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A Cassette Beasts review that completely misses the point of Archangels

When I was searching for Cassette Beasts on Marginalia Search in hopes of finding more Cassette Beasts stuff on the independent web, I came across Boiling Steam's review of Cassette Beasts. The review is generally positive, but I disagree with most of its criticisms. One of their criticisms of the game, however, stood out to me:

Lastly, the game features some stronger bosses called the archangels - they have a very different look than your regular monsters, and they feel out of place in the game, design wise and tone-wise. When you fight them, it feels like you stepped into a horror game, very far from the pokemon-y atmosphere of the rest of the world. That may be the biggest design flaw of Cassette Beasts.

This bothers me greatly, because this goes beyond disagreement, as this argument crosses into the "completely missing the point" territory. The Archangels are intentionally designed to be weird and not looking like they belong. They are eldritch horrors, and Cassette Beasts' main story is just about the mysteries surrounding them as much as the player character's quest to return home, so being weird is literally the entire point of the Archangels!

Not to mention, perhaps the biggest mistakes for a Cassette Beasts player to make is to expect it to be just a Pokémon clone. This is why I wrote a huge essay on my Cassette Beasts shrine with more than 4,700 words to list all the reasons Cassette Beasts is much, much more than a Pokémon clone. How is Cassette Beasts having eldritch horrors that are not "Pokémon-y" a bad thing?

I intended to respond to Boiling Steam's review to argue against their criticism of the Archangels, because I cannot stand seeing such a bad argument in a review on a publication website that is meant to be taken seriously given it has also been featured on other big gaming sites and letting it go unchallenged.

Therefore, I look at Boiling Steam's contact page, and tracked down its Mastodon toot sharing its Cassette Beasts review. I replied with the following:

You said the Archangels are maybe the biggest design flaw of the game because they feel out of place, but here's the thing: that is literally the whole point of Archangels.

The Archangels are eldritch horrors, so they were intentionally designed to be weird and do not look like they fit in the rest of the world. Cassette Beasts' main story is not just about the player character's quest to return home, but also about the mysteries surrounding the Archangels, so calling Archangels being out of place a design flaw is thoroughly missing the point of the Archangels.

Not to mention, you should not expect Cassette Beasts to be just like Pokémon, since Pokémon did not invent the monster taming genre, so Archangels are great for telling and reminding players of not expecting Cassette Beasts as just a Pokémon clone.

In fact, I find the Archangels are one of the absolute best and most fascinating elements of Cassette Beasts, and them not being Pokemon-y is a good thing.

Presenting a design choice of a piece of media that seems "off" when it is literally the creator's intention is one of my least favourite things to encounter in media review and analysis, and Boiling Steam's criticism of the Archangels in Cassette Beasts is one of such textbook cases.

Leilukin's Hub Cassette Beasts Shrine on Marginalia Search

Screenshot of Marginalia Search displaying a search result, consists of a link to the Cassette Beasts shrine from leilukin.neocities.org, the Neocities subdomain of Leilukin's Hub, with links to other pages of the Cassette Beasts shrine below.

I am pleased to discover that the very first result when you search Cassette Beasts on Marginalia Search is my Cassette Beasts shrine. Unfortunately, the result links to my website's original host on Neocities with its Neocities subdomain, instead of the custom domain leilukin.com.

My website, including the Cassette Beasts shrine, was originally hosted on Neocities, but it has migrated from Neocities since I registered a custom domain, leilukin.com, for it. I have set it up that visiting leilukin.neocities.org will redirect you to leilukin.com.

This prompted me to submit leilukin.com to be crawled by Marginalia Search.

I dont understand the insistence that fanfic writers have about being…

I dont understand the insistence that fanfic writers have about being considered "real writers"[...]

[...]i think the crux of the issue is this:

you cannot take criticism.

which is the bare minimum you should be able to do as a writer. because think about it, what else do you gain from being considered a "real writer?" what can you realistically GAIN from it?

you can't submit your fanfics to competitions, can't be nominated for an award, don't get your work studied in classrooms, you can't even sell it etc etc. the one thing you legally should be ABLE to do is take criticism, and yet so many fanfic writers refuse.

like even if you're like fuck the competitions, fuck the awards, fuck getting paid for your art, even if you considered all of those things as the pinnacle of classism (which we can argue about until the sun goes down i suppose), if you are not willing to take criticism about your fanfic/writing then, how are you any different from a toddler holding a crayon?

you will elevate your fanfic to that of historical, cultural and often religious pieces, not understanding that by trying to equate your bakudeku/stucky/omegaverse ships to that of, idfk, religious texts (yes ive seen too many of yall doing this shit) or any Greek tragedy, you're actually just diminishing the sociopolitical impact that those other works have had. you're not bring your fanfic up to that level, you're bringing those works down to yours. which, i shouldn't have to say is incredibly insulting to those authors.

we can agree that fanfic as a whole has had SOME impact on the art world, hell the way it's fucking shaped booktok and so much of publishing should be studied under a microscope. so many published books are just repackaged fanfic at this point.

but here's the thing. i'm an author who has written fanfic before. i have friends who have written fanfic but also write their own original material. i know of other authors who write fanfic, as well. the difference between us and so much of you ao3 fanfic weirdos is that not only are we brave enough to try something new, but that when we do, we are able to take criticism about our original works, which is so much harder than when you're writing fanfic. fanfic is playing in someone else's sandbox. wherever you fall flat, you can blame on the source material.

you can't do that if you ARE the source material. you have to take that criticism, process it, figure out what to do with it (if there is anything to do with it) and then take the next step. this is a skill you have to build time and time again as you write your own story.

do you know how hard it is to get people invested in your original stories? do you know how much work it takes to craft an original story, and put it out, and then deal with the demoralizing results when you realize either people didn't read/care for it at all?

i could not read a chuck tingle story to save my life but at the very fucking least, that man is earnest in his craft. he is putting himself out there, sometimes with satirical works, sometimes not. that takes guts. to be a writer, you need to have guts. you need to be brave.

the wildest fucking thing is so many of you write smut and it's not even good smut. i had a friend who asked me to read her fanfic and wouldn't even take the slight criticism that "maybe these characters should use actual lube". this was such a prevalent problem in so many of your smutfics during the early 2010s, that there was an ENTIRE BLOG dedicated to point out "this is not lube".

and the argument that fanfic is better than original books because it is "inherently queer, enjoyed primarily by women so critiquing it is misogynistic and homophobic" falls flat on its face for so many reasons, the first being that 71.3% of the publishing industry are cis women and 72.5% are white. the majority of these original books that you hate so much are being pushed by white women. now what?

not to mention its insulting to ME and other queer authors of color who are genuinely trying to break through the mold of publishing but yall won't read our books because we don't write about white twinks having mid sex.

this is almost a literary version of gamergate. gamers wanted games to be considered art but didn't want their games to be critiqued in any serious way.

if all you want to do is have fun with the same 5 or 6 tropes and squeecore storyline then fine. by all means, have at it, i don't care.

but you want to be considered a real writer? can you take the criticism if someone tells you your fanfic is bad?

frognonbinary on Tumblr (web archive version)

🔗 What applications can be automatically installed at Hostinger?

Today I learned that Hostinger's Auto Installer supports not only WordPress and Woocommerce, but also Nextcloud Hub, Tiny Tiny RSS, phpBB, Kanboard, and more. Nice!

This is handy in case I do end up needing or wanting to use some of these applications.

Thunderbird's Problem with Outlook

Thunderbird has randomly failed to log in to my Outlook accounts so many times it is annoying. I searched the web and found this article, "Thunderbird Has a Problem With Outlook, Hotmail, and Live Email Addresses". I followed the article's suggestion to change my Outlook accounts' authentication method from normal password to OAuth2, which seems to finally solve the problem, at least I hope so.

Reached 15 posts, 15 follows and 15 followers on The Dragon's Cave

Screenshot of the statistics of the Mastodon account @Leilukin@dragonscave.spaces statistics, consisting of 15 posts, 15 follows and 15 followers.

What a coincidence that after tooting about switching to Laragon as my PHP development environment, my new Mastodon account at dragonscave.space reached three 15s: 15 posts, 15 follows and 15 followers, LOL.

I do like the number 15, though. 😎

Using Laragon for My Local PHP Development

Since when I started dipping my toes into PHP by creating the Cassette Beasts fanlisting and subsequently my fanlisting collective, I have been using PHP's built-in web server to preview my PHP pages.

However, a major drawback of PHP's built-in web server for my PHP development was that when I used the web server to preview my fanlisting collective, the CSS stylesheet of my Cassette Beasts fanlisting will not get applied. Therefore, I have been searching for alternative development environment software for PHP. I tried out XAMPP, but it was not well-designed for developing multiple PHP projects; I even tried out Docker, which was overkill, especially since my back-end web development skills are not developed enough to be able to make use of Docker yet.

Finally, I discovered Laragon, which gave me what I needed: lightweight, fast, and easy to switch between different PHP projects. As a result, I finally decided to settle for Laragon for the development of Leilukin's Hub's PHP websites.

Mastodon is Not Inherently Better than Twitter

I will never forget that one of my earliest experiences on Mastodon was when I joined Fosstodon way back in 2020 and witnessed my notifications being flooded by trolls or users from right-wing instances, all because my avatar contains the Philadelphia Pride Flag, which one of the trolls literally described as something only "SJWs" use.

So yeah, the idea that Mastodon is better than Twitter is only true if you join instances that actually block troll instances and has explicit anti-bigotry policies.

I still do not regret deleting my account on Fosstodon.

Jerry Bell's long toot talking about the bigotry and troll problem of the Fediverse (archive.today version) I discovered today is so important.

Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection and Cbox

Today I learned that blocking tracking content on all windows (not just private windows) with Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection also blocks Cbox widget from being displayed on other websites.

This means that the Strict setting of Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks Cbox widget.