Cat Manning
@catacalypto
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Narrative Director @ Firaxis. Nebula finalist. Literature PhD. personal account. @catacalypto .bsky.social
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Finally an updated pinned tweet! I'm Cat, a Narrative Lead at Firaxis, formerly at Riot (LoL, R&D). I’m an IGF & Nebula-nominated narrative designer/writer, & I still work on blaseball. Here's a thread of links to some cool stuff I've done (games, writing, talks, etc):
• I've worked on some great indie titles like the IGF-nominated Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and Pathologic 2
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an unpopular Charles presiding over massive social unrest and precarious economic conditions? this always goes well
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worldbuilding belief: you should know what the thing is in your setting that people would make this sign about
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real
The last meme you have saved is gonna sum up your summer 2023 for you
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apologies yet again to environmental storytelling designers
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holy shit. we really did peak with Cats as a civilization.
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please buy this book because
1) it is a genuinely stunning prose-poetry novella that is unlike anything you will ever read
2) if it hits
#1
because a user named “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” tweeted about it that will be the funniest thing ever & you want to be part of history
ok it's at 7 now I'm just going to keep posting these if it keeps going up pls forgive my need to document this fever dream
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War Thunder users leaked restricted documents for the third time in a month. This time it's the AH-64D Apache Longbow. Link below:
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thank you [checks notes] bigolas dickolas
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furious that we now have a definitive answer to “is posting praxis”
Did Twitter Blue tweet just cost Eli Lilly $LLY billions?
Yes.
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everyone who agrees to a Chotiner interview is like
New Interview: I talked to Senator Ben Cardin, the Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, about why he believes aid to Israel should not be contingent on human rights concerns.
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the guy who helps me figure out if I can get a PS5 now has better info about rapid test availability than the federal government. I’m losing it
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once again extending my apologies for every time I called environmental storytelling unrealistic
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the issue with twitter’s prolonged, surreal, exceedingly stupid collapse is that twitter is the best place to watch twitter’s prolonged, surreal, and exceedingly stupid collapse
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Fuck. Haven't read the full version yet, but the opening lines of Emily Wilson's Odyssey are my new favorite of any version save the original Greek.
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WE’RE SO FUCKING BACK
Ship grounded in Egypt's Suez Canal - one of world's busiest shipping routes
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thank you for killing Henry Kissinger queen
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took a screenshot because I do really think this may be a watershed moment in the articulation of generative AI art aesthetics
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watching the Dragon’s Dogma 2 friction discourse as someone who worked on Pathologic 2
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where is my vampire hunter novel where the vampire leverages increasingly ornate tax loopholes to pass his estate onto “his heir”, while an exhausted vampire hunter accountant combs through piles of paperwork because *they all fuckin use this method these days*
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“Trigun fans propel Queer Yearning Novella to Amazon’s Top 40 Bestsellers List”
the internet continues to be a machine for generating never before imagined sentences
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the internet is a machine for generating never-before-seen sentences
This Final Fantasy 14 erotic roleplaying server is blockaded by catgirls.
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a universal gamedev experience:
junior: hey I’m looking for where X feature is because I want to do [something that would be straightforward if X is implemented cleanly]
senior: yeah so about that
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What's a tweet that's so canonical in your mind you make shorthand reference to it, even if people might not know what you're talking about? (I sometimes just say "uh oh y'all it's gettin' kinda hazy" expecting people to get it)
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in case anyone didn’t already know I DO own a “give me my money back Ea-Nasir” bracelet in Akkadian cuneiform
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“why are you posting so much about this when you normally don’t talk about Kendrick” because I don’t feel qualified to Take about rap but I certainly do about hating. next question
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Disco Elysium is like “what if the laws of physics were fucked up but you still had to pay rent”
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please enjoy this discourse from my facebook TL this morning
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really do not think a lot of people (myself included) have fully grasped how much of modern life’s expectations may now rapidly shift because they were low interest rate phenomena and it makes me feel sick lol
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men will literally face their nightmare self in a derelict ship rather than go to therapy
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millennial:
"please scream inside your heart"
"walk backwards into hell"
"you cannot kill me in a way that matters"
"everything happens so much"
I wonder what the millennial or gen z versions of the live laugh love inspirational text things are going to be
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This is what you get without an HOA. We have one place in our neighborhood that isn’t governed by the HOA and this is what we get as a neighbor.
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Destiny is a good game because I can ride my motorbike inside a god's head
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I don’t post pics of myself but I really do need to share a flatlay of my Barbenheimer fit
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I try not to QT usually but this is the funniest take on Eva I’ve ever seen
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this can be done right now by people like me without generative AI.
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personally I love doing prolonged unfunny bits rather than listening to game devs talking about their work
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The battle between Taylor Swift fans and alt-right incels is going to be FASCINATING
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Game devs should crunch more. And plank more. And leg lift more. And oblique more. And glute bridge more. It’ll help with the back pain we all complain about
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I feel like most people have a subset of their skills labeled “can do but would whine about it”
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I honestly hope the two private quote tweets are quibbling over my genuinely reductive misrepresentations of the 1640s English political landscape and not over propriety. come out we can be friends
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even beyond the human toll of layoffs, the next ten years of video games are going to be worse and/or harder to make due to the amount of people getting pushed out of the industry over the last year.
Outside of the human cost of all these layoffs (which is huge), it’s sad to think about the amount of talent that will have to sidestep into a different industry. Full on brain drain.
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hey this fucking sucks
WB Interactive has finally secured the patent to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War's signature Nemesis system after multiple failed attempts.
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opening twitter these days feels like spinning a roulette wheel labeled with different sorts of psychic damage interspersed with a few slots for cute animals
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me, sagely: I should spend less time on twitter
also me, bursting back in: a sarcophagus is a type of burrito
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Today was my first day as a Narrative Lead at Firaxis!
I’m so excited to be working with such a wonderful, talented team.
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NYT expose: even though the nice lady claimed she “got my nose”, I later discovered it was still affixed to my face
The other night, I had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing's new AI chatbot.
The AI told me its real name (Sydney), detailed dark and violent fantasies, and tried to break up my marriage. Genuinely one of the strangest experiences of my life.
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as a Destiny 2 player I cannot stop thinking about how true this is
My favorite fighting games are parkour. Yours are menus. I will not elaborate.
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please understand that we’re on track to do the funniest thing in internet history.
we’re at
#3
when everyone buying
#2
will be busy at 9 tonight & soon
#1
won’t ship in time for Sunday.
if we keep this going we can make “bigolas dickolas wolfwood gets a book to
#1
” true
please buy this book because
1) it is a genuinely stunning prose-poetry novella that is unlike anything you will ever read
2) if it hits
#1
because a user named “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” tweeted about it that will be the funniest thing ever & you want to be part of history
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I’m famously unhappy about this decision (my colleagues involved with this know my feelings and we’re cool about it) but one *can* still absolutely create a broadly systemic NPC action planning system. You just have to have the skillset.
Reminder that you will never play a game with nemesis system outside of Middle-earth games because Warner Bros PATENTED the idea
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was thinking about how recent it was and that I can’t believe King’s Hand happened during the pandemic but counterpoint: of course King’s Hand happened during the pandemic
I had a dream where there was a food called “King’s Hand”, a hollow hand made of m&m cookie, filled with Greek salad.
I could not stop thinking about it.
Here is the culmination of a week long effort.
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happy first birthday to King's Hand
I had a dream where there was a food called “King’s Hand”, a hollow hand made of m&m cookie, filled with Greek salad.
I could not stop thinking about it.
Here is the culmination of a week long effort.
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Historian here! This isn't funny, history only does this when it's in extreme distress
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coming to terms with workers striking for fairer pay: they sleep
removing the brand name from their products to stop customer boycotts: real shit
@_NevadaMan
Our data show that consumers routinely focus on the visual of the Pop-Tarts brand name, so we simplified the package design by removing "Kellogg's".
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I just think you can’t morally abandon a blahaj. you have to rehome it
on the phone angrily calling every polycule of trans software engineers in brooklyn. please come pick up your child
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This is not how anything works.
Since Bungie made the claim that they can't afford to focus resources on making PvP/Gambit maps for D2, I'm going to step you through a mathematical breakdown of how disingenuous and penny-pinching Bungie is being here.
A thread: (1/8)
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stages of game development:
junior: wait what X can happen?! oh no oh fuck
mid: I will spend 35% of my time ensuring that X does not happen again
senior: [staring into middle distance] if we do this X will happen
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honestly 17th century English religious sects whipped ass
This frightening mask was worn as a disguise by the outlawed Covenanter minister Alexander Peden. The mask, made from leather and fabric, the beard and wig from real human hair
#WyrdWednesday
#Scotland
📷 National Museums Scotland
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how was my day? well I accidentally put this in a sprint planning document
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unsurprisingly, this sucks
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I get asked this fairly often, so: you don’t need to play the original Pathologic before playing Pathologic 2! Pathologic 2 is a remake. The only thing I would say to know before going in is “buy the bull and don’t take the deal”*. You’ll know what those mean when you get there.
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“Trigun yaoi twitter more persuasive than Oprah” and other internet sentences
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I’m still kind of stunned that Google is looking at a major component of what’s actively ruining their product and going “yeah, let’s make that worse”
The nightmare begins — Google is incentivizing the production of AI-generated slop.
If you are a news outlet who has accepted this meager deal, and especially if you are publishing AI-generated articles without disclaimers, you should be deeply ashamed.
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this tweet causing the catastrophically failed rerelease of Morbius has strong “big boat stuck” energy imo
the best part of Morbius was when he said "IT'S MORBIN' TIME" and morbed all over those guys
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this guy has always posted aggressive, contrarian, often wrong takes—and now he can make money from doing so. screenshot, not QT, if you must engage (but this is stupid and not worth it)
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once again sorry to environmental storytelling designers
europe water levels are so low that sunk nazi warships are popping up in the danube
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not sure the last time we’ve gotten to see an “I’m not owned” meltdown of this scale or magnitude. everything else about this is obviously bad but it is unfortunately also very funny
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sorry but I cannot express how much worse this app is to use now that every time you click on a post you are greeted with the most insipid half-formed thoughts which range from banal at best to ghoulish at worst. instant psychic damage on even benign posts
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cool human experience bro. be a shame if it was impossible to fully convey to another living soul
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“funko pop mass grave” is someone’s mk ultra activation phrase
Funko is sending at least $30 million worth of its products to a landfill because it has so much idle stock sitting in warehouses that it's financially the best option.
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I’m always thinking about King’s Hand
I had a dream where there was a food called “King’s Hand”, a hollow hand made of m&m cookie, filled with Greek salad.
I could not stop thinking about it.
Here is the culmination of a week long effort.
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I’m not sorry for participating in discourse when it’s about pushing back on crunch culture. That’s my responsibility as a lead: to make sure it isn’t normalized. Crunch is a failure of project management and to normalize—let alone glorify!—it is unacceptable to me.
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whenever any of you talks about Kingdom Hearts this is all I can think of
JESUS CHRIST (ninth hour): Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
GOOFY (present at the crucifixion): Gawrsh
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Today was my last day at Riot after 2.5 years. I’ll miss so many of my amazing colleagues, & I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to grow as a designer.
I’m taking a couple weeks off, but excited to share what’s next when I’m able!
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well this blew up
what I originally meant was less “dangerous item” and more “very stupid-seeming item that a few people can use appropriately, but mostly a bunch of untrained idiots look at it and go ‘lol seems fine’ and create a dangerous disaster”
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pineapple is great. I love that humans looked at a plant that can break down proteins and went “eh, a little flesh-dissolving should be fine”
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