Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Trump should be leading, not lying.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Let there be snark.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Stand up, dammit!

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

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Major Major Major Major has written at Balloon Juice since 2018. He focuses on science, technology, and fiction.

Queerness and Gaming and Lovecraft, oh my!

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We recently got back from baby Camille’s first trip. We’d been waiting to travel until she got her six-month measles vaccine, on account of *waves hands frantically*, but now that we can, we took her to my sister-in-law’s Tahoe cabin for a week of too much family. I’ll have more to say about that once I get the pictures gathered together. In the meantime! The Kickstarter for me and my friend’s video game is up (with some pretty good goodies), but we reached our fundraising goal super fast, so I didn’t do any shameless self-promotion here. (Prior post about the game here, it’s a Lovecraftian adventure game/dating sim.) As part of our promotional push, we secured an interview with a historian of weird fiction about queerness and gaming in Lovecraftian stories, which is out today. I thought some folks here might appreciate it. You can find it at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

Lovecraftian horror (and weird fiction more broadly) is as popular as it is because, for many people, it’s challenges some load-bearing defenses about the world we live in. At its root is Lovecraft’s cosmicism, which speaks of the irrelevance of mankind in an uncaring universe full of incomprehensible beings that regard us as we might see ants, if they regard us at all. Or, if you’re already immune to that, there are stories like 2006’s Blindsight, a more scientific tale that challenges our assumptions about the value of consciousness itself. I’ll be honest, that book really did a number on me. And in the best stories, there are also the smaller-scale themes of transformation, hidden knowledge, and the mutability of self–whether you like it or not. And that is where the queerness creeps in…

I’m going to let one of our contributing writers start this one. (Em wrote one of the novelettes we’re including as a Kickstarter reward, and she came up with one of the main characters.)

“[Cosmic horror] stories provide a ripe foundation for exploring non-heteronormative identity because both involve recognizing that consensus reality is more fragile and constructed than it appears. Cosmic horror traditionally focuses on themes of transformation, hidden knowledge, and the inadequacy of established categories, all of which create natural space for examining gender and sexual fluidity without requiring explicit positioning.

The genre frequently features characters discovering their true nature, often something that existed before their conscious awareness or something that has been heavily suppressed. Both resonate strongly with non-binary and trans experiences of self-discovery.

To cap it off, the horror elements can effectively capture both the terror and liberation that can accompany stepping outside normative social structures.”

‘Terror and liberation’ summarizes it pretty well. All of our characters have something like this going on. There’s always something about themselves that they don’t understand or don’t accept. Sometimes part of that is about being queer, but we never sat down and decided to write a queer story, if that makes sense. Starspawn deals with learning to accept yourself and love others, and self-knowledge and transformation and the weight of history. It would be weird if it weren’t at least a little queer.

We’ve found a lot of opportunities to explore these themes.

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Finally Introducing The Game I’m Making, What Are You Making?

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Your scholarship is in danger, your friends aren’t human, and something ancient is awakening in the dreamlands. Welcome to Miskatonic University.

Hello jackals! I am super chuffed to formally show you all the video game my friend and I have been working on. We’re sort of thinking of it as a weird expensive art project, but if you ask us, it’s got some potential. The going has been a little slow what with the baby and all, and working with artists can always be time-consuming, especially if you include yourself in that category, but the demo is finally ready!

It’s an adventure game & dating sim set in the H.P. Lovecraft universe. You play a college student who wakes up one day from a very strange dream to find that everything’s a little stranger than it was yesterday–even your best friend, it turns out, is some sort of fish-monster. Even worse, you’ve been thrust into a conflict that’s far older than humanity itself, and threatens to unravel two worlds. Along the way, you can use your free time to make friends with the other main characters, and even romance them, if you play your cards right. There are ten potential story routes based on the choices you make.

It’s… been a lot of work! But now it’s time to show it off.

We’ll be launching a Kickstarter soon to raise funding to finish the game. There’s still a lot of art to go, and only so much that we can self-finance. You can read about it here on the pre-release page, including the cool rewards we’re offering, like an original short story collection. That page also contains links to the ~40-minute demo, available on Steam and itch.io. If you think you’d be interested, definitely click that “notify me on launch” button. Or don’t–I’ll be back to bug you all about it once it’s live! Oh, and you can follow us on Bluesky, too.

So that’s been my big creative project for, ah, about two years now. Time sure flies when you’re moving, installing a garden, panicking about the state of things, having a baby…

What has everybody else here been up to, project-wise?

And since I need to pay the cat tax, here’s a peek at everybody’s favorite character, which is, okay, probably not actually a cat:Finally Introducing The Game I'm Making, What Are You Making?

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How about some springtime respite?

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Hello Juicers! Reporting in from fatherhood. Camille is four months this week…
…and doing great! She’s ahead on most of her benchmarks, starting teething, and still super chill, at least by baby standards. No complaints, 10/10.

Boy it sure is a disaster out there, though, isn’t it? Fortunately I’ve got a lot to keep me busy right here. Camille isn’t even the only baby in the neighborhood…

But they grow up so fast, don’t they? Ten days later…

They weren’t even there the last time I walked by. Flown the coop! I’m an empty-nester now. Oh, and the yard is coming along really well, too. Thanks to a big assist from TaMara a couple years ago, we now have these lovely and prolific irises, which gave us quite a show this year!

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Exciting personal update

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Look what we made with the power of science!

Exciting personal update

Her name is Camille and she is perfect. Even the doctor says so.

As you can imagine, this took a bit of doing for two men, but we did it. It feels like we stole fire from the gods. I wish she could have come into the world at a more auspicious time, but at least we got in under the wire for the year of the dragon. More importantly, we got in under the wire for any legal or administrative changes that might have made modifying the birth certificate difficult or impossible (and there was already the looming threat of DeSantis pulling a Meloni, since our surrogate lives in Florida). I guess we should get a move on acquiring a social security card and maybe a passport before those offices get nuked…

I don’t really feel that much different. Got all my youthful goals out of the way a while ago. And, since this took several years, I guess I was already sort of in dad mode–getting a house, moving near family, gardening, birdwatching… already I hear the siren’s call of learning about the revolutionary and civil wars…

Happy to answer questions people might have in the comments, within reason of course :)

I’m pretty bad at writing about this, but anyway, this and the video game are pretty much what I’ve been up to. Cheers!

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And Now A LONG Bluesky Post

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Glad to see more folks are finally hopping on to the only good large* social network! It’s free, open-source, and federated, but you probably don’t care, so it doesn’t make you care; you’ll never notice unless you go looking for it. It’s ad-free, it’s highly customizable, it’s got an incredible block feature, it doesn’t shove fascism into your eyeballs 24/7 whether you like it or not. And now that everyone sees twitter for what it is–a nazi site for nazis–it’s got a lot of the accounts you know and love, and not just artists, trans shitposters, nerds, and the various intersections thereof.

So I thought I’d share some advice on getting started, plus a few philosophical notes. (Signup link)

After an obligatory cat pic of course. Here’s Momo looking enormous thanks to the power of perspective!

Getting started

1. Deprogram yourself

If you’re coming from twitter, you’re fucked in the head, but it’s not your fault. An aggressive algorithmic feed, tweaked by a white supremacist, that suppresses links and optimizes for ragebait, has primed you for a fight-or-flight response when you open the app. The promotion of nazis to the top of every thread has you looking for nazis around every corner. Social media doesn’t have to be like that–but it might take you a minute to undo ten+ years of billionaires trying to convince you otherwise.

It’s time to take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and get to work defining your experience for yourself.

2. Check out lists and starter packs

Bluesky does offer two in-house algorithmic feeds–“Discover” and “Popular with Friends”–but all they do is identify and track what topics interest you and your network, and serve you that content. (Pro-tip on Discover: if you click the … button next to a post you see there, you get “show more/less of this” options you can use to help train it.) But the main feed is just your reverse-chronological following feed. So it’s probably a good idea to follow a few people. To make this easy, bluesky has “starter packs”–lists of accounts that anybody can make, that you can follow with just one click. You can search starter packs here–sorting by “uses” will show you the most popular ones, such as a list of politics posters by lolgop, journalists, and legal experts. And of course, a starter pack of balloon-juice peeps (and other good accounts) by mousebumples! You can also search for starter packs by keyword for any special interests you might have.

I also recommend Joshua J. Friedman, who some call the mayor of bluesky.

Some people also make lists instead of starter packs, but there’s no search engine for them. For example, here’s a list of BJ peeps. The users on the list are under the “about” tab; you’ll notice there’s also a “posts” tab and a big “pin to home” button, which brings us to our next very important feature…

3. Follow lots of feeds and change one very important setting

Feeds! Feeds are super cool. Under the hood, a feed is an application that takes API requests and returns posts–which means that a feed can be anything the feed designer wants it to be. Most of them just pull from user lists or match certain words, #hashtags, and/or emojis, but there are more sophisticated ones, too. For example, this feed uses AI to locate cat pictures for you. You can find more feeds with this search engine. Popular ones include science, booksky, blacksky, astronomy, and birds. I also enjoy timeline cleanse and dream logs. Also a special shout-out to the gardening feed, which shares posts by opted-in users that include the seedling emoji 🌱. Check out this thread to see how to get added.

Feeds, just like user lists, have a big “pin to home” button on them. This adds the feed to the right column of the app (on desktop), or as tabs on top of the app (on mobile).

There is also a very neat setting that injects selected posts from feeds right into your following feed. Settings > following feed preferences > “show posts from my feeds”. Highly recommended!

4. Engage!

Bluesky won’t build your following for you. You’ll need to post and reply to people to make it happen. (Smaller accounts are a lot more likely to read your replies; big ones are more likely to have “priority notifications” turned on.) Humor is almost always appreciated, too, though do remember that the failure mode of “clever” is “asshole”.

Also, you can probably get your posts on a lot of feeds just by including the right hashtag or emoji, so there’s a cheap way to get eyeballs on them. Following What’s Mid can also get your stuff out there; it reposts popular-but-not-that-popular posts of yours.

MazeDancer also notes:

And may I plead, again, that you spruce up before you do that. Post 3 or 4 things. Put up a banner. Otherwise, people won’t know who you are – or if you are even a person – or if they would like to follow back.

5. Stop worrying and learn to love the nuclear block

Bluesky has a “block early, block often” ethos. When you block somebody, all your interactions are obliterated. If they have quote-posted you, nobody can see what they are quote-posting (and vice-versa). Threads involving the two of you will be chopped up into little pieces, making them nearly impossible to follow, for anybody. This is a slightly controversial feature but I like it. If somebody quote-dunks you but you don’t want to block them, you can also “detach” it to mimic the blocked-quote behavior.

6. A word about labelers

Bluesky supports third-party labeling services, which attach labels to accounts and posts. This can be used for moderation, or for fun, or just generally to improve your experience. I enjoy xblock, which lets you put twitter screenshots behind a warning; and yardcrow, which gives accounts compliments. There are many more but I don’t think there’s a centralized repository yet. Once you’ve added one, you can adjust how it works in…

7. Tweak your moderation settings

Settings > moderation. Here you can enable/disable/tweak adult content labels (might have to do on desktop if you have an iphone), and adjust how your labeling services work. You can also mute words and hashtags, temporarily or permanently. Also going to give a shout-out to my “tankies and shit” mute/block list, which is full of authoritarian communists, Hamas supporters, and other assorted miscreants. The button says ‘subscribe’, but that means ‘so you can mute or block all of these people at once’.

And now for something completely different: what’s under the hood?

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Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)

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Besides gardening and other various home improvement stuff, I’ve used most of my free time these days making a video game with my friend. It’s been a massive undertaking. I’d heard that game development is fractally difficult–every sub-component just as tricky as its parent–and boy did that ever turn out to be true. We’re both pretty experienced programmers, so we were able to manage the scope creep, at least; no features we don’t absolutely need, no matter how cool they would be. Anyway: I’m happy to say we are finally at the point where we can start introducing people to it! Before I do, I’ll note that this is not really shameless self-promotion; we are looking to buy some fiction, but you need context first, and also the pictures are pretty and I want to talk about something I think is exciting. (The shameless self-promotion will come later when I do one (1) post about the Kickstarter.)

So without further ado, here’s our first piece of promo art.

Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game

Starspawn is set in the Cthulhu-mythos universe, drawing primarily from the works of H.P. Lovecraft himself. Rather than paraphrase myself, I’ll just quote from our website:

It’s shaping up to be a beautiful spring at Miskatonic University. Finishing your independent study is your only real concern. One night, you dream of a strange frozen wasteland full of monsters and ancient ruins. You wake up shaken, but not worried—until you realize that your classmates, too, seem a little less human than they did yesterday. To top it off, somebody’s ransacked the geology lab, ruining the project you need to ace to keep your scholarship, and stealing something irreplaceable–a deep core sample of very ancient Antarctic soil.

Were the things you saw in the dream real? Was the quest you received more than the hallucination of a stressed sophomore? And what are you supposed to do with the knowledge that your best friend is some sort of fish-monster?

Explore worlds magical and mundane while evading monsters, solving puzzles, and maybe finding love. Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery offers a game mode for everyone, with top-down exploration, arcade minigames, 90s-style point-and-click puzzles, dating sim elements, and visual novel storytelling!

This is a story-driven game with lots of point-and-click first-person puzzles, as well as areas to explore in a top-down 16-bit mode. There are also dating sim elements, where you have to manage your free time to develop your relationships (platonic or otherwise) with various characters, each of whom has a side narrative that changes based on the choices you make. We’re aiming for about ten hours of play time. I’m super excited to share more as we work our way towards the demo. It’s been incredibly challenging and rewarding and I have so many thoughts about the development process. And the artists we’re working with are amazing, too. We’re lucky to have assembled a great team.

Later this year, we’ll be doing a Kickstarter to make sure we can afford all the art we need to finish strong, but for now, I’m trying out something a little fun: we would like to do a short story anthology set in the game universe as a Kickstarter reward! Part of the backstory is a cool (imo) Cold War thing, and we thought it would be fun to let people play in that sandbox if they wanted to. I know we have some writers here, and people who know writers, so I figured I would share it with you all. Here are the submission details. They do contain some (marked) spoilers for the setting, obviously, so beware, if you care. We can only afford hobbyist-tier rates, unfortunately, but it is what it is.

Bonus Samwise and Momo, doing their best impression of a synthpop (or folk) duo liner notes pic:

Aaaand, open thread, naturally!

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Gardening, cats, owls…

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Long time no see! I’ve been pretty disconnected from politics ever since I left Twitter, and weighing in on any of the threads here has just felt like a heavy lift. Been working a lot, writing/programming a lot on the video game (website btw, more on that soon), house stuff, travel (nowhere exciting). You know how it goes.

But, I have been meaning to drop a note about my garden, so, here it is! For all pictures, click to embiggen; the small versions are a little blurry. I’ll start you off with a picture of these lovely irises that TaMara gave me last fall:

Gardening and what-have-you
My phone doesn’t like focusing on flowers sometimes, but you get the idea…

When we bought this house, it was just surrounded by a dirt lot. The builders put some low-maintenance stuff out front, but the rest has been up to us, which is to say, up to me. I’ve been throwing stuff at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. It’s been pretty tricky—we get a crazy amount of sun in a lot of places, even on the narrow strip between houses because of the way we’re facing, and I’ve been avoiding bluegrass, because it’s boring and so thirsty. So I’ve been shotgunning ground covers around. The creeping thyme and sweet woodruff have been big successes; the phlox isn’t creeping like I’d like it to, though it still has lovely flowers in early spring. So this year, I planted a bunch more thyme, and phlox, and some strawberries for good measure. Hopefully I’ll have a nice jungle going on in the back by this time next year.

I have had pretty good success with my roses. They didn’t do so hot last year, but I did plant them in June, which is not ideal. This year, though, my hybrid tea and top gun roses are looking great. I have a floribunda that’s underperforming–thrips, I realized. Trying to get rid of them. I also planted some columbines this year. Wasn’t expecting any blooms, but it looks like they managed to get one out. Er, ignore the bugs… still figuring everything out!

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