TERMINAL_LEVY

simplifying the fun away on cutting away the wrong parts of a complex genre.

terminallevy.net/entries/simp... new entry! by @westernstyle.live, about 4X-lites and exercises in simplifying complex genres.

text from my essay "Let's Play Life" from 2024: "this is the kind of moment of true cinema the phenomenon of Let's Plays introduced to the world - the times when genuine humanity seeps out behind the facade of the usual production of media consumption, before being beaten back into line. the internet was built for you to search for and create communities around shared interests with other people, but they often could not really hold up their initial purpose for too long. that's why i'm glad this specific moment was captured and preserved, even if the surrounding Let's Play seems to be gone from the internet now. seeing behind the veil in this way can be excruciatingly uncomfortable, and always has been a subject for mockery on the machinery of the internet. but it reveals a lot of uncomfortable truths about the larger world. the surreal sense of humor of posting on the internet was a way to avoid dealing with this, but the real world always seeps out regardless. we cannot stop it from seeping out. the failed dreams of a bygone era now much more overtly fuel the despair machines of the present. perhaps this apparent death of culture, this death of accountability, this death of conscience is just the pit we'll be stuck wallowing in for a long time to come. it may be an exceptionally bleak future. but hey, at the end of the day, if you're still functioning: at least you've got a job."

i wrote this clip about it in Let's Play Life if you're curious
ellaguro.blogspot.com/2024/03/lets...

tag master list

fortunately it was probably not visible in the first place but the tags master list (at terminallevy.net/tags/) now actually works instead of just being a page that says "Object object" 50 times!

drifting without friction some notes on friction in games via what i've been playing recently.

terminallevy.net/entries/drif... new entry! by @westernstyle.live, about friction & the games he's been playing recently

nah, still on colemak - it feels better on a split keyboard

new entry on the horizon! i just had to relearn how keyboards work...

fixing a bunch of back-end design/layout issues (mostly removing a bunch of extra whitespace that was being generated at render time & using more semantic html tags), might need to do a hard refresh if the layout looks all messed up

gameplay not for gameplay writing down some questions about videogames' ability to be something other than fun.

terminallevy.net/entries/game... TERMINALLEVY's launch entry: an attempt at an introduction by way of talking about alternatives to 'fun' in videogames