Oatmeal

Between the kiddo being on spring break, having to travel for a family emergency, and generally making poor life choices around forgoing sleep the last week…I am tried.

I just watched a thing shared by Kottke which I won’t share directly here because it wrecked me and I’m terrified of the future 🥑

Elsewise, not heaps of links — I mean, I saved a bunch, but none seem of the vintage worth adding to the link log this week. More soon!

I continue to play on tilde servers, and noodle hosting my own bulletin board. Dwarf Fortress may have crushed my laptop’s very being, and I dig this song.

Dumplings are the greatest airport food. 🥟 ✈️

Bulletin Butter and Jelly

If I set up a BBS would you want in? What would you want to BBS “about?”

Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye

I thought about the last time I’d actually typed ttfn. I imagine it was at least 18 years ago, on my family’s Gateway desktop during the era of dial-up AOL. And then I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I said “g2g,” or even “bye,” in an online conversation.

The medium is the message, and the message is nearly always deliverable. So easy to be alone when you can’t ever be apart. Never say “good bye,” but are you then always alone?

Go! Make a game — play a game.

• Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering
• PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs

Report on Anthem’s development woes draws terse response from BioWare

Also see Jack de Quidt on this.

here’s the wild thing that it feels almost impossible to say in the games industry: the game doesn’t mean shit! it’s lights and colours! it’s nice to play one and it’s nice to make a good one, sure

but — and i mean this very sincerely — if the production of the object ruins the lives and health of the people making it, the object doesn’t mean shit! what — you shipped a fun mech game? or a good cowboy game? great. who’s taking medical leave?

All games are a mess

I love that strange homemade games like The Frogs Of War and Legacy Of The Golden Hammer exist, these unpolished mishmashes of ideas and design as a form of creative expression. Enjoying these games is a way to enjoy all games, to accept that everything is from the same cloth, a different flawed piece of creativity, a different glimpse into what can be created.

On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

And how much discovery can there be, really, with the same critics occupying the same space?

Hard left turn to allow me to insert a different conversation/question at this point on algorithmic curation.

Does algorithmic curation cutout the human element in what would elsewise be an artistic effort of mixing, or does it simply push the person a little further away — algorithm programmer as space builder, and us the “viewing audience” as participant in a shared effort of consumptive curation…

So, you know, Derrida?

\_(ツ)_/

The Roundups of SHACKLESHOTGUN

Also see @kicks on roundups. (Thanks for the link-love, btw! (I enjoy collecting things, and this exercise is a good way of scratching that itch. My favorite part of collecting is making the collage at the end — by putting disparate things in proximity to one another making a new thing. These posts are my trying to do that. If you are interested in the unfiltered stream oh-links that are eventually paired down to become this, check out my profile on reading.am))

Why there is so little left of the early internet

Sometimes the sites that are lost echo even more seismic changes; the deaths and births of nations themselves. “It happened with Yugoslavia; .yu was the top-level domain for Yugoslavia, and that ended when it collapsed. There’s a researcher who is trying to rebuild what was there before the break-up,” she says.

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Parameters are dead last on my list of powerful interventions. Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably 90, no 95, no 99 percent of our attention goes to parameters, but there’s not a lot of leverage in them.

Can we truly think about climate change at all?

Object Oriented Ontology says no. Enter the “Hyperobjects.”

Make it hard to screw up driven development

This is the request web dev resources link.

ttfn

Why is the most recent page 1? Shouldn’t the oldest, or “first?” page be 1 — working up, towards the present? This way paginated urls could remain consistent. If something shows up on page 4, it’ll always be on page 4 forever and ever.

After having conducted a very brief and very unscientific survey of a handful of websites I can’t find any examples of pagination as I have described here.

Theory: this is Google’s fault. Folks see how Google’s search results start at page 1 and work “back” from there, and mimic the design pattern. The issue here being that Google’s implementation of pagination is actually solving for a different problem than pagination on my blog.

Proposal:

• Blogs, or any sort of chronological timeline should link the concepts of pagination and date, so that the older the date, the lower the page number
• Search results, or any sort of weighted results should prioritize for relevancy, associating the most relevant results with the lowest page number (in other words, the pages closest to the user should be the most relevant to the search term)

Can an information system be art?

Yes.

Game Tourism is playing a game with the primary aim of exploring its world, without engaging in any active conflict such as combat or stealth. Whether conflict is bypassed with cheats, mods, or built-in functionality, the aim is to refocus attention on the game’s architecture, aesthetics, storytelling, and atmosphere. Feel free to think of it as a form of art modding or glitching.

See also, A digital abyss mixtape.

It’s strange to think about now, but until the 1920s, you didn’t generally need a passport to travel. A smart CEO I know recently mentioned this to me in the context of what’s happening to the internet. The idea of making citizens carry documents to promote border security, he said, dates only to the aftermath of World War I.

The online world is much younger than the offline one, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that it is generally a much freer place to travel. There are places you can’t easily get to, such as the so-called dark web; and places you can’t easily travel the internet from, such as North Korea. Generally, though, anyone with internet access has historically been able to access the vast majority of it.

Beware Of The Dogs is dedicated to the real damage patriarchy causes. The damage we always seem to ignore. It is my favorite album of this year because the narrator walked me through it all with kindness and humor while NEVER pulling punches. Stella believed in my ears enough to give me the truth as brutal and complicated as it is. So few have the temerity.

I got older last weekend so took a week off from assembling the link log. Gonna do a bit of ketchup here between playing levels of Baba is You.

Brace yourself!

Academics: it’s time to get behind decolonising the curriculum

Many advocates of decolonisation don’t want to abolish the canon; they want to interrogate its assumptions and broaden our intellectual vision to include a wider range of perspectives. While decolonising the curriculum can mean different things, it includes a fundamental reconsideration of who is teaching, what the subject matter is and how it’s being taught.

Elsewhere in the article,

When we offer white male-dominated reading lists we also teach students the wrong lessons about who is an intellectual authority and deserves our attention.

Privacy’s not an abstraction

Privacy for marginalized populations has never been, and will never be an abstract. Being surveilled, whether by private actors, or the state, is often the gateway to very tangible harms–violence in the form of police brutality, incarceration, or deportation. And there can be more subliminal, insidious impacts, too.

Continuing later,

…there is a valuable lesson here–just not the one that was intended. The idea that surveillance would be used as an assignment on those with no options for consent speaks to how broken our ideas about consent have become, trivializing what to many people is a life and death matter of their lived existence.

To loop back to decolonizing for a moment: this is why I think that “decolonization” isn’t enough — I think we need to go the step further and queer the curriculum (well, I think we need to queer a lot of things, tbh). Queer thought is powerful for a plethora of reasons, none of which I’m qualified to talk about, but I do know that it offers am appropriate framework for including consent, even prioritizing it. So, yes decolonization. Yes queering.

Dream Askew/Dream Apart

Dream Askew

Queer strife amid the collapse. Collaboratively generate an apocalyptic setting. For 3-6 players across 3-4 hours. By Avery Alder

Dream Apart

Jewish fantasy of the shtetl. Immerse yourself in a fantastical version of history. For 3-6 players across 3-4 hours. By Benjamin Rosenbaum

Dream Askew and Dream Apart are two games of belonging outside belonging.

They run on the same system: no dice, no masters, a structured freeform game with shared worldbuilding.

(See also: These Games Prove That Not Every Tabletop RPG Needs a 300 Page Manual, Jack de Quidt writing for Waypoint)

How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger

The power of kindness and patience for a parent. I’ve been trying to take this to heart. And to slow down…remind myself that the “schedule” usually, rarely, really doesn’t matter that much.

You Should Organize a Study Group/Book Club/Online Group/Event! Tips on How to Do It

I’ve tried to start many groups, and have failed most times. This blog post is a good reference for starting something. (Anyone wanna start a thing? Do a thing?)

Tilde.Town : The Hidden e-Village

I’ve been a resident of tilde.town for a while, and since then have explored a couple other tilde servers. I am smitten.

Making books to build communities, building communities to make books.

The power of the web (for better or worse!) might be distilled into two fundamental characteristics:

1. the ability to transmit and receive information instantaneously and cheaply
2. the ability to gather and harness communities (loosely joined ones like Facebook friends with shared cultural interests, and tightly joined ones like work colleagues collaborating on a project)

(…very tangentially related: iOS “versus” JavaScript: How to Learn From Other Programming Communities)

And some game dev resources

• Game Programming Patterns
• PICO-ATE; ALTRUISTIC TEMPLATE ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR PICO-8

But I don’t know if the Web—or the digital rights movement or Occupy or meme culture or whatever your personal fancy is—will ever be retaken. There’s space for an underground now—which is good enough for me. Perhaps better than trying to fit all of mainstream society in. And maybe social networks can stay—as a kind of fly paper

Queer the web.

Interesting discovery of the evening: it looks like Firefox will soon be sending all DNS through Cloudflare to enforce DNS-over-HTTPS.

I guess this is good because it obscures DNS queries from ISPs, but maybe bad because it pipes all Firefox traffic through Cloudflare? Having mixed feelings.

While this behavior is on by default, it can be disabled in settings.

mozilla wiki:Trusted Recursive Resolver

TFW the blender’s blades just spin and spin underneath the frozen fruit and veggies.