💚 seth/slime/worm • it/he • 27 • aroace/agender • pfp is me as a villager by @bunvomit
fiction got off soooo lucky with dreams and hallucinations. imagine if the human brain didn't come with a built-in path to surreal imagery that could perfectly represent abstract themes and emotional truths through metaphor. we'd be so fucked man
Saw someone mention the new Boston Dynamics' robot was introduced like a Souls boss. Was not expecting it to come out so creepy.
what the fuck somebody edit a health bar over this im at work
oh my god you said heaLth bar..
GIRL
it IS surreal when companies decide to invent the torment nexus from hit media franchise "dont invent the torment nexus" but also to be fair a lot of "dont invent the torment nexus" stories are less "don't invent the torment nexus" and more "oh god has anyone noticed that we are dangerously close to inventing the torment nexus. can we please stop inventing the torment nexus. the torment nexus is maybe 2-3 years away. is anybody listening."
as it gets colder and we are now in autumn i hope you have a SCARY time. i hope its full of BLOOD and BONES and KILLING with your friends. i hope you wear CREEPY sweaters and drink HELLISHLY HOT chocolate. i hope you have an EVIL time crunching the DEAD leaves
dystopia au where we are all assigned one of two chosen genders at birth
Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth. The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts.
Children are color-coded according to their binary assignment.
One of the genders is seen as inherently inferior.
This all sounds really effing creepy when you put it that way
#BECAUSE IT IS
And if you deviate from the assigned gender you can be disowned by your family, fired from your job, and beaten by authorities.
While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.
It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.
One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.
Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??
Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?
Why must the future suck SO much?
A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.
Hey if you ever worry that your art is too self-indulgent and weird, consider the following:
You know Franciso de Goya? Yeah that Goya. The one who painted "saturn devouring his son" and the other 13 of what are called his "black paintings", which are dark, creepy, and while you might not know all the other ones, if you only vaguely recognise the name Goya, the first image to pop into your head is probably this one:
Unless you've got an art history degree. This post isn't aimed at people with an art history degree. Anyway, those of you who aren't into art history probably only vaguely know the story, of how he was a painter and these 14 were his private paintings, only painted for himself, not commissioned by a customer and never intended to be publicly displayed. People were shocked when they were first discovered, due to how starkly different they were from his other, more traditional and conventional paintings.
This is the part I want you to meditate on: Goya also made plenty of normal art for normal people. A whole bunch of perfectly normal paintings.
How many of those can you name?
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.
anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.
thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.
anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.
thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.
Reblogging the update too
okay so in order to combat my utter disillusionment with the video games industry as a whole, i want to start playing more weird little indie games on itch.io made by one person as a passion project & i’m gonna try to share the ones i find interesting in case people might want to check them out.
ANYWAYS. this one got a lot of press when it was originally released in 2017 but here’s the tearoom, which is a historical public bathroom cruising sim
and if you don’t want to actually play a game about sucking dicks in a men’s restroom in 1962, the game is still really interesting as a reflection on gay history and culture and on police surveillance, and the artist’s statement is definitely worth a read on its own.
The Tearoom is a historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off other dudes’ guns. In it, you basically cruise other willing strangers for sex, and try to have some fun without getting caught by undercover police. It’s heavily inspired by Laud Humphreys’ epic Tearoom Trade (1970), a meticulous 180 page sociological study of men who have quick anonymous sex with men in public bathrooms (“tearooms” in US, “cottages” in UK), along with interviews, diagrams, and derived “rules” for participating in the tearoom trade.
My game is set in a small roadside public bathroom in Ohio in 1962. Much of the game sequences and gameplay are based on Humphreys’ notes (in his book, Humphreys even calls it a “game” himself) and the layout of the bathroom is based partly on diagrams from his observation reports. And while I wanted the game to be about gay history, I also wanted it to speak to how video games think of sex and violence.
[…]
But what is the LGBTQ community’s relationship to violence? Historically, cops have been perhaps the #1 most dangerous enemy of gay / trans / queer people for decades, and continue to target gay people today: in 2016, the Toronto Police started “Project Marie” to target gay men who cruised parks late at night; and since at least 2004 and continuing today, the NYPD have been targeting men at the Port Authority who “seem gay”, spying on them through slits in bathroom stalls and charging them with “public indecency.” (Isn’t going to the Port Authority already punishment enough?)
[…]
The Mansfield police had to figure out how to jail people for having “public sex” that wasn’t actually in public view. If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, then can you prosecute the tree for sodomy? To make this invisible subtext visible, the Mansfield police secretly recorded the public bathroom for 2 months and basically made one of the first full-color gay porn films in history. […]
Thankfully, no other US police department went to such creepy lengths to prosecute men for having consensual sex with men, but many departments did deploy undercover plain-clothes officers to actively solicit and entrap men. (Most famously, in the case of singer George Michael in 1998.)
Thus, each NPC in this game has a 23% chance of being an undercover cop. As in my previous game Stick Shift, I specifically used a relevant statistic from a 2015 study of anti-LGBT violence: of LGBT people who’ve survived abuse or violence from a stranger, police officers were 23% of the perpetrators. I like the gesture of imbuing politics within the game code itself, and I like how it plays out in the game balance: 23% chance sometimes feels a bit too frequent in the game… as it should.
[…]
[…] gay sex, especially in quasi-public or semi-private places, helps reify and build gay culture. The point of the tearoom comes down to this: when and where are gay people allowed to do our gay shit?!
If the police are going to raid and shutdown all our gay bathhouses or gay bars or gay theaters, fine, then maybe gay people should just do gay shit everywhere, all the time! Because without gay places and a gay geography, there can be no gay community. So maybe one answer is to project our gayness everywhere, and remap the entire city to our needs. Why stop at just one gay bar, when the entire city could be like a gay bar? (If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend reading Samuel Delany’s “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue”)
The tearoom represents an exciting and radical reclamation of public space, for members of the public who usually aren’t allowed any space of their own. Humphreys used the phrase “patterns of collective action” to refer to these dudes bonking each other, but to me that phrase also has a political tinge that reminds us how the tearoom is / was also a collective of white and black men, working class and middle class men, and straight and gay men… uh, bonking each other.
But if there’s any simple moral to be gleaned from this game, I just hope you never look at a bathroom, or park, or office, or shopping mall, etc. the same way ever again. Above all, the tearoom is about transforming the world around you by seeing (creative, erotic) potential in every corner and crevice. Even if you’re not a sex-with-men-haver, how can you remap your world to strengthen your community? All you need is some willing players.
Maybe the tearoom is just the beginning.
