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Well, Never Mind on RetroAchievements Then

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

About a month and a half ago I made a post about how I just learned about RetroAchievements and how it was a fun thing to use when revisiting old games. Well, hmmmm, I’m now deleting my account. It has just been discovered by folks that the site has a bit of a Nazi problem, which kills any interest I had in using the site so I put in my account deletion request, which apparently takes them two weeks to process. The quote retweets list other examples of the site’s moderation team not really caring about what users do. They can say as many times as they want that they’re neutral and just care about preservation but folks, they’re adding achievements to video games and that’s it. They can do whatever they want. You don’t need to add achievements to a far right rom hack.

Oh well, one less account for me to think about I guess and I can go back to not using RetroArch.

EDIT: They’ve since put out an apology and stated the right right rom hack won’t be added to the site which is good. I’m still probably going to let my account delete itself because I don’t really need to keep doing achievements for old games anyway, but I’ve got two weeks to think about it and see if they do anything else I guess.

Play an Old Indie Game?

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a screenshot from Yip Quest showing 3 kobolds outside a jail cell
Yip Quest

I’ve now put all the indie games covered in the indie game roundups that are on Itch in a single Itch list and will add things to this going forward. This isn’t a perfect list, sometimes my posts covered an entire jam or collection of games. For cases like this, I kinda just included one or two games from the list. Not an ideal solution but oh well. Of course it’s missing anything that didn’t have an Itch.io release. It’s also missing all context for why I thought the games were interesting that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a fun way to check out small, experimental indie games from a year or two ago since the memory on games feels like it’s extremely short lived and people move on extremely quickly unless it’s a massive hit. Search on Itch.io has also always been flawed. So I guess consider checking out the list, scrolling down a ton, and opening a random game?

There’s probably better ways of highlighting indie games that are older than a year but aren’t old enough to be considered “retro” and I think it would be fun to poke at that more. I think point-and-click adventures and interactive fiction seem to have a pretty long tail to them for maintaining interest after they come out, despite having smaller audiences, but who knows.

an image of a cartoon snake
SNAKE Lucky Laugh, one of the games that’s already been delisted from Itch

The biggest bummer about going through the list was that there’s been a few games that have already been delisted even though I’ve only been doing this for a few years. It’s good stuff so it kinda stinks I wasn’t able to save them. I thought I should start submitting this stuff to MobyGames as I do these roundups but I tried to submit one just not and got hit with a message about how I hit the limit on pending new game submissions because it takes mods there months to look at anything. You’d think with Atari owning the site it would have a bigger budget to deal with this but I guess not. I have no interest in submitting anything to IGDB since it’s owned by Amazon and Backloggd, which uses the database, just feels like another harassment vector at times. So the only documentation of some of these games is just my half assed weekly posts, and nobody deserves that.

Stop Allowing AI Art in Game Jams/Competitions

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

Like what are we even doing here? Why are IF Comp and $109 Adventure Game Challenge allowing AI slop in their competitions? Doesn’t that defeat the whole point? I don’t think any game jam or competition should allow AI art. I have a billion other reasons why I’m against using that stuff to make games but it especially seems to go against the spirit of making something for a jam where things can be messier and more personal. If I’m following along with a jam and see a game that clearly uses it, I’m going to give it the lowest possible rating because it’s boring shit. Bruno has a much more elegant take on this and the use of AI in IF Comp but I mostly wanted to vent because….fucking why use it? The sooner this bubble bursts, the better. Every jam allowing it should be embarrassed.

September is Library Card Sign-up Month!

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I already made a post like this on my birthday but it’s Library Card Sign-up Month! If you haven’t already, here’s another reminder to sign up for a library card if you don’t have one. They aren’t just for books! Mine offers movies, cds, comics, board games, video games, and more. Plus it’s a space where you can study and do work and have meetups.

Your local library may also have free digital services you can get through your card. Mine has Kanopy, Hoopla, and Libby (and probably others). Kanopy is a great streaming service for movie and tv that offers things to watch similar to what you would see on the Criterion Channel. Hoopla offers movies, ebooks, and audiobooks. Libby is focused purely on ebooks and audio books. Anyway, libraries are great. They’re a third place that would never be allowed to be created today.

I Am Never Doing This Again

~ mpklamerus ~ 4 Comments

Well, that’s Blaugust all wrapped up and my take from this has been that while it was a lot of fun as a reader to get a lot more posts in my RSS feed. I’m not going to do the daily posts again. It’s just too much work, which is not what having this site should be for me. I know there’s a lot of effort put forth by the Blaugust organizers that you do not need to do this so I don’t blame them, but that’s the initial goal I saw and what I ended up sticking with. Anyway, glad I tried it but I’m not sure if I’ll officially participate next year.

Internet Mysteries: CompUSA Corporate and Borders Books and Music’s YouTube Channel

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Because I have no life, I am thinking about two internet mysteries I do not have the answer to.

Mystery 1: How is the CompUSA Corporate page still up? The company went under like 15 years ago and yeah, the name has been passed around a few times by companies trying to bring it back, but it never stuck. Someone has to be paying for this though. Who? I’m currently seeing very small gambling ads at the top but that’s a new addition. Does that mean it was kept alive by someone else and then sold to a gambling company, who is assuming that people are looking up the corporate site for a long dead company and will click on the ads?

Mystery 2: Who is uploading new videos to the Borders Books and Music YouTube account long after that company has closed down? Is there an employee that still has the login and uploads videos when they stumble across them on an old hard drive? The most recently upload is an interview with Jimmy Carter where the first comment is “I thought both of you died how did this get posted?”

Some Summer Reads I Enjoyed

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Recently I came across this article about how reading for fun has dropped a ton in the US over the last 20 years. I don’t actually know if this is accurate or the way they studied this, but it did prompt me to post about some books I enjoyed reading on Bluesky so I may as well post an expanded list here. The trick to reading a lot over the summer is simple. Just develop an extreme love with your library’s summer reading program. Anyway, here’s some things I’ve read with each title linking to the Bookshop.org page, but I read a lot of these through my local library. Many of them have audiobooks too.

Some recent Sci-Fi/Fantasy reads include:
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey
A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert
Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston by Esme Symes-Smith

Comics also count as reading and here’s some I read:
Dungeon Club: Roll Call by Molly Knox Ostertag/Xanthe Bouma
Girl Town by Casey Nowak
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Eerie Tales from the School of Screams by Graham Annable

The non-fiction I’ve read this year is sorta all over the place, but some of the things I liked were:
Collected Game Writing Articles by Steve Ince
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything by Colette Shade
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker
How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

I’ve also read a billion The Baby-sitters Club and Baby-sitters Little Sister books because that’s what my two girls love and know a lot of the lore AND can recommend the graphic novel adaptations

Forums Are Still Great

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Once in a while I’ll see a post on social media lamenting that the Internet isn’t as good as it used to be and pine for certain things like forums, personal sites, IRC, etc but you can still do old internet stuff! There’s still plenty of active forums, and you probably already know this if you’re reading this site, but you can still make websites and webrings. IRC chat rooms are still going too. It’s still fun! Go do it if you miss it that much.

I really like papercult.club for tabletop rpg discussion. It’s a nice smaller community and it feels like there’s very little drama in the indie ttrpg scene when people can actually discuss stuff in smaller communities. This applies to the various ttrpg discords I’m in too.

DOS Game Club is another favorite of mine. It’s a DOS game discussion group where each month they pick a different DOS game to play and discuss. There is an IRC channel built into the web page too if you prefer real time chat and I think it’s a nice place to hang out.

Sometimes I poke my head into the IntFiction.org forums to see what is happening with the interactive fiction community too.

I’m sure I’ve talked on here about making personal sites. Personal sites are fun too and you can get one going pretty quickly with bearblog.dev or neocities.org. Both support RSS feeds as well, which is still neat and very useful.

Anyway, this stuff all still exists and it’s fun!