shadower @shadower@mastodon.technology

I've thoroughly enjoyed reading This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and max Gladstone.

Some non-spoilery thoughts here:

https://aimlesslygoingforward.com/blog/2022/05/25/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-and-max-gladstone/

Do not read the Wikipedia summary, it spoils all. Do get the audiobook if you're into that. It's awesome.

I've finally tried emacs's cua-mode which lets you use ctrl + x, c, v, z for cut/copy/paste/undo (i.e. like the rest of my desktop).

And it's surprisingly nice and not disruptive at all. All the shortcuts (like "c-x o" or "c-x c-f") still work as expected, but you get a more consistent clipboard approach.

The mode is really well implemented and fits in much better than I expected.

The only thing I had to adjust to is to stop scrolling with ctrl + v / alt + v and use the Page Up/Down keys instead.

I've been writing a smallish multicommand tool (think busybox/git interface) in Rust and using Clap with it's "derive" feature was awesome.

There's learning curve, yes, but I got the interface exactly as I wanted it with very little manual arg processing.

You get autogenerated help, all the --version, etc. stuff. And even shell completion via clap_complete. It's really neat.

Oh and I've tried Anyhow for the first time which is also excellent.

I really like Rust's story for building CLIs.

Great summary of the two dominant RPG dialog approaches ("every word" / "summary").

I grew up on and <3 the former, but this brings up great points on both sides. Especially around exposition and not having to do the old amnesiac/foreigner workaround.

https://www.tripthearkfantastic.com/ark-blog-thursday/whats-in-a-dialogue-choice-anyway/

Hey instead of the winter games sales, could Steam & co sell us some time to play the ones we own already?

I'd pay money for that.

Huh, someone put my blog post on Hacker News and it hit the frontpage.

I don't collect metrics and the webserver logs rotate fast (less than a day, got to investigate journald), but it got at least 10k GET requests.

No Hug o' Death, the server chugged along nicely \o/.

I did no optimisations, no CDN, serving everything locally, uncompressed images even (not in that post tho!).

But it's a static site, obviously.

Shoulda put on a "buy muh game plz" ad and rake in the millions tho

Put up my thoughts on the Disco Elysium game: https://aimlesslygoingforward.com/blog/2019/12/11/disco-elysium/

It's everything I hoped for, but didn't even dare to dream. Because no one makes games like this any more.

The Paleblood Hunt by Redgrave as an excellent analysis of the Bloodborne lore:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JL5acskAT_2t062HILImBkV8eXAwaqOj611mSjK-vZ8/edit

107 pages, incomprehensible to those who didn't play it and massive spoilers for the players who didn't finish.

But Oh My God it is amazing. I've missed a ton of connections on my first play through and this puts everything nicely together.

And the last section dedicated to the final-final ending blew my mind completely.

Play the game, then read The Paleblood Hunt.

One of the underrated benefits on working with CoreOS:

To do the initial configuration (think cloud-init) it uses a tool called Ignition.

Which means every time a server doesn't boot I'm like:

"♪ Check Ignition and may God's love be with you♫"

Yep, this is another Bowie toot.

Cool video on talking your way out of combat in games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9TzqNQBmr0

Agreed with the broader point, but as someone who really dislikes combat in pretty much any game*, the skipping it IS the better gameplay option. Lets you go back to the actual game you want to play.

* Dark Souls and Bloodborne's relentless defiance to this remains a mystery. Maybe the combat in literally every other game is just crap and DS/BB's one is the only one that's any good?