Cardboard Code

I make things and I believe in your ability to make things. Male, cis, he/him.

[talenlee]

A Grungler On Crossdressing

I think a lot about crossdressing, for a guy who doesn’t do it or go looking for it or interact with it at all.

Let me clarify: Kind of. Not really. I don’t think about it very often, it’s not a thought that occupies me a lot of the time, but it is a thought that when I do try and think about it involves thinking an awful lot, in a way that necessarily involves constructing not just ‘what I think’ but multiple related models about what it even means to do this thing we call ‘crossdressing.’ At a certain point the models break down.

If you’re not here to hear a cis guy talking about crossdressing as a practice with which he has nothing to do, then you might wanna go elsewhere today!

First of all, crossdressing is a term with a simple-sounding definition that I feel opens up a lot of weird doors. Crossdressing, ostensibly, is wearing the clothes of the opposite gender’s. Except, and this is the annoying thing, this doesn’t really mean anything, because there are no opposite genders. Also, people don’t really care about women wearing pants (unless they’re real freaks that I’m related to). As with many of these ‘queer’ discussions, what people really mean is ‘men doing something that isn’t men-appropriate.’

You can find this if you ask people about gay rights, inevitably you find the conversation gravitates towards gay men and then somehow, no matter what you start the topic onto, they want to bring up buttsex and poo and cocks. Now there’s a whole conversation around how that’s fundamentally because homophobia (and antiqueerness in general) is built around disgust responses and that’s why they try to bring up gross stuff.

When I talk about ‘crossdressing,’ bringing up like, Janelle Monae in a suit isn’t in the conversation. Nor should it be, really, because Janelle Monae isn’t a woman in a men’s suit, it’s a nonbinary person in their own suit, but the people who are mad about crossdressing include people who would absolutely see that as ‘probably fine’ because they’re parsing it as a woman wearing a men’s suit in a way that still nonetheless makes them look really hot.

Point is, step one: Crossdressing is, in one space, an impossible action and instead is just about patrolling the ways men shouldn’t dress.

Let’s assume, though, that crossdressing exists. Let’s assume then that it’s about some kind of simplified gender binary thingy that’s kinda silly, it’s a thing people can do when they wear the ‘wrong’ gender of clothes, or clothes that are ‘wrong’ for their gender. I’ll isolate it down to a specific example: Men wearing women’s clothing, and this is bad. From there I’ll discard the people who are mad about it for the obvious transmisogyny angle.

Instead, what about the trans people who don’t like crossdressing.

Now, for this in this context, I want to make it clear, I am neutral on what the opinions of these people should be and I do not think that anyone should have a particular opinion on this cultural practice. There are these two positions:

Men crossdressing is generally, bad or tasteless, because it enables transmisogynist people who are willing to play with gender enough to dress out of type, but are not actually engaged with the experience of being that gender.

Men crossdressing is generally, good or okay, because it enables people who might want to play with gender a place to do so that does not necessarily require deeper commitment and therefore, present those ideas to people, even those who are not necessarily the crossdresser.

This to me feels as much like an argument about drag specifically, and about drag culture in the specific, high-prominence American Excess. It feels like RuPaul. It feels like a conversation that isn’t about crossdressing, it’s a conversation around specifically some high-profile crossdressers who are probably also transphobes. It isn’t how it was phrased to me, though and I don’t want to speak over the conversation.

It is a challenging conversation to grapple with because I don’t want to act like it’s something anyone should have to put up with. I think that every community slice has bad actors in it, and I think that every single form that can take is going to feature shitheads that suck. I tend to think that any given practice that does enable those people should be addressed in a way that the community can, like, you know, by not tolerating them and kicking them out, and refusing to give them platforms and voice. I don’t think that means the practice of crossdressing is ‘bad’ in any way.

I do understand though that I’m not part of that conversation. I just don’t find myself compelled by the idea that guys wearing skirts creates some kind of greater structural problem that wasn’t already there, and would be there, even if the guy wasn’t wearing a skirt.

I kinda remember someone saying something like ‘femboy aesthetics are appropriating transfemininity’ which is just close enough to a joke silly opinion that I’m not sure it isn’t one. Like, if a guy wants to try transfeminine aesthetics, isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t transfeminine aesthetics be more present and more available and more seen as good and desireable things for people to engage with?

And the thing is, in with all this: I have no interest in it! Crossdressing isn’t something I’ve ever found interesting to do at all! I’ve worn a skirt a few times in the vein of ‘well, it’s what’s in this house and I can wear it,’ but I haven’t been left with any feeling of the experience afterwards like I’m delighted that Dress Goes Spinny. It’s just clothes, and I find people who get really mad about what other people are wearing tend to be silly. It’s one of the reasons I find hijab bans or the like a serious sign of someone being untrustworthy, because it’s so unserious to be a person mad about a hat. I know that hat is very significant to the person who wears it, but if I’m not invested in those reasons, it’s just a hat to me, and being mad about someone’s hat seems deeply unserious.

Honestly, this whole line of conversation, with my own complete antipathy towards the promise or threat of gender exploration is one of the reasons I’m nervous about watching I Saw The TV Glow. What if I watch it and I think it’s just fine and don’t have a full-blown gender crisis about it?

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

If you're the kind of anxious where you want people to reach out to you because you can't bring yourself to make first contact, I have a pro tip for you when someone does:

respond?

[melody-sy-deactivated20260424]

all the small things sand grain bug wings kitten puppies tadpole guppies baby fetus germs and amoebas hair strand (louse world) bartender mousegirl

[talenlee]

Dev Pile: What Value Story

Here’s an academic concept, presented in plain language. I think that every game requires stuff to play it with, rules for how it plays, and a fiction for what you’re playing. In the more academic way, I say that all games are the nexus of an abstraction, an entanglement and stuffness, which are each things that create and present limitations and boundaries on one another. Even an attempt to have minimal forms of one or the other creates stressors on the others.

A not-uncommon question that follows from this from people who hear and engage with it, which is largely, people I work with who want me to explain more and are doing me a favour by asking, is ‘what about X? it doesn’t have a fiction, right?’ and the X in question is something like Checkers, Chess, or Tennis. The solution to that question is that these games have fictions, because, and this is important: You can’t avoid it.

People use stories to explain sequences of events with related experiences. Naturally speaking, any game creates the structure of a story, with rising action and a conclusion because games necessarily are made out of the structures of play that pull the game towards its conclusion. That means that necessarily any given game is going to have an outcome, a product, that the experience of its play forms a story, a sequence of events, in which, if the game has engaged its players and given them reason to care about what is or is not happening, then they are going to structure as a story.

This fiction is going to be informed by the game experience, and that game experience is going to be shaped, again, by rules and play pieces. The fiction of any given game can be found therefore, in examining the parts that make up the game, and is related and expressed by those two other elements.

First things first, games have representations. There are things that are representations of abstractions in the game rules. An example is the all-purpose tally of ‘score’ – a score is used to represent the skill or difficulty of the things the scorer succeeds at. In basketball, three-pointers and two-pointers and penalty shots are all worth different amounts, and those different amounts create a valuation, in the narrative of the game, as to what commensurate tasks are comparable to one another. For example, two teams with scores of 81 are considered to be as good as each other in the fictional test of the game, even though one of those teams got 40 2-pointers and a penalty, while the other got 27 3-pointers.

Game pieces represent the things in the fiction, and the terms used to represent them are in turn, part of the creation of a fiction. In Checkers, the pieces have one major differentation – that they are one colour, or the other; this creates the fiction that the opposing forces are almost identical, but aren’t quite identical, and they’re placed on a board which is representative of some kind of space of relationship that the checkers pieces are capable of ‘moving’ across. In chess, pieces are representative of army units, and the board represents another space, which is necessary to explain how those pieces move.

These representations can bring with them implied information and values as well. For example, there is one piece on the board of Chess that has a feminine-gendered name (the Queen), and there are three pieces with masculine-gendered names (the King, the Bishop, and the Knight). I know you may think lady knights are cool as hell, and those terms are losing their gendering, but they absolutely were not ungendered when they were first used. The implication is that in Chess, power and authority to act and win is commonly in the hands of men, but sometimes in the hands of women, and also, that women need to be exceptional to be on the battlefield alongside even the lowliest pawns.

Similarly, the relationships between things in rules creates fiction. Say we have a game of pieces that move over a distance. If I have a piece that moves 1 square, and a piece that moves 5 square, the natural assumption of how to express these movements is that the 1-move piece is ‘slow’ and the 5-move piece is ‘fast.’ This is without calling the movement ranges ‘speed’ or anything, but just the natural consequence of how these rules are reasonably expressed.

There’s also something important to how game rules use fiction to both maintain coherence. Describing game pieces in ways that make sense to a fiction makes it easier to explain why pieces work together. Many simpler games don’t bother to try and enforce this; games like Snakes and Ladders or The Game of Life use entirely random pieces that are incoherently connected to the fiction; the dice aren’t something, they’re not doing something, they’re just a game piece that creates a game action that the players enact in the name of the game. The fiction of either is about random options happening to the player, who then has to make the best of the narrative of how they experience those events.

On the other hand, to compare to a game which uses a lot of fictional coherence tools, in Magic: The Gathering, when an attacking card is marked with a quantity of interaction points equal to or in excess of their secondry primary attreibute, the card is put into a discard pile, and cards that check whether that card was put there in this way, then trigger. Except what the game says in its fiction is that if a creature is dealt too much damage, it dies, and it’s too much damage if it’s equal to or higher than its toughness. When it dies, it goes to the graveyard, and getting the card back is then fictionally themed as digging up a grave, or raising the dead.

These ideas make Magic: The Gathering much more easily handled despite its immensely complicated fiction! And that means that by treating the fiction of the game seriously, and enmeshing the rules and structures of those rules with the fiction, and using the stuff of the game to represent that fiction, the game is better and easier to play.

It’s important to understand I’m not saying that your game ‘should have a fiction’, I’m saying you can’t prevent your game from having a fiction. It might be ill-formed and vague, but necessarily, there’s going to be something that the play experience creates that the mind is going to observe like a sequence in a story. It’s not that your game ‘should’ have a story, it’s that it can’t not, and that means that the story is a thing that you need to actively consider when creating the rest of the game.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

trans women are cool

[viralfrog]

[virtualgirladvance]

welcome back Shaolin Soccer(2001) we missed you

[joyflameball]

Anyway dni if you still support Cain, he hit his brother over the head with a fucking rock and it killed him instantly (source). I truly do not know how he still has fans. It astounds me how people can call themselves good people and still be completely fine platforming blatantly Abelist assholes like him. Smh

[oddarette]

Here, take this battle shrimp. One could say you've found your knight in brining armor🦐

[talenlee]

Pride Month 2026!

Welcome to June! Welcome to the month of Pride, as decreed by the way America does things and therefore, as an English speaking surrogate part of our second evil empire, we in Australia pretty much go along with. Buy rainbow merchandise!

Pride month is a month where I try to showcase and center specifically queer media, where I try to talk about queerness in games or media. This differentiates it from other months in no meaningful way, because, as you might have picked up if you’re a long-term reader of the blog, I am a bisexual cisgender male connected to a community of trans people. I’m a grungler, as I understand it.

If it is Pride Month though, how do I grungle? Do I grungle at you sir? Well, I grungle.

Look, all of my writing is queer writing because I’ve been entertaining the idea of kissing hot boys since I was fourteen or so. The bisexuality is deeply entrenched in everything I do, as expressed by the shameful hiding of all signs of my sexuality from a general audience. That may be more tied into the abusive Protestant upbringing, I’m not sure. I understand that there’s a general idea that bisexuality in culture is expressed by any old crap I think that characters I like have in common, so I’m going to assume that my bisexuality is expressed by a compelling character arc with a monstrous transformation and really hot characters. You know, all the characters I like are bi.

I mean who’s gunna bother to tell me otherwise.

This month nonetheless is an opportunity to take work from queer creatives (which I try to do, by default, anyway), and forward it with a queer lens (which I try to do, by default, anyway), and serve it up to an audience with the handrails necessary to understand the queerness of texts they may not recognise normally (which I try to do, by default, anyway). I mean, really, it’s a great opportunity to just continue on as ever I always do but this time I’ll try to point out the reasons that this specific thing is particularly queer.

I’ve really gone on a journey with my relationship to queer media on this blog. If you check the history of my opinions on this, I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that I started from a negative place about ‘queer readings.’ I think it’s because I disliked the idea of treating non-queer media as if it were queer, of characters being implied queer was super important, when in contrast with actually queer work from actually queer creators (of which I was one).

Genuinely, trying to think of examples of the kind of thing I mean is hard, because I largely forget about the ‘important’ queer media of the past. I guess I’d point to work like Uma Musume or Love Live or whatever girl gacha people are into these days, because those things typically present a vision of ‘queerness’ that is easily and readily denied as ‘there are girls in it, who are friends,’ rather than any attempt to represent queer lives and queer experiences. Hate that.

Now, since the line of ‘acceptable expressions of queer identities’ got moved around a little over recent years and media has been a little more daring, there has been more stuff with queer characters living queer lives, and even for that to be incidental. It is really nice when there are incidental queer folk, that there are lesbians in the background of the shows that normally would have left that implied. On the other hand, that’s still pushing a boundary so slowly and modestly that it’s embarrassing.

I think sometime around my writing about Lycoris Recoil, I adjusted my overall framework on that. I think the idea was something like that if the show recognised gay characters existing, and then implied something heavily, then it was pretty reasonable to say that the show was at least trying to mention it. There’s a similar thing with Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch From Mercury, where the actual people responsible for the show tried to present an argument that actually, this media isn’t queer and it’s entirely in the heads of the audience, and that’s stupid as hell.

Now, there’s an abundance of queer media – especially of the marketable types of queer, in that yuri series or games with hot lesbians – that feels it’s managed to move a conventional normal into a middle space. Basically, we’ve got media about queer girls, and that’s… nice and all, but you know, there are still all these other parts of queer sexuality and queer life that are being kept reasonably obscured from the tender eyes of the normies and the straights. There aren’t fat guys making out unless the game is only about fat guys making out – and I don’t bring that up because I want that, I bring that up because it’s a type of media that I know queer media has been making for a long time, and is still largely kept to the outside.

Basically, there’s just another set of qualifications that let characters show up and be expressed in media in a way that’s, you know, marketably attractive to the normies. I’d normally be kinda annoyed about it…

Except now we have a landscape where people are claiming that even the modest concessions, even the slow movement of normalcy towards queerness has been over-done, has been unreasonable. To that end I’m mostly thinking about the ways that queerness is older and better and these people are cowards and fools, and in many cases, bordering on evil because they’re digusted at the idea of things that don’t involve them and don’t want to involve them.

It’s Pride Month. I’m going to talk about Pride Stuff, and I’m going to be doing it constantly thinking about the people who saw an era of only-implied queerness and think that was too far. It is a time for rage and it is a time for grace and it is a time for bricks.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[markrosewater]

There have been a lot of relatively recent successful designs in the space of tokens. You have clues, treasures, blood, mutagen. Do you think similar design space exists for counters? There are already some that I can think of in stun counters, keyword counters and shield counters but I feel like there can be so many more.

The biggest potential for new counters is either on noncreature spells or players.

[talenlee]

[hoktom]

[talenlee]

my pride month article on 4th Edition D&D is about Corellon Larethian, the Anti-Grungler, chucking a baby down a well

[thydungeongal]

Great sentence, Talen

[talenlee]

I offer an extremely specific, extremely niche service

The article concludes with 'you can only grungle from a place of love and respect.'

[hotcrossedfangs]

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Tombstone

There was a point, in the lifetime of our great grandparents, where homosexuality had to be invented. Prior to that point, everything that we simply describe as ‘homosexuality,’ the cultural phenomena that ‘homosexuality’ refers to, was a diverse, scattered thing, and it existed in its own contexts that were hard to describe, and not necessarily unified under a single label that was easy to brand.

Tombstone is a movie that tells the story of real world historical events and that means there’s a lot of misogyny and old-timey disdain for the other. By old-timey I mean it was made in the 90s. It’s not particularly edgy or boundary-pushing with its language, I didn’t catch any slurs or the like, which is probably easier to do when the cast features nothing but guys who vary from eggshell white to nude-and-mad red.

Oh, and this is based on real historical events, which are appropriately unrealistic, but also, if you know the historical events of the gunfight at the OK Corral, you know how this movie’s going to go.

Tombstone is the story of a real historical event that happened to some real historical figures, and thanks to happening in the only important place in the world, America, it has been made into a number of movies. The story is about this guy called Wyatt Earp, notable for a mustache and a boyfriend and two wives, and a place called the OK Corral. The actual sequence of events is pretty simple; Earp arrived in a place called Tombstone, and the gang there didn’t like him. He didn’t like that gang, and they had a big fight. Then that fight led to another fight and that fight led to a third final fight, like some sort of sequence of violence that goes around in a circle.

The story is not by any means noncompelling, but it is familiar. It’s a stock plot, but in this case it’s a little bit unreasonable to judge it for that, since it’s retelling the historical events that are the bones from which this stock cooked. The characters are well documented, by themselves, and that brings with it some degree of unreliability and mystery. Did this guy commit suicide, or did he die in a hilarious accident nobody would believe, or was it ninjas?

In the end, the hero wins and then writes a story about how he did the right thing for the right reasons and it’s a pretty wild coincidence in history how often that happens. As a movie goes, it’s a pretty incredible piece, with a cast of people who made a host of other movies, both before and after – a real collection of movie-star ass movie-stars.

Mostly I just wanna talk about Val Kilmer’s Doc Holiday.

Now, look, I don’t actually have a strong attachment, emotionally, to Val Kilmer. What got me to watch this movie was the news of Val Kilmer’s death. Steve Shives, a Youtuber, produced a video celebrating Val Kilmer (in this movie particularly), and like, Steve feels like a much more normcore version of me. Instead of cult trauma and a degree in media studies, he feels like a guy who got into sensible work and Star Trek and had a divorce. I’m also not sure if he has the same feelings about Val Kilmer being this hot as I do, but nonetheless – I am trying to not just replicate what he has to say. If you watch his video, understand that it was enough to make me go ‘dang, that movie seems great, I should check it out.’

Doc Holiday is a historical character that stands a little larger in my mind because there seems to be something consistent to his characterisation and voice across other forms. He appears to have been both an immense asshole and a very loyal friend, a well-educated loser suffering from a near-terminal condition of the time, and a relentless pushing of his luck.

In Tombstone Kilmer plays him with a sort of graceful laziness, an easy charm. The man’s hands are fast, he’s skilled at what he’s doing, and I know, a lot of this can be done with doubles and with a thousand takes, but man, he executes on it well in the final product. However many people it takes to make the little gestures, the cup-flipping, the gun-slinging move so well, to get the Latin back-and-forth to go right, the result is really cool!

And that’s kind of necessary because the actual guy it’s representing is a lying, cheating, murderous asshole, who is on the hero’s team because he is fond of the hero, and that’s kind of all he’s got. There doesn’t seem to be a powerful animating ideology underpinning his behaviour, it’s just the friendship guiding him. He’s pro-Wyatt and anti-anti-Wyatt. And like, I get it, and for a character of his type? If you want him or not, he’s on your side. He’s your huckleberry.

Hey, why this movie, though? Why write about Tombstone, a manly man’s man manly movie about cowboys and lawmen made in the 1990s featuring just basically every famous dude at the time? Well, you must understand, and I fear I’m being obvious about it, but as a byproduct of mostly marginalising the opinions and presence of women and making its relationships so very intense, Doc and Wyatt come across as extraordinarily gay. That’s why the introduction, the description of the ‘invention of homosexuality.’

I’m not bringing any revolutionary opinion here. Multiple other people have touched on this, including at least one TV show (Wynona Earp). Glibly, it was homosocial, in that these are two guys who seem to have had no friends who were women; women were partners in couples but they didn’t share common social ground. The guys went out to hang out with one another, the women hung out with one another, and that’s just the typical social striation.

I don’t necessarily think these guys fucked. I think the kind of friendship they had was somehow gayer than merely fucking.

Oh, the movie itself. Sure, sure, okay, so like, this movie is straight up, just candy, dressed up as steak. It’s a historical story, it’s got serious elements, the music and framing and the setpieces are all full of potent this is important significance, but the actual events that make up the story are very simple, unsophisticated chains of the most comically, obviously evil villains showing up and being complete tools to people for no good reason. Then a hero responds by smacking the villain around. It’s so much like a fanfiction narrative structure it’s funny that it is meant to represent a real sequence of events. Every single line of dialogue the heroes dole out is meant to be a complete banger, but through the whole narrative, every step is immediately and obviously predictable.

The only real surprise is that Wyatt Earp never gets hit despite everyone shooting at him, which, it seems, is a real thing that really happened. People just might not have been that good at shooting back then!

Banger movie though.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

my pride month article on 4th Edition D&D is about Corellon Larethian, the Anti-Grungler, chucking a baby down a well

[thydungeongal]

They should make an anime where various tabletop RPGs are represented by cute girls with personalities appropriate to those games

[thydungeongal]

In the first episode all the girls gang up to beat the D&D girl to death with sticks

[interdimensional-chaos]

The joke would be on them the DnD girlie would whip out some monk shit or breathe fire and clobber them all

[thydungeongal]

Nope. Beaten to death with sticks I'm afraid.

[grazztthedark]

What I love about this reply was that interdimensional-chaos thought that D&D would somehow have more power than the other systems. Like, ignoring all the fantasy heartbreakers that are similar to D&D and could presumably beat it to death with sheer numbers, you get high-powered stuff like anything in the World of Darkness, Exalted, and Jolene. How does D&D even stand a chance?

[talenlee]

this isn't about power level of format this is about the D&D girlie deserving to be beaten to death with sticks

[talenlee]

May 2026 Wrapup!

I’ve been using the same icons for wrapups regularly now, because what happens is I tend to think up the question ‘what does this month make me think about’ and I type that into my icon search. This inevitably takes me to the thing I’ve already uploaded in the past, because I’m basic, and it seems that consistently, May makes me think of mayflies. I don’t even think this icon is of a mayfly, because mayflies are a kind of water creature with a long body and wings, as oposed to this squat little bugger.

Anyway, articles! Lemme talk to you about things I’ve written, recorded, and made and that I think you might enjoy!

May’s got five Fridays in it, and they were each a Game Pile. What’s more, three of them were video Fridays, which is how we wound up with the collection this month of an old videogame, a new(ish) videogame, and an indie-est TTRPG.

Duke Nukem 3D, a fairly mid game.

Terminal City, a really excellent parser challenge run game that I do kind of want more of.

Biophage‘s Quickstart, a TTRPG with a really interesting premise of two players and one storyteller.

Wonder Book, a spectacle legacy game.

The Glass Box of Disco Elysium, a long-former about a good game that I liked, that I didn’t like enough.

Next up it’s Story Pile. This month, I wound up bouncing Planetes from originally, April – I instead got to spend time talking with Fox about seasonal anime, and that took an earlier slot.

Planetes, an anime I love but don’t recommend.

Skeleton Double, a manga that I enjoyed, but not enough people did for it to succeed.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a whole movie covered in one page in Dracula.

Slow Horses, a story about horrid spies and the failure of the British security state.

I did a bunch of work on Moonshiners this month, and that formed these four articles:

Art Demands in Moonshiners, an assessment of what goes into the art brief for Moonshiners.

Catch-Up Mechanics in Moonshiners, which is the finding the game needs a way for players behind to catch up and not feel helpless.

Making the Moonshiners V4 Prototype, which is about the material exercise of making the fourth prototype.

Moonshiners Lore Update, talking about the vibe of the city.

This month, I also talked a bunch about Dungeons & Dragons! For example, I asked the question of if Harrow from the Locked Tomb would be an insufferable Dungeons & Dragons girly. In the historical vein, I looked at the magic addiction system from Magic & Mayhem, a Warcraft D&D expansion, and the mental load required to play 4th Edition D&D. While I was in the neighbourhood, I contemplated different worldbuilding questions around the way identities and ethics shape acceptable practice, and about the way we represent expertise in storytelling.

I also talked about another Cobrin’Seil nation, Foh-Lah Rah-Jah-Pha-Urd, a nation that Fox will always proudly rattle off at me when I just call it Foh-Lah because she likes being smug about having memorised the full name. For my own creative practice I also wrote some notes about the possibility of making Legions 2 as a Custom Magic: The Gathering set.

In broader contexts, I reflected on Firewall, a character from Transformers who is a big weirdo and maybe based on a real-world big weirdo. I thought about Harry Chapin, a musician I like a lot and his strange story, and the preposterousness of the Dark Forest hypothesis of space psychology. While I was musing on creativity and the ability to give up on things, especially things I keep trying, I even considered the way that nothing is created.

This month, I drew this cool turtle design!

Huhboy. Okay, what happened this month.

A podcast I love ended, had its last show, rode off into the sunset abruptly. One of the hosts said some weird stuff in amongst some probably good stuff, and then the pair decided it was time to hang up the hats and move on and now I’m in this community of people that get weird about it.

I finally made the Disco Elysium video. The article was written sometime around February last year, with the intention that I would finish the video when it fit – maybe around July. Then the discovery that I had missed a video slot in the schedule, and I’d need to make something for May came up. I was really glad to have it. It’s a really substantial, sizeable piece of writing and I loved the overall piece. Reminds me a little of the Megatokyo article.

It did involve going back over the history of how it got made, and the people I talked to about it. There was a supergroup I’ve been a member for at least three years, and a conversation around Disco Elysium made me so infuritated with them that I stopped talking to the whole place. It was something I reflected on through the whole process of making the video, this realisation that I was so angry at it, that I was being treated as having improperly or inadequately taken in this game because of how I chose to play it.

Because I don’t tend to listen to games with the sound on. I find it distracting and unpleasant. I don’t like hearing voice acting when they’re voicing text I can read on screen, especially long-form text. It conflicts with the speed of my reading and I find it unpleasant. If I phrased this as ‘I have audio processing issues,’ though, then it would be seen as nakedly, obviously disrespectful to complain about me not listening to the voice acting, but instead my pointing that out was seen as ‘bad faith.’ Because I was talking about the game I experienced, and I was being told I didn’t experience it right, I didn’t engage with it properly. I was told I ‘basically second-screened’ this game, which I spent 32 hours playing, with the same energy to me of someone complaining that finishing Dark Souls doesn’t count if you did it with a bow and arrow, because the ‘real’ experience is dot dot dot.

I can’t think of this without being flashbanged with rage about it. I feel like I was in a room full of adults and suddenly people decided to baby me about not loving a videogame ‘right.’ Hearing whast I thought wasn’t the important thing: Correcting my incorrect opinion was.

I did a lot to put my whole ass into the video. I tried to make sure that the visuals and aesthetics lined up well, and that involved making a specific outline of every single image I used in the video, then set up subdirectories for each chapter, and sort them into separate ones. All the pieces, saved and stored, which let me do things that were more complicated than I imagined I could at first – things like the glass tank with the miscellaneous things in them.

This video did leave me with two thoughts:

I should be putting chapter tracks in their own folders in Sony Vegas. Managing eight tracks at a time was hard.

I tried to do some things I couldn’t, like the pegboard in the video wound up cheating because I couldn’t actually make it work properly.

Oh and I guess a third thought:

When should I give up on Vegas and start trying to learn Davinci Resolve, just because it’s meaningfully supported now? Or do I stick with Vegas because it works?

The next video I expect to be of this scale will be the Inscryption video. But now it’s on to June, and the exciting opportunities there.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!