March’s theme is video games, sort of?

It’s started heating up here, and we’re in the middle of our usual ritual of trying to avoid turning the AC on for as long as possible. The house has been a bit of a sauna, which is somewhat distracting. Also a bunch of terrible crazy things happened on Twitter. Oof.

• doom: I playtested other people’s maps from that ZDoom mapping project. There are a lot of maps, and I’m just about half done, and wow it takes a very long time to play through this much Doom. I hope some of my commentary is helpful to the other authors!

• SLADE: I chased down a bizarre obscure bug and eventually concluded it was a problem in wxwidgets.

• art: Lots of doodlin’. I animated something for the first time, for Mel’s birthday, and then drew myself a new avatar! I’m pretty happy with both of these, wow.

• blog: Added some more suggestions to my Twitter post. Dabbled, briefly, in figuring out how to make Pelican host work I’ve done, like that Doom map.

I’ve got a few Patreon things to finish in the next few days, and along the way I’d very much like to work out a scheme for hosting other work on this domain.

March’s theme is video games, I guess?

It’s actually been two weeks since the last roundup, but there’s an excellent reason for that!

• doom: As previously mentioned, someone started a “just get something done” ZDoom mapping project, so I made a map! I spent a solid seven days doing virtually nothing but working on it. And it came out pretty fantastically, I think. The final project is still in a bug-fixing phase, but I’ll link it when it’s done.

• blog: I wrote about how maybe we could tone down the JavaScript, and it was phenomenally popular. People are still linking it anew on Twitter. That’s pretty cool. I also wrote a ton of developer commentary for my Doom map, which I’ll finish in the next few days and publish once the mapset is actually released. And I combed through my Doom series to edit a few things that are fixed in recent ZDoom and SLADE releases.

• veekun: I managed to generate a YAML-based data file for Pokémon Red directly from game data. There’s still a lot of work to do to capture moves and places and other data, but this is a great start.

• SLADE: In my 3D floor preview branch, the sides of simple 3D floors now render. There is so much work left to do here but the basics are finally there. Also fixed about nine papercuts I encountered while making my map, though some others remain.

• mario maker: I made a level but have neglected to write about it here yet. Oops.

• art: I drew most of the next part of Pokémon Yellow but then got kinda distracted by Doom stuff. I redrew last year’s Pi Day comic for the sake of comparison. I also started on Mel’s birthday present, which involves something astoundingly difficult that I’ve never tried before.

• irl: I replaced my case fans, and it was a nightmare. “Toolless” fasteners are awful.

Pouring a solid week into one thing is weird; I feel like I haven’t drawn or touched Runed Awakening in ages, now. I’d like to get back to those.

I also still want to rig a category for posts about stuff I’m releasing, and also do something with that terrible “projects” page, so hopefully I’ll get to those soon.

14DC-0000-01ED-C104
Difficulty: fairly easy
Quality: ★★★★★
Secrets: —

…

…

…

I removed the music and only used monochrome obstacles, with very few actual enemies. No pickups, no secrets. It’s short, linear, pretty easy, entirely thematic.

The result is interesting.

March’s theme is… is… I don’t know yet.

• blog: I made a cheesecake. (By the way, it turns out I had enough leftover filling to make an entire second one! Wow.) And wrote about Valentine’s Day. And wrote about this eerie clone of tech Twitter. I’m actually kind of ahead of the game this month!

• art: I started documenting my adventures playing Pokémon Yellow. Very… slowly.

• veekun: I came up with a rough YAML schema for Pokémon data and faked a Red dump. The idea is to try replacing the relational database with just in-memory data, stored separately per-game and in a way that can be reproduced easily. There isn’t very much data anyway, in the grand scheme of things, and trying to keep it relational is getting to be a huge headache. I’d really like to have a simple proof-of-concept of this sometime soon; Sun and Moon come out towards the end of the year, and I’d like to have a redesigned site ready to go.

  I’m using camel for this, so I’ve found reason to hack a few more features into it already. I’ll clean them up and release them, ah, sometime.

• floraverse: Yahoo is rejecting the store mail for some reason, which led to my discovering that Google Apps “aliases” are totally different from GMail “aliases”, and you need to have an address aliased in both places for it to actually appear in the “From” field.

• doom: Someone has started a “just get something done” ZDoom mapping project, so I’m going to do that. The actual mapping time hasn’t started yet, but I went looking for inspiration in the form of textures and background music.

• irl: Yardwork. Exciting.

I don’t know what to have as a theme. Runed Awakening still needs a lot of work; veekun needs an overhaul with a time limit; there’s this ZDoom mapping thing; and I’m drawing Pokémon Yellow as I play it. So maybe the theme is just… video games? Sure, we can do that.

I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed.

Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a few… quirks… of frontend Web development.

(No, really, do not try to diagnose this problem from one sentence, I have heard and tried almost everything you could imagine.)

update 2016-03-19: I believe the account described below is run by a real human being, but for the sake of their privacy I’m not going to tell you why. I’m leaving this post up, though, because it’s an interesting story and also this was a hecka creepy thing to do.

@softfennec and @orezpraw brought to my attention the following tweet, which I have to reconstruct from memory for reasons that will be clear in a moment:

I like to think I’m okay at math, but then I stumble into Math SE and it’s Latin to me. http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532

What a hilarious joke! I liked it so much that it turns out I’d already made it myself:

i like to think i’m ok at math but then i stumble into math.SE and it is basically lorem ipsum to me http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532

— @eevee, Feb 21 at 10:49am

This month — which I will pretend is still February, because time zones or something — Vladimir Costescu has sponsored a post on:

OK, how about this: write a post on what you think about (the concept of) Valentine’s Day. Bonus points if you write a brief commentary on this video and work it into the post somehow.

I… I’m afraid I don’t know how to work death metal performed by vampires into a post about anything else.

But Valentine’s Day, I think I can do.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is a book.

• Runed Awakening: Wow! Fixed a central area! Laid groundwork for scoring! Lots of work on, er, a core mechanic! Lots of work on a major NPC and their related geography!

• Don’t Eat the Cactus: I went on a brief diversion and created a tiny interactive fiction game called Don’t Eat the Cactus, which is based on true events.

• SLADE: Some more papercuts. A microscopic amount of work on 3D floor rendering. (Also, 3.1.1 is out now, so that’s pretty cool. I may update my Doom guides at some point to mention this.)

• blog: I made cheesecake.

• art: I drew some miscellaneous stuff. Haven’t really been in the mood for daily comics, and my inspiration has run a bit dry; all I do every day is work on stuff or not work on stuff. I’m working on an art trade and a Pokémon 20th anniversary thing, though.

• book: Wow, yes, I did actually write some book, with only a few days left in the month. I wrote a solid chunk of a chapter, even. I don’t actually like how it came out; it’s very dry, with none of the usual casual tone in my blog posts. I’ll have to… work on that.

If you were not aware, I have a Patreon tier that’s essentially: I will work on whatever you want for a day, then write about it. I made the tier assuming that people would force me to do programming, e.g. actually work on veekun for once. So far it’s been about half that, and half “hey try this thing you haven’t really done before”.

Last month, @amazingant asked me to cook something, so I decided to try making pretzels, and half-seriously ended the post suggesting that he should have me make cheesecake next.

Well, guess what I had to do this month.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is, er, a book.

I haven’t actually written a single word of a book? But oh dang I had one solid-ass week. I’ve been nocturnal for a few days and it’s been working pretty well.

• art: Did a ton of doodlin’ practice. I think I’ve finally hit a point where I can sketch something and have a decent chance of getting it sort of right, which is amazing, and a confidence boost as well. I ended up crafting a brand new Twitter banner, which is absolutely gorgeous.

• Runed Awakening: I built out several areas, fixed up a central critical puzzle, and had a lot of ideas for plugging together things I already had. I’m being vague, so that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was a pretty big step forwards.

• blog: I intended to write about abuse and harassment, and it sort of morphed into offense in general, but it seemed to resonate. Also I wrote about Twitter’s weird collection of subtle features, and I’m still getting suggestions for edits. Also also I switched the site to pretty solid https, which turns out to be pretty easy with Let’s Encrypt.

I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell:

We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usage and drive people away

There’s an interesting problem here. UI is hard. You can’t just slap a button on the screen for every feature that could conceivably be used at any given time. Some features are only of interest to so-called “power users”, so they’re left subtle, spread by word-of-mouth. Some features you try to make invisible and heuristic. Some features are added just to solve one influential user’s problem. Some features are, ah, accidental.

A sufficiently mature, popular, and interesting product thus tends to accumulate a small pile of hidden features, sometimes not documented or even officially acknowledged. I’d say this is actually a good thing! Using something for a while should absolutely reward you with a new trick every so often — that below-the-surface knowledge makes you feel involved with the thing you’re using and makes it feel deeper overall.

The hard part is striking a balance. On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. On the other end you have tools like vim, which consist exclusively of easter eggs.

One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them.

Here, then, is a list of all the non-obvious things about Twitter that I know. Consider it both a reference for people who aren’t up to their eyeballs in Twitter, and an example of how these hidden features can pile up. I’m also throwing in a couple notes on etiquette, because I think that’s strongly informed by the shape of the platform.

Stephen Fry has deleted his Twitter account after backlash from an incident I can only describe as very British. He vaguely explains:

…let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined.

There’s a bit of a semantic trick in his post, and it took me a couple reads to pick up on it.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is a book.

I had a strange week.

I’ve had frequent headaches since around the end of January, especially when staring at text on a screen for long periods of time, which has made the theme of writing a little difficult. This week, I finally went to an optometrist. Lo and behold, my eyesight has worsened from 20/15 post-LASIK to 20/25. One pair of glasses later, and the headaches are gone. I barely notice the difference, but I guess teeny-tiny monitor text was just fuzzy enough that I tired my eyes out trying to focus on it all day every day.

I’ve also been a little disillusioned with drawing lately — it seemed like I couldn’t even move the tablet pen how I wanted any more. This week I discovered I’d somehow turned on the stabilizer (which smooths out your strokes), and it was high enough to mess with me but not high enough to be the obvious cause. Whoops.

Not a great start to the month, but at least that’s all taken care of.

• art: One or two dailies, though I’ve taken a bit of a break, due to eye pain and lack of ideas.

• spline: Trimmed blog posts to the first couple paragraphs on the front page of Mel’s personal site, so you can actually see the buttons at the bottom.

• Runed Awakening: Dealt with some technical nonsense regarding touchability, which was satisfying but made no visible improvement. Did a lot of planning. Still feel like there’s too big a gap in the middle of the game, but I’m very gradually closing it.

• doom: Playing with weapons again. Looking for sound effects. Experimented with improving function documentation on the ZDoom wiki.

• blog: Wrote about UI changes.

• slade: Worked on previewing 3D floors — mostly fixing tricky bugs with what I’d already done.

A familiar story: company makes product, product becomes wildly popular, company royally fucks product up.

The most recent example of this is TimelineGate, but it’s something I’ve had on my mind for a while. Thus I present to you a list of complaints about personally-inconvenient UI changes, carefully disguised as a thoughtful essay.

February’s theme is writing, and the major project is a book.

• spline: Styled Mel’s personal site and put it in production. Did a lot of last-second oh-god-we’re-in-production-and-nothing-works fixes, like throwing in Disqus and GA and fixing permissions and whatnot.

• blog: I made pretzels! Also I wrote about making pretzels. And about writing. And like two-thirds of a post about UI changes.

• art: The usual. Also hourly comic day.

• doom: Some more tinkering. Made a few weapons that are pretty sweet. Also made a little start of a ZDoom editing demo map.

This month Vladimir brings us:

Er, hmm, maybe do a piece on what your writing process is like (because yay meta).

Indeed. This could only be more meta if I described the process I used for writing this article specifically.

So here’s the process I used for writing this article specifically.

@amazingant has bought a day of my time, and requested that I spend it on:

Cook something! Don’t make one of those meal-in-a-box (or can) things (e.g. hamburger helper, “manwich” sandwiches, etc.), no frozen dinners, and heating something with the stove or oven must be involved.

Don’t worry, I do know what “cook” means! It includes baking, right? I’m going to say it includes baking.