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Honestly, I feel similarly about indie games that get massive free updates (like Stardew Valley), not just big budget corporate games like The Sims 4.

For better or worse, you were largely stuck with the base game being as-is for 90's and 00's PC games. These means you could rely on things always working the same without specific gameplay elements being changed out from under you, but it also meant that bugs would often be left to fester in perpetuity...

(no subject)

Does anyone know of any like, critical theory writings on... I guess "madness coding" of villians and antagonists in fiction?

Like how antagonists are often queercoded to invoke normative audiences' disgust for female masculinity and male effimacy, sex between members of the same gender, any kind of gender "boundary crossing" ranging from drag and crossdressing to transgender and intersex bodies (and a refusal to even care about the differences between these groups), etc. The way marginalized audiences may identify with and rehabilitate these archetypes and characters, or even create them in times and place where they're the only allowed form of queerness in mainstream media.

I know there's a lot of writing on queercoded villians, and on how antagonist factions in fantasy settings may be racially coded even if they're not physically members of real ethnic groups - the way Rowling's goblins are antisemitic, that Orcs in fantasy are often invoking antiblack and anti-native cultural tropes, et cetera. There's also some theory on physical disability and villian-coding, from what I understand, though there should probably be more.

But how can I begin to find writings, on, like... how if a work of fiction wants you to believe a character is evil and impossible to reason with, they'll make them "crazy" or "insane" or "mad." They'll invoke an "inhuman" lack of empathy, they'll give them an "evil split personality", or they'll make them hallucinate and have delusions and odd tics. Even if they don't label the character as having a specific mental illness diagnosis (or slur for such), they'll give them traits associated with the most stigmatized mental conditions to signify that they're monsters.

And where can I find more writings that talk about how this is ableism, in depth??? Rather than taking for granted that it's totally fine to treat mental illness symptoms and evil as synonymous?

Anhedonia

...I feel like there's no point to me writing on my blog, or anywhere else, because I don't respect or trust my own thoughts and feelings. I don't feel like i have anything meaningful to say. Anything I ever could say has probably been said by someone smarter, more experienced, more disciplined, with firmer morals or better poltiics, more articulate and well-read. I don't feel like I have any unique experiences that would confer novel enough insights to compensate for my deficiencies as a person.

Someone can say that they like something I wrote, but that's never enough to make me feel like it had value on its own. General positive regard is a nothingburger; people can feel it about something that has nothing new or interesting to say, soley because it's by a person they like, or about a topic they like, or it's written in a style that garners Big Emotion and hits certain simplistic buttons in their brain (nostalgia, coziness, righteous anger, lust, etc) that override deeper critical thinking. it says nothing about quality of content. it says nothing about if i've actually raised good points or opened a discussion worth having. it doesn't say if anything i've said has value - intellectual or ideological or artistic or else-wise.

i don't understand how general positive regard can be "enough" for anyone. it's so detatched from anything specific about what makes you or the things you make worth their time. people feel it all the time about "essays" that are just fluff with no coherent argument, about fiction that's trite and banal because it happens to contain some tropes they enjoy, about kinkade paintings and funko pops of a guy they remember from a movie.

I don't want to be liked without a coherent reason. I don't want to have anything I say be liked without a coherent reason of having provoked something meaningful. I want to provide value, usefulness, something, and even when people seem to enjoy my company, I don't feel like I'm anything more than another mediocre soulless pseudo-intellectual who only mimics real thinking and creativity through imitation of their betters.

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gaming: petz

PF Magic's Favorite Eye Colors

I was thinking to myself, "huh, a lot of petz breeds have green and teal eyes, don't they?" But I wanted to do the math, so I made a table of every eye possible color found in first-generation, unhexed members of Petz 3's 20 official breeds. Note that most breeds only come in 1-2 eye colors, with the odd exception of Chihuahuas having 3.

Type	Breed	Eye Colors
		Recessive Colors						Dominant Colors
		Green	Teal	D. Teal	Steel	Blue	Slothy	Gold	Dusty	Orange
Cat	Alley Cat							105
Cat	B+W Shorthair	2							125
Cat	Calico	2
Cat	Chinchilla Persian	2	6
Cat	Maine Coon	2							125
Cat	Orange Shorthair							105
Cat	Persian				115
Cat	Russian Blue	2
Cat	Siamese			203
Cat	Tabby							105
Dog	Bulldog			203	115
Dog	Chihuahua		6					105		65
Dog	Dachshund								125
Dog	Dalmatian		6
Dog	Great Dane	2	6
Dog	Labrador							105
Dog	Mutt		6
Dog	Poodle					178	173
Dog	Scottie	2	6
Dog	Sheepdog		6
% of Catz breeds		50%	10%	10%	10%			30%	20%
% of Dogz breeds		20%	60%	10%	10%	10%	10%	20%	10%	10%
% of total breeds		35%	35%	10%	10%	5%	5%	25%	15%	5%

My findings were:

In Catz breeds, PF Magic's top three favorite eye colors are green, gold, and dusty.
In Dogz breeds, PF Magic's favorite eye color is teal, followed by a tie between green and gold.
Factoring in both breeds, PF Magic's top three favorite eye colors are green and teal (tied for first place), gold, and dusty.

Now, the amount of green eyed catz, I get... I don't know what made the developers so enamored with teal-eyed dogz, though. Green-2 and Teal-6 are both colors that mutate well in Petz' genetics engine, though, so I can't complain!

The ship-of-theseus nature of a constantly updated game is a bit strange...

(no subject)

Anhedonia

PF Magic's Favorite Eye Colors