I’ve mentioned a couple of times that a commensurate carbon tax would have to be infinite or larger than infinite (and that rationing is a better solution).
Here’s the situation. I’ll use Sweden as the example just to get numbers but similar applies to all lands and realms.
Our plan was to go from 21 Mt CO2e in 2010, through 6.3 Mt CO2e in 2030, down to zero, and then into net negative.
Showing someone just shown the first two points on that line and asking them for a solution they might be like “oh, okay, you want to go 21 Mt emissions down to 6.3 Mt? Let’s use a carbon tax! A commensurate number would be somewhere around 11.55 SEK per liter.”
Now, two problems with this. First, what we did was nowhere near 11 SEK per liter. We did 3.27 SEK. That’s among the highest in the world and still nowhere near enough just for the 6.3 Mt CO2e by year 2030 goal.
As bad as that problem is, second problem is the bigger.
Because as we want to move to zero, and through zero to negative. We didn’t show them whe whole problem. We’re not just trying to make the numbers small. We need to make the numbers go away and even flip.
Now, my original thinking on this was:
Price = Demand / Supply.
At low supply (like a 6.3 Mt emission year 2030 goal compared to a 21 Mt emission year 2010 reality), price goes up. You’re dividing the demand by a lower number.
At a zero supply like a 0 Mt emission goal, you’d have to divide by zero which breaks math. (For a tax where absolute values is what matters, it’d have to be infinite.) It breaks math even more at a negative supply. You’d… pay people to emit? So stupid. It’s a singularity pinch. The tax is beyond infinite.
Turns out that’s not really how they do it with these Pigouvian taxes. They use marginal abatement cost curves.
You want the tax high enough that it can often be cheaper to solve the problem in a way that doesn’t require buying the problematic good. I.e. you want to set the tax high enough so people are like “okay, never mind drilling for this project, solar is cheaper”.
So they put all the possible “abatements” (like switching to solar) on a big old curve and used that to guide the tax value. That’s where the 11.55 SEK number above would come from (and that’s before the flat-per-liter energy tax and VAT).
But we need to go to zero and net negative. Net negative even if everyone everywhere 100% stopped emitting (above what the carbon cycle normally can handle) means some sorta CDR. DACCS (direct air capture) or bio-CCS. Sweden has gone all in on the latter with a current contract to jam 0.9 Mt annually into the floor of the North Sea.
0.9 Mt is still only like less than one fifteenth of what just the Swedish transport section today emits, let alone all industries total. So the sequestering corporations are building out the bandwidth to jam things down there (it requires pressurized tanker boats to ship things there).
If the world doesn’t stop drilling & burning, even if we could figure out a way to jam things down there fast enough, the North Sea floor storage site would be full in just over two years. (At the current 1.5 Mt bandwidth—Sweden bought 0.9 Mt of that—it’d take over fifty thousand years to fill it up. But. Looking at what the world emits total in a year it’s almost half of what can total fit down there. The fifty thou years number is only there as a result of how slowly they can currently squeeze things down there.)
So I’m thinking maybe my original “naive” mental model wasn’t so wrong. Maybe I’m a bit Dunning-Kruger here but the more I think about this, it seems more that the marginal abatement cost curve model is what’s naive.
It’s based on carbon storage deposit amounts so big that we might not ever figure out how to do them. I’m all for CDR to the extent that it’s possible, but it’s not an infinite sponge.
We need to actually stop drilling and leave the fossil fuels in the ground!
Solar, hydro, wind, and bioCCS are all great as a consolation to not wreck our qualities-of-life too horribly when we leave it in the ground, but they’re not and can never be an excuse to not leave in the ground.
That’s what I mean with zero or even negative “supply”. Our “supply” of how much we can afford to drill and burn really is limited, even with CDR tech like bioCSS. Our actual physical supply of oil and LNG is way bigger than what we can afford to actually burn up because the bottleneck is CO2e PPM. That’s why “peak oil” spiels are wrong. It’s already way more pinched than that.
On the NES version of Clu-Clu Land, Bubbles goes to a rave between levels as the background screen rapidly cycles. That might’ve looked okay on CRT but does not look good on OLED or LCD.
Clu-Clu Land is my favorite game but I never heard of it back in the day (go figure; we played Devil World, Ice Climber, Little Sampson, all kinds of deep cuts but not this). The version I fell in love with was the 2DS Virtual Console release. It features a much slower and more pleasant background color pulse between levels.
TL;DR: Look for a sequence of A9 04 85 55 A9 01 at address 0x435 (that offset is for a file that does include the header) and change the $04 to $0f if you want to make the backgrounds cycle more slowly the way modern VC and AC releases of Clu-Clu Land do.
Disappointed in how the version from NES romsets was so stroboscopic, I wanted to dump out the VC version so I could play it on Retroid.
My 2DS is so broken and requires a lot of tries to boot but I finally managed to start Godmode9 on it and get the ROM from it. But it was just as stroboscopic!
After looking around, it turned out that there was a separate .patch file that the VC version applies dynamically:
;Format Sample
;[xxxx] ;User-defined Name (Max:31 chars)
;Mode = 1 ;1:Fixcode; 2:Fixvalue; 3:Mask; 4:Palette; 5:Double Frame Buffer
;Type = 0 ;Normal: 0:Begin 1:End; Mode2: Value Type
;Address = x1F8000 ;ROM Address
;Fixcode = 0 ;Mode1: Fixed Rom Code; Mode2: Fixed Value
;DelayFrame = 0 ;Delay Frame
;FadeFrame = 0 ;Fade Frame 0:Off
;DarkEnable0 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceEnable0 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Normal Mode)
;MotionBEnable0 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:Black Fade, 2:White Fade, 3:Frame Blend (for Normal Mode)
;Dark0 = 10 ;0~10 (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceColorR0 = 0 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceColorG0 = 0 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;ReduceColorB0 = 0 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;MotionBlur0 = 31 ;0~31 (for Normal Mode)
;DarkEnable1 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Green Mode)
;ReduceEnable1 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:On (for Green Mode)
;MotionBEnable1 = 0 ;0:Off, 1:Black Fade, 2:White Fade, 3:Frame Blend (for Green Mode)
;Dark1 = 10 ;0~10 (for Green Mode)
;ReduceColorR1 = 0 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;ReduceColorG1 = 0 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;ReduceColorB1 = 0 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;MotionBlur1 = 31 ;0~31 (for Green Mode)
;PaletteX = c31,31,31 ;X:0~15, cR,G,B (0~31)
;$A55F:A5 55 LDA $0055 = #$00 A:21
;$A561:D0 12 BNE $A575 A:00
;$A563:A9 04 LDA #$04 A:00
;$A565:85 55 STA $0055 = #$00 A:04
;$A567:A9 01 LDA #$01 A:04
;$A569:45 A7 EOR $00A7 = #$01 A:01
;$A56B:85 A7 STA $00A7 = #$01 A:00
;
;00000435h: A9 04 85 55 A9 01
[FPA]
Mode = 1
Address = 0x435
Fixcode = a6: A9 0f 85 55 A9 01
Clu-Clu Land also has a well-known score bug where you get 30 points when you’re supposed to get 3000 points.
According to The Cutting Room Floor, 0x0571’s value of $80 should be $08 to fix the bug. (That offset is 0x0561 headerless, as their page correctly indicates, but I’m working with a headered file here.) But the version on the 2DS actually had $80! So I’m wondering if maybe it went from $08 to $80 rather than the other way around? I did set it to $08 as per TCRF but I’ll keep a look out the next time I play the game and update this page once I know either way.
If I get back on the GTD wagon there’s a lesson I want to take with me and really hammer home.
When I’m off GTD the bad thing that happens is that I get an idea for an essay or something and I have to go do it right away because there’s no “bookmark” for it so I get driven by the latest and loudest. Fun, but it happes at the expense of working on bigger projects and if I have more than one new idea at once that feels physically bad from the stress that I can’t “catch” them all.
When I’m on GTD I would “capture” all those ideas into an ever growing system. That way, when I sit down to work I can pick and choose from the things I most want to get done. That works great.
It’s fine that not everything on that huge list is getting done. I’m getting an overview, which helps me pick what matters the most.
It’s fine.
It’s fine until it’s not fine. Usually for me that happens after about three years worth of backlog-growing.
Moving things off the project list into “someday, maybe” or “never” lists helps a little, but doing that too much in some sort of “take numbers six through twenty-five on your list and make an avoid-at-all-costs list so you instead can focus on the top five” hasn’t worked for me either. Heaven knows that I gave that approach a fair shake.
I haven’t figured out a solution yet. Maybe some sort of very elaborate someday-maybe system with org-mode outlines and categories and whatever. Something that’s easy to jam things into and it’s sorted and tidy and browsable. And I would never have to look at it again. I would want to hack together something that shows me those entries in a random order so each weekly review I could look at as many of them as I could stomach. That’s just the first idea, I came up with. Probably not the best. I’m gonna have to keep thinking on this one.
Banding was an incredibly powerful and underrated creature keyword in Magic that ended up a bit dysergic together with evasion abilities on cards like Mesa Pegasus. If Mesa Pegasus and Benalish Hero attack in a band, the flying becomes pointless. (Flying + Banding still pretty good on blocks though.) Because if the enemy can trip up the Hero on the ground with a Wall of Brambles or something, well, RIP the pegasus too.
Similarly, the Capital can attack all of us through one of us. That’s why intersectional solidarity is scary. No social movement has successfully overcome its backlash. Labor rights, reproductive rights, BIPOC rights and queer rights are all down.
But if Mesa Pegasus and Hurloon Minotaur join up (the Hero can come along too), then it’s bye-bye Brambles. The Minotaur would’ve just bounced with the Wall of Brambles normally but the Pegasus helps it go over the top, and the Brambles can’t take down a band that has a three-toughness minotaur (or even Dire Wolves with [Grizzly Bears][GB] to both take on one damage each).
Everyone on the banding side come through unscathed, doing a better job than they could alone. That’s why intersectional solidarity is the solution. ¡Les puebles unides jamás serán vencides!
[GB]: https://scryfall.com/card/10e/268/grizzly-bears “Grizzly Bears”
Economics really undervalue future damage. The reason they do that is this:
Imagine I’ve used the time looker-forward tube and seen that a broken staircase step will cause a $10000 Steinway piano to fall down the stairs and break in the year 2126.
Repairing the step will cost $10.
The time-discounting economics say that if I instead invest the $10 in meme stonks, and it compounds to $10000 and 50¢ in the year 2126, I can buy a new piano and have enough left over for a pack of chewing gum too. Ergo we need to time-discount the future disaster’s value to see if it’s worth the $10 today. And this has become mainstream in economics. This is how things are actually priced.
You’ve correctly compounded the opportunity cost. One of the flaws in this is that you haven’t compounded the catastrophe cost. If you think you can buy a piano for $10000 in 2126 or a pack of gum for 50¢ then.
If a stitch in time saves nine, you can’t just compound the one stitch.
Clean water and breathable air are priceless.
Right now the rule is that you can use substitute cards for double-faced and meld cards. The rule is also that if a card gets marked during play (perhaps someone spills water), the head judge can issue a substitute card. There’s a third rule for “pringle” foils but I’m not sure exactly how that one works.
But if you show up with a card that’s already worn (“marked” through wear and play), you don’t get a substitute card, you get punished.
Sleeves are super expensive. Not so much for the wallet today but for the environment (and hospitals) of tomorrow. The environmental impact in plastic pollution of a sleeve is about half a cent per year which compounded over the five hundred years it’ll last adds up to six figures.
Allow substitute cards for all cards not just DFC. You’d still have to bring the real card.
Right now there’s a rule that decks need to be sufficiently randomized after each game action that shuffles your deck like a fetch or tutor. Yes, at the feature table if you crack two fetches you are expected to shuffle after each.
Shuffling a normal deck takes seven through ten good mashes. (A “Battle of Wits” deck takes much more.) A good mash is one where the interleaving sections are roughly equal amounts of 1 cards and 2 cards. If they’re all 1 cards, that’s a Faro shuffle which is cheating. A bad mash is one where I miss entirely or half the deck or get huge clumps where almost every clump is 15 cards or so. So when I mash or riffle shuffle, I don’t count these bad mashes.
You’re also expected to finish your mid-game shuffles in under forty seconds.
You get punished for not shuffling and you get punished for shuffling.
There’s such an underappreciation for what sufficiently random actually entails and how difficult it is to achieve that. It means that all permutations are equally likely.
At lower levels of play it’s usually courteous and encouraged to “shortcut”. Fetch now, shuffle during downtime. Usually, but not always. Some people get mad and at the feature table (watching the pro tour on TV) I’ve seen judges insist on shuffling right away. Sometimes even at FNM that happens.
My “fix” here would be to formalize and extend this shortcut. Legalize having the deck in a “dirty” state (90° sideways and placed offset). You can fetch or tutor from a dirty state but if you cast a card draw spell drawing multiple cards, you have to shuffle the deck to put it back into the “clean” state.
If I really got my wish through and this is gonna sound so far beyond the pale to what’s legal today, I’d also allow to have one random card pulled from the deck (cut a few times and have the opponent pull the card—much faster than sufficiently randomizing the entire deck) and placed on top of the deck, in a “clean” portrait orentation astride the sideways/landscape “dirty” deck, for cards that lets you look at the top card. Like when you want to combine multiple fetches with Lantern of Insight, for example.
If there’s ever a format where they have cards that “look at the second-most card from your library” type cards then we can extend the rule to have up to four “clean” cards on a “dirty” deck. Hopefully that won’t be necessary. Five or more feels like “ugh just shuffle instead”.
Let’s postulate a scenario where I, an open borders lunatic with one immigrant parent and one Swedish parent, could’ve been convinced that Sweden should keep some limit on the amount of people who gets to stay temporarily, and/or some limit on the amount of those who gets to move full citizenships.
I’m not saying it’d be easy to convince me of that. Arguments would have to get pretty tender, like “Okay, we are gonna try to let everyone in later, we just need to get everything ready first and build up a good social safetynet robust enough to handle the influx safely so we can help everyone”. So the point of this essay isn’t gonna be that I’ve gotten on board with “limits on immigration” because I haven’t and that’s not what this is. So put an pin in that worry.
The scenario where you’ve managed to convince me about a limit on either or both of those two “gates” being a good idea is just a hypothetical for the sake a point I’m trying to make:
Even then, 99% of the policy suggestions I see from the far right (and from S in their current “stram migration” hellscape era) are about making the lives of people worse. In the name of limiting migration they instead propose and implement hassling and harassing human beings at various stages through those two sluice gates. In the name of integration they keep furthering segregration.
Personer med dubbla medborgarskap ska kunna fråntas sitt svenska medborgarskap om de döms för brott som allvarligt skadar Sveriges vitala intressen, enligt ett beslut som nu fattats i riksdagen.
So even citizens can never truly feel Swedish. How can we build a shared community when there’s this foundational inequality?
S is now talking about an “integrationsskuld”; an idea trying to convey a racist idea that we “let in too many” immigrants and they messed it up for everyone and now we’ve got to clean up. But if that were true (and again, that’d be a hard sell for me given how that same decade coincided with catastrophic privatization reforms causing massive corruption and furthering segregation in health care and education), it doesn’t make sense how all their political proposals serve to instead further segregation, alienation, and distrust.
Except of course to the extent it binds the outgroup. “Vote for our rich-get-richer policies and we’ll protect you from the muslims, Mexicans, and queers,” just like Mussolini drew it up.
Tidö är som vanligt köpta av fossilindustrin:
De svenska lastbilstillverkarna Scania och Volvo genomför en omfattade lobbykampanj för att sänka EU:s krav—och har fått direkt hjälp av den svenska regeringen, kan DN avslöja.
Det är så så så svårt att komma ihåg att den här avgrundsdjupa grymheten är en emergent konsekvens av ett buggigt transaktionellt system snarare än avsiktlig för det isar i märgen av hur demonisk den framstår.
På grund av deras lobbyism kommer andelen fossilbolmande lastbilar öka från 69% till 84% och utsläppsänkningssmålen kommer inte nås.
Att Kristersson har sina oljekletiga händer med i spelet förvånr väl ingen men för oss som närmast har ett bingokort över dom vanligaste klimatförsinkande gojorna kom det faktiskt en ny variant här. “Ni måste låta oss sälja oljedrivna bilar annars blir det andra som säljer elbilar”. Uj. Den gubben hade vi inte sett förut. Ännu svårköptare än det vanliga “…annars blir det andra som säljer oljedrivna bilar”. 🤦🏻♀️
DN gav också av nån anledning dom här två företagen spaltutrymme för ett försvarstal. Men till syvende och sist handlar det om att dom kommer sälja mer dieselfordon än vad dom skulle ha fått sälja om inte lagen som dom själva skrev hade införts.
Okay maybe this is platforming heresy but when I was little I hated the “coyote time” in platforming games. Still do. It’s there in order to make the game more welcoming and forgiving and I applaud that sentiment but what happened was: “Oh. I can’t reach the other side. Because I’m jumping too early. Because the game expects me to not jump until I’ve actually left the ledge.” So counterintuitive. It had the opposite effect and felt unwelcoming, punishing, scary, and frustrating.
Now, the solution isn’t necessarily to remove coyote time but ask yourself as game dev and level designer the following two questions:
Can the player make the jump without relying on coyote time?
If yes, you’re good, your game is great, no more questions. If no, then make the gap narrower by moving the other side closer and it’s time for the next question.
Is the game now too easy?
The answer is not necessarily yes. Not even probably yes. I mean, to players who don’t know about coyote time and are just enjoying the game intuitively. The idea here is for the game to be challenging while still being intuitive. The challenge should be “oh wow, is my reaction speed or sense of rhythm tight enough to make the jumps I want” rather than “oh wow, do I the player know about secret things like coyote time”.
But if it is yes, decrease coyote time slightly. Despite this essay being called “against coyote time”, coyote time can actually be a very good, even important thing, but if what you are pushing when you are increasing gaps is the distance to the other side of the ledge rather than the coyote time on the close side of the ledge I feel that you are shaving the wrong thing, the wrong side of the gap.
Coyote time should be a fallback, not a prereq, is what I’m saying.
In other words, or maybe in the same words but I just wanna repeat myself for clarity here: if you are making an easy, welcoming game where jumping the gaps isn’t meant to be the main challenge, be both:
And if you want to make the gaps be a main challenge element to require precise jumping, don’t just shave off ground on the other side widening the gap. Instead, primarily shave off coyote time on the close side. Not to zero, but don’t require heavy abuse of coyote time to make the jumps.
Here is why modern platforming games err on the side of more coyote time rather than less: there’s a different gamefeel in “ooooh I didn’t quit reach it, I fell down near the other side, I jumped too soon” vs “what the heck I fell down on this side? What happened to my jump, didn’t I jump?!”, some sort of principle of least surprise logic. The player is satisfyingly doing the thing, in this case jumping (maybe with a good satisyfing boiyoiyoingy sound) and failing which okay failing is part of the challenge so try again and make it the next time, is the idea. Too short of a coyote time and it feels like an ice level, like you’re slipping off.
I’m not disputing that. But. I remember so vividly when I first was playing Super Mario Bros. (I got into video games when I was nine years old which a li’l later than many of my generational peers and a lot later than the kids today.) I remember so strongly how this felt starting out. “I’m running towards the ledge it’s scary I don’t want to run over so I’d better press jump before I’ve ran over the edge of the ledge whaaaat I didn’t make it to the other side?!” I fell into so so so so so many pit traps.
Whenever I watch a game design lecture on jump physics and they’re showing how much coyote time they have and how good that is I’m shaking my head and like “no that was the most frustrating part of your game!” Not the fact that I can run out a li’l past the ledge, that was good, but the fact that I have to. That is what gives me the heebie jeebies. It doesn’t feel exciting, it doesn’t feel forward momentum, it doesn’t feel good, it feels like I have to go against nature and not get a good sense of “take off” from underneath my character’s feet.
PresGas writes in:
After all this time, THIS may be the reason why I never could make certain jumps because I didn’t even consider?!? I’m trying to think about how many games I just stopped playing because I couldn’t move further along…
On Fedi, Reverse wrote:
On the 6th of May, the Swedish Parliament decided to accept a new law that is supposed to “strengthen competition”, via harder punishments on public companies that compete “unhealthily” with private companies
This has been widely (and jubilantly) reported by various media operated by Svenskt Näringsliv, which is to be expected. With a quick search I didn’t find any leftist publications talking about this. Perhaps because it’s just a strengthening of an existing law from 2010 that (according to the lizardpeople from the article linked in this message), it proved toothless? So perhaps all the red ink has already been spilled back then about it?
In any case, trying to understand what it means made it seem disgusting in many parts. The classic example given in explanations of both the old and the new law is “what if the state or municipality decides to run a gym at undermarket prices” (I’m paraphrasing but that’s the gist of it).
Oh yes, what a tragedy indeed. The horror.
The project leader for the new rules at Konkurrensverket spells it out:
Offentliga aktörer kan ha fördelar som de privata företagen saknar som exempelvis att verksamheten kan drivas utan vinstkrav
What fucking lizardpeople this government is.
And yes, the law includes things that even I think are reasonable, like that public companies cannot restrict access to infrastructure that they alone can have, so that there can be private actors that offer better terms to the public.
But the most important part is that the law guarantees the opposite: that even the public sector has to offer services at terms that are at least as bad as the private sector.
The public sector is “inefficient” my ass.
Yeah, although I’m not even onboard with that part. I get that you wrote “reasonable”, not “fantastic”, and maybe that’s where I’d land too as in “contrary to the rest of this law which is tyrannical, suffocating, makes a mockery of freedom, and furthers corporate trampling of people power, this part at least makes sense, I ‘only’ disagree with it (reasoning that it’s great if public infrastructure primarily benefit public works, and that this paragraph whiffs of the ‘marknadshyror’ debacle and, like it, will lead to furthering the collapse of what we the people built together and have together), whereas the rest of the law is just complete and thorough cruelty without any amount of reason, motivation, or consistency with self-professed free-trade values, just a blatant money grab and a punch in the face of all of us” kind of “reasonable”.
Thanks for bringing attention to this. I hate it so much. And because of the ratchet effect and the de-leftification of the S party (although thankfully they did vote no on this one), I despair that this won’t be easily fixed or restored anytime soon.
Here’s a comparison between the three pixel/sprite/tile making apps I could find on F-Droid. I know there’s stuff in that vein on Varvara, but I haven’t figured out a good way to run Varvara apps on Android yet, especially in a way where I could get files in and out. (Definitively still interested in that approach though.) So here’s PxerStudio, Pixel Artist, and PixaPencil.
First I tried PxerStudio. My initial review of this was: Okay, I can use this one, but I really hope one of the other options is better. Why?
Because it’s “floaty” and “fidgety” in a way that makes my nerves knot up. This floatingness starts right away even when selecting the resolution (for all three of these apps I used 16×16) requires those aaaaawful number-sliders Android has. It feels horrible trying to get it to land on exactly sixteen.
Same goes for selecting colors: there’s no way to use palettes or entering hex digits or RGB values. There’s a color picker which you’ll have to rely on religiously. So if you reverse-engineer the project format you could open images with a palette base layer to pick from.
Also don’t press “back” by mistake because it might close the whole thing down (without saving, it seemed like,o but I’m not sure).
Placing the actal pixels is the biggest problem. There are three options: a drawing tool (basically a one pixel brush), a line tool, and a box tool. And a flood fill that does work well. The line tool doesn’t actually draw full lines if you go at an angle; it’s really conservative and only places the pixels it’s sure of. So it might only place two or three pixels inbetween long gaps that you’d have to fill in by hand. That’s fine. The biggest lack is a way to just tap in pixels. Tapping on a pixel doesn’t do anything, only dragging does. So I’m constantly adding pixels by mistake when I accidentally drag but where I do want to add pixels, I have to drag. The box-drawing tool is almost the best tool since you can make 1×1 “boxes” to make pixels but that still requires dragging.
There’s full undo support though, and that mitigates a lot of these issues. But wow is this app an anxiety factory for me.
The export options are great (of the three apps this one exports the best) and unique among the three apps is that you can use layers. The layers is a killer feature that might push me into choosing this one over the others.
Okay TL;DR: probably don’t use this Pixel Artist until they implement better export options.
Here we go the opposite direction with an extremely minimalist app that only has one drawing tool: tap on a square (a pixel) to make it the selected color. Long press on a pixel to color-pick from it. No other tools, this is all you’ve got, and the only available size is 16×16 which might be a showstopper for some projects but suits me perfectly.
In addition to the awesome color-pick-by-long-press super power, there’s a predefined palette along one edge (and that’s your only “toolbar”, the palette); you can’t import palettes but you can replace colors by long-pressing them. However, those new colors you can only select by R, G, and B sliders (and no number so you can’t select a specific R, G or B value, just ballpark). If you save or reload a file, you still get the default palettes and your customly added colors are gone. You can still color pick them from the image but you can’t copy picked colors into the palette. So maybe don’t use custom colors except the default palette is bad with no ramps, all colors the same brightness, a single yellow and seven nearly indistinguishable greens.
There’s no zoom option either, so on the Retroid Pocket Classic, the image doesn’t fit without panning (although I can see the whole image by opening the file menu, where it’s embedded) and on the Paper 7 (which has fewer pixels than the RPC so apparently this is determined by display size, not pixel density), there is a huge white margin to the right and below the image.
I can’t comfortably draw with a “tap by tap” app like this (and I hope you like tapping because a 16×16 image requires 256 taps), but if I sketch on 1mm grid paper, I can then “digitalize” those paper sketches by usig this Pixel Artist app as a “data entry tool”. The garish, unramped colors would’ve been fine if if they had at least been distinguishable, since I can re-palette them in the game engine and I’d only be using the app to get a digital representation of a paper sketches and I can use all kinds of colored pens when making the paper sketch versions on grid paper.
Dragging with a single finger pans the image and tapping sets a pixel to the chosen color. There’s no undo at all.
So far some pros and cons: great for quickly placing pixels with precision, but that’s all it can do. Now for what breaks it: exporting the images! Three issues with that:
You need to remember to turn off the grid before exporting, otherwise the grid will be visible in the image (and it’ll have a different resolution so it can fit the grid). Not a dealbreaker but I do want the grid on while drawing (that especially goes for this app with it’s dot-by-dot mental model) so having to turn that off before exporting each image is a chore.
One pixel is not one pixel. It’s display dependent. So images I made on the RPC are 1280×1280 (that’s 80×80 pixels per pixel) while images I made on the Paper 7 are 640 by 640 (so 40 by 40 pixels per pixel). That’s nothing imagemagick can’t fix (it’s only a waste of space and bandwith but I can live with that).
Now to the biggest problem: that big exported picture is a JPEG for some reason! What in the heck! Yeah, yeah, ImageMagick’s convert utility can probably reindex and requantize the images to hopefully dodge any artifacts so the JPEG decision doesn’t have to ruin anything except it also wastes space.
So okay, my lede on Pixel Studio said not to use until they fix exports not literally true because ImageMagick can rescue the image data. Just not easily.
Uh-oh! F-Droid warns that “source code no longer available” for PixaPencil, so I was really hoping it wasn’t gonna be the best of the three. (Turns out the sitaution is that the app has gone proprietary. It’s “source-available” but for our DFSG purposes it might as well be in /dev/null. Except! Older versions can be forked! That’s a distinction I sometimes wish F-Droid would make but maybe that’s splitting hairs. I see that on F-Droid apps and I think oh no there’s been a drive failure and the source code is literally gone (I’ve been there, fam♥︎😭) but what happened instead is that the main dev is making no more DFSG-free updates so may the forks be with you. Lookin at the sourcecode there’s a subpackage named “dao” which is a pretty bad red flag for me.)
Unfortunately it might the best one.
It doesn’t have layers, is the major missing feature that PxerStudio had. Export options are also limited compared to PxerStudio but it’s a good clean PNG where you can select raw (one pixel is one pixel, great for using in the game project) or scaled (one pixels is bigger, great for display and posting). That’s all I need. Other tools can take it from there. The PNG images are in indexed, 8-bit PaletteAlpha format which is perfect for this.
Of the three apps, this is the only one that lets you actually enter any hex triplet color (or I guess hex quadruplet since there’s alpha too). You can even import entire palettes (You need to use a specific website to do that, though. It’s called “Lospec”. You need to paste only the last part of the URL, the “palette identifier”.).
The only way to zoom is the zoom buttons and the only way to pan is the panning tool. Okay, I love that restriction. This means that dragging my finger (or pen but my pen is broken right now) over the screen does only one thing: the selected tool. Tapping pixels to add them is even more reliable than in Pixel Artist (where it semeed like it sometimes did require a little effort), and as I said, Pxer Studio can’t even do that.
The line tool is crisp and reliable and there are a couple of other tools like boxes, flood fill, polylines and so on.
I’ve got to remember than if anything in this section is bad, that’s fine, just don’t use it, it’s a “bonus section” anyway. (For example, the project I’m working on doesn’t benefit from dithering.) There’s mirror symmetry, dither and spray tools, other brush shapes (and your currently selected brush is used when using the line tools). There’s darkening, lightening, and color-inverting the entire image (maybe would’ve been more useful if there had been layers and/or selections).
There’s also a “darken/lighten” tool which I love and hate. Be careful when using it because if you accidentally lift your pen, it re-darkens already darkened squares or re-lightens already lightened ones, and it also lightens any black outlines you have. (Again, no layers…)
It does not stick to the ramps in your palette, is the major problem. Those caveats aside, I’m still thinking I might want to use this tool a lot, to crank out a bunch of sprites quickly: I’ll just make a way simpler hue-only palette for the main flats and then shade them with this darken tool, being more restrictive against lighten since that can mess up the outlines. I can re-palette the sprites in the game engine anyway later. But, this darken/lighten tool is at the expense of a more generic “only replace selected color” draw setting that MS Paintbrush had back in the early 90s. It’s both worse and better because if you’re satisfied with what it does, it’s fewer clicks to add a li’l depth to your images and make them a li’l less NES and a li’l more TG-16.
I also like the “pixel perfect” setting. With it on, I can draw sloppily and it deletes stray pixels after I lift my finger. I love that it’s not the default because it’s pretty surprising behavior, but it’s a great option that I’ll use often if I do go with this app.
My original plan when I got this 1mm grid paper was to enter the
pixels directly into Emacs and writing a li’l something something to
convert it into pixel data (and then I learned that pceas has a
hex-nybble-to-pixel-index importer built in which made this even
easier).
I mean something like:
00A0
00A0
00A0
00A0
(that’s a li’l 4 by 4 toy example, the real entries would be 8 by 8 or 16 by 16.)
I quickly learned that as much as I actually do type stuff in here with the OSK, that might be fine for coding but not so much for this amount of “data entry”.
In other words, I can’t do it on-the-go unless I bring my keyboard. But at home or when I do have my keyboard this might still be the best method for getting paper-sketched ideas into the game! I can choose homerow glyphs or otherwise comfortably-placed glyphs while entering and fix them with a tr filter.
Kind of sucks that the grid paper has “major grid line” every ten lines instead of every eight lines but I can live with that (I’ve already made plenty of sprites with this method and it works fine).
When I still had my desktop computer I loved making pixel art in a combination of Inkscape, MyPaint and GIMP #ChangeTheName. Waaay back in the day I’ve used Synfig also. Inkscape might sound like a bad choice for pixelart and it was, until I found some extensions that made it better. The icons I made for Heartfeed where all made in Inkscape, manually rehinted for every size. (Well, some of them started life in Blender but I did the hinting in Inkscape). Knowing that outlined objects need to start at .5-offset pixel increments while un-outlined objects need to start at integer pixel increments, that sort of stuff is necessary to be aware of when working with Inkscape. It’s definitively not safe-and-good straight out of the box. It’s just that at the time my brain was just really attuned into Inkscape. GIMP #ChangeTheName is also great for color curves, scaling options, applying gradients and so on, and there’s a million formats to export and import, and it’s great for making animations easily.
Then after I moved apartments and couldn’t use my desktop anymore because of lack of physical space and lack of power outlets and I’m relegated to tablets I got CSP for the iPad but I’ve let that subscription lapse. Looking into maybe getting a cross-device renewal later that works on both iPad and Android.
CSP was okay for pixel art actually. I wasn’t that happy with how the one image I made with it turned out, but I was pretty happy with the tools. The “pixel perfect” drawing mode that PixaPencil has would’ve been welcome, but in exchange it’s freeing to be able to use pencil sketching and painting tools for the first iterations and then go down to the nitty gritty for refining them. We get all symmetry lines, skewing, molding, pushing, warping, masking, layer joy we could ever need and can then cook it down to pixel size.
That’s an approach that none of these specialized pixel art apps can do.
It’s the difference between drawing and painting. Sometimes painting feels like molding clay, I love it, I can push and pull, add and sculpt. Sketching has some of the same quality with a loose-enough pencil scribbling approach (I like normal HB pencils the best). Drawing implies laying down the lines exactly where they should be and getting them right in the first try. That’s the mentality the pixel apps require and that’s a pretty huge limitation on all of them. They’re very waterfall and not so iterative.
Nothing I can do on tablet, among the options I’ve found so far, comes close to what I could do on my Debian desktop with MyPaint, Krita, Blender, Inkscape, and GIMP #ChangeTheName. Except for CSP which did come pretty close.
Of the three Android options I’m gonna go with the old version of PixaPencil in the hope of forks. I’m not saying no to the Varvara stuff if I can get them to work on Android although I’m working on a project that uses four-bit color, not two-bit.
If I ever rejoin society I might go trawling on the App Store and Play Store (including considering maybe renewing my CSP subscription).
Definitively not throwing out my 1mm grid paper either. After looking at these pixel apps I’m so glad I got it. I’m sure some of the sprites and tiles will be drawn entirely that way and hand-entered into Emacs, others will be drawn mostly that way, and hand-entered and refined in one of the pixel apps, some will made primarily in the pixel apps based on loose paper sketches, and some won’t use the grid paper at all and that’s fine too. I’m completely overwhelmed by the amount of art I have to make so I really appreciate the multi-faceted approach.
So there’s a hole in time with pretty clear rules, right?
You can only go back to a specific date and time. A specific September day at 11:58 AM, 1958. From a dark late night in 2011. That’s the portal. No freely controllable time-travel.
While the past-hole is static, the future-hole is moving. I.e. each time you return to 2011, two minutes in the future will have passed. So you go back, stay there for say 1d6 months, you’ll return two minutes later than you entered. So time can pass in the future but each time you go back, you go back to 11:58 AM that same particular September day in the fifties.
You can bring stuff from there and back home through the hole and vice versa. So feel free to bring a fifties fake ID and fifties money with you.
But, only the most recent trip “counts” in affecting your travel. I.e. if you travel back and carve your name in a tree, that will be there when you get back, but then if you travel back again and get a pack of gum and don’t carve your name in the tree that time, the carving will be gone. You can get many many packs of gum this way and stack them up in the future time line, but if you want to affect meaningful change for example by buring treasure boxes as opposed to schlepping the stuff with you through the portal,
So far, so good, right?
We’ve got clear, unambiguous rules that are different enough from any other time travel story to be interesting. Presented cleanly and clearly through storytelling in the first few chapters.
And, as the title indicates, the main guy wants to go back in time and tough it out for five years so he can save JFK that November day in Dallas, through quaint li’l small-town romance stories as the main guy lives undercover in a Dallas exurb interleaved with biography details on Lee Oswald and other historical figures. And a creepy and unwelcome cameo from two of the It kids in Derry. And way too many sex scenes.
But climbing to a premise this lofty only sets this book up for a very brutal tumble as we pretty much immediately head into triple mumbo-jumbo land. Haunted by weirdo supernatural monsters along with a Final Destination–esque “willful fate”. Trees falling, diseases showing up, car tires giving up, that kinda stuff. (And it’s not all bad: the main guy getting a traumatic brain injury was one of the interestingest part of the story! That felt original and true-to-life.)
Yes, that’s right. It’s our bad old enemy: a weird framework as a tension driver. As the only tension driver in this case. What’s that horror lurking around the next corner? Why, it’s… lolrandom hatpullery, of course! I mean, NOS4A2 had a very surreal setting and antagonist too, but NOS4A2 didn’t keep changing the rules of the story as a means to drive the story.
But that’s not the worst part. I’m sure almost everyone will have the “okay so when he comes back to the present day the world will be worse off than before he saved JFK so he can go back and buy one root beer to erase his own time travel shenanigans like a shower dream season” in mind as one of the possible outcomes. I try, I try, I try to not guess what’s gonna happen in books but some endings are so resonant that you feel their approaching rumbling on the tracks nine-hundred miles in advance and you read on because you don’t know for sure that it’s gonna end up that way, and having a very bradburyesque poetic resonant ironic ending option like that doesn’t in and of itself doom a book.
You’re still like “okay, so A. Can he or can’t he…” …even succeed with the mission in the first place? Stopping assassinations are plenty difficult even with hindsight. Especially with the pale horse of inevitability working against him.
“B. Will it or won’t it…” …go bad in the future if he does succeed with the mission?
“C. Will he or won’t he…” …undo it all with a reset trip? And if so…
“D. How much will it sting?!” as he keeps sinking cost after cost into both his past life and into the mission at hand.
That juicy li’l quadrivalent switch/case statement is a nurturing enough chewing gum to help me push through the ebbs and flow of the novel’s tension. The tension in-the-micro might be tedious hatpullery but the zoomed-out puzzle box as a whole still has this particular hitchcock ticktock boom under the table to tease our nerves, right?
So many possible endings to imagine… Maybe he just dies in the past? Maybe he needs to go back again and again? Maybe he gives up? Maybe he does a splendid job and Hitler dies in a French cinema fire and the world is good now? Maybe he can do the job but then the time machine breaks so he can’t go back? Maybe he falls in love with someone in the past and doesn’t want to undo the timeline because he loves her so much? We’ve got a delicious assortment of washi ribbons available for tying a bow on a box like this.
So, okay, I’m gonna spoil it. Because I have no mouth and I must sublimate. Here’s what happens:
When he returs to 2011 the world is indeed super bad. But the main reason that it’s bad is that his time traveling causes earthquakes and the earthquakes cause nuke plants to fail. Yep, a new rule pulled ex petasum.
Turns out the four rules of the time hole don’t at all work that way. It doesn’t reset. Each abandoned thread isn’t real either, exactly, it just become like-dreams-but-definitively-not-just-dreams. (And that’s where all the creepy dream monsters come from, they’re shadows from his own past trips.) And all those compounded strings, especially the longer 200 µg two-tab trips where you stay head under in the wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff for over five years, well, that’s what causes earthquakes and destroys the world. And the humans-not-angels-but-humans-from-a-weird-timebubble-line that keep an eye out for this kind of stuff end up begging and pleading for mr main guy to… Take another trip!!! One more to reset it all! Even though we just three sentences earlier were told that the new trips don’t reset and restore, they just combine and enworsen the situation. But okay. One more cup of coffee for the road!
I’ve got a love-hate relationship with this book. There’s plenty of gems sprinkled in the sand here. Awesome scenes and setpieces. And, I want to like Stephen King. On Writing is a masterpiece. He writes in a parasocial-enabling way that makes it feel like you’re his pal when you read his books and I love that. This one especially he has been working on since 1972 and it finally got made in the early 2010s. But normally when I say a book is among the weaker Stephen King books, it’s still a banger of a read. This one was bad just not bad-for-King but bad bad. It’s fun to write negative rants but I hate pressing send on them because fundamentally I do want to build the world up rather than tear it down. I don’t like being negative.
Yes, he makes us the reader fall in love with Sadie (the main guy’s love interest in the past), and yes, over time he tones down the creepy and controlling and tantrummy and offputting vibes of the main guy, but I just can’t even, since first and foremost:
This is a book that doesn’t play fair with its readers. Time travel is bad. Because it will turn out in the last few pages of the book that your time machine causes earthquakes and that is the reason that time travel bad. Now don’t you feel dumb for going on time trips you silly silly time dreamer? Even though we gave zero hints about that consequence of the time traveling until now. Sorry about that.
Yay I managed to re-beat Tetris Plus, the puzzle mode on the GB version! I beat this game when I first got it as a teen on the original Game Boy Pocket but I can’t have been playing on Very Hard (which is what I beat it on now) because I’m not sure level 84 (out of a hundred) is humanly possible.
The actual strategy isn’t hard, it’s just outracing the professor’s climb that’s hard.
I actually wanted to see if it was possible even for superhumans like if Supergirl travelled to a yellow sun planet could she do it? So I turned on 4x slow-motion in RetroArch (Gambatte core) so I could make the inputs virtually four times faster (relatively speaking). One of the bigger sources of wasted time is in between placing a piece and waiting for the next to appear—start moving too quickly and I move the old piece out of place by mistake, too late and I lose frames in the race. Thinking isn’t the bottleneck since I could mentally place the next upcoming two pieces while moving the current piece.
But even with slow-motion I couldn’t do it at first. I know that to make one of the lines you need to drop at least (and ideally at most) four pieces and then depending on what those pieces are you can get by on two more for the next line if they are both I-pieces. Possible on Tetris Plus since it’s bagless but even then the professor will outclimb you.
Then I thought “Okay, so on the PSX version the thing I had the biggest problem with was the repeat rate and the repeat delay. Maybe if I just spam the arrow directions I can get the piece to move faster than if I just hold it?” And it turnus out that it worked, and I could beat the stage pretty easily with that trick! So then I went on to beat the rest of the game normally without slomo and after beating the last stage a level select unlocked so I went to see if I could beat level 84 without the slow-motion using this technique of repeatedly tapping the D-pad instead of holding.
I could not.
With slowmo+tapping, yes, I can beat it pretty consistenly. With only slomo or only tapping, I can’t. It seemed as if I was doing even worse with the tapping than holding actually since you need to tap in the right frame or something I dunno. I believe if I set up RetroArch to have turbofire on the D-pad (especially down), I might be able to do it without the slomo but I didn’t try that since I was like “okay yeah I can do it tool-assisted, I aready know that, I don’t need to try a different tool”.
One of the cafés I really like recently started using those li’l “beepers”. Customers get one when ordering their food and when they start beeping you’re supposed to bring it to the disk and pick up your plate yourself.
So far so good. I’m all for it if it makes the job of the wait staff easier. I’m not blaming the café for what I’m about to rant about below:
I blame the manufacturers of the beepers for having such an incredibly annoying and never-ending piezo beep. I do think piezo beeping is useful tech and not every instance needs to be replaced by an actual speaker and sound chip, but, the ambiance used to be the main draw of this particular place! If they had put in like birdsong or something, that’d’ve been perfectly charming.
Instead what used to be a serene place with mismatched old-style furniture and quaint paintings and nostalgic breakbeats on the speakers is now home to an incessant beep-beep-beeping.
With this particular style of beeper there’s a button on the side that turns it off so customer’s can turn them off right away and carry the now-silent beeper to the disk and pick up their plate.
Even that would’ve been plenty annoying: this particular chirp is just that bad.
But that wasn’t what was happening. Instead, customers would bring the still-beeping li’l device to the unmanned desk, grab their plate, and leave the device there to beep. The people who worked there weren’t able to turn it off either.
What I’ve seen in other places is that the beep is a li’l bassier and more melodic, augmented by vibrations and a dull, flashing red light, and then the staff receives the beeper and turns it off right away. Here, that silecing responsibility was on the customers and no-one did. I don’t blame them either becuase I wouldn’t’ve figured it out unless I had seen the chef come out from the kitchen to turn one off. I mean, it was beeping when I entered the café and it kept beeping through the entirety of me standing in line, and only after five minutes or so a chef, that seemed super busy and overworked, could come out and turn it off, so I made sure to take note of what button he pressed to do so, in order to be able to turn of mine once my own order was done half an hour later.
And, on my way out I turned off another abandoned and annoying li’l one of these, left by some customers who had picked up their food and walked away.
The people worked there seemed miserable and unhappy but the kind of miserable and unhappy where you can’t put your finger on it because you’re so numb to the pain that you forget what caused it but not numb enough to the pain to know what to do about it.
Conclulu: I’m gonna try to find a different place. This was stressful and miserablse.
There’s one thing I wish you all could understand.
The way Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon owns the world? It doesn’t have to be that way. It used to not be that way. Their ascendancy should’ve been illegal.
I was on the FOSS bandwagon before those companies took over the world. I belatedly fell off it and drank the proverbial iPad Kool-Aid in 2021 (and have also gotten into the equally proprietary, just more openwashed, “alternative” called Android in the years since) but I don’t think that was a good decision on my part.
I was a weirdo who refused to join Facebook or even have .doc files from the old Microsoft Word era. Not refusing just to be a weirdo, but refusing because these corporations are bad for society.
I have seen the world willingly tether themselves in this poison cage. These days, more and more people can see how that’s a problem but fewer and fewer can actually do anything about it.
My own life as a weirdo is getting more and more difficult. Often I’ve stumbled in my determination and tried to get down with the sickness but been unable because there’s often a bootstrap problem where the apps expect you to already be deep in that toxic “ecosystem”.
When I see our policy-makers knit our fates even closer to the fealty of these monstrous beings I don’t know what to do. The daily gaslight dose is insanely high. The streets and even the inside of the local city busline are full of TV monitors constantly saying “Use apps! Use apps! Use apps! Use apps!” I’ve had to watch that “here’s how you, loyal Apple/Alphabet customer, can activate your app ticket correctly” video loop ten thousand times since it’s blasted directly into our eyes on the bus line here where I live. I can’t handle it! I grew up in an era where there weren’t even any ads on TV, that was illegal! And now the entire city is like a never-ending ad-break.
I come from a world where this wasn’t how it worked. As I always say: we lost the downhill battle in three decisive blows just one after another:
The network effect is a very strong poison. It is an externality that our economic system just isn’t equipped to deal with. I have to keep reminding myself to not really blame anyone for succumbing. It’s a foundational bug in how money works.
But our politicians all around the world have to accept some of the blame here. Corrupted by lobbyist bribes they have enacted things like DMCA, EUCD, TRIPS, ACTA and so on. We could’ve had a much different world. We still can. ♥︎
Now that I have video game mania, books are piling up at an even faster rate than normal. Therefore it’s time for some “Compulsive Vowing”:
It’s gonna be five-out-one-in until I have read twelve physical books. I.e. I can only get two more physical books until I have read twelve; and the first of those two has to wait until I have read at least five and the second has to wait until I have read at least ten. Once I’ve read twelve books I’m released from the vow. I’m gonna try to make some sort of page in my Techo that I can fill in with stamps or something to track my progress towards the vow with those three milestones at five, ten, and twelve.
My FOMO around books (most of my ways to get books are time-limited, for example in the freeshop there’s only one of each of a handful of books and the first person who gets it gets it) is usually stronger than my ability to keep vows so I’m really going to have to put effort into keeping the vow.
I have no buffer at all for them right now and as soon as one is finished I usually have to scramble like mad to find a new one. And they don’t clutter the apartment since they are digital.
My apartment has dozens and dozens and dozens of books with bookmarks in them that I have started and not finished. I love starting new books because my dream of how awesome the book is gonna be is usually better than how the book is while reading it. So if I find a book at home that has like 600 pages read and only thirty pages left to read, then reading those last few pages is 100% legit and encouraged in counting towards the twelve books I’ve got to finish to end the vow. It’s not a “get literate” kind of vow, it’s an “unclutter the apartment” kind of vow.
I just said I love starting new books. The vow concerns getting new books. I have plenty of books at home where I haven’t read a single page and if I, in spite of my overwhelming amount of ongoing books, get in the mood to start reading one of these unread ones that’s okay. That doesn’t void the vow. It’s at the risk of being a little bit counterproductive towards getting to twelve, unless the book I just started is so awesome that I finish it pretty soon.
I can get new e-books, no limit at all there, as long as I don’t start reading them. Reading already started e-books is allowed (I wanna finish Queen Mab’s Palace and I have about half a dozen other ones going) but does not progress towards the goal. Starting reading any new e-books is strongly discouraged. I decided that that is going to count as one fourth of getting a new physical book. I.e. until I have finished reading five physical books, I can not start reading any new e-books, and if I do start one then, that is in lieu of getting one physical book but I am then allowed to start three more new digital books. In other words, the two slots that open up during the vow (one after I’ve finished five books, and one after ten), can either be two physical books, eight e-books, or one physical and four e-book. I don’t have to use slots right away, they don’t expire, I can save them, but I can not use them in advance. So it’s okay if I use the first slot for two e-books, then once the second slot arrives I use it for a physical book, and then I still have two more e-books I’m allowed to start before the vow is over.
And, repeating myself: for physical books the prohibition is against acquiring them (while starting reading already acquired books is 100% unlimited), while for digital books the prohibition is against starting reading them (while acquiring them is 100% unlimited).
All in service of simultaneously decluttering my home and making it more digital so I don’t trip over stacks of books when cleaning, while in the short term rewarding paper time over screentime.
Finishing e-books don’t count towards the vow at all.
Most of the books will go into my storage library after I finish them and others will go away entirely (sold or gifted). But some books are bound to stay on the shelf here in my home because I like having them around so much as decoration, self-expression, and to be able to look things up in them. I am acknowledging that this is counter-productive to the decluttering spirit of the vow but deciding that that’s gonna have to be okay this time around. I won’t make any special rules for this but I’ll try to track it. Then if I ever do finish the vow I can evaluate how many books actually left this room and maybe make changes for future iterations of similar vows.
This is hard to explain so I’m gonna give two examples and extrapolate from that:
I needed to make rules around gifts because we have such a great freeshop for books here and I’m gonna have to just not even look at it until I’ve finished five books.
Ouch, I didn’t think of this! I had this essay all written and ready to publish until I realized that I hadn’t thought about comics. I read lots and lots and lots of comics both digital and paper.
Okay so off the top of my head I’m gonna have to come up with some rules for comics:
Digital comics don’t count at all. Starting new ones is fine. It’s going to have to be “it’s own thing” akin to choosing to watch TV or playing video games or playing guitar or something instead of working on the book goal. It’s not really because it does compete more directly with reading books than other hobbies do but this compromise is the only version of the vow I could actually live with.
Getting single issues is okay. Reluctantly. I have maybe 10% room left in my longboxes. My pull list is down to Monstress, Saga, and Knights of the Dinner Table.
Acquiring TPBs and OGNs do count and take up one slot each. They’d count as half a slot for how quickly I read them but two slots for how big they are (on average) so let’s just say that twice half is one and call it a day.
Finishing comics whether physical or digital doesn’t count at all towards finishing the vow. It’d be too easy to read twelve tankōbons in a day and call it done. So comics only count going in, not going out.
Borrowing books count just as acquiring them. They’re not free passes at all. My “to-read” stack already contains plenty of borrowed books.
I’m going to make two exceptions, both comics-related: This winter I read a lot of Terry and the Pirates and I’m planning to borrow the last three volumes so I can finish reading the run. Those three books specifically, as long as I only borrow them and not buy my own copies, do not interfere with the vow at all no matter how long I take to read them.
Second, I can borrow other comics too as long as I:
In other words, if I fail to read them within one week that’s okay, as long as I really tried, but then I only have three more weeks to actually read it.
In the book reader world, to DNF a book means to decide to not finish it. I’m way more prone to not actually cut ties with the book, instead I usually just leave them in the pile. Twice now I’ve decided to stop reading the book but even then I put it into storage, keeping the bookmark in juuust in case I later can muster the will to finish the book. So for DNF the rule is gonna be based on actually getting rid of the book. If I do, it counts. If I only put it in storage, it doesn’t count. This rule isn’t great because I don’t really like getting rid of unfinished books so hopefully I’m not gonna do it. So note to self: it’s better to do the “storage pseudo-DNF” than the actual real getting rid of the book DNF even though the latter counts toward the vow and the first doesn’t. I don’t really wanna finish the vow just by giving away a bunch of unfinished books, I’m just stating the rule this way as a way to prevent impossible states. (E.g. what if I lose all my books through accident? I could never read a new book again if it weren’t for this DNF clause.)
There’s no time limit on this. If I were to quit video games and working, in order to only read paper books, I could be done in a week (especially if I take advantage of the shortcut that finishing a few of the half-read books around here counts. Like, for Dune Messiah I’ve only got 65 pages left). I could also take it easy with the vow and stick to the games and writing and maybe this vow will linger for several years.
Either way or anything in between is completely fine. With ten books gone I will a least made a dent big enough for me to end the vow and start piling them up again until it’s time for a new vow with similar or different rules.
I’ve longed for so many years for the new Swedish e-id system to finally bring liberation from BankID but it’s going from bad to worse. It shares the incredible drawback of requiring a Google or Apple smartphone, but adds a hard requirement of NFC at all times. (A few years ago I belatedly gave in and got iPad and a GSF/Play-Store enabled Android tablet but neither has NFC (and neither has this Android game handheld) so hello e-waste.)
It’s insane to me that the Swedish police will be literally requiring every citizen to be a customer of one of these two American tech giants that among the richest megacorps in the world. That’s beyond any cyberpunk dystopia I’ve ever seen.
The fact that they trust them (or the OEMs, especially on the Android side) to not spy on their users is also pretty strange but tertiary to the forced customer relationship aspect. It’s as if schools required kids to bring a bottle of Coca-Cola™ every day or the DMV only gave out licenses if you drive Ford™. It’s a complete concession to all ideals whether it’s social democracy or free markets. It’s the billionaire oligarchy stomping on a human face, forever. The only one happy about this is Ayn Rand. She is laughing her head off in hell, making sure the railway there only runs on official Rearden® Metal™.
A new proposal from the Swedish government is to stop welfare and other social help to those convicted of severe felonies.
I’m not onboard with that idea.
We’re not supposed to have the death penalty in Sweden and I don’t like the “once a thief, always a thief” mentality. If they’re not in prison or in psychiatric care, we still wanna prevent more crimes. Not create more homelessness or relegate them to the “shadow society” they’ve been given so much lip service to opposing.
This proposal will create outlaws and lawlessness.
From a “get votes” strategy perspective this move is genius from them. Emotionally it does resonate. It feels bad to have to help villains. So people who protest this law are gonna look bad, look like they’re on the side of the bad guys. It also further conditionalizes the welfare system which is a great win for the employer class. The more miserable the breadline is, the cheaper and more compliant labor becomes, is the idea. They want employing to remain a buyer’s market. Making sure there are “unhelpables” that are just sentenced to die in the streets is a necessary stepping stone for them, it’s a way to try to erode our empathy. (Not saying it’ll work because as long as hearts can beat they can bleed. I know there is love.)
It’s evil genius like that Azarello “Lex Luthor” comic where he tries to make the people of Metropolis to become mad at Superman for saving the life of a criminal. An especially disgusting one that Luthor secretly funded. (That blurb doesn’t spoil the whole thing, there’s more, it’s still a great read.)
Helping the bad guys does feel bad but pushing them into the arms of organized crime feels worse. If you’re declaring them dead this way you might as well pull the trigger for real. One of the best arguments against the death penalty is that it fosters desperation and escalation (“I’m already bound for the mercy seat so I might as well kill a couple of dozen more”) and I agree with that and I do oppose the death penalty and that argument applies even more here, way more actually since they’ll still be living and be even more dangerous and desperate than they would’ve been if they were in the grave.
Another popular argument is that sometimes people are innocently convicted. Yes. Sweden is certainly not immune to that happening. It’s so easy to get tangled up and misunderstood when trying to talk to authorities and institutions.
Being able to quickly write replies to email, real actual email, was very valuable. That was the core of what drew me to Delta Chat.
There are plenty of proprietary email apps set up around that feature but in the free world, not so much. Delta Chat was it and it was a gem because it was in many ways better than those other sparks and spikes and whatever they were called. Not to mention the incredible leap of faith it takes to go for a proprietary mail app since they can read the emails.
Delta Chat is rapidly moving away from being usable for that. If someone forks it or finds a good alternative (that’s FOSS, obvs), I would love to know.
I know I’ve worked a little on Notmuch, and I’ve talked a little bit with the people who make aerc, but for all their conveniences they’re still traditional mail apps where the threads look like files that you have to open up and enter into and work with. The few extra clicks involved with using a normal mail app might sound like no big deal but it really adds up. All the opening, searching, archiving, threads management… Whereas with Delta Chat in its prime, you just see the message right away and can reply right away. Easy peasy.
Maybe K-9 but it got bought out by Mozilla and they hate autocrypt which I don’t. I think WKD is better, sure, but I try to use both. K-9 used to be one of the best autocrypt clients out there.
It’s a pet peeve of mine when people still call it Twitter (or variants like Xitter). The exact phrasing “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” isn’t even a callout to a specific person since I’ve seen that exact text string multiple times by multiple writers.
I’m not opposed to appellation activism—I try to always get #ChangeTheName in there if I have to refer to Apache or GIMP. I wish the ill-fated Glimpse project had only been an Icecat-like rename branch. That would still have been an enormous undertaking but with slightly easier merges. Glimpse would’ve been a great name for this image editor. I was not onboard with their UI changes. And I liked it when people on Masto took to calling Twitter “Birdsite” (in the pre-Musk era).
But what I see when I see “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” is “I think Twitter pre-Musk was acceptable”, and that’s the messaging I’m not onboard with. As if it weren’t a silo site, a harassment vector, and part of what was driving the Earth straight of the cliff and putting MAGA tyranny on the throne and having shallow discourse that was disproportionately respected and credited in mainstream media reporting (compared to how few people were actually on there) and with gov’t agencies using it and lending it infrastructure-level credibility.
X under Musk is so much worse than Twitter ever was but Twitter was already a net force for evil. For us long-time Twitter-haters, Musk changing the name and literally destroying the brand as he was already destroying the site was such a tee-up, such a free lunch, such a jumping-off opportunity. It makes me a li’l sad every time I see someone trying to retroactively glorify what Twitter was, is all.
Now, let’s put things in perspective here: A pet peeve is just that, a pet peeve. It’s not a thought crime. The people I’ve seen writing “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)”, I’ve seen it because I’m a fan of their writing otherwise. It’s not bad guys doing this, it’s well-intentioned folk. (The actual bad guys are on X, I guess.) This li’l essay you just read is absolutely not license to go out and try to “correct” people who are doing this. Yeah, yeah, if you who read this have occasionally been doing the “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” thing, feel free to reconsider that since it does bug me a lot, but it’s really no big deal compared to the real problems we’re dealing with right now.😭
