text_garden's recent activity
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
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Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books
text_garden Link ParentYou can of course answer that question in terms of the premise without addressing whether the premise is true. It follows from the premise that the bears of Novaya Zemlya are white, regardless of...You can of course answer that question in terms of the premise without addressing whether the premise is true. It follows from the premise that the bears of Novaya Zemlya are white, regardless of whether you are critical of the idea that they actually are. I know little about the fauna of Novaya Zemlya, but I understand it as a hypothetical syllogism, and it seems to me that the difference was that the literate peasants recognized it as such as well, while the illiterate peasants did not.
Case in point, we both reason about this account as though it happened as told even though we weren't there to experience it, and we both form hypothetical ideas about the implications of the result as presented. We accept it as true for the sake of the argument and we build ideas on it. That is immensely useful.
Now, I think it's much more dubious whether it was due to a lack of literacy that these peasants didn't understand the question. It could as well be that people that for some reason hadn't had a pressing need or interest to learn to read and write probably haven't had a pressing need or interest to engage in that level abstract thinking either for that same reason. If you have a busy day-to-day life that can mostly be understood in terms of your own experience and the knowledge that has been handed down for generations maybe you have no need or time for reading nor that kind of deductive reasoning.
There is value in a grounded perspective, but a peasantry that is either incapable or uninterested in engaging in abstract, hypothetical thinking seems like it would be less than ideal in a democratic society.
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Comment on What did you do this week (and weekend)? in ~talk
text_garden LinkI went to a tractor pulling event yesterday. Tractor enthusiasts compete by having their tractors pull a load that require greater force the longer it travels, across a course of 100 m, in...I went to a tractor pulling event yesterday. Tractor enthusiasts compete by having their tractors pull a load that require greater force the longer it travels, across a course of 100 m, in different weight classes and categories of tractors. I mostly liked the stock farm tractors. There's a competition for modified tractors and that was absolutely bananas, but they're barely tractors. Basically just engines and seats on wheels, and most have settled for a kind of builds that performs and sounds the same. That said, one tractor had an actual jet engine and sounded like an airplane taking off. Another had an 18-cylinder radial engine, the kind of thing you would have in a propeller plane.
Very loud, with fire and black plumes of smoke coming from the exhaust stacks. The biggest hot dog I've ever had.
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Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles in ~games
text_garden Link ParentNo, if you really want to get technical about it, of course Sony removed them since Sony manages distribution and availability on their own platform. The effect on trust should be the same either...No, if you really want to get technical about it, of course Sony removed them since Sony manages distribution and availability on their own platform.
The effect on trust should be the same either way you put it. Sony saw no issue licensing these movies to users knowing that their contract with Studio Canal meant that they'd have to remove them from users' libraries in the event they couldn't renew their deal. There's no good reason for me to trust a company that does that.
The licenses they sell for games come with a clause that effectively allow them to arbitrarily rescind access (emphasis mine):
The Software is licenced to you on these Software Terms; it is not sold for you to own, and you understand and agree that we may end online and network features of a Software that uses online servers ("Online Services"). We will provide reasonable advance notice of any end of Online Services. If we discontinue any Online Services, you may still access any offline modes we provide for the Software; however, offline modes are not guaranteed and may change or end at our discretion.
As far as I'm concerned, there's neither trust nor contractual obligation not to screw me over. So what else is there? With a PC and GOG for example I need neither trust nor contractual obligation because the copies they license are distributed as installers which work regardless of what they do with their platform.
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Comment on Consequences of advertising and enshittification on the Internet in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentIn their model, aversion towards advertising and price sensitivity are two different parameters. The assumption does seem to be somewhat supported by data, though. They cite Garrett A Johnson,...In their model, aversion towards advertising and price sensitivity are two different parameters.
The assumption does seem to be somewhat supported by data, though. They cite Garrett A Johnson, Scott K Shriver, and Shaoyin Du. Consumer privacy choice in online advertising: Who opts out and at what cost to industry? Marketing Science, 39(1):33–51, 2020 which is an empirical study finding that (free) opt-out (through AdChoices) rates of ad tracking drop as income drops, though with higher opt-out rates in both extremes. With that in mind it also makes sense to model it separately from price sensitivity. There is some other resource at play here. Maybe time and energy?
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Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles in ~games
text_garden LinkThe other week this company removed hundreds of films and TV shows from users' libraries. Just to establish a realistic expectation of the level of trust you can place with them. I couldn't care...The other week this company removed hundreds of films and TV shows from users' libraries. Just to establish a realistic expectation of the level of trust you can place with them.
I couldn't care less about discs, but I sometimes wish some court would reach the decision that when there's a "buy" button under an advertised piece of intellectual property, it is implied that what you're buying is a copy with a license for otherwise unrestricted personal use. That's how consumers understand the deal, and that's why they get pissed off when this happens; they're not realistically reading and understanding the extremely one-sided license "agreements" they're entering.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
text_garden LinkI'm making a general utility for MIDI processing with JACK. I've ended up writing a few single-purpose utilities for MIDI (e.g. for splitting a keyboard across two channels and there are a bunch...I'm making a general utility for MIDI processing with JACK. I've ended up writing a few single-purpose utilities for MIDI (e.g. for splitting a keyboard across two channels and there are a bunch more I would make if I could be arsed to do this kind of setup every time. So the idea of a generalized processing utility came to mind.
I'm building a virtual machine and a simple dynamically typed language for the purpose. Mostly for the fun of it, but also because the program will run in the audio callback, so it's good if it's predictable and free of heap allocations which I can design for. The idea is that it should only allow heap and stack allocations, and the only datatypes are floats and string constants. Maybe not even strings, but it's on the table for now because they could be useful for logging.
As a challenge to myself that I can't justify techincally, I also want to make the compiler itself free of heap allocations. In terms of my design this means that source code will be loaded into one big buffer, and VM instructions will be emitted to another. Parsing is done using a tokenizer with a fixed-size lookahead queue of tokens and a recursive descent parser where leaf functions generate code to the output buffer directly, and a stack of name-address/stack offset assignments. I remember reading that this is how Turbo Pascal works; there's no intermediate abstract representation of the source beyond the tokenization.
I've only written the tokenizer so far, and a wrapper which provides the lookahead queue.
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Comment on The end of [Marcin's] AArch64 desktop experiment in ~tech
text_garden LinkNasty bug, but I'd love to see make -j80 on the kernel happen on that thing, maybe even on a weekly basis :)Nasty bug, but I'd love to see
make -j80on the kernel happen on that thing, maybe even on a weekly basis :) -
Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentThat was fun! I played Zap. I noticed a bump in difficulty as the enemies grow in numbers but before you get speed and shots going, so getting from 3000 to 7000 was perhaps easier to me than...That was fun! I played Zap. I noticed a bump in difficulty as the enemies grow in numbers but before you get speed and shots going, so getting from 3000 to 7000 was perhaps easier to me than getting from 0 to 3000. But I think it just creates dramatic effect. You get to feel really powerful for a while as you zip across the level and can start herding bad guys by circling them, before they catch up.
It's interesting how this kind of design really creates a different kind of balancing problem altogether. For Acid Web, the waves are largely hand-made (barring some randomization of spawn points to prevent rote memorization) and I briefly considered a weapon upgrade system but decided against it because it makes balancing that much harder in such a design. But it also creates the level ranking conundrum. I want to try something more like your approach with continuously spawning enemies.
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Comment on I'm looking for an adage or "law" (like Conway's law), but for dealing with AI slop in ~tech
text_garden LinkI asked ChatGPT and it said... a bunch of stuff which was basically unrelated to the question. We should find an origin of the statement "if you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read...I asked ChatGPT and it said... a bunch of stuff which was basically unrelated to the question.
We should find an origin of the statement "if you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it" (paraphrased?) and name a law after that person.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentUpdated, thanks!Updated, thanks!
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentLove the list. In particular I have some shooters to dig through now! With this I have found yet another reason to mention Elasto Mania (which isn't currently on sale, though). It's a bit more...Love the list. In particular I have some shooters to dig through now!
- Trials: Evolution ($4.99, -75%) -- Looks like goofy biking but actually fascinatingly advanced 2d platforming, with a host of user-created levels (that you need to download separately in a pack, because Ubisoft shut the servers down). (Gem Graduate)
With this I have found yet another reason to mention Elasto Mania (which isn't currently on sale, though). It's a bit more open-ended than I remember Trials being with levels going in any and all directions and the skill ceiling is out of this world.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentThanks for the buy and the kind words :) I think that realistically most people who buy this are only going to play it for 15-30 minutes at a time and I designed it for that, so I'm glad you...Thanks for the buy and the kind words :)
I think that realistically most people who buy this are only going to play it for 15-30 minutes at a time and I designed it for that, so I'm glad you commented on the "hop in" quality.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentThe next time I will probably try to get more strangers involved in playtesting and ask them to record videos. I sent the game out to some friends and asked them to give me feedback. They had only...The next time I will probably try to get more strangers involved in playtesting and ask them to record videos. I sent the game out to some friends and asked them to give me feedback. They had only nice things to say about the game itself (which I attribute to positivity bias among friends), and the one guy who had some more elaborate feedback was essentially designing his own game, not really getting what I was going for or giving me insight into the extent I'd achieved that.
My design process here was mostly to design a bunch of levels based around combinations of spawning patterns, weapons and bad guy pairings. Then when I had a hundred I liked, I ranked them in terms of difficulty over a couple of days. In hindsight, with that little time you have to account for warm-up time and skill variation given different conditions of the body during the day. Like, I would in my estimate perform much better on my own levels in the afternoons before dinner when I was slightly tired and hungry (and more warmed up than in the morning) than I would after lunch. And after playing through a thousand levels of Acid Web in a couple of days you end up being quite good at it.
Would love to hear about your game and how you approached balancing the difficulty curve.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentThanks for the offer, I'll be in touch when I have a proper game going again :) Those are some good ideas, too.Thanks for the offer, I'll be in touch when I have a proper game going again :)
Those are some good ideas, too.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentCool, I'm glad you're enjoying it! I've been considering adding an easier set of levels to the game because you're not the first to comment on the difficulty. Over the course of making the game I...Cool, I'm glad you're enjoying it! I've been considering adding an easier set of levels to the game because you're not the first to comment on the difficulty. Over the course of making the game I became too much of an expert to even tell, and I didn't send it out to that many people to playtest it... It would have been a real coin eater back in the day.
I've made some small (unreleased) games since, but I'm focusing most of my leisure development time on Pocket Acid. I do want to make another bigger game after that's feature complete, though.
As for seagulls, they are fine, perfectly decent birds that turn evil when they get too comfortable in an urban area. Waking up to their shrieks at 3:30 in the morning is a common occurrence in the summer here :D.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden (edited )LinkI may have mentioned some of these the last time this thread happened, but I try not to. Derelict Star (125 reviews) is a mechanically tight and difficult jetpacking platformer set in an open...I may have mentioned some of these the last time this thread happened, but I try not to.
Derelict Star (125 reviews) is a mechanically tight and difficult jetpacking platformer set in an open Metroid-like map where you aren't really gated by item-based abilities. Instead you just have to persevere and git gud.
Tunnet (682 reviews) is a network engineering simulator/horror game where you need to dig and spelunk through caves to connect computer systems using routers, switches and packet filters to create an efficient network. Packets arriving at their destinations generate income that you can spend on buying more tools and upgrades. I imagine that there is someone out there to whom this is a dream game.
Navicula Meatus (121 reviews) looks and at a surface level behaves a bit like old, grid-based 3D dungeon crawler games, but it's really a short puzzle adventure. It's set in a mysterious, creepy and disgusting world where the player (some kind of crab man) does odd jobs for other monsters and abominations. The puzzles are mostly basically fetch quests, but the atmosphere made me play it through to at least one ending.
KNIGHTS (769 review) is a chess puzzle where you have to move your knights into a given position. Very simple in concept, but the puzzles are real headscratchers.
SharpShooter3D (405 reviews) is a first person shooter/brawler, filled with what I imagine are slavic pop culture references and stereotypes. It's sprite-based, and most sprites look like photo collages. Lots of senseless violence and interesting levels.
Dream Swing (124 reviews) is a first person grappling hook time trial. You swing around an open arena picking up balls. Very meditative.
Heroes of a Broken Land (185 reviews) is kind of a HoMM meets, err... Might & Magic. Gather a party, send it out in the world, loot some dungeons, upgrade towns and get more party members and create new parties altogether, rinse and repeat. All set in a procedurally generated world. Strangely addictive game loop.
Aeon of Sands - The Trail (108 reviews) is a first person, grid-based blobber set in a post-apocalyptic future. The gameplay is reminiscent of games like Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder, but interspersed with CYOA style prompts. I love the art style, music and atmosphere of this more than anything else in it, but it's fun.
Silk (16 reviews) is another first person grid-based blobber where you and your caravan move around an open world based on the Silk Road. Aside from trade and dispatching robbers and wolves, you have to manage your party's beliefs and wnats in order to keep morale up
Crash Dive 2 (226 reviews) is an open-ended light sub sim set in the South Pacific during WWII. You take on a variety of mission types, from sinking merchant ships to airplane carriers, rescuing pilots, picking up spies, reconnaissance or attacking harbours and coastal bases. It's a bit more complicated than its prequel, but can be played very casually, usually enjoyable even if you only have 10 minutes to spend on it.
Frantic Dimension (18 reviews) plays like a mix of Robotron 2084 and Bezerk. You navigate a grid of rooms that open up as you clear them using WASD, aiming and shooting independently using the arrow keys. Really looks and feels like an 80s arcade game.
Desert Golfing (97 reviews) is a 2D, side view golf game with an endless number of courses, set in a desert. There's no winning or losing, just advancing to the next course seeing your statistics improve as you get better. Absolutely no nonense; it just throws you right into the game from the beginning and continues where you left it when you last quit it in rage.
Incredipede (152 reviews) is a physics-based puzzle platformer where you arrange the limbs of a grotesque but somehow cute-looking creature to barely traverse levels and get to the goal.
Snakebird (897 reviews) is a puzzle game where you move snakebirds on a grid so as to reach your goal, or fruit (which make the snakebirds longer). It's very difficult, so much that the developers decided to release a less demanding set of levels as Snakebird Primer
Morph King is another chess-based puzzle game. On each turn, you take the role of a new piece, seen in advance, and you have to plan your moves accordingly as you clear the board of waves of opponent pieces.
Fit For a King (71 reviews) looks like an old Ultima game, but is actually more of an open-ended puzzle adventure. In preparation for a summit with a rival king, you collect taxes and treasures to afford the most lavish displays of wealth. You do this by moving around the world and applying 26 different verbs to objects, people and animals, each action mapped to a letter key on the keyboard. It's absolutely hilarious at times, and weird command-object combinations work surprisingly often.
One Line (64 reviews) is a puzzle game where you have to produce a space-filling curve over grid-based levels. Some tiles are blocking or constrained in other ways (blocking in some directions, forcing turns etc.). It executes that concept very well.
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Comment on Steam Summer Sale 2026: Hidden gems in ~games
text_garden Link ParentReally appreciate the shout-out!Really appreciate the shout-out!
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Comment on Are there any video games that are/were popular in your country, that the rest of the world hardly knows about? in ~games
text_garden Link ParentSchool computer staples! The DOS game club had an episode where they cover Deluxe ski jump: https://www.dosgameclub.com/skiing-games/School computer staples! The DOS game club had an episode where they cover Deluxe ski jump: https://www.dosgameclub.com/skiing-games/
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Comment on Are there any video games that are/were popular in your country, that the rest of the world hardly knows about? in ~games
text_garden LinkIt's not limited to just my home country (and I think it rarely is), but I think Elasto Mania (a small Hungarian shareware game from 2000) oddly enjoyed a disproportionate level of success in the...It's not limited to just my home country (and I think it rarely is), but I think Elasto Mania (a small Hungarian shareware game from 2000) oddly enjoyed a disproportionate level of success in the Nordics, especially Finland.
Probably not a commercial success because cracked copies spread like wildfire at LAN parties in the early 00s, and I think that's how most people knew of it. Mentioning it today to Swedish or Finnish millennial computer nerds is likely to bring up some memory of it, even if they've only seen it or heard of it.
It's interesting, because in itself it's not a LAN game. Competitive play is (or at least was) strictly through sharing levels, times and demos. I guess that played casually it also lends itself well to filling the downtime at a LAN party, between other games or while downloading.
I only actually bought the game myself a few years ago. I didn't know it was Hungarian until then, assuming it was Finnish because there's something about it that reminds me a lot of the Finnish freeware games of that era. It's legitimately great, with mechanics that create an absolute iceberg of potential strategies and approaches.
I've been spending a lot of time with Ridgerunners lately. It's a very tightly designed first-person racing game where you slide along mountains and use a rocket launcher to boost yourself and a jetpack to adjust your trajectory.
If you've played/seen the Starseige: Tribes series and undestand some of its meta, it's basically the skiing aspect of that game turned into a fast-paced game on its own, with the combat PVP aspect of Tribes removed altogether. You can either race other players in real time, compete at your own pace in time trials or just ski around freely. The maps are randomly generated, defaulting to a daily seed, but if you want a private room with friends you can just generate a random seed and make everyone join that world.
Here's a video the dev made of a really fast run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxKilguRjPw