Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

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?

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!

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.

( mushroom pics )

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

Correction

Christian media

Brain bad

Later that evening