Tales from the Feed, 2026-4

January 2026
February 2026
March 2026

People allegedly liked my Cohost compilation posts at the time and I think it's good to share sometimes. Though since this isn't Cohost anymore, I'm slow at looking at my RSS feed (these ain't even all from my RSS feed), and I hate looking at bsky, there's probably just going to be way fewer/smaller posts on these. Oh well.

Please comment with anything else you think was good, I am going to naturally miss a ton of stuff that simply doesn't reach me

When you operate in that space, where it might be possible for you to escape the threat of imminent poverty, it is so tempting to just do it, right? To take it all and then yell at your government, because of the taxes that might put you back into the danger zone. The big businesses could eat these extra costs, without risking everything, but you? You can't! It's existential!

Using RPG Maker MV/MZ on a Budget

This is only a sliver of the options in the set. I focused on combat here, but of course there’s way more: more control over UI, menus, text boxes, character and NPC movement on the overworld, and the switches/variables the game uses to remember things that have happened.
And, just to reiterate, the features I listed above are completely free. No need to get tempted by the shiny paid plugins.

What is the point of independent publications if they employ the same white men to sell cool cover art and write the same industry boosterism? If the outlets with the most subscribers advocate for slop or the sites with the most progressive headlines excuse themselves from culpability? For all their play, these writers have such small imaginations. All I see is a games media recreating an image of an idealized past.

But hardcore Quake maps are like learning Latin and having a conversation in Italian: I know the roots, but I've been left entirely out of a long period of evolution in the understanding of the language that's being spoken here. It's not that they're hard; it's that I straight up don't understand them.

What the world needs now...

Most people can probably agree that constructive, laser-focused, specific criticism of stuff is helpful and preferred over just baseless dunking on something. I feel like it's less often that I see really specific, nuanced praise for stuff. People rarely reflect on why they love something, or how they love it, and how that may be personal to them versus how it might be part of any sort of “objective” traits about the thing.

The reason I'm mentioning this, is because I think that this very specific perspective is harmful. If we only ever think of games as Restaurants, then all we will ever get are Restaurants. In this environment, the only new ideas that people can come up with, will be new ways for both players and designers to mutually exploit each other.

"Fuzzies" are what we call repeating lines in a text. The translation software saves them in the Translation Memory and, if that line shows up again, it pulls the previous translation or tries to jigsaw parts of it in a line that seems close enough, so the translator only has to change a few words around instead of writing it all from scratch. Most of the time, companies don't pay the full rate for these lines.

Where I had assumed Venus flytraps preferred the shade, it turns out they need full sunlight, preferably up to twelve hours a day (!!), and getting it filtered through the window glass wasn’t going to cut it. Not only that, but the mossy, fertile soil that it had come with was actually terrible for the plant. It needs a mix of unenriched peat moss and perlite, and proper draining, i.e. not the little terrarium glass that it came in. And finally, it needs distilled water or rainwater and cannot handle the kitchen tap water.

What is my time worth? Not a lot, sometimes. Quite a lot other times. And I usually don’t know which of those is true until I’ve picked the wrong one and am upset about it.

The play takes the gamble that the "cool robot" doesn't need to be seen if the pilots are emoting properly - but they go a step further having them sitting in sick-ass chairs that are being spun around and pushed by stagehands dressed in black to try and remain invisible, and the pilot actors themselves swing swords and aim weapons, recreating the mech combat as close as they can. (The audio crew also deserves a shoutout here because the use of sound effects from the show is key). Comparing it to like, wheelchair jousting wouldn't be too far off tbh.

Obviously, while I'm a big proponent of Evil Games, I do think that putting players into -24,000 XP debt 20 minutes into the game is a bit mean. However, this entire sequence is the result of the game's systems just working as they were built, and I'm also very committed to letting my system's "do their thing" after I set them up.

Of course, you can mix things up further by putting the caesura after beat 1 or before beat 5, by throwing in headless lines (/x/x/x/x/) or lines with initial inversion (/xx/x/x/x/), and by making sure some lines run straight through with no heavy pause at all. Ideally, you will do all these things for some better reason than merely to avoid monotony!

A man from Boston overhears me asking another stranger the question in an elevator, and cuts in: "Any restaurant you walk in, in the North End, is the best bread." I ask him to name one. "Any of them," he says. "Pick one," I encourage. The man grows furious: "Any of them!"

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