for that was that I was trying to hold myself to a higher standard, wanting to ask more and more insightful questions about their individual projects. This kind of "increased the workload" for me, leading the interviews to come more slowly.

Today, I've sent out a final shotgun blast of emails to a few devs I was going to get to on my list, with "mini interviews" that all have the same questions.

Read below for more info on IGOC ending and sharing your work in the comments

What happens now?

If any of the devs I emailed today respond, I'll be posting a few last interviews to this page and then wrapping it up. I might also reblog a few of the old interviews just to have something to post in the final weeks.

I will make a 2024 wrap-up post of the indie games I posted about as New Releases. To hopefully pair well with my 2023 indie games mega list.

As tempting as it is to continue this release curation + interview series on a different social media platform with whole new branding, I don't think I have the energy or spare time right now. If I do decide to do it months down the line, you'll hear about it on one of my accounts. Maybe I'll start a site or newsletter or something. But it definitely wouldn't be before Cohost shuts down.

If you'd really like to follow a list of newly released games I spot...I may continue to update this spreadsheet where I was jotting down the games I post on this account. So feel free to bookmark that.

If you've liked the types of games I keep an eye out for, you might want to follow my Steam Curator Scattered Gems, that highlights highly-praised (or interesting) games with low review counts.

A small piece of advice, if you enjoy indie games...

...if you've found a game, project, or dev on here that you've found interesting, please follow them or jot it down somewhere!

It's so easy, when spending time online, to find cool and interesting stuff that you tell yourself "I'll check that out when it releases" and then totally forget what the name was.

Believe me, I know you're probably not interested in following like a hundred new people on Bluesky, Mastodon, etc (I know realistically that I won't), but that's all the more reason to take advantage of the tools at your disposal. If that dev or project is on itch.io, press the Follow button in the top right of their itch.io project! If the project is on Steam, add it to your Steam Wishlist! I know these are corny calls-to-action that you've heard a thousand times before, but it really is a great way to save a cool-looking game for your future self to look into.

Are you a game dev? Share your links below!

If you're a gamedev, or involved with indie games in any way, use the comments section of this post below to share links of where people can find you going forward!

If you want a prompt, you can do your own mini IGOC interview with these questions:

1. Introduce yourself to everyone! Who are you?

2. Is there a project you're working on currently?

3. Any advice for aspiring indie developers out there?

4. Where can people follow your work online?

Thanks so much for everyone who followed, shared, and commented on this account. And thank you also for anyone who has shared kind words about enjoying this account, appreciating the interviews, or anything else. It means a lot to me!

When Cohost first got started, it was immediately a platform that really resonated for me. But I knew that people (in this case, gamedevs) would have a hard time getting started here and finding other people who were into games, especially if they were coming from a bustling place like Twitter. I hoped to be a little bit of a hub that could help introduce Cohost users to other Cohost users who like indie games.

If you don't already know, my name is Kyle Labriola (@kylelabriola) and I ran this account on my own as a fun side project. If you'd like to follow me as I make games and talk about new game releases, you can find all my links on my site or over here. Thanks for everything!

• artists (esp adult artists) setting up either RSS feeds or mailing lists (less ideal but still open at least)
• everyone setting up a website to have a links page of their friends' sites and other places on the web they like
• start a blog just for pictures of your cats. or something spiritually similar, at least. dont let closed social media monopolize cute animal pictures!!!
• less organizing on discord, more organizing groups in person
• honestly just try to spend less time online in general. i think a lot of people learned they wanted to do that because of cohost, and i hope we don't all end up sliding back now
• go to websdr.org, google and explore some radio repeaters near you. listen in. maybe study for a license and start transmitting! i think ham radio is underappreciated as social media, and the more weirdos and queers and anarchists and communists pick it up, the cooler we can make it
• everyone to be more vulnerable to others. take more risks. be a dork around your coworkers. host events at your home. send a text to a friend you haven't talked to in a year (or years!) asking to catch up. start things that might end up failing but teaching you a lot along the way. ask someone if they need help.
• try to assume that everyone is operating in good faith until they give you a definitive reason to believe otherwise. i think that's part of what made this site really good.

We have made it to the final stage of cohost.

Lots of smug people on other social media--the people I left those sites to get away from--have been gloating about how cohost was a failure because it couldn't keep itself financially sustainable. It is true that cohost was unsuccessful in this important aspect. It's also telling that they, as people who chose not to be customers, are thinking of cohost primarily as a business--about what it was to its founders, not what it was to its users. This is an astounding perspective from people who have built personal brands and amassed thousands of followers on being anticapitalists. Just look at those MAUs. Look at those growth metrics, those engagement numbers. No no no, you have no idea what you're doing, that's no way to run a hot new web startup. You'll never go IPO that way, you'll never be the next Twitter, the next Tumblr.

Cohost, as a business and as a sustainable project, is indeed a failure. But cohost, as an idea and the embodiment of a manifesto, is not a failure at all. It has been, in fact, a resounding success.

The central thesis of cohost, the design and engineering philosophy that has emerged from ASSC's manifesto, is that the love of virality is the root of all evil. Social media professionals balked at the hiding of follower counts and like counts, at the deliberate omission of a global feed, at the reliance of user-selected tags for discoverability, because growth and clout are central to how they think of social media, as a game where the goal is to score as high on the metrics as possible and convert that attention into profit, fame, or political power. You can't use cohost effectively as a marketing tool. You can't use it to get the word out, wage wars of ideas, slander or exonerate people, amass power and influence in any meaningful way. (You can't really use it effectively to sell things in general, which I guess was its Achilles heel.) It is not for the people who exploit social media for a living one way or another, its userbase forever an untapped market. It defies being used that way, by design, on purpose.

Cohost has been the first and only social media site in decades to be exclusively for its users, a site where the user experience was the single greatest priority, and where posters and readers were the customers, not the product. You go on cohost to write things--they could be a few lines long, they could be fifteen pages--and to read them. There is no algorithm constantly pushing you to engage more, to produce more content, to drive those metrics up. There are no grand delusions of empire building or mass propaganda or microcelebrity, of replacing journalism or connecting people or fundamentally changing how people interact with each other. It's just a collection of things someone cared enough about to show the world, at their own pace, consumed by people who went looking for it, at their own pace. If someone pisses you off on cohost--and this has happened to me plenty of times--it's usually because you went out of your way to find them, and can just as easily cut them off, complex social dynamics be damned. The site's sole purpose is the real reason we're all consuming text on the internet, which everyone these days now takes for granted: we want interesting things to read.

Cohost has been very good for this. All the little experiments in taking the other stuff away, the absence of metrics, the deliberately finite scroll, the chronological feed, the aggressive privacy toolset, the flexible content moderation policy--they succeeded at the goal of making the user experience less stressful. It has been genuinely enjoyable to read and write on cohost in a way that other sites are not, because cohost has avoided making compromises to people within its ecosystem who are not its users. I don't have to scroll through three pages of ads, influencer reels, suggested users, and stolen viral content farms I don't follow to find out what my favorite VN reviewer thinks of the new Tokimeki Memorial game, like I do on Facebook. I don't have to cut down a lot of complicated thoughts on politics or culture into 240 characters, like I do on Twitter or Mastodon, or even less, on Instagram, only to have some ragebaiting rando pop into my comments smugly pointing out some small detail I didn't have space to comment on or respond to. I am not pressured to conserve time writing because people here are not pressured to conserve time reading, and I don't care (and often don't even know) if five people have read my post or five hundred. Three paragraphs feels far too long to read on Facebook but ten pages go by in a breeze here, and I can step away for a week and feel like I missed nothing.

There are tradeoffs. Cohost is not a place to find community; I have not developed any sort of personal relationship whatsoever with mutuals who I did not know previously. The userbase is, as critics have rightfully pointed out, homogenous to the point of stereotype. The site is not a good place to promote anything, or find work, or fight a revolution. It is not well suited, for all its CSS-crimes flexibility, for sharing anything but text. If you do write something that goes cohost's equivalent of viral, in which your notification bell is stuck at 99+ for weeks--something that's happened to me a few times--there really isn't any way to make it benefit you.

And yet. Those aspects have always been the upsell, not the draw. Nowhere since the golden age of blogging have I taken so much pleasure, or had so much thought provoked, by the miracle of seeing the thoughts of strangers through a computer. Everything social media has done since the early naughts has diluted that. But each post I read on cohost, no matter how stupid or silly or upsetting, has had the purity of listening to a drunken stranger ramble over a drink at a bar. I have learned about so many little things through my follows--ballpoint pens, electronics repair, work culture in foreign countries, personal quests for nonbinary gender identity--that matter less to me than learning how somebody out there feels about those things, about what they mean to them, in a way that I'd never get from the engagement bait of an influencer video or the flippant brevity of a meme image or tweet. People communicate their own humanity here, at a depth I only ever see anymore in face to face conversation. We took that for granted for so long, on this internet. I missed that.

Reddit is a lynch mob. TikTok aspires to be an infinite quick-dopamine machine. Facebook is an ailing advertising marketplace, the dead mall where all your friends used to hang out. Tumblr is a high school cafeteria over where cliques of adolescent adults project their anxieties about the real world onto other people. Twitter, once a toy, is now a weapon--not repurposed as one, not useful as one, but a weapon as its primary purpose; I quit soon after I saw people I thought I respected screenshotting on Facebook that viral tweet about how Elon was robbing non-billionaires of the means by which they could speak truth to power. (Let's strip away that Marxist framing, putting aside whether or not billionaires deserve it or whether most of the people who get bullied by randos on Twitter are billionaires, and be honest about what it really implies: everyone on that site now broadly takes for granted that the whole point of Twitter is to hurt other people, an entire profession has arisen around doing it for any political ideology that will pay them, and that one user and tens of thousands of retweeters have been emboldened by the dynamics of propaganda on that site to the point where they feel entitled to that means of political violence without repercussion. It's why when somebody tries to sell me on Threads or Bluesky or even late Mastodon as a place where posters can be free to be Twitter without Elon, I just stare at them blankly and tell them I wish they hadn't told me that, because now I respect them just a little less as a person.)

Cohost is, on purpose, not any of those things. Cohost hasn't lost the plot by being obsessed with dreaming bigger. Cohost has become optimized for sharing not content, but thoughts--long ones, short ones, in depth ones, shallow ones, stupid ones, smart ones. The experiment in improving control over the quality of shared thoughts in your feed by eliminating features from the platform that increase the reach of shared thoughts produced the intended result. In the end, if you joined this site a year or more ago and are still here now, you're probably not here because it's just where your friends went, or because it's the battleground for a culture war, or because you're so mad about drama on other social media that you'd be emotionally attached to any alternative. You're here because you read some damn good posts. And if you're like me, you're sad that you won't be able to read posts like them anymore, because nowhere else on the internet really facilitates that.

Cohost won. It didn't fail because of its allergy to the engine of virality at the core of every other social media site's business model, it survived for this long with such an active and enthusiastic userbase because of it. The site quit when it was ahead, beloved by its niche audience, near the peak of its popularity, as functional as it will ever be. It never suffered the slow, humiliating rot of LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook, with ever more burdensome advertising features gradually driving away all its users. It never succumbed to enshittification. It was never cannibalized by vulture capitalists, or purchased by a state-owned company primarily interested in surveillance or propaganda, or absorbed into a huge tech corporation as part of its empire-building project and slowly atrophied to nothing, or acquired by a billionaire primarily interested in controlling the conversation around himself. It was true to its values to the end, its active, loyal, and mostly satisfied userbase well prepared for shutdown and bidding fond farewells with cartoon eggbugs and Love Honk and CSS crimes. It is meeting a far better fate than all the old websites it once made us nostalgic for, which seldom gave us as much as an end date, or the closure of a real goodbye. If we consider that all things on the internet are ephemeral, cohost had a really good run.

I'll be frank with you: while it was part of the initial draw of cohost for me, unlike other users writing epitaphs, I do not give a rat's ass about the Old Internet anymore. For all the time I spent there I remember how toxic LiveJournal could be, how vicious and cruel MySpace often was, how delusionally groupthinky and insular Wordpress blogs and their comment sections could become. They were the product of a much smaller, less inclusive, more elitist internet culture that is never coming back--and seeing the monsters it has produced, all the new media hipsters and the 4chan edgelords and the movement grifters, the Kiwifarms harassers and the Macedonian troll farms and the cult of the mass shooter, good fucking riddance. I've said goodbye to those sites and those people long ago and it's no skin off my back having to do it again. What I am going to miss is being invited to peek into the head of someone I'll never meet and never know, as a complex human being and not a brand or a demographic, with the frankness of someone who has too little at stake to be dishonest. There just isn't anywhere else, right now.

So where can you find me, instead? What's the alternative?

Maybe you won't. Maybe there isn't one. How used to the status quo are we, that we expect someone owes the internet a personal public presence, exposed to abuse? From promoting my work on social media I've received death threats in person, I've had people impersonate me on Twitter, I have on multiple occasions been confronted IRL at conventions by idiots expecting to find that I'm someone other than I really am. I've seen people cook up crazy Pepe Silvia conspiracy theories about me based on half a dozen Google hits. I've had one person demand on one social media site that I unblock him on another so he can argue with me, as is, apparently, his Zuckerberg-given right as a social media user. Why would I put up with this? Why does anybody?

The question cohost and only cohost has never bothered to ask me, by design, is who the fuck are you? I'm at a stage in my life and career where I understand I no longer owe the internet an answer. And neither do you.

If we're friends, you already know where to find me. My cohost migration strategy is touching grass. I've resolved to spend less time on social media and more time talking to people in person, and I'm really looking forward to better understanding where people are coming from, at a level of depth nearly impossible online. I have already been making new friends close enough to have a drink with, and new enemies who can only taunt me within melee range. If we're not friends, maybe we'll see each other again the next time some brave idealist tries to tear down everything awful about social media and start over. Maybe you won't know it's me. And maybe it's better that way.

EGGBUG.

people can sometimes say to me, "but creepy dave, you can't spell animal names!! what's with you all the times be using different words so you don't gotta say the name properly??" well friends, i'll tell to all of you a secret. i can properly say every time of name there is. even parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides brunetti, which is a little flying type guy: creepy dave can say them all. but sometimes the animals of the world they get ideas too big for them. they start thinking about, like. fuel economy. novel storage solutions. portable hard drives. thumbs. and it's better for them that they don't for reals go down the route that homer beans have. so you gotta time to times make a joke of animals, same as you do for peoples. remind everyone to be humble. all of us together on the planet dirt, you dig?

but eggbug. that's a name deserves to be correct. eggbug's a little type of guy with dimensions not fully understood by modern scienticians. is he tiny?? sometimes. so he can creep into your matchboxes and nibble on the match heads, where he gets some of his colour from. is he huge?? occasionally, so he can knock over your fridge and get to the sweet, sweet fridge meats inside. but it's pretty normally that eggbug is best described as 'a little thing' and that's good for a bug to be. this isn't the carnivorous period, you know?? not enough oxygen for full-time big bugs. i'm also absolutely probably sure that there's only one eggbug, but sometimes you see whole bunches of them doing mischief to 'chosters' so maybe i just can't count to one. anything's possible.

eggbug's got little stubbly wings that don't slow him down none, and it will probably be two surprises if i tell you he is shaped like... a egg!! because of this he is aeroguynamic - a type of guy good for flying. his little face is just two dots and a little uwu mouth which is good at nibbling cheeses, but not so much the type of nutrition that he most needs: currency. it's for actual pretty sad that eggbug couldn't evolve a way to eat credit cards for himself in the time that he had with us. but it's okay. kind of like the mayflies, around for just long enough to know he's there, and to love him plenty while we got him.

so it's not a story with a great ending, but it's one i'm glad i got to be here for while eggbug could help us tell it to each other. anyway, that's for real why eggbug is numberone bestfavourite animal okayBYE

speaking of third party access tools, Obsidian is my memory, and my extended memory, and it's where everything that I think is worth thinking about goes. It's just a flat markdown text editor, with support for [[linking to other notes]] within it.

here's my top plugins, as a starting point for people looking to be intereted. DOn't worry about my blurbs, most of these take effect when you install them and you don't have to poke them.

Obsidian isn't open source, but it's close. you can use the inspector to copy all the code, paste it somewhere else, and it'll run -- in an emergency, if the company dies and doesn't 'exit to community' or release source code, all the people who currently rely on it will probably work on reverse engineering it. Even if that doesn't work, it's format is flat markdown with some extra features plugins impliment, but all of those are based around unique combiations of characters in the text, meaning it's not hard for people to write things that can bridge the functionality if the worst-case happens.

I moved to it after notion went creepy. I haven't looked back. It's frustrating when a new note app comes out with better features, but usually a plugin is made to emulate that within a few months. I'm telling you: not only does it have huge plugin support, but huge nerds use it as a load-bearing memory support. Features Get Pushed. The downside is, well, you often have to do some of the work yourself, because everyone's technical. There's an entire cottage industry of people on the forum writing guides for less technical people, so don't hesitate to (kindly) ask the forum when you need help, and ask when they say something you don't understand, don't try to struggle through it.

here's my plugins I feel are most important, for me.

for notifications I haven't tried, but people use tasker to scrape their obsidian for reminders https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/whf2n5/how_i_use_tasker_on_android_to_show_me/

plugins I consider load bearing:

1. AidenLx's Folder Note github

• lets you make a note that's contained in the folder, so you can do things like tables of contents, or having sub-notes

2. Automatic Table of Contents github

• lets you turn your headings into a table of contents at the top, that adapts to new headings.

3. dataview (nerd warning: it's a database thing) website github

• lets you do like, sql on your notes if you give them consistent field headings

4. excalibrain github

• build a graph view instead of having it autogenerated

5. editor syntax highlighting if you're that kind of computer toucher
6. file explorer note count (it just tells you the number of notes in a folder)
7. file info panel (if you care about modified dates etc)
8. Natural Language Syntax Highlighting (very cluttered, but I turn it on with everything disabled but noun highlighting to see if I might have missed a concept I want to page-ify)
9. Pending Notes (Shows you all notes you make that link to a page that doesn't exist, so you can make that page. I use this instead of tags, and I use the Tag Folders plugin so I can use tags as a way of having folders but in ways where my notes can exist in more than one place at once. that's Advanced and Tedious though)

also I install Style Settings and use the Border theme, as it lets me tweak way more of obsidian than other themes let me, but there are plenty that work with Style Settings. It's just a frontend editor for the CSS, with nicer settings.

WRITING TIPS:

• Read read read read read. Read books, read poems, read essays, read anything that compels you deeply. Read outside your comfort zone. When a turn of phrase punches you in the chest, write it down; understand what it's doing and how it's doing it.
• Write write write write write. Do style exercises to mimic your favorite authors. Sketch out worlds with as few words as possible. Get as dense with your writing as you can, making every single word useful. (My personal version of this was writing in /r/shortscarystories every day for a few months -- the 500-word limit forced me to focus my writing hard.) Have others read your writing and give honest criticism: pay attention to what they say is wrong, but ignore any solutions they give.
• Think think think think think. What do you want to write about? Why do you want to write it? How can you best accomplish that with the tools you've been given? A piece of writing advice i heard a long time ago that every writer has a "free tool" that they can bring out whenever they're stuck: some people are great at worldbuilding, some people are great at character interactions, some people are great at poetic prose, etc. Figuring out your free tools (via the previous exercises) will help you play to your strengths and shore up your weaknesses.
• Repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat. Read write think read write think. What interests you now? How do you need to grow to be satisfied by your own work? All the while, keep that big project in your line of sight, constantly working on it. Sometimes the only way to learn is by doing. You'll notice the writing in meatpunks s2 is way better than in s1 by virtue of me gaining experience along the way (and practicing a ton between seasons).

That's pretty much it! Writing isn't magic, but it is a craft, and to practice it well you need to know how it works. Learn grammar rules so you can break them effectively. Learn genre rules so you can subvert them without looking like a newcomer. Learn each rule of storytelling, each piece of advice, and break it in half as soon as you don't need it anymore.

Game Design and Porn Pt. 1

or, How To Fuck Up The Best Intrinsic Reward Ever

Hi, I'm Leo G, veteran pervert. One time while chatting in a server exclusively made of porn artists, I brought up the game design of a porn game I enjoyed. One of them laughed, saying "Who cares, it's just a porn game?" Being unwell, I never let this go. Since then, I have played many adult games and took each one as serious products made by professionals. Fast forward to today, and the demo for my porn game, Joker's Trip, is nearing completion. I also have some sci-fi erotica you should check out.

So you wanna make a porn game. You heard they make money, and hey what’s more fun than making a video game AND porn? But you don’t know where to begin! Well don’t worry, Leo’s got you covered. We’re gonna walk through the line of thinking you should have when designing your porn game. There's gonna be at least three parts to this, with part 1 focusing on how to reward your player.

Define "porn game" for me, Leo.

There are porn games, and then games with porn in them. A porn game is a game where you won’t last 5 minutes, where everything exists solely to meet and, subsequently, fuck. A game with porn in it is a game where everything exists for the purpose of the game, and also, you fuck. Fate Stay Night, for example, is a VN with a story that just so happens to have some CGs where the protagonist rails Saber, but is mainly about Shirou and the Holy Grail War. Much like how I would call Castlevania a game with horror in it, but not a horror game.

Porn games are a lot like horror games. They both get a bad rap for being cheap to make, appealing to base instincts, and generally being low quality. They're also both not actual genres of games, but genres of content. Think about it, if I asked you what a horror game is, you'd say a game that's scary. But what's the actual game part? The unfortunate answer would most likely be "walking sim," but there are a lot of examples that are FPSes, puzzles, driving sims, platformers, deck builders, the list goes on.

The most common genres of game I see for porn games these days are by far RPG Maker RPGs and VNs. I won’t be talking about VNs because they’re closer to writing than game design, which isn’t a flaw but a feature. What used to be everywhere, in days of old, were breakout games, where the more bricks and levels were cleared, the more of the sexy image would be revealed in the background. Other arcadey type deals like shoot ‘em ups and mahjong were also around, and had a similar “strip ‘em down until you have sex” gameplay loop.

Okay, so what’s an intrinsic reward?

There’s intrinsic rewards, and there're extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards, generally, are the number go up rewards. Things that make your character stronger, or give you more resources to buy new gear or whatever. Intrinsic rewards in games can cover a large swathe of things. It can be the feeling of satisfaction of completing a puzzle, a piece of lore or world building, or a new dialogue option with a character you want to fuck.

I like fucking characters, are we talking about porn now?

Yes! I’m of the opinion that you literally can’t make a better intrinsic reward than pornography. On top of setting the tone for the entirety of the game., at its best it can add to a story, add to someone’s character development, or be a beautiful piece of art to look at. AND you can jack off to it! Unfortunately, that’s at its best. Let’s talk about how porn is delivered in a theoretical RPG porn game. (As a head’s up, there will be talk of “bad end” scenes, but this is under the assumption that the player is the one consenting.)

So you’re playing an RPG and get into a fight. Maybe you were underleveled or too cumbrained to remember to buy healing potions. Then your HP goes to zero, and instead of going back to the title screen, you’re getting fucked by orcs. That’s right, let’s talk about Game Over CGs.

You get to watch porn when you lose?

To someone making a porn game with a battle system, this delivery method makes sense. The characters in this world are driven primarily by lust, this is just the obvious conclusion. And it doesn’t even have to be non-consensual! Games like Future Fragments show that it can be presented as a sexy inconvenience rather than anything uncomfortable for the player or our hero. Game Over CGs even have the benefit of softening the blow of defeat, by giving the player a chance to reflect on their defeat and jerk off. Even better if losing a fight isn’t lost progress, but rather a bump in the road. However, there’s a problem here. The player is a dog, and we’re rewarding bad behavior.

The porn is an intrinsic reward, so why are we giving it to the player for losing? Incentivizing losing on purpose isn’t just bad game design, but a waste of time. And to that end, a lot of porn games try to give solutions to this. One being a kill button on the keyboard or a skill that instantly KOs our hero to get to the lose screen faster. What might seem like a convenience is really just expediting failure.

What it says is that the gameplay doesn’t actually matter. You’re just here for the porn, right? In that case there’s plenty of places I can go to see a chick with huge knockers get railed by an orc, with the added bonus of not having to play forgettable and mid turn based combat!

Another solution I’ve seen is the game outright telling you, “hey don’t bother killing yourself to see the porn. Once you beat the game all of the scenes you missed will be unlocked!” At first this seems like a reasonable way to go about it, but it comes with another problem: your game better be fucking good to make me play through the entire thing before getting to see cock. Like I said earlier, porn at its best can reveal things about the world and drive character development. I uh. Just beat the game. I don’t care anymore. Showing me a scene that’s taken out of context by a factor of 5 hours or more isn’t what I’d call great game design or story telling. It’s also too little, too late.

What if we made the porn actual rewards?

Now we’re getting somewhere! Let’s make the reward…a reward! What if, every time the player beats a level, we get some porn? If we tie the CG to beating the boss, we’ll be tying the reward to game progression. That’s good right? So now, on top of the extrinsic rewards you’d normally get for beating a boss (a lot of EXP, better gear, opened areas) we also get that sweet dopamine rush of pornography! So we’re good, right?

There’s 1142 words left in this post, so I’m assuming no.

Well. It’s a start. It has the problem of predictability. If not handled properly, it comes off as lazy. As a game designer, one of your goals is to not constantly remind your player that they’re playing a video game. Get through the level, get porn. It feels a little too “mouse in a maze looking for cheese” for my taste. And much like the game over method, if the actual game itself is mid, the player will start to question if the reward is worth it, and might be afflicted with the worst condition a player could receive: boredom.

Of course there are exceptions. In puzzle or arcade type games where you don’t get extrinsic rewards, giving the player porn as another form of reward per level or whatever is perfectly reasonable (though it does have the issue of being predictable.) This is a perfectly good way of doing it if your game is short, or if the game is, y’know, good and fun to play. Bad Color’s game, Heroine Conquest, is a level based puzzle game with porn as the reward, but only when you do good. Combining the actual challenge of mastering the game, with a genuinely unique game loop makes for a feeling of accomplishment when beating a level. Pair that up with a sex cutscene, and the dopamine rush will hit.

So! Let’s combine giving the player a power trip, with a less rigid structure for giving the player porn. Instead of tying the porn to purely progression gates, let’s tie it to the progression.

Plot milestones

In Third Crisis, sex scenes are peppered throughout the regular game’s plot, starting with some lesbian bondage before introducing the protagonist, who goes through a tutorial before having their own horny encounters. It’s not just given when you win or lose, but is a natural part of the game. Beating bosses, losing to enemies, and exploring dialogue options in sidequests all lead to unlocking new CGs.

Now what’s nice about that, is that the sex isn’t placed somewhere extremely predictable. It isn’t just a reward for beating The Boss Of Forest Zone, Now Go To Ice Zone And Beat The Ice Boss For More Cock. Because that’s the biggest issue of predictable rewards, you know you’re not getting anything until that checkpoint, which will make the player weigh whether or not it’s even worth continuing. This is fine, again, for an arcade type game, not an RPG or adventure game. By sprinkling sex throughout the plot itself, the player will not only want to progress, but their curiosity will have them wondering “what else is out there?”

Rewarding exploration

By putting sex scenes behind optional side quests or encounters, the dog that is the player will scour every single corner of the map, and leave no pixel unturned. Personally, that’s more exciting to me than what you’ll get in the main progression route. In Future Fragments the player can find their rival Faye in sexual situations if they explore the map enough. These are completely optional, and don’t give any direct rewards like more HP or an item, but they’re by far what motivates me to explore the maps as thoroughly as possible, more so than the plot macguffins the game is named after!

So now the player is excited. Sex can happen anywhere. Maybe that daunting off road path with stronger monsters isn’t just hiding a secret, but a sexy secret! They’ll be more likely to venture down those optional paths you painstakingly made.

If we’re using sex in game overs, boss fights, and just randos, why not put it everywhere?

So now I want to talk about the concept of a “sex stat”. It’s not a bad idea! Say, the higher the player’s sex stat is, the more opportunities you unlock for fucking. It could even be tied to the player character’s personality, and affect the story! Instead of using a sword and shield, they’ll end any conflict with sass and sex. They open their eyes to the horny world around them and stop being a hero, and instead become a succubus, and the ending is a massive cum filled orgy.

That sounds excessive

Yeah, it does, doesn’t it.

I’m not a fan of “corruption” systems in porn games. Corruption as a kink is totally fine, and having it be a part of the story lets you incorporate more sexuality into the plot. But as I alluded to, it snowballs pretty fast (and I’m not talking about spitting in someone’s mouth). It ends up being like a cheat code, where you’re bypassing parts of the game for no cost. It stops being a reward, it stops being unexpected, and it stops it from being sexy.

Wait, what? Stops being sexy? What’s not sexy about a succubus orgy?

Alright, listen, we gotta rein it in for a minute. This isn’t so much about game design as it is about writing erotica, but if you have a world where everyone’s fucking and sucking 24/7, there’s no contrast to make what would normally be a hot taboo a hot taboo. If everybody’s naked, nobody’s naked. The aforementioned snowball effect of a corruption system can be seen if you play literally any game that has one. It won’t take long to not have to engage with any combat or adventuring system if you can just press the “Submit to the big dick warlock” button and watch porn to progress.

Which, now that I said that, is exactly the problem. Imagine any other rpg you’ve ever played. Now imagine if every encounter and dialogue option had an option to just watch a short cutscene to skip the encounter. That would suck ass, right? Literally no difference here.

It would. Hey, I’m sort of lost now.

Don’t worry, we’re wrapping this up.

So what did we learn? We learned game over CGs have a critical design flaw that shouldn’t be relied on. We learned that predictable rewards can lead to boredom. We learned to keep sex as a reward and not devalue it.

To summarize, here’s a neat trick to know where to put your porn scenes.

”Would I put an Xbox Live achievement here?”

It’s that easy. “Lose to Goblins for the first time,” that’s an achievement. “Beat orc commander,” that’s an achievement. “Find Hubert the Magical Dickhead,” that’s an achievement. Using that as a guideline is foolproof. Almost.

This sounds like it’d take a lot of resources

It sure does! But don’t worry. I’ll cover that in the next post talking all about how to deal with the resource management of a porn game.

(Shoutout to Taylor, my guy for editing!)

I think a take is best served cold, so I'm ready to talk about JRPG design now. I see you already reaching for the door. Leaving so soon? It seems you've forgotten about the revolver concealed in my purse. Why don't you have a seat, and let's discuss this in a civilized manner.

Oh yes, I more than agree that guy what's-his-name had a terrible take. I'm sure the two of us could while away the hours naming JRPGs with sophisticated, strategic combat systems without resorting to timing minigames or real-time action, that meet the arbitrary yardstick some guy posting on a dead website made up. Games like Etrian Odyssey, Etrian Odyssey II, Etrian Odyssey III, Etrian Odyssey Nexus...but listen to me go on. You already know how I feel about Etrian Odyssey, just as you already know how I feel about game design (it's not real) and the player (always wrong).

But that's where the trouble starts. Some of my favorite games meet the western AAA consensus of what "good" "game" "design" is. But what about the rest of my favorite JRPGs? What about the rest of YOUR favorite JRPGs? Go down that list, please, and if there's even one Final Fantasy there, one Xenogears, one Valkyrie Profile or Vagrant Story or what have you, you'll find a game beloved to you with a combat system that you'd be hard pressed to say meets any definition of "good" "game" "design" as defined by what was it, "sequencing power growth and resource management"? Those sure are words that sound like they're supposed to mean something, but if I wanted game design like that I'd play some ex-Blizzard dev's roguelike deckbuilder.

I have a simple question for you, detective. Is this definition of "good" "game" "design" actually good? Are these the most important qualities for a JRPG to have? Are there other goals, agendas, and artistic pursuits that might also be important to these games? Do they not count as game design? You think an addiction loop you've played a million times before is "interesting" game design? Why do numbers always have to be "strategic"? Why can't systems design be about VIBES, for chrissakes?!

Sorry darling, that wasn't one question, and none of them were simple. Too bad I'm the one with the revolver. So here's one last question: If the take is bad, why use its measurement?

I understand why, of course; one can't help but look at the many, many past and present examples of excellent JRPG game design and feel so insulted by their dismissal you want to prove how excellent they are. But that's not enough for me. I want to burn away the very idea that JRPGs need to fit this definition of "good" "game" "design" at all. The reason why many JRPGs have not found a 'solution' to this 'problem' is because for many games it is absolutely not a problem and there is no need to solve it.

You can play a JRPG for the story, or the vibes, or the incoherent systems design, and you can MAKE a JRPG for those reasons alone. Is it not proper to consider the game design to serve the story, rather than the other way around? Whether flawed and experimental or successful and intentional, is it not more important for the systems to feel right, for them to express that story, than for the game to succeed at this very narrow definition of what makes a game "good". Why should that be anyone's highest priority as a developer in any genre, for that matter?

JRPGs are structured to move the story forward, as stories generally do. They contain a structure for exploring a world, and they use numbers to signify how their characters grow and change over the course of that story. The original Dragon Quest was made with an emphasis on that sense of progression and growth, and if the numbers and systems and math of that game were created to support anything, it is that journey. The illusion of the story is more important that the illusion of the combat's meaningfulness; the combat already has meaning because the characters and their growth and their story have meaning. The bad take we're discussing has fundamentally misunderstood the cause and effect, what's fundamental to the genre and what's peripheral. Numbers are there for storytelling first.

It would be enough if JRPGs were, like Visual Novels, simply an excellent and accessible vehicle for storytelling. But I also love them because they're one of the most innovative and experimental genres, full of ideas that are interesting even when they don't work (sometimes because they don't work). After all, a JRPG is nothing but a Visual Novel that uses numbers alongside art, sound, and writing. Math is another storytelling tool, and I'm attached to the genre because so often it was bold and experimental and prioritized creativity and expression with their systems regardless of ultimate success. If the genre didn't have such a strong, simple foundation that's easy to replicate, none of this innovation or experimentation would be possible. It's also perfectly valid to duplicate the most boring version of JRPG combat and spend one's limited time and budget on something else. Games like OFF or Wadanohara wouldn't exist if this wasn't an option.

Today, the availability and accessibility of RPGmaker engines allows for more niche and experimental games than ever before. JRPG design supports going in ANY direction, even if that direction means ignoring combat systems design entirely. Could we really see such bold and strange and wonderful games as we do, including games with 'good' or 'better' game design, if all they cared about was 'finding the fun' like some guy on the internet who's watched a couple of GDC lectures thinks we should? Dethrone gameplay. Let someone else be queen for a change.

Perhaps you now understand me a little bit better. Why I've become such a bitter old woman when I hear you talking about "good' "game" "design". Why I've come to despise it for representing a single way to be good that artists are expected to prioritize above all else. I want to have fun too, you know. But there are things in this world more important than fun and I want them so much more.

There's my ride. This was a fun little chat, wasn't it? Maybe we'll see each other again. I don't hate good games, you know. But 'good' could never make my heart beat like this.