I have just learned that ducks cannot drink milkshake. All along we have been excoriating the duck, when in truth, the duck was a victim and the truly problematic one was the person feeding the duck the dairy products in the first place. I am crushed by this realization :(
https://netizen.club/~wildweasel/ - it's liiiiiiive! god I forgot how exciting it is to redesign a website, this was something I used to look forward to back in the early-aughts before corpos ruined it =P
character concept: person who is born on Leap Day, but rather than only becoming a year older on exactly their birthday, they age as normal, and an additional four years every Feb 29th. See, the _idea_ was that Mom would have the kid on Leap Day so they'd have four times the lifetime, which didn't really work for the expected reason, but Father Time already _has_ a way around that, so now, the kid ages 7 years for every 4, in big, inconvenient 4 year spurts.
And now they owe some years back.
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And sure, I have things I do enjoy working on in my personal life. Tinkering with my computers. Drawing. Writing. They don't feel like work - not because I always have fun with them, but because try as I might, I can't figure out how to get paid for them.
Whoever rolled my character sheet and put all my stat points into intelligence at the expense of charisma, I want to take the dice away from you.
It's why I would rally for any kind of universal basic income, or just generally better/easier access to welfare programs. Opponents of such programs would say things like "people just don't want to work." I'd say that's untrue, but at the same time, *I* don't want to work. I hate the idea of a nine-to-five. The regular paycheck was nice, but spending half my waking days separated from the parts of my life in which I thrive was not so nice. The absolute hell of working for The Man.
I think a lot about a post I read years ago, where OP talks about having seen a therapist somewhere in the EU - talks about their problems, concerns, et cetera, the therapist hangs on every word, and ultimately declares the diagnosis to be not clinical depression, but "a terminal lack of funding."
How very many problems could be solved in our lives, if only we were all just paid enough money to live them comfortably.
Most were dated from the early 2000s, letters meant for another magazine, asking if anybody knew anything about a "forgotten retro computer game I played in school." Oddly, the replies were in the envelope, too; the magazines largely denying knowledge of the game, until one reply read "You know it was fake, right?"
I could not figure out why The Dev had all of this stuff, why _my_ name was on the mail, or why he showed it to me like he was accusing me of something.
The magazines featured a making-of feature about the fake page-ads themselves, that served as a tutorial for an old Mac 3D sculpting/rendering program, and some PageMaker-like print layout editor.
The letters were more interesting, as they were more contemporary.
All of the page ads focused on the "athletes": crudely 3D rendered humanoid shapes, Gouraud-shaded but also heavily dithered, as if displayed on a monitor that only has one shade of red to work with. No screenshots. Just the tag line, "NOTAS: Digital athletics simulation for the new world."
Had a strange dream where I was hanging out at the home of an esteemed indie game dev, and he told me, "one moment" and left briefly. When he came back, he dropped several magazines and sealed letters in front of me - sent to his address, but with my name on them, postmarked 2006.
All of them had to do with a "fake" Classic Mac OS "digital athletics" game called NOTAS, purported to be from 1991. Page ads, letters, making-of features, about an Olympics game that resembled a Virtual Boy game.
He/him. Puzzle-Adventure Hybrid with RPG Elements. Supports 3D Acceleration. He Is Essentially What He Believes. Just in case, π, LGBTQ+ π, DOS π, ππ©π.
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