iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Rutskarn

where the oleander grows @nonblnary.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

went on a level 1 dungeon delve with a new party i met at the pub and im about to lose my fucking mind. the sexy panel 1 elf keeps stumbling into treasure chests and pressing on every loose tile imaginable. they don't have that shit here man. we're clearing out rats from the church basement

17415

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

When I can't imagine a good ending, I take it as an opportunity to add some layers to the character. What's stopping them from finding something good in life? Are they really a prisoner of their bad circumstances, or is it just easier to believe they are? Are they truly irredeemable?

040

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It's not universally true, but my rule of thumb for roleplaying is that if you're playing a character long term and you can't imagine a happy ending for them, that's a red flag for your own mental health.

160

Reposted by Rutskarn

Crushed @silenttakedown.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

yeah sure whatever, let lara croft cook potato stew on her phone for 2m0s of damage resistance who gives a shit anymore

a screenshot from the upcoming remake of Tomb Raider 1. lara croft is looking at her phone in the middle of an ancient ruin, and it's showing her a generic crafting menu, and a png of saucepan of stew that apparently her phone lets her cook for "Damage resistance" if she has 6 potatoes

15276561887

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Not criticizing how they spent their development resources, but customization doesn't seem to have been a priority. There's a a broad pool of races/settings/options which make the random operators look distinct, but if you've got a specific vision for your guy odds are you can't get there.

340

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

hey what's up with the lipsticks in zero company. why can you only make your mouth look like the paint job on a Volkswagen

1100

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

So far by the grace of god, "Zero Company" has not been one of them

030

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

>Other Weapons. I don't know because I can't try them because I have to keep replaying this mission until I kill my enemies using a medical tool for breaking up kidney stones

080

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

GUIDE TO WEAPONS IN ZERO COMPANY: >Blaster Pistol. Favored by scoundrels and nerf-herders. Shoots warm piss, from a dick. Deals one-sixteenth points of a damage point and deletes a random file from your hard drive

2120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

She cannot say a nice thing about him without coming off like she's giving her dasher a five star rating and the recommended tip

010

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

He's like the only motherfucker in this show for more than twenty seconds who is full-speed In Love[tm] and it griddles him like Waffle House every waking second

111

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

During the episode that literally takes place during his BACHELOR PARTY it's about him grappling with his intense feelings of dread, paranoia, frustration, and lust towards this woman who consumes him. Shiv is cheating on him that entire time and her storyline's about her career

130

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

If you cut away every scene without Tom Haverford, you'd be like "that's a show about a guy who's losing his wife...or, perhaps, never had her." If you cut every scene but Shiv's you'd be like "I fast forward through every scene with her husband. It's like they just keep remembering he exists"

120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Something I genuinely love about Succession is that every storyline Tom has in an episode basically comes back to Shiv, but he has no weight in her storylines whatsoever. It adds an interesting layer to their whole dynamic as characters.

160

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

playing like a motherfucker

010

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

This song is lit. I love the Doobie Brothers. (drains plastic cup of merlot) What IS a "doobie" anyway

010

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

So I looked it up and apparently Santana's opener for 2026 was The Doobie Brothers

220

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

"I feel like it must suck to open for Santana, because people who go to his shows just like Santana"

120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

@mumblesbot.bsky.social I need an expert witness to confirm or deny the following sentence

110

Reposted by Rutskarn

Joshua Rivera @jmrivera.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

As someone who is writing a column about art and resistance — when it comes to the expression and practice of politics — I do not think art is anything more than a tool for discussion. Seeing a movie, playing a game, buying a commercial product — these things are not praxis

513018

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Not even as a power play, just the last thing he hears before the speargun racks is "oh shit chat it's Mr Beeaaaas—"

050

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I don't believe the world is going to end in the next five years, but if it did I guarantee you two things: that Mr Beast is going to try to become the king of humanity, and that he's going to be eaten by a seventeen year old who calls himself the Apocarizztic Bullionaire or something

1100

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

i'm not saying i don't have notes

110

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Proximity audio's a fun trick in plenty of games, but Big Walk's the one that makes switching back to the Discord call feel like taking off a virtual reality headset. It is socially immersive and it's hard for me to say what the distinction is.

140

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I've only played an hour and a half of it, not nearly enough to unpack it, but Big Walk's getting something right that I haven't seen anyone get quite this right before.

340

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I'm not sure how much this influenced its reception, but I felt the game's mechanics let the story down a lot. The narrative was great, but I was sucking it through a coffee straw. I could have played a lot more of it if I had to play a lot less of it.

190

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Modestly expensive is located one half-step above "no longer cheap," which is as consistently ungood

040

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

If they have been in business longer than sixteen months maximum and their thing is modestly expensive pizza, it is probably worth paying that at least once in a while

130

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Like there are always gonna be shitty pizza joints that slip through the cracks because they are a buck cheaper. But if you're charging a buck MORE, you really are going to have to make a very good pizza or you're fucking dead dude

100

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Do you like Detroit or Chicago? You a New York kinda guy? Can you even like STAND California style, ah-ha? Yeah it turns out these are all delicious dipshits. DO YOU THINK ANY REGION WILL ACCEPT SHIT PIZZA? IN A WORLD WHERE GOOD PIZZA EXISTS? ABSOUTELY NOT

151

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

It's not the only thing that matters, but if the crust is good enough to eat by itself, you don't need to worry about what style it is. You do not need to strategically assess which toppings are going to going to taste nasty for no reason, these people are geniuses and they will leave those out

140

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

My pizza hot take is that I've never, ever known a place to get the crust right and fuck up the rest

170

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

And in some ways the roguelite revolution just feels like that form factor, of more stuff rather than unique stuff, following that tail towards an increasingly claustrophobic efficiency

150

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

...which is an abandoned path of recreating the RPG experience which has long since given way to the other fork: Rogue, which traded the bespoke adventure element for endless generation and an unbroken content wheel. That's the ancestor of your Skyrim dungeons much more than any old adventure module

150

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Baldur's Gate III was a pretty successful alternative because it has such a rich verb list. You can throw, soak, burn, jump, steal, kick, talk. It's basically a kinetic Sierra adventure game...

140

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Your average room in a game like Dungeon Crawl Classics has so much weird, uniquely interactive shit going on in it which could only belong to that larger environment, but you can't really templatize that or tutorialize all the granular interactions without making a game that's JUST that.

140

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

As someone with an old school tabletop background, nearly all videogame dungeons feel this way to me. There's a whole mechanical / structural language to them which has been genericized over the course of thousands of repetitions, to the point none of it seems to belong to anything.

130

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I have no clue who Pavement are and I was skimming their article looking for anything I recognized, and this is all I spotted

111

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I actually googled "what do you do with a swollen battery" and the top result is like "put it in a lithium-ion fire and smoke containment bag if you have one" oh word? good shit

120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Is that special place an EWASTE CONTAINMENT SITE

120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Fascinated by the idea that some alternate universe doppelganger is telling ChatGPT to make a Ghibli meme of me saying "happy birthday" for the fuckass group chat, as opposed to this blessed timeline, where I'm hand-bashing inscrutable in-jokes for a Discord server of five people

A fake magazine ad: "Dirt, Bugs, Nothing at All: You choose the toppings, the pipe takes care of the rest. PIPED IN QUAIL PASTE. For that piped-in quail taste."

282

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Feels like everything that worked is going away. I figure the best we can do is figure out what kind of thing we want to exist, now, and do our best to make it real.

081

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

It's hard for me to remember that joy is not selfish. Joy spreads. Seeing someone's joy reminds you what all this is for.

0120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

At one point a character say something like "oh my god...these Nazis seem to have skinned themselves alive" except the stock skinless corpse mesh in the game isn't visibly a Nazi, so the circle's just full of regular skin-having Nazi corpse meshes with bird masks on to cover their faces

040

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

She said it like she was saying her doctor told her that she can't have her favorite food ever again

120

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Within about twenty minutes of starting one of our characters delivered the line, "the return of the Suiciders is a grave sign"

260

Rutskarn @rutskarn.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

My co-op partner and I have been playing the zombie spinoff of Sniper Elite, which is, no bullshit, called Zombie Army 4: Dead War. A review describes it as being "like a game you'd find in a Dave and Busters" and that is perfectly accurate

170