Got any other suggestions? I stopped reading RR webnovels after getting way too into them during lockdown, but I’m getting the itch to start again.

INTRODUCING:
PROJECT PHANTOM LIMB

SCOUR THE NAMELESS ISLE AND ITS EVIL FORTRESS
BATTLE WICKED SOULS AND SEVER THEIR BODIES
RESIST DEMONIC POSSESSION

(Releasing later this year)

Yeah, Pragmata's pretty good. Solid (and fairly slow-paced) third person shooter with some fun tricks up its sleeve, charming main characters, and environment art that knocks it out of the park at every turn.

It really does feel like an old PS2/3 game, but with modern QoL + visuals, which I love.

More higher ed discourse like this please

So I was just laid off from Vicariously.

If you‘ve got an opening in PR/marketing and want to hire someone who does good work and has a family to support, I’m your guy.

Any reposts super appreciated.

I liked the idea of it in Palworld, but the assembly line vibes were rancid enough that it's hard for me to give credence. It felt like a reskinned version of Conan Exiles, rather than cute little critters helping out on the farm.

This + Re: Legend was more what I was hoping for.

This looks incredible?

I want more life sims where you collect monsters that actively help out.

ambient music to wander in the vessel in mio: memories in orbit YouTube video by Kid Katana Records

I've been going back through indie games looking for a good OST to listen to while working and landed on MIO: Memories in Orbit.

It's got that sweet spot between Hollow Knight melancholy and aetheric sci-fi synth that I need to focus on stuff I don't want to do.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVEG...

Happy Procrastinators' Tax Day, for everyone who begrudgingly observes the tradition.

Maybe we should do an internet hermit get together from time to time.

100% completing it is hell. The rest is great.

Yeah, saw that and uninstalled in an instant.

I’m honestly baffled that anyone still believes that the blockchain is a good idea.

The Calvin's dad explaining records meme. He is explaining that the two kinds of meme are Calvin's dad and Loss. Despite being a meme about Calvin's dad, this one is Loss.

What are some indie game characters that would make exceptionally good cryptids?

Doesn’t have to be dangerous or overly spooky. Just weird little guys that would be fun to sneak into a TTRPG campaign someday.

Feel free to suggest your own if you’re making something that fits.

Four Horsemen

Oh yeah, Baba is perfect.

Frankly that thing is a full blown SCP that should not be trusted around any written words.

What are some indie game characters that would make exceptionally good cryptids?

Doesn’t have to be dangerous or overly spooky. Just weird little guys that would be fun to sneak into a TTRPG campaign someday.

Feel free to suggest your own if you’re making something that fits.

Factory Town 2: Paradise on Steam Build and automate a tropical island village at the base of a sentient volcano. Use conveyor belts, boats, trains, catapults and ziplines to produce and deliver everything your town needs!

I have enabled Steam Playtest for Factory Town 2 - if you're interested in taking an early look and helping improve the game, go to the store page and hit 'Request Access': store.steampowered.com/app/3312130/...

Yup. Frankly Amos Roddy's entire discography is an entire goldmine for great music.

On the plus side, I don't think Microsoft has been in a worse space as far as its reputation goes. I know a lot of the damage to M$'s reputation is self inflicted, but it's still a known ethical black hole that makes people uncomfortable.

Sadly, some folks will just lash out at the killjoys for it.

This VO is so bad it's not even wooden anymore. It's particle board.

A snippet of a Windows Microphone Settings, with Audio enchancements: Voice Clarity and Voice Focus: Automatic turned on by default. Turning them off solves some audio issues, and pushes back the inevitability of switching to Linux by at least another month.

But hey, my microphones aren't working either! Well, they are, I can see the meters going up and down on the Rode- but nothing's reaching OBS so I can record.

After a while of poking, I discover that Windows added audio enhancements. Disabling them re-enables my mic output.

I'm so tired man.

More Rodecaster UI. On the left is a basic dB meter and info telling the user to Select RODECaster Duo Main as the output device on your computer. On the right is "processing", with three greyed-out circles: Depth, Sparkle, and Punch. Below them is a circle next to the text Processing. If disabled, the noise demon haunting your music goes away. Probably.

Eventually I find out that the latest update for the Rodecaster Duo firmware added new audio filters, and enabled them all by default.

As usual, there's zero explanation for what any of these things mean. Depth? *Sparkle*? Punch? No information at all.

Turning them off fixes everything.

I spent the better part of an hour tonight trying to figure out why the heck my audio was sounding like this.

If you're unfamiliar with Citizen Sleeper 01: Density by Amos Roddy, the song does not normally sound like it's being played in a giant aluminum warehouse nor does it cut out constantly.

The Audio Setup UI for the Rodecaster Duo. Despite being named "Audio Setup", this screen is primarily for dragging audio sources onto preset mixer tracks. To make things extra confusing, many of these icons are new with the current version of the software, don't seem to do anything, and aren't properly explained anywhere in the online tutorials, which are several years out of date.

The Device Configuration > Routing page for a Rodecaster Duo. Every single UI element is completely unlabeled, so you have to guess what icon means- mess up and suddenly you've got whatever you're listening to blaring out of every single speaker imaginable, with an uninterrupted stream from your microphone picking up your desperate clicks as you try to ascertain why turning on the bluetooth meter has summoned a noise demon in your PC and how to shut it off.

Mobile style UI and iconography for anything other than a phone's main/app screen should go die in a fire.

I die a bit inside every time I have to do tech support for smart devices, because every one of them insists on having tons of icons with zero labels nor explanations anywhere.

Twitter post of Slava Cherk happily posting his own games art that's been put through an AI image generator to make it simpsons themed while another user named Javi Lopez is praising him for doing so while calling for people to embrace Gen AI

Slava Cherk claiming ChatGPT's image generation is fun while posting a screenshot of his prompts to generate images based on his game stuido "Lazy bear games"

Slava cherk asking for technical help with AI code generation from cursor_AI

Co-founder of Graveyard Keeper dev Lazy Bear Games regularly posts AI art & asks for help with AI gen code

Going as far as feeding his own games art into the slop machine

The game itself is from 2018 so it predates the stuff, but they announced a sequel & I expect it to be full of AI-gen slop

My viewership remained unchanged. If anything, I had a reasonably good month metrics-wise, as most of those people mad enough to unsubscribe apparently didn't watch enough of my videos to make a dent.

So when these assholes claim I'm "alienating half my audience", I know it's a damn lie.

A few years ago I called a dev out for being a bigot against LGTBTQ folks and it went viral, caught the attention of the gamergate chudverse, and led to weeks of harassment in and outside my YT channel.

And I lost ~2,000 subscribers... out of 500,000. Just .4% of my audience.

Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization A new analysis commissioned by The New York Times suggests that Google's AI Overviews are wrong an astonishing percentage of the time.

This is catastrophic.