rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!

Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.

(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)
penaltywaltz: (I'm A Mod)
[personal profile] penaltywaltz posting in [community profile] wipbigbang
So one of the mods brought up a good point about the posting dates, so there's going to be a slight change this round with when emergency posting will be. Official posting will, from now on, go from September 8th to November 30th since we have so many more posters than previous rounds. Emergency posting will go on for the entire month of December, and you will not have to sign up for it, you'll just post when you finish.

Also, with regards to submitting snippets if you don't think you'll finish your fic/art by November 30th: With December now being reserved for emergency posting, you CAN submit snippets for WIPs even if you can only finish by December. However, we strongly encourage you to be upfront with your artist if you're aiming for a December posting and come to a decision on what specific date to (finish) post(ing) by so you don't leave them hanging.
penaltywaltz: (I'm A Mod)
[personal profile] penaltywaltz posting in [community profile] wipbigbang
This is how snippet submission will work:

Fic snippet submissions and art snippet submissions will be on different forms, and both forms will be listed here in #announcements on the Discord as well as pinned under the pinned Schedule/FAQ post on Tumblr and pinned to the top of the Dreamwidth page as a separate post under the Schedule/FAQ (since a lot of you are on Tumblr I'm also going to have a post with the links I'll reblog every day the submissions forms are open, just in case people can't see the secondary pinned post).

Fic writers are to submit at least one but at max three snippets between 500 to 1500 words (if it goes over or under a bit that's fine). You may also submit them using Google Docsor Ellipsus (with the GDocs/Ellipsus option you can put all three snippets in one document and put the link in the first section and N/A in the other two sections, or you can do separate doc for each section and post each link in an individual snippets section...just make sure your artist can view them without haing to get your permission first!). The Google form collecting snippets does not italicize/bold/underline your text automatically when it's submitted; you can either use HTML coding to indicate where italicized/bolded/underlined text will be or submit it as a Gdoc link.

For those submitting art project snippets, you only have to supply one snippet to an image hosting service/YouTube/sound hosting service and provide a link to it, but you must provide the snippet when you submit the snippet form. If you want to provide more than one snippet you may, but it's not required.

Both snippet submission forms will be asking for general information about your fic/art project. You'll have two sections for content warnings (one for AO3's general warnings as a checkbox option and a section to write in any other warnings or things you want artists/writers to be aware of), a section for a summary of your project, the title, the rating and I think one other section. Please make sure to include all the fandoms your project is working in by FULL FANDOM NAME (not nicknames/abbreviations, as we use a script to put the claims forms together and I've got anywhere from 245 to 675 potential participants this round).

If you need to make any changes the the description info after you've submitted the form email the mods ASAP so I can edit the specific claims info in the spreadsheets we'll be generating before the claims list gets made via script. If you need to edit snippet stuff, email the mods with the subject line information listed in the first section of this post, as fic snippets will not be included in the claims listings (art/fanvid/filk snippets are included in the claims info so as I said before, you must include a snippet in your WIPRB form).

Any other questions you may have feel free to bring up in #mod-questions/asks/comments below. The form will stay open until midnight/early morning July 11th!

Here are the links to the submission forms:

WIPBB Submission Form | WIPRB Submission Form

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
* SAVE OFTEN, especially in the early game when you may be very fragile and the game's auto-save is infrequent.

BUT -- don't reload from a save unless you actually die or otherwise hit a "game over."

This game is about failing, and it rewards you for playing forwards through failure. Some of the best moments in the game come from failed checks. There are always alternative routes and ways forwards. If you tried to savescum it, you would miss most of the game and all of the point. Embrace failure.

Okay there are those two specific checks where failing is so emotionally devastating I would not judge anyone for savescumming. But apart from those.

* You can just pick one of the Archetypes for a starter build, and leave messing around with custom character creation until you've seen the stats in action and understand how the system works. Don't stress about it. Or, if you want, you can throw yourself into custom character creation despite not having a clue how it works, and you will also have a fun time. Your initial build and your later choices about what you put points into will radically change your experience of the game, but you can't do it "wrong"; there are no optimal builds which are "better".

* Press tab to highlight objects you can interact with, or activate "detective mode" in the settings to do it automatically. Yes I know this is the sort of thing that is probably obvious to people who have played video games before.

* If your Health or Morale (displayed on the lower left of the screen) fall to zero, you have about 5 seconds to apply a healing item (if you have one) by clicking the cross above that stat.

This is the one timed element in the game, and also the one mechanic that some of us initially have trouble grasping.

With all the other mechanics in the game, you can not only learn them by flinging yourself in and floundering about, this is IMHO the best and most enjoyable way to learn them. No idea what the Thought Cabinet is or what Internalizing A Thought means? Try it and find out!

* Perhaps the most important tip of all:

If you feel you are flailing around and failing on most of the checks you try and you've just been informed you have acquired a Thought you can internalize in your Thought Cabinet and you have no clue what that means or maybe you just had a heart attack and died before you even got out of your hotel room or you had a nervous breakdown because a child insulted you and you have no idea what you're doing and it's been three days and you still haven't got the body down from the tree --

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME "BADLY". THIS IS IN FACT THE UNIVERSAL DISCO ELYSIUM EXPERIENCE AND MEANS YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME CORRECTLY. WELL DONE.

PSA

Jun. 29th, 2025 01:54 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.

Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.

(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Man as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)

If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.

ETA: Okay, I will add in [personal profile] astrogirl's excellent content warning:

It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/06/25/trans-westminster-lobby-ehrc/

The organizers are estimating circa 900 people showed up, putting it on a par with the biggest LGBTQ+ lobbies ever (against Section 28).

Outstanding work from the Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, who also organized the legal briefing for MPs in May:

https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/trans-legal-experts-warn-supreme-court-ruling-could-be-breaching-human-rights-in-parliamentary-briefing-483801/

You can support them and get the "Maybe I'm trans?" badges or just support them without badges:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/maybe-im-trans
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/solidarity-projects-campaigns-fund
heresluck: (book)
[personal profile] heresluck
Animals

The president called undocumented immigrants
animals, and in the nature documentary
I watched this morning with my kids,
after our Saturday pancakes, the white
fairy term doesn't build a nest but lays
her single speckled egg in the crook of a branch
or a tree knot. It looks precarious there
because it is. And while she's away,
because even mothers must eat, another bird
swoops in and pecks it, sips some of what now
won't become. The tern returns and knows
something isn't right—the egg crumpled,
the red slick and saplike running down the tree—
but her instinct is so strong, she sits. Just sits
on the broken egg. I have been this bird.
We have been animals all our lives,
with our spines and warm blood, our milky tits
and fine layers of fur. Our live births, too,
if we're lucky. But what animal wrenches
a screaming baby from his mother?
Do we know anymore what it is to be human?
I've stopped knowing what it is to be human.


— Maggie Smith
from Goldenrod

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