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?

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

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

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

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.