Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon: Spoilers ahoy ☀

I don't think I've heard of it before. What kind of game is it?

essentially, it's a visual novel told via a simple, charming platformer. it's about a group of friends in a stagnating northeastern american mining town trying to keep themselves afloat with their pasts and dysfunctions holding them back; you play as a recent college dropout who's just moved back in with her parents for unclear reasons. you get to hang out with old high school friends and do dumb stuff like throw parties in the woods and hunt for ghosts. the humor is a mix of weird, pitch-black jokes and stupid humor like saying the word "crimes" a bunch of times or rigging a mall fountain to spray people when they walk by.
the art style draws everyone as funny little cartoon animals (your main character Mae is a cat), but they are human, and the game gets REALLY heavy, touching on mental illness, economic struggle, and religion. it's got some existential and cosmic horror themes too, but i can't say much else without spoiling. it's hard to talk about!
overall though, it's just a quirky, cute, funny indie game with some fabulously endearing characters and gorgeous color pallettes and animations. it's really good!!

some screencaps:

this has been your latest installment of "iT is a complete sellout"

taking this moment to plug another great indie game with a cat protagonist kinda

pls play OneShot 'cause it's an amazing game that does so much rad-ass shit

it's about a kid who find themselves in a mysterious, dying world and are tasked with returning its sun. kind of an adventure/puzzle game, with.... very unique puzzles at that. it likes to make you think outside the box.

the real draw is the characters and story, tho. just... gooood god.

the art is adorable also

I bought Codenames! It's a board(?)game I had the good fortune to play a week or so ago, and it was so much fun I sought out a copy for myself. It's really engaging! 25 cards are placed in a grid between 4 players, those cards have single english words on them. Two teams of two players each divide up, with one member on each team knowing the "secret" alignment of each of those cards - by giving a *1 word clue*, that player has to find a word that will clue their teammate into which cards they need to identify, while avoiding the other player's cards - first team to identify all of their cards win. It's a lot of fun, playable at any level of intelligence - gets into abstract concepts, trivia, psychology and game theory at a high level, and it's a crossword at its worst. The funny thing is, I have a terrible vocabulary. I can draw connections between words easily, but can't think of a single word to describe those connections, so I suck in that role.


Anybody want a taster? I'll alternate red team/blue team guesses. You're entitled to guesses equal to the number at the end of the clue + 1; if you hit a "bystander" or "enemy" card your guesses end and play passes, if you hit the "assassin" card your team loses instantly.




My clue is "Yew - 3." I.E I'm hinting that 3 red cards in play have something to do with "Yew". But which ones are they? Dun dun duuuun.

Huh, that sounds interesting

Okay, I'm gonna take a shot at this. Hopefully I'm doing this correctly--going for "trunk," "unicorn," "maple," and uhh... "berry"?

First turn! The results are...

Trunk: Red!
Unicorn: Blue! Your turn ends with Maple and Berry left unguessed, and the Blue team is starting with an advantage. (You can start to see the psychology bit coming into play. "Why would my teammate pick Yew? What was he trying to suggest? etc etc - also the order of guesses is important since bad ones end your turn prematurely. You can now use this info to inform future guesses! There are probably 2 other "Yew" related cards in play.)


Blue team's turn! (Red has first turn advantage so they have +1 more cards to guess to make it fair, so Red is 1/9 so far and Blue is 1/8.)

Blue guess: Uh. Imma have to think about this. It's REALLY TOUGH (I did say I was bad at this)! You're allowed to give obvious one-word clues, but that's boring. Yet I'm struggling to give *two* word clues (Ironically I had one involving Unicorn).


EDIT: Script, 2

ART FRONT because it's really quiet here!

I'm drawing a Worm character for a Tarot card, after reading the author's notes (it's actually a google spreadsheet - he's pretty organised) on how certain characters are represented by the major arcana. It's 95% done!




SEPARATE from that, I did a quick thing a couple of weeks ago for http://killsixbilliondemons.com/' devil contest, didn't really post it anywhere important. But Abaddon liked it enough he reblogged it on his main blog, yay I feel warm and squishy inside. http://killsixbilliondemons.tumblr.com/post/160666729230/infinitedevilengine-his-name-is-bo-he-likes-to


Still gotta finish a commission for someone on Smogon. I'm struggling really hard art-block-wise with it, I figure I'll probably have to scrap it and start again. It's a person, so maybe I'll repeat the process I used on the tarot card.

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I also bought a shit ton of Pokemon cards, Codenames hasn't arrived yet (though it has shipped), and as of tomorrow morning it'll be 3 weeks since I put an offer down on a new house and there hasn't been any counterbids in that time so I'm gonna call them. Scary.

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Happy belated birthday to OJ and everyone else whose birthdays were recently!

Yo dude those are great, and I'm especially loving the [Worm character] one! (There's so much tarot stuff going on in Wildbow's work that I feel like I should read a bit into it... might do that this summer.)

I'm on break now and have a week before I hightail it over to the West coast for an internship, so I finally have some time to take a look at all the things everyone here has been recommending. Until I procrastinate the week away, woo!

Here's the canon Tarot list! It's an interesting read - my brain was sparking ideas for artistry pretty much the whole way down. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ntXwQcmkioq4NPPayBEIjA4dHPD-TXpjU1bnul3udWg/htmlview?pli=1#gid=0


What's the internship? West coast stuff, must mean it's pretty cool! (Or at least worth the significant travel distance.)

I'll definitely give that a look! Didn't know it even existed, so thanks for the link. (Are you planning on doing more tarot art because man that'd be cool)

I'm going to be in Redmond, at Microsoft. They're doing my airfare and travel arrangements, so why not :0

Dude, that's some incredible art. How long have you been working on it?

And octi, that's pretty cool. What specifically is the internship about?

On my end, I just finished my first semester of grad school. Sadly, it wasn't quite as interesting as undergrad. Although I did learn about the magic of git stash, which I somehow had never seen before.

Oh man git stash is my best friend. It solves all of my problems. Well, the trivial git managing ones.

git status
git stash
git pull
git stash pop
*resolve conflicts*
git status
git commit -m "[ticket number] this is where the text goes, Reviewed By Nonfictional.Coworker"
git push origin
git status ((I'm paranoid?))


That's really cool Octi! It'll look great on your resume, and that's if you *don't* stay or go back there! Fantastic stuff. Congrats on getting it!


@cA: Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, Sunday morning, Sunday night, umm, and in a couple of minutes. Congrats on hitting that milestone!

I generally use a Git plugin for whatever IDE I happen to be using, rather than the command line, but that's more or less my workflow too. I've been burned too many times to not pull before committing.

Thanks guys I'm going to be on the Power BI team, but don't know what exactly I'll be doing yet.

Git... I have such a love-hate relationship with it but that's mostly because I keep forgetting what does what because I was using the GitHub desktop client for ages. I actually only finally figured out what the difference between pull, push, and commit were a few months ago for a class, and just learned the magic of git status about a month ago. Still not 100% sure on stash.

Oh yeah, the GitHub desktop client is garbage. I highly recommend either learning the command line or relying on plugins for your IDE/text editor of choice. The difference between push and commit can definitely be confusing at first, but they're both pretty crucial operations, so it's good that you've gotten the hang of them. Stash is great for avoiding pull conflicts; it makes a note of what changes you've made, then reverts the files back to what they were as of the most recent commit your computer has. From there, you can pull any new commits that your teammates have made, then reapply your changes from the stash.

Oh jeez I should have been using stash all along--I've been doing "git reset --hard" and that kind of screwed me over briefly when I forgot to commit any changes to my build file about a week ago (mea culpa). Thaaat's good information to know, thanks.

I finished! (I did say I was 95% finished anyway...) Will probably find a bunch of smaller corrections to make over the next few days but the main thing is IT'S DONE

Edit: guys after i posted it on reddit (which Wildbow reads) my sister wrote an email to him showing it off and only told me after she sent the mail, aaaaaaagh aaagh aaaaaagh whyyyyyy

Heyyyy neat-o, time to go and upvote. I don't see WB being the type to mind overmuch from his posts, especially since it's not you going "hey look at what I made!" (Kinda cute of your sis though to be so proud of something you made.)

Any plans to do any of the others?

I have ideas in mind, but no, probably not. It'd be weird to do more than 1 and not all of them, and I think everyone knows what my productivity is like... If I get two things done in a given year, that's probably an all-time-high. Some of them would be tricky to do, anyway - Art Nouveau is kind of a crutch in that it lets you skip some of the heavy detailing on the person, which I'd struggle with. But I wouldn't be able to get away with doing that for, say, Grue's card, or for Scion's or Dinah's, or even Taylor's, which wouldn't work with that style.


Doctor Mother's would be the next one I'd try, but I think it's too difficult. The idea rides entirely on whether I can have a woman look ambiguously dead while cradling Sveta.


E: on my sister, on the one hand, it's funny. And kind of cute and I get there was a good intention behind it. But on the other hand, it's meddling, it's tactless, it's very, very infantilising and again it's meddling! She's deliberately involving herself in personal things for the fun of doing it (and that's a large part of it) - Wildbow could be really nice about it, but that's almost irrelevant if she was still being a nuisance about it. I mean, she dug up his personal email address D: Like he doesn't get enough spam already!

Finally cajoled my boyfriend into reading Worm, and he just finished Arc 1.

The best thing I've heard from him so far: "Futuristic bombs? That sounds really lame;, bomb technology hasn't really improved that much in the past few decades. You can make them more explodey, but that's about it."

Looking forward to the next few arcs...

In a nutshell:

Skitter wrote:"Fucking Tinkers."

Funny that Bakuda's shenanigans actually reach pretty far. Random references to her capabilities and ensuing aftermath are all over the series. There's also Weaverdice documentation that goes into some depth on specific Tinker classifications; Bakuda is a classic Chaos tinker (maybe Chaos/Hyperspecialist) - she's *super* versatile but deep down has no idea what the fuck she's doing. Basically "LOOK AT THIS COOL THING I MADE" what does it do "IDK LOL LETS FIND OUT", I love that.


Twig's endgame is in the works; WB's already paused donation bonus chapters for twig until after the ending. You might have seen posts alluding to it. So its a great time to get into Worm!

Christ, D, I always forget how good your art is until I see it. You are powerful, my dude.

Damn I wanted to reply with some sort of relevant meme but all I could find was irrelevancy and lame inspirational photos

Pretty music! Just in time for... well, nothing, really, but it's never too early to hype for a DPPt remake. I do love DPPt music. 'cept those soundfonts But the actual compositions were great. And the snow! And the cold! And the cities! And the BIG COMPLICATED REGION! Ahh ~

...Just, faster engine, next time.

Yeah, the DPPt soundtrack was on point. I never really cared much for Sinnoh itself, though; between the stupid decisions that got fixed in Platinum and the general clunkiness from the old TM and HM model, it just didn't manage to make a great impression for me. In hindsight, it's definitely clear that GameFreak was struggling with the jump from the GBA to the DS just like they're doing now with the 3DS; at least this time we've just got sub-optimal framerates rather than "Saving a lot of data". Then again, I'm starting to wonder if their issues with the new architecture are preventing them from getting more content into the games, which is why Kalos and Alola both felt kind of shallow.

Speaking of programming stuff, anyone else hear the announcement that Android's going to start supporting Kotlin? I've messed around with it a bit, and it seems to be a pretty nice language; apparently it looks and behaves very similarly to Swift, if you've ever used that. Data classes, the distinction between nullable versus non-nullable types, and good lambda support are all handy features in my book. That being said, I'm not a huge fan of the fact that data types are declared after variable names like in Go; it just seems backwards to me.

And finally, on an unrelated note, I just saw Wonder Woman today. It was a solid movie, I'm pleasantly surprised to say. DC needed a win after their past few attempts. Granted, I'm not sure they'll be able to keep it up; the preview for the upcoming Justice League movie that they played at the start did not instill me with confidence. Who thought setting a fight scene to an aggressive cover of The Beatles' "Come Together" was a good idea?