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Archiving my Cohost posts and updates

10/24/2024

Long time no see! I've been pretty busy with my band, so I haven't been too active with this site as of late. Don't get me wrong, I love myself a good blog, but I just haven't been really getting the inspiration to do longform stuff besides music lately. Now that poor eggbug is being put to rest, I'm probably going to repost some of my long form posts from cohost here, and tag them separately while keeping them chronologically consistent with the rest of this blog. I'm also maybe gonna try revamping this landing page to show of some of my more recent music endeavors, and keep my big blog stuff to a separate page. I'll figure out the details later, but it'll probably be pretty neat :]

fuck teenage engineering rant (Cohost Repost)

6/30/2024

I think it's incredibly funny that Teenage Engineering is just complete dog shit as a synth company now. Like they came out with the OP-1 and the pocket operators, which were pretty well loved by the synth community for their versatility and compact nature with some interesting quirks to add some creative limitations and spice. Then they said \"hey, you know what people really loved about our previous products? The useless gimmicky bullshit of course!\" So they proceeded to make a DIY modular synthesizer line that was way too flimsy and finicky to be more than a toy, and a mixer that is too minimalist for its own good and puts you in menu hell just to do basic shit. That's fine I guess, but then we get into the \"what the fuck are they doing\" kinds of things, such as the choir series of wooden blocks that sound like shit, the fucking 250 dollar toy car they sell on their site, and lest we forget they also are the designers of one of the biggest AI sham products of CES this year, the Rabbit R1. Like seriously, is their design ethos just \"let's take the bougie hype train shit of Supreme, apply it to musicians, and see how much overpriced garbage we can sell to people just because we made it\"? It's kinda hilarious watching them fall apart to be honest.

Gushing about coffee shops (Cohost Repost)

4/12/2024

It's kinda funny that while I've never really been much of a fan of coffee (for the most part I drink chai or just get something drowned in sugar), I greatly appreciate the cultural centerpiece that is the local coffee shop. I'm not talking the starbucks, dunkin, or places that are solely meant to go get your caffeinated bean water and immediately leave. I'm talking shops that have nice chairs, a few options for a snack or light brunch, and encourage you to sit down and stay a while.

They're one of my favorite places to be, and more often than not one of the first places I go when I enter a new city. It's a great place to people watch, serving as a microcosm of the surrounding city. Middle age mothers in their book club sit right next to the artist sketching the people in line. The queer teens sit at one of the booth seats, taking a break from the stress of school and home. A single father brings his child to the outdoor seats, while she plays on the picnic tables and covers the sidewalk in chalk. Sometimes a shop will have live music from bands in the surrounding area, or poetry/standup nights, encouraging people to come show off their creativity. I love getting to see the local art for sale on the walls, and over time seeing each painting sold and replaced until the walls are filled with almost entirely new work.

To me, a coffee shop feels more like a home than home ever was. I've had all kinds of first dates, breakups, coming out stories, interviews, college acceptances, arguments, and wallowing sessions all in my local coffee shops. It's a comfortable space I go to when I want to process and be introspective, or when I want to make major life decisions.

Both the most and least important part of a coffee shop is the coffee. If the coffee is shit, it kills the vibes and less people will go to it. If it's really high end coffee, the vibes are often sacrificed in some other way. The high end coffee shop often leans into a hipster coffee nerd aesthetic, which detracts from the coffee shop as a watering hole. It needs to be good enough for people to choose going there over some shitty chain, but maintain a comfortable enough space that people will actually choose to stay there.

There really isn't much of a point here besides go support your local coffee shop, and maybe say hi to the cute queer barista there while you're at it. They're probably pretty tired of serving bitchy white women and straight dudes who treat them like an object. The world's least soldering savvy trans woman could build a better synthesizer from scratch than these cunts.

Frustrations with social media platforms

2/29/2024

There's been a lot of bullshit going on with all the various social medias that I use as of late. I started falling in love with the tumblr community around 3-4 months ago, and got really hooked on it as a place to look at art and such. Now that's kind of going to shit, as the CEO of the website is openly using his power to abuse trans people online. On top of that, the website is also actively selling people's data to AI development companies without telling them or making it opt-in, which is pretty scummy as well. Tumblr Staff responded to all this shit with the most mediocre response known to man, and now I'm one again moving social medias since it seems like there's a second Tumblr exodus again, now moving mostly to Cohost instead of Twitter.

I'm really tired with modern conceptualizations of social media, as they seem incredibly rife with exploitation of its users. I tried escaping this by making a Mastodon account, but then the main issues I had were frustrations with the architecture itself, and Mastodon masquerating as something it's not. Mastodon isn't the next step forward in social media, and it's trying to pretend it's something it's not. The entire thing is basically the facade of a twitter-esque experience that's built on RSS feeds, which doesn't fucking work!!!! Viewing/interacting with pages on different instances is incredibly jank, as whether or not you see all their posts is dependent on a series of factors beyond your control (has someone else on your instance followed them already, did your instance admin defed their instance, is their an instance bridge, etc.), which is frustrating.

I made a cohost and a bluesky as well, which both were significantly smoother experiences due to them being centralized thus avoiding some of the activitypub jank, but there is still an issue there of one company being the central host, which leaves my data in the hands of whatever benevolent dictator(s) own the joint. I honestly think that stuff like neocities, matrix (when they get a mobile client that isnt the jankfest that is fluffychat), and independently hosted forums are kind of a better future. This allows for more creative freedom on the side of the user and still allows for some level of interconnectivity. The communities I am a part of dont rely on any single website to function, and many of them have already moved platforms more than once (my oldest friend group recently fully switched to telegram). Idk, I think the level of computer literacy will go up soon, and that the inevitable collapse of this current era of the web will bring about users who are more conscientious about privacy, data ownership, and relying less on corporations that don't give a fuck about them. I haven't started posting on cohost really yet, but when I inevitably do I'll stick it somewhere in the lil buttons at the bottom of my page. I also have a bluesky account that I need to add there too.

I might try to upload more music on here when I get a chance :)

Battlebit and balancing a sandbox

9/15/2023

I feel like in comparison to a lot of the battlefield games that battlebit is based upon, it absolutely perfects on that formula and elevates the genre from just a more casual focused tactical FPS into something more akin to a sandbox game. Battlebit gives you an incredible amount of tools to have at your disposal, and not very much guidance on how to use them besides simply experimenting with them. You're encouraged to just explore all the possibilities of all the different classes as well, which most FPS games with class systems and progression dont do, which I find to be a great design choice since it does not pin the player down into picking a main class. What's even more amazing to me, though is that the majority of items feel like they fit into a very good niche that doesn't overstep its boundaries and sets out to do exactly what it was meant to do. For example, the assault class has the sledgehammer and pickaxe, both secondary gadgets that break through walls, but have completely different use cases. The sledgehammer creates big rotate holes so that you can flank the enemy inside a building more easily, but leaves the player more exposed if they choose to peek through that hole, while the pickaxe creates a smaller one brick wide peephole to pick players off while providing more cover, yet doesn't have much movement utility. This dichotomy is amazing, as it enables players to choose more varied playstyles in the game (even though the pickaxe is often the less popular choice. Furthermore, they still give the power to create rotates and delete cover to all classes using C4, though at the consequence of being louder than using a sledgehammer and having limited uses. This idea further applies to the different gun archetypes, which all seem to have their own niche and are viable in their own way. Some guns in each archetype are bad, sure, but having bad guns and having players recognize why they're bad is a great tool for teaching people about tactical decisions in the game, just like the importance of bad cards in a trading card game. Assault rifles are your midrange all-rounders, carbines are your high damage low penetration answer to the lack of range for SMGs, which are better for close quarters fighting in buildings, LMGs are your slow tanky powerhouses that can get you amazing feeds at the cost of movement, LSWs are your middle ground between LMGS and rifles, and snipers/DMRS are your mid to long range armor deleters and quickscope slut enablers. Even the guns that aren't necessarily super viable in the game at the moment, such as pistols, are getting significantly more love by the developers by making them more capable backups without worry of becoming god guns due to the lack of range, rate of fire, and armor penetration. Each class feels important, with specializations in team comp such as healers that can take more gunfights and give their team infinite health and fast revives, support that can refill your ammo to keep the fight going, assault that loves destruction and opening sightlines, engineer which is the tank and humvee obliterator, and recon which picks off players while they're advancing toward the point. None of these archetypes can really make it on their own either due to the time to kill being relatively low, with teamplay being incredibly important if you don't want your team to hemmorage tickets like crazy. The customization is absolutely insane too, while enabling a variety of different builds which don't ever feel like they give you a signficant advantage over everyone else. It perfected the idea that battlefield tried so desperately to accomplish, all while looking like a fucking roblox game, which honestly is an advantage due to the greater visibility on the battlefield making gunfights feel significantly more satisfying and fair. all of this is managed while having an almost fully destructible map, encouraging players to create unique play experiences via their choices of how much or how little they use map destruction to their advantage, yet even with things in the map being totally leveled it feels relatively fair, with the spawn mechanics being less punishing to players due to good map and spawn point design. Battlebit is probably the best tactical team-based shooter I've played thus far, perfectly balancing the high skill ceiling of other tactical shooters while also making it incredibly accessible to new players by not punishing death or experimentation very harshly for the individual. Even losing is still incredibly fun, since you still get memorable moments from all the crazy things you're allowed to do, and all the cheeky stuff you can try getting away with. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the hyper-competitive, punishing, and toxic nature of the FPS community, and I hope that it stays that way.

Non-extensive list of ways we can write the worst possible play

8/30/2023

Singing about animal people and lesbian horses is signficant to society

8/30/2023

Cringe culture as a whole essentially feels like a desparate attempt for the masses to shut out new and innovative ways of self expression, and I personally feel like it is antithetical to the production of meaningful and emotional art. Sure people make bad music, bad drawings, etc. But that's still artistically significant and shows the growth (or stagnation) of an artist's journey. I take the idea of something being cringe as a sign that someone is passionate enough about something that someone else is upset; they're doing something right. Agnes and Hilda by Patricia Taxxon wouldn't hit the same without a cute chubby furry on the cover and I will die on that fucking hill. This entire album is essentially the queer joy of being a silly little musical internet dog distilled into song, and it's in my top 5 favorite albums simply for that fact. I giggle every time Cj the X screams "LEFT PAW RIGHT PAW, THIS CHEWTOY IN MY JAW" because it is unabashedly fruity in a way that you can't help but smile at. I feel the intensity of emotion and subtlety in production that comes with the inspiration of Agnes Martin, and the forceful ripping of every ounce of shame left with Hilda. Antonymph by Violet Pony isn't just a silly little song about being a young adult on the internet with a silly little version of fluttershy wearing a gir hoodie on the cover, it's a queer person pouring their life out on a tray. It's the artist themselves saying "Your negativity about my creative outlets doesn't affect me, and you could be doing so much better for yourself." I really don't know where I'm going with this, I just love that sentiment in fandom culture as an antithesis to gatekeeping of all forms.

Neko