Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

It’s been several years now, and I still don’t know how I should have handled The Falling Out. I also still don’t know what I could have done better, other than to have cut and run sooner and more quietly, instead of trying to save friendships with people I care about.

I wish I hadn’t had to flee my community to prevent it from fracturing. I wish I hadn’t been a target. And I wish people understood how damn hard that is, when it seemed best to keep people happy.

... which is a good reminder going into the winter months: if you use vitamin D supplements or sunlight lamps at home, this is roughly the difference you need to account for when doing so.

Remember those solar panels we installed here a year ago? Here’s what a year of sunlight looks like from Renton, WA:
https://awoo.space/media/x7yRLQcBDfjG3YM9U0M

Which I suppose is a good reminder that engineers are still human beings, despite how hard faceless megacorps try to brand themselves otherwise.

Although I think NordVPN is still winner in this regard, when an engineer pushed “hi” to their production push notifier for everyone.

Sadly, it didn’t include “1N (no subject)” to make it perfect.

Seriously though, I’d love to know how birdsite ended up pushing internal state into iOS’ notification API. I know folks external to Twitter won’t get a full accounting, but I bet the internal postmortem is amazing.

(This isn’t an ask for internal info, btw. I’m just really amused watching the reports of that bug.)

Also, please have a plan of action if you’re harassed at your place of polling or if the data you provide is doxed by government employees. We shouldn’t even need to think about these things, but I put nothing past these people.

If you live in a state that does in-person polling and need to, bring a friend. Stay hydrated. Plan to get there early. And know your rights for leaving work to vote: https://aflcio.org/2016/11/5/know-your-rights-state-laws-employee-time-vote

I know things look pretty dark right now, but as a reminder: please vote.

Even if it looks corrupt or like they’re tampering with the voting rolls (or worse), they’re counting on people not showing up much more than any overt tampering efforts. The only way we stop them short of things getting _really_ bad is to show up at the polls.

Please make sure your registration is still valid. Please make sure you have a plan to get to the polls. And vote. It matters.

While perusing discount exploration games on Steam, I ran across a perfect dragon game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/331870/AER_Memories_of_Old/

Its a short game where the protagonist can shift from human to bird and back again instantly. Deceptively simple, yet I’ve never seen it done so fluidly or able to capture the visceral feeling of flight quite so well.

There’s a plot, and it’s decent, but I spent most of my time careening through the air at unsafe speeds. Recommended. 🐲👍

I wonder if there’s a tabletop version of this. Betrayal at House on the Hill and the Quiet Year are close, I suppose, but this blends the two nicely.

While nosing through my Steam collection, I realized I had bought and never played The Yawhg (https://store.steampowered.com/app/269030/The_Yawhg/) several years ago. So I booted it up.

After a slightly mediocre first run (“mediocre” involving animate furniture, eldritch horrors, and at least one grisly murder), I accidentally rolled a vampire and a werewolf that fight crime and save the town together.

Huh.

@Oasus@snouts.online I’m not on Z1 rando’s Discord, but dumb question: does anyone other than me use Voice Attack to do ZHelper annotation? Seeing mouse and hotkey annotation into brackets and elite 8 surprises me a bit.

Also, nice seed.

The other sprites from the four streamers shown being Link, Zelda (who is saving Link), and the protagonist from Crystalis.

Someone made a Yoshi sprite for Zelda 2 randomizer. It replaces Link’s sword strike with a Yoshi tongue animation. And I think that is one of the best things I’ve seen today.

... and then I got to spend an extra 20 minutes manually fixing Slack’s dark theme on my machine again, because Slack.

Apple: *bugfixes, performance enhancements, all these zanny new productivity-assisting multitouch gestures I will never even use*
Me: *yawn*
Apple: And we added a dark theme.
Me: *SLAMS THAT UPDATE BUTTON*

Which I guess is a good reminder to be skeptical about what personal data to give corporations, even ones with relatively good data handling hygiene at the time.

Oh hey, Google+ is shutting down after it was shown to be exactly the privacy and accountability tar pit I was concerned about. And oh cool, people that provided their “real name” and real info had their data scraped by parties unknown, too.

I totally did not see that coming at all. </s>

(As a reminder, I work for a Google competitor, so opinions my own. None of these observations are based on privileged info.)

Speedrunners: Here are all of the ways I figured out how to break each of these and look amazing. I will now clip into the fifth plane and end the campaign before it even begins.

All DMs ever: *sigh*

Adventure games I’ve played lately as D&D DMs:

Tomb Raider 2013: Here’s a puzzle. You glitch into a wall. You die.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: Here’s a puzzle. The orcs three rooms away hear you solving it. You die.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Here’s a puzzle. You try to jump down from a ledge. You die.

Breath of the Wild: Here’s a puzzle. You rolled what now? Cool!

Celeste: Here’s a puzzle. Here are all of the ways you die before succeeding. You climbed that mountain. It was _amazing_.