sʜᴍᴜᴇʟ

One thing I learned from sci-fi that the person who designed my boat at J&J Design design not, apparently:

Do not put the critical valve lever behind the glass door, *inside* the reaction chamber. Locate it in a nice safe place where we can rotate it *without* anyone heroically melting their face off to save the ship.

(bonus: check it periodically to make sure it moves freely)

I took a walk on shore and there was a beautiful seaweed rainbow and a lot of memorial benches.

Memorial bricks and benches and trees...imagine a society where the time, money, and effort put into life celebrations--weddings, funerals, birthday parties, graduations--was instead put into civil infrastructure.

A couple and their friends build 10m of sidewalk over the course of a weekend to celebrate their union. Every piece of public infrastructure has the name of a person on it. Public investment in public goods instead of private investment in parties (ok I just don't like parties) and then it becomes a matter of respect to preserve that infrastructure.

There's no vandalism because that's somebody's grandmother's wall, not just a city wall, and there is a small plaque with her face and name on it. You smile at her as you walk past the wall and would have to look her in the eye if you damaged it.

Everyone wants to maintain public washrooms and parks and fountains because they are a tribute to their ancestors and not anonymous spaces that can get run down.

And there's no corporate sponsorship on city busses and stadiums and libraries because everything is publicly maintained. It is all public sponsored.

Back on the sea for the first time this year...

Finally built my OWN dedicated quadplay arcade setup!

Raspberry Pi 500, scavenged monitor, bar-height table from Amazon, all open source software, and many, many hours figuring out how to hide the cables :)

The fancy part is the Tankstick, a big upgrade from the Xbox controllers I've been using. To keep it simple I went with two proper arcade sticks and buttons and then kept Xbox controllers for players 3 and 4. This gives a small footprint while still allowing four players with full controls.

OMG there is an entire unicode playing card deck now. I feel like I just received a birthday present!

🂡 🂢 🂣 🂤 🂥 🂦 🂧 🂨 🂩 🂪 🂫 🂬 🂭 🂮
🂱 🂲 🂳 🂴 🂵 🂶 🂷 🂸 🂹 🂺 🂻 🂼 🂽 🂾
🃁 🃂 🃃 🃄 🃅 🃆 🃇 🃈 🃉 🃊 🃋 🃌 🃍 🃎
🃑 🃒 🃓 🃔 🃕 🃖 🃗 🃘 🃙 🃚 🃛 🃜 🃝 🃞
🃟

Thinking about

Master of Puppets (1986) →
Doom E1M1 (1993) →
Hysteria (2003) →
At Doom's Gate (2016) →
The Only Thing They Fear Is You (2020)

Above islands and the sea glowed the sky
Above the sky burned the sun

I felt sorry for a friend who was frustrated with the I/O portion of writing a Rogue/Dwarf Fortress-like game this morning. Text mode is surprisingly painful in 2025 compared to 1985, when you could just grab a pointer to the text framebuffer and poke bytes.

So, I made a little open source library that presents a proper, modern graphics API for text mode games!

textgame runs directly in the terminal on macOS, Linux, Windows 11. 32-bit unicode, 24-bit color, double-buffered, keyboard input, blitter with transparency and clipping regions, and string printing with word wrap and numeric formatting.

https://github.com/factory797/textgame