a pickle for the knowing ones

accused of transmitting a negative aura on the second level

[miketon]

if i made a video game where you get to pick the gender of the player character i'd make both the options be nonbinary and you can either have they/them or it/its pronouns. those are your only options

[dramatic-dolphin]

i love that the part of bees' hind legs where they collect the pollen is actually called "pollen basket" because whenever i see a bee who has visibly collected a ton of pollen i do say "look, her basket is full!!" good to know everyone before me has thought the same thing too.

[waterandsilver]

if you have to rely on specific scripts or turns of phrase to socialise that's totally fine, but you must NOT reveal them to your friends while slightly drunk. it's like showing how the magic trick works, you can't do it in front of them afterwards

[waterandsilver]

i like dogs a lot but i can never remember the differences between breeds (apart from the few types i've actually owned/interacted with). but i know people looove their dogs and love talking about their dogs, so whenever im talking to a dog owner i'll ask what breed it is, and no matter what breed they say i'll say "oh! i've heard they have a really nice nature :D" and they always go YESSS THEY'RE GREAT and start gushing about their dog and we have a nice conversation and i build social credit with this person. anyway i told my friends about this script a few weeks ago when slightly drunk and now every time we're in public together and a dog goes past they turn to me and ask "does that one have a nice nature?" im in a hell of my own making

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Sam Handwich.

[sufficientlylargen]

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

[zooperdoopers]

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

[ashenmind]

I don’t know what’s crazier: that at least 200 species names had this specific slur, or that 205 of the 556 votes wanted to keep it

[ashenmind]

???

[cattreats4humans]

pretty sure this is the right article for those curious:

Botanists Vote to Remove Racial Slur From Hundreds of Plant Species Names

In a first for taxonomy, researchers opted to change scientific names containing derivatives of the slur “caffra” to derivatives of “afr,” i

[bace-jeleren]

I'm going to wind up on the news

[bace-jeleren]

You took a platform, that had been selling anime and manga for DECADES, and turn it into a subscription service to access exclusive bullshit.

FUCK SONY, ALL MY FRIENDS HATE SONY

[parkchanwoohoo]

OH! Appropos of the zombie topic, I have a movie night suggestion. "Lifeforce" and "Cocoon" (1985) were both released the same day, and both deal with aliens who subsist on life energy. But they are two VERY different movies. Plus, one features Patrick Stewart yaoi, sort of.

Oh my god these both sound bonkers. I'm adding them to my List

[imheretocryandiwill]

it is simply embarrassing to play Disco Elysium for the first time in the year of our lord 2026. And still here I am. Better late than never I guess.

Funny enough, I actually tried to play it like 4 years ago - and I couldn't do it. I was too impatient, too young and maybe too stupid to enjoy it. Well, at least one of these things has changed.

The real reason of my returning to this game actually has nothing to do with its legacy in the gaming world - it was one really persistent booktuber's (who never played games, apart for this one) posting that did it for me. And because of that the question of "why" never left my mind. What was so special about this game that enamored that one specific person, who was not interested in games as a genre of media altogether? What made Disco Elysium feel so book-like? (And, more precisely, why did she liked it so much? I looked up to her for, like, last ten years, so this is important for me, even though it really shouldn't be)

Lets start with basics - is it the sheer amount of the text? Of course not, thought it could've played a part. I saw a post on this site about how Disco Elysium, along with Citizen Sleeper and Roadwarden, which I had not played (yet), were that person's favorite "books". It was meant as a joke (and a good one, at that), but it got me thinking. There is some elusive quality that makes DE stand out.

The quantity of the text is not to be overlooked at. In Disco Elysium reading is the main activity - the whole gameplay is: talk to somebody (be that NPCs or voices in Harry's head) - go to another place - talk again. All skill checks come in form of dialog questions - you read, reply, walk and sometimes open doors or crates. That's it. And it should remind me of Citizen Sleeper - even the element of surprise is the same - controlled unpredictability of your actions - throwing dice and taking chances. And yet not even one time did I think about these games as something alike.

Besides, there are visual novels, which are even more text-heavy, and yet i never found anything remotely close there either (sadly, I've gotta admit i have limited experience with those, so do not take me for an expert). Of course, there are a lot of words in DE, but their abundance is not the answer I'm looking for (and what a boring answer would it be).

So if it's not about quantity, then it's about quality? Well, that's a convoluted question.

First of all, "good" is a debatable descriptor. It is rooted in peoples' own perception - one's man's trash and all that. Is it grammatically and logically sound - yes - and it is easy to see. But if i find its story grasping - that does not give any information about the text itself. Aside from that, a lot of games have good writing both narratively speaking and addressing in-game texts. So if it's not about being just well-written, what else there is?

One could say that Disco Elysium has a lot of real-life problems addressed in it. Racism, war, poverty, mental health, alcoholism, corruption - you name it, they got it. But it's not that either - games do address social problems all the time, and it is not necessary for a book to have more that one problem.

Maybe it is about the forth-wall breaking? Now we are getting closer. That is, of course, not the first time a game does this. But as it says in my bio, i am a casual gamer, so it was a first for me. So I have never played anything of that sorts, but i have seen bits and pieces - Portal, Slay the princess, that one ragebait game with Connor in it, DokiDoki and many, many more. It is used for the shock value, it is meant to unsettle you. Or sometimes it is there for funsies. But Disco Elysium acknowledges your actions in a very particular way.

You have voices in Harry's head - you inclined to trust them, you rely on them. You perceive information through them - and they comment on your every move. What an interesting way for the game to communicate with you without breaking the illusion. It is forth-wall scratching - and sometimes i did feel called out on my dialog options (too centrist). And being called boring by the game made me reflect on my choices - it is not even a bad thing (I'm just a cop on duty, i am no fun) - but it makes you think "what do I want from my gaming experience". But i digress.

The final scene is the in-game evaluation of your every move. What you did do, what you didn't. And it could be read as a mere statistic - but for Harry it is literary a catharsis - all his sins (drinking, drunk driving, losing his stuff) are forgiven, he is reunited with his team, forever changed by his journey. And that is one of the thing that remind me of literature. The reader is not only being kept in mind in the process of developing the game, but also is on the same level with Harry when skills talk to him (or do they talk to you? after all, it is the player who makes all of the decisions). There is a believe that literature as an art form exist only in the moment of reading - as a dialog between the author and the reader (the dialog is in the reader's head, of course). So let's put a pin on that and move on, because I actually have one more obscure connotation.

There is one literature critic - Bakhtin, whose theory of polyphony I kept returning to. Polyphony (as far as i understood it) is when there are multiple "points of view" that belong to different characters. Of course in a good piece of art every character has a distinct voice of their own - but polyphony is deeper than that. Not only their beliefs exist and expressed, but they are treated with the same amount of respect. Other characters live beyond the main character's perspective, all of them are imagined as a mc, just with lesser time on screen.

In games sometimes characters are simply a tool - this one is a helper, this one is an enemy. Even the story revolves around relationships between characters - one voice is overpowering the others. The characters are "stories" - written and set. In a polyphonic novel there are worlds inside characters. They change, they collide, but there is an astonishing depth inside them. This is how the contemporary literature started. And this is how the characters in Disco Elysium are written.

This leads me away from Harry Du Boir straight to ... hanged man (although others have it too - really noticeable in Cuno - or those two gramps playing ball. or even in the killer). He is in an interesting position - he is only defined by others (scene in the dream does not count as self-defenition, it is Harry's interpretation). So it creates intricate web of information - do people lie to you about him, some describe him as an rapist - some don't. People loved him, hated him, made his corpse into a morbid pinata, avenged him. There is a million interpretations - every one is true and each one is false - because they come from outside. He demonstrates ocean of meanings that we will never discover. It's complicated. It's beautiful.

The killer is interesting too - not to spoil anything - they are allowed, no, expected to share their story. Who are they, how they see themselves and other people. Why they did it, what brought them to this place in the world. The game insist on them being heard. That what I meant by respect - not agreeing with them, but just letting them exist in the world as an equal voice (it is an art form, so one of it's goals is to depict reality in it's fullness).

TL;DR - DE is a literature masterpiece first, game second

[transcyberism]

the idea of polyphony is very striking because DE was explicitly written by Hegel enjoyers and Hegel's whole thing was the dialectic evolving as different worldviews are synthesized and taken together. the entire plot and symbolic register is like this ( oh my GOD I could go on for HOURS about symbolism in DE because it's basically a bottomless well where the more you pry into "what does X represent" the less clear it gets because every single thing has multiple very clear and valid interpretations both textually and subtextually, and sometimes even metatextually. Like is the phrase "disco inferno" [lit. "flaming disc"] taken together with Harry's subconscious belief that he is in Hell a reference to Dante, or does the "flaming disc" in question instead represent the Sun - if so, what does the Sun represent, as seen in phrases like "Tequila Sunset," or as in the fascist sun flag, or even as vaguely implied by Kim's portrait? What does it mean that there is a sun at all, in a world whose cosmology is so poorly understood? Or separately, is the recurring mirror imagery a reference to Lacan, or to the "unstable nerve mirror" we're told about later - what does that phrase mean, anyway? Why is humanity singled out as uniquely able to mirror the Other, and what are the implications of this for a world which is implied to be encapsulated within a program on a tape computer, that is, a self-aware fictional narrative? And is the Pale the edges of the narrative itself - the parts of the world the story doesn't specify, left to the dreamy haze of the reader's imagination? Some of those questions are academic but you can just shake this thing and more symbolism falls out ).

These are the kind of deep questions literature makes you ask that video games very seldom do.

[transcyberism]

OK so I knew my own assumed translation of "disco inferno" felt wrong and sure enough, it was - "disco" derives from Greek "diskos" (disc), while "inferno" is an adjective in Latin that translates not to "burning" as I assumed, but to roughly "of the place below" and it only acquired the "burning" connotation because of Dante's Inferno.

BUT it turns out "disco" is also a Latin word meaning "I learn" (seen in e.g. "discover"). MEANING "disco inferno" means, in Latin, "I learn [via/in/from/of] the place below." "I learn hellishly."

"Disco Elysium" meanwhile means almost the opposite - Elysium, in Greek(!) mythology, was analogous to Heaven in a lot of respects, being a sort of exclusive afterlife club reserved for the mortal progeny of the gods (while everyone else went to Hades). "Heavenly disc" would be an apt translation of the Greek phrase.

I just. You know. There's a lot of layers to that. You don't see that kind of thing in video games, you know? You can't even walk two feet without stumbling on a way the symbolic field is more complicated than you thought it was.

[valentineblacker]

Last reblog: feather, not penny. was living in a beautiful world for a moment.

[badassdemonsword]

You couldnt come up with a jollier name for a bird if you tried

[minmos]

this thang has one of my favorite ebird descriptions of all time

[polarity-disturbed]

With the whole "Markiplier making his own DVD copies of Iron Lung to sell" thing, it's been fascinating and slightly concerning how many people seem to genuinely believe that if a physical release isn't coming from a giant corporation, it must automatically be a bootleg.

Look at me.

Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.

You can just make things.

You can simply create something and put it into the world.

That's allowed.

People have been doing it for centuries.

They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.

That is not piracy.

Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.

If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.

The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.

If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.

If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.

He's the rights holder.

He's distributing his own work.

If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.

The corporation is not what makes it real.

The fact that it exists is what makes it real.

I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.

But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.

That's not a bootleg.

That's just a product.

It's not "bootleg."

It's just... leg.

The normal kind.

The original, free-range, locally sourced leg.

[belovedgamers]

The BEST trope is when a character tells another “let’s run away together, we can leave all of this behind and start a new life somewhere” and gets rejected. And then the rest of the tragedy unfolds

[bgm05]

ideas for discourse i came up with

having OCs is bourgeois

people who write erotica should be considered sex workers

only americans believe in aliens

it's misogynist to draw touhou characters with big boobs

the "godzilla" franchise is harmful because it teaches children that they should be afraid of lizards and other animals

feel free to argue about any of these, credit not needed but appreciated

[unicafavorita]

You think you're alone in the room, but are you really?

As an architecture student, I was fascinated by how Backrooms turned architectural psychology into horror.

A lot of people say there wasn't enough horror because there wasn't a monster constantly chasing the characters and because there's no jumpscares, but I don't think they realize the monster was the architecture itself. And also, it's a psychological thriller and borderline horror. There's a difference. Grow up.

The film uses things we rely on to orient ourselves in space like landmarks, hierarchy, rhythm, daylight, scale, and spatial memory, then removes them or distorts them.

1. That's why Casino's don't have windows. It keeps you occupied and lose track of time. They literally distort your perception of time.

2. That's why shopping malls have looping layouts so you're forced to explore around. Like IKEA, you're psychologically “led” through a curated sequence, minimizing shortcuts and maximizing exposure to products.

3. That's why theme parks have carefully hidden service areas, controlled sightlines, immersive “world bubbles" to make you mentally stay inside a narrative environment where outside cues are eliminated.

But with Backrooms, it's manipulation of space and time and everything. All your senses are manipulated. Every room feels slightly familiar but never fully readable, so your brain keeps trying to build a mental map and failing.

What makes it scary isn't what is in the space, but what the space does to the mind. Humans constantly construct cognitive maps to understand where we are, but Backrooms breaks that process.

The circulation goes nowhere, the repetition erases reference points, and the environment sits in that unsettling zone between recognition and alienation. It creates disorientation, isolation, and paranoia without needing anything supernatural.

That is also why the concept went viral. Liminal spaces, dreamcore, whatever you call it. It feels endless, familiar yet unfamiliar, and deeply convincing in its emptiness. The suspense comes from thinking something else must be there with you, even when there is nothing. That uncertainty is the horror.

Adding paranormal elements often weakens it, because the original fear already comes from space itself, not from what might be inside it.

Hell, even the shot of Mary's "neighborhood" fucked me up because it looks exactly like the ones we see online and how it looks unoccupied.

Backrooms is really just architecture and human perception turned into a mechanism of fear.

I also like how Backrooms turns architecture into an allegory for mental health and the human mind, where spatial disorientation mirrors psychological unraveling.

[headspace-hotel]

I need to see this movie because that's exactly what's always fascinated me about Backrooms/ the "liminal" art movement

[headspace-hotel]

Can I share this plant with you that made me go insane? It's called apios americana and the only common name that makes sense is "groundnut" or maybe "potato bean" but really it doesn't have a common name because of genocide. Because it was a marginal semi-domesticated food even for native American food ways, it wasn't important enough to save. It was barely important enough to name.

Except! Inexplicably, someone brought it to JAPAN! Where they grow it still! So what the fuck! The wikipedia page lists all the reasons it's too hard to farm, then immediately says "oh but they farm it in Japan and it's called America-hodoimo." Why! How does this make sense!

So then a Louisiana professor started trying to breed it and improve the tubers, but he retired and abandoned the project.

Why am I crazy for this plant? Oh yeah, it fixes its own nitrogen and it's allegedly shade tolerant, so I wonder if it could grow under solar panels.

I am boggled by the natural heritage of eastern North america that is totally unknown and ignored.

I've heard of this and seen it, but I've never had any success propagating it. I brought some tubers to my meadow and buried them last fall but I don't see anything sprouting. They might just be hidden from my sight though.

I don't know if I've heard of it being cultivated in Japan!

Yes, it was domesticated, and there were lots of efforts to re-domesticate it a while back. I didn't know what had happened to the project though, it's sad that it was abandoned.

My foraging mentor said that some people can randomly develop a severe sensitivity to it and get really sick when they eat it...but I reckon that's the case with a lot of foods.

Most places I've found Apios americana the population has been rather small and marginal, but there is one spot my best friend and I found when driving around (on a gravel road leading up to somebody's trailer, next to a large wetland/marsh) that was completely overcome with it. It was everywhere, growing in vast mounds over top of other plants. The plant diversity in that marsh fascinated me. One of those little biodiversity hotspots that randomly occur in the landscape.

[ellienamored]

facts about my dad's disco elysium playthrough, which i just noticed he was playing today

he has a cheat client on so he can have infinite money and 100% every check

because of this, he only wears the most serious cop clothes he can find

he was immediately assigned sorry cop, which he turned down

when i found him he was in the middle of accepting the moralist vision quest

he keeps telling me he wants to be a "respectable moralist authority." he does not know what moralist means.

he likes kim and thinks he's a great example of a respectable moralist authority

he thinks harry's backstory and previous case record is appalling and wants to be as reassuringly Normal & Good as he can to everyone

he changed out of the starter outfit as soon as possible and avoided superstar dialogue options like the plague because he doesn't want to look "disco"

he used every option to get to the docks.

all of them. he snuck over the roof and grabbed the coat, beat up measurehead, and then internalized the racism thought anyway for the love of the game??

when i asked him about this he said it seemed useful to manipulate people later

his signature skill is encyclopedia, which he regrets because it won't shut up

his build has a 1 in psyche, ostensibly

he was able to name every tool except the tare bag, which he has never used as he has infinite money

he found the mega rich light bending guy but has not yet spoken to evrart claire

he is mortified that he has not yet found his badge and gun and asked me to make absolutely sure it would be possible for him to do so

he is still on day 1

[zoesupreme]

Sony is ending physical disc production for Playstation games in January 2028

[zoesupreme]

the question I think we have to ask ourselves is if new consoles are going to cost 1 william dollars and all the games are digital downloads only then what is the point of owning a console?