idk why last week's link roundup broke and is rounding up again

there's links somewhere, but I don't have any stockpiled lol.

Alternate title: I was sent to another world and all I got for it was these 5 links?!

Luke Plunkett: Trying To Get A Job In Video Games Right Now Is Like Crawling Through Hell

I am not a game dev person, but my own experiences with trying to find a job in the tech job market are pretty similar. (It never worked out. I work in education now.) You put in a lot of work only for the companies you're trying to get a job from to not even give you the courtesy of sending you a rejection email. It feels like what's going on is that companies are, in a way, dropping the pretenses. If you want to read another story about the hellscape that is the game dev job market, there’s more where that came from.

Peter Welch: Programming Sucks

You are an expert in all these technologies, and that’s a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots.

So true dude. Programming does suck. It's also great but you really have to build on top of the culmination of some really bad decisions.

Bharath Natarajan: vercel vs cloudflare: two philosophies of building for developers | thinking out loud

Normally, sharing an article by someone who works at not one but two AI companies should be signal enough that I have been replaced by a doppelgänger and should be killed on sight, but there’s something here I want to dig into more. What I find most interesting is the comparison between Vercel and Cloudflare’s backgrounds. My site is hosted on Cloudflare—it is significantly cheaper to use than Vercel—but I used to use Vercel in the past. From my own experiences, the assertions made in the article are true, but I disagree with the conclusion that these two monoliths need to prove that you should stick with them. Consolidation on this level is itself a red flag, and is maybe a sign to reduce your dependency on one of two giant companies. I'm slowly working out what it'd take to make the move away from hosting my site on Cloudflare, and while I'd recommend hosting your own site on Cloudflare if you're starting out, it's always good to learn how to move away from depending on the kindness of a large company offering a free tier.

Ysengrin and Safer: In Search of a Flat Game State

The thesis of this video is that, fundamentally, Netrunner has this problem where it is, by default, this flat game state. Where, without card effects, the Corp always loses.

This is a talk explaining what the concept of a "flat game state" is in the game of Netrunner, and what that entails in its card design and interplay. This is a video that's opened my mind to new ways of looking at board interaction in Netrunner, and is the motivating force for some new posts that are in the works on game design in Netrunner. Good game!

Jonathan Zellar: Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier

I wanted to end things off with another dunk on AI. Sure it's so easy and everyone is doing it, but there's some really incredible writers dusting off their keyboards to sit down and complain.

rolled credits on Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. incredible game. i know the postgame is the "real" game, but i'd argue that serpentcoil island on its own was worth almost all the price tag. it was such a journey to finally beat. transmutation pots are unrivaled.

annoying all my friends by saying "wow this is a really cool period piece!" whenever they show me a movie made before 1980

I always feel really bad when I procrastinate on the weekly link roundups. They’re relatively easy to put together and yet I still struggle to get one out each week. I’ll continue to try to get at least one roundup a week out, but I’ll likely continue to fail.

Noodle: am I crazy or did old movies used to look different??

I am an occasional watcher of Noodle's second channel, and recently he's been ranting about how color is kind of one of the hardest problems. Not just for computers, just in general. This video specifically focuses on how it is impossible to watch the original version of the movie The Matrix, and the wild thing is, this might be one of the best case scenarios for a movie. Movie rereleases change things all the time. Every accessible release of the original Star Wars trilogy no longer resembles the movie people saw in the theaters.¹ Same goes for the recent releases of James Cameron movies. Unless (and sometimes even if) you want to turn to piracy, it feels like movies as a concept is gnawed by slow fire.

Grace Benfell: What does it actually mean for a video game to be "horny"?

The simultaneous cultivation and rejection of smut has resulted in a phenomenon one might call “wholesome horny” games. Fields Of Mistria, Spirit Swap, and Date Everything! are all examples. None of these games have sex scenes, but feature attractive characters and innuendos aplenty. They feel ready-made for other people to make smut about them, but are ultimately skittish about being erotic themselves, beyond a little cleavage, a shirt tight across muscles, or a wink to the audience. Even more than games like Hades or Baldur’s Gate 3, which do feature sex, they retreat into a strangely sexless horny zone. Sure, you’ll find hot people here, but for erotica, apply elsewhere.

With the advent of Hades II, I was reminded of this article along with Melos Han-Tani's Treatmills article. I could've put either of them in the roundup, but I picked this one because, as an ace person, I find it really interesting. The modern world's specific flavor of puritanism is a weird special interest of mine. I have further thoughts on this and some weird things about the vibes of the MBMBaM and Dropout fandom that will maybe get expanded into a full blog post down the line. Who knows.

Rick Shory: Growing figs in the Pacific Northwest

You may be planting a potted fig tree from a nursery. I see this so often: Someone has brought me in for a consult, and they proudly show off their little fig tree, set to grow upright and stately like a maple. Sometimes, they have even staked up any spreading limbs, to make the growth even more vertical.

Sure enough, it will be beautiful, but other things besides figs make better shade trees. Within a few years, no ground-walking creature is going to be able to reach any of the fruit. There are better ways to feed the birds.

Just a guide on growing figs in the Pacific Northwest. Please read it.

Thomas Günther: The web behind glass

Liquid Glass—Apple's new design system that is currently used in all their major operating systems—is just okay. At its best, it's stunningly beautiful. It its worst, it's unreadable. In both outcomes, it calls too much attention to itself. There has been a number of thinkpieces on Liquid Glass. Perhaps give this one a shot.

Lyra Rebane: You no longer need JavaScript

CSS is probably my favorite programming language, so this is a fun read just for more ideas to steal on how to handle CSS stuff. Note: Most interactivity on the web should be JavaScript. Just for accessibility reasons. Theres a lot of nuances to this though.

I figured I should write some of these to kinda show in open that I actually write a decent amount of code for this site.

Big stuff!

Relative time added.

If you look at the timestamp on each post, it now says how long ago it's been since the post went up as opposed to the absolute time it came out. This is helpful for a couple reasons, but a big one is that all my timestamps are in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which meant you could not get a sense for what time I was uploading posts anyways. I'd fire something off at dinner and then it'd seem like I was doing crazed 1am posting.

Part of my Cohost archive has been reuploaded!

You can now see old cohost posts reuploaded to my blog at the #cohost archive tag. I am missing most of my posts because I have to import these by hand. Any posts that rebugged other posts or my own posts are not uploaded (see: Stuff I still need to do).

Small stuff

• Fixed the leave a comment box not having a shadow.
• Minor improvements to syntax highlighting
• General CSS improvements.
• Demo web components made for a secret blog post I may or may not make down the line

Stuff I still need to do

• Support reblogging. I don't grab posts using h-entry or anything, and my post templates don't support shared posts yet. I had to design some systems for handling post sharing with my tweet component, so I will probably use similar ideas once I add real posts.
• Improve accessibility. I have some quick wins I can and should do. Don't neglect accessibility y'all.
• Add a like button. Don't add a like count.

i have no opinions on everything else