blogette

2025-06-21 Spotlight: Pagat

pagat.com is a good website. Ever play a card game and forget the rules? Remember the rules of a card game but forgot the name? Pagat is a website written by John McLeod with the rules and variations of "card games from around the world" and it's been really helpful on several occasions when I wanted to fill in the "missing rules" from my family's card game oral traditions.

2025-06-30 Site Update: Fortune Girls

R-18: added images for Kitty and Bunny Fortune. Artists' names are in filenames. Might add descriptions later!

2025-07-04

moved news -> blogette. little posts go here now.

TODO for later: set up my rss feed to generate an update for every post in the blogette. im sure i can do that, its just programming right

oh hey look another little post from the same day with no title required, wow what a great system this is

oh yeah if you didn't see it yet I wrote this post over on github called eleventy for neocities users to explain how the markdown parts of my site work, give it a look if you like markdown and please tell me what you think!

what's the difference between one hambone and another hambone? the first hambone is a Hock, but now there are Tuah them. #chost

sent from my Phone

2025-07-05

today is 7/5 which is a very nice ratio because it's approximately equal to the square root of 2. I think the square root of 2 is a very useful number that doesn't get enough love, probably because it's long to say and doesn't have a funny greek letter. I'm gonna start calling it #root2 to solve that first one. I guess we could make it the letter rho, for root, but that might mean something already, and honestly writing √2 isn't any harder than writing π.

i'm sure people have known about the 7/5 approximation for a while now but I just noticed it recently when I realized that the standard size of a US playing card (3.5 x 2.5 inches) is nearly a √2:1 ratio, which means it mimics the A-series of paper (think A4 printer paper) where if you half or double it you get the same aspect ratio. That means if you stick two playing cards together by the long edge, you get something almost the same shape as a playing card, because 7/5 is close to √2 and 10/7 is also close to √2.

so I guess if you're in one of those countries that writes the date before the month, you can celebrate root2 approximation day on July 10th :p

okay so like im pretty sure my phone could scan a QR code printed on my 600 dpi laser printer as long as I used 3 dots per logical pixel. and this stackoverflow post says that a 177x177 pixel QR code has about 2 kB of usable data. so, at 600 / 3 dpi, that's about an inch wide QR code, I can easily fit two or maybe four of those on the same business card. I could have an 8 kB business card I bet. although QR apps don't really have a way to stitch multiple pages together, so I'd have to sacrifice the first code to writing a program that can read the other three. or I just have to fit my payload into a single code.

what's something fun that's less than 8 kB, that wouldn't already fit on a business card? hmm. a small book I guess?

the nice thing about a book is that it sidesteps the problem of needing a way to stitch multiple pages together, because books already work like that. the downside about a book is that if I wanted to write a lot of text on the back of a business card I could just print regular text in a highly legible low-resolution font.

like okay if I push my printer to its absolute limit I could probably cram a font into 4 x 8 pixels at 600 dpi, right? which means each character takes up 32 "dots" worth of space. meanwhile, if a 177x177 pixel QR code has 2 kB of data, that implies that each character is taking up... 15 dots worth of space? damn okay so this might actually be more efficient, assuming I need that much text.

then again, microtext is arguably even more fun than a qr code because then you can read it with a regular magnifying glass

oh wait I forgot that the qr code needs to be printed at 3x scale for my phone to scan it. so that's actually 137 dots versus a theoretical minimum of 32 dots. so even if I print the microtext at twice the scale, 128 dots per character, it beats the qr code. the qr code only wins if we assume my phone's camera has the same resolution as my own eyes, which is clearly not the case

2025-07-06

you can fit a pretty cool music box in a qr code, even at a modest resolution. Thanks SArpnt for the help with this!

2025-07-08

say nice things that are true.

it's an easy trap to fall into, especially for autistic people, to think that this is as simple as "always say nice things" or "always say true things", but both these rules are wrong. if you say nice things no matter what then you are a spineless fool, and if you say true things no matter what then you are a tactless jerk. sometimes true things are not nice and sometimes nice things are not true. sometimes, you will have to say mean things to be nice, and sometimes, you will have to say false things to be truthful. it's hard and people are complicated.

but if you ever get the opportunity to say something that is nice and true, then say it! people will love you for it.

"ok who put boba in all the slimes"

2025-07-26

working on a card game, working title is Kings and Fools, based on Oh Hell and Skull King. can you fool the king?

2025-07-28

I used to assume "if I'm doing something wrong, someone will correct me"

but it turns out making people correct you is really stressful for them

so I started asking "hey should I continue"

and that has made all the difference.

2025-08-04 proof of work

from an information theory standpoint, all art is proof of work. there's no "objectively good art", it's all about cultural context and connection to the reader etc etc, which means the only real quantifiable thing is "well, it wasn't going to make itself."

anything that does make itself is Not Art. it might be beautiful on a surface level, you might even put it in a zoo because it's rare and unusual, but what you are doing is Gambling, not Art.

2025-09-26 johnny bravo is the only cis character

johnny bravo is the only cis character.

he can look at his reflection and think "damn I'm pretty" without hesitation or qualification. he likes his body. there isn't a single thing he would change.

he's not trans. there was an episode where he got TG'd "to teach him a lesson" and his reaction was extremely mild, "well this is inconvenient." no euphoria, no disgust, just... petty annoyance. he even acknowledges that his reflection is "attractive", he knows he'd be hot as a woman, it's just not his preference.

and the writers know that this is rare. being "pure cisgender" is his entire schtick. it's funny because it's unusual. nobody else looks at their reflection and says "damn I'm pretty".

johnny bravo is the only cis character.

everyone else is queer or in denial.

2025-11-14 johnny bravo is cis but that's not the joke

correction to previous post: I have been informed that the joke is not "he's cis and confident", it's more like "he's a narcissist" and yeah that might be a better read. thank you for the callout. you can absolutely be cisgender and not a narcissist (and vice versa).

2025-11-14 fix for modded balatro on arm linux

Balatro is written in Love2D, an engine which runs natively on linux. but the steam version just uses Proton to emulate the Windows version, so you may never have used the native Linux version before.

If you're trying to run Balatro natively on Linux (e.g. Portmaster) and the mods aren't working: it's because of the Windows Newline problem. Convert the mod .lua files to linux newlines and it'll work again. Hope that helps!

2025-11-14 bullen't journal

I recently found out that PocketMod got a massive downgrade. You have to log in, and most of the templates are missing. DIYPlanner is basically dead, all the old templates are on the wayback machine, thank god. Bullet journal still exists but the good blog posts with the "one page simple logging" stuff are buried under a mountain of front-page fluff to sell their book.

Why do I care about this? Basically, back in the early 2000s there was this book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. It's about how to use any tools at your disposal to create order from chaos, and I feel like it's specifically targeted at ADHD people because it spells out a lot of things in great detail that a "normal person" might be able to guess intuitively. Things like:

seriously the book is cover-to-cover full of excellent tips like that, I'm not gonna summarize them all here, I highly recommend you find a copy and read it, or at least look at the pictures! there's two editions: the original one uses words like "Microsoft Outlook" and "Rolodex", the revised edition is more flexible and works with whatever software you already have (but if you're looking for something new, may I recommend VSCodium?)

anyway I suspect that the existence of the GTD book is the reason for PocketMod, DIYPlanner, and Bullet Journal to exist. David Allen proposed that "writing things down on paper is good actually" and a lot of people were excited to share the method that works best for them.

I want to share the method that works best for me, too. And I can do it without selling you a book. Although, if you want to send me money, my email is right there on the homepage :P

I should probably write a proper page about this one. When I do that I'll migrate this blogette post and put a forwarding link. Meanwhile here's some loose ideas I want to do:

2025-11-14 papermod

check it out I made a demo

November 17th, 2023

was the day I took my first estrogen patch today is my 2-year hrtversarry!

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