I’ve been writing on a blog post discussing the Israel Palestine war. As a person who’s highly critical of nazis, fascism, exploitation, colonialism, and nationalism I feel conflicted whenever violence in the Gaza region spikes. For in the temporal vicinity of such spikes antisemitic violence in Germany does rise. And regardless of what you think of Israel, German Jewish citizens for the most part have their own life.
I’m also working on a blog post exploring what we can do to help and how we can stand against rising violence and xenophobia in our own societies, and what perhaps are obstacles we keep running into. I ask what powers we have and who we even are.
Behind the scenes I started translating my articles into German, and this month is going to have the first translated publication.
Halloween has been here, and my daughter costumed as Wednesday Addams. We had been to a local party of people who a couple of years ago started turning their backyard into a haunted maze slash garden with actors and actresses. In addition, they serve food and drinks, and so far all of it is free with optional donations. It s a kind gesture, it felt welcoming, so I made my small donation. It’s a private backyard so it’s clear that if it got more attention it could go south quickly. and so far the not-so-small annual gathering of people seems to be predominantly white. Obviously, as conflicts are heating up around the globe and our own national climate grows ever more hostile, it would be really helpful for people who have to flee said wars to have some free distraction. It meant a lot to me already and I’m just some person. I’m not sure who was host and who was employed (or even helped out voluntarily), but the people who kept it running appeared to be primarily concerned with people’s entertainment, and less with people themselves. That’s the assumption under which I donated.
I also had to fight with technical difficulties as I spilled coffee over my keyboard. I tried to immediately dry it on a surface level, the next day I removed the keys to clean up under them. On the third day I unscrewed it, trying to spot issues with the contacts. Despite all that, the space, ctrl, shift and a couple of other keys didn’t work. Now I’m working with a replacement and the old one has become my tinkering project.
In terms of gaming, my daughter and I each played a run-through of Bugsnax (Trailer). It’s a nice game playable in short sessions, and equally quick to play through. I’ll have a more detailed review shortly.
During the Autumn holidays in particular we played Terraria, starting fresh to try and quickly make it to the final boss. It’s the first time we’re playing through a Crimson world. We offed three bosses (if you count King Slime), built a hellevator (a chasm going from the surface of the game world all the way to the hellish bottom), and isolated one of the two current Crimson-infested areas. Now, we’re exploring the Underworld and mining hellstone. Inbetween we’ll try and get a couple of different materials from which we can build huts or homes for our NPCs. I don’t like to simply have them all in wood or stone huts.
As I wrote in the last blog post, I had two big cleaning days a couple of weeks ago, and part of that was cleaning dishes. Some time prior, we had a calcified, heavily leaking faucet. I had planned to save a bit of money by cleaning and repairing it myself pretty much without any prior knowledge of plumbing. With consultation from a friend and Youtube I got to dismantle a fair bit of it and remove what was left from some seals. I’m not sure if I’m done or if there are some more parts to remove. If there were I wouldn’t know how I would go about that. Now it’s standing there and I can’t use the dishwasher because I had to turn off water for that pipe. We also can’t talk to our landlord (just because he and us really don’t share a world, and us and he misunderstand anything any one of us says).
All of that is how the mundane task of cleaning dishes became time-consuming. At some point I considered that with dishwashers being widely available perhaps some of you may not know a life without them, or remember not having one as a minor inconvenience for a couple of days after which you could again happily fill away on them. So this is a reminder that dishwashers – as widely as they may be available – are a privilege. There are many kitchen utensils that aren’t designed to be cleaned by hand, and if your dishwasher breaks
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Twice in the last two weeks I did a larger amount of house cleaning. I’ll probably elaborate on that at antoher time. Then, yesterday I thought I had a healthy chunk of time I could spend on writing blog posts, including this one, but that turned out to be profoundly wrong. I went out and had a haircut. We tried cutting our hair ourselves a couple of years ago in order to save money. That didn’t pan out all that much. But I had thought initially that because of the barber’s appointment at 11 AM I’d have spare time in the afternoon. By the time I was back home it was 13 o’clock because that’s what happens when you don’t have a car (or a driver’s licence) and then take the opportunity to shop for groceries. In the afternoon my daughter comes home and after that I can usually forget writing any sort of blog posts.
Last week I also bought a reprint of a celebratory issue of Astérix because at 8 Euro it was comparatively cheap. It’s an anthology issue for the birthday of the now-late first penciller of the Astérix comic series. It’s a cheesy and commercial occasion but it’s nice to have a host of different artists give their spin on the subject matter. I’m familiar with the work of some of them but not the others. It’s also a product of international – if Western-centric – artistic collaboration. If you want to hear more about that, let me know in the comments.
In the same spirit I’ve been buying a couple of European (mostly Italian) Disney comics in German translation and I have thoughts on them as well if people are interested.
On Friday I will be in Wiesbaden, the capital of Hesse, to fight for better and more inclusive environmental policies. I’ll be outside from 2 PM to about 8 PM, travelling by train of course. On September 27th, the head of Germany’s second-wealthiest and second-largest political party questioned in a newspaper talkshow stream whether black people should get medical attention in Germany. In the upcoming local election all five largest parties drive migrant-hostile election campaigns. That’s the kind of atmosphere we’re dealing with and which is why all political protest should happen in the name of inclusivity. We need people on the streets who don’t want to be racists and fascists. That’s my take at least.
Looking at the length of today’s blog post I’ll leave talking about video games and Foucault to another time. Please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi.
Since the end of August my daughter is attending a new school. That means we have to restructure our sleeping schedule. In addition, I have to find time to buy new materials from books to writing tools. I try to do as much shopping as I can manage locally which means having to set time aside for it.
I got Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” as an early birthday present, and now I read in it for a couple of minutes a day. But often I have to fall back to entertaining fiction because of how drained I am from the day, sometimes emotionally, sometimes in terms of memory capacity, sometimes cognitively over all.
Heat keeps me awake when I shouldn’t be. All of last week temperatures were at least 29°C mid day. When tempreatures rise a fair bit of my sleeping schedule is me waiting to just fall asleep. My bed gets so damn wet and makes it hard to sleep as well. Because of the weather we’ve also been swimming on Saturday.
I’m also currently listening to Jessie Gender’s “Sex in Star Trek”-series. First thing to mention positively is the diverse cast of guest voices who can really add their views on Star Trek to the project. The second most positive aspect is how she can maneuver to several social topics from the initial premise of sex. Sex is this important social topic that historically gets sidelined and with that got boiled down to sheer boredom over time. But in her essay series it gets explored as an inspirational thrust for a better future, as a tool of power, a litmus test for prejudice, and much more.
For the most part I listen to these video essays while playing Valheim or writing posts for this blog. In Valheim I’m still building my most recent house and minig copper and tin ore. I need to get a stone cutter up there for a better hearth that I can actually incorporate into the building’s design. I decided not to make an ordinary camp fire because thinking around taht would be too complicated. But it means I have to travel to a more improved base every time I need cooked food.
There was also a faire in town which I visited with my daughter twice, last imte on Sunday. She wished to go on the Ferris wheel which made me be on one for the second time in my life. The view wasn’t that spectacular but I managed better than I expected. My daughter had great fun and bonded with another little girl in the gondola next to us. That was the goal.
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Today is the day. For my last post of Blaugust I can’t come up with any topic to write about. Or, more precisely, no topic that wouldn’t require a fuckton of research and sourcing. I’ve got stuff on ethnics in my mind and how they’re actually nothing like the race-replacement people usually use them as, I’ve got something on sleep paralysis.
How did the break in mid-August happen? Some time I spent behind-the-scenes trying to learn a few things about GIMP for some specific image ideas I wanted to use. With the mushroom and the shrimps you have seen two of them. Another bit of time passed while I was editing and adding to the articles I eventually managed to published. These things were made more difficult by a heatwave and a couple of other reasons preventing me from sleeping. I was at the point at which you can’t mentally see easy solutions, start forgetting things, and stuff like that.
So yes, that was an appropriate bit for ending Blaugust 2023. A bit on when we struggle.
As mentioned in the title, this policy is temporary. AI exceeds my financial options a thousandfold as far as my current research goes. That, if true, itself says a lot about AI and its users. But if I can find ways for AI to make life easier, the process of writing, I am going to use it. Perhaps AI could teach me to write in a more accessible way with shorter sentences and fewer complicated and unwieldy words. Which I could imagine to be two issues of mine. Or I could get it to tell me what the structure is in the mess of my thoughts.
That said, looking at the Kobayashi Maru blog post for example I can’t see AI producing something similar to that. They’re my observations of everyday life, wrung through my moral values, and connected in the odd way I would do. Still, I don’t have experience using text AI. I don’t know exactly what input and how much I can give, and the degree of that human input would matter a great deal.
I’ll make sure that the thoughts you read in this blog will always be mine or those of people I consulted. Additionally, I’ll try and figure out what it means for thoughts to sound like mine because who you are doesn’t merely get expressed in content (the topics you choose and the way you connect them) but also in style (your over-reliance on difficult words only your brain could obsess over, the humourous asides, the undertones of hope in your dystopian worldview).
I won’t use deep-fakes to spread disinformation. Perhaps for artistic purposes such as parody but I see myself as carrying an educational mission. I have strong political views and most of them discourage me from using deep-fakes or spreading disinformation.
I can say for sure that I’m not going to use AI for any blog post in 2023. I try not to share AI art. If these values suit you and you’ve got faith because of this blog post that I would use AI in ethical ways, I’d be happy if you supported my endeavours financially. While my financial situation is tight I’d also appreciate you just writing a comment, and perhaps getting a conversation going.
As our modern-day society is undergoing rapid changes and life in general just moves on, my tastes and interest in relation to games have changed. Because of that I found things like #TenGamesToKnowMe don’t work for me anymore. To those who know me from my older blog it is apparent that games took a backseat as blogging content as well. What I’m going to do today, then, is presenting a snapshot of where I am in terms of taste at the moment, what games I played recently, and how I liked them.
As our modern-day society is undergoing rapid changes and life in general just moves on, my tastes and interest in relation to games have changed. Because of that I found things like #TenGamesToKnowMe don’t work for me anymore. To those who know me from my older blog it is apparent that games took a backseat as blogging content as well. What I’m going to do today, then, is presenting a snapshot of where I am in terms of taste at the moment, what games I played recently, and how I liked them.
For the last couple of weeks “Valheim” has been the front-runner. Its multiplayer mode allows me to play together with my wife and its building feature allows us to work on something together. In Valheim you play a viking post-mortem in a world inspired by viking mythology and heavy metal culture. Valheim is also the realm of viking afterlife you arrive at in the beginning of the game. To prove your worth to Odin and (theoretically) ascend to Valhalla you have to slay the most dangerous creatures locked away in Valheim. Thus commences a wild orgy of slaughter and chopping of demon-like and mythological creatures, domestic animals, and trees. In terms of story there is little but at times the game is really out to kill you and it seems most players bought into that, screenshotting their deaths and all. The landscapes and lighting make for phenomenal pictures as you may have seen already, and being a viking game it features sea-faring with threats in the ocean and several lands to explore. Right now, I’m mostly farming entrails for sausages. I did in fact die in the session that produced the above image because I tried fighting off a crowd of leeches with a flintstone axe.
Then there is “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” which I play with my daughter. Currently I’m out to complete my bug collection for a blueprint. My daughter may have been owning the game for three years now but I started playing in earnest last year. In terms of meeting the major goals we’re nearing the end.
With the start of Summer holidays my daughter and I have also returned to “Terraria”. There, we dug out an old world and try and have a relatively quick playthrough. It is a 2D game with pixel graphics, boss fights, and a lot of crafting with sometimes quite complex crafting trees. On thing I like in particular is that some of the most useful items are those providing information such as daytime, horizontal position in the world, and so on. As exploration is another core element this is how comfortable I feel going into detail about this without spoiling too much.
“Core Keeper” is another multiplayer I play with my daughter. It is quite similar to Terraria but top-down. So it’s got bosses and crafting. You extract raw resources – often via digging – and can build and customise a base with a vegetable garden for example, or different kinds of doors. As you progress through the game you upgrade the Core (pictured above) and get access to new areas and special crafting recipes. I like the squishy block animation when I strike a wall with my pickaxe. The scarce hints at high-tech of course give it a bit of a mysterious aura. And I blog about it in short-form.
In March I started playing “Hades” which was living up to its hype pretty neatly. It’s a hack’n’slay RPG in a Greek mythology setting that rewards you for dying. Such a clever idea. The characters are amazing and the story is cool. It is also a very queer game both itself and in terms of its creators. That’s important to me and bound to come up again in the future. I also have a hack’n’slay itch I need to scratch once in a while.
After a long pause I played “Elder Scrolls: Morrowind” again. I remembered almost nothing about its game mechanics, which meant I had to go to Youtube and refresh my memories. I’m currently playing a level 27 Redguard who completed the main storyline. Before the break I had gone to Solstheim but right now I’m not ready to take on the enemies of that isle so I went back, and I’m not sure what to do next. Probably travel to my storage rooms and check on the inventory. I do remember that for some reasons there is no Hlaalu locket in my game (I must have misplaced it right at the start of the game
“Baba is You” is a logic puzzle game that encourages out-of-the-box thinking. It’s cute, simple in sound and graphics. It’s probably the oddest and nerdiest entry in this list.
For a while I played “Pokémon Legends: Arceus”, and Stephanie Sterling is to blame for it as we bought it based on her recommendations. It is the first open world Pokémon game, and an optional stealth element is added to catching Pokémon. Because of its setting in the past many items have to be crafted instead of being bought in a supermarket. I played my first Pokémon game before Silver and Gold were out in Europe. I grew up watching the anime. For these reasons the franchise is always on my radar. I have favourite Pokémon types and all that shit but I don’t want to dwell on huge successful fanchises so moving on.
These are the games I played more or less recently. I’m moving towards indie games but I’m not happy about most of those I pick up being best-sellers or very famous already. With “Morrowind” you can see I like touching old stuff. “Valheim” and “Hades” play to that same interest in a different way as they’re much newer games about older parts of the human legacy. Exploration and crafting feature heavily in many of these games, and that as well is something that goes way back with me. It is also clear that my choice of games is strongly influenced by my family’s interests and the ability to play with my family. But for now I’m done with MMOs because of how gaming companies foster toxic communities, because of cash shops, and because of MMOs being the playground for the AAA gaming industry. Being small doesn’t make games ugly, it makes them beautiful.
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This is just a quick blog post announcing that I joined Blaugust 2023, expressing my appreciation, and doing a bit of advertising for that. If you don’t know, Blaugust is an annual event hosted by Belghast from Tales of the Aggronaut, promoting the art of blogging. It goes on for the whole of August, encouraging people to write with goals and prompts to fuel your imagination.
Blaugust had really been put on my radar in the Summer of 2014, and I had it in the back of my mind to partake ever since. Back then I was trying to get my first blog going, or I had it going depending on your criteria for success. I remember my little part of the corner quite well. My personal, not-so-great situation, the person who introdcued me to Skyrim (which has its own elements that make me not want to talk too much about it until some day we actually get to weed out the issues in the gaming industry, and, relatedly, the world) and made me write my first gaming-related blog posts, as well as S who kind of took me on as a blogging trainee.
Blaugust did indeed introduce me to a share of other blogs that I think are mostly defunct these days. Many were Warcraft- or Activision-Blizzard-King-focussed and I lost interest in that while I still very much like many of the writers. If you want to meet other bloggers there is the hashtag #Blaugust on social media for seeing new posts getting advertised, and there is a blog roll on the Tales of the Aggronaut page. Following Bel on the Fediverse (@Belghast@gamepad.club) is also a reliable option.
What I took away from playing World of Warcraft for eight years was that in reality everyone in Starfleet would alter the Kobayashi Maru scenario, and after a couple of years they’d start complaining that it had been created to be too easy. Granted, Starfleet training’s selection process could be preventing that from happening. But given how competitive raiding works in WoW, perhaps not. It is not nearly as glorious, as prestigious, and as much of an achievement as people make it out to be. It is both product of, and factor in the overall company environment as we’ve come to know of in 2021. That alone should absolutely wreck all prestige surrounding the scene. But it doesn’t. It’s also not all that impressive if your prowess is the result of training in a way most people don’t have access to. It’s not as impressive if you’re in with the devs and can influence the rules to your advantage.
While it isn’t that glorious I’d also feel bad not acknowledging the effort that is actually being put into raiding, all forms of it. From people trying to understand their class mechanics to people organising raid schedules impressive skills are required and people on all sides deliver. It’s just that you don’t know how nasty the carrot is that people are chasing. Some are more motivated because of how nasty that carrot is. Parts of society that are larger than we’d like to acknowledge even deem the carrot’s state a delicacy. In my teenage years, and when I was raiding that could’ve been attributed to me. It’s also that some people get celebrated for skills everyone brings to the table, and people don’t like to hear that someone else was also good.
With the initial speculation I wanted to highlight that in reality we may be a much more creative species than The Wrath of Khan makes us out to be (in this instance; the creativity of mankind often is a focal point in Star Trek, and this is not a thorough analysis of themes in The Wrath of Khan). We’re also adaptive, as the last twenty years have shown, and can be so much more technically literate than our parents or grandparents could’ve ever imagined. Kirk is no more special than you.
As I didn’t even manage to get an update on Core Keeper out for the last seven days, I figured an attempt to explain myself was needed.
I took a bit of a break after releasing the Year-in-Review blog post and the update on Core Keeper. I researched the relationship between the British Crown and media for a couple of hours because understanding ways in which media presently control our view is useful, and a very plain democratic thing to do. After March, 20th I also put a few hours into the hack’n’slay RPG Hades.
My daughter who has been diagnosed with ADHD does not have a good phase right now. Getting criticised for her is living through the end of the world, in that very moment at least. She’s also struggling particularly hard with any kind of time limit or getting any impulse to do chores at all. That ate into my and my wife’s sleeping times, and of course my working hours.
Then, I spend about two hours a day on quality-of-life stuff for other people – trying to make them feel less as if they were less of a human being because they didn’t work full-time jobs. For various reasons there is no way they could work full-time. We just chat or watch films together, it’s just what friends do, and they deserve it.
On top of that there is my wife, who had doctor’s appointments – just routine. The usual medication had to be ordered and taken home. I bought groceries. On principle, we don’t use a car but try shouldering whatever we can of the climate crisis. And that often costs time and money, and so far few have come forward to help us out with either. A blog post that discusses climate change and low-income more thoroughly is in the works.
These brownies were made after most of this blog post had been written, and after publication of “White Future”. But searching for recipes falls in the time gap between the review post and “White Future”.
I worked on my daughter’s RPG campaign. Later this year I’m planning to tell a bit about that, giving a guide through the campaign or some parts of it. I feel very, very insecure about this. After all, I didn’t have much experience before somehow happening to become a GM. It’s not wildly imaginative, but being able to talk about the goals I had in mind – maybe there’s still some merit to it.
But, on the blog front, I have been working on illustrations, and currently have to buy a few tools for that. A combination of hand-drawn pictures and screenshots Is currently planned to get utilised in blog posts, as has been suggested by S from The Internet of Words. I had been toying with that idea before but people who know me know that graphics design isn’t something I would consider to be my strong suit. I had had ideas but wasn’t satisfied with them, and training would be time-consuming. On the other hand I used to create hundreds of pages of fan comics – of questionable quality, but it’s still time I spent honing my skills.
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