Thinking about how the raw gameplay of ‘move your blip to avoid other blips’ always seems to get a ‘kill or be killed’ narrative layered on it. How can this be changed?

Direct inversion: You are given reason to want to Not Kill. Imagine you are playing Pac-Man, but instead of being killed by the ghosts when they touch you, you kill them – and it is seen as a bad thing. Perhaps you may have similar penalties as ‘losing a life’: everyone goes back to their starting point, and you can only do it three times. Perhaps you lose 25% of your score. There would need to be some reason everyone wants to be near you, despite the fact your touch is deadly.

Another inversion: ‘Throw blops to keep other blips from touching your blip’ is pretty much always cast in ‘killing’ terms. How can we change this?

Throw blops to turn other blips into your friends. Slowly the game would change, from throwing the right blops to befriend each particular blip (pink blips love pink blops, horses love apples, seahawks fans love blue/green, cops love donuts…), into moving your immense horde of blips around. Until the camera had pulled back far enough that the individual blips were impossible to make out from the group. I imagine eventually you would fill the entire zone, and to do anything interesting you’d have to zoom down and pick one blip to go through a tiny gateway into the next zone; repeat with variations until the designer runs out of interesting ideas for gameplay and/or scenery.

Saw William Gibson complaining about GamerGate recently and thought how much he’s aged, and how ungracefully, since GG and Operation Disrespectful Nod reminded me of the Panther Moderns.

– this comment on Hacker News

I have never made that connection. Now I kind of want to re-read the Sense/Net infiltration segment of ‘Neuromancer’ with that interpretation in mind. I suspect I will be a hell of a lot less prone to think of the Panther Moderns as totally rad this time.

I mean, angrily depressed thirteen year old boy me me thought the Moderns were pretty rad. But he thought a lot of dumb stuff was pretty rad. Including the word ‘rad’.

And think about it: the Moderns’ part in the raid, if I recall correctly, was to play atrocity videos on all the building’s screens, make a psuchoactive chemical leak, and DDOS the place. Their aesthetic was full-body video camoflaugue suits and total anonymity.  Yeah, in my headcanon, Lupus Yonderboy is now totally sea lioning the Sprawl equivalant of #gamergate when he’s not being a l33t ha><0rr.

Stuff I did this evening:

• broke the connector on the battery pack I’ve been using inside the still-not-finished Octoclock while removing it to use it to power the Witchin’ Coat
• powered up the Witchin’ Coat via my computer’s USB and decided what fabrics I want to use to diffuse the LEDs (a white fabric, with a sparkly black one atop it)
• half-assedly cut and sewed one panel that will have LEDs attached to it
• picked all the conductive thread out of the coat, and removed the LEDs from it

I think that is enough for now. I took some notes as to the exact way I want to stack things (coat, LEDs, white fabric, black fabric) and am now going to put all the bits away until next time I want to fool with this.

Earlier today, I got the next page of Rita halfway done. Not as much as it sounds as it’s just a single figure that takes up half the page. There’s some background stuff I’d like to do as well; I might fool with that while I eat some dinner but I probably will end up just poking at the net.

And of course half the day went to just slouching in the living room playing video games. I have been playing Diablo 3, and finally got to the point where it started being slightly challenging – the last few bits of Act 4 actually kind of woke me up, and the final boss of that made me finally change up the mindless tactics that had carried me through the game. Finishing Act 4 finally unlocked difficulty levels beyond the first three, which are named “normal”, “hard”, and “expert” but should be called “beginner”, “easy”, and “normal” IMHO. I’m not sure I’d actually recommend it; the gameplay is okay but the story is so by-the-numbers, and the whole thing is kinda grindy. That’s been tickling some part of my brain that just wants to be awake but kinda bored during the deepest parts of winter; basically I guess it’s a good game to hibernate to. I’m also hoping it will be fun for local co-op when Nick gets back in town.
Anyway. I typed this up while eating. Which I’m pretty much done with. So I guess now I’ll post this, go brush my teeth, and go to sleep.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been dealing with a cold. I had no energy, everything sucked, all I wanted to do was lie in the living room playing video games. This morning, I woke up at about 5AM with a bloody nose. Presumably from all that nose-blowing. I grumbled and went back to sleep for a while.

Now I am up, and I feel much better. Which somehow seems… I dunno. Weird? I just lost blood, and somehow that seems to have finished up the cold.

I doubt, however, that I could have skipped the past couple days of clogged-up misery by sticking a leech up my nose.

Today there is an invitation to drop in on some friends up in the suburbs. There will be cookies and meat and whatnot.

Tomorrow there is an invitation to FaceTime with some friends in New Orleans.

But it is winter and all I kinda really want to do is stay inside where it's warm and enjoy the silence of a day with very few cars on the road.

I dunno. Ever since Christmas stopped being HEY I GET ALL THIS LEGO AND ALL THESE BOOKS it's kinda lost its allure. Especially because around that time is when my father died. It went from yay bright lights and gifts to a reminder of a big emptiness in my life, and it's never really recovered. Well, sort of. I don't usually dwell on my dead father on the day, but I am definitely much more likely to spend it in solitude than to seek out people. I kinda lost what little interest I had in seeking out people then. And it didn't help that it kinda became “the day we'd get dressed up and go eat somewhere with Grandma, while she bemoaned the fact that her husband and sons were all dead”.

This sounds much more depressing than it actually is! I just enjoy solitude and silence on these CELEBRATE FAMILY TOGETHERNESS!!!!! holidays. Thanksgiving is like that too. I go home a couple times around winter, but make a point to never do it over a holiday. Quite possibly because that would remind both me and my mother of the fact that my father's dead and we'd just cry a lot. Him dying on my birthday just really kinda ruined all holidays for us, to be honest.

(It is good to HAVE invitations to spend time with friends on these holidays. That keeps me from feeling like nobody loves me. But I'd really just rather sit in a quiet warm place and read or something and eat very little and not talk with a single person.)

This morning I was poking around playstation.com to try and figure out if I could get Sony to quit sending me two emails every time I buy a game – one to say “you bought a game!” and one to say “you added funds to your wallet”.

Sadly, I could not find a “I am a grownup who pays for her e-goods with an actual credit card, please stop playing this ‘wallet’ game with me” setting. But I did find this:

Sony calls it the “portable ID” and wants me to stick it in my forum signatures or something. I call it the “no-life tracker”. If the little blue thing on the trophy collection stats ever begins showing a number larger than 0, please check if I’m alright; that tracks how many “platinum” trophies I have, which are typically only acquired by getting every other trophy a game offers.

“It appears that someone used Greek characters to draw a crude representation of a penis. Please do not do this” – a snarky header added by the weird e-mail client I was using in a dream.