I was a happy Newsblur user for a number of years, but decided to give it a break for while, trying out non-cloud options like Rad Reader.
But, none of these ever really felt like a good fit, so back to Newsblur.
My favorite bit in the new Aesop Rock album might be where he spends a bar explaining the previous line (from ‘100 Feet Tall’, a story about running into Mr. T at Carnegie Deli in the 80’s):
From a television toughie to endearing it’s eerie
Started rubbing his belly, then a quip for the pups
“It takes a place like this to fill Mr. T up”
Get it? For those of you who don’t know the establishment
They’re famous in Manhattan for serving gigantic sandwiches
🎵
twenty thousand milliseconds
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.
Bonus complaint: mastodon polls don’t translate over, they just disappear– compare this to how that conversation appears on micro.blog.
A month on micro
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’m not sure we’ll watch Merry Little Batman, but it brings me some joy to see Jingle Bells, Batman Smells in an official DC production.
Decker
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.
Currently reading: Petrograd by Philip Gelatt 📚
My excellent co-worker Adam created this online tuner for community radio stations: www.ldial.org (which is also excellent)
Troubleshooting before coffee
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
This is a good bundle of security books. I can vouch for Threats and Security Culture Playbook being worthwhile, and Software Transparency is on my to-read list.
Testing out Lillihub!
Currently reading: How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk by Douglas W. Hubbard 📚
Two chapters in, and I really appreciate learning about:
Currently reading: Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom 📚
I need to study this some more, but there are some good ideas in this cATO playbook, and the manifesto it links to: rise8-us.github.io/cato-play…
(hey, look, it’s an infosec post!)
Deadly Class
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.
Long after I’m dead, there will still be articles using this picture I took in 2004 www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2…
Personal SEO
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.