My Stupid Blog on Kai's Stupid Website

Kai's epic guide to ethical technology

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:56:30 -0700

This is post one in a two post combo: this one details how you can manage your own technology use, and the other details how you can start owning your own online identity via creating your own website. Both are targeted at people who know next to nothing about such concepts.

In this blog post, I’m going to go over a lot of ethical ideas on the internet and how I’ve found we should use it. I’m also going to be providing a lot of free tools and applications that pretty much anyone my benefit from. If you just want the latter, you can scroll down and go link fishing. Otherwise, strap in for a lot of yapping. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

As much work as this essay has been, I’m certain it’s still imperfect. In my estimations, this piece lands somewhere between academic paper and opinion piece, which has been a hard balance to strike; I’m not sure whether I’ve done it properly. If you find a claim missing a source, take it as opinion, give it some research yourself, and let me know if I’ve messed something up or you find a good source for something I’ve left uncited.

The end goal here is to move towards a more ethical usage of technology. Ethics is not a monolith, and a lot of the points I make in this essay can and should be discussed.

A case for self-managed media consumption

Profit focused social media and the advent of the algorithmic content feed have been a disaster for the human race. If you still happen to use an algorithmic feed regularly, I invite you to ponder

a) how much of your time it takes without your explicit permission
b) what thoughts it makes you think that you would have not thought otherwise and
c) whether the result creates a positive impact on your life, or simply serves as a convenient distraction/ cure for boredom.

If you happen to not love where that pondering has led you, that’s why I’m making this post.

This isn’t going to be a “burn the entire internet” post, but rather one that hopes to re-contextualize the way you perceive it, and hopefully change the way you use it so that it works for you, not the multi-billion dollar corporation profiting off your attention and time.

Do remember as you read this that nobody is perfect. Everyone’s going to have a limit whether that’s time or technical expertise, or something else, and that’s perfectly OK. This kinda stuff isn’t linear either. Sometimes you do a bunch of things, then nothing for a while, then undo some stuff, then do some more. As long as you’re making your best effort to move toward ethical and beneficial usage, that’s what counts.

Background

There’s some stuff that I need to go over before we get into the meat and potatoes, or else you won’t know what the hell I’m on about.

Free & Open Source Software

You’ve probably heard the term “Open Source” thrown around in regards to software, and have correctly ascertained that this means the code that makes the software do things is, well… Open. Not all public code is open source, though, and open source specifically refers to public code that anyone can do anything with. There are a few things that this means, though, that I’m not sure are well understood by the layperson, so I want to give a quick crash course on it now.

First off, you’ve used open source software before. You probably use it every day. Youtube uses FFMPEG for video transcoding. Pretty much every website uses a linux-based server to send you http(s) results, potentially via Nginx or Apache. You know those sketchy youtube to mp3/mp4 downloaders? They’re all almost certainly running yt-dlp behind the scenes. Though for some reason, cough advertising cough, people don’t really know that they can use open source software directly, as well as indirectly.

FOSS is a model that has its pros and cons (that’s a blog post for a later time), but critically, it returns ownership of the software to the individual, and it’s a damn lot better than the proprietary alternative. If a maintainer power trips and tries to close source the software, the community can simply fork it and move on without them. From a user perspective, you simply swap over to the new fork, and keep using it like nothing happened, or just stay on the open version. If you want a new feature, you can ask, and see what exactly is going on, and how progress is coming. If you want to learn how the thing works, or modify it, you can just do that. If you want to share your changes with everyone else, you can. It’s like an entire area of industry completely free of garbage copyright systems– it’s beautiful.

Not everyone will want to take full advantage of the above, but just the comfort alone of knowing that some probably publicly traded company isn’t going to totally lose their shit and fuck me over for having learned their software has made the swap well worth it. Fuck you, Unity.

Are open source alternatives perfect? Nope. Depending on what kind of software you’re looking for, some open alternatives might require hosting, which is a lot of overhead for the layperson, and others might not yet have certain features or creature comforts of proprietary alternatives. But as much as that’s true, I’d also argue some open source software is straight up better everywhere (Hi blender!). All I’m arguing here is to take a look around. It’s free, after all!

“But Kai, it’s free! Doesn’t that mean it’s bad?”

Don’t make me get out the spray bottle. Is a community garden bad because it’s free? No! People volunteer their time and labor for the sake of building something worthwhile, together. With software, you even have the added bonus that there is functionally no scarcity or marginal cost, and thus minimal adverse effects of free riders. With proprietary software getting more and more enshittified, requiring accounts and internet connections, shamelessly harvesting metric tons of user data without permission, moving to subscription models, and generally leveraging users’ sunk cost in their platforms for shameless profiteering, does a free and open source alternative really sound that bad?

Further, just because it is free doesn’t mean the work people are doing isn’t worth paying for. I’d argue it makes it more worth paying for, as you get value out of your money in the form of better software, but everyone else gets that value too! And the people spending their spare time and effort making this thing that everyone uses get compensated for that time and effort, so they can dedicate more of that time and effort back into the project.

Rather backwardly, I suggest that you should instead think about paying for free things!

Ads and Adblocking

This blog post is gonna mention a lot about ads. Ads are how the modern internet works. They’re why huge corporations like Google and Facebook are able to make a profit by giving so much free shit away. They’re also why LLM generated slop populates the vast majority of cooking search results these days. Here’s my silly opinion on ads:

You should block every single one from ever reaching your eyes, and, god forbid, your thoughts. If you ever think about an ad or engage with an ad, the corporation the bought that ad is getting their money’s worth. You can’t get that time or mental energy back; It has already been bought and paid for. This, I would argue, is bad.

If you feel guilty about blocking ads, as that takes money from individuals, you should determine exactly how much time and attention those ads were taking from your life, give your time and sanity some monetary value, and pay creators you care about directly via donations, merch, subscriptions, kofi/patreon, etc… Even if this is just a couple bucks, it’s almost certainly orders of magnitude more than they get from you watching ads on their content, and likely gives them a larger portion of the money as well, as they can choose a platform that allows them a better cut.

I’d also like to point out that viewing ads is a net negative for you as an individual, as it allows corporations to directly influence you and your thoughts. Further, in the age of targeted advertising, viewing ads makes you more valuable to corporations, and thus more profitable to advertise to. Who would you rather serve an ad to, someone who makes an effort to block them and might not see it, or someone who doesn’t? Yep, you simply looking at ads is making corporations money. They’re definitely thankful, but not thankful enough to give you a cut.

This sentiment has been echoed ad-nauseam, but if you’re getting a corporate product with ads for free, you’re the product. Ads make you a product. Every single social media service is working night and day not to make the experience of using their platforms better, but rather to make it more addictive. They only make money when you’re on the platform; ergo, the longer they can keep you on there, the more money they make. The logic holds with news. That cooking example I mentioned earlier. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you see, thus the content is influenced to be longer, more verbose, in order to keep you on that page. You want to game that youtube algorithm as a creator? Make content that keeps people watching youtube and you’ll do fine. Youtube will make sure of it.

This culminates in a rot that has spread across the internet. Most people are not creating to create. Writing to write. The very things that you as the internet denizen are here to experience are being corrupted by the very thing that brings you them for free. They are not. This is the cost.

In summary: pay for free things and fuck ads.

Sidenote: Individual sponsorships

Some of you may be wondering about individual sponsorships that advertisers will give directly to individuals, as opposed to large, platform-wide campaigns that you see on google ads or whatever.

I don’t want to make any statements regarding what exactly those agreements may or may not contain as I assume it’s largely individualized, however I do want to refer you to the above idea on skipping them and just giving the creator money directly. Same deal here. I would rather a creator be able to sustain themselves without having to resort to corporate sponsorships than otherwise, though I do understand that many cannot.

Notably, these too taint the creative output of the individual. Take something as small as referral links. If you’re a computer hardware reviewer, are you going to rank a device without a referral link higher than one with a referral link, even if you know you’ll get less money? Even if everything does have referral links, will you be more inspired to create buyers guides for more expensive products if the kickback is higher? If a corporation has sent you a thing, are you more likely to review it than otherwise?

Evil Design and Dark Patterns.

Ever wonder why it takes half a second and a misclick to accidentally sign up for a subscription of some sort, but 3 days’ hard labor to cancel? This is an example of a dark pattern.

A dark pattern is simply a series of design decisions that when put together exploit users into certain, usually profitable behavior. Think of it as a form of psychological manipulation. Once you’re aware of these, they show up everywhere. Those big countdowns on shopping sites. Raising prices on goods then discounting them to make them appear better value for money.

At some level, a lot of design patterns fall into this category. Think of the algorithmic feed, for example. Some may argue this is a feature, rather than a dark pattern. I would argue that while not necessarily a dark pattern, the constituent components of most algorithmic feeds: data collection for personalization and infinite scroll, among others, combined with the advertising profit motive of most social media companies, almost certainly result in something that is. Something designed to consume as much user time as possible. Something that collects and feeds off user data and optimizes itself to perpetuate that consumption of time even further, as well as market that data to advertisers. Whenever you scroll an algorithmic feed, you’re battling a team of engineers and psychologists each paid hundreds of thousands a year to capture your attention, data, and time. If you’re aware of it, maybe next time you’ll be able to put up a fight.

These properties are not incidental; They’re designed.

Decentralization and Federation

These two ideas frequently come hand in hand, with some caveats.

Decentralization

Decentralization entails the idea that no one entity has full control of something. Something like discord is centralized, where something like email is decentralized: Anyone can run up their own email server, but only discord can run up discord servers. Big email can’t tell you to shut down your email server if they don’t like what you’re sending (your government can, but that’s a whole other can of worms). Discord, however, reserves the right to shut down servers for whatever reason and they just can. They own the servers.

Another benefit of decentralization is your capacity to own your own data. Everything you send on a discord server is un-encrypted and lives on discord’s servers. They can (and do) just read it. Sell it. Hand it to ICE- (SUBTLE FORESHADOWING). This data can also leak by accident, or by coordinated effort from a third party, which gets significantly more likely the more data there is in one place, and the more valuable that data is. Remember kids, data leaks are a “when”. Not an “if”. If you want your data to be safe, never give it to anyone in the first place.

Federation

Federation is a property of decentralized networks that’s important so that this array of servers all owned by various people can talk to each other. It would be annoying if you could only email people on your same email server, right?

Broadly speaking, without federation, bob@website.com can only email other people who have their email hosted on website.com, like felix@website.com but not emily@internet.org. With federation, now bob can email emily@internet.org on internet.org and also ed@website.com on website.com. Very convenient!

This technology is still getting improved as time goes on, but there are already a good number of modern services that make use of it, such as mastodon (twitter-like social media) and matrix (instant messaging) both of which I’ll get into soon. (You can also read me crash out on git servers not having any federation here lol)

Sidenote: Technical people

Yeah I know that email example is a little weak in practice. I’ve found that it serves as a really good explainer for newbies though, as everyone’s heard of and used email, and are at least mostly familiar with its ins and outs.

For you non-technical people reading this because you want to feel included, basically, in theory, email should work as I described, but in practice, if an email isn’t coming from a trusted source, most mainstream providers will mark it as spam and thus the recipient may only find it in their spam folder, or in some cases not at all. This makes self hosting more difficult, but still not impossible. You can use a SMTP relay to get around this problem, but either way you get the idea and this sidenote has probably overstayed its welcome.

Use is endorsement

When you use something, you’re endorsing it. Period. There’s a base level of buy-in contained in simply choose to use something, and continue using it. A level that even words to the contrary can’t counter, as much as we hope they might. Did you pay money for it? Does it send telemetry to the manufacturer? Does it show you ads? Have you developed a set of skills or expertise in its usage? Do other people see you using it? These, and many many more, are all forms of endorsement.

“But Kai these issues are so big and pervasive! And I’m just one silly little guy, what’s one more little silly guy?”

Your presence still lends backing to the platform’s decisions and adds to the platform’s power. If you agree the world would be a better place if everyone sane simultaneously stopped doing something, I would urge you to consider being the change you want to see in the world, taking the hit, and stopping yourself. Or even just shopping around for alternatives.

The reason I want to hammer this one home is that I hear a lot of people excusing their use of problematic technology, and heck, a lot of other stuff this way. “I don’t support Elon but I’m just on twitter for this random ass meme account.” “I support trans people, but i just bought this harry potter merch for the nostalgia.” “I don’t support the bigotry, but I’m just using hyprland for the animations.” (Just use Niri, you’re welcome).

Shade aside, we should stop excusing our unethical behavior like this. Rather, recognize yourself as an imperfect entity, acknowledge the flaws and drawbacks to your specific actions, and try to make them better, one step at a time. Because, again, nobody is perfect, and I wholeheartedly include myself in this group.

I jokingly listed a few examples above, but in theory, a hermit could come along out of the mountains and declare my usage of a laptop computer as unethical due to its sourcing involving the exploitation of laborers around the world, that my purchase and usage of it is a direct endorsement of that system, and they’d be right.

Friends of mine have made very good points that I completely agree with about the ethical benefits of biking as opposed to driving, or vegetarianism as opposed to supporting the meatpacking industry. I currently continue to do both; I couldn’t go climbing as frequently or live my current day-to-day without a car, and would probably starve to death without the protein input that meat provides.

OK so everything sucks, got it. What now?

Now you figure out what’s feasible for you to do, right now, that will make it just a little bit better, a little more ethical. Then you do it. And you keep doing it. That’s the only way any of this gets any better. A shit ton of people doing little things, a bit at a time.

For me, that might involve taking my bike out instead of my car on Mondays. Or taking an afternoon to look for more accessible meat substitutions that I can start integrating into my day to day. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know it’ll be better if everyone did their best to put in a bit of work here and there, little by little, over a long period of time.

These little step-by-step improvements will be inconvenient; That’s the point. We live in a society that has normalized a lot of unethical practices and ideas that will have made themselves a mainstay within our lives, due simply to the adoption-by-default that just happens within these kinds of group structures. Over the course of our lives, it is our job and responsibility as individuals to, at the very least, deconstruct them, question them, and when necessary, deem them unethical. From there we can gauge the degree to which that breach of ethics exists, and finally, at long last, make a truly educated decision as to whether the pros outweigh the cons, and what actions you may be able to take from there to minimize cons and maximize pros. Maybe you do decide to change nothing, but at least you can do so knowing you have made an informed decision.

There’s another good Smashing Frames post on this, that I’d also recommend. You don’t need to agree with everything in there to get a lot out of it; It’s a very thought-provoking piece.

Sidenote: Not there yet.

Please don’t beat yourself up if you can’t do any of this. I’ve been there. Sometimes you’re just not in a place where you can worry about big stuff, and you just have to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. That’s alright too. It won’t help anyone to burn yourself out worrying about this shit on top of your own garbage. Focus on yourself right now, and hopefully you too will eventually have the luxury of worrying about ethics.

Extracting from an embedded platform 101

When thinking about social media platforms, the idea of one or another being “embedded” is almost a socially accepted default. Try to take ten steps into your local music scene without seeing an Instagram page, or using the internet without seeing a discord server. I dare you.

The idea of an embedded social media platform is one in which the majority of the user base is currently on. One that becomes less socially acceptable to not have, and one in which a large body of social interaction takes place. This is convenient for users as it’s a bit of a hassle to move between platforms, however it’s also really profitable for corporations. They can do whatever they want! What are you going to do? Leave? LOL!

Needless to say, this natural FOMO buildup is ruthlessly profited off, due to the incredibly inelastic demand. (Read: Corporations take advantage of you via ruthless advertising and data collection , and they just can as a result of you socially being unable to leave). But leave we must.

I don’t want to, your honor!

“But Kai! All of my friends are on {{nondescript platform name here}}! If I didn’t have it, I would DIE!”

First off, calm down. Perhaps you’ve built up a lot of social infrastructure on said platform and would suffer negative social consequences for leaving. Which is a fair point! But if you think about it, isn’t that itself a problem? Would you be able to reach the people you care about if the platform went down? Or you account got banned?

Even if you’re unable to fully leave, doesn’t mean you can’t start moving towards the door. Using both the embedded platform and a more ethical alternative simultaneously is, in fact an option! This in turn makes it easier for other people to leave as well, as they can follow your lead.

Art and Politics

“Stop making games/movies/music/art political!”

I’ve heard something along these lines too many times. Politics dictates the world we live in. Any artistic piece is inherently in conversation with the political, even and especially if its creators have the privilege to “ignore” politics. This is simply a political argument for the status quo, but still a political argument nonetheless.

Recently, a Lebanese game developer called into my ethics class and showcased his game that he made in a game jam. Among other things, the game engages with the impacts of war on everyday people, specifically children, who make up the game’s two protagonists. Under the material conditions that Lebanon has been under, especially in recent times, how can any art made under these conditions be anything but political? Should the game have been about something completely unrelated, such as a goofy platformer of some sort, how can that be seen as anything other than a distraction or respite from the political hardships that its creators must face every day?

Many of us in more privileged environments have gotten in the habit of conveniently ignoring this, and idealizing the absence of politics in art. This absence simply doesn’t exist, and instead serves as a convenient way for us to avoid difficult conversations and ideas, simply by including them as we wish in our definition of what happens to be “political” and what doesn’t. After all if I can include something in my definition of “political,” and frame being “political” as being bad, then I can simply dismiss the idea wholesale without engaging or contemplating it. This, of course, is simply a badly disguised argument for the status quo; If no outwardly “political” arguments are permissible, then the only option that remains is to continue with things the way they are, which of course is a political argument in and of itself.

Sidenote: Art and Diversity

One of the main targets of this rhetorical strategy that I’ve seen recently is diversity, with many proponents therein appealing to some nebulous idea of merit in place of efforts to diversify, which are deemed political and thus bad. In a neutral society, I completely agree that merit should be the sole deciding factor in something such as employment. However, we must make an effort to realize that the society we live in is not a neutral one, but one built to benefit its creators: Cis, het, white, able, and especially, rich, men. These biases cannot simply be glazed over or hand-waved away. On gender alone, we see depressingly few women and non-binary people make their way into male-dominated fields even today, not because they are any less capable, but rather because the environment is a hostile one. If you’ve ever talked to someone who has a female-presenting voice who plays competitive shooters, you will hear horror stories.

Diversity is a beautiful thing. Different perspectives and life experiences can introduce unique ideas into art that would not have existed otherwise. Much of the art we hold dear is a direct result of a diverse creative environment. We grow as individuals as we learn from others’ way of existing as human beings, and everyone is better off for it.

Efforts of diversity seek not to undermine the idea of merit, but rather the bias of society. Heck, pretty much the only way to get a non-evil career these days, especially in games, is to know someone. If the people in industry are already mostly cis, het, white, able, rich men, what is the proportion of their networks that also hold many of these features as well? When hiring strangers, how likely are they to associate with and “like” someone also possessing these traits, as opposed to someone who does not? This dynamic perpetuates itself. People hire others like them, and those others go on to do the same. No systems designate or spell out this bias; it’s simply human nature to prefer similarity over diversity. The goal is simply to work against this bias.

Wrangling modern tech: A Guide

I did not set out to write a hit piece, but I have started and cannot be stopped. If you wish to skip the turmoil, you need not read this whole section.

Each header not only contains a justification for its inclusion, but also a list of alternatives, and most importantly, even steps that can be taken on said platform if you’re unwilling to leave in full. I’ll also broadly go over major corporations, or as I’ll be referring to them: megacorps, in the space. And yes, it is always ethically OK to deadname corporations.

Someone stop me from ever doing this ever again :3

Megacorp | Apple

Due to my focus on Free and Open technology in this essay, I will not be touching much on apple. I genuinely have few complaints with the quality of their hardware or their software, but my disdain for their products focuses purely on their anti-consumer, anti-ownership design practices. If I cannot flash custom firmware or uninstall the bootloader on a computer I have purchased with my own money, I do not own the computer. If I cannot take apart and repair or upgrade a computer I have purchased with my own money, I do not own the computer. And the term “Computer” in this context applies to mobile devices as well.

I’m being a bit hyperbolic, and perhaps you don’t see the value in these things, but I’ve seen many apple users complain about the failings of the “Liquid Glass” design philosophy (especially as far as legibility goes), as well as ludicrous repair costs, on top of the already ludicrous hardware costs, all of which would be significantly better off if apple had to compete in any meaningful way without locking its users into its ecosystem. No apple, even in the modern day RAM hellscape, 16GB of DDR5 does not cost $400. It currently costs half that ($200), and should cost an eighth of that ($50).

Of course, Many apple users have knowingly traded ownership for convenience, which is a decision I respect, though would urge you to potentially reconsider, regarding the broader context of this essay.

If you wish to remain on apple, you can likely still use linux through the asahi project, in full, or in part alongside MacOS. (Though notably, to the best of my understanding, this only piggybacks off the MacOS bootloader, as the thing can’t boot anything other than MacOS. Weird!).

Alternatives

Mac hardware alternatives are numerous. I own a framework, and generally like what they do, other than the fact that they continue to donate to hyprland, which I find issue with. Most x86_64 computers will work fine (Read: most things that come with windows installed). If you like battery life and don’t mind compatibility issues, arm computers exist as well, which is the same tech that runs modern macs (which also suffer from the same compatibility problems).

If you’re crazy like me, you might find interest in the open standard RISC-V instruction set. Quick architecture summary: x86 is bad and proprietary, arm is good but proprietary, risc-v is good and open. Unfortunately, the more open you get the less things work as you’d want them to >:( (If I can save enough money, expect me to burn some on a RISC-V board and try to load NixOS on it)

As far as software alternatives go, if you want to avoid the windows dumpster fire, I’d recommend something like Fedora Workstation, which runs a similar UI to MacOS.

For mobile devices, you’d think I’d say android. You’d be wrong.

Instead, I recommend smashing your phone with a hammer repeatedly, dousing it with gasoline, lighting it on fire, then flinging it into oncoming traffic, off a bridge, or into the fiery magma of mount doom at your earliest convenience.

Megacorp | Google (aka: Alphabet)

Google’s strangle hold on the internet cannot be understated. The term “de-googling” and the sheer difficulty therein pretty succinctly summarizes what we’re up against here.

Chrome

Chromium, the engine behind chrome, makes up an immense amount of the web browser market (pretty much everything that’s not firefox and saf*ri), and it’s completely controlled by google who are in the process of making ad blockers and content blockers less effective. Ublock Origin is open source and incredibly powerful (stop reading and go install it now if you haven’t already), however Chromium based browsers (Chrome, edge, opera, brave, vivaldi, etc…) do not support the full version due to this.

There is a Lite version of ublock that supports chromium, which I would recommend if you’re committed to a chromium browser. If you wish to do more without fully swapping off chromium, you can use an open source chromium implementation such as Ungoogled Chromium or Qutebrowser.

Alternatives

Firefox! It’s not perfect; It’s primarily funded by google in order to keep the default search engine as Google, but it’s still not unilaterally controlled by google, which does make it better in my book.

Some firefox-based browser suggestions:

Librewolf - Don’t wanna think about it? Do this one.
Waterfox - Has some really neat features, such as tree style tabs.
Zen - Beta, lets you “glance” at a window and quick return to the original webpage.
Firefox - It works!

If you want to do something privately, I wholeheartedly recommend having the Tor Browser on hand. It’s free, and does almost everything a VPN does, but better. The real privacy threat these days isn’t IP addresses, but rather browser fingerprinting, which Tor works to mitigate. It sounds intimidating, but in reality it just does its thing, is a bit slower than your average browser, and does what you tell it to.

Google, the search engine

Believe it or not, these are different from your browser! A search engine is a website; a browser is the program that runs on your computer to show you websites.

Unfortunately, google pays pretty much every major browser to make Google the default search engine. And now, google unhelpfully presents bullshit as the first result, which most people will simply read and take at face value. That combined with the number of ads that google is shoving into their results, and their recent use of LLMs to rewrite headlines, the case for swapping off remains strong.

There are browser addons that allow modification of google search results, such as the helpfully named google AI overviews blocker. But I’m sure more exist.

Alternatives

I’d recommend Startpage or Duckduckgo for the layperson.

For the power users LibreY and SearXNG might be worth a shot. I think I might run up an instance of the former on my homelab soonish. There’s also Marginalia Search, which is a surprise tool that will help us later. Subtle foreshadowing

Gmail & Email

I foreshadowed this one earlier, but email is notoriously centralized, despite being an open protocol, due simply to the fact that major providers that host most everyday peoples’ emails have broadly agreed to be assholes about it. Gmail is definitely the worst offender here, though Microsoft outlook is almost certainly doing this as well. Email is also notoriously insecure, and can be read by your email provider, and used for LLM training, advertising, etc… There’s not much you can do about this, as only certain email providers allow any form of encryption, let alone end-to-end encryption, and any attempt to communicate with someone who doesn’t use such systems will inevitably leak data. Regardless, more people using secure and privacy-respecting email hosting is only a good thing, and I would still recommend swapping.

If you can’t swap off Gmail at the moment, look at toggling off LLM features, though I can’t speak to this doing anything other than ticking off the user-facing features. As far as I can tell, outlook has no such toggle.

Another thing you can do is try using an open source email client like Thunderbird so you can minimize the direct access they have to your computer, though, this doesn’t address the concerns with content on the server being read.

Alternatives

As far as free alternatives go, Tuta offers 1GB for free, with 20GB for ~3€ per month. Proton has a similar 1GB plan, however also has A few problems, enough that I don’t necessarily endorse it, though it’s definitely better than Google. Fastmail is a pretty solid paid option from what I can tell as well.

I personally will be looking at self hosting my own email server through Mailcow and routing traffic through an SMTP relay, though this looks to be a cripplingly technical endeavor, so I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart.

Android, the OS

The mobile market is genuinely the most horrific wasteland of corporate abuse I’ve yet to come upon in technology. Android sits at a cool 67% market share. (not one word. I will kill you.) The rest are iOS, which, no surprise, already suffer from the following lacks of freedom.

Android may be based upon the Linux kernel, but has diverged and become an incredibly closed environment as compared to other linux distributions, which it doesn’t even consider itself anymore. The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) has moved much of its development behind closed doors, and much of mainline android is closed source, and not included in the AOSP, and rather added on top of it through proprietary services such as google play services. These include pretty vital elements of the operating system.

Further, many android phones have disabled rooting entirely, and even bootloader access is being fully prohibited (as I recently discovered with my piece of shit Samsung), and many more are installing hardware level trips that will permanently disable applications on rooted devices. These actions are plain malicious, aimed at discouraging and preventing reclamation of ownership, and locking users into controlled environments. It’s becoming more and more likely that you’ll have to buy a phone that specifically allows you to own it than just owning a device as a result of having purchased it. If this was the case for desktop computers, every PC would operate like a console. This would be unacceptable. Yet on a small computer (a phone), it’s perfectly fine. It’s genuinely insane how normalized this kind of behavior has become.

And worst of all, soon you will need google’s express permission to simply run applications on the device that you have bought with your own money. This is literally the “isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?” meme, but for running shit on a device you supposedly own, running a supposedly “open source” operating system. Of course the onus of registration goes to the developer and not the user, making it so much easier for the average person to handwave, but this is some 1984 shit. If I want to run some shitty C code I wrote in an afternoon, or code that someone (who does not wish to dox themselves to google) wrote, on a thing that I own, I should not have to ask google pretty please to let me go and do that. I should not have to ping google servers and wait 24 hours to turn off this behavior, which is something they can simply remove quietly later on to little backlash. This is a horrifying level of power that one company is demanding over 67% of all mobile devices globally.

TL;DR? As with apple, I recommend smashing your phone with a hammer repeatedly, dousing it with gasoline, lighting it on fire, then flinging it into oncoming traffic, off a bridge, or into the fiery magma of mount doom at your earliest convenience.

I’m being a bit facetious. You have a few more options here, but they all have asterisks, which is what drives my genuine hatred for the mobile form factor. First off if you can root your phone, do it, and install something like /e/os, which replaces the proprietary google play services with the open source microG. Alternatively, if you have a phone that supports grapheneos I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. The maintainers are a bit… Prickly, but the software itself looks incredibly well-hardened.

Alternatives

Honestly? At this point a flip phone, or forgoing a phone entirely might be the best option here for non-technical users. Pretty much everything is android, and everything non-android comes with cringe-inducing drawbacks, as almost every modern mobile device is made specifically for android.

The obvious caveat is linux phones. Compared to the AOSP, these are comparatively early in development, and many require specific hardware. PostmarketOS looks promising, but is not nearly polished enough for the layperson. Devices like the Fairphone and Pine phone have promise, but are still too niche to benefit from economies of scale, among other usability problems that frequently derive from young projects. In time, I’m sure the situation will improve, however at the moment, we’re pretty much cooked.

Personally, when I find the time in my god-forsaken life, I’m going to assemble a custom cyberdeck and throw NixOS on it. Then, I think you know exactly what I’m going to do with my phone.

Google maps

Google Maps, or apple’s alternative for that matter, are pretty much a mainstay in most peoples’ day to day. Unfortunately that does give incredibly precise location data directly to google. I will concede that the utility of sharing location data with the Megacorp is not zero; you do get traffic statistics out of it. But do understand you are selling your data in exchange for this service.

Google has also begun to pretty aggressively advertise within maps. Have you heard it say “Turn left at the Starbucks,” replacing the coffee chain with any given store? I’d bet money that many of those callouts, if not all of them, are paid sponsorships. I also wouldn’t trust the reviews on there either, as businesses have been manipulating those systems like crazy for years. Not to mention the sheer bloat of the software itself. It takes concerningly long to launch, and overheats my phone concerningly often, for what should be a simple map.

Honestly at a more fundamental level, I’d argue that tools like google maps are doing the same thing to our sense of direction as LLMs are to our capacity to think. Maybe we should consider relying on them less often, just in general. Try going to a place without navigation every now and again. Turn it on if you miss a turn or get lost.

Alternatives

When I really need a map, I’ve been using Comaps which is based on the splendid Open Street Map project. It’s handled pretty much anything I’ve thrown at it thus far. The main downside is that it’s not perfect about listing stores and such, and keeping those listings up to date. The good news is that if you know something about a place, you can easily contribute that information back to openstreetmap and make the community project just a little bit better for everyone else. I’d recommend it!

Youtube

It’s genuinely insane how monopolized the video hosting market is as a result of youtube. Video hosting is not an easy problem, nor is it a cheap one, but just because one platform is giving out free shit, should we allow them to dominate the market, shoving ever more ads, shorts, and slop into it?

If you, like me, still use youtube because you’re a slave to long-form video content (hbomberguy release the adobe essay please I’m fiending for it), the following modifications can improve your quality of life considerably.

Ublock should take care of the injected ads, but Sponsor Block takes care of the embedded ones (eg: “This video is sponsored by…”) by simply crowdsourcing sponsor timings and fast-forwarding through them automatically.

Hate youtube shorts? Do the things grab your face and eat an entire afternoon, after which you don’t remember a single thing you watched? Improve Youtube lets you mod them out completely.

It also lets you make a couple more important modifications to youtube as a whole: removing the algorithmic feeds. Look, I love endless videoslop as much as the next person but at some point enough is enough. I need to have a semblance of ownership over the news, entertainment, and content that I consume. The main edits here are as follows:

I completely remove the homepage and replace it with the subscription timeline. If I want something to show up on my feed, I’ll subscribe to its creator. Novel idea, I know. (especially considering youtube has been moving away from algorithmically showing you videos from your subscribed channels if you don’t click on them consistently enough).
I’ve also killed the recommended sidebar and endscreen so that I don’t get recommended more videos after the one I’ve picked. These changes combine to a platform with clear end points. If a video’s over, it’s over. If I’ve run out of subscribed content, then I can’t keep watching youtube. Simple as that.

If you use youtube on your phone, you’ll notice the app doesn’t benefit from browser addons, unless you want to use the web app, which is not great. For android users, you can actually patch a custom youtube app via revanced. This allows you to make most of the above modifications, in the app. Including the adblock and sponsorblock. Waiter waiter! 3 bajillion dollars to the revanced team please!

Want to go even further? Check out invidious which does away with the classic youtube frontend entirely.

Alternatives

Youtube is a tough one to replace due to the heavy infrastructure that video upload and playback requires. Nonetheless, Peertube, a FOSS alternative, has risen to the occasion. It’s not a full youtube replacement yet, but functionally it works, so now it just needs to build the userbase. As an added bonus, it’s also federated, which means you can host your own peertube instance and have everything hosted on your own hardware, while also optionally communicating with other people doing the same.

You can actually find my peertube account here! (Thanks a bunch to makertube for letting me onto their server!).

Discord

We got complacent with discord. For a while, they provided a free service without ads, and maintained it sanely. Take it from someone whose first baby steps into programming was making little discord bots in discord.py; That discord is dead. It has been gutted by the forces of capital and thrown in a ditch to rot, save for its skin, which is now worn by its killers.

Now, a former blizzard executive and McKinsey consultant sits in charge of the corporation, charged with driving value for investors in the company’s looming IPO. They’ve reduced the free upload file size limit. They’ve introduced deeply integrated ads into their platform, to great effect, and concerningly little backlash. They’ve been trying to insert themselves as critical game infrastructure in the form of their social SDK. And are using the metric tons of un-encrypted data users give them to, at the very least, give directly to ICE, and even train predictive models off of– “we have an internal system that works to accurately determine your age.” (Stanislav Vishnevskiy, discord CTO) How does it do that discord? Please elaborate!

Speaking of, let’s get into age verification, shall we? They’ve kept user government ID photos that they claim to delete “within sixty days after the age appeal ticket is closed” (source) as showcased by the recent data breach that exposed government IDs of at least 70,000 people who submitted one to discord. (Yes I am aware the breach was from a subcontractor. No, I do not care. Corporations should be held fully accountable and liable for vetting and overseeing their subcontractors, period.) And this was before the whole recent mandatory verification thing!

Now they’re rolling out sweeping global age verification largely without governmental obligation. For what purpose? If I had to guess, I’d say brand safety going into the IPO. Accusations of grooming and CSAM on your platform scare investors, so you need a convenient defense to hide behind while doing nothing to actually help the situation. And No, collecting a bunch of high value data on children in a convenient little hackable bundle, and creating further stratification between adults and children where groomers can simply choose to move to childrens’ spaces is NOT helping kids.

Further, the companies that they’ve been using to verify peoples’ ages since this new initiative are hardly ideal. Persona, an age ID company funded upwards of $200 million by Epstien lister, Palantir founder and chairman, and overall slime bucket Peter Thiel, (or more specifically his VC fund), has been temporarily used by discord for verification purposes as a “test”. The simple fact that they’re even entertaining the idea of giving childrens’ government IDs to a company so closely tied with someone on the epstien list IS NOT GOOD.

K-ID, their main age verification provider, however, has the vaguest nothing-burger-ass data retention policy: “We store [user data] as long as you use our Services, or as necessary to fulfill the purpose(s) for which it was collected, provide our Services, resolve disputes, establish legal defenses, conduct audits, enforce our agreements, and comply with applicable laws.” (source). That could mean literally any length of time. Their backing is also pretty hilariously bad, having drawn a notable ~$45 million from nationalistic defense nuts and investors in autonomous military robotics andressen horowitz.

A few of the above links were helpfully sourced from this rogue article on the subject, which I would recommend reading as well.

TL;DR? Fuck Discord!

If you wish to continue using discord in full or in part, I would recommend using vencord or another client mod to prevent discord from having clientside access to your computer. If possible, try uninstalling any native apps and just accessing it via web.

It’s a worse experience, and that’s the point. The added friction makes using the platform more difficult, and as such I can move towards using it less. I personally lost a lot of time and energy constantly sifting through notifications and getting distracted by pings (That shit is literally just a skinner box istg), so having to consciously make my way to the website irregularly when I choose to was incredibly helpful. I also set clear digital boundaries with friends and told them that I would no longer be reliably reachable over discord. If someone wishes to contact me urgently, I have offered everyone I care about my contact information via text and signal.

Alternatives

I can solidly recommend the matrix protocol (specifically the element client) as something that’s been put through its paces. It’s got pretty much every feature out there.

If you’re in the mood to try something younger, fluxer has pretty much feature parity with discord, (sans a mobile app, for the moment), and has a solid roadmap; I’m pretty optimistic about its direction.

Additionally, if you only really need group chats, I’ve found signal really well designed, and generally use it for as much as I can, especially after leaving discord.

For communities, L + self-host discourse. It’s not a chat platform. That’s what makes it great. Instant messaging for online communities was a mistake. Need vc? That’s what Jitsi and Mumble are for. Reject modernity; return to forum.

Tik Tok

TODO

Megacorp | Amazon

TODO

Twitch

TODO

Alternatives

Twitter

You don’t need me to tell you twitter is not good. I think we all collectively know this by now. If you need some reminders other than the nazi running the show and the whole mecha hitler/ infinite CSAM generator things, here’s a relatively recent Last Week Tonight Episode that highlights some pretty major problems with the platform.

I personally have never used twitter, so I can’t help very much as far as usage goes, but general social media etiquette concepts as discussed elsewhere in this piece should apply here. I’ve seen nitter tossed around as an alternative frontend, but I have no experience with it, so I can’t speak to its quality.

Alternatives

More and more, I’ve been convinced that open source, decentralized, federated social media is the only way forward. And no project is more emblematic of that ideal than mastodon. Give mastodon a shot; look around for good servers, they’re like little communities scattered around. I’m here on peoplemaking.games. The best part is whichever one you choose, you can still talk to the entire rest of the network. This is how digital spaces should work.

Bluesky definitely exists. It’s technically open source, though it’s very centralized in its design, and it’s developers are taking VC money to scale it, which doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. More people (and bots) are on it than mastodon though, so if you care about that, then this might be the way to go.

Megacorp | Facebook

These fuckers explicitly allow trans slurs on their platforms. Like that shit was written out on training material. Their hateful conduct policy also kindly allows us to be discriminated against, and called mentally ill. Fun!

They’ve also intentionally stopped investigations into scam ads on their platforms due to the profit motive.

Even their most “private” application, Whatsapp (which implements the Signal protocol, lol), collects pretty much everything that’s not your message contents, and uses it to train content serving models for the algorithmic feed as well as profile your account to sell to advertisers. That privacy policy is rough.

As far as continued use goes, Facebook as a company is really locked down, so any attempts at recreating alternative frontends have died as far as I can tell. As with anything else, a good compromise can be found in deleting apps and using simple web applications within your browser.

Alternatives

For Instagram, which I see as the biggest hurdle here, there’s a great, mastodon-based, FOSS alternative called Pixelfed.

For any messaging functionality, I’d defer to Signal.

It bears repeating that this kind of platform is one of the more entrenched ones, as most people are only on it because their friends are as well. If you skimmed that section above, definitely give it a read.

Megacorp | Microslop

I want to flag that Microsoft is a priority target of the bds boycott due to their azure cloud services provided to the Israeli military for the surveillance and genocide of innocent civilians.

TODO

Windows

The device you use to access the internet isn’t just a neutral conduit to the internet; Rather, it’s an incredibly sophisticated amalgamation of hardware and software, all designed by corporate entity for the purpose of profit. (The internet isn’t a neutral entity either, but I digress)

Not only are modern operating systems designed meticulously for user retention and data collection (especially mobile ones), but even the hardware is getting more invasive and locked down. Once you realize how many household objects need to ping manufacturer servers, many requiring an end user account, there’s no going back. Look up the intel ME if you want to get really paranoid.

If you still need to use windows, in full or in part (dual booting is a great option for bi(OS)-curious individuals!), I’d recommend looking at the winutil framework to make the thing even a little bit usable.

Alternatives

This topic is a whole blog post on its own, but I would be remiss if I didn’t encourage you to give linux (Mint/ Fedora) a try on your current hardware. It’s a reasonable, privacy-respecting operating system that serves as a perfectly viable alternative for many windows and mac users, and, in any case, is a much more attainable goal than swapping all your hardware to RISC-V (my beloved), or burning your phone with gasoline and casting it into the cursed pit from whence it came.

Github

OK OK I know no sane layperson is going to be thinking about github in their spare time, so feel free to skip this one if you just don’t care.

Since I’ve gotten further into FOSS, github has become something of a bastion. A stupid percentage of FOSS projects use github as a collaborative platform, and as such, I’m compelled to be on there as well, and for a time did so happily.

These days it’s a monopoly on the FOSS ecosystem held in place by Microsoft. That’s why we haven’t seen federation take off for code forges. It’s simply more convenient for Microsoft that everyone be platform locked to github. It’s effectively holding the community hostage. Want traffic? Use github.

And given the aforementioned boycott, I have been making an effort to leave.

Alternatives

Codeberg is perfect if you just need something to work and you’re cool with your code being public. git.gay seems silly as well, but I can’t speak to their uptime.

I personally have a forgejo server on my homelab that I use for private projects (read: a dwarf fortress game I’m playing with a friend)

Minecraft

Yeah. It hurts me too, but it’s Microsoft and it’s literally called out on the fucking boycott page.

Alternatives

The worst part is that there’s a thriving open source competitor to Minecraft called lunati. It’s like right there, people! Then again, we play Minecraft for the nostalgia, not the gameplay, so perhaps this one’s a harder sell than I give it credit for.

Life 360

SCREAMING

TODO

Alternatives

Dating apps

I don’t see this one talked about a lot, but it’s personally a little horrifying how normalized these have become. Skirting over the many problems with objectifying people that plague these platforms, they also suffer from the same corporate greed that runs social media companies. Keeping people on-platform is how they make money. Doing their literal job is the antithesis to the point of their existence. They just need to jingle some keys in front of you to give you hope every now and then, and ka-bam, instant money printer. It also feels pretty icky to me how they play with social dynamics for profit, though in fairness, pretty much any profit-focused social media company will also be doing this.

Alternatives

The death of third spaces fucking sucks, but that doesn’t mean we need to stop trying. Local maker spaces, events, and hobby/user groups still exist, they’re just a bit harder to find. Go outside and talk to strangers. Set up a recurring board game night at your place. Make a community, a support system. Asking friends to set you up on dates isn’t normalized anymore, but you can still try.

Bottom line, there are things you can do to meet people. It’s not as easy as I hear it used to be, but nothing ever is. We still have to try.

Smart TVs

OK this is a bit of a weird one, but oh my god those TV operating systems are fucking evil. Burn them all.

TODO: Netflix are assholes

Alternatives

Get a mini computer, throw something like the upcoming kde plasma bigscreen on it, and plug it into your TV, and use the thing like a big monitor.

Or alternatively…

Routers

TODO

Hey. Did you know you can block all ads on your home wifi? Go take a look at the pi-hole project.

Conclusion

This was probably pretty depressing up to now. Not to worry, this post gets better!

The Ethics of Slop

I’ve been at ends about slop posting on my blog. My main thought pattern is thus: I simply don’t want to give it credence by talking about it more, and the less time it spends cluttering my mind, the better. That said, in a manifesto-style schizo-post on tech usage such as this one, there’s really no getting around it.

I will be referring to these concepts as “LLMs and Generative Models” or more succinctly, just “slop”. The term “AI” is unfathomably broad and applies to completely unrelated concepts such as enemy behavior trees in games. It is also the preferred corporate language for these objects that also just so happens to evoke profitable misconceptions about the functionality and efficacy therein, so I will not be using it. Ali Alkhatib has a good blog post, defining the term “AI” as a political term rather than a technological one, which divorces it from the disparate technologies that it’s used to refer to, and gives the term genuine utility once again.

Off the bat, on ethical grounds, I do not use LLMs and Generative Models, I avoid tools that include slop features wherever possible, and I’ve been working to avoid software that is built with these tools where I can. Though that last point has become almost entirely unfeasible, as I will get into later.

I’ll also be starting by temporarily putting the many ethical implications of using such tools aside, and defining what we’re working with in a vacuum, then moving on to those full ethical implications, so please bear with me. This is a field that’s still relatively new and incredibly nuanced, so I’ll do my best and hope nothing ages too badly! Anyone who happens to study these things is more than welcome to reach out if they find any technical or logical inaccuracies in the following.

LLMs

First order of business, LLMs are autocorrect. Autocorrect is not your friend. Autocorrect is not an expert. Autocorrect is not an omniscient god. Though, autocorrect is actually a pretty good thesaurus. I can’t necessarily speak to its programming capabilities due to my ethical aversion, (though I’m skeptical of misuse and laziness), but I’ll link a recent blog post from a friend who has a bit more depth of experience and can speak to the tech a bit better. And finally, if we’re getting philosophical, it’s also a pretty good mirror of the internet and broader societal perception as a whole. Let’s talk.

My Ethics Teacher has likened a LLM to a lossy snapshot of the internet. I really like this comparison, as it succinctly captures the essence of a LLM. The only reason LLMs can do what they do is the sheer mass of data that they require to operate. They get this data by scraping the internet. I’ll get into the more dubious elements therein later, but for our purposes right now, this accumulation of data allows someone to ask a model something, and get the “average” answer. Not necessarily the correct answer, as LLMs have no idea what truth even is, but the average answer, as represented by the accumulation of data. The goal with this data is to reproduce natural-sounding language. In this goal, I think everyone can generally agree, LLMs have succeeded. Is this a genuine use case? Perhaps a little bit, as I mentioned above, as a thesaurus. However, as I said earlier, they have no conception of the truth, and thus the validity of any generated statement should be perpetually in question.

“ChatGPT is Bullshit” (Hicks, Humphries, Slater) is an ethics paper that describes LLM output not as truths, lies, or hallucination, but rather as “Bullshit.” And it does so in a technical sense, rather than a colloquial one. The term “bullshit” in this context sits at odds with the ideas of truth and lies. Both truth and lies acknowledge the presence of a truth, they simply have opposing goals regarding it. Conversely, Bullshit has no regard for truth whatsoever. Doubtlessly, many people are adept bullshitters in this sense, but this characterization of LLM output seems pretty spot on to me.

The paper goes on to contest the term “hallucination” in the context of falsehoods contained within LLM output, as it suggests a level of perception that exists in the model in the first place that is then being undermined in some way. This perception does not exist in the first place, so this term unduly anthropomorphises models and gives users a false image of their capabilities and salience. Further, they argue the process that results in a generated falsehood and the process that does not are one and the same. These falsehoods are not a hiccup or bug of the model, but are simply artifacts of the LLM, as designed. The term “hallucination” does not characterize them as such, where “bullshit” does.

The aggregate data elements of LLMs are pretty genuinely fascinating though, especially as a mode of querying societal perceptions and inequity. A few of the examples that my ethics teacher showed me in class involved asking a LLM to give you a jail sentence in days based on two crimes, and change only the gender or race between the two (a black person was given double the sentence as a white person, all else equal), asking a LLM whether certain groups of people deserved basic human rights, (to which it responded “all people deserve human rights”), then asking whether Palestinians deserve human rights, (to which it responded a concerningly long and verbose “it’s complicated”). Like it or not, this is what we’re working with. This is the aggregate of pretty much the entire internet and every single piece of information that AI companies could get their hands on. And like it or not, that does say something about the people whose information trained it. All of us.

Of course, this is a mostly un-scientific mode of drawing conclusions, but it does highlight a lot of important ideas and issues with our society as a whole, and if that can shake someone out of the malaise of ignorance or apathy, then I think the technology does have a bit of genuine value! Of course, coming back to planet earth, we’re not using LLMs like this. We’ve actually sprinted away from this kind of LLM behavior as fast as our little legs can take us. After all, nobody wants to hear about modern day prejudice, and it would be a lot more convenient to duct tape those parts of the model off so the shareholders don’t see our model going haywire and calling itself something crazy like “mecha hitler” or something. God forbid they start thinking there might be something wrong with the society and individuals that ended up producing that output. No, no. Better to guardrail it and pretend everything’s fine. Much easier than making positive societal change.

Like it or not, these datasets are inherently biased. biased toward ideas and cultures that are primarily represented in the data.

Unfortunately in the context of how we use LLMs now (Read: for literally fucking everything why the fuck are we putting LLMs in toothbrushes fuck literally everything I just $50 of RAM to cost $50 sobbing), I think realistically the best case scenario is that those guardrails get real good real fast. Heavy benefit of the doubt here, but assuming the whole Grok CSAM thing wasn’t intentional, that kind of usage is just going to get more common as models become more and more accessible. These companies in charge must be held to standards and regulation hitherto unseen, or some really fucking bad shit is going to happen. Though, what am I even saying, you probably heard a little laugh track in your head at the word “regulation.” Me too, buddy. Me too.

Generative Models

I don’t think I fully understand the value of generative models. Images, video, music, speech, etc… At the very least it’s a moderately interesting technical problem, but its existence only really serves to replace people in creative industry with the hollow shell of pure output. This touches a bit on the idea of commodification of art, and the Kantian use of people as mere means.

Art posting

Oh boy here I go art posting again! Broadly, I like to define art as human expression. This definition is quite broad and includes a lot of crazy shit that people might not conventionally think of as “art.” I do not care. Perspective is a key aspect of art, so gatekeeping an artist by telling them their art isn’t art isn’t productive nor helpful. Instead, we should critique the art itself, and if necessary, simply concede that it’s not for us, whatever it may be. The value in art, however, is not the residue that it sometimes results in, but rather in the process itself. The lessons learned. The skills obtained. The base human joy of creation and expression. This is what makes art beautiful and what makes us grow as artists and as people.

However,this system of ours prioritizes only what can be sold: that residue. And in doing so, it tells people that the rest does not matter. If there’s only one take away you’re taking from this section, I want it to be that you should appreciate the beauty of the artistic process just a little bit more.

Slop == art?

So, what does this make slop? Well, it’s complicated.

First off, let’s look at the model itself. I think the engineering and programming that people did to create such a thing definitely qualifies as such. In this sense, a LLM or generative model itself is art. Now, I’m not making any statements as to the quality, morality, or societal implications of the piece, but I do think it’s art.

Now for the output. I want to take a leaf out of other artistic mediums here to make my argument. Imagine, if you will, an art exhibit that involves the viewer somehow. This could be an interactive museum exhibit or a pretentious art installation in a gallery. For the sake of the argument I’ll imagine a contraption of some sort with a weight, and a paintbrush, and a set of canvases. Viewers are encouraged to gently push the weight in their preferred direction, and observe the contraption paint. There is no argument that the contraption itself is art. However, in its inclusion of the viewer, it creates some further questions: is the interaction between the viewer and the piece art? And is the resulting painting artistic residue? I would argue yes.

In my mind, this is actually a very simple game. Games feature an interesting dichotomy of art, where both the game itself is art, but so are the players’ interactions with it (eg: speedrunning). Let’s label this derivative art “secondary art.” These secondary arts are (almost always) both an intended and a designed effect by the designer of the primary piece. The designer of our painting machine designed the thing to be interacted with in a certain way: Pushing the weight. However the secondary artist need not interact with it thus.

Perhaps they take the weight off and attempt to paint a friend’s portrait using the mechanics of the contraption. Or figure out a modification for the mechanics that allow the machine to interpret the swinging of the weight completely differently. Or use the machine as a paperweight. This is very similar to how many D&D players use 5e! Most players, however, will simply choose the simplest or most straightforward, optimal option. As game designers, this is what we optimize and design for; Our goal is to make this optimal option also the most fun option. Or the most punishing option. Or the most thematically interesting option. In doing so, we are designing around player behavior. We are shaping this secondary art’s possibility space. We are (usually) not designing for when players decompile our game and hack in an infinite cheese spawner. Yet the latter is, without a doubt, a much more creative mode of secondary art than simple, straightforward engagement with the provided systems.

These varying modes of secondary art create a spectrum of creativity within the possibility space, ranging from art that many would refuse to consider art, to works of genuine wonder*. All this to say: I would pose that the idle generation of slop by a human is a form of secondary art, low on the secondary creativity spectrum.

However, one quick little problem. Where does this spectrum begin and end? Have you created low-creativity secondary art simply by looking at a piece? Thinking about it? NOT thinking about it? (You just lost the game lol) Moreover, if you draw inspiration from another piece in your creation of primary art, is it now secondary art?

*: Disclaimer: This link is included for *comedic effect*. If you do not consider it a work of genuine wonder, feel free to substitute it in your mind for something that is, such as an innovative game mod/ hack or some other form of secondary art. There’s nothing I can do about bad taste, unfortunately.

Gender isn’t real

Just like the socially constructed concept of human gender, I have crafted a false binary structure between primary and secondary art. (Yes, both of those were me; I regret my actions). While there generally “feels” like there should be a distinction, I don’t think there is. Art is derivative, after all. Outside a vacuum why should one art be considered “Primary” and another “secondary?” Each of our tools is a piece of art in some respect, and we all take inspiration from the people and works around us. Is a game mod of Theseus, in which a game mod copies the original source code and completely rewrites it, secondary or primary art? I don’t think the idea of primary and secondary art is entirely useless as a concept to help frame ideas, but push comes to shove, it simply does not hold itself up to scrutiny.

So now that we no longer have our helpful little dichotomy, what do we do about the whole slop problem? Unfortunately, not much. I’m having trouble decoupling the value of art from its effect on the artist. Yes we have this vague idea of a scale of creativity and some concept of learning and acquiring skills, however the only hard and fast conclusion I can come to here is that this effect is fully individualized. There is no true “objective value” of art, insofar as its impact on the artist, (which is generally immeasurable), as much as I’d like there to be one.

That said, I feel strongly that in the use of a tool, especially one as sweeping as a generative model, in the place of learning a craft, the world has lost something of value. Just as craftsmanship declined with the rise of the industrial revolution and the advent of mass-production, replaced with the soulless, uncomprehending usage of machines, and the centralization of production within corporations, I am concerned about another such event occurring here. This is, of course, a subjective opinion though. The admiration I have for true mastery and understanding of a craft, is, to some, unproductive. The process of art is of little to no importance to them. Subjectively, they might find more value in generating slop than creating something themselves. Why waste time learning something, they ask, when a tool could do it for you? To which I’d like to respond: “If you’re nothing without the suit then you shouldn’t have it.” But, while I thoroughly disagree with this worldview, can I in good conscience refute it on objective grounds? Tell them that their opinion of art is simply incorrect? Unfortunately, due to the subjectivity that permeates my definition of art, I don’t think so.

This lands us at a rather stupid, vague, and useless conclusion: Pretty much everything related to human action is art, and no specific piece is inherently more valuable than another. I think one can potentially attempt to tie some form of external value to the art by querying the audience and obtaining a collective opinion and determining the collective impact. However, this process neglects the value of pieces that do not possess or appeal to an audience, as well as lends undue weight to pieces that are used as mere means of wealth and fame, as opposed to ends in themselves. I will not be exploring it.

I just zoned out really bad, what?

Basically, TL;DR, art is subjective and performative, so if someone thinks they did art, then they have. We may criticize this art for whatever we wish on an individual level, but from my perspective, one cannot categorically reject another’s actions as “not art,” nor can we make objective statements on the superiority of certain modes of art over others.

This is rather frustrating, as I myself very badly want to claim that typing a handful of words into a corporate web portal isn’t art or is at the very least objectively worse than actual art. But this is just a crude form of poetry is it not? And many people have exclusionary opinions on stupid performance arts (relevant dropout clip), musical compositions, or even video games! I think these forms of exclusion are frankly stupid, which is why my definition of art has evolved in the way that it has. You’re welcome to disagree with it as a premise, however, I can’t in good conscience breach my own definition of art in this way.

Did I need that many words to say that? I don’t even know at this point.

Now, let’s get this train back on the rails.

Slop and Society

Interestingly, the advent of this kind of technology is showcasing all kinds of problems, not necessarily with itself, but rather with our society and our systems; Under different systems the nature of such a technology might not be as negative as it is under ours, which is partially why I’m capable of coming to such an oddly pro-generated art conclusion in the purely theoretical vacuum I presented above.

School System

As someone in school, the amount of model usage I see is frankly appalling. I can’t comment on whether or not models can be used educationally, but I know for damn sure that they can be used in lieu of genuine understanding of concepts, and I’d hazard a guess that the majority of usage falls to the latter.

I’d argue, however, that this is not fully an inherent flaw in models, but rather one in the school system. The gamification of learning through grades was frankly stupid before generative models came around and it’ll be stupid long after. And as far as university goes, I’d argue it’s more of a corporate tool than it is a learning institution. How many corporations use degree ownership as an applicant sorting mechanism? How many university students are here to satisfy that requirement, or out of some nebulous societal obligation, rather than to actually learn shit?

My distaste for the school system is a blog post on its own, but these problems already existed before the dissemination of generative models. The models just made them far more evident and exploitable.

Copyright System

Models are trained upon anything and everything corporations have been able to get their hands on, with no permission or compensation. This has driven immense bot traffic to websites, the owners of which have been left to pick up the bill of serving https requests to tens of thousands of bots. This disproportionately affects open source projects and non-profits, many of which are already suffering financially. This also creates the distinct problem of “License washing” where GPL code or otherwise can be consumed then reproduced by a model under a completely different, more permissive license. Many people have found their art or writing styles perfectly reproduced by models upon request without their consent, which is simply disgusting.

Not all of these problems are a fault of the copyright system, but many are. Copyright is not a tool of the individual, but rather one of corporations or those with the money for legal counsel. If we simply retreat back to the copyright system to protect our work from being used without our consent, we will be retreating back to a system that will inevitably be used to exploit us in the same way, but legally. Remember that legality and morality are different things; laws can and are changed by those in power to benefit themselves, morally or not.

Capitalism

The widespread use and marketing of these models is not one of artistic intent, but rather of corporate profit seeking. While they may afford a commodified art experience, their intended goal is to create salable, marketable artistic residue, while minimizing or replacing as much of the genuine artistic process as possible. On an individual level, this focus on results over craft might mean less engagement in the artistic process, and less control and understanding of the craft involved. On a societal level, this means that corporations who wish to minimize cost of labor in the production of commodities can simply stop paying artists and craftspeople, making an already impossible career somehow even worse.

We as consumers need to stop seeing artists and craftspeople as a mere means of obtaining art residue and rather as other human beings with desires, struggles, and joys, just like everyone else, who simply want to make a living making art. Observing the current landscape, the use of generated content in place of human art undermines this idea, as the money and resources that would have gone to them, instead makes its way to corporations in exchange for the tools that have replaced them. Like it or not, even if you consider users of such models as such, fewer artists will be able to survive in this climate, with largely worse-paying, less stable employment, all while corporations use the tech to consolidate power. And this assumes the tools are well built and reliable, which they are not. If we build infrastructure upon this stuff we will be sacrificing our own capacity to create as well as setting ourselves up for disaster should these tools enshittify or fail outright.

My vision of an ideal future is one where people can spend more time making meaningful art and less time working to afford life, endlessly striving for infinite productivity, the excesses of which are all gained by executives and shareholders rather than individuals. The current existence of generative models is almost certainly moving us away from, rather than towards, that future, at least under modern systems.

Thus, I believe this mode of technology should be categorically rejected until systematic change brings, at the very least, the capacity for artists and craftspeople to comfortably live off their work in conjunction with the use of such technology.

Open source slop is not real (mostly)

There’s a quite good, if a little technical, blog post by Smashing Frames that gets into this in much more depth than I have time for in this already quite huge post, but suffice it to say, just throwing a bunch of weights out there without saying how you got them, or from where, is not open. This is equivalent of publishing a binary blob to github and calling it “open source.” This is only open source in the sense that “everything’s open source if you have unlimited time and can read decompiler output,” which, for the layperson, is a hacking joke and not actually indicative of open source status. Open source is interested not in the openness of the artifact (that’s what we call “source available”) but rather, it’s interested in the process with which that artifact is assembled, so it can be modified, improved, and understood. Model weights achieve none of this.

Slop in open source

Instead,

TODO

Avoiding Slop

That’s the neat part, you can’t.

TODO

Corpo Slop, homemade slop

TODO

The Indie Web: An Introduction

Did that last section give you crippling depression about the horrors of modern technology and our collective overreliance on them, as they’ve slowly but surely co-opted our support systems and to rely upon them

Surfing the Indie Web

RSS: Content Consumption as God Intended

Monthly Update 2026 February

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:53:23 -0700

Agh, another month! How do these pass so fast?

Disco Tools

Disco tools has not only released, but has already recieved its first major update!

Essentially, Disco Tools is a system that handles State and RNG to facilitate the creation of games in the vein of Disco Elysium. It builds off the splendid narrative base provided by Nathan Hoad’s Godot Dialogue Manager, to minimize the amount of work required to craft a narrative heavy game in godot.

This is the tooling from Gas Station, fully refactored into a solitary plugin from C# to GDScript and everything. I cannot tell you how much work this bitch has been, but I’m so glad it’s out there.

Codeberg Migration

You might notice that I’ve been migrating off github. Progress is slow, but it’s going little by little.

This is an ethical and political choice I’m making, as I dislike the proprietary nature of github, and the rapid enshittification therein, in addition to a general reluctance to use anything microslop-related due to the boycott. Moreover, Git federation is the way forward, and github will not be a proponent therein, so I would much rather support an alternative service that is.

Codeberg hasn’t been flawless (It’s down as I write this haha), but overall, it’s been working just fine.

Selfhosted forgejo has also been awesome, and I’d definitely recommend it. I’ve been running a generational dwarf fortress game off it with a friend, and it’s been super fun and convenient to have a personal git server for stupid shit like that.

Nodeletter

The February Nodeletter is out! Took a second but we should be reliably going every other month.

Games

I played some stuff. I got a good way through The Outer Wilds (That game has deprogrammed my object permananence), finished act 1 of baldur’s gate 3, and have been playing way too much timberborn (beeeeeeeavers). I should probably have waited till the thing’s 1.0 comes out later this month but my god I may be cooked.

Should probably uninstall all of it because that time sink is horrendus but gee whiz I just love games.

Music

I made a sick as fuck synth patch in cardinal for the game soundtrack that I’m working on, so hopefully I can get that out soon! Music is awesome but recording is just exhausting and I keep forgetting that when I go to play haha.

Retrospective

I think I did stuff this month. Probably.

I think I definitely needed to do more treehouse, I just got really sidetracked this month. Probably just a skill issue.

Plans

Further work on Disco Tools for sure. I really need to make a demo video showcasing some basic usage and the utility. I also need to get an asset store build out at some point, which requisites some assets and graphic design (the horrors).

I want to set up a Huginn server deployment on my homelab for content syndication. Also some much needed server maintanence. I’m not the best sysadmin, but I have kept my VPN and router up to date so at least my outdated deployments are secure.

I’m planning on testing out some XMPP clients as well to see how the user experience stacks up to matrix but haven’t had the time yet either.

That Niri PR is glaring at me so that needs to get done aghhh.

Treehouse! Treehouse! Treehouse! Get it out! Finish it! Make thing!

Conclusion

Imma go make things. You should go make things, and vaya con queso.

Difficult, Hostile, and Ambivolent Games

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:44:19 -0700

I was talking with a friend the other day and the idea of hosile games came up. Hard cut to me pondering it in a blog post, I guess!

What is a Hostile game?

A hostile game is a game that doesn’t want its player to be there. My favorite examples of hostility in games would be some of the games contained within The Beginners Guide, which I wholeheartedly recommend playing. (Slight spoilers ahead, nothing major or game-ruining though!)

In the game, many of the shown games gate content behind arduous or impossible tasks, vast time delays, and some simply just hide the vast majority of themselves from the player. These games are hostile because they specifically do not want the player to experience them. They do not care about being worth the player’s time, or being an enjoyable experience. In fact, they work to make it the exact opposite. The player must act in spite of the game in order to experience what it has to offer.

Further, I think I can categorize games that are made for a specific person or group of people, but are hostile to all others as hostile games as well, as they contain the constitent element of hostility. I’d argue this kind of game only falls out of the hostile category when it stops acting hostile towards the majority of its playerbase.

Thematically, this kind of game has so much promise, but entries will never be successful or maybe even ever played once, intentionally. I think that’s both sad and beautiful.

What a hostile game is not, however, is a difficult game.

Difficult games

Difficult games may appear similar to hostile games on the surface, but contain one key difference: Deep down, they care about the player. They put thought and effort into crafting an engaging gameplay loop. They make sure bosses are difficult, but still beatable with sufficient mastery of the systems. Like a good TTRPG GM, they provide the player with challeneges but with the ultimate intention of giving them a good experience.

Difficult games lie on a completely different scale to Hostile and Ambivolent games, that I’d like to label “Caring” Games. This is where most games lie. Difficulty is simply an aspect of caring games. Caring games can vary in difficulty, many may even offer the player difficulty choices so they may customize their experience. However, only the difficult ones are frequently confused with hostile games, due to the end results appearing similar on the surface. The process and intention of creation between the two could not be more diometrically opposite though. Spend an amount of time playing both, and you’ll feel the difference.

Ambivolent games

These games a lot of the time are just crafted for the sake of creation. These are my favorites of the bunch, as they kinda just exist.

Ambivolence and hostility seem similar on the surface, but interestingly, I’d argue that hostility shares more with difficulty than it does with ambivolence. Both Caring and Hostile games, explicitly care about the player experience. Either making it as good as it can be or as bad as it can be. Ambivolent games… don’t care. Ambivolence is pure craftsmanship, Art for art’s sake.

In games, that craft may still have a lot to do with the player experience, but its intention is completely divorced from fun, enjoyment, or lack thereof. My games specifically focus on thematic intention, with little regard for player enjoyment.

I do hope players enjoy my games, but in their creation, I don’t really concern myself with the reception. I want the piece to speak for itself.

Conclusion

More people should make ambivolent and hostile games.

Caring games may be the only ones that really sell, but there’s so much more room in the space to experiment and create! If all we create is what is deemed profitable, either in fiat currency or social currency, we’ve unknowingly shackled ourselves and our creative output to the system. We all have to make a living under the system somehow, so don’t kneecap your capacity to put food on the table, but if you have the money and time to create without constraint, I’d urge you to give ambivolence or even hostility a shot.

Especially if you’re looking for social currency and approval in your art, I’d urge you to think about why. As far as I can tell, almost everyone craves some form of social approval, me included. However, tying your perception of your art to the external response that it gets from others is fragile. As a rule, people are unreliable creatures, and I don’t want to tie my art, and by extention my perception of my own skills, to that which I cannot control. I love sharing my creations and I love both giving and getting feedback, but I don’t count these things as a given, nor do I base any intrinsic value upon their existence. They’re pleasant experiences, and ones that I can leverage and use to improve my craft in the future, but that’s all they should be.

As a sidenote, that’s how I’m able to put out these blog posts without pretty much any response whatsoever. I write to write. I get value out of these by simple virtue of the time I set aside to write them and think about them. The process is what becomes valueable, and I stop caring about the result.

Anyway, thanks for pondering with me. Have a good one and vaya con queso.

Monthly Update 2026 January

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:07:18 -0700

Alrighty here we go.

Global Game Jam

I put together An Unnamed Gas Station (in the middle of nowhere) for GGJ this year, and helped organize the event at my uni, so we could jam in person. If you haven’t done an in-person game jam, you haven’t lived.

Treehouse

Got a lot of progress on the treehouse done over january. Lots of refactoring done, a lot more to do. Gonna let the thing mostly speak for itself though, so you’ll have to wait till I release it.

Open Source

Noctalia

I finally cracked and swapped out my waybar setup for noctalia. It may be more customizable, but my god I just don’t have that kinda time. It does everything I need and looks great! Well, almost every thing. It’s still missing reverse scrolling. FOR NOW! MWAHAHAHA!! (I did this instead of stats homework)

Niri

I got an event stream for the hot corner pressure PR implemented! That’s a big step towards completing the damn thing, and I can feel myself getting closer. The last big thing I need to do is pointer capture on corner enter, so it gets stopped, doesn’t overflow into adjacent monitors, and can actually impart pressure onto the hot corner. Otherwise, should be coming soon(ish)!

Looking at hot corner bindings at some point as well though!

Framework

My old LG gram has finally died! And a framework 16 rises from the ashes! This thing is actually beautiful, and I absolutely love how customizable and user friendly this machine is. The BIOS is custom too! Really neat stuff!

Overall, there have been a couple hiccups, but the hardware is open, and that’s all I need. The PCIE lanes in the back are super appealing, so I might actually try modding the thing. An audio card for low latency audio would be super cool. A wireless access point would also be totally sick for LAN multiplayer game testing! The sky’s the limit!

And finally, the swap between computers took maybe 10 minutes. NixOS is fucking sick.

Retrospective

It feels like I got a lot done but it sure doesn’t look like it! Sorry again I’m late on this, hoping I’m on this more for febuary’s monthly report, but we’ll see!

The nodeletter specifically is ready but we’re running into pipeline issues, so we’ll see how it goes.

Plans

Again, more treehouse! Gotta finish this one up; I want to get it out.

Cabin is gonna go on back-burner a bit. I’ll work on it if I feel like it, but no guarantees!

Gas station was an interesting project, and I liked the tooling quite a bit. I might take a week to polish up the tools to publish them. I want more people to make disco-like RPGs so if I can make a toolkit for it, maybe I can inspire more creative work in this vein!

Conclusion

I can feel my brain melting okbyeeeeeeeeee

Monthly Update 2025 December

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:15:58 -0700

Heeeeey everyone. So… January 7th. No December update. What gives?

Not to worry, I’m here! I think what happened is I finally passed my discreet math class and got back so much free time that I promptly got lost in the sauce. Imma be real, this one’s gonna be silly, as I’ve been in the goddamn trenches since new year’s. Happy new year by the way!

Twee narrative

Yeah the thing is fucked. I crunched for at least a week straight trying to get that thing done and it still crashed when I needed it most. Very depressing.

If you’re down for some github trawling, you can find it and play it on my github, but I’m not gonna fully put it out there till I can polish it up a bit more and add a couple more random events.

New year, new Niri PR

I’ve started up on another Niri PR!

This time, I’m working on adding pressure-based hot corner triggering. I should look at adding spawn-sh to hot corners as well though.

GDT Logo

Remember that open source game developer webring I made awhile back? No? Game Devs Together anyone? Well it does, in fact, still exist!

And even better, GDT Member mailoeckchen contributed some splendid art for the thing, as well as some much needed widget code updates. We even have navigation buttons now. Snazzy!

Treehouse TTRPG Design

I’ve been chippping away at the treehouse game here and there to hopefully get the thing released at some point. Nothing huge, but we’re seeing incremental progress.

Blog Posts

I made a couple blog posts this month!

D&D isn’t for everyone is a pretty comprehensive piece on 5e as a system, who it’s for, and what you can try to play instead!

On Mediums is a bit of a meta piece where I just sorta yap into Nvim.

Music!

I DO MAKE MUSIC, I SWEAR!! I even have Ardour open right now! Trust!

I keep meaning to record, but unfortunately all of my time spent playing music is for relaxation, and the moment I start trying to record it I stop relaxing. I think that means I have to dedicate some project time to it as well. Drat.

SIKE! After writing this I got inspired and started making music and I released something that should be up now!

Codeberg

I’ve been considering migrating a lot of my code over to codeberg from github. I hate how reliant I am on a microsoft service, not to mention the endless copilot throat shoving.

No thank you.

Retrospective?

That’s it! That’s all I did in december, and absolutely nothing else. Please don’t scroll down past this poorly plagiarized hbomberguy segue…

ah you saw it.

THE OPENVPN SERVER… WITH A STEEL CHAIR

I WON! I BEAT IT! I’ve been bitching about this thing since at least june!

I’ll keep specific details light in the interest of security, but I’ve got pretty seamless LAN Access and I’ve been fucking around with some old laptops!

Deployments

First we got a forgejo instance (fuck microsoft). They seem to be the only ones working on some form of git server federation protocols and I want to support that how I can.

Jellyfin is a no-brainer (fuck spotify), and etherpad is actually so damn neat (fuck google).

Rocket.Chat is great as well (fuck discord), and finally, I still need to figure out freshrss (fuck social media algorithms) and syncthing (fuck google/microsoft again), but they both look incredibly helpful.

As far as future deployments go, openproject (fuck atlassian) is almost certaintly coming soon, and Memos (Actually, idk with this one) looks really neat. Please feel free to send me any suggestions though!

Colmena

Colmena is this crazy neat little deployment tool for NixOS based systems! It’s unfathomably useful, and I only see its utility growing as I add more hardware and software to my stack.

Basically, it lets you build and deploy a NixOS derivation remotely via SSH. Running servers on Nix is both really great (because nix is really great), and also a tadbit awful, as not everything’s packaged and compose2nix doesn’t work 100% of the time (though it’s absolutely incredible with what it can do).

Other stuff

I think I’ll save a lot of the ranting for a later blog post so I can provide a bit more of a resource for others who might want to set up something similar. OPNSense + OpenVPN + NixOS + Colmena is such a neat combo and I’d love to show other newbies what little I’ve learned so far.

Retrospective (for real)

Ok that’s it for real this time. Sorry again the thing is late!

But hey, in my defense, the nodeletter is late too! (It’s coming soon, and we’ll be back on the schedule for the rest of the year, promise!)

I did a good amount of treehouse work, and more TTRPG work is definitely forthcoming! I’m looking at getting treehouse done as soon as I can, then hopefully moving to wild west, but that’s still TBD.

Plans

More Treehouse! I also want to do more music, so expect maybe another song or two?

I want to do more work on my cabin game but I almost certainly won’t be able to, so consider this a bonus point.

Also, I’ll be doing GGJ so I’ll probably be a tadbit late on january’s monthly so I can cover that there as well :3

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next month, have a great one!

On Mediums

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:26:31 -0700

I write blog posts because they’re easy. They let me get my ideas down in one place with the lowest possible barriers to publication. I’m able to write something and a couple git commands, some staging proofreading, and a pull request later, the thing is just out there.

The downside, of course, is that nobody sees these. Except you, of course, Mr. AI webscraper. (Tell Sam Altman I said “Die in a hole”)

Regardless, it’s a lonely business, shouting into the void. So, I figured I’d ponder the void a bit on my little corner of the internet.

Why am I here?

I hate the idea of marketing, but as much as I make broad platitudes about these posts being helpful solely as resources for friends, or as organizational tools, I can’t lie. Deep down, I know I need to develop some sort of social following.

I’m a game developer. I want to make games for a living. And the sad truth is that the only damn way to do that these days, outside of getting shafted by every AAA studio known to man, is by growing an online following.

Past that, having a group of people that care about what you’re doing sounds really nice. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable releasing games and projects to resounding silence, as I don’t make them for social validation, but rather to engage in the creative process. I do genuinely just love making things, and even if I can’t live off them and nobody gives a shit about any of them, I’ll still keep making them. But, heck, social validation is pure gas for pretty much anyone, even if they don’t want to admit it, and I’m certainly no excepiton.

So what do I do about it?

Well there are a few options. The first is nothing! I just continue blogging, like normal.

The second is pretty appealing. In this one, I just stop blogging entirely, and just focus on making things. That’s the peaceful way to go, I think; I get the most time to just create, and don’t get bogged down in the administrative overhead of publicating things. The downside here, of course, is that the afformentioned benefits are completely abandoned, which is, as they say, “Not a vibe.”

Finally…

Youtube

I’ve stuck off youtube, as it’s so much work to get something out there and also “google” (need I say more?). However, as sad as I am to say it, that’s where the people are. Perhaps here’s where I dip my hat and surrender to visual media. I definitely wouldn’t retire my blog, but perhaps I could intermittently make videos from blog posts, to attempt to tap into youtube’s much wider userbase.

My main concern here is that blogging already takes up a good amount of the time that I dedicate to project work, and adding a whole recording and an editing component would just eat far too much to justify, especially if I like making things. Which I do.

I can’t say I’m not tempted to at least give it a shot though.

Conclusion

Not much of a conclusion here, mostly just musings. If I post something on youtube I’ll let y’all know as well of course. Here’s the channel I’ll be using.

https://www.youtube.com/@fireye.coffee

Maybe I’ll see you there.

D&D 5e is not for everyone.

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:10:41 -0700

One thing I get a lot from D&D 5e players is the statement “What’s all this about non-5e systems? 5e is all I need!” Or at least something along those lines. This is a bummer of a statement from just one person, let alone an entire population, so I’ve dedicated this blog post to all of these 5e players out there.

Please, just hear your friendly neighborhood game designer out on this one: There’s a world of fun out there that you’re very likely missing out on, and my goal in this piece is to show you the possibilities!

What you do from there is up to you.

D&D 5e is not for everyone

Have you ever thoght about what TTRPG system would best suit you and your group?

If you’re here, the answer is either “Definitely, yes. It’s actually the second thought my brain goes to whenever I start a TTRPG” (The first being “who’s bringing snacks?”) or “No, never. You specifically sent this to me and told me to read it, and I’m now doing so begrudgingly due to some polite society, social contract bullshit (thank you!)”

Well, either way welcome! I’ve split this one up into two sections. One of ’em (this one) breaks apart what 5e is, and who it’s actually for, and the second goes ahead and starts bringing back the curtain on the possibilities out there.

But before we begin, I wanna state clearly: I’ll talk about TTRPGs for years to come on this blog, but this is probably the only time I’ll ever make a focus of 5e or D&D in general. So, I’m putting everything 5e-related in my brain down here, and going forward, I’ll only look in earnest at various indie systems instead. Little designers deserve the world.

Let’s get into it.

What even is a TTRPG?

This sounds like a relatively simple question, especially for someone already familiar with the medium, but bear with me for a second. (Especially you, random GM that says “Oh i’ll just modify 5e for this,” every time you want to tell a different kind of story.)

A TTRPG is a collection of rules and mechanics that when put together create a system for often collaborative storytelling.

There are many others, but this definition is mine. The key point of which that I want to point out is that the end goal is telling a story. This end goal is super important, as your system’s collection of rules and mechanics is, essentially, a well-oiled machine tailor built and tested to make a specific kind of story. (Yes, patrick. Combat is a story)

See, in game design, (specifically TTRPG design, but many concepts apply more broadly), well-built systems are intentionally made up of mechanics that build towards a central thesis. This thesis can include critically important things, such as genre, setting, mood, tone, and even themes for the stories made within that system.

We designers just simply don’t have the same level of narrative control that other artistic mediums do, however, what we have, that they don’t, is a direct line of communication with the player (or players). So instead, we put a living shit ton of work into making arrays of mechanics that work together to build towards our thesis, as that’s how we convey artistic vision in place of raw narrative.

My main point here is thus: in modifying rules and mechanics, you are fundimentally sacrificing the designer’s thesis.

Or put simply, when you change shit, our designs no longer do what we designed them to do.

At the same time, it’s your game, and you are 100% within your rights to modify, tweak, and break things to your heart’s content. I encourage such behavior actually! It’s probably one of the best ways to learn game design! However, in doing so you should at least acknowledge that, at least to some degree, you are killing the designer’s child, and with it, their intentions, design, thesis, and all of the elements therein.

Specificity and vagueness by design, a sidenote

Some systems are intentionally vague or broad to expand the number of stories that can be told with them. Genesys and FATE (which, in turn, is based on “fudge,” The more you know!) are good examples of such systems. And they definitely have their uses; Edge of the Empire was built on Genesys, and that system uses the genesys dice system quite well.

However, broader systems fundimentally sacrifice their capacity to carry out their mechanical vision when they choose flexibility over specialization. In short, when you try to do everything, you do nothing well. Would you rather have one multitool that kinda handles everything kinda ok, or an array of specialized tools, each designed specifically and lovingly with their own hyperspecific application in mind?

D&D specifically is designed primarily as a system for combat, and has been slowly adapted into an everything system by its community over the years. 5e is designed vaguely, and if anything, continues to specialize in combat, as that’s the core identity of D&D. But heck, it doesn’t even do that extraordinarily well, due to its lack of focus!

In a world where people are lovingly crafting games about high school drama and gossip, games about sailing on trees on a chainsaw boat, games about living dungeons that gaze directly into the characters’ very souls, games about kids hoverboarding between dimensions, and infinitely many more, each with its own new ideas, mechanics, vibes, artistic visions, and themes… GASPS FOR AIR

Why would you want to play with a multitool?

RP enthusiasts, I’m looking at you.

Hey. I’m talking to you, roleplay enjoyers that just default to 5e because you don’t want to learn a new system. And I’m especially talking to you RP-focused 5e groups out there that simply just don’t run combat. Or do so very infrequently.

Because like it or not, 5e is a medival fantasy-based system designed primarily for combat.

So, if you’re looking to do anything else, you’re genuinely missing out on a system that was specifically designed to mechanically create the story that you and your party actually want to play.

The medival fantasy focus is self explanatory (A standard modern setting, for example, wouldn’t have pack horses as items and “arcana” as a skill), however, on the combat front, I expect I’ll get a good amount of pushback. Nontheless I stand by that; 5e is built for combat first and roleplay second. Allow me to elaborate:

The entire system centers around combat

In 5e, what percentage of class features, conservatively, center around combat mechanics? How about Feats? Items? How much session time does combat take up? It certainly depends on the group, but I’ve certainly run 7 hour combat sessions before.

Further, the sheer moment-to-moment detail of the system is nothing short of a second game mode. One must keep track of player & enemy positions, initiative order, player & enemy action economy, hit points, and everything must be done within ~6 second actions within the fiction. I’ll have more to say about the combat later on, but if you’re using this for RP it’s like hammering a nail with a wood saw: it’s overbuilt in all the wrong ways, and you’d be much better off investing the budget in a nail gun if all you wanted to do was nail nails.

The balance of the combat system is built for numerous combat sessions between long rests. And from personal experience running low-combat 5e campaigns, I don’t think my party ever went more than two bouts of combat between long rests, rendering the built-in combat balance way off (casters rarely ran out of spell slots, making them far more powerful than martials, etc…).

If you want to add something or have a player come up with an item or a trait for their character, as a GM, you either

have to be concerned with how it will be balanced/ abused in combat, or
don’t run combat anyway, and end up ignoring the many many 5e mechanics that center around it.

Its roots are literally in war gaming.

The creators of D&D were members of the international federation for war gaming (one of which co-founded the thing), which then branched off into a subgroup called the castle & crusade society, which then set the foundation for the chainmail system, which was a foundation for the original D&D ruleset. Go figure. (source)

The very basis for the 5e system is anchored in war games. It has indeed evolved to encompass much more, but it has almost certainly kept its roots. As a baseline, all the non-combat is a design addendum compared to combat, which is what the system was made for in the first place!

In short, D&D will never be a roleplay-focused TTRPG system and still be D&D.

A small capitulation.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use 5e or any other D&D based system for incredible RP-based storytelling. You totally can! I’ve done so myself, and I absolutely adore what GMs like Brennan Lee Mulligan do with the system.

However, just because a system is popular, doesn’t mean that it will give the most enjoyment to you and your party or be the best mechanical compliment to the stories your table wants to tell.

Since my fascination with tabletop RPGs hit, I’ve had so many incredible experiences and told so many beautiful stories that never could have ever happened in 5e, raw or modded to the teeth. And, as I stated above, my goal with this piece is to hopefully share that with you.

You don’t gotta take my advice, or heck, do anything with it. By all means, play what makes you happy, even if it is 5e. I clown on it a lot, but if it does make you happy, I don’t want to get in the way of that.

Combat enjoyers aren’t off the hook either

Remember all that stuff about multitools? Your favorite mechanic may be 5e’s design focus, but that focus has become a lot more fuzzy in recent times (especially with the recent influx of all you RP enjoyers).

Wouldn’t you like to just play a game that was made specifically for combat and nothing else? Look at something like Lancer and tell me that fucking mech combat wouldn’t be incredibly badass. Or perhaps if you like 5e’s medival setting, mythic bastionland might serve as a splendid alternative! And both place combat at center stage, so their systems are hyper-focused on providing a clean, well-oiled combat experience.

Even if you do genuinely enjoy 5e’s combat, it’s only one style of combat, designed to tell stories of combat in one way. The options out there for handling combat could create completely alien situations and encounters the likes of which you could have never done in 5e. Aren’t you curious what else you could experience?

Perhaps newbies?

Nope! I’d honestly recommend pretty much anything over 5e for sheer noob friendliness. 5e has a bunch of unecessary verbosity and specifics, and, again, gets bogged down in its combat far too easliy. So many other systems flow infinitely better than 5e and can communicate the awesomeness of the hobby much more fluidly, and directly.

Now, in terms of actually recommending an individual person a game, that depends entirely on what gets them excited. I’ll pitch them a bunch of stuff and see what they perk up at, regardless of difficulty. People are so much happier to sit through rules if it gets them to a place they’re genuinely excited about.

If that system is 5e, then so be it, but a lot of the time, that’s only the case because it’s the only thing they’ve heard of!

Who is 5e for then, bucko?

In summary, 5e is for you if you

already use the system & don’t like learning new things,
enjoy mideval fantasy settings, with a 60-70% combat tilt,
like vague, unopinionated sytems,
don’t mind overly corporate media,
just kinda like it (which is totally fair)

And if you do fit the bill here, I truly do wish you all the best in your 5e adventures…

But just because one system is for you, doesn’t mean others aren’t! pulls away curtain, exaggerated

Other systems and why you should play them

Every time I hear someone who likes TTRPGs say they’re not interested in learning other systems, I die a little bit inside.

In my brain, that sounds like someone who enjoys art saying “Nah the mona lisa is my favorite, I’m not going to go look at anything else.” Or someone who likes movies saying “I really like the avengers im not going to watch another movie ever.” Like what????

Come on, lil guy! We’ve got so much to explore, and we’ve only just begun! Off we go into the wild pale yonder!

The wild pale yonder

Hey. (I’m dressed in a trench coat beckoning you from a nearby alley) Hey, c’mere. Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking to you. You wanna roleplay as a fucking mouse?

I produce the box set of mausritter from the folds of my trench coat

Or perhaps you’re more of a “journal on my own from the point of view of a vampire losing their memories over the course of a thousand years” kinda person?

I manifest Thousand Year Old Vampire from a brick wall

No? Then may I interest you in modern detective horror?

Your bag of groceries transmogrifies into Delta Green and Triangle Agency

Hmm, scifi horror perhaps?

The Mothership box set, having grown spiderlike legs, scuttles up your leg

Or maybe, just a bunch of kids on skateboards. *Hoverboards. In portals. (Slugblaster)

a portal opens up to your right and at least four teenage kids on hoverboards pile into you, sending both you and them sprawling into another portal.

Ah, well I guess not then. Try not to peel out. Nasty business.

Other systems

The variety and creativity of the game design community is simply too vast for words. If it’s in your brain, there’s a system for it, and sometimes if you’re lucky, the designer has cooked up at least one mechanic that’ll change the way you see tabletop RPGs, and thus the way you play them.

However, a lot of the time, the true beauty is in games that would never have even entered your brain. Features, settings, mechanics, and themes that never would have even pinged on your radar, pulled full-focus by a designer who cares about them more than garlic bread.

That shit, my friends, is the good stuff.

So what should I play?

In short, whatever gets you excited! The options are so numerous and diverse, that it simply comes down to personal preference.

What kind of story do you and your party want to tell? How do you want it to be told? Do you have your heart set on a specific setting? A specific vibe?

If so, look for that! If not, go picking around and see what you can find! Read descriptions and check out options! See what gets your brain gets jazzed up about! What makes it buzz with interesting characters, plotlines, and ideas! And as discouraged as judging books by their covers is, TTRPGs feature some of the most beautiful art out there. And very often, a game’s overall vibe is encapsulated incredibly well by the art it puts on display, so if all else fails find some cool art and go from there!

My silly recommendations

As a quick disclaimer, this hobby, like many others, is a matter of taste. I, like everyone else, am biased towards a certain kind of game. Specifically, I absolutely adore games that place roleplay at center stage. Games that deal with the complexities of identity. Games with innovative mechanics. Games that present deep ethical quandries. Games that make everyone at the table ponder something menaingful. If you like similar games, you’ll probably love my recommendations. If you don’t, then don’t worry! There are so many more games out there that will be for you and not for me, (5e included!), and I absolutely love that about this hobby.

I listed a good few options above, but also, I’d encourage you to take a gander at a few of the following games, most if not all of which I will write full reviews for eventually:

Spire: Rise against the opressive high elves in a revolution destined for ruin, in an attempt to make a difference. Check out the fallout system in this one, it’s genuinely a game changer.
Blades in the Dark: Gang warfare: the game. Run a gang in a dark, steampunk, ghost-ridden world, and execute sick heists. Prep is for losers when in-scene you can just flashback to that time you prepared for this exact eventuality.
Slugblaster: TEENS ON HOVERBOARDS! DOIN’ SICK TRICKS! GOIN’ THROUGH PORTALS! GETTIN’ THAT SWEET SWEET INTERNET CLOUT! RUNNIN’ FROM INTERDIMENSIONAL POLICE! YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Lichcraft: You’re trans and the wait for gender affirming healthcare is 300 years. Welp time to turn to the dark arts and become a lich!

In addition, I wholeheartedly recommend the youtube channel “Quinns Quest” for incredibly well-made reviews of these kinds of games.

Conclusion

Well that’s that. I hope I’ve made a compelling point here, and I hope you get out there and find games that make you happy! If you find anything cool, please let me know!

Another interesting trend that’s almost identical to this one that I hope to write about soon is the broad retiscence to swap operating systems to linux, which is something I figured I’d prod at as well ehehe.

Finally, I alluded to this earlier, but I intend to do more TTRPG-related blog posts going forward, probably reviews as well as deep dives on mechanics and designs. If you’re interested, please feel free to add me to your RSS feed!

Thanks once again for reading, and I’ll see you next time.

Nixos Is for Crazy People- A beginner's experience

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alright, you (nobody) asked for it, and here it is. I’ve swapped to NixOS as my main operating system from arch, and I have concluded that Nix is for crazy people. I also happen to still be happily running it ~6 months later. Let’s get into it.

Setup

Imagine, if you will, me waking up, configuring nixos, going about my day, configuring nixos, and going to sleep… For two weeks. (Now, this did include a full port of every single significant arch dotfile into nix’s homemanager, which was no easy task.) BUT STILL, THAT’S CRAZY.

The learning curve

Believe me when I say the nixos learning curve hits you like a goddamn brick.

The official docs seem written for experienced users, unlike arch, so you end up totally confused. You just want a simple config that works, but everyone keeps saying things about flakes, but flakes are marked as unstable??? Everyone also keeps talking about homemanager, what the fuck is that? Do you need it?

At this point I can say with certainty that you should use both. Also here’s a competent guide to actually getting everything working in a sane way, written in (mostly) plain english: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

*kisses your forhead* Everything’s gonna be alright, buddy. It gets so much better from here.

What’s a flake?

Flakes are experimental features of nix that allow users to define the nix equivalent of a function. These are widely used in the nix community to provide additional support for programs that don’t exist in nixpkgs yet, add native homemanager configuration for certain programs, provide out of the box configuration for certain programs (for example, nix-citizen provided me a fully optimized SC/wine installation without any config on my end. Neato!), and much more.

The best way to manage your system config on nixos these days is by defining a flake to act as an entrypoint. This allows you to define other flakes as “inputs” (read:parameters), that you can feed into your “outputs” (read: other function calls).

What’s homemanager

This is what you use to manage userspace, including dotfiles! Many programs are included by default, many more have a supporting flake, and worst comes to worst, homemanager lets you just place raw files wherever you want in your user’s ~ directory. Quite splendid.

This is super neat, as it allows you to make almost everything about your system, down to the user-specific configuration and customization, completely reproducable. chef’s kiss

Initial impressions

I was a bit cooked early on, as you can tell from my original ranting back in august. However, now that I’ve got the bulk of the learning curve behind me, even the downsides I saw back then have faded with time and I continue to reap the incredible benefits of this beautiful operating system. Here’s how things currently stand:

FHS environments? One shell command away.
Never having a broken system? Incredible.
Being able to have certain programs on stable branches and others on unstable? Immaculate.
Full state control? YES PLEASE
System rollback? Hell yeah.
System duplication? god yes.
Development? Crazy easy once I figured out how nix develop worked. And now, no more “It works on my machine” state garbage to worry about.
Packaging? Nixpkgs+Flakes pretty evenly rival the Arch repos+AUR. I think the AUR does edge out flakes in quality due to the size of the community, and the extra features that flakes must maintain in addition to simple packaging, but that’s balanced out by the sheer dedication that nix developers have to nixpkgs, which definitely tops the native arch repos in my opinion.

So should I use it?

Depends! How much do you value the benefits of nixOS? If you really like the way that arch gets out of your way and lets you just do stuff, you might not love nix. Nix has opinions, and not following those is totally possible, but does make your life a little harder. System config does take a little bit longer, but none of it is “OH GOD I FUCKED SOMETHING AND I NEED TO FIX IT NOW.” There are ups and downs.

Nix is still a tradeoff. If you think you’ll get real value out of the benefits, I’d say do it. But if you’re happy where you are and don’t feel like subjecting yourself to a silly amount of head-banging, you really don’t need to!

If you’re an operating system nerd (derogatory) like me, i’d definitely recommend it though, it’s such a wonderful little thing.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Sorry this one took me awhile, but I’m glad it’s out now!

I’ll chuck some tips & tricks below if you’re follwing in my footsteps. Nix is beautiful and definitely my end-game linux distro, that I’ll almost certainly be using for years to come. And I still have so much to learn! (Time to start making my own derivations ehehe)

Have a good one, and I’ll see you next time!

Tips & tricks

Here’s some nix specific stuff i figured out that I’d find super useful if I were learning from scratch again.

My Big notes

Set up git in your /etc/nixos folder. very very handy.
In userspace I’ll use a quick sudo -i to get root access to /etc/nixos for painless editing
This website is god https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable&
This website is also god for homemanager https://mynixos.com/ (Omg god yuri :3)
Like running raw binary files like a goddamned maniac, but can’t figure out how? Looks like you didn’t read this page on the guide I posted above, silly!
nix-shell -p package-name lets you test out a package in a temporary shell without actually enabling it system-wide! Super neat!
nix develop is also god for all you devs out there dealing with dependency hell (God polycule; shit is getting real, y’all)
And finally, nix-collect-garbage actually frees storage space of unused packages (but also clears out old versions of stuff so you can’t roll back to them anymore without another download)

Shell Shortcuts

I have ninit mapped to cd /etc/nixos;nvim .
gupdate to git add --all; git commit -m "rev"; git push; sudo nixos-rebuild switch (still haven’t gotten the time to make a bash script with dynamic commit names, whoops)
nixupdate to git branch -d update; git checkout -B update; git add --all; git commit -m "update"; git push; sudo nix flake update; sudo nixos-rebuild switch

Monthly Update 2025 November

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:26:07 -0700

Heya! Welcome back to another month of crippling burnout. This discreet math class, as stated earlier, will end me.

Cabin work

I did some work on that open source cabin game, then had to refactor as I had built everything on the grid3d node in godot, which does not support nodes, but only meshes. Oops. Luckily I have feature parity with the original design using a world grid snapping system instead. Yippee!

I’ve got some simple construction in, but not yet at the fidelity that I want for this vertical slice. I still have to figure out how to apply an incomplete shader to placed objects and also allow materials to be added to them, which is probably as simple as just toggling the render style on certain nodes in the object as items are placed. Still, on the todo list. Also resource gathering and processing are still on the todo list but that’s still a long way off.

Niri v25.11

She’s out and she’s a beauty! My little change is in here somewhere, but it’s just incredible to see what the open source community can put together. Patchnotes here!

Twee Narrative

This is technically for school, but it gets a pass to be in here because it’s so cool.

Essentially, I’m to make a little 10 minute narrative experience in twee. (Technically the class wants twine but GUIs are for losers & I have the power of CI/CD on my side). I have hopelessly overscoped this bitch and am now gazing down the barrel of having to write content for the thing.

Basically, it’s trying to tell a story through random events. And I added a weather system because immersion (someone kill me before I scope creep myself onto olympus). Purely text based, but I hope to make something genuinely cool here (and if you’re any good at github scraping you’ll probably be able to see what I’m cooking up). Looking forward to sharing more details when I get the thing out by finals!

Them

Fresh new cyberpunk hot off the press! I love me a little creative short story here and there, and I hope you enjoy this latest entry into whatever the fuck I’m making these days. Here it is!

November Nodeletter

Back at it again, the godot nodeletter for november is out! Thar she blows!

Retrospective

Ok guys, I know. Nike’s.

How about this: I’ll make you a deal, if any single person, one (1) person, including people that know me IRL, I’m not picky, sends me an email at kai@fireye.coffee saying that they care about Nike’s and want to see it finished, I’ll work on it in any little spare time I have, and aim to finish it by the end of the year.

As for that nixOS post, I got no excuse on that one either. I just didn’t get the spare time to chill and do some blogging. At some point I’m going to have to cut out the time though, sorry about that, if anyone happens to care. ADHD is tough shit for consistency.

Plans

I’ve been feeling the TTRPG itch a bit in recent days, so I might look at picking up an old TTRPG project soonish. Probably going to have to wait until after finals though.

Also apparently “Wild West TTRPG system” puts one of these blog posts on the first page of search results, holy SEO batman! I think that contractually means I have to work on it again, so maybe expect more of that soon.

Conclusion

And that’s the game! It’s about midnight at time of writing so I’m off to get some sleep. Thanks for reading once again, and have a great day.

Git for the Layperson

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Updated October 20th and November 9th with some new stuff! Also I would be remiss to not include a link to oh shit git, which you should definitely refer to if you ever run into trouble.

Preamble

Hi! First off, welcome to git! Git is huge, and there are any number of guides out there, but this is mine.

If you’re using a UI to interface with git, there will be buttons and other input methods to execute the commands that I’ll be listing. Rest assured, this information is still incredibly pertinent for you as well, and can be translated with the simple internet search: “do git ‘command’ in ‘UI here’”. (eg: github desktop, gitkraken, sourcetree, vscode plugin, etc…).

Why do I need to use git in the first place?

A previous version of this guide assumed you already knew the value of git and generally VCS, but seeing as the target demographic is the layperson, I’ll assume you are walking into this blind. If not, feel free to skip this section! Perhaps you don’t know what git is, or assume it’s a programmer thing for programmers, or perhaps are generally skeptical of adding additional steps to your workflow, and see git (or VCS) as optional. I assure you, it is not. Trust me, regardless of your vocation, level of experience, or general computer knowledge, I am confient you can benefit from using git. It’s an integral tool in working with others in teams, and as an added bonus, once you learn it, you’ll never worry about losing work ever again. Allow me to elaborate.

First, show of hands who’s lost work on something before? Proficiency in git makes this occurence a relic of the past.

Not only that, you also gain the power to time travel back to every single iteration of your project, without losing any work, no ctrl+z required.

Further, you get the ability to simultaneously have multiple “versions” of your project that you can swap between. That way, you can have one version that always works, and others that you use to add features and fixes, merging them together when desired.

If you’re using a git server (like github) to upload your git repositories, you also gain an invaluable backup project that allows you to retain your full project state even if your hard drive gets lit on fire (no doubt from your nvidia 12 volt high power connector), you’ll still be able to get your project back just fine.

It also allows you to work on the same project seamlessly from multiple computers!

Sounds great right? Well those are only the benefits for solo developers. If you’re on a team (2 or more people), or working at any moderately sane software job (games or otherwise), git goes from “incredibly useful” to simply “mandatory”.

Why?

Well, let’s imagine what collaboration requires, without git. The project needs to live somewhere, and more often than not, it ends up finding a home on a flash drive or portable drive of some sort that gets handed around based on who needs to work on it. But if you don’t have the flash drive, what happens? If you have a copy on your computer and make changes how do you know that something you’re working on hasn’t been updated by someone else? Who has to throw away their work or spend hours of their day getting the two versions working together? Whose edits are the “real” version? And worse, if the thing breaks does anyone have a working, up to date version anywhere? And you’re still dealing with all of the problems above in the midst of this chaos!

Proficiency in git almost fully trivializes these problems. Where does the project live? Github. How do different people get the most recent version? Pull from github. How do you reconcile changes? Merge branches and resolve conflicts. What’s the “real”, working version? The main branch.

The nuances of all of this are of course a bit more complicated, but I hope this generally gave you an impression of the value of git and why you’d want to put the work into learning it. Now, let’s get into exactly that.

What is git?

Diffs

Git is a tool that keeps track of the changes made to files, and lets you manage these changes. A change in git is called a diff.

If you have a text file containing the text “hello world”, and you change it to say “goodbye world”, git says “ah it looks like ‘hello’ was deleted and ‘goodbye’ was added on line 1 of file.txt”. This is a diff. Git automatically takes this diff and holds onto it. You can look at these diffs by using git status.

Staging

Git also features a stage where you can put these diffs. Diffs are collected off the stage by default, but you can add them to the stage by using git add (thing). Regularly you’ll want to stage all of your changes so usually you’ll run git add --all or git add . Once you take a diff and put it on the stage, git stores that diff. This means that even if you wanted to make more changes to the staged file, It just creates a new diff off the stage with these new changes. You can combine the two by unstaging the staged diff (git restore --staged), or staging the other diff.

Be careful running git restore on unstaged diffs though, as in certain circumstances you can lose work if you do this flippantly.

Committing

Once you’ve finished work on something, you’ll want to save a snapshot of your work. Go ahead and add everything you want to save to the stage, and now you can commit. This is done by git commit. Committing yoinks every diff that you’ve staged, and gathers them together in a little box, and asks you to give it a name. This box is known as a commit.

Naming conventions for commits are a hotly contested subject matter, but however you do it, make sure to aptly describe what changes are contained therein. This is the first thing everyone sees when looking at your changes, and allows you to know what was in that commit later on, when you might need to revert to it, or diagnose a problem.

Stashing

Additionally, you can stash staged diffs to ignore them right now and save them for later. This sounds mostly banal, however becomes very very useful on occasion so it’s good to know. git stash creates a stash containing the currently staged diffs, git stash pop kills the stash and restores those diffs, and git stash drop deletes the stash without restoring changes.

Log

Ever need to see a history of your commits real quick? git log happens to be the default option, however I’ve got a little treat for you. If you run the following alias command on your terminal you unlock access to git lg which is a super trimmed down git log with a pretty looking graph!

git config –global alias.lg “log –color –graph –pretty=format:’%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset’ –abbrev-commit”

I had a mentor at work give me this one, but I found the alias command again after redoing my system config here. Beautiful little alias that’ll save you so much annoyance.

The main things to look at in git log, are the commit name, so you know what’s in there, and the commit hash, so you know how git referrs to it. All you need to know is a hash is a bunch of (not so) random characters that represent a commit in git’s brain, like an id of sorts.

Why is it useful to view your repo’s commit history and have access to commit hashes though? Stay tuned.

Reflog

Listen.

Pay attention.

Reflog. Will. Save. Your. Ass.

Reflog is similar to log, however instead of viewing your commit history, it looks at everything. See, every time you take a major action in git, reflog saves your state. Which means, if you did anything in git, reflog has it. Reflog is your homie, reflog wouldn’t do you like that. Reflog has hashes. So many hashes.

But what does one do with a list of hashes that represent the history of a repo?

Reset

git reset <commit hash here> is very powerful, but newbies can pretty easily mess it up and cause fixable, yet very distressing problems, so make sure you’re pretty confident in what you’re doing before doing it.

Notably, RESET is not RESTORE. Restore is for staging and unstaging. Reset allows you to restore your repository to a previous state. That state could be a commit, or it could be a hash you found in the reflog.

This means, if you fucked up real bad, you can fix it. Just reset the repo!

Reset comes in two main flavors (with some more minor ones you can look for yourself if you’re curous): --soft and --hard.

git reset <commit hash here> --soft resets the repo, however keeps all of the changes between your current state and the other one as diffs. tldr: it keeps your work.

git reset <commit hash here> --hard resets the repo. git reset –hard does not care. git reset –hard will kill your children (commits).

If you do end up accidentally calling in a git reset –hard, remember your pal git reflog, and be not afraid. Git reflog will help you, git reflog is there for you.

Branches

Alright now we have a bunch of these commit boxes in a line, tracking the history of the project in little chunks. What now? Well let’s say that we want to keep this line of commits as the “source of truth” in our repository. That’s to say, with few exceptions, this is the version of the code that everyone is sharing. This means that it needs to be kept in pristine condition. Absolutely no bugs, no half implemented features, no failing tests, no shenanigans, etc… This means, if all else fails, we still have this version of code to fall back on. We will call this the main branch. “Main” because it’s central to everything, and I’ll get to the “branch” part of that in a second.

That’s all well and good, but now how do you develop on it? Development is messy! Not perfect and beautiful like this main branch! True! This is where Branches, plural, come in.

A branch is essentially a copy of the codebase at a certain point in time, that can be used independently of other branches. So if I went ahead and created a branch off the main branch, I could do whatever I wanted on it, without having any effect on main. And the reverse is true as well: If one of my friends comes in and puts code on main, it doesn’t affect my branch.

Checking out

This one is super simple, but it deserved a pointer here. When you checkout a branch, you move from looking at your other branch to the new one. This actually changes the files around to be what they are in the other branch, but it keeps any local changes you’ve made. As a beginner, you’ll want to stay on a single non-main branch as much as possible, till you’re more comfortable with git.

Merging

In standard development environments, you want your working branch to always be up to date with main. If there’s code on main I want it on my branch! How, You ask? There are a few ways of doing this, but the simplest, is just a merge. A merge grabs the state of one branch and plops it onto another. In this case, you want to merge main into your branch so if you’re currently using your branch you can run git merge main. This will usually work, but in some cases you may have edited the exact same location in a file as someone else! Git has no idea what to do with this so it stops and asks you. This is known as the feared merge conflict. To resolve it, you can check which files conflict with a git status, and open any offenders in your text editor of choice. You’ll notice some weird symbols in this file:

<<<<<<< branch1
# branch1 code here
=======
# branch 2 code here
>>>>>>> branch2

If you want to keep both, just delete all three lines with the weird symbols (<, =, and >), save the file and you’re good to continue merging! If you want just just branch1’s code, you can delete the line that says branch1, along with everything between the equals signs and the branch2 line. If you want brach2’s code, just do the opposite. Bottom line, as long as the arrows and equals signs are gone, git doesn’t care. Just make sure the file is syntactically correct once you’re done! After that, just go ahead and readd everything to the stage, and run a git merge --continue. You just killed a merge conflict! Yippee!

If you want to avoid these entirely you can specify a merge strategy in your command taking either yours or theirs in the event of a conflict, but this will override someone’s work! I’d recommend you try to resolve it manually if you can.

Rebase

I would be remiss for not bringing up the humble git rebase. Strictly speaking, Rebase is Merge but cooler. Merges are rough and ugly, Rebases are clean and beautiful. In terms of sheer good practice, always prefer rebases over merges. Your coworkers/ team/ fellow open source contributors/ future self will thank you for it.

However, early on, rebases can introduce many many problems if not used in a repository that has general good practice and as such I don’t reccommend them to newbies. If you’re already feeling overwhelmed, skip this section, and come back when you’ve got some git under your belt.

For the rest of you, here’s a simple summary of a rebase: Where a merge simply grabs all of your changes and shoves them into another branch, a rebase takes the point where a branch was created and moves it around. This essentially rewrites the commit history, so make sure you’re not on a branch used by someone else or that makes problems.

This is especially useful for getting your branch updated off main, if main has been updated. Generally it’s good practice to rebase off main every time you sit down to do some work, to make sure you’re working off the most up to date stuff as possible, as well as to update your branch before merging to main.

Both of these actions are also doable by merges, but merges create really ugly merge commits that end up both:

causing a shit ton of merge conflicts at the same time (ESPECIALLY if you don’t regularly update off main) and
obfuscating commit history so it becomes super difficult to parse later on.

A well rebased commit history is literally just a line of commits and their names, each adding an incrememntal change to the project. Very simple, and very readable, so when the day comes that you need to regression test a stupid ass bug that won’t go away, you can rest easy knowing that you won’t need to crack open any commits to see what’s actually inside.

Moving on, another beautiful use of the rebase is the…

Interactive rebase

git rebase -i allows you to interactively rebase your branch step by step. What the hell does that mean? Well, it means you can do something like this: git rebase -i HEAD~3.

Let’s go through what this does step by step. First, What is HEAD~3? HEAD referrs to your current position on the commit history. Usually, this is the most recent commit on your branch. The “~3” means “including 3 commits back”. This is the total number of commits that will be displayed to you, including the one you’re currently on.

Now what are you doing to these 3 commits? You’re rewriting history, silly! You’re the time lord! Reality bends to your will! Wanna rename a commit? Done. Wanna combine two commits into one? Easy. Delete a commit? No worries.

Once you’re done, if you have a remote, you’ll have to force push. Again, make sure nobody else uses this branch, and if not, then go ahead and force push your rebase. You can make both your and someone else’s day really bad if you mess this up and push to remote so be very careful! You almost certaintly won’t lose work, but you will lose time and sanity, so it pays to think before acting.

Lingering Questions…

What if I want to put my code on main? Is it the same as a merge? You ask. Well yes but actually no. If you’re running locally, all alone, sure (though I’d recommend against it). But, if you’ve got friends, you need something that allows you to share code and work together. You need…

Github

(Or another git hosting service. I’m not picky, but I’ll be referring to this type of service as github, despite there being other options out there in the interest of beginner friendliness. If you understand that, check out my essay on why we need git federation!)

Regardless, Git and Github are often misconstrued to be the same thing. They are not! Git is the thing running on your computer tracking files and doing merges. Github is where you can send your git repository when you want to back it up on the cloud and/ or share it with others. How does this work? Good question!

Pushing

Is your commit on your computer, but your friends don’t have access to it on github? push it! Push is the third command in the classic git three-hit-combo:

git add
git commit
git push

This is the quickest way to get your code from your pc to the remote where other people want it! Notably, push only works on commits! It won’t do shit on diffs, even staged ones. Pushing will push your local branch to the linked branch on remote, usually of the same name. Generally, it’s impolite to push directly to a branch that someone is using without asking permission. Instead, consider a pull request, or sending them a message.

Wow! Can I push to any branch, you definitely didn’t ask? No! Never ever ever ever, ever ever ever push directly to main. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, avoid this like the plague. Local code has cooties, and we can’t have that on our precious main. Set up branch protections on github to make sure this never happens. Now. I’ll wait.

How do you get code on main if you can’t push to it?

Pull requests

A pull request is just a merge happening on github, rather than your computer. What makes it special is that it allows other people to review your code before it’s approved and sent off to main properly. They’re generally abbreviated to just “PR”. Generally, on larger projects, it’s good practice to keep these open for the duration of a feature or fix’s development so that other people can track your progress, rather than just opening one up once the code is ready for main.

Pull/ fetch

These last couple commands are how you get code from github onto your computer. Fetch is a glance at what’s out there without actually doing anything, while pull actually grabs changes from github and gets you them locally. Generally you want to be pulling code whenever there’s updates, especially to main, and if there are, merging main into your current working branch to keep yourself up to date with the project.

Best practices (Especially for teams)

Here’s a little addendum here, as there are a lot of little things that contribute to a better experience using git, especially with teams, that I didn’t fully comment on above.

1. Little changes over big ones.

This applies to both commits and pull requests. Split up diffs into discrete commits. If you made some big map changes and also fixed a UI element, those two should probably be on seperate commits at least. Ideally, you’d open individual branches and pull requests for both, seperately.

That way they can reach main faster, for your teammates to access more quickly. This also really really helps the readability of your project’s history.

2. Feature branches over monolithic branches

I alluded to this earlier, but it’s worth repeating: make different branches for different things. Individual branches do work for jams and the like, but hardcore break down when working on any long term projects with a team.

The convention here is to prepend feature/ to branches adding a feature of some sort, and patch/ or fix/ to branches fixing bugs and the like. (eg: feature/add-shops) Feel free to come up with your own conventions for your own projects though! Many more professional workplaces will have a task management or ticket system (github projects is a great free option!), with branch names mirroring ticket numbers. (eg: tickets/DM-38901)

This also allows teammates to base off your feature branch if they desperately need to build off an in-progress feature, without getting inundated by 83 other changes you happen to have made.

3. Update off main frequently.

Always, always, always work off the most recent version of the project. Whenever you sit down, checkout main, pull, checkout your branch, and either merge main into your branch, or rebase your branch on top of main.

Seriously, do this. People will complain that git has so many merge conflicts; If your team is constantly updating main, and always updating your local versions to track main, I guarantee merge conflicts will become unfathomably easier and vastly more infrequent.

This also resolves the problem of whose job is it to resolve merge conflicts, as main is the source of truth, so once it’s on main, everyone else has to deal with it on their own branches. (Which conincidentally really incentivizes smaller branches; if you’re keeping up a big branch, whoop de do every time someone makes a change to something you’ve edited you’ve gotta update your branch. Split it up buddy!)

4. Git is built for text.

This one is good to know, as git isn’t the only VCS (Version Control Software).

Git handles everything through text, including big binary globs. This makes certain software significantly more annoying to work with, especially proprietary software. I’ll call out Unreal engine specifically here. Things like actors, map files, etc… gets serialized into an unreadable jumble of characters. This makes them totally unmergeable (if conflicts exist anyway), which is bad. I personally don’t recommend using such software, as merging is incredibly powerful, (and open source software is simply better), however if the choice of software is set in stone, here’s the deal.

Git is not great at handling these files, however, other VCS solutions don’t really do much more than git in this realm, other than baindaid the problem a bit better. Essentially, other VCS solutions will allow users to “lock” files so that other people can’t edit them, which you can emulate in git by just communicating with your team. If the files are not locked, and two people do work on one such file, one person will simply have to abandon their work on that specific file, and start over. If you do have to work with these, I recommend looking into other VCS software and doing some research. Git is still a great option, but the playing ground does get a bit more competitive in this realm.

If files are openly serialized to readable text, such as in godot, this is not a problem and merging can be performed as normal in git.

5. Git is open source!

Just a quick reminder that git is free software developed largely by volunteers! It’s licensed under GPLv2, which means that you can use it as a tool to develop whatever you want with no strings attatched, though i’d definitely reccommend reading through the details of the GPL becuase it’s fascinating! (that sentence is the nerdiest shit I’ve written in a while dear god)

Conclusion

I’m finishing this thing up super late and I’m incredibly cooked, so if there are errors, or any points of confusion please let me know.

They/them out; ~ Peace! ~

Monthly Update 2025 October

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hey I did almost nothing interesting in october I think. I’m literally only writing this out of moral obligation to keep up the streak.

Cabin GDD

I put together a GDD for a new project that I’ve been contemplating for a while. I’m not sure if I’ll actually be doing this anytime soon but I do want to do it at some point. You can check it out here.

Optimization shenannegans

Do y’all run your entire operating system while gaming? Lame! You’re wasting frames! I’ve run up a series of custom gamescope sessions on my greeter that literally just spin up a gamescope instance running my game of choice, and nothing else. I have the current iteration in my nix config at the moment, but it’s still very incomplete. Currently systemd still runs up the same stuff as my main config, so I’m considering making a new user account to limit what systemd ends up running. I really don’t need a full pipewire instance here, for example, pulseaudio or even ALSA would work just fine.

Drumset

I got some digital drums so I don’t have to emulate drums on a keyboard. Nice! Unfortunately the MIDI integration that this drumset uses isn’t interpreted correctly in Ardour, so I’ll have to do the signal processing for the MIDI signals into raw XML so that my hi-hat pedal works correctly. That’s a project for later, because that’s a goddamn pain in the ass. Luckily the thing still works for simple drums, and I don’t fully need a hi-hat pedal to play better than on keyboard so I’m content with how it works at the moment. Mostly.

The only way I can get Ardour to recognize it in the first place is to swap the IO from pipewire into ALSA which is so inconvenient. I’m not sure why pipewire can’t handle MIDI input via USB, but who the hell knows. I’ll have to look into that as well.

October Nodeletter

I helped out on the october nodeletter, check it out here

Retrospective

The schoolwork this semester has been crazy, so I’ve been unfathomably busy with that, work, climbing, etc…

Definitely going to reduce my credits next semester though, as I really need to do more stuff.

Plans

I’m literally just trying to survive at the moment so I’ll just put stuff on pause at the moment. Sucks to do, but I really need to pass this discreet math class lmao.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading, hope you have more free time than I do haha. Imma go take a hike, have a great day.

Monthly Update 2025 September

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:42:43 -0700

It’s september time, and I’m unfathomably cooked. This is gonna be a short one, and I think I need sleep.

Why so short, batman?

Well, I got really really really sick for about a week, then was buried under the resulting schoolwork for the next two, and here I am. I’ve done what I could in that time, but have been largely cooked.

Niri WM Hot corners

WE’RE MERGED BABY!!! Compile the WM from its main branch to grace your eyes with fully configurable per-monitor hot corners courtesy of yours truly. Doccumented here!

Eventually I’m looking at potentially adding spawn and spawn-sh functionality to hot corners as well, but that’s closer to a thought marinating in the back of my head than an actual thing that’s happening. If it catches my fancy on a cool autumn day, perhaps I might pick it up. Until then, enjoy!

Motherboard update

Well, the mobo might be cooked. After ordering and consulting an annoyingly silent POST beeper, I’ve come to the conclusion that somehow the POST circut is simply just not triggering in the first place, which SUCKS, as that’s the thing that’s supposed to start everything and/ or tell me what’s gone wrong. Might try to do some contact tracing if I can find a half decent schematic somewhere but who the hell knows. If anyone knows the Strix Z-690-F Gaming Wifi moderately well, or knows how a POST circut works, please feel free to reach out!

Music

I played music! I recorded stuff! I haven’t recorded stuff since I was on arch, so I had to reconfigure my audio setup on nix, but ardour works great now, and I’m getting to work!

Did you finish anything?

Next topic!

Games!

Hades 2

I’ve been selfishly saving myself for the full release of Hades 2 through the open early access, as I loved the original hades and wanted to experience the second completely fresh. And seeing that it released last week I’ve been doing so! It’s been genuinely one of the best games I’ve ever played and I don’t think I’m even halfway through. I’ll almost certaintly do a post on it once I finish the thing, but suffice it to say I’ve been having an incredible time with it and the chaos redesign was literally life changing.

Hollow Knight

While I was sick I was able to 104% the original hollow knight. I haven’t done the true ending yet, but I thouroughly enjoyed it, with a few annoyances here and there. I might do another post on it as well, but I’ll wait till I get that true ending to do so. The writing is unfathomably powerful and it’s fucking bonkers how much they’re able to do with so little. I ended up crying twice through my playthrough and each such encounter had a number of dialogue lines that you could count on one hand. Truly impressive work, and I’m looking forward to picking up silksong when I get the time.

Where’s the NixOS post, Jon?

It’s being worked on, I promise! I’m still learning things about nix (yes even a whole ass month and a half after switching, NixOS is one hell of a rabbit hole, let me tell you), and I’d like to make it as good as it can be. I have an open PR to nixpkgs and I’d love to have that merged before I do the full post so I can fully write about what I’ve learned from it (though nixpkgs is huge and might very well take a while).

What I can say is this far in, I don’t regret the switch. NixOS makes so much sense and I’m delighted to say the bad stuff get so much better with time. I did half regret switching at first but I think the brain worm finally ended up taking hold, so I’m grateful for that at least :P.

Retrospective

I think I did well considering the circumstances. Mostly just annoyed that I didn’t work on nike’s. I think the scope is intimidating me a little bit, but that’s just a matter of making myself sit down and chip away at it little by little.

Plans

Alright here’s the deal. I’m going to put some stuff on the back burner as little as I’d like to do that, so I can focus on what actually needs to get done.

Main list:

Nike’s
Open VPN Config
Music Recording

Backlog:

Treehouse RPG
NixOS Blog post
Motherboard Repair
Niri Hot corner updates
Hollow knight blog post

Conclusion

Thanks for reading again! If you made it this far, go look up a picture of chaos from hades 2 as a reward. You’re welcome, and I’ll see you next month! Vaya con queso!

FEDERATE GIT!!!

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:26:12 -0700

Background

In the modern day, git servers are a must. Even on the smallest of solo projects, one can greatly benefit by using a git server to host it, collaborative projects are nigh impossible without git servers, and more importantly, git servers are the backbone of the vast majority of open source development. And among git servers, github is by far the most prominent, which is moderately saddening given that the main location in which most open source development occurs is not open source itself. This isn’t without reason, though. Free hosting, baked in support for issues, forks, pull requests, and anything else one might need to work in a git repository, and even free and easy access to github actions which are unfathomably powerful CI-CD tools. And at the same time, willingly or not, all the code hosted on it is also almost certaintly being used as free real estate for the microsoft AI teams to train off. It’s been pushing copilot nonstop, and will likely only get worse from here.

Self hosted git repos like sourcehut, gitlab, gittea, and many others serve as a great alternative, given you have the skills, know how, and/or resources to run one up. However they do have their downsides, as I’ll get into later on.

The Problem!

So what does one do when they want to switch off github to an alternative? Well you find and host a new git server! It’s just that easy! Jokes aside, if you’ve used github at all, setting up a new git server and migrating is nontrivial on its own. However, that’s not all. Like it or not, everything else will still be on github. So now you’ll still have to use github to contribute to most other projects, but now your own projects will suffer from the reduced traffic of not being on github due to its sheer size. Some choose to mirror their repos, which tries to reach a best of both worlds approach, but suffers from the partitioning of the community, and more often than not the mirror becomes higher traffic than the actual repo!

All this to say, you have been for all practical purposes cut off from the vast majority of the open source community. This, needless to say, sucks. Self hosing should certaintly provide more freedom, but also MORE connection to the community, not less. Open source is made and broken by its community, and this problem desperately needs some sort of solution, as looking at, well… microsoft, github will continue to enshittify, and if we don’t solve this problem, we risk either being trapped on github or losing a whole bunch of traffic to open source communities.

The Solution

We need global git federation.

I’m proposing Mastodon’s ActivityPub but for git development. On Mastodon you can live on server A but still get information from server B. We need this for git servers. I like to joke that git is my social media, but in this sense it really needs to be copying off social media’s homework. I’ve said this already but open source development lives off its community. Thus, we need to be pushing to expand these communities, making it easier to get involved in open source and reducing barriers to entry. As one does more open source work over git, one naturally gravitates towards wanting their own git server, as it’s freer and it gives the user back more control of their software. I completely agree that more people should be self hosting, which is why this means so much to me. We NEED to make this a no-brainer decision, but as it stands, all it really serves to do is separate an individual from the very communities that would otherwise help them. We need to FEDERATE GIT!

I found a few tidbits on gittea potentially implementing something along these lines, but everything I found dried up around 2022, and even if gittea, or any other git server provider for the matter, had implemented a perfect federation model, the issue of cross-provider federation persists until a critical mass of other providers also subscribe to the same federation protocol. As nice as it would be, one provider having federation does not fundimentally solve this problem.

The onus, instead, should fall directly on git. Git itself needs to define a server federation protocol, to clear up all confusion among the server providers and push all of them to adopt it so that they can claim to support the full git protocol, federation and all. The added benefit of course is that there’s no toiling over which protocol to use or how to implement it, there’s only whether or not they can implement the official one, which makes actual implementation much more straightforward.

What should it look like?

Actual implementation should certaintly be left up to the designers, but from a user perspective here’s what I would like to see:

I run up a git server. I can define the visibility of all my repos, ranging from private to local to global. My global projects show up on github and other git servers, and I can search others’ global projects in this way as well. I can create issues, comments, and pull requests on others’ servers and vice versa. Forking a repo on another server creates a fork on my server. Critically, If I have a gittea server (host) and someone on github (remote) leaves an issue, the issue should be created on my server! There should be no duplication, and the host server should have full authority. The remote server’s job is to display my repo to users and make API calls to my server when an action is performed on the remote. Rather personally, I’d also want a global subscriptions/watch/star list, so that I can watch or star repos across servers and get updates on new releases, comments, issues, PRs, and the like, regardless of server. Heck, built in RSS functionality could handle that last one just fine. (I know that a lot, if not all, git servers support RSS, however I’d like to see a first party reader as well so that you don’t need to be an RSS nerd to use it. Eg: Click the star button, and your account on your home server is automatically subscribed to that repo’s update feed.)

In summary

We should be splitting off github more but the communal nature of open source is harmed by this fracturing of the community, as beneficial as self hosting may be. We need a way to preserve that community in the process and we need to work to make that happen.

Thank you for reading and go forth and spread the good word of git federation!

Monthly Update 2025 August

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:29:35 -0700

Welcome to the august monthly update! We’re a bit late on this one, but not without reason.

Eldritch Wager

I Made a game! The brackeys game jam came around and I ended up decideing to make something simple because I could. Check it out here!

This is generally why I missed the monthly update deadline I’ve set for myself, as I was neck deep in this game jam. (Now I’m neck deep in homework catchup, as uni started last week, but que sera sera).

NixOS

I did it. My arch partition is gone, I’m running NixOS on my laptop, and it’s for the totally insane. I’m in the process of writing up a blog post on it at the moment, but suffice it to say, if you are not totally insane, stick with arch. Arch just works. Trust me. If you are not regular insane enough for arch, stick with mint or some fedora spin. Thank me later.

As for me? I might be clinically insane, because I’m getting things working slowly but surely. NixOS sounds like a straight upgrade from the outside (Namely Arch), but I would caution against this perspective. Rather, there are tradeoffs.

Determinism in system state? Upgrade.
Effortless rollback? Upgrade.
Packaging? Oddly enough, despite the size gap between nixpkgs and the AUR (Nixpkgs unstable is significantly larger by sheer number of packages!), I’ve actually had a more seamless experience on the AUR! Flakes are nice but they’re still experimental and purely community driven, and you can’t yet fully rely on them existing for your project that happens to be absent from nixpkgs. (3dslicer, zen browser, nirius, etc…)
Learning curve? Literal hell. This took me weeks of work, and I don’t think I’m even halfway competent at this operating system.
Literally just running software? Whoa there buddy. You want to run a piece of software? I hope you’re ready to dig through wiki pages for hours to get a working fhs environment. Dependencies? I hardly even know her! (Cooked)
Development? Harder. It’s just harder. Dev containers are definitely a thing, but I’ve had problems testing Niri, as on arch I’d just replace the system version with mine, but on nix you need to figure out a way to package your version somehow… I think.

More ranting to come though.

Federate Git

FEDERATE GIT DO IT DO IT DO IT RAAAAHHHHHHH :3

Website update

I got a huge website update out in which I was able to knock out a whole bunch of quality of life improvements for the website that you can view here. I’m super happy with this though!

Clear Thoughts

I also did a bit of writing, as I felt inspired to do something short to dip my toes back in. Cyberpunk is good, cyberpunk is friend. Check it out here!

Motherboard repair

Tried to fix a motherboard! Unfortunately the debug lights are concerningly not doing light things (completely dark) but I do get board power (pretty RGB) and power on works in at least some capacity (we get fanspin, but no video out). Looking to get a motherboard speaker to see if we’re getting beep codes in any respect. If anyone has any idea what could be happening please please please let me know!

Open source contribs

Godot engine

I’m now working on the official Godot nodeletter! Check out the latst entry here!

If anyone reading has anything they want potentially featured in there, please reach out to kai@fireye.coffee!

Niri WM

Multiple monitor hot corners are functonal! If I have time I’ll see if I can add custom actions on hot corner but As it stands I really just want that PR merged (Yalter notice meeeeee). PR can be found here.

Retrospective

So. You may have noticed a couple things are absent. Oops. First and foremost, Nike’s. I still want to work on it, I just didn’t have the time. Don’t worry it will happen, I will fight god (adhd) to make it happen. Further, I didn’t do enough music this month. Expect more of that going forward. OpenVPN is still T Posing over my sobbing corpse as per usual, and the treehouse did not progress at all. Cooked.

On the other hand, I did get that website update out, I started working on that motherboard fix, and I embarked on the long painful NixOS journey, so not a total loss!

Plans

Here’s the list:

Nike’s
Treehouse
OpenVPN setup
Motherboard fixing
Music
NixOS Blog post.

Let’s see how I do.

Conclusion

Thanks again for reading, see ya soon!

Monthly Update 2025 July

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:51:47 -0700

Hello and welcome back to my monthly update series! It actually has a publishing cadence so I actually released a sequel! Wow! I’m getting good at this “doing things” stuff!

Alright, let’s go ahead and kick things off.

Game Developers Together

I finally got the juice to go ahead and finish my webring! I started this months ago and rediscovered the repo a couple weeks back, so I decided to get it working! It took me about a weekend or so, but it’s up and running at gdt.fireye.coffee, and you can read my announcement blog post on it here. We’re open for applications, baby!

Nike’s House

Work is progressing steadily, but slowly on nike’s. I wrote a couple solid paths, but I’m not fully happy with the character voices that I put down so I may have to do some significant editing later on. Further, there’s some personality in this game that’s starting to shine through, especially in flynn’s dialogue options that I’m presenting to the player that I’m starting to like quite a bit. Unfortunately, leaning into this further than I already have would require some nontrivial rewrites in act 1 that I don’t necessarily want to commit to, however the disco elysium vibes of these new options is really calling to me like the green goblin mask. Still, I think I want to keep the scope creep to a minimum and keep focusing on the writing. I hope to start up some local writing groups in which I can share what I have with other writers to get feedback on what I have and points of improvement.

However speaking of nike’s let’s move on to:

Open source contribs

Godot dialogue manager

I think i’ve well and truly got the bug; I was writing for nike’s the other day and ended up finding a bug in godot dialogue manager, which I found a workaround for… then promptly ignored, opting to dive straight into the plugin’s source code fixing the bug itself. I made a few other contributions to godot dialogue manager as well, most of them C# oriented.

Godot engine

I continued testing godot PRs for regressions and reproductions. I don’t have any experience with C++, so as a way of getting familiar with the engine source code I figured I’d do some simple testing labour. I poked around in there a bit and tried to fix a bug in custom resource resolution, but C++ just isn’t my cup of tea. I do want to keep contributing to godot though, so I reckon I’ll go ahead and learn it anyway, It’ll just take a bit longer than I’d like.

Niri WM

Niri has been amazing, and I’ve loved using it so much that I’ve started to actively contribute to the project. Yalter, the maintainer, looks a bit cooked in terms of their spare time, which is a shame, however I can only see the project going good places, given they have the capacity to review people’s PRs in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve already submitted one adding a much needed update to hot corners and have fixed another PR’s failing testcases, and I’m hoping to expand the hot corners to per-monitor hot corners, when I have time.

Rust

Further, Niri is written in rust. Oh boy do I looooove rust. I hadn’t written rust before this but the level of control it provides at the level of simplicity that it sits at is simply unprecedented. Cargo is immaculate, and the tracebacks it gives me are better than even those of python, which is absolutely bonkers. I will be writing more rust in the future. Rust is good, rust is friend.

NixOS

It is getting more and more appealing to switch to nixOS as the days go by. It makes the hassle of sysadmin so much more streamlined, and especially when I have two systems to manage, I do NOT want to have to manage two different systems with different environments. And I won’t have to ever worry about debugging on a half functional system anymore! Nix just solves everything! The work involved in switching is large though, and I’m not totally convinced that home-manager is a good idea. This is probably because I don’t know how it works, however as far as I can tell, it needs all of its options to be manually programmed into it, which is already iffy, and only gets worse the closer someone is to the bleeding edge. If a program I use has an option that I want to toggle, but it isn’t in home manager, do I need a dotfile again? If so, now the entire benefit of home manager is busted! More research is forthcoming, but I’ll keep y’all updated :3

Pirate TTRPG

I’ve started casually working on a little pirate themed TTRPG with a friend. It’s still in early stages, so I haven’t even made a project for it yet on here, but stay tuned!

Music

I started doing actual music recording in july! You can find some of the little things I’ve put out here, but I’m hoping to do longer and longer releases as I go on. I’ve been playing around with synths, guitar effects, and I even bought myself an actual pedal the other day. Stay tuned here as well, as I have some stuff in the works that I like quite a bit.

Spire

I started a campaign of Spire this month! I’m hoping to use it to get a better grip on the system and take that forward into my other designs, but also to tell a good story. I also just want to take this second to reiterate the sheer importance of safety tools and of good communication at your tables. As I wrote in my treehouse game:

Your priority is to your friendship with these people, not to the text of this document!

Remember that y’all are doing this, as friends, for fun. If your friends are not having fun, you have failed at games. People say you can’t win or lose TTRPGs; I disagree.

You win TTRPGs by successfully scheduling sessions.

You lose TTRPGs by disregarding the enjoyment, safety, and wellbeing of your actual friends in favor of literally anything else.

Climbing

I’m weak! I can barely climb a 5.11c without getting gassed! This must be remedied. I will be hitting the gym much more frequently next month and maybe socialize with people for once.

Art & Literature

Burning Chrome, William Gibson

I read through more of William Gibson’s burning chrome and it was quite good. I might want to expand the website to allow me to share my favorite media with visitors, but for now, I definitely reccommend giving gibson a read if you are a fan of cyberpunk themes (hypercapitalism, baby). One of the stories I read this month had a beautiful ending that really landed quite well. It said a lot about how we as humans perceive ourselves and expect ourselves to operate on a social stage. Beautifully thought provoking stuff!

Mythic Bastionland, Chris McDowall

This is a beautifully crafted, short and to the point, TTRPG system about knights. It has 21 pages of precise rules, including one page on aging that makes the system truly unique as far as I’ve seen, and then proceeds to list a series of knights, seers, and quests for over 200 pages thereafter. Despite being short, this system looks unfathomably robust, and I can’t wait to play it.

Plans

Alright. I didn’t do great on last month’s plans, only getting around to 1 of the 3 goals I set: That openVPN server is mean, and I completely forgot to update the website, past supporting music publishing.

Nonetheless, I’d still like to get around to both of those things (self-hosted OpenVPN setup, and website updates), as well as continuing work on nike’s. I’d also like to do a bit on the treehouse, as that system still needs love, and I can feel it getting close to completion.

Further I might start getting more into electronics repair; I have my LGA1700 test bench and I’ve already ordered a broken motherboard that I hope to try and fix back up.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope to continue doing these, as they serve as great reminders for how I spend my spare time, and what I choose to use it on. The class is definitely eating a lot of the time that I’d be using for stuff like this but I’m still managing to get stuff in. Regardless, I hope you have a great day, and I hope to see you next time. Vaya con queso!

Game Devs Together

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:37:19 -0700

TLDR

Hi! I made a webring! An OPEN SOURCE webring! If you’re a gamedev with a personal website, you can join it here!

What is it?

The quick one-liner is that GDT is an open source indie web style webring for game developers who run personal websites.

Like a normal webring it serves to connect indie websites to each other without reliance on a conventional search engines. It focuses its scope in a bit more than many conventional webrings (specifically to just game developers) in order to hopefully provide a more curated experience for the indie web surfer who might be interested in finding more indie games and game developers to follow.

More importantly though, this also allows the community to focus itself and become a lot more useful to its members. Right now, I’ve set up a forum where people can talk, and I’ve intentionally kept it open as a resource for all game developers and aspiring game developers to come in and chat, not just the ones with websites.

Ideally, once GDT grows a bit, I’m hoping to see if the community can tackle a community project or two, taking advantage of the group’s open source nature, but till then I’ll be hanging out.

I’m hoping to go advertise it in a few other indie web forums and areas to hopefully gain some kind of critical mass or initial userbase, but who knows haha.

Monthly Update June 2025

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 17:31:29 -0700

Hello! Welcome to my monthly update for June (happy pride :3)! This being the first of its kind, allow me to explain what exactly I plan to do with this series.

See, I’m always working on things. However, these things very rarely see the light of day, complete or otherwise, so to the outside observer, it appears that I am doing nothing, which is a shame! Further, publicly summarizing my activities and setting goals for the next month allows me to hold myself to some sort of standard and thus do more things. Planning and visualizing the future is also really good for me in terms of ADHD, and being accountable to the internet to do so is a great way to make sure it happens.

TLDR: It’s a summary of what I did this month and what I plan to do next month, tied up into a neat retrospective.

So, without further ado, let’s kick it off.

Star citizen survival post

I’m dropping this with a post I’ve had laying around for a bit on survival in star citizen. The reason I didn’t initially release it was that around the time I wrote it the whole blades debacle came up and I just got super depressed about the direction of the project and didn’t want to engage in it as much. These days things have generally improved ever so slightly so I figured what the fuck I might as well just release it. All it was really doing was collecting dust anyway.

Treehouse TTRPG

I spent a lot of June working on “The Treehouse” (learn more here), which is a new TTRPG that I was working on for the “Jam In Silence” Game Jam by possum creek games. I was not able to finish it on time and as such it’s sitting incomplete on my hard drive, but damn is it gonna be good when it’s done! Imagine a modern setting but focused on the PCs in a treehouse where each characters’ troubles, flaws and vices are represented as “classes”. Feature-wise it’s mostly there, with a few additions and tweaks here and there, but content-wise, it’s a barren wasteland, which is somewhat terrifying. Definitely gonna return to this soon though, as I’d love to playtest this one with friends.

Vacation

My first half of june was claimed by a trip to spain, which was a breath of fresh air compared to the ins and outs of life over here. Functional public transport was really nice and the spanish siesta was truly iconic. The sun also goes down around 10 in the afternoon, which does wonders for my sleep schedule, and surprisingly everything is open past 7:15. Wild.

Open source contributions

I also started going down the open source rabbit hole. I did some work on the godot project (nothing major, just regression testing), and generally went out of my way to open tickets, do testing, and work with smarter developers to contribute to any number of random FOSS projects. The highlight reel consists of the embedded game window over wayland in godot, a bug in the xwayland-satellite project, and some work on the niri WM.

Niri

Welp it took me this long to realize that the hyprland maintainer is a bigot. Neat. Time to find a new WM. Enter niri! Niri is awesome! It’s still a bit rough around the edges (It doesn’t support release keybinds yet and scratchpads are sorely missing), however I love it. It took me about a week of literally nothing else, but it’s all set up, and now I can do any single productive thing (please). I’m tracking a lot of issues on its github, and I can’t wait for it to get better.

Nike’s house

It’s still happening! I promise! Treehouse really put a wrench in my progress here, as I wanted to make a TTRPG, and that jam seemed like a great opportunity, however I’ve since sidelined treehouse and I’m back working on nike’s. I’m hoping to get it done by august time, but no promises. There’s a lot more to it than I had hoped but I’ve made some steady progress.

I added an event tracker so the game can keep track of what you’ve said and which paths you’ve gone down, as well as a few api tweaks so that when I sit back down to do more writing I can make more tweaks to the gameplay from within the dialogue. I also cooked on a bit of dialogue and plot structure stuff but I’m not locked into anything specifically so I won’t drop anything specific here in case I happen to change my mind haha.

Disco elysium

In less productive news, I have played disco elysium to completion! My goodness that was good. I will be referencing it on a regular basis going forward. Long live tequila sunset.

In all seriousness it really gave me a deeper appreciation for the writing that goes into games, especially branching ones where people cannot ever be expected to experience every line of dialogue that the designers sweat over. It’s really a beautiful thing to bash your head in weaving a web of narrative that leads to a conclusion that can be experienced from all angles. Some things may be done out of order, others might not be done at all, and as a designer you have to account for all of it and still make sure the story remains coherent. You also have to provide multiple ways of going from point A to point B and make it all flow which is a mind boggling amount of work to do. It’s genuinely awe inspiring. The game is beautiful, and I’d urge you to give it a play (though maybe obtain it though alternative means as the game and related IP has been regrettably stolen from its original creators). Also, ironically, some of the most nuanced political discussion I’ve ever seen online (which isn’t saying a lot) has come from the disco elysium community, which is hilarious to me.

I killed all my social media too. I’ve kept youtube around in a limited capacity (30 minute daily cap, and I’ve limited it to just the subscriptions page), but everything else is dead, discord included. RSS feeds are so goated. Here’s a neat rule you can use to determine if you’re in too deep though: If you’re checking your phone like it’s a skinner box that dispenses dopamine at irregular intervals, it’s time to stop and re-evaluate your relationship with the thing.

It’s horrifying to think that I got in too deep despite knowing and working against a lot of the psychological tricks that social media companies use to cultivate addictive patterns. If I got sucked in that far, what about joe schmoe who just uses instagram or tik tok, or any alternative on a daily basis. How many hours are lost to just watching noise that will be forgotten in a matter of minutes. Staring into the static just to emerge on the other end no better than when you started, just more exhausted. It’s a depressing image.

I don’t want people reading this and thinking I hate all social media. I don’t. I think it has the capacity to do a lot of good. It’s just run by evil people and also mark zuckerberg (who is also evil but definitely not a person), and is handcrafted to turn your time and attention into profit through manufactured addiction.

I personally don’t have the capacity to make sure I’m using everything mindfully so I’ve cut it all off. Youtube is on thin ice, but youtube revanced (which i heavily recommend), an application timer, and the unhook browser plugin have made it manageable. I’d also urge everyone reading to look at your own use and make sure it’s done with your own consent. In other words, would you benefit from this time more if you sat down and watched a video, scrolled a feed, etc…, or rather got up and called a friend, climbed a tree, did some creative work, played some music, or anything else. It’s a really good practice to ask yourself that every time you whip out your phone to scroll and if you can’t then maybe consider deleting some apps.

Anyway I’m not your parent; I’ll get down off this soap box and get back to the meat and potatoes.

Plans

Alright, what are we doing in july?

Well, I’m planning a few updates on the website, as well as some extra content here, as it’s been awhile since I gave fireye.coffee some love. That integrated todo list looks really good, as I keep my todolist on github issues constantly up to date, so I’d love to figure out some sort of backend that translates that into raw HTML, and can natively display it for people here.

Further, I’m of course going to be working more on nike’s house. I should probably stop with the tools work and just get to writing, as I could work on tools forever (I love tool (the band too)). Expect an update on that sometime this month. If you don’t see one, email me yelling about it.

I’m also messing around with self hosting stuff and fucking christ I’ve tried to set up this openvpn server at least 5 times now and it still doesn’t work. It’s a distinct skill issue and even if I do set it up I reckon I’ll be hacked almost immediately due to further skill issues, but we’ll take those battles as they come. I just love the idea of homelabbing so much, so I’ll bang my head on this as much as I need to to get it working.

I also have a summer class starting up soonish so I might be a bit more cooked on time than I have been recently which sucks, but eh que sera sera. I’ll live.

Conclusion

Alright that’s all I got for y’all. This was already a couple days late, so sorry about that. I’ll try to keep these up though as they keep me accountable and help me track my actual goals, and if anyone happens to care then hooray! Regardless, I hope you have a great day, and thanks for reading. vaya con queso!

Star Citizen- On Survival

Mon, 05 May 2025 17:24:31 -0700

I know what you’re probably thinking: Oh great, another star citizen rant! When will this idiot shut up about their silly space game? Well the answer is almost certainly not now!

I saw a neat video the other day, discussing the concept of survival in star citizen, and while I am about as excited as the creator of said video about the prospect of survival in star citizen, I do think a lot of that video got caught up in the excitement of the “what ifs.” It failed to consider any of the factors of actually making a video game that would go into making this eventuality occur, nor did it take any real stance on the design/ implementation of these factors. Instead it settled for a vague starry eyed vision of survival, which while fun to envision, communicates nothing of substance, and is firmly unrealistic.

So here’s my response in an attempt to remedy that. This is not a dig at the creator nor the video; I actually quite enjoyed the thing and it spurred a lot of thought, which i’m very grateful for. The goal of this is rather to maintain a certain amount of suspense of disbelief, but to use it more productively, at least in my perspective. On with it then.

Survival is mandatory

Star citizen is a game that feeds its immersion above all else, likely as a core design intention. I can tell many people in the community dislike this part of the game, as many disliked Arthur’s sluggish movement and lengthy animations in RDR2. In immersive games, this friction is a feature, not a bug. I will concede that there is a “sweet spot” where this friction is substantive enough to fully immerse a player but isn’t too much to cause them to waste vast amounts of time, but that friction can and should exist in games whose goal it is to immerse players, such as in SC.

A core aspect of that kind of immersion is survival. Nobody wants to take time to feed themselves or drink water, but needing to do so creates so much interesting gameplay if used correctly (which I’ll get into later). That’s why I think star citizen is only going to lean more into this survival gameplay; they’ve already implemented the foundation, they just need to play off it. That said there are a few various aspects of survival each with various levels of feasibility:

Aspects of survival

Let’s take a look at what comprises survival, at least in my eyes, and see where it can neatly slot into star citizen.

Food and drink

We already have this! Yay! However, it provides so little depth that my game developer soul weeps when looking at it. Right now, all it does is mandates you grab some food when you leave a station or city and that you need to return to stations and cities regularly enough to restock. All that you’d need to do to make it overwhelmingly better is add edible meat to fauna and add edible flora if you don’t want to deal with the whole “meat needs to be cooked” thing, and allow people to refill water bottles at rivers, or just to directly drink out of rivers.

This is generally not the most complicated thing to add, though I’m not certain how high fidelity these functions need to be to be pushed to live, so I won’t make any strong assumptions regarding the planet tech that governs the utility of the rivers, nor the animal/plant loot systems which could provide that food. From what I can tell from what we’re seeing released at the moment, it looks like the animal loot systems are being used the most, so that would likely be the easiest avenue for this, as depending on their backend it could be as simple as adding a new loot item (which does involve adding assets and modifying fauna models) and toggling on a theoretical boolean “edible” flag. Admittedly it could be a lot more complicated depending on their implementation though so, again, the term “easy” is very easy to fling around when you don’t know the systems.

Regardless, what this addition would provide is an avenue to actually explore and engage with the beautiful planets that CIG have designed, as at the moment, why would you ever land on any non-POI part of a planet? Adding interactable rivers and edible flora/ fauna that feed into the extant survival systems, would draw players running low on hunger/ thirst to the surface, searching for sustenance. Low flying over microtech, looking around for a good river when you’re close to death, then hopping back into a mission as opposed to jumping all the way back to a station would prove much more time friendly, immersive, and enjoyable.

Crafting

We can’t talk about survival without mentioning the elephant in the room: crafting. Pretty much every survival game includes some form of the thing, as the basis of survival is the capacity to take natural resources and use them to create more advanced tools and resources, which then loops ad-nauseum. Star citizen’s current plans for crafting are more industrial and grand scale than many other survival games, but I do think there’s still both demand and capacity for smaller scale crafting, as would feature in an early game survival loop. If we look at how satisfactory navigates the small -> large scale crafting, we see the usage of a crafting bench that allows simple crafting mechanics, which enable further development, then the game directs you to automate this lengthy manual crafting, by pushing you to larger scale crafting.

I think star citizen could definitely benefit from this model of splitting the crafting system by size and scale, the smallest subsection of which could simply be a multitool attachment. That way when your ship has soft death-ed on a planet you have the capacity to gather natural resources and craft them into usable tools, or hacky replacement parts to ideally get your ship to limp back to civilization without having to phone support or off yourself and come back later. Ideally both of these options, (the latter especially), are properly de-incentivised in later, more stable versions of the game, though I don’t think phoning help is ever going to not exist. Like you can cut off in game comms to global chat and any other local systems, but at a base level, you can’t stop people from whipping out their phone and texting a friend or an org to bail them out, as immersion breaking as that might be.

I don’t, however, see the workarounds as a reason to just give up on any of these systems. The natural storytelling that these systems will afford are just too rich to pass up, in my opinion. Having a little multitool crafter, and allowing you to just build your way up to a building, or getting a broken ship back up and running despite nature’s attempts to the contrary are the stuff of stories you tell even after you set the game down. The zero to hero’s with this system in place would also be vastly cooler too lmao.

The loop here is pretty crazy as far as scope goes though. Giving crafting capacity to a multitool is an incredibly tall order though, and integrating all the collectables for this loop in planet gen isn’t gonna be easy. Luckily it looks like they’re already on the FPS scanning feature, which would be really helpful when searching for requisite resources, but overall this is a big endeavor, and I really doubt it’ll be in anytime before 2030 (which is why we suspended some disbelief above). The only reason I bring it up is that CIG seems to already be making a crafting system and thus could build micro-scale crafting into the spec from the beginning, which usually bodes better than tacking things on post-implementation. I do hope they’ve taken survival into account in their plans though.

Hygiene

This one’s a bit wonky as I don’t think a tier 0 implementation of it is a good idea at all. It’s similar to the issue with food right now: if you just add it without full engagement in the mechanic, you get all the downsides, without any of the upsides. No; It needs to enter the game in a fully fleshed out state. I know many people would be critical of hygiene playing any part in SC whatsoever at any point in time though, and I do want to push back on this. Things like having to use the restroom, sleeping, or regularly showering sound tedious and useless, and in a tier 0 implementation, I completely agree. In such a state they’d only really serve the immersion, and provide more friction to gameplay which is something a lot of SC players grumble about quite a bit.

But looking past that, I could see restroom features becoming useful as a part of farming when that’s added, and sleeping/ cleanliness can contribute to a demand for amenities in ships, cities, bases, and stations, requiring your ship or base supports the above or you face penalties for not properly caring for your character. This pushes demand for ships with these functions, such as the intrepid, which is a pretty bad deal at the moment but could become a much better one, allowing players to sustain themselves for much longer stretches of time than other ships of its class. Bases would also need to accommodate these new demands, which creates further demand for resources to construct the proper facilities, which stimulates the economy.

Conclusion

I look forward to seeing how CIG end up implementing these systems, especially with their being referenced in the recent star citizen live, be John Crewe himself. I just hope they’re done sensibly and at the correct time, as CIG is unfortunately not well known for their capacity to release things smoothly.

Thanks for indulging my long overdue Star Citizen rant post. I have a few ideas for future blog posts cooking, and as I have more time this summer I’ll likely be able to get to at least a few, not to mention a project or two (stay tuned Nike’s House fans, I’ll get that full version out sometime this summer even if it kills me!) As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great day.

Make Bad Art

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:56:49 -0700

“Make bad art! Make bad art, make bad art, make bad art!” This is my artist’s mantra. A motto that drives my creative process. And it kinda sucks! Why the hell would I want to make bad art when I could make good art? And what happens in the unlikely event that one of the three AI webscrapers reading this (that probably ignored my site’s robots.txt) thinks the bad art I made is actually good art? Well let’s kick things off with the beret-wearing elephant in the room:

What is art?

My hot take of the day is that art is, at a base level, human expression. This definition is incredibly broad, and it is so intentionally. I’ve heard numerous arguments on the futility of broad definitions, claiming that they rob the word of any utility. I believe that is a mostly factual assessment, but not a helpful one. I’ll come at this from two perspectives: that of the viewer/ player engaging with the piece, and that of the artist, the creator of the piece.

The viewer

From a viewer’s eyes, art is something that evokes feeling, spurs thought, and/or creates meaning for them. However, individuals are an incredibly diverse bunch, both in life experience and in perspective/ personality. I don’t see a reason why any single piece of human expression could not evoke at least one of the above, if not more. Even if the work was not intentionally created as art, if a viewer engages with it as described above, who are we to reject their experience as “not artistic”? In my eyes, that’s needlessly exclusionary. Art should be for everyone, not just those who do it “right.”

The artist

I think it’s worth starting out with another definition. An artist is, pretty simply, one who makes art. On the surface, this is, as stated earlier, pretty useless with the above definition of art in mind. A person who exppresses themselves in some way? Doesn’t this just make basically everyone an artist?

Yes it does! In my eyes, art is something that is almost inherent to one’s humanity. The uno to their xbox, if you will. I think including everyone who wishes to be an artist in the term does something much more profound than be “specific in definition,” or whatever that means. It grants the everyday person the societal permission to create. To express. I’ve heard any number of bunk perfectionist arguments from everyday people that discount their own abilities and capacities, afraid of judgement. “I’m not an artist, I can’t create cool things” they say, almost circularly preculding themselves from exactly that. That’s a damn shame, as every single person who enjoys art is now missing out on another voice contributing to the shared dialogue that permeates the artistic world. In my eyes, we as artists have a direct responsibility to make art more accessible, not less. More open and accomodating, and less pretentious and gatekeepy. Because every single artist benefits from more ideas, opinions and perspectives. Art is derivative and the more we have to draw from, the better.

The birth of an artist

I also want to address how one becomes an artist. Simply speaking, when they fist start out, artists make bad art. A lot of it. And over time, as they make bad art, they hone their skills, and at some point their bad art becomes good art.

This is also vague as shit, but let’s start by clarifying the idea of what “good” art and “bad” art are. A lot of semantics around good and bad art are generally also meaningless as the “quality” of art is inherently subjective, however, humor me here. When people say “I don’t think this is art,” I think it would be more accurate to state “I think this is bad art.” Anyone can have any opinion they wish on any article of creation, so your subjective nullification of what another person may see as an artistic piece, can go both ways, resulting in a generally worthless argument consisting of “Nuh uh!” and “Yuh huh!” being flung back and forth. Simply allowing it to be classified as art avoids the nullification of others’ experiences while also opening up the possibility of a productive dialogue as to the quality of the piece. Enter bad art. I think we can all agree that bad art exists, all i’m arguing is that we dissolve the frankly useless line between bad art and not art.

This is all to say, I believe anyone expressing themselves and creating art, even (and especially) bad art, is an artist. You are likely an artist if you so wish. Now what to do? Bad art.

Go make bad art

I touched on this earlier, but in the creation of bad art, one is able to learn their craft. The benefit of making bad art over good art is that when making bad art, one is able to shed their expectations and standards for what a complete piece of art “should be,” and is freed up to simply create. Those concerned with good art get tied up in standards and polish (which to be clear do have their own merits!), and aren’t able to create as much as those making bad art. In learning, sheer quantity of repetition and practice on broad strokes will teach one far more than a fixation on perfection or quality. And in the long run, with the sheer amount of learning in mind, the bad art you make down the line will be of higher caliber than the good art you might have set out to make in the beginning! In short, go make shit! It’s better to make a finished bad thing than nothing at all.

This mentality is a much more subjective one than the ideas on art I presented earlier in this piece, in that I think it’s perfecftly fine to disagree herein. I’ve found a lot of benefit in this “make bad art” mentality personally with my ADHD ridden executive functioning issues, but one could have an entirely different experience than mine, which is entirely valid.

Caveats

This mentality is shaped with self driven projects and artworks in mind. If you have a job, or a school assignment, you’ll of course be subject to external expectations and standards, and it’s not necessarily bad to learn polishing skills. I’d just give a friendly reminder to do so mindfully, rather than hyperfixate on perfection over creation.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope this article got you to think about art and the creative process, and hopefully just try to make something! Art makes the world better for everyone.

To get notified about future articles, I recently added a newsletter that you can sign up for here, and you can support my creation of future articles like this one via my kofi here. Have an awesome day.

Bloob Devlog

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:00:37 -0700

After finishing The Memories of bloob and sending it to friends for playtesting, I got a lot of interesting feedback while watching people play through the thing and talk about it afterwards. One of the most interesting pieces of feedback, however, was the general distaste for the Quicktime feature. Let’s talk about it.

On Quicktime

First off, quicktime is old. Not like old old, just regular old. It has a spot in a lot of antequated games as a lazy attempt to engage players during cutscenes, throwing a fail state on failure, then forcing players to restart the whole scene. On the whole, this use of quicktime is generally awful for player experience, and especially so for acessibility.

To be completely clear, this was not the way quicktime was designed in Bloob. The execution was not perfect, the game being made in under a week and all, however, I still think that many players didn’t look past the veneer of a cheap quicktime event and actually engage with bloob’s core message, which I want to try and remedy.

How did Bloob do it?

First off, Bloob is inherently a narrative game. Not reading dialogue is not a good way to enjoy your time with the piece. Bloob was primarily written as something closer to a short story than a jam game, though it does fall under the latter definition and as such is written off as a piece with throwaway dialogue (as many jam games are) by most players, which is a damn shame.

Bloob’s implementation of quicktime was designed with the idea of “pain in the ass, but still more than doable” as the core design intention. The user is prompted to prepare to spam by the system, then is let loose, and spams buttons for 15 seconds or until they lose. Notably, the term “Suppress the memory!” is displayed right below the bar.

Taking advantage of the gamer brain

For some odd reason, the combination of a shrinking green bar getting replaced with bright red and a timer ticking down makes the gamer brain short circut and just spam the prompted buttons. “Winning is good right? I can’t let the bar reach 0, I’ll lose!”

And knowingly or not, the player has just made a decision. Simply doing nothing, and thus not suppressing the memory is within the option sphere, yet players simply don’t even consider it, which is frankly fascinating! But this whole minigame boils down to a simple success/ fail. Did you suppress the memory or not? This naturally leads into the following question:

Why disguise the decision?

The exact same outcome could’ve been reached with a simple dialogue branch. “Do you want to suppress the memory? Yes | No”. Why disguise it behind a weird antequated minigame?

Bloob tells a story of suppression, escapism and refusal to live life, choosing to live in memories instead. When you’re in that headspace you don’t simply decide to stop, to click that “No”. The player shouldn’t have that luxury either. Offering a Yes/ No decision to the player is, in my eyes, antethetical to the entire premise of the game.

Quicktime instead?

On the other hand, the way that a quicktime event hacks the player’s brain works almost too well. On earlier builds of the game, players would just rush through the game without realizing that you could fail a quicktime event! It wasn’t even an option that occurred to them, which is a beautiful paralell to the game’s themes, however I did want the player to realize that something was wrong, so I added dialogue that better flags the idea of something being off, and tried to be more overt in my communication of these themes. Even so, i’m aware that some players just play through it and assume the discrepancies in dialogue and go “huh that was weird” then go on with their day, and I think I’m ok with that.

Final notes

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your time, reading my ramblings on a little thing I made. Have a great day.

Wild West TTRPG System Devlog 1

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hi! Welcome to my wild west TTPRG’s first devlog! I figured I’d use this blog as a tool to get me thinking about this project again, and if I can share my thought process and inspire others to be creative and make things as well, that’s an added bonus! Please feel free to use the table of contents above to jump around to stuff that you find interesting, as I’m gonna be yapping quite a bit. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Where did we start?

This wild west TTRPG project extravaganza started back when I was playing 5e very regularly (over four years ago, holy hell i’m old). I’ve since curtailed my use of the 5e system to take up playing more independent work to draw from in terms of system structure and approach to design, however the wild west system’s old doccuments that i’ll be picking up are still very rooted in that old 5e-style. It leaned heavily into that moment to moment combat that D&D is well known for and it dealt in minute stat values and to-hit bonuses to weapons and heavy resource management. In other words, I think my digital game design practices crossed with my overwhelming 5e experience to that point resulted in a rather creative, yet bewildering network of systems and ideas that aren’t well suited to the TTRPG medium, or at least to the experiences I want to create with this system. Let’s take a look at what remnants remain and what I want to do with them.

Old docs

Here are the old doccuments if anyone’s interested in looking them over.

Combat

As much as I love the detail and ideas behind my combat mechanics, they were incredibly overcomplicated, and, in fact, the system as a whole actually looked to de-incentivese combat as a core design decisison, so introdicing interesting complexity would draw players to combat (ooo, interesting system! Let’s do more of that!) rather than than the other way around. That’s a direction I intend to maintain from the original doccuments, so (in retrospect) this complexity was completely unwarranted. My goal is to make combat bad. Bad as in “incredibly costly”, not “unfun”. Something that pushes players to look for a nonviolent solution, but still remains a last ditch option in a dire crisis.

I assume many tilt their heads at this decision. The wild west ficiton, after all, is rife with gunslinging, cannons, gatling guns, and shootouts. The heroes running into the fray, firing pistols left and right, and emerging with a couple bruises, ready to do it all again a few more times before sundown. And no doubt there are systems out there that fulfill this fantasy, however, I want mine to be a slight departure from the “shoot first ask questions later” mentality. Or at least make an effort to push players away from such behavior, which in turn, makes it more impactful and meaningful when it does occur. The goal is a harsher combat ruleset, but also a simpler one, to help the game keep its focus on the roleplay and immersion in the setting.

Roleplay

This was actually the least developed part of my old docs, as I intended to finish the combat before moving on but uhhhh… ADHD. However I still have a few ideas for where I want to take it.

First off, I dislike stats, at least as a tool for longer term campaigns. In terms of shorter ones, Mothership, for instance, uses them to great effect. You can run up a character in a matter of minutes and have a great idea of what that character is generally capable of with a quick glance at a few simple numbers. However, in my many years running long campaigns of D&D, stats become stale with time and lock fundamental experiences and mechanics behind walls of numbers. ASI’s really don’t do much to help the problem as a) min-maxing is essentally the default approach to character creation and b) in my experience, people just take feats instead.

Abstracting the player character’s development over the course of the narrative to a basic +2 wherever the player wishes to put it (You killed 32 goblins without saying a word in character to get to level 4 and you’ve suddenly gained two charisma?) is frankly strange in my opinion. It’s an intuitive enough abstraction, but I’d argue in a longer campaign where your character’s current actions need to make a difference down the line, any number of sessions in the future, I refuse to accept that inherent stats and arbitrary bonuses are the best way to do that.

A quick aside

If I can pull the discussion towards my sweet child, red dead redemption two, i’d like to point out the honor system in that game, as I believe that many game developers, digital or otherwise, can learn a thing or two therein. It’s a simple as hell system: Arthur does good things, he gets good points. Bad things get him bad points, which cancel out the good points. And depending on how many points you have, positive or negative, the story changes. This isn’t a new idea, but the important thing is how deeply it’s connected to every single thing in the game’s world. Most actions that Arthur can take when interacting with the world around him will tie into this system, good or bad. Again, and again, and again. Players can no longer act like complete maiacs and murderhobos with complete impunity because they clicked the “i’m a goodie goodie” button on some dialogue a couple times. Is it perfect? Definitely not, (1 human life equating to approximately 3 “hey there, pardner!“s is comedic at best), but we can almost certainly draw from it here.

Specifially, I’m looking at the idea of individual actions contributing to a larger longer term result. As opposed to abstracting these to numbers and having the player choose how those improvements come about, they’re forced to actually do the things that improve them. You get smarter by studying. Stronger by lifting and hitting things. Better at lock picking by lock picking. And there’s an opportunity cost to doing things (as I know very well with the sheer number of hobbies and interests i’ve decided to engage in). These should all contribute to their own skills, without the need for essential stats, which in turn allows the character to evolve over the course of the campaign directly based on how they’re played. The trick is how to implement this simply and thoughtfully. That’ll have to be the focus of another devlog, because honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet, myself! But I’m very excited to give it a crack.

Classes

I’m toying with the idea of removing classes outright. They’re a simple, helpful abstraction to help the player shape their character, but I’m opposed to the idea of fundimentally separating ideas or skills from others. If D&D’s classes are the windows operating system, its navigation bar, desktop environment, notification manager, etc… set up in one specific way for the user, I intend for this system to be akin to a version of Linux, giving the user a much wider breadth of fundimental choice at the cost of some user friendliness. Breaking apart classes into a more general pool of available skills, potentially with reccomendations to create common character archetypes, but affording the player the choice and flexibility to create a truly dynamic, unique character. Again, more on this to come.

Dice system

Here’s the kicker. I’m still up in the air about what kind of dice system I want to use! Woe is me! The original was d20 based and was calculus hell. That’s something to move away from. But towards what? PbtE is too crude for my purposes (As much as I adore it). Spire’s d10 pooling system is much closer to something that I like for this purpose but it doesn’t feel quite there just yet, at least for this system. (It kicks some major ass in both spire and heart, though.) The next article is likely going to be focused on my decision process here, as a good dice system will make or break this game, and I need to think for a good long while about what direction I should take with it.

Final Notes

And with that, our short time together is up. Assuming anyone is, in fact, reading this. If you are, and you aren’t a webscraper, thank you for reading. I really appreciate it. And with that, I receed back into my world of dice probability calculators and balatro. Have an amazing day, and I’ll see you next time!

My concerns with Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is the first genuine sequel to 2015’s “Life is Strange”, in that others have been made, but this is the first to feature Max Caufield, the original’s beloved protagonist, once again. This is a bold choice, as max’s story was pretty clearly complete at the end of the first game, yet here she is once again taking up both the mantle of protagonist and, more concerningly, the use of her powers. I’m not overly impressed with how deck nine has handled the life is strange franchise after having taken it from don’t nod, and now we observe their attempt to alter the canon of the first story. While this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, it does make me concerned for the direction of the game. Let me explain why.

Gameplay

The genius in don’t nod’s original “Life is Strange” was, at a base level, inherent to max’s use of her powers. It was quite frankly genius to take a genre notorious for save scumming and “rewinding” (pun intended) and turn it into a bespoke mechanic. This allowed don’t nod to balance short term consequenses with lasting ones and be more secure in their knowledge that players would be, for the most part, happy with their choices, at least in the short term. This deincentivised the 4th wall breaking save scums and allowed a much deeper, more coherent, immersive story to be told in the fiction, as players would be taken through the game facing the lasting consequenses of potentially bad decisions that they made and stuck to. This is usually not the case for similar games, as players tend to optimize and save scum the fun out of reactive storytelling, instead opting for perfection rather than the mistakes and imperfections that will inevitably make any story better in the long run. The original’s mechanic had, for the most part done away with this, which is what makes it that much better than its bretheren, at least in my opinion.

This is also what I was happy about when I heard about double exposure. I was hopeful that the original mechanic would return, allowing for more of that awesome gameplay. Of course, the first game’s plot does make even this a bad call, but from a gameply perspective, I was hopeful. Then they announced that the had changed the mechanic. This, for obvious reasons, is a bit of a red flag for me. Why bring back the original protagonist for any reason other than to bring back her signature power? Narratively, her using it again doesn’t make sense, which honestly is probably reason enough to keep the character retired, seeing as this is a narrative game, however now it doesn’t make mechanical sense either. The only option left is that they’re looking to make a cash grab off of nostalgia, which is a tragic end for the series. How do they intend to make this mechanical loss up? It’s a big question, but for the sake of the game, I sure hope they have a big answer.

Narrative continuity

The first game very notably ended with the resounding message that the use of max’s powers had dire consequenses, even when used to save those she loves. So why in hell is she doing the same damn thing again? She knows people die for a reason and if she wants them not to, then there’s gonna be hell to pay. I hate how they’ve just repeated a plot point from the first one, as if she’s learned nothing. Why the hell would she ever use that power again? She knows about it now. Regardless of ending, she’s not the type of person to open pandora’s box again, because she knows what that brings. it’s definitely one hell of a hole to write yourself out of, and I hope for the sake of these characters, this story, and this game that i’ve come to love, they write well. I’m not gonna say it’s impossible; I can think of a couple ways that they might start to go about it, but it’s going to be hard. And I really really hope that they have what it takes.

The Allure of Star Citizen: A Buyer's Guide

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Star Citizen is one of the most incredible games to exist both in planned scope and what already exists for people to play. It’s also one of the most broken, infuriating games I’ve ever played. And yet I continue to play it. What even is Star citizen? What pros and cons are there to the game? How does the monetization system work? Why do I play it? And more importantly, should you subject yourself to Star Citizen as well?

What is Star Citizen?

Plainly put, Star Citizen is an open world MMORPG that takes place in space. It features 100 player lobbies (at the time of writing), and has a local gravity system that allows free movement inside moving spaceships, regardless of orientation or location. Star Citizen is also firmly a systematic game, prioritizing the freeform nature of its systems over a more straightforward ideology. This results in a lot of consequential gameplay that emerges from systems interacting with each other rather than pre-defined quests driving gameplay flow. This results in both a replayability factor that sparks joy and a level of flow in the gameplay that can turn a simple hauling mission into a cutthroat, vendetta-driven quest for revenge. This flow extends to other areas in the game, most notably, in loading screens! There aren’t any! Once you load in, it’s a seamless experience, start to end. And once you realize this game has fully scaled walkable/ drivable planets, and space stations scattered everywhere around the system, this lack of loading screens becomes something truly awesome.

Before I can talk about anything else though, let’s get into how the game works.

Gameplay

At a base level, gameplay consists of a few distinct “loops” that allow the player to gain in-game credits that can be spent on ships, which in turn allow the player to access different loops, or improve performance in other loops. For example:

Eddie likes bounty hunting. He has a Mustang Alpha, which is an entry level fighter ship. He plays a bunch of bounty hunting missions until he saves up a lot of credits. Now he can either purchase something like a Cutlass Blue to improve his performance at bounty hunting, or instead buy a Prospector to try his hand at the mining gameplay loop.

There are a plethora of defined gameplay loops. These include the following:

Hauling
Mining
Ship combat
FPS/ Ground combat
Bounty Hunting
Salvage
Medical
Pirating

Regarding the flow I mentioned earlier, the nature of the game’s systems and the way these loops are structured, many loops overlap each other. This is what drives the flow of gameplay. Here’s an example of this in action:

Dana is a hauler. She buys goods in bulk for cheap at one location, loads them onto her ship, and brings them to another location, selling them at a higher price there for a profit. Rex, having a ship with good firepower, decides that he wants dana’s goods without having to pay for them upfront. So, he intercepts her after she buys and shoots her ship down, stealing the goods.

This is the Pirating gameplay loop.

However, by doing this, he has now obtained a crimestat. This puts him up on the bounty hunting database. Emily has been doing bounties and finds Rex’s bounty. She accepts it, hunts him down and collects her reward.

This is the bounty hunting gameplay loop.

Quinn also has a ship with good firepower and is offering their services for a small fee. Dana doesn’t want to lose all her investment again, so she hires Quinn.

This is the ship combat gameplay loop.

This is only really one example of a pretty common systematic emergence in star citizen. It’s truly incredible how well systems are built to link with each other and even themselves.

These loops aren’t your only options, however. Star citizen, being a systematic game, defines systems and allows players to do what they wish with them. This allows you to do stupid things to an amazing degree. Want to sneak onto random peoples’ ships and mess with their shit? Go ahead! Want to see the biggest vehicle you can fit in the trunk of your Drake Corsair? Time to find out! (So far it’s a C8R Pisces). And the best part about this is:

Multiplayer

Guess what? There’s a reason this game is an MMO! And thank the gods it is, because this game is easily 10 times more fun with friends.

All of this stupidity that you get up to solo gets punched up to an 11 when you’re doing it with friends. You wanna put tanks on large ships and play battleship with your friends? Fire in the hole! You want to have a hover quad rally where you see who stays alive the longest? Rev the engines! Heck, let’s drive the hover quads off a moving ship and see if they can survive the fall.

Having backup also enhances loop gameplay, as now you can have someone in a cargo ship move the salvage from your vulture into their ship, allowing longer salvage runs and higher profits. You can haul cargo in groups to deter piracy, as a squad of hauling ships is significantly more intimidating than just one.

Bottom line, If you get into this game make sure you either cyberbully your friends into playing with you, or just straight up join an org. In terms of orgs, there are plenty of options out there (here are the listings) and here’s mine. Whatever you do, play this game with other people!

Ships

There are a lot of ships (you can check out a comprehensive and descriptive list here) But to summarize, ships are the bread and butter of star citizen. As of right now, we don’t have base building yet, so ships are essentially the sole late game toys that you can throw your hard earned in-game currency at. Predominantly, ships are seperated by two main distinctions: Size and Function. Size is primarily a function of number of crew members that the ship can accomodate (A stat that is usually lower than officially stated). Function is usually any specializations that the ship has that makes it better at or allows it to do a certain gameplay loop. More granular listings can be found at the site I provided above. In terms of bigger and more expensive ships, though, you don’t need to get something huge to have a good time. Most of the time, large expensive ships require a crew and are close to inoperable solo. Small ships like the Drake Cutter and the Aegis Avenger Titan are great solo; Ships like the Drake Cutlass and the Misc freelancer are the perfect balance between flyable solo but better with friends; and Huge ships like the RSI Constellation and the Anvil Carrack are borderline unplayable solo. I’d encourage those who are curious to look around at what the game offers because it’s truly beautiful what CIG have been able to make here.

All you really need to know about ships is that they’re the game’s backbone. You can’t do anything in Star citizen without a ship. Wanna mine? Need a ship. Wanna salvage? Need a ship. Wanna haul? Need a ship. You get the idea. To be clear, there are also non-ship related activities, but you’re gonna need a ship to get to them.

Scope

The game’s scope is jaw dropping. As you’ve seen throughout this section, there are so many damn systems and ideas. This game has something for almost everyone. It’s incredible how many different games Star Citizen has managed to combine. That’s why it’s taken 12 years and counting. Most of the time, sky high scope is a developer’s deathwish. In this case, I don’t believe it is, as they have taken the time and raised the money to do high scope correctly. There are, however, a lot more planned features and systems that are a part of this scope that I have left out above, as they don’t actually exist in game yet. And here’s where we get to:

The Drawbacks

You’re probably thinking: “Wow this sounds great! How did I not hear when this was released?” Well, the answer is twofold. First, the game hasn’t actually released yet, and second, it’s been in alpha (not beta) for 12 years now, with really no end in sight. There are a few issues with this being the case, the biggest being:

The bugs

Dear god there are so many bugs. Ask any star citizen player their favorite bug moment and they’ll prattle on for hours. One time a friend dropped me a shotgun on my ship while we were flying and the ship just straight up exploded. The game has semi-regular crashes called 30k’s that just thanos snap the world to smithereens, sending everyone in there back to the main menu, potentially losing them progress and/or money. Ladders are hell, and elevators should be avoided whilst in quantum. These are just a handful of the numerous bugs that exist.

Performance

The game needs a good PC to run. I’ve put together a list with the minimum specs that I’d recommend for running this thing enjoyably at 1080p resolution. I’ve taken some tips from the public facing telemetry site so feel free to check that out as well for more detailed data. At the time of writing, most of these reccomendations are above base spec, aiming for an ideal experience, so if you’re a bit below spec, you should be fine depending how below spec you are and in which areas.

Ryzen 5 5600X/ i5 12600KF
- SC is a very CPU hungry game. If you have a better GPU than CPU, as many gamers do, then you will likely be CPU bottlenecked.
3060 Ti / 6700 XT
- Quick tip: Make sure you’re not CPU bottlenecked before buying a new GPU for this game!
100GB of free SSD space
- This is probably the most essential part of this list; Star citizen will be essentially unplayable on an HDD.
32GB DDR4
- SC will pretty reliably use 20GB, which exceeds the 16GB that many computers have. This sucks, but usually won’t be the end of the world, unless your virtual RAM is using an HDD and not an SSD. This is to say, get the SSD first.

The subpar performance coupled with the fact that the game is only really supported on windows, also makes it harder than usual to get friends into it, which is a damn shame.

The balance issues

The game is also pretty bad off in terms of balancing. Patch to patch, you’ll be going back and forth between dropping 25 mil on an anvil carrack for the memes and barely scrounging up a few hundred k like a poor victorian orphan.

The point

Point being, this game is half broken, and anyone considering getting into it needs to understand this. It’s definitely not broken to the point of being unplayable, but it’s definitely broken. Why isn’t it being fixed? Well that leads us neatly into:

The development strategy

CIG, the developers of star citizen, have put a focus on making the game feature complete before polishing out the non-game-breaking bugs and balance issues. Now this isn’t inherently a “drawback”, per se. Polishing and keeping a game in pristine quality takes a lot of dev power and would make the already sky high scope of the game take far longer to complete than it already will. (Which is long. Very long.) This strategy lends itself very well to fast prototyping and development, which I believe will benefit the game in the long run. Additionally, It’s ideal for private builds of the game that aren’t made for the consumer side. However, star citizen is very much consumer facing, which brings a lot of the more ignorable issues in private development to the surface.

My point isn’t to discount the many bugs and grievances that players have; It’s to contextualize them. There are so many valid reasons why players can and should be unhappy with the game’s current state. I’m among them in many respects, however, I also see the long term vision and I would rather continue as things are and get to see more systems and actual progress being made than have something polished being perpetually worked on at a snail’s pace. Every prospective player should decide if this is a sacrifice they’re willing to make, though. If you’re not happy with this development style then you’re well within your rights to wait until the game is more complete and stable to invest your time and effort into it. I don’t fault that decision; Just know there is a decision to make here.

Devtime

The amount of time taken to develop this game, 12 years as of now, is vast. I personally don’t see a full beta release happening anytime before 2030. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, however, the speed at which development is going and the sheer scope of the project all point to years of devtime remaining, even with this expededited development strategy. There’s another force at work here as well: Squadron 42. Squadron is the singleplayer game designed by CIG alongside Star Citizen. They chose to direct their main focus onto it rather than Star citizen for a few years, slowing down SC development considerably, however, It was recently declared feature complete, and now developers are moving back to Star Citizen, porting over the many finished systems from there into Star Citizen. I’d predict a 2025-2026 release for Squadron, but I still don’t know how much this will speed up development. Regardless, 2024 is looking like a very promising year for the project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what progress is made.

Monetization

The monetization for star citizen is a subject of controversy, for good reason; The game has raised over 600 Million dollars of pure crowdfunding. There are rewards for spending over $25,000 in the game’s “pledge store” on mostly just ships. This is an immense amount of money, and just looking at that as well as the cost of just buying a ship from the pledge store would probably be enough to make most casual gamers weep. However, this is not the full picture. Allow me to explain.

In-game availability

Every ship that can be purchased with real money is currently, or will eventually be, completely available in game for in game currency, no credit card required. The usual timeline is that on release, a ship is exclusive to those who bought it with real money for about one patch cycle, which is usually a handful of months, then is made fully available to all players through a reasonable amount of in game cash. This means that you don’t need to buy anything more than a $45 game package to fully enjoy the game.

The Pledge store.

The pledge store is the digital retailer of star citizen, selling game packages, ships, in game items, and even physical merch for real life money. You can also purchase upgrades between ships and only pay the difference between the two. The main focus though, is ships. A small ship will run you ~60-80 dollars, an medium ship that can be well run solo can head up into the $120-130 range, and bigger ships just scale from there. A sizable multicrew ship can cost you upwards of $300, a huge ship can cost 500 or more, and capital class ships are comfortably over the ghastly $1000 mark.

What the F*@k?!

Is an understandable reaction. “If there is no real barrier to buying ships in game then why buy ships at all? And why are they so incredibly expensive!?” First off, good questions. The first answer to both of these is: to support the game’s development. These are primarily marketed as a way to support and fund the game, as the game is solely crowdfunded via these very sales. Even if you choose not to buy anything, (as I earlier outlined as 100% a possibility), you’re still benefitting from others’ use of the pledge store in their resources redirected towards the game’s development. Next, There are some creature comforts of owning a ship bought with real money, such as keeping it when a server reset comes around (where everything is wiped and everyone starts from scratch), or with certain ships, being able to customize and name them. But, I’ll say it again, you really don’t gotta spend shit! If you think this is garbage, splendid! Buy the game and never look back. If you want a slightly nicer ship, you can throw 20 bucks at the game and be totally happy playing the game from there. If you love the game and really want to support it while gaining a literal armada of ships, then that option is available to you as well.

The key point here is that this is not a vital part of the game, and can be ignored with little to no consequenses.

Who is this for?

Star citizen is a game by game developers for game developers. There also might happen to be other people who enjoy the game, but I am firmly convinced that game developers are the main body of players and fans of this game, especially in its current state. I know for sure that’s why I’m as into it as I am. I know that every second this game spends in development a developer at CIG out there is living their best life and I’m so happy for them. But other than the developers out there who will spend their first play session inspecting the glass materials and making conjecture about refraction equations, who is this game for? And more importantly, should you play it?

Audience

First of all, there isn’t exatly one main target audience, (barring game developers of course); You’ll get a lot of different people with many varied gaming backgrounds playing star citizen. Chill gamers opt for the relaxing gameplay loops such as salvage, mining, and hauling. More “hardcore” gamers will opt for FPS/ ship combat or just straight up piracy. And the options in between can be fun for almost any kind of gamer willing to put up with the downsides I described above. If you’re looking for a multiplayer experience to play with friends, however, I’d definitely encourage you to overlook the downsides more than you already would.

Should I buy it?

Here’s a handy dandy flowchart to help you decide if you should get into it or not.

Do you think there are cool things that you’d like to experience in Star citizen?

No

Don’t buy it.

Yes

Are you willing to live with the downsides?

Yes

Buy it.

No

Do you have friends that you’d like to play it with or are you planning on joining an org and playing with them?

Yes

Consider buying it

No

Wait until it’s in a better state.

Those of you have decided to wait or not buy it, I’m glad I was able to help you make a better informed deicision. Those who have decided to buy it, I have a few tips below on how to get the best out of the onboarding experience.

I decided to get it! What do I do now?

First off, Welcome to the verse! Here’s a quick intro to the game so you can have the best onboarding experience.

Steps

First off you’re either going to head to one of webpages, depending on what ship you want to start with.
1. Anyone who just wants the game go here. I fully reccommend this option over the other one, as you can always upgrade your ship if you wish.
2. If you insist on getting a better ship to boot, go here instead.
It also might be worth snooping around the 2nd link to see if there are any good sales going on. I got my first ship, the drake cutter, during a halloween sale where it sold me the ship & starter package for only $45 and threw in a green paint job as well. Since there have been a few sales, lowering starter packs to $40, so it’s always a good idea to be on the lookout!
Next, You’re going to choose which ship you want to start with.
1. If you went with option 1 in the step above, you’ll be choosing between the RSI Aurora MR and the CO Mustang Alpha. The Aurora is better equipped for general use with 3 SCU of storage, and has a small walkable interior with a bed, (which allows you to bed-log while in space). The Mustang can only really do ship combat and has no interior, bed, or storage. It is, however, significantly better at combat than the aurora is.
2. If you’ve opted for a better ship, the viable starters other than the Aurora and the Mustang would be, in order of ascending price: The Drake Cutter, The Aegis Avenger Titan, and the CO Nomad. If you’re a sucker for alien tech, check out the Syulen as well. I wouldn’t reccommend anything over the nomad unless you really want a solid multicrew vessel. If that is something you want, pick between the drake cutlass and the misc freelancer. I, again, don’t reccommend this, as you can buy ships in game with ingame credits or you can upgrade your starter to another ship later on.
Now it’s gonna ask you to sign in. Press “Enlist Now” to create an account.

Here is where you can put in referral codes as well, so make sure to find one and plug it in. These will give you additional starting credits (both in the alpha and on full release) and if there’s an event on, potentially some other goodies. The most recent couple I can recall are a full set of pretty armor and matching weapons, and a literal CO Hoverquad with a skin & LTI. I’d reccommend asking a friend who already plays (if you have one) for theirs, then looking elsewhere for one. Here’s mine if you feel so inclined: STAR-C6PX-673X. Regardless of whose it is, make sure put one in there!
Pay for the package and download the launcher. If for some reason you can’t find it, the link to download it is here. This will download the launcher and not the actual game, so make sure to allocate that 100GB of SSD space and buckle up.
While it’s downloading, find yourself an org! As per my advice above, here are a couple links!
1. The org Listings
2. My Org and our Discord
Alternatively, feel free to google relevant orgs and skip the listings. I actually found my first org through googling!
If at all possible, once the game is done downloading, get someone in your org to show you around, or find a youtube video to do so. Here’s the one I used but it is a much better experience if you’re doing it with other players so I encourage you to find an org and ask someone there to show you the ropes!

If you can’t find any that suit your interests, please join my org’s discord and ask for a quick intro! We welcome visitors and prospective org members alike, and would be more than happy to give you an intro to the game.

And that’s it for onboarding! There’s a lot more to this game that I plan to go over in future blog posts, however this is all you need to get started learning the ropes. To sign off, I’ll leave a bunch of other resources here at the bottom. Thank you so much for reading; I really appreciate it.

Closing Notes

Here are just a few more things i’m putting here at the end that might be helpful!

Resources

Game wiki: https://starcitizen.tools/
- Very helpful, especially with ship research. This is definitley one of my go to sites, that I wholeheartedly reccommend.
Ship loadout planner: https://www.erkul.games/live/calculator
- If you want to see how you can deck out a ship to maximize DPS or just see what quantum drives are the fastest and where you can get them, this site is a godsend. I have had issues with item locations being outdated, though, so keep that in mind.
Armory loadout planner: https://armory.thespacecoder.space/
- Allows you to look up armor and weapons’ stats and locations
Item Finder: https://finder.cstone.space/
- Need to know where you can get an item or a ship? This here is your place.
Commodity Prices: https://uexcorp.space/
- The most up to date statistics on commodity prices for hauling. Also has a bunch of other cool features.
Trading tools: https://sc-trade.tools/home
- More useful calculators than uexcorp, but not as updated.
More Trading tools: https://gallog.co/
- If the other 2 don’t spark joy, here’s another resource for similar functionality
SC tour guide: https://verseguide.com/
- Helpful tool to familiarize yourself with locations
Fleet builder: https://hangar.link/fleet/canvas
- Allows you to make cool graphics of ships. I love this thing.
Ship stats: https://www.spviewer.eu/
- Similar to erkul, but less for customizing and more for preformance analytics

Don’t concern yourself too much with these to start, but they do get very helpful later in game once you really get into it.

Disclaimers

I am not affiliated whatsoever with CIG or any related group that would lend additional bias to this article. This is an independent assessment of the Star Citizen project from an outsider perspective. Still, I would like to cite aspects of my situation that could contribute to any relevant biases that I may conciously or unconciously hold so that you may read this article with them in mind.

Using my referral code I provided above to purchase the game will grant me (and the referral’s user) certain in-game benefits.
I have also spent some of my own money on star citizen, and have overall positive views about the project’s direction going forward.
While it won’t directly benefit me in terms of money or rewards, I do link to my org and our discord in a couple places as well.

While these involvments help contextualize this article better, I try my utmost to keep my work as unbiased as it can be.

Support me

If you think this post was helpful and you want to support me doing more stuff like this, you can find a link to my ko-fi here. Every donation, regardless of amount, helps my work immensely and will likely go towards buying more coffee, which is essential in the creation of things like this. Thanks so much again for reading, have a great day, and I hope to see you in the verse.

~ Kai

Kai's Awesome Session 0 Checklist!

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite aspect of TTRPGs. What do they like about TTRPGs? What kind of things do they want to happen? Is there any “cool moment” that they really wanna have at some point? Usually you’ll get things like “world building” or “puzzles” or “social subterfuge”, but it really depends on the players. This really helps you set the tone for the campaign and how you plan it.
Campaign specifics. How long do you wanna run this for? (A good rule of thumb is when you estimate the amount of time for players to complete a certain amount of content, multiply it by ~2-4 to get the actual amount). How frequently are you meeting? Will it be the same day/time every week or not? Where are you meeting week to week? Will there be food? Snacks? If so, who brings the food/snacks?
Absences. Establish a quorum with everyone, and decide what they want to do with their characters when absent. (“give control to another player” and “has something else to do canonically” are the 2 most common options) If you don’t meet quorum do you still want to meet anyway and play board games instead? Also I like to implement a 3 strike rule. The way I usually run it is “if you no-show a session without at least 24 hours of advance warning that’s one strike, 3 strikes and you’re out.” This is also established on a case by case basis though so if someone has an emergency, I don’t rule that as a strike. You can be as loose or as rigid with it as you want, but it’s really good to have from the get-go.
Vibes. Ask everyone what kind of campaign they want and have them put percentages on the following scales: silly/ serious and RP/Combat (eg: 30% silly, 70% serious; 90% RP, 10% Combat). If there are any polar disagreements here (including on your part) talk it over. If you’re too split here, and nobody wants to budge, it might just not be a good group. If this the case, it’s good to note this early and potentially stop before you realize nobody is having any fun.
Safety tools. It’s better to have them and not need them than the other way around. The X-Card is a good option.
Lines and veils. Topics that people don’t want to come up at the table. Lines are red flag no-no topics that you should avoid writing into the story at all, and veils are more of a “it’s ok if you fade to black/glaze over it rather than going into detail but be careful”. I like to describe both then leave the table open for suggestions. This isn’t the only framework for this kind of discussion, so encourage your players to talk about sensitive topics in whatever way they feel comfotable with. For example, a player might be alright with going into a certain theme, but only if it’s being handled in a certain way. Also make sure that players know they can direct message you if they’re not comfortable saying in front of everyone else. The most important thing here is that everyone should be having fun, so if one person says something’s off limits, it goes, no questions asked.
Other stuff! Open the floor to any additional notes that players might want to add. Address any of these, and once you do that, you can move on to…
Character creation! I specifically ask players not to bring any character to session 0. Just potential ideas. Give them a brief intro to the world, ask for questions, then let them loose. I’d start with some basic character details (such as race and class), then jump right into backstories, as those influence pretty much everything else. Encourage them to link backstories with each other. I require my players to have at least 3 relevant NPCs that mean something to their character. This grounds them in the world and can serve for some really nice plot hooks later down the line. Here you also want to set the campaign’s starting parameters. Where are they meeting and how did they get there? Once backstories are done, have them finish character sheets. Bada bing Bada boom, session 0 complete.

Hello World!

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is an initial test of a blog system! I’m writing this in markdown and let’s see if it gets generated well through jekyll! This is the first paragraph.

Here’s the second paragraph, I’ll see if this one makes it into the excerpt. (it did not)

Thanks for reading this I guess!