For the uninitiated, there’s a well-known fantasy series called the Wheel of Time. It’s a fourteen book saga begun by Robert Jordan and ended by Brandon Sanderson on Jordan’s passing. It’s considered a modern classic in fantasy circles. Those same groups will argue up one side and down the other about the overall quality of… Continue reading Half the Wheel of Time Books are Bad, Yet We Still Recommend Them
Japanese visual novels are set in Japan with Japanese characters...because they're made by Japanese studios in Japan for Japanese people.
But the people who took Harry Potter that seriously? No no no no we weren't THOSE Christians who saw Satan in everything secular. We understood nuance. We were reasonable. We weren't the crazy Christians.
My mom's homophobic, even if she doesn't realize it. But not...like...a Homophobe, you know what I mean? She's a “love the sinner, hate the sin” homophobe. A “marriage is between man and a woman, but if they want a civil union, that's okay” homophobe. A “I use my one lesbian friend as a rhetorical shield… Continue reading In Which the Mother of a Queer Person Continues to Fail at Irony
So it's the middle of summer. Here, in Texas, that of course means we're just in phase 1 of a multi-phase summer process. My personal summer began right at the end of spring, however. When I bought a pair of shorts.
“Okay, so they're alchemists, alright? And they're brothers and one of them had his soul bound to a suit of armor...are you following?”
Oh, Ashe, so you've got something poignant and insightful to say about the human condition and how the footprint of an inter-social ... No. I just finished Mass Effect.
And it's really a very fascinating thing, isn't it? That even in settings that present us with a sort of infinite biological possibility, we still hinge on human-centric interactions in regards to gender and sexuality, particularly ones with heteronormative bents.
On Twitter and in casual conversation I have described my gender as the following: crab-person, one of the creatures from “Behemoth's World” by 70's sci-fi painter Richard Clifton-Day, a bird demon with a funny hat, the Pokemon Gengar, and “a lady, I guess, but...you know...not on purpose.” The non-binary experience is, by its nature, weird… Continue reading My Gender is Crab: How Fantasy and Sci-fi Helped Shaped My Non-Binary Identity
Then I actually see how they intend to go about this and it strikes me as a plan that doesn't take into account the full breadth and depth of the medium as it stands. That they're coming into the development process with a very narrow per-conceived notion of what a visual novel is and does and has. Sometimes, I see a Kickstarter description that makes me wonder if the developer has ever actually played a visual novel before deciding to make one.
Innovation in a medium is great. It infuses new blood and keeps things nice and spicy. But what does that actually look like in an effective way
Pixels and Pins Studio 