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Entries from June 2026

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l Again, yes (30 Jun at 23:59)

Hello my blog, my ball and chain, my primary source of -1,000 points for lateness. Did I know the month was ending? Yes. Was I sitting at my computer doing something else? Yes. Did I then just get tired and go to bed, forgetting about my chore? Again yes.

One piece of cover is that my site was down yesterday. I foolishly rebooted my server without looking at it, and learned this morning that my magnificent TLS reverse proxy httpv was not actually configured correctly to restart when the server came back online. My invincible website! It had been running continuously since that video, which now seems like a million years ago. I simply had never done systemctl enable httpv. Anyway, that should be okay, but might as well take another -1,000 points.

Next up: I initiated and got deep into a new stupid project, which hopefully I'll have ready for AEOUD in Brooklyn. The project part is "almost done" but I also need to make the story/visuals, which I basically just have the long 4th of July weekend for. So it's getting tight. I'm probably the only idiot in the world who does a new topic for every single appearance, which is probably why I usually just get stressed out and don't even respond to people who kindly e-mail me inviting me to talk somewhere.

But I like newness, which is why I also made myself run out of time by downloading Returnal, which I thought was going to be a straightforward single-player third-person shooter that I could just play through in bits when I needed a break. Turns out is actually a single-player Roguelike bullet-hell third-person shooter, which random-reward genre is known to be addictive to accomplishment-driven players like myself. Might as well take another -1,000 points for that error while we're in the mood. It is a good game, although it is funny to me how incredibly slow the walking-simulator sections are compared to the normal twitchy gameplay. I'm sure that as video game professionals they did this on purpose, but it's impossible for me to imagine someone who likes twitchy dodgy bullet-hell also being patient enough to enjoy a ten second long animation of the player picking up a piece of paper. I have picked up paper multiple times in my life, and done so in at most one second, even wearing a spacesuit.

We've got some record-level heat here! It had better at least reach 100°F if it's going to flirt with that level.

(2 comments — 6 hours ago) [ comment ]

Entries from May 2026

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l Stereolithography (31 May at 11:20)

Hi!

I'm currently in STL (not the 3D printing format, although can we really be sure that we're not inside an enormous stop-motion 3D-printed simulation?) for a friend's 40th birthday / Festkolloquium. It's at the City Museum, which is a place I highly recommend and which is certainly rekindling my warehouse fantasies. I gave a talk about another geometry problem I got sucked into, which might end up being a video but I think is more likely to just be a project I tinker with and gracefully avoid going in a math hole about.

In June I'll be in NYC presenting something at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail again!

I finished Oeuf, Stephen's Egg Roll, which I liked. I didn't know if I was going to want to finish it when I started, but the game is good at teaching you its moves and encouraging you along the way. I also played through the entirety of Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores and Minishoot' Adventures this month, which is how you know I was substantially vegetating. The first is a straightforward sequel; I think I liked the original more because it was less polished (in particular, movement power-ups allowed for significant sequence breaking). I liked the gloomy synth soundtrack in this one, and the bonus levels, but it was mostly quite easy. (I only upgraded the strength stat for a little extra challenge!) Minishoot' (yes with the apostrophe) is a genre mashup of "twin stick shooter" and "metroidvania," and was quite charming. I probably should have played it on the hard difficulty (yes I am so good at video games!!!), but I had a lot of fun exploring that world. My chief complaint is that essentially every secret is of the same type. I played The Cabin Factory, which is a one-session horror game with a smart structure, and it creeped me out the right amount. And now I'm pretty deep into Moonring. This is a strictly turn-based "RPG" with lovely low-color graphics that makes me wish I was playing on OLED. It reminds me very much of the old DOS Ultima games, and I expect it was inspired by them. I admire the design of this one; it exercises a lot of restraint in its mechanics and expression. The leveling system is pretty neat (essentially all "achievement"-based; no xp), and the interface is well thought out. It recreates for me the feeling of playing these underexplained games in the 90s and not being sure if you're "supposed to" go through this dungeon yet.

OK! Now it is time for Brunch with friends.

(2 comments — almost 4 weeks ago) [ comment ]

Entries from April 2026

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l SIGBOVIK 2026 [✓] (30 Apr at 11:55)

Good evening!

I posted my project, which again if you are looking here to find first news of such things, I admire your commitment to the olden days, but you are doing it wrong. Speaking of the olden days and doing it wrong, my project is No one can force me to have a secure website!!! and it has both a paper and video:

A pre-paid self own

I also gave a talk at SIGBOVIK that you can dig up if you want. They did do a good job of recording video and audio this year! I'm sick of this project now and on to other stuff. I already have two low-key talks scheduled (friend's festschriftish thing and another unnecessary detail) so I'm essentially already back in project mode. But: Since I stayed up too late before remembering how short April is and about my blogbligations, I think I will just leave it at that.

Category: videos

(8 comments — 19 hours ago) [ comment ]

Entries from March 2026

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l It was mostly video games and paper writing (31 Mar at 23:44)

Ah, I did not forget about you, my little bloggie! But I have to act fast.

March is always like this: I have finished or nearly finished my SIGBOVIK project, but SIGBOVIK has not happened yet, and so I have nothing to say here. I did finish my paper, a very dumb thing that I wrote 25 pages about, in order to make it dumber. I'm maybe a third of the way through putting together a video, which I should have done around the time of the conference. It's April 10 this year, I think to synchronize it with CMU's Carnival.

But quickly on the video games: I got myself addicted to Terraria. It has a lot of good ideas and decisions in it, although I must say that the core combat is pretty darn clunky. I think I'm nearing the "end" but I fear that nothing's ever actually going to come of my thoroughly-undermined base. I'm also playing increpare's Oeuf, which is a challenging Egg 3D platformer. It's for people who like to punish themselves (e.g. me) but I like it better than Getting Over It because it is a lot less mean. But it's still a little mean. I also just picked up Insight (or perhaps it is actually called IN⸮IGHT), a tidy little indie puzzler that seems promising (One of those: "No words. Feel smart for figuring out what's going on as you admire how the game designer communicates what's going on to someone so smart as you." games).

The next post will have Content and then I'm itching with so many projects to attend to next!

(49 comments — a week ago) [ comment ]

Entries from February 2026

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l Can stop losing points for tardiness (28 Feb at 19:51)

Ha! This time I feel pretty confident that I'll lose zero points, or perhaps even gain a small number of bonus points, for posting from OGG Airport before a red-eye back from vacation, even though this requires that I post far before the end of the day here due to time zone. OGG Airport is Maui, Hawaii, USA, where they exclusively use the Vorbis audio codec.

I did do some normal vacation things on this vacation. But I also spent a lot of time sitting on a beach, balcony, pool, or airplane with my PiePad working on projects from exotic locales. I'm almost done with my SIGBOVIK paper, which is good because the first deadline for SIGBOVIK XX is nearly upon us. Actually I didn't do that much writing; mostly I was indulging myself in improvements to BoVeX, which I often fail to get to because I'm usually so behind on the paper due to Relentless Vigor of Expanding Project's Scope, or Surely I Can Write The Whole Paper and Implement Footnotes The Night of the Final Deadline, or etc. Now there is actually decent support for footnotes and floating figures. I fixed a bunch of layout bugs that were causing very bad choices (mostly relating to me not actually reading Knuth's paragraph-breaking algorithm that carefully and just reinventing it from the general idea). I also sped up all of the expensive phases of the compiler with indulgent algorithmic and data structure improvements, so compiling a conference-length paper is now at least 2–3x faster end-to-end.

Since I was recovering from being sick (for more than a month!) I hadn't done any long runs (or even moderate runs) since AD 2025. But on a trip I insist upon doing adventure running. In Maui I ran south from the hotel zone until the road ended in an apocalyptic lava field:

I smoke lava rocks

Maui was generally a good place for running, with light traffic and decent pedestrian infrastructure. It did however get very hot as soon as the sun was overhead, and down where I was, there were no gas stations nor water fountains nor any other source of potable moisture, so we had another one of those heat stroke hazards where I was just crawling along for the last five miles or so trying not to die. I was proud of my run's name, Magma Man 2: Dr. Wailea's Revenge. Anyway, with that 15-miler I consider myself back on the wagon and I'm looking forward to getting back home for (a) some longer runs, (b) a full-size keyboard and (c) Baldur's Gate III.

OK, plane is boarding imminently!

(2 comments — 4 months ago) [ comment ]

... Feb 2026 continued

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6 Posts from 2026

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