Extra Future

Author: Phil Nelson

  • A Deep Dive on Z-Index Usage

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    Phil Nelson
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    How do you make sure your annoying popup is shown on top of every other element in the page, when you don’t know how many there are, who wrote them, and how bad they wanted their elements to be on top? That’s when you set your z-index to 100, or maybe 999, or maybe, just…

  • THE ROAD TO MAGNASANTI

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    Phil Nelson
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    Catnip for the doomed gamer generation: In 2010, an obsessed gamer designed the perfect game of Sim City. Achieved through a repeating pattern of clustered high rises, “Magnasanti” exposes the hellish consequences of top-down civic design. In his new documentary, John Wilson explores how New York City is creeping closer and closer to realizing this…

  • Rassler release 13 is now available

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    Phil Nelson
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    Release 13 of my doomed video game project, Rassler, is now available for download. [The dev log has more details](https://philnelson.itch.io/rassler/devlog/53705/rassler-release-13-is-now-available): >First and most notably: The Rassler title screen and wrestler / territory select screens have music now! I made it. It’s probably fine? I also created and added a little punch sound effect when you…

  • Astray, a lua-based dungeon and maze generator

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    Phil Nelson
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    Works great with Love2d, and so I am using it in a new (surprise!) wrestling-based project. Download: [astray on github](https://github.com/SiENcE/astray)

  • Gizmodo: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information

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    Phil Nelson
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    Just in case you needed more reasons that Facebook is a morally corrupt drain on our entire society, [Gizmodo went deep and forced FB to admit to this practice (after they denied it several times)](https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to-your-shadow-co-1828476051). If you’re still working at Facebook…. why? Is the money _that_ good?

  • Rassler Release 12 is now available

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    Phil Nelson
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    Release 12 brings a snazzy new launch screen, and an new territory select/generation screen. We’re getting closer to have a fully tracked career, with persistent opponents and all. More details are in the release notes. You can download it, or even buy it (if you can afford to do so) on the Rassler site.

  • Galencia

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    Phil Nelson
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    [Galencia, the 2017 Commodore 64 Game of the Year, is now available on Steam.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/887510/Galencia/) That’s right, a brand-new honest-to-goodness Commodore 64 game in all its 1980s glory ported to your PC (Mac coming soon). Full disclosure: Developer is a friend of my co-worker.

  • Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing’s NES emulator

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    Phil Nelson
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    >While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it was possible…

  • Rough.js – A “Hand-drawn” Javascript Vector Library

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    Phil Nelson
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    [Neat tool for drawing cutesy vector shapes](https://github.com/pshihn/rough): >Rough.js is a light weight (~9kB gzipped) graphics library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style. The library defines primitives to draw lines, curves, arcs, polygons, circles, and ellipses. It also supports drawing SVG paths. There’s a lot of nuance to this, too. For example, there…

  • Universal Mega Dumper

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    Phil Nelson
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    Unnaturally tempted by [this project](https://db-electronics.ca/wiki/projects/umd/), which has created a common platform for cartridge dumping w/ standard adapters for the major consoles. It auto-recognizes which type of cart you connect, too! > The Universal Mega Dumper (UMD) is a game catridge read/writer project designed around a Teensy++ microcontroller. The universality comes from the UMD’s ability to…

  • Metafilter needs help. Let’s help Metafilter.

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    Phil Nelson
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    In [a post on MetaTalk](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24814/State-of-the-Site-Metafilter-financial-update-and-future-directions), cortex lays it out for us. The site is currently running at about an $8,000/mo. The vast majority of their operating costs go to pay for kind, thoughtful, moderators and the folks who keep the servers running. If you can afford to support Metafilter, do it. The internet needs independent…

  • Retrobatch, a new batch image processor from Flying Meat

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    Phil Nelson
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    [Looks like a heck of a swiss-army-knife of a tool][link]. It’s node-based, supports CoreML image classification and sorting, and yep… it supports AppleScript. FM’s suggestions for new use cases contain fun, weird, stuff like “Read an image from the clipboard, apply a drop shadow, and write it right back to the clipboard to paste into…