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?

The real problem with modern personal computing is that it doesn't involve enough mysterious liquids. Sure, there's always been thermal paste, and the steadily increasing popularity of water cooling in gaming rigs is a step in the right direction, but I think we can do better.

One of my small joys is discovering that two etymologically unrelated synonyms have the same number of letters, especially when that number of letters is large. deficiencies shortcomings Both exactly twelve letters, and no roots in common. Exquisite.

BRB, writing an essay arguing that, since the number of people doing character build theorycrafting is anecdotally much greater than the number of people engaged in active group-based play at any given time, Dungeons & Dragons in its modern form should properly be considered a solo journalling game.

Turns your texture resolution way down because you're only visible at a distance.

It's gotta be weird being the one character on the wacky YA fantasy crew with a normal backstory. Your companions are all "I was grown in a tube", "I'm an incarnation of cosmic evil", "I was born when the first rays of the Sun touched the Western Sea", and you've gotta be like "my parents fucked".

There's a unique humiliation in being into blatant kink media for very vanilla reasons. You can't discuss it with normal people because of the kink, and you can't discuss it with the real fans because the fucked up psychosexual stuff does nothing for you, you're just fascinated by the lead's boobs.

I feel like maybe you should slap a warning on sado content like that.

Puppy play, but instead of breaking out the leashes and muzzles I just make you pose for Instagram photos while wearing a really stupid hat.

In my day we didn't have all this autism.

Frankly, generative AI is being given too much credit for devaluing art and labour. Dipshits who think the Idea Guy is the only one doing real work and everyone else is a mere technician who should be grateful they're allowed to be there at all have been a thing for as long as art has been a thing.

Penis humiliation BDSM scene where the stuff the dom calls the sub's penis gradually becomes increasingly politically charged, until by the end the sub's penis is being accused of collaborating with counterrevolutionary forces and ordered to give up the names of its co-conspirators.

Inadvisable tabletop RPG premise #137: Ultra-lethal OSR dungeon crawl where every time the group eats a TPK, they switch to playing as whatever killed them. Brave adventurers all crushed by a descending ceiling trap? Now you're playing as the goblins responsible for maintaining the traps. Good luck!

One of my favourite descriptions in older literature is "a person of strange fascinations". Depending on context, it means they're either a weird sex pervert or a colossal nerd, and it's handy to have a phrase that can mean both of those things because in my experience they're often found together!

I believe that facets of a character's identity should be textually addressed only to the extent that those facets are directly relevant the narrative, which is why I exclusively write stories about featureless hovering orbs.

Treating the name of a fictional character as the name of the class of beings to which that character belongs (e.g., "he's a Dracula"), but keeping the "the" when the name of the character in question starts with it regardless of grammatical appropriateness (e.g., "it's a The Thing").

Like, yeah, let people enjoy things, but there's a difference between claiming to be a fan of something you clearly don't understand as in not getting the themes, and claiming to be a fan of something you clearly don't understand as in failing to identify information the text is directly giving you.

"Power Rangers" mistaken identity subplot based on the facts that character A has never been seen out of costume by character B and character B is colourblind.

At some point we're going to have to confront the fact that many things we're relying on as obvious tells of AI art are also common mistakes human artists make. Not just amateurs, either; I've seen one of the most celebrated comic artists in the business accidentally give a character two left hands.

One must imagine so

Yeah, we do have a union, but in practice most of us are excluded because we're technically management. The only person on site who actually pays dues is the guy who puts the enormous iron spheres at the tops of sloping corridors. It doesn't pay much, but I'm told the job satisfaction is phenomenal.

Weekend at Bernie's type fighting game character who's clearly an inert corpse with two other guys manipulating its limbs to make it do dragon punches and shit. They take turns speaking for it in story cutscenes and everybody acts like it's the corpse talking. No one ever acknowledges the two guys.

It's honestly so much bullshit that when it comes to male wizards only the evil ones are allowed to have long gnarly fingernails. I shouldn't have to be actively malicious to be rocking freakish warlock claws.

Obscure sorrows #137: when somebody voice-acts a trending thread, but they put a LOT of sauce on a line which would be much funnier if delivered deadpan.

(1/2) 1. Okay, this porn is ridiculous, but it's got me curious – exactly how much semen COULD a human body plausibly produce? 2. Surely someone's done the math. Let's check the usual sources. 3. Stumble upon a bio paper discussing which types of mating competition select for high semen volume.