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I’m in a New Podcast: Before the Future Came
Sooooo, how do you feel about Star Trek? Because I love Star Trek. It has strong visions of what society could be and takes some big swings to try to show those visions as achievable. Sometimes those swings land, and other times they miss in interesting ways. Its vision(s) of utopia are fun to crack open and look at, so I’m co-hosting a podcast to do so! Before the Future Came is a podcast hosted by Lucy Arnold, Gregory Avery-Weir, and yours truly that is not quite yet about Star Trek. Until the SAG-AFTRA strike is over, we are turning our brains to examining utopias in science fiction books, comics,…
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Upcoming Granny Squares updates
Over the weekend of April 22, ye olde Granny Squares Color Generator is getting some upgrades! Unlike previous updates, I’m kinda-sorta locking down the database for this one, so blankets can’t be saved during the maintenance window. It includes getting rid of the already-broken Twitter login (fuck twitter), adding email/password auth, and allowing multiple login methods per user. Not a ton of flashy blanket-related features, but there’s a big database normalization that enables me to set up a not-terrible RESTful API layer, which then lets me implement new blankety features using React. I went into lots of detail over on the GSC forums, so go read that.
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Using Google Assistant with Habitica
So here’s what I did instead of finishing part two of my video game post (or doing FPG work) last night: I got a little service in place so that I can use Google Assistant to add tasks to Habitica, my (adorable) task tracking system. I quite often think of to dos while I’m driving, and haven’t had a good way to get them into Habitica. They’re often quick, contextual thoughts that won’t stick around, like a reminder to check if there’s a Beat Saber map for a song or artist I’m listening to, or a note to check out a game from a podcast I’m listening to. It’s best,…
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Delightful Games to Play (Part 1)
Video games are a pretty huge part of my life. I endeavor to make them. I stream them, both for my monthly Future Proof Plays streams and some on my own. Gregory and I have a standing Saturday morning date to play something before the world begins its demands on our time. I also play quite a lot on my own, although admittedly more in depth than in breadth. I’m often eager to fall in love with a game, especially a game that might land the two objectives I talk about in my Paradise Killer post. As a result, this list of kinda-sorta-okay-definitely-favorites is: Unsorted, Pretty biased towards recently-played games,…
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The Facts and the Truth are Not the Same – Paradise Killer Almost Gets There
There’s a certain kind of game that I’ve become very into in the last few years. These are games that are investigative or explorations of knowledge and that bring one or two important things to the table: They’re definitely going to examine the broken-ass structures of the society they’re set in, and They might offer up a way to break, reshape, or recreate the society to be not-terrible. The first gets me to play a game with gusto. The second makes the game perfect. Paradise Killer is an outstanding game by Kaizen Game Works in which you play Lady Loves Dies, a disgraced immortal investigator let out of prison to…
