also I am working on making some sort of main site (!)
 
so if you have a game / project / whatever that you'd like to throw up lemme know
 
you can see the wip for it here: https://www.saltworld.community/

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ever notice thoughts form like fractals? have you had that kind of connection with someone where at times it's almost like the barrier that separates you from being two different people or beings dissolves and you'll have a conversation that rises and falls like a mandlebrot set, and a long time passes and you haven't even consciously been using words or inhabiting physical space? ever think, as you zoom back out and the room materializes around you and you realize your throat is dry, that if you focus the hardest you ever have in your life you can form concrete thoughts that represent the true, pure form of this other that you've just witnessed and communed with, but it speeds away as fast as the world returns? tell me you have please!

 
yes I too have done drugs
 
but also no I'm just teasing. in all seriousness sex is the most obvious and relatable parallel, bc it sounds like you're kind of describing a certain type of sex, or relationship to sex maybe would be a better way to describe it
 
 
outside of that, I kind of get where you're coming from, as in I think I relate to it in different terms, but it's hard to know if the differences are semantic or substantive. it's a bit difficult for me to fully relate bc it's hard to think of ideal types as ascertainable and i thus do not tend to think in terms of there being a pure, essential self. but. I have felt like me and the other person were briefly seeing the same mirage and talking about the same imagined objects and felt this profound feeling of connectedness that I really only was ever able to describe in terms of its distance from the sort of fundamental loneliness of being a person in a body.

Now you tell me if this isn't the fucking best, finest written intro the fucking FINEST sci-fi epic novel you've ever heard. I worked for years on this bad boy so please don't take the piss. If you knew in what detail I've studied, concepts like and similes, that the eggheads never seem to notice. funny that eh?

Anyway, you tell me if this isn't good, you fucking tell me. I'd love to hear it. Because those eggheads at Harpen Collins, DON'T seem to understand. How to tell a person. WHY their work isn't good enough, or up to their petty f*cking "standards"... Anyway... here's where the tale begins...
 

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Jane Muon leapt like a sabertooth across a blue beam. It was made of metal; everything is made of metal. The glum moonlight cracked the clouds and draped the glow of drone lights. It was in a city. Jane was insouciant because she had just pulled off the biggest heist in her dreams; wakened thought of herself asleep and went off to find a hammer. In the four corners of the district were four cops, one at each tower. They received word from an aerial aimed voice like a wild duck quacking "Jane is on the way to a crime. Get her." There was only one person named Jane.
Jane found a hammer under a car and went down to the lower level. It had a window on one wall, the north. It was covered in bricks. As she stepped out of the elevator a vehicle crept, freezing the cyberrogue like a deer. Jane started moving again after it left. Jane walked to the north and broke a panel with her hammer. An alarm started as she threw the hammer at an eyebot at maximum cleanliness. The remaining eyebots observed as one of the cops opened a hatch in the southeastern end and jogged up the ramp on the east side, becoming even with Jane in 5 seconds. It shot a missile at her. The missile destroyed her with success. The cop spun around to the southeastern entrance where Jane respawned. She sprinted back up the stairs and jumped out a visored window, landing in a helicopter piloted by her boyfriend.
Jane said "That was a close call." Dane Gluon said "Just in time." Jane said "I only have three lives left. I need to get some 1-ups." Dane said "I think I know where you can get some 1-ups." Jane said "Oh yeah? Where?" Dane said "The Matrix."

The entire manuscript clocks in at 180,000 pages so I'm having difficulty uploading it without my sucky internert croaking. Anyway... enjoy. If you write fanfic of my universe I'll come to your house and kill you.

https://the-toast.net/2016/03/02/why-are-you-lonely-a-text-game/

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also tho mainstream discussions about sustainability never lead to the obvious conclusion of there's no ethical consumption under capitalism and it's not because it's taken for granted

agree completely but it makes a lot of those convos kind of fundamentally unsatisfying for me in the same way discussions about diversity and inclusion in consumer products and media does. near-sightedness/analytic myopia/inability to extricate oneself from lines of thought that have already been absorbed into a capitalist ideological structure blah blah blah

this btw is where I think one might begin to find value in the concept of the supernatural

also, never thought about the packaging thing. that fits into how I think about things so thanks for adding another brick to the wall!

idk man I'm so disillusioned about technocrats that I can kind of understand the anti-intellectual shit. on the one hand getting to the point of, like, the khmer rouge is disastrous, but I also think that intellectualism is often wielded as a cudgel against ppl with less education and as a means of delegitimizing their ideas/excluding them from conversation, and that a lot of intellectuals -- even those on the left -- have absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about and waste too much time on navel-gazing abstractions of social dynamics, and I even like doing that shit too. I get frustrated with people who are anti-book learnin' but also v frustrated with the people who look at them and are like ugh unwashed masses or, worst of all, pay lip service to The People while still displaying obvious disdain for the actual individuals that comprise The People once they realize how non-academic they are

fascists’ somewhat successful deployment of "human biodiversity" as part of an attempt to legitimize fundamentally racist ideas!!!

sometimes I remember esiann if only because her name was excerpted from patty mayonnaise from doug spelled backwards, and I can't even begin to understand how one would reach such a decision. also as it turns out I don't have issues with gluten, I just had (read: have) what is apparently moderately severe IBS. still tho, having a Completely Fucked Stomach is v relatable. I don't remember anything about you super clearly except that you were talking with someone about Kate bush before I knew who that was and I'll sometimes wish I could remember the conversation.

what did you end up doing? i think it's kind of impossible not to romanticize academia unless your opinion is that it's kind of terrible. I used to think finding some tenure track faculty position would be really cool, but as an institution, it's so grossly exploitative and hostile to people working in it that it's hard to imagine actually staying in it. part of this is the cynicism that comes from being a negro in a white people department/field, and it's esp. bad for minorities. idk, I'm ambivalent but leaning towards the negative. I love that I get to think about things I think are interesting for a living, but also think it means something that nobody's called a polymath anymore; hyper-specialization ends up obscuring a lot of the beauty of thought, imo.

it also means that in practice you frequently have nobody around to talk about your interests with, either. the guy across the hall does phylogenetic shit, the next two do theoretical population genetics, the people at the other end of the floor do conservation economics, the people downstairs do gut microbiomes in various species of beetles, the person upstairs does I don't even know... probably something about nitrogen cycles in the soil (this is actually really cool bc you start getting into world systems ecology and like bioenergetics and some really interesting sociopolitical territory that nobody in my department wants to talk about even a little bit!!)? the people across the street do invasion biology and some shit about botany and moss that I never paid enough attention to to remember, and I do mathematical models of sociocultural evolution. none of us have any idea what anybody else is talking about beyond some baseline education in evolutionary biology. it's kind of worse than it was before because you'd expect it to be a space for Enlightened Discussion.  sometimes we get to argue about the ethics and implicit construction of ~the other~ in invasion biology, tho, and I've gotten pretty into some philosophy of science stuff.

it's like... have you ever been at a party and talking with someone about music and you realize that despite both of you being into indie/alternative/whatever the fuck, neither of you have ever heard of any of the same bands? like you just keep naming them and neither of you recognize any of them at all? it's like that. like, it's exactly like that. ahhh!!!!

but you should still got to grad school someday if you want!!! most other people around me seem like they're happy fine. or just join a book club or an obscure subreddit. imo it's been easier to find Your People over the pandemic in some ways just because the barrier to interaction via zoom is essentially nonexistent and people are now used to navigating relationships through video chatting.

I still write too much, tho. years of education have still left me in a place where I have to go through repeated rounds of edits for even, like, an important email.

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I'm joking, I'm joking! I'm jealous. Do you remember the general time period you were an active member, waitress? there were certainly a lot of awful things from the real old days. lotsa prolly prot-incels on the internet at the time, but I also think there were things of value from then as well.

I think I was probably extremely active from about 2003 to 2010? after that, not so much. I definitely ditched the whole admin thing towards the very end, and I feel like that was around 2009 or so. I think by then I was just aging out of the place, and a lot of people I used to talk to had moved on as well. I also just like... didn't want to be the internet persona headphonics, so I spent a number of years avoiding any socializing in internet communities whatsoever. it was like a cleanse. I remember catamites showing up and being way too cool for anyone else here, and after that other people started coming around and it seemed like a cooler place, but I was already gone so I mostly just felt good about the community developing into something better and more interesting and considerably stranger. I didn't feel like I had any real place in it, but I thought that the people who did were probably a lot less terrible than I was. unlike other members I feel like this place so consistently incentivized sneering critiques of ________ that it actively stifled my ability to think creatively. I think that probably changed a lot after I left tho

but yeah, what I remember most at this point was the incel-adjacent shit. it seems obvious in hindsight. there was a lot of dope shit, though; I'm not trying to say there wasn't. I learned to love video games and began developing a critical lens for art in general here, I had friends and a place to kick it. I've spent a large majority of my life being incredibly certain I don't entirely belong in the room I'm in, and that's fine, but this was one of two places where I was able to feel like I was in the right room, even if I'm embarrassed about it.

maybe the most important thing is that this place left me discontent with my real life friendships and I think it taught me to expect more from connections off the internet, and to try to feel less hostility towards strangers because they didn't get me or whatever. also, steel dying was of the most important points in my early adulthood. I remember sitting around finding it strange that I couldn't talk to him and eventually coming to terms with the fact that it was such a waste to feel ashamed of loving people and of loving other men and of refusing to accept the vulnerability that came with that. so the place was toxic, but I think I came away from it with a better sense of how my anxieties and insecurities about all that stuff had ultimately been the cause of my needing this community to begin with, and that paradoxically the community itself was probably the biggest source of loneliness. so I guess you could say the ~most important lesson~ that I learned here was that I should leave immediately

so all of that was cool, but I can't bring myself to feel any nostalgia, like, at all. even with everything I said above, I remember the doxxing and borderline-hate speech and rampant misogyny and the actual child pornography the most vividly. it's hard for me to talk about that shit with people while still being able to credibly articulate any positive impact being here could have had, and at a certain point you kinda start to understand where they're coming from. I'm glad other people don't necessarily feel the same, though

buuuuuuut I'm also in academia

Probably not the thread for it, but what did you think was the dumbest part of Death Stranding? I haven't played it, but I like to read about it, because whatever it does seems to make people feel pretty strongly.

Well yeah, that’s true. I always liked the forum outline of this community much more than the other forms of social media. And I always wondered if maybe what this community was in it’s heyday could be kind of brought back in a different way if the forum had a more active caretaker and was geared towards general discussion and other media in general.

I got stuck in kind of a weird position in being here in the first place. I was never into rm2k or gamemaking whatsoever. I had a couple highschool friends who were and they would show me these discussions or running joke/gag topics that I got enamored with and just thought were hilarious.

I originally just signed up here so I could read more of it and laugh but the more I read the more engaged I got.

I found a level of intelligence and the kind of humor/discussions I was severely lacking in life. Most of the people I knew from highs school or just in life in general we’re far less thoughtful, far less articulate and I got that out of this place.

And I learned a lot, so much. I think that in a way this place saved me or at least gave me what I was sorely missing.

Ever since this place kind of died I’ve just been roaming around Facebook. Sometimes I’ll get caught in a debate or a discussion or just crack jokes to make myself laugh but yes it is very toxic or at least people on a media outlet like tinder aren’t the kind up for thoughtful discourse.

I even thought about offering to invest in turning this space around into something active if that’s even possible.

I’ve read through Reddit forums and things like that too but they just seem so massive and overwhelming.

What I liked about this forum is it’s a bit smaller of a community. If I’m reading through a topic on something I can read it all in it’s entirety. You can get to know the members on a more personal level so it’s a lot easier to get a feel for who someone is and who you’re talking to. A certain level of trust in that because these members build up a repertoire over time.


I think a personality like steel could probably do that and have the aspiration to do it. Figure out a new way to repackage the community and make it more active and less than a kind of outdated niche/fringe group.


Not that I find anything wrong with indie game development or things like Ragnars dump topic. I like that too and think it’s charming and has it’s own appeal in itself but at the same time this place is stagnant. I think it deserves better and IDK if it just had a more general kind of focus and that special bland of thoughtful discussion and articulate humor, with a little advertising it could see some new life and be better (for people like us at least) than places like Reddit or Twitter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRGMAW1wzQ8