Donate to the NAACP and bail funds, get cool games.

[enemyofperfect]

I imagine most of the gamers who follow this journal have already seen itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, but just in case anyone hasn't, it's pretty cool. For a donation of $5 or higher (the default is set to $10, but you can adjust it in either direction), they'll give you DRM-free access to over a thousand games, resource kits, and tabletop rpgs. The campaign still has three days to go, and so far, they've raised more than five million dollars.

Games and other items that particularly caught my eye include:

• Night in the Woods, which I've seen highly recommended (Windows, Mac, & Linux)
• Celeste, which I will definitely never play, but really enjoyed a Let's Play of (Windows, Mac, & Linux)
• Signs of the Sojourner, the Kickstarter demo of which I enjoyed and recced previously (Mac & Windows)
• Dungeons & Lesbians, an adorably named dating sim (Windows, Mac, & Linux)
• Lingotopia, a game where you learn a language of your choice while exploring a city (Windows, Mac, & Linux)
• Desktop Goose, literally a goose that hangs out on your desktop (Windows & Mac)
• A couple of Spanish language Twine games, El Interrogatorio and especially No cortarás a tu hermana con el filo de esta espada (browser)
• Oxenfree, another game I've heard very well spoken of (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Quench, a truly adorable looking game about guiding animals through a landscape (tragically Windows only!)
• Dungeon Tileset 2.0, which is adorable pixel art tiles for dungeon maps
• TTRPG Design Lenses, a set of cards to help designers evaluate different aspects of their games
• Hero Too, a "single player journaling game" about a teenage trans superhero you create
• The Bonds That Tie Us, a GMless TTRPG about relationships
• The D1 RPG, which I imagine is what it says on the tin
• and Rosette Diceless, a GMless game system that "focuses on collaborative storytelling and consent-based conflict resolution".

And of course, if you just want to give, there are links for that as well:

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Community bail funds
Other ways to donate and help

Comments

[stunt_muppet]

I got a chance to play Quench at MAGFest this year! It's very colorful and lively, and it's pretty intuitive to pick up and play.

One that I've spotted in the bundle and I'm very excited to play: Pet the Pup at the Party, where you're at a party where you don't know anybody but you were told there's a dog. I'm glad there are games out there about such relateable life experiences.

[enemyofperfect]

Aww, I'm glad to hear that Quench lives up to its promise!

Pet the Pup at the Party looks so cool, doesn't it? So far I've played a little Oxenfree, which is absolutely gorgeous and piled with way more trigger warnings than I for some reason expected, and a little Lenna's Inception, which is adorable and bloody and weird and lets me have a bodyguard bat who brings the combat down to something I can just about handle. My overall level of gaming has increased by like 300% this week, and it's kind of cool?

Also hello, it's lovely to hear from you, thank you for talking to me even though I haven't emailed you in over a month! Why does everything keep happening so much? I hope you're as well as can be expected under the circumstances!

[stunt_muppet]

I hadn't picked out Lenna's Inception from the bundle yet, and I love the SNES Zelda look of it - and that one of your companions is an adorable chicken!

I'm so glad that this bundle's led a lot more people to itch.io from what I can tell. Finding shorter indie titles on there has helped me keep up gaming when I haven't had as much time to play longer games - especially shorter RPGs, since I love RPGs but console RPGs are a bigger time commitment then I often have.

(And don't worry about it! I was feeling really bad for not reaching out myself. I've been neglecting just about every social media platform and I wish I could say it was because I'm doing something cool but it's mostly because I've been playing Animal Crossing.)

[enemyofperfect]

I love shorter games so much! I don't seem to get the same kind of flow state from gaming that I do from reading, so if a game wants me to give it dozens of hours of my time, then that isn't a game for me. But I've loved bite-sized web games for about as long as they've existed, and I'm learning now that if I can make substantial progress in a longer game with a couple of hours here and there, then I can really enjoy watching the story unfold and knowing that I'm getting somewhere. And that's so cool to discover!

(I keep feeling guilty about how quiet I've been online, too! I want to stay in touch with people, but it's just... so easy to be overwhelmed by the state of everything right now. So I'm really glad you've had Animal Crossing to escape into! My inspirational tweet of the moment is: It’s cool if life is your only current wip we’re all doing the best we can here.)

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, part of the problem for me with social media is that I feel like I need to say *something* about things going on in real life, but I want to make sure that what I put out there is accurate and useful, and that I'm amplifying the people who most need to be heard. But if I'm scrolling through social media on my phone, it's harder to verify stuff, so I'll bookmark it to check later and tyen keep scrolling, where I'll see another thing I want to share so I'll set that aside too, and on and on until Ive got 500 bookmarks and zero of them posted.

Animal Crossing has definitely been a nice, calm retreat, but it's also been kind of a big help to me? It was my reminder of how much I like to garden, because after Hour 3 of carefully rearranging my island's roses to get crossbreeds it occured to me that I should maybe get some real plants for my balcony. And so I did! I have new flowers to watch bloom now! More birds are coming by our balcony! I'm glad I had the reminder to get out and do that.

[stunt_muppet]

...okay, just log me out, Dreamwidth, that's fine.

[enemyofperfect]

The ways of Dreamwidth are fickle!

I really, really hear you about wanting to engage somehow with everything that's going on, but getting stuck on how to do it right. And it's not like I would blame anyone else who opted to keep their online time as relaxation time, but I guess worrying about the almost nonexistent impact of a post I might or might not make is a place my brain can shove free-floating anxiety?

Anyway, it's awesome that Animal Crossing reminded you of your love of real live plants! It's so great that you have growing things on your balcony and bird visitors! Lately I've been reminding myself to take a minute to look out the window whenever I get the chance, and now I know that there's a family of groundhogs in the neighborhood and they like to graze on clover together. It's really comforting to spend a few minutes getting out of the world of humans, sometimes.