matt bluelander 🏴 @matt@cybre.space

Um, excuse me, Scorched Earth is the mother of all games. It says so right on the title screen.

Does anyone know of any free fonts inspired by the vector fonts on PLATO terminals? Wolfenstein 2's enigma terminal is a real good example of what I'm looking for. Searxes have been fruitless so far

I guess the only way these could become popular is via a phone app, and these types of puzzles are just too complex for a good touchscreen UI. Sudoku and picross are simple enough to work, but I tried a couple "zebra puzzle" apps, and the UI they've all settled on isn't even close to as satisfying on a visual and tactile level as filling them out on paper. I don't want you to give me pictograms to eliminate, I want the gratification of filling in a big, empty grid.

Looking for books in English? No problem, did you want that in Great Britain English, US English, English English or English English English?

I'm super good at solitaire*, so I unlocked a story about a mysterious snowman train

Ohh, I don't like this

This 2011 interview with the creator of megaman (translated in 2016 by the indispensable shmuplations) is very good http://shmuplations.com/megaman/

Tinkered around with my ASCII dungeon thing a bit more. Got it working with 32-bit color and displaying at the correct size without any gaps between characters, which was an ordeal. Have a nice little translucent shadow on the player for better visibility on different terrain

Still just using text files for everything. If I want one of the characters in more than one color, I can just pick another character to map to it.

In his blog post Terry was like "I didn't really understand how static variables worked, so I did it this way", which prompted me to look up if static variables were a thing in QB64. Lo and behold...

But you know what? It worked. It worked for him and it worked for me. It made our lives a little harder, but the program still worked, he eventually learned something, and now I've learned something too

People poked fun at the source code because it constantly uses this function to update the state of the game

You know what? I fell into the exact same trap in the language I'm using, because the documentation is poorly written. It was like "the only variables available to the function will be the ones you pass to it... but don't worry! Any constant you define will be available across the entire program"

I was like "Oh, you can only do that with constants? Seems shitty but oh well"

Dang. Robert Boyd's (Cthulhu Saves the World, Cosmic Star Heroine) first game demo can still be downloaded from his old angelfire page, which still exists. http://www.angelfire.com/games/rboyd/rainbow1.html

It crashes in dosbox after the intro, though. It's a shame, it looks good

The most damning of all faint praise

Being from the US, I hadn't really considered the possibility of "royalty fandom", but it seems like a real contender in the bootlicker olympics

US celeb culture is at least rooted in the illusion of meritocracy. It's ultimately the same thing, but our celebrities usually have to be actors or singers or do *something* other than being born rich (although with all the Cardashian stuff that's definitely less true than it used to be)

It's 2020, this is what computers look like now. Welcome to the future, asshole

Huh, it actually looks *better* when I choose the highest level of noise reduction. That's not what I was expecting at all, I imagined it would interpret all the halftone as noise and mush it all together into a uniform blob. Good to know

Hm, on a closer look, I guess the subtler half-tone does get mangled a bit. That sucks, but at least it's really only noticeable when you zoom in. Good enough for computer reading.

Holy shit, I was wondering whether waifu2x would ruin the halftone in this comic but it handled it no problem. Really powerful stuff. I wish didn't have such a terrible name (original, lanczos, w2x)

The album "Comfort Eagle" starts out with a simple, straightforward song about an opera singer describing his job, and then immediately pivots to whatever this is

Are you shitting me

Hello 2015!