I'm staying because I have this flat, and I love my job, and there are no other jobs anyway, but it's difficult not to worry about the long-term sustainability of living here after two years of 'I'm just living here because of my job'.
Moral of the story: make your cocoon, a cocoon you'll love.
I honestly don't think I would have been able to stay in London if I hadn't moved to this flat a year ago, with a neurodivergent roommate. This city is always screaming, screeching, shrieking, and there is nowhere to run except my flat which we made very quiet on purpose. Commuting is torture.
Not to be dramatic but I can't overstate enough how crucial it is for neurodivergent people to have a space to themselves that they can turn into a cocoon and entirely control.
They'll keep shrinking the definition of "acceptable art" until you can't talk about any of your lived experiences in a fictional setting
If Kellogg's proposed a bill that would limit their liability for any genocides caused by Corn Flakes, the entire company should be dissolved and a full scale investigation launched into whatever the hell they were doing with Corn Flakes.
OpenAI is telling on itself.
www.wired.com/story/openai...
A game of Kodama 3D at the very start, wkth each tree only havinf one brqmch
A gane of Kodama 3D at the end, with cards forming branches and threatening ro fall off the table.
Roommate and I played Kodama 3D for the first time and vastly underestimated how much space we needed for our trees' branches spiraling into insanity.
A photo of a binder with Pokemon cards.
Happy Autism Awareness Month, I've been hit with a return to Pokemon cards hyperfixation, which means hours pored into learning about sets, finding reliable sellers on Vinted, cards shows, etc. Starting with Japanese illustration rares and working on master setting Solrock, Lunatone, and Unown.
It's Trans Day of Visibility today. If you're trans and are raising money for something (I don't care what it is), reply to this thread and I will boost you.
If you are a cis person, take a look and find someone to support if you can.
Everyone give this a share after.
Being a baby at art is fun though (yes I smudged the cat's fur by accident)
The first three months of 2026 went by in a blur of seasonal depresso, so I picked up (and messed up) watercolours again because painting is happiness.
A stack of printed notes covered in scribbles, some folders and notebooks.
The vibes today are "can i turn my old PhD materials I dont know what to do with into an art project"
Heads up narrative game devs! Turtle Rock has a remote possible role in the California PST time zone
Please share with your narrative game dev friends
turtlerockstudios.com/careers/4678...
It's always a heartbreak when a studio closes, but my heart always break a little bit more when it's indie studios with plenty of wonderful ideas and talent who just aren't given a chance because of how brutal the industry is atm.
The river Thames under a bright blue and cloudless sky.
Woolwich is pretty nice on a sunny day.
A female-presenting white individual with short brown hair, brown eyes, round glasses, holding a phone up for a selfie in front of a mirror hiding half their face.
Two decks of cards from a game design toolkit.
A meme in two pictures: in the first, a cat is asked whether it's aware that it's a cat, in the second picture, it looks shocked at this question.
So many new mutuals in the past few days, time for a pinned!
🌿 Hi I'm Charline, 30+, she/they (the latter is new hi)
🍂 Neurodivergent user researcher in the games industry
📖 PhD in games (designing failure into games)
🎨 Would love to go back to making stuff
✍️ Just getting into solo TTRPGs
A screenshot of Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee, where the player character is in a game studio and exclaims "someone's playing a game instead of working!"
Pokemon hitting too close to home (it's actually work, promise)
I'm excusing this purchase by saying that as a user researcher, I need to understand the other disciplines in the field really well, but let's be honest I just love all things narrative. Thanks @inkle.co for putting this together!
I've just started the demo, and I typically get easily overwhelmed in deck builders, but so far this one makes me want to keep coming back so you should take that as a very good sign (also awesome art, immediate gameplay is super satisfying, and who doesn't want to take on billionaires these days).
If you want to know what I and the team have been up to, contact us please! ⭐💛
We need LOTS of playtesters! 🤗
Reposts super appreciated! 🌈
A white woman in her thirties with short brown hair, round glasses and a black shirt, standing before a white wall with film-themed postcards.
I turned down my first chance to go to GDC because [gestures at the US], but hi #WhatAGameDevLooksLike I did a PhD on designing and experiencing failure in videogames (with a critical and queer design angle), and have been working as a games UX researcher at a big publisher for almost 2 years!
If only to then decide if actually, your game is better off if you fix it, or if you just discovered an unintended but interesting experience to play with (bad examples for this though, pls make your UIs scalable for accessibility)
Playtesting isn't about making games samey, it's about making sure players experience the friction you intended for them. If players can't see your really clever UI or if players miss that one really important thing in the onboarding you thought was OBVIOUS, do you really not want to see it?
Oh dear, the way the new HBO Lanterns show could go either very right or very wrong (I refuse to judge a show on first teaser alone since the One Piece live action series, its first teaser showed nothing of how awesome the show turned out to be). www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1jc...
12yo me hated PE with a passion, 32yo me gets their biggest boost of serotonin from playing volleyball again.
okay, Ill bite.
What do you think the point of reading for and writing a literature review is? The process of reading and writing is crucial for THINKING. Your ideas are shaped by all of this, offloading it to gAI, no matter how "good" you think gAI is at it defeats the purpose entirely.
Today I get to be a mentor in an accessibility game jam AND see the Greens win an election over Reform and Labour, I think this is a Friday that calls for celebratory cake.
I don't know how many years late I am to the party but today I logged into my academia.edu account for the first time in 8172 years and realised they had 1. added genAI, 2. automatically enabled it to take my papers to feed it. I deleted the papers and the account faster than I can eat a crepe.
This is/was utterly predictable.
Remote work was one of the biggest egalitarian things to happen to work in my lifetime, so obviously the bosses were never going to stand for it
My flavour sticking to routines and predictability is that I've been moving from one country to another on my own since I was 17 no problem, but if my usually hermit roommate isn't home at a time she usually is, my brain starts making up catastrophic scenarios for virtually no reason.
You don’t need Disney-level resources and drawing skills to create animation.
People have made classics with sand and a source of light. With magazine clippings, or their own bodies animated via stop motion. There’s no barrier to entry, as we explore: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/sand-and-a...
