Here are this month’s chocolate bars, courtesy of Origins Chocolate Bar in New Westminster, as usual!
The Stochastic Game
Ramblings of General Geekery
I received my copy of Cold City / Hot War and it looks pretty good! Also, there are “play packs” with cool stuff inside, which means I’ll schedule this game for the next time my group plays in meat space!
I always assumed that the James Bond “spiral jump” car stunt was made with models, but apparently not? It was not only made for real, but it was first planned and simulated on computers, and shot in one take! This is amazing.
“The remarkable story behind the secret Canadian guerrilla force you’ve never heard of”: I indeed had never heard of these people, Chinese Canadian soldiers who joined a WWII British special ops group to operate in Southeast Asia, at a time anti-Chinese racism was high.
“The Secret of Monkey Island: 13 versions, side by side”: this is not only super awesome, but the web UI is absolutely genius (if you’re of a… certain age). I played Monkey Island 1 and 2 with the kids a couple years ago and it was a blast.
SiloRider 0.3.0
I haven’t talked about SiloRider in two years, and even then it was the only time I mentioned it on this blog since I announced it eight years ago! I’m obviously not good at advertising or project management. But I’m decent at coding, and if you looked at the repository, I’ve been slowly maintaining SiloRider all this time. After all, I’m using it daily with this blog, which crossposts to my social media.
It’s been long enough that I need to re-introduce SiloRider: it’s a Python command-line utility that parses your blog’s homepage for microformat markup, and cross-posts your content to social media platforms. Basically, it’s how I post here on my blog, and everything then shows up on my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts.
Anyway, I was way overdue for a new release! SiloRider 0.3.0 is now available on Pypi, in case anybody out there wants to try it out. But watch out, this is very much a “works on my machine” kind of project, so you need a bit of technical know-how to get it running. I would happily welcome contributions to make it more user-friendly.
Notable new features since 0.2 include:
- Posting to Bluesky. This includes support for rich text, such as hyperlinks in your skeets.
- Posting to Facebook Pages. Posting to personal accounts isn’t supported, since Zuckerberg shut that down a few years ago to try and keep you inside his silo. But Pages, used by brands and businesses and so on, do support automated content.
- Automatic resizing of pictures in a micropost, for silos with file size limits.
- Generation of “social cards” for links in your posts, for silos like Bluesky who don’t do it themselves.
- Converting GIFs to MP4, for silos like Bluesky who only support “proper” videos.
And of course, a whole bunch of bug fixes. So many bug fixes, especially around the finicky ways of determining character counts for those silos with character limits.
I’ll try to post more regular updates about SiloRider going forward, but most of it will be bug fixes, unless something notable happens in the social media landscape on par with the exodus from Twitter.
“Three Body Orbits: an atlas of periodic solutions to the three body problem”. That’s pretty neat! Some of these orbits are quite wild and pretty! And there’s a page where you can help the hunt for more solutions to the problem, too.
“Two Games With The Same Name Released At The Same Time, So They Decided To Work Together”: that’s the cute game-dev story you might need in these otherwise shitty game-dev times.
I got some replacement pads for my headphones, and now they feel all new again despite being 6+ years old. Yeah, I could get a replacement headband too.
