Stepos Venzny

I tend not to play extremely similar games back to back so my head’s usually not in the wrong place. Maybe try a palate cleanser.

To a degree it’s just reflexive, a knee-jerk reaction to being told things without proper explanation. I struggled with that since I was very young. People told me what to do, what to think, how to feel, and I tried to obey but the stress of that obedience in the face of reason would always eventually end in meltdowns and by the time I was a teenager I was so worn down from that that I could barely function as a human being.

I was within a few years of twenty (pretty bad with dates) when the world showed me I had permission to think independently. There was a perceived familial obligation that I was too hurt to weather, an invitation to visit a relative that I found annoying. You’re told that you’re supposed to love your family, all of it, no matter how physically and emotionally detached they are from your life. But the act of trying to love a stranger that you can’t stand the company of and who cannot stand your company in turn, themselves only really trying out of this same sense of obligation that society pushes on them, there’s nothing in that but stress for all involved. And then you feel like a failure as a result, because you stressed them out and you’re supposed to be making them happy. It was a very small thing being asked of me and something I had always capable of weathering on previous occasions but this time I was too weak from the rest of life and, shamefully, I politely declined. I was kicking myself for the next hour, until somebody actually close to me caught me alone for a moment and praised that show of strength.

In my mind, she had always been stronger than me because she was better able to meet expectations. In that moment I learned that, in her mind, she was weak because she was unable to stand up for her own mental health needs and that I had just surpassed her by doing this. That realization changed my life. I let go of this obedience that my bones had always told me was wrong. Other people wanting something doesn’t mean I have to want it, other people feeling something doesn’t mean I have to feel it, other people doing something doesn’t mean I have to do it. Success at attempting all those things is exactly the same amount of suffering as failure, the very same action is both strong and weak. There’s no winning that game. Neither of us felt what we were supposed to feel and neither of us would be happy in the other’s shoes.

Society tells you that disobedience is arrogance, selfishness, but I’m a better person that I was before it. It made me more humble because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be right, now I want to be right and that means learning where I’m wrong. It made me more generous because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be good, now I want to be helpful because helping people feels good to do. It made me happier because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be happy, and now any instances of unhappiness don’t cause me the shame that negates future happiness. And it made me more tolerant because, fuck, I’m not about to start enforcing arbitrary standards on people when arbitrary standards caused me so much harm in the first place.

Now that there’s not an internal struggle against prescriptive conformity in the way, I’m freer than I ever was to do most of the same things everyone wanted me to do in the first place while also being able to set boundaries about those few things I know would be harmful to do.

It’s not at all frictionless to think for yourself, mind. People can be frustrated when you ask more justification of them than others do. If they’re doing what they’re told is right, saying what they’re told is right, believing what they’re told is right, it can feel threatening to ask them how any or all of that is right when, deep down, all they’re doing is playing their assigned role because they never had your epiphany. And the boundaries you set can also be at odds with the genuinely felt desires of those you care about because sometimes peoples’ desires are simply incompatible.

But that friction is nothing next to the cumulative psychic weight of total obedience. Mutual somewhat-grudging acceptance of each others’ limits is better than any one person’s permanent unhappiness.

In terms of actionable advice: follow your logic, follow your feelings, follow observable reality. Recognize it as a red flag when people discourage you from that, and recognize the importance of hearing out people who are talking through their own logic and feelings and observations and scrutinizing each other.

I got an idea for a fictional TV. It’s a black rectangle with a moving picture in the middle. There’s a logo on it that almost says the name of a real TV brand but in a slightly different typeface than they use and one or two of the letters is changed.

This is a revolutionary idea that nobody has ever had before, which if implemented will actually negate the need to use AI to create fictional TVs for us.

A while back I set out to watch the entire Disney Animated Canon. (Not in a binge-y way, like a movie per week.) When I reached Frozen II and started looking up trivia about it, I read that the four note sequence Elsa keeps hearing calling to her is something a lot of composers like to reference: Dies Irae.

A couple other examples were named and it reminded me that I had sort of noticed this once before; I remember playing Aria of Sorrow and noticing that the Clock Tower theme had those four notes repeating in the background and I kept hearing “making Christmas making Christmas”. I had thought it was a coincidence at the time but now knew they were both making the same allusion. Neat.

Cut to a few years in the future, Dies Irae is my fucking Number 23. It’s EVERYWHERE. I can’t escape it.

I don’t actively recall smell or taste being a feature so I guess probably not. Every other sense I definitely have, though.

On the general subject of things people say can’t happen in dreams beyond senses, I can also read, feel pain, see color, urinate without doing so in real life, and die.

It’s absurd to give any amount of power over people, however trivial, to a thing which is incapable of thought.

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Because they like the other stuff. It’s not exactly a TellTale game we’re talking about.

This isn’t the first RPG AC to have that feature, I’m pretty sure, just the first to label it “canon.” And it’s true there are people out there who are extremely strongly opposed to narrative freedom and obsessed with knowing objective canon, considering it infantilizing to allow players the freedom to influence characterization in dialogue. I cannot fathom what leads anyone to that mindset but I’ve met a few.

They may be a tiny minority but this seems like a harmless and low-effort way to accommodate that handful of weirdos.

(Hilarious that this is happening in a game where the series villains are the people trying to eliminate free will, though.)

There’s always going to be more dust but more than zero isn’t as big a problem as more than a layer.

For me, the answer is vacations. Not in the sense of “time off work” but in the sense of “travel somewhere special during your time off work”. There is nothing less relaxing than being pressured to spend your free time correctly.

That rule was designed to discourage you from faking it.

Oh, you mean you’re a cook. I thought you had a custom burger.

Arby’s, ironically enough. Not having burgers used to be their whole identity.

I’m interested in also having it your way. What’s the burger?

Because that’s more effort and most people don’t care.

Mortol stole my puzzle platformer idea and did a better job than I ever would have done with it. I am livid.

Sour grapes.

There is nothing popular fiction hates more than somebody doing something everyone wants to do but can’t. Impossibility, when possible, becomes cast as immorality or immaturity or otherwise something arbitrarily undesirable.

To be a ghost is depressing and/or monstrous because when we die in real life we don’t stick around. Time travel overwrites reality with a worse version of the present because in real life we can’t change the past. Resurrection brings people back as monsters because in real life we can’t have our lost loved ones back. Immortality is sad and lonely and often requires you to do evil things to sustain it because in real life we can’t live forever. Traveling to alternate lifetimes where you’re more successful is emotionally hollow because you had the most important emotional stuff in your life all along and you wouldn’t trade that for the world.

These and other speculative crises always have to be fixed by making the fictional world abide be the limitations of the real one. Aren’t we so lucky that our world is randomly already like this?

This post was finally the push that made me buy it, having been interested since I first heard about it. Only checked out Barbuta and Bug Hunt so far.

I’m loving Barbuta. It’s scratching that itch that only Tomb Raider 1 and Dark Souls 1 have scratched before. There’s something so weirdly cozy about this air of open hostility where the individual challenges aren’t actually hard to execute. I haven’t made it very far in yet, only found/bought three items, but I’m already in the headspace where I wanna push myself to keep replaying it until I can beat it without using any eggs and I’m not one to normally care about that sort of thing.

Bug Hunt is okay but, in terms of the framing device that this is a compilation of old games, I’m not buying it. Its mechanics and writing and tutorial pop-up windows feel distinctly like a modern indie game. Barbuta only slipped once that I’ve seen so far, with that I Wanna Be the Guy trap on the first screen.

Plus two Fallouts and an MMO.

Everything except pants. My legs are apparently within the bounds of normality but my head, hands, feet, and spine are simply too big.

You wouldn’t think being six feet tall would be such a hindrance to shopping. It’s not big enough to stand out in a crowd, so why is it so big as to be incompatible with mass production?