Here's a fun game to play: which director maximizes the ratio of "quality of feature film directorial debut" to "quality of the rest of their feature film oeuvre"?

I think Darren Aronofsky is the one to beat here. Pi is quite good; it's got just enough science fiction to feel exciting and superreal, but it's otherwise quite restrained. His work as a whole^[1] is just the opposite: unsubtle and excessive, even masturbatory, lunging at deep questions but lacking anywhere near the kind of emotional or artistic maturity to actually address them.

But Aronofsky can't be the only one who fell off a cliff after a great debut. Who else is in the running here?

I wish people would stop using the G-slur (g**fball) already. the proper term is "person of ridiculous demeanor"

developing a headcanon that the chickens in Sekiro are normal sized but most of the people are tiny. the chained ogre is pretty much the size of a child. the demon of hatred is as big as a normal man

I know it's small potatoes in the scope of the illiteracy crisis as a whole, but I'm seeing more and more people misuse "it's" and it's making me despair a bit. I'm not even talking about in casual communication, I've seen it in written works intended for public display, and it makes me so sad that people don't know or don't care or both.

For reference: "its" without an apostrophe is possessive. "It wanted its food". "It's" with an apostrophe is only correct as a shortening of "it is" or "it has". "It's hungry". I know the rules of orthography are silly and arbitrary and this one in particular is inconsistent with how other possessives are written, but however arbitrary the rules are, following them still conveys that you the writer care about your work and that you read other peoples'. Petty and pointless^[1] rule violations suggest to the reader (and most strongly to exactly those readers who do the most reading) that not only do you not take pride in your work, but you don't engage with the wider art form you're trying to contribute to enough to understand its basic patterns.

Typos happen, and that's fine. I make them too! But when I'm writing something substantial or making art to put out into the world, I get people to proofread it so I can catch and fix them. You should too!

Bruno Dias posted 3 August 2026 on azhdarchid.com

I really do think you should learn to use the Linux command line.

I really do think you should learn to use the Linux (or Mac, I suppose) command line if you can find the time at all. It is, genuinely, a dramatically more empowering way to use your computer than the alternative, and it will enable to think about your computer as a tool in ways that are completely different.

So much of what's wrong with "computing", in general, stems from systematic user disempowerment... I think most people my age are cognizant of the harms of young people today not being exposed to even the most basic underlying concepts like the existence of the file system as an independent thing from siloed apps. But a lot of us never took that step backwards of considering the ways in which graphical user interfaces are disempowering. The thing about terminal interfaces is that by nature they must expose every affordance; if something can be done within the system, then it must be doable by a user from the terminal. And those affordances talk to each other, can be automated and connected in ways that go significantly beyond simply being able to toggle something or do something.

There's just such a wealth of useful tools (in the Linux world, at least) that exist as CLI applications. magick is just always going to be better than any graphical utility for doing stuff like converting a png into a jpeg; rg is always going to be the best way to search a bunch of files for a snippet of text. Becoming comfortable with it will eventually give you avenues to make almost any task you do on the computer better.

• #computers
• #the joy of unix

I strongly cosign this post. The command line does a good job of being a lenticular system: one that's easy to use in simple straightforward ways while also providing a large amount of power when necessary^[1]. Here are some absolute basics:

• To access the command line from a desktop, run a program called something like "Terminal" or "Console". The exact program will depend on which flavor of Linux you're using, but it'll almost always come up if you search for "term". This application will look like a big old text box something like this:

  

  This text that's displayed there, nex3@framework16:~$ is called the "command prompt", since it's prompting you to enter a command

• The terminal is your window to the command line. You can type commands in here, and the output of those commands will appear below. For example, if I use the ls command^[2], it'll print the names of all the files and directories in the working directory.

  nex3@framework16:~$ ls
  bin  code  Desktop  Documents  Downloads  Music  Pictures  Public  src  Templates  Videos
  

• "Wait," I hear you ask, "what's the working directory?" Good question, friend! Every command line session takes place in a particular directory…

I probably should have read Computer Power and Human Reason years ago, when all this hype really started getting going. Honestly I should probably have read it in college when I was first getting into programming! But the next best time is now, so I borrowed: my mom's inscribed copy a few months ago (which to be fair she has also never read) and got started.

A lot of the first few chapters is fairly straightforward for anyone who has a basic grounding in computer science. Weizenbaum^[1] is walking an odd line where he's trying to explain concepts like "turing machines" and "assembly languages" to a lay audience without sacrificing either rigor or a relatively academic tone. I'm curious how well this works for someone who genuinely has no prior exposure to this material; to me, all of this is review of the basics of the field, and so ended up feeling a little boring.

But then I got to this section which blew my socks clean off my feet (emphasis mine):

The idea that a person can write a program that embodies anything he "thoroughly understands" is at least equally problematical. Understanding something always means understanding it at a certain level. An actuary uses some fairly sophisticated mathematical tools whose fundamentals he almost certainly doesn't understand or care anything about. Everyone who makes change uses arithmetic, but very few people know or care much about the beautiful axiomatic system on which arithmetic is based. In effect, we all constantly use subroutines whose input-output behavior we believe we know, but whose details we need not and rarely do think about. To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word "because" and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the "why" of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with "obviously," and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word "therefore," only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of natural language and to its inherent ambiguity. The very eloquence that natural language permits sometimes illuminates our words and seems (falsely, to be sure) to illuminate our undeserving logic just as brightly. An interpreter of programming-language texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence. And words like "obviously" are not represented in the primitive vocabularies of…

mpklamerus posted 19 August 2026 on virtualmoose.org

My Birthday Blog Challenge: Write About An Obscure Game

It is my birthday today so I am issuing a blog challenge. That is something you are allowed to do on your birthday. My challenge is to write a blog post about an obscure game, whether it’s a video game, board game, tabletop rpg, LARP, whatever, that you just do not see folks talking about online or easily findable documentation. No Substacks! Also you will not be graded on how obscure it is, don’t worry. If someone sees your post and says “That’s not obscure!” then they can get punched in the face. It’s just for fun. Doesn’t have to be a positive post about the game either, maybe it wasn’t very good. I just think it would be nice to see more documentation online of games rarely discussed and maybe someone will discover a cool new game they never discovered before.

…

I decided to rise to this challenge by loading up the list of all games I've ever played on Backloggd, sorting it from least to most popular, and finding the first one for which I felt I had something worth saying that I hadn't already articulated on my old media journal. What I ended up finding was a game I'd played long before I ever thought of tracking my impressions of media. It's sadly now unplayable due to the creeping march of time, but its place in my history and memory is worth writing about all the same:

nex3 BACKER

reviewed Javaders

★★★½ Retired on Web browser

This was one of a handful of games that my friends and I would play endlessly on the school library computers during lunch in middle school. It, more than anything in an actual cabinet, informed my taste for what "arcadey" games should be: fast-paced, easy to jump back into after a death, with just enough sense of progression and buildcraft to make each attempt feel a bit different than the one before.

It's a damn shame that this isn't playable anymore (I tried both applet-to-WASM plugins to running appletviewer from an old JDK), because I'd love to revisit some of the design decisions with older eyes. Instead, I'll have to make do with decades-old memories of power-ups changing shot shape and damage. In retrospect none of this is that different than any of its contemporary STGs, a genre which I wasn't even totally unfamiliar with at the time—I certainly had access to at least one cab on occasion, although I can't remember which game it held.

But Javaders had the crucial difference of being freely available on the web, even if it was much rougher around the edges, so I could throw myself against it again and again. This too is crucial to the arcade experience, as UFO 50 taught me (or perhaps re-taught me after I forgot the lesson I'd first learned from Javaders itself). The game is as much the progression through one's own skill as it is the progression through the game-space, or rather it's the dialectical relationship between the two. I don't remember for sure, but I think I did see the end of this game back in the day. I certainly put in the time on this game and came away with a fondness for it that's lasted all these years.

Reviewed on Aug 23, 2026

I've moved all my book reviews, both archival and ongoing, onto the StoryGraph (link also available in the header along with my other media review accounts). If you want to see what I think about books, go give it a follow; if I recognize you, I'll follow you back. As with my other reviews, I'll only be cross-posting the ones I think are particularly good, so you'll have to go to the source if you want to see everything.

I've been searching for a really good book tracking website for a long time, and StoryGraph is good enough. I used Goodreads for a number of years, despite finding its Amazon ownership intensely distasteful, because at the time I started tracking books it was the only option with any amount of traction. In addition to (and possibly because of) its position in the evil empire of booksellers, it didn't seem to have developed a single new feature since 2013. In particular, it had no way to look through one's own books by genre or do other cross-referencing tasks that are a major part of what makes these sites valuable to me.

About a year ago, I migrated everything to BookWyrm on a friend's suggestion. It solved the Amazon issue handily, but was a step back on almost every other front. The UI is so bad that it actively discouraged me from tracking books as I read them; it's ridden with subtle differences between different ways of marking books as reading or read or writing reviews that do or don't show up as separate posts on its inexplicable Fediverse backend, and the frontend itself offers no affordances for basic things like indicating that it's processing a request you made. Its database is itself deeply messy, often with half a dozen versions of a single book with none being marked as canonical and no clear path to helping the admins unify them. On top of all that, it provided exactly none of the features I felt Goodreads was missing, if anything making it harder to organize and cross-reference a collection.

StoryGraph improves on all of these issues. It's not Amazon, and in fact explicitly marketed around the fact that it's better than Goodreads which gives me at least a faint hope that whoever runs it would find it politically infeasible to sell out too badly. Its interface is silly in places (it's possible to rate a book up to 5.75 stars due to idiosynratic the way it handles intermediate scores) but entirely functional. And its collection view allows enough cross-referencing to satisfy my general needs.

The thing I don't entirely understand is this: Letterboxd has existed for fifteen years now. It's well-known, it's widely referenced, and it's excellent from a UI standpoint. Its ability to collate and cross-reference films is smooth and universal: every film links its director, its year, and its cast and crew, and clicking on any of these brings you to a standard "film list" view that covers all…

Hatkirby posted 24 July 2026 on www.fourisland.com

How Frog Game Allows You To Modify Map Data

It might look like two trees, but it's actually one. The borders of a top-down map are the same logical space as the borders in the adjacent maps, so those two trees actually represent the same object. It would be a finnicky edge case for the game to have to write two terrain edits to memory specifically when this tree gets destroyed. Instead, both trees are assigned the same global coordinates:

• Left tree is on map (14, 2) at tile (9, 3). Global coordinates are (14 * 9 + 9, 2 * 7 + 3) = (135, 17).
• Right tree is on map (15, 2) at tile (0, 3). Global coordinates are (15 * 9 + 0, 2 * 7 + 3) = (135, 17).

…

• #projects
• #kaeru
• #video games

Hatkirby has been writing a very intriguing series of posts on reverse-engineering For Frog the Bell Tolls, a lovely and underappreciated gem of the Game Boy's library. This is actually just the most recent post; you can read the whole series here (start at the bottom and work your way up). This has a lot in common with my own currently-on-hold reverse engineering projects, and it's interesting to see a lot of the same problems tackled for a very different piece of software with very different tools for working with it.