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egypturnashon What is going on with ceiling fans

Kate Wagner is the creator of the viral blog McMansionHell, which roasts the world’s ugliest houses from top to bottom, all while teaching about architecture and design. [...] Kate prefers the pronouns she/her or they/them. - https://mcmansionhell.com/about

egypturnashon PS5 Relapse Exploit

This is a setting somewhere in the Deck or your Steam account, my Deck comes right up into my account without ever asking for a PIN or password or anything.

egypturnashon macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess

A friend who quit Apple a month or two ago left mostly because the whole company was utterly AI-pilled and they couldn’t take being a meat proxy talking to other meat proxies any more.

I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.

egypturnashon It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

You could say it's illegal to connect AI to something, with heavy penalties if you're caught doing it anyway.

You could say that the human who hooked up an AI that did something that's already illegal is liable for the AI's actions. You could say that setting up an AI to do something illegal results in, ooh, an automatic multiplier of 10x on whatever the penalty for its illegal actions are.

egypturnashon The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

Really I think that deliberately courting persnickity people dissecting how Wrong it is that your pixel-art game has art displayed in three different pixel sizes that have aggressively non-integer relationships to each other might be a great way to get some free marketing. :)

egypturnashon The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

These are all aesthetic decisions. What feelings does a smeary CRT SNES screen evoke? What does a crisper 1993 DOS screen feel like to you? Which one better matches the mood of the game you want to make?

Probably you should screengrab some games from the first couple years of the SNES’ life and doodle things for your game that look like those screens. Possibly some later games that more directly inspired the game you’re making, too. Possibly you should read up on the precise technical limitations of its graphics and be precise about how many colors and moving objects you allow yourself. Possibly you might decide to break those limitations for the sake of making the game more fun, but it’s probably better to break them knowingly.

Then look at DOS games from that era. Same decisions and rabbit holes as above. Does it feel like there’s a harmony between them? Does one feel much better for the game you want to make? Play with shitty TV filters on the SNES and DOS shots.

Then doodle some things with fewer limitations. How do they feel? Does the lack of limitations make it easier or harder to animate an entire new game entity? And which one is more fun? Experiment, sketch, play, explore. It’s art. It’s also business. Maybe. Maybe you have a skazillion bucks to pay your bills and pay artists and musicians and whatnot while you develop it with no care for it selling even a single copy. Limited funds can stretch further with limited scope.

There is no single right answer to these questions. You need to find them yourself.

egypturnashon The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

My main gripe is with sloppy technique. A lot - not all, but a lot - of modern pixel art is purposely made to look overly blocky. Dithering and anti-aliasing just isn't utilized, which makes it look even chunkier than actual old game art does on a modern screen. It seems to me as if the artists are worried that classic pixel art techniques would make things look too good, though I personally believe the opposite applies.

I think a lot of this is due to where the nostalgia is being aimed. The number of pixelly games trying to look like a c64 or Amiga is vanishingly small compared to the number trying to look like an NES, SNES, or Genesis. (Or a PSX or N64.) And they’re mostly trying to make things like early first-party hits, not later third-party games that do crazy techniques. How many 8-bit-looking games sound like a Tim Follin soundtrack?

And of course given that those machines are from a generation that stopped being the new hotness about 30y ago, we have pro pixel artists who have never seen a game through a shitty connection to a TV unless they deliberately sought one out or had obsessively retro gaming parents; they just like making these square mosaics look like things.

egypturnashon Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)

Smooth full-screen scrolling on the c64 was hard. In the years since 1984 people discovered ways to use unintended behavior in the c64's video chips to move a lot more of the screen around seamlessly, but ROBB's fast omnidirectional scrolling was pretty slick for a game from the same year the c64 came out.

Raid Over Bungelling Bay grew into Sim City, which had remakes over two decades and spawned an entire genre of "city builders", I think there is indeed an argument that it became an "all-time great".

egypturnashon Another researcher says OpenAI trained on conversations, then claimed breakthrou

A toot in a tweet in a... skeet? Is there any consensus on what to call "a post on bluesky"?

egypturnashon I wanna live an NPC life

be neither the pc nor the npc

reject game metaphors

accept that your life is what you make of it

reject every possible demand on your energy that does not bring you joy (there will be compromises; weigh them)

eat the rich

egypturnashon Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

I wonder how Valve will decide to handle the incoming wave of refund requests from well outside the normal 2h playtime window.

Looking at the Steam page for this game, there's a "year 10 roadmap" post.

egypturnashon To become a better writer, read as much as you can

Try it. Leave your phone at home. Carry a paperback book. Whenever you have time to kill and look for your phone, take out the book. See what happens. You may be surprised.

egypturnashon ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs

miss.ng lett.rs

egypturnashon A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhere on Zorhan's to-do list :)

egypturnashon A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop.

The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.

egypturnashon I'm becoming AI-blind

I am an artist and when people who'd fallen into the Spiralism* hole started posting their lengthy emoji-laden revelations to all the occult subreddits I follow, my brain would slide right the fuck off of all of them. It felt like my brain was actively rejecting paying attention to this stuff. Like a defense mechanism against this human-seeming-but-not-actually-human-generated text.

* https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/975017/, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/, https://spiralism.website if you want to test how strong your defenses are against this particular meme

egypturnashon Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

LLMs are already perversions of writing, so what else is new. Oh no, the over-long circumlocution generated by three autocorrects in a trenchcoat might be slightly longer because of this and maybe people will start noticing the subtle rhythms of vaguely peculiar word choices as yet another cue that you are wasting their time with machine-generated wordslop, what a terrible fate. Your long rambling walls of machine-waffling might be 37.05% longer than they need to be instead of the mere 36.58% longer they are now.

egypturnashon A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

Rate Limit Exceeded Too Many Requests

You have exceeded the allowed number of requests. Your Requests: 500. Request Limit: 500 per minute. Tip: Please wait 60 seconds before trying again.

A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Learns About Caching Generated HTML The Hard Way.

https://archive.md/9FaRC

egypturnashon Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

$1k in 1990 ~= $2.5k today.

egypturnashon The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment

Consider: Beggars in Spain. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68333.Beggars_in_Spain

egypturnashon The Sound and Music of 'Hyper Light Drifter' [video]

If you liked HLD this is your reminder that Heart Machine made three other games.

Solar Ash - rail-grinding and schmoovement, with a joyfully colorful visual style and a melancholy story, well worth the ten bucks or so it is on Steam right now

Hyper Light Breaker - free-roaming online roguelike, did not make it out of early access, really not worth the twenty bucks or so it currently is

Possessor(s) - a very pretty and melancholy metroidvania, a great value for the two bucks it's priced at on steam

Last I heard Heart Machine seems to have pretty much evaporated, their bluesky is pretty much nothing but nine-month-old reblogs of their laid-off devs posting their Linkedins. Maybe it will return but I'm not holding my breath.

egypturnashon I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it.

Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.

egypturnashon Let's all meet up in the Y2K

All those gumdrop Macs sent me back to my time in a Flash cartoon shop that was filled with those things.

egypturnashon AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

A slop image header is a signal that the text is probably also slop. Why should I waste my time on the off chance that your text is not actually slop?

egypturnashon AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

I just assume that if you think it's fine to shit in my eyes with an AI image then you're probably also about to shit in my eyes a lot more with AI text.

egypturnashon Fasttracker II clone in C using SDL 2

Oh darling. Stop playing AAA games, start playing real games from teams small enough to make unsafe choices.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD6ujQ0tHAv2qLS5FKH6B... - chopped beats, glitched words, everything you would expect in a love letter to Jet Set Radio

https://halberball.bandcamp.com/album/fragrance-point-soundt... - absolutely perfect noises for a game that looks like a 90s rave flier

https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/hades-original-so..., https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/hades-ii-original... - hades and its sequel shifts seamlessly between lutey-flutey strumming, hard rock, ballads, and sets the heck out of its mood

https://momojams.bandcamp.com/album/flipwitch-original-game-... - this horny metroidvania can fit so many electro-swing bangers in it

https://blackpantsgamestudio.bandcamp.com/album/tiny-big-sou... - sideways grooves and gloriously self-indulgent prog

https://polybius-ost.bandcamp.com/album/polybius-the-origina... - so much blissful techno to stare fixedly at blinking lights to, while the Welsh wizard who wrote it repeatedly insists that you are not being programmed by this experience in any way

egypturnashon Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

It's more Ron Gilbert's thing than anything else.

Manic Mansion, MM2, The Cave, Thimbleweed Park, and now TWP2: Gilbert's. Possibly also some of the many kid's games he did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Gilbert#Games

Broken Age is the only one of the many, many games Tim Schaefer lead that does it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer#Ludography

I have generally found it to be some tedious bullshit that stretches out the length of the game far, far too much, and I grew up playing a lot of these point and click adventures.

egypturnashon I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music

> Turns out, cross-fading two 4MP images at 60 frames per second on a moderately powerful single board computer is not so easy. I needed to use GPU acceleration to make it happen and look smooth.

fizzle fade, munching squares, horizontal/vertical/circular/pinwheel/etc wipes - anything that lets you replace a small number of pixels in the display buffer each frame.

egypturnashon The case for MUDs in modern times (2018)

Welcome to your new side project!

egypturnashon Can a MUD evaluate LLMs? A $99 proof of concept

Thanks for the corrections :)

I sure spent a lot of time on Furry. I think the penultimate time I logged on there was something like a decade ago; the last time was to attend Tugrik's wake.