so, a fantasy universe where if someone saves your life, you owe them a blood debt, but it’s commutative, transferable, and financialized, so if you save a life, that person now owes the debt, and people who save a lot of lives can bundle and sell their blood debts on the open market
our mouths gleaming
with teeth that we have stolen from children
extra teeth
more than we could ever need
The marketing copy has to be about “protecting you from blue light” without any claims having to do with whether or not you actually need to be protected from the color blue, which you absolutely do not:
famously the Emerald City of Oz is depicted in media as actually being a fabulous city of glittering emerald, but in the actual story, residents were required to wear goggles that “protected their eyes” from the dazzling brightness of a city of pure emerald
the goggles were, of course, tinted green, the Emerald City was never emerald at all, it was just another elaborate swindle from Oz, which was in-and-of-itself satire about the myth of American prosperity
I think, were he still alive, L. Frank Baum might find humor in the modern proliferation of swindlers selling glasses intended to protect you from the many imagined harms of the color blue.
add a detail to your steam game that forces its runtime to just a hair over 2 hours, put an episode of “Ted Lasso” in there if you have to, thank me later
That time the Starbucks barista misheard “Curtis” and wrote “Turdi” on my cup and my wife called me “Turdy” for a week
anyways tune in for my youtube video where I explain my dark theory where everybody in The Wizard of Oz was dead the whole time because it was filmed 84 years ago
When I’m looking at the problem, specifically, of scripting video-game style dialogue, the thing I’m looking to work with is a language that allows me to mark up text.
In fact, if I could mark up the text in a way that’s extensible - with all of my weird text animations and sound effects and mood modifiers and special effects - that’d be great.
None of these formats seem to do the trick YAML isn’t really a markup language at all, it’s an object serialization language, same with JSON.
Why, this calls for an… extensible markup language.
I wish someone had made something like that.
If I could find some way to legally churn kittens and orphans into high-yield fertilizer in a way that was profitable, I’d be drowning in VC capital and employees by the end of the week.
People clown on silicon valley’s “if we don’t build it, someone else will, might as well get to work building the evil thing” ethos but it’s not necessarily WRONG.
You don’t have to participate in it, you probably shouldn’t if it morally disgusts you, but if a profitable market opportunity exists, no matter how evil, there’s no shortage of people out there who will cheerfully fill it. They’ll rationalize it to themselves one way or another - “well, we design land mines but we don’t DEPLOY them” - “our vapes are helping people stop smoking” - “microtransactions are the only way to sustain a live service game” - if there’s profit on the line they’ll find a way.
Godot’s default text system doesn’t allow for very complex text animations, so I’ve been working on my own thing, which is … well, coming along, gradually.
I’ve got some basic 2D rigging working, too:
To be honest, I’ve always thought that the open marketplace “economy” monetization model in metaverse spaces is actually a huge anti-feature.
It’s why so many of them feel like abandoned malls. People don’t like being sold to and giving your creators tools to try to nickel and dime people for every interaction with their products creates a bad and unpleasant experience for your users, so they leave, then there’s nobody to sell to so your creators leave.
Your creators would have stuck around to create art for the sake of creating art, but now that their art could theoretically be profitable and isn’t they don’t want to stay any more.
It’s one of the things I actually love about Second Life, you boot it up and it’s this eternal haunted mall, just emptiness and the hull of commerce around you as far as the eye can see. Nobody was enjoying this, they all just thought they could make some money.
A vibrant VR platform lets you play with the bowling balls and drink the beer and you don’t have to pay some idiot $1.75 to do that.
A dead VR platform gives you nothing to do without productizing it, and most real human beings go “fuck this” and bail, because that’s the kind of platform that appeals to speculators and capital and not, y’know, people.
On the other hand, Roblox is printing money right now and Second Life made enough money on a virtual speculative land rush bubble that they created that they could sit on their hands for a decade, so maybe I should shut the hell up.
My wife’s company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new “potemkin village as a service” startup.
seatfillr is gonna be huge
Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company’s image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.
as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon
He could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we’d be a productive team.
pretty sure we’d be VP of Engineering before long
“why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?”
Curtis’s Actor, Handsomely: “I’m very busy with all of my job.”
Sometimes when something bad happens, somebody will make a post on social media like “we warned you, we warned you this was going to happen and you didn’t listen” - with “you” as a kind of abstract other person.
It does numbers because, I guess, people would rather feel like they’re aligned with the “we” than with the “you” in that sentiment. Yeah, (awkwardly), we … did warn you! You tell ’em! We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.
I usually unfollow everybody involved in that kind of transaction because none of that is a good energy to bring to social media.
I struggle to keep solar watches running because they require about four hours of direct sunlight a year and that’s just a promise I just can’t keep.
So, I had a neat idea of something I could do with a game I was working on: take the 2D plane the game was running on and stack it on a 3D plane, so that the game would visibly take place on a screen in a different, 3D world.
I whipped up a quick demo:
2025 Editor’s Note:
In retrospect, this neat idea was actually the worst kind of idea: a total project killer.
It sucked up a bunch of time and air, and obviously I lack the experience and chops to build a viable full 3D game: so chasing this idea would be impractical.
Something about the mere existence of this 2D/3D divide ended up drawing a lot of focus and thought, but it was so obviously impractical that the project couldn’t continue. Rather than rolling it back and continuing with an earlier build, I simply moved on to the next idea.
This was the last time I ever posted about this project.
I can build a program that can beat me at chess.
And let me tell you, it’s not because I’m good at chess.
I’m not even that good at programming.
There’s a really recent episode of Black Mirror where the plot is that a rich white lady completely loses her shit and goes crazy, which hurts her social media score, which causes her to lose her shit even more, which ruins her life because in the future, your social media score determines your access to everything.
But all of her experiences with being unpopular are just experiences that regular poor people have, all the time, today - the rental company gave her a bad car! Nobody listened to her when she complained at the airport! The justice system didn’t treat her fairly!
And one day of being treated this way drove this poor woman completely insane.
People really liked this episode. Such effective horror writing! Imagine if the world was actually like this?
And, like… damn, the world is really like this, it’s just that the currency is “money” rather than “popularity”, as if that is any fairer.
Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about setting up a Discourse community without remembering that the software is the world’s most effective ghost town generator.
The internet needs a modern forum software, I think. It’s good that this exists: and I’ve been running a tiny, private Discourse community for lo, near a decade now. So, actually, I’m kind of on the side of Discourse.
Like, my Discourse site doesn’t have a CDN set up. Because the CDN that I use, Cloudflare, one of the most common CDN platforms on the internet, isn’t supported by Discourse. That’s fine: I only have about 30 users, all of us in the Pacific Northwest, serving the whole site out of Wasabi object storage in Oregon is perfectly fine. but Discourse feels the need to pop up a notification every single week letting me know that this is a critical error that I need to fix! Let me live my life, Discourse.
I’m still weirded out by some of the ways they brand themselves and act. Discourse. A civilized discussion platform. Who decided that their marketing should be dripping with, like, neo-colonial derision for the way that people communicate online? That’s really baked in from the get-go, too, all the way down to the name of the platform itself. “Discourse”.
🧐 Mmm, yes. Fetch me my tea, Willinglsley, it’s time for a civilized discussion.
This isn’t a place for your memes and nonsense, this is a Serious Roman Forum for high-minded communique.
I can’t think of a software package where I’ve had to disable more dubiously helpful “leave it to us, we know how to run a community better than you do” features than Discourse. “That’s not enough words, you can’t post a response that’s just an emoji.” “Oh, you need to read everything and rank up on the forum levels before you participate, you neophyte.”
obviously the problem with internet communication has always been that it’s Not Polite And Erudite Enough
why, if we could all simply have a vigorous discussion with a polite exchange of ideas and then shake hands afterwards, what a pleasant place the internet could have become, but INSTEAD you’re ignoring our civilized offerings and pelting one another with TWITCH EMOTES like a bunch of sava—
It is simultaneously the best or second-best available FOSS community communication product (in competition with Mastodon, even though they serve different purposes) and just awkward and frustrating and disappointing in so many little ways.
I don’t know the NATO phonetic alphabet; one time I was reading a complex serial code to someone over the phone and I just started making up words - “M as in Muffin, E as in Echo, C as in Capybara, W as in Wendigo, P as in Pterodactyl…” and they started laughing at me.
Maybe because I picked awful words, but also maybe because “Pterodactyl” very prominently has a silent P, so that’s a terrible choice of word for it.
A lot of my family work in supervisory roles, and when I talk to them about the difficulties of working with other people our problems are very different: they need to keep people motivated to work.
I rarely work with people who need to be motivated. Most of the people in my last few jobs have brought loads of their own motivation. If anything, they need to be calmed down and reminded to take their vacation days.
“Please do not build this from scratch: a solution already exists.”
Carl Sagan famously said
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
— and I’ve met countless software developers (myself included) who would respond to that quote by rolling up their sleeves and going “welp.”
I use a term to justify building things that don’t need to be built: joy-driven development.
Sometimes, especially if you’re trying to manage your own flagging motivation, you can do things your own way because that makes it… more fun. It improves your sense of ownership over the product. It’s what differentiates craftsmanship from good engineering. Sure, the custom solution is not as flexible or well understood as the existing one, but…
A lot of becoming a senior developer is developing better instincts about where projects can and should fall on the DIY to NIH spectrum. I’m still way too gung-ho about building my own solutions for things.
i’m doing my part for the environment, i recycle all of my garbage, regardless of how many times the city asks me to stop
accolades like “don’t put non-recyclables in the recycling bin” and “that’s not how it works”
I use the term “load bearing poster” all the time when describing legacy code - it means “that’s very obviously kinda bad but it’s also kinda best not to poke it unless you’re feeling brave”.
generally pretty good reviews for the local park n’ ride
I do not know what caused me to want to make this nightmare, maybe just frustration with Facebook in general
(editor’s note: For a while I was working on this project in Godot, a little RPG thing.)
This is turning out to be super interesting pixel art experiment:
The level’s geometry is very basic and I’m encoding the texture information on a normal layer rather than by painting it.
When combined with light sources, the level’s texture information looks very naturalistic.
basic geo:
2D normals:
final:
there aren’t a lot of cat gargoyles but there should be, wouldn’t buildings be better with a whole mess of stone cats napping all over the place, watching you from cornerso
isn’t this building better for having this guy?
in order to work off some of the almost oppressive closeness of the Christmas season I basically don’t talk to anybody in my family (or outside my family, if possible) for the first 20 days of January
if you look at the floor and see it needs sweeping but still your guitar gently weeps, you have confused your guitar and broom.
this is a common problem.
despite what you might think, it can not be resolved with a blistering solo.
you need to put down the guitar and fetch a broom. you can’t solo dust away.
Have you heard Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega?
Well, I can absolutely guarantee you’ve heard PART of it.
I just see it everywhere, now:
new idea: a microblog where I rate Canada’s hundreds of Terry Fox statues
This one would be, like, a 2/10.
My younger brother and one of my friends are literally having a conversation about boring - boring machines, boring holes, troubles boring. I suggested they change the topic to riveting because it might be more interesting but no dice.
grandmas are also 3d printers
spool up some yarn and watch a hat materialize
I have this picture from 2019 where I sketched out a geeky but non-existent object, the mythical “arcade wine cabinet” for adult nerds.
I think it would sell!
My experience of being broadly creative but not overwhelmingly talented is one of tremendous, unending shame.
How dare I produce such shoddy trash? How dare I presume that any of my output is worth others’ time and attention?
I deserve my relative anonymity.
This is tempered by what I would describe as “grim defiance”. God damn you, I will reach deep down and I will produce more trash than you had ever thought possible, and I will press it right into your goddamned faces until you love me.
everyone always describes VRChat like this
evidence is mounting that vampires and cats are beloved for many of the same reasons
basically I’m laying out the argument for why “Prince Alastair: Catboy Vampire” would be the most shipped character ever written
Cats treat dogs basically the same way that vampires treat werewolves, I’m telling you, vampires is just cats.
Do you know that part of Castlevania where Dracula dramatically throws a wine glass on to the ground and it shatters?
Total cat move.
Getting home in cold weather gear with groceries, then doing a Sailor Moon transformation sequence that ends with a lumpy man wearing pyjamas.
you trigger a fight with man who overestimated how many groceries he can carry home
watch out, he’s one of the slowest opponents in the game but if he can extricate his welt-crossed hands from his bags he can do big damage with his bottomless inventory and the Throw command
you trigger a fight with the boys in the bright white sports car
the boys are waving their hands in the air
who do they think they are?!?
Comfy behind the TV, buddy?
He turns his head upside down when he sees me so I can give him some chin snugs
This look means my toes are in danger.
having a heated bidet toilet seat during winter combines the satisfaction of power-washing videos with the toastiness of not having to put your cheeks on cold plastic
i maintain the identity associated with the bits I was born with, and also, am very good with computers
that is to say, I’m a cis admin
if you get 8 people with clearly defined gender in a room together, you have one byte of gender binary
tv: mentions “three men”
tiff: I want three men
curtis: I guess I know what to get you for christmas
tiff: what am I going to do with more men?
curtis: you were the one who requested the additional men
tiff: I already have two men, and one of them poops everywhere
curtis: and the other one’s our cat
curtis: if a vampire wanted a fizzy drink would they have to go after scuba divers and intentionally give them the bends?
tiff: couldn’t they just extract the blood and add carbon dioxide directly? I mean, unless this is Ann Rice rules
curtis: I mean, nitrogen works to make the stout all foamy, that’s also what’s happening to scuba divers, right?
tiff: it only takes, like, a few bubbles to kill you, I don’t think the vampires could move the scuba divers fast enough to make this satisfying
Tinned tuna? Dry. Tinned salmon? Bony.
I can see why you’ve been sleeping on tinned fishies if those are the only ones you’ve been introduced to.
No, the real money is in tinned anchovies, tinned smoked mackerel, tinned smoked herring, and of course, fried dace with black bean.
Small, oily tinned fish are more sustainable to fish, more efficient to ship (no refrigeration required), shelf stable for a long time, omega oil rich, filling, inexpensive, and most importantly: delicious.
to fix a hole in your jeans, simply put them on over another pair of jeans. Then, when you look into the hole in the outer jeans, you’ll only find more jeans
once again we have decided to go to Orlando
basically my theory of ops tooling is that if you’re a small team without a dedicated specialist, it needs to be rock solid and dirt simple, and SaaS providers get you there a lot faster than DIY
I carved it myself.
From a bigger spoon.
What’s curious is that nobody has pitched a Muppet movie on the internet yet that I wouldn’t watch.
A Muppet fantasy RPG where Muppets gather around a RPG table but all of their actions are performed by live-action actors, with The Rock voiced by Ms. Piggy? Sold.
Muppet Dune? Sign me up.
A Muppet adaptation of the Muppet Christmas Carol called “The Muppet Muppet Christmas Carol” where they re-do the Muppet Christmas Carol but with more Muppets? Absolutely
Muppet 1984? Why not?
Actually I might veto any big Muppet fantasy projects like LoTR because the Jim Henson company might lean into their Dark Crystal collection a bit and nobody needs any more of those creepy expressionless indistinguishable Brian Froud waifs.
One time I invited my friends over for steamed clams, a meal that I actually prepared for them.
and I absolutely spent some time wondering if it would be worth it to head out and pick up a little bit of fast food to disguise as my own cooking
Ultimately I decided against it because the meal itself was already fairly labor intensive and the joke, while funny, probably wasn’t worth the 20 minutes, $5-10, and possible ruination of people’s actual appetites; it would have been a wasteful throwaway joke on account of how I’d actually made steamed clams.
But I want you to know exactly how long and hard I struggled with that conclusion, because we honestly only really invite our friends over for steamed clams, like, a few times ever.
The best I could do was to ask them, when they arrived, if they were prepared for an unforgettable luncheon.
“We’re here for dinner.”
Dan Olson on Twitter, discovering the frequently-frontpaged-on-reddit superstonk cult.
I … hope he makes a video about it, but I’m guessing it won’t happen, because I imagine it would end up re-treading a bunch of ground he already covered in his flat earth/qanon and contrepreneurs videos.
Editor’s Note: 2 years later, it happened:
The old wizard pulls a crystal sphere from his overstuffed cupboard, blowing the dust off, and then rubbing it clean with his sleeves.
“I haven’t had to boot this thing up in years”, he says, popping the ball into a cradle next to an old CRT monitor and operating it like a trackball
Sometimes you wake up and there’s a lump of covers next to you that you need to investigate and you find a cat in there.
cat trap succeess
as Gorthrax The Volcano Demon’s lava murders are down to only a handful a day, we’ve decided to once again slowly phase out our expensive dimensional walls in favor of a demon management strategy that focuses more on individual choice
Have you seen Quinns talking for 30 full minutes about VRChat? Because it’s very good.
my myers-briggs type is [Object object]
(smug, haughty)
welcome to our haven, poor and desperate tweetsite refugees. together we shall create a shining utopia
(just as soon as a handful of dudes buy some slightly larger postgres servers and reconcile the problem of one entire sidekiq thread per toot)
i will be your guide to the customs and desires of this place we call home, as I have been here for fourty five entire of the minutes
the first decision you have to make in the fediverse is which of the five camps you fall into:
misunderstanding what parasocial relationships are
if you’re looking at it on any screen it’s technically pixel art
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, Fediverse/Mastodon, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Fediverse plus Mastodon.
It feels like the name “Curtis” is gradually disappearing from the public consciousness. I’ll tell people my name and see them write it down: “Chris”, often. Recently I got a “Furtis”. But this one… this one’s special
it’s a roguelike
in that
it’s a game that you can play on a computer
like rogue
which was also that
On one hand, sushi that’s any bigger than bite-sized is a tell-tale sign that you are not in a classy sushi restaurant.
On the other hand, there’s a certain visceral pleasure to be had opening your mouth real wide and packing a softball sized california roll in there, presumably impressing your date.
Their marketing team is honestly as surprised as you are:
the way I feel about typescript is the way I’d feel if someone popularized adding gendered nouns to english to make it feel more like a romance language
for a tale of top-notch unclery
my nephew was fiddling with a voice recording interface that had a “reverse” button
so I say “watch this”
and I record myself going “ynreh olleh” a few times
and he looks at me like a crazy person because I am speaking gibberish
then I click the reverse button
and it works
Obviously: cat pics
behind the wheel of a large automobile
and you may ask yourself
“how did I get here?”
and you may ask yourself
“where does that highway go to”
and you may ask yourself
“am I right, am I wrong”
and you may say to yourself
“My god, I should pull over and check the maps application on my phone”
The movie marketing fails to note that this is considered the correct, optimal status for babies.
a month ago the Guardian called VRChat a “no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare” that phrase has lived rent-free in my head ever since
it was intended as derogatory but it goes so fucking hard, it’s awesome
I’ve been suggesting that we use it as a pull-quote ever since, but no traction yet
Hah, I made a bread! BREAD HOOOOOO
editor’s note: these are images from a project I was working on in 2018, called northwestica, linked here
