Blog

Beyond Cyberpunk Web Design

What I want to note here is the UI in the original BCP and Billy's app. Borders filled with wiring and lights. Knobs and switches. Big chunky click areas. Punk rock, graffiti art. When you click things, audio and animations tell you something happened. Not so much the "Jacking into the Matrix. Into the FUTURE!" clip.

It's much easier to find and read information in the web version, but it's not fun. It's ugly and boring. Like almost everything on the web and apps these days, from Jony IVE-1138's sterile white room prisons where you're tortured for daring to have a personality, to all these endless linkblogs.

There are places with personality, but not many. The web looks like shit. Update: Brutalist Websites has some GeoCities-like aesthetics in a few. Others are sterile voids.

And that's bothering me about this blog. It looks OK, the stolen Midgar art and my '80s neon colors set some kind of tone, but it can be so much more. So in the weeks and months to come, I'm gonna be doing some redesign, make this into something weirder, if not full-on GeoCities. The RSS feed should be uninterrupted, but I'm going to put a lot more resources on the front page.

Kronar returns in a 24-page comic Dark Miasma! Oglaf is super NSFW, tho this one is pretty tame, but if you read the previous Kronar stories be prepared for… well, be prepared.

There is no surrender, there is only being dead

WordPress: Gutenberg

In brief: I tried to use Gutenberg for that, and it's fucking garbage. It repeatedly failed to load, just a blank page, and then after a couple tries it came up. It recognizes pasted-in Markdown, but doesn't let me write in Markdown. It makes half the window unusable whitespace instead of more editor. So I've installed the Classic Editor plugin. Why the fuck would they make their editor less usable?

What I'm Watching: Godzilla anime

I grew up with KSTW-11 every weekend playing monster and kung fu movies (those being cheap air-filler for a non-network station), and Godzilla to me is rubber suits smashing balsa-wood cities and toy trains. After a long dry spell of the '80s and '90s Godzillas being mediocre, I loved the Lovecraftian GMK: Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack and the very goofy Godzilla Final Wars. But I haven't kept up with the last few.

So, anime Godzilla on Netflix? Sure. Long weird backstory about aliens coming to Earth, Godzilla winning anyway, Humanity & two alien species (who look just like pale or red Humans; no Xilians or mutants in this one) fleeing to space, was this in the last couple movies? Anyway, long recap/setup I didn't care for at all.

Then 20 years in deep space later, after spacing the old people, they argue a long time and eventually space-warp back to Earth, but it's 20,000 years later there.

Earth is overrun with Godzilla and smaller monsters, the atmosphere full of chaff from the monsters so long-range comms don't work, but criminal/Space Captain Awesome is gonna save the day.

"What? Send the landing ships to the front line? It's too dangerous. If they get shot down, how will we return to the mother ship?"
"But we're already home. There's nowhere else to return to but here. Isn't that right?"

The alien high priest says Godzilla is divine punishment for thinking you rule the world. Or as the song says, "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man. GODZILLA!"

Of course, the Godzilla you can defeat is not the true Godzilla.

Visually this is OK, a lot of it is just filtered 3D CGI to look cel-shaded, which I've mostly only seen in shitty sports anime or later-generation Transformers; it doesn't look bad, exactly, but it doesn't look like animation. Give me Neon Genesis Evangelion any day.

Plot, there's a lot of arguing and not much gets done from that arguing. A serious editor could cut 50% of this and make a better movie with the same plot. Most of the dialogue is "Space Captain Awesome! Sempai!" "Yes, we must throw our lives away for heroism!" and screaming, it's not good.

Godzilla's new wrinkly metallic look isn't my thing, but it's functional; she doesn't move much, just stands there and fires atomic breath, occasionally swinging at something. I so much prefer the classic rubber suits jumping around and being physically in the scene.

Meh. I'll watch the rest, but at present I'm not impressed. Maybe I'll just rewatch GMK.

What I'm Watching: Extinction

What I'm Watching: Extinction

Extraordinarily dull first 20 minutes of a working stiff having bad dreams of war against space invaders. Then a pretty solid chase/urban combat arc. Then the plot flips, which I did not see coming, a rare pleasure.

Go watch this on Netflix and come back so we can talk about it.

SPOILERS: Please see the movie first. So copy this text and view it in advanced rot13 encryption

Gur zbivr arire rkcynvaf fbzr guvatf: Jul gur aba-uhznaf jbhyq or znqr gb ybbx yvxr uhznaf; va gur pnfr bs gur puvyqera, gung'f rfcrpvnyyl perrcl. Gur ryringbe tvey vf… lrnu, jr xabj jung ure checbfr jnf. Jul gur fbyhgvba gb n uneqjner ceboyrz vf zvyvgnel trabpvqr. Be jul gur vainqref unir fhpu jrveq fhvgf, bgure guna gur zrgn "vg ybbxf zranpvat naq nyvra".

Gur svyzznxref inzc sbe grafr ohg unccl raqvatf gbb bsgra, naq vg'f n yvggyr naablvat. Trg ba gur tbqqnzarq genva, erhavgr va fnsrgl.

But the reveal and resolution is great, this is a perfectly fine actual-science fiction movie.

★★★★½

Why Even Make Software

Long week at the grindstone on the game, actual gameplay is mostly done, but a lot of the fine details of UI, animations, and music are janky or nonexistent: "the first 80% takes 100% of the schedule, the last 20% takes another 100%", as they say.

So I may take beta-testers and let them at it soon; comment/email if you'd like in. If you've played any of my games before, you know what you're getting, but much bigger:

Perilar: Fallen Kingdom, an entire world of Perilar, massive dungeons deep into the earth, towers up into the sky, hard tactical roguelike RPG. Mac/Windows/Linux.

I'm running late to think about marketing now, but: Should I Kickstarter for the final stretch? Set up a Patreon? Those feel like begging or grifting, even though I support some stuff that way. I prefer to release, try to get copies in front of the people who'd like it, collect money. Advertising used to be viable for user acquisition, now I suspect a large part of my potential audience are savvy enough to ad-block, and giant horrible things like EA drive the CPK up. There won't be ads or IAP in the game.

Apple killing the affiliate program could not come at a worse time. Kick all the little guys while we're down, Phil Schiller, that's what you're for.

And then there's always people who say "just release it as open source!", by which they mean I should starve and die in the street, and no software except command-line developer tools should ever be made. Yeah, that's not an acceptable business plan.

The Wolf

These are amazing. The most overwrought, insane, semi-plausible haxxoring through shitty wireless printers. Great production values, reasonably well scripted. I'm always inclined to favor Slater's side in a movie, especially as a prankster/villain. ★★★★½ and I'm excited to watch more of these ads.

Their previous "The Fixer" series with Mike from Breaking Bad was awful, he can't even pronounce half the technology.

Obviously, no sane person would run a wireless printer and expect it to be safe. Also no sane person would run an immune-deficiency Windows box, HP or not, and expect it to be safe. Get a Mac, or install FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or OpenIndiana in lieu of Solaris, or if you really hate yourself, Linux (inevitable comment: "well, actually, it's GNU/Linux ahem may I show you my fedora collection"). At one time HP-UX was good, but that was a long time ago.