Ross Karchner

I’ve submitted twenty thousand milliseconds to the 20 Second Game Jam.

I’m not even necessarily sure it qualifies as a game. Maybe it’s more like a mutant skill challenge?

I wanted to do more with sound and graphics and juice and didn’t quite budget my time well enough to get there. Still, it’s nice to ship a thing.

About a month ago, I migrated my mastodon account over to this blog (via micro.blog’s built-in support for ActivityPub). How’s that going?

Mostly good. I like that I’ve got a full-fledged personal website here, that is fully customizable and could theoretically run anywhere. Behind the scenes, it’s just hugo.

I appreciate how micro.blog is trying to differentiate itself from traditional social media, creating a space that doesn’t reward popularity or sensationalism. There are no trending topics, follower counts, likes, or retweets to chase– just people writing and the things they write.

Of course, much of this is “good like eating your vegetables” and not “good like eating a cheeseburger”. All those little dopamine hits that make things like Twitter, Facebook, and Mastodon addictive and un-calm are also what make them fun.

I think discovery is worse here. The emoji thing is cute but I don’t think it works well in practice. For example, m.b wants 🖋️ to signify “pens and ink”, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’d also be nice to not have a hard-coded set of topics. Really, I just want hashtags, and I want to be able to follow hashtags. Like Mastodon. I can see how “trending topics” is a feature to avoid, but it’s perfectly possible to have hashtags without elevating trends.

One thing I have found useful is the book covers page. If you see someone posting about a book you like or that sounds interesting to you, that’s probably a good person to follow.

I’ve likened Godot to Hypercard before– they aren’t directly comparable, but my experience using Godot brought back a sense of possibility and fun that I felt when using Hypercard back in the 90’s.

I should probably be pretty excited to learn about Decker, which has modern touches, but also seems to lean pretty hard on nostalgia and Hypercard/Macpaint aesthetics. I’ll carve out some more time to kick it around some more, but honestly it leaves me a bit cold.

One thing I looked for, and couldn’t find, was some equivalent of “background” or template cards, which seem pretty core to some Hypercard uses, like address books or proto-Filemaker databases. OTOH, maybe you can accomplish that sort of thing with contraptions, which seem like a nice way to build widgets-of-widgets.

I spent at least 30 minutes trying to figure out why the score in my game wasn’t updating past the first point. It would go from 0 to 1, but then stayed at 1. I had a setter on the score variable, to update the score label shown to the user whenever the score changed.

It turned out, my setter wasn’t actually setting, so to score was always zero, and the incoming new score was always 1.

The missing line in the “set” code below is SCORE=new_score

Finished reading: Deadly Class Vol 12: A Fond Farewell, Part Two by Rick Remender 📚

Some of the late-middle volumes were a bit of a drag for me, the characters and their exploits didn’t seem that interesting after leaving school. In this final arc (volume 11 and 12), I enjoyed seeing how these people turned out as adults, and the ending was pretty satisfying.

I’ve been spending some time trying to clean up search results for my name (yeah, kind of douchy, sorry), and one thing that’s been vexing me is my old Twitter name. I deleted my ‘rossk’ account a while back, but I guess 15 years of google juice means my name will forever be linked with twitter.com/rossk, even though someone else owns it now.

All of that is to say, I’ve created a new twitter account, which I hope becomes more prominent in search results for “Ross Karchner”, and which links back to this site.

One week turned into three weeks, but I feel like I’ve worked that particular digital addiction out of my system (and diving in to Snap has actually helped crystalize an idea I’ve been thinking about, so it wasn’t entirely a waste). OK, back to making stuff.

My current idea for the 20 second game jam is really simple and pretty wonky: a trainer for being able to differentiate times shorter than a second (say, 500ms vs 700ms). Back in 2015 I went to some Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) training where this was mentioned as a useful skill for SRE’s. I didn’t entirely give up, but at that moment my dream of ever being an SRE seemed a little more remote.

There are some optional themes for the jam, but I think time itself is a sort of implied theme, and pondering that brought the SRE training back to mind. Thankfully, this isn’t a judged competition, so nobody else has to necessarily get it. Since the idea itself is so simple, I do want to lean in to trying to make it as fun and engaging as I can.

I’ve also started futzing with a micro.blog client written in Godot. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.