ELSEWHERE

These earbuds are still a little too big for my ears

Got less done today than I'd have liked, but still got some done. Cats woke me up at 7:30 and then I couldn't fall back asleep (stomach empty, brain full) so I dicked around a bit until it was late enough to feed them and then to pill Oz, and then I went back to sleep until around 3:30. Mostly today I tried to force myself to focus on Japanese study/homework (three pages due tomorrow, they are not difficult but uuuugggghhhhh), and around 8 I hit Dave up like 'hey I really don't want to be doing homework would you like to play games'

He was in the middle of movie but was down when it was done, which turned out to be, ehhhh, 45 minutes? Ish.

Did get up to some nonsense in the meantime instead of just asking Dave how much longer he'd be like a normal person

 
And then we played some more Smallands! I am really enjoying it, though today was another instance of dying over and over again while trying to retrieve my death loot. There was also an annoying period where I decided to kill the game for a minute to tweak a server setting (I was tired of accidentally killing my companion animals and wanted to turn friendly fire and companion death off) and then for some reason Dave couldn't rejoin when I started it up again. It took us maybe half an hour of restarting and validating files and trying different settings and &c &c &c before we finally got it working by destroying the bed he'd made at our home base (no idea why that did it, but it was a suggested fix on the forums that we had largely been ignoring because why would that be it?? And also because it specifically said to destroy all beds on the server and at least one bed was on the complete other side of the map). However I now have a pet wasp and we both have grappling hooks and gliders! We also defeated probably our first boss? It was pretty easy

There is some very weirdness about how the game handles, uh, saves? And worlds? And such? I made a second world to mess around in solo and then when I loaded our world up today my stuff from the solo world was there. Our guild base was Not in the solo world but might have appeared if I'd claimed the tree it had been on. And the character is the same so I of course had all of my levels and inventory, but my companions also exist in both worlds, what stable you put them in doesn't seem to matter at all. Very strange stuff

There's also a Halloween event happening in game but we didn't mess with that content much.

While we were playing the cats were going Nuts for much of the night, annoyingly. I ended up having to put Cael on timeout again for outright attacking Oz. He gets real full of beans if he keeps having access to the front of the house for very long past our usual bedtime, just gets excited about not having to go to bed I guess. That's fine except for the attacking Oz, of course

Loki also has been getting locked out of the bedroom when Erik goes to sleep, and I had to hop out of playing with Dave to let him back there. Unfortunately he seems to have clocked that ash still isn't home and also yelled once he was in the bedroom, which I think ended up waking Erik up. At least he did eventually quiet down

Alright! I need to continue forcing myself to do Japanese tomorrow, but I don't think there's anything specific on my plate aside from that. Going to go to bed here in a minute so I don't sleep all day again, though today it was extremely grey all day and if it's like that again I may just end up sleeping all day regardless of what I do. God willing I actually get my homework turned in this time though

…destroy…all the…beds…????????

also, i’m ready to be home with my cats and everyone. a couple more nights.

I would genuinely love to hear all about the programming decisions that led to the beds being a weak point in multiplayer connectivity

i would too. and /how/ it works

(just for fun)

la ileta kuu ki seken ture ancheine se kit iusik turevhir mare hiavhir ile ieki ture cen ira iusane ke

I think I saw your bird, it was sitting on a table then standing repeatedly in a hole

So steam requires developers to disclose when their games contain AI-generated content and the number of disclosures I see that are like 'Contains a teeny tiny bit of AI. Just a teeeeeeny tiny bit of AI, you'll never even notice. A smidgen of AI! We promise it's barely there we'd never use AI to generate any more than just a teeeeeeeeeeeeny tiiiiiiiiny part of our game please don't skip over our game just because we used AI to make a teeeeeeeeeny tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiny part of our game'

 
Like cool story, still not buying your game

So Game Grumps were playing Until Dawn this month for Halloween, which if you're not aware contains wendigos as one of the things trying to kill you -- I am almost certain it is one of the things that put the wendigo into the modern zeigeist, and (full disclosure, I am not native american, let alone Algonquian) I feel like it actually does a pretty respectful job of it for a horror game heavily based on the 90s/00s slasher genre (there's one bit where a character does a 'the Cree think [thing I've never seen said about Wendigos] but they're wrong and I, a white man, am right' which is, weird to include, but otherwise the portrayal is pretty accurate to my understanding of the myth)

Anyway, I was expecting either Arin specifically or people in the comments generally to bring up the 'you're not allowed to say that word' thing but it never did come up. Again, full disclosure I am white, but I've never seen that said by a native american person and specifically have seen several Algonquian people say 'What? That's not a thing at all, what are you talking about??', so I'm glad to see that that misinformation might have finally died out.

Also didn't see anyone bringing up appropriation generally either, which is also kind of a relief because again I think the game does a good job of actually portraying the actual idea of wendigos and I also think that it's, bad, to section off other cultures as things you're not allowed to touch. Obviously just using the name without any respect to the myth or the culture to which the myth belongs is bad, and of course there's nuance for like sacred or closed-practices things, but I am firmly of the opinion that exposing people to other cultures, and real cultural exchange, are forces for good

That said probably could have been some more native american representation in the game instead of just casual mentions that the white man mentioned above has spoken with some Cree people offscreen about the subject

Like you can't have 'I'm tired of Vampires Werewolves And Zombies being the only monsters, let's get some more obscure monsters from minority cultures in the spotlight!' and also 'But you're only allowed to portray myths and monsters from places that you have a direct bloodline connection to'