Oatmeal

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chickens

half way through 2026 so here are a few reading recs

my love of (addiction to?) rss outweighed my loathing server maintenance, so, I plugged a screen into my 11 year old Mac mini and got it cooking again. A power outage a few weeks ago rendered it kinda dazed and confused enough that I couldn’t just reboot it over and over again like I usually do to get it to reset to a (mostly) working state (yes, I know that UPS batteries exist but they so noisy,…

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Electrokrill

Don’t comfort me by wizard’s craft, Seeing twice a witch’s eye spells are ready to my hand, and needn’t further lye. The wizards beg dusty books, alas they haven’t roots nor bone. Cut out parchment, bleached, knowing no growth beside tone. A wizard sings! Songs of mud. A witch, the dirt-dance. Dancing tonight with us and together dirt-dance. Oh listless, listen! Know what witch bare truths loudly.…

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I took this a few nights ago with dog. She’s 14 and slowing down a bit, so doesn’t make it all the way to the woods or the cemetery anymore. Now we are exploring the area around the huge combo elementary school, middle school, and high school. Walking this way, we heard so many people. Lots of our neighbors were gathered in garages and on decks watching the World Cup. Every once in a while it…

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Tide pooling. Rock hopping.

Iceland

Whenever a social media whatever lets me set a header image I pretty much always use a photo of moss that I took from when my partner and I visited Iceland about a decade ago. We just went back and we had a blast. Birding took us way off the beaten path, as did my years long obsession with Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss .

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In reply to: The output doesn't matter

In reply to: The output doesn't matter Over on Lambda Create, Will writes that the output isn’t the part that matters. It has never been the part that matters for any Craftsman in the pursuit of any craft. Aristotle, who he leans on to make this case, agrees, and so would Emma Goldman (who I’m kinda becoming a stan for lately?) …though she’d take that claim somewhere Aristotle can’t follow.…

kiki

To hasten hest. Behest , behave, behold, come now — meet kiki . Left from over a machine god awoken from the millennium broken. Designate, determinate, uxn, bqn, k, q, alike but not you — seek kiki . Out past the moon-sea see-moon, where the void-knights ride dead-leviathans between the thousand moons, and where prayer-core robots kneel in libation-hymn, and spell-fire traces orbital arcs through…

The Seed Beneath the Snow

Jimmy Miller wrote a lovely response to Sean Goedecke’s “ Seeing like a Software Company ,” which you know is itself riffing on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State . I loved Jimmy’s response, and it felt to me like it walked right up to the edge of a different conclusion, but didn’t make it all of the way there. I want to directly point at and name the thing I see in Jimmy’s response: Jimmy is…

Wrap up - December Adventure, March 2026

The December Adventure in March has come and gone. It was chill and good, but also maybe not chill enough? A week is a very short period of time, and I saw a lot of folks mentioning that they were stressed or guilty at not being able to find the time or energy to adventure. I successfully got a WASM version of Goblin Farmer cooking, so now all you need to play is a browser. No pesky downloading…

Bamagotchi

Beware thunderous ides! Keep them at bay, Make cute guys. In honor of March December Adventure, and Marchagotchi, I’d like to introduce Bamagotchi ! Bamagotchi is a mobile-friendly toy where you can make your own virtual pets by using a HyperTalk-ish language of my own concoction (so sorry). It’s kind of a live-coding sandbox where you can tweak and poke the code to animate your pixel-art blob…

Goblin Farmer in early access

I’m releasing a game into “ early access!” The game is very much not done, but I’ve been working on it for about a year, and think it is time to get some other folks’ opinion of it and to make sure it, like, you know, runs alright. Goblin Farmer is somewhere between Pikmin, Caves of Qud, and Stardew Valley. It is a cli-based game, but the rendering layer is well and completely decoupled from…

Olympians

Today I realized that the Winter Olympics are almost over. This was a strange realization because I’d totally missed that they’d even started. My first job in “ tech” was with the Olympics and Paralympics so for about 7 years my entire life was configured around the cadence of national and international qualifying events, and then the actual Olympic Games…my winter coat is even from the games in…

December Adventure, March 2026

Hear ye, hear ye! Let it be made decree! The week starting with the Ides of March, Sunday March 15th, will be a December Adventure week! So far, every adventure has taken place in December, and rolled across an entire month, but the times have been laden with miasma most dire, so let us together adventure for a special week. December Adventure, March 15 - 21, 2026.

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Went beach.

Snakes snakes snakes, a week note

I’ve been working on an ill advised project. This project will have to be done in many parts. Part one of many is done, and I’m debating if I should share it, or if I should wait to get the whole thing done. But now, a smash cut…I started this post off as a normal post, but now that it is an RSS sickos only post… Check this shit out! I recently read about the $1 unistroke recognizer , and…

Constraint propagation for fun

I’ve been playing the very good Squeakross this weekend. It is adorable and the aesthetics are absolutely immaculate, but I’ve found the actual picross puzzles to be a point of frustrating friction in the game when compared to the picross-style puzzles in my bicross game. Picross puzzles, aka nonograms , can relatively easily have ambiguous solutions. Because the hints only tell you how many…

lutul

I made another camera toy. This one follows pico cam , the other pico cam , lut cam , and leibovitz . This newest one is called lutul . And, while it isn’t my most feature-rich camera toy, I think it is likely my most polished camera toy. As the name kinda suggests, lutul lets you take or upload photos and then apply some pre-made lut ( look up table ) filters to those photos. The filters in there…

Bicross

I made a game. I’ve written about it in passing a few times, but here is an honest to goodness intro to it! Bicross is 3 versions of the same basic game, Bicross , is a zen-mode version of the game. Bicross RPG , is an RPG version of the game where you can earn power ups, and build up hearts and stuff. Bicross Daily , is very similar to the RPG version, but everyone who plays on a given day is…

trees; week note

A photo in lieu of week notes.

being goblin

In response to my most recent week notes , Adrian shared this lovely quote on goblins with me. It comes from my favorite game designer, Avery Alder , being goblin is a way of flagging that you want to include people not in spite of their sloppiness and uneven emotional growth, but because of it — because goblins come as they are, and they grow in community with one another. Being goblin means…

no beautiful things

There’s this line in The Hobbit that haunts me. For one thing, it is part of a wider problematic habit running throughout all of Tolkien that, moving in the mythopoetic space, leads to these sweeping statements that define or collapse an entire culture into a single stroke. It seems to me to be like the most damning thing you could say about a culture, though: Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and…

2026.01 week notes

Will I succeed in making week notes a weekly activity this year? Only time will tell! …also, I mean…I feel like the answer is already “ no” and that is fine, but anyways. I don’t usually take the holidays off from work, it is a nice time to catch up on stuff while still being able to hang out with my family who are all off from school and work. I’ve moved where I work in the house so that it is…

December Adventure, 2025

At the end of my #DecemberAdventure, I re-learned what I learned last year: that 20 minutes a day can be surprisingly productive, that I am happiest in writing code when it’s just for me or for a small group of people I know personally. @wraith@phantasmal.work I find stats and data tracking antithetical to the experience of feeling joy, so I’ve got no bona fide numbers about this, but this year’s…

Year in review, 2025

Here, an obligatory end of year wrap up kinda post that, as I started to write in what I assume is the classical platonic form for all blogs wherein I reflect thoughtfully on stuff I read, or games I played, or projects I twiddled at, and what not, I became overwhelmed by the act of creating a kinda cursory and meandering review, because, what, in this run on sentence, do I have to contribute that…

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Sticker party, November

Some random thoughts including how the band Imagine Dragons is kinda like Metal for kids; distributing apps, even without involving Apple at all, is deeply annoying on macOS; Pokemon ZA is fun, but I think that I’m a turn-based girlie at heart; my partner has been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately, it has been a lot of fun for me to watch, and hair-pullingly frustrating for our nearly…

Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer. What I landed at was inelegant and I eventually panicked and found a watch list online. BUT ! BUT ! What is a blog for if not do overs!? Also, what follows has literally no information in it about where to…