The Packbats' Weblog

xdle is a game in the Wordle vein, but about guessing three-digit integers based on number theory facts like greatest common divisors.

Short post, but I guess might be spoilers, so it's under the cut. Also there's that one weed joke.

( some possible xdle starting guesses )

(Apparently there's some kind of official organization of Blaugust with a Discord or something? Consider this illicit Blaugust content.)

We were talking to Manifold Mindmesh a.k.a Many (cw: 18+-only content) the other week about loading times, and since that conversation, we've started playing with the metaphor of load times as public transit.

If we want to play FTL, for example, we metaphorically hop on a bus, wait for a goodly number of seconds, and then the bus drops us off in the game, where there's basically no load times we've noticed. One bus trip, of some time.

If Many is launching a new world of Dwarf Fortress, fae has quite a formidable trip ahead of faer as the system simulates a whole history before the embarkation fae will be playing.

And if we click a Twitter link ... we have a fair few seconds of bus transit to get to the page at all, and then an additional stop on the bus line every time we scroll down or up on the page. Anything off screen was yanked away and needed to be recovered if we wanted to see it again, and we had to wait for all of that.

And yeah, a long bus trip can be frustrating, but you can at least sleep through it or listen to a podcast or whatever. An incessant series of bus transfers gives you no chance to do that.

Thinking more about that boombox we got out to look at its cassette deck and the feeling we were enjoying of having sound in our physical space from it instead of in our headphones, and we ended up having a couple more thoughts.

You know that Brian Eno quote? "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"? I think one of those weird and uncomfortable things about radio is that you don't control what you listen to, when you listen to the radio - whatever the broadcaster decides you will hear, you either hear that or you don't listen to the station at all.

...and that can be fun? We have to be in the right mood for it, but it can be cool to make the soundtrack to our day be someone else's musical choices for a while. It ends up being surprising and novel, and encourages us to find what we appreciate in music we'd never've sought out.

(Admittedly we're currently listening to the web stream of WRUC 89.7 FM instead of a local station over the airwaves, but the principle applies.)

Inspired by active_apathy:

This is the evolving Internet meme. Copy this text, change it in any way you like, and then repost it on your blog. Then come back here - http://packbat.livejournal.com/250271.html - and post a link to your new version so we can see how it's changing!