I had a dream last night where I was once again a day camp counselor, promising the kids that I'd remember them years down the road. When I woke up, I had that kind of temporal vertigo that people gesture at with the phrase "wanna feel old?" It's been around two decades since I was a counselor, and the little kids I was responsible for^[1] are all now adults well older than I was at the time. The astonishing difference between the reality of that gulf of time and the immediate present-ness of that era in my memories—amplified by the team—sent me reeling.

I think that disconnect is really what hits us when we "feel old". We lived all those years in between our memories of younger days and the present, and we know them to be full of exactly that many years' worth of events and experiences. But vanishingly little of that time was spent in the context of those memories. I spent only a few sunscreen-scented summers as a counselor, and I wasn't there to see how the camp or the kids kept going without me, nor did I think of them all the time in the years afterwards. So when my sleeping mind guides me back to that time, it feels like now because what really counts isn't how many years passed for me or for the camp, it's how many years I spent there specifically, and that of course never changes.

Contrast with my early memories of dating my wife. We met years after I last answered to my camp name^[2], but I find it much easier to intuitively reckon with the distance of those early days with her because I have memories of us together through all the intervening years. To walk back into our first years together would be to cut through the dense thicket of all the times we've spent since then, whereas there's nothing but empty space between now and the day I said goodbye to camp for the last time, and who can judge distance in empty space?

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1. And yes, I do remember them all—or at least the ones who came back week in and week out. ↩︎

2. "Bookworm," named for my habit as a camper of always carrying a book and reading it any moment there was even a brief downtime. Although camp names were typically only used by counselors, I was one of very few campers to go almost exclusively by one even before I aged up into counseling. ↩︎

All I'm saying is that the first government to start funding grants for working on the fun parts of software instead of betting on machine learning as the be-all end-all is gonna have an incredible leg up on prestige and talent acquisition when it comes to shaping the digital world over the next half century. The USA's place as the center of software gravity isn't just eroding, it's being purposefully gutted by short-sighted fools who think they can save labor costs by farming out a medium that requires both creativity and precision to machines that are fundamentally capable of neither. Jobs are scarce and prestigious, fun jobs are scarcer. A huge orchard of talent is ripe for the picking.

And I don't just mean funding grants for open-source libraries or public-service web infrastructure or things like that (although they should do that too). I mean fully arts grants, blank checks to create experimental digital media, video games, demoscene demos, wacky hardware, video game mods. Fund the stuff that engineers do in their spare time as long as they do it on your soil and make it available in your language. Build goodwill, build local networks of skill and renown, and you'll have a lock on the whole culture as America continues to collapse.

[This is a repost of this post I originally made on Cohost on 19 September 2023.]

I've beaten Armored Core VI, all the way through the third loop. I've S-ranked every mission, and then I went back and S-ranked a bunch of them again to get better recordings. I have every piece of equipment, every combat log, every OS upgrade. Although my fingers haven't given up their itch for it, I can't justify playing this game anymore when so many other games are sitting on my virtual shelf, so I'm putting it away. For now.

As I always do with FromSoft titles, I've recorded my major accomplishments. They're available for anyone who's interested in two different playlists:

• My boss fights, including AC fights that felt major enough to be worth including. These are all official story mission victories in the order I did them in my three loops through the game.

• My S ranks, in the order they appear in the game. If you're struggling to S-rank a specific mission, this may help you out.

I had five different Armored Cores I rotated through for the S ranks, largely based on my experimentation during the main game:

FLAUMPTCH Three Time Charmed

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My go-to mech. Double SG-027 ZIMMERMAN shotguns are already a cliché but they're so much fun I can't bring myself to care. They force you to prioritize getting in close, hitting quick, and punishing hard. The digitigrade legs allow for huge quick boosts to get out of dodge fast if the enemy starts a melee attack or an AOE, plus it gives a great kick with a long hitbox—crucial for punishing staggers during this build's long reload windows.

This is a terrific boss-killer and one-on-one battler. Its biggest downsides are the relative lack of long-range options for mob-heavy missions and the low ammunition which makes it ill-suited for long-haul S-ranks.

APOCRITA Plasmatic Surgeon

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A relatively minor variation on FLAUMPTCH, with two Vvc-760PR plasma rifles taking the place of the shotguns and some tweaks to handle the added energy burden and give better long-range tracking. What this lacks in one-on-one stopping power it makes up for in its ability to absolutely mow down MTs and other weak enemies. The plasma rifles have good range and a long-lasting AOE when they land, so they can one-shot all but the toughest mobs.

I use this for missions where the bulk of the fighting is with random smaller enemies, or where I need a good amount of reach. It's great for "tower defense" style missions and some of the trickier "mop up the random MTs" missions where waiting for a shotgun or a missile reload for each enemy is just not practical. It struggles mightily to build up ACS damage against bosses and ACs, so look elsewhere if you want to bring down larger prey.

MAILLARD Cuite à Point

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I'll be honest: when I first saw flamethrowers in AC6, I…

people like to talk up how good babies are at language acquisition but I think they're mostly just stuck with thousands of hours of free time and literally nothing else to do. and even then, if you take me (a 30-something barely-bilingual adult) and stick me in a six-month immersion program for any language under the sun, I guarantee I'll come out able to hold a far more cogent conversation in that language than a six-month-old native speaker

has anyone written a Batman fic where Bruce actually goes to therapy, works through his trauma in a healthy and productive way, starts putting his fortune to work tackling structural issues, eventually realizes that while the Batman persona was borne of trauma and maladaptive coping mechanisms there's a part of it he still loves and identifies with and wants to find a way to embody more positively, and then the punchline is that the whole thing is a prologue to Batman (1966)?

bad art is so critical for being a healthy human being. you gotta see some awful movies or read some dogshit books or play a horrendous video game every now and then. I'm not talking about "I like it despite its flaws" I mean fuckin bad. just to keep your tastes well-calibrated you know?

describing art as "degenerate" because it expresses sexuality is not just classic American Puritanism, it is full-on Nazi shit

It's also quietly racist (as Nazi stuff tends to be when it's not being loudly racist) to frame an archetypically Japanese genre as intrinsically icky. I know present-day Kotaku is even more of a rag than it was historically, but this is particularly disgusting.

it's such a brilliant and hilarious commitment to the bit in Players to write a TV script with approximately two "fuck"s per minute, air it on a streaming network without any censorship, and bleep every single curse anyway

I guess there isn't much about this up anywhere particularly easy to find, is there? Sure, let's get into the history.

It All Starts with Haml

So, before Sass (not SASS), there was Haml. Haml was created way back in the summer of 2006 by Hampton Lintorn-Catlin^[1], when Ruby on Rails had lit the web development world on fire and everyone was rushing to invent cool new ways of writing server-side-rendered web applications with light AJAX support. Rails used YAML for its configuration and Hampton liked the terseness and indentation, so (as he once described to me) he took a template written in ERB (the dominant templating language at the time) and just deleted redundant characters until he got something that felt more DRY. After some tweaks, the result looked essentially like modern Haml:

%section.container
  %h1= post.title
  %h2= post.subtitle
  .content
    = post.content

That fall, just as Haml was released to the public, I was in college taking a Software Design and Development course^[2] in which the instructor encouraged us to get involved with open source projects. Rails being the big thing at the time, I hung out on the mailing list^[3] looking for good opportunities to dip my toes in. When Haml got announced, it was a perfect opportunity: it was still small and easy to understand, and it had a number of clear tasks that needed doing. I started sending patches, and pretty quickly (at least in part by virtue of having a lot more free time between classes than Hampton did with a full-time job), I became the de facto lead developer.

Sass Emerges

Haml quickly becomes quite popular in the Rails world. Writing HTML closing tags by hand kinda sucks, it turns out, and we're not the last to try to solve this in various ways (although we may have been the first). Hampton is a big ideas guy, and he's always excited to find another big thing to dig into. By this point we're working together pretty closely, so at some point in late 2006 he messages me about his idea for "Haml for CSS", which he wants to call "Sass".

That was the original pitch Hampton sold to me: just like Haml was basically just a different syntax for HTML (or more accurately, for ERB, since it did include the ability to inject Ruby code), Sass was going to be just a different syntax for CSS. The first…

I cannot believe they got away with this