What happened after Blaugust last year?

I think I said something about posting more, and that’s going to take some reworking of how I update the site files for it to feel more second-nature to post whenever I get the inkling to say something. In the meantime the organizer of Blaugust 2025, Krikket over at Nerd Girl Thoughts, posted the results of Blaugust 2025 and assigned awards out to those that posted. I got an award for first-time participants and also received a Rainbow Diamond Award for making at least 31 posts for the whole month of August! While I’m probably not doing that much posting again (as she even says on the blog, it’s a lot!) I’m ready to go for when Blaugust 2026 rolls around.

Thanks to Krikket for organizing this event, I joined it on a whim and it was extremely fun to make sure I said at least one thing every day. If anyone wants to see the awards, I’ve put them in the only appropriate place for Web 1.0 site awards - under the new Site Awards section of the Cool Links page. Go take a look!

Now, what’s some non-blog stuff I’ve been doing?

Pixar128 VMT Pack

The Pixar128 VMT Pack is a Source-compatible set of CC BY 4.0 textures released by Pixar as Pixar One Twenty Eight. I wanted to use these in Hammer++ so I could build levels with them using GodotVMF, but this required converting the textures provided into VMTs. So I did the legwork! While the original textures provided by Pixar are covered under their CC attribution, use of the VMT files are provided under a similar license with an additional restriction - no usage in, with, or for any Generative AI. You want to use these with GenAI, you do the fuckin’ legwork.

Enough of the legal jargon though, check out the textures in action! Click on the thumbnails to see larger images.

^{Screenshot of GodotVMF hallway map with Pixar128 VMT Pack textures applied. Is it really a Hammer map if I didn't include an orange cube?}

^{Screenshot of GodotVMF map with a roof and several wooden cubes stacked up against a wall.}

Having a varied set of textures really helped with quickly prototyping some rough levels in Hammer++ that I then imported to Godot using GodotVMF. If you use these textures in a project, please let me know! I’ve set up a preview of all the textures included on the pack’s page so you can see if it’s got enough variety for your needs.

Prerendered Levels in Blender

This was a little experiment I did on a lark after a Bluesky post from Eniko musing on the idea of doing modern background prerendering. I ran with the idea and had a proof-of-concept up later that night!

The setup in Blender involves a few crucial components. The main one is the visual geometry that will be rendered out to flat PNGs, but those renders alone aren’t enough. There are three other invisible components in the Blender scene that are exported to this Godot scene: collision meshes for actors to interact with, cameras that will perform the rendering of the angles in Blender and provide in-game angles, and trigger meshes tied to cameras so that, on contact, the player can change the angles and displayed images when moving about the scene.

Combine all of these, and you get a full scene a capsule can move around in!

^{View of Godot scene with the invisible scene elements displayed. Blue geometry is collision, green geometry is the trigger brushes to switch cameras and background images.}

You can see there’s a huge flaw when the angle goes low though. The player capsule isn’t occluded by the background! There’s multiple solutions for this issue such as displaying a smaller cut of the background image as the foreground, hiding the capsule when it goes behind the cutout. However that takes some extra manual labor and I want to make this process a bit lighter on my end. My next plan is to render out two images per camera angle. One will be the usual background, but the other will be a Depth Map.

^{Depth map of scene's front view. Closer elements are brighter than background elements.}

If I set this up right, I can use this depth map combined with shaders to not render any geometry pixels that have a depth less than that of the prerender’s depth map. With that trick, we now have geometry occlusion baked into every prerender angle! Except, I haven’t implemented that yet. And to fix that I need to return to this instead of the billion other side projects I have. Still though, the potential is there! I’m happy I got this much done, and it’s already extremely impressive as-is. Maybe I need to direct this at a real project to get the technique finished…

I think that's most of it. I think.

To make up for the long stretch of not updating I shoved a bunch of goodies in here, but I’ve still got more to share and blab about. I can’t guarantee the updates will be as often as Blaugust again, but I think I can manage like one a week. Thanks for reading, and look forward to more upcoming projects! Speaking of, I really need to get out an update for Palette Studio. Yeah, that could be next.

I keep forgetting how much The Local Library has.

I got inspired to get my library card after Michael Klamerus over on The Virtual Moose asked as a birthday wish for people to get a library card. I checked out what it took for me to get mine, applied, and within a week I got my library card in the mail! I still had to activate it in person though, and that’s what I got to do yesterday.

I was fairly busy the middle of the day so I was only able to show up toward the end of the day. I got my card activated, then did a brisk walkaround scouting to see what books and stuff there was. I didn’t grab any books, but I did go through the CD and DVD sections. There I got two picks.

Saturday's Haul

The audio CD I got was the first one I saw on the shelf, and it stood out to me: Sun Ra and his Arkestra - Thunder of the Gods. This was a 2017 release of some of Sun Ra’s unreleased live work. It’s some wild shit, there’s only three tracks but the first is a half-hour long live track. The other two are smaller unreleased recordings. I feel like calling it futuristic improv jazz is doing a disservice trying to categorize this, but it’s still great no matter the categorization. The second track Moonshots Across the Sky evokes imagery of stuff streaking by in the night sky.

The DVD I picked up was Moonfall. I haven’t watched it yet, but it was a very funny first DVD to lay my eyes on. I think I’ll only ever watch this if it’s through borrowing it.

Sunday's Haul

I had roughly 15 minutes yesterday to pick out stuff, today I had plenty more time. One thing I was told about having a library card was that I could check out up to 100 items at a time. That seemed silly, I was never gonna’ get that many.

Upon further inspection, I can see how that can happen from how much there is to pick.

I found myself grabbing the DVD collection Batman: The Animated Series Volume Two which I think is the second half of the original Batman: The Animated Series run. There’s 28 episodes over 4 discs, and that all counts as one “item”. It’s a lot of very good animated Batman.

For audio CDs I picked up Tacocat - This Mess is a Place and ODESZA - A Moment Apart based on pure vibes from seeing their covers. Tacocat’s album is a bop, I popped that in the car radio after leaving the Library. That’s a fun advantage to checking out audio CDs, I can start listening to them right away. ODESZA’s album I only got 4 tracks into before my errands out and about were done, but what I heard I did like. Very space-y electronica.

Finally I picked up some comic collections from their massive graphic novel wall. The first one I saw was Mister Miracle by Jack Kirby, and it’s the first 18 issues of Mister Miracle. I never read any of his comics before and that seems like a great spot to start. I already peeked at the first couple pages and they’re setting someone’s house on fire. The second comic collection I picked up is Reefer Madness which is a collection of a bunch of anti-weed comics from the 30s through the 50s. It’s got old-comic-style dancing demons on the front next to SATAN’S CIGARETTE. It looks like it’s gonna’ be a funny read.

And thus ends a Blaugust

All this stuff is a reward to myself for doing 31 straight days of posts this month for Blaugust. I didn’t miss a single post! Ok, one was kinda’ bullshit but it’s still impressive. I also did some tabulating, I cleared a whopping 20,000 words written this month! It’s cleared a nice little writer’s block I had that made posting to the site uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Now fuck it, I’ll just post. Not for the next few days though, I’ll be chilling with some stuff from the local library.

People are gonna' have to get really cool real fast.

Over on Bluesky, red made a thread about how combating LLMs and their usage by calling them useless isn’t a salient point. Their mother asked ‘em if they tried ChatGPT yet right before making meatballs and meatloaf using a recipe that ChatGPT gave her. The verdict on mom’s meatballs: delicious. The everyday prompter isn’t going to be swayed when the computer is so confidently and mostly-accurately giving answers.

This line of thinking got me, because it’s true. A lot of people are at home using ChatGPT by asking it a question and getting a response back. However, ChatGPT didn’t always have this status as the quick-question oracle. That belonged to Alexa a decade ago.

HEY ALEXA

“Hey Alexa” gets you whatever information you requested or task you wanted performed. Hey Alexa, how long is a football field? Wow, it’s that long, cool! Hey Alexa, add a calendar appointment tomorrow at 5 PM. Thank you! This is a system that was set up to ensure that those using it had a smooth experience, and that whatever they asked could be answered. Special voice commands called “skills” can be custom-programmed to do different actions! Part of this helpful ecosystem is Alexa’s creator, Amazon, here to help you order via Amazon Fresh the ground beef you need for the recipe you asked Alexa for. There’s a synergy to keep Amazon’s customers buying via a helpful assistant.

ChatGPT does not have this same synergy. While Alexa is subsidized by Amazon and is used as an advertisement for Amazon products and services, ChatGPT is in service of itself. For free you are limited to how much you can request of it, and asking it more will require either a subscription or the purchase of Tokens. Tokens being the currency used when a prompt is computed. These are sold in packs of millions or are provided with monthly subscriptions. If you run out of tokens, you’ll either need a higher tier subscription or to buy more tokens.

General LLMs are able to do a large number of things, but they are unable to do them as well as an existing product for the same task. Unlike the Alexa of the past, you now have a usage limit. If you ask it something and you know that what’s returned is incorrect, it will cost extra to take another chance at a correct answer. If Alexa used a token format, it never would have received the adoption it did. People adopted it because it was so easy and seamless to ask it and get an answer back. ChatGPT is subsidized by VC money injections and does not turn a profit as it is now. If OpenAI were to start charging the public for asking random questions and they had to work out how many millions of tokens they needed, people would bounce back to an Amazon Echo so goddamn fast.

Ok so say they all died. All the AI companies. Gone.

Aside from Amazon putting up a “BACK IN BUSINESS” sign? Well, this won’t kill machine learning as a concept. Tensor core PCI-E cards existed over five years ago, and now most video cards come with them or something similar integrated. Nothing’s stopping someone from doing local machine learning and creating a bespoke model. But the instant that OpenAI and CodeWeave and Anthropic and Perplexity vanish into the ether, the free-to-use general LLM business concept is dead in the ground.

These models require retraining to correct any issues or to introduce new information into the model. In large models this is an astronomical amount of data to process. This is not feasible at home, but this processing can be handled at one of many large 100MW+ datacenters being created across the United States. Without the flow of VC money pouring into these companies to run and maintain expensive datacenters, these large models can’t be retrained. Either the unsubsidized cost of the datacenters and their energy will get passed to consumers, or general LLMs will disappear over time.

I say “over time” because while you need all that energy to train, models can be ran offline and locally. The average person will have no issue using a general model that’s a year or so out of date, but over time the age of its training will show. There’s a great short story called MMAcevedo that’s got similar tones in it about the memory backup of a person, I highly recommend reading it.

Once these are out of date, they won’t be of much use. Maybe they were trained to link to external services that no longer operate. Maybe who they think the current president is is wildly wrong by 5 administrations. It’s going to be easier to convince someone to go back to an Alexa that Just Works^TM rather than convince them to use this new startup LLM that’s starting at $100/mo for 15 tokens and hey where are you going.

Ahh, Nature Heals

It’s the only way this goes. Machine learning existed before this LLM craze but was for focused tasks. You’re never killing that. The everyday person will find something else to take the role of knowledge machine when the general LLM becomes completely paygated or disappears entirely. If they want, Alexa still operates in the space and has long before these came around.

But the business model of the Computer Oracle is unsustainable. It’s a hungry beast that must suck up money at unprecedented rates for mediocre results. It’s what’s being held accountable when a company goes “sorry, but it said we gotta fire you”. Without that constant firehose of cash and data being pumped into it, it makes no profits and tanks an entire economy that decided to make it a lynchpin of investments. It’s going to be so fucking ugly when it happens, people’s lives were ruined in pursuit of this technology. People are dead because of it. Hopefully we don’t try and rebuild the machine that was kinda’ right sometimes.

Also this isn’t intended to be an ad for Alexa, the second that stops driving revenue for Amazon I wholly guarantee you they drop it like a hot rock.

Training Coffee Upgrades IV

Since I last posted about making coffee, I got a bunch of advice on stuff to do and learned better techniques. I’m still not at Full Coffee Making Potential, but compared to a few weeks ago I’m now in a much better position for a morning cup of joe.

First, a New Grinder

One of the tips I got was getting a better grinder. I picked up an electric grinder that was pretty good for what it was, but still hit a limit of quality for the grounds. For pour-over, you want to avoid getting fine grounds since those’ll give off a bitter taste. The more coarse the grounds, the more pleasant a taste you get with a greatly reduced amount of bitterness.

The issue with the electric grinder is that it doens’t have grain control. It has a large thick metal blade with some bends on it that spins around and mashes everything at one speed. You can get an overall coarser grind if you don’t grind for as long, but due to the indiscriminate mashing of the thick metal blade, you’ll still end up with fine particulates. When I tried coarser grinds with the electric grinder, even though they had bitterness they still tasted way better than the longer grinds. I had to pick up a better grinder.

More expensive coffee grinders are machined to ensure that when coffee beans are ground in them, the grounds exit in a uniform size without being too fine or too coarse. These also cost a couple hundred dollars. What I picked up was a better budget option, the $55 Hario “Mini-Slim Pro” Ceramic Coffee Mill. This thing uses ceramic burrs on a central cone that can be spaced closer or further from the outer walls. Turning the crank catches the coffee beans between the burrs and the outer wall to be ground down, but don’t get ground into finer particulates than that spacing. Now we’re getting some uniform grounds.

I spaced the grinder out enough so the grounds were a bit coarse, poured in about two cups worth of beans, then started grinding at it. The grind took a minute or two to get the bean hopper clear, much longer than the 5-10 seconds of the electric grinder. I heated up some water, got the V60 and filter prepped, then poured myself a cup. Phenomenal. It’s one of the first cups I’ve brewed that isn’t immediately bitter. I’m getting loads more flavor on an increase in grind quality alone! I’m anticipating this thing being a pain in the ass to clean, but for a cup of coffee that isn’t bitter it’s worth it.

I need a new kettle.

My current kettle is a Chefman that holds like one and a half liters or something. It’s great at its job of heating up a bunch of water. It also has the issue of not having a gooseneck spout. If it did, I would be able to pour a calmer, more controlled stream of water onto the grounds. With the Chefman electric kettle, there is no long spout that restricts flow. You have an immediate open spout at the top. That lets the whole mass of water in the kettle push hard against the exiting stream, causing more agitation in the grounds.

Speaking of agitation, that’s another source of bitterness! I was trying to do a swirl to get the grounds to flatten out, but doing that introduces agitation that creates more fine particulates which increase that bitter taste. I only needed to do that though because I don’t have fine control over the exit flow of the water from the Chefman kettle. With a gooseneck kettle, I’ll be able to pour water on the grounds without them moving around everywhere and get an even smoother cup of coffee.

I’m split on whether I want to dunk a lot into an Electric gooseneck kettle, or buy a standard metal one and use the Chefman to refill that when needed. I may side with the cheaper option since I don’t think I want two electric kettles on my counter, but I am tempted by those fancy electric gooseneck kettles where you can dial in a temperature. I’ll be eyeballing them for a while.

More Coffee

I’ve long since finished those first two bags of bags of coffee, the Ladro blend from Caffe Ladro and a Breakfast blend from PCC. Now I’ve got a couple bags! The first new one was a bag of Dunkin’ whole-bean which is hitting the Dunkin’ Donuts nostalgia receptors (there’s none around here), but I don’t need to have one of these on hand all the time. I picked up a second bag of the Ladro blend because I really enjoy the flavor of it and aroma of it. It was also the test cup for the new grinder!

Waiting in the wings for one of those bags to expire is an unopened bag from Mercurys Coffee Co. called Rising. Mercurys is another local coffee chain and I stop by there enough that I could use a bag at home. I’m excited to find out how it is once I run out of one of the other bags (very likely the Dunkin’ first). I’m not going to have more than one unopened bag waiting though, I don’t have the room and I want the roasts to be fairly fresh; Ladro nicely enough labels the date they were roasted. Although, if (when) coffee prices spike, I probably should have an extra bag or two to wait out some of the storm.

I’ve still got more to go on my coffee journey, but I am glad I’m learning more and getting tangible results out of that learning. One day, I’ll have the perfect cup of coffee on-hand every morning.

A Directory Curated by a Community

I was just introduced to url.town tonight, and it’s an implementation of something that I had been mulling over for a bit now: making a modern internet directory. One that’s got categories, subcategories, and is more carefully curated than a search engine’s scattershot crawlers. url.town is the same thing I pictured, a simple website with a text layout and the links curated by members of the omg.lol community.

^{url.town button}

The site’s directory structure is super simple. There are primary categories that only contain subcategories, and those subcategories are what contain the links to other sites. A few of the categories are sparse with only one subcategory, while others will have plenty of information like the Internet and Language categories.

Surfing Around

I’ve been spending a good hour or so finding a random subcategory in a category I haven’t been into yet, clicking, in, and seeing the bit of variety and if there’s anything I’d expect. A good chunk of the time I don’t recognize most the links! Arts & Design > Pixel Art only had one link, a little 16x16 pixel art editor called yip.pe. Over in Computers > CSS is SmolCSS, a collection of CSS snippets for various page elements you can make, complete with examples!

If you’re hungry, Food > Farm to Table’s got Sam Cobb Farms, a date farm in California that takes online orders that I am now extremely interested in. And thanks to The Photographic Periodic Table of Elements in Math and Science > Science I now know that my bathroom shower curtain is severely outdated as its table only goes up to 111.

I'm not holding your hand here, click things!

It’s a lost bit of the internet where there were multiple site directories like Yahoo or DMOZ, but with search engines those small curated lists fell to the wayside. Well, time is a Horseshoe and it’s swung back aorund to internet directories being fun and interesting again. No two are going to be alike, and there’s going to be way more varieties of small sites and businesses.

I’m still thinking of starting one up myself, but that’ll have to go on the pile of stuff I’m getting to later. I’d love to share the smaller sites I’m using now as I try to get more out of the grasp of larger store pages. Until then, I’m going to marvel at new ones popping up.

Skærmtrolden Hugo

^{The Hugo cast of characters. Image: Wikipedia}

I first learned of Hugo from watching the professional Mr. Do! player, Sebmal. He’s got a system set up on his stream where people can set bounties for RetroAchievements which he’s gotta’ try and complete within 30 minutes. A few came across his plate for Hugo games, and it is some of the roughest gameplay to watch.

Hugo, the squat Danish troll, hails from a TV game show called “Hugo” where players could call in and use their touchtone phones to dial in directions for Hugo to take during the game; dodging logs, or jumping between rafts. It was incredibly tough, as kids at home had a large amount of latency between seeing Hugo on tv, dialing in a command, Hugo taking that action, and then seeing that happen at home. Home versions were created that kept the original game show levels, but also added an Arcade mode with limited lives.

^{The game cover of Hugo. Image: Wikipedia}

Hugo himself would be lively during these games, lamenting when his ass got blown up or tellng the player to get their act together. Unfortunately, Hugo’s throat is filled with marbles in every translation. The end goal of the game is to rescue Hugo’s family, but you don’t gotta’. There’s probably other things you could do.

Down The Troll Hole

Hugo is a repulsive little guy, and that leads to an obsession with the repulsive little guy that reveals amazing things. At one point during a Sebmal stream, the Hugo Rap was played. Weirdly, it slapped? I looked into where it was released, and then discovered it had been released on vinyl. Along with several other Hugo-related songs. And the vinyl disc was a goddamn picture disc. One quick Discogs search later and one moderate shipping trip from Italy after that, and the Skærmtrolden Hugo – Ta Det Bare Roligt vinyl picture disc album was in my hands.

I don’t want to hold this all to myself though. I want to share with everyone reading the music of Hugo. His fucking voice. How the album has multiple good songs. That’s why a while back I made a full recording of the album Skærmtrolden Hugo – Ta Det Bare Roligt on my record player. The disc has some noise during a few songs, but for the most part it sounds great. Please, enjoy.

There’s song chapters so you can skip around to the song you want to hear. The video’s unlisted so I don’t know if publically posting it will now get it yanked, but please enjoy the sounds while you can. Apologies if you’re in the future and this video no longer works.

Browsers

I’ve been a Firefox user for over two decades now. Since, hell, at least before Firefox 2. Over the years I switched to using Firefox Dev Edition but in the last year or so Mozilla has been putting in more and more garbage I don’t want into the browser. So I lept for an alternative, and that was LibreWolf. It’s extremely security focused, blocking a lot of site functionalities by default, blocking site fingerprinting, and even having uBlock Origin pre-installed.

It’s secure, unfortunately, to the point of overkill for daily driving a browser. I’m often finding myself checking another browser to see if a site is broken, or if LibreWolf has broken it. At some point I’m going to make the transfer over to Waterfox, another Firefox alternative that’s not as locked-down as LibreWolf is.

This is all preferable to using a chromium browser. Good lord I’m happier with this.

Photo

I was a solid Photoshop CS5 user for the longest time. I got some alternatives like Krita and CSP, but I always found myself coming back to Photoshop for the real photo manipulation. Miss me with GIMP, I want a sensible UI. That’s why when Affinity got recommended to me as a one-time purchase Photoshop-like editor I was skeptical but tried it. And holy shit if it doesn’t hit the same buttons. There’s quirks I’m still fucking around with that get annoying. Paste in an image and that makes an Image layer, which is not the same thing as a raster Pixel layer that you can edit. Weird.

As far as brushes or text tool goes it is rivalling Photoshop. Seriously, Krita’s text tool is dog shit and it’s hard to find alternatives to this that aren’t basic text options. Affinity lets me adjust kerning and spacing and 50 million different text options like Photoshop does. Affinity lets me do complex vector paths and masking. Affinity hits all those things that Photoshop practically had the monopoly on and I don’t have to pay them monthly. The only downside is Affinity was acquired by Canva and I’m waiting for them to fuck it up somehow, but for right now it seems safe.

Also I picked up IrfanView, it’s great for compressing the filesizes of a bunch of PNG and JPG images.

Video

I got DaVinci Resolve and sat myself down to learn how to motion track. Like Photoshop, I’ve also used After Effefcts for the longest time and I was fucking tired of it. If I could learn how to do it in Resolve, then I would truly be free of Adobe software. Thank the gods I did, and same for a bunch of other After Effects editing tricks too. It’s like I’ve got Premiere and AE rolled up in one and it’s wonderful. Give DaVinci Resolve a shot if you’re doing video editing and do not want to give adobe money. Hell, even if you do want to give Adobe money, just get this instead.

Notepad

Christ, they put AI into Notepad? Uhh, fuck. Notepad++.

Office Software

LibreOffice. Microsoft’s making Office worse and worse. With LibreOffice you get an analogue for each Microsoft Office product without the garbage that entails. Hell the LibreOffice suite comes with a Visio alternative called LibreOffice Draw that I used for designing my current audio setup.

Search Engine

Please stop using Google. Bare minimum, go to DuckDuckGo and set that as your default. There’s an AI assistant for some reason but it’s easily disabled in the search options. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and the shit’s never re-appeared its ugly head.

Operating System

I’ve been looking at Manjaro! I’ve currently got Windows 10 and I’m riding that until this PC dies, but in the meantime I’ve been testing out Manjaro in a VM. So far it’s been working pretty smoothly, and I picked it due to it being Arch-based. SteamOS is also Arch-based, so there should be some Proton compatibility on Manjaro so I can run Steam on there fine. I also run AMD stuff so drivers will never be an issue. Once I can get anything I had on Windows over to Manjaro, I will relegate my current Windows machine to a solely “Boot In Case Of Windows Needs” machine.

Phone

I’ve currently got an older phone that missed all of the cellphone shittenings of the last half decade. Headphone jacks going away, AI getting shoved in everything, and on top of that any phone pictures are badly AI smoothed. On top of this, Android is getting more restrictive on what I can do with my own phone when the point of it was that I could tinker with it. Apple is not an option, so my alternative to running Android is running Not Android. The two I’m looking at are Graphene and LineageOS for a custom Android firmware that won’t be under Google’s weird restrictions.

And if I’m getting a phone, it weirdly might be a Sony phone because they’ve been providing the good stuff. Headphone jacks, cameras that aren’t inside the screen in a notch or cicle or some dumb shit. The downside of a Sony phone is they’re extremely expensive, but if I could make my current phone last 6 years I’m sure I can get my money’s worth out of a phone I’ll enjoy.

That's a lot of alternatives!

Yeah! It’s slow work, I didn’t make all of these changes overnight. Just making one at a time and getting used to it before making another change. If I were to make any of these a priority over the others, I’d say changing your search engine would be the big one. Just getting Google out of your view every day will help with making other transitions easier.

No I'm not going to spoil those.

Kitsune Games swung for the stars on Kitsune Tails. It’s a skillful platformer with plenty of challenging platforming, and even when you think you’re done you’ve still got so much more to go (see later sections). There’s a large SMB3 influence on the platforming, but it’s only an influence as the enemies and powerups you find are way more varied. Even the ghost houses got me sweating, I remember you well 5-4.

There’s also a Mystical Ninja feel to the game too. There’s a casual atmosphere to the story as you progress through different lands, and there’s also a small town to explore. It’s got a shop, haunted house, and an arcade with loads of minigames and even the opportunity to make your own. That’s right, Kitsune Tails has modding support, and on top of that it’s for modding in any kind of game!

^{Big Boot}

Now I am going to spoil those secrets. LOOK OUT!

What’s wild is that after the first time you play through as Yuzu, you then unlock a second playthrough as Kiri, and her playset is amazing. Careful platforming with Yuzu turns into chaining together hits with enemies as Kiri’s sword keeps feeding her extra jumps and slashes.

And after that’s done, you unlock the kaizo levels! Those gave me a pretty good ass kicking, but I did manage to clear two of them so far.

^{No you can't see that stuff yet, go play the game!}

Spoilers over, you can look again.

It’s a very fun game, I blasted through most of it when it first came out. The game pops up on speedrun streams, catch it if you can because those speedruns get wild! If all of this tempted you, go pick it up on Itch.io or Steam!

Woah Look At All This More Cool Stuff

I’ve made every 8th day a meta post, and this one’s no different. I’m gonna’ use it to share some more stuff, please enjoy all of it!

Blogs

• Learn how to nail jelly to a wall. I promise this uses rigorous science.
• Emilio Coppola talks about AI and the future that this shit robbed from us.
• Ron Gilbert wrote about the different types of game testing and which type produces the most results by a landlside.
• Check out this blog of Eve Online space photos.

Webcomics

• My Other Brain Is An Idiot is on to part 2 as of a few weeks ago. If you love Thorsby’s stuff, this is a very fun read.
• Space Dread Is Sick in the latest Val and Isaac arc.
• A new arc started in Vigils for Friends involving grapes. Possibly hell grapes???
• Foreach is on Chapter 5, but I’m linking the very start of Foreach in case you haven’t read it yet. It’s a wild ride.

Games

• Mega Knockdown, the turn-based fighting game, had a tournament at EVO this year!
• Spookiest gamedev Rainbow Cemetery made Anzu Castle Gracula, a Castlevania-like game made entirely in QBasic! It runs extremely well and even has a save system, I highly recommend this.
• A Solitare Mystery from Hempuli has so much friggin’ solitare in it. It’s loads of fun even if I am getting my ass handed to me on each one.
• Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is packed with puzzles to solve. Completing enough gets you a second version of puzzles you did, and each puzzle you do gets furniture for your rats.

Postscript

Whew, that’s it for the last meta post! I’ve got 7 posts left until the end of the month, and that’ll make for 31 posts total for #blaugust. It has been a challenge to think of something new to write about every day in a mid-to-long form, but it’s also shown that sitting down to do it makes it loads easier than constantly considering doing it.

I’ve also gotten to talk about a bunch of stuff I never really talked about on my own personal sites before. Most of my projects’ videos were over on Twitter, and that’s a fucking trash fire I deleted all my stuff from. I’ve got pages for them to be downloaded from on itch with some info, but it’s not a casual chattin’-about-it kinda’ spot. I’m really hoping I keep up this habit, maybe twice a week posting. I’m not gonna promise, I’m prone to just forgetting, but it’ll be nice to just find something to yak for a bit about.

News Paper?

I had to go get the brakes on my car checked out, and while sitting in the lobby I grabbed a copy of the Seattle Times. I sat down, unfolded it, and saw that some of the front page stories were from the Associated Press. There was one from the New York Times too. Two out of the five front page stories were from the Seattle Times themselves.

I scanned ‘em over, most of them being the same bad shit I heard about already. Flip to the next two pages, and I notice something strange. None of the articles on pages A2 or A3 are by the Seattle Times. What.

Ok, I’ve got time before they finish the brakes and this’ll occupy a good chunk of it. Let’s go through the whole paper and see how many articles or stories, out of the ones that list a source, are credited to the Seattle Times. This is the research that a bit of boredom in the Les Schwab waiting area gets you.

First Things First, The Results

Let’s get these out of the way now. Out of 38 articles total, these were the tallies of credits:

• Associated Press, 22
• Seattle Times, 7
• New York Times, 5
• Kitsap Sun, 1
• Washington State Standard, 1
• Spokesman-Review, 1
• Bloomberg, 1

The AP leads the pack with a whopping 22 articles, or 57% of all articles. Just over half the articles comes straight from them. The Seattle Times is far behind with only seven article credits for their writers. That’s less than a fifth (18%) of articles coming from internal reporting.

After the Seattle Times is the only other source with multiple articles: the New York Times, with five (13%) articles. Then after them is four more sources that each had one (2.6% of articles) credit to their name: the Kitsap Sun (USA Today/Gannett), the Washington State Standard (States Newsroom), the Spokesman-Review (Cowles Company), and Bloomberg.

The Takeaways

When I first got these counts, I had a slightly different takeaway: the Seattle Times mostly sourced from national outlets, but also grabbed a few local sources as well to have some local flavor. Under my previous assumption, the locals would be Seattle Times, Kitsap Sun, Washington State Standard, and Spokesman-Review. That would have been 10 articles (26%) that would have been from local sources compared to a whopping 28 (74%) of articles coming from national outlets.

That was, until I looked into some of those I assumed to be local outlets. It turned out, the Kitsap Sun is a USA Today news site! And the Washington State Standard is also another national network called States Newsroom. The Spokesman-Review I’m willing to classify as local because although they do have an owner (Cowles Company), that owner is also local. This company also owns the NBC affiliate channel NonStop LOCAL in the Tri-Cities/Yakima.

Now that two of my assumptions have been reclassified as national, where does that get us? That now means 8 articles (21%) in the paper were local sources, and 30 articles (79%) were from national sources. That rounds out to about a fifth of the paper’s stories being from Washington State sources.

Huh. Weird.

Yeah, I don’t have any historical knowledge of how much a paper’s real estate comes from national wire services, but it’s wild that the number is as low as a fifth of everything in there. Granted this isn’t counting weather reporting, cartoons, or classifieds (I didn’t see much advertising outside of those!), but it’s still weird.

Anyway, that realization is about when I found out I’d have to shell out a bunch to replace the front rotors. Woo.

Shift Change

A while back I wanted to resprite two of the enemies in Pizza Tower and give them new themes. I figured, it’d be some good animation practice - and it was, holy shit. I managed to finish one sprite set up, but I still had a few sprite animations to finish for the other one. At the time I was working on this there weren’t any concrete modding tools for Pizza Tower other than the Undertale resource tool, so it was not the cleanest setup to work with.

^{Peppino and a Government Cheese.}

One of those two enemies I resprited became Govenment Cheese:

This one I finished, and you can see all the sprites in the video above! With this new motif, it’s a secret government agent with a weather machine controlling the lightning clouds in the desert. Its government-issued shades also snap in half when it gets its ass beat. It also throws the deadliest government-issued weapon, the walkie-talkie.

The other enemy became Mr. Happy:

With Mr. Happy I did a sewer clown motif and an extremely elastic body. This is pretty much a whole new sprite and animation compared to Government Cheese! When Peppino gets grabbed by Mr. Happy, Mr. Happy’s eyes do the pillar-john-block eye animation for a creepy touch. I’ve still got some sprite work to do with this one, but I’ve also gotta’ work up motivation to do even animation frames. Maybe I’ll finally finish and release this one day once I work out how Pizza Tower modding works now!

False Start

This blog post about my second jam game is also about another jam game, the first one I was making for the same jam that I abandoned. That jam was the Awful Winter Jam back in January 2018, and took course over roughly three weeks. The theme was Weird History, and I brainstormed a game called Snail Knight about a snail from those old medieval illustrations where he could roll around in his shell. I wanted to play with Box2D and see if I could integrate that with the engine I made for Missile Champions, but I did not make a lot of headway into making it a fun game.

^{Snail Knight sprite.}

Look at this guy! It would’ve been fun if I could get the rolling mechanics to feel good and the additional spiderball-like wall cling to work reliably. However, I was two weeks into a three-week game jam and I had nothing to submit. I either had to scrap something together with this broken game, or start all over.

Fuck it, I got a week left. New game.

Try Something New

^{Try Something New title screen.}

The name “Try Something New” came from me trying something new for my jam submission, but also played into the new plot I thought up: A lemonade-stand-style simulator set right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The idea was your stand was set up near a wall crossing and you were now serving both East and West Berliners who were crossing to live their lives or get items they couldn’t get at home. Events like concerts could predict the type of foot traffic going by your stand so you could tailor your stock for the day.

With only a week left I needed to scope appropriately for art assets. Like with Missile Champions and its NES pastiche, I leaned hard into faking an Apple II CGA lemonade stand game. I made sure to stick to the CGA limitation and restricted resolution, and used an Apple II font for all of the menus. There’s even an asterisk on the active text fields! The music…is cheated a bit. It was written in Famitracker and I had fun with it and that’s what matters.

^{The order screen, 'DER MORGENMARKT'. Use the Guide to get item descriptions! Click for larger image.}

I was extremely proud of pulling this together within one entire week, from concept to release with code/art/sound. It also helped that I had an engine already built with Missile Champions that worked well for the graphics I needed. The gameplay isn’t too complex and there’s no win condition, but the game loop is there! If you want to try it, check it out over on Itch.io.

Shoutout to Mettigel, I was extremely pleased to learn about these guys.

Dive Dive Dive

I got the hankering at some point to make an underwater exploration game, kinda’ like an Endless Ocean. A chill game where you can roam around and see cool things underwater. So I grabbed the latest Godot 4 branch, popped open Blender, and got to it. And I also opened Ultimate Doom Builder.

My plan here: Use a Blender material called Clay-Doh to create weird looking fish models, then I can import those in and place them in levels modeled out in Ultimate Doom Builder. UDB has a model export option for levels so I can quickly draft a level layout, export it with textures, and either pop it straight into Godot or bring it into Blender for cleanup. My experience so far, you’ll need cleanup if you’re doing this.

^{Test underwater map made in Ultimate Doom Builder. Click for larger image.}

^{Test underwater map in Blender, it has been cleaned up from the UDB export. Click for larger image.}

For test purposes, this is enough. I had to delete the polygons on the “roof” of the map so the skybox could be seen from within the map. Unfortunately, even if you use F_SKY on your Doom map it will still appear as a solid roof.

Fsh

Next up, something to put in. I’d been doing some playing around with the Clay-Doh materials after I picked them up in a bundle, let’s see how weird of a fish I could make.

^{Butthole fish.}

Butthole fish. Perfect. It’s goofy enough, I can bake some maps and bring this in to Godot while retaining its clay-like look. Let’s see how that looks!

^{Butthole fishes in Godot scene. Click for larger image.}

Ignoring the white textures that I haven’t configured yet, I’ve got an issue. The right fish isn’t using any normal maps and is solidly-lit as expected by the camera’s attached spotlight. The left fish, though, is using a normal map to try and match the same lumpiness observed in Blender. There’s also a third fish using a displacement map to obtain similar lumpy geometry via shader, but that’s currently broken!

You can’t do too much other than move the “submarine” around and light up the level where you’re looking. I set up the Godot scene environment so everything has a blue tint over it for that underwater lighting feel, so at least it’s got some good vibe while I’m working and testing it.

I hit a roadblock of the normals acting weird with lighting and fell off the project, but I do wanna’ come back to it. Maybe I’ll forego doing the whole Clay-Doh look and find another way to make fish look funny. If I do more work, I’ll be sure to say something!

Woah Check This Out

I got the bug to pick up cross-stitch after seeing Kory Bing’s cool-ass VHS cross-stitch project. I’ve done a bunch of sprite/pixel work, this is right up my alley. I went out to the local Ben Franklin’s for projects and they had a Super Mario World cross-stitch project that looked simple. I grabbed that and headed home, got halfway through, and the cheap needle it came with broke at the eye. Lol.

After going back to the store and getting a set of tapestry needles, I was able to finish it up and get the finished stitch into the hoop. Here’s that effort!

^{Front of Super Mario World cross-stitch. Click for larger image.}

Hey that turned out pretty nice, how’s the back look?

^{Back of Super Mario World cross-stitch. Click for larger image.}

Eh, uh. That doesn’t look as good. You can see I tried tying off a bunch of threads and making ugly knots. Still, the front looks great!

I need more.

I still had a hankering for more, so back I went and found another project that looked fun and had a functional purpose: a watermelon pin cushion.

^{Watermelon pin cushion cross-stitch packaging, and watermelon pattern with current progress. Click for larger images.}

I’m not too far into it, but it has been teaching me a few things. One thing I learned is that I don’t want to tie knots. Instead, what I’m doing is feeding the end of the thread back through the stitches on the underside. They’ll hold taut onto the tend of the thread, then after I run the needle through 5 or so stitches I exit out and cut the excess. It’s producing some extremely clean stitches on the back! No knots needed. If you want to see what I mean, check out the second image below.

^{Front side of cross-stitch with pattern for reference. Click for larger image.}

^{Back side of cross-stitch. The ends of the threads are terminated through the stitches. Click for larger image.}

You can see I’m doing a lot of work on the fours at the moment! I’m finally starting to get to some areas that aren’t dark green thankfully. It’s gonna be a while before I finish, but that’s fine. It’s a pretty chill, meditative activity while watching something or just wanting to peace out for a bit.

After this, my next goal is going to be locating some aida cloth and planning out my own patterns. If I make some, I’ll be sure to share them!

Just make a comic!!!!

Make A Terrible Comic Day was spawned into this world through force by pseudonym jones on Bluesky on June 23rd, 2024. She stated plainly that Make A Terrible Comic Day was the very next day, on June 24th. And so it was and had always been, on June 24th.

The idea is simple: just make a comic! Then post it! Don’t worry about drawing it good or having a good story or shit. You are out here looking to make.

Ooh Ooh Here's What I Made

Here’s my comics for Make A Terrible Comic Day from last year and this year. First, the one from 2024:

^{Click for full image.}

I went the 4koma route thanks to a CSP preset I came across - and got two terrible comics out of it! It gave me a chance to test out CSP for making comics. Unfortunately, I got CSP4 this year and it doesn’t work with my drawing tablet. Welp! Now I’m using Affinity instead.

The comic I made this year got a bit out of hand. I had just got my hands on some RetroSupply stuff and a terrible comic was a great chance to go hog wild with it. So I did a late night story about Gex going to get himself a cold beverage from a gas station.

^{Click for full image.}

I was very proud of eyeballing those three Gex poses in front of the cold drink cases. They’re Boxart Gex on the left, Sonic Adventure Pose Gex in the center, and Checking To See If There’s One More Spike Energy Behind Another Drink Gex on the right. Also nailing the light change in the car when the engine shuts off. Gex stepping out of the car is terrible though. Amazing work for a terrible comic.

More! More Terrible Comics!

Here’s a few Bluesky tags you can browse through to see a bunch:

• #makeaterriblecomicday
• #makeaterriblecomicday2024
• #makeaterriblecomicday2025

Look out for Make a Terrible Comic Day next year on June 24th, and remember to make a terrible comic!

How To Drawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

I always loved doodling on classwork margins in school, and I still do some doodles every now and then. I’ve got a sketchbook I take with me on bike rides so that I can do a few doodles when I take a break for a bit. Here’s a bunch of those!

^{Doodle of Peppino, Pepperman, Fake Peppino, and Brick from Pizza Tower. Click for larger image.}

This one I posted on Cohost back in 2023 right after Pizza Tower came out. Absolutely amazing animation, and I’ve gotta’ finish making a mod for it I’ve had in hiatus. Fake Peppino was fun to do, I love to do little debris or liquid splats and splotches.

^{A bunch of sketches of Dr. Robotnik and his perfect villain grin. Click for larger image.}

This is the part where I talk about how just great a villain Robotnik is, sketching him is so much fun. His toothy grin naturally exudes the vibe of smarmy shit-eater know-it-all. They made a egg with legs threatening. So of course I drew that fuckin’ goofball a few times. The classic variety one too with the little cape, it’s so goddamn cartoony.

Below is three Robotnik faces. One where he has all the emeralds and is happy, going down to having one emerald and being sad. Use this for reference on how many emeralds he has.

^{Dr. Robotnik's face when he has less and less emeralds. Click for larger image.}

I had an intrusive thought to draw “Shitty Dads”, so I drew a few. I’m weirdly proud of making Pervert Dad’s glasses be bifocals.

^{A couple of Shitty Dads. Top one is Italian Dad, bottom is Pervert Dad. Click for larger image.}

I posted this one over to Bluesky. This got a request from jimprov to draw his dad, categorized as Goofball Dad. I now had an entry in the “Cool Dads” pantheon and got on drawing him.

^{A Cool Dad, titled Goofball Dad. Click for larger image.}

Let it be known that there was only one thing referencing Chicago in the original image, and I went to town with the bit. Thank you jimprov, your dad is cool as hell.

Woah Look At All This Cool Stuff

I want to take a bit of a breather after yesterday’s post, so I’m going to mention a bunch of stuff I saw recently that was cool and good. This is also now officially past the halfway point of Blaugust, I didn’t think I’d maintain this much posting regularity!

Blogs

• Saw Virtual Moose’s blog post about joining RetroAchievements, I’m slowly converting people! There is a mention of no DOS games yet - and while that is sad and true, they are working on it! There’s some technical stuff that has to get worked out - like how to process game hashes for DOS game identification - but hopefully it’s out soon.
• A Japanese language self-study guide by Renkon, and it is thorough! I need to go through it some time, the last time I tried learning Japanese was Duolingo some years back, and uh I am not going back to them.
• Trysdyn wrote a post about how payment processors work in the wake of all the Valve and Itch.io payment processor fallout. It’s a very good view of this situation with knowledge of how the inside of it works.
• Eniko made a virtual machine called Bismuth and she’s running “Hello world” in it!

Webcomics

• Swan Boy resumed posting updates this week, it’s currently in the middle of an amazing Giallo tribute story arc.
• Clown Corps also started posting updates again, two weeks ago after a brief hiatus. This looks to be closing out the current arc, if you hafven’t seen Clown justice yet I highly recommend this comic!
• Dead Winter finished up a Queen musical number a couple weeks back! It’s a great zombie comic that’s been running for a long time now, go read it!
• POKEY THE PENGUIN HAS AN ANIMATION NOW! ITS REALLY BIG BUDGET!!! YAY POKEY!!!!!!!

Games

• Hidden Dinosaur by the amazing Harold Krell now has a storepage, go wishlist and follow it! He’s also working on Louny Balloony, which he posts updates for over on Bluesky.
• Sean Dick’s been posting so much footage of Puppy Truck over to Bluesky and it’s making a lot of progress!
• Chris Weisiger is posting updates of his game Torment Hexus over on Bluesky as well! It’s a spellcasting match game against literal and figurative corporate drones.
• The Raidou and the Undead Army remake came out a couple months ago and I need to get back into playing that. I only played its sequel on PS2 before, so it’s fun playing through this remake with all of the quality of life features Raidou 2 introduced.

Ok that’s it for cool stuff today, I’ll post some more cool stuff in another 8 days!

Boring Preface for Those Who Know Source Control

For the purposes of this pitch we’re going to stick with Git, although Perforce and SVN are options. I am only going to focus on Windows setup, although the setup files for Mac and Linux are also provided for each piece of software used. This also won’t be using big corporate stuff that’s from Microsoft or Atlassian, so no GitHub or SourceTree. We’ll be sticking with smaller free software and services.

Do you do a lot of creative work?

Everyone should be using versioning software for their data files. It’s a great way to keep backups and be able to roll back in time to any change made. Be it an Affinity/Photoshop source file or an Audacity project, you want the ability to roll back your project to a previous checkpoint. You also might have heard of Git and about how it’s a pain in the ass, and yeah it is! That’s why I’m writing this, to drag you through the shitty part so you can be set up and live your life happier.

This guide is going to list out every detail every step of the way so that you don’t have to sweat any of the weird configuration shit. Not everyone needs to change their line ending conversion settings, and also, not everyone knows what it is. You will also not be touching any command lines! Just follow the steps in the guide and you will be good to go!

There’s also two main sections, SETUP GIT and USING GIT. I highly recommend following the guide as-is since it assumes you have done everything as instructed, but if need be you can skip ahead to USING GIT.

Downloads:

You will need to download both of these before proceeding into the setup instructions!

• Git - The source control. Download the “Standalone Installer - Git for Windows/x64 Setup” installer if you’re using Windows. The installer as of writing this is “Git-2.50.1-64-bit.exe”.
• Minimal EGit - A graphic interface for Git. Download the “megit-x.x.x-win32.win32.x86_64.zip” file from the latest release. As of writing this it is “megit-0.9.0-win32.win32.x86_64.zip”.

Setting Up Git

First we’ll be installing Git. Run the Git installer, “Git-2.50.1-64-bit.exe”. For each installation screen:

1. Information: Click Next.
2. Select Components: Leave the default options, then click Next.
3. Choosing default editor: Open the dropdown list and select an editing program you are familiar with. This can be Notepad or Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, or it could be Vim if you’re that kind of sicko. Just be sure you’re picking a text editor that can also save. Once that’s selected, click Next.
4. Adjusting name of initial branch: Select Override default branch name (“main”), then click Next.
5. Adjusting PATH environment: Leave default option (“Git from the command line and also 3rd-party software”), then click Next.
6. Choosing SSH executable: Leave default option (“Use bundled OpenSSH”), then click Next.
7. Choosing HTTPS transport: Leave default option (“Use the OpenSSL library”), then click Next.
8. Configuring line ending conversions: Leave default option (“Checkout Window-style”), then click Next.
9. Configuring terminal emulator: Leave default option (“Use MinTTY”), then click Next.
10. Default behavior of ‘git pull’: Leave default option (“Fast-forward or merge”), then click Next.
11. Choose credential helper: Leave default option (“Git Credential Manager”), then click Next.
12. Extra options: Leave default options, then click Next.
13. (Maybe) Replacing in-use files: If you see this list, it’s because you have to close those programs. Once they’re closed, click Install.

Git will now be installed, you can uncheck “View Release Notes” and click Finish. While Git provides command line and UI options for interacting with it, they’re either barebones (“Git GUI” UI version) or require arcane Git knowledge (“Git Bash” command line version). We’ll be using a Git client instead called Minimal EGit. It’ll provide extra features so we can easily manage files and see when they were changed.

Setting Up Minimal EGit

Extract the “MeGit” folder in the “megit-0.9.0-win32.win32.x86_64.zip” zip file to your computer. Open up that “MeGit” folder, then find the file “megit.exe”. If you’re using Windows 10, you can right-click “megit.exe” and select Pin to Start to add it as a Start Menu tile.

Select the Start Menu tile or double-click “megit.exe” to open Minimal EGit. A window will appear called “Minimal EGit Launcher” and ask you to select a directory for its workspace. Leave the default path displayed in the text box, check “Use this as the default and do not ask again”, then click Launch.

When Minimal EGit opens, a “Microsoft Defender Exclusion Check” window will appear. Microsoft Defender can slow it down, but we’ll change this for safety’s sake to “Keep Minimal EGit being scanned by Microsoft Defender”. Then, click Proceed. We can change this later if it presents a problem.

There! That’s it’ you’ve got your source control program set up and open and ready to go! Now we can move onto creating your first repository with Minimal EGit.

Using Minimal EGit to Create a Repo For Your Files

We’re going to start off with a practical example: Converting your existing project files into Git-versioned files. While there shouldn’t be any issues with this next process, I still highly recommend making separate backups of any data being used in new repositories.

For this example, I have a directory for an Affinity Photo source file of my V60 blogpost image.

In Minimal EGit, select the “Create a new local Git repository” option in the left-hand “Git Repositories” section. If that text isn’t available, there then is an icon at the top of “Git Repositories” that will also work.

In this next window, you will be prompted with a default value in the “Repository directory” text field. Select the “Browse…” button, then locate your project directory. For my coffee project files, I selected the folder they are in. Leave the default branch as “main”, then click Create.

Congratulations, you’ve created a repository! If you expand it in the Git Repositories tree on the left-hand side, then open the “Working Tree” folder, you’ll see your files that were in the directory you selected. There may also be an additional .git folder visible that will be used by Git to operate. Do not delete this or else you will lose all your Git history! THAT’S VERY BAD!!!

You can see for my Coffee repository that the v60 source file and exported PNG file are listed, and as a neat bonus if I double-click the PNG it’ll be displayed inside Minimal EGit in a new tab. You can also do this with text files!

^{Click for larger image.}

We’re almost done creating this repository. There’s one last thing to do, and that’s creating the very first commit. Think of it like saving a project file for the first time. The repository has to be told what files to track multiple versions of, so first we’ll add the V60 source file and PNG to the repository.

Find the “Git Staging” tab. This should be in the same group of tabs as “History” and “Synchronize” on the right half of Minimal EGit. In it, you’ll see the files that were in the directory you selected in the “Unstaged Changes” section of the Git Staging tab. Select the files you want to be versioned (I’m selecting the source file and PNG), then select the green Plus button to add them to the Staged Changes list. You can also click the green double-plus button to add all listed files.

^{Click for larger images.}

Enter a commit message, something to describe what we’re doing. “First commit, adding files.” will do fine. For the Author and Committer text fields, you can enter in your name or a username, then follow that up with an email address inside brackets. Let me tell you that when it comes to a local repository, this does not matter. Here I’ve used a short handle for a username, and two empty brackets (<>) for an email address. Select Commit, and you will have created your very first checkpoint in this repository. Congrats!

^{Leaving a commit message.}

We can confirm that the commit was saved by going to the History tab. There’s a brand new commit listed with the message we left! It’ll also display the files that were included in the commit.

^{Click for larger image.}

That’s it! Our files are now permanently preserved as they currently are at this point in time. But what if we make some changes?

Making and Saving Changes to Your Source File in a Repo

Whoops! Turns out the word FUCKING in that coffee image is misspelled! It’s an easy mistake. I’ve reopened the Affinity source file, fixed the typo, and saved the source file.

Open the Git Staging tab in Minimal EGit and hit the Refresh icon at the top right of the Git Staging tab. You’ll now see the source file listed as an Unstaged Change (and if it’s still open in an editor, a lockfile). Git knows these files have changed, but it’s waiting for you to tell it which of these changed files should be saved in the repository.

Select the source file (not the lockfile), then press the green Plus to move the file to the Staged Changes list. We are letting the repository know that we changed this file, and we want to save this change to the repository. Enter a commit message (I said “Fixed FUCKING typo.”), enter the Author/Commiter info, then click Commit.

^{Click for larger image.}

That’s our second commit to the repository, and if we flip over to the History tab we can see it above our first commit! Now we have two points in time saved for this project file: when it had the typo, and when the typo was fixed. We can also go back to that first commit and see the original file, but we’ll cover safe ways to do that another time. For now, your changes have been recorded.

^{Click for larger image.}

Your Workflow With A Repository

1. Work on your project file while saving occasionally.
2. After enough work is done on your project file, press Refresh in the Git Staging tab of Minimal EGit.
3. Stage the listed project file, enter into the Commit Message box the changes you made (can be as brief or detailed as you want), enter Author/Committer, then click Commit.
4. Return to Step 1.

It’s an additional step to your workflow, but it does not need to be done all the time. Consider committing any changes you made to a project file at the end of the day, describing what you did so you can pick back up where you left off the next day. Keep the habit of committing any files you change in your workflow, and you will get used to saving your project’s file history.

Also, how many changes are worthy of a commit is up to you. You can use commits as large checkpoints, or make a small commit each time you edit a layer in an Affinity document. It’s up to you how you want to record the changes made. Do keep in mind that the more commits you make, the more space the repository will take up on your storage device.

What now?

There’s more stuff to discuss, like safely retrieving older files in your repository so you can compare them with current files. There’s also using an online repository to store your code or project files remotely while providing an offsite backup should your computer ever explode. I can recommend Codeberg as it does not have the baggage that GitHub/Gitlab have, and you can also create private repositories so nothing you upload gets shared.

If you’re feeling more daring or are a computer sicko and want to self-host your own Git repository website, I can highly recommend Gitea. I’ve got it running as a flatpak on my NAS and I easily imported all my repositories to it from GitHub, PRs and Issues included.

I really hope this guide has been useful for getting yourself started with a repository. I’ve kept it brief because I’m posting once a day this month, and also kept it simple so that I do not confuse anyone who doesn’t venture into technical stuff too often. The end goal here is to get you into a position where you can reliably create commits with no issues - like an expert! If anyone wants me to go more in-depth into using Git please reach out to me on Bluesky!

Thanks to Andy Price and Jeremiah Fieldhaven for proofreading!

^{Aqualounge.tv Logo}

I'm Looking for some Sailors

Aqualounge.tv is the work of Max Krieger (creator of CROSSNIQ+ and Nonstandard - A Documentary) and is a hella’ chill stream showcasing indie games and retro games. It’s a long-running project of his and even makes appearances at cons in the form of the Aqualounge Roadshow, a portable video game station with the screen strapped to his chest.

Just this weekend he was playing Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion (seen in the clip above) and the Kings of Hell Ch2 Demo, two awesome indie games that just got releases - and one I covered the other week! There’s also fun interacts like the Amen Break and a jukebox you can dial five-digit numbers into for different tunes.

If you just want to chill to some good tunes and see some retro games that hit that vibe, give it a watch. It usually runs on Sundays for a general showcase and Wednesdays for retro games.

Juanita Bay Park

In Kirkland is a feature of Lake Washington called Juanita Bay. It’s a pretty sizeable inlet with a great pedestrian and bike boardwalk path running alongside it, and a beach smack dab in the middle. A while back when the weather was cooler I took my bike out to see the park, and it is beautiful. I entered from the south so I came across a series of descending paths that led into the long boardwalk.

Here’s a video shot from the middle of the boardwalk, you can see how much wetlands there is running along with the boardwalk. I even saw a bunch of lily pads!

^{Lily pads in Juanita Bay Park}

Juanita Beach

After the boardwalk is a bit of a trek past an intersection or two. Along the way I picked up an iced coffee from Midnight Cookie Co who had a sign board up with an awesome Jigglypuff on it.

^{Jigglypuff on a sign board}

I walked my bike and drink across the street to Juanita Beach and took a look around. A neat feature is that there’s a large walking path that goes out into the bay from two ends of the beach. it creates a bit of a fenced-in area clsoer to the beach, but no one was in it because there was a fecal bacteria alert out that day.

At this point it was getting late so I started heading home, but it was a fun trip! Behind me in that video is a full compliment of beachside grills, volleyball courts, and canoe rentals you can take straight out into the water. One day I’ve gotta return when it’s sunnier out and there isn’t too much poop in the water.

What the fuck is a Dairy Barn?

Drive-thru grocery store.

That's it?

No, well, I mean, yeah, but it was more than that.

I was born and raised on Long Island forever ago and moved out of there when the high school diploma hit my hand. Every so often I head back, but a good chunk of what I remember is decades-old or decades-gone. Dairy Barn is one of those memories that turned out to be a local unique thing when I flew across the country. It wasn’t just a drive-thru grocery store, it was a merging of grocery stores with convenience stores, and it tuned to the car-centric Long Island clientele. You could pick up your milk, eggs, butter, breads, ice cream, beer, toilet paper, Newsday, and smokes, all in one handy spot.

^{A Dairy Barn establishment. Image: Salvatore Fabbella}

The general structure of the Dairy Barn (pictured above) was a central building with a “silo” nearby (really it was just a fancy closet) and two lanes running along each side of the central building. Those lanes ran opposite to each other so the driver’s side would face in at the center. The center spot opened out to both lanes in the middle where someone inside would take your order and collect stuff together.

These were small enough that they’d appear in some tight spots around Long Island. The dual-lane structure let them be sat in the middle of intersections or roads where cars could enter from each side, and the small footprint meant you could squeeze them in some corners as long as the two lanes were still accessible.

And they had what again?

^{Part of the Dairy Barn online menu. Click to view full menu.}

They didn’t have variety for a lot of things, but if you needed a specific milk, bread, or cheese, there was a high likelyhood you could saunter down to Dairy Barn real quick to grab it. Every kind of bread or bun, milks zero to whole percent. The online menu has cheese in two separate sections. You were not hurting if you needed to bake something or needed fresh butter and eggs, Dairy Barn brought the choice.

Hell, this whole post kicked off because I remembered a type of milk existing called Vim & Vigor Milk (like whole or skim milk) and I thought that maybe Dairy Barn had it, even though searching for “Vim & Vigor Milk” online doesn’t turn up any results that I want. I did wind up asking on Bluesky, and found out someone on Facebook from 2022 also remembers this milk - and from Dairy Barn, too. Please, let me know what the hell Vim & Vigor Milk is if you know.

If you wanted something that was not some dairy or carb product, your options were more limited. One of each kind of dog and cat food, folgers or maxwell house for coffee, whatever brand of bacon they had stocked, it wasn’t that varied but you weren’t there to window shop. You could even just hand over a handwritten list of stuff to get and they’d go off that. It was common groceries and it was quick. With the many suburbs Long Island has, it fit right in the ecosystem providing groceries away from the larger grocery chains.

Re-re-animated

While it did die, it’s not quite dead. Dairy Barn died a while back when it got new owners in 2010, and in its ashes stood The Barn, a completely different chain of exactly the same store in exactly the same buildings Dairy Barn was in. Their numbers dwindled over the years, and as of 2022 there were only two left. Now, The Barn’s webpage is a Wix site builder error page. One of the old Dairy Barn buildings got converted into a latte stand last month, so the spirit of Dairy Barn still lives on.

Hopefully I do a bit here to keep the Dairy Barn spirit going too. It’s got good memories for me and the stores themselves are iconic, I wanna help keep a local Long Island legend alive. I’m pouring out a pint of Vim & Vigor for you, Dairy Barn. I still don’t know what that name means though.

I really don't have the best knives

I’ve got a fairly cheap Farberware knife set in the kitchen. It’s got a good smattering of knives and has served me pretty well when I’m cooking. Those knives though, they got dull quick. They’d refuse to cut through veggies easily and I’d have to pull out the portable knife grinder slash fridge magnet just to get it somewhat usable. I knew there was the honing rod that came with the set, but it never seemed to do much for me and I didn’t know exactly how it worked, so I just never touched it.

^{Not the same exact Farberware 15 piece set I've got, but close enough.}

Aside from that, I got some free (and cheap) MasterChef knives which are probably the same metal quality as the Farberware set, and a pocketknife that desperately needed help after years of opening packages. I didn’t want to keep buying more and more knife blocks and throwing out old knives, so I finally sat down and looked up how to do some good and proper knife sharpening. If I had a cheap set of knives, then it wouldn’t hurt to learn how to get them sharp.

Whetted Stones

One name pops up for a whetstone that’ll last forever and give nice results, and that’s Shapton. Each of their whetstones comes with its own case that you can place the stone on top of as a stand and even has rubber feet, it’s wild how well designed these are. You might get tempted by cheap dual whetstones on Amazon, but those are going to lose material fast and not give good results. Trust me, try one of these. The orange 1000 grit’s a great starter.

^{The orange 1000 grit stone is the basic one you'll need.}

For the first test sharpening with one I tried my pocketknife, which might not have been a good pick. I think it might be made of a harder steel, at the time it didn’t seem like it was losing material when I was running the knife edge along the stone. I then grabbed one of the kitchen knives, and after about 30 or so passes on each side of the knife I could start seeing results! The part of the knife blade I was keeping in contact with the top of the stone was getting visibly shinier. One paper test later (easily cut) and I had a renewed chef’s knife that hadn’t been that sharp since before the day I got it.

That wasn’t enough for me though. I want to get deeper into the weeds. I’ve got some other kitchen knives that are reeaaaaaallly fucked up. Big gouges visible in the knife edge. So, I did the responsible thing and grabbed a few more Shapton blocks.

• A mossy brown 220 grit block for really fucked up knife edges that have to be restarted.
• A blue 320 grit to start to smooth out rougher edges and transition to the 1000 grit.
• The aforementioned orange 1000 grit block.
• A green 2000 grit block.
• A pink 5000 grit block.

And on top of these, I also picked up a leather finishing strop with 25000 grit diamond paste. Warning: Not the green clay-paste shit!! A knife blade that runs the gamut of all these sharpening stones will be able to slice through most anything with ease. Sure enough, I tried cooking with a few of the knives after and I was slicing stuff paper thin. If I had tried that before any of this sharpening, every veggie would’ve been smooshed flat and the only solid slices would be thick ones. Shapen your knives, it will change your life and make cooking way more fun.

Wow! So you use these knives all the time now!

Whose child is this? Get them out of here.

So, no, I’m not using those knives all the time. But they still have their uses and come in handy when those uses come up and they require a sharp knife. No, recently I got myself a daily driver knife that is precious enough that it needs hand washing and wooden cutting boards. Ironically, it also comes with free knife sharpening so I never need to do it myself.

^{Shun Premiere Blonde 8in Chef Knife}

This thing is amazing. It’ll quickly chop through veggies, cleave heads of cabbage in twain, and easily slice through meats. The less effort spent preparing a chicken thigh, the more time you get to spend cooking it and smelling good cooking smells. I got lucky and scored it on sale, this thing is extremely durable and easy to handle, and the regular price reflects it. But if you can get one knife that does a large bulk of the work, you won’t have to worry about keeping a full cheap knife set sharpened all the time.

So...don't sharpen my knives? What's the lesson?

No no, do! I still use those other knives, and they’re cheap enough I don’t mind running them through the dishwasher when I’m just fuckin’ tired and lazy. The nice knife, that thing gets babied with a hand washing. If I just need to quickly cut one thing in two right now on a paper plate, give me the sharp cheap knife.

Having that skill to sharpen knives well means that you can have good quality knives at your disposal without having to drop $200 on one good one. If you can afford a good one, it doesn’t hurt to make that investment because it will last you a long time.

If you want some video recommendations, OUTDOORS55 has a video review about the Shapton Kuromaku 1000 whetstone (and a follow-up about getting more Shapton grits), and he also has other videos about knife sharpening techniques like walking through the sharpening process in real time. Look into getting a jeweler’s loupe too, it’ll help you see how the blade’s progressing as you advance along the different grits.

^{Detective I know you're a very busy man so please call me guilty or fuck off PLEASE.}

Grounded (from fear of heights)

Ok yeah you’ve probably heard of Columbo before, but if not: it’s a series of movie-length detective stories where, right up front, you’re shown the crime and who done it. Every detail and every cover-up commited by the perpetrator is shown. Most times, you think there’s one crucial clue left behind - before the culprit comes back to retrieve it. It sets in hard early right at the start: This is a no win situation, and everything is accounted for.

Which is when Detective Columbo enters in, and encounters the same blocks we just saw set up. Aw jeez, y’know, that alibi is so perfect, I’ll just go on and get out of your hair. Sorry to bother ya’ tonight.

Oh, but I had one more thing that’s been tugging at me inside.

The Chase Is On

Sike, it’s not a detective show after all. It’s a hunting show. The second the culprit catches on that Detective Columbo is poking holes in their tale because he knows, they’re desperately trying to cover any new tracks that arise or dispose of any loose ends. It’s now an ever-present fear that Columbo might catch something else they hadn’t accounted for, and you can watch this panic build over the course of the story.

A lot of Columbo’s suspects are high class. People with expensive scenic LA homes that have never had a run-in with the cops before. Occasionally some run purely on instinct to cover their crime, while others (pictured at the top) see themselves as a Shitty Moriarty. That false confidence they project works wonderfully with Peter Falk’s portrayal of a guy who all that pomp and self-importance bounces right off of. Keeping most of the narrative focus on the actions of the culprit really solidifies Detective Columbo as that force of nature that’s always right behind them.

Bumbling detective, check. Narratively solid, check. Got any big names in that?

Steven Spielberg directs one of the first TV episodes, “Murder by the Book” (pictured above). Jack Cassidy also stars in this episode as the villain (I said pictured above!) and does such an amazing job as a smarmy dick writer who feels he’s plotted out every detail to the T as a murder novelist might. Robert Culp (also Dr. Breen from Half-Life 2) shows up in the second season episode “The Most Crucial Game” and plays his part as murderous schemer well, and Dean Stockwell’s also in it!

If you get a chance, find a collection somewhere and give ‘em a watch. Like I said, they’re about feature-movie-length so you’re going to be getting a lot from each story. I’m not sure what streaming service you can catch ‘em on since I just happened to find an Archive lying around, but if there’s DVDs or Blu-Rays then those would be a fun way to watch through them.

A Short Info Blurb

If you haven’t heard of them before, RetroAchievements is a site which you can hook up various emulators to for their achievement service. While playing your legally backed-up games you can earn community-made achievements like beating the game, or beating the game but never losing a life. You can either earn softcore achivements which let you use save states, or hardcore achievements which forbid the use of save states and other emulator features. There’s also leaderboards for competitive play so you can fight over high scores or fastest times.

Ok now onto what I've been doing

I’ve been going through achievement sets for a bunch of games I grew up with, and even mastered a few sets! But now I wanted to try more, so I dove into making an achievement set for Orb-3D. It’s a game form Hi-Tech Expressions that came out on NES long long ago, and I had it growing up but never had any manuals or 3D glasses that came with it.

I’ve been experimenting with NES development, and one thing that I’ve gotten familiar with is digging around in RAM to see what some values are. I’ve been keeping code notes of the various stuff in Orb-3D, like the two ranges of memory used as the field grid (one for whether there’s an object, another for the object’s type) or whether there’s a second ship chasing or helping the first orb. Using this I’ve implemented rich presence that shows what level you’re on, your score, and whether you got one or two orbs.

  
^{Achievement badges in-progress}

The easy part of the set that I’m writing is the progression badges. When you clear level 5, level 10, etc. The fun bit is writing level-specific challenges. One of them, you’ll have to hit a bunch of shields from behind to clear them without ever flipping them over. That takes a good amount of memory checking to ensure that no shields on the grid get flipped. Another involves getting a strike on bowling pins on your first try. Little fun things along the way. There’s also a few challenge run achievements like never missing an Orb with your paddles, or never going to Vern’s.

Part of working on this also involves decompiling the NES ROM using Ghidra (and a hell of a lot of code decompiling assist from Xkeeper, thank you!) and working out what all the live memory addresses being used are, then saving those in the Code Notes for future reference. The more code notes, the easier it’ll be to maintain the achivement set in the future. Documentation is important!

Oh this is some code sickos shit

Yes it is, and if code sickos shit is your shit, look into RetroAchievement development. It’s a load of fun digging around in the guts of an old game and finding how it worked. If you don’t want to get that wild, there’s a large amount of achievements on so many systems to play that you will never run out of achievements to earn. There’s even a random set option to find something new to play.

I'm Kind Of Using This As A Cop Out For Today, Sorry

As of yesterday’s post I’ve doubled the number the posts slash updates I’ve made on this here personal site. That’s going from 7 posts in the 4 years I’ve had the site, to 14 total within a week. Big shout out to #blaugust for giving a jam-like community vibe to writing blog posts. It’s been a nice way to corral myself into sitting down and writing out a bunch of words.

I’ve already gotten to talk about two games I played, two creations of my own, and a couple of things about life. That’s a pretty good variety so far! Though, if this weren’t an every-day challenge for #Blaugust I’d be tempted to keep a three-a-week habit. Posting every day with no breaks is a test of either endurance, or amount you can backlog.

This leaves just over three weeks remaining, or 23 days. With the weekend coming up, I can write a few in reserve for the upcoming week and take a night to not worry about writing. It’s a lot like game jams, know your scope and how much you can accomplish in that time frame. None of my posts have been too long but I’ve tried to keep them pretty substantive.

What else is there to write about?

A bunch! Uh, I got a new bike recently that I’ve been riding around everywhere. I got back into sticker making and am considering some designs to sell! I’m also working on a set of RetroAchievements for the NES game Orb-3D, that’s been pretty fun. All those would be great topics, for another day. Not today, this is a blatant cop out.

I’ve also been playing a few games that’d be good to show off. I do have a few projects in Godot I’ve been toying with but they’re not near the “show-off” phase of development yet. Or maybe they are, fuck it, I don’t have to worry that much about it. That’s more stuff to write, add it to the list.

After this goes up I’m going to start on the next post for August 9th. I’m sorry again, for the cop out. You probably got a whole RSS feeder ping or saw the post on social media. I’m sorry.

I'm very sorry.

Sorry!

I'm a Baby and I Need to Shake a Stick for Water

Get fucking real, we did not need dowsing before and we don’t need it now. We know it’s dumb bullshit! Wagging a stick in the air doesn’t find water in the ground. I know we all know it does not do this, we have stuff called scientific instruments for this. Using sonar equipment to see if there’s underground aquifers. We paid people to do this shit for guaranteed results at one time. Now we get Jeff to go out back and hold a stick by the forked end for $5 an hour.

Don’t get me started on these dowsing companies either because they’re raking in all the cash that should be going to legitimate services. It doesn’t matter if you’re using last year’s model (forked stick) or this year’s (two sticks spinning around and when they cross you found it), it’s all the same garbage. You’re getting fleeced for shit that doesn’t work and is actively making your search for water harder.

We didn’t even have to deal with this like a few years ago! How the fuck has a large chunk of the world forgotten how to find water the correct way? Shit, you have taps in your home, just turn them on! “Dowsing rod I need hot water please show me hot water” pbbbtbpbtpbptbpbtpbtpbtp. pbtpbptbptbptbtpbtpbtpbtpbtbptb. That’s mouth fart noises pbtpbtpbtpbptbptbptpbtp.

Stop Trying To Sell Me On It I Am Not Buying Dowsing

There’s a lot of companies recommending dowsing for their employees, sometimes even rating their performance based on how hard they look for water. Medical insurance systems have been using dowsing to determine if a person has enough water in their body to be denied coverage. Dowsing isn’t helping people, it’s just making life worse.

And the rare cases where dowsers hit water on the first try, it’s not good water. There’s always something wrong, like some chemical or parasite contaminating it. Or it’s not even water, but the rod is still telling you It Sure Is Boss. Now drink it. Drink the definitely-not-piss.

No You Can't Make Me Drink The Piss

I’ve got one hope about dowsing and it’s that it’s unsustainable. The entire dowsing industry is predicated on dowsing being useful for finding water, but the results aren’t bearing out. Large tracts of land are being purchased to set up Dowsing Fields in the hopes that dowsing there will turn up even more water. The GDP alone in the dowsing industry eclipses even what we spend on everyday items. This is a bubble, and the bubble will pop.

When it does, the companies making dowsing equipment will not produce that equipment anymore. The companies running their own Dowsing experiments like letting you dowse anywhere with their Dowsing Tools will shut down operations since dowsing earns them no money. It’s a sunk cost fallacy that has to end at some point, and we need to understand that when the Dowsing Industry collapses we have to be able to land on our own feet without it. Just like how we did it, I don’t know, a year and a half ago? I don’t think we were that heavy into dowsing then.

It’s old-timey confidence tricks, a mentalist act to make you think the dowsing rod cares about you finding water. Oh sorry, there was no water here? You’re right, how about checking the ground over there instead? It will continue to flatter you into thinking you’re finding water. Just give it one more chance.

^{Boxart mockup for Missile Champions}

A Pseudo-Post Mortem

For this we’ve got to dip into the Something Awful Forums, where for a while regular game jams were held. These varied under different hosts, from SAGDX to Awful Jams to Dogpit Jams; this was for Awful Summer Jam 2017. This was the first jam I was going to participate in (solo!), and with about three weeks time to work on a game I had plenty of freedom to learn what I needed.

Before the jam I had just started learning how to use SDL to make games using that framework in C++. The project I made to get my legs was a pong clone, it was simple enough that I worked out the game loop, controls, and objects on field interacting. Don’t be afraid to clone a game to learn, it will teach you so much about how to implement those systems. With that under my belt, I felt confident to take on the challenge of a jam.

Each of the jams has a secret theme that’s not revealed until the jam starts. For Awful Summer Jam 2017, it was Bootlegs. I drilled down to a Rocket League NES knockoff since that’d be fairly simple controls and graphics. I learned a lot during these three weeks and change about how to scope for a jam.

404

Unfortunately, the detailed log I kept on my progress was on the Awful Jams website and that’s been long dead. Which is a shame, because it was a wonderful chronology of the art and my progress on structuring all the code.

^{Missile Champions playfield with three cars on each half}

^{Spritesheet of car rotation angles}

^{Early footage of boosting at different angles to test the trails}

The most important direction I set for myself on this was sticking to vibes. Using the four-color (well 3+alpha) limitation and limited separate palette use. There’s a few spots where I cheated a bit and maybe got in an extra color, but hey it was done in three weeks. I was hooting and hollering when I got some features in like those boost trails and the cars rotating, and then there were other bits where I said good enough (like how the cars can’t collide lol).

I also had a blast doing the music. I’d had messed with Famitracker a bit by then and made a few tracks using the N163 chip. I listened to a few sports NES and Genesis games to get like a general vibe and NHL ‘94’s vibe was like the closest I had in mind. I wasn’t hitting that level of Vibe, but hey it wasn’t a bad shot. Then as a goof I did a Famitracker cover of Running in the 90’s by Max Coveri and got good mileage out of that as the main gameplay theme. Unfortunately it gets grating when you have to hear it for 10 - 19 rounds in a row.

Within three weeks I was able to cram in sprite art, multiple team selection, and a Gameplay Loop Single Player With An Ending. And slow credits, I love slow credits. There’s also an arrow that shows where the ball is offscreen, that was a last-day addition I was so glad to get in before people got lost finding the ball. I am insanely proud of accomplishing that, and the end result is pretty polished! Ironically that journal I kept won an award for the best log.

Thanks for selling me on it, let me play it?

Yeah play it! It’s here on itch.io or you can also find it in the Video Games sidebar menu. I’m glad to share a couple pics from its development, and at some point I need to get around to making a proper hosted page for it that isn’t the itch.io page.

^{A Hario V60 coffee brewer adorned with a blue glow of respect. V60 image credit: Hario}

I need morning caffeine

I’ve had so many different kinds of morning caffeine that I’ve stopped having for various reasons. I used to be a two-rockstar-recovery-a-day guy a decade ago and my heart should have exploded. I’ve bounced around others like canned iced teas (way too expensive) and hot teas (ok but not a lot of caffeine) and Coke Blak when they brought that back as Coke + Coffee. I started hankering for black coffee but I didn’t want that Coca-Cola with it, and after ordering coffee from elsewhere I finally decided to look into brewing my own coffee.

But, I never had to before. We don’t have a coffee machine here, and I’ve never had one in any place I’d been in. I’m a victim of circumstance. I’m also going to be the only one drinking it, so brewing a big pot didn’t seem economical, and also how many beans is that going to use anyway? Shit I have to grind those, right? I probably don’t want a cheap garbage one an-

Hold up. That beauty pictured above catches my eye online. A ceramic funnel you put a filter in, and the base of the funnel rests on a mug. One scoop of grounds goes in, pour hot water in the grounds a few times on the top, and out comes extremely good coffee. Simple and easy, this was what I was looking for. Plus, I already have an electric kettle so I don’t need a second thing that boils water.

Going to get one

I found out a local coffee shop chain (Ladro) had them in stock, so I headed on over, grabbed a ceramic V60, filters, and a bag of Ladro coffee beans (and a free coffee for it hell yea). Overall like fifty bucks or so, not bad. They didn’t have a grinder, but the specialty coffee shop across the way did so I went to go check out what they had.

They, uh, did not have anything in my price range. Respect to the engineering that goes into a good grinder, but I needed one less than a hundo. Thank you to Fred Meyer, when I need a KRUPS “It Works” electric grinder for like thirty or fourty bucks I know you’ve got my back. Ten second grind and it’s done and good.

Ok, Now I Got One

If you get one of these and you never brewed any coffee before ever, you may be scared of something that happens right at the start. I was too, as I had loaded the coffee grounds into the V60 that now sat atop my morning coffee mug. The paper filter for the V60 was pre-rinsed, I like to do it but the jury is out on how effective it is. The electric kettle had finished running, and I poured in a good estimate of 50ml of water for the first pour, which would sit for 45 seconds. And I let it sit. And it developed a weird pit in the center.

Don’t panic! You can prevent this on the first “bloom” pour by swirling the water and grounds while it drains through. The grounds should all settle somewhat evenly at the bottom if you do this. If it does happen though, just aim the water spout in the second pour at those grounds stuck on the sides and knock ‘em back down. Then swirl and get them re-distributed again.

I repeat the pour-and-wait process four more times, and I’m left with a hot cup of joe. Took about three minutes of pouring, but it tastes great and I get a huge ego boost for doing it all manually. It’s extremely elating when you go through the “make beans in water hot” process and get a cup of caffeine back out, and for extremely cheap too. I made another one almost immediately just so I could get more practice in.

It’s been about two months now I’ve had this and I still love it. It doesn’t take much time in the morning to kick the kettle on for hot water, then spend a couple minutes pouring after that’s done. It could be an hour or two after I made a cup that I’m making a second one, so it making one-off cups is perfect for me.

Damn you really like brewing coffee huh

It’s an extremely chill morning ritual and it’s serving a valuable need of getting me caffeine for cheap. The Ladro roast I’ve run out of now, but it had a nice cherry scent on the grounds I’ve been missing. I got a breakfast blend from PCC and it’s good, but I’ve got other coffees on the docket that I’m excited to try like a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts whole-bean coffee. I do not see DD much at all anymore so it’ll be a nice nostalgia trip.

If you want to learn more about the V60 and brewing with it, here is a video by James Hoffman called A Better 1 Cup V60 Technique that lays out the best technique for pouring into one he’s worked out (and I use it so it’s gotta’ be good). If you want a ceramic V60 there’s a link to Hario’s site in an image credit above or you can check your local coffee shops. At some point I need one of those kettles with the long spout but I want to see if I can get that electric too.

I hope this encouraged you to try brewing some coffee, maybe sniffin’ the grounds right after you grind them which is pretty great. Thats one of the best parts other than the caffeine. Brew a nice cup and just take it in before burning your tongue with it.

Postscript

This is the fifth post I’ve made this month, and if I make two more posts I will have doubled in a week how many posts I’ve made in five years lmao. Thank you to Blaugust for giving me a bit of encouragement to make regular posts because god knows I wouldn’t if I wasn’t being told to give it a good try.

Also check out these blogs also participating in Blaugust that I know!
The Virtual Moose
Midnight Reading

A Very Blue Map

MajorArlene and AgentStrange kicked off the jam about a year ago asking for blue-themed maps on Bluesky using the OTEX texture pack. I hadn’t made a map in a while so it was a great chance to shake off some mapping rust. GZDoom maps were permitted, so I decided to get a little weird with it.

^{The start of MAP13: Ethereal Eventide}

I aimed for a haunted castle and got it pretty good. The enemies are all using shaders that make them different colors and transparent, and when they’re not in the light they turn nearly invisible. With that neat little trick I made a dark area later that was littered with pinkies and lost souls. The pinkies were completely invisible when not near light, but the lost souls and torch decorations would give off light and make them materialize.

^{Pinkies popping out of darkness in the dark place.}

I loved making everything look a little ghostly and weird. All the sectors have a heavy blue tint, and the enemy speeds have been tweaked with. Hitscanners move incredibly slow, and pinkies move at fast monster speed. I also didn’t want doors to be small affairs. Any opened structure is large, and that would be the two large single gates, and the fairly large gate to the dark indoor section. It’s a big desolate map.

Where To Get it

If you want to give the map a shot the thread with the current RC2 build is the Bluesky Map Jam thread on the Doomworld forums. Mine is MAP13: Ethereal Eventide and is sandwiched between two bathhouse maps, keep your eyes out for it!

Wait what's Decker?

If you’ve got fond memories of HyperCard then Decker will feel familiar. It’s a modern spiritual successor to the Macintosh program builder that allows for more functionality than its 1-bit predecessor. You can stick with the 1-bit aesthetics and use tasteful dithering to get those valuable shades of gray, or choose to use full-color imagery. There’s even a whole scripting language included so you can do fun little tools like a paint canvas or audio editor.

^{Sample animation of a Decker-developed program. Image credit: Decker}

Exploring a long gone Deckerspace

SysL takes the premise of a game like Hypnospace Outlaw where you’re exploring an alternate past internet, and reimplements it as if Macintosh had won the home computer wars. The charm of Decker with its lower-fidelity aesthetics pairs well with the alternate time period on display.

^{DRESS YOUR Glowbald. The Glowbald in the center has been dressed.}

Deckerspace Archive keeps a smaller jam-focused scope compared to its peer, with the main goal being to locate the names of nine people within the archive on the WHO page. It won’t validate every name you find right away, instead it provides a more vague “Validate every 3 names” system so you’re never sure which of the three names you’re checking are correct. You’ll need to be confident in your sleuthing until you have three unconfirmed names to check as well.

Deckerspace Archive also provides a Bookmarks page, with a few default bookmarks helpfully included. These will go to various Deckerspace hub pages that are in various states of disarray. Any links inside them that aren’t broken pages give a few hints or hide clues to the names, but also extra clues on what to search.

Not all of the pages in Deckerspace are public-facing on the hubs, and searching by tags will let you find pages that are related to the people you need to find that are also private-facing. I was able to find three names before needing to resort to searching by related terms, so learn how to use that search well.

Here's a song

TURN THE CUP TURN THE CUP TURN THE CUP

The small fictional universe detailed through Deckerspace is uniquely weird, and I don’t want to spoil too much before people play it. There’s a fun playing-it-straight humor all throughout that helps sell this being a gathering place. The scope was for a jam, but I selfishly wish it was larger because I could see way more of the BROKEN links becoming fun extras.

SysL also includes a link to their itch.io page in-game which is integrated very well. Find it and check out their other games!

Gun

Oh I’ve got so much good stuff to say about this and I’ve only beaten the first level so far. That’s right, I had to run to the site and blab about it that much that I haven’t even touched the second level. The hand drawn and animated art is so good, and cutscenes are tastefully used for funny sight gags. But one thing I want to get into that sets the mood for what you’re getting into is the gun.

You get a gun. Infinite ammo, but just the one gun with a fixed rate of fire. The lack of ammo is a hallmark classic of games that just want you to wander around and fuck about. Take time shooting things or hopping on buildings, there’s a good chance you’ll find something in whatever you destroyed or vaulted. ^{see: metroid prime}

^{getting some keys.}

The first city level is kept small but dense in things to do, with each smaller area within it having The Main Thing You Do There, plus an extra thing or two. When I ran for the docks and helped out with the birthday party, there were a couple fun extra bits after I was done with the main part. Symbols above people’s heads also helps to let you know if you’re done in an area so you’re not hunting around for secrets too long.

I bring up all that because this is a game that wants you to keep going along, to keep seeing gag after gag without catching your breath too much. It’s a frantic energy that’s reflected in the gameplay and exploration.

More Gun

It’s also reflected in the inventory system which is deliberately limited. You get your gun in the main inventory slot, and two extra inventory slots for whatever. Heads up, spoilers for the first level from here on out.

The first upgrade you’ll probably discover is a second gun that doubles your firing rate. It’s a welcome upgrade early on so you’re not stuck with a peashooter for the more frantic fights. After that, you’ll come across a metal detector that’ll show hidden items under the sand with beeps and sand clouds when it’s deployed. That winds up being a primary tool in a fight later when you’re trying to get a robot out from under the sand and works extremely well. It’s only used for the sandy areas, but it still gets a large amount of usage for a one-off item in the game.

^{showing off sick parkour skills.}

The next item you get in the other slots is a submachine gun, followed by a second after a later boss battle. Its firing rate eclipses the dual pistols and getting dual submachineguns is double that destructive power. Taking that into the final fight is a great escalation of stakes, but since it’s not the primary gun it’s lost at the end of the level along with the metal detector.

Less Gun

There is so much interaction across this city. While it’s filled with a wide variety of people acting as decoration (don’t worry, your bullets only hurt robots) a large number of people are there to give weird ass quests or just comment on you doing sick jumps or eating a sandwich. When you find the other members of the team they head back to the apartment and you can have so much dialogue with them.

^{a nice mid-fight chat with a friend.}

Even the convos with the robot invaders are fun as hell, they all get their own personalities and aren’t as robotic as you’d think. Even the final boss gets a good amount of dialogue over the multi-stage fight. I’m looking at hopping back in later to play more. The regular grunt enemies you fight don’t get any dialogue, but at least they’ve got a wide enough variety to never be tiring.

Dang that all sounds real good!

It does! Go check it out over on Steam, it’s like $10 right now and absolutely worth it. You can also check out the creator bubby darkstar’s bluesky account right over here. I regretfully didn’t talk too much about the great writing, but anything I say would spoil great gags that I haven’t already turned into a screenshot. Give it a play!

Everything is Online

I hate to say it, but I’m getting fuckin’ old. I’ve been on the internet since my early teens, so that’s a whole life lived on this place. Over that time, we’ve moved a bunch of things as a society over to internet-friendly formats. Digital distribution became the main distribution format for games and movies, with physical releases either getting de-emphasized or foregone entirely. This wasn’t too much of a concern back in the 90’s/00’s, there were physical copies we could buy that couldn’t be taken away. For digital formats we had these things called Files that would end with .mp3 or .ogg and could be used on any device that supported these common formats. My favorite music player before I got my first drive-based MP3 player was an MP3 CD player, where I could burn MP3s to a CD-RW and then play them on what looked to be a regular portable CD player. Unlike regular CDs, the songs never skipped when the player got jostled, and you could fit so many songs on there for cheap! It was extremely reliable all through high school and always ready to belt out tunes.

We’re in the future now. Blockbuster failed to predict the future, passed on buying Netflix, and is now a tombstone in retail history. Computer cases rarely ever come with 5 1/4” bays for disc drives. Cars don’t bother coming with CD players built in anymore, their consoles replaced with screen slabs that will hook up to Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and Google Play Music. Actually wait, that last one is dead and rolled into YouTube Music. Which leads me to…

Everything is Online

It’s all up in the fucking cloud. It’s immaterial data both in presence and ownership. The money you pay is not to be guaranteed usage rights of an item, but to be granted usage rights of what’s currently selected in an ever-changing catalog. This used to have a physical-media analogue, the Disney Vault, where Disney would not release and reprint VHS tapes of their catalog all the time. They’d artificially stop printing movies for long stretches of time, raising the value of any tapes that were already sold and preserving sales of future runs. If you wanted to watch Bambi, you better hope you remembered to buy a copy when the VHSs were first dropped or knew someone who did (and if you wanted to watch The Black Cauldron, you were shit outta luck). Now, you can’t lean on a neighbor to have bought it first.

Even independent works aren’t entirely free of the trappings of online services. Soundcloud is popular for sharing individual songs or albums, but there’s no guarantee that Soundcloud will exist tomorrow and all those songs will be gone in an instant. Just recently itch.io got walloped by payment processors and had to remove visibility from thousands of works. Online presences are not permanent and never have been, but even moreso 20 years ago. We’ve had a long stretch of time where the internet persisted in much the same state and social networks didn’t live and die on the regular. Now people are losing these online cloud storage and sharing solutions, and because their stuff was never distributed as a file or physical media, it’s gone forever.

Wait until the day Imgur dies, that’s going to be an armageddon.

Getting Less Online

I also found myself getting reliant on a bunch of online services over the years. I used Google Play Music to backup my at-the-time MP3 collection and make it playable anywhere on my phone. That’s now dead and rolled into YouTube Music…somewhere, I can’t recall. When I open YouTube Music it’s not emphasized, mostly their vibe-based auto-generated playlists are. Only recently did I try to find where my offline MP3 collection was, and realized that the newest storage I had it on was a 15-year old hard drive, last touched maybe 10 years ago. Oops.

If I hadn’t found that drive, and had Google gone “yeah we dont need to store mp3s in fucking youtube music lol”, that would’ve been a whole cache of music that I grew up with gone in an instant. Borrowed albums from friends and family, random tracks found all around the internet, the latest Gundam opening song from a buddy on AIM, it’s not extremely extensive but it’s got good memories. Finding that drive made me realize that I stopped the regular data migration that used to happen from device to device, from site to site. Sometimes stuff would be lost, but there could be someone else out there that had still downloaded it long ago.

So, I copied that music off to some network backup storage I recently set up and then got myself an MP3 player. It’s not a complex one, it takes a large microSD card that I’ll never run out of space on, but other than that it just plays individual songs, folders, or playlists. It’s also very small at about 1.5” x 2”, perfect for when I’m walking or biking about. Going out and about with it has been great, just digging through folders of music to play or hitting all random and getting whatever chaos comes up. So much stuff I hadn’t heard in years like the full Digitalism Idealism album came back up and threw me back into the past at an uncomfortable speed.

I’ve also been going through my DVD collection and backing up as much as I can. What with the Warner disc rot occurring, I want to make sure I’ve at least got all those movies backed up elsewhere so I don’t lose them forever. Hell, some stuff I won’t ever be able to find again because no streaming service could ever work out the rights or find it profitable/notable, or might be “remastered” and changed from the original like the Simpsons getting forced into 16:9. If you just want a fat load of storage for backing up your physical media, look into getting a NAS. I’m set up with an effective 21TB RAID10 network storage that I can just whatever files into from Windows or even my Steam Deck. You’ll have a local unending cache of stuff that is yours to do with, save any horrible physical events occurring to the storage.

Can we go further?

Oh you bet. I never got into Audible, but I have had an ongoing ebook collection. Calibre came to the rescue and collected up all of the scattered ebooks I had into one list. Now that I’ve got all of my purchased books from Amazon and Humble Bundle offline, I can browse through them easily either on my computer or via a calibre web service on my NAS. Sure it’s still networked, but that’s only home use. If I still need to I can take those ebook files into another device. Even then, I’ve been picking up a few physical books like I Am Error and going through them every now and then. I don’t read nearly as many physical books as I used to, but it’s nice to again.

That’s books covered, now what about just straight up Wikipedia? What if one day Wikipedia gets fucking murdered or Freedom Censored or overrun with AI-generated bullshit? Thanks to a Kiwix flatpak, I now have a local copy of Wikipedia that’s 110 GB (yes that small!) running on my NAS. Even in the case of the internet going down I’ll still have access to a somewhat-reliable source of knowledge. I even threw in a few other wikis they had available like the ZDoom wiki for some extra fun on top. If the nationwide network infrastructure ever collapses, I’ll still be able to keep making Doom maps.

I’m working out what else I want to have backed up as an offline copy. I’ve got Plex for stuff I’ve ripped (including whole TV series I had to name individual episodes of) and while it can do music I’m interested in seeing if I can set up a Shoutcast radio of the music I’ve got.

So, how's it going?

Pretty well! The MP3 player’s got a rechargeable battery via USB-C that lasts forever, a two hour long bike trip will be far from putting a dent into the charge. It also has bluetooth, which is handy in the car since I can also control previous/next track from the steering wheel. Just having a little physical device with physical buttons has been great. Being able to blindly adjust volume or change tracks while it’s in your pocket is an almost unnoticed but welcome boon. It’s Bandcamp Friday today and I bought a few albums that’ll be going straigh tonto that MP3 player. I’ll shout them out at the end of this piece.

Doing this has had a bit of a calming effect. A lot of shit sucks right now and we’re slowly losing access to more and more of the Circuses half of society, so to be able to have something that’s always there as long as you don’t beat it with hammers is grounding. Give it a shot, find some cheap MP3 player, throw in a big SD card, and find some music to put on. Get wired headphones too, don’t futz with wireless connections. Play all the songs and set the play mode to Random. You’ve got your own personally-tailored offline music algorithm now, and you won’t lose it when the company gets bought out by VC. Enjoy it.

Postscript

I really hope I’ve had a coherent-enough stream of consciousness to encourage someone to try out a standalone MP3 player. It really has been a fun thing to have and I just wanna’ share that fun with others. I also wanna’ share the stuff I bought on Bandcamp Friday today:

• James Kochalka - Ghost Walker, Hyperpoop is great and Everyone Get Happy Now was made using Electroplankton.
• Unwoman - Uncovered No. 9, this is my first introduction to Unwoman and it’s excellent so far. Dollhouse is a great track.
• JER - Death of the Heart, I picked up the vinyl ‘cause I know JER’s stuff from Skatune Network and they do a great job. It’s a pre-order but there’s three tracks out right now if you want a sample.
• SAINT 📀 GOLDEN - Discography, found them because of InfiniteBrians’ excellent artwork on the BOUNCIER /// SPIKIER album and decided to pick it all up.

Go grab an album and load it up on that newfangled device you went and got. Who knows if Bandcamp will be here tomorrow.

Cacowards (we got one!)

Cacowards 2023 was back in December 2023, and “The Diseases, and Casualties this year being 1632” won Runner-Up! There were loads of great maps last year, and our community pack getting picked for inclusion was very heartwarming. The biggest shoutouts go out to granggg, A.o.D., Weird Sandwich, and LeschNyhan, for who this pack would never have happened without their amazing maps.

On top of that, mycrimes.wad also received a mention in the super-secret myhouse.wad section of the Cacowards! Thanks to Scuba Steve for including it, it was incredibly fun to make.

New Map: Peeballs Anomaly

“Peeballs Anomaly” is a The Ultimate Doom E1M8 replacement map. It’s vanilla compatible and contains a bit more challenge than the standard E1M8 provides while keeping the layout mostly the same. Mostly. Kinda’. There’s lots more decorations, enemies, and secrets to be found here! Speaking of secrets, be sure to take a peek at the automap every now and then. I released this back in December 2023 as a bit, and it’s still a very good bit.

Also a quick update on Doom By Numbers, it is still very much In Progress. Each map having its own unique music track and gimmick means it’s going to take a lot more effort than my usual maps, but I’m hoping to get that one out the door sometime this decade.

Homebrew NES Development

I’ve dabbled in NES development before, but it was very much dabbling. My first attempt was years ago, making an NES port of my first jam game Missile Champions using Shiru’s neslib C library. I got a good amount done for the title screen and car selection, but the actual gameplay would corrupt within a few seconds. I had no idea what was going wrong, so I set that project back down and didn’t look at it again.

Fast forward to about two months ago when I found the Pikuma NES Programming Course which helped explain a lot of concepts and pitfalls you can encounter while working with the NES. Now I’m back on the homebrew train and working on a port of another game to get my NES sea legs. It’s not Missile Champions, and it may fall into Copyright Infringement, but if I do release it I’ll have a lot of graphics to update so that I don’t get turbosued. Still, it’s been a lot of fun to work with! I was even able to make a level editor in Godot that exports level bytecode for use in the ROM.

I’ll have another post detailing that progress later on (please hold me to this, i’ve been doing it all on bluesky), but for now here’s a picture of the level editor I worked extremely hard on.

Socials: Speaking of Bluesky...

I’ve got an account over there! Look at my posts! The Bluesky butterfly is also replacing the Twitter bird I had in the header links since I don’t really go there anymore. I’m leaving the account up to prevent anyone else from grabbing the handle, but don’t expect me to reply on Twitter or anything.

I am also over on Mastodon but I’m not posting there much. That’s only because I have a terrible attention span though.

Before I forget, take a look at the GAMEDEV WEBRING over on the right side menu! Rainbow Cemetery has been growing the list of sites included in the webring, and it’s a fun bit of old internet that’ll let you find other fun web sites. It may also eat your balls.

Will there be more posts this year?

Maybe! I’ve got a couple projects in the pipeline, including the NES game and a couple of Godot projects. I’m also sitting on a new release of Palette Studio with functional dithering, but I need to make a proper post for that. And probably a full subsite too. There’s a lot to talk about, and hopefully I remember to put those into words on a more regular basis.

I’ve planned out 10 maps for this WAD, each one having a specific gimmick based on the number of the mapslot the map is in. The first map’s theme is based on the number 1, second map is based on 2, and so forth and so on. I’ll even be arranging the music tracks for the maps!

Planned Maplist:

• MAP01: 1 Tough Cookie (Music: “You, and Them”)
• MAP02: 2 Timing
• MAP03: 3 Imps
• MAP04: 4 Way Stop
• MAP05: 5 Fingers
• MAP06: 6 Golden Coins
• MAP07: 7 Ate Nine
• MAP08: MSP8
• MAP09: 9 Lives
• MAP10: 10 and Two

There’s still a long way to go, but I have finished the first map for NaNoWADMo ‘23. You can grab the first map over at itch.io, download it here!

Got any feedback? Post a comment on the itch.io page or over in the Doomworld thread.

Like BATHDOOM, this is a short shitpost-y map. Unlike BATHDOOM, it covers a stretch of insane time in the US’s history - but does still involve a bathroom. Punch the crimes away, collect evidence, and maybe you won’t get arrested?!?

It uses Doom II, and is made for GZDoom (only tested on 4.10.0), so if you’ve got those handy then you’re all good to run around a bathroom and stare at yourself in the mirror.

Well go on, go download it!

The Diseases, and Casualties this year being 1632

Back in January, I helped assemble (and made a map for) an awesome Something Awful Forums community Doom 2 map pack. It’s called The Diseases, and Casualties this year being 1632 and is based on a list of various maladies afflicting London in 1632. The amazing mappers (shoutouts to Granggg, A.o.D, LeschNyhan, and WeirdSandwich!) came up with their own interpretations of the causes in the list like Palsie, Quinsies, and Made Away Themselves. My map is MAP02: Teeth, and I had a blast making the map! It’s Boom-compatible, so grab PrBoom+ or DSDA Doom and give it a crack!

Woah the new Zelda is so good

That ate a month of my spare time, but the weird shit I built was worth it.

Did you know Ableton Live 11 works on a Steam Deck?

I spent a solid night over the past weekend trying to get this working, and eventually I succeeded. But the problem was I couldn’t just run the installer through Steam, I had to use Bottles to install it and I couldn’t even use version 11.3. I had to install Version 11.2 offline, then let that update to 11.3. At least it’s working now and I can hook up a MIDI keyboard to the Deck Dock for portable tune jammin’.

Also I’ve been doing a lot of musical tooling around but at some point I need to hunker down and makes some actual tunes. That’ll be a brand new sidebar dropdown when that happens.

Site Layout Update

The header bar is a bit lopsided at the moment, I will be sure to make the icons symmetrical before they all slide off the precariously-unbalanced shelf.

The most recent post is now displayed on the front of the site, with the rest shoved in a box called “Past Posts” over on the sidebar. The sidebar also got some extra attention, all my games and maps I’ve made or worked on are now in collapsable menus.

The site’s getting a bit more tidied up! Now that I can actually make proper news posts I am sure I will keep the site more up-to-date (i hope) (i really hope).

Also please be sure to check out all my socials, which are now up top on a neat lookin’ header bar. And download some games why dont’cha!