home // index

april 2025

I need a post here or else the art of formatting will be lost to me forever! I kept the body of the lastest blog post from solflo that way I can steal his formatting, much the same way I've stolen lots of his code

FORMATTING EXAMPLE BELOW

new on the site: beyond the third piece: understanding layers and depth, a fashion article from me to you. planning a second part, i'll get to it i prommy!

new elsewhere: new vn dropped!! a machine walks on the beach at night. it's short and sweet and i made it in a week. i made music for it! the titular machine gets all wet and shiny and has abstract erotic encounters! read it now! more about it on this log, right after the links list ^_^

• pretty pretty please i don't want to be a magical girl (pilot animatic). yay and yippee! it's out!
• why permadeath matters. interesting video even if don't 100% agree with his opinion. i think he's right that saves are very much taken for granted as the default state of game design, and i'm always interested on questioning what we view as Good Game Design, and in this case specifically the view of (games) history as linear improvement. while i have a couple games that shift me into git gud mode (i'm aware of this channel in the first place because of my vague interest in stgs / bullet hells) i'm not a skill oriented player as a rule so i don't find the high stakes of permadeath and similar mechanics to be important motivators. however i do think the roguelike saturation is in part a sign of yearning for that arcadey permadeath, and heavy reliance on metaprogression is hindering the genre. this is an incomplete read: live service games have created on some game designers a perceived need for constant updates and keeping players hooked for longer, and roguelikes are pretty good for that. i say perceived because i think the players who whine about replay value and dollars per hour are a vocal minority. but uh yeah one thing that often puts me off about roguelikes is the expectation of grinding to unlock shit versus improving yourself, because i don't like it when games feel like chores. idk! i just really like it when your knowledge as a player is taken into account by the game design, and i suppose this is an extension of that, only in a different way. anyway yeah video got me thinking.
• guide to using calibre's "kindle collections" plugin to manage collections on your pc. this is the most straightforward resource i've found for jailbreaking this little guy, and collections are basically the only point of doing so, since an ereader is a single use device. btw fw version 5.3 sucks ass because it has garbage ui when it comes to dictionary lookup and you can't view page number, only position. downgrade to 5.4.4.2 (direct download) instead.
• my octopus girlfriend.
• lena.
• the other AI art.
• anatomy and the eight-legged beast. ok severely slept on youtube channel found. very interesting production, with a vibe closer to a idiosyncratic blog or zine! super cool.
• my casual god. look sometimes research means going on ao3 and look for explicit fic of the ultrakill earthmover. what do you mean there's only one. who said that.
• what does it actually mean for a video game to be "horny"?. welcome back "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny". see also these bsky posts. maybe i should play a horny survivors clone just to feel something.
• yuri evn webring. it's a pretty new project and i hope it thrives. go play some yuri, and submit your vn if you have one! let's go lesbians ^_^
• a 1-star review of slay the princess, a terrible game. ohohoho. interesting video. i haven't played slay the princess, as usually happens with hyped up games, but i have seen exactly one person criticize it, and it was in a way that lodged into my brain. so getting this one on my newsboat via sortition social was a treat. the intro really sold the review for me, because the thing about ironic oelvns is very real and true. i find fiction that attempts to distance itself from its own medium and genre extremely tiresome, and i hate being condescended to. rip disco elysium you'll always be famous.

art

more importantly: the new vn!

a machine walks on the beach at night is my first chunky project in a while, and i'm pretty happy with it. i've been wanting to make another vn for some time now. i came up with the idea because i really wanted to paint some dark cloudy skies, and it's more of a mood piece than anything else, but there's also a lot more to say so i figured i'd make a dev log about it. the word count here is longer than the vn itself btw (writing fiction...).

home // index