where i currently work is the most emotionally open work environment i’ve ever had. people freely hype each other up and congratulate each other, nothing is high tension, everyone is very receptive and caring. an example of that is admitting when you’re having a shit day for whatever reason and allowing yourself to peace out early and it being accepted instead of sitting in a negative feedback loop of bad productivity until 5pm. it has been extremely freeing having this positive culture at work.
however.
an unforeseen development of said example is noticing how often i actually am feeling awful and unproductive, now that i’m letting myself see it, and the realization that i’ve always just worked through it in recent years, thinking it’s just the way it is or i’m just being lazy or some other excuse. so that’s been a hard thing to process and identify into something i can hopefully action against and improve. and naturally i’ve gained a new anxiety around being seen as taking advantage of such a generous workplace – which i already know is dumb! but brains and so forth, etc.
(yeah this is about hollow knight: silksong but it’s bigger than that.)
we cannot escape the firehose of discourse around silksong’s challenging nature. i’m not here to talk about difficulty really, but to touch on one of the topics that people feel strongly about: runbacks.
blasted steps in hollow knight: silksong. iykyk.
runbacks refer to the traversal between the last checkpoint and the boss fight you keep dying on. sometimes the checkpoint is near the boss encounter, making for a quick return after death, and sometimes you spend longer getting back to the fight than you do actually in the fight before dying again. if you listened to reddit, every boss encounter should have a checkpoint three feet away from it, but i’m here to make a case for the runback:
the runback to the boss fight is also the boss fight.
i don’t want to be a Solo Dev (with 20 contractors in the credits).
i’ve had multiple folks tell me “you should work on your own thing!” with various tutorials and tricks for doing art while i’m not an artist. i’d love to learn how to draw, how to paint, how to texture, how to model, etc, because those seem like interesting avenues for expression that are different to what i know and do. but i don’t want to learn them just to do it myself in addition to design and coding.
i don’t want to remove other humans from the equation.
i am here to make games with people because i believe the shared experience is greater than the sum of its parts.
i want to make as many games as i possibly can with as many different people as i possibly can.
making games is a fundamentally social experience for me.
in 2019(!) i made a GDQ discord bot that posts as games are about to start on stream with some extra info and features like reminders to ping you. kinda wild it’s been this long but it’s still goin strong and people seem to be happy with it ✌
anyone is more than welcome to add it to their own server, you just gotta join my support discord for it for some rules and the bot invite link: https://discord.gg/JyKV26ED7a
an old cohost post about this said:
it is scrappy, it’s running off my macbook, one day i’ll stick it on a server somewhere but today is not that day.
lady gaga’s “MAYHEM” is her best album since the fame monster and it’s not even close imo. it’s really wall to wall bangers.
miami horror has a new album too and it’s good! they’ve gone in a much more ethereal direction with “we always had tomorrow”, or really in general since their debut album, and i’m still a fan although i liked their dancey origins better.
finally trying to dig into anxious’ new album “bambi” but it’s not really grabbing me like their last one did. gonna give it a few more spins to try and get something to stick.
dear seattle’s newest from january is still on my mind, especially since i’m deeply bummed that they are playing melbourne while i’m on holiday in japan. gonna be on a beach in okinawa instead of a dank venue in melb… i shouldn’t complain but i’m still pissed about it.
i miss channel ORANGE-era frank ocean!
i was very surprised how nothing on the fontaines d.c. album is anything like their song “favourite”, that completely threw me off. their actual sound is kinda trip-hoppy and sometimes the dude sounds like thom yorke. it’s not bad!
arm’s length is starting to release tracks from their upcoming album and i am pumped beyond fuck. they really click for me for some reason! check out their latest single “you ominously end”.
i started this up a month ago with the naive hope of blazing through it to be ready for avowed but i pretty quickly realized this wasn’t something i wanted to speed through. i told myself avowed will be there for me when i’m ready to play it, so i savored pillars of eternity 2 deadfire and goddamn dude. god damn dude. some good fucking food!!
i loved the first one so i had no doubt i’d be into the sequel, but i just didn’t expect it to hit so much harder for me. it’s so narratively dense and rich without feeling impenetrable. the variety on display in character depth is masterful, i truly felt bad swapping some of my favorites out for certain quests because i would MISS them. and the game’s overarching philosophical and religious themes around mortal self-determination and agency, the gods’ duty to mortals, and what faith means in the light of this all is just brilliant.
gonna start doing monthly recaps of my last.fm history as a fun way to catalog and expand upon listening habits and whatever whims i indulged.
random thoughts looking at the collage:
my friend bryn and i swap music because he’s a baby and i’m an old man, it’s a good learning experience. most recently he sent me tierra whack’s “whack world” and it’s really great. an experiment in building a 15-minute album out of 1-minute songs, she showcases a pretty broad range and skill in focusing on what can hook you in a short period. so many of them could easily be blown up into 3-minute songs if she wanted to. she also made an impressive 15-minute video for the album, that was actually how i experienced it the first time. highly recommend. faves: cable guy, hungry hippo, silly sam, fruit salad, pretty ugly
i didn’t listen to “GNX” much when it came out, but kendrick lamar’ssuperbowl half-time show lit that fire in me and it hit my rotation hard. dude’s on top of the world. faves: squabble up, luther, hey now, tv off, heart pt.6
i’ve got a post in my drafts to go a bit deeper on the pillows, but they’re an all-time favorite of mine and the news of them breaking up after 35 years had me down bad.
rosé’s debut album “rosie” is alright but the taylorswiftification of pop music is fuckin real. faves: toxic till the end, APT., dance all night
i love charli xcx but will forever believe “true romance” is her best album and forever be curious about what a future around that charli would’ve sounded like. faves: nuclear seasons, you (ha ha ha), what i like, black roses, you’re the one
a discord pal mentioned a short freeware game called hero core during a bigger conversation the server was having around combat design and i thought, what the hell, why not, it’s saturday, let’s download this bad boy and give it a go.
