8/28/2023 (exciting addition)
Finished a Terraria playthrough (classic For The Worthy) a couple days ago. I found the Wall of Flesh fight to be very difficult, and everything post-plantera to be really easy. After I got Titanium Armor, the Twins were easy, and every boss after that wasn't really all that tough, in general. I kind of wish I'd gone for more content; maybe next time I play solo I will try for a harder difficulty, so I'm forced to interact with the post-golem content? Eg. Duke Fishron, Empress of Light, Pumpkin and Frost moons, Betsy. Sadly, the Lunatic Cultist is the easiest fight ever, so I always feel inclined to skip to pillars and Moon Lord rather than play through the game's nicher content.
Despite my minor complaints, I love Terraria and playing through it. I hope people still play Terraria in 50 years. Both because I don't want to be alone, and because that would mean people are still playing old games, and still enjoying them, which I think would be good for society. Once finished, games are extremely easy and cheap to distribute--why not keep people playing the ones we already have?
Towards that end, I will always support libraries opening programs where they distribute games just like they distrubute books. Old games deserve to be free, and easy to get. Emulators are cool, but libraries do it the best.
8/28/2023
Have updated the front page to be sillier. I stopped updating this site because, as you might tell from the previous post, I was taking things a little bit too seriously, and was not having fun. I want to change that, because my friend is ALSO making a neocites account now, and hell if I'm letting hers be more fun and cool than mine is :P
2/18/2023
There’s a sense that I can only post a blog when I have something profound to say. That, should I write whatever, whenever, the overall quality of my website will decline, diluted. That the perfect website - and I want this to be the perfect website, vain as that is - has no need for bad posts. That, yknow, too many posts which end up as “that” repetitions will perhaps begin to show themselves for their lack of varying sentence structure. If I can even get to “that” repetitions.
Which is true, objectively. It’s also massively unhelpful. One does not create good art and analysis without first creating bad art and analysis, and making a lot of it.
Heck, even the post I made about Antimatter Dimensions, which I liked a lot, I did not know the ending to before I came to it naturally. I started writing that without any indication that it wouldn’t just end up meaningless. But I started writing that at 11pm, because that’s when my inhibitions are low enough that I stop caring about doing things well and care more about doing something.
I feel like a proper conclusion would go against the point of this post. I’m going to go sleep. It’s 11pm.
1/18/2023
A friend inspired me to write a poem. I do not know how good it is, but this is my website and I get to force you to read my poetry
it's hard for me to write about shoes
i want to write
about the people that wear them
their collective steps paving the way to shoes
shoes shoes shoes shoes
even the most important people wear shoes
they wear the same shoes as everyone else
you can buy them at the store
walk a mile in their shoes
and nothing will change
so why do i keep imagining
the grandeur, the recognition shoes shoes shoes shoes
they
wear out, after a few months
and it's always hard to choose a new one
(they are never the same)
some people shoes shoes shoes
their aglets remind me
of the caps on our DNA
the end-replication problem states
that you cannot replace an aglet forever
yet the shoe itself is what gives out first
and i do not like choosing a new one
(i do not like being wroes shoes shoes shoes shoes
shoes
what are shoes if not to be walked in
if not to be ran in
if not to be worn out
discarded. burned. learned from
but i fear having been wrong
(about shoes)
1/11/2023
Maybe I should try to fast-forward to the part of my essay (essay? badly-formatted wiki?) where I'm able to say things I believe rather than things that I imagine to be non-indicitave of my politics. I don't want to have to define everything or give a perfect strategy (towards what, neutrality?) before giving actual thoughts. I came here to put down my thoughts, not to dance around the idea of objective truth. Maybe i've just chosen a hard format to write an essay in - though i'm going to stick to it. I love the wonder of clicking through links to get to more thoughts, in seemingly infinite directions. That's what made me want to make this in the first place.
1/7/2023
I’ve been playing Antimatter Dimensions a lot lately, which is pretty objectively not a good game. It is not particularly rewarding moment-to-moment, you don’t really do anything, and the main draw of the game is just how it manages to keep itself structured around anything at all as your numbers go exponential over and over again. Yet, hearing that it now has an ending (an accomplishment most idle games don’t attempt), I picked it up again. I joked to a friend that my winter break had been preemptively ruined by it getting an update - and I wasn't wrong.
I don’t think idle games are necessarily bad; I’ve enjoyed a couple, i.e. Universal Paperclips and Spaceplan, but both of those dared to have themes and quick pacing while Antimatter Dimensions has neither, falling into the same pattern most idle games do where, if they have any story, it refuses to take itself seriously, because it’s an idle game. The story of an idle game, even in Universal Paperclips, must have the punchline be the fact that you’re playing an idle game.
Yet the number goes up and I feel some sense of accomplishment at the fact that reaching an eternity point takes me roughly 1 second where the first one took me 11.24 days (of playtime). The sense of momentum is addictive, I’ll admit.
Extra Credits did an episode on idle games in one of their earlier seasons saying that it appeals to the sense of multitasking, but that doesn’t particularly apply when I’m just sitting there optimizing my gameplay. There’s a joke in the climbing community, I’ve been told, that there are three types of fun: fun while you’re doing it, fun after you’ve done it, and neither fun while you are doing it nor when you are done. Idle games fall into the second category, ostensibly, but… am I really proud of my accomplishments? I played Realm Grinder for dozens of hours, yet scarcely remember its mechanics, much less than I remember any other activity I'd poured dozens of hours into. My total time playing idle games, throughout my life, easily totals a thousand hours. Wasted, by most accounts. So many books I could have read. Two on my counter right now.
Then why did I come back?
Community? The first online forum where I really interacted with others, back when I was young enough to use six-digit passwords, was the comment section of Clicker Heroes on the Armor Games website. There’s a story that idle games were invented for this, that they exist only because people wanted something to do while using chatrooms. Yet Kongregate, the main site to do that on, has shut down and idle games prevail on devices where chatting while playing is impractical at best. Besides, I didn’t use them all that much, after graduating from Armor Games and six-character passwords alike.
But could it still be that? Maybe not the community itself, but to that air of… playfulness?Idle games give a community of people who are actively playing and developing something silly. There’s no point to it. Number goes up, and we celebrate. Is that not enticing? A world where that’s possible?
Idle games feel surreal to me in a way that games like Chess and Melee do. There’s no ceiling, no limit, and always something to do. When I read 17776, part of the reason it appealed to me is because it treated football like an incremental game, one that lasts forever, and promised a version of humanity where you can just do anything you want, forever. In that way, maybe idle games are closer to that one guy in the Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles who drives a non-functional steering wheel on an elevator. It’s dumb, and pointless, and that’s what makes it fun and optimistic. Maybe someday we’ll just optimize whatever for eternity.
I think that’s what idle games are to me. 20XX. lol.
1/4/2023
To be honest it’s hard to write anything to continue my essay without it feeling… arbitrary. Like, who am I to try to define anything, especially when I'm trying to make it punchy and convincing without really using anecdotes or evidence. I suppose this is a natural result of my views expressed in the first segment of the essay, where I say that one’s political views are fairly arbitrary. Maybe I went by that point too fast, but I wanted to keep momentum. I’m trying to make the whole thing grandiose and exciting but that’s hard to do with such a big topic where I feel like I am constantly missing something. But that feeling of missing my roots is exactly why I want to start a website in the first place, no? (no, it’s because i want others to compliment my cool essays)
Either way, I should keep writing. One does not become a good essayist without, well, writing essays, and I don’t want to have lied when I told myself that I'm the kind of person who reads and writes now.
Anyway, yesterday I joined a vc with online friends for the first time in a long time. Felt weird at first to be using my voice when I'd previously liked to keep it hidden, but I quickly started to enjoy myself and the event we were gathered around. I’ve always kinda wanted to join, but it never felt like the right time I guess. Now that I’ve done it once (and now twice), I hope to continue and become closer friends with these people.