May 18

PuffPals: Island Skies – The first time I support a Kickstarter Kampagne!

Hey y’all! First of all: I am a bit stupid sometimes xD I actually wrote this post when the Kickstarter Campaign was still going on, in an effort to inform you about it, but maybe also get help on reaching the stretch goals for it! For some reason, I forgot to change the post from private to public and now the campaign is already over… I am still very excited about the whole thing, so I still need to tell you about it, but sadly you will have no chance to join in anymore 🙁 I hope you don’t mind and that you are still interested in hearing about my newest passion 🙂 Let’s start from the beginning!

I am sure most of you have heard about Kickstarter. It’s an American Website, which provides creators with the opportunity of showing their plans for future projects and getting them funded. You can fund anything there in theory from your college degree, over a road trip, a new gadget, a book or even a game, anything is possible. Only the audience gets to decide which projects will actually be fully backed and which won’t. It’s essentially a kind of powerplay, where trust is very important because supporters basically have to fund something which does not exist and if the campaign won’t be successful, it might never exist. That’s something which has always kinda bothered me, I just never had this kind of trust in something, so I never backed a campaign yet. But things changed when I heard about PuffPals: Island Skies!

Island Skies is supposed to be a video game that could be described as a crossover of games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, where you get to simulate a life in a perfect world, individualize your character, decorate your house, make friends and explore the world around you. Actually, I can say that it will be definitely a game in the future because the campaign reached its minimum goal within the first few days of its launch! This means that if anyone would decide to back up the project, they don’t even have to trust in the campaign working out, because it already did 😉 Of course, there is always the part where you have to trust the people keeping their word and actually using the money for a specific purpose, and I feel like I should mention that Kickstarter is not forcing people to actually do that, but with the active community that I have gotten to know through Discord, I don’t feel like this campaign is a scam 😉 This is actually why I decided to support the game and thus my first Kickstarter campaign ever! And all of it is so exciting to me, that I wanted to tell you about the process and what lies ahead in the future of this game.

What you can see here are the so-called stretch goals, which basically show what further features the development team will be trying to implement in the game, depending on how much money they will have at the end of the campaign. On one hand, it’s a way to get people to spend more money, but on the other hand, it’s also a way to make people participate in what should be inside the game. When the campaign started, there were not even any goals after the switch port, because the team behind the game did not even know if they would come that far. So they basically used the input they had from the community to decide what kind of goals they want to try to reach and thus shape the game in the way we as the fans want it. Also, money is an important factor here, since the team itself has to be paid, possible experts in new fields, artists and so on, so they really could not realize any of these goals, if they would not get the money. So it’s less of a way to get the supporters to support them more and more of a way to build up their game more with the help of their fans.

Depending on how much money you spend, you got assigned a certain tier with certain benefits. Some of them are access to behind the scenes when the game is in development, which is something me and my husband are looking forward to the most! Other benefits are in-game exclusives such as special clothing, decorative items or even pets you can own 🙂 But there are also “real” physical items such as very cute plushies, stickers and through the stretch goals, we also have reached the option of getting a hardcover version of the artbook for the game! Almost all of those benefits(minus the artbook!) are Kickstarter exclusive, so since the campaign already ended, sadly you won’t be able to get them anymore :/ But I will keep you updated and show you the ones that I got when they arrive! Actually, the exclusive plushies were part of the reason why I pledged 😛 The game itself looks super interesting too, but I can rarely say no to plushies xD The physical add-ons will ship at the beginning of 2023, so if you are interested in reading about it, save the date 😉

Why I am telling you this, you might ask. Well as I have mentioned in the beginning my idea was to share this campaign with as many people as possible because I think the game has very great potential and being part of its creation, sounds like a great adventure! Sadly now that the campaign is over, aside from following the developer fluffnest on Instagram, you can’t really join the adventure anymore. But as with the physical add-ons, I try to keep you updated at least a bit. Even though I still have to ask how much I am allowed to share. As for now let me tell you what of the parts of the game that have been teased, I am most interested in!
At 800k we unlocked a desert biome which is said to hold some secrets about the lore of the game. In my head, it’s kinda inspired by ancient Egypt even though there was no confirmation on that mental image from the developers so far 😛 Still, I am very grateful to know that the game even has a story, since at least Animals Crossing for me always lacked one. In general, I am happy that together with all the other backers we have collected enough money to unlock all of the possible biomes, making them as big and interesting as possible! So many things that can be explored^^ Multiplayer mode at first did not sound very exciting to me personally, but after the project reached over 2 million dollars and the amusement park biome was unlocked, I am now looking forward to it too 😉 How amazing could it be to meet up with friends in an amusement park to play minigames together and maybe after that explore each other’s islands?

Don’t get me wrong, I am super happy that the game reached so much money, but I am also super bumped that the post did not go online in time 🙁 So I hope you are all okay with me talking about it, even though you never had a chance to participate, at least not the way I planned too. But maybe you have found out about the game yourself, maybe you are a pen pal and we have talked about it in our letters or Instagram informed you about the campaign. Either way I hope you can be as excited as I am and if I am able too, I will make some update posts from time to time to inform you about the process of the development of the game 😉 If you want to further check out the game you can follow this link: *here* 🙂

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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April 13

Ableism 101

As some of you know, I am studying sign language at a university in Germany, which means a huge part of that is also disabled studies in general. I don’t want to say I am an expert in the field, but I might do know a few more things about it than the average person does. And today is one of these days where I feel like I should share some of that knowledge I have gained with you.

The difference between the words “able” and “disable”

To talk about this topic we first need to define some of the words I will be using throughout this post, let’s start with the difference between “abled” and “disabled” people. Someone is considered “able” when the body they have been born into fits the criteria of what society views as “healthy” and “normal”, meaning just because of their body, they won’t be held back by society in any way(let’s ignore things like racism and sexism for the sake of this explanation). “Disabled” people, on the other hand, are born with or without something, which makes participating in our society harder for them.

So let’s imagine someone who is born with legs that can run, take stairs and be independent. Someone born without or with broken legs in some way, can’t run, can’t take stairs and often is not as independent, not because of their disability, but because society often forgets about them. They make buildings without ramps, without accessible toilets or even without big enough doors for a wheelchair to fit through. And because of those things, they are not able to be independent oftentimes.

In Germany, the translation of “disabled” is actually “behindert”, which would literally mean something like “being hindered to do something“. In this case, a wheelchair user would be hindered to access a building for one or multiple of the reasons I stated above. Their problem would not be their wheelchair in this case, but the fact that whoever build the building did not think of how a wheelchair user would enter. And that’s the general problem disabled people face in life, no matter what kind of disability they have.

What is ableism?

As I said earlier, for the sake of that explanation, we tried to not think of racism and sexism, which I think you all know the definition of already. Ableism is very similar, only that the minority group which is being discriminated against in this case are disabled people. This discrimination can look very obvious, in that for example someone is bullied for their “strange look” because the person might be fully blind and thus has nothing to focus on. But it can be less obvious too, sometimes people don’t even know that they are acting ableist.

A good example of that kind of behaviour is what led me initially to write this post. As you certainly know, there are different kinds of gadgets already developed, which are supposed to help disabled people be more independent in life. The wheelchair is one of the most obvious, but there are many many more. One thing that comes to my mind is a plate that has some cavities and a little stopper, to position food into. It was made to make people who only have one hand or one arm, be able to slice their food without someone else’s help.

But those two Gadgets seem very obvious and self-explanatory to me, and it looks like there are others, which confuse people. Just recently I saw a video of a chef making fun of a device which I can best describe as an egg cracker, but one that does the job for you. You lay an egg into position, grab the handle and press down and the raw egg falls down into your pan, ready to be cooked. This chef in the video did make it seems as if that was an “unnecessary contraption” and it would be so much easier to just break an egg with your hands, “it only needs practice”. That is straight-up ableist behaviour because not everyone has the dexterity or just the right body parts to be able to crack an egg open like that. So making fun of helpful devised is very discriminative, even though I am pretty sure, the chef from the video did not even think of what that gadget might have been actually used for.

Gadgets that benefit disabled people, can benefit us all

This indirect form of Ableism often springs from a lack of education, like it’s the problem with many different things. People often just don’t know and somehow don’t find out, that some devices have been invented with disabled people in mind. And not all of them only benefit them, many of them actually benefit everyone in society. Let me give you some examples.

With TikTok being at an all-time high and Instagram basically trying to copy its functions, short video-based content is all the rage these days. POV, subtitles, Speech-to-text and Voice Recognition are all already part of our daily lives, but have we stopped one second to think about how they are actually helping disabled people more than they help us? Subtitles may not have been designed for deaf people, but they help them engage with said media content, which would otherwise not be available to them. Speech to text is making writing texts digitally easier for blind people, and audiobooks basically only exist because of them.

Curb cuts, which I have often used owning a scooter since last year, were designed to help wheelchair users get across the street. Typewriters were originally designed to help blind people write a letter, back when that was still popular 😉 Even electrical toothbrushes were designed to help those limited motor skills and this list could go on for quite a while longer, but I think I got my point across.

Fin

With this post, I only hope to spread some more awareness and educate people on topics, which at least in my school time, were sadly on no one’s mind. Disabled people do exist in our society, they are part of it and should be treated as such. So next time you pick up something, which seems useless to you, before discarding the product altogether, think about how it might be able to help other people. Who knows, maybe it even sparks an idea for a new gadget in your head, which will become so popular in the future, that everyone will use it. I think in general, we should just think of other people more often and some of the problems we share on a worldwide level would disappear.

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February 2

Normalizing violence against children on TikTok & other video-platforms

The “Throw A Shoe” Trope

I know this is a bold headline but hear me out. I don’t have TikTok, but I use Instagram a lot and since they “invented” the Reel feature, many TikTokers repost their stuff on there too. So without actually using TikTok, I have an idea of how the app functions and know that there are many different things you can do with it. What started as a platform where people would mostly sing and dance to tunes, is now used for educational tutorial videos, cute pet videos and also comedic videos. The last one is what I want to focus on today, because that was the most problematic I have seen. I don’t want to condemn anyone, I don’t want people to unfollow anyone, I really only want to spread awareness of the topic, because I feel like many creators just don’t know what kind of impact their work can have. So if you are interested in what I have to say and what I find out, this post is for you 🙂

Scrolling through the reels on Instagram has become some kind of routine for me, to do when I am bored. And I mostly adore the cool art videos, cute pets to look at and I do laugh and many videos with a comedic intention behind them too. But from watching these videos so often, there is one trope in particular which I have seen being used very often and very naively. Oftentimes, when I see a video situation or a POV describing a child – parent relationship, it’s about the kid doing something “wrong” and the adult either actively using violence or at least treated to use it. And the comedic idea behind this seems to indicate some kind of shared childhood memory of parents beating up their children. The trope which I have seen used the most is a parent, using their shoes or sandals to hit the child or throw at them.

You see where I live, in the whole country of Germany, beating up your children is actually against the law and I do know it’s not the same everywhere. But I still think hitting an innocent child, to make them “understand” something is never the right way to deal with a problem. It can even lead to trauma in the child, physically and psychologically and it’s always the better option to talk it out or choose non-violent penatlty like house arrest to raise children. The world is changing and I think beating up your children really is not modern anymore and might even be forbidden in more countries than you would think. Especially now with Corona and families being forced to stay in a house together for longer, that topic has arisen again.

Children between 12-years and 17-years use TikTok on a weekly basis

The problem I have with those kinds of videos is not the shared memory behind it, which is a concept often used in comedy. Where we laugh about something because we experienced it ourselves and have this “Yes, that’s true!” -moment, often amusing us and taking us back to a certain experience. I guess with violence, it’s more of a dark humour kind of thing, which I am not against in general. But if we think about who the audience of apps like TikTok is, mostly young children and teenagers, we should think more about how it affects them. Because for them, seeing such behaviour and adults laughing about it, will make them think it’s normal. And when they think it’s normal and gets beaten up themselves, they won’t do anything about it.

I don’t think children should be strong enough to defend themselves against an adult physically and mentally, but in a situation like this, they also won’t consider asking for help, because they might fear they get laughed at, just like people laugh at these videos. So what I would want to propose is for the people who make these comedic videos to stop and think about if they need to portray a story they want to tell in this way, or if there is no other way to deliver the message, without normalizing violence for all the children watching. And also, to not include these kinds of tropes in videos with a totally different meaning.

Hitting children seemingly has become a part of pop culture

Because what actually got me to want to talk about this topic here on my blog, is that I found this trope being used in a completely different context. Instead of describing a child – parents relationship, it was used in a POV for Squid Games. Basically, the video was about how Squid Games could look like in Germany and what kind of games might be played and it is joked about crossing the road. For context: In Germany, people really stop at a red light as pedestrians and only cross the road when the green light comes up. Mostly because if you don’t do it that way, a mother, a father or some old people will actually come up to you and scold you, saying stuff like “Think about the kids and what they will do when they see you crossing the street when the red light is up“, which is especially ironic in the context of this post.

Instead of being scolded like I just mentioned the person in the video was actually hit with a shoe by the grandmother who saw them cross the street with the red light on. And the thing is: the message could have been delivered in a very different way. You could have made the grandmother stare you down, animated superman-like laser eyes or actually have them scold you. But instead, the creator choose to use the trope normally connected to beating up children, because it was considered to be a “funny thing”. And now think about the children and what they will think, seeing us laughing about something like this.

As a creator, you always have the responsibility to think of your target audience when creating and this gets more and more important in modern times. I see many activists talk about their topics with Trigger warnings or videos being subtitled so that deaf people can have fun with them too. Why not think about why you choose to portrait violence in such a unique way and if it’s necessary, next time you make a fun video. That’s all I want to achieve with this post, for people to just think a bit more about their actions and act accordingly. I don’t want to tell anyone how to live their life, but to try and stop sharing unnecessary violence, not just for the children, but for a better society in general.

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

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January 19

Happy Birthday to us!

By now my blog will be exactly one year old, my first post was published on the 19th or January 2021 🙂 Congrats to me and thanks you to all of the people who have read my posts, talked to me about it and subscribed to this little project of mine! When I started, I did not really know where I was going. I just wanted to write about stuff I am passionate about, connect with people and maybe share some of my views. After one year, I think there are some things I want to try and change for the better. Posting more regularly, structure my longer posts in a better way and just make it a greater experience for all of us! You could say those are my new years’ resolutions(or at least some of them) for 2022 😉

Though the start into the new year sadly was not a great one for me personally. I really wanted to make a post about our new years’ traditions, but we did not get to do all of them, because we had a tragic loss in the family. As I want to keep my privacy, I won’t explain that further for now, but please be a bit patient with me, especially about my new years’ resolutions and what kind of posts there will be within the next weeks.
I have not yet decided which subscriptions to keep, which ones to cancel or which new ones to take on. I also have not yet published reviews about all of the subscriptions I started last year and I can’t say when they will be scheduled. So if you were looking forward to monthly reviews of subscription or mystery boxes, it might take a while until it’s all sorted out. But when it is, I hope that we will all be happy with it 🙂

There are also will be some more commentary-like posts in the future, which I had actually already written last year but I was not happy with how they looked and how they were structured. As you may have seen with my last post about Sexism in Cartooning, Manga and Anime, I already tried out something new. Don’t hesitate to let me know how you liked it! Some similar posts might be coming soon since as I just mentioned I basically already prepared them months ago and it’s a bit easier for me to finish and upload them than to come up with totally new stuff right now. Still, those posts are talking about some topics which are very important to me, so they are not bad (I hope) but just different to the posts you were used to seeing here. But I promise there will be light-hearted posts and reviews still in the future!

The picture at the beginning was drawn by myself and I am very happy about the progress I have made so far. Drawing people is still hard for me, I have learned some really useful tips and tricks for digital drawing in the last weeks! Surely I will tell you some more about it in an upcoming post too. Currently, I am still thinking about creating a new Instagram account just for my art, if I do, I will let you know 😉 Maybe I will even post some more drawings on here, we will see 😛

And last but not least I have something reaaaaally exciting to tell you! Since most of my regular viewers here are actually some of the penpals I have met on the App “Slowly”, I know from many of them that they want to learn German^^ I am no teacher myself, but they have told me that exchanging letters with me in German from time to time is really helpful 🙂 So I decided that I want to at least try(we will see how well it works later xD) to write my posts in both English AND German! I will have to see in which order I will update the later posts, hopefully, all of the posts in the future will be available in both languages. Maybe it’s just interesting for you to switch between them and try to understand some German 😉 Or maybe it really is helpful for your learning progress! Either way, I am really excited about this, as another feature for my blog in 2022!

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress

Category: Info Post, Personal Life | LEAVE A COMMENT