hayley-theartist:bluesturngold: laguzmage: laguzmage:How in the world did CDPR get this game past...

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hayley-theartist https://hayley-theartist.tumblr.com/post/637079407397404672/laguzmage-laguzmage-how-in-the-world-did-cdpr :

bluesturngold https://bluesturngold.tumblr.com/post/636925492315996160/laguzmage-how-in-the-world-did-cdpr-get-this-game :

laguzmage https://laguzmage.tumblr.com/post/636918718338826240/how-in-the-world-did-cdpr-get-this-game-past :

laguzmage https://laguzmage.tumblr.com/post/636915976868397057/how-in-the-world-did-cdpr-get-this-game-past :

How in the world did CDPR get this game past compliance, holy shit https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/07/cyberpunk-2077-epileptic-psa

Like, the gulf between “Hey some HUD elements blink and environment lights flicker, be careful” and “We expose the player to a recreation of the device doctors use to medically induce seizures” is so wide that I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft, Valve, et al nuke their digital stores until CDPR fixes it, and I’m honestly a little horrified at what could have happened had Liana Ruppert not caught it and had she not been an associate editor at a magazine as big as Game Informer

What makes me so mad is that this kind of malicious behavior is extremely on brand with CD Projekt Red’s reputation of being ran by edgy shitheads.

In the same way they doubled down on their awful transphobic nonsense in CP2077 after being called out by trans game critics, and in the same way they denied anything was wrong when employees spoke out about their crunch culture and toxic work environment, Liana Ruppert has stated that she’s told CDPR higher ups in the past when she’s reviewed their games that they contained epileptic triggers, and for CP2077 they’re unavoidable and apparently frequent, a part of the game’s visual design language.

She had one major seizure, but other less severe seizures while playing, which she chose to continue doing with help during the worst parts in order to write this more-detailed PSA https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/07/cyberpunk-2077-epileptic-psa while helping her team complete their review.

It’s unconscionable to design a game like this when you’ve been told your work isn’t accessible to, and could actively hurt, players with epilepsy. If all the other awful shit that came out about this game before now wasn’t enough to put you off buying it, let this be your reason not to support this miserable company until the folks in charge there have learned not to be horrible people.

I want to add as someone with epilepsy who has severe seizures, period, this is unbelievably dangerous. My seizures are well-controlled by medication, but I still need breaks every twenty to thirty minutes playing games like Halo. This game could quite possibly send someone who’s photosensitive into status epilepticus. Which will kill someone without immediate emergency medical attention.

This shit has the legitimate possibility of killing someone. It doesn’t need a warning, it needs to be banned for safety.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but– the reviewer who wrote and posted this review (who WORKS for a PUBLICATION where that is her JOB), who went out of her way to continue playing the game, and in the end wrote a comprehensive and very fair review of the game as well as a GUIDE for how to play it safely if you’re epileptic, but posted this excerpt to her Twitter to warn epileptics–

she’s getting sent a barrage of seizure-trigger media and videos and gifs, much of it deceptively labeled, by Online Gamer Types who seem to believe that harming/killing epileptics is the POINT. (Or, maybe, it’s just more that women should shut up; it’s hard to tell with these types.)

(ALso I’ve seen elsewhere in the reblog chain that closing your eyes won’t prevent a seizure, so don’t rely on that.) (Worth pointing out that some people don’t know they’re prone to seizures until something like this triggers one, and if there’s no one to help this can kill them, so this isn’t just dangerous to people who know they’re epileptic.)

I’m sorry to people who were looking forward to this game, and I’m sorry to people who (like me!) liked Witcher 3 and thought CDPR might be sort of neat. This is so disappointing. And worse, because it seems like yet another thing we’ve decided to “politicize”, where the objectively harmful thing is somehow defensible as a “political” position?

AHH as I was researching this to put in the link to the game reviewer’s Twitter I saw this!

[ID: a tweet from Liana Ruppert, dirtyeffinhippy, saying “I cried” with the cry and purple heart emojis in a quote-retweet of another user, Elise Favis, whose quoted tweet reads “Booted up Cyperpunk 2077 to see a seizure warning come up at the start of the game that wasn’t there before. Really amazing to see how dirtyeffinhippy helped make meaningful change happen for the safety of players.” applause emoji /end desc]

The thread, here, https://twitter.com/dirtyeffinhippy/status/1336862153417105410 goes on and Ruppert says she’s been contacted by several other major game studios to tell her this has made them take seizure safety more seriously and re-evaluate their process.

So I’ll link to that instead of combing back to find the Tweet I’d seen from her earlier where she was being sent horrible things. (Ah, and here https://twitter.com/dirtyeffinhippy/status/1336299585405394947 she asks people to stop commenting on that part because it’s warping into something that thas nothing to do with her work.) We know it’s bad; let’s see that good can come of it too.

mzminola:Girl Genius and The Witcher could go ALARMI

had almost forgotten my unpublished 15k maxim angstfest whatever that was, girl genius, that was during my not-fanfic phase, i tried to catch up on gg recently and was like... no, but there was a golden era there, the witcher

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mzminola https://mzminola.tumblr.com/post/634995098305888256/girl-genius-and-the-witcher-could-go-alarmingly :

Girl Genius and The Witcher could go ALARMINGLY well together, and now I’m imaging how fucking confused and offended Jaskier & Geralt make people by sheer virtue of Jaskier have clearly fallen in loyalty with Geralt, going around minioning, but Geralt isn’t a Spark and that’s just not done how dare he draw this talented bard into his orbit so effortlessly, doesn’t he know there are Sparks with terrible PR that would give a kidney (someone else’s kidney) to have songs written about how their horrible bloodshed is actually beneficial to humanity and should get them paid??? Does he???

how *am* i doing, really

why so much despair, who knows, (everyone knows)

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So I’ve reacted to the Near-COVID-Scare at work (i never did hear about that one guy’s test or not! by now it’s been so long that if he had it, it’s over! he’s back, i just leave the room whenever he comes in. it’s not actually hard, given my particular position) i’ve been getting real antisocial at work. Anyone comes into my office, I find a reason to go out of it. (It’s not hard to find a pretext, and I can hear people coming so usually I’m just coming out the door, like oh hi fancy meeting you here.) I stand in the hallway a lot to talk to people at a distance. And I try to avoid being downstairs at all when there are any customers.

my latest ploy is that since i wake up at 5am anyway because of this cursed flesh-hull that is my body, I just. Come to work. i’ve been starting at the very reasonable time of 7am lately– it delights Chita, as I get out of bed and let her go sit in the driveway for 20 minutes while I make coffee and pack my lunch– and it works if I remember to lay my clothes out the night before because Dude only gets out of bed before 7am if I’m not trying to leave the house, and since he sleeps in the room with my clothes that means I can’t get dressed in there before he’s up– and that means I can go home at 3pm. Which means I go home, ride the exercise bike for the duration of one episode of the Untamed (I’m up to ep 42 now and I’m gonna run out, sob), which gives me about 10 miles, and then i can shower (or not, I’m gross) and change into loungewear, do the dishes, and make dinner so it’s done at like 5:15, and then collapse into despair for the long evening until I go to bed at like 9pm and roll around restlessly.

So all but that last bit is going well and I need to think of something besides just frantically staying busy, which isn’t sustainable.

I’ve given up feeling guilty about not walking my commute, because I did that all last winter and it tore the shit out of my hip and lower back and feet, and maybe I just needed better shoes but which better shoes and I tried better shoes and maybe four miles a day on flat poorly-maintained concrete just isn’t good for me and oh well whatever. Having my chair properly adjusted at work and riding the exercise bike so I don’t get atrophied seems to be doing the trick and I don’t limp at all lately, which is what I want, so I’m not going to feel guilty about driving my car ten miles a week.

Oh I also managed to buy new waterproof office-worker winter-y boots for the days when my Snow Boots O’Doom aren’t appropriate, which is something I’d been procrastinating for two years and I’d had fifteen Zappos tabs open for like oh eight months about it, so. I don’t actually care for them much but they fit the bill so I’m keeping them. (Trying wool socks today…)

Going to put up the next chapter of the Keira/Lambert/SPOILER fic today, which literally everyone who cares already knows who the spoiler is, so. We’ll see. I need like. Titles, for everything, so that’s the hold-up.

fic update: new work

sitting, aiden lives, witcher lambert, keira metz

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Very Dark Magic, on AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/27993699

Note that I’ve made a new series just for the post-W3-timeline stuff with Keira and Lambert and… this newly-introduced character, note the tags, !!!!

I named it Trust https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048918, and it’s still nested within meet Death Sitting but I figured it was time to organize it that way as well.

Anyway we’re in it now, watch the tags for some dark shit.

She let go of his arm. “Of course,” she said. “You just– reminded me, of someone.” And she gestured lightly– she was a mage, it was a spell– an illusion spell.

A little illusion floated above her hand, sheltered from the view of the street by her body– an image. It was– ah, it was Lambert, gesturing as he talked, and then throwing his head back a little in laughter, and Aiden stared at it in naked longing, completely transfixed. Lambert. Oh, by the Gods, he’d– that had been his life, and he hadn’t even let himself think of it in so long, it had been buried deep down with his name. A little noise came out of his throat, without his volition, circumventing the compulsions. Lambert.

“You do know him,” she said. “He thinks you’re dead.”

ao3commentoftheday:timeisasocialconsturct:ao3commentoftheday: if you have an emotional support...

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ao3commentoftheday https://ao3commentoftheday.tumblr.com/post/635724708516626432/ao3commentoftheday-if-you-have-an-emotional :

timeisasocialconsturct https://timeisasocialconsturct.tumblr.com/post/635724507062124544/if-you-have-an-emotional-support-fanfic-do :

ao3commentoftheday https://ao3commentoftheday.tumblr.com/post/635724364275433472/if-you-have-an-emotional-support-fanfic-do :

if you have an emotional support fanfic, do yourself a favour and click that download button at the top of the page. then you don’t have to worry about it being deleted

but everytime i come back i boost hits 👉👈

the download is your emergency backup! keep reading however you like to read in the meantime ❤

you could also. leave a comment. when you download it. I am not one of those writers who’s like “ah i hate kudos only heartfelt comments make me happy” or whatever. “i’ll stop writing if people don’t reply with novels.” not true! not so. not at all. lurkers are fine. i love you. i write what i want; i’m inspired by commenters sometimes, i’m inspired by conversations, but I don’t need it from literally everyone. all of it is fine, you can just lurk, i am getting what i need. You do you. this is not one to one transactional.

but.

if it’s your emotional support fanfic, firstly yes make your own copy so you have it no matter what, don’t worry about the hits, but if you are worried about the hits… well, in that case, take your worry and shape it into a lil note, and stick that note on there. “i love this so much i downloaded it because i can’t face a world where it’s disappeared, and just know i’ve now read it on my device a thousand times, and it’s imporant to me, thank you.”

you don’t have to do this. but if you’re worried about the hits. you could do that instead. because i have gotten one or two lil notes like this and they really helped me a lot when i was feeling sort of bad about some abandoned old works and such.

(also i recently published a story that got a flurry of comments, and in the midst of that i got a comment on a much older story and it was somehow even more great in that context to be reminded that people sometimes like my old shit too, my worth is not entirely predicated on whatever the latest thing is. it’s just so reassuring. if you have a favorite thing you downloaded ages ago maybe now is the time to go back and say “i have loved this for years”; someone might really love to hear that. But, of course, you don’t have to.)

vaguely-concerned:me contemplatively stretched out o

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vaguely-concerned https://vaguely-concerned.tumblr.com/post/637147679761235968/me-contemplatively-stretched-out-on-the :

me contemplatively stretched out on the therapist’s divan: anyway I think the reason I’m so obsessed with looking at a big epic story from the pov of a humble side character who doesn’t want to get involved in the main plot is because growing up the only characters in stories who were like me were usually background people in other people’s – people who got to be protagonist’s – life, and instead of making me want to be another traditional main character it made me interested in the dignity and complexity of having to navigate how to live your life and find happiness in a narrative that tells you you’re irrelevant. there is worth in journeys that are not the hero’s. not everyone needs to save the world; sometimes saving yourself is enough.

the poor ikea employee who has tried to get me to leave the furniture department for half an hour now: I um – okay, uh-huh

i was scrolling fast and

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i swear I saw a post that said, beautifully and festively,

“Happy Hanukkah to all those who deserve it!”

and i was just like hell yes wait and scrolled back up and it of course said “celebrate” not “deserve”

but like. i mean. for sure, guys, happy hanukkah, but only for those who deserve it.

alternately, happy hanukkah whether you celebrate it or not

if i could write those in like the foreboding drippy text I would, because they both sound mega foreboding, right? The entire concept, either way– well, I mean, I guess that’s really how Christmas works, whether you fucking like it or not here’s st nick right down your throat, so like. whew. anyway. yeah that’s not Hannukah’s style.

For real though, chag chanukah sameach, it’s a beautiful story and very apropos for our current times.

OH my other Topical Thing is that this evening as I drove down I think it was literally Main St. a car came by with a weird assortment of lights on the roof and I only realized as it passed me that it was a lit electrial menorah so like, rock on Jews of Buffalo, I am glad you are out there representing in gestures broadly all of this.