Author: brilokuloj

The creepy world of Creatures

By brilokuloj

Creatures, if you’re unfamiliar, is an artificial life-raising game (not unlike Wobbledogs, heehee, you guys remember THAT one?) where you raise little – well, creatures – known as Norns. They eat, they drink, they talk, and they have a surprisingly comprehensive biological simulation running inside them.

There’s three games in the series, give-or-take a few games people choose to not acknowledge, and whether or not you consider Docking Station to be its own game or merely a free hanger-on to the much more robust Creatures 3. Whatever. Three games! But today I am focusing on the first one.

This game occupied an interesting niche in my life, not like any other game I can think of. I liked pet games, sure; Petz was my favorite computer game, second to none. But something about Creatures was so… meaty. There was so much to do in it, so much to poke around in and chew on.

But it was also unrelentingly terrifying. What was up with that?

Learning how to use Obsidian

By brilokuloj

Why I gave up on YouTube

By brilokuloj

Disclaimer: this post was originally written for Tumblr on January 29, 2023. It is here for preservation, because although YouTube has tried to backpedal… honestly, not much has changed for the better.

Hi. I am, or was, a small-time YouTube Partner. I have been described as “somewhat popular”. That’s some context to say, I’m speaking about my life inside the system.

So YouTube’s revenue has been decreasing. I don’t think that’s a well-known fact; this is something they would want desperately to hide, right?

Seems like it can only get worse; it’s in a corporate decomposition stage where the product is about as good as it gets but $ growth is expected for investors. So now it’s cut and restrict the product to get people to pay and add more ads.
– Deleted Reddit user

So instead of taking a step back, analyzing their product or their future, or even (God forbid) admitting that YouTube doesn’t need to make more money, they are now shaking their Partners for our fucking pocket change.

Here are the relevant policy changes:

Mouth Dreams, as reviewed by the panic attacks it gave me

By brilokuloj

Neil Cicierega, also known by his band name Lemon Demon, is an internet sensation. In my opinion, he’s the internet sensation, because he and his friends basically shaped the internet as we know it today.

It’s hard to avoid his influence online, whether your feelings are positive or negative. That’s why when he released Mouth Dreams in 2020, it changed the trajectory of my life – for the worse or the better, I cannot say.

Mouth Dreams is the newest in his series of inexplicably Shrek-themed mashup albums, alongside Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence, and Mouth Moods. You may remember Mouth Dreams as a funny novelty, or if you have a sense of chronological linearity not marred by trauma, you might even remember it as one of the few enjoyable things to come out of 2020. Unfortunately, I remember it solely as one of the largest and longest panic attacks I have ever had.

Today, I am here to take you on a tour of exactly what happened to me on the evening of September 30, 2020.

Things I didn’t know my local library had

By brilokuloj

I am ashamed to say that, up until last year, I had never been inside of a library. For most of my childhood, this was because my family didn’t seem to trust libraries for whatever reason, choosing to take me to the obviously much more expensive Borders for brand-new books. Into adulthood, I grew more comfortable going to other used-goods locations such as thrift stores, but just couldn’t quite jump the hurdle into just going to the damn library.

It didn’t help that they were frequently depicted as negative and hostile spaces in the TV I grew up watching. What was up with that? Between librarians being stereotyped as scary and controlling, to exaggerated tales of overdue fees, I grew up with the impression that the library was a terrible place that you only went to if you literally couldn’t afford anything else. Like the food bank. (The food bank is also fine, I learned.)

I started writing this article thinking of it as a collection of things that you could find at your local library, but that felt so broad as to be meaningless – or patronizing. I’ve chosen to narrow it down to things I have found at my library, as someone who only knew the library as a place where you could get a dirty old book that you’d forget about and accidentally end up paying $50 for.

Internet Archive: Music from Doom Vol. 1

By brilokuloj

As you may have heard, the Internet Archive has lost its first fight to defend their right to digitally lend books. This means, potentially, the loss of their millions of e-books.

It’s for these reasons that you should donate, if you can. But the people who benefit the most from a digital library are the people who don’t exactly have money lying around – so, in the Archive’s own words, actively using the archive is just as important.

That’s why I’m bringing back our Internet Archive series! Back in 2020 I had taken up the hobby of posting about things you could find on the Wayback Machine. I really do think it was one of the few things keeping me together back then, since it wasn’t like there was anything else to fuckin’ do. Tumultuous times like these feel like a good enough reason to bring it back, and why not branch into other parts of the Archive too?

Today, I’m looking at “Music From Doom Vol. 1”, ripped and uploaded courteously by “de usual archiver”.

KFC’s Double Down and the Skull of Doom

By brilokuloj

Against all odds, things have managed to get even worse for America in 2023. Prices for everything are going up while wages get cut. Our nation continues to divide against itself. In my most recent trip to the food bank (something I didn’t even need to go to until I moved out), I had to sit in line next to a working-class guy talking very animatedly about how the government was slowly killing us (true), while also taking forks in the conversation to say that he had heard Wal-Mart was putting reproductive sterilizing chemicals in their face masks (WHAT).

That is why I regret to inform you that, in this time of great catastrophe, KFC has had the audacity to re-release the Double Down.

Haven’t we had enough? Isn’t life hard enough? Isn’t America in enough strife, without having to remind us of our deepest shames? No. Now we have to deal with the Double Down, all over again.

Don’t confuse Rowntree’s Fruit Gums for anything good in the world

By brilokuloj

Food is one of the fundamental parts of any functioning society. That’s why I love to write about it so much. It forms the connection between us as people, it brings us closer together. It’s a shared experience that also happens to sustain us physically.

Where would we be without this? What a living nightmare it would be. Could you imagine eating food that does not replenish and nourish you, but actively attempts to harm you?

This is the story of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums, one of the worst ‘foods’ I have ever eaten.

How to waste your money and sticker paper

By brilokuloj

If you know me, it is not a secret that I absolutely love stickers, and labels and patches and all kinds of stick-on things. It was one of the first hobbies I got into as an independent adult and it has kept me sane in times of extreme duress, including and especially right now! So it only made sense to me that, as a sticker-lover and an artist who enjoys using printers, I would want to design my own.

Turns out it’s goddamn hard though. It takes a lot of time, and initial investment. I certainly am up to my shoulders in free time recently, but that is the same reason I don’t have money to spare.

So here’s my journey of trying to make my own stickers, all from the (relative) comfort of my own home. Did I succeed in my quest? No, I did not.

How to make Toy for Cat

By brilokuloj

Or, how can we set and achieve realistic goals?

In 2011 I decided to get into sewing, with the express and singular goal of sewing my girlfriend a life-sized plushie of Slowpoke, her favorite Pokemon. Nothing gave me this idea except my weird, strange little brain, that when she said Slowpoke was her favorite Pokemon I thought “I’ll make you one!”

I started practicing sewing, literally just the basic stitches, on scraps of old underwear I wasn’t wearing anymore. Then I eventually got that pink and cream fleece, and I started teaching myself how to draft my own patterns, with the help of many many online tutorials by the likes of much more accomplished people (Abby Glassenberg, I owe you my life).

My girlfriend didn’t just put up with my piles of unfinished projects, she encouraged me through all of it. I knew she was ‘The One’ because she believed in me no matter how often my hobbies shifted. I felt supported. We moved in together. We got married. We adopted a cat.

And, as it turns out, sewing is just a great basic life skill for me. Even as I stopped making plushies as frequently (after finding out most people are not willing to pay for the amount of labor that goes into a project), I could mend my clothes in a snap so I wasted less money on new shirts, I was much more dexterous with my fingers, I built up better pain tolerance, and – most thrillingly – I discovered that 3D art is just… my favorite thing ever. As I got better at sewing, I got more into 3D modeling, because 3D models helped me visualize sewing patterns. All of my disconnected hobbies constructed me, a fully-realized person.

I did not ever make that Slowpoke. I still don’t know if I could; the ears were always the thing that stumped me the most. Now I don’t even know if I should; she is no longer into Pokemon.

But that Slowpoke taught me a lot. And, as sort of a sappy thanks to my wife and all of the people who supported me (even unknowingly, like Abby Glassenberg), I am going to walk you through the internal process of me designing my latest sewing project: a toy for my cat. It’s about as much of a tutorial as my disordered brain will let me make!