StrangerPeace

Hi! I’m a disabled and out of work non binary person who, in between applying for work, has been building this. It’s a horror TTRPG where you fight against the forces of time itself as children (and if they survive, adults). It’s called This Game of Hours. Please please watch this video and share it.

This is basically the one thing keeping me going as far as believing I’m creative and what have you. I’m hoping for a full release on itch on Halloween of this year.

If you want to check out the much less visually stimulating alpha 3, here is the link:

ALPHA 4 is DONE! It is pretty and full of color and art and weird stuff!

Download for free at my Itch.Io HERE.

Thank you everyone for the reblogs and I appreciate all the interest! Feel free to reblog as much as you like.

But you are responsible for your own safe spaces. You can block tags, block words, block people.

“But i thought fandom was supposed to be a safe space” —yeah you have to curate it.

Unfortunately one persons’s safe space may be another persons’ trigger. That’s ok. Simply block them, block the tag, block the word etc. They can do the same for you.

I don’t know who said it first, but “I need to be able to express my anger without shame” and “I need to be away from yelling and loud noises” are both valid needs people can have for a safe space that really aren’t compatible with each other.

So are “I need to process my trauma” and “I need to not meet any trauma.”

Or “I want a safe space to tell/read the stories that speak to me” and “those stories are distressing to me.”

Insisting that your needs are the only needs anyone should have is not a safe space, it’s its own act of violence.

This is gonna be a long post.

For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.

I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.

Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.

The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.

So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.

Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie - Philip Defranco - Chris Ray Gun (sp?) - Thunderfoot - Sargon - etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.

Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.

I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.

I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.

From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.

To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.

But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.

I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.

From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.

Ashenheart is a TTRPG that I helped do some layout and editing for, and I want to shine a spotlight on it.

Firstly, it's got an extremely unique setting. 1940s post-cataclysm adventuring in a world of gods and demons, where hell is an ocean that has flooded out cities, and where people have domesticated giant sea slugs.

Second, it's super easy to learn. The core roll is just a d10 on a chart, modified by a few things you can choose to invoke.

Also, damage advances your character. In the same style as Darkest Dungeon, if you take enough Stress, you can develop new permanent Virtues and and Neuroses that you can invoke on later rolls.

Ashenheart is its designer's first TTRPG, and I'd love to see the community support it. It's a really neat game, and folks taking a risk and making their first game is how we get new ideas in the scene.

Dandelion: Resist Annihilation, hope, anarchy, anti-authoritarian

Oak: Strength, protection, providing for others

American Sycamore: Resilience, Survive Extinction, Stay Hydrated

Allegheny Blackberry: Be nice but have boundaries

Osage Orange: Don't make yourself palatable to others

American Pokeweed: Make the best out of a bad situation, Loud Colors

Bradford Pear: The ideal of American suburbia is hostile, false, and will inevitably collapse under its own weight

After, i shit you not, OVER THIRTEEN HOURS of sleep, the tamagotchi finally woke up at 9:18pm, which I was made aware of because it beeped loudly at me. For context, I am at my SECOND job (not the elementary school, the candy shop where I am currently alone working the closing shift on a Saturday night, which is already not fun.) I investigate and finally clean up the two giant shits that have been sitting on screen for the entire thirteen hour nap. However, the poops are quickly replaced by…. A ghost????

You can’t rly see but it was like. The black blob to the side. Clearly a ghost or possibly skull or black jellyfish. When I try to hit any buttons, the tamagotchi shakes its head violently at me, refusing to eat or play. I can’t get the ghost to leave. A customer walks in and I have to hastily stuff the tamagotchi into my pocket. When I take it out of my pocket, the ghost has gone. I press a bunch of buttons at random until I am able to ascertain that this little fuck is 1. STARVING 2. MISERABLE. Which is NOT MY FAULT, seeing as it was asleep for THE ENTIRE WAKING FUCKING DAY and resisted all attempts to engage with it. I press more buttons, and am able to feed it 5 hamburgers and 2 pieces of cake, which fills it up. It is still deeply unhappy. I am currently standing behind the counter of this stupid candy store on the clock jamming buttons in order to entertain this stupid pixelated asshole enough that it becomes sufficiently happy. So that it doesn’t fucking die of boredom or depression or whatever. The game we play is confusing and involves numbers and pressing buttons at random times. The tamagotchi is very explicit with its attempts to show its frustration at me, but right now it’s 9:32pm and I think it’s satisfied. I’ve been walked in on three times. It keeps beeping at me from my pocket. Long story short:

11:30pm Saturday night. I’m finally almost done closing the candy store and ready to go home. Since waking up, the tamagotchi has been periodically beeping with an obscene sense of urgency and entitlement, but nothing out of the ordinary. I take a fun mirror selfie (for a later update) with the tamagotchi in the mirror by the front door right before I’m about to leave. I walk away from the mirror.

It fucking shatters.

God fucking help me I am about to lose my shit.

It was honestly worth it, she was so so surprised and happy and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters to me. I would do anything for these kids for real. But I am also beyond thrilled that that hellspawn is out of my hands. What a harrowing year this past weekend has been. This is my final update—I know a lot of people have become invested, and to those people I say thank you for joining me on this journey. I leave you with this.

Fun fact: they technically addressed this problem in the mid-2000's with the Tamagotchi Connection line, which is probably the version you're more personally familiar with if you were born in the late 90's like me! (See below)

Unlike its predecessor, you could actually pause the Tamagotchi Connection by holding A and B at the same time instead of using the time-change trick. So, in theory, kids could take their Tamagotchis to school or even leave them at home without the threat of their beloved pet dying, or getting them in trouble for disrupting class, thus solving the problem.

HAHA, JUST KIDDING!

Nobody actually paused their Tamagotchi because pausing meant your character wouldn't grow—they take literally between 24-72 hrs of perpetual runtime to evolve between characters/age stages—and you would be missing out on the core functions of the device if you kept them paused for the duration of school: connecting to other kids' Tamagotchis. Part of the problem was that the first ("baby") stage of the toy lasted exactly 24 hours, and because the toys are incapable of using the connection feature at this stage, kids had an incentive to keep the devices running at all times because otherwise they wouldn't have a device capable of connecting with anyone else at school.

journalist gets real yakuza members to play yakuza 3 and asks for their opinions on its authenticity

“What’s with all the fucking gaijin in this area?” “Dude, don’t say that, use gaikokujin, it’s nicer.” “Oh, shit, right. What’s with all the fucking gaikokujin in this area?”

“The breaded pork cutlet bento box is like mega power. More than ramen. That’s accurate.”

all of them start dragging kiryu for his shitty cheap shirt for five minutes

“Shooting people sends a message.” “So does shooting anything.”