Klara, faceted @klara@wandering.shop

Extremely happy to hear that Joe Biden finally got his two letters from mental health professionals (at least one of whom is a practicing psychiatrist).

LA Metro would be a screenplay that everyone knows would do so well if the people in charge didn't object to its central premise.

And of course Sound Transit is series of very popular responses to various "quote from your work in progress" Twitter memes that paint a really interesting picture of a story, but it's been decades and the dang thing still isn't anywhere near finished.

I appreciate the NYC MTA the way I do Homestuck: what is this color-coded mess that somehow works, I can't look away.

Whereas the CTA is more like the TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: perfectly serviceable but I'm mad about what got left out.

SEPTA could be any number of lovely short stories that make me wonder where the rest of the novel is.

MBTA, maybe a "Realm of the Elderlings" novel, mixing exactly what you need at some times with unending slog at others?

First Dominion game of 2020!

This spread feels appropriate.

I haven't seen this going around a lot, and it looks _really_ neat: https://gather.town/

It's not just the cute pixel avatars in a custom location aspect, although that is charming: it's that you can do video chats the way you'd do conversations in real life. To me this makes the idea of a casual virtual hangout involving more than a handful of people sound actually feasible for once, which is definitely intriguing!

A birdsite friend of mine is having a hard time getting crowdfunding support, due to the usual trans thing of mostly just knowing other people who are also super strapped for cash.

I've shared this over there, but maybe Mastodon has someone else who can help out? https://www.patreon.com/InscrutableJane

A thing I'm noticing this year: when I order some household thing online, there's no option to order directly from the manufacturer, and I don't order from some known big box entity, the chances of it ending up being shipped from Amazon are just exceedingly high.

And it's not like there's a dearth of other sites to buy from! Just, you know, more and more of them aren't stocking things themselves. Even eBay isn't a safe bet for Amazon avoidance anymore, which makes me wonder why it still exists.

It took until now, the 36th week of lockdown, but I have finally declared a pair of what were previously pajama pants to be everyday wear, counts as totally dressed pants.

Started playing Dragon Quest XI last night, and it's telling that, when the game told me that I'd picked up a piece of copper ore, I had this flash of feeling like maybe I should just play something else.

I've put too many hours of my life into JRPGs and their unending systems.

Feel free to text/IM/DM/etc., but my first election as an adult was 2000. I just can't deal with yet another night spent watching state-by-state projected responses come in, knowing everything is probably still up for grabs in court.

Instead I'm gonna play a dang video game. I'll hear about if Chicago is under attack, and otherwise I can read up on how bad things got tomorrow.

That "reversing the design" article (http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_CT_4.html, but the website version is tragically now truncated) talks about how sneaky Zeal is, but, like, at this point it's already gotten you used to all the genre-hopping, right? So jumping next to a setting that's THE THING YOU DON'T GET TO SEE, from ALL THOSE OTHER GAMES YOU'VE (presumably) PLAYED AND LOVED is just, dang, such deviously clever trickery to get the player attached to a place they'll barely spend time in.

Of course it needs the through-story that connects them to click, but the genre differences are crucial too.

And I feel like the recursive nature of Zeal is part of why the place feels special: it's Altena, not as it appears in Trials but as the unseen creators of the Mana Fortress in Secret. Or the society that fell to the War of the Magi. (I mean, heck, it was already the proto-Shevat.) CT so knew what it was doing, setting this up to aim at people who've played other games.

I have a bunch of Trials of Mana thoughts, but one thing it made click for me is actually (maybe because of how interleaved development was at Square back then) about Chrono Trigger.

We label it as a time travel game, but the charm of those eras is that they're different genres:

- 600 AD is a Dragon Quest homage,

- 2300 AD is post-apocalyptic sci-fi,

- 65000000 BC is Land of the Lost by way of The Flintstones,

- ...and 12000 AD is _the backstory of a Squaresoft RPG_.

Hey, what movies still on Netflix in the US are good?

No genre constraints, but, like, actually good (however you define that), not "well if you're already bought into this kind of movie, ignore the bad writing/acting, and/or can ignore the following shitty tropes".