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I've been making a stir-fry with frozen spinach as the base (even though I add it last). I sautee carrots, onion, celery, a pepper of some variety and tofu and add about 2 tbsp of tumeric, a tbsp of coriander and cumin seeds. Then I microwave a bag of frozen spinach and just dump it in the mix and salt it. It hasn't gotten old. Sometimes for left-overs I add sweetened soy milk and peanuts.

I find it suspect that numerous popular distopian fiction ideas end up becoming realities. Perhaps what is happening is that my way of seeing what is occurring is through the lense of the futures that I have been primed with. It makes me wonder if the world would be noticeably more consensual if imagery and ideas of utopias were more popular than the nihilistic hellscapes that seem to be seen as more real.

In the last couple of years I've been intentionally cultivating a compassionate perspective. As I've been doing so, my experience is becoming more purposeful and joyful even when things are unpleasant. Lately, I've been examining where my distrust and fear of people and institutions comes from and what comes up is the dystopian fiction that I have been exposed to. 1984 Fahrenheit 451 Brazil Soylent Green Logan's Run They Live Hunger Games Lord of the Flies Minority Report A Scanner Darkly In Time (staring Justin Timberlake totally underrated movie The Walking Dead games Sleep Dealer The Matrix The Stand Cerebus X-Men the Neuromancer series Cloud Atlas With the exception of Cloud Atlas, when I look back on how these works have affected me, I think they have encouraged paranoia and distrust rather than some sort of reasonable and helpful skepticism. It is worth noting that Cloud Atlas has a hope that doesn't rely on individualism and also that I was exposed to it when I was older than the other pieces of fiction I've listed here. I'm becoming more and more confident in pacificism and empathy. I'm starting to wonder if the effects of dystopia fiction in an individualistic, capitalist society is for folks to basically exaggerate their disconnection and trust of others---while adding an attractive spectacle that we tend to want to create in reality---rather than to warn us about something that could go wrong so that we can avoid it. What are your thoughts? As you consider where you are and how you got here, how has dystopian fiction affected you?

I enjoy Familiar Things a lot. It is an easy paced read that was enjoyable and meaningful and intriguing for me. I think about it often. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33148672-familiar-things

The thing is that I would have been willing to say the same thing 10 years ago, but I'm noticing it in a different way. I'm pretty sure that the problem I'm seeing is related to the motivation to make content for money at a frequent pace and the way the algorithms work and what makes something clickable. I'm becoming more impatient with books as well.

It is on.

I'm considering making it a goal for February to post or comment here 5x a week for the entire month. If anyone else is willing to do it with me I'm in.

That makes sense. I wouldn't be able to watch it two years ago, but now I watch it regularly. I'm not sure what exactly has changed, but it has something to do with how I process the information from the stories. It sounds like you process the information with art and activism. I think a lot about how no one wants to have a hard time and everyone is trying their best to get happy. Watching SWU is great material to rub against the reminding myself of those two things.

I find myself watching a lot of Soft White Underbelly videos. It is kinda difficult to recommend to other people, but I get a lot out of hearing folks' stories.

So funny that I came here on a whim after years. I've fallen off of Slack, Discord and Twitter. I don't really play games any more either.

As I'm sifting through the massive quantity of available resources in order to figure stuff out, sometimes I find something that tells me exactly what I needed to know. It is often not in the first place I look. I figure it may be interesting and helpful to see other people's examples of these decipherments. Here we have an example of what the fuck Time.deltaTime actually does.

As the winter-solstice grows near, I find myself wanting to play a lot of the games that I enjoyed this year. Some of them were made by y'all. They are somewhat hard to find. This thread is intended to be a digest of all the playables made by forum-members this year. I want to encourage partial builds to be included. I happened upon PanzorFork's chilling laughing cube thing and that's exactly the type of thing that I want to be able to find in a yearly summary. My suggestion is to make a post and put all the playables you made in it. I plan to edit my post when I release something else this year. This thread is intended to make all the stuff we made this year easy to find, make decisions based off of that.

I don't need to know this, but I want to know and I haven't been able to find it online. In C#, why doesn't the string.Split() method need to know the length of the array it's creating? So for instance: String[] exampleArray = sampleSentence.Split(new Char[]{':'}); I get why the Char[] doesn't need to know the length, because it is being instantiated with the contents in the brackets. But the String[] doesn't know how many strings it'll end up with; doesn't seem fair. Just wondering.

So I've been thinking about this all day. I'm working on character-designs and I would love to include a diverse cast. But I think there are some reasonable concerns. I drew a character with dark, brown skin and wild, green hair and then I thought "Is this exploitative?" The calls for representation of diversity typically focus on the efforts of large corporate media products. I often see three types of arguments made: 1. That tent-pole games, films, and marketing materials should be more inclusive by presenting a larger breath of people and cultural influence with which individual consumers may identify. 2. I also see a lot of concern about how the historically dispossessed are represented since the unchecked tendency is to perpetuate the negative stereotypes that white-supremacy and heternormativity benefit from. 3. That explotation is often an attempt to fill the need to experience the other in a comfortable way and the comfortable way tends to exclude input and agency from the exotic groups depicted. This is doubly nefarious because not only does it repeat number 2, but it also lessens the opportunity of members of a dispossesed group to gain financially from representations of their cultural experience. How does this change when I just want to make a drawing and put it on Twitter or make a small, free game to put on itch.io? I'm not going to hire people to solve the problem and I can't expect free labor from others. So I'm going to be real here: Yes I am priviledged because of my race, gender, sexuality, and the financial weath of the home in which I grew up. But I'm also cheap, and lazy. I have no interest in paying other people for their input even though I do value it. I understand that this makes me a hypocrite, I'm a hypocrite. The reality of myself (that I see) is that if I have to use the $40/month of disposable income I earn on input on a hobbyist game, then I'm just not going to make that game. So here I am in a situation where I'm unsure of how to be less of a heteronormative white-supremacist (because either way, I am promoting both by being unwilling to exploit my own priviledge by giving actual monetary value that I can earn easier to groups that cannot earn it as easily as me because of the current and historical racist power-structure from which I benefit financially). I feel that I basically have four options and I need to prioritize them. That's what y'all are for (but of course further discussion is encouraged because I think this is an interesting issue that needs to be addressed). Option 1: Just attempt to make a diverse cast. I'll inevitably fuck up multiple times, but I think I can sustain an openess to criticism on these issues as they are pointed out. I might even make a few corrections even though I don't finish games. Option 2: Write from my experience and personal perspective without trying to including a fictional mixture of diversity. Not only do I live in a circumstance where I see 99% white people, pretty much all of my non-online interactions are exchanging money for goods and services or talking about the weather. People do not want to have deep conversations with me. People don't want to tell me that they don't want to have substantial conversations with me. I want to, but not if it requires that I have to go to church, hang out at their house, or have them come to mine. I'm not that kind of guy. Not only do I not have substantial exposure to other ethnic groups and/or those of circumstances significantly different than my own (such as chronic pain), but I am extraordinarily aware of my inabilty to know what it is like to be in those ethnic groups and circumstances. I am very aware that my depictions of the experiences of those who are not me are just going to be my own and I'd love to be like "Hey do you want to play my game and see if I did a generic indigenous person right?" but that would make me even more of a douchebag if I don't pay in cash. Option 3: Change. This will probably happen anyway, regardless of whether option 1 or option 2 is chosen. But still, I see myself making games forever and I have no plans to work paying jobs more than part-time. I am stuck between knowing that it is not my story to tell and seeing a need for for broader representation. Thoughts?

Have y'all seen these videos? They are some of the most satisfying videos I've ever seen. I find them incredibly suspect.

I'm going to try and make some crap. I thought other people might want to also. I think that what makes crap different from product is that crap isn't accessible. In order to negate frustration, links included in this thread will include a description of what is in the application and what is not in the application that might be expected. That way people will only waste a small quantity of their time looking at what is there without making efforts to discover what is not. Please include a whimsical title and a description of what to (and what not to expect).

Some feel that the Social Justice thread is being derailed with discussion and debate on the harm/benefits, generalities/nuances of cultural appropriation. So feel free to talk about it here.

Let's have a discussion about Frozen 2's treatment of its themes! I particularly enjoy thinking about how the various characters are motivated. Christoph being motivated by his need of Anna; Anna being motivated by her compassion for Elsa; Elsa being motivated by a potential self that removes the veils of ignorance' Olaf motivated by a similar potential-self that is hinted at by a sense that others know more than they do. There are a lot of neat ways to graph the patterns and permutations. Other/Self, Past/Present/Future, Awareness/Ignorance and so on.

fuck can't say that I didn't appreciate the forum whjle it lasted. !Blast

I saw The Art of Self Defense last night. The narrative was predictable and the rhetoric is so concise and relevant. The film effectively ridicules toxic-masculinity while still presenting the severity of its perspective.

I think Kylo is going to help the rebellion and Reylo is training in the desert.

Seems like we might need a thread to talk about Game Pass and the games on it since so many of us are using it. I was pretty much uninterested in it until they offered 3 months of Game Pass for $1. They totally got me. I'm playing Vampyr and Outer Wilds because the low investment allows me to excercise my curiousity. I haven't enjoyed every game I've downloaded, but since the investment is diversified it is fine. I wasn't a fan of Sunset Overdrive, Crackdown 3, Masterchief Collection, Samurai Showdown II. I did enjoy playing Abzu to completion.

Slay the Spire allows for much more strategic and tactical choices than I expected. Yoku's Island Express is very much not my thing; it feels like a game made for people who don't like pinball who want to like pinball. But they removed a lot of what makes pinball enjoyable. Learning a playfield is a huge part of the game, the way Yoku's moves you around constantly feels so bloated and boring for me. I never get a feel for the playfield. And you can't dead-flipper pass. I could have ended up eventually buying Yoku's in a Steam sale so gamepass is doing a great job for me.

I isn't clear to me whether or not you can go back to regular gamepass after subscribing to Ultimate, so I just went with that and found out they have a 3 months for $10 deal which is pretty much what I was hoping for. I didn't realize Slay the Spire is on console. Looking forward to trying it out.

Buying 3 years of a subscription service in bulk was not appealing to me since I don't use Xbox Gold. But after reading this message I got an ad for two months of Ultimate for $2 so... thanks? I'm a low-capital kinda guy.