#research.txt

[cybergoth-damsel]

So a few days ago I was made aware of this drawing of Harley Quinn and Jake the Dog posed like Lady with Ermine and it has completely captivated me.

drawing (left) by u/Vvix0 on reddit I'm like obsessed with it. The combination of such incongruous ideas combined with the earnestness of the effort... the extreme eye contact that breaks entirely from the base image. The piece itself is so confrontational in spite of how pedestrian - perhaps even sweet - its concept is. I've been thinking about it for like two days straight.

[cybergoth-damsel]

It's amazing how lego sets targeted at adults cost multiples of times more than imported model kits even by big name JPN brands. I tried to get into LEGO in 2022 but it was so expensive that I decided it wasn't worth it after buying just one $30 set.

Because the appeal of LEGO to me was modifying and repurposing them I never thought I'd enjoy gunpla until I found out about 30 Minute Missions kits last week.

(30 Minute Missions are a bandai gunpla line that sport interchangeable parts and "extra parts packs" that allow you some beginner friendly customization without breaking out a power drill)

I bought a small on-sale kit from a local hobby shop for only $14 and I really liked putting her together;

I'm a little embarrassed posting her because she's so small and simple but I'm pushing through it LOL

Since I'm picky about paint and tired of working with spraycans I'll have to save up for an airbrush set-up, but the ceiling of expression already feels a lot higher than I thought it would! Also I'm really happy at the prospect of a hobby that won't burn blue light into my retina. For the time being I'm very happy to have something fun to look forward to.

If you customize gunpla at all or use 30 minute missions lmk! I wanna see what people have done with them and get some inspiration outside of the most god-tier expensive complicated shit.

[cybergoth-damsel]

Part of the reason I'm so drawn to the Folding Ideas videos/writing style is that they're so even-handed about victims of scams without pulling punches on the way their larger cultures are harmful, reactionary or misogynistic.

It's not hard to find ""comprehensive"" video essays about cults or strange internet communities, but so often their lust for narrative just creates voyeuristic exploitative content out of (often) very vulnerable people. They also typically lack due diligence with regard to larger cultural shifts in the historical moment, and just generally trend towards lazy forum "journalism".

As someone who (some time ago) used to struggle with a "warped" perception and unstable grasp on reality I appreciate the compassion for people who, at the end of the day, are being taken advantage of - but if it went so far as to pity them it would only reinforce their very isolating environment further. Its compassionate and direct sociologically, not individually, and I think that's very good. I like it a lot.

[cybergoth-damsel]

Really pleased with the presence of religion in Disco Elysium so far. Both it and Night in the Woods have a sort of intimacy with the value religion has in people's lives without being outright pious - even amid their own cynicism. There is a slight reverence for the blank-space-filling power of spiritual thinking that feels very human and honest in a way you wouldn't necessarily expect.

I grew up deeply entrenched in religion and, naturally, its presence in my life made a lot of things difficult - but I think too many writers are eager to write off its presence in a world, especially those producing "cozy" settings. Faith is really not as alien to other ways of enduring the world as Redditors would like to believe, there is a place for it in worldbuilding for any setting that has poverty or tragedy.

[cybergoth-damsel]

A lot of the conversation around tumblr's "financial defecit" has started falling into very binary camps of "if you like something. support it!" and "poor people need money more than tumblr", and I'd like to posit a secret third thing.

For starters, this old Dan Olson video is illustrative on the general pitfalls of interacting with platform owners as if you have shared interests:

I don't think enough people recognize that the interests of the Owners will always be at odds with the interests of the people who actually like using a blog website. It doesn't matter if the people who make tumblr have good intentions, or if they're "lifetime bloggers", etc. At the end of the day, their priorities will always be to find the most inexpensive path to growth.

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In the present, the most inexpensive path to growth is the Content Trough. A tiktok/twitter "feed" of "content" that never ends and keeps you scrolling - seeing more ads - producing more data so that it can target the Content Trough more accurately. This is why tumblr wants to collapse reblogs, to lead people down algorithmic feeds. The current approach to Social Media Platforms is low-effort, quick reading media that people can generate a "hot take" on and move on.

It's approachable as a direction because users from other sites are already familiar, and higher-ups like it because it doesn't require any new ideas and comes with baked in statistics. Half of the reasons that tumblr is fun to use and good are also the reasons its unprofitable and outdated; and it'll always be more appealing to them to court new adopters than old bloggers.

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Basically what I'm trying to say is that we can't make tumblr profitable and good. Obviously the site tanking means it'll go away as a living platform, but at the end of the day it could be better than the entire history of the site becoming illegible and inaccessible as the format completely eats itself whole trying to look like Twitter.

The 2020s have seen capitalism completely cannibalize the internet as it fails to produce the infinitely climbing line its so desperately seeks, and this is no exception. The well has dried up. If you're looking for someone to blame it's not other tumblr users, it's the structure that only allows social spaces to exist for the sake of profit.

[cybergoth-damsel]

If Multiversus ever actually comes back from nonexistence I guaruntee it'll be bloated with Harry Potter characters and more microtransactions.

Like assuming WB didn't just pull the plug on a bad investment when the corporate leadership changed, the reasoning for such a bridge burning call had to be complex. It could have just been stupidity though Warner Bros is kind of just like this. Remember the batgirl movie? Me neither.

My conspiracy theory is that they saw the controversy around Hogwarts Legacy and, with more than one HP character already leaked in some way, decided it'd be easier to sneak them in beneath a ton of new content rather than eek them out every few months as they had been and face a steady flow of backlash. Either that or the portion of the smash community they managed to poach was so toxic that development time was extremely hampered by catering to them.

No matter what horrible fate awaits it I really think that game had some fun potential. I could be projecting but it really felt like the developers had a genuine passion for evolving the genre of platform fighter; they talked pretty openly about their ideas and the resulting game was fun and kinetic and collaborative in a way I haven't experienced with smash in a long time. It's a shame its wagon was hitched to the company that made Big Chungus Spacejam 2.

[cybergoth-damsel]

Idk if this is a universal impression, but it's wild to me how the framing of Tiktok videos sloughs away all evidence of earnesty and candidness.

I don't mean this in a "There's so much irony on Tiktok way". Moreso, there is this spectre of expectation that lurks over nearly every video and irrepairably changes it.

I watch a funny video someone made with their father, and everything from the puns and c*nsor5h1p in the captions to the attempts at smooth camera motion betray a deep desire to be prepared for success. Suddenly this joke you made with your dad at 7pm needs to be obvious, needs to have the corpse of its intentions long dead on the dissection table. It can't have a dull moment because any sense that this video was made by people at a place and time is a poison to the pushed ideas of quality.

It just sucks! I loathe the way Tiktok - and the surviving internet at large - repackage ideas that need no cross advertising and demand they act as every form of media all at once. Textposts but you have to be hot, doing a little dance while you accidentally spread misinformation. The "audio" element of your work can be stripped of its context and used by thousands of strangers, and you pursue this because it is the unilaterally defined path forward. It is just some kind of grim mask that everyone wears now more than ever. The air smells like bleach.

[cybergoth-damsel]

blab about video games as a moral medium please!

Woah I asked to be reminded of something and someone actually reminded me! Sweet. ^ w ^ I just generally take umbrage with the ways people overstate the novelty of games being able to "place the viewer within a story" and "react to the viewers' choices/input." There's obviously a truth to that novelty in a very literal, pedantic sense, but none of the gestures that it allows are truly new or unique to games. I think there are plenty of well told (non game) stories that present a moral dilemma through means that inspire direct empathy rather than "taking an unaffected role as a detached observer", and on the other hand plenty of people's experiences w/ games DO end up as kind of a detached observer because gaming culture actively seems to prefer that position.

On one hand a massive strength of games is their accessibility in this way - I think a big part of the reason YA games focus so much on ludonarrative/meta storytelling is because it's an avenue into questions about art that many people don't have the luxury of discovering in other mediums with greater required reading. For people growing up with an interest in art it's a very powerful thing to discover, but people were discovering this in their personal journeys since long before video games.

I'm not saying video games aren't particularly strong at this, but they also tend to find friction with sticking the landing because games are expected to be toys first and foremost.

Like yeah "Gamers" are kind of the worst, yeah - but that's partly because the industry of video games has been sandboxed in the toy market for decades before finally opening up to hobbyists and small artists. The language that defined how we interact with games, what they are, and what we expect our experiences with them to be (in order to justify it as a Purchase) evolved to compliment their role in the market above all else. All this to say I think video games being such a common commodity is kind of a complicated double edged sword! It's weird idk.