bell ☪

♋︎ ⊙, ♌︎ ☾, ♓︎ ↑ • THEY/THEM • this blog is a chaotic mix of my hyperfixations + special interests, shit I find funny, and the horrible state of politics

[daintyartisan]

High Fashion SpongeBob by WISDOM KAYE (2023)

[philcollinsenjoyer]

explained to an 8 year old that once a fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon and she said so i'll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? no and there are about a million pieces of art for you unrelatedly

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[t00thpasteface]

i was talking about this on my server earlier but i really think "cozy" is one of the worst genre labels out there in the gaming space. like people dunk on the terms "metroidvania" and "first person shooter" a lot for being uncreative or limiting but at least those are like... falsifiable descriptors. you can look at a game and go "yeah this game's mechanics and core gameplay loop generally operate like metroid/castlevania" or "yeah this game primarily uses a first person camera paired with some sort of projectile weapon" so i don't think they're completely useless. but "cozy" is just nonsense. fully subjective. i see a lot of games popularly labeled as "cozy" that share almost zero mechanical features between them and don't even always match in tone or aesthetic. hearing a game described as "cozy" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect as a player beyond maybe giving you a sort of forewarning about the fanbase and their discomfort tolerance. "cozy" is not a quantifiable metric. like imagine if someone offered to buy you takeout and asked you what kind of food you'd like and you told them fully unironically, and with no further elaboration, "i want to get yummy food." that's what hearing "cozy games" sounds like to me

[t00thpasteface]

i especially chafe at the way "cozy games" just seems like a "woke" way to say "girl games" and conflate certain game mechanics or aesthetics with a non-cis/het/male identity (to equally useless effect from a buyer's pov). gender stereotyping by any other name is still gender stereotyping. i'm not cis het or male, but i've spent decades enjoying pvp shooters and feel bored to tears by cutesy cottagecore farming sims. and i find those pvp shooters very "cozy" to play, too! @_@;

[mlembug]

there's also the issue of handwaving away the political implications of the in-game world, where the most egregious example of this happening recently was the cozy airport security simulator.

[flanbolt]

[bish0ps]

damn that's crazy dot com forward slash thanks for sharing

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

always some new bullshit in the ocean

[local-demon-in-your-area]

Why is it always orcas or dolphins

Why can't a salmon do some bullshit for once

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

worry not ☝️ they're doing coke

[gaslit-dipshits]

[appalachian-werewolf]

PoweredByWho — Who's Building Data Centers in Your Backyard?

Follow the money behind America's data center boom. Track 2,300+ projects, PAC spending, and the politicians who sign off on it.

[ourdarling]

insane shit happening over on uquiz right now

[pinkmisspiggy]

movies will really make an evil woman im not supposed to root for like fine as hell & confident 2 boot like………..bro we gay out here what did u think i was gonna do

[pinkmisspiggy]

goddess of chaos or whatever: give in to my will

me, who already stopped wearing bras in her presence & dyed my hair black to match her whole situation: ok but can we only kill the really really bad people

[syn4k]

"lock in" is probably one of the most important phrases to enter the public lexicon in the 2020s

[joyflameball]

[not-your-average-url]

I miss when ads were a single click and then they’re gone. Now every ad has a minimum of three phases where you watch a video, exit the still frame of fake gameplay, and then exit the app download. That doesn’t even touch on the ones that forcibly take you to another app after opening a tab in safari without you ever touching the screen.

I hate advertising. I hate that you can’t do anything without companies jumping down your throat with mostly bullshit ads. I hate that billboards exist. I hate that every company unanimously decided to make their ads longer and longer. I hate that ad blockers try to charge you money and there are in app purchases to remove ads. I hate that my attention has become commodified. I hate that there’s nothing I can do about it.

[rslashrats]

[phantomrose96]

Hey kids, you need to start worrying a little less about getting “#mogged” and a little more about getting “#smogged”. This is an Air Quality Index public service announcement.

[celinethefeline]

[soup-mother]

There's a certain kind of person who's really proud of their taste in video games and that taste in video games is anything that cost more than $80 for the latest playstation

[soup-mother]

"Rate my taste in games" [Latest god of war, latest assassins creed, latest uncharted or whatever, nier automata but not replicant, latest horizon zero dawn]

[soup-mother]

Like your taste in video games is that you own the latest playstation.

(and perhaps only experience life from a fixed over the shoulder view.)

[enba-and-luka]