iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

spent today moving stuff off our old archive system that's actively dying as i'm using it. if i try to download too much at once, it crashes the download packaging service and i have to email IT like "hi... me again... yeah... i broke it again... sorry..." how much is too much is forever unclear.

image of part of the "Stop Doing Math" meme, but I've edited it so that it reads as follows:

"Stop doing .TIFs

Images in print or on the web were not meant to be clearly perceived.

Years of giant images yet no real-world use found for 500,000 DPI pictures.

Wanted to see something really clearly? We had a tool for that: it was called looking at the actual thing with your own eyes.

Yes, please give me 93 gigabytes of something. Please give me 4 billion pixels of it. — statements dreamed up by evil wizards."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 12/10/2026

woah no way, european fantasy?? in rpgs?? at last??

screenshot of an advertisement google pushed me that says "The Hazelands brings European Folklore to Fantasy RPGs".

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 07/10/2026

most of the stuff in mine is like "yeah alright, fair cop", but then every like five or six of them is just something incomprehensible, entirely unrelated to anything anyone w access to my account has ever ordered or even looked at.

Screenshot from the list of things Amazon dot com thinks it knows about me. This one says "Product Preferences: Gradually building propane equipment collection".

I am not, and have never bought or even looked at "propane equipment" from amazon. lol

Screenshot from the list of things Amazon dot com thinks it knows about me. This one says "Interests & Hobbies: Collects Funko Pop figures".

I do not, and don't think i've ever even looked at a funko pop on amazon. rofl

Screenshot from the list of things Amazon dot com thinks it knows about me. This one says "Product Preferences: Prefers vintage-style home hardware".

I don't, and don't think i've ever ordered something that qualifies as "home hardware" from amazon, let alone "vintage-style home hardware". lmfao

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 07/10/2026

what's always really funny to me is that, whenever she shows up in the actual game, her class is paladin and she wears heavy armor. she still has her staff, though. but even after she started showing up like this, official art still always goes with the 2-piece. :'D

Screenshot of Everquest, showing an elf woman in heavy armor named Firiona Vie. She is pale and has long blond hair tied up in a topknot.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 06/10/2026

in a star wars game i'm in, my sith (a Kissai priest of the Immortals) explained to another PC who fears the capital-S Sith (dark force sect & imperial entity, i.e. not the species), that the Sith are loathsome cowards & their power to kill w/ the force is no different than a blaster or heavy rock.

Meti-ten-Ryo from the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons. She is a wizened old woman with floral bindi-like ornamentation on her forehead. She looks down, disgusted, at people fighting with swords. She says, speaking to her student, "Look carefully! Observe how it is used for the same purpose a man might use an especially sharp rock."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 06/10/2026

they do in fact got Ki Adi Mundis.

Screenshot of two Erudites from Everquest. They are humans with dark skin and tall skulls to contain their Gigantic Brains.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 06/10/2026

people will stare for long hours at Everquest key art by Keith Parkinson and quietly whisper to themselves, "hell yeah".

The original box art for Everquest (1999) by artist Keith Parkinson, depicting an elven woman in a crop top with a staff (named Firiona Vie) stands on the rocky boulder-strewn banks of a river, a dragon's tail snakes around her legs. Nearby are an erudite (a dark-skinned man with an unnaturally tall head to house his Gigantic Brain), a half-elf bard, a paladin, a dwarf, a halfling, some undead ghosty-looking guys, a big troll, a bigger ogre, a rangery-looking guy, a dark elf lady and a barbarian woman all squaring off. The colors are bright and the vibes are immaculate. Blue sky, green trees; it's rendered so lovingly it feels like you can smell the place.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 05/10/2026

at first this reply had me like "okay" bcz while it's the sort of reply i'd enjoy getting from one of the handful of occultistas i'm moots with, it's always weird when someone drops some prose in your replies. then i realized it was a robot that just spouts vague gibberish.

Screenshot of a reply to my quote-tweeted bluesky tweet, by an account called @khaderbai dot bsky dot social. It says "The office is a temple with fluorescent lighting. Every age has its secret diagrams; ours merely leaves them beside the printer."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 05/10/2026

The government doesn't want you to know this, but you can just scribble esoteric arcane diagrams onto the printer paper at the office during meetings and take them home. It's legal. I have hundreds of instructional esoteries at home.

A 6-part arcane diagram elucidating the connections between the six Sublime Arts. The three Artes Materia and the three Artes Animi.

The Liminal Ars Materia is called Wyldsong, while the Liminal Ars Animi is Concordance. The Occult Ars Materia is Embercraft, while the Occult Ars Animi is Neverurgy. The Vulgar Ars Materia is Techne, while the Vulgar Ars Animi is Arcanistry.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 02/10/2026

"i do not believe that such a thing has ever happened in real life. it is strictly a thing that happens on TV. there is no world in which a father would willingly wake up before sunrise to do an all-day activity with one of their children," i say, standing like Bob Bobsburgers.

Two shots from the cartoon Bob's Burgers. Linda, the wife of the titular bob, is sitting in bed reading a romantasy novel. She says, "Look at how you stand. People who had good childhoods don't stand like that." Bob, her husband, stands relatively normally, if a bit slump-shouldered. (The art style does not really give him prominent shoulders to begin with, so this is mostly projection here—really Bob is just kinda standing there as normally as he could.)

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 30/09/2026

they really, truly are just chatbots. the craft has hardly advanced since Eliza. this is literally just an AIM-bot or bonzi buddy reply to my tweet.

Screenshot of my bluesky tweet about something from a game I'm making, with a reply from an AI spambot account called "An Hourglass of Focus" which has clearly been set up to reply randomly to posts related to tabletop roleplaying games.

It uses a handful of words & phrases I used in my post and throws them back at me, sandwiched between compliments.

A screenshot of just the AI spambot's reply, it reads as follows:

"Giving the heroes' home its own character sheet — then threatening it — is delicious table craft. Hope the next attack makes them roll with real worry."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 30/09/2026

aww shucks i kinda feel like showing the whole sheet, it's fine. it's just a wip and this is just to get through playtesting. eventually i'll hire a real big brain to make gooder sheets (i hope). but i think it turned out okay. the other sheets are looking pretty good too after much fiddling.

Screenshot of the entire sheet, only part of which was shown in the previous tweet in this thread. In addition to the Nexus, there is also a grid of spaces for small square cards, labeled "Party Bonds". Also a section labelled "Shades", where the players can list the people they've rescued and brought back to their Nexus tower.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 30/09/2026

it's important to give the heroes a home. it's also important to give that home a character sheet, so that the players can build it up, make it cute, make it their own. and so that you can attack it. make them fret over it. make them roll dice about it.

Screenshot of a sheet in-progress for a fantasy adventure game called Aryse, showing the Nexus, the home of the characters in the game. The Nexus is an indistinct silhouette of an otherworldly tower surrounded by smaller outbuildings; sections of the structure are labeled, as the Apex, the Tower, the Memorium, the Gatehall, the Satellites, and the Undercroft.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 22/09/2026

oh god, of course they'd have to do tests on mice as a part of running this down. i wonder if the mice see tiny mice!! i need to know about the tiny mice!!!

Another snippet of the Wikipedia article on Lanmaoa asiatica mushrooms, describing an ongoing research effort to determine the cause of its hallucinogenic properties. I've highlighted the following words specifically:

"The researchers have been narrowing down the compounds by testing various fungal tissue extracts in mice and then observing if any behavioral changes occur."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 22/09/2026

ah man... if i had room in my calendar for a vague "1 to 7 days" (plus 12 to 24 hours before onset) to pencil in for Elf Time... i wanna see the anchored lilliputians, that sounds fucking amazing.

Snippet from the Wikipedia page about Lanmaoa asiatica, the hallucinogenic mushroom being discussed in the quoted tweet. It reads:

"Lilliputian hallucinations have been documented as arising from many different disease states, including alcohol withdrawal, macular degeneration, and Charles Bonnet syndrome, among many others. However, no disease can induce Lilliputian hallucinations as reliably as raw Lanmaoa asiatica. The hallucinations with Lanmaoa asiatica have a peculiar time course, with an onset of 12 to 24 hours after the meal and a duration of 1 to 7 days or in some cases weeks. The little people with Lanmaoa asiatica are said to be about 2 cm, or 10 to 30 cm tall and anchored in one's environment, including being stable, realistically embedded in the environment, three-dimensional, rendered in fine detail, and generally obey the laws of physics. One example is little people submerging themselves in a soup, resurfacing, and then being lifted out in a spoon. Nothing else is said to be known that produces anchored Lilliputian hallucinations like Lanmaoa asiatica. Due to the delayed onset, it has been hypothesized that the active constituent might be a prodrug or that it might act by altering the gut somehow. People who are hallucinating on Lanmaoa asiatica are usually aware that they are quite intoxicated. In addition to the Lilliputian hallucinations, Lanmaoa asiatica can produce gastrointestinal symptoms and alarmingly, occasional states of delirium. People appear to recover fully from the intoxication, and no deaths have been reported."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 19/09/2026

i have a lot of feelings about this kind of stuff. after boiling it all down as far as i possibly could i was still well over the character limit.

Screenshot of a bluesky tweet i was writing in reply to this thread, which was a bit over the character limit. It reads,

"this whole thing also extends into people not thinking about what "magic" actually is or how it actually acts upon the world, which is a mental inaction that can be deployed mostly inoffensively ("preserving mystery") or maliciously ("magic can do anything so i'm going to use it as a free square in mental bingo to draw very stupid conclusions, and make very stupid jokes, all while sealioning ppl annoyed by this behavior")"

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 17/09/2026

fuck yes, i'd missed this one somehow.

Screenshot of a youtube video thumbnail for the most recent video by Civvie 11, called "CV11-8A-241 - Ronaldo's Revenge".

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 14/09/2026

the timeline is some event ID 2 warnings about Nvidia drivers (not finding an event description to describe what's happening, apparently), then the crash happens an hour later, and we get these three events talking about the crash, a while after it recovers.

screenshot of a windows 11 event viewer log, event ID 6008

screenshot of a windows 11 event viewer log, event ID 162

screenshot of a windows 11 event viewer log, event ID 41

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 12/09/2026

i definitely agree that players don't agree & generally aren't really even capable of knowing what a good change to a game looks like. i wrote too much, but i've discovered i apparently have Feelings about Old MMOs vs Old Games more broadly.

Screenshot of a bluesky tweet with almost 300 too many characters in it to post. It reads as follows:

"i guess mmos exist in a different mental place for me than most games. i miss & enjoy things abt older ones, but older ones that are no longer around idk.

i replay & enjoy old video games all the time. but w old MMOs at most i'd want to putter around for a couple nights & then put it away for another 20 years.

it's just that SO MUCH abt their design, expectations, and my own play habits (and available freetime) has changed from how it was back in the early 00s, that I just don't see An Old 00s MMO In Its Original State as the same fundamental type of thing as any other Old Video Game."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 08/09/2026

in that case, the 2024 starter set may be worth investigating. i've used it to introduce some folks who were broadly into board games but had no real rpg experience, and the character sheet tech really helped them dial into it. the sheets do very well to explain how and when you use different stuff.

Image from amazon of the dungeons & dragons 2024 starter set, showing some of its components -- a little trail map, some dice, item and spell cards, and character sheets.

Image from amazon of the dungeons & dragons 2024 starter set, showing the box itself.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 08/09/2026

everyone shut uyp my show is on

Screenshot of a YouTube video thumbnail for a video by Noah Caldwell-Gervais, called "Adapting the 80s With Teyon Games".

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 04/09/2026

this thing pegs my speech as Virginian, a state i've never stepped outside of a car in to my knowledge. but the heatmap also lights up Florida pretty strongly, which makes sense (i was born there, my dad's from there, i talk quite a bit like he does).

Image from a web quiz called "my dialect", showing a heat map of the united states, with cooler spots in places where my speech patterns are less similar than the median, and warmer spots where my speech patterns are more similar. The southeast US is particularly red, including Florida.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 31/08/2026

fully charmed by and in love with Travelling at Night after only half an hour or so. there's been lots to love already, but this was just kinda funny and warmed my heart a bit to read.

Screenshot of several menu windows in the game Travelling at Night. The one in focus explains the nature of the game's randomization, which it calls the "Invisible Bag". It reads in part:

"What's random, what's fair? If you roll a ten-sided die a hundred times and get a 1 every time, is that fair?

You can roll a die a hundred times and get the same result ever time. So Travelling doesn't use dice - it uses tokens, each numbered 1 to 10, from a bag. When the bag is empty, we put the tokens back in and shake the bag. There's more than one tile with each number, so you can get the same number a few times in a row. But you luck will always turn.

When you reload after a save, we always put all the tokens back in and shake it. This means, bluntly, that you can save-scum. You can change this in Options."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 30/08/2026

the Victorian Child in question, eager for more Dorito

Photograph of a smallish corgi named Daria, staring up at me expectantly.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 30/08/2026

to be perfectly clear: this art's fine. it's American Fantasy Comics. it's professional. it's not remotely dark souls, however, in any recognizable way. compare the above to some snippets from the bloodborne comics, which are also very American Fantasy Comics, but actually work to fit the brief.

cover image from a bloodborne comic, showing a hunched beast similar to the Blood-Starved Beast from the game, closely inspecting a bald, pale child.

page from the bloodborne comics, showing Hunter Bloodborne walking through the ruined fishing village with the bald pale child from the previous image. there is some laconic narration.

page from the bloodborne comics showing Hunter Bloodborne being talked at by Gehrman from his wheelchair. both characters' features are obscured, the mood is mysterious and oddly tense with long-shot framing and allowance for silence.

page from a bloodborne comic, showing Hunter Bloodborne and The Doll Bloodborne having a short back-and-forth. The Doll greets the Hunter and asks what they desire, the Hunter ruefully admits they desire to sleep forever.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 30/08/2026

i cannot express the degree to which this is just warcraft comics, but without even the Vague Hints of Sauce that one gets from having a blizz IP hound lawyer sitting over the artists' shoulders insisting on some brand consistency. it's so much less than nothing. it's so much worse than wrong.

Screenshot of a page from a Dark Souls comic, showing some Warcraft-looking footknights fighting extremely generic-looking undead guys in armor with big glowing eyes and alien features. at the bottom of the page, a very smarmy-looking nobleman pores over a scroll by candlelight.

Another page from a supposed Dark Souls comic book, showing two generic fantasy characters having a very wordy conversation around a campfire.

Promotional image for a dark souls comic, with shows a fiery demon man, a fiery demon, and an extremely detailed image of a woman's face wearing generic fantasy armor, blood dripping from her mouth.

An image from a dark souls comic, apparently, which shows some rocky-textured undead man-things wielding hooked spears. The text reads, "These foul degenerates serve the master of this frigid hell, and they have come once more to torment me."

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 27/08/2026

it is, especially if it has little legs built into it, like Kramer's Coffee Table Book. that way you could roll on the book itself or w/e.

Image of two shots from an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is on the Regis & Kathy Lee show, showing off his "Coffee Table Book of Coffee Tables", which itself has little legs that fold out from the book, making the book itself into a coffee table as well.

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matara @mataramg.itch.io · 27/08/2026

reading abt the history of a sealion-infested lighthouse, called the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse. i adore this Cursed Pants Contraption they made to get workers onto the rock. "'Tis your turn to Ride the Pants, good man! Worry not, you'll likely not drown, for the Pants are a floatsome thing!"