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gaming

Itch.io Is Having Its Strikethrough Moment

Last night, bluesky exploded with the discovery that itch.io has delisted/shadowbanned pretty much all its "adult" games - they don't show up in a search anymore, even if you have the 'show me adult content' turned on, even if you are the game's creator.

They are still listed on the creator's pages; they are still in the bundles they've been in, and the "search title/author/tag" on the bundle pages still works.

Some games have been removed entirely - with a claim that they violate the TOS and therefore the creators can't receive payment, so itch will be just keeping their money thankyouverymuch.

After a mad scramble to figure out "what's going on and why," Itch mentioned payment processor issues on its Discord (which is going wild with drama; it does NOT have enough moderators for this), and eventually released a statement:

We have “deindexed” all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages. We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are truly sorry for the frustration and confusion caused by this change.

Recently, we came under scrutiny from our payment processors regarding the nature of some content hosted on itch.io. Due to a game titled No Mercy, which was temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April, the organization Collective Shout launched a campaign against Steam and itch.io, directing concerns to our payment processors about the nature of certain content found on both platforms.

Itch instantly caved to their "Warriors for Innocence."

( Specific game info )

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reading

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book report

The Brightness Between Us, by Eliot Schrefer

A good old fashioned young adult novel about being stranded on an inhospitable planet and struggling to live off a steadily declining cache of resources. In one case, it's an alien world far in the future, and in the other, the dying Earth those colonists left, where the last inhabitants are about to extinguish themselves through nuclear war. Ah, children's lit.

This is actually a sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, but if you're a chaos demon you might be able to read this without having read the first. Partly because it stands on its own while gently reminding the reader what happened in the first book, but also because it fully retreads some of the same ground.

Because half of this book was telling me stuff I already, basically, knew, I was much more interested in the sections on the alien planet with its frontier survival vibes and foreign mysteries. I wanted to spend all my time there rather than on Earth, since I already knew that was a lost cause, and any new information we got in those sections could have easily been worked into the future segments and much of it, in fact, was. But it wasn't a chore to spend time with the original versions of Ambrose and Kodiak as they come to terms with the lies they've been told and try to undo some of the damage they caused, and together the two parts of this book tell a full story that comes to a satisfying conclusion, whether or not there's ever a third book in the series. But if there is, I'll be there.

Contains: queer dads; child harm and references to child death; wild animal harm/death; mental illness with intrusive thoughts; gun violence; nuclear apocalypse; climate disaster.

presented without explanation

(Novelist.app appears to be genuinely free.)

Current Music: Jin, "Rope It"

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I got a job for my birthday!

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Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Angels on tv

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that's 21 straight successful stolen bases

Today was my first day back at work after my vacation and I did not sleep at all well last night, despite, you know, working from home and didn't have to get up early or anything. I was tossing and turning until sometime after 4 am, at which point I finally fell asleep.

Work was fine - busy, and kind of a lot, but not difficult despite the lack of sleep - but then I sat down on the couch after dinner to watch the Mets and fell asleep for about 40 minutes. *hands*

I'm really glad I took yesterday off too. I 100% recommend adding an extra day onto your vacation if you can - especially if it's a Monday, and doubly so if you actually went away. It makes it easier to get back into the grind, at least for me. I had 333 emails to sort through this morning, and there is way too much going on, as usual, but I timed it so that all of my regular meetings happened while I was out, so this week should be fairly quiet.

On the home front, I've had my new dishwasher for a week now and it is working really well, though I am still learning how to load it. The tines are much closer together and shorter than in my old one, which makes it difficult to get stuff in between them. But it's so quiet! And it doesn't leak! *knock wood* It does take 2.5 hours to run the full normal cycle, but I can live with that.

On the TV front, I finished Murderbot and enjoyed it - Mensah is still my favorite and I wish Bharadwaj had had more to do because I liked her as well.

I also finished the last 2 available episodes of My Life Is Murder because I read they are doing a new season, though who knows when it will be available here. I enjoyed the s4 2-part finale, and I do kind of low-key ship Alexa and Madison, though I also like that they have not had any real romantic interests for Alexa, and those 2 episodes really focused on her lingering grief for her husband.

In other news, Baby Miss L went to Sesame Place this past weekend and the videos of her vibrating with joy over meeting Elmo and Grover and Cookie Monster are amazing!

*

Current Mood: thoughtful

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real life: public transit

Once more with public transit...

Choosing to change my bus route slightly to avoid assholes who won't take "no" for an answer was definitely the right choice. I hadn't realized just how stressful it had been getting until today when I avoided the transit center, and the difference was very much noticeable.

The extra walk once I get off bus #1 to get to a bus stop where I can get on bus #2 is a bit annoying, admittedly, but I think it's well worth it. It was so much more peaceful waiting for the bus at a random bus stop with one or two other people than it is waiting at the transit center with dozens and dozens of strangers all around.

Now, it's not going to be fun the next time I take the bus when it's raining, since the bus stops don't have any type of roof over them like the transit center. Considering the alternative, though, I think it may still be worth it.

Current Mood: frustrated

Entry tags:

real life: public transit

The joys of public transit...

I think that I'm going to shift my bus route to/from work a little bit. I've been getting on the bus outside the hotel/near work, taking it to the transit center, and then switching to the bus that goes to work/the hotel (depending on if it's morning or evening, obviously). It's relatively painless, although the schedules almost never match up so I always end up having to wait a bit for the next bus once I get to the transit center.

There's been a growing issue the past few weeks, though, where a few of the jobless and/or homeless guys who hang out at the transit center all day have been giving me trouble. Some of them hang out there because they don't have anything better to do. Others stay there because it's a good place to pick up odd jobs from people, sell snacks or bottled water to raise a few dollars, easily bum a cigarette from time to time, etc. Most of them are fine, and even a little protective when they see people giving the "regulars" a hard time, but there are some who... well, aren't. It's aggressive flirting and not wanting to take "no" for an answer, for the most part, which isn't great but I can deal with it since it's a crowded, public spot.

This afternoon, though, one of them grabbed me by the arm hard enough to leave red marks when I tried to get to my bus because he wanted me to stay and talk with him. Despite the fact that I'd been pointedly ignoring him for a good ten minutes at that point. A couple of the other guys pulled him back so that I could get to my bus, and it sounded like they were giving him a pretty good tongue lashing, but no. Just, no.

What I think that I'm going to do is in the mornings start getting off four stops earlier near the library. I'll have to walk a block-and-a-half or so, but I don't have to cross the street or anything, and if I get off there I can make it to another bus stop that the bus that goes by work stops at without having to go to the transit center. Then in the afternoon, I'll do something similar and get off several stops early, although it's a little more of a pain as I'll have to not only walk a block or two but I'll have to cross two decent-sized roads in the process.

I think it will be worth it, though, to avoid the assholes.

Current Mood: hopeful

Entry tags:

weather: storms

Rain, rain, go away...

For over a week straight, the DC kept being hit by storms in the late afternoon, and it's been absolutely killing my head. I've always been sensitive to weather fronts moving through, and the older I get the worse it seems to be getting. (Although there's a definite possibility that some of that might be stress related too, considering the current state of everything.)

There were so many things that I needed to get done this past week that just didn't happen because I got off work and immediately curled up in bed for several hours until the storm had passed through. And by that point it was late enough in the evening that I didn't have time to get everything I needed to do done (or it was too late to start it because of noise-related reasons).

Theoretically the rain is supposed to finally be gone, so we'll see if this week goes better than last week on that front. 🤞🏻

non-binding pol re: Ninefox hobby mode reboot/AU format

Poll #33394 best format for continued hobby mode Ninefox AU/reboot shenanigans

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

View Respondents

Best format for hobby-mode Ninefox reboot/AU shenanigans

View Answers

Ninefox MUD
0 (0.0%)

Ninefox text-only browser-based chapter-based adventure (Inkle Studios' Ink)
10 (55.6%)

Ninefox VN
4 (22.2%)

Ninefox comic (this one is happening regardless)
9 (50.0%)

Ninefox animation (Candle Arc is happening regardless because MFA project)
4 (22.2%)

Ninefox reboot/AU serialized novel (prose) [1]
7 (38.9%)

None of these! Something else I will explain in comments.
0 (0.0%)

In terms of sustainable effort:

MUD: medium-high bar if using existing codebase.

Ink serialized web-based text adventure: medium-low bar. Probably chapter by chapter releases.

ETA #1: Wait a second! You can compile Inform 7 to release for playing on the web! Either this didn't exist ca. 2007 or I suck at reading documentation. That's my choice, then. I enjoy writing parser IF (interactive fiction / text adventures) more than choice-based formats. Yay!

VN: high bar.

comic: I'm doing this for myself so it really doesn't matter what anyone thinks, but maybe people prefer this.

2D animated short (we're talking 5-10 minutes): SLOWEST. VERY SLOW. 2D hand-drawn animation is just slow. But I've proposed this for my final major project starting in 2028, so I'm doing this no matter what anyone else thinks.

[1] serialized reboot/AU novel (prose): This would require negotiating with my publisher, which has an option on further prose works. I control the relevant rights for other formats.

Discussion with Solaris suggested they would be happy to talk about a different Machineries trilogy with a new plot and a new set of characters but the two ideas I have aren't trilogy-length and I don't have a sense that any reader wants this! It's theoretically possible Solaris might let me play with a newsletter (etc) serialization if it's something they wouldn't have an interest in offering for and they are assuming zero risk since I doubt anything I do here would tank sales of the existing books. However, there are negotiation complications here that may make this Not Possible rights-wise so I'm hoping no one wants this and I can stop thinking about it with a clear conscience.

I'm sitting on something like 100,000+ words of disorganized prose bits (not a coherent single narrative, it's a bunch of different POVs) and I want to write about that crashhawk unit and Gödel's incompleteness theorems in hexarchate numerology. I have an outline.

But also. For health and family reasons, I'm not signing a book contract in the near future; any prose-format writing is going to be on spec or similar if at all, and if the answer is that it's just noodling that stays on my hard drive, it is what it is. Meanwhile, I have orchestration homework to do, ta!

Entry tags:

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer

3/5. Do I need to say what this is? Look at me reading this, only twenty mumble years after multiple boys informed me, explicitly or implicitly, that my opinions on all literature known to man were irrelevant unless and until I read this book (and liked it, one presumes). You’ll note that this directly resulted in me not reading this for multiple decades.

I do not like it very much, for the record. It is what it is, and it suffers hugely from me having previously read many of the books that it engendered, such that I finally get back to this and find it reads as derivative rather than what it is. It also suffers from the racism, I should mention. Oh, and the thing where the male protagonist is a total loser and yet we have to spend all this time with him while a much more interesting woman does stuff that actually makes the story go. At least Gibson was apparently aware of that; he just didn’t do anything about it (in this book, anyway – I have the impression she gets better billing later).

What no one told me, however, is that Gibson can really write. I may not be interested in a lot of the stuff he’s interested in, he may have been baked out of his mind while writing most of this, I may find this tired and silly, but god damn if I didn’t reread certain passages of this multiple times just to figure out how he just did that. If I’d known he was writing like that, I would have read him twenty years ago. Though then again, I probably wouldn’t have known how to read a writer like that twenty years ago, so okay.

Also, I’ll say this for him, that is still a banger of a title.

Content notes: Fridging. Racist stereotypes in multiple directions.

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#661, Bashō

a wild boar
is also blown about
by the typhoon
-1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

( 俳句 )

Current Mood: hopeful

Entry tags:

real life: extended stay hotel

Hotel Life: Once more on the power front...

The power went off again for a bit but, once it turned back on, everything was working correctly again.

Well, mostly. My AC was still making the odd grinding sound, but I did some googling and opened it up, and I was able to get it fixed. The sudden power outage while it was turned on basically knocked a couple of things loose, but I was able to get them all screwed back in properly so that it's working properly again.

We'll see if it lasts?

ETA: The power went out for another half hour around 7pm, with the fire alarm going off when it went out and again when it came back on. Our guess is that the fire alarm is being triggered for some reason when it transfers to the emergency back-up battery and back. No updates from Pepco about what's actually causing the outages (which is par for the course for Pepco), so everyone is assuming it's because the network is so overloaded from everyone using the AC 24/7.

Current Mood: annoyed

Entry tags:

real life: extended stay hotel

Hotel Life: Power Update

Okay, so apparently the sister hotel and the 7-Eleven next door are having the same issue where about half the lights/plugs in the building are working and the other half aren't. So it looks like it might actually be an issue with the power company rather than some of the wires specifically in this hotel getting fried like we were initially suspecting might be the case.

My AC still won't cool, but I have managed to get it to at least have a weak fan blowing which is better than nothing. And the AC in the hallway just outside my room is working, which is helping a little with keeping the temperature from going up too quickly in here.

Both the power company and the fire department are wandering around trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, especially since two extended stay hotels full of people without working AC (in some rooms, not all - the AC is working fine for some people, although most of the rooms with working AC don't have working lights) in 90+ degree weather is... not great.

The temperature in my room is slowly edging upwards, but it's not too bad yet at least. When the power went out at 11am, it was about 68°F in my room as I turn the AC down low at night to sleep so it hadn't had a chance to start warming back up yet at that point. A little over three hours later, with no AC that entire time, it's gone up to 74°F, so it's averaging about 2° an hour. Which, you know, could be worse.

Now, if they don't get it fixed within the next few hours, it's going to start being a problem. My fingers are desperately crossed that they'll figure it out before then, though.

ETA: It only went up to 75°F by 3pm, so it looks like the temperature might not be rising quite as quickly as it gets warmer. We'll see what happens.

Entry tags:

under the table and dreaming

@fan_writers

New comm for meta about writing! Moderated by fandom staples

mific and

china_shop!

Current Mood: frustrated

Entry tags:

real life: extended stay hotel

Hotel Life: Happy Sunday?

The power in the hotel went out a little while ago and, while it came back on after about twenty minutes, the plugs for my fridge and microwave are dead and my AC won't blow cold air. And it's definitely not the circuit breaker, because I already checked it and tried flipping everything on/off to be certain. 🙃

While the plugs for the microwave and fridge aren't working, there are three more in the kitchen that are working fine (two on the wall over the counter and one for the oven). I was able to move the fridge to another nearby plug that was working, and I'm pretty sure that there's one close enough that I can do the same for the microwave if I need to use it. Or I can move the microwave to on top of the stove top long enough to use it if the cord won't reach.

It's not a great option, but it's at least an alternative until they can figure out what the fuck went wrong.

The temperature in the room is quickly ticking upwards a little at a time without a working AC, though, which is definitely not a plug issue since it's turning on but is just not cooling anything off. I turned the AC completely off, flipped the breaker off/on, and am letting it sit for half an hour to see if that helps. I know sometimes that can be enough to reset it, so my fingers are crossed it will work this time. Luckily, I had the room cool enough that it will take a while before it gets too hot in here, but still. It's supposed to hit 90°F today, so a working AC is kinda vital.

The lovely part is that the person at the front desk has no idea what to do, because a ton of people are having similar issues where some things came back on but not others. Half the lights in the hallway are still dead and a lot of us are having issues with some things working but not others (although it seems to vary from person to person per the person at the front desk who I spoke with), so it's gotta be some type of wiring issue where plugs that are piggybacked off the same failed wiring are the ones not coming back on for anyone. The maintenance guy doesn't even work on weekends, though, so.... yeah.

ETA: And now the fire alarm is going off, presumably due to the same wiring issue as there's definitely no fire. Today's great, y'all.

The last 24 hours have been a whole year

1. Chaos. Last night, the building across the street caught on fire.

Again.

It's an abandoned/defunct factory; this is the... fifth? time it's caught on fire in the last couple of years. (The owner who acquired it after the previous owner died has been trying to sell it for far more than anyone wants to pay.)

2. Discord. This morning: Skipped my GURPS game (sigh) for round 3 of 4 of the Seattle Worldcon virtual business meeting. 3.75 hours of intense Roberts Rules neepery wrapped around 16 action items. 14 passed, 2 failed. I took notes on (1) everything that happened and (2) How To Bog Down A Worldcon Business Meeting, should I ever be so inclined.

There are a substantial number of people involved for whom Roberts Rules is apparently their main fandom. The Worldcon Business Meeting is their Pennsic. Some of them get annoyed at people who aren't interested in RRONR procedures as much as they want changes to Worldcon rules.

Also I have volunteered to be on two committees; we'll see if I get accepted to either.

3. Confusion. Family birthday party. Eldest daughter came over to cook tacos yay. Much bustling around a small kitchen with people no longer used to having three butts in a one-butt sized space.

Tacos were yummy. Cake and ice cream were yummy. French-press coffee was yummy; I wound up thinking "I should do that more often" and then remembered why I don't - because the cleanup is a hassle, and also, I prefer the coffee hotter than the press makes it. (5 minutes of sitting in a glass cylinder is cooler than I prefer.) But it's nice once in a while.

4. Bureaucracy. 2 hrs of OTW Board public meeting. (The meeting is 1 hr, but I'm involved as a volunteer, so had to be there in advance.) It ran short - instead of the normal "dozen questions emailed in advance + 10-20 questions asked in session," it was "5 questions sent in advance and only 4 more asked in session." All questions answered during the meeting; none left over to get posted on the website later.

5. Aftermath. Kid the Elder has gone home with doggo via Lyft; I am trying to catch up on the several chat channels with all sorts of stuff in them. Also now trying to figure out what writing deadlines I have pressing that have been shoved aside during prep for these two meetings.

( Now what? )