Purposeful Grimace and a Terrible Sound

Hidden Springs #1 (May 13, 2026)

Crown shyness

What an interesting word. :D

“Crown shyness is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming a canopy with channel-like gaps.“

How do the trees know not to touch each other?

Do you know what company used to pride itself on having extremely high employee retention, with some developers staying there for 10, 20, 30 years (something nearly unheard of in the AAA game's industry)?

Do you know what company just had that entire bit completely wiped out overnight because some inhuman corporate shitheel that's gonna jump ship in three years to some AI crypto startup decided that quest designers and lead concept artists were somehow middle management? Wanna guess how many of those actual supposed layers of managers that were causing problems were actually dealt with?

But hey, gamers will happily celebrate it happening because said company made a mid space game and *checks notes* were 3 years into a game with a 4-6 year development cycle like every single other game they've made in the past, and even though none of the gamers would like the game anyway the game wasn't being made fast enough and therefore they need to be fired, because clearly firing artists and level designers and quest designers and replacing them with the empty space where a tech CEO's soul should be is clearly going to result in a better game overall, right?

“As for Misato’s bangs, well, I just stuck Usagi-chan’s bangs on her. It started as a joke. But now having the voice actor, Mitsuishi-san and all, it’s no longer a joke.”