Tales from the Feed, 2026-6

January 2026
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April 2026
May 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

For me, the appeal of visiting a place like this was not to get inspired to do any of this myself - it's to visit a place that looks fucking crazy. It's absolutely just Star Wars type shit. It looks like an alien planet. If you work in videogames or visual art I cannot recommend coming here enough.

All of these switches came because I found myself using these things more out of compulsion than out of joy. It felt like I just had to scroll endlessly on Facebook, or check my phone, to the point where I wasn't enjoying any of it... I just didn't want to be bored. Because of this compulsion, though, it was having real world consequences (like ignoring my wife when I should've been more present). I didn't like that's what I was doing with my time, and I didn't like how it made me feel, so I had to change it.

You are allowed to hate the way you're treated. You should hate how this disease is managed in the United States. Your hate is politically powerful and will keep you safer in the long run. I believe that you should be polite to the individuals who need to keep you alive, but reserve your hate for the systems that design, manage, and supply your imperfect and annoying medical equipment. The inconvenience you live with should make you furious, and it should impact your politics.

There was a time when my life was defined by tools. I had so many that I owned and obsessed over the right combination of boxes and bags to hold them all. I owned a truck just to haul them from building to building, and from town to endless town. I had tools for hyper-specific purposes, and others that were rudimentary. Some were bulky and brash, necessary when something just needed to be hit, or cut, or broken. I had drills, and bigger drills, that drank batteries like water in the winter months. All of them helped me do my job, but never did my job. All of them an extension of me, my arms and my elbows and shoulders. They could only ever build what I could, and destroy what I was capable of destroying.

But, the overall goal of both of these formats (and most of them I believe), is to get your opponent's life points to 0, before they manage to get your life points to 0.

So, cutting and measuring the right length, then slowly twisting the silver and aligning the ends so that they are really tight, tensing and pushing against each other. Was harder than I thought. It didn't need to be perfectly round yet, just aligned. Then it gets fired up with two pieces of silver to weld it all together.

Here in America, dance is seen as challenging, sexy, intimidating. There is a sense of potential humiliation deserving of fear. Americans I speak to who do attempt to dance, or to learn to dance, frequently express to me the same emotion: they feel horrible and embarrassed because they aren't immediately good at something they've never done in their entire life. It's not private. It's something everyone can see you be bad at. It is not sexy to be new at dancing. It is not sexy to be Jon Arbuckle dancing alone.

The greatest pitch I can make for "nurturing" is that it is much more descriptive. Nurturing describes the relationship that the player has with things, people, communities, and creatures in many different cozy or "wholesome" games. It also illuminates the power fantasy that a lot of these games are actually fulfilling.

I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.

Writing poetry also offers the chance to take part in a long tradition—long in English, far longer still in some other tongues. I reject some things in that tradition, but its very length helps me. Twenty-first-century life shrinks our view. I benefit from trying to carry an idea or an image across from a thousand years ago.

Industrial Videogames, regardless of scope and team size, are dead. Whatever desire for human connection existed has long been obliterated in the name of economic necessity. They tell you that if you want to make a videogame, any videogame, you too have to reject your humanity and turn yourself into a servant.

The French Data Protection Act (the Loi Informatique et Libertés) actively considers death in data protection and explicitly allows a person to give instructions regarding the retention, deletion, and communication of their personal data after death and appoint a person responsible for implementing those instructions. It mandates that controllers must follow the deceased's valid instructions, and heirs can obtain access to data necessary to settle the estate, to identify assets and liabilities, or to close user accounts and manage digital affairs.

Manifesto Jam 2026

When we read works that are untimely, it drags us out of our comfort zone. Historical fiction forces us to navigate outdated worldviews. The optimism and cynicism of science fiction dates itself and gives us insight on what people were thinking then.

If we stop making things people because will not buy them, then only commercial products remain. If people who have not made a videogame only see people buying games, they will think two things: first, that people will buy their videogame (this is false, because NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY THEIR VIDEOGAME); second, they will think that videogames exist to be bought.

Pirating Harry Potter doesn't make it less relevant. Though you're not giving your money to someone dedicating her life to make others suffer, you're still giving her credit by talking about her cultural works. The same way, pirating Indiana Jones The Movie The Game and talking about it online makes it live.

There's instructions here how to play and some extra historical context by Rob on how the game was discovered; in 2025 the Novas are Forever site started uploading a series of drive dumps, and one of them had a number of lost items, like a novel variant of Adventure, a multi-player RPG called Quest, and an early version of Ferret. Prior to last year, Thissala was entirely unknown and not written about in any histories at all. (This is despite Soul of a New Machine making a big deal out of Crowther/Woods Adventure; there was a strong culture around the game at Data General. I'll get into that connection more when I'm deeper in the game and have more context.)

These "translation solutions" actually create more problems than they solve: not only companies using them pay less for the work, but they expect you to work more, not only to make it up in more earnings/income/returns, but because they are sold as a "faster solution". And, well, they are not: it takes as much time to review a machine-translated text as it takes to review a human-made one, with one extra detail: the cognitive load required to check and correct machine-translated content is way higher than human-made one, because you have not only to be constantly fixing mistakes that humans wouldn't make, but most of the time you have to rewrite the whole thing because there are so many "small" issues — and that's even if the machine got the context right — that it's literally easier to redo everything from scratch.

To work with your hands in public is to be seen covered in dirt and sweat, to be gruff and curt and tired. To be seen as a body, but less than a person. To be something other. To be labourers, to be working class, but a different kind of working class. To be simple. To be nothing at all. To be annoyances, or nuisances, or bodies that were moving too slow. Hands covered in the detritus of labour that are never enough. If only they moved faster, if only they were better, and cleaner. If only they could be perfect, then this wouldn't be so hard for those with porcelain skin watching from great distance.

What I'm really asking is, what happens to a work once it's been translated, especially for the first time? In entertainment media and video games in particular, where translations are often the most time and labor-intensive to realize, most works make the jump to another given language only once. Barring exceptional situations, in the vast majority of cases, the first translation into that language is the only one that work ever receives, officially sanctioned or otherwise. In turn, it becomes the de facto way that audience can and will ever engage with that piece, the very grammar and semantics available to that language informing how people observe even objective realities of that content.

This things in combination mean that UE6 represents a categorical rejection of everything positive that Unreal has stood for since UE1. It's interested in disempowering users. It's thoroughly disinterested in the needs of its licensees. It's predicated on catastrophic misunderstandings of, and disregard for, creativity itself.

The audience is and is not "the people who read or look at a work." It's an imagined thing. So, let's refer to one as the "audience function." When a creator is creating a thing, they imagine an audience. If they don't -- at all -- then they're not anticipating releasing the thing to the world. Some subconscious, implicit assumption about "audience" is happening when creation is happening, if there is an intent in the "person making a thing" to ever allow other people to see it.

I wrote this blog post in my text editor. It took me a while.
Until recently, "someone cared enough to write this" was an ok heuristic. Plenty of writing on the internet was bad, but you could convince me that you cared about something just by writing it down.
Of course, generating plausible-looking text - or a plausible-looking website - is trivial now.
For me, this means it's harder to find good stuff worth engaging with online. And on a larger scale, systems built on easily gauging effort at a glance are falling apart.

When I was getting back into creating videos, I wasn't really thinking about creating videos on adult visual novels – in fact, I was a bit biased against it because at that point I bought into the false idea that a lot of developers put adult scenes in out of obligation rather than desire. But I was open to it, and upon playing more games for the channel and on the side, I realized there was an immense amount of potential in focusing on them in particular, and how the adult content adds to their themes.

I needed a pen, a red LePen that I had googled twice just to make sure it was real. It feels very Canadian to call it a LePen, like the time my French teacher tried to tell me that the word for vegetable in french was Le Vegetable. I failed French that year, and almost every year after, and I blame her for the most part. I blame many people for plenty of things, and it's not always fair. It is honestly more often my fault, but that's less easy to admit. One of many challenging steps.

The reply took and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him). Walking through these, ended up to be the most enjoyable couple of weeks in that job, and I want to go through it here too.

For many games, dialogue choices are a core mechanic (sometimes the only core mechanic), and so they are a means to many different narrative ends. That they don't uniformly have the same level of stakes or "consequence" is, for those games, a feature and not a bug. We shouldn't treat this as a problem to be solved any more than platformer level designers should view it as a problem that there are easy jumps and hard jumps, that some jumps are over a death pit and others are only required to get an optional collectible.

RPG Design For Beginners Vol. 2: Archetypes

I hope these examples show that even with a really limited set of turn-based combat options, or limited programming knowledge, you can still make characters in your party feel unique. Whether you approach it by experimenting with the math first or the flavor first, you can make characters who battle completely differently.

If it's too humid, sweat will not evaporate and your body will not cool down, so dry yourself frequently in whatever way you can. If you're in an enclosed space without natural air flow, a dehumidifier turned on can go a long way. A fan can help too, as long as you stay in front of it.

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