owl'll come up with a real title later
-
-
“you’re using your illness as an excuse” I’m using it as an explanation
“you’re using it as an excuse for bad/lazy behavior” I’m using a scientifically-recognized medical condition to explain my real symptoms that you (a person who is not my healthcare provider) have decided to dismiss with a moral judgement
“you’re using it as an excuse not to try” I’m using it to understand why trying so hard for so many years has not allowed me to keep up with my peers, while damaging my health, my self-esteem, and leaving me traumatized.
I’m using it to explain why “trying harder” was never an adequate replacement for the medical treatment & support I should have received sooner.
LISTEN TO ME. I am using my illness to understand why I struggle to exist in a world that was built against people like me. And I am trying to pass that understanding onto you, if only you would believe me.
(via iamatinyowl)
-
-
The Golden Globes just did a skit asking toddlers about movies, shows, actors, etc. and they got everything wrong until they were asked if they knew who Chadwick Boseman was.
Every. Single. Kid. Knew. Black Panther.
-
if you ever feel bad about your writing, especially structure-wise, remember: you’re still not the one who put “somehow, palpatine has returned” into a multimillion dollar franchise produced by one of the greediest and richest corporations on earth. you’ll always be better than that one.
(via tearlessrain)
-
(via gaysparkler)
-
-
-
Alex Haahaard (they/them) on twitter:
“at some point we should probably have a conversation about how the normalization and glorification of physical exhaustion during medical training contributes to producing deeply ableist doctors.
Like a) it makes the field completely inaccessible to many disabled people whose knowledge is deeply needed there and b) it supports a deeply f*cked up worldview in which pain and fatigue are things you can and should "just push through”
(via isaidyoulookshitty)
-
“What if people treated physically ill people like they treated mentally ill people-“ THEY DO. Physically ill and disabled people have to listen to every dismissive, invalidating, ableist thing abled people tell mentally ill people. This idea that everyone have endless patience, compassion and understanding when it comes to physically ill and disabled people is a myth - and if you spent any amount of time actually listening to physically ill and disabled people’s experiences you’d know that. If you find yourself thinking things like “no one would ever tell someone in a wheelchair that their illness wasn’t real” or “no one would ever tell someone with chronic pain that they didn’t need their meds” then you’re vastly under-estimating abled people’s ability to be ableist assholes and it’s about time that you include listening to physically disabled people in your activism.
(via kipplekipple)
-
-
-
I know the cyberpunk epilepsy thing has been talked about a lot at this point. We, as epileptics, tend to focus a lot of energy on the “what was done badly” since it has such a drastic effect on our health, and strobes are such a big problem.
I was thinking about Stardew Valley, and kinda wanted to talk about the one tiny thing that made it accessible, and why it makes this game my favourite.
It seems surprising, thinking about it, that stardew valley could trigger seizures. I didn’t think it would the first time I played it, and it wasn’t until I got to winter that I actually had any problems.
You see, with photosensitivity its not necessarily about flashing so much as it is the sharp contrast and the change between colours. As well as how much of your vision is taken up by that movement speed.
While the storms during the other seasons didn’t cause me issues (blue raindrops on a grey blue background) the snow storms did (white on a dark ish background)
The first time I saw the snow my heart completely shattered. I’d been watching stardew as it was developing and wanted to play it so badly. It felt so unfair that I played multiple hours before even finding out the game wasn’t safe. I spent the rest of the night crying about it, which may sound stupid, but photosensitivity means you can’t get excited for video games, and this was one of the few I let myself be excited about.
My ex gf was the one who pointed out the snow transparency setting after looking into it themselves. This one slider bar in the settings. Something I didn’t think to check for since I rarely see them.
That slider made this game for me, and it was there when the game released. I can’t tell you how much that single setting has made me cry over the years because one man decided it may be useful to some people.
When epileptics make posts about a specific video game or a movie or whatever its because we have examples of how easy it is to put in these settings! My bf’s modded 3 games for me so they don’t give me seizures and all he had to do was like change a timer? Or set images to static????
Keep your flashing lights if you need them for your “artistic vision” just give us the settings so we don’t need to be scared
(via kipplekipple)
-
Sometimes I think about Red Dead Redemption 2’s development where the devs were begging people to not boycott the game to protest the news about their absurd working conditions because their bonuses were dependent on copies sold. I remember one of them made a statement around the lines of “We worked ourselves to the bone on this and we want to at least see people experience the fruits of that labor”, which makes me think about how we talk about blockbuster games developed under crunch.
I was given a copy of RDR2 to review it, and I couldn’t help but think about how I kept seeing so much that was technically impressive and yet just not necessary. Did some poor guy really work overtime for weeks just so Arthur’s horse had realistically shrinking testicles in cold water?
I honestly did not know how to properly articulate my thoughts on this at the time. I still don’t. Red Dead Redemption 2 was polished - I couldn’t deny that - but it didn’t have to be that polished. I could have connected every bit as strongly to Arthur if every horse in the game had no realistically shrinking horse balls, or even no balls at all. I would much rather have never had it and known the hardworking people who made the game enjoyed their lives more.
Still, I was impressed by the technical proficiency on display. Do I acknowledge that when I talk about RDR2?
I haven’t read any of the reviews for Cyberpunk yet (I want to form my own thoughts and I promised to play through it for a trans friend worried about whether or not she would have a good experience with the game) but I’m betting there’s going to be plenty of praise from people rating specific features as very good. Of course they’re very good; too many people have spent too much time on those features for it to not at least be good. The question is if it even needed to be that good. Could we just have not had this very good part in exchange for the developers living better lives?
The answer should be yes, but all people will really see is “this part was good” and sing its praises and demand more of it. Upper management watches these reactions and concludes that their methods are working splendidly. The company executives laugh all the way to the bank, tickling themselves with the dollars stuffing their pockets as more talented developers vow to never work in the industry again.
It sucks.
I don’t know if I properly expressed this in the original post but there is a specific pain I’m probably failing to capture here. There is a special hurt, an anguish, for when you work in games as a smalltimer and you see the fucking magic that the veterans at AAA studios are pulling off and knowing that it was accomplished through crunch.
These developers are accomplishing feats that can only be described as insane when you understand what they need to do to make that shit happen. The thing they made is incredible, and it must have no less than to have its praises be sung in every corner. That it was made under abuse and that your words of admiration that the devs so rightfully deserve to hear will only ensure their continued abuse is heartbreaking.
Adding onto this… I think we’re hitting a real wall. Not in what’s technically possible, but what’s technically feasible.
Because I get it. I get it. We started in a place where video games looked like this:
and then this:
And the desire was: How can we make this more like real life? The landscape, the models, the dialogue, the ability to simply interact in the world.
And you know what? We’ve made it pretty damn far. More than once I’ve seen a clip from a video game and literally not been able to tell at first that it wasn’t live footage.
But
How viable is that really? To have giant, sprawling open-world games where every character, no matter how minor, is fully voice acted? Where you can see every pore on peoples’ skin and the subtle shift of the hairs on their heads?
Cyperpunk 77 was in production for seven years. It was delayed what- twice, three times? CDProjectRed forced its employees into grueling 100+ hour work weeks to get it all together. And by most accounts, it still came out a buggy mess with entire missing systems.
To me, that’s evidence that this style triple AAA hyper-realistic game is getting so out of control that this scale is simply not tenable.
And do we even.. need all this? Really? Because I have had plenty of fun with smaller, less-realistic video game titles like Hyperlight Drifter, Slime Rancher, and Abzu. Near-perfect emulation of reality isn’t the be all and end all of gaming. Maybe it’s time the industry stopped chasing it so desperately.
(via isaidyoulookshitty)
-
