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Normally, sharing an article by someone who works at not one but two AI companies should be signal enough that I have been replaced by a doppelgänger and should be killed on sight, but there’s something here I want to dig into more.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.

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.

New week new links! This one is a bit late since I was busy all weekend, but all my links are from Friday or earlier!

Bruno Dias: A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Supplemental: Commander's Road to Hell

I never really got Commander. I had a brief period where I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan because I ran away from home, and the person I was staying with there was a huge magic fan. He would offer to pay me to sort his cards for him, which I never really succeeded at. During this time he tried to get me to play Commander with him at his local game store, and I didn't really get what was fun about it? To be fair, I didn't know Magic cards well enough to know what was going on. (I still don't.) But I also didn't vibe with the social aspect of it. I got into card games through Hearthstone, and my favorite part of Hearthstone was carefully sequencing your actions to maximize the amount of value you could get out of a turn. This could be social if you played with a friend, but the game took a backseat to the conversation as opposed to being the vehicle that facilitates the social interaction.

I tend to treat Netrunner—my current main card game—similarly. Netrunner tends to be more of a social engine (as in, the mode of social interaction is facilitated by the game) than Hearthstone, but the fun isn't negotiating with the table politics or anything of the sort. Maybe I'm wrong about how people play Commander, but that's how it feels to me.

Anyways, this is a good piece. It's interesting to see a different angle of how Magic is slowly killing itself to make those sweet sweet quarterly earnings.

Retro Heart: STRICTLY IMPERSONAL

I think the other side of it all is systems that don't want you to connect with others, at least not in a meaningful way. It wants to keep you at arms length while putting themselves in between, because you're only a benefit to platforms if your money goes right back into the systems that keep you just a bit distant from others and never fully satisfied to begin with.

Speaking of quarterly earnings, Twitch is becoming worse. Thankfully, this piece is great. I wish I had more to say about the financialization of community but man it's so bleak that everything is becoming a gig. All of this is swirling around in my head with other things like the "You too can flip assets" valorization of speculation, the giggification of everything, and how our whole world is now just a big slot machine that we're not meant to win. Like, it all sucks. We know it all sucks. We're no longer at the stage where the companies are ripping the copper out of the walls. We're at the point where we're being encouraged in all facets of life to rip the copper out of the walls of our own social life so we can pay our rent.

Jenna Frank: we love 4

"I'm an anxious patient," I said to Rob then.

"Good," he said. "I think that just means you're grounded in reality. Things happen all the time." We shook hands. The nurse returned with a sheath of instructions and a bag with two bath mitts and a bottle of frothy hibiclens.

A post about pain and pain tolerance.

Laura Michet: Blaugust...?

New week new Laura Michet post going in the link hole. I hope to god everyone who follows me now follows her. Like genuinely. She puts out so many bangers. This is just her blog writing process. Still a banger.

Colin Cornaby: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Chefs have fragile egos and they all seem to enjoy cooking (???) so it’s obvious they’re just too attached to the food.

A nice little joke to end off on.

I’m in the middle of moving, so I’ll try to keep this one short, but here’s links!

Mikhail Klimentov: Kill the CEO in your head

Genuinely though. I’ve read so much writing about games that just feels like a press release.

Os Keyes: Beyond Trans Archives, Beyond Trans Medicine

Please, if you only read one thing this week, let it be this. I found it in my read later pile, saved from a recommendation from probably god knows where. It’s a deep and loving look at archival practices, trans joy, and our relationship with academics. It will leave you in tears.

Laura Michet: It's okay to be a certain kind of hooligan

I do not "understand" getting that mad about having to drive slowly behind cyclists for a minute. I never will. It's deranged, murderous behavior. I'm glad to call it criminal.

I love basically everything Laura Michet writes, and this is no different. Read her stuff! It’s good!

jergling: 2026: A Tech Odyssey

You are awakened by a digital chime at exactly 4:00 a.m. Peeling your eyes open, you see the walls begin to shine in a rainbow of RGB waves. Your handheld greets you in Scarlett Johansson’s voice, through the bedside speaker…

A short story about the hell-world we’ll be moving towards 😔

wirewitchviolet: Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen.

I’ve been playing a bit of Sudokuvania recently, and it is genuinely impressive how good it is. It is also hard as fuck. I really do recommend it, but please realize you are signing up for many hours of puzzle game where the gameplay is Sudoku. (I love sudoku so this whips to me.)

New week new links!

Michelle Starr: Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

Have you heard the news? Eating ants is the next big thing in animals!

Patricia Taxxon: mental health update

I'm just going to soapbox for a second. You might have DID without knowing it. It's far more mundane and common than you think it is. You don't need to hear voices in your head or wake up in random places without knowing how you got there. It can be a kind of depression that makes your memory spotty. A sense that something terrible has happened to you, but that feels like it happened to someone else, leaving you suspiciously unscathed.

This is genuinely just a mental health update from a youtuber I follow, but there's a lot of really good bits in here. I have rewatched it a handful of times, which is impressive when it's only two days old, just to hear the specific ways she phrases stuff. I think that it's a mark of a good writer when even the functional writing sticks with you.

Dr. Devon Price: Is Your Fear of Gender Transition Really the Fear of Aging?

Even the fear of transition regret is a resistance to the irreversibility of time. Life’s options inevitably winnow down as time advances, whether we make decisions or not. It is a loss of exit routes, but it’s also act of cementing and building upon what’s been there before.

Before I ever admitted I was transgender, I kept a log of male style inspirations on my Tumblr that I tagged #boysonas. The “boys” that captivated me were largely effete, soft spoken creative men with greying temples and lines around their lips. People like Ira Glass, Mads Mikkelsen, Rami Malek, Damon Albarn, Anthony Bourdain, Richard Ayoade, and Raul Esparza.

These were not boys, these were forty- and fifty-something men with a tired reflectiveness and a dry, sad wit about them, and they were beautiful to me, just beautiful. I had always wanted to be like them, yet I started to recoil when I saw those same lines and greys on me. Why?

This is the good good writing about being trans I crave. There is a lot of writing on being trans, but what I wish I had more of is writing by trans people for trans people about some of the messier aspects. This is making me think about Maddie's On Being Trans and the Importance of Passing, which also talks about some messy and maybe not fun parts of transitioning. We really need more of this and if any of y'all send some my way (don't forget, there's comments!!!), it'll almost certainly get linked in next week's roundup.

Wendy Brenner: Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife

I have never heard of the Oxford American before I read this, and since I mostly read articles on my e-reader, I didn’t even hear about it until after I read this. It’s one of those stories that make you desire more—more of the writing, more of the world, more of the characters—the moment I finished reading it on the little e-reader, I immediately searched for the article, pulled it up, and scrolled through the whole page again in the hopes that there would be more article that I had missed somehow, hoping for a parsing issue of some sort that would result in me finding out I had a little bit more I could read. There was not.

Horse on VHS: Nothing Doing

I swear I had one more link ready, but I guess I lost it? My backup is reminding y'all of Nothing Doing, my second favorite webcomic. (my first is still Please Forgive Me!!)

More links! These link roundups are something I really enjoy because I have a good collection of new articles I have stolen from other link roundups, and old articles I have stolen from other link roundups. Okay, only some of these links are stolen from other link roundups, some of them I've found myself. Anyways, I hope you enjoy them all! Please comment if you do because I really genuinely love reading these comments. It gives me real joy to know my comment system hasn't broken yet.

Heydon Pickering: The Body Element

Heydon’s doing this series where they write an article on every single html element, in alphabetical order. This one’s on the <body> element, the one element that anyone who’s ever touched html knows about. This isn’t the most educational resource, but it is heaps of fun, and I think that’s something you can easily forget about when you’re diving into web development. It’s fun!

P H Lee: The V*mpire

A short horror story set on early 2010s tumblr. It’s genuinely really good.

Talia Fenix: Steaming a Good Ham

The writer of the scene, Bill Oakley, claims it is very unusual and doesn’t resemble any known comedy. He’s wrong; it’s a type of joke that’s old as dirt, going back at least to the Commedia dell’Arte if not to ancient Greek theatre.

This fits into my favorite genre of post on the internet: Someone with a deep knowledge in their field making a good version of something they saw someone else do badly.

Phire: Modernity is stupid: A rant not about politics

I’ve been using and ignoring read-later apps since the launch of Instapaper in 2008, because precocious little dorks who cry when they realize that they will never read all the books in the world grow up to be weary adults who transfer that Sisyphean energy to hoarding thought-provoking New Yorker longreads they will also never have time to read.

It’s me. I am a precocious little dork who transferred that energy into hoarding thought provoking longreads. What hits especially hard for me is seeing the birth, rise, and fall of Omnivore from the outside. I wasn’t ever a user of Omnivore (it looked far too much like open source design crossed with a mobile port of a web app, in the worst way possible), but I respected the drive. Something that always came up when I saw people talking about it was, “How are they going to make money?” I guess the answer was that they weren’t.

But despite that, the real meat of the article comes later on. This is the hard-hitting line and the clippable sentence that I probably saw on some other website 6 months ago, which led to me reading the article, saving it somewhere so I would remember to put it in a Link Roundup, and then sharing it with you all today.

But you know what, I shouldn’t have to understand the business models of every little icon on my stupid pocket supercomputer to get through life!

Speaking of ways our modern condition is dumb, but going in a more endearing direction...

Mendhak: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice and received the GPLv3 license

This story is silly and I love it. I love that approximately 2/3rds of the article is getting stamps. I love how anticlimactic the ending of the article is. It’s positively delightful.

It's been a minute¹ since the last link roundup! Since I've got the new more convenient writing flow, I thought it’d be nice to actually use this to get back to doing these again!

Gobolatula: Please Forgive Me!!!

I’m starting this off with a whole-hearted recommendation of Please Forgive Me!!! It’s the sorta-sequel sorta-reboot of my favorite webcomic, It Hurts!!, and It’s genuinely so fucking good.

Butterfree: When Rumours Come True: The Mew Trick

As someone who never had a point in my life where the Mew trick was anything other than something people used to show how glitchy gen 1 was, it’s really nice to read the experiences of someone who was on the ground floor for it.

Anna Dana Hudson: Any Percent

I think this one made the rounds on cohost way back in the day, but I finally read it recently and holy hell this is good.

Sciman101: A Price of Commodity

Nothing, absolutely nothing, didn't have a human involved in the creation process at some point.

This post from cohost alumni Sciman101 is a good reminder that, all those things you have? People made them. Even the cheap things. Refreshing to see someone point out the humanity in a world where corporations want more and more products to seem like they appeared whole cloth out of the void.

Kōdō Simone: What if we made advertising illegal?

What if tho? Wouldn’t that be awesome or what?

Hey! It’s time for another link roundup! But first, some housekeeping.

Cohost Minnesota Wake at Minnehaha Falls at 3pm

That’s today y’all! The link for the wake is here. Please come down! I’m gonna be there! This is just a quick refresher for everyone here to actually go!

Geoffrey Bunting on the Rolling Stone: The Digital Orphans of ‘Pokémon’

Honestly, Pokémon is super important to me. Anything that takes a close look at the games will make me feel warm and fuzzy. I will use my link shares as an excuse to shove Pokémon down your throat and I will not feel sorry about it.

Studio MillMint: Photovolumes

MillMint is a long running website/worldbuilding project I’ve been following for the past 7 years maybe that’s about 40% thinking too much about guns and military stuff and 60% talking about weird fictional versions of things I actually care about. And trains. It recently put out an update about this world’s fucked up computers. Please read about them.

Eleanor Konic: On what it means to not have time

Tim is right that if this were a big enough priority for me, I could get up at four in the morning every day and work in a quiet, locked office with no distractions. I might end up divorced, but I could do it if it was my #1 top priority.

The reality is that it’s not, and that’s okay.

I’ve spent way too much time in college soaking my brain in some total productivity bullshit, and it’s very refreshing to read a critique of this stuff that approaches it by acknowledging that it’s feasible and would be more productive, but is it a better way to live your life?

From Jason: Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something

The internet doesn’t run on scattered clouds and rushing streams. It takes heaps of fibered glass and twisted steel to send a DM to that cute French boy from your year abroad.

As the saying goes, the cloud is just somebody else’s computer. This essay explores some of the problems that come up when you remember that someone owns that shit and places profits over people.

Blake Watson: HTML for People

It is an indisputable fact that cohost shutting down meant that a larger portion of the people in my feeds are going to be computer touchers, and that’s really sad. I don’t really know what to do to help with that, but at the bare minimum, here’s a guide on HTML made for people who aren’t computer touchers. I wanna see more of y’all in my feeds! Share your links! The website section in my comments form isn’t for nothing! I actually do check the websites in there!

Thanks for checking this stuff out!

Once again, come to the cohost wake at 3 pm, and please leave a comment below, or email me at [email protected]. And I have a special email for asks at [email protected]. Feel free to send some asks and they'll probably show up on the site unless you ask me to not put it there! Just like cohost! See y'all!

I’ve been seeing some people in my circle doing link roundups, and I thought it’d be nice to join in. I have such a huge backlog of links to work through and maybe this could be a good way to get through all of them. I’m thinking of only doing five links per roundup, but let me know if you think that’s too many or too few. That’s enough waffling for now, here’s the links:

Austin Walker: i have been trying to find some words for cohost's final days for about a week now

I don’t have much to say here besides wow Austin is really good with words in a way that I am as impressed by as I am envious of.

Indie Hell Zone: Tangle Tower

This is just as much a recommendation for Tangle Tower as it is a recommendation for the review talking about it. Tangle Tower is a complete delight, and feels like the closest you can get to a modern Professor Layton. I thoroughly recommend it. Oh and also this review talking about it too, of course.

iA: Our Android App is Frozen in Carbonite

I’m as much of an Android hater as the next apple fangirl (they just don’t have the same rich indie scene as apple does, and every android-native app I’ve seen feels like it hates itself), but this whole story about iA Writer’s endless expensive struggle to keep up with Google’s demands all to let Android users write to files in their Google Drive leaves me feeling more validated by that decision than ever. That is, until Apple makes some sort of dumb decision too that screws over its developers. Also, this isn’t the only story I’ve seen this week of someone shutting down their android app because of Google’s weird shifting requirements. A second developer has said that they’re also throwing in the towel with Android.

Laura Michet: Biking Catalina Island

As someone who has also biked Catalina Island (i was a kid then, so not by choice), there’s so much in here that brings back memories. I’m out here looking at the pictures thinking, “I’ve been here! I’ve seen this!” It’s nice to read a story about someone doing a thing I did as a kid and barely remember so I can be reminded I had a life somewhere amongst the foggy memories.

Zach Leat: Eleventy 3.0 is now available

This one is for everyone who’s hosting their blog with Eleventy. Version 3.0 just dropped! It’s now made using ES Modules, which is the modern way of being able to import stuff in Javascript. The migration process seems to be pretty simple, and it means you can start sprinkling import in your code instead of having to use require(). If you want to someone spill ink about its upgrading process, cohost alumni beeps wrote a whole thing about its site changelog.

That’s all!

I had a great time doing this, and I’m really looking forward to the next one. Feel free to leave a comment below, or email me at my new website-specific email at [email protected]. Don’t worry, it just goes straight into my normal mailbox I didn’t pay anything for this. I also now have a special email for asks at [email protected], which is an idea I stole from nex3. If you send any questions in to that email, I will answer them on the site! Just like cohost.