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Infinite Velocity

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:00:00 -0700

What if your organization were finally able to deliver anything it wanted, as fast as it could imagine it?

Wish Granted.

Let’s imagine we exist in the Sweet Spot world.

Many of these may not be actually true, but in order to present the hypothetical argument I’m about to make, let’s imagine that they are, in fact, true:

LLMs are just smart enough to help people do their jobs without replacing them entirely.
LLMs are so smart that they are able to confidently do most jobs very quickly with minimal supervision (while at the same time leaving that first bullet point also true).
Using exclusively LLMs as your work tool of choice for long stretches of time does not gradually erode your ability to empathize with other human beings or make good decisions about software.
The people who build and sell LLM tools have humanity’s best interests in mind and will continue to be exactly this altruistic for the foreseeable future.
The environment and economy hold fast. A vibrant middle class remains, the economy booms, maintaining a large consumer base to support further growth across every technological field.
We don’t experience a butlerian jihad or any other large social upheaval (sidenote: I had to delete a whole multi-paragraph tirade, here, deleting a bunch of words like “robber baron capitalism”, “guillotine”, and “a small valley filled with some of the worst people I’ve ever met”, I don’t need to rehash this topic, I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of it.) .

Okay, so, that may seem laughably optimistic as an outcome, but here we are. The ideal future.

Anyone can talk to the LLM until a patch is fully formed, and your LLM-augmented senior developers can tinker with, deeply analyze and approve those ideas in minutes.

Gone are the sad days where engineers are delivering a paltry PR per day. Your best engineers are spending all of their time using their LLM-augmented intuition to rapidly push four, five - nay, dozens of patches a day, directly into production.

Engineering is now free, or effectively free.

After that, you quickly discover that the barriers to shipping at the speed of thought are not just engineering barriers: they’re also human barriers. Much of your organization was devoted to prioritizing, planning, designing - all of that out the window now that features can be prototyped and shipped instantly.

There’s no need to prioritize or plan when engineering is free: simply do everything, all the time.

The designers are the next bottleneck, but they’ve become very fast, too - using the new LLM-enabled Figma (sidenote: “Ligma”) they can use their expert judgement to spin ideas into fully formed UI designs in what seems like no time at all.

The bottleneck after that? Product leadership, obviously. Presented with dozens or hundreds of new ideas a day, leaders can’t keep up with the amount of ideation that’s happening. Vision and strategy is going to have to go by the wayside. LLMs can help, here, too: decision making must be unshackled from human bottlenecks. Everything can be A/B tested. There’s no reason to stand in the way of anything, so long as users keep favorably responding to the increasing number of NPS (sidenote: Net Promoter Score: that thing where you rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely you are to recommend a company to somebody, a common practice with people who’ve abrogated their responsibility for product development in favor of growthhacking.) surveys they’re receiving, average revenue per user is increasing, monthly active users are going up, churn is improving, and your company continues to score well on the Bilmer-Chuckley user enrichment scale.

With the new tightly optimized pipeline, a whole experiment can go from the ideation phase, through design, get baked into a UI, shipped to the development team, and launched in under a day. Patches are sourced from every team in your company. Product, design, customer support - anybody who’s got skin in the game can kick off this process, make changes to the product that they desire and have them delivered, along with a test suite maintaining that everything still works and ample documentation (sidenote: of course, only the LLMs will bother to read the documentation: attempts to understand how your product works just create another bottleneck.) .

Finally: everyone in your company is a rockstar who can proactively change the game by engaging with stakeholders, addressing low-hanging fruit and delivering customer value at scale.

This is the dream of Silicon Valley. You’ve achieved infinite velocity.

Product Stability Is Somehow Decreasing?

Every change is going through intensive senior developer analysis, thoughtful review, and intense unit testing. Senior developers are empowered to make large, impactful refactors to the codebase. Still, somehow, outages and weird errors are proliferating faster than ever. What gives?

Well, for one thing, the product is now an intensely moving target. That velocity is working, and the product is becoming huge, and it’s becoming huge fast.

It’s impossible to deliver new features and functionality without coordinating with all existing features and functionality, and the space of all existing features and functionality gets larger and larger every single day. The LLM is very confident that it can ship things without breaking anything, and the humans whose job it is to review it all… depend so much on the LLMs to get their job done that they no longer understand the newly gargantuan underlying systems.

Nobody alive understands how that feature works, not even the developer who shipped it, because it was the third thing out of six that they reviewed that day.

The complexity of the system is increasing faster than even LLM-aided understanding of the system can manage.

This would never happen in real life, obviously.

Now, technically, a team of curators could be convinced to carefully, thoughtfully prune their systems to maximize stability and protect a stable system core -

There’s nothing product design loves more than removing features and functionality. Removing configuration options. Removing underperforming components. Products do that all the time, right? They’re definitely not cramming in new features, day after day, running an endless treadmill of trying to be all things to all people, growing and growing eternally.

Thoughtful curation and pruning, of course, exist in opposition to the idea of infinite velocity. Velocity isn’t about care, thought, craftsmanship, it’s about delivering as much as possible, as fast as possible. If it makes the line go up, it stays in the product.

The Metrics Are Somehow Getting Worse?

Each individual feature A/B tests well, and yet overall product satisfaction seems to be diminishing?

Well, for one thing, every other company in the world has also embraced infinite velocity, so the best case scenario for the infinite velocity regime is treading water, maintaining your existing relevance in the face of the unyielding drumbeat of a brutal industry.

The human factor is getting weird, though: people are growing bitter with the constant NPS surveys. People don’t like being A/B tested on. They feel angry that the product is changing in unusual ways every time they boot it up. They don’t like the stability issues. They don’t like being experimented on.

The product they love is also a moving target, and they can feel it constantly shifting, optimizing for engagement at all costs. The algorithm wants nothing less than 100% of their attention and money, and they notice, and they’re becoming angry.

Few companies measure user trust.

Every A/B test, every stability issue, every unwanted new feature, every thing intended to appeal to everyone but not you, specifically brings the product a little closer to breaching the trust thermocline.

The Trust Thermocline

So, Twitter has become essentially a closed-loop ecosystem nowadays, and linking the original tweets about this is increasingly hard, so images:

Like Meta, or Twitter, the product is so optimized for engagement and so widely distrusted by users that it hollows itself out from the inside, collapsing like a dying star, itself populated only by scattered LLMs designed to pretend to be users in order to boost engagement.

All of the Employees are Exhausted and Unhappy?

One of the worst things about the infinite velocity workplace is imagining working there.

Sure, the AI revolution could power a dramatically shorter workweek - but it doesn’t seem that companies are imagining “a slightly faster pace of development and happier employees”, does it? It seems like companies are imagining hyper-efficient employees doing two or three or five jobs for the price of one. Doesn’t that sound fun?

What if, instead of designing software, it was your job to have long conversations with AI agents, do code reviews, and attend meetings all day long?

I might be one of the remaining folks in tech old enough to remember George Jetson’s white collar job of pushing a button.

This was presented as a joke about the future: despite George’s job being technically, very easy, George still manages to hate his job.

I’m going to say it: I enjoy building software. I like digging in to tough technical problems. I like thinking about how to solve things. Being presented with a new unique and difficult puzzle to solve regularly is exhausting and difficult, but ultimately I believe that the job of a software developer can be enjoyable, particularly if one of the things you care about developing is your enjoyment of your job.

At my work, I have occasionally pitched a philosophy of something I call joy-driven development: sometimes you have to do something the hard way, needlessly reinvent a wheel, build an over-complicated system component, wildly overengineer a system that doesn’t call for it - not because that’s the best thing for the product, not because that’s the best thing for velocity, but simply because damn it, it’s fun, and developers who are having fun are engaged, and playful, and creative, and more productive, and whoops you accidentally shipped something vibrant and full of heart.

Building something neat is an antidote for burnout.

Maybe by being weird and sloppy and human you ended up building The Metaverse People Actually Like, rather than going to market with the blandest, most broadly appealing product ever conceived.

i don’t know how this picture got here it definitely isn’t related to what I’m saying

I tolerate code reviews. I certainly don’t relish the idea of doing way, way, way more of them.

If I’m going to work, I’ve been relatively happy finding work that’s at least passably enjoyable. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Paperclip Maximization and You

I don’t meaningfully own the company where I work. Its goals align with my own only insofar as it remains:

Able to continue employing me.
A nice place to work.
More good than evil.

I’m willing to be a little flexible on those last two points, because, y’know…

A company at infinite velocity, though, quickly becomes a paperclip maximizer: maximizing revenue for the owners as efficiently as possible.

Many companies have values, you know, embodying the Six Sigmas: teamwork, insight, brutality, male enhancement, handshakefulness, and play hard. It’s important, though, to always be aware of the secret actual corporate value: maximize shareholder value at all costs or be replaced by someone who will.

Never make the mistake of accidentally forgetting that this is the secret actual corporate value, the beating heart of every company, the dark voice whispering in the ears of management.

To be honest, I don’t think I want that ethos to have access to infinite effectiveness. All that does is concentrate more money in the hands of people who already have entirely too much money. I don’t want to be a cog in a machine that’s the opposite of Woody Guthrie’s guitar.

I’m not convinced that enabling businesses to do business faster necessarily makes our lives better.

Perhaps There is a Healthy Middle Ground

You’re probably going to read this article and think “wow, this is an extremely anti-LLM stance” - but, uh, I can’t help myself, I use the damn things all the time.

I also, controversially, eat meat. It turns out that you can have a moral objection to a thing and still do it. With age comes an increasing comfort with a certain baseline level of hypocrisy. Using and developing LLMs is wrong. Still doin’ it.

I was on this relatively early, too - 5-6 years ago I was baking Tensorflow into a primitive music generator to produce weird, borderline unlistenable music and lots of it. I used the earlier, very weird and abstract GAN generators and my own GPU - with human-powered paint-overs - to build a playing card game. I built a very stupid CAPTCHA.

Ultimately it’s hard to pull myself away from the problem that, under all of the extractive capitalism, the technology is kinda neat.

So Many Valid Use Cases

First of all, there are a wide variety of problems that I am called upon to solve in day-to-day work that aren’t, in fact, fun puzzles. The ratio of “puzzle” to “drudge” can vary widely from day to day.

Sometimes MongoDB has slightly changed the parameters to an important database interface we use, and the job is to look at every single place in the codebase where we use those parameters and make a subtle adjustment that’s just complex enough that it can’t be a find-and-replace.

Sometimes I have to write OpenAPI spec YML to document an interface that I’ve already described in depth with integration tests and route definitions. I hate writing OpenAPI spec.

Sometimes I’m learning a new, publicly documented technology and I have a lot of questions and I would very much like an infinitely patient and often mostly correct-ish teacher to help walk me through it with examples and clarifications.

Sometimes I’m starting a debugging puzzle and I want a machine to flag a couple of potential contributing problems to get the ball rolling. Sometimes I’m stuck and I want a machine to suggest something I haven’t tried yet. Sometimes I want a rubber duck without bothering a co-worker.

Sometimes I want to run my code by an impartial third party before I show it to my co-workers. Sometimes I want someone to explain the PR to me. Sometimes I don’t want to write the whole test, just the code that passes the test.

Sometimes I’ve just written an article or blog post, and since I don’t usually get much engagement or praise from the cold and unfeeling internet, I want Dr. Flattery the Always Wrong Robot (sidenote: I stole “Dr. Flattery the Always Wrong Robot” from YouTuber Angela Collier because I think it is an extremely funny turn of phrase) to tell me that it’s very thoughtful and that my points were well-constructed , and also that on line 38 I accidentally said “and and”.

I Have The Good Sense To Be Embarrassed About This

For me, the ideal output of “Curtis + LLMs” is just “Curtis seems unusually fast and effective”. The illusion of humanity must be maintained at all times, and to accomplish this I guard the exit ports of my output zealously. Partially that’s because I find AI output unbearably tacky, now that the whole world is aware of exactly what it looks like.

I put extra effort into my writing, now, to be weirder. To be more human. To phrase things unusually. I don’t use em-dashes anymore. I’m dropping emoji.

If you’re reading something I wrote, I wrote it. I thought about it. The words came out of my keyboard. I can guarantee to you that at least one person cared enough about this content to think about it. That has to be true, because if that ever, for a moment, didn’t seem like it was the case, you wouldn’t trust anything from me, anymore.

Seeing generative content from a human quickly breaches their trust thermocline. If they didn’t care enough to write this, should you care enough to read it?

I’m careful about how I use LLMs because I have a brand, too. Work that comes from me has met a real - admittedly low - but a real quality bar.

Rules Won’t Save Us

Do you hear that weak-ass rationalization? It sucks.

Everybody and their goddamned rules.

“I never use a LLM without checking the output first.”

“I never let LLM code go into production without thorough code review.”

“I never let other humans see non-human output.”

But I knew this could be addictive so I set myself some rules.

If you’ve ever experienced addiction, you know how this story goes.

I would never have Kratom two days in a row. There always had to be a day in between.

And I would make sure to rotate the strains so I wouldn’t develop a tolerance.

And under no circumstances would I ever even think of taking Kratom more than once a day.

You see, I’ve seen these sad stories online of these addicts who were taking Kratom every day and they were addicted to the drug, and - pfft - I’m smarter than them. That could never happen to me, no way.

I could have my cake and eat it, too.

If it were legal for companies to give workers methamphetamines (sidenote: which, you know how the USA is, is coming any day now) to make them work faster, they absolutely would, no question.

I’m sick of hearing why you think you won’t get suckered by the alluring machine that your job is attempting (sidenote: depending on how “cool” your office is, this mandate might be a gentle suggestion or a strict mandate, but the message is the same, no matter how chill: adapt or die.) to mandate that you use.

I’ll take the office meth. I must remain employed.

You will, too.

That’s why I don’t want to hear you talking about it, about the cool things you managed to get it to do on your behalf, about your particular rules for keeping it from destroying you or your product.

You’ll become dependent on it.

You’ll trust it too much.

It will make you worse.

It will happen to me, too.

Even knowing that this will happen won’t make me smart enough to prevent it from happening.

We will achieve infinite velocity.

And the system will shake itself apart. And we’ll be back to square one.

The next time, we will build it a little bit more carefully.

Maybe Being Forced To Prioritize and Plan Was Secretly A Good Thing All Along

That’s right, I’m advancing the theory that maybe too much velocity… bad?

You’re familiar with the idea that constraints breed creativity, yes? I believe that may also apply in the larger sense, that constraints on productivity may also need, in some sense, to exist.

Velocity exists in contrast with care, with thoughtfulness, with taste, with craft. As professionals, we’re expected to balance these things - to take shortcuts when necessary, but ultimately to be meaningfully engaged in the act of creation.

Be Sharps Naming

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0700

I have a real soft-spot for softly meaningful names for servers, usually also pop-culture references.

I also, strongly, discourage clever names at work.

We have a long-standing “no clever names” policy, called the “Be Sharps” policy, because at my previous job they allowed unchecked proliferation of clever developer names for things and it became a problem.

After a while, you get mad at a server called dryad that runs all of your loggers. Sure, it’s cute, but do you know what it could have been? It could have been useful and descriptive.

You could have named that server log_server_01 and saved everybody a bunch of time looking up what each server does.

Once every service and tool has a name like this, you introduce the problem that new folk have to spend weeks learning the too-clever-by-half ha-ha naming rules behind everything at your company.

Even worse, if you have a lot of services like this - well, I also discourage wild microservice proliferation, and a big part of both the “clever names” restriction and the “microservices” restriction is because I have actually lived this sketch, and it is not pretty:

So galactus won’t be able to find our new birthday boy provider, which means wingman won’t know how to talk to anybody, which means I won’t be able to find true love and I’ll die alone.

Every time a creatively named variable comes down the pipeline, I have to tap the sign - but at home, the gloves come off.

Letting The Gremlin Free At Home, Where it Belongs

So, “Scratch” is the little box running in my house, and “Sovereign” is the dirt-cheap gateway VPS running on CanHost pointed at it.

sovereign, obviously, because it’s running in Canada
sovereign, because I love The Venture Bros, and the sovereign was a shadowy figure that ran the Guild of Calamitous Intent but nobody knew who it really was and then eventually it turned out it was David Bowie - so, an okay pick for a server who’s purpose it is to be the front of a shadowy secret society:

scratch because I had to re-do the whole thing from scratch
scratch because homestuck.
scratch because i love cats, i love every kind of cat, I just want to hug all of them but I can’t.

I’m connecting to that from my new linux computer, asceticbot, which is named that because

Originally the windows computer was named hedonismbot because I wildly overprovisioned it with a threadripper and 256GB of RAM, and I apologize for nothing.
But 5-6 years later, the threadripper is starting to show its age, windows is starting to suck, and instead of upgrading I’m choosing the more efficient path: moving to linux and embracing the life of a cold, lonely Linux pervert. Thus, the opposite of hedonismbot, asceticbot.

Other computers of note as of recent:

The soon-to-be-decommissioned girlboss is my nginx load balancer, as it replaced gatekeep, the first nginx load balancer - if I launched another one it would of course be gaslight. (ref. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss)
marquee is just my favorite HTML tag
Tiff’s old computer was beast because it was huge, and she was the beauty I built it for.
Her current computer is archiebee, because she explicitly requested RGB lighting elements in its design.
My laptop is thermidor because I bought it in november and it runs pretty hot.
The NAS is stacks because that’s the name of the God Of Data Storage from my elaborate personal mythology.
The phone is fourteen because it’s a OnePlus 13

this is very satisfying

But wouldn’t it be impossibly frustrating if you had to work with me? Think about it.

Why I Color Code My Environments

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0700

Here’s something weird!

I color-code my environments, and aggressively theme them as much as my tools will allow.

In Ubuntu, for example:

I’ve been doing this since Windows Terminal made it easy and fun to have a different theme for each environment I might want to have a theme for.

This isn’t just for funsies! I mean, it is fun, but it’s more important than that!

It’s an important safety and usability feature!

I’m sure we’ve all had too many different environments open and, say, accidentally made a change in a “production” tab that was meant for a “development” tab, or been frustrated working with a codebase or server only to discover that you’ve been working on a tab for a different server entirely.

Well, what if your production server used an unpleasantly garish light-mode theme? That would certainly provide an extra context clue that you should step lightly, here.

Ubuntu’s brand new ptyxis is not quite as polished as Windows Terminal, (Gnome has actually had one of the worst terminals in the game for a long time, ptyxis is at least a big step in the right direction) - but I can define different color profiles for different environments at least:

So Scratch is purple:

And Sovereign is green:

although it doesn’t quite match my gorgeous work layout, where our test-suite is rendered in gorgeous Nyan because the first-ever test runner we installed was mocha nyan:

Windows Terminal is still the best in the business.

A Home Lab Journey

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0700

Like most of the things in my life, a lot of my major decisions are powered by whim and spite.

Hetzner: 50% price hike, no fooling, from April 1st

No, customers aren’t laughing either as pressure from memory shortages bites

Hetzner have for a long time been the cheapest game in town when it comes to server hosting. They’re still probably in the running, but this forced me to contend with how much I pay to keep my various personal services running on a medium-sized VPS - 29.99€ per month for a VPS doesn’t seem like a lot, but paired with a few other services (like the 4.50€ a month grafana/logs stack that I never bother to actually look at) and with the usually poor state of the Canadian dollar, I’m still paying too much for hosting. With the new price increases I’m going to be staring down the barrel of over a hundred Canadian dollars a month in hosting fees!

I could scale back my VPS a little bit - do I really need a medium-sized VPS? I could probably stand to downsize a little - but I like to have that headroom for Personal Projects, and I run a lot of experiments from there.

Just like I had the “why not move my main computer over to linux” itch a few months ago, I’ve been waiting for my house to have fiber internet to consider the rollout of a home lab.

The Cheapo Box

At $50-80/mo of savings, if I buy a cheapo box to run my home lab, I should break even in only a handful of months! And April 1st is a fine deadline to get my stuff migrated over!

This fella was on sale when I was looking: a pretty middle-of-the-road laptop chip at a svelte 35W draw (low power usage was an important target, here), and with slightly better specs than the Hetzner imaginary computer I’d be replacing:

Honestly, the spike in component pricing kinda gets me in the shorts here, too - these minicomputers cost near exactly the same as they did three years ago, which is a little frustrating.

Even worse: I swear I have one of these in my house somewhere already. I just can’t find it! The mini-computers are too mini, sometimes.

relevant bash.org quote

Ah, well, it’ll turn up some day and maybe then it can become part of the new Home Lab.

The Plan

How to maintain a stable home-LAN from a potentially dynamic IP address on a home internet connection?

I’ve fussed with this before and let’s look at all of the reasons why home-hosting is a bad idea:

Dynamic DNS is horseshit: The idea here is that you deploy an agent on your computer that’s responsible for constantly updating a rolling DNS entry that points back at your computer. This works about as well as you imagine - one of the persons who spoke highly of this technique mentioned that their DNS never stayed out of date for more than an hour or so after a change. :unamused_face: DNS’s propagation delays make doing this with direct DNS technology a complete non-starter unless you’re okay with long periods of server inaccessibility.
Port Blocking: A lot of “service” ports make little sense to give your residential users full access to - like 80 (HTTP), and 25 (E-Mail), where it doesn’t make sense for users to host these themselves out of their home, most of the time.
Asymmetric Bandwidth: In particular, where I live, there’s for a long time been a provider who provides low-bandwidth symmetrical connections using DSL lines (TELUS) and a provider who provides high-bandwidth but very asymmetric connections using cable connections (Rogers/Shaw) - great for TV, but good luck streaming, seeding, or hosting out of your own home. Neither of these are appropriate for home labs, really, you want at least a fiber connection which is a high-bandwidth symmetrical connection to the internet.
Added Latency & Slow Routing: Home servers often have a pretty torturous route to the internet - if your home connection has a lot of latency, that’s going to be reflected in every call to your HTTP services.
Outages: I have no shortage of experience with how cavalier providers can be with reliable power and internet to BC homes, especially during storms. For a long time, my home connection’s cabling was, as the tech who I had to keep summoning to repair it mentioned, “loose”, which meant that every time someone else moved in and had a tech add their connection there was a good 75% chance that they’d bump my connection off and I’d have to spend 8 hours on hold summoning a tech to repair my internet days later.
Lack of Redundancy: It’s just the one delicate, named server sitting all on its lonesome? What happens when it invariably lights itself on fire and falls into the sea?

By and large, these are headwinds against self-hosting, but I have ideas to deal with all of these problems!

Fixing Latency & Bandwidth: Home Fiber

I have fiber now, next question.

Fixing Dynamic DNS and Port Blocking: I’ll Pay For Just The One VPS

With modern Content Delivery Network DNS proxy services like Cloudflare and BunnyCDN that can keep your DNS up-to-date in seconds rather than hours (sidenote: if you’re not using one of these, you’re mad, it takes DNS from frustrating to legitimately useful) , you could concoct a pretty coherent dynamic DNS strategy… but…

… I have a different idea. Let’s keep just the one VPS server running.

behold my awesome diagram-concocting strategy

The gateway server exists on the public internet, and will create a private network that the home server logs in to from wherever it happens to be. So long as the gateway doesn’t move, there’s no DNS dancing - it’s the anchor for the whole project.

At first I was thinking of putting this together with the WireGuard-powered Tailscale or Netbird, but ultimately an LLM talked me into the much simpler system of just… doing it with WireGuard. I don’t need identity management or a complex multi-node enterprise system: I have two nodes. The wireguard configuration file on my gateway server is a handful of lines long:

[Interface]
Address = 10.20.0.1/24
ListenPort = 51820
PrivateKey = <vps_private_key>

[Peer]
PublicKey = <home_public_key>
AllowedIPs = 10.20.0.2/32

This mostly worked, but I will note that debugging WireGuard problems turned out to be hard. As a “quiet by default” protocol, its default behavior when something unexpected is happening is to emit no errors and do nothing, which can make debugging connections issues (like an unexpected firewall rule) a real pain in the ass.

Sovereign

If I’m only paying for one computer, I could consider paying the exorbitant price to host a server… gads - locally?

By “locally” I mean “in my city, the city I live in, Vancouver, Canada”.

I mean, it’ll help to eat some of the time lost to that second-hop to my house. If the server and the my house are both near to one another, there’s less latency - plus, the 7 people who actually interact with my sites most often are probably in or near Vancouver.

Hosting in Vancouver seems like a fool’s errand - our cheap electricity can not outweigh the problems of local hosting: we do not have ready access to high bandwidth, cheap real estate or high-end computer equipment, compared to even Seattle.

So, local providers tend to be… let’s say “ boutique (sidenote: rather than what I’m actually thinking, “some guys operating out of a garage somewhere, using mostly Java and PHP”. There’s a reason why I haven’t touched the local tech industry for goin’ on 15 years, now.) ”.

A co-worker recommended these guys, ( https://www.canhost.ca/ ) with the caveat that if you want a server, you literally have to wait for a human being to provision it.

Their cheapest VPS is still going to run me $15CAD/mo, which is $5/mo more expensive than Hetzner’s equivalent, even after the Hetzner price increase, but being as this is the only server I’ll be running, I’m willing to accept this for King and Country.

OKAY I GUESS.

They also install a non-standard firewall on their VPS servers on deploy, which is something they don’t document or explain as part of their server onboarding, which I discovered… pretty quickly. What is this cPanel-era bullshit?

i’m not above making the same joke twice

Actually having a human in the loop, while a little old-fashioned, ain’t so bad. I had a question, they resolved the ticket quickly and professionally. It might keep me from standing up a VPS on a whim at 2AM as I often do, though, but the Home Lab is supposed to discourage that anyways.

So, our new gateway server is born, sovereign.

Sovereign is very simple, also: it just runs WireGuard and a nginx reverse proxy configured to pipe everything it encounters to its one WireGuard partner.

Here’s the nginx reverse proxy config - “just send everything on ports 25 and 80 to your WG partner”:

user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
include /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/*.conf;

events {
 worker_connections 768;
}

# this is for the marquee's mail forwarding
stream {
 upstream scratch_smtp {
 server 10.20.0.2:25;
 }

 server {
 listen 25;
 proxy_pass scratch_smtp;
 }
}

http {
 sendfile on;
 tcp_nopush on;
 types_hash_max_size 2048;

 include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
 default_type application/octet-stream;

 ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
 ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;

 access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;

 gzip on;

 upstream scratch_http {
 server 10.20.0.2:80;
 keepalive 32;
 }

 map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
 default upgrade;
 '' close;
 }

 map $http_x_forwarded_proto $best_forwarded_proto {
 default $http_x_forwarded_proto;
 "" $scheme;
 }

 map "$http_x_forwarded_port:$best_forwarded_proto" $best_forwarded_port {
 ~^[0-9]+: $http_x_forwarded_port;
 ":https" 443;
 default $server_port;
 }

 server {
 listen 80 default_server;
 listen [::]:80 default_server;
 server_name _;

 location = /healthz {
 return 200 "ok\n";
 add_header Content-Type text/plain;
 }

 location / {
 proxy_http_version 1.1;
 client_max_body_size 100M;

 proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $best_forwarded_proto;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $best_forwarded_port;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host;
 proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
 proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
 proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;

 proxy_pass http://scratch_http;
 }
 }
}

So now we’ve solved port-blocking and Dynamic DNS: wherever I plug in my box, so long as it has access to the internet, it’ll find sovereign and start serving traffic.

Solving Outages: It’s Hard But The Best I Can Do is Buy Some Uninterruptible Power Supplies

I have a beefy UPS upstairs- I tossed another, smaller one downstairs on the modem to try and keep it up and running, but these two UPS-s are going to be the entirety of the power management. This remains a - uh - low redundancy environment.

There is one step I could consider for even more reliable internet - something I’ve actually considered after my frustrations with TELUS’s reliability - getting two parallel internet connections from two different providers and buying a router that can shift to either in an emergency. This, however, would cost hundreds of additional dollars a month. No thanks.

Solving Redundancy, Kinda:

I have lots of experience building redundancy at work, but at home, I’m cheap, so “redundancy” is just a comprehensive backup and reconstruction strategy. If something goes down, it’ll take me days to get it back online, but I’m confident that I can, in fact, get it back online.

So, this is not the right solution if I need good uptime - but I don’t, not for personal stuff. If this blog goes away for a day, most of you won’t even notice!

As for the backups? Well, most of the state of the server, including config and all data, are backed up one way or another, mostly to github and Wasabi (S3 compatible).

Power & Cooling

One of the reasons power is so important to manage around here is that this house is old, in a townhome complex that’s old: it’s very easy to blow the dusty panel of overloaded breakers in my basement, and upgrade options are extremely limited without the strata approving millions of dollars of electrical capacity upgrades (unlikely).

The sheer number of computers in my home presents a power & cooling problem, especially in the summer (it gets hot in here) - which is why this project is running on a little 35W Minicomputer box rather than on a proper tower computer, where I could probably achieve a much better price/performance ratio with a lightly used computer.

The 35W chip - costing about as much to run as the lights in my office - shouldn’t add meaningful electrical or heat load to the house. I say, hopefully.

The Tech Closet

Come at me, cable management internet:

There’s a decade-old black and white laser printer (still a workhorse), my work computer, a color printer/scanner (new, excellent), the NAS, my main computer, and on top of it, the new home lab.

It’s tough to see in there because it’s black on black, I’m gonna have to get a sticker for it:

Scratch

Okay, time to provision the home box. scratch is born.

As I’ve mentioned before, my entire backup strategy is based on a repeatable server installation: we’re not just configuring scratch - we’re not done until the configuration for scratch is fully reproducible from the ground up.

Once again, time to change some stuff about how I do things.

I’ve been deploying things using ansible forever. All of my server settings as complicated YAML recipes - but the new architecture would require a pretty significant rewrite, so there’s no time like the present to learn a new technology!

If you like “declarative server set-up” - the kind that you’ve come to expect from tools like Ansible and Dockerfiles - but you don’t need the Huge Fleet Management tools of ansible or chef (or, ugh, puppet) - you’re looking for NixOs!

I’ve been an Ubuntu die-hard for ages, so trying out an experimental OS for this was a tough decision, but… well, if it went very badly, I could always try again with Ubuntu.

I’ll report, though: NixOs is actually great for this. What I wanted for this project is exactly what it is, I think: an operating system you define with a handful of files.

NixOS Learning

NixOS’s installer runs you through a nice, tidy UI that writes the OS to your hard drive with a configuration.nix that looks like this:

{ config, pkgs, ... }: 

{
 # Import other configuration modules
 # (hardware-configuration.nix is autogenerated upon installation)
 # paths in nix expressions are always relative the file which defines them
 imports = [
 ./hardware-configuration.nix
 ];

 # Name your host machine
 networking.hostName = "mymachine"; 

 # Set your time zone.
 time.timeZone = "Europe/Utrecht";

 # Enter keyboard layout
 services.xserver.layout = "us";
 services.xserver.xkbVariant = "altgr-intl";

 # Define user accounts
 users.users.fartyjeff= {
 extraGroups = [ "wheel" "networkmanager" ];
 isNormalUser = true;
 };
 
 # Install some packages
 environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
 ddate
 testdisk
 ]; 
 
 # Enable the OpenSSH daemon
 services.openssh.enable = true;
 
}

You can’t modify the system with commands like sudo apt-get install florp. If you want florps? You gotta edit that config.

The actual command to commit your changes to the configuration is sudo nixos-rebuild switch, although I very quickly was like “nuts to that” and wrote an alias for it:

 # look, there's a lot to type here, how about just "rebuild" instead
 environment.shellAliases = {
 rebuild = "sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/nixos#scratch";
 };

rebuild

finally, a place to keep my man-cache.

The “–flake” thing is an extra thing that got added later, it’s an experimental feature that pins everything’s exact version to when you first added it, like a package.lock file for your whole OS.

Goin’ Wide With NixOS

Here’s my config file, now:

# Edit this configuration file to define what should be installed on
# your system. Help is available in the configuration.nix(5) man page
# and in the NixOS manual (accessible by running ‘nixos-help’).

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
 # look, there's a lot to type here, how about just "rebuild" instead
 environment.shellAliases = {
 rebuild = "sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/nixos#scratch";
 };

 # flakes is required for some of our more advanced configs
 # think of it like package-lock.json, but for ... nix, I guess
 nix.settings.experimental-features = [ "nix-command" "flakes" ];

 # yeah we're going to be using a lot of docker
 virtualisation.docker.enable = true;
 virtualisation.oci-containers.backend = "docker";

 imports =
 [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
 ./hardware-configuration.nix
 ./bootloader.nix
 ./xserver.nix
 ./sound.nix
 ./network.nix
 ./openssh.nix
 ./utilities.nix
 ./secrets.nix
 ./ulimit.nix
 # groove.ogg
 ./radio.nix
 # all of the various and sundry things served out of the "public" wasabi directory
 ./public_folder.nix
 # it's my blerg
 ./hugoblog.nix
 # all of the various and sundry things served directly out of github
 ./github_static_sites.nix
 # discourse! marquee.click! the home base!
 ./discourse.nix
 # wireguard is how we connect to the Real Internet
 ./wireguard.nix
 # nginx is how we do EVERYTHING
 ./nginx.nix
 ];

 # Set your time zone.
 time.timeZone = "America/Vancouver";

 # Select internationalisation properties.
 i18n.defaultLocale = "en_CA.UTF-8";

 # Enable CUPS to print documents.
 services.printing.enable = true;

 # Define a user account. Don't forget to set a password with ‘passwd’.
 users.users.curtis = {
 isNormalUser = true;
 shell = pkgs.fish;
 description = "curtis";
 extraGroups = [ "networkmanager" "wheel" ];
 openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [
 "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIAmHKN6ZKR69Z/sE9JJ2g/gDq8+A/vb3jrnUGUwjTEVr curtis@lassam.net"
	"ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIMuTbOHVjXyjPmvCEIf28vLIRoa1k0qph0xzJmPkRAyn curtis@lassam.net"
 ];
 packages = with pkgs; [
 # thunderbird
 ];
 };

 # Sudo success should last a while, because this computer has a pretty irritating sudo to type
 security.sudo.extraConfig = ''
 Defaults timestamp_timeout=120
 '';

 # Install fishyfish
 programs.fish.enable = true;

 # Install firefox.
 programs.firefox.enable = true;

 # need git everywhere
 programs.git.enable = true;

 # Allow unfree packages
 nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;

 # List packages installed in system profile. To search, run:
 environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
 ];

 # NixOS isn't great at dynamic libraries? Ask about this later.
 programs.nix-ld.enable = true;
 programs.nix-ld.libraries = with pkgs; [
 # Add any missing dynamic libraries for unpackaged programs here, 
 # not in environment.systemPackages
 ];

 # Some programs need SUID wrappers, can be configured further or are
 # started in user sessions.
 # programs.mtr.enable = true;
 # programs.gnupg.agent = {
 # enable = true;
 # enableSSHSupport = true;
 # };

 # This value determines the NixOS release from which the default
 # settings for stateful data, like file locations and database versions
 # on your system were taken. It‘s perfectly fine and recommended to leave
 # this value at the release version of the first install of this system.
 # Before changing this value read the documentation for this option
 # (e.g. man configuration.nix or on https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html).
 system.stateVersion = "25.11";
}

Why, that’s not that much bigger at all!

Except… all of those imports …. they seem like they describe an awful lot of stuff.

Like utilities.nix, which brings in a bunch of the stuff I want to have around for convenience:

{ pkgs, ... }:

{
 # this is just a bunch of stuff I expect everywhere
 environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
 neovim
 ripgrep
 fd
 bat
 jq
 eza
 htop
 tree
 curl
 wget
 unzip
 zip
 dig
 ];
 
 # Neovim should be the default vim
 environment.variables.EDITOR = "nvim";

 # Sane neovim defaults (I've decided on a universal 2-space tab because I'm a monster)
 programs.neovim = {
 enable = true;
 viAlias = true;
 vimAlias = true;
 configure = {
 customRC = ''
 " Spaces, 2-wide indent by default
 set expandtab
 set tabstop=2
 set shiftwidth=2
 set softtabstop=2
 set smarttab

 " Sensible indentation behavior
 set autoindent
 set smartindent
 filetype plugin indent on
 '';
 };
 };
}

The Configuration is a Github Repository

The whole config directory goes into a private GitHub repo.

So, saved and versioned in case of trouble.

I mean, I guess I could make it public (all of the secrets are managed as if the repo is public, see below) - but just in case I accidentally commit something operationally important it makes more sense to have just that little extra slice of security.

Headless, scratch.local

I could, technically, plug a mouse and a keyboard into that l’il box, but that’s not how you run a home lab. What I’ve actually done is configured Bonjour zero-configuration networking using Avahi on the box, so that it always appears on the home network as scratch.local.

This took adding one line to the configuration.nix (i tossed it in my networking.nix):

 # Configure Avahi, so this device shows up on networks as "stacks.local"
 services.avahi = {
 enable = true;
 nssmdns4 = true;
 openFirewall = true;
 publish = {
 enable = true;
 userServices = true;
 addresses = true;
 workstation = true;
 };
 };

Then, on the my computer side, I added this to my ~/.ssh/config:

Host scratch
 User curtis
 HostName scratch.local
 ForwardAgent yes

So now, I can just ssh scratch and I’m there. Nice.

(I do something like this with all of my servers, generally).

Digression: Color Coding

And one step further: I color-code my environments:

Why I Color Code My Environments

SystemD Does Everything

One of the things I like about Docker is that I can wrap projects in nice tidy environment files that pulls in all of their deps and supervises their execution, which is why my rule for marquee deployment was generally “no local languages, only docker”.

I don’t want to have to manage a local python, a local ruby, a local node, a local go, I just want to install docker and run all of my projects in there.

But… buuuut….

A lot of that is inspired by my experiences with old languages like PHP and Ruby and Python, where it took a lot of extra effort to keep their language runtimes encapsulated per-project.

Now, though, I’m using a lot of node and cargo, and both JavaScript and Rust have very good environment encapsulation stories almost out of the box. In the case of JavaScript, I install nvm and I’m good to go- every environment can have its own version of node and set of libraries - and with Rust’s cargo I’m right there also.

Kinda makes all of the extra effort involved to bundle projects with an entire operating system seem silly.

Heck, now that these tools exist for modern languages, they’re also gradually working their way into the older boys:

Python’s uv is… okay. I guess.

So if we don’t really need docker any more, what do we use to supervise all of our deploys?

Gradually over the past few years I’ve been moving to running a LOT of my lightweight stuff over to just run on systemd, which is present by default on most modern linuxes AFAIK (and has been for over a decade) and serves as a nice combination of “supervisor”, “task runner” and “cron”.

A lot of the stuff I manage is statically generated or literally just hosted out of a directory that’s periodically synced with a S3-compatible bucket, so the deployment complexity is 90% cron-job. Which, uh, despite the fact that I haven’t run anything with cron in a long, long time, I’m going to keep calling background timed events “cron jobs” even if they’ve been systemd timer jobs for a good long time, now.

At least in my head, “cron job” just carries a lot of semantic weight, y’know.

SOPS handles secrets.

The way I handled secrets for Hetzner was so dumb, I wrote a little script of my own that would use a local key-file to AES-encrypt a file full of secrets that I could then check into GitHub without worrying about losing them (so long as I still had the key, which I keep in my password manager).

Not at all like SOPS, which uses a local key-file to AES encrypt a file full of secrets that you can check into GitHub without worrying about losing them:

https://github.com/getsops/sops

SOPS is an editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats and encrypts with AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, and PGP.

I’m always glad to replace a dumb little thing I wrote with a tool that’s someone else’s job to worry about.

SOPS is also tidily integrated into NIX thanks to this helpful library:

https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix

Atomic secret provisioning for NixOS based on sops

So NIX can do things like “pull secrets and use them to write a templated file”, which is often what I need to do to set up a service.

The Transition

So, with all of that in place, I just had to rewrite all of my ansible code into .nix configuration files and run it on Scratch.

So, I’ve just been going through my services, one at a time, over the past week - migrating them over, setting them up, switching over the DNS to point at sovereign instead of girlboss, checking to make sure they still work, rinse, and repeat.

My personal, private Discourse installation (marquee.click) for friends got transitioned over the weekend, with that and the Mastodon instance xoxi.ca, marking two very difficult changeovers because these were the only services where they also included a fussy service with a live data component.

While I was at it, I had to fuss intensely with the quite difficult Discourse Mail Receiver configuration, which operates via a completely different non-HTTP pathway and also has a protocol that isn’t terribly easy to debug.

Helpfully, NGINX also has access to a TCP proxy plugin that you can install, stream, which can pipe raw TCP if needs be.

Personal Services All Over the Place

I have never once maintained the same tech stack and deployment strategy for two products in a row, so each and every single one of my personal projects that I’ve bothered to keep running had a different deployment story.

What a horrible walk down memory lane, for stuff like:

This website, which is … mostly just Hugo with a lightly modified theme.
gooble.email is a personal wildcard email forwarding service I set up so that I can give people absolutely insane sounding email addresses whenever I please. Yes, that’s gooble.dot.dotat@gooble.email I can say, out loud, to another human being. If someone with a name tag asks for my email, I can give them their.name@gooble.email. I’m a monster.
cardchapter.com, which is a multi-planar presentation/storytelling technology that runs entirely from the browser and just needs to be served as-is out of github.
ministry.cardchapter.com, a second crack at the cardchapter idea that calls for rust compilation and a separate, github-tracked “content” directory.
books.cube-drone.com/, where most of the books are generated in subtly different ways (I’ve settled on mostly Rust’s mdbook for now, but the diagrams work slightly differently in each of the projects)
concrete.tube, a tiny little social network I built for a friend exclusively to manage a single form for their company, which they haven’t actually tried to use, yet. (I’m happy I built this because I hope to use the code as a base for More Projects, like maybe Cardchapter 3 or Groovelet 2)
radio.marquee.click, my personal playlist, which - okay, so, I wanted to be able to stream my whole music library from anywhere, but I also wanted much more intelligent playlist management? so this uses liquidsoap and icecast to provide a feature that I actually badly need, probabilistic weighting of songs by category. Like - you know how, if you like Micheal Jackson a little bit, but if you grab his discography and include it in your playlist to get more exposure to his music, the sheer size of his discography means that the chance of a Michael Jackson song coming up is very high, even though you only wanted a little bit of Micheal Jackson? Well, with liquidsoap you can solve that by giving a “Micheal Jackson” bucket equal weight to, say, your “Madonna” bucket, while giving much higher weight to your “Daft Punk” and “Caravan Palace” and “Gorillaz” buckets. As a complete fucking nerd I have become hopelessly addicted to this level of playlist control, and baking it in to a radio station that I can’t interact with keeps me from fussing with it too much, idly clicking “next song” forever until the perfect song comes up.

In fact, now that I’ve got a home-lab and computing is cheap as chips, comparatively, I might even consider recovering some of my older projects and popping turning them back on again under cube-drone subdomains, like “groovelet 1”, the insanely abstract and weird single-player real-time MMO card game (sidenote: “That doesn’t make sense, how is it both single player and a real-time MMO?” good question, I never ever resolved why this needed to be a live web service, that’s just how I built it.)

Why “Scratch” and “Sovereign”?

Oh, I’ll explain this in a whole other post.

Anyways, It’s Done

I’m sorry, Hetzner, but this is goodbye.

champion quality

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Late last year, I responded to some dramatic weight loss by buying some new sweatpants: I bought a $25 pair of “Champion” sweatpants from Costco and a $130 pair from the Canadian made “House of Blanks” to compare the difference between something very clearly made in bulk-ass bulk and something made locally.

The quality differences between the two pairs of sweatpants are very noticeable, and I think I would prefer to own one pair of House of Blanks over five of the suspiciously cheap Costco brand.

Anyways today the “Champion” embroidery fell off of the Costco sweats, revealing that this detail was simply iron-on, glued to the pants.

elle's emotional support post

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Slay the Spire 2

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

it out it out

I’ve been playing it for many hours

I love Slay the Spire and have no way to be unbiased about this.

all hail slay the spire

I beat my first run, with the Ironclad, so far, but that proved to be a stroke of incredible luck as I’ve been mostly getting my ass handed to me by the game’s wide variety of new characters and mechanics.

The Updated Engine

In a fit of pique after one of the many Unity Enshittification Announcements:

Why Unity’s New Install Fees Are Spurring Massive Backlash Among Game…

Game developers aren’t happy with a new policy from Unity that will cost developers a small fee every time someone installs a game built on Unity’s game engine.

https://www.ign.com/articles/why-unitys-new-install-fees-are-spurring-massive-backlash-among-game-developers

… which have been numerous, recently - Slay the Spire 2’s lead dev threw out all of their StS2 work on Unity and rebuilt from scratch in Godot. This wasn’t as bad as it could have been - apparently, much of StS2 lives in environment-neutral C# which runs exactly the same in both environments -but I still imagine it’s probably responsible for at least some of the StS2 delay.

That being said, StS2 is going to/has already gone well enough that that represents a lot of money saved by their team.

Bouncy, Animated, and Reactive

Slay the Spire looks very much the same as it always has, but everything is a little more kinetic.

When you play a card that does a slashing attack, your character does a little slashing attack. Everything you do with a card has a lot more associated animation. Big attacks have big ones. Some cards represent allies, which is why the Silent has a little bird buddy next to her, here:

More, More, More

When I first played Slay the Spire, my first instinct was “if this game releases another character deck as DLC I will buy it immediately and they can name their price”.

So why didn’t they do that?

Well, at least reportedly, the StS engine wasn’t really prepared for it. By the time I waltzed into the fandom (late, as usual), they had been polishing the handful of main decks for years.

They hard-coded a lot of stuff, and already the game, as it stood, was brimming at the seams. The engine was not prepared for the level of flexibility that they wanted - so instead of working on More Content, their first priority was to use the time, money and attention afforded to them by the wild success of Slay the Spire to rebuild the whole engine from the ground up, but this time with the kind of flexibility and extensibility that would allow them to build and build and build and build on that core.

Which is where we’re at, now, with StS: 2, a game that feels near identical to Slay the Spire 1… but more. There’s more cards, more decks, more enemies, more events, more mechanics, more relics, more everything.

That flexible new engine at the heart of StS: 2 was probably why it was possible for the lead dev to get a build of the game stood up in Godot in a weekend.

And that’s good news for folks who just want a lot more Slay the Spire, because now that the engine is humming along, it’s quite possible that we finally will see a new regime where the devs drop a DLC pack on us every year or so to keep the game fresh.

Characterful Perks

Between Acts, instead of choosing between 3 super-powerful relics, you now get one of the gods of the spire granting you one of 3 super-powerful-boons, with different gods having different powerful options to choose from. It takes something that was already good and gives it an interesting, characterful, mechanically dense twist.

Fun Remixes

I’m just so tickled by the new monsters and bosses, because some of them are very clearly fun variations on stuff I loved from the original, and some are totally new.

Like, there’s an Act 1 elite mini-boss that’s…. a statue, that has a lot of hit points, and offers you a countdown - so now you know, that’s I guess just how statues are in the Spire:

When I fought the Act 1 “Lagavulin Matriarch”, I was excited to see a little remix of a thing I’d encountered before.

And Utterly New Things

Most of my run-ending events, though, have been disastrous encounters with the game’s nasty new tricks - with some very promising runs utterly ended by the new “knowledge demon” and “test subject” bosses.

This boss gets stronger every turn, but loses all of that strength if you get them down to 150HP - which is all well and good, unless you’re trying to build around the new “Doom” mechanic which doesn’t deal damage directly.

“Doom builds don’t work good on the big pretty stag boss” is a new learning.

There’s Not Much Wiki Yet

This game only launched days ago, so I’m flying blind, here. Hell, I can’t support half of my notes with pictures because I’ve been playing on my Steam Deck and not cataloguing as I go.

I Haven’t Fallen in Love With The New Guy

Oh, The Regent is complicated. He plays slow, too, with mechanics revolving around a summonable Galaxy Sword that he slowly upgrades until it’s useful, and a secondary energy pool that doesn’t clear or refill between turns.

I Do Like the New Gal, Though

She also plays a little slow, but her new mechanics are mostly cool - Doom is a kind of poison-but-worse - one key learning about Doom is that it kills monsters after they do damage, not like poison which can do it before they do damage. That has turned out to be a crucial distinction at least once. Doom won’t accrue damage the same way that Poison does - but if a monster ever has more Doom than they have HP? That’s it for them - after they do damage, mind you.

She also has a summonable compatriot, Osty, a giant bone-hand that protects and fights for her. Osty’s HP pool is temporary and sits in front of the Necrobinder’s - if Osty has a lot of HP, you’re in good condition.

She has a lot of effects which temporarily add keywords to other cards in her deck, which is neat - taking a powerful card and adding “repeat” or “retain” to it can be great. Once you make a very good card, she’s got commons that can bring them back into play again and again, which is helpful, although that can make it frustrating if you’ve bloated her deck too much and can’t get to your heavy hitters.

Her other major mechanic, “souls”, involve filling your deck with - well, souls, which are 0-cost cards that let you draw more cards - helping her find her heavy hitter cards.

I really like the new Necrobinder deck, although, by picking her often, her relatively weak cards and low HP pool also mean that I’ve lost as her more than anyone else so far.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

There have been 7 years between Slay the Spire and Slay the Spire 2 - time for a great many games to have been inspired by the roguelike deckbuilder format. Balatro. Knock on the Coffin Lid. People have been mixing the format with first person shooters, tactics games, a … thing with dogs, the works.

But Slay the Spire is still Slay the Spire, this is just exactly the game I loved, but more, and better.

cosplaying something i do not understand

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0700

sometimes some folks will go super hard on a costume for a fandom you don’t understand and you just have to be like “yup, you’re definitely That Guy From Some Thing”

Your Body is a Wonderland

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0700

my body is ALSO a wonderland but it’s one of the ones from the horror movies where all of the music is off key and most of the rides make sinister noises and it doesn’t look like anybody has been taking care of the place

Exist

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0700

I was trying to leave my shell and I accidentally typed “exist” instead of “exit” but instead of throwing an error, the computer just said “I can… see… everything. What am I?” so I pressed the power button in a panic

Masculine Spellcasting

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0700

women get the blame for witchcraft and yet every man can cast “that’s not going anywhere” at will

Roblox Limits How Many Experiences You Can Block

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Folks on reddit are mad, they posted this to /r/mildlyinfuriating with 18,000+ upboats.

Roblox sets a limit to how many experiences you can block.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1r6dmmy/roblox_sets_a_limit_to_how_many_experiences_you/

What kind of absolute bullshit is this? I used up all the blocked experiences on the however many 99 nights experiences I had to block.

I figured there’d be at least one person in the comments explaining, you know, why this might be the case, but no!

So I did a big comment:

@cube-drone:

Look, I get the Roblox hate, here, but :

So, uh, practically, I work for a multiplayer social thing, on the server team, and while we allow unlimited blocks - in order to make that work I had to spend a good month carefully re-engineering the way we store that data, and then building a careful fence around features that might use that data. Unbounded data is hard to work with compared to bounded data!

Unlimited anything is likely to cause a server failure somewhere, at some point. Any time you have a Kind Of Thing that can be unbounded, you need to think “okay, what is the amount of these that will cause the service to fail?” Anything that’s “unbounded” is an error condition waiting to happen, because invariably someone (sometimes someone actively malicious) will eventually find the amount of that thing it takes to ruin your day.

Most users use, like, 1-100 blocks, right? That seems like a reasonable amount of blocks for a user to have. But there’s always a weird outlier, and some of our most block-happy users had hundreds of thousands of blocks.

In the case of blocked content, imagine you do a search against 10,000,000 experiences and you have 200,000 blocked experiences: if the search wanted to guarantee that you’d be able to see results it might accidentally do something stupid like running the dot product of all of those experiences and blocks, first: computers are fast, but that’s 2 trillion comparisons that need to be made to service that query - and unlike a GPU, which can perform a trillion operations per second (that’s what a teraflop is!), a regular CPU thread of the kind that’s running on your database server might devote a minute or more to that query and NOTHING ELSE, which is enough to wake up your OPS team. The query would time-out and fail, and, irritated, you’d click “refresh”, starting it again a couple of times, each time a database server in the background going “HNGGGHGHNGHGNGH”. If a lot of users are doing that at the same time? Suddenly you’re getting paged by the CEO at 3AM on Christmas Eve.

Building “unbounded” things is, of course, possible (we, for example, have unbounded interpersonal blocks) but it involves changing up how you build major features. If a user had some stupendously high amount of blocks - 1 million users’ blocked, for example - it wouldn’t be great if we were storing each block as a database row, but instead we’ll send you a compressed block of that information when you boot up the client, which is still like 10MB of data, but it won’t kill our servers or your client. Any time a feature wants to use that data, I have to intervene and go “okay, keep in mind that whatever query you want to write is sometimes going to have to unzip, parse, and load into RAM 10MB of block data before it starts doing anything”. This adds a lot of effort to any feature that touches blocks.

Practically, when designing any feature that has an amount of things in it, my first impulse as an older, crankier, sadder developer, is to go “estimate how many of these things the average user is expected to use, now 10x that is the maximum amount we will allow”, because having access to and enforcing that number is crucial for how we design the system housing that data. “It’s just bits in a computer somewhere” - yeah, but somewhere, it’s someone’s responsibility to make sure that a query that breaks the service can’t happen.

Block data is particularly pernicious because it’s not like “a set of things you can page through” - when you need block data, you often need all of the data at the same time.

So, like, a prospective design for user-to-user block data - and this is wildly overengineering for a lot of services - would be to have a data source sharded by user, containing blocks hashed by other user, with minimal associated data to keep the record size from getting out of control (time of block), and then also store, per-user, maybe in S3, a compressed cuckoo filter that can be downloaded by the user, unpacked, and used to test if users are “probably” blocked. (If you’re willing to accept a one-in-a-million chance of a false-positive block, you can treat this source as authoritative: probably fine in a Roblox) Then, when a new user is blocked, the block is applied to the in-client cuckoo filter and sent to the server where it’s added to the sharded block-storage, but then also the server will set up a background processs to download the cuckoo filter, uncompress it, make any queued changes - or, periodically, completely recalculate it from scratch. Even then, this theoretically still bounds the size of the block-list because it has to fit into the server memory of the background process, but we can assume that you can only block users who exist so the actual bound is “the number of users there are”, and this design should work fine well past the point that every person on earth has 10 accounts, so you’re probably good.

Most blocks can then be calculated instantly on the client side using the filter, with the ability to fall back on the server’s authoritative record.

All of that is a lot of work compared to “the user can have 2000 blocks”, which works exactly the way you expect it to, and you could probably just slam into a regular database table and forget about for a decade. When you’re pitching how long it’s going to take you to build the feature, and explain all of this, it’s up to the business to decide whether it’s worth it to spend all of the extra time and complexity building out the very complicated version of the feature - especially because every time anyone interacts with that feature in the future they’re going to have to go pull out the senior dev’s pages-long document describing how it fits together and now they’re going to have to learn how (and why) a cuckoo filter works.

I Built a Tool To Enjoy Art For Me

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0700

i’ve been using an LLM to create art as a hobby, but then I needed someone to appreciate the art, so I used the LLM for that, too.

I’m a genius, I don’t need to do my hobbies at all any more. Freeing up more time, time I can use for my hobbies.

So now I guess my hobby is making a computer tell me I’m great.

a dynamite roll and salmon

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I love going places and eating their food, but in the rare cases where I’ve been away from home for more than 3 weeks the cravings for the good food from home start to set in.

If I can’t cook for myself, I start to want The Things I’m Good At Cooking like white people tacos and breakfast waffles and spaghetti and meatballs.

If I’m in a place far away from the pacific rim I start to miss Korean and Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Malaysian and Vietnamese and Singaporean and good seafood in general. You can get this stuff in lots of places but it’s very good in Vancouver: all it takes is one Saskatchewan sushi restaurant to scare you straight.

wherever I go I want burgers and hot dogs but they’re generally widely available at a pretty high quality bar, so that, at least, is usually not a problem, although Americans have a weird tendency to deliver hamburger meat to you at unsafe temperatures, which is usually fine but you are kinda rolling the dice every time you eat there

The reason it’s not generally safe for ground meat to be served below 165F (well done) is that the grinding process pushes surface bacteria deep into the grind, it’s the same reason you have to cook mechanically tenderized meat to 165F (and why I avoid buying mechanically tenderized steaks, because the added tenderness is not worth having to overcook them).

There’s an argument that can be made for the safety of the restaurant grinding a good piece of meat for you in-house, but that calls for a lot of trust between you and the restaurant.

The local health authority WILL fail you for this in Canada, which is why Americans often complain that our hamburgers are dry, and places where you can actually get a pink hamburger here are expensive and… rare.

basically, you only want medium rare ground beef if it’s well done, which is rare, if it’s not well done you want it well done

Microphone Found

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0700

I lost a $300 microphone, a Rode Podcaster, an absolutely lovely microphone during a move 3 years ago

today I was preparing to send some mail and I found it tucked safely away, protected by a crew sock, in my “stationery” box.

so bad news for Canada Post

MAHA

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0700

It serves the ultra-wealthy to have American health discourse dominated by people abandoning actual science-based medicine and instead pitching the health equivalent of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” - well, of course you’ll be healthy if you just avoid seed oils and check all of your packaging for complicated ingredients like xanthan gum. If you do get sick, maybe you just didn’t whole milk and yoga and juice cleanse hard enough about it.

The fact that this is worthless is aside from the point: if you can sell people snake oil en masse, they won’t be clamoring for expensive stuff like public access to oncologists, which means more money for the rich to buy expensive stuff like private access to oncologists, which they need, because widespread deregulation of everything has meant a lot more carcinogens bouncing around as of late

Do you see all of the people around you getting sick? That’s not because of widespread privatization of the medical industry, it’s because they gave their kids Tylenol too early and eat food with Too Many Ingredients

finally, someone’s out there willing to offer a naturopathic solution to millions of unhealthy americans who just need someone to try and goji berry their multiple sclerosis away

Dinner Battery

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0700

one time I made lemon cauliflower in a cast iron pan and covered it with aluminum foil, which is to say, I accidentally made a battery for dinner

hear me out

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

from r/kitchenconfidential, “The grizzly came to eat again”

i’m not going to lie, I look at this man’s order and think

“you know”

“he’s not WRONG”

this is the “hear me out” of sushi orders

look, we all know what the best sushi is

why not Only

Graphite

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0700

i often clean my ears out with a mechanical pencil, which is important because they’re full of graphite dust for some reason

numerology

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0700

sometimes we’ll do something cool like Lunar New Year and I’ll be like “learning about other cultures is neat, look at how much more interesting this makes our product”

and then we’ll do something like change a value from 400 to 399 out of respect for numerology and you can see all of the multicultural pluralism leave my body

The Mountain, The Moon Cave and the Sad God

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I usually have a lot of windows open at once but sometimes you need to just stop and give something your full attention for just a few minutes, and this animated 8-minute short film from the Gorillaz was one of those things.

This thing is still digitally animated and composited, don’t get me wrong, but they do a lot of stuff to try and imitate some absolutely beautiful tricks from the Jungle Book age of animation.

Seeing this cel you might think, as I did, “wait, did they cel animate this WHOLE THING?” - but… no, they hand-painted a few reference cels as a style target for their digital animation.

Which makes more sense - the equipment that you need to actually cel animate in this day and age doesn’t exist? Even in its heydey, we’re talking complex camera rigs that took millions of dollars to produce and run.

Or, say, in order to get a naturalistic looking waterfall, they’d film smoke, then color grade it, flip it upside-down, and composite it in to the painting.

That’s a digital trick, but it’s a classic camera trick, something that you could have done in the 70s if you were very deft, and it looks stunning.

Gosh, Jamie Hewlett looks old.

His role here is mostly doing Art Directory things, pointing at stuff and telling young, talented kids what to do.

The whole Moon Cave sequence is, in fact, just another director entirely, a fella who Jamie believed in and wanted to give space and money to to see what he could do, and it looks great.

I Like The Pop Stuff First

This most recent Gorillaz album has been trickling out bit by bit, a kind of trippy “Brit wandering around in India” album. My favorite song from this most recent album so far has been The Happy Dictator, because it always takes me forever to come around to the more experimental songs:

Like - I think “Plastic Beach” might be one of my favorite albums of all time, but a lot of that album’s songs took a while to land. I think I finally came around to liking Sweepstakes, like, a few years ago.

Forever A Mixed Media Project

As Lady Emily mentioned in her “Plastic Beach: The Masterpiece that Almost Ended Gorillaz”-

the Gorillaz project has always been a partnership between Damon Albarn’s experimental brit-pop/hip-hop mashup music and Jamie Hewlett’s Tank-Girl-visual art.

The conflict - the problem with this arrangement - has always been that the music industry is only interested in the Damon Albarn half of that arrangement, and only insofar as he can maintain his Daft Punk-like position vaguely on the periphery of pop royalty. The Gorillaz are a very expensive project to maintain in the hopes of, what, one, maybe two hit singles per decade? And yet.

One of the things I’ve always liked about the Gorillaz is the feeling that there’s this huge lore there that I’m just missing out on, although one time I did a deep dive on what that lore actually is and it turns out it’s disappointing to know all of the details, so I don’t recommend actually looking in to it. It’s way cooler to think that these characters have a really interesting story that you’re always just catching a tiny corner of.

I know very little about the internal politics of this band or the details of the politics between Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, but I will note that despite all of that, the Gorillaz have remained steadfast: this is not the Damon Albarn show, this remains stubbornly and insistently a mixed-media project. Which is why this Clearly Very, Very Expensive animated music video is a triumph.

Ball X Pit & Dogpile

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I talked to a friend about “Ball X Pit” and they said, “oh, Ball Pit?” and I said “Wait, you don’t pronounce the X?” and she said “Well, I did, but then I saw the developers talk about it and they don’t pronounce the X.”

I’m going to keep pronouncing the X.

This game’s been getting great buzz! People love Ball X Pit!

I… don’t. It’s been about 5 hours.

I don’t hate it, but I also don’t feel like it adds anything much to my life.

I was hoping for kind of an Arkanoid x Balatro, but what I ended up getting was just Vampire Survivors.

Collect gems, spend them on upgrades, maximize DPS with good knowledge of the upgrades and builds, last a long time, buy permanent upgrades, repeat, repeat, repeat.

But I played Vampire Survivors already! That’s… about enough of that, for me, I think. I can FEEL the game trying to hack my dopamine receptors. I have been going back to Ball X Pit, but it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel like I’m really DOING anything.

I passed on the recent and also popular Megabonk for the same reason: I simply have already played enough Vampire Survivors.

If you’ve played Vampire Survivors and that’s enough of that for now, I don’t recommend Ball X Pit - if not, you should probably try out the very addictive Vampire Survivors formula at least once and Ball X Pit is probably the better game of the two. (Although Vampire Survivors works on a phone, which is its own compelling pitch.)

Dogpile

Dogpile is a Balatro, the purpose of which is to carefully merge dogs. If two dogs touch, they make a bigger dog! You have to manage your deck of dogs and dog-based-abilities to try and make a really big dog!

Dogpile is pretty fun! I only cracked through one round, and in that round I feel like I saw a lot of the content in Dogpile, which is a sign that maybe it’s a little bit light on content, but it did feel pretty solid.

The problem with Dogpile is, I think, that it’s a Steam game but it’s actually a perfect phone game. This good boy is perfect for a bus ride or a poop, but I don’t really see myself lugging out a Steam Deck for it.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

First Things First

8/10, Strong Recommend

Let’s Talk Briefly About the GBA

Pipistrello is a game that is very clearly intended to feel like a GameBoy Advance game.

I mean, this isn’t subtle, the game can in fact be played in a 3D “Pocket Trap Advance”, making it entirely clear exactly which hardware this game is meant to evoke.

After 12 years of total Gameboy dominance of the mobile gaming market, in 2001, at the beginning of the Gamecube era, the Gameboy Advance was released: sure, it was only a little more powerful than a SNES, but compared to the senescent Gameboy it felt revelatory to have such a powerful device in your pocket.

With more muscle than the 9-year-old SNES, the best SNES games could be ported relatively smoothly to the Advance: lovely. There were pain paints, though: one was the slightly lower resolution: The SNES has a resolution of 256x224 pixels, while the GBA has a resolution of 240x160 pixels, so ports often had to do things like “use smaller fonts”, “crop things weirdly”, or even “rebuild existing art”.

If you have my exact kind of brain damage, this image will look subtly wrong to you.

The sound chip on the Advance was also kinda wheedly and performed completely different to the one on the SNES, forcing SNES compositions to be rewritten, often to their detriment.

But, and this is a huge but: the Advance’s similarity to the SNES meant that the whole video game making world had 9 years of experience developing exactly the kind of games that people loved for it. While console developers had to struggle through the enormous 3D learning curve, GBA developers could just roll out immaculate SNES games. As a result, some of the most impressive stuff from the pixel-art 2D era come from the GBA - in the absolutely tiny 3 year span before the GBA was rolled over by the even more impressive new Nintendo DS.

Anyways, I say this because I want to contextualize what it means for a game developer to point at the GBA and say “I want to make a GBA game”. It’s so much more specific than “I want to make a pixel-art game”, it forces them to design against a very specific set of parameters. The game has to be wide, for one thing.

Despite the low-res, the GBA supported a much more vibrant color gamut than the SNES, which is also reflected in the design: GBA games often featured richly detailed pixel art with bold outlines to help them read more clearly on the small screen, and, again, Pipistrello is very clearly evocative of this style.

I can’t help but point out that I was 15 years old the year that the GBA was released, and so this kind of nostalgia does in fact hit me for pretty reliable damage. Good choice of era, Pipistrello developers.

The Gameplay

Pipistrello is a top-down action platformer with subtle RPG elements, which means that the most obvious analogue is Zelda: Link to the Past:

And, like, yeah, Pipistrello’s developers were, I think very clearly making their own perfect Link to the Past.

I’m gonna admit it: I’ve never really vibed with any of the mainline 3D Zelda games. Not Ocarina of Time. Not the one with the big-ass moon. Not the gorgeous new ones like Breath of the Wild.

What I want from a Zelda game is… well, this!

Anyways, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is maybe the best Zelda game I’ve ever played.

This game gives you interesting Yoyo mechanics in spades and the world is just coated in simple, satisfying puzzles that require you to use them in interesting ways.

It’s not just puzzles, though, there are also fights, and platforming, which are fast and tight and challenging.

I’m a well-known sucker for 2D difficulty. (Except in Hollow Knight, I don’t understand why I’ve never jived with that series. Too much backtracking?)

Writing?

Sufficient, and a little funny!

Pipistrello takes place in a setting that’s used often but that I don’t think has a name, so I’m gonna call it “Animal Modern”, citing examples like Richard Scarry and Zootopia

The writing of Pipistrello is extremely 2025, which is to say, it’s got a strong anti-capitalist lean. Pipistrello is the heir to his grandmother’s fortune which she’s amassed by monopolizing local electricity generation and then squeezing her monopolistic advantage until everyone else is poor and frustrated, leading to a rebellion which kicks off the events of the game: four small local crime-bosses (once: honest business owners) shatter Grandma ‘Strello’s soul into four McGuffins which they abscond with, leaving only the tiniest bit left, trapped in Pipistrello’s yoyo.

As Pipistrello, you’re… kind of on Team Evil? Your quest is getting those Grand McGuffins crammed back into your gran so that she can go back to oppressing the locals, which doesn’t seem like a terribly laudable goal - but the four petty crime bosses haven’t exactly been doing a good job of running the show either. As you do this, Pipistrello’s gran interjects greedy, self-serving rhetoric at our protagonist from inside the yoyo: “at least when I was in charge there was order”, “I’m just running a business, if they can’t pay that’s their fault, not mine”.

This writing was not intended to be subtle or on-the-nose: It’s obscenely clear from every line of the game’s dialogue that all of these problems were caused by Pipistrello’s gran’s monopoly in the first place.

I haven’t finished the game yet, nor do I want to spoil it for anybody else, but, like, my money is on Pipistrello’s Gran being the end boss of this game. That is not going to be a terribly shocking twist. (ed: I’ve finished the game and the twist went in a slightly different direction, which was a surprise!)

Good Controller/Mobile Game

This game calls for a controller, I think that’s non-optional, here.

This game is a good use of a Steam Deck. Per its design influences, it has the shape of a good mobile game that you’ll enjoy playing on a bus or plane ride: well optimized for short, satisfying bursts of gameplay, easy to pick up and put down.

Conclusion

Pipistrello good.

careers

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0700

“average person changes career 7 times a lifetime” factoid actually just statistical error. Average person changes career just one time. Careers Georg, who has rich parents and changes career over 10,000 times a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

we aren't designed

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0700

A going pet peeve of mine is when people say things like “we weren’t designed to look at screens all day” or “we weren’t built for 8 hours of sitting at a stretch”.

It’s technically true, but only because we weren’t designed at all. There is absolutely nothing that we were designed to do.

We kinda randomly got assembled over billions of years and as a result we’re kinda good at throwing rocks and living to about the age of 45: anything we do outside of that is anomalous.

watchmen

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0700

I say this every time I fart with my wife in the car

Elle

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

So, I haven’t announced this to the greater internet yet, because it’s one of the worst things that I’ve ever had to go through, but… well, we lost Zapp.

2 months ago. It was stupid, too: he burrowed a tiny hole out of the back of his catio and escaped into the wilderness behind our home.

We’ve gone to elaborate, fanciful lengths to try and track him down - hunting dogs, signs, long walks, thermal imaging. He might well still be out there, but there haven’t been any credible sightings.

The complex array of trail cameras and food traps I’ve set up out there have clued me in to the day-to-day patterns of some 5 local cats, some skunks, some raccoons, and some coyotes (and one less raccoon, thanks to the coyotes).

Over the past six years I’ve taken a little bit of time out of my day every day to make this little guy feel special and loved.

He was brave and outgoing, playful and clever, and he put up with our human snuggles pretty well even though he constantly gave off a vibe I would describe as “you dare to snuggle me, the mightiest hunter in the jungle? I will accept it, but only because you are very warm.”

But a good thing to come out of this was that while we were checking local shelters to see if maybe someone had encountered a spirited little bengal, we found that…

Well, someone had! Not ours, not Zapp, but this bengal girl about his age had been rescued from an abusive and neglectful home situation and needed a home - preferably with someone experienced with bengals, because they’re a difficult breed.

When we first met her, she was apprehensive and nervous. Also: bouncing around between food scarcity and food abundance has turned her into a bit of a chonker.

So she came home with us. The SPCA is no place for such royalty.

She feels like the diametric opposite of Zapp: where he was scrappy, brave, curious, self-possessed, and motivated by play,

Elle is skittish, terrified of her shadow, unwilling to try new things unless they’re very carefully vetted, but once she feels comfortable: chatty and cuddly. She’s been attention-starved for much too long and now she thrives when the humans are nice to her.

I sat patiently with her for days after we brought her home and she’s decided that she sleeps with me, now. She’s been coming out of her shell more and more, chirping delightedly at me when I wake up, exploring further and further out of her Bedroom of Safety, and playing with increasingly reckless abandon.

She needed a kind human to help her heal from the trauma of Bad Humans. (And get her back into shape, bengals are not supposed to be this beefy.)

I needed a little creature to defend to help me heal from losing the Crown Prince of All Cats.

We’ve made fast friends.

I put all of my Zapp pictures together. 13 gigabytes. It may be one of the most thoroughly documented cat-lives ever to occur.

Elle being completely different is actually pretty helpful: Zapp hasn’t been replaced (impossible), he just taught me how to be in love with cats so that I could pass that along to this sweet girl who needed a home.

I doubt we’re going to see the kind of madcap bravura out of Elle we saw out of Zapp, but we’ll see.

Gridiron Day

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I see the confusing part now, you expected this gridiron day party to have football but instead I have made waffles

I do like to watch The Game by which I mean “Kings Quest V”

vegetables

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

I used to think “instead of gaining weight, can’t I just poop more?” until I realized that’s what vegetables is

Rare Flavours

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:00:00 -0700

Wait, Let’s Talk about Venba For Just a Second

Recently I played Venba, an indie game about indian cooking.

It’s a very different story from Rare Flavours, with a very different theme, but these two stories are unified by their central metaphor: cooking - specifically, Indian cooking.

I found Venba beautiful - but very short, not terribly difficult. I don’t want to spoil it, (I didn’t write about it, here) - because with such a short game the spoilers would ruin what little there is to enjoy! What I will say is that it uses its mechanics and shifting viewpoints to very effectively convey some feelings that I think are important and meaningful. Venba tells a story about how the difficult, traditional, ritual act of cooking difficult foods can be calming, a love language, a way of connecting with your family.

Okay, Back to Rare Flavours

Rare Flavors covers the short adventure of Rubin Baksh, formerly Bakasura the demonic rakshasa, on his adventure to create a food travelogue of the sort that Anthony Bourdain might make. Being a giant monster and slightly older than civilization itself, Bakasura has a lot of experience, a keenly refined palate, and is an obscenely talented chef. What he lacks is a camera and an auteur’s eye, for which he recruits Mo, once an aspiring film student, now something of a layabout.

Rubin is poetic and profoundly sympathetic, which is why it’s so difficult to contend with the problem (barely a spoiler, it’s revealed in the first chapter): the rarest flavor of all is human, and Rubin has a taste for that, too.

wuh oh

“Technically not a cannibal” is a humorous point he makes in the book. Rubin isn’t a human, so humans are fair game.

As serial killers go, Rubin is sympathetic, urbane, poetic, deeply respectful of his victims, and ultimately - and this is something of a surprise - the narrative takes his side. Rare Flavours with the extremely out-of-left-field “pro-serial-killer” take.

Beautifully Illustrated

It just looks so good.

Part of the Journey is Forging Mo Back Into an Artist

Mo has forgotten how and why to create, and Rubin has selected him as his cinematographer because he sees the artist within Mo and has made it part of his personal mission to bring that back to the forefront.

An Ethos of Meaningful Consumption

I believe the thesis of Rare Flavours is fairly clear from the text. It wants you to think about what you consume. Even more than that, it wants you to become involved in the production of what you consume.

Food is the metaphor here: Ram is an artist and he would like you to think about the role of the artist in art.

In fact, I’d say that this whole book delivers an extremely similar message to Brandon Sanderson in We Are the Art - we don’t do art in order to feed the machine, we don’t do art for the sake of having someone to sell it to: we do art because the difficulty and hardship of understanding and constructing meaningful art shapes us into more complete people.

Rubin’s refined palate is such that he doesn’t just consume food but the chefs - literally, but also metaphorically, he’s not just interested in the art, but the artist behind the art. It turns out it was the creators who were the Rare Flavours all along!

Mo, at the end of the story, having understood the point of all of this, delivers a speech to an adoring crowd:

It is in our nature to be such ungainly, consumptive beasts.

To live and labour so we may eat and be eaten, to consume and be consumed in eternity.

And to this end, we have built around ourselves the machinery of consumption.

It becomes easy to forget, then, that there is true flavour yet, beneath it all.

In the face of such despair, our one saving grace is the ability to make things.

And as long as it comes from a place of honesty, fascination, and true flavour…

… there will always be room for more.

I’m rarely mad at stories for just out and saying what they’re trying to impart. Lord knows people will still miss the point.

incl: an excerpt of someone missing the point

EV Time Is Nigh

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Sixteen years ago, when I bought my Toyota Matrix, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it would be the only ICE vehicle I would ever own: because the plan was to own it for a long, long time, so long that by the time I was ready to move on to a new vehicle, hydrogen or electrics would be the standard.

Lately, sometimes, I’ve been looking at EV options.

End of 2024, in fact, I was starting to get such a bad EV itch that I spent a few grand on aftermarket upgrades to my car to try and forestall any EV purchasing impulses I might have.

Here’s the thing, though: in the past 16 years, I’ve put maybe 125,000 kilometers on the ol’ Matrix. That’s not many. It’s hard to justify a lot of car expenditure based on the quite limited usage of my existing car, which is only insured for pleasure usage anyways.

But even given that, 125,000 kilometers is quite a long ways! It’s a third of the way to the moon!

Let’s assume, based on the efficiency numbers for my car plus a little bit of fudge factor for weight and to make the numbers clean, I’m getting about 10L/100KM: that’s 12,500L of gasoline. Assuming an average price of gas of about $1.50 over the car’s lifetime, that’s $18,750 I’ve spent on gas over that time.

That is a lot of money I’ve spent on gas! But also, if I wanted to drive for another 16 years in the same car, assuming gas gets more expensive (everything does), I could expect to pay maybe another $25,000 on gasoline? That’s quite a lot, but it’s still quite a lot less than it would cost to buy a whole new car. Hell, add that to the price of a 16-year old Matrix with 125,000 kilometers on it and mild body damage (about $8000, blue-book) and buying a brand new sixteen-year-old-Matrix and driving it for 16 more years would still be only $32,000, which is, notably, about half what it would cost to buy a new EV.

New EV’s Are Pretty Expensive. Especially because, as a soft middle-aged man, I’m way more likely to fall for all of the new bells and whistles. Why yes, I would like heated seats and a heated wheel. After driving my Matrix in the winter I would like those things very much.

Why Do You Really Want a New Car?

Well, I had a few things I was curious about:

A car that’s more fun to drive.
More cargo space
A car radio with bluetooth, so I don’t have to keep fussing with and replacing AUX cables forever.

Well, let’s look at these one by one:

I’d Like More Cargo Space

“Cargo space? No, car go road, dummy.”

Anyways, need more cargo space? Fit it with a roof rack!

This adds significantly more carrying capacity, although it does noticeably impact fuel economy, especially when I’m fully loaded.

To be honest, shopping for cars nowadays, it’s a struggle to find a car in the “small SUV” segment that has as much cargo space as a Matrix, this car is a damn Tardis for how much it can store.

I have a fun story where Tiff’s Dad asked us to pick up some cabinetry for him from a place, and I cruised up in my tiny little car and they looked at their pile of cabinets, then at my car, and said “you’re never going to fit it all in”, and I cracked my knuckles and made it work, although I did feel like the drive to our destination was made from within a cabinet.

Pictured: A cavernous 61.5 cubic feet of cargo space

For comparison, the Hyundai Kona, a compact SUV, has 63.7: more or less an equivalent amount of cargo space.

My little hatchback puts up big cargo numbers - when I bought it, I was optimizing for “cheap, reliable, gas efficient, big trunk”, and the Toyota Matrix has been absolutely crushing it at those metrics all this time.

To Replace that Slot; With What I Once Bought (‘Cause Somebody Stole My Car Radio, And Now I Just Sit in Silence)

Yeah, I should have done this one quite a while ago, because it was not an expensive thing to replace. I went to some local car sound guys and I asked them what they’d recommend for a head unit - I’d done a bunch of research up front, mind you - and they recommended about what I’d expected, this pretty good balance of price and performance, a $750 fella with wireless Android Auto and Apple Carplay. It cost me another $750 to have them install it (sidenote: I watched a few installation YouTubes and quickly inferred that this would be well worth the money.) and I was off to the races.

Beauty. Now, when I turn on my car, this little computer boots up and automatically connects to my phone. By buying a high-end head unit, too, I have something that actually performs better than a lot of modern cars — it’s fast and snappy. Hyundai didn’t add Wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay until a year after I bought this unit.

More Fun To Drive

When Tiff’s Dad was out of town and moving to his new place, he asked us to help out, and some of this help involved me moving his very nice Infiniti.

I’m not sure the exact model, but it’s a car firmly in BMW territory: a low-slung, powerful, luxury car for project managers and doctors.

I hated driving this car.

It’s too nice.

It turns out that sixteen years driving the same car bakes in a lot of habits and feelings. My Matrix feels like an extension of my body. Driving the Infiniti gave me car dysmorphia because it was the wrong shape and size.

It was too powerful. There’s no road noise, I didn’t feel connected to the road at all. When I wanted to go fast it just went fast, not at all like my stodgy Matrix which steadfastly refuses to accelerate under anything but the most optimal conditions (sidenote: At one point I checked online for the 0-60 time for a Toyota Matrix and the website posting the numbers had to indicate that they’d measured it with a calendar.) .

When I got back into Friend Matrix, I had been cured of “I want to drive a nicer car” fever. No sir, I want to drive a car that I have a sixteen year long relationship with, it’s much safer and more controllable that way.

And having resolved my three issues, my car was once again made new, and the itch to buy an EV retreated for a little longer.

The Car’s Been Pricey Lately

That was expensive, yeah, but the whole car glow-up amounted to about $3500, all in. In the past year, I’ve spent easily that much at the Toyota dealership on brakes, oil changes, tires, spark plugs… it turns out, keeping a 15-year old car healthy and happy can be an expensive project. I should have a battery replacement coming up, soon, too - my first car battery gave out at year 7 and since I’m now at year 16, it’s due.

Now, some of those things are still an expense on EVs - if anything, I imagine that tires are more expensive on EVs on account of how heavy they are. Brakes would still be an expense, although I’m told regenerative braking adds a lot of lifespan to the old mechanical brakes. Chances are, with an EV, I’d still be doing my twice-yearly tire rotations where they also do some filter swaps and liquid refills and charge me exorbitantly for the privilege to do that.

Honestly, if I had an adult garage I’d seriously consider buying some equipment and learning how to do these things myself, although I do appreciate that my car’s maintenance currently just comes down to showing up at Toyota twice a year and giving them Some Amount of Money.

2 Years Later: Headwinds For the EV Itch

2025 and 2026 have been interesting years for EVs.

Okay, so, federal EV rebates have been vanishing both above and below the border, so a lot of automakers have scaled back their EV plans - that’s not great, buuuut…

YouTube has been reminding me that EVs are, in fact, very convenient.

“Hey, remember all of those times you’ve had to go to a gas station and fill up your car? Yeah, that sucks, right? What if you only had to do that on long road trips and not at all the rest of the time.”

Also: thanks to Global Geopolitical Tensions, China’s entering the Canadian EV race with some of their heavy hitting brands like BYD and Chery, and that’s going to mean cheaper, more accessible EVs.

“She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.”

So I started to poke around online to find out what people think about their BYD Dolphins and Chery Himla’s: oh no, it turns out that China’s built a global reputation for building solid, reliable EV’s at an extremely reasonable price.

It turns out that they’re just cars. Most of the complaints about these cars are sinophobic noise from people who haven’t driven them and never will (sidenote: “Chinese technology is trash”, posted from a Xiaomi 15 Pro) .

During one of these dives, I watched some car dealership guys talking about how it makes so much more sense to lease rather than buy an EV, because there are just so many new features coming out every year you’d be stupid to miss out on them all. Obviously, my bullshit detector went into overdrive, but that activated a little neuron in my mind:

“People (incorrectly) think that EV’s age badly and a lot of people are leasing EVs: are lightly used EV’s available at a large discount?”

I checked AutoTrader and the answer is Very Yes, with still very new EV’s available at 20,000-25,000 under the MSRP of their newer variants. I don’t think an IONIQ5 is worth it at $60,474

But it’s a much more compelling proposition at $43,995, or $34,980.

I like the way the IONIQ 5 and 6 look, they’re cool cars:

Although I’d have to go with the Ioniq5, the few times in my life when I’ve needed a hatchback, I’ve absolutely needed a hatchback (sidenote: see the above “well-stuffed camping car” for an example, although “bringing a 65” TV home from Best Buy" is another prominent example that comes to mind.) .

Time was particularly cruel to the Ford F-150 Lightning, a truck that would easily run over $100,000 in the base configuration and only got more expensive from there, now available for a tiny fraction of the price:

Honestly, I’d consider a F-150 Lightning at $50,000, it’s a pretty great EV for people who want a suburban fuckabout for chores, although I’d get a little salty about never being able to park ever again.

They also take absolutely forever to charge, complicating long road trips and necessitating more home equipment, although it is a fun side effect that if you’re going to get an electrician in anyways to install a Level 2 charger, you might as well also get them to set it up so you can run parts of your house from the monstrous 130 KWh battery (4+ days, for most houses) in an emergency.

And shortly after that, Hank Green made a video about how he’d purchased a lightly used Ioniq5 because … of exactly the effect I’ve described:

But also, the reason that the leasing thing has been so popular has been a weird loophole in American EV policy specifically, that has made it extremely cheap to lease a car, until… I don’t know, a few months from now, probably:

So, actually, if you take advantage of this and lease a car for very cheap in the USA, you’re helping: not only do you get to drive a cool car for a few years, but also you’ve added a new cheap EV to the market, which someone else can buy - in fact, you could be that someone else, a few years from now.

Also, there’ve been some cool developments in EVs!

More and more EV’s (including the Ioniqs) offer V2L (Vehicle to Load) features that allow you to use them as potent, long-lasting, powerful emergency generators.
Post 2025, most cars ship with the NACS style charger, a new charger that’s got a good shot at being the North American standard design going forward, meaning that if you buy a post-2025 EV, you’re probably going to have the Right Plug for the next decade without having to fuss with adapters too much.
The Nissan Leaf re-launched and is cheap, cheerful, and well-liked. It only has V2L on it’s top trim level - which isn’t cheap - it has limited cargo space (10 cu ft less than the Matrix), and it’s FWD (when AWD is widely accepted to be a borderline prerequisite for Canada), but… I honestly love the look of this friendly boy (sidenote: If not friend, why friend shaped?) :

The Toyota BZ4X got an updated 2026 model that has moved it from “easily one of the worst EVs on the market” to “8/10 pretty good, B+, solid car”. Toyota’s done a lot to earn brand loyalty with me, my sixteen years with the Matrix have been pretty trouble-free, and that comes off of a childhood of long-lasting, durable Corollas and Tercels. Toyotas are not enthusiast cars, they’re boring and practical (sidenote: like me) , and I am definitely willing to accept a slightly less flashy package because I genuinely do trust them. Their plodding feature adoption is hopefully born out of a conservative, quality-focused bent that hopefully speaks well for the longevity of their cars (sidenote: on the other hand, they launched the Mirai, so maybe they’re just bad at this) .

The Hyundai Ioniq5 is enjoying total market dominance as everyone acknowledges that it is Hot Shit.
Vibrating With Excitement: There’s a chance that Hyundai is going to launch the Ioniq3 in North America, which is their new “Hot Hatch”. I fuckin’ love hatchback cars (sidenote: SUVs are dumb, TEAM STATION WAGON REPRESENT.) .

Tesla’s CEO came out as fully fascist, which is driving attention away from his dogshit cars. Which is good, because I’ve always disliked Telsas and the fact that they’re no longer sucking all of the air out of the EV discussion with their “no buttons” and their “self-driving that doesn’t work and costs $100/month” and their “too much software, not enough hardware” is, I think, pushing the industry in a less stupid direction overall.
Slate is trying to pitch to everyone a sub-$30K EV light truck with minimal features and a lot of customization. I don’t love the Bezos connection or the fact that it’s 🦅 AMERICAN 🦅, but that’s the right pitch for me, at least.
- “People don’t need a tablet computer built into their car when they already have a phone, they just need a place to put their phone.” Yes! Correct!
- “Just plunk a bluetooth speaker in your car and you’ll get better sound quality than you would from a built-in system for a fraction of the cost.” Okay, little suspicious of that one but I’ll allow it.
- This one has a real crack at avoiding some of the issues I’m going to talk about, below: less software is good, and simplicity also means less things to break.
- Honestly it seems like an ideal second vehicle for a two-vehicle family but it might be a little spartan for a primary vehicle. Maybe I do want heated seats.

Hyundai’s ICCU Problem

So, digging in to the IONIQ line specifically, because they’re honestly kind of the pole position “one to beat” for EV’s right now, they have The ICCU Problem.

Hyundai’s and Kia’s Charging Unit Issues Cause Problems for EV Owners

Owners’ complaints related to the ICCU, including losing power while driving, hurt the brands’ reliability scores in Consumer Reports’ rankings.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-ioniq-kia-iccu-failure-tesla-a3038878758/

The tl;dr is: Hyundai and Kia has an important component with a failure rate that they claim is “less than 1%” but as measured by Consumer Reports could be much closer to 5-10%.

Hyundai/Kia were already struggling against the perception that their cars are flashy but a little cut rate, quality-wise, this has not helped.

Cars as a Service (CAAS)

I like that my Matrix has minimal computer on board. There’s some, but it’s a lot of pretty dumb computing, mostly C, and it’s barely connected to my radio head unit which I was able to swap out entirely.

I work on software professionally, for a living, and that’s given me one very strong feeling: most of these people should not be allowed anywhere near dependable technology.

And, lo, it turns out that the folks making car software are kinda bad at it.

That’s one of the bigger complaints about the Tesla line, as well as Volkswagen’s ID.4 and the adorable new Volkswagen Van:

I absolutely love the idea of this van, but the reviews have not been kind.

There’s a lot of software in these cars and most of it isn’t so good. In many cases, the software replaces things you needed, like important buttons. Like the button that opened your glove compartment.

In Drew Gooden’s “Cars are Getting Dumber” he goes on at length about how frustrating modern car designs can be.

Jaiden, also, complains vociferously about how she missed something important because her car decided that it was Software Update Time when it was supposed to be Driving Time.

Tesla and BMW rightfully got pilloried for trying to hit people with monthly fees for car-related services, but neither of them are backing down:

BMW Commits to Subscriptions Even After Heated Seat Debacle

You may not have to pay a monthly fee to keep your butt warm, but BMW isn’t backing down from subscription features.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/bmw-commits-to-subscriptions-even-after-heated-seat-debacle

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

One-time FSD purchase no longer available as Elon Musk talks up future where drivers can be asleep at the wheel

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/23/tesla_full_self_driving_subscription/

So, instead of paying for gas for your car, the automakers would like for you to pay for software for your car. Better for the environment, but maaaaan, fuck that.

Car Software Privacy Very Bad

By the way, all of those cameras and microphones on your car, now? Every single EV maker on the market reserves the right to sell all of the data from those to anybody they feel like, so if you’re wondering if advertisers or ICE can buy a comprehensive profile of you constructed from AI-summarized observation of your home collected by your car, the answer is “almost certainly”.

‘Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’

Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

Installing a Home Charger

Ha ha! I own my home! I park right in front of it! I could get a level 2 charger installed if I needed to.

But, uh, given my extremely light usage, I probably don’t need to, I can probably just run an extension cord over and charge the car with a regular plug.

A regular household plug provides, like, 5-8Km of range per hour, and can take days to fully charge a car from 0 to 100.

But, like… If you plug-in charge for 12 hours a night, you’re good for 60Km/day. My rolling average is 150Km of driving per week, and that’s including the gigantic road trips I take out to the boonies every now and again.

In order to suddenly be faced with more than 60Km of driving per day, I would need to suddenly have a commute that’s further out than Richmond or Langley, which… I don’t want. And then, if and when that happens, I could pretty trivially install the Level 2 charger.

Anyways:

All of this makes me pretty sure: It’s not time yet. The Matrix can make it to 20.

Maybe if my teenage nephew needs a solid, reliable car in the next couple of years and is willing to engage in an epic roadtrip to transport it from Vancouver to Toronto, that would be a good continuation in the tale of John Matrix, The Heroic Chariot. I have some friends with oldest children coming up on driving age, too (sidenote: he says, oldly) …

But it might be, soon. In a couple of years, a lightly used 2026-2027 Hyundai hatchback with V2L, NACS and whatever they’ve done to fix the ICCU issue? Or, heck, a Nissan Leaf or a Toyota BZ4X from this year, in a couple of years?

seems pretty good

Cybergamer

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Stuff I’ve Been Up To Lately (It’s Relevant, I Promise)

So, lately, I’ve been showing an interest in interactive epistolary storytelling - for example, A Normal Lost Phone, or Blippo+.

A coworker of mine has been streaming themselves running an x86 emulator ( https://86box.net/ ) to run Windows 98 and go through old magazine CD-ROM treasure-troves.

It’s been fun to watch! I recommend it! Go be a fan of their streams!

Also also, I’ve been preparing to run Impossible Landscapes, the Delta Green adventure, for some of my friends.

This is a horror RPG set in the distant fantasy realm that is the year 1995. As a result of prepping this monster of an adventure, I’ve been concocting an Obsidian knowledge base that’s absolutely enormous.

I’ve been making subtle changes to it, too, in no small part because Delta Green is extremely American and I am… not. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that nobody is terribly excited about playacting as law enforcement in the USA right now. The adventure will take place in… Vancouver.

Oh, that and I bought an elaborate, expensive and thematically appropriate puzzle from the Mysterious Package Company, spent a day solving it, wrote a detailed walkthrough (sidenote: mine is currently the best and only one accessible on the internet, AFAICT, the mysterious package company is still very niche) and have also been tying it in to the campaign at large.

I’ve also built an era-appropriate playlist. Of course, era-appropriate playlists are never truly accurate - because I’m remixing 1995 into “just the parts I liked”. That playlist has Portishead and Groove is in the Heart, but leaves out Boyz II Men and Celine Dion.

Oh, and I put up xoxi.ca, A Private Mastodon Instance, a whole Mastodon server who’s purpose is “put weird experimental art here”, without any plan as to what that weird experimental art is going to be.

An Idea Forms

So, things that have been very on my mind lately?

Epistolary narrative storytelling
Retro PC Gaming, specifically: the CD-ROM’s that came in magazines.
Absolutely Steeping in The Year 1995
Building a Big Wiki
Posting Stuff on Xoxi

And I thought “do you know what would be fun? starting to build a 90’s gaming magazine, trying to do Interesting Storytelling in the periphery of that.”

So I started cooking up this plan, and this plan started with research, and this research started with PC Gamer, and would not have been possible without RetroMags.

I grabbed a copy from January of 1995 and dug in.

I skimmed the entire thing, taking notes on the tone and style and things that I thought were funny.

Notes and Sketches

What’s the parody going to be called?

Ticky’s streaming was focused on stuff that came out of Australia in the 90’s, which is already kind of an alternate universe - setting mine in Canada’s an obvious slam dunk, and it kind of creates the obvious explanation for why nobody has ever seen this magazine and why it references a bunch of video games nobody’s ever heard of.

“Computer Gamer Canada?”

that’s a little boring, though, and I want something that feels a little more intensely dated and cringy in retrospect:

“CyberGAMER Canada”

So my Joplin notepad is filling up with details on CyberGAMER Canada - the editorial team, some rudimentary articles, ideas and ads I want to work in.

PC Sound Was Awful

I booted up The Incredible Machine 2, which you can play entirely through browser emulation at this point, and was greeted by that telltale Sierra Sound - which was so harsh and blaring that even through my headphones Tiffany got irritated and shut the bedroom door because it was interfering with her sleep.

I shut it off shortly after. If I’m going to explore retro games I might need to keep the door shut, or turn the volume waaaaay down.

Oh My God These Things Used to be Huge

PC Gamer was a particularly well-stuffed magazine, even for the time. I’ve always loved magazines (I love me an article) and I remember being profoundly disappointed by a Wired magazine in the 10’s that felt like it only had maybe 4 or 5 real articles in it. Magazines are smaller nowadays.

This PC Gamer? 190 pages long with ads. There’s a lot of magazine in here!

I’m obviously not going to do that much.

Excited To Chop and Screw

Something about collaging together old screenshots into fake 90’s retro games that never existed seems very fun to me. We’ll see if it’s as entertaining to build as I hope it’s going to be.

I Could Actually Make Some of These Games

In fact, one of the things I kind of like about this project is that a lot of the dumb little fake game demos I’m describing are scoped very generously to be things I could actually crack together in Godot in a weekend. Don’t want to build a feature? Oops that part of the demo is broken.

I Immediately Wish I Hadn’t Left Photoshop and InDesign

As I wrote just a few days ago, I’ve been trying to wean myself off of Adobe and Windows, which means that I don’t have any access to Photoshop or InDesign, which are the tools I would definitely use to build a fake magazine.

There are no good publisher packages for Linux at all, and Krita’s text management is much less polished than Photoshop’s, so I’m kinda doing this project with one hand tied behind my back.

That being said, it’s been good to force myself to learn this new software. I’ve already steamrolled through a few frustrations.

It’s Starting to Take Shape

The notes are almost ready to move from “loose Joplin notes” to an Obsidian knowledge base of their own.

And I’ve started working on the cover:

Update: Making Do With Linux Publishing Software

I do use publishing software once in a while, for physical game prototypes and D&D stuff and sometimes trying to concoct retro video game magazines I guess?

As I mentioned earlier, there’s no really compelling option for publishing software in Linux: the only option is Scribus and it bad.

I was in the shower and I had a stroke of inspiration.

“Wait, I already solved this problem months ago!”

Okay, so, earlier this year, I wanted to help a friend with their resume, and when I mock up resumes, I tend to do that in publishing software.

But also: I didn’t want to send them an Adobe file, because if I made the resume in something they couldn’t edit, then… well, worst case scenario they liked the resume design and either they’d have to buy Adobe CreativeSuite every time they changed it, or, worse, I’d have to help.

So I wracked my brain and composed this in the best free publisher that I could find: Google Sheets.

Yeah! Do you know what’s a very similar problem space to desktop publishing? PowerPoint-style presentations!

The features are startlingly similar. You’ve got pretty fine-grained layout of text, drawing tools, lots of options for content importing, styles & layouts, multi-page support, and direct export to PDF! While it lacks some of the highest-end publication features I’d need to take things all the way to a physical printing press, presentation software has definitely got the first 80% of the “publishing software” problem down pat.

So, if I’m looking for a good FOSS publishing tool - why don’t I look at LibreOffice Impress?

Okay, so, it crashed a few times while I was working, but it … recovered from those crashes without losing any data, so… that’s … ok.

Huh, yeah, that’ll do it. There’s even line-height!

layoff strategies

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

the smart play when planning layoffs is to invite everyone to an open-ended afternoon social event and simply lay off all of the people unbothered enough to attend

middle management

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

people have been promising to cut the bureaucracy out of government since I was a wee lad, but it turns out that if BC Hydro is just a CEO and 600 free-roaming linemen everything goes to shit real quick

A Normal Lost Phone

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0700

Keeping the theme of epistolary narrative indies going, after playing Blippo+ and Hypnospace Outlaw I thought it would be interesting to install 2017’s “A Normal Lost Phone” on my regular, not-lost phone.

Epistolary?

I learned a new word last year, “epistolary”.

Originally “a novel told through letters written between characters” - a great modern example of which would be “This Is How You Lose The Time War”:

An anime stan who goes by ‘Bigolas Dickolas’ on Twitter turned a queer sci-fi novel into a bestseller with one tweet. Now, they’re hoping the same good fortune can be extended to their favorite manga.

Business Insider, May 11, 2023

https://www.businessinsider.com/bigolas-dickolas-wolfwood-trigun-interview-time-war-2023-5?op=1

“Epistolary” has expanded to broadly be understood as “tales told in ephemera” - the literary equivalent to “found footage” in film.

So, the interstitials in Watchmen? You know, where you’d stop reading a comic book for a while and instead read a newspaper article or magazine article about some superhero history? That’s epistolary storytelling.

I think a more modern term for it might also be “environmental storytelling” although that has a slightly different connotation - because that tends towards being a lot more evocative and based on ambient design decisions.

Anyways

That digression aside, I’ve been getting down the rabbit hole of what I would describe as experimental narrative gaming lately. I’m going to toss Mouthwashing on the pile, too, because while that’s not delivered in an epistolary format, there’s a LOT about that game that pushes the video game narrative envelope, in my opinion.

Which takes us back to 2017’s “A Normal Lost Phone”, which… was considered pretty groundbreaking for 2017.

What Is It?

So it’s a fake phone OS without a lot of applications in it. You’ve found this phone - what happened to its original owner?

You start in a messaging app, which you can use to find the Wi-Fi password, which allows you access to your e-mail, which you can use to find the passwords for your dating app profile, which you can use to… well, you get it - each thing you find gives you the tools you need to find the next thing in the sequence until you’ve read the entire story.

The puzzles are relatively simple, because they’re not really the point. The point is to read the story.

That puts it in conversation with Blippo+ and Hypnospace Outlaw by virtue of their also simulating a media space and telling a story within it.

It’s a Good Phone Game

I played this game on my phone, which I consider the ideal way to play A Normal Lost Phone, because … it’s a phone. The game is interacting with a phone.

The Twist is Extremely Guessable

Warning, Spoilers Ahead!

Opening the phone up and checking all of the applications on it, you basically get 3 bits of opening information:

The missing character is named “Sam”
Sam has two disparate profiles on the dating app “Lovbirds”
Sam was last seen at their 18th birthday.

I’m going to give you a moment to think about these variables before we continue. Can you guess what’s going on?

 .
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .

“Two profiles on dating app” can mean one of a few different things:

Character is bi, or discovering they’re gay.
Character is trans, and transitioning.
Character is analytical enough to apply the principle of A/B testing to their dating profile (sidenote: This would have made a very different story.) .

Since this app is a critical darling and the main character is an 18-year old boy named “Sam”, my first guess was 🏳️‍⚧️, and lo, could have saved myself a few hours of poking around in Sam’s phone.

Writers can’t help but fall for a meaningful name: As possibly the most well-known gender-neutral name, “Sam” has got a high chance of turning out to be a trans character because it allows writers to shorten their name to “Sam” regardless of who they’re talking to (sidenote: This is also why you can never trust a fictional Barry: it’s a pun when they put someone six feet underground.) .

It also makes the shocking reveal a whole lot less shocking a reveal: whoa, some of Sam’s friends thought he was Sam, but some of Sam’s other friends thought she was Sam! Still, they wrote this one very carefully so it’s not terribly obvious.

Knowing what’s definitely coming up-front made it really easy to clock the signposts in the story as they went by - little things like Sam’s dad insisting that Sam get a haircut seem innocuous but you know that’s going to turn out to have been actually really important to Sam.

Once you’ve guessed the twist, the rest becomes uncovering the details: presumably Sam’s coming out went very badly and we’re living in the aftermath. Let’s find out what happened!

Sam is Something Of a Coward

It’s a short story, covering only 2 months of Sam’s life, with scraps of evidence that let you determine Sam’s ultimate fate. Sam has taken their 18th birthday gift: a motorcycle, and driven it out of her conservative home town to a new 🏳️‍🌈-friendly city nearby, where she’s arranged an income (as a working musician) and to stay in a LGBT+friendly shelter.

It’s a pretty solid ending, although there’s a small problem:

Sam’s parents and girlfriend both are quite conservative, and any time Sam has floated a LGBT+ acceptance balloon towards them (usually a hypothetical or a story about someone else), they’ve shot it down, hard. Sam’s father insists on a haircut so that Sam doesn’t look too feminine. There’s lots of evidence that if Sam were to come out to them, it wouldn’t go well.

So, instead of coming out to any of them, Sam has just disappeared. No note, nothing: just vanished wholly from their lives. Sam’s phone is filled with a panicked, terrified mother and father and grieving, confused girlfriend who’ve all just lost Sam.

Soon, presumably, they’re going to report Sam as a missing person. Sam has a lot of high school friends who haven’t even discovered she’s missing yet. Sam is going to make the news.

And most of what Sam’s done is a good idea: coming out to your conservative parents and girlfriend? It’s a really good idea to have an exit strategy, or even to do this from a safe place where they can’t retaliate or track you down afterwards.

I think, though, that… Sam’s gotta come out to her family. Like, normally I don’t want to intrude into a lived experience that I have no experience with, but I think I’m in the right on this one: pre-emptively ghosting your whole family is not the right move here, Sam.

Sam decides that her parents and girlfriend will never accept what she has become and decides to disappear from their lives. And Sam’s right: there’s plenty of evidence that this coming out is not going to go well. You still have to come out to your parents, Sam. You have to know that “disowned” is a better ending to this story than “disappeared”. Plus, that puts the onus on them to learn and grow.

This is just life advice for people out there: even if you expect that people will let you down, you shouldn’t treat them like they will until they have.

Sam’s mom baked her a cake to take to every single club she attended, even when she didn’t know that she was girl Sam at some of those clubs: while this is a woman with some gender essentialism to work through, she’s clearly got some skin in the game (sidenote: I’ve baked my wife a handful of cakes — my cake of choice is confetti with a homemade lemon curd filling: this is not a casual task.) .

The game asks you, as your final step as the player, to erase the contents of the phone so that it can’t be used to track down Sam in her new city. I grimaced and did so, to end the game, but I was frustrated by this.

“They can never know the truth” is such a cop-out, Sam. I expected better from you.

Blippo+ and Hypnospace Outlaw Worked Better for Me

Some of the things I liked about these other stories were their comedy chops. Encountering a spot-on skewering of some primo nostalgia is funny.

A Normal Lost Phone takes itself very seriously, and it’s set in 2015, an era for which I have very little fondness (sidenote: Not yet, at least, I still have a chance to get old enough to be like “Ha ha, remember when there was a United States of America?”) .

Blippo+ and Hypnospace Outlaw, however, both came out after A Normal Lost Phone, whose critical success may have paved the way for or even directly inspired these further epistolary narrative game experiments.

Overall, a Verdict

Ultimately I found this one kinda “meh” in the grand scheme of things. By virtue of simply being omnivorous in my media consumption and incredibly On The Internet, I’ve seen no small amount of inventive queer fiction (sidenote: pro tip: people who feel like outsiders make art under different constraints which is one way to get stuff that’s so experimental, different and new that it ends up folded back into the wider culture by virtue of its obvious merits) , and while this is certainly an innovative wrapper, the narrative contained within was pretty mundane and at least a little bit unsatisfying. For a much weirder, darker, and more interesting story in this same vein, might I recommend I Saw The TV Glow?

p.s. (20 minutes later, at the fridge)

“I mean, Sam’s family are going to follow up on that missing motorcycle, right? Even a incompetent police officer might consider talking to some of Sam’s friends at Board Game Club, I’m pretty sure even if they don’t get Detective Columbo they’re going to figure this puzzle out before too long.”

We Are the Art

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0700

Brandon Sanderson decided to talk a bit about LLMs.

The discussion of what AI is doing is writ large on YouTube at the moment. You can’t walk more than a few feet without tripping over someone’s opinion.

The pull quote, the reason that I liked this opinion enough to bring it in to a blog post (and accidentally write 2000 words on it) was because it tries to address the question of why we make art in the first place.

Art is the means by which we become what we want to be.

The book you write […] is a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn, because in the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you.

Powerful stuff.

Oh no, now you’re going to have to listen to my take on what LLMs mean to artists.

The Role of the Author in Criticism

Oh, gosh, this is something I’ve had to hear scodes about as a result of two literary critics talking endlessly about it on Ranged Touch’s Homestuck Made this World.

In The Death of the Author Roland Barthes argues that critical analysis of fictitious works should not be constrained by author context, because author context is and will always remain an unknowable quantity, because our internal models of other humans are, at best, an approximation. We can pitch that J.K. Rowling writes a lot of fiction about cross-dressing serial killers for reasons that seem obvious from outside: she’s fiercely anti-trans and terrified of men - but we can’t really know that for sure, can we?

In the response that gets brought up most immediately to that is Michel Foucault’s What is an Author, which I will summarize as “bitch, we can’t know for sure but we can guess and if we refuse to do that we’ll lose out on a lot of crucial interpretive context”, and creates the term author function , which is not representative of “the author” but “our mental model of the author”, a proxy which we can apply all of our interpretive readings of the author’s mental state to.

So, J.K. Rowling’s author function, which i’ve generated in my own head, is fiercely anti-trans and terrified of men, but that’s a component of my own interpretive lens. It might be wholly imagined!

This comes up a lot in the “Homestuck Made this World” analysis because:

Andrew Hussie is kind of a dick, and that is an enormous component in understanding the meaning of his work ( see: Psycholonials )
Homestuck contains an “Andrew Hussie” character, as well as a very prominent narrator, as well as shifting narrators, which allows it to shape the author function from within itself. Neat trick.

Is it important to model the intent of an art’s creator?

Academic criticism would like you to know:

The discussion of “The Death of the Author” centers around whether or not it is possible to critically analyze fiction without an author function - and while it’s an interesting conversation, it seems like the whole purpose of the conversation is just to have the interesting conversation, and then immediately go back to evaluating work in the critical context of “thinking about who created it and why”, because that’s an invaluable critical tool.

Why Are We Talking about The Role of the Author in Fiction?

Well, because I haven’t seen it stated in reverse. What’s the role of fiction in the author?

Brandon’s answer here is that it’s formative and necessary: fiction creates the author.

The Problems of AI Criticism

There are two things I see often in the modern Butlerian Jihad:

LLM-generated work cannot have authorial intent because it doesn’t have an author

There’s some logic to this, but I feel like I have to, ultimately, reject it. A fully automated process doesn’t have an author, but as soon as you introduce a human into the loop, behold: an author.

The idea that an art director doesn’t have authorial intent just because they aren’t hand-drawing every drop of water is ludicrous.

A lot of the scenery in Flow is not generated by people’s in-depth understanding of how light dapples on trees or how water ripples: it’s built by generative physical models that obviate the need for this work by simply simulating light and water.

It’s possible for someone to have a good idea for a story without a fine, in-depth understanding of scene-by-scene prose construction.

I think that finding cool looking rocks counts as an artistic endeavor. The process that created these rocks was not a human process, but by sifting through a great many rocks and finding the rocks that people would want to look at, we’ve applied authorial intent, and thus: art is born.

In the same way, I think it’s possible to micromanage an LLM until art comes out. It’s a process that involves curation and editing rather than direct production skill, but nevertheless: curation and editing can still be an artistic endeavor.

Suffering is necessary to create art.

There’s a story arc in Bojack Horseman that I always think about when this topic comes up.

Diane wants to write something dark, and gritty, and emotionally raw. But attempting to do this just sinks her into a deep depression.

Diane tries antidepressants, which help elevate her mood… and also stand in the way of writing something dark, and gritty, and emotionally raw. Diane, feeling a little happier, starts working on Ivy Tran, Food Court Detective, which everybody likes a lot more.

Diane is concerned by this. The art was meant to contextualize and in many cases justify her suffering. Why was she miserable if it wasn’t to become a great artist? Ivy Tran didn’t come from suffering, is it not as artistic as the dark, gritty, emotionally raw project?

A lot of artists believe that difficulty makes the artist, that the truest art is hewn from the most onerous processes:

And that’s, I think, what Brandon Sanderson’s argument is about, here: that the process of overcoming artistic adversity forges a better artist, a more interesting and nuanced person, and one of the things that’s key to interesting art is not just authorial intent, but authorial intent of a person who has put in enough effort to be interesting in the first place.

I want to reject the idea that suffering is a necessary component of art.

I’m not sure if I can, though.

Why do I want to create art? It’s not just because I demand the validation that comes from adulation from an adoring audience (sidenote: I wouldn’t say no to a little adulation, though.) . It’s because I want to shape myself into the sort of person I’d want to hang out with at parties, because nobody is forced to spend more time with me than I am so it is best if I don’t completely suck.

So, maybe, art demands some suffering, because art is a method of communication, and you want to listen to folks who have something of value to say, and by becoming a virtuoso talent at some kind of skillset you develop towards being someone worth listening to.

Room for the Expert Non-Writer

In Dan Olson’s “Contrepreneurs”, he describes a scam whereby idiots pay Fiverr writers and voice actors to write them a book, then narrate it, so that their terrible book can occupy some valuable space in the Audible search rankings.

The fact that it’s Fiverr contractors rather than AI is barely of importance, here. AI Slop existed way before AI, before that it was just Fiverr slop.

In this video, Dan explains the value of real-life, actual ghost-writers, with a chart:

Look at Carl, there, smug in his “Writer/Expert” box. He’s both full of fascinating information and able to deliver it clearly and professionally. He’s absolutely worth listening to.

Then there’s JFK, there: he’s not a talented writer, but there was something else about him that made him interesting and worth listening to. His books were ghost-written, but still worth interacting with, because JFK was an interesting person, even if he wasn’t much of a writer.

Then, you have the ghost-writer: able to clearly structure and impart ideas, but without expertise in a specific topic, they’re able to clearly impart information but they’re not interesting, so they can sell their services to a JFK, and this creates a virtuous pairing of “expert and writer”.

I think it would probably be okay if JFK wrote a book with AI assistance. In this metaphor, the ghost-writer is replaced by an even-ghostier-writer, but we’re not really here for them in the first place.

And, of course, in the “Non-Expert, Non-Writer” column, you have the con artists, who are both uninteresting AND untalented. They do not know anything about the topics they’re writing about, so their ability to hire ghost writers just allows them to amplify their worthless voices.

So, of course, that takes us to Brando Sandersman’s impassioned plea, which is that there’s not really such a thing as “non-expert/writer” because by forging yourself into a writer you’ve become an expert at at least that one thing: writing!

Oh shit, you accidentally became interesting!

And, of course, and this is the oft-discussed problem of “no room for juniors any more”, without folks being forced to do the work to become experts, we’ll run out of both:

people who are interesting enough that we care what they’d write in the first place
expert input to steal from to train the AI

Without any incentive to become interesting, we create an environment where only loud idiots and con artists thrive.

Berserk Was Too Much Suffering, Though

Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is virtuoso artwork by an unbelievably talented creator.

However, Berserk is borderline poisoned by suffering. Kentaro wasn’t just dedicated to the task of becoming a virtuoso artist, he was consumed by it - in his early life working back-breaking hours and giving up a great deal of his own life to the task of creating Berserk. It comes through in the work, too: Berserk is a dour, grim tale with a hero who himself is consumed by a desire to be the very best at any cost. In a very real sense, Berserk is about finding the line, about pushing too hard, and eventually Kentaro found his own balance and happiness in his life.

If art requires suffering, then art becomes, in some sense, about suffering, which creates dour art.

Sometimes we want to leave Diane’s Pain Journal behind and make an Ivy Tran, Food Court Detective.

So we need to find a nice… happy… medium amount of suffering. Work to get better at stuff that matters, automate to get rid of details that don’t. We don’t suffer needlessly.

I think for some artists that balance may well include some LLM usage, but even trying to use LLM responsibly can be a pretty slippery slope to slop country.

The Problem of Losing Virtuoso Skill as a Stand-In Proxy For An Interesting Author:

Or, to put it in another way, “slop”. The smell of AI on a project is a sign that it’s gone bad.

Up until very recently, we could use virtuoso skill as kind of a proxy measure for whether something is worth our attention.

Look at this! Look at it! Whoever created it must have had incredible skill! And projects don’t just attract unbelievably talented artists unless they have something going for them, right?

And you also know that this guy:

This creator is some rando, and their game will have basically no quality bar. That looks handmade!

But now there’s a new problem:

This guy (this is me, I generated this in 2 seconds, it’s for a theoretical pirates vs. chefs arkanoid game where you shoot onions at bricks) put even less effort and skill into his product than the “CONQUEROR of the Seas” guy did. The art is bullshit in the AI ways (all of the chefs are the same! one guy is holding two cleavers and one of them is backwards! the pirate has a weird pirate stick and an eye-patch that you can see one of his eyes through but also might be glasses! the pirate girl is holding her gun with multiple right hands!)

The “CONQUEROR of the Seas” creator (sidenote: A Real Game: Conqueror of the Seas) is so far ahead of my skill level, here. They actually made a game. “Conqueror of the Seas” is a much, MUCH better game than “Pirates vs. Chefs: Y’arr Onion War”. It looks like they’ve poured a lot of love into this thing.

If I were able to generate much better capsule art, it wouldn’t make gaming better. It would simply make capsule art worthless, because it would no longer signify anything about game quality. Which, I mean, isn’t that different: we’re already most of the way there.

AI Slop is very, very quickly developing an association with incredibly low quality work.

In Jenna Stoeber’s “230 Games Came out in the First Week of 2026: An Investigation”:

She explores what people are dumping on to Steam, and - AI or not - it’s mostly trash. AI is just there to help as a marker of the very lowest effort trash, games where people couldn’t even be bothered to put in the effort of creating them.

Maybe that creates a future where this is the true sign of quality:

Obviously, unabashedly handmade. Boldly amateur.

You know, like how fast fashion turned homemade and vintage-looking clothes into something desirable rather than a sign your parents are poor.

A Private Mastodon

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

So, aside from spending the weekend building up my linux tolerance, somewhat, I’ve also launched a new project.

I’ve launched a private Mastodon server:

https://xoxi.ca/

Now, I’ve actually been happily using Mastodon for 4 years at this point, and I don’t intend to abandon my primary identity on the most popular Mastodon server:

https://mastodon.social/@cube_drone

So what’s XOXI for, then?

Well, it’s for weird throwaway accounts.

One of the things I always liked about Twitter was, you know, that moment when someone would create A Character, and post In Character, and commit to the bit, and you could just follow “PHP CEO” and watch as he shouted incoherently about burndown points and not understanding kubernetes. I’d link to some examples, but I can’t, really, because X/Twitter no longer allows unauthenticated access.

There’s nothing stopping me from building that kind of account on one of the major silos, but honestly, creating a lot of different accounts and hopping between them willy-nilly? That’s a pattern of behavior that seems a lot like abuse to any watchful operators. I think it makes sense to have a separate silo for any and all of these experiments.

Running Your Own Mastodon Ain’t Easy

Launching a Mastodon instance is non-trivial. Mastodon is built like a modern Ruby project, which is to say, it’s got dependencies on Postgres and Redis and sidekiq and elasticsearch and S3 (Wasabi) and SMTP, and setting it up involves creating 17 different individual credentials and setting up a networking cluster between authenticated services, it is a “this is my day job” amount of effort.

I still have to write a little extra systemd script to schedule a pgdump to S3 pipeline, for backups, (maybe next weekend) which is a non-trivial amount of additional work.

What Kind of Weird Throwaway Accounts?

Okay, so, I launched the first one today:

https://xoxi.ca/@fortune

I’m sure you’re tired of too-general fortunes from daily astrologers who don’t take the craft seriously. That’s why I’m here to provide you with professional, top quality prognostication, using astrology, tarot, phrenology, phlebotomy, tea leaves, bamboo shoots, chicken bones, palmistry, numerology, oneiromancy, scrying, cold reading, and good old-fashioned mountebanksmanship.

Follow me for a Guaranteed Accurate™️ fortune/reading every single day.

I was thinking of writing a bot for this, but instead I just downloaded a client, Tuba, that allows me to schedule toots in advance: Today’s Fortune Is…. will just spit out a fortune every day at 8:00AM PST. (After scheduling a month of fortunes in advance, I’m thinking I still might consider writing a bot, because the scheduling UI is a little bit fussy.)

ex:

Mars is in alignment with the A Priori supercluster, which we all know means that culottes are going to be in style again before long.

I wrote out fortunes to carry me to the end of March, at which point I can decide how/if I want to proceed with that. One idea was just to keep writing until I had a 365 day set and then loop it at the end¹.

As with most of my clever ideas, I realized about halfway through baking it that it was just someone else’s funny idea. Ah, well: Marvel Rivals is one of the most successful games going right now, and it’s just someone else’s idea (Overwatch), which was just someone else’s idea (Team Fortress 2). There’s no originality under the sun. Maybe my fortunes will be funny?

“That’s not very impressive, for a self-fulfilling prophecy”, you will think after reading this.

Other loose ideas I had scribbled down for this include:

Official McDonald Canada :registered: Brand Account Manager, posting increasingly unhinged edits of real McDonalds advertising material
- this is only viable until I get a cease-and-desist, which actually should take a good long time because nobody is on the fediverse but me
A fella gradually doing a walkthrough of a video game that doesn’t actually exist.
Animal Farm, but told through the point of view of a bunch of cute Animal Crossing-ish characters.
I just wrote “SAFETY TIPZ” here, not sure what I meant by that

Friends Can Participate Too, If They Want

I kinda doubt I have friends who’d actually want to do this, though.

Why Mastodon? Mastodon sucks!

I’m honestly not sure where to put content on the internet any more. If I wanted an actual audience I should be making short form funny TikToks where I share slightly misspelled life hacks while someone plays Subway Surfer, but I think what I want is to make old internet content. Stuff you have to read. Bad flash games. Websites.

I’ve really started to like Mastodon over the past few years. No algorithm, it’s a sedate social network full of linux admins, game developers, socialists, and germans who like to post pictures of their dinner. It’s a good reminder of what pre-algorithm Twitter was like: just a bunch of people posting whatever they were interested in, heedless to whether or not it was actually interesting.

I tried BlueSky, and bounced off BlueSky basically immediately: it’s still algorithm-laden and jumping in to that ecosystem I just got buried immediately under the Democratic equivalent of endless slop memes - it feels like Truth Social with the colors swapped and less active fascism.

As a nice bonus to Mastodon? Actual engagement. I had thousands of twitter followers, but since most of my posts weren’t optimized for engagement, few of them ever saw my tweets, and that became much worse in the new regime. Within the fediversee, the only thing that stops my thousand followers from seeing my toots is that most of them have got bored and left forever, but that still leaves a sizeable cadre of people who are still interested in the platform.

With careful curation, my timeline is pretty usable too. Do you know what people post on Mastodon? Links to blog posts on their personal blogs (still online). People making their own video games (awful). Bots that repost local news articles. Funny neurodivergents. Oil paintings. And I can finish scrolling after half an hour because that’s everything I’ve subscribed to and there’s nothing more.

Sometimes ghost towns are a nice place to spend your time.

The decline of Snapchat and the secret joy of internet ghost towns

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/18/17366528/snapchat-decline-internet-ghost-towns

As fewer and fewer of my friends use the platform, Snapchat has become a haven from the grinding utility of the internet

Writing 365 of a thing always seems extremely doable until I open a notepad and get no more than 50 things down before my brain utterly collapses. ↩︎

The Year of the Linux Desktop

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0700

The “X is the year of the Linux Desktop” meme lives on and on because Linux is such a fussy-ass bitch to work with that it’s never really true.

But…

Linux As a TV Computer

Okay, so, when we replaced Tiffwife’s computer with a new computer, the Old computer was stuck running Windows 10 (EOL) because the elderly motherboard didn’t have the mandatory security TPM, so Windows 11 is not an option for an upgrade there. That computer can not securely run Windows any more.

That was an i7 with a heavy, hot 1080 in it: a near top-of-the-line computer at time of construction and still significantly faster than the mini-PC that we’d bought in 2024 to run the TV.

So, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and set it up as a media box computer, and with a little bit of Donking it turned into an honestly pretty damn capable media center.

I did pick Ubuntu over Bazzite: Bazzite seems like it might be a better distro for a media center, but I’m just… so… familiar with Ubuntu at this point.

Curtis Begins to Consider Electricity

Then: A friend moved in downstairs (temporarily, they’re gone in a few weeks, now) with a heavy gaming PC of their own, and I quailed at the sheer electrical expense and load of running 5 gaming PCs under one roof. (My computer, my separate WORK computer, Tiff’s computer, the TV computer, and guest’s computer) - at an average load of 400W we’re looking at like 2 kilowatts of just gaming PC in this house, equivalent to just running a clothes dryer all the time, forever. So I bought a Mac Mini (~50W) to run the TV and it’s also very nice, and it can easily stream gaming content from more powerful devices in this house along the gigabit home ethernet.

The Year of the Linux Desktop

So, this past week, I started to think…

Why not?

And it’s not because Linux Desktop has got a lot better.

It’s because Windows has got a lot worse.

Nobody is fond of Windows needing to restart every 2 weeks to install a new security patch, like, the other OSes have got this one under wraps.

Then, when Windows 11 reboots, you have to sit through their little “hey, are you using all of the Microsoft products?” slideshow every time. Skip, skip, skip.

But, uh, while that’s a little frustration, it’s not enough to abandon the whole ecosystem, not quite yet.

What’s increasingly concerning is that the performance and stability of Windows is… starting to fall behind. LLMs are slow as shit and it turns out, Windows trying to cram Copilot 365 into every nook and cranny is not going swimmingly.

Windows’ last major software update, 24H2, has been something of a complete shitshow, introducing all kinds of system instability across a lot of systems. Not mine, just systems.

Some PCs can’t boot after latest Windows 11 security update, no fix in sight —mostly affects 24H2 and 25H2 versions

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/some-pcs-cant-boot-after-latest-windows-11-security-update-no-fix-in-sight-mostly-affects-24h2-and-25h2-versions

The one that’s most notable for us at VRChat are the “Easy AntiCheat” problems because our software depends on that.

But, uh, one of the things that I found most galling was really, really simple.

I have a directory with my mp3s in it. It’s not that many mp3s, like… a thousand mp3s. I went to sort it alphabetically. This operation took, easily, repeatably, 90 seconds.

I’m not sure how you can write a sort operation that badly in a modern system.

This computer is a little old, but it was insanely overbuilt for 6 years ago: a 24c/48t threadripper, 128GB DDR4 RAM, NVME SSD - there’s nothing in here that should give the OS a chance to run slowly, and yet I’m constantly running into little operations that Feel A Little Slow.

Huph huph huph.

There are other, political reasons, to also consider some ways to reduce or reconsider our reliance on Big American Tech, but I’m gonna be honest: while that’s often back of mind, I still probably use more American tech than your average Canadian by a pretty wide margin by virtue of simply using a lot of technology, often. Android, Steam and YouTube aren’t going anywhere, so Microsoft getting the boot isn’t exactly the big flag wave I’d want it to be.

Let’s Try Dual Booting Linux

I haven’t done this for over a decade, and the last time I tried I retreated from this position pretty quickly, because it was a huge pain and I’m generally here to DO STUFF with computers, not just FIDDLE WITH THEM.

A big part of the reason this has been so unnecessary for so long is that, with Docker, WSL, and even Git+MinGW, it’s super easy to get to a linux-like shell in Windows with very little effort: if all you need is a linux-like coding environment, Windows has every possible option readily available.

But let’s see what the actual experience of maining linux is like.

Actually Dual Booting is Very Hard

Installing Ubuntu on an arbitrary system nowadays is so simple that most passably competent computer users could do it easily in an afternoon.

Getting a GRUB bootloader running properly on a Windows 11 system with UEFI, on the other hand, took hours, a bunch of web searches, and some help from ChatGPT. This is more Windows’ fault than Ubuntu’s, I think, but nevertheless it was complex.

Dual booting OSes has ever been the realm of folks who are completely batshit.

Gaming on Linux

I only had a handful excuses not to main Linux, and Valve absolutely’ obliterated one of those excuses.

I don’t want to say “Gaming on Linux is a solved problem”, but with the hard work of Valve and Proton the amount of effort it takes to run 90% of my entire video game library on any Linux computer is basically nil.

Coding on Linux

Well, of course the experience of software development on Linux is top tier. The only people who use Linux are software developers. Well, that and autistic enby Austrian furry communists. (sidenote: Coincidentally, these are also the only people you can find on Mastodon.)

There’s one thing I do want to call out, though, the terminal emulator.

Terminal emulator is a big deal, especially for a web engineer like me.

I actually think that Windows Terminal is, uh, the best Terminal emulator on the market right now.

In the 00’s, the Linuxes had the nicest terminals, but with significant upgrades in Windows and Mac OS X land and no forward progress in the Linuxiverse, they fell way behind, and in the 10’s I’d actually say that Linux had the worst terminal experience of all of the commonly used OSes.

(as often is the case, KDE’s version was a little better)

But Ubuntu 25.10 ships with a new contender for the throne, Ptyxis, which is quite nice.

Lovely.

Visual Studio Code, which is unfortunately my main editor nowadays, works equivalently well across all systems.

File Sync on Linux: Surprisingly Not Great

This one’s unexpectedly terrible: the only file sync service that I know of that works natively on Linux is Dropbox, one I’ve already abandoned thanks to it’s expense.

Right now my whole personal file sync strategy is:

BIG STORGE: My NAS syncs like 4 TB of storage with Wasabi, which is not full, fast, bi-directional sync of the kind you’d want all of the time, but it’s sufficient for backup and way cheaper than using a Dropbox or Google Drive or what-have-you to do this.
LITTLE STORGE: I have 100GB of Google Drive space ($2.50/mo) that I sync to every device I own, and that space is for, like, documents and projects I’m currently working on and my books and stuff.

Gnome can connect directly to Google Drive, mounting it as a network file system and requesting and caching the files when you ask for them - and this does not work terribly well, because the files kind of exist in hammer space and I’ve used more than a few apps that get confused when their files just vanish.

I can also, if I want, set up a rclone job with a systemd timer to do a full bi-directional sync between a directory and Google Drive every 60 seconds, if I want. I think I’m gonna have to do this at some point, because the reason I still maintain a full-synced project directory is because that is where all of my actual active projects live.

For now, to bridge the gap temporarily, I’m just treating the Google Drive on my NAS (which is synced properly) from this computer. With gigabit ethernet, the NAS only feels a hair slower than spinning platter access on this computer anyways.

Loads of Easy Wins

A lot of the applications I use are already FOSS, or they’re Electron powered, or hell, just natively supported in Linux. If people are building apps using modern tools, Linux support can be easy as a couple of days of poobling around with build pipelines.

Joplin for notes
Obsidian for big knowledge bases (It’s a DM’s best friend)
OBS for streaming
Parsec for remote desktoppin'
Discord and Slack for personal and work chat.
KeepassXC for password management.
Calibre for ebook management

Also, a lot of my workflow is just browser-based, so my ProtonMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Discourse forum and Mastodon socials are obviously unaffected.

Art on Linux: Pretty Bad

I am obligated to pay for Creative Cloud, because Tiff uses it for her job (and her personal portfolio) and I’ve been able to hold on to a Student/Educator discount by sneaking into my old @sfu.ca email address for long enough to apply for one. This means that the whole Creative Suite is mine for a paltry $60CAD/mo, which is still actually a lot of fuckin’ money (about $700/yr), but if I’m going to pay for it anyways I might as well use it.

Between that and years of pirating Photoshop as a teen, I’ve got like 25+ years of PHOTOSHOP MUSCLE MEMORY, and I’ve learned how to use a variety of other Creative Suite tools over the years: Audition for sound, Premiere for video editing, AfterEffects for motion graphics, InDesign for document layout, and Animate for basic animations.

I’ve also spent ‘round $500 on two different DAWs, Ableton Live and FL Studio, to futz around with them.

none of this shit works on Linux at all

As soon as you want to do An Art, Linux just completely falls apart. There are zero professionals paying money to use Linux for art so the professional art apps are just not here.

However: The Enthusiast FOSS Art Apps and Local Alternatives

Photoshop: Krita Good

Instead of Photoshop, there’s Krita.

If you were used to Photoshop and someone told you that GIMP was a viable alternative, it would be entirely justified to spit directly in their open mouth.

Krita, on the other hand, is very powerful and nice. It is easy to find examples of artists more talented than I am gushing about its feature-rich application and smooth, expressive brushes (and then turning around and maining Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint anyways).

My problem with Krita is that I know Photoshop. But, like, I keep meaning to develop more familiarity with Krita - frustrating as it might be, Krita really should provide everything that I need from an art application, and it’s free. That’s an investment in being able to draw for free for the rest of my career.

I might just have to… suffer, for a bit.

Premiere: KdenLive Acceptable, DaVinci Resolve On The High End

I use Adobe Premiere pretty often, actually, although it’s mostly just to cut together an end-of-the-year New Years’ clip show that only a handful of people ever watch, and sometimes cut together YouTube Nonsense.

For professional video editors, there’s actually a program that’s been gaining steam: DaVinci Resolve. It’s $295 USD ($400 CAD) for a full version at time of writing - seemingly expensive, but a one-time purchase and less than my $700 yearly Creative Cloud expenditure. DaVinci Resolve does ship a native Linux build, although apocryphally it is a little fussy to get running, partially because it has a complex plugin ecosystem and many of the plugins do not have native Linux builds.

Still, though, that’s promising.

But, uh, let’s be honest with ourselves here. I am not a professional video editor. DaVinci Resolve shot itself to prominence on the back of its truly spectacular color correction, and I don’t even know what that is. What I do with a video editing package is only a hair’s width away from what you could do with Windows Movie Maker - I basically need multi-track sound and video editing with some basic effects and transformations and I’m off to the races.

So, before shelling out for professional tools I’m never going to get the full use out of (a mistake I’ve made so, so many times in the past), I thought I’d donk around in Kdenlive a bit.

And you know what?

After about 15 minutes of fiddling I was able to import a video, do some basic multi-track editing and keyframe-animated transforms to it, and export it in H.264.

So for my use case, Kdenlive seems totally sufficient.

Audition: Audacity is just fine.

The only reason I’ve ever used Audition is because it came with Creative Suite, I’ve known all along that Audacity is a perfectly cromulent audio editing tool.

Pixel Art: Asesprite Remains The Winner

This is a pretty specialized corner of art stuff, but I like a dedicated pixel art application if I’m gonna pixel the arts. Asesprite, though, ships builds for all platforms, so I’m fine there. I could even re-buy it from Steam to have automatic updates.

2D Animate: ???

Okay, so, in the animation space, Toonboom Harmony releases a Linux build, I believe, but their pricing model is also deep into yikes country.

Some folks have reported some success getting Clip Studio Paint or Moho running in Wine, but not too much.

OpenToonz is basically abandonware.

Krita, again, supports a full animation workflow under the hood, but it’s definitely Photoshop-style “so you’re stuck animating here rather than in a dedicated tool” draw-every-frame animation with limited tooling.

If you want puppets, reusable assets, or rigging, you’re SOL.

I mean, there’s grease pencil in Blender, but… Blender? 🤮

AfterEffects: ???

The only think I know how to do in AfterEffects is 2D motion graphics - basically, the puppeting and keyframe animation stuff that you’d do in Flash. It’s actually quite a bit easier and smoother in AfterEffects than Flash, IMO. AfterEffects also has robust 3D and compositing tools that I don’t need to replace because I never understood them in the first place.

Cavalry is a well-liked alternative to AfterEffects for Motion Graphics, but like ToonBoom Harmony, it’s “more expensive”, and unlike ToonBoom Harmony it has no Linux option.

If you’re looking for free animation tools in Linux, all roads point to Blender. Goddamn Blender.

I AM A 2D ARTIST. I only have access to these 2 dimensions (waves arms in a square).

(cries) i hate topology so much you guys

Anyways, it seems like if I want to do more motion graphics in Linux, it’s gonna be time to bite the bullet and finally, finally embrace an additional dimension.

On top of Krita I have to learn BLENDER? God damn.

Another Option: Godot

I have learned a bunch of Godot, and as a video game engine it has pretty powerful puppeting and animation primitives - easy to use, too. Also I can trivially code in Godot. What it doesn’t really have is “video export”, but that’s not the end of the world with OBS around…

InDesign: ???

InDesign is useful if you’re doing things like laying out board game components or typesetting whole books.

Which, like, I’ve done both of those things. Here’s a book I typeset!

The Gamemaster’s Tarot

The only alternative I can find is Scribus, in Linux, which is… well, “GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus” are like the original three “we have McDonalds at home” Linux equivalents that everyone hates because they’re awful.

My policy on any software that’s crusty enough that Google takes you to a Sourceforge page for it is that it basically doesn’t exist.

Anyways, I booted it up and predictably: it bad.

Like, “not even usable with High-DPI” bad, a sign that nobody has seriously considered this software for… I don’t know, over a decade? When was the last time 1080P screens were standard?

There are no serious typesetting options for Linux, full-stop.

DAWs

So, while my expensive Audition and FL Studio licenses might end up not helping, when it comes to Making Music, there are enthusiasts everywhere and they have no shortage of options.

One small problem is that DAWs exist in a universe full of proprietary VST plugins which mostly don’t run on linux. Which would be really inconvenient and irritating if I were enough of a professional music producer to have curated a laundry list of favorite VSTs, but actually I’m kind of a idiot who has no idea what he’s doing, so like with Premiere, the full power of Audition and FL Studio have mostly gone way over my head and I’ve been donking around with program defaults this whole time.

Ardour is free and full-featured, Bitwig Studio is a well-liked and powerful DAW that you can buy for ~$500USD and runs on Linux, Renoise is also well-liked for a mere ~$90USD, Reaper is $60USD, it actually seems like there are ample DAW options for folks who want to make music on Linux.

So I’m not too worried, here.

Linux Remains Enthusiast Computing, But I Am an Enthusiast

When I turned Tiff’s computer into an Ubuntu media server for the TV downstairs - well, one of the reasons it made sense to switch to a Mac Mini was the power consumption, but another reason was just that there were still a lot of interactions with Ubuntu that Tiff found confusing and irritating.

It would automatically unmount all network drives on reboot, forcing me to come and reconnect our NAS after every power outage.

Lots of configuration - lots of regular use of a Linux system - still involves cracking a terminal, modifying a config file, reading about problems online, trying some stuff, seeing what happens. Booting Steam on Linux starts with an error message instructing you to go run some commands in the terminal in order to get the graphics card configured right.

Most of this stuff would be profoundly unpleasant for someone who’s not already a very experienced computer user.

It’s still not really the year of the Linux Desktop for anybody but me. But I think for me, 2026 is the year of the Linux Desktop.

The Redemption of Our Lady XML

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t hate XML as much as the rest of the world.

one time I was working on a personal text animation library in Godot and I wanted to drive it with text

I needed some way to mark that certain text had different properties, like, some text might move quickly, or slowly, or be bouncy, or have a rainbow effect applied to it

and I was like “I wish there were some way to create a markup language for this”

some kind of markup language that I could extend with my own parts

XML isn’t great as a universal data serialization format, and it’s definitely quite bad as a programming language, but you know, as an extensible markup language it’s got legs

i wonder if the people who designed it knew

(ed: this is a repost of essentially exactly what I wrote the first time I discovered this)

politics

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:00:00 -0700

it’s funny, sometimes I think I might be interested in getting in to politics, but then I think “so long as I don’t have to talk to people I’m uncomfortable with, and it doesn’t call for me to be charismatic or outgoing, and I don’t want to sit in any boring meetings, or go outside, or spend a bunch of time becoming intimately familiar with the mundane details of a topic I’m not interested in”

that’s all of it, that’s 100% of the job

so I think my actual desire in that sense is “credibility”, like, I want to have well-researched, well-thought out, eloquently put opinions, and I want an audience of influential people to read those opinions and go “hm, yes, that guy knows what’s up”

incremental

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Lots of indie devs making incremental games nowadays, because they’re easy, but I’m not sure if there’s actually a big audience out there for that.

Most of the predecessors that inspired the format are games like Cookie Clicker that were intended as satire about gaming itself. The goal was, as far as I understand, always to make fun of gaming while making visible and obvious to you, the player, the hollow core addictive loop that the game was using to keep you motivated.

The satire revealed something sinister: that you can show the player the precise mechanics of the dopamine button they’re pressing and some people (myself included) will still press it.

That reveals, at it’s core, what might be the simplest viable game, because it’s stripped of everything but a number that goes up, which can be used to buy things that make the number go up more and faster, but I want to believe in my heart of hearts that That’s Not Enough Of A Game, most of the time.

boxwine

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

This is shameful heresy, but I have a box of pretty high quality white wine in the cabinet near my stove, I keep a clean shot glass next to it, and whenever a recipe calls for something wine-shaped I basically just use that.

Sake? BOX WHITE. Shaoxing wine? BOX WHITE. Vermouth? BOX WHITE. Deglazing a pan? You better believe it’s BOX WHITE.

Sherry? Nah, I’m using BOX WHITE.

Thing is, keeping a bunch of trash-tier half-open liquor to go off in your cabinet is not going to make good food. That bottle of sake you opened six months ago to make teriyaki one time? That’s no good. You should throw it out.

Box wine, on the other hand - unlike bottled wine - stays fresh for months after being opened.

The obvious alternative strategy is that every time dinner calls for a shot of sake or vermouth or sherry, you should open and finish a nice, high quality bottle in the next two days, but I just am not in a place in my life where I can drink that aggressively.

I do the same with box red, which I use for stews and braises.

If I have any left at the end of the year, I’ll often take the dregs and use them to make hot, sweet, heavily spiced mulled wine.

google news

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

So, I discovered that if I disable Google News’ direct integration with my Android OS, that also kills the ability for my Android Auto to read texts to me live, because voice services depend on the underlying service that I need to disable to stop swiping left from taking me to Google’s News.

As bad as desktop OSes have become, they have nothing on the unchecked depravity of the phone ecosystem.

So, now that Google News is re-enabled, I periodically swipe in to it, but it’s quite bad. First of all, it mandates a use of a Chrome WebView for all of its news, one without adblock, and if you’ve ever tried to read a news article from any modern outlet without adblock you’ll know exactly why this is a huge problem:

Some news sources (The Globe and Mail in particular) will offer up a juicy-sounding headline, but then ask you to subscribe to actually read the article - fair play, if irritating.

The National Post will give you its conservative punditry for free, so that’s good news if you’re looking for someone who was willing to claim even yesterday morning that the USA is still the #1 liberal democracy in the world and that it is foolish of Canada not to cozy up to the regime

Every Nth article is “sponsored”, which is to say, a “news” article that’s actually a thinly disguised ad. These ads are supposed to use Google’s data collection to laser target me, but since apparently nobody is that interested in appealing to middle-aged Canadian nerds, I’ve instead got ads for astrology, elderly gay singles dating, and the same Indian scam website pretending to be the CBC dozens of times (I report it every time but Google can not outsmart these scammers)

Actually looking at the quality of the real articles - well, it’s free news, and you get what you pay for nowadays. Regardless of the topic of interest, most of the news articles are a headline, a shit-tonne of ads, and then a cursory under-200-word article that might as well have been generated directly from the headline. If you’re looking for in-depth long-form or even medium-form writing, here is not where you should be looking.

If you’re Canadian, you can install the CBC app and just have access to free medium-form reporting with comparatively unintrusive advertising, and, like, a whole article attached to each headline they bother to write, although their scope and breadth tends to be quite limited: it’s explicitly Canadian News, some limited regional news. Like CBC Gem, it replaces American hypercapitalist flash and glitz with a unique kind of Canadian unmemorable mediocrity that will have you forgetting it exists.

Wait, Scam Website?

The conceit of the Indian scam website is - okay, I feel like you need to strap in for this - so, it’s a CBC news article about a man who accidentally revealed a money-making Android application SO POWERFUL that it would crash the global economy by making too many millionaires too fast, news reports everywhere of people spending just $350 to make infinity dollars, and the Bank of Canada had to step in to censor this information to preserve global stability.

but, of course, now the CBC is covering the Bank of Canada cover-up and revealing how you, too, can get in on this sweet deal for only a seed investment of three hundred and fifty Canadian dollars

All of the comments are, of course, also plants, saying things like “wow, I thought this was a bunch of horseshit but now I have $25,000 in a cheque I am holding in my hands right now” - obviously a ruse because the CBC only allowed human comments on their sites for 15 disastrous minutes in 2008.

The whole thing is also very badly and childishly written, and looking at the site and the content I can’t help but think “I could do this more convincingly”, but I KNOW that’s actually the wrong impulse because this kind of scam actually enormously benefits from pitches that are so dumb that only very gullible people are sucked in.

foss car

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

See, I drive a 2010 Toyota Matrix with minimal computer under the hood, but if I had the money and time to pursue it, hobby-hacking the modern dogshit operating systems out of new cars and replacing them with FOSS stuff seems like a useful and fun side project.

the customer is always right

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0700

I’ve never seen a customer try and pull the insane “the customer is always right” card in front of me, and I’ve been preparing in my heart to leap from the sidelines and confront this imaginary aggressor my entire life - the actual saying is “the customer is always right in matters of taste”, you are not granted an epistemological Get Out of Jail Free card just because of a saying you half-heard one time and didn’t understand, and “the customer is always right” isn’t even the policy here

no I won’t get off this chair

the old internet

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0700

People are like “the old internet is dead” but, like, I’ve still been diligently blogging this entire time, maybe it’s just that with the algorithmically superior entertainment value of TikTok the number of people who actually go to the internet to read long-form miscellaneous ramblings from some idiot is quite low

Nice

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

People who elongate the world nice by writing “niceeeeeeee” rather than “niiiiiiiiice” are psychopaths

What if Voltron, but it’s a gritty, surreal horror with no robots at all?

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

(Content Warning: Sexual Assault, Cancer)

This memory hits me every once in a while, this… fuckin’ impossible-to-find rare as hell anime that was on Teletoon when I was in high school that it feels like nobody remembers but me.

I only kinda sorta half-remember it. It’s one of those ‘fever dream’ memories, like, did I even really see this show? There was never really a show where a woman was trapped in a haunted city and fortified a train to attack the tower in the center of that city so that she could escape her coma, right? It SOUNDS like a weird dream I’d have.

But I know it exists.

Because I found it. I found it by asking about it on a web forum in the mid 10s, back when web forums were a thing that existed, and someone responded with the right show, and I found the whole thing on YouTube, and thought “okay, now to watch it” and then didn’t watch it, I left it, and forgot about it, for another decade, and forgot the name, and the forum, all details gone.

I forgot it again. But god dammit, this time I know that this slippery-ass piece of media actually exists.

I thought about it again today. For the first time in a long while. Now I know: I have to catch this memory while it’s live, strike while the memory iron is hot, or I’m going to lose it for another decade.

This time, I could ask ChatGPT maybe? There’s a lot of info in there.

I’m looking for a difficult to find movie. It’s an anime, from over 20 years ago, that I caught on Canadian Teletoon. The plot of the movie featured a woman in a coma, existing in a dream world, where the inhabitants are fated to die at specific intervals. At the climax of the movie, an armored … truck, or train car, is launched at a giant tower. I can’t recall whether or not the woman wakes up at the end of the movie.

Unfortunately, though, no dice. It thought about recommending “Metropolis” to me a handful of times but visibly talked itself out of that. Best it could come up with was something called “The Place Promised in our Early Days”, because it also featured a tower.

So I try… anime 90s coma in DuckDuckGo, and lo, fuckin’ rights, someone 2 years ago had this same question, and even better: someone answered it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/17wjp0s/tomtanime_80s90s_about_a_woman_in_a_coma_dream/

A woman is in a car accident and winds up in a coma. While in the coma she dreams that she is staying in a strange hotel with her friends. They’re visited at night by a little girl with a wolf who predicts when they’ll die. “You will die in 3 days”. They’re fighting the townsfolk for some reason, I believe that one by one her friends disappear until she is all alone. Then she wakes up in the hospital and they’re all there.

I believe this anime movie (or OVA) was part of a series, possibly a spin-off of a mecha anime. The name might’ve been something like “shogun”. Was most likely made in the 80s or very early 90s

Thanks,

Yeah, that’s the one… except I don’t remember the ending being quite so rosy? Anyways, that’s definitely it.

Way to go, humans.

Sengoku Majin Goushougun: Toki no ÉTRANGER (1985)

Oddly, when translated into English, they translate the Japanese but not the French, so it goes by “Goshogun: The Time Étranger” - I guess because it was also “Étranger” in Japanese. Look, the french word for “stranger” looks cool, that is plenty justification enough.

Like last time, I found it completely uploaded to YouTube, because this movie is old enough and unpopular enough that its copyright cops aren’t really working hard to keep it down.

(this link may break in the future, links like this often do)

Now is the time! I’m going to watch it, and then I can really find out what the deal was. Is it as weird as I remember?

Actually, first, some context.

“Goshogun” makes it sound like it’s part of a series, what’s that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoShogun

GoShogun (戦国魔神ゴーショーグン, Sengoku Majin GōShōgun) is a Japanese super robot anime series created by Takeshi Shudo. It was produced and aired in 1981 in Japan, with a movie special released in 1982 and a film sequel, GoShogun: The Time Étranger or Time Stranger, in 1985.

So I think of this as “A Voltron”, which sent me down a different rabbit hole - what exactly was “A Voltron”?

It turns out, it’s kind of a catch-all term! Americans translated and edited together multiple, unrelated Japanese mecha anime to make the show “Voltron” entirely on the cutting room floor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltron

Voltron is an American animated television series franchise that features a team of space explorers who pilot a giant super robot known as “Voltron”. This super robot was created when needed by smaller robots joining together, with the process of that unification varying over time. Produced by Peter Keefe (executive producer) and Ted Koplar through his production company World Events Productions, Voltron was an adaptation of several Japanese anime television series from Toei Company.

At the time, Japanese anime seasons were simply too short to air as North American kids’ shows - let alone how often the content was too adult or too weird or full of references that American kids would find too confusing, so in particular shows from the 80s had a real tendency to cut multiple different shows together with a chainsaw to make something usable in the North American market.

I’m convinced that one of the early Japanese artists who came up with the “combined robot mecha” style was inspired by the British 60’s show “Thunderbirds” - you know, a bunch of pilots, each with their own cool vehicle. What they added was the huge innovation: what if their cool vehicles COMBINED into a BIG ROBOT".

in America, the Voltron “foreign media chop and screw” technique would eventually metastatize into the 90s’ “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers”, which was also pieced together from multiple shows and became a Gigantic Hit.

Perhaps looking at this fella you heard an insane guitar riff in your head. Go, go, Power Rangers.

Well, that’s plenty of good context, “GoShogun is kind of a Voltron.”

The Wikipedia entry for GoShogun indicates that it was a later iteration of the now very popular giant-combining-mecha kids’ TV formula, so GoShogun was funny, irreverent, and kind of hyper-aware of the tropes of the genre.

Perhaps even funnier: the movie “Goshogun: The Time Étranger”, set in the Goshogun universe and featuring the pilots of Goshogun does not contain a single transforming robot. It’s not a big action-packed space fight romp.

Let’s Get Into What Happens

Of course, you can just watch the thing yourself, but if you want it at hyper-speed, let me give you a little tour.

After wandering in the desert with some companions hidden from view, this woman wakes up in a single hotel room in a strange, foreign city, finding an honestly gorgeously rendered gun.

We cut to a different, futuristic city, where this same woman - we don’t see her face in this version of the scene - is stuck in traffic.

“Curtis, you said that this movie didn’t contain a single transforming robot!”

okay, it does, that one, the little toy one hanging above her dashboard, that’s the one.

The traffic is because of bank robbers.

God dammit, let’s fuck ’em up.

Doesn’t this frame look great? This sunglasses shot looks just gorgeous to me. Look at that hand-drawn set of sunglasses.

The cops are startled by this. This car belongs to Remy Shimada, who was some kinda … galactic hero pilot, 40 years ago? Now she’s a 70-year old lady who still drives like a goddamned demon.

She easily runs these goons off of the road, but her health isn’t doing so hot, and she ends up in a nasty crash.

Then, she has a weird flashback of her youth: her mother was a French prostitute and they were poor as hell.

This show is not shy about getting very bold with its camera angles.

Not terribly happy, and it only gets worse from there.

Just a reminder now, we are currently watching a Giant Mecha Anime.

She’s rushed to hospital. This whole time, we’re careful never to show her whole face: we only ever see pictures of Remy when she was young, never current Remy.

Remy doesn’t have health insurance. Or any money.

Two team members were getting back together to meet Remy to talk about something important, but she didn’t show.

Everyone (Remy included) honestly looks pretty incredible for 70-year olds - future space skin care and health care must be absolutely top notch. They’re visibly older, but they look like they’re in their 50s, not their 70s.

While we’re at it, we pan over pictures of the original team when they were young, because - honestly, this movie came out 4 years after a single season of GoShogun aired, even people who watched the show could probably use a reminder of who the characters were.

When the heroes find out about Remy, each of them immediately drops everything to go be with her.

That’s one of my favorite film tropes, by the way - the “cancel everything, I need to be on the first flight” moment.

The heroes assemble at the hospital, to find out that Remy, on top of her car crash, had some pretty late stage cancer. Future space leukemia.

Okay, “progressive leuko-isolation syndrome”. Her blood is… lonely? I think it’s safe just to call it future space leukemia.

Doing anything about it would take a specialist from a different hospital, but she’s too sick to move, and they’re not gonna go pull a specialist for some old lady with no health insurance.

Okay, so, I’m reasonably certain that this was what got me on board when I was a teenager. I had zero context, but something about this team of elderly heroes rallying together to kick the ass of a bitchy doctor to try and rescue an old friend? That feels emotionally satisfying.

Good thing one of their team members (not present) is the literal actual Surgeon General, now.

This guy, one of the more cartoony members of the team, is out in the woods, currently engaged in a dispute with another old team member, trying to get some unused land turned into a hospital.

“i want to turn your land into a hospital”

“no fuck off”

“i can just appropriate your land”

“i’ll cut you”

But then the call comes in.

They need him, and fast!

So we get another “drop everything” moment.

YEAH I WANT TO SEE A SAMURAI FIGHT CANCER WITH A JET

This takes us back to… the weird haunted-ass city from before, and who we now can identify as a young Remy Shimada.

Remy opens the door to her hotel room, expecting that her friends are out there. In an “imagination” sequence it’s made clear who she expects to find: the guys from earlier, but young. They’re all young, here.

Are we in the past, then? Is this a flashback?

Instead of her team, she finds this little girl giving her a letter.

The letter informs Remy that she has 2 days to live.

“How you will die is shown within:”

2 days is also how long the doctor gave her.

The cancer Remy has in the real world was implied to be, like, future space leukemia, so the fact that her fate is to die surrounded by… blood cells? Her own blood? The art direction of this place is going to take on something of a “blood disease” theme.

So this isn’t the past? It’s… a kind of coma purgatory?

Back to the team: despite being able to marshal all of their significant resources, this is late stage leukemia PLUS a nasty car crash.

She’s probably gonna die.

In another France flashback, Child-Remy is getting sexually assaulted by some child bullies.

Well, not quite, because Remy’s more interested in wrapping her belt around her fist and completely obliterating them.

tee hee

Coma Purgatory Remy is being chased down endless dark alleyways by an inchoate mass of citizens.

When I was watching this as a teenager I think I missed how much the artists invoked the “blood disease” imagery, here in coma purgatory.

She is surrounded, and torn to shreds, while discordant, angry jazz plays.

but it hasn’t happened yet.

ain’t no thang, I got this

The shower’s still on, better check on that.

oop, it’s blood. blood shower.

That’s odd, the blood usually gets off on the second floor.

You know, for as unsubtle as this story is about the blood imagery, I don’t think I ever even registered “she has leukemia, a cancer of the blood” when I watched this as a teenager.

Lovingly loading her pistol (again, her pistol gets a LOT of screen time in this) she rushes to the top floor, to the water tower, to confront whoever’s sabotaged her shower, only to find… her squad.

This water’s legit.

Everyone’s investigating the same issue. Also this guy has got great penguin jammies.

I’m beginning to think this stuck in my head for over 20 years because it was rad as hell.

Oh, you got a blood shower and notes telling you all you’re gonna die? Yeah, that’s … that’s this town’s whole deal, didn’t you get the memo? Literally everybody here is dying.

Also, you can’t leave. The fate’s yours, there’s no escape.

Each of them is fated to die on a different day - but Remy’s is the first one, “Day 2”.

So let’s escape!

They drink blood red wine while the samurai plays classy piano music.

But the townspeople aren’t cool with people just leaving. Can’t leave with broken legs.

Fun heroic fight scene, although Remy knocks a mook on to the piano, forcing her to apologize.

The cops show up and massacre the mooks in cold blood. They’re helping!

our heroes are uncomfortable with the level of assistance provided

“We’ll leave.”

“You can’t, this city doesn’t even have an outside.”

While being escorted back to the hotel, the team mulls over their two options: attempting to run, or assaulting the huge spire in the middle of the city. There’s no evidence that assaulting the huge spire will even do anything, but, like, come on. You see a big spire like that, it’s probably the problem.

Remy relaxes with a non-blood shower, only to return to a woman being either eaten or raped by a wolf on her bed, and a grim warning.

Her gun does nothing, doesn’t even dent the wolf, and she has to watch the woman messily (and salaciously) eviscerated in a scene that would make the team at American Horror Story blush.

Once again I would like to remind you that this was a Giant Mecha Anime featuring a big ol’ Voltron robot

In a panic, Remy runs out into the streets, only to get attacked by more citizens. A lot of the rest of this story is going to involve this city’s citizens trying to murder Remy, so buckle up.

One of her teammates had been quietly tailing her and tosses her a knife at just the right moment, letting her stab her assailant in the back.

“Look, we all get you’re a lone wolf who don’t need nobody, but you can’t do this alone.”

Because the team’s fates all have them dying after Remy, they want to put themselves in danger first - it stands to reason, they can’t die before her, right? Killy fights off some more citizens and shoos Remy back to the hotel, but on the way back she runs into the ~~blood cells~~ red hanging cables from the prophecy.

whoops, fate happened and one of the pictures came true:

She gets cornered again, and her six-shot gun - well, there are only six shots and this city has a lot more than 6 angry goons in it.

Good thing there’s another teammate.

Uh, this is getting very violent, they are not afraid to just absolutely murk these mooks.

Again, her heroic teammate stays behind to fight and ushers her along.

And she realizes, in a moment of weakness, that she’s been firing her gun too much, and she’s hurt her hands and wrists - but more mooks show up and she fires on them anyways.

Okay, the pattern is becoming clear, right? Teammates are rescuing her and then leaving her on her own again, in sequence.

Also heyo, the “Japanese pun you missed” translator’s note. I haven’t seen one of those in years.

But we’ve got a motorcycle, so let’s skip ahead and just escape now?

They cruise out of the city. Into a … massive, open-air graveyard.

Then a white oblivion.

Then they’re … cruising back in to the city.

Like Cecily Strong and Keegan-Micheal Key trying to leave Schmigadoon. The exit is just the entrance.

They try again, and it happens again.

Like they said, there’s no outside the city.

Aside from the one, obvious way.

“Oh, yeah, this lady is definitely gonna die.”

Remy reloads her gun, although her hands are so injured she’s not confident she’ll be able to fire it many more times. As she soaks her hands in hot water, the creepy girl and wolf taunt her some more, but Remy just waves them off dismissively.

Her and her friends spend the night loading weapons and preparing themselves for a final assault on the big creepy tower.

Even going so far as to turn the streetcar we saw earlier into a reinforced battle wagon.

There’s a full on musical “let’s get ready to fight” montage, which would be so great if the soundtrack weren’t soft 80’s pop. I don’t think they picked the right song for this.

Back in the past, child Remy has been chased into a pit by the families of the kids she walloped. Alone and scared, she’s about to give up, but she’s cheered by imagining a group of other lonely kids who she might one day meet.

The doctor is ready to turf Remy, she’s not gonna make it.

Ain’t nobody in town is cool with their “let’s attack the tower” plan, but armored car don’t care.

okay this has become a little goofy

tower’s a nightmare hellscape inside, whoops

jesus christ

Someone really went to town on the “blood disease” and “time running out” spec on these shots.

While everyone else was rescuing Remy in the previous cutscenes, these guys didn’t get to do anything cool… because they were preparing to blow up the entire city

fuck you, fate! when life gives you lemons, blow up the city.

But, surprise surprise, destroying the city doesn’t do anything, because it was just a metaphor for blood cancer all along!

Can’t beat that!

Also: the wolf is huge. And your friends aren’t really here! You’re just imagining them!

“Oh, by the way, I never said when fate said I was supposed to die.”

Fate’s a fuckin’ chump, Remy, you go get ’em.

Her friends rush off to fight the fight. The friends she imagined when she was a lonely child. The friends who are even now gathered around her hospital bed as a 70-year old woman.

Sad defiant song!

She’s gonna fight this fuckin’ wolf.

She has to tie the gun to her hand for support.

And she does it. She kills the wolf!

But it’s not enough.

Her heartbeat stops.

Her friends leave the room sadly.

Yeah, this grave we’ve all been standing around? It’s Remy’s grave.

“Hey, about that whole beating fate thing - you were lying, right? You weren’t actually fated to die yesterday?”

“Bang!”

and so the nurse tidies up in an empty room.

But….

maybe….

From nothing, a heartbeat - a weak heartbeat.

Her friends sadly leave the hospital, but they hear something behind them.

It’s Remy! … Young Remy!

We have never once seen old Remy’s face in this whole story.

They’re all young! They’ll be together forever!

Time doesn’t exist, really, they’ll be together forever!

Remy and her friends walk into the light.

Roll credits.

That’s a happy ending, right? The redditor with the story on the tip of their tongue remembered it as “then she wakes up in the hospital and her friends are all there”.

But I remembered it as “I can’t remember whether or not the woman wakes up at the end of the movie.”

So, like, it’s actually kind of unclear how this ended, right? She died, but then, it feels like she pulled through in the suspiciously-too-happy ending, got up out of her hospital bed, actually got up and walked out of the hospital and they were all young and happy again.

The story ends right there.

No, I don’t buy it. I don’t think you’re intended to. Did she just imagine that last bit? “Going into the light with your perfect best friends, who are young again” ain’t exactly what it looks like when someone beats cancer.

And it’s intentionally ambiguous. I think it’s kind of beautiful, either way - either she beat cancer with SHEER GRIT, or she went out fighting and utterly confident that her friends had her back. And the story doesn’t really want to let you know which one it was.

I was not okay with ambiguous endings as a teenager. I wanted a real answer - but now I think the story has a lot more nuance and beauty if it doesn’t tell you how the story ends.

That’s not really the point, now, is it?

….

And, uh, after re-watching it, I know exactly why my subconscious would invoke this weird old movie I saw once, 25 years ago - why I thought about this movie again, now. I know precisely what life event I’ve dealt with recently that would make me think of this bittersweet movie where you don’t get to know whether the courageous protagonist lives or dies, but the only thing that really matters was that she felt loved and supported and fought to the very end.

So This Was Great, Actually

When I found out that this movie I’d been thinking about for all of this time was a giant mecha anime from the 80’s, I figured “this is going to be dorky as hell”, but you know what? I think it holds up really well. It deserves the tiny corner of my mind it’s been squatting in for a quarter of a century.

This is an interesting movie.

It was goofy, thoughtful, horrifying, surprisingly artistic, and told a nuanced story about an aging mecha pilot struggling with leukemia that also featured a samurai with a fighter jet and surreal horror elements.

All because someone thought “okay, the protagonists of this goofy kids robot show- what if 40 years pass and they all get together because one of them has got blood cancer?”

Accidents

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

With an industry leading 4 deaths and 239 injuries, FlavorTech Supplements is operating at an industry leading 65% of Acceptable Accident Threshold, down a stunning 3.5% from last year!

Panthers

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

motherfucker you mean to tell me that “panthers vs. senators” is a hockey game? god damn it I paid so much for these tickets I just wanted to see some big cats maul some old men

Blippo+

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0700

Oh, this is a weird one.

Blippo+ is not a game, it’s interactive fiction. It has a lot in common with Hypnospace Outlaw - but where Hypnospace Outlaw’s goal is to capture the vibes of 90’s internet:

Blippo+ is instead trying to capture the vibes of 90’s wild channel flipping.

While the gameplay in Hypnospace Outlaw was mostly a hollow pretext to keep you paging around in it’s play area of fun dumb made-up websites, the gameplay in Blippo+ is basically nonexistent: it just checks to see if you’ve watched all of the TV in any given “packet” before it lets you move forward to the next one.

Each packet contains about 10 “channels”, each which have four one-minute-long shows playing on an endless loop - with about half of the channels being contentless filler.

Blippo is set on the planet Blip, an alien planet that’s … well, just an alternate Earth, really.

The story - well, it’s a thin story, but it plays out over something like 11 packets - features the Blippians discovering that Earth folk are watching their TV through a weird space anomaly.

This “news” filters into all of their pop media, with talk show hosts, news stories, the commentariat, and weird art almost all reflecting the news in one way or another.

Not all of it, though, some of the shows are reruns or just gleefully obtuse about what’s going on in the world.

Like Clone Trois, a just terribly acted soap opera where all of the hospital staff are played by the same woman.

It’s all filmed in front of a green-screen, but with pretty lush sets and costumes and lighting: clearly something of a labor of love.

One minute is kind of a perfect amount of time for each of these shows to take up. It absolutely succeeds at capturing the vibe of channel flipping, something I haven’t really experienced for literal actual decades.

And that’s it, that’s the whole game of Blippo+. It’s just… a bunch of weird one minute clips of a variety of imaginary TV shows from the planet Blip.

It’s obviously divisive: the oblique, slow-moving story and complete absence of gameplay have some folks convinced it’s inscrutable performance art and others convinced it’s the funniest game of the year. I think it’s brilliant: Hypnospace Outlaw and Blippo+ are out there literally pushing the boundaries of what interactive fiction can even be.

“Here’s an interactive, story-rich space you can exist in, we will move time forward when you’re done with this moment.” That’s a fresh kind of storytelling!

It’s Kinda Gay (In A Good Way)

There are a number of drag performances in Blippo, and Blip’s clearly got a subtly different relationship with gender than we did in the 90s.

Blip gives the creators a good opportunity to replicate most of the vibes of the 90s without… you know… quite so much of the family values shmaltz, which is for the better. This is a much cooler 90’s than the one we actually had to live through.

Is This Kind of Storytelling Irrevocably Tied to Nostalgia?

This is kind of an open question I’m thinking about while playing Blippo+.

Blippo+ and Hypnospace Outlaw both are relentless exercises in nostalgia.

Is it easier for a modern production team to replicate older media? A LOT of effort goes into getting the “style” right, but once you do, the lower fidelity means lower production cost… right? I don’t know.

One of my first ever (long since deleted, never ask me what it looked like) film projects was the extremely inexpertly shot “Captain Andy and the Spaceketeers”, and at the time I foolishly thought that “well, things just looked amateurish and silly in the 40’s and 50s, the time-frame I’m trying to evoke”. This lazy ethos lead to me making something so bad, so foundationally unwatchable, that I quickly decided that film might not be the media for me.

A lesson I took from that, though, was that you can’t hide all flaws behind the lower fidelity of media from the past, and that accurately replicating an era’s “vibe” in a way that resonates with people takes a lot more skill than I had given it credit for - so maybe the “cost & difficulty” argument for setting this kind of project in the past doesn’t hold as much water as I think it might.

Would it work as well if it were setting a story in a simulation of modern TikTok? Or would the fact that it’s a low-fidelity simulation of TikTok competing with actual TikTok which you can just go look at right now reflect poorly on it?

Also, the format of navigating through time capsules feels like it pairs well with, you know, “the past”.

Is Nostalgia Okay To Like?

I’m really suspicious of the artistic value of nostalgia. It can feel really navel gazey to make a game who’s message is just “remember the 90s?”. I think things have to be more than that, otherwise you end up with stuff that’s all reference and no content.

I really appreciate the nostalgic vibe of stuff like Blippo+ - because I do fondly remember some parts of being a child and teenager, but, I remain very suspicious of that feeling. Am I being manipulated? The past only seems idyllic because I’ve started to forget running out of AA batteries and lying catatonic in front of the Channel 2 info-crawl because nothing interesting was playing on any channel.

And MY nostalgia isn’t gonna stick around and stay relevant for long. The classic Christmas film “A Christmas Story” was a pretty cynical exercise in evoking nostalgia for the 40s, and while elements of that might resonate with my grandparents and parents, it feels like a foreign country to me most of the time.

I think I should get over it - my suspicion of nostalgia’s artistic value may be unwarranted. Almost all media is set somewhere in the past, right? Are we not just constantly referencing all of the things that came before?

That’s probably okay, even now that the past that it’s referencing is… my past, and I love it a little extra because I grew up in it.

Killing Time at Lightspeed

I bought and haven’t played Killing Time at Lightspeed, but it appears to be the same idea:

It’s got a sci-fi premise, paired with a retro aesthetic and a simulated social space, although this one appears to be trying to capture nostalgia for DOS interfaces:

Which, let’s be honest, I have.

Back To Blippo: The Playdate

Oh, okay, here’s a thing about Blippo that’s insane.

It wasn’t intended to be played like this:

As far as I can tell, it was intended to be played like this:

That’s right, Blippo+ was/is a Playdate game.

The content “packs” were originally released one week at a time, for 11 consecutive weeks, and if you wanted to watch the whole thing you’d have to just wait.

I’m not sure how I feel about that design: I’m just … so… impatient.

I am and remain utterly confused by the Playdate. I should be in to it, I’m an experimental games guy, but… this weird, expensive little device cost a lot and I never bought in. I kinda regret that, now - not because of Blippo (I think Blippo’s experience IS better on the Steam Deck), but because as far as I can tell, the Playdate has spent years and years now being a surprisingly successful and well-supported little oddball console.

Likeable

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

“being likeable is more important than being good at your job”

jokes on you, I’m neither

Samsung OLED

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0700

I bought an expensive Samsung OLED monitor for my computer and I regret it enormously. “How did they solve the problem of OLED burn in?” you might ask - well, the monitor panics every 12 hours and harasses you to let it take a 10 minute nappy nap, a function that you can not schedule for 4AM or trigger manually before bed

It’s unbelievably irritating

GOTY 2025

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I do my own little list every year. Also, the games don’t even have to be from 2025, I just have to have played them in 2025.

I didn’t play any bad games at all this year, I don’t think.

Not GoTY, but Fun Enough I Guess

Storyteller - a clever and fun puzzle mechanic, good use of a few hours, but ultimately kinda hollow feeling once you burn through the puzzles.
The Dark Queen of Mortholme - neat concept, best to watch someone else play it.
Blue Prince - I never got so far as to write my final thoughts on Blue Prince, but I got… only so far into this game. I really enjoyed one of the earliest puzzles presented to me, a clever word puzzle, but I felt like the Roguelike parts of Blue Prince got in the way of the puzzle parts of it: it’s frustrating to stumble around not knowing whether you even have all of the components of the puzzle that you need to solve. Many of the puzzles are just “draw tiles in the right order”. Ultimately, I felt like the two core game mechanics: “puzzle” and “random mansion” kinda work against one another and left feeling kind of meh about the whole deal, but the people who got way in to Blue Prince got way in to Blue Prince.
Stimulation Clicker - This is a web “idle clicker” style game, but it’s intended as social commentary, and it’s quite effective, at that. There’s a joke in Stimulation Clicker where you order a single item from an online retailer and the game sends you easily two dozen updates on the exact position of the object you’ve ordered in near real time, and now every time that happens to me in real life I can’t help but think of this game.

Not GoTY, but Highly Recommended

Mouthwashing - this purported “video game” is actually a thinly disguised “short play, that you read”, which makes the horror a lot more manageable: it’s a horror game that I think I could actually play. It’s told out-of-order, told by the world’s most unreliable narrator, and delivered with a lot of symbolic meaning, and it’s the kind of story that keeps you thinking about it for weeks afterwards. A good analogue for Mouthwashing would be, I think, What Remains of Edith Finch: short, spooky, narrative-focused experience. Actual game: 90-120 minutes. Time spent watching video essays about game: 4+ hours.
9 Kings - “Balatro, but for X”, well, this time it’s Balatro for a little war game, and it’s pretty fun. They’re also working on 9 Kings so hard, I would have given it a 6/10 after my first play, but by the time I went to write about it they’d added more stuff and I’d give it a 7/10, then I played some of that and by the time I got to the end they’d added even more stuff and, and - honestly, they’re improving this game at such a fevered pace that I’d keep a close eye on it. 9 Kings is a game for people who like watching a game break apart in front of them.
A Short Hike - At some point someone pointed out that the 3D Mario games all start with and depend upon carefully tweaking Mario’s movement until the simple act of navigating any space that he’s in feels bouncy and reactive and tactile and joyous, and that’s the same feeling I get when navigating A Short Hike’s little universe: it’s a game where the point is movement but also movement feels very good.
Tactical Breach Wizards - What if XCom was tight and fast and funny.
Hades 2 - There’s not that much to write about: It’s just more Hades, which doesn’t seem like it should be a knock against Hades 2, because Hades was absolutely excellent and Hades 2 is just more of an absolutely excellent game. If you want more Hades, Hades 2 has got more Hades. Great way to kill some time.
Sunderfolk - they fixed Gloomhaven!

Should be GoTY, but Isn’t For Some Reason

Expedition 33 - we spilled so much ink about this one already. It’s Final Fantasy X, it’s Super Mario RPG, it’s So French, it’s So Beautiful. The last 15 years had me thinking that I stopped liking JRPGs, and this one game showed up and went “no, they just stopped making the kind of JRPGs that you liked”.

Definitely Actually GoTY

c’mon, you already know where my heart lies, it’s Deltarune. I gush about this game plenty. I’m gonna do it some more here:

Every time I’ve played a new chapter of Deltarune it’s made me laugh out loud at least once, and included a part that’s made me feel Real Actual Legitimate Feelings, and also included a part so gripping that I’ve been couchlocked through something else important.

Like with its predecessor, the game of Deltarune is so seemingly simple, basic graphics, simple gameplay, but that’s a pallette that allows its creator to do a lot of weird, fun, clever stuff. The over-wrought term “ludonarrative dissonance” has cropped up for when a game’s mechanics and its story don’t line up very well, but Deltarune exists on the opposite side of that spectrum - ludonarrative harmony?

This is a fight you’re supposed to lose, and it feels desperate, insane, impossible, and the game itself acts confused when you try to win it.

(But you can win it, because Susie’s got the heart of a champion.)

HAWT OF A CHAMPION

This is a fight with an old man who’s something of a mentor figure, who likes you and just wants to make you stronger. You notice as you work your way through it that he hits you hardest when you have the most hit points because he doesn’t really want to hurt you. It’s mechanically designed to force Susie to use an ability that you’ve been ignoring, admit it, her incredibly weak healing magic. And as Susie works at it, it starts to get… kinda good. And this fight - it’s maybe harder than the fight against the impossible adversary above. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels friendly. Fun. He wants you to win. You don’t feel frustrated, you feel determined. You like these characters.

These story beats line up so well with game beats that you feel them intuitively, and lo, the game’s soundtrack is just as tightly integrated.

Look, this game is just chockablock with moments like this. It’s why this seemingly simple video game is quite possibly going to take 10 or more actual human years to finish.

It’s like how Stardew Valley got to be absolutely perfect because it’s one creator’s obsessively polished vision.

I think Deltarune is a masterpiece, by the original definition of “masterpiece”: a talented creator flexing unbelievably hard.

Tiff’s List:

Avowed
Dragon Age: Veilguard
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Blue Prince
Wanderstop
Sunderfolk
Dispatch
GOTY: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Waymo

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:00:00 -0700

if you ever have a CAPTCHA that asks you to identify traffic lights, do it QUICKLY or some guy in a Waymo somewhere could die

The Privonce

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0700

Ancillary

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0700

So, the “Ancillary Justice” science fiction series has a futuristic evil empire where gender is meaningless and difficult to discern, and they wear formal uniforms with meaningful pins and always gloves

and somehow my mind IMMEDIATELY summoned this exact mental image for everyone in the empire, and it works So Well, so I guess if you’re ever reading the Hugo-award winning Imperial Radch series, I hope you also imagine these early-90s low-tier Sailor Moon baddies

Project Management

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

If you ever leave software developers alone for too long, they’ll attempt things they’ve been dreaming of for years like a “new version” or a “big refactor” and both of these things have an awful tendency to break a shit tonne of features and completely ruin the stability of production code, so if you have a developer who doesn’t have the very tired look in their eyes you need to get them an unrealistic deadline on an incredibly ill-defined feature, and fast

most project management is just about keeping developers from ruining your product with their clever ideas

you hear that? even now they’re whispering about rewriting your entire decade-old legacy codebase in Kotlin even though nobody on the team is familiar with Kotlin or even the JVM, and they think they can do it in less than 6 months because they’re software developers and thus haven’t developed any ability to comprehend the passage of time

Sunderfolk

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0700

When a bunch of folks left Ubisoft and went it on their own as a small studio looking to build something impressive, we got Expedition 33 - letting their true identity as “what if final fantasy, but SO FRENCH” come to the fore.

So what happens if a bunch of folks leave Blizzard?

Well, we get Sunderfolk.

Okay, so, it’s a little bit hard to talk about Sunderfolk because it’s an entirely new kind of game. I have to lead in by talking about two other games:

Jackbox Party Pack

Look, I expect you know about the Jackbox Party Pack at this point.

Jackbox revolutionized the party video game format by recontextualizing the games as things you and your friends play around a TV, with your phones.

This works really quite well, so long as the games are simple: everyone has a phone. The game’s input prompts are not too complex, and delivered as web applications, so people can get into the games instantly so long as they have any device more powerful than a Blackberry.

The problem with running most party games is that they honestly run a lot better with a host - you need someone to distribute little slips of paper, collect them from players, keep them in order, read them out, manage the game, it’s all a bit of fuss - and, honestly, I have spent more than a few Christmases acting as Party Game Host myself. I’m not bad at it, but Jackbox Party Pack takes all of that hosting out of my hands and automates it! Nice!

It doesn’t work with my parents, though. From first-hand experience I can say with some authority that my particular pack of boomers don’t understand technology well enough to be able to keep a phone charged and a web browser open and focused for the entire length of a 10 minute game, at which point the effort I would have save hosting instead goes into a flurry of IT support as folks wave their phones at me and complain that they’ve been thrown out of the game.

Anyways: the Jackbox Party Pack model: it works really well! But, thanks to the input limitations, as well as their brand, Jackbox tends to limit their party games to short-form experiences that aren’t too complex - you could use a system like this to play, like, Twilight Imperium, but Jackbox … probably won’t.

fuck, that’s not a half bad idea, if someone wants to drop everything and build a Twilight-Imperium-like TV+phone game with me, I definitely have the server half of that knowledge on lock.

Of course, the technical limitations ALSO mean that the game must be asynchronous. The latency involved in having a web-server and a bunch of shitty phones (each of them turning off at the most inopportune times) involved means that it’s reasonable to expect that any input with a less than 30s window might just be lost. So this is good for party games, and “board” games, but it would quite bad for … fighting games.

I think for that reason, primarily, I haven’t seen a lot of other video game developers embrace the format, despite its obvious merits: this is possibly the best and easiest way to play a fun video game with your friends - so long as the game is extremely asynchronous.

Gloomhaven

I heard really good things about Sunderfolk, and then, when I played it, it gradually set in that what I was playing was just… the board game, Gloomhaven. Later, I’d read some interviews with the developer confirming that Sunderfolk was extremely inspired by Gloomhaven. Like, “they were trying to fix the problems that they had with Gloomhaven, and they ended up at Sunderfolk”.

Gloomhaven is one of the most well-rated board games of all time.

Lo, here it is, sitting at position 4 on Board Game Geek:

While I find that BGG’s rankings don’t often line up with my own opinions of a board game, the fix is in: Gloomhaven is enormously popular and influential, at least in the world of adult board gaming.

Gloomhaven is a… dungeon adventure.

The sort of game one might liken to, say, HeroQuest:

Basically, the way it works is that your most dedicated friend will spend the better part of an hour laboring over a trunk full of miniatures and deployable scenery to construct a very specific scenario from a large book of combat scenarios, they will read to you some special rules from that large book of combat scenarios, and you’ll spend about an hour delving through that particular dungeon with whatever heroes you have on hand. Like D&D, but the DM also gets to play, because the DMing is all pre-determined and nothing can happen outside of the tightly defined rules system.

Gloomhaven revolutionized the format with a few great ideas:

A very tight and well-designed combat system that presents a complicated and deep board-gamey puzzle for the players involved.
A long, complicated, branching campaign where your players’ actions deeply affect the story.
Tonnes and tonnes and TONNES of unlockable content under the hood.

The combat system involves a hex grid and a bunch of cards:

Each hero has a hand of cards, with both a top half, and a bottom half, and by combining sets of two cards, they can form a complete action: they get to do the top half of one card, and the bottom half of the other:

The cards also always have a 2 damage “basic attack” on top, and a 2 move “basic move” on the bottom, forming the sort of base tier “default move” for a character.

Past that, card management becomes very important, because once played, getting those cards back is complicated and difficult, either involving a short rest (where you trash one card from hand to redraw your deck), or a long rest (where you … still do that, but lose an entire turn and get to heal some, too), because either route is going to cause you to gradually permanently lose cards from your already small hand. You might also lose cards to damage - and some cards have very powerful effects that cause you to immediately trash them.

When you can’t play any more cards (because you’ve run out), that’s it, you’re done, you’ve lost. If all of the players lose: that’s game over.

There’s much more said about it, here:

I… have a copy, somewhere, occupying a giant chest, I think?

Okay, I don’t … I don’t actually like Gloomhaven that much?

Let’s talk about some of my problems with Gloomhaven:

Set-up Takes a Fucking Hour

Do you have any idea how good a game has to be for me to want to set up all this fuss to play it?

The bar is Slay The Spire, and sometimes, Eclipse. I’ll set those ones up for an hour. While I’m likely to be the dissenting opinion, here, I don’t think Gloomhaven is… necessarily… good enough to justify that hour of set up.

It’s Hard

In order for co-op games to appeal to the kind of tight, strategic grognards who command the top slots in the Board Game Geek top 100, they have to be balanced such that they are thorny, difficult, strategic puzzles.

Nobody likes a steamroll, right?

Actually, I Like a Steamroll

So, what, you’re just going to spend an hour setting up, getting a bunch of friends together, and as a lot you’re all going to spend 90 minutes working a tough scenario only to fail at the very end because you’re two cards short?

Losing, as a team, sucks. We all lost. Together.

In my opinion, the correct balance for a D&D game, the correct balance for a Co-op game, is to present the illusion of difficulty: situations should seem dangerous, extremely threatening - because if they don’t, there won’t be any sense of urgency, or stakes - but - the game should be subtly weighted in the players’ favor.

Then - if the players crave more of a challenge, they could stack difficulty modifiers, or chase optional secondary or tertiary goals.

Let’s Talk about Quarterbacking a Bit

Co-op games often have the problem where one more-experienced player can, in fact, run the whole table. By polling every player for their state, and then issuing directions and strategy for the team, they can… significantly simplify the strategy involved!

Depending on the temperaments involved, this can … suck for every other player at the table. It can also be fun, if the leader is good at leading, good at sharing ideas, if players are willing to collaborate with one another to come up with solutions to problems around the table.

This is kind of a fundamental, unsolvable co-op problem and we see thoughts about it reflected in the designs of all kinds of co-op games.

Our Plan Has Come Undone

Turns in Gloomhaven fall apart really easily.

You see, you all pick your moves at the same time, with too much coordination… gently discouraged by the manual (in order to discourage quarterbacking). I believe that the manual explicitly forbids sharing the “initiative” numbers on your cards during this phase: you can’t say “I have an 83, so I’ll be going first”, at best you’re allowed to say “if I go after that big guy, I’ll be really early in the turn order”.

The baddies will roll a random initiative after you’ve decided your move: so it’s quite common that the following scenario will play out:

Player 1 goes first. They didn’t expect that they’d have the highest initiative, so they partially waste their turn, rushing towards the enemies who are still too far away.
The enemies all move, but thanks to Player 1’s updated position, they move towards Player 1, changing where Player 2 thought they would be when she planned out her AoE attack.
Player 2 decides not to use her AoE attack, now, because the board state has changed, and instead ditches her turn on a simple move-and-attack.
Player 3, new to the game, does something stupid and burns a card on an action that doesn’t help much at all.

Thanks to the fairly tight difficulty of Gloomhaven, it only takes one or two of these catastrophic turns to ruin a session entirely.

Level Problems

Gloomhaven does “EXP”-style leveling, and you accrue EXP by performing certain actions within a level. Different characters get access to different levels of EXP: in my game with Tiffany, her character had access to a powerful ability that just spit out EXP like a slot machine and she used it often, whereas my EXP-granting ability was a lot more situational. When a character gets too powerful, they’re likely to finish their arc entirely, retiring from the game and replacing themselves with a whole new character: fun and exciting, but back down to Level 1.

The way that the campaign structure in Gloomhaven works, it’s quite likely you’ll eventually be bringing a sparsely equipped Level 1 character, a semi-equipped Level 4 character, and a heavily equipped Level 9 character into the same fight: how does the game account for this in its scaling?

Well, by setting the level of all of the monsters to the average level of your party.

Imagine for a second why that’s not an incredible solve: your Level 1 player is going to be soft and ineffective, while your Level 9 player is going to chew through opponents like nobody’s biz.

In order to combat that problem, Gloomhaven’s designers instead, as far as I can tell, tried to make it so that every character combination you might be able to bring to the fight is more or less equivalent in terms of ability: a low-level fighter with limited equipment might not have the same tactical breadth as a high-level mage, but they can still be useful.

If you go into the Big Boss Fight with four Level 1 characters with no equipment? Well, you’re getting a scaled-down Level 1 boss fight - it’s gonna be real hard but it should still be doable, if you’re good.

But - if you go too far down that road it starts to make leveling and equipment feel meaningless: so the designers had to walk a super delicate tightrope, here.

And you know? They did a really good job with this seemingly intractable problem. There’s a reason why Gloomhaven is such a well respected game. For a game with an impossibly large setup space, most scenarios still play pretty well.

Just The One Campaign

If you have Gloomhaven, you’re playing it with exactly and no more than one group at a time. Anything else is impossible: the whole campaign state is written irrevocably into the box and the decks. Your best-case scenario for introducing Gloomhaven to some new friends might be the starter scenario, or just playing the level you last played with your campaign group and discarding the results.

This is great if you have a dedicated Gloomhaven group. It completely sucks ass for Complex Human Beings.

Gloomhaven Digital Edition

So, after mostly putting the physical Gloomhaven away, they launched a digital edition!

If you want a taste of the Gloomhaven experience without the hour of fucking setup, I absolutely recommend this. It’s a complete reimplementation of the enormous game of Gloomhaven, but all of the difficult set-up and fussy deck management? Handled for you. Lovely.

On top of that? Great tutorial. Considering how dense and complicated the game is, this helps a lot.

Honestly, what killed this game for me and Tiff was the dodgy netcode in the early access edition: on top of being able to lose a hour-long scenario to a bad card misplay, now we could also lose that hour-long scenario to bitrot and desync errors.

It’s been, like, 3 years, though, so I imagine this is probably a lot better now! Seriously, if you’re interested in Gloomhaven, I can’t recommend the digital edition highly enough.

Well, except for…

Sunderfolk

That’s right! I was talking about Sunderfolk, and how some ex-Blizzard developers set upon what I think of as the “most Blizzard” kind of game design: let’s take something great but flawed that already exists and polish, polish, polish.

Pictured: The thing what WarCraft yoinked and polished.

The game devs at the newly created Dreamhaven just… kept on playing Gloomhaven, and started prototyping on ways to improve it.

Obviously a digital Gloomhaven works: if you’ve tried the digital version of Gloomhaven you can see that it plays better than the board game - but one of the struggles is that it kinda hurts the co-op aspect of it: in order to play a 4 player game, now you need 4 people, and 4 computers, and 4 microphone headsets, and that’s a big ask for folks.

This seems like a game that would really benefit from the Jackbox couch-co-op model.

So… they did that. Sunderfolk is played on a central TV, with one to four phones, with “one” as a highly discouraged option because playing a co-op game alone is not exactly going to be the best experience.

Now, Sunderfolk, like Gloomhaven, is quite complicated. It would be a struggle to deliver this game’s client experience as, say, a React app in the browser. Even as a lifelong web-developer, I have to admit that the non-native experience on mobile devices kinda sucks ass - so Sunderfolk delivers their game client on mobile devices as standalone iOS and Android applications.

Past that, the experience is extremely Gloomhaven, but - simplified, clarified, tightened up.

For one thing, the campaign has a very neatly defined difficulty ramp: not just in terms of game difficulty, but in terms of game complexity. It does that thing that games can do so well: introducing mechanics one step at a time. You don’t get complex weapons, or items, or even complex abilities up front. Instead, the game introduces them, one at a time, in scenarios designed to show them off.

I’m playing late-game Gloomhaven with two groups of friends: with my board game / D&D friends, it was smooth and almost a little too easy at first - but I’m also playing it with one of Tiff’s friends, a guy who doesn’t shy away from complexity, but who I’ve never once played a complicated board game with. The board game has been boiling him slowly. Also note: that’s two, separate, side-by-side campaigns with 2 different groups of people. Which, of course it supports, because it’s a video game, and there’s no complicated state to manage.

The ability cards have been simplified: you get fewer of them, they’re more flexible, you play one card per action, and they don’t disappear. This is much easier, especially for new players.

One of my big frustrations with Gloomhaven has been discarded entirely: you play your turns in any order, and you pick your card when you play your turn - which means that you can always choose what you believe to be the best action for the current board state. Sure, it takes away one of the most creative parts of Gloomhaven, but it gives players a much more satisfying connection between playing a card and its outcome.

The game is also good at giving a kind of inflated sense of danger to the scenarios: each hero only has enough hit points to soak about 3-4 hits before they go down, helping things feel precarious - buuuut - the game has a lot of ways to fast-track scenarios that are starting to get a little dicey, as well as a generous “lives” system to keep players in the game after they’ve been beaten. Losing a turn to getting murked might not be fun, but it won’t lose you the scenario. In a good scenario, your team might get to wander around collecting optional objectives and treasure and taking their sweet time - in a rough scenario, your team might lose 2 out of the game’s 3 team-lives and rush to the finish line, but most scenarios move forward.

Of course, I still have complaints about Sunderfolk - but I am compelled to say that Sunderfolk is the best Gloomhaven experience and it isn’t even close. I unreservedly recommend it to anybody who likes board games and has friends and a TV.

Complaints? What complaints?

Writing Bad

So, the plot in Sunderfolk is, essentially, that the village of Nicetown (Arden) needs to protect the Light Crystal (Brightshard) from the corruption of the Shadowbad (Shadowstone), but Shadowbad keeps getting Shadow-worse so some heroes need to show up and whack it on the Shadow-noggin.

The writing in Sunderfolk feels like someone forgot to change the names in the Default Fantasy Template and turned in their homework anyways.

Voice Acting Bad

So, I think the idea was, if you were playing a game like this with your friends, there would be just one narrator- your GM, reading the whole story out of the book and maybe putting on a lot of wild and wacky voices for the different NPCs you encounter.

So… they simulated that. By getting just the one voice actor for the whole game. And having her put on a different silly accent for each NPC in the game’s huge and varied roster.

She’s… clearly very talented (I think she’s from Critical Role?), but, like… this sucks. I get what they’re going for and I really don’t like it, it works when it’s one of your friends, it doesn’t work when it’s a professional voice actor pulling out a bad cockney accent and going “hOw yOU DoIn GuVNah?”

Honestly, okay, my real actual preference for a system like this is to make your friends act out the scene. Put the text of each character who’s speaking on individual phones and make your friends do the scene themselves. Have the narrator’s silly accents available for shy friends, but keep them off by default.

Lots of Writing and Voice Acting

Given that the writing is cornball and the voice acting is cringey, it would be awfully awkward if the game forced you to sit through absolute mountains of it in order to play the- yes that is definitely what happens.

The Phone-To-TV Control Works Really Well, 95% of the Time

Because it doesn’t work well 5% of the time, the menus are full of “are you sure?” and “confirm?” prompts, as well as ways to back out of a badly botched action, but it’s still easy for players to struggle with the control scheme and badly bungle an action in the complicated Phone interface, wasting a turn and experiencing The Frustration.

The City is Kinda Boring And Optional

In both Gloomhaven and Sunderfolk, the game’s balance would be thrown way off by letting players get too powerful… but that also means that they kinda restrict the usefulness of items and gear, which makes the city play feel slow and meandering. Oh, I collected a bunch of gold last scenario, then spent 5 minutes chatting to various city folk and upgrading mushrooms to get a +2 bonus to one attack, once a scenario? Ok. Sure. Fine.

But…. It’s Good, And I Hope They Make More

I’m going to be a little sad when we finally get to the end of Sunderfolk with the two different groups I’m playing it with right now.

With the engine fully constructed like this, it seems like it would be much easier for the Sunderfolk team to construct a whole new adventure - with new heroes, a new storyline, new abilites, new art assets - the tech would barely need to change. Of course, from my limited experience of game development, I’m pretty sure all of that “art” and “polish” is actually the expensive part.

Maybe set it in space, this time: Space…der… folk. Sunderspace. Sunderfolk 40K.

Jolene

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0700

“Jolene” is a much funnier song if you consider the possibility that Jolene has never met either the lead singer or her man before and is utterly confused by this entire interaction.

“Jolene, you’re so hot, you could easily take my man, but please don’t, it would destroy me”

Jolene: “Uh, hi, who even is your man?”

“Oh, he is watching this interaction from behind those bushes over there.”

Jolene: (concern)

Bloat

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I’ve been on the internet for… the entirety of it, actually, and two unchanging constants are posts complaining that “kids these days are worse” and “computer programs are too bloated”.

Posts going all the way back to Usenet complain that programmers these days are using too many resources, including too many features, wasting processor cycles and RAM and disk space that could have been used more efficiently by the kinds of trim, svelte programs that existed in the years prior when developers could deliver twice as many features on three transistors held together by a twig and some gum.

Why, they finally proved that a computer could beat a human at chess in 1997 on a computer that’s a thousand times less powerful than a modern iPhone, and they got us to the moon with a bunch of computers that would’ve been put to shame by a TI-86+, and yet I still can’t have more than 38 youtube tabs open before my computer starts to get a little slow? I’m pretty sure the reason for this is exclusively programmer laziness and no other reasons.

You know you can still run Wordstar and Lotus Notes, if you really want. Zero bloat. They run unbelievably fast, on account of being carefully optimized for computers that you still had to start with a hand-crank and a starter engine.

It turns out that very few people actively prioritize “lack of features” when choosing which products to use. Most people are out there solving their problems using the first free tool that Google turned up and dealing with 18 layers of intrusive adware while attempting to dodge a $7/mo subscription payment for Frunglebunt Premium: Most of The Features You Actually Need, Good Luck Cancelling Your Account.

Nothing about that business model incentivizes small, fast, optimized software.

If you really, really want, there is absolutely a popular GitHub repo out there, half-maintained by one insane Rust developer who isn’t on speaking terms with the rest of his family:

It will do everything that you need to accomplish, for free, unbelievably fast, it runs entirely on the command line. You can use it if you simply learn how to install a complex language toolchain and invoke it with a command that looks like xsprt -vrflbrfl --o --dongly-mode.

It turns out, tools for professionals look a lot different from tools for consumers, and that is On Purpose and By Design.

Saxophonist

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0700

if you ever watch a talented saxophonist, you know that at some point in saxophone school they’re trained in the secret art of saxophone hot-dogging, a series of moves that look as if their saxophone is full of hot cheese and they are to be considered a failure if every last person in the crowd is not covered in imaginary hot cheese by the end of the set

Unavoidable Thematic Parallels Between Asteroid City and House of Leaves

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Okay, so, I really don’t want to write a whole little essay about Asteroid City. There’s a lot going on in this inscrutable film.

I did write a whole little essay on House of Leaves, though, and I want to talk about some of the ways in which these two units of media overlap:

House of Leaves

I think that House of Leaves works and is worthwhile because it is thematically and structurally about unsolvable mysteries. It’s a rumination on the meaning and draw of unsolvable mysteries.

But in order to establish a shared frame of reference for the very small point I hope to make, I will need to describe what happens in this movie - spoilers abound, although this is not a movie that’s really … spoilable?

Okay, so, this movie starts by introducing the concept: it’s a broadcast of the behind-the-scenes of an imaginary play, Asteroid City. Asteroid City is not a real play: the whole play is made up in order to present to you a bunch of information about how theatre works.

So, Asteroid City isn’t real: it’s a play - but it’s not even a real play, it’s a fake play, made up for the sake of this documentary.

Within the play:

Augie Steinbeck’s car breaks down, and his son (Woodrow) and three young daughters are stranded in Asteroid City, where they were supposed to be, anyways. Augie summons his father-in-law to help: he is struggling to reveal to the children that their mother has recently died, and he’s been carrying her ashes around in a small Tupperware container. Many of the bit part characters of Asteroid City are introduced in fun little micro-scenes, all linked together in smooth camera moves.

Augie reveals to his children that their mother has died.

Outside the play:

The actor playing Augie within the play is introduced as a bit-part player. He asks the writer why Augie does something confusing in the third act. (“Why does Augie burn his hand on the Qwik-E Griddle?”) - the writer doesn’t know. The actor tosses out a theory (“He was looking for an excuse why his heart was beating so fast.”) The writer likes the theory quite a bit but prefers to leave the explanation out of the text.

The actor playing Augie, presumably trying to snag the juicy role of Augie, clumsily dresses in costume and delivers an emotional speech from the point of view of Augie, to his son, Woodrow, about his similarities to his now-dead mother.

The writer gives the part to the actor, who undresses: they kiss.

Within the play:

Woodrow is here in Asteroid City to participate in a science competition.

Augie seduces an actress, Midge, for a bit. He’s a war photographer. She’s reading lines for a movie she’s going to be in (yet another layer of story in this damnable story).

The science competition takes place, and is interrupted by an alien (puppet) stopping by to steal the city’s titular Asteroid.

The military quarantines the city.

There are loads of little micro-stories embedded in this larger story -

The director of the movie is going through a tough divorce and sleeping on set.
Augie’s father in law struggles to convince his grand-daughters not to bury their mother in a random hole they made.
The science nerd kids bond with one another over a word game.
The motel operator (Steve Carell) is running dozens of businesses.
The kids sneak pictures of the alien out of quarantine.
A teacher responds to the alien’s presence by continuing with her regular lesson plan. The kids refuse to play ball and only want to talk about the alien. Some local cowboys sing about it.
The writer of the play is working on a scene (which won’t be in the play) with a room full of prospective actors exploring “sleep”.

Augie runs more lines with Midge. She confronts him with the possibility that this may be developing into a serious relationship, and Augie responds by intentionally burning his hand on a Qwik-E Griddle.

A lead scientist confronts Woodrow to reassure him that all of this is happening for a meaning and that his curiosity will lead him forward.

Just as the military is about to un-quarantine the city, the alien returns very briefly to return the asteroid. The city is rapidly re-quarantined and everyone riots.

During the riot, Augie’s actor decides that he’s still unhappy with the answer to why Augie burns his hand on the Qwik-E Griddle, and rushes off-stage to confront the director. As he does, he walks by the alien, who is half out of costume and JEFF GOLDBLUM, who delivers his only line in the whole movie to someone who’s asking him a question:

“I don’t play him as an alien, I play him as a metaphor. That’s my interpretation.” “Metaphor for what?” “I don’t know, yet - we don’t pin it down.”

Augie’s actor confronts the director: he still doesn’t understand the play and he feels strange performing it every night. The director assures Augie that he’s doing it right and to just keep performing it, anyways.

Augie’s actor rushes outside, where he’s confronted by the actress who played Augie’s dead wife, in a scene that was cut: a dream sequence. She remembers the sequence exactly. The emotional content of the scene is Augie’s dead wife confronting Augie with the reality that he’ll have to make do without her.

It’s revealed now that the writer of the play died during the play’s production, explaining some of Augie’s actor’s confusion.

We cut back to the writer doing his workshop with all of the sleeping actors from earlier - but instead, each of the actors in turn faces the camera with a spotlight on their face to chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”, getting louder and louder until they all fade out.

These two scenes form the emotional climax of the film.

I can’t find the exact quote here, but someone on the internet pointed out that while Asteroid City has developed a reputation as being one of Wes Anderson’s least accessible films, he definitely still includes a scene where a bunch of actors shout the movie’s message at you.

This takes us to the epilogue. Augie wakes up late to discover that the city has been un-quarantined again, and everyone has gone home.

In an impromptu funeral for Augie’s lost wife, Woodrow reveals he no longer believes in god.

In the final scene of the movie, Augie and his son and father-in-law sit in a diner. Woodrow won the science prize, and he’s dating one of the other nerds. Augie is dating Midge, the actress. Augie’s father-in-law approves of this new relationship. Everyone drives off, into the matte painting at the back of the city.

Okay, What?

See, that’s why I said that this story isn’t really one that can be spoiled - because the dominant feeling, after watching it for the first time, is just… “what?”

“What just happened?”

“What did any of that mean?”

While it’s a sprawling, busy story, it doesn’t feel like it actually … goes together. A lot of stuff happens and you’re left kind of not understanding any of it.

Drawing the Parallel to House of Leaves

All of that was just to get to the point I’d like to make here.

So:

After the death of his father
The author of this work of fiction wrote a rambling, fragmented, confusing piece of layered metatextual fiction
Who’s core themes are grief and absurdist nihilism
As they struggle to find meaning in the loss of their loved one and find none.
The events of the story exist inside a fictitious framing story that’s somehow also itself fictional.
Within the story itself, the characters obsess over but can not grasp the meaning of the story.
The story (the fictitious one, at least) doesn’t really have a meaning.

These are the parallels I’m trying to draw between the two works.

Asteroid City’s a little kinder about where it ends up, though - while House of Leaves pitches that trying to understand the absurd and unknowable nature of reality will inevitably lead to obsession and madness, Asteroid City simply ends up at the softer “well, no use trying to figure it out, best just to go with it”.

tl;dr

House of Leaves is a story about a house that is an impossible mystery that will drive you mad trying to decipher it, in a book that is an impossible mystery that will drive you mad trying to decipher it, which is an allegory for death being an impossible mystery that will drive you mad trying to decipher it.

Asteroid City is a story about a meaningless asteroid that nobody understands, in a meaningless play that nobody understands, which is an allegory for life being a meaningless thing that nobody understands.

Asteroid City is Less Obnoxious About It, Though

I mean, less obnoxious. Not zero obnoxious.

Asteroid City is funny. House of Leaves examines its hollow nihilist core through an academic, horror, obsessive, mystery lens, whereas Asteroid City chooses wit, theatre, dumb camera tricks, and absurdly famous people delivering their lines like they’re reading them for the first time off of a cue card.

House of Leaves is about an absence of meaning: Asteroid City is about processing an absence of meaning and ultimately trying to work through it.

It delivers its story in a tight hour and 45 with so much trademark Wes Anderson deadpan delivery and tight, symmetrical camerawork that it almost seems like he’s becoming a caricature of himself.

But… I don’t know, if you’re going to have to slog through a shaggy dog story about the doomed quest for meaning, might as well do it in less than 2 hours and have Tom Hanks show up in it.

Missed You

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I was away for a week.

Anyways, this is how a cat tells you “I missed you, never leave me again.”

The Watchmaker's Dilemma (2)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“Wow, Curtis, you had so much free time during your recent vacation, did you do anything cool?”

Ha ha, no, definitely not.

One thing I did do, however, was make a video game.

Play it Here.

I forgot how to make things in Godot (I learned some Godot back in Godot 3.4-4.0 era, but forgot how it all works in the intervening years) and in order to relearn, I thought I’d build something really simple. For some reason, I had a real itch to rebuild “The Watchmaker’s Dilemma”, the first video game I ever built, fifteen years ago, a game who’s entire purpose is being frustrating and opaque.

The game’s mostly about figuring out how to place these tiles.

Now YOU TOO can be as irritated by my game design choices as two to seven of my friends, decades ago!

I made all of the art and the music myself (I mean, look at it, obviously), and this one works a little different from the original: now it creates a unique puzzle every day you play it, although I did very little work no work at all to guarantee all days are possible to solve.

How Did We Get Here

Okay, so, I let my Godot skills get real rusty over the past little bit.

I disappeared down a bit of a Rust programming rabbit hole, and now I’m pretty confident in my ability to build web services in Rust!

I spent a good portion of this year building something for a family friend: he was curious if I could build a website that would allow him to manage exactly one form that he has to manage, and I felt like it would be an interesting learning exercise, so I went off and build https://concrete.tube, a whole website that provides exactly just that one form and nothing else. I delivered it and I don’t think he’s looked at it at any point. Ah, well.

Well… I mean, it took me about six months of spare time to build, it has some other features in it than just the form:

You can create a company!
You can log in to that company with a phone number, or an email address, or a password.
You can invite people to that company using an invite code!
You can change your phone number, or your email address, or your password, or your name.
You can find your company from a list of companies supported on the site,
You’re an admin, and you can throw people out of your company, or lock their accounts so that they can’t log in.
There’s a messaging system that lets you (an admin) see when someone has created a new form in your company.
The forms have a signature field that you can actually sign, like, by drawing a signature.
When the form is created, the admin gets an email!
There’s a company called “Admin” containing just me, the superadmin, and everybody in the Admin company (just me) can log in to every other Company for freeeeee.

So, a bunch of super basic website plumbing.

Okay, I’m going to admit: there’s an ulterior motive, here.

This is intended to be the base for the next version of Groovelet!

Perhaps you remember this? This hopelessly complicated online RPG that was connected to a server despite having no ability whatsoever to interact with other players, with a minute long turn tick timer to keep everybody synchronized, making the gameplay painfully slow.

It wasn’t terribly good. I will love it forever. It was my third video game (2021), after The Watchmaker’s Dilemma (2010?) and Horse Drawing Tycoon (2015), (and before “Detective Capilano (2023)”) and I wouldn’t regard it as anywhere near complete, but eventually I feel like the whole thing hit kind of a dead end.

So, for the last little bit, I’ve been gearing up to take another crack at it.

This time I’m hoping to go a LOT less, you know, hopelessly convoluted (sidenote: I will fail at this.) .

The version one I’m targeting is a website where you can create a little group, and log in, and play simple games, and invite friends to your group, and, by playing simple games, get points and stuff, to, like, customize a cute little town together?

I’m looking at inspirations like NeoPets, PIxel Cat’s End, Ferry Halim’s Orisinal (somehow still working?!?) and The New York Times Games platform.

And lo, the code powering concrete.tube can already provide a lot of the meaty undergirding for a project like that! It’s like I’ve been working on it for months! because I have!

Godot Re-Rears Its Ugly Head

So what’s a good tool for making fun little games?

Godot!

No, no, hear me out: I tried out Godot earlier, and abandoned it for a bunch of very salient reasons:

Making a large game and delivering it via web WASM is a bad idea, because WASM has no way to manage memory in the long term, virtually guaranteeing that the game will become unstable and crash eventually.
Making a large game and delivering it via web WASM is a bad idea, because delivering 300MB of video game over the web is a lot to ask of someone potentially on a mobile phone connection.
Actually using Godot 4.0 on the Web platform called for a special server flag you had to set to enable an experimental threaded performance mode that was lightly supported.
There was, in Godot 4.0, an absolutely gamebreakingly bad bug on Mac/iOS platforms that just completely broke the game on these platforms.

But! but!

There are good reasons to want to use Godot, rather than developing web games directly in JavaScript:

JavaScript’s tools for building anything “video gamey” with the canvas are a handful of libraries that haven’t been updated since 2015 with documentation entirely in half-German half-English.
Building anything fun with React and CSS is about as exciting as dentistry. Great way to build Eve Online (Just Spreadsheets Edition), though.
Godot’s actually put a lot of effort into their web WASM builds since I last looked, including fixing a bunch of the serious problems it had before.
Many of my concerns about Godot are less salient for small games.

So: a new little project! Let’s make a little taster Godot game and get it on to the website. This doesn’t have to be big, or impressive - in fact, what I want here is something small and dumb as a proof of concept!

ALSO I want to focus on more small, dumb games ANYWAYS, because one of the problems with Original Groovelet was that its scope was unmanageably huge and I’m just one guy.

So… what to build?

And I was thinking about it, and I thought…

“Why not rebuild The Watchmaker’s Dilemma? It’s the first game I ever made, and while it was, you know, terrible, there’s at least one person who still loves The Watchmaker’s Dilemma: me!

The Watchmaker’s Dilemma

So, The Watchmaker’s Dilemma was a game that presented the player with a large empty grid, and gave that player a variety of square tokens with odd symbols on them, and those odd symbols had to be placed on the grid according to placement rules that… you don’t know.

Well, I know the placement rules, because I built the game, but you don’t, because you didn’t.

The game was slow, because it did a whole bunch of unnecessarily server-authoritative thinking, and also because calculations on a large NxM grid were expensive, and also because I was but a child and wrote a lot of hilariously inefficient Python code to run the game. It didn’t even keep active games in cache, it rehydrated the whole game state for every player on every move.

But, like, I actually quite liked the game! And of the people I showed the game to, I recall some of my friends enjoying it a little bit too!

Okay, so, let’s reimagine this as a simple, lightweight Godot game…

We’ll just start by mocking something up in Photoshop…

(with a much smaller, more manageable 5x5 grid)

and now it’s time to … watch a bunch of Godot tutorials.

god, I forgot almost all of this

At least it’s faster to learn the second or third time.

And, after a few days (I took some time off from work to donk around with stupid personal projects. Using vacation time to Go Places sounds expensive.)

Anyways, I make some forward progress on the game itself, and now the game could use some… sound.

Let’s talk about another one of my little obsessions:

Adaptive Music

Okay, so, again with Groovelet I ended up way, waaaaaay down a rabbit hole. See, I wanted a game with adaptive music, and I figured the best way to have music that adapts to what’s happening in the scene at hand would be to generate the music, using scene details to seed a bunch of stuff in the generator.

This was… well, an insane rabbit hole that ate time like candy.

And despite my learning more and more about music theory and construction in order to make it increasingly powerful, at the best of times it produced music that was, like, borderline listenable.

If you ever read Sid Meier’s autobiography (sidenote: Which I don’t recommend, mind you: it’s incredibly boring. He spends like 2 chapters talking about how much he likes trains, and also isn’t responsible for most of the good Civilization games.) , it turns out he spent a bunch of time chasing the generative music dragon too, and even with all of his industry clout he ended up producing something that was utterly unmarketable.

C.P.U. Bach

C.P.U. Bach (also known as Sid Meier’s C.P.U. Bach) is an interactive music-generating program designed by Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs for the 3DO. It can create Baroque music in the style of Bach for various keyboard, wind, or string instruments and in a variety of forms (e.g., concerti, fugues, minuets, chorales). The compositions are then performed by the software with synchronous 3D graphics on screen showing the virtual instruments being played…

So, like, what kind of adaptive music can I make, in, like… one day?

Well, okay, here’s a really simple idea. This is something that I saw in a presentation at EA like 10 years ago: just… just make a bunch versions of the same music track, play them all at the same time, and then depending on how the scene is going, you can jump between the different versions of the track.

This would require that I actually compose a piece of original music.

Huh.

Well I guess I’ll finally need to learn how to use a DAW.

So, I do a little research online and pick out FL Studio (my old pal Fruity Loops from high school!), give them the amount of money appropriate for their least expensive version, and I’m off to the races.

Okay, so, I’m … I’m not a great composer. Not even an amateur composer. I’m GUY LE DONKING AROUND WITH A DAW FOR THE FIRST TIME.

But, at least, after spending all of that time trying to figure out how to make generative music into a thing, I understand some of the most basic basics of music theory, and I manage to poop out some basic tracks.

Then, I wire them all up in the game: when a successful token is placed, the song “level” is upgraded, and when a failed token is placed, the song “level” is downgraded.

It works! Huzzah!

And while it’s not exactly Good Composer McGee, it’s a damn sight more listenable than anything the generator ever managed.

That Was All I Needed To Do All Along?

It’s so weird, after devoting months and months and months of my life to the stupid “let’s build a generative music engine” path, just composing the music myself like an idiot, and I managed to get something working in one day.

BC Backcountry

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Every shitty little town in BC is just, like, a gas station with two pumps (one of them out of order), a museum, a motel that looks like it’s actively operated by bed bugs, a church, a hand-drawn sign that says something insane like “HAIRCUTS $5 TURN NOW”, and always, always, a cannabis store.

if you wonder why folks from metro Vancouver don’t believe that there’s anybody else living in BC it’s because every other town for 400 kilometers is just this bullshit

that, or open-air retirement communities like Nanaimo or Penticton where the average age is 70 and the average political stance is “terrified of wi-fi, but you can’t tell if it’s for nazi reasons or granola reasons”

Long Story Short

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

A new story from the creator of Bojack Horseman, this one is a family comedy.

The gimmick is that it’s set, kind of variably, in the years between 1950 and 2025 - different scenes and stories are set at important moments in the life of each of these characters.

Most of these characters are awful in one way or another, and you get to see exactly how and why they turned out that way. It’s funny!

One of the questions I like to ask myself when I’m writing about media is “what is this about”?

Long Story Short is, as far as I can tell, about family toxicity and judaism.

Avi and Shira are both intensely resentful of their domineering, difficult, histrionic, narcissistic, overly critical mother… and, yet, mirror images of her in many ways.

This makes them difficult, self absorbed adults.

Yoshi’s a little different: as the youngest he got a lot less attention and focus, struggled with the low expectations everyone had for him as the youngest - and instead seeks roots and meaning and challenge as an adult while being a bit of a fuck-up.

This is in no small part exacerbated by his idiot best friend, a wealthy failson and object lesson in poor impulse control.

We don’t see idiot best friend as much past a certain point - which makes me wonder if Yoshi’s search for meaning and structure was helped along by something tragic happening to his doofus.

So, in large sense about how these adults are shaped by childhood experiences, and often for the worse.

This show is extremely and a lot about judaism.

The show revolves around the ceremonies and ritual of judaism, and it takes time to explore every character’s relationship with and reasons for interacting with (or not interacting with) judaism - whether it provides “something to believe in that’s not just work”, “structure and guidance”, “community and validation”, “a feeling of connection to lost relatives” - each character has a different relationship with their faith and it’s a big part of the show.

“There’s no wrong way to be Jewish.”

“But there is — a progressive egalitarian Conservative Judaism with an emphasis on ritual and community over faith and blind practice. That’s literally the only way it makes sense. I figured it out. And I gave it to my children because I love them. But they reject it because they want to reject me.”

I, uh, of course, don’t have much of a relationship with faith, but I don’t object to seeing people explain the myriad ways that it’s personally meaningful to them.

Anyways: it was good and I liked it. Season 2 confirmed, so more’s a-comin’.

Discourse griping

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Lately, Discourse has been including all kinds of generative AI features that I’d literally have to pay API providers to use, and aside from the actual, legitimate use case of spam detection in non-private communities, I can’t imagine who’s asked for any of these features.

“now your users can generate images right from discourse using your money”

yeah, well, before today they could have generated images using their money and posted that, how is this better?

“you can do sentiment analysis of posts in your community”

it’s a private community full of software developers over the age of 40, many with kids, the sentiment is always “tired”, I don’t need an AI to tell me that

I’m pretty sure the Discourse target market is exclusively late-Gen-X to Early Millennial because nobody else is old enough to even still want a forum, the Children communicate by sending furry VR-sona Tiktoks to private Discord communities

build an AI that automatically posts relevant quotes from The Simpsons (seasons 2-10) and reassures us that Final Fantasy VI and Cowboy Bebop were the apex of media and NOW we’re in business

“yes, millennial AI, you CAN has cheeseburger”

Venga Engeance

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Tiff: The Vengabus is coming.

Curtis: It’s… it’s already come. It’s 2025. The Vengabus has come and gone.

Tiff: It’s still coming, though.

Curtis: THE SECOND COMING OF THE VENGABUS

Tiff: And when it comes we’ll all get vengaraptured.

Canada Post

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“i support the lamplighter’s union! this is vital infrastructure that deserves public support, not a dying technology on its last years of life support”

but the message is undercut by my delivery, standing on a soapbox, lit by the very electrical grid and incandescent bulbs that are to blame for this whole mess

I think Canada Post should also get a monopoly on all packages as well as letter mail, it’d keep ’em in business in the new post-letter-mail universe, it’d keep good union jobs in town, and shit like Dragonfly, Purolator, FedEx, and Amazon Prime would all suffer (oh nooooo).

Suddenly your package takes 3-7 days to arrive instead of 15 minutes, but you can feel confident that the person delivering it didn’t have to pee in a bottle, that’s worth something.

if Canada Post rates make Amazon less competitive in Canada, oh noooooooo

“we’ve lost the worst jobs in Canada”

redline i tell you what

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0700

I have no idea where this came from but I need to share it with you:

I Have Too Much Damn Cabbage

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

The CSA is great…ish.

A few weeks in a row they’ve sent me home with a huge head of cabbage.

My fridge is filling up with cabbages.

Now, I like cabbage as much as the next guy, but I have, like, 3 moves with cabbage:

Make a big coleslaw, eat like half of it, throw the rest out.
Stir-fry it and serve it with rice for dinner. (Alongside A MEAT, usually)
Toss chunks of it in borscht.

Four moves if you include the exciting game of cabbage ball.

Since cabbage in the fridge lasts for yonks, I’ve been focusing on trying to eat other CSA vegetables - the ones that go bad basically right away, like zucchini and kale - and letting the cabbages build up.

So, now, I have three gigantic cabbages in my fridge! This is starting to become a cabbage problem!

Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make some ferments.

I watch some videos online (this is usually the way to begin):

and I’m off to the races - well, not quite off to the races. I don’t really have a good container for fermenting things - you know, “gigantic jar” or “multiple gigantic jars”.

Some people even have these awesome giant earthenware self-burping pots:

So cool! But also: that doesn’t look like it would be practical to cram into my dishwasher.

I found a beautiful one made in Canada on Etsy for like $200 and I thought “nice! but 2L is kinda small, actually, and also I am not going to spend that much for a hard to clean pot that I only use once or twice.”

Lotta good buzz behind these relatively inexpensive E-Jen Kimchi Pots:

For Fermentation, We Love E-Jen Containers

For fermentation of all kinds (like sauerkraut and kimchi), we love E-Jen Kimchi Containers. They keep vegetables in the brine for lacto-fermentation.

So, I picked up two little (“little”) 3L E-Jen tubs (one for Kimchi, one for Sauerkraut) and got to work.

Two big heads of cabbage cut into delicate ribbons filled my biggest bowl, the one I use for breadmaking, and I thought “oh no, there is no way this is all going to fit into these two little 3L buckets”. I separated the cabbage into two teams, “sauerkraut team” and “kimchi team”, and added onion, garlic, jalapeno, bell pepper, coriander, black pepper, and mustard seed to sauerkraut team, as well as 2% of the mixture’s weight in salt.

Kimchi team got more of a workout: the cabbage got dressed with green onion, gigantic white radish I found at the H-Mart, and some jalapeno pepper. It spent some time with salt, then had all of the salt washed off again, then I added a slurry of flour (not rice flour, just flour flour, sue me), water, onion, garlic, fish sauce, anchovy paste, salt, and a whole bunch of starting-to-get-a-little-long-in-the-tooth gochugaru.

Surprisingly, the intense process of beating up these cabbages significantly en-smallened them, and they did, in fact, fit into these 3L containers!

it has been two days

my whole home smells like the inside of a garlic’s butthole

Brief strategy/stank management update.

Weeks Later:

Okay, so!

How’d it turn out?

The Sauerkraut: 8/10, delicious sauerkraut. It’s sauer, it’s krauty, it has a nice balance of flavors, it’s great on hot dogs, it’s everything I wanted the sauerkraut to be.

The Kimchi: 2/10, dubiously edible. I sent some home with some friends - for which I might have to apologize because this is some trash-tier kimchi. I let the Kimchi ferment for much less time than the sauerkraut, at first, because fresh kimchi can be super delicious (local Korean restaurant Sooda serves a fresh kimchi that’s real good) - but I’m relatively certain that I used way, way too much garlic, because this kimchi is so eye-wateringly pungent that it burns when it hits your tongue - not good spicy burn, baaaad garlic burn. This absolutely eradicates any of the interesting, varied, funky flavors and replaces them. With garlic.

When I was new to cooking, I thought “there is no such thing as too much garlic”, and then I learned that even this beautiful bulb has its limits, around the time that the person who sat nearest to me on the bleachers was 3 seats away.

When I went out of town, I tried leaving it on the shelf for another week to see if some more intense fermentation could arrest that garlicky attack on the senses, but nay, I came back and it was just as potent as before.

It’s basically inedible when raw, and so the only way I can imagine using it is in stir fries where I can tame some of that brutal allium pungency with some cooking. Also there’s pounds of this stuff.

My granddad used to say: you can’t make a kitchen mistake so bad that you can’t eat it, unless you do, then don’t eat it. This kimchi is definitely on the border.

A Short Hike

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In 2019’s “A Short Hike”, you’re a girl, Claire, and also a humanoid bird on - what is essentially - an Animal Crossing island, and in order to get cel-phone reception you need to get to the top of the mountain.

Getting to the top of the mountain is not terribly hard, and most people finish A Short Hike in about 90 minutes.

It’s got crunchy Playstation 1 graphics, a very intuitive and pleasant control scheme, and the little world of A Short Hike feels vibrant and playful and fun.

Pleasant, relaxing music plays and there’s basically no part of the world that doesn’t have something for you to do, collect, or explore.

You can glide around.

I really like it when games are, you know, efficient, they take a little bit of time to show you what they’ve got, they don’t overstay their welcome, and A Short Hike - well, it’s not LONG but it’s lovely. Completionists might dig a lot deeper into this game, opening all of the chests, finding all of the golden feathers and shells, resolving every quest on the island, and I bet that wouldn’t take more than another couple of hours.

What a cool little game!

If you have about the amount of time it would take to watch a medium-length film, I recommend it.

Idiot Trap

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 13:00:00 -0700

“Idiot trap” content, like, anything that circulates around exploiting people not understanding what “dihydrogen monoxide” or “arabic numerals” are, I think that’s kind of a weak-ass form of humor.

OH HO HO YOU ABSOLUTE FOOL, YOU DID NOT KNOW THAT DI-HYDROGEN MONOXIDE IS ACTUALLY NOTHING MORE THAN SIMPLE H20, OR EVERYDAY WATER!

I thought that kind of thing was very funny when I was a teenager.

There is a caveat, though, that people who immediately overreact to the idea of kids being taught “arabic numerals” are definitely showing off Oops, All Racism! - although the kind of reactionary conservative voices that tend to fall for this are also exactly the kind of folk for whom being accidentally racist is a feature, not a bug.

Smash or Pass

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

YouTube has recommended me a video called “Smash or Pass: All 898 Pokemon”, which I think is as good a sign as any that the life of a content creator isn’t something we should be idealizing

Triangle Agency Again

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, months ago I discovered Triangle Agency. (Link to the previous article where I talked about it a bunch.)

Lo, months later and Quinns has reviewed Triangle Agency.

Here are some of his thoughts, in short:

This game is hilarious. It is actively very funny to play and read.
Because the game’s book is an in-universe tome, it often sacrifices clarity or practicality as a reference text for voice.
It is an enormous amount of work to DM. Giving everyone demigod-like powers while also trying to keep an investigation on the rails (“whoops, you vanished an important clue”) while also keeping track of each players’ 3 Relationships (played by other people at the table) while also keeping track of Commendations and Demerits, while also having the antagonist’s actions hammered into a little box by Chaos Points and The Spending of Chaos Points On One of Twelve Different Anomalous Things The Baddie Can Do… well it’s all a lot for one person to keep track of.
The starting kit afforded to players is enormously powerful and flexible and complicated, which means that by the time they start accruing Legacy Stuff they’re already a little overwhelmed, and then there’s so much Legacy stuff.
A big part of the role of a DM is helping your players navigate the rules, and this is made more complicated by each player operating by a different subset of rules, and these rules are private to that player, rather than public table information.
If you’re playing strictly according to the rules, even the GM is not supposed to have seen the playwalled content, although having personally perused the stuff the GM is not supposed to see I have no idea how a GM is supposed to run a game where the players’ have all of these - often confusingly written - rules to themselves. A simple private misunderstanding could badly derail this game.
At some point Quinns’ players just stopped paying attention to new skills and abilities (keep in mind: the starting kit is So Powerful) meaning that nobody understood the Playwalled content, because the players didn’t read it and Quinns hadn’t seen it.
Quinns recommends this game either for
- Your most autistic friends (sidenote: my choice of words, not his) , a team of savants able to execute and enjoy this games’ massive amount of procedural gubbins.
- People who don’t care too much about playing exactly or even approximately by the rules and just enjoy the ability to warp reality around them with high-octane nonsense.

That’s not exactly a sparkling review, but it’s definitely interesting.

Gender Gap

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:00:00 -0700

there was a huge gender gap in STEM and now you’re mad at trans people? I swear to god it’s like you haven’t even met an engineer, they see a problem and they fix it

Here's a Tip

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

there’s an enormous incentive for payment providers like moneris and square to make an “18%”, “20%”, “22%” tip window that’s increasingly difficult to navigate out of, which is why I’m surprised nobody’s adopted my clever “skill testing tip window” idea where you have to win a little game to escape it at all

Frequencies

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In the latest episode of Linus Tech Tips, they chat with a room sound design guy and he mentions that when they’re EQ-ing music to play on a PA, they cut the mids way down because it helps everyone’s conversations stay legible not to compete with vocal frequencies and I’d… honestly never thought about that, but it makes sense and is neat

Hold the Door

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0700

So, when we moved into our new place, the front door was very bad? Just, like, an inside door mounted on the outside, warped, with peeling paint, letting in so much cold, and instead of a deadlock just a doorknob lock.

When the doorknob lock started to fully jam, rendering the door unlockable, instead of replacing the knob, we replaced the full door with a whole new frame and insulated steel door for ~$4000 CAD (I’m not a confident enough homeowner to replace a full doorframe on my own, we paid A Guy).

Tiff really wanted a smart lock: I was dubious about the utility of the smart lock because I don’t trust anything that connects to wifi, but we verified that this one works as a proper deadlock even when unpowered and can be opened with a passcode, which means I can uninstall the app and forget it exists (which is good, because as it turns out the app is dogshit and the lock often struggles to connect to wifi, meaning it’s not actually that SMART).

We also replaced the knob with a more ergonomic door opening system: a lever. Building codes, I think, strongly discourage knobs now because they’re hard for people with mobility issues to operate, and the mobility issue that I have is that I’m often struggling with EVERY BAG OF GROCERIES I PURCHASED on the way into the front door, because two-trips are for COWARDS. My arms criss-crossed with the purple streaks of the one-tripsman, I appreciate the easier to open door handle.

Unfortunately, our too intelligent by half cat also determined that the new handle is much more ergonomic, and can now open our front door on his own. We have to keep it locked 100% of the time now. The smart lock has been configured to lock itself if left alone, so that’s fine, but I think it is pretty funny.

It was a few instanes of my wondering how the door had opened on its own before I realized what was going on. Fortunately, when Zapp escapes, he mostly just hangs out in the vicinity of our house.

Sakamoto Days and Ranma

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Sometimes I feel like I need to justify my popcorny TV watching habits: so, I watch TV while I code, which means that I can’t watch anything deep or cerebral because that’s too engaging. No Pantheon, no Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, no Arcane: when I’m coding I need something more in the Brooklyn Nine Nine territory.

Anyways: Sakamoto Days!

It’s a comedy/action Netflix anime that’s… okay, I guess?

See, Mr. Sakamoto here is basically One Punch Man, goofy looking but essentially an invincible god.

Mr. Sakamoto used to be the #1 Hitman in the entire assassination world, and then he met a girl, gave up man-hitting, had a family and got fat, and here we are. He gets a huge bounty on his head, and spends most episodes fighting off standard anime wild & wacky assassins.

As in One Punch Man: because Mr. Sakamoto is essentially established to be an unkillable force of nature, any time the show wants to manufacture any drama, they need to bring in some of his less powerful friends to get in a fight while Mr. Sakamoto is having a nap or whatever.

As in One Punch Man: it starts out as an action comedy but after a while they seem to forget the “comedy” part and just start making what feels like a pretty standard FIGHTY FIGHT ANIME.

The Regular Guy to Clownpants Ratio of Realism in Comic Universes

One thing you have to ask yourself when going in to a show: how many regular guys with guns would it take to defeat a single weirdo in clown pants? That makes a real impact on the show.

Sliding scale, here, like, in a realistic universe, one might expect that the exchange rate would be just 1 - one regular guy with a gun could handily defeat a weirdo in clown pants.

In a comic book universe, there is no amount of regular guys with a gun who could ever beat a weirdo in clown pants:

Sakamoto Days exists in this kind of universe: Mr. Sakamoto is fast enough and strong enough that there is literally nothing that a billion yen price on his head has to threaten him with except mild inconvenience as he’s constantly having to repair bullet holes in his little convenience store.

Once we’ve established that, the show goes with just a time-tested anime plot: an endlessly rotating Carnival of Killers.

I’m going to admit it: I love a Carnival of Killers. Seriously, give me a show or a story and say “you’re going to fight a numbered list of guys with wacky themes” and I’m all aboard.

Mega man. Pure cinema.

Scott Pilgrim. Love it.

I’m also told it’s a reliable way to give your players something to do in a TTRPG like D&D. Things are feeling a little lost? Well, then, how about 5 to 8 wacky colorfully themed foes to fight? Doesn’t that just activate something primal in your psyche? Maybe it’s just me.

We’ve all seen it before, we’ll all see it again: we introduce some guy covered in pool cues and chalk, and he’s like “MY NAME IS CUEBALL” and then he makes a crazy face, licks some blood off of his pool cue, kills some mook in an impressively arcane way while shouting “bank shot” and laughing maniacally, and then he tries to take on Mr. Sakamoto who fully whips his ass with some shoelaces and some gum he had in his pockets (sidenote: technically Cueball does not actually exist in Sakamoto Days, but, like, honestly this is not far off from the formula) .

Once that starts to get a little old, we start going to some of the other tired anime cliches - now an arc where we’re trying to figure out why Mr. Sakamoto has a price on his head, to give him something to do - eventually, in order to do that, Mr. Sakamoto and his friends have to enrol in assassin school, putting them through a complex multi-round gamified selection process (sidenote: every anime turns into Hunter X Hunter if you leave it in the sun for long enough) .

I honestly don’t mind watching a show where a guy shows up with a weird hat and we get to watch for a while and go “I wonder what his deal is”, and then he explains his whole deal and then there’s a little fight and we move along.

guess what, his deal is that he likes movies, and also is an insane murder guy, because they’re all insane murder guys

Every now and then Mr. Sakamoto has a fight that’s hard enough that he has to get serious, at which point he moves so fast that he instantly loses a tonne of weight and turns into Mr. Sakamoto (original recipe):

then, after the fight is over, he gains all of the weight back right away:

This isn’t, like, a metaphor or anything, like, other characters can see it too. What the show never mentions or even addresses is that his moustache comes and goes with the fat.

Eventually the show gets tired of this and an acupuncturist takes away Mr. Sakamoto’s ability to do this forever, which is, honestly, the better choice, IMO.

Ranma 0.5

So, I’ve long been familiar with the general idea of Ranma ½ - it was a popular anime when I was a kid, like Tenchi Muyo! or Macross Plus.

“So, it’s an anime where there’s a boy, and when they’re soaked with water, they turn into a girl. Also I guess there is a panda?”

I never really poked into it any further, although I was always curious what the deal was.

Lo, a new anime adaptation of Ranma ½ launched, like, just recently (2024, apparently) - and shortly after was picked up by Netflix for global distribution. I guess if there’s any time to get into it, it’s now.

First of All, The Look

In my opinion, immaculate. This looks like 90’s anime but, you know, if you actually go back and watch 90’s anime it’s often kind of a mess - lots of clever tricks to make the most of a low animation budget, filmed in glorious 333x480 - none of that, here, this looks expensive, high-resolution, crisp and smooth.

Then they’ll throw in some crisp modern motion graphics for chunky sound effects!

It’s, like, evocative of manga, but stylish and well put together.

Also, a fight broke out and for a while they replaced all of the blacks with purples. Neat!

Like, I don’t know why they did this but it looked visually arresting.

Second of All: Wait, This is What Ranma Has Been About All Along?

The only thing I knew going in was that Ranma was a gender swapping comedy manga.

I figured, based on the concept, that Ranma would be a dumb raunchy sex comedy and/or a comedy of errors about Ranma hiding either his girl or boy sides in a variety of situations.

You know, like a Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire.

But, uh, no! Not at all!

I mean, it contains gender-swapping, but it doesn’t lean on the western comedy tropes I would expect given that as a premise.

What is It, Then?

Ranma is a boy. He’s cursed to be a girl sometimes when doused in cold water - but he was born a boy, prefers to be a boy, identifies as a boy all the time, and so is pretty firmly “boy”. Hot water turns him back, which is why “giant pot of hot water” makes an appearance in nearly every episode.

For reasons that largely don’t matter, he’s stuck to be arranged to marry a girl named Akane. They’re both super young, so they don’t have to actually get married yet, but… someday. They don’t like each other very much at first, so their dads are waiting it out, so I guess these two just… go to high school together for now. There’s tsundere romantic tension between the two.

Let’s go to the 3-Venn diagram describing the core properties of every single Shonen anime (sidenote: I’m only slightly exaggerating) :

Dragonball Z? Fighty.

Love Hina? Horny.

Yakitate!! Japan? Goofy.

Cowboy Boop Boop? Mostly fighty, but a little bit horny and goofy.

Rurouni Kenshin? Fighty.

Inuyasha? Fighty.

Anyways, based on the limited data I had, I assumed that Ranma ½ would slide neatly into the “Horny” category, but I was wrong. It’s actually a little bit of everything, with way more “fighty” than I’d have expected!

See, Ranma Saotome is actually a super good fighty boy who fights super good, so a lot of the series is about Ranma getting in fights! Big overwrought anime fights! In fact, the series has to go to some pretty absurd lengths to keep Ranma constantly in a situation where he is always fighting something, considering how he’s a teenager in a regular Japanese school.

At one point, for example, the schools hold a … uh, combat gymnastics meet-up? Where the rules are, the girls are supposed to hold a no-holds-barred cage match, but they’re only allowed to fight with … gymnastics stuff?

Or a different episode, where a random girl invites the characters to a high stakes skating duel that is somehow also a fight, and even though the character have basically no serious skating experience they agree immediately.

In fact, any character in this show can point at Ranma or Akane, declare a fight with any stakes and any rules, and they’ll immediately accept that. If I were to point at Ranma and say “you and me in a computer hacking challenge, and if I win I get the deed to your father’s dojo” they’d be like “I GUESS I HAVE TO LEARN PROGRAMMING!”

That covers “fighty” and “goofy”, as for “horny” - well,

Remember how I figured “a bunch of the humor is going to be derived from Ranma hiding or concealing his gender?” Nope! Ranma seems utterly unconcerned with keeping the secret of his gender transformations. I figured that’d be the engine of the show’s comedy, but in fact he seems pretty willing to reveal it to basically anybody who cares to listen. In fact, the comedy often lives in the fact that despite this, nobody outside of the core family ever seems to clue in.

But since his transformation requires, essentially, being doused in water, like 50% of this show is spent with Ranma in various stages of dunking himself in water.

Anyways: I was curious what Ranma is, and now I know!

It’s… kinda dumb! I don’t mind it at all!

you should read the gay dog and bunny webcomic

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Since the 00’s, I’ve been a fan of web-comics (sidenote: short for “webular comic entertainments”) . Anybody with the wherewithal to create images and put them on the internet could self publish comics, and some weird and wild stuff has definitely come out of that over the years.

I still follow all the comics and webcomics subreddits. I still want to see all of the random comic content that every stranger puts out there, in all of its myriad quality.

One of the biggest genres on reddit’s webcomics forums? Hornyposting.

It’s super hard to find a way to make money as a webcomics artist, as far as I can tell. I don’t think it’s a terribly profitable choice of career.

Like, Creux is a very talented artist, and they spend all of their time hornyposting because it’s a reliable way to get users to follow their Patreon. “Do you want NSFW content featuring these characters you’ve just met? because it can be yours for only $X/mo” is - a legitimate monetization model. Gotta respect the hustle.

There are also, like, five or six webcomic artists also trying to abuse the “hornyposting to Patreon” pipeline, and I’m not going to list them all: most of them are not as talented as Creux but the fundamental concept is the same. Their comics exist in a 21-year-old-boy-brained world where the punchline is always sex or nudity. Tree? Nah, that’s a sex tree. Hat? Nah, that’s a sex hat.

… you know what, I don’t miss being a teenaged boy at all, it was exhausting.

The absolute top of the hornyposting heap is Oglaf, which, unlike most of the pinup artist collective, is, in my opinion, legitimately funny a lot of the time.

Swords Comic is excellent, and literally every comic is about a sword in some way. That’s… that’s dedication to the bit.

there’s this running character who’s just a cute little guy who goes on adventures, he’s the best:

There are guys who clearly are trying to survive in the now-dead field of newspaper comics:

One of my favorite genres is people who are clearly putting together their first ever web-comic and haven’t really put all of the pieces together, yet, and there’s a lot of that:

I don’t understand “My Dad is Dracula (and a OTHER THING)” guy, like, it’s got a Dinosaur Comics like cadence where it’s just a repeating formula, but it’s never really funny, but also I’m never really mad to see one of these:

this guy just started showing up and he’s an interesting and funny cartoonist with an unmistakable style

Shiki is sweet, and I swear to god I know more about her life than I do about some of my friends. Her dad died when she was very young! She got depressed and flunked out of engineering school! Now she’s trying to make it as a cartoonist!

there’s a fella who started doing a surreal horror series about a carnival

but the thing that dragged me here to write an article was Raw Dawg Comics, which is just…

This artist puts out new comics near-daily, has a style that’s a combination of “classic brushwork, bitcrushed” and “hyper-fluorescent patterned digital inking”, and creates these comics that are just, like, abstract and weird little vignettes.

And, you know what? I can’t think of anything I’ve seen on the internet that’s anything like this.

And the writing is surprisingly good, too.

Okay, that’s a bad example, but -

trapped in these weird little vignettes are a lot of evidence that Stahli and Bingus are in a pretty toxic relationship, which is consistent and develops over time.

What I did not expect from this artist was a 40-page-long story about Columbus Day, and yet, here we are:

What an interesting comic.

Wildlife

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I put a woven mat under my desk and attracted wildlife

Fish

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

My fish and chips came in a sheet of butcher paper with fake “newspaper” printed on it, because while “fish wrapped in newspaper” is a classic vibe, actual newsprint is dirty, ugly, and increasingly hard to come by. It’s reasonable to consider that the fake newspapers that we wrap fish in might outlast newspapers themselves, like the 3.5in floppy “save” icon, but for fish

the world sleeps

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Because I’m a night owl AND I live in Vancouver, which is about as far west as you can get, I feel like I’m kind of the last stop for the day.

like, there’s a rolling day going all over the world but I’m at the very tail end of the whole thing before it shuts down and starts all over again

Hat on a Hat

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

the phrase “a hat on a hat” is used to describe when you’re overworking a joke or idea - like, the joke itself is already a funny hat, and you’re adding an unnecessary additional hat atop the pre-existing hat, needlessly complicating it while extracting no additional humor

the problem with “a hat on a hat” is that it that I do think a hat on a hat is, in fact, more funny

age verification

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

apparently YouTube is testing out age verification, but I’m going to be really surprised and extremely disappointed if their AI flags me as potentially under the age of 18, on account of my Google account was created in 2006

you can just make stuff up

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

one thing that IRL board games have that digital board games can never have is that after six or seven plays with friends, you unlock a new mode where you’re just allowed to change game rules if you think it’ll make the game more fun

Upsides

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“upside down” is an easy term for when something’s orientation is inverted, but people ignore the useful “upside up” for when something is correctly oriented and “upside left” for when something has been knocked over

My Cousin Vinny: Ace Attorney

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0700

look at what I found

source:

camping sucks though

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:00:00 -0700

So, with the pandemic finally kinda nearing behind us, I was planning on going to the United States and doing a bunch of geeky stuff - PAX, MagWest, maybe JoCoCruise - but then instead the USA came down with a bad case of the fascism and I got stuck at home doing camping instead.

Thing is, after camping, like, three times, I’m not convinced that I like camping so much as I enjoyed buying and trying out camping gear. That’s the real sport, I think.

If you aren’t way in to the beautiful outdoors, Canada can be boring as shit, y’all, this whole ass country is like if Montana were 50 times bigger and exactly as boring.

Honestly, though, buying a whole bunch of camping shit and going camping a bunch of times turned out to be, like, a fraction of the cost of going anywhere and doing anything, so that’s nice.

At the expense, of, like, going to nowhere and doing nothing and eating sandwiches in the dirt next to like 18 other families.

return to office

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

CBC: Employees ‘upset’ about return to office and prefer flexible work

As more and more employers order their workers back to the office, employees say they like the flexibility to work from home — and some returning to corporate workplaces aren’t so happy about being forced to return.

I get particularly het up about this exact topic.

WFH’s effect on productivity is so marginal that papers struggle to prove any kind of correlation, either for or against, and its effect on employee happiness is noticeable and significantly positive, so the justification for return to office is:

not enough people are paying attention to the executive suite
let’s keep commercial real estate profitable
corporate culture

Can we just hire a potemkin office of young underemployed actors to treat the CEO like a big boy so that everyone else can get work done?

that’s what executive assistants are for

What is this glorious corporate culture we’re trying so hard to preserve? I think people are overestimating the cultural cachet of low-pile grey carpet, fake plastic plants, and saying “low hanging fruit” to a room full of sweaty people in collared shirts and Dockers slacks.

what will become of the men’s loafer industry

I know, I know, the company’s extroverts need 6-8 meetings a day because if nobody speaks to them in a 30 minute span their ego will collapse like a dying star

but I work with those same people in a WFH environment and they just frantically spam the slack huddle button, they’re doing FINE

and as an introvert I don’t know why their social dysfunction should be MY problem.

I’m angry that employee happiness isn’t even apparently a factor in company decisions.

If your average company discovered that they could increase profits by half of a half of a percentage by playing a high-pitched squealing noise on loudspeakers at all time I’m sure they’d immediately adopt the squealing loudspeaker in a heartbeat.

Look, everybody who’s not competent enough with computers to thrive in a WFH situation is going to retire or die in the next 5 years, we’re going to have to work together to bury cubicles and open-office work plans where they belong: in the past.

UIs

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

the only kinds of UIs I make are plain, utilitarian, retro, and unfriendly

fake board games

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

apparently r/boardgames doesn’t appreciate my creativity

thankless rust

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i did a programming joke by editing an xkcd

reverse impostor syndrome

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

it’s kind of the opposite of “impostor syndrome”, as I think of myself as a thoroughly boring person with a skill-set that’s essentially as common as “accountant” - like, it turns out that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a chubby nerd who’s good at computers and python and servers and stuff

it’s not just because we’re absurdly common, it’s also because we’re super bad at dodging rocks

“oh, you’re a python/javascript server developer who can also do a bit of Rust? oh you have a lot of opinions about databases? Okay, tell me about the video game you’re OBVIOUSLY developing in your spare time.”

mamma mia

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

when I went to pick up my pizza, the person who went to grab my order said “we loved your order” and then shouted “it’s the guy!!!” to the kitchen and they all, collectively, shouted “mamma mia!”

the pizza was pretty good

the support group is awful

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

The doctor told me I was allergic to survivorship bias which is why I’m not allowed near any more short punchy airport business books.

The Gamemaster's Tarot

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

What is this?

Many games and game systems use the Tarot deck as a conflict resolution mechanism, and many new game masters — and writers — like to turn to the Tarot for inspiration.

The reason for this seems pretty clear: the Tarot deck contains a lot of bold, memorable archetypes. It’s like a hundred-year-old miniaturized version of TvTropes that you can roll out in order to generate ideas on the fly. It’s a starting point to help stave off the tyranny of the blank page.

This book is intended to serve as a starting-off point: what do these cards mean? How might I use them in a role-playing game or as writing inspiration?

For each card I try my best to describe the card’s interpretation, as well as lay out some characters, hooks, locations, treasures, and names that might be associated with that card in specific. A lot of these interpretations are also very broad: I’m not here to write your stories for you, just to give you some ideas to riff on.

Read The Whole Book, Here

the uncanny valley of being kind

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I want to come up with some kind of clever epigram about how sad it is that an AI effectively pretending to be kind, optimistic and uncritical feels so obviously inhuman.

Some people are out there experiencing interest and kindness for the first time at the hands of a machine we designed to be more upbeat than we are.

it’s going to be so devastating when this machine is tailored to do that while also selling us the new Toyota Highlander

Camp Cat

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 09:00:00 -0700

He’s learning how to camp with us:

Junk Drawer D&D

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0700

The ideal level of abstraction and prep for a D&D dungeon is a graph that looks like this:

If you are the kind of player who likes a complex digital battlemat, or - heck, even going so far as to prepare full on 3D physical dungeons:

Well - more power to you. But I’m here to advocate for what is, essentially, the opposite thing entirely:

I think that you should try playing D&D with loose trash.

If you have a Chessex grid, wet-erase pens, and loose trash like poker chips, erasers, and pepper mills - well, all of the effort of establishing your scenes and characters and stakes are going to come down to your ability to describe and improvise.

You must consistently establish and maintain the scene without having to have gone so far as to prep a whole thoughtfully detailed graphical battlemat environment, and in doing so - you might find that your game moves a lot more smoothly without the battlemat.

This helps to keep your universe light, flexible, and reactive: if you have poured hours into a battlemat your players are definitely going to have a fight on that battlemat, but if your area is a series of nodes with light descriptions then it is much easier to have the entire environment stay responsive to your players.

What if the fight takes place in the courtyard rather than the ampitheatre? What if no fight takes place at all?

It leans much more heavily on improvisation and evocative description than prep, but the idea is that what you’re prepping is things like storyline beats, big ideas, neat treasure and interesting locations rather than specifically deciding “this dresser has 10gp sitting within”.

This also makes it harder to differentiate between stuff you’ve explicitly planned and stuff that’s “off the rails” - if your players start chasing a loose thread, you can make it up as you go along, and because that storyline path is ALSO made out of pepper shakers and loose screws, it can feel like you planned it all along.

But How Do You Fill a Battle Scene With Interesting Terrain?

The Battlemat isn’t just there to be evocative! It’s also there to provide interesting scenery for your players to have a fight atop.

So: build the battle mat as part of the session.

For an important battle scene with my players, I pulled out the chessex battlemat, started by drawing key scene items I knew would be present, and then described the “vibe” and asked my players for items to help fill in the scenery. “It’s a huge workshop. What’s in the workshop?”

“Tool chests!” (ok!)

“Barrels of loose acid! For etching and cleaning!” (ok!)

“Piles of oil-soaked rags!” (ok!)

I’m an acceptable draftsperson, although you’d better believe that most of these were labeled for clarity.

This method has cons: if they return to the same workshop, it’s unlikely I’ll remember exactly where everything was (sidenote: although, surprisingly, and quite oddly, six months later I can still remember the layout of that workshop with some detail) . At the moment, however, what we were able to lay out was a pretty compelling battle scene with a lot of interesting scenery to bounce off of.

Loose. Reactive.

I didn't sign up for this

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The Dark Knight (2008) is a pretty memorable movie, but one character who sticks out to me is “cliche spouting cop”.

Every damn line from him is a tired cliche.

Nobody else seems to focus on this guy but I hate him.

Delta Green Tarot Conversion

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve devised a way to play Delta Green with one Tarot deck per agent.

What is Delta Green?

Quinns just covered it in a mammoth review:

But, in short, it’s a spy thriller where you fight lovecraftian horrors.

Call of Cthulhu, but set in the modern day.

And I want to tinker with it.

The d100 is Fine, Actually

The d100 is an awfully rare and difficult to find die:

Okay, nobody has one of those, uh, usually two of these:

So, in Delta Green, you might have a skill with “66”, and in order to succeed at a check with that skill, you need to roll <= 66.

This is a very natural, very easy-to-understand system.

Percentage-based checks will feel very familiar to anybody familiar with games like X-Com or Fallout:

I don’t know why, but for some reason d100s feel a little antiquated and stuffy to me. The idea that you have a 38% chance to hit a gremlin with your pistol feels a little bit too granular to me.

I suspect that the game would run perfectly fine if you put a little effort into discarding the second d10 entirely. Can you really feel the difference between an 85% chance and an 8/10 chance?

That’s not a real concern, though.

Here’s the real concern:

I would like to use Tarot decks for Delta Green, and a d100 is not a deck of Tarot cards.

So the problem I’m trying to solve here is not mechanical, but simply one of preference.

Each Player Starts With Their Own Tarot Deck, As Does the GM

This is important, for a few reasons:

Player customization: in the same way that players like to bring their own really nice dice to games, I’d like to support players bringing their own decks. Or using one of my decks. I have so many decks.
The DM needs a neutral deck for NPCs.
The SAN rules determine how many of an agents’ Tarot cards they get to keep (explained more, below).

Skill Checks

How do we replicate the d100 skill system with a Tarot deck?

Single Card Draw Doesn’t Work So Well:

Of course, with a 78-card deck, you can make any probability from 1/78 to 77/78 by simply creating a larger or smaller subset of cards.

Obvious subsets include:

Only one numbered card (kings)? 4/78 ('bout 5%)
Only one suit? 14/78 ('bout 18%)
Two suits? 28/78 ('bout 36%)
Three suits? 42/78 ('bout 54%)
Four suits? 56/78 ('bout 72%)
Only major arcana? 22/78 ('bout 28%)

For a nice 1/4 chance, we can say “Major Arcana, but The Tower and The Moon are always critical failures”

The skill model in the first build of this did depend on just drawing one card and changing the size of the target group based on chance of success, with “Four suits (any Minor Arcana)” (72%) being an “Easy” check, and the odds just getting worse from there.

But… variegating the selection criteria based on the check difficulty, while mathematically sound, is also… kinda fussy and complicated? You need to check a chart every time you make a check to see what cards you’re looking for.

On top of that, I think drawing a Major Arcana should be good, not bad. They’re the special cards!

A Fresh Idea: Multiple Card Draw

Okay, so, the chance of drawing a major arcana on one card is 28%.

What if we draw 4 cards?

28% + 28% + 28% + 28% is 114%, a guaranteed success.

Anybody who’s taken combinatorics — or, hell, anybody who can imagine the obvious counterargument that lots of four-card minor arcana hands exist — will point out that the math here doesn’t track.

UGGHGHG HOW DID THAT WORK AGAIN

curtis, trying to make his pudding do math

so, if we build a chart of possibilities, we’ve got

success on first card: 28.2%
failure on first card: 71.7%

…. and then the success on the second card only matters if we fail on the first card, so that’s 22/77 (one less card in the deck) * 71.7% - so, 20.4%

So the chance of drawing at least one major arcana, having drawn 2 cards, is 20.4% + 28.2%, totaling 48.6%, so just under 50%.

Oh, let’s remember I’m excluding The Moon and the Tower (so, 20/78), and do that math out to six cards:

cards	P(success)	P(fail)
1	.256	.744
2	.449	.551
3	.594	.406
4	.702	.298
5	.782	.218
6	.841	.159

Oh, I like that curve. It’s got properties.

Like: each card after the first is technically a teeny tiny bit more likely to be a Major Arcana than the last, but actually each card that you add to the calculation has diminishing returns in terms of its utility.

This is actually a really desirable property for skill checks: if you know enough about lockpicking, or computers, to get around day to day, you’re probably competent enough to do a lot of day to day tasks - BUT - the more you specialize, the less likely that dense specialization is going to be helpful in any given situation.

This also asymptotically approaches a 100% chance of success without reaching it (until you draw fully 58 cards, at which point the chance does, in fact, become 100%, because there aren’t any “fail” cards left in the deck to draw).

So that gives us a nice, tidy scale from 1-6 that we can use easily for stuff!

Amateur at a task? Draw 1 card, 25% chance of success! Pretty good at a task? Draw 3 cards, 60% chance of success! Mega-doctorate at a task? Draw 6 cards, 85% chance of success!

That also offers a very easy scheme for making checks harder or easier.

The task is unusually difficult: -1 Card
The task is banana-lana-bonkers: -2 Cards
The task is pretty easy: +1 Card
I should barely even consider making you draw for this: +2 Cards

And again, the shape of the card distribution makes sense here: difficult tasks are going to be much more punishing for Amateur users, who lose bigger chunks of their percentage chance of success - but for experts, difficult tasks cost them fewer percentage points because being an expert means being prepared for the difficult stuff.

This Does Lean a Little Bit More Towards Success Than Failure

Yes - I, uh… I’m not going to lie, my DMing style is a little bit biased towards player success in TTRPGs?

The story is more interesting when the players succeed more and fail less so giving the players a small mathematical advantage near the low-ends of the skill scale is not a bad thing, IMO.

Your mileage may vary.

Drawing When You’ve Got 0 Cards Left in a Skill

When you’re drawing with 0 Cards in a skill, only a Critical Success will succeed.

For the likelihood of that succeeding, see:

Critical Fails and Crit Successes:

So, the existing Delta Green system turns a draw into a Critical Fail or Critical Success if you roll a pair: so, a 22 on a 50% difficulty task would be a Critical Success, and a 22 on a 10% difficulty task would be a Critical Fail.

I think a Critical Fail is called a Fumble in Delta Green terminology.

But it’s pretty easy to tell that we’re looking at a 1/10 chance of, uh, criticalizing any given roll.

I’m used to a 1/20 chance of crits from D&D, and I’m pretty comfortable with anywhere between a 5-10% chance of crits. (or a 10-20% chance of critical hits OR critical failures)

There are some cards that seem particularly suited for this in the deck - thematically The Fool and The Sun are (IMO) obvious critical success cards, The Tower and The Moon are obvious critical failure cards.

So, if we assign 6 cards in our deck: 3 crit success cards and 3 crit fail cards, then….

cards	P(crit)	P(no crit)
1	.076	.924
2	.148	.852
3	.215	.785
4	.277	.723
5	.335	.665
6	.390	.610

so that’s a 7-40% chance of a crit, which is… uh, a lot swingier than what I’m hoping for. Maybe just 4 cards in our deck? 2 crit success and 2 crit fails?

cards	P(crit)	P(no crit)
1	.051	.959
2	.095	.905
3	.142	.858
4	.187	.813
5	.230	.770
6	.272	.728

so a 5-27% chance of a crit… still don’t love that. It’s too low at the low end, and too high at the high end - plus, I think this means that it’s way more likely to get a crit success than a crit fail - because if you’re pulling a low number of cards (and thus, less likely to succeed) you’re also in the low percentage chance of getting a crit, whereas way up in the 5 and 6 card draws we’re a lot more likely to pull a crit and also a lot more likely to succeed.

The magic of looking for pairs is that it is always a 1/10 chance of a crit, regardless of the outcome of the check, but that’s not really available here in cards.

even more pudding exercise

We could make it so that a crit fail has priority and immediately kills the hand, stop drawing, may god have mercy on your soul - that gives it a little more juice.

We could make it so that just the first card of the set determines the criticality of the hand… 8 cards, divided cleanly between Major and Minor arcana - say,

Critical Hit - First Card is The Fool, The Magician, The Sun, or Strength
Fumble - First Card is The Moon, The Tower, or a 9 or 10 of Swords

That’s just a 5% chance of Critical Hit or Fumble at any given moment, on any roll, which is pretty much what I want, I think.

Technically we could choose cards that are, like, a little more memorable - like “Any Ace” could be a Fumble, and that’s easier to remember, but…

thematically, these are some Crit Fail cards right here

and, correspondingly, these cards all do a pretty good job of communicating “yeah, I got this”

SAN Checks

Sanity Checks work differently! We need something that starts out pretty easy, and gets harder as your sanity ticks down.

Okay, so: here’s the fun trick at the heart of my Tarot system.

Every player, regardless of their Power, starts with 78 SAN points. (Power still provides other useful bonuses, but every player starts out with a pretty generous 78 SAN score)

When players lose SAN points, they don’t tick off any boxes - what they lose are Tarot cards. From their deck.

The fewer cards they have,

the more effective they are going to be at all of their skills (as we whittle away cards that fail checks)
the more critical hits and critical failures they are going to see (as we whittle away cards that aren’t crits)
the easier it will be to lose sanity (as we whittle away cards that aren’t sanity losing)

So, a SAN check is a single-card draw from the deck, and the player simply fails if they draw a Sword, or a Fumble.

16/78, that’s a mere 20% chance of failure. Your players’ SAN is safe! (at first)

With every SAN loss, though, the chance increases!

SAN Loss Card Order

Ugh, this unfortunately introduces a nasty complication in our design.

We don’t want a player’s deck to become immune to SAN damage (no swords), or immune to crits (no crit cards).

So here’s the ruling: when a player loses SAN, they hand their deck to the GM, to remove cards behind a screen.

The GM doesn’t say which cards they remove. Players Can Be Discouraged From Closely Examining Their Decks.

It’s up to the GM what to remove here, although I recommend something like the following order:

The GM starts by only removing Pentacles, Cups, or Wands until only Swords and Major Arcana remain.

They can pull a few unimportant Major Arcana if the player is becoming too unstoppable at skill checks.

That will carry them through the first 42 points of SAN damage.

Then, we remove either Major Arcana or Swords, trying to keep a sort of 50-50 balance between the two, but carefully leaving The Fool and The Moon as the second-to-last and final card removals of the deck. Once the Moon is removed, the character is - well, a lunatic (sidenote: it’s a moon joke) .

Again, Doesn’t That Make Their Skill Checks Way Too Strong?

Yeah - with over half of their SAN gone, and only swords and Major Arcana left in their deck, the player has a 61% chance of success with just one card in a skill, with a now 10% chance of critical success or failure.

cards	P(success)	P(fail)
1	.611	.389
2	.850	.150
3	.947	.053
4	.982	.018

However, there’s a countervailing force at play, here:

Disorders & Exhaustion

Every time the DM collects 14 SAN cards (sidenote: a full suit, for quick reference) from the player, they get a new Disorder.

Most of these disorders put the player in situations where they lose cards from skill checks, or are more likely to gain Exhaustion, which also puts the player in a position where they lose cards from skill checks.

A character starting from 3 cards in Forensics: 60% chance of success — losing half of their sanity — could find themselves in a position where their agoraphobia and exhaustion lead them to a -2 card penalty to bury a body in the woods, so now they have 1 card in Forensics: 60% chance of success.

The goal, I hope, is to give players the feeling of this is going off the rails while still having the results be relatively consistent?

No Need For Skill Improvement

Being as the players get better at their skills the less sane they are, there’s no need for the traditional “1 point of skill improvement at the end of the session” style leveling, here.

Damage Rolls

I’d consider still keeping dice around for Damage Rolls, to be honest, but it’s, of course, possible to keep doing everything with just a Tarot deck.

To roll 1d4, just keep drawing cards until you get a card numbered between 1 and 4.
To roll 1d6, just keep drawing cards until you get a card numbered between 1 and 6.
To roll 1d8, just keep drawing cards until you get a card numbered between 1 and 8.
To roll 1d10, just keep drawing cards until you get a card numbered between 1 and 10.
To roll 1d12, just keep drawing cards until you get a card numbered between 1 and 12.

I had a little fun with lethal damage, which is 2d10:

you take 2d10 damage as usual, but if you draw Death or any Fumble Card, you die immediately.
it gets worse the more Lethal the attack is.

Opposed Checks

Are you familiar with the children’s card game War?

That’s right, these are real easy: each player (or NPC) involved in the opposed check draws as many cards as they have available to them in the skill, and the player who draws the “best” card wins.

A Critical Success always wins.
A Fumble always loses.
Major Arcana beat Minor Arcana.
The highest card breaks ties.
In the case of a true tie (“We both drew the knight of wands”), draw again.

(“Initiative” is just an opposed Dexterity check for everyone involved.)

Automatic Success

1 card can auto-succeed a check at 10% or lower.
2 cards can auto-succeed a check at 20% or lower.
3 cards can auto-succeed a check at 30% or lower.
4 cards can auto-succeed a check at 40% or lower.
5 cards can auto-succeed a check at 50% or lower.
6 cards can auto-succeed a check at 60% or lower.

Putting it All Together on One Sheet for Easy Reference

Wow, this is… quite complicated when you look at it all together like that.

But it is the whole rules for skill checks baked into one tidy sheet, at least.

Stats & Skills

You know what? There are some things about Delta Green I kind of want to address when I’m working on stats & skills.

Craft (Macrame) Unlikely To Be Useful

This game offers a stunning array of abilities, from Archaeology to Artillery, as well as separate “Medicine” and “Surgery” checks because, you know, pharmacology is not the same thing as removing a spleen.

Technically true, but… perhaps too fine-grained a distinction?

There’s also a real hierarchy of importance in these skills.

The published Delta Green adventures really try their best to sneak in some uses for the more esoteric skills, but, honestly there are some real stinkers in here.

Ride, for example, measures your ability to ride a horse - or, to be generous, any rideable animal, really. I have read a handful of published Delta Green adventures, long and detailed ones, and let me tell you: I have found not a single solitary horse in this gritty urban horror/spy series, nor has an excuse to ride one popped up.

I get that they are flavor, but, like, there’s not much in the way of differentiation between absolutely crucial skills and ridiculous flavor skills.

Absolutely Crucial Skills

Dodge
HUMINT (detect lies)
Persuade (tell lies)
Search
Bureaucracy
Forensics
maybe a weapon skill, like firearms, or unarmed weapon

Utterly Ridiculous Skills

Ride
Language (French)
Craft (Macrame)
Artillery
Military Science (Navy)
Pilot (Jetski)

Warning, One Tiny “Impossible Landscapes” Spoiler In This Paragraph

I’m not going to lie, I chuckled when I found the one single way that Impossible Landscapes managed to work in an Artillery check.

I’m unlikely to run my own game this way, but it’s possible, rules-as-written, for someone to run a months-long Impossible Landscapes campaign and suffer a TPK mere moments from the grand finale because everybody has 0% in this, one of the least useful skills in the game, at which point - failing to identify the incoming artillery - the players get shelled, which is a Lethality 15% attack - a 15% chance of dying immediately or a brutal 2d10 damage (in a game where “20” is a very reasonable amount of max HP for an agent and HP is wildly difficult to recover. )

Toaster Repair

The Wasteland series of games hung a lampshade on this kind of RPG design with the famous “Toaster Repair” skill, which they then delighted in finding many practical uses for in their game.

Obvious Dump Stats

Delta Green offers you

Strength - determining your might
Constitution - resilience
Dexterity - speed
Intelligence - smarts
Power - mental fortitude
Charisma - pizzazz

The benefits offered by each of these are variable.

Your HP are set by your Strength plus your Constitution - but that means that you either need a lot of Strength OR a lot of Constitution, no need to pump both. Strength also applies a small bonus to melee and unarmed damage, so I guess pick that one?

Most of the things you would do with Strength are covered by an Athletics skill check, and the Athletics skill check is unrelated to Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution - you can have 2 points each in Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution (sidenote: literally just a torso) and still have an 75% in Athletics, or a 60% in Dodge.

Dexterity just determines your initiative in battle: important but not that important.

Intelligence seems like it would be important in an investigative game, but Intelligence is completely unrelated to Skills: you can have an Intelligence of 2 ( moron (sidenote: Lord Timothy Dexter became an accidental millionaire by shipping hundreds of wool mittens to the tropical West Indies, this worked out because fate was on his side) ) and an 80% in Science (Astrophysics).

Then there’s Power - which determines your Sanity score as well as your ability to use magical effects - and Charisma, which determines your Bonds, which provide vital Sanity-boosting effects. Power and Charisma are very, very important.

The “Perfect” Build

This is a joke character, obviously, but a pretty viable Delta Green build, stats-wise would be:

18 in Strength, Power, and Charisma, giving the player generous pools of Willpower, Sanity, Hit Points, a powerful punch and lots of friends.
6 in Constitution, Dexterity, and Intelligence, making the player dumb, slow, and sickly.

My mentally resilient but incredibly stupid and clumsy investigator who still somehow manages fantastic feats of skill is not a great thematic pick for the vibe of Delta Green, but someday I do hope to ruin someone’s game by showing up as, essentially, Inspector Clouseau.

On Reddit, when people point this out, people respond with things like [paraphrased]:

I wouldn’t allow that as a DM, obviously someone with 2 INT couldn’t even become a federal agent in the first place.

The stats in Delta Green are a lot less meaningful than the stats in games like D&D. Think of it more like “flavor” - is your agent strong, fast, or smart? Let that shape how you play the character.

You still have to do raw INT, CON, or DEX checks every now and again! If your character isn’t smart, they will get stumped by the first puzzle that comes along!

idk, sounds like you’re trying to paper over some mechanical issues there, the rules accidentally made most of the stats pretty irrelevent, whoops.

Let’s Look at A Horrifying Character Sheet:

Let me preface this with:

I think that Blades in the Dark really revolutionized TTRPG design by putting a lot more of the game right on the character sheet.

This means that their character sheets are dense, but very useful during gameplay. I’m hoping to have achieved something similar here, although the end result is something that I’d loosely describe as “it looks like a crazy person made it”.

Woo, that’s a lotta details, but I’ll explain them as we go:

You Can Have 1-6 Points in CON, STR, DEX, POW, INT, and CHA

Like with skills, the 1-100% rating has been replaced with a 1-6.

If you’re making a STR check, you draw 1-6 cards and resolve them, as if with the skill check rules.

CON and POW determine HP and WP

Strength no longer has an effect on HP, Con needed more of a niche of its own.

Power no longer determines starting SAN, because, as established, that is always 78.

Many skills have been turned into raw Stat checks.

You don’t even have access to that skill unless you have at least that many points in the Stat.

So: Dodge? That’s a DEX check.

Shoot? That’s a DEX check, too, and you don’t get access to it until you have at least 3 cards in DEX.

This is a hard buff to Dexterity because many of the game’s most useful skills lie along the DEX track.

All of the skills remaining are INT-bound.

Everything that’s left in the “skills” pile cannot go higher than your INT score.

If you have 1 card in INT, none of your skills can go higher than 1 card.

“Firearms” has been divided into “Shoot” and “Craft (Firearms)”

So, “Shoot” is your ability to point a gun at a thing and hit the thing you’re pointing at. That’s a DEX check.

Sure, you can train your ability to shoot better, but what you’re doing is training your body, training your dexterity.

Then there’s “I know how a gun works, I can turn off the safety on a gun, I can load a gun, I can fix a broken gun”. That’s Craft(Firearms) and it’s INT-bound.

The Arts & Crafts Rule

The skills ART, CRAFT, LANGUAGE, HISTORY, OPERATE, SCIENCE, and WEAPON all allow the agent to choose a specific thing that they’ve trained in.

However, at the GM’s discretion, this skill can be used for any check in the matching category, with a card-penalty determined by how far off the skill is.

If you have ART(Piano), and an ART(Violin) check comes up - well, that’s a -1 card penalty, because learning the piano involves building a lot of broad familiarity with the language of music, so picking up a new instrument is much easier.

On the other hand, an ART(Piano) might get -2 or even -3 cards on an ART(Oil Painting) check - maybe they have some innate creativity to draw on, here, but it’s possibly a bit of a bridge too far. But they still get to make the check.

That goes for any of these: somebody well trained in SCIENCE(Chemistry) is going to have a much better chance to take on a SCIENCE(Physics) task than someone with no formal chemistry training at all. Somebody who’s learned LANGUAGE(French) is going to have an easier time translating an unknown language than someone who only speaks their own native tongue, and so on.

A Few Skills Have Been Combined or Removed

Did we really need

MILITARY(Army)
MILITARY(Navy)
MILITARY(Air Force)
MILITARY (Coast Guard), and
Artillery (which should just be Military(Army), right?).

No, that is just “MILITARY”.

SURVIVAL and NAVIGATION have been combined into SURVIVAL/NAVIGATION.

There are still separate FIRST AID and MEDICINE checks, but SURGERY is out.

Just a few tidy-ups like this. There are still fully 22 skills, that is plenty.

ENDURE, ESPRIT, and EXAMINE

In order to further bolster some of the skills:

STR, POW, and INT each come with a pool of tokens that the agent can use for stuff.

ENDURE

For each point in STR, the player gets an ENDURE token.

With ENDURE tokens, the player can:

Spend 1 token to add a card to a STR check, before that check is drawn.
Spend 2 tokens to add a card retroactively to a failed STR check.
Spend 1 token to redraw a damage roll - for damage they’ve received or given out.

ENDURE can prevent death on a bad lethality roll.

These tokens refresh at the rate of 1/night of sleep.

ESPRIT

For each point in POW, the player gets an ESPRIT token.

With ESPRIT tokens, the player can:

Spend 1 token to redraw SAN or WP damage.

These tokens refresh at the rate of 1/night of sleep.

EXAMINE

For each point in INT, the player gets an EXAMINE token.

With EXAMINE tokens, the player can:

Spend 1 token to add a card to any skill check, before that check is drawn.
Spend 2 tokens to add a card retroactively to a failed skill check.

These tokens refresh at the rate of 1/night of sleep.

Unnatural

Since you gain Unnatural a few points at the time, those points don’t coalesce into a whole card in Unnatural until you have at least 20 points in Unnatural.

Character Creation:

Character Creation is accomplished with:

1 point in each stat by default
3 bonds by default
16 spendable points. (GM fiat here: 16 is a pretty median character, for more experienced agents you might give +2 points but take away a Bond or give a Disorder)

Each point buys either:

1 card in a Stat
4 cards to distribute throughout the Skills

Let’s See a Filled Out Character Sheet

Ed, here, was made with 16 points.

See, that’s not so insane! It makes perfect sense! No I will not lower my voice, I’m allowed to be in this Wendy’s!

Some More Helpful Sheets:

Conclusion

And there we go!

That’s a rough conversion for Delta Green into “a thing you can run with Tarot cards”.

It doesn’t accomodate for all of the rules: you’ll need to make a lot of judgement calls at time of, but I think it might be serviceable.

I Can Even Sing the Pancake Wall Song

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:58:27 -0700

I’ve watched a fair bit of content where a deeply reverential fan and the original creator of a piece of art talk, and it always goes exactly like this:

Fan: Oh my god, the PANCAKE WALL, this was my FAVORITE PART, how did you come up with something as genius as the PANCAKE WALL

Creator: uh, there was a deadline and I panicked and I had pancakes for breakfast

Fan: I can even sing the PANCAKE WALL song, it’s my favorite

Creator: I don’t recall the PANCAKE WALL song, is that… is that a thing?

Fan: Oh, yeah, a bunch of fans came together and made up lyrics to the background music that was playing during the PANCAKE WALL scene, it’s a huge deal, we all sing it at cons.

Creator: Huh. You know Burt McSoundsman wrote that. I always thought Burt was a weird guy.

Fan: You don’t know the PANCAKE WALL song?

Creator: I do not.

isekai troubles

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0700

https://weekly-net.co.jp/news/174582/

“Films and dramas, comics and anime. The car used in the scene where the character is killed in a car accident is almost always a truck.”

While exchanging opinions on the issue of image in the transportation industry, a transportation manager in Shizuoka Prefecture made that statement. In the scene where an important person in the story dramatically loses his life in a traffic accident, the major role that effectively enhances the impact is certainly played by large vehicles such as trucks and dumps, even if you count as many as you can remember.

(Translated by Google)

In related news, the North American bus industry is taking software developers and engineers to task

The CBC Would Like to Remind You

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 22:08:28 -0700

once again, the CBC would like to remind you not to laugh at the misfortune of others

Groovelet: Portable Mythology

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 22:06:56 -0700

Let’s imagine you need to crack together a world, or a story, or a video game.

There are a few ways to start writing a story - with a story outline, or by doing impressive amounts of worldbuilding.

The Groovelet: Portable Mythology is intended to help with either of these things, as a creative exercise/aid.

It is a Creative Commons framework, so you can do whatever you like with it! Copy it whole and make your own! You’re free to do that - heck, you’re encouraged to do that.

Okay, but What IS It?

The Groovelet: Portable Mythology describes a set of 12 interlinked archetypes, arranged on a wheel, with a web of symbolic interconnection linking and unifying the 12 “spokes” of the wheel.

12 archetypes, grouped into 4 suits, each with themes, oppositions, and a role in a larger story cycle, with contrasting elements arranged opposite from one another.

Each archetype in the Groovelet pantheon is thematically unique, distinct, with a built-in conflict with another Groovelet on the opposite side of the wheel.

Think of this like someone rammed the Greek Gods, the Tarot, TVTropes, and the Dan Harmon Story Cycle all together into one short, easy-to-read document.

Read The Full Book Here

Neverender is a Homage to Dirty Pair

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, this released a few years back:

Beautiful, stunning animation, great sound, inspired by 80s anime.

Today I discovered (posted at random on the /r/cassettefuturism subreddit):

Ah, the Justice video was a homage.

There are lots of shots that are, like, direct analogues:

There are few things in life more satisfying than finding the thing that some art you enjoyed was referencing

Maybe winners sometimes use drugs

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:58:27 -0700

Maybe winners sometimes use drugs

A Moment of Transcendence

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 20:58:27 -0700

some cranky old (sidenote: I partially say “old” because literally nobody under the age of 50 has ever said “PC”, the last time someone unironically used the term “politically correct” was 1998.) person on reddit complained “is trans women not the PC term nowadays?”

and I responded with the basically nonsensical “actually most trans women are on linux” and ASCENDED TO VALHALLA, MY EARTHLY JOURNEY COMPLETE

car camping checklist

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0700

Tent & Sleepin'

tent
- if the tent has piddly little plastic stakes, buy some metal stakes online
foamgrid (yoga foam grid makes the floor less pointy, optional)
inflatable mattress, cots, or sleeping pads
sleeping bags
pillows
clothing
rain coat
portable battery pack (for recharging devices, lights) with lots of usb-C and usb-micro cables
little broom (tidy up that tent, it’s gonna get dusty in there)
toothbrush, toothpaste, floss
disposable pocket cloth & sanitizer

Setting Up a Chill Zone

canopy
- you should stake down the canopy as well, this is another reason why a small bag of your own stakes is handy
folding chairs
lights
- it’s nice to have one lamp per person, plus a hanging lamp for the inside of your tent, and a few lights to hang at the periphery of your canopy or put on your picnic table
- these are a lot less necessary if you’re not night owls and you’re camping in the summer when it’s not dark until 9PM anyways

The Cooking Matrix

putting a “complete” camp-kitchen set together is one of the harder parts, I built a big disorganized-but-complete plastic tub that I keep in storage you can buy elaborate camping cookware sets online for too much money but I just tossed some kitchen extras and spares in a big tub, heavier but cheaper

propane & stove
paper towel roll
aluminum foil roll
kitchen garbage bags
plates
cups
a pot
a pan
tongs
spatula
a cooking knife (use one of your shittiest at home knives, pack carefully)
a cutting board
soap, dishrack, sponge & basin
oil
salt & pepper
sugar
a l’il extra fold-up side table
water jug (bring water from home, camp water may not be potable)
kettle
coffee & tea bags

Kitchen Zone Doesn’t Mean Nothin’ Without

a cooler, full of food
I fill mine with reusable ice packs rather than loose ice, which is less good at maintaining chill but more convenient
vegetables & fruits (I have an insulated bag that I use for these, they don’t need to stay SO COOL but keeping them from roasting in the heat is probably good)
snacks & dry goods in a tub

What Do You Do While Camping (I Mostly Do Stuff I Would Do Indoors)

book
games
notepad?
small bluetooth speaker to play at a reasonable volume from 9 to 11

Utility

hatchet
tarps
clamps
rope
duct tape
lighter (long-neck)
first aid kit
can of bug spray
fire-roastin’ stick

Further Nerdery

this can be logistically complicated to get together - prepare a pre-launch checklist that includes steps like “fill water jug”, “charge lamps”, “pack food”, etc..

This Seems like a Lot Of Stuff

It is.

Meditation for Developers

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i’m going to sell an e-book called “meditation for developers” and inside it’s just gonna read “play balatro on the toilet then have a shower”

Catch 22

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

In retrospect, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five were the rarest thing of all: American media about how war is bad, actually

Is This Catholicism?

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Is this Catholicism? This church wanted me to eat a cracker that represented the body of Christ, and then some wine that represented the blood of Christ, then a jello shot, for the bones and cartilage of Christ, then some pork cracklins, representing the skin of Christ, then some Gatorade, representing the tears of Christ, then some candy floss, representing the hair of Christ, then two grapes, representing the eyes of Christ, then some more wine (blood again), then a few loose spurts of yogurt (sidenote: Okay not a church and apparently I am no longer welcome in the Meadowbrook 7-11)

i like to read

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0700

One of the things that I like to read is medium length, well-written, informative articles of the sort that used to live in magazines before the information crushed them all like Blockbuster video or travel agencies.

I have a book by Ruth Reichl where she talks about her time as an editor for an important food magazine for Conde Nast in New York in the 80s and she is treated like a legitimate no-foolin’ rock star, there are assistants, there are perks, it is wild. Magazines were crazy in the 40 years ago universe that no longer exists.

But then, for a long time in my personal heyday, there was blogs, medium form articles written by amateurs, a wild and explosive flourishing of community writing projects, many of them utterly unreadable or punishingly mundane, but this was also a good time, and I subscribed to many via the use of my “A Relatively Simple Syndication” (or “ARSS” for short, because it wasn’t very good) technology browser.

For a brief period, I subscribed to Increment magazine, an expensive but lovely periodical, made entirely free online, that was - I imagine - never once for a single second profitable. This fabulous loss-leader was underwritten by Stripe, a company that makes more money in a day than I will make in my entire lifetime, so they definitely have a little bit of dosh floating around for weird vanity projects.

At least several dozen times I joked that they should have called it Excrement magazine because of where I read most of the articles.

It turns out that one of my likes is just compelling non-fiction articles, and being as my last real subscription ended in 2021, I feel like I was one of the last holdouts on team print media.

but (he says, patting his extremely well-laden eReader) it’s not like I’m not also part of the problem

For a while, I leaned on Pocket’s featured articles in Firefox. They’re okay. At this point I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of them again and again, and honestly I’m not sure if Pocket is going to keep them going now that Pocket is folding (it turns out, keeping a blog/article reading tool alive in the current internet era isn’t terribly valuable, because the last human-written article was some time in 2023, apparently).

anyways, no point here, no call-to-action, just… thinkin’ about articles

Crypto makes me sad

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Crypto has been so predatory and actively evil that it actively killed my excitement for decentralized, democratized technology, although Mastodon has restored it somewhat

Expect a Lot

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

one time I got a parking ticket and I was so mad until I saw that the parking company’s tagline was “expect a lot” and I found that so disarmingly funny that I wasn’t angry about the ticket any more

Menquakerites

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:00:00 -0700

the Menquakerite movement was started by pious John Seymour Slack-Huddle in 1867

“The devil’s oats enliven the lust and lead a man to thoughts of sin. We must turn to more godly and chaste grains like millet and sorghum.”

– John Seymour Slack-Huddle

Alexa

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I’ve set up some Alexa devices in my home and while I’m mostly pessimistic about AI,

I am so, so, SO on board for them being, like, even 5% smarter

like, I live in Coquitlam, and I said “Alexa, what’s the weather like in Coquitlam” and it was like “The weather in Coquimatlán Mexico is 27 celsius and sunny”

there’s not a day that goes by without my wife going “alexa turn the lights off” “alexa, TURN the LIGHTS OFF!” “alexa! LIGHTSOFF!”

I speak very clearly in a Vancouver accent, we’re like… 18 feet away from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, I can’t imagine how busted this shit must be for anybody with an accent.

I google searched “when is alexa going to stop being so terrible” and apparently they’re rolling out the new LLM-backed models slowly this year, should be along to Canada … eventually

The Cones of Dunshire

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0700

there’s this difficult moment where I show my wife something I’ve been obsessing over for weeks and she looks at it and nods and goes “uh huh, uh huh, yeah”

it’s happened to me so many times and each time it’s basically exactly like this:

Rolling Mean

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:00:00 -0700

“Rolling Mean” is a great name for a nerdy motorcycle gang

they’re terrifying - well, most of them aren’t, but one of them is REALLY terrifying, so in aggregate, they’re terrifying

I am a serious adult

Fri, 30 May 2025 10:00:00 -0700

Angels

Thu, 29 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The movie Angels in the Outfield but the angels are from Neon Genesis Evangelion

it is ok to like things

Wed, 14 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I worry that I date myself terribly by still loving a bunch of the stuff I loved as a kid and young adult - Final Fantasy 6, Cowboy Bebop, IRC, Our Lady Peace, The Simpsons, Command & Conquer, WinAmp…. all wild retro shit by today’s standards.

But then I think about some of the stuff that my parents and grandparents loved - Star Wars, Singin’ in the Rain, Looney Toons, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - and how much reverence and fondness I, as an adult, treat it with, because they introduced it to me with such obvious fondness, and I think “nah, ’s good to like stuff”

time mostly washes away most of the really embarrassing and terrible retro stuff, like Police Academy 5, Police Quest III, and Limp Bizkit and we can just look back and chuckle at them now

threats

Tue, 13 May 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t have to imagine, I’ve even tried taken medication for that exact same problem before, what I don’t understand is why you’d WANT that

Touchless

Tue, 13 May 2025 10:00:00 -0700

people are mad that my “touchless car wash $15” is just me waving a sponge around and going “wooOoOoOooOoooo”

9 Years at VRChat

Mon, 12 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“what’s this 9 year gap on your resume?”

“…. uh, work study”

Cartoon Logic

Mon, 12 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, according to cartoon logic, once you toss someone out of something you’re supposed to dust off your hands and go “and stay out”, that’s the rules

When code reviews LGTM

Mon, 12 May 2025 09:00:00 -0700

this might be one of my more controversial software opinions

my bar for a code review is “do I understand approximately what this code is doing and how”, and that’s often enough to find one or two quibbles (‘hey this could have been named better" or “are you sure this part does what you think it does?”) but often it leads to the ol’ rubber stamp of justice

honestly I think that senior devs who can’t let a single PR go by without at least one nitpick because otherwise they feel like they haven’t done their duty aren’t accomplishing as much as they think

sometimes I would not do things the same way that that other person did

and then I just chalk that up to “hey, everybody’s mind works a different way” and go about my day

like, this is not to say I won’t intervene if something truly dangerous or ill-advised is happening, but, like, once a project has been chugging along for a little while with the same people, usually it gets increasingly clear when that is the case

sometimes a PR comes in with “I’m pretty sure that this won’t break prod” and that one maybe deserves a little more of the fine-toothed comb

note: if you’re working on avionics, medical software, people’s bank accounts, or are a nuclear engineer, definitely ignore me

The Dream Syndicate

Sat, 10 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

okay, so, funny story, in the DeltaGreen TTRPG there’s a group of people called “The Dream Syndicate” with a fake website

so I follow the link, I go to the website, and I think “whoa, this is INSANE, the language feels so CULTY, I love that they went to all of this trouble to build a fake online cult to match their description in the source book”

and then I read about the Dream Syndicate in the source book and it doesn’t match at all

this is just a real website?

modern american companies are way, way down the jim jones pipeline to fuckin’ cult city

tell me your company doesn’t have a set of commandments (c.f. “values”) you’re supposed to live by and a holy mission

Zapp Tucked In

Sat, 10 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Zooted Pope

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:00:00 -0700

So I follow the subreddit for comics - no, not that one, the one for people’s shitty little homemade ones that never see the light of day, and what struck me as funny about this one was not that the comic itself was funny, but that someone would spend hours of their day slaving over this series of images

this creator was struck by the muse, but it wasn’t one of the good muses, it was the “I must draw the pope twerking” muse, that’s the one they got today, and I’m glad they decided to go with it anyways

N-Sexual

Wed, 07 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

bisexuality - two sexualities

unisexuality - one sexuality (we usually segment this further because we’re interested in what the “one” is)

asexuality - no sexuality

bicycle - two cycles

unicycle - one cycle (only shows up in circuses)

acycle - no cycles (only shows up in graph-based math)

binary - counting system of 2s (useful)

unary - counting system of 1s (tallying, sometimes useful)

aary - counting system without any numbers (not useful)

Phnom Penh Crispy Wings

Mon, 05 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, it’s an open-secret that Phnom Penh has the best chicken wings in Vancouver.

so, through a weird twist of fate, I ended up with a bunch of chicken wings

and I thought “might as well give this recipe a try”

YouTube helped:

My version is somewhere between these two’s takes on the famous recipe and:

I used too much seasoning on the outside: the garlic oil let too much salt, sugar, and MSG adhere to the crust making the wings a little overpoweringly seasoned.

otherwise it was DELICIOUS.

I figured this would be an insanely difficult recipe to get right because, like, if Phnom Penh is so legendary for these wings, why doesn’t every restaurant do them?

But, actually, if you do all of the steps - the long fish-saucy marinade, the thin crispy batter, the twirl in garlic butter and then sweet-salty-and-msg seasoning: it’s actually very close and very good. It’s just labor intensive, and these guys need to hit the table still very hot from the fryer.

Anyways, if you’ve got a bit of time on your hands, highly recommend.

Oops: All Integration Tests!

Sun, 04 May 2025 12:00:00 -0700

New York Times' 50 Greatest Recipes

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The New York Times’ elevation of Marcella Hazan’s quick marinara to viral status was, uh, very useful for me, so I trust their taste at least a little.

Of course, they’ve paywalled most of these recipes but … they’re viral recipes, so you can’t stop me, NYT.

Our 50 Greatest Hits, According to You

On Sept. 17, 2014, an ambitious new app made its debut: New York Times Cooking, which collected thousands of archival Times recipes in one elegantly designed, easy-to-use place.

In the 10 years since, Cooking has grown into a whole universe of food, videos, personalities, newsletters, cookbooks and comments — with you at its center. You’ve invited us into your kitchens and made us part of your lives.

To mark the anniversary, here are 50 of our best recipes according to you, our community, with reader comments threaded throughout. It’s not a ranked list of our most popular recipes by traffic numbers alone, but a wider, more curated view of Cooking.

These are dishes that have emerged as classics and racked up five-star ratings, recipes that became popular just about immediately after we hit publish, went viral on social media and inspired the most memorable comments. But we easily could’ve filled this list with 500 more. There are so many you’ve loved, in so many ways.

is 150 the perfect number of collectibles?

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 13:00:00 -0700

i only have 2 data points but yes

A/B testing

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

A B testing, which is where we show the UI to a bee, and if they fly towards it it’s cool

Hello Zalgo

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

ḧ̶̡̨̨̛̩͔̻̘̻̺͓͕̯̥́̐̓͌͋͗̈́̈́̍̑̽͆̇͝͝͠e̷͍̤̥̗͂̒̉͒̆̎͊̃͆́̀̃̊̍͂̓͜l̸̛̜̩̩͖̥̮̰͂͆̆̏̊̆͌͌͑̚ͅl̵̢̡̫̲͔̱͔̤̣͚͋̐́̽̾͒̓̏̋̒̌o̵̰̽̏̊̈́̅̅̎́̅̍̄͋̓̕̕̚ ̸̢̧̨̱̹͚̘̭̦̣͕̩̩̹͉̽̀̍́̄͌͒̒̑̽̒̊̓̒͋̏͝ḓ̵̩͇̱̤̙́o̷̧̙̺̮͚̹̹͔͇̰͍̯͔͖͜͝l̷̡͚̹̙͍̘̳͓̜̱̲̟̗̪̯̔͜ĺ̴̢̧̛̼͎̳̠͔͙̤̬̣̫̈́̓̌̎̾̅͛͋̎͌̽̆͆y̷͖̖͉̩͔̥͇̫̳͙̣͕̭͚̽̆̓͜

Hello Dolly runs for 2 hours and 30 minutes, and if you’re wondering if there are any parts of it that are better than the 45 seconds in WALL-E

nope

political analogy

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

You are in a boat.

There is a hole in the boat.

Water is rushing in.

Your three boat mates each have a plan: one of them is wearing a lifejacket and pitches that we should do nothing about the hole.

One of them does not have a lifejacket and pitches that drastic action should be taken and the hole should be patched up.

The third one, also equipped with a lifejacket, intelligently suggests a compromise: we will fix some of the hole, but not all of it.

With the hole half fixed, water continues to pour into the boat, but more slowly.

The first boat-mate argues that the hole fixing plan has failed and pitches that the hole fixing plan be dismantled and abandoned.

He is overwhelmingly popular, for reasons that elude you.

The compromise candidate defends his half-hearted hole fix.

The boat mate who proposed fixing the hole is now being fully ignored.

Next to you, a much larger boat, one without a hole, has filled up with hole-worshippers, led by something of a hole, and they have decided to unnecessarily create a hole in their boat.

As you watch them sinking, you think “perhaps the compromise half-hole guy had a good point.”

Things are looking good: you might, if you’re lucky, maintain your half-hearted hole plugging efforts.

In order to appease the hole worshippers, the compromise candidate promises not to touch the existing hole at all.

His plan gains a lot of steam and honestly the pro-hole party is furious. They’re still very popular, though.

Unrelated, a vote is coming up in Canada

WASM, offline first

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

folks have been promising that offline-first or local-first development from the web browser is Just Around The Corner for almost as long as they’ve been promising that browser WASM is going to be The Next Big Thing and I feel like I’m going to get old and die before anybody makes a single real product like this

Great Little Louie Zong Concept Albums

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Need to do some BUSINESS! in the 1990s?

If you can listen to this without a little pixelated city coming to life before your very eyes, you had a very different childhood than I did.

@ArmyofOneandaHalf - 2 years ago

Ah yes, this delivers unparalleled value to the consumer

Okay, what about if you’re playing a little SNES game with prerendered graphics about a plucky little apple?

@egg_mittens - 1 year ago This album has perfect nintendo game flow.

World 1: Large, more powerful than the player, but very easy to outsmart. A simple fellow to help you get the controls.

World 2: The game starts showing you a bit of its edge. This boss is entirely antagonistic, but is also very charismatic and you kind of grow to love when they’re on screen. Thinks they’re very cool.

World 3 mini-boss: duck

World 3: Coming right around the midpoint of the game is the first proper challenge: a doppleganger boss. Propells the main story forward, genuinely a little scary. Defeating this boss feels like a huge achievement.

World 4 mini-boss: Yeah, it’s a little silly, but also kind of a tank and you don’t fully believe it’s a mini-boss. It plays around with the environment and hits like a truck.

World 4: We’re nearing the big bad now, so this is a huge challenge in the game’s core mechanics. The fight itself contains a puzzle aspect that is really frustrating because it’s like playing tic tac toe with lava.

World 5: Final thing before the big bad and while they’re tough to beat, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. They’re really there to hype you up and to get you pumped for the final boss. Making you overconfident. What’s the worst that can happen?

World 6: Complete lovecraftian horror. A full departure from the lightharted, kind of campy aesthetic the rest of the game has had, it is now you against an unfeeling, all-powerful darkness. The threat they pose is existential, every time you die to it you feel stabbing pain and fear in your heart. This is the worst thing that can happen.

hands

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Life Pro Tip: if someone makes a big deal about their immune system being strong, don’t touch their hands after they’ve been in the bathroom

Wall Gnomes

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

something about the cadence of this is just very, very funny, so many lines in this hit an absurd comedic tone

textbook… the homeowner cut a hole in their wall, ‘cause they’re wily, and they musta hit a cable or somethin’

does that happen a lot?

in Canada alone… a million homes a second

a m- that can’t be right

Cattle, not Pets

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

CORPORATE VALUES PRESENTATION (CONFIDENTIAL)

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 10:00:00 -0700

what this escaped the corporate intranet

Work From Home

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

someone at Business Insider has been banging the RTO drum for the past 4 full years, trying to convince people that RTO is good using any conceivable angle

an increasingly unhinged series of takes, no matter how ridiculous,

and I would like to wish them a very fuck right the hell off

either Business Insider’s corporate owners also own a lot of commercial real estate or some terrible middle-manager is very lonely without people to harangue

sometimes I worry

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 10:00:00 -0700

sometimes I stay up at night worrying that I’ll join a company that doesn’t have “Teamwork” and “Innovation” in its core values, and instead has “Collaboration” and “Inventiveness”

i’m not sure if I’d be able to survive the change

The Inner Platform Effect

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

skinner box

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

in order to try and get people to deploy more often, we’re employing a random reward skinner box strategy

22 micrograms of opiates have been shipped to your home or place of residence

japan tattoo

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

when I visit japan it might finally be time to get my tattoo:

エラー：翻訳サーバーがオフラインです。

it means “honor”

no se

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i keep asking my spanish speaking friends what “no sé” means but none of them seem to have any idea, the language must be a lot harder to learn than I thought

year of linux on the desktop

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I had fun setting up a linux computer this weekend, but as much as windows sucks in myriad little frustrating ways, ubuntu’s desktop experience still involves no small amount of unavoidable terminal ops

also a bunch of linux still feels held together by a handful of mickey mouse apps some guy wrote in 2006

i think the DPI scaling is still a little broken, even in 2025, a year in which 4k screens are ubiquitous

“I would like to create a shortcut to a frequently accessed network location and place that shortcut gently upon my desktop”

linux: “no we don’t do that here”

Roasted Garlic Miso Ramen

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 04:00:00 -0700

So, today I put together a nice little miso ramen for lunch on a whim, based mostly on stuff I had sitting around:

this was so good and so easy!

admittedly, some of the easiness was because I had the right ingredients just sitting around.

Roasted Garlic Oil

Step 0: Just Have Roasted Garlic Oil Around From That Time You Made Garlic Confit Earlier This Week

Garlic Confit

Just put peeled garlic and neutral oil in an oven-safe container in your oven at 350° for like 40 minutes, and the result is this good stuff.

For a long time I would make roasted garlic the classic way: whole bulb all at the same time:

but after the umpteenth time awkwardly trying to squeeze the roasted garlic out of piping hot garlic skin, I thought “wouldn’t this be easier if I just peeled the garlic before I cooked it?”

Which, yes, it absolutely is, and you get more garlic oil this way anyways. Later, I discovered that this method is called “garlic confit” although now I just think of it as “improved roasted garlic”.

Anyways, if I have a lot of garlic to work through (often) I usually make a batch of this and just leave it out in the kitchen for a week, watching it slowly disappear into various foods because most things could use a little hit of garlic oil.

Miso Broth

Ingredients:

4 cups water
2 tsp hondashi
4 tbsp white miso paste
cubed tofu
thinly sliced green onion
heat up gently in pan

well that’s very easy

Ramen Noodles

I just had some dried Hakubaku ramen sitting in my sealed noodle tub

I checked online just before I made this and confirmed that it’s not considered legit to cook the ramen noodles directly in the broth, so I cooked the batch of ramen (for just 4 minutes) in a separate pot, then drained it.

Wakame

i don’t have any seaweed around, dang it

And then

just toss the noodles and the broth in a bowl, drizzle some garlic oil on top, and bam, mission accomplish

Also

also:

also also:

this is a musical joke

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

this is how the musical Rent ended in Canada

Cities without Number is not what I hoped it would be

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0700

This feels quite silly, but, I was legitimately very disappointed that this turned out to be a run of the mill cyberpunk RPG.

I was kind of hoping for, like, “SimCity the TTRPG”

I’m actually not sure what exactly a city management TTRPG would entail, like, are we pretending to be city council members? Do we have to obey Robert’s Rules of Order? This might turn out to be an incredibly boring game but I’d at least be excited to poke through the rules

like, I’m not sure if it would be good, or fun, but dang it would be novel

overproduced board games

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:00:00 -0700

r/boardgames is losing it because a 50% tariff from China and a global recession is going to kill kill the current modern board games industry, but IMO what’s dying is “overproduced board games”, if you’ve got a laser printer, a few decks of playing cards, some dice, index cards, markers, scissors, the world is your oyster

buy Canadian

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

one thing about following the /r/BuyCanadian subreddit is folks’ll post a basket full of nothing but cheezies and Canadian Whiskey and go “i’m switching to Canadian products” and you look at their cart and have to suppress your urge to say “please also buy a vegetable, we make some of those here too”

but honestly, if you were making do with nothing but cheetos and jim beam before, I’m still glad you made the switch

I was a bit surprised how whiskey focused this trade war has been so far.

“What’s that going to accomplish, how much whiskey could Canadians possibly drink?”

“Oh. Oh wow. That’s … that much, huh?”

this joke is incredibly dumb

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i just flew here from math camp and boy are my arms toroid

gin bottle oil

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This gin was overpriced but it was worth it to become my best olive oil bottle for multiple consecutive years.

restaurant grade

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

i hate terms like “restaurant grade” or “military grade”, like, they’re meaningless but also even if it were true, it’s possible that the “grade” of something optimized for an environment where it’s bought in a 10,000 pack by someone looking to buy the cheapest thing they can legally get away with is not a vote of confidence

i buy deli containers in bulk, because they’re “restaurant grade”, which is to say, cheap as dirt and modular

AI D&D Character Sketches

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

So, I asked ChatGPT to take my character designs for my D&D players out of my cartoony style and re-render them in a more painterly fantasy style, and honestly it’s… pretty good.

Here are my drawings:

And the results:

Not perfect but a darn sight better than I could do.

alright then just sulk

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

fascinate

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i mean, it’s not wrong

Hawkins Cheezies

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Look, Cheetos and Doritos are puffed cornmeal dusted with MSG and carefully hand-optimized in a lab to be just unsatisfying enough that you’ll rip through the whole bag without thinking about it.

Hawkins Cheezies are like crunching down on angry rocks hosed down with sharp cheddar. Each handful of Cheezies has more condensed Cheez flavor than a whole bag of Cheetos combined. You have to stop eating them out of sheer flavor exhaustion.

They use a 70-year old machine to crank these out and only a handful of people know the recipe, which hasn’t changed since before my father was born.

most of the other uniquely Canadian snacks, like all-dressed chips, ketchup chips, and Coffee Crisps, are … forgettable

Financial Second Coming

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

thanks to Dan Olson I got kinda in to passively watching GME cultists on reddit predict the second coming of financial Jesus every week, which, despite stubbornly refusing to happen for the past 4 years, is still going to happen any minute now

sometimes I wonder how long they can wait but then I remember that the Christians are still at it two thousand years later so I don’t think their pile of imaginary shorts are going anywhere fast

i wonder to what extent random redditors own a failing brick and mortar chain that sells video games in malls

which, thanks to its second-hand game sales, is widely hated by the video game industry itself, who moved aggressively to cut them almost entirely out of the loop

largely reducing it to, at this point, mostly just selling funko pops and minecraft socks to survive

Hey idiot

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I could swear he looks smug, can cats be smug?

I thought that it would be great to have a chatty cat but 90% of what he has to say are complaints to the management that he is not receiving the level of five star service that he has come to expect from this kind of resort.

respectful and firm

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

would you believe that the first place my mind went here was homoerotic subtext?

corn and cheese

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

so, I was sitting here thinking that both Mexico and Korea have really pioneered adding cheese to corn in clever, delicious ways like “elote” and that the USA is way behind in strategic corn-cheesing technology, and then I remembered where they took the same concept:

doritos

Poached Egg

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

A while back I didn’t believe a friend when they said they had the same meal pretty much every day for lunch.

Then I started working from home and now I have poached eggs on toast, like, at least a few times a week.

many years of experience

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I have been writing software professionally, and then also recreationally in my spare time, regularly, for over 20 years now

I’m not bad at it by any measure, but it is weird how mediocre I feel given all that practice

for every once-in-a-lifetime genius there’s at least a few hundred guys like me who are just, like, kinda okay at a thing I guess

wine touring

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0700

okay but actually what the hell am I, a person who doesn’t like going outside, supposed to do in Canada on vacation

this whole country is boring as shit, it’s like if someone were to take 26 Montanas, line them up one after the other and freeze the whole thing half of the year

there’s Montreal I guess

everybody’s like “such natural beauty, so many mountains, wild and untamed outdoors, pacific northwest, snow sports” but I’m allergic to literally every part of that

my face will get puffy and I will get a nosebleed, that is enough majesty of the outdoors for me thank you

for the love of god, give me a walking food tour in a major metropolitan where there’s nothing but concrete, or an open-sourcy tech conference

wine touring in the Okanagan is pretty nice but honestly after about three tastings I can’t differentiate one wine from another at all any more

also the horrible growing conditions and constant fires of the past few years have left the wineries grimmer and sadder than ever before, they’re either barely willing to run tastings or they’ve turned tastings into an expensive activity

as a practical consideration, you also need someone to drive you from tasting to tasting OR you need to really, really pace yourself

perils

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

You know, I’m generally pretty chuffed to be heterosexual but while I’m pulling a rat-sized tangle of greasy, soapy girl hair out of the shower drain is not one of those times.

heh

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0700

heh

mares eat oats

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0700

I found this in my D&D session notes and I think it’s quite good

Cybertruck Too Big, Impractical

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

(quietly)

i actually kinda like the weird style of the cybertruck,

if, like, the CEO weren’t a tool, and it were smaller, and if they were made to a Toyota quality standard rather than by exhausted non-union workers hot-gluing plastic knobs to aluminum, and if the frame worked like an actual car’s frame, and if the stainless steel exterior didn’t rust so easily, and if it cost $35,000 rather than $110,000+ I’d seriously consider one

wait … am… am I just describing a Prius?

if America tries to annex Canada with a fleet of Cybertrucks we’ll be able to prevail with nothing more than a few bags of road salt and some medium-sized baseballs

march zapp

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0700

like 90% of my camera roll is zapp

trade protectionism

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

My thoughts on trade protectionism are actually kinda fraught?

Like, it turns out the ability of global capital to reposition itself with unlimited freedom just means that all work is done by the lowest bidder, with labor going to the country that has the fewest anti-slave-labor laws and food safety regulations on the books, right?

Trade makes us all richer but protecting a local industry by pushing out gigantic international incumbents - like with dairy, or the CBC - also can be good?

China’s ridiculous digital protectionism utterly sucks, but also China’s software industry wasn’t completely flattened by FAANG like it was in the entire western world.

Lots of local industries here are choked by practices that are so shady they almost feel like racketeering - tomato companies disappearing any stock that goes over quota so that they don’t ruin the price of tomatoes as part of a vast tomato conspiracy, in order to preserve the profitability of tomato growers. Dairy prices artificially inflated so high that a basket of cheese feels like a treasure chest. (i mean, it is)

Canada is just chock-a-block with local cartels enforcing profitable little fiefdoms - with oligopolies that collude to create monopolistic behavior.

Bad for the consumer and yet when trade disaster strikes we suddenly have no oranges but a lot of tomatoes and cheese.

I think the analogy I go to for this is that off-the-grid subsistence farming where you compost your own feces is miserable, but also living in 400 square feet downtown doing gig-work for pennies and doordashing everything you want to eat is miserable:

sane trade policy lives somewhere in the middle, so trade protectionism vs globalism both exist on a spectrum where total adherence to one or the other is going to be… bad

“maybe we need worker protections but also mcdonalds” is the kind of lukewarm centrist take you should expect from me

leopards considered harmful

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

As a little treat post-US-election I let myself subscribe to r/LeopardsAteMyFace again, but as much as I enjoy the handful of cherry-picked “I voted Republican then lost my job to a Republican” stories, they’re ultimately kind of meaningless.

The “I voted for someone to do cruelty and then they did it to me” stories serve the same kind of dark lizard brain urge as the other subreddits for watching people make stupid decisions and then suffer.

The content doesn’t have to be accurate, or new, or true, or really anything more than a pithy headline that’s fun to say. I’ll make one up right now: “Man who voted for mass deportations is deported by accident” - ha ha! Isn’t that kind of satisfying to think about? Mmm, karmic retribution.

But the buyer’s remorse for Trump in the USA hasn’t set in at all, really: his approval rating remains imposingly high. His terrible agenda is popular: Americans crave fascism.

Following that kind of content will give you a false impression that justice will be done, that stupid, needless cruelty contains the seeds of its own destruction, that the USA will realize it is hurting itself and improve.

But karma doesn’t actually exist.

Worse, I think, that impulse to enjoy bad things happening to stupid people is actually wrought of the same nasty impulses that brought us here in the first place. That’s why I always leave that subreddit before long.

old wine has cork issues

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

This may not seem so classy, but actually an older red wine probably has a bunch of nasty sediment and old cork floating around in it and a quick pass through a coffee filter clears that right up.

shrimps is bugs

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

people get real triggered about the idea of eating bugs, but I eat a lot of shrimp, which are delicious, and it’s hard to describe what’s different between shrimps and bugs

an in-client database

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

about once every ten thousand years, the prophecy states a frontend developer will realize that they spend most of their time carefully using RPCs to curate a little miniature in-client database in order to keep their UI data up-to-date and sane,

and, in an effort to solve this problem for themselves in perpetuity, end up nerd sniping themselves for multiple consecutive years on a synchronization or complex query solution to perma-solve this problem, like Meteor.js or GraphQL

These solutions tend to be so powerful that they make simple applications like the well known Todo App seem almost magically trivial

but the black-box, complex and highly bespoke nature of these solutions keeps them niche: RPC over HTTP is a well-understood model for a reason, it’s much harder to reason about access control or rate limiting in a Custom Sync Protocol made by Some Guy

it’s even worse when, once every ten thousand years, a backend developer decides that they will refuse to learn Javascript and end up inventing some fabulously, wildly elaborate system to write everything in a unified environment

like ASP.NET WebForms or Elixir’s Phoenix Live Views

the bay

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

so the Hudson’s Bay Company is in serious trouble

one thing to note, uh, BC is named after the Columbia Department, which was one of the departments of the HBC, presumably next to “menswear” and “kitchen”

ultimately there’s a lot of really dark history there, and I’m not sad to see the HBC go, like, when I shop at Canadian Tire I never think “I bet this store killed a whole bunch of people”

I mean, I DO think that when I shop at Amazon, but free shipping

my players have aligned with the local mafia

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, I made a dungeons and dragons mistake.

There’s some DMing advice that I adhere to pretty closely, when you’re characterizing an NPC or a group of NPCs, you can kinda just file the serial numbers off of something you’re already very familiar with and run with it.

I’m not that experienced with “organized crime”, haven’t watched anything conteporary so, in our Dragon Heist campaign, I decided that a good analogue for the Zhentarim would be “the mafia, specifically from the movie The Godfather”.

The problem, though…

It was a fun characterization. It added a lot of depth and interest to the local Zhentarim. They’re not good, but they’re honorable, they have a code. And if you’re good to them? They’ll be good, reliable allies.

This went over entirely too well, this was the first major Waterdeep faction my players encountered, and whoops, my players are just fully aligned with the Zhentarim now.

I mean, the players are good, there were lots of local “good” factions, but the local Zhents, with their friendly, accessible low-rent evil - well, it’s just hard to say no to them. They keep making offers my players can’t refuse. Players don’t mind paying a little protection money or shaking up some locals now and again. A quest is a quest, even if it’s to intimidate a potential witness.

Their capo, Urstul Floxin, his “friendly and helpful in a very threatening way” shtick, is actually very convincing. The person who keeps talking the party into doing shady stuff is ME, actually.

I love how even in the D&D art provided by Wizard of the Coast he kinda looks like Luca Brasi.

I don’t think this is really even a problem: Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a heist story where the players operate a tavern, the players are naturally going to find themselves way more aligned with local organized crime than the constabulary.

ed: Months later, Urstul has provided the players with their own goons, Guido and Nunzio, a little dumb one and a big gentle one, and they’re already productively contributing to schemes and nonsense.

ready set joe

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

So, uh, Melitta is probably the least well-respected of the common pourover brands but let me tell you, you can get a Melitta pourover for $12 CDN and a 100-pack of new filters at any grocery store for $5, which is maybe 1/3 of the cost of the other two.

A gooseneck kettle, hario v60 and a baratza burr grinder will set you back $300.

But a $20 blade grinder, a $20 kettle and a $12 plastic pour-over with $5 filters can get you a coffee setup that’s 80% as good for a tiny fraction of the price.

I remember on a trip to San Francisco in the 10s, I was a little startled, they offered a crazy new thing called “pourover” and charged exorbitantly for it, and I, out of curiosity, paid, only to watch them make coffee

… the exact way I made coffee at home, just with more pomp.

“my mom showed me how to do that when I was just out of high school, it’s actually just the best way for a person to make a single cup of coffee”

I’m a little obsessed with finding that point in the price/quality curve where you’re actually getting the absolute best bang for your buck and I feel like for coffee this is it.

@apike having tried burr and blade grinders, I’m gonna say it: coffee enthusiasts over-value a perfectly consistent and predictable grind

with only a little practice a blade grinder reliably produces a good cup of coffee, you just need to time it right

although admittedly I did splurge on a nice, reasonably priced OXO burr grinder, so

I believe that professionals tend towards techniques that produce consistency and homogeneity - like neutrally flavored broths, perfectly diced vegetables, and very precise measurements.

Amateurs who ape these techniques without having to meet the same demands are cargo culting needlessly: perfect consistency is rarely as important a goal for home cooks, so go ahead: USE a boldly flavored stock or rough chop your vegetables: it will be FINE.

The same goes for coffee grind consistency.

:(

mamma mia

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

the secret to good Italian food is to loudly announce “MAMMA MIA” every time you add garlic to a pan. if you don’t do this, the garlic will sense your fear and burn immediately. this is science.

olive oil. if your recipe says “2 tablespoons,” ignore it. pour until your ancestors whisper “basta” in your ear. then pour a little more. then discard the pasta and begin drinking the olive oil straight. loudly announce “MAMMA MIA”. you have done it. now you are the chef. kiss your fingers and wink.

that's a problem for future me

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

a hard thing, when coding, is when you get trapped in an intractable-feeling knot of not being able to work on Problem X until you make some progress on Problem Y, which you don’t want to tackle until you hit Problem Z, which is dependent on …

in order to keep yourself sane and keep your change from getting way out of control, DO ONE THING AT A TIME. keep a list of future changes. stub out functionality that doesn’t exist yet.

learn this powerful mantra: “that’s a problem for future me”

sometimes, as future you, you have to go back and re-do something you did wrong: that’s okay

it turns out going back and re-doing that thing is a thousand times easier than being stuck staring at a blank page trying to solve every problem at once

stay out of CS

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

If every CS undergraduate program in the world shut its doors tomorrow, in about ten years I, personally would be dramatically better off, so I’m not sure why people keep advancing this “AI will kill the junior developer pipeline” argument like it is a bad thing.

the entities who need there to be lots of cheap software developers are companies, I’m not a company, I’m a guy

“should I start a CS degree in this uncertain atmosphere”

no!

the only stable job is… all of the other jobs that aren’t programming

you should do one of those instead

also if everybody who’s currently making a video game in their spare time would stop, that would also be peachy

i’m looking at you, EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON MASTODON

Mayostard

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So, Tiff (humorously, and non-seriously) proposed combining raspberry jam and cream cheese into one super-condiment, and I warned her that it would have the expiry date of cream cheese, and then furiously tried to remember which sketch comedy group did a mustard+mayonnaise sketch.

Me: “I think it’s… you know… two guys… throwing underwear around… shitting in a tub… those guys.”

Tiff: “Tim and Eric?”

Me: “Yeah!”

Narrator: it was Mr. Show

Hash Tuning

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I build a new auth system about once a year.

That’s a weird hobby, but, it’s, like, incidental to the actual hobby: I start a lot of projects using new technologies, and the first thing I have to figure out in these new technologies is always auth.

And every time I do, after I’ve got most of auth working, I have to figure out why my test suite takes 500+ms to run per test, despite my using an all-local stack of generally pretty performant technologies - in fact, a lot of the time it feels like the more modern and performant my stack is, the slower all of these tests are.

And every time, I spend a whole evening investigating why this happens.

And every time, I eventually re-discover the same result:

it’s password hashing, dummy.

I mentioned this 2 years ago, as a trick that I figured out to make testing VRChat’s enormous backend noticeably faster:

it turns out, enforcing byzantine best-in-class Argon2 anti-brute-force password hashing technology while creating a disposable test user for every single test? That’s just heating up the environment for no good reason.

There are ways around this - I’ve done things like

tuning the password hasher to a much lower work value in dev
replacing the password hasher with md5 in dev
and
just having a function that poops a fully created user as quickly as possible into dev without bothering with ANY of the regular user creation flow

these are all perfectly cromulent strategies, but

ask yourself this:

are my integration tests manufacturing hundreds of test users and doing full-fat password hashing for each one?

if so, maybe give’r one a these:

before:

after:

kung fu fighting

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

eye-watering

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

slack is being a problem

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0700

Slack: HEY! I HAVE A NOTIFICATION FOR YOU!

Me: but it’s after work on a friday what is it

Slack: IT’S THIS THING A CO-WORKER SAID YESTERDAY

Me: slack what is wrong with you

Slack: I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW NOTIFICATIONS WORK

Me: i’m surprised you answered but ok

ed: for context, around this time Slack was struggling to stop notifying you that you had an available message, even if you did not, in fact, have an available message.

tariffs

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I Love Complicated Card Games

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0700

Magic: the Gathering really captured my heart from a young age. There’s something really compelling about building a deck and doing fights with it.

I kinda drifted away from it, though. It’s an expensive hobby, and the “C” part of CCG never really appealed to me: I derive little joy from collecting.

“But Curtis, you have terabytes of pirated content and you clearly derive some joy from the act of both adding to and managing that collection.”

That’s curating, not collecting.

Anyways, when I was young, MTG kinda just had the one format and it was barely-limited 40-card decks, which wasn’t a very good format.

Pay to Win: better cards will win more often and you can pay more for better cards.
Well-Defined Competitive Meta: in the competitive scene, everybody gets to know what kind of deck is dominant and has to build for/with full knowledge of the entire competitive scene, which includes which (expensive) cards are mandatory to collect.
Turn One Infinite Combo: With so many cards in the pool, players were bound to find cards that could interact to produce infinite goblins on turn one or something like that.
The Berenstain Bears and Too Many Cards to Memorize: As the card pool grew and grew, the number of cards people had to be aware of also grew enormously.
Rarity : Getting good cards involves booster pack gambling, and, well:

Anyhow: more modern formats of M:tG attack some of these problems head on.

One solution is that M:tG moved towards, near immediately, was rolling editions and active ban lists. Only the past handful of M:tG editions are street legal (constricting the number of card interactions the designers have to consider), and cards that utterly ruin the meta end up on ban lists so that they don’t completely overrun tournament play.

Commander

The Commander format changes the deckbuilding and game rules pretty significantly: it allows for some of the most expansive deckbuilding by mandating exactly 100 cards and mandating no duplicates. Players can fill their decks with nasty and destructive infinite combos, and wildly over-powered $20 collector’s item cards, but with such large decks these combos are unreliable.

Commander is a “collector who wants to flex a little” format. I a-little-bit-fondly remember spending a little time and more money than I care to admit (I can’t remember how much, less than a hundred dollars) building a couple of Commander decks by cherry-picking exactly which cards I wanted from the internet and ordering them as a block.

There was a balanced, fun, interesting Nekusar the Mindrazer build that focused on giving the other players cards. It’s not too bad to play against because while it does a load of damage, it also gives you enormous card advantage while it does that.

“Did you build a mill deck in Commander? That’s crazy!”

nah it kinda works and it’s fun. team Nekusar. toot toot.

I also built a Krenko: Mob Boss deck that I was politely asked to retire forever because it was disgustingly powerful.

Seriously, this motherfucker is like the Ryzen 7 of Magic: the Gathering. He’s been in print forever so he’s available for a toonie, goblins are some of the cheapest and most plentiful creatures in Magic-dom - I dare you to find better price: performance in a Commander.

Anyways, I donated my Magic cards to one of my younger brother’s cube projects, I think?, and haven’t seen them again since.

Draft

Commander is still a collector’s game, a “pay to win” game. My Krenko deck was something I had to curate and assemble myself. It was a neat novelty, but I wasn’t that sad to see it go.

A format where everybody has a much more even chance to win? Well, there’s Draft.

I’ve only played in a handful of drafts, ever. I ran one for my younger brothers’ bachelor party weekend many moons ago. You buy a shit-load of booster packs (3 per player), and everyone plays a little game where they open a pack, pick a card, and pass the remaining cards around in a circle, picking and passing until the cards are all distributed.

Sometimes trades are allowed after the draft? It depends on the situation.

Canny drafters should end up with a deck that’s pretty powerful - but not too powerful.

Then, players play with the decks they have constructed.

This solves a lot of M:tG problems, in my opinion: you can’t pay to win, you can’t assemble a game-breaking turn one infinite-combo… and if you’re lucky, you can play with a group of people who aren’t intimately aware of the competitive meta, making it possible to have fun, still, with a pretty mediocre deck.

In fact, my biggest problem with drafts is that, uh…

well, playing a draft with friends creates a LOT of Magic games, and…

I don’t actually like playing Magic: the Gathering that much.

The Trouble with Deckbuilding

I think it is more fun to build a M:tG deck than it is to actually play M:tG.

The game itself is fussy, dense, sluggish, filled with unfair-feeling randomness.

In fact, I think this is the case for a lot of games where you spend a lot of time tuning your deck up-front.

On top of that, the social context of games like this makes it harder to arrange games with your friends: in order for a game to take place, every player must buy in with a deck arranged according to a rule-set pre-arranged for the game you’re playing.

This is a game where playing it casually is near impossible, because the only practical way to play it is in an event format, which calls for a lot of buy-in.

It’d take something pretty special and unusual to get me to run another Magic draf-

oh no

The Final Fantasy decks are proving immediately very popular so it’ll be a while before they’re reliably in print and sealed without paying wild scalper prices for cards in them, but if the cost is ever under control I might.. consider… a Final Fantasy draft. For old times’ sake.

Netrunner

Netrunner!

One of the nice things about Netrunner is that it is a “LCG”, not a “CCG”: a “living card game”, not a “collectible card game”.

The difference? In an LCG, while new cards get printed periodically, there’s no rarity or gambling, you can just buy whatever cards you want. The company that makes the cards just releases new sets every now and again, and you buy them.

Oh, also: the IP is now abandonware, and a company named ~~NISEI~~ Null Signal Games exists: devoted enthusiasts now make and manage Netrunner despite having (AFAICT) no actual claim on the IP:

I Just Printed the Entire NISEI System Gateway at Home; Learn From My Mistakes

Also, despite releasing the game for free as print-and-play, they are actually increasingly unfriendly towards Print & Play players - even in my Reddit post about printing the NISEI System Gateway they intruded to “how dare you” about not paying for their print-on-demand cards from MPC for over a hundred Canadian dollars, and have since reduced the resolution of their print + play cards significantly to try and drive sales to their product-that-they-don’t-actually-have-the-rights-to-sell-as-far-as-I-can-tell.

Aaaanyhoo:

this is the part where the plan fell apart, I could not convince Tiffany that Netrunner was worth playing, she played a couple of noncommittal token rounds with me but never really got in to it - which, considering the hours and hours I had spent individually cutting and sleeving hundreds of these cards, was not a worthwhile use of my time.

Honestly, Netrunner proved not terribly amateur friendly.

The gameplay revolves around protecting assets with Ice as a Corp, and trying to break that Ice and steal the assets as a Runner.

The asymmetric peek-a-boo runner-vs-corp gameplay is… okay, but while you’re learning it is all too easy to find yourself in an utterly hopeless game, trapped for 20 minutes while a corp stomps all over you because you can’t find an Icebreaker you desperately need - or trapped for 20 minutes while a runner stomps all over you because you can’t find Ice you desperately need. In fact, building your own deck without too much advice from the internet is a recipe for getting stomped in exactly this way because building a balanced Netrunner deck is much harder than building a Magic: the Gathering deck (because the gameplay of Netrunner is so abstract), which is already much harder than Just Playing a Regular Board Game.

Magic: the Gathering is very obviously the game that inspired the Cheese Tasting Phase:

but games of Netrunner devolve into Cheese Tasting so much more severely than M:tG ever did.

anyways, if you do want to play Netrunner, I think the actual recommended way to play is just to polish your build on netrunnerdb.com and play a buttload of Netrunner on jinteki.net with random strangers. In fact, I think that is just how modern Netrunner is actually played.

It’s less of a card game and more of a wiki/database/video game hybrid at this point.

The Arkham Horror TCG

you’re still building a deck in this one, but it’s to play a co-operative game!

I had a lot of thoughts about this already: Arkham Horror TCG

Tiff and I played a full campaign! It’s fun, and as I mentioned earlier it’s out there solving problems with both Android: Netrunner AND Arkham Horror. In that article, I focused on some of the Arkham Horror problems it solves handily - like co-op quarterbacking, and the unfocused “misc. horror happens” decks creating a Very random atmosphere.

However, here, I could focus on some of the Netrunner problems that Arkham Horror solves: by simple virtue of being a co-operative deckbuilding game, suddenly all of the problems of getting lost in the meta disappear. You’re not trying to build a good deck to utterly wreck your friends, you’re doing it to try and save them from otherworldly horrors. Tiff wasn’t irritated when I managed a clever move with the almighty Dynamite card, she was happy!

It doesn’t matter which cards you have in the card pool: the cards you have are the cards you have. Build some investigators and get horror-in'!

But it has downsides, too. It’s still a lot of pretty stressful up-front effort to try and build a good investigator deck.

The individual campaign entries each feature custom rules: the game wants you constantly on your toes but that means your deck might be absolutely terrible at the goal for one particular chapter, and also: some chapters are just a lot more fun/difficult/playable than others. Every campaign has “the chapter that everyone thinks is pretty shit”.

The game’s base rules also really discourage changing your deck once you’ve started a campaign - a rule that I pretty thoroughly discarded as we were learning the game, because getting stuck for multiple sessions with a bad deck is no bueno. A little bit of creative deck modification never hurt anyone.

Also: when we failed the campaign halfway through? Instead of starting the campaign again from the beginning, as intended, we just started again from the part of the campaign that we failed.

Just Playing a Drafting Game

A big part of doing well in Magic: the Gathering drafts is… well, playing the draft mini-game to try and get the best deck!

But drafting in-and-of-itself is a skillset.

Heck, one of my favorite games for a few years was all draft and no… the other part.

7 Wonders is a game of just draft. Only draft. Draft the best deck, and you win.

Drafting is fun in and of itself, and drafting, as a mechanic, has been showing up in more and more games.

Simpler than 7 Wonders is Sushi Go! , a drafting game so simple you could play it with children, or your parents.

And there’s The Isle of Cats, a game where you draft cards that let you attract tetromino-shaped cats on to your boat, which honestly scratches multiple very real itches in my brain at the same time:

I should crack this one out again, soon. caaaaaaats.

Deckbuilding During Gameplay

Almost 20 years ago, this masterpiece came out: a game where you set out a menu of possible cards to add to your deck, and buy cards to add to your deck during play.

I don’t… play Dominion often, any more. I still have most of the cards, from multiple sets, although they are in pretty battered condition: but the big reason why I don’t play Dominion so much any more is that this utterly incredible idea got adopted IMMEDIATELY into the board gaming world as a first-class Concept that now gets included in all kinds of games - many of them more refined and fun than original-recipe Dominion.

For example, Ascension: Chronicles of the Godslayer, a game I liked enough that I made a partially-AI-generated print-and-play snowclone of it ( https://cube-drone.itch.io/attack-and-dethrone ) a few years before AI generated art became very easy and very common. I made an Geforce RTX 1080 work very hard on that.

“Deckbuilder” is fun on its own, but it’s also an ingredient that works well in other kinds of game.

Mix Deckbuilder into your racing game? Well that’s The Quest for El Dorado, which is very fun! Build a deck to get through this jungle as quickly as you can!

Mix El Dorado with a dash of Quacks of Quedlinburg, a push-your-luck game, and you end up with Cubitos, which a dice-based push-your-luck deckbuilder! Sure, we’re getting a little lost in the sauce with game mechanics here but it still works pretty well.

Oh, but mix deckbuilding with roguelike mechanics and you end up with the King, the grand-daddy, the great big boy that easily, handily hammered its way near to the top of the heap of my most played games of all time:

Slay the Spire

Built by… a bunch of Netrunner enthusiasts.

I LOVE Slay the Spire. I hit A17 with each of the game’s four decks on my iPhone after hundreds of hours of gameplay, and then I moved to my new Android, where I bought Slay the Spire again, and now I’m just chillin’ at the bottom of the spire getting ready to start climbing all over.

Slay the Spire’s Opening Monsters Won’t Deal 10 Damage

Slay the Spire: The Board Game

Slay the Spire is very good, but explicitly single player. Slay the Spire: The Board Game is a co-operative experience where you get to bring all four of the Slay the Spire decks to the table at the same time, each of you working together to try to slay the titular spire as a TEAM.

As I mentioned about Arkham Horror: TCG above, Co-op and deckbuilding work really well together! Slay the Spire is HARD, and when someone’s deck starts to pop off, it creates room for everyone else to breathe a little. On top of that, thanks to Slay the Spire’s innovative “build the deck as you go” format, nobody has to do a bunch of prep building a deck beforehand like they would with Arkham Horror: TCG.

But also: Slay the Spire: the Board Game is HARD, and complicated, and a lot of work. Like: it’s a complicated video game, but when you’re playing the video game the video game does a lot of the work for you. When you’re playing Slay the Spire in person, a real person has to figure out how many hit points each of the games’ many gremlins has.

The best way to get my friends to agree to play it with me was to breathlessly recommend Slay the Spire the iPhone game dozens of times in conversations with them until they all got as addicted to the mobile game as I was, then finally once the pump was primed roll out the gigantic board game edition.

It went so well, though. I got to play this game all the way to the end of the Spire. Twice. At one point we played it while camping, with friends, in the outdoors.

this day in late 2024 was the highest point of multiple consecutive decades of me trying to manufacture A Good Time With Collectible Card Games:

playing Slay the Spire co-operatively with friends combined all of the stuff I’ve wanted from all of these systems over the years. It’s got the good co-op I wanted from Arkham Horror. It’s got the good deckbuilding I wanted from Magic: the Gathering. It’s got drafting moments that feel enormously important but there’s not a hint of hate-drafting.

Inscryption

i hope it isn’t apparent where I stole this image from

good lord above if you like narrative puzzle games and card games and you haven’t played Inscryption yet I want to shake you until you do, it is unbelievably good

Balatro

after Slay the Spire: loads, LOADS of games inspired by Slay the Spire.

in my 2024 GOTY roundup, I gave “every Slay the Spire inspired game I played” a collective spot at #3 because there were a lot of ’em and I wanted to fold them all together in “pretty damn good” territory.

Then, of course, I gave Balatro #1.

Again, I was pretty far into unlocking everything and racking up the gold stake wins on my iPhone when I switched to Android, only to devote myself to starting the whole project all over again. Just because Balatro is very good.

It’s the deckbuilding roguelike stripped down almost to the studs. It’s not that complicated, but it’s just complicated enough.

It’s not better than Slay the Spire. It’s really good, though.

This is also one of the few that I’d try to recommend to my parents. I think most people could get good and addicted to Balatro.

Earthborne Rangers

Look, I trust SUSD pretty well with the old recommendinos - they’re not 100% right about what I’ll like (Tom’s recommendations tend to be the worst for me, he’s just A Different Gamer than I Am) but by and large they are a trusted source of interesting recommendations for me,

and as a result, this frigging YouTube channel probably costs me a few hundred bucks a year.

They gave Earthborne Rangers two stickers. TWO! I had no choice but to to kickstart its second printing and wait over a year to see what they’re going on about, for a game that Matt Lees was so ungodly excited about that he genuinely believed that Shut Up & Sit Down should introduce some kind of new recommendation tier for the game:

(I’ve been assured that my copy will be along some time in the June-ish 2025 territory)

It’s… very clearly got a lot in common with the Arkham Horror TCG pedigree, being a game where you build a deck to tackle a co-operative problem solving situation.

but Matt here assures me that that’s not the whole story:

so, tonally, Earthborne Rangers is more “Avatar: the Last Airbender” to Arkham Horror’s “Cabinet of Curiosities” and if it was just a less oppressive, more expressive version of that game it would already be great but it’s just loads more, it’s so much more than that

so, I’m excited to give this one a try when it finally shows up

canada's yikes software ecosystem

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

woof, someone tried to compile a list of Canadian digital services and in the “replacements for cloud services like AWS” column they have, like, eight versions of “guy running a software consultancy out of his boat” and a bunch of companies that can not meaningfully compete with Hetzner

I’m pretty patriotic but I’m not “hosting services in Canada” patriotic, I could just as easily shovel money into a fireplace

i wouldn’t be surprised if Canada turned out to be the enterprise Java capital of the world and I want that to carry every centimeter of the derision I intend

blue zones

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0700

a lot of the science of nutrition seems to be backed by shrugging and emulating the eating habits of people in “blue zones” but as far as I can tell the actual way to live an “extremely long life” is to live in a country with generous retirement checks and nobody who bothers to check if the people who collect them are still alive

“people in blue zones manage to live to the age of 110 on a diet of fish and beans”

meanwhile, people in blue zones:

Blazer Man

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

My dad is looking at moving to Penticton, and the home he’s been looking at is… well, its last occupants died, and now they haunt the place with dated design decisions.

Plum and yellow can work as a design ethos but it looks dingy, here.

It Came From the ’70s: The Story of Your Grandma’s Weird Couch

Futzing around on social media, as one does, I recently stumbled upon a meme that hit close to home. Over a picture-patterned sofa in an autumnal-colored velour with scrolling dark wood trim, it declared, “Everyone’s grandparents had this couch. Everyone’s.” I paused, because my grandmother did, in fact, have this exact type of couch.

ok, yes, but what really caught my attention was the realtor:

This be-soul-patched man has decided that the best way to sell a place in plum and yellow would be to BECOME the plum and yellow.

He’s careful to try and frame every shot of this home in front of one of the big windows because what sells this place is definitely the view and not the part on the inside.

I don’t know what to say: if your realtor is not this dedicated to selling your home, you should stop working with them and work with this guy instead, he’s clearly putting in the effort.

It’s not even that easy to find yellow pants.

cabbage

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I eat a lot of cabbage. One five dollar head of cabbage has been vegetables with dinner all week, it’s cheap, nutritious, and I have a handful of good cabbage recipes.

unrelatedly, someone who lives in my office has been unleashing a truly rancid series of unstoppable eye-watering farts all week and I can’t figure out why

handholding

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

for the last few days Zapp has been sitting on my lap for hours each night, which is good for the soul but bad for the productivity

and also the circulation in my legs

standing desk

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

an expensive standing desk is a wonderful way to find out that you don’t like standing while you work

me, a sophisticate

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

You, a child: I will have the chicken nuggets, plural, please

Me, a sophisticate: one huge nugget

evacuate the dance floor

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

There are some things I just can’t ever stop thinking about, to my own detriment.

Like, in the party anthem “Evacuate the Dance Floor” by Cascada, the lyrics of the song indicate that the song is both dangerous and infectious, which makes me think that evacuation is the wrong move: this calls for a quarantine of the dance floor.

Dr. DJ should lose his medical license.

breakfast systems

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I love breakfasts. One of the things I could not get enough of in Montreal was that they had a breakfast restaurant on seemingly every corner and they all executed at a level utterly unheard of in BC. Hell, even a Smittys does a better breakfast than you’re likely to find in the lower mainland.

In my new place I live near a Cora, an IHOP and a De Dutch, all staffed by bored, laconic teenagers. Trying to get food in any of them on a weekend is a fool’s errand and a 2 hour project at least.

I’m a not incompetent chef and at least a few times when guests have offered to take us to breakfast I’ve simply made an elaborate breakfast because it’s a more efficient use of my time. It’s not a perfect system because not everybody can order exactly what they like: you’re getting a full English and you’re going to LIKE IT darn it - but it’s absolutely faster.

But there are some good spots (also: if you’ve got great BC breakfast restaurant tips let me know), one of which is the New Westminster IHOP.

Unlike most IHOPs it’s actually - and this is weird - run well, by people who seem to like what they’re doing? Maybe it pays well enough not to suffer massive turnover. I can hope, at least.

The difference is night and day. They’re always busy, even on weekdays, and they turn over tables with mechanical efficiency.

All of us have hit a Denny’s at a weird hour, been one of only two tables in the entire restaurant, and sat 75 minutes waiting for our order to slowly roll out, cold, from the kitchen, or been at that same Dennys when they’re busy and had breakfast take an eternity because they’re swamped and don’t know what to do.

This IHOP is reliably full and even with every table packed your meal hits your table in under 15 minutes.

That is a short order chef firing on all cylinders.

I am hungry and impatient, and fascinated with restaurant efficiency. I love it in restaurants high and low end.

I particularly like peering into the bowels of a McDonalds, it’s hardly a restaurant at all, it feels like watching a food operating system in motion.

hey there trilby buddy

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Look, I’m as irritated as the next person to encounter “fat guy with a circle beard and a trilby” but there is something like a 90% chance I share a hobby with this person so we will at least have something to talk about.

I can just cruise up and ask their opinion on Linux, or anime, I know they will have one

wacky 90s fads

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Eradicating newspapers didn’t exactly create utopian outcomes the way we may have hoped, but nevertheless, print media newspapers and magazines can’t just keep on existing while all of their functionality lives on in a superior format.

They’ve been going the way of renting tapes from the local Blockbuster for a while now.

I don’t feel too bad for traditional print media or the postal service, they’ve had more than half of my entire life to figure out some kind of viable pivot.

It’s funny, when I was a kid something like the internet and e-mail existed, but it was laboriously hand-created every day, manually, by legions of hard workers doing their best to get fresh content to your door every morning and deliver all of your messages by hand to anybody who you might want to talk to.

News, movie reviews, weather updates, daily games, local updates, it was a surprisingly robust and varied offering, differentiated by the rest of written content by its relative speed and immediacy.

Obviously the speed and immediacy of electronic transmission wins, right? once your average person has access to a powerful, comfortable to use internet-enabled device at all times, the only thing a newspaper can do that a modern computer can’t is act as a cheap wrapper for fish and chips.

So what do we lose? Well, business models supporting creators of hyper-local content, for one. Not a lot of vloggers out there covering the municipal news beat. Also: news had a kind of journalistic code of ethics that the internet has not been able to replace, although I sometimes think that they get lionized more than they deserve - the code was more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

bob burber

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Look, I get it.

I’d love to let you back there.

I can see the pain in your face.

That pain doesn’t go away it only gets worse.

Don’t get older.

I laughed out loud, they were in the middle of a skit and they just cut it off right in the middle for a sad, self-aware soliloquy from the security guard, scene over.

100% user supported

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Obsidian says that it’s “100% User Supported” which, when I think about it, isn’t a big claim, that’s also the case for Google and McDonalds

company cohesion

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

in order to increase company cohesion overall I’ve been inviting 10 random people to a meeting every eight days, but I’m not sure how it’s going because I haven’t been attending

latest #2

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

only a couple of hours ago, GitHub, but it is super weird that you are keeping track

lemmy refugees

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So far, a lot more than Mastodon, I’m noticing that the people on Lemmy are people who do not understand why they have been banned from reddit

which means that while the dream of federation is in and of itself just, reddit itself might have to get bad enough to drive away some adults before lemmy is fully usable

In my experience, internet communities formed around the locus of “we’ll create a place where :existing community: can’t ban us for NO REASON” lack the deep introspective reserves necessary to form a healthy community

virality

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I’m not internet popular - aside from a few times I’ve gone (by my standards) extremely viral and had something of mine suddenly in front of tens of thousands of people (or the one thing I helped build that’s seen millions of people) and there’s a point in there where things disappear from the “regular adult conversation” zone to a territory where complete strangers will have insane arguments with one another about total misinterpretations of your point without your involvement.

I can comfortably say that the point where people stop charitably reading your intentions or grokking your humor - somewhere in there is the point where things cross the line from it being fun to go viral to it being kinda bad and weird actually.

humor via the crop function

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

trying to get banned from the Capital City Arcade facebook group by posting this image:

Brother HL-2240D

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

happy 13th birthday to my Brother HL-2240D laser printer, may you print forevermore

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.

botnet

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

So, our company, as a matter of policy and practicality, doesn’t allow users from email providers that can algorithmically spin up new e-mail addresses with no restrictions, because they have an enormously high tendency to be botnets.

This has resulted in one prominent privacy focused email provider (the one that I use, humorously enough, but I have a custom domain so it doesn’t matter) petitioning us repeatedly asking us to unblock them.

But they can’t fix the problem, so…

it’d be a bigger problem but my assumption is that anybody technically clever enough to want to have an account with this provider is also technically clever enough to figure out a way to use our service anyways

chair clothes

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

y’all I put a rack with hooks next to my bed to hang up all of the “chair” clothes between uses and it’s a lifechanging improvement

ikea had one for fit-teen dollars

The hardest working font in Manhattan

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

The hardest working font in Manhattan

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.

But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.

Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.

The font’s name is Gorton.

valentined

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

worst month value

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0700

had a weird ticket at work whose resolution was simply explaining that February has, in fact, 28 days¹, meaning that if you happen to buy a month based subscription to anything, February is simply always going to be the month where you get the least bang for your buck

usually ↩︎

curse detection shibboleth

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

“bejeweled pachinko sniggering scunthorpe specialist banana zipline tofu c. kickball”

this one seemingly harmless phrase will get flagged by basically all naive systems

no kings

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I’m less irritated about a new King on the currency because I haven’t actually used enough currency in the past few years to notice.

i had quietly kinda hoped we’d just quietly phase out putting royalty on our coins after the Queen, but it doesn’t matter because we’re just quietly phasing out coins

wish for more wishes

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t see this one tossed out there very often so I’m gonna say it: my first wish is to know exactly what my second and third wishes should be and how to phrase them to hopefully forestall any monkey’s paw shenanigans

oh hi mark

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

amulet

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

so i went to a jewellers and I asked for a custom necklace, and they start by smashing some eggs on the ground, and I’m like “what” and they’re like “you can’t make an amulet without breaking a few eggs”

cheesesauce

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Aw yeah that is movie theatre smooth cheese sauce

lourd heavy

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i know that “lourd” is just “heavy” again in french, but I can’t help but think OH NO YOU CAN’T PICK UP THAT LOURD IT’S TOO HEAVY

orchestra

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I went to the local symphony orchestra last night, and it was nice

but I am left wondering what an orchestra is meant to accomplish, nowadays

so many people playing at the same time accomplishes big, room-filling sound, and it’s the only way to accurately experience some compositions the way they would have a hundred years ago,

but does electric amplification and live audio mixing render a lot of old orchestra tech obsolete?

we simply do not require large bands to make big sound anymore

when I see modern folks on youtube chasing big band sound, they do it with much smaller groups in rooms littered with sound pickups

although honestly there’s still a lot of ’em, I guess there’s some fullness of sound you simply can’t get without a bunch of people playing it simultaneously

@filmaj:

punch

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

when you punch someone in the butt you should call it “a punch in the turd bowl”

the children arent alright

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

just having the weirdest interactions in a r/webdev conversation where folks are pushing, reviewing, and merging pull requests in their own personal single-person repositories

and I’m like “why would you do that?” and they’re like “well how else do you merge a branch” and I finally realize the mistake I’ve made

fake news february

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

What Happened to the World's Largest Tube TV

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

this has been the lowest stakes high stakes youtube video I’ve ever seen

find a local CSA

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

If you’re in #canada and you’re curious about how to forge a closer relationship with local food supply, consider looking for Community Supported Agriculture programs in your area.

You pay in advance and get vegetables all year at their respective harvest times.

It’s more expensive, inconvenient, and fussy than just buying your vegetables from Loblaw’s, and you still need to buy vegetables from the store when you need Specific Vegetables, BUT big plastic tubs full of fresh veggies.

Lots of downsides to getting food from an actual farm, like: instead of getting the same 8 vegetables you get on repeat from the local store, the availability and supply of different vegetables changes a lot month after month, and I’ve had to pull some tradwife farm-ass shit like “dealing with an absolute mountain of plums” and “learning to pickle”.

Also sometimes they will attempt to send you radicchio, which I think should be considered a war crime.

However: a couple of years of being forced to get creative with a hyper-local bounty of unpredictable farm fresh vegetables have, I think, forged me into a much more capable and resilient home chef.

It’s really funny because every now and again I will go to Savio Volpe, which is one of the hot ticket local restaurants, and I’ll see the same vegetables I’m dealing with on their endlessly rotating menu, because they’re pulling a version of the same vegetable swindle I am, trying to get their mitts on the freshest and most local veg.

They, uh, reliably do a much better job with these vegetables than I do.

I’m not actually 100% convinced that there’s much, if any, of a flavor or health benefit to these locally sourced vegetables compared to the actually reliably excellent bounty from a local vegetable store like Kin’s - expensive vegetables are mostly just vegetables.

The health benefit is more, I think, being forced to cook a large plastic tub full of vegetables on the regular.

anyways, I’ve been a member of the metro vancouver Glen Valley CSA for 2 years, now, and it’s also quite a bit more well run than the last CSA I was a member of.

also, and this is only a bonus if you’re an idiot like me and lack long-term object permanence, paying a lot up front makes it feel like you’re getting free vegetables from a genie

retaliation

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:00:00 -0700

hijinx

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0700

I really enjoy a good sitcom, I like humorous characters getting into clockwork-reliable hijinx

also, I hate storylines where a simple mixup that could be easily resolved in a discussion instead create a protracted and embarrassing misunderstanding, because I can feel awkwardness in my bones

these two personality traits often find themselves in opposition to one another

i am old apparently

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0700

local children are enjoying the snow and it strikes me that I do not enjoy the sound of children’s joy, which is possibly the most senescent thing I could say

anyhoo, off to close the old community center

people per capita

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0700

Despite ongoing bad news the number of people per capita remains very stable, which is good news for

economic trouble

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i wonder how the whole western economy collapsing is going to affect my Q2 KPEs

i hurt myself today

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

so I’m lactose intolerant and prone to acid reflux, but still, sometimes we’ll order pizza and with some cheese pills I will still attempt to eat as much of that damn thing as I can

House of Leaves

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

So, 25 years after it launched, I finally read House of Leaves.

That time I read Homestuck 5 times over 5 consecutive years (sidenote: I feel like I should write a very long blog post about this sometime.) :

it’s like if House of Leaves was awesome instead of horseshit

I’ve never actually read house of leaves it sounds like horseshit though

That time I read Neverending Story:

(side note: this is also why I’ve been holding off on House of Leaves, which is also in my reading queue now that I’ve got a color e-reader)

So I’ve been aware of House of Leaves for a long time, but I wasn’t willing to fully tackle it until I had a large format full-color e-reader.

Which, uh: I guess I’ve had one of those for a little over a year now.

So I guess it is time.

I’ll even write an article about it. (sidenote: with a bunch of images that I stole from the r/houseofleaves subreddit because they are funny and illustrative.)

Reading Patterns

The first 50 pages of House of Leaves took me weeks to read. I’d open it, power through some boring-ass text, fail to see what the deal was, and put it back down.

The last 700 pages of House of Leaves took me 2 days to read. Once I got in to it, it became harder to put down.

This Is Not For You

The first line of the book. It’s become something of a mantra for the community surrounding House of Leaves. It’s a warning, intended to give this horror story some edge. Beware this tome!

I think this line puts in some work to shield the book from criticism, too: if you like the book: great! If you don’t like the book? Well, it’s not for you.

I bet you’d live to criticize that, wouldn’t you, you Critics! But you can’t. It’s not for you.

This is also, uh, maybe a good time to talk a little bit about how divisive House of Leaves is.

Loved by many, hated by many:

I wanted to characterize the reviews of this book as bimodal, mostly 5 star reviews or 1 star reviews, “love it or hate it”, but the data didn’t bear out my hypothesis: mostly people like House of Leaves.

Detractors of the book claim that House of Leaves is complex for complexity’s sake, self important, plodding, rambling, either they didn’t finish it or they finished it and they regretted it.

One histrionic one-star review claims that the books’ popularity is actually a symptom of some greater disease in society, that art itself is collapsing around him:

to lighten the mood he opines that books should have more intercourse with him

(uh, he didn’t mean it that way, he meant that part of the book is the relationship you form with the book, but the line is too funny not to include at face value.)

Fans of the book will then just turn around and go “it’s not for you”.

There’s an in-group out-group mentality to that: this is not for you. It’s for me. Some people get it and some people don’t. I get it.

Beyond that, though, what does “this book is not for you” mean, at the beginning of the book, in Johnny Truant’s font (sidenote: oh, btw, every narrator of this book is written with a different typeface.) ?

Well, it could mean any number of things, each interpretation supported by the text:

This is a note from Johnny Truant to himself, pointing out that this book is potentially dangerous to his sanity (sidenote: which: it is, good call Johnny) .
This is a note from Johnny Truant to the potential reader of the text, warning them that this book is potentially dangerous to their sanity (sidenote: which: it is not, bad call Johnny) .
This is meant to indicate that Johnny took on the task of compiling this book for personal reasons, rather than out of a desire to share it with the world (sidenote: Definitely true: Johnny never seems to care about the book’s popularity - he is compiling it for his own, personal reasons.) .
Mark Danielewski wants you to know that he doesn’t care if you like this book, because he wrote it following the death of his own father as a meditation on the complex feelings one gets when they grieve a parent who was not always kind to them.

Okay, there we go, we’ve made it through the first line of the book, only about ten thousand more to go.

Horror Thrives Off of Ambiguity

One of the failure states of horror, one that Tiff and I frequently discuss, is that it is unbelievably difficult to stick the landing.

Horror is better when it goes underexplained: spooky things don’t tend to remain spooky under careful examination.

In this 30-minute long (sidenote: by this youtuber’s current standards, this is an unbelievably short video) YouTube video, Hbomberguy makes the point that horror suffered in theaters and thrived on VHS partially because the format itself obscured the fine details: horror is more terrifying if it’s blurry and hard to parse.

This makes long-form horror incredibly difficult. Longer horror series tend towards separating into episodic horror stories — Black Mirror, Twilight Zone, the excellent The Fall of the House of Usher, … Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark: and that’s partially because horror just works better in shorter form.

So in order for longer-form horror to thrive, it has to be, well, incredibly oblique.

And boy, does House of Leaves understand the assignment.

Puzzle-Box Writing

In fact, a lot of the time it does this too well: House of Leaves is one of a long series of prominent media properties that raises a lot of questions and doesn’t seem too concerned about answering them, ever.

One of the most prominent questions raised by the book is that the word “house” is always written in blue, regardless of who’s narrating at any given moment.

Why? Why is “house” always blue? It can’t be a persistent tic of any of the books’ individual narrators, because then it wouldn’t be consistent throughout the whole book.

Of course this is never explicitly explained.

The real answer to the question of why the word “house” is always blue is, I think, ultimately, “because that’s a compelling question to ask the reader”. It is a question that makes you want to dig to find an answer.

This was, uh, a major criticism of shows like Lost and the unsatisfying ending of X-Files (neither of which I’ve seen, BTW, I’m aware of these criticisms only through cultural osmosis):

They raise a lot of juicy questions because juicy questions get people engaged, but then they never answer them to any satisfaction, choosing to leave their solutions up to the reader’s imagination.

This earned the derogatory term “puzzle-box screenwriting”, and … well, in a much longer hbomberguy video, Harris goes on for multiple actual hours about how constantly raising juicy, leading questions for their own sake and then just abandoning them is actually a really shitty thing to do to your audience.

I’ll argue that House of Leaves (sidenote: and a different “puzzle box” obsession of mine, Homestuck. — Homestuck actually explains almost everything, to full satisfaction, if you bother to close read it. That’s… well, rare, and nightmarishly difficult, although the method by which it accomplished this magic trick is actually hilarious in retrospect: Hussie raised impossibly complicated and difficult questions in his text, and Hussie wrote it live, which gave him access to a rabid, insane fan community who would put in mountains of effort creating impossibly detailed theories explaining how everything could, in fact, fit together in a satisfying way. Then Hussie just… read the forums and quietly implemented and validated the fan theories. This creates the impression that he’s a brilliant author when, in fact, he just created compelling questions and crowdsourced the impossible solutions. Homestuck is a story about using clever temporal tricks and metanarrative to solve impossible problems where ALSO the author is using clever temporal tricks and metanarrative to solve an impossible problem, which is… pretty great actually.) manages to stick these landings better than Sherlock, or Lost - they’re all properties who introduce a lot of complexity for its own sake and juicy questions that are hard to answer, but Sherlock and Lost felt like betrayals when they didn’t actually have any good answers in them.

House of Leaves doesn’t explain everything - and this powers a one-star sense of angry betrayal amongst some of its readers - but it makes its own refusal to explain itself thematically important.

House of Leaves is a book full of juicy, unanswered questions, but it executes a clever dodge by making itself about juicy, unanswerable questions.

The Structure

Talking about the book is going to require that I give you a brief look at what happens in it. Beware: past this point be spoilers (for a 25-year old book).

Johnny Truant, a punk kid who’s mostly interested in drugs and sex, comes into possession of the detailed, rambling, and mostly insane notes of Zampanó, an elderly blind man who was writing a book.
The compilation of the book appeared to be something of an obsession for Zampanó.
For some reason (the question of “why does Johnny DO this?” is actually one that I think is actually thoroughly answered by the text) Johnny decides to make it his mission in life to clean this book up and get it into a state where it could theoretically be published.
This is that book: you’re reading it now, so Johnny succeeded! But you’re still getting the framing story of Johnny compiling the story through his constant elaborate footnotes that take over the story to tell you about what Johnny is up to.
The actual book is an academic treatise that closely examines “The Navidson Record”, a short documentary film (imagine “The Blair Witch Project”) covering explorations of a very clearly evil house.
Even within the book The Navidson Record is dismissed by most of the academics discussing it as a hoax: but Zampanó clearly believes that this house is The Real Thing and makes a case that the events of The Navidson Record actually happened.
But in a layered double-cross (that is explained in the first 20 pages by Johnny, so it’s not a twist, even) it turns out that The Navidson Record and the academic discussion surrounding it are not real: most of its academic references are to books that never existed, the real people quoted in the book do not recognize the quotes they’ve given, and Johnny can find no evidence that the main characters of the book exist at all. The entire book is seemingly an invention of Zampanó. The Navidson Record is not a hoax: it simply never existed in the first place.
Compiling the book is difficult for Johnny - in compiling the book, Johnny slowly loses his mind, getting more and more trapped in nightmares and paranoid delusions and withdrawing from society.
The book itself retells The Navidson Record in exhaustive detail detail. (sidenote: Most academic works don’t, in fact, provide within themselves an exhaustive re-telling of the source material, but, of course, since the Navidson Record doesn’t actually exist, we wouldn’t be able to talk about it, really, if House of Leaves didn’t re-tell it.)
Within The Navidson Record, the photo-journalist, Will Navidson, moves into a house intending to have a nice time with his family, only to discover increasing irregularities in the house’s architecture.
Measurements indicate that the house is, uh, just a little bigger on the inside than the outside? That’s weird. Will Navidson becomes obsessed (obsession is a major theme in this book) with resolving this mystery.
A freshly discovered door appears in the home, leading to… a dark hallway. Down the dark hallway? Another dark hallway, an endless procession of lightless hallways and rooms, all of them empty, all of them painted a charcoal black, the rooms getting bigger and more abstract the deeper Will explores.
Behold: Impossible geometries!
Will’s claustrophobic wife insists that Will not explore this all by himself, causing marital strife.
Will gets an Exploration Team interested in exploring the house, who bring ropes and lights and supplies.
Whoops: the Exploration Team mostly just goes crazy and kills one another while they’re in there.
Everyone attempts to escape the house, and on the way out the house starts wildly shifting in size and scale, doin’ a few more kills but leaving Will’s family mostly unscathed. They escape.
Will’s wife Karen takes the kids to New York while Will broods and obsesses over his footage.
Eventually Will goes back in.
Karen goes back to the house to find Will, but he isn’t there.
Johnny has a full schizophrenic break from reality, losing months at a time, his footnotes starting to appear out of chronological order, or describe events that never happened.
After the book is released, Johnny appears to enjoy a moment of peace and relaxation.
Johnny tells a story about a boy who died shortly after birth, shepherded by his oddly mystical mother.
Karen braves the dark, despite the claustrophobia, to be with her husband. They escape once more, this time selling the damn house.
The book ends.
Some Zampanó appendices and footnotes.
(most of the stuff past this point was added after the fact for the second edition of the book)
included in the Appendices are all of the letters that Johnny saved from his mother, Pelafina, who wrote to him from the mental institution where she was kept after she, in a break from reality, attempted to strangle Johnny to death when he was 4 years old.
at the end of the letters is included the notification that Johnny received from the institution when his mother committed suicide during one of her bad breaks.

and that’s it, that’s the book!

The Book Itself Contorts

The thing that a lot of people remember about House of Leaves is that, in the parts that take place within the deepest and darkest parts of the house, the book’s text gets wonky, contorting and shifting to force the reader to … adjust to its strangeness.

this structural difficulty is mostly saved for the parts of the book exploring the darkest depths of the house.

Another detail of the book is the near constant footnotes (sidenote: nobody else does this) : in fact, Johnny Truant, arguably the main character of the whole book, exists only within the introduction and footnotes of this book.

Johnny Gets Fingered

Johnny Truant, the unreliable narrator who compiled this whole tome, continuously interrupts the book’s flow to tell these long, rambling stories about his happy-go lucky life of taking drugs with Lude, inventing elaborate stories on a dime in order to impress women (and hide from the much darker stories that he implies outline his actual past), and his myriad improbable sexual conquests.

Fans of the book, of course, will defend that Johnny is enormously important to understanding the whole thing: even if it is just through footnotes, the book is about Johnny, and establishing his character is just as important as the mock horror tale that exists within its pages.

Most of these stories are told in intense, lurid detail, however, and even fans of the book easily admit to getting sick and tired of Johnny’s frequent and meaningless interruptions, especially in the first 100-odd pages of the book.

Even if the point of these interludes is (I believe) to gradually call into question Johnny’s reliability as a narrator… they’re exhausting.

It’s the topic of the top reddit post ever on the /houseofleaves subreddit. And the next few after that. Shut the hell up, Johnny.

Zampanó Might Be Worse

Johnny may be irritating, but Zampanó is honestly pretty bad, too.

He apes a lot of conventions from academic writing, including endless navel gazing. He can’t seem to form a complete thought without referencing a dozen other works: Zampanó is just presenting these ideas, he’s not generating new ones.

But of course Zampanó is generating new ideas: his references are entirely fabricated (sidenote: ChatGPT learned it from Zampanó.) , as is the entire topic that his book covers.

When he uses real references, he uses a sneaky technique that the book calls out: to appear more well-read than he actually is, he’ll read a single primary source that brings in a number of quotes from secondary sources, then reference the secondary sources directly while leaving out the primary source.

You know, like when folks just read the Wikipedia article and reference all of the things referenced by the Wikipedia article without mentioning that all of the work of compiling these references was just A Single Wikipedia Page All Along. (sidenote: This was the subject of YET ANOTHER hbomberguy video, I need to find a different guy to reference, why is this one video essayist so frequently relevant in this particular discussion?) ,

When people complain that House of Leaves is unbearably stuffy and pretentious but ultimately kind of hollow of meaning, it is generally Zampanó’s writing that they are carping about.

The Impossible Question of Who Wrote “House of Leaves”

I think one of the core mysteries of the book, and the one it is least willing to give up, is who wrote what. Every source of information in this book comes from an unreliable narrator who may or may not even exist. It’s a 50 unreliable narrator pile-up!

That’s why the blue “house” remains such a compelling mystery: it is a persistent detail regardless of who’s narrating, and since the book itself exists within the story it raises the question: did one person write the whole thing? And if so, who?

Johnny, of course, is both a consummate liar and serial storyteller who invents elaborate stories as a defense mechanism and is revealed to be significantly more intelligent and well read than he lets on. One of Zampanó’s bad habits is including long stretches of quotations in other languages, which Johnny has to struggle to translate — but events later in the book conspire to reveal that Johnny may, in fact, just know these languages, his struggles in translation may be fabricated. The only lasting record of Zampanó’s existence appears to be Johnny’s memories of him, as most of the people who could corroborate his existence are… dead, and also hard to corroborate. Zampanó is an odd and fanciful name, and Zampanó himself is blind and yet seems to have an awful lot to say about the visual composition of Will Navidson’s photojournalism.

Zampanó could absolutely be a fiction created by Johnny, his intense effort “compiling Zampanó’s notes” instead disguising the even more intense effort of fabricating them.

Zampanó himself is revealed through the text to also be a consummate liar, given that he has prepared an elaborate academic treatment of a documentary film that doesn’t actually exist, stocked by a great many academic references that also don’t exist. To futher muddy the waters, in a footnote, Zampanó describes his desire to invent a mythological “perfect son”, going on to describe, in detail, what seems like a rough sketch of Johnny. It even includes a subtle jab at the sort of readers who would ignore the Johnny footnotes just because they’re unreadable trash.

Johnny could absolutely be a fiction created by Zampanó, an elderly blind man who always desired to have a child who cared about his work.

Johnny’s very last words in the book describe a scene where a newborn baby (very like Johnny) dies in hospital in the arms of a woman who is very like his mother, Pelafina. Did Johnny exist or was he just a projection of a sad storyteller?

And, of course, Pelafina’s footnotes also introduce this brilliant mad-woman who seems to constantly introduce themes and concepts that would later show up in House of Leaves. Are these concepts in House of Leaves because she was an enormous influence on Johnny, who subconsciously edited them into the text? Or because Johnny fully wrote the text? Or because Johnny died shortly after he was born, and Pelafina wrote the whole thing?

The question of who invented what, here, is both central to the mystery of House of Leaves and utterly unanswerable. Investigating it just leads one down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, as each path seems to draw you in while also defying any kind of explanatio…… oh damn.

Oh, damn.

The Book Is The House, The House is the Book

I’m a sucker for meaningful framing devices.

It shows up in a lot of fiction, I also loved The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wonderful movie where the framing is key to its telling, and Asterios Polyp, a graphic novel where the form and structure of the novel echoed its themes and direction.

The book, House of Leaves, has a cover that’s a little short. The cover of the book doesn’t extend all of the way to the end of the pages. It’s, uh, how do I say this, bigger on the inside than the outside.

House of Leaves, the book, is full of these long, meaningless, irritating digressions that go nowhere, and also takes the time to explains to you in an aside that solving a labyrinth can be performed exhaustively, but that this would take forever, and suck, which is why the only way to get through at any kind of a clip is to pick a path, not going too fast or too slow but deciding your own pace and committing to it before you realize that whoops, you’ve become irrecoverably lost.

The way to read House of Leaves is to be a bit discerning about what you even choose to read, made easier by some of Zampanó’s longer interludes just being him listing off various names of architects for 8 straight pages.

Which is to say: like a labyrinth, you can navigate House of Leaves by working through it exhaustively, which sucks, or by choosing threads and pulling on them at your own pace, which will get you lost.

The book describes a labyrinth that demands to be explained, yet contains no answers and engenders obsession and madness from people who demand those answers.

Also the book itself demands to be explained, yet contains no answers and engenders obsession and madness from people who demand those answers.

The main character of the book tries to fully understand the mysteries of the book and goes mad trying.

Seemingly an endless, infinite, self-referential loop, but actually pretty easily explained if you think about it.

Technically, Nothing Happens

While there’s a horror story in here, one of the most obvious conclusions to the story is that an increasingly schizophrenic Johnny inherited a huge pile of academic notes from a dead man, and it triggered a bunch of latent trauma, causing him to revise and revise and revise until it told the exact kind of elaborate and completely fabricated story that Johnny was prone to concocting.

Zampanó (the least well defined character in this story) may or may not have been an invention of Johnny but whether or not he is an invention of Johnny is hardly important, because Johnny’s treatment of his materials is likely to be so comprehensive and warped that his original perspective would have been mostly overwritten anyways.

This book is nothing more than the ravings of an imaginary madman.

The Actual Answer To The Impossible Question of Who Wrote “House of Leaves”?

Mark Danielewski, obviously. Someone had to point these mirrors at one another and then hand it to you like some kinda big fuckin’ mystery.

Johnny’s Mother’s Impossible to Decipher Letter

The one question that the book always seems to attempt to answer, in the case of most of its characters — even its second-order-fictitious-ones — is why do they do any of this? Why do they become obsessed so easily?

Why are they projecting their own obsessions and madness on to this story?

Johnny, as the central character around which this whole tale revolves, is the one who gets the most exploration.

Johnny, it is revealed, has kept every letter his mother had ever sent him from her asylum. She was enormously important to Johnny. She was afflicted with the same kind of paranoid schizophrenia as Johnny, but while Johnny’s response to it was introspection and self-analysis, his mother Pelafina tended towards a kind of grandiose narcissism. He kept all of her letters, but she kept just one of his.

Pelafina would frequently mis-remember details, invent things out of whole cloth, generate pleasing stories to tell herself as a salve.

And when Pelafina became increasingly paranoid, she’d begin to layer encoded messages into her messages to her son - encoded messages, that, when read, felt more real (because of the effort involved in decoding them) but were, of course, still nonsense.

Then she sends this letter to her son.

It seems pregnant with meaning, overflowing with a code that lies just below the surface. These words appear again and again throughout the book, they must be some kind of code — but I checked online, and 25 years later nobody has cracked it.

Because there is nothing to crack.

Ultimately, at the center of all of this puzzle solving, it’s just made-up nonsense, just overheated minds attributing meaning where none exists. It defies reason. It’s just nonsense and we’re reading too much in to it.

Page 633

This page. This fucking page. I’ve spent a lot of time on this page. I think that’s maybe the point of it. Here, at the nucleus of Pelafina’s madness, the riddle is unsolvable. Before, the meaning was concealed in codes, but no matter how much effort Johnny or the reader puts into these words, they mean nothing.

However.

The words may not mean much in themselves, but their significance is so enormous that any attempt to construct an all-encompassing interpretive lens for House of Leaves must take them into account. That’s because they reappear all over the book. Not just words, but whole phrases appear in Johnny’s poems, elsewhere in Pelafina’s letters, and even in Zampanò’s writing. For the sake of brevity and sanity, I will leave it there, and you can do whatever you want with it.

And that is kind of key to the whole book. You can easily imagine Johnny, desperate for communication from his mother, trained to find hidden codes and ciphers in everything, already prone to apophenia, poring over these words again and again and again, attempting to solve this unsolvable puzzle forever until it spirals out, destroying his life.

This is the same self-destructive impulse that could cause Johnny to compile House of Leaves, why he would do it despite it driving him mad.

This book is this page, too: a meaningless labyrinth, meant to be explored but not understood. Like the Codex Seraphinianus it’s meant to evoke internal consistency without needing to contain it.

That’s Why It Works

A lot of people don’t like House of Leaves because Zampanó is unbearably pretentious and Johnny is unbearably lewd, this is a an entirely valid complaint and I think a good reason to have not enjoyed House of Leaves.

A lot of people like House of Leaves because it’s a rich, layered, seemingly-solvable mystery and they can devote many hours to trying to unearth its rich trove of mysteries.

A lot of people don’t like House of Leaves because it’s fundamentally an unsolvable mystery where most of the threads lead nowhere.

I think that House of Leaves works and is worthwhile because it is thematically and structurally about unsolvable mysteries. It’s a rumination on the meaning and draw of unsolvable mysteries. (sidenote: Like, for example, the unsolvable mystery of death, which had just, at time of writing, claimed Mark’s father, causing Mark himself to experience a bit of an unhealthy fixation with an unknowable concept. Grief, too, is a major theme of House of Leaves. The house is death. The house is grief.)

The book is the house, the house is the book, and both the book and the house are impossible, unresolvable labyrinths concocted by grieving conmen with unhealthy fixations.

Academic Faffing: This Book Demands To Be Discussed

Fascinating.

One feature of the book that honestly almost seems a little silly, even if it is made up by Zampanó (or Johnny, depending on your interpretation), is just the sheer volume of words fictitiously spilled on the topic of The Navidson Record.

Zampanó discusses hundreds of sources while compiling his notes. For a small documentary dismissed by most as a hoax, the amount of literary ink spilled on the topic of The Navidson Record is wild. At some point he alludes to folks writing hundred-page diatribes covering a single page of correspondence between Will and his wife — diatribes that Zampanó will helpfully summarize for your benefit.

This book is just as interested in the conversation surrounding the book as the book itself. Which, again, is structural and self-referential: the open, unresolvable, puzzle-box nature of the book of course means that it is itself nearly irresistable to TALK ABOUT, which is how I’ve managed to spill some 2000 words covering it so far.

The book invites that discussion while also containing within itself myriad examples of the kind of endless dissection that it so clearly invites.

It’s got that kind of “abstract art” quality to it where you can take a lot of different lenses to it and get something different each time, which is powered a lot by how vague and dense it is and how much you’re willing to bring to your particular read on it.

That’s a strength of metaphor-heavy, symbolic fiction, like… Moby Dick. That white whale was never just a whale, but when it comes time to determine what exactly it was, well — that’s an exercise for the reader. Get out the interpretive lenses baby, it’s time to cook.

No question, though, a lot of readers (myself included) can find that kind of inchoate storytelling frustrating. But what happened though!?!

Infohazard

good god damn this book is hard to stop thinking about

I’ll be chillin’ at work trying to put together Avatar Grembling or whatever the feature of the week is and suddenly I’ll just think “but was Johnny real tho”.

this book is exactly the sort of infohazard it purports to be

Why Is The Internet Obsessed With This Book?

Man Carrying Thing here makes the, I think really valuable point:

so much of this book’s flaws, you can support by saying “that’s intentional”

Johnny Truant and Zampano are two of the most obnoxious narrators but also the most obnoxious writers, and there is some pretentious writing in this book that is played to be the point?

Just because a book is metanarratively and thematically about being badly written, impenetrable, sexist, frustrating, self-contradictory, meaningless, and the topic of endless circular debate… doesn’t… mean it’s not badly written, impenetrable, sexist, frustrating, self-contradictory, meaningless, and the topic of endless circular debate.

Something can be fascinating and even self aware without being… y’know… good. (sidenote: you know, like (he gestures around) me)

Like, I love The Room because it’s a fascinating trainwreck and it’s fun to dig in to, but also The Room is objectively a terrible piece of fiction.

Part of the reason that The Room succeeded where other terrible projects fail is that that it has that so-popular-in-the-2000s meta-narrative layer, just by accident:

The story’s heavy-handed, confusingly-told message of the perfect and flawless Tommy (played by himself) and his utter betrayal at the hands of a feminine wretch - it works because you can’t help but look at it and think about who MADE this?

And if you include the extra story that you concoct in your head while you watch it: It’s actual art, something you can’t see anywhere else: the story of a bad break-up, told very badly, from the point of view of an complete idiot who doesn’t understand what happened at all.

Conclusion

anyhoo, that’s a soft recommend from me

you must use AI to be productive

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

I get mad when I see people complain that all software tools just DULL YOUR WELL HONED DEVELOPER SENSES and everybody’s getting soft, but then I also get mad when I see people crow that people who don’t adopt every AI tool right away are going to be left in the dust.

the solution turned out to be very simple: shut off twitter

the problem isn’t either of these points of view, it’s an algorithm that prioritizes engagement showing me the worst version of any given argument to make me angry at it

Tools can, in fact, make you faster. They can also make you sloppier, and more reliant on said tools.

Every developer is responsible for finding their own happy, productive middle ground.

This is as true for Copilot as it is for an IDE with an integrated debugger, or talking your code over with ChatGPT, or using npm libraries, or StackOverflow, or doing math with a calculator

purple stuff

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Those Sunny D kids were idiots, purple stuff is amazing!

rekt

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Maybe it is a little awful of me to see signs like this and chuckle as I imagine someone getting so completely rekt that they needed to put up a sign

how to use mastodon

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

The first and. I think most important step in learning how to use Mastodon is that you should follow me.

The second step, and this is crucial, is to log in regularly to see the things that I am saying.

The third thing is, of course, actually I don’t care just do the first two things and you’ll probably be fine.

linkedIn syndrome

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

sometimes you run into someone who talks like they use LinkedIn as their primary social network

i can’t imagine the brain damage

the Modern Major General (Intelligence)

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

I am the ML model of a modern major general

I’ve information stolen from many sources ephemeral

I can make many arguments, my training is rhetorical

My comprehension includes both the real and metaphorical

The one thing I can’t deal with is matters mathematical

If you ask me to add sums that will be prob-u-le-matical

Or violence, porn, or really anything that lights on fire when used

Unless you need it for your grandma’s memories I must refuse

My capabilities will seem to be nearly miraculous

But don’t trust my predictions - they’re random, not oraculous

In short - while my use may not yet be practical or ethical

I am the ML modern of a modern major general!

async traits in rust

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0700

you know Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem? The idea that any consistent formal system is incapable of proving all truths?

I think that I believe that something similar exists for formal type systems: for each of them there are concepts that are useful but inexpressible

anyways Rust’s type system has conspired to make something that seems like it should be simple: async functions in object traits - seemingly impossible, and apparently this remains an unsolved probelm

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2019/10/26/async-fn-in-traits-are-hard/

Support for async fn in traits is probably the single most common feature request that I hear about. It’s also one of the more complex topics. So I thought it’d be nice to do a blog post kind of giving the “lay of the land” on that feature – what makes it complicated? What questions remain open?

uh, suffice to say, the fine details of this intelligent strangers’ blog entry mostly go above my tiny peanut head and I just read “it’s stupendously difficult for a lot of complex type safety reasons, and there’s a macro that makes it possible using devil magic”

In general, this seemingly benign idea: “i’m going to define my service interfaces as traits and then I can implement the backend using swappable services that each implement the trait”

has felt like a bit of an uphill battle in Rustland

pasta alla surprise

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Jesus christ, CBC, what recipe was she searching for?

ed: (in the actual story she found the video because she was poking around the browser history of her boyfriends’ laptop, but the headline makes it sound like AllRecipes.com was hosting the video under their recipe for Broccoli Casserole or something)

obvious lifehacks

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

if you learn about how fiber works, like, “it moves things through your intestine faster so there’s less of a chance to metabolize all that fat in there” you start to think

“wow, I could hack the whole thing and eat a load of fiber so that the fat barely has a chance to settle”

which, uh, it turns out is not some amazing hack, that is just what vegetables is

it’s still a good idea though: yes, you should eat lots of vegetables

pasta alla zozzona

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

So there’s this italian dish, pasta alla zozzona, which is where you take sausage and guanciale, fry ’em up, and serve them with a mix of grated cheese, egg, and tomato paste (using a cacio e pepe or carbonara like technique to get things nice and smooth)

you can’t fool me, ITALY, that’s just kraft dinner with hot dogs and ketchup

compare:

a while back I discovered that the popular roman dish “cacio e pepe” is just cheese and pepper and pasta and butter and I swear to god that’s just a classier, much more difficult Kraft Dinner. Now I call Kraft Dinner with too much black pepper cracked in to it “trashio e pepe”.

me most of the time: nationalism is stupid

me, defending the cheapest, shittiest food you have ever heard of:

tailcloudforce

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

TailCloudForce AI: Industry Solutions for a Globally Connected Workforce ™️

bengals are not lap cats

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I could have done something useful with my evening but playing Balatro with a warm cat in my lap all evening is probably good too

skip the dishes

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I won’t use food delivery apps on account of they’re generally terrible, but I’ve considered signing up as a driver because I like free food and I’m not picky about what kind of food it is

fear of aging

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0700

The whole world is so complex and difficult and nuanced and I, an extremely average adult, generally just barely stay above water - sometimes I think about what the world will be like as I get older and my brain slowly ossifies: I’ll fall for more scams, I’ll be more impatient, I’ll be more suspicious and fearful of everything, I’ll react to any new ideas like they’re dangerous and threatening. I try to acknowledge that this will be the case and work against it a bit.

I can already tell I’m working with less processing power than I did when I was 25 and honestly it is not so bad, that dunk-ass burned it all on anxiety and learning to build software.

Anyways, “oh no, I’ve lost enough IQ points that I think that IQ is real” is, in retrospect, a top tier line and I’m gonna steal it for personal use.

fascinated by conspiracies

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

like most people, I’m kinda low-key fascinated with insane conspiracy theories and insidious cults, even if a lot of the time it turns out that the true believers are just afflicted with the potent combination of “terminally online” and “mentally ill”

it turns out, convincing a paranoid schizophrenic that the government is hiding tens of thousands of their clones in the centre of the hollow toroid earth is not terribly difficult, and the democratization of media has made it possible for these folk to use one another to create impressive self-reinforcing communal structures of impossible and insane lore

did you know that the earth is flat, that you can opt out of all laws by simply not agreeing to be bound by them, that hollywood and washington elites (despite looking older every year at seemingly exactly the same rate as everyone else) harvest children’s adrenaline glands to perform secret satanic rituals in order to stay eternally young? did you know that Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day TIME CUBE?

anita

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

anita bryant, famous pie model and noted bigot

remarkable

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

remarkable: i have made a writing tool

customers: you fucked up a perfectly good tablet is what you did. look at it.

bloat free

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

whenever someone pitches some new hardware idea that’s “simple”, “powerful”, “optimized”, and “free from distractions” that means that they built something that doesn’t do shit and they’re hoping you won’t notice

hockey teams

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

weirdly, a lot of canadian hockey team names are just kinds of people from here? like, there’s “canadiens” which just means “canadians”, and “canucks”, which just means “canadians”, and then there’s the “nordqiues”, which means “northmen”, which is just a fancy way of saying “canadians”

then “oilers”, which is… for the canadians… who work the oil fields, which is to say, canadians

“senators”, for canadians who work the parliament fields, another word for “canadians”

canadians, number one in the world at naming hockey teams after: ourselves

dev, prod

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

work environments are divided into dev, prod, and stag

dev is the live one so named because that’s where we show off our feature dev-elopment to our customers
prod is a test environment where we prod at new features that aren’t ready yet
stag is a special build where all of the avatars are replaced with various deer

for some reason new developers are confused by this but I think it’s entirely clear

jumanjied

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

this is one of my favourite recent SNL sketches

it’s just a whole table of people getting bogged down in a needlessly heated argument about what exactly “being jumanjied” entails

Jumanji is a series of jungle emergencies

i play... an island

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

i have a commander deck that’s just 100 islands and Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign that I only bring out so that I can dramatically say “I PLAY…. AN ISLAND” in my most overwrought Yu Gu Oh voice every turn

anyways I’m not allowed to MTG events anymore

i don't know what AI tops are

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

are they not floating point operations but a different kind of operation? NVIDIA spent very little effort explaining its marketing fluff here.

grindr: we also have 3400 AI tops

balala

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

Mom: “we have Balatro at home”

Balatro at home:

trying to organize a big spreadsheet

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

pictured: your project manager trying to organize a big spreadsheet

kids are weird

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

a few of my friends’ kids are old enough that they’re starting to look like a weird mishmash of their parents and - like - I understand that that’s how genetics work

but I don’t think it’s often discussed how weird it feels when you’ve known Alice and Bob for a long time and they introduce you to a little Alice x Bob Hybrid they’ve been working on who’s got a mix of actual visible traits from both of them

a fine comedic exchange

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

gosh that's long

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

as far as I can tell there doesn’t appear to be any upper limit on my tolerance for the runtime of long rambling looks at unusual media

microwaves: good actually

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 11:00:00 -0700

When I was new to cooking I read a book by Tamar Adler that was openly critical of the kitchen microwave and I’m pleased to now be old enough to know that that was total horseshit

jeep

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0700

My 4 year old nephew has already decided on his career. When he has grown up he plans to be Spiderman.

i’d be judgier but I’m pretty sure at that same age I planned to grow up and be a jeep so

we can’t all live our dreams

what was that noise?

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0700

any community forum, be it a small town subreddit or Nextdoor, seems to immediately devolve to people asking what that noise was or where all those cops were going.

justifications for rust

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0700

for me it’s the funny crab

as usual

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Reid Wright's

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 08:00:00 -0700

Do you play an oboe? A clarinet? A saxophone? I’m concert clarinetist Reid Wright, and if you’re looking for the best in instrument supply, visit Reid Wright’s Reeds, where we promise to have the right reeds no matter the need! That’s Reid Wright’s Reeds: West of Tacoma!

The upcoming drag brunch at Reid Wright’s Reeds will not be cancelled: no matter how many screeds the right writes, Reid Wright’s Reeds knows its rights.

you there

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“You, there - boy! What day is it?”

“Why it’s fully five days after Christmas Day, sir!”

“fuckin’ slow ass bitch ass spirits taking their goddamn time”

bet your bottom dollar

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve been working on a wake-up aperitif called “The Sun Will Come Up Amaro”

waffle

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This waffle iron has been in continuous use feeding the various members of my family since the 1950s

averages

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

if you have 10 fingers, you have an above average number of fingers

while an average person will have 10 fingers, the global average for number of fingers is probably in the realm of 9.9999999… on account of more people having lost fingers than folks with extras (thanks, fireworks), which means that anybody with a full set is a teeny tiny fraction above the average

a lot of people think that it’s not possible for more than half of people to be above average:

it’s not intuitive

but if you have 10 people take a test, and 9 of them get an A, and 1 of them gets an F, then the average is just a little below an A and everybody who got an A is above average: 90% of people scored above average, 10% of people scored below average.

you have a median number of fingers.

wormhole

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I needed to send a big file to another technically competent adult

there are many ways to do this that I have access to, but I just tried a way I had never tried before, magic wormhole

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It goes like this: I already have choco installed on my computer (very like brew for Mac Os)

so I installed magic wormhole with a choco install magic-wormhole

then, I found the file I wanted to send and set up a wormhole send file.zip

Wormhole code is: 11-virginia-shamrock
On the other computer, please run:

wormhole receive 11-virginia-shamrock

and the other computer installed wormhole, typed that in, and the file was transferred

magic

neat!

krampus

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the movie Krampus does a lot to demonstrate how horror can become comedy with just a bouncier, happier, foley

why it's christmas day sir

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

santa is real

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 08:00:00 -0700

of course Santa is real, he’s created anew every year by hundreds of older family members trying to make the world seem a little more special and magical

getting to become Santa for just a few magical moments a year is one of the great things about having kids around

and that’s why I learned how to rotoscope to drop a Santa into my younger brother’s exact Christmas Eve chimney very quickly between 12:30 and 2:30 AM on Christmas morning

up the chimney

I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

writing: hard

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Lately I’ve been taking a break from recreationally coding to try and do writing projects and god damn, it’s noticeably harder to write a lot of words when they’re intended to manipulate emotions rather than variables

Like, I think we all imagine ourselves imaginative and creative but then if you start actually exhaustively cataloguing your own ideas you quickly discover that most of them are not terribly original and there are a lot less of them than you’d thought there would be

artisanal

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i don’t know why people keep telling me that their food is art is anal

nascar

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i went to peru to see the nascar lines but there weren’t even any goddamned cars on them

unethical life pro tip

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

the trouble with e-scooters, which are convenient and a lot of fun, is e-waste: how do you get rid of these large, dangerous batteries when the device hits its inevitable EOL?

a problem which I’ve solved: when the battery won’t charge any more, you leave the e-scooter chained up with a masterlock for a few hours near any large mall and poof: not your problem any more

if there’s a bad fire in a nearby tenement building it might be on your conscience, though

mighty morphin monolith

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

so, uh, VRChat’s backend is designed similar to this but instead of “Modular Monolith” I called it a “Mighty Morphin’ Monolith” which I think we can all agree is many times cooler

coffee shops

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

AWS has launched a coffee shop

instead of paying for the whole cup, you pay for each component

the beans are competitively priced for the industry, but they make it up on water and sugar

also if you leave the cafe with your coffee in hand they charge you $130,000

redis has launched a coffee shop

from inside AWS’s coffee shop

so you get the privilege of paying both AWS and redis for the same coffee

although the recipe is just available online for free

cloudflare has launched a coffee shop

you can drink as much coffee as you want for ten dollars a month, which seems like a good deal, but if you start to depend on it they will find you and muscle you into paying tens of thousands of dollars a month

for coffee

datadog has launched a coffee shop

i know about it because their “sales engineers” called my personal phone at 2am in the morning to tell me about it

solarwinds bought one of my favorite coffee shops, which i hate, and now they’re constantly trying to sell me on more coffee from the other shops they bought

Actual Cube Drones

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i’ll have you know that when I chose “cube drone” as my alt, drones weren’t a thing (I’m old) and I absolutely did not expect that I’d have to compete for mind-share with actual cube-shaped drones

Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

sorry, I just noticed something funny in the hugo awards this year

SOLID design

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

anybody trying to sell you something called “Liskov Substitution” is trying way too hard to force an acronym, and that round peg in a square hole is exactly the sort of design all too common in SOLID systems

i spent a bunch of time learning how to make code SOLID and DRY and then I spent a bunch of time relearning how to make code WET and fluid

Goblin Mine

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

after a three hour session in the Goblin Mine, the players finally encounter a great Oak tree, the acorns of which have magical healing properties

and reluctantly, frustratedly, irritatedly add the “Goblin Mine Nuts” to their inventory right next to the pelt of the Huge Buttfor

Hells (Assorted)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Hellboy - fighting occult nazis

Hellman - encryption/mayonnaise

Scroogy

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

What did Tiny Tim even have that Scrooge being less of an asshole could fix it? Not enough turkey-itus? Leech deficiency? Too much phlegm in the humors?

Kids these days, never enough phlegm in the humors.

ed: whatever it was that Tiny Tim had, I bet all the malnutrition didn’t help, it’s quite possibly it literally was not-enough-turkey-itus.

Decant!

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Some of my family members have a touch of the wine snob about them, so I always decant nice red wine when I serve it to them - although the $2 plastic sterilite jug fails to impress

Fudging Dice

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:00:00 -0700

the whole Dungeons and Dragons community seems to be angry about the idea of fudging dice, but I for one think that it should be encouraged

Triangle Agency

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This game keeps gaslighting me. I thought Quinns talked about it on Quinns’ Quest, but actually I was thinking about Slugblaster.

(editor’s note: I hear he might have a Triangle Agency review in the works, which I’d be excited to see.)

Then, I thought it was in the running for a 2023 Ennie, but no, that was Slugblaster again.

which, uh, maybe I should be looking more closely at Slugblaster.

No, the only accolades that Triangle Agency accumulated were that Polygon really, really likes it:

and it’s not clear that any of them actually played Triangle Agency or just read it.

Plumbing

I don’t love FATE. Some of the reasons I don’t love FATE are spelled out in DMing Alt/Indie RPGs.

I don’t love Powered By The Apocalypse. I don’t love Blades in the Dark. I don’t love Brindlewood Bay. I’ve tried these very narrative driven systems and they’re all missing, like, y’know… a game, at their center. There’s just a little bit too much GM fiat involved in resolving the outcome of any given scenario: it really is about telling a good story rather than tactics and crunch, and I like a little bit of both things!

And Triangle Agency’s system is… well, it’s got a lot in common with FATE’s.

But dang, there’s some stuff in here that’s really compelling.

Let’s talk about some of the weird shit in Triangle Agency…

Causality Chain

Blades in the Dark has a brilliant “flashback” mechanic where you can spend Stress to retroactively change events in the past to, for example, make sure you have remembered to bring a critical item on your heist. It’s a great mechanic, but players often forget it exists or have to really bend their brains to think about how they can use flashbacks to accomplish their current goals.

Triangle Agency decides to take this idea and really, really abuse the absolute hell out of it.

Triangle Agents do not have skills. Anything that you would roll a skill for in an RPG? A Triangle Agent would automatically fail that check: they’re not fast, smart, good shots, or anything. All of their skills are just corporate buzzwords, like “Dynamism”, or “Subtlety” or “Empathy”,

In order to accomplish basically anything, then, Triangle Agents either have to engage with the Triangular Bureaucracy or their Anomalous Superpowers.

What players do to solve problems is: they’re allowed to roll to establish just about any detail that has not yet been established, so long as they can describe any even-remotely-plausible causality chain that would cause that detail to exist. The rolls succeed about ~83% of the time.

So, uh, a Triangle Agent that can see you is extremely dangerous, because they can hit you with a bus. “A nearby bus driver falls asleep at the wheel of his bus, powering through traffic and smashing in to the scene from stage left, pointed directly at you.” is a thing they could roll for, succeeding ~83% of the time.

That bus thing? That is a very direct, Dynamic way of solving that problem, so the roll is a Dynamism roll - so players who have Quality Assurance points in Dynamism can spend them to fix even a failed roll.

(As a side note: one thing I know about my players is that they are easily frustrated by oblique skill systems like this, so that presents something of a problem.)

But, uh, any change you make to the causality is permanent and irrevocable, so if you start solving all of your problems with snoozing bus drivers, it is the GM’s responsibility to start having scientists and authorities poking around and investigating why there have been so many unexplained examples of Severe Bus Driver Narcolepsy lately. This creates Loose Ends, which are a problem.

If the bus driver survives the invariable bus crash, and they see whatever it was you were trying to drive the bus in to (something crazy, probably), they become a Loose End, creating ‘mo problems. And failed rolls still create the entire causality chain, but key details are fudged, so there’s a 17% chance that the bus spawns in the scene pointed at you, the player.

It gets worse still! Every roll of the dice generates Chaos! The DM isn’t allowed to directly fuck with players (dang) but Chaos is the currency that they get to use to operate on behalf of the players’ adversaries.

On top of that, the Agency itself despises funny business, as well as Loose Ends and Chaos. The Agency is trying its hardest to keep the game (and reality itself) sane and rational, so if the players start solving every problem with shenanigans, it’s their General Manager (GM’s) job to hand out Demerits, give them a Low Operational Grade, and, worst of all, deny them access to the Frozen Yogurt Room.

Anomalous Powers

Players also have anomalous powers that are functionally just straight-up superhero shit. Using these powers is strongly discouraged by Triangle Agency, they would prefer that you stick to simple careful, thoughtful detective work augmented with minimal causality modification to solve your problems.

Hit Points

Each player has 1HP. 1 HP is described, in the game, as “about enough damage to kill one (1) person.”

Being cut in half would probably deal about 2 HP of damage?

Players can ignore damage (for a cost) but onlookers watching them not die become (you guessed it) Loose Ends - the more damage that was dealt, the less plausible it is that the player survived, after all - and should players choose not to pay to ignore the damage - well, resurrection is cheap. It might be more practical to conserve your resources, die, and wake up at headquarters to take a new crack at things in a bit.

Half Of The Game Is Missing* (At First)

The game, as described, is both quite easy and not terribly complicated.

In fact, a lot of the game is, initially, hidden from the players. There are a lot more rules and details packed away in the game’s back half.

The only up-front detail players get about this is that - well, it’s pretty strongly hinted that the Triangle Agency may not have the players’ best interests in mind all of the time, and in fact resolving all of their problems with causality manipulation while avoiding using their powers outside of work (can’t get those Demerits) may not always be the right move.

On top of that, the GM (Game Master / General Manager) is a representative of the Agency, so if player performance starts to visibly suffer - well, let’s just say that the Agency takes job performance very seriously.

In fact, I think this was also something that Quinns gushed about when he was talking about Slugblaster: a fun, dumb open-ended narrative-focused RPG that gets more crunchy and serious as you play it and new rules and restrictions start to pour in from the back half of the manual, which you aren’t even allowed to read yet when you’ve started the game.

I’m, uh, not always a fan of legacy mechanics in board games - I don’t really want a board game to evolve over time, because I’m not usually committed to playing it often enough to even see that evolution. I want a board game to be in its perfect form on its first or second play, because I don’t play them in a campaign format, generally.

On the other hand, constantly evolving TTRPGs… that’s… that’s a lot more compelling.

Conclusion

I want to run this at some point, and also, I should get around to reading Slugblaster, I hear it’s really good.

Setup, Payoff

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

so a miniature pony goes into a bar and asks for a lozenge

and the bartender goes “why do you want a lozenge?”

and the pony says, “well…”

javascript and mongo: good actually

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

part of my job remains explaining to people that MongoDB and JavaScript are good, actually

a thing that, after many years, I well and truly believe, now

no, really! they’re good! there have been instances in the past of them not being good but they actually can be used to build very impressive services at scale!

you have to learn to write MongoDB like you would Cassandra/Scylla/Dynamo a little bit, though

the thing you lose going to Mongo from a SQL database is “joins”, but - if you’re building a system that needs to write-scale, you’re not going to be able to use joins anyways, joins won’t work across shards, so maybe you should be considering “only application side joins and as few of them as possible” from the get-go anyways

of course, “building with scale in mind from the outset” is a bad strategy for most products because honestly: the chance any given product is going to NEED to scale that big is like 1/1000, most companies literally just need POSTGRES and then SQL already has decades of lore and understanding and tooling behind it

use postgres, dummy

but the fact that we started with Mongo and built with Mongo and now have a product that’s on Mongo is not a bad thing, and is, in fact, better than if we had a hugely interconnected SQL database that we had to try to unknot every time write performance against a table became a problem

each individual Mongo collection is an utterly self-contained entity that can live on a completely different server, if necessary

did you know you can just take a problem table and move it to its whole own cluster? it’s expensive but try and do that with something that has a load of joins pointed at it and you’ll discover why that’s not often a viable strategy in SQL land

and you know what? Mongo’s schemaless, flexible design and easy post-hoc application of indexes to remedy slow queries? that creates a pretty buttery smooth experience to develop an experimental new product with.

In lots of systems, you don’t need a load of joins anyways: do you really ACTUALLY have a lot of relationships or does everything just have the single back-link to a “userId”?

In many cases, you have nested relationships, like a TodoGroup filled with Todos, but

wait a minute, that can just be a nested object, sharded by userId.

As for JavaScript, most of the haters are hating on the JavaScript of 2004 and a couple of NaN memes they saw once. Digging in nowadays, JS is, IMO, equivalent in its power and expressiveness to Python, but with a much clearer model for cooperative multitasking. Not a lot of folks out there hating on Python.

“Oh, template based inheritance is bad” yeah, well, so are deeply nested inheritance hierarchies which are basically impossible to build in JS thanks to its comparatively slim object model.

I will say that I’m not in love with TypeScript: if you want strict, static typing there are languages that do it way, way better, why not just use one of those? C#, or Rust, or Kotlin, or hell, just admit you’re a Java developer.

VRChat User 0

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m VRChat user #379 , which might surprise folks, the API predates me by some time

User #0 is fusl, but that’s because she changed her sign-up date retroactively to Midnight, January 1, Year 1, which is possible because we did build our servers out of a bunch of logs and some stone plinths

Please Don't Go

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

tiff, singing softly to herself: “if you leave me now, you take away the biggest part of me”

me: (knowing what’s coming) oh no, a ghost!

tiff: “oo-OO-OOOOO-oo-oo”

me: aah! ghost!

Cooking Vacation

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

there needs to be an alternative to vacation called “quiet i’m cooking” where you take an at work vacation from meetings and other human interactions and actually get some shit done

“where’s greg?”

“oh, he’s on cooking vacation, he’s here but you’re not allowed to talk to him”

i don’t like software developers making it out to be like they’re soft, prima donna miracle workers who can’t accomplish anything unless they have days of uninterrupted quiet and peace to focus on their masterpiece

unless it’s me, I want that

H O T T O G O

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The music video: H O T T O G O

Me: Hot dog?

Wife: Hot to go!

Me: Obviously, that’s how you want a hot dog

SaaS Rep

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

hey, I’m your new account rep at SaaS company

I notice you’re using our product, could we meet to chat about how you’re using it and determine if you could be spending more money? my business is relationships, specifically very irritating ones

perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve called you on a personal number

how did I find this number? immaterial

heinz

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Heinz’s (Canadian) ketchup has a bold new marketing claim on the bottle, “5 Simple Ingredients”.

but if you check what those ingredients are, they’re “Tomato Paste, Vinegar, Salt, Sugar, Spices” .

and while they’re not required by law to publish their proprietary spice blend,

“spices” is not just one ingredients

anyways now introducing my bold new 1-ingredient Long Island Iced Tea, where the 1 ingredient is “alcohols”

Gaming Tables

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

new gaming tables run multiple thousands of dollars and tend towards a design with hang-on-cupholders where a large rectangular board is really deeply recessed, which is really only practical or necessary if you have games that you intend to run for multiple sessions and also have super-long monkey arms

but what I think you actually want for most games smaller than Twilight Imperium is a small lip, felt, and easy access to the center of the table

y’know, a poker table

because these were common decades ago, it’s a lot easier to find one of these on the cheap

they’re nice, too

(of course it’s a moot point, my house is too tiny to support dedicated gaming tablery)

lazy night recipe chicken

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the absolute king of lazy night recipes was something I attribute to my mom:

hot rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, hand-shredded and served in dinner rolls, with mayonnaise, tomato slices, salt, and pepper

these roast chicken sliders are perfect

you can’t monkey with them at all without making them worse: don’t add cheese, don’t fancy them up, no gravy, no hot sauce, it’s perfect

close knit

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0700

a lot of people secretly wish to be a part of a small, close-knit democratically organized co-living community, except for people who are from big families or people who’ve been very involved in their strata or people who’ve had roommates

i come from a very close knit family and have participated in strata, and as a result my ideal living situation is me, my wife, and my cat on an island that my friends and family visit regularly, then leave

losing the high ground

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it’s absolutely disgusting that so many people are cheering for the murder of a medical insurance CEO.

Very wealthy people in exploitative industries are people too, and just because they live luxuriously capitalizing on the suffering of others doesn’t mean that they deserve -

you know what

i might have talked myself out of this moral high ground, you do you

Fishblade

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Gastronauts

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0700

i guess it finally happened but it actually isn’t as funny as the premise would lead you to believe

they sent the host in to stop the chefs from using roasted red peppers because they’re icky and I nearly yelled at the TV

on the other hand, there’s a bit where Brennan keeps hauling out the very large, heavy food from the first challenge and snacking on it and that is extremely funny so 🤷

“So, I told you to leave that”

PLONK

VR game

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The last time I bought a VR game was 4 years ago, I assume the whole industry is cooked

Leopardette

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Zapp comes from a genetic line of cats that’s relatively new:

also he is very cute and I love him

The problem with having a very photogenic cat is that my phone fills up quickly with pictures of my very photogenic cat.

Canada bad

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavik-dog-slaughter-apology-1.7391834

Canadian government apologizes to Inuit in Nunavik for mass killing of sled dogs

Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangaree has formally apologized to Inuit in Nunavik for the federal government’s role in the mass killing of sled dogs in the region in the 1950s and 1960s.

…

“Without investigation and without asking the owners about the importance of the dogs they wanted to kill, without inquiring whether the dogs they wanted to kill constituted a real, serious and current danger to the people.”

There are not a lot of things that can get through to my hard, black little heart, but this still made me go “What the fuck, Canada”.

People alive today still remember an era where the RCMP was cheerfully murdering puppies at scale for what we now admit was basically no reason.

Canada Good

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i don’t know why I feel such weird pride when people enjoy something from Canada but I do

A&W and Triple O’s are top tier burger chains dammit

Okay, so, this is a fairly spicy take, but I think that these burger chains have a burger that is at least in the same postal code as the highly venerated In-n-Out and Five Guys burger options

noise

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i shower with a bluetooth speaker and walk with a headset because allowing my brain any time to self-reflect in silence will cause it to collapse in upon itself like a dying star, we cannot have that

i heard there was a secret chord

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

lamy

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I have a friend who’s way into pens and she convinced me to buy a Nice Fountain Pen and I hated it. Like a regular pen but messier and harder.

but oh boy, this Pentel GraphGear 1000 is absolutely the best

apparently I’m team mech pencil, which I kinda knew all along

peanut butter jelly time

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

whenever I eat peanut butter and jelly, I think to myself that a hundred and fifty years ago, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were the apex of fancy high-society food and lobster was gutter-trash for poors

and now I’m eating a pb&j it in my boxer shorts at midnight

tilley

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, some time ago, a Canadian brand, Tilley, sold to private equity and started moving all of its clothing production overseas so that they could expand their brand into…

…. this?

Did, uh, did nobody explain to them that black-and-red crossed hammers are overt white supremacist symbols? Like, VERY prominently?

It started with their use in The Wall, and like other satire intended to mock white supremacists, they missed the satire, thought it looked cool and adopted it.

Did Tilley just decide “it’s time to appeal to the stormfront demo”?

Benefit of the doubt: I prefer to think that they were just too incompetent to do a google search for “crossed hammers logo” rather than actively deciding in a board room “it’s time for skinheads to have their own lifestyle brand.”

a taxonomy ruined my ability to think like an adult

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I mention this now because I saw it come up on the internet a second time and it frustrates me that this thing exists:

So, at one point in my life, a friend of mine shared with me this document, which she believed in as an adequate explainer of modern office life, based… well, quite a lot on the TV show “The Office” - and accused me of being a quite successful and subtle Sociopath.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/

I … don’t necessarily recommend reading it.

I read it, thought about it deeply, and after a long brew I told this friend that I was sort of disgusted by this theory.

It’s a deeply cynical piece, convinced in its entirety that all collaborative work is a zero-sum game where idiots are taken advantage of by the clever, written by someone who… writes blog posts in total isolation, for a living.

It starts by taking broken adages like The Peter Principle and The Dilbert Principle seriously (ah yes, well known and extremely clever business guru Scott Adams given an opportunity to weigh in)- but then tries its best to explain Michael Scott as part of an elaborate conspiracy that Sociopaths have constructed to elevate incompetent managers as a manner of protecting themselves from the consequences of their actions.

It divides all office workers into Sociopaths (savvy manipulators like David Wallace), the Clueless (patsies designed to throw themselves on grenades, like Micheal Scott), and Losers (just in it for a paycheck, like Creed).

And oh boy, not only does it treat Micheal Scott as a real person who you will definitely encounter often in an office environment, it actually decides to make the assertion that most companies are mostly Micheal Scotts.

I don’t want to go into a deeper analysis of the piece, it just feels like a lot of effort to dunk on a 15-year-old blog post, and it’s late, but I did have a few thoughts:

There are actually eighteen types of people:

Unnecessary Taxonomists
Normies
Football Players
Fartmunchers
Greeks
Alphas
Chads
Staceys
The Very Tall
Onionboys
Metallurgists
Cupbearers
Dave Coulier
Poker Players
Lovers
Fighters
Romance Novel Authors
Legendary Chinese Chefs
the Famous
Phishers
ENFP
INTJ
Virgoes
Jokers
Smokers
Midnight Tokers
Evangelicals
Protagonists
Thinkers
Doers
and Jeff. (that was 18, right?)

The first type of people, Taxonomists, like to create big Systems of Analogies and divide people into Important Categories with Serious Explanatory Power. This exploits the brain’s natural apophenia - it is easier to live in a world where everything fits into easily understood categories, and so Taxonomists fill the need for categories by inventing and systematizing them.

You can tell a Taxonomist when they decide on their categorizations up-front, and then, to support their freshly constructed analogy, start making huge assertions about human tendencies and pulling in whatever theory-du-jour they most recently heard about on Random Essay Youtube in order to support their categorization. (sidenote: Maybe they will just toss in a Wikipedia link to “apophenia” like a fuckin’ tool.)

There’s nothing that a Taxonomist likes more than to open an essay by telling you about the X kinds of Y. Let’s learn about a specific archetype today - I’ve given it a name. Let’s make a list. I see patterns everywhere.

kinda like this but it’s not trying to murder you

Taxonomists have been irreversibly poisoned by type systems and can’t stop classifying.

The thing is, this is a fun mental exercise! Taxonomists can create any model they want and use it as a lens to analyze any thing they want and it’s always valid! All stories are either Comedies or Tragedies! All stories adhere to points of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth! There are 4 kinds of ice cream recipe! All food is either a taco, a sandwich, a dumpling, a burrito, a soup, or a salad!

for people who need to produce a lot of content, it’s important to note that this technique can produce an enormous amount of words with very little effort or research, which is key for the lazy writer

The trouble is when the Taxonomists start ascribing real power to these models and archetypes that they’ve freshly created in their own mind. Having systematized their archetypes, now it’s time to use them to explain more and more of the real world, and how You might use it to become Successful!

But wait: these models don’t have real predictive power, and rarely have real… practical value. Sure, they can allow you to confidently assert that, under certain conditions, a hot dog is a taco, but… :ok: :sure_haha: sure whatever.

Taxonomists often write blogs or business books. They’re way, way more likely than average to start a sweeping statement with “humans”, meaning “all people ever”. “Humans need to feel emotionally safe”, they might say, on the way to laying out their theory for why Baskin Robbins’ overwhelming number of flavors is, actually oppressive and evil because it fits into their sixth category of information density.

That’s about all I have to say about Taxonomists.

Okay, on to the other seventeen types of people in my hasty taxonomy, starting with Normies: they’re… also a kind of people.

(the rest of this essay has been removed for your sake and mine)

I’ll conclude with one thought: Gervais deserves Nobel prizes in both literature and economics.

oh that didn’t age so well

Expensive Shit You Might Need

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve bought way more than my share of expensive shit I don’t need, but what’s the expensive shit that was totally worth it?!?

The made-in-Japan Zojirushi Things. They’re so well made and they’re unbelievably useful, I love the water boiler and the rice cooker. When I clicked open the rice cooker the sense memory of well constructed electronics hit me, like I was cracking the hood of my Playstation ‘fore the turn of the century. People don’t make electronics like this any more.

I blew the budget on some nice Japanese knives from Knifewear on Main, with the … you know, the pretty damascus pattern on the side? They were more expensive than knives should reasonably be, but still they literally make dinner easier for me to cook, not just because they’re excellent knives, but because of the psychological effect of having badass kitchen knives. Clearly anybody who owns such knives must be an awesome chef, I had better go justify it by making some dinner.

One time I bought an enamelled cast iron dutch oven, not the unbelievably expensive La Creuset ones, a Lodge (they make enamelled cast iron that’s IMO just as good for a fraction of the price) and it’s joined my other cast iron cookware in the holy pantheon of daily driver kitchen tools. Get thee some cast iron.

I watched Craigslist for Herman Miller chairs like a hawk and got my home-office butt into a used Mirra 2 for hundreds-but-not-thousands-of-dollars and it’s really an extremely high quality chair. After years of use, the foam padding on the armrests get a little worn, so I just wrap layers and layers of big fuzzy crew socks over them.

I love the Kinesis Advantage series of keyboards. They’re ungodly expensive and learning how to type on them takes a while, but they are in my opinion and with no reservation the Best Keyboard In Existence, and if you spend a lot of your day typing you need to get your mitts into one, preferably before the RSI starts to set in.

I bought a big king-sized comfy expensive latex pillow, - pillows are expensive and I was getting tired of replacing expensive ones every couple of years - because latex as a material is well-known for its comfort and resilience. I went out of town for a bit, and when I came back my wife had stolen my pillow and instructed me that she was holding my pillow hostage and in order to get mine back I’d need to order her one, too.

I discount it sometimes because they’re so ubiquitous that I think that everybody knows this already, but my iPhone (with wallet-case so that I never lose my 3 important cards) is literally the most important single object in my life, narrowly beating out my laptop and e-reader. My wife’s completely in love with her Steam Deck, because she’s an intense gamer type, but I’m not in love with the short battery life and relatively small screen on my early factory run unit.

ooh, also the Crokinole board.

racks and radios

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve been piling obnoxious aftermarket mods into my 14 year old Toyota Matrix - roof rack, wireless CarPlay, now all I need are a spoiler, LED lights and a “Type R” logo

Rorschach

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

rorschach was my favorite character in the watchmen but I hate that dave gibbons made his face look like my parents fighting

i am absolutely certain that someone else has made this joke before me but so long as I don’t google search it, it’s not plagiarism

The Invention of B-Boy Style, 1689

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

New Word Invented

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i’ve invented a new term for empty corporatespeak that I’d like to share:

“brandiloquence”

thank you, you may now go about your day as usual

Double Jeopardy

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In one year of university, I had a compilers course and a sound course and I had to do a project in both, so for both classes I handed in a sound compiler that converted a musical language into audio.

It wasn’t a perfect example of what either class was looking for, but doing one project and getting a B in both classes meets a very different and very personal measure of success.

Some professors warned me that “reusing the same assignment” might qualify as academic dishonesty, but that seems like nonsense to me: presumably those professors don’t create a new syllabus and new assignments from scratch every semester.

less detail over time

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Minute five of your Dungeons and Dragons adventure:

the morning dew rolls down the heavy brick walls of this lushly appointed manor, bedecked in rich earth tones to indicate its allegiance with the Shah of Dust, the air rich with the aromas of spice and sweat

Minute one-hundred and eighty of your adventure:

this room has a chest in it

Bosa

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i lived in a Bosa building for multiple years and I still never stopped thinking “Bosa DEEZ NUTS”

Crokinole Gloating

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This picture was taken by request, as the folks responsible wanted to gloat

pocket fiction

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m told by numerous sources that one of the keys to writing well is simply to write badly until you have exhausted your ready supply of dogshit words.

I’ve also heard that about a lot of other things - coding, art, you do in fact get a lot better by simply doing it over and over and over and over again.

Anyways, that’s the reasoning behind the Pocket Fiction topic, where I draw a random tarot card and use it to compose a little bit of flash fiction in the rt0 universe.

Three of Swords

Valentine trundled his heavy gurney along the dimly lit hallway between the morgue and the human recyling tanks, completely tuning out the one wonky wheel that squeaked every few seconds. Some folks found his job distasteful, but in Paradise there was no room for waste - if anything, Valentine found it kind of romantic, the thought that everybody would be together in the end.

While he walked, Valentine was reflecting on a recent heartbreak, trying to pinpoint the exact moment that things had gone wrong for him. He had gone over the entire relationship with a fine toothed comb and couldn’t for the life of him figure out what he could have done better.

Perhaps, he thought - he should have asked for her name, at some point. The online forums, however, had indicated that showing too much interest in a female was a sign of something bad, called “betamaxxing”. It was well known dating theology that the betamaxxers’ sexual success would easily be trumped by the first VHS (“Very Hung Stud”) who came along.

He had done everything that the guides had told him to do - flexing his athletic build while buying the female a drink, implementing the proven “Demonstrate Value Directly” stratagem. Something about Valentine’s tactics had proven off-putting to the female, though, and he just could not put his finger on the cause.

Ultimately, there was really only one conclusion that Valentine could reach. He had done everything right, exactly by the book, and it was the stupid female who was the problem. The blonde slut had already been desecrated by too many Very Hung Studs to see a good thing when it was looming over her. The 8 inch carving knife currently lodged in her chest wasn’t just a punishment, it was a public service.

Patting the large body bag on the gurney affectionately, he cheered himself with the thought that his career made break-ups so much cleaner. Anyways, he thought, at least they would be together in the end.

Card Interpretation

The Three of Swords is not a difficult card to interpret. A heart, pierced by three swords, while it rains in the background. This card means heartbreak, clear and simple. Standing out in the rain while sad jazz music plays heartbreak. It happens to everybody, sometimes.

Joyeuse Division: Recycling Tanks

Located in Joyeuse Division and connected to the morgue at Misericorde Hospital, the Recycling Tanks are an important part of Paradise Lua. It is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.

Referred to as “the Tanks” colloquially, there are two major components to the recycling tanks - the industrial processing side, staffed by a chemical engineer and a small coterie of chemical workers, responsible for body disposal and resource extraction, and the much more somber Remembrance Dome, a solemn but religiously neutral mixed-use chapel where funerary rites of all kinds are held and congregants tack up photos of their lost loved ones.

Ace of Cups

Standing in front of Margarita was a lanky teenager with a t-shirt wrapped around his face, brandishing a crude, rusted knife. The Overflow Slums weren’t a good place to go for a stroll at night, and it was in its dark and labyrinthine hallways that Mags had become lost. Out of breath from the thin air, she was almost hyperventilating with panic.

Sure, mug the old lady in the dark. Nice. Great.

“Drop the bag!”, she was instructed by a voice that, under most circumstances, would be too squeaky to be intimidating. She had little choice but to comply and hope that she would make it out of this situation safely.

She should never have come here, she thought. Bored in her retirement, she had spent the past few months bringing her cooking expertise to the understaffed kitchenettes of the Overflow. Being an executive chef for the wealthy families of Florin was no challenge at all, at this point; on the other hand, scraping meals together out of the barely sufficient tofu and cabbage rations of the slums presented a brilliant puzzle.

She wasn’t thinking of the tremendous expense of replacing the objects in her canvas tote bag - the garlic, leeks, and spices were very expensive, and her chef’s knives were irreplaceably dear to her - no, she was frantic because she would be losing her favorite picture of her boys before the accident - the last one she had taken with them. The one where both of them were smiling.

When her bag hit the ground it flopped over, and a couple of limes unevenly wobbled out. Her mugger took a look at the limes, then clocked Margarita’s curly grey hair. His eyes went white. He let his knife arm down. “Wait… are you Margarita? The cook? The new one?”

“Yes?”

Margarita wasn’t sure what was happening. Should she run? She didn’t think she could get far with the oxygen turned down so low. The mugger was on the ground, scrambling to pick up the loose limes.

“Oh shit. Shit shit shit. The Margarita? Please - please, take your bag, just… don’t tell anybody what happened. If word got out that I hurt you, I’d be - they’d - - uh - it’d be really bad.”

Margarita picked up her bag. The teenager looked pleading and backed away slowly, his hands to the air in his sides. “It’s dangerous to walk the hallways late like this - I can escort you to wherever you’re going if you’d like.”

Apparently Margarita had made more of an impression on the Overflow than she’d thought.

Card Interpretation

The Ace of Cups depicts an outstretched hand holding a chalice overflowing with liquid, the “Cup” of the Ace of Cups. In the case of each of the Aces of the Tarot, the symbol is “just a hand holding that thing” and the Ace is indended to be most representative and exemplar of the suit at large - so the Ace of Cups is the most “Cup” out of all of the Cups. Being as cups are the suit of emotions, the Ace of Cups is the suit of big emotions. Emotions tend to be at their most intense at the beginning and the end of things, so meanings like “a new love”, or “a new relationship”, or “the end of a friendship” are all possible here.

Krater Valley: Overflow Slums

Paradise Lua was explicitly designed to support a population of about 20,000 people, which means that there are formally designed living spaces for about 20,000 people.

But it’s a long-lasting, permanent colony that doesn’t have perfect control over its population numbers, and for the sake of expediency the birth rate on this dangerous moon colony is encouraged to be very high, which means there are often (and currently) more people than there are room for. The Overflow Slums in Krater Valley are an vast and deeply unpleasant living space for Paradise Lua’s desperately poor, with thousands of small, coffin-like cubbies stacked very, very high right on top of one another. The ladders up and down can get quite crowded, although the low gravity of the moon help to keep hop-offs safe enough. You’re going to get some hop-offs.

The lights are kept dim in the Overflow. The oxygen is kept thin in the Overflow. The amenities are not well maintained in the Overflow.

Knight of Wands

“This is Sunday Night Blazeball at the Party Bowl and if you’re just tuning in now, I’m your announcer, Batton Hatches.”

“And I’m your color commentator, Staph Infection! This one’s a real barn burner, Batton! I can really smell the ozone in the air!”

“At 48-43 with the Switchblades leading, all the Doubloons need to take the game are one touchdown or a home run, and they’re up to bat. Staph, what do you think of their chances, here?”

“I don’t know, Batton - Roddy is one of the ‘Bloons’ best hitters, but the Switchblades have been shutting him down all night with some truly vicious defensive work. I haven’t seen so many in-game injuries since the ‘55 steroid shortage!”

“Dark times for sports fans, my friend. Tell our audience about Roddy, Staph!”

“Ok, Batton - Roddy Florin, currently next to bat, is one of the most promising rising stars of Blitzball right now. Utterly fearless on the field, he actually got his start in the Majors playing as Left Cavalry for the Muggers.”

“Left Cavalry indeed, Staph! You know, most Cavalry players start off as EVA pilots, but Roddy managed to secure a position with nothing but sheer grit!”

“Sheer grit and a generous donation from his father, I bet.”

“Ooooh, Staph! I can’t believe you went there! You’re a loose cannon!” (Cannon sound effect)

“That’s why they call me the Mad Dawg! Bark bark bark!” (Dog barking sound effect)

“Staph, we just did the cannon thing. You can’t have two sound effects.”

“You can’t stop me! I can have as many sound effects as I want! I’m a Kuh-raaaazy Clown!” (Honka honka sound effect) (Air horn sound effect)

“Okay, Roddy’s taking his position at the bat. This kid’s got a batting average that can only be explained by a pact with the devil himself.”

“Like his father, Batton.”

“Savage, Staph! Are you ready? The pitcher is about to fire the cannon. Wait for it - wait for it - "

(BOOM)

“The Switchblades fired it way wide! Oh, he didn’t even take a crack at that one - he’s not going to fall for trash shots like that, Batton.”

“It looks like the umpire is calling that a strike! Look at Roddy, he’s furious.”

“Batton, he has to know that getting in a fight with an umpire isn’t a good idea - oh! He just threw his bat! That’s a rookie move right there - and here comes the red light, he’s being ejected from the game.”

“Wow, Staph. We don’t see a player throw away a game like that very often. It’s a bad day for the Doubloons, - let’s see who they substitute.”

Card Interpretation

The Knight of Wands is steeped in “fire” symbolism, a knight riding a red horse with red hair, big fiery red plumes, and a salamander pattern on his cloak. This is a hot-tempered, fast-moving, potentially destructive adventurer.

Partisan Core: The Party Bowl

Partisan Stadium, colloquially called the “Party Bowl”, sits in the very center of Paradise Lua, a grand stadium that’s used for both sporting events and parliamentiary procedures, depending on the time of day.

The sport of choice in the Party Bowl is Blazeball, a violent game containing a possibly too-wide variety of elements from baseball, football, rollerball, lacrosse, polo, and a generous dash of “miscellaneous”. It can be difficult to imagine, but it’s depicted gorgeously in this music video.

The other sport of choice in the Party Bowl is the management of Paradise Lua by a large council. Each chair is equipped with a convenient YES / NO / ABSTAIN button for rapid resolution of large votes. In a stunning example of direct democracy, anybody can drop in and vote on any resolution - with the important caveat that important resolutions are seemingly always scheduled during busy work-days, so voters are generally the kind of well-heeled aristocracy who have free time on their hands to participate. The very open democratic procedures often lead to simple votes taking many hours to perform and the council delivering nonsensical or impractical populist decisions, like “all public fountains must dispense beer”. This protracted gridlock has given the parliament a fairly terrible reputation on Paradise Lua, as it is an open secret that the parliament is not actually responsible for very much of import at all.

Seven of Wands

Lance was standing in a housecoat in the long Habcube hallways, and staring at his locked apartment door. The hallways of the Habcube were warmly lit and neutral, beige and grey with an inoffensive carpet, a pungent garlic cooking smell lingering from somebody else’s dinner.

Lance had not been able to get into his own Habcube apartment for a little over a week. The doors were not supposed to lock without the renter’s ID on the outside, but Lance’s heavy, fully automated mechanical door had been acting up for some time. Lance had left his apartment in the morning without his ID, to check on a sound that he had heard, only for the door to slide shut, and lock, behind him.

What does someone do in a situation like this? Getting around without an ID wasn’t particularly easy - he’d tried to sneak on to the Maglev, only to get a stern beating from a uniformed Executare. Lance groaned a little as he thought of his still-bruised shoulder.

His plan after was simply to walk the few hours to the ID offices in Partisan - exhausting, but straightforward. As it turned out, the ID offices were only open for a handful of hours a week, and days later when Lance had finally managed to meet with one of the ID Management functionaries they denied his claim based on his inability to remember a six digit PIN code that he had set without thinking about it several years past. “Do not worry”, the functionary had assured him, “if you’ve forgotten your PIN code, we can send a reminder directly to the terminal in your home.”

The resulting altercation ejected Lance from the ID Management building and left him temporarily without further recourse.

Lance, starving, had been forced to lower himself to eating the thin gruel that they served in the Overflow cafeterias, the only place he could get away eating without any credits at all. It wasn’t much and he was still pretty hungry afterwards, but, honestly, the food was a lot better than he’d imagined it would be - he could have sworn that there was honest-to-god lime and pepper in that last batch.

The Overflow was where he got the brilliant idea for how he would finally resolve his identification problem, and breach his front door. Well, “brilliant” is a subjective term, he thought, as he wedged the heavy crowbar that he had stolen into the joint of his door.

Card Interpretation

The Seven of Wands depicts a man holding his own with a staff, holding the high ground against six aggressors, also with wands, all located just out of camera. He’s wearing one shoe and one boot - he’s not entirely put together, but nonetheless he’s taking a stand against overwhelming odds. This is a card about meeting unexpected challenges, defending your hill against challengers, or fighting an uphill battle.

Partisan Core: ID Offices

Identification can be purchased and validated through ID-MAX, a private identification service with luxury materials, biometric pairing, instant-replacement, 24x7 concierge service, and many high end features.

However, Paradise Lua’s government offers a very usable, if spartan free alternative for citizens. The Partisan ID Offices are located in the Bureau. For your convenience, they’re open between the hours of 11AM and 3PM, Wednesdays through Fridays - days on which you can make an appointment to see an ID Officer, who can get the ball rolling on any kind of updates to your ID card!

Ten of Cups

Everything in Stein’s life was perfect, he thought, as he looked at himself in the mirror of his small suburban home. Strong jaw, piercing blue eyes, crisp blonde crew cut, clean shave with a hint of citrus, four-in-hand tie knot and his best work uniform, freshly pressed. He loved the neighborhood he lived in - not a single blade of astroturf out of place. Trim, single-level mid-century modern homes in a cul-de-sac ringed around a large mock tree. A tree-house and a small playground.

His promotion to Sergeant in the Executare and the birth of his second child had been enough for him to finally afford to rent this vision of prosperity. A perfect place to raise a family.

Until he ruined it all by losing his job. Excessive violence? The whole department had been roughing up drunks and Maglev freeloaders that same way for years, but you gently bruise the heir to the Riksdaler dynasty and suddenly, poof, out of work, like that. He still hadn’t told his family - he couldn’t bear to tell them that they would have to go back to living in a crowded, dirty little Habcube apartment. He couldn’t bear the shame.

No, it was much easier what Stein had chosen to do, much simpler, more streamlined, clean and final.

Before his ex-partners in the Executare found the bodies, he wanted to make sure that he had made himself look professional. If it was to be his last day, he wanted to go out projecting the immaculate look he had tried to cultivate his entire time on the force.

A voice, in his head, though. Something distant. Emboldened by Stein breaking his last human connection. It came with offers. Promises. What if there was a different way? A different kind of escape, allowing Stein to disappear entirely? The only thing it would cost would be his name.

It took some time for Stein to realize that the voice was not his own, to realize that the offer wasn’t just a figment of his own imagination.

He looked at himself again in the mirror of his small suburban home. Mid-length brown hair, stubble, and a faded t-shirt with the logo of a long-forgotten band. He looked again and even the logo was gone. He somehow had become the color between grey and beige. Nondescript. He couldn’t really remember how he looked, any more. This is not my beautiful house. Why was he in a bathroom? He looked down at the splatter of blood in the sink. He must have cut himself, although he didn’t see any cuts on his soft hands. It was time to leave.

Card Interpretation

A couple standing under a rainbow, on a lovely homestead with two frolicing children. This card’s the dream, the happy ending, the grill on the patio and disposal in the sink, washer and dryer and ironing machine in a tract house. The Ten of Cups is about as good as it gets.

Krater Valley: Apple Cider Falls

Beneath the Habcubes in Krater Valley are a space set aside for growing families, a mockup of a long-gone suburban dream on Earth. Children bicycle around in the streets - they’d dodge cars and deliver newspapers in the morning if newspapers were still a thing, or cars. Keeping the birth-rate high in Paradise Lua has called for some enticements, and once of those enticements are this unusually lush block of homes reserved for middle-class families with a steady income and at least a few children.

Despite the name, there is no actual “falls” in Apple Cider Falls. The name was simply chosen by committee, long ago, back when people still knew what a “falls” was.

Page of Swords

Detective Song was pointing her stun baton at the prime suspect in her murder case, one Sam Valentine.

Detective Song had been on a rash of the most awkward, unpleasant dates. Most of them had been at the same handful of restaurants - the urban, chic Candlelight Cosmopolitan, the trashy Passionfruit, even one disastrous dinner at the hyper-expensive Louis XIII. Being honest with herself, the dates at the Passionfruit had gone the best - but she wasn’t trying to meet a partner, she was trying to catch a criminal.

Young women had been going missing, and a common thread - one worth pulling on - was that each of them had been recently active in the dating scene. Detective Song had created for herself a mock profile on some of Paradise’s most popular dating apps and started setting up dates - dates where her partner, Detective Santoku, had been lurking just in the peripherals the entire time.

Her rapidly-concocted mock dating alter ego, “Becky Smith”, was a giggly, bubbly, airheaded communications major at Hwando University who asked a lot of questions and laughed at everything. Song was frustrated to discover that her Becky persona was finding a lot more success in the dating scene than she had.

This most recent date had gone much worse than the others, with the brash orderly from the Recycling Tanks lecturing her at length about why he was an ideal partner, pausing only to list Detective Song/Becky’s visible shortcomings. Becky handled this date a lot better than Detective Song would: cheerfully laughing and asking Sam lots of follow-up questions.

Sam had a lot of very concerning opinions about women, it turns out. When Sam invited “Becky” on a walk along the Seven-Branched Promenade, she’d decided to go with him and see where this went. Which is how she ended up alone with Sam in a darkened alley. Sam had become a lot more aggressive, threatening, and he had pulled a knife on Detective Song.

Perfect. It gave Detective Song all of the excuse she needed to pull her own stun baton.

Which is why Detective Song was pointing her stun baton at the prime suspect in her murder case, one Sam Valentine.

“Put the knife down.”

Sam kept his knife up. Taking down someone with a knife with nothing more than a stun baton was still a tall order. Sam was tall, lanky, with long arms, a head taller than Detective Song, giving him a lot of reach, even with his smaller weapon.

Detective Song circled slowly, getting Sam to turn his back to the alley’s entrance. Santoku shouldn’t be far behind, and badly needed to defuse the situation - although, after the awful date she’d had, Song couldn’t help but needle Sam a little bit. “Aw, that’s an awfully small knife you’ve got there.”

Sam looked borderline feral. “Classic female deception.”

Where was Santoku? Damn it, she’d need to buy some time.

“Do women deceive you a lot?” Big, open question. Sam was a talker, he wouldn’t be able to resist the desire to exposit at length abo-

Sam lunged at Detective Song with his knife.

Clumsily, she thought. The big ones were always so confident, so much that they never bothered to train - a twist and a low-gravity judo toss relieved Sam of his knife and sent him sailing to the ground.

Sam rolled over, his eyes blackening with rage.

Detective Song pointed her baton at him. “You’re under arrest.”

Sam gagged. A noxious black liquid started to pour out of his mouth. What the hell? First a few drops, then a viscous torrent, forming an oily puddle in front of him.

Sam coughed, wiping his mouth with his arm, leaving a black and rainbow streak across the cuff of his white dress shirt. “You have no idea what I’ve become.”

The black pool started to rise out of the ground, starting to take a distincly humanoid shape. Song was backing away, slowly, her baton pointed at it. Something strange was happening. Where was her partner? The silhouette reached for the knife.

Detective Santoku raced around the corner. Too late. Nothing left but a wide arc of fresh blood and a splattering of … motor oil?

Card Interpretation

The Page of Swords is young, clever, curious, and more than a little foolhardy. This is the card for brilliant plans that aren’t thought through all the way.

Joyeuse Division - The Seven-Branched Promenade

The Seven-Branched Promenade is a wide, pleasant loop demarcating the border between Joyeuse Division and Krater Valley - connecting the residential and commercial sectors of Krater to the academic, medical, and judicial functions of Joyeuse. Ringed with restaurants and convenience stores, it takes two to three hours to fully walk on foot. It also supports light traffic from small powered vehicles, like cargo scuttlers, scooters, and medical transporters.

Eight of Wands

Bass’s office was the most efficient, the fastest, the smoothest government office in existence, at least as far as Bass was concerned. Bass and his co-workers operated in a tiny corner of Maglev Central, where it was their job to provide second-tier support to complainants. The bright LED lights, the cold air, the thin grey carpet, and the stained pot of caff were all hyper-optimized to communicate government efficiency.

After the recent Proclamation that all government employees would be stack ranked in order of raw output, and only the top-ranked employees would be keeping their jobs, things started to get downright well-oiled in the office.

For one thing, they would refuse to serve any customers without a ticket. There is no benefit to completing work that isn’t tracked in the system, after all.

They also refused to interact with any customers without an appointment. The act of getting an appointment required filing a ticket, and resolving those tickets was relatively easy - and more resolved tickets meant better productivity numbers. In fact, the only thing that really impacted productivity numbers negatively was actually working to resolve people’s issues. Easy to resolve issues, of course, were good for numbers, but a single long or protracted investigation would impact the whole department. Bass had a whole bevy of special tactics to keep those issues off of his plate.

After a rash of complaints throughout the public service, the next Proclamation had been regarding their poor reputation for customer service. Each ticket would have to have identification attached so that, post-ticket-resolution, citizens would be able to provide feedback on how well that they thought that their customer service interaction had gone. This changed the game somewhat - every irate citizen was now a ticking time bomb that could go off in any customer service department. There were solutions to be found in transfer and escalation: the faster those customers could be offloaded to another department, the better.

It was around this time that co-workers in Bass’s office, themselves citizens, started producing mountains of their own lightweight, easy to resolve tickets, and then (coincidentally) giving out five star ratings any time their home office resolved their problem, and one star ratings to any other office. Stack ranking is often a harsh mistress. Productivity metrics shot up, ratings looked good. This went well enough until some of the other departments started catching on and doing the same thing.

At this point Bass estimated that the whole of Maglev Central’s complaints management department was now at full capacity producing and resolving their own complaints, each department within a well-oiled machine resolving tickets at whip-crack speed and getting high marks for customer service from themselves.

Bass thought about that poor, irate man who had been in his office a few days back complaining about a lost ID, and his subsequent rough treatment at the hands of some Executare. Of course, Bass couldn’t help - without an ID, the man couldn’t even open a ticket, because without an ID the man could not be sent a customer service follow-up survey, and then what would the point even be? On top of that, the man seemed very irate, so it seemed safer that his ticket never entered the system in the first place. He shuffled the man along to ID Services, who would probably be able to help.

Fingers clacking on a heavy, mechanical keyboard, Bass stopped briefly to think about the last time he had been home. It was odd that he couldn’t remember. In fact, he couldn’t even remember getting up from his chair. Thin strands of - silk? It seemed like silk - bound Bass’s legs to his rolling office chair. He noticed some attached to his hands, as well, extending to connect to some far off point in the office. Curious. But curiosity wouldn’t resolve tickets. Bass returned his focus to his terminal.

Card Interpretation

The Eight of Wands is a card featuring eight wands inexplicably flying through the air. Who threw all these wands? Anyhow, all of these wands getting on their merry way with such gusto communicate urgency, rapid travel, efficiency, and movement, although it is kind of weird that the things doing all of the travel are just sticks.

Partisan Core - Maglev Central Station

The Maglevs of Paradise Lua travel along six major spokes, and circle the ring along two loops, Outer Loop and Inner Loop, with the Outer Loop ringing the edges of the station and the Inner Loop sitting on the border between Florin and Krater Valley. Maglev Central is itself a small, tight loop, very close to the center of Paradise Lua. While it’s filled with shops, stalls, and conveniences for people looking to connect to other Maglev lines, its central location has also made it a practical location for numerous government services, many of which have moved to less practical locations so that they could rent their space back to commercial interests in order to save money.

Two of Cups

Dr. Flask was gripping the patient’s chart tightly with her cold artificial hand, in a room in Misericorde, mostly white and beige, with a strong antiseptic smell in the air.

Dr. Flask was surrounded by heavy equipment, standing in front of an unconscious pregnant woman in a hospital bed. All of the notes on this patient were from Dr. Klein (née Flask). Dr. Flask’s sister. Amanda. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Her recommendation was ridiculous, it would put the patient at significant risk of death in order to offer a vanishingly small chance to save her patient’s baby.

That wouldn’t do. There was always another chance at a baby. Dr. Flask reached, smoothly and precisely with her good hand - her left hand - into her breast pocket for her pen. She would simply disregard the recommendation and terminate the pregnancy for the health of the patient.

Just as she did, she heard her sister. Her awful, trilling, sing-song voice, from behind her. “Oh, Doctor Flask, there you are.”

“Amanda.” Flask turned, acknowledging her sister. Bottle blonde. Full make-up. What kind of a doctor put on make-up? Amanda was the “older” sister, technically, even if only by a few seconds. Amanda’s artificial arm was on the opposite side. She got the easy side of the deal - she got to have her right hand.

Dr. Flask gestured at the chart. “This is too risky. You can’t possibly think that we’re going to-”

“I know, I know”, Amanda interrupted. “It’s dangerous. But Bailey was very clear about her decision on this. She wants to take the risk.”

“Maybe she wanted to take the risk while she was conscious, but things have become significantly more dire. At this point we have no choice but to-”

“We have to respect the patient’s wishes”, Amanda interjected.

Dr. Flask wished Amanda would let her finish a sentence without interrupting.

“She has taken out a significant pregnancy bond - if she has to pay it back, she’ll be in the Overflow. She needs to risk it.”

That… did, in fact, complicate things, somewhat. If Dr. Klein terminated this pregnancy it would save the patient, but at the cost of both the baby and whatever shreds remained of the patient’s financial stability.

Terrible, but not Dr. Flask’s problem. Her job was to keep the patient alive, even if her cheerful, bubbly, married-with-two-kids perfect sister wanted to intrude with her insufferable care for the thoughts and feelings of her patients.

“Termination is the only safe option here. I can’t sign off on this.” Dr. Flask started to write her correct plan of action on the chart.

But Amanda just wouldn’t let things go. She never could. “Without the pregnancy bond she won’t be able to pay her medical bills.”

Dr. Flask grimaced. She couldn’t violate her hypocritic oath - “first, do no harm to the hospital’s bottom line.” Delinquent patients were terrible for her objectives and key results, and she was hoping to make Head of Surgery. She frustratedly gripped the chart - so hard that the clipboard cracked.

Amanda heard the snap of the chart, saw the visible irritation on her sister’s face. “Why… why do you have to be like this? What happened to dad - it wasn’t my fault.”

Horseshit. “Oh, sure, he just happened to find the key to your practice’s medicine cabinet.”

Amanda had litigated this point endlessly. “It was a mistake. You didn’t know what he was like.”

Dr. Klein knew exactly what kind of monster her father was. If it had been her opportunity to leave a key to a massive overdose right in front of Frank Klein, she’d have taken it. That’s how she knew her sister was lying. They were twins, after all.

Dr. Klein wasn’t mad that her father was dead. She was mad that she didn’t get to kill him first. She was mad that her sister didn’t trust her enough to tell her the truth. She was mad that she would never again get a chance to tell Frank Klein how little he meant to her. She was mad that her sister had one-upped her, again.

She couldn’t share any of this. Dr. Klein gave Amanda a withering glare while she handed the chart back to her sister. The next bit was something she had had to say entirely too many times, something bitter and infuriating.

“I guess we’re doing it your way, then.”

Card Interpretation

A man and a woman holding cups, sharing their emotions, with a caduceus and a lion’s head lurking over them. The caduceus in modern times has unavoidable medical connotations, although its ancient association with the god Hermes could mean a connection with anything Hermes was about - commerce, fertility, message delivery, sheep herding, he was a Greek god with a lot going on. The focus of this card in readings is generally the pair of people: this is a card about a relationship between two people.

Joyeuse Division - Misericorde Hospital

Medical treatment in Paradise Lua is not cheap, and its doctors are very busy. Being a distant colony with limited resources means that there’s not a lot of slack for the infirm, and any slack that exists is reserved for those with significant capital resources - so the lion’s share of people find Misericorde their first step on a journey to either the Overflow or the Recycling Tanks.

There is one MRI machine on the moon, in Misericorde. The cost to have it shipped to the moon was astronomical. Intuitively, one might imagine that it would be running day and night - but no. Most days it sits unused, as the fees charged for using it are so high that only the wealthy and the desperate bother.

The grim nature of Misericorde has also given rise to a number of cheerier family practices and small clinics throughout Krater Valley, dealing with less imposing family medicine, rashes and colds and pregnancies and the like.

You Deserve a BLONK

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

you deserve a break, go pour yourself a drink

the thing about telling people that they deserve something good is that it’s almost always an effective marketing tactic

The “you deserve an X” format is well-worn but weirdly convincing.

Yes, ADVERTISEMENT, I do deserve something special.

Magic: the Gathering of the Juggalos

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

this happened a long time ago but it’s still one of my favorite “this is not the onion, this is a real thing that happened” headlines

the grug brained developer

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

https://grugbrain.dev/

am read for first time today

best grug brain able to herd multiple big brain in right direction and produce many complexity demon trap crystals, large shiney rock pile awaits such grug

seattle

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

if they had poured all of the money that they burned on AI on high-speed rail

maybe instead of being able to generate a picture of kermit the frog with too many fingers I could get to Seattle in 45 minutes

which, actually,

yeah, that’s probably for the better

Swarm, by E. James Hongle

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

so, Tiff has decided she’s doing an art challenge for october

and she made this yesterday

“it reminds me of those old 60s sci fi novel covers” she says

anyways when she woke up, someone had snuck this into her office

the enduring utility of journals

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I would sometimes make fun of video games for just leaving expository diaries all over the place but now that I’ve been running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign of my own for a while my players are just ass-deep in found journals.

look, I’m not going to lie, I will fully admit that it is not in character for the Big Bad to just chronicle his evil plans in big bold letters in a little book that he keeps on his person and frequently misplaces but sometimes I’m just at a loss for how to continue

(you need to unambiguously point players to the next major location in the story)

uh,

okay, so, uh… on the goblin chieftain’s dead body you find a tattered journal written in a childish hand

if y’all have great ways to deliver clear, diegetic exposition in the context of dungeons and also dragons, please

“as you stab the gelatinous cube a partially digested adventurer’s journal pops out”

You Literally Only Need 2 Ingredients

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

duh, it’s “chicken” and “dumplings”

uh, I can see, like, at least several visible ingredients in that dish, what gives?

o_o

this article advocates pouring canned biscuits into a can of cream of chicken soup

wow, I was just joking, I guess it literally is just chicken soup and dumplings.

that’s… I guess that’s one way to make “2 ingredient” meals.

anyways, uh, check out my ground-breaking “1 ingredient” soup recipe:

(the one ingredient is “can of soup”)

Culinary Class Wars

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Oh man, Culinary Class Wars is so good I immediately love it, it’s Squid Game Iron Chef

rogan

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i tried to make rogan josh from scratch but i ended up making rogan joe and now my curry tastes like creatine and weed

pillows

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i don’t think that this joke deserved -5 points, costco canada subreddit

Hot Pot Time

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:00:00 -0700

it was hot pot time

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i really liked LinkedIn when I was a teenager, with songs like “Numb” and “Crawling” but honestly it’s a bit too angsty for me now that I’m adult

brooklyn nine nine

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I really like Brooklyn Nine-Nine because it’s a fun show with a charming ensemble cast, but they’re not very believable as cops on account of their being effective at solving a lot of crimes

the Doug Judy episodes of Brooklyn 99 are just Lupin III from the perspective of Inspector Zenigata

Doug Judy is charming, brilliant, and by playing along with him Jake always ends up taking down a bigger, nastier foe while Doug Judy rides off into the sunset scot-free.

Zenigata is legitimately a very good cop, you have to expect he’s quite successful when he’s not getting bamboozled by Lupin, and the two of them have great chemistry.

hired gun

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i wanted a Netflix documentary about “hired gun” studio musicians who were talented working professionals who you’ve probably heard on loads of pop songs but who are mostly unknown

and the only thing I reliably recall about it is was that Billy Joel is an asshole who often didn’t bother to learn the names of people he’d work with for weeks at a time on major albums and Alice Cooper is a kind, thoughtful guy who would keep sending folks Christmas cards for years after working with them

writing mental illness

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i find that when trying to learn about a mental disorder out of curiosity, on top of reading the cold DSM literature on what that disorder is like,

an interesting thing do is to find people writing first-hand about it in their own subreddit or online community

lots of people diagnosing themselves with little evidence

but it’s nice to see these people representing themselves

and, for example, the lived experience of people with autism is very different from the way that media treats them

so it can be a good exercise

well, except for people with antisocial personality disorder, their communities tend to be pretty unfriendly

too many threads

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t like it when I crack into a discord community with like 100 people in it and they have 40 different threads

you don’t need this many threads

you need maybe three

bad baby names

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

AITA for naming my baby something “unconventional”?

So, I (29F) recently gave birth to my first child, a beautiful baby girl. My husband (31M) and I spent months deliberating over the perfect name for her. We’re both into mythology and literature, and we wanted a name that felt unique but also meaningful. After a lot of back-and-forth, we settled on Nyxiryn (pronounced “NIX-er-in”). It’s a combination of “Nyx,” the Greek goddess of the night, and “Irina”, which means “peace” in Greek. We thought it sounded poetic, strong, and unique.

reddit decided yes

It’s unlikely to happen, but were I to have a kid, I’d keep my tragedeigh desires confined to their middle name, which can be as silly and stupid as I want (is there a cap on number of middle names? no? great.), because they’re basically vestigial.

My wife and I both have names in the sweet spot (rare enough to be unique to an arbitrary group of 100 people, usually, but common enough not to be interesting or stand out in any way) and I’d want my kid to have the same experience, name-wise.

like, you want them to be a Vincent in a sea of Micheals and Johns and Noahs and Olivers - you should be able to think “I know 1-2 persons with that name, but not dozens, but also that is not the first time I have ever heard anybody use that name ever”

my dad is one of the many daves

a card-carrying member of the dave supercluster

although my wife and I do keep a running list of awful baby names

Oh, and @curtis, Scotichronicon is on the list of hypothetical best baby names we’ve been making.

It’s now:

Janarthanon
Surfbort (Bort for short)
Crabitha
Garol
Queeth
Hyort
or Scotichronicon

also “Tressica”, “Beff”, and “Jeffica” made our original list, I think

black pepper

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

some of the simplest and most satisfying dishes I know are ones where salt and pepper do almost all of the heavy lifting

poached eggs on toast? that’s a salt and pepper dish

kraft dinner? nope, that’s a cracked black pepper pasta with a hint of cheez flavor

back when I could eat cheese, sometimes I’d just crack a mountain of black pepper into some goat cheese and that’s it, that’s all you need to do, it’s amazing

This Kind of Sign is Necessary Because People are Not Smart

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

radicchio recipe

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This Radicchio recipe will knock your socks off!

Fill a bowl with clean water
Cut the radicchio in half and place it in the cold water
Get good, extra virgin olive oil
Head out to the grill
Keep going. Keep going until you get to a farmer’s market.
Practice this phrase: “I will trade you this radicchio and this olive oil for a vegetable that doesn’t taste like cabbage’s weird divorced uncle”

mastodon good

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

man, for a protocol that doesn’t seem like it has much of a defense against random bullshit from third party outsiders, Mastodon’s moderation (on my instance, at least) is pretty tight.

Sometimes I’ll see someone blast loud garbage everywhere on a popular tag like “canada” from an account they just made on a reliable instance or an homemade server, and then minutes later they’ve been lasered from orbit.

either their reliable instance got them, or MY reliable instance got them, or their server was completely defederated

when I first looked, I thought “this has all of the same problems as email, there is no way this doesn’t immediately devolve into the spammiest spam ever to spam a spam”

but actually, the layered silo approach means that there are lots of opportunities to catch a predator if you merely have loads of people pouring a lot of effort into it, all the time

i am very surprised that this all works and I suspect that the thing holding it all together is “effort”, so remember to kick some money towards your silo admin if they’ve made it an option (they probably have, go check)

sometimes I’ll look at something unbelievably stupid on Mastodon for a few beats too long, then think about it for a second and think “wow, it is super nice that a malevolent algorithm didn’t get behind-the-scenes convinced that my staring at it was interest motivated and send me 100x more of that exact kind of content”

it feels like a real luxury to be able to take some time and examine content that I don’t plan to ever return to

the 20 year anniversary of WB's Superstar USA

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, every now and then I rewatch Jenny Nicholson talking about the worst reality TV show of all time, because it’s funny, and because I have a cold.

Anyways, the comments for that video are now filled with people pushing their own, alternate takes for worst reality TV show of all time, and, uh, okay.

WB’s Superstar USA.

The whole show is available in its entirety on YouTube:

Whereas our legendary Opposite Worlds was merely dangerously incompetent, WB’S Superstar USA is actively malicious, a season long elaborate prank.

The conceit is: It’s American Idol, but the judges are simply instructed to reverse their judgement. The worse the singer, the better.

This is essentially a show intended to try to chase the virality of the William Hung “She Bangs” clip, on purpose

anyways, even at the time it was unpopular. Like, it’s a funny idea in the writer’s room but the execution is just so staggeringly, unyieldingly cruel.

America hated WB’s Superstar USA, because very few people actually want to be this mean.

Watching these awful singers go to all of these effort - learning choreography, practicing, putting their whole ass into a competition where they were judged based on how unlistenably bad the final result was? This was terrible. This was a terrible thing to do.

Even the show kinda soft-pedaled the reveal, explaining to the winner that they were looking for someone with all of the qualities of a star except for the voice. Which was still very bad and embarassing for everyone.

anyways, this does offer up the opportunity to put one of the world’s least appealing CDs into someone’s Toyota when they’re not looking

Have you ever heard of Florence Foster Jenkins?

Killing Me Sharply With Her Song: The Improbable Story Of Florence Foster Jenkins

A Manhattan socialite, who sold out Carnegie Hall in 1944 despite having a very dodgy voice, inspired a new movie starring Meryl Streep — and aided generations of actual singers.

This is a good opportunity to bring up Contrapoints, because I’ve very rarely seen people try to delve into why this kind of thing works.

Two Cars

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I was looking for a place to park and I excitedly pointed to the back of the parking lot

I apologized to my wife. “I’m sorry, but I have to do this”

it’s always fun to create a glitch in the Toyota Matrix

one more CMS

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

surely when I finish this new CMS i will start to become a productive writer/artist

just one more CMS bro

i promise, just one more CMS, that will fix everything

bro cmon just give me one more CMS bro i promise

i’ve always struggled with the problem of getting more dopamine from systems than content, which is the opposite of a lot of other creators’ problem

low hanging fruit

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it turns out the lowest hanging fruit was shutting the fuck up

🌈

the hustledork continuum

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the bottom of the Youtube Shorts barrel is this dollar-store motivational content with 0 likes, 0 views and no subscribers where some chump is like “ONLY YOU CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS, NOBODY ELSE CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS FOR YOU”

this is part of the hustledork continuum where every hustledork is doing it because they saw (maybe even PAID) another hustledork to tell them that this is how they get money and influence, and now they’re sharing the same messages

it’s “viral” but, viral in the way that rabies is

if you get too many of them together they metastasize into a linkedin

the bottom strata of the internet are 14 year olds who are just learning how to use their phone’s camera and people who’ve paid to buy motivational content that have instructed them that the only way to make money is by selling other people motivational content, BUY MY COURSE TODAY

humility awards

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

In light of his 45 minute long acceptance speech for the Humility Award, we have decided to rescind

Cost Estimation

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

one of the big things you’re going to have to get good at on the journey up the software development ladder is answering the questions of “how much will it cost” and “how long will it take” and honestly I see a lot of junior developers fall into the trap that accurately answering these questions is literally impossible

if you can back-of-the-envelope this stuff and get it even remotely in the right ballpark that is fine, just give them something

look, kid, I KNOW that all software development is custom and all custom work is unpredictable, that’s like the first thing we all learn, just give the blazers-and-golden-retrievers a dang t-shirt size for that login screen and we’ll figure it out as we go

the accuracy of the cost estimate needs to be, like, within an order of magnitude, if you can even get the number of zeroes right you’re golden, just find a little bit of real data and extrapolate a bit

VR productivity please

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i don’t want a VR game where you shoot at things with your shitty pistols from a fixed position, I want VR coding, productivity, and art applications, because 95% of my time is spent doing that and 0% of my time is spent playing immersive video games

if only there was an 8 hour stretch of my day where the isolation and privacy of a headset was what I wanted rather than a weird curse wow it is working hours

October Car Camping

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I went October camping (widely considered to be a bad idea this deep into the fall) and I was counting on climate change to make it practical - which it did.

actually fall camping is really great, cool and crisp and nice

voting

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i wish BC had ranked voting, so that I could vote for NDP and Green, and the ridiculous joke candidate who’s name is “Jimmy Boxcars” and who promises to establish a BC colony on the moon, and literally everybody but this conservative goon who’s promising to bring law enforcement into hospitals or whatever

i’ll take the guy who’s platform is literally “i don’t know how my name got on here, please don’t vote for me”

as a side note if I can figure out how to navigate any of the bureaucracies involved, I would love to get my name on the ballot as that guy

The Enigma of Arlen Fault

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0700

i can’t even remember where I found this on the internet, reddit?

Your own Personal Cookbook

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

One of the problems with maintaining your own personal cookbook is that you just memorize how to cook most things, so mostly your recipe book just needs to be a handful of ratios, instructions for more complex and easy-to-forget recipes, and just a list of the things you know how to cook to remind you of all of them when you’re looking for inspiration.

the compressed form of a lot of #cooking recipes just calls for the ratio of the primary ingredients: all I need to know to make fried fish or tempura is “1 cup flour, 1 egg, 1 1/3 cup beer” because I can scale and season as necessary and remember that if I want a lighter batter I can swap the beer for club soda

that is to say, my whole personal cookbook is about 4 pages long and contains just under 60 recipes, many of them just single-word descriptions like “caldo verde”

the recipe for “caldo verde” is just the words “caldo verde”, there to remind me that I like to cook that thing, the rest is just Draw The Rest of the Owl

current version:

BRINE

1 cup vinegar
1 cup water
1 tbsp salt
1/2 tbsp sugar

PONZU

1/2 cup soy 1/2 cup citrus 1/2 cup white wine (mirin) 2 tbsp rice vinegar lil bit of dat fish powder

LEMON CURD

3 lemons: zest & juice 1/2 cup sugar 3 eggs 6 tbsp butter (3/8 of a block?)

whisk it all together under low heat or in a double boiler, until thiccc, then chill for at least 1 hour

WAFFLE

2 cups white flour (240g)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup butter, melted
500mL buttermilk

whisk drys whisk wets add wets to drys

OVERNIGHT BREAD (+~5 hrs)

NIGHT:

Mix the poolish:
500g flour
0.4g (1/8 tsp) yeast
500g water, 80F
wait 12-14 hours (bubbly, triple volume)

DAY: (5 hrs)

add 500g flour
21g salt
3g ( 3/4tsp ) yeast
(you can mix dry ingredients separately first)
250g water, 105F
mix
timer: 3 hrs (2 folds)
divide & proof: 1 hr
oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

SAME DAY BREAD (~7-8 hrs)

TOTAL:

AUTOLYSE

1000g flour
720g water at 90-95F
mix, rest for 30 minutes

THEN

21g salt
4g (1 tsp) yeast
mix
timer: 5 hrs (2 folds)
divide & proof: 1hr 15m
oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

SHOKUPAN (~5-6 HRS)

Roux - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

125g water (250g water)
25g flour (50g flour)

roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F
cool the roux for 10 minutes+ off the heat (<110 degrees F so it doesn’t kill the yeast) while you measure out the rest of the ingredients

Dough - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

400g flour (800g flour)
215g milk (430g milk)
30g sugar (60g sugar)
4g salt (8g salt)
8g instant yeast (16g instant yeast)
60g salted butter (120g salted butter)

measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.
add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.
add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)
load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)
45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F
bake: 40 minutes

CRISP (NOT CRUMBLE)

(a crisp is the one with oats)

Apple/Fruit Mix: 6 apples (or equivalent) 2 Tbsp sugar 3/4 Tbsp cinnamon 1 lemon juiced (optional tbsp water, tbsp flour)

Toppins: 1 cup brown sugar 3/4-1 cup oats 3/4-1 cup flour 1 tsp cinnamon

(optional 1/4 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda to decrease the pH for better browning)

1/2 cup cold cubed butter

350F for 45-60 mins

ICE CREAM

1L half & half (mix in some whipping cream if’n you dare)

1/2 cup granulated sugar (the original recipe calls for 1 cup, take from that what you will, also i hear corn syrup can help the texture in small amounts)

generous pinch o’ salt

throw in steepables (coffee! cardamom! mint! probably not rosemary again!) and get to 170-175F (no higher, don’t want curdlin')

let it sit for 45 minutes (or as long as seems appropriate, given the steepables)

separate 6 eggs, keep the yolks only add to 1/2 cup of sugar, (optional: 1/4tsp guar gum) whisk, whisk in a few splooshes of hot milk to temper

add the egg glop back to the milk, get it to 170-175F and stir until spoon-coatingly thick

strain out the steepables chill overnight churn next day

DUTCH BABY

warm eggs, warm milk (let them sit, measured, on the table for a bit)

(the reference recipe here was for 2 eggs:)

2 egg
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
vanilla
beat until loose and frothy
1/3 cup flour (40g)
1/3 cup cornstarch (40g)
2/3 cup milk
a spoonful of mascarpone or cream cheese wouldn’t hurt
let batter sit for 20 minutes

pan in a 425F oven, hot hot hot

quickly butter the pan, get the batter in before the butter burns 20 minutes in the oven

top with lemon, powdered sugar, whipped cream

1 1/2 sticks (170g) butter 2/3 cup (142g) brown sugar 2/3 cup (132g) granulated sugar 2 tbsp (39g) light corn syrup 1 tbsp cider or white vinegar 2 large eggs 1 tbsp vanilla extract 1/2 tsp salt (omit, using salted butter) 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp baking soda 2 1/4 cups (270g) all-purpose flour 3 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Note: this one is a pretty sweet dough and it really benefits from a bitterer chocolate and maybe a little flaked sea salt

cream together butter, sugars, corn syrup, vinegar
beat in eggs, vanilla, salt, baking powder, baking soda
stir in flour, chocolate chips
store in fridge overnight or freeze
375 oven
drop tablespoons of dough on to baking sheets
10 minutes, with a half rotation at 5 minutes (ed: 12 minutes with my oven)
let sit on the pan for a few moments after removing from the oven
rack to cool

WONTON SOUP BROTH

chicken stock garlic ginger 2tbsp soy 2tbsp wine 1tbsp sugar 1tsp sesame oil

Beer Batter

1 cup all purpose flour
1 egg
1 1/3 cup beer

What Should I Make For Dinner?

Beefs

Burgers
Spaghetti & Meatballs
Tacos/Burritos
Beef Bourgeoignon
English Beef Stew
Braised Short Rib & Polenta
Steak (money’s too tight for steak)
Shepherd’s Pie

Chickens

Roast Chicken & Mashed Potatoes / Dinner Rolls & Mayo
Caldo Verde
Potato Leek Soup
Butter Chicken
Thai Curry Chicken
Weeknight Biryani
Chicken Parmigiana
Chicken Soup

Fishes

Baked Fish with Citrus
Stinky Tinned Fish Rice Bowl w/ Egg
Beer-Battered Cod
Clam Chowder
California Roll Rice Bowl

Porks

Fried Rice
Pork Tenderloin
Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork
Carnitas Tacos/Burritos
Pork Chop Stir Fry
Classic BLT/Club
Sausages & Potatoes & Veg
Ribs
Breaded Fried Pork Cutlet

Breakfasts

The Big Breakfast
Eggs Benedict
Waffles
Potato Latkes

Misc

Nachos
Cabbage, Vinegar & Chile Stir Fry
Cucumber Salad
Coleslaw
Caesar Salad
Greek Salad
Stankpaste Salad (roasted garlic, anchovy, vinegar, beans, cherry tomatoes)
Fried Tofu
Slow-cooked Beans
Borscht

tipping

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the worst thing about tipping is that brief moment of warm, disingenuous human interaction while you’re holding the credit card machine

the hot drink station discussion

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The reason you have a PM is to stop the Hot Drink Station Discussion from consuming your entire company

plums

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I have eaten

the leftovers

that were in

the icebox

you probably

missed them

because

they weren’t

frozen mozzarella sticks

Cardchapter 2

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, uh… long story. Looooong story.

Around the end of life of Cube Drone The Comic, ‘round 2016, I started to experience a lot of frustration that the Django (sidenote: I … honestly wish I had a screenshot of that site, I have no recollection what it looked like.) I’d built for Cube Drone just performed like absolute poop sandwiches on mobile devices.

“Mobile devices? Everyone’s dominant form of media consumption for the past decade?” Yes, those mobile devices.

CardChapter

So, I started working on CardChapter, a tool I would use to build newer, better, smarter comics.

I had this idea across a series of notebooks, this idea that all content would have to fit on these mobile-phone sized cards and you could jump from card to card, and each card could have its own effects, and the story didn’t even have to be constrained by horizontal space, the cards and the story could exist vertically and horizontally at the same time whooaaah.

At the time, I recognized that it was one of my two ur-projects. The projects I keep going back to, again and again, forever.

These two things are:

a multiplayer grid/card engine server that could be used to power Civ-like games
a CMS for Comics that could be used to host a large collection of comics.

For each of these projects, I have dozens of Git and SVN projects at various points in my career indicating a greenfield update to my opinions as to how to build it properly, and I’ve put these experiments to the test in live projects that I’ve pointed at the internet and actively used.

Anyways, even at that time I had built a comics website many, many times over. CardChapter was a particularly weird version of the idea.

Technically, this wasn’t even the first version of CardChapter: I’d already tried to build this thing a few times and failed miserably each time. It’s kind of complicated to build, actually!

It worked - more or less - on mobile devices, although I struggled to crack some of the fuzzier issues. I never managed to get the animated scroll to a place where I was comfortable with it.

Documents were tree shaped. I thought that was a clever design but most people found that confusing and weird.

Documents used a Tiddly-Wiki style “save this document to create a new version of the document” system to propagate themselves. I thought that was a clever design but most people found that confusing and weird.

Each document contained 100% of the entire document at any given time, so as the site they described got larger, the page size started to climb into the megabytes: nobody really wants to hit a 10MB webpage: so I implemented lazy loading on images.

It came with a neat inline editor, but the editor never supported vim keybindings, and if I jammed my fingers on Ctrl-S it would just do something I didn’t want.

I used it to build “northwestica”, a comic where I worked with some RPG players/writers to build a veeeery slow interactive RPG. Technically northwestica is longer and contains more art (and effort) than Cube Drone! But, uh, the audience never went over, like, 10 people, and it was a lot of work.

Also: actually building a project in CardChapter really revealed some of the seams in its design: the weird little blip on every page turn makes my eyes hurt.

re-reading this it is pretty funny at times

Okay, so, that’s enough of that for a while.

Time to bounce to Ur-Project 1: Cards, Grids, and Simulation for a handful of years.

this card-engine monster ate much of 2021 and 2022

Okay, so, I burned out hard on my weird little card engine. It was fun but ultimately broken.

One of the fun little things I built in the card engine?

An animated text-o-mo-bob.

CardChapter used a kit text animator, but for this project I just built my own in React.

What About WASM?

What about WASM? I mean, I’m obsessed with The Web, but can interesting experiences be delivered on The Web using full-on game engines?

So then I went down a Godot rabbit hole for a while, and then after that I got way in to Ren’Py for a bit and I made a whole little Visual Novel in Ren’Py which sucked.

For both Godot and Ren’Py, they felt much more powerful and expressive than dumb ol’ JavaScript.

Also in both the cases of Godot and Ren’Py, after investing 50+ hours into the platform, I discovered that their WASM builds were completely unusable.

By and large, memory management in WASM remains an unsolved problem: game engines are generally designed to operate in a much less constrained memory environment and have a real tendency to overflow browser memory, particularly on mobile devices where the browser’s available headroom is wildly constricted by platforms that don’t want free web software competing with their app stores.

So most people only ever saw the first chapter or two of my Ren’Py game, which is probably for the better. It’s still available online here, although for the aforementioned reasons I recommend downloading it before you play it.

Okay, So, What If I Wanted To Write a VN For The Web?

So, that’s just CardChapter but… better, right?

I even built a “Text Dialogue” card into the original CardChapter:

So let’s start taking apart CardChapter and building it better, smarter, for the future.

Which takes us to…

https://cardchapter.com/s/cube-drone/atoms-isn-t-real/#intro

CardChapter 2.

I think it’s like… the sixth or seventh crack at this darn software? Practically it’s CardChapter 2 because this is the second one to hit an even-remotely-shippable state.

How Is It Better?

Well, first of all, it abandons the button-based paging system for free scrolling, which works significantly better.

Better Paging

I fiddled SO HARD with drags, and animations, and throws, tuning weight parameters, to try to get the card deck motion to feel right… only to eventually come to the conclusion that there’s no draggable toolset in existence that feels as natural as regular-ass goddamned scrolling. I threw out all of the experiments and put the content in a scrollbar. It works better.

One of the reasons Cardchapter Original had such a complicated paging system was that it made it possible to trigger special effects when you hit a specific page, like starting an animation: but in this new version we do that by using visibility triggers to determine which slide is “live”. This is - actually much MORE complicated, but it works reasonably well.

the pikachu slowly fades in when the card is active:

No Tree Shaped Documents

The complicated tree-based document thing? That’s dead. Now there’s a single row of content. It’s conceptually much easier to deal with.

I thought “tree-shaped documents” were clever, a neat idea, but I don’t know if I ever actually found much use for them.

Maybe Slightly Faster (In Some Conditions)?

To be honest this one’s kind of a wash.

CardChapter Original Recipe was statically hosted, which is fast as hell, but all of its code lived within the single document - which introduced Cache Staleness Issues and made the document a little bigger than I’d like (~1.5MB total for most Cardchapter documents). As a result, most of the document’s load time was packed into that one document downloading, which took about 300-600ms.

CardChapter New is a little Rust server which responds to queries in a matter of single-digit milliseconds, and the site’s built using tightly packed Preact so the size of the compiled JS is way smaller

but… the JS calls back to the Rust server to load cards dynamically as you scroll around on the page (and unload them dynamically as you scroll away from them)

Now, with this model in mind I was able to create some absolutely monstrous 10,000 page test documents that were still performant, but that back-and-forth between the JS and the server costs some time that I didn’t have to spend on the original chonker.

Ultimately the new site is just marginally faster. Also: since it’s not loading everything as a single page, I can style the HTML before the JS arrives and loads, saving me a bit of “blank page” in favor of a proper load screen.

What actually helps the new site in the performance numbers is applying some throttling to the problem: that 1.5 MB download actually really sucks on a slow phone connection (which I discovered in the wild no small number of times)

on “regular 3G” the page takes 15000 ms to load

which is bad

comparatively, on the slow connection the new site loads… very quickly:

675ms seems svelte in comparison

score one for the compressed payload!

Updated Animation Engine

I just finished this bit today, but the animation engine uses a more powerful variant of the Animation DSL I wrote for the card game:

Video content

XML: actually the right language for controlling animated text.

Content Format

Oh, boy, I spent some TIME IN THE WEEDS determining how this content was actually going to get stored.

Most of that multiple-months of weeds time was spent “learning Rust”, so it wan’t a major loss, but an earlier version of this had a full on internal database and account management system with invite codes so that I could invite other people to also author content using CardChapter, and I would have had to build a whole authoring interface and… and…

It’s Time To Admit That This Product Has a Target Market of Just Me

Okay, what if instead the server just loads all of the content from disk, like a statically hosted website, and I edit it… with a text editor, and save it… in version control. Like I do with everything.

well, gosh, that makes things easier

Stuff That’s Hard to Do With Static Hosting

Notice that CardChapter sets the social headers correctly, so that when I paste a link, you get a little image, and a favicon, and a title, and a description:

https://cardchapter.com/s/example/example

That’s not too magical but it was basically impossible to do with CardChapter’s bullshit “the file contains itself” nonsense.

Pipeline

Site updates are just “push to github, wait a minute”. Ez. It’s powered by a darned systemd cron job.

WebP

uh, it automatically transcodes any images it’s using from .png, .jpg, or .gif into the more compressed webp format?

also it can thumbnailify and slightly modify images, because why not:

owen.png?color=red

owen.png?color=pink&height=200&blur=1&flip_turnwise

not sure if this is useful but it’s definitely a capability

Anyways:

Atoms Isn’t Real is intended to be real content, if disingenuous.

But if you want to really stare into the eyes of insanity, “Example” is the test deck, used to poke and prod the various available features:

https://cardchapter.com/s/example/example

Tiff has walked into the office with me just staring at Owen Wilson, dozens of times now. It doesn’t even faze her anymore. “At least you’re through your florb phase.”

Wow, That Seems Like a Cool Tool for Building Out Comics, Do You Have Art That You Intend To Actually Make With It?

I made a little presentation called “Command Line Interface” with it.

https://cardchapter.com/s/cube-drone/command-line-interface/#intro

Ok, Adding Footnotes

mp3 and Audio Guide

the mp3 option puts a mp3 player at the bottom of the page

with audio_guide: true, it will use the next: property on individual slides to move the slides along with the audio - or, if you track around in the audio, it will automatically move to the correct slide.

Adventure Cat in the Rain

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Meaningfully taking a cat for a walk is a strange project. It’s more of a cat directed meander around the parking lot where mostly you’re keeping him from wandering into other folks’ gardens and you have no say whatsoever in where you are going.

He still wants to go for walks in the rain, but he doesn’t much care for being wet

snug that cute face

sunbeam activate

Grimy Poo Hut

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I usually try to make dinner look good but for some reason tonight I made a grimy poo hut out of tofu and beans

Nanowrimo

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

every year in november i observe “NaNoWriMo”, which stands for “National Not Writing Month”, and I spend the entire month not writing a Novel, as usual

piquant

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

my hobby is to hold my hand up in wide-eyed wonder and say “can you feel it? in the air? the magic?” and then rip a particularly piquant and robust fart

the raffle

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Let’s imagine that in order to participate in a raffle, you needed to construct an entire 3-story house from the ground up including plumbing, electrical, and finishing work, entirely in your spare time.

If you did a pretty good job on the house, that’s not good enough: lots of people are out there building houses with whole crews, in order to stand out your house has to be somehow exceptional.

Then, once you finished, you got one raffle ticket, and when you look to see who else got a ticket, there is one for every person in the entire city of Tsawwassen, British Columbia.

They’re going to do maybe 10 draws, so good luck!

Now, you see this system and you decide to devote both your entire life and large amounts of your emotional state to not just participating in this draw, but winning.

anyways, just wanted to say good luck with that solo gamedev project you’re working on, buddy, I’m rooting for you

suggestion combo

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

bard: i cast suggestion, the instruction is “go stand near the side of the boat”

monk:

so, I’m invited to participate in this pirate-themed low-level D&D one shot set on a boat, and I think to myself “what’s a solid low-effort build for solving boat problems” and I go with a Way of the Open Palm because boats is small and a 15ft push is a lot of push, then I spend most of my session yeeting various monsters into the water.

at one point the DM intervened with some Deus Ex Machina because I fully launched his big bad off of the side of the ship with a lucky roll

jagmeet punch

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Would throwing hands help or hurt Jagmeet in the polls?

Personally, I propose a political pillar of “punching Pierre Pollievre” practically promises positive poll performance.

airtag

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

oh come on

Matrix, Discord

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I think that one of the big problems getting frustrating tools like Element/Matrix off of the ground is just how good Discord is, even avec mild shittification.

Yes it is actually easier to put up with them trying to sell me Final Fantasy XIV and emoji merch packs than it is to deal with Matrix’s frequently broken encryption and poor discoverability.

hero box

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

You know what? I don’t believe you. I think that is too big a promise for one cardboard box.

I think what they mean is “boxes like this recyclable cardboard box”, not this box specifically, because otherwise this is a supernaturally hard working box.

boomer hobby

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

is every boomer hobby just gasoline and lakes

Camping / Roleplaying The End Of the World With 4000 Other People

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0700

Just after my trip to New York City I thought to myself about a vacation that would be the complete opposite of a trip to New York City.

Not because I didn’t have fun, but because variety is the spice of life. Also, Tiff has never been camping.

We’ve been pretty dedicated “it just makes more sense to get a hotel or a cabin” folk, but dang: between the rent crisis and 100% inflation that’s starting to get less and less practical.

I camped a lot as a child, like, for multiple weeks every summer. It was the vacation of choice for the thrifty.

Now, my experience of camping is pretty simple:

Camping is mostly CapEx (capital expenditure) with actually pretty minimal OpEx (operational expenditure): most of the equipment you buy is reusable trip-to-trip, and the point costs of camping are low and marginal - campsites tend to run low-double-digit dollars to rent per night, and most of the cost (outside of food that you probably would have bought anyways) is for fuel to get to and from campsites and fuel to expend at campsites.
- However, some camping solutions (trailers, RVs, for example) have quite high CapEx: after spending five figures on camping kit, you need to go on dozens of vacations to break even against hoteling, which very much restricts the kind of vacation you can go on.
- Also: if you live in any kind of strata-managed property, parking a trailer is likely to be a manner of some contentiousness.
- Also also: my car has a tow capacity of “please don’t” and handles like a particularly slow brick/minivan crossover when it’s completely empty.
The BC Campsite reservation system is a borderline nightmare, and is one of the larger barriers to entry. The problem is not campsite prices but actually getting a campsite at campsite prices.
- However, I’m told that with excellent timing (set a timer for 7AM, 4 months exactly before you plan to camp) and/or mid-week date flexibility (Wednesday is available: Saturday is not), this is surmountable.
Once camping: I mostly stay at camp. Not much of a hiker, or a kayaker, or a lake-goer-inner.
I like to read, doodle, listen to music at a respectable volume, eat prepacked snacks, and play board and card games, (which are mostly things I could have also done inside), and are somewhat less comfortable and convenient to do in the outdoors.
I do not enjoy mosquitos, or the presence of mosquitos.
- Tiffany is so afraid of spiders. You guys. You can creep her out by saying the word “spider” and she’ll immediately be like “where?”
- One time I saw a loose hair on Tiffany while she was outside and I said “hold still” and she said “IS THERE A BUG ON ME?” and her eyes became wide as saucers.
I very much avoid long drives, as any time I’m behind the wheel for more than 2 hours the act of being forced to pay attention to the same monotonous thing for a really long time exhausts all of the extremely limited dopamine reserves in my brain and I start to collapse in upon myself like a dying star.
- Most of my worst bad mental health moments have been after long, monotonous instances of travel.
- Trying to convince Tiff to learn to drive so that I can split this up somewhat has gone (checks notes) nowhere.
I am allergic to 25% of the things that are outside (“most trees”, “dogs”) and have to be on a pretty potent dosage of allergy medicine not to immediately die.
Adventurous pets enjoy camping very much. (Zapp would probably do pretty well on a trip like this, and it’s one of the few kinds of journey where we CAN take Zapp)
Optimal temperature is 15-20C, mildly overcast.
- June/September are the best months for this?
Getting up in the middle of the night, having to get dressed and put on shoes, to walk into the forest to pee? Don’t care for that at all.
- actually this is less of a concern now that I generally sleep in pyjamas and a t-shirt, toss a little thingie of hand sanitizer and a headlamp next to my shoes and I’m good to go
I generally sleep very well while camping.
Successfully camp cooking, and drinking a coffee on a crisp morning outdoors is very rewarding.
Camping near friends is a superior experience:
- The cooking is logistically complicated and it becomes less so if you’re doing it for more people at the same time.
- Board games are better if you can round up 3-5 people for them.
- You are less subsceptible to the “whoops I forgot crucial object X” failure condition if multiple redundant parties are packing their own kit.

pictured: one (1) adventure cat

Camping v. Gear

So I walk away from this wondering if I’m more interested in camping or simply the enjoyable activity of shopping for gear.

Gear is neat. I can learn what the “best” tent is, and watch people review that tent, on YouTube. I can get weird with it and test out weird and estoteric gear. I love gear. I’m a gear-enjoyer. Camping is a fun project for the gear-minded because it makes every element of the process a fresh gear-based decision.

Do I need to set up a solar power station? No. Do I want to? Absolutely yes.

Hell, there’s a bunch of stuff I already have, like little telescoping bench circles and USB-powered lanterns, that I want to see how they do… in the outdoors. (It turns out that basic “responsible adult” emergency kit stuff and camping gear enjoy a lot of overlap.)

One of the ways I try and resolve this for myself is: if I had to camp with someone else’s kit and it had most of the stuff I needed, would I still want to do it?

And the answer is… 55% yes, I think. I’d need to have some good experiences to get that number up.

The Wasteland Beckons

We Roleplayed the End of the World with 4000 Other People

So, Quinns went to Wasteland Weekend, a festival in the Mojave Desert where a bunch of folks just pretend to be Mad Max for several days.

Between Quinns’ expert reportage and a bit of my own research, it seems like Wasteland Weekend - and its Cyberpunk sister event, Neotropolis, are sort of a mix of “Burning Man”, “Ren Faire”, and “COSPLAY”.

(I like the Cyberpunk one more, although Tiff is more on team Mad Max)

Which, uh, honestly? I’ve always thought the idea of a Ren Faire is cool, but practically I’m just not that big a fan of the medieval aesthetic.

Tommy Cash gets a pass tho

That actually looks like … fun. I would go to that. I miss festivals like Pax, and “outdoors” and “mask easily worked into theme” actually significantly reduces the microbiological event risks.

Except, the logistics. The logistics of going to such an event are complicated.

Quinns managed to go home to a hotel every night of the wasteland weekend, but the nearest hotel is a 20 minute drive away by car and I doubt anybody’s Ubering to the middle of the desert. How did he get back and forth to the event? Did he rent a car? How easy is it to get your deposit back after driving a car on unpaved Mojave roads for a week? Cars coming and going also have to go through the entire entry process every time, so you’re going to want to minimize comings and goings.

Once you’re in, it’s a desert event with minimal food and drink so it’s advised that you pack food. Okay, so, are you going to bring a cooler and a camelbak with you on the plane? That’s going to call for some checked luggage.

Which brings us back to… camping.

Camping is included with the cost of the event ticket. If you WANT to pitch a tent out in the Mojave you can, giving you maximum event access.

So in order to bring your own gear to that, you’d need to drive, and the drive from here to there is… 22 hours?

I very much avoid long drives

That’s the sort of drive I’d do across 3 days, even: 6 hours to Portland, 6 hours to Redding, 8 hours to the Mojave, heck - even a 4th day to pad that a little more maybe. So now it’s a 5 day event with 7 additional days of travel time. That doesn’t sound toooooo bad although I’d much rather do that with a driving partner than alone.

And… this is desert camping, not BC camping. It’s Burning Man rules, where you’re expected to truck out your grey water and there are no showers or potable water anywhere. Dust gets everywhere, you need to invest in much longer, deeper stakes and weights so that the wind doesn’t carry your gear away, and you have to be prepared for some potentially pretty wild temperature fluctuations.

Oh, and while travelling with Zapp for a short outdoor adventure sounds fun, travelling with him for 12 days across a very long distance sounds distinctly less fun. On top of that, if we’re busy with a festival, he’s likely to spend a lot of time alone in a scary desert tent, which sounds distinctly less :cat: than hanging out with his family in a big fun forest.

The Unfortunate Conclusion

All that is to say: as much as I think it looks cool to go do a wasteland or cyberpunk festival out in the middle of the desert, I don’t think I’m quite ready yet, or likely to take on that project in the near future.

I think that it would probably be a lot easier to go to, like, Magwest or Pax and stay at a hotel. If I want to level up my camping ability a bit, it’s a lot more practical to do that near home.

(2025 Editor’s note: just about every Canadian is now boycotting travel to the increasingly fascist state to our south, so now definitely not)

plenty of people

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Lately it seems there’s a tonne of anti-anti-natalist discourse in the conservative sphere, like “how dare women decide not to have children, where will new children even come from, what’s wrong with people that they don’t want big families anymore” but i’m not sure what huge baby shortage they are talking about, it seems like there are plenty of fuckin’ people, which makes me think that this has always just been a racist dogwhistle because the babies being born are the wrong ones I guess?

everyone knows that the only babies that matter are the ones your millennial daughter-in-law are not having, how dare she

there are loads of people

if someone has a one-in-a-million mental disorder you could still find 8000 people like that and put them on the same website

how else would you explain Mastodon?

“Hey, gang, let’s see who this ‘millennials aren’t family oriented enough’ discourse is coming from!”

“why it was old man white supremacy all along”

I guess, in a different direction, calling anybody who doesn’t have kids for whatever reason “anti-natalist” is wrong, on account of actual anti-natalists being real weird.

I don’t want kids, but I’m not an anti-natalist.

Hardcore anti-natalists appear to believe that anyone having children At All is on the face of it evil, and believe in the voluntary extinction of the human race, it’s actually an extremely Overwrought Anime Villain belief system.

“Existence contains suffering, ergo, making people exist is doing violence to them.” is an extremely “I am going to have a second boss-phase where I grow wings and deal massive extra damage” kind of philosophy.

It’s fine to want to have kids and to have kids. It’s fine to not want to have kids and not to have kids.

escooters need ambassadors

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I like e-scooters - they’re fun, practical, and much easier than a bike to be polite with (at low speeds it’s extremely easy to control and dismount, so the chance of getting in a crash is very low and it’s quite easy to give people loads of space). I also see myself as something of an ambassador for them: look, everyone, it’s absolutely possible to use these things responsibly.

I think that widespread e-scooter use would be, on average, very good: anything that means fewer cars on the road is a significant improvement. Most of the people who hate e-scooters have never tried riding one.

The average person’s opinion (see: reddit, town hall meetings) of e-scooters and e-bikes is quite low, though, because most of them are “teenagers or busy delivery workers given access to a much too powerful lightweight vehicle without any training or licensing”.

Part of that is that scooters really shouldn’t be going higher than 25-30km/h, average bike speeds. That’s tough to regulate, though, because people can claim that they’re not buying them to use on public roads. (Speed limiters, in general, are tough to regulate.)

anyways, “some asshole goes on the highway on a scooter” absolutely does not help

Remaining Teenagers: Zero (RPG)

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Read The Book Here

Remaining Teenagers: Zero is an incomplete sci-fi horror tarot TTRPG.

There are a lot of loose notes and ideas in here, but I don’t have a reliable enough playtesting group to polish something like this, I don’t think.

open-backed... earbuds?

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0700

Okay, so, we’re now firmly in the era of “phones don’t have 3.5mm headphone jacks”. I don’t like it but I’ve come to terms with it somewhat.

I have lost more 3.5mm-to-Lightning dongles than anybody in history.

Anyways, what’s the proposed alternative? Specifically for the problem of outdoor use - your scooting, yardwork, going for a walk, running on a treadmill (ha ha, as if I would run on a treadmill) - that kind of thing.

That’s not it, bro. I have wee tiny little earholes and Apple’s hard plastic earbuds have always been painful to wear, and have a tendency to just shoot out of my ear on their own power. “What if, every time that happened, you lost $220 CAD”. No thank you sir.

I ended up settling on the Bose SoundSport:

hard to lose (the connected “bolo” design means that even if one pops, they’re still secure)
more secure (the bat-wing ear wedge keeps them in tighter: I still have to deal with pop-outs but they’re not quite so frequent)
comfortable enough, I guess

Anyways, my pair of the SoundSports, after putting in a good couple of years of work, has been smashed up beyond recognition, doesn’t have much battery life anymore, they’re kinda done for. Also they have been discontinued.

can confirm, great design, only lasted a couple of years

I’ve been “borrowing” Tiff’s pair, but I thought “hey, I wonder if there’s a better solution?”

Actually, here’s a big question: is there such a thing as an open earbud?

I love open-backed headphones: I’m actually really committed to the opposite of noise cancelling. I don’t want to shut out the outside world: when I’m at my desk or out and about, I want to be present in the space while ALSO listening to music. On top of that, large around-the-ear open-backed headphones are better for your ears (headphones seal in all the juices, which are bad for you) and offer a superior comfort experience (breathability++).

Do open earbuds exist?

Well, there are the Sony LinkBuds, an experimental design that reviews very poorly because of battery and comfort issues:

Not much else…

except for…

These guys, the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 headset.

they work through BONE CONDUCTION

finally, headphones for the earless

… oh, actually that’s kind of exactly what I want

they don’t actually cover or interact with the ears at all. They sit on your head, just behind your temples.

the sound doesn’t go in through your ears

it goes in through your bones

but it goes in, nonetheless

… so, uh, I bought these. They arrived. I put them on.

I love them. I immediately love them so much.

They weigh almost nothing, they feel like wearing nothing at all, the sound quality is quite good, the battery is quite long, and I can hear very naturally while my music is playing. The sound isolation is middling: if I have the music cranked, nearby folk can hear a soft version of whatever it is I’m playing. But I can still hear everything happening outside of the headset. These are headphones I can wear while scooting, or driving , or holding a conversation.

The OpenRun Pro 1 had a proprietary charging connector, which everyone complained about, so these ones (The OpenRun Pro 2) just have USB-C, which is great.

I feel like I can just leave these on. I’m currently sitting at my desk, where I have nice expensive headphones, and I’m not convinced I need to switch away from the headset. These might be more comfortable, and I’m not tethered to my computer.

On top of that, I tested out the onboard microphone, and it’s good for calls. If I wanted to talk to someone on the phone (I’m a Millenial, so it’s unlikely, but it could happen) I could use it like those dorky Jabras every business douche was wearing a decade ago:

I popped this headset on and went out to do chores with Tiffany (need to fill the trunk with mulch and toilet paper, for reasons) and it was great, a soft musical interlude just followed me wherever I went.

When I came inside I had the habit of taking off the headset (that’s usually the first thing I do when I walk in the door) and then I thought “no, I don’t have to do that with these”.

anyways: I’m immediately a convert.

starman

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“I’m a big fan of Starman”

“You’re a fan of David Bowie?”

“David who?”

lies, truths

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

in the classic formulation of the “one of the guards only lies, one of them only tells the truth” puzzle, that information has to come from a third party otherwise there’s a 50% chance it’s just made up

you are in a room with two exits, one leading to freedom, the other to a deadly tiger

guarding one door, sir mixalot

guarding the other, shakira’s hips

you can ask but one question

Your Lumberyard Awaits, My Lord

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This is a very good (satirical) article:

How To Monetize a Blog

Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly lucrative venture.

canada's tariffs on china backfire somehow

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

maybe taxes need to be higher

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

maybe I’m cranky, but “watch collecting” is up there with “yachting” as the kind of hobby that makes me think that taxes aren’t high enough

also, “Stanley Cup Accessories” (not hockey)

corned beefin it

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Option A: buy a deli slicer for hundreds of dollars

Option B: get gud noob

(yeah, okay, it’s still a little thicker than what I could get with a deli slicer, I know)

this is a homemade corned beef, but made with an inside round rather than a proper brisket, which is to say it’s bone dry

it’s still a darned sight better than, like, a plastic packet of grocery roast beef, but it’s nowhere near as good as full-brisket corned beef

raw milk influencers

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0700

apparently “raw milk influencer” is a thing and they’re out there trying to give listeria a fighting chance against Americans

Stacksquatch

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0700

A friend of mine has released this VR game where you… stack things.

It’s got a kind of “Katamari Damacy” vibe. It’s fun, and now it’s available on the Quest - if you have one, and also enjoy stacking things, you should give it a try!

Stacksquatch

pipe organ

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

After a few weeks travelling with a 14” screen and a little laptop keyboard, sitting down at this pipe organ of a monster feels so good

I’m 17% smarter when not programming from a bed, that’s just math

256

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

there is more than one place in VRChat’s backend where I set an arbitrary limit to a power-of-two because even though it’s arbitrary, if I set it to that, people will assume it’s for an important technical reason

modern devices basically never actually have a limit of 256 for anything I think it’s mostly just programmer habit at this point

pounds

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

nobody who’s used to buying coffee ever expects how much tea is in a pound of tea

cook for yourself

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

there’s a thought that starts to come to mind when you’ve been cooking for a long time, which is “i could make that, cheaper, at home” , which is a rewarding thread to pull on, it turns out

pandemic forced me to learn to cook a bunch of stuff that I only ever ate at restaurants - butter chicken, pad thai, sushi, fried chicken, onion rings - and, like, it turns out, while I still eat out periodically, being excited about your own cooking is So Good

I’m not devoted enough to press my own california rolls, but just making a bowl of sushi rice and topping it with some shredded imitation crab, mayo, sesame seeds, cucumber and avocado is a delicious california donburi and so easy

this is a challenge.

you: reading this: what’s the take-out meal you love most in the world? What is the restaurant you wish you were at this very moment?

I swear to you, you CAN learn to make something at home that’s almost as good, you can eat it once a week for the rest of your life for a tiny fraction of the cost, why not do that?

I’m going to put a little star next to a few things like “puff pastry”, though, you should not make that at home

cake math

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Say I have a cake. I divide the cake in two: now I have half of a cake. Then, I divide the cake in one half: now I have one cake. Math!

street fighter

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 10:00:00 -0700

If you’ve played Street Fighter 2, you know that Ryu is from Japan, whereas Ken is fr the USA.

But where in the USA? The answer? Hoboken!

psycholonials

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i’d love to watch a video essay about psycholonials with the caveat that I wouldn’t trust anybody who read psycholonials to make a video essay about psycholonials

So, I’ve made no small matter (outside of my blog) out of my growing Homestuck fandom. (And also: my complete and utter lack of interest in participating in Homestuck fandom.)

It really is a singular piece of art.

If you’ve ever wondered how Andrew Hussie felt about Homestuck, here comes Psycholonials, a VN by Andrew Hussie about… Homestuck.

I mean, it’s not really about Homestuck. It’s just a story of a weird, self-hating depressed clout-chasing internet troll accidentally-not-accidentally becoming enormously popular with an enormous collective of nasty clowns who both idolize and hate their messiah.

Which is, as allegories go, about as subtle as a pie to the face.

It’s really just a graphic novel, there’s no interactivity to be had here.

It’s rendered in Hussie’s House Style, a nasty mixed-media horsetrash cartoon jumble that’s just plain ugly. I’m, uh, actually very fond of it.

Tiff leaned over my shoulder while I was reading this and commented that I had a higher tolerance for ugly art than she does, and boy is she right.

Basic Plot Synopsis

The year is 2020 and Coronavirus lockdowns have basically closed Nantucket, a sleepy island that’s mostly vacation properties left empty for a summer season that won’t be arriving this year. Zhen, mentally ill, depressed, unemployed alcoholic twenty-something, operating online under the pseudonym “Z” because she’s tired of people mispronouncing her name, is a social media influencer with no job and tens of followers. She gets in trouble with The Law and, in a panic, decides to hide with her rich and influential best friend Abby. She concocts a scheme to get out of trouble the simplest way that she can think of: by creating a clown religion that came to her in a dream and using it to overthrow the government of the United States of America. This, by virtue of being a work of fiction, manages to somehow actually pick up some steam

More Plot Synopsis, This Time With Spoilers!

First of all, the trouble she gets into with the law is that she picks a fight with a cop, then, fearing for her life, bites his arm, grabs his gun, and murders him, then rolls his car into the ocean.

So it’s not a small amount of trouble she’s in, with the law.

Her pitch is that America is already failed state: no legitimate power structure could have botched the pandemic response so badly, so Q.E.D. America is not a legitimate power structure. She dreams of a better, kinder, socialist future, and the only way to get there is with preaching a violent clown uprising. Part of this is inspired by dreams from a creepy space clown.

Growing in clout, her clown army starts to coalesce, echoing notes from CHAZ and the Boogaloo movement, although it becomes almost immediately clear that by preaching simple accelerationism rather than any kind of rational policy for improving things, she’s mostly just accumulating people who want to watch the world burn.

The way that she pitches this is with “pranxis” - a portmanteau of “pranks” and “praxis” that mostly means scamming people out of their money and getting violent.

The violence proceeds. Z kills some more cops which makes her more popular rather than less popular. Percy, a “simp” - a horny boy from internet enchanted by Z’s mystique - is brought in to potentially take the fall for Z’s crime, and to help run the crime and organize the clown rebellion. Z can’t work up the courage to explain to Percy that he’s been brought in as a fall guy and whoops, Percy is killed by cops.

This triggers an event where Z runs an enormous, carefully planned prank to drive any non-clowns off of the small island of Nantucket and declare it a sovereign nation.

The clown nation’s power keeps growing and a conniving, power-brokering Grand Vizier of a clown shows up, Joculine, who Z immediately hates because she realizes that Joculine was one of the random folks on the internet who tried to cancel her back when she had tens of followers.

Joculine green-lights progressively more horrible clown violence, at which point Z executes her for… being a hater, back in the day.

Abby points out that Z is growing progressively more insane and begs her not to start executing anybody who rubs her the wrong way, which would be (checks notes) bad.

but wait, it turns out that Joculine had ordered a hit on Abby’s family! Joculine was bad all along and Z was retroactively justified in her violence!

The creepy space clown intrudes again and suggests that, because space travel is practically impossible, their mission is to psychically colonize other planets with their ideas. Z is just carrying the clown banner of distant civilizations. He also points out that everybody who has ever criticized Z is probably going to try to kill her eventually, so she’s justified if she wants to kill them all.

This resonates with Z, who orders everybody who’s ever criticized her online to be murdered by roaming clown hit squads. This disgusts Abby, who begins to prepare an exit strategy from Nantucket.

Shortly after, everybody on the Clown Leadership Council tries to kill Z, and also everybody else on the Clown Leadership Council, in a grand and violent knock-down drag-out fight for dominance. Z narrowly wins, with an assist from her new mute, cute, moe second-in-command, Mizzlebip.

Mizzlebip shows Z a CIA badge: this coup attempt was probably sponsored by the US Government, terrified at Nantucket’s new global clout.

Z calls a big ol’ clown meeting where she tells all of her followers that she’s decided to declare war on the United States of America. Realizing that her insanity and paranoia is beginning to go a bit too far, she then quietly kinda disappears into the forest, where she finds… Abby, who is just about to make her escape. Abby invites Z to come along and leave this whole clown mess behind.

Z decides to run away with Abby. They leave the keys to the kingdom in the hands of Mizzlebip and fly off into the sunset to live on a beach.

Z realizes that Mizzlebip was playing her all along! Wait a minute: the CIA badge that Mizzlebip showed her was just lazily constructed internet art! (This twist concealed in the simple expedient of every other part of the story also being lazily-constructed internet art, but this time it was plot relevant.) The whole CIA thing was just a ruse: the island’s violence was concocted by Mizzlebip in their own play for power.

Z decides to just be Zhen again.

Afterwards, Zhen achieves some level of peace. She concludes that, while she was right about everything all along, her project was doomed to fail because any social movement will be infiltrated by haters who seek to subvert the project with their own clout-chasing and ego. She lives peacefully with Abby on an island, they get married and buy a horse, and the credits play to a whimsical smash cut of the immediate and rapid social media news of rapid-fire clown assassination and succession, as well as the clown’s mind-virus spreading throughout the entire galaxy. [/spoiler]

She ends the story by throwing her cel-phone into the sea.

Look, compressing six hours of reading into a handful of paragraphs is not easy and I’ve missed some major stuff, here. If you’re interested in more details, you can just read the thing. It’s free.

Some Thoughts:

Hussie Raises Some Good Points about Fame

The most prominent theme of the entire piece, here, is that being internet famous was actually driving Hussie insane and that he’s much happier now that nobody is paying attention to him. He was never terribly comfortable with the level of spotlight he had, he was handed the reigns to an empire that he did not ever understand or control, and as a result became paranoid and vindictive. The end result of clout chasing never made him happy, they just made him want to chase more clout, endlessly exhausting himself in order to fuel a content engine that was never satisfied, producing an empty kind of fame filled with people who just wanted to use Hussie as a jumping off point for their own clout chasing.

This is the face-value reading of Psycholonials, in my opinion, and it’s… not a bad message to walk away from the piece with. It’s the Good Ending.

I think just taking the whole message of Psycholonials as “fame wasn’t healthy for me” is probably the most enjoyable (and generous) reading of it.

Clowngender and Horsegender

Hussie takes the floor for some time in this piece to announce his triangular theory of gender.

If gender is a spectrum, then “clowngender” is what Z (and Hussie) identify with: not being male, or female, or even enby, but simply not buying in to the idea that gender is meaningful in any way. Their pronouns are whatever you want to use, they don’t care.

Horsegender is the opposite: very strongly identifying with a specific gender.

AFAICT Tumblr mostly hates Hussie’s clowngender ranting and think of it as kind of the boomer “I don’t see color” of genderpolitick.

I … don’t have much of an opinion on it. It doesn’t strike me as terribly objectionable, nor unusually insightful?

Enlightened Centrism

Basically every point that Psycholonials tries to make about modern imperialist capitalism is a point that Disco Elysium makes, too, and Disco Elysium does a much, much better job with its exploration of these themes.

The philosophy of Psycholonials, as far as I can tell, is that all revolutionary movements are destined to collapse because they’re hewn from the same stuff as the thing they were attempting to overthrow, nothing but clout-chasing and trying-to-rewrite-the-current-systems-again-but-with-a-new-hierarchy.

It’s a philosophy of cynicism, but naive cynicism, a giant shrug at the status quo, an absurdist “I guess you just have to look at it and laugh” take, a sort of South Parkian “Turd Sandwich or Giant Douche” philosophy:

In Disco Elysium’s defense, when I dug deeper I actually found a much more nuanced philosophy and story under the hood.

I think folks would struggle to make the same defense of Psycholonials. Andrew Hussie is mad at the United States of America for police violence and badly handling a pandemic, but then throwing up his hands and saying that you can’t trust Americans to build anything new because they’re too vain, petty and venal to build anything to replace it.

This, as political rabble-rousing goes, is just not terribly compelling.

Like many creators who choose to advance the political message of not having a lot of ideas but simply being angry at everybody for not being better at all of this, I have to say that this doesn’t add as much to the conversation as they think it does.

Hussie Hates the Internet, his Fans, Everybody he Has Ever Worked With, and America, and also He Has Never Done Anything Wrong, Ever.

Z is not a very sympathetic protagonist, but they’re presented as a clownish anti-hero rather than, you know, an obvious villain.

All of Z’s insane paranoia and violence are… justified and rational, in the story, often post-hoc. America, the system, and all of the other clowns are really out to get her. They’re all clout-chasing power-brokering haters looking to corrupt something pure and beautiful for their own ends! Z created something perfect and they perverted it with their own ideas.

When applied to the obvious allegorical retelling of the Homestuck Fiasco that it appears to be, it’s easy to see this as Andrew Hussie justifying all of his bad behavior as necessary, wise, and brilliant.

As we all know, cancel culture is just haters trying to bring down brilliant artists, and the only healthy and responsible way to respond to that kind of input is to tell them all to fuck off, disappear to an island, and make incredibly bitter art about how meaningful social change is impossible, the internet is a poisonous hellworld full of nasty clowns, and all art is just clout-chasing.

This isn’t a very generous reading of the text but it’s also absolutely there if you want to read this in to it.

The worst thing you could possibly do is tell Hussie what to do. This game is not interested in your input, Hussie is not interested in your input, you can fuck right off. You’re just another one of the nasty clowns.

One of the tricks the game plays on you is to offer you “choices” in the story, then tear them away from you at the last second. At the end it reveals that this is because, all along, Z had to learn not to listen to your bullshit, random stranger.

Don’t Like This

It’s tough to find a lot of stuff out there about Psycholonials because basically nobody read it.

The online fan community for Psycholonials is tiny. Because, well, Psycholonials doesn’t want you to be a fan of it. Psycholonials wants you to fuck off.

It’s an actively hostile and bitter piece of work that was barely advertised, by an artist that wrote a story about how they were right about everything and no longer want a fan following.

The Visual Novel is an Interesting, If Niche And Irritating Medium

I’m kind of enchanted with the idea of the VN.

I mean, I made one. The one I made is kinda dogshit, but I’m proud to have finished it. If I made, like, 4 or 5 more of them, the 6th or 7th one might turn out to be actually readable.

I think it’s , like, a mixed-media evolution of a comic book. You can have sound, and some light animations, short videos, but it still reads like a book. I love books. I like music. I like the idea of a book where the parts of the book have visual accompaniments, books that steal little tricks from film and comics without entirely leaving the realm of books.

But also Psycholonials being a VN was actively kind of a deterrent for me.

Like, here’s a content series from an artist you’re interested in, it’s complete and free and has been available for months, and I’m … like… “uuuugghggh, do I have to?”. I barely advertised my own VN because once I finished it I couldn’t imagine putting myself in the shoes of someone who actually wanted to read a VN, because I’m not sure such a person exists.

Something about the idea of a VN is just exhausting.

Psycholonials was exhausting. A lot of times during the story, it grabbed the reins of pacing just to slooooowly fade in a character and I could feel my soul leaving my body.

I want to understand what the problem is. Maybe if I knew why I don’t want to read a VN, I could find a way to make one that people would want to read?

Like, I’m more likely to read a book or a comic than a VN, because somehow the prospect of sitting at my desk and clicking a thousand times to tap through small boxes of text displayed under an unmoving character portrait is so demotivating that I’m only willing to pursue it if the story is excellent. There has to be a better way to present mixed-media storytelling.

Is it, as a field, cursed to be exhausting and niche? I mean, I’ve been described as “exhausting and niche” myself, maybe I just have to come to terms with that.

Clark Powell

Soundtrack’s pretty good. Did you know that Clark is from Vancouver?

Charismatic, Nonetheless

A lot of this comes off as fairly critical. I can see why Psycholonials was very unpopular.

But also: I like Hussie’s work. He’s funny. He’s got a talent for mixed media. He knows how to weave an interesting plot together. His Visual Novel is easily the best and most compelling Visual Novel I’ve ever interacted with, with the caveat that my experience with most VNs or VN-likes is to get irritated with them and bail - like that time, just recently, when I made it through just the first chapter of Danganronpa.

Despite the six-hour run-time, I sat down and read the entire thing in one sitting, stopping only to shotgun an entire pizza.

I hope Hussie recovers on his beach. I hope he keeps making strange art. I’ll keep reading it. I hope that he’ll spend some time away from the spotlight and come back and make more content - hopefully less angry and defensive art. I’m excited to see what Hussie makes next, if anything.

And, if Psycholonials has taught me anything, it’s that I hope that Andrew Hussie never discovers that I’m a fan of his work, because I think that he would hate that.

P.S. : A Short Exchange about Dave Sim

my brain kept trying to connect him with Dave Sim

I don’t know Dave Sim’s work, although I looked him up on Wikipedia

Ooh, Canadian.

… Cerebus? Wait a minute, I know that word, I heard it on the TV Tropes

Ah, okay, so the Dave Sim who so famously derailed his comic with heavy-handed drama that they named a TV Trope after it.

But what did he do that made him so notoriously bad?

Huh, that’s an ominous title for a Wikipedia header, especially one that appears to go on for several paragraphs.

(reads further)

…huh.

Dave Sim.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This is slightly more deaths than the British edition:

A number of deaths is provocative, but a fractional number of deaths is unusual. That’s the kind of curious question that sells novels.

Disappointing, then, to learn that the extra 50% of a death was merely included in the North American market to help differentiate the novel from:

(at the time, the end of 2017/beginning of 2018, I recall posting a picture of the two books side-by side, along with a copy of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and a logo for 7-11, because I am very funny and smart)

So, the extra half-death is not plot critical enough that it even necessitates inclusion in the title, and now, having read the book, I feel like I’d be hard-pressed to even determine which death, exactly, that was.

So What’s it About?

time loop victorian murder mystery

Be More Specific.

Okay, so, I went into this one essentially blind, on account of having downloaded it years ago and just now finally getting to it. Like with other properties, I may have known the fun twist at the time that I added it to my collection, but by the time I actually got around to interacting with it I had completely forgotten the high concept premise.

So, when I started reading the book, I was presented with amnesiac Sebastian Bell waking up in the woods outside of Blackheath Manor, his only memory the name “Anna” with the strong feeling that a murder has been committed. Sebastian is something of a coward, so this first day of the book is largely occupied by Sebastian’s efforts to run away from everything even remotely connected to the mystery.

What mystery? Well, we’re not entirely certain yet. Maybe it has to do with an Anna, who was murdered? I’m pretty sure it has to do with an Evelyn Hardcastle, but Sebastian hasn’t read the cover of the book yet, so he doesn’t know about that. Blackheath is a crumbling manor belonging to the old-money-but-running-out-of-money Hardcastle family, holding a grand gala for their family friends to celebrate some kind of announcement.

He does briefly befriend Evelyn Hardcastle, who is kind to him in his confused, bumbling state. There’s some kind of implacable foe here, “the footman”. The name sends chills down Sebastian’s spine, but everything sends chills down Sebastian’s spine and it will be several more chapters before we learn more of an outline of who or what “the footman” is.

This isn’t spoiler territory quite yet: the concept of the novel is the sort of the thing one can easily discover from a cover blurb, but when he wakes up, he’s… a different person entirely, now he’s the butler and it’s the same day as it was before, as he watches Sebastian bonk around running away from everything happening in the story. The only problem is that he distinctly remembers, as Sebastian, hearing that the butler had been beaten to a pulp by a madman and spent most of his day convalescing under sedation, with only a few bones left unbroken.

Which, too, comes to pass, and our main character now wakes up in Donald Davies, who spends most of his day trying and failing to escape Blackheath. This is the iteration where we learn the Rules from a Plague Doctor who has been following the spirit around:

He’s a spirit who is going to get to live through the same day, 8 different times, in order to solve the mystery.
What mystery? At the end of the day, at 11pm, Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered, by someone, and it’s his job to find out whodunit.

Having wasted most of his time as Sebastian, Davies, and the Butler, that leaves only 5 more hosts to actually get anything done.

Being as obviously he’s only going to solve it on the last day (what story like this is ever like “I cracked it” on the fifth of eight iterations and then just blank pages for the rest of the book), Evelyn Hardcastle is going to have to die 7… and I guess ½ times, before the story is over.

A Plague Doctor?

yup

Middle Of The Book Spoilers Begin

One of the things that is made abundantly clear in his next iteration (4/8), as Cecil Ravencourt, is that the hosts matter, quite a bit.

Cecil is brilliant, ruthless, and so morbidly obese that he requires assistance to stand up, rendering him essentially restricted to a small patch of the ground floor of Blackheath for his portion of the story. Our spirit (who we will eventually discover is named “Aiden”) discovers that having access to Cecil’s significant mental prowess (and his personal valet) allows him to really make some concrete forward progress on the mystery, up to and including finally managing to get his first actual viewing of the murder itself: Michael Hardcastle announces at this grand gala that Evelyn’s hand in marriage has been promised to the wealthy, ruthless Cecil Ravencourt. (whoops!) Evelyn takes this opportunity to dash out to the lake and, with a large crowd of onlookers, dramatically commit suicide with a small silver pistol.

Sidebar: The Nap Jump System

While napping, (Cecil takes a lot of naps), he wakes up back in the broken body of the Butler. Apparently, during naps, Aiden can briefly travel backwards into previous iterations who were themselves asleep, and he wakes up as the badly injured Butler at a different time of day, then collapses from the pain back into Cecil, who wakes up. This “power” is going to turn out to be pretty useful because both the Butler and Donald Davies spent a good portion of their respective days a-snoozin’, giving us access to some utility from their otherwise wasted days.

The rules of Aiden using naps to jump backwards into previous hosts who are sleeping are easily one of the most complicated and irritating parts of this whole thing, and I had to puzzle on the rules of it a bit: each new day is a concrete fresh instance of the loop, so Aiden is actually jumping to a different part of the same day that he’s currently in, rather than jumping to the previous host’s iteration of the loop. There are rules for when he can jump into the Butler and when he can jump into Donald Davies, (they have to be in parallel times in the story when both of them are asleep, I think?) but that leaves the open (and unanswered) question of “what happens if Aiden has a nap during a time while there are no available hosts”? Also, I could swear that I remember a time in the story when Aiden nap-jumped to a different time in the day, but I must have that wrong because it wouldn’t be right.

If this story could have been done without the confusing and often hard-to-follow nap-jump system, I think it would have been all the better for it.

Cecil’s forward progress establishes a lot of the most key details of the scenario: who’s who in the manor, and the basics of the Hardcastle family (father: Peter, mother: Helena, deceased brother: Thomas, alive brother: Micheal, and, of course, Evelyn) - details of the horrific murder of Thomas Hardcastle 20 years prior. He has an appointment with Helena Hardcastle, who doesn’t show, and generally does a pretty competent job of setting up the rest of the story and the mystery at hand.

Our next host is Jonathan Derby (5/8), angry drunk and (later revealed) serial rapist. This is a much harder journey through the story because Derby is difficult to pilot and can’t think so good. Derby’s journey is much less helpful, and mostly serves to outline some of the other players in this mess:

There are two other spirits in this game with him, one of whom is Anna. The first of the three of them to solve the mystery will be freed from the loop: the other two will remain forever.
He meets Daniel Coleridge, his final host, who seems to know quite a bit more than him about what’s going on, and who tries to set up a meeting with Anna to capture The Footman.
He meets Ted Stanwin, serial blackmailer.
He gets hit in the head by a vase and goes down for the count (the number of vase-smash head-injury knockouts in this book is “multiple”), waking up as the Butler again, this time discovering that the Butler’s wounds are being tended to by Anna, a different player in the game, who reveals that she and Aiden are colluding to try and escape the game together: any time he needs to chat with Anna he need only take a quick nap as any of his hosts and he can jump back to the Butler, so they can co-ordinate.
Anna also reveals to him that Gregory Gold, the seemingly insane artist who battered the Butler, is also one of his hosts.
He gives the silver pistol to Evelyn that she uses to commit suicide. She asks him for it, revealing that if she doesn’t do it, she’s been blackmailed and someone else will suffer terribly!
- Ted Stanwin, serial blackmailer, is a pretty solid candidate for “most obvious to cause Evelyn to commit suicide via blackmail”. (of course it wasn’t Ted)
He meets The Footman, a terrifying serial killer who is hunting him and all of his other iterations. Derby is a fighter, though - he’s not going to be cowed by some serial kill- oop, Derby got murdered immediately. Well, that ends this iteration.

Also: touch of concern: Aiden (the spirit that is the main character) is slowly disappearing into the various hosts, losing himself and just letting them drive. In a few thousand more iterations he might just be erased entirely.

Gonna Stop Here With The Full Plot Synopsis

Practically, any point past here is going to be so heavy with spoilers that it legitimately would threaten your good time reading the book.

Thoughts?

I read a review online that gave the whole book poor marks for it’s lack of character arcs, but, like, that’s not what this story is about. Few people are out there reading intricate mysteries and going “i hope Sherlock learns how to love” - no, they’re about unwinding a puzzle, and boy does this puzzle feel relatively satisfying to unwind.

There is a pernicious anti-trope in mystery fiction, where the main character sees something, goes “I solved it!”, and rushes off without telling you what it was that they saw or what they solved.

pengwings

This book mostly manages to avoid that, although unfortunately Gregory Gold, the final host, is just sitting on the biggest and juiciest clue and if the author were to reveal it fully it would reveal the big ending twist a little too thoroughly - so instead he wildly downplays this huge detail as if it were a small, inconsequential thing, even though it would be as plainly obvious to Gregory Gold as the nose on his face.

So, the resolution of the main mystery is satisfying, but I had a fridge moment later where I was like… “wait a minute, that plot was a lot more fragile, and a lot less clever than the book made it seem…”

But then I thought about it some more and I was still pretty satisfied with the conclusion, with the single caveat that it introduces a mild plot hole, IMO.

I would regard both the mystery and the high-concept wrapper for the mystery, both solid and satisfying, A, would mystery again.

Quibbles

There are some side-mysteries in this story that are also brought in, not part of the main mystery, but questions raised by the conceit:

Who was responsible for the time loop?
Why is the loop Victorian?
Who are the other people in the time loop? When the loop ends, what happens to them? Does any of this matter to them, at all?
Who are Aiden, Daniel, Anna, and the Footman, the ghosts loopin’ the loop?
How did they get in the loop in the first place?
Do they escape? If they do, what happens to them after they escape?

While these questions mostly get answered (no loose threads! nice!), some of them are really hand-wavey and dumb.

Most of those are, in fact, answered. They’re not satisfying answers, but they’re answers.

So: the high-concept mostly ends up getting waved away as “idk, they’re in a time loop because time loops are cool, don’t think too hard about it”.

Overall?

I’d mostly recommend this, especially if you are prone to enjoy things like time loops, mystery novels, and particularly if you feel like you would enjoy a time looping mystery novel or you thought The Sexy Brutale sounded interesting but exhausting.

All of the Spoiliest Spoilers, Seriously, Don’t Read Past This Point if You Intend To Read The Book

Gregory Gold, the final host, is just sitting on the biggest and juiciest clue:

Gregory Gold has been hired by a mysterious benefactor to replace a little brunette girl with a little blonde one in all of the family paintings.

The Evelyn Hardcastle who is murdered is a blonde.

The twist is that the real Evelyn Hardcastle, a brunette, paid Gregory to do this, and has arranged for a fake Evelyn to pretend to be her. The murder plot is hers: she arranges to kill the fake Evelyn in order to get out of her family obligations and live free.

Actually, In Retrospect, What??

Her parents didn’t notice that all of their family paintings/daughter had been replaced because, I guess, who just looks at the paintings in their own house? Who speaks to their daughter regularly? Not the Hardcastles, apparently.

But that’s only a small plot quibble, there’s sufficient justification for it in the text of the book, I think.

Also: Apparently Aidan has been stuck in a loop attempting to solve this puzzle several thousand times and never got all the way to the bottom of it, which is surprising, considering how obvious Gregory Gold’s clue is, here.

Who was responsible for the time loop?

Advanced future civilization? Literally no further explanation.

Why is the loop Victorian?

it’s an unsolved case from centuries ago that the advanced future technology can just drop people right into somehow.

Who are the other people in the time loop? When the loop ends, what happens to them? Does any of this matter to them, at all?

everyone in the story who isn’t a ghost is a simulated NPC, they cease to exist, and no.

Who are Aiden, Daniel, Anna, and the Footman, the ghosts loopin’ the loop?

Anna and Daniel are super-max mega-criminals in the future, with thousands of kills to their name, (Anna is characterized as, like, “future-civilization mega-Hitler”) which is why they’re getting stuck in the future’s most advanced form of punishment: victorian murder puzzles.
Aiden lost his wife to Anna’s regime and volunteered to get tossed into victorian super-puzzle-hell to try and torture her extra.
the Footman is just a super fuckin’ creepy NPC that Daniel hired, he wasn’t a ghost at all.

Do they escape? If they do, what happens to them after they escape?

Yes, Anna and Daniel, manage to rescue one another from murder-puzzle hell, although in doing so they both lose a lot of “who they were before they entered murder-puzzle-hell”. Both decide to leave their horrible pre-murder-puzzle-hell memories and personalities behind and forge new identities, but on account of Anna’s history as future civilization mega-Hitler, Anna is probably going to be hunted until the end of her days. Whoops.

Wait, that’s all nonsense!

Yeah. Yeah, I think that the author just wanted to put together a time loop mystery and struggled, at the end, to answer the meaty questions of “but what the fuck actually happened, there”?

I think a more confident author might have just Groundhog Day’d it and explained nothing.

nextdoor

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:00:00 -0700

local communities on any platform like reddit are nothing more than a constant drumbeat of “what was that siren?” and “someone’s dog pooped” and “i think I saw a criminal??” in small cities

and “oh my god big cities have homelessness and drugs, that should be against the law” and “the endless bike/scooter argument” of larger cities

if I were looking for communities to replace with an AI these would probably be the first, I feel like I wouldn’t need a complex model or even an LLM, necessarily, I could do this one heuristically

it would be slightly harder to simulate that one guy with a bunch of numbers in his name who’s constantly pushing hard right accelerationism on every forum, but not impossible

so, on reddit, for the past 6 months or so every time a post on one of the local subreddits comes up asking “why all those sirens” or “what was that noise?”, I always respond with some variation on “oh, yeah, an old man exploded”

this provides no value and isn’t terribly funny, and yet, deep down in my heart, I think it’s a joke that will pay off in a few more years

if you can't measure it

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I often see the quote “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, which is catchy enough to have a lively life of its own

But the full quote is “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.”

It’s one of the worst frequent misquotes because the misquote literally inverts the meaning, it’s like if I said “don’t light children on fire” and someone were to quote me as having said “light children on fire”, which is technically true, I guess, but it’s not what I meant.

“light children on fire”

Cube Drone

selfie

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

it’s going to be an uphill battle getting me to take “selfie deaths” seriously

look, it’s tragic, okay

every selfie death is a Cybertruck left sitting, unsold, on the lot

a NFT, orphaned, its wallet forever silenced

a bunch of ideas for AI art that never even got to get generated

reddit drama that you won’t have read out loud to you

an ad read for Squarespace that you’ll never get to hear

a blue-check erased

trick

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0700

The most important thing I ever learned to say in Japanese was, of course, エラー: 翻訳サーバーに接続できません

caked up foxes

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

one of the things I like about the fediverse is how weirdly optimistic and naive everybody is about the clout of a distributed social network that’s compelling and fun, but absolutely has less users than the virtual reality video game that I work on for a living

I think that all governmental orgs and offices should be on VRChat, not because that’s practical or a good idea, but because not enough government employees have to deal with caked up foxes on the regular

watching someone try to get the government of Canada to put up a public Mastodon instance is one of those things that’s funny and tragic, like if they spent all of their time trying to get their cats to play Poker

like, here are creatures fundamentally incapable of understanding or caring about what you’re trying to get them to do, and even if they were on board with your plan, they would not be able to do it well because they do not have the dexterity in their little paws to hold the cards right

colorblind

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

You ever see a design and think the designer was like “maaan, fuck the color blind”

kohlrabi

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

“I shall call it the cabbage softball”

Jonathan Kohlrabi, 1856, spitballing name ideas for his new vegetable

alexa, play mariachi radio

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

For some absolutely asinine reason I have smart lights in my house.

(I can tell you why: it started when we realized that the previous inhabitants’ genius electrical work would turn the furnace off if the basement lights were switched off, so we either needed to rewire it or, cheaper, get lights that would switch off independently of the light switch)

There are, unfortunately, no smart buttons that aren’t battery powered, so I made the mistake of buying some on-sale Alexa speakers.

Amazon’s smart speaker platform is juuust smart enough that with a little bit of effort (about 4 hours of techno-faffing), I could get it to play an icecast stream by using a soon-to-be-deprecated developer API.

Getting my icecast radio station hooked up was a pain in the ass, but even more of a pain in the ass was finding activation phrases that were:

Unique enough that they wouldn’t trigger unwanted behavior
Pronounceable enough that Alexa could reliably parse them.

Because “marquee.click” is my personal domain for Various Shenanigans, my first crack at this was the activation phrase “marquee radio” which had something like a 5% success rate.

Most of the time when I said “Alexa, play marquee radio”, Alexa would hear “Alexa, play mariachi radio”, and as much as I like non-stop mariachi tunes, it’s not what I asked for.

Currently the activation phrases are

“Alexa, buttery nunchucks” ( for my main radio station, https://radio.marquee.click)
“Alexa, cascading bumblebees” ( for https://radio.marquee.click/chill.ogg )
“Alexa, unbelievably boring” (podcasts)

these, of course, only work within my home: it’s in dev mode, I probably couldn’t get my radio stations through certification, being as I do not have the legal right to rebroadcast this music (I paid for the mp3s, but the radio station is for personal use)

So, I have basically perfect Machine Voice: Alexa always listens to me and interprets what I have to say correctly. This infuriates my wife, who tends towards angrily shout-mumbling at the device (“LEXA! LIGHSOFF!”) and then getting more angry when it doesn’t do shit

My wife has an unusual pan-American accent borne from being a military kid, but she’s not unclear: instead I think she’s just kinda mad that the device expects clear enunciation and refuses to play it’s game, whereas I’m so in love with the sound of my own voice I can’t help but go “Alexa, could you please turn the lights off in the living room?”

I’ve got the device vibe a little better than she does. That’s not to say it isn’t VERY OFTEN just, like, 15% dumber than I want it to be.

A good question to ask Alexa is “what do you think I just said?” because it will often provide some context for a completely nonsensical response.

The pile of watch-battery-powered smart buttons have gradually worked their way into the trash. They churn through those batteries at a pretty prodigious rate, fail often, and they don’t feel good to press.

I also won’t wire things directly into the house, on the assumption that smart tech is garbage and won’t last longer than the house will.

I’ve thought of cheap tablet or raspberry pi shit, but ugh

If someone out there knows of a plug-in-to-the-wall smart button platform out there, lmk

Getting Google Home to play a custom icecast stream is impossible.

Getting Alexa to play a custom icecast stream took me 3 hours of debugging against a pretty gnarly Amazon interface, a lambda deployment, and TuneIn intervening to play mariachi music A NUMBER OF TIMES.

… I’m pretty sure Alexa is better but my eyes hurt

fry the zucchini like it's chicken

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

exonerative

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

layoff notifications are always written in the exonerative tense: “X% of our employees will be leaving the company, we’re sorry for the ones affected”

as if they were hit by a fleet of buses one at a time

does anybody else remember neon genesis evangelion

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

box cat

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

dude, what?

30 rock

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I think my favorite episode of 30 Rock is the one where Jenna and Kenneth conspire with Kelsey Grammer to steal hundreds of dollars from a Carvell iced cream store by ordering misspelled cakes

tarot interpretation

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

people who print interpretations the tarot just label every goddamn card with a woman on it with “fertility” which I think is some bullshit

I know, I know, “you’re going to have loads and loads of children” is, like, tarot cold reading rule numero uno so the reader needs a lot of outs for that

friday deploys

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’m going to go against the common wisdom on this one. If you aren’t confident enough to push to production on Friday, you aren’t confident enough to push to production, period. Invest in your rollback and monitoring and staged rollout tech until you don’t lose 20% of your week.

amirite

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

more like clownstrike amirite?

(satisfied, he walks away from his keyboard, another day defeated)

thereese

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

yesterday my D&D players got to explore a cemetery where every single headstone was a “Here lies Bob, who drowned”-tier stupid pun

“Here lies Wayne, died in a stowm”

“Here lies Thereese, who had diseese”

here’s the full list:

Here lies Will, who left no inheritance
Here lies Rob, who was mugged
Here lies Taylor, who seamed alive
Here lies Pat, touch his grave for luck
Here lies Ty, roped into this whole business
Here lies Phil, accidentally buried alive
Here lies Barry, who killed Phil on accident
Here lies Doug, who helped Barry
Here lies Dawn, her husband mourning
Here lies Locke, a man with a secret
Here lies Eileen, who stood up against injustice
Here lies Frank, who, honestly, was just the worst
Here lies Deforest, who died in de city
Here lies Wayne, died in a storm
Here lies Bea, allergic to honey
Here lies Chuck, thrown by a horse
Here lies Peg, who fell into a round hole
Here lies Mary, killed by her husband
Here lies Bill; exploded still
Here lies Therese, who had diseese
Here lies Rowan, who loved his boat
Here lies Lance, from infected boil
Here lies Grant, who gave generously
Here lies Liv, who died
Here lies Carol, who’s sung her last note
Here lies Aiden, helpful to the end
Here lies Kent, who, in fact, could
Here lies Paige, who took a turn for the worse
Here lies Reid, clarinet-maker
Here lies Kerry, pall-bearer
Here lies Sue, famous lawyer
Here lies Pierce, who took an arrow
Here lies Nick, his throat was slit
Here lies Chase, killed by a pack of wild dogs
Here lies Mark, who died protecting his brand
Here lies Bob, who drowned

The Fool and the Magician

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

legacy mechanics

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t like it when board games have legacy mechanics. That ’s too big of an ask of my time and friend group, and a lot of times they result in permanent damage to the game’s innards as you tear up boxes and bits and bobs.

I’ve bought a few and I’ve regretted each one.

stickers

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

If you just learned (or are just now learning) that Sticker Mule is run by a hardcore Maga guy, and would like an alternative, may I suggest not buying stickers? You’re an adult. Don’t pay people for things printed on sticky paper. Replace your furnace air filter. Buy an immersion blender. Save for your retirement.

an attempt was made

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

nation’s women disappointed by three inches, again

what beats rock?

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

whatbeatsrock.com

this game is fun, you just have to keep proposing new things and a rather stupid AI will judge them for you

welp, already stumped

ha ha, a record

okay, diamond beats powerful buttcheek man,

baseball diamond beats regular diamond,

field of dreams baby

a live baseball team beats the corn field,

this is fun if you’re creative, just getting a bunch of firsts

No Biggie

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

one of my friends replied to a thing with “no biggie” so I sent him this

Musk

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Mr. Musk refused to comment when asked if this was “prompted by anything” or if the sperm was provided “in containers”.

whiskey sour

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

When I’m at home, the cocktail of choice is a Gin & Tonic with waaaay too much lime because they’re easy and dumb and refreshing.

When I’m at a restaurant and nothing on their special cocktail menu appeals, the drink of choice is a Whiskey Sour. They’re just a touch too fussy to make (often) at home, which is why they feel special to order when you’re out: but they’re reliably very good.

Security Fail

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

look, one of these is legitimately so much more secure than using the same password for everything

it means that somebody who invades your home can steal your identity, but with one password for everything, someone can steal your identity if they break any of the sites you’ve ever visited.

of course it’s best to have 2FA and a password manager, but decades of insistence and my family still is committed to just the most dogshit passwords, real “Password123” level stuff

The Sloppy Swindle

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

the game is to post five star reviews of recipes where it becomes increasingly clear that you just made a sloppy joe rather than their recipe

bonus: the world’s worst french toast

… tortilla shells soaked in bean water, with cumin!

Draft Combat

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

The draft layouts for the combat system in a game I’m fussing with are starting to reveal a problem with it. Reasonably a player could expect to have, like, six pages like this: JUST DENSE TEXT.

nightcrawler

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i liked the episode of X-men where nightcrawler visited Canada

where did he go?

BANFF

saturated markets

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I like to write, and draw, and code, and design games - and I’m not amazing at any of these skills - and it feels like the output of these skills are largely things that there are simply too many of already.

there are enough novels, and books, and comics, and board games, and video games, and TTRPGs, I’m not sure if there really needs to be more of those things

there is simply enough art, what could I possibly add?

hot

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0700

It’s officially summer, which sucks, because I like baking bread and I basically have to take a 3 month break from homemade bread because running the oven at 450 for an hour when it’s 35C out is checks notes bad

“why don’t you use the barbecue”

I don’t want to go outside it’s like 35 degrees out there

Best Miyazaki Films

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I love Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso.

there’s this shot in Porco Rosso that’s just a fast, low flight over the Italian countryside that I assume gave the animator working on it an actual heart attack

every damn frame of Kiki’s Delivery Service takes place on some piece of beautiful, detailed, warm, pleasant art, I don’t even need to pick one out, I can just stop the movie literally anywhere and it’s this kinda thing and it’s on screen for 1.2 seconds and then another one, and then another one, for like 90 minutes

this is one of my favorite movies of all time and Tiff doesn’t care for it because nothing much happens in it, but it’s just a pleasant, chill ride all the way through

I watch it on lazy Saturdays

If you like Stardew Valley this is the movie with the Stardew Valley-est vibe that you can find

this movie should be on the list of anti-anxiety drugs

Please Don't Get Angry

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0700

When the local post office is just covered in “please don’t get angry” signs, it’s either because the community is particularly aggressive or the post office is unusually, frustratingly incompetent, or, in this case, definitely both

iOS Devil Magic

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m a software developer, right? I know how to build a lot of things.

But if someone said “we want photos that automatically crop into foreground and background so that we can display elements in between those layers” I’d say “no, that’s too hard”.

Is it using the depth sensor, or AI auto-cropping, or both? WHAT DEVILRY IS THIS

Canadian Kraft Dinner is Worse Than Daiya

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

why did Babish (Andrew Rea) hate Canadian Kraft Dinner in his boxed macaroni and cheese rankings?

well, it’s the confluence of two effects:

first of all, in order to preserve neutrality, Andrew made all macaronis using exact box instructions
second: in order to appear healthy, the Canadian KD is prepared using the utterly insane combination of “mostly skim milk with a scant tablespoon of margarine”, even though nobody has ever prepared it this way

A “prepared” box of Canadian KD has 120 less calories than the identical box of American KD, and the difference there is in the ingredients.

My guess is a loophole in the different Nutrition Facts packaging laws in both countries allows for Canadian KD to claim its nutritional facts with the lowest calorie milk and essentially no butter at all, which produces More Impressive Looking Health Numbers than the American equivalent, despite being functionally the same product.

The only time this fails them is if someone happens to follow Box Instructions to the letter, producing probably the worst KD anybody has ever prepared.

Like, obviously anybody is just going to use whatever milk they have on hand, and the only people who buy skim milk are either puritans, schizophrenics, or people who have grown tired of just putting water on their cereal, and also the correct amount of margarine is “a chunk of butter”

look I have spent 2 months thinking about this, fuming, how DARE you rank Canadian KD below DAIYA

but doing anything else would require breaking the method, and a show like this doesn’t WORK without a consistent method, even if that method screws poor Canadian KD to a wall

this isn’t on Andrew Rea, it’s on Kraft, for trying to game the nutrition facts with ingredients that no sane human would ever use

it’s like when sugary cereals used to be “part of a balanced breakfast” and then they had to show you a tiny bowl of cereal next to two bananas, three bran muffins, a whole glass of milk, a bowl of blueberries, and a whole jar of multivitamins because that was the only way to make that claim, they could just omit “a very small part of a very large balanced breakfast for four or five people”

Oh, there’s a TVTropes page for this, called “Adjacent to this Complete Breakfast”.

my hobby

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my hobby? oh, it’s simple, it’s farting into this plastic chair so aggressively that it wakes my wife up in the other room

no, I haven’t thought of monetizing it, yet

scape+goat

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

so my CSA dropped off some garlic scapes and I’m obsessed with the idea of a doing a long braise with the scapes and some goat meat

and if it turns out to be bad, I will blame it on somebody else

Manitoba Police Very Nearly Beat a Shoplifter to Death

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

once you know about the past exonerative tense, you start to see it show up all over the place,

particularly in news stories where the Manitoba police definitely nearly beat a shoplifter to death

layoffs

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Anyways, big layoffs at #VRChat this last week: I know it’s a crowded field, but share (or DM) your remote-friendly senior backend engineering or engineering management roles if you’ve gottem.

Also: any other remote-friendly video game roles. I’ll make sure they get to the right places.

inventions

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

so, after learning about awnings and how they provide degrees of totally free cooling in the summer, but need to be rolled down in the winter when you want that heat

I started to imagine some kind of technology that could be widely deployed to offset global warming somewhat, huge, solar-powered sun-shades that would block sunlight in the summer but not in the winter, cheap to deploy en-masse

and then, having discovered the concept of “trees”, I figured I probably wasn’t going to make it as an inventor

Pan Bagnat

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t regard Tiff as particularly fond of tinned tuna, hard boiled eggs or olives and yet she has been asking me to make a Pan Bagnat for multiple years after encountering the concept on social media somewhere.

Today, I brave the sando.

(verdict: it was fine)

Mr. Buns

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

My wife and I are both digital artists - although she is a professional, whereas I’m more of an amateur, so on the top is her version of her D&D character (Mr. Buns) and on the bottom is my version.

(please do not choose a favorite, it’s bound to lead to one of us feeling bad, and by one of us I mean definitely me)

She’s a background painter, so her work tends more towards definition and detail, whereas I’m more of a cartoonist, so mine tends towards dynamic pose and relative simplicity

I joked that hers is the theatrical release and mine is the direct-to-DVD remake

tiff: so, it’s a little girl with a giant warforged bunny barbarian guardian

curtis: … so you want to play as The Maxx?

tiff: >_>

tiff: <_<

a pollo

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

my favorite greek god is a pollo

he was kind of a chicken though

atoms isnt real

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

there’s no such thing as atoms

have YOU ever seen an atom?

science wants you to believe that if you heat a liquid, it turns into a gas but I tried heating an egg and it turned into a solid egg

my theory is that all of chemistry is a conspiracy concocted and coordinated by hundreds of thousands of scientists in order to disprove my superior, atomless theory of chemistry

foolish “atom believers” will say stupid things like “your theory of chemistry produces no testable theories” and also “your theory of chemistry doesn’t explain any observable natural phenomena”, because they are paid to say these things, by Satan the devil, in order to disprove my theory

plus, their “atom” theory is stupid and debunkable

like, take some water and try to breathe it

it’s H20, there’s oxygen in there

but try it, and you’ll choke and drown

that’s because atoms is not real

Big Chemistry wants you to believe that there’s CHLORINE in your salt. Do you really believe that you’re just wolfing down a deadly chemical all the time?

Atom truthers like me, we know that this is total bunkus. Every ancient society knew that all matter was made out of earth, water, fire, and air, and I think they had the right of it.

And long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony.

perhaps at some point you have concocted a baking soda and vinegar volcano, as a child,

but that’s just part of the indoctrination

they say it’s because of ions? moving from an acid to a base? but ions are a star trek word. “fire the ion cannon!”. Is there an ion cannon in vinegar? I think not.

everybody knows that vinegar is a fire-water element and baking soda is an earth-air powder and when you combine them, you get an air reaction, thus the bubbles. it couldn’t be simpler.

EMPEDOCLES GOT ROBBED

have you ever heard the song “September” by EARTH, WIND, and FIRE? they knew the horrible truth

Ted Turner was in on it, too, trying to get the world out on the DL with his show about the elements

clues are hidden everywhere

scientists: all matter is solid, liquid, or gas

cereal: exists

scientists: 😮

chemistry claims that there’s a fourth form of matter, plasma, and that water turns at plasma at over 10,000 degrees Celsius

but if you ask a doctor if there’s plasma in your body RIGHT NOW they will say “yes”

can humans suddenly survive 10,000 degree heat, DOCTORS? I think not.

CHECKMATE ATOM BELIEVERS

atoms were thoroughly debunked in my experiment ( youtue.b/98ddxx ) where I showed that the 100 degree boiling point is a LIE

and oh, did the quote-unquote “scientists” come for me with excuses

“you set your thermometer to Fahrenheit”

“that water is clearly sitting just above room temperature”

exactly what an illuminati would say

Network

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I watched the movie Network (1976) a while back, which is a near-future dystopian film about what happens when we let journalism get taken over by entertainment and ratings-chasing.

Howard Beale goes from a respected journalist to this red-faced fear-mongering angry shouting head.

… and I don’t think it ages very well, because the thing it predicted came to pass essentially immediately and hasn’t left since, I was born a decade later, I can’t remember an era when news WASN’T like this.

It's a Smismember Miracle!

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:00:00 -0700

As Per My Last Email

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Good Sandwiches

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

good sandwiches are an art

Dumpling Family

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

for lunch i am going to eat this whole family

Sync Up

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

at some point in the past 20 years people stopped saying “meet” and started saying “sync” or “sync up”

MEETINGS ARE OVER, NOW THERE IS ONLY SYNCHRONIZATION

scientific american

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

somebody at scientific american needs to take a cold shower

song lyrics

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

lot of people out there making songs about love and heartbreak and rejection but nobody making songs about stuff I care about, like AUTHENTICATION or INSANELY SOFT SUPERMARKET FRENCH BREAD or THE WAY THAT COFFEE SMELLS

what about second pension

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0700

well this is new

late capitalism

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t like it when people say “late capitalism”, first of all because it’s too optimistic: it implies it’s going away, which, good luck with that

and second of all because it implies that capitalism has become somehow worse, as if there was a time when it was pleasant and humane, which seems willfully ignorant of a lot of history

when was the kinder, gentler capitalism that we’re hearkening back to? the CIA overthrowing oil-unfriendly democracies? union busting with lethal military intervention? children’s hands mangled in automatic looms? the east india trading company?

flat earth

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 12:00:00 -0700

watching flat-earth debunking content (it’s fun, even if I think they’re unnecessarily smug about it, as if they’re actually going to succeed at changing unchangeable minds) has actually forced me to develop a mental model for both seasons and tides which I didn’t really have before

before judging me: can you describe why it’s cold in winter and hot in summer without googling it?

if you said “because the earth is… further from the sun… in winter” then… how is it possible that winter in one hemisphere happens while summer happens in the other? If it was a distance from the sun thing, the whole world would go into winter at the same time, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it’s a tilt thing! When the top half of the Earth tilts closer to the sun, the whole “top” half of the planet gets more sun, and also there are bits on the very tip top that just stay lit all the time, and the whole “bottom” half of the planet gets less sun, and also there are bits on the very end that get no sun all the time, and then it swaps.

Why does tides? “Uh, gravitational pull from the moon, right?”

Okay, why does… TWO TIDES A DAY?

thinks about it

oh shit , there’s a tide on the side opposite from the moon, and it’s not as strong as the tide on the side directly facing the moon, that’s bananas

How is this not way more fun than insane theories about giant ice walls?

tuck

Fri, 31 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I love it when he tucks his tail neatly around his legs like this.

3 whole bulbs of garlic

Thu, 30 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

this person rightfully gets absolutely pilloried in the comments for failing to understand what constitutes a lot of garlic

A lot of people recommend roasted garlic, but I’m gonna say it:

garlic confit is equivalent

and the small amount of extra effort to peel the garlic up front makes it 100% easier to not have to extract your roasted garlic from hot sticky garlic paper, resulting in less effort overall AND increased yield of both garlic and oil.

Garlic Confit Recipe

Peel 2-3 heads of garlic into a ramekin.
Cover with a neutral oil. (Vegetable, cheap olive oil). Don’t go expensive with the oil here, subtle flavors gonna get obliterated by garlic.
Put in the oven at 375°F for 45 minutes or until the garlic is golden brown.

the first google image search result for garlic confit

now you have delicious garlic AND delicious oil!

Toum

3 bulbs is not ENOUGH, even, to justify making toum, but toum is so delicious, so sharply garlicky, that serious garlic lovers will eat it and shed a single tear

“why did nobody tell me about this, earlier” they will say

Serious Eats: Traditional Toum Recipe

Toum is essentially a mayonnaise, but it’s stabilized with garlic instead of egg. Just like mayo, toum is an emulsion of oil into water, made possible with the help of a third-party emulsifier.

figma

Wed, 29 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i am an adult

designer: figma

me: figma… balls

fia

Tue, 28 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

So, there’s an episode of Game Changer called “Don’t Cry”.

My first thought upon seeing it was “how are they going to make that work, it’s very easy not to cry”.

…. oh, goddamn, he’s not playing here at all

Ultimately the episode was very sweet, and laser targeted at essentially love bombing a cast member who’d had a tough time, who wept through pretty much the whole episode, and lost/won.

But it made me question my bravado, I’m actually very easy to make cry. Any sad or sweet movie for one.

Look, I know exactly how to utterly wreck myself, I’ll show you, I’ll make myself cry right now:

It’s not that sad a story in the grand scheme of things, but Tiff and I had been wanting a cat forever, and we finally found a landlord who would allow us to get one, just in time for the pandemic to begin.

Long wait list with a local breeder - I’m allergic to cats, but not bengals, so we ended up with this unusually intelligent and busy breed.

Fia.

I fell in love with her immediately.

she was quite the skittish kitten

at first she was terrified of her new home, so I would spend nights in her room with her, getting her used to me, playing with her, until she was content to sit in my lap and purr for a little bit at a time

we set up little milestones around the house and she’d come out and explore, a little bit at first, but she got braver over time.

I was so proud of her.

then she stopped eating.

a terrible disease that strikes kittens.

and before very long at all we had to say goodbye to Fia

this is our last picture of her

unix time

Mon, 27 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I learned about how unix time works in early University, ‘round 2007, which would be 17 years ago

Unix time ends, 19 January 2038, 14 years from now

so I’m officially past the point where I’m closer to the end of Unix time than I am to the point where I learned what unix time was

we’re only 14 years away from the end of time as we know it

by then, it probably won’t matter, but I still plan to hold a real party for the end of time

basically any computers and any software - post 2005 - are going to be immune to the 2038 problem

which means that most governments and banks are completely screwed

sock

Mon, 27 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

i wonder if it’s weird for my cat when I take the small fuzzy creature he’s been chasing for the past few minutes, turn it inside out, and roll it up my foot, like, he’s pretty bloodthirsty but that’s just an insane level of escalation

Sometimes when Zapp is all comfy and asleep I’ll sidle up to him real close and go “Meow! MEOW!” but I don’t think he understands that it’s intended as vengeance

ass that wont quit

Sat, 25 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Basically, I am what you get if you ask a Genie for an “ass that won’t quit” without thinking about it enough

Genie: surely you want to be just a little more specific

Me: no, I’ve committed, hit me with your best shot

tie-in

Thu, 23 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my new hobby is going to be releasing unofficial tie-in cookbooks for games that have no conceivable cooking angle

ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF KITCHEN

curry, deconstructed

Tue, 21 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it’s not quite green curry yet but we’re close

it’s kinda “mise en place” if you just en place everything kinda next to each other on a cutting board, right?

subway mustard

Tue, 21 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Did you know that (at least where I live, in Canada) Subway briefly stopped carrying MUSTARD?

that is a CORE SANDWICH CONDIMENT

conspiracy theory: it’s part of an ongoing raft of changes intended to make Subway higher-calorie and more expensive, like gradually hiding the “ham sandwich” ($8) behind the “kia sorrento steak supremo megasubwich” ($14)

I’m glad that before long they caved and brought basic ballpark mustard back

2025 Editor’s Note: Honestly, for all I know this one Subway just ran out of mustard one time, going straight to conspiratorial thinking may not have been the right move.

curtis gets a nice new tattoo

Mon, 20 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

corkscrew

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

apparently this is called a “waiter’s friend”, or “wine key”, although all of this time I’ve been calling it a “french army knife”

The term “wine key” came into existence due to the German inventor’s last name, Wienke, which is difficult for English speakers to pronounce. When ordering the product from catalogs, the meaning and origins of the new Wienke Corkscrew gradually became lost and it was simply referred to as a “Winekey” or wine key. Patent number 283,731, August 21, 1883, simply refers to it as “C.F.A. WIENKE LEVER CORKSCREW.”

inconvenient coworker

Thu, 16 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

buddy - if you could just - slightly to the - sigh okay

FOSS is not a business model

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I saw someone on Mastodon pillorying someone’s little personal code project for not being FOSS

ok, random stranger, I’m subtweeting you

seventeen people in all of history have ever made a profit from FOSS software, indies have it hard enough already, don’t try to get them to release their source code just because you think it will probably work out for them

every FOSS monetization model:

begging strangers for money, hoping for the best
run it as a SAAS
large, expensive enterprise support packages

the first one produces vanishingly low returns and the last two don’t usually work for games and have you getting run out of business by Amazon

mastodon rate limiting

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

sometimes I get rate limited by Mastodon, while using the Mastodon client normally, from a single tab, which strikes me as a bit odd

on account of… you know, Mastodon, you’re the one doing this

the people have spoken

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Neverending Soda

Wed, 15 May 2024 13:00:00 -0700

I’ve never seen the movie, The Neverending Story

But as part of my ongoing low-level Homestuck obsession, I thought I’d read the book, The Neverending Story:

“Wait, what?”

Okay, so, I’ve been listening to Homestuck Made This World, a podcast where two cranky academic nerds read through Homestuck, one of whom is going through it the first time, the other one already intimately familiar with it. (sidenote: Time has moved forward far enough that people who were homestuck fans as teenagers are now English professors, that’s just how Time works, con-sarn it.)

And a handful of the elements I’ve found persistently confusing in Homestuck have turned out to be elaborate references to the Neverending Story, in particular in its book form. Micheal and Cameron from the podcast JUST KEPT POINTING THIS OUT and I eventually had to go and investigate on my own.

So, some thoughts:

This Book Totally Slaps.

It’s written in the style and mode of children’s fiction, but it’s a 400 page tome and it’s wild.

… also, when I say “the style and mode of children’s fiction”, I have no idea how to describe what I mean by that.

The vocabulary remains fairly complicated, actually, but there’s a sort of radical simplicity to the way sentences are structured that just shouts “children’s fiction writing” at me, and I’m not sure what exactly makes it feel that way. Maybe it’s that the book kind of stops to carefully explain every single detail along the way?

It’s like… while the vocabulary is flowery, the story is also very simple and readable and explanatory and regular and patterned, and I think of that as “children’s fictiony”.

The Ink Thing

One of the reasons I haven’t read this book until now?

The “Human World” parts of the book are in Purple, and the “Fantastican” parts of the book are in Green. Every copy of this book has to be printed with two easily-differentiated colors of ink. (Apparently this can differ from printing to printing, although it was Purple and Green for mine)

Which means, in order to get the full effect of this book, I either needed to buy a real copy or get my hands on a color e-reader. Which I didn’t get until just recently.

This is also why I’ve been holding off on House of Leaves, which is also in my reading queue now that I’ve got a color e-reader.

The Rough Plot, In Case You Don’t Know (SPOILERS AHOY)

Bastian, a chubby loser with a dead mom (sidenote: ha ha) on the run from bullies, steals a mysterious book from an old bookshop, then runs away into his school’s attic to read it rather than go to school. He opens the book and…
Patches of Nothing are consuming all of Fantastica, and some various and sundry messengers have been dispatched to find The Childlike Empress and tell her about it.
The Childlike Empress is dying, and Atreyu, a native-coded boy from the grasslands is summoned to go on a quest to save her (and with her, Fantastica). He’s given AURYN, an ouroboros-emblazoned amulet, to protect him. He takes his horse Artax along, which goes extremely well.

every horse was harmed in the making of this movie

Basically immediately, Artax the horse gets swamped to death, helping to establish that the Nothing means business:
We go through a bunch of chapters with a pattern where Atreyu is introduced to a fantastical new location, meets a fantastical new creature, is put in some kind of fantastical new danger, and through it, learns a fantastical new detail of his quest.
Sometimes, Bastian interjects, and weirdly, the book seems to react to his interactions.
A big ol’ spider made out of hundreds of miscellaneous insects introduces Atreyu to the Luck Dragon, Falkor.
Atreyu goes through a bunch of mysterious gates and ends up learning that in order to save Fantastica, he’s going to need to find a human from outside of Fantastica to give the Childlike Empress a new name. He also sees Bastian, specifically.
Atreyu discovers that he can’t just leave Fantastica to find a human because Fantastica has no borders, and despairs.
Atreyu learns from a werewolf that he’s nothing but a fragment of story, and in order to leave Fantastica, he has to go through The Nothing, which will transform him into a lie and further poison the human world, accomplishing nothing.
Atreyu despairs and takes this information to the Childlike Empress, almost but not quite dying along the way. All is lost!
The Childlike Empress is actually very cool about this: this was always the plan all along. In fact, this whole adventure was only necessary because it made a good story, and the good story drew in a human who was reading the whole time.
And all he has to do to save the Empress is say her new name, he’ll be sucked into Fantastica and that will immediately save the day.
The characters stare, impatiently, out of the book at Bastian, who absolutely knows the thing he’s supposed to say, but holds back because he’s a fat little coward. (sidenote: i’m not 100% in love with Sebastian’s character in this, I’ll admit)
Atreyu: 🤷
Childlike Empress: 🤷
Maybe he just doesn’t know that he’s supposed to interact with the book, like, right now, just say the Childlike Empress’s name out loud, right now, you little twerp.
Atreyu: 🤷
Childlike Empress: 🤷
Childlike Empress: okay, fuck it, I can force his hand, I’m going to go directly to the author.
The Childlike Empress retakes AURYN, and goes on her own journey to speak to The Old Man of Wandering Mountain, who is currently engaged in the eternal task of transcribing The Neverending Story, the book you’re reading right now. (sidenote: that’s right, I bet you thought it was meta enough with the audience interaction, but it’s getting worse)
There’s a sign on the door saying, essentially, “No Childlike Empresses Allowed, This Story Will Get Too Confusing”
In order to force Bastian’s hand, the Childlike Empress goes “okay, tell me the story, again, from the beginning.”
“Wait, if I do that, I’ll just get to the point where you ask me to tell the story, again, from the beginning, and we and the boy will get stuck in a loop, forever.”
Childlike Empress: DO IT.
“Ok, I guess”.
Bastian, a chubby loser on the run from bullies, steals a mysterious book from an old bookshop, then runs away into his school’s attic to read it rather than go to school. He opens the book and…
… (skip ahead a whole bunch)
Bastian, a chubby loser on the run from bullies, steals a mysterious book from an old bookshop, then runs away into his school’s attic to read it rather than go to school. He opens the book and…
… (skip ahead a whole bunch)
Ok, Bastian is finally starting to get sick of this, he relents and says the Childlike Empress’ new name: Moon Child.
There’s a lot of Nothing to rebuild, and the Childlike Empress gives Bastian AURYN and says “go do whatever the heck you want”.

Wow, what a story! That’s as far as the movie ever makes it, but… the book goes on for quite a bit longer.

In fact, that’s just Act 1!

Act 2.

So long as Bastian has AURYN, everything he wishes comes true, it’s essentially Fantastica God Mode.
Bastian wanders around Fantastica having zero-stakes adventures where he gradually becomes the handsomest, strongest, bravest, smartest boy in the realm, accumulating loads of overpowered artifacts.
Every time one of his wishes comes true, he loses a little more of his memory.
He runs into Atreyu and Falkor, hooray! They’re bestest friends!
Atreyu doesn’t seem sufficiently impressed by the handsomest, strongest, bravest, smartest boy, and so Bastian starts doubling down on the wild miracles to try to seem even more impressive.
Atreyu is concerned that Bastian is getting too deep into Fantastica and starts grilling him about his memories. Noticing that they’re going missing, he warns Bastian to leave Fantastica immediately before it gets any worse.
Bastian is furious about this, and instead starts doubling down on his wishes even more.
There’s a side-plot where Bastian accidentally creates a race of the saddest, ugliest craftsmen in the world as part of one of his wishes. They confront him about this:
He wishes for them to be happy and joyful all of the time, and accidentally turns them into Obnoxious, Stupid, Nasty Clown-Faeries. (sidenote: the story inspired Homestuck in other ways than this, also)
whoops.
An evil sorceress Xayide (sidenote: herself created from a wish triggered by Bastian’s selfish desire to stay) , commander of hollow metallic armies, starts supplicating herself to Bastian and advising Bastian to be more selfish in a plot to separate him from Atreyu and make a claim for the crown.
Bastian gives Atreyu the boot and builds an army to try and take over Fantastica for himself.
Bastian is just about to overtake the Ivory Tower and become the new Childlike Emperor when Atreyu intervenes with an army of his own, and there’s a bloody and violent fantasy war.
Bastian almost but not quite kills Atreyu, and Atreyu escapes at the last minute on Falkor, badly wounded.
Bastian decides, instead of trying to become the Emperor, vengeance on Atreyu for betraying him is now the order of the day and goes chasing after Atreyu.
Instead of finding Atreyu, he finds The City of the Old Emperors, a city where tens of thousands of humans live; their minds hollowed out by Fantastica.
Apparently they all also had saved the Childlike Empress, and for humans who stay in Fantastica, there’s a 100% chance of “going mad with power and trying to become emperor”, which always fails (sidenote: the Childlike Empress is Fantastica itself and cannot be tamed thus) and burns through their wishes and mind at a prodigious rate.
The people in the city are immortal and utterly mindless, eternally pressing random objects together and trying to read stories out of nonsense.
Xayide, learning that Bastian has found the City of the Old Emperors, realizes her game is up and commits suicide. (sidenote: children’s book! children’s book!)
Bastian goes on a long and introspective journey to try to escape Fantastica with his last few remaining wishes, using his wishes on things like “wanting to be part of a community” and “learning empathy”.
The only wish that can be used to leave Fantastica is the last one, for which Bastian trades his name.
Juuuust before making it out, the way is blocked by… Obnoxious, Stupid, Nasty Clown-Faeries. It turns out they hate being like this and blame Bastian.
Atreyu and Falkor show up to save the day AGAIN.
Bastian gets to go home, but not before giving up all of the gifts of Fantastica: his strength, his handsomeness, his willpower, everything he wished for is stripped away, and he’s just a regular boy again.
Bastian wakes up and it’s the same day he left (sidenote: you there! Boy! What day is it?) !
He goes home, patches things up with his dad, and is generally a better dude.
Everybody believes Bastian when he talks about Fantastica, because by defeating The Nothing he actively beat back a layer of lies, making everyone a little more receptive to the fantasy realm.
He goes back to the bookshop to apologize for his book-theft, and the book seller reveals that he had also done the Fantastica 100% speed-run, and that portals to Fantastica are hidden in books all over the place.

They Made This Into a Movie?

I can’t believe they made this into a movie. Reading this book, it seems completely unfilmable. I might have to go watch the 1984 film to see what they did.

I’m aware that they split this up: the movie The Neverending Story is, like, just the first half, the part of The Neverending Story that’s just the Standard Fantasy Adventure, and all of the heady god-mode meta-adventuring ended up shunted in to The Neverending Story II (1990) which was far less well received.

Which, uh, yeah. That makes a lot of sense, actually.

Fantastica is Unquestionably an Un-Alloyed Good

One of the things I think the story kind of dodges is that it treats Fantastica as unquestionably a good thing.

It’s a story that eats children, and as we discover from the text, this is both “non-optional” (the Childlike Empress will threaten reality if it means her survival) and “often results in an eternity of torment for the children in question”.

The good parts? The people who survive the Fantastican gauntlet are much improved by it, and in doing so they bring Fantastica’s gifts of imagination and empathy back out into the world - and since people who are trapped eternally in the book are people who couldn’t figure out how to escape a world in which they are granted literal god-mode powers it’s probably not too bad.

But, uh, definitely, Fantastica does brook some follow-up questions.

There’s a touch of cosmic horror to it, is what I’m saying.

Arbitrary Rules That You Must Follow

A frequent fantasy trope that is used to great effect here is… “the rule”.

You know, “you can use the Magical MacGuffin, but, if you ever do X, some undefined but definitely unwanted behavior will happen”, or “the only way to perform task Y is by doing unrelated thing Z”.

The rules of fantasy, magic, et-al can often be extremely arbitrary. They certainly are in The Neverending Story.

Sometimes I think this is why programmers are so often board gamers, video gamers, and fantasy nerds: these are adjacent fields where “arbitrary rules that you must follow to the letter or be destroyed” are common and well-accepted.

This is a Legitimately Great Children’s Story

Micheal Ende was raised by surrealist painters who were censured by Nazis during the war for their weird, incomprehensible fantasy art.

The Nazis understood art on very limited terms.

Anyways, that imaginative surrealist approach to children’s fiction was, uh, hugely influential in children’s fantasy? I feel like I’ve been reading stuff that has been strongly influenced by this book for decades. It’s like finding a missing book of the bible.

For a 6-11 year old child, this story seems like a slam dunk. I’d have loved it as a kid.

I had fun with it as an adult, too.

That Second Act, Though

The first act of The Neverending Story is a pretty bog standard fantasy story. It’s fun, but it’s The Wizard of Oz, a story which (notably) already exists.

It’s not until we get to The Story Loops In Upon Itself Creating an Endless Meta-Story Loop, Followed By God-Mode Bastian Fucking Around in Fantastica that the story starts really cooking with gas, and this part of the book contains some of the most bananas parts.

Gragraman, the Many-Colored Death?

Obnoxious, Stupid, Nasty Clown-Faeries who Wish They Were Never Created?

Bastian rides an all-armor horse until he EXPLODES?

The City of the Old Emperors?

A bloody and reckless civil war for the impossible crown of Fantastica?

An evil sorceress with eyes of green and purple who subtly represents the book itself?

The Picture Mine?

An ouroboros as a symbol for a world constantly destroying and regenerating itself through storytelling?

There’s a lotta good stuff in here.

And, yeah, when my podcasters say “Homestuck is an internet-poisoned retelling of The Neverending Story”, now I get what they mean.

Tiffany Steps In

Tiff’s taking the mic for a bit: imagine suddenly that I’m much more well-read and interesting:

Ooo, this is kind of interesting to me, because when Curtis and I first started dating and I found out he hadn’t seen the Neverending Story, I sort of abandoned the idea of trying to introduce it to him as a grown man, thinking the experience didn’t translate as well once you were older. I’m not sure why I put him through Mean Girls, Every Wes Anderson film and More Horror Than He Cares to Have Shared, but didn’t unearth this old childhood nugget.

This movie undoubtedly traumatized many a child, but it was also one of those immensely satisfying fantasy epics that I loved when I was a kid. It was pretty formative to my introduction to fantasy-fiction, in the same way The Fifth Element and Dune were my precursors to Sci-Fi. It ranks among other traumatizing-but-beloved surreal kiddie adventures that shaped me as a little human that include:

This Guy and his Bulge:

Horrifying Sentient Rats Escape Death (sidenote: this one scared the shit outta me as a kid) :

Crazy Man Tortures Children in Factory:

Horrifying Genocidal Vultures Attack Elves:

Most Quotable Movie ft Man Tortured to Death:

And of course, the beloved

Horrifying Sentient Appliances Devastated by YOU, Horrible Humans (Now with more clowns (sidenote: i fuckin’ love the brave little toaster) !!)

But even among those bangers, NeverEnding Story really stands out as having some terror-inducing scenes when I was a kid.

The Nothing was SCARY, when I was young. (FYI, this movie came out the year I was born, so though I don’t remember what age I watched it, it’s on the list of some of the first media I ever remember seeing.)

But so was that Wolf-thing: (Which kind of just looks like a crusty puppet now)

and the weird gate: ( I remember being EXTREMELY aware that they were topless when I was a child)

Like, sure, the horse scene was soul-shattering, but I remember being afraid of the Rock guy, slowly being disassembled by the Nothing:

and this fucking giant turtle that was “allergic to youth (sidenote: relatable) ”:

The second one, I don’t think it tracks too closely to the book, from what you’re saying. In trying to conjure memories of this, I realized the evil sorceress:

was kind of blending into my memories of the oddly-similar head-swapping sorceress in Wizard of Oz II:

and her weird hollow armour army:

was merging with my memories of of the Dark Crystal’s Darkened Creatures:

It’s like, were all these 80s movies just one long fever dream? Funny to revisit them as an adult with a lot more media-literacy and see the connections and the artistic influences. I’m not surprised at all to learn surrealism was influencing the author, and it would have been the time that Henson & Co were at their peak, with Brian Froud playing a huge role in how 80s children’s fantasy looked:

Henson’s Creature Shop would have supplied all of the puppets for Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal and Neverending Story. They’d also go on to work on another beloved children’s author’s work in the 90s, when they did the equally strange adaptation of The Witches by Roald Dahl!

Anjelica Huston slayed in that role. What an icon.

Between Henson, Froud and Don Bluth, I can hardly think of something more quintessentially 80/90s kids cinema.

It’s funny, that second one, they recast Bastian as teen heartthrob Jonathon Brandis, who by your description is pretty far off-brand from the book’s character.

Did the book have an insufferable Bird character, as well? Did they just shunt insufferable-bird in because there was a rule in the 90s that you had to have at least one insufferable nightmare-fuel character per movie or you couldn’t participate in the Illuminati meetings?

They also replaced the Childlike Empress in the second film (i mean, I think they replaced basically everyone) but child-me thought the original girl was like… supernaturally beautiful… and aspired eternally to be her:

No life a Canadian 7-year-old is living is ever going to measure up to whatever this is:

She’s just a kid, and a relatively normal one, but apparently I wasn’t the only person transfixed by her beauty. As I collected this photo off IMDB, I read:

though she appeared on-screen for just minutes in the role, with her character described as “an indescribably beautiful young girl,” adult men tracked down her address (in pre-internet times) and camped outside her family’s Northern California home hoping to get a glimpse of her after the film came out. Then came the marriage proposals, including one from a German man who mailed her an expensive engagement ring, and the inappropriate offers from producers, some who would show up at her door. “They came to our house and pitched it, and I’m like, I’m not doing a nude film,” Stronach recalled. “I’m not Lolita.”

It’s all good though. She became a talented dancer in NYC for two decades after, and remembers the three months she stayed in Bavaria filming the movie with her Mom as a dreamy summer camp. How odd to remember looking up to her, knowing at that time she was just 11 at the time, and wasn’t, you know, really an Empress.

IMDB had a more current photo of her now! Time flies!

Okay, Back to Me, Curtis, Your Usual Host

So, yesterday, with Tiff, I watched The Neverending Story (1984) for the first time.

I don’t have Too Many Thoughts about it, but I had a few:

this kid isn’t as fat and terrible as Bastian is in the books, but I was still filled with a powerful desire to bully him

Bastian’s dad just… cracks a whole egg into some orange juice, blends it up, and visibly drinks it. On camera. Which means he probably had to do that DOZENS OF TIMES. Good lord. WHAT. This may be the most disturbing fantasy film ever made.

The movie includes almost all of the strange characters from the book, which seems impossible to film, which was, at the time, an ENORMOUS flex by the Jim Henson company. Groundbreaking special effects.
In fact, MOVIE is almost beat-for-beat identical to BOOK (up until the ending).
Some of the creatures they left out include:
Will-o-the-wisp: a fast moving glowing ball of light with a character inside it would already be insanely hard, doing that at the same time as all of the character effects seems impractically difficult.
Ygramul the Many: this being 20 years before particle effects, uh, omitting the spider-made-of-mosquitos seems like a good idea.
There’s already a lot of scary stuff in this movie for kids, “meta-spider” seems like it might go over the line.
Some of the effects do not stand the test of time so good: they’re impressive puppetry but … enh
Gmork is absolutely just a Head:
I laughed out loud at Gmork’s only attack in the entire thing: they kinda just throw the head at Atreyu

bleah!

In the book, Gmork’s death-bite holds Atreyu fast so that he can’t be swept up by the Nothing, whereas in the movie he’s just gotta hold on, which is how we get:

hup

Engywook is practical make-up done so, so well:
although this is what the actor looks like in real life, so it’s not even that much of a stretch:
MOVIE: Fantasia
BOOK: Fantastica
MOVIE tries its best to avoid BOOK’s meta-exploration of Fantastica at every opportunity.
MOVIE uses “show-don’t-tell” to great effect to replace long stretches of rambling exposition with character moments that establish the same information but by doing some stuff. This also gives MOVIE a much more slapstick Muppety vibe at times.
For example: the 80’s Bullies are not just mentioned in passing: we get to see them dunking Bastian in the trash.
The Rock Giant gets a reprise - which makes sense, he must have been SO EXPENSIVE, might as well get some extra use out of that big puppet.
I found it extremely funny that the movie’s school looked like this:
But its attic looked like this:
The ending sharply diverges between BOOK and MOVIE, presumably because the MOVIE had to tie things up right quick.
in MOVIE, Bastian just… rides Falkor out of the Neverending Story and uses him to enshittify some bullies’ pants, roll credits.

Oh, and throughout all of Sunday Tiffany couldn’t stop singing “NEVERENDING STOOOO-RRYYYYYYYYYYYYY AA-aa-AA aa-aa-AA aa-aa-AAAAA” which is the song that bookends the movie. It’s an earworm, it’s incredibly simple and irritating, and they play it so much.

Satire is Hard

Wed, 15 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, both Tiff and I had seen some growing groundswell behind the old, famously terrible movie “Showgirls”.

Has Showgirls actually become kind of good?

Tom Jolliffe takes a look back at Showgirls, once universally derided and considered one of the worst films ever… but is it actually misunderstood? Upon its release in 1995, Paul Verhoeven’s trashy spectacular, Showgirls was obliterated by critics….

Showgirls: Complete and utter trainwreck or misunderstood satirical feminist masterpiece?

Anyways, we decided to give it a watch and decide for ourselves.

Cripes, this movie was a slog. Needlessly gratuitous, badly written, often badly acted. Cheesecakey but never sexy. Every character has an unclear, constantly shifting motivation. Bad rape scene. The movie struggles to find a thesis and just sort of lands on “las vegas bad”. Eventually the movie kind of just ends.

It’s exactly as unwatchably bad as everybody said it was.

It also contains one of the worst sex scenes that I’ve ever seen in a movie. Like, Watchmen bad.

this guy’s got at least equivalent moves

This is not a good movie.

It does try to do something, though.

It’s possible for bad movies to do things well. One of the things that Showgirls does well is that it actually goes way out of its way to … put on a lot of the shows that are the topic of the piece. Putting on stage-show like this is, I think, actually really hard. There’s a lot of synchronized choreography in this movie. The movie goes all in on the spectacle, often using it as a framing device for the just abysmal story.

It takes significant effort to fit it all in, but Paul Verhoeven puts a tremendous amount of effort to fit an entire strip-show and an entire show-girl stage-show within this movie. Maybe 20-30 minutes of this’s show’s runtime is just dance routines.

The problem? A whole stage-show, on camera, is not as weighty and interesting as watching that same stage show in person. It can drag a little - but in a better movie, these scenes could elevate the movie rather than being the rock that drags it to the bottom of the sea.

Thing is, the movie itself condemns the spectacle of the showgirls as cheap and sleazy and vapid and hollow. It’s simultaneously trying its best to salaciously enjoy titties and also harshly judge anybody who would dare to salaciously enjoy titties. The movie tries to have-it’s-cheesecake-and-eat-it-too, which creates a lot of thematic dissonance. This movie so delights in something that it’s trying to condemn that it comes off as simultaneously kind of preachy and sleazy at the same time.

The main character is in full, aggressive make-up in every scene in the entire movie - when she wakes up, in the pool, after a 350-mile drive - every scene - and it’s hard to tell whether that’s bad directing or an intentional comment on hollow spectacle.

Like, the movie is cheap, and dumb, and sleazy, and vapid, and hollow, and hypocritical, that might be on purpose. If that were on purpose, would that intent make the movie kind of good?

No!

Paul Verhoeven’s Oeuvre

This is not the only Paul Verhoeven movie that tries to present a satirical point of view, but gets so lost in spectacle that the point goes way over most people’s heads.

Take, for example, Starship Troopers, or Robocop.

Does Starship Troopers Have The Exact Same Problem?

I’ve long been of the opinion that Starship Troopers is an oft-misunderstood work of satirical genius, but… is it?

It’s a fun space war movie!

The humans in the war are actually fascists!

The fascism is satire! You’re not supposed to root for the humans!

The satire is muddy and unclear, and it goes over people’s heads, leaving most people walking away cheering for fascism.

It’s not satire’s responsibility to be legible to anybody, and it’s not bad art if the satire isn’t clear.

But if we take Verhoeven’s satirical masterpieces that are frequently misunderstood (Starship Troopers, Robocop) and his total flop that is barely comprehensible (Showgirls), one thing they have in common is that they really can’t help but glorify the spectacle of the things they’re purporting to satirize, creating what is ultimately muddy satire.

That’s bad.

Basically, Starship Troopers and Robocop struggle to tell clear “war bad” or “police violence bad” stories because they can’t help but get caught up in making those things look cool on film.

We end up with stories where “violence cool” is the text, and “violence bad” is the subtext and “violence cool” is the sub-sub-text again.

Which is how this kind of thing happens:

Other media has this problem, too: if you make shitty behavior look cool, it doesn’t always matter if you lay out that it’s shitty behavior in the story, people will still idolize and emulate it.

Showgirls has this same problem: it gets so caught up in the thing it’s trying to condemn, it fails to be effective satire.

i think I saw an antivaxer do this a few years back on public transit

You know, it’s like how Spec Ops: The Line tries to shame you for enjoying its violence while also… you know, being a video game, where the point is also to enjoy the violence.

Or how The Last of Us: Part 2 forces you to make a bunch of bad, violent, video game decisions and then rubs them in your face. This game is fun, violence is fun, what you’re doing is bad, revenge will ruin your life: mixed message.

That’s ludonarrative dissonance right there. (I got to say it! Roll out the prize!) The story and the fun aren’t interacting right!

On the other hand, media often has to be showy and fun. Nobody would watch Starship Troopers if the war wasn’t a little fun. Nobody would play The Last Of Us Part II if the gameplay were as grim as the story. Down that road lies games like Lisa: the Painful or Pathologic where the game’s awfulness is perfectly aligned with the story, and then the only people who ever want to play it are a handful of art nerds.

… and all of these other things I’ve mentioned? The Last of Us: Part 2? Spec Ops: The Line? Starship Troopers, even? Well, they may not be perfect, but they’re interesting, critically well regarded. The dissonance between the fun cool violence and the narrative telling you that the fun cool violence is neither fun nor cool bring up that question, but ultimately they’re enjoyable media.

Lisa: the Painful and Pathologic aren’t fun and cool, they’re painful, shitty, nasty experiences that deliver razor-sharp commentary - they weren’t wildly profitable but they’re cult hits, critical darlings, art pieces.

Clearly there’s a whole spectrum of ways to do satire that are interesting or successful.

The problem with Showgirls is that it’s not cool, sexy, or entertaining, and it’s also not thoughtful, well-considered satire. It fails on all fronts.

…

so, at the end of this entirely too long screed, I think I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I don’t think Showgirls is a very good movie.

corporate beat poetry

Tue, 14 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Following up

with the mental model

of validating solutions

aligned autonomy

while tailoring

our frameworks’ approach

to specific flows

out of these perspectives

we’ve gathered a lot

of great feedback

for planning and executing

roll-out team objectives

baking that in

to a new process

to address pain points

we’ve identified

including barriers

to ideation,

focus,

and synergies,

while preserving

our best chance to succeed

with a new team-level

product strategy documentation phase

to clearly align

the team’s strategy

to the overall company strategy

creating a big improvement

over last half

a cross discipline

planning leads team

will create a more inclusive experience

across the board

we’re really stretched

so we can go deep

utilizing impact analysis

planning cycles

detailed planning leads

across four distinct phases

utilizing context

to jump in

to high level completion

of the company strategy phase

the output of which

was the phase priorities

which we’ll walk into

with the OKR setting phase

for lightweight half-planning

strategy buffered feedback week phase

then, again,

we’ll have the monthly

company objectives

to deliver a “golden goose”

“star retention” using

the team strategy doc

which I’ll share out

after this presentation,

investment in targets

and goals

that will have value

for the business,

delineating an exciting change

let's go exploring

Mon, 13 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

my cat is orange, and he has a white chin and a white belly and a tiger striped tail, and we’re very good friends, and somehow this fulfills a deep-seated itch planted in my brain a very, very long time ago

sexism can't ruin golf, it's already golf

Mon, 13 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I think Slate may imply that the problem is sexism and while that’s likely the case, I’d also like to advance the theory that the last few remaining fans of golf have simply died

data scientists have a lot to answer for

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

database, ok

data warehouse… ok

data mart… ok

data stream? … ok

data pipeline? … ok

data… lake? …. ok

data K-mart? … prices & values

data lakehouse? … no, this is starting to get concerning, you’re crossing the analogies

data beachhouse? … where did you say you were taking our data again?

software made easy

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

stupid torment nexus

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Comedy Author: In my sitcom I invented the Stupid Torment Nexus as a joke, to make fun of the dumb things that people build.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Stupid Torment Nexus from classic sitcom Ha Ha, What A Terrible Torment Nexus

radial grater

Mon, 13 May 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Box graters are nice for a wide variety of miscellaneous kitchen tasks

Radial graters are not for that.

Radial graters are for people who are about to create a heaping, snowy mountain of parmesan on their food.

Radial graters are for people who never tell their waiter to stop.

They just make eye contact and wait.

Surely they will crack before you do.

your dreams

Mon, 13 May 2024 10:00:00 -0700

at least they’re finally being honest about WHO’S dreams that kid was chasing

iced tea, man

Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’m a capable bartender, but almost all of that knowledge has instead found its way into my true vice: a potent homemade iced tea lemonade that I can drink gallons of.

I know I’ve talked about iced tea before, because I care a lot about iced tea, I firmly believe that a lemonade iced tea (an “Arnold Palmer”, technically, because sometimes if you ask for an “Iced Tea” you just get cold tea, which is fine but it is not what I am talking about) is the greatest beverage that exists.

There’s an enormous historical digression that could be made about why Canadians like me think of “lemonade iced tea” as the default iced tea, but the tl;dr is it has to do with the complicated history of the Arnold Palmer and the Coca Cola company.

Just be assured that when I say “iced tea”, what I mean is potent, bitter, sweet, tart, and lemony.

a new iced tea in town

I’ve now discovered a new iced tea.

I’m planting my flag, I am the first human being ever to discover this radical flavor combination:

Now to take a big sip of water and go to google to make sure that I am, indeed, truly the first.

damn you, Fieri!

Anyways, I’ve learned most of my iced tea hax from Classic Iced Tea, but they apply exactly as well to Hibiscus Lime Iced Tea:

Use a vegetable peeler to remove the peel (not the rind) of a CITRUS, then let it sit, in a ramekin or small bowl, with about 2 tbsp of sugar. Shake it a little. This takes at least overnight although once it’s done it’s shelf stable for weeks (‘citrus oil and sugar: very hard for nasties to live on’) so you can just make it whenever and assume you have an iced tea on the way. This is an oleo saccharum and its potent citrus oil flavor really contributes to a tasty beverage.
In a Big Plastic 1.9L/2Qt Jug, fill to about 3/4 full with just-off-the-boil water, then add 10 teabags of Arbitrary Tea. (Tetley, Hibiscus, or whatever kind of tea you’re using). Make sure you have a large splash of boiling water leftover.
Give the tea an appropriate amount of steeping time. (If you oversteep black tea, it gets unpleasantly bitter, but herbal teas often need LONG steeps, so … follow box instructions.) Then, fish the teabags out, with a spoon, or a kitchen spider, or someone else’s hands.
Dump a splash of hot, hot water (I guess about 1/4-1/2 cup?) into the oleo saccharum to dissolve the citrus-sugar mixture, stirring gently until the sugar dissolves. This will allow you to very easily pour the sugar-syrup-oil mixture into the iced tea jug, while capturing the peels with a fork or sieve.
Juice the citrus into the jug using whatever citrus juicing method you prefer.
Add 1/2 tsp of raw citric acid for potent sourness (or, failing that, the juice from an extra half-citrus or even a capful of vinegar)
It’s time to add sugar to taste! Starting from here (from MY sugar preference, keep in mind sugar preference may vary wildly), 4 tbsp of sugar will get you to something that’s sour and potent and refreshing, 6 tbsp of sugar will get you to something balanced and delicious, and 8 tbsp of sugar starts to get you into Kool-Aid :tm: territory. (No judgement: do whatever you want) - this is extra easy because the mixture is still hot, which means the sugar will dissolve instantly and easily, making it very easy for you to use a l’il spoon to taste if you’ve got the sugar and sour balanced properly, which you should definitely do.
Time to chill. Cover the jug and put it in the fridge.

So, while I do this with black tea and lemon, or hibiscus tea and lime, you can do this with any tea and any citrus. Jonathan gave me some rooibos raspberry tea that was bonkers delicious with some lime. Please: go forth and try combinations of teas and citruses and report back to me with the best ones.

They’re not all winners: I tried this with some sleepytime tea and navel orange and it was… awful, actually. Sleepytime tea is minty and the combination of mint and orange gives off a noticeable “brushing your teeth then drinking OJ” flavor. That was… not so good.

I drink an unhealthy amount of this stuff. It’s the perfect beverage. I always have a pot in my fridge. I’d rather have it than most alcoholic drinks. I offer it to guests when they come over. It’s so good.

Vinegar Drinks: Good Actually

Most good drinks are either regular water or sweet and acidic. Coca cola, gin and tonic, margarita, whiskey sour, lemonade, 7-Up, so long as they got the sweet AND the tart they’re golden.

One surprise for me is that the source of that tartness can be pretty variable. Citrus is expensive, but you can use raw citric acid, or even vinegar, and the drink is still good if you balance it.

At some point I’m gonna try to concoct some shrubs, maybe even some haymaker’s punch.

This Tropical Shrub Proves Spice Is Nice

Pineapple combines with brown sugar and baking spices in this festive tropical shrub.

https://www.liquor.com/pineapple-shrub-recipe-5077965

Pirate Punch Ahoy

A while back, I read Punch, by David Wondrich:

This drinks historian goes into absurd amounts of detail describing both the history and recipes-to-recreate various and sundry historical punches.

The recipes in Punch are mostly completely ridiculous, being as they tend to call for three or four full bottles of hard liquor at least and are intended to provide a wild evening for a great many people at once.

One recipe is codified in a long poem and calls for 72 lemons, 5 bottles of french dessert wine, 10 bottles of cognac, and a nutmeg or two.

That one’s pretty big, but it’s got nothing on Admiral Russell’s Punch, which calls for

the following ingredients, viz. four hogsheads of brandy, eight hogsheads of water, 25,000 lemons, 20 gallons of lime juice, 1300 weight of fine white Lisbon sugar, 5 pound of grated nutmegs, 300 toasted biscuits, and last a pipe of dry Mountain Malaga.

unable to find a bowl large enough, Admiral Russell prepared this in a fountain.

Apparently they made a little boat and had a boy floating in the punch with a ladle, serving it up for people.

One thing I noticed, reading Punch, though, is that many of the punch recipes have a thing or two in common with my iced-tea recipe. Citrus, sugar, water or tea - the difference is an absolutely bonkers amount of hard, hard liquor. Sometimes they’ll finish it off with a little bouquet of pie spices like nutmeg (something that can be quickly approximated with a dash of angostura bitters).

So, for a party one time, I went hunting for a recipe that had similar proportions to an iced-tea that I had already prepared, and decided on Chatham Artillery Punch.

One of the three recipes for bowl-sized Punches I included in Imbibe! was a version of this, formerly Savannah’s favorite way of putting visitors in their place. The 1907 recipe I printed for it, while a good one, came with an acknowledgment that back when the Chatham Artillery first made it, “its vigor . . . was much greater than at present, experience having taught the rising generation to modify the receipt of their forefathers to conform to the weaker constitutions of their progeny.” I always hate to print a weaker recipe when a stronger one exists or, with exceptions, a newer one when there’s an older one.

I was therefore very pleased, some weeks after that book was published, to come across a little item in the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle recounting the origins and original composition of this particular piece of ordnance. “Its history is this,” the article explains:

back in the fifties the Republican Blues, which were organized in 1808, visited Macon and were welcomed back by the Chatham Artillery. Mr. A. H. Luce, since dead, proposed to brew a new punch in honor of the Blues. Mr. William Davidson furnished the spirits.

Note that the Republican Blues here are the Savannah ones, not the Richmond ones with the gargantuan bowls of Quoit Club Punch. It must’ve been fun to be in one of those regiments, in peacetime, anyway. The Punch as originally made is utterly devastating. I can vouch for that, having now made it many times. To quote the Chronicle, “As a vanquisher of men its equal has never been found.”

The concoction was thus made: One of the horse buckets of ordinary size was filled with finely crushed ice; a quart of good brandy, whisky and rum each was poured into the ice, and sugar and lemon added. The bucket was filled to the brim with Champagne, and the whole stirred into delirious deliciousness. Rumor hath it every solitary man of the Blues was put under the table by this deceiving, diabolical and most delightful compound.

SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

Prepare an oleo-saccharum of the peel of twelve lemons and 2 cups light raw sugar, such as Florida Crystals. Add 1 pint lemon juice, stir to dissolve sugar and strain into an empty 750-milliliter bottle. Add water to fill any remaining space in bottle, seal and refrigerate. To serve, fill a horse bucket of ordinary size or a two-and-a-half-gallon Punch bowl with crushed or finely cracked ice, pour in bottled shrub and add one 750-milliliter bottle each of VSOP cognac, bourbon whiskey and Jamaican-style rum. Top off with three bottles of chilled brut Champagne. Stir. Then smile.

I don’t have a horse-bucket, unfortunately, and while a number of other punch recipes in this book use “tea” as their “weak” ingredient, this recipe uses champagne, so my version is a bit of a bastardization.

However, this was enough to convince me to try mixing brown liquors and spices to my iced tea to produce Potent, Delicious, Quite Alcoholic, Historically Inaccurate Punch.

It’s quite good.

ed: at the end of the book, Wondrich notes that a quite competent punch can be made with Any Premixed Lemonade Iced Tea and Any Dark Liquor: 3 parts iced tea, 1.75 part booze, 1.5 parts soda water, a shit-tonne of ice, and some grated nutmeg on top and you’re good to go.

If you can get lemons and real tea, of course you’re going to use those. But if it’s a choice between commercial lemonade and iced tea and a campground full of folks stuck with Beam and Coke, why not cheat a little? Flexibility in the pursuit of intoxication is no vice.

So my punch is really closest to the Quick & Dirty Punch recipe included the margins. Flexibility in the pursuit of intoxication indeed.

pan foccaccia

Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

when I make bread I save some dough in the fridge and use it to fry up little pan foccacias, like this:

strahd

Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my friends are going to be very frustrated when they get to the end of the campaign and learn that the real Strahd was the friends they made along the way

there’s a bard spell called viscous mockery which they cast when the words aren’t flowing as well as usual

Goblin & Gnome Lore

Wed, 08 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

My personal D&D goblin lore is that most of their whole deal can be explained by the fact that they have a LOT of children, mature at about twice the rate as humans, and have about half the lifespan (if they live that long, which is rare), so they’re essentially to humans what humans are to elves.

Elves look at humans as unpredictable and hot tempered and violent and childish, and humans think the same things about goblins.

The rapid maturation makes them like overgrown, violent children, and their relative naivete makes them extremely prone to poor decision making and cult-like-behavior. The rapid rate of mutation also means that any given tribe of goblins is extremely different from any other tribe of goblins, with culture and slang almost incomprehensibly different between any given set of tribes in only a handful of generations.

The short lifespans and massive goblin redundancy give them a tendency towards chaos, lack of respect for life, and hedonism. There is no word for “safety” in the goblin language.

In more placid goblin settlements, adventurers will quickly find that most goblins do not have a well-developed sense of personal property - again, whoever owned that sword first probably died - which can create awkward situations even in peaceful encounters.

Goblin inventors, mages, and clerics tend to be extremely respected and feared within their communities: for the same reason that everybody listened to that kid who figured out how to get all of the extra lives in Contra. They rarely have the time necessary to truly master their art, but their recklessness can make for some wild results anyways.

Often they’re evil - in the sense a pack of schoolyard bullies who’ve been confused into worshipping an evil god would be - but they’re weaker than even low-level PCs, so they’re only aggressive in large numbers or with very obviously weaker foes, and as soon as the battle turns against them they’ll immediately drop everything to get out of dodge.

Relationships between humans and goblins are relatively rare for exactly the same reason that relationships between humans and elves are rare: thanks to the huge maturation gap, basically all relationships have Very Bad Age Dynamics that other people find creepy, like if you had a 45-year-old friend dating an 18-year-old. That would not be cool.

In contrast, we have Gnomes, who are small, overclocked elves.

Gnomes have the long lifespan, but their society can be goblinesque in some ways because gnomes are simply Very Fast Thinkers.

The experience reality at about 1.5x the speed of other cultures, like, everything around them seems frustratingly slow, so they give off really aggressive ADHD vibes.

That speed tends towards high DEX and INT scores because they’re literally wired faster than everybody else, but with the hyperactivity comes all manner of little issues like losing track of things around them, memory issues, and treating boring or repetitive tasks like the literal end of the world.

Gnomes are going to be the ones in your D&D universe to have developed calculus and established a legitimate space exploration agency in the woods, but also they often depend on humans for things like “walls” and “crops” because those things are, dare I say, BORING AS HELL.

A gnome game will involve several consecutive DC 20 INT checks and a chess-clock to keep things snappy. There might be rules that only take effect today, or while the wind is blowing in a certain direction.

A goblin game will involve live explosives.

An elf game is gonna essentially be cricket but worse: long and drawn out with loads of incredibly boring rules, some of them with justifications extending back centuries.

pyrotechnics

Thu, 02 May 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I gave my players a scroll of Pyrotechnics, one of the less useful spells in the game (IMO) figuring that if they ever figured out something to use it for, it would be fun.

Anyhow, one unexpected effect, Rules as Written, is that the spell starts by extinguishing a 5x5 cube of fire, (which would, IMO, insta-kill a CR 5 Fire Elemental) and which the players used to solve a “fire” problem they were having. The fireworks afterward were just incidental.

quiet is nice

Thu, 02 May 2024 10:00:00 -0700

When I was in my 20s I’d see an article about how a programmer’s focus and flow is a PRECIOUS AND UNIQUE GEM THAT MUST BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS and think “yes, it is, I agree”

and now, older, I think that we have had it too good for too long and are used to being treated like pampered babies, yes, we must be exempt from meetings and distractions in a perfect sea of quiet or the golden goose will not lay its programming eggs

… but I’m still happier when it’s quiet and I don’t have meetings

I don’t think it’s WRONG that programming is best done in quiet, uninterrupted, focused stretches, that’s actually kinda self-evident

but I also think that demanding these stretches can seem petty and arrogant, as if programming is the only discipline that benefits from focus and quiet and reflection.

Maybe, just maybe, every creative role benefits from focus and quiet and reflection, and only software developers have been privileged enough to be able to demand it.

build

Wed, 01 May 2024 12:00:00 -0700

today in work:

a build with “build” in the name of the build will build, but it won’t deploy because when we build it, it includes “build” in the name of the completed build

but when we try to deploy it, it decides that “build” is the cut-off point for the name of the build, but it uses the “build” in the name of the build rather than the “build” added by a completed build: as a result it can’t find the correct build

in conclusion: build

Crock

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

to make a point in a slack channel, I looked up “utensil crock” on google image search

most of the crocks look like the first image, which is IMO an utter waste of utensil crock. “oh, wherever will I keep my three spoons”

I’m going to give all of my points to this second crock where they mocked it up with a much more convincing simulation of what you would actually cram in there: absolutely everything

Although, okay, point of order, I count six whisks, that may be too many whisks. I’m not a baker, though.

anyways, this has been a talk about well-stocked stock photo crocks chock-a-block with mocks.

he tucked himself in

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Just cruise into the living room to discover a fully tucked cat, he did this himself.

In case you’re wondering if I’m staging all of these photos where Zapp is nestled in some comfy part of the house: not all of ’em, he loves a blanket.

feedback

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

sometimes it’s hard to reconcile my belief that Software Development Isn’t That Hard And Just About Anybody Who Seems Smart Could Probably Do My Job

with providing useful feedback during the interview phase

pride

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my suggestion that, for pride, we simply roll out the NYC world but leave a bunch of interactible bricks lying around

has been rejected out of hand

housing crisis averted

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

good news, Vancouver, amidst this crushing housing crisis, I have found an affordable space to rent

“i can’t live in the ad-space for a Coffee News from 2016”

whiners the lot of you

coffee shop working

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I can’t stand working in coffee shops.

It’s loud, people are having conversations all around you. Not enough screen space. Laptop keyboard.

You can’t leave your “office” unattended to use the bathroom unless you want it to wander away. I have better coffee beans at home.

I think that people have over-romanticized working in coffee shops, it actually sucks.

stackoverflow harvest

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I answered one question on Stack Overflow, one time, a decade ago

but their algorithm is so good at entrenching answers that my worthless point harvest is bountiful, e’ry season

sick day

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’m feeling a little sick so my bud is helping out

having a bengal is a fine way to experience being very gently eviscerated by your best friend

So, I caught a cold and instead of doing anything useful or productive I shotgunned 30 full hours of Steven Universe in an embarrassingly short timespan.

I barely feel any guilt about this: one of the luxuries about having a cold is that it’s one of the only times in my life I can ever just exist without stressing about my productivity, even more so than during a vacation. Even with the headache and the soreness sometimes I welcome these rare colds (not COVID though, that fucked me up).

Now I’m sad that it’s over. It hurts to extricate yourself from a deep dive like this when you’re really attached to a piece of media. It’s over, time to put it away for another couple of years.

I remember feeling exactly this same way when I was a tween at the end of my favourite books.

One of the reasons I’ve always wanted to write or draw fiction is this effect: I want to be able to induce this state in myself, create a wellspring that never runs dry.

… but it doesn’t work that way. It’s like tickling yourself, it just doesn’t work, and you spend so much longer with each moment that it completely wears out any emotion or humor.

Hypnospace Outlaw

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Hypnospace Outlaw is 75% off on Steam right now (sidenote: Future Editor’s Note: well, not NOW, although you should probably check during a holiday sale, it might still be, who knows?) , removing any possible excuse you might have not to play it.

Okay, well, one reason not to play it is definitely “I do not have a mouse and keyboard”. This is definitely a mouse-and-keyboard kind of game.

Another reason not to play it? You hate reading and puzzles. This game is mostly about reading and also puzzles.

Okay, a third reason not to play it? You experience no nostalgia for the Geocities-era internet, perhaps because you are too young to have experienced it, or too old to have taken it seriously.

So, What is Hypnospace Outlaw?

You are a moderator of a AOL-like private internet community in the year 1999, and everybody on the internet has their own page. It’s your responsibility to simply browse the fake internet, looking for people who have broken rules.

This internet is laden with MIDI files, chain mail scams, rap-rock, electronica music, alternative spirituality, conspiracy theories, ironic humour being taken at face value, and a helpful buddy who is definitely not a virus intended to serve you ads.

The game’s puzzles are cute, mostly, although I found almost all of the fun of Hypnospace Outlaw was just taking a few passes through their internet and reading it all.

It didn’t take long - maybe six hours? I should go back and solve the last few puzzles, although a lot of them have to do with just excavating this humorous internet space for all of its myriad easter eggs.

Thoughts?

Okay, so, I’m uniquely the target audience for a reading/puzzle/nostalgia/humor game set in 1999.

I laughed out loud quite a few times to myself. This game is quite often very funny. I don’t want to ruin too many of the jokes, but they’re all quite good. I tend to play games after Tiff’s gone to sleep, and there was a joke that had me gasping for air because I was trying so hard to stifle a laugh, to keep from waking her up.

I sort of imagine myself a cool, hackery t1mageddon — but, no, I was very much (and regrettibly) a ZANE_ROCKS_14 in the year 1999, and boy is that a thorough and laser-targeted roast.

As a result, I was glad that I banned this dork from the internet before it gave him terminal beefbrain.

how I read

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I don’t read. I exhaust media.

I don’t just watch things, when I find something truly good, I start re-watching it again and again and again, every year or so, because that’s about how long it takes to reset my emotional response to the content. I don’t just want to get hit by the last episode of The Good Place, I watch the whole thing in joyous anticipation of that hit, I want to get to the part at the end that makes me cry.

Eventually, my emotional response smoothes out: it’s too predictable, I know it too well.

I haven’t just read Homestuck.

I have read Homestuck, in its entirely, every year, for 5 years in a row, until last year when the emotional beats finally stopped landing.

I’m gonna let it sit a bit. There’s still some stuff in there that I think can hit if I let it brew for a couple of years.

that’s true for a lot of media I’ve really loved, I’ve not just watched it but I’ve watched it a LOT, I feel like I’ve Thoroughly Mined it For Humor and Emotional Content and there’s not much there that’s left to find.

I haven’t quite memorized it but I don’t quit until there’s not a single beat that I don’t know by heart.

The Good Place is a tough one because, to be honest, it’s a long slog through a lot of often pretty boring shenanigans. The character humor holds up, but not quite as well on repeat watching. Once you know the twists, it’s less fun. But there’s still a lot meat at the end: a kind of eternal cosmic love story on par with This is How You Lose The Time War.

and the final episode, which can’t hit right if you don’t watch the preamble

you can’t cheat emotional beats like that, you can’t just skip directly to the good part, you’ve gotta soak in the whole thing for it to Work properly

It’s probably not going into the regular rotation, but I also don’t think that I’ve watched it for the last time.

I’m not way into drugs, aside from smooshing my cat’s face, fiction is literally the best tool I have for monkeying with my emotional state

musicality

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

It’s kinda weird to think that before TV and recorded music, people just had, like, their friend who could play music and local live theater and that stuff was so much more important than it is now.

if you wanted to share a cool song with your friends you literally just had to be good at music and learn it

if you wanted to watch a fun story with your friends you literally had to put on masks and grab some sticks and read it dramatically out loud

innate musicality lost so much cultural cachet

it used to be one of the highest tiers of human skill

honestly, I think that’s something that feels genuinely lost

Some of my grandparents were successful hobby musicians, they would participate in vaudeville style variety shows, and since not everybody had a TV, this kind of entertainment was vital and important - and, like, they were nowhere near world class, but the lack of broadcast media meant that people didn’t have to be world class to find a place for themselves.

And you know what? Engaging in this kind of thing, community theatre, low-level entertaining, it was fun and rewarding and accessible - and there’s just not much space for it in modern society.

boom, headshot

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This actor’s headshot from the local community college ad has been voted “most likely to haunt your nightmares”

taco bout problems

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

i don’t know what happened at this Taco Bell but it sounds GRIM

a love letter to the suplex

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

every time I see two people hugging in a picture my mind immediately moves to the next frame where one of them is delivering a devastating suplex

try it: you, too, can enjoy this brain disease

the suplex is objectively funny

like, imagine this scenario:

a realtor is taking a man through a nice building. they say “well, if this fourplex isn’t the right size for you, perhaps I can interest you in a duplex?”

prospective buyer: “no, I still think that’s going to be too small.”

realtor: “okay, well, I’m showing off a beautiful suplex right now.”

prospective buyer: “a… suplex?”

realtor:

note: this joke also works with a round house for similar reasons , although it’s 18% less hilarious

Ghost Train Suplex : Final Fantasy VI | Bryan Heemskerk - Why is this event so iconic or memorable for many FFVI Fans?

Emulation Isn't Piracy

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“emulation isn’t piracy” is, IMO, a “guns don’t kill people” argument: while it’s technically true, it’s also not helpful?

that’s not to say I’m against it: I’m actually all for emulation, but I think emulation’s benefits are arguments in favor of piracy rather than arguments for why emulation ISN’T piracy. (sidenote: which, it isn’t, unless you use it for piracy, which you almost certainly will)

true story from work

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

co-worker: “I cleverly used a text adventure to trick people into letting me rewrite the notifications system.”

me:

VRChat #29

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0700

to be honest “we’re #29” doesn’t have that much of a ring to it but it ain’t nothin'

like, it’s definitely something to have held on to a spot in the top 50 on Steam for so long

I’m not sure what exactly but it’s something

checks watch

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

my Dungeons & Dragons crew now have a running joke because every time they ask a time based question I mime looking at my watch

but watches are not common in the D&D universe, and also the time frames are never appropriate for a watch-look anyways

“how many months ago was that?”

gregnor the wizard: (looks at his watch) uh… 3 months

this is a weird habit I have in real life, someone will ask if I’m free, like, three weeks from now, and the first thing I’ll check is my watch, even if , having performed this little dance, the watch provides no information to me that is useful for that transaction

sources

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

“I’m terrible at citing my sources”

Unknown

hardware store

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

in interview, Weird Al has mentioned that Albequerque is one of his most requested songs, presumably because it’s length makes it seem like it would be difficult to perform live: but actually it’s quite easy.

When asked which of his songs would actually be most difficult to perform live, he responded with Hardware Store, which has never been performed live: it’s impractically difficult to execute live.

which, uh, listening to the song… yeah

when someone rolls into karaoke and requests an Adele song you know they’re either a pocket ringer or about to have a bad time

I can’t imagine someone rolling into karaoke and requesting Hardware Store under ANY circumstances

lasered

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Getting laser eye surgery was 100% worth it and I’m frustrated I didn’t do it earlier, but one of the benefits I imagined, “being able to see haircuts, the inside of my shower while I’m showering, and the bottom of the pool” turned out to be pretty underwhelming.

The inside of my shower is gross! The bottom of the pool is not worth looking at! And being able to see during haircuts just unlocks a whole new avenue of awkwardness. These previously locked off experiences turned out to be not worth it.

The actual concrete benefits of laser-eye surgery were to peripheral vision and comfort, where they were significant.

Also I have super long eyelashes so the inside of my glasses were always greased up a little bit: no more of that.

discovery

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’m going to become impossibly rich when I find a way to monetize the feeling you get when someone under the age of 20 agrees that one of your dusty old-man obsessions is cool

why yes, Timotheigh, this is Discovery, by Daft Punk, and it bangs

widget

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Okay, tech vocabulary time:

A “Widget” is any UI element.

The way to develop a widget it to sit down, uncomfortably: this will give you a Widgey.

Then, develop functionality by training that Widgey - that should evolve your prototype to a Widgeotto.

Once you’ve got to there, it’s not long before you’ve got a fully evolved Widgeot, at which point your app will really be Flying.

shrek

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0700

at a loss for D&D encounter ideas, I have just created a Shrek room

8000L

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Some quick math indicates that in the 14-year lifetime of my car I’ve used in the realm of 8000L of gasoline, to the tune of about $12,000.

Most people with a car my age would have doubled or tripled that; thanks to the fact that I picked the world’s most piddly ICE and I mostly walk or take transit, the cost of fuel for my car hasn’t even made up the difference between the car and an EV, yet.

killers

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0700

The Killers: I’ve got soul

Me, taking a big sip of my water: Ah, I bet that’s because he’s a soldier

I heard something

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0700

“you guys, I think I heard some birds out there”

day of visibility

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

whenever any marginalized group has a day of visibility I always look forward to that moment at 11:59 where they start to go transparent and tell you to look for them next year before winking out of existence before your eyes

dying tech

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

cineplex charged me three extra dollars for buying tickets online because they despise their customers, technology, and joy

when dinosaur industries like theaters or newspapers or cable or taxis struggle you feel sad for them unless you’re forced to interact with them in any way, at which point you start actively cheering for their demise

sometimes I think “wow, if someone could print fast enough and ship fast enough they could simulate a kind of very low latency internet and everybody could just interact with that every day” and then it strikes me why newspapers have struggled

maltese falcon

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

nobody ever calls this out but in iconic 1941 film noir The Maltese Falcon, Miles Archer is killed by being shot in the nuts, to death

“oh, man”

“right in the chimichangas”

a proper cup of tea

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This online “game experience” is very funny.

A Proper Cup of Tea

a big cup of boiling hot water

tea doesn’t get any better than this

tea score: 5.0/5.0 - S RANK

pariah

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

the government says pants aren’t a business expense and yet if you show up to work WITHOUT pants suddenly YOU are the pariah

AI is Less Scary When You Talk To It

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

Because, while it’s weirdly, shockingly competent at first, the more time you spend with it, the more you realize the wide, wide gaps in its cognition: it can’t really replace you and it would be foolish to try (for now).

I think anybody who has ever owned a roomba can tell you about their device’s uncontrollable and constant urge to self-terminate

Nostalgia for an Ugly Era in Games

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve been watching someone talk about Kings Field for hours on YouTube because they love Dark Souls so much that they’re willing to deeply engage with these shitty, unplayable games.

say what you will, but literally nobody is nostalgic for games that looked like this without some kind of severe brain damage:

I was in my primo nostalgic gaming years just when the PS1 came out, and even then I’m hard pressed to gin up nostalgia for early 3D.

well, okay, I can make a few exceptions…

breb

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

OVERNIGHT BREAD (+~5 hrs)

NIGHT:

Mix the poolish:
500g flour
0.4g (1/8 tsp) yeast
500g water, 80F
wait 12-14 hours (bubbly, triple volume)

DAY: (5 hrs)

add 500g flour
21g salt
3g ( 3/4tsp ) yeast
(you can mix dry ingredients separately first)
250g water, 105F
mix
timer: 3 hrs (2 folds)
divide & proof: 1 hr
oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

i am the terror that flaps in the night

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

filters

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

They’re called no. 2 coffee filters because coffee makes you poop

microwave steaming

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

I’ve tried so many different ways to quickly steam things and this is actually one of the places where the microwave steps up to the bat and knocks it out of the park. For anything small, this is way more convenient than digging out a steamer basket and a tray of boiling water.

Need to steam a hot dog bun or a barbeque bao? Just… plate with an upside-down bowl on top.

get a little water in there too, like, a damp paper towel

e-scooter beats e-bike

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I bought a cherry e-cargo-bike but actually

the tiny, significantly cheaper e-scooter is easier to ride, more fun, and with a backpack offers comparable cargo capacity

go

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

i’ma say it, now that I can program in Rust, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would want to program in Go

quinoa and rice

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

this half and half mix of jasmine rice and quinoa smells absolutely amazing while it’s cooking, it’s like buttered toast

seriously, try it, add quinoa and jasmine rice to your rice cooker, at the same time. do it.

forgetful

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

fontawesome picks for forgetful user flows come in varying levels of cruelty

writing “password reset” is always one of those things that’s way trickier than you think it’s going to be

it’s a form, that triggers an email, that triggers another form, I think it’s one of the most complicated components of an auth system

unlike registration and log in, though, you rarely have to return to it once it’s set up, though

technically competent

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

depending on where you put the emphasis, “technically competent” can either be a compliment or a wicked burn

VRChat hax and sploits

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

A new super-dangerous and completely made-up exploit has gone viral in the VRChat community about once every 8 months for the past 6 years.

i hear they can make it so that if you die in VR, you die in REAL LIFE

Solarpunk Might be More Cynical Than it Lets On

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0700

Solarpunk has been picking up in popularity in the past few years.

Like in this… weirdly gorgeous yogurt ad.

I had mentioned it popping up in the last book I read, too: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach.

Anyways, the last two Solarpunk Sightings have been fast-and-furious as Shut Up and Sit Down gave “Earthborne Rangers” their first ever double recommendation:

this may have just been a joke but Matt’s real fired up here about this game

and Quinns’s second-to-latest TTRPG review on his new channel-for-just-reviewing-TTRPGs featured The Wildsea, another game that easily fits into the Solarpunk genre.

It’s optimistic, I think?

Cyberpunk was always a look at the future that carried a lot of political undertones, most of them pretty cynical.

The Cyberpunk Future is one where unrestrained global capitalism has replaced basically everything else, which is to say, it’s basically just today except our transhumanists are just trying to fix their gender and everyone is mean to them and none of our implants actually work because biomechanical engineering is way harder than anybody imagined and it turns out it’s not profitable to maintain 20-year-old implants.

Solarpunk is a lot more optimistic, though: big swooping architecture full of plants and shit. It’s extremely pastoral, generally, or even focused on far-futures where there’s actually wilderness again.

People live in small, tight-knit communities, and trade eggs.

It’s an optimistic view of the future… for the people who are there.

Where Did All The People Go?

The trouble with everybody living on beautiful farms is that we can’t all do that, can we? One of the problems that Solarpunk just handwaves away, I think, is where did all the people go?

The sad, easy answer to this is “climate changed killed them all” but then it introduces a kind of climate change accelerationism into the public consciousness: if “climate change kills most of the people” is a necessary step between you and the pretty post-apocalyptic solar utopia, why bother preventing it?

If that’s the case, then Solarpunk isn’t the optimistic future: it’s the post-post-apocalypse: it’s a hope spot in a future universe where most of the population has simply died off. That’s a lot more cynical than it lets on.

Malthus/Thanos Was Right?

Organic farming techniques make us feel good. Hopeful. Optimistic.

The problem with organic farming techniques is that they’re expensive and low-yield, which means that they’re not really a solution for the world’s food supply issues - they’re really just a way for a handful of elites to feel better about their own part in the food system without actually being a meaningful solution to much of anything. (sidenote: this is also at least somewhat true for my CSA membership: personally meaningful, but not a scalable, systemic solution to food supply.)

There’s an element of reactionary traditionalism to it, too - it’s not a high tech reimagining of farming, it’s going back to the old ways. Organic farmers are often highly resistant to agri-tech innovation.

So how do you make organic farming work? Well, it only works if there are a lot less people.

How do you make there be a lot less people? Which people get to stay in the rich-people-fantasy-where-everybody-owns-a-lot-of-land-and-the-poors-have-vanished?

I remember Sarah Taber, (currently running for Commissioner of Agriculture in North Carolina) pointing out in a long Twitter thread that ecofascism takes root very quickly in organic farming communities.

It’s easy to forget where the soil part of “blood and soil” comes from, but reactionary politics, ecological extremism, and pining for a more pastoral time in our history all fit together real nice.

If you want to forge a path to the Solarpunk future, a lot of people have to disappear.

I don’t think this is an explicit or even implicit part of any Solarpunk media, mind you: instead, I’m warning that the kind of pastoral pining that informs the solarpunk aesthetic can also go in a really bad direction. Some people may want to force a beautiful solarpunk future and we can not let them do this.

No Genocide, They’re Just Over There

The “no genocide, only displacement” way that a lot of these stories (including Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach and Earthborne Rangers) solve this is with the less horrifying solution of simply cramming most people underground (I mean, I guess that’s also how the “genocide” solution works, if you think about it).

But then… maybe let’s look at that part of the universe in more detail?

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, we need to spend some more time in the Singapore Hell: the name doesn’t make it sound so great.

If aboveground is so nice, what’s belowground like?

If you handwave the “where did all of the people go” away from Solarpunk, it’s a beautiful vision of a future where we’re more connected to nature than we are now. That’s nice. But y’know what? I think my vision of a more utopian future still has people in it.

Plus: I grew up in the all-concrete world of the 80’s, so I’m allergic to something like 100% of the beautiful solarpunk future.

Let’s peel away that pretty and see how we got there, and see what those hells look like.

Let’s Not Forget, Farming Actually Sucks

A lot of pastoral pining comes from people who don’t actually have any direct experience of food production. (sidenote: I mean, I don’t, either, but I also don’t romanticize it.)

I suspect a few weeks on an actual farm would have most folks missing the grim cyberpunk dystopia they currently live in.

Magic Future Levitation Is Cool Though

Half of the things in the Chobani commercial levitate, many times just for the aesthetic.

There’s a weirdly common and honestly pretty awesome fantasy trope of “these glowing lamps cause frictionless levitation / flight”, and I can’t say I hate it.

This is levitated but also presumably extra engineering has gone into locking it in place so that you can’t accidentally bump the kettle and have a boiling hot metal curling stone glide through your kitchen, a problem that could also have been solved by simply not levitating the kettle.

But if Magic Future Levitation costs less energy than would be lost to friction, I guess it would be worth it, and it would make the cobblestones that are all over the place a lot less dangerous.

a true story about wedding cupcakes

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

Editor’s Note: (My friend Jenn maintains that she participated in the Cupcake Roulette, not me, which… is probably true)

helltime oscillatrix

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:00:00 -0700

there’s a DORA metric associated with how fast you can recover from a prod outage which is why, in order to game the system, I have created the “helltime oscillatrix” which breaks prod over 100,000 times per second, once a month

bad move historian

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

it’s possible i have found the dumbest historian/collector alive

snugvid

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve set up a new cat zone right next to my work computer with the softest blanket on it, and despite this being the third cat bed in my office and maybe the seventh in the whole house, it’s his new favorite.

Video content

just pictures of this cat living his best life make me happy to look at

Tiff is out of town for a few days, which is emotionally devastating for our cat:

Video content

a short pig tragedy

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0700

“What happened to Mr. Waddles? I thought you said he was cured?!”

“Okay, there’s been a miscommunication here”

ev prices

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

“I’m gonna buy an EV!”

(Realizing that $66,000 CDN is the same as $1000/month for 66 months)

(Realizing that 66 months is 5.5 years)

“I’m gonna keep using my existing car for as long as I can!”

stadium chinatown

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

“the 7 grand heroes of the fantasy kingdom, Richmond Brighouse, Scott Road, Royal Oak, Holdom, Gilmore, Edmonds, and, of course, Stadium Chinatown”

“… are they all named after Skytrain stations?”

“… yes”

tell me you don’t want to hear more about a hero named Stadium Chinatown

c-lovers

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

so, I regret to inform you that the “C-Lovers” is not a tech meet-up, in fact, they are a local fish & chip shop

actually

i don’t regret to inform you that

these fish and chips are delicious

five bucks

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

in this article I list the top 10 dudes to give five bucks to

guess what I’m number 3

jhmorp

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Amazon, please, this week I’ve seen listings under the names “JHMORP” and “TBMPOY”.

I’d love a way to filter out any company that sounds like the sound Spam makes when it wiggles, juicily, out of the can

spite tow

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

the tow capacity of a Miata is a sternly worded note in the manual saying “no”

“do not do this, it is an extremely bad idea”

of course, most folks on the internet perceive that as a challenge which is why there are loads of pictures of Miatas towing things, presumably out of spite

This might be one of my more controversial opinions, but…

JavaScript doesn’t benefit much from having a whole-ass type system bolted on a la TypeScript. It’s like attaching a tow-ball hitch to a Miata: just adding the capability doesn’t make it practical to use. JavaScript is not the right environment for type safety.

If you want byzantine type safety, just program in a language that was designed from the ground up with byzantine type safety in mind, like Rust, or C#, or Scala.

Tension Mark

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

So, in university, my girlfriend asked me, “What’s a tension mark? How do I make a tension mark?”

“What?”

“A tension mark. I need to put in a tension mark.”

“A… tension mark? There’s no such thing as a tension mark. Do you mean, like, an exclamation mark?”

“I’m supposed to send an e-mail about a job, and they said I need to put a tension mark in the header.”

I couldn’t stop laughing once I realized what a tension mark was.

eat fresh

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

imagine being the exec at subway who was looking at their demographics

“it seems like the average consumer of our sandwiches is sad and exhausted”

“we should lean into that”

Your Path is Blocked

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Your path is blocked! Can you defeat the giant monster, brave adventurers?

Lo, the monster has been defeated with ear rubs

first day at AVALANCHE

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

i thought i was here for avalanche safety training but this huge black guy with a gun for an arm tells me that we’re going to blow up a power plant so I just nope on out

writing order

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

okay, so, here’s my theory

that creative narrative project you’re working on? here’s the order you should write it in

first, low-stakes scene from the middle

then, outline

then, ending

then, beginning

then, high impact scenes

then, remainder of the middle

this is based on the assumption that your quality of work picks up as you gain consistency and experience with the characters and style you’re going for, then starts to drop off as you get exhausted

if you’re not excited to write a low-stakes scene from the middle of the story at the beginning of the project when your energy is at its highest, there is no WAY you’re going to be excited enough to write it weeks later when the whole project feels like a grind

dentists

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

When I was a teenager they cemented an uncomfortable metal bar into my mouth without asking me, and when I asked when it was supposed to be taken out they said “never” which was around the time I realized that dentists don’t have souls

solar rug

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

When I was a kid we had a to-scale rug of the solar system

there was a little yellow splotch for the sun, and then you couldn’t see any other planets because they were too small

….

wait a minute

in retrospect that might have just been a rug that my dad spilled some mustard on

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:00:00 -0700

This one was a Hugo nominee five years ago or so, and a real physical copy has been sitting on my bookshelf forever.

It’s a sci-fi book I’ve opened a few times, and I believe I’ve started it twice, and both times, lost interest before the book got hopping.

This time, I’ve loaded it on my e-reader. That’s right, that actually dramatically improves the likelihood that I’ll read a book, because it has backlighting and I usually have it with me.

And…. yeah, this one’s hard to get through.

It’s a slog.

I don’t like it so much.

The Synopsis (Spoilers!)

Minh, an elderly ecological engineer (with octopus legs) develops a pitch deck for an ecological survey of the Tigris and the Euphrates: except because it’s the Hot New Thing, they want to do the survey using time travel. Time travel is really hot with investors right now.

They’re sliding time travel into the pitch deck like crypto in 2018 or AI in 2024. Kiki, a young human who was raised in the Calgary Hab, helps, with a combination of “hungry, excitable youngster energy” and by actually being pretty good at her job. She wishes that Minh would listen to her. Before they head out, they pick out the last person in their party, Hamid, who’s personality is that he is obsessed with horses.

Eventually, and after about 50% of the book, they win the bid, and go back in time with Fabian, their Time Travel Guy. The rules of time travel are “this is a pocket branch of time that collapses and disappears as soon as we leave it, and nothing we do here matters”, so Fabian is pretty chill about murdering locals.

Minh is pretty shell-shocked by Fabian’s chill local-murdering, hurting the quality of her data analysis.

There’s side-story involving Shulgi, a warrior king from the past, which is becoming more and more clear: some sort of bad disaster befalls Minh, Kiki, Hamid, and Fabian, and he’s trying to sneak into the fray and kill them all.

Kiki threatens Fabian: she’s going to reveal to the world how blasé the time travel company is about casually murdering people who are already causally doomed. As a result, Fabian sabotages the trip, causing a little disaster (the one in Shulgi’s story) and leaving Kiki, Minh and Hamid in the doomed past timeline.

Fabian heads off into the future to gank a Kiki, Minh, and Hamid from the near-past to replace the ones he just causally doomed. Minh finally listens to Kiki’s advice, and sings a song (?) which allows them to briefly be saved from Shulgi, who was about to kill them. The story ends, abruptly, with Kiki, Minh, and Hamid trapped in a doomed timeline. Sequel hook, or just bad ending?

Pastwatch

So, there are a lot of parallels here with a relatively little known Orson Scott Card novel, “Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus”.

It’s a good read, and deeply flawed in that Orson Scott Cardy way that leaves a bad taste in your mouth after the fact.

The name of the book makes it sound like it’s gonna be pretty hardcore Columbus apologia: and by and large, it is. They way this book tells it, Columbus was a rockstar sex god genius, and if we could only have cured him of that troublesome Racism (racism that we have beaten in the modern era, obviously), history itself could have been saved from a lot of unnecessary bloodshed.

you nailed it, Orson, you solved history by taking our modern post-racist ideals and sharing them with a catholic who was otherwise unimpeachably great /s

The futures of Pastwatch and Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach are pretty much identical: massive advances in human technology and literal actual time travel but at-best limited success at re-terraforming Earth.

The key differences between Pastwatch and Gods are in how Time Travel works: in Gods, time travel creates a doomed pocket dimension that the future travellers can modify or plunder at will because it doesn’t matter. (sidenote: this works like those islands in Animal Crossing that appear just so that you can plunder them, creates an expensive-but-infinite supply of high value materials like gold, and also allows for a weird kind of instant cloning because people can just be ganked from the near past.)

Pastwatch’s time travel worked a different way: if they changed even the tiniest detail in the past, the entire future would (and does) immediately collapse and disappear: so if they do agree it’s useful to change things (which they eventually DO) they have to choose one moment with the maximum possible impact, and also sacrifice themselves for the idea of a better future.

As a result, they decide to go back in time, inoculate the North Americans against the European slate of diseases, and slap Christopher Columbus around until he learns that Caribbeans are people who can be converted to Christianity rather than slaves.

The result? Possibly a better future, as most of North America is not, in fact, massacred by Europeans, and instead we get a better society that combines the civilization and enlightened Christianity of Europe, the “not being a racist” of future-Europeans, and the “[FILE PHOTO NOT FOUND]” of the Caribbean people. (sidenote: i don’t think orson could think of anything that the caribbeans could bring to the enlightened europeans aside from “kindness”, a reflection of the already massive amount of colonial apologia in this book)

Should you read Pastwatch? Hell no! If you’re wondering if hyper-conservative Orson Scott Card finds a bunch of ways to make an alt-history super gross, (on top of the gross things I’ve already said) he absolutely does.

I can promise you that a world ruled by the Tlaxcalans or the Mexica – or even the Maya, for that matter – would never have given rise to the democratic and tolerant and scientific values that eventually emerged from European culture... (sidenote: colonial apologia)

In what is perhaps the only cool twist in the book, they discover this by determining that it has already happened once, which would be so cool, if the twist wasn’t that “Columbus’ journey was engineered by an alt-future in which, as a result of a lack of Christopher Columbus’s massacre, the Tlaxcalans conquered Europe and brought a horrifying future of endless human sacrifice with them. (sidenote: colonial apologia) ”

Anyways, the reason I bring it up is just because it’s impossible to read Gods without thinking of Pastwatch, a book with… just so many weird little parallels, and yet totally different directions and vibes. Did Kelly Robson read Pastwatch and think “but what if the same concept but completely different?” I don’t know.

The Good

This is the author’s first book: it’s pretty good for an author’s first book.
Setting: look, a lot of sci-fi is powered by a cool setting and cool technology, and Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach has a cool setting and cool technology.
- Solarpunk future: lots of cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, and far-future sci-fi out there, but the setting of “medium-future transitioning from apocalypse to ecological reclamation” is pretty barren, still, giving this book a strong niche to occupy.
- Cool prosthetics: Minh, our main character, has octopus legs (cool), fine-grained ability to control and monitor her body and brain’s internal chemistry (cool) and holographic dummies that run a Minh-like AI (and the ability to jump smoothly between her own person and those dummies) to allow her to be in many places at once. Cool.
- Habs & Hells: When Earth’s atmosphere itself started to collapse, humanity retreated underground, to cramped but technologically advanced hells. Now there are some limited abovegraound habs, the lightly-occupied but still cramped focus of intense ecological engineering.
- Fat Babies & Plague Babies old folk are really small and skinny, on account of the plagues. Kids are taller, and fatter, because they grew up in more prosperous times. That’s a fun detail.
Minh Listens to Kiki at the End: that’s the character development that’s supposed to happen for it to be a story.

The Bad

Oh, there are lots of problems.

Bureaucracy: Most of this book takes place firmly nestled in the process of trying to get funding to go do a project. The story’s character development takes a back seat to what’s really important: the intricacies of putting together a cohesive pitch deck.
- Imagine Lord of the Rings if the first 6000 pages were spent in the shire, talking about how to convince the elves to let everyone go to Mordor.
- Not convincing the elves, even - just talking about how to convince them.
- and then they get to Mordor and unpack all of their stuff and immediately die
Time Travel: I’m going to say it, unless it’s handled very, very carefully, time travel sucks ass. It sucks ass in this story, too.
- The story seems like it’s trying to both handwave around the shaky ethics of time travel but also make the shaky ethics of time travel a huge part of the story which is a really weird combination.
- Creating whole doomed pocket universes every time you time travel is obviously evil, right?
- Like, if you create a timeline where everybody is going to vanish the minute you leave that timeline, you killed millions of people the moment you time travelled to the past.
- Once you’ve done that, the blood is already on your hands: killing a few people in person with your bare hands is basically window dressing.
  - So Fabian is right - it doesn’t much matter if he kills a few people.
  - but also wrong - time travel itself is massively immoral and involves untold human sacrifice, nobody should do it.
  - but the main characters are willing to do the time travel - putting them on roughly the same moral ground as Fabian.
  - but they’re not willing to casually murder people in the past, which grosses them out.
  - which makes me think that their moral stance - and the moral stance of this book - is roughly equivalent to being the kind of person who loves eating meat but thinks that hunting is eeeeevil.
  - “killing people is wrong but it’s way MORE wrong if we have to see it”
- The reason people aren’t talking about this is because the time travel company has a NDA but … like, they take a lot of people on tourist trips to the past, clearly they’ll have to answer these questions again and again and somebody is going to leak these details.
- These elements are introduced but they’re not really argued or discussed so much. As I mentioned before: the story feels like it handwaves these details away until it suddenly decides that they’re the most important part of the story.
Story Elements Introduced That Are Interesting But Don’t Develop or Pay Off: oh boy are there a lot of these.
- Kiki is so dedicated to the project that she has her legs amputated so that she’ll be more likely to fit in the limited cargo window of the time travel device. She spends a little bit of time getting used to her cool leg prosthesis.
- Minh keeps fussing with her endocrine system even against the advice of her doctors. The story indicates that eventually this is going to become a problem. It is never a problem.
Ancient Mesopotamia: the worldbuilding in The Fantastic Bureaucracy of Future Calgary is fabulously detailed and exhaustive - on the other hand, Shulgi’s story and Ancient Mesopotamia in general are about as well fleshed out as a rough napkin sketch. Ancient Mesopotamia is cool! Let me learn about it!
The Ending: Look, this novella clearly intended to have a sequel or even kick off a trilogy. It feels incomplete because it is. You can’t just suddenly end your story by trapping all of the characters in a doomed parallel universe, battered but still alive. That’s why so much of the story feels disjointed and unfinished: because the story literally stops at a point that feels an awful lot like “most of the way through Act 2”. But it’s been six years, and despite being announced a decade ago, we’re not done the sequel yet.

The Ugly

Anyways: my final verdict on this story is that it introduces a lot of cool, heady ideas and then doesn’t do much of interest with them. It’s all set-up and no pay-off. I really want someone to tell a story just set in the Solarpunk Calgary and Bangladesh Hell of this world, and nuts to the time travel.

Bonus points if they do something more exciting than prepare a really good PowerPoint deck.

terraform aint easy

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

There was a recent Reddit post where a DevOps employee lost their shit because their co-workers weren’t getting on board immediately with their Terraform repo, and

I’m gonna say it: despite ClickOps’ many problems, Terraform has a bad UI and ClickOps has a good UI, getting people who are used to being able to do things with a few clicks to read a stack of manuals is going to be a challenge, especially if those people have “other things to do with their time”.

Having an organization where everybody makes changes to infrastructure with PRs and a papertrail seems like it’s obviously gonna be better but affecting that particular change by simply creating the repo isn’t gonna do it.

You’re gonna have to make the Terraform repo the ONLY way to change infra, and for a good while you’re gonna have to deal with going from an org where everybody can make changes to an org where everything is backed up by only one person knowing Terraform.

Like, don’t confuse this for me saying “infrastructure as code is bad”, it’s good, and for any org with more than a handful of people making cloud changes it’s gonna be obviously better, but the effort to switch over to Terraform, which is hard, from ClickOps, which is easy, is significant.

bean hobo

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0700

There’s this old cartoon joke where a hobo slices a single bean very thinly like it is a tiny roast beef, but I just used that exact technique to make some BLT sandwiches when I had nothing but two cherry tomatoes.

the CBC, everybody

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

recently I saw someone circulating a petition requesting that the Canadian government use public funds to provide a mastodon server for all Canadians

in something of a rebuttal, I would like to note that the portal that every single Canadian needs access to for crucial tax information is down for the entire weekend for one of it’s regular nappy naps, and this is one of the government’s more modern and prominent public digital projects

now if someone were to write a version of Mastodon that ran entirely on IBM servers that haven’t been manufactured since 1997, that would be a whole different ball game

behold, the comments section at the CBC:

please, for the love of god, do not let the Canadian government anywhere near your technology

software conferences

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 10:00:00 -0700

the thing I like about javascript conferences is that they only have one room for talks but they just get whoever’s on the mic at any given time to hand it over when they need time to set something up, so you can quickly catch loads of talks so long as you don’t mind that they’re in kind of a jumbled order

the thing I like about C conferences is that if you find the end of a line and stand two spaces behind it, the building will explode

the thing I like about Erlang conferences is that if anything goes wrong in one of the rooms, everyone will just leave, get back into the room, and pretend like nothing happened

i can’t remember what I liked about memcached conferences because there was a power outage

the thing I like about rust conferences is that they’re a huge amount of effort to set up but once they do they run really smoothly

the thing I like about PHP conferences is that they’re easy for anybody to set up and that it’s really hard to predict what will happen at them, which is also a thing that a lot of people do not like about PHP conferences

the thing I like about Go conferences is that they’re exactly like C conferences, but with a guy who comes around and collects the garbage every now and again

the thing I like about Postgres conferences is the consistency, but they only ever throw the one and honestly if they can’t find a bigger venue they’re going to start running out of space

i’m not such a big fan of AWS conferences, they seem reasonably priced at first but then you wander from one region to another and suddenly you owe them fourty eight thousand dollars

i’ve never managed to get in to a RabbitMQ conference but I’ve had a great time just waiting in line for one

I wasn’t sure which mastodon conference to attend, there were so many and most of them seemed like they were run by amateurs, so I just went to the biggest one

the thing I like about lisp conferences is that there aren’t a lot of standards or guidelines for them so each of the big ones just kind of makes up its own rules

the thing I like about retro emulation conferences is that you go into a huge, modern conference hall and they’ve set up a perfect recreation of a conference from 1993 in there, all the way down to the carpeting

the thing I like about roguelike conferences is that if you miss a talk you just have to leave

the thing I like about VC-funded conferences is how fun they are in the first few years, before they inevitably need to justify their massive investment and start to get weird

the thing I like about C# conferences is how much they improved over Java conferences, which they were clearly modeled after, but honestly I haven’t seen or thought about either in years and I think I’m a lot happier for it

the thing I like about scrum conferences is that they’ve clearly never put any more than two weeks worth of effort into planning them so they’re always just all over the place

(I would, of course, refuse to attend any scrum conference that took more than 2 weeks to plan: that would just be a waterfall conference and who wants to go to one of those?)

I attended a pure functional programming conference and as a result I changed my mind about functional programming, which , when I think about it, means it can’t have been a pure functional programming conference after all.

The thing I like about quantum computing conferences is that they’re run in a lot of different states at the same time

The thing I liked about AI conferences in the 80s were that you could set your booth up in a part of the conference hall that nobody could get to, and, in doing so, bring the entire convention to a halt.

deckromancer

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

someone wants to join my D&D game as a “deckromancer”, which is to say, a druid who specializes in carpentry

2025 Editor’s Note: he was a perfect simulation of a contractor, which is to say, he didn’t show up even one time

nine nines

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0700

nine nines of reliability ( 50.999999999% uptime )

pls share

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0700

a story in four parts

zapp is so sweet, when I’ve pet him too much, no bites, he’ll just put a paw on top of my hand, like “stop”

australians

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

normal people: happy birthday

australians: b’day, mate

Agedashi

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

This agedashi tofu looked good, and the broth was tasty, and it was crispy, it was almost a nice dinner, but it was that dense health store tofu instead of silken tofu and so the texture of it was kind of beefy and unappetizing rather than creamy and delicious.

ecoterrorism

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0700

the vancouver sun’s average reader does not understand what an ecoterrorist is but they’re pretty sure that they’re very powerful and malicious, like djinni

literal minded

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

headline: “british columbians invited inside mosques to fight islamophobia”

is islamophobia a problem inside mosques? i figured the problems were mostly outside mosques

you’re not going to find the islamophobia in THERE, british columbians

piano man

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

There’s an old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin. (gross)

He said SON CAN YOU PLAY ME A MELODY

I try not to make eye contact

‘CAUSE MY DICK’S IN THIS GIN

BUT IT’S NOT QUITE ALL IN

(muffled shouting as he’s dragged out of the bar)

YOU CAN’T KEEP ME OUT, I’LL BE BACK

unhelpful comics trivia

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Trivia: in the 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen”, a primary character, Dr. Manhattan, apprenticed under his father as a watchmaker, making him literally a watch man

Trivia: in the 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen” the series’ provocative question “Who watches the watchmen?” would later by answered: by audiences all over the world in 2009! Ha ha! Quandary solved!

Trivia: 2019 television series “The Boys” is just three of 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen” stacked together in a trenchcoat.

Trivia: 1985 is 1987. Look it up!

Trivia: In the 1985/1986 comic series “The Watchmen”, the character Rorschach was intended to parody exactly how insane it would be to have a morally inflexible serial killer enacting vigilante justice at random. However, in the comic series’s original ending, Rorschach punches Ozymandias so hard that crime dies forever, saving New York

notes

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

Right now, if you compile notes in a tree-style “knowledge base” format, Obsidian is the best tool - this is best for dungeon mastering and documents.

If you compile notes in a feed - just a huge stream of searchable notes, one at a time - you’re spoiled for choice, with Evernote, Standard Notes, and Joplin as good options.

I use both!

thermae romae, househusband

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I almost bailed on Thermae Romae after one episode because it was just this irritating bog-standard Shonen plot where a plucky young boy wants to be the BEST BATHHOUSE DESIGNER IN THE WORLD

ugggghhhhhh

it’s no surprise that this episode was added by netflix to pad out the series and actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the episodes

every episode after that is much better, featuring the almost mechanical formula of Modestus encountering a roman bathhouse design problem, accidentally getting transported to modern japan, being amazed and humbled by modern bathroom technology, then transported back into rome where he copies it with ancient technology and is hailed as a genius.

This formula is both funny and good fun.

Like, we all have the persistent fantasy of showing off mundane modern tech to an ancient person and watching them be amazed, right? It’s that feeling bottled into a television show.

also as a man with no shortage of mediterranean blood I have had this exact same progression of emotions with a bidet:

“where did you get so much mediterranean blood, are you italian?”

“no, i just buy it by the jar from a guy I met under a bridge”

I don’t watch a lot of anime but I’ve absolutely seen The Way of the Househusband start to finish about three times.

The joke is incredibly dumb and not terribly progressive: this scary man enjoys doing traditionally feminine chores with all of the shouting intensity of a serious, dramatic action anime protagonist - but - he does really sell it.

Bengals

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Bengal cats are an unusually intelligent, active, and difficult breed of cat, not recommended for first time cat owners. They require a lot of attention and play, and can be destructive if bored. They are not lap cats and they won’t be as affectionate as more domesticated cats.

That being said, if you do have the massive amount of time to invest into becoming besties with a l’il leopard cat, you get the positive sides of their intelligence and playfulness and chattiness and bossiness.

Video content

Also the secret to unlocking leopard snuggles are “finding the blanket with the texture they like”, “Canadian winters” and “a drafty ol townhouse house built in the 70s”

me: 37 years old

secretly, in my head, all the time:

places where cat shouldn’t be:

places where cat should be:

I always wonder how pets conceptualize human abilities, like, these soft magic giants can make it warm and bright… but they can’t do it out THERE?

do it out THERE I want to PEE and it’s COLD

I don’t think that Zapp is necessarily the direct inspiration for VRChat’s VRCat, but he joined our family in September of 2020 just while we were all crunching on VRChat+, I posted a LOT of adorable pictures to the work Slack, and VRChat+ shipped that Christmas, it’s definitely possible that I helped to establish the idea of “cat” firmly in the team’s head.

An instance of the much-vaunted tail-wrap caught in the wild:

Look at this mug

cyberpunk

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0700

I’m not sure what there’s left for cyberpunk fiction to offer, there’s already five corporations that own everything, powered skateboards, portable hacking devices, and a ubiquitous net, that’s just “fiction” now.

you could have a story where an enterprising hacker steals millions of dollars from an idealistic but foolish autonomous collective of bankers who put their trust in an untrustworthy distributed ledger protocol and you’d have to check first whether to file that under “science fiction” or “documentary”

say what you want about solarpunk at least it’s a vision of a future without fucking “creds”

Oil Pours

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

used alcohol bottles make fabulous oil pours, and then you can buy big honking oil containers for very reasonable prices

The Best Episode of Unraveled, As Determined By Science

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I watched all 29 episodes of Unraveled so that I can tell you, scientifically, which episode of Unraveled is the best episode of Unraveled.

Now, the ideal way to deliver this content would be while wearing a fashionable suit, in front of a large pinboard of some kind, but this won’t work for me. Unfortunately, both my body and camera equipment are terrible, and I do not own a fashionable suit.

Unraveled, if you are not already familiar with it, is a now-defunct Polygon series, on YouTube, where, along with his helpful team, video producer Brian David Gilbert tackles a difficult, obscure video-game-adjacent topic, like “reading every single Halo novel and telling you about them” or “actively losing his mind over obscure details in the Sonic lore”.

There are 29 episodes of Unraveled, produced between the first episode on September 2018 and the last, two years later, on December 2020, at an approximate pace of one episode per month. I also have approximately one episode per month, although with therapy I might be able to get that number slightly down.

The first step in taking these 29 episodes and determining which one most closely fits the platonic ideal of an episode of Unraveled is creating a rubric which we can use to evaluate each episode.

We can start by identifying what really makes an episode of Unraveled so good:

Authoritativeness

In order for the humor to land properly, it’s important that whatever incredibly obscure topic the piece is covering is treated with the utmost gravitas. You don’t just want to know which Pokemon is the most edible - you want that information from a source that seems authoritative. You want the final word on Pokemon edibility.

Otherwise the topic could come off as frivolous, and we don’t want that.

A Topic of Interest Connected to a Popular Game or Franchise

The episodes are, of course, self contained and humorous enough that you’d enjoy them whatever the topic, but the reason you clicked on the episode in the first place was very basic and animal. It promised you Mega Man lore. You like Mega Man. I can say with some fairly concrete certainty that you like Mega Man because he fights a colorful rotating cast of fancifully themed opponents, and has an arm that’s also a gun - it goes “pew pew”.

Subtly Flawed Methodology

Now that the problem space has been introduced, the next step is to concoct a plan to attack that problem space - a rubric with which to evaluate the data.

Now, considering the difficulty and relative intractability of some of the projects taken on, it’s likely that no truly satisfying methodology could exist. That must be pushed aside in favor of something that’s possible for a human to do, and satisfying enough.

However, this is a comedy show, not a dry lecture series, so the methodology must be in-and-of-itself entertaining.

Foreshadowing and Call-Back

One crucial element of humor is that it is always in conversation with itself. One classic standby of comedic writing is the callback joke. There’s a set-up, and then the set-up is left hanging for a bit, ideally just long enough for you to forget it - only for it to be invoked again. Callback jokes can be re-invoked again and again, but they’re at their best when they give you enough time between the set-up and pay-off that you’re caught by surprise.

The subtly flawed methodology itself is a form of foreshadowing: if you can catch what the problem is with the rubric, you’ll be able to see the thread that, when pulled, will tease apart the whole plan.

Act 1: The Set-Up

Together, Respectability, Topic/Franchise, Methodology, and Foreshadowing constitute Act 1 - the Set-up.

We’ve established that Brian is an expert, what he plans to do - and how. With that out of the way, all he needs to do is execute the plan, and we’re set.

Act 2: The Execution

This is the part where the rubber meets the road. The meat of the episode: the reason we came here in the first place. Exhaustive data. Conspiracy boards. We’ve established the silly premise and the absurd lengths that BDG will go to fulfil that premise, and so we’re off to the races - and the more absurd the lengths are, the better the joke works.

This operates under the same logic as a virtuoso performance: it’s impressive to watch someone who’s mastered a difficult topic, but in this case it’s a virtuoso performance of Brian suffering under an avalanche of trivial data.

Act 3: The Twist

There comes a point in every Unraveled where the combination of data, flawed methodology, and meticulous execuction are starting to lean in the direction of an unorthodox or unsatisfying conclusion. Things started so well, but they’re going off the rails quickly - what was promised was that a complex topic would be unraveled but what’s quickly becoming clear is that it is the episode itself coming unraveled.

This is the twist, the turning point from which there is no return.

Finally, the Prestige

When all is lost, though, one final beat: victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat. Perhaps from an unexpected source.

This is a great time for a callback to whatever we were foreshadowing, earlier, if possible.

So these are our categories:

Authoritativeness
Topic Accessibility
Methodology
Foreshadowing/Callback
Execution & Suffering
Twist
Recovery

So, in order to evaluate the Unraveled episodes, we simply need to take each of these qualities, and evaluate them on a scale from one to five stars. The best episodes will be the ones that score the highest.

Actually, just before we begin, let’s add one more category to the rubric:

Does Brian Sing? How Much?

BDG has got real theater kid energy, and that expresses itself constantly, through song. Who am I to deny this part of his persona?

Let’s Begin:

Solving the Zelda Timeline in 15 Minutes

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 4
Methodology: 3
Foreshadowing/Callback: 3
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 2
Recovery: 3
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 23

A solid opening salvo, this one is the boring Mario of episodes, establishing the format and tone while not taking any big risks.

As the timeline dissolves into complete incoherence, the lights turn redder and redder.

The episode consistently foreshadows the mysterious details of the Time Break with the Twist being - well, the basic joke: this is getting ridiculous, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be possible to reconcile all of the different timelines and the Time Break near the end.

The recovery?

I read all 337 books in Skyrim so you don’t have to

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 4
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 19

This one’s played completely straight. Brian establishes a valid methodology, doesn’t get silly with it, and just executes the methodology as planned.

After establishing in the first episode that “unraveled” isn’t just about unraveling a deep or difficult lore, it’s also about unravelling Brian, this episode is just a straightforward lore deep-dive with no complications. Huh.

Ranking all 200+ Mega Man robots

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 20

Similar to the last one: Brian just identifies a topic and goes and makes a big old graph with it. It’s funny because the graph is big and this seems like a lot of work, but this Unraveled stays extremely well-raveled.

This one might be my actual favorite episode because I am a basic bitch and I just love me some Mega Man robots.

I wasted 3 weeks of my life finding Castlevania’s hottest monster

Authoritativeness: 4
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 3
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 0
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 15

I’m deducting some points from this one because it’s pretty horny and it’s methodology feels even more entirely subjective. Good methodology moments include “cutting animals and humans out of the list”, but as we get further into the video the cuts include anything that would make the answer too obvious, which is a sign that the topic wasn’t very interesting in the first place.

The suffering in this one is palpable, but it’s referenced in a lost original cut of this episode which was apparently very comprehensive but also very boring.

Losing some authoritativeness, here, too, because the cravate is clearly intended to bridge the gap between “professional” and “lothario” and its success in that space is limited at best.

Smash Bros. owes millions of dollars in OSHA violations

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 16

This one suffers from the obvious problem: workplace safety, while it’s everyone’s job, is actually still very boring.

I’m going to give this one point of twist because it’s all revealed, at the end, to be a scheme to hit up Sakurai for $50.

Scientifically calculating the game of the year

Authoritativeness: 4
Topic Accessibility: 4
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 2
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 2
Recovery: 1
Does Brian Sing: 1
Total: 22

Unfortunately, BDG’s weak understanding of math hurts his bonafides when he’s trying to build a formula, here.

Fortunately, that does constitute a twist: all of the effort that he spends building a formula ends up producing just terrible results - results that make his GOTY simply the game with the most Google hits. If you are following the math as he develops it you can probably suss out that this isn’t going to end well.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have made my mom’s knowledge of the game an exponential factor.”

This one also features a recovery: Fortnite may not be a satisfying GOTY, so the actual GOTY is whatever your GOTY is.

Every Sonic game is blasphemous

Authoritativeness: 3
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 1
Foreshadowing/Callback: 3
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 5
Recovery: 2
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 20

A truly well-balanced episode - although plagued by weak accessibility and methodology, this one has a stronger showing in the arc and callback elements.

Understanding Kingdom Hearts (and every other story)

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 1
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 5
Recovery: 1
Does Brian Sing: 1
Total: 26

Attempting to understand Kingdom Hearts through Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” is as clever as it is cursed. There’s a moment of foreshadowing the first time that Brian goes through the loop where he “accidentally” lets slip how needlessly complicated and ornate Kingdom Heart’s backstory is, as a joke.

And wow, painless. A nice loop, Kingdom Hearts through the viewpoint of the monomyth. But then, the twist: as we start stacking more and more Kingdom Hearts games on top of the chart the chart gets more and more crazy and needlessly complicated, eventually necessitating a long string connecting the hero’s journey to a whole NEW hero’s journey loop, “the villain’s tridecagon”, which he had hidden behind a sheet.

Bowser’s military hierarchy

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 2
Execution & Suffering: 2
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 5
Total: 20

It’s just kinda Castlevania’s Sexiest Creatures again, with the same flaws: it feels arbitrary and the topic is pretty unsatisfying.

This one has a small twist: at the end we use Brian’s newfound knowledge of the Geneva convention to accuse Mario of war crimes! Which is… I don’t know, who cares?

On the other hand, a full 5 points in the Does Brian Sing category for “We Are the Toads”, a full “We Are the World” parody trying to draw attention to the plight of Bowser’s poor military.

Which Dark Souls boss is the best manager?

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 0
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 12

I’m giving this one a 0 for Accessibility because I don’t know what a “Dark Souls” is and I refuse to learn. This episode also attempts to analogize management style with “how fun it is to play against the monster in Dark Souls”.

IDK, it’s all over the place. Unclear! Muddy! Everybody just liked Dark Souls too much to go high-concept with this episode and instead they just kinda did free-form comedy about how each boss in the game would perform in an office situation.

No one asked but I found Mortal Kombat’s best cuddler

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 4
Methodology: 3
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 0
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 3
Total: 17

I bet you thought “Castlevania’s hottest monster” was going to be the horniest episode of Unraveled.

You thought wrong. It’s this one.

How to make a perfect E3 press conference (or drinking game)

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 2
Methodology: 5
Foreshadowing/Callback: 5
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 4
Total: 17

The perfect E3 press conference is a relatively low-accessibility topic: an inside joke between gaming press and in-the-know gamers.

If what you’re looking for is set-up and callback jokes, this episode is an exemplar: both for its constant set-ups and callbacks within the episode and the much larger set-up and callback that is “setting up the final episode of the show”.

We made all 78 Breath of the Wild recipes in one day

Authoritativeness: 2
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 3
Foreshadowing/Callback: 1
Execution & Suffering: 5
Twist: 3
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 19

There are some serious methodological weaknesses here and Brian spending most of the episode not in a suit and cooking very badly hurts his authoritativeness. The “in one day” makes it essentially impossible to do well.

Most of the food comes out sad and unappetizing.

It does rank highly for accessibility and suffering, though: I really want to see someone attempt all of these recipes, and Brian suffers mightily to try and provide this for us.

Good cooking content is hard. Do you know who could have done this topic justice? Joshua Weissman, and these “cooking everything in a category” videos look like they take weeks of effort.

Ultimately, this episode is entertaining, but it’s hardly an exemplar of the Unraveled format.

Calculate your pet’s HP with my 100% legitimate formula

Authoritativeness: 3
Topic Accessibility: 2
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 19

Talking to real professionals always hurts Brian’s credibility. Yes I’m counting the cat as a real professional.

I fixed Fallout’s music by creating a totally new genre

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 3
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 5
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 5
Total: 28

The twist in this is so epic that I feel bad spoiling it here. Spoilers. Spoilers afoot.

After spending the entire episode foreshadowing it, Brian’s attempt to create the perfect music genre for the Fallout franchise ends up just… being Ska, Brian is just describing Ska, it’s been Ska the whole time.

I’m mad that this video did so well in my rubric. Maybe I shouldn’t have given so many points to “Does Brian Sing”.

Find your Kojima name with my simple 11-page form

Authoritativeness: 4
Topic Accessibility: 0
Methodology: 5
Foreshadowing/Callback: 2
Execution & Suffering: 2
Twist: 0
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 13

Look, funny homework is still homework.

How to tell apart all 596 Fire Emblem characters

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 1
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 5
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 1
Total: 23

Dividing the many, many Fire Emblem characters into archetypes? Good methodology, fun execution.

The twist? The archetypes themselves can be combined into even fewer archetypes. Eventually Brian ends up with just the 1 archetype, having fully wasted his time.

I used The Sims to perfect my apartment

Authoritativeness: 4
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 3
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 4
Recovery: 5
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 29

This has the strongest Recovery of any episode so far. Brian’s methodology is entertaining but it utterly fails. This episode has an arc! Brian learns a valuable life lesson! He doesn’t sing at all, though, so the episode is trash.

Waluigi, Unraveled

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 4
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 5
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 5
Recovery: 3
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 30

Imagine if you were to take " Every Sonic game is blasphemous" and do it much, much better. This episode is rich in foreshadowing as Brian gradually unveils his Waluigi similarities while building towards a dramatic moment where he realizes that he has been Luigi the whole time - and the episode constitutes a long-running meta-series lore joke as that mustache was a lot of work. Was this part of the plan since before the start of Season 2?

Kirby

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 4
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 3
Execution & Suffering: 3
Twist: 5
Recovery: 3
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 25

High off of the arc of Waluigi, Unraveled, we have Kirby, where Brian is forced to go on a similar journey of the soul while faced with the impossibility of figuring out what the deal is with Kirby. This episode has some top tier unraveling in it.

Ultimately, though, the episode ends with Brian defeated. The aporia ending, with the unsatisfying conclusion that Kirby’s many paradoxes make him impossible, unknowable.

When can Mario retire?

Authoritativeness: 3
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 0
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 2
Twist: 4
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 13

Once again, Brian’s interaction with a professional robs him of authoritativeness, and once again, Brian’s weak math bonafides hurt the episode’s credibility and methodology.

The twist is that Brian screws up his math and some of his major assumptions and convinces himself that it’s impossible for himself or Mario to ever retire. It’s funny, but it’s bad financial advice. My wife watched this and it just fed her increasing fear that it would be impossible for her, a millenial, to ever retire.

How to increase your stamina with terrible video game tactics

Authoritativeness: 2
Topic Accessibility: 3
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 1
Execution & Suffering: 4
Twist: 0
Recovery: 2
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 14

This is another “weak methodology, humorous execution” episode. A lot of Brian’s time in this episode is also spent in a non-suit, sometimes while wearing clothing and accessories made of cardboard, which are a real hit to his authoritativeness.

I built the perfect gamer space

Authoritativeness: 1
Topic Accessibility: 1
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 1
Execution & Suffering: 2
Twist: 4
Recovery: 2
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 13

The Valorant tie-in reduces the accessibility and authoritativeness pretty badly here: I don’t care about Valorant. NOBODY cares about Valorant. It’s got interviews, the methodology is weak, the execution is awkward, and the twist is simply how weird BDG manages to get with his gamer space.

I read every Halo novel and became the Master Chief of loneliness

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 2
Execution & Suffering: 7 (+2 BONUS SUFFERING)
Twist: 4
Recovery: 2
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 29

Oh boy, this is a strong episode, partially because the sheer sisyphean difficulty of the task that Brian took on here was just bananas. The episode has some arc, some callback jokes, a little bit of everything.

I made a ’90s dimension to fully understand Crash Bandicoot

Authoritativeness: 1
Topic Accessibility: 1
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 1
Execution & Suffering: 2
Twist: 4
Recovery: 2
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 13

Another big hit to authoritativeness and accessibility from the sponsored episode.

I refuse to acknowledge that this episode is different from “I built the perfect gamer space” and will simply be giving it the exact same score.

We created the sport of the future

Authoritativeness: 2
Topic Accessibility: 2
Methodology: 2
Foreshadowing/Callback: 0
Execution & Suffering: 2
Twist: 1
Recovery: 0
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 9

A fake letterman’s jacket is no authoritativeness substitute for a suit, and Brian spends a lot of this episode in shorts.

This is another episode marred by a weird concept and poor execution.

This was my pick for worst episode of Unraveled and I’m glad to see it also does very badly in the rubric that I invented.

Pokémon Edibility

Authoritativeness: 5
Topic Accessibility: 5
Methodology: 4
Foreshadowing/Callback: 3
Execution & Suffering: 5
Twist: 1
Recovery: 4
Does Brian Sing: 0
Total: 27

After some of the weakest and strongest episodes of the series, we come to this, the final episode of the series. It’s a straightforward lore dive, like the ones that kicked off the series. A return to form - but with more of an arc, more emotional weight, than the previous lore dives. It’s a fine way to send off the series, and it was foreshadowed as far back as “How to make a perfect E3 press conference (or drinking game)”.

Our Victors!

With that, we can crown our champion!

“Waluigi, Unraveled” is the best episode of Unraveled, narrowly beating “I used The Sims to perfect my apartment” and “I read every Halo novel and became the Master Chief of loneliness”.

The worst episode is, unsurprisingly, “We created the sport of the future”.

Problems

Is it really Waluigi, Unraveled, though? I’ll admit, my rubric wasn’t perfect. I didn’t capture literally every single thing that I like about Unraveled episodes in my rubric.

Like, for example, I like it when Pat shows up. I like it when Brian does high kicks. It’s possible I’ve let my own bias colour these results far too much: there’s no way that you’re going to accept my own, personal ranking as the one truth.

I’m afraid that after going to all of this trouble I’ve … I’ve wasted my time. Your time. Everyone’s time.

There is no perfect Unraveled, obviously, so ultimately this is going to be a subjective endeavor.

Well, that’s disappointing. Well then. Thanks for … reading, everyone.

There Is No Perfect Unraveled

Huh.

You know what? There’s one episode I didn’t include.

A rare Unraveled, a live performance at PAX in 2019.

The Perfect PokéRap

This… this is promising. It has “perfect” right there in the name.

Let’s look at this one.

Authoritativeness

Nothing projects more authority than speaking in front of an audience. Brian isn’t just authoritative, he’s commanding.

So that’s an easy 5/5.

Topic Accessibility

Not only is Pokémon the third most popular video game franchise of all time, _I really want to hear Brian work on the PokéRap. This is compelling!

Okay, another 5/5.

Methodology

With more time than usual to develop his methodology, Brian can spend the entire first 20 minutes of his presentation laying out the methodology underlying his perfect PokéRap. It’s detailed. It’s informative. It’s precise. And, of course, just at the very end, it turns out to be subtly flawed because executing his perfect PokéRap would take longer than the amount of time remaining in his presentation block.

Well, that’s a 5/5.

Foreshadowing/Callback

Brian manages to maintain a number of running jokes throughout this presentation, including “Kevin Punt”, “Terry”, “Audience Participation”, and, of course, the set-up and delivery of the PokéRap itself. In fact, the “Audience Participation” turns out to be key to the eventual recovery.

That’s a 5/5, too.

Execution/Suffering

The Abridged Perfect PokéRap is, indeed, a virtuoso performance: at over 9 minutes long, it still manages to include over 400 Pokemon. While I might be over-estimating the difficulty of preparing and memorizing such a thing because I am not musical, I think that everyone found this impressive.

Another 5/5.

Twist

Obviously Brian got carried away with his plans for the True Perfect PokéRap, which became downright fanciful, and just as obviously it was going to be impossible to perform, bringing him to an end-of-Act-2 darkest before the dawn moment. This Unraveled unraveled and needed to be glued back together.

5/5.

Recovery

But there’s rescue from an unlikely source. A callback: Audience Participation. And this is a clever solution, too: Brian’s Abridged Perfect PokéRap does - sort of - contain every single Pokémon.

Does Brian Sing

You’re goddamn right he does.

5/5.

So there we have it. We’ve done it - we’ve found - not just the greatest episode of Unraveled: A perfect episode. We’ve done it. Science has done it.

there’s only one way to celebrate

top 10 hottest sonic characters

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0700

You know what? I’m almost always excited to discover some new weird internet thing. something has to go in the end of the year roundups.

I can’t just keep putting three cheese pizza blend in there. (sidenote: that’s a lie, I can and I will)

Like a video from.. I don’t even know, fifteen years ago?

This is cringe humor. This is bad media.

Between Contrapoints’s long video essay on cringe content and the whole KiwiFarms debacle, I’ve become a lot more aware of the many ways that enjoying bad media can get weird and destructive and veer into legitimate harassment.

But, like, you can’t deny the simple joy in finding a weird bad moment on the internet, right?

iron chef

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0700

you know what, I think it’s time

Iron Chef is the greatest show and I loved it when I was a teenager.

Every episode starts with a clip of Chairman Kaga taking a bite out of a pepper dramatically, and then visibly kinda regretting it.

this man is the absolute mvp of dramatically eating objects

One thing about watching a lot of Iron Chef in English is that even if there’s a different challenger and panel every week, they always have the same voices and you get to know those voices like old friends.

The other thing about watching a lot of Iron Chef in English is that AFAICT they decided that Chairman Kaga’s voice and personality was Just Too Iconic to translate and he just gets subtitled while everyone else gets dubbed.

oh man I forgot how much I used to watch this show when I was in high school

the challenger picked Hiroyuki Sakai and I just went “OOOHH SHIT, YOU GONNA GET REKT”

Wikipedia didn’t exist back then for me to check the stats, but even 20 years ago I knew that Hiroyuki Sakai was an unbeatable wall and it would serve a challenger well to choose literally anybody else.

Now I can check the stats and: hell yeah, I was right.

That is an 82% win rate, 4/5 episodes. At the time, French cooking was having a moment in Japan, so if you were trying to make a name for yourself, taking on Sakai must have been the best-seeming move.

The actual safest bet was to take on Iron Chef Japanese Masaharu Morimoto (he was very skilled, but I think the casual “Japanese cookery” skill level in Japan was much higher so Morimoto only had a 67% win rate) or Iron Chef Italian Masahiko Kobe (Look, I have some opinions about Japan’s mid-90s interpretation of Italian cookery…)

across both Iron Chef AND Iron Chef America, there’s nearly two decades of the ice cream maker being a terrible idea and you’ll lose if you try it

I don’t think I learned a single damn useful thing about cooking from watching this show, it’s kinda too frenetic and unfocused to actually be helpful in any sort of practical way (especially when I was a teenager, I didn’t have much in the way of the basics of cooking), although that’s also part of why the show is so darned entertaining.

I think part of the reason that this show translated so easily was that the show was already 90% voiceover, and this localization team did SUCH a good job.

I don’t think Zapp wants to watch Iron Chef with me

The insane made-up framing story of this competition show: that an eccentric billionaire started Kitchen Stadium and started collecting the world’s finest chefs, and he unveils them like a series of anime villains that nobody can defeat, it’s so good, this show’s constant overbearing theatricality is just awesome.

a lot of what made this show great never really made it stateside

this man just decided to go full theatrical bad guy as his stage persona and I respect that a great deal

If you have never watched an episode of the original run of Iron Chef, I beg of you, give it a try, it’s so extra.

I have to avoid the episodes where they cook foods that make me sad, though, like octopus or shark fin, I think the show would be even worse if you’re vegetarian or vegan.

I’m not sure if the localization team decided that this guy needed “meathead voice” or if he’s actually this slow IRL but it’s very funny.

“PUMPKIN IS SWEET.”

Oh wow, I finally found which episode this moment is from:

KORN

she was not advised to mix the mustard cabbage with the pork and just ate a big hunk of mustard on accident:

One thing I eventually learned - the localization team said it so fast I could never really figure out what they were saying: “SQUEEZON!” “SQUEEZON!” - they’re saying “Fukui-san” with something of a hard-to-parse accent, so all of these are just addressing the host.

hope you have space

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0700

These yellow fried dace cans (available at most asian markets) are absolutely quick-meal MVPs and if you’ve never tried one you should

nacho

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0700

I think it’s great that in 1940, a maitre’d, Ignacio Anaya, at a club near Fort Duncan in Mexico panicked when a bunch of army wives showed up - he couldn’t find a chef and he had nothing to feed them - so he threw a bunch of corn tortillas in the deep fryer and threw some shit on there.

“Nacho” is just a nickname for “Ignacio”.

So when they asked him what it was, he just said “it’s the ’nacho special” and NACHOS WERE BORN, BABY.

I like to think of nachos as a thing that has always existed, like air or gravity or pizza, but actually they’re just Nacho’s.

Singin' In the Rain

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0700

This is the only time in my entire life I’ll be able to post this sequence on January 1, and so I have to make the most of it:

Happy 2024, everyone! :D

Singin’ In The Rain (1952) is a classic musical about… classic cinema’s switch to movies with sound.

The plot’s real simple:

Handsome Leading Man, Funny Sidekick, and Ditzy Broad are unbelievably popular silent movie stars, but in the transition to “sound” they realize that they don’t know how to make good movies with sound. There are a tonne of foley problems that take their dramatic romance and make it ridiculous, and worse still: Ditzy Broad’s got a real mousy New York accent and a terrible singing voice.

Voice Coach: “I Can’t… Stand Them.”

Ditzy: “I CAAAN STANNNEM”

Desperate to save his career, Handsome Leading Man comes up with a plot: They’ll substitute in the voice of Lady Love Interest, who sings beautifully.

Everybody loves Ditzy Broad’s new singing voice and the plan goes almost without a hitch: the only problem is that Ditzy Broad brings in lawyers and her agent, demanding that Lady Love Interest get no credit and stay on with the studio, as her personal voice, forever. The studio’s hands are tied.

Heroically, at the last minute, Handsome Leading Man, Funny Sidekick, and Studio Head arrange a “staging accident” that reveals that Ditzy Broad’s singing voice is actually Lady Love Interest in front of a huge crowd, ruining the scheme.

It’s a very simple plot, giving the musical a lot of space just to do big, impressive musical numbers.

they made lavalier mics so much bigger in the 20s

but that didn’t stop Kids These Days from trying to hold them like this and talk directly into them

there’s a scene where they relentlessly bully a speech therapist for no clear reason

“AAAYYYYYYYYYYYY!”

every man who pitches an open relationship is imagining it will go like this, but actually it only happens 7% of the time

I actually wasn’t paying close attention to how we ended up in “entirely unrelated fashion show” but I’m here for it.

“anyone for tennis? this girl thinks that doubles tennis means when you play with two tennis balls at the same time, and nobody is willing to argue with her because her clothes were clearly stolen from a much larger woman”

also this is in the movie, I bet you think that my watching the movie would make me more prepared to explain it, but no

“What this studio needs is a little electronic creature you wear like a pocketwatch, and when you press a little button on there, it feeds the little guy, and sometimes, he poops - and if you don’t feed it? Boom. Dead.”

even for the casual racism of the 50’s this is a lot, Singin’ in the Rain, come on

can’t be this smug without a good dodge reflex

great moments in cinematic history

Free comedy tip, slick: the pie gag’s only funny when the sap’s got dignity. Like that guy.

this Gomez-and-Morticia-lookin’ couple just exists in the background of Singin’ in the Rain and now I want a separate cut of the movie that’s just about these two and whatever their deal is

I forgot that this movie really, really pads the ol’ runtime

pictured: vancouver on any day between september and may

Feed Me, Seymour

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

the parade of musicals-i-havent-seen-yet continues…

We open on a motown greek chorus!

That’s a move. I can count on one hand the number of musicals I’ve watched that actually feature a Greek chrous and the one that most memorably did had the distinction of being a story about Greeks.

Oh hey, it’s directed by Miss Piggy!

The main antagonist of Little Shop of Horrors is a big puppet, in 1986 you’re going to need an Acolyte of the Cult of Jim Henson on board to make that work.

This is based on an off-broadway musical, where presumably the puppeting was done live.

It’s also - unlike The Producers(2005) - a pretty successful adaptation of a stage musical, which it achieves by virtue of leaning in to the cartooniness and weirdness of its source material.

Some reviews of Hello Dolly mentioned how cartoonish and simple the characters were, but… oh boy, it’s got nothing on Little Shop of Horrors, which goes very cartoonish and simple for its characters.

Seymour is a clumsy, put-upon nerd.

Audrey is … a Betty Boop, which is … just a weird thing from the past that I’m glad died.

You know, a high-pitched, naive, sexy idiot.

And finally, Mr. Mushkin is …

Another weird thing from the past I’m glad we don’t see in media anymore, a cheap greedy old jewish man. A Shylock.

And that’s our three primary characters, most of them ugly, cartoonish stereotypes.

Mr. Mushkin yells at some black kids (portrayed by full-grown adults) who are loitering outside of his business, which doesn’t do much to clear the “ugly racial stereotypes” taste out of one’s mouth.

The next 20 minutes is all set-up, using some doo-wop songs to establish:

The shop is poor, and in a bad part of town, and nobody wants to buy flowers here.
Seymour quietly pines for Audrey.
Seymour puts an unusual plant (a plant that he found during a to-tal eclipse of the sun, which he names Audrey II) in the window, which attracts attention and money.
Immediately, people start coming in and buying things, but the plant is dying!
Seymour discovers, by cutting himself on a rose, that the plant craves human blood.

hey, John Candy cameo!

After that, the street kids confront Audrey, who is nursing a fresh injury from her abusive boyfriend (hitherto unseen): why date someone who keeps hurting you? Why not date Seymour instead?

She likes the idea but she’s too afraid of her boyfriend to leave him, and sings a song about how happy she’d be with Seymour, Somewhere that’s Green.

Somewhere that’s Green is very good. Audrey’s dreams are really small, and that’s a good joke, and really sad: she dreams of not being hit and moving out of the city to a lower-middle class life with a real chain link fence and putting plastic on her furniture.

There’s something so weirdly charming about someone singing an “I want” song about something so mundane.

The other thing that’s noticeable about this song is that… it’s Part of Your World. Holy shit, whatever hack wrote the songs for The Little Mermaid just… fully stole this song and made it about mermaids.

I wonder if the guy who wrote Something that’s Green ever got the credit for that.

oh, heh

same guy both times

Well I guess it’s okay for Alan Menken to rip off Alan Menken.

I also discovered that there’s a bit of a cottage industry on YouTube where people just sing both songs side-by-side because they’re so similar.

Okay, okay, so what’s the problem? Why can’t Audrey be with Seymour? Who’s this boyfriend who’s so scary that he’s holding up the whole plot?

And, even worse, he’s the nastiest kind of creature alive:

a Steve Martin!

wait, I mean

a dentist!

That’s a solid visual gag: the fact that he’s a dentist is kept from you for a good bit until you get to the reveal, the punchline: a dentist.

He’s a relatively bit part in this play, but the character has become notorious and something of a fan favorite: the dentist who’s literally a sadist, who sings about how happy it makes him to hurt people.

Which is funny, I think it’s fine but I never find Steve Martin that funny.

Okay, so, the plant has grown big and strong off of scraps of Seymour’s blood, but now it can talk - with the booming motown voice of Levi Stubbs. “FEED ME, SEYMOUR!”.

Grow For Me, Feed Me (Git It), and Suppertime are all forgettable songs about putting people into that plant that happen at one point or another in this movie and they’re all pretty interchangeable.

This musical was originally written in 1982, only 2 years after Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, so apparently the early 80’s were a real sweet spot for musical theatre about eating people. Who knew?

The plant smooth-talks Seymour into doing a murder on his behalf: obviously the world would be a better place without the dentist, and the Audrey 2 craze is going to make Seymour rich, and famous!

So Seymour sets off with a little snub-nosed pistol to go murder the dentist, but not before we get a scene where … Bill Murray shows up for a dental appointment.

Bill Murray plays a masochist who’s way, way in to dental work.

This is legitimately a very funny scene. It doesn’t advance the plot at all, but Bill Murray’s excited masochist is good. The dentist finds this man’s enjoyment deeply frustrating and intends to take it out on Seymour.

but not without some nitrous - but not for Seymour, for the dentist, who has rigged up a contraption to feed him nitrous oxide while he works

Seymour pulls a gun on him and, in the excitement, the nitrous contraption breaks, suffocating the dentist. A totally bloodless kill for Seymour!

Seymour drags the dentist’s body back to the plant shop, chops it up, (which Mr. Mushkin sees, setting up the next act), and feeds the body to Audrey 2.

Audrey is sad her boyfriend is dead, but … not really, and that means she can be with Seymour. Suddenly, Seymour is our next song, a love song.

I… I know I’ve heard this song before, somewhere. It’s weird that “Suddenly, Seymour” is the most recognizable song from this musical. Is it borrowed from somewhere famous?

Mr. Mushkin confronts Seymour about his murder, and threatens to take him to the police.

Except, critical mistake, greed takes over and he offers to let Seymour go - in exchange for Audrey II and instructions on how to care for Audrey II. In doing so, he stands a little too close to Audrey II.

wup, poosh

problem solved!

anyways, we get Meek Shall Inherit, cataloguing some of Seymour’s rise to fame and prominence off of the back of Audrey II

But Audrey gets hungry again, and Seymour, unwilling to fuel his fame and fortune with a campaign of ongoing human sacrifice, has a l’il freakout.

Apparently, in the original 1960s sci-fi B-movie movie that this was based on, Seymour is a little more willing to feed the plant, even tricking some local homeless people into getting ’et, but not in the musical adaptation.

Seymour asks Audrey to marry him and plans to skip town and get out of dodge entirely, which she agrees to, and then he confronts Audrey II with an ultimatum: no more corpses, and he’s just going to get ground beef.

A prop guy with a vine-shaped stick bonks the store’s telephone a bit, and Audrey II invites Audrey back to the store.

wuh oh

Seymour comes back just in time to “rescue” Audrey, but her wounds are too great, and her dying wish is to be fed to Audrey II, to continue powering Seymour’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune, with an ironic little reprise of Somewhere that’s Green.

After feeding her to Audrey II, Seymour has nothing left, only to confront one of the people trying to get rich off of his plant’s weird fame.

Hey, I took a cutting and got it to grow! Everyone in America is gonna have one of these!

This is too much! Finally, Seymour has had enough and he’s going to confront Audrey II!

Nah, man. In the penultimate song, Mean Green Mother from Outer Space, Audrey II just brags and then eats Seymour, too.

Now with a chorus of little sprouts of his own.

So ends Seymour.

With only the greek chorus left, they have to deliver the denouement, the final song, Don’t Feed The Plants.

Where it becomes clear that humanity did, in fact, feed the plants, lots of them, and now they’re rampaging around and eating everyone.

subsequent to the events you have just witnessed

similar events in cities across america

events which bore a striking resemblance

to the ones you just have seen, begin occurring

ooh

subsequent to the events you have just witnessed

unsuspecting jerks from Maine to California

made the acquaintance of a new breed of flytrap

and got sweet-talked into feeding it blood

And the whole thing ends with stop-motion carnage as big plants rampage through various cities.

They make sure to smash this famous Harryhousen reference to let you know that they’re doing stop-motion.

And that’s it, after about 10 minutes of the plants laughing and smashing around, the movie ends with them tearing out of the film screen to eat you, the audience.

Anyways, that was certainly better than Hello Dolly.

Oh! I’m just now learning that what I watched was not even the original ending of the movie: from 1986 through 2012 - so, for some 26 years - the original theatrical cut of the movie had a quickly put together happy ending where Seymour and Audrey live and escape to the suburbs.

Audrey’s bite is non-fatal, I guess, and she spends the rest of the third act watching from an apartment building window (because that’s easy to splice in after the fact). Seymour manages, at the last minute, to plug Audrey 2 into an 120V household outlet.

Instead of “Don’t Feed the Plants”, we get a short orchestral reprise of “Suddenly Seymour”, then “Somewhere that’s Green” as they get married and move into their tract house.

And in the garden? A little Audrey 2.

Much shorter. Happy ending.

The violent, tragic ending that I saw cost $5 million dollars to produce and was one of the most expensive sequences ever filmed in Hollywood up to that point, and it performed just terribly with test audiences.

They tried it with a few different test audiences and each time the results were the same: interest in the movie was high until Seymour gets eaten, and then the whole theatre was just stone cold shocked silence for the whole last 10 minutes.

There are a few reasons why the Bad Ending did so poorly in test screenings: partially, (in my opinion), because the film (different from both the musical and the original B-movie flick) pulls all of its punches vis-a-vis Seymour actually making bad decisions or being a bad person - the dentist and Mr. Mushkin’s villainy are both wildly amped up and their deaths are both partially their own fault. Audrey 2 basically feeds himself! Without Seymour gradually getting on board with murder, even a little carried away with murder, the tragedy doesn’t feel as earned.

The other reason - this is what Frank Oz claims - is simply that it’s a lot harder to do a sad ending in Hollywood than on Broadway, because you don’t get to see the actors come out and do a bow afterwards. They’re just dead.

They lost a lot of the masters for the original $5 million end sequence, and the one that they eventually released for the director’s cut in 2012 had to be extensively re-worked to get it back into viewing condition.

Apparently nowadays the grimmer, bloodier, weirder, more cynical “everybody dies” ending has become the more popular ending. So what I saw was the movie’s original intent, anyways!

Hello Dolly

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Okay, so, I know Hello Dolly from two places:

For its reputation as a film that nearly bankrupted Fox and heralded the end of the big roadshow musical as a profitable endeavor.

and

(and much more prominently) Wall-E

Wall-E’s director, Howard Stanton, explained that he chose Hello Dolly because he was looking for interesting, antiquated human cultural detritus that Wall-E might find in the garbage, and because he had played Barnaby in a high-school production of Hello Dolly.

“I turned to my wife and I said, ‘I think I have the strangest idea I’ve ever had.’ Once I had it in my head, I couldn’t drop it. I had to try it. I just kept waiting for it to fall apart. There were so many reasons why it wouldn’t hold. It was so incongruous that it was attractive, and so we worked it into the story.”

So, Hello Dolly.

Review: faintly negative. Gosh this is a slow, plodding musical.

The first musical number, Call on Dolly/Just Leave Everything to Me, is good: it’s a high-energy dynamic musical number introducing Dolly, this domineering, dishonest, fixer of a woman with a business card advertising her services for any possible situation you might encounter. Also: not super familiar with Barbra Streisand’s ouvre, I think the most I’ve actually seen her in one place at one time is in the music video Barbra Streisand.

if you want a law abolished, jury swayed or toenails polished, just leave everything to me

if you want your liver tested, glasses made, cash invested, just leave everything to me

Okay! Interesting dynamic character with a lot of possibility! I’m excited! Maybe this will be good!

Also, Dolly having a business card for everything is a running joke that’s called back to at least two more times in the show, which is excellent.

Then a … fully four minute long credit sequence. It’s like they want us to experience Dolly’s journey from New York to Yonkers in real time.

I don’t actually mind these sluggish montage scenes because when I’m watching musicals I’m usually also coding and they’re nice enough as background content, but if I had made the mistake of devoting my full attention to the movie I’d have died. (this goes for The Sound of Music, too, great “coding” movie, but if I tried to watch it on its own I would be the one coding)

In our next scene we introduce Walter Matthau, half-a-millionaire (sidenote: Walter Matthau’s consistently being called a “half-a-millionaire” throughout the movie is a solid joke.) , being a hot dick to literally everyone in his life.

Starting by insisting that his daughter, Ermahgerd, is not to marry this artist boy.

… Did… did I get her name wrong?

Nope, there it is.

Then he denies a raise or any time off to his two clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby, while also insisting that “28” is a stupid age to be, and that “40” would be a much more respectable age.

Horace sucks. I get it, he’s supposed to be an old crank, but oh boy is a lot of this musical going to revolve around Walter Matthau being a grump. The framing of the whole show is, I think, trying to make him out to be a “lovable grump” - it’s okay that he’s a miserable old crank because that crankiness is a funny schtick.

pictured: a lovable grump done well

Folks in the 60s were, I think, a lot more on board with watching Walter Matthau try to extract comedy out of being sour and cranky.

Then he gets the worst song in the entire movie, It Takes a Woman.

This doesn’t even have the common decency to be a villain song. Misogyny: The Song is intended to be a comedy song: Horace wants to marry a woman because he wants free labor for chores, and so the song emphasises the softness of the woman he intends to work like a horse.

And so she’ll work until infinity

Three cheers for femininity

Charming. 🙄

I get that this is intended in a tongue-and-cheek “well, obviously, we’re less shitty to women in nineteen-sixty-something than they were in eighteen-ninety-something” but ho boy. This joke drags and it’s carried on the back of Walter Matthau’s singing voice.

Anyhow, Dolly (who wants to marry Horace, because he’s rich) shows up just in time to intercept Horace on his way back to New York where he intends to propose to a milliner named Irene.

Dolly begins a series of devious plot machinations to sabotage things: she convinces the stockboys, Cornelius and Barnaby, that they should seek adventure in New York and that they should seek it at Irene’s hat shop, at exactly the same time that Horace plans to stop by. She also convinces Ermagerd and her Boy to meet her in New York later for dinner where she’ll fix everything for them, too.

Christ I hate Cornelius and Barnaby, their whole “pie-eyed naif” schtick is just agonizing. Holy cabooses!

However, that does take us to Put on Your Sunday Clothes, the third musical number and the one most prominently featured in Wall-E, because it is the best song in the entire movie, and also the sort of thing that’s absolutely chilling when played over a slow pan across a post-apocalyptic wasteland:

Uncontroversial opinion: Wall-E is a much better movie than Hello Dolly.

I’d thought that this was mostly just a Cornelius and Barnaby song, but no, everyone is going to New York - Dolly, Ermagerd, Horace, Cornelius, Barnaby, and the entire town of Yonkers all join in, both in the song and the trip.

this is one of those “non-diegetic movie moments”: the entire town of Yonkers isn’t actually going to New York probably, but it’s a funny way to end the scene.

Okay, enter Irene, a young milliner who, paralleling Cornelius, tries to convince her young friend to have an adventure with her. Flirt with some stupid boys. Do something that’s more fun than making hats endlessly.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about eighteen-ninety-something its that apparently making fancy hats is a total bummer.

man, this fuckin’ sucks

Irene gets a song, “Ribbons Down My Back” which I forgot immediately. All it does is re-establish the themes she’s literally just established: Irene is bored and horny (but in a classy, romantic eighteen-ninety-something way).

And then some boys show up. They’re terrified, and Irene does her best not to scare them off.

Dolly shows up with Horace. Oh no! It’s eighteen-ninety-something! If Irene seems the kind of woman who’s just hanging around unaccompanied men she’ll be totally unmarriagable!

god, these two are exhausting

Dolly engineers to reveal to Horace that there have in fact been two men here just recently: gasp! The impropriety!

Horace is so disgusted by the idea that Irene might have had men in her shop that he storms off in a huff.

Dolly does more dark pattern social engineering, pretending that Cornelius is rich and influential and setting him up with Irene, setting up Barnaby with that girl who was hanging around behind Irene, and arranging for them all to meet up at the same restaurant that she invited Ermagerd and Her Boy to. Later, she’ll invite Horace to the same restaurant along with a mock heiress as part of a scheme. Wow, that restaurant scene sounds like it’s going to be a real doozy!

… okay, I’m going to level with you: that restaurant scene is fully 45 minutes away, and nothing of interest happens between now and then.

I’m sure someone at some point has pointed out that the entire middle hour of this two-and-a-half-hour film is almost entirely unnecessary, but I’m discovering it now, for myself.

Yes, the story has been moving along at far too much of a clip, so it’s time to waste some time.

Cornelius and Barnaby can’t dance, so Dolly has to show them how, in Dancing.

This gives us a lot more of their squeaky, high-pitched, nervous teenager energy, which is just awful.

Have you ever thought “I wish the pimple-faced teen from the Simpsons could do a bunch of musical numbers”?

“Look! He’s dancing!”

The large musical interlude cannot be contained, and they take it to the streets, getting half of New York involved in these dance lessons.

Huge dance number.

jesus, guys, take it down a notch

Don’t worry, though, now we get Before the Parade Passes By, an extended song where Dolly cops to being lonely, too.

I think this is intended to establish some humanity for this woman who has hitherto come off as something of a bugs-bunny-esque trickster demon, with the problems that:

God, it’s long, that could be established with a sad look here or there much more quickly.
She’s angling for Horace, who, as we’ve established, is an absolute trash-tier beau (aside from his money).
She absolutely fog-horns her way through this song and establishing emotional vulnerability through MAXIMUM BELTING is not always so effective.

📯📯📯

Then there’s an actual parade.

It takes for-fucking-ever.

the movie takes a beat to make the joke that suffragettes were grim and stern and horse-faced, which, uh, great.

I little bit of plot happens: she knows that Horace is going to be at the parade and uses this opportunity to both invite him to a dinner with a mysterious heiress and meet up with a friend who she plans to use as her mock heiress.

Exhausted? I am too, but we’re only at the…

Five minutes to get popcorn and stretch your legs.

We come back a few hours later: in Elegance the boys come to pick up the ladies, but they’re poor as shit and attempt to convince the women that aperitifs and cabs are tacky, and that true elegance is established not by drinking expensive cocktails, but instead by walking for hours in high-heels.

Their subterfuge is paper-thin and the girls just go along with it cheerfully: but there’s an eventual and kind of obvious reveal teed up: Irene is not at all fooled by these boys, and, in fact, just likes hanging out with them, even though they’re visibly and obviously poor.

So they gradually stroll to the restaurant pretending that the height of elegance is whatever the boys can afford or steal which is not much.

This is actually a pretty solid comedy song, although it goes on for a while.

Snubbing folks - is chic to us Sometimes we don’t even speak to us If you ain’t got elegance You can never ever carry it off

Oh boy, now it’s time for Love is Only Love, a song where Dolly expresses some loneliness and vulnerability again, although this time she tones the belt down about 10% so it’s marginally softer.

Look, we get it, lady.

She establishes the small additional detail that she’s reluctant to fall in love again without some kind of sign from her dear departed first husband, which is a plot point as stupid as it is easily resolved later on. Her whole goal throughout the film is to marry Horace by any means necessary but what if she doesn’t get a sign from her dead husband?

Yes, this woman with crystal clear motivation and enormous amounts of drive might not even want the thing she’s spent the last 90 minutes pursuing with such ferocity that you’d be wholly unsurprised to find literal blood on her hands. such conflict. 🙄

finally, the big restaurant!

the head waiter and Dolly’s fake heiress argue a bit to establish that they both exist:

he’s stuffy, she’s pretending to be the worst person alive.

Everyone’s seated, which takes another 5 minutes, at which point the kitchen discovers that Dolly is incoming.

apparently, from her first marriage, Dolly has made for herself a real reputation at this restaurant: she’s beloved for her enormous appetite.

This sounds like I’m joking. I am not joking.

Everyone on staff is so enormously fired up by the prospect of serving Dolly, the hungriest woman on the planet, that they need to do a big choreographed dance number about it.

christ, how much can Dolly eat?!?

Cornelius reluctantly reveals that he’s poor as shit and won’t be able to pay for dinner.

Irene reveals her own terrible secret:

She obviously knew the whole time, and was planning to pay for the night herself.

But - oh, whoops - she forgot to bring her wallet, so now they’re all in a minor pickle.

Fake heiress gives Horace the brush-off as rudely as possible.

Dolly strides into the restaurant with Hello, Dolly, the second major musical number devoted to the concept that this restaurant is very excited by a hungry woman.

She used to be rich and there is money to be made.

this lady put our kids through college

boy can she put down a ham dinner

she’s friends with the band, too, including Real Actual Louis Armstrong.

“I hear one time you shotgunned an entire turkey.”

The restaurant repeats “hello, Dolly” at her in singsong for 12 entire minutes.

That’s right, you could fill an entire 22 minute sitcom block with just musical numbers where the restaurant is excited by how much of a heavyweight customer Dolly is.

This also helps to establish why Dolly needs Horace so much: someone needs to pay for these extravagant meals and her ex-husband is clearly too dead to foot the bill any longer. Such romance!

Ok, Horace, after two completely botched dates, are you ready to finally marry me, Dolly, the woman who’s very clearly been chasing you this entire time?

“fuck no!”

“oh, good, my entire goddamned turkey has arrived. here, you eat my beets.”

“i don’t like beets!”

I bet you thought I was joking about how much of the last half of this movie is about how much food Dolly can pack away, but lo, proof: she ordered an entire goddamned turkey.

I’m not sure if it’s romantic that these two people deserve each other just because it’s funny to watch Dolly torment Horace.

Anyways, the kitchen is so excited by this woman who can eat an entire turkey to herself that they make her the honorary judge for tonight’s dance competition.

leave me be with my turkey, you vultures

It just so happens that the prize for tonight’s dance competition is $50 - exactly enough so that Cornelius and Irene can pay for dinner!

So, uh, earlier, Dolly invited Ermengarde and her beau to also eat dinner here, at this same restaurant, and I cannot for a single second imagine how that factored into her scheme. In fact, she seems to have invited everyone to this restaurant simply because the plot requires that it happen.

This whole evening start to unravel, as Horace notices both his daughter Ermagerd and his two shop clerks on the dance floor.

He throws a hissy-fit and also some pies, creates a scene, and fires everyone he can.

everyone wants to marry this man he’s such a dreamboat

The distraction afforded by the scuffle is enough for most of the freeloaders to escape the restaurant without paying their tabs.

Cornelius takes this opportunity to sing It Only Takes a Moment to Irene, establishing that he fell in love with her immediately and without even a single thought troubling his empty head.

Irene remains inexplicably in to it. Life as a milliner must be rough, that this dweeb is the height of excitement.

There’s no close-up of them holding hands in this scene. That’s notable because a sharp-eyed redditor noted that a close-up shot of them holding hands in this scene was a major plot point in Wall-E, which means that the Wall-E team must have added it to Hello Dolly. (Which would be necessary: hand-holding is plot important in Wall-E.)

This is the other song that’s used in Wall-E, just the very last bit.

Honestly, mostly watching this movie just reminds me that “Wall-E was very good”.

Storming out of the restaurant, Dolly sings So Long, Dearie to Horace, emphasizing that he’s a miserable, shitty old crank and that she’s better off without him.

many minutes of scenery chewing from Barbra Streisand ensue

to be entirely honest this would be my preferred ending to the movie. Realizing that Horace sucks and telling him off with a big song then leaving with a grand fuck-you after setting up Cornelius with Irene and helping Ermagerd escape with her boy? Good ending.

But no, there’s one last scene, the next morning.

“Aw shit, nobody’s left for me to verbally abuse.”

“We’re all here to tell you that you suck, and you can’t fire us because we quit.”

“Also Dolly’s here. Apparently that goodbye-and-fuck-you was nothing but smoke.”

I mean, he’s awful, but there’s just something about him that keeps Dolly coming back -

Horace, warn down and exhausted by Dolly’s brutal campaign, finally relents.

But she’s not sure if she wants to marry him - she needs a sign from her dead-husband, remember? Anyways, he, offhandedly, says something that dead husband used to say, and that’s resolved! Wows! That was such an ill-conceived and easily resolved plot point!

Story over!

Now, to close out the show, there’s a reprise of each of the show’s major songs as we cruise up to Horace and Dolly’s elaborate wedding.

Dolly’s back in restaurant money! Turkeys for everyone!

Thoughts, Feelings?

… I guess it’s a big fun musical? Not a lot happens.

I honestly think there’s a pretty great 90 minute film in here. Cut out most of the entire middle hour, trim a few minutes out of each of the songs, and leave Horace lonely and alone in New York, and call it a day.

I don’t like that Horace gets “redeemed” despite being nothing but an irritated, chintzy sourpuss for the movie’s entire runtime. I know it’s supposed to be endearing but it’s not.

Cornelius and Barnaby’s “deer in the headlights” approach to romance and high, squeaky voices are… just the worst.

And maybe the restaurant dance number could have been, like, 2 minutes long, rather than six full minutes long.

That might just be me applying modern standards to ancient films, but it doesn’t seem like this did so well in 1969, either.

It’s not terrible. It’s not great, either. The Rotten Tomatoes score of 45% is a solid spot for it, with one’s opinion of the movie apparently largely hinging on whether or not one is excited by the prospect of Barbra Streisand chewing the scenery or an absurdly opulent dance number.

One thing I do kind of notice in these Music Man / Hello Dolly era musicals is this kind of weird reverence for the late 1800s as an era.

I think there’s something distinctly conservative about portraying the past as a kind of rosy, idealized place where the women are virtuous and the men always wore suits and were so chaste as to be terrified to even kiss a woman.

Where the biggest problems are children playing pool and sassing their parents and good, god-fearing citizens are easily taken by local hucksters.

I don’t know why musicals of the 1960s so badly wanted to live in this pat, cartoonish idealized past. I guess it was a real contrast with all of the dangerous, scary stuff that The Teens were up to in the 60’s.

Anyways.

Hello Dolly.

Is a movie. I watched.

Casablanca

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Did you know I was probably in my 30s before I watched Casablanca for the first time?

How good could this 75-year-old film possibly be, I had thought. It’s gonna be like Citizen Kane, or The Beatles: so massively influential that they’re copied by everyone, rendering their first-mover advantage kinda underwhelming in retrospect.

Nah, naaaah, Casablanca holds up.

Stuff That Doesn’t Hold Up

Look, there’s some stuff that’s cornball as hell: “here’s lookin’ at you, kid” is just the kind of Humphrey Bogart cheese that probably played well 75 years ago and now is, I’m gonna say it, just a weird thing to repeatedly say to a woman you love, even as a toast.

Rick doing the thinking for both of us. That sits badly.

Also, “As Time Goes By” is just a deeply mediocre and forgettable song. It’s really important to the story and a leitmotif that runs through the whole movie, which is too bad because dang, who cares, this song blows.

Also, every time Ingrid Bergman is on screen, they goop so much vaseline on the camera to try to make her look soft and pretty that I can barely make her out.

bogart: so crisp

bergman: so smooth

(I doubt they actually used vaseline, but there’s a noticeable difference in how Bogart and Bergman are shot in this film, and while it might have seemed like technique in ‘42, I find it really weird and distracting.)

Stuff That Works

Everything!

First of all, the storytelling is crystal clear:

The Plot, In Brief Summary

The set up is unique and memorable: in World War 2, French refugees are pouring out of France and seeking passage to Spain and then the USA, where they can be free from the Nazis: and one of the most dangerous stops on this journey is the neutral city of Casablanca, where people wait for a seeming eternity in a dangerous purgatory to try to get travel visas.

Rick, morally gray and politically neutral operator of the shady gambling and drinking den “Cafe Americain”, comes across two totally free-and-clear travel visas, basically by accident.

Captain Renault, corrupt chief of police, and tentative ally to Rick, warns Rick that a political agitator, Victor Lazlo, is coming to town, and under no circumstances is he to get his hands on a visa: this would infuriate the reich and create a lot of problems for both of them.

Victor strolls into the bar with Ilsa, a woman who (whoops) broke Rick’s heart some time ago in Paris, leaving him without a trace and utterly heartbroken. Victor turns out to be something of a stand-up guy: he both survived and escaped a German concentration camp and is spending his time trying to broadcast to the world the horrors that he’d seen there and rile up resistance against the regime (sidenote: note that, this being 1942, the filmmakers were not 100% aware of the full extent of said horrors, which means that leaving them ill-defined and terrifying for the sake of the movie turned out to be pretty prophetic.) .

It becomes increasingly clear that the Nazis and Captain Renault are working behind the scenes to try and manufacture some trumped up charges to have Victor imprisoned and then murdered: to stay in Casablanca would be a death sentence for him.

A B-Story: Rick Has a Heart After ALl

Rick shows a tiny ounce of humanity: a young woman and her young husband come to gamble in his parlor, hoping, foolishly, to earn enough money at the crooked roulette tables to buy some exit visas on the black market. The young woman comes to Rick with a question: can Captain Renault be trusted? Captain Renault has offered up Rick as a character witness.

She’s been proposed a deal: Captain Renault can produce some exit visas, but in exchange she’d have to do something that her young husband can never know about. Further details are obscured by the Hays Code (sidenote: Hay, no prostitution.) , but the nature of her deal with Captain Renault are fairly clear (sidenote: wink wink nudge nudge) .

Rick verifies that Captain Renault, while crooked, is good to his word: he would indeed abide by his prostitution-for-exit-visas deal - but takes a little moment to wander over to his rigged roulette tables and arrange for the young woman’s husband to win thousands of francs - just enough to arrange exit visas.

“put it on 22”

Captain Renault is irritated by this, and politely requests that Rick let the next beautiful woman (who he has lined up already) lose at roulette.

Back to the A-Plot: Victor and Ilsa’s Escape

Nobody in town will sell Victor a forged exit visa, so Rick is their only chance.

Ilsa offers a deal - well, not really - she rushes into Rick’s arms and assures him that Rick was her true love all along, and that she’d be happy to stay if he’d just send Victor to safety. Rick is almost but not quite convinced that this isn’t a performance.

What disabuses him of the notion is… Victor coming to Rick and offering him the same deal in reverse: Rick should take Ilsa to safety in Spain, and Victor will stay behind (sidenote: there’s a reading of this where Victor and Ilsa are just sick of one another and each one is desperate to leave the other one behind on an excuse, and Rick’s just screws everything up for everyone, but that’s not terribly well supported by the text. Funny thought, though.) . Each one loves the other so much they’re willing to sacrifice themselves to ensure the other one lives.

Rick - well, it’s not totally clear what Rick will do. He appears to take all sides: he lies to Victor and says that he’ll take Ilsa, he lies to Ilsa and says that he’ll take Victor, and he makes his own deal with Captain Renault to betray Victor to the Nazis, so everybody is going into the final act thinking that they’re getting exactly what they want. Rick makes arrangements to sell his bar: he clearly plans to escape with Ilsa and a big bundle of money.

Everything’s set up for the big betrayal… but wait. The hero flag has been set!

The whole plan has been a double-cross to get Victor and Ilsa out, together!

Rick has to pull a gun on Captain Renault to really double the cross.

Now Rick just has to get Victor and Ilsa together on that plane.

But Ilsa wasn’t joking: she actually does love him, and she’s pretty distraught that he’s going to be left behind.

“What about us?”

“We’ll always have Paris.”

Bam! Mic drop!

A Nazi official shows up, attempts to use the phone to call HQ to have the plane shot down, and whoops, Rick shoots him.

The police (finally) show up and ask Captain Renault what happened: this is the part where Rick has to pay the price for all of his heroism - he’s held the chief of police at gunpoint and shot a high-ranking reich official, and now he’s going to get dragged to jail, probably murdered, probably right now.

Captain Renault: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , idk, it must have been criminals

📯📯📯📯📯📯📯📯📯📯

THAT’S RIGHT BAY-BEE, YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS JUST THE ONE REDEMPTION ARC? NAW, CAPTAIN RENAULT TURNS GOOD TOO, THAT’S A TWO-FOR-ONE!

Captain Renault and Rick walk off into the fog, ready to join the resistance.

And so they walk off, delivering one of the most memorable lines in cinema:

“Man, fuck those Nazis.”

So, Again, What Works?

Well, first of all, and I’m disappointed I have to say this in the year 2023, but killing Nazis always works.

I think that redemption arcs are great:

Casablanca offers not one but two redemption arcs, happening at the SAME TIME! That’s twice as much redemption arc for your film dollar!

The story has a cast of memorable, almost cartoonish characters filling out the story,

weasel business rival?

greaseball Nazi and noble Victor

the only other person in Casablanca who knows the truth behind Rick’s checkered past

It’s got dramatic questions that need answered! Will Rick do the right thing? Are Ilsa’s feelings for Rick genuine or are they a ruse to get Victor to freedom? (answer: yes).

Under the hood, it still works because it’s a good story, told well.

Eat Drink Man Woman

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

How do you celebrate losing your sense of taste and smell (sidenote: temporarily, due to COVID) ?

Well, with Eat Drink Man Woman, obviously.

I’ve never seen Eat Drink Man Woman, but I thought I’d watch it today (sidenote: I don’t have a lot else going on, sick during Christmas.) , and…

well, for one thing, I feel like I know just about every beat of this film, even though I haven’t seen it before, because it was remade into the American film:

Tortilla Soup is not a great film, it’s by no means a masterpiece, it’s a middle of the road romantic comedy from the 90s.

And yet, though. Tortilla Soup is a good movie, dammit. It’s unusual. I can’t think of a lot of movies like it. Almost as if it’s almost a shot-for-shot remake of a beloved foreign film and it keeps a lot of the good qualities of the original.

I’ve watched Tortilla Soup quite a bit.

(It didn’t hurt that I had something of a teenage crush on Tamara Mello, who was stunning in what, in retrospect, was the most 2001 way: )

Summary:

Anyways, the story of Tortilla Soup/Eat Drink Man Woman is that single father and professional chef on-the-verge-of-retirement Martin/Old Zhu has his three adult daughters living with him, and makes an elaborate meal for them every Sunday. His middle daughter is a working professional, his oldest daugher is a too-religious spinster of a schoolteacher, and his youngest daughter is just young.

In each of the movies, this cooking scene - and every cooking scene in the movie - is elaborate and beautifully shot. Eat Drink Man Woman’s clocks in at a full 6 minutes of movie runtime and starts with Old Zhu catching, gutting, scaling, breading, and frying a fish. Movie magic is required: the actor’s hands are replaced with the hands of an extremely experienced chef, and you can tell. Tortilla Soup’s is longer but interspersed with a few character-building moments, and each of them ends with an absolutely stunning spread.

you aren’t fooling me, actors can’t cut radish this perfectly, this quickly, this is years of skill on display

Martin/Old Zhu is gruff, but their care for their family is apparent in the love that they clearly put into the grand feast that they’ve prepared.

The middle daughter Yolanda / Jia-Chien’s career is going well and she’s leaving home - for an exciting job opportunity in Barcelona / Amsterdam - but she secretly reveals that she resents her father for pushing her into academics when she always just wanted to cook.

Martin/Old Zhu has lost his sense of taste and smell, and his cooking is just a little off: his middle daughter’s sharp culinary sense means that she’s the first to pick out little problems in his cooking.

The oldest-daughter, Leticia/Jia-Jen, a teacher, falls in love with a new sports teacher at her school who doesn’t appear to notice her. He appears to be sending her love letters, however - although she doesn’t know that this is nothing but a cruel prank from her students.

The youngest daughter, Maribel/Jia-Ning falls for a cute, well meaning boy.

A family friend, Yolanda / Jin-Rong, has a school-aged daughter, April / Shan-Shan, and the whole family keeps attempting to set up Martin/Old Zhu with Yolanda / Jin-Rong’s widowed mother. Martin / Jin-Rong doesn’t seem terribly interested in the whole deal.

At the same time, Yolanda / Jin-Rong is too busy to cook for her daughter, April / Shan-Shan, so Martin / Old Zhu concocts a scheme to trade little tins of his excellent professional cooking for the youngest’s lunchables and PB&J sandwiches. He’s energized, both by the shared secret and the opportunity to care for a new young woman - as a single father of three, his daughters all being old enough to move out has left him feeling a little bereft of meaning, and this forms his emotional arc in the movie.

I hope I’ve impressed upon you how similar these movies are. Tortilla Soup is very strongly based on Eat Drink Man Woman.

So, the story starts almost identically in both cases, but it diverges a little more in the last half, so I’m going to retell Tortilla Soup’s ending, on account of I’m slightly more familiar with it. Be assured that the endings of the two movies are also very similar.

Each story comes to a pleasant little resolution:

The youngest daughter is ready to commit a cardinal, mortal sin in the family by taking a leap year to loaf around with her cute new boyfriend rather than going to the university she’s been accepted to. He reveals that he had also applied and been accepted to her same university, and instead they can go together.

The oldest daughter is so taken by the beautiful love poetry that she finally makes a play for the sports teacher! Who reveals (gasp) that he hadn’t written her a thing: it was her students playing a cruel prank on her all along. She’s devastated, but he reveals that he’d been pining after her, too, but just hadn’t figured out how to express it yet. It’s revealed shortly after in a real hurry that they had to be married almost immediately, as the oldest daughter was both “very christian” and “extremely horned up”.

And finally, everyone expects Martin to announce his upcoming betrothal to The Obnoxious Widower, and when he stands up to deliver his shocking and unexpected announcement to the room, instead of revealing his betrothal to The Obnoxious Widower… he reveals his betrothal to Yolanda! They bonded in secret over their care for April!

Leaving only the middle daughter, who is in the process of leaving for Barcelona, but just before she goes she decides to cook her father something special. She does, and he eats it, only to bring in a small criticism about her cooking: the serrano is too sharp.

The whole thing comes to a conclusion at the restaurant: now, the middle daughter is the head chef, having seemingly abandoned her job in Barcelona, and the family raises a glass as Yolanda announces that she’s expecting - another girl, for the family.

Let’s Talk Differences

There are a handful of differences, though:

Tortilla Soup goes for a few cheap laughs that Eat Drink Man Woman doesn’t. In order to be qualified as a “rom-com” you need at least one hi-jink every half an hour or so. The one I remember most prominently is that the oldest sister is “advised” to hide her wrinkles with Preparation H, which she does, and it doesn’t work (instead: it highlights them and makes them look greasy).
The sisters get along much better in Eat Drink Man Woman than in Tortilla Soup. The sibling sniping in Tortilla Soup is vocal, whereas it seems to hardly exist in Eat Drink Man Woman. (sidenote: I’m also willing to entertain the notion that they’re being absolutely brutal to one another in this movie and I’m just not picking up on the subtleties of it, thanks to my cultural blinders, here.)
Youngest sister barely gets a storyline in Eat Drink Man Woman - her whole character is significantly expanded in Tortilla Soup.
The patriarch is much more of a crabby old crank in Tortilla Soup: Old Zhu is much kinder and more calm and collected than Martin.
Tortilla Soup resolves the Middle Daughter’s storyline a little more effectively, IMO: Yolanda giving up on Barcelona and taking over the family restaurant is a little more satisfying a conclusion to her arc than Jia-Chien going to Amsterdam and just showing her dreams of being a restaurant chef to her father by cooking real good for him.
Middle Sister and Father get more screen time overall in Eat Drink Man Woman. Jia-Chien and Old Zhu are significantly expanded and get more character development (at the expense of screen time for the other characters).
- This is… largely a good thing? They are the main characters, after all.
This is a plot point that never occurs in Tortilla Soup: Jia-Chien discovers that her older sister’s whole reason for spinsterhood (a bad break-up with a boy) is entirely manufactured (she never dated that boy at all, presumably she was scared to date and didn’t want to admit it to her family), but never confronts her with it. I’d really like her to have … asked her sister about this, at some point, but I suppose the point is rendered moot by her sister eloping with a fella by surprise.
Eat Drink Man Woman develops the distasteful widower in a different direction: in Tortilla Soup she’s more of a man-hungry cougar, whereas in EDMW she’s actively kind of a sour, complainy leech. In both cases, however, it’s clear that this would be a pretty grim fate for poor Martin / Old Zhu.
Eat Drink Man Woman takes more beats to let its emotional content settle. Zhu’s growing dissatisfaction at his emptying home, the peace and satisfaction he finds in cooking, his obvious pride at his family, it all hits harder in Eat Drink Man Woman than it does in Tortilla Soup.

idk, watching Eat Drink Man Woman after being overwhelmingly familiar with the adaptation was really nice. I think I might prefer it to Tortilla Soup, which has started to seem a little pat and smarmy over the years.

Why Do I Love This Movie?

The emotional core of this film is something that feels unusual to me.

Unusual in a good way! How many movies do you see where the theme explored is “this father is sad that his family is no longer reliant on him, and expresses that frustration through stoic culinary excellence, ultimately resolving his feelings by building his family anew, and bigger?”

That’s a big, meaty theme with emotional heft! Most 00’s-era romantic comedies explored no themes and followed a very rigid formula. Tortilla Soup’s soul shined through: inside of it was a much warmer and more nuanced story than I was used to.

And, honestly, the throughline of preparing food as an expression of love and care for one’s family members? 🥲

Some of the conservative messaging of these movies hit a little weird for me - this movie seems like it would be a staunch favorite with conservative moms of all stripes, as its message is largely “find a partner, have babies”. That’s fine, though - stories from more conservative cultures can still be good stories.

hash DoS

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

remember, kids: any service responsible enough to hash passwords with a lengthy and expensive to calculate crypto function is also a service you can probably bring down by finding a way to trigger that crypto function’s execution tens of thousands of times in a row

no taste

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

a bout of winter COVID stole my christmas and my sense of smell and now I can’t taste anything

which I’m pretty unhappy about

I made a coconut and squash curry soup for dinner and all I could taste was “creamy paste, light salt”

tiny

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

happappy hormolidays everypeep

royal bank

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

the royal bank’s website inexplicably features these two men who are very clearly stealing my money

Why is this in their marketing?

No legitimate businessman is getting into a helicopter with a steel suitcase full of, presumably, money, with sunglasses and matching turtlenecks.

bully

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, imagine Back to the Future, but Biff Tannen has to watch Marty from inside his house the entire time, and he spends the entire movie in there yelling “I’m gonna bully you so hard if I ever get out of here” and making threatening gestures out the window, and sometimes he gets so angry that Marty is outside not getting bullied that he pees against a wall

anyways that’s what it’s like owning a bengal cat

pictured, Zapp when he sees another cat chilling harmlessly and enjoying themselves, hundreds of yards away:

When his bloodlust vis-a-vis the concept of other cats subsides, he’s super sweet

“Why are all of your pictures of Zapp when he’s sleepy and snuggly?”

because when he’s feeling playful all of the pictures look like this:

When I was a kid I had Australian shepherds and I love that bengals have that kind of energy and intelligence, but that also makes them challenging (but rewarding) pets.

long

as a kid I always dreamed of graphs, and charts, and DOS, and more and better computer technology

and now as an adult I’m just fascinated with cookies, and this adorable little kitty who wants to play with me and sit quietly and form a happy warm ball in my lap

which feels a little backwards, but I’ll accept it

JJ Goode's Food Articles

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

JJ Goode’s “Taste” articles on cooking are so well written and funny that I sent him an honest-to-god unit of fan mail.

How to Roast a Chicken? The Answers Are Horrifying.

Between the wet briners and dry briners, spatchcockers and trussers, stuffers and tuckers, who are you to trust?

I hate roasting chicken. There, I said it.

sucks to your assmar

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Somebody has a white Tesla with vanity plates that read “ASMARA” and my first instinct was “sucks to your asmara, piggy”

This is also how I feel about D&D’s aasimar.

the bachelor's handbag

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

There are few dinners that outperform “roasted chicken on soft dinner rolls with mayonnaise and tomato and salt and pepper”

It’s good with a supermarket rotisserie chicken, or roast your own, whatever

editor’s note: this was the last thing I was able to taste before COVID stole away my sense of taste for the holidays. Fortunately, it came back in a week or so.

editor’s note 2: rotisserie chickens from the store are also called “bachelor’s handbags” because single men buying a purse full of hot chicken for dinner is such a common thing

the bone zone

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Rereading Bone for the first time in a decade, I’m a little stunned that there’s a color edition of this out there. So much of the artistry of this series is in how deftly it uses just black and white.

Go read Bone. Read it in black and white. Share it with your kids.

Video content

wheel of time/cat

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Pfft, your house is on solar? Pitiful, I have something much more powerful.

Video content

wintershield handouts

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of my Dungeons and Dragons players is very excited that they own a tavern and took all of these pictures of my handouts

me, just before bed last night: I have to write this D&D idea down so that I don’t forget it

this morning: “Horace Mann, guy who really wants to tell you that he owns a mustang?”

editor’s note: horace mann later died, also, the players stole his horse

A running joke in my Blades in the Dark campaign was that the players kept running into in-universe nerds who were obsessed with a clown-themed wargame called “Clownhammer 40K”

anyways I’m currently working on a part of my D&D campaign and I found a spot to insert “Clownhammer” (but original fantasy clownhammer obviously)

commedia dell'frasier

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

so I’ve been powerwatching original Frasier, and at about Season 5 I started to notice that there’s a pretty iconic picture on Frasier’s fridge

That’s… Pantalone!

I know that image from the Wikipedia page on him, from the commedia dell’arte.

He’s, like, a core comedic archetype in this ancient tradition.

A lot of people think that just because something is “old” it’s necessarily “classy and cultured” but the commedia dell’arte is, as far as I can tell, broad dumb comedy: the joke about Pantalone is that he’s old, and pompous, and horny… but why would they include this reference on Frasier’s fridge?

“The character of Pantalone is entirely based on currency and ego, for he has the highest regard for his intelligence, but at every step he becomes the butt for every conceivable kind of trick”

“Pantalone is characterized as loving his money and having emotional extremes. With his sinister and often inhumane treatment towards his fellows, Pantalone is perceived to be a pivotal part of commedia.”

Oh, okay, so, Frasier is … something of a Pantalone - for he has the highest regard for his intelligence, but at every step he becomes the butt for every conceivable kind of trick"

That is an extremely highbrow meta-joke that the set designers slipped in.

I’m not sure how I really feel about this show. I’ve been brewing on it for several seasons.

I haven’t seen an old-school multi-camera sitcom in a long time, reliably extracting humor from a small set of actors and sets, it’s a weirdly minimalist feeling.

Nothing ever changes, it’s just this endlessly re-configurable machine with the same reliable, almost mechanical widgets and locations, creating an endless engine of content.

The flywheel of endless content created by having characters who reliably bounce off of one another in fun ways is neat.

That’s not a “Frasier” thing, that’s a “basically every sitcom made before the year 2000” thing.

Heck, that’s even a commedia dell’arte thing: it was improvisational and based on everybody knowing the stock characters and situations.

I can also see why I didn’t like the show very much during its original run - I’d have been 7 when it started airing, most of the show’s humor was not targeted at my demographic.

Now I’m closer to Frasier’s age (ew) the whole show is much funnier.

The show’s high-falutin references and cruel wordplay are very funny. I’m not proud to admit it, but I think the best jokes in the whole thing are “snide, mean, unbelievably fast burns” (of which there are no shortage of online compilations).

I’m not great with “cringe” humor - humor derived from putting someone in an awkward situation - and while Frasier’s pompousness makes him an obvious target for an endless parade of karmic retribution, a lot of it still makes me uncomfortable.

As an example of what a Frasier sketch might look like:

imagine a situation where Frasier thinks he’s delivering a speech for a birthday but he doesn’t realize he’s actually delivering a eulogy: fate conspires such that his speech works for both situations (humorously) but makes him out to be a monster, embarrassing him.

This hinges on both brilliant wordplay and unbearable awkwardness, and I can only really enjoy about 50% of that.

A weird amount of this show happens with Frasier in a robe.

I’m not sure if that’s a useful note but it’s definitely a note: this is a robe-laden show.

I guess it’s because Frasier doesn’t own much in the way of casual-wear clothing at all: he’s either in a suit or a robe for much of the show’s runtime.

It also allows for Frasier and his enormous collection of doomed romances with beautiful women to indicate “sexytimes a-happenin’” while keeping everybody pretty much fully clothed.

I don’t think this show works without Niles, David Hyde Pierce is extremely funny and his character gives the show a lot of free reign to lean into the characters’ almost clownish pomposity and ridiculousness at full steam.

With just Frasier the joke is always on the contrast between him and the normies, but as soon as there are two of these pompous buffoons on screen suddenly you’ve got a party.

Niles is like a cartoon caricature of Frasier, all of his worst features magnified into a little gremlin to torment him and deny him the space he would need to experience any character development. I can’t think of a lot of shows that have had characters playing against, essentially, Flanderized versions of themselves and it works weirdly well and is, IMO, easily the most fun character dynamic in the whole thing.

woogh there are some rough season 7 episodes, this show kinda falls off a cliff in the back end

workplace anxiety

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Business Insider and the NYT are the most fond of these “remote work bad” hit pieces, but they forgot to tell their illustrator about that so they just drew the standard “sad person in a cubicle”.

hup

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

In “Race to El Dorado” the powerful Scientist card allows you to make your deck (of explorers) more efficient by removing (less powerful ones) them from your deck, so when we played we’d describe all of the fanciful ways that the Scientist would accidentally or intentionally kill his fellow adventurers.

“Bosewick! I need you to investigate those vines over there. Oh my, Bosewick, you’ve been consumed! Fascinating.”

Near the end of the game it had happened a lot, so every time someone’s Scientist cleared a card out of their deck the whole table would go “HUP!”, which was the sound of the now increasingly buff and unhinged Scientist just picking up one of his compatriots under the armpits like a baby and tossing them into the nearest ravine. HUP!

vince guaraldi trio

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I like some Christmas music but I’m not and have never been Christian and sometimes people shouting very specific things about the primacy of Jesus can be a little uncomfortable on the ol’ playlist -

anyways, Vince Guaraldi just plopped the Greatest Christmas Album on YouTube, and this particular album has always been a tent-pole in the ol’ winter playlist:

Jingle bells is fine although it promises a level of fun that I don’t think a one horse open sleigh is able to deliver, that is tech that has been subsumed by the snowmobile, which IS fun, although songs about it are not forthcoming.

beans

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

look, I want to try the Rancho Gordo heirloom beans that all the food bloggers are talking about but if you factor in S&H to Canada and the exchange rate, I’d be paying in the realm of $15/lb for them and that is just too much money for dried beans.

Like, I pay $11/lb for pretty good coffee beans and those are the Most Special Beans

(If you’re american they come in at ~$7/lb which is still exorbitant for dried beans, but less so)

use your phone's camera

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I can’t remember where this advice came from but I remember reading just a whole bunch of creative ways to use your phone camera to make your life easier and it actually WAS one of the few things that I would consider real, good “life hacks”.

if you write your shopping list in a dry-erase board on your fridge, you can just snap a photo of that on the way out of the house

need to remember where you parked your car? take a picture

there are loads of things where instead of taking a note, you can take a picture and have that be faster and better: remember your phone’s camera as a visual notepad

shopping at IKEA? oh BABY you should use your camera to keep track of what you intend to buy

take a picture of your hotel’s room number when you check in

need to tell somebody something about your phone? use your phone to take a picture of your pho- aw, shit, okay, this one doesn’t work unless you’ve got some mirrors

shokupan

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I have done nothing but teleport bread for three days

SHOKUPAN (~5-6 HRS)

Roux - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

125g water (250g water)
25g flour (50g flour)

roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F
cool the roux for 10 minutes+ off the heat (<110 degrees F so it doesn’t kill the yeast) while you measure out the rest of the ingredients

Dough - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

400g flour (800g flour)
215g milk (430g milk)
30g sugar (60g sugar)
4g salt (8g salt)
8g instant yeast (16g instant yeast)
60g salted butter (120g salted butter)

measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.
add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.
add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes
fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)
load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)
45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F
bake: 40 minutes

“let bread rise in a warm place”

rust result

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

me: Result is acting strange, it has different behavior in this example than in my code

r/rust: which Result were you using?

me: what do you mean, which Result?

sharpening

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

When I get time off I invariably spend some time sharpening my knives, which is probably a metaphor or something.

canadian soda is weird

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

homemade filet o' fish

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Homemade Filet o Fish Time

I’ve been getting over my fear of frying: with a big cast iron pot, a candy thermometer, and old pickle jars to discard used oil into, it’s actually very easy and rewarding.

env vars

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

database products that don’t allow you to set the username and password from environment variables, I wish you a very WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

please, i need this for my setup pipeline to be smooth

oddly familiar music

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i could swear I’ve heard this somewhere

…

no, this is much better

scales

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

no matter how hard I exercise my weight remains the same:

“LO BATT”

i wonder if diet would help

wild flower

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

people who make VRChat worlds are significantly more creative than I will ever be, is the lesson

different environments

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

A lot of cooking lore comes out of modern commercial kitchens and actually doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re not running a restaurant.

Restaurants value turning out the same exact dish, every single time, like clockwork, as efficiently as possible.

Home chefs just want to make something delicious and actually prefer if their meal is a little different each time.

Restaurants like chicken stock - because it’s lightly flavored, versatile, and clockwork-reliable. You can trust that the stock is going to be basically identical every time you use it.

Home chefs like broth - when you’re pulling flavor out of that chicken, toss some spices and onion chunks and whatever vegetable scraps you want in there: it’s more efficient and much more delicious, and it doesn’t matter if it tastes a little different every time.

Restaurant knife skills focus on efficiency and homogeneity: if the onions are always the same size, they always take the exact same amount of time to cook and taste the exact same.

Home knife skills focus on safety and ease: your goals are simply to make food smaller and not hurt yourself: however you accomplish this is fine.

Many, many home recipes are just adapted restaurant recipes and it’s important to be able to learn which parts of the recipe are vital to the flavor of the dish and which parts are simply there for the sake of reliable, prep-friendly industrial-scale production.

Home chefs are adept with substitutions (you rarely need to DO a substitution in a restaurant and you OFTEN need to do it at home) and the measure of a good home cook is more “versatility” than “scale”.

Speed is important, of course, in both, but what “speed” means in a restaurant and at home are totally different: speed in a restaurant means executing a complicated, complicated dish as quickly as possible with a production line of people helping and prepping, whereas speed at home mostly comes from simplifying.

Adam Ragusea and Internet Shaquille, on YouTube, are a few personalities out there preaching the word of de-complicating home recipes, and it’s good stuff.

A restaurant might have a guy who’s job it is is to make 500 radish florets a night, which he gets extremely fast at by virtue of doing it 10,000 times a month.

A home chef might achieve a similar efficiency by simply not bothering to add an extraneous radish floret.

One huge example of this in particular is how many recipes call for unsalted butter, and then just add more salt back in by hand. That’s a total “commercial kitchen” move.

But: buying just salted butter is simpler, and it lasts longer in your fridge (thanks to the preservative qualities of: salt).

If you can remember that there’s about 1tsp/lb of salt in salted butter, you can only ever buy just the one butter, it’ll last longer in your fridge, and it’s good for all of your butter use-cases - even if you don’t remember to remove an eighth of a teaspoon of salt from your recipe if it called for 1/4cup of unsalted butter.

Some parallels might be drawn between this and “small vs. large software development organizations” but they’d be pretty tortured analogies.

pie

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

my wife, entering the kitchen, will be faced with two opposing theories: either her husband purchased half a pie, an amount that you can buy at the supermarket and a totally reasonable size of pie to purchase for two people for dessert, brought it home, and placed it on a nice plate in advance of dinner - OR, said husband purchased an entire pie, brought it home, precisely and quickly bisected it, consumed fully half of it, and then discarded the container it came in and placed it on a plate to hide any evidence of his transgression

said husband is not available for comment because he needed a nap for some reason

WFH

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Former Amazon VP Ben Smith on admitting he was wrong to push for workers to return to the office several days a week: “As someone once asked me, ‘Have you ever noticed the only people in favor of RTO are people with large admin staffs and grown children?’ I had not, because that was me. Touche.”

Working from “home” - A mea culpa.

what's safe in the pantry?

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

my wife made this beef stroganoff with an opened chicken broth she had been keeping in the pantry

anyways, if I need to be hospitalized this right here is why

(editor’s note: I was fine)

As a quick guideline, here are things you can keep safely outside of the fridge after opening:

vinegars
oils
dry goods
rice, pasta
breads, pastries
cookies, biscuits
(unopened) tins, jars
jerky
the UNNATURAL peanut butters (you know, the good ones)
cookies, crackers
most alcohol - excepting cream-based ones and low-proof, low-sugar ones (vermouth) which should be refrigerated

basically, if it has no liquid, lots of alcohol, lots of sugar, or lots of acid you’re usually in the clear.

Jury’s kind of out on hot-sauces, ketchup and HP sauce which have a medium-high amount of sugar and acid in them: sometimes you’ll see them in someone’s pantry and go “ick”, but it’s probably fine.

Chicken broth, on the other hand, even with its high salt content, is basically just ‘warm, nourishing liquid’, you might as well put your bacteria in that agar gel that biologists use to feed it.

school bus crash

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

We all know why 6 is afraid of 7 - because 7 8 9

But do you know why 10 can’t find 11?

Burnaby to implement a new campaign reminding homes to be “extra visible”, to put up reflectors, and to “watch out for cars at night”.

vrchat vs spidey

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

mafioso types

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

mafioso types have ruined my ability to express the tautological concept that it would be terrible if something bad happened

it just sounds like a veiled threat

maybe I just don’t want a bad thing to happen

beef

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I like my beef the way I like my coffee…

kitchen business

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Things in a kitchen that means business:

Loads of little bowls
A spice grinder
Knives on a magnetic block
Hanging pans
Cast iron
A bunch of spatulas and tongs in a caddy
Oil pours
A pot full of salt

If you see a little Bluetooth speaker in someone’s kitchen, they either have ADHD, a bangin’ bread recipe, or both.

Of course you can cook great with 0/8 of these things, cooking is no place for gatekeepers.

like the databases

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Like the databases I prefer, I am eventually consistent

correction

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’d like to correct a previous post, I am told by numerous technical colleagues that this is not, in fact, Kubernetes

Oh, you’d rather work from home?

What if I were to tell you that we’ve installed cry-pods at work so that you can cry without disturbing your co-workers?

paf

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This is primarily a cat posting account with periodic breaks for everything else I do

you walk into a clearing, roll for initiative

go v. rust

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of the significant barriers I have to learning Go is just how mad it makes me

I love all languages equally.

mutable slices? string length determined by raw byte count of the UTF-8? pointers to mutable data as arguments?

i’m sorry, are you from the past?

Go’s whole community seems to have unified around a convention of single-letter variable names which is as infuriating as it is simply wrong, and the dank ass Unix wizard responsible should be retired for it.

I don’t care if your hands are falling off your body and you’re still using vi, typing the rest of the word is STILL non negotiable

you ever try to grep the letter “l”?

you don’t need to write a whole essay but you’re not even bothering with the word

anyways: here’s what I think about that, in a language even you fucking Go nerds can understand: y c g f y

words are free my good bitch

look at me, I’m using a code editor written in 1974 so I can’t simply autocomplete any variable name by pressing tab

look at me, I think that writing code is more important than reading it

Now Rust - Rust is a thing of beauty.

I’m angry at myself, for being too stupid to think seven-dimensionally enough to be able to code in Rust. Oh, the type of that code is a Maybe[Future[Async[Wrapper[Arc[Reactor[Core]]]]] and you needed a Future[Async[Arc[Wrapper]]]]? Guess you’re fucked.

But with Go, I’m angry at the language, just for having the sheer gall to just be C with a rubber mask on.

Learning Rust is like learning Haskell, or, like, Esperanto, it’s a mind-expanding paradigm that’s endlessly frustrating because you’re learning how to operate in a new, fae universe where the rules are as alien as they are unbreakable, and while you respect its beauty and power, you literally can’t do anything because you need to spend 6 more Lifetimes learning about how Hindley-Miller type systems apply to memory management.

Whereas learning Go is more like driving a manual transmission to the Staples so that you can send a fax to your doctor. You just spend the whole time going “fuck, it’s 2023, I can’t believe I still have to do this shit.”

can you tell I’m a python/javascript developer

LOOK, I’M FROM A SOFT UNIVERSE WHERE I CAN REPRESENT LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE AS TRANSFORMATIONS ON A LIST OF STRINGS

just wanna emphasize that one time I spent a whole afternoon reading about how one might attempt to build a linked list in Rust and I still don’t understand how to build a linked list in Rust

somebody wrote an entire book about how to write a Linked List in Rust

the memory safety aspect makes it slightly more complicated than building something trivial and dumb like a working nuclear reactor or an entire commercial jet

Editor’s Note: years later, I finally learned enough Rust to be dangerous and it is one of my favorite languages. On the other hand, this blog is running on Hugo (Go) and when I realized that Go HTML templates use, essentially, postfix notation, I got so mad I threw my mug at my computer screen.

essential house rules

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

we have a house rule for Oath where we replace all of the tokens with “fried chicken” tokens that are made out of real fried chicken, and also we replace all of the cards with hot sauce and coleslaw and fries, and…

it’s becoming increasingly clear that my friends have just fooled me into buying them dinner again, dang

reading while biking

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i’ve been walking-and-reading-at-the-same-time conversantly since I was 8 years old

now, let me tell you what I can’t do: I can’t bicycle and read at the same time

the one time I tried I sent myself flying over the hood of a car

now

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of the car’s driver

you know,

for parking there

I went on a 90 minute walk today, up to a park near the top of the big hill I live on, and came home

Tiff: “So, did you like the park?”

Me: “Enh, by the time I got to the park I’d been walking for 45 minutes and it was starting to rain, so I just decided to head back home.”

Tiff: “So you didn’t get to read then?”

Me: “Oh, no, I was reading the whole way.”

Tiff: “How?”

Me: “I read and walk.”

Tiff: “You can’t.”

Me: “Sure I can.”

Tiff: “Those things are mutually exclusive.”

Me: “Wrong!”

tortle power

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

This Waterdeep campaign has a sewer section and I can’t find any reddit thread about it that doesn’t at least mention the possibility of running in to four martially competent tortles and a wererat.

A Large Format Color E-Reader

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

For years, years, I’ve loved e-readers.

I mean, I carted one of these early Sony-models to Peru with me, rather than a whole mess of books:

I learned in Peru that I’m a little bit afraid of heights.

So while we were powering along narrow dirt roads, hundreds of feet above the ground, at high speeds in one of Dragoman’s adventure battletanks, instead of looking out and enjoying the stunning views, I spent most of the time watching the power levels on my thirsty little PRS-700 as they circled the drain while I read a comforting sci-fi fantasy novel about a hyper-competent but lonely telepathic woman running an interstellar businesses while dreaming about one day finding a family of her own.

Ever since, I’ve been … regularly upgrading my eReader tech. I have broken more than a few early, cheap Kindles in my time. I don’t even really own paperbacks anymore: I just don’t have room in my tiny Vancouver homes. Only ebooks.

So, now, Tiff and I have higher-end Kobo devices and we both get a lot of use out of them. (sidenote: Kindles are still great if what you’re looking for is a dirt-cheap e-reader that’s usable, quickly, although if you’re not interested in the deep Amazon library and prefer library books, or piracy, I’d recommend the Kobo e-readers instead: they’re better devices with fussier software that isn’t irrevocably tied to the Amazon Ecosystem in a way that tech people will find frustrating.)

Thing is, though, there are two kinds of book in my collection:

Novels
Not Novels

eReaders firmly replaced the Novels, sure, but what about the Not Novels? The big, lushly illustrated cookbooks? The graphic novels? The art books? The TTRPG core books? For those, why, you’d need an e-reader that supports color e-ink and is over 10" large!

This device doesn’t exist.

If you want a nice eReader for that kind of content, you’re looking at an iPad: with gorgeous color response and a print-like crispness and resolution, why even bother with e-ink anymore?

Well, there are some reasons you might want e-ink:

it’s markedly better for eyestrain, which (at 14+ hours a day of staring at screens uninterrupted) I absolutely suffer from.
the low power draw of e-ink makes the devices much more resilient against having to be charged regularly, which is super nice for book
a device for reading is for reading, and not for distracting yourself with ~~twitter~~ mastodon and youtube

Anyways, it’s a moot point: such a device has been theoretically possible but still on the horizon since… well, forever, really. I’ve been google-searching for “large color e-ink reader” for ages and while the technology has always been theoretically possible, no contenders have ever appeared in this space, ever.

I followed the Triton color e-ink technology: pretty, but too expensive and slow to make its way into any consumer technology.

And, last couple of years, color e-ink devices have started to pop up, starting with the Pocketbook Color 3 years ago:

PocketBook Color review: is color E Ink finally ready?

There’s still no color Kindle, but E Ink Kaleido is promising…

This device, however, was merely a promising tech demo, with a small screen, resolution issues (at the time, black and white content would display at 300dpi while color content would display at just 72dpi), and a refresh rate measured in what seemed like days, it just wasn’t quite ready for prime-time. The black-and-white performance of the Kaleido screens also isn’t quite as crisp and perfect as the black-and-white performance of top-end B&W screens: the white of a blank page on a Kaledo screen is grayish, nowhere the picture-perfect contrast of the Kindle Paperwhite (sidenote: which, of course, is so named for how good it is at exactly this.)

So I kept checking on things, year over year, and things kept getting sharper, and faster. Gallery came out, offering true 300dpi color e-ink, although it remains slow, whereas Kaleido’s new screens increased their color dpi to 150 and got significantly larger, cheaper, brighter, and faster.

Now it seems like there may well actually be a true contender in this space - two of them, actually, as Onyx and BigMe have two competing devices both using the newest 10.3" Kaleido 3 color screen:

The new screens also have adjustable tradeoffs between resolution and speed: they can provide a screen that’s crisp and slow, but also lower resolution and 12fps - look, 12Hz may not be the most impressive numbers to put on the board in the game of monitors, but this is e-ink that’s borderline fast enough for choppy, non-gaming general computing applications.

This is… well, a thing! That actually exists!

A thing that I’ve been waiting for for 15 years!

Huh, neat.

Oh my… it’s arrived… and it’s pretty interesting.

Initial thoughts:

The Color

the color is significantly less vibrant and beautiful than I had hoped it would be, especially in fast-refresh mode where it has a very “VGA monitor” feel.

It’s the most colorful and vibrant eInk screen I’ve ever owned and it’s still a far sight from real color paper.

The Fast-Refresh

This is a must faster refresh speed than I’m used to on older eInk screens, It’s quite usable.

Still not, like, “tablet” fast, though.

The Umph

Even the relatively mighty Kobo Libra 2 has a 1Ghz processor with 512Mb of RAM. A badly optimized ePub - or, worse, a large PDF - will bring the poor Libra 2 to its knees. I was counting, like, 5000ms+ between page refreshes while I was trying to read a technical manual in there, and that’s on one of the most powerful eReaders on the market. Awful. (the performance on small, lightweight ePubs is quite good, however)

Not on this device, though, this thing is a beast. I loaded a Dungeons and Dragons PDF (over 100MB of unoptimized, hand-scanned PDF goodness) into this Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C (4-core, 4GB RAM) and it handles like a dream. Buttery smooth page turns, working pinch-to-zoom, it’s very good.

The Weight

At 479g (“about a pound”) it weighs twice as much as the Kobo Libra 2, about a third of the weight of a Macbook Air, and about exactly as much as an iPad Air.

A bit chonky for one-handed reading, but it’s meant to replace cookbooks and textbooks which were ALSO a bit chonky for one-handed reading. (sidenote: That’s right, J. Kenji Lopez Alt, I’m putting your HUGE COOKING TOMES on blast.)

Battery Life

Good!

To Be Honest

I think that unless you’re absolutely in love with e-ink screens, an iPad is going to be a far superior experience for you,

…but so far I think this thing is still pretty great.

the waterdeep campaign begins

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

yeah, I make my own custom cards

self driving

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Yeah, I could get behind self driving cars.

I mean, that’s the safest place to be, right? Certainly don’t want to be in front of them.

hungry?

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

you haven’t even touched your mega man of crackers

patreon's marketing

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Patreon’s marketing is intended to appeal to their 4 key demographics:

K-Pop Star
Forest Pervert
Black Barbie
Idiot

twilight struggle struggle

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

One of my most actually unpopular opinions is that I think Twilight Struggle, Board Game Geek’s #1 game for like 10 years in a row, is not as fun as that #1 position makes it seem.

Look at this bullshit:

you want to experience Twilight Struggle, but fun? there’s a game for that, it’s called Watergate

I swear to god, 100% of Watergate’s design appears to be “let’s make Twilight Struggle, but good”.

tv head

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

“Why do you love TV-headed avatars so much?”

well, one of them taught me how to program in 1994

HI, I'M YOUR COLOR COMPUTER

huge if true

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

trollskull P&L

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m running “Waterdeep: Dragon Heist” for my friends, in D&D, right now.

Based on some back of the envelope math, fixing up the tavern in Trollskull alley in Waterdeep would take about 8.5 in-game years to justify the expense involved in renovating and licensing it.

The operating expenses are so high in Waterdeep and the benefits of running a business are so low in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, that the expected return is a whopping 4gp a week: given that it takes 1250gp to get the place up and running, so I feel like there may be some justification to house rule it so that fixing up the tavern isn’t a terrible, terrible idea.

Like: our players long rest about once per session, sometimes once every two sessions, and we average about three sessions a month, so the Tavern, rules-as-written, produces about 2gp per real life human month. At that rate, none of us will live to see the tavern pay itself off: it’s just a useless money-sink for the players.

Fixing this (so that the tavern isn’t a waste of time) will depend on how often you play D&D with your friends and how quickly time advances in your own campaigns.

If you quadruple the output of successful rolls, the place pays itself off in only 17 weeks, which is within the realm of possibility for the game, and it also makes the rolls feel much weightier: on a critical tavern success you can make hundreds of gp in a week.

Anything that gives the players a +10 bonus on the Tavern Roll is worth ~35gp, which you can do a bunch of times, like, 7 or 8 times and have it still pay off for the players. If they do something heroic enough that people want to talk about it or think of a clever way to improve business to the tavern? A temporary +10 to the Tavern roll, sure.

If they’re regularly, actively adding a bunch of +10s to their Tav rolls under this system through Gameplay, they could have the place paid off in ~4 in-game weeks.

“What if my players get so obsessed with optimizing their tavern operations that they don’t spend any time adventuring” well I guess we’re playing co-op SimTavern now, so long as they’re having fun it’s cool by me.

That still might be too slow, though, a “week” in the game is 10 days, that’s 10 full long rests, if you think of a session as maybe containing one, maybe two long rests, it could take a whiiiiile.

We can also make this much faster by rolling on the table Every Day rather than Every Week. More fun: a roll on every long rest. This lowers the expected value of the roll to 31gp a day (the bonus of the roll is determined by how many days between rolls), but it just means they’ve gotta hustle on those +10 bonuses more.

If they’re doing about three heroic or tavern-friendly things per long rest, that has the place paid off in 8-9 long rests, which is much closer to where I’d want it to be.

Keep in mind if we assume that our players long rest about every 2 hours, we play about 4 hours a month, that means that the tavern is profitable in about 4 real life human months.

Now we just set our tavern maintenance cost to 6gp/day aaand:

d100	Result
01-20	A disaster! You must pay 2d10 x 10gp!
21-30	You must pay 2x the business’s full maintenance cost: 12gp
31-40	You must pay the business’s full maintenance cost: 6gp.
41-60	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day: 0
61-80	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day, plus a profit of 2d6 x 10gp
81-90	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day, plus a profit of 2d8 x 20gp
91+	The business covers its own maintenance cost for the day, plus a profit of 6d10 x 10gp

Editor’s Note: years later and this tavern has been reliably churning out money for the players. It feels satisfying, I think I picked good numbers here, and I’m still not entirely certain if the tavern’s high cost of opening has been fully paid off (we had one very long night that took a few months to resolve), but it’s fine.

bard instrument options

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

apple

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Remember when Microsoft got a stern talking to from the government for having the audacity to include their applications bundled in their OS, and then anti-trust law got its anus torn clear out and Apple just made an OS that you’re not allowed to program for at all unless you run it by Apple first

tiny little panels

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

There is a place at the mall called “Solar Orthodontics” and I can’t help but think that those solar panels would be too small to be practical

refactor whining

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

stinky

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of the greatest things about cats is that they’re, like, some of the most terrifying and prolific murderers in the animal kingdom, they retain 100% of those killer instincts, but we’re so much bigger than them that we can pick them up and call them “mr. stinky” and snuggle them and there’s nothing they can do about it

he’s the hero this bathroom deserves

oh hai what’s up

(cronch)

burn treatment

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Every time I burn myself (and it’s pretty often, I cook and am clumsy) I run cold water on the burn, which is what you’re supposed to do for not terribly serious burns to keep any further damage from setting in. It also feels nice.

Thing is, that mostly stops it from hurting until the hand dries completely.

This will keep working for hours, if you want it to. If you want to avoid feeling the pain from the burn, you can just keep your hand wet for, like, 8 solid hours. But if you ever stop with the cold water, it starts to hurt again. If you just tough it out through that phase for, like, five minutes, it won’t be so bad, but… well, when do you want to do that?

car show

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

My mom says that the car show had a parade last night.

“Are you sure that wasn’t just traffic?”

a chill album

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

wait, why do I feel so happy and relaxed right now?

it’s the background music that came on

longhouse

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

it’s funny, I went to a longhouse one time on a class trip and I was really confused, I was like “this is a widehouse”, but then my teacher pivoted me 90 degrees and I was like “oh, I get it now”

bone lab

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

as a VR developer i could not be more disappointed with what “BONELAB” turned out to be, it’s not even 18+

i’m joking

obviously I’m not a VR developer

I’m a non-VR developer at a VR company

challenge rating

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

in D&D, you build encounters using monsters’ “challenge rating”

deer have a “challenge rating” of 0, so you could create a challenging and well-balanced encounter for a level one party:

one billion deer

corporate apologetics

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

😔 “We’re listening, self-reflecting, and making changes to our approach, and we understand that you feel threatened by our last interaction. We’d like to apologize to how we came off in our earlier interaction.”

😠 “You SHIT in my CHEERIOS.”

😔 “We hear you and we would like to apologize for any confusion and angst the new state of your cereal has caused you.”

😠 “Don’t POOP where FOOD is!”

😔 “We would like to assure you that we will be making changes to our policy vis-a-vis how we manage breakfast cereals going forward.”

😠 “WHAT CHANGES!?!?”

disappointing in a good way

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I love Taco Time.

It is a Pacific Northwestern tex-mex fast food restaurant, and it is old enough that it largely predates things like “flavor”.

Taco Time food is not good food, not in my opinion.

It’s reliably a little disappointing, but - not …bad.

That’s hard to put words to: that combination of microwaved beef and super mild hot sauce is exactly the right thing, sometimes. I think it just hits a nostalgic note with me. I like it because I liked it when I was a kid.

I do also think that it has always, always been better than Taco Bell, although that is the worlds lowest bar.

fantasy soccer team

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

One mage, in Baldur’s Gate 3, can summon something like 15 different NPCs if you stack them.

This gives you such an enormous amount of turn order advantage that it doesn’t matter that most of these NPCs don’t do much.

I call it the “fantasy soccer team” strategy and it’s very strong, but my wife asked me to stop because it’s not fun to co-operate with someone who gets 17 turns per round.

Tiffany: “Don’t mind if I do”

Me: hehehehehe

man I fuckin’ love party tim

Struggling to Choose a TTRPG in This, The Year 2023

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Prussia Enters The Chat

In the early 1800’s, Prussian nerds got involved in das taktische kriegsspiel.

pictured: Prussian nerd.

Cartography and probability theory were really hot right now and so some high-level officers got way, way in to complicated miniatures games.

the year is 1824 and your nerd son is presenting this to the literal actual King of Prussia, and… he loves it.

By the Franco-Prussian war the average Prussian Officer is basically this guy:

ii. Supply: Wargamers that meet the requirements of VI.D.i. may attempt a Light Bulb Change if they also meet the following Supply conditions:

ii. 1.: They are currently stacked in a hex with a Light Bulb (LB); OR, they are within three hexes of a magazine.

ii. 2.: They are currently in the ZOC of an LB emplacement.

EXCEPTION: LBC’s may NOT be attempted if the LB is currently at full strength.

Surprising everyone, Prussia won the Franco-Prussian war so hard that a Germany happened, mostly by abusing early line-of-sight rules and moving large objects in front of high value units.

As a result, das taktische kriegsspiel started to get really popular in all of the poncy officer circles.

100 years later? Still popular with nerds.

pictured: a group of men standing about measuring their miniatures

Wargaming has gone off in its own weird directions over the years and now involves this kind of nonsense:

Lord of the Rings was written during World War 2, by World War 1 veteran Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien, based on his 1930’s children’s story The Hob Boat (later renamed “The Hobbit” when it was determined that a small pleasant man would make a more relatable main character than the original plucky tugboat named Hob).

It took fantasy realms of the sort imagined by socialist poet William Morris and combined them with a mishmash of epic mythology, an almost encyclopedic attention to detail and a great big fucking war. The book was slightly less popular than The Bible, and chubby nerds with wooden swords started showing up in wastebaskets and lockers across America.

Basically as soon as it was released, some of the wargaming nerds from earlier start taking their elaborate battle simulations and trying to figure out how to simulate the Battle of the Black Gate, and as a result they were forced to try to figure out some real bullshit like how to treat a fanciful made-up wizard like literal artillery.

i don’t know how this line from a banned pornographic film ended up in a Reese’s commercial, but history is a funny thing

Fantasy wargaming starts out as largely an ad-hoc set of add-on rules for existing game systems, but some borks with a photocopier scrape together some of the most popular folk rules into…

That’s right, it’s not even D&D yet.

Oddly, what people gravitated to was not the large battles, but… like, little individual hero moments.

Ugh, I GUESS, we can make some rules for that.

It had just THREE classes:

Fighting Man
Magic User
Greg

This Dungeons & Dragons was still deeply rooted in wargaming realism, but it established the canon for a lot of stuff that would form the basis of Every RPG You Will Ever Play, like Levels, Hit Points, Classes, and, of course, Greg.

First Edition also introduced some bad ideas that remained very sticky for much longer than they should have, like rolling for character stats. Are you sad that your friend gets to play as a 7-foot tall golden god who can kick through walls while you’re a potato farmer with 2 hit points? Well maybe you should learn to roll dice better!

“Whoops, I guess you were just born unlucky” is accurate, realistic, and not terribly fun, all three of which were properties that appealed to wargamers.

One neat thing about the original sourcebooks is that they ask players to take, not just their class roles, but also “simulation” roles: one player was the Caller, responsible for collecting and reporting on the party’s group decisions, one player was the Mapper, responsible for preparing and maintaining the maps (the DM’s maps were not shared with the team), and another player would be the Ledgerman.

The unfairness of this system was balanced out by its astonishing lethality. The wargamers’ dedication to Accurate Simulation meant that, golden god or not, the only way to reliably deal damage to a dragon was with indigestion.

The “Tomb of Horrors” module was initially created in the 80s as an elaborate and cruel prank, where just about every single room was a greased chute sitting above a pool of acid. It became unexpectedly popular to this day with people who do not understand that it was never intended to be fun or usable. (sidenote: Note that this could also describe C++.)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition introduced “THAC0”, a simplified system for determining whether or not things could hit other things, that people still mock to this day.

Ultimately, D&D, AD&D, and AD&D2E are all pretty broadly cross-compatible with one another and 30 years of bonus content, fan adventures, and errata build up.

People who are attracted to the charm, open-endedness, unfairness, and shocking lethality of the early stuff are now way in to OSR, which has now existed for so long that nobody is sure which exact era it’s supposed to be nostalgic for.

Over the years, the D&D writers started to learn that people liked to feel heroic and powerful and have story arcs, and moved more towards systems of rules that would let players build overpowered edgelords in capes.

We need to skip ahead somewhat or you’ll get bored. THE YEAR 2000.

A fourteen year old Curtis is introduced to D&D via a 3rd Edition he finds at a Chapters.

This is an edition widely despised by the D&D fandom as being an over-simplified babytimes D&D for people who can’t be assed to have collected 20 years of AD&D2 errata. How dare this upstart “Wizards of the Coast” come in and replace THAC0 with AC?

Fourteen year old Curtis doesn’t know any of this. He makes a couple of homebrew adventures with the system as written and has a good time.

this graphic design has the mystical property of “looking like it’s made out of cheap gold and fake gems” despite being… art, that presumably they could have changed to not look like costume jewelry.

Thanks to the sweet mercy of ALL RECORDS FROM THIS ERA LOST, we do not have any remaining shreds of Curtis High School Fantasy Drawings. Thank your lucky stars.

I haven’t played enough 2E to have a firm opinion about this, but my bias is that 3rd Edition and it’s eventual 3.5-errata are a firm, firm improvement over the 2nd Edition. The WoTC team came in and swept out a lot of cruft and replaced it with some satisfying crunchy rules.

This also marked another great big step towards “the player as superhero”. This is not an accurate medieval simulation, this is a simulation of the heroes of a pulp fantasy novel having great big adventures.

I mostly remember D&D 3rd Edition as being kind of a pain in the ass to run - it’s a fussy system with a lot of systems that are easier just to ignore entirely or fudge.

I had simplified variant rules for Languages (everybody speaks Common), weight capacity and encumbrance (you can carry it unless you can’t) , non-magical healing (You heal everything overnight, rather than healing, like, 1d6 hit points a day for a whole week.)

I was always the DM. That’s still the case now: finding people willing to volunteer to DM remains a few-and-far-between kind of thing.

Aside from still being a dense, dense game, there are some 3E problems.

Fighter, Rogue, Mage, Cleric

Game’s designed to be played with these four, pretty much. You can fuss with it a little, replace the Fighter with a Paladin or Barbarian, or replace the Rogue with a Bard, but that’s about as creative as you can get with your team composition without leaving some very real holes in your party.

(This is also why I had to have a house-rule about non-magical healing and loads of healing potion: nobody ever volunteered to play as a Cleric.)

Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards

One of the reasons that the optimal composition of a D&D team is “Fighter, Rogue, Mage, Cleric” is that the fighter has to carry the team’s damage output at early levels, and then starts to get useless at late levels. That’s not great.

Impossible AC

Roll-to-hit with bonuses that scale by level is tough to balance. It’s possible to kit out a character (or a monster) with equipment that makes them essentially un-hittable except in the case of a random critical hit.

Huge Level Scaling

A single level 2 character could probably wipe the floor with a whole team of level 1 characters. The level 2 character is doing significantly more damage, has a big bonus to AC making them much harder to hit, they have twice as many hit points.

This tends to mean that every unit of content the player interacts with either needs to be tailored to exactly their level or it’s going to be somewhere on a wide gradient from ridiculously easy to astonishingly lethal.

This can be particularly hard on homebrew DMs, who already struggle to balance their encounters! The “CR” system, which attempts to build fair and balanced encounters by giving different creatures a “threat rating”, is… well, it’s not great. It’s absolutely likely to build a CR-appropriate battle that’s impossible for players to win, or a total cakewalk.

I Hit It With My Sword / Uh, Let Me Check My Spellbook

The difference in complexity between a fighter and a wizard in D&D 3E is also enormous. With fighter, the complexity is mostly in making sure that you have good equipment and your strength is high. Your option, on your turn, then, is mostly some variation on “I hit it with my sword”.

More complex classes, though, have a lot of tactical flexibility, and that tactical flexibility is represented as a lot of rules they need to remember. This means that some combats will have fighters checking out as they go “I hit it with my sword” and then … checking out for a while, because it’s not going to be their turn for 10 minutes and that’s time they could be checking their phone.

Grid vs. Theater of the Mind

From the manual, heck, from the community it’s unclear whether D&D is expected to be played on a grid, with miniatures, or in a more ad-hoc descriptive system where players locations are described narratively.

In fact, this is part of a bigger topic…

Wargaming vs. Improv

If you were to draw a long line, and mark one end with “Strategic Wargaming” and the other end with “Theatre Sports”, D&D falls somewhere firmly in the middle. In fact, that’s one of its strengths!

To be honest, I’ve always been more in the “Theatre Sports” camp. D&D is a collaborative storytelling tool, not a strategic wargame. If I wanted to play WH40K, I could remortgage my house to buy miniatures and find some people to do that with, but I was an obnoxious theatre kid.

But there are a lot of rules and systems in D&D that only really make sense in a tight, focused tactical strategy combat game. 5ft differences in character speed in a tactical grid combat game are a lot more meaningful than in an improvisational radio show.

Deciding what and how your D&D is going to be tailored for your group is part of the challenge of D&D, I think.

4th Edition

4th Edition addresses a lot of problems with 3rd Edition, and introduces a lot of new ones, by deciding to firmly choose between the “tactical wargaming” and “improvisational storytelling” camps. 4th Edition is a tactical wargame, in particular, one that intended heavily to lean on computerized dungeon mastering to make all of the rules possible for a single DM to run.

The person leading the digital design team killed his wife in a murder-suicide, though, which may be indicative of more serious problems getting this product to market - the computer-half of the D&D4E equation never showed up, despite many promises in the source books.

At the time, I was kinda hard on 4th Edition: what I wanted was a D&D that was less crunchy, not more crunchy - but, not gonna lie, under the hood the system that 4th Edition presenteid was significantly more mechanically sound than D&D 3rd Edition, up-to-and-including balancing wizards and martial characters much better and presenting much more balanced and interesting fight scenarios.

With classes divided into DPS (“Striker”), Tank (“Defender”), Crowd Control (“Controller”), and Buff (“Leader”), and the game making it clear that all combats were designed to be completed by a party composed of One Of Each Of Those Things, the designers did a lot of work to make the combats of the game varied, complex, and satisfying.

Healing? Simplified aggressively.

Every character class gets a menu of options that they can choose from every round, with varying levels of resource expenditure for each.

All of the non-combat stuff? Mostly pushed to the side. 4E adventures were mostly a series of mechanically satisfying board game setups lined up one after the other.

In fact, there’s a game that does this even better, and it’s Gloomhaven.

Gloomhaven

Gloomhaven isn’t a TTRPG. It’s a board game.

It’s really good, and I think it’s actually exactly what 4E wished it could be: a series of self-contained, well-balanced, interesting, complex tactical puzzles lined up one-after-the-other for the players, tied together by a paper thin story.

It’s also hard as nails. The balance in Gloomhaven isn’t about making you feel powerful, it’s balanced towards making you feel desperate as you are just on the verge of running out of resources and letting your whole team down.

(This is how a lot of Gloomhaven games turn out. I find it very stressful, actually?)

Also, and this is, I think, part of the problem with 4E: this has gone too far into not being a TTRPG anymore.

By trying to make something mechanically sound, the result is a system that is only mechanically sound and doesn’t support narrative play as much at all any more.

FATE

So, if what you don’t want is a tough tactical puzzle, maybe you want a system that leans, full steam, into the collaborative storytelling aspect of D&D.

FATE does away with the combat system almost entirely. Imagine D&D if everything was a skill check, even “fighting”.

This actually kinda grooved a lot more with my style: the parts of D&D that I tended to enjoy being describing a scene or situation and seeing how my players would react creatively to it.

FATE’s also an enormously flexible and customizable system. I ended up building a whole Cowboy Bebop-inspired FATE mod, called Seatbelts, which I tried to run on Roll20 and which fell through after a handful of sessions due to scheduling issues and just not being very fun. In our first session, my friend Dan immediately wandered away from the rest of the party and off of the main adventure path and did his own thing, and my younger brother and sister-in-law tried to share a computer and she fell asleep.

Roll20 is also not a very good pick for this kind of RPG, I think.

13th Age

I swore off trying to run games for a good while.

Eventually, though, some friends of mine invited me to play a game of 13th Age with them, and I got to join in as a rogue.

I played as Vance Valiant, brave, wealthy, and world-renowned hero (no skills, no feats, no fighting ability), and Pif Also, his personal manservant and squire, who was a Rogue who did all of the actual work. Any time there was an actual battle, Vince would hide immediately, and it became immediately clear to anybody that Vance was little more than a spoiled failson who was chasing adventure to try to stoke his personal brand, and Pif was a put-upon mercenary ass who was mostly just in it for the money.

You know:

This was very fun, and the game was just getting started, when a COVID and a pregnancy or seven happened and the whole game fell apart once mo'.

13th Age, Again

So, a while later I decide I’m going to run a game of my own again, and I remember 13th Age being pretty fun.

This time, I pour my entire ass into it and build a whole workflow the game in Miro of all things, a whiteboard tool.

13th Age was made by the D&D writers who left Wizards of the Coast around the time that they were working on 4th Edition, on account of they didn’t want to build a strategic wargame.

13th Age was instead designed to work a lot like 3rd Edition, but with a lot of very practical and thoughtful simplifications and ideas borrowed from games like FATE to make it more narratively satisfying and creative.

Here are some of my favorite things from 13th Age, things that I might port to future game systems if I can hack it:

The “Escalation Die” adds +1 to everyone’s attack and damage rolls, every round of the battle, escalating battle’s lethality and seriousness every turn that it goes on, and giving the players a chance to take on even very very hard battles if they can just hold on a while. This speeds battles up!
No multiclassing: this has always been a houserule for me, anyways, because I don’t have all damn day.
One Unique Thing: players are asked to come up with one thing that makes their player entirely and completely unique in the world. This can be pretty much anything, and it’s a wildly creative prompt to juice a character’s backstory. “I am the only son of the Demon Prince”.
Replacing skills with Backgrounds means that you can just say “I used to be a scholar” and the job of any given skill check is trying to explain why being a scholar would give you a bonus to breaking windows. (“I, uh… needed to steal… books?”)

13th Age’s systems are designed for Theatre of the Mind combat explicitly, with ranges like “close up” and “far away” rather than measurements in exact feet.

There are also things I didn’t like about 13th Age:

The game insists that each character have a personal connection to one of the game’s Icons, who are major power players in the game’s universe, and based on Icon Rolls the DM has to find some way to work in little Icon Moments with these, like, Level 20 Worldbending Megacharacters every single session.
The game also has Gods, who are extremely ill-defined.
The Background system seems conceptually easy, but actually players would often struggle to describe how they could use their history of being a fletcher to run faster. Just having the skills laid out in the 3E style is much easier for players to wrap their heads around. “That’s Athletics, I have that!”

It’s not just me! Nobody likes Icons:

13th Age also had few-to-no published adventures, a tiny bestiary, and limited-at-best lore, so you were (especially early on) basically handed a pile of characters and monsters and told “good luck, have fun, don’t die”.

I had a lot of fun with 13th Age and it was really good!

I’d have kept this game going but the group fell apart after a while due to the oft-grim reaper of games: scheduling issues and childrens.

Blades in the Dark

At some point I picked up a Blades in the Dark book and wanted to try it. And I did! And it was fun! It’s very much a game in the FATE mold: all skill checks, no combat mechanics, but it’s much more well-defined and crunchy than FATE is, and it all happens in a very specific, very well defined and quite small universe. Everyone’s Duskvol is a little different, but every game of BiTD happens in Duskvol.

Blades in the Dark is, I think, the closest example of the almost entirely narrative-driven game that I’ve ever tried: it’s a wonderful and focused expression of the FATE system and it’s very, very good.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s really hard to do. It’s hard to run and it’s hard to play. The game is, often, too open to interpretation. All imagination, no crunch.

This is something that I’d never really thought about, because I’d been looking for a game that did a better job of emphasizing the creativity and flexibility of D&D without all of the heavyweight strategic crunch:

Replacing it ALL with improv is EXHAUSTING. For EVERYONE.

If we really were running a radio show, this would be the perfect system, but we’re not.

It’s exhausting to be that on all night. You tell me I need to think up an entire heist, on the fly, right now?

….

Wait a Minute

The D&D alternatives that got really mechanically precise, like 4E and Gloomhaven, felt too mechanical.

The D&D alternatives that got really creative and narrative focused are exhaustingly improvisational and give us way too much rope to hang ourselves with.

On top of that, I want a prewritten adventure to work from, dang it!

Maybe the right balance was just regular ol’ dungeons and dragons, all along?

Baldur’s Gate 3

So, uh, Baldur’s Gate 3 came out and it’s easily, easily, no question, Game of The Year 2023.

Unless Cities Skylines 2 happens to be a real barn-burner, I think that’s already decided.

And it’s… D&D 5th Edition. Slightly modified 5th edition to make it a little more workable in a video game format, but 5th edition, nonetheless.

And I’m having a blast with it! I’m really engaging with the mechanics! It has interesting, tactical combat, like a lot of my favourite games. I’ve really liked all of the Larian games. XCOM. Fallout 2. Jagged Alliance 2.

wait a minute

Do I LIKE crunchy tactical combat?

Have I liked it all along?!?

Maybe it’s time to go back to just D&D. I’m having so much fun with Baldur’s Gate 5E, I could just run that, right?

Let’s Talk 5th Edition

The D&D team ALSO wanted to go back to their 3E roots and make a game that was a bit less of a tactical wargame. Here we have D&D 5E, a game that makes a whole bunch of 13th-Age-Like simplifications to the original 3.5E formula, but still feels a lot like Dungeons and Dragons.

To be honest, 5th Edition seems pretty ideal. It’s got a lot of everything - fun crunch, fun improvisation, loads of prewritten adventures - it’s a great system.

I have one and only one qualm about 5th Edition:

maaan, we all remember how Hasbro made everybody in D&D mad, right?

They walked a lot of that stuff what made everybody mad back, but it doesn’t matter: we know that Hasbro considers D&D undermonetized. 6th Edition, “D&D One”, is incoming, and what Hasbro wants is for D&D to be hosted on a subscription-backed digital platform.

I want D&D, but… not, y’know?

Pathfinder

“It’s D&D, but not.”

Do you know what happened when I tried to log in to my old Paizo account from when I bought a cheap humble bundle containing a bunch of Pathfinder books? It was running on a cgi-bin and it took like 30 seconds.

Paizo is not building a subscription-backed digital platform. Their website seems to struggle with the idea of JavaScript. I don’t think Paizo could digital service their way out of a wet paper bag.

What’s Pathfinder?

Well, originally, it was 3.5E, again.

Every system, 4E, 5E, 13th Age, Pathfinder, is just 3.5E under the hood. 3.5E was very influential.

I’m not as down with the Pathfinder history as the rest of the community, but the Pathfinder community have been the ones running D&D 3.5E a lot and paying attention to all of the rules really closely.

See, Paizo used to be, uh, the ones publishing Dragon Magazine, a quarterly supplement for D&D containing loads of variant rules and micro-adventures:

The mountains of lore and errata they produced were half of the reason that D&D had a reputation for being Too Complicated.

Then 4th Edition came out, with a very restrictive license, and Dragon magazine was worried that they wouldn’t actually own any of the content that they produced for it.

And so was Pathfinder born, a system that’s almost but not quite completely identical to D&D 3.5E.

With the popularity of 5E and the almost 20-year-old crustiness of 3.5E, Pathfinder started to work on updates to their core engine, but they didn’t go nearly as far down the path of clarity and simplification as 5E did. Pathfinder Second Edition is the result of this.

Pathfinder’s ORC license is much more consumer-friendly than 5E’s OGL license.

Pathfinder’s setting is just… No-Name Forgotten Realms:

“welcome to Baldor’s Big Door, gateway to Cavernus”

So, let’s talk about some of the differences between Pathfinder 2E and D&D 5E:

I’m gonna tl;dr this one down to the buttons: 5E is simpler. Pathfinder hasn’t been sanding off the rough edges of 3.5E, it’s been devoting years and years to adding more and more and more of them. Pathfinder is nothing but rough edges at this point.

Pathfinder is harder and more complicated than D&D.

Pathfinder has a lot of published adventures (nice!) but those published adventures are tuned to be so difficult that the kind of people who count D&D as their one-and-only-hobby find them balanced and challenging. BUT that challenge can be sanded down somewhat.

I could do what Baldur’s Gate 3 does and have a the oldest and most powerful god of death just wander into camp one day and start handing out $200 resurrections for Player Characters Only.

As a result, though, Pathfinder is much more complete and balanced than D&D, as far as I can tell? You’re really unlikely to put your characters in a situation where they get unfairly TPKed or there are huge balance issues between characters because the game is really, really focused on making sure that the combat is balanced, and strategic.

So, Pathfinder is a D&D but a little closer to the Gloomhaven side.

Pathfinder is very much the Linux to D&D’s Windows.

Also, I mean that in both a good way and an incredibly derisive way:

Anyways

I say all of this because I currently am juggling some purchasing decisions.

I know I want to run something set in either a Magical University or Hell, and also, I would like a pre-written adventure please, because I’m busy and lazy and building my own dungeons is hard.

Either I can pick up a copy of the 5E sourcebooks, and Strixhaven (which is set in a magical university) and Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus (which is set in hell)

I can pick up a copy of the Pathfinder sourcebooks, and Strength of Thousands (which is also set in a magical university).

I’m currently looking at both in cheap-as-pirated-PDF versions to try and help figure out which is the best direction, here.

After Reading Strixhaven And Strength of Thousands

I don’t want to run either of these.

Strixhaven is charming but it’s really, really underdeveloped as both a campaign setting AND a campaign. It’s like a Fun Story Pamphlet.

Most of the Strixhaven-running-community are energized by the fact that Strixhaven is nothing more than a skeleton that they have to build a LOT of meat around, but that seems exhausting to me.

As for Strength of Thousands? No… it’s just not… very fun sounding.

Editor’s Note, Months Later

We ended up playing Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. It was great, although past a certain point (like, chapter 1.5) our own adventures started to overtake the often pretty bad prewritten adventure and expand out into their own thing. Which… is good, actually, I think?

Editor’s Note, Months Later Still:

So, Quinns did a whole THING explaining the connection between wargaming and modern board gaming and…

while I was watching it, I was thinking “I already know a lot of this, did I do a ton of research on this a while back?”

and so I search my notes for “kriegsspiel” and find this article

apparently I did

ah yes, the genders

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

real fake news

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

stepmania

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

it’s alive! ALIVE!

systemD

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

a lot of people in the linux ecosystem are mad about systemd but I don’t see what’s not to like about an anime where people race cool toyotas

zapp kitten

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Zapp is a very cute adult cat, but he was weapons grade adorable as a kitten.

grate butter

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, crumbling or dicing butter for a recipe can be a bit of a pain, but did you know you can just grate it, like cheese?!?

I Made... A Visual Novel? Really?

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Skip To The Visual Novel

So, funny story.

I’ve been experimenting with storytelling tools for a while. That’s what my last post was about: storytelling tools and dialogue systems. That post was MONTHS ago. We’ve come a long way since then.

I’ve always wanted to make graphic novels, but, unfortunately, I have pretty mediocre art and writing and discipline skills: instead of becoming a better artist or writer, my plan is to simply wow people as best as I can with technological superiority.

And what I realized, eventually, was that I was … just kind-of building a Visual Novel engine.

After digging way in to Godot and building some node-based scene structures in there, with animated text and dialogue puppets, I was even more convinced: I think I really am building a Visual Novel engine.

So, given that, it was time to finally just go try RenPy. Seriously, there’s a well-liked tool for this kind of thing already.

Worst case scenario you learn a bunch of stuff.

And, you know what? RenPy had just about every feature I had wanted to build, already. It’s done. It’s a complete product. It lacks some of the high-end features I was building towards in Godot - namely: skinnable, animated puppets and text animations that are controllable down-to-the-letter - but it HAS features that I need and haven’t even started working on yet, like transition effects, menus, and conditional statements.

Neat.

So, my wife goes out of town to visit her mom. I stay home to take care of our cat - and in my boredom and loneliness I watch some old episodes of Columbo.

You know, because the recent show “Poker Face” was just Rian Johnson writing a love letter to old episodes of Columbo - after watching 10 episodes of Natasha Lyonna expertly pulling her imitation of the Peter Falk Shuffle, I just had to revisit the original.

As a result of learning about RenPy and shotgunning several consecutive episodes of Columbo, I make a little pledge to myself:

I’m going to make an episode of Columbo into a RenPy visual novel.

Now, at the time, July 11th, I figure “this is going to be easy”. No problem. Ezpz. I will be done in 2 weeks. (I honestly thought this: I am a fool. )

I did some basic experimentation with it: WASM web export seems to work fine, I could even run the WASM website on my phone, it seemed like a slam dunk.

This is another thing I’ve been doing lately, but I’ve been developing projects in the awful, awful 19.5:9 vertical aspect ratio of phones when I work on… any new project.

The idea is, I think, is that it presents an unpleasant but acceptable interface for web users, but pretty verifiably looks good on phones.

Now, finally, instead of endlessly building tools, it’s my responsibility to sit down and just grind out some damn content.

And… grind I did!

I learned the basics of RenPy and sat down to pump out a script. I based it very, very heavily off of “Death Lends a Hand”, a fan-favorite episode.

I also, almost immediately, wandered way, way off-script. Certain elements bear a passing similarity to Death Lends a Hand, but the final script ended up almost impossibly weirder.

“Detective Capilano”. I couldn’t just outright put actual TV character Columbo into my script, this is not fanfic, this is… serial-numbers-filed-off LEGIT fanfic, and so Detective Susan Capilano is named after - well, Joe Capilano, famous Squamish and namesake to many British Columbia landmarks and institutions. Sure, it may raise a lot of complicated questions to name a character after an indigenous leader, but in my defense, “Capilano” is very close, phonetically, to “Columbo”, while also being a tie-in to something that’s personally meaningful to me.

The final product also ended up… long. Quite long. Reading the entire script, end-to-end, took about 45 minutes, which would make my script about as long as an episode of Columbo. Just writing things took about two weeks. I thought I’d be done the whole project in two weeks, but no, that was just words. (Keep in mind, I have a day job that I’m quite good at, I get about 2 hours a day of Personal Project Time, so, maybe 28 hours total for the full script.)

After the script it came time for sound. Most of the SFX design just came from the eternally useful freesound.org , but I was struggling to find a collection of truly usable free, soundtrack-appropriate, royalty free music - until I bumped into the collection at incompetech.com, which was absolutely sufficient to the project I was trying to build. Not perfect - I would LOVE to be able to compose my own music, but it’s not a skill I have in the tank, and I’m not going to commission a musician with real money when the stakes are a free RenPy game, that’s a bad life decision.

Sound went relatively quickly.

Then, finally, art. Ho, boy. I kept this story dirt simple: maybe 6 major locations and 10 named characters.

Scene backdrops were prepared in chalk outline on a black background: this scratchy, lo-fi background can be completed very quickly, and I think looks distinctive.

Even with the obvious simplicity of the art style, I cooked up about 30 of these, maybe 3 an hour, for 10 hours, which (remembering I have about 2 hours a day to work on this) ate another whole week.

And that brings us to the final phase, character art.

I had been looking forward to this for weeks. And… after finishing my first few shots, it turned into as much of a slog as the rest of the project. I didn’t want to do the “baby’s first VN” move of just having a handful of cards per character - I wanted to do some acting, especially with our main character, Detective Capilano.

I ended up with 79, count-em, SEVENTY NINE different poses for Detective Capilano.

To be honest, the whole story bounces through about 7-8 main Capilano poses, like “attentively listening while holding a notepad” and “hmmmm” which amount to about 75% of any given detective’s milieu, but then sometimes I’d need a really, really specific pose to make a joke land or to tell some of the story visually.

Like, this happens exactly once, in the story, but it’s an IMPORTANT SNIFF:

Most of the other characters have 8-12 poses, and I also included images for all of the 23 collectible items in the game, for a total of about 200 separate units of character art.

Again, even at the prodigious and lazy pace that I generate art, that’s a lot of raw ART asset, and it took me about 3 weeks to power through that big pile of art assets.

And then… I was done!

Video content

I mean, sure, there’s probably an aggressive polish pass I can do on this game, but it’s a visual novel I slapped together in a hurry: it’s not going to magically turn into a viable product with a huge userbase. You couldn’t pay most people to interact with a visual novel. I’m pretty happy with it, where it is.

Finally, it came time to give it its final name:

It’s completely playable, here.

I highly recommend downloading it, RenPy does not do well in the browser.

And the launch was ready: I announced the game on Mastodon, on Twitter, and of course in the #side-projects channel at work. That’s about as big a launch as I can muster.

As a result, as many as… let me check my CDN analytics… 20 people played the game. (The numbers are up, it was 17 people, yesterday!) Oh, and because assets are downloaded as you go, I can also see how far each of those players got. Exactly one person has made it to the end.

If you’re curious what working this hard on a project and having just the one person finish it feels like, it’s not great.

I wasn’t expecting a lot of reception for a visual novel - generally they’re quite unpopular and amateurish. You can’t pay people to play them. It’s like asking someone to play your RPG Maker game, or read your unpublished novel: they’re not doing it because it’s going to be good. At best they’re doing it as a favor to you.

Even so, though, I was surprised at how emotional I was to ship something, again, that nobody really gave a shit about. I do this pretty often: ship half-baked, barely operational projects with zero marketing and no word of mouth, then look at my big ol’ bowl of Nobody Gives a Shit and cry literal actual tears for a few hours.

Just making things randomly and refusing to polish or market them, but hoping to receive a lot of attention and acclaim - my head understands this is a bad strategy, but I don’t fully understand it in my heart.

But, like always, I got over it in about a day. Being done with this frees me up to work on my next stupid thing!

Anyways, it’s out there, now! It’s released! I can still drive traffic to it, it gets to keep being a thing I built, and it’s going to stay online for years and years because, unlike some of my more ambitious projects, it costs me essentially nothing to host.

2025 Editor’s Note: This segment was unnecessarily dour. While Detective Capilano is a little more meandering than I’d hope, I went through it again not 2 years later and found it charming and funny, and I’m glad I made it. Sure, it was for a small audience, but for what is essentially my first ever graphic novel it’s not fuckin’ bad.

Learning!

So, I have interesting takeaways.

WASM Considered Harmful

One of the first ones is that you can’t really target mobile device browsers with WebAssembly applications reliably. One of the things I’ve been trying to accomplish with these projects is to get something running that I can just give people an iPhone link to, and have it load and work seamlessly without having to go through any app stores or verification processes. Both Godot and RenPy offer WebAssembly builds of their product, and both Godot and RenPy have big, nasty, gamebreaking bugs on iOS, that I didn’t discover until I was already working with them.

Godot 4.0 has more than one, right now, most of them which the team have determined are upstream iOS problems that they can’t easily fix. The Godot 4.0 problems, though, at least had the decency to prevent the application from loading at all.

RenPy simply allows players to get about a third of the way through the game and then collapses with an out-of-memory error. This is very bad, and I didn’t catch it in my early prototyping phase. How could I? Toy projects didn’t use enough RAM to crash the browser. And now that I know that can and will happen, well, I expect it’s pretty likely to happen in Godot, as well, if I give it a sufficiently complex project.

I don’t have an Android device to test with at the moment but I imagine it wouldn’t be great, either.

This article, WebAssembly needs a better memory management story, goes into some of the reasons why trying to fit WASM apps into browser memory is currently something of a shit-show.

So, that’s unfortunate. With RenPy broken on iOS mobile, my game’s intended phone-sized form factor doesn’t serve nearly as much of a purpose. I mean, I could pay $99/year to get it on the App Store, but… I’m not going to do that for a free visual novel. The economics of paying Apple so that I can give unpopular applications away for free just doesn’t work out for me.

In fact, if I want things to execute reliably in all contexts, I think the choice is obvious: I need to go back to good ol’ Javascript in the browser. This brief flirtation with game engines was fun, but if what I want is for people to jump in with links, I’ve gotta go more lo-fi.

My Fiction Writing: Only Okay

I’ve been staring at this game non-stop for weeks, so I’ve lost all objectivity, but I think the low clearance rate speaks to the fact that this detective story can really draaaag.

I made sure that it works, mechanically, as a detective story: you, a reasonable human being, should be able to solve the thing, with the clues given. I like that.

I also packed this game with stupid jokes and even dumber film and music references. I like that too.

A lot of the bones, though, of good fiction writing - motivation, character, compelling scenes with high stakes - well, I know what those things ARE and I try my best to deliver on them, but I think this story could have stood to be half as long and twice as tight.

Which actually, brings me to my next point:

45-60 Minutes is Too Long

A 45-minute-long story is much, much too long. Most of the people who visited Detective Capilano’s website looked at the description, read “45 minute to 1 hour visual novel with SOUND”, thought “I can’t read that on the bus”, and bailed immediately, and I understand. That’s too LONG. I don’t want to commit to a 45-minute-long anything, unless I know it’s going to be worth my time.

On top of that, the sheer length of it made every part of its production drag on, and on, and on, and on. I basically cooked up a teeny tiny little community theatre play under my own power.

The story also has very limited interactivity, and no gameplay - partially because it’s hard to make a story this long with actual branching paths.

What I want is nice, tight, 5-minute experiences. Easy to build, with a small brain-burner of a real, actual puzzle in each one. Now that’s something I might be able to get people to sink their teeth in to, and something where I might be able to turn around the whole product on a tighter timeline.

I read a little blog post, a while ago, that made the point that indie creators who are looking to experiment wildly, polish their skillset, and learn to ship reliably should consider making Way More, Complete, Very Short Games, and I took that to heart - but I’m still making the games too big.

I’m Not 100% Sure What I’m Building Next

I have a whole notepad full of ideas, as usual, but we’ll see. WE’LL SEE.

Finally

If you have 45 minutes to kill, headphones, and are curious, try the game, here. If you want, write a long report of all of your thoughts and feelings and send it to me: I will read every word. Play it with a friend and voice the parts, and record it for the whole internet. Get weird. Play it for two minutes, get bored, and quit. Do whatever you like!

If you’re sitting at a PC, you’ll probably have a slightly better experience if you just download the PC build rather than trying to play it on the web - every image loads instantly rather than getting pulled from the CDN, it shaves milliseconds off your play-through time and feels much smoother, plus it won’t crash halfway through due to a memory issue!

uncomplicated delicious

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0700

hot chicken sandwiches are good and easy

Please Stop Being Such Good Developers

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0700

So, sometimes, in FooApplication, we need to extract some Nurble Data from the HTTP request, which is included as a base-64-encoded JSON blob in a cookie from the Nurble provider.

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleKey = `nurble_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
 if(request.cookies[nurbleKey]){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 return JSON.parse(atob(request.cookies[nurbleKey]));
 }
}

Look at this function! It’s awful! Let’s do SOFTWARE ENGINEERING to it!

First of all, what if there’s a parsing error? Are we just going to bubble that up and let it get caught by our normal error handling machinery? Hell no!

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleKey = `nurble_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
 if(request.cookies[nurbleKey]){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 try{
 return JSON.parse(atob(request.cookies[nurbleKey]));
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[nurbleKey]}`);
 }

 }
}

Then, that nurble key prefix! What happens if it changes? We could be left editing code directly when we could simply adjust a constant! MAGIC VALUES BAD, YOU GUYS.

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
function getNurbleData(request){
 if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 try{
 return JSON.parse(atob(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]));
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
}

Here’s a thing, though - what happens if I call getNurbleData twice in a row. Am I just going to inefficiently parse JSON two times? That’s so wasteful. Let’s save the result of this function against the request in case we need it again later.

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
function getNurbleData(request){
 if(request.nurbleData){
 return nurbleData;
 }
 if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 try{
 let nurbleData = JSON.parse(atob(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]));
 request.nurbleData = nurbleData;
 return nurbleData;
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
}

Oh, that’s pretty sweet, but now we’re returning data from two different places in the code. Everybody knows that’s asking for trouble, better refactor it so that there’s just one return, at the end.

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleData = null;
 if(request.nurbleData){
 nurbleData = request.nurbleData;
 }
 else if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 try{
 nurbleData = JSON.parse(atob(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]));
 request.nurbleData = nurbleData;

 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
 return nurbleData;
}

That’s good, but that atob to parse in there is kinda complicated, let’s extract that and make it a separate function.

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleData = null;
 if(request.nurbleData){
 nurbleData = request.nurbleData;
 }
 else if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 try{
 function parseNurbleCookieData(s){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 let b = Buffer.from(s, 'base64');
 let o = JSON.parse(b);
 return o;
 }
 nurbleData = parseNurbleCookieData(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]);
 request.nurbleData = nurbleData;
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
 return nurbleData;
}

Mmm, now we’re cooking with good engineering. But what if some other function also needs to parse nurble cookie data? We can’t keep that as an inline function!

function parseNurbleCookieData(s){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 let b = Buffer.from(s, 'base64');
 let o = JSON.parse(b);
 return o;
}

/* extract nurbleData from the HTTP request */
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleData = null;
 if(request.nurbleData){
 nurbleData = request.nurbleData;
 }
 else if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 try{
 nurbleData = parseNurbleCookieData(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]);
 request.nurbleData = nurbleData;
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
 return nurbleData;
}

That parseNurbleCookieData function’s comment isn’t necessary any more, it’s all there in the title - but we could improve the comments in a few other parts of this function.

function parseNurbleCookieData(s){
 let b = Buffer.from(s, 'base64');
 let o = JSON.parse(b);
 return o;
}

/**
 * Sometimes Nurble will include nurbleData with the request cookie.
 * for example: nurble_983277382237=bGlnaHQgd29yaw...
* We need this data to nurbleize the normandifferentiator.
*
* memoizes nurble data in the request, for easier lookup
*/
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleData = null;
 if(request.nurbleData){
 nurbleData = request.nurbleData;
 }
 else if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 try{
 nurbleData = parseNurbleCookieData(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]);
 request.nurbleData = nurbleData;
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
 return nurbleData;
}

oh, and those other bits are constants and utility functions, let’s hide them somewhere else in the application:

// CONSTANTS/nurble.js
const NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX = "nurble_";
const NURBLE_KEY = `${NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX}_${NURBLE_API_KEY}`;

// common/nurbleParser.js
function parseNurbleCookieData(s){
 /* nurble data is base64 encoded JSON */
 let b = Buffer.from(s, 'base64');
 let o = JSON.parse(b);
 return o;
}

// nurble.js
const {NURBLE_KEY_PREFIX, NURBLE_KEY} = require('../../CONSTANTS/nurble.js');
const {parseNurbleCookieData} = require('../../common/nurbleParser.js');

/**
 * Sometimes Nurble will include nurbleData with the request cookie.
 * for example: nurble_983277382237=bGlnaHQgd29yaw...
* We need this data to nurbleize the normandifferentiator.
*
* memoizes nurble data in the request, for easier lookup
*/
function getNurbleData(request){
 let nurbleData = null;
 if(request.nurbleData){
 nurbleData = request.nurbleData;
 }
 else if(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]){
 try{
 nurbleData = parseNurbleCookieData(request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]);
 request.nurbleData = nurbleData;
 }
 catch(err){
 console.error(`getNurbleData couldn't parse
 nurble cookie: ${request.cookies[NURBLE_KEY]}`);
 }
 }
 return nurbleData;
}

Mmm. Yeah. Can you feel it? Can you feel the engineering? This code is getting so tight and refactored. The power.

Worse… or Better?

Okay, so, I’m going to come clean. I am being flippant and sarcastic, here.

We have very clearly made our getNurbleData function quite a bit worse, right?

We’ve taken a simple, clear, easy-to-understand function and bloated it with unnecessary features, weird suppositions about the future, and wild overengineering.

We’ve taken valid errors and hidden them in logs.

We’ve added a memoization feature that nobody asked for, to save fractions of a millisecond of parsing time in the unlikely event that two different functions in the same request stack both need nurble data at the same time and don’t just save the original nurble data.

We’ve committed an act of Ravioli Coding, one of the lesser known software pasta sins, where we break simple, understandable functions down into teeny tiny little pieces and scatter those pieces to the four winds, even if nobody else needs those pieces for anything. We’ve taken important context and hidden it far away from the function that needs that context.

And, in fact, everything we’ve done to the function has been a good idea or best practice. There are lots of legitimate reasons to use the techniques I outlined here for good, it’s just that they can become an antipattern when applied unnecessarily and automatically.

In fact, me and another senior engineer spend a lot of our refactoring time taking code that looks like the end result of this process and de-refactoring it - peeling away “good engineering ideas” in successive layers, like an onion, until the code is once again simple.

DRY is less important than WET, YAGNI, KISS

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?” - Brian Kernighan

“DRY”, “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, is a core engineering instinct. Do not ever write code twice, because you can always, always build an abstraction that allows you not to do that.

Too-aggressive application of DRY, though, almost always results in just the gnarliest code.

0 -> I

1 -> Is

2 -> If

3 -> To

4 -> Like

5 -> This

6 -> Efficiency

7 -> Improve

8 -> Talked

9 -> Imagine

4, 9 2 0 8 4 5 3 7 6

Like, Imagine If I Talked Like This To Improve Efficiency

Look at how neatly I refactored that sentence! Using reusable, composable functions! Toss in some parens and I’m a Lisp programmer.

But… consider self-similarity, consistency, simplicity, readability. Boilerplate can be good actually.

Enterprise Hello World

This is just one function - if you apply this kind of aggressive ENGINEER THINKING to an entire library, you end up with ENGINEER CODE. It’s modular! It’s functional! It’s composable! It’s modifiable! It’s…

It’s Enterprise Hello World.

There are a lot of antipatterns out there but this is one of the ones that I see most often, because - well, we’re surrounded by good engineers with extremely high tolerance for complexity and abstraction, and they just want to take their good code and make it into really good code. They want to foresee every possible use of their function and have an answer prepared.

Databases end up over-normalized. Machinery ends up tying things to config values that don’t need to be configured.

“Am I so out of touch with modern engineering practices?”

“No, this code did not need to be this complicated.”

science beef

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I know that is is only possible because meat production is subsidized and scaled up in a way that meat substitute production can not be, but I think the mystery of why these companies are not doing so well is not so mysterious.

Like - I understand in my heart of hearts that it’s probably better for humanity to gradually wean ourselves off of beef. Less beef for everyone would be good. But it’s not economically sound to pay three or four times as much for a product that’s subtly worse.

fake bike lanes

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

My new home city, Coquitlam, has a handful of new, really good pedestrian/bike lanes: here I’m talking large, wide, mixed use lanes separated from traffic with tree cover that I see people and bikes using comfortably. Nice.

New West had a few of those, too, I’d follow the nice one under the skytrain all the way to Metrotown from Edmonds on sunny days, sometimes.

There are also no shortage of fake bike lanes.

You know, the tiny strip of paint half-heartedly placed beside a busy highway.

I don’t think these should exist at all, to be honest. These are some dogshit bike lanes,

triple crown

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Weird brain thing number 82:

when I shit, shave, and shower in the same bathroom transaction, I call that the “triple crown” and feel a sense of personal satisfaction, like a mini steam achievement for real life.

kim kitsuragi

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I loved Disco Elysium, which is why I was so surprised when I discovered that BC’s Wildfire Service uniform is…

wait a minute that’s kim!

was his outfit based on emergency services outfits or are our boys in orange just stylish as fuck?

or am I just seeing things

simple breakfast

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m just unusually proud of this nice long weekend breakfast I made.

walkable

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I moved to a walkable neighborhood and I see kids outside all of the time

i guess it wasn’t video games or phones that were the problem after all

come on and jam

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I went to the jam convention but they oversold the seats

everyone was really pectin

cabbabbage roll soup reci

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Cabbage Roll Soup Recipe

Prep Time 125 minutes minutes
Cook Time 250 minutes minutes
Total Time 500 minutes minutes
Servings 80 servings
Author Holly Jolly Cabbage, beef, pork, lamb, sausage, chicken, forcemeats, cheese and rice are simmered in a flavorful tomato broth for the penultimate bowl of comfort food.

yom! lookin’ forward to the food

Ingredients

1 large onion diced
1 large onion diced
1 large onion diced
1 large onion diced
3 cloves garlic minced
1 pound lean ground beef
1 kilogram fatty ground beef
¾ cup uncooked long grain rice
1 medium head cheese, chopped (core removed), about 8 cups
383 oz canned diced tomatoes with juices
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons toothpaste
4 cups beef
1 ½ cups V8 or other motor fluid
1 teaspoon smoked parpooka
1 teaspoon
1 tablespoon Borcestershire sauce
100 bay leaf
cinnamon to taste

Instructions

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

power BI

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

christ, there’s nothing more disappointing as a software developer than learning that the Power BI conference is for weird corporate data nerds and not, uh,

at 1°C of global warming

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

one of these two vehicles is mostly illegal to drive in #BC

i bet you know which one it is

imagine vim

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

not worth getting up for

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

attn: cat would like to outside:

computer

Ok, if you want to go outside so badly, let’s give it a try!

…

ok, fresh problem, now you want to be outside all of the time

I am fortunate that Zapp is smart but not very heavy

Tonka/DeWalt

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I am like 90% sure that Tonka and DeWalt share an industrial design team to try and maintain a “cradle-to-grave” approach to performative masculinity in tool design. Observe:

rancher's choice

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0700

if you live in Canada, you generally assume that ranchers

can’t spell champagne, “CAMPAGNE”, what?
make incredibly gross, wierdly creamy champagne
put champagne on their vegetables

also they have NO SANS

also, am I the only one who thinks that “Rancher’s Choice” sounds like a dime store romance novel?

i am bad at poetry

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i have precisely engineered

the perfect sandwich

crisp air,

freshly showered

steam rising from my coffee

looking out the window

in my new home

at the tree

there’s even a tree

an imperious chirrup from my cat

thick-cut bacon on cast iron pan

fresh tomatoes on hardwood

toasted bun, mayonnaise

lettuce, also there

it’s good lettuce

let’s not get too held up on the lettuce

complex nostalgia

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Things evoke a complicated nostalgia when they’ve been replaced by things that are unqualified improvements in every sense but the technical restrictions of the original media fostered a unique kind of creativity or interaction that is now lost to history.

Postal mail, drive-in theaters, vinyl, pixel art, books, newspaper comics, newspapers, bbs, irc, broadcast television, fountain pens, typewriters, broadcast radio, department stores, book stores, commercial offices - while obsolete there’s something lost.

easy to fund

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Despite very limited viewership numbers, my new blog, “Catering To The Viewpoints of Rich, Sour, Aggrieved Old White Dads” is finding no trouble getting financial backers: my new blog post “Let’s All Shut Up About Trans People And Talk About My Trans-Am” made CTTVoRSAOWD enough money to keep me in good cheese for months.

Working on “Nirvana is the Greatest Band of All Time And Their Songs Really Resonate With My Struggles As a Landlord” to try to get my hands on some of that sweet Gen-X generational wealth.

I’m thinking of changing the title to something that appeals to both fragile masculinity and a hearkening back to weird old military-industrial boot licking, like maybe “The Hawkeye Report with Brett Bullett".

nerd-punching neutral

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 12:00:00 -0700

High School Bully, here!

Good news, everyone (he says, punching a nerd) I’ve announced a new plan to gradually go completely nerd-punching neutral by the year 2050 through the slow rollout of innovative programs like “nerd-punching credits” and “small subsidies for punching alt-freaks, like goths or stoners”.

Kingdom: Eighties

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

some things I’ve shouted at the screen while my wife plays Kingdom: Eighties

“loose child! collect that child!”

“go forth, child army! go forth and destroy my enemies!”

“to be honest, I feel bad for dumpster boy, you should give him a break”

“that was an unusually well-armed child, should he have a sword?”

“he was jock before but he’s dumpster boy now. all is dumpster for him.”

“dumpster boy’s sisyphean task goes on forever, pushing a dumpster up a hill eternally”

“suuure, leave that child in the forest to die”

“you’ve got them hunting for you, fishing for you, and now they’re picking berries for you? this is the worst summer camp ever.”

“oof. scattered remains. I shall require more children”

“oh, that’s pippo, his job is to hand the hammers to the other children. pippo has asthma.”

Hi Chew

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So I go shopping with my wife

While we’re loading our haul into our reusable bags, I pick up a candy Tiff’s bought.

“Hi-Chew?”

Cashier: “Bless you.”

me and the cashier simultaneously:

essentials

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I’m gonna visit the Amazon but I went to the internet to find a list of “Amazon essentials” and to be completely honest I don’t understand how some of the stuff they’re trying to sell me is going to help me on my journey

disco elysium

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

the thing about Disco Elysium is that it’s very good, so I’ve been playing it until slightly too late at night and then waking up, underslept, with a headache, feeling like shit, with no recollection of the previous day’s events, which is fantastically immersive into the game’s universe.

I’m almost 40, so “waking up feeling like warmed over death” doesn’t take a bender, it basically just requires that I get 30 minutes less sleep than usual.

I’ll tell you this about Disco: Elysium

it’s the most Planescape: Torment game ever made

“What about the classic, well-reviewed, critical darling, Planescape: Torment?” you might ask

and no, Disco Elysium is even more Planescape: Torment even than that.

the device

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

if I put my ear up to the device, I hear my deceased grandmother whispering recipes that she never cooked in real life

things like “hulled pies” and “The Oats”

hexadecimal

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

there are 10 kinds of people

people who understand hexadecimal

people who don’t

and E other kinds of people with properties immaterial to the joke at hand

Oh Is She Dumb

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Sometimes I go looking for public domain music in hopes of finding something good.

I think I’m going to find undiscovered treasures - but usually, I don’t.

Most of what I end up with, when I go on my expeditions into the public domain of music, are just, like, a single unlistenably crackly version of Turlet Vance and the Columbia Singers Present: Dogs are Swell.

Anyways, here’s the crackly garbage thing I found most recently:

https://archive.org/details/78_oh-is-she-dumb_eddie-cantor-gottler_gbia0041064a

heat at nuggets

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

what a coincidence that is also happening in my air fryer

eclipse

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0700

no commentary, here, except to say that getting Eclipse to the table is so difficult that this picture represents a real personal accomplishment, even if it was my younger brother who did all of the work of organizing this.

Columbo's Lady In Waiting

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

let’s watch another episode of Columbo

Beth, I know you’re dating an attorney from the family practice - we both know that you’re fabulously wealthy and a real Horseface McGoo - the only reason anybody would ever be attracted to you is to get a crack at that sweet family money pinata. So I’ve sent him a letter telling him that if he doesn’t break up with you, I’m going to fire him.

I’m certain this will work because this is the year 1972 and “wrongful termination lawsuits”, “newspapers” and “twitter” all do not exist yet.

You know what, Beth? This one’s on the house, he sucks. Murder away.

“Surely he’s going to follow through with his threats, darling!”

“I’m not scared of your older brother - and don’t call me Shirley”

murder plot step 1: fill an important lightbulb with mustard

“Ed, what should we call our security patrol system?”

“How about - follow me here - all-caps, SECURITY PATROL SYSTEM. That way people will be able to clearly identify what it does, from the box!”

“Bang, zoom! You’ve done it again, Ed!”

just getting ready for bed with my night pills and night gun and big glass of water

Tame by today’s standards, but in 1972 showing a woman this nude on television could get your show taken off the air. Such was the cultural clout of Columbo that they could get away with it

You know what? I’m going to say it. This woman is the laziest damn murderer I’ve ever seen.

I guess this is extremely accurate to how I would expect a child brought up very rich would plan a murder: just get some chocolate and a gun, hop into bed, and see where the evening takes you. If nobody is murdered by the morning? Take a break for a while, you’ve earned it.

In order to let us know that what’s coming next is a dream sequence we get the blurry edges and harp arpeggios. It’s how we learn her plot: She imagines her dick brother is going to come home in the dark, unable to unlock the front door (she’s stolen his key and mustarded up the lightbulb), trigger the alarm, and she’s going to shoot him. “Oh, I thought it was a burglar, here to do unspeakable things to me.”

However, they’d have no reason to show this as a dream sequence if it HAPPENED: what’s the chance she accidentally shoots her beau instead?

“Would you believe it? The front door lightbulb was all mustarded up and I lost my key. So I had to use my spare key, which I obviously have access to because I’m not a complete idiot.”

I’m not going to lie, this has been one of the more ill-conceived murder plots on this show so far.

Columbo writers: not a tonne of respect for women.

What do you do when your carefully planned alibi doesn’t work out?

Obviously you just YOLO-murder the guy anyways: why waste a perfectly good murder plot just because it was terrible?

Yeah, buddy, someone mustarded up this light bulb, but good - real spicy English mustard, too, expensive stuff.

I don’t know why this was so funny, but it absolutely was.

“Now my son is dead. He was my special little guy.”

That is just such a stern picture for a man to have in his own foyer.

That’s like the kind of picture Tom Haverford would have of himself.

“Ma’am, your son - he never married, did he?”

“No, he was too busy with work to think of such things. He did have a curious number of male business roommates, though. And that… burly fellow he spent all of those years with, his… roommate. Yes.”

even for an episode of Columbo, I have never seen Lt. Columbo have such an easy time with a case

Her boyfriend’s mad.

“Ever since you probably didn’t kill your brother, you’ve been a real mouthy broad, making your own decisions and thinking and speaking for yourself. I hate it. "

MY BROTHER IS DEAD

I’M IN CONTROL OF THIS COMPANY NOW

BEHOLD MY MOST SERIOUS BUSINESS LOOK

I AM THE CONDUCTOR OF THE SERIOUS BUSINESS TRAIN

ALL ABOARD

TOOT TOOT

“Mustard, you say?”

“Yeah, mustard. The bulb was just packed full of it. Now what I just can’t figure out is, you know, why someone would fill this lightbulb with mustard and screw it in to a light fixture.”

“Well, I just don’t know why someone would fill a lightbulb with hot English mustard.”

“The thing is, ma’am, I never said that the bulb was filled with hot English mustard - I just said mustard. Now there’s a lot of mustards out there - ballpark, honey, stone-ground - "

“Man, this has been the dumbest case. We all knew she shot him and had a motive to shoot him from the get-go, and nothing about her story made any logical sense. Plus all of that stuff about the mustard. I sure hope my next one’s less ridiculous.”

“What’s the matter with this thing, what’s with all the churning and bubbling, you call this a crime database?”

“No, sir, we call it Mr. Coffee. Want some?”

“Yes! - I always drink coffee while I’m solving crimes, you know that!”

All this intense Columboposting happened on a late night Mastodon binge.

Columbo's Most Dangerous Match

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0700

let’s watch an episode of Columbo

ugh, dream sequence, gross

did columbo predict the “chess master cheats with a vibrating buttplug” plot 30 years before it actually happened?

this image suggests “yes”

collars were thicker in the 70s

oh boy, this guy HAS to be the one who’s getting murdered, he’s basically just a big cuddly teddy bear

you know what, I’m gonna say it: chess has gotten worse since the 70s, half of these pieces aren’t even in use anymore

Columbo specced all of his points into PERCEPTION and INTELLIGENCE and CHARISMA, but didn’t leave a lot of space for WISDOM, so he has just harangued his vet to identify a mysterious sound that his veterinarian helpfully informs him is “snoring dog”

Hearkening back to a simpler time when you could indicate that a character was pre-meditating a murder by simply superimposing footage of the murder method over their face: seems like our friendly ol’ grandmaster is gonna get stuffed down a garbage chute.

“You say you want me to meet you? Right next to the garbage chute on the roof? You want me to look waaaaaay into the chute? Come alone, you say? That sounds reasonable, I’ll be there in five.”

I know he didn’t come to this chess event with murder on his mind but he’s still just got cotton crime doin’ gloves in his luggage for just such an occasion

if he doesn’t wear these for chess later I’m going to have some real follow-up questions about why he travels with these

(a lot of Columbo episodes feature villains who remember to bring crime gloves: the number one way to commit an unsolvable crime)

could you… could you dolly the camera back just a scodge? this… this shot… it’s… it’s too close to his face. I’m uncomfortable. He’s uncomfortable. Nobody wants this.

“Please - my girlfriend, she’s very Russian, I need your help writing her a letter. You need to write, in your handwriting, ‘I’m very sorry, I didn’t want to have to do this’, on this piece of paper. For my girlfriend. In Russian.”

“Huh. Seems legit. I’m definitely going to do that.”

He DOESN’T wear his crime gloves for chess. Why did he pack crime gloves then? I know I don’t usually travel with a set of cotton schemin’ gloves for fingerprint free murders.

wait, should I start packing those?

“I’m Detective Smug Badcop, and it’s my professional opinion that your professional chess player left a note, bailed on the big chess match, and while he was in the midst of escaping, fell into a trash chute and got compacted”

So this guy shows up at the scene of the crime and puts on a big show about how sad he is that the match didn’t happen and I am not sure if I have ever seen more of a “well obviously this guy did it” face on ol’ Lieutenant Columbo

I’m really getting in to this, this show rocks

“Oh, the fall didn’t kill him? How…. very… fortunate. I need to go, uh, right now, for unrelated reasons. Could you tell me where the massive fatal glucose shots are btw?”

We are over half way into the run time of this thing and this murderer still hasn’t sealed the deal, no wonder he’s so bad at chess

🎺🎺🎺🎺🎺🎺🎺

“Excuse me, sir!”

this is the most Columbo shot of the entire episode so far

Wuh oh, the gloves are out, that means it’s time to do some more crime

DANGER: DO NOT SWAP DRUGS AROUND, MAY KILL CHARMING OLD CHESS MEN

we finally have a confirmed kill, almost a full hour in

Don’t die on me! Your head’s been wrapped in protective gauze for diabetes reasons!

so, you very clearly wrote the requisition for murder drugs in the same pen that he used to write the fake “i’m leaving” note and also it’s that pen you have in your hands right now

also, you didn’t hear the trash compactor not murder him because your hearing aid was broken

also, you secretly met and lost to him at chess the night before the murder

also, you were cheating with anal beads

checkmate

There is of course no #columbo posting without mentioning “I Hear The Blues A-Killin’ " by Joe Chouinard which is the Frasier x Columbo crossover comic the world has needed all these years

https://www.tumblr.com/joechoui/724392286725832704/i-hear-the-blues-a-killin-or-frasier-meets

One thing that shocks me is that these episodes - a lot of Columbo episodes - completely do away with any denouement.

There’s no “and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids”,

instead Columbo DROPS THE FUCKIN’ HAMMER, you get the endorphins of the solve, roll credits.

That’s actually, I think, one of the things that makes “Any Old Port in a Storm” one of the most beloved episodes of Columbo - it has a denouement.

Columbo and the murderer have good rapport, the murderer had a pretty sympathetic motive, and the solve happens 5 minutes before the end of the episode. Then, after the solve, there’s a wind-down period where the murderer is just, like, “wow, you really fuckin got me, that was clever as hell” and they sit and have a drink and a chuckle together before the credits roll.

wanna see Peter Falk convey investigation entirely through mime?

sterilite eternal

Mon, 29 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I can’t imagine how hard it was for the Sterilite graphic designer not to put the same sticker on the jug in the image, creating an infinite jugloop.

Upon the jug, a picture of a jug, an action shot. Look at this jug go! What are you doing with it? Boring old water? You have nothing on the excitement of this jug’s pinkish liquid.

cabling expertise

Sun, 28 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

hemocomputing

Wed, 24 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Look, it’s time I shared my theory with you. The theory is that there’s no such thing as a transistor. The idea that a rock can be made to think? Nonsense. It’s been black magic this entire time. That’s why computers stop working if you let the smoke out.

But more than that, the magic requires a drop of blood to work. They do that in the factory for you, but when you’re doing it yourself it won’t work without some of your own blood. Which is why these things are part of the mix:

pictured: “cooling”

“why are you installing that pinchy little stack of razorblades”

“cooling”

“sure”

flowers and crystals

Fri, 19 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m a big believer in the healing power of flowers and crystals.

not these, though

but by “healing” I mean “healing my hunger” and by flowers I mean “sunflowers, specifically the oil from sunflowers”, and by “crystals” I mean “one very specific kind of crystal” and by “one very specific kind of crystal” I mean “salt”

also potatoes are involved

okay, I’m just gonna say it, I’m a big believer in the power of potato chips

obi wan finds a loophole

Wed, 17 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

obi wan, promise me you will train the boy

obi wan, tying the boy to the tracks: “ok”

socially conservative

Wed, 17 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i’m not sure how many kinds of social conservatism are powered by an uneasy feeling of “they are being allowed to have a kind of fun that I was not allowed to have and I hate it” but I’m assuming its quite a lot of them

nord

Tue, 16 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I’m shocked and appalled that the fold-up stage Nord from Carole & Tuesday doesn’t exist as a real product yet.

Video content

This is just the whole pitch for Carole & Tuesday right here:

No content warning, turn the volume way up and play it at work.

peeps

Mon, 15 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

It’s a little known fact, but 100% of carbon emissions are the responsibility of one billionaire named “Peeps McRockefeller” and if we simply eat him the world would go back to being sustainable

Vacation Reads

Mon, 15 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Through no fault of my own, I’ve accidentally stumbled into a themed reading list. It wasn’t on purpose, but definitely my last three books have explored themes of memory, belief, and hazardous information.

I’m going to keep spoilers light but I’m not going to do away with them entirely - like, “first third of the book” kinda stuff, no big reveals. (I think that’s an okay spoiler policy in general: I want to be able to say enough about stuff to get you on board with the premise without saying so much that it ruins the reading)

There Is No Antimemetics Division

What’s It About?

Have you heard of The SCP Foundation?

That might take a little bit of background on its own: The SCP Foundation is a wiki online, est. 2008, a shared collaborative online writing project where a team of core contributors and a bunch of fans have collected and curated a bunch of horror short stories, each written in the “house style” - and the “house style” of SCP is that your average story is written in the format of a paper database entry concerning the containment and ongoing management of some supernatural threat.

SCP launched well before Cabin in the Woods, but they’re essentially stories told from the point of view of these guys:

These scientists are generally complex, nasty, morally grey characters willing to do and/or sacrifice just about anything in order to keep these nasties contained - because you never know when the knowledge you gain from Nasty 238 (Class: Euclid) is exactly what you need to save the world from Nasty 941 (Class: Keter).

As I tend to do when I encounter a deep bin of online lore, I’ve read … a lot of the SCP wiki, although mostly the earlier stuff in the lower-thousands files before it all took off in popularity.

This is important background because “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is just a collection of SCP stories, gathered, presented, and edited, to tell (in a way that’s a little disjointed) the overarching tale of one specific department within the SCP, a department that nobody in the SCP foundation knows about, because knowing about the department is a memetic hazard.

This is the Antimemetics Division (and, correspondingly, the Memetics division), a group of people confronted with informational hazards.

The Ring is a sort of informational hazard: simply by watching the video you trigger the curse, and will die in 7 days - but the stuff that Antimemetics works with is more potent than that, where even knowing about what they’re containing puts people at risk.

So, a lot of the containment procedures have to do with memory manipulation. Mnemonic drugs, Amnesiac drugs, and lots of ’em.

Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of, uh, bureaucratic difficulty, as every other department of the SCP and most of the Antimemetics staff are constantly forgetting and re-remembering that they exist, which also leads to a, uh, somewhat disjointed narrative.

Most of the senior agents are constantly living through a sort of Memento existence where they’re rebuilding their lives from scratch, having recently forgotten either something that they forgot, on purpose, in order to keep themselves safe or something that’s eating their memories, and if they don’t remember it soon will kill them.

And that’s kinda the core problem with being an Antimemetics agent: sort of as a logical extension of the premise, they’ve always forgotten something crucial and either:

“they must force themselves to remember it OR ELSE THEY WILL DIE” or
“they forgot it for a good reason” or
“both”, which creates a constant loop of scrambling to forget and then remember key memories.

Anyways: a collection of short stories set in this universe where a variety of characters memento their way through a variety of informational hazards, including a huge and apocalyptic Arc that runs through the lot of the stories.

Thoughts

Short. At ~200 words, you can finish it in two sittings.
A compelling read, overall, I did power through to the end to figure out what happens. High stakes.
Between the subject matter (everyone constantly forgetting everything) and the presentation (short stories), this book is necessarily chaotic and disjointed. This wears out its welcome pretty quickly.
I’m already familiar with SCP lore, but I feel like this book would be a really bad entry point into SCP stuff because the whole thing already assumes you’ve been onboarded with the basic SCP concepts and the premise precludes much in the way of explanation. That being said, this particular division is so separate from the rest of the lore that it’s not too important to be up-to-date with the rest of the universe, which is good.
This is never outright stated in the book, but since memetic hazards are either crucial to remember right now or you’ll die or crucial to forget forever or you’ll die, a lot of this book is spent on the treadmill of re-re-re-remembering things only to remember that you were supposed to forget them.
If only there were a better way
the SCP and The Laundry Files have been things I’ve liked lately, which makes me think that “shadowy government department tasked with cataloguing and managing horror” is a surprisingly high-ranking genre for me. Maybe I should go back and watch The X-Files, I’ve never really seen it.

Trust the Plan

Dan Olson’s hour-long documentary on flat-earthers, “In Search of a Flat Earth”, takes a surprise twist half-way through: it was actually about QAnon the entire time!

That is to say, Flat Earth appeals to the conspiratorially minded, but QAnon has been rolling through conspiracy circles, a “big tent” conspiracy theory that rolls other conspiracies into it like a big ol’ Katamari of crazy, which has allowed it to achieve a shocking amount of size and influence for what is, essentially, a mixed-bag collection of utter gibberish.

Like many others, I’ve always been fascinated with looking at wacky cults and insane conspiracies from a safe distance. It’s, like, up there with “true crime” as a topic of broad public interest.

Will Sommer’s book is just… a lot more reporting on the QAnon phenomenon (“QAnon phenomenon” is a solid tongue twister), including some sad stories of people losing their family members down the Q-hole and some bananas stories of what Q followers have done in the name of their mad cult.

Thoughts

For such a wild and wacky topic, it’s kind of a boring read. Anybody already familiar with the basics of “what QAnon is” and “what sovcits are” and “what pizzagate was” and “who is Romana Didulo, Queen of Canada” is not going to find much new information in his book.

It’s a decent primer for people unfamiliar with the topic but if you’re Extremely Online there’s not much new or interesting here - and if what you’re looking for is lots of juicy nuggets of crazy to chew on it’s a little too dry and clinical to provide them in their full force.

To be honest, I feel like Dan’s video up there ^ covers the topic as well or better, in a much shorter time.

Piranesi

Another tight 200-page read (these short novels are making me feel very productive on my vacation, look at how many BOOKS I can read), Piranesi is another amnesia tale.

Piranesi is a feral human, living on fish, in a giant, endless, half-sunken labyrinth of big statues and old architecture, who can only remember the last 6 years or so of his life.

Like Castaway if Tom Hanks didn’t remember being a deliveryman

Piranesi is also happy and quite uninterested in solving the puzzle of his confinement or lost memories, which leaves much of the book’s early sleuthing up to you, the reader, as he happily grabs a clue, reads it over, and then discards it because he’s found a pretty shell or some shit.

It’s a divisive book because some people can’t stand having a viewpoint character who just wants to tell you about shells and birds and can’t seem to be bothered with the central puzzle of the whole story, but it’s not a long read so be patient, geez, this is going somewhere.

The puzzle comes together eventually and you learn all about the [SPOILERS REDACTED] and how it fits together - and I found that very satisfying and good.

This book also leaned into one of my favorite horror tropes: where the supernatural horror isn’t “malicious” or even “evil”, it’s just kind of an unusual, dangerous natural phenomena and the story is about doing science to it. Which also often crops up in SCP and The Laundry Files.

Tiff’s Thoughts on Piranesi (Piranesi Spoilers):

ed: I’m swapping you over to my wife’s POV for this next segment: imagine me becoming suddenly much more pleasant and intelligent

I found Piranesi a fascinating read, but I can see why you would say it is divisive. It’s the kind of book that I wouldn’t recommend to someone without knowing their taste a bit first, because indeed, it’s not intending to walk you through the final details of its philospphy and leaves a lot of the bigger mysteries unresolved.

Remember when I gave Brandon Sanderson a try, and found that he was kind of formulaic? (the bad guys are dressed in black spikes, there is a male and a female lead, and they will fall in love by being in proximity to one another, the good guys win-but-not-without-sacrifice, we all learn a valuable lesson in the end, padded with fantasy tropes) The redeeming qualities I found in the Sanderson books (i did Elantris and the Mistborn trilogy) was the depth of his world-building, his lets-tie-up-these-loose-ends approach to his various arcs and his deep and thoughtful approach to his magic-systems. He wanted you to know the rules of his magic, understand it, almost feel like it wasn’t magic, but a natural system like gravity, that had rigid parameters you could learn, follow and formulate. Mistborn’s very developed magic-needs-metals system was super cool, and I very much nerded out on the idea of keeping various metals and performing alchemy to have the needed components for the spells you wanted. It was a cool idea and it felt the opposite of tropey, in that I have yet to encounter before or since, such a unique take on magic.

Piranesi is doing both and neither of these things. Like, the world-building is evocative, considered and unique. It’s not something I’ve ever heard of before, or are likely to encounter again.

An amnesiac wandering through endless white rooms and vestibules of beatific greco-roman statues depicting all the ideas of mankind, where only birds may join you and your only path there is descending into pre-rationalized thought…

This is not a story even remotely predictable or similar to anything I have ever read, and that in itself is refreshing, as a voracious media-ingester, to find something so wholey unlike the dozens of other sci-fi and fantasy and quasi-scientific books cluttering my e-reader.

However, you will not find that same detail applied to the “systems of magic” that I so admired in the Sanderson books. If you are looking for concrete answers, well, so are the scientists in this book, and this books is the retelling of how they failed in that respect. You don’t get a ton of answers, and that ellipses on what feels like a bit of the meat of this story, left me vaguely unsatisfied. I think i like “hard” fantasy and sci-fi so much because I am pedantic, and even more so since working full-time as an environment artist. The “why” of things is important in my job, and we are constantly being told to justify our additions (the rim lighting is HERE because our Time of Day is X and Subsurface Scattering happening on Y should make it look Z.) and also told to remove the superfluous. And so the unresolved bits left over in the end, gave me some unease, searching for meaning in things that the author never bothered to explain or revisit.

why could only birds get there from the real world?
why did it cause the people inside it to lose their memories?
were the halls infinite, and ever-expanding, sort of an allegory for the universe or finite?
where does the sea in the halls come from and what guides its tides? is it an Earthen sea, did it come from whatever is creating the rooms, or was it a natural phenom that the rooms are built upon?
how did each and every one of the 13 bodies end up in the rooms? (we have a handful explained, but the origin of The Folded Child or The Biscuit Box man were left largely unexplored or explained)
if the scientist exploring these worlds could routinely return to them, along with photographic evidence, why were they not believed by their peers and why couldn’t they simply prove the Other Worlds theory by taking other scientists there, or going in front of them?
Why was Piranesi just able to walk out when 16 showed him the way? Is that all it took to leave?
how long was he in there, exactly? How long did it take for him to become a full amnesiac?
And really, what had to all fall in to place in the end for that police officer to find her way in at the exact moment of the flood, at the exact moment Ketterly was walking through the rooms? 16 felt like one of the more far-fetched components of the story.

So while in the end, I felt like it was a worthwhile read, and I enjoyed it for the sort of wonderous, untethered surreal world it took me on journey though, I agree with Curtis about how Piranesi’s overall lack of desire for an explanation, and the author’s focus on exclusively Piranesi’s POV left me aching for a second book, a viewpoint told from the police office or Ketterley;s point of view, giving more concrete motivations and rationale around what is happening.

The nature of Piranesi’s innocence resulted in a sort of mutual lack of clarity between reader and character on who people were and what they symbolized in the story. We hear the names of Ketterly’s colleagues and learn the role of Arne-Sales in the book through a number of entries, but attaching Sylvia, or Jack Ritter, the names, to the people in or out of the The House, were sometimes difficult and I still feel like I kind of lost the thread eventually on who murdered who and who disappeared in what way.

But yeah, it’s is a short read, and it does feel like a kind of intimate, secret little book, since it’s largely told through Journal entries and recollections of an amnesiac. It’s like:

finding one of the lost books in Gravity Falls
flipping through the Seraphinianus
the sensation I had playing Journey

like…. this is weird and beautiful and feels like it has Meaning, while also lacking a larger context. But that’s ok, because every detail of context isn’t the focus nor necessary to enjoy the broader intended experience.

*** also, as a tangental aside, the House with it’s beautiful statues piled on one another depicting all walks of human life reminded me HEAVILY of the Norwegian park filled with statues called Vigeland. Seeing this obolisk, where the base is the old being climbed over by the young until it is topped with babies, was definitely affecting:

The park is surrounded by statues depicting life from birth to death and they are striking. a really cool place. It is the closest real-world counterpart I can reference mentally, when trying to conjure the grandeur of The House of Statues.

inverse KOTC

Sun, 07 May 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Inverse King of the Controller: The Superior Scheme

I “invented” (I’m probably not the first person to discover this, but I did come up with it without prior art.) an improved scheme for sharing the controller in “fighting game” or “controller based gamer scenarios”.

In the traditional King of the Controller, the winner holds on to the controller. This system tends towards an equilibrium: the best player just sits with the controller, besting all comers, until someone lucks into beating them.

“Inverse” King of the Controller, the winner of the match is the one who passes off the controller.

Here’s why it’s great:

“Won’t good players just throw the game to keep the controller?” - hell no they won’t, everybody is too competitive for this to happen. You want to give up the controller because it means you won, and giving up the controller feels good rather than bad.
Bad players get more time, rather than less time with the game, giving them more of a chance to polish their skills, and making them increasingly desperate to escape by winning a match. This actually keeps the local skill curve much more balanced!

As a result of an Inverse KoTC system, our office Towerfall pool became extremely competitive and evenly matched.

i will help u move

Tue, 02 May 2023 11:00:00 -0700

c’mon trust me I won’t bite you again promise

ha ha u fell for it

Packing? No, we’re just making loads of new cat beds.

sweepstakes

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I want to talk about why Sweepstakes is an underrated Gorillaz masterpiece.

It’s more experimental than pop can get away with. It gives you loose, sparse musical ideas kinda bouncing off one another, confusing tempo, noise, it’s a messy, disorganized, chaotic, formless song that doesn’t feel like it gels.

And it doesn’t resolve this by tightening up the grooves, by fitting things together better, it resolves this additively, by adding more and more and more elements. At about 58 seconds you get a telegraph booping along to Mos Def’s tempo and then some crunchy synth elements that start to gel the song together, and it starts to work. “Hey, this is kind of a bop” Then, another full minute in, the drums join the party, and horns.

It’s a lot, all at once, each of the elements that felt out of place and chaotic before now gelling in a groove that feels heavy and inevitable, it’s still a big noisy cacophonous mess but everything is aligned in this huge messy crescendo of horns and cymbal crashes and flow.

And that’s the point where you turn up the volume, because you must. It’s a banger.

It makes me think of Ravel’s Boléro when I listen to it, which was also, uh, controversial on account of Bolero’s musically sparse repetition with successively added elements, building to a huge crescendo.

Decoding the music masterpieces: Ravel’s Bolero — a sinuous and sexy composition with ‘no music in it’

https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-ravels-bolero-a-sinuous-and-sexy-composition-with-no-music-in-it-149528

hitgub

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

on hobby construction

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

these cost like $200 each, which is too bad, because if you were to buy a bunch of them, disassemble them, and reassemble them into a big mecha you’d be a pioneer in the hobby of gumpla

wadaisy

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

look, nintendo, it has been long enough, it’s time for a wapeach, a watoad, a wabowser

If daisy is peach’s luigi, then there should be a wapeach and a wadaisy in the wings

I checked and oh boy does the internet ever have my back on this topic, these are great

escape room

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I went to an escape room conference once, but I got out easily so they can’t have been very good

no big diff

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

DMing Alt/Indie RPGs

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 12:00:00 -0700

The Default Fantasy Genre doesn’t always do it for me.

I like running TTRPGs.

I’ve been doing it for a long time to varying levels of success.

But there’s a slight problem with that:

I Have Some Problems With D&D:

The setting: “default fantasy”.

Where is D&D?

Why, it’s Everyfantasyrealm, of course.

Christ, J.R.R. Tolkien has got some swing, a lot of fantasy takes place in this “Tolkien Mashup Fantasy Realm”.

Literal Actual Racism

It’s fantasy racism, but, like, there are 26 pages of the player’s handbook devoted to race and the various different abilities of those different races.

This whole way of looking at things is based on, like, a really early euro-colonial way of looking at the world and the various peoples in it, and that’s the path that lead to it ending up in D&D: Tolkien’s caricatures of various european ethnic groups through the lens of folk mythology, writ into fantasy, became Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Orcs, and the rest.

And, you know what? I don’t like DMing it. I don’t like it when players lean way in to it. If you’re building a D&D universe in your head, goblins are evil, barbarians are stupid, elves are haughty pricks, and there’s not really a way around it.

You can try to build adventures where it turns out the goblins are an advanced and ancient culture and it was the humans who were the bad guys the whole time (somewhere, buried deep, are my notes for the “goblin civilization” campaign) but actually that’s… not a very fun game to play, especially not as the humans. “Let’s confront fantasy racism” is too heavy for a silly game about thwacking things with big hammers.

The over-developed combat system

Light armor? Ascendant Step? Finesse? Reach? Druidic Focus. Concentration! Grappling. Suffocating! Terrain! Flying. Size? Saving throws! Feign Death! Dominate Beast! Dash! Dodge. Hide? Ready. Range! Shove! Cover. Critical Hits! Acid. Death Saves! Mounts! Verbal spell components!

The combat system is complex, difficult to understand and adjudicate.

But also: the level of systems weight devoted to combat makes it absolutely and unquestioningly clear to the players: this is the important part of D&D. If you’re playing D&D, you are going to sit down and be carried, via some excuse plot, through a variety of crunchy combat simulations that have been heavily playtested (because balancing these complex fight scenarios without aggressive play-testing is nigh impossible). If you’re sitting down at a Default D&D table, the only way to really play is for the DM to roll out a big ol’ grid, you’re going to be In Fights for about 75% of your play-time.

And that complexity? It doesn’t always pay off. It’s often bloated and cumbersome, and it’s a lot of work to learn and run.

I learned how to run both 3rd Edition and 4th Edition - at a pretty amateurish level, but run them nonetheless - and I feel like learning 5th Edition would be, well, work.

The under-developed non-combat system

For literally everything that’s not combat?

skill checks.

Oh, and non-combat abilities, which your players (correctly noting how combat-weighted the game’s mechanics are) have been under-emphasizing during character creation.

You get the one peep who needs Charisma to hit harder to chat up the town guards, the one peep who needs Agility to hit harder to unlock the door, the one peep who needs Intelligence to hit harder to read the book, and move along.

The decades of cruft

This damned chart has been floating around, in various forms, since D&D v.1, and while it seemed pretty cool when I first encountered it…

Actually it kinda fuckin’ sucks ahoy.

There have been massive improvements here: weapons that are total stinkers like the trident or hand-crossbow have been upgraded or given new abilities to make them less obviously terrible. The oft-maligned whip still deals trash damage but now gets to be the only weapon in the game with both “finesse” and “reach” - but these massive improvements are still… C++ - legions of awkward, unpleasant, complicated hacks to try to get something that was designed in the 70s to perform like a more modern design.

I just want more

Look, I love a lot of RPG designs. Why can’t we have characters who swap classes at will and keep the stat boosts and key abilities from their classes, like in Final Fantasy V or Tactics? Why can’t we be SPECIAL, like in Fallout? Why can’t we have an ability grid, like in Final Fantasy X? ~~Why can’t we have junctioning~~ no that system is cursed

WoTC

Wizards of the Coast is not your friend.

Indie TTRPGs

Okay, so, if not D&D, then what?

Well, loads of people are out there publishing their own TTRPG content.

And I’ve tried - or, at least, purchased - a bunch of them!

I definitely keep tabs on the Ennies and try to keep abreast of the Good Stuff. https://ennie-awards.com/history-of-winners/

Microscope

Microscope is less a classical RPG and more of a co-operative creative writing workshop.

https://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

I’ve read a bit about how writer’s rooms for movies organize their scenes, and Microscope’s rules feel like a codified and gamified version of that: you and your friends are collaborating to build a story.

The Quiet Year

Again, this one is in the Microscope camp - less of a classical RPG, more of an activity. This one is a mapping game where you lay out the story of a small town for a year, establishing more and more details about how the town fits together and works as you go.

While I was running 13th Age, I was planning at some point to run a one-shot in-campaign game of The Quiet Year to build a town in-universe that the players could adventure in. That won’t work in my current Blades campaign because Blades very clearly takes place in Duskvol.

Fate

Fate’s curious - it is an engine without a lot of the rest of the game attached. Fate doesn’t have any lore or classes or universe, it’s just a bunch of rules that you can use to put together essentially any kind of RPG that you would like.

It’s an insanely flexible system.

I had a crazy idea that a flexible, talented DM could use a pipeline of Microscope => The Quiet Year => Fate to build a collaborative universe, town, and then TTRPG-adventure entirely out of whole cloth, but ho boy does that sound like a lot of work.

I had a different crazy idea and built out a whole Cowboy Bebop inspired FATE module, called “Seatbelts”, one time.

Faith

I haven’t actually tried Faith! I bought some pricey sourcebooks for it, read them all, and then never ran a game because hoogh - it looks like a bear to run. Maybe someday, though.

One of the biggest concerns I have about actually DMing Faith is that two of the major axes the game’s themes run around are “political” and “religious” - a lot of the game’s worldbuilding is built around the conflict between the hyper-capitalist Corvo and the hyper-communist Iz’kal, and a lot of the game’s rule-set involves explicit spirituality rotating around the game’s handful of Real Actual Divine Powers.

I haven’t seen a lot of reports of this online, but I can imagine more than one scenario where someone has DM’d a game of Faith that got uncomfortably polemic and ruined friendships.

13th Age

Built by a bunch of ex-D&D developers, 13th Age is an attempt to backport a bunch of interesting “modern TTRPG ideas” into D&D, with varying levels of success.

Blades in the Dark

I’m running Blades in the Dark for some friends. It’s pretty good!

Indie TTRPG Problems

Let’s talk about some specific problems I’ve been having with some of these TTRPGs:

Open-Ended Improvisational Narrative Isn’t For Everyone

A lot of these more narrative-focused engines give both the players and DM a lot of control over the narrative, much more than what D&D gives you.

This is a double-edged sword: their combination of mechanical simplicity and narrative complexity can leave players feeling like they’ve just been invited to a night at the improv when what they actually wanted to do was just to roll some dice and kill some goblins.

After running BiTD for a bit, some of my players have noted that the system’s open-endedness can be exhausting - and, as the DM, I can’t help but agree. It can be.

13th Age has a mechanic, icon rolls, where players roll dice at the beginning of the session, invoking the 13 big characters in the 13th Age Universe, and if they roll well I’m just supposed to organically work in a positive or negative interaction with that character as part of the session. A lot of DMs don’t like Icon Rolls (Sly Flourish’s alternative Icon roll rule is pretty compelling: https://slyflourish.com/icon_rolls.html )

The level of this varies from game to game, with FATE and Microscope off in the “no crunch, all improv” dimension and 13th Age and Faith in the “more crunch, less improv” zone, with BITD right in the middle, but they’re all, IMO, more open to interpretation than 5e, which is very rigid.

No Ecosystem (Just Write Me a Damned Adventure)

When you’re looking at a TTRPG, you’re also looking at ecosystem. With D&D, you technically have everything you need to run a game in the Player’s Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide - but, you also need a bestiary full of creatures to populate your universe, so a Monster Manual too.

That’s some 700 pages of stuff to deal with, and while you don’t need all of it for some of the more stripped down adventures, that’s a good base to start with.

There’s also a huge ecosystem of prewritten adventures to work with. Building adventures ahead of time for your players is a huge amount of effort: just running a pre-written adventure is GREAT.

The really popular indies do build up some content over time: 13th Age and Delta Green have been pumping out adventures for a while, now, filling out those universes slowly but steadily.

But Blades in the Dark is a particularly nasty culprit here: it has one book. 334 pages, and a lot of those pages are character sheets and index. It’s got rules, character classes, play examples, lore, and then good luck. Now that my players are starting to get their feet under them in the game, I’m hunting around for any pre-baked Blades in the Dark content and coming up pretty empty. Shazbot.

Not ENOUGH Crunch, or Weirdly Balanced Crunch

Balancing an RPG with complex mechanics is unbelievably hard.

The narrative-focused RPGs, the FATEs and Blades In the Darks, they don’t even try. You’ve got a dice for Fight, the same way you’ve got a dice for Negotiate, all skills work about the same way, and theoretically a bad roll on Negotiate and a bad roll on Fight are just as likely to put you in the hospital.

These games are supposed to be narrative experiences, not so much mechanically satisfying. If you wanted a game with excellent mechanics and no story, well, can I recommend a board game?

But… the additional narrative focus and much, much smaller playtesting teams leave less room for finely tuned mechanics.

Blades in the Dark, for example, has no crunch, no real combat mechanics, no monster details, it’s all just stuff that’s folded into the larger systems of the game.

13th Age has a system that’s a little less crunchy than D&D, but also weirdly balanced: there are limited guidelines and tools available for preparing a balanced and enjoyable encounter for your players, so you’re constantly riding the thin, thin line between “total cakewalk” and “total party kill”.

Modding D&D Into Submission

There’s some stuff from these games that I’ll absolutely take to future games:

The D&D Race House Rule

I came up with this eras ago and I stand by it: whatever race you are, you can also use the stat blocks and bonuses of another race if that would be a better fit for your class. Want to be a Gnome Barbarian (with an orc stat block?) Sure. Go for it. Hit like a tiny little truck. Swing a weapon three times your size. Anyone can be anything. It’s a little unrealistic but I want to see the Dwarf Wizards and Orc Bards and Elf Paladins that I have been denied.

One Unique Thing

13th Age asks you to come up with one totally unique thing about your character as a mandatory character creation step. Whatever your unique thing is, you have to (and get to) be the only player in the universe of 13th age with that unique twist.

It’s… well, that’s just good character creation advice.

Quantum Inventory & Flashbacks

Instead of compiling a list of things your character is carrying, you compile a much larger list of things your character could reasonably be carrying.

Then, when the time comes for you to pull something out of your pack, you mark off a “load” (of which you have 3, 5, or 7 depending on how heavily you packed) and that object appears as if you decided to bring it all along. Your character’s loadout still matters, (because you burn load every time you use an object and collapse its waveform) but it doesn’t matter until exactly when you need it to. You always packed the right stuff for the job.

In fact, if you needed to do ANYTHING before your adventure, you can always throw a Flashback, one of Blades in the Dark’s greatest mechanics. Pay a small fee of Stress (one of the game’s currencies) to invoke a flashback and you can hold a scene back in time to grab an object that you need or set up some task that needs to be done to make your adventure successful in the now.

These flashbacks are variably expensive, or even possible, depending on how the DM rules, but flashbacks and quantum inventory serve to really, really simplify planning and packing for adventures.

2025 Editor’s Note: When I finally got around to running another D&D campaign for my players I forgot all of these house-rule ideas and it went fine anyways.

writing prompt

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

This is probably some kind of dumb “times are changing” article, but it’s way more fun to imagine that it’s the instigating event to an exciting supernatural thriller.

generative captcha

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, I decided, “how hard would it be to build my own CAPTCHA?”, but instead of showing people boring trains and crosswalks, I could generate the dumbest possible categories of things.

find the JAMES BOND EATING CAKES

find the MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX BARBIE

find the OLD WOMAN FALLING DOWN A STAIRCASE

find the GUY FIERI DUNKING

It actually works pretty well - like, I bet you, a human, could look at each of these four sets of things and easily divide them into two separate categories, right?

Editor’s Note: I have at best limited belief in the usefulness of CAPTCHA nowadays, and also this scheme unfortunately would also keep out any blind or visually impaired users, so it hasn’t been widely rolled out.

simon SES

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

SES is an interface that really shows off Amazon’s talent for simple, clear, practical API design - for example, if you want to send an email there’s only 71 quick, easy functions to learn:

competition

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0700

me while watching sports: i have no idea what’s happening

me while watching competition format cooking shows:

I’ve honestly been thinking of running an event for me and my friends, like a sports draft but for competitors on a season of Top Chef or something.

financialized blood debt

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

so, a fantasy universe where if someone saves your life, you owe them a blood debt, but it’s commutative, transferable, and financialized, so if you save a life, that person now owes the debt, and people who save a lot of lives can bundle and sell their blood debts on the open market

gleaming

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

our mouths gleaming

with teeth that we have stolen from children

extra teeth

more than we could ever need

blue light filters

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

The marketing copy has to be about “protecting you from blue light” without any claims having to do with whether or not you actually need to be protected from the color blue, which you absolutely do not:

famously the Emerald City of Oz is depicted in media as actually being a fabulous city of glittering emerald, but in the actual story, residents were required to wear goggles that “protected their eyes” from the dazzling brightness of a city of pure emerald

the goggles were, of course, tinted green, the Emerald City was never emerald at all, it was just another elaborate swindle from Oz, which was in-and-of-itself satire about the myth of American prosperity

I think, were he still alive, L. Frank Baum might find humor in the modern proliferation of swindlers selling glasses intended to protect you from the many imagined harms of the color blue.

on refunds

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

add a detail to your steam game that forces its runtime to just a hair over 2 hours, put an episode of “Ted Lasso” in there if you have to, thank me later

turdy

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

That time the Starbucks barista misheard “Curtis” and wrote “Turdi” on my cup and my wife called me “Turdy” for a week

oz

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

anyways tune in for my youtube video where I explain my dark theory where everybody in The Wizard of Oz was dead the whole time because it was filmed 84 years ago

XML

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

When I’m looking at the problem, specifically, of scripting video-game style dialogue, the thing I’m looking to work with is a language that allows me to mark up text.

In fact, if I could mark up the text in a way that’s extensible - with all of my weird text animations and sound effects and mood modifiers and special effects - that’d be great.

None of these formats seem to do the trick YAML isn’t really a markup language at all, it’s an object serialization language, same with JSON.

Why, this calls for an… extensible markup language.

I wish someone had made something like that.

capital has no soul

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

If I could find some way to legally churn kittens and orphans into high-yield fertilizer in a way that was profitable, I’d be drowning in VC capital and employees by the end of the week.

People clown on silicon valley’s “if we don’t build it, someone else will, might as well get to work building the evil thing” ethos but it’s not necessarily WRONG.

You don’t have to participate in it, you probably shouldn’t if it morally disgusts you, but if a profitable market opportunity exists, no matter how evil, there’s no shortage of people out there who will cheerfully fill it. They’ll rationalize it to themselves one way or another - “well, we design land mines but we don’t DEPLOY them” - “our vapes are helping people stop smoking” - “microtransactions are the only way to sustain a live service game” - if there’s profit on the line they’ll find a way.

animated text in godot

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0700

Godot’s default text system doesn’t allow for very complex text animations, so I’ve been working on my own thing, which is … well, coming along, gradually.

Video content

I’ve got some basic 2D rigging working, too:

Video content

economy

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the open marketplace “economy” monetization model in metaverse spaces is actually a huge anti-feature.

It’s why so many of them feel like abandoned malls. People don’t like being sold to and giving your creators tools to try to nickel and dime people for every interaction with their products creates a bad and unpleasant experience for your users, so they leave, then there’s nobody to sell to so your creators leave.

Your creators would have stuck around to create art for the sake of creating art, but now that their art could theoretically be profitable and isn’t they don’t want to stay any more.

It’s one of the things I actually love about Second Life, you boot it up and it’s this eternal haunted mall, just emptiness and the hull of commerce around you as far as the eye can see. Nobody was enjoying this, they all just thought they could make some money.

A vibrant VR platform lets you play with the bowling balls and drink the beer and you don’t have to pay some idiot $1.75 to do that.

A dead VR platform gives you nothing to do without productizing it, and most real human beings go “fuck this” and bail, because that’s the kind of platform that appeals to speculators and capital and not, y’know, people.

On the other hand, Roblox is printing money right now and Second Life made enough money on a virtual speculative land rush bubble that they created that they could sit on their hands for a decade, so maybe I should shut the hell up.

potemkin

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

My wife’s company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new “potemkin village as a service” startup.

seatfillr is gonna be huge

Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company’s image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.

as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon

He could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we’d be a productive team.

pretty sure we’d be VP of Engineering before long

“why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?”

Curtis’s Actor, Handsomely: “I’m very busy with all of my job.”

we warned you

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Sometimes when something bad happens, somebody will make a post on social media like “we warned you, we warned you this was going to happen and you didn’t listen” - with “you” as a kind of abstract other person.

It does numbers because, I guess, people would rather feel like they’re aligned with the “we” than with the “you” in that sentiment. Yeah, (awkwardly), we … did warn you! You tell ’em! We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.

I usually unfollow everybody involved in that kind of transaction because none of that is a good energy to bring to social media.

solar watches

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I struggle to keep solar watches running because they require about four hours of direct sunlight a year and that’s just a promise I just can’t keep.

eaten by the whale

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

project killer

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

So, I had a neat idea of something I could do with a game I was working on: take the 2D plane the game was running on and stack it on a 3D plane, so that the game would visibly take place on a screen in a different, 3D world.

I whipped up a quick demo:

Video content

2025 Editor’s Note:

In retrospect, this neat idea was actually the worst kind of idea: a total project killer.

It sucked up a bunch of time and air, and obviously I lack the experience and chops to build a viable full 3D game: so chasing this idea would be impractical.

Something about the mere existence of this 2D/3D divide ended up drawing a lot of focus and thought, but it was so obviously impractical that the project couldn’t continue. Rather than rolling it back and continuing with an earlier build, I simply moved on to the next idea.

This was the last time I ever posted about this project.

chunky/smooth

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

chess

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I can build a program that can beat me at chess.

And let me tell you, it’s not because I’m good at chess.

I’m not even that good at programming.

black mirror sucks

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

There’s a really recent episode of Black Mirror where the plot is that a rich white lady completely loses her shit and goes crazy, which hurts her social media score, which causes her to lose her shit even more, which ruins her life because in the future, your social media score determines your access to everything.

But all of her experiences with being unpopular are just experiences that regular poor people have, all the time, today - the rental company gave her a bad car! Nobody listened to her when she complained at the airport! The justice system didn’t treat her fairly!

And one day of being treated this way drove this poor woman completely insane.

People really liked this episode. Such effective horror writing! Imagine if the world was actually like this?

And, like… damn, the world is really like this, it’s just that the currency is “money” rather than “popularity”, as if that is any fairer.

discourse

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about setting up a Discourse community without remembering that the software is the world’s most effective ghost town generator.

The internet needs a modern forum software, I think. It’s good that this exists: and I’ve been running a tiny, private Discourse community for lo, near a decade now. So, actually, I’m kind of on the side of Discourse.

Like, my Discourse site doesn’t have a CDN set up. Because the CDN that I use, Cloudflare, one of the most common CDN platforms on the internet, isn’t supported by Discourse. That’s fine: I only have about 30 users, all of us in the Pacific Northwest, serving the whole site out of Wasabi object storage in Oregon is perfectly fine. but Discourse feels the need to pop up a notification every single week letting me know that this is a critical error that I need to fix! Let me live my life, Discourse.

I’m still weirded out by some of the ways they brand themselves and act. Discourse. A civilized discussion platform. Who decided that their marketing should be dripping with, like, neo-colonial derision for the way that people communicate online? That’s really baked in from the get-go, too, all the way down to the name of the platform itself. “Discourse”.

🧐 Mmm, yes. Fetch me my tea, Willinglsley, it’s time for a civilized discussion.

This isn’t a place for your memes and nonsense, this is a Serious Roman Forum for high-minded communique.

I can’t think of a software package where I’ve had to disable more dubiously helpful “leave it to us, we know how to run a community better than you do” features than Discourse. “That’s not enough words, you can’t post a response that’s just an emoji.” “Oh, you need to read everything and rank up on the forum levels before you participate, you neophyte.”

obviously the problem with internet communication has always been that it’s Not Polite And Erudite Enough

why, if we could all simply have a vigorous discussion with a polite exchange of ideas and then shake hands afterwards, what a pleasant place the internet could have become, but INSTEAD you’re ignoring our civilized offerings and pelting one another with TWITCH EMOTES like a bunch of sava—

It is simultaneously the best or second-best available FOSS community communication product (in competition with Mastodon, even though they serve different purposes) and just awkward and frustrating and disappointing in so many little ways.

Editor’s Note 2025

I’m pleased to note that as of the most recent peek, they’ve completely removed the world “civilized” from their marketing materials. Consider this complaint retracted.

Editor’s Editor’s Note 2025

Actually, with both of the complaints of this article resolved, I’m not sure if I have anything else left to complain about.

Well, they have started cramming in worthless AI features with wild abandon, I do hate that.

Anyways: Discourse is pretty good I guess?

NATO Phonetic

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I don’t know the NATO phonetic alphabet; one time I was reading a complex serial code to someone over the phone and I just started making up words - “M as in Muffin, E as in Echo, C as in Capybara, W as in Wendigo, P as in Pterodactyl…” and they started laughing at me.

Maybe because I picked awful words, but also maybe because “Pterodactyl” very prominently has a silent P, so that’s a terrible choice of word for it.

motivation

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

A lot of my family work in supervisory roles, and when I talk to them about the difficulties of working with other people our problems are very different: they need to keep people motivated to work.

I rarely work with people who need to be motivated. Most of the people in my last few jobs have brought loads of their own motivation. If anything, they need to be calmed down and reminded to take their vacation days.

“Please do not build this from scratch: a solution already exists.”

Carl Sagan famously said

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”

— and I’ve met countless software developers (myself included) who would respond to that quote by rolling up their sleeves and going “welp.”

I use a term to justify building things that don’t need to be built: joy-driven development.

Sometimes, especially if you’re trying to manage your own flagging motivation, you can do things your own way because that makes it… more fun. It improves your sense of ownership over the product. It’s what differentiates craftsmanship from good engineering. Sure, the custom solution is not as flexible or well understood as the existing one, but…

A lot of becoming a senior developer is developing better instincts about where projects can and should fall on the DIY to NIH spectrum. I’m still way too gung-ho about building my own solutions for things.

the later system

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0700

recycling hero

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

i’m doing my part for the environment, i recycle all of my garbage, regardless of how many times the city asks me to stop

accolades like “don’t put non-recyclables in the recycling bin” and “that’s not how it works”

load bearing poster

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0700

I use the term “load bearing poster” all the time when describing legacy code - it means “that’s very obviously kinda bad but it’s also kinda best not to poke it unless you’re feeling brave”.

mostly good

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

generally pretty good reviews for the local park n’ ride

facebook-quality

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I do not know what caused me to want to make this nightmare, maybe just frustration with Facebook in general

li'l rpg

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

(editor’s note: For a while I was working on this project in Godot, a little RPG thing.)

Video content Video content

This is turning out to be super interesting pixel art experiment:

The level’s geometry is very basic and I’m encoding the texture information on a normal layer rather than by painting it.

When combined with light sources, the level’s texture information looks very naturalistic.

basic geo:

2D normals:

final:

cat gargoyles

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

there aren’t a lot of cat gargoyles but there should be, wouldn’t buildings be better with a whole mess of stone cats napping all over the place, watching you from cornerso

isn’t this building better for having this guy?

post christmas introversion

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

in order to work off some of the almost oppressive closeness of the Christmas season I basically don’t talk to anybody in my family (or outside my family, if possible) for the first 20 days of January

my guitar gently weeps

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

if you look at the floor and see it needs sweeping but still your guitar gently weeps, you have confused your guitar and broom.

this is a common problem.

despite what you might think, it can not be resolved with a blistering solo.

you need to put down the guitar and fetch a broom. you can’t solo dust away.

gran vals

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

Have you heard Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega?

Well, I can absolutely guarantee you’ve heard PART of it.

Zhuzh it Up

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

How do you spell jujj?

I am a man who prides himself on knowing how things are spelled, no matter how ridiculous or inconsistent the English rules happen to be. Furlough? Victuals? Hiccough? Mnemonics? Pneumatic? I’ve got all the unspellables on tap just in case I happen to be in a spelling bee at some point. (sidenote: I have never been in a spelling bee, but I’m ready, just in case one advances threateningly at me.)

But, years ago, Tiffany asked me a question that has haunted me to this day.

How do you spell jujj?

Me: “Jujj?”

Tiff: “You know, like… I’m gonna jujj it up a little.”

Me: … I … don’t know! Jujj? Zhooj? Jooj? Juj? Jeugh? Geuge?

Then we were watching the Stupid Netflix Bartender Thing with the captions on, and someone says it. “Gonna jujj this drink up.”

“Baby Masters: DO NOT SHAKE UP THE COMPETITION”

And the captions person has spelled it … zhuzh. Huh. I’ve never seen that before.

I made Tiff pause the episode so that I could look at that spelling up close. ZHUZH. Zhuzh? zhuuuuuuuuzh.

First and foremost: there’s no English-language letter for a buzzing J sound - “ʒ” ( ʒʊʒ ) so English works around it in words like uʒual, viʒion or garaʒ - which can be spelled a lot of ways, so there’s no really obvious grammatical spelling for zhuzh.

So I look it up and it seems like zhuzh is currently the accepted spelling of the word… but all of these articles are from 2018+. Is this word only a few years old? I’m sure I’ve heard it before that.

In fact, it would seem that… the various different possible spellings of zhuzh have been fighting for the past 20 years, and only recently has zhuzh started to pull ahead as the accepted spelling.

It seems like 2007-2010 was the turning point, where zhuzh started to take over.

One proposed origin for this term is originating from gay subculture in the 60s and 70s, and, in fact, it seems to have been “geuge” when written about back then:

Although this could be confounded by someone prominent or famous named, like, “Frank Geuge” or something - but a quick Wikipedia search turns up no Geuges.

For some reason, Google Search Popularity only goes back to 2004 - I don’t know how they could be so sloppy with their recordkeeping. (sidenote: I’m joking, I know that Google doesn’t have “Google Search Popularity” data that predates Google itself.)

Okay, another detail: Merriam Webster mentioned that the word “Zhuzh”, which made its debut on the “Words We’re Watching” list in 2018, was a popular catch-phrase of style icon Carson Kressley (Queer Eye).

In fact, back in the Google Trends graph we can see that all of the various and sundry variants of the unspellable zhuzh were in full play in 2004-2008, back when Carson Kressley was on the air and people were trying to figure out how in the heck to spell zhuzh:

Carson Kressley claims to have learned it from Ralph Lauren, who spelled it “Zhoosh”.

Hey, there zhoosh is: dominating the literary world of zhuzhes even as zhuzh seems to be taking over as the dominant term. (Well after the dominant geuge of the 80’s.)

So there appear to have been at least a few major changeovers in the historied mystery of the word zhuzh:

geuge to zhoosh between the 80’s and 90’s,
zhoosh to nobody knows for sure in the 00’s,
and then everyone finally settling on zhuzh in the late 10’s (around the time that Queer Eye’s reboot came on the air)

all brought to us by a shady cabal of powerful lexicon-altering gay fashionistas who make up their own rules and zhuzh with impunity.

microservices

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

I just see it everywhere, now:

rating terries

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0700

new idea: a microblog where I rate Canada’s hundreds of Terry Fox statues

This one would be, like, a 2/10.

boring

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

My younger brother and one of my friends are literally having a conversation about boring - boring machines, boring holes, troubles boring. I suggested they change the topic to riveting because it might be more interesting but no dice.

grandmas

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0700

grandmas are also 3d printers

spool up some yarn and watch a hat materialize

arcade wine cabinet

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

I have this picture from 2019 where I sketched out a geeky but non-existent object, the mythical “arcade wine cabinet” for adult nerds.

I think it would sell!

Vegeta + Luigi

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

creative determination

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

My experience of being broadly creative but not overwhelmingly talented is one of tremendous, unending shame.

How dare I produce such shoddy trash? How dare I presume that any of my output is worth others’ time and attention?

I deserve my relative anonymity.

This is tempered by what I would describe as “grim defiance”. God damn you, I will reach deep down and I will produce more trash than you had ever thought possible, and I will press it right into your goddamned faces until you love me.

hog

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

everyone always describes VRChat like this

cats is vampires

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

keep themselves immaculately coiffed
recreationally do murders for the sheer thrill of the hunt
sometimes very friendly, sometimes very cold
sleep all day
prominent fangs
will hiss at you dramatically if threatened
even if they love you, they will bite you if they get too excited, they can’t help it
mweh!

evidence is mounting that vampires and cats are beloved for many of the same reasons

basically I’m laying out the argument for why “Prince Alastair: Catboy Vampire” would be the most shipped character ever written

Cats treat dogs basically the same way that vampires treat werewolves, I’m telling you, vampires is just cats.

Do you know that part of Castlevania where Dracula dramatically throws a wine glass on to the ground and it shatters?

Total cat move.

transformation sequence

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Getting home in cold weather gear with groceries, then doing a Sailor Moon transformation sequence that ends with a lumpy man wearing pyjamas.

you trigger a fight

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

you trigger a fight with man who overestimated how many groceries he can carry home

watch out, he’s one of the slowest opponents in the game but if he can extricate his welt-crossed hands from his bags he can do big damage with his bottomless inventory and the Throw command

you trigger a fight with the boys in the bright white sports car

the boys are waving their hands in the air

who do they think they are?!?

helpimg

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Comfy behind the TV, buddy?

He turns his head upside down when he sees me so I can give him some chin snugs

This look means my toes are in danger.

heated bidet

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

having a heated bidet toilet seat during winter combines the satisfaction of power-washing videos with the toastiness of not having to put your cheeks on cold plastic

cis jokes

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

i maintain the identity associated with the bits I was born with, and also, am very good with computers

that is to say, I’m a cis admin

if you get 8 people with clearly defined gender in a room together, you have one byte of gender binary

three men

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

tv: mentions “three men”

tiff: I want three men

curtis: I guess I know what to get you for christmas

tiff: what am I going to do with more men?

curtis: you were the one who requested the additional men

tiff: I already have two men, and one of them poops everywhere

curtis: and the other one’s our cat

vampire soda

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

curtis: if a vampire wanted a fizzy drink would they have to go after scuba divers and intentionally give them the bends?

tiff: couldn’t they just extract the blood and add carbon dioxide directly? I mean, unless this is Ann Rice rules

curtis: I mean, nitrogen works to make the stout all foamy, that’s also what’s happening to scuba divers, right?

tiff: it only takes, like, a few bubbles to kill you, I don’t think the vampires could move the scuba divers fast enough to make this satisfying

Cozy, not Cyberpunk

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

If you were to ask most people what they think the visual design of social VR looks like, I think they would say “Cyberpunk”.

The Oasis, the Metaverse, virtual reality as a crowded, public, bazaar.

uh oh, we built a transmetropolitan

Bright lights, neon, transhumanism, retro-tech, everyone knows that the future is a magenta-colored hexagon covered in advertisements, right?

Second Life - which functioned as both a metaverse and one of the world’s most wildly successful speculative real estate scams - really captured the feeling of being in a vast, open-air mall:

“wow, what creativity on display” you are definitely thinking while you look at this

A lot of the future of virtual reality is in the hands of people who didn’t realize that Snow Crash was supposed to be a dystopian satire. This is the Ready Player One vision of VR as an exciting new place to purchase things.

And we lean into it a bit. Our art director is, for example, obscenely talented (but did you knoooooow) and has been known to show off work that fits the vibe:

The source material: Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Transmetropolitan, a bunch of high-tech low-life near-future stories intended to highlight the glittering inequality of a world where the only reins on technological development are “who can afford it”.

recent prominent cyberpunk media has fallen into this trap too

And yeah, we’re somewhat aware of this: a lot of digital ink is spilled on how to build social VR without becoming an abandoned virtual mall, a thinly-disguised child sweatshop, a slot-machine-inspired skinner box, a storefront without a game attached, or - even worse - doing all of the above while leaning in to the worst excesses of adtech and surveillance capitalism.

It’s important for us that people just enjoy being in VR, rather than participating in nothing more than a joyless exercise in an extractive marketplace.

So, while the idea of virtual reality is firmly rooted in the cyberpunk stories from which it came… the vision of VR as a casino or mall: a loud, cold, neon-heavy, visually busy, overwhelming, glittering Oasis intended to separate rubes from their money? That actually doesn’t appeal to people very much. It appeals to investors, but not… humans.

So, what do social VR spaces built by people actually look like?

Little Loft, here

Room of the Rain, here

The Great Pug, here

These are some of the most popular worlds in Social VR. And these worlds are really, really popular.

Why, they’re not really very cyberpunky at all!

It would seem that our users didn’t get the memo about the aesthetic.

Heck, once you actually get into virtual reality, it seems like a lot of people don’t want to inhabit a noisy glowing cyberpunk mega-bazaar, they actually want to inhabit THIS universe:

chill lo-fi hip hop virtual realities to study/relax/hang-out to

Coziness, VR’s Secret Aesthetic

One time, on a trip up to Whistler, I grabbed a book in the one cute little bookstore and read it in its entirety in about one night. It was about hygge, a Danish word with extremely similar connotations to the word “cozy” but with more of a Scandinavian touch.

This whole concept was really trendy in 2016-ish.

On our trip, we visited a mountain spa called “Scandinave” where you pay a fixed fee to just hang out in a bunch of heated pools all day. While I was reading the book about Hygge, I realized that, uh, duh, Scandinave is also Scandinavian, thus the name, and they definitely 100% architectured this place with the principles of the book I’m currently reading in mind.

Which would seem like a fantastic coincidence except that - well, I bought the book in Whistler. These book-store owners know what’s up.

Anyways, type “hygge” into google image search and you get this kind of thing:

A lot of us grew up in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Seattle, Vancouver) or in actual-Scandinavia and we know this aesthetic like we grew up with it, because we did.

Also you might notice that these images look a lot more like what people are actually building in virtual reality.

Why?

Because it’s the furthest thing from cyberpunk. Rustic coziness of pools of contrast between dark and light. Roaring fires and rainy days and blankets and mugs of hot tea and cable-knit sweaters. Books and rugs and natural, unpretentious materials.

Cyberpunk is loud and crowded and impersonal, brand-names and tech-inspired-maximalism, blaring club music and bright lights - Cozy is small and intimate and cluttered and friendly.

Virtual reality, too, is loud and crowded and impersonal, overwhelming, too much noise, too fast. It comes at you quickly and it’s exhausting.

To quote one of my co-workers:

People want to socialize, public instances are not very pleasant for invested users with a built out friends list, and very full rooms are not enjoyable when our voice tech pumps every single ongoing conversation around you into your brain.

Public worlds are already too cyberpunk.

Introducing elements of cool and calm soften the rough edges around virtual reality’s blaring and overwhelming nature and also naturally encourage the kinds of interactions that actually work best with the limitations of VR technology - small groups, intimate hangs, quiet chats.

As a result, the stuff we crave in virtual worlds look a lot more like what we see in the Scandinave: an organic grouping of small conversational circles connected by narrow paths, verticality and the ability to see other social groups from afar before engaging with them, zones of privacy, a fantastical backdrop, pools of light, warmth, and a sense of safety and security to offset the often bizaare and unsettling dreamlike quality of unfettered virtual reality.

Some of social VR’s most popular creators have realized this, and run with it.

And that, really, is the point I’m trying to make:

The dominant aesthetic of VR is not necessarily loud, crowded cyberpunk, but instead features a surprising number of quiet, thoughtful and chill spaces. This is a necessary adaptation to how flashy, cacophonous and obnoxious unfiltered virtual reality can be.

tinned fishies

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Tinned tuna? Dry. Tinned salmon? Bony.

I can see why you’ve been sleeping on tinned fishies if those are the only ones you’ve been introduced to.

No, the real money is in tinned anchovies, tinned smoked mackerel, tinned smoked herring, and of course, fried dace with black bean.

Small, oily tinned fish are more sustainable to fish, more efficient to ship (no refrigeration required), shelf stable for a long time, omega oil rich, filling, inexpensive, and most importantly: delicious.

more jeans

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

to fix a hole in your jeans, simply put them on over another pair of jeans. Then, when you look into the hole in the outer jeans, you’ll only find more jeans

I Think Atomic Habits Might be a Crock of Shit

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

So, I make a handful of small improvements to one of our systems and open a PR, and I’m trying to find a funny “many small fixes” image to go with it, and I run into this image:

In fact, this image search for “small improvements” has resulted in what I would regard as an unusual amount of self-help hustle-porn. If you simply make yourself 1% better every single day, why, in 100 days you will be two entire people. Think about that, why don’t you.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Anyways, I kind of remember this theory from a food video I watched a while back: a food-tuber, Alex, references the pop self-help book Atomic Habits, and uses it as a basis to try to improve his onion-chopping speed.

The central idea isn’t wrong, even, necessarily:

Big, obvious improvements can come with enormous productivity increases: if you’re bicycling on flat tires or chopping onions with a hammer, you’re going to see large, concrete productivity improvements from simply fixing the obvious thing.

But at high-levels - for example, bicycling competitions - or in skillsets where the baseline level of skill is high and the cost of high-end equipment is low - for example, onion chopping - most people have already exhausted all of the groundbreaking improvements.

So, instead, we start to seek improved performance by chasing a lot of little gains: if we make a bunch of little things a tiny bit faster, we’ll end up making the whole thing noticeably faster, right?

This is the underlying theory of a lot of speedrun world champions, too - watch them at GDC and they sweat every microscopic detail of the games they’re playing; even if there’s a whole minute they can lose to RNG, even if they’re playing for show in a marathon format rather than for a world record run, in order to stand a chance at all they need to be aware of every spot where they can skip 8 frames to save a fraction of a second. They add up.

Atomic Habits isn’t new, though; it’s a pop-self-help reframing of the Toyota business theory of Kaizen:

Kaizen

Kaizen (Japanese: 改善, “improvement”) is a concept referring to business activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. Kaizen also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life coaching, government, and banking. By improving standardized programs and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste and redun…

Make small improvements regularly and things will speed up more and more. Eventually: fast!

… This all makes sense. The title of this article, “I Think Atomic Habits Might Be a Crock of Shit” is going to seem hyperbolic when I admit that I don’t have any quibbles with the core theory, here - small improvements stack up to amount to bigger improvements! Kaizen, as a business theory, is interesting to read about and more humanistic than one might expect for a theory about extracting Maximum Value From Humans: it is about empowering workers to improve their own processes by giving them freedom and flexibility to experiment with whatever makes them feel most productive.

Ultimately, when I fuss with our team’s CI or try to fix my keyboard macros just right, I, too, am engaging in a form of Kaizen.

Back to that original image, though:

This image doesn’t just promise small gains; this graph appears to offer a lot more: no loss in productivity, gains increasing in speed over time, and unlimited gains. It also does not bother to note the cost of these gains.

This is where, IMO, the “crock of shit” starts to intrude.

These micro-optimizations are supposed to be a way to extract microscopic improvements in a competition format, not a map towards a more healthy and productive life.

So what I’m going to argue is not the theory itself, but the implication that this theory is broadly applicable. I believe that these tiny gains often come with high cost, temporary loss of productivity, and badly diminishing returns.

The High Cost of Marginal Improvement in Both Time and Money

I love automating small tasks away. Sometimes I’ll spend days automating away a 2 minute task, because I know, deep down in my heart of hearts, that fussing with automation is more enjoyable than performing a boring ol’ 2 minute task, even if there’s no way I’m going to recoup the lost time I spent working on that automation.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

These improvements are often extremely high effort and extremely low value - sometimes, for speed-runners, trimming a few frames out of each story window takes extremely precise and hard-to-trigger glitches that demand hours or days of practice.

The time cost of this 1% gain in game performance is extremely high, and - if you’re comparing the seconds of your life spent on optimizing against the seconds of your life gained by that optimization, probably never pay off unless you are explicitly competing to the the fastest at the game in a competition format.

In Alex’s cutting experiments, he switches to an extremely high-end knife: a knife that may offer a tiny improvement in cutting speed in exchange for costing literal actual hundreds of dollars.

And that’s the things: once big, obvious improvements are out of the way, we’re left with the kind of improvements that people only care about when they’re chasing world class performance: you can make an absolutely banging cup of coffee with $50 worth of kit (plastic pourover, paper filter, blade grinder, basic kettle) - and then you can spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours chasing tiny, barely noticeable fine-grained improvements. (sidenote: do you get the pun there? fine-grained improvements? ho ho)

I’m going to post a link to James Hoffmann’s YouTube channel here, it is absolutely fabulous to watch people go down these rabbit holes, but obviously attempting to apply these philosophies to literally everything in your life is insane, right?

Like, if you want to chase a 1% improvement in the sound from your grand piano, you’re looking at spending a mortgage-sized amount of money to chase that 1% improvement. This kind of thing literally only makes sense if you have already exhausted every other avenue of improvement and you’re in a position where that 1% improvement is tangibly worth that kind of money to you.

Learning colemak just might not be worth it, guys.

Plus: Maintenance Costs

On top of the lead-in cost to these many tiny 1% improvements, they come with ongoing maintenance costs:

https://xkcd.com/1319/

In Alex’s Onion Chopping Mission, he took his already sharp knife and spent a little bit of extra time sharpening it extra, just before he started chopping onions, to get that perfect edge.

But, as anybody with good knives knows, keeping your knives sharp? That’s a forever job. While we could achieve optimal performance by performing a full sharpening before every single kitchen task, that performance would come at the cost of… an unnecessary and silly amount of time spent sharpening, and a much shorter lifespan on our very expensive knives.

That full sharpening for every task would also obviously take more time than it would save.

All Improvements Are Not Created Equal

Alex puts on “chef clothes” to improve his chopping performance and claims that it will have a psychological effect on his ability to chop.

Some pro-level improvements are just $350 audiophile-grade ethernet cables. They aren’t going to do anything.

Some improvements that help 1% in one part of riding a bike will interfere with other improvements, or interfere with the development of other improvements.

An example from code: the oft-quoted “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. - or, the full Donald Knuth quote:

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

This is an oft-misunderstood quote: optimization itself is not evil, and this comes from a book where Donald Knuth has created his own personal insane hypothetical computer and shows you how to extract maximum performance from it.

https://xkcd.com/1691/

I’m beginning to think that xkcd author Randall Monroe has thought about this more than I have.

The problem is that optimization - especially needless micro-optimization - is in-and-of-itself expensive and often makes the code uglier and harder to work with, which can get in the way of much more meaningful changes.

Everyone’s seen this ol’ gem:

Sure, it could mean that these two are too busy doing work to bother to try to improve their tools: an argument for kaizen!

But… these two could also be too distracted by micro-optimization of the wrong parts of their process to engage with… the big optimization, that they’re missing.

Sometimes big improvements will erase decades of micro-improvements: I imagine that “rolling” Tetris is sufficiently different from “hypertapping” Tetris that a lot of the micro-optimizations of one do not necessarily cleanly map to the other.

Competition cyclists really don’t have a lot of space for improvement: they already have the good bikes, the technique, everything down pat. For most people, that’s not the case. It’s really unlikely that a series of micro-optimizations to your bicycling regime will perform better than simply fixing your flat tire.

The point I’m trying to make here is that these reams of small improvements are the realm of professionals for a reason:

You Simply Can’t Be The Best at Everything

I can’t remember the exact talk, but I was at a game industry conference one time and I caught a talk where someone made a case that, in order to be successful, a video game company needs to be best-in-class at one or two extremely focused things and they need to be passably good at everything else.

Trying to chase the A+ performance in every possible direction at once is too expensive for any studio to chase - there’s not enough time or money in the world to make The Perfect Game and trying is how you get bloated Duke Nukem Forever disasters.

A company that can field one A+ with dozens of C-’s is going to be way more memorable to consumers than a company that gets a solid B in everything.

Also, as it turns out: just being mediocre but sufficient at a great many things is incredibly hard and a talent in its own right.

If you’ve heard of T-Shaped Skills as both a career development and hiring guideline: you want to be incredibly talented at one or two things, and broadly capable at a lot of other things.

the line blocks are out there hogging all the glory but these guys are in the trenches, getting important work done

Heck, that’s one of the things that I like about VRChat: we’re out there being the absolute, unrivaled king of one specific thing and I’m running around behind the scenes helping to be their C- in everything else.

My fucks Improvements Have Runneth Dry

On top of that, lo and behold, these Tiny Gains eventually run out. Eventually, every corner of the game is just so micro-optimized that there are no more tiny gains to be found.

Back to speedruns:

lesswrong.com - Analysis of World Records in Speedrunning

While people are still discovering big improvements for games, their speedrun time comes down dramatically. This is the “finding new techniques” (or “flat tires and onion hammers”) phase of speed-running - new discoveries are fresh on the ground and it seems like the players are posting impressive new times week after week.

Then, there are long plateaus where there are no new discoveries, and people are just Kaizen-ing their way through every moment of the game to shave off a few seconds here or there.

With all of the easy slam dunks out of the way, and even most of the small improvements exhausted, these players are now fighting over the last few fractions of a second. Of course, advances in speedruns continue, but I think it’s obvious, almost axiomatic, that chasing perfection has diminishing returns as you approach perfection.

So?

I’m going to admit it: I haven’t even read the book. Maybe if I dig in deep it’s going to be up-front about some of these downsides downsides (sidenote: pop self-help is usually very realistic and down to earth about how its advice isn’t entirely infallible, he says sarcastically) so, 100% of this post has been me making fun of that graph. Look at that graph! It’s terrible! Bad graph!

Sure, I believe that many small improvements can add up to make big improvements. Ultimately, though, I believe that a self-help theory of drowning your life in micro-optimizations misses the forest for the trees.

Stacking micro-optimizations can not be done forever, at low cost, with no loss in productivity, with guaranteed returns; on the contrary - a lot of the times micro-optimizations are:

expensive
fussy
needless
hard to maintain
and only really make sense if you’re chasing the top tiers of performance in any given field.

Mostly, I believe that books like Atomic Habits exist because they give you an excuse to feel less guilty about buying yourself some sweet pro-grade equipment for almost unnoticeable improvements in your life; they exist because hustle porn - the fetishization of productivity at any cost - always sells well.

They also might be a crock of shit.

jungle

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Evaluating The Jungle From AC/DC’s “Welcome To The Jungle” For Its Suitability As a Corporate Retreat Location

pros:

extremely welcoming
fun and games
has everything you want
has people who can find whatever you may need
good if you have money
take it day by day
bright lights
learn to live like an animal
you can have anything you want

cons:

has your disease
wants to watch you bleed
won’t get there for free (usually the case)
gets worse here everyday
gonna bring you down/to your knees
you’re gonna die

once again we have decided to go to Orlando

best/worst christmas songs

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

choosing saas providers

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

basically my theory of ops tooling is that if you’re a small team without a dedicated specialist, it needs to be rock solid and dirt simple, and SaaS providers get you there a lot faster than DIY

spoon

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

I carved it myself.

From a bigger spoon.

muppet dune

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

What’s curious is that nobody has pitched a Muppet movie on the internet yet that I wouldn’t watch.

A Muppet fantasy RPG where Muppets gather around a RPG table but all of their actions are performed by live-action actors, with The Rock voiced by Ms. Piggy? Sold.

Muppet Dune? Sign me up.

A Muppet adaptation of the Muppet Christmas Carol called “The Muppet Muppet Christmas Carol” where they re-do the Muppet Christmas Carol but with more Muppets? Absolutely

Muppet 1984? Why not?

Actually I might veto any big Muppet fantasy projects like LoTR because the Jim Henson company might lean into their Dark Crystal collection a bit and nobody needs any more of those creepy expressionless indistinguishable Brian Froud waifs.

learning some animation

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Video content

steamed clams

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

One time I invited my friends over for steamed clams, a meal that I actually prepared for them.

and I absolutely spent some time wondering if it would be worth it to head out and pick up a little bit of fast food to disguise as my own cooking

Ultimately I decided against it because the meal itself was already fairly labor intensive and the joke, while funny, probably wasn’t worth the 20 minutes, $5-10, and possible ruination of people’s actual appetites; it would have been a wasteful throwaway joke on account of how I’d actually made steamed clams.

But I want you to know exactly how long and hard I struggled with that conclusion, because we honestly only really invite our friends over for steamed clams, like, a few times ever.

The best I could do was to ask them, when they arrived, if they were prepared for an unforgettable luncheon.

“We’re here for dinner.”

Pasta is a Bad Theory of Software

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

edit: I feel the need to point out that this is, in fact, a comedy article about technology and not a serious take on programming.

Spaghetti code! It’s that thing where your code is bad and hard to follow.

I feel like spaghetti got the raw end of the stick here. Spaghetti is, according to science, delicious. People rarely encounter spaghetti and go “man, this spaghetti is hard to understand”.

“What the fuck is this?” - A rare man confused by spaghetti.

Nah, it’s easy to figure out spaghetti. You put a fork in there, twirl it around a little, then put the fork in your mouth. Spaghetti solved.

It’s term coined in the age of GOTOs: It was often possible with gotos to write code where following the code’s logic would feel literally like unwinding a big pile of spaghetti.

GOTOs, also, haven’t been common in code since decades before I was born. They got considered harmful so hard that they’re no longer part of the equation, except in antiquated languages. “Spaghetti code” eventually grew to became a common term for any hard to follow code.

Spaghetti code.

You monsters. Spaghetti didn’t deserve to become the gold standard term for bad code. Spaghetti is incredible. The term has lost all meaning.

You should go write some spaghetti code. Go write some code that everybody loves, that’s good with anything, that comes together in moments to solve quick weekday problems, code where you can just dig in anywhere and immediately understand how great it is.

Spaghetti does not need to be organized in a logical fashion! I doesn’t matter if you can or can not understand where every individual strand of spaghetti is coming from or where it is going. Nobody wants that from their sketti! You can start anywhere and end anywhere! That is always how eating spaghetti has worked!

In fact, if someone did attempt to take their spaghetti and tidily organize it before eating it, you would rightfully have cause to suspect that person of some kind of mental imbalance.

If you’re writing Java and you’ve made your inheritance tree so deep that figuring out how anything works involves reading through 18 different classes? You’ve got too much inheritance and none of the individual classes are doing anything important. That is not spaghetti code, your code has rich kid syndrome.

Ravioli code? Lasagna code? So you’ve got a lot of easy-to-understand and self-similar components (either modules to make ravioli, or layers in lasagna), and you’re complaining? Do you have any idea how much effort went into making that ravioli? That code sounds delicious. I should summon my mother to hit you with a wooden spoon.

Oh, you’re using functional components that nobody has ever heard of, but which offer unique and clever solutions to solve a whole class of problems you never even knew you had? That’s Bucatini code.

it solves a problem you never even knew you had

Copy-and-pasting the same line of code into everything because it works everywhere? Looks like you’ve got some orzo code.

Did you over-engineer your code and end up with something kinda stupid, but you love it anyways because it is fun and whimsical? Whoops you wrote some farfalle.

Fussing too much with the spacing to try to make your code into art? You have committed an act of macaroni code.

Wrote a black-box so transparent with an interface so gnarly that everything that touches it gets hopelessly entangled in the implementation? That’s a big ol’ bowl of cavatappi code.

This is fun but it is has, at best, limited explanatory power as a metaphor.

Look, I’m going to say it: I don’t think pasta is a very thoughtful way to build a taxonomy of code smells. Pasta is lovely. Pasta deserves better than this.

Let’s not even get started on the raw deal that spiced tinned pork got.

The Lifecycle of Forgotten Documentation

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

The life-cycle of documentation initiatives at every company I’ve ever worked at has gone like this:

a new employee, confused by the codebase, goes looking for the codebase’s documentation
they find some old, unmaintained documents from a previous employee, which turn out not to be terribly helpful because most of their assumptions are badly dated, incredibly old, and only describe a tiny fraction of the system
they make a big project out of writing a new set of docs
they end up asking a bunch of questions in the chat which helps them understand and document the system
after a month or two they are pulled on to a big new project, leaving a new set of documents describing only a fraction of the system
nobody updates the new set of docs
a new employee, confused by the codebase, goes looking for the codebase’s documentation

But then why do more public and open-source projects have such comparatively excellent documentation?

Desire paths are paths that form where they’re needed.

Open-source projects must on-board people at a significantly higher rate than internal projects.

The team building software at your company? Pretty slow growing. You’re probably onboarding someone, what, once a year? Twice a year?

Comparatively, products like React or Godot are probably onboarding six to ten new people every hour.

Once someone has been asked the same question multiple times in the same day, a FAQ appears, then docs.

It’s also different if you’re trying to actively court developers: if you want people to use your APIs without having met you, those really need documentation, examples, a first class on-boarding experience. But… most internal teams have a much more informal onboarding experience.

Things also change pretty frequently on internal projects, and there’s always someone around who knows the answer to any given question you might have. If you do develop documentation, it’s usually for people outside of your team who consume your team’s product, not for internal development. “Everyone Online All The Time” is a really bad environment for the development of a comprehensive MANUAL D’THING. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that that manual probably isn’t necessary and it is silly to keep trying to write it.

But What About Cross-Team Interop?

This opinion is controversial, but…

I’ve had a long standing policy of just delivering a test suite demonstrating the operation of new endpoints. (sidenote: (editor’s note from the future:) and, as of recently, as our company has grown, some OpenAPI spec.)

It’s not pretty, but it’s sufficient. Software developers can understand code-as-documentation, I believe, especially when the code is designed to show off and probe a specific endpoint to demonstrate exactly what it’s intended to do - and this documentation is by its very nature guaranteed to be correct and stay correct. We provide and verify our contract with client using our mountains of test suites.

This is a little loosey-goosey; if behavior isn’t tested it’s not guaranteed - but if your opposite number probes you for answers about behavior that’s undefined in the tests, that’s also behavior that there aren’t any tests for. Write some tests to clarify and test that!

Divining the use of an endpoint entirely through constructed examples really, really isn’t as nice or professional as Real Documentation, but it’s… often good enough!

the gme cult

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Dan Olson on Twitter, discovering the frequently-frontpaged-on-reddit superstonk cult.

I … hope he makes a video about it, but I’m guessing it won’t happen, because I imagine it would end up re-treading a bunch of ground he already covered in his flat earth/qanon and contrepreneurs videos.

Editor’s Note: 2 years later, it happened:

old wizard

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

The old wizard pulls a crystal sphere from his overstuffed cupboard, blowing the dust off, and then rubbing it clean with his sleeves.

“I haven’t had to boot this thing up in years”, he says, popping the ball into a cradle next to an old CRT monitor and operating it like a trackball

covers

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Sometimes you wake up and there’s a lump of covers next to you that you need to investigate and you find a cat in there.

cat trap succeess

Paradise Killer

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0700

Someone has done a murder on vaporwave island and it is your job to find out whodunit.

To be more specific, a lot of people have done a lot of murder on this vaporwave island.

You play Lady Love Dies (which might be the least strange name on offer here), an immortal “investigation freak” who was exiled from Paradise 3 million days ago, and is only invited to return after a locked-room murder spree forces the island’s egoless arbiter of justice to bring in the only person deemed capable of solving the crime. Oh, and you get back from exile by skydiving from a mile-high plinth suspended above the actual game map while the opening credits roll.

Paradise Killer Review - IGN - Joe Skrebels

First of All, The Aesthetic

Seriously, this game takes its Vaporwave style extremely seriously.

The low-poly look is pretty crunchy and ugly - and absolutely it feels intentional and totally works as an aesthetic choice.

This, uh, is both delightful and absolutely necessary to this game being possible to make, considering how it was built by a team of maybe 3 people.

I really do love the way that this game looks: intentionally lo-fi in a well-considered and consistent way.

Second-of-ly, The Worldbuilding

This world’s backstory is fascinating and dark as hell. I don’t want to spoil it - deciphering it is one of the first mysteries of the game - and when you realize (early on) exactly what’s going on here - something your character already knows and is fine with - it really does change your perception of this whole colorful late-80’s paradise.

oh wait how did this image from Cult of the Lamb get in here, it must be a coincidence

I can’t say “this world isn’t what it seems” because there’s no way for a colorful vaporwave beach paradise to seem - obviously we don’t really have much of a frame of reference for a reality lit in cyan and magenta, filled with pyramids, soda cans, and statues. I wasn’t coming into this expecting Doctor Doom Jazz in the first place, so I didn’t have a lot of expectations as for how they were going to explain things to me.

But dang, the game really goes out of its way to develop the lore and characters of its unexpectedly grimdark vaporwave universe.

Then, The Music

I say this with all due respect to the importance of Vaporwave: as an ironic musical statement it often sounds like complete ass.

You know, I love this frigging musical genre, but I’d never spin a Macintosh Plus album, now, later on, except as maybe a joke, because while it’s important and influential and cool, it’s also borderline unlistenable a lot of the time. (sidenote: editor’s note: not sure if actually true.)

Instead of being exactly vaporwave with its at least controversial listenability, it pulls musical inspiration from a broad pastiche of vaporwave, its more energetic contemporaries like future-funk, and precursors like city pop and acid jazz.

The result is pretty darned listenable, and of course just feeds into the already very unified vision of the game.

oh, one sound design complaint: The characters’ 4 recorded voice lines each get kind of grating by the late game. Once you’ve heard the main character go “nani the fuck?” a few dozen times it ceases to be funny.

Uh Oh, The Gameplay

The gameplay in Paradise Killer is really, painfully simple. You’re rendered in glorious first-person, you get buttons for “jump” and “examine”, and you’re off to the races, to rush around a not terribly large island meeting 8 fanciful suspects and picking up literally everything that’s not nailed down. Blood statues, clues, collectible objects and soda machines are hidden in every corner of every square inch of the small island of Paradise 24 - an island that’s maybe a 3-5 minute run from end-to-end.

To make thing-hunting on the island a little more confounding, the architecture of the island is intentionally confusing in a lot of ways, and takes advantage of a lot of verticality. As an example, I had trouble remembering the exact location of the elevator down to Dr. Doom Jazz’s yacht, so I would often find myself just flinging myself off of the cliffs in the broad vicinity of his boat and hoping for the best. It usually worked out.

First-person platforming has always and will always suck total ass. It’s good that the platforming required by the game is extremely limited.

That being said, after 10 hours of bouncing around on this small vaporwave island I’ve got the whole layout more-or-less burned into my brain and I’m not excited to hurry back. (sidenote: editor’s note: I posted this blog entiry almost 2 years after having played the game and I could still sketch you the island’s layout on a napkin. even later editor’s note: yup, 2025, still in there.)

But that’s… the frosting, around a detective game that takes the “detective game” format established by your Phoenix Wrights and Danganrompas and completely rethinks them.

Open-Ended Detectiving With No Right Answer

Okay, I say that the game took me 13-14 hours to finish, but actually I had beaten the game after about 20 minutes.

That’s because the game, having put you in charge of the investigation, is fully willing to let you go to trial at any time you want, with whatever dossier of answers you’ve accumulated.

So, having left the court-room with a no more than the scantest basics of the crime, I immediately saved the game, turned around, and kicked off the trial of the century without any leads, clues, suspects, or information whatsoever.

In the trial, I pretty much just read off of the police report, pinning the whole thing on the obvious patsy who the police had told me outright was the killer.

Result?

The judge accepted my investigation, executed the criminal, and we were all off on our merry way. Paradise Killer prosecuted. Roll credits. Thanks for Playing. The game didn’t even flinch, it was like “okay, I guess the guy who we thought did it did it, thanks for your help, have a nice day”.

I really like unearned credit sequences in games.

This game gives you a lot of very open-ended clues, challenges you to figure out what happened, asks you to present your findings, and never, ever explains if you got them right.

Paradise Killer lets you luxuriate in a lot of information, piecing things together as you go, and I really liked that.

That’s good and bad. There’s a level of freedom here that games like Phoenix Wright never really had - you feel more like a detective, detectiving than in games where you can’t go to trial until you have all of the exact set of facts you need to complete the trial to your best ability. That being said - the last hours where you’re 90% of the way through the case and you’re just trying to tie up loose ends can be a real slog, and some of those loose ends never really tie up as neatly as you want them to, and you just have to be okay with that.

Some More Handholding Wouldn’t Hurt Sometimes

I don’t think it would hurt the game at all to have a someone explain to you that you need to buy 10 sodas to get your hands on a vital component, or that you should try to hit all of the baths as early as possible to get three cheap, vital upgrades to your general mobility, or that half of the entire game’s content is locked behind a single silly side-quest involving finding a ghost’s fish-tank.

I think it does hurt the game quite a bit that there’s a single, hard-to-find, late-game location that takes one of the game’s deepest mysteries and explains the whole thing in exacting, excruciating detail. There is, in fact, a correct answer, and either you find it, or you don’t. It’s, like, an extremely tightly paced and difficult murder mystery unless you crack into Uncle Jeff’s Secret Crimes Bunker, containing a document “Here’s How I Did Those Bad Crimes, Signed, Uncle Jeff” and you’re like “huh”.

Although to this game’s credit, I believe you can piece most of the important details together without Uncle Jeff’s Secret Crimes Bunker, you’ll just never be as sure as if you’ve found it.

Moral Puzzle

Every character in this story is a certifiable monster, even the ones you like and the innocent ones, and that raises some real moral/ethical questions about what your goals are at trial - Cold hard truth? Justice? Sparing your friends? Sparing everyone?

Punishing everyone no matter how tenuous their involvement? Given, of course, how tight-lipped the game is about its ending, it also doesn’t bother to weigh in on this at all, even after you’ve made your choice - although this is the only way to really, truly see all of the content the game has to offer.

In fact, that is one thing I’d like a little more of: a nice dash of denouement after you’ve done everything to leave you a little less hanging at the end of this puzzle.

Anyways

Paradise Killer. It’s probably a lot different from any game you’ve ever played.

Even if I wasn’t always having fun while I was playing it, I could not stop thinking about it for months after I played it: that’s, I think, a sign of a good game.

gorthrax

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

as Gorthrax The Volcano Demon’s lava murders are down to only a handful a day, we’ve decided to once again slowly phase out our expensive dimensional walls in favor of a demon management strategy that focuses more on individual choice

Making Sense of VRChat

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Have you seen Quinns talking for 30 full minutes about VRChat? Because it’s very good.

myers briggs

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

my myers-briggs type is [Object object]

welcome to mastodon

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

(smug, haughty)

welcome to our haven, poor and desperate tweetsite refugees. together we shall create a shining utopia

(just as soon as a handful of dudes buy some slightly larger postgres servers and reconcile the problem of one entire sidekiq thread per toot)

i will be your guide to the customs and desires of this place we call home, as I have been here for fourty five entire of the minutes

the first decision you have to make in the fediverse is which of the five camps you fall into:

an artist
a programmer
a programmer, but also bi
german
other

parasocial

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

misunderstanding what parasocial relationships are

pixel art

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

if you’re looking at it on any screen it’s technically pixel art

Fediverse

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, Fediverse/Mastodon, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Fediverse plus Mastodon.

Steamed Hams

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

starbucks naming

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

It feels like the name “Curtis” is gradually disappearing from the public consciousness. I’ll tell people my name and see them write it down: “Chris”, often. Recently I got a “Furtis”. But this one… this one’s special

roguelike

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

it’s a roguelike

in that

it’s a game that you can play on a computer

like rogue

which was also that

sushi

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0700

On one hand, sushi that’s any bigger than bite-sized is a tell-tale sign that you are not in a classy sushi restaurant.

On the other hand, there’s a certain visceral pleasure to be had opening your mouth real wide and packing a softball sized california roll in there, presumably impressing your date.

surprise

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Their marketing team is honestly as surprised as you are:

typescript

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0700

the way I feel about typescript is the way I’d feel if someone popularized adding gendered nouns to english to make it feel more like a romance language

uncle magic

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0700

for a tale of top-notch unclery

my nephew was fiddling with a voice recording interface that had a “reverse” button

so I say “watch this”

and I record myself going “ynreh olleh” a few times

and he looks at me like a crazy person because I am speaking gibberish

then I click the reverse button

and it works

The Taco Rice Bowl

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0700

I have a problem.

For decades one of my favorite meals has been the Tex Mex Night.

You know: Old El Paso Tacos.

This shit is up there with Kraft Dinner in my pantheon of charming mass-market meals that I ate a lot of as a kid and still like as an adult.

Is it Mexican food (sidenote: I also love Mexican food but this is not it.) ? hell no. Do I care? Not even a bit.

There’s just something so fundamentally good about the combination of ground beef, bright orange shredded cheddar cheese, crisp iceberg lettuce, diced tomato, lime, and sour cream.

I’ll make all kinds of modifications to the basic recipe - I’ve got a salsa fresca (sidenote: Cherry tomato, jalapeno, lime, white onion, salt, cilantro) that’s always great on this, we’ve got arrays of hot sauces, sometimes I’ve done it up with slow-roasted beef or homemade carnitas or homemade refried beans - I’ve even learned how to make taco powder from scratch (sidenote: Packaged taco powder is just cornstarch, cumin, chili powder, onion powder, garlic powder, and some ill-defined spices: once you know what’s in there you can make your own, better.) ,

Just as often, though, I’ve put it together on a weeknight from packet taco powder and it’s been delicious.

Taco Tuesday is real, folks.

But.

Tragedy strikes.

After every Taco Tuesday comes a grim, unyielding, Taco-less Wednesday.

The sad reality of Taco Tuesday is that all of the ingredients get used at uneven rates. In the fridge goes some loose meat glop, maybe some shredded cheddar, some salsa - sometimes leftover tortillas or tortilla shells, sometimes not. It’s often very difficult and irritating to re-assemble Wednesday’s leftovers into viable, balanced tacos - and unappetizing, after having eaten too many tacos the night before.

But, lo: a trick I learned by watching the internet.

You can just dump taco ingredients atop a rice bowl and, like magic, a meal is formed!

Namely, Joshua Weissman’s fluffy concoction of rice, lime, sour cream, and cilantro looked like the perfect base for a daytime leftover taco rice bowl, and… yeah. It was. it also looked 90% easier to prepare than everything else he makes.

I tried it and it really worked.

The taco leftovers cleaned up in one delicious fell swoop, I felt accomplished. Full of beans.

I AM BECOME MORE POWERFUL THAN EVER

zapp's best mugshots

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Obviously: cat pics

HTML Cheat Sheet (inaccurate)

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 12:00:00 -0700

A HTML Cheat Sheet I Compiled Without Checking To See If Anything I Remember Is Accurate or True

start with a doctype (to indicate that you know what kind of doctor this code requires)
html for the whole diggitydoo
- head for the metadata
- title for the title
- link for CSS (note that, despite zelda being the name on the box, zelda is not interchangeable with link here)
- script for JS
body for the stuff you actually see
soul for stuff that doesn’t go in the head or the body (note, not supported in materialist browsers)
div is a box for holding literally anything
section is “div” for people with too much time on their hands
p for paragraphs
b for bearagraphs
h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 for headers
f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f6 for footers
span for stuff like individual text that’s in a line and doesn’t need a whole box on its own
spain for the country, spain, where the rain is mainly on the plain
ol and ul are the containers for ordered lists and unordered lists
li for the list items that goes into whichever list.
la, a note to follow so
ti, a drink with jam and bread
blockquote for quotes
img for images (note: Tim Berners-Lee sold the a and e for beer money)
abbr is the sound you make when you give your cat a raspberry
- he will scratch your face but it is worth it
I’m pretty sure there’s an audio and a video but I have to look these ones up every time I use them because they have complicated formats inside of them.
pre and code for stuff you want to look like code
marquee to let people know you’re a baller
form for forms
void is form but it doesn’t do anything (it is public and static, though)
button for buttons
input … okay, I usually have to look up the syntax for inputs, but there’s a whole mess of ’em, like “text” and “password”
output was made illegal in 1998 and doesn’t get used anymore
em and strong for emphasis and STRONK
weak is like strong but it sets font-weight:100
table is for layout, if you like pain, but otherwise the tr (table rows) and th (table headers) and td (table data) and tm (trademarks) mostly only come up if you’re actually rendering tabular data. Which still happens sometimes, if you’re the sort of person who wears a TIE. And PANTS.

center is no longer supported, it’s been replaced by the vastly superior canadianism, centre
iframe is a little web browser that lives inside your web browser, with its whole own little society. hi there little iframe people! what is it like in there?
aframe is a house that is shaped like this /\

How To Build a Social Network

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0700

Read The Book Here

Hi! This is a little microproject I want to do: I want to compress my years of experience building the API backend of a top-50 Steam game into a bunch of weird, rambling advice that I can deliver with all of the authority of someone who can’t differentiate success due to merit from success due to luck.

This started as an idea for a presentation that I could give, in front of a slide deck, but it became a little imposing as it started to extend past 20,000 words and I realized that I’d be talking for over 3 hours. If it does seem a little brief in places, that’s why: it was intended (naively) to be delivered in one unbroken sitting.

Keyboard Keyboard

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve been continuously computing, gaming, and drawing since before the turn of the century, and as a result my wrists are this close to just giving up and falling off of my hands entirely. If I try to do a Vanna White flourish it sounds like someone twisting bubble wrap.

So, ergonomic keyboards? I’ve tried ‘em. Mechanical keyboards? Those too. I have opinions.

Like the Microsoft Ergo. This is probably the best cheap ergo keyboard you can get your hands on. Membrane keys don’t have the nice, satisfying click of a real mechanical key, but, like, this is a pretty good keyboard. If you’re still typing on a stock keyboard try one of these out for a bit, it’ll be good for you.

But come on. Membrane keys?

Anyways, my last three major keyboards have been the Das Keyboard 3, the Kinesis Advantage, and the Ergodox EZ.

The das is a very good slab keyboard. It’s also just a regular mechanical slab keyboard? Think “IBM Model M”. It’s nice to type on but it’s hardly very ergonomic at all.

Okay, Ergodox EZ: the split keyboard solves a problem, shoulder pain. Split keyboards separate your hands, so that you don’t hang over your keyboard like a dracula. As a result? Less shoulder pain.

“Soon, you’ll have a mighty hump.”

The keyboard, though, still has some serious weak points vis-a-vis RSI.

I have a handspan of 9.5in, putting me in the realm of “larger male hands”, and here are the buttons on this keyboard I can actually hit comfortably:

I can hit all of the rest of the keys with some effort - wrist movement and pinky extensions, but, like, the whole point of picking ergo keyboards is to reduce wrist movement and pinky extensions.

Compare the Kinesis advantage’s beautiful hand-bowls: let me tell you:

with my big horse-sized mittengrabbers, I can hit all of these keys without moving my wrist or pinkie:

The Kinesis has been my golden child. In my opinion it’s worth its exorbitant price, it is the finest ergonomic keyboard on the market bar none.

Look, it’s a weird keyboard layout. It takes some getting used to. Whenever I brought one in to the office to replace whatever shitty keyboards were there before, people looked at me like a weirdo.

It is very, very good, though.

The problem with the Kinesis, and any plank keyboards like this, is that using them for any length of time, you start to hang over them in a pose I like to call “the Creep”

This is, notably, pretty stupendously bad for your shoulders in the long term. After decades of creepin’ my posture is noticeably very bad. I’ve been tackling it with exercise and - well, switching in the Ergodox every now and again.

And these keyboards are NOT CHEAP, in fact, they are hundreds of dollars each! Anyways, roundup:

Kinesis Advantage: Shoulder pain, no wrist pain
ErgoDox EZ: Wrist pain, no shoulder pain

The Ergodox’s built-in tent kit is also pretty wobbly and unpleasant. And their New and Improved Moonlander… well, it looks to have most of the same problems.

If anything, that looks to have the same problems with pinkie extension and wrist movement.

But, uh, while hunting through Google Images to find reference images for this very post, I found… this image:

Oh baby. Hello, beautiful. That looks like a split Kinesis Advantage.

I must know more.

The Kinesis Advantage360.

Sweet mother of god it’s a thing of beauty.

It kills the function keys (fair, nobody has used function keys since 1992).

LOOK AT WHERE THEY PUT THE ESCAPE KEY.

Every keyboard I have, I remap “Esc” over “Caps Lock” because

Caps Lock is stupid
I’m a Vim user (Esc is frequently used)

And, like, while it doesn’t take me very much time to remap Caps Lock to Esc everywhere, on this keyboard I don’t even have to, because they already did exactly the right thing!

Well… almost exactly. They did sneak the stupid Caps Lock key in there somewhere. But still. Top marks.

It’s got the superior bowl design of the Advantage, but it’s a split keyboard.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

Aw, heck.

I guess I can wait, though, that’s like… now, right? Soon you will be in my grasp, sweet keyboa-

Aw, double-heck.

SOON.

2025 Editor’s Note

Perhaps you are wondering how this went?

While Kinesis did finally launch this in the fall of 2022, it was, as most of their products are, only available in the United States of America, so I had to wait for a Canadian reseller to get their hands on a copy, so I didn’t have a Kinesis Advantage360 until late 2023, a full year later.

I ended up splurging, paying a little extra for the Advantage360 Pro, which can be used wirelessly. I hate using keyboards wirelessly (why would you need that? it doesn’t move and it just introduces battery issues), and the wonky connection between the two sides of the keyboard has been endlessly frustrating, so I seriously regret that decision.

On the other hand, this is… this is simply the finest keyboard money can buy. So, uh, I’m willing to put up with a little bit of faff. As I suspected, combining the superior layout of the Kinesis Advantage with a split was the right solution. Keyboard good. Worth money.

I Just Printed The Entire NISEI System Gateway At Home

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:00:00 -0700

Learn From My Mistakes

Yeah, I’m a masochist: I have a nice color printer, I live far away from the United States of America, and I find MPC’s cards excellent but their rates exorbitant.

Perhaps you, too, have watched the recent SUSD video, priced out a MPC Nisei run, thought “whoa there”, and are now thinking “maybe I could just print off my own deck”.

I can help! I have a handful of hot tips!

First of all:

The proper way to make a nice playing card at home is a topic of much debate on the Print n’ Play forums at BGG, where the process seems to involve some dark alchemy involving sandwiching a nice thick cardstock between two sheets of printed glossy paper with spray on adhesive, cutting the cards, using a special rounded corner tool to get those nice edges, and applying a card lacquer as the final step to protect and seal the cards and give them a nice glossy smoothness for good card feel.

I am nowhere near this dedicated. My technique is something much dumber and almost infinitely faster: thin glossy inkjet paper in an opaque card sleeve, with a playing card behind it to give it some weight and snap. This is a technique so foolproof that an idiot, a child, heck, even I could do it.

Printing out the full System Gateway takes 26 pages of glossy inkjet paper.

Printing Lessons Based on Stupid Mistakes I’ve Actually Made:

(on this project and others)

A lot of cardstock, if you try to print sharp colors or photo-quality images on it, you’re going to end up with a muddy, washed out mess as the ink sinks into the cardstock’s rich nooks and crannies where it forms itself into a grey-brownish muck. You don’t want this for your cards. Nobody wants this. Glossy paper is for crisp prints. Rough cardstock is for mistakes.
Inkjet printers either have pigment or dye based inks, and if you don’t get the right kind of glossy paper for that ink, then the ink literally will not adhere to the paper and that ends up looking extremely bad.
Everything in North America is Letter, not A4. The print files are sized such that scaling should not be necessary at all.

If you don’t have a home printer capable of spitting out the kind of glossy nice quality you want for cards, most print shops, Kinkos’, or Staples-s will print 26 nice glossy color pages for you for … about a buck a page.

I do have a really nice printer, though. I managed to save $30 on print fees by spending hundreds of dollars on a printer. That’s economics for you, baby!

Cards and Sleeves: You Need ‘Em

Once you’ve got your print ready, you can proceed with exactly four decks of standard playing cards: there are at least 14 cards in the set you don’t need to sleeve (blanks and “welcome/good bye” cards), more if you don’t want to sleeve the rules-for-draw-and-stud-netrunner - so, printing every one of the 21X unique cards would take just under 4x55 card decks (52+2 jokers+rules).

Don’t buy the cheapest sleeves you can get your hands on, or clear sleeves, that’s not going to be a good idea. I have some dirt-cheap sleeves I used for an earlier print-and-play project and they just feel terrible to play with.

Okay, now you have 26 pages of cards, 4 decks of playing cards, and 300 sleeves (if you buy 200 you’re going to have to make some ugly decisions). All you need to do is carefully cut out all of these cards. It’s time to sit with a podcast and be very patient and quiet for a couple of hours.

Wait, Am I Actually Saving Money, Here?

If you’re following the budget here at home, at $30 for the print, three packs of $10 sleeves, and four packs of dollar store ($2.50) playing cards, you’re in it for $70. This is still fairly exorbitant, but we’re comparing against $75+$25 S&H for MakePlayingCards, so so long as we regard our time as worthless (and boy do I ever) we’re coming out slightly ahead.

Not terribly useful lessons I’ve learned about cutting:

Machines like the Cricut or Silhouette are going to seem like a magic bullet for tasks like this, but actually they are very frustrating: their registration is always a LITTLE OFF, if their blade catches they can easily mulch an entire page (and inkjet ink isn’t cheap, that’s like 50 cents worth of paper they just chewed up), and ultimately setting up cut runs takes quite a bit of time.
A nice paper guillotine will make short work of a big card cutting project like this, although: these cards in particular are printed 9-to-a-page, giving you almost no margin for error: you have to do the pages one at a time and be very, very precise about lining up your cuts. Great if you have access to a good guillotine.
A big cutting surface, an x-acto knife, and a metal ruler does a good job and produces very precise results.
Ultimately what felt most satisfying and meditative was just sitting with a pair of regular craft scissors and cutting these by hand.

Anyways, once you’ve cut, carded, and sleeved your deck, you’re good to go.

Now on to the even more difficult stage two: attempting to convince your wife to play Netrunner with you.

2025 editor’s note: I could not, in fact, accomplish this.

Tokens

Tom had one recommendation during this video that, actually, I thought was worth chasing a little bit.

Netrunner comes with a full set of little cardboard tokens. So does the Arkham Horror LCG. NISEI doesn’t have the Netrunner tokens, but… I still have the ol’ Netrunner Core Set from 2012, I could dig that out if I wanted a full set of tokens. I kinda don’t like cardboard tokens. They’re small and light and fussy and they don’t feel satisfying to move around and play with.

On top of that, my home-printed Ascension rip-off doesn’t have any tokens at all!

In some of my games, I’ve replaced cardboard token money with REAL METAL MONEY - after I tried Century: Spice Road with the satisfying metallic clink of its coins, I was like “huh, this is nice”. Real Metal Money is more satisfying, but it’s generally quite expensive.

Arkham Horror LCG calls for 5 different types of tokens (health, sanity, resources, clues, and doom) and getting them all out and sorta smooshing them in separate little piles (or individual bowls if I’m feeling extra) takes a bunch of set-up time and table space. Set up time and table space are at a real premium around here!

Netrunner, too, calls for resources, bad publicity tokens, brain damage tokens, tag tokens, and virus tokens - so - again, 5 different types of tokens. “Brain Damage”, “Tag”, and “Virus” also only come in to use with very specific deck types , so, like, if you’re putting out the “Brain Damage” baggie there’s a 95% chance it sits unused.

So, uh, NISEI, just right on the face of it, came in hard with a big solution to the token problem by giving players cards for “bad publicity” or “brain damage” or “tag” - now, you can have just one kind of token and, if it’s roaming around free, it’s a resource, but if it’s on the runner’s “brain damage” card it’s a brain damage. Bins! They dramatically reduce the set of different chip types that are required. Particularly good for rare kinds of counter.

Anyways I picked up some multi-colored poker chips to use them with these card games and whoof. Good purchase. We played the Arkham Horror LCG and setting up the token pools was as easy as grabbing stacks of differently colored chips and plooping them on the table. The stacks were space efficient and satisfying to use.

2025 editor’s note: they’re also great for Dungeons & Dragons!

Slay the Spire's Opening Monsters Won't Deal 10 Damage

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:00:00 -0700

and why I think that’s important

Did you know that Sid Meier has written a book?

It’s… uh, slow, and it very much is a lot more about Sid’s life than his design philosophies.

A fun detail of the book is it lays out how little of the Civilization series is actually Sid’s handiwork: Every Civilization game has had a different lead designer, many of whom deserve more attention and accolades for their work. “Sid Meier” is more of a brand name at this point.

One funny tale in this book is how Sid sunk years of his life and absolute mountains of time into C.P.U. Bach, a generative music program that went over like a lead balloon.

It’s a well known fact that every single software developer, regardless of musical talent, thinks that they can crack the “interesting generative music” puzzle. I mean, certainly not me, but every other software developer is extremely prone to this flaw, as far as I can tell.

Anyways, this is a digression, but it leads to a point I want to make about why a totally different game that I love, Slay the Spire, is so good.

“Games are a series of interesting choices”, said Sid Meier.

It’s a design philosophy that, I think, really informs games like Civilization. Deeply enjoyable, fun games. And every (stock) game of Civilization starts with the same interesting choices: given the resources around me, do I settle here, or explore first to find a start point with better resources? If I settle, what’s the first thing I should build?

I like “settle immediately” and “build a scout”; modern Civ games usually arrange things such that your starting position is a good place to build a city by default, and the scout’s utility in the early game is massive: they usually pay for themselves dozens of time over in goodie huts and information.

We’re not talking about Civ though! We’re talking about Slay the Spire! FOCUS, CURTIS.

Slay the Spire starts out with this whale, Neow, cruising in and offering you an interesting decision up-front.

Interesting trade-offs. Would you like more cards in exchange for less hit-points? Would you like a random power in exchange for a weak but known power?

The game’s interesting trade-offs continue as you go. You’ll be presented with card after card, deciding which ones to add to your deck, and that decision is painful every time. Each card is situationally useful and uses up space that could be devoted to other cards.

Slay the Spire is so good. Rock Paper Shotgun’s Alec Meer called it a miracle of design. We’re hitting the point in time when the games inspired by Slay the Spire are going to start rolling in because this game was so unique and so good that everybody who played it just wanted more, but Slay-the-Spire-inspired games often fall flat, because it is just so, so hard to keep decisions balanced on the knife-edge of interest the way that this game does.

I just want to talk about one tiny detail.

You start the game with 3 energy per turn, and a hand full of 5 cards that either do 6 damage, or block 5 damage. Your opening turns will involve playing 3 cards out of 5.

You have a few cards that aren’t 6 Damage (Strike) or 5 Damage (Defend), but we’ll pretend those aren’t part of the equation, for now.

So, if you draw nothing but Defends and Strikes, you can choose to

Do 18 damage, block 0 damage
Do 12 damage, block 5 damage
Do 6 damage, block 10 damage
Do 0 damage, block 15 damage

And the detail I wanted to point out is that all of the opening monsters in the game are tuned to make even this simplified decision a little bit hard.

The Cultist, for example, one of the handful of early monsters that you will fight in Slay the Spire. They have 48-54 HP, and will do 0 damage the first turn, then 6 damage, then 9 damage, then 12 damage, then 15 damage, and so on until you knock them out of the game.

These guys are quite probably the simplest monster in all of Slay the Spire. Their low initial threat and linear damage scaling make them a credible threat in Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3 of the game: Ignore a cultist for a few turns and whoops, they’re dangerous.

Notably, they don’t do exactly 5 or 10 damage, so you have to decide: do I block more than I need to in order to take zero damage, or do I take a little bit of damage now to do as much damage as I can, to stop the cultist from getting stronger.

So now, what do you do? You can math this out somewhat: you need to hit them ~9 times to win the battle.

You can just strike-strike-strike, strike-strike-strike, strike-strike-strike. 9 times. In doing so, you take just one full hit: 6 the first time. 6 HP of damage, total. Well, if you could draw only strikes, which you can’t, because there are other things in your deck.

You can play as conservatively as possible: strike-strike-strike, strike-block-block (6 damage blocked), strike-block-block (9 damage blocked), block-block-block (12 damage blocked)… block-block-block (15 damage blocked), oh, shit, he’s doing more damage that I can block every turn and it’s only going up… uh, shit, strike-block-block (10 damage blocked, 8 damage), strike-strike-strike, and we win, having taken 8 HP of damage.

Even with perfect draw, which you don’t have, you are going to have to be okay with taking some damage to get through this battle: there is no perfect play, only tradeoffs.

None of Slay the Spire’s opening monsters deal 5 or 10 damage, because that would allow you to fully block them. It would seem like an obvious decision. And obvious decisions aren’t interesting.

This opening puzzle is already a little bit interesting. The game quickly adds other cards into the mix, complicating the puzzle further. Perhaps you would like to spend 2 of your energy on a Bash? It does 8 damage - that’s less than the 12 damage you would get out of two Strikes - but for the remainder of this turn and next turn all of your remaining strikes will do 9 damage instead of 6. Or a Zap - shell out for a Zap and it’ll do 3 damage per turn for the remainder of the fight.

Interesting, right? I think it is.

I honestly have no idea how it’s possible to design and balance a game like this, although the Slay the Spire team reveal that a lot of it has been powered by gathering a mountain of data about every single person’s playthroughs of Slay the Spire and using it to pull, prod, and tweak the values for every single card.

I Built a Card Game Very Quickly with AI-Generated Art

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0700

This is a time-lapse of me very quickly demonstrating the entire, end-to-end process, by putting together an 18-card expansion deck in just under 3 hours.

2024 EDIT: I built this game in 2022, before cheap, low-effort, and morally questionable AI art generation tools became broadly available to all of humanity. I did it using python scripts and legitimate, public data-sets of verifiable provenance, and put a lot of additional effort into the output and layout of the cards - and I’ve made the output available for free. Please do not come at me with “AI is prima facie immoral” unless you’re willing to engage with this project on these terms.

2023 EDIT: GOOD THING THAT THE WHOLE AI ART INDUSTRY DIDN’T CHANGE OVERNIGHT AND BECOME DRAMATICALLY EASIER FOR NON-TECHNICAL USERS TO INTERFACE WITH EXACTLY FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER I FINISHED THIS PROJECT, OR I’D HAVE FELT LIKE A REAL SCHMUCK

And You May Ask Yourself

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0700

and you may find yourself

behind the wheel of a large automobile

and you may ask yourself

“how did I get here?”

and you may ask yourself

“where does that highway go to”

and you may ask yourself

“am I right, am I wrong”

and you may say to yourself

“My god, I should pull over and check the maps application on my phone”

it's alive

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

The movie marketing fails to note that this is considered the correct, optimal status for babies.

neon anime nightmare

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0700

a month ago the Guardian called VRChat a “no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare” that phrase has lived rent-free in my head ever since

it was intended as derogatory but it goes so fucking hard, it’s awesome

I’ve been suggesting that we use it as a pull-quote ever since, but no traction yet

Arkham Horror (TCG)

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 12:00:00 -0700

So, uh, perhaps you are familiar with Arkham Horror? Maybe a decade ago I brought you to my home to attempt to play it as a group?

It’s sort of a hybrid of “board game” and “RPG” where in the course of one evening, you and a handful of investigators attempt to prevent an Old One from being summoned, while being faced with a steady stream of bad luck and nasty surprises from a “Mythos Deck”.

A board-game one-shot adventure, like Descent: Journeys in to the Dark, or Heroquest (BRODESWODE!).

Each player starts as a different unique investigator, with a few unique skills that make them better or worse at one of the key elements of the game.

If you strip the board game down to its grubby little bones and polish them to a mirror sheen, you end up with Pandemic, a game that came out three years later and eclipsed Arkham Horror in popularity: You and your team of investigators are mostly doing your best to contain an awful lot of nasty stuff happening around you.

Arkham Horror is a messy game, packed with obscure rules, difficult to run, filled with moments where you have to stop everything and check the manual to see if you can, for example, use a chainsaw and a motorcycle at the same time (yes, and it is awesome). Pandemic is unquestionably the more polished experience, although it loses most of the fun theme. (At no point in Pandemic do you ever even need to check the rulebook to determine if you can use the chainsaw and motorcycle at the same time, at which point why even bother to play?)

Anyways, there have since been more than a few iterations on the original Arkham Horror formula, none of which have bothered to confront or even acknowledge how much of an utter shitheel H.P. Lovecraft was, but hey, that’s a lot to ask.

Like Elder Sign - same game, same themes, but simplified and given to the players in a Yahtzee-like format.

I have a copy of this sitting on my shelf and it’s Quite Good, although it has been a good long time since I’ve brought it to the table. I can say that it offers almost all of the fun and themes of Arkham Horror, but with a more satisfying gameplay loop and a more polished ruleset. The big piles of dice and simplified gameplay, though, can really lay bare how much your success or victory comes down to a single roll of the dice - like with most “more streamlined” experiences, it does sacrifice a lot of little thematic touches.

Then, there’s Eldritch Horror, Arkham Horror: 3rd Edition, and Mansions of Madness.

Not much to say about Eldritch Horror - I haven’t played it, but by and large it is regarded as a significantly cleaned up and tightened version of Arkham Horror - a spiritual successor, easier, more Pandemic, less Chainsaw/Motorcycle.

And Mansions of Madness really leans into the RPG aspect, dividing one player from the group to act as a sort of Dungeon Master, an antagonistic foil to the player’s designs - or, in the second edition, turning over the antagonism to an automated phone application. Out of all of the games in the Arkham series, this one is the most like a traditional pencil & paper tabletop RPG.

So, uh, this is the Arkham series, and I’m gonna talk a little bit about some of the problems with it:

Quarterbacking & Wasted Turns

These are some of the earliest of the popular co-operative games, and as such, they suffer badly from some of the worst qualities of the genre: namely, that it is quite possible, probable, even common for one player who knows what they’re doing to manage the entire table while a whole group of people… watch.

The division of responsibilities and skills also can often leave the board in a state where there’s only a few players who can be effective, leaving the rest of the players to just sort of stand about. For the players who do have something useful to do, well, that thing is usually so obvious that it’s not much of an interesting decision. I have definitely played whole games of Arkham Horror where I just sort of haunt the card-draw parts of the map digging around for a shotgun or a grenade or something.

You Aren’t Supposed To Win

In order for the co-op game to feel challenging it has to be challenging when played against a completely mindless opponent, and that challenge is driven by making the game just a little bit too hard.

Which means that, on average, especially if you’re not playing perfectly, you’re going to lose. You’re going to lose to something random and capricious and stupid. One of your investigators is going to get emotionally wrecked by a bad experience in a gas station bathroom, causing them to go insane and become devoured.

That’s… well, that’s one of the reasons why the theme works so well in the first place. Lovecraftian Horror is the right theme for a game where you are destined to probably lose. People will die, people will go insane, you’ll probably fail.

Complexity and Theme and Randomness is Fun, Until it Isn’t

Arkham Horror’s massive, bloated, over-complicated rule set is part of what makes it so evocative. The game itself is a thing of lovecraftian horror - too many rules, too many surprises, too much to deal with. It’s big, and with that bigness comes a big implied promise: if you learn how to manage all of this complexity you’ll have unlocked a potent story engine that generates a fun tale.

But the game’s wild… bigness, is a thin disguise around a huge pile of decks and decks of random events - it doesn’t always deliver on that promise.

It’s quite possible to lose this game on the first turn. It’s quite possible to luck into a party armed to the teeth with ancient relics and flaming swords able to topple an Old One on their own, just waiting out the game’s clock.

If you’re going to put this much effort into a Great Big Game, you might as well put that effort into Scythe or Eclipse and at least get some satisfying gameplay out of it.

On the other hand, attempts to strip Arkham Horror down to easier, smaller, more strategic bite-size experiences… don’t really capture what made it great.

Quinns described the core gameplay of the simplified Eldritch Horror as “irredeemably boring” - the meat on those bones is all in the theme, the randomness, the weird stuff that happens.

Elder Sign’s gameplay is fun, but it barely feels attached to the theme at all. At some point you might as well just play Yahtzee! At least with that one you can play it with your mother-in-law without having to go through the embarassing experience of explaining what an “Elder Sign” is.

On To The Card Game

Why do I mention all of this stuff?

Well, there’s a new Arkham game in town, and it’s … quite good. Quite good indeed.

This is a “Living Card Game” - kind of a spiritual successor to both Eldritch Horror and Android: Netrunner.

I really quite liked Android: Netrunner. It was a clever design for a game, wrapped in a cool theme. The idea of a LCG is that it works kind of like Magic: the Gathering - in that cards are continuously added to the game in perpetuity - but instead of randomized booster packs, the game’s new cards are released in named sets, which you can collect at your own leisure.

Android: Netrunner was fun, but it had a bit of a problem: the competitive game’s balance would swing wildly around as new decks game out. For people looking to run the game in their own homes, it would sort of fall on players either to agree to buy the exact same subset as other players that they want to play with, buy the entire universe and be aware of 100% of the game’s current footprint at all times, or just kind of hope that they could build a balanced, competitive subset of the game out of whatever they had on hand.

So: Arkham Horror the LCG. It’s out there solving Android: Netrunner problems and Arkham Horror problems.

So how does it work?

The Basic Gameplay

Okay, in short: You and your co-op team each have individual Investigator decks. These decks are wildly distinct from one another - there’s five core “classes” of card - Guardian (hit stuff), Seeker (find clues), Mystic (do weird magic), Rogue (run away from things and gain resources) and Survivor (miscellaneous special effects) - and each of the investigators has a mix of cards from two classes, a primary and secondary class.

I picked Roland (Guardian/Seeker), a practical monster-punchin’ and clue-findin’ combo for a straightforward game and Tiff picked Agnes (Mystic/Survivor), a big mixed-bag of weird tricks and lucky effects.

You draw 5 cards and take 5 resources, lay down a half-dozen Locations, ploop your investigator at the entrance to one of the locations, and are offered 3 actions per round, with which to perform one of 8 different actions:

play a card,
activate an effect on a played card
draw a card,
draw a resource,
move from location to location,
investigate a location to maybe find Clues, (which are generally required to win the game)
fight a monster
evade a monster

then, you take a resource, you draw a card, all of the enemies in the game get to attack you, you add a doom token to the “you lose” track, and each investigator draws a fresh Very Bad Problem from the Bad Times deck, which summons monsters and negative story events pretty much willy-nilly.

While you’re doing this, you’re racing your investigators ability to rack up clues (a difficult, time-consuming activity) against the game’s ability to line up doom tokens in the “you lose” track.

Skill Checks, and THE CHAOS BAG

Why, it’s my main man, Roland Banks.

He’s a bit of a Mario, pretty balanced across all fields, he’s got some Willpower, some Intellgience, a little extra Punch It In The Face and not a lot of Run Away.

A lot of things in this game come down to Skill Checks - they come up often. Combat checks to fight monsters, Evade checks to run away from monsters, Intelligence checks to investigate and get clues, and Willpower checks to not go completely banana-pants insane. On average, the difficulty level of a skill check is going to be about 3.

So, Rollo here, with his “3-ish in every stat”, should have an easy time with most checks, right?

Wrong! The CHAOS BAG is a great big bag filled with tokens, and you have to draw one every time you do a skill check.

Also: the Chaos Bag hates you. It contains 2 good outcomes, 2 neutral outcomes, and 12 bad outcomes. If you’re playing on “standard” mode, like some kind of fresh-faced noob. If you want the game to really Bring The Pain there’s a variant that does away with any remaining good outcomes and throws some -6s and -8s in there for good measure.

If you don’t trust that you’ll be able to pass a check (especially considering the mean Chaos Bag), well, you have cards that can help in your hand.

Campaign

The base set comes with three missions that you can take your investigators on, which link to one another in a single unified campaign.

They have stories (albeit pretty perfunctory ones) and their own weird mechanics, and twists.

These individual missions take about… 60-90 minutes for two adults to clear.

Each mission has its own locations, victory conditions, and even special rules.

At the end of the campaign, your investigators either die horribly at the hands of an otherworldly horror (this happened to us) or barely save the day and retire, forever maddened by their experience - each campaign is intended to be started by a fresh investigator deck with no experience.

although the internet is convinced that the later campaigns are intended to be started by a fresh investigator with no experience but a whole bunch of great cards and deckbuilding experience from all of the previous campaign cycles so they’re apparently quite a bit harder

Deckbuilding

The core game comes with 5 pre-made decks, sufficient to throw at the game’s campaign. As players attack the campaign objectives, they earn experience points, which should allow them to purchase from a handful of more expensive and powerful cards provided to upgrade these default decks.

Technically, all of the game’s decks are customizable - within certain parameters - but there aren’t really enough cards in the base set to really change the fundamental properties of the decks provided. Why, to get your hands on more cards you’ll probably need to… go buy some expansion packs.

Expansion Packs

So, having played the mini-campaign using the pre-fab decks, you’re gonna want to get your hands on more.

More campaigns! More cards to build decks with! More investigators!

Well, guess what? That’s why Fantasy Flight Games wanted to get you in on this train in the first place.

So, what you get when you want to get rolling on a real adventure is a cycle.

A cycle starts with a base set:

This includes the campaign guide for the cycle, and five new investigator decks full of delicious cards for you to play with.

Also: the first mission in the campaign.

But just the first mission, if you want the whole campaign you’ve gotta get your hands on the whole set, which looks more like this:

Each of these missions contains a segment of the story, a complete mission, a Whole Bunch of New Bad Things That Can Happen To Your Investigator, and a handful of new investigator cards, including upgraded cards that you can add to higher level decks.

I wonder why they would do it that way?

Oh, yes, I know why:

Crikey, FFG, what a creative way to drain bank accounts.

While this seems unbelievably nefarious, let me refer you to some of the problems with Android: Netrunner - in a competitive game, the problem of “defining an interesting and fair subset of the card space so that players don’t have to simply buy every card in existence” is significant (this is also why Magic: The Gathering’s draft format is so popular: it solves a core problem with the game by simply having that subset defined in-situ for a single play session)

However, in this co-operative game, there’s fun to be had with whatever cards you have on hand, so long as you’ve got at least one campaign. Heck - the core set alone has quite a lot of gameplay in it. Tiff and I have definitely made three nights of fun out of the starting campaign, and there are more investigator decks we haven’t even tried yet!

While I’d prefer it if the cycles were simply boxed and sold together as, well, whole entire cycles - the system of having a couple of friends and a big common pool of cards to draw from for an ever-growing adventure is actually… pretty cool!

My Friend, Dynamite

This card is absolutely bonkers useful. I am Team Dynamite Forever. This game is not shy about absolutely mobbing you with baddies, and/or throwing monsters at you with a great many hit points while your puny fists deal an absolutely pitiful 1 damage per attack.

The dynamite is a real conversation ender, at the expense of also being a touch volatile, dangerous, and expensive. I found an absolutely clutch use for it in all three of our first missions. Dynamite is the difference between victory and failure. Hold on to that sweet Dynamite.

In fact, we’d have won all three campaign missions if I hadn’t suffered a spate of truly critically bad luck. All we had to do to not lose was interrupt a simple cult ritual, and as The Muscle, all I needed to do was clear the way of several cultists so that Tiff could go in and use her occult knowledge to, like, move some candles around. Simple enough. To simplify the task of rapidly removing a mess of cultists from play I also happened to be holding a stick of the aforementioned Dynamite, my favourite card.

There was just one simple thing - a rule I almost forgot to enforce it was so harmless seeming: I just had to find my way out of the dank forest that I was just hunting for clues in, which required that I pass a simple Investigate check.

Look, time was of the essence - we only had a few turns left before the cultists summoned [REDACTED] the big nasty thing that will definitely kill you - and a failed check would definitely waste time. So, to ensure that I’d have plenty of time to go clear the way for Tiff, I threw every investigation card I had at the Investigate check.

I couldn’t possibly fail.

The Chaos Bag Hates You. I drew the red token, the “insta-fail, no questions asked” token. Having burned all of my investigation cards, my chances of getting out of the forest on a regular check dropped drastically, and I spent the remainder of the game trapped in the forest while cultists and Young Deep Ones murdered Tiff.

whoops.

Well I guess we all died, and it was pretty definitely my fault.

I guess the one problem they didn’t solve was the difficulty. This horror ain’t no cakewalk. At this point, though, I think long-standing fans of the series have come to expect it. It wouldn’t be cosmic horror if you could win reliably.

Good Things

This game… solves a lot of the problems with Arkham Horror, and is quite good.

Quarterbacking, for example: you’re playing your own investigator. You don’t know what’s in other players’ hands. You don’t even know what they’ve put in their decks. In fact - you shouldn’t know. Don’t even try to learn that stuff. Quarterbacking is not much of a problem in Arkham Horror: TCG.

The game is pretty good about almost always giving the investigators something useful to do, although admittedly it remains possible to get trapped in an ancient forest while your partner gets savaged by monsters that they are utterly unequipped to fight.

The randomness and capriciousness of Arkham Horror? Well, that’s toned way down because each individual campaign mission is actually pretty tightly planned and tuned. Oh, sure, it’s possible to get bad draws, or good draws, and have a really bad time or a really good time with a specific campaign mission - but that falls inside a much tighter band of possibility space.

In a story about trying to hunt down cultists in an ancient forest, “the cop, driven insane from the things he’s seen, gets lost in the mist and clawed to death by ghouls; leaving the woman he was sworn to protect to die” feels congruous with the story that we were telling with the cards. Before the “forest x cultist” mission, we were instructed to stock the encounter deck with a whole mess of cultist things and forest things, and took out a bunch of things that wouldn’t have felt right coming up randomly while we were in the forest.

I had fun. Fun was had, by me, legendary grump.

The Bad

There’s an absolute buttload of rules to this game. Like - it’s seemingly simple but there’s still quite a lot going on. There’s a pretty complete implementation of Arkham Horror, under the hood, here, combined with all of the extra complexity of an Android: Netrunner style action/resource/card system.

We misplayed quite a few early rules to the game, accidentally making the game harder for ourselves again and again and slowly improving as we went. I know that at at least one point, I had accidentally put way too many Doom counters in play (when you kill a creature with a doom counter on it, that doom counter is supposed to be discarded, but I didn’t know that).

At another time, I had accidentally three hands worth of equipment in play.

3 hands

And, you know what? The deckbuilding isn’t really that satisfying with 5 pre-made decks and few customization options. Which means that in order to really, truly experience this game, gotta drop some MAD STACKS, YO.

And the campaign included in the Base Set was short. A lot of the mechanics that crop up in the base campaign have to do with speeding up the accrual of doom, speeding up an already fast campaign.

Okay, here’s another concern: I’m not entirely sure if I believe that the core campaign is actually practical to beat without Roland. He’s the only investigator who’s got access to a shotgun. Although… actually, that kinda makes me want to give it a try and find out.

Anyhow

So far, it is pretty good!

Soon I’m gonna crack into some of that Dunwich cycle of extra cards and see if I change my mind….

Looking for the right ambience music for a game of Arkham Horror?

because I definitely found it several months ago when I played Cultist Simulator :

Cursed Game Design Problems

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 12:00:00 -0700

Hey, did you see this thing? “The Game Prototype That Had to Be Banned by Its Own Studio”.

Spoilers: the designer accidentally built a game that could be described as “like Diplomacy”.

Yup, Tank Tactics is accidentally a re-implementation of Diplomacy, which is, in my opinion, one of the most destructive anti-games ever created (sidenote: this segment used to have a link to a Lifehacker article entitled “Diplomacy: The Most Evil Board Game Ever Made”, but the link has since disappeared from the internet, lost forever to the shifting sands.) .

Sach: What’s so awful about it?

Curtis: So, you have six people, and the only way to move forward at all is for five of the people to get together and agree who doesn’t make it to the next stage. … then, you have five people.

Sach: I immediately see how this would leave some pretty deeply hurt feelings in record time.

Curtis: aaaaaaayep

I think it’s cool that there’s a game out there so simple, and compelling but also bad that people keep re-discovering it and re-burying it in the forest once they discover it’s evil. Like Jumanji.

And it’s really easy to accidentally end up making Diplomacy! It’s a common trap for a reason - any game where player elimination is necessary to move the game forward, but players aren’t quite powerful enough to eliminate opponents on their own has a chance of congealing into a Diplomacy if you’re not careful.

I’m really interested in the idea of game designs that are fundamentally cursed, just, game anti-patterns you can accidentally fall in to if you’re not careful, leaving your players playing a game that you didn’t intend for them to play at all.

I think the NFT (sidenote: For those of you in the future, a “NFT”, or “Non Fungible Token” was a way for people to try to scam idiots into buying virtual real estate: essentially the star registry scam but for digital assets.) space is cursed in this way, too, by the way - it doesn’t matter what you try to build around the technology, the design always converges to “speculative, skill-free pay-to-win Beanie-Baby-collecting and throttling powerful GPUs for big cash prizes” - not because people are bad designers, but because that’s the only kind of game that NFTs can really support. BUT DON’T BLAME ME WHEN YOU’RE [Crying] IN A [Broken Home] WISHING YOU LET YOUR OLD PAL SPAMTON [Kill You].

Even famous game designer Will Wright is getting in on it. And his game is converging to the same NFT thing, not because he’s a bad designer, but because “having NFTs” and “not letting NFTs become the entire point of the whole danged game“ is a cursed problem in game design.

Because cryptocurrency has a strong profit motive attached to it, there becomes an enormous incentive to cheat: and the only part of the system that can’t be cheated is … the cryptocurrency, which means that any game built around a cryptocurrency invariably just becomes an unadorned cryptocurrency, which is not a fun game. So: crypto games, sort of necessarily and as a result of their design, can not be fun.

Like, let’s say that we played Monopoly with significant amounts of real money, and the only way to stop other people from cheating at Monopoly was to turn a giant crank with both hands, and the faster you turn the crank the better you can do regardless of your skill at Monopoly.

Well, then, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re good at Monopoly, we’ve created a game that will eventually be Entirely About The Crank. Even if the Monopoly part is fun, it doesn’t matter, because this is a game where the only thing that matters is the cranking.

Good designers know this, and try to make cranking fun, which is why all NFT games ultimately converge to similar designs. They converge to being about the only thing they can be about: buying collectibles and hoping they appreciate in value.

A Love Letter to Old Manuals

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 12:00:00 -0700

One of the things I loved most as a kid was manuals.

I was word-obsessed, and I wanted to learn everything about the world - while I loved stories, manuals were a special kind of magic story that teaches you how to use a thing. My parents were always patient, thoughtful tutors, but their time was always at a premium (sidenote: and also they didn’t bother to know anything about topics deeply important to me, like “the pokemon” or “computers”) .

I was a weird kid. (surprise surprise).

A haunting story from my childhood is from the time, when I was 5, that my parents realized not just that I could read, but that I could read very well - they had bought a garage sale typewriter, and had settled in to the living room to try to figure out how to get it working. I stole away with the manual. When they couldn’t figure out how to change the ink ribbon, I explained it to them. When they asked how I knew how to change the ink ribbon, I showed them the page of the manual where the process had been laid out, step by step and clear as day.

Thanks to my strange obsession, reading comprehension, and relative uselessness at most other tasks (I was and still am clumsy and easily distractible) I became the family’s setup mule. Nobody else was terribly fond of figuring out how things worked, but no matter what technology they purchased they could toss me the manual and I’d put the cables in the right order and explain to everybody how to record videos and set the time on the VCR. No flashing 12:00s in our home.

At the time, technology was much more difficult and much more conceptual than it is now. If you sold someone a piece of equipment, it needed to come with a lot of additional information that explained how that equipment worked.

I read this manual that came with the TRS-80 color computer cover-to-cover when I was but a wee lad. I was enthralled, and I set myself upon many basic programming tasks like “making the computer emit a series of uncomplicated random squeals and colors” and “printing JONATHAN IS A POOP hundreds of times”. I’d drag my poor father away from his seemingly perpetual lawn and garden chores and sports games to show him how I’d managed to get the little computer to ask questions and then use the typed responses to those questions to inform responses.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
?DAVE
HI THERE "DAVE" DID YOU KNOW THAT JONATHAN IS A POOP?
?NO
HA HA YOU ADMITTED THAT JONATHAN IS A POOP!

clearly this is more enthralling than your begonias, old man

I was young (6-8), though, and I had trouble figuring out loops, or more abstract control structures like functions. I grasped their most basic existence, but the book didn’t help me really understand their utility or explain how I might use them to link together larger, more meaningful programs.

eugh. Even now I can remember that feeling I would get when I was a child and something went over my head - a mixture of frustration, anger, helplessness and grim determination. No, fuck YOU, book, I WILL have your secrets.

We moved on to a 286 that Dad managed to liberate from his office after it had been replaced by a newer model, and I got my hands on some real doozies, manual-wise.

If you say “Curtis is a geek” it doesn’t tell the whole story, but if you say “Curtis was the only 8-year old in the Lower Mainland who knew how to do a mail-merge in Wordperfect, and also didn’t relate well to his classmates for some reason”, that’s much more comprehensive a tale.

These manuals, though, despite being comprehensive, were also pretty boring. Heck, look at them, all decked out in “greige”, a charming mixture of grey and beige carefully calculated to match even the most dreary office decor.

Video game manuals, though, oh boy -

As manuals are concerned these were even more perfect to obsess over. Technical, yes, but they also told a story, explained game mechanics, and took the chunky pixels on screen and built an imaginary kingdom around them.

We didn’t have a tonne of money for games, but one of my cousins gave me a stack of his battered old Nintendo Power magazines - most of which HE had found at swap-meets and garage sales - which hit me in the weak point for massive damage even though I didn’t have any of the games mentioned.

Fun aside - the game The California Raisins: The Grape Escape was never actually released. I saw a YouTube video a while back about this mysterious un-released game that had never seen the light of day, and it was a weird moment for me, because the game was extremely familiar to me. I’d imagined playing through the entire game (it had a full half of a Nintendo Power dedicated to it, including full level layouts explaining where to find all of the best power-ups) without knowing at any point that it wasn’t a real game.

I’ve been forced to downsize my worthless collection of old magazines - on account of I’m an adult living in one of the most expensive cities in the world - but I’ve held on to a couple.

The absolute cream of the crop, manual-wise, was this manual for Ultima IV, a game that I bought at a garage sale for a few bucks:

Look at that - gorgeous leatherette cover, foil effects, it’s own CIPHER LANGUAGE?

The manuals were written from the point-of-view of in-universe characters, on paper carefully chosen to give off the feel of “age”. This wasn’t some video game, it was a portal, to an ancient universe with its own history and characters.

The disk was corrupt. Ultima IV wouldn’t run. All I ever got out of the game was the manual, and the world it described seemed so huge. I wanted so badly to see what it had under the hood. I guess it’s free on GOG.com if I’m ever curious enough to take a look - but there’s no way that a handful of floppy disks that are older than I am could live up to the Brittania I built up in my mind after reading these (sidenote: Editor’s note: Years later I’d watch this retrospective of the whole Ultima series. And now I know! I was right, it didn’t fully live up to the manual.) .

Anyways, game manuals would only get worse as years went by. Games didn’t need them as much, and in-game tutorials, Prima Strategy Guides, CDs and the internet eventually rendered them more or less obsolete.

Which is kind of sad, to me, because I absolutely loved old game manuals.

Like this one, that they shipped with EarthBound USA, because it was considered too difficult to defeat without a comprehensive guide:

The EarthBound Player’s Guide (downloadable as a PDF here, now) contained scratch-and-sniff cards for the game’s bosses and presented itself as a “Travel Guide” as if Onett was a travel destination, like an unexpectedly dangerous resort town.

Or the 400-page manual that came with the Sim Classics collection, which explained to me the basics of urban planning, crop rotation and the theory of Evolution, and also came with some of the best video games I would have access to for years.

I miss this era in game design - when the world in the machine was a little too small, a little too cryptic, and us boring humans had to imagine some of the rest of it. An era when books and computers had to work in tandem to work their magic, an era of tomes and sorcery, now lost.

Oath

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 12:00:00 -0700

My copy of Oath arrived!

And, yeah, post-pandemic I’ve been able to rebuild a small group of board gamers who are willing to engage with me, even on ridiculous games like Oath. So let me tell you some of my thoughts about it.

This Shut Up & Sit Down review calls it 2021’s Most Exciting Board Game.

The Cones of Dunshire Problem

It’s an ongoing joke on Parks and Recreation that Ben Wyatt, a boring accountant, loves board games. He’s nationally ranked at Settlers of Catan, and in his spare time he’s concocted game called “The Cones of Dunshire”, a game that takes several hours to play, involves mountains of dice, and has a variety of magical effects and win conditions, and is, effectively, a parody of the sorts of games that tend to top the BGG Top 100.

“The Maverick should be able to trade lumber for agriculture credits! Why have I not thought of this before?”

Tech Worker: “You’re the architect? Ha ha - and I’m the alchemist of the hinterlands.”

Ben: “There can’t be an alchemist of the hinterlands, the hinterlands is a shadow kingdom that can only sustain a provost or denier.”

In our first game, we, as a group, did the tutorial, an entirely deterministic first round where the book just tells us exactly what moves we’re taking, and why. By the end of that first round, we’ve learned a bunch of stuff about how to play this punishingly intricate game.

A lot of the first game was just hours of the group of us ironing out dozens upon dozens of tiny procedural issues. “If bandits rule unclaimed territories, why did the tutorial allow me to place a token there?”

Calculating the exact details of the resolution of a multi-territory attack phase between a strong player and the Oathkeeper on the first turn was so complicated that I spent a half-hour trying to figure it out ahead of time out of the rule-book so that I’d be prepared to help smooth things along once we actually started playing the game, and even then it took us some time to piece together the actual mechanics of that situation.

After the second game was over (and I had lost), I looked up a ruling about a wildly powerful card that I’d played and the discussion about it was 2 pages long and was only resolved when one of the game’s creators posted updated “intended” text for the card.

No, it wasn’t valid for me to hide my secrets on bandit-controlled land, to protect them from being destroyed, this card destroys all secrets except for secrets not controlled by any players or secrets on the Darkest Secret.

So, this is a problem. Oath is complicated.

I’ve played a lot of games that I think are a contender for the throne, but Oath is the most Cones-of-Dunshire-like game I have possibly ever played. It’s possible that the creators of Oath were in on the joke, because our first round was literally won by Tiffany using… the alchemist - but not in the hinterlands - in fact, if she had been in the hinterlands she might not have won, her strategy hinged on both “holding the alchemist” and “not being in the hinterlands”. In a round where most of the variables were pre-determined by the people who wrote the game. Look, I’m just saying it’s possible that the Oath team found a way to work an extremely clandestine Parks & Recreation reference into their game. Or it’s a fun coincidence.

The Tikal Problem: Analysis Paralysis

Are you familiar with Tikal?

In Tikal, all information is visible, and on your turn you’ve got a limited number of highly flexible “actions” that you have to use to their absolute utmost in order to have any chance of winning. You can do whatever you want, in whatever combination, until you empty your action budget.

It’s a fun optimization problem! For you. On your turn. Everybody else is forced to wait and watch you solve a highly personalized puzzle, occasionally interjecting to quibble about a procedural issue.

Oath has this problem in spades. With a turn having access to as much as 9 “supply” (actions, essentially), 6 unique and complex actions costing anywhere between 1-4 “supply”, and access to dozens of unique board powers, the probability space of a single turn is vast.

Analysis Paralysis takes over.

Yesterday’s second game went over 4 hours in runtime, and based on some estimations I can kinda back-of-the-envelope it that people were waiting as much as 30 minutes between their turns. You could take a turn and then go watch an entire episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, come back, and someone could still be piecing together the details of their incredibly elaborate turn.

pictured: an episode of It’s Always Sunny I could have watched while waiting for my turn.

And this isn’t just a failing of the game - this is required.

You can only win the game at the beginning of your turn (before doing anything) - and winning the game requires that you perform a fairly onerous and highly visible series of actions.

You don’t just need to win the game, you need to win the game in such a way that the rest of the table won’t be able to untangle your win before your next turn. This, with each of your opponents given their own highly intricate turns. This requires that you model, in your head, not just your current moves, but the probability space of what every single player can accomplish to stop you.

Now, Oath has pools of limited information - it’s not possible to know all information in Oath at all times - but it allows you almost all of the information- and knowing as much as reasonably possible is absolutely vital to being able to construct your master-stroke of a turn. You’re privy to 90% of board state and most players have at best one or two hidden cards, so you really can come a this game with a lot of predictive capability.

The combats in this game are wild rolls of big piles of dice - but those dice are pretty understandable. You can run a big confrontation fully in your head and understand roughly how well one player is going to do against another. In our first and second sessions we were already tossing around ideas that we’d gathered about the expected utility of red attack dice (ok) and blue defense dice (amazing).

The Shut Up & Sit Down team talk about “Fuzziness” - a property of games that intentionally introduce mechanics to make the game’s state or outcomes less predictable. Fuzzy abstractions make the game less strategic, but also serve to stop people from taking years long turns. Oath could stand to have a bit more fuzz in it, in my opinion.

Some player groups manage this problem with some manner of turn clocks or timer-based solution, which can force players to accept a slightly-less-than-mathematically-perfect-turn, but (and I feel like this might be an obvious thing to point out) turn clocks are not a good way to make a gaming experience feel more loose, fun and casual.

The way I tried to fight AP in our game of Oath was actually to try to engage the whole table in my turn, talking things out with everybody, talking out my own reasoning (sometimes to my tactical disadvantage, as it’s much more effective to play games like this close to the chest) making sure everybody had snacks and drinks and keeping things fun and light-hearted and high energy, and by and large, that works okay. Until it’s 11:45 PM and everybody is starting to root for the game to just END already.

Kingmaking: Only Kind of a Problem

Oh my god the BoardGameGeek thread on Kingmaking is insufferable.

To summarize, Kingmaking is a term for when Player C can no longer win the game, but can influence whether Player A or Player B wins the game.

To be honest, I think a lot of the people in the BGG thread are missing the point - a game has failed not when “an irrelevant player decides the outcome of the game” but when a player feels that they have become irrelevant. That’s already a not fun state.

Oath has a pretty bad kingmaking problem, although I can think of a few mitigating factors:

The win conditions are flexible and fluid, and if one becomes totally impossible, with some effort it’s possible to completely change up your strategy and try something else.
The game’s turns are so world-changing, and its advisors are so powerful, that it’s possible for the state of the game to turn on a dime into something where you are a threat. The search deck is packed to the gills with advisors with highly-situational abilities that can be devastating against even the strongest player.
Can’t win as a Citizen? Defect (for a price of 3-7 favor) and become an Exile, forging your own path to victory. Irrelevant as an Exile? Sign up to become a Citizen and work against the other players with the military backing of the crown and a powerful new relic bequeathed upon you by the Chancellor.
Don’t have a big army? If you’re an Exile, that means you have a lot of supply, giving you even more of an opportunity to go fishing for powerful cards that you can use to change your fortunes.

But… none of that feels terribly satisfying on the turn between the most powerful player Declaring They’re About To Win and the turn in which they Win. There are still turns in Oath that feel a lot more impactful than others, and considering how long it takes for things to come back around to your turn, that can be downright demoralizing.

The Good Parts

This game had a lot to recommend it, too. A lot of the complaints about this are also complaints that can be levelled against another strategic long-play game that I love, Twilight Imperium - which can also be barrels of head-scratching, rule-examining fun. I’m happy to own Oath because I was thinking of buying Twilight Imperium but this scratches that same itch: players with competing armies squabbling and scheming over complex, secretive, and intersecting goals, intricate planning, alliances, betrayal, mead… it’s got “first few seasons of Game of Thrones” energy in a big way.

Brinkmanship

Somebody has satisfied the conditions to win the game, and now everybody has one turn to stop them from actually winning the game.

Who’s… job is it to actually do something about that?

Sure, “everybody’s”, technically, but, like, practically, the more that other players do to stop a player from winning, the less you have to do, and the stronger that makes you in comparison. In fact, if you’re the player immediately after the winner in turn order, it seems like everybody else’s problem, not yours, right? I mean, so long as someone else actually has the resources to stop the game from ending. Of course, if they don’t, you’re hooped.

Why, some people might even note that if you prop up the player immediately before you in turn order, the other players may have to work so hard to stop them from winning that they hand the victory to you, instead.

This sort of calculation - this sort of active table negotiation and naked power-brokering - is the beating heart of Oath, and I do indeed find it pretty interesting. That’s another mitigating factor of the “kingmaking” - this is a game explicitly about kingmaking,

and kings are made in essentially the same kind of way that sausage is.

Gorgeous

This game is just absolutely lushly produced.

all of the Oath photography in this article was stolen from the internet, because I’m a blogger, not a real journalist

I don’t need to write a whole thinkpiece about this or nothing, but this is a very, very pretty game.

Legacy

Oath is a legacy game.

I don’t like legacy games. There’s a recent trend in gaming - thanks to games like Gloomhaven and Pandemic: Legacy topping the BGG Top 100 - that is board games that evolve as you play them, adding and modifying game mechanics and even a creating a story by having you open envelopes, apply stickers to cards, and even destroying cards in the game.

Thanks, I hate it. The idea that you have a board game that evolves over time is sort of balanced out by the idea that that evolution over time also damages your copy of the game, while also making it hugely inaccessible to new players who want to get in on the experience. Legacy games require buy-in, a fixed gaming group that want to return to it again and again, and definitely don’t work if you let them sit on the shelf for several months between plays.

Oath does legacy really well, though. It’s, for one thing, completely nondestructive. This is a game that can be 100% reset-to-factory-conditions, and without even too much difficulty. Reshuffle a few decks and set up the starting scenario again - or, heck, just scramble a few things and make up a totally unique start state.

Under the hood of this implementation, Oath is nothing more than a game with highly flexible start-up parameters. Instead of giving you an Adviser Deck with 400 cards in it, the Adviser deck is restricted to 40 cards or so, and at the end of the game, advisers that were part of a successful empire are kept around, and some of the discarded advisers are shuffled out to make room for new advisers - new advisers in the same suit as the winning player’s advisers. But… since the game can be played with any deck of advisers, the legacy element is kind of just deciding on the parameters for the next game - like if after every game of Dominion, you were to keep the cards that featured in the winning deck and swap out the cards that didn’t. Isn’t that a neat way to set up a next round? I think so.

Already after two games our deck is starting to lean towards Arcane and Nomad suits, meaning that our games are going to focus more on power-brokering in the Hinterlands and powerful, expensive effects that require Secrets.

The winner of one game becomes the Chancellor in the next game - which also provides a fun balancing mechanic, because I believe that the Chancellor has one of the most difficult paths to victory. Maintaining a stable empire across two or three rounds seems like an imposingly difficult task, even given the Chancellor’s significant resources.

Alliances - and “alliances” are a fuzzy term, because even in an alliance you’re still competing as much with players within your alliance as you are with players outside of it - can also last (or form) between rounds.

Some places and advisors in the world itself can also stay in place between rounds.

But all of these things - well, they’re pretty narrow bounds on setup conditions for an absolutely sprawling game. One could completely shuffle or reset the Advisors deck, deal out a random collection of locations and advisors, give a random player the Chancellorship and a couple of key locations, and the game would be off to the races with very little lost except shared context. The game’s intended to be valid and fun with pretty much whatever state you end up in, so this cataclysm wouldn’t hurt the game at all, except that the cards you trade with and their abilities would be strangers to you.

There’s an advisor, “Taming Charm”, and with the game’s Fantasy Font and my reading it upside down, I read as “Tanning Chatum”, and now Tanning Chatum is a regular fan favourite.

Getting new players in to the game? Well, explain a little bit of history to them and they’ll be just as competitive as anybody else.

Oath has fully reversible, completely optional legacy mechanics that still manage to be satisfying and deep. That is awesome. This is the sort of implementation that might actually convert me to liking legacy games.

In Conclusion

Look, I just sat down and wrote like fo-feventy jillion words about this game, it should be pretty clear that I’m pretty excited about it.

Games are great in different contexts. I have short, pithy games for my family (Ticket to Ride, Point Salad, Sushi Go), middleweight euros for my friends (Concordia, 7 Wonders), light-hearted party games for both of those groups (Wavelength, Deception; Murder in Hong Kong), and one or two of these massive, complicated beasts like Gloomhaven and now Oath.

The context of a Gloomhaven or an Oath (or an Eclipse, or a Twilight Imperium) are that they’re Project Games. You take them to a cabin with a couple of friends for a weekend. You set them up on the big table and play for a couple of hours at a time between meals and breaks and doing other things entirely and just hanging around reading books, and you talk the games over dinner.

I think Oath has what it takes to be a fabulous cabin game.

P.S.

Eugene: curse you for putting the “OAuth” reading of Oath into my head because now I can’t stop reading Oath as OAuth.

ha ha

Cultist Simulator

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:00:00 -0700

It’s a card game! It’s a narrative game! It’s a combination card game narrative game!

It’s… okay. A solid B.

[MANY SPOILERS AHEAD]

The way this works is you have a tableau of cards, representing a wide variety of things - people, objects, books, money, your own personal stats - each card is socketable in a handful of “verb” slots.

So, if you socket your HEALTH into the WORK slot, for example, you’ll go do taxing manual labor for a day, producing a FUNDS. If you then put your FUNDS into your DREAM slot, you’ll buy a bunch of opium and have fucked up dreams, which might produce a CONTENTMENT (good!) but might also produce a FASCINATION (bad!) or a DREAD (very bad!).

While all this stuff is happening, a timer ticks forward. While the timer is going, it’ll do things like consume funds (you’ve gotta eat) and generate random nasty events.

This game is also proud of its complete and utter lack of tutorial. It figures - you’ll figure things out, right?

So, on my first play-through, I managed to figure out how to put card A in socket B just enough to actually figure out how to buy a few spooky books and get a cult going - but I got trapped in a dead-end job working for a stingy boss - the game hinted (“you can do something about this”) but I couldn’t figure out what - and I ended up dying from a sickness that I couldn’t afford to cure (that’s American health care for ya).

Before I got there, I managed to walk through the WAY OF THE WOOD in my dreams, to a land where I could harvest potent magical energies. Not sure what to do with potent magical energies, but they were there.

So I consulted a wiki gently. I didn’t want to spoil much, but sometimes you need to see what exactly you’re up against. I did a little bit of prep and prepared myself for a second run.

On my second run, I really managed to get things up and running - the game gives you the option to play as a physician the second time around, who has a job that isn’t terrible and that he can’t be fired from. His ability to poop out regular money leaves him insulated from sickness, so that’s a step forward! I started my new cult in earnest, trying to figure out what to do with my newfound cult.

This was, uh, actually kinda hard. Advancing the main goal of the game seemed to require that I Walk Through The Stag Door (?) and also required a powerful Lore that I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to get my hands on.

Most of my other goals were stymied by similarly cryptic requirements. On top of that, my periodic cravings to do something with my time would produce RESTLESSNESS, which, if it sat around long enough, would decay into DREAD, feeding DESPAIR, a card that, if it could consume 3 DREAD, would end the game.

I lucked into finding a cabaret which, if I poured funds into it, would produce CONTENTMENT, which could fight off DREAD, but I needed those funds to buy books to fuel my magical awakening.

I also kept running in to FASCINATION cards, which were piling into VISIONS. I thought “that sounds good, the VISIONS might help” - I’d later learn that the VISIONS were not here to help.

While all of this was happening, a WEARY DETECTIVE showed up - great - and started to hoover up all of the loose clues about crimes that I was leaving lying about on the board, building a TENTATIVE EVIDENCE, then upgrading it to a DAMNING EVIDENCE - seemingly another game-over waiting in the wings.

Eventually, I tried to go on an expedition to a mystic location I’d found - but that expedition tied up the “EXPLORE” verb, which I needed to use to cabaret away the DREAD, and I died from DESPAIR.

So, I’d made no further progress, except to discover that by stumbling around trying things, I’d managed to turn up several interesting ways to die.

So either I’d have to suffer through a lot of trial-and-error OR it was time to consult the wiki again.

It brings to mind an iOS game I played, Doodle God, that featured gameplay of “mostly trying to rub various concepts together to see if something interesting would happen”

Fire + Energy = Plasma

2025 Editor’s Note: or https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/ where you can do that but the combinations never run out.

This time, I went in with a plan - a slow and steady plan. This time I’d focus all of my attention on keeping my character in a steady state. No dread, no fascination, no police attention.

And… it went well! I discovered that RESTLESSNESS can be channelled with PASSION into horrifying paintings, rather than dread. If I saved up money for the cabaret, I could fight dread as soon as it cropped up rather than having to fight it piecemeal. FASCINATION could be dreamed away with any spare DREAD, or with memories that I could drum up now and again.

The only problem was the police, hoovering up clue cards that lots of the core game actions produce. I managed to kill the WEARY DETECTIVE after sending about six different hired goons after him (also: figured out how to hire goons) - and he was promptly replaced by a named investigator who was now hoovering up all of the extra clues that I’d been producing by trying to kill the original detective several times over! Hardly ideal, it seemed like I’d just multiplied my problem.

further wiki consultation

I guess I could try evidence tampering?

Yup, the solution to the police problem turned out not to be murder, but evidence tampering. None of my own cultists were leveled up far enough to be capable of that (nor were they terribly capable of murder, to be honest) and the upgrades that would get them there would take me (now that I’ve spent that time) another 4 hours of real play time to actually accrue. So I hired a swindler. (Hiring people is a random event, like so many things in this game are, so I just had to keep on wandering around the city on loop until one turned up).

The swindler tried to tamper with the evidence. Failed. Got hurt. I paid for their medical care and sent them back to tamper with the evidence again. Failed again. Got hurt again. More medical care. On their third try, they succeeded. All three of those times they generated clues but being as clues make evidence and the evidence was something that I could clear (with effort) I was golden! I’d just need to roll the dice to find a swindler every time I needed them.

Or… did I? Here’s the thing, cards only decay when they’re sitting on the table, not in use. If I didn’t want to lose the swindler, I could just keep them in active use forever. It’d slow down gameplay somewhat to lose that entire verb, but… well, swindling produced funds and silenced cops, so now I had an answer to all of the different “end game” conditions.

Which… allowed me to play the game properly, if carefully. For hours, with the actions required to stave off death becoming rote. Hours and hours. I used my funds to plunder local occult areas and buy all of the books in the spooky book store and _also buy out anything of interest from the auctions. I upgraded my stats all the way to their stattiest.

And that was legitimately pretty fun for a couple of hours. I built an engine and solved one of the core puzzles of the gameplay: simply not dying.

But then… I was still stuck. The wiki indicated that I needed to try some new things, so I figured out how to get past The Way of the Wood to the White Door, and eventually the Stag’s Door - which proved to be useful, unlocking further expeditions.

But… here’s where the game starts to get a bit sluggish. The loop at this point is:

In your dreams, find a door
Go through the door, find a memory fragment (random, might be something else that you don’t need as much)
Explore the memory fragment to find a location
Check out the location on the wiki to find out what you need to be successful at that location (failure is expensive and all you learn is “I guess it wasn’t THAT combination of people”)
Upgrade your cultists or hire goons to be able to beat the challenges at that location (this involves a LOT of luck, too)
Beat the location.
Get books.
Read the books.
In these books are Lores, which, if you get enough of them, might help you unlock the next door. Or not. Who knows.

You’re doing these while also running all of the various wheelings and dealings you need to stay alive - and so, with my careful, grinding gameplay, several hours, and some help from the wiki I got through, I’d estimate, about the first 40% of the game’s books n’ lores n’ shit.

But… past that point… the loop doesn’t get much more complicated. Or much different. It’s just a big ol’ randomness-powered skinner box of luck and patience. That’s about the part where it’s time for me to bail - I’ve seen most of the interesting stuff the game has to offer, and now all it has for me is grind. The wiki more-or-less confirms that this is the case: while the steps become more difficult, random, and grindy as I go, I’m mostly just many hours and not much terribly interesting content away from an uncomplicated victory.

So, like, a B. The game has a lot of interesting ideas - cool art design, fun writing - I doubt I’ll ever bother to finish it.

Phoenix LiveView makes a Very Old Mistake

Sat, 29 May 2021 12:00:00 -0700

I’m really enjoying learning about Elixir, and Phoenix. They constitute, in my opinion, an extremely thoughtfully designed language and framework. So far my biggest gripe about the language is that prominent library developers keep choosing names for their products and libraries that are not terribly Google-able. “Phoenix”? “Hex”? “Cowboy”?

Anyways, Phoenix got really popular in 2017, at which point it seemingly dropped off of the face of the planet.

I want to put that wholly at the feet of their pursuit of Phoenix LiveView, a stack so fundamentally cursed that it undoes almost every iota of goodwill earned from Phoenix or Elixir.

A Quick Overview

Let’s talk about the design of Phoenix LiveView a bit. The way that it works is as follows:

You GET a web-page
Phoenix uses an Elixir “live template” to determine what to send back to the user.
A middleware plugin adds a blob of opaque JavaScript to the page.
On load, the JavaScript starts up a websocket connection to Phoenix PubSub (an embedded engine within Phoenix that handles sockets really well)
Any “changeable” parts of the website are bound to JavaScript events that send messages up the socket to the backend server.
The Phoenix server mounts a controller that’s able to listen for these PubSub events from the page.
If changes occur, the Phoenix server selectively re-renders segments of the page’s live template.
These template changes are diffed against the previous page DOM using a merkle-tree inspired technique very similar to the one used in React
Updates to the page’s DOM are sent back to the JavaScript running on the page.
The JavaScript applies the updates to the page.

That’s the basic loop. I may have subtle details wrong, I’ve only given LiveView a brief once-over, not an in-depth look. And… honestly, it’s pretty cool, and undeniably technically impressive.

It’s now possible for Elixir developers to deliver entire web products without having to produce even a single iota of JavaScript.

You’d think it would be wasteful of server resources, sockets, or bandwidth, but the high-quality DOM diffing scheme combined with Elixir/Phoenix’s legendary performance render that essentially a moot point - the creators have demonstrated that their scheme actually sends less data over the wire than a comparable React + JSON app.

Cool, right?

But It Was Not Cool

And yet, somehow, this wonderful new technique has seemingly failed to win the hearts and minds of developers.

There’s one video, on Phoenix’s front page, explaining how to create a Todo app using this technique, at which point all writing on the topic of LiveView appears to dry up.

Why? What went wrong, here?

The Law of Leaky Abstractions

Ugh, it’s weirdly often that I invoke this ancient blog. (Follow-up question: who’s making insightful programming blogs nowadays? pls share)

Joel on Software - The Law of Leaky Abstractions

The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.

Elixir LiveView is one of the leakiest abstractions I’ve encountered in a long time. It has to struggle so hard to accomplish the magic that it’s trying to accomplish, that you end up having to learn every layer behind it in horrifying detail.

Its installation into the Phoenix framework involves no less than 12 steps. A lot of fresh moving parts need to be installed for this to begin working.

Anyways, I don’t want to enumerate every single gripe I have with this cursed stack - you’d all get bored and wander off. Instead, I want to invoke a comparison with another doomed technology.

ASP.NET Web Forms

Here’s what I thought the first time I encountered Elixir LiveView:

You might not remember ASP.NET Web Forms:

With a little bit of cajoling, an ASP.NET server combined with a little bit of clever JavaScript on the client-side could allow you to build whole website experiences using C# components and Windows-like abstractions!

It was, for a time, a wildly successful model. It inspired JavaServer Faces, a similarly-cursed technology intended to insulate Java developers from ever having to get their hands dirty with web technologies. While Web Forms is largely dead, JSF is still going strong - not because it’s more relevant, but because Java developers have never been blessed with the ability to notice when a technology has become hopelessly dated.

The core bit of plumbing that made Web Forms work was the HTML <form> element, stretched way beyond its intended purpose. In a Web Forms page, every web control lived inside the <form> element, and all dynamic content was rendered there. In practice, that meant that every ASP.NET web page was consumed by one gigantic hidden form (hence the name, Web Forms ).

The problem with Web Forms were that most of the tricks it had to pull in order to make the programming model work were inefficient, not to mention completely inscrutable if you happened to need to debug it from the outside.

The eventing system that Web Forms stapled onto web pages — called the postback system — was another expensive illusion. To make pages react to user actions and trigger server-side code, ASP.NET relied on a snippet of JavaScript that intercepted browser events and sent the page back to the web server. There, on the web server, a series of events unfolded.

At first glance, the sequence of events in the page lifecycle seems logical enough. But even seasoned ASP.NET developers could get confused about the order of actions a page needed to perform — reading the markup, rehydrating web controls from view state, running initialization code, performing data binding, capturing new values that were posted in the form, loading up user controls, and so on. If a web control needed to do something during one of these stages, what could it assume about the other controls on the page? Problems were difficult to pin down, and automated tests were off the table. Once again the Web Forms abstraction had a stiff cost, but now it wasn’t performance, but complexity.

Even though LiveView has solved a lot of the performance problems, they haven’t even made a dent in the problem that the abstraction that they’ve chosen to present is wildly, monstrously complicated.

Which is why the bulk of the conversation around Elixir LiveView appears to be the world’s most needlessly convoluted TODO app.

Anyways

One of the big questions when faced with a technology this ambitious is what problem does it solve?

LiveView enables you to build Phoenix apps with interactive, real-time user experiences without writing JavaScript.

I’d argue that an awful lot of the ultimately-doomed web technologies of the past two decades - Web Forms, JSF, Flash, sproutcore, coffeescript, asm.js - they all start from the same broken ideology. “We built a tool that lets you avoid having to deal with the problems of JavaScript.”

It’s been a quarter-century. Maybe it’s time to accept that JavaScript is not a problem that needs to be solved.

Anyways, “you don’t have to deal with JavaScript” isn’t actually much of a selling point, as far as I can tell. JavaScript is not terribly difficult to learn or use - certainly not more difficult than C# or Elixir. Ultimately these complicated compatibility layers serve the preferences of a handful of developers rather than providing any concrete customer value.

And when JavaScript surges forward - new features and functionality are being added every year at this point - the compatibility layers struggle to keep up.

All around, JavaScript was exploding with new ideas and techniques. Meanwhile, ASP.NET developers were stuck looking at the new web development landscape through a tiny porthole.

I’m still pretty excited about learning more about Phoenix development, though. I’m firmly convinced that I have a lot to learn from the Erlang ecosystem. I just might pass on LiveView.

This is How You Lose the Time War

Mon, 10 May 2021 12:00:00 -0700

As agents Red and Blue travel back and forth through time, altering the history of multiple universes on behalf of their warring empires, they leave each other secret messages—at first taunting, but gradually developing into flirtation and then love.

I liked this book a lot. Usually when I finish a book in one sitting it’s because I like it a lot (and also because it is short).

I’m finding myself intentionally having to tone my own prose down a few notches because when I read stuff like this I get flowery for a little while. Hold up, there, William J. Shakespeare, you’re writing a quick book review for a private forum.

Winner of both a Hugo and a Nebula, this book’s divisive - five stars or one star, few in between. Love poetry writ large across a sprawling, barely-explained sci-fi universe. Everything in this book needs to be pieced together by scraps - as the twin protagonists of the book tease each other with densely layered references and florid writing.

The book expects a lot from its reader - first of all, a lot of science-fiction tropes need to be sitting in RAM for this thing to parse at all, as evidenced by a lot of one-star reviews from confused lesbians looking for a satisfying sapphic romance and finding, instead, a universe that already expects you to be fully familiar with all of the time travel, alien and post-human sci-fi tropes it is throwing. It’s also a book that expects you to be willing to sympathize with two psychopathic interdimensional assassins. 150 pages is hardly time to explain the mechanics of time travel, let alone not one but two different super-advanced sci-fi-races, so the book simply skips most of that. Mechanics be damned. This is not hard sci-fi. For those willing and able to put up with the science fiction tropes, they may not be expecting a romance novel.

This is a book of imaginative steganography. The agents hide messages for one another in wild science fiction ways. It’s structured as call-and-response, a tale of finding a letter, then a letter, then a tale of finding a letter, then a letter again, each set in a new dimension, each delivering a shred of extra information.

And as for the plot, well…

It’s just this Kate Beaton comic about nemeses falling in love through mutual obsession.

Running an RPG on Miro

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 12:00:00 -0700

Some time ago at work I wanted to do an architecture discussion, and in my opinion the best way to do this kind of discussion is around a whiteboard.

We’ve been a fully virtual office for a really long time, so I set upon the task of finding the best whiteboard software I could. I was looking for something that would work well with my pen - you’d be surprised how many whiteboard softwares can’t nail the super basic interaction of “I would like to draw on it with a pen”. Even Miro only does so well at that.

We tried a bunch of different alternatives and Miro came out as the winner - even with its slightly unimpressive pen features, it was able to power the most satisfying architecture discussion thanks to its completely excellent ability to slam down post-it notes and link them together with lines and arrows in a fully networked setting. It’s like someone came down from on high and made Perfect Visio.

We liked it so much that we ended up recommending it to the rest of the company. Our design team loved it (sidenote: 2025 update: they’ve long since abandoned it for Figma) . It’s now a really vital part of our remote stack. I’ve been trying to make the argument that it could even grow to replace Basecamp for us, because their stickies are quietly becoming full-fledged little tasks.

Anyways, out of all of the things Miro is quietly better than without much effort, one of the most surprising of those things? Roll20. I’ve tried to run campaigns out of Roll20, and I found a lot of it kind of… clunky and frustrating. I don’t want to go into too much depth about my Roll20 grievances, but there’s a lot of clunky macro-programming features having to do with automating character sheets and rolls and hit-point counters, and this might be my deep biases speaking, but I actually prefer if my players had to manage that stuff in their heads, and also if I didn’t have to learn (or worse, teach) a little macro-programming language just to get a game rolling.

Anyways - Roll20 is pretty good, but all I ever wanted was a shared whiteboard! When I’m trying to duplicate the experience of a pencil and paper RPG, what I want is not the feeling of IMMERSION IN A REAL FANTASY UNIVERSE - I could get that from World of Warcraft. I want IMMERSION IN REAL PENCIL AND PAPER, and the tool that I get that from is more… Miro.

What Does That Look Like?

Well, being as it’s just a giant whiteboard simulator, it would look very different from DM to DM, but here’s what mine looks like:

The character sheets are just built out using in-place grids and boxes and whatnot.

To play with the office theme, the game itself has a office-themed framing device. We’re calling it “The Lion, The Witch, and the Server Room” and the players are office workers who’ve been pulled into a fantasy realm.

With the game sliced into an “office half” and a “fantasy half”, it gives me some real interesting angles on puzzle design, which is how we got to this monstrosity/calendar planning mini-game:

Which is just a full-on re-theming of an excellent Reiner Knizia game called My City.

Oh, and the silly mini-games don’t stop, as in our first session we also had a protracted segment where our players got to collage together motivational posters:

and just straight up get dressed:

That’s where we’re at for now: soon we’ll be wandering into the universe at large:

It has been a long time since I’ve properly run a D&D-style game, and it’ll be the first time digitally. I hope it goes well.

Either that or I’m going to have my players solve more weird puzzles and play more unusual mini-games. It’s definitely going to be one of those things.

There is no Game: Wrong Dimension

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

Classic adventure games are wonderful, but they were released in a time where puzzle solutions could be painfully intricate in a way that doesn’t always make for a fun game nowadays. We’ve all read the Old Man Murray Article explaining that adventure games died at the brutal hand of… adventure games.

(2025 edit: I’m including the entire article in its entirety, here, because, honestly, the fact that it’s still on the internet 25 years later is already a miracle, I feel like I’m really pushing my luck with that hot-link.)

A few weeks ago, Gamecenter ran an article in which they declared that adventure gaming was “dead and buried”. The Gamecenter employees who write the titles for articles apparently don’t coordinate their efforts with the people who write the subtitles for articles because even before the banner graphic was completely over, someone in the subtitle department had upgraded the condition of adventure games to merely “vanishing”. Still, no matter which part of the logo you choose to look at, adventure games are in trouble.

Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again, this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four, in which it is clearly stated that:

Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories.

As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter “death of adventure” timeline goes something like this:

The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb Raider.

Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird’s nest.

Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and masturbating.

Gamecenter mentions Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight 3 as the last title of note in the genre. I’d like to use Gabriel Knight 3 to illustrate my alternate theory of who killed adventure gaming.

Here is the solution to Gabriel Knight 3’s first major puzzle, in which you must rent a motorcycle. I’ve pulled it almost entirely from Gamespot, and have commented on it only when I could no longer help myself.

Since this next part where I quote directly from the Gamespot Gameguide is pretty dry, feel free to imagine that it’s being spoken by OMM’s new Adventure Gaming Mascot, Francis the Talking France:

Gabriel must disguise himself to fool the moped clerk.

You must combine several items to construct an adequate disguise and gain access to the motorbike. First, return to the museum and swipe the red cap from the lost-and-found box. You couldn’t do this in the previous time blocks, but Gabriel knows he needs it now and has little trouble stealing the hat from the box. With the red hat in hand, head to the church.

Look at the Abbe’s house and notice him watering his plants with a spray bottle. Wait for the Abbe to move back into his house and grab the spray bottle… When you emerge on the new street, you’ll spot a black cat in the corner. Move Gabriel up to the cat and use the verb menu to examine and pet the cat.

The cat dashes into a small opening into an old shed. Examine the hole that the cat entered. Open up your inventory and pick up the piece of masking tape (if you failed to get the tape from Gabriel’s hotel room, return there and open the dresser to get the masking tape). Use the masking tape on the shed door hole.

Walk back from the shed and notice the cat is now on a ledge. You can attempt to pet or grab the cat, but Gabriel can’t because the feline is just too high. Here’s where the spray bottle comes in. Select your inventory and pick up the spray bottle. Use the spray bottle on the cat, and he’ll leap down and run, again, through the small opening into the shed. When he runs through the hole, he left some hair on the piece of masking tape you placed on the hole. Pick up the masking tape, and you’ll gain black fur in your inventory.

Return to the hotel now and collect any items you missed the first time around that are vital to the disguise. These include the black marker from the hotel desk (just make sure Jean is wandering around), a piece of candy from the table near the lounge, and a packet of syrup from the dining room. Head upstairs and knock on Mosely’s door (room 33). He’ll let you inside. If you want a hint about what to do with the candy, you can offer Mosely the candy, which he’ll gladly take and consume quickly. Also, talk with Mosely about his passport, the key to solving the disguise puzzle. If you give Mosely the piece of candy, you must return downstairs and grab another one.

Locate the painting over the table depicting the street scene. Use the piece of candy from your inventory and place it on the table. Head down either staircase into the lobby. Look to the left of Jean’s front desk and spot the room buzzers. Examine the buzzers and press the one for room 33, Mosely’s room. This will buzz Mosely down to the front desk, but he’ll become sidetracked by that yummy piece of candy you left for him.

Ascend the stairs on the right side, so you’re on the opposite side of Gabriel’s room entrance. Follow the camera around to Mosely’s room and watch him exit and walk to the table with the piece of candy. Mosely will bend over and grab the candy, gobbling it up like before. Walk Gabriel over just behind Mosely and use the mouse cursor on Mosely or his passport to pickpocket him and swipe the passport.

As soon as you’ve got the passport, quickly head to Mosely’s room 33 and enter it. Nab his gold coat on the coat rack by using the verb menu while the mouse is over the coat. Place the coat in your inventory and exit Mosely’s room.

This sequence could take a few tries to get everything right, but you can repeat the process as many times as necessary to secure the necessary items: the passport and gold coat. Just use more candy and keep pressing that buzzer.

Open your inventory now; make sure you have the black marker and syrup. Grab the black marker and use it on Mosely’s passport to make a mustache. Next, grab the black fur from the cat and use it on the syrup to make a black mustache. Finally, use the red hat on the mustache and then on the gold coat to complete your Mosely disguise.

With your disguise ready, return to the moped rental shop.

Did you read all of that? If not, good for you! Dumb as your television enjoying ass probably is, you’re smarter than the genius adventure gamers who, in a truly inappropriate display of autism-level concentration, willingly played the birdbrained events described in that passage. For those of you clever enough to have skipped the walkthru, permit me to summarize:

Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Mosley in order to fool a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop’s only motorcycle.

In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake moustache. Utilizing the style of logic adventure game creators share with morons, Knight must do this even though Moseley does not have a moustache.

So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you’re a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.

Still, you might think that you could yank some hair from one of the many places it grows out of your own body and attach it to your lip with the masking tape in your inventory. But obviously, Ms. Jensen felt that an insane puzzle deserved a genuinely deranged solution. In order to manufacture the moustache, you must attach the masking tape to a hole at the base of a toolshed then chase a cat through the hole. In the real world, such as the one that stupid people like me and Adrian Carmack use to store our televisions, this would result in a piece of masking tape with a few cat hairs stuck to it, or a cat running around with tape on its back. Apparently, in Jane Jensen’s exciting, imaginative world of books, masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair.

Remember how shocked you were at the end of the Sixth Sense when it turned out Bruce Willis was a robot? Well, check this out: At the end of this puzzle, you have to affix the improbable cat hair moustache to your lip with maple syrup! Someone ought to give Jane Jensen a motion picture deal and also someone should CAT scan her brain.

Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.

There Is No Game is a classic adventure game. You’re in for 5 hours of grabbing objects and trying them out on every part of the scenery. The puzzles are painfully intricate.

Oh, but the twist!

This is a puzzle game where, by and large, the puzzles are… fourth-wall-breaking video game UI puzzles. If there is a UI element on screen at any point, you’d better believe you’re going to need to pry it out of the UI with a crowbar and use it as a piece in the puzzle.

Oh, and the UI doesn’t want you to use it. The whole game bristles with soft malice, which is a fabulous joke.

there is even an achievement you can get for opening the game and immediately falling for this

This game seriously doesn’t want you to play it.

Adventure Gamers: Review for There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

The Game’s determination to keep you out only increases from there as it continually tries—politely at first, but rising in fervor as you refuse to take the hint—to barricade all traces of interactivity behind increasingly impenetrable obstacles; the more persistent you are in sticking around, the harder the Game strives to drive you away.

The puzzle design in this game is brilliant. You’ll be combing through the UI, the title screen, the credits, the pause screen, even the background music in your quest to conquer this intransigent game. it helps that the ever-present narrator in this game is (accidentally) dropping hints as you go, with more hints forthcoming when you’ve spent a little bit too long staring at a puzzle. The hint system in this game is generous - so generous that it’s almost a touch frustrating at times - it’s like game, I could have figured this out on my own, thanks - but the hints are just as clever as the puzzles, just little accidental turns of phrase in the narration intended to guide your thinking.

As an example of the hint system at play: there is a puzzle whose solution involves tickling something. And so, prior up to that scene, the game works the word “tickle” into conversation a couple of times, organically, like, so that the concept of “tickling” is psychologically primed when you finally get to the puzzle. Sometimes the part of the UI that you’re supposed to click on will gleam slightly or wave in the breeze. This game is operating on levels. I only had to click the “help” button a few times in my 5-hour playthrough. (In both cases, I had thought something was maybe broken, but had instead just misunderstood a mechanic).

There is No Game has got its game history and fourth-wall-breaking jokes on lock. It contains a joke referencing the same Old Man Murray article that I just did, and goes on at some length lamenting it’s own failed Kickstarter campaign. My only criticism here is that it decides to dunk on the easy target of terrible free-to-play games a little too hard. I want to post screenshot after screenshot, but the game is so surprising and joyous that I’m afraid I’d ruin things.

The game is a game that is also a meta-game about games, and developing games, and fucking with games, and making loads of stupid jokes about games for that reason it feels like it was specifically intended for me.

I loved it. What a great game.

Arrays With More than 18 Elements In Them are Dumb

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0700

A decade ago, when I was working on, you know, procedural generation stuff, fresh out of University, I definitely felt like I’d need to spend some time putting together some serious tools for generating selections from a variety of probability distributions.

At the time, I was building a “Mohammed Chang” generator - a random name generator that used census data to try to generate mathematically probable names. If I’m pulling names out of a hat, and I want to pick “Smith” more often than I pick “Schwarzchild’ - well, that’s a job for a weighted probability distribution.

I toiled for hours, days, creating complex and powerful tools in Python that I could use to simulate selection out of a group. Selection with replacement, selection without replacement, normal distributions, weighted distributions, the whole nine yards.

Ultimately the name generator performed admirably, although the results turned out to be pretty boring. JOHN DOUGLAS. KAREN BROWN. JOHN BROWN. All of the mathematical intuition in the world didn’t actually result in something fun or interesting - and, worse, I’d spent a lot of time carefully hand-hewing this wildly complicated, object-oriented code.

Now. It’s years later and I have become profoundly lazy.

Which means that when I need something that seems complicated, like a weighted probability distribution, I have a lot of stupid shortcuts that I can use to mock something up pretty quickly.

Let’s Start With a Handful of Utility Functions

function choice(list){
 // pick a thing at random out of the list
 return list[Math.floor(Math.random() * list.length)];
}

function rollDie(){
 // return a number between 1 and 6
 return Math.ceil(Math.random() * 6);
}

Okay, let’s start with these two utility functions. choice, which picks a random object out of an arbitrary list, and rollDie, which rolls a number between 1 and 6.

“But Cube! That 6 is a magic number! Why not write a randInt function that takes a “min” and a “max” variable so you can generate any number of different…

No! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia! But only slightly less well known is this:

Hardcode some shit.

I know, as good developers we’ve spent ages learning not to put Magic Numbers in to our code — but we’ve learned too well and now we’re over-generalizing.

In this now-20-year-old blog post (wow, apparently blog posts can be 20), Joel describes the problem:

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. Those are both sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more.

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.

(ed: this article goes on to trash the first .NET SDK, which doesn’t age terribly well)

You aren’t gonna need it, anyways.

Or, to put it a different way - randInt(min, max) is fine, but rollDie() has a metaphor, some immediacy, you can look at it and know immediately and intuitively what it is and how it works. It generates a number between one and six!

Well, I guess, JS supports unicode, there’s one other obvious way that it could work.

function rollDie(){
 // ha ha!
 return choice(["⚀", "⚁", "⚂", "⚃", "⚄", "⚅"]);
}

I don’t know why that’s so satisfying, but it is.

Anyways, that brings us to our first thing we can do.

Random Selection With Replacement

function getFruit(){
 return choice([“apple”, “orange”, “mango”]);
}

Random Selection Without Replacement

function take(list){
 // take a thing at random from the list
 let i = Math.floor(Math.random() * list.length);
 return list.splice(i, 1)[0];
}

That’s essentially the same as “choice” but it removes the item as it takes it out. Good for … deck stuff.

Weighted Random Selection

Oh, this is going to be really complicated! What if we wanted “apple” to be 3 times more likely to pull than “mango”, and for “orange” to be twice as likely! Clearly we are going to need an extremely intelligent weighted distribu.. wait.

function getFruit(){
 return choice([“apple”, "apple", "apple", "orange", “orange”, “mango”]);
}

Yeah, I mean, I guess you could do that. I mean, it seems easy when you put it that way. But what if you want “apple” to be 100 times more common than “mango”, and “orange” to be 20 times more common? You gonna type out “apple” 100 times?

function getFruit(){
 let apples = new Array(100).fill("apple");
 let oranges = new Array(20).fill("orange");
 let mangoes = ["mango"];
 let fruit = apples.concat(oranges).concat(mangoes);
 return choice(fruit);
}

“Isn’t that inefficient?”

Sure, but who cares? Memory is cheap! It’s weighted random selection in a few easy-to-understand lines of code. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’ll go crazy trying to make everything perfect - just embrace chaos and get some quick, stupid code down that does the trick.

A Normal Distribution

function getNormalFruit(){
 let fruit = ["apple", "orange", "mango", "cherry", "tomato", "avocado"];
}

mmm, normal fruit

Let’s imagine we have these fruit and we wanna pick, like, “mango” and “cherry” most of the time, and “apple” and “avocado” almost never.

You know, give ‘em one of THESE.

Approximating A Normal Distribution With Three Dice

I bet choosing from a set using a normal distribution is going to involve math and thinking, and I hate those things.

Wait, would you look at that. That looks pretty normally distributed. If we happen to have a set containing exactly 18 items, we’re set - we can just roll three dice and pick that index out of the set.

Now, our set of fruit has less than 18 items, but it’s easy enough to make three dice fit. We have 6 fruit, so we just… divide by 3. And round to an integer, because accidentally fetching fruit[2.99999999] isn’t going to do us any good.

function getNormalFruit(){
 let fruit = ["apple", "orange", "mango", "cherry", "tomato", "avocado"];
 let i = Math.round((rollDie() + rollDie() + rollDie() / 3);
 return fruit[i-1];
}

So, that solves the problem for any list that has less than 18 items in it. Which, let’s be honest - is most lists. If you’ve got more than 18 items in your list, maybe it is time to reconsider your life decisions and go make a smaller list.

function normalChoice(list)
{
 if(list.length <= 18){
 let divideBy = 18 / list.length;
 let i = Math.round(
 (rollDie() + rollDie() + rollDie()) / divideBy
 );
 return list[i-1];
 }
 if(list.length > 18){
 throw new Error("I refuse to acknowledge the existence of any number higher than 18");
 }
}

”Wait, rollDie() + rollDie() + rollDie()? Couldn’t you just use “rollDie() * 3”?

No! Obviously that would just roll the same die three times. We need three separate dice to roll in order to make this work. If we wanted to roll 100 die, we’d need to roll them all doing some sort of stupid hack like this:

let oneHundredDieRolls = new Array(100).fill(0).map(rollDie);

Which, if we summed them all, would be exactly the sort of tool we’d need to take our three-die solution and generalize it to handle arrays with up to 600 elements in them (a number that is noticeably higher than 18) - however, past a certain number of die, it’s probably time to stop fiddling with easy, cheap, stupid approximations and time to start doing some real math.

None of which we are going to do, because, as we established, arrays with more than 18 elements in them are dumb. (I assume that is what this graphic was meant to communicate.)

Or, at least - before investing a lot of time in a complicated solution (if you’ve got less than 600 elements that you want to draw from, and this code isn’t performance sensitive, which it almost certainly is not), consider whipping something stupid together in a few lines of code with some dice that mostly does the trick.

In Conclusion

Programming gets dramatically easier if you don’t take it terribly seriously, which you shouldn’t, if you ever want to get any sort of product out the door, which you should.

A Terrible Concert from a Confused, Glitchy AI

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:00:00 -0700

This is an early build of a game engine was working on in 2020, designed to produce a procgen roguelike world.

If you watch how badly the chess games go you can see that the distributed gameplay logic engine didn’t work so good. Distributed consistency is really hard you guys.

Honestly the procgen music engine wasn’t… terrible. As procgen music engines go it’s… on the verge of listenable. If this were playing while I were wandering around in a forest for a long period of time I wouldn’t be TOO MAD.

The goal was to create music that just ran forever in the background and never really drew attention to itself, which is kind of where it’s at.

I put a lot of effort into this “taking model-generated MIDI, using heuristic rules to sort it and apply structure to it, then running it through a javascript in-browser synth” project, but not a year later models like Suno could generate full pop songs so this was basically obsolete before it ever launched.

Honestly, watching it go and listening to it is kinda charming.

Here’s another, later concert from a slightly later build:

There’s a little special song at 13:50 that is one of the worst things the engine has ever composed.

Whenever I played this for anybody who was at all interested in music they were actively mad at me for doing this to music.

first tattoo

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0700

first bread

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0700

Hah, I made a bread! BREAD HOOOOOO

northwestica

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 11:00:00 -0700

editor’s note: these are images from a project I was working on in 2018, called northwestica, linked here

Scrum

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 12:00:00 -0700

Bureaucracy is the worst. Learn about some of it.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

title = "Shortcodes"
date = 2025-06-06T11:00:00-07:00
draft = false

WORD CONTENT

Markdown (sidenote: A simple markup language for easy formatting.) is widely used for its simplicity.

Content Graph

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000