Your mentioning using stuff from tlieset packs (which I presume you made) actually made me wonder about something – I’m definitely not a skilled visual artist myself, but I do have various very well-made asset packs that I’ve picked up over the years (mainly due to the giant bundles on itch.io), so maybe I could actually try stitching a scene together from them sometime. Could be a fun way to spend an hour or two when bored, and I could do something with these purchases while also being able to show off the work of a variety of pixel artists to friends.

(or his mother)

lol, suspiciously specific denial

Yeah, I wasn’t really using Reddit much before Reddit had its meltdown and the threadiverse exploded onto the scene. I’ve had a lot of fun here. Frankly I think I understand how the threadiverse works more than I understand how Reddit works.

I’ve had a similar experience with Mastodon. Wasn’t a big Twitter user, but now I’m more active on Mastodon than I ever was on Twitter. On each of multiple Mastodon accounts.

So that means that programmers are being replaced with debuggers. Human debuggers.

Egads! An error SSL occurred. Secure connect to server be not here.

JRPGs definitely did get dunked on sometime within the past couple decades. There was definitely commentary going around about how JRPGs were somehow bad because they’re too linear and tended to have too many similar story tropes/character archetypes and random battles were bad, yadda yadda. Some people even speculated that the genre was dying out. (That prediction obviously turned out to be wildly inaccurate.)

I guess it could be argued that some people did dunk on it for culture-specific reasons, especially for the anime art.

I’ve met such people before.

I disagree with them though, as the tropes and presentation of a game are more pertinent to genre labels, than is the nationality of its creators. There are many western-made JRPGs, and there might even be Japanese-made WRPGs as well.

Amusingly, Dark Souls seems to have spawned its own mini-genre, with people now calling games “Souls-likes”.

I’ve heard some people try to use “eastern RPG” instead, but I’m not sure it’s caught on.

For what it’s worth, “western RPG” (or “WRPG”) seems to have caught on; some people call this style “computer RPG” or “CRPG”, but I’d say that even more inaccurate of a label. So yeah, WRPGs and JRPGs.

And meanwhile, we also have action RPGs, which can be subdivided into games that are more similar to something like Diablo (action WRPGs) vs. games that are more similar to something like Ys (action JRPGs).

And then we have strategy RPGs. And then we have MMORPGs. And then we have dungeon crawlers. And then we have roguelikes, which are distinct from dungeon crawlers despite also involving going around a dungeon.

Okay let’s be frank here, “role-playing game” itself was never a great name to begin with in the first place. There’s the famous comment that if you’re playing any Mario game you’re playing the role of Mario. But rather, “RPG” is just the broad umbrella for games that are descended, however distantly it may be, from D&D. Kinda. (I’ve heard that at one point Zelda 1 was called an “RPG”, though obviously the meaning of the term has become a little more specific since then.)

I use both Anime-Planet and MAL.

I joined Anime-Planet one time MAL had an outage, I think. Both sites have their advantages. A-P has a very rich database of tags, for both anime and characters, and also has a personal feed history that stretches back way longer than MAL’s does. On the other hand, MAL includes metadata fields for when I started/finished watching something, and has some third-party sites that integrate with it, such as anime.plus, which I use to see stats on how much I’ve watched and when and how I’ve rated things.

So, for now, I just use both at the same time.

I once tried Kitsu, back when it was called Hummingbird, but I wasn’t very satisfied with it. Haven’t ever tried AniList or AniDB.

You’re welcome!

You might already know this, but I just wanted to mention (for anyone curious) that one neat thing about what NYC did is that it’s actually one of the more famous textbook examples of ecosystem services.

Basically, at some point they actually calculated how much it’d cost to build a water filtration plant vs. how much it’d cost to maintain the Catskills watershed, and found that the latter was significantly cheaper, proving the notion that well-functioning natural systems can do things that are worth huge amounts of money, seemingly for “free”, so they’re well worth the effort to understand and safeguard such resources.

Here’s an article about it: https://blogs.edf.org/markets/2017/11/07/how-and-why-farmers-in-the-catskills-protect-new-york-citys-drinking-water/

And here’s an article about how policy approaches have changed over time. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2015/11/30/the-catskill-watershed-a-story-of-sacrifice-and-cooperation/