What's up folks? The end of the month is speeding towards us and the holidays hit me like a truck, so I haven't had much to say. Cohost is finally shutting down properly at the end of the year, and I suppose I had gotten used to it just hanging around as a read-only artifact I could still reference. Now that it's really really going, I don't have it in me to scroll through my follows and find where they all scattered to. Despite thinking I might be compelled to join mastodon, the website league, or something to fill in for what cohost did for me, I've just not felt the need. I've got my export, and I'm gonna back that up properly, so ultimately that info is still there, just not in the usual format. But I figured for a little send-off, I'd throw out some of my smaller drafts that are reasonably complete. there's plenty of half-finished longer ones I could turn into actual blog posts themselves (bitching about minecraft modding, gushing about obscure pen and paper games, talking about why the elder scrolls skill system is Objectively Wrong for the games they are, and suchlike)
I thought about installing the cohost web component to make these look like cohost posts, but that's both too much effort for where I'm at right now and not in the spirit of cohost going away. If I gotta post, this is how it's gonna be now. cohost is leaving. Enjoy one last Drafts Jubilee:
where the FUCK can I buy a robe. not a halloween costume, not a bathrobe. I wanna look like a fat little mouse straight out of redwall abbey. I need it. for reasons. gender reasons. [A/N still looking..]
I had a dream with various other interesting things going on, and the one (1) thing I remembered on waking up this morning is that orange juice had 9g of dietary fiber per serving. I was like "oh shit for real"? because if true that would be genuinely exciting. (it is not true. OJ has a negligible amount of fiber.)
imposing a moratorium on indie devs: stop calling the thing in your game a 'language' that needs 'translation' when what you did was make a substitution cipher. that's just not what a language is. it makes everyone in your world (especially the classic "studies ancient civilizations" type characters) seem very stupid when they don't recognize this. "hillo, thez ez ny miw lamguagi Imglezh." "haha wow so mysterious, how will we ever uncover the secrets of the forgotten race when their language is so different?"
#cryptography and linguistics are not the same thing #just own the fact that you don't wanna make a conlang #that is sensible and reasonable #relexes are better but you're still on thin ice pal
imagining what it would be like if Critical Hit had made it big instead of the other D&D podcasts. god I would kill for some fanart of She Who Slumbers In Agony. or being able to reference The Fields of Autumn Pumpkin Incident and have anyone know what that means.
people who unironically call it the "jon era" and talk about how much better it was have the same energy as chuds talking about the confederacy. like my guy, that "era" was less than a year long and ended a decade ago. you just liked that he said slurs
tired: haha but can it run doom?
wired: an fps game with both single player and pvp duels. almost a decade before the creation of DooM, coded in Ink and fucking Paper.
let me tell you, minecraft wiki is a bad fucking resource for anyone who doesn't play only the latest vanilla. the big offender is that the style of this wiki is to pretend all prior versions are nothing but footnotes. which only works in a game that it only makes sense to play the latest. minecraft is not that game: it is highly notable for its modding and playing "outdated" (read: stable) versions is commonplace.
a bit over two years ago, 1.18 ("caves and cliffs: part 2", god I hate modern minecraft's production) fully overhauled terrain generation. prior to this, the world had a very straightforward structure: y=0 is the bottom of the world. below that is nothing. basically all cave gen is dependent on this being true. 1.18 decides to upend this and now the world ends at y=-64. wow it's like a whole new game (not really they just slabbed on twice as much "underground" space). so now, any page on the wiki lists only this new information. what depth does lava replace air at prior to this? hope you're ready to comb through a fucking table of revisions looking for the exact version that changed in! (And don't forget to read the rest of the log in case they patch that out again, only to once again patch it in!) something that has been in the game in a stable state for a decade gets no mention outside of a changelog.
because it seems they have to stop constantly to tell people in chat not to spoil the fucking thing, that people in chat should not answer their rhetorical questions, constantly have to remind people what constitutes a spoiler, that saying an upcoming event or character is cool or your fav is a spoiler, they even have to prevent people who are also experiencing the thing for the first time from chatting about what might come next because if that's accidentally right (or even has the appearance of truth) then that was kinda a spoiler/ a 'fake spoiler'.
even backseating and gameplay tips act as a vector for spoilers, and thus the chat can't even be allowed to point out extremely obvious things happening right on screen. i've had a streamer call me out by name for suggesting they equip a weapon they had picked up earlier. for their third attempt at a boss fight. not for backseating, but because that was a 'spoiler'. yes, I spoiled you on the idea that you should equip a weapon with a higher attack stat, rather than the weapon you started the game with, to fight a boss in an rpg.
random chatters can't be trusted keep their pants on about spoilers because literally anyone can be on twitch. so streamers can't keep their blind playthrough blind without aggressive moderation. so the moderation of spoilers supersedes even playing the game. regularly.
#guess who had to buy new jeans
#i should not have to see a typo like 'line of site' in a 30-page booklet that had an extensive beta reading period
who first put me on that "riah connadine/the divine, arbitrage" tip, because oh my god the latest fatt episode[A/N I do not remember when I drafted this.]. their mind. I want to shake their hand. they had it so right. [genuinely wish I could have found the post again before the shutdown]
so if you play minecraft modpacks much, you likely know about "expert packs": where many mods are integrated into one pack with adjusted crafting recipes to create a staged progression. you may hear these derided for the seemingly absurd recipes in service of the goal. the legendary Infinity Evolved gets complaints to this day for making logs -> wood planks only give half the normal amount. you could rightly complain that this only slows the game down, and yeah, kinda! it does incentivize automating and mechanizing the process of getting wood, though. using a sawmill gets you the full amount, and the needed steps to make and run a sawmill give you stuff to do, which is what this style of play is all about.
now, depending on the circles you run in, you might often hear of a legendarily deep pack called GregTech: New Horizons. It's pretty infamous for its' complexity, and proudly boasts a playtime measured in thousands of hours (for someone who knows what they are doing). it takes the mindset of expert packs and combines it with the infamous GregTech mod (and philosophy) of complex interactions. it pursues a degree of realism in its' processes. if you run a machine out in the rain, it might explode. if you over-volt your machine, it might explode. (a lot of mistakes cause explosions, because there's a lot of machines and electricity involved).
and also, if you kill passive animals without a butchering knife, they have a small chance to just explode. for no reason except to punish the player for not having a specialized tool. no "realism", no reduction in drops or other mitigation. if you kill a sheep, it might just explode and kill you (and every animal you penned with it), because that's how they "incentivize" you to make a butchering knife or a meat-o-matic and prevent you from simply mass-farming "real" animals. after all, you can get all these drops from an Animal Trap, and that's much more performance-friendly.
(i'm not gonna reupload the image for this draft, suffice to say it is a screenshot of minecraft where I have approximately 50 of an item called 'Loot Chest')
the most tiresome trend in minecraft modding is definitely packs that want to ape the old Infinity Evolved quest style, but have 0 desire to set balanced, customized rewards. so every quest gives you one (1) loot box. it doesn't stack. it could have fucking anything in it. it could be game-breakingly strong, or a fucking joke. my reward for starting botania was octuple-compressed cobblestone (a single block containing over 43 million cobblestone). I got draconic evolution energy relays before even having Energy to Relay. the ender dragon's fucking head. a hang glider. a single book and quill. 8 servings of peking duck. a solar panel. a computer. a molecular assembler. a cup of coffee. no rhyme or reason, no attempt to balance, just a bunch of inventory-clogging random garbage in a pack with so many mods that you already are struggling for inventory space. [maybe if I play more modded minecraft I will be irritated enough to write more on this.]
me: yeah okay, guess I'll just mute you and put you in a folder until this project's matured. or is available at all.
[ ONE YEAR LATER ]
them: closed beta time! all you have to do is join one of the four (4) games being run by our handpicked GMs and submit to the scrutiny of beta testing while also playing ttrpgs with complete strangers. Nothing could be easier!
[ ONE YEAR LATER ]
them: sorry, still no open beta. also we're helping other kickstarters by contributing labor to their stretch goals. also we've been acquired by a different company. also we're doing the equivalent of celebrity appearances for our product (that you cannot use or buy anything for yet).
[ ONE YEAR LATER ]
them: official launch is finally here! good news, we now have a marketplace full of assets for our software that you can buy!
[ ONE YEAR LATER ]
them: sorry, we can't afford to keep this running! no refunds btw!
anyway RIP to OMM after just 14 months.
[extremely weird addendum: since this bitchy post about One More Multiverse kicking the bucket, they somehow found a way to relaunch it. they no longer sell market items, it seems, and now take money on patreon. like, good for them I guess, but kind of a kick in the teeth if what you backed was fancy software for VTT, got a digital market, then it crashed and took those digital goods with it after barely a year of public release, then re-launched a few months later as a subscription service with all the previously bought content now only available as "premium" subscriber content instead. which means it basically sucks as much as roll20 now, without even the support roll20 has due to its scale.]
not included: various posts about drama that I banished to the draft-zone. much like on twitter, I wrote all that shit to get it out of my system, then chucked it in drafts so I could look back on it and think "wow, that didn't matter much." or "wow it's kind of wild that even happened."