Leigh Alexander

a screenshot from 2013 of a virtual pet game called 'kawaii pet megu'. the user's virtual pet, a frowning blue blob with a bulb tail, stands in an illustrated backyard with a dilapidated pet house, looking sad. above its head is the message 'everything is alright'. below it, its status window includes bleak updates like 'health: super fine' 'reliability: you are made irrelevant' 'hobby: tweeting' and 'stress: being bone lazy'. the overall onscreen status message reads screenshot feels particularly relevant to OP today

you are made irrelevant

🤩🤩🤩

burned into my dreams

literally nothing to this day is as scary as cd rom games I played in the 90s

a selfie of the poster. you’re not missing anything

a well lit room with cream walls and wooden floors. tables are set up displaying an ad5 terminal as well as vintage mac studio displays. a pink cafe menu hangs on the wall. there are shelves with zines and a wooden cutout painting of a cat on a laptop.

ascii art flyer with two pop up windows, one with the title “bubblesort.html” and the other with the title “popup.html”. the latter has the body text “popup internet cafe, 78 gough st. sf, feb 14-mar 8, sat & sun 1-6pm. a button on the popup window says “ok”. on the right side are some ascii art icons including a globe, heart, cat, and folder.

ascii art flyer with a pop up window with the title “bubblesort.html”. the body text reads “showcase of interactive art about connection & the internet by nina freeman/aaron freedman, cara eaten hurtle, jackie liu, henry tran, and amy wibowo

day 2 of POPUP INTERNET CAFE! a gray rainy day is a perfect time to sit in a cafe and enjoy interactive art!

Jack de Quidt Jack de Quidt is a writer and composer based in Ann Arbor. Avatar by lorhsdraws.

as usual, if you've been waiting to pick up any of my music at notquitereal.bandcamp.com, today's the day to do it. realis is in a really interesting place and perpetua is bursting at the seams with traditional FatT tracks and also crumbs of musical ephemera that are sticking the video game together

Saint Elizabeth, by ella guro 10 track album

folks, it's bandcamp friday today. and i just happen to have a big brand new album out - my most ambitious musical project ever - that you should buy! ellaguro.bandcamp.com/album/saint-...

SAVE THE DATE: Thursday, March 12th will be STELLATHON: A FUNDRAISER FOR YOUR COOL ONLINE FRIEND.

Games streamers! Artists! Storytellers! Giveaways, baby! Participants will be revealed throughout the next week.

Let’s get @antlervel.vet her money back!

Poster by @yotsuben.bsky.social.

video games don't make me feel whatever emotion it is these screenshots make me feel anymore

a compilation of my photos of maine, "A Place Without Bodies" volumes 1 and 2, to advertise it for my early spring sale. in the top left it says "Early spring/"FUCK! I got bills" sale!". in the middle, over a moody photo of a gas station, it says "Over 600 atmospheric photos of Maine in 2 volumes for $20! (That's 2/3rds off its normal price!)". and on the right, over a foggy photo of a bridge, it says "Licensed for commercial use! Use 'em in games, art, albums, more!"

hooooo heyo! some surprise bills have come up here, so i'm doing an early spring sale of my photo packs of maine, "A Place Without Bodies"! over 600 moody, atmospheric photos, WITH license for commercial use! normally $60, cut down to $20! and it lasts all march! ko-fi.com/s/bc50ecb11f

People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans "Pervert Glasses" On Bluesky, users quickly embraced the term "pervert glasses" to refer to Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses, following a shocking investigation.

Make it stick.

some people are just culturally doomed

lol fuck this show and every open mouthed consumer who thinks it’s good

Chrontendo Episode 31 (00:47:37)

Yes! Exactly this. Well remembered wisdom from the Queen

love to work in a field with 0 institutional memory

🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

personally I only love software that openly despises me

the flattening of context and the relative lack of firm institutional memory is a huge huge problem for games as a medium!

don’t like this view, hence making the post I made. there was simply a different set of design values, player motivations and required vocabulary at that time.

I don’t mind that type of ‘unwinnable state’ puzzle mechanic specifically, but I also didn’t like this one and never revisit it! not my style of input

Neither have I

the experience functioning as intended

I did this in the third grade ~1989, including a ‘terrapin turtle’, you simply cannot impress me

☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽

Thank you, still one of my favorite things I’ve done

Leigh Alexander Hi! I'm Leigh Alexander, a games columnist, critic and industry writer, and here's where my videos go! For more of my work, please visit leighalexander.net, or follow me on Twitter at @leighalexander.

discoursing with an ancient text parser and figuring out what it can understand, and what it wants you to understand, and where the hidden clues lie, is one of my favorite hardcore game experiences

please enjoy my old lo-fi let’s play series all over again!

youtube.com/@leighalexan...

we also beat these games via folklore, and dubiously reliable playground word of mouth. there was a lot of lying and myth-making. friends would come sit around the computer with you after school and mash in guesses. very few of us ever beat them “without help”.

also publishers like sierra operated hint lines that cost upwards of 99 cents a minute. I dreaded the day the phone bill would arrive and my shocked parents would yell at me