Liz England’s game design library ✶

Liz was a designer in Watch Dogs: Legion, a unique game where you can hire any non-player character and make them player characters.

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

3D International Space Station live tracker ✶

By Matt Eason, who also made Live Cloud Maps and Ambiphone.

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

♫ Kyrie ✶

From Popol Vuh’s 1970 album Hosianna Mantra.

Monday, 13 January 2025

Awareness of atomic reality ✶

From the Science and Transformation chapter of Jane English’s Fingers pointing to the Moon:

The phrase “awareness of atomic reality” triggered in me an experience that lasted about a half hour and was accompanied by changes that were noticed by people around me who commented that I seemed to be in a transcendent state. The experience began with a sense of sudden dissolution, especially of visual forms. The initial experience is impossible to describe in words. After a moment, I was aware of patterns of energy, millions of pinpoints of light, and a confused rush of visual sensation. Soon the experience stabilized somewhat, and I became aware of visual forms corresponding to what I now would call the furniture in the room and the sunlight on the trees outside. But everything was somehow different; there was no in-here/out-there split in my seeing!

This experience of no-separation cannot be fully described in words since words are, in their essence, distinctions and separations. It was an experience of union in which I and the world of objects did not exist separately. In this state of awareness there was no space or sense of separation between objects and my eyes. Thus I felt no need for light to exist to connect objects to eyes. Objects, eyes, and light no longer had the objective existence they had seemed to have just before. Separate self-identity and separate objects were optional ways of structuring experience rather than absolute realities. I wandered around delighted, awed, and amazed. I was aware that I had often had moments of this kind of seeing while looking through a camera. I had described it as “becoming what I photograph,” even though that had then seemed crazy, impossible, and not quite accurate.

When experienced as two alternative ways of structuring awareness, rather than as qualities of something objectively real, the existence of light-as-waves and light-as-particles no longer seemed paradoxical. I realized that the wave/particle paradox had been my first koan, and that I had just solved it. The phrase “awareness of atomic reality” had pulled together my experiences in awareness work, in physics, and in photography to create a new state of awareness.

This new seeing gradually faded. I think that I was feeling overwhelmed and not ready to let go of my old worldview or of my separate identify. Since then, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in meditation, I re-experience that seeing for short periods of time. I also find that I am more open to the possibility that things are not as they seem to be. I have learned to trust my experience of reality more than I trust what other people say about reality.

Sunday, 12 January 2025

Confessions of a disillusioned scientist ✶

Just found Tom Murphy’s Do the Math blog, via a comment at Ongoing, and I like it a lot.

Tom’s path brings to mind Gia-Fu Feng’s and Jane English’s translation of and artwork in The Complete Tao Te Ching.

I became aware that some of the pillars on which modern life is based were necessarily temporary. Growth on a finite planet would have to stop—both in physical terms like energy, but also in economic terms.

Tom seems to me to be a sane and optimistic person, so it’s a good time to make a plan B, and C, and D, wherever you may be.

The last line of his 2021 textbook Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet:

Treat nature at least as well as we treat ourselves.

And as Jane English puts it:

Each of us can in this way bring a drop of balance and beauty to our world that so needs it. Many such drops can create a river and an ocean … We need to honor ancient wisdom as well as modern science and technology, the intangible and the measurable integrating them in both our minds and our hearts.

Saturday, 11 January 2025

The People’s Cabinet ✶

Borrowing the UK’s Shadow Cabinet idea and bringing it across the Atlantic is a good idea. Timothy Snyder:

In a shadow cabinet, in Britain and Canada and elsewhere, parliamentarians from the opposition party follow the actual cabinet members, develop expertise in the relevant portfolios, and comment to the press. They remind the public that other policies and other approaches are possible, and get a chance to show off their skills. (For more on the particular value of such an institution in America right now, see the earlier post.)

Thursday, 9 January 2025

Travel Checklist

❦

A checklist for travel that saves the state of each checkbox in your web browser’s localStorage so it doesn’t get lost when refreshing the page. Click the Clear All button at the end to clear the checkboxes.

Documents & Money

Electronics

Toiletries

Health & Miscellaneous

Clothing

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Monday, 6 January 2025

Why triple-A RPGs focus on violence ✶

As descendants of hunter-gatherers, there’s a thrill felt by many humans, maybe around 50% of them, when swinging or launching a projectile that hits a target. The opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example.

Maybe this is a reason violence in video games is so popular. It lets humans express it in play without real-world consequences.

Yet, at least. See Ender’s Game, Ready Player One, drones in ongoing wars, and James Somers’ writing about AI and robotics for a glimpse of a future, or present, where joypad-controlled machines kill remotely.

The most efficient killers, however, are the ones who can convince a mob to kill for them. Unfortunately, once in a while, they take power.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

—Primo Levi

DOOM: The Gallery Experience ✶

Admire the glasses and critically curious, somewhat worried expression of your space marine avatar while drinking wine and eating hors d’oeuvers in a web browser experience “…created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.”

Press 1 to switch from the glass of wine to your hand and then click each artwork for a close-up, then click the title of the artwork to open its page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Zelda Breath of the Wild controls ✶

After playing this video game art piece again yesterday I’ve updated the Zelda BotW page with a table of controls to help avoid future rage during livestreams.

Friday, 3 January 2025

Create new Textmate bundle or snippet using Bundle Editor

❦

The following doesn’t seem to be in Textmate’s manual, there are no UI buttons to press, and I’ve forgotten how to create or edit Textmate bundles often enough to write this down:

  1. Top menu → Bundles → Edit Bundles
  2. Cmd + N to create new item
  3. Name the item on right sidebar
  4. Cmd + S to save an item
  5. Cmd + Delete to delete a selected item

Examples

HTML <img> tag snippet, inserted by typing img and pressing Tab, then pressing Tab again to jump between defined fields:

<img src="${1:URL}" alt="${2:ALT Description}" width="${3:Width. Usually 650.}" class="rounded">

Date and time in UTC/Zulu format for current locale snippet, inserted by typing dz and pressing Tab:

`date +%Y-%m-%d\T%H:%M:%S%z`

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .
Abject Audio Inputs ✶

Utility to bind inputs from your keyboard to frequencies recorded from your audio devices so you can control a video game character with a musical instrument.

Tuesday, 31 December 2024

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

❦

Joan Rambo in the first episode of HyperTextHero Bannerlord streams.

Horse & Sword II: Flaghugger, or Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord (Steam), is the first video game I’ve played that follows your avatar from birth, childhood and youth (character creation phase), to a life, potential children, and death, and then onwards to your offspring’s turns around the sun.

A strategy action role-playing thing, Bannerlord takes us back to the Middle Ages in a world of fiction-based-on-fact, where romance, commerce, and leadership is punctuated by brutal melee crowd combat.

War does change. It’s humans who don’t.

HyperTextHero Bannerlord videos originally livestreamed at twitch.tv/hypertexthero will be listed here, as our orphan, Joan Rambo, gallops across lands, searching for her siblings, for power, for vengeance.

1 · Character creation, tutorial

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Image slideshow for OBS with captions generated from filenames of images in a folder

❦

A screenshot showing the slideshow running in OBS with Photoshop, Terminal, and Textmate open at HyperTextHero’s.

  1. Download Browser Image Slideshow and follow install instructions step 0 in the project description.
  2. Put images in the /images/ folder.
  3. Rename image files to: Title, ####, Author..ext …where #### is year of creation (if unsure, use c.####-####), and .ext is the file extension, such as .gif or .jpg.
  4. In Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), in the Sources window, click + and select Browser, give the source a name like Slideshow and click OK, then check the checkbox by Local file and select the downloaded BrowserImageSlideshow.html
  5. Check checkboxes for both Shutdown source when not visible and Refresh browser when scene becomes active.
  6. Run the following command from a macOS Terminal command prompt inside the BrowserImageSlideshow folder whenever a new image is added to the folder, including the first time you run it:
    ./RefreshImages.sh On Windows I think you need to run RefreshImagesW.cmd instead.

If you want diacritics (accented characters) in image captions, add the following line directly below <!DOCTYPE html> in BrowserImageSlideshow.html: <meta charset="UTF-8">

To change slideshow look and layout edit the CSS styles at the top of BrowserImageSlideshow.html, save the file, then click the eye icon next to Slideshow in OBS’s Sources twice to refresh the source and see changes.

To change slide duration, order (default is random), autoplay, and enable or disable captions, edit the settings.js file in the BrowserImageSlideshow folder.

Change slide fade duration to 1 second by changing:
let fadeDuration = slideDuration * 0.25;
…to:
let fadeDuration = 1000; // 1 second fade duration
in the JavaScript in BrowserImageSlideshow.html

Thanks to dustymethod, NaGeLBaileyVT, and SocksTheWolf for making BrowserImageSlideshow.

You can see it running during my Co-working & Studying Sound Space streams at twitch.tv/hypertexthero.

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Video game fonts

❦

An ongoing list of typefaces, or fonts, used in various video games I’ve played. It includes fonts in game user interfaces (UI) and marketing materials, and there may be guesses and mistakes.

I’ve identified these with the following tools: Friends, internet citizens, websites like What The Font, books, Mark I Eyeball, and design work experience.

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .

Monday, 30 December 2024

Apollo-11 HSK TV monitor polaroid pictures ✶

A click on each broken thumbnail reveals the images.

Browser image slideshow for OBS ✶

With captions generated from the filenames of the images that you put in a folder. Supports many image types including animated gifs, avif, svg, and bmp, and webp. I’ve added this to the streaming guide.

Show time in other time zones in macOS menubar ✶

With the free Hovrly utility.

Sunday, 29 December 2024

Goodbye, Jimmy Carter ✶

I came along at a time when Americans still remembered painfully the lies told and the debacle of Watergate. I was outside of Washington, I was not stigmatized by the mistakes that had been made in those previous years. And I brought a fresh face of a peanut farmer, a working man who swore never to tell a lie or make a misleading statement.

An unlucky president, and a lucky man.

Wednesday, 25 December 2024

Noticing nature ✶

Our surroundings can impact our well-being for better or worse, but we’re not always aware of these effects. This practice asks you to pay attention in particular to the feelings evoked by nature. Research suggests that people often feel positive emotions like awe, connectedness, and hope in natural settings, and taking time to acknowledge these feelings can strengthen them.

Monday, 23 December 2024

Two thousand and twenty-four

❦

2024. Click to see HyperTextHero merch using this typeface.

2024, a better spin around the sun and behind the moon than the previous one here at HyperTextHero Headquarters.

Visited friends, found more help for mom, started playing piano, and late in the year, with the help of new accessories, got my livestream back on schedule, even if temporarily as 2025 is looking busy for In Real Life movement.

Here are some of my favorite things done or discovered:

Books

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, on my display shelf.

Films & Series

A closeup of Cillian Murphy’s face from the final scene of Oppenheimer.

Songs ♫

The Gods We Can Touch vinyl cover detail, on my display shelf.

Video Games

A screenshot from a mission played with friends versus killer robots in Helldivers 2.

  • Dedicated pages with links to each episode of video games I play were made this year. Scroll to the bottom of this page to see a list of the current ones, or visit the Articles page. Variety seems to be the true name of the HyperTextHero video game game.
  • Helldivers 2. An action comedy troupe theatrically powered by the best sound track since the original Star Wars and Rambo II: The Mission.
  • Delighted to have a new Flight Simulator, but waiting for creases to be ironed off my pilot’s shirt before begining my flight around a digital Earth in 2025.
  • Starfield didn’t reach the heights of the hype, but I still enjoyed its soundscapes and occasional wild low gravity combat to finish it.
  • Kithack Model Club keeps improving. I see a bright future for this one-of-a-kind radio controlled plane, car, and boat simulator and aeronautical enginerring and 3D modelling piece of digital education by the creator of Kerbal Space Program.
  • Arma Reforger is better, too, out in the light of day, with only desync during vehicle collisions remaining in my “particularly annoying” bug list.
  • Sneaking into this list a few minutes before 2025, the strategic layers of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, along with a rekindling of Jagged Alliance 3 gave a welcome break from the always-moving nature of simulation action games I’m partial to.

Visual Art & Objects

  • Tove Jansson: Bird Blue, 1953 (detail). © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
  • Trips to visit friends with a decade+ old X100S, and then the lovely X100VI, rekindled my candid photography. The VI is my first new dedicated, non-phone camera in over a decade. Thank you for making this thing, Fujifilm people!
  • Bozeman Tall winter boots (thanks, babe!)

Websites

  • Hacker News, still one of the very best places to find and discuss interesting things on the internet, thanks to moderators like dang.
  • PAXsims, “devoted to the development and effective use of games and simulation-based learning concerning issues of conflict, peacebuilding, and development in fragile and conflict-affected states, as well as to the policy application of gaming and simulation techniques.”
  • My favorite blog writer of 2024 was Simon Willison. Clear, thoughtful, expert commentary about technology, including AI.

Todo list for 2025

  • In the beginning of the day, don’t look at your phone or computer. Avoid news especially, and instead write your thoughts, draw something, work on a song, make something, anything. Don’t let your day get sucked away with things that you can’t control
  • Excercise every day. Also 20–40 minute walks or 100 basketball jumpshots, if possible.
  • Publish first original song, publish first EP.
  • Draw daily, even a 5 minute drawing. Try more drawing streams.
  • Write daily, even for 5 minutes.
  • Learn a new song or practice one or two from existing set two or three times a week.
  • Write postcards to people.
  • Continue editing YWAB.
  • Set up a weekly “office hours” stream to help people.
  • Cold water on face after any shower to help keep sinuses clear.
  • Add any streamed video game episode to YouTube and link to it from articles about the game here. Don’t worry about not finishing games. Keep going with ones you like. Let others go.
  • Set up bird/nature cam for Sound Space streams.
  • Make a 1 minute stream trailer and a 5 minute film.

Wishing you a good 2025, dear visitor!

˚　✦　.　　.  ˚　.　　. ✦　 
  . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　.  ˚ ˚　　 *　　
　✦　 .　✶　.　✦　˚ 　✦˚　˚　　　　
    .　. 　˚　.　 ੈ  ✧̣̇ ˳ · ˖ ✦ .
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century ✶

Also available in a visual graphic edition.

✶ Linked List
❦ Articles