Heeee-llo.
I am Artur and I go by they/them and er/ihn. I believe that everyone needs digital real estate, and this is mine. It's a laboratory because I keep tinkering with it when I am here, and it's where lots of my thoughts are cultivated. I am an artist and researcher by day and ... by night lol.
Weeeel-coome!
-PAST-
When I first went online, it was all about games. I was looking up cheats on mogelpower.de for Animal Crossing: Wild World, reading wild rumors about various mysteries that were all made up. I barely hold any nostalgia for Geocities, IRC and whatnot. What I did was play disturbing flash games on erdbeertorte.de. I loved browsing DeviantArt even though I didn't know what the hell the english meant. I played games on neopets.com even though I didn't know what the hell the english meant. I played Toontown even though I didn't know what the hell the english meant. In general, there was a huge language barrier to me which I curiously did not mind. I kept telling my friends at school to go on nick.com and not nick.de because that's where all the cool SpongeBob games were hidden away from us. Eventually I became a mod on one of the bigger German Animal Crossing communities which I to this day treasure. And while most of my time online was spent on fun games, German social media platforms turned out to be quite magical before Facebook gobbled them all up.
-PRESENT-
I taught myself a lot of web development as a kid when I wanted to make my blogger blog all cool and hipster. I believe it's what led me to my research field. As I never really spend time on very wild and myspace-y spaces, I could never really resonate with a lot of the amazing punk and brutalist work that has been happening on Neocities. I quickly fell in love with its raw nature and yearning for the social media periphery. After all, I love finding community online, but like many other people, comfort and accessibility turned out to be crucial to how I spend my time online.
FUTURE I am dreaming of a web that strengthens community and uplifts their voices. I don't want to give in to the yearning for old times. I want the ones capable to make an effort in building bridges to spaces worth sharing. This space is for me to reflect on my time online and to brood over my online experiences. There's a lot I am struggling with when I look at central and peripheral online spaces, and I hope to make room for those doubts here.
The Latest — freshly cooked updates from across the lab.
Writing
The Cozy Game as the ultimate fuel for creative bankruptcy
Since establishing my own Mastodon instance for my friends, I've often discussed ways to welcome new users. While they can understand the medium on their own, discovering content for their timeline can be challenging. Moving away from automatically curated content designed to keep you glued to your screen is tough, so I've collected some suggestions to help everyone get accustomed to the Fediverse. At the end of this post, you'll find all the links I found useful for refining my content feed.
Games
Atelier Rorona
This game is joyous and quite beautiful. It was my first real experience playing an Atelier game, but this time around I did not completely fail. I think most characters are quite charming, and the gameplay loop gets quite addictive. I am glad the series kind of figured itself out along the way, but I appreciate the obscurité of unlocking certain stories. I think this series is a great example for when achievements can hurt your experience playing a game. This game in particular prides itself on letting you experience a different story with different events if you replay it, yet that goes against the philosophy of getting as many cheevos in one go as possible. I am glad I played this on my Switch. The endgame is BRUTAL, and I would have not expected these games to be harder than a lot of current JRPG-style games.
