Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I had a useful JavaScript utility hidden away in the source for my Stone Halls & Serpent Men game, so I extracted it into its own thing:
Especially with people doing the #dungeon23 challenge, it may be helpful for quickly drawing a dungeon, roguelike style.
I'm pondering doing a full wilderness + dungeon adventure again sometime soon, and I'll likely use Tilemap for it, but I sure won't be doing a room a day or anything like that!
I spent a little time this evening making some fireworks for tomorrow night!
Download, unzip, launch in your favorite Atari 800 emulator, like Atari800MacX
Pick Y from the menu, ESC to end, reboot to get back to the menu. See you in a year!
(I didn't get around to putting an emulator page on my site; I will before my next actual game)
OK, thinking about projects time, what I've done with my 3-year summer vacation (extended, 2022 edition).
Schemers in general are annoying but less annoying than LISPers, so if the LISP community pissed you off, Scheme's might be 50% less toxic. I still have to block some people in IRC because they won't STFU or tolerate anyone Doing Things in Unapproved Manner. You know what would be amazing? A language as technically awesome as Scheme, with Python's friendly community. Python the language is trash, tho.
Haunted Dungeon, Scheme roguelike. Needs at most weeks of work, and then I can take a day and grind out binaries for various platforms (UUUUuuuugh Windows & Linux suck so much to interact with; Mac does for different reasons), ship it. It ballooned past my original tiny roguelike design long ago, but it's still not that big.
Multiple small Scheme programs & games, once I do that ship day I may just make a bunch of binaries. None of these are amazing but some are nice. Don't ask a developer to praise their own software, you know?
New Perilar CRPG, also Scheme. I have this at like 60% functionality, map generation's beautiful, and fuck-all for story, it's fine, same shipping problems, so much I need to think about if I get it to a playable state. Or it may be a learning experience.
Little Atari 8-bit game. Dungeon crawler with no purpose but it's cute, was meant to be a ZX SpecNext game but that's still not shipped after 2 years so… It's now at like 30% done, but I have some vision for it.
Open world action-adventure game I've got a bit of design for (in my paper sketchpad! Not even on the computer!), it could either be Scheme or Atari 8-bit or whatever. I don't actually know of anything like this design, tho original Zelda & Metroid are the parents (I clearly don't understand genetics) of all such games. Needs so much mapping & writing before I even start, but all the technical side is easy for me.
Currently Atari stuff's in TurboBASIC-XL which is less bad than you'd think, but still really sucks compared to having a modern language; both Pascals and C's I have access to are less useful. I've been borderline to making a new language that compiles to 6502 ASM, but I know I'm lazy at tools-to-make-tools support.
One nice part with Atari 8-bits is, shipping is easy. Put it in an ATR file, with an Atari emulator as seen on archive.org. One click, any browser shows it. Down side is, can't really charge money for this. Beg for patreon support; which I need to be better about giving you goodies in return for your cash, my fine patrons. Shall I write thee a sonnet?
Update & reupload my iPhone stuff. Should I even bother with Castles? I liked the underlying game but the UI is unbelievably shit, I had no idea what I was doing and limited by iPhone 1 screen/UI constraints. But Perilar, and some utility stuff, and maybe patch Brigand to be paid-up-front instead of IAP and say "this is what you could've had!". And I have my 3D game which never got shipped, just shown as demos. Worth spending some time on this and then never looking at it again.
Tabletop RPGs. Fuck this third goddamned plague year, which has made playing & playtesting RPGs just a nightmare. Every online group I try flakes out so fast they may be composed entirely of microscopic black holes. So I have my "original dungeon game" retroclone, and my much nicer sword & planet game, and a couple tiny gamelets. And with Hasbro's sabre-rattling at the OGL and "One D&D", I'm inclined to just ship only the sword & planet game, and turn the rest into world books for it. But I'd like to test it more than once with other Humans and also not get infected with plague. So. State of that world is uncertain.
Someday soon the Machines may be making music instead of Humans. Until then, here's some Machine-like music.
Rather than my longer music playlists, I often just sing one song to fediverse, like this. It's a slightly manual process, but I have part of it automated:
nowplaying.applescript
#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Music"
set t to current track
set msg to (t's artist & " " & t's name)
msg
end tell
urlencode
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import urllib.parse
for line in sys.stdin:
line = line.rstrip()
print(urllib.parse.quote(line)) # unquote for the urldecode script
sing
#!/bin/zsh
q=`nowplaying.applescript|urlencode`
open -a Chromium "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!yt+$q"
open -a Chromium "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!genius+$q"
Then I just type sing, it pops up Chromium (my garbage media browser), I pick the best YT video and paste that, grab some lyrics and paste them, I have o/ bound as ♫ in Text replacements, and add a #music tag.
I suspect I could automate it a bit more, pick the first result on Genius and YT, but I trust neither to be right. Apple Music would be easier, but not everyone has it. I could grab cover art and paste that and a template into my appdot.net toot box. Anyway, it's the post-Human touch that shows I care. It's amusing that I have three scripting languages to get one thing done (urlencode/urldecode scripts date back to the '90s).
One of the games (modpacks) for MineTest I've been trying, is SurviveTest. It's much closer to vanilla MineTest Game, but with a good selection of mods to make a survival/mining game, and the developer is updating it regularly, and making youtube videos (in Portuguese, but you get the gist).
The Awards panel is pretty good at driving you thru the game. Some things are less obvious, tho.
I mostly just swordfight sharks that jump fences to get into my garden every morning (that is a sentence nobody sane would ever write).
You can also combine signs with fish to make trophies, and for servers there's a fishing tournament UI.
Bread is more realistic: 4 wheat make 1 dough, cook dough and it becomes bread. The pies & cookies are fun, but take much more resources than they're worth, and I haven't been able to reliably farm chickens for eggs yet. Soups are a pain, they don't stack.
The bottle rack W-W-W, B-B-B, W-W-W (Wood, empty Bottles) gives an OK-looking shelf for 2 rows of bottles, no indicator as to how full it is but it looks nice enough next to a bookshelf, which holds a similar number of books.
Mining: Mineral levels are much deeper down, see chart below. Stone tools suck when you dig hundreds of blocks down. As soon as you can, start making bronze tools from the extra tin & copper you get, I just carry a stack of bronze with me now and craft more tools as I go (I also bought a nice Mese pick from a trader). Then every 50-ish depth, I make a little mineshaft grid, get some of that level's minerals, go further down. I'm finally at diamond and below, looking for the Dungeon Master. A lot of MineTest players do ladders and falling, but I prefer a staircase so I can safely get off.
Coal = 0
Tin, Copper = -100
Iron = -150
Gold = -200
Mese = -350
Diamond = -500
Dungeon Master (Boss) = -600
Mese Monster = -350
Mastodon 4.0.2 has been released, with one of the worst UI choices ever: Changing "Toot!" to "Publish!"
This aggression will not stand, man!
Update 2022-12-01, removed all the excess whitespace from the post UI, and enlarged emoji so I can read them. Maybe too much, but I like it. If you're not so happy with that, edit (carefully!) and remove the padding rules, or change 0 to 4px or 8px to taste; you'll have to use Safari preferences to un-choose and then re-choose the file to make it reload.
Before:
After:
Sidebar after:
Footnote about the title, because it's come up from yapping commenters who know nothing: Peyo, the artist who created the Smurfs, was emphatically not anti-semitic, Gargamel is not a racist stereotype, he's just an evil/misguided alchemist character borrowed from Rabelais, and we mock "Gargron" with his name. You savages. How dare you.
Since everyone is finally joining Fediverse as the maniac burns down Twitter shitbird, I have some more advice, after 6 years on (plus some OStatus way back when):
Pick any instance except mastodon.social or mastodon.online, those are run by mstdn gGmbh (aka Gargamel), gigantic, massively overloaded, poorly moderated now and for the foreseeable future. Also don't join an instance blocked by everyone else, see the list of moderated servers - if in doubt, ask a friend on already on fediverse.
Set your avatar, write a bio. Put your interests in there. Blank accounts might be pigs or advertisers. We fear faceless intruders.
Toot (what we call posts) at least an #introduction - maybe pin that on your profile (ellipses … menu under the toot).
THEN you can follow people, see Local or Federated timelines or look thru follows/mentions. If you know someone's @userid@host, put that in the search box, hit enter, it'll show up in a list, and you can pick it there.
When you write something good, pin it. Read pinned toots to know who and what people are. I'm amused by people faving all my pins, but it's a little noisy.
CW (content warning) ANYTHING someone might be bugged by. ESPECIALLY politics, pictures which might be even a little slutty or eye-contact, gross, whatever. CW anything that might annoy or trigger someone. If you don't do this, you will be rapidly blocked by almost everyone. This is maybe the single most important bit of etiquette.
When you toot pictures, write a description. It doesn't have to be long, but the key text & image & context. There are blind users, and those on text-only interfaces. There are online OCR sites or on macOS/iOS you can just open it, copy-paste the text. If the picture is NSFW or blinking or otherwise annoying, hit NSFW to blur it out until it's clicked on.
Don't crosspost from shitbird. "Free content!", no. Nobody wants that, nobody will read you.
Favorite just sends a "hey, cool" beep to the author of the toot. Boost sends it to your followers as well. There is no algorithm, just a timeline! So if you like something, boost it!
Mastodon starts in a single-column simplified UI. It has a much better mode:
There are also lists of users, so you can see JUST the important stuff, and in the next update (rolling out to servers soonish) you can follow a hashtag, but that puts it in Home, which may be too busy.
Welcome to fedi, here's your pineapple and jorts.
I thought I'd make it thru the entire series, but really three were at my dosage for the day. Still have H20, Resurrection, and End. I will get back to those, obviously everything up thru Nightmare Before Christmas time is still Halloween.
Halloween 4: Return of Michael Myers (1988): "Jesus ain't got nothin' to do with this place. This is where society dumps its worst nightmares. (continues recapping 1-2) Welcome to Hell!" Thanks, strangely informative security guard Jones. Mikey yet again breaks out of the asylum during a transfer on a stormy night, after a decade of sedation and doing nothing, he can punch a hole in a man's skull with his thumb. Laurie (JLC having better things to do) offscreen has a daughter Jamie (not Lee Curtis) and then dies. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is back and having a great time! Despite the "burn" latex on his face & hands.
So most of the film is split as in 2 with Loomis pursuing Mikey, and Mikey pursuing a little moppet; she's cute but utterly ineffectual. Mob of grade-school bullies taunt her with "Jamie's an orphan!"; real bastard kids are more creatively evil. I do like the blatant horror tropes, flashbacks of Laurie to little Mikey, the psychopomp, crazy old preacher who talks about hunting apocalypse. New cop is surprisingly competent and ready to help, without a lot of "oh no I don't believe you". Town drunks & rednecks instantly form a posse/angry mob. But then Mikey's able to massacre multiple locations & critical infrastructure without any planning. I must say, the "guy cheats on girl so they must both die" bit, the new girl is much much hotter than Jamie's stepsister.
Best kill: The cheating girl. The setup is an offscreen kill but you think for a second Mikey's gonna shoot… nope! The rest are pretty lame.
And the chilling finale, looping back to the first film!
Like the first film, they shot it during spring, and here it's even more obvious, green lawns & Utah shrubbery instead of Midwest autumn leaves. Utterly implausible location/time. Soundtrack is lame, lite muzak imitation of Carpenter's score without the overwhelming electronic noise, but not played often, just stingers. Maybe the scariest thing in this film was, my overhead light started flickering & went out during the dark house sequence. Woo-eee-ooo.
★★☆☆☆ Adds nothing to the world.
Right off, this is gonna be a struggle. There's comic horn beeping when the cops (one is Troy Evans, more recently "Barrel" in Bosch) are in the scene. Kill off the recurring characters (stepparents are never seen, stepsister dies in minutes, "Tina" takes her place), bring in some bimbos too dumb to be valley girls on coke, imitation Fonzie, another dumb child for Jamie to sacrifice to Mikey.
Mikey is here played by a smaller actor (Don Shanks) in football pads, and he looks pathetic in shots where you can see him clearly. The same actor plays the "Man in Black" with really sweet boots that cost half the budget, but he does nothing.
The murder altar here is super out of character, more like something Jason would do. There's an impossible touching moment and unburned face.
Other than a few very short stingers, I don't even recall hearing music.
★☆☆☆☆ May be the least interesting slasher flick in history.
Crazy Jamie is now 15 (but played by 20-year-old J.C. Brandy), held prisoner, impregnated, gives birth to a baby; by the Thorn Cult, the Men in Black seen previously with the ᚦ (thorn rune) on everything. Hot librarian Kara (Marianne Hagan), her son Danny being turned into another Mikey by the cult, and bad parents/victims now live in the old Strode house. Bad choices! Laurie's old babysitting brat Tommy (Paul Stephen Rudd) is now an online Mikey conspiracy theorist. Loomis (very old Donald Pleasence with no more burn latex) lives alone in the woods because that's a good idea. But soon Jamie manages to get the band back together by prank-calling the only radio station anyone listens to.
You know what I love about Haddonfield? Their commitment to Halloween, street parties and screaming at the handful of helpless cops, even tho every few years there's a giant bloody massacre. These people love to party. They love the sacrifice and tradition.
One perfect shot: Creepy landlady telling little Danny about Samhain, then Kara about babysitting little Mikey Myers… lightning flashes… and you can see Mikey standing outside thru the window. Good job!
A few of the kills are very gruesome, maybe even too much so, just gore & splatter bags exploding. Others are completely G-rated. Kara gets strangled and has no finger marks on her neck, often there's just a splash of blood, sometimes there's no blood on weapons. Mikey rarely poses the corpses, but a couple times they're set as traps/funhouse props, like the good old days.
Lot of running around Smith's Grove asylum, now a combination hospital/prison/medieval bedlam, and being played with by the Men in Black. Remember you don't have to outrun Mikey, you just have to outrun the slower person he's going to kill. Party members in the asylum come and go, they really don't know how to keep together.
Again barely has any music, except stingers, and a short piece when Mikey's stalking. Alan Howarth from Halloween II did a soundtrack, which was largely cut in editing, and there's a few hillbilly rock songs.
Credits:
In Memory of DONALD PLEASENCE
★★★½☆ Very flawed, half-assed, confused movie, covered in the viscera of a better movie that could've been. But watchable. This has been the high point of today, for sure.
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—"Ozymandias", Percy Bysshe Shelley
Immediately after ElmoNusk came into shitbird central with a sink (what), he fired the old management (and claims he doesn't need to pay their bailouts), and is already "making redundant" the workforce (before having to pay off their stock vesting). Win or lose, his scam there is funny; the people who built the Torment Nexus deserve punishment, but he's likely to have to pay out more in legal fees by the time it's over.
Already the shitbird to Fediverse migration is going well, the stats account I follow shows a couple million up, which might be half the "MAU" Humans left on shitbird, the rest being bots and defunct accounts. Shitbird's stats describe anyone posting 3-5 weekly as a "heavy tweeter", which many of the actual people I know do per hour. I've got a lot of new followers, and my policy is "followbackfriday", every Friday I go thru my new follows and see who's filled in their avatar, bio, and an intro post at least. I say "a lot", but on fediverse that's <500 follows, <1000 followers, I had something like 5x as many on shitbird, but 1% of the activity and "engaaaagement" (excuse the SEO word). Anyway, I expect migration will take another week or so as frogs figure out the stove really is on.
When the Crown Prince of the Joseon Empire (defunct) bought out Freenode, it took a few weeks for everyone to get over to Libera.chat with the same or better channels (# lisp is now all LISP-family, # commonlisp is CL-specific, # scheme is for all Schemes, etc.), and get kicked off the corpse of Freenode. Nobody knows or cares what happened to the CPotJE or what used to be freenode.
So now I'm wondering how long it'll take for that to happen to shitbird. Days? ElmoNusk posted QAnon shit almost immediately. GM pulled their advertising. And this is just Halloween weekend. Next week, mostly awake and sober, is gonna be lit. And not in a good way, more "your entire city is on fire". Will there be anything but jesus-dakimakura pillow guy and (Kan't)Ye posting by next Friday?
OK, you want something more positive, actionable than my schadenfreude? Back up your tweets. I had a hell of a time getting my shitbird data out. Don't stall on this. Because when stupid companies shut down a service, they do it fast and don't care about your stuff. Remember Yahoo! paying billions for GeoCities, the greatest communal artwork of Humanity, and shuttering it with no backup or warning? That's what's gonna happen to shitbird. Don't be there when it does.
