« Oatmeal

I’ve been experimenting. I’ve been concocting a recipe for vegan kugel, and rediscovering little features and edges of my website I’d forgotten I baked in. Like chocolate chips hidden in an oatmeal raisin cookie.

One chip most recently re-discovered: support for per-page custom styles?! All I gotta do is include an optional bit of meta data, bespoke-css, that points to a style sheet. I may play with this feature more. I do love myself some css. I can tell exactly when in my life I added this feature because these days I’d never call such a thing “bespoke-css” — it would get a much more boring, terse label, like “css” or “styles.”

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The kids have been home on school break this week. We’ve been having a lot of fun reading The Wind in the Willows aloud, and playing a bit of No Man’s Sky on creative mode. You wouldn’t think it, but each carry a really similar vibe. Cosmic-pastoral-localism?

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In the last week notes I made mention of potty training; at first that was harrowing and seemed like it would never happen. Then, all at once, it did!

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I continue to expand the newly formed wiki. My plan isn’t to catalogue everything and anything — outboard brain style — but to really only document stuff I find useful and that I want to keep track of for myself…that maybe will be useful for other folks, too? The acme page is probably most inline with what I’m going for.

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For good times, check out ratfactor’s rad presentation on forth!

I’ve also been playing with babashka, reading it’s excellent companion book, babooka. Babashka is a wicked fast way to use clojure when you’d normally reach for bash.

Sable’s world is not a broken machine, it’s doing fine. You’re not on some grand quest to save it, or return the planet to its former glory. You’re just a girl growing up in this place, and growing up means choosing a new mask.

Closing,

Sable imagines identity and growth as playful, joyous, and nearly impossible to fail. It promises you that changing your mind is okay. You wanted to be an Innkeeper, and now you don’t. It encourages you to become something else then, without rejecting or hating the person you’re leaving behind.

Later on,

Sable imagines something different, and gentler. It imagines masks as objects which communicate to other people who you are, and how you can help them. You can find the machinist in any city, or the cartographer in any bar. These identities are not the only part of the person, of course, but they do express how they relate to other people. And I think that, at its best, that’s what identity is all about.

Like tetris, but the game hates you.

Replay my best game ذ๙సএ௨ටฐJઅඖړןѻඦඍݸƁಉVJߜಇಊݹ௧ࡄҽʥ୭ඖІρƏชଈݲಗڌໃࢭ௧๓ໃܢ௨ආІɞ௨ชܘܮۑ൱СݸРϺณח௮୮ໃӽ௧ঘໃऐமలȣچஒඞΓࠇߙԾරݏدȻۺƺɜՕܐஞସՈ

THE TWINE EDITOR looks like an architect’s drafting table crossed with a conspiracy chart. Users start by creating a “passage,” or a simple text field, that can be linked to new passages. When you’re done with the story, you “publish” it as a single web file, which you can load in any ordinary browser.

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

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.