WTF Internet
I have learned a sad truth today: the internet does not have a good, “PK Fire,” meme. I feel with the number of times, “ok,” is mistyped to, “pk,” one might have plenty of opportunity to meme-drop some PK Fire love. I guess not.
I have learned a sad truth today: the internet does not have a good, “PK Fire,” meme. I feel with the number of times, “ok,” is mistyped to, “pk,” one might have plenty of opportunity to meme-drop some PK Fire love. I guess not.
I have lived overseas for a non-trivial part of my life. I have experienced a handful of different cultures, both in the anglophile and non-anglophile worlds.
In all that time, I have come to experience a truth: the phrase, “BBQ,” is probably the most universally assumed, but misunderstood of phrases.
What do I mean?
Someone invites you to a BBQ, or to go, “eat BBQ.” There is a very good chance you feel you know what means, and you will most certainly start packing on the assumptions. And there is a good chance that if you are living outside your home country, none of your assumptions will be true.
Yet, it will still be a BBQ.
I am reminded of this on a regular basis when I search for BBQ and never find what I am looking for.
I am building a wordpress-based website. It's the year 2022. I am using some fancy WYSIWYG template editor. It's not bad actually, once you get a hang of it. And yet, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and iOS all display it differently. What. The. Actualy. Fuck.
It's 2022.
I remember doing this years ago. Zen of CSS, Bulletproof Web Design era years ago. When Meyers and Zeldman were twt-ing out tips and tricks, years ago (though they're both still going strong of course!). Why is web design still as terrible now as it was then?!
I have a collection of Raspberries Pi. Spanning generations. I still have a 1B+ and was delighted when I noticed it was still supported by RISC OS. Recently I've taken an interest in 80's computing, and RISC OS, while lesser known, fits into that category.
Coincidentally at the same time I stumbled across Decker by John Earnest. I never used HyperCard, but I am delighted by the idea it is the eptimoe of Simple-but-Powerful software design. “Elegant,” might be a word some choose. Or I might just reading between the lines something which is not actually there....
So I thought, let's install RISC OS and get Decker running on it. A Frankensteinian creation of 80's nostalgia.
Going into this, I am self-imposing at least one limiting factor: I don't want to use a monitor; I want RISC OS running headless.
I did 30 seconds of web searching to verfiy my project on the insanity scale: 1. VNC technically can run on RISC OS 1. SDL2 can technically run on RISC OS 1. C compilers, particularly GCC, seem to exist on RISC OS
So sure, off to the races.
telnet: Unable to connect to remote hostSo, now what...
I tried dark mode on my desktop.
I tried is on various flavors of Linux.
I tried it on macOS.
I do not like it.
I feel like someone, somewhere, is judging me. I don't care.
There have been a few blog posts bubbling to the top of The Orange Site recently about tech writer’s experimenting with DALL-E 2. One theme seems to recur in these posts, which is the notion that you really need to specify your input parameters be because very often the parameters you think will work, don’t.
What annoys me is that in the tech and software engineering spaces, there has always been a complaint that the, “normals,” or, “users,” or, “clients,” really seem to expect people to build magical life changing product with just the vaguest of descriptions or acceptance criteria. Yet, here we are holding the poor algo up to those same unrealistic expectations. Tsk tsk.
The culture of paywalling and gate-keeping that is the USA Tax System is immensely fucked up and broken. How can so many other countries have figured this out, and yet, “The World's #1!” is just ass-backwards.
I am quite skeptical of the inevitable arrival of a metaverse. To me, today, (tomorrow could be different), a metaverse is a VR-first, or maybe just AR-first, virtual environment that attempts to reproduce as many IRL systems as possible using digital equivalents. It's VR Second Life, I guess (side note: I wonder what Linden Lab is up today these days... heads off to Search)...
...and back.
Not only am I skeptical that it will be embraced by consumers en masse, I am also skeptical that it would be beneficial to anyone.
It's why I like the idea of a slow-web. Wordle comes to mind; successful because it's slow. It forces you to disconnect rather than create newer and newer ways to trick you into paying attention. You can play once a day, that's it. It is a not-for-profit in the attention economy.
I wish there were more. Smaller engagements; products and services that create one thing, do it well, and don't attempt to suck you in. The UNIX Philosophy as applied to the modern web.
I hereby coin the terms, “euphe-moji,” and “euphemoji.” Meaning: when an emoji, or sequence of emoji, are used euphemistically. For example, an aubergine/eggplant emoji used to represent a penis.
Pico Lake is a point and click adventure that tells the story of a man looking for his phone. Throughout the game, you will navigate fixed-scene areas and interact with various objects to progress the story. There is no overarching guidance beyond finding your phone.
I felt that the graphics made good use of the palette and the animations were smooth. I enjoyed each of the scenes that you visit in the story, and they had enough detail to encourage interaction. The story also had a bit of humor to it, especially toward the ends.
I did feel that too many of the interactions that progressed the story were random. The links between each interaction were strong in some cases, but were weak in too many. I felt that the game required you to revisit a location that most players would have assumed was cleared, for example.
The control scheme for Look, Get, Use, and Talk is also a bit clunky.
If the developer were to take a stab at enhancing it, I would recommend adding some ambient music. A, “Walk & Click,” game benefits from immersive atmosphere, so sound effects and ambient music will really help out.
Additionally, I would consider merging the Look, Get, and Use actions into two. When, “Looking,” if the character sees an item of potential importance, maybe just prompt the player to subsequently add that item to inventory, rather than have the player use a second, “get,” action.
Play or Pass? Play