 if that’s a thing you might be in the mood for tonight.

Always not-sad (glad?) to see John Prine at the top. Weirdly missing, this American sadness classic:

So sad I could sing a little country song.

Sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year

, an enjoyable write-up of a confusing part of JavaScript, although I’m not entirely sure I’d ever use them short of a library that hides all of the implementation details.

, that’s where most of my knowledge of them comes from. After implementing it once (look at me, very smart!) I took over another project that used it and immediately ripped it out which, based on the replies, I’m not the only one:

I had to rescue a saga based project that went badly off the rails and it was some of the hardest code I’ve ever had to debug in any language. Code flow was very difficult to reason about and forget about trying to use stack traces. 

JavaScript Generators

Happy first 5 PM after Daylight Savings ends. I know Winter doesn’t officially start for more than a month but something changes today. Maybe we need a micro-season for it, like Dark Fall.

Happy first 5 PM after Daylight Savings ends.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

. The first I guess I’ll try as a Twitter replacement, the second just a happy little side-effect of cross-posting to 

…and now too many Mastodons

 from a while back (April 2017 my account says — looking for an alternative to Twitter in late 2016 sounds right). Unfortunately the instance is shutting down. I looked about for a new one tonight and a 

 of them are already full, waitlist only. Which lead me into self-hosting, but the managed instance service I found, 

Seems like a lot of people looking for a Twitter replacement real quick. Might do some more reading this weekend on the 

Trying to find a new Mastodon instance, just like everybody else.

Mastodon’t, or can’t

I’ve currently got my Helix LT updating to version 

. Updates for the Helix are interesting because every update gives you more value for your initial investment. It’s essentially free amps, pedals, better tones. This release fixes a lot of the issues with the stock cabs, including allowing you to easily do dual cabs with a simple delay and pan between them, which is something I used to do with every preset in Bias FX.

It’s nice to get new and exciting features in an update. Software updates are mixed bag these days. Some apps I prefer they never update (like Things, Bear), because I don’t want to learn new features all the time, I want consistency. Others update to the point where I feel like every time I use them I’m getting a new tutorial on how to use them and overwhelmed by the changes (looking at you Confluence). Others push new features at a higher cost that aren’t necessarily wanted.

Which is to say, shout out to the Helix team at Line 6 for continuously making the software more better and not charging for so many awesome new features.

The joys of software that keeps getting better.

It’s free software

 for the Switch (on sale!). They’re both inspired by 

, which, to me, was inspired by deck building games like Magic the Gathering. The idea in all of them is that you have a limited amount of resources per turn and a set of abilities or cards to play per turn.

Dicey Dungeons goes for more of an RPG style game with different classes with different abilities and a load-out for your particular skills. The limited resource is determined by (surprise) dice rolls. It’s by far the more frustrating of the two because the dice rolls are dice rolls and even though you can control them to an extent, depending on which class and variation of the game you’re playing, you are often stuck hoping for a lucky six. And once you get above the intro levels the runs can end extremely quickly — one enemy that is strong against your current load out and it’s game over.

Monster Train encourages you to build up an army of monsters to fight invaders on your train. Don’t think too hard about the plot, the main differentiator is there are multiple levels and multiple monsters per level, which gives it a bit of a “tower defense” game feel. It’s deck building is deeper than Slay the Spire because you mix two factions at the game start and build from both, and it gives you a lot of options to remove or modify the cards you have, rather than hoping for lucky draws in the events where you add cards to your pool.

If you’ve never played any of these games, start with Slay the Spire. It’s the most straightforward, and quickly shows you how the gameplay loop works, where you balance building a resilient character as new cards come in, or going all-in on one strategy to exploit it’s ability to do tons of damage, and hope that later draws (or enemies) don’t completely destroy that plan. After that Monster Train, which is more complex, and if you want a fun diversion that’s easier to understand, Dicey Dungeons.

And be warned: while these are all fun games with strategy involved, you might get a 

 way into a run and then get absolutely destroyed. And also be warned: once you get your first win, you’ll want your second, and third, and fourth, and….

A quick review of Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train

Game Review: Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train

The key to posting a lot on your blog is making it easy to post on your blog.

Nanoblogmore

The unique tragedy with Twitter’s changing attitude toward developers is that so many of Twitter’s early innovations did come from third-party developers. The word tweet, the first use of a bird icon, and even the character counter started in Twitterrific. Twitter’s new leadership displayed an incredible disrespect for the value developers added to both the ecosystem and core platform.

From the Leaving Twitter chapter of Manton Reece's 

. Just a reminder that political and leadership changes aside, most of the joy of early Twitter died years ago.

Twitter stopped being fun when it had to be twitter.com

Leaving Twitter

This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point. The possibility of a new type of ecstatic vision and a life filled with meaningful tasks, I imagine, is what drew me and so many other readers to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” We believed Pirsig could see the Buddha in a well-maintained carburetor. We wanted to see it, too, and we wanted to work as he did, perhaps in large part because we saw very little future for ourselves in the striving world.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

,  mainly because even if I don’t love the book, it has lots of great little lessons and themes that resonate. I reference 

This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point.

built with coffee