Blog
Putting images in frames with nicely-formatted captions like in my last two posts is a bit labor intensive on Mataroa. There's no good way to do it natively in markdown; you can use MD tables, but they require the presence of a header row. Good for some use cases, but not all. A subset of HTML is supported, including <figure> and < figcaption >, but these always center the caption below the image;…
When I was in high school, I had the bright idea that I could save a screenshot of a Winamp MilkDrop visualizer in progress, and post it to my DeviantArt account as if it were an abstract digital painting I made. Not my "artwork", but a representative sample of MilkDrop's output. Abstract psychedelic colors and patterns. Via Xanthine Complex on Wikipedia . It was still early enough days on the…
I understand the impulse to say "nothing's impossible". We've been raised on stories about heroes triumphing over impossible odds. Our scientific understanding of what's possible has greatly expanded in the last couple centuries. Things once thought impossible have become possible at historically unprecedented speed. "Nothing's impossible" is a good heuristic, because if someone tells you…
In the late 20th century, there was a gorilla named Koko who made waves by displaying an apparent ability to talk to humans in sign language. This would've had shocking implications for life as we know it, but the science determined that what she was doing wasn't actually "using language". Through reinforcement learning, she had come to realize that mimicking the hand signals of her human handlers…
Thanks to everyone who's contributed to the fundraiser so far. I'm not out of the woods yet, but you've made a big difference. As a donation incentive, anyone who contributes $5 or more will get a coupon code for all the paid bonus content I've released on my itch.io page . (everyone who's donated since Thursday has already been contacted; let me know if you didn't receive an email.) All of my…
Hello, friends. If you enjoy this blog or any of my other work, now would be an excellent time to support it. July is a rough month for my family; our insurance deductible reset on July 1, and we're ill enough that we've had to pay pretty much all of it in the past 30 days. There are meds we've had to go without to buy food. We're going to struggle to make rent this month. Also, my shoes are…
I like bowling. I haven't been in over a decade, but it's probably my second favorite 3D physics game after Katamari Damacy . I wish I could bowl more often. But as much as I enjoy the physical act of bowling, I think the scoring system has some major problems. The first time I ever went bowling was a field trip for gym class in Junior High. I'm not an athletically-inclined person because I have…
August is coming up, which means Blaugust , a challenge in which bloggers try to post 31 times in August, is also coming up. I participated last year and won the gold award, meaning I posted 25-30 times. I was two away from the rainbow diamond award. I also burned out hard at the end of the challenge and didn't post anything for a month and a half. I don't think doing Blaugust is fully to blame, I…
I knew it was legal to sell fake medicine in the US. It sucks, but "homeopathy" has been around forever here, and the "medicine" is just sugar pills, so it's not going to actively hurt anyone (outside of scamming them out of a few dollars.) Our government decided banning them isn't a hill worth dying on, so these fake remedies have been grandfathered into the culture. I accept this. What I didn't…
(note: this post uses <details> and <summary> tags to hide the riddle answers. If you're viewing in a reader that doesn't support this, click here to open in a browser.) A riddle is like a puzzle, except it's purely for the benefit of the person telling the riddle. It's not designed to be fun to solve, or even particularly clever. The only satisfaction in a riddle is for the person telling it,…
If you put a creative work out into the world and someone has a very negative reaction to it, I find that often the best thing to say is: Thanks for the feedback, sorry it wasn't for you. Now if they made some factually untrue statement, you should push back on it, 1 and if they're using the critique as cover to make personal attacks, feel free to tell them to fuck off. But if they're giving you a…
It wasn't always like this. In the early days, video games were for everyone. Games like Pong and Space Invaders could be enjoyed by players of any age. Pac-Man fever wasn't only an affliction of the young and old, everyone was susceptible. If anything, early arcade games were more likely to be played by adults, because you were more likely to find them in smoky bars than any place a child might…
Note: The literal first pause button was probably on a tape recorder in the 1930s or 40s, but this post is about video games. I was playing some Caverns of Mars for the Atari Home Computer and noticed, through trial-and-error, that you can press the H key (for "hold" or "halt", I expect) to pause the game. I thought this was nifty. Caverns of Mars came out in 1981, so it was still early days for…
I thought about doing something for Manifesto Jam 2026 , but I was having trouble coming up with video game opinions I felt strongly enough about to publish in manifesto form. Then I had the idea, "what if I wrote my manifesto in text adventure form?" It seemed like a strong concept: I've wanted to make a proper text adventure for a long time. It's a format I've toyed with as long as I've been…
In reference to these results for this survey This poem is a mnemonic. The mnemonic is used to answer the question "how many days are in this month?" If it's February, you're never going to be asking that question, because you already know how many days are in February. (Or if you don't, you need to look up whether the current year is a leap year, or find a different mnemonic; the poem won't help…
Still hard at work on the new project. Also been playing lots of Wizardry ; I started playing the first one. As in, the first first one, on the Apple ][ . I'm keeping a little play diary of my time with it; not a full-blown "Let's Play", I'm not documenting every detail of my time with it, but it might still be of interest to some. Right now I've just been posting it on fedi: Day 1 Day 2 and the…
The deluge of spam has become unbearable. You can still contact me at bluelander@tutanota.com. Sorry for the recent interruption in posting. I've been working on something big. Should hopefully be able to let you know more soon.
What the heck even is time?! April 13 was the one-year anniversary of the start of my full-time Linux journey, and I haven't talked about it in awhile. Well, I'm happy to report that no news is good GNUs. It's remained the most stable Linux experience I've ever had and it's not even a contest. I've barely felt the need to shut down or restart my computer: I put it into "hibernate" when I go to bed…
My caption "Now I wish I didn't eat my camera." This was a tough one. I thought about it for several days before I settled on my caption. Every joke about the cat being the moon or a UFO seemed too obvious, or too difficult to make snappy. I debated going with a UFO-themed caption, since I figured most people would interpret it as a moon. I almost submitted “Unidentified Aerial Phe-paw-menon? I…
The Slop Cop is an online computer program that claims to identify prose that either is or resembles text generated by a large language model. For funsies, I thought I'd show it yesterday's blog post and see what it had to say. In this short 600-word post, it identified nine (9) spots where it felt my writing resembles output from an LLM. Ridiculous! I don't fuck with slop generators, in fact I go…
When I was a kid, orange juice concentrate was a freezer staple. It's just a tube of highly concentrated juice you can mix with 3 parts water and have a pitcher of ice-cold orange juice ready to go. It's a simple but brilliant idea: why pay for the inconvenience of a bunch of extra water when you can supply your own? Well, I recently learned that you can also get apple juice the same way, which…
My caption “I'm trying to to stop doomscrolling, would you mind switching it to the moon?” A million obvious jokes about gym etiquette, form critique, and sexual harassment immediately came to mind. After rejecting those, I started thinking about why the man might be there. What led to this situation? Assuming this is just part of the normal gym-going experience, why might the woman be annoyed…
I wasn't sure if I'd post about this every week, but I guess as long as I keep participating, I might as well. Every Monday I'll post my caption, what I think about the finalists, and whether I'm happy with my performance. What is "funny"? In my previous post , I doubted the possibility of writing a truly funny caption, but I didn't really get into why or how I'm defining "funny", so I thought I…
⚠️ content warning: hypothetical suicidal ideation in the abstract, evopsych nonsense People in the "Effective Altruist" (EA) and longtermist subcultures (and other members of the "rationalist community" ) like to play this game in which they assign a numerical value to human happiness. They say that happiness can be described on a scale from -100 to 100, where 100 is the theoretical happiest a…
Every week the New Yorker holds a contest to write a caption for one of their cartoons. I'd like to participate in this more, because it's a good creative exercise, but knowledge of its existence always seems to exit my brain. It's good that the contest is only once a week, the infrequency gives it some weight, but once I submit a caption, I have no reason to think about it for an entire week, so…
I finished Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for the NES today. Heck of a game. It'll be in the next batch of Game Badges , and its rating will be 4❤️/5. It's messy and unpolished, but its foundation is a rock-solid platform adventure game. When I posted about finishing it, I remarked that it's "probably a top 10 or 15 NES game for me". But I wondered how true that was, so I looked at my master list and…
        Doors of Doom (5❤️/5) DoReMi Fantasy (4❤️/5) Ever Oasis (no rating) Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (1❤️/5) RPG Maker 2003 (5💖/5)
Finishing Hero's Last Hurrah was a revelatory experience for me. I'm always proud of what I make (the stuff that I put out for the public, anyway) but it's always with qualifications. This is a good puzzle game—if you like this kind of puzzle game. This is a fun short story—if you're okay with intentionally light tropey fantasy fiction. This is a cool little experience—if you accept the…
Sorry for the radio silence here on the blog, I've been laser-focused on finishing and bug-testing my entry for the Cookie Cutter RM2k3 jam . It's called Hero's Last Hurrah . It's a little adventurey RPG with light combat that should take 1-2 hours to complete, with optional bonus objectives. It should play fine in a browser on any modern-ish computer, 1 but if you're getting slowdown I recommend…
I have a good excuse this time, though: Faraway Times, a game enthusiast and indie dev I follow on the fediverse, started an RPG Maker game jam and it's a perfect fit for me. If you're unfamiliar with game jams, it's an informal competition in which individuals or teams work to make a game within an intentional set of constraints in a limited time frame. It's a friendly competition and there are…
Progress is still being made on my cable station , albeit much more slowly than when the idea was fresh and I was full of energy. I'm about a third done filling out the schedule we, but I may decide to rebalance some of what I have later. It's brain-intensive work, trying to not only remember enough videos but also thinking aboit the right order to put them in, and manually filling out the…
Since my first compilation review was so unpopular, I thought I’d alienate whatever readers I have left by doing an even longer one. Just kidding, I’m doing it because it’s fun! For me! Visionaire No. 53 is the 53rd “issue” of Visionaire , an American art and fashion periodical. #53 was published on five 12" vinyl records in a sleek black UFO-shaped capsule. Each record is a picture disc featuring…
Going to have to neglect the blog this week because a big project came into my head instead. Do you remember in my last post where I was talking about all the cool websites showing up in my referrer logs? Well, one of the sites I found there is msx.gay , where I discovered their nifty HTML cable guide . If you grew up with cable TV in the era with the Prevue Guide (Later TV Guide Channel ) this…
I've been using CX file explorer on Android I think since day one? I'm sure one of the first things I did when I got my first smartphone was holler "what do you mean there's no file manager??" and search the web to figure out wtf I was supposed to do. CX popped up as a recommendation and I've been happy with it ever since. It seems impossible for this to be true, but AFAICT Google wouldn't start…
Contents Disc overy My Standpoint The Reviews Conclusion Disc overy On my way to work on January 2, I noticed a bunch of CDs in the dirt at the side of the road. I investigated and was disappointed to learn that it was just a bunch of free internet trial CDs from around the turn of the century. I gathered them up anyway so I could post a photo when I got to the office: because I thought it was…
Now that streaming TV has entered its late-stage enshittification era, one nostalgia-goggled sentiment I'm starting to see goes like this: "Cable TV wasn't so bad! We didn't know how good we had it!" I can't blame them; if you weren't a bill-paying adult in cable's heyday, it probably does seem humane compared to the modern streaming landscape. But I think this perspective lacks much-needed…
        Gauntlet 2 (2❤️/5) Hook (1❤️/5) Super Mario Bros. Remastered (5❤️/5) Super Metroid (no rating) Ys Chronicles: Ancient Ys Vanished: Omen (3❤️/5)
Thanks to Lisa for her tip w/r/t migrating from bearblog to mataroa . She suggested using the core utility csplit to split the archive into individual files instead of the commercial program I found. It took some tinkering, but I figured out how to make it work. csplit can only split a file at lines, not at a specific character. So the first thing you need to do is use sed to make sure the ending…
Being able to migrate our data freely between open platforms is all well and good in theory, but when every service uses its own opinionated data format, it can feel like the option might as well not even be there. What good is all this data if no two sites speak the same language? Well, here's one translation. I don't figure the number of people in need of this guide is very large, but if you're…
If, like me, every time you cook spaghetti, while the water's boiling you frantically search the web for a transcript of Season 1, episode 10 of Good Eats (Pantry Raid I—Use Your Noodle) to remember whether Alton Brown says to use a teaspoon of salt or tablespoon of salt per quart of water: It's a teaspoon. One teaspoon of salt per quart (32 ounces) of water. Approximately one quart of water per…
My main gamepad is a Retrobit Legacy 16, a perfectly cromulent USB pad that in my dusty memory banks feels exactly like a SNES controller, but it's been awhile since I've used one so I'm sure there are more differences than I realize. One such difference is that the D-Pad is a little bit too sensitive: when you're holding left or right, it's far too easy to accidentally press up or down (and vice…
I realized that a big part of the data entry portion of my job is retyping information contained in the filenames of my completed Work Product Units (WPUs.) So, I came up with a batch script to automate some of that process. This is a Windows cmd script (not Powershell) that will create a file called list.txt containing all of the files of a certain type in the current folder, omitting the…
Bingo and Sudoku are both pretty boring games about putting numbers in grids, right? Sudoku is a bare minimum logic puzzle, and Bingo is mostly a game about trying not to fall asleep. But what if we combine the two? Everyone gets a unique SkuDingBo 1 card, it's the standard 9x9 grid with a few starting clues, but not nearly enough information to start filling it in. 9 is always the center square,…
Every post before this one has been imported from an old blog: from Apr 25—Oct 12 2025, I self-hosted a blog on my website , and from Apr 15 2022—Apr 24 2025 I posted industriously but intermittently on bearblog , except for 2024, when I posted on Dreamwidth . 1 Old posts may contain formatting errors, unsupported HTML, long outdated facts and opinions, deleted images ( fuck you imgur…
Just barely missed finishing Blaugust. I was inches from the finish line. Then, one Saturday, I did way too much, reasoning that I'd still be able to at least do a short blog post at the end of the day. I didn't have to write about everything, I told myself, just a short throwaway post would suffice. Then I could do a proper post on Sunday. Well, I collapsed in exhaustion before that could happen.…
1. I'm sort of able to read lips? I mean not consciously, but lip-reading is definitely more important to my speech comprehension than I thought. For the training sessions I had to do at work this month, one of the trainers had a mild speech impediment. It's not a big deal, but combined with my audio processing disorder, it meant I was almost completely unable to understand him for one of the…
Today I made the mistake of not only writing about a book I read, but also trying to make an insightful point about it and tie it into broader cultural events. With the limited amount of time I have to write, I definitely can't finish a post like this in a single day. Not a good one, anyway. I need time to think about what I'm saying, make sure I'm communicating effectively, and put a nice bow on…
Google has announced their intention to end the installation of applications on android phones by 2026. Once this update takes place, you will no longer be able to install applications from .apk files. You'll only be able to install programs through the official Android app store. If this goes through as planned, it will bring an end to the era of pocket-sized general-purpose computers. Without…
It's unfortunate that "blog" portmanteaus so nicely with "August", because in truth, any other month would probably be better for this kind of undertaking. August happens to be my month of hire at work, so the month is dotted with mostly pointless but compulsory annual trainings and recertifications. It also happens to be the month of my and my spouse's anniversary. For extra disruption, it's also…
I started a couple lighthearted half-baked posts about stuff I'm not really qualified to talk about--I mean, even less so than usual--but I can't figure out how to hammer them into a shape that comes across as funny and not just me being dumb. I have a longer introspective post about mental health stuff in the works, but progress on it has been slow. It's good not to rush stuff, but it's left me…