she/they/it // disabled personal trainer, luddite game dev, walking oxymoron
glad it worked out for y’all! It seems rare for a monogamous relationship to be successfully opened up, rather than it being the expectation from the outset. I can imagine it being a big challenge and test of your compatibility + ability to communicate. Was that your experience?
I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.
In the age of early access viral hits, optimization is just something no publisher wants to put resources into before they know the game’s a success or not.
True story, a game I worked on at my last job shipped on Xbox One and PS4, the PS4 version was not even built until a month before shipping.
for me I just… couldn’t stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn’t believe these were people that “should” be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (???) I was fully checked out.
The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I’ve had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn’t need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I’m glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.
I picked up a $10 cane at random last year and it helped me walk enough to realize there was a chronic issue at play. Definitely worth trying if it seems like something that might help, worst case you have a walking stick.
definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I’d give it a problem I was having, it’d spit out some symbol that seems related, I’d search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I’d get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like “oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!” but most of the time it’d give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn’t be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I’m sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.
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more complex yes, but more hands in the family unit and structure between the other two can be a really nice perk too. when conflict happens, you have someone else you love who knows your partner and relationship who can bridge the gap and give perspective.
I have two sets of beliefs here. There’s what I rationally believe based on what I know, and there’s the story I’ll be telling myself for comfort if I know the end is soon (and I think benefits me in day to day life too)
The experience of death and if anything comes after is inherently kind of unknowable and if there was a truth to know I don’t think human minds could comprehend it. Even if the answer is nothing, I can’t comprehend experiencing nothing. When consciousness lapses we only have what we experience before and after to contrast it to. So I have to live life with the understanding that I will die and I can’t know what that will be like until it happens.
That being said, we really don’t know anything about how consciousness is connected to our physical forms, and we don’t know that experience ends after death, either. Especially when you consider time may not be linear in the way we perceive it. The closest thing I have to a belief would be some form of reincarnation, where consciousness would resume in another life in another time. Maybe every life is the same consciousness reborn an uncountable number of times. I can’t say I believe this per se, more that it’s just as possible as any other theory, and it’d be a comfortable delusion to pass on with. it helps me feel closer to others too.
I guess my main point is go play Outer Wilds (and its DLC) if you haven’t gotten to it yet. It helped me grapple with a lot of this and even if I’m still scared of the end, I no longer find it overwhelmingly distressing.
idk this gave me the mental image of someone whacking it and muttering “jake jake jake jake jake” in rhythm to themselves through the whole thing
definitely helps to bow out instead of talking down to a beginner. “it seems you’re having an issue with X, I would recommend reading up on Y and Z because [how they relate to your problem]” is helpful, a very natural stopping point, is useful to people who search and find the thread in the future.
probably the only thing that’ll bring me back to professional game dev. especially cool to see after how brutal of a year it’s been for the industry. hope this works out for them!!
like most engines, UE5 is whatever you hack it into being. I hate developing with Unreal but I do have to admit it’s solid in a lot of ways. and has pretty mature content/LOD streaming, one of the biggest issues I saw with Cyberpunk at launch.
I haven’t played the witcher specifically, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that this is the usual experience for women playing mainstream male-led titles with romance arcs. women have been playing and enjoying the witcher for a long while, including its sexual elements. if it’s possible for us it could be possible for you too! I know if I’m replaying Mass Effect I’m actually probably more likely to play as male Shepard (because I can’t be gay with Tali 😫)
ultimately one of the coolest things a game can do imo is encourage you to step into the shoes of character unlike yourself in a situation you’ve never encountered and ask you to make decisions as them. If you’re uncomfortable roleplaying romantic enounters as a woman, there might be some value in trying anyway! you may find the experience to be more similar than you’d expect. I recognize it’s probably more complicated if you have more paternal feelings toward her, but telling her story from her viewpoint does mean including elements that conflict with how she’s seen by Geralt - it’s her story now and it’d be a disservice to only include what’s comfortable from Geralt’s POV.
In any case, sexual content may be in the game and referenced here and there, but if it doesn’t interest you I expect you’ll be able to not see it. correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding is that you could play Geralt as aromantic and asexual if you wanted, yea? I imagine the same would be true here too.
I was getting ready to come out to my sister in like late 2021, she had a really bad motorcycle accident and we were catching up and it seemed like the right time to tell her.
then she started talking about how a near death experience made her start re-evaluating some things, and then she came out to me and it was the fucking spiderman pointing meme. Both of us moved to WFH after covid hit so the timing makes sense, but it was such a wonderful coincidence.
Excellent answer and I’ll also jump off this to say this applies to marginalized groups just as much as anyone else, in a way I see a lot of people forget all about. Some percentage of marginalized people, through being in the right place and/or putting themselves there, do experience upward mobility through capitalism and therefore identify with it.
People forget that queer conservatives exist, but think about a gay couple with a lot of wealth, living a fairly standard nuclear family existence with an adopted kid or two, integrated into a society that probably still doesn’t fully trust them but sees enough signifiers of “normality” that they’re willing to let it slide. Which side of the political divide benefits them the most to align with? And what ideological principles will they come to internalize in the long term? Might they come to see themselves as somehow different or better than others in their marginalized community?
I’m getting tired of the fluff pieces expressing shock at the fact that some % of black voters are conservative, clutching their pearls at the thought of that number increasing, and speculating about black churches and “social conservatism.” While also completely disregarding the fact that black voters have always leaned left yet are also affected by some of the same political shifts that every other demographic is. Our first loyalty is generally to our class.
<3
furries get a lot of psychological safety out of embracing animalistic traits in all contexts. Speech is extremely difficult for me and being able to “awooo arf x3 wuf bark!” my way through normal day to day conversations with partners is such an inexplicable relief that I hope people with a passing understanding of neurodivergence can empathize.
For as beneficial as these things are in normal day to day life, it would in fact be far weirder if it didn’t extend to the bedroom too. Like play-gnawing a partner to say “I love you” and then getting to the bed with them and just saying “ok for this one thing in particular I am a normal human who doesn’t howl!!!”
That would be fucking weird right?
It’s working out great! I’ve been openly polyamorous for a few years now. Romantically engaging with multiple people has allowed for the longest-running, most secure relationships I’ve ever had, with basically no downsides except the fuCKING work. It complicates the logistics (my shared calendar is a nightmare) as well as the emotions. (recognizing when I am jealous is a nightmare)
But the payoff is so worth it. We make the best use of the time we have together, because we have to. We communicate effectively, because we have to. Through many intersecting relationships with appropriate boundaries we’ve weaved a cohesive family unit, one that achieves a lot of mutual aid needs around housing, food, and mental health support among local queers. I’ve grown a lot as a person through having to communicate my insecurities, sort out my trauma, and think more clearly about the people in my life.
I think some people on the internet have heard of insane polycule drama at some point and declared it categorically unapproachable. But idk, we don’t write off monogamous relationships because a cousin’s friend’s marriage exploded. Polyamorous relationships run the same spectrum of great to dogshit, but with less rules that monogamous relationships demand, we have so much more flexibility to solve problems when they come up.