Moist.

It’s not a brand name. Two American companies picked different compound abbreviations at roughly the same time, and somehow one name spread here and the other name spread everywhere else.

My parents had one where it slid down, and my grandfather had one where it slid up. They looked otherwise identical.

Some thanksgivings we’d have both at the same table and it drove me up the fucking wall.

In the UK it’s mandatory, ostensibly to prevent deliberate overdoses. You can’t buy a big bottle of acetaminophen.

In part because they call it paracetamol.

Plenty happens after you die. You’re just not there for it.

I only recently tossed a Handbook Of Christian Apologetics by Tacelli & Kreeft. I was never devout, let alone outright brainwashed into anti-science nonsense, but at the cusp of my reddit atheist phase I figured a question this big deserved a fair shake. So I got a big ol’ book of the best arguments anyone had. They all sucked. So that was that.

The one that made me put the book down and go ‘yep, atheist’ was “the argument from magic.” You think about moving your hand. Your hand moves by thought alone. Magic! Therefore, Jesus. I fucking wish I was exaggerating.

Took another decade to figure out the people pushing these arguments don’t actually give a shit about being right. The point is performing loyalty to the ingroup. There’s a conclusion, and it comes from people above you, so your job is to make whatever mouth noises get there. Consistency and logic are neat features if you can manage. A monotheistic god is only the purest expression of that tribalist worldview.

South Park: “I’m afraid it was the Mormons. Yes, Mormon was the correct answer.”

Nah, like Kankri and Porrim.

How do you get tan-egg poop out of a keyboard?

I wrote the only first-person shooter on NES.

I can wholeheartedly recommend C for 8-bit platforms, endorse 6502 assembly as brilliant and rewarding, and tell anyone new to retro game dev to pick any other system besides the NES. It’s a fucking nightmare. VRAM is only accessible during vblank and will jank up your screen if you try doing too much per frame. The sound chip will eat inputs if you try doing sample playback. Splitscreen of any kind is nightmarish without a mapper chip. Everything has errata - VRAM reads will return junk once per frame, because go fuck yourself. Every color that’s not blue is ugly, anything saturated has “dot crawl,” and the palette grid is a bitbanging headache that only gets hidden by CRT overscan.

None of this is aided by cc65 being a jumped-up assembler macro. It is instant. It’s the fastest goddamn compiler I’ve ever used. But some C will generate absolute dogshit assembly, for reasons inscrutable to mortal men. There’s documentation - it’s wrong. It tells you how to put variables in zero-page and it’s lying. There’s a fastcall convention that still shoves registers onto the stack. There’s no sane way to place things at specific memory addresses, or even page-align arrays, which you’d think might be kinda fucking important for a compiler suite that supports one architecture. But I really cannot overstress how stupidly fast it is, to where checking any of this bullshit by modifying and rebuilding is quicker than any debugger.

So.

Uh.

If this setup eases any of that - great. Otherwise start with a Game Boy game and GBDK.

Final v3 is funny cartoon man Noodle and his game-dev friend Sam talking about the creative industry. Mostly about why you shouldn’t work in the creative industry.

Well There’s Your Problem is two communists an anarchist exploring awful ways architecture and infrastructure can turn people into a homogeneous paste. Notably this one has slides to accompany the audio.

Kill James Bond is a review podcast for slagging off spy movies and related films.

Youtube videos. I used to use youtube-dl exclusively, and then that stopped working, and I’ve gradually been sucked back into just using the website. But there’s a text file with a list of URLs I’ve been meaning to grab for posterity… and it’s getting kinda fat.

1 + 1 = “11”.

Big thanks to Microsoft for their efforts to advertise Linux.

Would the association with the transgender community be news to you, or is that how you first heard the term?