A Genuine Request

(Somewhat related YouTube video that I think is kinda funny)

Lately something shocking has been happening to my blog: it's actually getting consistent readers. I'm genuinely surprised. I've done zero marketing or SEO, the site looks like something that Clippy might cough up, and I post whatever randomly pops up into my head. That explains why it's not a lot of consistent readers, but some of my recent posts have views in the 25-40 range. I made sure in the settings that Blogger isn't counting my own views, so the only conclusions I can draw are these: either something about my writing is actually clicking with 5 to 37 people, or 5 to 37 bots have been instructed to scrape my website.

My response to the bots is obviously that they can feel free to scrape these nuts. But if you are an actual real person who is reading my blog regularly, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop a comment or DM me on Instagram (linked in the sidebar). I'd love to see what kinds of people are reading my rantings.

And if you are real people, I'd like to sincerely thank you for reading. My goal with this website was to bring back the "for the heck of it" feeling of the old web, and the fact that you're visiting this blog shows that there's a real yearning for that. So seriously, thank you.

In Which I Rage Pointlessly About a 90s Game I've Never Played

(I very often feel like this, in spite of the fact that I'm ****teen years old. Credit: Fox)

I'm very much not a gamer. I have a little too much fear of installing anything over fifteen megabytes on my computer to really become one. That said, I have a lot of respect for the medium and I'm always on the hunt for games that are artful, tell interesting stories, or will generally give me worthwhile experiences. My backlog is pretty enormous (and Steam sales certainly aren't helping to keep it small), but someday I hope to be well-versed enough in interactive storytelling that I can work in it myself and finally create my dream game. Text adventures still sell, right?

Among the games I'd like to someday experience is, of course, Square Enix's 1997 PlayStation classic Final Fantasy VII. I have heard nothing but downright reverence for this game. Every screenshot and music track I have been witness to makes me more convinced of how much I would love it. I love the aesthetics of the whole thing; there's really something special about late 90s pre-rendered backgrounds (shoutout to Grim Fandango, another game sitting uninstalled in my library that I'm 100% sure I'll love). What I'm saying is, I really want to play this game.

The problem? Square Enix is making it really hard.

(I mean, like, come on. Credit: Square Enix)

The game industry knows that there are many people like me in this world, people who have little to no reservations about pirating games that aren't legally available. So their solution is to make all of their games available in the most bog-standard quality possible. It's what Disney has done with all the classic LucasArts adventure games---imported them into ScummVM, slapped a $5 price tag on them, and called it a day. It begs the question why I wouldn't just download the files from the Internet Archive and play them in ScummVM myself. Plus, if I do that, I don't have to accept Disney's EULA.

The same thing is going on here. Square Enix is publishing basically the exact same game that was available in 1997. Sure, they're including updated textures and HD support (things that fans have been doing through mods for years), and technically it's running natively rather than being emulated, but when it comes to a game with 1997 system requirements, one could hardly argue that makes much of a difference.

The fact that it's based on the game's original 1997 PC port actually leads to problems of its own. The PC port, unusually, includes even further censorship to the dialogue than was present in the PlayStation version, replacing a brief outburst with symbols and even obscuring a use of the word "wench" for some reason. It is absurd that Square Enix is asking $12 for a license to a game that is even more censored than it would be if you just emulated it.

Note that I said "a license to a game" rather than "a game." This leads me to my biggest criticism: when you open the game on Steam, you don't get the actual files. You get a proprietary launcher that requires a Square Enix account to use. $12 and I own some intangible license that can be revoked at any time. It feels insulting that people in 1997 owned it more tangibly than I ever will. Legally, at least.

This is not even to mention that it only runs on Windows, which is discouraging to me as a new Linux devotee. Thankfully Steam has offered a solution through Proton, but would it be so hard for Square Enix, a billion-dollar triple-A studio, to get it running natively on Linux? Of course not. But given how much of the triple-A landscape is paid off by Microsoft, Proton looks to be the only way.

Valve founder Gabe Newell once stated that piracy is a service problem, and that it would decrease if companies provided a better service than piracy gives them. Here is what I am offered by downloading Final Fantasy VII from the Internet Archive and running it in RetroArch:

• Actual ownership of the game
• Ability to run it mostly tinker-free on Linux
• Years of fan updates, bug fixes, and mods
• Uncensored (or less censored, as the case may be) dialogue
• Ability to play the game offline
• Free

Here is what purchasing Square Enix's launcher offers me:

• Cloud saves (note: you also get those with RetroArch on Steam)
• The impending threat of having access to a product I exchanged real money for revoked from me without any course of action, and the law requiring that I shut up and deal with it

The conclusion is obvious. Square Enix is providing something infinitely worse in every way, and charging me for it. To buy into this is to perpetuate the American public's abusive relationship with corporations who see ownership as a threat to their control over us. I'm not going to pretend emulating Final Fantasy VII is a meaningful act of rebellion, but at the very least, it is opting out of something I consider to be genuinely harmful.

But what does this mean to me at the moment? Pretty much nothing. I'm going to be away from video games (and really entertainment in general) for the next two years, so I'm not going to be playing it anytime soon. Even when I get back, the game is pretty low on my backlog (I've still never played either Portal game, so that has to happen first). But unless Square Enix manages to have a legendary, generation-defining change of heart, I'm stuck between a rock and a beautiful grassy field, and there's only one solution in that situation.

GoComics is Dead to Me

GoComics has always been one of the worst implementations of a good idea in the entire landscape of the Internet (noting that it's debatable if social media and video sharing were ever good ideas). Its interface has never been pretty and I would rank it as one of the worst on the web in terms of bludgeoning users with ads.

Well, apparently I missed this, but last month it apparently got significantly worse.

Note, first, that I had to use a random screenshot from Reddit to represent my problem. This is because the website no longer functions in any meaningful capacity on Firefox, so I can't even get the paywall screen to load (this would be a victory if only I could get the actual comic I'm looking at to load). Note second that, yep, it's a paywall. GoComics is now paywalling comic archives, making the art they shamelessly exploit only available to those willing to fill their pockets. Disgusting.

Now, if you're like me and you just want to read some FoxTrot without being reminded of the anti-art hellscape we're living in, you do thankfully have some course of action. The Wayback Machine will gladly show you these comics without forcing you to pay, because the people who run that website may be actual angels. For those who need their morning fix of the comics, I point you to comicsrss.com, which provides up-to-date RSS feeds of most comics available on the site. It sounds very 2008, I know, but we should all be moving to RSS anyway. While we're on the subject, may I recommend Feedbro?

As of today, GoComics is persona non grata on my web browser, unless it's being accessed through the Wayback Machine. GoComics is supposed to be a means of preservation of newspaper comics. But digital preservation doesn't mean squat if it's not exclusive to paying customers. For shame, GoComics, for shame.

Anxiety Keep on Tryin' Me

 

(Something something Gotye sue her. Credit: SoundCloud)

It's really hard for me to take the widespread online hatred of Doechii's "Anxiety" (a song that prominently samples Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know") seriously for two reasons:

1. "Somebody That I Used to Know" is also largely composed of samples.
2. I just know that half of the Instagram reels types decrying how Doechii is "disrespecting a masterpiece" or something are the same people who were calling Gotye "Gotgay" in 2011.

I get a lot of the criticism of the song. I think it's overplayed and perhaps not transformative enough from a creative standpoint. But I'd at least love if the critics could apply three seconds of thought before attacking.

Asmongold and the Death of Right-Wing Humanity (and Standards)

(I swear I can smell him from here. Credit: straight from the horse's mouth, or Instagram as it were)

Asmongold is an interesting guy. He's a streamer, currently the most-watched on the Twitch platform, and he sees no value in personal hygiene. He has expressly stated that he does not take showers simply because he sees no reason to. This has led some users on the Internet to term him "Asswithmold." His Twitch account received a temporary ban in October 2024 for stating that Palestinians deserve to be "genocided," and is also a frequent user of ableist slurs. Such use includes a recent post on Twitter, in which he stated that society would benefit from placing 5-10% of the most, and you best believe I'm quoting here, "retarded kids" in coal mines, adding that "almost all Western cultural problems are derived from adherence to the false god of equality."

In other words, he's in a perfect position to be revered by the American right.

One wonders what could have happened to the right wing of US politics that led them to look up to a profane WoW-playing manchild who likely smells like Mountain Dew and smegma and always seems a sentence away from saying "despite making up a fraction of the population...". Then one realizes that this is the same party that elected Donald Trump, America's favorite pornographer, and it all starts to make sense. Once you elect a president who sees no problem calling his opponent "retarded," then for his supporters, that word is no longer off the table. I hate to think what this would extend to if his supporters believed the multiple credible accusations of rape and pedophilia against him.

The indisputable fact is this: the American right is plagued by a chronic lack of empathy and a genuinely stunning lowering of standards. Their favorite streamer barely thinks of children with mental disabilities as human. Their president barely thinks of women as anything beyond a particular body part to grab. Their president's billionaire playground buddy considers empathy "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization."  These are things that can only be thought by people who no longer consider any degree of kindness to be necessary, people who are so entrapped in the outrage economy that they have lost the way out. And these are the people who are running our government.

I picture America a few years from now. President Asmongold has just shut down the final existing soap company and sent a kid in a wheelchair to a coal mine, before announcing another billion-dollar spending package for the Trump Gaza Golf Resort. I hope that, four years from now, we will reject conservative hatred and pessimism so resoundingly that this sentence reads as complete idiocy. For now, we have to accept that this may as well be where we're heading. As a country, we are what we allow, not even to mention what we admire. And we're getting far too lax in that department.

(P.S. --- To the right-wingers who think my criticism of Asmongold's unkindness is unkind, I encourage you to consider the fact that maybe Asmongold has done more to make me angry than the concept of equality has done to Asmongold.)