You can grab yourself a heapin’ helpin’ of Phil’s Newsletter at the usual place. It’s still free. You can still pay me anyway. Just sayin’
This week I launched a big project and talked a bit about the little things.
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Category: Links
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My Newsletter For This Week Is Out
I wrote about the Smashing Pumpkins album Adore, shared an exclusive guitar picture, and ruminated on leaving it all behind.
Two of the things I’ve wanted to do since day one with Divergent League are coming true this season: Season Tickets (coming soon) and Divergent League Update, our weekly podcast. It’ll have stats, standings, and occasional talk about how our season is different than “real life.”
This first update is a short one, at just 2 minutes. In the future you can expect to find interviews with league owners, polls, and more. As always, thanks to the owners and my Patrons for supporting Divergent League. You can too!
You can get the feed in your preferred podcatcher, as I’ve submitted it to Apple, Google, Stitcher, and Spotify.
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Divergent League Baseball Signup Sheet
You can now sign up for the Divergent League newsletter (and be invited to play in the next Season) by filling out our new form.
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I’m Available For Freelance Work Again
Having run the $1,350,000 campaign for OpenCV AI Kit, I am now stepping away from that project while they focus on computer vision development, manufacturing and fulfillment. They’ve got a big job ahead of them and I wish them the best of luck.
This means I’m available for freelance again, after several months of that project taking all my time.
My dance card is filling up rapidly, I guess that happens when you raise a million dollars, but I still have space for projects in the realm of 1-2 weeks of work. If you need video production and editing, voiceovers, UI/UX design, web development and infrastructure consulting, or have some other wacky idea- hit me up by emailing phil @ this domain name.
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7 Years On
I’ve been laid off by Occipital after 7 years and 2 months of 8:30am to 6:30pm days. I didn’t see it coming and it genuinely hurts. I’ve got a little money, but not much. Until the next thing comes around, let’s do some of the stuff we used to:
You can find me streaming RimWorld, Fire Pro, and other stuff on Twitch
I’m still posting too much on Twitter
If you’d like to help me directly, you can join my Patreon for a buck and help me pay my rent / eat food while I work on my indie games, apps, etc.
You can, of course, also hire me to design beautiful, usable, apps, websites, and games for you. Hit me up on LinkedIn or send me an email.
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New Work: “Warming Up The Band”
Occipital has posted a new teaser video I worked on, please do check it out.
This is the first big animated render I’ve ever produced and shown to the public, so far. It was created using Modo 13 on macOS, Final Cut Pro, and Compressor.
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A Deep Dive on Z-Index Usage
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 maybe 99999 to be really sure yours will win. That, at least, is how I write my CSS. In the rest of this post, we will look at millions of z indices to see what everyone else does.
Of course, if you make websites for a living you’ll find this interesting. Like most things available here.
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THE ROAD TO MAGNASANTI
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 fictional metropolis.
Works great with Love2d, and so I am using it in a new (surprise!) wrestling-based project.
Download: astray on github
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).
If you’re still working at Facebook…. why? Is the money that good?
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Rassler Release 12 is now available
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, the 2017 Commodore 64 Game of the Year, is now available on Steam.
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.
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 to load new NES games from the memory card. I was also able to find a way to exploit this ROM loader to patch custom code and data into the game, allowing for code execution via the memory card.
Incredibly detailed and well-written article, goes super deep into reverse-engineering the technology.
Neat tool for drawing cutesy vector shapes:
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 are 5 distinct fill styles (hachure, solid, zigzag, cross-hatch, or dots) and it supports Web Workers with the optional Workly library.
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Universal Mega Dumper
Unnaturally tempted by this project, 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 support many different types of catridge connectors by having general purpose 16 bit data and 24 bit address paths along with a dozen control signals – all of which can be customized for each game cartridge mode.
More on the project page.
In a post on MetaTalk, 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 spaces like Metafilter.
Looks like a heck of a swiss-army-knife of a tool. 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 another app.”
Retrobatch is available as a 14 day free trial, and licenses start at $29.99. Props to Flying Meat for being one of those third-party Mac development houses that just keeps going.
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Super Mario World – Virtual Reality
A gorgeous VR version of the SMW map, rendered in Google Blocks. There is a video of its creation, too.
Via Chappel Ellison
A font constructed entirely by CSS. It is, essentially, a programmatic realtime typeface. I love how it degrades for older versions of IE:
It’s not what I’d consider practical for production use. Still, CSS Sans is a hell of a demonstration of how far CSS has come since Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer 3 in 1996, which was first browser to implement some of the CSS1 spec (CSS v1 was not yet a W3C recommendation).