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How To Make Good Small Game

I used to be more into making small games - especially at glorious trainwrecks and their 2-hour-game-jams. Small games often hearken back to the early days of video games where games tended to lean on novel physics and other mechanics, often on a single screen, instead of world-building and lore.


Processing (Java) and then P5 were my platforms of choice. You had to do everything from scratch, but you had absolute flexibility. And skills I learned in small game making have come in useful in small projects for work and the interactive greeting cards I still enjoy making.


games.alienbill.com is probably the high point of my small-game hobby, where I gathered 25 of the most interesting things I had made into an advent calendar.

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Netflix is the UHF of Our Time

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What does angel meat taste like fried in oil?

You know your old when you clean your house to the music you use to get drunk too.

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Nothing between human beings is one-to-three. In fact I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is to six-to-five against.

The last quarter of that (starting with "all life") used to be my .signature file on Usenet, and I seem to be the only bearer of the phrase Google knows of.

I got it From William Kennedy's introduction to "Guys and Dolls", a re-release of Runyon's short stories published around the 1992 Broadway revival (my mom had just moved to NYC and we saw Nathan Lane and Peter Gallagher on stage in it... and I had been "Big Jule" in Euclid High School's production a year or two before.)

(Not sure what made me think of it - perhaps the C.S.Lewis trilemma yesterday made me think of "1-to-3 against"...)

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You're born with too many marbles. You can afford to lose some. In fact, you only need one marble.

Larry was one of the "anchor-outs", an off-shore community of about 100 people in Richardson Bay off of Sausalito, living in abandoned and unseaworthy vessels (via Joe Kloc in Lost at Sea in Harper's.)

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Got a bit chilly so I decided to double down on the hoodie action. But then I realized I was really rocking the watermelon angle.

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And yet another Dean in the Chair pic...

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Worthwhile videoNo one knew there'd be a pandemic, or an epidemic of this proportion - except Obama, 5 years earlier. My friend and bandmate Sophie was looking for advice on reassembling a pile of cat, and I thought of this old Kliban's Cat:


Either my dad or I or both had this T-shirt when I was a kid, and we loved singing the little jingle:

(I think we usually sing it to that "I Eat My Peas With Honey" tune) Was fear of burning in hell forever a big part of your childhood? My church wasn't particularly fire-and-brimstone but I remember being scared witless at some point as a 10- or 11-year-old. It really set me to be uptight in certain ways - even after I gave up the supernatural belief, I think subconsciously the "do right or face the most dire imaginable (actually, literally unimaginably awful) consequences." sunk in deep. And in some ways its kept my behaviour on some good straight and narrow paths but, man, what a cost!

Anyway. I had a dialog tonight that reminded me "fear of eternal hellfire" isn't a universal feature of childhood / tween years, so now I'm wondering how many of my online buds had it?

I want to reiterate that my church didn't hammer hell home, or at least not frequently, and I'm very sure I didn't get it from my folks. (Though on a visit to DC I had a Sunday School class taught by my Aunt that emphasized the Tribulation, complete with a Christian in front of a firing squad, that seized my imagination. A terrifying pile of bullshit for a child. Not sure if that kind of scare is morally better or worse than "pre-tribulation" thinking (that uses a dubious reading of scriptures and a more optimistic and selfish view of God's protection for his flock to presume good Christians have a "Get Out of Jail" free card and will be whisked off before the excrement hits the ventilation system.))

One of my frustrations with my conversation last night was my discussion partner, who was blessed with a more wholesome set of one on one religious instructions as a child, kind of flaunted that wholesomeness over what I had picked up then, but as if my view then was what I overtly believed now, and as if I hadn't matured my own view. I have, but am aware that there's a subconscious underpinning - or even undermining - and that "epistemology and morality is a game you play for unimaginably perilous, eternal stakes" drives even my secular view (where the preponderance of SO MANY DIFFERENT faiths and corresponding supernatural explanations leads me to believe that none of them are as true as they claim, unless they go down a non-exclusive "many paths to the same destination" approach.)

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It's funny how many years I ran from having a conversation about this with my Preacher Lady Mom. I mean, I still do. I see now that given my views about "Objective Truth that you can know but never be certain of your knowledge of, but other people's beliefs are important signposts as to the most likely Truth" I had a lot of anxiety about us not being able to pay attention to each other's signposts.

At one point maybe ten years ago when we had part of that conversation, she came back to a "and when I have doubts, I just realize that it's not such a bad way to live anyway." At the time I thought it was just a recapitulation of Pascal's Wager, but I realize now she might have been referring in an understated way to a lot of richness the Christian Preacher life has provided for her, really given her purpose and community and with all The Salvation Army's charity, many tangible and real-world proofs of the good she has done.

I shared my religious skepticism with Mr. Johnson (the man, a pharmacist and my part-time employer, who came closest to stepping as the father figure after my dad died during the beginning of my time in high school, and had many great man-to-boy talks over dinner - now he's up in Heaven too, to quote Vonnegut) and he said he was pretty assured I'd come back to religion/church some day. And now I wonder if the community and richness I find in activist bands counts - the parallels with my church upbringing (in particular with School of Honk - marching outside Sunday afternoons and constantly inviting people to join in) are tremendous, and I'm thinking I get many of the church-y benefits sociologists talk about through my 4 or 5 bands... (tl; dr: maybe I'm so damnably bad with names is because my main processing part of my brain is separate from my verbal inner voice part of my brain.)

Weird possible introspection revelation, tying into yesterday's Cormac McCarthy link about how the subconscious talks to us via images and dreams and not words.

I had some early morning dreams that were about me going on a white river rafting trip, modeled after one I took a few years ago. For some reason it was stuck on the preliminaries rather than the rafting itself, but whatever -

As I stumbled through that murky twilight of half-awake, I realized the one thing that was missing from my understanding of that dream narrative's was a description: i.e. the words "river rafting". I can't be sure of the dream production process, but it often feels like some part of my brain, the subconscious, spits out feelings and images, and then my verbal/inner-voice/narrator weaves it together into a more coherent story that it can understand. (The McCarthy article speculates a bit about this process as well)

I feel like my subconscious can *understand* words - in fact it's the subsystem I use to skim read quickly, and it gleans the relevant bits for the narrator brain (and tells it to go back for the tricky bits for more careful review) but the subconscious doesn't use words and labels much - it relies more on a wordless understanding of how things interact.

This felt like a revelation, or maybe half of one. I have long suspected I'm bad with names and faces because they don't change how I interact with that person. A person could interact and be the same person under a hundred different names and still be the same entity from an interactive standpoint. (This explains that old "remember people's names" trick of associating it with some semi-arbitrarily selected mnemonic - like picture Francis in a beret with a baguette, just to engage these other parts of the mind and not just the verbal narrator)

So the other half, the new half, of this revelation is maybe that is so difficult for me because I rely more than most folks on the part of my brain that doesn't have any facility for names. I might just be making an excuse for myself, trying to to justify a kind of laziness and disengagement, but I think fully recognizing the source of a problem is both a key to making excuses for it and for fixing it.

(The revelation also provides a path to reconciling some seeming contradictions: on the one hand I'm what my friend Tom Kermode has called a "cruxian", the thrust of things is what matters to me. I like art and music that engages in broad strokes, and a dual insensitivity to details / nuance and indifference to interior life that doesn't come to the surface. On the other hand, one of my arguing partners frequently gets annoyed when I correct his vocabulary, and insist on a precise selection and usage of words (but, to his chagrin, precise in a descriptivist, how it's actually used kind of way, not in a word-history arm-chair etymologist kind of way) - at a shallow level, word choice seems very much to be about nuance. I think the contradiction is resolved in the interplay between the desire for two people's subconsciouses, the ones doing the deep understanding to communicate but they have to filter through the rational verbal narrators - the surface characteristics of the words are all they have to work with, so the wrong or misleading word can lead to big problems indeed.)

This all reminds me of that bit from "Through the Looking-Glass":
'This must be the wood,' she said thoughtfully to herself, 'where things have no names. I wonder what'll become of *my* name when I go in? I shouldn't like to lose it at all--because they'd have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That's just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs--"answers to the name of 'Dash:' had on a brass collar"--just fancy calling everything you met "Alice," till one of them answered! Only they wouldn't answer at all, if they were wise.'

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#321 formation of a committee to determine the plausibility of "aggressive passive" behavior; for example, furiously hammering water (for my work's slack channel #stupid-idea-buddies )

[Minsky was] trying to create a computer beautiful enough that a soul would want to live in it.

(quoted in Sherry Turkle's "Reclaiming Conversation")

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RIP Prince. WTF is up with 2016?

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Days like today always remind me of this Achewood about Michael Jackson's death (WARNING: read only if you want to dwell in that sad place a little more fully and thoughtfully for a bit.)

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Deadspin suggests his 2007 Superbowl show

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Awesome collection of Prince moments. The video of his best throwing shade moments (under "Anna") is worth the price of admission. A friend of mine is pondering moving back to the Boston area, a person I'm dating just got back from a trip to SF, and so I'm thinking about cities and where I live in a way I haven't for a while.

One essay that I paraphrase a lot (and so am surprised I can't find links to it on this site) is Paul Graham's Cities and Ambition. My rough paraphrase usually goes:

Every big city whispers a secret message, about what you should be. For New York it's "You should be richer than you are." For Paris it's "You should be more stylish than you are", for LA "You should be more famous". For Boston and Cambridge, though, it's "You should be smarter than you are". And I like that message.

Another article I can't quite relocate, maybe more than one article, and maybe from the Atlantic, talks about how gay friendly cities tend to be the most creative, and it's not just that gay people are creative, it's the correlation with being open to new ideas and alternate ways of being. And similarly, people want to be near museums and parks less because they use them a ton (though sometimes they do!) but because it's nice to know it's around, and also to be around other people for whom that's important.

Living around Boston more than 20 years, the story of my youth (the kid who moves around a lot) is being supplanted... I move around the same pace, but just from 'burb to 'burb. I have professional and personal connections here that are pretty deep; families where I'm the virtual uncle, I've had the same doctor for over a decade, I know a bunch of folks in the tech industry. I know the places I dig, but I'm still finding new places I've never seen.

I dig this city! (Insert "Big Dig" joke here) (Insert admonition against the laziness of making metajokes rather than things that are actually funny here) (Insert further admonition against unduly self-conscious attempts at framing via metahumor, and a request to let the meta-analysis stop here.) Man, I have never seen so many people wrestling with the (admittedly, not intuitive) MBTA card/ticket system at one time as this morning at Alewife...

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I feel like every selfie is basically asking: 'Do I look sexy when I'm lonely?'

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So the first thing you wanna do is get out of your wheelchair and into your walker. Now if you don't have a walker, it probably means you can actually walk - so you're already ahead of the game!

From his autotuned workout video which I liked a lot.

We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.

Q:What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?

A: The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

--Someone at work posted this outside their cube, it's from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics. Good stuff!

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If everything is coming your way then you're in the wrong lane.

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I think half of my problem with clutter is a refusal to believe that I'm not depriving some future biographer of precious research material.
--Man, this poster outside the stairs at work brings me no end of joy.
(Especially because there's a landing, it's not like the door opens right to the stairs.)

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The lost iPhone 4 story, with the phone disguised in a 3G case, reminds of how weird it seems that cases are so popular for such a durable and tactiley nice thing.

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After dabbling with backpacks, back to courier bags. A child of the 80s, I always feel like a tool using both straps, and worried I might have left a flap open, or vulnerable to pickpockets. Kind of sad I can't remember what I used in college... maybe gym/duffle style bags? Or one that came with my laptop. (In high school it ws gym bags, including this one god awful huge Nike bag, I think ment for sports equipment or something.)

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"Truman's in the White House eating bread and jelly. Dewey's in the pig pen rolling on his belly."

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Three chains I saw in Cleveland that need to be franchised in New England: Jimmy John's (great fast subs), Steak and Shake, Sport Clips (haircuts)

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Even if a goose has an iron neck, it must have a spot where you can plunge a knife in.

It reminds me of this odd bit of dialog from the Japanese game EDF 2017, something like "Even a seemingly strong defense must have a weak point - find that weakpoint!" Both seem a bit optimistic to me, really.

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UPDATE The Meryman: Gin, Diet Tonic, Lime, a Splenda. Named after its inventor Amber.
To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
iso - source - built with processing


Shortly after a study in the joy of smashing, a study in isometric graphics ends up becoming something about the loveliness of building. Use the mouse to move the cursor, the button drops blocks. Space clears, 'M' makes the bricks' 'mortar' visible or invisible. (Prettier hidden, in my opinion.)

(I was meaning to transfer all my data to my new PC tonight, but got sidetracked by this, in part because I started playing with isometric cubes the other day and was worried I'd forget about the project if I just turned the computer off.)

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Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Like Larry "Perl" Wall says, programming is all about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.

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"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."

(Yes, 2 quotationspage.com qotd in a row. Sosumi.)

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New Yorker on neuroenhancing drug abuse. Yesterday EB observed that the local Thai place (Sweet Chile) had not just "Crazy Chicken" but "Excited Chicken".

This got the two of us and MrsEB wondering about a restaurant that featured dishes named after emotional states: Complacent Potatoes, Smug Steak, Serious Sprouts. MrsEB thought it should be Curious Cupcakes, though I thought it would be a better name for Curry, and of course the inevitable "Bi-Curry-Us" was thought of by both me and EB ("Curry Us" wouldn't be a bad name for a curry shop actually.)

So we came up with more, Angry Lobster, Angsty Noodles, etc etc.

Anyone else got some ideas?

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Photos of the Moment

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Quote of the Moment

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.

Up in Rockport helping EvilB work on a house they hope to move into later.... I'll try to post more at some point.

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Pointless Cartoon of the Moment

--Another taking-notes-in-meeting dragon

Hope yesterday's work wasn't too much of a slog for people, or if they just blew it off...I had a lot of fun writing it a few weeks ago

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Lyric and Digression and Link of the Moment

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

It's a good song and all, but it occurs to me as a little unbalanced, how half the suits (♠,♣) are related to fighting, with only ♥ and ♦ otherwise. It seems like...I dunno, having spades me the "tool of the farmer" or something would be more balanced, then you'd have food, fight, money, love, which seems to cover more conceptual territory than fight, fight, money, love.

Anyway, I enjoyed Wikipedia's entry on the history of Playing Cards. There's definately some kind of magic to all that I think.

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Decoration of the Moment

♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥

--I hadn't realized the card suits were built into browser character sets; I like it. Reminds me a little of making art and "screenshots" with special characters on the old 8bits.

Poem of the Moment

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big Love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

By chance, SalonSlate.com had a article on his legacy on the day after I added this poem to the backlog to post in the future. Must be a sign! Oh, one goofy detail I forgot to mention yesterday...Monday, while watching the movie, I got a cellphone call from my Uncle Bill (it was set to vibrate). So afterwards, but still during "Kill Bill Vol 2", I was able to show Peterman and Dalton "Missed Calls". Entry #1? Bill.

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Link of the Moment
A little while back this link about hidden stuff in Microsoft's own Word documents was making the rounds, where Microsoft inadvertantly lets you see the edits that were made to drafts of various documents, sometimes in an embarassing kind of way.

It reminds of how back in the day, online folk would write fake Delete characters, ^H^H^H^H, to undo "mistakes" they made and put the "corrected" versions after...e.g. "He's such a assh^H^H^H^Hforceful personality"

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Essay of the Moment
Good essay on What is the meaning of life?, a close second to the Monty Python answer to it. (via Bill the Splut)

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Article of the Moment
Slate on the Columbine Killings. It argues that it was a play for infamy, to make the world shudder at their power; it was their failure at wiring timers that made it a "mere school shooting". Talks about the killers from a clinical psychiatry health point of view which is kind of interesting. Quote of the Moment

...In essence this fellow is looking for all there is of life. The great questions for a man are what to do about his time and his passion, and where to find friends and money to live them with. When he's found the right answers, he's got all four legs a man needs to walk on. Could anything be more interesting or important?

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Link of the Moment
ForumFlames, images to add heat with no light to any online discussion. (Some swearing etc.)

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Outrage of the Moment

Their most pressing problem was the breast-feeding picture, which the indictment characterized as sexual, "to wit; actual lewd exhibition of...a portion of the female breast below the top of the areola, and the said defendant did and then employ, authorize and induce Rodrigo Fernandez, a child younger than 18 years of age, to engage in said sexual conduct and sexual performance." In other words, says Chatham, the act of simulated breast-feeding, captured on film, was being portrayed as a sex act. "They're saying the guy who took the picture is a sicko and wanted a photo of this to satisfy his sexual desire."

The tactics the prosecutors are using sound really slimey, it seems like a real witch hunt. The kid in the picture shown had already been weaned, but still; clearly, if you're not using a digital camera (or Polaroids) already, be careful what you bring to the film stop...

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Video of the Moment
Nina Paley's Fetch! is a great romp of messing with perspective and some classic optical illusions. Plus it has a puppy. So, today's entry is coming to you live from John Sawers' house. And from a Mac, which is probably a first as well. None of the little keyboard things in side a textbox (hop to the end of the line, etc) work right.

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Quote of the Moment

"You make me sick, Homer. You're the one who told me I could do anything if I just put my mind to it!"
"Well, now that you're a little bit older, I can tell you that's a crock! No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you."
"Gotcha. Can't win, don't try. "

...and as Kurt Vonnegut points out in "Bluebeard":

A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications puts him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

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Link of the Moment
The Oulipo Compendium has some really interesting examples of Oulipo, highly formal methods of restricting writing. (Like, not using the letter "e" throughout an entire large piece, or replacing every noun with the seventh following it in the dictionary.) Check out the Excerpts page for more examples. Finally got around to downloading the pictures from my birthday party on the 31st. (E-mail me if you want to see them all.) This one of me blowing out the candles is a little creepy:

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Gag of the Moment
At the risk of beating this into the ground, this is an excerpt from a fake Taiwan news story that's making the rounds:

In a heroic dogfight fought over international waters off the mainland China coast, a 1960s era American built Lockheed Electra (EP-3) propeller driven airliner with 24 US military crew, passengers and observers aboard chewed up one of China's best state-of-the-art supersonic jet fighter aircraft.

The Americans, utilizing the infrequently seen combat tactic of straight and level flight accomplished relying solely on autopilot, engaged the unfortunate single seat combat jet fighter aircraft and knocked it out of the air using only one of the EP-3's four formidable rotating air mass propellers.

You know, at the risk of sounding like a 1950s racist humorist, it's kind of funny that the downed pilot's name is Wang Wei. Change the 'a' to an 'o', and you have a very stupid but apropos little joke.

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Link of the Moment
Found Diary of a heroin using girl. Not as fascinating as I thought when I first heard about it, but kind of interesting view of street life.