This week’s earworm: Chronology, by Jean-Michel Jarre. 🎵
It’s telling that the word “stupider” is growing in our lexicon. I’m all for language evolving, but seeing this is just making online reading “painfullier” (10 points to anyone that gets this obscure ‘90s reference).
My trumpet playing skills are what got me into the strings section. 😄
Free B-movie idea: you have a large multi-national company, like one of the large tech coorporations. One day, the CEO is away for an extended period of time. They might be on leave or something, but it’ll need to be for a few weeks or more. During that time, a new hire that looks exactly like the CEO begins working there. They start doing their medial tasks until one time during lunch, one of the executives mistakes them as the CEO, and starts asking for directions about company strategy, etc. Well, you can probably imagine how it goes from there.
Maybe give it it title like “The New Hire” or “The New Job”1 or something, and boom! You’ve got a blockbuster summer hit on your hands. “Fun for the whole family.” 😄
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Both of these are already the titles of real movies so maybe not these. Honestly, must be super hard for producers to come up with original titles these days. ↩︎
The Switch 2 looks pretty exciting. If I were ever to spend money on a game console, I’d probably go for this.
Tina Arena is a really underrated artist. Her music is really good.
Started working on world 2, and one of the main mechanics of this world: quicksand. It won’t kill the player directly, but it will make it difficult for them to manoeuvre, and getting too low could cause death. Might be one of the more annoying mechanics in the game, but that’s kind of the point.
The results of my first play-test are in. And overall, they were pretty positive: movement was good, hit-boxes were fair, and it was described as “quite fun,” which was better than I was hoping for.
One thing I’ll need to look out for is telegraphing secrets. The number of secrets is indicated at the end of the level, and based on the play-tester’s feedback, they seemed to have spent a lot of time running against walls trying to find them. There is one secret in the level 1-1 that I thought was telegraphed well, and I can confirm that the player found them all. But I will concede the others required the player to make a leap of faith, and fall into an area that the player will usually want to avoid, which is pretty unfair. So I’ll need to fix that.
Ugh, dealing with financial institutions is so annoying. Forms, solicitors, settlements; everything’s more complicated than it first appears.
Apple’s style of public writing is so grating. I’m sorry, but seeing thoughts written in a way to suggest that they’re made by someone who is “just a regular person” comes off as patronising when it’s backed by a three trillion dollar company. I just can’t suspend disbelief in thinking that these are genuine, off-the-cuff comments.
Saw my barista put a few coffee beans in the chocolate shaker when he refilled it this morning. He says that it helps break up the clumps of chocolate powder that form near the bottom. That’s brilliant! I’m going to do this when I get home.
Got some answers about the recent train shutdown. Reason why busses couldn’t run from our station had nothing to do with the overhead lines. It was just logistics; turning the busses around was easier to do at the station they did run from. Okay. Interesting to know that.
TIL: CR2420 button batteries are not the same as CR2032, no matter what your eyes say to you.
I’ve started keeping links to interesting posts and software packages on a separate link blog. These links would usually go into my Linkding instance, but I may repurpose that for things I’d like to revisit later, whereas this site will be more of an archive of things I’ve seen.
This site, now served from Europe. 🇪🇺
Okay, I too tried out ChatGPT’s new image generator, mainly it’s graphics design capability. Got it to generate a logo for our bocce club. I’m impressed by the results: it’s pretty much what I imagining.
A bit more on the Godot game this morning, this time working on background tiles artwork. Made some grey masonry tiles for the end castle sequences. Also tried some background rocks for underground areas. I’m pretty rubbish at anything organic, but they didn’t turn out too bad.
It pains me that Forgejo’s CI “pipeline running” animation spins anti-clockwise, as if you’re going backwards in time. A metaphor, perhaps? Services get undeployed, binaries go back to the source code, projects return to their seeds of ideas. 🤔💭
Oh, build’s done. Never-mind. 😀
I don’t think I’ve ever regretted spending money on a solo or small team’s online publication. Sure I’ve cancelled subscriptions when I lost interest, but it’s not like I’ve said to myself that I wish I’ve never signed up in the first place.