Posted by Sortition Social

https://zine.milliesquilly.com/ex/ex1.html

Entry syndicated from zine of millie [feed link]

https://zine.milliesquilly.com/ex/ex1.html

Posted by Natalie Weizenbaum

https://nex-3.com/blog/in-a-better-world-hornet/

Entry syndicated from House of Nettles [feed link]

in a better world, Hornet Silksong would be a woman who loves her pet dog so much her partner gets jealous. but instead she lives in a world where every god specifically chooses to make all dogs rabid

https://nex-3.com/blog/in-a-better-world-hornet/

Posted by Greg Jensen

https://belarius.neocities.org/barleydog/post/juniper-friday-a-rare-sort-of-creature/

Entry syndicated from BarleyDog [feed link]

Juniper, a dog, seems ambivalent about her unicorn-themed sleep mask, despite being cozy in a pink-and-blue fleece blanket.

Juniper’s increased time around young kiddos has generally been good for her. She seems to have intuited that they are juvenile humans and seems to dote on them. She certainly tolerates a level of child goofiness and energetic play that she wouldn’t abide from grown adults. Even so, the sometimes you get the impression that even “tolerate” is pushing it a little bit.

https://belarius.neocities.org/barleydog/post/juniper-friday-a-rare-sort-of-creature/

Posted by Sortition Social

https://www.eladnarra.com/blog/2025/not-being-able/

Entry syndicated from eladnarra's blog [feed link]

I wrote in my last post that I had a lot going on in July and wasn't sure how much I'd be able to do to celebrate Disability Pride Month. The answer, as it turns out, was... zero posts, zero projects. But hey, with crip time, who says a month can't be two or three.

A Rough Month (Written 8/2/25)

I'm tired.

I'm not sleeping well. I wake up groggy every day; not sure if it's my ME/CFS (which causes unrefreshing sleep) or the sleep meds.

I've had difficult-to-control heartburn since February; whenever I think meds and lifestyle changes have helped somewhat, it comes back. I miss pizza.

My POTS symptoms are worse. It could be the summer heat or lack of electrolytes (which I had to pause because they can exacerbate my heartburn). Or something else; I guess we'll see if adding yet another med helps keep my heart rate from spiking.

I triggered my arm repetitive stress injuries (RSIs) in May and have been dealing with symptoms ever since. Sometimes the pain is constant. At other times it's a latent sensitivity, ready to flare into pain the moment I type too long or so much as think about doing some embroidery.

I went to Ft. Lauderdale for 3 nights to see a specialist, who yelled at me for still being worried about how COVID might make me worse. It's been nearly 3 weeks and I'm still not recovered from the travel.

I've had on average 3 doctor appointments or tests per week since I got back. It took 3 tries for them to get a good vein the other day. I'm 15 pounds lighter than I was at the start of the year, but not intentionally.

This all sounds melodramatic when I write it out. I'm fine, I'm safe. I'm just feeling pretty poorly and sorry for myself. I've been stuck on the couch with a million things I want to work on, but no energy to do any of it.

BRAIN FOG ENCROACHES. THE COUCH CALLS. TIME TO STOP.

Pride (Written 8/4/25, 8/5/25, & 8/27/25)

Sometimes it's hard to feel pride.

Lately I watch TV, I go to doctor appointments, and I rest. The Internet Archive Fundraiser Zine was successful (raised over $500!), but my crash means that the zine itself has stagnated. I feel anxious every time I think about it; the work others have put into it, the work that still needs doing.

Everything in my life happens in slow motion. My education, my career that never had a chance to take off and is now grounded (maybe permanently), my work on this website, my artistic practice in embroidery and zines. Most of the time I'm able ignore the internalized ableism that I'm not worth anything if I can't "produce," but what if I want to? What if I want to contribute to making the world better, to our household finances? What if I want to make art?

[3 Weeks Later: Now where was I...?]

Pride makes sense to me in abstract, for folks who are LGBTQ, POC, and/or disabled. There's power in taking something about yourself that people denigrate or attack and saying, "no, fuck you, I'm proud of that." And I am proud of how being a part of the disability community influences my politics and my actions. I'm proud of the things I've accomplished, like getting a degree, in spite of the barriers imposed by both my body and by institutions.

But when I'm in a period where the only thing I can accomplish is rest, when I'm treading water with millions of healthcare appointments on the horizon... it's hard to feel that pride. Because I'm still stuck in the mindset of defining myself by what I can do, even if it takes a long time. And somehow in my mind, rest doesn't really count as a thing to be proud of.

I'm working on it.

Grief (Written 8/5/25, 8/27/25, & 8/28/25)

I lost a lot when I got sick. Playing viola in a youth orchestra, rock climbing, being a straight A student at a college prep high school. The life I'd planned.

I don't know if I ever grieved properly for it. At first I was too tired to do so; strong emotions are just as tiring as reading or going for a walk. And eventually it was just... the way things were. No sense in getting upset about it, you know? It doesn't change what happened, and it's not like I dislike my life now.

But that grief is always in the background, ready to pop up the minute things get worse. While I may be used to the limitations I've had ever since I got sick, like not being able to work full time, new limitations restart the adjustment process. Realizing I can't work part time, either. Realizing that embroidery and web development hurt my arms, when they were meant to be physically doable hobbies to replace ones like rock climbing and viola.

It's the same grief, but new again.

There's also grief of lost opportunities once I got sick. Sometimes it's simple; not getting a tilt table test and medication when I was first diagnosed with POTS, because the pediatric cardiologist dismissed my (extremely disabling) symptoms as not that bad. Other times it's complex, like losing touch with my viola teacher after getting sick and only learning that she'd died years after her funeral.

Grief surrounding my chronic illnesses mingles with grief for people, in sometimes confusing ways.

I didn't get to know Anne Sturdivant as well as I wanted. We shared a few of each other's posts on our blogs, and we'd chatted on Mastodon about things like COVID and ME/CFS. It meant a lot to me when she included my Dispatches from VR zine in one of her bookmark posts, and even more when she mentioned one of my posts when writing about vulnerability:

I worried when Anne disappeared from the internet in January, but we were just Mastodon mutuals, so even if it hadn't been inappropriate to reach out offline, I didn't know how. All I could do was wait, occasionally checking her account to see if I'd missed a post, sending a message in February in the hopes that it wouldn't bother her. I was terribly sad to learn in June that she'd passed away. And it was very strange to learn recently that she was already gone by the time I messaged her.

I feel grief for the version of her I was privileged to get to know: a great web developer who "put pixels in their place," someone who loved her garden, and an advocate for those of us with ME/CFS. I feel grief for not getting to know her better; for the ways my fatigue and anxiety threw up barriers to connection. And I grieve for the ways she (and many others) have been abandoned in "post-COVID" times to navigate a society and healthcare system that are not only uninterested in treating ME/CFS patients, but are actively endangering us.

Vulnerability (Written 8/28/25 & 8/29/25)

This post I'm writing is another exercise of vulnerability, like the one that partly inspired Anne. I've cried a few times writing it, and I've once again documented the breaks I've had to take while writing it, making my fatigue and limitations visible instead of hiding them.

She wrote about vulnerability being a risk online. I don't write under my legal name, but it still feels risky to write this. I hope that my pseudonym means that none of my online identity will somehow be used against me by a government agency, but these days with data brokers compiling tons of personal information, who knows. More likely, by being vulnerable I open myself up to the risk of being misunderstood.

Will people read this post and think I'm writing for attention, playing up my symptoms and struggles for pity? Will they read my reaction to Anne passing away and think I'm making her untimely, tragic death all about me, a person who barely knew her?

I don't know. Like Anne's post, this one has had many twists and turns while writing that I didn't expect, and I don't know if it says what I want to say. Writing a post in two pieces nearly a month apart was unavoidable and necessary, but it's also been disruptive. Things feel disjointed, unfinished. Still, hopefully it does some justice to the complexity of being chronically ill and disabled. To the tension between disability pride and the disappointment of not being able to do what you want to do. To just a few of the many shades of grief.

https://www.eladnarra.com/blog/2025/not-being-able/

Posted by Natalie Weizenbaum

https://nex-3.com/blog/power-skill-and-silksong/

Entry syndicated from House of Nettles [feed link]

While this blog post does contain specific mechanical spoilers about Hollow Knight: Silksong, they're only at the very end, clearly marked, and hidden by default. Most of the post is spoiler-free.

Many games, video and otherwise, are structured in a way that presents the player with both challenges tools they can use to address those challenges. In video games specifically, much hay is made online of the challenges themselves: everyone talks about Ornstein and Smough, Absolute Radiance, or Balteus. But to the player in the moment, the shape of the tools they use determines as much or more about their actual experience.

Tools aren't just in-game items. They're anything that aids the player or allows them to engage with the game, from their character's stats to movement mechanics to the very concept of "make your character not be where the attack is". In sports, the players themselves are the most important tools. In chess, the pieces are tools but so are rules castling and stalemates. It's an intentionally broad term to discuss a broad set of game structures.

These tools are not only the ultimate determiner of how difficult the challenge is^[1], a well-designed arsenal gives players the opportunity to sculpt their experience, creating a mode of play that fits both the needs of the challenge at hand and their own personal preference. Often players end up self-sorting into two rough camps: those who choose one set of tools (a "build") and stick with it for every challenge and so experience challenges that may be easy for others as very difficult when the tools they've chosen don't line up well, and those who see each challenge as an opportunity to puzzle out the exact optimal set of tools and so take down the challenge as easily as possible. I myself fall into either camp depending on the specific context^[2].

One of the first thing a player will ask when choosing which tools to use is, "what's the most powerful?" And in some cases the answer to this is straightforward. In Dark Souls, the Straight Sword Hilt is certainly among the weakest weapons you can use by any objective measure. But in many cases the answer is unclear. There is no consensus "best" weapon in Dark Souls nor its successors, because what "power" even means depends on the player's play style, their goals, and to a substantial degree, their skill.

Defining Skill

I want to take a moment here to clarify what I mean by "skill", at least for the purposes of this post. I don't really want to get into the weeds discussing video game difficulty here and now, but I do think that discourse has made it difficult to mention skill as a concept without raising everyone's hackles and bringing in a bunch of extra baggage. So I'll try to be explicit about how I'm using the term here.

I'm not talking about skill as in some sort of innate talent at video games or even specifically hand-eye coordination or twitch reflexes. What I mean is something that comes with practice and, especially, shedding the fear of the unknown.

Every player, no matter how good or bad their reaction speed, is worse at the game in the initial phase when they're still getting used to it. Everyone loses some percent of their possible effectiveness from needing to manually think through which actions to take, from not fully understanding the challenge they're currently facing, and from not knowing how to match those actions up with that challenge. I'd go so far as to say that for almost everyone, this lost effectiveness is so large that it makes up the vast majority of the reason they fail the challenges with which a given game presents them.

The other side of this coin, then, is that players can increase their effectiveness simply by paying attention to their experiences and internalizing them through practice. This scale of practice-driven effectiveness is what I mean here by "skill". I certainly don't mean it as any measure of the player's "quality" in a moral sense or whether they've "really" engaged with the game. There's nothing better about spending the time practicing a game so you can beat it blindfolded except inasmuch as that experience is intrinsically rewarding to the player.

Power and Skill in Dialog

What's the more powerful ring in Dark Souls, Tiny Being's Ring which increases the player's max HP by 5% or Red Tearstone Ring which adds 50% attack power when the player is below 20% HP?

It's tempting to say that the answer is Red Tearstone Ring hands down. It's a staple of all the most challenging ways people play the game: Soul Level 1 runs, hitless boss fights, and speed runs. Tiny Being's Ring on the other hand is available as a starting item and is handily outclassed by numerous other rings which the player could use in that slot.

I don't think this answer is wrong at all, but I do think it's incomplete. For an unskilled player, Red Terastone Ring might as well have no ability at all. When the whole game is full of unknown monstrosities with unfamiliar moves, the safest course of action is to never be below 20% HP if you can help it. Any time you find yourself that low, your first priority should be finding a safe spot to heal. Tiny Being's Ring may not have a dramatic effect, but if that little HP bump saves you from one hit that would have killed you otherwise it's at least doing something.

We can think of power as a way of talking about what's most effective at helping a given player overcome challenges with the least amount of effort. From this perspective, how powerful something is depends on the player who's using it. This sort of "power" doesn't make sense as a metric in its own right—for a low-skilled player, Tiny Being's Ring is stronger than Red Tearstone Ring. For my friend who never uses spells in Hollow Knight, the underwhelming Grubsong^[3] charm is stronger than the excellent Shaman Stone^[4].

But this is a little unsatisfying, because games are fundamentally social even when they're single-player and tightly individualizing the concept of "power" cuts off any ability to discuss it with others. What I think most people mean in practice when they talk about it is something more like power pegged to some sort of implicit "average player", although where this player falls specifically in terms of skill and preferences is left unspecified, sometimes to the result of confounding the whole conversation. If this average player is pretty good at Dark Souls, maybe Red Tearstone Ring is better for them because they might be able to survive long enough to get in some hits at 20% HP, but it's still much weaker than one of the better options like Ring of Favor and Protection^[5]. I think if you posited this to a player, they wouldn't argue.

The power of tools affects skill as well. I talked about a tool's power as its effectiveness in helping a given player overcome challenges with the least amount of effort. In turn, exerting effort to overcome challenges is how the player builds skill. So we can see tools as lowering the skill bar for facing a given challenge, and we can see their power as how much they lower it^[6].

Another Perspective on Power

I want to look at this from a slightly different angle, though, inspired by my recent experience playing through Silksong and discussing the merits of various builds with my friends. I want to look at which tools are best the first time through a game. In other words, I want to view a tool's power as the lowest overall skill required to overcome a challenge with that tool across all starting skill levels. Red Tearstone Ring rates poorly on this metric because it only becomes strong in the hands of players whose skill levels are already high, but Tiny Being's Ring rates poorly as well because it doesn't lower the skill requirement much for anyone.

This is particularly interesting in the context of Silksong because it's full of tools that are at their best when the player is already skilled. Hollow Knight's spell mechanic is the same way: you accumulate "soul" by hitting enemies, and you can spend it either to heal or cast spells. While spells can do a lot of damage, using them concretely eats into your ability to survive fights.

So, are spells powerful in Hollow Knight? By this metric, which I'll call "initial power", I think they're good but not amazing. Their damage output is big enough that learning to use them effectively can shorten some fights enough to make up for lost heals, but not so strong that you can rely on only using them and never healing without investing a lot more time into building skill.

By contrast, we can also talk about "final power": the power of a tool once the player has built up their skill and understands the game's challenges. (We can frame this as the tool with the biggest overall reduction in skill required to overcome a challenge with that tool across all skill levels.) Hollow Knight's spells rate very high here, because once you're getting hit infrequently enough they can massively accelerate fights and reduce the overall risk.

The Part Where I Talk About Silksong

I'm not going to spoil anything you can't find in Act 1, but I will talk frankly about certain mechanics.

https://nex-3.com/blog/power-skill-and-silksong/

Posted by Freya

https://coolgoth.zone/blog/9347391/another-new-synth-module!-voltage-controlled-filter?

Entry syndicated from COOL・GOTH・ZONE [feed link]

yoo..

it took a little while but i got a new filter built out a couple weeks ago. i'd have blogged about it sooner but i havent been in as much of a writing mood recently and i'm not sure why. maybe weltschmerz? in any case tho since my plans for the weekend got fucked up¹ im forcing myself to do the blog post now. and it looks like this btw:

the new module is a voltage controlled filter based on the filter section of the edp wasp, a weird little synth from the late 70s that as far as i can tell was produced by a british company that only seems to have existed for like 5 years. originally i was gonna go with an ms-20 type filter like basically every other diy synth head seems to, but i didn't really like the idea of my first vcf having a different roll-off depending on whether it was in low pass (12db/oct) or high pass (6db/oct) mode, and tbh i just didn't really understand how it worked at all. so i did some digging around for a filter design that had a high pass with 12db roll-off and found jurgen haible's wasp clone, which seemed to do exactly what i wanted and also included band pass, notch pass and distortion, which seemed like a nice set of bonus extras.

now, something i always like to do before trying a circuit out on breadboard is to to try and figure out what the thing's outputs should look like using a simulator. this especially is true for cases like this where weird and kinda rare parts² are involved, but unfortunately cos the wasp filter relies on (mis?)using inverters as comparators my usual circuit simulator of choice, circuit.js, just could not handle it at all. so i had to give in and finally learn how to use kicad. finding models for this thing is a pain and i still don't really 100% get how the simulation stuff works but after a couple weeks i finally got my head around it and, now knowing what i should be seeing on the oscilloscope, i went on to breadboarding it....

it looks kinda clean but dont let it fool u this thing was a nightmare to prototype. i think something's up with the translucent breadboard cos it would just cut out at random and screech at me if i touched the pots wrong. this and having to learn how to use kicad were the main reasons this thing took so long to build, but i kept struggling thru it anyway cos there were features to be added.....

first was exponential cv input. for this i took a look at the cgs twin cmos filter and borrowed part of the cv input design, which involved switching the entire filter core to run between 0v and -5v instead of 5v and 0v³. once i'd done that though i found that i was getting no output at all, which had me stumped as to whether it was just my breadboards finally giving up. but nah turns out i needed to add an extra trim pot for centering the frequency control, which is missing from the cgs schematic and only mentioned in passing halfway down the page. my bad for not reading i guess. whatever.

once i'd done that i got to looking at ways of moving the distortion section to be either before or after the filter. i had a few ideas but i was totally pissed off at the breadboard situation by this point and really didn't feel like doing much more prototyping, so instead i decided to just drop the distortion and notch pass sections entirely (i wasn't super feeling the sounds from them anyway) and use the 3 inverter gates that were freed up by this to make it into a dual vcf. i then also decided that it made no sense to drop £5 on a rotary switch for changing filter mode like the original wasp has, so i changed the design to just have separate outputs for lp/bp/hp. i haven't done a huge amount of testing of this, but as long as they're feeding into high impedance inputs i think they'll all be usable simultaneously?

finally with the distortion section gone the remaining parts of the schematic was all stuff i (mostly) understand, and it seemed like there was no real need to be running the core(s) at -5v specifically, so after seeing a forum post where someone had adapted the wasp filter to work as a guitar pedal running between 9v and 0v i decided to just try running the core on -12v instead, which seems to work fine and also means the input and output don't need to be scaled up/down. i did leave the attenuation pot on the input though so that the volume can be tuned to give the resonance room to go wild/crazy without clipping 😈

overall i'm real happy with how this one came out⁴. now that it's fully built and i'm not having to wrestle with the janky prototype setup i can really appreciate just how good it sounds, and i totally get why people seem so enamored with this goofy old synth's filter section. the resonance sounds sick too, and the cv input works great, although i haven't bothered tuning it to v/oct yet⁵. now i just need to build an lfo to plug into it....

as always i've updated the synth page so u can see it in the rack and hover over it and see it light up etc if u want, and u can also check my eurorack module schematics repo if u wanna see the stripboard layout. i realised kicad schematics look kinda nice and they'd probably be useful to have so i'm planning to go back thru and add real schematics for all my previous designs at some point too. idk when that'll happen tho cos tbh i've fallen down a hole playing tony hawk games and will be in that hole for some time i think

see u in the next,

– freya

https://coolgoth.zone/blog/9347391/another-new-synth-module!-voltage-controlled-filter?