Lucio’s Rambles

Make Games For An Audience of One

2026-06-13T10:26:15+03:00

A friend sent me a link to NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME, described by critics as “the most pretentious itchio submission ever made”. While I do agree with the “manifesto” on some regards, I do think the sarcastic commenter was right: this is way too pretentious for its own good, to the point it ends up contradicting its own mission statement.

So I wanna talk about this manifesto a bit, and then give my own twist on its mission statement.

I’d recommend you go read it regardless, even if you’ll disagree with it its good to work that critical thinking muscle.

Anywho, the manifesto’s ostensible goal is to combat the capitalistic idea that every hobby needs to necessarily turn into a business. That “making it” means “making money from it.” This is most bluntly stated in the title of section 1: “THE DREAM OF SELLING GAMES IS KILLING THE DREAM OF MAKING GAMES”.

However, this manifesto also conflates “no one will purchase your game” with “no one will play your game”, ironically reinforcing the belief it sets out to combat - that games only exist as products to be sold. This can be seen in section 6, titled “YOU MUST MAKE YOUR GAME EVEN THOUGH NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY IT”, which discusses no one playing your game:

It is your duty to the next generation to show that the commercial videogames are an anomaly, a systemic flaw, a rounding error. They are drowned out by a vast, unspeakably dense landscape of shitty, flawed, imperfect videogames that no-one is ever going to buy.

I’ve bought and played many dogshit games on steam. I won’t name and shame them here, but I’ve played games with heart and soul that were so rough around the edges I had to leave the developer a very critical review, and in a few cases refund the game. I’ve also played many free titles that were an absolute joy, positively world-changing, which I will name and praise here: We Become What We Behold, Mike Shadow: I Paid For It!, This Is The Only Level…

“Dogshit games” and “games no one is going to buy” are two different categories, and conflating the two implies to me that the author still primarily sees games as objects of capitalism to be given a pricetag.

There’s multiple sections in this article (like section 4) which rebel against the tyranny of… uh, good game design practices. Like that you do not need to have “good controls” or “a tight core gameloop” or “a reasonable learning curve”. Which like, you should? You really should have all of these if you can, just to make your players have a better experience. It once more states that “you do not need these things because you are not trying to convince anyone to buy your game”, implying the only reason you’d ever want someone to play your game is if they’re buying it.

There’s much to discuss about whether games should always be made for the enjoyment of their audience, or exclusively for the enjoyment of their creator (the beginner’s guide is an entire game about this debate, which I suspect the author played right before posting), but there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to enjoy your game. I’ve made plenty of free games out there with zero intent of making money off of them, but I still wanted people to enjoy them. I iterated and reiterated and tried different strategies so people would have fun in it. I’m not convincing anyone to buy my game, but I do want them to play my game, that’s why I made it in the first place. Not as a way to (in my least charitable wording) jerk myself off to how smart a designer I am, but just to spread joy in the world.

Nothin’ wrong with that.

If you want to convince people that their game doesn’t have to exist within the confines of capitalism, you can’t exclusively discuss the game from within the confines of capitalism.

So, what do I say?

I do agree with the fundamental idea that you don’t need your game to be marketable. Thinking about what games sell rather than which games will be enjoyable results in a very, very bland gaming landscape. What “sells” is dictated by trends, and trends are volatile and unpredictable, so you really shouldn’t worry about them. Make something fun, something you are proud of, and just put it out there.

You don’t need your games to be perfect, because I assure you, they never will be. I spent literal years redesigning a board game from scratch several times over, and I still felt the final game rules could use a little more tweaking. Make something you think is fun, something that might not be for everyone, but will have an audience of one (1) insane person who’ll be begging you to add more to the game.

That one person could be you. They could be a stranger. They could be a friend. But make the game for one person. And make the game as perfect as it can be for that one person.

If all goes well, more than one person will find your game, and they’ll love it too. You will have found an audience of similarly insane people who think you’re god’s gift to gaming and tell their friends to try out this cool new indie title they found.

If not? You have made one person happy. And that’s more than enough.

Do I Actually Fit the Diagnosis?

2026-05-29T15:35:13+03:00

I am unsure if I mentioned this before, but I got diagonsed with ADHD a while back.

I don’t know how official it all is, but a psychiatrist with my medical insurance told me that I have fairly textbook ADHD symptoms and that she believes I have it. I didn’t get a certificate, or an explanation paper on what to do now, or any medication, so that’s why I say i’m unsure on the “officiality” of it all, but on the other hand I also mentioned I didn’t really want medication as I am decently functional in day-to-day stuff.

Now, even though I went there explicitly to confirm or deny whether or not I have ADHD (as my friends were making that joke one too many times for me to actually start doubting myself), I still am not fully convinced. It felt… too easy, I suppose. The doctor straight up asked me if I want to have the diagnosis or not during the conversation, so it felt like she was doing so to appease me rather than for any medical reason. My friends say I’m a textbook case and that this diagnosis didn’t shock them at all but… I dunno, still feels odd.

Mainly because I feel like what I feel is standard? I am unsure how to phrase it without making it seem like I think ADHD is some demonic possession incident but, it’s a diagnosis of a medical condition, right? And I have friends who have it hit them HARD. I have a friend who was constantly failing classes until he got on Attent, and now he’s finishing his degree. That was an ADHD diagnosis where I went “yeah no shit”. But… me, really? I am fully functional I’d like to say, don’t need meds, have some procrastination but it feels standard, so like, how did I get it?

This unsureness also comes because of discourse regarding “overdiagnosis” - the idea that people who do not have ADHD or autism are being given that label due to… something, I dunno. ADHD and Autism seem to have been… I’m not sure if fetishized is the right word, but pretty-fied by the internet and popular discourse. Autism and ADHD are quirky, and cool to have, and hot, and the new trend, but the ADHD and Autism I see in this depiction are not the ones I’ve seen from people I know. They’re closer to how Millenials abused the term OCD, in that regard: a faded facsimile which bares only surface relevance to the original copy.

Cultural ADHD is being casually inattentive and nothing else. Cultural Autism is having a personality. I see people bring up “hyperfixiation” in the context of any mild interest people have, as opposed to the times I’ve had friends exclusively want to talk to me about Star Wars for several months (I do mean exclusively. 70%+ of the conversations turned to star wars). This is exacerbated by self diagnosis which, while not necessarily malicious or negative, does run into the same issue year 1 psych students discover: everyone has elements of every mental disorder, and it only crosses into a disorder once it actively harms your day-to-day functioning.

My friends constantly make jokes about me having both Autism and ADHD. The former is prohibitively expensive to get diagnosed for as an adult. The latter I tested professionally, and got told “you have it”.

And yet still… do I? Is it, or is it just trendy to say so?

Do I have a diagnosis, or did people butcher what the term means?

My Boss Has Never Used Unity

2026-05-27T15:01:40+03:00

My boss, the same boss who has been developing an in-house game engine for over 5 years now, has just told me, he has never used unity.

Not once.

This came after a 50 minute talk where he asked me why it seemed that I have been so down and had zero faith in the work, and I laid into the shitass work forumla these people have here.

Not. once.

I geniuenly have a headache, this place is so fucked.

I Have Watched An Anita Sarkeesian Video

2026-05-06T19:46:11+03:00

Anita Sarkeesian is a name that should not be unfamiliar to anyone who was in the gaming sphere around 2014. She was an outspoken feminist who made a video series about women in video games, and ended up being one of the various targets of the GamerGate scandal. (Scandal is putting it nicely, moreso “harrassment campaign.”)

To those who don’t know of GamerGate, here’s the first line of its wikipedia page:

Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.

When this was going on, I did not know much about Sarkeesian other than she was a “feminazi” and out to destroy my precious video games. She seemed silly, and everything I saw online seemed to reaffirm this idea, so I didn’t really bother reading more into it. In my defense, I was 12.

Well, it’s been about a decade since, and the name popped up once more in my feed - she was hired as part of the dev team for Slay the Spire 2.

Gamers spotting this decided to start reviewbombing the game on steam (barely made a dent so far, but I’m making this post hours after the “discovery”), and I brought up the topic to friends, realizing I never actually watched anything by her. So I did. I opened up a video that a different friend of mine recalled as being an example of her making a very silly point - Strategic Butt Coverings. Where she talks about butts.

I went in expecting some sort of passionate, radical feminist, and came out absolutely gobsmacked by how benign this criticism was.

Like seriously, this is basic feminism. It’s not even radical or jaw-dropping, the video was just “female characters are sexualized while men are not.” Something that is blindly obvious if you’ve played a AAA title in the past two decades. Actually, probably even earlier, considering Tomb Raider is from the 90s.

This is what people were up in arms about? Basic, nothingburger feminism?

Holy shit I was stupid.

Appealing to Casuals in Deadlock

2026-05-05T13:45:57+03:00

Deadlock is a game that is currently still in closed beta, and somehow already has taken over 200 hours of my life.

It’s the most recent title by gaming-juggernaut-turned-digital-store-owner Valve, known for only publishing games that seriously redefine the gaming landscape (we don’t talk about Artifact) and having a work schedule best described as “we’ll work on it when we fucking feel like it.” The title is a new entry in the MOBA genre (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), a genre characterized by human-controlled avatars duking it out in an online arena populated by various NPCs to slaughter and side objectives to complete in hour~long matches as each of two teams tries to destroy their enemy’s base.

As you can figure by that description, MOBAs are notoriously difficult. They are notoriously annoying to get into. If you know a MOBA, it’s probably League of Legends, and if you know League of Legends, you’ll know people hate League of Legends. Yet despite this, my friends sunk their teeths deeply into Deadlock, despite none of them being a particular fan of MOBAs. Why? And why did I sink so many hours?

I think it’s mostly chalked up to how this game invests heavily in supporting casual players, and doing away with the MOBA genre’s tendency to over-skill-ify its own systems.

I’ll go down a few examples of what I mean.

The POV

MOBAs’ camera perspective is, for the most part, a bird’s eye view. This is a standard carried over from the genre MOBAs were born from - the Real Time Strategy - and it’s a standard that’s all but unused outside of strategy games. The bird’s eye view tells a player that this is A Serious Game, To Be Played with Skill. That this game is a Strategy Game to Invest Time In.

It also tells people that this game is a bore for gamers that take themselves too seriously.

Deadlock, meanwhile, has a typical over-the-shoulder camera perspective found in most modern titles. This makes the game more familiar to players right out the get-go, and associates the game and its systems more with the Hero Shooter genre (Overwatch, TF2) which has been incredibly popular for the past decade.

Without changing any of the mechanics or fundmental systems, just changing the camera already makes this game much more approachable to the average gamer.

Signposting

Another issue with MOBAs is that there are a LOT of systems and sub-systems to be learnt, and players often drown in all of it. The game’s tutorial is… less than stellar, but it resolves this issue in a different way: voicelines. All of the characters have voice lines commenting on how the player should be playing the game to save them from imminent death.

The characters whose design is made to put turrets all over the map will comment “I need to put as many of these up as I can”. When you wander too deep into enemy lines without backup, your character will comment “I don’t like being exposed here” or “I should reconvene with my allies”. If you’re walking around with two thousand coins without having bought anything, your character will comment that “these won’t help me when I’m dead, I need to spend!”

This is without getting into how many of the upgrade paths for the various characters incentivize specific ways of play. Sure, this is true for any character in any game, but I can say that characters’ upgrades have been actively changed to be clearer about how they are intended to be used. If a great offensive capability is used defensively by new players, that capability was changed so that one of the upgrades is explicitly better offensively. Sure, good players were not making this mistake, but this change was made to help new players figure this out on their own.

The game teaches you during gameplay, rather than only during the tutorial, so you aren’t frontloaded with information. As you’re playing and processing the world around you, it nudges you in the right direction, so you feel like you have some control over things.

No Draft

This is something very specific to MOBAs and other “highly competitive” games. In ranked, competitive games where the choice of arena or character impacts things, there is typically a “draft phase” - a section of gameplay where both players select and deny eachother a choice of playable character and/or playable arena.

While this makes the game more balanced, it is also… really annoying. I can tell you personally, it’s really annoying if you just wanna play your favorite character in the game, and when you pick them you get some jackass hopping on the microphone going “YOU DUMB FUCK, THIS CHARACTER IS NOT META! report optimisticlucio for trolling. ggs. we lose.”

Merely by not having this minor feature, it’s already much easier to get into a game. I’ve already seen people whine about this feature being missing, but holy shit I could not be happier for this.

In general, this game shows how appealing less to an existing crowd of hardcore players and appealing more to the fringe, casual playerbase, can do wonders. This game is ranking in hundreds of thousands of players despite being in a closed beta you must get an invite to.

If you haven’t played this yet, I cannot recommend it enough.

…If you can get an invite.

Luck in Games

2026-04-06T19:49:06+03:00

So, a few weeks ago, the director of my game design course told me she’d be willing to let me run a small course on game mechanics next semster. Sweet! I’ve complained about the lackluster education this degree gave us about how to actually make games when it comes to rules and mechanics, so this is some attempt to remedy that fact myself. Problem is - I gotta think of a syllabus now.

More than that, I need to now make lectures about mechanics and have them be both understandable, interesting, and useful. I managed to do one of those a while back, but now I need to have… I am unsure on the amount actually. I’m banking on around 6. Still - more than 1. And even that one I feel I’ll need to redo.

I sat down to make the presentations and realized I’m actually unsure of what I want to say, so today (and probably a few more times on this blog), I’ll just be writing a giant list of thoughts about game design, so I can later parse my mess of incoherent babbling and convert it into something useful.

First topic on the agenda: LUCK!

WARNING: The following post will be wildly incoherent and messy, likely reading like I am talking to myself. This is because I am talking to myself.

So, luck. Luck, luck, luck. I wrote some notes before doing this about the topics I’d want to discuss, and what I wrote about luck is:

Luck and Skill
- Luck and Skill are opposed on individual mechanics
- Luck and Skill are orthogonal on the broad perspective of a game
- People love luck but hate to admit it

So let’s go over these first. Typically when people talk about luck and skill there’s the implication that these are opposing forces, right? That if a game is more luck-based it is necessarily less skill-based. And that is true to some extent, right? If we define “skill” as being “how frequently a given person can bring upon a desired set of circumstances, typically via some sort of training”, then luck is diametrically opposed to this, as it creates uncertainty. It makes the given person less likely to bring upon their desired set of circumstances. But I don’t think that’s exactly what people mean when they say ‘skill’.

Well, sort of, I think that people think of skill as a trait a game can have more or less of. Not as a percentage, but as something that two skill-based games can have either more or less of, compared to eachother. Think of Tic-tac-toe and Chess, right? One of these is more “skillful”. But why? Neither has any random elements, they’re both fully open info. So clearly this “skill” isn’t just how often a given player can bring upon a desired set of circumstances, but rather how… difficult? not difficult. Maybe how much there is to learn in a given game to give you an edge over your opponent. In Characteristics of Games they called this the “skill ladder” - a “ladder” of players of a given game, where every “tier” up the ladder has a 60% or more chance to beat people below them. The more steps on this ladder exist, the more “skillful” a game. I think that makes some sense, right, when you play a pvp game your success only matters in respect to who you’re fighting, so if there’s always someone you can get better at, that’s… “more skill.”

So in that sense, they aren’t really opposed to eachother, right? There’s plenty of games with very tall skill ladders that have plenty of luck, like Poker, or any roguelike. If anything I’d argue luck compliments skill in this area, because it forces players to learn more than they’d otherwise want to. If a game is fully deterministic, right, you can just not bother learning certain areas of the game if they’re of very low importance or if you know how to shut them down ahead of time. It makes it so you need to be good at less things overall. If luck forces your hand to situations where using these niche mechanics would be favorable, it lengthens the skill ladder, because there’s more ways to learn and beat other players.

So yeah like, luck and skill seem opposed but aren’t really when we discuss the way people typically think of skill. On the individual mechanic scale they’re opposed, but broadly they’re complimentary. Interesting but weird.

Now the next part that people love luck but hate to admit it… Yeah it’s pretty straightforward. Well, people would be the wrong word, experts would be more accurate. In the hardcore audience of pretty much any game, people fucking HATE random elements, dude. Look at Smash Bros right, there’s a reason tournaments ban items and only play on final destination while when I play with my mates we spam smash balls like it’s no tomorrow. They see the items as adding variance and being able to take away from their displays of skill, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but… even if we move past my disagreements with that base concept, hardcore players tend to forget the reason why luck is present in games, and how it adds to the experience.

….How does it add to the experience actually? I was gonna go on a tangent of how it helps lesser players win more, therefore making more people play the game and enjoy it therefore increasing the game audience, but that feels too specific to multiplayer titles and also assumes the location of luck in very specific places. Might come back to it later.

One thing that I think may be worth discussing would be the separation of luck into three categories (also from characteristics of games):

Random Elements: mechanics which create some unpredictable result during gameplay, like dice or cards
Von-Neumann Games: situations where players create a simultaneous decision, being only able to guess what their opponent will do, like rock paper scissors.
Human Ignorance: situations where the player technically has all the information but it is either unreasonable or unfun to come to the proper conclusion, resulting in a guess, like guessing between the two best moves in a game of chess.

Technically the first category fits into the last category in some sense, like, technically a supercomputer could predict what a die roll would land on and it’s just human ignorance that we can’t predict it, but… uhhhhh what am I even gonna say about these distinctions? Is there anything fundamentally different or interesting to say about them? I am unsure there really is.

I could say that Vonn Neumann games are considered to be more “palable” to the hardcore audience than pure luck games are, because technically you are making a decision (even if it’s completely arbitrary), but what then? What’s useful about this knowledge?

Let’s think. Random elements fully remove control from the player. This can be good. Von Neumann may be more palpable to hardcore players because you can essentially roll a loaded die in your favor, but the “tryhard” way to treat every decision like that would be to plan for and calculate every possible result, which is a headache, and in reality even calculating only two may be more annoying as opposed to knowing with certainty.

The Human Ignorance bit could be interesting, because I could tie it into a point about how all luck is just a form of hidden information. How there doesn’t actually need to be randomness or even anything arbitrary for it to be percieved as luck.

If I make a GIF with three doors that ask the user to pick a door, and then reveals only one of the doors had a key behind it, is it luck? It’s deterministic, repeteable, nothing in it was random, but it still is lucky. Merely because I didn’t know the answer. Because I could figure it out without knowing why I figured it out. The act of making a decision without knowing all the information involves a gamble, and that’s luck.

And that might be what people like- ehhh i’m going into philosophy. This isn’t what I’m doing, I wanna stick to rules.

I don’t know what I’m gonna say about luck. I had some other topics there that I had more bullet points on. Maybe I’ll shelve this and go to something else i have more to write about.

That seems like a good plan.

Euthanizing Denji

2026-03-28T14:56:06+03:00

To those of you who don’t know, four days ago we got the very final installment of Chainsaw Man: Chapter 232. And it’s somewhat controversial.

Chainsaw Man is a very popular manga about a boy who can turn into the titular Chainsaw Man, using this power to take down various monsters and learning about his place in the world. Fairly standard setup, but it’s executed very well, making it an incredibly popular story.

The story’s split into two main parts: Part 1, aka “The Public Safety Saga”, and Part 2, “The Academy Saga.” The first part focuses on Denji’s story working under the Public Safety division, while the second focuses on a new protagonist named Asa, trying to live a normal highschool life while dealing with a devil who took residence in her body.

If these plotlines sound interesting to you, I recommend you go out and read the manga (or watch the very-well animated show!), because I’m going to go into spoiler territory here.

SPOILERS FOR ALL OF CHAINSAW MAN ABOUND.

TURN BACK NOW IF THAT MATTERS TO YOU!

Part 2 of CSM has gotten… mixed reception, to say the least. While the start of part 2 was sincerely excellent and still works as a (mostly) standalone story, there is some point where the story starts going downhill. Depending on who you ask you’ll get different answers for when that was, but around the 3rd or 4th arc, the focus of the narrative shifts.

Initially Asa was our protagonist, a new perspective with a whole character arc to complete and absolutely loathing towards other humans (which I found to be hilarious), but as we continue, Denji is our protagonist once more as she gets kinda tossed and forgotten about. The first two arcs are small-scale and entertaining on their own, while implying greater things yet to come, but from chapter 3 onwards the implication is everything we get. We get implications of what will happen, and how that future payoff may be interesting, but we don’t get quite as much interesting stuff in the then and now. Everything focuses on what will happen later, on this great prophecy, on mysteries, on building up arcs rather than resolving them…

On promising something thrilling later. On promising that juuust around the corner is the big reveal that will tie everything together.

So of course, when the ending arrived, and the payoff didn’t, people lost it. People said that this ending is atrocious, that it spat in the face of everything the fans wanted, but in reality it was just the moment where fans were forced to accept all the dissapointment they’ve already been fed under the promise of later reward.

And honestly? I’m glad it’s over. Hell I wish it ended earlier. Because it’s clear the author fucking hated writing this.

As the story goes along the artstyle (penned by the guy who also wrote the story) gets worse and worse. Panels become indecipherable and action becomes hard to follow. That coincides with characters getting increasingly flatter and relying on their old characterization. Atleast for me, it really felt like Tatsuki Fujimoto (the author) was done with this story many moons ago and just kept going for the paycheck.

I kept following this story even when I was down with it with the sliver of hope that he really did have some greater plan or payoff at the end of the road for us to reach. And now that we’re here, I’m glad this story is over. I’m glad that I can know with certainty that part 2 isn’t worth reading through, rather than wondering whether I need to tell friends to just “power through” the shit in the middle. I’m glad that the author can take a break and start something new.

I still think that the first two arcs of Part 2 are really good and worth reading (the ones with Asa in the protagonist seat), but beyond that?

Denji’s been euthanized, and I couldn’t be happier for him.

The Amazing Digital Circus is Fine

2026-03-21T17:57:09+02:00

So, The Amazing Digital Circus! To those who haven’t heard of it, it’s an ongoing show about six unlucky protagonists being trapped in the titular circus, and they don’t know why. They wake up in bodies that aren’t theirs, barely remembering who they were before, and trying to find how they escape while being entertained/tortured by a sentient AI who sincerely seems to want to make them happy.

If this plot summary seems interesting to you, I’d recommend checking it out, all the episodes are on both netflix and youtube.

Also, because I’m gonna start ripping into it a little.

The latest episode dropped today, and the final episode is set to drop on june, so I feel like at this point I have a fairly strong read on the quality of the show as a whole. And my verdict is: It’s fine.

It’s cute, the animation is very good, the first few episodes are entertaining and fun, the show on its own doesn’t have any glaring issues. However, the reason I am making this post is because when I go online and see other people talking about the show I feel insane. Maybe not insane, actually, that’s a strong word. I feel like I’ve walked into a group of people watching their first ever show.

People are hailing this show as being peak, posting how they are FLOORED at the twists and reveals at the end of every episode, and like - they’re alright? They’re really not that exceptional. There’s plot holes and rushed development moments littered all throughout, which aren’t a cardinal sin but would make the show not be “OHHHH MY GOOOODDDDD”-level warranted. I won’t go into them too much here incase you didn’t watch the show, but like… the latest episode has many moments where someone acts in a way that isn’t quite out of character, but is not at all how they were acting the rest of the episode, because if they kept acting normally the plot would be resolved. Again - not a cardinal sin, but not oscar-worthy writing.

One thing I’ve been told is “lucio, the fans are mostly teens. teens are like this”, which I can dismiss some of the more wild takes I’ve seen (someone saying this show brought “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” to the mainstream. Yknow, one of the most well known pieces of sci-fi literature). On the other hand, I know plenty of adults that treat this show as the second coming. I really don’t get it.

Is it just me? Am I missing something?

Probably.

But I feel like people are really making it out to be more than it is.

The Horrors of Personal Style

2026-03-13T18:47:26+02:00

While I couldn’t go to this year’s GDC, the friend I was planning to go with did. They are very fashionable and great with people, two things I am incredibly jealous of them for; they managed to make connections with a bunch of people in the industry already, including getting someone to pay for their expensive lunch on day 1.

I asked them to teach me their ways, how did they manage to get so many people to know them so quick. They said I should compliment people and then naturally introduce myself to enter the conversation (good plan, however I am terrified of talking to new people, so it’ll take work), and to “dress in a way that makes you easy to recognize or stand out”.

This second part is the part I wanna talk about. Because man oh man do I have negative points in style. The most I know about matching clothes is owning 200 green T-shirts because I have green eyes. Beyond that point it’s up to god whether I look good in the mornings or not.

For years I’ve wanted to get some sort of style going, but I never really got how to do that. I look online for advice, or skim descriptions of books, and they all already assume you have some sense of natural style. “Try new clothes and see which ones fit your asthetic!” How do I know if they fit, if I don’t know what my asthetic is, or what clothes even compliment it? The few times I’ve gone with people to shop, they would usually rip whatever I picked off the shelf from my hands and hand me something else to try out.

And even then, how do I look memorable? I am a tall bearded white guy, I already look “default” in most work-related conferences I go to, so my clothes really need to pull their weight here. What do I wear? In terms of accessories every guy wears a watch and a necklace so those seem like boring options. Do I get a print tee? Are print tees cringe? Is wearing tight shirts too self-absorbed? Where do I START???

I’m probably gonna pester that same stylish friend for tips once GDC ends and they’re not running around meeting everyone in the industry within record time, but until then I’ll just scream at the heavens and wonder what the hell “matching patterns” even means.

Also, on the topic of self-grooming. I have tried waxing my legs today.

Hoooooly shit, it took like an hour and I only waxed half my leg. And it took so much goddamn wax! How do women do this shit???

You Are Not Affiliated With Me!

2026-03-09T22:11:55+02:00

I was just added to a group chat by a friend who I have not talked to in many moons. Good friend, known him from highschool, chill guy, does cosplay. He opened a discord chat for other israelis who are currently trapped at home bc of the war.

I join the server and notice that there’s a game of gartic phone going on, so of course, I join in. Many laughs are had, silly drawings abound.

I immediately notice two of the guys are… edgy. Incredibly liberal usage of the hebrew N-word, “ironic” misogyny jokes, you know the drill.

Except this time, they tried getting me in on it. I was the only other cis guy in the chat and no hint of fruit in my voice, so I figure they figured I’d be a likeminded individual to share in their hatred of women and how shallow they are.

I kept shutting that shit down and commenting on how their views on women were both unrealistic and harmful to themselves.

I don’t want a medal or anything it just SUCKS when people assume “my team” is one I do not subscribe to IN THE SLIGHTEST.