wallacepolsom
oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
No title available
AnasAbdin
will byers stan first human second
pixel skylines
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Acquired Stardust
noise dept.
izzy's playlists!
Monterey Bay Aquarium
sheepfilms
JVL
we're not kids anymore.
$LAYYYTER
hello vonnie
cherry valley forever
ellievsbear
JBB: An Artblog!
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
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seen from United States
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@senrath
Me when I see the word beaʃte
In my head: ah! The archaic form of the letter s! Being a casual scholar of linguistics myself I am well aware that though it resembles the letter f in modern typography in fact it is phonetically identical to s! How foolish it would be to stumble into such a simple lexiconical pitfall!
Me aloud to myself every time: beeft
Carl says it is almost time for flowers
Bondie says it is very much already time for leafs
We're finally about to get some rain so once I'm back from the veterinary conference next week I'll be getting my garden prepped. The weather has been so absurdly mild that I might just start planting
The miners lettuce (native) and bittercress (invasive) are being allowed to take over my mulch as their shallow roots seem to thrive atop the weed cloth. Both are edible and I like their flavor.
The storksbill/filaree, while apparently also edible, is being viciously eradicated as the seeds wreak havoc with Alyssum and Ruckus' fur. It's also choosing to grow in my walkway so it chose violence first.
(It's free salad)
Carl has begun his second year of becoming a father!!! The first of a great many potential offspring
AND
Bondie is trying to be a mother! She will need support for any branches that produce apples this year, and I'm not going to let her set too many. But she's trying!
My yet unnamed apple has yet to really start leafing so I don't know if they're going to try this year as well. But they do have a little friend making themself cozy
Carl has made Many More Children this year!
However, growth-wise he continues to be a very strange tree. He wants to be spindly. He wants to have 20 foot long limbs with a huge cluster of branches right at the very end. And he wants these branches to grow straight up. Or straight down, preferably onto the ground itself.
Just... literally straight down.
So he got a fairly major chop today. I can't reach the top of him currently, but this weekend I'll get a ladder out there and further curb his extreme enthusiasm.
possibly the best ever piece of american sports journalism
"This morning, we posted NBC anchor Mary Carillo's 2004 rant about badminton because we had never seen it before and we wanted to share it with the world. Carillo just wrote an email to us, explaining how that monologue made it on the air:
"Can't believe that thing's still around. I was hosting a morning show in Athens that covered a lot of badminton—some table tennis too, but badminton, I'd been assured, was going to be "the curling of the Summer Games." (!) There was no script for that rant—just a little dead time—but it got some chuckles and a head shake from my producer. It was a pretty loose show—I'd already explained a team handball's size by comparing it against various members of the melon family, and when I found out that equestrian horses were listed as "equipment" I did a rant on the fact that horses needed passports to get into the country and dramatically produced one, so surely they needed an identity upgrade..
"That sort of nonsense got me a hosting gig on Torino's Olympic Ice show, which is still one of my all-time favorite scams. Don't know if it's still kicking around, but maybe my salute to Guido The Zamboni Guy is still out there from that wackadoodle show..
"Don't know how I stay employed,carillo
Mary Carillo is cool as hell. Also, someone please bring us her salute to Guido the Zamboni Guy.
Link to Deadspin article
Her salute to Guido the Zamboni Guy at the Torino Olympics
my cat is completely obsessed with watching the bathroom sink drain and I have started calling this "her shows." as in when I'm in the bathroom and she meows and runs up I'll be like "oh you want to watch your shows?" and run the faucet for an extra few seconds so it fills a little. she will then sit there at the edge of the sink for ages totally entraptured by the drain. blorbo from her sink
my observation from 2 months of kittens
If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.
How to spring-load your bow!
This information is freely given. What you do with it is up to you! 🏹💐🧚🏼
Decided to make myself an OC
Meet Tia!
home cooked meal
Steam Rejected My Upcoming Visual Novel for Having “Adult Content” That Doesn’t Even Exist
Banning random eroge from the platform wasn’t enough, apparently.
Hey, ya’ll. My name is Jacob Cumiskey and I make Higurashi inspired visual novels about how much living in Florida sucks. The answer, of course, is very much, but that’s not why we’re here today. Those in the community that know about Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity already know. What matters for today is that I make visual novels and, hey, maybe you do too. In which case, I love you. And because I love you, I don’t want you to get crushed by the giant boulder that’s rolling towards us. I don’t want you to get hurt.
Cause this shit hurts bad. Really bad.
Even though I’m furious at Steam right now, please remember what I’m about to say here comes from a place of love. Not love for Steam and how they seem to ban games from their platform for seemingly no reason (CHAOS;HEAD NOAH two months before it was set to come out...cough...cough…), but love for you as a developer or you as a fan of the medium itself. Thank you for believing in visual novels and letting them change your life for the better in the same way they’ve changed mine. Now, please, learn from these mistakes of mine as my life’s work gets crushed by Steam into complete vaporware. A few weeks ago, I completed the beta for my second full length game, Siren’s Call: Second Wind. I was thrilled; play-testing had been going well and the general verdict was that it improved upon the mistakes of my first game, Escape Velocity, considerably. Other than writing the script, it was significantly easier to make Second Wind than game #1, as I had really learned the engine I was using inside and out. As such, it only took two years to make and 11,000$ (thank you assets from the first game) as opposed to Escape Velocity’s five years and around 25,000$. I don’t like talking about those gross game development numbers typically, but I feel like it’s important to mention them so that the weight of this boulder rolling towards us can be felt properly. Perhaps your game cost less to make financially. Perhaps more. The money doesn’t really matter that much, other than me no longer being able to justify to my in-laws this “career path” of mine. Cash is just a means to an end, that end being making more visual novels. I need to make more visual novels. It’s a compulsion. To quote someone I love very much, “I gonna keep writing until I die!” Or, at least, I want to. What matters more than the money, to me at least, is the time spent making the game itself. That time spend making a game is the crystallization of your soul. Your love. But does any of this matter to an AI Steam Chat Bot?
Of course not. Siren’s Call: Second Wind got flagged for having adult content that doesn’t exist. Even though Steam spent a median time of 36 minutes playing a 10 hour game.
Please note that in Siren's Call: Second Wind, there is not a loose nipple to be had. No sex scenes. Nothing of that ilk. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m “against” eroge or anything stupid like that. Aoi Tori in particular might be one of my favorite visual novels of all time (Judith looking main heroine + religious overtones sold me immediately), I am just famously bad at writing sex scenes and have more fun making games without them.
Maybe it was the mature looking, all adult-aged cast that did it though? Or the fact that it’s a story about marriage and all that entails? Yeah, maybe it’s just a little too “adult” even though there is no nudity or sex to be had? The main character does use the word “masturbate” at one point! Maybe it’s that. So I’ll just get this totally-human Steam person to tell me what the issue is and then maybe I can…
...oh. Right, 36 minutes median playtime.
Across 7 people (not 8 cause one of them was me play-testing on Steam). Over the course of several weeks of “reviewing.” What the fuck are we doing here Steam? Legitimately what is the excuse? Tell me what to "fix" with my game. Tell me what is so over the line that my game needs to be paired with legitimate eroge/hentai games that I can’t possibly compete with. Tell me WHY you want me to falsely advertise my game with an “adult only” label that I cannot rip off? But that’s when I remember that a boulder has no mouth to speak with. It just rolls forward and crushes everything in its path that doesn’t know any better.
So learn from my mistakes. I’m not saying you need to lie to Steam during your content review if you’re making a visual novel. Just remember that they are now flagging games with no nudity or sex scenes in them as “adult only.” Cult of Takumi for Hundred Line and Persona 5 are totally fine with their crew though. Remember that. Learn from it.
Before this point, I was spending about 25$ a day running Reddit adds to direct people to Steam and generate wishlists so that I had enough groundswell for people to, you know, be aware that my game exists when it launches. It was going well. As you can see from the above picture, we got like 3,000 wishlists since I launched the Steam page in January. Given that 10,000 is the metric for a “successful” pre-launch, a few more months of this would have put us within striking range. But yeah, not doing that anymore. Steam might be the only way I can realistically recoup my 11,000$ loss from this game and keep making visual novels, but I don’t want to put more people in front of a fucking boulder. I don’t have much social media, but I’m gonna do what I can to just link people to itch.io instead from now on. I’ve emailed JAST about potentially bringing my games to their platform, because I heard they are compassionate people that give VN developers that have had their games purged from Steam a good home. I’m hoping they write back. I respect their legacy. Really, the whole situation with Chaos;Head should have made this kind of thing obvious to me. But I was blinded by love. I wanted to keep making games. I still do. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’re a human with a heart in their chest that loves seeing how people react to the stories you need to tell.
But the human element doesn’t matter to Valve. To them, games are a product. End of story. If I release a patch for Second Wind on Steam, I won’t be able to be vocal about it on Steam itself. They remove entire accounts for things like that. So, visual novel fans will see the black bars covering content I can only guess Valve considers to be “adult only,” get (reasonably) pissed, and then tie that negative feeling to the game. It makes sense. I’d be pissed too. The whole pipeline leaves a sour-taste in one’s mouth. Maybe a good publisher can smooth over that process. I don’t know. All I know now is that the feeling of joy I felt for getting my second visual novel in 7 years completed feels like a distant memory.
Maybe if I find more money, I’ll add legitimate porn to the game. I can become the game Steam thinks I am. Crowdfund some hentai after I’ve already done two crowdfunding campaigns. My Mom would understand. My Dad would think it’s funny. But I’d think of Aoi Tori and how much worse the porn in my game would be. Purple Software is too high of a bar for me. At least on that front. No matter what happens though, please be aware that this is happening. The boulder here is only getting bigger. And we’ve gotta a find a way, as visual novel fans/developers, to either shatter that boulder to bits or, more realistically, circumvent it altogether. Please be safe. Remember you are loved.
I'm going on an adventure! (•⩊ •マ✨ ...wallpaper LINK!
magical girl Julian aka Radiance at the ready (sparkle sparkle) !!!
Apparently someone got their car stuck on the light rail tracks at Mt. Baker. For those unfamiliar this is 35 feet up in the air
Sasa! You should go jogging with her.
In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.
Taylor Swift does this
no she doesn’t
You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.
it has been way to
