left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!
running back and forth between furry and non furry / normie and non normie circles, something that keeps jumping out at me is how homestuck is still symbollically important in describing how you use the internet and what communities you seek out. i dont mean having read homestuck, much less liking or not liking homestuck. i mean merely knowing what it is at all, being able to do a description of it about as detailed as "seinfeld was a popular absurdist sitcom set in new york city centered around four friends in their thirties"*. its one of the things that i think neatly describes a lot of the sorts of people who seek out / get latched onto alternative social media: people who know what homestuck is, broadly. the sorts of people who dont latch on to spaces like this, or even something much closer to conventional social media like bluesky, broadly fall into the category of people who dont know what homestuck is
when i say that in many ways furry culture still has more similarities to cishet gamer culture than queer non furry culture, this is one of those important tells of that: something that shows that from a pure "getting information" basis there can be media that's foundationally important to the way things are to one group that is barely a blip in another seemingly related subculture.
has anyone else noticed this? are there other media tells like that, where something ubiquitous to one group is virtually unknown to the other, that are important distinguishing factors?
*inb4 a homestuck fan is like "lmao ive spent hundreds of hours on this and buddy i cant even give you a neat explanation of that"
So often, you're greeted with the splash screen of Unreal Engine or "Made with Unity" when booting up a game, two of the most common game engines today. These are robust and mature engines, but they're not always the best options for independent developers, according to longtime developer Rez Graham. At a GDC 2024 talk titled "A Case for Making Your Own Game Engine," he advocated for building games on your own tech through frameworks and libraries—existing tools that offer some major advantages and, admittedly, some disadvantages developers should be aware of.
Graham has been making games independently under BleachKitty following his work at Electronic Arts on The Sims series. From his perspective and experience, the most popular game engines aren't always the best fit for development, and it really depends on your goals and the type of game you want to make. That makes sense on paper, but he outlined several factors that need to be considered when deciding whether to build your own tech or work with existing engines.
Read our full write-up of the talk at Game Developer.
I appreciate that there's an argument to be made here depending on the goals and scope of your game but also "C++ programmer with 20 years of professional experience says you should roll your own engine" is advice I'd caveat fairly heavily compared to if it was coming from someone in a less technical role
You don’t want to be beholden to Windsor and newtons cartel on paint colors do you? You don’t want to have to be subjected to some dudes idea of what pthalo green is, do you?
No. You should buy your own pigments and mix your own colors. Become like pre impressionist artists and become locked to the studio, mixing your own cancerous powders and becoming one with the fine abilities of powdered cinnabar