video games allow us to live out even our most impossible wish fulfillment fantasies such as… *checks notes* being a disposable corporate wage-slave exploiting a planet’s resources for the profit of space billionaires

seriously why are there three separate factory games with this premise and how can people stomach playing them? what is it with automation games and fucked-up stories?

I think we have certain innate desires - given to us by evolution - that we can not indulge directly without hurting others. I’m specifically thinking of the desire to dominate and conquer others, the desire to feel superior to others, and the desire to be violent and to feel dangerous and powerful because of that violence

I think the vast majority of people have these desires, but if we indulged them directly we would start attacking people or socially dominating them - which would be harmful to others who didn’t consent to that

so we have to find roundabout ways to satisfy these desires. obviously kink can indulge all of these desires very very directly. I think roleplay is another great way to indulge these desires (and of course there’s plenty of overlap between roleplay and kink, or even ways to incorporate the two together)

another way to satisfy these desires is through video games - where dominance, superiority, violence, etc. are simulated for us in virtual worlds where no one is actually harmed. why else would video games (generally) be so violent if not to satisfy these desires?

but with that out of the way, what I actually want to talk about is how this relates to competition in games, and video game culture in general. yep this is related to my last boost

first of all I want to say that I don’t enjoy competition because I don’t have a healthy relationship to it, so my perspective on it might be skewed. but with that said, I think that the purpose of competition in a sport, a competitive video game, a competitive board game, etc. is to let the winning side satisfy their desire for domination and superiority - with a (hopefully mild) emotional cost to the losing side

I can’t imagine a reason to play a competitive game (as opposed to a singleplayer or co-op game) other than to establish domination and superiority over another person in a way that everyone consented to by playing the game. in which case only one team/player can have their desires satisfied at a time, at an (ideally mild) cost to the others. the goal is probably that everyone will get to win at least a bit, so everyone will get to feel dominant and superior at least some of the time. but again my perspective might be skewed here

obviously one needs to be very careful when engaging in a competition. one needs to understand that this is meant to be a safe environment to indulge dark desires that would otherwise harm others, and to understand that it’s not only possible but important to learn to not feel too hurt by losing. that way losing is a mild enough pain for a player that the positive experience of winning will even it out

unfortunately a lot of players don’t have the emotional maturity to do this - so they express domination and superiority in terrible ways to the other players, or they express frustration and contempt that they won’t get to be dominant and superior. I think that’s more-or-less what toxicity is and where it comes from: the desire for domination and superiority, stoked by the competitive nature of a PvP game, unfiltered

I think a lot of people are drawn to video games because they have an especially strong desire for dominance and superiority, and that is part of why even singleplayer games can have toxic communities - because video game players as a demographic disproportionately want to assert superiority over others - and they often don’t have the emotional maturity to express that in healthy ways. which is how you get things like *shudders* the Steam community

so how do we fix this? assuming that I’m right about why people play games (both singleplayer and multiplayer) the best thing to do is probably to create a culture that:

• calls out people who socially attack others to assert dominance/superiority - even if those social attacks are cloaked by bad faith tricks
• goes out of its way to educate others on the limits of how dominance/superiority should be expressed - in a game or otherwise. and why it’s important to stay within these limits
• has explicit expectations of players in any given game - laying out in clear terms which behaviors are okay and which aren’t

it frustrates and upsets me that the need to feel valuable to capitalism poisons so much, but especially relationships.

we should celebrate the interests, progress, and excellence of our loved ones but instead, many feel threatened because of the inherent competitive nature in which we’re steeped. and often these feelings can’t be openly addressed despite the fact that it’s a systemic problem rather than an individual problem. too often i’ve heard expressions of these feelings be met with accusations of jealousy and the only remedy is to get good or whatever. it’s made much worse and much more confusing when so often these feelings are directed to those who are close to us. what are we supposed to say: “stop being so hot and good at stuff, it makes me feel worthless?”

even more specifically, it reminds me of the relationship between passing and feeling threatened by other trans individuals.

i hate the idea of living competitively. i like competition but competition only works when it happens in (mostly) a vacuum where the rest of the participants’ lives are cooperative – otherwise, it’s just reinforcing and celebrating the same shitty behavior that makes us miserable in the first place.

so rowan’s spent the past 2 weeks or so really working on a game. it decided to go with bevy because it’s the only thing that runs well enough on her laptop to actually develop something.

in the past 2 weeks, it has:

• setup a blender/bevy workflow using bevy_skein that allows design in blender and all the unfun stuff to stay in code
• made a basic player controller: movement, looking around with the mouse
• added physics (love u avian3d)
• made an interaction system that allows for entities to have arbitrary behaviors when the player interacts with them
• added an animation/animator system that reads from blender and kinda makes it work in bevy. it’s still kinda jank and doesn’t handle it very well, but it does work
• made a tiny ui framework with data binding
• made a change detection system that uses bevy’s new observers/events (just got done profiling this and it’s Not Bad ™ for a first attempt )
• setup tracy and configured cargo to build a slimmed down version of the game for testing and profiling stuff

would love to upload a video or something but there’s not much to look at and also fuck trying to record/screenshare on wayland, hate it so much. once that works though, expect a few images/videos

Is your OS working properly?

If re-installing the game does not fix your problem, then we would recommend checking the state of your Windows CPU using DiscCheck or memtest86 or any such tool used in windows diagnostics.

Please also check:
A) That you have enough space set aside on your HDD drive.
B) That you have completed any and all updates Windows has to install

In the worst case scenario, you might have to consider a full re-installation of Windows. CPUs can be rather fragile, and if you have spent a long time without activating/properly maintaining it, there is a chance it can break.

Should you wish to re-install Windows, we would recommend consulting their user manual.

For data recovery and whatnot, we would also recommend reading the user manual or consulting with the manufacturer of the CPU

I absolutely hate the requirements to “dress professionally” and “act professional” and even create a LinkedIn profile for a fake “professional” persona for myself, just to convince potential employers that I meet their preconceived and utterly arbitrary idea of what a good worker is

the whole thing makes me want to take a shower - I hate it T_T

but I’m thinking about making a LinkedIn unfortunately, because it seems like I need connections in order to get any kind of job at all, and making connections offline is extremely difficult for me as someone with crippling social anxiety