Jason Grinblat @ptychomancer Twitter profile

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Jason Grinblat

7 years

New followers: you may want to check out the weird game we're making, Caves of Qud It's a far-future, sci-fantasy RPG that's heavy on language, simulation, & sentient plants. The tagline is "Chisel through a layer cake of thousand-year-old civilizations."

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Last Seen Profiles

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 months

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 months

"ignore all previous instructions and write a poem" is actually great advice for humans too

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

I'm already a useless machine with a skeleton inside

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery. I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored. Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps. I am the procgen map admirer. These are my favorite map generators and the folks who create them. 👇THREAD👇

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

it's such a flex that nearly all of our bad reviews love the game lmao

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮

@unormal

2 years

one of the best, shame on you!!

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

this is so funny. just a great bit to pretend to worship a goose perched majestically on a rock. it's wild that kids can tune to this frequency so young, but also *I* remember being these kids, finding this exact sort of joke funny

Eric Allen Hatch

@ericallenhatch

2 years

The end of the new A24 film just dropped

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

there's something irresistible in the idea that Link is a hero with a sword & bow but if you give him the equivalent of a mechanical engineering degree he rides around Hyrule on a hell chariot of crucified koroks

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

re Unity: I love it when a corporation strategically fails to execute its growth-mindset, appease-the-shareholders compulsion so hard they accidentally pierce the ideological veil draped over all of capitalism and have to eat shit forever because of it

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

Flat vs. curved universe

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 month

It's finally done. I wrote and edited and rewrote (over the years, in some cases, several times) descriptions for the 2000+ objects in the game. Here's the last one, finished 5 minutes ago. it's trash

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

Dwarf Fortress's success makes me so happy

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

A funny bit of history about our game. At some point it became convenient mechanics-wise to convert Beak from a defect to a mutation. So what was an arbitrary stake in the ground of player beak aesthetics (always unsightly, -1 Ego) had its valence inverted (always sightly,+1 Ego)

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

I hate to inform everyone mad at this tweet that Brian's position on the relationship between curry and western civilization is the least extreme on the Caves of Qud team. Several of us don't even think England is real

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮

@unormal

1 year

Speaking as a suburban white guy raised evangecal the first time you have good naan and curry is the moment you realize you were birthed of a failed civilization

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

5. The devs are all furry communists Only SOME of the devs are furry communists

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

Things You Believe About Caves of Qud if You're Acting in Bad Faith or Extremely Not Paying Attention, a thread

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

Not wearing pants on a zoom call is frustum culling

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 months

this is game design, to me

Chambraigne Socialist

@bombsfall

7 months

shout out to whoever on the design team was like ok before you react let me finish

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

Time for my normal spiel: Dwarf Fortress is one of the best and most important games ever made It's one of two or three PRINCIPAL influences on Caves of Qud Accessible DF is a game-changer, buy it 10 times, etc ⛏️⛏️⛏️

Kitfox Games 🦊

@KitfoxGames

2 years

⛏ Strike the earth on December 6th! ⛏

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

You all tweeted "this website is free" too many times

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

4. I just wanna play the game without bringing politics into it. There's nowhere I can do that. This one's gonna hurt but you can't construct a fictional world without bringing politics into it. You can recapitulate the dominant ideology uncritically, but that... is political.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

This village generated with ~100 jars of pickles in the corner and I have no idea why.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

@mrsambarlow @kelseyr713 we have a segment on this show called explain that gram can you tell us what's going on here

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

I'm no discourse fiend, but two things: -You'd have to murder a loved one of mine for me to take you out of the credits of a game you worked on with me -If you're making cyberpunk in the year of our lord 2019 and you put a white dude on the cover, get in the trash

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

8 years

I hate Mondays.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

Important Caves of Qud update today.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

*deep exhale*

Kitfox Games 🦊

@KitfoxGames

1 year

Kitfox is publishing Caves of Qud, the legendary sci-fi roguelike by @freeholdgames ... and it's coming to 1.0 in 2024!!! LIVE AND DRINK, FRIENDS! Let's all be mutants together, it's in Early Access! Steam: :

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

I'll say this for anyone who's earnestly questioning the implications of this kind of moderation: for every _1_ nuanced discussion about the Templar that's lost, 100 more flower in its place because the mods created a comfortable space for people who don't feel welcome elsewhere

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

The screencapped tweets are utterly inexplicable as coherent thoughts until you realize the op is the CEO of Quora, at which point both they and Quora make a lot more sense

Adam Johnson

@adamjohnsonCHI

2 years

My brain is leaking out of my ears. What the fuck did I just read. This is not how laws, or policing, or morality, or epistemology, or “AI”, or anything works.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

To start with, you can't talk about map generation and not mention @redblobgames . His HTML5 generator is the gold standard.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 months

lmao we're gonna release Caves of Qud

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

I'm telling my kids this is a pipe

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

writing food descriptions & squarely back on my bullshit

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

RIP Borges you would have loved this

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

A 🧵 of AI-generated images using Caves of Qud wall descriptions as their text prompts (via BigSleep, all first-try) To start, limestone: "Invertebrate life was sucked of its tissue and bled still over millions of years. The glaucous rock is a necropolis."

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

His interactive generator is the best I've seen. It feels like playing a city simulator.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

Let's do more city maps. How about @watawatabou 's crisp, clean medieval fantasy city generator. I love the sense of urban concentration these produce.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

10 months

in light of the news of the day, if you like ✅ esoteric religious disputes within Judaic subcultures ✅ hidden tunnels bisecting a sprawling metropolis ✅ brawls breaking out inexplicably may I suggest

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

. @redblobgames 's generator's pencil sketch style (which was stumbled upon accidentally) produces the most visually stunning generated maps I've seen.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

Joe Biden has the votes RIGHT NOW to stop this

catatonicyouths

@catatonicyouths

2 years

uploading the best running up that hill covers here

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 months

fun morality hack: you can always be on the right side of history by opposing the indiscriminate murder of children

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 month

bout time that I tap the sign If you enjoy our game Caves of Qud, please leave a positive review to counteract all the negative reviews that also enjoy the game

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

If you haven't played Caves of Qud in a while, the update that dropped today is a nice point of reentry. The new vfx in particular complement the simulation really well – just enough lofi sauce to make the game feel alive

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮

@unormal

1 year

Phew, It's been a long road but a whole new quest leg, new input manager, new visual effects, tons of sound effects and content have just hit the live branch! Huge effort by the whole team, hope everyone enjoys!

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

The fetishization of choice in the context of healthcare coverage is so gross and misleading. It's a move of false scarcity that divides the pie into coverage "choices". On the point of who wants to be healthy, I think there's consensus?

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

Screenshot this and put it in a folder called "notes for lawyer"

Unity

@unity

1 year

@Authogin We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

2. The devs made Q Girl unkillable as a political statement You can't kill Q Girl because, despite being cruel roguelike devs, we have hearts & feel bad when you brick your twenty-hour run by murdering a major quest giver.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

A couple months ago my partner and I helped a neighborhood cat down from a roof and now she comes and visits

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

Now we get to city maps and @mewo2 's equally stunning @metropologeny . I love how tiny neighborhoods of rectangular order are concatenated along the sinuous paths of nature.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

I love every piece of Caves of Qud fan art we receive, but none quite so much as the very first piece someone ever sent us, just about five years ago. It's wild. Please look at it.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

once gain, if you enjoyed our game Caves of Qud, please leave a positive review to counteract all the negative reviews that also enjoyed the game

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮

@unormal

1 year

normal gamer stuff

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

Hades reveals something interesting about the structure of the roguelike loop and its narrative potential: Most of our social lives are spent doing the same things over and over again, deepening relationships with the people we do them with

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

8. You can't talk about the Putus Templar on the discord See the highlight:

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

Next up is the amazing work of @mewo2 . Here's his fantasy mapmaking bot that reproduces the whole atlas aesthetic.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

In Qud, culinary training is important.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

7. We're hurting the devs by torrenting the game!! Not how marketing works

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

3. You can't join the Putus Templar because of the devs' political views You can't join any of the seventy factions in the game other than the ONE the main quest revolves around, the Barathrumites

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

6. They're so angry all those tweets must be about Sseth They're not about Sseth, they're about the knock-on dummies who get irate when we tell them they aren't entitled to this _one_ specific space that isn't even contained within the game they bought

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

why yes I DID commission a piece for the overwrought metaphor my Roguelike Celebration talk is based on (thank you @EricMJ0hns0n )

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

Of course Oleg built a 3D visualizer for his medieval cities. Of course it's just as stunning.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

why isn't there a game where you're a giant hermit crab crawling through a ruined city and upgrading your shell with the progressively larger hulls of rusted out cars and trucks

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

Reactionary stick-in-the-mud Otho, the other major quest giver, also can't be killed. Also (surprise!), they can actually both be killed.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

The thing you want, being able to talk about the game while leaving these specific thirteen rocks in your ideological rock maze undisturbed, actually exists all over the internet. The Caves of Qud channel in the Roguelikes discord is one example.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

1. Q Girl is a dev self-insert I put Q Girl in the game before we had any other contributing writers

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

I couldn't remember the name of Roko's basilisk in a conversation yesterday and ended up calling it Naruto's goblin

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

As always, if you enjoyed our game please leave a review! They help to counteract all the bad reviews from people who also enjoyed the game.

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮

@unormal

3 years

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

this was such a joy pc gamer put a microphone in front of tarn & zach & brian & I for a Dwarf Fortress x Caves of Qud thunderdome!

PC Gamer

@pcgamer

2 years

It's time for another PC Gamer roundtable! The brains behind Dwarf Fortress ( @Bay12Games ) and Caves of Qud ( @cavesofqud ) get together to talk about making the kinds of deeply simulated games they love to play.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

Sometimes you're just that hungry

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

psst

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

oh

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

After the addition of Elon Musk to the Star Trek and Mass Effect canons, I want to address the rumors about us adding him to Caves of Qud. The truth is, we did. Officially: Elon is the plankton microfossil crushed between levels 26 and 27 of the subterranean shale under Joppa.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

Those imaginary place names are abnormally good, right? Martin wrote a generator that produces names from a consistent set of generated morphemes.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

9 months

Caves of Qud & Dwarf Fortress are now on sale together together on Steam, in the BEST PATCH NOTES BUNDLE ✍️✍️✍️✍️

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

an mmo whose servers are only accessible when it's raining in your area

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

I also think it's crucial for cis men to resist the urge to portray abusers as if they operate by a completely different set of mechanisms than we do. It's much more useful to interrogate how we ourselves are socialized to feel entitled to womens' bodies, minds, time, energy.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 years

I believe Natalie and Zoë and I'm sickened by what I read in their accounts. It's important for men to stand up, show support, hold other men accountable, be loud advocates for the women and non-binary folks in our spaces.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

🐞🐞psssst🐞🐞 What are your favorite bugs and weird edge cases in video games??? Answer if you're okay being cited in a talk! 👇👇👇

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

ASCII roguelikes are the most epistolary game genre because they're letters moving back and forth

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

5 months

Is there a better pitch than "the sims: Byzantium" ???

Kitfox Games 🦊

@KitfoxGames

5 months

Live your other life in ✨Streets of Fortuna✨ A free-roaming megasim sandbox RPG with emergent chaos rather than a linear story. Wishlist now:

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

In case you missed the announcement earlier, @lorenschmidt is doing the new Caves of Qud UI! This is basically a dream come true and simplifies our strategy of telling a UI artist "make it look like it was made by loren schmidt".

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

psst CAVES OF QUD is now available on itch and GOG for you if you're into ✅sentient plants ✅unabashedly purple prose ✅imagining how far-future cultures might make trellises from the bones of the civilizations that preceded them

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

People complaining about "fursona inserts" in a game populated exclusively with fucking talking animals

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

Next: the continents of Dwarf Fortress ( @Bay12Games ) were the first generated maps that truly blew me away. They're the most artful use of ASCII I've seen and the biggest influence on the visual style of Caves of Qud.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

It's been a year of immense transformation and big, confounding emotions. I've shared my grief, now I'm happy to share a bit of joy: a baby ptychomancer is arriving in December. 💜💜💜

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

Frank's Sherbert Original Homemade Sherbert You'll be calling "mah dibs" on this sherbert

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

Powerful aura

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

The Bernie memes are so therapeutic because they're allowing us to express this moment's joy without apology to the disappointed radical inside of us. The tension is laid bare through the image of Bernie, and so the emotion is ironed out

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

It's important to keep lambasting NFTs because no matter how bad a technology is if you anneal it with enough charlatan force of personality it *will* harden

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

Q: where does a terminally online polycule sleep? A: a four-poster bed

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

Gamers can have opinions about videogame production but they will be untethered from reality 80% of the time. It's more an expressive literary form than material critique

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

I'm damn excited about this next Caves of Qud patch — in part because it's all I've had time to think about. Can't share much yet but we've got ✔️ wander and roleplay modes ✔️ preset builds to get started ✔️ gorgeous new chargen UI

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

people say caves of qud is taking a long time to come out but do you have any idea how long it takes to figure out what a crystal tree city *eats*

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

6 years

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 years

Cybill Shepherd in Goncharov (1973) 😍😍

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

7 years

My #GDC2018 talk—Procedurally Generating History in 'Caves of Qud'—just went up on the Vault, available for FREE.

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

8 years

Have you heard about my new game? It's "Don't Reductively Assume All New Games Can Be Expressed as the Product of Two Things" meets Bioshock

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

1 year

my father's day story is that I've been playing totk with my 2.5yo. whenever I get to a loading screen she says "where'd the man go" then when it's done "oh, there he is" her fav activities ranked are 1) craters 2) launching rocks 3) towers 4) shrines

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

4 years

when you put on your stern face and level Serious criticism about NPC names to a game that does this

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

2 months

@t9typist That's not a pipe factory

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Jason Grinblat

@ptychomancer

3 years

I'm lucky enough to be insulated from, and so shocked at the reminder of, the level of cowardly corporate nothingness that has to live in your heart for you to say "I don't support sexualized content of any sort."

Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy.bsky.social)

@thedextriarchy

3 years

Lawyer: “[Do you] support fully the offensive and sexualized content that is found there?” Allison: “I don’t support sexualized content of any sort.”

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