The worst thing about being born and raised in a poor family, in a poor country, is not having to drink stomach-ache-inducing tap water and then sleeping on your stomach because once again your parents couldn't afford dinner. No, sir, you get used to that... eventually. The worst part is having to dream small, having to conform with whatever you get from life, and counting your blessings. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, creative fulfillment is the least of your concerns.
But kids don't care, and I dared to dream. I made my own trading card game with original monsters hand-drawn and colored by myself when I was seven years old — because I couldn't afford Yu-Gi-Oh cards —, co-wrote — alongside my older, more creative cousin — a superhero series when I was eleven, and wrote an article for an independent newspaper when I was sixteen. Not an astonishing resume by any stretch of the imagination, but writing was somehow always there.
Looking back to those years, I cannot help but ask what would be different if I hadn't let the spark of creativity die. Who knows. Kids from poor countries have to work as if they were men as soon as they're able to, and that's how I spent my teens. I was too tired to care for creative work.
It wasn't until my mid-twenties that I reconnected with my creative self: I did YouTube, I did stand-up, and that eventually brought me here, to writing.
I couldn't sleep; therefore, I got up. I had creative ideas — I always have; thus, I started reading. Save The Cat was my book of choice. I started reading it years ago, but never finished it. What else could I read at four in the morning?
It was clear to me that I wanted to write stories, for my own amusement — and maybe for other people's too —, but I didn't know how to. A lot of reading was to be done if I ever wanted to learn how to write.
From that day on, I read. I finished Save The Cat, and started another book, then another one, and another. I read fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, and autobiographies. I read books in English and Spanish. I read about writing, and I read for the fun of it, but damn it, I read! I did more reading during these 100 days than in the past decade.
Here are the books I read in case you're curious:
Audiobooks
Short Stories
The following stories are all drafts, first drafts, that is. I wrote them, and I moved on. I haven't checked them ever since. I see them more as exercises than pieces of literature to be read and enjoyed. They are most likely plagued with grammar and syntax errors, aside from the obvious storytelling sins the amateur wanna-be writer might commit. They are not meant to be read, unless the reader has offering criticism in mind. You've been warned, do not enjoy them.
The first ten days were difficult, in particular the very first day. Writing a story was nothing like writing stand-up comedy, where I could just get in a stream of consciousness, write whatever, and then take what I wanted. No, I had to write with coherence in mind, and I hate coherence. This is evident in the first story I wrote: Untitled Story #1, which I sometimes refer to as A Guy Decides To Be A Social Recluse. It's told entirely in third-person unlimited, and it doesn't have a single line of dialogue. It's an abomination, and it makes me feel ashamed, as if I just wet the bed.
I had some interesting ideas — despite the poor execution. For example, Untitled Story #4, A Group Of Guys At A McDonald's Discuss A Movie They Just Saw, it's the kind of Seinfeld-esque stuff I enjoy reading and would like to write. It's just that, a "slice of life" story of a group of friends talking at a McDonald's. Nothing more than that.
As I approached the 10% mark, I thought about getting out of my comfort zone with the writing prompts I came up with; thus, I wrote Untitled Story #7, A Guy Chats With A Woman Every Night But Things Go Wrong. I had watched the movie Phone Booth the day before and basically ripped off the story for this one. Shameful stuff.
The longest and most complex story I wrote during those first ten days was Untitled Story #9, A Guy Gets A Chance To Sleep With The Girl Of His Dreams But Cannot Find A Box Of Condoms. I felt good after writing this almost two-thousand-two-hundred-word piece. Although riddled with style and composition errors, incoherent plot, and much repetition, it was my little mess, and I loved it all the same.
In a typical me-fashion, I had to end on a low note; thus, I wrote Untitled Story #10, A Guy Finds A Fly In His Soup. A less than a thousand words story where half of it is "X said" or "X replied", because I knew squat about dialogue attribution by that point...
The next 15 days were less difficult; I kept reading and learning, and that made my writing a little better. Take my word when I say "a little". I mean it.
The first story I wrote was Untitled Story #11, A Woman Has To Work Overtime While Her Kid Is Home Alone. In a perfect world, this story would be thrilling, but again, I could not pull that off. The end of the story was literally taken from a writing prompt in Steve King's On Writing. I had read it the day before, and my mind went instantly there.
The next day, I wrote Untitled Story #12, Two Guys Play Videogames And Talk. I usually start from a prompt and let my mind take me anywhere it wants to; this time, however, I started from a funny piece of dialogue I wrote and wanted to fit into a story so badly. It's about economy in JRPGs; of course it was funny!
A couple of days later, I tried writing horror for the first time. Untitled Story #15, A Man Writes In His Diary, and Untitled Story #16, A Housewife Waits For Her Husband's Family Visit, are what I managed to come up with. I tried stuff like an unreliable narrator for the first time here. I felt like I needed a shower after writing the former of the stories because of the kind of violence depicted there, but I told myself that's what the character would do — because he's a sick bastard. The latter story occurred to me after reading a headline that lacked commas, and deciding to run with it.
Further down the line, I wrote Untitled Story #18, Terrorists Take Over A TV Station. I was so scared of writing this because I thought the prompt was solid and I didn't want to mess it up, but I like how it turned out. This is one of the stories that I'd love to rewrite after I get a better idea of what I'm doing. This story gave me my favorite character so far: Lorenzo López, whom I want to make a recurring character in my stories.
Untitled Story #19, A Woman Talks To The Police was inspired by this toot. I asked myself: "How can I make a story out of this?" and ran with it.
Another couple of days passed, and I tried writing something sci-fi(ish) in Untitled Story #21, A Man Gets A Call From His Future Self. I wanted this story to be so much more, but the result is all I could come up with, and I won't obsess about it.
Untitled Story #22, A Man Reads The Eulogy At His Father's Funeral, and Untitled Story #23, High School Students Get A Chain Letter Email are both father-son stories, the former being more emotional than the latter, especially because the latter is unfinished. I'd need around 5,000 words to tell the story I want, which makes it a perfect candidate for a rewrite. Also, I named the kid Tyler in the latter because I was reading Fight Club at the moment.
Next, we have my favorite story so far: Untitled Story #24, There's A Heist In A Hospital. The reason I love this story is that it really happened, and I saw it with my own eyes. In 2014, I was an intern in one of the biggest hospitals of my hometown — as an AC repairman, not in a medical role! Long story short, everything in the story happened exactly how I described it, except for the dialogue between the heist team, which I obviously had to come up with. Now, this story is flawed. Not because of my inherent lack of knowledge in the craft, but because I was sleep-deprived and exhausted when I wrote it; thus, it ended up not only with several grammatical and syntactical errors, but also with named characters that literally serve no function besides having a single line. What a waste... I will definitely rewrite this one, but as for now, I present it as it is.
For the last story of this stretch, Untitled Story #25, A Guy Has A Date With Her Crush, I didn't go out with a bang. I wanted to create a character part unreliable, part complex, but I don't think it ended up working.
During this stretch, I went from a quarter to half the way; I'm not gonna lie, it felt good! It's all downhill from here on, as they say.
I incorporated dystopian and science fiction themes in multiple stories during these 25 days, starting with Untitled Story #26, An Anti-Noise Pollution Law Is Passed In The Future. Other stories are: Untitled Story #30, Aliens!; which I imagined as an episode of The Twilight Zone; Untitled Story #32, A Man Gets Warned 24 Hours Before His Son Dies, which is basically the plot of the series Person Of Interest; Untitled Story #33, Zombies!; Untitled Story #35, Workers Don't Exist Outside Work; Untitled Story #36, Minors Get More Rights In The Future, which occurred to me after seeing a Huggies billboard; Untitled Story #41, Space Traveling!; and Untitled Story #49, People Live Forever, which I somehow thought of and posted about the premise on Mastodon. These stories were fun to write and are some of my favorites.
In the paranormal/supernatural front I wrote such stories as: Untitled Story #28, A Guy Tries To Revive His Wife; Untitled Story #38, People Ride A Bus, which I wrote solely because I wanted a story that took place in a bus; Untitled Story #39, Dancing!; Untitled Story #40, A Kid Hears Voices; Untitled Story #45, A Guy Speed Dates; and Untitled Story #46, A Dark Cloud Engulfs A City. I don't think these stories are as solid as the previously mentioned ones, but I still had a good time writing them and think most of them have potential to become something greater.
I also wrote my first ever erotica story: Untitled Story #42 Horny Stuff!, which is not that much about horniness as one may expect; and my first fantasy story: Untitled Story #44, Fantasy!. At first, I only had a one-line premise, and I told myself that turning it into a fantasy story would be pretty fun. I wanted it to be familiar but also different; that's why I chose a premise that had nothing to do with fantasy. It also serves as a good metaphor — I hope.
As usual, I didn't get out with a bang. The last story of this stretch was Untitled Story #50, A Kid Gets A Tamagotchi. I liked where the story went as I wrote it, but I committed myself to an ending before knowing the direction the story was gonna take. It's supposed to be a supernatural story after all, but it's not immediately evident.
With these 25 stories, I experimented a lot. Some stories went too heavy on description, which may not be ideal when writing flash fiction. I'm still learning; I will allow myself to make mistakes, look back, and learn from them. Writing every day is more important than being perfect.
The next 25 days took me three-quarters of the way. I'm not going to lie, by this point, I was tired. Finding the time and energy for creative work in between work and chores was not easy. Fortunately, work was not too demanding, and I could push through.
I started with Untitled Story #51, A Flesh-Eating Bacteria Epidemic Breaks Loose. The story is a celebration of life in times of crisis. Like most other stories, it didn't end up being what I envisioned, but it's OK.
I wrote multiple stories about group struggles during this period, some of them: Untitled Story #53, Armed Forces And Civilians Face Off; Untitled Story #54, A Group Of People Visit The World's Tallest Building; Untitled Story #59, A Zoom Call To Die For; Untitled Story #61, Underground People!; Untitled Story #70, Yafreisy Takes Over The World.
Other stories were focused on individual struggles, among them: Untitled Story #55, A Man Keeps Re-Living The Same Day; Untitled Story #58, A Cinderella High School Baseball Team Heads To The National Tournament; Untitled Story #62, Underwater People!; Untitled Story #67, Correspondence; Untitled Story #74, Between San Juan And San Pedro, this last one being is based on a famous Argentinian folk lullaby song my mother used to sing when I was a kid, but given a little tweak to make it my own.
The last story I wrote during this period was a fun experiment. Untitled Story #75, Already Seen, turned out very different from what I initially wanted, but all the important elements are there; I can't complain.
I noticed that I kept defaulting to male characters and decided to go the opposite route. As a result, many of these stories are protagonized by female characters; some are average, others are indistinguishable from male characters, a few are good. The important thing is that I tried and will keep trying.
Fantasy, horror, and science fiction are very present in these stories; some of them were even inspired by Kaiju films, which I was watching a lot while writing this batch of stories.
Now, for the last 25 stories...
I was exhausted and creatively bankrupt, "maybe I should leave it here," I told myself multiple times, but I didn't; I pushed through, I made it happen, and it was during this period that I wrote some of my best stories, accounting for my little experience.
Here are five of those stories, not necessarily my favorites, but some of the most peculiar ones:
Untitled Story #76, Once Upon A Time In Rainbowland, was my first fairy tale. Of course, it is an allegory; I wouldn't want it any other way.
Untitled Story #84, The Quban Revolution is a retelling of the Cuban Revolution. I must apologize to the beautiful people of Cuba for my limited knowledge of their story; nevertheless, I did the best I could.
Aliens just invaded Earth! How does that affect YOU? That's what we explore in Untitled Story #85, Proletarians And Aliens. This is certainly a flawed story. The lack of real action makes it feel like a missed opportunity, but I'm OK with the result.
Untitled Story #90, The House is a gritty story about a reality we collectively choose to ignore because it does not affect us. Reading this can make you feel uncomfortable, and I'm not going to apologize for it. Like many other stories, this is an allegory, but I think it works well even if the "real" meaning is not immediately apparent.
Untitled Story #100, A Hot Summer Day, the last story I wrote. I think this reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone, but I'm probably just flattering myself. I wrote this the same day a national-level blackout hit the country. Coincidence? Yes, 100%.
I personally think the last ten stories or so are pretty solid in more than one aspect. They might not be perfect — of course, they aren't — but they are decent. Some of my best work, if I may say so myself.
And with that I say: the job is done!
Since this post was almost a day-by-day update on the process of writing — I wrote different sections as I advanced in my journey — I'm planning to write in detail about what I learned from this experience in a separate post.
For now, I can say that I re-discovered what I knew all along: I am capable of creative output; we all are, and you should be doing that thing you have been longing to do but keep putting off. Come on, go do it, now!
Now, here's the big question: now what? I thought that after writing my hundredth story, I would write the hundred-and-first one the next day, but I'm tired. I learned so much during these three months and a third; I want to let that knowledge sit in my brain for a while.
I also want to keep challenging myself in new ways. I have wanted to create a comic strip for a long time. Maybe I should try 100 days of drawing? That remains to be seen.
Of course, I want to keep writing; in fact, I've been working on the outline of what I hope to be my first great short story. I have envisioned a 4,000-5,000-word story, but who knows, it may be longer! Oh, and said story is in fact an expansion of one of the one hundred stories I already wrote; it'll be familiar but bigger and better in every single aspect.
But that's for the future, hopefully before the end of the year; right now, all I want to do is finish Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei I-II, a video game I started playing more than three months ago and had to pause to dedicate myself to writing entirely.
Thanks for reading.
As usual: SPOILER ALERT, I'll be talking about different games, and I might or might not spoil parts of the plot. Don't worry, I'll start each paragraph by mentioning the name of the game so you can decide if you want to keep reading or not before being spoiled.
As that Italian plumber once said: "Here we go."
The first game I finished was Blue Dragon, a game most famous for being one of the few JRPGs on the Xbox 360. Oh, it was also developed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy, and the character designs were made by Akira Toriyama, but I don't really care about that. I mostly played this game during June, but it was early July when I managed to finish it.
This game is usually referred to as "a forgettable experience" by people who got it all wrong. The game is primarily aimed at kids, so, sorry if there's not enough political conflict and complex character arcs in here; it doesn't mean it's not good, it means it is not for you, and that's OK. Nobody compares Blue's Clues to The Sopranos; only an idiot would do that. What I'm trying to say is: shut the fuck up, it's just a game for kids, move on.
Behind its cartoony aesthetic and seen-before plot, there's a complex game, and I appreciate it for that. That being said, I have a confession to make: I didn't "finish" this game. I grinded for hours, made it to the final dungeon, beat the third-to-last boss, proceeded to the final boss chamber, and the game crashed. Did I mention you can only save in designated locations in this game? I didn't!? How silly of me.
Since I was over-leveled by about 20 levels and was definitely not going through that horrible maze of a dungeon again, I just watched the ending on YouTube and called it quits. Not a fan of doing this — like I'm not a fan of this game's bullshit — but that will have to do. I still marked it as finished.
And there it was, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, a game that has been in my mind since I first played Oracle of Seasons as a kid. There's a certain charm in portable Zelda games that's hard to describe. Of course, the king of them all is Link's Awakening, and I did like Oracle of Seasons better, but I still had a good time with this one. What's more, after finishing Oracle of Ages and inputting a password I got that time I finished Oracle of Seasons, I got to play the real ending of the game, so that's something.
Moving on.
Let's all be honest here, calling it Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island was a stupid idea, a marketing scheme, and a communist plot! Well, maybe not that last one, but it definitely was stupid.
I remember this game from my childhood, not because I owned it, but because a friend of mine used to play it all the time on his Game Boy Advance. I was just mesmerized by how colorful it was and how good it looked. I always wanted to play it, and finally got to.
Needless to say, it is not as good as Super Mario World, because it's its own thing, it excels at doing its own thing, but that thing ain't the thing when compared to Super Mario World, you follow?
Platformers make me way too stressed. I'd play one here and there, but they are surely not my thing. What else can I say? Kaiju baby Koopa at the end — that's how we call Bowser over here — was pretty neat.
Next, I played Sakura Wars, the first Sega Saturn Game I ever play. I came to know about this game one day, when I was — as one usually does — browsing all the games published by Sega in Questlog, when suddenly the box art of this game caught my attention. It was so beautiful, it reminded me of the anime Rurouni Kenshin — which I keep telling myself I have to watch. Reading the game's summary made me want to play it even more "A graphic novel that mixes dating sim-like mechanics and tactical RPG elements? Oh, you're going to the top of the pile baby!" and that's how I got to play it over the other almost one hundred games I had in my backlog at that time.
Now, this game keeps being called a "dating sim," and that couldn't be farther from the truth. Yes, you play a guy surrounded by girls. Yes, you have to win their affection. And yes, you get the girl at the end. Despite all those things, this is not one of those games that makes you feel funny in your pants; au contraire, it's a game where horny prompts are discouraged, making you lose affinity points with the girls. Plus the story, and the combat sections are good enough to carry the game on their own. It's a damn shame Sakura Wars was never brought to the West, but thanks to a community translation, it can be played in its entirety without any issues.
You should play it, trust me, I'm a guy on the internet, of course I'm right.
I continued my gaming escapades with Advance Wars, a game that had been sitting on my backlog for years, and that I came to hate almost immediately. Fog of war, who thought that was a good idea!? I can see why people like it, I liked it! I just didn't love it. I feel that if a strategy game forces you to play the same stage multiple times until you discover the right strategy to win, then it's not a great game; it can be a good game! Just not a great one.
Of course, when we talk about strategy games, Fire Emblem immediately comes to mind. I don't think comparing this game to Fire Emblem is fair — even if I find myself doing it all the time — but I can't help but wish it were more like it. It often feels like there is one and only one right way to complete a mission, and that makes the game a little less enjoyable for me.
I'm not even trying to come up with a clever heading here; the game is Dinosaur for the Game Boy Color. It's not only notorious for having the most generic name in video game history, but also for being a game where you play as a monkey most of the time. Remember, the game is called Dinosaur.
There is really no reason to play this game in the year 2025. I did, because I had it as a kid, and even though I finished it, the ending was so anticlimactic that I wasn't even sure I actually did. And yes, the final screen literally says "Congratulations, you win," but I didn't know any English back then, cut me some slack, will ya?
I even watched the movie recently!
Please don't play this.
Bomberman, the most famous terrorist in the history of video games. I'm not crazy about Bomberman, but when I heard of Bomberman Quest for the Game Boy Color, I said to myself, "I gotta play this!"
This game keeps being referred to as a Zelda-like adventure, but I have to disagree. Yes, Zelda was clearly one of the multiple inspirations for this game, but even the easiest dungeon in a Zelda game feels like an impossible task when compared to Bomberman Quest's ones.
I still like it. I love how self-aware the humor of the game is and how you can miss the true ending of the game if you get lazy, which I did, before going back and beating it for good.
A must-play for the Game Boy Color.
Another Game Boy Color game I played solely because I owned it as a kid and wanted to see the end of it. Rocket Power: Gettin' Air is a collection of sports mini games with little variety and horrible controls.
I could say more about it, but it's honestly not worth the effort.
Now let's talk about Driver... again for the Game Boy Color. Sorry, I'm not that cool to play the PlayStation one, I tried once and couldn't get past the tutorial in the parking lot — true story.
I technically owned this game as a kid because I stoled it. I would borrow it from a kid at school, and one day I just traded it for Pokémon Yellow — such was my obsession with that game. Of course, somebody snitched on me, and I had to give him not only the Pokémon Yellow cartridge — which was trash to him — but also the Rocket Power: Gettin' Air one. The moral of the story is: never do drugs, kids.
Putting my youthful idiocy aside, this game is good! It's a top-down, arcade-like, gangsta game. There are fifteen short missions in three different cities with varied objectives, plus a roam-free mode!
I was so sad when I finished the game. I read online that there were forty-six missions, but apparently, that was for the PlayStation game. Bummer.
Go play this one if you are into Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
Picture this: you're 8 years old, it's 6:00 PM, and your mom arrives from work. She comes to you and says with her sweet voice, "Hi, sweetie, guess what I got you?" And you go crazy, "What did you get me, Mom? What is it? What is it? Tell me." She reaches into her purse, takes something out, and enthusiastically says, "It's a Mario game!" Your little kid's face draws the biggest, most genuine smile for a second. And then you realize the box says "Super Marino World" or something along those lines. You know it's a buggy, rip-off, mess of a game, but you still play it, because you love your mom, and you don't want to hurt her feelings.
This is how I felt while playing Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. It's such a good game, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like Mario at all. For Pete's sake, there are side-scrolling shooting sections — which I loved — in the game!
The game probably felt so different because it was made by a different team without the involvement of Shigeru Miyamoto and the other ace developers. I'm guessing here, I see videogames — and movies — as experiences, and rarely care who got to work on them or not.
That doesn't mean the game is bad, not at all, it's a pretty enjoyable pocket adventure, and a must-play if you are going through the Game Boy library.
For a change of pace, I played a PC Game, a retro PC game that is, Virtua Cop 2! If you know me, or at the very least are familiar with my gaming quirks, then you'll know I like playing games in release order; therefore, I should have played the original Virtua Cop, right? Not exactly. One exception to the rule is games I played as a kid and never got to beat, and Virtua Cop 2 was the game I could not beat as a kid.
I used to play it all the time at my aunt's, they had a computer since I can remember, when most people could not afford one, so hanging out with my cousin gave me access to this game — and probably others I neither remember nor care for. So when I saw it featured in a list of the best Sega Saturn games, all those memories came flooding back to me, and I said to myself, "I have to finish this game!" To my surprise, the game is abandonware and a pain in the ass to run on modern computers, but that wouldn't stop me from finishing it.
At first — as to be expected — I sucked, I couldn't complete the easiest mission, even after using my five credits, I could not reach the final boss of the stage. Then I kept playing, one game per day, no more, until I could finally complete any of the three missions with the five credits. The ultimate goal was to finish the three missions with the same five credits. If I could do that, I could mark this game as finished and sleep well at night, so I put my head down and got to it, one game per day, no more!
Finally, after coming close — real close — multiple times, I got it, I finished the three missions with the same five credits, I was ready to see the credits roll and put all this behind me, but then, something happened. A fourth mission was unlocked! "Holly, freakin' shit, I'm in my last credit and got what, three lives? I won't survive another mission!" I thought. Fortunately, the fourth mission was just a boss fight, a tough one, but nothing I couldn't manage.
I beat the game, the credits rolled, and that kids, it's how I met your mother.
If there's a genre I am a total neophyte in, that would be Shoot 'em up, or how the cool kids call it "SHMUPs". I didn't grow up in a time-place where arcade machines were accessible and/or popular, plus, I was dirt poor — still am — so I couldn't experience this genre as it was intended to be. Sure, I got consoles here and there while growing up, but there were richer, more complex games to be enjoyed on those. I didn't want to play no stupid shooting game.
Whatever the case, I got to play R-Type for the Game Boy Color recently. It was good, I enjoyed it, but damn it, these games are stupid — I guess that made them the perfect fit for my "stupid video games roundup" then. The unfairness of enemies coming from all directions and taking a hundred bullets to be defeated, all the while, your ship will blow up into pieces if it gets hit even once! Why can't the intergalactic force afford sturdier ships? I can't save the galaxy like this!
A good deal of fun, but still not my thing.
The last game I finished in July was Popeye 2 for the Game Boy, a game I grew up playing on my best friend's Game Boy back in the mid-2000s — yes, we poor people would play with whatever.
This was such a whatever game for me as a kid, but playing it now, I can appreciate how good of a platformer it really is, dare I say it's underrated? Whatever that means.
Go play it if you like short platformers; this one can be beaten in around an hour.
Fun fact: the first Popeye game was only released in Japan. What's up with that?
And that concludes a month of gaming. I had a lot of fun with most — if not all — of these games, already looking forward to whatever I get to play in August, although I don't think I'll come close in hours played and/or number of games finished this time.
Go spend some time with your grandma, see you around!
]]>Needless to say: SPOILER ALERT
The first game I finished in June was Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations, a good ol' Nintendo DS game, although I played it as part of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy on Nintendo 3DS. This game is more of what came before, which is good since I knew what to expect after playing the first two entries, but there were some elements that ruined it for me, first of all the good-twin / bad-twin dynamic of the last case — and honestly the whole game — it's been done before, to death actually, but more than that, what truly ruined it for me was the character Jean Armstrong who appears during the case Recipe for Turnabout, and why is that? I'm glad you asked.
Jean Armstrong is the most disgusting stereotype I have ever seen in a video game. He's the chef of a French restaurant called Très Bien, and of course, he's French, a French chef that is, who knew... Not that there's anything wrong with having a French chef in a piece of media, but this French chef is also effeminate, a well-known stereotype about French people. Jean Armstrong introduces himself as a man, but then would refer to himself as "a little girl" multiple times; other characters will partake in this during the case too, making it a running gag. To put the cherry on top, the developers decided to convey Jean Armstrong's thick French accent through text instead of leaving it to the imagination, which made the game hard to follow for me as a non-native English speaker, and again, I found it really annoying and blatantly racist. They also added French definite articles every couple of words — la and le — for some reason, with no disregard for correctness of course, because racism is funny!
Honestly, this is my least favorite game of the trilogy, even accounting for its redeeming qualities, it's not as enjoyable as the previous games, and yes, I know everyone is a caricature in the Ace Attorney series, the clueless judge, the incompetent detective, the corrupt prosecutor, but even so, some shit is just not funny to me.
Continuing with my pocket adventures, I played Mega Man Battle Network, a game I've been wanting to try for a long, long time. Mind you, this is not your grandpa's Megaman; there's no running and gunning or platforming here, just good ol' JRPG fun! That being said, it was a little disappointing how the game was structured; each mission is basically presented as a separate chapter with events beyond the player's control occurring in between missions, which is certainly not immersive. The beautiful isometric view makes the game stand out visually but makes navigation in the digital world a tiny bit hard. To add insult to injury, there's no map, so good luck navigating those giant mazes! Some games are rough around the edges, and then there's Mega Man Battle Network, no edges, just roughness.
Pokémon Colosseum was my monthly dose of Pokémon during June and the first GameCube game I played and finished on my Wii ever, and although I loved the idea of a more "mature" Pokémon game in a neo-western style, the game failed to impress me, not because there's something wrong with it, but because they removed the elements I enjoy the most in a Pokémon game, I don't play Pokémon to mindlessly battle hundreds of trainers, I'm not obsessed with bAsE sTaTs and tHe MeTaGaMe, I play Pokémon because I like the idea of a fantastic world populated with these little creatures, so when the exploration/adventure part of the game is removed and focus changes mostly to battling I can certainly say I won't enjoy it that much, at that point I'm better off playing Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Stadium 2, which are in fact still in my backlog.
Another pocket adventure of mine was Professor Layton and the Curious Village, an impressive puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, I was in awe while watching the cut-scenes of this game play in the screen of my 3DS, it wasn't the first time I saw a cut-scene or anything, but the fact that developer Level 5 included these beautiful animated videos with full voice acting on a DS game was impressive, even if the audio was compressed beyond imagination.
At the end of the day this game is just a collection of puzzles, not different from those you can find for free in the app store of your phone, but the fact they created this incredible complex story around them, with beautiful animated characters and fully voiced cut-scenes is remarkable and I tip my hat to them.
Now, the puzzles themselves. I believe there are only two types of puzzles, the ones you think "huh, that was fun!" after solving them, and the ones you go "mine is bigger than yours!", to my annoyance, the game includes both types. I personally enjoy the former rather than the latter the most and relied on hints — or straight up looked up the solution — for some of the most difficult ones, still, that did not take away from my experience at all.
I've been eyeing the Megami Tensei franchise for quite a while now, and being the stickler that I am I decided to start at the beginning with Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei I-II for the Super Famicom, a remake of the two Famicom games: Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei and Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II. Now I technically didn't finish this "game" because, as I said before, this is a two-game bundle; what I did finish is the first game in the bundle, the remake of the original Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. I have a lot to say about this game. Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei is first and foremost a first-person dungeon crawler JRPG, I had never played something like that before, and after a couple of hours, I was ready to give up, mainly because of how difficult it was to navigate these huge, same-looking mazes with no map! Then I realized you could cast the spell Mappara to get an on-screen minimap, oopsie! And then, I read you could bring up a map by pressing the R button, oopsie again! After that, the game became more bearable, and dare I say even enjoyable! This is not a game I think is worth revisiting nowadays because of how dated it is, it's repetitive, unnecessarily punishing, confusing, and worst of all, slow, thank god I was emulating it and speeding the hell outta the CPU, also, did I mention your characters can actually lose levels in this game? Yeah, definitely dated. That being said, I'm glad I got to play this game and got to know how the franchise came to be, can't wait to play Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II... Except I can wait, and will wait, don't want to play too many similar games in a short time.
"Just a horny Devil May Cry", I was quick to dismiss Bayonetta after only a couple of minutes of play by calling it that, and boy, how wrong I was. First of all, the hypersexualized nature of the main character had me constantly asking myself "was this truly necessary?", I mean, at the end of the day this game was primarily made by men, for men, horny men that is, teenagers and young adults that want women, all women if possible, to look like this because they have a narrow view of the world, and we have seen women like this in videogames before, just take a look at any JRPG artbook and marvel at the absurdity of ripped men wearing the heaviest, most-protective armor there could possibly be, while women get to expose their torso as if shouting "go ahead, stab me, I don't care, my breast looks fabulous!", but Bayonetta wasn't this, because unlike most women in JRPGs, Bayonetta was not an accessory to someone else's story, this was Bayonetta's story, and as hypersexualized as the character was, it was not about that, this is not a sex simulator after all, it was a strong's woman journey of self-discovery and coming to terms with fate, and when I say strong woman I fuckin' mean it, there has probably not been a stronger female mythological figure in history than the witch, women feared and persecuted by their strong power, and Bayonetta is a witch, a very capable witch, and a very strong witch, the character being hypersexualized is part of the sense of humor baked into her — because yes, she has a great sense of humor — and into the whole world that revolves around her, which makes her feel authentic. More than a witch, Bayonetta is a woman, and she embraces their femininity; she blows kisses to barriers to destroy them and uses lipstick as a bullet, which is refreshing in a game primarily marketed towards men.
And that's only the non-gameplay related part, because yes, the gameplay is flawless, with easy combos to pull off, varied sections that include platforming, shooting, and racing, and beautiful cut-scenes that lean into the humor of Bayonetta's absurd world more than the gameplay could ever do. Bravo, I tip my hat to this game.
The only logical conclusion that I can reach after writing all this is that I play too much videogames, which is... OK? Escapism is OK, just remember to take care of your responsibilities and you'll be OK, and more than your job or mortgage I mean your body, mental health, and family, the things that really matter, remember to eat well, drink enough water, exercise at least a little, and spend time with your family, maybe playing videogames with them.
]]>If you have interacted with me in any way, shape, or form, chances are you have noticed my love for Pokémon, the Japanese media franchise targeted at kids that I refuse to let go, how could I? My happiest moments in life have been tied to Pokémon, since first watching the anime to then spending hundreds of hours playing Pokémon Yellow on my Game Boy Color, to meeting my best friend with whom I still have a close relationship after 20 years, Pokémon was always there, there's just something special about the story of a neglected child that turns to animal cruelty and runs from home that I cannot get enough of! And maybe that's why I keep playing the new games, to recapture the magic of those past moments, but honestly, it's not the same, I just feel like the games are not for me anymore, and that's OK! Maybe it's all nostalgia, and I'm watching the past through rose-colored glasses, right? I can't deny that there's some of that involved but after playing Cassette Beasts I can say there's more to the story, for the first time in 20-plus years I feel like a 10-year-old adventuring in a foreign land through the screen of a Game Boy Color, and that's how I met your mother what we are going to talk about today.
Have you ever seen those videos on YouTube titled "Let's Play X", where some guy plays, well, X!? Of course you have, you beautiful internauta, — that's Spanish for internet user, we have our own word for that! — well, I'm old and not that cool so I don't think I'll be making videos anytime soon, but writing about this or that game whenever I feel lik it1? Oh boy, that I can do!
It's just video games. It's not that deep, bro.
Now we're getting somewhere.
I usually don't play "modern" games, I don't own any modern console, also I don't know what a Steam is, my laptop could totally handle some of the games the cool kids are playing nowadays but nah, I'm good, there's a huge library of games I didn't get to play growing up, I'll stick with those for the most part. Once in a blue moon, if it captured my interest, I would play a modern game, and Cassette Beasts was one of those modern games that caught my eye and I just had to play.
I first heard — more like read — of Cassette Beasts in an article titled "Play These X Games If You Like Pokémon", or something, I don't really remember that well, the thing is I immediately dismissed it — all of the games in the list actually — as a "Pokémon clone", a catch-all — pun intended — term used to refer to monster catching games, and one many people are way too eager to label any game that features catching and training mechanics, I know I was one of them. And boy, how wrong I was!
There are indeed a lot of Pokémon-like games out there, some of them are so similar to Pokémon that you might find yourself asking "Why aren't I playing Pokémon instead?", but Cassette Beasts is not one of them, no sir! There are more the qualities that differentiate it from Pokémon than the ones that make it similar, the battle mechanics for once are nothing alike, Cassette Beasts utilizes a battle points system, each attack costs a number of battle points — except for one basic attack you get to use for free — and each turn a beast is given 2 battle points, battle points are shared between all your attacks and the way you use them is up to you, that's a fresh idea! Plus, you can get more — or less — battle points per turn if you have a specific status effect or passive move, and that's two of the greatest things in Cassette Beasts' battle system: status effects and passive moves.
If you have played a JRPG before — any JRPG — you are probably familiar with status effects like poisoned, paralyzed, and burned, they are these temporary handicaps you could get inflicted with during battle, and they're of course present in Cassette Beasts too, what's different is 1) all status effects are cleared at the end of a battle, and 2) there's a ton of original ones alongside the classics to make the battling system ever richer and more complex.
Passive moves on the other hand can be compared to "abilities" in Pokémon, these could be an extra attack at no cost or some kind of status effect at the beginning of the battle or under certain conditions, but unlike Pokémon, a beast could have as many passive moves as it's compatible with, in fact you can have a beast with only passive moves if you wanted! How cool is that!?
And now that we touched on moves, well, let's talk about moves! In Cassette Beasts you don't actually have moves, you have "stickers", these stickers you put on your cassette tapes — each cassette tape represents a beast — and your beast will learn the ability to use the move described in the sticker, the best part? Stickers are replaceable! Don't want a move anymore? Just peel the sticker from your cassette and that's it, the sticker will be added to your inventory for you to reuse whenever you feel like it, just like that! This mechanic allows you to customize your cassette stickers as much as you want and/or need, you could get a set of stickers for a fight and then a completely different set for the next fight, again, HOW COOL IS THAT!!?
And on top of everything I just said about stickers, did you know there are typeless stickers? That means you can put those on any beast you want to, no matter its type, the sticker will be compatible! And what's more, it will assume the type of your monster! A typeless sticker like smack or spit could be type poison if put it on a poison beast, or fire if put it on a fire beast, or... Well, you get the idea.
But I don't intend for this post to be a review of the game mechanics, that's lame! Let's review what I liked, didn't like, and what I'd like to see more of.
In Cassette Beasts you don't have to embark on a journey alone, in fact, you can't, — as far as I know — multiple characters will accompany you during your journey, each one of them has their own beast, personality, and story, and you get to hear said story by hanging out and listening to your companions while resting at the café or camping outside, it's a simple and effective way to make you care for the characters. Also, you can just pass a second controller to one of your friends and they'll be able to control said companion, that's a nice touch on a JRPG.
When you start the game they ask you for your character name and their pronouns — yes, I said the "P-word", if that makes you uncomfortable I invite you to get the hell outta my blog and go fuck yourself — the developers don't seem too concerned with the genitalia you were born with, they just want to know how your character should be called and how to address it properly.
After seeing that I immediately thought "Cool, this is one of those games that make grown-ass men and women cry on the internet, let's play it!", and boy, I did have an awesome time playing it!
I'm gonna get serious for a moment. When I was in my teens I thought lesbians weren't real, I'm not trying to be funny here, I genuinely believed that, why? Because back then I never met a — openly — lesbian woman. I mean, I saw gay men in the neighborhood, at school, and here and there, I didn't understand it back then — and didn't know I didn't have to understand it, just accept it and respect it — but I knew men liking other men was a real thing, I couldn't say the same thing about love between women. Sure, I'd see it in those kinds of videos that one watches way too much of as a teenager, but was that even real? I don't think so.
The thing is I've grown, I've met all kinds of beautiful people, in the stand-up comedy circuit, — yes, I went to a couple of open mics for like three months and now I won't shut up about "doing stand-up" — in social media, in college, and I think representing those people in the stories we read, or listen to, or watch, or play, it's important, and Cassette Beasts makes a great job representing people of all kinds of background, color, and sexual orientation across its vast array of characters.
The game rarely feels unfair, they don't want you to grind or complete impossible missions just so you can prove you're the guy — or gal! No, they would have NPCs point you in the right direction, and give you valuable advice instead of babbling some useless piece of generic dialogue, every action in this game is rewarded, you talk to an NPC? They give you valuable info or even a side quest. You battle wild beasts? They give you materials you can trade for stickers or other items. You explore the world out of sheer curiosity? You get valuable loot. It's as simple as that.
The music in this game is so good, I mean, it has to be, you cannot make a game called Cassette Beasts and have horrible music, they knew it, and they delivered. I wish it was more 80ish, I don't know, some synthesizers would have been nice, think Tainted Love by Soft Cell or Don't You Want Me by The Human League, but that's just me.
We gotta be honest here, each and every "monster catching" game ever will be compared to Pokémon at some point, Pokémon is so ingrained in popular culture across the globe that we cannot talk about "monster catching" without immediately thinking of Pokémon, that'd be like talking about superheroes and not thinking of Batman or Spider-man, but I digress... Cassette Beasts manages to distance itself from the likes of Pokémon by being original and embracing its own ideas instead of striving for familiarity.
One of those original ideas is fusing with your beasts like in Digimon Frontier, instead of commanding them like some sort of sick 10-year-old pro-animal-cruelty gambler, you do your own fighting, and yes, after your beast gets beaten they can straight up kick your character's ass!
Some of the characters' stories didn't resonate with me, concretely Felix's and Viola's. I mean, one of Felix's drawings comes to life as a beast, why? Why not ALL of his drawings? I don't see how it makes sense, it honestly was a little weird, but it's not the end of the world. Viola on the other hand is a character from a Shakespeare's book? Why? Why aren't all Shakespeare's characters in this world then? I don't get it, and not having studied classic English literature makes it even more confusing, so I can't say that I enjoyed their stories too much.
More and more games are doing this, and honestly, I hate it, just don't do it. What do I mean by pointless decision prompts? Well, do you like ice cream? Here are the valid answers:
Please, we gotta stop this nonsense.
The humor in Cassette Beasts is awesome, when they introduce the Landkeepers for the first time and then you get to fight them and discover what they really are is just hilarious. There are some other moments here and there but not nearly enough in my opinion.
I loved the dungeons and puzzles in Cassette Beasts, they are not overly complicated, they're inviting, they pick your curiosity, and always reward you with something worth your time, my only complain is that there are not enough of them, I'd like the map to be even bigger, with more caves, more puzzles, more surprises, I want it all!
I wanted to take a minute to express my appreciation for the game, this was supposed to be a way shorter article but I kept thinking of things to say about the game, — I still have more but I better stop! — I already put nearly 40 hours into it, I finished it, but I can't stop playing, I think it's a great game, I love it, and maybe you would love it too if you get to play it, I don't know.
Anyway, here's Closing Time by Semisonic, I'll go play some Cassette Beasts, or take a nap, whatever my old-man body feels like.
probably once or twice year. ↩
Anyway, I won't go into too much detail about yesterday, there's more context in the embedded Mastodon thread here, what I really want to talk about is my other personal hells and how I managed to escape.
You cannot go further back than the beginning, at least not without getting philosophical, so let's start with my beginning, a humble beginning that is, I'm the youngest of three children, my parents, both undereducated, working-class people said one day in 1993:
Parent 1: wait a minute, we're poor as hell and already have two children, what should we do?
Parent 2: have another kid?
Parent 1: oh, you know it, baby!
This probably wasn't exactly what happened but as an anti-natalist individual I cannot imagine the actual thought process of broke people having kids being much different than this, but hey, they told me I was the only planned child, so, hooray!?
Leaving third-rate jokes aside, these circumstances meant I lacked the competitive advantage that even the least privileged of people had, heck, I had limited access to basic needs like water, food, electric power, and information for most of my life! And although I always had a roof over my head thanks to my parents being diligent and building a house, as you can imagine, it was not located in the best part of town, in fact, I was born and raised in the poorest district of the city, in a third-world country...
Now, that didn't mean I lived in the worst neighborhood of the whole district, because I didn't, but I don't think that would have made much difference, my parents still couldn't provide for us, so me and my siblings had to work since a very early age, I for example started shinning shoes when I was only 10 years old, more than once the money I made was used to provide food for my mother and siblings, the old man left around that time, so things were rougher than ever. Of course, my big brother and sister stepped up, even more so than me, they worked like crazy and did all sort of things to put food on the table, and for that, I'm eternally grateful to them, but that's their story and it's up to them to tell it, or not, maybe one day we can all get together and let it out, cry, laugh, and hug, I doubt it, but maybe...
With the old man gone, and even the youngest kid — that'd be me — being able to carry their own weight, things weren't looking good, I was sent to work with him as some kind of twisted insurance policy, if I worked with him he would have to 1) at the very least provide for my food, and 2) be more involved with the family, plus he would be able to work faster thanks to the cheap labor I provided, which meant getting profits more often, which meant supporting the family more. Those years were probably the worst ones of my life, because among other things, let's just say the old bastard is not a very nice person.
"Son, you must study hard, so you don't end up like me."
This is one phrase I heard a lot growing up, in fact, I think any person born to working-class parents has heard this phrase a million times — that's assuming those parents have at least some sense of responsibility — but in the grand scheme of things I don't think this really helped me much. Don't get me wrong, I went to community college and got a degree in educational psychology, I even graduated as an honor student, but so what? I was never told I should get good grades so I could enter a good university, or apply for a scholarship, or go to study abroad, the real importance of education was something that was never taught to me, so I ended up going through school on autopilot and then finding myself with no plan after high school, what was I supposed to do? Stay in the hood, smoking — or selling — weed on a street corner, get a teenage girl pregnant, and maybe get a job at a cigar or shoe factory making tens of a cent per hour? Life, man, this cannot be it...
Fortunately, my love for computers brought me to Linux one day in 2014, an OS that'd let me do anything I wanted through one of those black little boxes hackers use in the movies — the terminal — it was a surreal experience, I'd tell the computer "Mr. computer, please do this" and what do you know? It would actually do it! That's when I realized I wanted to do more of that, I wanted to tell computers what to do, I couldn't get enough of that, I'd go to Linux forums and read about it all day long, learn simple commands like cp, use them and get blown away, spend hours customizing my desktop, and try any tool and/or command I'd see in the wild, just for fun, I was like a kid in a candy store! It was around this time I learned about two important concepts: open source and programming.
I remember being in utter disbelief after reading what open source was for the first time, how come such a concept really existed? Why would people put hundreds, even thousands of hours into some piece of software and then say "Here you go, go to town with the thing"? It seemed too good to be true, what was the catch? Well, there wasn't too much of a catch, but you did need technical knowledge to actually modify the software, you needed to know how to program, and what was this programming thing? Telling the computer what to do, so I said "sign me in!" With that in mind, I decided to grab a book on the C programming language, even if the book was in English and I could barely introduce myself in the language at that time, let alone the fact that I had zero experience with software engineering, I didn't care! I was going to modify the Linux kernel, baby!
Of course that didn't happen, I mean, how could you go from knowing zilch to modifying the Linux kernel by reading a book in a language you could not understand and with zero software engineering experience? But that didn't matter, because even if I didn't know it at the time, this programming thing would be my ticket out of hell, and by the end of 2015, after a year of constant experimentation with different languages, including C, Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, I landed my first job as a software developer, all that after quitting my job repairing air conditioning units and secluding myself at home to binge-watch Video2Brain courses I torrented from the good old internet. Oh, and I was attending community college all day long on Saturdays, studying something that didn't have anything to do with telling computers what to do. Good times.
It's been more than 10 years since I first wrote a "Hello world!" and even though my understanding of computers has not gotten that much better in this past decade-plus, I could not imagine my life without programming, I love automating small and/or insignificant tasks and building applications for myself or the people around me, I even made programming my full-time job, take that, air conditioner repairing gig! I made a job out of my hobby, nothing could go wrong, right?
I've heard and/or read that if you turn something you love doing into your job then you wouldn't have to work a single day of your life, and that sounds wonderful! In theory... In practice, turning something you love into your full-time job it's the fastest way of getting to hate the guts out of that once much-beloved thing. Don't get me wrong, I love programming as I just said in the last paragraph, reading dozens of GBs of pipe-separated plain files, parsing them, and storing that data in a database? Not so freakin' much, and by the way that's exactly what I did for the past thirteen months at work, who said you couldn't have fun at work!?
To make matters worse, software development has gone from a very rare and desired skill to one companies can hire by the dozens in a minute, a lot of times at a very low cost, so working conditions have gotten tougher and extra benefits have become rarer, you can be replaced, you're not that special, get over yourself! I didn't envision this when I left my job repairing air conditioners and said to myself "From now on you're a software developer, and you will not accept any other job".
Despite all my ramblings, I do recognize I'm in a very privileged position, I'm not a rocket scientist, anyone could do what I do, and probably way better than me, I firmly believe that, plus I don't have a terminal illness or live in a war-zone, I'm very fortunate, I did escape hell, and I feel grateful, every single day, even if sometimes I struggle, and boy, I do struggle.
Even beyond hell, there's more road to walk, not moving can even mean having to go back to hell, and that's definitively something I'm not looking forward to. Maybe you've been through hell yourself, maybe you're going through hell right now, whatever the case I hope you make it, I've been through multiple hells, and I know it's hard, but I know you can get out.
]]>I recently created this blog and probably the first thought I had was "Let's write about what tools I used to get the job done", which is actually a common practice, in fact, I dare to say there are more blogs out there with one single post detailing which tools were used to create said blog that ones showing regular quality posts. But I didn't want to just show which tools I used to make the blog, no sir, I wanted to tell the story of why I decided to use these tools and why they may be "better" than most other tools in an unexpected way, not because they are the most cutting-edge, fast, or innovative ones, but because they may be the most reliable ones.
Have you ever been in the market for a new TV? Or computer? Maybe a new internet plan? It doesn't matter where you look, it doesn't matter what you want, it doesn't matter if you are a company, software developer, or regular user, everything seems to be trash nowadays, so much so that a term was coined to describe this very same phenomenon: enshittification, and what is enshittification? Well, it wouldn't make sense to describe it in detail after linking to the Wikipedia article, but essentially is taking something and making it worse, especially in the software industry.
Let's talk about this for a minute. Companies under capitalism have one, and only one main goal, and that is, as Lalo Salamanca put it so eloquently in Better Call Saul's season 5, episode 7, "JMM": just make money. All the stuff you see in TV commercials like white men in suits serving soup to homeless people, or a group of employees from different backgrounds, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations smiling to the camera while sharing a pizza is just a PR stunt to make you think that there is actual people behind these brands, Coca-Cola means family and Chevrolet means tradition, they cannot be evil, they have Santa Claus in their commercials! The reality is companies are profit-driven, not people-driven. So these companies put out products that do one thing, and they even are very good at doing that one thing, but that's not enough, how could it be? If the goal is making money they have to appeal to everyone from single mothers to LGBT+ members, because even if these companies are financing the biggest bigots' campaigns, gay money is still green. So what do they do? They add fancy names to the same ol' products, this is not a cellphone, this is a smartphone, sure you're gonna want one of those — it gets worse, some companies would throw a letter in front of the word "phone" and charge a premium for it. They also add features you didn't know you needed — maybe because you actually didn't — sure your "smartphone" can phone and text your friends and family, but now it's also a pedometer, it comes with an accelerometer, it has a bigger diameter, and if you stick it into the right place it works as a thermometer! That's a lot of bang for your buck I'll say.
These last examples refer mostly to hardware but software enshittification it's no different, sure cutting the cord made sense when Netflix had the HBO, NBC, Paramount, and Disney catalog, it was cheap and convenient, not so much now, these four companies have created their own streaming services and taken most — if not all — of their catalog with them, now we are stuck with multiple streaming services with smaller, less-varied catalogs that appeal no one, how are companies going to combat this? They won't, they will just start pumping original "content" into their catalogs as fast as possible, never mind the quality, customers will bite after seeing the amount of stuff they're getting, but that doesn't make a profit big enough to satisfy greedy CEOs and shareholders, maybe taking the money from customers AND advertisers is the solution, so showing ads it is! But you know, password sharing is getting in the way of even more profits so let's restrict that too, if your cousin wants to watch Squid Game they better pay for their account, plans start at just $4.99.
But you are a software developer, you are smarter than that, you are part of the resistance, you know better! There's just no way companies are getting you, right? Well...
Is easy to look at products or services aimed at the masses and point out when they started going downhill, but what about products and services aimed at software developers and other people in IT? What about languages, frameworks, libraries, databases, and infrastructure as a service? They couldn't be getting worse, we wouldn't allow that! Right...? The reality is, that not only are they getting enshittified, companies are building more and more enshittified products from the ground up every day.
Frameworks are being built not on top of standards, design patterns, and best practices but on what they call "developer experience", that's to say they are being made so even the less skilled of developers could get easily up to speed and writing code with the tool, which is good, right? Wrong. These frameworks are made to trap junior developers and companies into using them, thus providing cheap labor for companies, and work opportunities for less experienced developers, which is good, right? What do you think? IT'S NOT GOOD. Third-party companies, and more often than not, the very same companies behind these tools start offering bootcamps, and certification programs that cost hundreds of dollars, ripping off college students and working-class young men and women with the promise of a good-paying job after learning the tool. But these developers are a menace to society — I know I was, and still am one — they are learning to fly a jetpack way before they learn to crawl, they are getting familiar with abstractions before learning the underlying language, standards, design patterns, and best practices which the tool was built on, they are living and dying by the tool, in other words, they are cult followers — and again, I know I was one.
Since these frameworks are rarely built on design patterns or best practices, much of what is learned when using them is not transferable, and why would they be built on best practices? That's boring! The secret sauce is using adjectives like "bespoke" or "forward-thinking" or cliché tag lines like "for rock stars" and people will be getting hook up to that thing as if it were heroin, after all "The web framework for competent professionals" just doesn't have the same ring to it. But competent professionals are the ones that end up dealing with the biggest piles of lasagna code — like spaghetti code, but with more layers — built with these frameworks, and their challenges are always the same, "How can I make this use properly injected services instead of global static classes and functions?", "How can I introduce automated tests?", "How can I introduce a better architecture?", "These ORM-produced queries are not efficient, what were these guys thinking?", "Wait, why are we using a million non-descriptive CSS classes instead of plain CSS like a normal human being would?", etc. You get the idea.
This obsession with making everything new and exciting is just contributing to the enshittification of the software industry, the thing is, these shiny new tools that offer to make you more productive or stay up to date with the current trends pray on the gullibility of companies and developers alike, even in the open source space it's not uncommon to see a whole ecosystem built around paid services and addons for these kind of tools, because at the end of the day their only goal is to make enough of a following to secure making a profit. That doesn't mean that making money makes you evil, there are great paid products and services out there that will deliver on their promise of making you more productive — or whatever they're selling you on — with little to no enshittification.
It's said that when the Spaniard conquistadores arrived to the island La Hispaniola — which is now shared between the Dominican Republic and Haiti — they were carrying little mirrors with them, the natives, fascinated by these artifacts, gave their gold — which they didn't have a use for — away in exchange for the mirrors. I can't vouch for the veracity of this story but I can firmly say that the tech industry has been exchanging gold (standards) for mirrors (novelty) at least for the past one or two decades.
If the industry is giving away its most precious resources, how can we as individuals, and as a group fight back? Simple, reject novelty, embrace boredom. Standards and not-so-novel tools aren't attractive, there's no tagline or fancy adjectives attached to them, they are not for "rock stars", "ninjas", or "forward thinkers", they are boring, but they are for everyone, and as a competent professional you are gonna need them the most. You don't need a convoluted process to create your personal website, at the end of the day browsers only interpret HTML, why then feed it a pile of JSON and let the client do the heavy lifting? Choose a tool that is good at generating HTML and you're done. I chose Cecil, it's boring and I love it! But you don't have to, you could even just manually type your content into a .html file and that's OK too. You don't need a load balancer and infinite replicas for your web apps, stop it, you definitively don't need Kubernetes and Docker, you don't even need an AWS EC2 instance or Digital Ocean Droplet, you could host your static site or web app using Surge like I did, deploying your site takes literally one command and configuration is minimal, boring!
That is not to say that:
What I'm trying to say is that you can accomplish a lot by focusing on standards, design patterns, and best practices, tools that have been available for decades and have been proven to deliver results time and time again. If a framework, library, or any other tool — including programming languages — goes against those standards reject it, why would you choose to use CSS in JS or a "utility first" framework when there's already a tool that does the job? What you need to do is actually learn how to use CSS. Yes, CSS has its shortcomings but it's the standard that browsers agreed to use, it's constantly improving, and updating a website to use new directives is way simpler than trying to replace a "utility first" framework after scattering thousands of small classes across your project — as you might have noticed this is one of those tools that I don't really think have a place in this industry.
Tools that are proven to work, to be efficient, tools that follow standards, those tools should be the foundation of the software we build today, they shouldn't be cast away but embraced, improved, and celebrated.
]]>I have spent more time with my thoughts than with any other human being during my lifetime, I have been more intimate with my thoughts than with anybody else, I have laughed with my thoughts, cried with my thoughts, taken refuge in my thoughts, confided in my thoughts, you get the picture, my life is a continuous conversation with my self, especially when I am at my quietest, but that does not mean there is not anything I want to say, and that is where the written word enters the picture, including texting, blogging, writing in the sand, and maybe most importantly social media.
I never saw social media the same way "normal" people around me did, I started using MySpace during my high school years because as Bender said in Futurama's season 2, episode 4, Fry and the Slurm Factory: "Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to be popular", staying connected was important to people around me, so it meant it has to be important to me too, right? I did not have a personal computer or laptop around that time — we are talking late 2000s here — so I would go to a cyber café and pay around 50 cents an hour to hook up to the World Wide Web, all in the name of staying in touch.
Then it came Facebook, and despite my objections to moving from MySpace, my "friends" had already started doing so, I kept insisting on fighting a lost battle, like using 8-tracks in the Compact Disc era — although who am I kidding, I haven't even seen an 8-track before, that's way before my time. Maybe cassette tapes? — eventually, I gave in and did so too, it was my last year of high school, so maybe it was worth it to keep in touch with all my "friends", right? — spoiler alert: almost 15 years and multiple Facebook accounts later I have no idea where all these people are or how they are doing.
Highschool came and went, we are now in the 2010s, computers and internet access is now more affordable than ever, still, not everybody in the neighborhood can pay for one or the other, let alone both, so the neighbors that could actually afford one or multiple computers and a 512Kbps internet plan — or in the best case scenario 1Mbps — would gladly hook you up to their router for a monthly fee, even if you lived across the street — which in my case I did — or 300 meters from them. Carpooling, sharing your Netflix password, crashing at a friend's couch, community will always beat the system.
Shoutout to my big brother for not only getting a laptop and letting me use it — more than he ever did — but also for paying our neighbor Piro to hook us up to her router, despite how messed up our relationship has been, I love you brother. Also, there is no way in hell you are reading this, you would have to learn a whole other language to do so, so who cares.
It is during this period that social media becomes an integral part of my life, I dare to say I get addicted to social media during this time, even if I don't share that many pictures or stories about my life I am seemingly always on social media, reading other people's jokes, playing games, following Facebook pages and groups, befriending people for the fun of it, in summary being online for the sake of being online. Then I discovered something even better: Twitter.
Since Twitter got invented, bathroom doors all over the world have been the cleanest.
— Someone for sure, but I cannot remember who.
I always come back to this quote because I find it very powerful, as an introvert what I wanted from social media was not a way of staying in contact with people I honestly did not care that much about — that comes from my inability to create meaningful connections with people, and that in turn comes from personal trauma, it has nothing to do with the people around me — but a way to turn my thoughts into something material and let them float in the cyberspace, I wanted to parse my thoughts into zeros and ones, or at the very least HTML nodes traveling through HTTP, it's not that you couldn't do that on Facebook, it is just that it felt too intimate to me, and I was not open to that, Twitter on the other hand was perfect! Think of something, make it 140 characters or less, say it, bam! You're done, next! To that add the possibility to connect with anybody around the world who cares about what you are saying by just adding that stupid tic-tac-toe box in front of a word, which is called a hashtag, because we need a catchy name for everything, and of course it will retain their anglo saxon catchy name anywhere in the world because we are living in a connected age now and Silicon Valley dictates how these things go, but I digress.
Not only could you easily connect with people with the same interests as you on Twitter by just "tweeting" about the stuff you cared about, but you could follow the topics that people were talking the most about in real-time, there was an earthquake? Surely people are flooding Twitter with the hashtag #Earthquake, did Leonardo DiCaprio finally got that Oscar? I see, that's why I'm seeing the hashtag #LeonardoDiCaprio trending globally. It was, in my opinion, exactly what social interactions on the internet were supposed to be, just people talking about everything and nothing at all, in real-time, with no pressure to collect "friends", because the fun of it was in connecting with people regardless of if you knew them, or not.
At this point we are entering the mid-2010s and honestly, the next 10 years are not relevant to the story I want to tell here, so allow me to come back to the present day.
Much has happened since the days I discovered social media, a lot more happened even before I was able to use a computer, Twitter and MSN are gone, so are AOL, IRC — not really but you get the idea — and most web forums, much have changed but people still have stuff to say, people still want to talk about their favorite music, and TV shows, and videogames, and food, their hobbies, new and innovative ways of doing stuff, their trauma, their passions, their way of living, as I said before community will always beat the system — look at this guy repeating himself like he is a big shot or something — and as long as people have something to say others will listen, even if sometimes feels like we are screaming into the void.
Mainstream social media is still being used by billions, and although social media has empowered people all over the world, people who wouldn't have a voice otherwise, it has also "given a voice to people that should never have been given one", I can't even remember where I read that last quote but to the person that came up with it, damn, you're right! Mainstream social media has made the spread of cyberbullying; misinformation; bigotry and radical ideas like misogyny, homophobia, racism, fascism, etc. easier than ever, giving ill-intended groups platforms to target and harass other people and encourage others to do the same, what's worse, these mainstream platforms are notorious for doing nothing to protect these targeted groups or to block access to the ill-intended ones, as long as you keep feeding the algorithm they don't care.
The good thing is people are expressing themselves in other ways too, although not as prevalent as before, dedicated web forums are still around, some of them still using table-based designs like it's the pre-HTML 5 age, and other people are hosting their own websites, WordPress is more popular than ever, and other similar tools allow you to have a website up and running in minutes, but more importantly people are starting to care more about their privacy and reject mainstream social media, people want to own their data the same way they want to own their music and TV shows, and the only way to do that is giving the finger to the people that don't want you to do so and shouting to their face FUCK YOU.
This is when alternative social media enters the picture, and unlike alternative medicine, this thing does work, for the most part at least. We all want different things in life, and we all expect different things from life, some people use social media because they want to connect with friends and family, others were born into social media and see it not as something you opt-in, but something integral to their lives, the same way television was for my generation and the radio was for my parents'. Depending on what you want, and expect from social media, one platform could resonate more or less with you, so it's normal that alternative social media might not resonate with people who value an endless stream of mind-numbing content over their privacy, and that's OK, I think.
Now let's talk about the Mastodon in the room.
I'll be referring mainly to Mastodon here, so even if I say Fediverse please assume I'm talking about Mastodon. Yes, I know they are two different things, and yes, I'll still go ahead and use the terms interchangeably.
Allow me to go straight to the point here: I don't care if Mastodon fails or not, I don't care if other platforms get more users than Mastodon, and I don't care if Mastodon stagnates and stays niche forever. I should clarify that I do want the platform to prosper, to grow, and to keep improving, but these topics that seem to concern so many people for one reason or another don't concern me at all.
Seeing the world the way I do implies not giving much importance to what most other people think and/or say, I'm on the Fediverse because people who unknowingly have changed my life are there, their influence means more to me than that of the millions of users on other social platforms, and the connections I've made on there so far are more meaningful than most of the ones I made with the people I came across on other social media platforms during my 15-year-long social media journey, I want to see the people behind these avatars as real individuals and not as a collection of HTML nodes traveling over HTTP, and I feel Mastodon helps me to do that in a way that other social media platforms simply can not.
And that's how I met your mother why I am on Mastodon, and that's why I created this blog, and that's why I'm writing this long post, even when it was supposed to be a cheap throwaway one with the overall message of "look, I created a blog that I'll probably never update, here's a post, I had thoughts and I had to write them" but then I actually started writing, and I went into a stream of consciousness, and I kept writing until this was the final product, so if for whatever reason you stopped to read my ramblings about everything — and nothing at all — thank you.