Notices by clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone), page 5

@typeswitch the ones who proactively offer to be the omelas kid even though nobody is asking them to

My actual thing is that nobody else does sword-and-sorcery fantasy like Hollow Knight. While everybody else is making either "cool guy spooky epic dark fantasy" or "what if D&D was Shrek" these guys are making "Conan the Barbarian but its all bugs" and it's such a breath of fresh air

"what makes Silksong any better than [my favorite metroidvania]" that game doesn't have a little guy who makes a funny noise. any more stupid questions

silksong is…. very good

@typeswitch I've hand-rollled simple fixed-point stuff before for exactly these reasons

@vanderZwan yeah I think part of what makes the political situation so surreal is that suburbia is split between “centrist” libs and “moderate” republicans, both of whom imagine their enemy as being non-suburban minorities. post-modernism’s defining feature is the way it barks at its own reflection in the mirror

@uoou again, it’s predominantly -suburban-. Rural and urban populations are both minorities here.

Your enemy is not a man in overalls in the countryside hitting an anvil with a hammer. He is a landlord in a cul-de-sac complaining about how the city that he doesn’t actually live in should “do something” about the homeless people he sees from his car windows.

Like why do I still see libs imagining their ~evil republican enemies~ as rural small town hicks? rural populations are only 17% of america, and I promise the electoral college isn’t tipping the scales -that- hard.

it’s weird that I still constantly see people talking about “rural vs urban” in the us as though this is the True Political Debate when almost 50% of americans live in suburbia. I love small towns and rural regions – I grew up in one – but suburbs are the disease at the heart of our society.

@mcc I do think turbo and htmx solve for that type of problem, only instead of spreading the power of the DOM manipulation engine into the server like Redux/Nextjs, it's spreading the power of the HTML templating engine into the client in selective+dynamic ways but it's very possible I'm misunderstanding your use-cases here!

@mcc Sorry if you've already heard this one or if it explicitly doesn't meet your needs, but have you considered things like Hotwire Turbo or HTMX? I'm increasingly thinking that this sort of "minimal JS and generating html entirely on the server" approach is the better way to go.

@bob I'm sorry, but I'm confused as to why you're arguing these points with me, a total stranger, when I genuinely seem to share a very similar outlook on the topic at hand (I love oral tradition!). Are you doing okay? Have I done something to bother you somehow? Do you have any curiosity for me as a fellow human being?

@bob nothing inherently wrong with it though it does tend on average to be a harder topic to connect on. Mostly it'd be problematic if we made all of mainstream culture work like that.

@bob I mean, yeah, obviously?

I saw this line of though even before modern genAI where the ideal for art is some sort of magic box that generates the perfect personalized content for each person, and it's such a wildly antisocial position to hold. Even if you hate artists, people still like to have a shared baseline reality. "Press button to generate TV show just for me" is obviously bad because it would turn idle office smalltalk about today's episode into what amounts to people attempting to describe a dream that they had

I feel like 50% of what makes Hollow Knight so evocative is its best-in-class sound design tbh. Struggle to think of a game with a more iconic sound—the dialogue chirps, the grubs, the bellfly shriek, the mushroom men, the intense ducking when you take damage. Not to mention the music.

I've been playing 9 Sols and having this weird feeling that I would like this game more if it didn't look so beautiful. As-is, the gorgeous art is overselling the story & gameplay and leaving me underwhelmed. It wears its influences on its sleeve openly but imo doesn't compare to them favorably.

9 Sols' steam blurb literally says "featuring Sekiro-inspired deflection focused combat" (this is insane to me!) and yet it really doesn't draw much from Sekiro other than "lots of parrying" – no stance system+deathblows, and no sense of taking turns since enemies don't parry back.

the aesthetics call to mind Hollow Knight, but while the Taoist-infused cyberpunk setting feels very novel, something about the level design and game structure fails to spark my imagination. Meanwhile Hollow Knight's by-the-book sword-and-sorcery is still rich with strange specificity & life