imagine a community that has:

• one person who loves to sew and fix clothes
• one Fedi transfemme that gets all the computers working together and maybe creates one community-wide LAN and self-hosts a bunch of community resources and downloads games and movies and music for everyone
• one person who’s passionate about machines and works on everyone’s cars and other mechanical devices
• one person who’s in really good shape and can do yardwork and other physically-demanding labor
• etc.

like fuck I need that tbh

weird thought but the problem of “Linux demands too much tech-savviness for the average person to be able to use it” might be sidestepped by having strong, diverse communities

like imagine a community with ~30 non-techies and 1-2 Fedi transfemmes who want an excuse to fuck around with Linux anyway, and the transfemmes get everyones’ computers up and running and fix technical problems when they arise and help with hardware compatibility. that way nobody is dependent on Microsoft but also nobody has to learn the intricacies of systemd or package management or the command line unless they want to

beginners: music theory is bullshit i can just play notes and it sounds good

music theory nerds: nooo you're meant to use the chromatic harmonic mediants as a way to modulate towards the fifth of the sixth and then modulate downwards to the fourth with a backdoor progression!

jazz musicians: music theory is bullshit i can just play notes and it sounds good

It appears that I have drawn yet another entry for my portfolio of fantasy glamour models. I can only apologise.

Slightly more seriously, I think I'm fairly happy with how this one came out, though as usual I had lots of conflicting thoughts about colour schemes. I think I reined back my worst excesses... this time.

Comments/suggestions welcome as always.

#MastoArt #FediArt #ArtistsOnMastodon #Fantasy #Tiefling #Devil #Illustration #Procreate #Turquoise

@kasdeya the way that i got past a lot of my personal insecurities about skill was surrounding myself in others that were trying to do the same thing. it helped expose me to a wide variety of different types of creativity at multiple “skill levels” which gave me a more realistic perspective on what it means to create or even to learn, i think. when making art and looking for inspiration, it was really discouraging to see nothing but elite artists who have been doing it their whole lives while i was trying to get started. . . but when i surrounded myself in artists nearer to my time investment into it, i felt a lot more comfortable and at home (and i learned a lot more that way)

as far as games: playing with friends is both infinitely more rewarding to me than playing alone, and often i start playing the same games at the same time (if its multiplayer, that is). what i’ve noticed is that the rate of learning is generally the same and the only different is how much time one puts into it.

@rowan to be honest I also barely know who filthy frank is lol. I think I know that he talks in a really rough voice and wears green spandex and that’s about it

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that there are fucked-up parts of youtube but it kinda does since the algorithm just doesn’t show that to me. but yeah I guess a huge monolithic platform like youtube is going to have a ton of asshats on it

since we only listen to music made by the top 0.01% of artists who have been training for years or decades at using their exact instruments and making their exact genre of music, that becomes our only basis for comparison. so once we see someone try to play music IRL, or we try it ourself, all we can think is “wow that’s so dogshit. I have literally never heard anyone this bad before and have no frame of reference other than to know that this is beyond terrible”

and the same thing happens with all other forms of art: poetry, writing, drawing, etc.

I think this causes another, subtler problem too. because the assumption becomes - implicitly - that the only reason to learn these forms of art is to become another top 0.01% artist who is then good enough to sell their art to the world. because those are the only artists we ever see, so how can another form of artist exist if we never see them? so at that point there’s no reason to learn art at all unless you’re going to dedicate your entire life to it

but interestingly, this is starting to happen with video games too, because we only see the top 0.01% ultra pro challenge run speedrunning esports gods break the game wide open and use every tech and optimization imaginable. and then they get money for how skilled they are - either through youtube views or esports contracts or etc. and that’s probably a big part of why twitch chat is so full of “why are you so dogshit” every time they encounter a non-pro player, and it must be a big part of why gaming culture has become so optimization-poisoned as well

I don’t like the phrase “given a chance, players will optimize all the fun out of the game” because I don’t think this has to be the case - I think this is a cultural problem that we can and should fix, and the disproportionate focus on highly skilled players is feeding this problem by normalizing the idea that the only reason to play a game is to try to win as hard as you can (instrumental play)

and then of course - because everyone approaches gaming as an optimization problem - new games are designed under the assumption that their only value is as an optimization problem - accidentally punishing any other form of play. which just compounds the problem

so how do we fix this? I’m honestly not sure, but I think a good start would be to reward more Let’s Play type content and watch players start multiplayer games without knowing all of the optimizations and techs - and enjoy watching them learn. I especially like those “granny plays Skyrim” or “I teach my dad Dark Souls” type videos because they show the viewer the exact opposite of a speedrunner esport pro god, and they celebrate that lack of experience and the process of learning

I think it would also be helpful to invent new types of casual play that don’t focus on winning (ludic play) - like roleplaying in a PvP game - and make content around that for people to watch, to help drive home that games don’t have to be a rat race to win every time, and even playing a competitive game doesn’t have to be treated as a competition

@rowan omg I’m glad I haven’t (as far as I know?) encountered this specific section of gaming youtube - this sounds terrible

Many thanks to folks using the content warning (CW) feature on posts as needed (especially violent photos or videos). Thanks also for adding hashtags, helpful for filtering / searching / following ❤️

FYI, a CW does not hide information, it adds information. It only takes one click to reveal the body of the post. It gives folks with PTSD or other issues a chance to prepare.

Anyone who finds CWs annoying can set an option to expand all CW posts - see attached image.

#CW #FediTips #ContentWarning

I know people make fun of the whole "kindness is punk" bit, but it's actually not too far off. It's not so much that kindness is punk and more that kindness is the natural conclusion of having an outlook where you put your trust in community rather than authority figures.

how can a language just, not have a module system

should be illegal tbh

@ruwuby this all definitely makes sense! and it’s interesting that in FFXIV it sounds like the expectation is that you’ll fight each boss multiple times before you learn their patterns and are able to beat them. in the low-level WoW content that I’ve done there is almost no difficulty at all lol - bosses don’t even really have mechanics or attacks that need to be dodged. you just use your abilities like normal, and the difference is that bosses might have more health and/or do more damage

but yeah if I think of it in terms of a game that’s meant to be technically challenging and practiced repeatedly (appropriately, like a rhythm game or a bullet hell) then it definitely makes sense that the level of difficulty wouldn’t be too overwhelming - especially since I assume it gradually ramps up over time

I tried playing a game on Steam called Rabbit and Steel which is a 2D roguelite version of FFXIV, and I found it extremely difficult and overwhelming - but I think it was probably made for people who had already played a lot of FFXIV. and when I was playing FFXIV, the combat wasn’t actually difficult at all - so I think the difficulty curve is probably pretty reasonable there

and thank you for the offer! I think at this point I should just stay away from FFXIV as much as I’d love to have an MMO that we could enjoy together. I’ve kept it installed this whole time but I might just uninstall it so I’m not tempted to try it anymore

I should be able to set a flag in my browser that tells websites “I’m broke af so don’t waste bandwidth asking me for donations”

https://noelberry.ca/posts/making_games_in_2025/

I was just sent this amazing article - which is by one of the Celeste devs - about how you don’t have to use a huge monolithic engine to make games. and not just in the sense of “well if you really want to I guess you could make everything from scratch but it would take like 30 years” - it’s actually practical and somewhat common to do things this way

so that has me hopeful that I can still make games at some point in the future, without having to learn something enormous and horrifying like Unity