like every other game dev born after 1985 i’ve had thoughts of making my own Pokemon-like and the main roadblock for me has been: how do i come up with a typing system that doesn’t just mimic Pokemon’s? and the answer is you don’t come up with a system. maybe there’s types but they’re completely ad-hoc - you could even have one-off types just for one specific mon or move if you want. the flexibility is dizzying; you can add dozens or hundreds of new types whenever. sound type, radiation type, magic type. go wild! you begin to run into combinatorial explosion. strengths and weaknesses grow more nonsensical as you start skipping over most of your ever-growing type chart anytime you add a new one. after all, who cares whether food-type mons are weak or strong versus electricity? they just need to be weak against munch-type attacks, and maybe mold-type too. to make full use of the increasingly-specific types you’ve been coming up with, some of your mons end up with 5 or 10 types. your spidershark monster is, at the very least, a spider, shark, swim, beast, and bug type. overlaps happen; redundancies crop up. music type, nuclear type, mystic type. have you done those before? don’t worry about it. 3 years into development you cannot imagine having ever hated anyone as much as you hate yourself
this is not a cautionary tale. i think everyone should do this
alright boys, girls, neither, both, and those in between we need to clear something up:
if someone says they are queer, they are queer.
no ifs, ands, buts, etc. they are queer.
and if they discover later that they’re cishet, great, amazing, wonderful, i’m glad we gave them community when they were figuring themselves out and needed it.
no gatekeeping of queerness here, alright?
because when shit hits the fan queerphobes wont care whether you’re a cis gay man who goes by he/him or a bigender aromantic pansexual who goes by it/its
tumblr I have posts I need 3rd party plugins to hide because the notifications won’t shut up if you start giving me made up nonsense notifications like this…. 😬
I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.
And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.”
So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)
It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful.
It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons.
There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:
The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.
You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!
But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.
You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking
man imagine posting this shit under a lesbian’s autobiography knowing that your review is A) one of few one star reviews B) will contribute in preventing people from reading it. this makes me dread publishing shit
btw this entire series (my lesbian experience with loneliness) is explicitly about the author’s search for love and intimacy. why are you reading it. it’s exactly what it says on the tin
ive been saying it but people these days will literally base their opinion on the quality of a book/movie by how much of themselves they can project onto the main character
this whole character relatability or likability thing is something i’ve seen come up a lot in bad book reviews and its like. since when has that been the point
I am Kayin, the creator of the Indie freeware game, I Wanna Be the Guy, as well as I Wanna Be the Guy: Gaiden, who is also working on Brave Earth: Prologue!
