Alvin!

pixel art wine

llama sitting on some grass in Machu Pichu

Llama

the left needs to seriously engage with umamusume: pretty derby. if you don't plan out which support card banners to pull for the next year, you'll struggle to be competitive during future scenarios and champions meetings

There’s a principle I talk a lot about in relation to Lancer game design which I call the Knight Boat Principle. In Season 6, Episode 13 of The Simpsons, “And Maggie Makes Three,” this exchange occurs: TV Announcer: We now return to Knight Boat, the Crime Solving Boat! [a boat chases several men on jet skis] Michael: Faster, Knight-Boat, we’ve gotta catch those starfish poachers! Oh no, they’re headed for land! [the starfish poachers switch from jet skis to motorcycles and speed away] Michael: We’ll never catch ‘em now! Knight Boat: Incorrect. Look, a canal! [cut to the Simpsons’ living room] Bart: Aw, every week there’s a canal! Lisa: Or an inlet! Bart: Or a fjord. Homer: Quiet! I will not hear another word against the boat.

I actually hold the belief that it’s perfectly fine for there to always be a canal, or an inlet, or a fjord, because this is a show about Knight Boat, the crime-solving boat, and if you don’t have a waterway down which Knight Boat can travel, you are kneecapping the entire premise of your show. Lancer is a game about mech fights. Major problems in the Lancer universe must always, in some way, have a solution that includes fighting in mechs. If players travel to a place in their mechs, it should be a place with architecture sized to reasonably accommodate them. This is the guiding thematic principle around which I write for Lancer. I need to justify why the mechs are fighting in a theme park, but I do not need to justify why the mechs are able to fight in the theme park – In Golden Flame and in the greater extent the whole of Lancer is a setting about giant robots being used for things they definitely shouldn’t. If you need me to explain to you why the theme park uses fully-armed giant robots as mascots, you are in the wrong game.

I call this the Knight Boat Principle and it is an unironic, genuine game design principle that I have, which can be briefly stated as: "if your core gameplay has a specific premise, your worldbuilding should be structured around enabling it, rather than the other way around." #LancerRPG

I found the old 35mm slide for the cover for Neuromancer and had it scanned in for your pleasure. Enjoy!

If copilot suddenly got better at auto-completing for 4D deformable code approximately 9 days ago, you're welcome!!

GitHub - Alvf/NDIM: Code used in Hyperdimensional Deformation Simulation for the creation of the doubly-rotating bunny. Code used in Hyperdimensional Deformation Simulation for the creation of the doubly-rotating bunny. - Alvf/NDIM

Do you like to look at grad students' cleaned-up code? Check out my NDIM repo, which is a nifty repository for the 4D stuff I published at SIGGRAPH, equipped with a scene setup for the rotating bunny: github.com/Alvf/NDIM. Lemme know how I can support other machines or if anything breaks!

It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

DOCTOR: I told him he needed to get out to a show, that was how he would cure his depression.

CHOTINER: So you learned this technique in school?

DR: No, not— listen it was good advice. Pagliacci was in town.

C: Right. Is it standard to give advice before learning a patient’s name?

DR: Now look

An aerial map of Firestep, a city in a Pathfinder campaign. It's home to a rather large adventuring academy

Pathfinder city prep done!

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step.

1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish.

2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

Decided to start keeping track: I peaked at having 8 concurrent terminals open, one of which was tmux-d with 6 panes yayayyayyy SIGGRAPH

phenomenal and unstoppable

Why spend $1,000,000 on a Game Awards Trailer when you can spend $10 on $20,000 of royalty free commercial use video game music.

All proceeds go directly to funding us making more games:
moonanagames.itch.io/80-songs-pack

#gamedev 🎮 #ttrpg #vtuber

I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human I thought this was going to be a review of my time with Santa Ragione's Horses, the controversial art game recently banned from Steam and the Epic Store. To some extent, this will be that but after...

I played Horses this weekend and I wrote down some messy thoughts not only on the game but especially on the specter of formalism that emerged to haunt us all for a moment.

transgamerthoughts.com/post/8023277...

Image is set up like a video game hud, featuring a character in a suit with a swollen smoking head with the twisted remains of a smile underneath. He says "I've been really getting into cigarettes lately, both as an accessory and a lifestyle. There's a lot of interesting occult significance to smoking if you think about it, let me send you a link to my blog."

Smoker

a title card from the award nominations video that says: BEST SCORE & MUSIC LEVELED UP BY (SPOTIFY LOGO)

like i am not going to devote a fraction of my brain to being upset for longer than a minute, but this says about all you need to know about the legitimacy of TGA's awards at least as it applies to music

Don’t unionize: fired

Try to unionize: believe it or not also fired

Would be a kinda fun task to come up with a list of the Ten Songs You Could Use To Score Every Video Essay

Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same

Last night I dreamt that I was spurting blood from a hole in my chest. I caught most of it in a bowl, and then felt the call/urge to take that bowl and pour it through a tall window with a red sill. No part of my body could physically cross the threshold, just the blood bowl.

What is Happening to Japan? YouTube video by Abroad in Japan

Chris Broad, a guy who lives in and has made his living as a sort of cultural ambassador of Japan, made a video about the emerging content slop genre of "immigrants and tourists are destroying the pure, unconquered land of Japan" that ties in with its current right-wing swing.
very interesting

"The roleplaying is the stuff the game DOESN'T need rules for, idiot" is such a ridiculously illiterate stance (in multiple senses) to hold in 2025, an era in which we have a veritable cornucopia of designer TRPGs to showcase that elfgames can be more than a combat engine draped in vibes

Incredible infographic at the state fair

[ssb] feathered friends