Part of my 2025 mental and physical health plan has been building and landscaping my little slice of land to go from an unfenced hillside of lawn to a walled and terraced garden.

Removed the sod and got a dumptruck load of granite stones at the start of the year. I am building using a dry stone technique and moving it all by hand on purpose. Currently finishing the main terraces and wall base, beginning raised garden beds now. Every day I move a couple stones into place and it feels like an accomplishment that is quite literally building on itself.

I look forward to seeing how it (continues to) come together.

The first one was fairly clever in that they had probably 50 years of collective ideas and inspiration to work off of. It’s a story that needed to push no boundaries and hold to established tropes, with no expectations because it was a ride: perfect for Disney.

Now when Disney gets their hands on an established franchise full of expectations…

My history is lacking on the conflict but IIRC the area was ‘run’ as a monarchy under British rule. The monarchy was Hindu but the population was largely Muslim.

So you had a local population in conflict with a ruling class inheriting being a mechanism of the colonial apparatus.

Namely: there became another human in our lives. Our children became our central focus in our lives.

Being a family is a different dynamic and being a parent is a significant role in life. It is a relentless onslaught of needs and chores for someone that is neither of you. Babies don’t know boundaries and that has a very real effect on their caregivers.

If you’re birthing a baby: be aware of post partem, don’t be afraid to seek help, talk about it, and you deserve a chance to breathe regularly.

If someone is birthing your baby: giving that someone alone time with themselves (usually by having time with said baby yourself) is one of the most important devices for bringing you all together sans conflict.

Essentially if a mother can get the mental load of parenting off for a day–a few hours even–there should not be any (new) trouble acheiving or maintaining intimacy.

Appearance, story, setting, and style are all mostly secondary to the mechanics and design of the game.

Strip away the appearance of metroidvanias and you have a platforming maze with gated areas unlocked through progression.

The overall maze of the game should ideally be enough to get lost in. Whether the world is going to be procedurally generated or predesigned, or some combination should be figured out early on. Even if progression is linear the access to and pathway through the maze should likely not be a straight line. It is very common to see or view inaccessible late game areas in the early game, for example.

The gates of the game traditionally come in the form of new movement options. The reliables are usually: (double) jumping, running, slide/rolling, climbing, swimming/sinking, flying/gliding and so on. Choosing how and where the player may access these is important. This is to say: player movement is the game.

Another common ‘key’ to gates is something that allows the player to defeat an enemy or boss they could not previously defeat, or otherwise access a new area. A notable example being metroid’s ice beam. Freezing enemies gives the player new platforming options: and new movement in the game.

Good new metroidvanias are aware of what has been done before and try to innovate on those tropes.

Anxiety, easily.

Which version of Skyrim will Skyblivion require?

The proper response to being offered something to read, indeed.

I never really used Reddit, but I read an article during the API debacle in 2023 that mentioned Lemmy so I gave it a shot.

There are workgroups at my job that use it as acknowledgement and for voting consensus as we are allowed to attend meetings camera and mic off.

That was kind of the critical issue going on. There was this whole movement to get some kind of course change on Israel. Biden made it clear there was a higher chance of Trump changing course on Israel. Kamala insisted she would not change course from Biden.

It really didn’t work out for their campaign.

There are whole portions of red states that currently lack OBGYNs. And the police are patrolling the roads for pregnant people that might appear to be leaving the state to see an OBGYN.

It’s been that way since 2022 though.

(Reference: Idaho.)

It’s $70. There has been little appetite for $60 games as of late, but from what it sounds like Avowed at least has $70 bucks worth of time and stuff. Whereas many $60 titles aren’t worth their sale prices–its not a high bar.

A $40 or less Avowed on sale next year will do well I predict.

I went to a wedding where they played Bittersweet Symphony as she walked down the aisle.

It always felt slightly offputting.

…And then the groom’s mom made a speech about how love was like a dog, which had some sweet sentiments about loyalty in there. But also… vaguely shady.

I prefer me the multiplayer environment of Fromsoft games where it’s just absolute degeneracy and your own damn pride on the line. Where the sweat and the stupid blurs.

I didn’t see the original comment nor do I need to, but ethnic nationalism, the ‘blood and soil’ kind of nationalism, seeks to forge nationality into the same framework as race. Approaching nation states from this perspective is effectively racist, inherently so.

This is compared to civic nationalism where commitment to national values matters. So one could argue that without clarification it is a stretch, but at the same time… it’s usually pretty clear which version is meant.

The packmule in Dungeon Siege was a good integrated inventory mechanic.

A good game knows to explain game mechanics with lore. Games that break the 4th wall and by knowing they’re games tend to struggle to be immersive. It can really obliterate environmental storytelling too.

I find it interesting four of the top 10 sellers are Free To Play.

I have a screenshot from a time in an MMORPG where a member died before they could do a global event quest they’d always wanted to do. There was a player-driven server-wide memorial event where her character was run through the quest by friends so that her name could be honored by a global broadcast message.

The game and the servers are now gone, but that screenshot of everyone holding torches for her character on that day still means a lot to me 20 years on.

So yeah, I think a steam account can fit that billing as a memorial.

When the first major migration from reddit happened and people didn’t yet know about mod logs there was a whole lot of blatant misrepresentation of what was or wasn’t said that got someone banned by an instance. A lot of hastily deleted comments and accounts as well. So tales of tankie moderation are usually in need of a hefty grain of salt.