Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

The dreamwidth experiment has concluded. I wrote some thoughts about why it didn't work out on my blog, which is where I'll be writing for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading

In lieu of a journal update today, I put some work into my Game Badges page. I've got the layout looking good on desktop and mobile, I put up an info page, and I've created the first 6 game pages. There's still some details I need to fill in, but the important stuff is there.

I know it's silly, but I've been wanting a longer-term project I can work on from the office, and this is scratching that itch. I'll post some short diary updates if anything happens, but for now I'm happy with most of my writing energy going to this. Thanks for understanding 🙏

In somewhat higher spirits after a much-needed break. Last week was also the monthly housing inspection, which is always a nerve-wracking experience. That on top of the yearly recertification and all the stuff I had to do during the week made me look forward to a weekend of rest.

My spouse and I briefly considered early voting and going to a local Halloween event on Saturday, but between her illness and my exhaustion, we stayed indoors all weekend. I managed to make about 15 levels for Slime & Goo 2, which is a pretty good clip. I won't finish by Halloween, though. I had thought about making it vaguely halloween-themed, since it's about collecting mushrooms in a spooky forest at night, but there's no way I'll be done in time for an Oct. 31 release. If only I had thought about it sooner. Ah well.

I have, however, come up with some interesting new mechanics and written a couple paragraphs of story and dialogue, which is more than any of my other published games. I hesitant to mix my interests too much, because it's easy to overdo text in a game. I don't want to fall into the trap that a lot of independent games do where large amounts of text are used in lieu of interesting interactions or dynamic storytelling. I think I'm striking the right balance so far, and I have more ideas for levels that feature interesting mechanical storytelling even in puzzlescript's very limited toolset.

One positive limitation of the platform is that you can only fit a couple hundred characters on screen per message. It's helpful in preventing me from overdoing it. I've decided 3 of those messages in a row is the maximum I'm willing to accept per story moment before it gets back to puzzle-solving. If I keep it to one of those sequences every few levels, hopefully that'll be a satisfying pace.

Game Badges

I haven't been nearly as active on RetroAchievments.org lately, other than continuing to plug away at Mario's Picross on my phone. I had a brief intense phase of 100%ing games, but I think I'm running out of games where I care to do that. It comes from having a different philosophy than most of the people designing achievements: I think 100%ing a game should involve doing everything in the game. For some games, that means there aren't going to be a lot of achievements, and that should be fine. Coming up with a bunch of arbitrary achievements just to pad out the number is counter to the spirit of the game.

For an example everyone can understand, take Super Mario Brothers. It's a pretty linear game, but there are things the designers included to add some spice and mystery. Here's my idea of a perfect achievement set for SMB:

• Finish the game
• Find a warp zone
• Finish the game without warping
• Find a pipe to a secret coin room
• Find a secret 1-up in an invisible block
• Get 6 fireworks at the end of a level
• Get 5000 points from a goal pole
• Defeat King Koopa with fireballs
• Defeat King Koopa by getting the axe
• Finish the second quest

That's pretty much everything the designers put in the game. Sure, there are multiple secret pipes and hidden 1-ups, but there's no way the designers expected the players to find all of them. You'd have to finish the game at least twice to 100% this set, and it's not an easy game! It's only 10 achievements, but this would be a fun, challenging, complete experience.

The rA set had more than 10 achievements, though. It has 77. It includes tasks like this:

• Finish the game without losing a life
• Complete world X without harming enemies or being fire Mario (x8)
• Using shells, defeat every kind of enemy that can be hurt by a shell
• Hit a buzzy beetle from below while it's in the air (???)

It's just a bunch of nonsense. There's also achievements for defeating every King Koopa with fireballs, for finding all the coins on every level without dying, shit nobody actually finds fun. It's the quintessential retro video game, it has nearly 50,000 players on rA, and less than 2% of them have 100%ed it. That's a bad achievement set.

What's more, if you want a gold badge, you have to get every achievement without using save states, so there are several achievements where if you fuck up once, you have to restart the entire game.

The save state thing is turning into a big problem, because the rules don't differentiate between saving your state to cheese difficult segments, and saving your state to come back to the game later. So in games without battery backup, which is most of them, I have to leave the emulator running all the time to keep my progress, which is preventing me from playing other games. Also, I'm finding myself only playing games on my PC or (God help me) my phone. I have a hacked 3DS and I'm not using it, because I can't get retro achievements on it. I feel like I may be missing the forest for the trees.

I recently stumbled on gamedad.club, a charming little shrine to the device the author has neologized as the Game Dad: cheap generic emulation handhelds. From Game Dad as Time Condenser:

The Game Dad creates Game Time.

It takes the games that you used to have to commit an hour to, and it overlays them with instant save states, meaning at any time you can pull a console out of your pocket, play for a minute or two or three, then instantly save and put it right back in the pocket again.

The Game Dad collects the wispy mists of useless time that would have otherwise been lost to doomscrolling, and it condenses them into Game Time. It gives you time to play the games that you meant to play twenty years ago but didn't have the time for. This time is chewy and satisfying. It scratches your restless brain and fills up your empty stimulation tank.

When the tank's full, when you've had enough Game Time, you turn the Game Dad off and your hands are still, your mind is quiet, and you don't feel the tug of your anxiety rectangle. The time that comes after Game Time is quiet time. You don't want to switch to a different app, your device is back in your pocket. Instead, you might chat with someone else whose car is also up on the lift at the mechanic, or just watch the clouds and have an idea.

I thought this is a lovely sentiment, I agree 100% and I realized how silly it is that I've been emulating games on my phone, when I've got a device with a perfectly good D-pad. Well, the new 3DSXL¹ actually has a slightly-too-small D-pad and it hurts my thumb if I play intense action games for too long, but whatever, it's still leaps and bounds above playing anything on my fucking phone.

Anyway, I started thinking about what I like about retro achievements, and how I can incorporate them into my life in a healthier way. I realized there are two main draws:

• I like seeing a neat grid of gold badges

• I like when a set is thoughtfully designed, and makes me appreciate the game more.

That second bullet point is far and away the exception rather than the rule, but for example, Super Mario Bros. 3 is my favorite game, and the achievement set actually made me appreciate it more. On first glance, a lot of the achievements appear daunting, along the same lines as SMB1; however, it all clicked for me when I remembered that after finishing the game, you can start over with an inventory full of P-wings.

I never played the game like this as a kid, because it takes long enough to finish, the game doesn't have saves or passwords, and I was never allowed to leave the NES on for that long. Also, I never had a reason to play the game a second time after finishing it. Being able to fly through most of the game was novel, but it wasn't really that interesting.

Except the achievements give you plenty of reasons to go back through the game with P-wings. It turns it into a proper second quest. 100%ing Mario 3 was the most fun I've had with retro achievements, my other experiences on the site have been trying to chase that feeling, but very few of the sets are that thoughtfully designed.

Well, I don't actually need an emulator to programmatically prove that I did all the things. I can just do it on my own, for fun. And I can ignore the not-fun parts.

What about the satisfying grid of gold badges? Heck, I can do that myself. And so I created: Game Badges.

It's very much just in the prototype phase, and it doesn't have a mobile-friendly layout yet, but this is what I want to start doing instead of retro achievements. Every badge will be a link to a page with information about the game, what self-imposed challenges I've completed, a link to a video of me playing the game (if one exists) and maybe a mini-review. There will also be a section for non-gold badges, for games I haven't yet completed to my own satisfaction. So it'll kind of serve as my personal backloggery, too.

This will be a slow long-term project, but it'll open me up to playing more games in more situations than I was allowing myself. My 3DS is in my backpack and it's loaded up with all the games I've been playing recently.

Uh, but I can't really play anything at work. I can get away with using my phone, but sitting at my desk with a Game Dad will definitely draw unwelcome attention. But that's okay. I can use this time for reading and writing.

---

1. The 3DS isn't definitionally a Game Dad, but a hacked one can serve the same function. Maybe it's a Game Uncle?

Had a doctor appointment yesterday. It's not related to my recent mouth issues, it's just time for my checkup. I hate going to the doctor when I'm not sick. What always happens is, the doctor shows me a bunch of numbers that say oh, I actually am sick, very sick indeed. And then he tells me to do a bunch of stuff that makes me feel worse.

Now, I'm not some kind of medical science denier. I know that these numbers do in fact have some relationship to my health. What I don't know is how to make myself take the steps necessary to change them when my lived experience tells me that I feel worse when I do it.

Imagine there's a hot stove in my home. I touch it, I get burned, I learn not to touch it. But a man in a white coat is telling me that I need to touch a special medical stove 3 times a day. It'll feel just like it does when I touch the other stove, but this one actually imparts a special healing burn that will make my chance of contracting Frozen Bone Syndrome drop by 50%. Which sounds like a lot, but actually that just means it drops from 3% to 1.5%. How do I square this with my lived experience? My brain is screaming at me to stop touching the stove. From my body's perspective I'm torturing myself every day for no reason. Even if the doctor is right—and doctors are wrong all the time—is it really worth the drop in quality of life? I don't think it is. If you take this mindset to its logical conclusion, you turn into that creepy rich guy who's ruining his life trying to optimize his "health markers" in pursuit of eternal life (Lily Alexandre recently published an excellent video essay about him).

But of course if I take it to the opposite logical conclusion, I never go to the doctor at all and risk missing some actually important medical information. Health feels like a no-win situation and I don't know how to feel better about it. Just going to the doctor causes me stress, which in my experience is one of the leading causes of my despair. The thing that would actually be best for my physical and mental well-being is a permanent sabbatical from work, and I can't have that. My medical insurance won't pay for me to have shelter, and healthy food, and the time it takes to acquire and prepare it, and adequate rest time. But it'll pay for the drugs that numb me to the fact that I don't have these things. It'll pay for the drugs that make bad health numbers go down so I can be a part of the machine that makes economy numbers go up. Take a drink every time it's capitalism (and you'll be too shit-faced to care.¹)

At least my blood pressure was good. It was 126/86, which isn't perfect, but it's in a healthy range, and considering I've been in pain and have anxiety at the doctor, I think that's pretty damn good. As we all know, blood pressure is the metascore of health. Sure, all the critics are pointing out that I have too many bugs and don't run at an acceptable framerate, but as long as that metascore is above an 80 I still get my year-end bonus.

Oh actually that would be a great way to incentivize me to get my bad health numbers down: give me money for doing it. Then I won't have to believe it's real, I'll see a tangible benefit. I think my "pay people to be healthy" program could be the revolutionary public health initiative the world needs. Mr. Ghebreyesus,² give me a call 🤙

---

1: Rhetorical advice only, do not take

2: Tedros Ghebreyesus is the Director-General of the World Health Organization

---

Run For The Border

My spouse came with me to my appointment, because she needed some labs there anyway, but also just to help me remember stuff. Ironically, the closest place to the clinic we could eat is Taco Bell. The only other place in walking distance is a McDonald's. What a country! We picked Taco Bell, the lesser (?) of two evils.

In lieu of hours of operation, there was a sign on the door which says: "Open 'til 4 AM or later! Check online for local hours."

Huh??? Like, I realize Taco Bell is a franchise, different locations are going to have different policies, but like, I'm at this location! There are people physically here who can put a sign up! If corporate doesn't give you a fancy custom decal, write it on a sheet of A4 and tape it up. It's not pretty, but it's information. We shouldn't need to google opening hours for a business we're standing in front of. Anyway, I knew they'd be open cuz we went at like 18h00, but it's the principle of the thing.

They were playing country music on the radio, which sucks, but that's the expectation for the part of the country where I live. But they played one song I kinda liked. Most modern country is bad, but some pop-country is so poppy that it's barely recognizable as country, which probably isn't popular among the core fan base but to me, it's an improvement.

I shazam'd it and learned that the song is What You Want Me To Do by Phillip Andrew Buckle. This surprised me, because the vocalist doesn't sound like someone who would have that name. They sound more like a Phillipa or Philomena. I searched around a little more, and other sources give the name of the artist as Vitamin A. The album art doesn't give an artist name, just the title of the album, Hits and Pieces. It also has the word "vocals" on it, which leads me to believe this is a fictional group who only makes music to play in restaurants, and they provide both vocal and instrumental mixes depending on the ambiance you're looking for. Phillip Buckle might be the songwriter, or maybe it's another pseudonym. It's a little on the nose for country music, isn't it? Buckle? Like a big cowboy belt buckle? I dunno, maybe I'm just being paranoid.

What is true is that there's zero information about either Phillip Buckle or "Vitamin A", just a million places you can buy or download tracks. A little more digging and I found the source: Universal Production Music, a source for royalty-free music you can license for film, TV, and apparently, Taco Bell radio. The youtube audio library of real life. It's kinda sad that the only song I found tolerable was the most bland and crassly commercial music that can be made, but I suppose that's country music these days.

I don't want to be a hater, so I'll share a good country song, a Johnny Cash song I was unaware of until recently called One Piece At A Time. It's a "talking country" song about a guy who worked at a General Motors plant smuggling car parts out in his oversized lunchbox. Over 25 years, he brings home everything he needs to build himself a Cadillac. It's a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of stories about salami slicing and other outside-the-box ways to steal back a bit of agency and dignity from the systems that control us. Also, this song is apparently the origin of the term "psychobilly". Neat!

So How Was The Food

Mostly unmemorable and not worth the price. Taco Bell used to be the most dirt-cheap fast food, a bare minimum viable product for the least money you can spend. Now you can't even get a meal at Taco Bell for under 10 bucks. But you know what? For $1, they'll sell you a giant cheez-it. My spouse got one because she had to experience it. It is, in fact, a single cheez-it the size of an MRE cracker. They made it happen. I'm miffed that they gave the Nobel to one of the guys partly responsible for AI slop when we have giant cheez-its now. It's all politics.

Have A Good Weekend

Thanks for reading, everyone. If you enjoyed my Taco Bell radio report and want to help fund more investigative journalism like it, reminder that I've got a ko-fi and a Patreon. Help me do more things I can write about, and I'll write about more things! It's all part of the symbiotic relationship we call "spending".

Question Of The Week

What's one of your favorite or least favorite portmanteaus, and why? Speak up in the comments below or email bluelander@tutanota.com if you want to make your voice heard. I'll see you Monday

Doing slightly better today. I remembered that menthol cough drops are surprisingly effective for soothing a toothache. Orajel and other home remedies like clove oil never did much for me, whatever relief they offered was very temporary and not worth the disgusting taste and mouth feel. Cough drops I can hold between my teeth and let it slowly melt over the problematic tooth, so it actually lasts longer than a few seconds. Combined with painkillers I can actually get a few moments of normalcy throughout the day. Relative normalcy. The drops are sugar free so they taste like shit, but it's worth it for real relief.

The main downside is that it's easy to not drink enough water. The taste lingers in my mouth in a way that makes drinking water particularly unpleasant. And they promote salivation, so I don't necessarily realize how dry my mouth is/how thirsty I am. So I have to be a little more mindful of how much water I've had.

One way I encourage myself to drink more water is with this gif:

This is Peach, from the online cartoon/sticker set Peach and Goma by Bu Jue Xiao Xiao. These unassuming cartoon cats have surprisingly become a major fixture in my relationship. There are a bunch of these relatable couple cartoons that you can find in sticker sets of messaging apps and gif repositories. There are several that my spouse and I use, but Peach and Goma have become the MVCs.¹ They're cute, expressive, have been drawn engaging in hundreds of activities, and simple enough to draw for each other. They're rarely explicitly gendered; Peach is occasionally portrayed as femme and Goma as masc, but in general they're both fairly neutral, and we can share relatable gifs without worrying about gendering. Not that this is ever really a problem, but most couples-oriented media is heavily gendered and it's nice to have a break from it.

Anyway, seeing Peach drink water makes me want to drink water. Look how much she's enjoying it! I don't have a fancy square bottle, but if I look at the gif while I drink, I can imagine myself drinking upmarket luxury water. So chic!

Here's a gif for gently encouraging each other to drink water:

Now that I look closely, I think it's meant to be some sort of hygiene product? It looks like it has a spray nozzle. Well whatevs, close enough.

There's a gif for every occasion. My spouse and I don't see each other for most of the day, so I can let her know when I'm hard at work

Having an easy day at work

Having a rough time at work

...or finally done with work

and we feel a little closer. It brings a little lightness and joy to the rather bleak reality of life under capitalism. I don't know anything about Bu Jue Xiao Xiao, but they made something beautiful and I'm grateful to them.

The Great Canadian Hate-Read

I re-stumbled across a community devoted to comprehensively shitting on the comic "For Better or for Worse" and the woman who makes it. I remember seeing this sometime around 2008, when the author was going into semi-retirement and the comic reached its plot conclusion. At the time I had no opinion about it, I never paid attention to the comic because it was too realistic to be interesting, but the people who hated it seemed to have good reasons for it. It was interesting to me that people were so passionate about it, but that's about the only opinion I could muster. Now that the comic's been in reruns for 16 years, seeing the same people posting the same bile on a daily basis makes me profoundly sad. I can understand the pain of seeing beloved media go downhill, but the level of obsession in this community is frankly unsettling.

And as far as I can tell, there are some very valid criticisms one could make about the direction of the story and the quality of the writing in later years, but to this community, every aspect of every strip, no matter how light-hearted or innocuous, is evidence of some severe psychological defect on the part of the author. If there's nothing to criticize in the day's strip, the posters have encyclopedic knowledge of other strips this one is sort of similar to that they can criticize. They have their own language, they have a whole canon of shared Lynn Johnston lore, a black legend they pass back and forth for years, thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of words.

I was going to share some of the more unhinged quotes I found, but I don't really have a point other than "it makes me sad" and I don't really want to spread the misery around. It's currently in the top 10 livejournal communities if you're really curious.² The positive takeaway I have from all this is: I'm glad I never embarked down the path of the hater. I'm glad I haven't wasted over a decade of my life sharing vitriol over a comic strip. Or a TV show, or series of books, or anything I once enjoyed that went downhill. It could've been so easy for me to fall into a forum of Simpsons fans who think the series stopped being good around season 8 or 9, but continue to hate-watch, tear every new episode to shreds, speculate about the personal lives of the writers and voice actors, and generally be miserable shits. There but for the grace of god go I.

I think it's easier to bond over shared disgust than shared joy. It requires less vulnerability, less personal investment, and more dogmatic thinking. If you're in a group of people who don't like a thing, and you say "I disagree, here's what I like about it": that's a display of weakness. You're going to be lumped in with the mockery. You won't make any friends. But if you're in a group of fans and you say it's shit: that's cool! You're being an edgy contrarian, stating your mind and you don't care what other people think! Others will look up to you for your bravery. That's the perception, anyway. So if you haven't necessarily thought critically about why you think the things you do, it's very easy to fall back on haterism. And it's very easy once you're in a group of like-minded haters to let inertia carry you until you wake up one day and realize hating this thing has become a defining characteristic of your identity.

This isn't to say we shouldn't criticize. We need to critique power, systems, harmful societal trends like AI and cryptocurrency, yes; but even media criticism can be valuable, even when it's something frivolous without broader harmful implications. Dan Olson's review of Doug Walker's The Wall parody is one of the most brutal and interesting takedowns of a failed creative work I've ever seen. It has something to say about why we create, the different lenses through which we view art, the value of curiosity. It's mean, but only as mean as Doug Walker deserves. Dan doesn't call him names or speculate about his personal life.

And that's it. Olson probably won't make any more videos about Doug Walker, and I don't need any. There are probably others out there hate-watching every new Nostalgia Critic video, making videos tearing them apart, reposting and mocking everything he says on social media. And I don't doubt that Doug Walker continues to make an ass of himself, but I have nothing to gain by devoting any more thought to him. Whatever camaraderie can be found in communal schadenfreude feels bad to me. Ersatz friendship. Let us go back to never thinking about For Better Or For Worse again.

---

1. Most valuable critters. Boy, it was a long walk to get to this footnote, huh?

2. I don't really recommend going to livejournal at all; I only remembered it existed because they implemented some sort of an achievement system, and I got an email informing me of my new achievement: Writing my first post ever (in 2002)

I wrote a couple hundred words of an entry about my ADHD, burnout, the hardships of the week, my mini-meltdown last night, my struggle to forgive and love myself and accept my limitations, then I got distracted by something and deleted it by mistake. On a better day I'd rewrite it, but I just don't have it in me right now. I have enabled the "automatic backups" feature of my notes app. I'll see you on monday

My body has felt like it's trying to fight something off for the last week. I don't think I'm actually sick, and my symptoms are very vague—just kind of general body aches and an overall icky feeling. You know the icky feeling? I got that. I think I'm somewhat prone to psychosomatic sympathy¹—if I'm around someone who's sick a lot I start feeling like I'm a little sick too. My spouse doesn't have covid and my symptoms don't line up with it, so I'm not worried on that front. Just a little temporary unpleasantness, and nothing compared to what my spouse has gone through.

Gonna be another short one today. I actually have a bit of a backlog again, because I've been spending a little too much time writing (and using my phone generally) and not enough time working. Now that my condition is treated, and my brain is able to focus on things, it wants to focus on all the things. It's ok, I'll get caught up. I'll simply focus on focusing. Balance in all things. Whenever I feel the urge to do something with my hands, like the 8 seconds every few in minutes in which I need I have to scan a document, I'll go for the bubble bracelet instead.

Bubble Bracelet!

It's one of many thoughtful or cute trinkets my spouse put in my Easter basket this year (my spouse made me an Easter basket! 🤯) but this has by far been the most useful. It works just like any other silicone bubble-pop fidget toy, but the fact that it's a bracelet means I always have it with me. I put it on my right wrist when I leave for work in the morning (my watch goes on the left) and any time I need something to do with my hands, I pull it off and get a-poppin. A lot of people probably have something similar on their keychain, but the shape and size of the bracelet make it more interesting to fidget with than something that would fit in my pocket. To me, anyway. I can rotate it with one hand and pop with the other. I can count the bubbles before I get back to the beginning (there are 10), etc. A dollar-twenty-five very well spent.

Worms Armageddon 1999 PC league

I'm loathe to recycle social media posts on my journal. The level of my aversion probably isn't rational, but in the twilight years of Livejournal, a bunch of my friends set up bots that would make a post once every 24 hours that just contains all their tweets from that day, and it made me very sad. All those abandoned zombie accounts reposting tweets at other zombie accounts made me feel, and this might be overly dramatic, some kind of existential dread.

But I want to spread the Worms word, so:

It's so weird that they ported Worms Armageddon 1999 to the newest consoles. That's the Worms game people should play, but the PC version still works fine and will run on a baked potato, it controls best with keyboard and mouse, it's extremely moddable and there's a plethora of extant player-generated maps and other content. People just stopped playing it. Online W:A was some of the best fun I've ever had with a multiplayer game. Anyone else wanna get back into #WormsArmageddon PC?

Having an action physics-y sandbox game where players take turns made it a perfect hangout game. You can open the chat window and talk to your friends while you're watching the other players take their turns. You really don't want to try to chat on an Xbox controller. All you can type are words like AX, BAY, YAB, BART, ARBY, etc. Gets old after awhile

Two people expressed potential interest, but they're both in wildly different time zones from me, so I made an aspirational collaborative document (edit: peerpad doesn't work, awesome. Re-made the document on rentry.co) to maybe help people come together and play Worms. If you think you may be one of these people, see the link for more information.

Why?

If you don't know what Worms Armageddon is, I probably won't convince you to spend 15 bucks on it. It's sort of a niche genre. If you've ever played an artillery game, it's basically one of those except your tanks are worms that can move around. How much they move is dependent on the game mode you're playing. They can always scooch around a bit left and right, but their mobility is limited and they can't fall very far without getting hurt. Mobility items such as the ninja rope, parachute, jetpack and teleport give you a much wider range of movement. These items can turn it into a completely different game; the ninja rope especially has exceptionally good physics, and if you get good at using it, you can fly around the maps with acrobatic fervor. Many of the most popular modes from the early aughts we're mostly or entirely about rope movement; you can look up rope race videos on youtube for a sense of what that looks like. It might not seem like the most exciting thing if you haven't played, but there's a very high skill ceiling and getting good (or even okay) is a lot of fun.

I got okay at it. I was never much into the pro rope stuff. My favorite mode was called a "shopper". You start with no weapons, and every turn a crate will appear. You have to use your rope to get to the crate and launch an attack before time runs out. The skill level required depends on the map, but this is generally considered a more casual mode because of the luck involved. A crate has a chance of containing any weapon. Weaker ones like mines and bazookas are most common, but you always have a chance of getting one of the more powerful/chaotic weapons like a holy hand grenade, or potential team-ruining banana bomb. To me, the shopper is the perfect mix of luck and skill. You can't feel too bad about losing if you play well, because you can only use what you're given; but if you're not at least somewhat competent at roping and using the weapons effectively, you're probably not going to get far.

If the rope action isn't for you, there are a bunch of other more traditional modes. My favorite "normal" mode was the T17. It's similar to a shopper, but you start with a few basic weapons and mobility tools, including a limited number of ninja ropes. This one is more about using your resources strategically, but is more interesting than a straightforward artillery duel.

The customizability is the game's killer feature. This is the only game I've played that can either be eSports or Mario Party or somewhere in between depending on how you set it up. That's how we should rate the sweatiness of competitive games, in my opinion: where does it fall on the esports-Mario Party spectrum? Me, I like a good balance, but definitely closer to the MP end. I like to have fun and goof off, but I don't want complete chaos. I want some amount of structure to both motivate me and to put boundaries on the activity. I've never been someone who can just drop into a Minecraft² server with a bunch of people (or by myself, for that matter) and have fun just noodling around for hours. Worms Armageddon is a structured, time-bound social activity that requires neither too much or too little skill, is extremely customizable and doesn't require you to talk to other people with your physical animal voice. If these sound like qualities you value in a game, maybe give Worms a try.

I feel like I've written some version of this post at least three times over the years, but Team 17 porting the game to new consoles is a bizarre and unexpected development that prompted me to think about it again. I've mostly made peace with the idea that I don't like the same kinds of multiplayer games as other people, but events like this make me think "...what if?"

---

1. Beastie Boys voice psychosomatic sympathetic, sympathetic psychosomatic

2. This is the problem with the Mario Party-Esports spectrum, I don't know where Minecraft would fall. People take it more seriously than anyone should take MP, but it's so unstructured it barely feels like a game to me. It's left the spectrum entirely and is off in a field somewhere, doing its own thing. (There are like a billion people in this field. I recognize that I'm the weird one)

My spouse has been very ill, so most of my weekend was spent taking care of her. She was sick enough to go to the ER last night, just in case it was anything serious. I'm glad she went, because it could've turned into something serious, but they sent her home with medicine and she's doing a bit better, well enough that I could come to work today. 😌

Not that I wanted to come to work, but I'm still not permanent enough to get benefits like sick time or vacation time.

My puzzle game playing has got me brainstorming a sequel to Slime and Goo. I've thought of a setup that would enable to make more sokoban-style puzzles with the S&G mechanics. It would be called Slime and Goo 2: Quest for the Cure in Phantasia Phorest. The story is: the Radiant Cake was a phony! Dr. Fondant must have already gotten to it, and replaced it with a cursed facsimile. All the critters of the Black Forest who partook have succumbed to a debilitation sleeping sickness. Luckily, Slime and Goo were full, so they avoided the effects. Now they must venture into Phantasia Phorest and collect 100 Insomnient Shrooms so the witch can make enough waking potion for everyone.

Mechanically, it would be similar to the previous game except that instead of just needing to reach the cake (exit) on each level, you have to collect all the mushrooms to move on. Instead of showing you what level you're on, the counter would show total numbers of mushrooms collected. That way you can get an idea of how far into the game you are, percentage-wise.

The sokoban element comes from magic logs that you must push into patches of moonlight peeking through the forest canopy to grow mushrooms. The win condition for each level would be: no logs or mushrooms remaining on screen.

That's my only idea for new mechanics so far, but it would open me up to making more traditional sokoban puzzles with the S&G twists. I may also copy over the one-way passage mechanic from The Quest For One, that could be a pretty simple way to add some puzzle variety. I'd probably eschew the bonus coin idea this time around; I liked it, but it was a difficult constraint to work around, and S&G wasn't as fleshed out as it could've been. My goal for the sequel will mostly be more puzzles, so it's more of a level pack than something that'll redefine the game.

I'm debating whether I want to include more story. Puzzlescript does allow you to display short messages, and having some charming writing could make the game more interesting to more people. Having two protagonists automatically gives me plenty of opportunities for little bits of funny dialogue, and a Phantasma Phorest is a good setting for interactions with other fantasy character archetypes, like The Owl of Wisdom and Orestes the misunderstood rat.

I do kind of enjoy that the first S&G is a textless experience, so it can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of language. I think it's more elegant as a game, but it does limit me creatively. Maybe I can expand on the zine idea, instead of just 2 pages from the Indiepocalypse zine, I could make a full booklet with some expanded lore. Of course no one would read it if it requires an additional download, and the whole idea was to have interesting stuff in the game to make it more compelling. I dunno. Maybe I'm being unnecessarily purist about it. People seem to like bitsy games, so if I include some bitsy-like exploration and storytelling, maybe that'll make it interesting for a greater number of people. And since it'll have essentially the same mechanics as the previous game, some storytelling would help set it apart. Okay, it's settled: Slime & Goo 2 will have in-game lore. Thanks for letting me brainstorm at you.

Of course this is all academic, because puzzlescript is not a development environment I can make use of on a phone, and it's still unclear when I'll have the time and brainpower to work on personal projects when I'm at home. I can make a page in my notes app to jot down story and dialogue ideas to be transferred to the game later, but I can't work on actual level designs. Maybe I can get some graph paper and pencils and start sketching them out like it's the 80s. Just kidding, that would probably draw more unwelcome attention than using my phone, and I can't work like that anyway. I need the live playtesting ability. I downloaded a tiled graphics editor on my phone just to see, and yeah, I can't do anything with it.

I'm trying to think of more creative outlets I can tap into while I'm at work. I wish I had more ideas for downpour games. Truth is, I've never been all that interested in straight-up choose-your-own-adventure games. The few actual CYOA books I interacted with as a kid bored me, I didn't see the appeal. There's not enough to do in them and your choices don't really matter. It takes 10 minutes to go through the book and see every possible branch. There's no way to predict which choices will lead to good outcomes, there's no way to feel like you "solved" the adventure. The only real strategy for getting the best ending on your first go is picking the most counter-intuitive action at every branch, because they probably punish the obvious good choices to make it more interesting. I heard tale of solo gamebooks that were more like RPGs where you have a character, you're moving around an actual map, and there are systems with die rolls, but I never saw any outside of the tiny solo example dungeon in one of the original red box D&D manuals. I would've loved to play more games like that, but I never encountered any.

Twine is cool because it has systems for tracking variables and generating random numbers, and that's all you really need to turn a CYOA into a proper adventure game or RPG. I haven't finished any of the games I started making along these lines, but I'd like to. But twine also isn't workable on a phone.

Downpour has one game mechanic that isn't possible in a physical CYOA book: the ability to make a choice lead to a random passage. You can use this to implement a crude "die roll": if you want a choice to have a ¼ chance of leading to outcome A and a ¾ chance of outcome B, you can make a link to a random pool of 4 passages consisting of ABBB. But there are no variables, so there's no way to make it have a long-term effect on the narrative unless you create two completely separate paths that branch out from from that point.

For example, if the player clicks a treasure chest and there's a ¼ chance of finding a magical shield that will protect them should they try to confront the dragon, there's no way to check to see if the player has the shield when they get there. You'd have to create two completely divergent story paths from that point, and obviously if you have more than one or two of these kinds of choices, your narrative will quickly unspool into unmanageable fractal spaghetti. So nifty as it is, downpour is really only useful for little joke games, and that's mostly not the kind of game I want to make. Not that I think it would be easy to make a tool that allows people to make these types of games on their phone, and it's very good for what it is, that's just why I lost interest after a couple small projects.

I realize I'm asking a lot from a bad computer with the world's worst input device, obviously I'd be using a real computer if I could, but if I want to reclaim a little sliver of agency in this hell society, it's phone or nothing. Might as well make the most of it

I apologize for the quality of the mushroom pics in the previous post. I was shrinking them down with an app called pocket paint, and I didn't realize looking on my phone how badly it was mangling them. I checked the settings, and there are no scaling options, so I assume it's just doing nearest neighbor for everything. I asked fedi for recommendations for Android photo editors, and abetterjulie at wandering shop recommended Snapseed. At first I didn't think it had a resize function, but I found it in the settings menu. Rather than being an editing tool, it allows you to set a maximum resolution when saving the file, from a list of pre-baked options. I chose to have the "long edge" set to a maximum of 800 pixels, meaning the pics will either be 800x400 or 400x800 depending on if it's portrait or landscape. Which is a very convenient setting, much better than doing it by hand. Snapseed is made by Google, I don't understand why it's not the built-in photo editor. It does all the same stuff, but more and better. It's bonkers that the built in editor doesn't have any way to resize photos, like they seriously expect me to share photos in their original massive 13MP resolution? On a phone? Unlimited data is still far from universal. Maybe they expect whatever social network the photo's being shared on to handle resize and compression. This is something Twitter and Facebook do, but not fedi software. It's one of my few remaining gripes with the fediverse, but maybe all that image processing would be too computationally expensive. Twitter and FB can do it with their massive server farms, but it might be too much to expect from a small host. Ah well, at least I know Snapseed works now. I updated the best picture from yesterday's set with the higher quality resize, the close-up of the flat mushroom with the building in the background, and it looks worlds better. I also added a bit of custom CSS to make sure it's resized to fit whatever screen you're on, so they should all be viewable in the mobile layout. I hadn't touched the style settings at all, because I still have nightmares about trying to customize Livejournal's batshit S2 system, but luckily while dreamwidth did inherit that stuff from LJ, there's also a field where you can just add or edit the CSS. Maybe I can get things looking a bit more comfy around here without it becoming A Project

See you, space eggbug

So, cohost is gone. I had an account there, and I didn't use it much because it doesn't really fit my social media consumption lifestyle: I do most of my social media-ing on my phone, and cohost was too data intensive for me to use on the reg. There were accounts that I greatly enjoyed checking in on from time to time, and it seems like it had a great community, so I'm sad to see it go but not surprised. If you were following the financial update posts, and reading the analysis of the financial update posts, it was clear this was inevitable. The team behind cohost wanted it to be a business that paid them software engineer salaries, and they never had a real plan to make this happen. Even the most despicable ad-laden social media with the most addictive dark patterns isn't profitable. Cohost wanted to avoid all the bad stuff, which is commendable, but they had no other feasible ideas for funding the operation. They were borrowing money from a rich friend to pay their salaries and the website's operating expenses. They agreed to turn over the code to said rich friend if and when they were unable to repay the loans. They sold premium subscriptions, and they had an unbelievably loyal core user base with a fantastic conversion rate, and it still wasn't close to enough. I don't think it was bad of them to try, but I definitely think they should've been more forthright about their financial situation. Not that they're obligated to talk about it, but they claimed to want to be transparent about the health of the website, and saying nothing at all would be preferable to putting out a bunch of bullshit.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I never thought there was all that much special about the cohost website. It was novel that their posting system was open enough to allow the users to hack in a bunch of interactive CSS widgets, but once the novelty wore off, it was essentially just another blogging platform. That's certainly how I used it. I was a fan of a couple people who had their blogs on cohost, and I would often see fedi posts broadcasting and boosting good writing on cohost, the same way I see links to dreamwidth, bearblog, tumblr, self-hosted static blogs, etc. There were features that I appreciated compared to its contemporaries—I really appreciate the ability to view a person's profile without the boosts and just see all their original posts, and I wish fedi software would copy that feature—but I don't see anything about the software that would justify half a million bucks in development costs. The people were what made cohost good.

And maybe I'm just fedi-brained, but I don't see what's stopping someone from spinning up a mastodon instance called eggbug.social, crowdfunding the hosting costs, and everyone on cohost signing up and continuing to have more or less exactly the same community they had before. They could share their CSS toys on neocities, they could move their longposts there or use whatever blogging platform they wanted, they could continue using the same hashtags to find what they're interested in, the difference would be minimal. In my opinion.

Instead, there's been a sort of cohost diaspora. Former members are finding each other with the #heycohost tag, people are moving to whatever instances suit them best, and they're making the fediverse a better place to be, and that's awesome. I've also seen tale that some longposters are moving their stuff to dreamwidth, which is also cool. I haven't seen any examples yet, but I see how it would be a good fit.

But I've also seen people say that they're not moving anywhere, that there can be no replacement for cohost, that the only alternative is going back to the giant corporate social media that's ruined everything and created the modern internet hellscape, cohost was the only port in that storm and now it's gone and social media is dead. I don't get it.

I think some people perceive there being some kind of cohost/mastodon rivalry, that people on federated social media hated cohost and vice versa, that they were two ideologically opposed projects, and that hasn't been my experience at all. I didn't spend enough time on cohost to see the breadth and depth of opinions on the subject, but I've certainly never seen anyone on the fediverse wishing for cohost's destruction, and I've seen plenty of people enjoy both places in equal measure. On fedi, I have seen a lot of criticism of cohost's business practices and moderation policies, very justified criticism IMO, but none of it was vitriolic. Yeah, some of it has been a little snide and mocking. I tend to unfollow or mute those people. I recommend doing the same. There are twitter-brained individuals on every alternative social media platform, and yeah there are some twitter-brained instances you can safely defederate from. Once you do, the fediverse is a great place to be. I wouldn't trade it for anything, except when I need to write more than 500 characters, in which case I trade it for... What you're reading right now! And a separate blogjournal isn't really a trade-off, I think they complement each other.

I see the fediverse as kind of a co-working space for creativity. Everyone is in a big room with a bunch of tables and chairs, sitting at their computers, doing their own thing, but at any time you can get up and walk around and see what other people are up to. And other people can walk up and see what you're doing. And you can ask questions or talk to the other people at your table. There's a lectern with the mic in the middle of the room, and you can get up and announce that you made a thing and you'll be showing it off in the game room, or the poetry room, or the retro computer room, or whatever; and everyone who's interested can get up and come check it out, and everyone who's not can keep doing their own thing.

And here's the thing: the room doesn't matter. Any room with tables and chairs and a place to plug in your computer will work. Sure, if you sit at a specific table long enough you might form an attachment to it. I was on cyber.space for 6 years, and I was sad to see it go. But it wasn't the end. I got up and moved to a different table. Everyone else on cybre space did too. We can visit each other's tables any time, but we're meeting cool people and making new friends at our new tables.

When you meet so many cool people and see so many great things, you might think "wow, whoever set this room up is a genius". But the room is just a room. The tables are just tables. The people are what's important. I hope everyone who loved cohost find their people

Had kind of a rough one yesterday. Had to go to the grocery store after work, which meant I got home at 19h00 instead of 17h00. Those two hours on the bus and at the store put a huge dent in my executive function. I don't think people who drive cars understand just how much harder every aspect of life is for people who use public transit.

You know the old labor slogan "8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will"? Well for me, "rest" has to be put in a different category than "sleep". I need 7½-8 hours of sleep a night just to function as a person, just to be able to work. But I also need rest, time to convalesce and let my brain recover and just think. I've never been someone who can get off work and spend the next 8 hours doing things until it's time for bed. Whether this is part of my neurodivergence or a PTSD thing or just part of my human condition is hard to say. But if I don't get 3-4 hours of rest, preferably uninterrupted, it takes a huge toll on the rest of my life. Last night I couldn't get an adequate amount of rest. When I get home at 19h00 I basically have 4 hours until I need to get to bed if I want to get 8 hours of sleep. And I couldn't use all that time to rest because I have other responsibilities as a married adult. I managed to get to bed by 23h30, which would've been about 7½ hours of sleep, but I woke up in the middle of the night to pee and had a hard time getting back to sleep. So I didn't get adequate rest or sleep, and I'm going to take it easy at work today.

Even when I get home at 17h00, that only leaves me 6 hours, which when you factor in rest and responsibilities doesn't leave me any time for self-actualization. So I have to steal time for self-actualization from work whenever I can. My therapist has more or less signed off on the need to engage in "time theft" to keep myself sane and as happy as possible under the circumstances.

"Time theft" in my case means figuring out ways to be super efficient at my job, so I can get all my work done in less time than they expect me to need, and then use the leftover time for what I will. It's not ideal, because I have to be discreet—I can't just set my laptop up on my desk and get to work, because people would see me and realize something unusual is going on. Phones are generally safe, and as long as I carefully manage my time and don't fall behind on job duties, I can write these journal entries, or work on downpour games, or read a book. Or play a couple levels of picross. Or post some jokes on fedi.

It's not ideal, because I have to do things in short bursts throughout the day, and it makes long-term projects especially difficult, but I try to be grateful for what I have. A lot of people are forced to work in dehumanizing environments where they're not allowed to so much as look at their phone, the kind of real jobs where they're told, with vile sincerity, "if you have time to lean you have time to clean". I have a comfortable bullshit desk job and I try not to take it for granted. If I had to work a real job it's very likely that I wouldn't be here today. But it's still hard not to grieve for the portion of my life that's been stolen from me.

Anyway, that's enough self-actualization for today. I have 6 hours to go and I'm going to try to get as comfortable as possible and listen to podcasts and work as slowly as I can get away with. Maybe I can find a little rest in the cracks of the day