It’s Blaugust, so time for another introduction post, I guess. I find it fun to write one each year because you get to kinda see how my style and I have changed. I mean, you just do change little by little from day to day or year to year, so going back to older intro posts is nice. Lots of people have been talking about their first blogs and the like, so I figured I’d combine this post with that prompt and talk about that as well. I also didn’t have a post prepared for today or anything. The last couple of days, I’ve published reviews I’ve written on the day, which in the case of reviews has gotten a bit rough… So, I’ll take a free prompt. I know it’s not creator appreciation week or anything just yet but I might as well embed some good music I like in here to give ya a better idea of me, right? Other folks have also written posts on their first-ever blogs and written introductions and the like. Krikket has been doing a wonderful job with sharing little prompts that folks can get inspired by and I highly recommend checking her out. She’s a good bean. Who am I? Hey, I’m Magi and I’m a blogger from Germany who primarily writes about indie games. I study English studies and Philosophy at university to become a teacher. I also work at an English pub at the moment, on top of doing streams on Twitch where I primarily do indie showcases and first playthroughs of various games. Since I do reviews, I go by “independent journalist” as a label for what I do these days. At the least, German law says that I’m that, so now I’ve got responsibilities and stuff to deal with cause folks have to be able to sue me if they don’t like me and whatever. I love cooking and drawing, going on walks, reading and video games, I guess. I used to be part of a few different Drama groups, performing on stages and during festivals. Beyond that, I’m a big fan of indie music, metal, alt stuff, but also just listen to a lot of different genres all the time. I like to say that I just like good music. Some of my favourite games of all time include but aren’t limited to Catherine, Deadbolt, Risk of Rain 2, Dungeon of the Endless, Jet Set Radio, and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. Old-school and modern roguelikes are my jam, typically, but there are also so many great games I have yet to experience. Growing up I never had a console or anything, so I missed out on a lot of stuff. Last year, I streamed Final Fantasy 7 (the OG) for the first time. I also got to experience Bayonetta around that time and Earthbound, all of which are absolutely phenomenal games. Yeah, beyond that, I love animals, but don’t own any pets at the moment since my living arrangements and whatnot just wouldn’t be great for the pet. My parents are from Kosovo, so English is actually my third language. I was born and raised in Germany, learning Albanian first, then German, and streaming/blogging has really helped with my language usage. For what it’s worth, I learned most of my English through anime rather than school. Around 2013, I got into the medium and got rather upset at the missing commas in the subtitles and the fact that so many German subtitles would make very easy-to-avoid mistakes that severely hindered my ability to understand what was going on. German is one of those languages where commas are actually important, you know? I guess, it’s similar in the English language. “Let’s eat Roger” and “Let’s eat, Roger” are two very different sentences. Hence, I’m no grammar nazi but I most definitely do advocate for some good usage of it given the fact that commas can save lives, and Roger is a cool guy. That, paired with the fact that the English subtitles would be ready a whole week before the German ones, got me into English subtitles. Due to my very limited English skills (school English kinda sucks), I had to look up every third word online, then every fifth, then every seventh, and before long, I just didn’t need to do that at all. Since I took a liking to it, I switched to English in all games I played, too. The words just sound a whole lot cooler in English… and a lot of references get lost in translation, after all. I started reading a lot of English literature when I was 16, from Shakespeare, Mills, and Wilde to Lovecraft, Dick, and Chambers. And yeah, I blog and stream in English. Working at an English pub, I speak a lot of it, too. Being an English major, I naturally have a lot of English to speak in those lectures, and these days, I don’t get to speak all that much German, actually, which is a little sad, especially as my skills are deteriorating, and apparently I’ve even got a bit of an English accent in German these days. Weird! Meanwhile, I sound like a very posh twat when I speak English despite not being a native speaker and despite being anything but posh. My first blog Back in 2016-2018, I had a huge Steam library, particularly due to my inability to say “no” to big bundles, sales, and the like. I worked a job as a waiter for 5 bucks, and growing up, I spent most of my gaming playing games that nobody else knew. So when I finally earned my own money, which funded all the books I needed for school, as well as various school trips and my driver’s license, I would often buy stuff on HumbleBundle, Fanatical, Steam sales, and whatnot… and since I knew way too many games that nobody else in my friendgroup has ever heard of and since I would recommend cool stuff to them, I was told that I should write about it. The idea itself wasn’t too out there for me either. Around 2013, I was following this blog called PetebackWelcome (like Feedback but with Pete? Get it?) run by derLoarp. It was the only blog I read posts of at the time, and every day after school, I’d hurry home to check and see if there was a new article on the site. derLoarp would publish reviews on a variety of games from Banished to indie titles like The Unfinished Swan, as well as a series of posts called the Monster Hunter Log (sounds familiar? I started and quit a very inspired series ages ago), Gundam models, as well as anime and the like. The blog sadly doesn’t exist anymore, but looking at it through the Wayback Machine filled me with unfathomable amounts of nostalgia just now. I remember creating a WordPress account in 2014 or something and leaving comments from time to time, at one point even offering to spellcheck for him since I wanted to help the project. To my surprise, derLoarp didn’t care whatsoever about his spelling (Shocker, I know!) and told me to just start my own blog if I wanted to. Fast forward four-ish years, and I, while studying for my A-levels, had the idea of just taking the jump and starting a website. The name, at the time, was something along the lines of “Indiekativ”. The name was originally based on “der kategorische Imperativ” (the categorical imperative by Kant), which is a moral concept about treating others based on values that you’d want to become universal laws. I thought it would be fitting for me to talk about games that do things that I’d like more games to do, so that’s why that influenced the name… except, shoehorning “indie” into “imperativ” just didn’t really work, so I opted for the word “indikativ”, which is just a mode for verbs that are neutral. It was a cool name but it also was just kind of a weird play on words that didn’t make much sense at the time. In the end, I am kinda glad that I didn’t go in that direction since, while I did learn a lot about Kant, he was a bit problematic in the sense that a lot of his ideas put rationale and logic above empathy and love. The idea of treating others based on values that you’d want to become universal sounds good on paper until you come to some moral dilemma, like the murderer at your door. You shouldn’t lie and you don’t want people to lie to you, but now this very obvious murderer wants to know the location of your friend, and according to Kant, you shouldn’t lie to him even if it gets your buddy killed. There are layers to everything and since Kant was a stubborn old man, he just ignored the concept of nuance altogether at times, for which he got criticized aplenty during his lifetime. Either way, Indiekativ had three or four reviews on them, but before long, it became inactive and eventually I even had to remove the blog since some folks online were doxing me and whatnot. Or at the very least, they put 2 and 2 together when I was the only person on socials talking about this very new website, haha So, given that I’ve covered the games I reviewed back then over here as well, I don’t really count Indiekativ as my “first” blog, even if it technically is. I’ve been doing this project right here since 2019. I started posting on July 15th, shortly after joining the Blaugust community, and have been posting ever since. What’s Indiecator? As I’ve been writing for a long time, let’s talk a bit more about Indiecator. Back in 2019, I really wanted to pick up the hobby again and just share my thoughts and opinions on all these cool indie games out there. Since the original blog was annoying to run, in particular due to Blogger’s very janky image placement, but also due to my lack of knowledge on basic website code stuff and things and whatnot, I wanted to know what other platforms there are… and I also wanted to see if there are blogging communities I could join. Blaugust was the first result that popped up, a community led by Bel whose posts I’ve actually read a few times before then around 2017 but I just didn’t realise at the time that that was that guy, which was funny later on. Initially, it was just me yapping and these very long reviews with way too many words that took 20 minutes to read and didn’t have great English in ’em. Looking back, I cringe a little… but I also take a bit of pride in that. AI could never replicate the awkwardness with which I handled reviews and interview back then, not to mention the unprofessional attitude I accidentally displayed when meeting developers, noting down in the finished blog post that they were thinking or laughing for way too long. I was built just different (since it’s a meme, I can get away with a little ungrammaticalness, right?), one might argue. These days, I don’t do stuff like that quite as often. Interviews have been more streamlined with more game-centric questions, reviews are 1-1.3k words in length with an actual structure and a whole lot of principles and values behind them, and my inbox is constantly a state. Look, this is a one-man operation and a passion project. These days I see it less and less like a blog and more like an independent gaming publication run by some dude who likes to hear himself talk. I mean, I will still write about other things I wanna use this platform for… but I’ve noticed a severe lack of that wokeness recently that used to make this site “my site”. I fear that eventually I’ll become just “IGN but in good” instead of “a site run by that weird Magi guy”, you know? That is not to say that I’m losing my personal voice. I don’t think people read my blog for the games necessarily. At least, I’ve gotten feedback that the games I recommend (or don’t) are just an added perk, and that the “writing quirks” I have (that they didn’t disclose to me at all… those psychos!) are charming and fun. So, I guess that’s cool? I am still working on bigger essays, including this super huge megapost on AI and the destruction of humanity… I got some longer ones that are sitting around and just waiting to be covered on the death of nuance… but those take me ages these days because of all the research I have to do and all the stuff that keeps happening, adding more and more recent examples while dating the examples originally used, so I have to then rewrite stuff… not to mention that the AI-megapost is currently sitting at a grand total of 23,372 words. I just checked. It’s a bit much, innit? I think using one’s platform for a good cause is great, so I wanna do more of that. Sadly, I don’t have the time between streaming, working, studying, chores, running from doc to doc about my chronic pain and other health issues, not to mention the avalanche of other responsibilities and personal projects. There’s just so much to do and so little time. God, I wish I could just stop sleeping and instead work on all the fun stuff. A little update on other stuff I am currently still working on the Blaugust filtering tool in google sheets that I wanted to have ready by August 1st. As it turns out, uh, I suck at this. Some people in the community know way more about technology and programming than me, though, and those folks have been working on some cool programs to sort through blogs and exclude different things. It’s really exciting! As such, I will still try and finish what I started, mostly as a learning experience, but god does it remove the pressure off my back since someone else is doing something I wanted to do but they’re doing it much better than me. I’m honestly incredibly glad about that. Blaugust’s awards are coming along, I wanna say. I hate doing font art. I’ve done digital art since 2020 and as much as I love designing shit, I absolutely hate having to draw fucking letters and writing stuff on a little canvas, you know? It’s bizarre how much I hate that or colouring things. On the bright side of things, though, I’ve got some very cute designs figured out and am also figuring out how to do colour maps and whatever. My main issue at the moment is just that I don’t have enough time in the day to do this as well as all the other things. On that note, since I have too little time, I’m not doing the “daily uploads” thing I wanted to do on top of the daily posts. It’s just too much. Ambition and Hubris are too very different things. Beyond that, I’ll be at Gamescom this year again, actually for all five days, so if you’re in the area, let’s meet up? I’ve been working on a design for my very own Business card, too, which is gonna be pretty stellar, I reckon! My very own game? Outside of that, I’ve got a game project in the works! It’s pretty janky at the moment, and learning Godot is taking a lot of time for me, but as my first-ever very own game project, I’m looking forward to seeing what folks will think of it. I intend to just publish it as a free game on itch.io once it’s done, but for the time being, it’s a pretty fun learning process. For what it’s worth, it was originally supposed to be a wave-based tower defence kind of game where you point a laser pointer at enemies and a tiger jumps out and attacks them. So, it’s like that one Sniper Mode in Hitman… except with a tiger! But then it somehow ended up turning into something much more akin to Megabonk, which isn’t bad or anything per sé but it just is funny to see. Currently, enemies just spawn over time and then chase after you. I am working on figuring out how to set up a killing mechanism that is just “point at enemy” -> “enemy disappears” basically, but I also laid some groundwork for a “budget” system where enemies spawn based on a “budget” which increases over time (like in Risk of Rain 1/2/Returns), and with a bigger budget, bosses can also spawn in eventually. Since I’m still learning and also setting up all the basic stuff, it’s all boxes and blobs at the moment. That being the case, I intend to have a sorta doodle-y art style in place later that will feature 2D cardboard cutouts of everything which will always face towards the player… in a 3D environment! So, sort of like in Battleblock Theatre except it’s 3D… perhaps a better comparison is Satisfactory’s Arachnophobia Mode. :) I also really want friends of mine and content creators I like to watch to voice different characters in the game as cameos. I think that’d be neat. All of that about the art and voices and whatever is so far in the future, though… Currently, it just spawns lots of enemies that chase after you, but it’s definitely getting somewhere. Other stuff I just wanted to give folks a better idea of what stuff I’m into. I absolutely love the Dio tribute album that Jorn did and listen to a lot of older music. There are a lot of contemporary artists I like but lately it’s just been a ton of 80s metal and early 2000s alt music for me. One of my all-time favourite bands is Crywank who sadly disbanded a couple years ago, but they make weird antifolk music that is pretty depressing and fun and silly. I also really like the Smiths and the Cure… but Morrissey is quite the cunt, as I learned recently, so I included the (honestly superior) t.A.T.u. cover of How Soon Is Now in the post instead. As someone with friends and family in the UK who struggled to find food initially after Brexit happened, someone advocating for that bs while living in his mansion or whatever is pretty weird to me. It ruined the band’s legacy a fair bit for me, personally. The added benefit of listening to a lot of indie rock these days and older rock music is that none of it is infused with the AI crap. There’s so many bands nowadays that utilize it, and I just dislike how a lot of it gets same-y and how it robs the soul out of the music. Luckily, though, the GEMA here in Germany had some major breakthroughs in suing Suno, which hopefully might set a precedent for future class action lawsuits in the music industry, and that it might by extension help the creation of legislature that prohibits or at least restricts the development of generative AI. Personally, I’ve got way too much to say on the topic (evident by that aforementioned huge post I’m writing) and I really dislike how much generative AI has tainted society as a whole. There’s so many folks who can’t do proper research anymore. Younger generations are using ChatGPT and the like for life advice and can’t make decisions for themselves anymore whereas older generations just trust whatever the thing is spouting out, leading to AI psychosises and other issues that are getting more and more documented these days. Add to that that there are political campaigns to create websites with fake news to influence the data sets of AI to then also influence the “opinions” and “political leaning” of LLMs, and by extension many people out there… Dystopia! Yay! So, I don’t use it. LLMs are designed to be addictive and servile, to the point where people feel incredibly good about themselves when they use it. I’ve seen writers and artists who used it stop being able to create because AI does what they do “better”. It’s heartbreaking to see talents not be able to do things they used to love because the LLM (in part trained on their work) sounds more like them than their writing ever could. This all comes back to Blaugust in a way where we permit the usage of it for assistance. Again, it’s also in part an accessibility thing… but I fear that blogging as we know it might suffer from this overreliance and dependency that LLMs in particular tend to foster. Oh well (pronounced Orwell). This post was originally published on Indiecator. If you wanna get in touch with me, feel free to stop by for one of my Twitch streams. For business inquiries, please reach out via email. 2 thoughts on “Yet another introduction: What is Indiecator, who the fuck is Magi, and also some updates and music to vibe to”