Random Thought of the Day

[Nyctophilia]

^Hey I'm not a moderator or anything like that but the above stuff doesn't belong in the random thoughts section. Probably be a good idea to move this,put a
warning label on it and remember what kind of site you're posting on.

Tc

Eh you're probably right. I've been posting in this thread because it seems more inactive than the blog section and seemed people were paying less attention to it. Plus this site is mostly inactive in general.

I was on another site where I often felt like I was walking on eggshells and self censoring which I got banned from anyway (also some censoring was unrelated to rules and just not wanting to post certain info for reasons I won't go into,) but I wanted somewhere I could post thoughts which would be mostly ignored but with the illusion of not writing like a diary in wordpad or something so ended up using this thread this way and overcorrected in the opposite direction.

It's hard to find places that aren't either social media, more active, IM stuff like Discord etc. Probably should switch to some blogging site though.

[Lucid]

No worries no eggshells.We are all here for a reason. (Request for cleanup after the edit and quote I look like a gigantic asshole lol]

[Doseone]

I think they fall under random thoughts.

[Doseone]

Me existing is so unlikely under physicalism that it's basically impossible. Every event since the big bang had to happen exactly as it did. I can't believe that. It also would have done so, just because. If we're going to go with brute facts, consciousness should be what's fundamental.

Also, this is cool:

[Nyctophilia]

Someone posted a video of Trace Lysette (trans actress,) talking about Dave Chapelle's makeup (stage makeup that is, not visible makeup. Pretty much everyone on TV etc is wearing makeup even if they don't in everyday life.) Only most people have no idea what she's saying lol because of all the slang.

But basically she's talking about how some guys who see trans prostitutes like crossdressing or end up wanting to transition etc (this is a known phenomenon where straight trans women often end up dating guys who later come out as trans or enjoy crossdressing, and there was a controversial research paper suggesting this made up about 50% of that group for some reason. Sexuality is weird.) And she's saying that either his makeup makes him look like someone like that or:

"It's one of those two things it's either giving client wanting to be one of the girls or the butch queen who did his makeup set him up."

I'm polyam nonbinary dating two trans women and chatting up another enby and I have no idea what half of those words meant, if it makes you feel any better

Lol I was going to say this may as well be another language but I figured out the gist after a couple of listens. I actually don't think the slang is the barrier to understanding here because I still don't know what a bunch of the words mean but I'm aware of that phenomenon which is useful. Plus the caption explains the most useful word for figuring it out.

And I'm always surprised by people who have lives like this person commenting because my reality is just near total social isolation and I don't know any [BEEP] people. Imagine having multiple partners somehow.

Reminds me of this dumb tweet lol:

Many converts to the new right believe polyamory will follow trans as the Left Patronage Network's fresh conquest.

But I predict that it will not. True polyamory necessitates Mormon-style polygamy, which condones/serves straight male sexuality in ways the Longhouse can't stand.

Polyamory with one man and many wives will remain illegal. Other permutations, with a trans thing married to a non-binary lesbian with 5 gimp gay husbands will be allowed and celebrated

Well they're part way there. Clearly I'm doing this wrong.

unironically though yes sort of but it's not new or really a trans thing. I was having this conversation with some guy online many years ago. He suggested the cultural left subtly promotes poly dynamics with multiple men but I've seen more and more people bring it up recently yet it's been going on for a long time now. It just makes sense because the sexual revolution has led to an imbalance in this area and it's a general interest since the emo era or probably further back in some cases. Lol I wrote an entire post about voyeurism and slash etc and 'female harems' once. There's a reason this tends to be niche though. It's suppressed in most cultures. It probably won't ever become popular but there are lots of weird things technology is doing now so I wouldn't say impossible. As the 'instinct' appears to be there...

Though there are many right wing guys who ignore this and anything that deviates from certain norms. I think they're low key horrified so they're in denial even when the whole emo thing was a really sizeable subculture which is about as big as it's gotten in the West. Although there was slash fanfiction involving real and fictional people long before that was as self aware as it's gotten. This makes them uncomfortable too

The issue would be on the male end because several guys aren't going to want to share one female partner in most cases. Louis Theroux did a documentary on polyamory once which I haven't watched but I watched an interview where he talked about it and he said what he found was that in dynamics where there was a guy and multiple women it only really worked out if the women got along with each other. I'm assuming the examples he looked at had more women in and like one guy.

There are relationships where it doesn't work out and the two women leave together as well like with Alan Moore's first marriage.

Also I'm low key enjoying the implication from some right wingers online that the cultural left are basically like The Forsaken in WoW or something lol. Like mad scientists. That's my aesthetic.

I don't care if Dave Chappelle wants to joke about trans or LGBT+ people. On a personal level none of it's going to really apply to me well anyway especially at this point in my life since I'm older and non-binary which is already an anomaly as most non-binary people are younger. I don't even label my sexuality which is somewhere between asexual and bisexual but I guess I do sit on chairs weirdly and always have done and that's a bisexual stereotype so there you go lol...

The same tedious media cycle happens over and over which is irritating and emotionally exhausting where the media talk about how offensive something is, a bunch of people claim that people from that group are really offended, and then people are manipulated into watching/consuming something just because a group they find annoying or disagree with were 'triggered.'

The Trace Lysette video only interested me because it touched on my special interest in sexology lol. If she decided to 'read' (slang term,) him in any other way it would have had no significance to me.

The funny thing is that Dave Chappelle wouldn't understand what she's saying at all because he doesn't have that level of familiarity. There isn't a singular trans community either there are lots of different subcultures and experiences and these experiences and subcultures overlap with cis and straight people and some of these communities and interests are considered shameful and people try to distance themselves from them like erotic crossdressing if you're a trans woman or amab and transgender, or reading slash fanfiction if you're a trans guy or afab and transgender. So there's tons of material there for a comedian.

I don't watch South Park but the creators of that show had a great episode on BL and slash called Tweek x Craig. Well it was mostly about BL really even though it was a Western/slash pairing and those subcultures are different despite overlaps and have different language and aesthetic trends etc (also usually you use a / not a x for same gender pairings =P,) most people are more aware and knowledgeable of the yaoi subculture somehow even in the West compared to slash. Also most people just use the label BL now since yaoi implies sexual content I think whereas BL is more general and includes romance stuff like slash can. But I think the episode uses both terms.

But still even BL and the people who consume that are mostly unheard of in mainstream Western television and comedy (despite having sizeable Western audiences,) so I thought that was interesting. Apparently they'd noticed that people were creating fanart of the characters on the show which led them to investigate more. They even reached out to people to create fanart for the episode lol.

I think the funniest part was when Randy? Yeah that dad character pretended to be very knowledgeable but had no idea what he was talking about lol. He talks to the Chinese government who are basically like 'that's just Japan' and then he later starts talking about how Japanese people make some people gay and how it dates back to World War 2 and then gets a bunch of stuff wrong about that too lol.

The writers talk about this episode here:



I'm interested in people who can write comedy like that about niche groups ideally without contempt.

That's why I liked the South Park Episode even though it wasn't an exhaustive look or perfect and a lot was missing. You can tell they spent a significant amount of time researching things nevertheless.

There are lots of subcultures and niche groups that rarely get included in comedy but are reasonably sizeable and have been around for many decades at least. To the point where mainstream sitcoms and comedy shows can feel a bit out of touch in some ways.

I started watching New Girl recently again (I started watching it years ago but didn't finish it and forgot most of the episodes, my friend started watching it which reminded me.) I'm up to early season 4 atm. At this point that show is dated since it started in 2011, but even still it was a show of the 2010s where a lot of the jokes and the social topics being explored felt like the 1990s although there are some exceptions. You have punchlines like in the 2nd season where a guy says he's bisexual and the main character is immediately turned off and this is just taken as an 'of course that's a turn off' moment which feels weird for the time (and other similar jokes,) but perhaps it's just weird to see how much changed in such a short space of time. Like in 2015 you had a sitcom (Schitt's Creek,) with a main male character who was pansexual.

There's also a whole episode where a guy is wearing what's apparently a female coat and this is supposed to be weird and funny but he looks good in it so I never really understood that and why they kept pointing out lol. They kept saying it was a woman's coat, but it was a fairly neutral looking coat not even a dress or something like that so it felt more like they had to remind the audience because if they said nothing most people wouldn't have thought about it. Imo basically anyone over a certain height looks good in long coats though. Sadly I am too short to pull that off RIP.

The early 2010s already feel like a completely different era honestly. There's the overlap between flip phones and smartphones in the early seasons of this and other shows of that time, an episode with Prince who has been dead since 2016 which is kind of bittersweet. Obama was still president during a significant chunk of the show and there are mentions of him, 'hipsters.' The amount of casual sex everyone is having seems ironic with the way social media discourse is now which is simutlaneosuly focussed on a 'sex recession,' while simultaneously everyone is complaining about the amount of casual sex a minority of people have. The surreal sensation of watching a show where the 20 year olds were my peers at the time it was airing but now I'm closer in age to the main characters.

The weird thing is that I expected the lead writer to be a boomer guy but it's a 42 year old woman.

[Nyctophilia]

Stumbled on this article while looking up New Girl stuff or something:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dga...m-tv-and-video

It struck me during Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World that I was watching the end of an era: Late in the film, Julie (Renate Reinsve) listens to her elder millennial cartoonist ex Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) expound upon a life lived through media. He tells her, wistfully, of his young life "without internet and mobile phones? spent going to record shops, comic spots, video stores, "a time when culture was passed along through objects".

"I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books and I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my 20s. And now it's all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about

"I reached a point in my life when suddenly I began to worship what had been. And now I have nothing else."

Yeah.

I knew that I was watching the Last Millennial Film - an acknowledgement of time passing, youth fading, life continuing on within and without us. The unbearably familiar rhythms of the film both resonated and frustrated, not only as memories from my own life but also as ones I absorbed from culture across my 33 years of life. Telling the difference was tricky: Like Aksel, I grappled with the ephemera that made me. But what made me was less tangible - entire histories confined to obsolete formats, blogs that go offline, server transfers that fail. In an existential haze, I sought to finally answer a question that has haunted me since downloading a leaked copy of Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion shortly before my 20th birthday: "Am I really all the things that are outside of me?"

Through the 90s, there was a hopeful idea of what millennials could become. At some point, that optimism shattered. We've been mourning that loss ever since.

I actually don't think I was ever that optimistic exactly. I was writing kind of dark and depressing stuff from about the age of 11. Nevertheless I still operate from a place of nostalgia. But learning that nostalgia is psychologically a coping mechanism for loneliness made the current prevalence make a lot more sense.

Upended by America’s War on Terror, a global financial crisis, sudden outbursts of mass violence in public spaces, and the single most consequential technological shift since the Industrial Revolution, it makes sense that millennials wanted to look backward. Justifiably unsettled in the present, and terrified by what's to come, “The Millennial” mythologises our past and eulogises a childhood that never really was, an impossible youth.

I like the idea of the future portrayed in things like Star Trek even though I'm not a fan of the TV show really, and I've gone back to reading some Star Trek fanfiction lately. It's very hard not to do dystopias now though. Mostly I'm bummed that I'm going to die before various potentially cool and useful technology will be created. Before space travel exists, before artificial wombs, before increased lifespans that might match the incredibly slow pace I'm moving at, before improved medicine (relative to now obviously it constantly evolves,) before shapeshifting technology exists if that's even possible, before hopefully someone creates a better way for people to find community and relationships/friendships than now and integrating that with technology if necessary.

And so far I've never seen bioluminescence irl.

The fact remains that, for all our influence over the past 20-ish years, we don't actually own anything. All we have is our media.

And much of the time, we don't even have that.

That's often true.

These films are imperfect critiques, in the same way my list isn't airtight: I know the canon I put together is riddled with blind spots, dead ends, confusing detours. After all, where's Drake? Where's Kendrick? Where's Nicki? All three contributed unforgettable visuals for our era and their influence cannot be understated. But it's the images of Soulja Boy in a Web 1.0 browser, or Tyler, The Creator eating a cockroach, or Le1f launching a Kamehameha wave, or MC Ride screaming in a car filled with TV static, or Azealia Banks grinning on the block in a Mickey Mouse sweater that feel closer to the admittedly limited narrative of millennialism explored in the list. The triumphalism of pop icons gives the culture something to aspire to. But there's a reason I selected Homecoming over Lemonade, or 'Formation' or even 'Single Ladies' - 'The Millennial' could never be Beyonce. We just watch her in awe.

Yeah for sure. This is very millennial:



And Beyonce is literally but her image isn't the stereotype. It's the black and white for no reason, the Mickey Mouse jumper as mentioned, the white guy with the glasses, her twin braided hairstyle. Cutesy but low effort image. Complete with social media meltdown persona. It's very NYC too lol there's random footage of a bodega I think?



Tbh though there's (not surprisingly) a big difference from people born in the early 80s and the early 90s due to technological changes etc.

They've created a list of well as they put it:

Chris Osborn: The Millennial Canon

A list of 125 moving image artifacts that, for better and worse, feel most representative to the cultural construction of "The Millennial Experience."

https://letterboxd.com/olepbr/list/c...lennial-canon/

Though I'm not a fan of a lot of this I can see why they picked a lot of the things they did. My Chemical Romance are very millennial but Helena wasn't my favourite song props for not going for a song from The Black Parade I guess lol.

Also can see why they picked Oblivion by Grimes stylistically but I'd want to go with Genesis. I mean it was probably the first Grimes song I listened to.



I never watched the OC but I liked the theme song and learnt how to play it on the keyboard lol.

Frances Ha is a movie I actually did watch but don't remember well at all now. For some reason it was in black and white (again.) Adam Driver is in this film (and in a bunch of key millennial stuff.) And the only reason I watched it was because one of the main characters had glasses and I liked the way she looked in some gifs I stumbled on. I feel like these glasses are closer to gen z aesthetics now:



Like back in the day we all had rectangular glasses. I still do because I'm avoiding getting my eyes tested again and buying new glasses. My first pair cost me over 100 pounds.

There's a lot of stuff that's just not good but is reflective like Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Speaking of being the worst generation:

- Girls (2012)

I had to stop watching Broad City because despite it being a comedy it was bumming me out or something like that. Just bad vibes.

A lot of this music I haven't listened to, and films I haven't watched, and/or don't care about.

- Euphoria (2019)

^ This I don't even consider a millenial work but gen z, although it is basically the US version of Skins. The US had a Skins adaptation but it didn't work out from what I remember like many of their reboots. Also I never watched Skins but it should be included since it's early seasons were when I was in sixth form and it was very culturally relevant. So I guess by extension Euphoria is a millennial show played by gen Z.

Mean Girls is a classic.

This is all very American I would also throw in Enter Shikari:



I was never that into their music, I only heard a couple of songs. They're not an important band for me but there's a period from when I was in sixth form and uni where their music videos kind of represent a bunch of the vibes and certain people.

No idea what this is but Google suggests some 4chan thing posted on the music board:

- Still Life: Betamale (2013)

OK so it seems to be a 4 minute age restricted video which includes clips of what seem to be hermit guys/hikikomori rooms I guess. I think shoeonhead once made a video tangentially related to this about guy's posting images of their rooms. Some of those photos she included are actually in this video I think, mixed up with like anime and pixel art and cartoon porn, some electronic music. It's sort of vaguely similar to vaporwave and stuff like that.

Created by this guy I think:

Jon Rafman (born 1981) is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the emotional, social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life. His artwork has gained international attention and was exhibited in 2015 at Musee d'art contemporain de Montr?al (Montreal)[1] and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.[2] He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes (2009-ongoing).[3][4]

I first saw this film 7 years ago. It's one of the few pieces of art that I return to at least once or twice per year.

I'm sure someone who isn't "from" the internet, doesn't browse 4chan, nor participate in the seedier sides of the internet would simply find this film repulsive and nothing more.

It's only when you are willing to accept what people reveal themselves to be in those anonymous corners of the internet that you will be able to truly understand this film.

This video screams: "if only you knew how bad things really are".

I don't see this as bleak, I see it as a celebration of what the internet really is. Also an objective document of how the internet has touched and impacted humanity.

This is sort of what I meant when I said comedy is outdated but we're not comfortable with anything besides self hate and horror right now.

On that note I would include more micro egenre work of the early 2010s, deliberately bad animation from YouTube, YouTube videos in general since millennials make up most of the big original YouTubers. Crystal Castles....

One half of the millennial internet seems to be surreal weird and creepy stuff and the other half is like Bo Burnham comedy songs and autotune schmoyoho type stuff. This is also often what people bring up when they talk about millennial comedy that a lot of it centres music. And the video essayists are kind of a mix of millennials aged 30-34 and older gen z.

Overall I think there's this kind of bouncy bright youthful vibe and then The Nightmare (tm.)

I guess the art movement he's considered part of, and also vaporwave and also Grimes is referred to as 'post-internet' which is a very ironic title since most of the time someone uses the post prefix it's to describe something that's moved beyond and of course we haven't moved beyond the internet yet. But I guess they're using it like 'stuff that was created after the dawn of the internet and grew out of e-culture with a certain aesthetic.'

Post-Internet is a 21st-century art movement[1] involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society.[2]

The issue with this list though is some of this is art created by millenials like Grimes Oblivion and most likely that 4chan video, and some is created by gen x or other generations and just stuff that millenials consumed and were inspired by so it's kind of hazy anyway. Even that movie they're talking about was described by someone as an example of 'gen x ennui' in the 3 or so minutes I was googling about it.

Also I'd throw in The Matrix in that list despite the death of the author situation going on there.

[Nyctophilia]

So I had to check to make sure but I noticed that someone had stolen one of my video thumbnails for their video (as in they're also using it as a thumbnail.) It's definitely mine as it's exactly the same and no one else had that thumbnail the design couldn't be coincidence basically. This doesn't bother me really as it's just a thumbnail, just kind of nonplussed lol. I actually didn't get that many views on that particular video either as it's not super related to my main content which most people who watch my channel are there for and so there are many other videos that would come up in a YT search first, it's also been almost 2 years since I uploaded that. So I'm sort of wondering how he even stumbled on that now.

Then I noticed the video description and it seems to be a third party archive of someone else's twitch streams on YouTube. It's unclear if they even have permission but I assume not. They have 1000s of subscribers and they have a patreon link and paypal link in their video descriptions. And they're not even making their own thumbnails let alone content.

Somehow in spite of this they have 5 patreon subscribers. So if I'm reading this right they're making like 53 dollars a month off that plus probably ad revenue. I'm not going to lie as a lazy person I'm kind of envious they managed to make that much putting in such little effort. Like the fact that they're making anything off that is weird and I've done more for less lol.

Like the period where I was creating stuff for POD websites well some of it was just art work I'd made anyway recreationally, but some of it was deliberately created for that purpose (and I wasn't stealing the designs though a lot of people do that too of course.) In the end I only really made any money off zazzle not any other sites I tried to use (I think cause the bar was lower there lol,) but it was such a tiny amount I didn't manage to cash out. I'd made like 30 pounds I think and then you needed 60 to get the money.

I mean it was cool that stuff with my designs on ended up in people's homes on pillows etc throughout the world lol. Mostly people bought stickers and buttons but someone in Paris bought a pillow and I also sold a baby outfit, postcards, wrapping paper, paper plates etc, but Zazzle got basically 90% if not more of the money for that. Their stuff was already overpriced so couldn't justify adding much on top of that even though you could add as much as you want but you have to be competitive.

And then years later they introduced some new policy when I'd already given up so they start charging you unless you've uploaded something in the last year or something like that so they then took all the money I earnt anyway because I'd never earnt enough to cash out. So the option of one day doing so eventually when finally enough people had maybe bought stuff was also taken. Really bleak stuff yeah. Probably made them hundreds of pounds. I've always been desperately trying to find ways to make money online though with ideally minimal communication.

Did I mention I love capitalism?

There's a lot of channels that do this though but usually there's a particular point that's taken from some longer stream for reference and it's clipped and they also won't have a patreon for it lol. I think that might also violate fair use because they've not modified anything. Even the thumbnail of that particular video was stolen... I can't get over it dude. How long does it take to make a thumbnail lol? Or it would have made more sense really to use a screenshot from that other guy's streams.

Seems like the twitch guy has a YT channel too but he's not uploading his full streams there as far as I can see so that could be the appeal. I don't watch twitch streams really but from what I know the system for re-watching them later isn't great and not set up by default I think.

It's still just reminding me of this though:



But without any reaction. At least they're crediting him I guess, but given he seems to be a fairly popular streamer it would be hard to get away with not doing that probably.

I'm reminded of that video way too often though.

[Nyctophilia]

Windows start bar graphics have been really great lately but also maybe creepy in its relevance to my personal interests. I mean there were aliens, and then there was a platypus (I love those. I was talking to my brother about them the a few times recently. They're mammals but they lay eggs, have fur and a beak, they're biofluorescent. They're such random impossible animals... Could only be from Australia but obviously they're from outerspace.) Today there's a desert scene with cacti. This is what I mean (yes I do save screenshots of the ones I like lol...):







If I click on the desert it's like 'Discover Phoenix'

Are you spying on me? 🤨 Maybe but I also think these are super common interests.

Also:

The issue with this list though is some of this is art created by millenials like Grimes Oblivion and most likely that 4chan video, and some is created by gen x or other generations and just stuff that millenials consumed and were inspired by so it's kind of hazy anyway. Even that movie they're talking about was described by someone as an example of 'gen x ennui' in the 3 or so minutes I was googling about it.

Also I'd throw in The Matrix in that list despite the death of the author situation going on there.

I was going to delete this post but I ended up having more thoughts. Stuff like American Psycho and Fight Club which became more relevant to younger millennials and gen z was created by gen x about gen x. I think overall these are bigger influences for older gen z though but American Psycho was one of my favourite films since I watched it back when I was at uni.

And it's weird because it seems like the author of the book spends more time talking about millennials now but that might be because his boyfriend is a millennial. Like this I just found:

https://creammagazine.com/2023/06/10...py-generation/

"It's an argument that my partner and I get into a lot. I grew up admiring individuals doing something amazing or creative. He cares more about the group and what the group thinks. What does the group think about this video? Or this video game? Or this victim movement?"

But I feel like he (and/or the person asking him these questions,) combines millenials and gen z into one generation and if you read it that way it makes more sense. Like these quotes:

If someone in their twenties would read three of your earlier books, say 'Less Than Zero', 'Rules of Attraction' and even 'Glamorama', do you think they'd have less of an antagonistic attitude toward you?


Completely, because that's what reading fiction does; it makes you more empathic; it puts you in someone else's shoes, whether it?s Oliver Twist's, Lily Bart's, or Patrick Bateman's. I think that sustained concentration on these pages and on these characters who are so different to you, that's why fiction always thrilled me; to take you into these different worlds. I'm not sure if it fully works that way anymore in this hectic, busy world. And I don't think video games today work like fiction novels: they last for 36 hours and you're in control of the narrative. Sometimes I do feel very old-mannish about the novel. You know, "The novel is the greatest medium!" Many people don't think this anymore. I think I was just raised in the right time.

People in their early 20s aren't millennials and don't have an antagonistic attitude towards him afaik (even late 20s is like barely millenial and this was written in 2023,) and younger guys seem to aspire to be like Patrick Bateman which is a choice lol and some people identify with elements of his character. A lot of other people find the film interesting and it's not aged out of relevance though it's probably less relevant than Fight Club is for millenial and younger men.

I think some women have often disliked American Psycho and judge him mostly based on that work, but that's not a generational thing it's been going on a while. There have been complaints from different political interest groups going back a long time and about the film which was ironically created by a feminist and a lesbian woman lol.

There's a lot of elements to the film that can appeal to millenials like the dissociation and surreal vibe obviously. And the music. I think he said at some point (can't find the quote now) that people criticised him for using music references in the book because they felt it would date the work. At that point no one had considered how important nostalgia and false nostalgia would become though I think.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/mu...-musical-taste

There are plenty of novelists out there whose work pulses with the influence of contemporary music, but none use music references quite so effectively as Bret Easton Ellis. Few divide opinion quite as much as him either. Those who love him, really love him. His critics, however, dismiss him as an empty stylist, a yuppie or, even worse, a misogynist.

Another work that does this a lot that's popular with millenials is the Perks of Being a Wallflower. I actually read that book and liked it a lot when I was 17 but didn't end up watching the film.

Also I think video games can work that way but it depends on the genre and game and the player.

Instead of the proverbial silver soon, would you say Millennials were born with a silver smartphone in their mouth?

Completely I would. Obviously there's pain there; this is not the happy generation.

This as well even younger millennials were young adults when we started using and buying those so that's what I mean when I say he combines the two and possibly even the generation after gen z really if you mean literally born with them.

It's like the '90s meme 'Kill your idols' is suddenly going viral.

Yes, but around the world, people still do like soccer stars, people do respond to huge pop stars. But one-on-one, when I talk to my boyfriend or his friends, they identify with people who are injured in some way more than people who aren't.

Is there a certain Us-versus-Them at play? When a person is liking someone's victim situation, aren't they kind of saying 'there's someone weaker than me, hence I like it'?

Yes, of course, that plays into it as well.

Isn't that less celebratory and more sadistic and sinister?


Well I've never met a more passive-aggressive generation than Millennials. There's a passive-aggressiveness there, and I think you've just located it. There is a very 'Oh, I'm just a likeable victim' mentality going on but 'I'm very positive and I really want the best for everybody' - but the slightest questioning of that, the slightest hint of the reality that comes in, I have never seen a group turn on you with a snarl and a snap so goddamn quickly it'll make your head spin.

It's like an episode of 'RuPaul's Drag Race' but real life, really.

Yes, and not with drag queens, sadly. That is a very strange dichotomy; between that upbeat positivity and this almost whiplash anger at almost anything that intrudes upon it.

That's kind of what I was trying to say in my other post it comes out creatively like... On one end there's a kind of dark surreal sadistic angry self pitying monster thing, and then on the other there's a kind of childlike upbeat optimistic somewhat naive happy thing. This is reflected in character archetypes you can find like Jessica Day from New Girl and April Ludgate on Parks and Rec (though this is really more of a reference to characters in the late 80s and 90s like Wednesday Addams and Lydia Deetz, which is because of the gen x influence.) I dunno maybe this scene lol:



New girl is pretty weird though in some aspects. I can't remember if I brought this up but it's like they couldn't decide what to do with Winston so he sometimes feels like a fifth wheel etc but that's not the only weird thing about him. He starts off as this relatively normal character and just gets weirder and weirder lol. It just hit me while writing this he has the vibes of a ghost. And then I googled it and other people were thinking the same thing:

Is Winston a ghost?
I'm in Season 4, and for the past two seasons, Winston just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Like he's a ghost that doesn't know he's dead yet, and the isolation of any actual human interaction is slowly making him less and less human.

Every other character has some sort of relationship (friendship or otherwise) with someone else, even multiple people - But not Winston. Winston is there to make weird, off-handed comments about what's happening around him. [...]

Is Winston even alive? Is he the previous tenant who died in that apartment before the rest of them all moved in there?

That is the exact energy.

I think it begins somewhere around the episode where they talk about how he's no good at pranks because he either does something completely boring that has no impact or something way too extreme and over the top. Then there's the beaver air vent incident, the whole cat saga in general.

I noticed multiple actors from It's Always Sunny have appeared on this show so far and there's elements of his character that overlap with Charlie especially the cat stuff, so I feel like it's related or something.



And initially I just thought 'well this is bad writing this character seems poorly integrated compared to the others.' I don't know if it was deliberate or what. I was even contemplating if it was just that the writers weren't comfortable writing a black character at one point but then they brought back Coach and it became obvious that wasn't the issue (I mean all the characters have cheesy stereotyped aspects that don't entirely work and it gets cringe, but that's not what I'm getting at here.) Sometimes he does connect though and he even has a back story with another character but it still feels that way. It's so fucking weird lol. I feel like by the time I finish the show I'm going to want to create some kind of video essay about Winston, or at least someone could, if they haven't already.

Cece also has sadistic moments on the show.

Then you see this combination of traits with real people.

Also, of course, a lot of this is just a Human experience really since nobody is just one thing.

But I do love this it's kind of mixing nostalgia, transience, surrealness and darkness together:











No I'm rambling about l̷̢̹̺͈̤̲̭̓͗i̵̧̩̥̘̖̫̠͋̾͋͐̈͝m̴̥̲͚̲̺͎͐̄̓̆̏̕͜i̸̩̋͛̕ n̷͝ ͈̀à̶̡̜̯̟͉̞̱̂̇̋͝l̷̨̝̝̹̰̰̚͜͝ stuff again. That's also a coping mechanism. Pretty sure I have undiagnosed autism because of the repetition among all the other things.

And I was trying to find a way to describe this emotional memory that's like... I think often you're waiting or you're not occupied much and then you start to contemplate the space and there's this strange feeling. It doesn't just happen when looking at the photos etc. I have memories of it as a kid. Maybe in a Mcdonald's or something. Which is why it's so effective.

But there are a few different feelings. I mean there's the service station/motorway/night lights vibe feeling with Little Chef if you're in the UK which is also now dead apparently:

The chain had become unsustainable with many motorists choosing to flock to a roadside McDonald's or Burger King to eat instead. Many of the former Little Chef sites have been converted into other food businesses, while others have been left unused and derelict since closing.

I never ate at one with my family but I always remembered the logo/signs.

And then there's the surreal creepy kids shopping centre feeling (which was still kind of there at the time,) and so on.

This aesthetic and the backrooms inspired one of my YouTube videos last year too. Oh it's basically old news now though (and then,) this aesthetic peaked in 2019 and the Stanley Parable had the same vibe in 2013. There's also stuff like the hallways in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining film from 1980 and Relativity by M. C. Escher in 1953 (though I'd probably give more credit to The Shining film for this aesthetic,) but still~

There's a kind of nightmare/dreamlike quality to a lot of it or like a vague memory you can't recall in detail. Pools are also very significant for me growing up, and in my dreams. Lots of it has this kind of 90s and 80s decor thing going on from childhood which is where the nostalgia comes in again. I know this appeals to a lot of millennials but obviously as I keep saying older gen z are also creating this as well maybe even more. They're really into Stranger Things.

Also a big part of why I love Steven Wilson's new album (but also musically it might be his best solo album tbh.) I didn't like this song on first listen as much as some of the others on the album the video was really cool though:



They worked on The Impossible Tightrope video too.

2002 (never paid attention to the lyrics beyond the chorus really until today lol):



I find myself in the same place again
With floors and stairs across the walls
It's like a courtyard under glass ceilings
And there's no way to go outside

Ohh-ohh, nobody's watching me
Turn around, lean out of the balustrade
Ohh-ohh, something is guiding me
Through an endless corridor

Is everything real
Is everything real
Is everything real
Is everything

The elevator in the final room
A metal square without walls
In asymmetrical trajectories
Vertical movements through trapdoors


It's weird how stuff from the past can gain significance or relevance in new contexts even though they were probably just messing around at the time or doing something unconsciously. Like there's this lot in The Sims 2 Nightlife (2005) that I always thought had a weird name for what it was (a clothing shop,) but I never paid too close attention and now it fits right in lol:

Building Trap Doors since 1987. Hans' Trap Door Corp has had many recent complaints of missing employees in the prototype department. Watch your step while visiting!

This lot has unique architecture. There are flower bushes planted on the outer foundation, with soil flooring beneath. It's also the tallest building in Downtown, but only the first floor is accessible. Behind the cashier, there are 4 doors that lead to a small room, which connects to the back door. The middle doors lead to "trap doors", which inspires the lot's name, Hans' Trap Door Corp, as well as the written lot description about employees going missing in the trap holes. In practice, Sims cannot actually get stuck in the traps, but will simply walk in the hole.

Obviously there were other tangential things that predated this aesthetic or... Maybe went alongside it really like the fixation with abandoned malls. And a lot of that is a kind of neo-gothic 'the empire is dying' sort of thing. Vaporwave too. But, the Liminal Spaces thing is more personal than that.

A lot of millenial's fixation is really on group level stuff from Occupy Wall Street to the planet is dying because of climate change. Lots of focus on saving the world/planet. Also what Bret Easton Ellis mentioned with caring about what groups think. With younger millennials that's kind of related to the films we watched growing up and the games we played like all the superhero stuff and Final Fantasy VII etc, I think. Also being very connected online from late childhood/early adolescence. I mean I've actually used this exact track from that video game to describe the sensation of being online lol:



And that game has everything. An evil megacorporation, an environmental extremist group, a super soldier who was born as an experiment convinced he's a monster and the fans can't decide if he's androgynous or hyper masculine he also has an obsession with this narrative he's built around his genetic mother who is an alien, a protagonist with identity issues, intelligent talking animals. It's the millennial video game compilation (moreso if you consider the lore of every work in that universe.)

Always being connected in that way has a weird impact on psychology. It can feel nice (like the stuff I'm talking about in this post,) but because of how social media works now it often feels terrible. That's because a lot of social media is trying to make you feel angry and pushes us vs them thinking and there are no bubbles (contrary to popular belief.) You are constantly exposed to opinions you disagree with. I'm sure people are more exposed now to opinions they disagree with then in the past. This probably leaves people in a permanent fight/flight state. I also find sometimes I'll watch something and just imagine people having issues with various things. Like 'get out of my head.'

The focus on identity in younger generations might seem like self obsession (which is you know an accusation that's always chucked at millenials along with being narcissists and I definitely am but that's besides the point here,) but it involves group level dynamics, tribalism and losing yourself in something bigger again. But then it's the combination of losing yourself but also projecting yourself onto everything.

And again that's a very Human thing.

I'm sure this pattern must be even more apparent with gen z who were on social media from a young age because the individualism of the early internet was reduced even more and social media sites are kind of like the internet versions of shopping malls...

I've been comparing the two for many years now but it seems I'm not alone which isn't really surprising they definitely give off that vibe. Minimalistic, largely uncustomizable beyond banners and avatars (not including tumblr which is in between):

https://www.staygrounded.online/p/th...ll-but-still-a

"You don't find a sense of community in malls." - Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

There are two kinds of users on for-profit social media: people with something to sell (or promote, etc.) and suckers, frankly, who don't realize they're trying to authentically express themselves in someone else's shopping mall. See- Malls can't have too many features that don't earn money, because then customers wouldn't be customers, they would just be people. And malls, like social media, don't want people. They want consumers.

Like social media, real malls have to strike the balance of maximizing the money it's taking in from tenants (stores), but without doing it too aggressively or in a way makes customers uncomfortable. The difference between actual shopping malls and social media of course is that you can get real stuff at the mall, whereas social media at best provides shallow entertainment (often cosplaying as news). You could say social media offers all the superficial "fun" associated with 1980's and 90's suburban mall culture, without actually giving you anything of substance, or at least, not giving you anything more substantial than you could get without it.

The liminal aesthetic feels more personal because it's a kind of projection of the self onto environments (which also I think gives the surreal nightmare/dream quality because it's kind of subconscious.) So if nostalgia comes from loneliness it's a kind of desperate attempt to connect by projecting Humanity and meaning onto these soulless transient spaces and office environments.

The aesthetic may convey moods of eeriness, surrealness, nostalgia, or sadness, and elicit responses of both comfort and unease

This interests me too because over time I noticed people describing my videos with a similar combination of responses. Initially I was kind of enjoying that it was freaking people out, but I also got lots of comments from people expressing some kind of comfort from them. Like

The Olive Garden joke took me out more than I thought it would.

No not that. I'm glad someone enjoyed that from years ago lol... Uh:

omg this was so amazing! I wanna go on a nostalgia trip and watch some old [video game] horror films x

So there's something about horror that actually makes people nostalgic lol and I kind of get this too even though I don't watch horror films and I'm not that big into the genre but when I was a kid/teen I'd go to charity shops and market stalls and alternative clothing stores etc and there were a bunch of like old horror aesthetic stuff around and Hellraiser video tapes and things like that and some of these are probably false memories since it's often more of a vague sensation, but it's kind of jumbled up in my brain that way.

There's an indoor market in the shopping centre in my hometown that very much has backrooms vibes and there were always a couple of stalls in there when I was growing up that had like a bunch of sort of gothic/horror stuff and comic book stuff. Lol literally #mallgoth. No one used that label as far as I remember definitely not as a self identity thing.

And if I look now there are actually a bunch of websites talking about nostalgia horror, and how horror can be nostalgic lol. Also how newer horror uses retro imagery.

Obviously Stranger Things is the most blatant example.

There's also stuff like The Lovely Bones which seems to play into that false nostalgia vibe in a weird way. Both of these works have incorporated a lot of older music like Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush. I've only seen the first season of Stranger Things though but it was impossible not to hear about Running Up That Hill everywhere lol. I might watch the rest eventually but who knows.

These vids are so nostalgic and cozy in a weird way!

Really clever and creative! Loved the worldbuilding, that maze felt like a mix between Pixar and a horror movie.

I think it's the mix of nostalgia, mystery, spookiness, and most of all the intrigue of watching someone destroying their game from within the way we personally wouldn't have the courage and patience to.

This is such Creepy-Pasta material, you could make an ARG-ish thing with this sorta stuff-

(alternate reality game.)

I just... Find it really interesting that I wasn't trying to do anything especially initially but this kind of unfolded exactly like this anyway? Like what's the word... I don't think it's serendipity. Synchronicity? I feel like there was a film with the word I'm looking for that I've forgotten lol but synchronicity works so that will do.

Of course the original game also has these vibes and a lot of older video games have this uncanny vibe that combines with nostalgia now for people who grew up playing them. There are even some hobby fan games now based on ps1 titles that are kind of highlighting this.

People who procrastinate tend to have high levels of anxiety as well as poor impulse control.


Yes.

"Millennials weren't created in a vacuum; they were a reaction to many of the values of my generation and Gen X. Of course they were tired of our nihilism, our negativity, our coolness, our irony. Maybe it's normal to react against that with an aspirational viewpoint, but it's disturbing to hear them say "Why would I want to see that movie when it's so negative?"

This also only applies to certain groups of millennials which is an issue with generational theory more generally. If you consider 4chan they kind of took irony to the extreme and other people also use it as a way to obfuscate their real thoughts/feelings now.

I think a lot of us are tired of the negativity though from media at least. When you're kind of trapped living in a certain way you don't want it reflected back at you. I feel like The Walking Dead might have been the last straw. I dunno.

We do really like escapism though I think.

"There's a lot of stress; a lot of anxiety about being likeable; about dealing with technology; about being distracted by technology; and I think there's a real lack of pleasure in the amount of information they're privy to. You've got so much of everything that nothing really matters in the end."

I saw a headline some time ago that read: Bret Easton Ellis Takes On Generation Wuss?


That happened years ago on my Twitter feed where I began to notice things about my partner and his friends that were so shockingly weak. Little things that they couldn't do or were confused by. So I decided to put some of that stuff in my book [White] and I really did not think it was going to be circled so heavily and dissected by Millennial writers - I mean the angriest, longest reviews have been from Millennials. The reviewers were, like, "The old and irrelevant white writer Bret Easton Ellis". That is Millennial in a nutshell; Exhibit B of what I'm talking about: this over-reaching hysteria about anything that comes close to investigating the world with a critical eye. It's depressing in a way, but I never meant to poke a stick at Millennials.

I think it's because of that knowledge and information that we know every generation always does this and that makes everything feel a bit like an endless cycle/groundhog day or...

Like The Matrix.

Apparently there's going to be a musical of American Psycho which is quite insane. I wanted to blame millennials (in a good way,) but as with most musicals the creators are still gen x (or boomers):

It may not have seemed possible but American Psycho has been turned into a musical. Yep, all those ironic songs from the 1980s that Patrick Bateman played on the big screen as he hacked his way through the city of New York can now be heard in dandy musical format.

[Nyctophilia]

I started reading the liminal spaces wikipedia page which surprisingly I haven't read before then fell down a weird rabbit hole of reading a bunch of TV tropes pages about stuff I like. I had some more thoughts but then lost all of them when my browser crashed lol.

But I was thinking as I said in my previous post about the fact that liminal spaces are often nostalgic for people and it's interesting that the wikipedia page emphasises the uncanny valley aspect of liminal spaces. Obviously as it points out this is usually applied to Humanoids. But I feel like there's a kind of projected Humanity onto these spaces especially The Backrooms. This would also fit with the appeal of anthropomorphisation in recent years - objects, animals, plants along with the general classic speculative fiction stuff like aliens, robots, vampires, werewolves etc. Apparently this is more common for autistic people according to research and again seems to overlap with loneliness. There are some studies suggesting autistic people are more likely to be lonely than neurotypical people.

This sort of thing isn't new to Humanity though since animism is often described as a foundational belief in cultures:

Although each culture has its own mythologies and rituals, animism is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion").[10] The term "animism" is an anthropological construct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic)

Research by Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University has attributed the unsettling nature of liminal spaces to the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. The term, which is usually applied to humanoids whose inexact resemblance to humans elicits feelings of unease, may explain similar responses to liminal imagery. In this case, physical places that appear familiar but subtly deviate from reality create the sense of eeriness typical of liminal spaces.[1]

Also interesting that Mark Fisher has been referenced:

Peter Heft of Pulse: the Journal of Science and Culture further explores this sense of eeriness. Drawing on the works of Mark Fisher, Heft explains such eeriness may be felt when an individual views a situation in a different context to what they expect. For example, a schoolhouse, expected to be a busy amalgamation of teachers and students, becomes unsettling when depicted as unnaturally empty. This "failure of presence" was considered by Fisher to be one of the hallmarks of the aesthetic experience of eeriness.[2]

I figured this would be something that would appeal to him if he was still alive.

I was thinking about how my videos inspired similar reactions from people and it makes a lot of sense because there's the fact that the game is removed from it's original purpose/context and even while experimenting myself it can feel creepy lol. There's also the hybridisation element though that happened by accident initially, similar themes are part of the original game and I've always liked that and kind of incorporated stuff like that into my writing, drawing/painting, anything really. But this is a very common recurring theme for a lot of people.

Broadly, the term liminal space is used to describe a place or state of change or transition; this may be physical (e.g. a doorway) or psychological (e.g. the period of adolescence).[3] Liminal space imagery often depicts this sense of "in-between", capturing transitional places (such as stairwells, roads, corridors, or hotels) unsettlingly devoid of people.[4] The aesthetic may convey moods of eeriness, surrealness, nostalgia, or sadness, and elicit responses of both comfort and unease.[5]

This also interests me and I think even before I was really paying attention to liminal spaces (though I can't be sure,) I had the word liminal as some user title because I identified with that. I also used the word chaos on my old livejournal as a user title or the subtitle back in the 2000s. That's another word that became very popular in the 2010s with the whole order/chaos thing.

Also obviously the inspiration for liminal spaces is partly real life but also partly video games. Especially the backrooms meme so video games in general lend themself to that kind of thing. There's the kind of noclip thing in games. This is the description of the backrooms reddit page (probably came from 4chan originally):

If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

And then like I said I fell down a TV tropes rabbit hole and found a lot of useful/related terms lol.

I was also thinking about how for a long while I'd been interested in emergent gameplay and narratives (not sure if those are the closest terms for what I mean,) like the Falador Massacre in Runescape and how it was incorporated later into the video game lore:

The Falador Massacre was an infamous glitch and subsequent violation of the bug abuse rule that occurred on 5/6 June 2006 in world 111[1][2], which gave it the nickname the "w111 glitch" or the "Doomsday Massacre" due to the date of the event abbreviating to 666.

Many players who gained this ability, against RuneScape rules, took advantage of it by attacking other players in crowded cities. A Jagex Moderator eventually took action by locking down the accounts of the massacre leaders. The players who took advantage of the bug were then given black marks, and those who killed a large number of players were permanently banned.

The bug initially spread from Rimmington[10] to Falador East bank[11] as players ran north trying to escape the attackers by the Rimmington house portal. Though most players abusing the bug were attacking nearby players, one also used it to protect players by attacking the bug abusers. Jagex' night shift Community Management team were quickly alerted to the event by the Player Moderators sending in emergency tickets through the website[12]. However, the reacting Jagex Moderators were unable to ban the PKers, as they couldn't be logged out whilst still in combat. Instead, the moderators messaged the bug abusers asking them to stop[13], waiting for the remaining abusers to leave combat before applying bans.

Runescape also breaks the 4th wall a lot in writing and builds that into some quests. Recently they also added a 'fake bug' with the advent calendar feature where there was a day 0 on the advent calender and then if you keep 'communicating' with the voice telling you you're not supposed to be there (creepy vibes again lol,) eventually they give you a treasure hunter key and then warn you if you keep bugging them they'll disappear and then vanishes.

The Corrupted Blood incident in WoW is similar leading to a virtual pandemic in game:

The Corrupted Blood incident (also known as the World of Warcraft pandemic[1][2]) took place between September 13 and October 8, 2005, in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Blizzard Entertainment. When participating in a boss battle at the end of a raid, player characters would become infected with a debuff that was transmitted between characters in close proximity. While developers intended to keep the effects of the debuff in the boss's game region, a programming oversight soon led to an in-game pandemic throughout the fictional world of Azeroth.

Although it was the result of a software bug, the Corrupted Blood incident gained attention from World of Warcraft players and disease researchers. Blizzard developed intentional in-game pandemics in two expansion sets: Wrath of the Lich King in 2008 and Shadowlands in 2020. Epidemiologists, meanwhile, took interest in how MMORPGs, unlike mathematical models, could capture individual human responses to disease outbreaks rather than generating assumptions about behavior.

So yeah The glitch entity thing really interested me growing up too like missingno and glitch city in Pokemon red. That was really fascinating to me when I first learnt about it and started messing around to get that in that game when I was a kid:

A Glitch Entity is a Video Game item or character whose very existence is actually just a flaw in the game's internal programming. Can be considered a Good Bad Bug in and of itself, but all bets are off.
May be found in a Minus World, and often exists for the same sort of reason -- the game accidentally tries to load character data from a section of memory that is intended for some other purpose entirely, leading to the resulting "character" appearing. If a Glitch Entity is noticeably more powerful than anything obtainable at the point in the game that it can be gotten, using it treads into Not the Intended Use territory.

Because this character was never intended to actually exist, merely encountering the Glitch Entity can trigger an unpredictable bevy of side effects, ranging from other Good Bad Bugs to game crashes, or even more severe bugs. In the rare worst-case scenario, it can even corrupt the player's save file, forcing them to erase it and start the game over from the beginning. Some Glitch Entities can eventually become an Ascended Glitch, though.

There also exist In-Universe examples, characters who are living glitches, usually used to explore the concept and how they interact with the world they are in. They can range from benevolent characters to mischievous tricksters to malicious Digital Abominations. These characters are common antagonists in Digital Horror media.

I think glitches fall into a kind of uncanny territory too.

I can't remember 100% but I actually think I learnt about those things in Pokemon from other kids while on holiday lol? Some stuff I definitely did with those games but not sure about that. There were a lot of myths surrounding early Pokemon games as well.

Preying on the beloved experiences of your past and the inherent oddity and vulnerability (both to malevolent users and glitches) of the digital worlds you made them in, Digital Horror is a subgenre of horror that derives its scare factor from disturbing the memories of the viewer. It primarily takes the form of online video series, Video Games, urban legends passed through social media and Fora, and Websites.

Even when not relying on your sense of nostalgia, Digital Horror works lull you into a false sense of security by presenting themselves as being limited to the confines of the digital world -- only to pull the rug out from under you, either by messing with the in-universe protagonist or in the case of games and other forms of interactive fiction, affecting things outside the bounds of the work itself.

And yeah actually Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a pretty great example of 'cosy horror' actually.

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared loosely plays with this in Episode 4, on top of its normal Disguised Horror Story flavor as an educational children's show.

Enter the Disguised Horror Story -- a work in the horror genre that masquerades as a non-horror work. It sets up a bright, colorful, or serene tone and atmosphere to lure viewers into a false sense of security, then abruptly drops the facade for maximum impact. One such type of work is the Subverted Kids' Show, which often employs a stereotypical, Sugar Bowl-like aesthetic in order to make the subsequent twist even more jarring. The marketing can further enhance the effect by intentionally hiding the true nature of the work and playing up its saccharine elements - though just as many give away the story's true nature in order to attract horror fans who might otherwise ignore it. Either way, the twist will generally only work for so long before the work becomes known for its hidden dark nature, but one can still expect at least a few complaints from parents who thought it would be a great thing to show their kids.

[Heelsbythebridge]

Everywhere is closed here till 10am besides coffee shops. I cannot drink anymore coffee

[Ironman]

Bundle up, Buttercup! It's going to be a long, cold week.

[Nyctophilia]

Before I get into the main thing I wanted to talk about in this post I went back to that guy's profile who makes audio stuff I've been listening to recently with the cute voice and he'd uploaded something with a male nymph character. It wasn't suitable for the purpose I was using it for (being vague haha,) but it was still cute and so weird that he decided to do that. I mentioned before in some other post that some of his other stuff weirdly fit my 'interests' like the femboy audio (technically I don't know if the word femboy was used but basically,) and apparently he wrote this script for a woman to upload and then he was listening to the uploads and thought it would be fun to switch the genders. So he re-uploaded it with a male nymph. It's so hard to find stuff like that but I used to write and daydream about lots of similar stuff as a teenger. I mean I didn't call them nymphs but like male or androgynous characters who have a connection to the forest and are plant elves (so Humanoid plants,) with various abilities, and things like that.

He seems to like comments so I should comment on his stuff. Especially that one... But I'm basically too lazy to many a new reddit account just to comment on 'things like that.' It's not easy to switch accounts either I have three already logged in on different browsers. YouTube reddit account for stuff related to my YT channel where I actually have followers and recently realised people can mention you on reddit so you get a notification which is weird, the reddit account that seems to have become about responding to anything that's controversial or gender related argumentatively maybe used once every 1-3 months sometimes less, and a reddit account just for responding to stuff about music or other interests. I've compartmentalised myself haha.

So a while back I was looking for romance stuff with humanoid male bunny hybrids (that guy also had something like that in audio form which inspired me but I'd read stuff about Humanoid bunnies before and thought the idea was cute a few times in recent years before stumbling on his audio,) I've found though that a lot of the stuff I like and the themes I like only exist in slash or homoerotic form which is increasingly annoying to me. Like the straight stuff is just automatically heteronormative and I don't mind reading that, I read a variety of stuff, but not all the time (it's not even what I like to imagine most of the time when thinking about guys I find attractive hence audio stuff.) It's also impossible to find stuff that's sort of 'non-binary' and even if I could it would prob be some weird gen z stereotype that didn't work for me.

The reason I struggle with slash stuff now is because I don't want to feel bad about the fact I'm not a cis guy, and I don't have a dick but at the same time that stuff technically works better and I don't want to imagine myself in a female sexual role because of dysphoria etc so it's just... Terrible all round. At least with sex. (if I end up self inserting anyway, usually I don't.)

But while searching for that Humanoid bunny thing Google sent me an entirely unrelated reddit thread of some guy asking for romance stories written for men. (I've mentioned this before too but this is an update.)

In this thread I discovered The Rosie Project which I thought would have appealed to me in my late teens and early 20s because of the main character.

Once around that time I picked up The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Nighttime because my mum had it on her bookshelf and the cover caught my attention then I just read the whole thing in a day or two.

I also really like romance stuff with characters who are either autistic or coded as having similar traits which is why I was reading Spock/Uhura fanfiction at the time and again recently (also because I wanted to read something romantic recently and the Star Trek universe is more optimistic than the clusterfuck that is social media. So it was either that or LoTR with elves) Also used to like Sheldon/Penny fanfiction at one point briefly.

There were lots of negative reviews of the book when I looked into it. The Internet kind of ruined people like this and now everyone's a transphobic tradcon who is against surrogacy and uses evo-psych to argue for all these things etc (exaggeration,) and I don't read fiction books anymore only fanfiction and erotica so I decided not to read it but then felt the urge to read it again yesterday so I read the amazon preview first and I kind of liked the main character's 'voice' so then decided to buy the ebook.

I've read just over 50 percent of the book so far and there's something pretty interesting about it.

Something I like about the main character is he has a system for food where he cooks the same thing weekly to reduce cognitive load. This is why I cook the same thing over and over again because I don't enjoy cooking and I don't want to think about it much. But unlike him I don't have an exact system and I haven't optimised this nutritionally which is something I'd want to do/should do ideally but I'm not that organised and I'm more chaotic (the main character is very conscientious which has a lot of advantages, I'm the opposite of that usually lol,) and so I just stick to basic stuff which is often less ideal. It also takes a while before you can cook something on autopilot if it's more complicated.

When I say I'm more chaotic. I have over 2000 tabs open right now in Google Chrome alone (I also have a bunch of stuff open in firefox and edge,) and it's affecting the performance of my PC and causing Chrome to crash periodically. I need to go through a bunch of them and close them.

The main character (age 39,) is an autistic professor who designs a questionnaire to find the perfect wife. He is best friends with another professor (ate 56,) who is in an open marriage and has sex with lots of women of every nationality (the main character describes this as his project he sees everything as a science project,) the main female love interest (age 29) dyes her hair, wears alternative fashion, and has strong feminist views that come out, the main character and his best friend are very focused on genetics evo-psych etc, main character is quite judgmental in a kind of pragmatic way especially about intelligence, the rest I will have to put under a spoiler tag

Spoiler: It turns out she's a student but works part time at a gay bar the main character eventually questions if she's gay on this basis. It's not revealed straight away but she's a student of the guy who sleeps around and she doesn't like him and considers him a sexist pig. Main character eventually realises she was the woman arguing with his friend when he came to talk to his friend. When the main character asks him if she's gay the best friend's response is to say 'she might as well be have you seen how she dresses.'

She also hid that she was a student instead of just a bartender as she disliked the stereotypes about intelligence she also dislikes the term barmaid (at one point she mentions shes bad at maths and it's her least favourite part of her job so main character concludes she has a low IQ,)

Also the main character is helping her find her biological dad as she was raised by another man she doesn't get on well with and her mum died when she was 10.

This is a bit of a cliche and is a scenario a lot of men online fixate on now so it's interesting to see that included here too.

It loosely matches the backstory of Kat Bjelland lead singer of Babes In Toyland (riot grrrl band,) I was reading about the other day. Whose mum left and so she was raised by her step dad and she didn't get on with her step mum but weirdly people only fixate on the daddy issues part when it comes to girls and women...

Katherine Lynne Bjelland was born on December 9, 1963,[3] in Salem, Oregon, to Lynne Irene Bjelland (n?e Higginbotham).[4] She is of English and German descent.[5] Bjelland was raised by her mother and stepfather, Lyle Bjelland, until age 3, when her mother separated from her stepfather and gave him full custody, after which he raised her as his own.[5][6] She was not made aware of her biological father until age 18, and did not meet him until age 23.[5] "[It] was weird", Bjelland recalled of the revelation. "I was like, 'Huh? I have a different dad? I'm not Norwegian?!'"[5]

[...]

Bjelland's stepfather subsequently remarried, after which she claimed to have been physically and verbally abused by his wife.[8][9] "You know, I really hate to talk about it because she's great now, but in my childhood she was very abusive", Bjelland said. "It probably did help my creativity a lot [though]. I was always grounded. I hate to talk about it because I feel like she doesn't think that she did it, but she was [abusive] and it influenced my life quite a great deal."[9]

Main character can't figure out why she dislikes her stepdad or is looking for a deeper reason than those she lists. Stuff she talks about atm is: he seemed to buy her affection, never got to know her, and would get her girly stuff for her birthdays which she disliked instead of a chess set which her mum's close friends brought her, also emotionally inconsistent and promised things without following through.

Also I feel like I knew straight away who her biological father is going to be, and if it turns out to be him that was pretty predictable lol (at least to me.)


My aunt has gotten me girly Christmas presents the last two years like stuff prepubescent female children might like honestly. It's hard to picture adults in general liking that stuff. Like pink girly slipper socks with love hearts on, and some pick girly hair brush last year also this little box with soap in. The soap is practical at least but then the box would have been OK - it had like some kind of newspaper print thing on it but then there was pink glitter on it. I hate this and she's wasting her money but I'm not in contact with her. She just gives them to my mum. The stuff she gets for my brother fits better like she got him a multitool I think and then just a hat this year. He found it hilarious. If it was from someone who did know me it would definitely be an obvious joke.

Also I was very girly as a young child (probably why she buys that stuff, yet the obvious double standard with my brother,) so I feel like that phase of my life is over. I don't have to do it again. I've played that game already lol. Even then there was other stuff I liked like computers, video games etc. This is why gender roles are retarded though.

When me and my friend buy stuff for each other we just ask each other lol and then buy stuff most of the time. We were doing that recently because we have overlapping birthdays.

The trans debate so far doesn't make an appearance at all (this book was published in 2013,) but otherwise it's like the author decided to take the culture war and turn it into a romance book. That's the interesting thing about the book. That subtext which is there.

I'm enjoying it for the same reason I enjoyed reading all the other stuff I mentioned before.

It feels like a book that would piss everyone off but for different reasons. Romance books shouldn't be this polarising but they often are. There's also this tendency to hate everything women like eg: Twilight, Justin Bieber, kpop, but this isn't even that lol. Although in a sense it kind of is.

I noticed before (from what I remember anyway,) a lot of people felt the main character was a dick, his best friend was terrible, and questioned the main character's martial arts ability 'like the writer wanted to make autistic James Bond.' I think someone said.. Except he doesn't do well in social situations at all.. I do think it's slightly unrealistic and the characters fit very obvious group archetype/stereotype roles but it fits in well with how people are now online.

Also one reddit thread had the title: The Rosie Project is the worst book I've ever read.

It would be surprising if someone said it was the best book they ever read (unless they hadn't read many books even by my standards,) but it seems like an overreaction so far. I've definitely read worse stuff in this genre.

For example, there's a scene where he is somehow giving a lecture to an auditorium of college students and researchers and during the question and answer portion he calls on a woman in the back by saying, "Yes you, the large fat woman! What's your question?" The author tries to write it as a funny scene as if he's just socially awkward but in reality it's brutally cruel.

That's not how I read it and that isn't an exact quote either. It is unbelievable that someone would be that socially unaware about that in the present day though. They'd have to be very socially clueless. I've met a couple of people online who fit that but most don't. My brother's best friend is also autistic and I can't imagine him saying something like that. He clearly doesn't get various social norms/cues and comes across very differently from neurotypical people (so he's obviously autistic and that's why he was diagnosed as a kid,) but yeah.

The main character is like Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory but on steroids. He's a super genius, who's also apparently good looking, a young professor at a very prestigious university, in incredible physical shape and he even knows martial arts like Jason Bourne.

The story is that he's actually got some kind of mental issue, like an extreme case of autism or aspergers (the author's words, not mine), that makes him unable to understand social cues or engage romantically with women. He doesn't come off as quirky or cute like Sheldon Cooper or Steve Urkel. He's a total psychopath and just downright mean.

Yeah I thought they went with James Bond lol but same thing.

All the female characters he meets are immediately head over heals horny for him for some reason. They're also all described as "stunning, beautiful etc". I can't recall anything being memorable about the female character's thoughts or minds.

This isn't really accurate. The book constantly highlights how he can't make or keep relationships platonic or otherwise. It does point out at least once that he's physically fit. He seems to be the only person who finds Rosie as attractive as he does so far, and the other female characters vary a lot in appearance. It's from his pov so aside from when you hear other character's comments you don't see how other people view the characters, or what the other character's are thinking and he's also autistic so not a good judge.

Again I'm only 50% of the way through though.

So, anyway the main character, in a quest to find a female breeding partner, makes a checklist of 200 questions for each women to complete so he can determine a perfect match for himself. It's absurd.

My girlfriend and I tried, really tried to get through this book and we quit 3/4ths of the way through. The main character is just unbelievable, irredeemable and boring. The author has no idea what asbergers really looks like.

Now, whyyyy did I suggest this book to my gf and why did I try reading it? I'll tell you but you won't believe me -- I had a chance run in with Bill Gates several years ago. Just a short conversation, the kind you'd have in an elevator. I asked him if he was reading any good books at the time and he said, "oh yeah, Melinda and I read The Rosie Project, it was really good. Check it out." I said I would and that was the one and only conversation I ever had with him

I forgot about this this review is great haha. If this is true.

It's the worst book I've ever read. It's like a really, really dumb 1970s romcom.

Yeah some people really hated it.

I bet his girlfriend secretly liked it. Or he's worried she might.

'You don't like Amanda Palmer do you? No.'

Something like that. Has the same energy lol.

I was gifted this book and felt pressured to read it so I did. The worst part of it is when the character continues to hang out with Rosie, he becomes more sociable and has less autistic tendencies like she is curing him 🙄

Copying others? behavior is something that helps those on the autism spectrum. Girls are often undiagnosed until later in life because they seem to do this better than boys. So, it?s not a cure because autism is not a disease, but people do adapt their behavior given their environment and social influences, so this believable : )

Yep.

You're amazing for explaining this in such a nice way. This post has got me so frustrated.

If you'll notice, it's not usually autistic people claiming how the book is "sooooo unrealistic 🙄"

lol. The backlash to it is more 'problematic' than the book I think.

Ftr I haven't even noticed what they're even talking about yet. It hasn't happened yet.

It's so offensive to women and also people with social difficulties and mental health issues simultaneously

Also having never read it, I'll say from what I've read here is that it comes across as an incel fantasy.

I love how this word has lots 100% of it's meaning in the 2020s haha.

I still remember how infuriated that teenage boy was with Justin Bieber and Justin Bieber is actually a dick but he was so violently angry and talking about how he wanted to stab and kill him and it was fascinating to watch in this video clip I saw again recently. Someone had included it in their video about something. Some video essay. And it's obviously coming from a place of envy.

Edit Just clarifying here that I don't claim to know a single thing about the Autism Spectrum or whatever the term Aspergers used to mean. The author used these words and claims to understand them very well. My criticism is that he has no idea what he's talking about and his use of these terms is offensive to some*.

How can you possibly argue it's unrealistic if you don't know anything?

I never met these people irl at uni in the 2010s though people I met then fit other stereotypes sometimes or less extreme apolitical versions of these. Now I live back in a working class town so people are even further removed. I stopped dying my hair 10 years ago. But these people exist in the US in universities, weird niche subcultures and online.

I also think the questionnaire thing is something people in the rationalist community actually do online to find partners. I've seen people do similar stuff at least, and online over the years I've spoken to lots of people who are very similar to the main character (in that community or adj to it,) so they exist as well.

The book is probably set in Australia though because the author is Australian yet I'm 50% of the way through and you could imagine it's any Anglosphere country that has dollars as a currency and it's not clear to me where it's set except that it's not the UK. That's interesting too.

The culture war isn't the main theme. I don't think it was intended to be or even that that's what the writer had in mind but it still seems to be there as a backdrop for the entire work. Just like it's a backdrop to people's entire life. I can't visit my dad without him using the word woke.

I also was really surprised to realise who the female character was. I was expecting someone entirely different (even moreso after seeing it suggested on the subreddit where I initially found it,) and that was a really odd direction to go in lol.

I mean because a lot of men online aren't exactly huge fans of aggressive women who dye their hair and talk about gender roles etc. Whether they self identify as feminists or not.

My ex boyfriend who I'm still friends with is a less stereotypical version of this personality type though and he's a computer programmer. He also doesn't listen to music much (but sometimes creates it.) Unlike this guy he never drank alcohol though and was even more introverted I would say but also not as socially unaware (not diagnosed autistic.)

My personality is a mixture of both of those stereotypes + aesthetics and others.

Very weird/uncomfortable to be making this connection but I'm using it as a kind of comparison point I guess to argue that it's not that unrealistic irl if you don't think of people as 2d Memes and the extreme version of certain personas. Also if you don't expect some kind of happy ending for life.

Also like with that female character a few people made statements about me being a lesbian (I'd guess now people would assume you're non-binary if you present that way instead of gay because that style became associated.) or questioned why I act like a guy or complained about me not wearing dresses, that I'm boring to shop with, or commented on how I don't fulfil other gender roles at a similar time period (early 2010s.) Kind of weird because I saw my style then as being feminine and not how most guys would present (also never had short hair,) but then a lot of the comments probably weren't about style as well. Some of it seemed to be body language and how I interacted with people. Sometimes people read me (or did,) as being young too because of my social anxiety and personality (which has always bothered me obviously.) I was also forced into a makeover in high school once. So a lot of this stuff that people think is unrealistic in films etc actually happens lol. Also films, TV etc then inspire people to do that stuff.

It's also very millennial.

[Doseone]

I keep having a dream about me writing an unfinished book. I've never considered writing a book, but I remember my neighbor saying that I will write a book when I told him I used to write (bad) poetry when I was younger. He said he wrote poetry, so that's how it came up.

[Nyctophilia]

So yeah The glitch entity thing really interested me growing up too like missingno and glitch city in Pokemon red. That was really fascinating to me when I first learnt about it and started messing around to get that in that game when I was a kid:

I just realised that the missingno glitch actually has it's own wikipedia page lol. This is uncommon for video game and e-culture stuff (seems more common these days though.) Usually there are just pages on various wikia about that kind of stuff. It was amazing though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MissingNo.

MissingNo.[a] (Japanese: けつばん[1], Hepburn: Ketsuban) is a glitch and an unofficial Pok?mon species found in the video games Pok?mon Red and Blue. Due to the programming of certain in-game events, players can encounter MissingNo. via a glitch. It is one of the most famous video game glitches of all time. Encountering MissingNo. causes graphical anomalies and changes gameplay by increasing the number of items in the sixth entry of the player's inventory by 128.

This beneficial effect resulted in the glitch's coverage by strategy guides and game magazines, while game publisher Nintendo warned that encountering the glitch may corrupt players' game data. IGN noted MissingNo.'s appearance in Pokemon Red and Blue was one of the most famous video game glitches and commented on its role in increasing the series' popularity. Fans have attempted to rationalize and incorporate MissingNo. as part of the games' canon as an actual in-game character, and sociologists have studied its impact on both players and gaming culture as a whole. Additionally, references to the glitch and the circumstances around it have also appeared in other games, such as Vampire Survivors and The Binding of Isaac.

I always wonder how the hell people find these kind of glitches in the first place (or rather figured out the process of how it happened,) since the steps required to get this to happen are quite complex sometimes. I think it's usually multiple people working together though. Like I've discovered rare/unique bugs that people can sort of explain parts of but not everything. And I can't because I don't have that knowledge and don't know how it happened in the first place as I wasn't paying close attention lol.

A player can encounter a MissingNo. in Pokemon Red and Blue by following a series of steps. First, the player watches an in-game tutorial for Pokemon capture in the game's Viridian City location. Second, the player uses a Pokemon with the "Fly" move to instantly travel to the game's Cinnabar Island location. Finally, the player uses a Pokemon with the "Surf" move to travel up and down on the eastern shore of the island until a MissingNo. appears.[7]

These events manipulate the game's random encounter system to generate a Pokemon with an invalid identifier. Each area within the game assigns values to a data buffer to represent the Pokemon that can be encountered in that area. However, some areas--such as Cinnabar Island--do not overwrite the data in this buffer, so the data from the previous area is used instead. During the Viridian City in-game tutorial, the player character's name is temporarily overridden to read "OLD MAN", and the player character's actual name is temporarily copied to that same data buffer. If the player travels directly to Cinnabar Island after viewing this tutorial, the player character's name will be read as the Pokemon that can be randomly encountered in that area. Due to the player character's name not being intended to be read as this kind of data, the game can attempt to generate an encounter with a Pokemon with an invalid identifier, such as MissingNo.[8][9] Fans have dubbed this method of encountering MissingNo. the "old man glitch".[8][10]

As with any wild Pokemon, players may flee from, fight, or capture MissingNo.[9] After an encounter with MissingNo., the quantity of the sixth item in the player's inventory is increased by 128,[11][12] and the game's Hall of Fame Pokemon gallery becomes glitched.[10] Temporary graphical glitches may also occur,[10] which can be removed by viewing the statistics page for another non-glitched Pok?mon or resetting the console.[13]

A captured MissingNo. is functional as a Pokemon and appears in the games' Pokedex as number 000.[8][9] The games classify it as a hybrid Bird/Normal-type Pokemon even though the category of Bird-type Pokemon was cut from the games before release.[8][14] It commonly appears with a scrambled block-like form commonly described as a "backward L-shape", but depending on the player character's name, it can also appear as one of three ghost or fossil sprites not used by other Pokemon.[13][11]

Yesterday my friend was telling me about Starfield being buggy. So he views this from a dev perspective (as he is a game dev not on that game,) bugs are obviously a bad thing but I was thinking 'were they at least funny?' So he was like:

Sometimes

There was a bug where your guns would stop working randomly and the only way to fix it was to change your characters gender

And I just think that's amazing lol and wonder how it could be incorporated story wise.

So now I'm going to buy that game. No I'm still not lol. I find the graphics off putting and a bunch of other stuff I've heard about the game like the planet side exploration not being that fun/great. But it's just so impossible because for years before that I was thinking 'I want Bethesda to make a science fiction game centred on space travel and exploring planets' now they have and I just... Cba playing it and it didn't appeal to me somehow lol. And I love as bunch of their RPG's (Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim) because they have worlds that are fun to explore + sandbox + they're good at creating lore + the gameplay is just fun and immersive. Then again in previous titles they have often relied on procedural generation for Oblivion gates, for dungeons and caves etc.

Then started reading this reddit thread from 2013 this comment makes some points:

I see the same pattern for many top tier game developers from the 90s. They became famous at a time when just sticking emergent technologies onto your game almost guaranteed you a fresh, innovative product. The added storage space of CD-Roms, widespread home internet, high quality sound, 3D-graphics, sufficient amounts of RAM for detailed simulation... It was a great time for game innovation in terms of technology.

Now fast-forward to the mid-00s. Suddenly, it's becoming hard to come up with anything new since hardware plateaued and it feels, for the first time, like all the basics are covered, everything's been done. You see game developers used to inventing entire new genres desperately throw themselves at the latest fad: Motion controls with the Wii, MMOs, mobile/"social" games, tablets and now (dare I say?) VR. Nothing really went anywhere.

Will Wright joins Second Life, Molyneux does weird Kinect prototypes and leaves Lionhead to do F2P mobile games, Brian Reynolds joins Zynga, Warren Spector makes some bizarre Mickey Mouse project that revolves around the Wiimote, Ken Levine fired everyone at Irrational to make games based on "Narrative Legos", Shigeru Miyamoto makes an iOS game. John Romero has honestly developed this F2P game called "Pettington Park" for Zynga. John Carmack leaves id to join Oculus, Gabe Newell turns Valve into a VR company. Richard Garriott flew to the International Space Station and apparently (and I couldn't make this up) joined "SpaceVR, the world’s first virtual reality platform with the ability to share live 3D, 360-degree content from the International Space Station (ISS)".

There's some exceptions. Sid Meier managed to focus on what he's good at and somehow avoided (a public?) mental breakdown, Firaxis is doing fine. Tim Schafer was lucky betting on Kickstarter. But generally, Will Wright's path is typical.

If I wanted to be dramatic, I'd say that there's a good chance that a lot of the most iconic game designers from the golden age of the 90s weren't ever that talented designers, they were mostly at the right spot at the right time, getting to work on big productions in a time when a little bit of discipline and creativity more or less guaranteed you a place in gaming history. It must be tough to transition from that to the current, F2P-dominated space.

Yes this happens to everything eventually it becomes more and more difficult to innovate. Also happened to music. Also happened to films.

Also just found this and maybe this is a technological issue (talking about Starfield and it's 1000 planets) but this is not an issue I've had with enjoying their other games personally:

Worlds feel procedurally generated...
This has always been a problem in Bethesda games. They make a big beautiful world...and then fill it with "random generic". Yeah, I'm sure there are a few cool things mixed in, but mostly it's the same caves and dungeons and houses and rather uninspired loot. Realistically, running around a planet here feels almost exactly like running around a planet in No Man's Sky...and that's why I don't play NMS.

Now I like the stories and quests I've done, but I'm not going near any of those "Mission Boards" to do procedurally generated missions.

Devs need to learn that procedural generation (or the feel of it) are huge turn offs to a lot of people. I'd rather deal with less that hand crafted than "muh million explorable worlds".

At the time I was at uni already lots of companies were shutting down, and there were so many projects that just went nowhere or failed. Phone games were becoming more popular and didn't interest me. I thought the games industry seemed really interesting as a kid in the 90s, but by that point it was an entirely different industry.

I really enjoyed games like Oblivion, The Sims 2, Skyrim that came out in the 2000s and early 2010s. The Sims 3 was also fun. But the next Elder Scrolls game will probably suck (I hope it doesn't but Starfield wasn't great,) and even Oblivion and Skyrim were technically dumbed down from Morrowind (but I didn't play that until after Oblivion, by that point was difficult to get into due to lack of voice acting etc.)

Microtransactions and splitting stuff into 3425235252 different packs everywhere. Focus is on making money so even if your product is the worst game in the series so far (The Sims 4,) it doesn't matter because it earns more money.

In the early 2010s the most interesting games I was aware of besides those that were just recreating classic games were weird artsy things that were purposefully surreal and people would refer to some of them as 'walking simulators.' Polarising genre. 'Are they even games?' other art games too (Journey, Flower, The Path, The Graveyard etc.) This became interesting because everything else had already been done and this was one of the only areas of experimentation (technically this too had been done but not very fleshed out.)

You had a few games like Goat Simulator which were more tongue in cheek (and hiding behind that,) and more recently you have Untitled Goose Game lol. You're more likely to find quirky indie games.

When we started working on this game, I think we considered the idea of a game about a goose that runs around hassling people a bit of a niche appeal. It turns out people have a lot of feelings about geese! I think it has a lot to do with how threatening they are, in a kind of mundane way – although we’ve never encountered them ourselves, I think we’d underestimated how many people had, and nearly everyone from the Northern Hemisphere that we’ve spoken to about the game has relayed their own stories of traumatic goose encounters. It seems like we’ve tapped into a relatively universal experience without meaning to.

I think a lot of people have experienced that at some point in their life. I don't really remember it in detail but I know once I was staying on a farm as a young child in a caravan and the geese there would apparently chase after me and my brother. I remember the farm, and I remember my parents talking about this. I even remember there were geese but don't really remember them aggressively chasing me or anything lol. I mostly find geese hilarious. Also there were other games with geese in I think in the rugrats game a goose steals the grandpa's teeth and then Chuckie ends up chasing the goose as part of a minigame. (I haven't played this since I was a kid but yeah it's Tommy not Chuckie you're playing as. You have to ride Spike the dog to chase after them.)

Your first objective in this level is to find Spike (1991). You start out in the playground and must find your way through a maze which leads you to Spike (1991) (1991). There are many dead ends in the maze and it is very easy to get lost if you've never played before. Also in your way will be several geese, which are hiding around some of the corners; you will lose health if you come into contact with them. Keep trying to find your way through the maze until you come to a wooden arch with a bench beyond it (also here is a cookie, which is helpful if you've lost any health). Progressing past this point will lead to the next section of the level.

This section of the level is played while riding on Spike (1991)'s back. Your objective is to follow the goose down the trail until you reach the shuffleboard court. There are several obstacles that you must jump over, including benches, tree trunks and fences.

When you get to the shuffleboard court, your objective changes yet again for the final part of the level: now you must throw pucks at the goose as he chases Chuckie around the court. Be careful with your aim, as it is possible to hit Chuckie. If this happens four times to hurt Chuckie, you have to start over when Tommy starts crying. Five successful hits on the goose will cause him to spit Lou's dentures out and you will win the level.

So the beginning part is kind of like the hog wild levels of Crash Bandicoot I think from what I remember.

The repressed geese trauma.

Octodad is another one I remember.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is an independent adventure video game developed and published by Young Horses. It is a sequel to the 2010 freeware game Octodad. The game consists of controlling the protagonist Octodad in completing chores typical of the mundane suburban father, but complicated by the fact that he is an octopus in disguise.

I actually contributed to the kickstarter lol but I don't think I ended up playing it. I did play the original which was hilarious.

From a design/creative perspective you don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. But it becomes more and more difficult to innovate and the failure rate increases. Then there's the stuff which everyone hates temporarily but later sees some appeal in when it's placed in a different time period/context. That's true of anything creative.

There's a kind of polarisation of the genre in general in the same way The Sims is seen as bad because 'it's not a game,' and 'girls like this' I remember the backlash to Gone Home. I see the wikipedia page below goes into that. I decided to play and review that game in 2014 I think. (Video is private now cause on an old channel lol.) It was OK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator

While these video game elements originated in the 1980s, people online began pejoratively referring to new games as walking simulators in the late 2000s, notably with Dear Esther.

The walking simulator elements are controversial due to purported lack of challenge, discontent of such games became viral in the mid-to-late 2010s among "hardcore" gamers. In other criticism, artistic aspects and emphasis on decision-making and morality are recognizable in them, and walking simulator elements remain popular.

The Stanley Parable was one of the most interesting examples of this I think and definitely inspired The Backrooms meme. But around that time (let's say 2015-2016 or so,) I mostly stopped paying attention to video games besides the few I still played from before.

Another example is Amnesia The Dark Descent. Horror works a lot better when you can't do anything. I found it scarier than any other game I'd played. But again some people found it boring.

This whole thing was incredibly stupid (but there was a lot of dumb culture war stuff going on in the early to mid 2010s surrounding video games that I cba going into. On both sides of the argument):

Whether to use the term or something else continues to be debated by developers and fans, with those in support pointing out the positive health and mental benefits of walking as a sign it does not have to be derogatory. Detractors characterize it as dismissive and condescending, relating it to other insults like "social justice warrior", although even its critics expressed a feeling of inevitability that it would continue to be used for the foreseeable future.[3]

Developers including Dan Pinchbeck, who co-created Dear Esther, reject this narrow definition in favor of a more expansive and inclusive one.[2] The 'walking sim' term was later embraced by fans, going so far as to be used as a description tag on the Steam digital distribution service. It is sometimes used in an ironic manner.[3]

Whether to use the term or something else continues to be debated by developers and fans, with those in support pointing out the positive health and mental benefits of walking as a sign it does not have to be derogatory. Detractors characterize it as dismissive and condescending, relating it to other insults like "social justice warrior", although even its critics expressed a feeling of inevitability that it would continue to be used for the foreseeable future.[3]

Led to this copypasta lol (people still get annoyed by this because they don't realise it's just a copy pasted thing):

No, you’re NOT a real gamer.

I’m so sick of all these people that tho k they’re gamers. No, you’re not. Most of you are not even close to being gamers. I see these people saying “I put well over 100 hours in this game, it’s great!” that’s nothing, most of us can easily put 300+ hours in all our games. I see people who only have a Nintendo Switch and claim to be gamers. Come talk to me when you pick up a PS4 controller then we be friends.

Also DEAR ALL WOMEN: Pokemon is not a real game. Animal Crossing is not a real game. The Sims is not a real game. Mario is not a real game. Stardew valley is not a real game. Mobile games are NOT.REAL.GAMES. put down the baby games and play something that requires challenge and skill for once.

Sincerely, all of the ACTUAL gamers.

And as I said before similar concepts to The Backrooms also existed in The Sims 2 a decade before:

Building Trap Doors since 1987. Hans' Trap Door Corp has had many recent complaints of missing employees in the prototype department. Watch your step while visiting!

More recently people have compared this to The Backrooms. That's the worst thing probably about being a creative person. 'This is fucking stupid' then suddenly it gains popularity.

Another post from reddit:

It makes me think that games we are creating for the future will lack innovation, creativity and heart because those who are brave enough to undertake a career in video games are constantly being reminded of job insecurity, small pay checks, horrendous hours, the list goes on. If we couple this with a publisher's desire to see more and more sequels (2011 had so many sequels) because they generate money, this creates an environment where innovation cannot thrive, the boundaries are further out of reach and the adjacent possible cannot exist: in fact – the adjacent possible is impossible.

The problem with innovation in gaming is that gaming is incredibly nostalgia-driven. Look at movies for a second: new movies with special effects that would've been impossible when we were kids (let's assume we're all mid-twenties) are well received because movies only take up two-hour chunks of our lives. Sure, we all have our old childhood favorites, but they don't really define who we are. We can sit down and enjoy The Dark Knight just as much as we did Batman Forever when we were young.

You can't do that with games. As kids, we put hundreds of hours into Zeldas and Final Fantasies and Marios and Sonics and Pokemons and the like. Those games were hugely defining of our experiences in the genre. We all pine for innovation in public forums, but secretly, most of us just want to play prettier versions of our childhood favorites over and over again. Look at how many times Ocarina of Time has been sold and resold and resold to an amazing reception.

Innovative games clash with our hardwired expectations of gaming, which is why, no, games are not a good environment for innovation, when the target audience is used to previous generations. I think innovation can be successful within the medium when it defines the gaming experience for new generations. For example, FFXIII could very well be the quintessential RPG experience for today's children.

And there's nothing wrong with that. That's why I hate when new parents on reddit are so proud of starting their kids out "the right way" with gaming on their childhood favorites. It's innocuous indoctrination, sure, but it's indoctrination nonetheless. It hurts the reception of innovation because we're raising the next generation with the same "things ain't what they used to be" mindset on which so many of us were raised.

Long story short, I think innovation does not currently work well in the video game industry, but I don't think it's the video game industry's fault. I think it's the players' fault for being generally closed-minded about new experiences that clash with what they know and love.

The part about movies is wrong, especially now. People are only rebooting the past, exploiting nostalgia, creating sequels, and not taking risks.

I think we've reached the deconstruction era where it becomes more fun to break stuff (like I do on YouTube,) or create some fan game that parodies something or takes some emotion people experienced and then focus on that. Like Escape PS1 Hagrid because Hagrid was creepy in those games. When you do that you kind of get away with doing crazy things like having several different game genres in one, and you never get famous enough to attract serious criticism either, you've incorporated nostalgia too and you're not pretending your work is supposed to be 'serious.' And if it's just a meme/joke/something to not take too seriously then that's not as bad.

Cowardly though.

The descontructing thing is something conservatives absolutely hate. It's also what a lot of people hate about 'post modernism' haha.



I think this lack of innovation, the poor response to change, combined with journalists just doing what they always do (encouraging people to get into fights,) led people to try and find people to blame. Knowing that everything has already been created before when it comes to art and storytelling also makes it impossible to creatively innovate in those domains. I think innovation is still happening in science.

Also people want stuff that makes them feel like they did when they were children (impossible of course,) they want fun and challenging gameplay and they want innovation and the creative/design/artistic side of the industry want to find outlets for that, and having something that achieves all of that and satisfies everything is very difficult. Even harder than with a movie and the film industry is having similar issues.

Part of the reason The Sims was so popular is it made failure fun and the roots of the game were in failure and crisis. Like initially a big inspiration was Will Wright losing his entire house in a forest fire. Also the dark sense of humour and lore. Eventually all those things were stripped away. Which is why among many other reasons The Sims 4 doesn't work well. It's not replacing this with anything equally compelling. They brought back the want and fear system a couple of years or so ago but it doesn't work well. It's poorly executed and immersion breaking. There are things the game does well and better though it's just the overall package which is worse.

[Ironman]

Happy New Year, career!
You are driving me crazy! L O L!!!

I reach 20 years in August ROFL