Folks sometimes accuse my games of doing the whole The Author's Barely Concealed Fetish thing, and I'm like, shit, if this is what your experiences have led to to believe an author being sneaky about it looks like, I'd hate to see your idea of blatant.

Folks gassing up literary fiction and looking down their noses at sci-fi and fantasy because the former is "grounded in real human experiences", then you look at your average piece of literary fiction and the author's notion of how the real world operates is AT LEAST as fantastical as Narnia.

Can't help but read this and picture a giant robot with The Temple of Elemental Evil jutting out from in between its legs. I think that counts as a very inappropriate module.

the three porn categories: realistic, hyper, and geopolitical implications

My curse is I'm down for anything in weird porn, but only in its most restrained form. A cock the size of a pool noodle? I'm willing to entertain the potential eroticism. A cock the size of Pennsylvania? That's not porn anymore – it's gone all conceptual. What are the geopolitical implications.

Topic: least appropriate module or system to crotch-mount on a humaniform giant robot. Both "the pilot's cockpit" and "a big fuckoff gun" are rightly well explored within the genre, but I feel we can do worse.

I genuinely can't tell whether the Jeph Jacques is just making fun of shipping-brained readers with the current arc, or whether this is actually leading up to having Liz and Moray fuck.

Noticing that a mutual's casual vocabulary has very suddenly acquired the word "unforchies" at some point in the last, oh, eight weeks:

"Making [thing] missable is unfair to the player" possibly, yes. However, a. the idea a player MUST have access to 100% of a game's content at all times regardless of choices made is an unreasonable constraint in many contexts; and b. achievement-hunter culture is a disease. Glad we cleared that up!

Metroidvania about badass deep space bounty hunters scavenging alien ruins, except there's something wrong with the upgrades that gives you non-standard game overs if you collect them. Instead, you have to lure other badass deep space bounty hunters to grab them, reverse escort mission style. (1/3)

Survival game where if any of your attributes get too high, people who cultivate/worship/oppose that attribute will show up to kill you. This may be straightforward, like skill at firearms attracting rival gunslingers; for attributes like "Cooking" or "First Aid", the motives may be more eccentric.

Informal survey: if you've tried out or are interested in trying out Eat God (penguinking.itch.io/eat-god), are there any particular media characters you're interested in trying to emulate? Not necessarily as in statting them up directly – I'd be interested to hear about indirect inspirations, too!

Look, I've nothing against Deltarune per se, but Deltarune fans are so desperate to be the topic of discussion, they'll respond to literally any description of a game with "this is Deltarune". I could bullet-point a précis of Pathologic and they'd find a way to interpret it as being about Deltarune.

If I had a nickel for every genre-defining indie franchise that's gained a reputation for slow and erratic publication in spite of being published exceptionally quickly because their fandoms based their expectations on unsustainable early-instalment crunch time, and also their titles start with H

I've got nothing against mega-metroidvanias like "Silksong", but frankly, the average metroidvania having a blind 100% clear time of 8–12 hours is a virtue, not a flaw. Open world games that exercise discipline scope-wise aren't a thing you often see in any other genre, and there's a place for that!

Erotic mindbreak story about two characters who hail from different subgenres of the type with very different sets of expected tropes, such that each thinks they're the one doing the breaking. It takes like 100 000 words for them to figure out what's going on because they both suck at communicating.

Being a monsterfucker for abstract concepts and vast unknowable expanses of flesh and such is well and good, but there's something to be said for just watching a shitty 1980s fantasy movie and developing some sort of complex over a rubber muppet covered in K-Y Jelly.

I love when an author wants to write porn that requires a specific pre-existing relationship dynamic that's not present in the source material, so before they can do the ship they actually give a shit about they need to arrange the requisite secondary – and sometimes even tertiary – pairings first.

I think we often give social media brainrot too much credit for making people horny for odd shit. I guarantee you people who want to fuck trains pre-date not only this platform, but also the concept of social media, the existence of the Internet, and the advent of modern telecommunications.

Annoying cat traits to give your catgirl OC that aren't just "zoomies" or "pushing things off of shelves" (1/3): 1. If I like something, I will hoard multiple identical copies of it 2. If a person I like is about to sit down, I will quickly and stealthily sit there first to make them sit on me

Sometimes I see what is very clearly a kink post intended for small audience of close mutuals cross my feed and I must with great effort restrain myself from quote-posting it to explain at length why it would actually be a fantastic premise for a short-form tabletop RPG.

Years ago I read a webcomic whose title escapes me where a character threatens to subject another character to "[their] own personal Very Special Episode", and it's stuck with me because it feels like which specific genre of television we're assuming is in play is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there.

I'm not usually much for let's-plays of video games, but I have a special weakness for folks who are only familiar with the concept of interactive fiction via Andrew Hussie's parodies of the medium giving 1980s text adventures a try and discovering that they were actually Like That.

Exclusively courting the non-recruitable supporting character whose romance option was almost certainly included by the developers as a joke because as party leader fucking your own party members is ethically fraught.

All of its increasingly severe writing issues aside, it's a LITTLE bit funny how for the first five games the "Trails" series was developing this fairly nuanced through-line about how mechanised warfare is bringing about the end of the age of lone heroes [...]

Gives your game with a beautifully poetic title that perfectly captures and expresses its core themes a really dumb abbreviation.

Like, I get that encouraging a culture of hyper-pathologising oneself is bad, but it's also extremely funny that I could lament that literally any of my Tendencies is a symptom of this or that neurodivergence and get a dozen people who also have that neurodivergence replying "that explains SO MUCH".

A peek at the expanded character sheets for version 0.7 of Eat God (penguinking.itch.io/eat-god) for feedback before we lock stuff down. PDFs can be obtained via the links below: penguinking.games/files/eat-go... penguinking.games/files/eat-go... (Graphic design by @curatrix-ribston.bsky.social.)

Sometimes it pays to step back and ask: am I arguing that [thing] is bad BECAUSE OF the material harm it causes, or am I arguing that the material harm caused by [thing] is EVIDENCE OF its inherent badness? One of these is a lot more likely to fry your brain in the long run than the other.

Cleaning up my open tabs in Notepad++ and I ran across an unsaved text file whose entire contents are as follows: kings exiting queer microlabels I have absolutely no memory of what the context of this was.

That so many gags in Shakespeare are references to 16th C lost media is a sobering thought. Imagine being so popular the greatest playwrights of your day are memeing on you, then 500 years later the only surviving reference to your work is a dick joke in a play where an elf tries to fuck a donkey.

TTRPG jam where entries must be based on a random permutation of the "gaslight gatekeep girlboss" meme (d6): 1. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss 2. Gaslight, gateboss, girlkeep 3. Gaskeep, gatelight, girlboss 4. Gaskeep, gateboss, girllight 5. Gasboss, gatekeep, girllight 6. Gasboss, gatelight, girlkeep

Given how many porn games from the 80s and 90s had this whole pose of "yeah, this is TECHNICALLY erotica, but we want to make it clear we have nothing but contempt for anyone who plays it for that reason", I'm kind of surprised I never bumped into one that made it an explicit humiliation kink thing.

Autistic nerd reality check: have you REALLY discovered a hidden connection no-one else will see, or have you simply taken a word and broadened its definition via technicalities and edge cases until it's ceased to describe anything at all, then mistaken that lack of descriptive power for insight?

I'm fascinated by Gunnerkrigg Court's decision that the REAL baddies are an evil magical girl team whose members have barely been present in the comic to this point. I wonder if we're going to get a months-long flashback explaining who the fuck this is for each of them like we did for the first one?

Saying "bro, I have forum posts older than you" to someone who's getting on your back about Internet history gets objectively funnier the older the target is, but owing to linear time it kind of tops out around 30 right now. I need to live long enough to say it to someone in their 50s at least once.

You'd have so much latitude to mess with people if you were a magic skeleton. Space aliens have biology, and robots are at least presumably beholden to physics, but skeletons are bullshit. Nobody would have the slightest intuition about your whole deal, so you could claim it works however you want.

Erotic point-and-click adventure game, except in the classic Sierra mode, so instead of just saying "that doesn't go there" every time you try an invalid item combination, many combinations trigger unique death scenes. There's an achievement for finding 5 different ways to make your penis explode.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKgj... Every time I joke about most people who "only listen to video game music" being instrumental jazz fans who don't know it, I get folks in the replies going "well, what if I only listen to Super Mario soundtracks?", and I'm afraid the answer is still instrumental jazz.

This can be normal Call of Cthulhu if you're pure of heart and spirit

"The Minoan focus of my Art History skill means I can dodge their attack by emulating the bull-leaping ritual depicted in pottery fragments..."

Tabletop RPGs with skill-check-based conflict resolution that are like "well, TECHNICALLY every skill is a knowledge skill, because you can test Ranged Combat to know things about guns" are... whatever, they're fine, but what I want to see is a game that comes at it from the opposite direction.

this post was made by a true patripassianist, pneumatomachianists do NOT interact

DNI that's just a roughly chronological list of high-level descriptions of various Trinitarian heresies.

"Name one genre of media more creatively inbred than Dungeons & Dragons clones" easy – self-labelled deconstructions of visual novels developed by people who have only ever played other self-labelled deconstructions of visual novels.

Catholic-adjacent denominations that're hardcore about never using the vernacular in services fascinate me because, like, their sermons have gotta touch on contemporary issues at least occasionally, right? Somebody had to be the first person ever to figure out how to say "iPad baby" in Church Latin.

I confess I sometimes have difficulty taking TTRPGs that use capital-H Harm as the name of their not-dead-yet resource and/or the move that depletes that resource seriously, because for reasons that are unclear to me I always hear it in my head in a Ren & Stimpy voice. Like, "I will haaaarm you."

"Facebook offering to train an AI on your blog and continue making posts in your 'style' after you die is so dystopian" no, dystopian is the inevitable controversy two years after launch when it will turn out they're tweaking the outputs to have dead users' accounts perform paid product placement.

One of my favourite reading comprehension failures is when I criticise a game and folks come to me like "well ACTUALLY [thing] is not true because [game] has one sentence in its intro that says [other thing]". Like, y'all are aware a text can make claims about itself which are not true, right?