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.
Back to making
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.
DragonRuby, which usually costs $48, is free right now, as part of the 20 Second Game Jam
I let myself get sucked into Marvel Snap this week, so spent more free time playing games instead making them. I have started experimenting with Godot features I’m not familiar with yet, starting with navigation meshes.
Next on the list is 2D lighting and shadows, maybe this weekend!
Currently reading: Deadly Class Vol. 5: Carousel by Rick Remender 📚
The first four volumes were a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a sort of “Hogwarts for Assassins”, and there’s a bit of that– but the stories being told are much more complex and personal.