alexx_kay

siderea has written an excellent post about Mental Health Awareness that I feel is well worth signal-boosting. Go read.

There was context for this, but you don't need it. This is one of the best things I've read about Art in a long time:

Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

Just finished playing a great iOs game called Waking Mars. I really, really enjoyed it. It's a science fiction game about explorers on Mars, discovering the remnants of an ancient ecosystem, whose seeds are still viable. You study the relationships between the various organisms as you attempt to restore this ecosystem to full working order in the mysterious cave beneath the Martian surface.

The game is, in the broadest sense, an action-platformer, but doesn't require extremely high hand-eye coordination. (At least on an iPad. I suspect it would be a bit trickier on a phone-sized screen.) When you bring up the menu of seeds to throw one, the game pauses, making it generally easy to aim.

Besides being an enjoyable experience on its own terms, I got the strong impression that the makers of this game were making some implicit political statements about the possibilities of games, as opposed to the 'accepted wisdom' of the big game companies. This is one of the few games I've played lately that *can't* be described as "shoot, shoot, take their loot"; it's entirely themed around growth, restoration, exploration, and discovery. Yet I found it no less exciting, for all that. The two human protagonists (there are a few AIs in the cast, also) are a Chinese male and an African female, so there's complete gender balance, and not a single Caucasian to be seen. I didn't have any trouble identifying with these protagonists.

Very highly recommended.

Last night, as I approached home (well after dark), a fat raccoon ran across the street in front of me, and proceeded up the front walk into our yard and around the house.

Here's a great article by one of my favorite game journalists, Tom Chick: Bioware plays the gay card. It starts out about the portrayal of a gay relationship in Mass Effect 3, then goes in some unexpected but interesting directions before looping back 'round to the start. Especially recommended to londo.

This morning's conversation:
kestrell (excitedly): Do you know what today is?
Me: Fredric's birthday! [1]
Kes: Do you know what *else* today is?
Me: ...No.
Kes: It's Sadie Hawkins Day!
Me: Oh!
Kes: Will you marry me?
Alexx: Yes!
Kes: I've got a hunch it will work out well.

[1] Today is Fredric the (sometime) pirate's 39th birthday. For a few months back in 2004, I had the same number as him.

"Videogames do a thing that no other industry does. You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a videogame, and the videogame will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the videogame." My pedant-side wants to argue with him, but he's funny, and mostly correct.

I just finished playing Dear Esther. It's available on Steam for $9.99 and well worth it. Highly recommended.

I say 'playing', though it isn't a game in any conventional sense. It's an interactive narrative experience that, for me, lasted about two hours (though I am likely to revisit it again). I knew very little about it going in, mostly just what I've said already, plus the fact that it had generated a *lot* of writing by the sorts of writers I respect. Sensing that here was a rare opportunity to experience a unique thing relatively unspoiled, I actively avoided finding out more about it. It would probably have been OK if I had, but I did enjoy going in blank.

If, like many of my colleagues, you *design* interactive narrative experiences (whether attached to more conventional gameplay or not), this is worthy of careful study. Dear Esther contains a lot of masterful design work, on multiple levels. But again, I think you're better off going in without preconceptions about what they are. If you're the sort of person who studies this stuff, you'll recognize them on your own. *Highest* recommendation for students of the form.

Free-associating during a dream, I was thinking that the term "happily married" carries a lot of connotations and cultural baggage along with it, that may or may not actually apply to a given marriage.

*I*, am "giddily married" (and smug about it).

Particularly for russkay, though of interest to many others on my Friends list who appreciate fonts. Averia: The Average Font. I find it quite beautiful, both in itself, and in the story of its creation.

(h/t juldea)