Milfpope's Prison Notebook

pfp from https://gvales.carrd.co/

[otomokatsuhiro]

KAZE NO TANI NO NAUSICAA (1984)

[slaughtersafe]

Composure

[ferociousmilfpope]

Being on sertraline for me feels like one of those would you rather questions on reddit, and I've picked the "you instantly gain mental stability but completely unexpectedly have brief panic-depressive episodes so bad it might just genuinely kill you" option.

In my perception, they happen without triggers, though I'm sure something prompts my subconscious into sending me into fight or flight. But it's so removed from my conscious experience it's more akin to a trauma trigger response than to an upsetting event that I snowball into disaster.

And maybe the fact that I cannot perceive this is the problem: either I'm too dissociated and have intellectualised the possibility away by building up a system in my mind that does not account for it.

[cuartosol]

made a disco elysium sketchbook 🪩

[prokopetz]

i've seen the term "disco-like" used a lot lately. what features from disco elysium differentiate it so much from other CRPGs?

Twenty years ago we called them Planescape: Torment clones, and they're essentially the product of trying to implement investigative procedural VNs inside game engines designed for Dungeons & Dragons clones. Navigating that mismatch between the affordances of the game engine and the intended mode of play is what produces nearly all of the genre's distinctive features, including:

the sprawling recursive dialogue trees (i.e., because that's the only way the game engine allows you to interact with NPCs apart from fighting them);

the hilariously overengineered inventory system where your pants have separate stats from your shirt (i.e., because it was adapted from an inventory system designed for managing magic item slots);

the fact that most "cutscenes" consist of a narrator simply describing what you see in spite of the game being fully graphical (i.e., because the game engine just doesn't have the assets or the scripting capabilities to do non-combat cutscenes);

and, of course, the most obvious fact that your principal interface with the world is running about on an isometric grid with characters that look like animated minifigs opening and looting various containers (i.e., because that's the game engine's sole affordance for nonviolent environmental interaction)

Disco Elysium's innovation was simply subtracting a lot of the superfluous game-mechanical cruft carried over from trying to build an investigative procedural VN inside the Baldur's Gate engine, while carefully keeping the shape of the resulting gameplay more or less intact.

So if you're looking at your average Disco-like and thinking hey, this isn't all that different from what you might imagine some sort of fucked up fantasy Phoenix Wright mod for Baldur's Gate 3 would look like, this is because that's actually, literally the genesis of the genre.

[prokopetz]

(Amusingly, this means that from a pure design standpoint, the Disco-like and the RPG Maker horror VN are sister genres, right down to the weird cross-genre adaptations of basic system affordances!)

[byjove]

5 dead and 27 wounded in difficult conversation with mom

[maezanilla]

griddle doodling

[maezanilla]

Some bonus doodles!

[fitzvash]

Had this scene in my head where Harry holds may bells in front of Kim`s and Klaasje`s faces, wondering how it could have gotten onto the rooftop. getting obsessed with the stairs symbolism recently

[funeral]

We consecrate the world with our own subjectivity, investing people, places, things, and events with a kind of idiomatic significance. As we inhabit this world of ours, we amble about in a field of pregnant objects that contribute to the dense psychic textures that constitute self experience. Very often we select and use objects in ways unconsciously intended to bring up such imprints: indeed, we do this many times each day, sort of thinking ourself out, by evoking constellations of inner experience. At the same time, however, the people, things, and events of our world simply happen to us, and when they do, we are called into differing forms of being by chance. Thus we oscillate between thinking ourself out through the selection of objects that promote inner experience and being thought out, so to speak, by the environment which plays upon the self.

Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience

[honeybee-arts]

This isn't how it happens.

[guerrillatech]

[drawerbread]

devotion's casualty

[prokopetz]

Eat God on Rule Zero.

[funeral]

Michael Eigen, The Psychotic Core

[funeral]

Dissociation protects the mind from the unthinkable, the unimaginable, and the unbearable helplessness to stop events that trigger feelings of terror, annihilation, and non-being. The encapsulation of self-states into varieties of dissociated ways of being containing affect and experience forestalls the total collapse and dissolution of the mind. This allows the person to preserve a semblance of self-continuity and capacity, albeit changed and somewhat limited, of engaging with the interpersonal-relational world.

Once the traumatic experience has been dissociated from the sense of "who one is," it is no longer thinkable as a self-narrative or so-called "rational" process. The emotional set of living experiences has now been encapsulated as a part of past living time, and remains contained in that self-state as present and ongoing. When the experience has become dissociated, what the trauma is and was is not known to the self-state of "me" that is usually presented to the world. This dissociative mental structure remains—until the traumatic experience reappears, often in raw form as a flashback or memory, whether verbal or somatic.

Elizabeth F. Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz, The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis

[27-moons]

George Habash on poster

PFLP founder

(1 August 1926 - 26 January 2008)

[funeral]

What's perhaps most troublesome about dissociative process is that it erases its tracks as it does its work. We hide from ourselves that we are hiding. We have amnesia for our amnesia. We don't notice that we didn't notice. Moreover, when dissociative process clicks into place, it tends to continue until it's disturbed by new inputs or just rusts into ineffectiveness. It doesn't just stop when the danger is over; it often goes overboard in its efforts. That makes sense because affectivity is much more of a right brain process. Unlike the logical, sequential accuracy of timelines and language that animate left-brain processing, right brains do nonlinear work. What's important to a right brain about trauma is that it happened, which to the right brain can mean that it might still be happening.

Richard A. Chefetz, Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes: The Fear of Feeling Real