@jmac@masto.nyc
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

jmac

@jmac@masto.nyc

I live in New York. I get paid to write about databases. I don’t get paid to write about other stuff, but I do it anyway.

Tech writer at Google; Co-founder of IFTF, an interactive-fiction nonprofit; Liker of coffee, cats, open web technologies, et cetera. Co-admin of https://masto.nyc.

All views I express in my personal posts are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Five Borough Fedi Project.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

990000, to nyc
@990000@mstdn.social avatar

Visiting the museum of natural history makes me wish public parks had T-rex or Allosaurus, or some other similar dinosaur skeletons on permanent display so kids and just people in general can study them casually and frequently. I know it would be a maintenance nightmare, but it would be so cool.

jmac,
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@990000 Why, I was at Dinosaur Playground at Riverside Drive just yesterday! What more do you want!!

danblondell, to random
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My friend leant me his racing wheel so if all goes well I’ll soon be Racing Rig Guy

jmac,
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@danblondell Is this your plan to not be Don Draper, then

CarlMuckenhoupt, to random
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An adorable dog moment:
I walk into my building. A family of three is waiting for the elevator, accompanied by a small dog. My apartment is on the second floor, so I start up the stairs. The dog follows me. The family calls to the dog, but it pays no heed. I turn around and point down the stairs. The dog looks to where I'm pointing and is overjoyed beyond measure to see its entire family down there!

jmac,
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@CarlMuckenhoupt dying

18+ jmac, to random
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More proof that reality is always more subtle than fiction: If last weekend's verdict had happened in fiction, then at least one of those jurors would have turned up dead by now. Why even write the story, otherwise?

BONUS: I didn't mean to when I started thinking about this toot, but I'm feeling a swell of pride for my twelve brave anonymous neighbors, and by extension for the other eight million too.

jmac, (edited )
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My gold standard for truth's subtlety over fiction is the story of Tara the Hero Cat, who rescued her young human companion from a dog attack ten years ago.

Ask most any writer to draft out the scene, and they'd have her tearing in yowling with teeth and claws. But Tara knew the goal was not "attack the dog" but "get it away from the boy", and so she leapt and twisted to side-slam the dog away instead.

I think of this lesson often.

Tara is still with us, by the way! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(cat)

jmac, to random
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Kids today have it so easy, when I was your age we didn’t have all these flavors of gay with their own flags, we just had LiveJournal quizzes to find out which Welcome Back Kotter character we were or whatever

jmac, to random
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Why isn’t there a stronger association of Sam Pepys just being a guy happy to just go home and jam on his lute until bedtime. It’s always kidney stone this, fire of London that
https://mastodon.social/@samuelpepys/112559850225530707

jmac, to random
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If you want to hire a full-stack developer who cares more about the long-term health and openness of the World Wide Web than anyone you’ve talked to since you last called home, then you should talk to Jacky over here.
https://todon.eu/@jalcine/112553640889348695

jmac, to nyc
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

About to head over to Greenpoint Open Studios to see some art by my pal Emily, who makes Weird and Beautiful Maps of imginary spaces and topologies: https://greenpointopenstudios.com/artists/emily-garfield-2024/

Hoping to see some other artists too! I don't think I’ve ever knowingly visited Greenpoint before?!

jmac, to random
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You might know exactly what my reply to this would be, and I checked the replies on the original post to make sure that nobody else already pasted it in, but someone had, so I said nothing. 😇
https://syzito.xyz/@selzero/112547435487073100

jmac, to VideoGames
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Watching this very good playthrough of Ninja Gaiden on NES, with just enough mistakes to convince me it's not tool-assisted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V822oMzJQSg

One remembers only an ugly, cruel game, but watching this played by an expert is so rewarding. Stunned to rediscover how much of my lifelong mental background-music playlist comes from this game.

jmac, to random
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Shingles vaccine GET. 💉🏠

jmac,
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Oh my, this shingles shot has me at least as sick and loopy as I was after my first COVID shot years ago. Glad they had me wait until Friday for it.

jmac, to random
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I watched a dear friend get ordained here earlier this year. The space defies description, as well as any attempt to capture its majesty with a crappy little phone camera. (Though based on the hashtags, I see that this person did a great job with one just the same!)
https://mastodon.art/@jennylam/112537978391577771

jmac, (edited ) to random
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This goofy looking idiot is one of the scariest surprise boss fights in all of gaming.
https://mastodon.social/@GameArtArchive/112536817139241086

GameArtArchive, to random
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Crocomire
'Super Metroid'
Super Nintendo

jmac,
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@GameArtArchive SCREAM

jmac, to random
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Made one of my occasional visits to the former Twitter just to breathe in the fumes from tonight's top news story. And, like. Other than those of us who left, everyone is still there, huh.

No judgment! I'm happy for myself that I have kicked that habit entirely, and found fulfillment here instead. I hope more people come, and I hope we can make it more welcoming, but I know it's not for everyone.

Still, I guess I was expecting it to be LiveJournal-dead by now. Not by a long shot, no.

jmac,
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Thinking about this more.

  1. Most of the posts I saw were from "professional posters": pundits and media figures and others for whom Twitter was so important to their identity and livelihood that they've remained part of it even as it's transformed into whatever it is now. And I follow a lot of them. (I never deleted my old account!)

  2. Things are fragmented, and true mass-culture events don't happen in Fedi like they did in Twitter. And that's... okay, actually. Better-and-worse-but-better.

jmac, to random
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I had the pleasure of helping test this new strange work directed and edited by @rcveeder. It is a quilt of small parser-IF games by many individual authors stitched together at the edges, with the player (and their inventory!) able to traverse freely between them, making one large space to explore. #InteractiveFiction
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nilsf/112524852506128389

jmac, to nyc
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If you were not at https://hahahanyc.com tonight then you missed watching me take a shower onstage in front of 200 people. #NYC #theatre

jmac,
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@auran recommended this show and instructed me to go in blind, so I did. Amy, who accompanied, chose to read a review.

I was curious why the ticket-site seat-picker showed the front row sold out, but then people seemed to choose seats as far from the stage as possible, while avoiding the center aisle. How odd! I happily bought two tickets for fourth row, center. Amy, knowing what this portended, said nothing.

Even though I'm not really sure what just happened, I'll never forget it.

jmac, to random
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I'm not saying that I actually thought that Jay Smooth, JB Smoove, and Smoove B were all the same person, but I am saying that I never really put the energy into disentangling the three names in my head until circumstances forced me to do so just now, okay.

jmac,
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@danblondell There's an entire recent book from an author who experiences this from the other direction, of course https://lithub.com/one-naomi-two-naomis-three-the-too-real-experience-of-reading-naomi-kleins-doppelganger/

brettwitty, to random
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Urgghhhh. This final (?) boss in Animal Well is tedious. The real boss is "the wheel of items" and manipulating that.

jmac,
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@zarfeblong @brettwitty I didn’t know that there was an inventory button until the boss fight!!

jmac, to random
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This is why I've given up this habit in favor of attaching a link to the post in question to my own toot, viz.
https://aus.social/@stib/112527070631404138

jmac, to random
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

It would make me very happy if any game studio hired @heyheymomo to illustrate a game about absolutely anything.
https://socel.net/@heyheymomo/112525914194939284

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