Emilia
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lazerwalker.com
Emilia
@lazerwalker.com
Experimental games, interactive art, OSS tools. Was games advocacy lead at MS/Xbox, currently a full-time Very Sick Person. Organizer, Roguelike Celebration (and formerly !!con). Disabled (ME/CFS), queer, neurodivergent.

https://lazerwalker.com

she/her
There’s a lot that’s fascinating about Where Winds Meet, but one particularly interesting design choice is the granular escalation of opt-in consent for multiplayer, stepping up from “Soulslike messages and assist requests” to “Genshin Impact co-op” to “full-on MMO shared-world social space”
November 26, 2025 at 4:03 AM
Reposted by Emilia
I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.
I see some book piracy discourse, and, to make a positive argument in favor of buying books, your marginal ability to influence what books get published and support the careers of writers you like is massive compared to most other forms of media.
November 25, 2025 at 11:07 PM
Reposted by Emilia
One of the producers on Guilty Gear Strive said it was basically impossible to source player feedback on balance changes online because nobody had original opinions and would just parrot what the most popular content creators said and so they had to rely on data and I think about that every day.
November 23, 2025 at 4:08 AM
Reposted by Emilia
Did you know that Yarn Spinner tests and deploys all our software on some old PCs a friend found in a dumpster? 🗑️🔥

We entered a competition to win $5000 to buy better gear, so we can test and deploy to more storefronts and platforms. Now we need YOUR VOTE 🫵 Help us out? 💚 woobox.com/fw8p3z/galle...
November 26, 2025 at 12:54 AM
This is a great intro to pelvic floor issues.

I increasingly view this as inextricably linked with the intersection of queerness, neurodivergence, and trauma. If your nervous system is atypical in any of those ways, get these muscles and fascia checked.

www.wired.com/story/the-pe...
The Pelvic Floor Is a Problem
Everyone’s suddenly obsessed with the pelvic floor—physical therapists, MAHA influencers, me. Could this deeply misunderstood body part really be the seat of so much modern dysfunction?
www.wired.com
November 25, 2025 at 10:38 PM
Reposted by Emilia
Go up
> you cannot enter Nirvana with Desires in your inventory

>drop Desires
you now have 2 Desires
March 23, 2024 at 2:08 PM
Paper about fetal autopsy after maternal COVID infection.

“Our observations reveal that SARS-CoV-2 can be widely distributed in fetal organs through vertical transmission… Further, proteomic profiling reveals DNA damage and immune imbalance in infected organs.”

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Presence of SARS-CoV-2 in fetal organs via intraamniotic infection - Nature Communications
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy may result in maternal and fetal complications. Here, the authors analyze 18 fetuses following maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection and identify distribution in fet...
www.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 11:39 PM
You can argue that western-style beds are the wrong tools, or that the American mattress industry is fucked (it is), but I think there are few better places to spend your money than “how you spend literally 1/3 of your life”
Bitch what the fuck?!
November 24, 2025 at 5:48 PM
I have plenty of critiques of Pluribus, but I just keep thinking about how much it rocks that The Big Prestige Show Everyone's Talking About is at its core a character study of a middle-aged lesbian.

(A white cis lesbian, sure, but I'll take that in the current political environment)
November 22, 2025 at 10:53 PM
Hey, Bernie has the right take on AI. It's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about what tools are transformative in what ways (or not) if the big picture is "these are tools aimed at the goal of widening instead of shrinking the inequality gap"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30N...
The Billionaires’ plan for AI | Sen. Bernie Sanders
YouTube video by Senator Bernie Sanders
www.youtube.com
November 22, 2025 at 8:31 PM
I’ve learned my body tolerates rice better or worse at (consistent) different times of day, presumably because different microbes in my microbiome are active at different times.

I’m fascinated by this, and also wish this science experiment had a feedback loop other than “causing me physical pain”.
I'm currently reintroducing white rice into my diet at the speed my poor body can handle, which means I started by eating literally 1-2 grains a day and now weeks later I'm up to a whole teaspoon.

It's hard to convey how miserable this is, especially if food is (was) a source of joy for you.
I'm lucky in that while I was once down to literally only 3 safe foods (white rice, chicken, kale)--which took me 3 weeks and 15 lost lbs subsisting on multivitamins and broth to even figure out--I'm now up to "just" a strict low histamine diet.

But this is why we tell you to protect yourself--
November 22, 2025 at 5:59 PM
A lot of people are going to say “they killed off Morpheus in The Matrix Online”, but the important bit is they killed him off *in a live event with paid human GMs live-roleplaying*
After "film trilogy that dropped a critical plot point exclusively via timed Fortnite event" and "video game series whose story only makes sense if you're aware of the events of a canon pachinko machine", I feel like there are whole frontiers of user-hostile narrative design waiting to be explored.
November 22, 2025 at 6:38 AM
Reposted by Emilia
Sektori is the most Finland coded game I've ever played. It feels like you got Isekei'd into a demoscene demo. This is the kind of game they'd invent in a YA novel in 1995 where dying in the game means they blow up the earth.
November 22, 2025 at 5:09 AM
Okay I have been extremely nerd-sniped by linguistics olympiad problem sets, and you can too if "solve paper puzzles about real languages you don't speak" sounds appealing

ioling.org/problems/sam...
Samples
International Linguistics Olympiad official website
ioling.org
November 22, 2025 at 4:33 AM
A few years ago I had a project that involved extracting the art assets from a copy of MS Bob, and you may be either delighted or horrified to know that the entire thing is a series of Access database files with bitmaps embedded directly in the DB
November 21, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Emilia
Hey, I bet you didn't hear that Zork 1, 2, and 3 were open-sourced today!

…Oh, you have heard. Yeah. Way ahead of me. :)

Here's my comments, and some details that you might not have seen.

blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork...
Zork is now open source
Two years ago, I wrote: Microsoft-the-company does not care about Infocom. But a lot of people in Microsoft must care. Microsoft is heavily populated by greying GenX nerds just like me. Folks who grew...
blog.zarfhome.com
November 21, 2025 at 3:19 AM
Welcome to Springfield - Fortnite | The Simpsons
YouTube video by Fortnite
www.youtube.com
November 21, 2025 at 4:18 AM
Reposted by Emilia
fuck to dsm-5
November 20, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by Emilia
literally nobody else in the entire retro computing community I've seen so far has done this, and this is a VERY conservative group. fuck John Carmack.
I just learned that John Carmack misgendered and deadnamed Rebecca Heineman in his "tribute" over on Twitter. He probably thinks it's okay when talking pre-transition days, but FYI, most trans people hate that. Worse, he never calls her "she," switching to "they" for recent memories. Fuck that guy.
November 20, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Been thinking about the tension between "transition is a thing you complete" and "transition is a lifelong journey".

For most there's a sense of "after a few years, the mechanics of hormones etc fade away".

But I don't think you can separate the larger project of psyche unification from gender.
November 20, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Welp, a guy I’ve been considering reaching out to for help with my microbiome is suddenly out on The Bad Site cheering for the CDC page saying vaccines cause autism, so I guess that’s a bullet dodged.
November 20, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Bill Nye is short for William New Year's Eve
November 20, 2025 at 3:46 AM
Reposted by Emilia
It's on apt. It's literally on Cargo. It's on DockerHub with ads. It's literally on nuget. You can probably find it on snap. Dude it's on portage. It's a Homebrew original. It's on pacman. You can download it on nixpkgs. You can go to pkgsrc and watch it. Log onto the Windows Store right now.
November 20, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Emilia
November 19, 2025 at 5:42 PM
This is a 30 Rock bit
Someone found an mp3 of the creepy "Jailbait" song Olivia Nuzzi released when she was 16 🫣
November 19, 2025 at 7:28 PM