Dipole

Hey, so, if your single player* game disables pausing, that's a bad thing actually.

Pausing is an affordance to the fact that players have lives. If I'm trying to pause, it's probably because I need to go to the bathroom or get a snack or take out the trash or talk to someone at my door. All things your game cannot and should not try to have dominion over.

This is another one of those "meta" things a lot of players swoon for, but which can make life really suck for other players. Imagine putting someone in the position of having to quit and lose progress just so you can feel cool. Reminds me a lot of the trend of games reading and displaying your OS username, and now streamers need to make sure something that was never a game's business doesn't have PII so they don't get doxxed.

This post brought to by voices of the void, which during most events simultaneously disables pausing *and saving*

I'm going to keep putting stuff like this under #gamedev because it seems to get it to the right people, even though you don't need to be a game developer to have these kinds of opinion.

*something like invasions in souls games are temporary multi-player segments, so it's normal to be unable to pause

Sometimes I think about random aspects of childhood and realize "oh, that was an #actuallyAutistic thing"

Like: in the playground of my elementary school, there were upright halves of tractor tires in the mulch. An elementary-school-age child can easily fit inside. A cool, dark, quiet place where you are alone or nearly alone (one other kid could fit in the other side of the tire). The most sensory relief I could ever hope for at that age. I was always drawn to those spots. I would often spend the entire recess there.

After I had gotten used to it over a couple years, the staff banned lingering in the tires (they wanted playground staff to always be able to see you). Worst thing that happened to me in elementary school. And for comparison, I did get kicked in the face once.

People seem to misunderstand the "One bad apple spoils the bunch" idiom.

It does not mean "If someone sees a bad apple, they will unthinkingly throw out the bunch".

It means "If the bad apple is not promptly removed, all of the apples in the bunch will become bad". That's literally how apples work -- spoiled fruit causes spoiled fruit, and overripe apples cause overripe apples

Had an idea a couple nights ago and made a sketch of it. First time using the tablet since resolving the driver issues (switched to OpenTabletDriver)

I keep bouncing off of drawing because I have trouble keeping lines steady. Definitely got frustrated with that a lot sketching that, but it was less bad than I remembered. Might be getting some progress.

Could try setting a small drawing area on my tablet so I can do more lines with just the wrist