starfall 🔰 @starfall@plural.cafe

@Lioness whelp i guess i'm si'ing now

alright onto fantasy games because i love the 4x genre

there's age of wonders (which just released its own space-themed installation) which started in 1999 and was pretty clearly inspired by master of magic

and probably cribbed the movement system & unit stack cap from warlords (1990), warlords ii (1993), and/or warlords iii (1997), which is pretty strictly a strategy series with rpg elements (questing and heroes that level up) and doesn't involve much town building

on a completely different track there's what new world computing was doing, which was contributing spaceward ho! (1992) to the space games and building heroes of might & magic (1995, 1997, 1999) as a strategy/rpg game with gameplay from their game king's bounty (1990) and story from their might & magic rpg series.

a lot of these series experimented with their releases after 2000 with games like moo 3, warlords 4, and homm 4 having a few radically different changes to their core gameplay that fans of the originals didn't care for. this was an attempt to compete with real-time strategy games, but it didn't really work and the genre became pretty niche, except for civilization

oh shit and i forgot space empires (1993, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2006) because i haven't played any except the demo. hard to find copies of these nowadays, se4 is on gog though

and plus there's disciples (1999, 2002) with an overland map and simple base building like homm, and combat is that style with two lines for short & long range units

@Lioness basically!

i don't think moo brought in food until moo2, which is one of my all-time favorite games.

civ and smac are designed by the same folks (sid meier &c. at microprose, eventually founding firaxis), and pretty clearly part of the same series. microprose was also publisher for the "masters of" games, which were developed by simtex. so there was probably quite a bit of cross-pollination, especially given the turn based strategy market has never been massive

galciv is completely unrelated but actually first came out around the same time for os/2, and ten years later got remastered for windows

the timeline is roughly
star lords (unreleased moo prototype) 1990
civilization 1991
master of orion 1993
galactic civilizations 1993 (for OS/2)
master of magic 1994
moo ii 1996
civ ii 1996
smac 1999
civ ii: test of time 1999
galciv 2003 (remake for Windows)

my transmasculine friends are great

good job, pals and dudes

🦊 👍🏽

Fedi user: Not all women are ciswomen!

the TL: You are absolutely right!

Different fedi user: Not all men are cismen!

the TL: Fuck off, I wasn't talking about you!

Anybody else see a problem here? Like this ain't "not all men" bs, it's literally recognizing and validating the existence of transmasc folks, which we should be doing, I thought?

normalize self-reinvention for everyone tbh. name changing should be merely the start. people shouldnt be afraid to discard the parts of themselves that are holding them back or that they feel like they need to shed

im seeing some kinda bitter takes about the whole "masculinity isnt bad" thing and i just kinda wanted to talk a little about my experience.
ive never wanted anyone to "not all men" for me. i know that when people say that men suck, that theyre not talking about me. it really doesnt bother me. i never wanted anyone advocating that on my behalf.
the thing that DOES bother me, is how a lot of the spaces im in are extremely trans fem oriented, and it makes me feel alienated. hearing every day how gross T is or how things i do is "real girl shit" or other trans fems talk about my genitalia as a "girl" thing and just that kinda stuff does make me really dysphoric, so seeing a lot of trans fems stick up for masculinity in that way, saying that i am valid for not wanting to be fem and not wanting my boobs and what not meant a lot to me. thats what i hope people mean when they tell me being masc isnt bad. it makes me feel wanted in a place i otherwise wouldnt feel that way.

person A: *has marginalization a*
person A: *finds a phrasing 1 which allows them to relieve their anger at the harm done to them by bigotry against a*

person B: *has marginalization b*
person B: *has experienced bigotry against b that lines up with phrasing 1*
person B: *hears A say something with phrasing 1*

person B: can u not
person A: what kind of bigotry are you on about
person B: what the fuck, this isn't a joke to me
persons A and B: *angry subtooting about each other doing bigotry*

☝🏽 this dynamic fucking sucks

this is not okay

I've seen this with trans & nonbinary issues, I've seen this with transmasculine & feminism issues, I've seen this with LGBP+ & ace issues ... it keeps fucking happening and it /fucking sucks/.

nobody here means ill but there is real trauma happening in this situation that isn't being resolved because /every-fucking-one/ involved thinks it's about bigotry and isn't recognizing the competing access needs dynamic

it just makes me tired, tbh

a lot of the problems w/smaller scale communities (where the ppl w/authority or who hold the group together are someone "everyone knows," ie, having a lot of social capital) trying to enact alternatives to bans/call outs/cancels etc as "accountability" is that a lot of the time ppl who are not as skilled at wielding social capital, not as aware of the group norms, or not as likely to be listened to will be criticized for raising the issue in the "wrong way" rather than... addressing the issue

The gender of the night is: blank

"I don't know about this consensus stuff, it seems complicated. Isn't it just easier count everyone's hands (twice, just to be sure) and then compare the number of raised hands to the number of people present divided by two?"

actual consensus: "So it sounds like most of us want to do x. Is anyone opposed to that? ..... Okay, then let's do x!"

@astraluma i get that's how it makes people *feel*, but programming is just a thing you do, it's just stuff you make, no different from other stuff you make. I don't feel it's any different from my graphics work.

It shouldn't feel special at all, or at least the idea that it is shouldn't be encouraged, and I think programmers and society as a whole would be a lot healthier for it.

Snake girl joins twitter, makes a typo in her bio, gets blocked for misspelling #naga

i wrote a poem! here it is:

i am a kitten
and i mew
because that is
what kittens do