This dream I have of you

Orion l she/he/they l INFP nonbinary ace/aro and very braindead Links for mobile

[staff]

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

[nameheart]

its gonna be abt 3 months in unemployment once this month passes & grimace

[nameheart]

1st full time job and im getting laid off next week so

[ot3]

it's really interesting how on tumblr at least most people i come across will understand and agree with the premise that corporations not receiving hypothetical future profits they wanted or expected is not equivalent to theft in any meaningful way, but can't really extend the same logic to works made by individual creators. and I understand that this is primarily because these individual creators are operating on much slimmer profit margins than, say, The Disney Corporation, but that doesn't actually change the mechanics of what is happening in these situations. pulling a random drawing off the Internet and using it on the character sheet for your DND campaign instead of commissioning the artist isn't theft like ordering a commission and refusing to pay for it would be. printing off a drawing by an artist you like on your home printer instead of buying off their shop isn't theft like snatching it off their artist alley display would be.

I really think the poster child for the over-reverence of the Small Artist's Sacred Right To Profit is closed species. which for those of you who don't know is when an artist or group invents a fictional creature with an associated setting and lore and then you are forbidden from creating any original characters of your own that are this species or live in this setting. you have to buy or commission a design from the creator and if you don't you'll be essentially blacklisted. these types of communities are notoriously restrictive and cliqueish. can you imagine a more miserably hostile and extractive way for an artist to monetize their work? in this scenario, what is one of the most common ways that people online engage with art they like - getting inspired by it and making derivative works if their own - is completely off the table unless you pay for the privilege of doing so. this is the kind of financial relationship between artist and audience you're advocating to be legitimized when you go to bat for the necessity of ip protections.

[fipindustries]

adoptables are the stupidest concept ever and half the time i see them i want to draw them on principle

[99centmenu]

I saw myself in the mirror

[nevershootamockingbird]

[ Begin ID: an illustration of a brown bear dipping its head down to drink from a body of water. There are ripples in the water, and snow is melting on grass. In the water, there is the reflection of the aurora borealis, stars, and the Ursa Major constellation. / End ID ]

[nameheart]

*crawls back out of cave* im free from my internship im free from uni aughghgghgh

[annielostmarch]

Tim Curry with his GameBoy on the set of The Three Musketeers (1993)

[chilewithcarnage]

cunt levels off the charts

[nameheart]

watched nosferatu remake with my friend today, poetic cinema 100/10

[ratliker1917]

The concept of "spyware" has disappeared from the common internet lingo after it became the case that the word could now be used to describe nearly every major website and a huge percentage of the most commonly-used software.

[pocket-deer-belly]

patents are so fucking evil though. you can patent game mechanics and limit the kinds of games people are legally able to make. you can patent medicine to be the sole producer of that medicine. you can patent fucking, crops to ask a premium on specific variations of crops. it's so fucked

[pocket-deer-belly]

there is no ethical way to own an idea. Under capitalism, the only reason to have sole ownership over ideas like this is to drive personal profit and prevent other people from replicating it, which in the case of all three examples listed above either kills people's ability to make art or straightforwardly kills people. IP, copyright, and patents are all tools for capitalists to buy ideas and prevent everyone else from benefiting from said ideas, including the artists who made the things those capitalists now own.

[pocket-deer-belly]

IP, copyright and patents are all tools for monopoly building, to put it in a more capitalist sense.

[technofeudalism]

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

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

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

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

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

[technofeudalism]

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

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

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

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

[frogsforthefrogwar]

I truly believe any neurodivergent person can be framed as manipulative if their doctor dislikes them. What is masking if not manipulation if you view it uncharitably enough?

[frogsforthefrogwar]

it doesn't matter what your diagnosed with, solidarity with the "bad mentally ill people" needs to be a priority for you. No one is ever more than one bad mental health episode away from being labeled as manipulative and noncompliant

[nameheart]

*tumbling back from the cave* anyways wtf is 2025

[onemillionfurries]

"want to learn more about this project? join our discord!" explode. "want to download this game? join our discord!" explode. "want to play this mod? join our discord!" explode. "need questions answered? join our discord!" EXPLODE.

[lizardsfromspace]

Westerners may not understand that in Japanese culture, companies often [insert obviously horrific act of worker exploitation here]. We simply just don't understand it because we are more individualistic and self-centered and do not understand the untranslatable concept of [thing they said in English but in Japanese]

[lizardsfromspace]

This was specifically about people "explaining" Nintendo not crediting composers in their music app by framing all of it as Uniquely Japanese

Like, that the composers are employees doing work-for-hire. That's unique to Japanese corporate culture, apparently, and makes it Make Sense not to credit them, since even though they're credited on the games, if you put their names out there other companies might hire them. As if Westerners can't grasp the idea of corporations refusing to name their creatives to keep wages down & keep them tied to the company - something the movie industry did in the 1900s-early 1910s, the animation industry did in the 1930s, and something the gaming industry did in the days of Atari. In this case they also explained that companies exert enough control over employees that they can forbid them from social media use and even talking about where they work (like, not what they do, but even mentioning the company could be a fireable offense).

What's being described is a very clear and obvious case of worker exploitation: of keeping people tied to one company so they're less likely to leave and more willing to put up with poor treatment. I don't know if any of that is true, but the Japan Explainers all wanted us to know this is...good? It's a Fact of Japanese Culture that we just don't "get". I even saw people saying "wow, I wish Americans weren't so self-centered and could put company before themselves like this" and it's weird how certain people will look at something in an American context and go "this sucks" and look at the exact same thing, but in Japan, and go "ah yes, a noble part of their culture". But especially with Nintendo, a company that's proven itself to not just be as bad as other gaming studios but far worse in many ways, but which still holds this fanbase who will forever treat them as a special baby who can do nothing wrong, the one company who Does Things Right

Also this whole idea that the Japanese corporation is the Ideal feels so...out of date? If that's the case why has Japan been in a economic downturn my entire life? Why the yen reached its lowest value of the whole crisis this year? Is it possible all the bonkers shit they laud as How It Should Be is not in fact a noble aspect of culture, but a bunch of companies treating their employees like shit and overwhelmingly one of the causes of, you know, The Problems?

[nameheart]

damn 2 months into internship & im still suffering from the Coughs™

[reachartwork]

Artisanal Intelligence: What’s the Deal with “AI” Art?

We already know, and it is a waste of air to keep pointing out, that everything coming out of the mouths of the venture capital freaks of th

Reliance on a producer-owner framework and individual property is leading artists to develop the tools that are eventually used to abuse them. The slightly batshit campaign to “support human artists” [18] posits that the best way for artists to fight back is to pay a lawyer and lobbyists to beg the government for harsher IP laws, by teaming up with the Copyright Alliance [19] — an organization whose members include representatives from Disney, Netflix, Getty, Adobe, Sony, WB, Nike… you name it.

An extremely good article about AI art from a leftist perspective. You should read this

[reachartwork]

We already make our stuff public when we post it online, and we do it to share it with peers and strangers — it turns an individual indulgence into a social relation, and turns the artifact into a piece of culture. Confronted with the implication that this piece can then be used by others — to copy, to remix, or to feed to an AI training pool — some react with reflexive greed, and lock their pieces away from public eyes. This is the most depressing thing I can imagine, the equivalent of art barons purchasing pieces only to lock them away in a windowless safe in their mansion’s basement, only the artist themself is the one doing it. We must not lock culture behind intellectual property; we must fight for a world where your work being copied doesn’t rob you of your income, where it just doesn’t matter that much.

[reachartwork]

For all intents and purposes, art produced for the market is already procedurally generated by market forces. The process of selection is at play at both the inception end (by selecting which projects get funding, and even prior, which creators and modes of production are allowed to thrive in the industry) and at the distribution end (through competition between pieces — which is a matter of marketing and platform penetration much more than any kind of metric of artistic merit, if such a thing really existed in the abstract). Can the capitalist market not be described as an analog algorithm optimized for the maximum production of abstract capitalist profit without concern for any other metric?

what a good article