Played through "A Good Gardener" today. Couple hours long, content warnings for war, blood, and death.
Spoilery thoughts under the cut.
( Read more... )
The Humble Store sent us a receipt for our purchase of Lexaloffle's PICO-8 fantasy console at 9:13 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, September 25, 2019.
Today - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - we happened to select the "carts" folder and opened the "Properties" window to see how much we've done in that time.
For lack of knowing what to say, here are some subsets of that:
- 38 files, 2 folders, and 1.23 MB are made up of Lexaloffle's demos and various carts we downloaded off the Lexaloffle forums.
- 36 files and 1 folder are from making and modifying the Cave Diver cart from the Game Development with PICO-8 zine.
- 31 files and 2 folders are from the Mixed Feelings Jam we made Driftself for.
- 15 files and 2 folders are from the Games Made Quick Jam we made Truck Drive Test for.
- 232 files and 43 folders are from a single export of binaries for the Rain Gif cart.
- 78 files and 8 folders are from the rest of the Rain Gif files.
- 539 files, 11 folders, and 835 MB are made up of music compositions, exported .wav sound files of those compositions, and (mostly) .mp3 exports of those sound files made in Audacity.
- Or rather, 522 files and 9 folders; the other 17 files and 2 folders are from a music cart work-in-progress adding visualizers to nine tracks.
- We don't have a dedicated site or account for sharing this stuff, but some of it has been uploaded to our dragon.style Mastodon account under the #PicoBatMusic hashtag.
- 65 files and 1 folder are from various experiments with sound effects, mostly to support the composition stuff.
- 218 files and 2 folders are from other experimentation, including some bug testing.
...we've done a lot in a year. We have a lot more thoughts about the assumptions of PICO-8 and the limitations of PICO-8, for good and ill. We also have a lot more experience writing code, composing music, and drawing pixel art. We have several projects done and shared with the world, several projects that are incomplete and being worked on, and a lot more that we've left idle or abandoned.
It's hard to figure out what we should say about all this, but it's clear that dropping PICO-8 into our life has catalyzed a hell of a lot of reactions in us. It's been significant.
Reminded of the existence of The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal" today.
(Content warnings include: homophobia (incl. family), alcohol use (incl. once to blackout), smoking (nicotine and marijuana), other drugs, food (specifically non-vegan), genitals and sex on-panel, someone getting punched, discussion of stressful subjects, casual ableist language of the kind that's typical basically everywhere, background 2008 Democratic primary election.)
...I feel like we must have read it circa 2012 - kind of in the middle of our heavy webcomics-reading period. As webcomics go, it's pretty gorgeous - lovely sketch-like art with occasional vistas, generally wonderful and elaborate detail - and the story is extremely solid. The emotional dynamics feel extremely real, the dialogue is fantastic, and the plot has a good arc and meaning.
Developing an appreciation of content warnings has been weird for us, because a lot of the stuff we find really comforting and nice and valuable needs very heavy ones? Bad stuff happened to these people but this story is about something better happening to them now. And about a long car trip. And about people clicking with each other really quickly. And about a lot of different kinds of music, and about conversations at restaurants, and about stopping and looking at really wonderful scenery.
Toward the end of "A small packet", the player-envelope crosses a couple maps - one of (part of) the US mid-Atlantic region and one of (part of) the Atlantic Ocean.
While the maps are hardly detailed, these are, in fact, based on the area we live. The line under the ocean at the end is one leg of TAT-14, the one from Tuckerton, New Jersey, USA to Widemouth Bay, UK, and probably the line through which a small packet sent directly from our house to our UK friends houses would go.
Someone on the fediverse shared a link to everest pipkin's massive "Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup", and I decided to go down the list and talk about the ones we've touched.
Firstly, the ones we've actually tried to make something - or even succeeded at making something - with:
( Read more... )Secondly, the ones we've looked at but never tried to create in:
( Read more... )
So, last month we wrote a blog post about the limits of the music theory we learned as a tool for actual music invention, inspired in a significant part by David Bennett Piano's video "How much music theory did The Beatles know?".
The topic has been bouncing around in our head a bit more, though. And I think I want to pull on a different tangent to David Bennett's video (which, to be clear, was really interesting and well-researched): who gets to lay claim to the Beatles as one of their own? Who owns the Beatles?
Or rather: if people describe the music of the Beatles as a matter of academic music theory, where does that leave people for whom that academic world is an enemy?
...writing this now, I want to connect this to Adam Neely's recent video on "The Girl from Ipanema": a song which was made less than it was because musicians from outside the culture and community that created it - musicians at a college in the US listening to a bossa nova album by Brazilian composers - used their authority as academics to define it in their framework and discard a great deal of what was outside their framework. Academia has that power. And people outside academia know it.
I don't think that the hostility to music theory analysis of popular music is as simple as "music theory studies boring music for stuffed shirts, it can't study truly emotional and meaningful music I love". Or I don't know if it is. I can see more reasons than hostility to analysis as a thing to be hostile to analysis as an act.
There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.
...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.
( 550 words, including mention of food )- 🐲
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The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling today on three cases related to LGBT+ rights - Gerald Lynn Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express, Inc., et al. v. Zarda et al., as Co-Independent Executors of the Estate of Zarda; and R. G. & G. R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission et al. - answering the question of whether Title VII the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination against gay and trans people when it prohibits discrimination by sex. In, unexpectedly, Justice Neil Gorsuch's words, the answer is "yes, it is illegal to discriminate against them" (us):
An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguist has a nice roundup post bringing up a lot of good points about how much this means (tl;dr: a lot).
...a GMless tabletop roleplaying game on itch.io, included in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (ending tomorrow from time of posting) and Tabletop Treehouse BLM Bundle 2 (ending in four days).
...about understanding cities not as maps, but as neighborhoods, points of interest within them, and people to be found at those points.
...a process of yes-and - of sharing and developing and enriching ideas.
...pulses of character and place - moss roads one traverses quietly so as not to break the concentration of wizards, a relay race of ropes for an elevator to climb on as it rises or sinks, the bench one sits on after walking for hours through a market.
...considerate of the emotional safety of those who wish to create their street magic.
...kind of beautiful.
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I think part of how we Packbats will approach the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (which is running for another two days and change from the time of this post) will be inspired by Errant Signal's "Talkin' 'Bout tiny Games". Specifically, the idea that small games do not need critics - those who can disassemble their themes and techniques, evaluate their successes and failures - so much as they need champions - those who can make public that which might otherwise be overlooked.
There are 1,659 items in the bundle. That's a lot to be overlooked.
We'll probably try to occasionally talk about what we've encountered and been delighted by in the bundle here. (For example, i'm sorry did you say street magic.) But we don't need to talk about what didn't click for us. That's not necessary.
"So, open source implementations of the API are great because it makes you feel safer that your cartridges are going to live forever and there's more things you can do with it. And, you know, in the long term, I'm, y'know, working hard to make sure that no one will lose their PICO-8 cartridges.
"But, ah, but there are good reasons for it being close source. Part of it is that there is a very large secret basement to PICO-8 that I don't want anyone to know about yet. (...please don't tell anyone.)" [audience laughter] "And also, I think if it was open source at this point, there would be many variations of PICO-8 that would sort of eat away at that shared experience. You know, everyone knows what PICO-8 is - how big a cartridge is, what the pallete and screen limitations are - and that why it's valuable, I think.
"So, over time, you know, it should be more open and fixable and safe, you know, safe in regards to preserving software; but it would be bad in the short term for that reason. So there's good and bad things about the open source business."
The longer we have spent working with PICO-8 as a tool, the more we've come to appreciate that the virtual console idea is really the least important part of what PICO-8 does. "Virtual console" is a framing for communicating about PICO-8 - for telling us, people who are not Joseph White, that the thing he made will put restrictions on us, that it's not designed to use the full power of our computers, and that what we make with it is fully ours rather than just mods on someone else's thing - but PICO-8 was not designed to help people make games they would have made on the NES or Apple II or Commodore 64 or Amiga 1000 more conveniently.
PICO-8 was designed to inspire.
It won't do that for everyone, and that's fine - nothing will inspire everyone - but:
- PICO-8's restrictions are there to condense the space of possibilities into one with a greater density of joy, and therefore to inspire.
- PICO-8's scale is small to make small projects fun - you can't do much, so doing a little feels allowed, feels significant, feels worth being inspired about.
- PICO-8's scale is small to keep it light - much of the optimization is done for you, so you don't have let the 'am I going make people's computers grind to a halt?' question get in the way of your inspiration.
- PICO-8's options are restricted, so you can become familiar with all the pieces and connect any idea you have with what pieces it would use - and use the pieces themselves to inspire new ideas.
- PICO-8 carts are easy to share, which means that there are a lot of them, which means that folks like us can get a feeling for "this exists, has an identity, and is available to anyone - and I'm an anyone, and I can play too".
- PICO-8 makes a space for you. A new cart in PICO-8 has no source code, nothing on the map, and only eight pixels of a single "fyi this sprite won't work on the map" sprite drawn on the sprite sheet. You start it up or type "REBOOT" and there is nothing to clear out of your way before you start.
- PICO-8 has competent documentation. ...*flails wildly* that is so useful and it frustrates me when tools don't have that. If you want to do something in PICO-8, you can probably look up what you need to know in the PICO-8 manual, and if it's not in the manual, it's probably in the regularly-updated-and-fairly-comprehensive wiki. You don't have to stop being inspired to go try to find a person who's available and willing to explain how something works - you can just read how to do it and do it.
There are a lot of reasons to not use PICO-8 - we have plenty of game ideas that we cannot fit on a 128x128 pixel screen or in a 32kb file, for example - but for anyone designing one, the words "virtual console" I think become an impediment to understanding PICO-8 and why it works. It works because it exists to inspire.
Not sure what I should be doing with my Dreamwidth, but ... eh, a public diary could be a thing. I'll see if it works for me.
Some up:
Played some Minecraft on the server I reside on.
- Built a Nether connection, marked it up so it would show on the server Overviewer map.
- While I was in the Nether, I picked up some glowstone for lighting up a riverbed that can spawn Drowned after the server updates to 1.13.
- Did some fishing to repair the Mending Silk Touch diamond pick I carved the tunnel through the netherrack with.
Cooked some marinated chicken thigh I bought from the Korean mart yesterday.
Watched a friend stream a videogame.
Some down:
Still have a cough. Still haven't talked to a medical professional about it.
Haven't scheduled my labs and my endocrinology appointment either.
Not sure how well the marinated chicken sat with my digestion.
Got stressed out about a couple interpersonal things.
Some ... *shrug emoji*:
Sent an email about a thing for a group I quit, because I wanted to back up a friend of mine who's still in it and I'm still on their mailing list. Hope I wasn't out of line.
Not a lot of Tuesday webcomics in my current (much-contracted) rotation. Been digging Goodbye to Halos, though.
h/t deviantart::ByoWT1125: "Junkers Come Here", in eleven parts.
(I have not watched it all the way through.)
(I have not watched it all the way through.)
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Ah, the disorganized list. What greater bloggoriffic staple could there be?
I fear I may pass out before finishing, s
- Our house has a heat pump for both winter and summer ... and it's dead. Capacitor's blown, and wires of the condenser fused together. Whole new unit's needed, and won't arrive before, well:
* PRECIPITATION TYPE...HEAVY SNOW. * ACCUMULATIONS...STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 18 TO 24 INCHES. * TIMING...SNOW WILL BEGIN MID-MORNING FRIDAY...AND WILL CONTINUE THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING. CONDITIONS WILL DETERIORATE RAPIDLY FRIDAY AFTERNOON...WITH HEAVIEST SNOWFALL OCCURRING BETWEEN SUNSET FRIDAY TO SUNRISE SATURDAY. THE MOST HAZARDOUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS WILL OCCUR FRIDAY NIGHT. * VISIBILITIES...THE COMBINATION OF HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS WILL REDUCE VISIBILITIES TO BELOW ONE-QUARTER MILE...PRODUCING NEAR-BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AT TIMES FRIDAY NIGHT AND EARLY SATURDAY MORNING. * TEMPERATURES...HIGHS IN THE LOWER 30S FRIDAY. TEMPERATURES WILL BE IN THE MID TO UPPER 20S FRIDAY NIGHT AND SATURDAY. * WINDS...BECOMING NORTHEAST 10 TO 20 MPH FRIDAY WITH GUSTS TO 30 MPH FRIDAY NIGHT AND SATURDAY.
Joy to the world. - I got a lucky break (alluded to in the prior post) with respect to a presentation I am to deliver; I now have a fair bit of time to actually produce that which I must present.
- The slide of the zipper on my leather jacket is brokened. However, the buttons on my blue slacks are fixted.
- I would be interested in purchasing this tee-shirt, should it ever be for sale.
- I am once again a TA for
Heat TransferTransfer Processes! (So called because the processes can transfer mass, as well ... and I have now taught you the entire mass-transfer curriculum of the course.) I come better equipped this time, as I have Asked A Professor For Advice On Running Discussion Sections. (Also, my student guide on the solution of nonlinear algebraic equations is much improved!) - Prof. Orzel gave a talk today on campus!
- I reread The Moonstone (excellent! --although Ms. Clack danced a merry jig on one of my berserk buttons) and read for the first time World War Z, which my mom kindly lent me after I bought it for her (rollicking zombie fun!). I also read The Silent Tower by Barbara Hambly, and am now jonesing for the #2 in the series.
I fear I may pass out before finishing, s
I swear, there is no conceivable explanation for how I can be as stupidly lucky as I have been my entire life.
I am seriously tempted to start invoking absurd excuses for this.
In other news, hello! Don't follow those links if you value your time!
I am seriously tempted to start invoking absurd excuses for this.
In other news, hello! Don't follow those links if you value your time!
From a couple people:
You know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.
first name: Robin. I, like my siblings, have a gender-neutral name, and like (at least one of) my siblings, that means occasionally getting mail with the 'wrong' honorific. (As you can see by my scare quotes, I 'care' about this. For the record, the correct honorific is "Mr".)
age: 770 Ms - or about 24 years 5 months, if you like the merely standard units of measure.
location: Near DC on the Maryland side - convenient to the bus lines and Metrorail, which explains why I don't have a driver's license. (Which explains why I have disposable income - can you say "car insurance"?)
occupation: Graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland, College Park, doing research in two-phase cooling for power electronic systems. From the back forward: "power electronic systems" are, for example, the thing that turns your AC into DC or vice-versa; "cooling" is taking the waste heat off the device (it's not 100% efficient) so that it may be dumped into (probably) the air somewhere else; and "two-phase cooling" means doing the above by making a liquid boil, later to be condensed elsewhere. This is something which is an active area of research because it's kind of a messy problem (like turbulence in fluid flow) and the best solutions are of the plus-or-minus-30% strength. Which works in steam power plants, but not in microelectronics.
partner: Romantic? None so far.
kids: In light of the previous question, I am quite glad that the answer here is "none" as well.
brothers/sisters: One each. The sister is a twin, and yes, I've been asked if we're identical. I don't get it either. (The brother is older, and makes me look boring.)
pets: None. My parents had a guinea pig when I was young, and my sister had a rabbit some time later, but I've never been responsible for another living being. (I did quite poorly just caring for a plant!)
3-5 biggest things going on in your life: Largest is the research project, presumably, and second is my schoolwork. (I'm actually pretty stressed these days thanks to an incomplete from last semester I'm having trouble tying up. The class I'm in now is pretty chill.) There on down, it gets pretty minor-scale - the novel I started for Nanowrimo is the biggest thing, and I'm ... not really diligent about working on it.
parents: Both living, and both with a Web presence. I'll mention my father's (done!), as he comments on this blog from time to time. Oh, and is a fierce blogger himself. Pretend that I said that when I mentioned him.
some of your closest friends: There are a couple from my Scout troop that I've been absolute rubbish keeping in touch with (K and W), and then there's several from school with whom I'll banter in the ASME lounge, exchange books, and occasionally play board games (particularly J, J, and T). Other than that, I get on decently with my parents, hang out with my brother, and exchange communications with quite a few people on the Web of Lies (as my mum would call it).
I believe that's better than one-word answers, anyway! Toodles!
You know how sometimes people on your friends list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.
first name: Robin. I, like my siblings, have a gender-neutral name, and like (at least one of) my siblings, that means occasionally getting mail with the 'wrong' honorific. (As you can see by my scare quotes, I 'care' about this. For the record, the correct honorific is "Mr".)
age: 770 Ms - or about 24 years 5 months, if you like the merely standard units of measure.
location: Near DC on the Maryland side - convenient to the bus lines and Metrorail, which explains why I don't have a driver's license. (Which explains why I have disposable income - can you say "car insurance"?)
occupation: Graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland, College Park, doing research in two-phase cooling for power electronic systems. From the back forward: "power electronic systems" are, for example, the thing that turns your AC into DC or vice-versa; "cooling" is taking the waste heat off the device (it's not 100% efficient) so that it may be dumped into (probably) the air somewhere else; and "two-phase cooling" means doing the above by making a liquid boil, later to be condensed elsewhere. This is something which is an active area of research because it's kind of a messy problem (like turbulence in fluid flow) and the best solutions are of the plus-or-minus-30% strength. Which works in steam power plants, but not in microelectronics.
partner: Romantic? None so far.
kids: In light of the previous question, I am quite glad that the answer here is "none" as well.
brothers/sisters: One each. The sister is a twin, and yes, I've been asked if we're identical. I don't get it either. (The brother is older, and makes me look boring.)
pets: None. My parents had a guinea pig when I was young, and my sister had a rabbit some time later, but I've never been responsible for another living being. (I did quite poorly just caring for a plant!)
3-5 biggest things going on in your life: Largest is the research project, presumably, and second is my schoolwork. (I'm actually pretty stressed these days thanks to an incomplete from last semester I'm having trouble tying up. The class I'm in now is pretty chill.) There on down, it gets pretty minor-scale - the novel I started for Nanowrimo is the biggest thing, and I'm ... not really diligent about working on it.
parents: Both living, and both with a Web presence. I'll mention my father's (done!), as he comments on this blog from time to time. Oh, and is a fierce blogger himself. Pretend that I said that when I mentioned him.
some of your closest friends: There are a couple from my Scout troop that I've been absolute rubbish keeping in touch with (K and W), and then there's several from school with whom I'll banter in the ASME lounge, exchange books, and occasionally play board games (particularly J, J, and T). Other than that, I get on decently with my parents, hang out with my brother, and exchange communications with quite a few people on the Web of Lies (as my mum would call it).
I believe that's better than one-word answers, anyway! Toodles!
Have you ever participated in a seance? If not, would you consider it? What spirit would you summon and what question would you ask them? Do you believe we can get messages from the dead?
I haven't - I might attend one as a favor for a close friend if they wanted me there. If I did, though, I wouldn't be planning on trying to summon any spirit at all, or expect to get any message from the dead. I'm fairly sure that death is the end.
That said, I wouldn't object having a chance to have a real conversation with my maternal grandfather. I just think it's impossible.