Currently reading: Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers 📚
Christmas present from the kiddo!
Currently listening: Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog 📚
Forgot to add this, I’m about halfway through. Contains more blood and guts than you would expect from a film director’s memoir.
fixed it
I usually don’t consider myself very “handy”, but I’m proud of the job I did today switching which side the refrigerator door opens on. One of the screws holding the bottom bracket on broke of, leaving most of itself in the hole. I tried a few methods of getting the partial screw out, but that was a doomed effort.
So, now our refrigerator opens on the right instead of the left. Annoying, but better than any of the alternatives.
I’ve been working through SelinaDev’s Godot 4 roguelike tutorial and I like it so far. I just finished part 4 (of 13). There are no enemies or things to do yet, but just wandering around the dungeon, and seeing the lighting and “fog of war” effects in action is pretty satisfying.
Finished reading: Petrograd by Philip Gelatt 📚
Not sure I buy the “dominos falling” theory, but interesting/sad that Firefox might be about to fall under the USWDS 2% threshold for browser support www.brycewray.com/posts/202…
As of yesterday, Doom is 30 years old
It’s interesting that Newsblur, Pinboard.in, and micro.blog all make bookmark archiving part of their premium offering. Maybe it’s an easy way to add value?
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
