A friend of mine made this game, and I was already going to check it out, but I got 1000% more interested when I realized the protagonist in the key art was the ferret and not the guy with the sword
It's human to want to simplify a complicated situation. It's human to want to believe that people who are more ethical, or more attractive, must be more talented. From where I'm sitting, these are completely disconnected variables. (If there are studies correlating them, I'm unaware of them.) But when an artist people like turns out to be a bad person, it seems like it's easier to decide their art was bad all along than to accept the broader idea that terrible people can make excellent art.
Conflating everything about a person into a single "I like them" or "I don't like them" variable makes it harder to accept that a talented, attractive person who knows all the right gender words, can still be a bad person. It makes you more likely to, if someone made art you dislike, to look for reasons to believe that they're a bad person too. It makes it difficult to accept that a bad person can still do good things, or that a broadly good person (like you, perhaps) can do bad things.
I've been playing Infinity Island, by Luca Redwood, the You Must Build A Boat guy. It's themed as one of those collect-the-animals F2P games, but it's structured more like a clicker, with a half dozen different currencies that interact via a half dozen different upgrade interfaces. I've been playing for several days but some of the most basic stuff is still mysterious to me, to the point that I feel like it must be on purpose? Like it feels overcomplicated past the point of satire.
@gray17 I get the impression that he was only ever on the public-facing internet to promote his games, and vanished as soon as that stopped seeming important
You may have seen the Balatro Discourse, which consists of people looking at a screenshot of code that it straightforward and getting angry that it's not more complicated.
I'd just like to posit here that a straightforward solution is an excellent default and you should have a really solid argument for the advantages of a complicated solution before you choose it.
@mogwai_poet There is also this now-deleted but memory-indelible Terry Cavanagh tweet from early 2020: "Every screenshot I see posted of terrible things in the VVVVVV source code only makes me more powerful"
One of the touted advantages of the internet was that it made available the global range of options. No longer are you limited to talking to the person next to you on the bus, etc.
Now global everything is the norm, and the exciting thing would be the ability to filter for locally sourced stuff. Like, if I go to a hotel concierge and ask for some good local podcasts, he's probably going to say "Um, This American Life? Joe Rogan?" No, dude. I mean podcasts recorded in this neighborhood.
The real story of the xd/liblzma attack is that it's considered totally normal in the FOSS community to hurl abuse at people who are maintaining critical public infrastructure in their free time.
Thinking further on what Picotron is for. My initial concern was that Pico-8's constraints are very well-tuned, and you can't make a better Pico-8 by relaxing the constraints.
Picotron isn't trying to be a better Pico-8. If Pico-8 is a fun cozy way to make games, Picotron is a fun cozy way to use a computer. I don't know if you've noticed, but computers suck now. (Mostly because developers and platform owners have figured out more effective ways to make money than making their users happy.)
You haven't lived until a couple you know makes an album together to process their breakup and you get to hear them singing backup on each other's diss tracks