So the cool stuff I got going on...

I just finished Big Bad Game-a-thon's accept list. Every year I sit down with my co-chair and a bottle of brandy (which I don't touch, personally, that's all Mr. Co-chair) and make the schedule. We're doing that tomorrow. It's going to be a very good marathon.

I'm starting this Choro-Q stream project probably tonight if I can get my brain to stop spinning in my head.

I'm excited to start planning this serial show I want to do. It may change shape before I say any more about it; who knows.

It's all cool. I got plenty to keep busy with.

So with that said, I'll say in public what I've been thinking for awhile: I want to resurrect Jank Science.

If you don't know what that is, well it was neat, and died because I couldn't help care for it at a pivotal time; among other fixable issues.

How I do this will take time to develop, because it's not my thing to just decide is coming back. It might be different; it might be a BBG sub-show; it might involve the former people. I need to ask, and give time to decide, and plan.

But I'm going to do something to keep a project burning. I have to stay in motion.

I just quit Kusogrande.

I might officiate their tiebreaker round because I promised I would and did all of the work around it and it's all in my head. But that's just "Finishing obligations" because I don't want my departure to be entirely proximal to their problems.

It has been my observation that LLM-generated contributions, either in material or in meta/description, take longer to process in exchange for generally lower quality and accept rate.

As the maintainer of multiple projects, I prioritize my time and resources in that role. I have experience and insight into my charges, and am able to draw trends in quality and turnaround effort in contributions to my projects better than anyone.

So it's perfectly reasonable, on a completely objective level, to say "I will not expend the extra effort for lower quality here" and forbid these kind of contributions.

...and if that doesn't work for you I'll unpack this giant box labelled "Every other reason why AI slop sucks"

I would really love a cutesy toy car "Beat it to own it" car-collector racing game... Choro-Q HG 2 / Road Trip Adventure has most of the DNA of what I want but you just kind of collect car bodies that don't do anything for you, not expand a garage.

If the rival cars in TXR weren't just objectively worse than building up your own, and you had a TXR that was just rival cars, that'd be kind of neat.

The Hot Wheels Unleashed games are close on another axis, but the cars don't really distinctualize themselves on the track, just looks. So I stuck with one the entire game.

Tomorrow I need to have a meeting with the BBG staff but somewhere in there I'm going to start the Choro-Q project.

Unless I'm too tired. I'm so very, very cooked from the past couple of weeks.

But... I have the big nasty stuff over the finish line. I can probably relax for a little bit before BBG.

Ah great. I was going to pick up CICADAMATA now that it released and there's this circular thread of "The dev is a Nazi" that just feeds into a source loop. I finally managed to find Anything At All outside that loop and it's a megathread on Twitter I cannot read because of their absolutely desperate parasitic login walls and algorithm bullshit.

What I can read is arguments of "That's not the dev saying that stuff" and people posting screenshots that may or may not be doctored trying to prove it is; we're so far down the rabbit hole the point is lost.

Watching an artist getting publicly dragged over accusations of AI use; people rifling through their portfolio and posting super zoomed in shots of their low-res for-public-release JPGs and claiming the most minor of compression artifacts is "AI slop noise" and the tiniest errors are "Warped bullshit that cannot come from a human mind"

and all I can think is if this is legit, and looking at it I'm inclined to believe it is, this must be the most terrible feeling in the world to have people look at your work and go "This has to be from a shitty machine because it's too incoherent to be from an artist"

That's how you lose artists forever.

I guess the Arch packager for Ovenmediaengine finally gave up trying to get them to stop monkeypatching core system libs. The package has been delisted from the Arch repos.

Welp... that... sucks. Now I get to gut my own PKGBUILD from now on I guess.

I leaned back in my chair, looked down, and saw a Cat-6 cable hanging from my cable guard, unconnected.

Huh. Everything on my desk has wifi disabled and works...

Maybe... I don't investigate this... I'm scared of the answer I'll find.

I need to teach people the "Have a million plans if you people you manage fall through" part of leading something is supposed to be quiet. Sitting in front of the person with a task and talking about how good you are at management because you have a plan if this person fucks up is othering and belittling as hell.

But this is how certain things function.

Heckin' CICADAMATA" and Funi Raccoon Game are being sold as a bundle called the "They/them ass!!! bundle"

This is immaculate

I was thinking a lot about "What content/critique ratio would be required to republish a report that the original author is trying to have removed from history, before that author gives up on trying to assert copyright on it because they will obviously lose on fair use grounds"

...and then I remembered cases like that are not about merit, they're about wearing the defendant down until they give up.

Preparing for the second friend-group AP async and I go "Sure I'll toss in Aria of Sorrow with drops shuffled" and only after I put my yaml file in do I remember AoS's drop-rates are hilariously bad and LCK is broken and does about 1/100th of what it should.

So I broke out the RAM editor and set my luck to 12,000 and now I have reasonable drop rates. Not good. Just reasonable.

What a broken stat.

Cor, the overlay and graphic design for this year's big Dota tournament is...

Really, really ugly. Wow.

Gemini seems to be under the mistaken impression that I made Illersia in Lustra, a Korean indie DOS game made in like 1996 that I showcased in a speedrun marathon once ever.

I've had three people ask vee about this.

I don't use Mastodon so I don't have a horse in that race, but from the outside it seems to vee that part of the outrage is that we're trying to build a world free of platforms and software devs Just Changing Shit because they say so, and once in awhile MastoDev drags us back into it.

There's a difference between improvements and "An entity outside of your control has decided everything has changed overnight" and maybe this is something you have to be a certain breed of old to have seen in its day fully in context because everyone just "Refreshes" on a whim now.

Met up with some people at the mall for lunch and on the way out we passed by this little curio shop that always has something different. One of us had leftovers in a takeout box so one of us had to stand outside holding it.

It was my turn to hold it and another person was standing out with vee when we spied the most amazing snail plush on a high shelf. It was like 2 feet around with a prismatic gossamer fabric shell and we were both commenting on how "Friend-shaped" it was; just as a clerk hopped up on a ladder and took it down.

And I went "Noooooo the snail!" and made a big deal of it, just as one of the friends came out with the snail in a bag going "Hey guess what I found in there?!"

I love synchronicity.

Concept vectorization is something an extremely neurotypical person would probably design that explodes in a hellish fireball the moment I go "Oh yeah I link Perl and Lua in my brain because they're both yellow, bumpy textured languages" and no one knows what the fuuuuuuck I mean by that but I am 100% certain in it.

Giving up figuring out where I need a - in this jinja template and just injecting {{- \n -}}

This templating language is ass compared to ERB.