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names expire

2026-09-02T12:00:00.000Z

names expire

this is just a quick PSA i guess for readers of my blog who aren't super versed in trans stuff, which probably is like 3 people at most, but i wanted to put this into words anyway so here it is. this thing is the number one mistake in "interacting with transgender people" i see get made by well-meaning cis people who are otherwise pretty good with this stuff, or at least know enough to not do anything obviously wrong. what you need to know is as follows: the longer it has been since you have heard from someone, the more likely it is that they have since changed name, gender, etc. crucially, and i think this is where people get tripped up, this especially applies to people who were (apparently) cis when you last knew them.

if you're not cognizant of this fact, the mistake you can easily make is that you'll see an old friend - who, unbeknownst to you, transitioned in the intervening year or so since your last meeting - at some social thing and, loudly enough for others to hear, say "oh, hey [deadname]! funny seeing you here, we haven't spoken in ages!", instantly creating an extraordinarily awkward situation. there is a taboo on deadnames, as i'm sure you already know: trans people generally don't like hearing them, especially if others also hear, especially if those others are friends they made after coming out who don't know what their deadname is. it's a kind of forbidden knowledge, you see. so doing this is far from ideal.

basically my advice is that if you meet someone who you know but haven't heard from in, we'll say, more than 6-12 months, especially if they are around friends you don't recognise or they seem to have dramatically changed presentation from what you last remember, you might just want to ask if they've since changed name before trying to use what you remember their name being. this will be a little awkward at minimum because it's off-script and kind of makes it seem like you forgot what their name was, but it will occasionally save you from the above described really bad faux pas so i think it's worth it. and when that does happen you get to instead have a pleasant interaction that really makes it seem like you're locked in on this stuff!

and it's a free point if you actually did forget what their name was.-*

Atkinson Hyperlegible appears a little smaller than some other fonts at the same font size, so if you're replacing an existing font with it you may need to make the font size a little bigger

2026-08-24T12:00:00.000Z

Atkinson Hyperlegible appears a little smaller than some other fonts at the same font size, so if you're replacing an existing font with it you may need to make the font size a little bigger

ok, so, i like Atkinson Hyperlegible a lot. i mean, it's the font used for this website! i think it looks good. but, you might run into a weird problem if you use it to replace the font in an existing thing:

this sentence, which i am padding out with extra words to give a better example, is typeset in 10pt Arial

this sentence, which i am padding out with extra words to give a better example, is typeset in 10pt Atkinson Hyperlegible

this sentence, which i am padding out with extra words to give a better example, is typeset in 10pt Verdana

at small sizes it's maybe a little easier to read than the Arial, but compared to Verdana (at the same font size!) it just looks smaller, and thus, is harder to read. so, if you're using a font like Verdana already, you might replace it with Atkinson Hyperlegible and find your text is now less legible. the trick is that font sizes are kind of fake and some fonts are just bigger at the same font size. especially, the height of the shorter lowercase letters like x (the "x-height") varies between fonts and contributes a lot to readability at small font sizes. so if you're switching from a font that's already very readable because of a high x-height you just gotta make the font size a little bigger. post ends here.

descent into confusion

...conveniently, if you're doing stuff on the web, there's this CSS property called font-size-adjust that lets you automatically scale the font based on the metrics of another font. so, trying to make everything match Verdana, let's set font-size-adjust:0.545, which is apparently the correct value:

this sentence, which i am padding out with extra words to give a better example, is typeset in (scaled) 10pt Arial

this sentence, which i am padding out with extra words to give a better example, is typeset in (scaled) 10pt Atkinson Hyperlegible

this sentence, which i am padding out with extra words to give a better example, is typeset in 10pt Verdana

and now it is fixed. yay. well, weirdly now the Atkinson Hyperlegible looks too big compared to the Verdana (it even overruns a line). and also the Verdana is now a little smaller when font-size-adjust isn't supposed to do that. (if this and the following example actually look right to you, that's probably because, and i only realised this after writing everything else, this issue might be firefox-specific -Ed.). and sometimes it doesn't work, like in this example at an 11pt font size, where both Arial and Atkinson Hyperlegible still look too small:

this sentence, which is padded with extra words to give a better example, is set in (scaled) 11pt Arial

this sentence, which is padded with extra words to give a better example, is set in (scaled) 11pt Atkinson Hyperlegible

this sentence, which is padded with extra words to give a better example, is set in 11pt Verdana

i am pretty sure this is because of rounding of font sizes to exact values. or something. i think the takeaway here is that small font sizes are the devil!!! because it seems to work just fine beyond a certain size.

also, the MDN describes a ridiculous method of determining the correct value for font-size-adjust whereby one plays higher-or-lower with the value for their preferred font until the property does nothing. i am sure the value must be automatically calculable somehow because the browser must surely know the metrics of a font to know how much to scale it by. but i cannot find any convenient method to get such a value for myself. strange.

this html stuff is tricky huh. this took like 3 detours in writing because every time i wrote up an example it didn't look the way i expected. anyway, sincere shoutouts to pebble for its tireless work on running critter.cafe, including changing the font to Atkinson Hyperlegible and inadvertently sending me down this rabbit hole. (and subsequently adding a font-size-adjust when i suggested it about 20% of the way into this rabbit hole, which seems to have worked well enough in this case, yay).

The ground quakes. The font used on this website is now a little bigger.

broadcast shuffle in practice

2026-07-07T12:00:00.000Z

broadcast shuffle in practice

context

"Cube Draft" is a format for Magic the Gathering where, before play can begin, the maybe 6-8 players must work together to shuffle a deck (the eponymous "cube") with about 400 cards in it. "Broadcast Shuffle" is a method of doing so that produces good results in a reasonable amount of time. I've linked the full writeup that introduced the method, but it suffices to say here that broadcast shuffle includes a step, the eponymous "broadcast", where everyone takes the stack of cards they are shuffling and evenly distributes it among all the shufflers, such that the stack everyone has after this step is comprised of a roughly even number of cards from every previous stack.

I introduced this shuffling method to my cube group, and we wanted to use it, but had trouble actually physically performing the broadcast step. It's not so bad if you're four shufflers sat around a table, as you're all in reach of eachother (though it does take some care to not turn piles upside-down accidentally), but four shufflers is about 100 cards to shuffle each, and that's still somewhat cumbersome with just one set of paws. Introducing more shufflers seems to turn the broadcast step into a chaotic mess where you're all getting in eachother's way, especially if you need to get up from the table to reach the other players. But, I've figured out a way to do it methodically, inspired by the actual draft step of a cube draft. After all, drafting cards from packs is a way of evenly distributing their contents across a table of players! So, here is the full method for broadcast shuffling a cube, as we actually do it in our cube group:

the method

Split the cube into n (approximately) equal piles, where n is the number of shufflers you have. Each shuffler gets a pile. For ease of writing, we will henceforth assume n = 8, but this method works with any reasonable number.
Shuffle: each shuffler shuffles their pile, briefly. There is no need to spend too much time on this step; more iterations of the process are overall more important.
Broadcast: each shuffler:
1. Removes approximately 1/8th of their pile, placing it in front of them, and passes the remaining 7/8ths to the shuffler on their left.
2. Removes 1/7th of the pile they receive (or, an amount of cards roughly equal in size to the first 1/8th), again placing it in front of them and passing the rest onwards.
3. Repeats this process, taking 1/6th, 1/5th, and so on, until they receive their eigth pile, which they take 1/1th of (i.e, keep the pile and pass nothing on).
4. Combines the eight piles in front of them into one new pile.
You may find in this process that you are handed a surprisingly small pile of cards, like having to take one quarter of a pile of 10. This just seems to happen, it's fine.
Repeat the shuffle and broadcast steps until three or four broadcasts have been done (or everyone is ready to play).

With this process complete, the cube is now shuffled! Everyone can start dealing out packs from the pile they have (and trading cards to make it even as necessary).

review: death's door

2026-06-18T12:00:00.000Z

review: death's door

bit of context

Since mid-2024 i've been maintaining a spreadsheet of games where you play as a bird; that whole time, i've been meaning to go through and play and write reviews of as many of them as practical. I want to review these both as games - how much did i enjoy them, are they generally worth playing - and as bird games, which is harder to define my criteria for. Look, i'm bird therian, kind of, it's unclear, and not that important, the point is that getting to play as a bird in games is special to me, and i especially care about how well the game represents the bird experience. That's what i'm looking for here.

as a game

I will admit i love when a game has some nonsense high concept, something immediate and interesting to differentiate it from everything else in its genre. So i actually want to draw attention to the previous game from Acid Nerve, the developers of Death's Door: the 2015 Titan Souls. Titan Souls is very high-concept: it's a boss rush where you have one arrow and one HP, but thankfully every boss also dies in one hit. Dodge roll and evade attacks for long enough to line up a shot on the boss's weakpoint juuuust right and take it down. I quite liked Titan Souls! I think anyway, i last played it in 2021 and i was fundamentally a different person back then so i don't really remember. I did get the game's true ending, and my track record of actually getting to even the regular ending of anything is terrible, which implies that i was pretty invested in it.

In any case I was very excited to see what of Titan Souls the team brought into Death's Door, which seemed to be a far more traditional game. You know, you explore an overworld (with enemies everywhere), you upgrade your stats, you find new weapons and hidden trinkets, there's the occasional boss fight. I actually got got by an incredible bait-and-switch here because I bought the game and then played it six months later, having forgotten everything that was on the Steam store page. The first 20 minutes of the game's story had me expecting another boss rush like Titan Souls: ah, you work at this place where you "reap" the souls of the living, you get assigned a soul to collect, which is a boss fight, presumably then you bring the soul back, you get another assignment - ah, no, your first soul is immediately stolen from you and that sets off the whole adventure. This is not a spoiler because it's described in the paragraph of text at the top of the store page.

Anyway, despite there being non-boss stuff now and the bosses having the large health reserves you'd expect, they kept the Titan Souls emphasis on punishing mistakes. Though you now have a generous four health instead of just the one, there's no healing in combat, so beating any boss is a demonstration that you can reliably dodge all its attacks... while still getting damage in. Titan Souls, i think, was more interesting in how it encouraged taking on risk; when the boss goes down in one, you might want to - and often had to - put yourself directly in harm's way for the chance of making the one perfect shot. Here, the boss fights are more of a straightforward dance: learn the timing and the steps, beat the boss.

Oh, they also give you a bow and arrow again, which is a joy to use - the subtle invisible aim assist that I'm like 90% sure is there is much appreciated. Ultimately this is still a game about combat and the combat is pretty good! I had a good time with it - i had minor gripes at points about the 3D-ness of the game making some hitboxes unclear and sometimes you'd kind of slide past an enemy while trying to hit it, but really, i had fun. Oh, and the music is great, and the art is pretty (the style on display is fantastic, i especially loved the boss title cards), and the story is relatively coherent.

...but still i am lost on whether to recommend this game. Sure i enjoyed it, but it felt like nothing special. I think i am driven by novelty, far more so than the average person: what i really want out of a game, out of any experience really, is for there to be something new, something unique, something i've never experienced before; like, say, an interesting and novel high concept. Personally, i would have felt somewhat less content with having played Death's Door had i not been intending to go write this review and make it part of a bigger project. I keep thinking of this review for the board game Rummikub, where the reviewer Tom Brewster introduces his new three-star rating system:

Three stars for anything that's essential and unmissable, two stars for everything that's worth your time for whatever reason, and one star for everything that is downright bad, but also could be described as "alright", or "decent", because you've only got so many hours in the day to consume media, and none of them should be spent on the subpar. Because you're worth it.

I fear that Death's Door for me, like the rating Brewster gave to Rummikub, might be a 1.5 star game. Whether it's worth your time is going to depend on what you value for it.

as a bird game

Well! You play as what appears to be a hooded crow, which, aside from its inexplicable ability to wield weapons in its wings, is depicted as pretty much a normal bird of its kind. You have all these cute little bird mannerisms in cutscenes - my favourite is a gag where you're about to eat a meal with chopsticks, before tossing them aside and just going in with your beak. They did an amazing job on the character animations; the cutscenes, and that half-hopping walk you do, and - though i can't explain it - the way you swing a sword or dodge roll or whatever looks just like how you'd imagine a bird would do those things if those were things birds did. I adore the main character in this game, it's a fantastic little bird to embody, and it has the honour of making me write bird transformation fiction directly inspired by it.

However there is one glaring omission which is that you simply cannot fly, which is not diagetically explained at all so far as i can tell. Now, this makes sense from a design perspective, the game would be fundamentally different if you could, but it still did occasionally feel a little strange to be stopped by a metre-high wall or take one damage from falling into a pit. Like, c'mon, i'm a bird, this shouldn't be an issue. So it really feels like they went all out on the aesthetic qualities of being a bird, but ultimately did just that; the fact that you are a bird does not actually matter to the game or its story. Not that I fault their choice of aesthetic at all! I mean, i like birds, obviously, and it feels about right to have Death's bureaucracy staffed by crows - the choice of a hooded crow for the main character (calling to mind the Grim Reaper's traditional hooded black robe) is a nice touch. It's just not quite there as a bird game for me.

At least those trinkets you collect go into a section in the menu titled "shiny things", which i appreciated.

we awaken in a strange place

2026-02-20T11:00:00.000Z

we awaken in a strange place

short post just to get the update into rss readers. the full post is over here, part of the library. check it out!

i have kind of solved my email situation

2026-01-25T11:00:00.000Z

i have kind of solved my email situation

previously: dailies

posteo

I ended up just signing up for Posteo for several reasons:

cheap

Okay there are kind of other reasons that can be summed up as "I like the cut of their jib", but they are ultimately forgoable. The one thing I really wanted was alias addresses, because I want to have more than one email address I actually like without having to manage more accounts because I already have way too many. This eliminated the option of spinning up more free email accounts. Posteo gives you three addresses total which is exactly as many as I need (with the option of adding more by slightly increasing your monthly fee, which is nice as futureproofing).

And that's just the thing, I could pay more somewhere else to get more: probably more features and certainly more storage and alias addresses. For a point of comparison, Tuta Mail's cheapest paid tier is €3/month to Posteo's €1/month, and at that price it has 20GB of storage to Posteo's 2GB and 16 total email addresses to Posteo's 3. That's far better value if you try to do a kind of unit price thing, but that assumes you're actually going to use that stuff. I don't think I'm going to need 20GB of storage in my email: emails are pretty small and if my inbox fills up I can always just download all my oldest emails and then delete them from the server. As for the extra email addresses, they're €0.1/month at Posteo to add more, so I can even get the standard 15 extra and still be paying less than I would anywhere else. Not like I need that many, though.

The one thing I predict could get me in future is Posteo's lack of custom domain support. But I think in the world where I'm paying for and setting up a vanity domain I'll also be happy to futz around setting up another email account.

Can I recommend that you use Posteo as your email if you need to switch for some reason? Idk, maybe. I don't know your situation! Maybe you need some feature those other email services provides and Posteo lacks, maybe you don't need alias addresses and you'd be happy with the free tier for something. All that I can say is that Posteo seems alright so far; my emails aren't going to spam, at least.

Also, it's niche enough that I was able to snag both my universal unique-ish username and my very own firstname.lastname as emails with no numbers at the end or anything, which I'm quite happy about.

thunderbird

My original plan for making it easier to check too many email accounts was to have them all forward emails to the one account. I think this is the correct strategy to consolidate them in the long term, once I've gotten most everything switched over to using the new addresses that are all already aliases to the one account. However in the short-medium term this would be a mess and also make it annoying to reply to emails as that requires actually logging in to the original account.

So what I've done in the meantime is log into most of my email accounts in Thunderbird. I made this decision of email client because:

it was only one i've ever heard of
i couldn't be bothered to go looking for others

Unlike Posteo, I do actually have complaints about Thunderbird. Yes it gets the job done, I do have basically all my emails in one convenient program now, which is probably all I should have ever asked for. However, it does have a particular open-source jank about it. For instance, it has a "unified folders" feature you can enable which lets you access your Inbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent, Archives, Spam, and Trash folders for all your email accounts at once. This is excellent. But what if you want to unify some other folder across accounts, like a custom label? Just giving two folders on different accounts the same name isn't enough to give it an entry in the unified folders.

Something like this can be done, but not via the "unified folders" thing! The process is as follows:

Bring up the search menu with CTRL-SHIFT-F
Change nothing and "Save as Search Folder"
In the "New Saved Search Folder" menu that comes up, name your merged folder and select to make it as a subfolder of "Local Folders"
"Choose..." to open up another menu where you can select the folders you want to merge
Leave the search criteria blank and Create your new folder

Okay, this isn't that bad as a sequence of steps, but the way that creating a folder that merges two other folders requires you to first open the search menu, which doesn't(!) allow you to actually search multiple folders at the same time, and then go into a submenu by pressing a button which doesn't end in "..." so it doesn't look like a submenu... well, it's just very silly.

Still, though. I've used Outlook so I shan't complain too much. Thunderbird may be the best option out there for all I know. Don't take this as a proper recommendation or review. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not your lawyer. Ok that's all thanks!

The ground quakes. The email address mentioned on this website has changed.

something strange at the art of banksy "without limits" exhibition

2026-01-24T11:00:00.000Z

something strange at the art of banksy exhibition

Okay, so I was recently at the Art of Banksy exhibition in Brisbane and one particular piece, located right at the end of the exhibition's main path, stood out to me. Take a look:²⁸

It's weird, right? The car just doesn't seem to sit right in the piece, as if it was simply pasted in; the angle it sits on the ground is subtly wrong. You can see some other modified oil paintings in the same series by Banksy here, and they look far more sophisticated, with the additions painted into the scenes and matching them in lighting.

...and then another member of my party pointed out a far larger problem: the car depicted in the artwork is clearly a Tesla Model X, a 2015 car first unveiled in 2012, which Banksy surely could not have painted in 2005! And it seems unlikely this is merely a case of the wrong date being printed on the placard;²⁹ the artwork matches the other works in Banksy's 2005 Crude Oils exhibition in style, so it's clearly meant to be part of that set. And I don't think he went back and did a cheeky extra one with a Tesla, because no reliable source I can find mentions a Banksy artwork titled "Countryside Ride".

In fact the only mention I can find is this reddit thread questioning whether the piece is actually by AI. I will at least say that it is not; the artwork the car is edited into is The Mountain Ford, 1846, by American artist Thomas Cole (though admittedly, a heavily crunched-out version of it),³⁰ and the car image appears to be... uh... this one, which was the fifth result in Google images for Tesla Model X for me. Well, the image of the car clearly has some sort of "painterly style" filter applied, but...

With a bit of warping to account for the angle of my photo it's a pretty good match. Oh, the placards at the exhibition were totally AI though. Lots of vapid, surface-level analysis that is especially eager to puff up the importance of its subject matter. A couple of them had odd hallucinations, too. The didactic text they have for Banksy's Crude Oil (Vettriano), which depicts ballroom dancers on the beach with workers in hazmat suits cleaning up an oil spill behind them, says:

In Banksy’s version, the elegance and glamour of Vettriano’s ballroom dancers on the beach are undercut by a pair of uniformed hooligans holding their drinks, leering and intruding on the refined scene.

Yeah, I... what? Uniformed hooligans? The whole thing is weird to me. It's not like the exhibition was a total rush job - sure, it was a bit slapdash in parts,³¹ but you can't throw together something like this in an afternoon. Why would nobody double check that these placards were, at minimum, correctly describing the artworks? And back to that car... why forge a painting that doesn't exist? Most of the works in the exhibition were prints, reproductions - why go to the (albeit minimal) effort of making an entirely fake painting rather than just printing off something else? Did they just run out of usable scans and need something to fill space?

I might want to risk a guess here that the curator of this exhibition is trying to make his own point somehow. From an ABC piece about the exhibition:

Of the 150 works on display, 34 are certified originals — the private collection of Mr Gurkaynak [the curator of the exhibition] and his partner. It can be hard to tell if you are viewing a reproduction or not. For Mr Gurkaynak, authenticity is beside the point — real or replica, each work's ability to provoke thought is what matters.

Perhaps including a fake piece is the curator's way of making a little joke about people's inclination to believe art is genuine just because it shows up in a gallery.³² It is also very interesting that this piece features a Tesla, perhaps the most politically charged of all vehicles. As to what point it's trying to make, though, I do not feel qualified to speculate.

Muse Entertainment and Fever (the producer and promoter of the event respectively) did not respond to requests for comment. This post was originally written 2025-12-23, but held back to give time for a response.

that qr code goes here, by the way, if you wanted to snoop
easter egg tangent link: A video about the little labels they put next to art in a museum.
examining the original artwork makes something clear that wasn't obvious before: the car appears to be parked on a lake!
some of the prints had jpeg artefacts if you looked closely, for one
i can only hope that being the first to notice this means i've won and become the new owner of banksy's chocolate factory or something. okay the redditors beat me to it but i did at least identify the original painting which has got to be worth something.

i played in the 2026 mit mystery hunt

2026-01-21T11:00:00.000Z

i played in the 2026 mit mystery hunt

First off, if you don't know what MITMH is, or what a puzzlehunt is in general, then, uh, this post is not going to make much sense! Okay fine, a puzzlehunt is an event where teams of people compete over a set period of time to solve a series of usually quite difficult and very creative puzzles that can be about literally anything. This blog post is the canonical introduction to the concept. The MIT Mystery Hunt is the biggest puzzlehunt by I think every metric? Most puzzles, most participants, most clout. It is the puzzlehunt on the yearly calendar. Hosted at MIT (the Cambridge university) by the winning team of the previous year, traditionally an MIT thing though in recent years has been more and more open to remote online teams - you can complete most of the puzzles and even get to the finish line with a fully remote team, but you cannot win, and certain puzzles and story elements will require physical presence at MIT campus (like being given a little electronic trinket that hides puzzle content, or the climactic final "runaround" puzzle).

Couple more bits of housekeeping. This post is going to have unmarked spoilers for stuff from MITMH '26 because it would be harder to write otherwise and, realistically, you're probably not going to go play it after the fact. Also this is going to be really weird structurally because this felt like one of those things where a million things happen in three days and then there's no obvious way to assemble it into a coherent sequence of events afterwards. This is also not going to be like a normal Mystery Hunt retrospective blog post because I have never done one of them before and I have nothing to compare it to. So this is more going to be, here's what I learned from playing in Mystery Hunt for the first time. Okay!

how did we get here?

I hunted with the team ⛎ Unicode Equivalence, who I would describe as probably one of the strongest puzzling teams out there? I knew them from my previous hunt experience of getting some friends together to play in the 2024 and 2025 Galactic Puzzle Hunts, and the 2025 Teammate Hunt, because they were always at or near the top of the leaderboard. How I got into this situation is that December 2025 I got a DM from a friend, who incredibly is one of the frighteningly good puzzlers on Unicode Equivalence, essentially saying, hey, my Mystery Hunt team wants a few more people, are you in?

I do want to get across how weird and unexpected this was, and how it still feels kind of surreal to me. Let's say, for an analogy, that you play a lot of basketball. You're really interested in basketball, some of your friends know you as the "basketball friend", and you're certainly far better at basketball than the average person who plays very rarely if at all, but you're not a pro and you're not even really on a team, you just kind of play pickup games whenever you get the chance. And then you get a DM from a friend, who happens to play for the Phoenix Suns, saying, hey, a lot of us are busy this year, do you want to fill in for us in the 2025-2026 NBA season? It kind of felt like that. I don't know why I used basketball for this analogy I don't know anything about it. You get the idea.

So going into it I would say my main concern was something of an imposter syndrome. In a team with some of the best puzzlers out there, how much would I really be able to contribute? Somewhat, it turns out!

chaos!

The thing is, Mystery Hunt is really big. In my view, you benefit a lot from having strong puzzlers for puzzles like this nightmare²² or that round with the hexagons that I still don't understand, but you really do just need a lot of people to work on stuff. Not every puzzle is an impenetrable nightmare! And you benefit from having a big diverse set of puzzlers so that when a puzzle about crochet or France or bird calls drops, you've got someone for it. So, especially on the first day, I was able to contribute a decent amount! There was one about identifying board games which was well within my wheelhouse, there was this really cool logic puzzle meta which I think I really got to show my skills on, and I even got a moment to shine in the final runaround by solving one of its 24 minipuzzles. I will admit that under the pressure I did the puzzle wrong at first and took like twice as long as I should have and also told the in-person team to submit the wrong answer the first time, but still! I also had a great time on voice call with my team in either the night shift crew or day one's roving gang of like 5 people who bounced around getting random stuff done.

There's an interesting note there for me; prior to this, I have never gotten on voice call with people who I know exclusively "from the internet". And I never really thought about why I did this. Weird to admit that I guess it's just a kind of shyness? On the internet you can construct this version of yourself that is exactly who you want to be, but your voice will unavoidably give something away of who you are irl. But... my team needed me, and it is so much easier to communicate and solve puzzles over voice, so I just went for it.

The worst part was actually that I had to reinstall Zoom because Discord voice call wasn't working on MIT wifi for some reason??

order

Actually playing in Mystery Hunt has made me think that keeping your team organised is a kind of puzzle in itself. When I was just hunting with my friends, we made new discord channels for individual puzzles manually and worked out of different tabs of the same google sheet. And this worked fine for like 7 people and a couple dozen puzzles, but with Mystery Hunt's (typical) upwards of 30 people and a few hundred puzzles, you really need a better system! So perhaps unsurprisingly there is software written specifically for this,²³ a program named Cardboard that keeps track of everything and manages the discord channels and makes new google sheets for you. We used it on our team and I genuinely think the hunt would have been impossible without it.

Of course, "organising your puzzles" being a skill means that they can write rounds that test your ability to do that. Land of No Name, my favourite round from the hunt, did just that by starting with every puzzle's name blacked out. We went through many ideas for how to refer to them; almost every puzzle in the round got renamed in Cardboard several times!

It's never in anyone's introduction to puzzlehunts but I think it's worth mentioning that google sheets specifically²⁴ seems to be a major part of hunt culture. Every puzzle has a button on the page that copies the puzzle content in a format that you can paste right into a spreadsheet! It just happens to be the perfect tool for this kind of real-time collaboration that involves a lot of semi-structured data. And grids. Lots of puzzles have grids. Sometimes the format gets weird and you gotta pull out the Excalidraw, but for the most part it's all sheets. I enjoyed this kind of collaboration a lot! Especially for the final runaround, we had the in-person players sending the online team everything that could be done remotely, and then like 15 online players trying to do 10 minipuzzles simultaneously all scrambling around this one google sheet like a colony of ants. I've never seen anything quite like it before.

Maintaining the sheets is one thing but keeping track of everything that's actually happening is quite another. One particular challenge for me is that I am Australian. This means that a lot of stuff happened very early in the morning for me while I was asleep. I was able to get my bearings on day 1, but then by the morning of day 2 there was a lot going on and I was very out of the loop. This is not to fault my team in any way; this is sort of an eternal unsolvable problem for me. I'd love to build a life that happens online, but so much of online happens overnight. But, shoutout to my fellow off-timezones night shift crew, and those of you who probably shouldn't have been there but stayed up way too late anyway, you were great to hunt with.

how does anyone ever solve puzzles for two and a half days straight?

Okay, nobody actually hunts for two and a half days straight. I hope. You do need to sleep, puzzling performance drops off pretty quick after 24 hours awake. Also, you do have to take care of yourself! One of my favourite aspects of the hunt was that every few hours I'd get @everyone'd on the discord to be told to eat, stretch, and hydrate. This was genuinely very helpful.

Still, I don't know how you can stay focused on essentially the one task for a whole weekend. Sure, there are a lot of different puzzles with different topics to bounce between, and they had this fun gimmick called "research tasks" where you had to do little scavenger hunt-esque things like "send us a photo of you touching grass" or minigames on the site to get points you had to use to unlock puzzles, but by day 2 I found myself getting distracted by other things and needing to go take a break from the hunt for a bit. Maybe in future big hunts like this I'll deliberately schedule time to do non-hunt stuff just to refresh.

What didn't help was that I learned on the morning of day 1 that someone I interact with a lot had covid. And then by that afternoon I started to feel unwell myself. I don't think I have covid but it's weird and I'm not enjoying it. Mystery Hunt is one of those events that feels like you get transported to an alternate dimension for two days,²⁵ it's just a shame that the real world still finds ways to cause problems.

misc.

Anyway. I guess I had a lot of fun! Thank you so much to Cardinality for putting the hunt on - playing in one of these has made it clear that it must be an incredible amount of work - and to my beloved ⛎ Unicode Equivalence for having me. Couldn't work out where to put it in the post but I also want to say that the keeper from the gacha round gave me gender envy.²⁶ So shoutout to the artists behind the hunt. Also @google sheets please make it so that if someone else selects multiple cells you can see their coloured box change to match. That'd make indicating things a lot easier. Okay that's all thanks!

puzzle links will not work until the archival site is up, or if you happened to participate and unlock that puzzle.
actually several more programs that i didn't know about
i don't mean to shill for google or anything but this is the software that gets used. excel web is gross (and microsoft is probably worse anyway) and, if any of those open source cloud alternatives have puzzlehunt feature parity with google sheets (custom named functions is big), the hunt community has not worked it out yet.
which i think also happened in the lore? i'm not 100% sure, there was kind of a lot going on. apparently there was this whole egg-based subplot i totally missed. which made me look a little silly at a pivotal moment.
edited to add: it turns out though links to puzzle pages are login walled, links to individual images on the site are ok. so, here is a representative image of Widowager, the Keeper Puzzmon from the gacha round. All of the Puzzmon art they did for this is fantastic and I'm really hoping Cardinality puts out artist credits at some point.²⁷
additionally edited to add: i have learned from a mysterious and clandestine source that the banner arts from the gacha round are credited to the names Jeff Yin and Buck

dailies

2025-11-19T11:00:00.000Z

dailies

sometimes i worry that i have too many dailies

NYT Connections

I've been doing the Connections daily for a while; I've long since fallen off doing Wordle because it's kind of the same game every time, but the Connections at least has some amount of creative input into each puzzle. Also I'm in a group chat where we all do the Connections every day and discuss it, so that helps. I'm probably going to keep doing the Connections because it takes like one minute and is at least kind of interesting, but you know, we are over 800 puzzles in and it really does feel like it. I don't know if it's truly possible for them to run out of ideas, but it's been a while since any puzzle has actually surprised me; it feels like by this point I know all of the techniques they use and it's just a matter of applying them. The one time the blue category was "EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL" might have been the high-water mark of the whole thing. Also, sometimes a category just annoys me: there haven't been as many Americanisms as of late, but some of them just don't work. So I don't know if actually continuing to play it is worth it.

Also isn't the NYT evil for some reason? In any case this game is obviously lifted from the British game show Only Connect.

Catfishing

Catfishing is one of these daily games where you get shown the categories for a Wikipedia article and then attempt to name the article (technically anything that redirects to it). On its own this would not be a very interesting game so you do it 10 times, and only get one shot at each article. It's... pretty good! As with the Connections a lot of the fun is in comparing results with friends (over time you get a general sense of where everyone's knowledge lies, which is cool). I know I just complained about Wordle not having any real creative input when this is basically the same thing - outside of the original article pool selection, the articles used in each day may as well be drawn out of a hat - but there's enough there in the hard work of Wikipedia editors to categorise things to make it interesting. This may not be enough to justify it being a daily game on its own... but the way you do 10 acticles and get a score at the end gives it a sort of gambling energy. Maybe today will be the day you get the legendary, coveted 10/10? Probably not though, my best is still 7/10.

Puzzmo

Puzzmo is kind of like the games section of a newspaper except there is no newspaper and it's just the games. I originally joined back when it was this cool, exclusive, mysterious thing by artist game developer Zach Gage, but now I mostly think of it as a good crossword and some other games I don't care about.

The other games are actually behind a paywall now, which is fair enough, you've gotta make money somehow. I am of course unaffected by this.

Flipart

You rotate the shapes to make them fit. You could treat it as a logic puzzle but there are so few possibilities that you can kinda just put everything into place by looking at it. For a time I believe I was one of the best Flipart players in the world, but I stopped playing it because it takes like 10 seconds and there's nothing there to really grab me. I only bring it up because I wanted to brag.

Crossword

Puzzmo's crossword is very good and it is definitely my favourite of all the daily games. It's "midi" sized so there's a good amount to do without it being overwhelming, the clues are generally pretty approachable, there are hints available if you get stuck on something, and they just kind of have fun with it. There's a lot of clues that you wouldn't expect to see in, say, the New York Times; references to video games, things from the crossword author's life, stuff that's just kinda silly, clues that are... I want to say "woke" for lack of a better word? Today's crossword¹⁶ has "T, E, etc." for MEDS which I think is neat. It used to have a bit of a problem with being America-centric and it still feels that way to an extent, but it's better now. I think if you're looking to get into crosswords then Puzzmo's is a good place to start; it definitely got me into crosswords, anyway.¹⁷

Mini crossword

At one point Puzzmo ran a series of 30 mini crosswords that each introduce and explain a common crossword mechanic. These were really neat! I think also if you were getting into crosswords you could play these to learn all the little tricks you're expected to pick up sooner or later. Unlike the rest of Puzzmo where you gotta pay to access the archives, you can play them all individually from the list in this Bluesky thread (I don't know why they did it like that).

Oh, they also kept doing mini crosswords after the series was over; the new ones are unthemed. They're good, like the midis, but there's much the same problem here as with the Flipart for me where they're over so quickly it doesn't feel like anything meaningful has happened.

checking five email accounts

I have five email accounts and the worst part is that I'm considering making another one because I'm not a big fan of the names on any of them.¹⁸ You might think I should just set them all to redirect to one email account, but then I'd have five times as many emails all in one bucket. Probably I could set it up with folders or something. In any case the situation is a mess.

I would love to get to stop doing this one but sadly reading email is required to like, participate in society. Emails are good sometimes, though. I do think about the situation where emails are something I have to check, while some other ways of contacting me are delivered as notifications. This means I sometimes miss stuff for a bit, but the alternative would require some careful effort to manage so that I don't drown in notifications about stuff I don't care about. This is the kind of effort I should be putting in anyway but it's just so easy to maintain the status quo.

backscrolling social media

I'm at a bit of an off-beat timezone so much activity on social media happens while I'm asleep. I've ended up with a daily task of backreading my whole feed; I used to do this on Cohost, and now I do it on (beat)¹⁹ Mastodon. I knew that this was terrible when I was doing it on Cohost and now I'm still doing it. It's not that I don't like the posts that I see, broadly I do, which is exactly the problem; there's too much good stuff and I don't want to miss any of it!

The best I can do with the Mastodon web interface seems to be to sort my follows into a set that I should and realistically can backread every post from and one that I will not. Which means making some tough decisions about like, you know, maybe I like your posts but there's just too many of them and I don't want to spend my whole life on this website.²⁰

The perfect alternative Mastodon frontend has not yet revealed itself to me. Phanpy has this neat "catch-up" feature that helps with backreading but if you follow a lot of pages you've still got to click on them all one-by-one to see the posts by each and it's a bit of a chore. In my head I have this vision of a perfect social media algorithm where, when you load your feed, it takes every post you haven't seen yet and orders them in the traditional reverse chronological order, but grouped by whether they're the last/second last/third last/etc unseen post by that author. So the first thing you'll always see is the most recent post by everyone (who posted), followed by the second-most-recent, and so on. Any post that was boosted of course only shows up once (in the first position it could appear in the feed). This system would be perfect because you could do a quick scroll through the first group to check in on everyone and make sure you haven't missed a post by someone who only posts like once a month, and then keep going if you're bored to see stuff from whoever is more talkative.

I do not believe this system already exists because I just invented it. There's nothing technically stopping me from producing this myself aside from the fact that I have genuinely no idea how and too many other things to do. You know, like, backreading my whole feed.

Youtube

I don't know if this should count as a daily because I do check it throughout the day for some reason. (Ignore the fact that I obviously also do this for Mastodon). What I actually should be doing is checking the front page once per day to see what the recommendation algorithm knows I will obviously want to see, maybe check in on SiIvagunner once a week to see if they uploaded anything from a game I recognise, and that's it. Beyond that point the recommendations get pretty bad, it's all, "are you sure you don't want to watch a Game Changer short? Maybe rewatch a Danny Gonzalez video"? And usually it's actually right and I will watch them but I don't think I need to be spending time on that.

Even if I was to only check it once per day this would still be a dangerous one to keep around. Probably it can be cleared in half an hour but there's always a risk that hbomberguy uploads and then I'm not getting anything done that day. I think I'm willing to accept this risk.

This is another one that shouldn't qualify because it's more of a continuous than a daily, but the real reason it's struck through here is that I actually stopped checking it entirely. This is something I had been meaning to do almost the entire time I was on that website. And all I had to do was sign out of it on my phone.

I didn't even sign out on my desktop computer where I spent like half my time on reddit! I'll admit I'm having trouble working out what's going on here; it seems a contradiction, that I would so frequently bemoan my use of this website and yet for so long never actually meaningfully attempt to get off it. We talk about being "addicted" to social media, but I never had the desire to go back, which isn't how addiction is supposed to work, right?

It did feel as though reddit had been getting worse for a while. Or perhaps I was just maturing around it. The trouble, I find, with following communities rather than people is that you can't just follow pages that make exclusively good posts.²¹ So if a community you're interested in is full of complaining, or people who don't know what they're talking about, or is moderated poorly, what do you do? Maybe there'll be a nicer subreddit with the same subject matter, but that kind of split usually happens because of weird moderator drama, so probably not.

Okay now I'm kind of just complaining. I don't know, the system does have benefits in other ways - there's no feeling obligated to attract followers or construct a personal brand. My point, I think, is that these annoyances built up to a point where I decided I was happy to sign out of the website and never look back. Instead of trying to just use it "less", which never worked.

Maybe one of these days they will invent the perfect social media. Maybe it can't exist (or can't exist forever, RIP Cohost). Maybe it's Schlaugh. I'd sign up for that website but I already have too many things to check every day.

At time of writing. At time of reading it's in the past.
Though I'm not sure how much I can say it truly got me into crosswords when I still mostly just do the Puzzmo one.
What's the email service we're all recommending these days, I haven't been paying attention. Is Posteo good?
I never know what to call it; my instance is critter.cafe but that means nothing if you don't already know about it, it's running Mastodon the software, but I'm following people elsewhere in the Fediverse (and also Bluesky via the bridge) on servers with different software. So honestly I kind of just usually say "social media" and hope nobody asks which one.
How does anyone find the time to post upwards of like, 20 times a day? This is not meant to be a dig I am just genuinely confused. Maybe my standards for what I post are just too high.
The meaning of "exclusively good" is a longer topic, but suffice it to say that I try to follow pages that only rarely make posts that I don't want to see. Which is not to say that posts I don't want to see are "bad" in any way. We all use the internet differently and I think you have to make concessions in order to use it in a way that is healthy. I try to avoid convincing myself that I am obligated, somehow, to follow any particular person, view any particular kind of post, or make any post myself.

animal noises

2025-09-21T12:00:00.000Z

animal noises

you are an animal ... make noises

mechanical keyboards

2025-09-21T12:00:00.000Z

mechanical keyboards

I've had a mechanical keyboard for a couple months now and I'm beginning to think the mechanical keyboard community is on to something. I don't think I'm going to get into mechanical keyboards as a hobby - it seems expensive, and I'm not that kind of tinkerer - but I am beginning to get it, I think. See, the hobby seems quite impenetrable from the outside: you can't wirelessly transmit the experience of actually using a mechanical keyboard, so the reddit and discussion boards and so on have to resort to jargon and keyboard glamour photos. So you get this impression that it's all about the aesthetic qualities of keyboards and niche nerd stuff that's hard to care about without a prior investment. And it's not *not* about that, but at least to me, what it's really about is that mechanical keyboards are computer peripherals that are *toys*. I don't mean that in the disparaging, "tools not toys" sort of way. A mechanical keyboard is a tool but it is a tool that is designed as a toy. To me, just having this thing on my desk, it is a kind of fidget toy to me. I like the way it feels to press the keys, the different sounds from all of them, the feeling of rolling my claws over a set of letters, or hitting a bunch at the same time with a text field open and seeing them all dilligently appear thanks to N-key rollover. Outside of mechanical keyboards, computer peripherals broadly come off as very *utilitarian* to me. Your two options are office stuff, all extra buttons for productivity and better ergonomics for long work sessions, and gamer stuff, with faster polling times so your mouse movements come in as early as possible in the frame, or whatever. Either way, they're both very concerned about "performance". It's not that these qualities aren't desirable! It's nice to have things that work well; I originally bought my keyboard to play the whole-keyboard rhythm game Projekt Godhand, because you need N-key rollover for that, and then that feature happens to also make it better as a toy. Mechanical keyboards just seem to treat these features as a baseline: something like, "if we're going to be keyboard enthusiasts, our keyboards should be, *at minimum*, better than all other keyboards". That then frees them to worry about other, less practical concerns, to value more than having a device that merely translates your thoughts into your computer, with no exertion and no delay. What *I* want, and what I think mechanical keyboards represent, is *tactility*; to care about the actual, physical experience, the *feeling*, of using the device. So much of that mechanical keyboard technical jargon just describes the way different kinds of key switch physically feel to press! "Tactile" even has its own meaning in the jargon as a specific category of switch that feels a certain way, but I mean to use the term more generically (or possibly as an oblique reference to [celsient's essay on "tactilism"](https://web.archive.org/web/20250107114846/https://cohost.org/celsient/post/541662-an-essay-on-tactilis), which all this reminds me of). I have [written before](https://web.archive.org/web/20250107114846/https://cohost.org/two/post/3785655-ok-i-finally-cleared) about how I like rhythm and typing games because they are games about the physical world, about your body and the interface between it and the machine. And I love playing these on this new keyboard because they draw attention in that way to this device that just feels nice to use. I like computers, but I also like tactile objects and existing in the world, and I think mechanical keyboard fans really get that. At least, that's the impression that I get. --- ...the gamers, at least, have the right idea with RGB lighting, often garish though it is.

quick updates | transference

2025-08-31T12:00:00.000Z

quick updates

I've been doing a few things on this site and elsewhere that never got Posts here because the process for making a post involved copying and pasting things between like three different files. But through the magic of technology (working out how to iterate over files in Phantomake) I should now be able to put stuff up here a lot easier! For those following these posts via the atom feed, let me know if this broke things in your feed reader; it should still be about the same, and it seems to work to me, but there could be some weirdness.

Anyway, there's also now a couple more things up in the library, inlcuding a card game that I think is pretty good. The "site last updated" date in the bottom right should be more correct more often now. I've been occasionally updating the links page to add more buttons. And there is now at least one secret hidden around here somewhere...

What follows is the text of a post I was planning on putting on here but then didn't because making posts was too much hassle. I ended up putting it on Mastodon but now that this is easier I may (may) make more shorter posts on here like this.

transference

Some years back I finally got myself a powerful enough computer to play Minecraft with shaders, having run it off a terrible laptop for years before then. I had a lot of fun at the time loading up various shader packs and mucking with the settings and looking at water reflections, sunlight filtering through trees, clouds, shadows, sunsets, that sort of thing. I distinctly remember, then, that I started doing the same thing in real life - I noticed myself looking at, for instance, the shadows cast by a railing, or light diffusing through dust in the air, and thinking, unconsciously, something like "wow, these shaders look really good".

And now I'm playing Minecraft again and this time the modpack that I'm playing happens to include Presence Footsteps. So now specifically footstep noises have a lot of care and detail put into them, and like before I'm doing a lot of running about and just listening to the way that all the blocks sound different. (As a fun extra thing, Presence Footsteps has support for different "body types"; I have it set to "avian", which adds some subtle wing-flapping noises when jumping. For some reason it defaulted to "pegasus" which made me quite confused at first as to why it sounded like I was quadrupedal). What reminded me of starting to play with shaders is that I am now also paying more attention to the way that my footsteps sound in real life. Noticing the bassy resonance of walking on stone footpaths compared to the soft crunch of low grass.

It's interesting that Minecraft in particular had this effect. It's not like it's the only game I play and I don't only play weird indies - I do play games with graphics and sounds and so on. But I did gain a great level of familiarity with Minecraft before enabling these extra details, and I think that's what did it. Being so used to the game not looking or sounding like that made me pay attention to these things instead of taking them for granted. Like, boot up any game that just has realistic graphics and it looks good, sure, but I think I just accept that that's what the game looks like within 3 seconds and then stop thinking about it.

And then the rest is just regular transference into real life. The Tetris Effect, maybe, or just that paying attention to something in a virtual environment also copies over to the real world. I'm not gonna say that playing this game in this very specific way has given me some great appreciation for the natural world or anything so dramatic. Maybe a little, but for a counterexample: one of the things I appreciate the most irl is the clouds, the sky... and I've always kept Minecraft's square default clouds, even when playing with shaders. Video game clouds just don't feel like they stand up to the real thing for me.

thoughts from some games i've played lately

2025-07-22T12:00:00.000Z

thoughts from some games i've played lately

so lately i've played through a few games - the poker-based roguelike deckbuilder balatro, the puzzle strategy roguelike with mystery elements blue prince the "undertale 2" adventure rpg deltarune, and the puzzly minecraft modpack⁹ spectralarity. and i have thoughts on all of these that i have attempted to organise into one coherent post.

the most important thing is being part of the zeitgeist

I did quite enjoy playing Balatro, Blue Prince, and Deltarune (especially Deltarune), but getting to talk with friends about these games might actually be the best part. I got into these games largely because my friends were playing them, and talking about them, and I wanted to get in on the zeitgeist,¹⁰ the overall cultural moment surrounding these games. And you know what, it is a lot of fun! I think these things are worth doing almost for the social aspect alone, if your friends are in on them. (Though, if you definitely won't like something, don't do it for the sake of not missing out, you know? The point is that you're enjoying it alongside eachother!)

Spectralarity, in contrast, has been more solitary. There is at least some shared cultural knowledge of Minecraft in general that means I can, say, complain about accidentally killing my whole village with a Raid and have it make sense to people.¹¹ It slightly makes me want to do a Minecraft server or something with my friends again... sometime down the line, for now Spectralarity has me covered for this kind of game.

i don't really like roguelikes with slow persistent progression between runs¹²

Though I did enjoy playing Blue Prince, I don't think I'm going to finish it.¹³ I do actually think Blue Prince works quite well as a roguelike! To me, it never really felt like the randomness to it really got in the way of solving any of the deeper mysteries, because I took enough notes such that on any given run there was bound to be something I was looking into that I'd get to investigate further. (I actually picked up Obsidian to take notes for this game and had a lot of fun organising my little conspiracy board as I went).

My only problem with Blue Prince is, I realise, that I just don't like this kind of roguelike very much. Progression being incremental over many similar runs feels too much like I'm being asked to do approximately the same thing 100 times, which is too many. But, I like the classic roguelike features of emergent gameplay from complex systems and the feeling of slowly exploring a big possibility space. I think I just like them a lot more when, without an extrinsic reward for playing more, it's up to me when I'm done exploring. Roguelikes without permanent upgrades also have that thing I like about rhythm games where they become easier over time solely because of your own skill! Practicing skills is a lot of fun, and it gets muddied a bit when the game is slowly lowering its level of challenge.

Bennett Foddy has written about how maybe the only reasonable numbers in game design are 0, 1, and infinity. If a roguelike-with-progression is a "100", to me, a good roguelike without it is infinity. The random generator will make something different each time, and you will change, too, but the parameters of that generator will be exactly the same whether it's run 1 or 2000. Exactly the same thing, designed to be played up to (but not including) an infinite number of times.

maybe i actually can stick with sandbox games??

Previously I have reliably fallen off any sort of sandbox-type game - singleplayer Minecraft, Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Factorio - some number of hours in, despite making multiple attempts. The pattern is always seemingly that I go slightly too long without playing, and then once I'm back I've lost my train of thought and no longer know what I was doing. But these games are long, so starting over so soon doesn't feel like a great option...

Somehow, though, Spectralarity seems to have had more staying power with me. At least one part of this has to be that it does a lot of things I like! See, Minecraft is a very open sandbox - there's a lot of things you can do, but most of them don't contribute to any sort of overarching progression. It's a big game with a very short critical path. Which I'm sure is great for some people but just leaves me feeling directionless. Spectralarity, though, does a great job of putting lots of Minecraft's little "useless" features into your overall progression, while giving you more meaningful side projects sourced from a decent amount of modded content. So, at any given time there's a selection of 3-4 things to do that all move the game forward in some way, which feels about right to me.

It's good stuff, I think! But much credit to me sticking with it has to go to me just taking semi-detailed notes now. I had great success playing Deltarune kind of like it was a puzzle game while trying to find the secret bosses; I suspect you can also play any sandbox game like it's one of those puzzle games that wants you to take a lot of notes: like Blue Prince, Void Stranger, or Polymute.¹⁴ Theories and open leads are quite similar, in my mind, to unfinished projects or build ideas!

ok bye

i was gonna put a "final thoughts on these games" section here but you know what all my thoughts are in the post and it's already too long.

maybe a little odd to describe a minecraft modpack as a game, but the way that i'm engaging with it is really no different than how i would any other game.
a word i am definitely using incorrectly
those things are ridiculous on Hard.
early drafts of this post used the term "roguelite" for this but then i realised nobody uses the term to mean specifically this, so then i'd have to define it, and then i'm just defining a new term to refer specifically to things i don't like, which feels a bit mean somehow.
by that i mean, reach the true real ending and/or solve all its many puzzles. i did roll credits, it's just that blue prince is one of those games which rolls credits multiple times.
gratuituous non-sequitur polymute recommendation!!! oh yeah Void Stranger is also very good; if you really like puzzles and want something that isn't a roguelike,¹⁵ Void Stranger is a puzzle-game-with-deeper-mystery like Blue Prince that I did see all the way through to the real true actual final ending.
if you do want to play one of those no-progression roguelikes i was alluding to earier, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, everything i've played by Michael Brough, Threes (the mobile game), and Crypt of the Necrodancer (all zones mode) are all great.

i think i've cracked it

2025-06-25T12:00:00.000Z

i think i've cracked it

Hatsune Miku

Fictional singer who also exists in the real world (as a digital program)

The Wiggles

Real musicians who also exist in a fictional universe (for instance, Dorothy the Dinosaur, an inhabitant of that universe, is fictional)

Gorillaz

Fictional band whose songs are also released in the real world by a real band that uses their likeness

Big Time Rush

I don't...

I don't know...

some recommendations

2024-11-22T11:00:00.000Z

some recommendations

Women Puzzle

a 1-screen puzzle game by Sylvie; I shan't say anything more about it, just try it. if you're not familiar with Sylvie's work, this is now a recommendation for checking her stuff out more broadly. there's a strong irreverence towards traditional modern indie game design tenets (coyote time, the importance of a good the tutorial, the like), but it's all done very intentionally. these games aren't just idiosyncratic for the sake of it, everything is in service of some particular goal. I think Slyvie's blurb on love ♥ game puts it well:

Sylvie is a normal girl who makes surprising and cute games. They have colourful graphics and sweet characters, but there are often sharp edges hiding beneath the surface. You might be shocked by the high difficulty or the unusual design. If you try your best to understand them, maybe you can have a good time and experience something new.

corn thins

okay I'm not reallly recommending corn thins specifically because 1 there exist off-brand versions of this product that are also good⁷ and 2 the specific food does not really matter that much. however corn thins are interesting in that they are a good snack food but also extremely bland.⁸ the intention is clearly that you put some kind of topping on them, but i am not doing that, i am bringing a thing of corn thins to a social gathering that people didn't bring snacks to, opening it around 11pm when everyone is hungry, and sharing it around. sharing food is the important thing, that's what i'm really recommending, but corn thins are special in that the blandness makes them feel healthy, and kind of cheap, so there's no external factors that might prevent someone from just taking one. it's just, would you like to eat a corn thin? it is a little unpleasant to eat one dry, but there is a certain level of hunger beyond which that doesn't seem to matter, and it seems that is about 11pm when everyone had dinner at 6. sometimes i think you need to have, and really appreciate, an experience that is just okay. all the better to have it alongside others. also this is really kind of just the a4 paper thing again; another way in which you can be surprisingly valuable to your friends by bringing a thing to a place and giving it away.

How to play in a museum

one of a series of articles by Holly Gramazio about games - slightly unusual, real-life, social, physical, or just weird games. i got here from Holly's website; i find there's something in particular about this kind of artist portfolio website that makes them fun rabbit holes. but always with a side of yearning: so often the fun stuff they talk about is physical installation work that i'll never be able to experience firsthand thanks to some massive distance in time, space, or (usually) both. it always seems like the cool stuff is never anywhere near me... but i guess the world is a big place and the internet shows you a lot of it. probably there are cool art things happening around me all the time and i'm just not noticing! but how do i start to notice...

one side rabbit hole here is that one of these articles links out to the Ludocity wiki, a big collection of unusual physical games with instructions for running and playing them. this is distant too: most of these games seem to have been designed around 2007-2010. but they do come with full instructions, so with a bit of effort, one could drag these things back into the present. there's nothing stopping you from playing that imaginary golf game in the current year. and now i want to try it.

i will continue to call them "corn thins" though because there is no consistent term for this product used among all the other versions that i can find
you can get flavoured corn thins that are not bland. i am not talking about those however

administrative note (2024-12-17)

i wrote this whole post and then procrastinated on putting it up cause i wanted to add proper comments and then didn't do that. but here it is now. also the experimental comment box is below! and then there's the normal one after that. yeah it's a mess i can fix it later

also just realised that cusdis doesn't inherit the website styling. i'll fix that later too.

meta post 2

2024-11-18T11:00:00.000Z

meta post 2

i'm on mastodon now! finallly got around to setting up an account. come say hi at @two@critter.cafe! no guarantees of course that i'll really end up using it but it seems fun so far. okay that's all bye

experiencing experience

2024-10-19T11:00:00.000Z

experiencing experience

Cow Life Sim RPG (Steam, Itch) is a pretty good game! It's this bizarre but cosy send-up(?) of RPGs with some surprisingly good writing.

Because it's an RPG there's a bunch of different skills you get experience in and level up, like Walking (which, of course, you gain experience in constantly just by walking) and Juice Drinking (which increases the probability that you'll be able to drink juices with a lower Edibility stat). Juice Drinking is a weirdly pivotal part of the game - there's this whole crafting system, and juicing things is one of the main verbs in it, and like all the other verbs you can do this to literally any object. And everything's just done with adjectives, so (for example) if you juice a trumpet it makes a trumpet juice (which you need a pretty high level in Juice Drinking to drink), and if you juice a trumpet juice you make a juice juice, which you could then set on fire to make a juice ash (which would give you Arson experience).

The crafting achievements are some of my favourites. There's "Behold a Caramelized Wolfs Milk Slime Mould Basket", which requires you to parse what parts of that item name are noun and which parts are adjective and how you're supposed to apply those things in that order, or "Eat a BBQ Sauce" (the solution to this one is pretty funny).

Okay, to get to the point: one of the skills in the game is Experiencing, and you get experience in Experiencing by having an experience for the first time; for the most part this means crafting an item for the first time (or drinking the corresponding juice), but it also accounts for various things you can interact with in the game. The first time you experience something, you get experiencing experince for it. In the context of the game it's a neat way to hide a "completion" stat. But I've been thinking of how you could apply it to real life...

Because, you can talk about "gaining experience in skills" in real life, right? Giving everything numbers and "levels" and so on is gamer nonsense, but like, the general concept exists in real life because it's something that RPGs lifted from real life and codified. If you have more experience in something, you generally get better at it. So... can you get better at having new experiences? Probably, kinda! I mean, even in the game Experiencing levels don't actually do much, but it just got me thinking: I think there is significant value in having an experience, any experience, for the first time.

Sure, you'll be better at doing that thing the second time, but even if it's not likely to happen again, at least now you know what it's like; you can take that into any similar experiences, or if anybody you know does the same thing, you'll have something to talk about, words of advice - or sympathy if the experience is one that sucks.

And this is all something I've thinking about because of Cohost shutting down. A social media website I spend all of my time on semi-abruptly closing is definitely a new experience! And it sucks, and it's not like this is an experience I expect to repeat any time soon, but I still think I gained something out of it: for one thing, I actually started sending personal messages to people I only know from online, which, it turns out, is fun and not as difficult as I thought.⁶ And I think the only reason I was actually brave enough to do this is because of my previous experience with the end of Blaseball, a kind-of similar thing where a community fell apart and I regretted not actually making social contact with anybody post the end of that.

I'm not trying to make a "suffering is good actually" point here; my point is more so that novelty is good. A bad experience can be useful not so much because it is bad, but regardless of that. Though, I suppose if you only ever had good experiences the pool of experiences you could draw from in future would be pretty limited... you shouldn't seek out suffering, but I don't think you should avoid a first time experience just because it might (or will) be a bit unpleasant. You'll get the Experiencing XP either way. Even if the experience is terrible (and in fact, even if it's good). You might even level up!

this is your unsubtle reminder that you can send me an email if you have something to say :>

meta post 1

2024-10-16T11:00:00.000Z

meta post 1

the site has been set up...

more or less. i've got the basic structure of it down, at least; there are still a few more things i want to add (more links, more of my past projects and some sort of archive of my cohost posts in the library, a comment system that isn't complete nonsense), but this is enough for now. the important thing is that i have phantomake set up so that new stuff is easy enough to add. mostly i'm just putting this paragraph here so you check out the library there's like 2 good things in there!!!

okay where to next?

i'm pretty sure i'm gonna join the fediverse, because a lot of beings i was following from cohost have gone there and it's different enough from twitter that i think i could get used to it. an appreciable number of pages i was following have gone to bluesky instead, but i don't expect i could really enjoy posting there. possibly i make an account entirely for interacting and sharing posts, but with bluesky's good rss support i'm mostly content to just follow from afar.

also schlaugh tempts me but it's mostly a site for long-form writing and the plan is to do long-form writing on here and i feel like it'd be poor form to duplicate things. i don't know how people handle being on like 4 different social media websites.

the only reason i haven't signed up for anything yet is that i'm somewhat busy right now and, honestly, am kind of enjoying being in this strange time between websites. it's given me a chance to really think about what i want and make something of an attempt at reducing my massive browser tab count. there will be an update on this website when and if i join some social media, so if you're following the feed, you should get it.

what about sharing stuff on here?

one of my favourite things about cohost was getting to share art i really liked; i had some high-ish number of followers (mostly i think just because i'd been posting since the public opening) and sometimes i would share a post and see it get shared around more or get a couple nice comments from my followers who were better at commenting than me. which is really just to say that the best part of cohost was how much incredible art and writing and shitposting there was and how even if i wasn't making much of my own i got to play my own small role in the ecosystem by bringing more attention to the stuff that really spoke to me.

...so, can i just do that on a blog? i suspect i have less Influence now - not everyone would have followed me here post-cohost - and the lack of any real interactivity here makes it impossible to tell besides. i do still want to just share stuff i really like to whoever happens to be around, but it might be kind of weird to like, just link to art that people are posting on social media from a static site blog? like, when someone shares your post on cohost or whatever you get notified about it and you can appreciate the extra attention, but if i share a post here the author might never know that extra people are looking it from behind the glass, or perhaps worse, get an unusual burst of attention and have no idea where it came from.

maybe that's okay; you, dear readers, are kind, are you not? and there are not nearly enough of you to make you frightening by your sheer numbers, i suppose. in any case anything that's published out in the open on the internet and not to a social media feed is, i think, more obviously fair game for linking. so, possibly expect to see some of that. (and maybe let me know what you think about all this, especially if you're an artist who posts to social media)

(okay, the plan when i drafted this post was to put some links to interesting non-social media web things here, but my bookmarks system is such a shambles than i don't have anything to hand. oh well.)

nothing is guaranteed

i may not continue to update this website. i may actually continue to update this website and not join any social media at all. anything could happpen. anything could also not happen. we will find out together

why was there a framed picture of link in the house they used in this segment from The Checkout?

2024-10-09T11:00:00.000Z

why was there a framed picture of link in the house they used in this segment from The Checkout?

the segment in question

i have no idea

i did at least work out that it's this key art of link from skyward sword. this does not answer any other questions i have

unnamed post 1

2024-10-04T12:00:00.000Z

unnamed post 1

first half

The featured Wikipedia article for october 2⁴ is really good! It's the Tichborne case, just a genuinely really interesting story about an Australian(?) guy in the 1860s who claimed to be the missing heir to a baronetcy (and its vast fortune) who was presumed lost in a shipwreck. Check it out: just read the lead, skim through it, jump around, or read the whole story in chronological order, anything works. It's a good story in broad strokes and it's got all these weird details if you read the whole thing.

I think the Wikipedia writing style really lends itself to this kind of story; dry, factual, intensely detailed. The story is gievn room to speak for itself, there's no real commentary except that given by historians or the story's own characters: 'His speech was prefaced by a severe denunciation of Kenealy's conduct, the longest, severest and best merited rebuke ever administered from the Bench to a member of the bar" according to the trial's chronicler John Morse. And especially well-fitting for a story with an air of mystery like this, Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy means that the article can't exactly come down on either side: Although most commentators have accepted the court's view that the Claimant was Orton, some analysts believe that an element of doubt remains as to his true identity and that, conceivably, he was Roger Tichborne.

I just kinda love reading Wikipedia.

⁵ on this website times and dates are given in UTC (when they are not obviously local time) but the prices are in Australian dollars
pawnotes i write are now globally-numbered. try to find them all!

second half

Machine Love by Jamie Paige is a pretty awesome song.

youtube embed

okay that's all bye!

twotwos rss feed

names expire

names expire

Atkinson Hyperlegible appears a little smaller than some other fonts at the same font size, so if you're replacing an existing font with it you may need to make the font size a little bigger

Atkinson Hyperlegible appears a little smaller than some other fonts at the same font size, so if you're replacing an existing font with it you may need to make the font size a little bigger

broadcast shuffle in practice

broadcast shuffle in practice

context

the method

review: death's door

review: death's door

bit of context

as a game

as a bird game

we awaken in a strange place

we awaken in a strange place

i have kind of solved my email situation

i have kind of solved my email situation

posteo

thunderbird

something strange at the art of banksy "without limits" exhibition

something strange at the art of banksy exhibition

i played in the 2026 mit mystery hunt

i played in the 2026 mit mystery hunt

how did we get here?

chaos!

order

how does anyone ever solve puzzles for two and a half days straight?

misc.

dailies

dailies

NYT Connections

Catfishing

Puzzmo

Flipart

Crossword

Mini crossword

checking five email accounts

backscrolling social media

Youtube

Reddit

animal noises

animal noises

mechanical keyboards

mechanical keyboards

quick updates | transference

quick updates

transference

thoughts from some games i've played lately

thoughts from some games i've played lately

the most important thing is being part of the zeitgeist

i don't really like roguelikes with slow persistent progression between runs12

maybe i actually can stick with sandbox games??

ok bye

i think i've cracked it

i think i've cracked it

Hatsune Miku

The Wiggles

Gorillaz

Big Time Rush

some recommendations

some recommendations

Women Puzzle

corn thins

How to play in a museum

administrative note (2024-12-17)

meta post 2

meta post 2

experiencing experience

experiencing experience

meta post 1

meta post 1

the site has been set up...

okay where to next?

what about sharing stuff on here?

nothing is guaranteed

why was there a framed picture of link in the house they used in this segment from The Checkout?

why was there a framed picture of link in the house they used in this segment from The Checkout?

i have no idea

unnamed post 1

i don't really like roguelikes with slow persistent progression between runs¹²