Been tinkering on and off with the designs for some of the artistes represented by the Perizene Big Time Talent Agency. Here’s a few doodles I’ve accumulated.
'They’ve been compared to a watermelon, green on the outside, red on the inside; in fact they’re a cauliflower, grey and frothy without, grey and rubbery within. What this troupe of cauliflower-headed clowns want more than anything is your vote: the claws to dig them further into the bloated corpse of liberal democracy, the biofuel that keeps the dismal train of parliamentary radicalism chuffing, so they can continue their sad stomping march into the algae-choked sea. They want your vote with a vegetable hunger, eyeless, faceless, insatiable. Don’t give it to them.'
Wow. My brother's mum's husband is always trying to get me to vote Green.
“Nilbog! That’s…”
Forgive me, but the much-vaunted ‘Green Surge’ doesn’t sound like the most important underground political shift in a generation. It doesn’t sound like politics at all. It’s a disease, one of those old medieval sicknesses that would suddenly sweep its bile-trimmed cloak across a nation and then vanish, leaving modern historians baffled. What caused the Green Surge? Why was it that thousands of people in 13th-century England spewed this strange green substance from every possible orifice before dying in their inexplicable filth? From what infected pits of the body did the Green Surge spring? Contemporary scientists suggest some kind of virus, an organism too blind and stupid to know not to kill its host, possibly carried to Europe with seafaring rats. The people of the time knew better. These sicknesses come with the miasma that wafts into towns with the morning breeze, carrying with it the stench of undrained marshes and dense bogs, the foulness of rotting vegetable matter and the eructations of unclean animals. Like a rolling, invisible tide, sweeping past the fragile barriers that separate civilisation from all that swarming organic decay upon which the social limpet is encrusted; the stinking revenge of the English countryside, in all its ancient, unknowable evil. Nature kills.
According to the Green Party itself, the Green Surge is actually a sudden exponential spike in their membership, which has since the beginning of the year given them more paying party members than either Ukip or the Liberal Democrats – but then these people shouldn’t be trusted. The Greens aren’t a political party, they’re a cult. American politics are often described as a circus: they’ve got the flashing lights and booming announcers, the roving lights that settle on some terrified elephant shuffling along a high fiscal tightrope. Every American politician is inescapably clownish, with their heavy caking of make-up, their pathetic and seedy desire to entertain that only terrifies the children, and the sure knowledge that they’ll all eventually all die strung out on prescription painkillers in a lonely ranch somewhere. British politics is less refined, less glossy. It harkens back to a more earthy form of entertainment: parliamentary procedure is a gang of witless peasants pushing each other into the village midden. But even among all these gormless shit-splattered idiots, the Green Party might be the worst. They’re the only ones who actually want to roll around in all that natural, organic filth. They want it with such a seriousness that the cult is the only available working model. Eco-scientology: a ghastly dead-eyed vegetable legion, a slow cellulose celebration of every tuberous bloat in the ranks of the Turnip People. You can see Green Party members canvassing on any given Sunday in farmers’ markets and greengrocers. One of us, they chant through brussels-sprout blob mouths, staring at a bag of spinach with a fraternal reverence. One of us, they implore the silent ranks of moulding courgettes. One of us, they yelp as they fuck a lettuce. One of us. Any politics that’s not grounded in a fundamental disdain for all vegetables is not worthy of the name.
God knows why, but people – normal, ordinarily sensible people – actually plan on voting for this gang of dendrophile lunatics. Ask them why, and they’ll come up with the usual platitudes: a break from politics as usual, the chance for a fairer society, a different way of doing things. Haven’t we learned anything? This was the same brave cry thousands of students roared five years ago as they flung themselves into the fathomless void of Nick Clegg’s conscience, like young Hashishim from the walls of Alamut. The Greens are a chiliastic suicide cult as mad and deadly as the worst of them. Their logo literally depicts the world in flames. They, too, are waiting for the aliens to come and whisk them away: they’re here to prepare the ground for the final victory of the plants. The tendrils that will twist their way through the mortar of our homes, the scraggly blotches of lichen that will expand upon the oily surfaces of our great artworks. The seething, bubbling, rotting stupidity of mere life, Utopia and apocalypse all at once.
To be fair to the potato folk, they’re in a strange and contradictory position. On the one hand they’re desperate to be seen as a real, proper, viable political party, which is why they’re collecting council seats like gym badges and clamouring for a spot in the TV debates. Not just a drifting protest march of sandal-wearing beardies, but an organisation capable of real competency in real politics. On the other, there’s still the buried desire to be an actually radical alternative, to delineate the absolute horizon of acceptable thought under conditions of post-everything modernity and, by circumscribing it, necessitate the faint conceptualisation of its Other, a thought and a programme that lies beyond any such limit. There’s nothing wrong with either of these desiderata, especially not the fact that they’re mutually contradictory. The problem is that rather than attempting any kind of synthesis, the Greens have settled on a policy of abstract negation. As Caroline Lucas, their only current MP, admitted, the Greens won’t be taking power any time soon; instead they exist to put forward some radical ideas which this political system needs so badly, and to push Labour to be far more progressive. What this actually means is that firstly, these radical ideas must remain as ideas and only ideas; even if framed as concrete proposals in a manifesto, their function is only ever entirely symbolic. And secondly, the radical nature of these ideas must always be essentially non-heterogeneous to the politics of the Labour front bench – a group which should, after its jolly little adventure in Iraq, be considered a genocidal party of a type with the Khmer Rouge and the Impuzamugambi. (And how should Labour be more radical? According to Lucas, by renationalising the railways. Icarus never dared dream higher.) The absolute worst of both worlds: at once a flighty, immaterial, nonsensical radicalism without its usual and important virtue of that unbounded creativity only possible through sheer silliness – and a grounded, measly, banal fascism that doesn’t even have the grisly sop of bare practicability. There’s nothing there. It’s a politics of the void; the unthinkingness of plant life.
Until recently, the Greens called for the replacement of the current benefits structure with a universal basic income of £72 a week. As a transitional demand, it’s not a terrible idea (even if it came with the quesily cauvinist name of a Citizens’ Income). That plan has been dropped from their 2015 manifesto. Why? Because the Green platform is structurally required to be a colossal failure of the imagination. Uniquely, the Greens could rename themselves the Why-Isn’t-Everything-Nicer Party without any substantial loss of meaning. Their vision is of a Britain powered by the kinetic energy of middle-aged people in cardigans pottering around allotments. A Britain where every family will bury acorns over the winter, where discussions of state will take place in a magnificent wooden treehouse, where thousands of protected voles will form a living quilt to scurry you off to sleep at night. (Plenary sessions at their party conferences – this is true – start with enforced ataraxy, a horrifying hippie-fascist ‘period of attunement’ in which the delegates engage in sixty seconds of ‘calm reflection’ to ‘clear their minds’ before the chakra-straining bustle of minor-party politics. Hard not to imagine them skimming off all actual thought like the fatty film from a psychic consommé.) It’s the same kind of ideology that propels people into thinking that 3D-printed shovels can save Africa; that drinking soya milk will refoliate the rainforests, make dogs and cats be friends again, and resolve the subject-object dichotomy; that they’re ‘lifehacking’ or ‘finding ingenious solutions to everyday problems’ as thousands of twanging rubber bands bounce around their heads and smash all their glassware. Heads in the clouds, knees in the shit; social change reconceived as a single rubbery floret of overcooked broccoli.
Given that they’re without any real radical vision or plan for action, the Greens have had to organise themselves around some kind of principle beyond mere vegetative idiocy. Be like the cabbage might have worked as a rallying cry at the time of Puritan pietism, but it doesn’t sound quite so sexy now. So the Green movement has taken as its empty signifier of choice a concern for the environment. Fine: who could possibly be against saving the environment? But what environment? An environment is something that surrounds, encloses, and determines any individual phenomena, something that always remains fundamentally outside. What’s called the natural environment is not this thing; in fact, it no longer really exists. There’s not a scrap of the non-human world that hasn’t been invaded and encoded by capitalist practices. The bunnies fucking in the fields are being pimped out by greetings cards companies. Songbirds now chirp car-insurance adverts every fifteen minutes. Even those places that are supposedly still wild and untouched are, precisely by virtue of their exclusion from the order of commodity society, utterly enmeshed within it – after all, sovereignty is defined by its capacity to create a state of exception. The deep-sea tube worms that gulp nutrients from the fires at the centre of the earth, waving their sad frilly fringes alone and unseen in a world without sunlight – they’re pioneering examples of neoliberal entrepreneurship. The last really wild megafauna are the subject of a frantic exchange in images; more than anything, they’re used to advertise their own endangerment. Some Latin American governments are seeking money to not exploit their oil reserves – a proposal that, while gesturing towards the inviolable difference of the ‘natural’ world, actually effects its opposite: the gooey remains of our old dinosaur rulers can’t even gloop around in peace beneath the soil without being subjected to the laws of the commodity. If there is an environment that acts as a substrate to our everyday activities, it’s not nature, but late capitalism itself. The esoteric core of the Green leadership must know this. Just like the malignant nature that threatened earlier societies, capital is vast, profligate, and ravenous; it knows no limits to itself, but seeks to spread its evil to the furthest galaxies. It’s something we’re in but not of; a vast stalking alien demon. The abstract principle that the Greens want to protect is nothing more than the blank futility of the status quo.
Their ideology is utterly hollow, and they don’t even have the aesthetic sense to exult in its hollowness. But still thousands of people believe in it – not just that, they believe in it very seriously. Believing something stupid but magnificent is generally laudable. Believing something stupid and miserly is cultish. This is the difference between a cult and a religion: when you join a cult, you have to give up your imagination at the door.
It doesn’t matter that some of the things they actually say about climate and inequality and so on happen to be true. Imagine some young person telling you, with perfect straight-faced enthusiasm, as if they’d just discovered the most important fact in human history, some perfectly ordinary truth – that blue whales are bigger than any dinosaur, that ducks fly south in the winter, that the polar ice caps are melting, whatever. Now imagine that this person keeps telling you their fact, over and over again, and tries to cajole you into signing a petition to help their fact gain wider recognition, and begs you to join their organisation, dedicated to the propagation of this important fact. The truth-value of what they’re saying doesn’t matter. It’s in the earnestness, those wide sugar-blasted eyes: this person is insane. Someone who cares this much about waterfowl migration can’t put much of a value on human life. Any hierarchical organisation affirming cetacean vastness can only be a violent, paranoid sect. Should I run? Am I about to be bludgeoned to death with a clipboard? When the nails on those wiry, intense hands start to claw at my face, will anything be left of me apart from a messy splat on the pavement? This is how the Green Party functions.
This isn’t to say that earnestness by itself is a bad thing. But if you’re going to earnestly attach yourself to a political project, it should at least be one that has something to show for itself. Storming palaces, overthrowing humanity, war against the Sun, not a miserable set of policy prescriptions designed purely to appeal to the symbolic intelligence of disaffected lefties. Look at the areas where the Greens are projected to do well. Brighton, Oxford, west Bristol, and north London: middle class enclaves, petty fiefdoms of the bien pensant liberal bourgeoisie (full disclosure: I’ve lived in two of these places). Ukip is bearing down on the east coast like a horde of zimmer-frame vikings, the Tories soar over vast swathes of the countryside on ragged vulture wings, an infestation of Labour candidates scuttle through city sewers – and the Greens send their zapped-out cultists to canvass for votes in Brockley and Stokes Croft. For a counter-example, just look at Syriza in Greece. They also started as a small, weird party, and however many theoretical and practical mistakes they’ve made since taking power – and there have been plenty – their method of getting there was exemplary. They actually listened to the people, stepped in to provide services when the state couldn’t, helped to organise workers and position themselves as something radically heterogeneous to the governmental system. Even after taking office, they promised to keep the central locus of power on the streets; they knew that party politics is just an abstracted expression of the real, visceral thing. This was hailed as a radical innovation, but it’s not really anything new: the Black Panthers were doing the same thing in the 60s, giving out free school meals and getting shot by police for their efforts; Hezbollah have come to replace the State in much of Lebanon; even Occupy briefly experimented with moving homeless families into foreclosed properties. The Greens don’t seem to do anything of the sort. They’re far more interested in getting MPs and council seats; for them a 6% electoral representation is the highest radical goal. They move entirely within the repressive state apparatuses, as if politics is something that takes place only in constituency surgeries and the wormy tunnels of Westminster. When they do try to actually effectuate any kind of change it’s always as a local government – here in Brighton, for instance, where their rule has been an unmitigated disaster. But of course it has: the institutions they’re working in are structurally calibrated to make radical change an impossibility, which is why they’ve ended up as the simpering enforcers of austerity.
The election is looming, and even the most devout Green cultists will eventually be forced to admit that they’re not going to do especially well. But doing well was never the point. The political right is, of course, up in arms about some of their policies – they want to legalise ISIS but ban your bins! they want foxes and hunters to attend interspecies sensitivity courses! they want to give all our jobs to Mongolian yak-herders and teach our children to go into prostitution instead! – but far from delegitimising the Greens, these paranoid critiques actually recapitulate the narrative in which any of this might actually happen, in which the Greens are a genuine electoral viability. They’ve been compared to a watermelon, green on the outside, red on the inside; in fact they’re a cauliflower, grey and frothy without, grey and rubbery within. What this troupe of cauliflower-headed clowns want more than anything is your vote: the claws to dig them further into the bloated corpse of liberal democracy, the biofuel that keeps the dismal train of parliamentary radicalism chuffing, so they can continue their sad stomping march into the algae-choked sea. They want your vote with a vegetable hunger, eyeless, faceless, insatiable. Don’t give it to them.
'games are uniquely suited for these purposes because they can locate dynamics of harm within social systems'
I wouldn't understand what Merritt is saying here without you. You've helped me understand my own world so much better than I could before. I love you, MCB.
soft chambers is invested in discussing care, as we believe it is an undervalued task and an underexplored topic in games
however, soft chambers also believes that games have done a poor job of exploring the inverse of care, which we might label ‘harm’
rarely do games explore the complex dynamics of harm or the lasting consequences
to fully consider healing and care we must consider harm
how can games usefully depict the myriad everyday forms of harm we inflict on one another, harm which is often unintentional yet no less damaging for it?
how can games help us to understand the consequences of harm and develop new strategies for healing from it?
games are uniquely suited for these purposes because they can locate dynamics of harm within social systems
rather than depict harm as strictly transactional, games can help us understand it as occurring within communities and locales
soft chambers believes that games can then also help us develop means of healing harm that are social and systemic in nature
I hate how intersectionality has become a liberal buzzword instead of representing the crucial contributions black women made to feminism and the importance of understanding the ways race functions with other oppressions.
"Let's Play" video formats on YouTube are one of the most popular ways people learn about and share games with one another. But while young men shouting over cutting-edge works are de rigeur, I like to talk softly over nice, strange old games. I'll be sharing some of these videos with you on Offworld every so often.
I think a lot of old, strange design forms, many now obsolete, still have a lot to teach us about design, and a lot to offer us in terms of sweet surprises, rough-edged and lovable graphics, and the voices of hundreds of offbeat old uncles cracking jokes at us from the cursor-blinking depths of the early 1980s. Subscribe to the Lo-Fi Let's Play YouTube channel to go on smooth vintage cruises with me. As a bonus, people often tell me the soft speaking and keyboard tapping gives them ASMR responses, too.
This is my MP (the MP for Basingstoke and Dean) proposing a new law which would force Facebook to give personal information on its users to the British government.
The growth in online crime suggests that many people still do not understand that what is illegal offline is illegal
online. Has the time come to make websites and social media operators verify the identity of the people who use their services in the UK to make it easier for people to be held accountable for their actions online?
soft chambers does not love it for its exploration, or its puzzles, or its storytelling
soft chambers’ ideal method of playing super metroid is to advance to brinstar and curl up into a morph ball in the downy, mossy embrace of an underground jungle
here we are safe in our power suit exoskeleton, deep beneath the harsh acid-pocked surface of zebes
here we can rest and watch the endless drifting of the spores
here we have found a cozy digital space
where else have you found secret spaces to curl into a ball and sleep a little?
Skip to the gameplay portion of the video above to see how it works: Players socialize at the dog park by rolling a pleasurably big, tactile tennis ball with their hands. Occasionally they will need to incline their head to touch, with their nose, the fluffy bottom of a stuffed pug that is emerging, hind legs splayed, from the controller.
Naturally, these kinds of experiments are better suited to public spaces and exhibitions -- no one is about to commercially develop a pug butt controller, sadly. But each year jammers make weird, touchable things for the annual Alt.Ctrl.GDC showcase at the Game Developers Conference, and other highlights from this one include a little wearable snail shell and a Cold War anti-nuclear device that uses a rotary phone dial.
'Making breasts jiggle becomes a tech issue, a way to show off the capabilities of a new engine or to demonstrate proof of the onward march of fidelity and sophistication -- women's breasts as the avatar for men's progress, even.'
Video game breasts are one of the video game industry's albatrosses.
If you weren't aware of the commercial sector's long and storied history creating ways to make cartoonish and often unbelievable forms gyrate alarmingly (or milkshake oddly but gently in place), Patricia Hernandez has written a fascinating piece on the software, tools and cultural landscape around "breast physics" in game development.
Of particular note: The guy that recommends devs watch porn so they can learn about where a woman's nipple goes.
Full disclosure: While it's not the kind of thing I feel like I should bring up at Women in Games Luncheons, I do preserve a secret affinity for the alien and often-lewd character designs of Soul Calibur. For me personally, exaggerated body forms in fantasy media is never going to be the "hill that I'm gonna die on," so to speak. I've still got friends who, when they hear I'm a "video game feminist," think my primary quest in life is to cover up all the boobs and make sure all the dragon fantasy armor is realistic for battle. While I respect where folks are coming from -- discomfort is fair -- I sometimes worry that those well-intentioned lines of conversation bring the focus back onto women's bodies as somehow The Problem, especially in the context of games or comics that are intentionally silly or joyfully stupid to begin with. It's not like folks are commonly taking mature and respectfully-nuanced female characters (or male ones, for that matter) and simply making them look weird physically.
But importantly, the video game boobs issue peels back a deeper layer in the relationship between women's bodies and traditionally male-dominated commercial spaces. Making breasts jiggle becomes a tech issue, a way to show off the capabilities of a new engine or to demonstrate proof of the onward march of fidelity and sophistication -- women's breasts as the avatar for men's progress, even. And that's without even asking the question of how the women in the office may feel when their coworkers are gathered around a screen plucking virtual nipples to watch for the right skin ripples. Or studying porn, "for realism."
As Hernandez added on her Twitter later on, "women become a tech problem", where the focus becomes on improving the movements of their artificial flesh, rather than, y'know, improving them as characters.
'There's a lot of reasons why games about giving or receiving care aren't more common. It may be easy to chalk it up to tech issues, but those kinds of arguments—you know, how it’s supposedly easier to simulate a bullet than a hug—obscure deeper social issues. Caring is feminized labor, dismissed as not particularly valiant, interesting, or worthwhile. Games where the main project is caring for another character—usually in the form of human-animal relationships—are generally dismissed as “casual". These are not neutral judgements—they're informed by the gendered qualities we attribute to different kinds of interactions.'
Merritt Kopas is so cool
THWACK!
My hand connects with ass cheek, sending a jolt through the man on all fours in front of me. I giggle a little—I'm not totally used to this. I pull my hand back and send it forward again, harder this time, and he bucks, a satisfying squeal slipping from between his lips. Later, I'll rub his back and tell him how good a job he did, tell him all the things he loves to hear after a scene.
No score, no contest, no real win conditions—just a single, meaningful interaction between me and my fictional partner. This is Robert Yang's Hurt Me Plenty, a videogame about spanking—but also, on a much deeper level, about consent, responsibility, and care. And it's just one of a number of independent games that's exploring these topics. In doing so, Hurt Me Plenty and other works are pushing players to reconsider their relationships to games, themselves, and one another.
On a deep level, most video games are competitive. As players we’re generally conditioned to expect friction and challenge. Obstacles are usually either logical or reflex-based: maneuver a falling block into an open space, marshall your virtual resources to overcome enemy armies, or avoid a hail of alien lasers as you duck behind cover. But why not question the conventions behind these themes? Are they necessary?
As a designer, I'm interested in exploring nontraditional uses for games. That's why I started Soft Chambers, a project about making games as vehicles for emotional skill-building and expression. For instance, my game Take Care charges players with caring for a pixelated character via simple touch gestures.
But it only provides the player with minimal guidance on how to do this, because human beings don't come with instructions. Putting players into situations where they're asked to care for another human character, a peer, is still pretty unusual for digital games.
There's a lot of reasons why games about giving or receiving care aren't more common. It may be easy to chalk it up to tech issues, but those kinds of arguments—you know, how it’s supposedly easier to simulate a bullet than a hug—obscure deeper social issues. Caring is feminized labor, dismissed as not particularly valiant, interesting, or worthwhile. Games where the main project is caring for another character—usually in the form of human-animal relationships—are generally dismissed as “casual". These are not neutral judgements—they're informed by the gendered qualities we attribute to different kinds of interactions.
Increasingly, though, independent artists are exploring dynamics that aren't competitive, and are creating stories that are more about intimacy than conquest. In Hurt Me Plenty, the player takes on the role of a top—the actor delivering some sensation—in a spanking scene. Yang designed the game to run with the motion-sensing Leapmotion device, so the player interacts with the game by literally making a slapping motion with their hand.
But the game doesn’t hurl players right off the spanking deep end. Before that, the player shakes hands with their prospective scene partner in order to negotiate the parameters of the scene—elements like the desired intensity, and the safe word that the bottom can use to end it, all via motion gestures. After the spanking segment ends, the player provides care for the other character by massaging his back and shoulders while he discusses his feelings about the charged physical interaction.
I played the game with my laptop's touch pad rather than a Leapmotion, but even so, I felt an intense sense of responsibility and care towards this fictional character. Most games encourage us to experiment, to test the limits of their systems, to try to find breaks or inconsistencies in their rules. But I didn't approach Hurt Me Plenty that way. Instead, I tried my best to take care of this virtual man, whose name I didn't even know. Between the physicality of the interactions and the way the game invests you with a sense of power that comes with responsibility, I felt a connection I rarely feel with non-player characters in videogames.
And Yang is serious about exploring this sense of responsibility and connection. While I didn't push my bottom very hard when I played, players who continue to inflict pain on him past his use of the safeword find that the game becomes unplayable for two to twenty days as their bottom recovers and rebuilds trust in the player. For Yang, this was a means of moving away from a proprietary relationship between the player and the game as a piece of software.
The non-player character may be just an unsophisticated AI—but this rejection of the player's ownership over it by locking her out in response to a violation of their negotiated boundaries goes a long way towards making the relationship feel weighty and meaningful.
I tried to create this same kind of dynamic in my own game, Consensual Torture Simulator. Whereas Hurt Me Plenty uses motion-sensing technology to create a sense of connection, in CTS I set up the narrative of an established romantic relationship, to encourage the player to invest in their interactions with a character.
CTS opens with a non-interactive negotiation scene where the player character and her partner agree to an impact play scene, where to goal is to make the bottom character cry. The player then has her choice of a range of tools, from canes and floggers to her fists and nails, to work her partner up towards consensual tears. But the player has to keep an eye on her own body, too—vigorously inflicting pain tires her out too, so she needs to take periodic breaks to pace herself.
I hoped that players would take the narrative seriously, but the extent to which they did surprised me. I had a number of people tell me that whereas in any other game they'd push the limits, try to discover a fail state, or play with the game in a detached way, in CTS they felt too strong a sense of responsibility to the fictional character to do that. Instead, they strove to take care of her as best they could, often ending the scene and the game long before things got too intense. Whoa.
Beyond these kinds of player-computer interactions, designers are also experimenting with multiplayer games that encourage players to practice active consent and care for one another.
Loren Schmidt and Jimmy Andrews' Realistic Kissing Simulator is a two player game where players manipulate inhumanly long, alien tongues in a way that totally belies the straight-faced title. But like Hurt Me Plenty, RKS first presents the player with a negotiation scene. One player asks if the other would like to kiss, and the other is free to accept or reject the offer. If the player accepts, the game goes ahead. If not, the game ends in the same way that it would when the players finished kissing.
Crucially, this isn't a static cutscene—it's an active part of the game involving both players that portrays consent and communication as at least as important as the acts that come afterwards.
Similarly, In Tune, a digital installation game by Tweed Couch Games [previously covered here at Offworld], has players negotiate and communicate physical boundaries with their partner, using one another's bodies as the game's controller. I saw it played at Indiecade East in February, and the public exhibition is a really compelling experience. By using familiar and nonthreatening conventions of videogames, In Tune gets people to reflect on their experiences of space, touch, and intimacy.
Works like Hurt Me Plenty, In Tune, and Realistic Kissing Simulator depart from our traditional view of games as sites for competition and domination, and ask us to imagine new possibilities. Like: maybe not all games exist to be owned, beaten, or completed. Maybe digital games can be used to facilitate care relationships and to build emotional skills. And maybe we can use games to imagine the kinds of worlds we'd like to inhabit, where care is a more celebrated and widely practiced activity.
My mum loves screaming down the phone at call centre people.
People who answer customer service lines have to deal with angry people all day.
If you have to call them when something broke and you’re angry, don’t be mean to them. It’s not their fault the thing broke or that the company did something unreasonable. Being mean to them will not get revenge on the company, and it will not make the company suddenly realize that they have to start being reasonable.
All being mean will accomplish is making someone’s else’s day worse.
Remember that there’s a person there on the other end of the line, and that they’ve been dealing with the brunt of frustrated angry people all day. Don’t be a jerk to them.
I wanted to draw my trash ass kid harassing someone
and I also wanted to draw silvermender’s Hector.[for a while nowTBH]
Hector’s the kind of person that will only get harassed if the weird touching includes a price tag on it. I’m sure he’ll appreciate cute tiny ladies prodding around his face and hair, makes him feel important
THO MAN THIS IS—SSSOOO CUTE, OMGaagrrh hector doodle ;u; and aggwwhdf i love, love when people draw interactions of their characters with mine! IT’S SUCH A TREAT SERIOUSLY and gosh your trash ass kid is so pretty i want to see more of her!1 aarrhrhh what a cute design fgfhg. THANK YOU MOMO this is such a nice thing to see in these TRYING COLLEGE TIMES!!!
Word has spread quickly around the Homeworld that a certain infamous worker class gem who calls herself “Cindi” may well be more than what she seems. She’s a troublemaker for sure, but … could the rumors really be true? Could she really be the Archandrite that the old lore foretells?
The excuse I’m going with here is that I was planning to draw two separate pieces of fanart for two separate pieces of media I love but I’m Late For The Bus so i had to find a compromise. I went all in with it because why not go all in with it!
one of my friends wanted to see a steven universe amv set to “dance apocalyptic” by janelle monáe and i thought, hey that sounds like something i could make
so i put together this little video to commemorate the incredible first season!
:D
This is the best Steven Universe fan-thing thing I have ever seen
It`s mostly just a name that means the same thing as comics. Manga is a pretty big blanket to get under- There`s stuff made in Japan that reads closer to American storytelling to me than some stuff made over here. I think if people are coming from mostly Japanese influences, then sure, call it Manga.call it fumetto , Bande dessinée, manhwa, 连环画, COMIX or Graphic novellas — usually my goal in saying what I do is explaining it as clearly as possible. “I make comic books”
I do think there`s a loss in not making what you do really show where you`re from. I`m thinking of a KRS ONE interview where he talks about how he doesn`t want to go to Sweden and just see people intimating NYC Hip Hop— he wants to see what they bring to the art form that is uniquely their own.
I feel like I eat comics from all over the world, I want to learn from all different styles to do the stuff, but In the end it`s all in service of making work that feels like I made it.
'Hybrid animal, with crowned human head and serpentine body, plays bagpipe through anus.'
ærs, m.n: exactly what it sounds like.
Image: Pierpont Morgan Library’s MS G24. Hybrid animal, with crowned human head and serpentine body, plays bagpipe through anus. Read Got Medieval’s short but hilarious blog post on medieval archivists who have to categorise images like this.
“Nilbog! That’s…”
Naturally, these kinds of experiments are better suited to public spaces and exhibitions -- no one is about to commercially develop a pug butt controller, sadly. But each year jammers make weird, touchable things for the annual Alt.Ctrl.GDC showcase at the Game Developers Conference, and other highlights from this one include a little wearable snail shell and a Cold War anti-nuclear device that uses a rotary phone dial.
