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.