The plot of Sea of Stars just. uh, keeps going, doesn't it?

@thatguyovertherewiththetaco replied:

I'm reasonably certain I'm about to fight Daffy Duck.

There's no feeling like checking the notes on a trending post and realising that one of your mutuals has beef with a fifteen-year-old.

THE SUSAN TAXPAYER ORIENTATION DEMO IS OUT NOW! <- CLICK HERE!

Susan Taxpayer is a free 2D platformer made in the SMBX2 engine, meant to imitate the likes of the later Wario Land games (specifically WL4!), with music by the Super Lesbian Animal RPG Composer Beatrix Quinn! Follow Susan and her coworker Franky as she powers through the worst workday ever. Help her platform through a myriad of office themed levels, from orientation videos to mailrooms to forests made of printer paper!

There are two levels packaged inside; Employee Training and Office Orientation! Plus, there's an extra bonus room for players that gather the Golden Documents in each level. Give it a shot! Additionally, the Orientation Build comes with six achievements to snag. View them in the launcher by clicking on the little trophy icon!

Notice! Everything in this demo is subject to change; this includes graphics, animations, level design, and even movement skills. As this is an early build of the game, there are still some engine bugs present! If you end up stuck in the Ground Pound animation, simply mash the movement and charge buttons, and you should break free. Feel free to send any feedback to me! The current version of this demo requires having SMBX2 - it's an easy setup, takes less than a minute, and is linked on the SAGE demo page! Currently it only runs on Windows unless you know some funky Linux tricks or something, I'm not familiar with that kinda stuff. The demo will be updated periodically for additional bugfixes/QoL changes because I KNOW I'm gonna need to! Have fun! And if you stream it or something, tag me so I can watch! <3

Indie horror games are fundamentally about going in holes.

Indie horror games are fundamentally about going in holes.

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

This is, in fact, some of the earliest piracy. Because creative works weren't protected by copyrights much earlier than this, so there used to be no need for pirates. Or rather, back then, it simply wasn't piracy yet. It's only in the age of printing that we see the linked concepts of copyright and piracy taking off, and even then at first it had less to do with an author's rights than it had to do with:

But, and here's the important bit, the first copyrights did NOT belong to the authors. They weren't going to show up and yell at you for copying their work, because they'd already been paid for it before it ever went to print. Lots of reprintings of their work just meant lots of readers, which meant their next piece was sufficiently likely to be successful that they could ask for more money for their next work, and/or that they could make their (often political, because wow was printing ever a huge deal for political thought and philosophy through the Enlightenment) points to a wider audience. Piracy only really becomes relevant to creators once their pay for their work is directly tied to sales, or when the distribution impacts their moral rights in some way.

While the part about printer's copyrights is true, it's not correct that creators didn't care about piracy in this era: playwrights in particular were often worried about it because there was a fear that rival theatre companies would use pirated scripts to stage competing productions of their plays, thereby depriving them of audience revenue. (Many playwrights of the time were part owners of the companies that staged their work, or otherwise entitled to a share of the take.) It's unclear to what extent this actually happened, but it was a present concern!

Facts:

This information in mind, I want you to imagine Simon Belmont trying to explain the miracle of the Resurrection to an Inkling.

(You can tell this is the "dunking on Christians" website because half the notes seem to think this is a joke about Simon being too stupid and primitive to understand what an Inkling is, rather than a joke about the inherent difficulty of impressing the theological significance of Christ's sacrifice upon a person whose culture has such casual access to bodily resurrection that their children blow each other up for fun.)

I genuinely think the Heathcliff guy has cracked the code. Newspaper comics are subject to a constant demand to be as inoffensive as possible, and no one can make a credible argument that you've offended them if no one can explain what it is that you are doing.

08/31/2023

The worst thing about the leering clown is that if it wasn't an ad it would be fucking hilarious. Capitalism really does ruin everything.

i replaced the clown with a picture of Silver the hedgehog :)

Once per mission you may annoy the GM so much.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I really just wanted it to be possible for the space gerbils to have the time travel dingus from Galaxy Quest installed in their mech suit as part of their starting loadout, but I also didn't want to make any firm commitments about whether time travel is possible in the game's default setting. This is the workaround!)

This Kickstarter is five hundred bucks short of ts goal, and I know for a fact there are enough RPG-playing Ultraman nerds following this blog that we could double their total without even trying. These are the same folks who published the Belonging Outside Belonging based Henshin!, so they've got a track record backing them up.

90 minutes to go, if anyone was planning on waiting to see whether it funded before chipping in.

Horses exist in zoos, you're pretty sure. That's where they, more or less, belong. It's not like there's a stable next to the auto shop or something. Are there... wild horses? In.... nature? Presumably, at some point, there must have been. Probably not, anymore.

Oh, the race tracks, though. Duh. They probably have stables. Couldn't lose twenty thousand wen a day if there weren't losing horses to bet on.

Horses don't belong at the gas station, but there's one here anyways. Its rider is wearing a leather jacket studded with old military medals; what looks like a torso-sized cogwheel, slung over her back like a shield; a broadsword, underneath the cog-shield; and a pair of holo-screen shades.

She dismounts. She slides her card through the machine. The pumps start pumping. The horse sticks out its neck, dips its snout, and begins drinking gasoline directly from the nozzle. The rider holds the spout up to the horse's mouth, at a bit of an awkward angle.

She meets your eyes, and shrugs. You know how it is.

You don't know how it is. Later, you will see her on the news, clotheslining a police officer on horseback at seventy miles per hour. You will understand even less, and also, so much more.

+++

GASOLINE FIST

a martial arts style available in

TEN THOUSAND DAYS FOR THE SWORD