I went another two months without writing a media diet! These posts are way too important to ignore for that long, so let’s get into the crap I took in. But before that, look at this 👇 Table of … Read more

Monkey Man was brutal action fun. Big ups to the trans community training Dev Patel how to kick the corrupt cop’s ass. 🍿

Did I watch Friday the 13th Part 6 and 7 last night? Yes, yes I did. Do the teenagers behave like humans? No, they do not. But they do behave like Friday characters, so that’s consistent. 🍿

It’s been a while since my last media diet post—three months, I was horrified to learn. There’s a lot to get through, so I’m taking a whirlwind tour on this one. There’s no … Read more

I watched half of the Red Hot Cheetos movie the other night. It is not good, but I was entertained, but I shut it off. Make of that what you will. 🍿

My January has been monopolized by moving into an apartment and traveling to California for work and to see friends and family. In between all that, here’s what I was watching, reading, and … Read more

I’m missing Godzilla Minus One Minus Color, but then again dogs permenantly suffer from the reverse so I think I’m doing okay. 🍿

It’s the last day of December, and this is my last opportunity to ramble about what I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to. You ready? I’m not. Let’s go. 📺 TV I watched … Read more

🍿 My year in film stats, via Letterboxd. Do I stand behind all my star ratings? No. Will I revise them? Absolutely not. Most interesting takeaway? Only a quarter of the 93 movies I watched were released in 2023.

I went to a Die Hard watch party the other night with mostly folks I didn’t Know in Houston. One person out of maybe twelve hadn’t seen it. Very fun time. 🍿

As December rolls in, I’ve been spending some time reflecting. There’s a lot on my mind, but for now, here’s the media I’ve been experiencing over November. Movies Killers of … Read more

I saw No Hard Feelings last night. Fun, formulaic, funny moments, and as always Jennifer Lawrence is endlessly charming. 🍿

My friend Jon gifted me the classics. 🍿

In my notes, I found some fairly sparse thoughts on listening to Lita Ford’s solo career for the first time. I don’t know why I was listening to it, or what I had in mind when I was taking down notes. Perhaps we can all figure it out together.

I went track for track, jotted down a tiny observation, and gave up after less than two albums. Here’s my essential thoughts in full.

Out for Blood (1983)

1. Out for blood Rocker. Pretty standard hair metal fair.
2. Stay with me baby A little slower, but still upbeat. Has a fun intro bass line if I remember right.
3. Just a feeling Down the middle power ballad.
4. Ready, willing, and able Mean, heavy riff. Stomper.
5. Die for me only Screeching metal riff. Galloping.
6. Rock n roll made me what I am today Hard rocker, more in line with later Runaways runes. Shout-along-style chorus.
7. If you can’t live with it Another dark, similar to “Ready, willing, and able”, but more melodic and less mean.
8. On the run Rolling fast number. Production seems worse than the rest of the record, hard to hear her voice. Maybe it’s the copy?

Dancin’ on the Edge (1984)

Bigger more pop production than the first album.

1. Gotta Let Go Mid-tempo Motley Crue-type rocker, but with more melody.
2. Dancin’ on the Edge A little more expansive, more like a driving metal song.
3. Dressed to Kill Slower, but not quite a ballad. That 80s heavy metal slow-ish attempt at epic.
4. Hit ’n Run Hornier riff, more swing.
5. Lady Killer Talk opening. Another big riff. Not much to distinguish. Gang vocal chorus.
6. Still Waitin’ Driving riff, more pop-oriented. Like a pale version of I Hate Myself for Loving You.
7. Fire in My Heart No comment.
8. Don’t Let Me Down Tonight No comment.
9. Run with the $ Heartbreakingly, no comment.

I did a little analysis of my Letterboxd watch list, to see if there were any interesting patterns. Since the data export only includes the date I added it to the list, the title of the movie, and the … Read more

I just learned that I’ve seen 17 Cate Blanchett movies, which is 18% of the amount of films she’s made. I don’t know what to do with that, but there it is. 🍿

I saw Cocaine Bear last week in theaters, and it was joyous, grind-house, B-movie fun. I see so many reviews miss the point: it’s not Citizen Kane, it’s Citizen Toxie. 🍿

Alamo Drafthouse put out a list of 100 movies they’d want on a desert island back in 2020. Sourced from all their creative directors across the country. I thought it was an interesting place to … Read more

I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles last night. It’s so aggressively naturalistic, I had to sink in, but I found paying attention throughout well worth it. 🍿

Watched David Cronenberg’s The Brood from 1979. I wanted to like it more. Someday.

I watched The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Interesting twist on the Frankenstein legend, but I thought this one was less focused and entertaining than the other hammer horrors I’ve seen. Still, an engaging performance from Peter Cushing.

A lot has changed in the world since I last posted.

I have been extremely lucky during this pandemic. I am still employed, I can work from home, and I have my wife to shelter with. I do not take these things for granted.

And yet.

While my work life has not changed as drastically, my personal life has. Most of the things I did outside work before the pandemic were in person. Can’t do that right now. So, it gave me some time to work on home-bound projects that I pushed back on the shelf.

To that end, I’m very excited to introduce PCG, or Point and Click Game engine, an adventure game creation utility for the open web.

I did a talk about it three years ago (ouch), so this project has certainly been a long time coming.

PCG is very much in active development, but I think I’ve made encouraging progress, which I’ll explore in detail later.

But first, what am I talking about?

What is an adventure game?

If this is old hat to you, skip ahead to the next section.

For those not familiar, a point and click adventure game is a style of narrative, story-based games where progress is made primarily through puzzle solving, rather than violence or reflexes, something I appreciate more and more as I age.

While their popularity peaked in the early 90s for mainstream gaming cultural, they have thrived in the indie space over the past decade or so.

Mechanically, many games in the genre use a system of verbs to interact with the world. You click a verb from a menu, for example “push”, and then the person or object in the game you want to apply it to, such as “crate”. Perhaps there would be a trap door below the crate, and a new area is unlocked.

Another method some games employ is to do away with the specific list of verbs, having pre-determined actions when interacting, or relying on the levers that must be switched in the right order.

Almost all have you collecting various esoteric items, having the player apply those items to people or objects in the game, or combining them with each other.

A relatively simple system, from a game mechanics perspective, but one that hides a lot of depth, story-telling potential, and that particular player satisfaction from figuring out a puzzle.

Why a web-based adventure engine?

Most innovation in the web game space is around the <canvas> element and Web Assembly, which allows developers to “start from scratch” and create entirely custom rendering divorced from any of the preconceptions of the web.

This works well for action games or games with pixel-pushing graphics. However, the goal here is always to emulate a native application, and since games written for the browser cannot by definition ever be native, the best they can be is a close approximation.

While close might be good enough, this always felt like a missed opportunity to me. We spend all these resources trying to get the web to be more like native applications, but hardly any on what new and interesting experiences we can create that are unique to the web. As Marshal McLuhan wrote, an author I’m proud to say I got a few pages into, the medium is the message.

I started thinking about what kind of games would work well inside the traditional web context - aka, HTML, CSS and JavaScript (and SVG) rendered into a DOM tree.

After some thought, I settled on point-and-click adventure games.

My reasons being:

1. They are not real-time games—Having game play that relies on any kind of precise timing are going to need a more controllable rendering model than the traditional web.
2. They rely on text/audio—Text is a first class citizen of the web, and new web audio APIs make that aspect possible.
3. They are narrative-driven—The web is a powerful method of communication, and I’m excited by new methods of leveraging that.
4. I like them :smile:—This is important, because without it I wouldn’t be able to finish a big project like this.

In short, I thought I could re-create many of the different point and click adventure paradigms on the web, while taking full advantage of the things that make the web the web.

Some of the unique things that are attractive about the web are:

1. It’s universal—Many more people have access to a web browser than those with access to a machine that can play a triple A game.
2. It’s accessible by default (with a rich API for extensions)—This enables access by those with visual, auditory, motor, or other disabilities. Accessibility is sadly an afterthought in a lot of digital design, and seems entirely absent in the gaming space. Treating accessibility as a first class citizen makes the experience better for everyone.
3. It’s sharable—An oft taken for granted killer feature of the web is URLs. The power of sharing a permanent link that will work in every browser and can be posted to any platform is one I cannot understate.

Design goals

The ultimate goal of PCG is to foster a open, welcoming, and creative community around making point and click adventure games on the web.

In game engine terms, the goal is to create a flexible, modular, and pluggable system of components that can be combined to create most if not all the point and click varieties mentioned above (and many that were not), as well as opening up the possibility for new and unique games only possible in the web format.

After a lot more thought, writing, re-writing, trial and error, and leveraging embarrassingly earned career experience, I settled on some design principles for PCG.

The thought of even having design principles was something hard earned, but one I strongly believe in: a north star for how you go about making something out of nothing.

1. Leverage core web tech (HTML/CSS/JS)—Rely on core web technologies and patterns over writing new systems. While new systems may offer benefits, building off existing ones usually means a more familiar, fast, and pleasant player experience.
2. Player experience over developer experience—While developers are important, the end result that players consume takes precedence over the experience of the developers creating the game. These first two principles are why PCG is built without a framework in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.
3. Through documentation—A well documented system is an understood system, and an understood system is a powerful tool.
4. Newbie friendly—As the web has professionalized, many exciting capabilities have opened up. It has also raised the barrier to entry. Creating something fun and expressive that can be used at a basic level to good results, while still offering a much larger world of possibility for those interested in learning, I think strikes the right balance.
5. Open source—This is essential to creating a community, which is critical to the success of a tiny project like this. I also believe in it.

Next steps

This is a very high level introduction to the ideas surrounding the PCG project. I plan on writing posts going in-depth on each component of the system as they’re built and as updates are made. These posts will hopefully serve as a living progress report.

While I’ve spent a lot of time on PCG already, it is still in the beginning stages. It is very much a leap of faith.

I can’t predict what kind of community it will attract, if any, or what this project may or may not evolve into.

But I am excited to find out.

You can check out the Github repository or the documentation site for PCG, both very much in progress. If you have any feedback or would like to contribute, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you’d like to see what PCG is capable of currently (as much as I cringe to reveal the multitude of missing features) my friend made a tiny, rough demo game, and I made a little demo showcasing the text box component.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, hope you and yours are safe and healthy, and I’ll catch you on the next adventure.

Syndicated to:

• dev.to
• Medium
• Hacker News

This is a piece I wrote for McSweeny’s that I didn’t think would get published, but wanted to go through the process regardless. As suspected, it was not published. Here it is, in all it’s rejected glory.

Cats have lived with humans for thousands of years, but their behavior can still be baffling. The best method for understanding cat personalities is the same as it is for humans: figuring out which lifeless rocks were in the sky when they were born.

Aries

Your Aries cat is energetic and headstrong, which is why he ruined your couch. Drawn to competition, he excels at interpersonal struggles, like stealing the neighbor cat’s food. He can appear selfish, but only because he has tunnel vision for his task at hand. That’s why he seems so disinterested in you when he’s staring at dust.

Tarus

Your Tarus cat is peaceful and non-combative, and other cats will beat the ever living Christ out of him. Trusty and reliable, he will always pee on the exact same spot on the carpet. Naturally seeking luxury, your cat would never make it on the street. In fact, all street Tarus cats are dead.

Gemini

Feeling a deep need to be with others, your Gemini cat will make a habit of barging in whenever you take a crap. A philosopher at heart, you will often see your cat gazing out the window, pondering life’s great questions. Questions such as, “Will I get to kill that bird?”

Cancer

Much like Vin Diesel, your Cancer cat is obsessed with family. Except only metaphorically; cats are really territorial. Have you ever seen two cats getting to know each other? It’s brutal. But somewhere in her heart, she thinks of them as family, even as she’s ripping off an ear.

Leo

The ur-cat, Leos do what cats do, but more. Lay around? Check. Eat? Check. Hunt your shins? Check and check. In addition, Leos are very courageous, and will barely run away from the vacuum.

Virgo

Don’t let the surface fool you - it may look like your Virgo cat is doing nothing, but rest assured, inside, her mind is alive with calculations and predictions. Yes, to you it looks like she has been asleep for upwards of three days, but inside, she just did your taxes. Trust me.

Libra

Your cat craves balance above all else; can’t have too much or too little, everything has to be just right. Dry or wet? Felt or feather toy? Petting or no? Whatever it is, you better get it God damn right.

Scorpio

Scorpio cats are not aggressive on their own, but are quick to violence if provoked. Like, if you look at them too long.

Sagittarius

The symbol of Sagittarius is the centaur - half human, half horse - but that’s for humans. The cat version is half cat, half shetland pony. The cat half is terrified of the pony half.

Capricorn

Driven by ambition, your Capricorn cat will stop at nothing to achieve things no cat has ever accomplished before. That’s why she keeps fighting the dog. One of these days, she’s going to win, so separating them is against the stars.

Aquarius

Generous and dedicated, Aquarius cats are the philanthropists of the feline world. This means they’ll think twice before stealing the neighbor cat’s food. They’ll still do it, but they’ll think about it first.

Pisces

The symbol of Pisces is a fish, and all Pisces cats won’t eat fish out of self respect, even though they love it. The only way to get your Pisces cat to eat fish is if she’s hungry.

Just saw The Best Years of Our Lives, which I recommend. Like many movies prior to around 1970, it features a lot of cheery, well-mannered alcoholism. You can get it public domain on archive.org.

I just saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie on Amazon Prime. I’d like to like it more. 🍿: https://www.chrisdeluca.me/note/1574308753/

Also posted to: https://mastodon.social/@bronzehedwick/103174031973953819