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<artem> your blog could really benefit from larger margins!I made some modifications and:
So I reverted back to old layout, only making minimal changes on margins (they should be responsive, i.e. thicker on desktop and narrower on mobile). Any comment on site usability (font size, margins, whatever) is welcome.
Flurry of links: First Warm Day ◇ Cyan Sky ◇ Twisted Vase in OpenSCAD ◇ The California Problem.
Venzone received a very cosy review from arachne cache!
This made me replay it with a critical eye. I was happy with the overall feeling and mechanics, but I found the game needed a better tutorial and that the Orcolat story was at times too difficult — well, at one time, when you find two Longanas in the same screen after having beaten the Krampuses.
Hence I rewrote the first level and made one minor tweak to Orcolat. You can download venzone at the game page.
Art links: Lonsdale quay ◇ #cat #art.
Movie record. In 70 years from now, will what we are writing today be as accessible as paper notebooks from the past are to us?
A satisfying puzzle from #EnigMarch. (hint: ɹǝɥdᴉɔ ɹɐsǝɐɔ ɐ ɥʇᴉʍ sʇɹɐʇs ʇᴉ.)
I have received two fantastic presents in my mailbox:
A DYI Stallman waifu and what I discovered to be a linocut, a way of printing on paper using linoleum rather than old fashioned wood. It is time to write two thank-you postcards.
(fr)
J’aimerais mieux crever que d’écrire à nouveau le poème précédent
La vieille folle de la rue Visconti peut chaque jour se promener
⁝(en)
I would rather die than rewrite that poem
The crazy old woman of Visconti Street may continue
promenading her torn stockings
⁝
Can we make bicycles sustainable again?
The main reason why I have opted for old bicycles is that they are much better than new bicycles. Most people don’t realize that, so they are also much cheaper. My four bikes cost me just 500 euros in total. That would buy me only one low-cost new road bike, and such a vehicle surely won’t last 40 to 50 years – as we shall see. Of course, it’s not just old road bikes which are better. The same goes for other types of bicycles built before the 1980s. I ride road bicycles because I cover relatively long distances, usually between 35 and 50 km round trip.
You can make whatever kind of game you want. But if there’s any stage or scene or idea you could take out without it detracting from the rest of the work, that’s a reason to pause. The idea might be making a promise you don’t keep, or fulfilling a promise you forgot to make.
Hands, an article I needed to read
As a computer scientist, one of the most vital tools that I have is my hands. I have been taking horrible care of them. Your hands are one of the most valuable tools you have. Do not squander them.
Cyber Vanguard, frontier of static WWW.
Art Compianto sul Christo morto ◇ Isle of Skye ◇ The Pit and the Pendulum.
Everywhere we look, we’re bombarded with flashy symbols trying to grab our attention. This is even the case where we think that we’re in control of what we’re looking at. I made two simple changes that reduce visual distractions in my life.
Since the game launched over 12 years ago, you’ve spent countless enights playing World of Adventure, the highly-acclaimed and popular MMORPG. However, tonight is the final time you’re logging in because the servers are shutting down. Forever. Time to say your last goodbyes.
A quest for the perfect monospace font (I use xft:Monospace:size=13:antialias=true:hinting=true,xft=Symbola).
Art: Composing around the centre in Gaborone, Botswana ◇ Telemann, Fantasia 1 in Do.
(boring, skip this if you are not into the fediverse)
I decided to deactivate my mastodon account. The fediverse experience felt immediately great and the command line client I used (toot) extremely slick, but I feel I am not the kind of person for “fast” social networks.
I start following interesting folks;
they post and/or retoot several times a day (sometimes dozens of times);
I fire up my client in the evening. How many of those toots are memes (which I may skip), how many — say — stuff they released and want some feedback on (which I am eager to try), how many life updated (which I want to take note of)?
It felt a bit of a chore mixed with a Fear of Missing Out Syndrome; blogs are still easier to approach and digest for me. Maybe I am approaching this in the wrong way? Comments welcome.
This does not mean the experience was not worth it: conversations felt great, I had a way to ask questions and interact with very interesting people, retooting is a great way to get exposed to new material. I will follow you via my RSS client (magic of interoperability) and maybe open a new account in the future.
Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link.
The Vault of Minos, a challenging procgen platformer.
[I translated a good game. If you know English, Italian or Japanese, find it here]
Mi sono cimentato in una traduzione di un gioco breve e molto bello, Lover’s Loop.
Tradurre non è mai facile: ho cercato concretezza, precisione e un po’ di lessico ovattato proprio delle fiabe. Scaricatelo qui!
two more excellent games: The Witch’s Lullaby (Adventure Game) ◇ Plasmorphosis (Interactive Fiction).
misc: Pesi e misure ◇ Curb Couches.
art: Giorgio Morandi Etchings ◇ Metropolis.
A Writer’s Word Processor, in which a professional author describes a program he holds dear, Wordstar. The middle part of the article is particularly interesting, it illustrates various metaphors of writing before the invention of the PC:
Let me speak generally for a moment. I’ve concluded that there are two basic metaphors for pre-computer writing. One is the long-hand manuscript page. The other is the typewritten page. Most word processors have decided to emulate the second — and, at first glance, that would seem to be the logical one to adopt. But, as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor.
It made me think how little time we spend on User Interfaces (for games, graphical applications, command-line ones, etc.) and the metaphors end-users are familiar with.
A very clever Interactive Fiction with an ASCII map, Trouble in Sector 471.
<n-p> Imagine you got stuck with your head in a fruit mixer
<n-p> and want advice from likeminded peoplethree short stories (ita/eng/eo): Nessuna colpa ◊ Dislocation ◊ Vivi.
Operation Ocflore, a fantastic Commander Keen 4 mod (play it with Dosbox).
art: Minoans Spring fresco ◊ Taccuino.
New ways of contacting me (IM).
A portrait of myself
music: Malagueña for tenor recorder.
<Glider_IRC> It's a nodejs mentality, not understand what you do, not
understanding what the machine do, not understanding what your
code do, and not understanding what the code parts you
put together like lego do.
<Glider_IRC> In others words and shorter, understanding nothing.I almost broke (again) my laptop; I am not amused by my misery without a computer.
In a WWW that all looks the same, it is always exciting to find pages that are styled differently.
Recorder ranges, clefs, and other useful information is full plain-text, yet so cosy and easily browseable; I wonder if I could convert this site to plain-text.
User Sentimental eXperience is a bit of a blast from the past, where navigation and discovery were paramount.
⏪,⏩: Dichiarazione d’amore di altri tempi ◊ The future of road transportation.
art // a statue in Yekaterinburg ◊ Tiempo convertido en espacio:
Photography is time converted into space. In fact, every virtual art is, movies included. We have the impression that Scarlett is having a coffee, but she will never get to it because time has disappeared, and with it life and reality. Such is the demiurgy and powerlessness of art.
Not one, but two games I have enjoyed during Easter:
Return of the SLIMEPIRES!
The Bones of Rosalinda, a simple, clever gamebook.
Rest: The kinds of portraits I prefer ◊ Whatsapp suicide.
BTW, I use lentil quite often, I like it! And your code base is really nice!Always take a moment to thank devs/maintainers, it might make their day (for sure it made mine).
Links:
How new Linux users can increase their odds of success. tl;dr: learn to use the shell; learn to find package via command line; try a tiling window manager; compile a program from source; help someone out.
Indeed eons ago, when I started using Linux, the turning point was to avoid the «like Windows, but one click more» experience.
A very good Ludum Dare (3-day game jam) entry by NuSan:
Art: Medusa ◊ Exploring Rare Manchu Books at the Library of Congress.
Essays:
Framing accessibility in broader terms:
Importantly, accessibility also means understanding that there are many other kinds of users who have accessibility needs.
For instance, consider someone who cannot afford a computer as nice as the one your developers are using. When your Electron crapware app eats up 8G of RAM, it may be fine on your 32G developer workstation, but not so much for someone who cannot afford anything other than a used $50 laptop from eBay. Waking up the user’s phone every 15 minutes to check in with your servers isn’t very nice for someone using a 5-year-old phone with a dying battery. Your huge JavaScript bundle, unoptimized images, and always-on network requirements are not accessible to users who are on low-bandwidth mobile connections or have a data cap — you’re essentially charging poorer users a tax to use your website.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?:
Do you have the courage to be found on the wrong side of history?
Kappa, A Gulliveresque novella by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa:
[it] Seduto tra le rocce vicino al torrente, aprii una scatoletta di carne e accesi un focherello con quattro sterpi, e proprio in quei minuti la nebbia si diradò rapidissima: l’avermi indotto a ripercorrere tanta strada mi sembrò una beffa. Sbocconcellavo il mio pane, e ad un tratto guardai l’orologio: l’una e venti. Ma ciò che mi stupì non fu tanto l’ora quanto un volto straordinario riflesso per un istante dal quadrante. Mi voltai, e per la prima volta nella mia vita vidi un ᴋᴀᴘᴘᴀ.
[en] I sat down on a rock by the stream to take a meal. I think I had spent about ten minutes cutting open a tin of corned beef, gathering dead twigs and making a fire. Meanwhile the fog was lifting fast, as if it had brought me all the way down for the sole purpose of making a fool of me. Biting at a piece of bread, I looked at my wrist-watch. It was already twenty minutes past one. But what surprised me more was a strange, weird-looking face reflected for an instant upon the round glass of the watch. I looked back, and for the first time in my life I saw a—^kappa!
art: I made a vase for my daughter. It's made from a discontinued glass light bulb diffuser and cardboard ◊ Nuestra Señora de las angustias, Granada.
Escape from M.O.N.J.A.S is a lovely little adventure for the ZX Spectrum which you can play with an emulator or straight in your browser; availble in Spanish and English.
The game fits in 47K, roughly ⅔ of the above screenshot. Controls: Q A O P to move, M to interact.
The particular situation I have in view is the hijacking of public discourse (and consequently the political order) by the endless proliferation of manufactured news and fabricated controversy.
Unica e insondabile (tutte le nebbie lo sono):
how stereograms work ◊ pictorialist photograp ◊ root system drawings ◊ a poem in pencil ◊ daily retrocomputing ◊ harmonium jrpgesque music.
