christmas sayohina | art by xin (blueramen) | twitter

it sucks that we don't know what to do it sucks that we can't fix things it sucks that so many others are hurt it sucks that the future is impossible it sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks-

it's actually really weird to me that a lot of adults don't seem to remember the worst bits of being a child. were you not horribly aware of when adults were talking down to you as a child? don't you remember how little autonomy you were allowed, even when it came to things that seemed pretty harmless? don't you remember the times when adults would seemingly be assholes to you for no reason? even if you had nice and reasonable parents, didn't you ever have teachers or other adults in power who treated you disrespectfully? didn't it sting no matter how people justified it?

especially when I was a teenager, it seemed obvious to me & to most of my peers when an adult wasn't treating us with respect. you could almost smell it, in certain classrooms. there would be this palpable, shifting undercurrent of teenage dissatisfaction whenever some teachers started talking. and it made a lot of the kids act out! which of course made the teachers try to exert their power, which never worked because nobody respected them, which made them get more draconian, etc.

as a teen, I didn't really get why my peers and I seemingly had a superhuman sense for when an adult was on a power trip. but now I think I get it. kids are systematically denied autonomy, respect, and consistently have the validity of their experiences denied. like, flat-out. they're a vulnerable class of people made even more vulnerable by their lack of societal rights. being disrespected as a kid is so frequent that I would say it's a defining experience for most children. is it any wonder they tend to pick up on when an adult doesn't see them as worth listening to?

so yeah, of course a ton of kids want to be treated "like an adult." to them, that's synonymous with being treated like a human being worth listening to. it's up to you, as an adult, to understand that wish for what it is, and behave accordingly. you don't gotta be a child psychologist. you don't gotta be perfect at it. all you have to do is remember how painful adult disrespect could be when you were a kid & do your best to act with some compassion.

people love visual novels they just have to get tricked into reading them

Yuri Espoir - Mai Naoi

English version translated by Caroline Wong and published by Tokyopop

oh wow i never posted this

Eeping

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

Thinking about sexual themes in yuri manga and how too many of both the genre's fans and detractors act like sexual is the opposite of wholesome, somehow, or that too much sexuality is unwholesome or detrimentally perverse or gets in the way of a good story, somehow, and also the precise definition of "lesbian fetish porn" and how people like. Don't seem to think of occasional explicit sex scenes in stories as "porn"

I might write an essay about this

The Witch from Mercury by @okurasato

source

Itsumi Toudou was the lesbian equivalent of those 4chan posts that start out with ">be straight male" before describing the gayest shit imaginable.

ayane

Protip: you wanna do this shit, you do it in the comments of our YouTube videos, where I expect this kind of garbage anyway, and can ignore you.

joystick system diaries - June 29, 2023 - storytelling and open world games

Okay so, I (Audrey) was going to make this into, like, a video thing with a video format, so that we could have something up this month. However, I just now realized that I fucking hate it. I hate the idea of editing this brain soup into a video. I hated reading this out loud. I hated listening to our voice reading this out loud. I fucking hate the whole thing.

I fucking hate everything that we have written lately. Everything we write is bad. I hate it. I just want to be rid of it

so. Here! I guess. I'm getting rid of it. Here's the whole written thing. It's about how Fallout New Vegas is actually not all that great. I guess reblog it if you think Fallout New Vegas is not actually all that great. Or don't! Meow.

I think you should give us money on Patreon or Ko-fi so that we hopefully write a little more (and one day, better?) while eating a little more and being slightly less mentally ill

Lately, we’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a game that a lot of people like. It’s a game that a lot of trans women like. It’s also a game that a lot of trans women do not like. One of those trans women happens to think that they're not sure if they like Fallout New Vegas, but that maybe, Fallout New Vegas is boring!

I finished a playthrough of it a few weeks ago, and found that the whole thing was just not very, whelming. It has walking, it has dialogue, it has an ending. It has a bunch of tasks that you can do, which leads to more walking, and more dialogue. And, sure, the tasks are well organized, in a sensible manner for this type of game- you start by getting an objective to go to a place and find a person, by meeting a person, who refers you to a person, who refers you to another place with another objective and that place takes you to another person, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the last person, one of these fuckers, who gives you the last place, Hoover Dam, with the last objective, shoot some of these other fuckers with these other people.

So, sure, it works as a video game that takes you from thing to do to thing to do without leaving you scratching your head, but this doesn’t really make for a story. It makes a bunch of pieces of a story that you can kinda pull together. I guess. So well. That’s why after blitzing through the game to get to the independent route and having the game pat me on the back going like, “oooh, good job! you won!” Just sorta rang like… “excuse me?”

What’s the point of open world games, anyway. Why does everything have to be open world. Like, medium open world, like a semi-open overworld that just, offers an intentionally designed explorable but eminently manageable place that exists to connect the gameplay and provide a little narrative context, but doesn't awkwardly stretch on into infinity. Sonic Adventure, Psychonauts, Yakuza. That kind of open world is nice. But the big open worlds that are just like, hey, here’s a huge field, huge city, huge place that is just huge for the sake of being huge. Why do we need this?

I don’t know, if people enjoy sandbox playgrounds, I guess, whatever- but I can say this much, and it’s just, open world games aren’t a great vehicle for storytelling. How the fuck are you supposed to tell any kind of coherent story when the way it’s presented is as dialogue nuggets dripfed to players as they fuck around? Like, Sonic Frontiers, for instance, is what I’d say is one of the few examples of this done well, and it has some really good dialogue written by Ian Flynn, one of the writers of the Sonic comic books everyone likes. This good dialogue is not really well serviced by the structure of this game, where Sonic is ostensibly under a time pressure to go rescue everyone but can in actuality fuck around infinitely. Like, a lot of the best bits of dialogue are from idle dialogue you get standing around, but no one is going to just stand around in this game unless they’re specifically waiting for the dialogue. So. The way you’re going to get a good story in this game is by, y’know, not fucking around. Going and doing the objectives. And I guess, fishing, so that you can unlock the egg memos, that Big the Cat inexplicably has. So.

So yeah, Sonic Frontiers, cool game, good story, and the open world is made tolerable by having Sonic, be fast. I like the Sonic video game. But this could’ve pretty easily been presented in a Sonic Adventure 1998 but updated, format, with a world that was only as big as it needed to be, and discrete memorable stages, like, y’know, a regular 3D Sonic game, and that would’ve been cool, but instead it’s, big field. And now the next game, probably, has to be big field. Except maybe the Generations/Forces asset use in those cyberspace stages will get itself replaced with some new stages, or at least, like, new assets for new stage themings, and that’d be nice.

Um, what else has happened lately? We’ve been watching a lot of anime and reading manga, I guess. We’ve been watching a lot of movies. We watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. We watched Across the Spider-Verse, and it was great and everything. I have mildly complex feelings about the spider-people being cop kids from cop families, and the flag on the wall owned by one of the cop kids with the cop dad leading everyone to mass headcanon her as trans, but y’know what, whatever. I can wait to talk about that.

We watched Bound. That was cool. That movie’s got a couple lesbians in it. Literally a couple, of them, y’know.

Oh, and also, we’ve been reading a few really good yuri manga. So, y’know what, I think I’m going to write about those later.

Might make this a series. Maybe. We’ll see.

Y’know, y’know what’s what, with the Patreon thing, and the Ko-fi thing, and with how we always need money, so I’m just going to, skip that. This time. Check the description or the comments or whatever.

Bye.

Oh, um, setting aside what I said about New Vegas, our friend, colleague, and unofficial teacher, Talen Lee, wrote a post about New Vegas. It’s a nice interesting little piece that talks about the value of memes. Okay. Bye for real now.

Reblogging to spite this jackass who went out of their way to dig up a 10 month old blog post and yell at me

joystick system diaries - June 29, 2023 - storytelling and open world games

Okay so, I (Audrey) was going to make this into, like, a video thing with a video format, so that we could have something up this month. However, I just now realized that I fucking hate it. I hate the idea of editing this brain soup into a video. I hated reading this out loud. I hated listening to our voice reading this out loud. I fucking hate the whole thing.

I fucking hate everything that we have written lately. Everything we write is bad. I hate it. I just want to be rid of it

so. Here! I guess. I'm getting rid of it. Here's the whole written thing. It's about how Fallout New Vegas is actually not all that great. I guess reblog it if you think Fallout New Vegas is not actually all that great. Or don't! Meow.

I think you should give us money on Patreon or Ko-fi so that we hopefully write a little more (and one day, better?) while eating a little more and being slightly less mentally ill

Lately, we’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a game that a lot of people like. It’s a game that a lot of trans women like. It’s also a game that a lot of trans women do not like. One of those trans women happens to think that they're not sure if they like Fallout New Vegas, but that maybe, Fallout New Vegas is boring!

I finished a playthrough of it a few weeks ago, and found that the whole thing was just not very, whelming. It has walking, it has dialogue, it has an ending. It has a bunch of tasks that you can do, which leads to more walking, and more dialogue. And, sure, the tasks are well organized, in a sensible manner for this type of game- you start by getting an objective to go to a place and find a person, by meeting a person, who refers you to a person, who refers you to another place with another objective and that place takes you to another person, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the last person, one of these fuckers, who gives you the last place, Hoover Dam, with the last objective, shoot some of these other fuckers with these other people.

So, sure, it works as a video game that takes you from thing to do to thing to do without leaving you scratching your head, but this doesn’t really make for a story. It makes a bunch of pieces of a story that you can kinda pull together. I guess. So well. That’s why after blitzing through the game to get to the independent route and having the game pat me on the back going like, “oooh, good job! you won!” Just sorta rang like… “excuse me?”

What’s the point of open world games, anyway. Why does everything have to be open world. Like, medium open world, like a semi-open overworld that just, offers an intentionally designed explorable but eminently manageable place that exists to connect the gameplay and provide a little narrative context, but doesn't awkwardly stretch on into infinity. Sonic Adventure, Psychonauts, Yakuza. That kind of open world is nice. But the big open worlds that are just like, hey, here’s a huge field, huge city, huge place that is just huge for the sake of being huge. Why do we need this?

I don’t know, if people enjoy sandbox playgrounds, I guess, whatever- but I can say this much, and it’s just, open world games aren’t a great vehicle for storytelling. How the fuck are you supposed to tell any kind of coherent story when the way it’s presented is as dialogue nuggets dripfed to players as they fuck around? Like, Sonic Frontiers, for instance, is what I’d say is one of the few examples of this done well, and it has some really good dialogue written by Ian Flynn, one of the writers of the Sonic comic books everyone likes. This good dialogue is not really well serviced by the structure of this game, where Sonic is ostensibly under a time pressure to go rescue everyone but can in actuality fuck around infinitely. Like, a lot of the best bits of dialogue are from idle dialogue you get standing around, but no one is going to just stand around in this game unless they’re specifically waiting for the dialogue. So. The way you’re going to get a good story in this game is by, y’know, not fucking around. Going and doing the objectives. And I guess, fishing, so that you can unlock the egg memos, that Big the Cat inexplicably has. So.

So yeah, Sonic Frontiers, cool game, good story, and the open world is made tolerable by having Sonic, be fast. I like the Sonic video game. But this could’ve pretty easily been presented in a Sonic Adventure 1998 but updated, format, with a world that was only as big as it needed to be, and discrete memorable stages, like, y’know, a regular 3D Sonic game, and that would’ve been cool, but instead it’s, big field. And now the next game, probably, has to be big field. Except maybe the Generations/Forces asset use in those cyberspace stages will get itself replaced with some new stages, or at least, like, new assets for new stage themings, and that’d be nice.

Um, what else has happened lately? We’ve been watching a lot of anime and reading manga, I guess. We’ve been watching a lot of movies. We watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. We watched Across the Spider-Verse, and it was great and everything. I have mildly complex feelings about the spider-people being cop kids from cop families, and the flag on the wall owned by one of the cop kids with the cop dad leading everyone to mass headcanon her as trans, but y’know what, whatever. I can wait to talk about that.

We watched Bound. That was cool. That movie’s got a couple lesbians in it. Literally a couple, of them, y’know.

Oh, and also, we’ve been reading a few really good yuri manga. So, y’know what, I think I’m going to write about those later.

Might make this a series. Maybe. We’ll see.

Y’know, y’know what’s what, with the Patreon thing, and the Ko-fi thing, and with how we always need money, so I’m just going to, skip that. This time. Check the description or the comments or whatever.

Bye.

Oh, um, setting aside what I said about New Vegas, our friend, colleague, and unofficial teacher, Talen Lee, wrote a post about New Vegas. It’s a nice interesting little piece that talks about the value of memes. Okay. Bye for real now.