Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

Toni Morrison, from a speech she gave in 1981. Gosh this seems relevant to just about any kind of creative work these days. thx @jomc

to be differently-specific: running a community is frequently fairly rewarding with little effort required for lots of good times, but then occasionally someone takes a dump on the floor and you have to put on the latex gloves and clean it up and put little signs around the affected area, and you have to be willing up front to do this an unspecified number of times at almost any time of day. none of this is in the software manual.

the thing about digital community software is that setting one up takes about 0.00000001% the energy it takes to actually run a community

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/ "Kirk Drift" makes an interesting argument: that despite Star Trek TOS being steeped in the sexism of its time, Kirk's reputation as a womanizer is mostly a retroactive reclamation by 80s-90s nerds seeking to bend him into a prototypical modern action hero and normalize a specific contemporary brand of nerd sexism.

So yeah that's 4 random games from itch. I think I came to all of them via word of mouth from here or birdsite, I can't even remember via who at this point. I love the idea of doing writeups like this on the reg but we'll see if I have the energy for it.
Definitely please dig around on itch for things that interest you, it's the only way to save ourselves from a world where everyone only ever talks about the same five huge games that each cost 9 trillion dollars to make.

Apple's hardware aesthetics have an almost terraforming effect: the sleek MacBook makes the rest of your desk look cluttered and irregular, their stores feel like alien temples you must assimilate into the customs of. I would like technology to feel more like going down to a local co-op hardware store where a lesbian sells you a hammer you will own for 30 years.

I try to think of these hardware and software project goals as acts of political imagination: in a world that has stopped capitalism's stranglehold on our species, what does personal computing look like? What choices do we have, how does ownership work, what are the aesthetics? What does it mean for technology to have aesthetics independently of consumerism?

boutique handheld discourse has me really wishing there was a homebrew platform that excelled at:
- cheap, widely available, open (as much as possible) hardware
- SDK + simulator that runs on anything
- large community of people hacking on it & sharing knowledge
- diverse, welcoming culture that views games as an art form, doesn't care about the boundary between "game" and other stuff

2018 was the year I concluded that any system whose purpose is to measure, capture, and monetize human attention is immoral and inevitably leads to the erosion of the commons and society itself. In 2019 I'm committed to helping dismantle these systems by all possible means.
Concretely this means supporting nonprofit alternatives like mastodon, blocking all ad tracking (sorry, people whose livelihoods have been captured by that industry), and doing whatever most damages the attention industry.

the people most invested in this idea typically have a poor grasp of interactive design, so they miss/deny that the true difficulty of a digital actor isn't capture or animation or shaders or degree of "photorealism" (a problematic term in many respects) it's that it's a deep dark pit of design with few objective best practices, just constraints you must choose & live within, and that takes some of the luster off it as a pure tech problem which is largely what interested them in the first place.

Facebook's long game with Oculus is to gain the same kind of leverage over the Augmented/Mixed Reality world that they currently have over the conventional web, in all their democracy-corroding, Royhinga-genocide-enabling incompetence and naivete so don't buy or support that shit.

It's been long enough since I released Mr. Friendly that I can appreciate all the writing I did for it. Still hoping to get a final release out before the end of this year. https://jp.itch.io/mr-friendly

Once-in-a-long-while reminder that I made an open source ASCII art, animation, and game creation tool called Playscii: http://vectorpoem.com/playscii
People have made some pretty cool stuff with it! http://playscii.tumblr.com
It's a dynamic, hackable thing written in Python so you can do all sorts of oddness with it.

before Windows standardized on the hourglass, the Atari ST desktop used a bee to indicate the system was busy https://mastodon.social/media/UpI7CwmjO305wWb7JiI

Doodling up a little PETSCII fireplace app in Playscii. If I crank the particle counts up enough, my laptop generates a bit of actual heat making it 2% more immersive.
Custom colors using only the lava shades from Quake's palette. https://mastodon.social/media/IXFx2J708NSQFq5LN7s

today What's Good is how the two engineers who designed the Commodore 64's VIC-II video chip chose 16 very specific colors that profoundly affected the aesthetics of the thousands of games produced for the C64 in the decades since. I sometimes wonder what their office looked like, what kind of music they were listening to. Every color choice is a moment in time, only a few echo for decades. https://mastodon.social/media/mJ_06eDZ-Z-amuVrQRg