@jmac@masto.nyc
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

jmac

@jmac@masto.nyc

I live in New York. I get paid to write about databases. I don’t get paid to write about other stuff, but I do it anyway.

Tech writer at Google; Co-founder of IFTF, an interactive-fiction nonprofit; Liker of coffee, cats, open web technologies, et cetera. Co-admin of https://masto.nyc.

All views I express in my personal posts are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Five Borough Fedi Project.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

jmac, to random
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The joy of the original Alone in the Dark had more to do with being a dapper post-Edwardian lady-or-gentleman expertly roundhouse-kicking a floppy cookie monster twenty-seven times in its snaggle-teeth within the first ten minutes of play than anything else.

jmac,
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This guy right here!

One of the very first survival horror games knew what monsters should look like. They nailed it in one try. Everything since then has just missed it completely.

jmac, to random
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Surely this is the highest score ever achieved by anyone in this or, indeed, any videogame.

jmac, to random
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Isle of Dogs (2018)

jmac, to random
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Watching Isle of Dogs. It’s super-good, right?

I feel like it blazed through the culture right before the pandemic and nobody’s mentioned it since. Maybe everything that isn’t a 100-hour video game is like that now, I dunno.

I had just seen it once in the theater, before this. I think this may be an all-time great, man.

jmac,
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I have finished watching Isle of Dogs. It really is a great movie.

I think I didn’t love it in 2018. I remember feeling agitated at its imperfections. (Not in the animation! I love the stop motion wonkiness unreservedly.)

Such heart, though, expressed with such craft.

jmac, to random
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Wrote a Fogknife post about my first experience using an —in this case, —as a programming assistant.

https://fogknife.com/2023-05-28-rubber-ducking-it-with-an-llm.html

temvald, to random

Hmm i wonder if this website is at all machine-generated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230527230844/https://www.foodandlifelover.com/whats-the-difference-between-a-chickpea-and-a-lentil/

(Link is to the wayback machine because the site doesn't deserve the traffic.)

jmac,
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@temvald This is amazing.

jmac, to random
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023)

jmac,
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@CarlMuckenhoupt My understanding is that the entire game is inspired by Twin Peaks!

kevinctofel, to random
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Kicking off our weekend with a little golfing on the . I’m “Pro Golfer” because I didn’t want to fiddle with the on-screen keyboard. 🤣

jmac,
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@kevinctofel Names are destiny. Go with it. 🏌️‍♀️

samplereality, to random
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shopping spree for next semester

jmac,
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@samplereality Some very good timeline synchronicity here:

jmac, to programming
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Last night I successfully used one of the big thingies to get me, a novice, over the hump with writing a program for a specific task.

As far as I can tell, it made up a fictional library with a reasonable -guess API, and then showed how it might work. It absolutely did not work, but it gave me ground to start from, and unstuck this long-stalled project. I had it working within an hour.

jmac, (edited )
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While tuning the original template that the LLM offered me, I had a lot of specific follow-up questions about how to do things in python, from “What syntax do I use with booleans” to “How do I strip HTML tags from text”. It got them all bang-on perfect—and was infinitely more pleasurable to use than putting the same question to a search engine, these days.

jmac,
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@adr Google's Bard.

jmac, to random
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Lightning-bolt and utterly incorrect social theory that just struck me: “Reaction videos serve to fill the void created by the decline of canned laugh tracks on broadcast TV.”

jmac,
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This after my partner, as an act of love, sent me a compilation video of people filming themselves playing Disco Elysian and whooping it up.

On some level we feel it’s missing, and some visionaries step up to provide it—even the ones too young to have grown up with ubiquitous laugh tracks.

Is a completely bogus thing I just made up but also sincerely believe as of right now.

jmac,
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@victorgijsbers I can see having a hard time with it if the opening doesn't grab you. The main character starts off self-destructively cynical, but the world he inhabits is as beautiful and rich as it is violent and mean. I felt richly rewarded for exploring it, and letting the player-character grow into someone better. But it's a big investment, with an abysmally low starting point!

jmac,
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@victorgijsbers The vibe borrows a lot from the fiction of China Mieville, if that's at all a useful statement to you. The world as a profoundly ugly and oppressive place, but with much opportunity for good people to create beauty and grace anyway.

jmac,
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@victorgijsbers It's not clear at the start, but the main character is basically beset by a kind of bicameral-mind syndrome, and the voice at the beginning, coming from within his own head, is an adversary, his own self-destructive thoughts made into an other. It rules while he stays in the hole he's dug himself into, during the events immediately preceding the start of the game. An initial challenge is helping the character pull himself together and dismiss the voice—even just temporarily.

jmac,
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@dougo @Taleslinger @CarlMuckenhoupt I called them "laugh tracks", but thinking about it I definitely remember that fake-audience-reaction sound effects in the 1980s covered a wider gamut of emotions.

What immediately comes to mind is an episode of "Webster" when the title character accidentally burned down his family's home, and there was a close-up shot of all the flammable materials he'd left lying around bursting into flame while the "audience" moaned "OOOHHHHUUUGGHH".

nickmofo, to random
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Props to Amtrak for stepping up its game

jmac,
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@nickmofo Mm, Bloody Mary with beef jerky garnish

drskyskull, to random
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Do I need to play another Boomer Shooter? Yes. The answer is yes. This was not a rhetorical question.

jmac,
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@drskyskull have you played chop goblins yet

jdyer, to random
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The Haunted Palace is one of those games where the description almost sounds like a made-up creepypasta about an Apple II game from a made-up company. But it is still real and I am still making progress.

https://bluerenga.blog/2023/05/21/the-haunted-palace-a-game-of-hide-and-seek/

jmac,
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@jdyer @marcel All these concepts are very delightful to me.

jmac, to random
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I see the Great Fairies from BotW have returned for . Oh, my heart. Gotta be my favorite game character concept of the 21st century.

We all need a gorgeous and colossal woman to breathe on us and tell us we look amazing. We deserve it.

jmac,
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@jwisser Big Georgia O’Keeffe energy (very big)

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