Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

Happy new year

2025-01-12T05:39:56Z

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

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despair

2024-11-07T21:28:48Z

I was going to write about how disenfranchised my vote was this year. This was the first year I've ever had to take a fucking uber to vote. Every other year my polling place was in walking distance of where I live, this year it wasn't even on a bus route. And I was going to talk about going to vote with my spouse, and how fucked and inefficient the polling place was, how much I regret not voting early when I had the chance, how much smoother that was when I voted during the last mid-terms.

But then fascism won, and none of it seems like it matters. I mean, my state's red as paint, so that part never matters, but I wanted to at least say I was there, you know? I guess I've been in denial about how likely this was, because I wasn't prepared for the wave of despair that hit me. I feel utterly lost and alone. I've been crying a lot. I've been making it to work each day but that's about it. I'm staying off social media as much as possible. Even a relatively healthy environment like fedi has been a minefield for black pills and intrusive thoughts. I'm scared in a way I've never been scared of an election result before. The presidential immunity ruling and Project 2025 loom above like a black star.

I'm trying to survive. I'm not looking at news. I've been tending my little digital garden (up to 68 exhibits as of this writing!) because it distracts me and gives me some semblance of normalcy. I have kind of a big backlog at work now though, so I'm probably going to have to drop it down to 1 or 2 new pages a day.

I need to find more stuff to listen to at work. Even apolitical podcasts are tough because they take place in the present day. Earlier this month I listened to Into The Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, and they were good. Bleak, and containing echoes of what's taken over our political culture today, but made tolerable by the cold distance of time. I also downloaded Educated by Tara Westover, along the same lines, but I don't know how well I'd do with a first-person memoir right now. I need more history, more science, more sociology and anthropology, more research and cold objectivity

My one tiny glimmer of hope is that our local excess levy to fund the library passed by a huge margin, almost 3 to 1, so books will be there for me. Sorry if this entry is contributing to the black pill atmosphere, just needed to vent.

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Badge engineering

2024-10-30T19:35:10Z

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 🙏

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A "career" milestone

2024-10-29T21:23:53Z

Hard day. Therapy this morning was rough, but necessary. I skipped it last week. Life was too much. When I got to work, I had some good news in my inbox: they're finally starting the process of hiring me on full-time with benefits and such. Had to pore over some insurance information and fill out forms and make decisions that hopefully won't bite me in the ass. That was mentally draining on top of a rough morning, and then I had to work late to stay late to make up time.

All this will hopefully culminate in getting what I need more than anything else: TIME OFF. I haven't had an extra day off in three years that didn't require a grim trigonometry balancing my physical health, mental health, and financial stability. I hope they can get me hired before the winter holidays. I don't celebrate american or religious holidays, but if I can get a few days OFF-off, it might heal my soul just enough that even I, me, will carve the roast beast.

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Game design, game writing, Game Dad, game badges

2024-10-28T15:08:50Z

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?

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Recertification Day

2024-10-23T23:35:57Z

Yesterday I had to endure the indignity of laying out every detail of my financial life for the last 6 months bare to ensure my continued housing. It's a humiliating and dehumanizing process, and the paperwork is designed in such a way to make people feel existential dread basically no matter what. They're filled with dire warnings that knowingly falsifying information on the forms is punishable by fines and jail time, while simultaneously making it impossible to fill out the forms 100% correctly.

On one of the forms, I had to sign a sworn statement indicating any property that I "dispensed with for less than fair market value". I swore that I did not, because what the fuck? Like, did I throw anything away that I technically probably could've sold on ebay for a few cents+shipping? Yeah, I'm sure. None of it would've been worth the time and energy of listing it. Could I have collected every aluminum can I used over the year and gotten a couple bucks for recycling it? Theoretically, but I don't have a car, am I supposed to have taken garbage bags full of cans on the bus to the recycling center in case I got more than enough to cover the bus fare? Nobody would do that.

And yeah, I'm sure the only care about high-value property like cars or real estate, but they don't actually say that.¹ They make us think that if someone actually sat down and went over every detail with a fine-toothed comb, they could find something to get you evicted at best or arrested at worst. Is someone going to do that? Probably not, unless some bureaucrat at the housing authority decides they don't like you. It's not discrimination when there's technically a reason for it.

This kind of selective enforcement could be illegal, but who's going to represent us? Even if we found someone to take the case pro bono, how would one prove intent? What if there's no pattern? What if the person reviewing my case just had it out for me, specifically, because they saw a donation to a political cause or charity they don't like? Even if I could fight it, where would I live while the case made its way through the courts?

I'm being paranoid, probably none of this will happen and I have nothing to worry about. But me being paranoid and afraid is definitely the end goal of this process. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Anyway, that whole process was exhausting, and I had to go into work late because the meeting was 11:00 AM, and I had to stay late and I still didn't get my 8 hours in, so I have to work late throughout the week to make up the rest of the time, and I had to go to the pharmacy after work and didn't get home until like 20h00, and I have too much to think about this week so I don't know how much writing I'll be able to do. I'll try

UPDATE: also I'm out of data on my phone and work has been busy this week. I'll see you when I see you

1: So I just looked this up, and in the past it would only qualify as something I need to disclose if the difference between the value of the asset and what I received exceeds $1000. But apparently this rule changed this year and the threshold is gone. No one seems to know about it. The form this year was the same as last year's, and it doesn't mention a threshold either way ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯ I hate it here.²

2. This is academic for me, but even if I did have valuable assets, how the fuck am I supposed to know what "fair market value" is? Who decides this? What if I can't reach that number? What if someone decided the car I sold is worth $5000 but I couldn't get anyone to buy it for that amount? What if I was forced to sell it for $2500 to make rent? I'd lose my housing for that? I HATE IT HERE

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Doctor visit, health numbers, the Taco Bell music scene, Johnny Cash slices salami, big cheez

2024-10-18T15:31:30Z

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

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Keyboards and gamepads. Nothing important

2024-10-17T16:36:43Z

Spent a little time yesterday tweaking the journal style. Switched to a different theme and modified it a bit. The theme I used before was fun, I liked the spinny icons, but the justified sans serif text was driving me crazy, especially on mobile. I chose a dark theme with serif text, which is how I have the ebook reader on my phone set up. A livejournal-derived CMS is interesting, because I'm not only defining how my page looks, I'm defining how the page where I read everyone else's journals looks, too. So I'm extra incentivized to make it as comfortably readable as possible.

The layout is a bit broken on desktop at the moment, the left column is overlapping some of the navigation links. I'll have to look at it when I get home. I'm amazed that none of the DW themes have a basic layout with all the content centered in the middle of the screen. That's one thing I miss from bearblog. I liked the simplicity of the front page being a list of entries, and each entry being a simple page of text with navigation links at the top. None of the DW layouts take mine length into account. I use a 21:9 monitor at home, so it's especially bad there. Even with the 3-column layout, the center column with all the content is like 150 characters long when the window's maximized. Now that modern CSS lets you define element width in terms of number of characters, there's no excuse not to have your lines fall in the 45-70ch sweet spot of readability.

So I centered the content column and made it 60ch wide, and had to nudge some of the elements around manually, and it's not quite right but it's getting there. Mobile is about perfect, and that's where I do most of my reading anyway. And I figure others read either in their own style which they're comfortable with or in a feed reader. But if you're reading on the website on a computer, consider this space

Keyboard Blues

Hey, let me know if this is a thing: a keyboard that can be used either as a USB or Bluetooth device. I'd like to get a new keyboard for work anyway, since the one they gave me is an awful chiclet-style keyboard, basically a laptop keyboard sandwiched in a cheap plastic rectangle. I have no idea why this product exists. I have plenty of space on my desk for a real keyboard.

If they make keyboards that can be used as USB/Bluetooth devices, I could plug it into my work computer and pair it to my phone, so I could type on my phone but still appear to be working. Ideally it would have a physical toggle switch so I could switch modes seamlessly, but that's probably asking a lot. Even being able to press some Fn-FX combo to switch would be okay.

What wouldn't work is if the keyboard is always in USB mode if it's plugged in, and can only be used wirelessly if the cable is unplugged. I suspect that this is how every BT/USB combo keyboard works, and none of them tell you that's how it works because it's just How It's Done™. But if you know of a keyboard that works the way I'm describing please let me know. It doesn't even need to be mechanical, a good rubber dome keyboard would be preferable to what I'm using now. But if it has some nice cherry browns, I wouldn't complain.

When I search for "multi device keyboard" I'm finding a few that might sort of do what I want, but (a.) they're all chiclet keyboards, and (b.) it's unclear whether "a computer via USB" is one of the devices they actually support. They mainly seem to be for switching between multiple Bluetooth devices. USB is only mentioned in the context of charging.

Now, you would hope that plugging it into your computer's USB port turns it into a wired keyboard. It'd be nice if we could assume that's how it works. But my spouse recently bought a wireless mouse that doesn't do anything without the dongle. If you plug it in, all it does is charge. If you want to use the mouse while charging, it requires two USB ports. One for the mouse and one for the dongle. What a crazy, mixed-up, topsy-turvy world we find ourselves living in.

No Joy Stick

Speaking of input peripherals, I think I need to find a wired gamepad for my computer. I've been wanting to play games that aren't RPGs or puzzle games, and I think the delay introduced by wireless controllers is making me have a much worse time.

My two options right now are an 8bitdo M30 bluetooth and a Wii U Pro controller with a Magic-NS dongle. They're both fine, but I feel like both controllers add just enough imperceptible input delay to compromise any game that requires quick reflexes. I was playing Kirby's Pinball Land for the gameboy, and I did okay, but I haven't yet finished a single level. I feel like I should've, given the time I put into it. I just lose control of the ball too much.

I don't think it's me, because I've also played a bit of 3D Space Cadet Pinball on a keyboard, and I was much better at it. I felt myself improving on subsequent runs. I felt able to put the ball where I needed more often. I accomplished goals and got some decent scores.

I also don't think it's the game, because it doesn't seem that hard! Kirby games usually aren't. It's very generous with the gutter-blocking power-ups and even if your ball drains all the way to the bottom, you can save yourself from losing a ball with a little timing microgame. But I'm missing the timing on it most of the time, and I'm struggling to keep Kirby on one screen long enough to complete an objective and move on to the next screen. I think I'd feel more in control with a wired gamepad.

I suppose I could use my keyboard for KPL to test my hypothesis. Maybe I'm just inexplicably bad at it. But if I do improve on a keyboard, I want to look into a wired controller for action games that require it. Like Battle of Olympus for the NES. I've really been enjoying it, it's like Zelda II if it were improved in every way, but I'm struggling with the combat more than I feel I should.

I don't know what the good USB gamepads are nowadays. They do sell a wired version of the M30, but it's $35! Also the buttons on my M30 tend to get sticky way too easily and require frequent cleaning. Their SNES controller clone has smaller buttons that might hold up better. It's $27, but it has two analog sticks I don't need.

I could also get two generic SNES controller clones for $10. I don't really need two, but I guess I'd have a backup if one breaks? I have a feeling they're pretty fragile. But if the D-pad feels good, it might be the most comfortable controller for me. And for that price it might be worth it even if they wear out in a year.

Actually those D-pads look a little too big. This one looks more accurate and is also more highly rated, but it's two for $17:

Ratings don't necessarily mean anything on Amazon, though. The reviews that look legit seem mixed. I dunno. If you have a wired gamepad you can recommend, let me know. Even if it's more expensive, if it's been serving you well for years it might be worth it. I'll try KPL with a keyboard the next chance I get and report back.

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Home remedies, relatable cartoon cats, staying hydrated, the great Canadian hate-read

2024-10-16T19:20:58Z

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)

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Teeth

2024-10-15T18:18:14Z

Content warning: while it's nothing graphic, this post dicusses trauma related to dental health, parental abuse and poverty.

It's after work and I'm in the emergency room. I'll try to speak honestly without self-deprecation. I went because my teeth are a disaster. I was in this position several months ago. They gave me strong NSAIDs and antibiotics, and I was better in a few days. I'm hoping that'll be the case again. It won't fix the problem, but it'll get me functional enough to get there eventually.

I could blame myself for my teeth, but I've done that my whole life and it hasn't helped. I didn't take care of them, but also we're all products of our circumstances, and I wasn't given a chance to take care of them. The story of my teeth is one of many traumas, ranging from early childhood to recent middle adulthood. One of the traumatizers was the US healthcare system, such as it is, which did not think poor children deserving of dental care when I was a poor child. The system made sure I could only get help in dark basements of schools where dental students practice their trade on living specimens. A place where the screams of the other children and the whirring of drills echoing through the cold tile halls scarred me before I could even open my mouth. Their hands in my mouth were shaky and uncertain; my imagination provided vivid previews of all gruesome outcomes should their hands should slip with one of their medieval torture devices in my mouth. The air was thick with the scent of what was probably fluoride, but in my anxious imagination I'll always think of as tooth dust.

At home, two notable incidents of parental violence occurred around and related to bedtime dental hygiene, so that instilled an anxious and avoidant attitude towards basic dental care that persists to this day.

Most recently, I had some problematic teeth removed, and the person doing the removal didn't use enough anesthetic, and didn't stop when I started screaming. So now I have a debilitating phobia of the place I need to go to get the problem fixed.

The emergency room is a sensory nightmare, it's a cacophony of unwelcome televisions and grumbling patients and announcements and general susurus, and I can't wear headphones because I have to listen for my name to be called, but at least I know I don't have to lie back and have a light shined in my face and hear drills whining and let some potential sociopath put their fingers in my mouth. I can get the drugs I need to make the pain go away for awhile. But it won't fix the problem and I'm going to have to figure out how to face the music if I want the problem to stop.

I don't have many of my original teeth left, and I'm probably going to lose those too. My head is swimming with anxieties, both on the surface and buried deep down. The terror of unbearable pain. The shame of my failure to take care of myself. The shame of the stigma. The internalized classism. The anger and resentment at the people and systems who caused me to become this way. The prospect of being unable to talk or eat for an unknown amount of time before I can get artificial teeth. The frustration of adapting to them. I can't do this and I also can't not.

...

It's now Tuesday. I was given a shot of toridol and a prescription for penicillin. 28 big pills, 4 per day for a week. I've taken two. They don't give anything for pain, not even naproxen. I have acetaminophen. The pain is still there but it's not dominating every thought.

The doctor was pretty brusque about telling me what I have to do, which made me feel bad and judged. I know what I have to do. But I get it. There's no way I can explain all this to him, and he has to assume I know nothing. We both wanted me out of there as fast as possible and he had to make sure he wasn't negligent in informing me. I just wish his demeanor was a bit more compassionate. But, you can't teach demeanor. I'm sure he's good at what he does.

Therapy was this morning. Only 30 minutes. I pretty much just talked about my teeth and the ER trip. The connection kept freezing and creating a delay that made it hard to communicate. It didn't do me a ton of good in the moment, but keeping my weekly appointments is important for momentum.

The one good thing I can say about all of this, and I'm going to cling to it like a security blanket, is that I got help as soon as I needed help. I didn't wait days or weeks until the pain was almost unbearable. I didn't let my anxiety stop me, I did the hard uncomfortable thing. I walked to the hospital after a hard day at work, filled out the slip, sat down and waited until somebody helped me, on my own, of my own volition, my spouse didn't have to talk me into it. It's not much, but when it comes to me and health stuff, that's a victory. And even small victories in aggregate lead to change. Writing this is expressing my commitment to change. No more hiding

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It's been a week

2024-10-11T17:35:54Z

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

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500 grams of refined blog butter

2024-10-10T18:11:45Z

I said yesterday's entry would be short and I hammered out ninety thousand words about worms 🙄 500 words today, max

Fediworms league signups still open at rentry.co/fediworms. Two players on board for a potential game this weekend!

Ok that's all, thanks for reading my 500 words. Just kidding. Totally worth wasting 2.2% of my word budget on this dumb joke. Now 4.6%. I'll stop now

I realized Minecraft doesn't fit on my MP<—>ES spectrum because it's co-op. Well, there are competitive unofficial modes, but it's thought of as a cooperative game. My spectrum needs another axis. Minecraft at one end and... Idk, Among Us at the other? I haven't played it.

My monthly psych appointment is today. It's a video call, but these are a lot shorter than therapy (~20m) so I don't change my schedule like I do with therapy. I usually sneak off to the conference room and call it a break, but there's some official business going on, people have been having meetings in there all week. I reckon I'll go to the "break room" in the basement and hope nobody comes in. Nobody usually does, and when they do it'll only be for a minute. I probably won't be talking about anything super-sensitive, but it's still uncomfortable. I wish there was somewhere I could go to make a private phone call. Like, officially. Workplaces should privacy rooms, somewhere you can go to be alone for a few minutes that isn't a lavatory. I guess that's a luxury reserved for management only.

...

Okay, psych appointment done. I ended up going outside. He ended up doing a phone call instead of video for whatever reason, probably because his support staff is a little clueless. They called me 10m before the appointment and asked a bunch of irrelevant questions, then probably put the wrong thing in the system. It went ok. He's happy with my progress, no changes to my meds. I intended to ask for his thoughts about an autism assessment, but I didn't want to have to shout into the phone over the nearby traffic and big truck that pulled into the parking lot right after I stepped outside. We have an in-person appointment next month, I'll bring it up then. It doesn't seem as urgent now that my ADHD is treated. And honestly, I think it's less likely that an autism diagnosis makes sense for me. Probably I was experiencing the overlapping symptoms more strongly, and that was coloring my perception.

face the music

Remember how when new albums started coming out on CD in addition to cassettes, the CD always cost more? Even though a cassette is a complex machine composed of a plastic shell, reels, screws and magnetic tape, and a CD is just a plastic disc? But the record companies charged like 30% more for the CD, just because they could? Napster in 1999 was what the music industry deserved.

Okay that's it for today. Stay safe everyone and I'll

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Feeling the funk, good fidget jewelry, Worms is back?! The Mario Party—eSports spectrum

2024-10-09T18:38:06Z

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)

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Therapy day, S&G2 proof-of-concept, bad UI decisions in Masto 4.3, interesting links

2024-10-08T21:38:08Z

Today was therapy day, and it was kind of a rough one.

I didn't go to the library yesterday because my spouse is still sick, her mother dropped off some medicine and supplies, and I had to be home so I could meet her at the bus stop. Hopefully next week.

I fell asleep around 21h00 last night. I haven't slept the best the last few days and it was nice to catch up. I set my alarm for 06h00 and actually got up on the first snooze, which isn't a guarantee. I'm glad I did, because therapy is always more useful when I have a little time to wake up and for meds to kick in.

I used my extra time this morning to make a few proof-of-concept levels for Slime & Goo 2. It's nothing worth looking at yet, but I'm pleased with how quickly I was able to create the new rules and decent-looking sprites. The text is just placeholder for now, but I'll probably go with the "storybook" style of prose because (1) puzzlescript doesn't have a way to display multiple lines of text in a single message,¹ and (2) Winnie the Pooh is a perennial influence.

It was hard to drag myself away from it, because my brain just wanted to keep working on it. I could've done that for 4 or 5 hours if I didn't have therapy and work. But drag away from it I must.

There's been a big interface change for everyone whose instance updated to Mastodon 4.3 today. I haven't seen anyone who's happy about it. I accidentally presaged this the other day when I happened to be looking at a post on mastodon.social. I almost never interact with the fediverse via the mastodon we interface. I use pinafore on desktop and subway tooter on my phone. However, my home instance limits federation with mastodon.social (as it should.) Consequentially, when I want to view a post on M.S, I typically need to view it via the source instance on the web because it won't display in my client.

Being the "flagship instance" of the software, it's already incorporated the changes in 4.3 ahead of pushing it out to the public, but I didn't know that, I thought it was just how the web UI looks now, so I got some confused responses from people not on M.S

Well, I should've waited a day, because they pushed the changes out a few hours ago. Among the lowlights:

The "unlisted" post setting has been changed to "quiet public". The icon for this setting has been changed from the sensible "unlocked" symbol to a crescent moon. The description of this setting is "fewer algorithmic fanfares". Huh? No idea what this is supposed to mean,² and also, "The Algorithmic Fanfares" sounds like the name of a 10-piece psychedelic choral pop ensemble.
Content warnings now display with a yellow-and-black "caution" border, and the button you click to view the post is labeled "show anyway". This is what I was complaining about yesterday. This is clearly meant to imply that CWs are only meant for posts with potentially dangerous or disturbing content, and not, like, anything someone might want to opt-in to looking at. I use CWs all the time for perfectly anodyne posts. I use them for posts on obscure subjects not many people following me may care about, particularly long ones. I use them for jokes that I think may be easily misinterpreted. I use them as subject lines when I make several posts on the same subject, so it's obvious they're part of the same thread. There are no good reasons not to CW something in my view, I don't understand why they want to nudge people to only use them a certain way, but I assume it's purely ideological. Gross
There's a little pop-up when you hover over someone's avatar that shows a preview of their profile. It sucks, very distracting and unnecessary, and they know it sucks, because they give you an option to disable it. (of course it's not opt-in, none of these anti-features ever are.) What's worse, this pop-up has a follow button on it, implying that it's good and expected to follow someone without even basic vetting of their post history 🤦‍♀️

I'll never understand the technocratic drive to constantly make pointless UI changes everyone hates. I mean, I get it to an extent with corporate platforms, they have to demonstrate dosomethingism to placate shareholders, but Mastodon has no shareholders. It's

Oh well, there are plenty of ways to use the fediverse without interacting with the masto web UI, and I intend to keep doing do, just sucks that the less technically-inclined have to deal with this shit.

Just a quick update today, apologies for being scatterbrained, therapy always throws off my rhythm for the day. Here's some interesting links you can check out.

In-browser palmOS emulator! Load it up on your phone and pretend you're on 1996s cutting edge of handheld computing. Only... You can't use a stylus, so it's kind of sad. I wish there was a program that would let me use a stylus on my phone.

I haven't figured out how to install any interesting programs, so here's the handwriting recognition tool:

It really works! You can draw the letter shapes in the little box with your finger and it'll recognize it. It might be a better way to write than how I'm doing it now... if I could use a stylus 😔

A clique of middle school trolls in Japan is spamming the fediverse as a false flag operation against another clique they don't like content warning for bullying, harassment, sexual violence threats, the worst adolescent channer shit. This is about the spam wave back in February, but it's happening again because people keep leaving sign-ups open on their instance. They need to not do that. Okay, see you tomorrow.

1. I mean, I can do multiple messages in a row to make it seem more like a back-and-forth conversation, but reading a lot of text like that in a silent black void seems kind of sad. I'd rather have at most a page or two of writing per message, I don't know why, just feels a bit more cozy. Also, this is how I'm going to do footnotes now, because long parentheticals just get too messy. I miss the slick footnote hyperlinks from bearblog, but the entries aren't that long, I figure it's not that bad to scroll down a bit

2. Shit, forgot the second footnote. What I mean is, I know what it means, because I have prior experience with what that option does, but I can't imagine the current description is easier for a newcomer than "Unlisted - don't post to public timelines". "Algorithmic fanfares" is a meaningless phrase to me. I thought the whole point of mastodon is that it doesn't have algorithms? That's why I ditched twitter for it in 2016. Very odd

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Weekend nurse, Slime & Goo 2 brainstorming, why CYOA isn't for me

2024-10-07T18:08:06Z

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

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Therapy day, grindset fakes exposed, a Super Mario radio drama, no cake for me please

2024-10-04T21:01:20Z

I forgot to mention on Tuesday, but my therapist wasn't available that day and scheduled me for Friday this week. It wasn't as rough as usual, I mostly talked about how much better everything is now that my ADHD is being effectively treated. I talked about being proud of my consistency with this journal over the last couple weeks, and how it's not just that I feel like I'm able to write, but I'm able to have thoughts that worth writing down, and how scary it is to think this might go away if insurance decides to fuck with my meds again. I compared my situation to Flowers for Algernon and was a little sad that my therapist was unfamiliar with it. It's not a perfect comparison (or a perfect book) but I think anyone who's had a mental illness effectively treated can relate to it on some level.

We're scheduled for Tuesdays for the rest of this month, which is good for my brain. Now that my ADHD is better and I'm out of pure survival mode, we're probably going to start talking about my trauma more, so Tuesdays are going to be rough again for the next little bit. But it's a good, necessary kind of hard, and I'm glad I'm in good enough mental shape to start working on it again.

Even if therapy wasn't that hard, today's entry will probably be on the shorter side due to having my morning routine thrown off. More of a diary kind of update.

lies and grind

Speaking of morning routines, I just watched this video about how social media stars lie to their audience, and I'm quite amused at how grindset tiktok influencers fake their morning routines. There's one guy where the whole point of the video is that he's in the "5 AM club", a supposed elite cadre of the ultra-productive who wake up at 05h00 to start their day with a battery of self-improvement tasks, and she explains based on his location, the time of year and position of the sun, he had to have recorded the video hours later than he claims. Like, enduring these morning routines is his whole shtick, and he couldn't even do it once to make a convincing video. His whole life is a lie. lol

I don't watch this kind of content, so I don't really need the debunking, but it does make me feel better seeing the extent to which these supposedly super put-together, hyper-productive people have to fake their lives. Also, my life may not be perfect, but at least I don't have to set up my phone to start recording me, get back in bed, and pretend to wake up for millions of people. I could be doing a lot worse.

I've watched a couple of Hannah Alonzo's "influencer" videos and they're pretty entertaining, although in some cases I worry I'm just engaging in the thing itself. Exposing how influencers do dumb shit on purpose to make me mad does in fact make me mad, and if I didn't watch the exposé, I wouldn't be exposed to it at all. It's probably fine in small doses though, idk

When I was a kid, I watched a TV special called Buy Me That that exposed how TV and print advertising lie to make their products look better, it was a pretty influential piece of edutainment. It set the wheels in motion for my anti-consumerist (and eventually anti-capitalist) attitudes, Influencer Insanity feels like a modern extension of that. I hope it gets seen by the people who need to see it.

workday cake

It was someone's birthday in my office today, which is always potentially exciting, but all they had was cake. I was hoping there would be food. One of my co-workers brought me a slice of cake, which was very kind, but it's just been sitting on my desk cuz I came in late and haven't had lunch yet. Sweets aren't my preferred junk food, I'm more salty/fried/savory-inclined. I mean I'll eat it eventually, but probably won't get much out of it.

I live in walking distance of my office, which is very nice, but food options in this part of town are dire. There's one pizza place down the street, and I've been here for 3 years now, so I'm thoroughly sick of it. There is a little employee cafeteria, and the food isn't stellar, but it is cheap, so I take advantage of it when I can. But (1) it's cash-only, (2) it's only open til 13h00 and sometimes I forget to eat before they close, and (3) it's very often closed due to staffing shortages. So it's not something I can depend on.

In contrast, we have a little vending area with drinks and snacks that's fully self-service. You grab items you want out of the cooler or baskets, scan them on the little tablet that's bolted to the wall, and insert your credit card. It's nice and convenient, but it's all overpriced junk food. That's why cake is so disappointing, I can go downstairs and get a 100% sugar snack cake any time, and a sheet cake from Kroger or whatever is basically the same thing. Sometimes people bring in donuts to share, and I hate to seem ungrateful, but that's also the same thing. It's supposed to be a special treat, but real food is a much scarcer and more special treat, to me.

cake update

I have eaten the cake. It tasted like sugar and chemicals.

two burly plumbers

I haven't seen the Super Mario Bros. movie, and don't intend to. But I have now listened to the official 45 minute promotional storybook cassette. "Theater of the mind", I like to call it. It's pretty good. The narrator is doing a reasonable facsimile of the 90s movie trailer guy voice. I wasn't bored. It passes the bechdel test. It sets up and pays off an important lesson about never leaving your tools behind. I wouldn't say I laughed at any of the jokes, because I didn't, but there were times the writing surprised me, and being surprised is similar to laughing. This is letterboxd, right? 2⭐/5. At least it was only 45m long

happy friday

That'll do it for this week. Thanks everyone for reading, I feel like I'm getting back into a groove. What movie do you want to experience in the form of a 45m storybook cassete? Comment down below, and submit any questions for Monday Q&A. If you enjoy my work and would like to support independent writing on the world wide web, I've got a ko-fi and a Patreon if you're so inclined. You can also help by sharing a post you enjoy with a friend or on your social media platform of choice. See you on the seventh!

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Thoughts on the demise of cohost, from an observer

2024-10-03T15:21:46Z

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

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Mushrooms and libraries good, capitalism and big publishers bad. Library apps questionable?

2024-10-02T17:58:27Z

Doing quite a bit better today. Spent some quality time with my spouse last night, which I needed. Had to sacrifice some sleep to get some rest, but it was worth it.

It's been raining for like the last two weeks, and mushrooms are popping up everywhere. They're mostly the plain white puffball variety, but it's still neat. I almost never see mushrooms at all, and never in this quantity.

I like how they appear in neat lines, like groups of little extraterrestrial tourists seeing the sights. I can see why they have a much bigger cultural footprint cultural in damp climates like England and Japan, because they're quite a sight when they pop up in large formations. They're a really interesting form of life. I keep meaning to read that mushroom book everyone recommends. In fact, I'm going to check and see if the library has the audiobook

several seconds later

There's one copy available on the Libby app but it's in use, so I placed a hold. Nice! It's rare that I go looking for a specific book and they actually have it. It says there's a two week wait, but it's okay. If the mushrooms can wait for a period of sufficient wetness, I can wait for this.

I saw a discussion recently about all the lawsuits being filed against the internet archive. There was the Hachette suit they lost, and now apparently every major music label is suing them for their collection of digitized 78RPM records. Their collection preserves a lot of stuff that's gone out of copyright that one wouldn't be able to hear anywhere else, but it also has a lot of artists whose back catalogs are being exploited by the labels and "intellectual property" holders. I don't see how any of these cases have merit, but it's very disheartening.

Anyway, the cultural assault on physical libraries came up, and I'm seeing a lot of people say that you should never use apps like Libby and Overdrive because the contracts are so punitively expensive compared to physical media, but I don't know if this is true? I'm pretty sure every actual librarian I've seen express an opinion on the subject says any use of services offered by libraries helps them, because demonstrating use is how they get funding. I do understand the argument that Libby/Overdrive is owned by a for-profit investment firm and is subject to the same cancerous deterioration as every capitalist scheme (I'm familiar with the Cory Doctorow-coined term) but it seems to me that if they turn the screws, the libraries will stop using it. They're not getting rid of physical media, they're using the tools that are available to make media accessible to more people. It would suck if that goes away, but I don't see it being an existential threat to libraries. I'm inclined to trust the librarians on this one.

In my case, work and the state of our public transit system are too burdensome for me to get to the library during opening hours, so learning about these apps has been a godsend. I'm a patron of the library for the first time in years, and I expect there are a lot of people in a similar boat. Surely getting more people to use the library can only be good? They (used to?) have bookmobiles to help people in remote areas get access to books, that's an expense that wasn't strictly necessary but helped make books accessible to more people. I think the apps are a modern extension of that. Yeah there needs to be a version of this that's not controlled by a corporation, but I think telling people not to use them is unhelpful at best.

I do think it's beneficial to encourage people to check out physical items in addition to using the apps if it's at all feasible. In fact, I just looked up my local library hours, and while they do close at 5 or 6 most days, they're open until 8:30 on Mondays. I might start making an effort to make a weekly library trip. I'd be interested in checking out their physical audiobook selection.

I do actually have a CD/Cassette player next to my desk at work. I assume it belonged to a previous employee and just became property of the office. On rare days that I work alone, holidays and the occasional Saturday or Sunday, I like to plug my phone into the line input and listen to podcasts over the speakers. It's nice to be able to not wear headphones for awhile.

I haven't actually tested the CD and cassette player, but if they work, that'd be a novel way to get more audiobooks into my media diet, although the way my desk is set up there's no elegant way to plug my headphones into it. Maybe I can get one of those little bluetooth transmitters.

Also, the library may have some of those little dedicated audiobook players. They're neat. I mean, they're incredibly wasteful, all of this is, if we didn't live in such a capitalist hellscape the supercomputers we carry in our pockets could have seamless 24/7 access to all the information in the world, but in the context of finding more ways to support libraries, they're interesting. Techmoan did a video about them, which prompted me to pick one up at a library book sale a couple years back and see if they can be hacked. If they can, it would have to be by someone with more skill than me, because it's pretty much just an SOC under a black blob. It didn't occur to me that the library might have books in this format I'd be interested in listening to, or that there would be a reason to go this route instead of checking it out from Libby or pirating it.

Torrenting audiobooks is an exhausting process. Audible's pissed in the pool with their 32kpbs, 22khz 8-bit mp3s that sound like a talkboy being played over shortwave radio, to the extent that it can be difficult to find audobooks in decent quality, especially older ones. Even some of the ones I've got from Libby have been compressed to the point of unlistenabilty. The playaways seem to have pretty decent quality files on them, which makes sense, because bulk 4GB eMMCs cost about a penny, and that's enough to hold just about anything short of the encyclopedia in perfectly acceptable quality.

I focus on audiobooks because practically, the 40 hours a week I need to fill at work is the time I'm most likely to get a lot of reading done. Historically I've listened to more podcasts than audiobooks, but that trend is starting to inverse. A lot of the podcasts I used to love have ended or I've grown tired of them, and a lot of the ones I've started to enjoy more recently have an insufferable number of ads. Even skipping them is starting to take its toll because having to skip ahead and backwards until I find the right spot every few minutes is hell for my focus.

I wish I had an easier time getting into audiobooks. There's a lot of, I dunno what to call it, onboarding anxiety? Like even a short audiobook is 8 hours, and that's a big commitment for an unknown quantity. Fiction is the hardest, I don't know if I'll like the world, the characters, the quality of the writing, the story, or the narrator. If it's sci Fi or fantasy, there will probably be a lot of new words and concepts I need to learn about. If I'm lucky, the book will start off with a strong character moment and get me through the door. If I'm unlucky, it's hours of turgid world building and scene setting and I nope out before I can even meet a character I care about.[^1][^2]

Nonfiction is easier for me, because it's already set in a world I kinda understand, and I can appreciate a deep dive on just about any subject if the writing is good and the author is passionate enough. Like mushrooms! Hey look at that, I brought it back around.

I want to write about the podcast I've been re-listening to instead of trying new books, because it's kind of interesting and kind of embarrassing; and I also wanted to talk about the untimely demise of cohost; but I'm already at 1500 words, so I'll save it. My god, a callback and a tease, it's like I'm some sort of blogger

[^1]: If I'm really unlucky, it's Neal Stephenson's Reamde, a book I spent an audible credit on back in 2011 when I could afford it and listened to for 30 hours before I realized I was bored out of my mind and stopped like 80% of the way through the book, my god someone get that man an editor (please don't use this statement to own me re: the quality of my own writing)

[^2]: now that I think about it, I don't know if the version of markdown used by dreamwidth supports footnotes, I think it's a non-standard feature that happened to be included in bearblog's MD flavor. I hope it is, because those are really fiddly and annoying to do in HTML. I guess I'll see

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8 hours for what I can't

2024-10-01T14:40:58Z

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

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Puzzle game weekend

2024-09-30T19:14:12Z

Kemco's Crazy Castle

I went on a bit of a puzzle game spree over the weekend, mostly action puzzle games. I was in the mood for a relaxing NES game I haven't played before, so I loaded up The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a game and franchise I was unaware of until Jeff Gerstmann ranked it in episode 9 (currently #104/374, a pretty decent showing. Well above the Spondylus Line.) It's a very basic movement game, sort of Lode Runner-esque but no digging. All you do is move around levels, going through doors, up and down stairs and through pipes trying to collect all the carrots in each level. There's a boxing glove you can pick up to defeat an enemy (usable once), objects scattered around some levels you can kick into enemies, and a potion that makes you invincible for about 5 seconds, and that's it as far as player mechanics. Most of the game is positioning, moving around trying not to be in the path of enemies, and figuring out how to exploit the enemy AI. The enemies do follow a script to try to get close to you but there's a bit of randomness baked in, so it can be tricky. If you pay close attention to the enemies, you learn how some of the enemies behave, so you'll be like "okay, the dark brown Sylvester goes up pipes but never down then, so I have to make sure I get the carrots at the top of the level quickly" or "Wile E. Coyote never goes through doors, so I have to save my boxing glove to deal with him." Little things, but it was enough to keep me entertained through all 60 levels. The later levels suffer from the same problem the NES port of Lode Runner has: the full level isn't on screen, so avoiding the enemies you can't see yet is often a matter of luck. But the game gives you an extra life after every level you complete and there's a password system, so it's forgiving enough to get through.

Lode Runner

I also tried the NES port of Lode Runner again. I wish they figured out a way to compensate for the offscreen enemy problem, because I really like how it looks and sounds. I made it through a dozen levels or so, but once you hit the levels with a lot of undiggable floors, it just gets too frustrating. I run right to get away from the enemies, clear out all the gold, head back left, whoops there's an enemy waiting on every viable path, I can't dig to get away from them, yay I'm dead. It's sad, but I gotta write this version off.

I tried to play proper Lode Runner, but I couldn't get the disk to work with the Apple II core (heh) in Bizhawk. I could've used a different emulator, but eh.

Kemco's normal castle

I tried the sequel to The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a Gameboy game known as Mickey Mouse IV in Japan, The Real Ghostbusters in North America, and Garfield Labyrinth in Europe (this series has the weirdest mess of licenses I've ever seen.) It's a totally different type of game than TBBCS: you can jump, you have a life meter, you collect differently-shaped keys to open doors, and you have a digging button for solving Lode Runner-esque block puzzles. You don't trap enemies in holes, you just occasionally need to figure out how to dig down in a way that won't cause you to become trapped; but because you can just jump out of the hole if you're about to become trapped, it makes it feel more like chores than a fun puzzle to solve. The time it takes for the blocks to respawn is interminable, and you have a time limit for completing each level. I'm not into time limits, in any game really, but especially one where I'm solving puzzles. There's no worse feeling than figuring out what you need to do, but being unable to execute the plan and get to the exit quickly enough before time runs out. Solving a puzzle and then losing anyway makes me want to not play anymore. So I bailed on this one pretty quickly. Honestly, it's hard to even call this one a puzzle game, it's more of a bad platformer. It's on the original Gameboy, so it looks and controls like shit. I mean, it's not awful; if it were 1993, I was 8 years old and stuck on a long car ride, I would've been happy to have it, but I'm not going to play it when I have other options.

Moblin Sokoban

I played a little bit of Moblin Sokoban. That's not its name, but it's a recreation of the original sokoban from 1982, first released in Japan on the Fujitsu FM-7 computer, using the Moblin sprite and other graphics from The Legend of Zelda. I loaded it up because I wanted a game I could play with one hand while I eat, because I'm kind of bored of watching videos recently (note to self: books are a thing. Read a book, you ADHDingus)

It didn't really work, because neither eating nor using the arrow keys is something that's easy to do with my left hand, but I played a dozen or so levels after I finished eating anyway. It's a good version of the game, very basic but snappy movement, and it looks good, but I wish it didn't provide metrics for how many moves it takes to solve each level. I went on a little rant about this on fedi, which I'll place behind a cut to spare anyone who's already seen it

mini rant

I like sokoban, but I don't like ones that show how many moves and how much time you take to finish the puzzle. Even if it's not gating my progress based on score, the number is always really high and it makes me feel like I did a bad job. Just let me feel good about solving the puzzle please

Like, this moblin sokoban is good https://suppilulemur.neocities.org but what does it mean that it took me nearly a thousand moves to solve this puzzle? I dunno, I assume it means I sucked! I neither have nor want context for this data, so why provide it?

I was being a little harsh, I don't dislike Moblin Sokoban because it provides these metrics, I can make myself ignore them, I just would prefer they weren't there.

Anyway, it has 90 levels, which are overall much larger and trickier than modern sokoban games, so it'll give me a good bit of entertainment.

Chip's Challenge

Finally, I brought it all around full circle with the intersection of sokoban and action puzzle games: Chip's Challenge. This is a pretty legendary game most people know from its inclusion in various Microsoft Entertainment packs in the mid-90s, but it originally came out on the Atari Lynx in 1989. I never thought I'd play a Lynx game, but I checked to see if that version has retro achievements, and it does, so that's the version I'm playing. The achievements are reasonable: there's one for finishing all 8 tutorial levels on your first try, which I did in about 5 minutes after my first loop; There's an achievement for viewing an easter egg accessible from the main menu, a psychedelic mandelbrot fractal generator; the rest of the achievements are just for playing the game.

Which is good, but there are 150 levels and this game is fucking hard. I've played a little bit of the Windows version, but I apparently didn't get far past the tutorial, because I'm in the 20s and these levels are already kicking my ass. It has the dreaded time limit, and the number of times I've run out of time after solving the puzzle is >1, but unlike Garfbusters, the design of this game is interesting enough that I want to keep going. I may end up forgetting about the gold achievements and cheating to give myself infinite time, but if that's what it takes, I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. But if the levels get so hard that I'm not having fun even with infinite time, I'm not gonna push it.

I'm particularly interested in a set of mechanics in one level that bears a strong resemblance to the puzzle in Slime Resgoo Towlr and went on to play a part in the sequel, Quest For The Radiant Cake. There's a button you can step on that will cause a block to appear. When you push the block into water, it becomes a platform you can stand on. You repeat this process to build a bridge across the water, but where and how to build the bridge requires a little bit of lateral thinking. I'm pretty sure I never got that far in the game before, so I don't think I was consciously ripping it off, and it feels nice to have independently had the same idea.

Another level has a similar setup, except the blocks are scattered all over the place and the map is HUGE. At least huge relative to the 9 tile x 9 tile view of the world afforded by the Lynx's miserable 160x102 screen. I spent some time wandering around the map wondering where I should even start, when a light bulb went off. "You know," I thought, "I bet one of these blocks has the flippers underneath it." There are four power-ups that allow you to move freely on the four types of rough terrain: the shield for fire, skates for ice, the magnet for moving walkways and flippers for water. With the flippers, I could walk straight to the exit like the water wasn't there at all. I moved just about every rock on the map, and I was right. That felt good, like I got one over on the level, like I found the one weird trick puzzle designers don't want you to know about. That's what I want out of a puzzle game.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I'll keep chipping (heh) away at Mario's Picross on my phone when I have a spare minute. I made it to the star puzzles, which are a lot more difficult than the mushroom puzzles, so progress is slower but still satisfying. I'll keep chipping (heh) away at Chip's Challenge when I have some time at home. I'll report back if I get frustrated and call it quits or if all the logic practice makes my brain spontaneously evolve into some kind of omniscient superintelligence with ESP. I figure it's 50/50.

Markdown update

Quick follow-up to something from the previous post: claudeb let me know that dreamwidth does, in fact, support markdown! There's no indication of this on the page where you write you entry, it looks more or less identical to the livejournal interface from 20 years ago, but if you bing "dreamwidth markdown", you'll find a 5 year old FAQ entry that explains that yes, dreamwidth does have full markdown support, you just have to start the entry with a special bangtag (!markdown). This whole entry has been written with markdown, so when I'm ready to copy it from my notes app into the post box and click "preview", I'll let you know how it works out:

Hey, it works perfectly! Thanks again claudeb

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Why are hats? home shrine advantage, it's been a week, markup cock-up

2024-09-27T22:10:22Z

I had the—cursed? Let's go with cursed—realization that briefly taking off my headphones to say hello to someone (usually just a co-worker in passing) is the modern equivalent of doffing one's hat. Like people on the internet say as a meme. I doff my cap to you, good sir or madam. People used to really do that. But now I just grab my headphones and pull them away for a second. Or if it escalates from polite greeting to brief chat, I put them around my neck. To show how much I value you, rather than revealing to you the most secret of my head hair, I will make an exception and let your words enter my knowledge canal. I think it makes more sense as a sign of respect, but... Look, this is a little embarrassing, but I've never really understood hats.

I understand them in terms of practicality. A hat with a wide brim can keep the sun out of your eyes. A thick hat can keep your head warm in the winter. I get all that. I don't understand hats as a social convention.

Hats used to be the thing. Look at any photo of a group of people outdoors for like the first 100 years after photography existed, everyone is wearing a hat. There were complicated rules and customs around hats, when and where you can wear them, where you hang them, which hats are appropriate to wear at which occasions. Hatters would give themselves chronic mercury poisoning to make popular styles of hats. This was a well-known phenomenon, and was in fact documented in a famous 19th century novel (which later went on to inspire The Matrix, the defining literary work of our current century in spite [or perhaps because?] of a conspicuous absence of hats) but it seems like society accepted their malady as the regrettable but necessary cost of having hats. What were we gonna do, not wear certain types of hats?

I'm glad the hat craze has died down, but some elements of it have carried over to the present day. I wasn't allowed to wear hats in school, but occasionally we were allowed a Hat Day as a special treat; but to me, wearing a hat to school seemed just as silly as not being allowed to wear a hat to school. I don't understand why rules mandating or forbidding hats exist at all, except for hard hats on construction sites, and ladies with big elaborate hats in 1940s movie theaters. It seems like it should be left entirely up to individual taste.

Anyway, I'm the only person I see wearing big over-the-ear headphones in public, and my extreme charisma and effortless good looks make me a preternatural trend-setter, so I expect doffing them will become the next big thing in polite gestures by, oh, let's say 2031.

Legends of the Hidden Temple

I always thought it was sketchy that the show had a team based on monkeys and also a location called Shrine of the Silver Monkey. There was no barracuda moat or iguana grotto. I think a fair game show should strive to eliminate even the appearance of favoritism.

Have a good weekend

And that's a week of journal entries in the can! I'm proud of my stick-to-itiveness, but I gotta say, I'm out of practice and the quality of my writing has really gone downhill. Writing on a phone will never feel natural or good to me, and I deeply resent this being my only window to the world for the majority of my life, and I see so many typos and grammatical errors and subject-verb disagreement and overly long clunky sentences that it's almost too daunting to look at when I get home; rewriting it to make it good would require more time and energy than I have left at the end of the day. I suppose I could cut the task in half, spend one day writing and the next day editing, but writing is more fun than editing even in ideal circumstances, and on a phone, 1000x moreso. Editing on a phone sucks way more than writing on a phone. Keyboard and mouse editing feels effortless in comparison: moving the cursor with laser precision like God intended, ctrl-X and ctrl-Ving bits of text around with reckless abandon, etc. Doing all that on a phone feels like folding origami with boxing gloves on. And if I want to mark up any hypertext, perhaps with some computer language designed for that purpose? Well, let's just say less than sign b greater than sign I MISS BEARBLOG less than sign forward slash b greater than sign.

Nah, dreamwidth is cool, there are a lot of things I enjoy about it (see 15 icons for an example. —ed.) But it is kinda funny how confident I was that I could effortlessly go back to a platform where I have to use HTML instead of markdown. I've been marking up hypertext since I was knee-high to a doodle bug, I thought, it'll be a piece of cake! Forgetting that, hey dummy, most of your writing in this blog has been on a device where getting to the </> characters requires eight sub-menus, two days' travel by carriage and a writ of free passage from the king. But I'm not ready to switch back just yet. Let's see how this plays out.

As far as editing is concerned, I'm going to try not worrying about it too much. This is for fun, and if I spend too much time and energy worrying about the not-fun part, I'm likely to burn myself out and not write at all, which would be a shame. Hopefully with practice my off-the-cuff writing will improve, and I already think it's acceptable. And in this era of plagiarism robots, "acceptable" is a higher bar for writing on the internet than it used to be 😬

Anyway, I'm taking the weekend off, so see you in a couple days. If you're reading via one of the feeds, reminder that you can leave feedback on any entry by clicking the link and logging in via openID, or leave a totally anonymous comment! IP tracking turned off. Questions and comments will be addressed on Monday.

If you like what I'm doing over here, I have a ko-fi and a Patreon. Drop a buck or two in the hat if you'd like to vote with your dollar for more of this stuff

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Gotta scam em all

2024-09-26T23:57:03Z

I was curious, so I looked a little bit more into the "currency trading cards" I stumbled on the subreddit for the other day. These all come from a website called cardsmiths.com. My first thought was "oh, maybe this is more innocent than I thought." The currency cards were front-and-center, but they also sell trading cards for licensed properties like The Golden Girls, Bob Ross, and Street Fighter. If they managed to get a license as wholesome as The Golden Girls, surely they can't be all bad. My spouse loves that show, so I even briefly thought that I might get her some as a fun gift.

Well, the wholesome licenses are a smokescreen, it's just as shady as it looks. The first red flag is the big "we accept cryptocurrency!" Banner that's always at the top of the screen. Okay they have one product aimed at crypto weirdos, but maybe the rest of it is normal.

The second red flag is the price. The cheapest set of Golden Girls cards you can get is $20, and I wasn't sure at first how many cards you get for that price. The SKU label is "2-pack collector's box" which I initially thought meant you get 2 cards in a fancy box, which would be unhinged. You have to zoom in on the box to see what you actually get. "2 packs per box, 5 cards per pack". (This seems to be the base quantity across the board, I don't think they sell individual 5-card packs.)

10 cards for $20 is $2 per card, which might be acceptable if this was like a boutique, limited-run novelty set where you're buying the whole set at once, but if they're being mass-produced at a level where they sell blind packs, that's totally outrageous. Magic: The Gathering packs have shot up in price in recent years, but a booster pack of the most recent expansion works out to about $0.43 a card. You also get a decent discount for buying in bulk: a box of 36 booster packs is $175, which works out $0.35 a card, or about 20% cheaper than base price. Still not exactly a thrifty buy, but hey, at least with these cards you get to play a game.

You can also get the Golden Girls cards in bulk. The biggest box you can get is a "master case" of 48 boxes. Each box contains two packs of 5 cards, so 480 cards.

The master case of Golden Girls cards costs $950. $1.98 a card. A whopping 2% cheaper than buying individual boxes.

Fucking bonkers.

Look, trading cards have been around since the 1860s, and it's always been a little exploitative. Baseball cards were a sleazy way to separate kids from their pocket money. But they weren't an outright scam. Kids weren't buying them to collect a whole set, or as an "investment", they were buying them to collect the players they like, or the teams they like. There is entertainment value in trading with your friends and trying to get the cards you want. But this is a perversion of that. No one should ever spend a thousand bucks on a box of cards. The only reason to do that is if there's an expectation that they will someday be worth more than that, but here's the thing: nothing sold as a collectible will increase in value.

Baseball cards and comics sold in the first half of the 20th century shot up in value precisely because they weren't seen as collector's items. They were a bit of fun for kids that got tossed out once the novelty wore off. The ones that weren't thrown away are now worth a lot of money, because there's a bigger market of people wanting to recapture a bit of childhood nostalgia than there are copies of those objects. Adults who saw this happen in the 80s and 90s thought this would be a repeatable phenomenon, and they stocked up on baseball cards and comics carefully saved in plastic sleeves and mylar bags, and now they have a bunch of worthless perfectly-preserved paper and cardboard. They're worth less than nothing, because if the comics were read and the cards were traded and enjoyed, they'd at least had entertainment value.

The objects from the 80s and 90s that became valuable collectibles are all the things no one thought was worth keeping around: computers and electronics and video games. You always threw out or sold or gave away the old thing when you upgraded to the shiny new thing. And now we're seeing a similar thing happening to video games that happened to comics in the 80s. People are selling physical copies of homebrew console games for $60-$100, and people are buying them as collectibles, because they're thinking "if only I held onto that copy of Magical Chase when I had my turbografx, it'd be worth thousands! Now I have another chance!" But everyone buying new homebrew or licensed reproduction carts are thinking exactly the same thing. They're all going to sit around on a shelf, barely if ever be played, and eventually become landfill.

Anyway, the third red flag is the submenu at the top of the page that says "redemption programs". Explore it and learn about the sketchy lottery that they're running on top of the base scam. Randomly inserted into packs of cards are cards you can redeem for varying amounts of cryptocurrency. No prize values or odds are given, but the example image has a card they claim can be redeemed for 1 bitcoin, so they at least want to plant the idea in your head that you might get a card theoretically worth $65,000 (at time of writing)

Now I'm not a lawyer, there might be something about this that makes it technically legal, maybe there's some loophole that says it's not considered a lottery if you're not giving away cash or physical goods, but even if it's legal, it's still sick. Fuck this company, and fuck whoever agreed to give them the Golden Girls license. Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia would've kicked your ass

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On special inserts, Christian media, medicine quest

2024-09-25T22:14:08Z

Correction

Apparently "special insert" isn't a newspaper term? Either that or there's no documented use of the phrase online, because when I search for it, all I get is pages about fastening hardware and an incredibly sad subreddit for cryptocurrency-related trading cards. I thought it was a term used when a magazine would would put a little special promotional mini-issue in with the newspaper. Not like Parade, that was just the "Sunday insert" or "Sunday magazine", but sometimes you'd get a miniature copy of, like, Good Housekeeping or something. Now I don't know what term they'd use for that, but that's what I was trying to evoke in the last post with "special insert": a special mini issue of Garbage Digest in your normal journal entry.

Christian media

Hey Christians, if secular values are so bad, why can Christian media only succeed within a very narrow niche, or with a huge list of caveats? If Christian values are self-evidently good, shouldn't way more Christian movies and books and music projects find mainstream success? Like you've got Chicken Soup for the Soul, the paintings of Thomas Kincaid, and The Passion of the Christ was a big crossover hit (not saying they should have been big, but I'll give you the Ws) (heh. "Cross" over)

And... That's pretty much it? At least in my lifetime. Heck, I'll also give you Veggie Tales. That's 4 in as many decades. Maybe Jesus fans should stop whining about society not appreciating them, and spend more time honing their craft so they can make something good enough to succeed on its own merits, rather than "succeeding" because they convinced enough weirdos to buy 5 tickets each. Either that, or embrace your niche. Having a small but dedicated fanbase is nothing to be ashamed of. Yeah, Christianity was the only game in town for a very long time, but tastes and trends change. If all you do is sit around and complain that no one appreciates you like they used to, you're never gonna grow. It's a vicious cycle of stagnation. Adapt or die, assholes Sorry, I know you don't like evolution metaphors, it's just really applicable here. Nothing against anyone reading this who is a Christian, this is squarely aimed at Angel Studios and their ilk. If you want people to like you, make better shit. It's not a mystery

Brain bad

That's probably going to be it for today, since I didn't have my meds, since for some reason it seems to be impossible to get my doctor's office to do the pre-authorization at any point before the day I run out. Like, my appointment was Sep. 10, they knew a dose increase would require a PA, they had nearly two weeks to do it, but they just sat on it until I tried to get my meds and couldn't? I guess next time I'll just have to call every day until it's fucking done, because this has happened over and over. I'm just trying to get back to the dose of meds I was on before when Medicaid made me start taking them and try some other bullshit instead. Now that the other two didn't work, I'm allowed to take the medicine that did work. How very kind of them. But I can't just start at the dose that worked before, I have to start with the lowest dose and increase it bit by bit, month after agonizing month, and it never occurs to them that I'm going to need the new meds when I run out of my old meds. They can't grasp this concept. I'm so fucking tired

Later that evening

Meant to post this much earlier cuz my brain is still oatmeal and I didn't anticipate having anything else to write. But then I ran out of data. Womp womp

After 4 or 5 phone calls to doctor and pharmacy and wasting several valuable minutes of brain time on hold, I got my rx filled. The pharmacy is in one of those awkward locations where it would take longer to catch buses than to walk, so I walked. About 30 minutes. Luckily it's cool enough that this is safe, unluckily it's raining. Luckily I had my umbrella. Unluckily I *still* had to wait for them to fill my prescription even though I talked to them an hour previously, so I missed the next bus I needed to catch to get me home, so I'll be home at 18h15 instead of 17h15. I'll post this as soon as I have wifi. I need a vacation.

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I've got a brain problem situation on my hands

2024-09-24T19:37:09Z

I saw my notes app on my home screen, so I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts. I don't know how things worked out this way. Serendipity, I guess.

I wish it was easier to clear the contents of the current note. I have to long-press somewhere on the screen, tap the three dots to expose the "select all" option, tap "select all", then press backspace. I guess it's not that burdensome, I just wish there was an "erase all" button I could tap. I can delete the whole note, but then I have to create a new note, which is another whole process. I don't want a process, I just want to clear the buffer. Rip the paper out of the typewriter and roll in a clean sheet. Actually I guess that's directly analogous to deleting the current note and creating a new one. Look, Tuesdays are rough for me right now. Apologies.

Tuesday is currently my therapy day, and for ease of making up time it's scheduled basically first thing in the morning. I normally have to be at work at 8:30, and therapy is either 08h00-09h00 or 08h30-09h00. She's usually able to schedule me for the full hour though. I have a 30 minute walk to work, so in theory I'm an hour late to work and I can stay an hour late, but in practice it takes me time to recover and there's usually *some*thing I need to do in the morning. This morning it was seeing the landlord about something I have to be there in person to sign a thing for, and that took some time, so I got to work at 10:30. My ADHD makes me sensitive to changes in my routine, so therapy is a little extra hard, but I'm being really brave about it.

One thing we've been talking about is whether I've been misdiagnosed and have actually had autism my whole life. My spouse suggested the possibility, and at first I thought it was unlikely, because there are a lot of symptoms I associate with autism that I don't experience, and in many cases am the diametric opposite. I don't infodump to people easily, I actually have a really hard time opening up to people. I don't get lifelong hyperfixations, my brain bounces around from thing to thing (for example, I might have a blog I update every day for a year and then lose interest for several months.) I don't struggle with empathy or telling how people feel by their expression, if anything I'm a little oversensitive in that respect. I'm reasonably okay picking up social cues. I don't stim or self-soothe (I like to fidget with things when my hands aren't doing anything, maybe that counts.) And I know autistic people aren't a monolith and don't all have the same struggles, and I know ADHD symptoms have some overlap with autism, I just thought I didn't identify with enough of the classical autism traits to qualify.

But I don't know if all of my neurodivergence can be explained by ADHD either. I don't know what it is. My therapist wasn't dismissive of the idea that it might be autism, but said she can't really help with the diagnosis and suggested I ask my psychiatrist, which I will at my our appointment. I asked my previous psychiatrist, who thankfully I only saw twice before he left for a different practice, and he was extremely dismissive. It was for practical reasons—he said the test is expensive, and an autism diagnosis wouldn't help me get any additional benefits or accomodations that I don't already qualify for with an ADHD diagnosis. And sure, fair enough, I'm not approaching this from a medicalist point of view where I'm like "I need an official diagnosis or I can't have autism", and in a perfect world, no diagnosis would be necessary. I could just be like "this is how my brain is, these are the reasonable accomodations I need,", and that'd be it. My current job is very accommodating. They let me work with the overhead fluorescent lights off (we have big windows that provide a lot of natural light) and they allow me to wear headphones all day while I work. But I might not be here forever, and wherever I work next might be like "Why do you need sensory accommodations? You're not autistic?" And maybe my psych can write a note like "my client needs these accomodations for ADHD" and everything will be fine, but I dunno. My current psych is a lot better, and he'll probably bring up the same cost/benefit warning, but I don't think he'll dismiss the idea out of hand. And hey, maybe I'm not! Maybe it's all ADHD or maybe I have some as-yet undiagnosed form of neurodivergence. I don't fundamentally care about the actual label, I just wanna understand my brain and get through life with as little suffering as possible. And I think I have an above-average understand of my brain and what it needs, I just need to figure out how to fulfill those needs in a social system that is hostile towards and punishes what it considers abnormal.

Garbage Digest special insert:

Oh no! I tried to open chunblr, the app for current traffic conditions in the tunnel under the English channel, but I accidentally downloaded chumblr, the app for information about shark bait! Is my life a sitcom or what??

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Achieving the proper balance, my top 8 apps, the joy of picross

2024-09-23T18:32:12Z

We're about ten months into the year of the journal and so far it's off to a rocky start. I wanted to post at least once a week, and my track record has been less than stellar.

The main factor I attribute this to is an absolute glut of work at my job. When I did my 100 consecutive days of blog posting last year, it was a time when it was possible to get caught up on work and have the tiniest sliver of downtime in which to goof off, and writing on my phone was a good use of that time. I can't use my work computer for anything fun, because everything I do on it is monitored and recorded. Sitting at my desk using my phone is acceptable, because we live in a reality where everyone does it, and no one wants to be the one to not do it to enforce the rule. As long as I'm getting my work done, and not flagrantly using my phone all day, I'm in the clear.

At the time, reading and writing were the only things I really wanted to do on my phone. I don't use any big social media platforms, and my fediverse timeline is tightly curated, so doomscrolling is thankfully a habit I was able to break. It doesn't take me long to catch up with the posts I missed while I was asleep, and then I'm done with the fediverse for awhile. That gives me a lot of time for creative activities.

Unfortunately, I realized that I could download retroarch and be getting retro achievements on my phone. So now that it's been a time of year that we're somewhat caught up, I've been spending time I might've otherwise have used writing playing Mario's Picross. Which I've learned is one of the best games on the gameboy. It came out in 1995, it should have been to the gameboy pocket what tetris was to the original gameboy. Everyone and their grandma should've been playing Mario's Picross, your local news should've been running stories about picross fever taking over the country, Andrew Lloyd Webber should've covered the picross theme under the pseudonym Dr. Chip.

The good news is, there's a very limited subset of games I can tolerate playing on a phone. It's pretty much just picross and digital board games. Even RPGs aren't playable for long stretches, because I have to slide my thumb around a virtual D-pad to navigate the world, which feels extremely bad. Digital board games are the best, because they only require occasional screen taps. Picross obviously isn't as good as playing on an actual Gameboy or something with a controller, but it's tolerable; and also, I've tried to play native android picross games, and I find the emulated gameboy game easier to control. On android, the boxes in the 15x15 puzzles are too small to consistently fill the way I intend. Moving a cursor with a virtual D-pad sucks, but it's better than the alternative.

I already got all the achievements in Monopoly for the megadrive (which I actually owned as a kid) and Life+Payday+Yahtzee for the GBA, so once I'm done with Mario's Picross I'll probably be done with phone achievements. I might check out Mario's Super Picross on the super famicom, but if it just ends up being the same puzzles on a different platform I don't think it'll hold my interest. (I might be in trouble if anyone makes achievements for the Itadaki Street fan translations.)

Picross is good for playing in small chunks, 10 or so minutes at a time (which is good because that's usually the amount of time I have) but I want to start jotting thoughts in my notes app, because that's how I managed to keep my 100 day streak. I would have sporadic thoughts throughout the morning, the time of day my brain is working, and just keep a log running throughout the day. Then when I get home, I have enough brain left to do some light editing, formatting, title-thinking-of, and posting.

I moved the notes app back to my home screen. I use a custom home screen app called oLauncher, which limits the number of apps on the home screen to a maximum of 8. It's a text list rather than a grid of icons. If I need another app, I swipe up and can either select from a list, or start typing the name of the app. This is so my attention is drawn mostly to the things that are important and I want to do. I *can* use other apps, there's just a little more friction to prevent me from over-apping. My top 8 currently is: (no particular order)

An audiobook player
An ebook reader
An instant messenger
A fediverse client
A music player
The notes app
The bus pass app
Weather

I can also access clock settings by tapping the time, and bring up the calendar by tapping the date. I think that encompasses most of what I actually want to do on a phone. I don't have a web browser on my home screen because using the web on a phone is kind of a drag.

The app I replaced to make room for notes is newpipe, which is super useful, but I typically download the audio from YouTube videos in batches when I'm home and listen to them in the audiobook player when I'm at work, so it's fine behind the swipe-gate.

Anyway, now that notes is front and center, hopefully I'll remember to use it more. I have ADHD and tend to forget activities I enjoy are a thing.

Like writing in this journal! Hello! I'm back and this time I'm hopefully going to remember that writing is a thing I enjoy. Please look forward to more loosely-connected bursts of cognition loosely edited together into whatever this is

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