jmac

jmac, 6 days ago to random

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, 8 days ago to random

Shingles vaccine GET. 💉🏠

jmac, 9 days ago to random

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, 9 days ago to nyc

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, 9 days ago to random

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, 10 days ago to random

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, 11 days ago to random

Thinkin about the UPA-animation-style character art from the 1960 edition of Clue.

jmac, 13 days ago to random

I was a little upset to learn about the existence of "slow worms" based on comments to this post. This is apparently an animal found only in Europe, and it's a lizard with no legs. “B-but... that's a snake,” you might object, "that's literally what a snake is. What?"

But apparently no, Wikipedia says they have a different skeletal physiology than snakes, which gives them fundamental trouble with locomotion. I really want to know what on earth their evolutionary niche is.
https://mastodon.social/@tikitu/112503384717553423

jmac, 16 days ago to random

Played about ten minutes of #indika and put it back down due to evening work-pings and dinner bells. I’ll pick it up again when the din dies down. I am very convinced that it deserves my full attention for a little while.

jmac, 18 days ago to random

Sometimes I think about the fact that I will never, ever open a shell terminal and see ”Heads up! Here's what's new! Take a tour!! [Skip]" https://digipres.club/@misty/112481913811666838

jmac, 19 days ago to random

A discussion about the unusual cover design for the Traveller RPG—still striking in its tone and its minimalism, decades later—led me to recall and share this timeless banger from @avram.

And only then did I get the joke: Oh, because the ship on the original cover is named “Beowulf”!! OK.

https://wandering.shop/@avram/109809275612064222

jmac, 19 days ago to random

I saw a person talk about the desire to see "a meeting in a smoke-filled room" happen, which seems like an oddly outdated metaphor... but these things do tend to have legs, don't they.

I wonder how many people know perfectly well what a "smoke-filled room" is, but don't know why it's called that. Like, maybe they think it means that since it's addressing an urgent issue, like a fire, that metaphorical fire is filling the room with smoke?

jmac, 20 days ago to random

I think of this every time I wake my MacBook up from a furious sleep, its fans blasting full-speed to render Apple's default screen saver of a fully animated drone flight over Californian vineyards, in order to get back to my screenful of tiled xterms.

https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/112464257491011844

jmac, 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago) to random

I just bought Indika and I can't wait to play it. Sunday morning drowsiness is probably not the right headspace for it, from what little I know of it.

The cover art alone sold me on it!

jmac, 21 days ago to random

“This is how Google’s search result sausage is made: Real people like me make it.” Toni Allen, secretary of the Alphabet Workers #Union, writes about working as a contracted “rater” for Google. https://fortune.com/2024/05/03/google-search-raters-wages-benefits-contractors-tech-ai-employment/

Toni is among many laborers who perform high-speed, human-powered fact checking on AI-generated search results—and, thanks to recent legal maneuvering on the part of our mutual bosses, now receives an hourly rate that is less than California minimum wage.

jmac, 24 days ago to random

Speaking of Discords and puzzle games, I had reason to dig up this circa-2010 parody of both Braid and then-contemporary game streamers. I remembered it for "reverse tiiiime" but I had no memory of the time-loop microfiction that unfolds in the "chat window", so that was a fun discovery! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI

jmac, 26 days ago to random

Is the best thing about #Helldivers the completely unironic “hug” emote, and the habit of quickplay mutual-randos to deploy it before disconnecting after a successful mission?

jmac, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Good mail day: Got my copy of "The Paradox" by @elainemwill

jmac, 1 month ago to random

Really one of the standout lines from the whole dang enterprise. Right up there with the “What is grief" one.
https://dementedandsadbut.social/@genehack/112374808756068264

jmac, 1 month ago to random

I find these photos of a GWB-era mass protest at Columbia fascinating for one subtle reason: None of these protesters are wearing masks or otherwise obscuring their identities in any way.

This change in the way that protests are conducted in the U.S. feels like the least foreseeable side effect of the COVID pandemic.
https://mastodon.art/@jennylam/112373961712380437

jmac, 1 month ago to random

Oh no, my old NCR-flag T-shirt just changed from a somewhat in-jokey game reference to an extremely non-obscure TV reference, didn’t it. Boo

jmac, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

An impressive doozy of an unwinnable #CobaltCore situation, if I don't say so myself.

• Yes, that's the final boss with three HP left, and my ship's cannon lined up with its weak point.
• Yes, that's me holding 10 identical non-attack cards, each of which adds a copy of itself to your hand when you play it.
• Yes, each such card has the "This stays in your hand if not played" modification on it.
• Yes, there is a 10-card hand limit.

jmac, 1 month ago to nyc

I lived in Newport, RI for a few years in the 2010s. A small city with a lot of residential wealth, it has a gorgeous and very well funded public library. I would visit it several times every week, and especially enjoyed browsing its wide shelves of new and recommended fiction and nonfiction, regularly rotated by a staff with excellent and diverse tastes.

I'd love to visit #NYC public #libraries more. Is there a branch you know of that offers something like this?

jmac, 1 month ago to Steamdeck

Invited to play some Left 4 Dead with friends last night. Complex nostalgia: I was back in Boston the last time I played it. That was on Xbox 360, and I’m unsurprised to see that it plays great on #SteamDeck today.

It’s as fun as ever, with very minor mechanical nits. The aspects that felt most dated were philosophical.

First, the easiest skill level is called "Easy”, and beyond it being Rather Hard Actually, a modern game would pick a less dismissive description for it. 🧵#videogames

jmac, 1 month ago to random

Literally nobody in a 3,000-person work chat liked my story about how walking past a nearby burger bar when its window is shuttered makes me say "We're closed now!!" in a weird voice because I'm remembering a 1983 TV ad for the video game Burgertime, so I'm telling you instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjJ0Tl3WENQ