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2025

  1. Junk Drawer D&D

    The ideal level of abstraction and prep for a D&D dungeon is a graph that looks like this:

    GRAPH



  2. too many words about balatro

    Caution
    Normally I try to keep my blog posts at least a little bit general-audience, but this is exclusively Balatro DEEP LORE which is only maybe interesting to people who obsess over this game.

    okay, so, I hear on the grapevine that Black Deck Gold Stake is the nastiest challenge in Balatro.


  3. Roasted Garlic Miso Ramen

    Roasted Garlic Miso Ramen

    So, today I put together a nice little miso ramen for lunch on a whim, based mostly on stuff I had sitting around:

    this was so good and so easy!


  4. Hash Tuning

    I build a new auth system about once a year.

    That’s a weird hobby, but, it’s, like, incidental to the actual hobby: I start a lot of projects using new technologies, and the first thing I have to figure out in these new technologies is always auth.

    And every time I do, after I’ve got most of auth working, I have to figure out why my test suite takes 500+ms to run per test, despite my using an all-local stack of generally pretty performant technologies - in fact, a lot of the time it feels like the more modern and performant my stack is, the slower all of these tests are.


  5. I Love Complicated Card Games

    Magic: the Gathering really captured my heart from a young age. There’s something really compelling about building a deck and doing fights with it.

    I kinda drifted away from it, though. It’s an expensive hobby, and the “C” part of CCG never really appealed to me: I derive little joy from collecting.




2024



  1. a taxonomy ruined my ability to think like an adult

    I mention this now because I saw it come up on the internet a second time and it frustrates me that this thing exists:

    So, at one point in my life, a friend of mine shared with me this document, which she believed in as an adequate explainer of modern office life, based… well, quite a lot on the TV show “The Office” - and accused me of being a quite successful and subtle Sociopath.


  2. pocket fiction

    I’m told by numerous sources that one of the keys to writing well is simply to write badly until you have exhausted your ready supply of dogshit words.

    I’ve also heard that about a lot of other things - coding, art, you do in fact get a lot better by simply doing it over and over and over and over again.

    Anyways, that’s the reasoning behind the Pocket Fiction topic, where I draw a random tarot card and use it to compose a little bit of flash fiction in the rt0 universe.


  3. the 20 year anniversary of WB's Superstar USA

    So, every now and then I rewatch Jenny Nicholson talking about the worst reality TV show of all time, because it’s funny, and because I have a cold.

    Anyways, the comments for that video are now filled with people pushing their own, alternate takes for worst reality TV show of all time, and, uh, okay.

    WB’s Superstar USA.

    The whole show is available in its entirety on YouTube:

    Whereas our legendary Opposite Worlds was merely dangerously incompetent, WB’S Superstar USA is actively malicious, a season long elaborate prank.



  4. Camping / Roleplaying The End Of the World With 4000 Other People

    Just after my trip to New York City I thought to myself about a vacation that would be the complete opposite of a trip to New York City.

    Not because I didn’t have fun, but because variety is the spice of life. Also, Tiff has never been camping.

    We’ve been pretty dedicated “it just makes more sense to get a hotel or a cabin” folk, but dang: between the rent crisis and 100% inflation that’s starting to get less and less practical.




  5. psycholonials

    i’d love to watch a video essay about psycholonials with the caveat that I wouldn’t trust anybody who read psycholonials to make a video essay about psycholonials

    So, I’ve made no small matter (outside of my blog) out of my growing Homestuck fandom. (And also: my complete and utter lack of interest in participating in Homestuck fandom.)

    It really is a singular piece of art.

    If you’ve ever wondered how Andrew Hussie felt about Homestuck, here comes Psycholonials, a VN by Andrew Hussie about… Homestuck.



  6. Satire is Hard

    So, both Tiff and I had seen some growing groundswell behind the old, famously terrible movie “Showgirls”.

    Has Showgirls actually become kind of good?

    Tom Jolliffe takes a look back at Showgirls, once universally derided and considered one of the worst films ever… but is it actually misunderstood? Upon its release in 1995, Paul Verhoeven’s trashy spectacular, Showgirls was obliterated by critics….

    Showgirls: Complete and utter trainwreck or misunderstood satirical feminist masterpiece?


  7. iced tea, man

    I’m a capable bartender, but almost all of that knowledge has instead found its way into my true vice: a potent homemade iced tea lemonade that I can drink gallons of.


  8. Goblin & Gnome Lore

    My personal D&D goblin lore is that most of their whole deal can be explained by the fact that they have a LOT of children, mature at about twice the rate as humans, and have about half the lifespan (if they live that long, which is rare), so they’re essentially to humans what humans are to elves.

    Elves look at humans as unpredictable and hot tempered and violent and childish, and humans think the same things about goblins.







2023



  1. Casablanca

    Did you know I was probably in my 30s before I watched Casablanca for the first time?





  2. Please Stop Being Such Good Developers

    So, sometimes, in FooApplication, we need to extract some Nurble Data from the HTTP request, which is included as a base-64-encoded JSON blob in a cookie from the Nurble provider.




  3. Vacation Reads

    Through no fault of my own, I’ve accidentally stumbled into a themed reading list. It wasn’t on purpose, but definitely my last three books have explored themes of memory, belief, and hazardous information.



  4. generative captcha

    So, I decided, “how hard would it be to build my own CAPTCHA?”, but instead of showing people boring trains and crosswalks, I could generate the dumbest possible categories of things.



2022

  1. Cozy, not Cyberpunk

    If you were to ask most people what they think the visual design of social VR looks like, I think they would say “Cyberpunk”.

    The Oasis, the Metaverse, virtual reality as a crowded, public, bazaar.

    uh oh, we built a transmetropolitan








  2. Keyboard Keyboard

    I’ve been continuously computing, gaming, and drawing since before the turn of the century, and as a result my wrists are this close to just giving up and falling off of my hands entirely. If I try to do a Vanna White flourish it sounds like someone twisting bubble wrap.

    So, ergonomic keyboards? I’ve tried ‘em. Mechanical keyboards? Those too. I have opinions.




2021

  1. Arkham Horror (TCG)

    So, uh, perhaps you are familiar with Arkham Horror? Maybe a decade ago I brought you to my home to attempt to play it as a group?




  2. Oath

    My copy of Oath arrived!

    And, yeah, post-pandemic I’ve been able to rebuild a small group of board gamers who are willing to engage with me, even on ridiculous games like Oath. So let me tell you some of my thoughts about it.



  3. Phoenix LiveView makes a Very Old Mistake

    I’m really enjoying learning about Elixir, and Phoenix. They constitute, in my opinion, an extremely thoughtfully designed language and framework. So far my biggest gripe about the language is that prominent library developers keep choosing names for their products and libraries that are not terribly Google-able. “Phoenix”? “Hex”? “Cowboy”?

    Anyways, Phoenix got really popular in 2017, at which point it seemingly dropped off of the face of the planet.

    I want to put that wholly at the feet of their pursuit of Phoenix LiveView, a stack so fundamentally cursed that it undoes almost every iota of goodwill earned from Phoenix or Elixir.



2020


  1. Arrays With More than 18 Elements In Them are Dumb

    A decade ago, when I was working on, you know, procedural generation stuff, fresh out of University, I definitely felt like I’d need to spend some time putting together some serious tools for generating selections from a variety of probability distributions.

    At the time, I was building a “Mohammed Chang” generator - a random name generator that used census data to try to generate mathematically probable names. If I’m pulling names out of a hat, and I want to pick “Smith” more often than I pick “Schwarzchild’ - well, that’s a job for a weighted probability distribution.