bluelander | Entries tagged with meta

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 🙏

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

under construction

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.

controllers

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:

controllers

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.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Venetian Snares - I'm Sorry I Failed You

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

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: DJ Rozwell - Satan in the Suburbs

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 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

Current Mood: focused
Current Music: Strawberry Girls - Bird Technology Pt. 1

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

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: _ensnare_ - Inevitable Sound Shower

Youtube

Now that I'm more active on youtube again, I have to resist the self-destructive compulsion to constantly check my analytics page. Like many algorithmic validation machines, it's a lot like a slot machine for feeling bad about myself. Every time I "pull to refresh" is another pull of the lever. I stare at the view graph, hoping a few bars will pop up. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do, and I feel a glimmer of hope. 5 views in 5 minutes? That must mean youtube is showing my video to people! I refresh again, hoping for more. Sometimes they keep coming, and I keep pulling, but I'm inevitably let down. No likes, no subscriptions, no comments, no indication that any of those people watched more than 30 seconds or whatever the minimum amount of time is to count as a view.

And my brain knows that this is fine. The videos I make appeal to a narrow niche of people. The odds of a small handful of views containing people who fall into that niche are very low. But the part of me that desires validation can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong, that my videos are bad and I'm wasting my time and I should give up.

This isn't true! I'm having fun with my friend, of course it's not a waste of time. But the social media content machine is designed to make us feel worthless and unimportant, so we get addicted to trying to do better, so the subset of the population most vulnerable to that addiction do more and more harmful and outrageous things to please the algorithm and get ever more validation while churning out content that makes the corporation as much ad revenue as they can generate. Shit's fucked.

I've mostly managed to eliminate this sort of algorithmic bullying from my life. I stopped using twitter years ago. I moved to the fediverse, which isn't perfect but is much healthier, and has tools that help me use it in a less stressful way. I don't post on facebook and mostly use it to look at what my spouse posts and communicate with her. I intentionally use a journal platform where I have no idea how many people are reading my posts. I don't want to know! But if I want to play TV presenter on the internet, and have any hope of the people who want to watch it finding it, youtube and their obsessive analytics are the only games in town. Oh sure, I could find a peertube instance that can accommodate a ~4-500MB weekly upload, or just upload them to archive.org, but that means even the small number of viewers I get now would drop to approximately zero. A rounding error. I'm grateful for my fans that would follow me to whatever platform I posted on, there are a couple of them, but like, I think this new series could potentially appeal to at least a couple thousand people in the world. Not enough to quit my day job, but enough to maybe get a few nice comments on each video and possibly bring in a little extra money each month. I always rejected the idea of making ad revenue from videos, but having a job where I don't make a living wage has made me a lot less precious about it. I'm still going to block ads, and I have no beef with anyone who does, but there's a sizable number of youtube viewers for whom ads are normal and just the way internet TV works—kinda like how watching 22 minute shows with 8 minutes of ads per episode was how it worked when I was growing up. I can't imagine going back to that.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I started playing Cookie Clicker on my phone.

Cookie clicking

I played Cookie Clicker on the web when it was new. I liked it at first, but I ended up hating it because it turned me into a greasy little optimization goblin who would obsessively micromanage everything for optimum cookie output. I would, like, sell old buildings so I have enough cookies to buy new ones, I'd look up forums and websites where people talked about cookie clicker strategies, leave it running on my computer with an autohotkey script to continuously click while I was AFK, I got up to like the octillions or nonillions or something when I realized that I hated myself and every second I spent looking at clicker. I deleted my save and vowed to never play it or any other idle game again.

Since then, I've chilled out quite a bit, and I realized that Cookie Clicker could be ideal for preventing me from constantly checking my analytics, and other things on the internet, while I'm at work and should probably look like I'm working most of the time. I leave it running in a little stand on my desk, screen brightness turned down pretty low. I have an app that lets me rotate my screen 180 degrees, so I can keep it plugged in, and I set the screen to never turn off when it's on power. I mostly keep the stats tab up, so it doesn't look like I'm looking at a big cookie to anyone who glances over my shoulder. Occasionally, a yellow dot will pop up on the cookie tab to let me know that a golden cookie spawned. I click it, and usually I don't have to do anything but go back to the stats tab; occasionally it's a click frenzy or cookie storm, which requires me to furiously tap my phone for 15-30 seconds, but otherwise I just let it go back to doing its thing. I occasionally take a short break from work to do some building management (always buying, never selling) or buy upgrades and research. It barely takes any time at all, helps me stay on track with my work, and still provides little bursts of excitement when I get a nice golden cookie combo. It's maybe not the healthiest thing, but it's certainly better than refreshing my youtube stats over and over. You see, the number can only go up.

Hundred dollars

I found a hundred dollar bill on the way to work. Weirdly, this isn't the first or even the second time I've found money during my walk; I walk through a relatively middle-class part of my neighborhood, and past houses where people can afford to be careless when digging their keys out of their pocket or purse, and it's not well-lit enough at night that it'd be easily noticeable, especially if someone was hurrying to get in from the snow or rain. But $100 is definitely the most money I've ever found from a single windfall, and I thought it was worth celebrating. My spouse and I are going to treat ourselves to something, but we haven't decided what yet.

Button sticking

The button on my headphones started sticking. I love them: the brand is 3M Worktunes Connect, and they're rated to provide 24 dB of noise protection. They connect via bluetooth, but there's also a 3.5mm headphone jack you can use with just about any cable. I always use them wirelessly though. It's been life-changing. I can't express how much better quality of life I have not having to hear the noises of everyday life that overstimulate me and wear my brain down. The wirelessness is secondary, but also nice: it's quite freeing not needing to be tethered to whatever I'm listening to.

That said, I've never been a fan of the "one button does everything" UI philosophy. There's one button. You hold it for a second to turn them on or off. You double-press it to pair them with a new device. You press the button to pause or resume playback. You double-press it to either skip to the next track or skip ahead a few seconds depending on the app's settings. You triple-press the button to skip backwards, but not every app respects this. Needless to say, in the 3 years I've had this pair, the button's been put through its paces.

It's rubbery, and used to make a nice "click" when pressed, but it's lost its click ever since it started sticking. When the sticking started, the headphones would continuously turn themselves off and back on, because it was like someone was holding in the button. I managed to dig it out with an unbent paperclip, but it's not trustworthy. I no longer feel like I can do single presses with it. I think I can get by with just holding the button in to turn them on... it's already paired with both my devices, so I don't need to activate that function, and they turn off when I plug them in to charge, and I can use the controls on my phone or computer, it's just more of a pain in the ass... so as long as I can hold the button in to turn them on in the morning without breaking it, I shouldn't need to replace them. Crossing my fingers. If I was the cynical type, I'd make a comment about finding $100 and then my $50 headphones immediately breaking, so even when I catch a break I can't catch a break... but I'm trying to stay positive. Even if I need to replace my headphones, I'm able to now where I might not've been before, and an extra $50 on top of that is still way better than nothing. Still, it'd be nice if everything in life didn't have to come with a caveat, you know?

Dreamwidth's crappy trigger-happy auto-filling tags

Sorry if you got a premature notification for this post. I was entering tags, and for the second time, thought that I could press "enter" to accept the tag that was currently auto-filled, since that's how it works on most UIs with this sort of feature. But it turns out the "post" button still has enter key priority, causing me to fire off the entry before it was ready. What, I'm supposed to press the right arrow key? I guess so. Maybe now that I've written about it, it'll stick in my brain.

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: Mates of State - For The Actor

11,100 gecs

A few years ago I decided I didn't like the band 100 gecs based on the first song of theirs I looked up, "Money Machine". Well, recently I had seen a couple tracks recommended on youtube while I was looking up some other music, and I heard two that I really liked: "Ringtone" from their first album, 1000 gecs (1Kg) and "Hollywood Baby" from their second album, 10,000 gecs (10Kg). So I decided to give them another shot, and I'm glad I did.

1Kg is my less favorite of the two, but there are still a few tracks I enjoy. I can tolerate or even enjoy heavy vocal modulation/distortion up to a point, but 1Kg crosses that line more than I'd like. "745 sticky", "800db Cloud", "Ringtone" and "gec 2 U" are the 1Kg tracks I enjoyed.

I liked 10Kg quite a bit more. The standout track for me is "The Most Wanted Person in the United States", which I've listened to dozens of times. I also really liked "I Got My Tooth Removed". I found it incredibly relatable, and I liked how earnest and vulnerable the song was compared to their other ones.

Across the whole album, the speech distortion and modulation has been toned down to a level that I'm able to enjoy. I think the only track on 10Kg I actively dislike is "One Million Dollars", but I've always had an aversion to speech samples repeated ad nauseam without sufficient variety. I like how Hideki Naganuma uses them, chopping them up and mixing them in different ways throughout the song, but "the system is down"-style repetitive techno sample drops always grate on me.

Other than that, 10Kg is a great evolution of their style. 1Kg felt like they were trying to make a meme album, 10Kg feels like they're getting more confident in their songwriting without sacrificing the humor. They're still not taking themselves seriously but their new music has a lot more artistry and maturity than 1Kg, in my opinion. I look forward to seeing what they do next.

On Cinema

There's a new season of On Cinema On Demand (FKA On Cinema! and More in the Morning, FKA On Cinema At The Cinema) which is exciting. Other than the Oscar special in March, they took 2023 off in solidarity with the writer's strike, which worked out for me: I discovered the show in mid-2023 after watching The Trial of Tim Heidecker on a weird random whim, and spent a few months getting caught up on everything from the On Cinemaverse I could get my hands on (which is most of it: there's some bonus material I haven't seen because I don't have a HEI network subscription, but all the main content I've been able to watch either free on youtube or find on soulseek)

They've released 3 episodes so far, and I've enjoyed them. I'm a little surprised the Amato Group storyline is still going, I sort of expected there to be an off-screen universe reset at some point, but Tim's more dedicated to the Amatos then ever. Tim (sorry, T. Amato) now has a fictional mental illness with the sole symptom of being unable to tell movies from reality; now that he's medically unable to watch movies, he brought on a mysterious new cohost, Joey P., a really great Joe Rogan-style meathead podcaster character, who for reasons unexplained records all of his reviews in a separate segment which is spliced into the main show, much to the confusion and consternation of Gregg. Gregg consistently asking Joey what score he gave the movie and Tim getting more and more pissed off as he repeatedly has to explain that the audience saw the rating in the other segment is great. Also Gregg doing the math in real time to convert from Joey's 4-star scale to On Cinema's traditional 5 buckets of popcorn is a great bit. I'm a Gregghead, so getting to hear Gregg explain movie runtime trivia before giving them five buckets of popcorn in the present day is like a warm blanket, although it loses a lot when you don't have the graphics and the "pop" sound effect. Hopefully this is addressed later in the season.

The most interesting thing about this season so far is that it's also being released as a podcast. On Cinema started out as an audio podcast in 2011, but it's been exclusively a video series since 2013. It's especially strange that there would be a free podcast feed now that the videos are locked behind a paywall. I got even more curious when I saw how much longer the audio episodes are than the videos. I assumed it would just be the audio tracks from the episodes: did they record additional material for the podcast? It can't all be ads, right?

Friends, it's all ads. At first, I wasn't sure whether it was a bit. Every ad in episode 1 was for Carrabba's, an Italian restaurant I had never heard of, and they were maximally intrusive. Ads would be played randomly, interrupting people mid-word, and it was always two 15-30 second ads back-to-back. I thought it was a fictional restaurant and was a meta-commentary on the state of podcast ads, but I looked it up, and it's a real restaurant, there just aren't any around where I live. "Huh", I thought, "maybe the ads are real."

In episode 2 I started using a stopwatch to time how many minutes of the show were commercials. Of the 25m44s runtime, 11m30s were ads. There were still Carrabba's ads, but other ads started creeping in. Some were very typical podcast ads, stuff like Blue Apron and T-Mobile, but it was starting to get weirder. There was an ad for the Morongo Casino Resort and Spa, a real business located in Cabazon, CA. At the end of the ad the announcer assured me it's located less than 90 minutes from wherever I am. Which for 2100 miles would be a pretty impressive trip.

Episode 3 was 12m30s of ads for 27m02s of runtime, and this is where it really starts to go off the rails. It's still the audio from the show, but now the ads are playing on top of each other, 2 or 3 at a time. You'll get a few seconds from the middle of an ad sporadically interrupting the show, then an unbearably long block of ads a few minutes later. There was an ad for a Philippines airline and Malaysian pizza hut (when I looked up the promotion, I found a 2016 upload of the ad on youtube.) Total chaos. I still have no idea how many, if any, of these ads are legit.

I'm kind of conflicted, because as much as I hate listening to real ads, the bit wouldn't work if they were obviously fake. It's an incredible parody of the state of podcast advertising in 2024, I just don't know where it can go from here. There's usually 10 episodes in a season and they've reached peak unlistenability by episode 3, so I'm really curious what happens next. I'm expecting bits of the show audio will start to be cut, and eventually it's just a wall-to-wall cacophony of random ads. How long I'm willing to endure this for the sake of art remains to be seen, but I'll definitely listen to the next one. Whatever it'll be, I'm intrigued. I hope they're making at least some money from the podcast. Whether I keep listening or not, I'll download each episode. Maybe this can be my requital for pirating the show.

Snow

Yesterday it got above freezing for the first time in a couple weeks. It got up to 40F, but there was still a fuck-ton of snow on the ground. What the hell. How did it stay frozen if it's above freezing? Messed up.

Snow didn't use to bother me so much, but I used to live somewhere people shoveled and salted sidewalks. I guess they don't do that anymore. I love snow in theory, I love the cold, I love how freshly fallen snow looks; I just don't like having to choose between walking in the snow and maybe slipping and dying, or walking in the road and maybe getting hit by a car and dying. I usually pick the road. Most people are usually slightly more careful in snowy conditions, and I figure I have better odds of making it if my feet and ankles aren't in pain from walking on hard uneven terrain. We didn't get a real snow this year until relatively late, well into January, and I was hoping I wouldn't see any this year, but alas. It's currently 51 and there's STILL snow on the sidewalk, it's soft and slushy and patchy enough that I can walk through it with a minimum of pain, but it still got pretty slick in spots. There's a lot more traffic when I'm leaving work than when I'm walking to work, so I'm more hesitant to walk in the road in the evenings. It's going to be 60 on Wednesday and 66 on Thursday, surely that'll be the last of it, if there's any justice in the world.

15 icons

To end on a happier note, one thing I didn't realize I was missing about a livejournal-like writing platform is the ability to upload multiple icons, and choose which one you want to set for each post. How sad that this 25-year-old feature still feels fresh and novel. I have a bad habit of being mercurial about avatars on social media. I'm sure I change mine enough to be annoying for fediverse posters who rely on visual cue to keep peoples' identities straight. It's not like I change to a different raccoon picture every time, I pick wildly different avatars based on how I'm feeling at the moment I decide to change it. I feel bad that some people are frustrated by it, and I understand if they want to unfollow me, but if I see the same picture next to my name on whatever I post for too long, I start to feel resentful at pigeonholing myself. Like there's more to me than just being a raccoon, y'know?

But on Dreamwidth, it's okay! I'm meant to be mercurial, it's how the platform was designed! Even the 15 icons I get as a free user is plenty to make me feel able to express myself. I've been slowly adding old and new avatars, and I'm up to 11. I'm sure I'll be fine once I hit 15, I'll probably delete old ones and add new ones periodically, as old interests fade and new ones appear. It's a cool way to express myself that I didn't know I wanted. Maybe that subconsciously influenced my decision to switch to Dreamwidth. Whatever, I think I'll be happy here

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: 100 gecs - Doritos & Fritos

Back when I occasionally had some disposable income to spend on unnecessary tech junk, I got myself a Thinkpad X60 on ebay. It's a lovely little computer, one of my favorite form factors for a laptop. It's got a matte 4:3 display and a real non-chiclet keyboard that feels quite nice to type on. I had recently seen Vwestlife's video about it and there were plenty available on ebay for a reasonable price, so I picked one up. I bought that 10-year-old computer 7 years ago, and it's still going strong.

My original idea was to turn it into a dedicated portable word processor, and it served that function quite nicely. But at the time, I was working somewhere I had a bit of downtime and a computer I was reasonably sure wasn't being monitored, so I could do most of my writing there. I was also working the graveyard shift, so my unusual hours prevented me from going to the sorts of places I would use a portable word processor, cafes and restaurants and the library and such. So it didn't see much use at first.

I was glad I had it when my desktop computer died, because despite being nearly two decades old, it's still quite a capable little machine once you have some lightweight version of linux on it. I don't mean it's capable for what most people use the internet for, but it's more than capable for the sort of things I do. Firefox can sort of barely play youtube videos if you put it on the lowest quality, but if I used yt-dlp or an invidious instance to download them, VLC could play 720p video no problem (and on a 1024x768 screen, 720p is all you need.) I could play emulated games with retroarch and my USB controller. It even connected to my bluetooth headphones seamlessly. I could listen to music and browse the fediverse and read the occasional article. I could download books to read from libgen and play Cave Story. What else do I need?

Well, it's not a good machine for game development. Most of the tools I use will run on it, but the small screen and inability to plug it into a monitor really made it not suitable for any kind of creative work other than writing. Good for consumption, not so good for production.

Luckily, I now have a proper modern 2015 computer with Windows 7 I can plug into my monitor, so the trusty Thinkpad went back into storage. But recently I've been thinking of ways I can encourage myself to write more, so I decided it's time to make it a word processor again, and I thought it'd be interesting to some people if I talked about how. Distraction-free writing is something people are interested in, and there are apps and absurdly expensive bespoke devices available to help people achieve this, so maybe some people besides me would be interested in DIYing it.

First off, you obviously don't need a Thinkpad X60 to accomplish this, it's just what I like to type on. Any computer with a USB port and a proper configurable BIOS will work. You'll need a USB drive you can format, and it can be as small and cheap as possible. My current one is a 4GB microSD card in a microSD-SD adapter in a USB adapter. Not the most convenient option, but it's what I have. When I have a few bucks I'd like to get one of those tiny ones that sits almost flush with the USB port.

I used a Windows program called Rufus to format the card and create a bootable DOS flash drive. I then searched for a suitable DOS text editor. I had originally intended to just use EDIT.COM, the classic text editor that came with DOS 5.0 and later, but I discovered that it doesn't support wordwrapping, so it's good for editing .ini files and such but not suitable for the kind of longform writing I want to do with it. I tried a couple full-fledged word processors (George R.R. Martin famously swears by WordStar on a DOS machine to get his writing done) but they're overkill for my purposes: I don't need to do any text formatting and I don't need any advanced features, I just need to make a text file and transfer it to my main computer.

I settled on FreeDOS Edit 0.9a, a clone of EDIT.COM for the FreeDOS clone operating system. It looks exactly like EDIT.COM out of the box, right down to the eye-searing white-on-blue default color scheme, but it does thankfully have a monochrome option. Most crucially, it adds the missing wordwrap feature.²

When I want to write, wherever I am, I pull the laptop out of my backpack, stick in my USB drive, and press the power. It boots up almost instantly. I added a line to my AUTOEXEC.BAT file that immediately launches the editor with my BUFFER.TXT file, so I'm right where I left off.

( Short video demonstrating bootup time (1.4MB) )

Of course, I can create and save and load other text files if I want to work on something else. There's no on-screen battery indicator, but if the battery light on the machine itself starts blinking, I just hit CTRL-S and I can be assured nothing will be lost. With an incredibly light OS and no spinning disk, even this 20-year-old battery lasts a remarkably long time, and I've never found myself in a situation where the battery wears out before I do. This whole entry was written on the thinkpad over the course of a couple hours, and I could probably keep going for several hours more.

So instead of a bespoke device that costs six hundred freaking dollars for a single-board computer, mechanical keyboard and e-ink display, consider visiting ebay or a secondhand store and giving one of the thousands of old, obsolete and unloved laptops a second lease on life. You can get an old school³ chromebook on ebay for 30 bucks. I don't know how easy it is to install DOS on them, but there are guides that can help you jailbreak a chromebook and install linux; a text-only linux distro and micro will give you much the same experience.

2. Minor caveat: FDEDIT does "hard" line wrapping, so the text is formatted for the screen, but the file has a line break every 40 characters or so. Basically all it does is press "enter" for me once the cursor reaches the edge of the screen. Not having to do that is better than using EDIT.COM, but I'll keep looking for a good editor that doesn't do this. In the meantime, it's not too hard to fix the superfluous line breaks in post. ↩

3. An old chromebook that was used in a school, not "old-school". ↩

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: synchro//start - 宇宙レーザー

Now that I'm writing somewhere that hopefully has compliant RSS feeds, this is just a test to see if I can use MastoFeed to send new updates to my botsin.space account without everything breaking. I've just been doing it manually, which sort of defeats the point of a bot, in my opinion. Here goes something!

Edit: hey, I think it works! Go follow bluelander@botsin.space if you want to get journal updates on the fediverse. Unless it breaks.

( Pinned introduction post )

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: The Wooden Birds - The Other One

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Badge engineering
Keyboards and gamepads. Nothing important
Thoughts on the demise of cohost, from an observer
Puzzle game weekend
Why are hats? home shrine advantage, it's been a week, markup cock-up
Youtube, cookie clicking, $100, button sticking, Dreamwidth's crappy trigger-happy auto-filling tags
11,100 gecs, on cinema, snow, 15 icons
Distraction-Free Writing with DOS
Bot test
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Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

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Badge engineering

Keyboards and gamepads. Nothing important