#nullcore

[anomalous-root]

an entity and their dog

[opaiescents]

NULL stimboard!! they’re an oc of mine and i’ve been wanting to make a board for them for a while :)

🖤 🖤 🖤 / 💿 💿 💿 / 🤍 🤍 🤍

[systembroadcasting]

@liquidlikecats @fromfesteringflames

:) Anyways, Moss.

[anomalous-root]

I made the journey. I grew the ship. I carried it carefully as the tissues developed. And here, on this planet, I see the kindred of my ship have managed to grow all on their own.

[anomalous-root]

thinking about the sort of information that is available to the traveller

vs. like what you are taking telemon's word for

probably a lot of the loading-in oddities could be dismissed as HUD errors or other problems with your equipment upon changing environments. it is all hand repaired after all

for me at least the ruins planets are so nakedly artificial -- the ruins grow on the earth like mushrooms, not like abandoned structures. it becomes so clear how each little building is just like a tree to the atlas, just another object in the tileset. they are in their way just as stark as the anomalous worlds which i also quite like

it is interesting to have sunk so much time into a game whose thesis is "isn't the illusion unsatisfying? beautiful, but hollow? don't you want to live in the real world? don't you want the real world to be livable? don't you know this dream is dying? do you want to die with the dream?" esp b/c for much of that time i was literally dying and so my life was actually not livable

and i felt like i was in my sickbed hanging out with the atlas in its sickbed and that was meaningful to me.

now though the game has so much more to tell me and it's mostly "at some point you have to abandon the dream. you have to wake up and be real"

i was really fascinated with the expedition in which you can't warp between systems as usual, instead you are forced to use the portal network, and at the end of each stage of the expedition you step through a supercharged by maguffin ingredients portal to find .... a black screen. just me, confronted with myself. the glass, the 4th wall, now simply a mirror.

later, squids talk to you as if you had a conversation on the other side of the screen. but in refusing to depict it, the game forces you to construct something yourself. you have to, briefly, envision that the traveller is living a radically different life some place you can't reach, and you are dumped back out of the game into your real material circumstances. and maybe you could both be living differently, and better, you know? that sort of IS what the game is all about

[anomalous-root]

[Click Here To Escape Samsara]

[anomalous-root]

i think this is my favorite macroblank album actually

[anomalous-root]

atlas: i am unable to live in the old way

traveller: so are you going to do something new then

atlas: no