Notices by Spindley Q Frog (spindleyq@mastodon.social)

@emptyfortress I was able to recover by wiping /var/lib/dpkg/updates/* but that makes me feel really Y I K E S

the problem is I've got lots of random shit configured everywhere (it's a file server! it's a CIFS client! it's an internet router for my 286! it's a music server!) and I don't remember where any of it lives and I've backed up none of it

this KEEPS HAPPENING TO ME, Linux administration is fine right up until I have to remember what the hell I've done to my system

grrrrr my raspberry pi appears to have become corrupted at some point without me noticing >:/

What's on it still runs OK, but I'm suddenly locked out of installing packages with weird errors. Previously apt told me to run a command to fix a bunch of packages, and /etc/defaults/locale was full of garbage instead of a locale setting. I reeeeally don't want to wipe it but I have no way of knowing what's borked and what's fine.

@jplebreton so I got curious about this, and discovered it was apparently a viral hit on _tiktok_ somehow, and then my withered skeleton dried up and blew away

@Ludonaut worked for a billionaire once who was having a casual lunch conversation where he came out with, "My carbon footprint is second to none!", then paused, thinking, for a minute, then said, "Maybe that's not such a great thing..." before the conversation moved on

I don't explicitly remember if this is what triggered the comment or not, but I assume it was the second trip to space that really put him above all the other billionaires

anyway I think about that moment a lot

So, like. maybe when things are scary and hard and frustrating, I need to... learn more about how to do them? Trust that that investment will pay off? Start with something small that I know how to do? Read at least as much about how to figure out a plot as I did about how to program EGA? All of those things, I guess!

Suddenly working on this thing felt _good_, and then with every small win it felt _great_; I had a mental list of improvements to make and I knew I could tackle them all, and I honestly don't feel that way about very much in my life! It feels really good!

It became apparent pretty quickly that that path was not a good one. So with a sigh, I opened up Michael Abrash again, read a chapter or two, and boom, suddenly a tiring slog became a fun puzzle, because I _knew_ I had everything I needed to solve it.

I'd convinced myself that writing an editor would be _useful_, but I had totally forgotten in the span of a couple of months that it could be _fun_. I wanted to write as little new code as possible, and I didn't really remember all the details about programming EGA, so I tried to reuse my existing graphics engine.

When I started working on this sprite editor, I Felt Bad. I'd been in a funk about the project for months, trying to find a way to figure out how to finish something I was happy with as a game. Those bad feelings directly affected my motivation to do _anything_ on the project.

It doesn't exactly leave graphics memory in a pristine state but whatever, I can fix that if it bugs me

Embedded the sprite editor into the game and suddenly I want to make shit look better because I can just hit tab and edit things! Like there's a dark gray bit on the car that's supposed to be a license plate or a grill but it's the same colour as the road. I can just... fix that!

Saving and loading wooooorks

My sprites are now stored only in my custom format (which is just a straight memory dump) instead of TIF, and I don't have any code to SAVE TIF files, so, goodbye forever NeoPaint I guess, I hope I don't need flood fill and that I never irreversibly corrupt my sprite file

@technomancy https://youtu.be/HU2ftCitvyQ

@dosnostalgic oh FUCK YEAH

The best use of guns in a videogame is How Do You Kill A Circus, change my mind https://archive.org/details/gtrwx_circus

Sprite editor is shaping up nicely. Control logic fits in a screenful of Jorth code but already I can test animations by swapping back and forth between sprites quickly. Now I know I have a walk cycle I gotta fix but it doesn't save sprites yet. Soon!

like honestly the thing that will get me to actually finish this game is just reminding myself that drawing is fun and that I really want to put a curling club into a videogame because I have never seen it done