BILLY JOEL: I'm sorry what
ME: the piano-man...which half was piano and which half was man?
BILLY JOEL: no, no, he was just a regular man who played piano
ME:
BILLY JOEL:
ME: william that can't be right

I love Godot. I filed a bug report last night before bed, and by the time I checked in the morning, it had been fixed. No waiting.

@gemini6ice Ah yes, the BIPoC (Blinky, Inky, Pinky, ond Clyde) flag

Today I discovered a performance regression introduced in 2005. I am deeply Chesterton about fixing it without understanding why the change was made, since it was clearly a deliberate change.

Here’s a poem for World Otter Day.

Househunting On Behalf Of My Cat: A Poem

(via The Whippet)

Monday you can say you’re Greg
Tuesday, Wednesday, morph in bed
On Thursday climb the walls instead
It's Friday, I'm a bug
– Robert Smith on Kafka

(Gregorian Calendar)

Monday: Greg
Tuesday: Ian
Wednesday: Greg
Thursday: Ian
Friday: Greg

A few weeks ago, I tried to get a vaccine at Walgreens/Duane Reade. I booked an appointment online, and they happily gave me an appointment. But when I got to the store, it wasn't in stock. They called around, and basically none of their stores had it in stock.

Today, I tried again. While their online system would give me an appointment, I decided to call first -- and indeed, the location still didn't have it. So I asked the pharmacist to let their management know that the system is broken. She told me to call and tell them myself.

... or I could just use another pharmacy whose employees give a shit about not inconveniencing customers.

Turds

(a new blog post about AI-generated art)

I invented a new, really irritating puzzle!

It's an inequality crossword. The idea is that, for instance, the bottom-left letter is later in the alphabet than both of its neighbors, as denoted by the > signs to its top and right. According to Z3, there is a unique solution with my word list (excluding words always capitalized)... assuming I didn't make any mistakes transcribing it from my awful hacked-together Python to the image.

I think with longer words, fewer givens and/or fewer inequalities would be necessary. When I look at that bottom 3-letter word, there are hundreds of possibilities. But if instead I consider a word like ACCESS, there's only ACCESS, ABBESS, or ABBOTT. So all we would need to do is pin the second or third letter to 'C' to make it unique. Some longer words are still hard ("INTERNS" has hundreds of possibilities), but double letters really help pin it down (AARDVARK, for instance, has only one possibility). There are only three five-letter words which are unique (LLAMA, LLANO, OOZES), but there are 13 six-letter words, and by the time you get to 12-letter words, there are 835.

Anyway, enjoy... I guess?

One funny thing about using Godot for my games is that I say the word "Godot" a lot. I pronounce it like Beckett did: GOD-oh. This confuses nearly everyone I talk to (except for one guy whose uncle was an actor who had performed in the play). But since I know the right way, I have the choice between being confusing and being correct.

I think the engine should officially adopt the "wrong" (but common) pronunciation, which would arguable reduce confusion, and also give a change for the rare snapback correction ("it's pronounced GOD-oh", "no, that's the play, the engine is officially guh-DOUGH").

#gamedev #godotengine

Today, I am releasing my new indie game, Deco Deck. It's a series of logic puzzles. You can get it at https://decodeckgame.com -- it's available for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac.

And here's the blog post:

https://novalis.org/blog/2023-05-12-introducing-deco-deck-my-new-indie-game.html

https://novalis.org/blog/images/godot-rigidbody2d.mp4

I had hoped to add a tiny stacking sandbox to my next game. But it looks like Godot's 2d physics engine is not up to the job. (These were recorded with Godot 3.5; 4.0 fails in arguably worse ways).

So maybe that one will have to be cut.

Every time I try to use XSLT, I realize that it's incomprehensible gibberish and it's quicker to just use lxml.ElementTree to do whatever it is manually. Most recently, I hit "It is an error for the value of the match attribute to contain a VariableReference" (apparently fixed in 2.0, but of course xsltproc doesn't do 2.0).

Oh well.

New blog post: "Rarely seen game mechanics". Featuring Philip Dick, Robert Yang, chimpanzees, and Sichuan peppercorns. https://novalis.org/blog/2023-05-02-rarely-seen-game-mechanics.html

Weird thing: I posted on a local mailing list looking for a lawyer to help me keep my house from being landmarked. All of the on-list replies were in favor of landmarking. All of the off-list, private replies were against it.

this is my new piece "Birdsight (Develop/Validate/Acquire)"

The aging on this box is all fake. The top of the box is covered in faux bird droppings.

Normally it makes nice nature noises. Hold the "Acquire" button and loud, destructive noises emerge... then warning lights flash.

If you hold the button for 30 seconds—an excruciatingly long time, honestly—it begins to pour smoke (really water vapor) and continues to crescendo—until a sudden silence.

it is about some other website 🤔

The Fine Sweater is finally complete! Great pattern by Yu Jie, based on the comic by KC Green. This is definitely the most complicated thing I’ve ever knitted, and I think it took me as long to embroider it and weave in the ends as it did to knit it, but I’m glad I did it. Not recommended for anyone who is a perfectionist, though.
#knitting @knitting
#knittersofmastadon

I had to basically beg the NYPD to do anything at all about a car with opaque tape covering its license plate this morning. What the fuck? First call, NYPD Traffic Brooklyn North: "We're not allowed to touch the car, and since there might be no inspection sticker, we can't ticket it." Second call, NYPD 77th precinct: didn't pick up the phone. Third call 311: We have to send you to 911. 911: This is not a 911 matter. Me: Well, I tried three other places. Them: Well, do you think it's suspicious? Me: Do I think it's suspicious that someone has a bunch of tape on their license plate so it can't be read? Yes, that's 100% suspicious: it's 100% so they don't pay tolls or get tickets from red light cameras.

What the fuck?

(Bonus points: NYPD vest in the windshield and a Delaware plate, so if it were actually an NYPD officer, said officer would be violating the rule that officers must live in-state).

🎶I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain🎶

“My hot take on “15 minute cities” is if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.” - Gareth Klieber #cities #urbanism #housing #transit #cycling

Matzo Project is legit better than other matzo. It's probably even better than my homemade one. Not sure how they manage that.

This week:

Programming: Whacked together a date picker: more-or-less correct on the first try.

Deploying the code: fucking around with incomprehensible machine-specific crashes that don't happen in debug mode.

An (amazingly simple) aperiodic monotile has been discovered by David Smith, Joseph Myers (@jsm28), Craig Kaplan (@csk), and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. It's literally four copies of a third of a hexagon glued together. Details at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/

I am organising a conference on FreeBSD / Linux jails and chroots.

It’s an in-person event, but you have to sit in a room in your own, and there’s no socialisation / networking after.

I really enjoyed "Say Nothing" by Patrick Radden Keefe. It's about the murder of Jean McConville, and covers the Troubles more generally (although generally focusing on the IRA's crimes more than those of the other sides). I highly recommend it.

I had a dream that there was a group called the "Linux Sex Mafia". People had lsm.org email addresses and everything.

It seems like exactly the sort of name that someone would (a) have come up with in the 90s and (b) be embarrassed by today.

So anyway, if the ASF is looking for a new name, they can use LSM.

Catoll.

The most valuable company in the world thinks that it's acceptable to send (always very small) integers as strings in JSON. Also, booleans as the string "true" or "false".

"Aye, the sirens," says the lighthouse keeper, picking a bit of tobacco from his beard. "Some nights, when the wind is just so, I swear I can hear 'em singing." "What do they sing?" I prod him. A faraway look in his eyes, he says in a voice barely above a whisper, "Tubthumping."

Went to see the Nick Cave exhibit at the Guggenheim. I had assumed that it was Nick Cave the musician (why not -- he's also written novels, and acted in movies). But no, it's a totally different guy with the same name, who is also totally awesome. My pottery buddy and I were both totally blown away by one particular piece. We want to play the video game of it. Obsessively.

Definitely go see it.

"The time of the original app purchase, in a date-time format similar to ISO 8601."

Similar? Similar?

(No, there's no further information about how it differs)

Ah, yes, the famously delightful Apple user experience, where users have to manually restore in-app purchases, like savages. It's almost as if Apple has forgotten that computers could keep track of this shit on their own.

Flying away from #NYC makes me remember the same single disorienting shock I feel every time I return to it:

New York! Greatest city on earth! Where we just pile up our literal garbage right on the fuckin sidewalks! Hahaha! Yeah, I know, trust me, you’ll stop even noticing it after the first week. 🗑️🐀

Introducing Dante

It’s a hellishly exciting time to be working on torment technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that deliver new levels of distress.

That’s the journey we’ve been on with creating torment from large trauma models. Two years ago we unveiled next-generation torment and misery creation capabilities powered by our Artificial Generative Ordeal and Nuisance Esnemble (or AGON-E for short).

With this patch, I now have patches in three different programming languages that I do not use. (Previously, I added a function to Rust's standard library, and fixed the return code of scaladoc).

I was trying to make an Art Deco style card back for my work-in-progress game Deco Deck, and I accidentally created... Fart Deco.

I think Biden ought to be impeached over his handling of classified documents. Classification is bullshit, but it's far more important that the president follow the law than basically anything else.

Our fucked up healthcare system: Had a prescription (for something time-sensitive) sent to Capsule. Two and a half hours later, Capsule let me know that they can't deliver it until after I leave the house tomorrow morning. So I called up the doctor's office to have it sent to a local pharmacy, and the receptionist said that (a) the doctor herself will have to call the new pharmacy (why?!) and (b) she might not get to it before the local pharmacy closes, and that the receptionist has no way to know whether or not this will be the case (and she didn't even mark it time-sensitive until I was rather insistent about it).

Meanwhile, I am pretty sure that my cat had exactly the same medication three weeks ago, and like a fucking idiot I threw out the remainder. That one's on me -- I should know better than to ever throw out medicine. I bet if I called the vet and told them that my other cat had the same problem, I could just stop in and pick up some, but that would be more expensive and further away.

Hey #VideoGames Mastodon, what short video games should we be checking out? The shorter the better.

Just realize I had never posted my new finial.

Got my @conservancy T-shirts today. Always happy to donate, and the shirts look great! Also a Godot sticker, which is much more fun now that I'm actively using it.

#GameDev

I'm working on an app for a new kind of logic puzzle. It's likeTentai Show (https://www.interactive.onlinemathlearning.com/fun_galaxies.php) in that it involves marking regions on a grid.

Like most logic puzzles, there is a single correct answer.

Question: should I have a mode that immediately marks wrong entries (even if they are not contradicted by any other decisions that you have made yet)? Is that useful for learning, or does it just make it so trivial as to be pointless?

Ms. 3: Dad, how many colors are in a rainbow?

Me: 16,777,216.

I've updated my new game, Mosaic River. The update fixes two major bugs, and improves the instructions. It's available gratis for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fun.mosaicriver.mosaicriver and iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mosaic-river/id6444349912

Things just seem so crazy today.
I mean, can you imagine say in the 1930s if the richest automobile executive in America was also a media owner who used his platform to encourage anti-Semitism and allied himself with a foreign dictator waging a territory-expansion war in Europe?

There are many legitimate reasons to track Elon Musk's flight coordinates, for example to offer him ads more relevant to his interests

I'm really enjoying Fake Feelings:

https://dadabots.medium.com/fake-feelings-ai-emo-93e77918b21

It's reconstituted music sludge that's great background noise for working.

We know you're obsessive, but please stop telling us about your three girlfriends already.

It's completely weird that forms require a "title", like Mr., Ms., Mx., etc. I don't want to be referred to as "Mr. Turner". I prefer to use my first name. Surely I can't be the only person with this preference -- the entire tech industry seems to use first names by default. It's not even that they're using the title as a proxy for gender, because "Dr." is often on there.

Does anyone these days prefer to be referred to as "Mr. Lastname"? The one case I can think is be a person from an underrepresented minority who has a PhD: they might want to be referred to as Dr so that they're taken more seriously. But anyone else?

For fuck's sake. I got four quotes to replace some windows:

• one at nearly twice the cost of the others
• one written by hand, scanned sideways, with only half of the windows listed and a different model than I had requested, with no price listed (and no reply to emails asking to correct)
• one which I had to ask four times for a U value, which finally sent me a PDF which listed U values of "0.17-0.45" (a range so broad as to be meaningless)
• one reasonable, professional proposal that I could actually sign.

So Google search is increasingly vibing late-90s Alta Vista in a casino, Facebook has melted into MySpace + Second Life, Twitter is dogpaddling as hard as it can toward early 4chan but probably isn't going to make it, people are making blogs again, and everyone wants to talk to the ELIZA

Is the whole internet swimming back home to spawn and die, what is happening

My new game is out! You can find it at
https://mosaicriver.fun/

Mosaic River is a mobile solitaire game. You’re an archaeologist, sailing down a river, collecting mosaic tiles, and placing them into a triangular grid to make melds (straights, flushes, etc). Tiles have bonuses randomly assigned at each game.

Here's a blog post with more information:
https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-12-mosaic-river-my-third-indie-game.html

New blog post: A response to some Hacker News comments on my Stable Diffusion post https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-10-response-to-some-hacker-news-comments-on-stable-diffusion.html

They know what they did.

Perfect cinnamon roll.

Last night's chicken, for @katieamazing:

If you have time, brine your chicken thighs: cover them with a few cm of water; weigh the results, water and all; add salt to 1% of this and MSG to 0.25%. Refrigerate overnight. If you don't have time, just salt and msg to taste while the onions are sauteing.

Saute some onions. When they are brown, add minced garlic, minced preserved lemons, turmeric, and ground coriander and saute for a minute.

Drain your chicken, discarding the brine. Add the chicken, along with chicken stock and/or water. When the chicken is nearly finished cooking, add some green olives and vinegar or lemon juice to taste. Mustard would be good too.

New blog post: I am frustrated with Stable Diffusion.

https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-05-i-am-frustrated-with-stable-diffusion.html

DZ: cats not cats

Beautiful. I like that it starts writing the extra letters into the image.

https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1599254476720066560

@hankgreen: Someone suggested that I ask MidJourney to show me a cat but to keep adding “A”s until it wasn’t a cat anymore. Here is “cat.”
@hankgreen: Caat
@hankgreen: Caaat
@hankgreen: Caaaat
@hankgreen: Caaaaat
@hankgreen: Caaaaaat
@hankgreen: Caaaaaaat
@hankgreen: Caaaaaaaat
@hankgreen: Caaaaaaaaat: officially no longer a cat.
@hankgreen: Other cats…it kept being some sort of cat for 18 “A”s.

I've been enjoying The Whippet: https://thewhippet.org/

I especially liked the Calvino story reprinted here: https://thewhippet.org/the-whippet-131-how-to-pick-up-and/#conscience