2025-09-18 08:05:00
content note: besides the obvious (see title), there is rumination on Joanne Rxwling as well as GxmerGxte
I can't discuss my appearance on a game show until the episode actually airs, but I can share, probably without any repercussions, that I was invited to that taping by a friend and professional peer. Actually, that's putting it too strongly—the "peer" part—because I am nowhere on his level, nor have I even really worked in the same fields. So we'll just say "friend," but one whom I met through other friends/colleagues who've since moved into other avenues.
This distinction is extremely important to make, since one of the most horrifying things about GxmerGxte was that the mob conflated anyone I'd ever met—any peer, colleague, boss, friend, pal, subordinate, industry professional, or complete rando—into a possible link, a potential conspiracy actor and therefore a worthwhile target. The ‘movement’ had mistaken what is the normal, sometimes mysterious, interconnectedness of being human, into a conspiracy map for its own anxieties. In practice, it felt a bit like a Red Wedding, but also an Indian Wedding, where everyone you ever met, and anyone your respective families ever met, are all attending. I guess this is why I've felt an overwhelming over-responsibility toward anyone I've ever subsequently met, which has made me a fucking wreck.
Anyway, the taping. I think it's safe to surmise that the only reason I was invited up as a contestant—at the production's peril, I'm sorry to say—was because this friend suddenly told the contestant producer that I was the "game industry's mother" or some similar something. He explained that for years I'd been caretaking and nurturing and mentoring people who'd come up through the ranks.
Now, I do think this would be very surprising information to almost anyone who has ever worked on a triple-A title; I was equally surprised to hear this.
At the time I probably felt a soupy mix of emotions. I do care about people and their nourishment and edification, and it's nice to be seen and complimented in this way. But I'm also acutely aware that giving-care is perceived as gendered labor; we leave glory, "important stuff," to the men. In January, my young neighbor—who, by a twist of fate or circumstance, went on the same game show not long after I did—referred to me as a "hen," and I'd responded sharply.
I previously wrote that my "shadow" persona, the "character I roleplay under stress [...] is that of 'dutiful daughter'." However, in July, I would learn the worst possible thing about myself: my enneagram type. I had mistaken my disintegrated personality for my actual personality and, conversely, my 'real' personality for my 'shadow' personality. (There's also the notion that, at a person's 'best', they take on the positive traits of a different enneagram profile entirely, which comes as only slight relief.)
Taking a quiz and being told by simple math that my organic personality is 'helper' or 'caregiver' had left me floored. I literally laid backward onto the floor and screamed. It is information I feel so endangered by, I have managed to keep it a secret for years, especially from myself.
I think a lot about how I'd refused, in a white-hot rage, to take home economics in high school. I didn't want to learn those skills and then be trapped and taken advantage of. (I was extremely early to that "weaponized incompetence" tip.) In practice the outcome of my rebellion is, okay, now I don't know how to sew a button onto a shirt or jacket. Great. I lament this fact frequently. I keep meaning to sit down and learn how; I guess I'm mostly fearful about poking myself. But, like, weirdly extremely scared of poking myself.
And I hesitate to acknowledge that I am in any way helpful or handy—and I definitely don't want word getting out about it—because I still don't want to be taken advantage of. In other words, my rejection of any personal adroitness at "gendered" labor hinges on the fear of how a bad actor would attempt to leverage it: this is the source of my gender agony.
To be honest, I'd always identified with my dad more than my mom; as a direct consequence of that, from earliest childhood, I was terrified of becoming, somehow, some way, someone else's victim. So I refused to learn to sew buttons or hem cuffs or any of the other things people might naturally expect me to do. Obviously cisgender men wrestle with a version of this—some people claim they invented this, har har—like when men pretend not to know how to shop for groceries.
Anyway, my personal gender ideal, or ideology, is "soupy": a mix of good and bad and neutral traits from all genders, floating around in a roux. I'm soup. I'm soup, and I'm about to go into the Vitamix.
I think a lot about the fact that in 2020, Just Keep Rolling wrote, in public for all to see, that if she were a young person today, she "might transition," herself: as in, she would choose to be trans masc or nonbinary. And it's like, duh, obviously; she's defaulted to gender-neutral pseudonyms her entire life. So the heart of her particular brand of 'gender essentialism'—gender fascism, really—is seemingly akin to those people who rage at student loan forgiveness. "I paid my debt off," they fume, "so everyone else has to." In Joanne's world, boys have to stay boys and girls have to stay girls forever because, she reasons, she had to stay a girl. For her, sticking to gender and gender roles is punitive.
Rxwling is also open about being a survivor of D.V., and I'm trying to think of how to make a point very delicately. I have already written about seeing scenes of D.V. play out as a child—with the usual gendered roles of "victim" and "perpetrator" in fact inverted—and I think Rxwling genuinely defines gender solely by her own sense of victimhood? Her idea of gender is as reductive and pat as "who is abusing whom?" and she is so tied to her own concept of "cis-man evil, Joanne good," Joanne always the one being hard-done-by (by all the evil 'men' creeping around in elaborate disguises), that she can't seem to wrap her arrested, unimaginative brain around being an incredibly powerful 1.2-billionaire who is actively and aggressively terrorizing the most vulnerable group of people. She is, by her own definition of gender—"who is abusing whom?"—a "rich man." She's the rich and powerful, awful, abusive man she always wanted to be.
She is still chasing the feeling of "never being anyone's victim ever again," and at this point it's clear that there is no degree of accumulated wealth or power that will solve her particular agony for her. So now she's made it everyone's problem.
When I think of my silence during and after GxmerGxte—I turned down a lot of interviews and at one point pleaded with a journalist to not write about me—it was because I did not want some horrific gendered victim narrative to follow me. I wanted no part of it. I just wanted to keep my head down, keep working. (I didn't get to do that, either, due to a combination of being both nonfunctional as well as, now under a public microscope, a liability for others to work with.) But by remaining silent, I victimized myself more completely, more totally, complicit with the larger narrative of disempowerment and helplessness, by self-deplatforming and hiding myself away. It was a type of mob-enforced coercive control, but also, I was scared and I fell for it.
Back then I guess I thought any for-profit victim narrative was a shitty thing to do. My view has softened since then; a willingness to lay out the facts, at potential personal risk, is a profound emotional labor that is presumably worth reimbursing in some way.
Now, as I look back on that particular time period, I find it interesting how the people who would lob accusations of others being "professional victims"—a phrase you'd often hear in those days, which was super effective at sending their targets into hiding—tended to be bullies themselves, hurling abusive spaghetti at the wall hoping for someone to react so they could discredit their target, lay a claim to their own victimhood, and then disingenuously leverage it for a raised profile and hopefully some cash. The allegation of "professional victim" was, shock of shocks, a projection all along! People are always telling you exactly what they're up to.
Anyway. I'm reviewing all this now because, if I ever hope to talk about or process GxmerGxte—if only to do any fact-checking for someone else—it's going to require divorcing myself pretty fucking hard from any sense of victimhood, any grief, any fear, basically any emotion ever. And I'll also need a fresh infusion of that valkyrie juice, a substance that I do not produce naturally.
2025-09-18 00:38:00
On this blog, I've previously talked about struggling with aphantasia - a lack of being able to imagine something mentally. Reading books, playing DnD campaigns and similar things didn't produce an image, and I couldn't imagine art in my head before bringing it to paper, and I couldn't see a mental image of the people I know even when I tried. At best, I would see short flashes, a brief detail, shadows, and that's it. I couldn't rotate an item in my mind, either.
The past few months, I've made a concentrated effort to train myself to have more of a mental image. I had previously just given up and not even tried to imagine things when the situation would lend itself to that, but now I did; trying to imagine what my friend or my wife experienced while they tell the story, or trying harder to visualize things in my Pen and Paper groups, or trying to think of the art I wanted to make while falling asleep. It got better the more I worked on it, and I noticed that the closer I was to sleep, the easier it was to vividly and strongly see a mental image, without being fully asleep or dreaming yet. I think acknowledging and appreciating whenever that happened helped make that mental wall crumble. I knew it was possible, and it made it easier to happen on purpose outside of trying to fall asleep, too.
The better I could mentally visualize something and just let a little movie run internally of whatever I chose, the more I noticed negative side effects that I had completely forgotten about. I was experiencing vivid flashbacks to traumatic situations again, and I had rather gruesome mental images triggered by fear.
Let me explain: Sometimes, I might see a situation that is risky, or a close call, like a cyclist crossing the red light at an intersection. And in real life, nothing happens, everyone is safe, because no car crossed at that time... but my brain will repeat this situation internally and show me how that cyclist is mowed down by a car gruesomely. It's like I get a replay of what would have happened otherwise. It is triggered by me either seeing something that could have ended badly, or randomly thinking out of nowhere "What if this awful event happens?". It's always very graphic and upsetting, and I can't control it.
I haven't had this in so long, I had completely forgotten about it, maybe even repressed it. But now that it was happening again, I recognized that this used to be a big issue, until it suddenly wasn't. This led me to think that maybe, I have simply shut off all mental vision to deal with these graphic mental images, and in turn made myself aphantasic. And while trying to lift this repression and train my mental eye, it returns. This fits to a feeling I briefly mentioned at the end of my old post linked above: I had a theory for how this happened for me, because I knew I used to be able to visualize things, I just didn't know when or why I had lost it. Now I know.
This has definitely caused me to regress again, not training for it anymore. I don't know how to proceed yet and if I will ever have a mental image without this disturbing side effect; I guess I'll see.
This is kind of sensitive and weird to share, but on the other hand, I know a lot of research is still done on aphantasia and others struggling with it sometimes try out things to treat it, and I didn't want this realization to be lost. If you struggle with aphantasia and have maybe in the past struggled with disturbing or violent visions or maybe even are diagnosed with (C-)PTSD like me, maybe this helps you connect the dots.
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2025-09-18 00:27:00
As of yesterday, I have completed one year of blogging once a day - September 16 to September 16. My first post of the year was here.
I want to resist the urge to do a big big post about this because one of the reasons I was able to do it at all was by not thinking or worrying too much about it. I did not set a goal for myself and I did not permit myself to think of it as a project.
I still do not. It's merely something I am doing, like my Letterboxd, where I've been recording every movie I've seen since late 2018. I intend to continue this until it becomes impossible for me to keep it up. I cannot predict what would cause such a breakdown, but I accept that it could happen. At this point, it would have to be something medical.
The same goes for the blogging. I'm not going to set limits or goals for myself, and I'm not going to set a minimum floor of quality for either of these things. Sometimes my Letterboxd review is only a couple of words. Sometimes a blog post is just a youtube video. It's okay. It doesn't have to be a whole damn production.
Before September 16 2024, I was putting at least the same amount of energy into microblogging, and chosting, and whatever. I thought that if I used that energy for something else, it would not be a burden on my life. It was merely a change of targets for energy that I was already spending. And I was right! To some extent, I am only doing this in order to make myself so busy that I do not have time to look at social media.
I've mentioned this before, but I write many of the posts in advance and I rarely, if ever, write a post on the day that I post it. I'm most comfortable when I get a chance to queue up 4-6 posts over the weekend and build a buffer to get through the beginning of the week. This doesn't happen as often anymore, but it still happens.
Lately it's gotten a little harder for me. I've been very busy with a variety of family and social commitments. On top of that, I've been shipping or preparing to ship a lot of games. But it remains sustainable, because I always did have this much extra time, really. I was just using it on dumb shit.
I will say one spicy thing: I rarely look at the Bear Blog discover page because I feel like every time I look at that ranking list, I see a lot of people who are trying to get comfortable writing more... but are often writing about writing, or about blogging specifically, or about motivation and shit like that. I cannot stress this enough: you did not start blogging to blog about blogging, I guarantee it. (And if you did, you should probably just stop!)
Unless you want to run out of things worth saying, you should try to write about specific, concrete, identifiable things that you are interested in, or things you're doing, or other events in your life.
I won't get into it in depth here, but this kind of navel-gazing blogging-about-blogging writing is self-help flavored to me, and self-help writing is so scammy and unpleasant that I want nothing to do with it. There is nothing actually moral or positive or socially productive about writing every day. I do not even write every day. I find it easier to write a lot when I don't write every day. I write professionally, I've written on like 15 different videogame productions, and some days my job just requires me to go to meetings all day! This is fine and normal.
What I'm doing here is stupid, and you shouldn't do it if it's too hard for you. Personally, if I start thinking about it too hard, I'll probably stop!
2025-09-17 15:53:00
response to Slow social media, posted by bearblog's dev Herman
Herman my man you would have loved cohost
2025-09-17 00:49:51
Even though I don't tweet anymore, I spend an hour on Twitter every day reading about the ongoing clown car accident that is American political and social culture. I don't enjoy it, but I think there's value in it. The United States is sliding into authoritarianism and I live next door. Ideally I would like to know what might be coming up here before it does.
Yesterday I mentioned that media illiteracy has contributed to the destruction of modern American life. Thing is, we're not doing that much better up here in Canada. Canadians are as susceptible to believing lies and straight-up Looney Tunes conspiracy theories as are Americans, and though I think our media literacy is better than theirs, there's still a ways to go.
I want to put together some kind of course or set of resources that will help people improve their media literacy. This is just a hazy idea at this point, but I really do think it is a moral imperative. If you would like to help me do this, please get in touch.
[Extreme John Oliver voice]: ==And now, On y va!==
🎵🎵 My friend brought up Feist's album Metals the other day, which made me think of my favourite song from Metals, which led me to post that song here today in order to get you to listen to it. (Spotify)
👛💰 For the past decade or so I have been using a binder clip as a wallet, but I've been thinking of getting a few micro wallets from these guys whose recent ad blitz on Instagram has been overwhelming and (clearly) persuasive. (paperwallet)
🤣🤣 Just For Laughs Toronto opens up in a couple of days and I'm mostly excited for the smaller shows featuring folks I know, including Rapp Battlez, which I wrote up in 2018, and David Lynch's Seinfeld. Unfortunately I am not going to be in town to see Maria Bamford, an all-time fave who I've interviewed a handful of times over the years including ahead of Just For Laughs in 2019. (Just For Laughs)
🐦🦉 Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching, now streaming on YouTube, is an insane documentary about birdwatching that has been compared to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and if you don't mind I'm gonna go watch it now. (Slate)
🎮🎮 Another great bundle is on offer over at itch.io. Fun fact: Electric Zine Maker, which I mentioned on August 21, is one of the various warez included in this bundle. (itch.io)
🎥🎥 RIP Robert Redford. This obit keeps getting updated and added to and includes a lot of tributes and anecdotes, including one on how Redford wasn't initially meant to play the Sundance Kid. (Guardian)
👨⚖️👨⚖️ Judge Gregory Carro dismissed the two top state charges against Luigi Mangione this morning. (Guardian)
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
==If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.==
2025-09-17 00:18:00
I consider myself a lapsed member of the interactive fiction community. Writing and reading IF was more or less my education in interactive narrative and where I got my start as a writer of stories meant to be read on the computer. I made several of my closest friends within that community, and I have very fond memories of submitting to the yearly Interactive Fiction Competition.
But I haven't kept up with it for several years; in the last couple years, a combination of intermittent health issues, being actively busy, and mounting burnout have kept me from engaging with a lot of seasonal events, including ifcomp.
This year, I have more free time (not out of choice), and so I wanted to check it out once more, play the entries, and submit a ballot! Go back to my roots. Have fun.
Cue the horror strings.
Out of a few dozen entries, I count 12 that explicitly say they used generative AI in some way or another – whether to generate a cover image, in-game assets, or actual text. These are just the more egregious examples of using it for cover images.
The cover image aspect of it is kind of dumb and instantly disqualifying to the authors in question – it obviously looks bad, but also cover image quality was just never really an issue with the ifcomp; historically most people used a public-domain image, a photo they took with their own two hands, or a simple word mark as their cover.
Using a GAN image instead lives at the intersection of tryhardism and aesthetic incompetence; you're trying to look more 'professional' in a field where professionalism is not really the goal, and in the process you're putting out something that looks gross and low-effort.
But the thing that's really crazy making to me is the games that use LLMs for text, including one particular entry that, to quote:
This adventure has been fine tuned and optimized to permit a player to paste the prompt into either the free version of Claude.Ai or ChatGPT and have a play and entire adventure.
Instead of pre-selected "choices", players tell the GM "Investigate the smoking cabinet" or "Consult the legal department on ...". The GM, within the well known limitations of AI, will improvise a response and move the story along.
To play: past the contents of the attached file into either Claude.ai or ChatGPT. Feel free to try it out on other LLM platforms, but your mileage will vary.
I realize that the IF community has a certain trauma around gatekeeping of what 'counts as IF' but I don't think a prompt you're meant to paste into chatGPT 'counts as IF' in any meaningful sense.
At this point this basically means I am not going to be playing or judging any games this year either, and I think it curtails me trying to return to involvement in the IF community, because there's now kind of a toxic dynamic at play if you're someone who has ethical and aesthetical objections to AI slop:
Theoretically, you could rate the AI entries at a 0; whether you bother to 'play' them at first (I'm not sure you can even play that last one in the expected sense and I would not want to touch chatGPT to do it either), the fact that you're summarily nuking them is a pretty obvious violation of the judge rules. I don't want to participate in a way that will be read by comp organizers as bad faith.
Alternatively, you can play and rate only entries that don't use AI. This would seem to be 'fine' but it creates a dynamic where the only people willing to play and rate the AI entries are people who are not going to object to them on grounds that they are AI, and thus they're getting judged by a different standard than everyone else's work. This means that the final result of the competition is at risk of legitimizing AI use or worse, making someone who put out real work feel bad that they placed behind someone who put out slop.
And I want to be clear, I would rate the worse, most amateurish piece of real human writing above the 'best' piece of slop.
Consider the example above of the 'game' that you 'play' on chatGPT. How many people are going to play and rate that who aren't already habitual chatGPT users?
Ultimately I think that slop is always creating a gresham's dynamic – bad-faith submissions crowd out good ones. The field of AI-generated entries seems to have grown significantly since last year.
These days I am not really active or connected in IF, which means I'm not effectively capable of pushback, so I'm kind of left just expressing my severe disappointment. For me, what IFComp and the broader IF community represents is genuine creative exploration that's unconstrained by commercial considerations, by trend-chasing, by trying to meet some standard of popularity or mainstream acceptance. It's a safe space for creative weirdos.
To see it become a stage for people who want the outcomes of creative exertion without the actual exertion is really sad to me. It also incorporates all of the pernicious effects of LLM usage into the competition as a matter of course. For me the saddest example is this one entry, where in the author's disclosure they write:
As you may know, English isn’t my native language, and in my previous works that was sometimes a drawback. For this project I focused on a smaller location and used ChatGPT as a writing assistant. I ran almost every sentence through it several times to correct grammar, smooth out phrasing, and find the most context-appropriate terms. It often suggested multiple options, and that really helped me tell my story the way I meant it, even in a language I’m not yet fluent in.
Which essentially amounts to: instead of producing something flawed and human you made something that a lot of people are not going to look at out of principle, and which (having seen plenty of LLM-written text at this point) I know is just going to cap out at 'barely adequate' in quality anyway. It's just sad; we are losing the ability to give people meaningful feedback when that feedback is going to cause them to retreat into embracing LLM usage.
Ultimately this feels like trying to go back to a space I used to be fond of and finding that it might not really be there any more.
I always welcome responses on things I post on this blog, but I want to specifically highlight that I have an open inbox specifically for this purpose at askdarchid [at] pm.me.