Or maybe just luckier.

I mentioned winning the first game of Magic: The Gathering I ever played (against someone else who also had never played) and also winning game of Dandân immediately having it explained to me. On Saturday I was meant to be playing a game of Lancer with Caoimhe and Tigris, DMed by the zombie enthusiast and when that fell through due to some technical difficulties we played a game of Magic instead. I did not have a deck but the zombie enthusiast had apparently brought several. She started to explain each one and I asked her to stop and just hand me one and I’d figure it out. I think if I am going to lean into my bit of being a Yu-Gi-Oh! character I should approach card games like one: Knowing as little as possible, rolling with whatever surprises happen and relying on dumb luck the heart of the cards.

The deck, as it turned out was a proxy deck themed after Pokémon cards that she found online, with Pokémon Breeder as the commander. The zombie enthusiast was using a Chainsaw Man proxy deck she made herself with Denji as her commander. Caoimhe was using Tigris’ walls deck with Arcades the Strategist and Tigris was using another deck that I do not remember the commander of but had a lot of dragons.

For much of the game zombies dominated what was happening, with Denji on the field eventually equipped with a Chainsaw¹ and Tigris having cloned her own Denji using Will of the Temur, resulting in six zombie tokens being generated every round which constantly got wiped out and flooded cards into their hands. I was holding on to a Heat Wave for much of the game and kept looking for chances to use it to wipe out a zombie horde to multiply my own tokens but they would keep being blown away before it got back to my own turn every time.

I never actually got to generate any eggs with my commander and her ability to play creatures from the deck activated only once, when a Tauros died that counted as an egg due to being a ditto. What resulted in me getting a Zacian on the board, but without a 10/10 Zamazenta to back it up because it wasn’t cast, and which was killed before my next turn anyway. My game consisted of getting out strong creatures (including my commander twice) which my enemies kept bapping away, but without ever taking much damage myself and only occasionally getting to deal it out. My life never went below 40 and nearly reached 60 at one point due to a Venosaur.

In the end everyone targetted Chainsaw Man for getting too powerful and killed knocked her out, then Caoimhe used Slaughter the Strong to wipe out Tigris’ amassed dragons and all of my creatures other than a 4/4 Turtwig generated by Grotle, and I finally unleashed Heat Wave to destroy Caoimhe’s Arcades, Floriferous Vinewall and my own Bulbasaur to multiply my Turtwig into a small army to wipe Caoimhe out.

I did quite enjoy just rolling with the punches and seeing where the deck took me. Learning the game is very fun to me and if I had a perfect idea of how everything should work and a huge knowledge of cards and builds and the metagame it would probably not really be that interesting to me any more. I have been struggling with the motivation to actually build my own decks following the Seto Kaiba one.

As you can see from my games of each year list I don’t play many games with character creators and when I do I generally don’t get particularly attached to the characters I make in them. I couldn’t really tell you anything much about the characters I made for Dark Souls and even when I went through the character creator in Baldur’s Gate III recently¹ I made a dark elf woman without any particular thought to backstory or much else. I honestly don’t even remember what I named her². I do not have the making OCs bone I think. But I do have two old custom skins and a custom character that I have lying around on my computer I’d like to share.

Minecraft

Back seven billion years ago when I was in university and Minecraft was this weird, new thing I wanted to make my own custom skin for it. Being mostly into first person shooters and real time strategy games at the time my first thought about making a skin for a character in a game where you mine was to try and recreate the mining suit from Red Faction:

Pokémon Crystal Clear

I haven’t played a new Pokémon game since I was a child, but during covid lockdowns (before, y’know, every government just dropped all health measures for a debilitating disease that is still rampant) I tried to revisit the series via a hack called Pokémon Crystal Clear³. Crystal Clear adds a lot to Pokémon Crystal. You can choose your starting town (in either Kanto or Johto), play gyms in any order (they scale based on the number of badges you have), it fixes various bugs in the original games, allows you to set any pokémon as an overworld follower with every species having unique follower sprites, adds new areas and battles, new music, a lot of customisation options, and has ways to obtain all 251 pokémon without trading or events.

Sadly all of that was not enough for me to get over the simple fact that these games are too repetitive for me to want to bother with any more. I do not want to do dozens and dozens of nigh-identical battles over and over again. I never got very far in the game but I did make use make use of another feature: The ability to inject custom player sprites and custom starters (I started with a sandshrew). I actually posted one of the player sprites on here before when talking about drawing it in Wplace.

Sonic Forces

The last one is the closest thing that I have to a Sonic the Hedgehog OC: My avatar from Sonic Forces who I decided to call Blitz the Cat, both because she ended up being a little lightning-themed (and I used the lightning whip as my main weapon for a lot of that game) and to keep the alteration going with Blaze the Cat and Big the Cat⁴. I do not have any backstory for her but I like how she turned out.

I posted a diorama I made for Caoimhe³ yesterday. I like to make little things for partners sometimes.

My other partner has a strong fondness for the pokémon goomy and I have learnt that your partner identifying with an extremely marketable pokémon makes putting together silly little gifts pretty easy. A couple of years ago I got a little 3D-printed goomy figurine from an Etsy shop (that doesn’t seem to sell it any more), painted it myself and and paired it with a love ball from a more official toy as a gift for her.

She has also been, more recently, getting back into Magic: The Gathering and had put together a ooze deck which she used my printer to make proxies for. While I was doing that for her I threw in some little custom cards for the deck.

For the Slurrk card I used Poké Card Generator to fill in the basic rules then made more modifications in GIMP. For the token card I used Card Conjurer and put a photo of the goomy figurine over a swamp background made by Aveontrainer.

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local GAA club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.

Picmix is a website for making GIF collages. If you’ve seen square GIFs of anime characters drowning in glitter and surrounded by rapidly animating icons and text it was probably made with Picmix. The typical aesthetic leans extremely girly and overloaded; the digital equivalent of a scrapbook page covered in magazine cutouts, glitter and stickers. It is very charming (though sadly the current front page of the site seems to be flooded with AI art).

Last year on Cohost (RIP) Freja asked me what my favourite planet was and my reply was “♃”. This is mostly just vibes and associations with fictional characters that I have great fondness for: Lita Kino from Sailor Moon¹, Jupiter from We Know the Devil, and it would be nice to round this out with a third example but actually it’s only those two². But also the planet is cool and I like the astrological symbol.

But thinking on those vibes, that loose collection of associations that still resulted in an immediately clear preference it made me want to make something to tie together these Jupiters: The planet, the Sailor and the Devil-knower. And even though I had never actually used Picmix before that type of silly, sparkly, collage seemed like just the thing.

The Sailor Jupiter, rotating planet and glow around the edges were pulled from Picmix but I actually put it together using Aseprite. This is an artisanal GIF collage. The central Jupiter picture (that I also use as an avatar now) was made by putting the cover art for We Know the Devil through Luna Pic’s glitteriser. The little tin sample cube is because tin is the planetary metal associated with Jupiter in alchemy. I actually have a similar cube of copper in my house next to a replica Ea-nāṣir complaint tablet that I have on my wall. Perhaps I should get a tin one as well.

A little while later I decided to make a similar collage for Blaze the Cat, my favourite Sonic the Hedgehog character.

This one pulls from Picmix, The Spriters’ Resource and a GIF of Blaze running that I do not know the original source of that I cut the background out of frame-by-frame.

I never returned to making these but it was a lot of fun and perhaps the urge will strike me again at some point.

And let me know if there’s any other Jovian women that I should check out.

Steam Grid DB is a website that hosts artwork for customising game libraries. I learnt a little while ago that it has a tool called Boop that lets you apply art to Steam games much faster by clicking a button directly on the website.

This reminded me that I actually used to make quite a few custom banners for games on Steam myself and I decided to upload my old work to the website. You can find those on my Steam Grid DB profile and I will include a selection of them here:

Half-Life 2

Some of the first ones I made were a set of matching banners for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I’m still pretty happy with these.

Some classics

I made some for a few classic games, usually from a still of the title screen, sometimes with some variants.

Megagames 6

At the time I had a Retrode and would dump my own game cartridges. Two of the old Mega Drive carts I had were two different 6-in-1 game packs, so I decided to make custom artwork for them too.

ROM hacks

And of course some ROM hacks.

And a few others

Games that weren’t even in the database

Some games I had to submit to Steam Grid myself because they didn’t have the games listed at all. These all have links if you click on the banners. The Monokuro: From Here and Back is actually new and I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. The process of uploading these banners made me want to make a new one and I had the game added as a shortcut on Steam without any artwork. Somari 3D Blast 5 wasn’t accepted by Steam Grid DB, sadly.

One last joke

These are a pair of banners that I made for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube and Wii versions, respectively. It was a little private joke and I didn’t bother submitting them to Steam Grid DB.

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ

A friend has been infodumping about Susumu Hirasawa and I thought I’d share her passion a little wider so have this live performance from him:

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This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website — Sophie Koonin

One thing to warn is that if you do actually make your own website is that tinkering with it can be addictive in and of itself, at least to me. It’s like a model train set: There is always more you can tweak or add to it. I updated my homepage a few days ago to make each section stand out from each other a bit more.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it.

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A Eulogy for Urban Dead — Adrian Hon

I played Urban Dead back in the day. It’s sad to see it go and infuriating to see it happen because of a regulator trying to target the likes of Facebook and Tiktok and not even being able to conceive of small, independent operations or how it could affect them.

Naturally, these player-generated events were chaotic and often hard to discover, though the ability for humans to graffiti messages helped spread the word. Zombies, being dead, were not permitted to communicate as freely – they could only use the letters a, b, g, h, m, n, r, and z – but this was sufficient to lead to four different zombie languages including terms such as armah baz (army base), zmazh anh grab (smash and grab) and my personal favourite, barhah (roughly “a spirit of zombie warriors in brotherhood”).

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Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home — Laura Michet

I saw this because it was shared by Adamn Le Doux. How the restrictions of online pokémon trading evolved a market where the currency changes every time a new game gets connected to the system. The current one being a qilin giraffe thing. Also some followups: How to buy a Pokemon online and How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun.

Today, you'd list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you'll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You'll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.

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I ordered a wheel of cheese in a can — Laura Michet

Also from Laura Michet: A type of cheese I now really want try.

The cheese is apparently one of a very small number of cheeses that can cure inside a can, apparently because it's made with a culture that emits less gas than other cheeses, so it won't bloat or pop the can. It is only sold in 30 oz containers. It is cheddar… you can get several flavors. Big time cheese fans or people from Wisconsin know and care a lot about it and I get the impression that it is quite popular here in the US, but I have never heard of this shit before.

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CD-ROM Journal: Crosscountry BC — Misty De Méo

A look at a Canadian edutainment game series.

It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player's driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it's not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it'll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It's that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.

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The Most Mario Colors — Louie Mantia

Seen via Mike Egan’s post roundup. This is the ideal post. This is the type of thing that people should be researching.

Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.

This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.

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a love letter to level editor icons — erysdren

Who doesn’t love some programmer art?

i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand.

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dev scoops: vultures in Weird West — Joe Wintergreen

Joe Wintergreen talks bout the first thing he worked on in Weird West and shows how systems-driven game design allows complex interactions through fairly simple building blocks.

In the end, it ended up being just as well that I implemented the landing-and-walking-around behaviour for the vultures, because later we wanted chickens and there was already Flightless Bird Support – a chicken is just a flightless vulture who lays eggs, as any ornithologist will tell you.

As minor as these guys are, they’re one of the features I’m fondest of – my first task, omnipresent, occasionally chaotic, and shipping almost unchanged from their initial implementation. Good eggs.

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Why Are Chronically Ill People Forced to Hide Their Pain? — Kelly

Oh no! You’ve scrolled too far and entered The Serious Zone.

Unfortunately most people can’t process the lack of choice in the matter. They genuinely believe that we either want to be this sick, or could get better if we really ‘tried’. They believe they wouldn’t be able to handle what we go through, because they’re convinced they will never NEED to handle it. They’re the exception. Chronic illness won’t happen to them.

This is the comfortable lie that most people tell themselves so that they can move through life without having to think about the precarious nature of the human condition. Without having to consider how quickly you can become disabled, homeless, an ‘other’. How quickly your life can change without your consent.

This need to cling to a lie makes people abandon us. Some will stay when you become chronically ill, but most have an internal clock. If you’re not better by whatever random and pre-conceived timeline they’ve set for you, they walk away.

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Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women — Ryan Broderick

Ending the roundup again with a light dusting of fascism. I am far too online and read far too much about American politics and fascists but I was still taken aback by this description of a strain of hatred I wasn’t familiar with.

If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.

Mewtwo is the Shadow the Hedgehog of pokémon

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ

A roundup of some posts I’ve been reading that I thought I’d share.

Deus Ex Machina [1984] — Arcade Idea

I have been catching up on the sadly inactive Arcade Idea, a blog working through the history of video games through selected games that chart development of the medium. Unlike many such projects it does not focus only on console and arcade games or on games that are still famous.

Deus Ex Machina, whose entry I have linked, is a fascinating ZX Spectrum game/interactive movie/concept album that I had never heard of, designed and composed by Mel Croucher.

It’s actually on Steam and there is a playthrough available to watch on Mel Croucher’s Youtube channel. It has some pretty heavily strobing lights in some sections.

When the mouse dies inside The Machine, it takes its one final death shit. The turd drops into the test-tube babymaker. For the whole first act, and arguably the whole game, you play as this mouse turd.

COVID Denialism and Disability Justice — Natalie Weizenbaum

I have been also reading Natalie’s posts about setting up post embedding and reblogging and will have a look at doing that too, so maybe in future instead of these roundup posts I will directly reblog stuff into my feed.

Because this category myth isn't just incorrect, it's oppressive. All axes of oppression are wrapped around similar myths. This is why sexists are so threatened by transsexuals, why racists invented the crime of miscegenation. An oppressive mindset demands a clear and permanent division between oneself and one's victims; a mode of thought that relies on clear and permanent divisions is at high risk of enacting oppression, knowingly or not. Those who are unable (or unwilling) to imagine themselves becoming disabled are the ones who do the most harm to people who already are.

The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam — Luna

The NES Pictionary bot, was, as Luna describes, something that could almost have existed on any social media website. But it could only have worked how it did, and how well it did, on Cohost, where users were given much more of a blank canvas to work with than any other social media site.

This could have been achieved on Twitter via a two-account mechanism. The main account would post the image with the dashes, a secondary account would post a reply with the solution. Users could then mute/block the secondary account, or follow it if they wanted to always see the solutions.

Similarly, this could have been achieved on Mastodon using the Content Warning (CW) system, which allows you to put a post behind a warning and require action on the part of the user to actually view the post. The bot would post the image with the dashes, and then in a follow-up post, post the solution under a CW, making users interact to see the solution.

These solutions always seemed kinda clunky to me, and eventually I just forgot all about it.

Enter Cohost.

A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat — andi mcc

Speaking of giving users a blank canvas with HTML, this is one of the posts I saw circulating again towards the end of Cohost’s life, detailing the absolutely audatious way that Geocities HTML chat (which I had never heard of before) worked. Now that Cohost is shutting down she has returned to her blog.

Geocities HTML Chat was, from a technical perspective, a guestbook with a small twist. There was a chat for each of the "cities" (my home was SiliconValley, I think?). Each chat used (of course) frames to display two smaller webpages. One frame above (I don't actually remember, but let's say it was above) was a thin band containing a CGI input form. The lower frame was larger, and scrolled freely. This frame used a server-side trick; the server would tell your web browser it was sending it an infinitely long web page (or maybe it just claimed it was some impossibly large size, a gigabyte or something). It would send it the opening <html>, and then it would hang. It would keep the socket open. When a user in the chat room submitted a line to their CGI box, every user would simultaneously receive a new line on the bottom-frame open socket (which their web browser sincerely believed an ordinary webpage was actually really loading into, just very slowly).

pokémon cymraeg — Twitchcoded

A page where Twitch is documenting a project of translating pokémon names into Welsh. I had fun before coming up with Irish translations for Sonic the Hedgehog characters. It’s the kind of thing that lets you play with language in a cool way. Pokémon are great for this especially because of the multilayered and punny nature of their names. Draoi Aisteach</i> has actually already made full translations of Pokémon Red and Blue.

38

ninetales

cadnaw

cadno (fox) naw (nine) cadnawes (vixen)

America a Prophecy — Elizabeth Sandifer

Last time I linked to Elizabeth Sandifer’s Doctor Who writing. This time I am going to link to another of her long-term projects: An annual series of blog posts analysing the American psyche through the lens of a bafflingly awful newspaper comic about the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I recommend reading the whole series and I look forward to next year’s.

As a practitioner of a magical/critical practice that I have coined psychochronography, it is my belief that one can position any cultural object at the center of one’s vision and, through sufficiently thorough exploration of it, understand the larger world in which it exists. To this end, I propose that we explore this genuinely astonishing work of comics art in order to understand the whole of America in the 21st century.

New Team, New Discord! — Spore in the News

For the sheer novelty of it: Spore’s official website and RSS feed updated this week. Spore. The game from 2008. Why not add it to your RSS reader too so that you can get updated on any new Spore news? Or I guess more likely join the Discord server they are using the news post to advertise.

Spore has a new team! You may notice some of our team members making the rounds throughout the Spore communities - RogueLyeshal (Rogue) and Reiliyn (Rei) are leading up our new community efforts. Speaking of… there is now an official Discord server, where you can keep up with the latest news from the development team, participate in contests, and get to know other players of Spore! Come join us!

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them — James O’Malley

A cry for help I saw via Tom Scott’s newsletter that also goes into recovering teletext data from tapes.

What Alistair realised though was that even though there were no complete teletext pages stored on his tapes, there were still fragments of teletext data captured and saved by the tapes.

So he wrote some code that does something mind-blowing. Using his software, if you play in a VHS tape to a TV capture card, it will take the raw recording data, pick out the nuggets of teletext, and like magic will stitch them back together into complete pages.

Like I say, it’s witchcraft.

Artificial Life: Insects — CD-ROM Journal

A blog from Misty De Méo that explores old multimedia CDs. Maybe some day she’ll cover Ring: 感×染.

Although the front cover and spine credit Harada first, and it's clear Harada's CG artwork is the real centrepiece here, the three works are presented as coequals. More than an art book, a novel, or a game, it's a project that shows how different mediums transform the same basic concepts. The three works don't just diverge because of different inspirations but because their mediums influence what kinds of interpretations are possible, what kinds of ideas can take root.

hot pepsi ☕ — Dr. Melon

I can’t say I agree with this but it’s certainly an interesting perspective.

I highly recommend trying it out if you haven’t had it before, especially on a colder or rainy day. There’s something great about the warm steam coming off the top combined with tiny droplets flying out of the drink due to the carbonation that leave a pleasantly-contrasty cooling sensation on the lips just before you take a sip of the toasty liquid within. Drinking it and feeling the warm fizz is a little alchemical, and a little rebellious, with the net effect of overall feeling like you’re sneaking some of a wizard’s potion while he’s out gathering herbs.

👨‍💻 Side By Side 👨‍🎨 — Mike Egan

A cute little motion design animation!

I was deep in the website building mines in April, both working on this site, and building Welcome to the Cyber World, my MMBN fansite that I made for the Critical Distance Fansite Jam.

So I wanted to make something celebrating the joy and creativity of the particular left-brain/right-brain cooperation present in using code to make what is essentially a piece of visual media.

It's called Side By Side because it was originally a horizontal piece with both windows sitting next to each other, but I found that to be too static, and the transition I landed on is more fun and dynamic. It also mirrors the actual experience of building a website, in that you often write the code not knowing 100% what the site will look like until you load it up in a browser!