Cassidy

Bye, everyone. And thank you.

Whelp, Cohost shutting down, huh. Was worth a try I guess. What a shame.
Honestly, it’s not worth bothering with all the other links and stuff or whatever for me, since this was basically my only presence and I don’t have the time or energy to learn another site. Thanks for y’all who shared your stuff here.

I just read a post that awoke me like a sleeper agent hearing their activation phrase and wrote wayyyy too much, so I’m just going to dump it here instead of clogging it with an essay. That’s not going to stop me from being a huge pretentious twat on the internet, but I’ll yap about it here instead, at least.

I’m someone who struggles a lot buying commissions for TTRPGs, OCs, and stuff like that. I’m also one of the pickiest clients of all time. Here’s my thoughts:

One strategy that’s worked really well for me, being queer, is to stick to environments where I’m overqualified: Even if you’re an average fish, in a small pond, you look like a big one. This works as an excellent shield: Though I do have coworkers who come from backgrounds where being queer was not only socially reprehensible but a literal crime, what are they going to do about me? I do so much complex technical work that I just can’t be replaced for the wages the company’s hiring at, while they’re constantly humiliating themselves by failing at their most trivial responsibilities. I simply out-leverage them when push comes to shove (unless they try to kill me, which is a whole separate can of worms but unlikely in my circumstance).

I’m really happy that Age of Mythology: Retold was received so positively. Genuinely, that game was a huge part of my childhood. These sorts of games are plagued by rancid cash-grabby re-releases that never really go anywhere, so I was surprised that AoM: Retold is picking up a bit of steam. Granted, I don’t really expect to play it, other than maybe once or twice with my little brother as a nostalgia thing…

The last several works of writing that were good enough for me to share and harp on to my friends about have always taken the form of blasted cohost posts.

So, I’m not a great sport, right? But I manage. I recognize that there are lots of my friends I’d never play video games with for a variety of reasons. e.g.:

I love Pathologic so, so friggin’ much. I’ve given it a month to sit, after starting the game half a year ago, and it remains firmly my “best video game of all time”, beating out Outer Wilds, Darkwood, and Pacific Drive.

It was crunchy and tense. It tore right to the soft, vulnerable parts of my heart and lay them bare. I was thrown through a profound range of passionate and horrifying emotions, facing one of my lifelong phobias head on. It was spectacularly constructed, refracting inwards on itself in emergent scintillation. I felt and feel driven by its impact in a way media just doesn’t easily get to each other. I have the highest respect for Ice-Pick Lodge, as they seem to have for us.

I heard a lot of complaints that the game was too hard, but I dunno about that. The game succeed at its overwhelming impression of brutality, so much so that it can be utterly overwhelming. Fact of the matter is though, as a game so thoroughly infatuated with dis-empowerment, it makes the hellfire very entertaining. It’s not just practically difficult, either- it’s emotionally intense. It’s beautiful, it’s moody, and it was a downright threat to my way of life simply by virtue of being. Oh, and, uh… The game is finished. Being forced to play the original with minor variations thrice in a row was not exactly an asset, and they’ve done a good job consolidating the themes and ideas under the Haruspex*. Oh, and on top of that! The Haruspex’s life is not only thrice as compelling as before, it’s worth more than the sum of its parts! Rashomon is old news, anyway.

Hell, I’ve even incorporated some steppe language into my speech, making me somehow even more of a pretentious twat than I already am.

Play the remake, Pathologic 2, not the original or remaster. HBomb’s advice to skip the original and play the remake is on point**.

I’m really glad about the latest good financial news!

This week, VRChat rolled out changes limiting maximum download and uncompressed avatar sizes.

This has been… Controversial.

Conversation from discord, anonymized.

My brain is a peanut rattling around in a vacuous bone cage. I wasn’t built to process the beauty I’m constantly inundated with.

This is an incredible blessing, but it’s one I’ve developed almost no ability to appreciate. For one, it’s a sea where principally systems devoid of beauty organize beauty. And I’m no navigator. For another, as a rational actor, this beauty is fundamentally irrelevant to my day to day- I have not discovered a way to leverage this beauty in any capacity.

I’m cleaning my “Watch Later” playlist on YouTube, and I was surprised by the fact that I’m removing 95% of the videos on it. I look at a lot of it and it’s just… Trash, churned out not because it’s a thing that should exist but because it’s written by somebody who wants to be successful as a creative. I’m talking cooking videos, low-effort video essays, Age of Empires casts, and so on.

Before the pandemic, my list of essentials for travel was quaint. I got by on very little, and though I was drab, it worked.

But uh… Scheduling my first flight now in six years to go meet an online friend? My packing list is… Huge. It’s only now starting to dawn on me the price of being pretty.

Since AI Dungeon’s heyday, I’ve wondered about a better way to generate Content™. Usually, pondering this, I assume that the purpose of generated content in this domain is to adhere to a couple sets of strict standards a conventional author might like. But after reading this, I’m not so sure.

I had a really strange moment the other night hanging out with my pal Mari.

So it turns out that the VKET worlds weren’t deleted! They were just made private, which means that if you haaappen to have a direct link, then…

Having a weird brass craving right now.
I think it looks really good. In a lot of things, too! Not just like, jewelry, but antique-y looking household accessories n’ stuff.

This is a terrible thing to have develop right before going shopping.

Sacrificing livestock to Tupper for features: Group instance moderators restricting avatars based on performance characteristics per event attendee classification (staff vs. non-staff)!

I started using spotify for music recently at the recommendation of a friend, and while I strongly dislike how little indie music makes it to that platform, the Discord Rich Presence has lead to a nice interaction~

Yeah, I’m a vampyre… Can I bite you~?

I cannot think of a worse place to fall asleep after meditating. Truly the most unhinged, bad ideas- like, some real whoppers of buffoonery. That being said, visiting to pull someone out of there had a side effect of showing me this brilliant place!

https://vrclist.com/world/306545

Got a Tarot reading yesterday because a group of my friends was concerned about me and my recent actions. It was… Odd. I mean, my gut reaction was just… You know, the typical “this is ridiculous” energy, but…

Saying “ignorance is bliss” even about tomorrow’s weather, you forego your umbrella

Has no right to slap so hard for a friggin’ visual novel OP song

The process of alteration, very innocently,
is a fiction that deceives even the gods,
proceeding towards that place of promise

And that’s another one altogether

sigh
mstdn.social became, for me, fundamentally useless as both a social platform and as a way to engage with my favorite artists. Out of sheer ideological merit, I figured I’d give it a chance, but… Reading about the Fedipact and the fundamental motives for it, there’s just… A failure. A sad failure, in terms of technical and legal prowess and commitment to making anything better, even over the years I’ve been there.

Huh, looks like I got an account on this website! Best user interface I’ve seen so far, wonder how it’ll hang out.

Twitter will probably be my main until folks decide to migrate, and every place has it’s issues, but hey. Here’s to another one.