Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

Planescape: Torment might also be a possibility off the top of my head.

 

i keep coming back to that dumb article hoping to find a point that isn't shit but I can't and that makes me sad, bc meditations on the nature of game narrative as often restrictive to the player, the nature of game mechanics being often somewhat restrictive just bc coding is hard and true reflection of absolute freedom is like impossible, and the fact that most games still like advertise ultimate freedom is... it's a thing to talk about. it's interesting. The fact that ludic and narrative contracts exist that can be in opposition of eachother is itself something of an argument for low-to-no-narrative sandbox games like Minecraft, like Rimworld. Games prioritizing gameplay over narrative aren't even that uncommon it turns out! And yeah, it's a way to avoid ludonarrative dissonance if you don't really have any narrative to be dissonant with. Same as you can avoid it by having as little ludic mechanics that could cause dissonance and going at it on a 'only include what is 100% necessary' basis.
But any criticism of genre creep and hating rpg mechanics being tossed in games where they have no business being for the sake of hobbling progression and then selling people timesavers for real money, I love true RPGs and Action-RPGs. I love fucking with numbers and then being swept away by a compelling narrative and falling in love with characters and feeling so invested in the decisions i make that I physically get adrenaline bursts.
I love ludonarrative consistency too much to give either side up. And I hate that we live in a world where people are so used to the idea of certain games involving grind that they see any play as work, as a series of tasks to be completed, rather than what it is. Non-productive expression of society.
(Also as a sidenote I'm aware ludonarrative consonance isn't the sole purview of RPGs, in fact they're often some of the worst offenders (LOOKING AT YOU RENEGADE SHEPARD IN MASS EFFECT) because there's so many contact points where things can get messy.
One game I love right now is not an RPG at all, aside from vague borrowed traits from MMORPGs due to the MMO angle, and Destiny 2 is... very very consistant about the ludonarrative. not so much the narrative in itself, but that's an issue with global worldstates and episodic progression of story in some parts of the game and not in others and an entirely different kettle of worms)

 

*sidles up hopefully holding stack of notes for rant about two linear JRPGs that decided to talk about the tyranny of predestination, one of which understood the inherent irony of this and one of which really, really, hilariously did not*

 

Would anyone be interested in streaming Drawful 2/Trivia Murder party with me around 3 pm et?

 

I'm also looking for people to host on twitch, if you're ok with that send me a message on twitch.tv/oozeclues

 

Well, you can't just say that and leave it at that. :P

 

Let's just say Suikoden Tierkreis yelling "WE WON'T KNOW UNTIL WE TRY" every three seconds while having more railroady hopeless boss fights than literally any other game I've ever played (a couple of which I actually WON the first time I played, but the game insisted I didn't) somehow got even funnier after playing Tales of the Abyss, a game where getting rid of presdestination breaks the dialogue subtitles.

 

My stream is starting in about 15 minutes at https://www.twitch.tv/oozeclues if anyone is interested in playing some jackbox games.

 

I can’t seem to go live and I’m not sure why. I’ve clicked the go live button a couple times and it still says I’m offline.

edit streams off until I can figure out what’s going on sorry.

 

bruh, ironically this is basically the ending statement to my paper about Red Dead Redemption.

 

a question about how other brains process things; when you walk into a room that say, has clutter or things out of place, how does that generally come to your attention and how does it affect you??

I have the thing (i thiiink it can be ADD associated but I flunk out of quite qualifying for ADD) where when I look at say, a cluttered desk, it takes an extra step for me to really process what the individual items in it are, and even more to find everything of a distinct category. Say I want to clean all the trash off my desk, I'll grab everything I can see, turn around to throw it away, turn back and notice three more things, and then usually notice one more thing I missed several minutes later unless I make myself literally go through every single item on the desk.
In a larger environment like a living room, unless there is literally no room on any surface I'm probably not going to really notice if something is left out, and if there is it doesn't really affect how i feel about the room and i am just. puzzled at how this process goes differently for people for whom things being non cluttered is important

basically. in my house share, housemate is insisting on putting a table and plants between the clothes drying racks and the rest of the living room so you can't see them when sitting at the couches, and is insisting on a shoe rack that has like, closing shelves so we can also not see any shoes in the living room and while i'm only marginally annoyed that this means i have to add a few small steps to what i do when i get home, i am genuinely baffled as to how this could possibly be important enough to insist upon

 

@IvyLB
It's just that extra bit beautiful in a game where the cartoonishly evil antagonists are defined by their belief that everything is predetermined, a religious belief that is treated as self-evidently both abhorrent and absurd by the narrative (the MCs never doubt in the slightest that it's untrue even when they repeatedly predict natural disasters), and which is, metatextually, completely correct. :::')))

 

oh that is just gorgeous on a story telling level and could be so tasty if treated just right

 

The game appears to be blissfully unaware of the contradiction, which just renders it hilarious instead.

 

I find clutter to be inherently distracting and it makes it more difficult to function with my add, so and out of sight out of mind approach to organizing is preferable and makes me less anxious

That said, out of sight out of mind also makes it more likely I'll forget to ever go through it, and I don't really have a solution for that part

 

I find an overall level of organization to be subtly mentally pleasing. I’d compare it to a mood buff in the Sims 3. A really messy environment may give me a slight negative effect, but it’s not at all make or break unless I’m already doing pretty poorly in other ways. Knowing I don’t have to navigate around clutter on the floor at night on the way to the bathroom or other things that actually serve as even minor physical impediments make a surprising amount of difference.

I don’t actively notice clutter if I’m expecting it. It’s not that I don’t know it’s there, I just don’t really see it most of the time unless I actively look with the goal of evaluating for clutter, then I can see the level of clutter clear as day. Otherwise it’s a collection of individual objects that mostly aren’t relevant to whatever I’m doing. If one of them happens to be something I like, I’m much more likely to notice when I’m looking at it and be glad to see it. My attention will also catch on anything I feel requires special attention to maintain my standards of basic habitability, like a bug or a dirty dish. If I look at usual surroundings through a camera, my evaluation of clutter may be different, probably because it actually looks different than I’m used to that way.

My surroundings are currently quite cluttered and it’s probably having a slight negative effect on my overall mood and how much energy it takes to navigate my environment, physically or even visually to a lesser extent. I’m hoping I can muster energy and focus to tidy soon.

(A couple years ago I did a commiseration webcam tour of bedrooms with a disabled and ill friend. As much as it feels bad to have someone else say damn that’s a hell of a mess, it was actually pretty amazing to hear that followed up with something like, I know exactly what that’s like, here check this out!)

I actually dislike when everything is too tidy. It feels slightly unpleasant imo. I like just a little mess. I would probably mix very poorly with someone who likes everything just so, or can’t bear to see something that reminds them of a chore, though I can sympathize with the idea.

Now that I’m thinking about it, as much as I understand the appeal of the thought of keeping the mess out of sight, I very much dislike having any additional visual and physical barrier with anything I interact with regularly. Putting stuff away has never made a lot of sense to me the way most people seem to mean. If I’m gonna need my toothpaste more than once every day, why would I want to put it where I can’t see it instead of neatly beside the sink where I’ll be reminded and can easily grab it? Why would I do that with pretty much anything I don’t want to actually store? Drawers are basically the abyss.

One of my friends, an actual miracle worker, helped me set up my closet when I first moved into the dorms at college. I had such an easy time maintaining the system, in retrospect probably not because it was fresh since that rarely helps by itself or my life would be solved. Probably because it was completely oriented around making things I would most frequently care about finding, like my favorite tshirts, very easy to see and reach, and dirty laundry, usually the least useful and desirable thing in the closet, somewhat but not completely hidden, which put something I mostly wouldn’t process anyway in the blind spot. There was no door on the closet and I never got around to hanging a curtain, which in retrospect makes perfect sense because it would have made things slightly worse for me specifically. It was already about as close to perfect as it could reasonably get.

Good grief, I think I’ve been going about organizing all wrong. Which is probably related to how it only sort of ever works. Wow, um. I obviously need to do some more thinking.

 

It occurred to me today that Redwall (the first novel, not the series) is effectively a spitefic of the sacking of Lindesfarne.

 

I enjoyed reading Lord of the Flies well enough even if it was a school assignment, but I liked it a lot better after I learned it was something of a response to an existing book about schoolchildren being marooned on an island and having a successful time of it, in no small part because of the superiority of their Victorian sensibilities. I very much appreciate someone taking the time to write Fuck No: A Novel.

 

So hey I just listened to all* of Wolf 359 in the last week and it was real good and the old Wolf thread hasn't had a post since Aug 2018 so I'm putting this here

Spoiler: Massive series spoilers

1) I'm annoyed at how much I liked Doctor Hilbert and Jacobi,
2) Isabel Lovelace is a sweet, funny, empathic person who cares deeply about her crew and then she was betrayed and fell into the heart of a star and went God-Tier was reforged by its light into The Unstoppable Captain Lovelace and that's both very sad and, like, super badass.
3) Maxwell's death was unfortunate because if a sympathetic character can be dug out of Jacobi then one can definitely be dug out of Maxwell but also I had a lot of trouble telling her voice apart from other people's so I don't miss her as much as maybe I should.
4) When I was earlier in the series I asked someone if anything nice would ever happen to Doug Eiffel or if it would just be a continued series of Bad Things and they never answered, and now I understand why.
5) Kepler helped once they were like 95% of the way to the end of the series but also he probably shoulda been tossed out the airlock day 1.
6) I think maybe we could have had, like, 30% less dramatic speeches but also its an audio drama what the fuck else would it have
7) It was a good time and I'm full of emotions
8) I haven't mentioned Eiffel, Hera, or Minkowsky because my love of them should be obvious and I have adopted them all.

*I skipped some of the mini-episodes and one or two of the specials because I needed to know what was happening in the story right the hell now.

 

out of curiosity, I found the ad my boss made for the part time receptionist he's looking for to replace my position now that I'm full time

the standards are, like, way higher than when I answered the ad ^^; which like, could potentially be good I guess bc it'd be nice to have someone else who can keep up, but also like... I hope it doesn't mean it'll be months before we find someone, because getting through the holidays understaffed is gonna suck ass