Nerium Lorese

I'm tremendously excited to hear your thoughts, Lark!

I'M SUPER GLAD YOU WOUND UP LIKING IT SO MUCH, RUBY!

You'll have to let me know what you think of the latest draft. I know you're looking forward to this one, my ferocious fox knight~

Tried a pomodoro for the first time using On-Together, that twee productivity "game," with some of the girls since it's on sale.

I'm not sure the timer aspect did much for me, but just having what amounts to a digital sticky note on my desktop saying "focus" really did seem to keep me off Bluesky.

Another 1,400 words in 2.5 hours. I've done better, but I've also done MUCH worse.

Now we're getting into the juicy stuff, too, so hopefully things speed along.

Starting at ~4,000 words now. Gonna really lock in tonight to finally try to make some real progress.

This one's gonna be on the harsh side, I think, and it's a slightly different genre than I'm used to (fantasy and knights). Curious to see what the reaction will be!

Importantly (I think): it understands how to make you feel like a walking monkey wrench thrown into mechanisms beyond your ken and that of the supposedly powerful forces surrounding you. It's fantasy-comedy-neo-noir.

You are a joke, yes, but also a pseudo-sentient act of God.

Save 10% on Esoteric Ebb on Steam Esoteric Ebb is a single-player CRPG inspired by the freedom of tabletop adventures. Unravel a political conspiracy with your goblin sidekick. Roll dice in tense encounters. Become a cleric of legends...

Poking slowly at Esoteric Ebb (the game that's "Disco Elysium meets Planescape: Torment") and it really does seem to have the juice.

Wears its influences on its sleeve (your stats talk to you and you start by waking up on a slab in a crypt), but it's FUN.

store.steampowered.com/app/2057760/...

I'm *extremely* excited to play more! Gotta beat it so we can finish Pathologic 2 together.

As Ruby pointed out, so few games even care about peasants in medieval storytelling as PEOPLE, rather than a sort of background... resource and/or force of nature that must be managed or mitigated.

In this, I really about how like the sheepherder enjoys reading, but never learned Latin...

Streaming Pentiment to some of the girls and, while I knew I would like it, I didn't expect to feel quite so connected and empathetic to the little townsfolk right off the bat.

All its stylistic flourished (like the fonts) are ASTOUNDING, yes, but the relationships between the people really hit.

My two cents is that the corpos don't actually care much about expanding the demographic. They are run by people with (almost entirely conservative) opinions and biases.

At a big enough scale, corporations don't do things because they make business sense. They do things to control and feel power.

There's probably some even more specific insight be had about this particular style of acquiescence in advance from smaller, "cozy" art, but smarter people than me have already talked about that at length I think.

It's available on AO3! archiveofourown.org/works/626280...

There's a lot to take away from this about how porn (still) determines the trajectory of culture, or how corporations will co-opt things we make first to ensure we are not allowed to own it ourselves.

But I also like: "Keep making that fucked up shit you like; it's the literal DEFINITION of cool."

Not to mention there is the much finer line between "cool sexy" (Deadlock) and "uncool sexy" (The First Descendant).

At the end of the day, you still either have the sauce or don't. Which, ironically, means it's just good business sense for Valve/Blizzard/whoever to just hire great porn creators.

Addressing it directly doesn't inherently rob the cool factor, but it's VERY hard for a trained white dude Creative Director to say anything cool about Vyper liking strippers.

It also adds to that sense of "being in on something subversive," which is makes pre-deplatforming work in the first place.

It FEELS subversive (and thus cool) in the same way that courting IP litigation does for things like The People's Joker, Nirvana The Band The Movie, etc. Because porn has artificially been MADE something that will get you deplatformed in the same way.

But you CANNOT TALK ABOUT IT.

Historically, that work is done with plausible deniability on the platform's side by roving bands of artists and sex workers kicked off one platform and looking to survive on the next.

Deadlock, Marvel Rivals, Genshin, etc. are all sort of examples to me of the companies making it themselves.

You can't say that, because (as we've seen) old men who run credit card companies et al. don't like it. At the same time, sex and sex work is what draws attention to and initially builds online communities (e.g. porn driving Bluesky, Patreon, etc. until they decide they don't need us anymore).

At least, certainly, Gabe Newell and the like will never say "people like our characters because they fuck." Valve is a weird example, because it's a private company, but, the director of Marvel Rivals will probably never tell a board of investors "Our horny fans like that Magik is a sexy goat."

Deadlock got me thinking about this (plus the recent successes and failures of live service games like Marvel Rivals and Highguard).

Deadlock's cast is unapologetically horny and grimy in a way that is both interesting and feels like it will basically never be directly addressed by anyone at Valve.

Stray thoughts about art, porn, games, and "pre-deplatforming" after conversation with a friend. Feels like we've entered an age of "Unspoken Horny" in mainstream commercial products.

Like, we left the sexless Marvel/Disney era and entered the "don't ask, don't tell" phase of the attention economy.

Thank YOU for writing it! We all deserve more great dommebreaking stories.

Chapter 1 done. I still very much like my comparison to The Prisoner et al. It has a "silly deadly" vibe that congruously blends a sort of camp to lethal (or worse) ends that feel MORE sickening for how banal they are.

Meanwhile, it still turns the dial to real emotional stakes whenever it wishes.

You can tell the author is a real one because she abbreviates "exosuits" into 'suits, with an apostrophe.

Oohhh, this one is very lovely. Really, really cutting and detailed descriptions of the "domme's" internal destruction and reduction. Like scraping the inside of a jar clean by the end.

Very effective and dreadful cadence to the rise and fall of their situation, too. Thoroughly enjoyed it!

I might have to revise my thoughts on Berkowitz. Building a thing like that pretty firmly puts her in the "actively terrible" camp.

You can thank Claudi for that turn of phrase.

That's what I thought! Also, tell me that anything I suggested is WRONG. It would have worked out great.