The Spines of America
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

Origami Around
Show & Tell

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
noise dept.
Misplaced Lens Cap

No title available

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
trying on a metaphor

oozey mess

#extradirty
Jules of Nature
occasionally subtle
wallacepolsom
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosmic Funnies
hello vonnie

pixel skylines

Kaledo Art

seen from United Arab Emirates

seen from Türkiye
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seen from France
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seen from United States

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seen from Indonesia
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@randomly-musing
The Spines of America
This popped up in one of my FB groups and I thought it was rad!
10/10, would use if I was running a game with folks I don’t know
So this is actually a single page from a pdf supplement by Sean K. Reynolds and Shanna Germain called Consent in Gaming. The pdf has several tools and tips for making your table as open and friendly as possible, and it can be downloaded for free »HERE«.
@jointhepartypod
Musings’ Fic Recs:
The Seasons that Changed Us
By: LanderAvenue
https://archiveofourown.org/series/1817713
What the RDR games could’ve been as a gay love story.
I’ve always loved the Arthur x Albert pairing. The rugged outlaw meets the proper city boy. What could go wrong?
These works have been my favorite of the pairing thus far. The writer seems to work really hard to think about these characters and their potential motivations. This deeper thought often leads to large payoff because the characters seem more grounded in their dimensions.
I absolutely love the way they also incorporate existing canonical events while tweaking them to feel appropriate to the narrative. LanderAvenue weaves the existing characters into the plot by further developing their relationships than what was depicted in the games.
Amazing works. Engaging direction. Truly cemented my love for this pairing.
Important to keep in mind
it is moral to git gud
Thanks to media, I’m suddenly finding myself absurdly obsessed with tall men with gruff Southern accents. 😍
feel like pure shit just want him back
Mood.
Musing’s Fanfic Recs:
Back to the Future
By: Caruscus
https://archiveofourown.org/works/16959261
Started reading this almost two years ago and it was recently updated with its last non-epilogue chapter. It’s one of my favorite pieces written in the RDR world. The story pairs Arthur with an OC who is a badass doctor in the modern world. She finds herself transported into the video game and becomes central to the events in RDR2 by having knowledge of the game’s narrative.
There’s romance, angst, mystery, sci-fi elements, female empowerment, a chosen family, and a ton of sweet fluffy Arthur. The writer does an amazing job weaving in a modern character’s perspective into canon and it’s a fascinating exploration of what-if.
It was such an amazing read. Thanks and kudos to the author who clearly put so much thought and care into the work. 🙌🏼
Flipping Guardian Trick-Shot
Funny thing is: CD Projekt and their sub-divisions are all super great to most people who work with them. They’re famously generous and kind, giving out sweets and food and bonuses regularly.
If any game should get this article treatment it’s Naughty Dog.
this is gonna be one of those rare things i (1) reblog on main and not my shitpost blog and (2) leave a comment on
if you have never worked a media job you literally cannot serve up a “but they’re so NICE and give TREATS” opinion — my studio only occasionally asks us to work a saturday and it’s usually voluntary, we’re fed, and paid our day rate, and i am still exhausted come monday. and that’s after a standard 8-9 hour work week.
hauling 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days, doing so repeatedly, doing so with no end in sight is beyond exhausting. i have been adjacent to an entire group of my friends going through endless crunch — a death march, as its referred to — and it was emotionally and physically devastating on them.
and that feeling doesn’t end when the product is shipped. you are expected to come back to work on monday, you get some platitudes from your leadership (the ineffectiveness of which put you in the crunch position in the first place, so their words only make everyone feel worse) and you are expected to perform. but you can’t. you need to recover. for days, for weeks, for months.
or have we already forgotten the kotaku article about bioware?
“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.”
i stopped seeing my friends for months when this happened to them. and when i did see them, they weren’t themselves. they were crying all the time. when i worked these kinds of hours under this kind of pressure at my marketing job, i was crying all the time. you spend all of sunday dreading monday. you stop going to sleep until you’re too exhausted to funciton, because going to sleep means you wake up to go and do the thing you’re dreading.
i think people outside of arts careers, specifically media arts careers, think that we go into this for the thrill of creating and that’s it, we can subsist off of that. full offense, but you’re incorrect.
it’s just a fucking job. entertaining people is not worth the kind of burnout crunch puts people through. there is nothing romantic about that. media workers are there to do a job and crunch is nothing but a failure of management that makes games and tv shows and movies worse. no one does good work when they’re tired.
i can’t stop anyone from playing this game but boy howdy i will never shut up about the labor abuses that went into making it.
by the way the "games, pizza parties, treats" etc aren't there to make the employees feel better. they're specific, calculated tactics to prevent them from reporting abuse.
at an amazon warehouse, they cut down on the number of reported work-related injuries by giving the whole staff a pizza party for every week without a single injury and hurt employees just stop reporting them because they didn't want to face the backlash/cause their fellow staff and friends to lose it.
unionise.
Cyberpunk 2077 did not undergo crunch, it went through a deathmarch. That is the industry term. Fuck CDPR.
We need more visibility and discourse around this!
I started crying at work, I was laughing so much.
Obsessed with this. 🤣
THIS.
Last night, The Last of Us Part II walked away from The Game Awards with seven trophies, including those for Game of the Year, Best Narrativ
I similarly don’t hate the game or the studio’s leadership. However, TLOU2 was created and developed under flawed leadership. ND’s treatment of employees should not be commended but discouraged. I’m equally disappointed in the VGA showrunners.
I love triple-A games. But if they require hundreds of hours of crunch time under grueling circumstances, I’d rather have an enjoyable indie game. If you need more resources to build an immense game, then find them. Most of these studios have seemingly ENDLESS amounts of capital and they should be using it appropriately to reduce the strain on employees. STOP CUTTING COSTS BY CRUNCHING YOUR EMPLOYEES. Don’t milk your existing employees for every ounce of energy and instead fucking treat them like humans. 2020 has clearly showcased that BURN OUT IS REAL.
I understand that certain people enjoy crunch and working under pressure. But developers as a whole should not have to suffer in the same environment in order to have access to opportunities in game development. I really hope developers unionize and fight this aggressive mistreatment.
The Game Awards 2020 musings:
- Representation in gaming still needs a lot of work. White Hollywood seems to be penetrating (Vin Diesel, Keanu Reeves, Christopher Nolan, etc.) and it doesn’t help that the industry is predominantly represented by cishet white men, some of whom clearly want to become this generation’s Hollywood execs. Meanwhile, even Disney’s crews and actors showcased in their Investor Day presentation look more diverse than what was displayed at VGA tonight.
- Really happy to see inclusion of an award that commends innovation and improvements in accessibility. Very ironic that an old exec from Nintendo (notoriously terrible for accessibility options in their games) was the person to announce the winner.
- Disappointed in the winner of GOTY. Not surprised considering the buzz from game critics. I’m sure plenty of gamers feel similarly. Objectively, it incredibly pushed the boundaries in accessibility and visual/graphical effects. Subjectively, I did not agree with various narrative and character decisions. I also have issues with statements made by the game’s director and his apparent inability to accept criticism from fans. I’d have given it to the game that worked extremely hard to artfully tell a non-western story filled with non-white characters voiced by non-white people.
- It was great to see the team of Among Us earn awards tonight. Their wins exemplify the idea that large teams under crunch and high fidelity graphics aren’t necessary to develop an enjoyable game that brings people together. I hope the industry takes this as a hint to reimagine what gaming can be.
a Take™
Tag yourself I’m currently dumbass thot
Depressed bitch. 🤣🤣🤣
I.
Don’t.
Have.
Daddy.
Issues.
Clearly💅🏻🤷🏻♀️
Every time. 🤣