fuzzy notepad - personal

I am thirty-eight years old

2025-07-21T20:56:00-07:00

There are several old, personal events that I’ve been rotating in my head for a very long time. I’m finally writing about them because I’ve just had the staggering realization that they all form one singular story. In some cases I’d never made the connection; in other cases I just plain forgot that things which happened within hours of each other were related.

This isn’t pleasant to write, and it won’t be pleasant to read. But I need it out of me.

I might have some of the details wrong, since I’m piecing together fragments from decades ago. This is a story, not a documentary. It’s about me, no one else.

content warning: underage sex; the active pursuit thereof by adults; bestiality mention.

I am five years old

My family moves from the UK (where my mother is from) to an American military base elsewhere (as my father is in the US military). In the switch from the UK to US school system, my parents push to have me put in second grade, on the grounds that I’ve been absorbing basically anything I’ve been exposed to since I was old enough to walk, and I’d be bored to tears in kindergarten.

This puts me two grades ahead for my age, which makes me two years younger than everyone around me, which will remain the case until I graduate from high school. I’m still quicker on the uptake than most everyone in my grade, and later get shifted a third year ahead in math. I never have school-age peers. This is normal.

I am eleven years old

I’m a picky eater. A lot of foods actively repulse me. My mother keeps making them for dinner anyway. I do my best to eat around them. Once she makes a quiche, and the taste of the cheddar makes me instantly want to vomit, so I can’t eat any of it. My father insists I sit at the table until I’m finished. I try a few bites but can’t bear it at all. I sit there for an hour, alone, before he gives up and lets me slink away.

I like computers. I don’t know much I can do with them besides toodle around in QBasic, but being able to write out instructions and have a thing happen feels like magic to me. I’m enamored. I’ll stay enamored for the rest of my life. I’m dimly aware that Windows and Office are also software, but they seem too incomprehensibly vast and complex to have been made, let alone made by fundamentally the same process I’m engaging in when I draw circles on the screen. I don’t consciously think about this, merely take for granted that they emerged fully-formed from a Company, which is somehow a different sort of entity from a person.

I think the Internet sounds cool but I don’t really know what there is to do on it besides download utilities I don’t need or read about The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team! easter egg, which I only ever get to work once. I also find out that you can trick MS Paint into taking a screenshot of its own help window, which is cool because I don’t know how to take actual screenshots. That means I can make fake UIs, which is cool because I don’t know how to make real UIs, and I don’t know how to draw, either. Art, too, seems like some kind of foreign magic.

I’m really into Animorphs. I want to turn into a red-tailed hawk like Tobias and just fly away. I’m starting to do less well in school, and feel a budding hostility coming from my parents over it. I don’t have a lot of friends, don’t really have a sense of how to make them, and don’t think about it much. I feel a little out of place everywhere, but I always have, so it’s normal to me.

I hear about book 16, The Warning. It’s the one with Jake morphing into a rhino on the cover. I haven’t read it yet, but as I understand it, the plot centers around one of the protagonists typing “yeerk” or something into a search engine and finding exactly one result, which they then go investigate.

I think about this. I know about the Internet and search engines. But obviously, I think, entering “Yeerk” wouldn’t find anything, because Yeerks aren’t real. I try it anyway, just to see. I’m stunned to discover the world of fansites.

One of them has a forum and even a chat room attached. I join both and am stunned once more to discover that the Internet has other people on it, just hanging out. The other people are all teenagers, a little older than me, but I’m used to that. Half of them also have overbearing parents, and we bond over bitching about them. I can be kind of weird and awkward here and it’s fine. I’m really happy about having found this little sanctuary, and I start spending a lot more time online.

I am twelve or thirteen years old

I’m in ninth grade. My parents have put me in a private school, and it is fucking miserable. Homework is so tedious it feels akin to torture, so I just don’t do it, so my grades drop, so I get endlessly scolded and told I’m a disappointment. Chores, too, are agonizingly boring, and my mother regularly screams at me for not doing the dishes. None of the adults in my life — not parents, not teachers, not other school staff — suspect I have ADHD, perhaps because I’m smart and quiet, and I will eventually work it out myself some years later. Everyone else seems to believe their lecture will be the one to finally inspire me. My parents, who had once fought to save me from boredom, don’t recognize it happening in front of them.

I’m miserable at home from all the screaming, which makes me even more reclusive and less interested in school, which makes my grades all the more mediocre, which makes my parents yell more, which makes me more miserable.

Perhaps luckily, I don’t draw any conscious conclusions from any of this. I have no sense of how other people experience the world, and I haven’t really thought about, say, whether homework is easy for other people. I don’t even understand that I’m struggling, because I have nothing to compare it to. I don’t remember being a little kid very clearly, so as far as I can tell, it’s just always been like this. This is normal.

I have a little breakdown once and yell back at my mother, trying to convey… why I’m unhappy, without fully understanding it myself. She stands there, stunned. My father storms into the room, grabs me by my shirt collar, drags me upstairs to my bedroom, and throws me into it. He gets a utility knife and cuts through several random cables on my computer, then leaves without a word.

One of the cut cables is my keyboard, so to use my computer, I have to steal the keyboard from his computer and be sure to return it before he gets home and notices. Otherwise I would be completely isolated.

I learn a valuable lesson. Adults will hurt me, and this is normal. I hurt quite often, but I can’t do anything about it, and if I try, adults will hurt me more, so I just sit with it.

Sometimes I used to cry, but then my mother would hear and come tell me (in a caring voice) not to, because I’d give myself a headache. I took that to mean I just shouldn’t, so I’ve stopped.

My parents will later try to send me to a therapist a couple times — the problem is of course with me, not them, never them. I confide the encounter with my father, which makes it through some unseen grapevine, and I end up having to talk to some sort of military-HR person about it. Fearing that I might get put into the foster system and things will somehow end up worse, I lie that I had it coming. I hate lying, but I’ve learned that I have to lie to adults sometimes, so they won’t hurt me as much.

It isn’t mentioned again. My parents never say a word to me about it… until over a decade later, when my mother will tell me that I was physically imposing and physically threatened her. I will have no idea what she’s talking about — until that moment, the thought of attacking her in some way never crosses my mind. I’ll also be a late bloomer, insofar as I’ll bloom at all, and one of the few strong images I’ll remember from that day will be my mother looking down at me. But she will remain absolutely convinced that I was a threat, and that is why my father took the therefore-fully-justified actions he did, and I will be unable to disabuse her of this notion up through the end of her life. One day, many years later, she will die of cancer, having never believed me about my own motivations.

She will also, in the same conversation, chide me for not doing the dishes. I will be almost thirty years old.

I am fourteen years old

I’m in tenth grade, taking AP calculus. I’m good at it, but the homework is still mindnumbing.

I try to coast through my own life, attracting as little attention as possible from the adults around me who have the power to hurt me. I’m not fully successful. But when I’m hurt, it’s normal.

I’m still online a lot. I’ve gotten into doing, well, “web stuff”. It started out with posting little JavaScript snippets onto a small forum that doesn’t strip it out, or using a lot of <font> tags to make rainbow text. I’ve also gotten into Pokémon, and I feel a strong affection for tables and lists, so I start to make a Pokédex website. I don’t really know what I’m doing, and much of the effort comes from painstakingly retyping information from strategy guides or just other people’s websites, a process my future self will find comically rudimentary in hindsight. But it still feels like magic, and now I can share it with other people, too. I don’t know if anyone uses my website, but I’m delighted to have made it.

I’ve also hit puberty — several grades after everyone else, which has been a little awkward — and am starting to hear about this “sex” thing. It sounds pretty interesting. I end up combining my interests and joining an IRC channel dedicated to Pokémon porn. I’m probably the youngest person here, but no one cares, and I have no sense that there’s any reason anyone would care. There are some older teenagers here, as well as some adults, ranging all the way up to one 40-year-old — but he’s a completely regular cheerful guy who just genuinely enjoys writing fics about Sabrina having sex with an Alakazam or whatever.

But there’s also a guy who makes the occasional comment about “little girls”. There are at least one or two people who casually mention they have regular sex with their dogs. No one bats an eye at this, so I don’t, either. I have no basis for comparison, because I am fourteen years old. Maybe this is normal. Everyone else acts like it’s normal. It must be normal.

Sometimes people try to have cybersex with me. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really know anything about sex, but I start to pick it up from how other people describe it. It’s fun to write about this thing I’ve never done, this activity so mysterious that it almost feels like it must itself be fictional. It feels like it only exists in a bubble, completely detached from normal life.

Offline, I still barely know anyone. I’ve sort of gravitated to a couple other nerds at school, but outside of the fact that we are all vaguely aware how to make a website, we don’t have a lot in common. One of them is just kind of mean, even. This is normal. I’m two years into high school and just barely hitting the age when most people are starting it. I live in Hawai‘i at the moment, and almost everyone else has lived here their whole lives, but I’ve never even been to the same school for more than two years.

I find out about a little old-school website where furries can enter their location and find other furries nearby. I put in my zip code. Nobody else, it seems, lives in Hawai‘i.

I am still fourteen years old

We move, for the fourth time in my life, this time to the US mainland.

I update my zip code on the furry location website. Still nothing.

But then, out of nowhere, I get a message from someone I don’t know, who I’ll call 🐨. He’s eighteen, four years older than me, but that’s normal. He says he used to live in my town and he’s passing through for just a day or two, and would I like to meet up? I’m fucking ecstatic and say yes.

My mother drives me to where he’s staying. It has that 1970s wood panelling everywhere, which I might be seeing for the first time. It ultimately leaves me with a strange, otherworldly impression.

We talk a bit, and then he clearly wants to have sex. This hadn’t come up in our brief conversations beforehand. He seems surprised, but unswayed, that I haven’t had sex before. I don’t see any reason to turn him down — sex is supposed to be The Best Thing, after all.

We fool around some. It’s… fine. I don’t really like how he touches me. But hurting is normal, and this barely hurts at all, so I don’t say anything. I don’t even know how to say anything. People don’t show much interest in what I want. If anything, what I want seems to be an inconvenience to everyone else.

So I don’t say anything. It’s fine. This is normal.

Things peter out. I go home.

I’m no longer a virgin. It seems like something should be different. But nothing is. I don’t really think about it.

I try to keep in touch with 🐨, but he isn’t around much. He’s part of a little group of furries who all live in the same town and know each other, though, and they start to reach out, and I talk to some of them.

I am sixteen years old

[Hello, future Eevee here. Just letting you know, this is your last chance to back out. –ev]

I’ve just graduated high school. I’m so close to being away from my parents, to living on a college campus in a distant state. It’s exhilarating, but also terrifying, because I don’t really know how to live on my own. I’ve never done laundry or bought my own food. I don’t have a car or much money. I don’t really know how to do anything, other than make websites that look like they were made by a sixteen-year-old.

Over the past couple years, a number of guys have shown sexual interest in me. Almost all of them have been eighteen or older. I’ve met some of them at furry conventions and had sex with them. I didn’t really like any of it. But I’m desperately starved for affection and still assume the problem is with me, so I keep taking any opportunity I’m given. Maybe the next time will be better? I don’t know what else to do, so I keep doing what I’m doing.

I’m sufficiently self-aware of this inner turmoil to post about it. The only relevant comment I get is from someone I do not know and never otherwise speak to.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with giving it up for whoever wants it, especially at your age!

I am sixteen years old. This is normal. It can only be normal. No one else thinks anything of it, so I don’t either.

I attend another furry convention not long before I’m to move into a college dorm. My family’s situation is a little complicated at the moment — the house has been sold, my mother is in an apartment in our old town, my father is in an apartment in the new town, I’m off to a convention, and somehow this is all intended to coalesce later.

I have two sexual encounters that have… ramifications.

One is with 🐯, who I met somehow-or-other through 🐨’s group, despite not being local to them. [I have no memory whatsoever of how we met, why we started talking, or what we talked about. –ev]

He is twenty-six years old, a full decade my elder. He is openly interested in me because I’m underage. This is normal. After all, I am underage, and most of the people capable of travel are adults, so anyone who would have sex with me would at the very least have to find it acceptable that I’m underage.

We meet up at this con. He has sex with me. As usual, I don’t really know why I’m participating.

It’s the worst sex I will ever have in my life, deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable. I spend every single moment of it desperately wishing for it to be over, but I don’t know how to ask him to stop. I expect people to hurt me if I push back against what they want from me, but I’m not even cognizant of this — I see myself as just wanting to make people happy. Eventually I can’t take it any more and, in a flash of inspiration, offer to fellate him instead. I don’t really care for that, either, but it’s much less bad.

He gets me to promise I won’t tell anyone. I’m vaguely aware that this is the sort of thing he shouldn’t be doing, and I don’t want anyone in trouble on my behalf, so I agree.

There’s also 🐸, who I’m at least acquainted with, though we’re not exactly close. We hang out in a couple of the same IRC channels and have friends in common. Also, we’re the same age, almost exactly — we were born in the same month.

We also meet up and have sex. This time, at least, it seems like sort of maybe a good idea. At least it’s someone I know. It’s not great, but it’s not nightmarish, either.

He leaves his phone in my hotel room. I happen to catch a glance of him a little later, and so I run up to him to return his phone.

His father is with him, and is furious. He’s absolutely convinced I’m some kind of sex predator, despite that we’re exactly the same age and I look younger than 🐸. I go for my wallet but he sense my intentions and angrily insists he doesn’t care what kind of ID I have. He declares he’s placing me under citizen’s arrest, a thing I’ve never even heard of. But of course, I believe I have to go along with adults, or they’ll make things even worse.

He actually calls the police, who spend about two seconds checking my ID and say “yeah this is fine”. But then they want me to Make A Statement Down At The Station, so I go there, and I awkwardly describe a bland teenaged sexual encounter to someone who is a remarkably slow typist considering it seems to be their whole job.

And now I’m at a police station, and the police only want to release me into my parents’ custody, because I am sixteen years old. So they call my father, who is thankfully only a few hours’ drive away. And they put me in a chair and tell me that if I get up they’ll lock me in a cell. And I sit there, for two hours, while cops twenty feet away crack jokes with each other about the fact that two teenagers fucked. It may have been more or less than two hours, but I have undiagnosed ADHD, which has a way of stretching out activies like sitting in a chair doing nothing.

My father arrives, so silently furious that he accidentally drives into the wrong state on the way back to his apartment. He demands I log into my laptop, and he changes my password. Once I’m alone, because he’s off at his job as some sort of network administrator, I log into my laptop as admin, and change my password back. [Bright spot in this story. Fucking hilarious. Great job, li’l Eevee. –ev]

I then write a public post about the experience, which ends up linked on a now-defunct drama site. A bunch of people — who are we kidding here, more adult men — have a grand laugh about, again, two teenagers having sex. It probably doesn’t help that the post is written in an almost painfully cutesy affect, since I am sixteen years old. Several dramamongers approach me personally to be nasty, including one who calls me a “sick fuck” for “doing kids”. I am sixteen years old.

One of the convention staff also emails me with a brief rant, asking why I’m trying to destroy the convention by writing about things that happened to me, because now he’s fielding accusations that the con is full of pedophiles (presumably, again, because I had sex with someone my age). I have no idea what to say to this and never reply.

I do show it to 🐯, hoping for support. I happen to think that it’s absurd to blame someone for posting that they had sex at a con. But 🐯 insists I’m wrong and should apologize. I deflate.

My father later talks to me about the event. The conversation is extremely one-sided, because I know what happens if I push back against anything. He tells me I’m cold, calculating, manipulative, evil. He tells me I care only about myself. That I have no soul. That he doesn’t want me in the house.

I am sixteen years old.

All of this is normal.

The irony is, unfortunately, lost on me — because as requested, I erased mention of 🐯, the twenty-six-year-old who had sex with a sixteen-year-old, from my story. I erased it so thoroughly that I will forget these two encounters happened on the same weekend until many years later, even as I will continue to be lightly haunted by a memory of horrendous sex I felt trapped in.

Sometime in the next week and a half, I admit to someone that I had sex with 🐯. [I don’t know who, but I think I was pointedly asked, and I didn’t really know how to reject questions, and I’ve never liked lying, so I can extremely see how I would end up just saying it. –ev]

This makes it through some unseen grapevine, and suddenly 🐯 is furious with me, threatening to end the friendship [lol –ev] unless I fix it somehow, by convincingly lying to someone in this gossip chain that I don’t know. I make a half-hearted attempt, which I hate, and am (unsurprisingly) not believed.

Our relationship, such as it is, deteriorates, both because 🐯 himself deteriorates and because I don’t seem to have as much interest in trying to be friends with the person I had inescapable nightmare sex with. I must feel resentful of him without ever wanting to confront him directly, because I will later discover a few remaining scraps of one of our last conversations:

🐯: Gods eevee you’ve become such an annoying little bitch, I can’t beleive I was ever even nice to you. I wouldn’t have come within 20 feet of you had I known you were this kind of person.

I am sixteen years old. I am being spoken to by a twenty-six-year-old man.

🐯: gods, you and your stupid faces

I am sixteen years old, and I use emotes as punctuation o.o to a ridiculous degree ^o.o^ like multiple times per line o.o and the twenty-six-year-old man who was so eager to have sex with me is now sick to death of how juvenile I am. If only there were some way he could have foreseen this.

I am sixteen years old, but I begin to realize I do not give a shit about this loser who can only bed teenagers, nor about his big important opinion of me. He’s mad at me, but it doesn’t matter. Adults have been mad at me my entire life. What’s he going to do, type at me? I glaze over. I become laminated. I rebuff everything.

He only talks to me once more, to say he misses seeing me around. I don’t care.

I am sixteen years old. I start to wonder if this isn’t normal.

I am eighteen years old

Someone new joins the Pokémon porn IRC channel. They are fifteen years old. I don’t think anything of it, just as no one thought anything of it when I first entered. This is normal. Sort of.

I recognize their name from the artwork that decorates several Pokémon fansites. I find it fascinating that they were able to create any of that. It’s like magic to me.

There are a few artists here already, but this is the first whose art was truly captivating to me. Somehow it feels more impressive yet also more real, like I can believe it was done by a person. It plants the tiniest seed that maybe, one day, I can do it too.

I approach them to say hi, that I like their art. We have an actual conversation, then another. It’s like a breath of fresh air. So many people I’ve talked to have just wanted to hit on me way past the point of comfort and barely have a personality beyond that. But nothing like that happens here.

Instead we talk about actual things: Pokémon, and art, and our lives, and all the wrinkles they’ve had so far. They like cats. I like puzzles. Sometimes they struggle with pressure from overbearing commissioners, and something about that must resonate with me, so I try to be supportive. Later I’ll admit I’m still struggling with affection and my inability to tell people no, and they’ll be supportive of me, too.

It’s nice.

One day, it’ll even be normal.

I am thirty-two years old

I’m at the DMV. My best friend, someone I met a lifetime ago — in a Pokémon porn chat, of all places! — is here with me.

We live together, now, with our five cats, and we’ve recently escaped someone we both struggled to push back against. It feels like a small victory, but it was hard-earned.

We both sign the marriage certificate.

I am thirty-eight years old

I’m thinking back on a lot of things. It’s almost dizzying to see so many little threads of causality. My parents, even teachers, practically training me to think that whatever other people want is paramount. The deeply fucked-up culture of early-00’s Internet, where people could just openly announce their interest in doing sex crimes and no one batted an eye. Even the notion of a 14yo in a space dedicated to porn sounds unthinkable by today’s standards, but I poked my head in a lot of sex-themed places back in the day and not one of them cared how old I was.

I suppose I was well-spoken enough to sound older (aside from the hailstorm of o.o), but at the same time my social development was… almost non-existent. Hence how I had 20-somethings talking to me like I was an equal, all while I didn’t even understand how to say “I don’t like this”.

It took me a few more years to extricate myself from the weird little rut I’d dug for myself. It certainly helped that, around nineteen or twenty, vastly fewer random older men were interested in me. I’ll just, uh, try not to think too hard about that.

I don’t know what would have helped me avoid this. I keep thinking back to the vague ambient warnings about the Internet in the early 00s, which mainly focused on how anyone might be lying to you, might be pretending to be your age to trick you into sex later.

But that never happened to me. It was so unlike my experience that it almost feels laughable. Everyone I had sex with was pretty open that they wanted to have sex with me, and I agreed. No one ever warned me that sex without pretense could have emotional consequences. Everything in my (regular, offline) life that tried to tell me anything about sex was laser-focused on either pregnancy, STIs, or a guy in a van offering me candy. Like, hello, I was a deeply lonely sixteen-year-old. They didn’t need to offer me candy. They just offered me sex!

And there are lingering consequences — although now that I’m happily married and no longer on the radar of a bunch of people who really want to sleep with a teenager, they largely don’t matter in practice. But I had so much terrible, uncaring sex with men that I feel a little anxious even considering the thought of doing it again. There’s no one besides my spouse who I want to have sex with at the moment, but I still don’t like having that stuck in me. Like a shackle around my ankle that isn’t chained to anything, but it’s still there, and occasionally I feel it rattle.

But what really struck me, what really compelled me to write this down, was the realization of a strange pattern in the post-con sequence of events.

I think it’s fair to say that 🐯 used me for sex. I played along, but I think there’s at least a little bit of a responsibility gradient here.

But then, wait. Some group of people confirmed with me that I’d had sex with 🐯, and then I guess started gossipping about it, possibly even harassing him. Do you know how many people from that circle reached out to me, to see how I was doing?

Zero. Nada. I was useful only as long as it took to crystallize a nugget of Drama™, and then I was no longer needed.

So let me recap, this time with some editorializing:

A man ten years my elder used me for sex.
A bunch of adult men used me for laughs.
Some kind of gossip ring used me for, well, gossip.
A con staff member used me to vent about something that, frankly, furry conventions seemed to deal with a lot in the 00s.

Not one of these many adults reached out to see if I was okay. The con staff guy didn’t know about 🐯, of course, but they did know I’d had a harrowing experience and now was having at least one more — because those are what my whole fucking post was about! — and yet the only reason they went through the effort to find my email and reach out was to blame me for it again.

But it’s the gossip ring that I truly cannot excuse. The sole reason there was any gossip to be had at all was the idea that a twenty-six-year-old having sex with a sixteen-year-old is, in some sense, bad. But this clearly didn’t actually mean anything to them! It was “bad” only in the abstract, “bad” only in the sense that it gave them an excuse to ostracize the “bad” person, or laugh, or whatever the fuck they were doing.

It’s no different than that drama-site clown calling me a “sick fuck for doing kids” or whatever the hell. You could not possibly read a post about how I had to wait for my dad to pick me up because the cops wouldn’t release a minor and not grasp that I am a minor. Like, I AM “THE KIDS”! You, my fucking guy, right now, are being cruel towards the people you’re feigning concern for! But it just didn’t matter what happened or who was involved or who was hurt by it. Some asshole — almost certainly yet another adult — just wanted to be nasty, and they thought they saw someone they were allowed to be nasty to, so they were.

None of these people were interested in helping a sixteen-year-old. They only wanted to lash out at someone. The best I got was a tiny apology from 🐯, of all fucking people, who eventually caught on that I had not fully enjoyed our time together. But he can, of course, shove that entirely up his ass.

For many, many years, I’ve avoided making any mention of the thing with 🐸, my first exposure to the Internet “Drama” Circuit. I feared it would happen again, or that I’d be called a pedophile some more by people who just conveniently forget that we were the same age. I’d completely forgotten that 🐯 happened at the same time — because he’d basically asked me to detach him from the rest of it! Rediscovering that little tidbit has sure cast this story in a different light.

But like, fuck that, regardless? I will talk about my own life in whatever goddamn way I please. As soon as I decided to write this down, I couldn’t even remember why I’d ever been scared to do it. I guess I had been pretty thoroughly punished for writing it down the first time.

And sure, with decades’ worth of hindsight, it was perhaps not a good idea to have described my underage sex life — or the brief entanglement of the police with it — in public. But I still reject the idea that it was wrong to do so, or that any subsequent ragging on the convention was my fault. The actual story here (once 🐯 was stripped from it) was that Some Fucking Guy overreacted and called the cops because his teenaged kid got laid and he didn’t like that. That is fucking bananas behavior for a grown-ass man, but somehow fingers ended up pointed at literally everyone else. Clown world.

And various people have been calling me a pedophile ever since anyway. I’m often not privy to why. Like, as best as I could discern, the Something Awful Pokémon crowd branded me a pedo at one point because I had some cutesy, non-sexual, unremarkable artwork of myself (i.e., an Eevee person) as the background of my website for a while. Like that’s it, that’s the whole thing. Conspicuously, I am not attracted to, or otherwise interested in, teenagers or children, but that just doesn’t seem to factor in. You’d think it would be kind of important, right? But there’s this weird chain of semantic implications that lets you suggest someone actively molests children based purely on vibes, without ever having to identify any concrete child, and that seems kind of bad to me, but if I try to explain it I’ll probably be called a pedophile, because why would anyone but a pedophile defend pedophiles by nitpicking the definition of “pedophile”, huh?

Meanwhile, I was actively pursued by much older adults! 🐯 isn’t even the oldest guy who had sex with me when I was sixteen! But I’ve spent half a lifetime nervous about even admitting that, out of some nebulous fear of the reaction, all while I get lumped in with the sort of people who did it to me because my website background doesn’t have a suit and tie or what the fuck ever. What a joke.

It makes me feel fucking crazy, sometimes, to watch our culture obsess over rooting out anyone with a whiff of “pursues sex with a minor” with the same furor and accuracy as we once rooted out people possessed by Satan, but with “the minor” — a person — reduced to a sort of… fantasy hypothetical? Or just dropped entirely, I guess. “Pedophile” is the thing you call someone that makes you win, because that’s the worst thing, and they can’t prove you wrong. Even the richest man in the world does it.

Sometimes I think about what might happen in another timeline, where I’m sixteen now and I post this story. I’m sure 🐯 would be absolutely roasted right off the Internet — but how many people would still check on me for anything other than more sordid details?

…But then, who have I checked on? How many times have I had the opportunity, and not taken it?

I can definitely think of one or two. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

This sucks. I feel like basically every adult in my teenaged life let me down, and I have no idea what to do with that information.

I guess all I can do is try to reach back in time with the power of blogging and say what I desperately needed to hear.

If you are a teenager reading this — I don’t know how or why, but I am functionally powerless to stop you — and even a little bit of it has resonated with you, then let me impress upon you this: how you feel matters. Even if it doesn’t seem to matter to the people around you, the people with power over your life, it should still matter to you. Hold onto it, even if you have to hide it, and do not let go for anyone.

I’m sorry for whatever you may feel trapped in. I’m sorry if it’s hard. It might keep being hard for a little while. But if you keep looking, you will find people who care about what you want, who will have your back when you struggle to stand up for yourself, and who won’t punish you for hurting.

Please take care of yourself.

P.S.: Sex is an amplifier, not an automatic good time. It’s like Mario Party: a hilarious chaotic mess with the right people, but a horrible fucking slog with the wrong people.

I am thirty-eight years old.

I still think about what happened to me when I was sixteen. Not all the time. But sometimes.

Maybe after today, I can finally stop.

Anise lives

2025-06-10T02:00:00-07:00

(a post rescued from Cohost, originally Aug 2024)

Some backstory may be necessary.

Some backstory

FIP is a cruel joke of a cat disease. It’s a mutation of the feline coronavirus, which as you might imagine is fairly common, so virtually any cat might develop it at any time. It tends to afflict very young or very old cats. If left untreated, it is virtually always fatal in a matter of weeks. And there is no cure.

At least, that was the state of things when my first cat, Styx, died of FIP.

That was a long time ago now and it was very sad. It’s still very sad, just, less frequently. Sometimes I try to give his death meaning by reassuring myself that it led me to meet Anise, but that’s trading one companion for another, which is kind of weird? I think nowadays I find it more comforting to think about how the universe is chaotic and things just happen and there doesn’t need to be any… moral weight on them.

Anyway.

The regular story

Anise is my second cat and he has always been a sturdy guy. He’s never had any real health problems.

But then a couple years ago, maybe around the end of 2022, I noticed he was losing weight. And this freaked me out a bit because Styx’s first symptom was weight loss that only I had noticed — I’d gone out of town for a weekend and returned to find his back looking kinda bony. And now I realized Anise was looking kinda bony.

And then he started getting lethargic. He’d spend basically all day, every day, just sleeping. And yeah, I know, cats sleep a lot, but they don’t just sleep. Anise would get out of his cat bed, drink some water, maybe eat a single kibble, and then return to his cat bed. That was all I saw from him all day. And he’s usually very, um… sociable? Demanding? Sociamanding.

So we went to the vet (a different one, now), and they poked and prodded him a bit, and said he was basically fine. Great news.

But he kept slowly… shrinking. And he didn’t seem to enjoy eating. I thought about this some and wondered if maybe he had a dental problem, that chewing on kibble was painful. I took him back and asked them to look at his teeth real good, and lo and behold, he had a couple bad teeth! So we farted around for over a month with appointments and some other vet thing I can’t remember before he could actually get those teeth pulled, and then he had a month of meds afterwards, and in the meantime I’m doing stuff like putting kibble in a coffee grinder and turning it into a paste so he can just lick it up, because at least he seems to eat a bit more when I do that.

And then I wait for the post-op soreness to probably go away, which is mostly just waiting for some length of time that seems reasonable because cats aren’t real big on telling you where or how much it hurts, and meanwhile he’s now having diarrhea that seems to be especially unpleasant for him. So it’s back to the vet, and they still don’t see any clear problems, but maybe we could try this bland sensitive stomach food and mix in some pumpkin? And I go off and buy a bunch of prescription food and mix in a truly staggering amount of pumpkin purée — the advice is to give a cat up to a teaspoon a day, and I need to give him a tablespoon or more to keep him moderately regular — but it does seem to help, and he seems to enjoy eating it more. Progress! Progress?

We came to call this concotion Prince Food. Anise soon learned that the only source of Prince Food was me, and every four hours like clockwork, he would ask for some Prince Food. He did this by sitting on my desk, facing me, putting him at very nearly my eye line, and just staring at me. That’s what the photo is: Anise asking for Prince Food. I literally put my phone as close to my face as I could and took a picture. That is what my field of vision looked like, four to six times a day. For months. Absolutely ridiculous.

This is what I mean about Anise being sociamanding — he is very aware of the things he likes, and most of the ways he’s found to ask for them are almost cartoonishly obnoxious. Going a whole day without being physically bugged for something is rare.

…But he was still slowly losing weight. We went back and forth to the vet, trying various things, waiting weeks each time to see if anything would change — sphynxes especially seem to need time to adjust to a new diet, so it was really hard to know when to call something a definitive failure — and it wouldn’t. It was uniquely exhausting. I really didn’t like the endless treadmill of just trying endless minor variations of food and medication, because each one meant risking he’d be even more miserable for a while until we gave up on it. But even the super duper bland prescription food with a ton of pumpkin mixed in was just barely keeping him digesting anything, and he wasn’t gaining any weight back, so it didn’t seem like a permanent solution. And time continued to pass.

I think at the most extreme, I found out he’d dropped from 11 pounds to something like 7½. An entire third of my cat had disappeared. And the response from the vet felt like "Huh! That’s weird." Meanwhile I was losing my fucking mind in this slow burn that dragged on for months.

They eventually directed me to an internist — something I wish had occurred to me much, much sooner — who gave him an ultrasound. It showed his small intestine was… flattened? Like, you know how your intestines are full of cilia, all these tiny fleshy fingers, to increase surface area for absorbing nutrients? His were just like, flat. So his guts were straight up, uh, not working good. Well no fucking wonder. But we still didn’t know why.

We went through this cycle of trying a couple meds again — I remember steroids, because autoimmune was on the table — and still nothing changed. We were approaching a year of this at this point, I was constantly thinking about what a massive percentage of Anise’s lifespan that is, and I was about two seconds away from just blowing up the universe, when the internist said:

“Maybe it’s FIP?”

And I said:

“what”

Because it couldn’t be. He didn’t have any of the bloodwork of a cat with FIP. The usual FIP age range is very young or fairly old, and he was close to smack-dab in the middle of those. He didn’t have the swollen belly that most cats get with FIP. (Apparently that happens when there’s no immune response at all.) And most conspicuously, he was still alive, after this extensive period of fucking around.

But there is no conclusive test, so it’s hard to definitively say yes or no. The internist tested his poop for coronavirus antibodies and they were off the charts — like, I think, literally beyond what the test can accurately count — so she said, ok, let’s just assume it is.

And I said, I know exactly what to do.

The cure

Because you see, in the decade since Styx died, someone has found a cure for FIP. A cure that is effective as often as FIP itself is fatal, some ridiculous percentage like 97% of the time. It is just unbelievably good. The turnaround from “almost always die” to “almost always live” gives me fucking whiplash. It even works on cats who are in worse shape than Styx was when I euthanized him. Truly a shining moment of human ingenuity.

…There are some problems.

One is that the company that invented it has refused to submit it for FDA approval. I don’t really know why. I vaguely remember a suggestion that they wanted to market it as a treatment for human coronaviruses and thought submitting it for veterinary use would interfere with that? I don’t know. That sounds absurd to me. I definitely gave my cat several drugs I recognized as things we also give to humans in the course of this adventure, so why would this be a problem?

It doesn’t even have a real name. It’s just GS-441524. If you want some, you have to get it off-brand from a slightly dubious seller in China. I don’t know why it’s China but all the sellers seem to be in China.

The other problem is that you can’t really give it orally, because at this point the cat’s guts can’t absorb anything. So you have to give it subdermally.

Like, with a syringe.

To a cat.

Who has no idea what you’re doing.

And just as a bonus, it has to be suspended in an acidic solution, so it really stings.

And your vet can’t help you do it.

She did, however, prescribe us a big pile of gabapentin, a fairly safe anticonvulsant with the convenient side effect of significant drowsiness.

So once a day for over a month, Ash would give Anise a capsule of gabapentin, transforming him into Stumble Anise. Then I would load a syringe, we would hold him together, and Ash would inject him, and he would be real mad, and I would give him a little cat stew treat thing, and he would go in his toasty box.

(Anise started to get pretty cold, since we live in Colorado, it was winter, he doesn’t have fur, and he’d lost most of his body fat. There’s a furnace vent near my desk, so I got one of those Costco display boxes and set it up with a blanket inside overlapping the vent a bit, so the warm air would flow into it and keep it warmed up. Anise spent a lot of time in there that winter and would go there to sulk after we inexplicably bit him every day.)

And then a miracle occurred, and he started gaining weight.

After a month or so it’s apparently safe to switch from injections to tablets, so we did that, and he kept regaining weight. And he stopped having diarrhea.

And then he stopped asking for Prince Food. He would just go eat kibble and it would be fine. We might even still have a can or two of bland prescription food somewhere that I never ended up needing.

And now he’s just fine. He’s not bony any more. He’s active and engaging and incredibly annoying again. He doesn’t have such immense stomach pain that he wakes up growling.

It feels like a fucking miracle. He caught the same deadly disease that killed my first cat, and he fought it so hard no one even suspected he had it because he wasn’t sickly enough, and then with just a bit of black market medicine he shrugged it off like it was nothing.

I think that’s pretty cool of him.

The aftermath

This was all so stressful like you would not even believe, and the whole saga spanned over a year. It was often hard to work. Or sleep. At best, feeding him Prince Food every four hours was still an ADHD nightmare — I could only feed him on my desk lest other cats interfere, he would take some twenty minutes to eat (he’s always been a dawdling eater), and I couldn’t really do anything else with him in the way. I’m very glad it’s over, and I’m sure he is too.

All this has left me thinking about the series of cat eulogies I’ve written here and how I’m kind of tired of doing that. So I think I would like to post all about Anise while he’s, y’know, still alive. I’ll get on that.

And thank you, Ash, for doing some of the hard parts. I really struggle with wrangling a cat who really doesn’t want to do something — I would’ve had a hard time getting him to swallow a pill, let alone holding him still enough to stick a needle in him. I do not know how I would’ve done this without you. So as far as I’m concerned, you saved his life. Thank you.

Eevee gained 4,219 experience points…

2025-01-17T20:00:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 38!

It’s been a few years since I did one of these. My birthday in 2022 was kind of overshadowed by the loss of our darling cat Pearl. But I think I’d like to get back into it, to christen the redone website.

This year

Untitled Trefoil game

This was my entry for my annual horny game jam, 🔞 Strawberry Jam 8. Tragically, we did not make it. I think I bit off a bit more than I could chew by trying to design and also implement an RPG battle system in an engine I haven’t used much.

The engine in question is Godot, which I keep desperately trying to get a foothold in, and then… not… doing. By “foothold” I mostly mean a little bundle of common code I’ve written atop Godot for dealing with cases that come up a lot in games but that are too specific for the engine to include directly — a basic actor type, scene switching, that sort of thing. Just a mini library for me that’s already made all the decisions I would make, so I’m not starting completely from scratch.

I guess the other half of a “foothold” is figuring out how to make the engine do things at all. Other than a brief foray into Unity many years ago that didn’t go much further than twiddling with player physics, I just haven’t really tried using an integrated engine, and boy — in some ways, it’s harder than rolling your own everything. If a built-in gizmo doesn’t do something I take for granted that I should be able to do, then… fuck me, I guess?

But I would still like to get away from actually having to build every feature from scratch myself (like I do in LÖVE) because it just takes so much dang time, which I am then not spending on making a video game. So I would really like to get something resembling a game built and released in Godot! And this is the latest of several attempts in which I do not do that.

I think there were two big stumbling blocks here that were not conducive to wrangling a new-to-me engine in a jam setting, and I think both are partly effects of Godot’s being new-in-general:

There’s often not an obvious good way to approach a problem with Godot’s primitives. Nodes are a cool idea and all, but I think it’s less than obvious that you might want to use node names as an ad-hoc interface, e.g. by giving actors a collection of behavior nodes named after components or states or something.
There’s a lot of little oddball behavior and little feature gaps, most notably from GDScript, Godot’s bespoke language that’s “we have Python at home”. But for a non-code example: there’s no way to give a UI widget a maximum size, so if a long word sneaks into your text somewhere… don’t do that, I guess? Stuff like that that will cost you a few valuable hours chasing down only to find that it doesn’t exist.

I took notes at the time about a lot of the speed bumps I ran into, and many of them were about GDScript specifically, but I never wrote them up because… I mean, christ, I don’t want to do another epic teardown XD of a language. It’s embarrassing enough being known for the first one. Instead, let me try to summarize with a single bullet point that I hope will convey the vibe to anyone who’s ever thought about language design for a few minutes:

Some builtin functions can accept an arbitrary number of arguments. There is no way to write a function in user code that accepts an arbitrary number of arguments.

Anyway the short version here is that I picked too big of a project to do in a month and I tried to do it in an engine that still has a lot of rough edges.

Anise

Anise was sick for much of 2023, which kind of fucked up that whole year, but we finally cured him this past spring. Hooray! Here is a photo of him from his 2020 Presidential campaign.

This is worth its own post, which I have already written, but it was on Cohost, which is now gone. Maybe I’ll port it over and add a bunch of cat photos to it.

Anyway he’s fine and that’s great.

vignettes

So, we released 🔞 Cherry Kisses a few years ago. (Five. Five years ago?? Oh my god) It’s a little spruced-up jam game where you walk around and talk to customers and do little sex scenes with them, accompanied by art, and also there’s an overarching puzzle aspect you can completely ignore if you want.

This was originally, as I said, a jam game, which we didn’t actually finish in time, but which took maybe a month and a half to do. At the time, I thought: wow, great! This porn stuff is E-Z. We should just crank a couple of these out a year, in between other stuff we’re doing!

Five years later, we have not yet released another porn game. Or another game on Steam at all! Not for lack of trying — we started several (overscoped) visual novels that never ended up finding their footing.

COVID and other world events kind of put a damper on things, creating a broader problem: it’s just been hard to drum up the right mood for writing extended lighthearted sex romps.

That said, we finally have something that is almost done. Actually it’s been asymptotically approaching “done” for a while. It’s tentatively called vignettes, and the idea is that we will release a shorter story, then go back and update the game later with more shorter stories, and also play around with the format if I feel like it too. Hopefully this will fix some of our scoping problems.

It’s still not done. But we did most of the work for it this past year. Like 90%. It’s so close. I’m getting back to it after I finish this post and another urgent thing.

I’m actually going slowly insane over this, because I’ve been designing characters and whatnot for VN purposes for years, and they have all been rolling around in my head like marbles that whole time, and no one outside this house knows anything about them. I need to let them out!

fox flux

Wow! When I sat down to write this post I thought I’d done basically nothing on fox flux all year. But I guess I did a lot actually. It’s not moving quite as quickly as I’d hoped, and the game is in a bit of disarray so there haven’t been Patreon builds in a bit, but, it is moving.

I don’t want to write out a whole gritty changelog here, but suffice to say I implemented a bunch of stuff that had been languishing as little stubs for a long time, so the game feels a lot closer to feature-complete. Now I just have to make a zillion levels! How hard could that be?

(It’s very hard. It’s where I got blocked, creatively! All my level ideas turned out not fun and I didn’t have any more so I went to work on other stuff for a while. Puzzle level design is fuckin’ gnarly my dudes)

Lexy's Labyrinth

Lexy’s Labyrinth, my free Chip’s Challenge emulator, was like 90% finished, so I sat down and 100% finished it. Or, I dunno, 99%.

Highlights include:

Now has CCLP5, the latest and greatest community level pack! Adding this in is what got me back to working on LL, so, thanks for putting it together, everyone.
The tileset got a lot of touching up, and it now sports a brighter palette, instead of merely a copy of an old dull (not even pastel, just, dull) fox flux palette. The website is pink to match Lexy, too, though I fear it might be too reddish?
You can hold R to restart the level! At last!
Undo now uses much less memory, and the undo buffer is limited by size rather than time (though it will always save at least 30 seconds). On the most pathological built-in level I could find, 30 seconds was about 12 MB, and the limit is 10 MB, so this should be a huge improvement pretty much anywhere. On a sokoban-like level where the player is mostly stopping and thinking while nothing else happens, undo is virtually unlimited.
Rewind now accelerates the further back you go, too.
There are several touchscreen control schemes now: swipe, tap relative to the player, or tap relative to the viewport. So you can try whichever is least bad. There’s also partial gamepad support, though only within a level.
A bit more CC2 behavior is now shown visually within the level where it wouldn’t be in CC2, like dynamite always showing its full explosion radius.
Compatibility is vastly improved, and more of the built-in levels are beatable. (Some of the built-in levels are designed for CC1, but the default rules are CC2-like and slightly different. A couple levels now have manual patches specifically to make them beatable, a tactic borrowed from ZDoom.)
Support for Lynx mode has gone from “very bad” to “pretty solid”! It’s still not speedrun legal, largely because it doesn’t fully emulate frankly insane bugs like actors being able to teleport on top of each other, but it should be sufficiently accurate for normal purposes.

The editor is also vastly, vastly better; it has multiple new tools for otherwise awkward tasks, it supports arbitrary selections (including a new wand select tool), it supports CC1-style tile connections, and it can export levels in CC1 format!

I’d had code for that last thing written for ages and just never plugged it in, and I didn’t even notice until I saw someone in the Bit Busters Discord comment that LL wasn’t useful for CC1 level editing because it couldn’t actually export as CC1. Whoops.

There are also lots of experimental extra tiles, though they aren’t all fully implemented, and I haven’t made any “official” levels with them. I did start on my own level pack for Lexy’s Labyrinth specifically, but I completely forgot about it until I was writing this post just now. Wonder if I’ll ever finish that. 200 levels is a lot, but it’s also good practice.

Doom stuff

In August, Microsoft unveiled an entirely redone official Doom release, now with Boom support, making it compatible with more of the Doom ecosystem.

That was weird, because Boom is a third-party fork of the open source Doom release, meaning it’s GPL. And there was no release of the current Doom codebase.

Turns out that what Microsoft did was pay someone to cleanroom Boom from scratch, effectively laundering the GPL off of it, so that they could add open source extensions to Doom (an open source game) and make it proprietary again.

I found this… frustrating. But a lot of Doom people didn’t really care and mostly found it neat that they can play Doom on an XBox now. (It’s notoriously difficult to put someone else’s GPL code on a console. The console APIs are all covered under NDAs — you know, to prevent anyone from finding out that the XBox uses DirectX — so you’d be in a position where the GPL requires you to release your modified code, but the NDA requires you to not do that.)

Instead of sitting around being mad forever that the very people who’ve benefitted so much from Doom’s being open source don’t really care about open source, I tried to pour it into something slightly more constructive, and so I started tinkering with an improved idgames frontend. I guess the idea was that people mostly seemed to value having a WAD browser built into Microsoft Doom, but there’s no reason we can’t have that for the entire archive of everything ever made, right?

I ran out of steam before it got too far, but I did get it doing a few interesting things, like automatically producing screenshots of the opening shot of each level (which you can see in the screenshot above). I had some other ideas, like trying to infer qualitative descriptions of level size and difficulty, but didn’t quite get around to it. Oh well.

So I went back to my Doom text generator, a former advent calendar project that I cranked out in a day and wrote about before. I’d seen a couple people mention having actually used it, which was cool, so I went and did some stuff to it.

It could only render its own built-in fonts, so an obvious extension was to extend it to load fonts of any format from a provided WAD or PK3, all client-side.
It has a truckload more built-in fonts now, courtesy of Jimmy Paddock’s collection. So the Doom text generator can now generate Duke Nukem text, too. Weird.
It can, finally, combine multiple fonts in a single message, using a tiny bbcode-like markup language.
It can generate a bunch of images in bulk, which is exceptionally handy for level authors targeting vanilla-like Doom, where you have to provide your own level name images. It can even read the level names directly from a MAPINFO file that more advanced ports would use to render names themselves.

Now it’s got a Doomworld thread and source code (little redundant since it’s all shipped to the client) and everything. It’s like a real project! I’m glad people find it useful.

It even got a Cacowards 2024 sidebar shoutout, which is cool, making this basically the only thing of note I’ve ever done in the Doom ecosystem. The Boom license laundering also got an explicit shoutout, though, so. Cool.

Sudoku

I made some sudoku, after realizing I could just make some sudoku if I wanted to. My first one is appropriately titled 1 (killer + little killer), and the rest are on my new puzzle index. Speaking of which—

This year

I basically forget about any aspirational list like this within a week, but I would really really like to:

Get vignettes released, and get a couple more stories added to it!
Get fox flux out of its level design rut and just accelerate into building the game proper. Also more patron builds.
Write more, I think. I do kind of miss it.

I’d like to… reconnect with the world, I guess. Everything feels disconnected. I dropped Twitter and tried to rebuild on Cohost, did not really succeed at that (there’s a post in that, too), and then Cohost went down. Now there’s Bluesky, I guess, but I feel like I’m two platforms and several years in the hole. And a couple closer friendships disintegrated over the same period, so I have been adrift as all hell.

And the primary way I know how to connect with anyone is through my work! So I need to make some!

Goodbye, Pearl

2022-01-25T22:57:00-08:00

A Chronicling of the Lyfe and Times of one Miss Pearl Twig Woods, who has Passed at a Young Age from Troubles of the Heart. She is survived by Anise, her Arch Nemesis; Cheeseball, her Adoptive Ruffian; and Napoleon, her Star-Crossed Suitor for Whom she Longed from Afar.

Pearl is… difficult to describe. She had such a strong, vibrant personality.

She was lovely, that’s for certain. She loved everyone she met. And while various people — friends, vets, etc. — have met our cats and always liked them, I don’t believe anyone has met Pearl and not adored her. Anise will check out your stuff and perhaps jump on you; Cheeseball will do antics for you and rub on your leg; but Pearl would accept you into her life and be very directly, personally affectionate with you specifically. She made you feel special.

At the same time, she was very fussy, very particular, and had a very strong sense of… her place in the world, I suppose. If she liked something, she would be having it. If she didn’t like something, she would make that exceptionally clear. She was never mean, but she would be very vocal about her boundaries.

It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to Pearl repeatedly headbutting me right in the face, pressing her head up under my chin, or giving me a nuzzle with the entire length of her body, purring all the while. If she was happy to see you, she made an entire production out of it. It wasn’t just us; guests who slept on the couch also got the Pearl wake-up call.

It was also not uncommon to wake up because Pearl had decided that she needed my pillow, and somehow this very small cat took up the entire thing. I couldn’t move her; trying to displace her from a comfortable spot would generally earn you a sad, offended meow, after which you felt guilty for even having entertained the notion in the first place.

One of her particular quirks was to often “bury” her food when she was done with it, or at least paw fruitlessly at nearby carpet. On its own, this is endearing but not unusual — burying leftovers is a common cat instinct, even if we’ve not seen it in our other cats. What made it a uniquely Pearl trait was that she would also perform this ritual if offered something she didn’t want at all. I laughed every time; it was such an audacious way to indicate utter disinterest. Take it away, please. Put it in a hole, if you would.

She got, more or less, everything she wanted. If she claimed a spot, everything about her expression and body language indicated it was clearly hers, even if that spot was your body. (Naturally, if you moved too much or even sneezed suddenly, she would tell you off for that too.) If she wanted to ride on your shoulders, that’s what would be happening. If it was time to feed her and she was too comfortable in her cat tree, well, we’d just have to hold the food up for her. She had a way of looking very pleased with herself that was impossible to argue with.

I first met Pearl in 2014, shortly after we moved to Las Vegas. She was tiny, even for a kitten, and apparently the runt of her litter. I don’t remember what specifically compelled Ash to adopt another cat, except that they love cats, but what a selection.

I cannot stress enough how small she was. You know those solid wood desks that have a column of drawers built into them on one side? You know how they often have a little decorative shape carved out at the bottom with molded edges? Pearl could crawl into that space. I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw it; the gap is so short that I’d never even thought to categorize it as a space, let alone one a cat might enter, but she slunk into it like it was nothing. I was so worried we’d have to move the desk somehow to get her out, but she usually turned around and came right out again. I still remember the very last time she did it — I could tell she was having to shimmy a bit to fit in there, and she must have noticed too, because I never saw her even try it again.

The other cats had somewhat mixed feelings. Napoleon didn’t like her at all and hissed directly in her face, but… after that, I don’t remember any bad reactions from him at all, so I guess he warmed up quick. Anise did not seem to understand what a kitten was, tried to play with her, and then acted very confused when that didn’t seem to work. And Twigs…

Oh, Twigs. Twigs was jealous. He had always been Ash’s cat, he had made himself Ash’s cat, and he very quickly inferred that Pearl was a threat to his position. Another cat! In Ash’s lap! Unthinkable!

On one particular night Ash had barred Twigs from the bedroom to sleep with just Pearl, but came downstairs to visit the kitchen. Twigs ran up to them, looked them dead in the eye, and let out a huge sad wail to convey his feelings about the depths of this betrayal.

They let him into the bedroom after that, but he opted to sit across the room and stare daggers at Pearl, moving a little closer every half hour until he was on the far corner of the bed. Just staring.

Ash eventually had to bribe him by putting some cottage cheese on Pearl’s head, after which he decided Pearl was okay. Also he found out that he could fit himself in Ash’s lap alongside Pearl, so that probably helped.

Oh, and she loved to be cozy. She loved to be cozy. Sphynxes are naturally drawn to warmth, of course, but Pearl elevated it to an artform. If I’m propped up in bed, Anise might stand next to me to look at the covers expectantly, or he might just lay down nearby. Pearl would stand right on top of me and pull at the covers with impressive force until I lifted them for her, let her lay on my chest, and tucked her in.

We’d often find Pearl very awkwardly tucked under the edge of a blanket somewhere, having attempted to insert herself beneath it with mixed success. We described this as Pearl doing it all by herself, and complimented her on how talented she was, and then fixed the blanket for her.

We have heater vents in the floor, and one of her favorite pastimes was to sit on one of those, often covering the entire thing, and be gently toasted from below. Sometimes Anise would see what a great idea that was and try to share it and they would end up squabbling.

If there was a sunbeam to be found, Pearl would find it. Much like with vents, she didn’t like to share sunbeams, even if they were half the width of the room. She found it first, you see.

Other places she discovered that were lovely and toasty included: in front of the fridge where the warm air vented out from the bottom; straddling the PS4 so the fan blew onto her tummy; next to or underneath my laptop; on top of my computer case which has a fan vent on top; in front of the heat dish we got while our furnace wasn’t working; and in a laundry hamper full of freshly-dried laundry.

She liked to go outside, too, during the summer. All of our cats are indoor-only, but once in a while we’ll take the more well-behaved ones (not Cheeseball) into the backyard to wander around on the porch and sniff things and enjoy the sun and look at a bird.

And I have never known a cat to be quite so comfortable. Perhaps Anise, on occasion, but he doesn’t have the raw talent Pearl was born with.

You could tell she was settling in if she tucked her paws in against her chest, something she always did quite deliberately and distinctly. But that was only the first stage of comfort. If you were lucky, she would stretch out one arm really far, perhaps to place her paw on you. As she dozed off she might lay flat on her side with her limbs outstretched, which meant we always had to check blankets carefully for a flattened Pearl before sitting down. And if you were really lucky, you might witness Pearl in a chaos configuration, upside-down with her paws wherever.

But even just sitting up with her eyes closed, she looked so content. Looking at photos makes me want to take a nap with her.

Sadly, Pearl had some health troubles from the start. She had a kink right at the base of her tail from the day we got her, suggesting it had been injured while at the breeder and not healed right, so she was never able to raise her tail all the way. She also came home with some sort of intestinal parasite that gave her a lot of… um, gastric distress, and while we were able to clear that up quickly, it seemed to recur soon afterwards.

We took her to the vet again, suspecting more parasites, but multiple tests turned up nothing. We tried a number of things — different food, sensitive-stomach food, wet food, more water, different treats — but could not seem to figure it out, and so Pearl just had stomachaches on and off for a while. Sometimes she would sit by the litterbox and grumble, and all I could do was try to reassure her.

It wasn’t until a few years later that Ash’s then-husband, with no explanation whatsoever, spontaneously decided to just feed her some plain chicken mixed with pumpkin purée. Just like that, she was fine. I felt like kind of an idiot for not trying that earlier, but after giving her veterinary sensitive-stomach food and seeing no change, I thought we’d ruled out food sensitivity.

We swiftly outlined a general idea of what Pearl could or could not tolerate. Chicken, pork, pumpkin: OK. Beef or any kind of organs: she immediately threw up. Fish: no good. And yet manufactured food containing only very simple things still gave her stomachaches, so our best guess was that she also couldn’t tolerate fucking xantham gum or something, which is in pretty much all pet food, including the sensitive stuff.

Regardless, we had a diet she could stomach, so for the rest of her life we made her a custom diet of ground chicken, ground pork belly, pumpkin, and some nutrient powder that didn’t bother her (which took several attempts to find). That meant no more free-feeding the other cats, so we got a big dog cage to keep the kibble in, and we’d let the other cats in there while Pearl was eating her special princess food. Thus began a multi-year saga during which, every four hours, like clockwork, Anise would start bothering me to feed him.

Please do not tell me what I could have done to dissuade Anise or space out the schedule. I guarantee, he is vastly more dastardly and annoying than you are giving him credit for. The cats run this household, and I have long since made peace with that.

The closest to any real insight we got about Pearl was that perhaps her kitten parasites had left her with IBS — a very vague diagnosis of exclusion, and the best anyone could come up with. But Pearl was happy, so that was good enough. We eventually found new treats she could stomach, too.

Pearl had relatively intense relationships with the other cats, much like she did with people.

She adored Napoleon, our furred and largest cat, for some reason. She often trotted up to him, very eager to sniff him; or when he trotted towards the kibble cage in recent years, she would run alongside him, staring sideways at him. I don’t really understand what her feelings were, and Napoleon didn’t really return them, but he at least tolerated them. Curiously, I can’t remember many attempts on Pearl’s part to snuggle up to Napoleon; she mostly snuggled with the other sphynxes.

She and Twigs (her uncle, incidentally) spent a ton of time together, and Anise was often in the mix as well. They’d often end up in a pile under or within a blanket, or all wedged into the same cat bed, or piled on a chair that had a towel on it. Sometimes she’d grumble at Anise for being too much in her personal space, but somehow Twigs’s presence seemed to defuse everything. I can’t remember her ever grumbling at Twigs, in fact.

Cheeseball is the only cat we have who’s younger than Pearl. When he was a kitten, she kind of doted on him like a mom, frequently trying to groom his head. She kept doing this into his adolescence, even as he was swiftly growing bigger than her, which was endearing and also very funny.

We moved in 2018, and spent the summer with a former acquaintance’s parents, as they had a finished and furnished basement that was practically an apartment all on its own. Unfortunately, they had four cats of their own, for a total of nine crammed into a relatively small space. (One of the parents couldn’t be around cat hair in the medium term, due to reasons.)

One of the cats, Seamus, was a maine coon, and by all accounts kind of an asshole. He made a habit out of chasing Napoleon around, which Napoleon did not like at all, and which would result in Pearl chasing him to defend Napoleon, and then Anise chasing after Pearl because everyone is running around and he doesn’t quite understand why but he doesn’t want to be left out. We kept the cats separated as best we could, but we didn’t have much space to work with, and we were already trying to sequester Cheeseball, who we’d just adopted as a kitten. Everything was just kind of a mess.

Anyway this kinda stressed everyone out.

I bring it up because of one particular event. The only segregated parts of the basement were the bathroom and a somewhat awkwardly-shaped bedroom. The bedroom was exclusively for our cats. I don’t remember exactly what led up to this, but at some point Seamus made a beeline for the bedroom while Pearl was just inside the open door. I’m guessing Napoleon was in there too.

Pearl was absolutely not having this. She stood her ground and hissed hard enough to stop this absolutely massive cat in his tracks. She was so mad that she peed on the floor (which was, thankfully, vinyl). We got there to intervene about half a second later, but wow! She drew a line in the sand and under no circumstances was this bully going to cross it. We have always looked back fondly upon this “rage piss” incident.

I think Pearl was left a little rattled, though. Even at the time, she growled at the other maine coon there, who was an absolute sweetheart and rarely did more than sit nicely and ask to be pet. Once we were out of there, she seemed a little distrusting of Anise, often growling at him or biting his haunch merely for sitting nearby (which would entice a bewildered Anise into smacking her, justifying her reaction). I wish we hadn’t stayed there.

Cheeseball was also growing up and wanted to play with Pearl, because playing is how he engages with pretty much everything; alas, he was a bit too rowdy for Pearl. Twigs, infinitely patient, was there to absorb a lot of this.

But then Twigs died, and the cats’ relationships seemed to deteriorate. Cheeseball liked Pearl, but he always wanted to fight with her, which she didn’t like. Anise liked Pearl, but she seemed to resent him a lot of the time, and there was no Twigs to separate them. Pearl liked Napoleon, but Napoleon liked to be by himself.

It was okay, but tense.

Maybe I’m overstating this. Going back through photos of Pearl, I’ve found plenty from the post-Twigs era where she’s still hanging out with Anise peacefully. A number of their conflicts even started because she would approach Anise to sit by him, then growl at him. No wonder he was confused. Sometimes she would groom him and start growling, while licking his ear. Hello? What are you doing?? What do you want from him here.

Still, that must mean she still liked him. She just had some complicated feelings. It always made me a little sad when they couldn’t get along, though. I’d gotten Anise in the first place in part to give Twigs a friend, and Pearl and Twigs had always gotten along well, and now… well.

Having said all this about how great and lovely Pearl is, her presumptuousness also made her a huge pest in some very specific ways. For example, once we’d settled into the food routine that saved her from constant stomachaces, one of her favorite things to do was to go over to the kibble cage and try to find kibble that had escaped from it. If she could get away with it, she would stick her paw between the bars and pull kibble (or the entire bowl) out to eat.

It was slightly annoying, and also very funny. We called this pulling a heist. And then she’d have awful gas some hours later.

I also very distinctly remembering getting takeout one time, which happened to include a breaded and fried slab of fish. I had the little takeout container on the table in front of me, and I think I was fiddling with the wrapper on their plastic fork or something, when Pearl came along, sniffed it… and then bit the fish and pulled the whole filet out of the container. Right in front of me! Points for boldness, I guess. She wasn’t quite so audacious any other time, but she must’ve really liked the smell of that fish.

And while she was generally pretty picky about what she would consider a toy, she did, on occasion, like to bite the arms of my glasses. Once I was laying next to her and petting her while she purred, and she stuck a paw in between my glasses and my face, pulled them off, and tried to bite them — purring all the while.

My favorite Pearl trick was what we dubbed “mouse alert”. If Pearl was looking for someone — often anyone at all, but sometimes a particular person who was absent or in a room with a closed door — she would find one of her toy mice and carry it around doing a very loud, muffled meow. If she saw you she would then drop the mouse and trot over, making happy high-pitched meows instead.

Sometimes she’d start out with regular meows, which we could hear from the other side of the house, but then they’d abruptly turn deeper and longer, and we knew she’d picked a mouse up. It was so charming and so funny. Every so often we’d find a pile of mice outside a door and we knew that Pearl had been trying to open it. She later expanded her roster to include Big Mouse — a plush almost half her size who became her favorite — and a plush of a single HIV virus that she must’ve stolen from my desk.

She didn’t play with the mice, either. I have video of her playing with a mouse when she was fairly young, but it’s not one of the mice we have now. She seemed to regard them as precious, her comforting belongings that she could almost always lure us out of hiding with. “Come look at my mouse!” Sometimes she’d carry them around quietly, just to have one or two nearby in a comfortable spot.

I tried for her whole life to get a recording of this, which proved nearly impossible, because she’d stop if she knew anyone was nearby! I got a clear recording only once, a week before she died; I was in our dark bedroom, filming into Ash’s office, and I don’t think she realized I was there. There’s a link at the bottom.

Her other favorite possession was string. Pearl loved to play string. She would ask for it by name. No, really. If she wanted to play string, she would find (or bring) a string and sit on it hoping someone noticed, and if that didn’t work, I’m pretty sure she had a specific meow for asking you to please follow her to string and then play with it.

Playing string with her was a slightly frustrating affair, but perhaps I just didn’t understand the rules. They seemed to be: I should wiggle the string; then Pearl grabs the string; then Pearl keeps the string. That doesn’t end the game, though. I should keep trying, in vain, to get the string back, while Pearl simply keeps winning.

A great thing to do was dangle it above her, at which point she’d stand up to try to get it and chomp at it, audibly. I loved her little chomp sound. I can’t even do it myself; I feel like I’d hurt my teeth.

After she was through adolescence, string was the only thing she really wanted to play with. She might’ve chased a laser pointer a couple of times, but string was the one thing she would ask for. Occasionally I’d try to play with Anise with a string, but Pearl had a fucking sixth sense for when string was happening, and she would appear from nowhere and go absolutely nuts over it while Anise sat back and watched.

In March 2021, I took Pearl to an ER vet over very rapid breathing. They told me she’d had fluid in her lungs and diagnosed her with congestive heart failure. That’s when your heart can’t pump hard enough; part of Pearl’s heart wall had thinned and weakened, and one chamber was enlarged. She had to be hospitalized overnight. I drove home thinking I’d never see her again.

They couldn’t identify a cause. She was given a prognosis of “not fantastic” and prescribed a growing mountain of medication, which Ash dutifully gave to her every twelve hours for months on end, even when Pearl refused it. Sometimes Pearl had to be bribed with treats in order to eat at all, though I later traced that to a batch of food with insufficient pumpkin for her liking.

We had to keep her stress level low, which meant keeping her completely separated from the other cats (or at the very least Cheeseball) as much as possible. That meant Ash vanished into a closed room for most of every day to work while keeping an eye on Pearl — who was, after all, Ash’s cat. That also left me with three other cats constantly vying for my attention.

For several months we often couldn’t even sleep in the same room — Pearl and Anise couldn’t be left together, and Anise makes a racket all night if he’s shut out. Early on, our roommate would often take Pearl overnight (even despite being allergic to cats), but as time went on, Ash felt a stronger impulse to be around her as much as possible. Eventually we found we could have both Anise and Pearl overnight as long as we put a sweater on Anise and had sufficient extra blankets on the bed, but honestly it felt like a constant logistical nightmare.

Even with all this, we still had several more ER visits, several more hospitalizations.

Still, Pearl seemed to be doing okay. She was happy, she engaged with us, she purred, she snuggled, she nuzzled, she played. She was fine, and stable, until she wasn’t.

It was January 11, and it was the first ER visit for rapid breathing in a while. We handed her over, they hospitalized her, and we left, assuming we’d pick her up in the morning and she’d be fine, as had always happened.

We weren’t home for long before they called us. Pearl wasn’t recovering this time, and wouldn’t make it through the night.

We raced back. We saw Pearl, struggling to breathe, even on oxygen. We pet her and told her it would be okay. She cried out for help. Ash held her.

And then we let her go.

I love and miss so many little things. She had such beautiful eyes, like Twigs did, though she squinted a lot so it always felt like a special treat when I could see them clearly. Her whole face scrunched when she meowed. She had a marble pattern, so I guess she would’ve been a calico. I didn’t even notice it when we first got her, and then one day it jumped right out at me and I felt briefly like our kitten had been replaced with a different one. She had a funny little clump of four hairs that stuck out from her hip. She had marbling on her pawpads, too.

I love her wide vocabulary of very cute little meows, in contrast with Twigs’s more raucous ones. She reserved them for special occasions, opting to chirr most of the time.

I love how, when she was surprised by something, she would simply jump straight up in the air an inch, then come down. No other movement. It was like she was tweened. I never tried to spook her on purpose to see this, but she was a little prone to being spooked.

I love how, when she’d knead at a soft blanket, she did just a few quick little motions and then she was done. It was so dainty. I always called it kitty paws, to distinguish from cat paws.

I love how she’d do a straight upwards stretch that somehow made her ears flick inside out briefly.

I love the very deliberate way she tucked her paws, and how she would gently hold onto someone’s shoulders while getting a taxi ride. Everything she did came across as so purposeful.

I love how Ash had found that rubbing their face on Pearl’s side as a kitten would get her to purr, and that kept working for her whole life, and it’s basically what she ended up doing to people in return.

I love how she had a funny obsession with water. I can’t really explain it, and I don’t know what she found so interesting. If I took a swig from my water bottle with Pearl nearby, she would climb on whatever was necessary to sniff at the nozzle. If I opened a soda with Pearl nearby, she’d stick her nose right in the opening, then recoil when the bubbles fizzed her. She didn’t enjoy baths or anything, she just liked… water. From afar. Like with Napoleon, perhaps.

I love how she nuzzled so hard that she hit maximum nuzzle, and so she would also sort of gently swipe the air with her paw as well, for extra nuzzling power.

I love her funny “bug off” sweater, illustrated with a ladybug, which seemed to capture her personality well: don’t be rude to me, but expressed in a very cute manner.

I love how she adopted the sort of extended windowsill in our bathroom as her own, and would lay there on sunny days and roll around on a towel.

I love that she was pampered right to the end. Over the course of recent weeks, Ash would keep giving me updates on Pearl’s development of a new routine, where she would sit in a Treat Spot she had designated, possibly meow once or twice, and wait very nicely until Ash gave her a treat. And then Ash would eventually capitulate, helpful before the polite ministrations of this very tiny cat, and give her a treat. It seemed that the number of treats Pearl was managing to get per day was gradually increasing, and so I asked every time: why not simply not give her a treat? But I knew the answer.

If you cried, there were decent odds that Pearl would come and comfort you, come chirp at you and nuzzle until you felt better.

When we first moved here, Ash’s ex-husband had driven the truck containing all our stuff, and he slept here one night before leaving for good. The day after he’d left, we heard Pearl doing mouse alert in the room he’d slept in, and I just broke down sobbing at the kitchen table, thinking about how Pearl liked him despite everything and was just trying to find him, and we had no way to tell her he wasn’t coming back or explain any of it to her. To her, one of her favorite people had just disappeared, and that was so sad.

But Pearl heard me, came over, jumped on the kitchen table, and purred and headbutted me like crazy. The idea that I was sad for her and she still wanted to comfort me made me cry harder.

She would also headbutt and nuzzle Ash specifically on the mouth when they sang, or do the same to me if I whistled competently. I suppose she liked music, but only from us.

Most of all, I love… how much she doted on Ash. She slept alongside them (me only a few times), she followed them around, she waited outside doors for them. They were her favorite person. I feel so bad for them, to have lost both Twigs and Pearl back to back.

It’s been… two weeks now. Just over, because it took me another day to finish this post.

I don’t know if it’s fully clicked yet. I didn’t see Pearl much during the day, since she’d be tucked away in Ash’s office slash our bedroom. I saw her mostly at night and first thing in the morning. So while I’m out here, at my desk, it’s like nothing has changed. It only sinks in when I go upstairs and see the door left open, see a bed with no Pearl tucked in it somewhere.

It’s kind of dumbfounding just how much of this house and our lives had warped around Pearl, around this one tiny cat who loved everyone. So many things have disappeared or seem superfluous now. I was already free-feeding the other cats again since Pearl wasn’t allowed to roam the house unsupervised, but now we don’t need the kibble cage at all. Half our doors had been kept closed to make a few different places for Pearl to stay, but now none of that is necessary. Litterboxes had ended up scattered throughout the house so Pearl would always have access to one; now they’re back to being in a few central locations.

Ash doesn’t have to wake up at a specific time every day to give Pearl medicine. Pearl won’t wake us up to feed her. We don’t have to make her food, ever again.

And there are so many things that were only for Pearl. This wasn’t the case for anyone else. Styx only had communal cat sweaters; his favorite toy was loose change on my desk. Twigs, too, only had sweaters that Anise and Pearl inherited; his one dedicated toy was a single very tiny mouse he sometimes played with.

But Pearl? Half the sweaters we have only fit Pearl. Her mice were very much hers. Even her string was very much hers. We have a mortar and pestle that were specifically for grinding up her medication, oral syringes only Pearl used. She had possessions of her very own, things she’s left behind.

We knew this was coming, of course. Without the intervention of modern medicine, she would have died last March, and the outlook for heart failure in a cat isn’t great. I’ve already grieved for her several times over the past year. I didn’t see her much during the summer, but I’d been trying to spend more deliberate time with her in recent months, and I’m glad I did. I regret nothing. I earned her purrs, I played string with her exactly the right amount, I woke up to her stealing my pillow. I got the full Pearl experience.

And so did she. Ash took her outside extra over the summer, let her see a bit of the outside world (even if it was only our yard). We let her roam the house when we could, banishing Cheeseball to a room by himself if necessary, though she usually ended up sitting on a vent or my lap (or trying to heist some kibble). She got lots of treats, lots of love, lots of blankets, and even a vent all to herself. What more could she ask for?

She was living on borrowed time, but we borrowed every second we could. I don’t know what else we could’ve done. And we were there for her right up until the end. We didn’t have that opportunity with Twigs; he died in the back room, surrounded by strangers.

In the end, her heart was literally too big.

This sucks.

Pearl deserved better. She was dealt a bad hand from the beginning, but she was still friendly and kind, and then this happened. She was so young, too — her eighth birthday would’ve been next month. She, like Twigs, should’ve had twice as long.

Things won’t be difficult for her any more, I guess. I don’t know how much that comforts me.

Everything else moves on. Pearl continued until the night of January 11, 2022, but can go no further. We’re forced to leave her there, retaining only memories, while time carries us gently forward, ever further away.

So here is my landmark, my stake in the ground. Pearl was here. May this mark out the shape of who she was and leave that impression upon the world for much longer.

The finality of death resolves so many questions. I often wished I could improve Pearl’s tense relationships with Anise and Cheeseball, but now there’s no problem to solve. The interactions they had are all the interactions they will ever have. The tension is gone, now. The worries about how long Pearl’s heart will last are gone too.

The cat dynamic has shifted, again. Cheeseball and Napoleon have been much more affectionate towards Ash, and Napoleon has suddenly become a lap cat. I suppose the rest of the cats missed Ash while they were siloed away with Pearl for so long. Maybe they’re grieving? Cats are so open with their emotions, but sometimes they’re still inscrutable.

Pearl’s urn is on the dresser in our bedroom, right next to Twigs. Hers is bigger than his, somehow. But that’s Pearl for you — she always knew how to take up space.

…

No, this is too dire an ending. Pearl was dealt a bad hand, but she always tried to be nice despite that. She got to see a lot of places and make a lot of friends, both people and cats and even one dog. Even when she had complex and skeptical feelings about Anise, she kept trying to be friends with him. She faltered at times, but she always did her best to uphold her principles of loveliness, strong boundaries, and please give me a treat.

That’s a lot for a tiny cat. I admire her for it, and I will not forget it.

Thank you for reading about Pearl. I hope you’ll remember her too. We loved her very much, and she put a lot of love back into the world. If you would like to experience more Pearl, here are some videos of her. I have some more to sift through, so this list may grow in the coming days.

And here are some games she has starred in. Or, rather, her fursona Purrl has starred in them.

NEON PHASE — a shortish platformer with items and puzzles where Purrl is an NPC
Lunar Depot 38 — a little platforming shooter where you play as Purrl, with a gun
Star Anise Chronicles: Escape from the Chamber of Despair — an illustrated text adventure where you must work together with Purrl to escape
Star Anise Chronicles: Oh No Wheres Twig?? — a short platformer with items and puzzles where Purrl is an NPC, but differently, and made after Twigs died
a very tiny purrl game — a tiny 3D platformer where you play as Purrl and must collect things

Eevee gained 3367 experience points

2021-01-24T11:35:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 34!

I super almost forgot to write one of these!

What a very, very long year. I went back through my dev journal to see what I’d done and could not believe most of this happened in the past year. Even stuff from August feels like it must have been at least a year ago.

I made our first Steam release: Cherry Kisses, a polished version of a jam game we made (though didn’t finish in time to get in the jam, oops) the year before. It’s sold pretty decently, especially considering the reduced audience (adult games are hidden on Steam unless you opt into them), so that’s been nice.

I started HRT! Then I stopped HRT. Alas.

I dipped my toes into Godot for real this time with Rogue Ike, a Strawberry Jam game that was perhaps much too ambitious for a first (and time-limited) attempt but worked out as a proof of concept. I don’t think I’ll pick this back up until I’ve made something a bit more substantial, though; I’ve got a lot of bits and pieces of Godot code now but still don’t feel like I have a solid grasp of how I’d approach architecture for a new game.

I poured some feelings into a little PICO-8 game: Star Anise Chronicles: Oh No Wheres Twig??, a charming little platformer about my cat’s fursona. It’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever released.

I did actually an incredible lot of work on fox flux over the summer and made massive strides with it in a relatively short span of time? It was a broken hopeless mess at the start of the year, and now it’s… well, not. Better art, better physics, more plot ideas, a lot more little bits and pieces implemented, a whole minigame conceived and mostly implemented, a level tally… it feels like a real game, even!

I also took a crack at a possible port of fox flux to Godot, which was informative both about Godot itself and about designing complex actors in general, but I don’t think I’m going to continue with it. Godot does make some stuff easier, but at the cost of a lot of rough edges that will seriously slow me down — a lot of basic functionality I’ve been taking for granted in my current setup of LÖVE-duct-taped-to-Tiled just does not exist in Godot, and some of the 2D tooling has major oversights that I’d have to work around. Some of this will be fixed in Godot 4, but I don’t want to wait for that just to continue on this game that I’ve already poured a lot of work into. I’ll probably do something simpler in Godot 4 when it comes out.

I poured most of the last four months of the year into a surprise project, by which I mean, I surprised myself by doing it: Lexy’s Labyrinth, a web-based and unencumbered Chip’s Challenge 2 emulator — the first of its kind! It still has some teeny compatibility issues, but for the most part it faithfully plays both the original Chip’s Challenge 1 and 2 as well as tons of community levels created over the years. It needs a bit more polish, and then I’m gonna call it “basically finished” and make a bigger effort to drum up interest in it.

I think I worked on baz, the game engine I wanted to make that was intended as a bridge between MegaZeux and PuzzleScript and bitsy? But I haven’t touched it in a while now. I also started a web-based Sudoku player and then lost interest in Sudoku again. And then there was the AC:NH companion, which I kept up with until I lost interest in Animal Crossing. Hmmm.

I did dip my toe back into blogging with the well-received CSS post, and then not so much for a while. I started the “gamedev from scratch” series to replace the ill-fated book I toyed with writing, but it has yet to see a second installment.

I feel like I miss making video games, even though I did rather a lot of it this year. I guess I don’t feel like I released any; Cherry Kisses was an existing game, Rogue Ike didn’t get further than a handful of rooms, fox flux is still quite a ways off from being done, and Lexy’s Labyrinth is really a game engine. That leaves the Star Anise game as the only “““real””” one I released, but that may not be an entirely fair way to gauge how much work I’ve done.

I do miss writing more often. I guess after everything that happened three years ago, I never quite figured out how to reconnect with the universe. Sometimes I go on a tweeting spree for a couple days, and that feels nostalgic, but in general I’ve gotten more withdrawn and don’t quite know how to shake it. I’m still trying.

I like how well Cherry Kisses did, and I’d kinda like to do small adult game releases more regularly — they’re fun to design and write, they make folks happy, and they bring in a steady trickle of sales. I have a concept for one I’m going to start on during Strawberry Jam 5 next month, but it’s a bit more ambitious, so I might have to do something smaller for Steam purposes this year. Maybe I should take this as an opportunity to get a real foothold in Godot? Cherry Kisses wasn’t terribly complicated; I could recreate something like that without much trouble, and spend some time ironing out wrinkles.

I do want to keep working on fox flux — it’s been just about four years since the jam version now, and I still love the idea and would like to get it seriously going. I’ve spent so much time on engine and design stuff that I still barely have any areas to show!

And of course I would very much love to get that gamedev from scratch series going. I promised one installment per month, and I already missed December because I was neck-deep in Lexy’s Labyrinth, so I really ought to write two in the next week. We’ll see how that goes.

I don’t know how I feel about being 34. Solidly in my mid-30s. I still remember the days, twenty years ago now, when I was the youngest person I knew in almost any circles: online, at school, whatever. Now I’m usually one of the oldest, as most folks my age are off with children and careers; whereas I’ve made a life out of making weird stuff on the internet, just like I did as a teenager.

Still, I guess that means I’m exactly where I always wanted to be.

Browsers all have autoplay restrictions now, so you’ll have to hit play on this yourself.

Eevee gained 3169 experience points

2020-01-14T09:05:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 33!

I had kind of a rough year. Between medication issues, a lot of interpersonal tangles, and discovering ancient trauma, it feels like my head is full of static a lot of the time, and I don’t know how to create when I’m in that state. I might be able to function, even do rote programming work, but I just can’t synthesize.

And that sucks. I miss it. I miss writing! I barely wrote anything here all year. I’ve had a half-finished post open for months and just haven’t been able to wrap it up and get it out.

I’m working on it. It’s just hard.

Ash and I made Cherry Kisses (nsfw), probably the best puzzle game I’ve designed and the most polished game we’ve released, so that was nice. I also made a particle wipe generator out of the screen wipe effect I used in the game.

I started on baz, a game creator meant to kinda blend the styles of MegaZeux and PuzzleScript and bitsy, but it’s yet to see the light of day.

I worked a lot on fox flux — adding water physics, redesigning the player sprite, inventing some new mechanics, adding a menu, refactoring to use an ECS-like approach, massively cleaning up my collision code, and whatnot. I also got stuck in a quagmire of trying to make push physics work how I want, but never actually got it working despite pouring weeks and weeks into it, and now the whole codebase is in a broken shambles. Kind of a mixed bag there.

I finally started on GLEAM, an editor for the VN engine I’ve used for Floraverse for many years now. It’s not quite ready for public use, but it’s far enough along that I can make VNs with it and only a little manual adjusting, which is cool.

Twigs died.

After half a year of pulling teeth, we managed to get Ash’s divorce from Marl finalized.

Ash and I married.

I did the advent calendar, which included a dozen or so smaller projects. That was pretty fun, if a bit ambitious.

I drew more than the previous year, I think, and probably got better at it. I even drew some character references, at long last.

I don’t know what I’ll do this year! I’m tired of listing a bunch of ambitions and then not being able to do them. But I’ll keep trying.

Goodbye, Twigs

2019-10-26T20:12:00-07:00

I did not expect my return to writing to be like this.

Twigs, our nine-year-old sphynx cat, has died.

He is survived by Pearl, his lovely niece; Anise, his best friend and sparring partner; Cheeseball, his wrestling protégé; and Napoleon, his oldest and dearest friend.

Twigs was Ash’s¹ cat, more than I have ever known anyone to be anyone’s cat. He loved them so much. No matter where in the house they went to sit or lie down, Twigs was practically guaranteed to appear a short time later to insert himself into their lap.

¹ For those who’ve been following along for some time, Ash used to go by Mel.

If there was no room for him, or Ash rebuffed him for whatever reason, or if he was just in the mood, his backup plan was to sit somewhere else and keep an eye on them. Sometimes I’d be talking to Ash and catch sight of Twigs behind them, staring at them. Just watching. I’d tell Ash, and they’d turn around and giggle at him, and he’d keep on staring. Sometimes they played hide-and-seek with him, ducking out of sight and then peeking back out at him; he might still be staring, or he might have trotted over to see where they went. Or they could call out to him, just say his name, and he’d acknowledge them with a little meow and come over. They could summon him silently, too, with nothing more than eye contact and a particular nod.

Sometimes we’d be sitting apart and Twigs would sit on me instead, laying chest-to-chest against me. He’d play this ridiculous game where he’d nuzzle my chin a few times, then look at Ash for a moment before doing it again. As if to say, hey, look what you’re missing out on. Or maybe just to say he hadn’t forgotten about them.

Twigs liked to sit at the top of the cat tree in our dining room, right in the path of a huge sunbeam for much of the day, where he could watch Ash at their desk and also see most of the house. We got a huge beanbag over the summer and put it behind Ash’s desk, and Twigs spent a lot of time there as well. He did his own thing at times, certainly, but it was rare for a day to go by without Twigs trying to be close to Ash.

If Ash was inaccessible — in someone else’s bedroom with the door closed, or in the backyard, or even in the bathroom for too long — Twigs would sit at the objectionable door and yell for them. I can’t think of many other cat meow I’d describe as a yell, but that’s definitively what Twigs did. MYAOOOW? MYEHHHH! When Ash was out of town, I’d often hear him trotting up and down the upstairs hallway, yelling for them — until he gave up looking for the moment and came to snuggle with me, just as intensely, like I were the one he’d been looking for all along.

His favorite thing in the world was bedtime, when Ash would finally not be distracted by anything else, and he could lay with them all night. All the cats sleep with us to varying degrees, but Twigs was usually the first to show up. His arrival was so distinct: the quiet footsteps, the weight on the bed, and then the purr would start up before we could even see him. He’d spend all night with us most nights, laying on Ash’s chest in the classic Sphinx pose or curled up behind their knees under the blanket.

I loved how frequently he showed up already purring, apparently anticipating how good of a time he was about to have. It came across as this comical overconfidence, like he took for granted that of course he would be involved in whatever Ash was doing. But his purr, as common and subdued as it was, was such a deep and full and genuine rumble. He made me feel like I’d earned it, like I must’ve done something truly admirable to earn this level of praise. I always called it regal. The purr of a king.

In the early morning hours of October 13, early enough that it was still the previous night, Twigs came downstairs and yelled. That wasn’t unusual; he’d yell for Ash’s attention all the time. But then he lay on his stomach, angled straight up like the actual Sphinx, a pose he exclusively reserved for comfy places like laps and cat beds.

Ash and I went over to check him out, but we couldn’t find any tender spots, injuries, or other obvious problems. My best guess was a stomachache, which wasn’t unheard of for Twigs; perhaps laying on his stomach helped settle it? The room was a little chilly and he wasn’t wearing a sweater, so Ash wrapped him in a blanket and set him on the beanbag he liked, in the path of a heat lamp.

We went to bed only an hour or so later, and Ash carried Twigs with them. Without the heat lamp on him, he was noticeably cold to the touch now, and starting to stumble. I didn’t think of it until later, but as cold as he was, he never shivered once.

We rushed him to a 24/7 emergency vet.

His temperature was 92 when we arrived. Normal body temperature for cats is around 100.

They set about warming him up, rushed through some authorizations, drew some blood, told us results would come in about thirty minutes.

Twigs didn’t make it that long. At 4:26 in the morning, cold and confused, somewhere in a sterile room apart from everyone he’d ever known and loved, his heart stopped.

Only three or four hours had passed since he first showed any signs of distress whatsoever, and Twigs was gone.

Twigs was so expressive! He had so much personality, and he showed all of it. Sphynxes seem a little easier to read than furred cats, but… well, Pearl is a little reserved, and Anise is downright incomprehensible. Twigs was an open book.

Photos don’t quite do him justice, since cats are easiest to photograph when they’re relaxing. All of his body language and facial expressions felt really crisp and distinct, like he wanted you to know what he was thinking, but didn’t want to ham it up. How do I even explain this? How would I explain the faces a human makes, even?

His “I love sitting on you” face, his “I want to eat that” face, his “this is a bit annoying but I’ll put up with it” face… they were all so clear and distinct, moreso than any of our other cats, moreso than any cat I’ve met. He’d even turn up the corners of his mouth when he was really happy, making a little cat smile.

His eyes were huge and beautiful, and we got to see them a lot while he played sentinel, perched somewhere with a good field of view. They were different colors, too! Only slightly, but in the right light, one was distinctly greener and the other distinctly bluer. It was obvious from a glance at his eyes whether he was staring into space, watching you, wanting something from you, or wanting to come over to you.

He was always, always delighted when someone would pet him. I don’t think Twigs ever acted solitary; he stands out as the most readily and consistently affectionate cat we’ve had. He even had a specific expression for when he was in a good mood and wanted someone to pet him, which I called “bedroom eyes” — both because he lidded his eyes a bit, and because he mostly did it when laying in bed with us. If he was especially happy, he’d come lie on your chest, scoot forwards as far as he possibly could, and give you super nuzzles all over your chin.

Twigs had a very pettable head, too. Broad, with his ears more to the sides. I always said he had a cheese head, because it reminded me of a cheese wedge? For some reason? He had a good cheese head, perfect for kissing (“kitten kisses”), which he seemed to understand was a sign of affection. He loved having his head pet so much that he’d keep tilting his head further and further back, ostensibly to press harder against your hand — but if he was perched on the top level of a cat tree, that made it harder to reach the top of his head, so you’d have to do this silly little negotiation with him. It made his smile all the easier to see, though.

He had some other quirky little “tells” that seemed subtle, but that gave away what he’d almost certainly do next: hesitating in a particular way before inexplicably dashing away, or looking up and around at the ceiling before doing a big meow.

His meows! Twigs had a huge vocabulary, and so much of it was for asking politely for things. His “yell” for when he wanted Ash was big and boisterous, with a little characteristic warble to it, and he opened his mouth comically wide when he did it. If he wanted Ash’s steak scraps (which he loved), he had a very reserved meow for asking for them. If he couldn’t get under a blanket, he had a different reserved meow for asking for help. He was the only cat who regularly did that funny chirpy meow at bugs on the wall, though we hadn’t heard that one since we left the Seattle area — Vegas didn’t have nearly as many bugs.

When Anise would roughhouse a bit too hard, Twigs had a distinct pained meow for “this is too much” that would bring one of us running. I didn’t hear it much after we got Cheeseball, who acts as a more eager sparring partner for Anise, until one day I heard a distorted version of it — and I found Twigs and Cheeseball happily wrestling! Twigs came up with a new meow, ending on a happy note rather than a painful one, just for when he was playing with this new giant kitten friend.

One of the most frustrating parts of this is that it’s so hard to capture a cat’s meows, or a lot of other subtleties. As vocal as Twigs was, he still only spoke when he had something to say, and that was rarely when he was in front of a camera. I remember them so clearly now, but how can I convey them in text? Myehhh doesn’t really cut it. (I’ve been sorting through old cat videos, but it’s slow going; I’ll throw some of them up somewhere in the near future.)

I don’t understand what happened.

The test results only showed that he was severely anemic — he had far too few red blood cells, so he couldn’t warm himself or get enough oxygen. They didn’t explain how he’d reached that point in a matter of hours without showing milder symptoms first.

The day had been entirely normal. Twigs had been happy and active earlier in the afternoon. He wasn’t in the habit of chewing or eating strange things. We keep all our cats indoors, and the others are still fine, so he couldn’t have picked up a communicable illness. If he’d ever shown any sign that anything was wrong, I know with absolute certainty that Ash would’ve noticed, just as I immediately noticed when my cat Styx had lost weight. But there was nothing.

What, then, actually happened to him? I don’t know. I’ll never know. I briefly thought to ask for an autopsy, but at the time, I couldn’t bear the thought of what that would… mean.

No explanation, no reason, nothing to blame. Twigs was his healthy happy self all day, all week, all month, all year. Right up until he wasn’t. And then he died.

Twigs was so friendly. Kind, even. He never hurt anyone; he rarely did anything unexpected or rambunctious. He rarely even messed with things he shouldn’t, in sharp contrast to Anise, who tries to push my phone off my desk anytime he wants my attention; the most Twigs would do was gingerly tap something with a paw to see if it would react, then move on.

(Well, with one exception. If he found an unguarded glass of water, but the water level was too low for him to reach it, he was smart enough to tip the whole glass over and douse everything on your desk. We switched to reusable water bottles years ago.)

I can’t think of a single time Twigs was mean or angry or even wanted to be alone. All the cats have times they’re comfortable and don’t want to be disturbed, or just aren’t in the mood, or whatever — except Twigs.

If Ash scolded him (“Twigs!”), he’d dash off to a cat tree and scrabble at it briefly, taking his frustrations out with a few quick scratches and this funny little shimmy of his hips, then forget all about it. In extreme cases, he might run upstairs to our empty bedroom, yell once or twice, then come back down. Or in milder cases, when he couldn’t get something he wanted, he’d snort audibly and that was that. It was so, so charming — if he was upset, all he needed to do was go somewhere to yell about it for a moment, and then he was fine.

He was so patient, too. Ash put little costumes on him a few times, which he took in stride — well, for a cat, at least. He was always happy to be picked up, wrapped in clothing or a blanket, and/or held in all manner of silly positions. You could check his teeth and he’d hardly mind at all. Play with his ears, shake his paw, squish his lip, whatever; he was content just to be interacted with. (I suspect there was some mutual reinforcement between Ash doing goofy things to Twigs, and Twigs laying in increasingly obnoxious ways on Ash.)

He didn’t much like having his claws trimmed, and when Ash would do it, he used to bite the squishy part of their thumb — but not bite down, only put his teeth around their hand. Enough to communicate “I don’t like this” without trying to hurt them. Ash eventually started bribing him with cat treats every few claws, and then he disliked the process a bit less.

His good nature extended to the other cats, as well. He befriended every cat we’ve ever had! I didn’t really think about it until after he died, but if I ever saw two or more cats hanging out together, Twigs was almost guaranteed to be one of them. He was the binding force of our little cat sitcom.

There was one brief exception, when Ash first adopted Pearl — the first new cat since Twigs that was 100% Ash’s. They kept Pearl with them all the time at first, and Twigs got so jealous. Very early on he made his feelings very clear: he stood on the other side of the room, stared right at Ash (and Pearl), and made a huge meow at them. Then after like three days he found out that he and Pearl could both fit in Ash’s lap and everything was fine.

He’d cozy up with Anise or Pearl for warmth, and we’d often see all three of them nestled together, as though Twigs’s soothing presence deterred Anise and Pearl from their usual squabbling. He had an awkward but friendly relationship with Napoleon, the most aloof of the cats by far, who doesn’t show much affection towards any of the others except Pearl. I remember Napoleon used to refuse to groom Twigs anywhere but on the backs of his ears (the only place he had fur!), but after some years together, we started to see Napoleon grooming Twigs’s face and neck as well. For Napoleon, that was a really close friendship.

Twigs was even friends with Apollo, the German shepherd we used to have, who was much bigger than this tiny bald cat. I have a video of Twigs and Apollo playing, where Apollo is gently nudging Twigs around with his nose and Twigs alternates between nuzzling and lightly smacking Apollo. What a sweetheart. I don’t think any other cat interacted with Apollo quite like that.

He had a somewhat more complicated dynamic with Anise, who’s a good bit rowdier and more… destructive. Anise liked to start little brawls a lot, which wasn’t quite Twigs’s usual style, but he’d play along until Anise got too rough. (It probably didn’t help that Twigs would often respond by grabbing Anise by the sweater, which allowed Anise to wriggle backwards out of it and unleash his full powers.)

It’s been funny looking at older photos; when we first got Anise, Twigs was pristine, with maybe a scar or two on his haunch somewhere. (And all down the top of his tail, which he liked to nibble with some intensity.) At the end of his life, Twigs was riddled with little round scars from where Anise had bitten his back, and even a conspicuous dark spot right on top of his head. Who bites someone’s head?

I don’t remember his relationship with Styx as clearly, but I have enough photo evidence of it. The two of them were very close and spent a lot of time snuggled together, whether sleeping or just hanging out. We even got them matching pink sweaters! I’d forgotten that was deliberate. They played together, too, though much less seriously than Anise and on more “even” terms.

Six and a half years ago, my own cat Styx died. He’d been my cat, the way Twigs was Ash’s cat, sticking to me like glue the whole time I had him. But then Styx contracted a cruel and incurable illness, one that can strike even indoor cats and prefers to take the young. He wasted away over the course of a month.

I’d like to think that, whatever it was that took Twigs from us, maybe this swift departure saved him from the kind of long and excruciating ordeal that Styx went through.

I wrote his eulogy the day after he died. I avoided looking at it for years, but finally went back and read it a few days ago. It seemed so short! Was that really all I had to say about him? I knew him for over a year, yet I feel like I barely got to know him — I think Cheeseball is already older than Styx was when he died, and Cheeseball’s personality is still rapidly developing.

I was more shocked to find my own tweets from soon after Styx’s death, saying I couldn’t even look at photos of him. How long did that last? I don’t remember.

It hurt too much, so I avoided his memory, and now so much of it is a fragmented blur. Watching him deterioriate was gut-wrenching, and the worst part of his life — but it’s what I spilled the most ink on, and the part I need the least help remembering. Why did I write so much about that month? None of it was important in the end, yet I liveblogged every gratuitous medical detail. I guess I didn’t know what else to do, watching Styx wither away in my arms, while I couldn’t do anything about it.

I still cry for him, sometimes. I get a little sad over something else, and I remember Styx, and I cry. No matter how many of the details fade, I know I had a little cat named Styx who I loved dearly, and he loved me back.

This feels like a second chance, though. I won’t make the same mistake again.

It was hard to grieve with Ash all those years ago, back when things were so awkward. Now we can mourn together, and thinking about Twigs doesn’t sting the way thinking about Styx used to. It finally feels okay to remember Styx, too, and I’ve been rediscovering some old moments as I’ve sorted through photos in search of Twigs.

We’ve been celebrating and filling our space with both of them — we printed out physical copies of our favorite photo of each and put them in little thematic frames. Their pawprint casts are together on a shelf behind Ash’s desk. Nearby is Twigs’s urn, and I’d like to put Styx’s humble grave marker next to it, once I figure out where I packed it. Ash is painting portraits of them.

At my suggestion, we threw Twigs a little goodbye party — I baked a pumpkin cake (in honor of his homemade pumpkin cat food and the one fall he loved a tiny pumpkin), Ash decorated it, and we talked about Twigs and all the things about him that we miss. I insisted we wear party hats.

I’ve been taking notes on his life ever since he died, all so I could write this eulogy for him. It’s intimidating and even more difficult than I expected, trying to capture a life that meant so much to us in only a few thousand words. I hope I’m doing him justice. I want everyone to know how good Twigs was, and how much we’ve lost.

Twigs had his sassy side, but it was always sweet and harmless. Less like typical cat aloofness, more like that charming confidence of showing up to cuddle with his purr already in full swing, completely taking for granted that he was welcome and was about to enjoy himself. Or the similar energy he put on display when you were on a couch and he wanted to sit on you: he’d identify the most Twigs-shaped nook on your body and wedge his butt backwards into it, sometimes even hoisting himself with his front legs a bit, like a human settling into a recliner.

For example: if Twigs tried to approach Ash but Ash pushed him away — e.g., because they were eating or painting or their lap was occupied — then Twigs would often do a complete circle around the table or part of the room, only to approach Ash again from the other direction. It was so comical! So gentle and friendly, but cheerfully defiant about being near Ash. As if he couldn’t even imagine that he was disallowed for the moment. The problem must have been with his approach. There’s just no other rational explanation.

Since living in Colorado, we’ve occasionally come home and opened the front door only for Twigs to immediately dart outside… just so he could cross the front porch, stop at the nearest blade of grass, and bite it. None of the other cats have ever shown any interest in grass, but every once in a great while, Twigs would just get a hankering, and it’s the only reason he’s ever so much as attempted to leave the house. (Thank goodness.)

The thing that hit hardest right after he died was the feeding routine. Several of the cats eat storebought food, kept out of reach in a big dog cage we bought for this purpose, while Pearl and Twigs share homemade food. For the last couple months, whenever I went to go open the cage to let the other cats in, Twigs would trot along with them! He wouldn’t actually go in the cage, and he’d even slow down before getting to it (so the others would get ahead and it’d be easy to keep him out), but he acted like he belonged inside. It was such a perfect reflection of his personality: he went after something he wanted, yet he stopped short of breaking the rules.

Twigs knew how to have a good time, too. He loved rollin’ around on carpet. He’d wriggle on his back, grab the carpet with his claws and pull himself along it, and clearly be having the time of his life. Our Vegas home didn’t have any carpeted floors, but we added a little carpeted platform to the stairs (so the cats wouldn’t fall off!) and he had just as good a time on that. Later we got some small cat trees with singular round platforms, and those had a carpet texture he loved as well.

Rollin’ around would put Twigs in a feisty mood, and he’d reach out to smack anyone — cat, dog, or human — who came nearby. Ash would make a game out of this: they’d tap the floor nearby or the edge of the platform, then try to pull their hand away before Twigs “got” them. Sometimes Twigs would make a very riled-up face but not try to get you, and you could wind him up a little more by performing the “cat pat” — lightly and repeatedly tapping his haunch with your fingertips. You could watch him get more rowdy in real time, and then the game was to stop before he suddenly rolled over and tried to grab your hand.

Our home near Seattle was just up the street from a big park, and on a couple occasions, Ash took Twigs out for a walk on a little leash. On one such walk, while I was holding Twigs’s leash, he suddenly darted straight away from me and towards some underbrush! The leash caught him, of course, but he was running so fast that it actually yanked him right off the ground and flipped him over. (He was fine, albeit just as surprised as we were!)

(On another walk, Twigs stood right in front of Ash and made a huge myeehhhh up at them, clearly indicating that he was Done With Outside For Now. Poor baby. Ash picked him up, wrapped him in their sweatshirt, and held him until we got home. He really knew how to say exactly what he was thinking.)

Twigs played the typical cat games as well, when he felt like it — he might join in when we were playing string with Pearl, or teleport into the room when the laser pointer came out. One of the last things Twigs played with was a tiny mouse toy, ripped and with its stuffing pouring out. He sometimes liked to carry them around, roll around on the floor fighting them, then carry them somewhere else and do it again. He had a surprising ferocity with toys at times: wild eyes and incredibly quick pounces! It made me appreciate all the more how gentle he was with cats and people.

Once in a great while he’d play fetch, repeatedly bringing the same toy (or twist-tie or something) back to Ash’s feet so they could toss it and he could pounce it again. I even have an old video of Twigs playing chase: Ash would dash down the hallway, Twigs would dart after them with an intensely serious expression, Ash would yelp that Twigs “caught” them, and then they’d run down the hallway the other way. I don’t think any other cat we’ve had has really done that! They’ll run away from us, but not try to chase us around.

(Ash put fantasy “Luneko” versions of all our cats in NEON PHASE, a little game we made a few years ago, and I was struck by how Branch Commander Twig’s personality was so serious, when Twigs struck me as mostly lighthearted and friendly. But then, I suppose Twigs was very serious — about being lighthearted and friendly.)

I can’t tell what effect this has had on the other cats. They were all friendly with Twigs. Do they wonder where he is? Do they, too, assume he’s out of sight somewhere? Are they grieving? Will they grieve later?

The other cats got to saw Styx’s body, but Twigs died elsewhere. We have no way to tell them what happened to him. They just have to… guess? After living their whole lives with him? That sucks.

I think they’ve been more affectionate over the past week or so. Or they might be cuddling more because it’s getting colder. Or I might be paying more attention to them. Hard to say.

They do seem to be expanding their roles to fill Twigs’s niche. Napoleon, best known for spending almost all his time alone, has come and hung out on the couch — virtually unheard of. Anise and Cheeseball are, well, fighting each other instead of both fighting Twigs — but they’re starting fewer fights with Pearl. Pearl, who has had absolutely no tolerance for Anise since we left Vegas, has spent whole nights asleep next to him without making a fuss.

I guess they learned a lot from him.

Twigs was also fiercely loyal, but thankfully only had to show it a couple times.

We spent last summer in Marl’s parents’ unused (finished) basement, where they kept four cats of their own. (For a total of nine. We had quite a time.) One of them, Seamus, kept antagonizing our only furry cat, Napoleon.

We aren’t really sure how or why this started, but every so often, Seamus would start chasing Napoleon around, and Napoleon would scream. I don’t know why Napoleon was so scared of him, or what Seamus thought he was doing, or why he couldn’t understand that Napoleon didn’t like it. It was a constant source of stress for everyone; Seamus did it infrequently but seemingly on a whim, and we didn’t have many options for segregating the cats outright.

The incredible thing was, every time Seamus would start chasing Napoleon… Twigs would start chasing Seamus. And then Pearl would chase along with Twigs. And this would often end with Twigs and Pearl facing Seamus down, with Twigs saying some very nasty things that I will not repeat here.

(Anise would often show up and also run around, but he didn’t seem to understand why everyone was making such a fuss. While Twigs and Pearl were cornering Seamus, Anise would be standing next to them while mostly looking confused. Hey guys I see we’re playing chase!! I love chase too!! Oh why’d we all stop?)

I wouldn’t say it helped matters much, but it was strangely heartwarming. Twigs considered Napoleon his friend and had no problem telling this strange bully cat, a Maine Coon twice his size, to fuck right off.

Oh, but that’s nothing.

Apollo, that German shepherd we used to have, once somehow managed to knock down a whole set of shelves in Ash’s room. Ash, of course, yelled his name in response. They must’ve sounded really mad, because Twigs appeared instantly. He stood right in front of Apollo (separating him from Ash), in a very aggressive stance, making some very threatening growls and meows.

And he chased Apollo out of the room and right down the hallway.

All Twigs knew was that Apollo had seriously upset Ash, and that was that. No questions asked. This tiny little cat stood up to a giant wolf, because he thought Ash needed defending. Twigs was never aggressive or mean towards Apollo any other time, before or since. This only happened once, once ever, when Twigs thought Ash was in danger.

What a brave cat! If Apollo had wished Ash (or Twigs) harm, well, I don’t like those odds. But Twigs didn’t even think twice. We’ve never stopped marvelling over it.

I say “brave” very deliberately, because Twigs while was not fearless, he stood up to his fears. The only one we really saw was a fear of, ah, foam strips. See, we used to have a tiny “gym” in the corner of the kitchen, and the equipment sat on a foam mat made out of tiles with jigsaw edges that could fit together. To give the assembled mat a smooth perimeter, the tiles also came with thin edge pieces.

Foot traffic (or cats) could knock one of the edge pieces loose, leaving a strip of black foam alone on the floor. Twigs found this highly alarming. He would crouch down and eye it very suspiciously, creep up to give it a light smack and then back off, and generally treat it like a live wire. We assume it looked like a snake to him, though no other cat took interest in the edge pieces except to play with them, and Twigs never reacted the same way to anything else snake-shaped.

But he didn’t run away. He investigated, to see if it was dangerous, see if there was a predator in his home. Even after we’d find him doing this and put the foam piece back, Twigs would creep around for a while, looking for possible snakes until he was convinced it was gone. He was clearly very wary, yet he never ran, never hid.

The only other times I recall seeing Twigs anything close to scared were when he encountered a couple of accessories that resembled large animals: a Lucario hat Ash bought many years ago, and one of those goofy horse masks. I’m not even sure if “scared” is even the right word; he looked more annoyed? He neither backed down nor tried to attack them. I only remember him standing his ground and hissing, warning them to leave him alone.

I never heard him hiss any other time.

(Ash did, though. Once as a tiny kitten, our late cat Granite sat on him. A big furry cat just sat his ass right down on this little kitten. Kitten Twigs hissed about this, but kittens aren’t very ferocious hissers, so it came out khh! khh!, which Granite ignored.Funnily enough, once Twigs grew up, he developed his own habit of sitting on furred cats!)

We haven’t had a death since Styx. Twigs’s best friend! I never once expected Twigs would be the next to go. Now Napoleon is the only one left of the original crew.

Ash moved in with me not long after adopting Twigs. I don’t think he was even a year old. I knew him his entire adult life! I lived with him longer than I’ve lived with anyone, save my parents as a kid.

For so many years, it’s been Ash and Twigs. The inseparable duo, joined at the hip. I knew it would end someday, but I was so sure that day was much further off. I thought he’d be around for another five years at least, and secretly hoped he’d make it another ten. But we only got half of that. He loved twice as hard, and his heart burned out far too early.

He had so much life left in him. He played, he ran around, he wrestled (or, at least, was wrestled upon). He was still growing, inventing new antics and new ways to interact with us.

It’s been a strange experience. I couldn’t even absorb the factual knowledge of his death at first, even as I spent much of the first few days crying. How could Twigs die? That doesn’t make any sense; I haven’t seen him yet today, but he’ll show up soon. But I feel really sad. Oh, right, that’s because Twigs died. Rinse, repeat, over and over.

We picked his ashes a few days later. It’s been nice to have him home again, and it helps to have something physical to look at, rather than just the lack of his presence. Ash intends to paint his urn.

It got easier much more quickly than I expected, and that’s been weird as well. I wanted to hold onto his memory and be happy for the time I got to spend with him, and then that actually happened. I think about him a lot (especially over the multiple days it’s taken to write this), and a lot of little things remind me of him, but they don’t make me break down in tears. Usually.

That feels a little bad. But I know that hurting less doesn’t mean I loved him any less. And I know the last thing Twigs would want is for us to be sad.

Twigs was the best. I miss so much about him. I miss the way his whole nose scrunched up when he did a big meow. I miss his distinct little trot as he came down the hallway to see you. I miss watching him do eager little circles on the floor as I got the food out. I miss how he’d smack his lips as he showed up, a distinct and inexplicable quirk I’ve never seen in any other cat, a good compliment to how long he’d spend licking his chops after eating. I miss his huge ears! I miss “savannah cat” — when he’d hook his paws over the edge of something he was lying on, like an arm or the edge of a cat bed or the corner of my computer tower. I miss what a serene and calming presence he was.

It’s funny how some of the most memorable moments are things he only did one time. He joined Ash in the bathtub once — they were reading a book and Twigs came in, hopped in the bath, and sat in water up to his neck, just to be with them. He often announced his presence with a questioning meow when coming into Ash’s Vegas room at night, and once he did this really funny “meow-ow!” kind of double meow, and we’ve repeated it to each other as a nod to Twigs ever since, even though he never did it again.

One fall, we got a tiny pumpkin — the size of a slightly disappointing donut — and Twigs was enamored with it. We’d roll it along its edge and he’d chase after it and keep biting it, and it was so cute. Another fall, we bought another one, and Twigs wasn’t interested in it at all. Very cutting-edge of him. Tiny pumpkin is so last year.

He used to be really interested in eggs, too. For a while, we couldn’t turn our backs on an egg on the counter, because Twigs would materialize and start gently batting it around. Then he lost interest.

I miss how he slept with me. He’d always slept either behind my knees or on top of the covers, but right towards the end of his life, he invented a new trick, just for me. I sleep on my side, so he couldn’t lay on my chest; instead, he went under the covers, poked his head out, and lay against my chest with his head on my pillow. Like a little person! It was so sweet. He’d then keep nuzzling my face with his cold wet nose, which was kind of annoying. I miss that, too.

Even the annoying things are conspicuously absent. He frequently stepped on my hair while I was in bed, trying to get around me to get to Ash, and wow that is painful. Twigs groomed his cat sweaters more intensely than any other cat, biting the fabric and pulling so hard that it stretched and made this horrible high-pitched squeak, like nails on a chalkboard. He loved to groom people, too — usually on the chin or upper chest, since that’s what was accessible when he lay on you. Somehow Ash got used to it (and learned to redirect him to their palm, which he’d lick for ages), but I could never bear more than a few seconds of his cheese grater tongue.

What a good cat.

I felt like I’d been waiting for this all year. I don’t want to go much into it, but death has felt like a looming spectre almost since we moved in. The pointlessness of doing things, the feeling that I’m just passing time waiting to die, the occasional intrusive thought about a tragic accident befalling one of us or one of the cats. Never Twigs, though.

Last year was harder on me than I thought. I fired on all cylinders, trying to get Ash back on their feet, and once that happened… I deflated and never quite recovered. I lost a lot of my drive, my spark, my voice. I got frustrated with difficult work much more easily. I stopped writing. I stopped interacting. I stopped trying.

I didn’t even realize. Even as I felt increasingly distant and detached from the universe, I still thought I’d been pretty normal all year with only a few rough patches. It’s been hard to compare the past to the present, separated as they are by a strange and tumultuous six months that changed almost everything. Then Ash commented that I’d seemed kind of down all year. What a jolt that was, and only a few days before Twigs died.

Twigs’s death feels like a kick in the ass. I’ve felt a lot of despair over the past year, but all of it has been tied to anxieties and what-ifs — imaginary things. But this is sad, which is very different. This carries a pain for something tangible, something real, something important, something I want to hold onto. How can any of my little fantasy fears matter, when the loss of a cat outweighs all of them combined?

I don’t want to waste any more time. I want to reflect what I admired about Twigs: kind, patient, confident, and loving. I want to make this mean something.

Twigs had a good life. He spent it around people and cats he loved dearly, and who loved him right back. He had friends when he was lonely and blankets when he was chilly.

Oh, did he ever love blankets. Sphynxes are naked and tend to seek out warmth, of course, but of the four we’ve had, Twigs was by far the one who treated heat sources like a passion rather than mere physical comfort. His ability to identify the most snuggly spot to back his ass into was nothing short of superfeline. Sometimes he’d toast himself so well that he turned a little pink! And he used to do this incredible display of cat paws, with all four paws, accompanied by the occasional meow — but only on a specific blanket that we’ve long since lost.

He was also the one who tolerated cat sweaters the best (despite inflicting the most destruction on them). Anise’s powers of antagonism are greatly reduced in a sweater, and he will run away if he sees you approaching him with one; Pearl still does a funny awkward walk with her back half lower to the ground, even after wearing them through half a dozen winters. But Twigs in a sweater just acted like Twigs.

And what a well-travelled cat! He lived in four states and drove through half a dozen others. That’s more of the world than a decent number of humans see. He got to meet and snuggle with all kinds of other cats, and even some sort of giant wolf-cat who tried to herd him occasionally. He got to see the great outdoors, then decided he didn’t like it and returned to the great indoors.

Twigs did spend a couple of his later years afflicted with “pillow paw” — his pawpads swelled up one day, for seemingly no reason. Our vet couldn’t find an underlying cause, and meanwhile it was uncomfortable for him to land on his feet from a height. Poor guy. I’m eternally grateful to the vet we found last summer, who finally solved the mystery and cured him. He got to spend his final year active and unhindered again.

Ash spent much of our last couple Vegas years secluded in their office, too, so Twigs didn’t get as much face time as I’m sure he would’ve liked. But in our new place, both of our desks are out in the open and right next to each other, so Twigs could see them whenever he wanted. Sometimes he lay on a cat bed on my desk watching them, or strolled back and forth between us both, purring up a storm.

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster for all of us, but I think the last year was the best year of his life.

I miss Twigs, but I smile when I think about him. He made us so happy while he was here.

Twigs came into Ash’s life while they were somewhat adrift — no clear goals, no home of their own, resigned to an unhappy marriage. He stuck with them for nine whole years, unwavering in his affection. He followed them down into the darkness, down where they couldn’t feel love from anyone — anyone except Twigs.

Now Ash has work and a community they love. We have a home together, and it finally feels like one. And by sheer coincidence, Ash’s divorce was finalized mere days after Twigs died. His entire life was contained within that marriage, from birth to death.

(Oh, we’re married now. Hurrah.)

Ash adopted Twigs almost on a whim, and he left us just as abruptly. As though he’d only shown up in the first place to help Ash when they needed it, and with Marl finally out of our lives, his work here was done.

The last thing Twigs did, the night that he died, was tell us he loved us. Ash put him under the blanket to try warming him up, and at first he was by our feet… but then he crawled up to slump against me, similar to how he did when I was alone in bed, and then he climbed on Ash’s chest and lay on them for a moment. Right at the end, as cold and confused as he must’ve felt, all he wanted was to be with Ash, to be with both of us.

I don’t know where Twigs is, now. He might be nowhere. But the universe has consistently proven itself to be more baffling and beautiful than I expect, so I’ll hold out hope that he’s somewhere — somewhere he can once again see Styx, his (other) best friend in the whole wide world. Somewhere that we can see them both again, one day.

Goodbye, Twigs! We’ll always love you, and we’ll always miss you.

Thank you, so much, for everything.

Eevee gained 2977 experience points

2019-01-14T21:16:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 32!

This has been a surreal and difficult year, but everything turned out much better in the end.

I can’t possibly do the whole story justice, and I’m not eager to rehash it anyway, so here’s the incredibly short version. The players are myself, my partner Ash (formerly Mel, aka glip), and their (at the time) husband Marl.

Helpful context: for years, Ash has been the target of a stalking slash gossip campaign. A group of folks on a forum infamous for this sort of thing likes to dig through our online footprints for dirt and compile lengthy lists of awful things we’ve allegedly done. Every time this happened, we dropped everything and investigated. It’s exhausting. Virtually everything we’ve been accused of has been some combination of long since resolved, wildly embellished, carefully trimmed to remove any explanatory context, completely misunderstood, distorted through rounds of telephone, or occasionally outright fabricated — and what’s not, we gladly apologize for and try to repair. But there are so many fractalline complaints that no casual observer could possibly double-check the evidence (it sometimes takes weeks for us to comb through it all), and we can’t respond effectively without producing a massive tome that no one will bother to read.

This is where we’re starting from.

In early April, someone posted logs from 2012 of Marl having horny chats with someone who was 15/16 and suggesting a variety of other shady behavior. The teenager in question was someone Marl had briefly hired to help him assemble con merch; Ash and I had barely interacted with her at all and didn’t even know they’d spoken outside of that. Nevertheless, “warnings” about all three of us began to circulate rapidly, Ash’s friends started getting doxxed, and folks bailed on us in droves — all while Ash and I were still trying to grasp what was even going on.

Marl offered a general apology, told us the logs were bogus, then became upset and withdrew. He didn’t keep logs of his own, so we had little else to go on and had to trust him. I found some oddities in the logs: enough to make me skeptical of them and more trusting of Marl, but nothing concrete.

Ash was completely exhausted with this, which was by no means the first accusation leveled at them over events they hadn’t even known about. They couldn’t take any more, were on the verge of a breakdown, and decided to abandon the internet altogether. That left me as the obvious conduit for anyone trying to get at Ash, and I am very bad at not grouching about something annoying, so this presented a very tangible risk. Ash is more important to me than being online, so I left as well.

For various reasons, not least of which is that the forum had our address and was still whipping a rather lot of people into a bloodthirsty frenzy, we no longer felt safe in our home. We left that too.

We stayed with Marl’s parents for a while, which gave Ash time to think. They started to feel the full weight of a lot of things, big and small, that Marl had done over the course of their ten-year marriage: lots of breaches of trust; stretching Ash’s patience as far as it would go and then promising to improve for just long enough; leaving us to deal with accusations levelled against him with zero information more than once.

He also eventually admitted that the logs were not entirely bogus, although he never clarified more specifically, so I have no way to know what he actually did or not. At the very least, he did slide into the DMs of a high schooler (who was also his employee, no less).

We subsequently evicted him from our lives, leaving him with his parents when we moved to a new place.

I’m told the teenager dropped off the forum (which she’d been posting on anonymously), and no one but Marl knows her identity, so she’s effectively vanished. We haven’t had contact with Marl in months. That just leaves us.

I’ve explained a lot of this in gratuitous detail on Twitter, and it’s been relatively quiet for a while now, but the initial confused mess can’t be undone. Gossip cannot be un-spread. To this day, we still get folks trying to warn people away from us, based primarily on what Marl did behind our backs.

Oh, well. Can’t please everyone, right? Does that actually apply here?

It drives me nuts to be misrepresented, but on the other hand, maybe it’s okay that people who take gossip at face value are self-selecting themselves out of my internet experience.

Anyway, that’s why my output was a bit low last year: I was chased from my home and thought I would be leaving the internet forever! Then I had to spend a few months getting settled. Plus I’ve been on and off ADHD meds since May, which has kind of thrown me for a loop, but I finally got that all sorted out just a few days ago. Now I can finally get back to, um, whatever it is that I do.

In lighter news!

We live in Colorado Springs now! It’s beautiful and lovely and actually has weather, which is a nice change after five years in Vegas.

I changed my name! It was in part to stay out of public records so we wouldn’t be doxxed again, but then they doxxed the name change, so, that didn’t work. Oh, well, I’m still happy I did it. I’m Evelyn Woods now. That’s right: I legally changed my name to Eevee.

Ash and I are engaged! Also I love them a lot. Marl injected a lot of invisible, ambiguous tension into the household; without that smothering us, we are flourishing. We went through hell together and made it out the other side. I’m… well, I’m really happy.

We got a new cat: Cheeseball, a Lykoi! He loves to make friends and also fight them, and his antics helped a lot over the summer. He’s very good.

So good, in fact, that over the summer I started working on Cheezball Rising, a game about Cheeseball for the Game Boy Color! It is hard and I am not very far along. Also I’ve been in outer space and haven’t worked on it much in several months. But I’ve been blogging the whole thing which is at least moderately interesting.

I also wrote a stub of a game for the GBA in Rust over the past week for a game jam, though it hasn’t gotten especially far either.

And, some other games? Probably? I think Alice’s Day Off was this most recent February, right? God, that feels like it was a decade ago. So much for finishing it by June.

I kinda-sorta kept up with art over the summer, but art requires a certain kind of mood for me, and I… wasn’t in it. Which is a shame, because I was starting to feel like I was getting somewhere.

I slopped together little Pelican-based art galleries for my SFW and NSFW art, which I’d been meaning to do for a while!

I don’t know. I stopped tracking what I was doing every day quite so closely, since I wasn’t doing much every day for a while there. Maybe I’ll start the weekly roundup posts back up? Did anyone read those?

What about 2019, then?

I feel unleashed and am absolutely certain this will be a fantastic year. Mostly I have to catch up on everything I didn’t do last year. Well, that’s fine. Let’s see, what do I even have in the air right now:

Cheezball Rising, the GBC game
fox flux advance, the GBA game, maybe
fox flux, the continuation of the desktop game
Alice’s Day Off, which was only released as a demo
idchoppers, the Rust Doom tool
art, writing, music
idk half a dozen other things, god

So, the usual: make stuff.

Eevee gained 2791 experience points

2018-01-15T16:53:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 31!

A year strongly defined by mixed success! Also, a lot of video games.

I ran three game jams, resulting in a total of 157 games existing that may not have otherwise, which is totally mindblowing?!

For GAMES MADE QUICK???, glip and I made NEON PHASE, a short little exploratory platformer. Honestly, I should give myself more credit for this and the rest of the LÖVE games I’ve based on the same codebase — I wove a physics engine (and everything else!) from scratch and it has held up remarkably well for a variety of different uses.

I successfully finished an HD version of Isaac’s Descent using my LÖVE engine, though it doesn’t have anything new over the original and I’ve only released it as a tech demo on Patreon.

For Strawberry Jam (NSFW!) we made fox flux (slightly NSFW!), which felt like a huge milestone: the first game where I made all the art! I mean, not counting Isaac’s Descent, which was for a very limited platform. It’s a pretty arbitrary milestone, yes, but it feels significant. I’ve been working on expanding the game into a longer and slightly less buggy experience, but the art is taking the longest by far. I must’ve spent weeks on player sprites alone.

We then set about working on Bolthaven, a sequel of sorts to NEON PHASE, and got decently far, and then abandond it. Oops.

We then started a cute little PICO-8 game, and forgot about it. Oops.

I was recruited to help with Chaos Composer, a more ambitious game glip started with someone else in Unity. I had to get used to Unity, and we squabbled a bit, but the game is finally about at the point where it’s “playable” and “maps” can be designed? It’s slightly on hold at the moment while we all finish up some other stuff, though.

We made a birthday game for two of our friends whose birthdays were very close together! Only they got to see it.

For Ludum Dare 38, we made Lunar Depot 38, a little “wave shooter” or whatever you call those? The AI is pretty rough, seeing as this was the first time I’d really made enemies and I had 72 hours to figure out how to do it, but I still think it’s pretty fun to play and I love the circular world.

I made Roguelike Simulator as an experiment with making something small and quick with a simple tool, and I had a lot of fun! I definitely want to do more stuff like this in the future.

And now we’re working on a game about Star Anise, my cat’s self-insert, which is looking to have more polish and depth than anything we’ve done so far! We’ve definitely come a long way in a year.

Somewhere along the line, I put out a call for a “potluck” project, where everyone would give me sprites of a given size without knowing what anyone else had contributed, and I would then make a game using only those sprites. Unfortunately, that stalled a few times: I tried using the Phaser JS library, but we didn’t get along; I tried LÖVE, but didn’t know where to go with the game; and then I decided to use this as an experiment with procedural generation, and didn’t get around to it. I still feel bad that everyone did work for me and I didn’t follow through, but I don’t know whether this will ever become a game.

veekun, alas, consumed months of my life. I finally got Sun and Moon loaded, but it took weeks of work since I was basically reinventing all the tooling we’d ever had from scratch, without even having most of that tooling available as a reference. It was worth it in the end, at least: Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon only took a few days to get loaded. But veekun itself is still missing some obvious Sun/Moon features, and the whole site needs an overhaul, and I just don’t know if I want to dedicate that much time to it when I have so much other stuff going on that’s much more interesting to me right now.

I finally turned my blog into more of a website, giving it a neat front page that lists a bunch of stuff I’ve done. I made a release category at last, though I’m still not quite in the habit of using it.

I wrote some blog posts, of course! I think the most interesting were JavaScript got better while I wasn’t looking and Object models. I was also asked to write a couple pieces for money for a column that then promptly shut down.

On a whim, I made a set of Eevee mugshots for Doom, which I think is a decent indication of my (pixel) art progress over the year?

I started idchoppers, a Doom parsing and manipulation library written in Rust, though it didn’t get very far and I’ve spent most of the time fighting with Rust because it won’t let me implement all my extremely bad ideas. It can do a couple things, at least, like flip maps very quickly and render maps to SVG.

I did toy around with music a little, but not a lot.

I wrote two short twines for Flora. They’re okay. I’m working on another; I think it’ll be better.

I didn’t do a lot of art overall, at least compared to the two previous years; most of my art effort over the year has gone into fox flux, which requires me to learn a whole lot of things. I did dip my toes into 3D modelling, most notably producing my current Twitter banner as well as this cool Star Anise animation. I wouldn’t mind doing more of that; maybe I’ll even try to make a low-poly pixel-textured 3D game sometime.

I restarted my book with a much better concept, though so far I’ve only written about half a chapter. Argh. I see that the vast majority of the work was done within the span of a single week, which is bad since that means I only worked on it for a week, but good since that means I can actually do a pretty good amount of work in only a week. I also did a lot of squabbling with tooling, which is hopefully mostly out of the way now.

My computer broke? That was an exciting week.

A lot of stuff, but the year as a whole still feels hit or miss. All the time I spent on veekun feels like a black void in the middle of the year, which seems like a good sign that I maybe don’t want to pour even more weeks into it in the near future.

Mostly, I want to do: more games, more art, more writing, more music.

I want to try out some tiny game making tools and make some tiny games with them — partly to get exposure to different things, partly to get more little ideas out into the world regularly, and partly to get more practice at letting myself have ideas. I have a couple tools in mind and I guess I’ll aim at a microgame every two months or so? I’d also like to finish the expanded fox flux by the end of the year, of course, though at the moment I can’t even gauge how long it might take.

I seriously lapsed on drawing last year, largely because fox flux pixel art took me so much time. So I want to draw more, and I want to get much faster at pixel art. It would probably help if I had a more concrete goal for drawing, so I might try to draw some short comics and write a little visual novel or something, which would also force me to aim for consistency.

I want to work on my book more, of course, but I also want to try my hand at a bit more fiction. I’ve had a blast writing dialogue for our games! I just shy away from longer-form writing for some reason — which seems ridiculous when a large part of my audience found me through my blog. I do think I’ve had some sort of breakthrough in the last month or two; I suddenly feel a good bit more confident about writing in general and figuring out what I want to say? One recent post I know I wrote in a single afternoon, which virtually never happens because I keep rewriting and rearranging stuff. Again, a visual novel would be a good excuse to practice writing fiction without getting too bogged down in details.

And, ah, music. I shy heavily away from music, since I have no idea what I’m doing, and also I seem to spend a lot of time fighting with tools. (Surprise.) I tried out SunVox for the first time just a few days ago and have been enjoying it quite a bit for making sound effects, so I might try it for music as well. And once again, visual novel background music is a pretty low-pressure thing to compose for. Hell, visual novels are small games, too, so that checks all the boxes. I guess I’ll go make a visual novel.

Here’s to twenty gayteen!

Introspection

2017-05-28T13:59:00-07:00

This month, IndustrialRobot has generously donated in order to ask:

How do you go about learning about yourself? Has your view of yourself changed recently? How did you handle it?

Whoof. That’s incredibly abstract and open-ended — there’s a lot I could say, but most of it is hard to turn into words.

The first example to come to mind — and the most conspicuous, at least from where I’m sitting — has been the transition from technical to creative since quitting my tech job. I think I touched on this a year ago, but it’s become all the more pronounced since then.

I quit in part because I wanted more time to work on my own projects. Two years ago, those projects included such things as: giving the Python ecosystem a better imaging library, designing an alternative to regular expressions, building a Very Correct IRC bot framework, and a few more things along similar lines. The goals were all to solve problems — not hugely important ones, but mildly inconvenient ones that I thought I could bring something novel to. Problem-solving for its own sake.

Now that I had all the time in the world to work on these things, I… didn’t. It turned out they were almost as much of a slog as my job had been!

The problem, I think, was that there was no point.

This was really weird to realize and come to terms with. I do like solving problems for its own sake; it’s interesting and educational. And most of the programming folks I know and surround myself with have that same drive and use it to create interesting tools like Twisted. So besides taking for granted that this was the kind of stuff I wanted to do, it seemed like the kind of stuff I should want to do.

But even if I create a really interesting tool, what do I have? I don’t have a thing; I have a tool that can be used to build things. If I want a thing, I have to either now build it myself — starting from nearly zero despite all the work on the tool, because it can only do so much in isolation — or convince a bunch of other people to use my tool to build things. Then they’d be depending on my tool, which means I have to maintain and support it, which is even more time and effort poured into this non-thing.

Despite frequently being drawn to think about solving abstract tooling problems, it seems I truly want to make things. This is probably why I have a lot of abandoned projects boldly described as “let’s solve X problem forever!” — I go to scratch the itch, I do just enough work that it doesn’t itch any more, and then I lose interest.

I spent a few months quietly flailing over this minor existential crisis. I’d spent years daydreaming about making tools; what did I have if not that drive? I was having to force myself to work on what I thought were my passion projects.

Meanwhile, I’d vaguely intended to do some game development, but for some reason dragged my feet forever and then took my sweet time dipping my toes in the water. I did work on a text adventure, Runed Awakening, on and off… but it was a fractal of creative decisions and I had a hard time making all of them. It might’ve been too ambitious, despite feeling small, and that might’ve discouraged me from pursuing other kinds of games earlier.

A big part of it might have been the same reason I took so long to even give art a serious try. I thought of myself as a technical person, and art is a thing for creative people, so I’m simply disqualified, right? Maybe the same thing applies to games.

Lord knows I had enough trouble when I tried. I’d orbited the Doom community for years but never released a single finished level. I did finally give it a shot again, now that I had the time. Six months into my funemployment, I wrote a three-part guide on making Doom levels. Three months after that, I finally released one of my own.

I suppose that opened the floodgates; a couple weeks later, glip and I decided to try making something for the PICO-8, and then we did that (almost exactly a year ago!). Then kept doing it.

It’s been incredibly rewarding — far moreso than any “pure” tooling problem I’ve ever approached. Moreso than even something like veekun, which is a useful thing. People have thoughts and opinions on games. Games give people feelings, which they then tell you about. Most of the commentary on a reference website is that something is missing or incorrect.

I like doing creative work. There was never a singular moment when this dawned on me; it was a slow process over the course of a year or more. I probably should’ve had an inkling when I started drawing, half a year before I quit; even my early (and very rough) daily comics made people laugh, and I liked that a lot. Even the most well-crafted software doesn’t tend to bring joy to people, but amateur art can.

I still like doing technical work, but I prefer when it’s a means to a creative end. And, just as important, I prefer when it has a clear and constrained scope. “Make a library/tool for X” is a nebulous problem that could go in a great many directions; “make a bot that tweets Perlin noise” has a pretty definitive finish line. It was interesting to write a little physics engine, but I would’ve hated doing it if it weren’t for a game I were making and didn’t have the clear scope of “do what I need for this game”.

It feels like creative work is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. If this were a made-for-TV movie, I would’ve discovered this impulse one day and immediately revealed myself as a natural-born artistic genius of immense unrealized talent.

That didn’t happen. Instead I’ve found that even something as mundane as having ideas is a skill, and while it’s one I enjoy, I’ve barely ever exercised it at all. I have plenty of ideas with technical work, but I run into brick walls all the time with creative stuff.

How do I theme this area? Well, I don’t know. How do I think of something? I don’t know that either. It’s a strange paradox to have an urge to create things but not quite know what those things are.

It’s such a new and completely different kind of problem. There’s no right answer, or even an answer I can check for “correctness”. I can do anything. With no landmarks to start from, it’s easy to feel completely lost and just draw blanks.

I’ve essentially recalibrated the texture of stuff I work on, and I have to find some completely new ways to approach problems. I haven’t found them yet. I don’t think they’re anything that can be told or taught. But I’m starting to get there, and part of it is just accepting that I can’t treat these like problems with clear best solutions and clear algorithms to find those solutions.

A particularly glaring irony is that I’ve had a really tough problem designing abstract spaces, even though that’s exactly the kind of architecture I praise in Doom. It’s much trickier than it looks — a good abstract design is reminiscent of something without quite being that something.

I suppose it’s similar to a struggle I’ve had with art. I’m drawn to a cartoony style, and cartooning is also a mild form of abstraction, of whittling away details to leave only what’s most important. I’m reminded in particular of the forest background in fox flux — I was completely lost on how to make something reminiscent of a tree line. I knew enough to know that drawing trees would’ve made the background far too busy, but trees are naturally busy, so how do you represent that?

The answer glip gave me was to make big chunky leaf shapes around the edges and where light levels change. Merely overlapping those shapes implies depth well enough to convey the overall shape of the tree. The result works very well and looks very simple — yet it took a lot of effort just to get to the idea.

It reminds me of mathematical research, in a way? You know the general outcome you want, and you know the tools at your disposal, and it’s up to you to make some creative leaps. I don’t think there’s a way to directly learn how to approach that kind of problem; all you can do is look at what others have done and let it fuel your imagination.

I think I’m getting a little distracted here, but this is stuff that’s been rattling around lately.

If there’s a more personal meaning to the tree story, it’s that this is a thing I can do. I can learn it, and it makes sense to me, despite being a huge nerd.

Two and a half years ago, I never would’ve thought I’d ever make an entire game from scratch and do all the art for it. It was completely unfathomable. Maybe we can do a lot of things we don’t expect we’re capable of, if only we give them a serious shot.

And ask for help, of course. I have a hell of a time doing that. I did a painting recently that factored in mountains of glip’s advice, and on some level I feel like I didn’t quite do it myself, even though every stroke was made by my hand. Hell, I don’t even look at references nearly as much as I should. It feels like cheating, somehow? I know that’s ridiculous, but my natural impulse is to put my head down and figure it out myself. Maybe I’ve been doing that for too long with programming. Trust me, it doesn’t work quite so well in a brand new field.

I’m getting distracted again!

To answer your actual questions: how do I go about learning about myself? I don’t! It happens completely by accident. I’ll consciously examine my surface-level thoughts or behaviors or whatever, sure, but the serious fundamental revelations have all caught me completely by surprise — sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly.

Most of them also came from listening to the people who observe me from the outside: I only started drawing in the first place because of some ridiculous deal I made with glip. At the time I thought they just wanted everyone to draw because art is their thing, but now I’m starting to suspect they’d caught on after eight years of watching me lament that I couldn’t draw.

I don’t know how I handle such discoveries, either. What is handling? I imagine someone discovering something and trying to come to grips with it, but I don’t know that I have quite that experience — my grappling usually comes earlier, when I’m still trying to figure the thing out despite not knowing that there’s a thing to find out. Once I know it, it’s on the table; I can’t un-know it or reject it meaningfully. All I can do is figure out what to do with it, and I approach that the same way I approach every other problem: by flailing at it and hoping for the best.

This isn’t quite 2000 words. Sorry. I’ve run out of things to say about me. This paragraph is very conspicuous filler. Banana. Atmosphere. Vocation.

Utopia

2017-03-08T19:40:00-08:00

It’s been a while, but someone’s back on the Patreon blog topic tier! IndustrialRobot asks:

What does your personal utopia look like? Do you think we (as mankind) can achieve it? Why/why not?

Hm.

I spent the month up to my eyeballs in a jam game, but this question was in the back of my mind a lot. I could use it as a springboard to opine about anything, especially in the current climate: politics, religion, nationalism, war, economics, etc., etc. But all of that has been done to death by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

The question does say “personal”. So in a less abstract sense… what do I want the world to look like?

Mostly, I want everyone to have the freedom to make things.

I’ve been having a surprisingly hard time writing the rest of this without veering directly into the ravines of “basic income is good” and “maybe capitalism is suboptimal”. Those are true, but not really the tone I want here, and anyway they’ve been done to death by better writers than I. I’ve talked this out with Mel a few times, and it sounds much better aloud, so I’m going to try to drop my Blog Voice and just… talk.

*ahem*

Art versus business

So, art. Art is good.

I’m construing “art” very broadly here. More broadly than “media”, too. I’m including shitty robots, weird Twitter almost-bots, weird Twitter non-bots, even a great deal of open source software. Anything that even remotely resembles creative work — driven perhaps by curiosity, perhaps by practicality, but always by a soul bursting with ideas and a palpable need to get them out.

Western culture thrives on art. Most culture thrives on art. I’m not remotely qualified to defend this, but I suspect you could define culture in terms of art. It’s pretty important.

You’d think this would be reflected in how we discuss art, but often… it’s not. Tell me how often you’ve heard some of these gems.

“I could do that.”
“My eight-year-old kid could do that.”
Jokes about the worthlessness of liberal arts degrees.
Jokes about people trying to write novels in their spare time, the subtext being that only dreamy losers try to write novels, or something.
The caricature of a hippie working on a screenplay at Starbucks.

Oh, and then there was the guy who made a bot to scrape tons of art from artists who were using Patreon as a paywall — and a primary source of income. The justification was that artists shouldn’t expect to make a living off of, er, doing art, and should instead get “real jobs”.

I do wonder. How many of the people repeating these sentiments listen to music, or go to movies, or bought an iPhone because it’s prettier? Are those things not art that took real work to create? Is creating those things not a “real job”?

Perhaps a “real job” has to be one that’s not enjoyable, not a passion? And yet I can’t recall ever hearing anyone say that Taylor Swift should get a “real job”. Or that, say, pro football players should get “real jobs”. What do pro football players even do? They play a game a few times a year, and somehow this drives the flow of unimaginable amounts of money. We dress it up in the more serious-sounding “sport”, but it’s a game in the same general genre as hopscotch. There’s nothing wrong with that, but somehow it gets virtually none of the scorn that art does.

Another possible explanation is America’s partly-Christian, partly-capitalist attitude that you deserve exactly whatever you happen to have at the moment. (Whereas I deserve much more and will be getting it any day now.) Rich people are rich because they earned it, and we don’t question that further. Poor people are poor because they failed to earn it, and we don’t question that further, either. To do so would suggest that the system is somehow unfair, and hard work does not perfectly correlate with any particular measure of success.

I’m sure that factors in, but it’s not quite satisfying: I’ve also seen a good deal of spite aimed at people who are making a fairly decent chunk through Patreon or similar. Something is missing.

I thought, at first, that the key might be the American worship of work. Work is an inherent virtue. Politicians run entire campaigns based on how many jobs they’re going to create. Notably, no one seems too bothered about whether the work is useful, as long as someone decided to pay you for it.

Finally I stumbled upon the key. America doesn’t actually worship work. America worships business. Business means a company is deciding to pay you. Business means legitimacy. Business is what separates a hobby from a career.

And this presents a problem for art.

If you want to provide a service or sell a product, that’ll be hard, but America will at least try to look like it supports you. People are impressed that you’re an entrepreneur, a small business owner. Politicians will brag about policies made in your favor, whether or not they’re stabbing you in the back.

Small businesses have a particular structure they can develop into. You can divide work up. You can have someone in sales, someone in accounting. You can provide specifications and pay a factory to make your product. You can defer all of the non-creative work to someone else, whether that means experts in a particular field or unskilled labor.

But if your work is inherently creative, you can’t do that. The very thing you’re making is your idea in your style, driven by your experience. This is not work that’s readily parallelizable. Even if you sell physical merchandise and register as an LLC and have a dedicated workspace and do various other formal business-y things, the basic structure will still look the same: a single person doing the thing they enjoy. A hobbyist.

Consider the bulleted list from above. Those are all individual painters or artists or authors or screenwriters. The kinds of artists who earn respect without question are generally those managed by a business, those with branding: musical artists signed to labels, actors working for a studio. Even football players are part of a tangle of business.

(This doesn’t mean that business automatically confers respect, of course; tech in particular is full of anecdotes about nerds’ disdain for people whose jobs are design or UI or documentation or whathaveyou. But a businessy look seems to be a significant advantage.)

It seems that although art is a large part of what informs culture, we have a culture that defines “serious” endeavors in such a way that independent art cannot possibly be “serious”.

Art versus money

Which wouldn’t really matter at all, except that we also have a culture that expects you to pay for food and whatnot.

The reasoning isn’t too outlandish. Food is produced from a combination of work and resources. In exchange for getting the food, you should give back some of your own work and resources.

Obviously this is riddled with subtle flaws, but let’s roll with it for now and look at a case study. Like, uh, me!

Mel and I built and released two games together in the six weeks between mid-January and the end of February. Together, those games have made $1,000 in sales. The sales trail off fairly quickly within a few days of release, so we’ll call that the total gross for our effort.

I, dumb, having never actually sold anything before, thought this was phenomenal. Then I had the misfortune of doing some math.

Itch takes at least 10%, so we’re down to $900 net. Divided over six weeks, that’s $150 per week, before taxes — or $3.75 per hour if we’d been working full time.

Ah, but wait! There are two of us. And we hadn’t been working full time — we’d been working nearly every waking hour, which is at least twice “full time” hours. So we really made less than a dollar an hour. Even less than that, if you assume overtime pay.

From the perspective of capitalism, what is our incentive to do this? Between us, we easily have over thirty years of experience doing the things we do, and we spent weeks in crunch mode working on something, all to earn a small fraction of minimum wage. Did we not contribute back our own work and resources? Was our work worth so much less than waiting tables?

Waiting tables is a perfectly respectable way to earn a living, mind you. Ah, but wait! I’ve accidentally done something clever here. It is generally expected that you tip your waiter, because waiters are underpaid by the business, because the business assumes they’ll be tipped. Not tipping is actually, almost impressively, one of the rudest things you can do. And yet it’s not expected that you tip an artist whose work you enjoy, even though many such artists aren’t being paid at all.

Now, to be perfectly fair, both games were released for free. Even a dollar an hour is infinitely more than the zero dollars I was expecting — and I’m amazed and thankful we got as much as we did! Thank you so much. I bring it up not as a complaint, but as an armchair analysis of our systems of incentives.

People can take art for granted and whatever, yes, but there are several other factors at play here that hamper the ability for art to make money.

For one, I don’t want to sell my work. I suspect a great deal of independent artists and writers and open source developers (!) feel the same way. I create things because I want to, because I have to, because I feel so compelled to create that having a non-creative full-time job was making me miserable. I create things for the sake of expressing an idea. Attaching a price tag to something reduces the number of people who’ll experience it. In other words, selling my work would make it less valuable in my eyes, in much the same way that adding banner ads to my writing would make it less valuable.

And yet, I’m forced to sell something in some way, or else I’ll have to find someone who wants me to do bland mechanical work on their ideas in exchange for money… at the cost of producing sharply less work of my own. Thank goodness for Patreon, at least.

There’s also the reverse problem, in that people often don’t want to buy creative work. Everyone does sometimes, but only sometimes. It’s kind of a weird situation, and the internet has exacerbated it considerably.

Consider that if I write a book and print it on paper, that costs something. I have to pay for the paper and the ink and the use of someone else’s printer. If I want one more book, I have to pay a little more. I can cut those costs pretty considerable by printing a lot of books at once, but each copy still has a price, a marginal cost. If I then gave those books away, I would be actively losing money. So I can pretty well justify charging for a book.

Along comes the internet. Suddenly, copying costs nothing. Not only does it cost nothing, but it’s the fundamental operation. When you download a file or receive an email or visit a web site, you’re really getting a copy! Even the process which ultimately shows it on your screen involves a number of copies. This is so natural that we don’t even call it copying, don’t even think of it as copying.

True, bandwidth does cost something, but the rate is virtually nothing until you start looking at very big numbers indeed. I pay $60/mo for hosting this blog and a half dozen other sites — even that’s way more than I need, honestly, but downgrading would be a hassle — and I get 6TB of bandwidth. Even the longest of my posts haven’t exceeded 100KB. A post could be read by 64 million people before I’d start having a problem. If that were the population of a country, it’d be the 23rd largest in the world, between Italy and the UK.

How, then, do I justify charging for my writing? (Yes, I realize the irony in using my blog as an example in a post I’m being paid $88 to write.)

Well, I do pour effort and expertise and a fraction of my finite lifetime into it. But it doesn’t cost me anything tangible — I already had this hosting for something else! — and it’s easier all around to just put it online.

The same idea applies to a vast bulk of what’s online, and now suddenly we have a bit of a problem. Not only are we used to getting everything for free online, but we never bothered to build any sensible payment infrastructure. You still have to pay for everything by typing in a cryptic sequence of numbers from a little physical plastic card, which will then give you a small loan and charge the seller 30¢ plus 2.9% for the “convenience”.

If a website could say “pay 5¢ to read this” and you clicked a button in your browser and that was that, we might be onto something. But with our current setup, it costs far more than 5¢ to transfer 5¢, even though it’s just a number in a computer somewhere. The only people with the power and resources to fix this don’t want to fix it — they’d rather be the ones charging you the 30¢ plus 2.9%.

That leads to another factor of platforms and publishers, which are more than happy to eat a chunk of your earnings even when you do sell stuff. Google Play, the App Store, Steam, and anecdotally many other big-name comparative platforms all take 30% of your sales. A third! And that’s good! It seems common among book publishers to take 85% to 90%. For ebook sales — i.e., ones that don’t actually cost anything — they may generously lower that to a mere 75% to 85%.

Bless Patreon for only taking 5%. Itch.io is even better: it defaults to 10%, but gives you a slider, which you can set to anything from 0% to 100%.

I’ve mentioned all this before, so here’s a more novel thought: finite disposable income. Your audience only has so much money to spend on media right now. You can try to be more compelling to encourage them to spend more of it, rather than saving it, but ultimately everyone has a limit before they just plain run out of money.

Now, popularity is heavily influenced by social and network effects, so it tends to create a power law distribution: a few things are ridiculously hyperpopular, and then there’s a steep drop to a long tail of more modestly popular things.

If a new hyperpopular thing comes out, everyone is likely to want to buy it… but then that eats away a significant chunk of that finite pool of money that could’ve gone to less popular things.

This isn’t bad, and buying a popular thing doesn’t make you a bad person; it’s just what happens. I don’t think there’s any satisfying alternative that doesn’t involve radically changing the way we think about our economy.

Taylor Swift, who I’m only picking on because her infosec account follows me on Twitter, has sold tens of millions of albums and is worth something like a quarter of a billion dollars. Does she need more? If not, should she make all her albums free from now on?

Maybe she does, and maybe she shouldn’t. The alternative is for someone to somehow prevent her from making more money, which doesn’t sit well. Yet it feels almost heretical to even ask if someone “needs” more money, because we take for granted that she’s earned it — in part by being invested in by a record label and heavily advertised. The virtue is work, right? Don’t a lot of people work just as hard? (“But you have to be talented too!” Then please explain how wildly incompetent CEOs still make millions, and leave burning businesses only to be immediately hired by new ones? Anyway, are we really willing to bet there is no one equally talented but not as popular by sheer happenstance?)

It’s kind of a moot question anyway, since she’s probably under contract with billionaires and it’s not up to her.

Where the hell was I going with this.

Right, so. Money. Everyone needs some. But making it off art can be tricky, unless you’re one of the lucky handful who strike gold.

And I’m still pretty goddamn lucky to be able to even try this! I doubt I would’ve even gotten into game development by now if I were still working for an SF tech company — it just drained so much of my creative energy, and it’s enough of an uphill battle for me to get stuff done in the first place.

How many people do I know who are bursting with ideas, but have to work a tedious job to keep the lights on, and are too tired at the end of the day to get those ideas out? Make no mistake, making stuff takes work — a lot of it. And that’s if you’re already pretty good at the artform. If you want to learn to draw or paint or write or code, you have to do just as much work first, with much more frustration, and not as much to show for it.

Utopia

So there’s my utopia. I want to see a world where people have the breathing room to create the things they dream about and share them with the rest of us.

Can it happen? Maybe. I think the cultural issues are a fairly big blocker; we’d be much better off if we treated independent art with the same reverence as, say, people who play with a ball for twelve hours a year. Or if we treated liberal arts degrees as just as good as computer science degrees. (“But STEM can change the world!” Okay. How many people with computer science degrees would you estimate are changing the world, and how many are making a website 1% faster or keeping a lumbering COBOL beast running or trying to trick 1% more people into clicking on ads?)

I don’t really mean stuff like piracy, either. Piracy is a thing, but it’s… complicated. In my experience it’s not even artists who care the most about piracy; it’s massive publishers, the sort who see artists as a sponge to squeeze money out of. You know, the same people who make everything difficult to actually buy, infest it with DRM so it doesn’t work on half the stuff you own, and don’t even sell it in half the world.

I mean treating art as a free-floating commodity, detached from anyone who created it. I mean neo-Nazis adopting a comic book character as their mascot, against the creator’s wishes. I mean politicians and even media conglomerates using someone else’s music in well-funded videos and ads without even asking. I mean assuming Google Image Search, wonder that it is, is some kind of magical free art machine. I mean the snotty Reddit post I found while looking up Patreon’s fee structure, where some doofus was insisting that Patreon couldn’t possibly pay for a full-time YouTuber’s time, because not having a job meant they had lots of time to spare.

Maybe I should go one step further: everyone should create at least once or twice. Everyone should know what it’s like to have crafted something out of nothing, to be a fucking god within the microcosm of a computer screen or a sewing machine or a pottery table. Everyone should know that spark of inspiration that we don’t seem to know how to teach in math or science classes, even though it’s the entire basis of those as well. Everyone should know that there’s a good goddamn reason I listed open source software as a kind of art at the beginning of this post.

Basic income and more arts funding for public schools. If Uber can get billions of dollars for putting little car icons on top of Google Maps and not actually doing any of their own goddamn service themselves, I think we can afford to pump more cash into webcomics and indie games and, yes, even underwater basket weaving.

Eevee gained 2611 experience points

2017-01-21T16:50:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 30!

Wow! What an incredible fucking year. I’ve never done so much in my life.

I made a video game! Twice! Thrice, even, if you count the one I just finished, which was done on the week surrounding my birthday. Mel and I made Under Construction on the PICO-8 in a few weeks, then I used its engine to make Isaac’s Descent on my own for Ludum Dare, and we just published the more substantial LÖVE-based NEON PHASE for my own week-long game jam. I’ve also got a couple other things in progress, and Mel is at this very second working on NEON PHASE 2.

And we made these from scratch. I wrote a little collision engine! It even mostly works! That’s amazing and I’m so happy about it. It’s also great that Mel and I have something we can actually work on together; before, the most collaborating we really did was on web design.

My interest in Doom waxes and wanes, but I did find time to finally make a real map and later make some speedmaps (which I realize I never fully published, oops!). I even put some effort into embedding Lua in ZDoom, which is an interesting side project but probably not something I’m going to actively champion.

I wrote a few Twitter bots! @perlin_noise puts my post on Perlin noise to use by tweeting images, GIFs, and emoji grids generated from various kinds of Perlin noise. @unicodeveryword tweets every word in the English language that’s also in my wordlist, slightly scrambled by Unicode shenanigans. @calloutbot is mostly an injoke.

I wrote 45 posts comprising 195k words, which is about four novels, and that’s not counting the couple of articles I was paid to write a few months ago. I have Patreon to thank for getting me to write more often, though I recently dropped the writing obligation so I can spend more time on games and a book and other stuff.

Oh, yes, I actually started writing a book, in the sense that I have (quite a bit) more than a few pages written and a concept that I like and am sticking to.

I dipped a toe into music, however briefly, and managed to produce a simple song that’s not too bad. Promising!

I feel like I’ve been slacking a lot on art lately, but looking back, this year saw my first animation (and several more after that), a mountain of ink-on-paper work for Inktober, and of course a lot of exploration of pixel art for games. I haven’t done as much digital illustrating as I’d like in the last few months, perhaps, but I’m definitely creating stuff I’d never have imagined I could do two years ago.

Veekun? Ah, hm. I did write some gen 1 dumping stuff, much of which can be reused for gen 2, so that’s good. Some of the code got modernized a bit, and I made some good progress on gen 6/7. I also wrote that model viewer, which is pretty dang cool. So, still making progress, just slowly. It’s obviously not something that holds my attention as strongly nowadays, but I’d still like to get the site redone — hopefully that’ll make it easier to understand and work on, both for me and other people.

Even after all this, I’m surely forgetting a few more minor things! I’m really happy about how far I’ve come in a year, and I can’t wait to see what this coming year has in store.

One year later

2016-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.

What I didn't do

I think I spent the first few months in a bit of a daze. I have a bad habit of expecting worst case scenarios, so I was in a constant state of mild panic over whether I could really earn enough to support myself. Not particularly conducive to doing things.

There was also a very striking change in… people scenery? Working for a tech company, even remotely, meant that I spent much of my time talking to a large group of tech-minded people who knew the context behind things I was working on. Even if they weren’t the things I wanted to be working on, I could at least complain about an obscure problem and expect to find someone who understood it.

Suddenly, that was gone. I know some tech people, of course, and have some tech followers on Twitter, but those groups are much more heterogenous than a few dozen people all working on the same website. It was a little jarring.

And yet, looking back, I suspect that feeling had been fading for some time. I’d been working on increasingly obscure projects for Yelp, which limited how much I could really talk to anyone about them. Towards the end I was put on a particularly thorny problem just because I was the only person who knew anything about it at all. I spent a few weeks hammering away at this thing that zero other people understood, that I barely understood myself, that I didn’t much enjoy doing, and that would ultimately just speed deployments up by a few minutes.

Hm.

When I left, I had a lot of ideas for the kinds of things I wanted to do with all this newfound free time. Most of them were “pure” programming ideas: design and implement a programming language, build a new kind of parser, build a replacement for IRC, or at least build a little IRC bot framework.

I ended up doing… none of those! With more time to do things, rather than daydream restlessly about doing things, I discovered that building libraries and infrastructure is incredibly tedious and unrewarding. (For me, I mean. If that’s your jam, well, I’m glad it’s someone’s.)

I drifted for a little while as I came to terms with this, trying to force myself to work on these grandiose dreams. Ultimately, I realized that I most enjoy programming when it’s a means to an end, when there’s a goal beyond “write some code to do this”. Hence my recent tilt towards game development, where the code is just one part of a larger whole.

And, crucially, that larger whole is something that everyone can potentially enjoy. The difference has been night and day. I can tweet a screenshot of a text adventure and catch several people’s interest. On the other hand, a Python library for resizing images? Who cares? It’s not a complete thing; it’s a building block, a tool. At worst, no one ever uses it, and I have nothing to show for the time. Even at best, well… let’s just say the way programmers react to technical work is very different from the way everyone else reacts to creative work.

I do still like building libraries on occasion, but my sights are much smaller now. I may pick up sanpera or dywypi again, for instance, but I think that’s largely because other people are already using them to do things. I don’t have much interest in devoting months to designing and building a programming language that only a handful of PLT nerds will even look at, when I could instead spend a day and a half making a Twitter bot that posts random noise and immediately have multiple people tell me it’s relaxing or interesting.

In short, I’ve learned a lot about what’s important to me!

Ah, yes, I also thought I would’ve written a book by now. I, uh, haven’t. Writing a book apparently takes a lot more long-term focus than I tend to have available. It also requires enough confidence in a single idea to write tens of thousands of words about it, and that doesn’t come easily either. I’ve taken a lot of notes, written a couple short drafts, and picked up a bit of TeX, so it’s still on the table, but I don’t expect any particular timeframe.

What I did do

Argh, this is going to overlap with my birthday posts. But:

I wrote a whopping 43 blog posts, totalling just over 160,000 words. That’s two or three novels! Along the way, my Patreon has more than tripled to a level that’s, well, more reassuring. Thank you so much, everyone who’s contributed — I can’t imagine a better compliment than discovering that people are willing to directly pay me to keep writing and making whatever little strange things I want.

I drew a hell of a lot. My progress has been documented elsewhere, but suffice to say, I’ve come a long way. I also expanded into a few new media over this past year: watercolors, pixel art, and even a teeny bit of animation.

I made some games. The release of Mario Maker was a really nice start — I could play around with level design ideas inside a world with established gameplay and let other people play them fairly easily. Less seriously, I made Don’t Eat the Cactus, which was microscopic but ended up entertaining a surprising number of people — that’s made me rethink my notions of what a game even needs to be. I made a Doom level, and released it, for the first time. Most recently, of course, Mel and I made Under Construction, a fully-fledged little pixel game. I’ve really enjoyed this so far, and I have several more small things going at the moment.

The elephant in the room is perhaps Runed Awakening, the text adventure I started almost two years ago. It was supposed to be a small first game, but it’s spiraled a little bit out of hand. Perhaps I underestimated text adventures. A year ago, I wasn’t really sure where the game was going, and the ending was vague and unsatisfying; now there’s a clear ending, a rough flow through the game, and most importantly enough ideas to see it through from here. I’ve rearchitected the entire world, added a few major NPCs, added core mechanics, added scoring, added a little reward for replaying, added several major areas, implemented some significant puzzles, and even made an effort to illustrate it. There’s still quite a lot of work left, but I enjoy working on it and I’m excited about the prospect of releasing it.

I did more work on SLADE while messing around with Doom modding, most notably adding support for ZDoom’s myriad kinds of slopes. I tracked down and fixed a lot of bugs with editing geometry, which is a really interesting exercise and a challenging problem, and I’ve fixed dozens of little papercuts. I’ve got a few major things in progress still: support for 3D floors is maybe 70% done, support for lock types is about 70% done. Oh, yes, and I started on a static analyzer for scripts, which is a fantastic intersection of “pure programming” and “something practical that people could make use of”. That’s maybe 10% done and will take a hell of a lot of work, but boy would it be great to see.

I improved spline (the software powering Floraverse) more than I’d realized: arbitrarily-nested folders, multiple media per “page”, and the revamped archives were all done this past year. I used the same library to make Mel a simple site, too. It’s still not something I would advise other people run, but I did put a modicum of effort into documenting it and cleaning up some general weirdness, and I made my own life easier by migrating everything to runit.

veekun has languished for a while, but fear not, I’m still working on it. I wrote brand new code to dump (most of) RBY from scratch, using a YAML schema instead of a relational database, which has grown increasingly awkward to fit all of Pokémon’s special cases into. I still hope to revamp the site based on this idea in time for Sun and Moon. I also spent a little time modernizing the pokedex library itself, most notably making it work with Python 3.

I wrote some other code, too. Camel was an idea I’d had for a while, and I just sat down and wrote it over the course of a couple days, and I’m glad I did. I rewrote PARTYMODE. I did another round of heteroglot. I fixed some bugs in ZDoom. I sped Quixe (a JavaScript interpreter for some text adventures) up by 10% across the board. I wrote some weird Twitter bots. I wrote a lot of one-off stuff for various practical purposes, some of it abandoned, some of it used once and thrown away.

Is that a lot? It doesn’t even feel like a lot. I want to do just as much again by the end of the year. I guess we’ll see how that goes.

Some things people said

Not long after my original post made the rounds, I was contacted by a Vox editor who asked if I’d like to expand my post into an article. A paid article! I thought that sounded fantastic, and could even open the door to more paid writing. I spent most of a week on it.

It went up with the title “I’m 28, I just quit my tech job, and I never want another job again” and a hero image of fists slamming a keyboard. I hadn’t been asked or told about either, and only found out by seeing the live page. I’d even given my own title; no idea what happened to that, or to the byline I wrote.

I can’t imagine a more effective way to make me sound like a complete asshole. I barely remember how the article itself was phrased; I could swear I tried to adapt to a broader and less personal audience, but I guess I didn’t do a very good job, and I’m too embarrassed to go look at it now.

I found out very quickly, via some heated Twitter responses, that it looks even worse without the context of “I wrote this in my blog and Vox approached me to publish it”. It hadn’t even occurred to me that people would assume writing an article for a news website had been my idea, but of course they would. Whoops. In the ensuing year, I’ve encountered one or two friends of friends who proactively blocked me just over that article. Hell, I’d block me too.

I don’t think I want to do any more writing where I don’t have final editorial control.

I bring this up because there have been some wildly differing reactions to what I wrote, and Vox had the most drastic divide. A lot of people were snarky or angry. But just as many people contacted me, often privately, to say they feel the same way and are hoping to quit their jobs in the future and wish me luck.

It’s the money, right? You’re not supposed to talk about money, but I’m an idiot and keep doing it anyway.

I don’t want anyone to feel bad. I tried, actively, not to say anything wildly insensitive, in both the original post and the Vox article. I know a lot of people hate their jobs, and I know most people can’t afford to quit. I wish everyone could. I’d love to see a world where everyone could do or learn or explore or make all the things they wanted. Unfortunately, my wishes have no bearing on how the system works.

I suspect… people have expectations. The American Dream™ is to get a bunch of money, at which point you win and can be happy forever.

I had a cushy well-paying job, and I wasn’t happy. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Yet if anything, the money made me more unhappy, by keeping me around longer.

People like to quip that money can’t buy happiness. I think that’s missing the point. Money can remove sadness, but only if that sadness is related to not having enough money. My problem was not having enough time.

I was tremendously lucky to have stock options and to be able to pay off the house, but those things cancelled each other out. The money was finite, and I spent it all at once. Now it’s gone, and I still have bills, albeit fewer of them. I still need to earn income, or I’ll run out of money for buying food and internets.

I make considerably less now. I’m also much, much happier.

I don’t know why I feel the need to delve so deeply into this. The original post happened to hit lobste.rs a few days ago, and there were a couple “what a rich asshole” comments, which reminded me of all this. They were subtly weird to read, as though they were about an article from a slightly different parallel universe. I was reminded that many of the similar comments from a year ago had a similar feel to them.

If you think I’m an asshole because I’ve acted like an asshole, well, that’s okay. I try not to, and I’ll try to be better next time, but sometimes I fuck up.

If you think I’m an asshole because I pitched a whiny article to Vox about how one of the diamond lightbulbs in my Scrooge McDuck vault went out, damn. It bugs me a little to be judged as a caricature with little relation to what I’ve actually done.

To the people who ask me for advice

Here’s a more good comment:

The first week was relaxing, productive, glorious. Then I passed the midpoint and saw the end of my freedom looming on the horizon. Gloom descended once more.

I thought I was the only one, who felt like this. I see myself in everything [they] describe. I just don’t have the guts to try and sell my very own software as a full time thing.

I like to liberally license everything I do, and I fucking hate advertising and will never put it on anything I control

It’s almost as if that [person] is me, with a different name, and cuter website graphics.

First of all, thank you! I have further increased the cuteness of my website graphics since this comment. I hope you enjoy.

I’ve heard a lot of this over the past year. A lot. There are a shocking number of people in tech who hate being in tech, even though we all get paid in chests full of gold doubloons.

A decent number of them also asked for my input. What should they do? Should they also quit? Should they switch careers?

I would like to answer everyone, once and for all, by stressing that I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know anything. I’m not a renowned expert in job-quitting or anything.

I left because, ultimately, I had to. I was utterly, utterly exhausted. I’d been agonizing over it for almost a year prior, but had stayed because I didn’t think I could pull it off. I was terrified of failure. Even after deciding to quit, I’d wanted to stay another six months and finish out the year. I left when I did because I was deteriorating.

I hoped I could make it work, Mel told me I could make it work, and I had some four layers of backup plans. I still might’ve failed, and every backup plan might’ve failed. I didn’t. But I could’ve.

I can’t tell you whether it’s a good decision to quit your job to backpack through Europe or write that screenplay you’ve always wanted to write. I could barely tell myself whether this was a good idea. I’m not sure I’d admit to it even now. I can’t decide your future for you.

On the other hand…

On the other hand, if you’re just looking for someone to tell you what you want to hear, what you’ve already decided…

Well, let’s just say you’d know better than I would.

My first computer

2016-04-05T14:59:00-07:00

This month — March, okay, today is March 36th — Vladimir Costescu is sponsoring an exciting post about:

How about this: write about your very first computer (e.g. when you were a kid or whatever) and some notable things you did with it / enjoyed about it. If you’ve ever built your own computer from parts, feel free to talk about that too.

My first computer

I could swear I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find it, so it must’ve never escaped Twitter.

My very very first computer was this bad boy, which I had when I was… geez, I’m not even sure. 7, maybe?

The VTech PreComputer 1000, from back in the days when “1000” still sounded futuristic. It had a screen with one entire row of pixellated LCD characters, a qwerty keyboard complete with Caps Lock (?!), and a wide variety of trivia games. Ran on six C batteries.

I seem to recall that the behavior of Caps Lock was to reverse the usual capitalization, by which I mean holding Shift while Caps Lock was on would produce lowercase characters. Wild. (edit: A great many people have informed me that this is in fact how Windows always worked, which surprises me a lot, because I very distinctly remember being surprised by a real computer’s behavior! It seems that at least some combination of MS-DOS 6.22 and a particular keyboard model would ignore Shift when Caps Lock is on, so maybe that’s what I remember.)

In a kind of precursor to DLC, there were also several extra cartridges you could buy. They were about the size of a thick wallet and came with different sets of… more trivia games.

Then there was the part that changed my life forever: a built-in BASIC interpreter.

It was a huge, huge pain in the ass. I could only see or edit one line at a time, of course. There was also no writable internal storage — this machine was released in 1988, when the idea of a video game that could save your progress was still novel! — so any program I wrote was lost as soon as I turned the thing off.

It did come with a book full of documentation and sample programs. The documentation was helpful enough to get me to make some things, but perhaps not particularly well aimed at the target audience of 9-year-olds, as I remember there being several constructs I didn’t understand in the slightest. The sample programs weren’t described particularly well, had no comments at all, and at the longest ran beyond 30 lines. 30 lines doesn’t sound like a lot to me now, but it was the biggest program I’d ever seen at the time, and typing it all in on a one-line display was daunting. (There were nine “canonical” sample programs baked into the ROM, but the programming tutorial had several lengthy examples that had to be typed in.)

I really wish I could find a copy of the book online, but it predates the web, alas! This was all so long ago that I can’t really remember any of the sample programs. I want to say there was the usual “guess a number” game, a temperature converter, and maybe hangman? Haven’t the foggiest idea what kind of little programs I wrote from scratch, unfortunately.

I’m tempted to go find and buy one of these, partly for the nostalgia and partly to see how much I can convince a baby BASIC to do. Mine might even still be in my parents’ attic, if they haven’t thrown it out by now.

While I resist the urge to scour ebay, let’s move on a year or two.

Addended interlude: the manual

Aha, a commenter has found a post with a scan of the BASIC part of the manual (at the bottom)! There are a lot of gems in here I’d forgotten about, like how switching to BASIC mode would automatically turn Caps Lock on (something I remember hating, even as a kid). I also fondly remember the goofy proportional font they used, even for code, that used a ∅-like glyph for zero. I even spotted a missing semicolon in some example code that I could swear I’d noticed before.

I’m surprised to learn that there is some semblance of debugging available, though I doubt I understood it at the time — you could add a STOP statement to a program and it will halt there, returning you to the default REPL, where you could presumably print out variables or change lines of the running program.

Something that particularly fascinates me now is the error reporting. A syntax error would be reported as ?SN ERROR, and you would have to look at the list of error codes in the manual to find out that SN meant SYNTAX ERROR. Why not just say SYNTAX ERROR, then? This had me thinking that they adapted an existing BASIC interpreter rather than writing their own, and indeed, the errors have the same names as MSX-BASIC’s errors. Not sure where the two-letter codes came from, though.

I’ve copied all the example programs into a gist for easier perusal. Looking at them with a more seasoned programmer’s eye, a few things stand out to me.

There were clearly several different authors here! Programs 6 and 9 are the only ones to start numbering from 100, to have 999 END as their last line, to ask if the player wants to play again, and to only accept YES as an affirmative answer. 3 and 4 are the only two to use the SOUND statement, and both omit the space between the word SOUND and its first argument. 1 and 8 are the only programs to finish with an END that doesn’t use 999 as its line number.
The PRINT statement accepted multiple arguments, separated by either semicolons or commas, though the manual doesn’t explain the difference (if any). Program 1 stands out as the only program to manually insert a space at the end of a literal string followed by a variable. The tutorial part of the manual implies that PRINT inserted spaces between its arguments automatically, which makes me wonder why this one program felt the need to add its own. Program 8, seemingly by the same author, never prints two things on the same line.
Program 4 appears to simulate a one-second delay with a 630-iteration empty loop. There is, of course, nothing explaining why this is the case. 630 might have been my very first magic number.
Program 8 is an implementation of selection sort! This is the only use of DIM — the statement for declaring an array — in the example programs. I remember being very confused as to what DIM even did, let alone realizing the point of the program. None of them have any kind of explanation or comments, except for a couple comments dividing up the rather long program 9.
The only built-in functions used in any of these programs are INT() in program 9 and RND() in program 5. None of the example programs demonstrate use of FOR ... STEP, ABS(), SGN(), SQR(), LOG(), EXP(), SIN(), COS(), TAN(), ATN(), LEN(), STR$(), VAL(), LEFT$(), RIGHT$(), MID$(), ASC(), CHR$(), GOSUB ... RETURN, AND, NOT, READ, DATA, or RESTORE.
Program 9 implements the perfect single-pile Nim strategy. If the player doesn’t correctly decide whether to go first or second, or doesn’t play perfectly, the computer will always win.

My first actual computer

We got it in the mid-90s — a 486 DX running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It screamed along at ~~25 MHz~~ 33 MHz, and if that wasn’t enough for you, it had a turbo button that would boost it all the way to 100 MHz! I had to turn turbo off when I won at sol.exe, or else the card waterfall animation would play nearly instantly, but otherwise turning turbo off resulted in a hard lock and a loud angry endless beep. Thanks to an upgrade, it also had 40MB of RAM. Nice.

It came with a huge CRT monitor with an incredible high-def resolution of 1280x1024. (The full-size photo of the PreComputer above is 1024×801.) It had a keyboard lock, too, which I eventually learned how to pick using a paperclip. For reasons.

I distinctly remember its price tag of ~~$1999~~ $1995. I didn’t know what many things cost yet, nor did I have any sense of how much money people with jobs actually made, so that might as well have been “infinity dollars”. Twenty years later, you can buy a phone that’s orders of magnitude better than that computer for a third of the price.

Thanks to the power of the Internet, I actually managed to track down one of the original ads! This is from page 331 of the May 30, 1995 issue of PC Mag, courtesy of Google Books, which incredibly has a searchable index of quite a few old PC Mag issues. That pins down the date we bought this to the summer of 1995, when I was 8 years old. Damn, I remember those little speakers and that joystick too.

I graduated naturally from toy-computer-BASIC to a real programming language: QBasic. I first encountered it on school computers, and mostly enjoyed it for the fascinating sample programs, nibbles.bas (Snake) and gorillas.bas (a game where two large gorillas standing on skyscrapers try to throw exploding bananas at each other). I remember scrolling through their source code numerous times, having absolutely no idea how any of it worked. I didn’t really understand the feeling at the time, but I’m sure I was amazed and confused at how the same tools I’d used to make guess-a-number could also make these graphical, uh, masterpieces.

Lurking in there is a critical stop along the way to several flavors of enlightenment: realizing and internalizing that the amazing creative things you see and admire were just made by regular people, using regular tools. You can do it too.

I only remember one notable thing I made in QBasic in those days. I must’ve still been in middle school, which would mean I was 9 or 10? I got regular homework that involved taking a set of vocabulary words and making “word pyramids” out of them, like this:

1c    d
2ca   do
3cat  dog

…except that the words were more like ten letters long. I guess the point was to learn their spelling, but as someone who was just fine at spelling thank you very much, I thought this was agonizingly boring and a waste of time. So I decided to write a program to do it. I spent well over a week on it, but I did it, and it worked! I managed to get pyramids (effectively squares, really) of different sizes arranged on a page automatically and to print out (directly to the printer) one line at a time. I felt like a fucking wizard for what may have been the first time.

Alas, the teacher wouldn’t accept a printout for some reason.

The 486 was the family computer for a while, what with its being our only one, but after a few years my parents bought a better one (a Pentium!) and I inherited the 486. The glorious beast. I must’ve been 11 or 12.

Somewhere along the way it also got an upgrade to Windows 95, which I hated initially. It was just a blank screen! Where was Program Manager?! Where was Cardfile?

This was just before the turn of the millenium, right when digital music was getting popular. By “digital music”, of course, I mean “Napster”, as the music industry was still a few years away from hearing that the Internet exists. You could download a massive 4 MB MP3 of your favorite song in only ten minutes!

You could, anyway. I could not. My 486 couldn’t decode MP3s in real time, even with the turbo button. In other words, it took more than one second to understand one second of music. I think I had a single WAV, but 40MB was a huge chunk of my 851MB hard drive (later improved to 1.2GB thanks to DoubleSpace, and partly mitigated by a 100MB Zip drive), so I mostly listened to MIDIs.

The timeline is a bit fuzzy, but at some point I graduated from QBasic to a few different things. I think the earliest was some proprietary shareware scripting language I’d read about in PC Magazine or whatever; it was clumsy, but it could be triggered by hotkeys and manipulate existing programs, which let me do more interesting tinkering than the confines of a command prompt would allow. I want to say it was “Wilson WindowWare” or something similarly alliterative; that finds me a extant company with a product called “WinBatch“. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but it fits the description, so maybe that was it.

I ended up with a copy of Visual Basic 6 at some point (free copy on a CD with a magazine, maybe?) and built a few little toy programs with it, like a color picker and a really bad “encryption” program. I also got into JavaScript (!) for a little while, back before anyone was even saying “DHTML”, back when XSS was unheard of and I was free to embed rainbow-text JS into a forum post. That largely fell by the wayside when I discovered server-side Perl, which was magical. veekun was probably the first big thing I tried to build (and stuck with for more than a month or two).

My first built computer

I was still using a 486 in 2000 or 2001, at which point it was comically obsolete. Again, the timeline is fuzzy here, because I could swear that I got a new machine by 2001, but I distinctly remember building it in a place I thought I only lived in 2003. I don’t think I had an extra machine in the middle there, either.

I couldn’t tell you much about the process of building it, but I imagine it went much the same as my experience with building computers now: get a bunch of parts, wiggle them together because everything only fits one way, spend all day trying to figure out why it doesn’t boot only to find that a stick of RAM is sticking out one millimeter too far.

It was a Pentium something in a tower case, which was quite a change. I named it kabigon, the Japanese name for Snorlax, beginning a theme that I’ve continued ever since.

I also put Gentoo on it for reasons I cannot fathom. This was back in the day when the “real” way to install Gentoo was from stage1, which means you don’t get an installer; you just get a massive, massive list of instructions on how to manually bootstrap everything from scratch. It took days to get a working system, including a day or two to compile X and KDE, but I sure did learn a lot about Linux and how a desktop environment is put together.

I’m not sure XP was actually out at this point, so consumer Windows still had no built-in way to share an Internet connection, and ISPs weren’t yet giving out routers. The very concept of a router was still pretty alien. Up until this point, we’d been sharing the connection via some terrible shareware garbage called WinGate (which is somehow still around) that mostly worked, except when it didn’t. I, despite having no clue what the hell I was doing, offered to instead have my computer act as the router, because Linux is better at being a router than Windows ME. Which is true! The plan almost fell apart when my parents got tired of waiting for days for me to finish creating a computer, but in the end I did manage to get kabigon acting as the router, by blindly pasting a bunch of iptables rules my boyfriend gave to me. Hm, actually, I think my interest in Linux can all be traced back to (and squarely blamed on) him.

In 2003 I was also in a high school programming class. The class really had two classes taught at the same time: computer science 1, where the teacher taught maybe 16 or 20 kids to do simple stuff in QBasic; and computer science 2, where four of us who vaguely knew what we were doing basically had free reign. I’d taken the AP Computer Science AB class and exam a year or two prior (and was nearly constantly mystified by why C++ was such a pain in the ass compared to everything else I knew), so by now I was finally dipping my toes into building slightly more complex stuff.

One such thing I remember well is an implementation of Hex, the board game on a hexagonal grid where two players try to be the first to connect their two opposite sides of the board. I remember it so well, in fact, that I have managed to exactly reproduce the source code and placed it in this gist just for you. Also I made this screenshot.

Or maybe I just still have most of the code I wrote in that class because I’m a packrat. I’m glad, too, because it’s the oldest window I have into what the heck I was doing thirteen years ago. I see I was also showing off. At one point the computer science 1 class had been told to write a change-giving program, where you enter a cost and an amount paid, and the program spits out the assortment of coins and bills you should get back. It’s not too difficult a problem; read a line of input, do a little math, print out a few numbers. I, however, decided that not only would I also write this program, but I would be a total dick about it.

Don’t worry, I’ve got the source code for that, too! And it is unreadable slop.

I also remember an assignment about drawing a picture using QBasic’s drawing primitives. So I dug up a picture an artist friend had drawn me, reduced it to 16 colors, and wrote a Perl script to generate a QBasic program that would render it one pixel at a time. Alas, I don’t have the source code for that.

But my greatest achievement was probably writing a Chip’s Challenge clone, complete with a bunch of tiles that were supposed to be in the eternally-delayed Chip’s Challenge 2 (incidentally, now released at last). I had no understanding of a game clock or an event queue or any of that nonsense, so it’s entirely turn-based; the game waits for you to move, and then the entire world updates. I never got around to making any monsters, so it would’ve been purely puzzle-based, except I never got around to making any levels, either. I don’t think you could even die; the game would just not let you walk onto hazards. Also it was just DOS characters, no graphics. I was working on a level editor, but never finished it. Tragic.

That’s all of interest I can remember. A couple years later, I was in college, playing a lot of World of Warcraft and making bad stubs of websites that never saw the light of day.

Appendix: all my computers ever

If you’re curious! Primary, in order:

fushigidane (Bulbasaur, named retroactively for being the first): the 486, running Windows 3.11 and later Windows 95 — current location unknown, possibly parents’ attic?
kabigon (Snorlax, named for being gigantic): the Pentium I built, running Gentoo — left behind at a friend’s house many years ago and not seen since
rapurasu (Lapras, named for portability): a lumbering brick of a Dell laptop I had in college, running XP and then eventually Kubuntu — still in my possession
myuutsuu (Mewtwo, named for its nebulous origins): a Frankenstein(‘s monster) assembled from my roommate’s spare parts after I left home, running XP — eventually returned to its component parts
tekkanin (Ninjask, named for its impressive speed): the first machine I actually bought for myself, running Ubuntu — I believe was incorporated into a former roommate’s media center
perushian (Persian, named because I splurged on it): my current machine, running Arch — typing on it right now

Secondary:

nyarumaa (Glameow, named for Apple aesthetic): a glossy white MacBook I bought for work in 2007, running Ubuntu — current location unknown
rukushio (Luxio, named for being medium-sized, blue, and electric): a “big” netbook I bought on a whim, originally running Ubuntu, then Arch, then accidentally bricked when I tried to update it after a long time — current location unknown
jarooda (Serperior, named “because it is a smug macbook for smug people”): the MacBook Pro that Yelp loaned me while I worked there, running OS X and Arch — returned to Yelp
zeruneasu (Xerneas, named for being newest??): a System76 laptop I bought after getting sick of fighting to get Apple hardware to work with Linux, running Ubuntu — in my bedroom, though rarely used nowadays
itomaru (Spinarak, named because… web…): a Soekris 6501 running pfsense and acting as our router — still doing that

I made cheesecake

2016-02-28T13:39:00-08:00

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.

(Curiously, I hate cheese, and don’t much care for cream cheese, but I love cheesecake. I suspect cream cheese might be more a form of cream than a form of cheese; it even looks like an ice cream sandwich with the cookies picked off.)

Once again I turned to Alton Brown, the man I would trust with my life. There’s an entire Good Eats episode on cheesecake, culminating in this recipe. Just like last time, the recipe as written skips a lot of the more interesting details that were in the actual episode.

Also like last time, Alton assumes I have a stand mixer. Well, I don’t have a stand mixer. Why do you think everyone has a stand mixer? I’m starting to think stand mixers are super great and I should buy a stand mixer.

So I bought a stand mixer. By sheer coincidence, the cost of the stand mixer plus shipping was exactly the amount pledged for these two cooking excursions. All told, it’s kinda like someone gave me a free stand mixer, on the condition that I make two things with it and then eat them.

My lovely cat Anise helped me unpack it.

First, though, I need to make the crust. And here I must make a confession.

I committed the ultimate sin.

I modified Alton Brown’s recipe.

I do love cheesecake, it’s true. But the cheesecake I love the most is the Godiva™ cheesecake from Cheesecake Factory©®. It’s so good. It’s so good. I have to carefully moderate how much actual food I eat when I go to Cheesecake Factory, lest I be too full to eat a comically large slice of super chocolate cheesecake.

Godiva’s website does have a recipe for chocolate cheesecake, but… they’re not Alton Brown. Also, they seem to think a single regular-sized cheesecake yields 16 servings, so clearly they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Their recipe calls for four bars of dark chocolate, so I went and bought four bars. That’s like sixteen bucks’ worth of chocolate. No wonder Cheesecake Factory is so damn expensive.

But what do I do with the bars? Ingredients don’t just add flavor; they have physical properties which they add to the texture of the food. If I add a big pile of chocolate, do I need to take something else out? Do they contain enough milk or sugar that I should cut down on the sugar or cream I add directly?

I don’t have the foggiest idea. I’m sure there’s a Good Eats episode about this somewhere, but I’m not about to rewatch the entire series to figure this out. I’ll just, you know, wing it.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I also bought chocolate graham crackers to make the crust. Seemed appropriate.

The crust is pretty easy. You need 33 graham cracker squares, which is a really weird number. It’s kind of a weird way to count graham crackers, too, since they come in 1:2 rectangles consisting of four similarly-proportioned pieces.

Honey Maid boxes contain three packages, each of which has nine rectangles, or eighteen squares. Thus I needed two packages, minus leftover three squares that I ate as I went.

I assumed I’d be reducing them to crumbs in a food processor, but Alton Brown insists it’s better to crush them by hand and have variously-sized chunks. It’s definitely a lot more fun.

I did notice that some of the chocolate grahams had a conspicuous sprinkling of sugar on top, which I’ve never noticed on regular honey grahams. Again, is this going to affect the recipe? These are not things I know.

I need to mix some melted butter in here, but I also need to oil my pan with a bit of the melted butter, so I’ll do that first. Or rather, I’ll do that second, after preheating the oven.

Let us take a moment to appreciate the terrible UI of my oven’s temperature knob. There are notches, and there are numbers, but the notches go between the numbers. Is 300° the notch before the label, the notch after, or the midpoint? I assume the midpoint, and so far nothing has gone terribly wrong, but I wonder every time.

Alton has a creative method for cutting parchment paper to fit a round pan: fold it radially into sixteenths, eyeball the radius of the pan, and cut the folded shard of paper. Unfold, and you have a hexadecahedron pretty close to the size of the pan.

Cutting the paper to go around the circumference was surprisingly difficult. I didn’t cut anything resembling a straight line. My paper was slightly too short and needed an extra patch. And the sides of my pan are slightly angled, so I had to add short tears all around my strip to get it to stay against the sides. I don’t know if I’m terrible at kindergarten or actually awesome at it.

Once arts and crafts time was done, I mixed the cookie crumble with some butter and sugar, dumped most of it into the pan, tamped it down with a coffee mug, and tossed it in the oven.

Now, for the filling. I melted the chocolate in the microwave first, so I could somehow add it later.

First I need some sour cream.

Hmm.

Okay, so. I have big measuring cups for measuring liquids. I have little measuring spoons for measuring powders and small amounts of liquid. Sour cream is… some kind of gelatinous goop. How am I supposed to measure this?

Alton Brown has a neat sour cream injector gizmo, but alas, I am not a renowned television chef. I had to fudge this a bit by spooning sour cream into a measuring spoon. At least it came out easily.

At last, I get to use the mixer!

The recipe advises running the mixer on just the sour cream for a few seconds — the idea is that the sour cream will coat the paddle and keep the cream cheese from sticking to it. Sorry, Alton! The cream cheese totally stuck to it.

Meanwhile, I need to mix some heavy cream with vanilla extract and five eggs (sans some of the whites).

It is at this very moment that I discover we only have three eggs. I was fooled by the massive dozen-and-a-half egg carton in the fridge, and didn’t think to actually look inside it. Argh.

If I’ve learned anything from Cutthroat Kitchen, it’s that eggs are pretty important and nothing is really equivalent. I had to run to the store and get more.

Okay, back to whatever I was doing. Mix that stuff, throw it in the mixer.

Anise, meanwhile, was supervising from atop the fridge behind me. He was particularly fascinated by the loud red thing.

Hm.

So. I have some completed cheesecake batter (which is delicious, by the way). I also have some melted chocolate.

I guess there’s only one obvious course of action here.

Something very strange has added here. The volume of the batter seems to have increased dramatically, by far more than the volume of the melted chocolate.

It’s also distinctly lumpy, but I don’t think this is related to the chocolate; Marl says they’re lumps of cream cheese, caused by adding the cream cheese while it was still fridge-cold.

Despite these curiosities, the batter is now absolutely delicious. Extremely chocolatey, but still with some tangy cheesecake undertones. It’s not exactly the Cheesecake Factory, but it’s pretty damn good.

The batter I have is now way too much to actually fit in the pan. It’s also kind of a mousse, rather than the thick liquid it’s supposed to be. What am I even making? Is this still cheesecake?

I guess I’ll bake it and see what happens.

A good chunk of the Good Eats episode is about how you ought to use a hot water bath to modulate the temperature or something. But I don’t have a Biggoron cake pan to put the water in. And our oven is kind of small. And I’m getting kind of tired at this point.

(I have a really bad habit of leaning over slightly when I’m standing at a counter. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember, and I’m not particularly tall, so it’s not that I can’t reach. I don’t know why I do it, and I usually don’t even notice, until I’ve been hunched over for an hour and suddenly my back is killing me.)

So, screw it. You will just bake like a normal cake and you will like it.

I left it in the fridge overnight, and…

I gave it a quick bath in some hot water, and it came out of the pan really easily, thank goodness.

I had some of the crust crumbs left over, intending to add them to the sides to complete the crust. They didn’t really stick at all, though, and I gave up trying to force them.

I’d put the cheesecake on a regular plate, for lack of a real cake platter. Cutting a cheesecake that has a big hole underneath it doesn’t go very neatly. Oops.

All told I made a bit of a mess of it. And yet…

This is a fabulous cheesecake.

Oh, wait, one more thing. The Godiva recipe that I awkwardly spliced in asks for four bars of chocolate, but only three and a half of them are actually added to the batter; the other half a bar is reserved for garnishing the final cheesecake. So here’s some garnish.

I still have half a cheesecake’s worth of batter and a bunch of crust crumbs, too! I guess I could make… mini chocolate cheesecakes in a muffin tray?

I made pretzels

2016-01-31T12:04:00-08:00

@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.

I should mention that I’m not a complete stranger to cooking. I’ve converted a few things from cold to hot. I wouldn’t claim to be particularly good at it, but I can at least fumble my way through a kitchen. Plus I’ve watched a bunch of Food Network while out of town and trapped in a hotel room by myself.

I also have a secret weapon in the form of Mel’s husband, Marl, who actually knows how to cook. Conveniently, that means we also have a moderately well-stocked kitchen.

Picking a thing

The obvious place to look for inspiration was Alton Brown, a food nerd I would trust with my life, if for some reason I were in a life-or-death situation that could only be escaped by making crepes with a coathanger.

I pretty easily found this list of the most popular recipes from Good Eats, and glanced through for some baked goods. That still left a lot of options: french toast, sugar cookies, chewy chocolate chip cookies, soft pretzels, granola, tres leche cake, cinnamon rolls, pumpkin bread, cocoa brownies, …

I’ve made his cookies before. Actually, I think cookies and cake are the only things I’ve baked before, and they’re both pretty easy. You put stuff in a bowl, stir it, and put it in the oven. Given that someone’s paying me to do this, that seems a little too easy. So I filtered those options down to those listed as “intermediate” difficulty: soft pretzels, tres leche cake, and cinnamon rolls.

Soft pretzels or cinnamon rolls? I love you both so much. How can I possibly choose?

Okay well the cinnamon rolls involve waiting overnight, and I don’t have that kind of time, so let’s do the pretzels. If I could have only one baked-goods-related superpower, I would be pretty okay with the ability to summon soft pretzels whenever I please.

Making dough

Per the recipe:

Combine the water, sugar and kosher salt in the bowl of a stand mixer and sprinkle the yeast on top. Allow to sit for 5 minutes or until the mixture begins to foam. Add the flour and butter and, using the dough hook attachment, mix on low speed until well combined.

The butter needs melting first. I threw a measuring cup with the 1½ cups of water and a smaller measuring cup with half a stick of butter in the microwave, and nuked them for a minute on high, a time I completely pulled out of my ass.

Marl informed me that putting yeast on top of warm water and waiting for it to foam is called “proofing“, and that I could skip that step, because we have magical instant yeast that doesn’t need to be proofed. Nice. I’m kind of sad that I had to ruin this amazing vacuum-sealed brick of yeast, though.

I measured out 22 oz of flour with our teeny scale, like a boss. Weighing flour is great and I love it. Atop that went the kosher salt, sugar, water, and butter.

Here are some exciting photos of this process. In the background you can see a box of Hamburger Helper™, plotting its revenge for being explicitly disqualified from this quest.

At this point, it already smelled like pretzels!

So, ah. Now I ran into a slight problem. Alton Brown assumes I have a stand mixer. I do not have a stand mixer. I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who has a stand mixer. Those things are surprisingly expensive for what boils down to a whisk attached to a little motor.

What I do have is a wooden spoon. And legs. So I became the stand mixer.

Eventually I hit the point where the spoon could stand in the dough under its own power, so I had to put my phone down for a bit and finish mixing with my bare hands.

The hard part

Cool! Let’s see what’s up next.

Change to medium speed and knead until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the side of the bowl, approximately 4 to 5 minutes.

Ah, fuck. Guess I have to knead by hand as well. Marl tells me manual kneading works as follows:

Get a big lump of dough.
Flatten it out.
Fold it in half.
Repeat. Forever.

The object of this exercise is, I believe, something like a taffy pull: you break some of the bonds in the dough to make it softer and stretchier.

This was so hard. Marl estimated it would take ten to fifteen minutes; I ended up spending twenty. At five minutes I was feeling a bit warm; at fifteen minutes I was starting to sweat; at twenty minutes I just had to stop, and found out my wrists were incredibly sore.

I’m still not even sure if I did it for long enough; it’s hard to gauge how smooth the dough is when the texture is changing so gradually over that stretch of time. Around twelve minutes, Marl pointed out that it was still breaking when bent, so I guess that’s a thing to watch out for. Or, you know, just go until you physically can’t go any more.

Also, Anise came to help.

With that done:

Remove the dough from the bowl, clean the bowl and then oil it well with vegetable oil. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and sit in a warm place for approximately 50 to 55 minutes or until the dough has doubled in size.

Phew, a breather.

A curious quirk of Food Network’s Good Eats-based recipes is that they tend to be completely stripped of Alton’s cute kitchen tricks. You can watch the actual clip on the recipe page, if you’re willing to stomach a twenty-second ad for fish sticks or whatever. Alton covers the bowl with a damp towel, but the recipe says to use plastic wrap.

I mention this only because I liked the towel idea better, but I forgot the “damp” part, and just left my dough covered with a dry towel. Apparently you’re not supposed to do that, because it dries the dough out. Oops. It wasn’t too bad — just the top surface was a little dry rather than moist and sticky. I mixed it back together and it seemed to be fine.

After the break

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line 2 half-sheet pans with parchment paper and lightly brush with the vegetable oil. Set aside.

Sure thing. We have two sheet pans that have, er, been through a lot. But hey, that’s what the parchment paper is for, right?

Bring the 10 cups of water and the baking soda to a rolling boil in an 8-quart saucepan or roasting pan.

This is for giving the pretzels a basic bath, to… do some science… to their outer surface. The baking soda isn’t even a real ingredient, so it doesn’t matter exactly how much you have, but I measured it obsessively anyway. And the water too.

Look, okay, when Alton Brown tells you to use ten cups of water, you use ten cups of water. (Admittedly, I’m the kind of person who sees “6 to 8 minutes” and always goes for exactly 7 minutes.)

Also, I will need a spatula later, for recovering the pretzels from their bath. I couldn’t find a big pretzel-sized spatula, but I did find this sweet griddle spatula, so we’ll go with that.

It works pretty well as a dough… cutter… thing, too.

Alright, so, now I have to actually make some pretzels.

In the meantime, turn the dough out onto a slightly oiled work surface and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll out each piece of dough into a 24-inch rope. Make a U-shape with the rope, holding the ends of the rope, cross them over each other and press onto the bottom of the U in order to form the shape of a pretzel. Place onto the parchment-lined half sheet pan.

This sounds easy, and Alton Brown makes it look easy, but it took me a few pretzels to figure out how to do the rolling. It’s actually deceptively hard! You have to keep pressure applied at the right angle to squash the dough out the whole time without making it slide across the countertop, and you have to move your hands gradually outwards to get that excess dough to form a rope. This is much harder if your wrists are still sore from pounding dough by hand an hour earlier, too.

The first rope drove me up the wall for a while because it just would not get any longer than 18 or so inches. Several of the others ended up with big lumps in the middle or at one end that I had to roll out. I can’t believe none of my Silly Putty skills transferred over.

Eventually I succeeded in producing eight pretzel shapes.

Final stretch

Place the pretzels into the boiling water, 1 by 1, for 30 seconds. Remove them from the water using a large flat spatula.

This was, shockingly, the most difficult part — as measured by the number of ways I screwed it up.

The first problem I had, which is only obvious in retrospect by comparing the photos, is that I set the water boiling before I started rolling the dough. That would’ve been fine, but rolling the dough took ages, and a lot of the water boiled away. Oops.

That still wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the water level was so low that I had trouble getting the pretzels submerged on the spatula, and they were sticky enough that they wouldn’t come off of it on their own! As a result, the first couple pretzels lingered in the bath for much longer than thirty seconds while I strugged to get them to let go. After those, it finally occurred to me to add more water. But I also added more baking soda to match, not realizing just how much of the original water had boiled away, which is probably why several pretzels ended up with a lot of tiny baking soda pebbles stuck to them.

Oh, well. I don’t think any of this had any impact on the pretzels.

So, so close…

Return to the half sheet pan, brush the top of each pretzel with the beaten egg yolk and water mixture and sprinkle with the pretzel salt.

We don’t have pretzel salt, and our grocery store doesn’t have pretzel salt, and I don’t know where the hell you find pretzel salt. I just used some more kosher salt instead. You can’t see it very well in the photo, but whatever, salt is salt.

Now they’re ready for the oven!

Results

They came out beautifully. The salt was much more visible after they baked, too.

One teensy error: I put them a little too close together in the oven, and the pretzels in the lower tray were (of course) a little pale on top. I left them in for an extra minute or two, and they ended up a touch dark on the bottom.

But they are still absolutely fucking delicious.

This is a pretty cool thing to have done. In all it took three and a half hours from start to finish, almost twice the time the recipe claims. Worth the effort, I think, but I miiight keep an eye out for a stand mixer before trying this again.

I got paid to make and eat my own pretzels, though, and that’s pretty cool! Please pay me to make myself a cheesecake next.

Eevee gained 2437 experience points

2016-01-22T15:27:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 29! Like a week and a half ago.

Wow, what a year.

I finally, seriously, started learning to draw. I went from this on Jan 1 to this on Dec 31. A lot of people have told me this is amazing progress, and I believe them, but it’s sure weird to hear. I spent 28 years not thinking I was terribly good at anything artistic, and while I know a lot of amazing artists, pretty much all of them started before high school. Our mythos is full of that kind of thing too — here’s Mozart, isn’t he amazing, he was playing the piano far better than you can ever dream to when he was six years old. There aren’t too many inspiring tales of people who abruptly picked up a new and completely different skill around age 30. Maybe I can be one?
I left my job at Yelp seven months ago, intending not to work in the tech industry again. So far, so good! I thought by the end of the year I’d have come up with something I could actually sell, but I haven’t yet. I’m still afloat, though, and meanwhile trying to get a book and/or game actually finished.
I paid off our house? That’s pretty cool? Damn?
I started a Patreon — at first experimentally, but now as a serious income source. It’s definitely forced me to write a lot more, since, that’s the whole idea. I’ve gone from a mere 6 posts in 2014 to 25 last year, not even counting the dev log. Some of them were even kind of popular! Sometimes not for good reasons.

I put a good bit of effort into sprucing up this site, too, and it’s gradually turning into an actual little personal site. Two years ago it was just a veekun subdomain and had nothing but a blog. How far we’ve come!
I dipped a toe a little more seriously into game development. Only a little. I tried out Godot and had fun making a stub of a tiny platformer. My incredible text adventure, Runed Awakening, has gotten some serious revamping and is coming along steadily. I made a bunch of Mario levels, partly to experiment with design concepts and how to make spaces that feel like something, and partly to actually finish and release some small things. I wrote about design some in the second part of my Doom mapping series. I worked on some Doom mapping of my own, but kept getting distracted by fixing a bunch of SLADE papercuts.
I released camel, a better serialization library for Python. I have absolutely no idea how many people are using it. But it doesn’t really matter — the real goal there was just to have something to show for my efforts for once, since I put a disproportionate amount of time into patches and experiments. Still feels good to think about now.
Spline has made steady progress; it’s not ready for (other people’s) primetime yet, but it’s getting less hardcoded and more understandable all the time. I don’t have any strong goals for it beyond “do the stuff Mel needs”, but it’s nice to see it drifting in the general direction of becoming a solid project. The Floraverse site is definitely much nicer than it was a year ago, and the visual novel engine it uses was basically written all this past year.
I wrote an article for Vox, which was cool, except that without the context it kind of made me sound like a huge asshole, which was less cool.
veekun got some attention, but not too much to actually show for it. I’m still tinkering with the next generation of the site from time to time, and I’m moving in the direction of having scripts that parse everything from each game individually into a known canonical format. I wrote most of such a script for OR/AS, and added the resulting data to current veekun, but I never finished the output format bit and it’s languished a bit since then.

Let’s see what I said I wanted to do last year…

Write more. Success!
Do a bit more with this domain. Success! Could probably do more, but hey.
Finish a game. Not so much. Half done?
Write a book. I started on a couple, but not really anywhere near publishable yet.
Make money. Ahem, well. I do have Patreon, but half of it is coming from three very generous individuals. I’m eternally grateful to them, of course, but that’s a lot of reliance on not so many people. Actually finishing either of the two things above will hopefully help.

Well! Those last three are pretty good goals for this year as well. I should be able to actually finish and publish a book and a game within a year, surely. If I get started, like, now.

I quit the tech industry

2015-06-09T21:45:00-07:00

This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp.

I don’t intend to look for another tech job.

Or another job at all.

Ever.

I’m just thoroughly exhausted. I have so much I want to do, yet I’m selling half of my waking hours every weekday to someone else, for the sake of cleaning up their legacy messes. By the end of the day I’m already worn out, and now I have to squeeze in whatever I wanted to do alongside relaxing and doing chores and maintaining this fleshsack. Weekends are nice, but become a mad dash to get fifty things done, meaning none of them get done.

Working on anything complicated is nearly impossible, because I can’t get a contiguous block of time that’s bigger than half a day or so. A lot of that time is ramp-up: filling my head with what the problem is and what I was planning to do to solve it. Finally I know where I stand and what to do next, and— oops, time to go back to work again, where I have to deal with different problems just long enough to forget it all again.

Here, let me illustrate. This is how time feels:

And this is how time feels with a full-time job:

Meanwhile, I’m trying to plan a picnic. Fifty picnics.

This has been weighing on me for a while, at least half a year; I spent much of April and May increasingly grumpy and withdrawn and on edge. Weekends and evenings have become even less useful, instead being clogged by a sense of paralyzing dread that I’m wasting fleeting time if I’m not doing ten amazing things at once. I’ve foregone trivial maintenance like cleaning junk off my desk because I don’t feel like I have 20 minutes to spare. I stay up hours later than I mean to, not even doing anything, just trying to put off sleeping — because the next thing I experience will be waking up and going back to work.

(I hate dread. What a completely useless emotion. Let’s just stop doing anything, and feel bad about something that hasn’t happened yet, and also feel bad about not doing anything because we’re too busy feeling bad. This will definitely improve anything in any way.)

The breaking point actually came during a two-week vacation at the end of May. The first week was relaxing, productive, glorious. Then I passed the midpoint and saw the end of my freedom looming on the horizon. Gloom descended once more. The difference was striking, and I knew I had to stop.

It’s nothing to do with Yelp specifically. I just don’t care about Yelp’s problems, any more than I care about Uber’s problems or Yo’s problems or anyone else’s problems. They’re interesting for a while, but they’re also the same self-inflicted wounds everyone seems to deal with — why is this slow? why is this broken? how can we keep this old code limping along indefinitely without having to rewrite it? how does this thing a former employee wrote even work? They’re cute puzzles, and I can get into solving them for a while, but I don’t care about them. Because they aren’t my problems; they were just dumped in my lap, along with a canvas sack with a dollar sign on it. 💰

Even the most interesting technical things Yelp is doing probably involve reinventing something hundreds of other companies have already reinvented, because the existing things don’t work with their infrastructure or they’re written in the wrong language or they’re just kinda bad and maybe doing it from scratch will be better. And again, I stress, this is nothing about Yelp specifically; this is the nature of our stupid, backwards, fledgling industry. This is the beast we have created. We make fun of Google and Apple for just going back and forth copying each other, as though the entire proprietary world weren’t the same fucking story. Do you have any internal libraries or systems or platforms at your company? Do you think no one else has ever had the same idea and built the same thing?

I’ve only worked for two tech companies, in radically different fields. The only things they have in common are that their main products are websites with tertiary features that let you buy things. Yet both of them ended up scrambling to write their own payment platforms from scratch. What the fuck is going on?

Maybe I’m an asshole for even complaining about this. It’s not like I’m uniquely hard off here. Quite the opposite, I’ve been getting away with a really nice setup — I’ve worked remotely my whole career, from states with no income tax too.

But I can’t do this any more. It’s running me into the ground.

From here

People keep asking where I’m going next.

I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to sit at this desk and I’m going to work on whatever the hell I feel like working on.

I don’t know how to turn this into dollars yet. Hopefully I’ll figure that out.

I had stock options, and I cashed them all in last week. I net enough to pay off the mortgage, so I’m doing that, which will leave the entire household debt-free and cut our expenses drastically. There’s not a whole lot left after that (lol taxes 💸), but I can keep us afloat for a while. Mel’s Floraverse franchise is gradually gaining steam, which will help a lot too.

And I hopped on Patreon. Yelp sure thought my work was worth some cash, so hopefully other people think that too. I’ve had people ask before if they can chip in a few bucks to help keep veekun running or whatever, so that’s not without precedent.

Eventually it would be nice to make a thing that actually makes money on its own. I have two factors working against me: I like to liberally license everything I do, and I fucking hate advertising and will never put it on anything I control. So that knocks out pretty much every business plan the greatest minds of our generation (if Google’s job ads are to be believed) have come up with. I guess we’ll see if I can do any better.

Yep. Three days left until the rest of my life.

Wish me luck!

Eevee gained 2269 experience points

2015-01-29T18:29:00-08:00

Eevee grew to level 28!

I’m a bit late; my birthday was on the 12th. Oh, well.

I don’t know what to say about 2014, really, so let’s just start typing and see what happens.

Bought the house, finally divorced myself of the old one. Paid half of it off.
I made some (one and a half?) ZDoom maps. I first got into the ZDoom community over a decade ago — I found articles on the ZDoom wiki with my own edits in them from that long ago — and only now have created a map that’s actually playable. By which I mean it has an exit.

In the course of doing this, I also wrote a bunch of patches for SLADE, the editor I’m using and the only one that really exists for Linux.
I released a couple more tiny modules on PyPI: cgettext, classtools.
I actually got my dream roguelike, flax, to the point that it’s playable.
I started trying to draw, on and off, again. I’ve recently gotten in the habit of doing a little daily comic, since my partner is doing the same.
I learned Inform 7 and wrote some of a text adventure. I also made a whole lot of aborted attempts at writing fictional prose for my partner’s Flora universe; it turns out fiction is hard, maybe.

I feel like I’ve grown a lot, but I can’t quite explain how. I tried a lot of things I haven’t really tried before, and they’re all informing how I think about things now. I don’t feel like I have a lot to show for all of them, though. Hm.

For once, I’m also considering what I would like to do this coming year.

Write more. I only wrote six posts last year! I blame this mostly on my emphasizing this as a “real” blog — I’m now unsatisfied with posting anything that isn’t as long and informative as, let’s face it, the PHP post. I need to knock that off. Back in my LiveJournal days, I once wrote a post every day for a month; perhaps another such month is in order.
Do a bit more with this domain. Ever since I bought it, I half-intended to also host separate pages for things I’ve made, and I don’t mean just cramming them onto a single “projects” page. I don’t know what form this will take yet, but as long as the domain is actually my name, I’d like for it to be something that more accurately reflects me.
Finish a game. Probably not flax, but hopefully this text adventure. It would be great if I had a website where I could host a text adventure, too… hmm…
Write a book. Or at least a significant chunk of one. I have a lot of ideas for a programming book (series?).
Make money. I have a salary from a “real” job, of course, but I would really like to prove that I could someday support myself with my own endeavors. Any of the above are possible candidates.

Only five things in a year. How hard can it be?

Level 27

2014-01-12T21:13:00-08:00

Another year gone by. I don’t think I even did one of these last year, but let me think about what I did while I was 26.

I lost a cat for the first time. It had… quite an impact. Later I adopted a new little buddy, Anise.
I bought a Soekris router and slapped pfSense on it. No, really, you would not believe what a nightmare this was to actually make work.
I did a whole bunch of Yelp-funded work on pyScss, turning it into a rather solid Sass compiler. I learned a good bit about parsing from this, which is cool since I’ve always thought it interesting but never found a good opportunity for getting my feet wet.
We (myself, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, and her husband) just moved to Vegas, which has been fantastic. The old house was co-owned by someone I’d gone to room with after moving out initially, and with the addition of my cluster (and accomanying menagerie) it had gotten a bit crowded. We finally got around to buying a new house in December, and it’s been pretty great so far; the house is cheap but huge (with a pool!), food is everywhere and also cheap, and the weather is rather a bit less dreary than Seattle.
I did a whole lot of technical tinkering and not a whole lot of releasing software and that is a shame. I’d really like to actually spit out some useful things this year. Fingers crossed.

Surely I’m forgetting something; that doesn’t sound like a lot. Okay yeah obviously buying a house is kind of significant, but it only ate a month. And I guess Styx’s declining health ate another month, during which I was largely a zombie. And pyScss was the only significant project I worked on for quite a while… hmm.

Seems like 2013 was a dreary void of a year for a lot of people. Even a millenium can’t escape being awkward and useless when it’s 13.