This Nightmare Will Never End! Hell Yeag! with Lilith Walther

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 181.

Lilith Walther aetherboosts her way on over to talk about Nightmare Kart, its previously life as Bloodborne KART, its demake predecessor Bloodborne PSX, and the relationship between retro aesthetics, open development practices, and a general attitude of… YOLO?

Nightmare Kart will be out for free on May 31.
You can see more of Lilith’s work, including Bloodborne PSX, on Itch.io.
You can also follow Lilith (or rather, Bunlith?) on Twitter, and see her stream on Twitch.
She’s also got a Patreon, a Ko-Fi, and a Discord.
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• Here’s the Noclip documentary about Bloodborne PSX. We’d also point highly recommend this Gayming interview, which is the source of that quip about intellectual property law being eldritch—”Capitalism is terrifying. That’s our cosmic horror”—and also the occasion for Lilith saying that the original Bloodborne

kind of talks shit about the people in power, and the protagonist is an outsider, and all your friends are disabled people and sex workers and other outsiders. Then a lot of the enemies are the upper-class people responsible for the plague who trapped all the lower-class people into central Yarnham and closed the gates – who then die horrible deaths anyway from their own creations. It’s a direct response to a lot of the problems with gothic horror as a genre. It’s incredible, and it’s probably why it’s so transgender.

• Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka from Analgesic have been on the show twice, first to talk about Anodyne 2 and then to talk about Sephonie. Both interviews get into the topic of older design tropes worth recovering (and new ones worth jettisoning, or at least bemoaning).

• The Rock Paper Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show recently did an episode on free games.

• Drew was drawing on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, though he did misquote it. Graeber’s phrase is not “basic communism” but “baseline communism,” which he defines as

the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

He goes on to say that, “in fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability” (emphasis his). This is obviously true on the level of giving someone directions if you know the way, or (as Drew says in the episode) handing someone a tool they’ve asked for. Just as obviously, we sometimes operate on other principles, such as hierarchy, exchange, or (as Lilith says in the episode) reciprocity. As Graeber says:

All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us act like a communist consistently. “Communist society”—in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

• Ah, and anyway, here’s Add Astra.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Pthumerian Cup” from the Bloodborne KART April Fool’s joke, the Bloodborne PSX OST and the BBKART Soundtrack, by The Noble Demon.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

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