Cursor*10 – little game where you have several “lives”. you use your cursor to navigate the floors, and when the time runs out, you go back to the beginning. however, the previous cursors will go through the same path they made before, thus allowing you to get further each time.
Daymare Town – creepy point and click game. very inky, interesting drawings. you have to find your way through (or perhaps out of) Daymare Town, which is inhabited by obscure prickly people.
Grid Game – there are a bunch of little circles. click one, and watch it rotate and set off a chain reaction. mindless distraction game.
Samsara Room – a strange escape game where you’re stuck in one room but pass through different dimensions to get out
Feed the Head – more like interactive art than anything. there are several different things to do in this game.
Factory Balls – a bit of a puzzle game. you have to paint a bunch of balls to match the model shown, using various options and paints.
Grow Nano Vol. 3 – one of my favorites of the Grow series. you have to click the options in the right order in order to make the sick person feel better. this one just warms my heart.
make sure to click the tags to find more games by the creators and companies and the rest of the games in the series!!!
I find Tonypa’s games to be simple, unique, and enjoyable. A lot of them involve patterns, colors, and matching, so they’re very calming as well.
some from me!!
deep thinking games with exploration themes…
6 differences – a pretty cool find the difference game that’s very atmospheric and somewhat soothing in the first levels, mostly takes place at night around a city, features sound effects and music and even moving cars down the highways. content warning for some surrealism and acid-trippy effects in the later levels (a person with a deer head, some kind of alarming music, the level’s walls moving as you look for the differences, etc – sometimes the level changes after you find all but one clue, and in one instance a train goes by rather suddenly and loudly, but it didn’t make me jump and i am sensitive to jump scares)
i can hold my breath forever – a game about exploring underwater caves in search of a friend. some references to drowning!
i wish i were the moon – short and sweet game about two people and a moon! clone things and move them around to get different endings :3
small words – a soothing platformed-style exploration game that lets you uncover different maps/pictures as you walk around
don’t look back – a creepy game based on the myth of orpheus and eurydice, this is a platformer-style game that has you going to the underworld to get your lover back. very atmospheric, but a slightly creepy atmosphere that (of course) references death, so take care
alight in dreams – during a dream you get wings, and explore the dream to find out about the history of a person who has never dreamed before. mentions death and suicide.
a house in california – explore an old house and learn its history, very atmospheric. can be a bit confusing for some, you may need a walkthrough.
silent conversation – a soothing game that makes levels out of passages of classic books; you win by toughing every word. not my preferred reading material, but the way the levels are built kind of force you to drink it all in stead of speeding through it.
games that are a bit creepy…
prior – you, a little box creature, wake without your memories in an unknown place. you must explore to find your family and figure out what happened before you woke. a dark game with multiple possibilities – can be a little creepy.
immorTall – an alien makes friends with a human family after crashlanding to earth. defend them as long as possible!
loved – a dark sort of game where you go through the levels deciding if you will choose to obey the voice giving you orders or defy it. in some casing obeying makes things easier, but in other cases the voice asks you to make things hard on yourself – throwing yourself onto spikes so you have to start over, etc. sometimes it is almost impossible to do what the voice asks. (serious warning for emotional manipulation, just to be safe – the question at the start will purposefully misgender you depending on your answer, and continue to do so throughout the game, but, depending on your actions, will then correct the mistake at the end.)
one chance – a kind of dark game; in the impending apocalypse you have one chance to decide what to do with the rest of your life. there are many endings, but you really do only have one chance…refreshing the page will not let you play again! content warning for death,suicide, impending doom, hopelessness, etc
every day the same dream – another fatalistic game with multiple endings, but this one allows you to find them all. same warnings as the one above.
elude – a metaphorical representation of depression. dark melancholy levels, nice atmosphere, but can be a little moody.
symon – you play as an elderly man stuck in a hospital bed. you sleep to dream and relive your past. this game is pretty much endless and features endless combinations of the same tasks, to reflect what that sort of life might be like. cw for death and end-life blues.
now for some lighter ones…
pizza king 2 – i found this sim where you run your own pizza shop weirdly addictive. food cw, of course, and it’s the only sim on here because they usually aren’t my thing, but, well.
boomshine & obechi – two colorful games where a well-placed click will start a chain reaction and see how many points you can collect!
music bounce – release bouncing balls to hit platforms to get the perfect rhythm!
dropsum & dropsum colors – math games where you combine numbers to eliminate them. you can choose where to drop the numbers, turn the board, and use powerups! (dropsum colors isn’tloading for me rn, but it might for you)
first person tetris – you spin with the tetris blocks! fun for pros, but it can make you dizzy.
flash tron – a recreation of the original tron game as seen in the movies. here you can play with others online!
dolphin olympics – super fun game where you swim and do tricks as a dolphin to score as many points as you can in two minutes. there’s also a freeplay mode. if you jump high enough, you may even see the moon ouo
mirror’s edge 2d – i adore the 3d version of this game for ps3, but if you don’t have access, you can play the mini/2d version. no real story, but it’s a very challenging game with rad animation!
bloons – i started playing the tower defense game, but they’re all pretty fun and complex. scroll down a bit and click any of the ones under “bloons games”
elephant games – a sort-of series with gems like “achievement unlocked” & sequels (where there is no objective except to complete all the achievements) and “this is the only level” (where you go through the same level many different ways). you grow to be quite fond of the little guy. :’D
some of these i haven’t played in awhile! i pulled from my bookmarks, because i used to spend all day curating links to these things. if i’ve missed a content warning PLEASE feel free to contact me about it or add it yourself!
I have been rereading the MsScribe saga today, which I now believe was so much more than an account of fandom because to have been able to write it is to understand fandom as it operated. This is important because we spend a lot of time on this website talking about how fandom should be, not about how it currently exists, as actual fact. Charlotte Lennox’s analyses of fandom, particularly, of how MsScribe was able to manipulate fandom, were very sharp, and talked about things that fannish people were not necessarily willing to talk about.
A few things struck me as particularly prophetic about this current state of fandom.
The fandom community is completely defenseless against bad faith actors who know how fandom works.
Consider MsScribe’s meteoric rise. Consider how knowing the right words is the one and only condition to being considered Good.
Fandom operates on a couple of perverse incentives:
Trauma will earn you not only sympathy, which it should, but also earn you authority to speak to a number of topics.
Trauma had become the only way that you earn authority to speak to those topics.
In the times of MsScribe, this manifested in her story about her accident and her stay at the hospital, but it was very interesting how she trotted out the story in irrelevant contexts.
MsScribe has also claimed to have experienced sexual assault.
Now, this is combined with fandom’s de facto policy of Always Believe. This set of rules on which fandom operates does not mean that Always Believe should be done away with, but that we have to understand that it should come as no surprise that bad faith actors will exploit this rule.
Accusations of racism and bigotry elevate fandom to a higher level of importance than it actually is.
I have a post or two about how fandom is not actually important in the grand scheme of things, so I will not belabor the point here.
Fandom still plays a huge part in the lives of fans, however, so it must be important, right? How do we make it seem more important?
I believe MsScribe’s stunt with the racist and homophobic sockpuppets presages fandom’s abuse of social justice language. This is not a new point, but by elevating shipping wars to the levels of racism and homophobia, people can claim righteousness and justify their overzealous reactions.
The thing is that nowadays, fandom no longer even requires sockpuppets to be made. Offences in order to generate appropriate outrages do not need to be odious neo-fascist statements; they are everywhere, manifest. You need to keep up with the latest non-ablest language, or you’re out. This is why fandom will never be able to surpass MsScribe’s sophisticated level of wankatry–there is simply no need for it.
Separately, it amuses me to no end that fandom remembers Dan Savage as the guy who said some unwise things about asexual folks, and not one of the media dipshits who championed the Iraq war.
So a lot of the dynamics that we’re talking about right now have already been in existence in fandom, literally as early as the first true fandom history was written. Scary, no? But this is also why I completely reject analyses like Devin Faraci’s that paint this generation of fans as particularly “entitled,” as though “entitled” is not the right wing’s favorite bludgeon with which to hit Millennials. I also reject Aja Romano’s lol-tastic version of how fabulous and important fandom is in her numerous, brazenly ahistorical posts for Vox.com. I invite the likes of Charlotte Lennox, who has a real understanding of fandom and its history, as well as a willingness to talk about oft avoided things, to contribute to the discourse instead.
****Coming to you soon, maybe: A long ass post about everything wrong with Faraci’s and Romano’s takes on fandom.
i’d never heard of this before, but am reblogging it mostly for @vastderp, who may get a kick out of it in light of his experience with similar scoundrels in other fandoms. 😀
Imagine being a writer, and then after your book’s release and when the hype goes through the roof, you write fanfiction for it, then you tweet “there is a fanfic out there that is totally canon. Try and find it.” Then all your readers are scouring every fanfic website, trying to find which one is yours, meanwhile helping all these fanfic writers get readers.
I mean david gaider did this. david gaider wrote dragon age 2 fanfiction on the kink meme and we still don’t know for sure which one is his
my brother asked me how I was and I said “well I’m currently procrastinating my emotions” and with the most tired expression I’ve ever seen on his depressed 17 year old face he said “can you please not be so dramatic for 5 fucking minutes” and anyway that’s the mood of the week
“I’m currently procrastinating my emotions” is not a phrase I have never expected to read in my 23 years of life and yET…
I like how fanfiction culture decided to drop all pretense about self-insert oc characters hooking up with canon characters and just leaned into “character x reader” stories. These were just non-existent in my early FF days, we’re talking 15+ years ago, and they’re everywhere now. I appreciate it, chase your bliss dears
GOD I WISH I HAD THAT SPINE OF STEEL
WHY DID YOU LEAVE OUT THE BEST PART, THIS IS A LEGEND
hello. i am writing to let you know you did good job on the stars, and also on cats.
yours respectfully, me
dear universe,
in the original post of this, it says “dogs” where it now says “cats”. i do not know when (or how) it got changed, but i am glad that someone loved cats enough to do that, because i love my dog and i also love my cats and i felt bad about not mentioning it that first time. i’m also glad for all the tags where people told me what i should have added (like libraries and waffles and maple syrup) and i am glad for all the comments about how much they love their pets (and some people have such cool pets!)
i kind of think, universe, if we are your children, this is our macaroni art. see, see, see, you gave us a little bit of the stars, and we’ve made our own constellations. we tried to give back to you by making art and music and books and bad poetry and our laughter and our love and our tv dramadies. we took pictures of the night sky and pictures of sunsets and pictures of dew, we fell in love with space and the rivers and the rain. i personally have my desktop background as a picture of one of your nebulas. your hair looked great that day.
i think…. you did a good job, universe, on the stars, and what the stars became, because you put us together and yes, yes, things might be terrible – but good gracious did we make so many things worth loving, worth writing to you about, worth telling you – thank you, i’m taking the spark you put in me and using it to be kind, to be alive, to be wildly fierce about our gardens and gentle about our pets.
so hello. i amend my previous memo. i am writing to let you know you did a good job on the stars, and on my dog and my cats and the lizard i kept illegally in my apartment. and universe, i hope you’re watching, because some of the people you made? they’re great, universe, and they’re full of love, just endlessly capable of loving. and they give me hope.
and through them, universe, that’s you. that’s how the stars sing.
Fisherman: Friend, what do you want? [weasel sniffs at a closed bucket with fish] Hungry for some fish, aren’t you? Maybe I should give you a fishing pole? Eager beaver. Let me open it. [weasel is busy digging under the bucket. fisherman gently pokes it] Hey, there is a lid up here. Come on, pick any you want. [weasel grabs a fish and runs away] Hey, no “thank you”? Well, you’re welcome.
just moving along like everyone else 