Here's another project I've started but probably will never finish:

I want it to be kind of like a souped-up Pocket Operator with extra features. I plan to bump the step count up to 64 and implement the FX and LFO modules soon, but unfortunately I can't test on hardware right now since my Playdate's kind of dead. I tried updating from recovery OS 1.11.1 to 1.13.7 (for reasons I don't want to say here) and it started bootlooping as soon as the update began applying. I sent an email to Playdate support but honestly I'm skeptical that they'll be able to fix it, from what I can tell the serial interface doesn't work and the System partition is corrupted. The good thing is, I was able to access the Data partition through spamming the reset button in the crank dock so all of my save data and games are backed up on my computer. ANYWAYS, as of now my synthesizer is unnamed. Name contenders include Kronos, WaveDate, and Mono(chrome). I'm kind of leaning towards Kronos, it definitely sounds the coolest. I'll post an update later once I decide on a name.

Well, my hunch was correct. My Playdate is unfixable. I'm pretty bummed about it, partially because it was my fault, but also because I'll no longer have the original Playdate that I preordered 10 minutes after it went on sale. Sigh.

Fortunately, there are a lot more pros than cons in this situation. I'll have a fresh, new Playdate; a fully functioning d-pad (the up button was a little mushy); and now I know never to do that again. I didn't even lose any of my save data, since I backed it up way before any of this even happened.

Hopefully I'll get the new one pretty soon, from what I've heard Panic's pretty good about sending out replacement Playdates quick. Pretty sure they say this to everyone, but they told me to send my Playdate back to them for inspection, which is really cool! Maybe they'll figure out what went wrong...

(P.S. Panic's customer support is the absolute BEST! They were super nice, and I definitely felt less stressed about everything when we were trying to figure out a solution to my issue)

Replacing a Ford Taurus X radio

Today I successfully replaced the radio of my 2008 Ford Taurus X! The CD drive had gotten jammed at some point and hadn't ever recovered, so we thought it might be a good idea to replace it so we have a (practically) fresh unit.

Maybe I'm just used to things being incredibly hard to repair nowadays, but honestly it was easier than I expected!

Taking off the control panel's front was literally as simple as using your fingers to pry it off, and the radio was only held in with a bolt in each corner. Actually unbolting it was a bit of a pain though, since the front panel was wired to the car and in the way, and it would be more trouble than it was worth to unplug everything then plug it back in once the repair was done.

every single time the socket wrench was turned, my hand hit the panel xP so annoying

I will admit I lost a bolt or two in the abyss below the control panel. Thankfully extendable magnets exist and I was able to get them out of there X3

The radio we bought to replace it didn't look the best, it had a huge scuff on the display, and the paint on both of the seek buttons was completely worn down. BUT it had a working CD drive, and that was really all that mattered.

Oh yeah, strangely when installing the new radio, there were only two connectors on the back instead of three like on the old one..? I'm 99% sure the leftover connector was for Sirius XM, since everything else seemed to work okay when I gave it a test run (including the CD drive! was a bit skeptical since it was bought off of ebay haha).

I feel like I've always seen Sirius XM advertised on cars, but personally I've never seen anyone use it (does anyone use it at all?? [yes, apparently]).

ANYWAY, since our old radio had some relatively cool CDs stuck in it (Foo Fighters was a big one) I thought I'd try taking it apart to recover them! The front display came off pretty easy, but after pulling it away from the mainboard I saw that it was connected through ribbon cables, which made me think that it would be possible to just swap out the entire display since it looked much better than the display on the new one.

Unfortunately this meant taking apart the Taurus' control panel again, but I was willing to do that just to make everything look a little bit nicer.

Thankfully the display swap worked perfectly!! Now you can't even tell that a new radio was put in.

tadaaaa!

Once everything was done and dusted with that, I went back to trying to recover the CDs in the old radio. I ended up having to basically destroy the top metal cover just to get inside, and tear apart each lock tab keeping the CDs in place. I'm not too disappointed though, it's not like I was gonna use a broken radio anyway :3

Anyway, I guess I'm proud I managed to pull that off today! Never really had to work on a car before so this was a cool experience.

RIP old radio parts 🪦

Today I started working a custom Launcher.pdx for the Playdate console, which I named SLINGSHOT! I'm adding all of the features that people really want right now, including app searching, sorting, and editing. I do feel kind of bad though, there was another person working on a launcher but I just kind of ruined that by making my own...

Creating slingshot was a good idea, not only because having a custom launcher is awesome, but also because it gave me an excuse to jailbreak my playdate so I could test it on-device! I did this using Crank2Unlock, an app that shows your playdate unlock code. Apparently, through the serial interface, you can access a million commands hidden from the user until you use that code to reveal them, such as sysdisk (share the system partition of your playdate's disk) and lcdtest (shows a cool stripes pattern on the playdate).

HACKING STUFF IS SO FUNNNNNNNNNN!!!

Today was the strangest and most interesting day I've ever had.

It started like a normal school day would. Doing work, slacking off because it was nearly the weekend, etc. But during lunchtime someone said over the intercom that there was a tornado watch announced for our location, so everyone was to grab lunch and hurry to 5th period (I still don't know why they said to go to our next class, we could have just, I dunno, gone to the massive non-windowed room 5 steps away from the cafeteria?). So we went to 5th period. It rained hard for about 10 seconds, but after that, the sky was blue and there were no clouds in the sky. An hour later, someone's Honda got crushed by a falling tree, and our local news station came by to cover the story. Not even 30 minutes after this, a TRAIN BLEW UP outside and busted a power line, causing my school to lose power for a solid 15 minutes. THEN we had to leave early at 2:45 because the electrical issues were so bad that it was unsafe to stay in school.

At this point you might think that was the end of the story, but no, it keeps going. When I got to the bus station, it was super early so I grabbed a snack and missed the 3:15 bus, which isn't normally a massive deal because I don't usually make it to the station before 3:15. Well, I ended up having to wait 45 MINUTES for the next next bus to come, because for some reason the bus at 3:35, which I usually depend on, never showed up. So I got on this late bus with my friend lilfigurative and another friend of mine, expecting it to take the usual route. It ended up dropping us off at a random community center. Thankfully I knew where I was and could give my location to my dad.

Anyway, there's my insane day. Here's a button for your troubles:

Button!

Installing Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro (8,1)

I've always liked the premise of a system so bare-bones that you quite literally only install what you need onto it, so I thought I'd try to install Arch Linux on an old MacBook Pro I had lying around!

I had actually put Linux on this MacBook already (Linux Mint) alongside an install of Mac OS X Lion and it went incredibly smoothly, so I thought that it might be the same story with Arch (spoiler: it was not).

So, here's how that went.

First thing I did was just straight up delete every partition on the drive besides the one containing Mac OS in recovery mode's Disk Utility. This went fine, but it left behind the old bootloader from Mint (GRUB), which I thought would be alright for now.

I then flashed Arch onto a spare USB drive and tried to boot from it, which... didn't work 😆. It basically just hung on a black screen, even with MacBook Pro-specific kernel parameters. After a while I just gave up on booting Arch entirely and gave Fedora XFCE a go, and that ALSO didn't work. Fedora at least displayed something onscreen, which was nice since I could at least try to figure out what was going on.

Fedora would hang for a while on boot, but then spout this string of messages every couple of seconds:

After a quick DuckDuckGo search it seemed like Fedora couldn't find any logical volumes on the system (whatever that means LOL), and all of the solutions I found dealt with a complete install of Fedora and not the live boot version, so I couldnt really fix the issue.

I thought I should try to delete GRUB off of my EFI boot partition at this point since I thought that might update the logical volumes index (if there even is one). In hindsight though this was pretty pointless, I don't know how that would have helped anything XD

I assumed that USB booting was completely impossible (for some reason) so I tried to use a tool called bootconfig, but it was written for much newer versions of Mac OS, so that was a bust too.

Finally, I decided to just bite the bullet and wipe the entire drive so I could start fresh.

After THAT was done, Arch still wouldn't boot, and neither would Fedora for the exact same reason!! I was genuinely worried I screwed something up at this point, it made no sense that the error persisted even after essentially restoring to factory defaults.

It took me an hour or two of tinkering around to realize that I could try to install Linux Mint again, since that for sure worked last time. So, I did just that, and thankfully it booted up just fine!

I ended up reinstalling Linux Mint so I could at least have some Linux distro running in case installing Arch was impossible.

NOW I could actually start doing stuff! I discovered a tool called archstrap which really saved my neck here. From Linux Mint, I could set up my Arch install without ever touching the live boot installer!

The first time I ran through the Arch install process I had no idea what was going on, it essentially was a massive infodump of command line utilities I had never heard of and technological terms I hadn't seen before either. So, inevitably, the first try installing Arch was a failure, and the second try was too (for various reasons, one of which being I ran pacman instead of pacstrap when installing necessary packages). But I kept trying stuff, and eventually I got a functional Arch install!

I then installed rEFInd (which worked without any issues). However, after rebooting, I noticed that Arch didn't boot at all and it skipped straight to rEFInd (this should not have happened :/), and there was also no Arch boot option. Apparently I had forgotten to actually create the boot entry with efibootmgr 🤦‍. So, I went ahead and did that, and Arch booted just fine after restarting!!

I went ahead and took this chance to get most of my stuff set up (swaywm, kitty, lvim). I had a couple issues with connecting to WiFi though, which were fixed by installing the right Broadcom chip drivers (I forget the name of the package though, haha), but other than that everything was relatively simple to install and configure.

Later on I created an actual entry for Arch in rEFInd, and that also went well but also took a few tries.

Finally, after all of that, I successfully got Arch in a state I'm happy with!!

Something I'll mention about installing Arch is that it's fundamentally very simple to do, although the installation guide looks scary XD. It all makes sense what you're doing, and that's mostly in part to how well everything is explained (thank you, Arch wiki contributors). It could also just appear simple to me now because I've read the entire guide about five times 💀

As for Arch itself, I can definitely see why people love it so much. It's honestly kind of fun to set up, since you're picking and choosing exactly what you want with absolutely no bloat. Even after getting my install the way I'd like it, I only used about four gigabytes of space TOTAL!

Late yesterday night I released a new version of AOS-GUI, which I really haven't wanted to work on in a long time. I don't really know why I all of the sudden wanted to add a ton of new stuff, but hey, progress has been made and I don't regret spending my time on it!

Another thing that happened, I created a Mastodon account, and I like it a lot more than Twitter. It's open-source and its API is free! Hopefully a lot of others move over to Mastodon, although a lot of people have already migrated over there are still a lot of accounts I followed on Twitter that aren't on Mastodon yet. I also hope that more people create bots for it, some of the bots I've already seen are really interesting!

Ahh, my monthly blog post! I don't write very often, but man, it's great to type something out that's personal and not related to school!

About a month ago, I decided I was going to make an ACTUAL GAME! The current title is Overflow (referring to the technical term 'stack overflow'), but I do want to change it if I ever come up with a better name. Overflow is cool but it's often misinterpreted (as I've witnessed from talking to my friends about it...).

I'm actually almost finished with the game engine! Once I brush it up and smash all of the bugs, I can finally add the story to the game, which should be the fun part.

Because I feel like it, I'm going to explain the .map file format that I created!

THE .MAP FILE FORMAT

Here's an example .map:

• Lines 1-15: This is the map that you will actually see on the screen.
• Lines 16-(line with -END-): Map exits. The format is 'map-name startX, startY, endX, endY, playerX, playerY'.
• Lines (line with -END-) to (line with -ENDI-): Bump interactions. Interactions are just big blocks of JSON ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. They're similar to the map enter interactions on line 19, except the first value in the JSON is a pair of X,Y coordinates instead of the amount of times the player needs to enter the map to run the actions.
• Lines (line with -ENDI-) to (end of file): Map enter interactions. Like stated before, it's basically the same as the bump interactions.

All of this together makes a big moshpit that somehow works when put into practice, albeit it is pretty slow to process (~.7 sec.). My solution? PRELOADING. If preloading didn't exist (somehow), I'd have to either rewrite the engine in C or rewrite the map format again.

I'm trying to have fun here, this shouldn't be a job!

I also got really excited and started to make music for Overflow! I think I created something pretty close to a movie soundtrack, which was EXACTLY what I was going for. This song is going to play during the ending cutscene!

The only problem is that I can't animate for the life of me. And my drawings suck. So, I'm going to try to improve art-wise. Hopefully by the end of 2024 (that's when I plan to release the game, by the way) I'll be good enough to make something that looks kind of okay!

To sum up / In conclusion / Finally, I'm super happy that I'm making a game! It's been a ton of fun so far, and I don't plan on stopping any time soon, unless my creativity tanks and I become too unmotivated to continue...

AOS-GUI is coming along nicely! I'm pretty proud of my changes to the shell so far, and I'm really excited to publish the new version! Unfortunately school has started back up again, and the workload is already annoying.

Thankfully, I'm working on a couple of ways to increase my productivity (non-school wise) on school laptops. USB booting has been patched, so sadly that is a no-go :(. I have 16 GB of free storage to work with though, so there should be plenty of space.

Current ideas:

• PowerShell. This is the most viable option for expanding my horizons (don't worry, nothing to do with gaining admin, just simply trying to bypass UAC prompts).
• Online tools. Incredibly, there are many programs available online that I can use to my advantage, namely copy.sh/v86, Distrosea, github.dev, and Infinite Mac. With just these websites I can get my Linux and coding fixes.
• Remote desktop software. As an easy solution, I can simply wire into my computer at home and do what I need to do there. Without admin access or the ability to run executables not signed by Microsoft, my options are pretty limited. However, there are ways to pull this off (VNC, noVNC, anydesk, chrome remote desktop [this one may not be a very good option due to some recent... changes on Google's end]).
• Microsoft MSIXes. There's a way to install Microsoft store apps by opening a downloaded .msix file (package file). I've already done this to install Python, so it's probably also possible with all of the other apps (this solution requires further testing).
• Just ask for the apps I need ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I attempted this earlier today, I emailed an IT guy about installing Git onto my computer along with Neovim. That should hold me off if successful.

So there are plenty of backup plans in case something goes wrong or one of these methods get patched. I'm also constantly looking for other ways to make school more livable and the laptops less annoying to work with, so maybe I'll discover the Holy Grail of workarounds sometime soon!!

Facing the Loss of my Childhood

I've recently turned eighteen years old, which means I am now a legal adult. Yay?

Look at all the exciting things I can do now!! -

• taxes (gross but necessary)
• smoke (just gross)
• join the military (hard pass)
• vote (okay this one is actually really great)

I've simmered on this for a few months now, and my feelings about it have shifted from excitement to indifference, and now to trepidation. This sounds cheesy, but I'm feeling this way because I recently realized it's the beginning of the end for the life I used to live. Which, to be completely honest, is hard for me to accept.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had such an amazing childhood. I had so much time on my hands to do pretty much whatever I wanted, and for every second I was supported by my family (to which I am immensely grateful, by the way. Words cannot describe how much, haha). But now I'm eighteen, and I suddenly find myself running out of time. I'm getting my first job in April. I'm graduating high school in May. I'm mentally and physically preparing to live somewhere other than the place I've lived my entire life.

I have to... move on?

But I'm not ready yet. I'm very much not ready.

Starting this new chapter of my life is great in a lot of ways, sure, but I can't help but think about what I'll be losing. The thing I'm most upset about? I'll never again have the kind of time I had when I was younger to be human. Learn and create for the hell of it, with no expectations whatsoever, without the constant nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you need to be productive, or be useful, or make money or something. That sort of thinking has already started to creep up on me, and I don't like it at all.

But it's not like I can just push those thoughts away, because that's what you have to do to survive in today's world. You have to work, and work hard, only to earn just enough money to buy the essentials, and maybe a little more if you're lucky. Even that's not so simple though, every step of the way you have outside forces working against you.

Sure, it's what you need to do to survive, but as soon as you become an adult and get your first job, your life of being truly free is over. You're now, for lack of a better term, "a cog in the machine", and I hate that. Everyone has so much potential but I feel like usually it's left unrealized, since nine-to-fives take up such a huge chunk of time.

Anyway, I guess I'm not ready to give that up yet, but at the same time I suppose I'd better just suck it up and face it head on.

I will say this though: one of these days, I would love to pack up my stuff and move out into the middle of nowhere with [error: universe: person not yet found in this timeline]. But I can't because that's just an unrealistic living situation...

...right?

The pathOwOgen spreads.

(source unknown)

So uh... yeah. I'm a furry! You may have already come to this conclusion based on some of the newer additions to this site, but here's an 'official' announcement to confirm any suspicions XD

I guess I've had this lingering interest in anthros ever since I watched Robin Hood (1973) when I was really young. Around three years ago (I'm gonna be completely honest, I think it was The Bad Guys (2022) that did it, haha) this interest started to kind of spiral out of control... I've only recently let it show a bit, and now it's gotten to the point where I just kinda want to be myself and stop trying to hide it.

I will say I don't think I'm a furry furry like people usually think of when they hear the term. I don't (really) have a fursona and I'm not absolutely dying to make one, and I'm also not involved in the... uh... interesting side of the community. I really just enjoy the art and culture :P It's great stuff, and there are some incredibly talented people in the fandom.

At first I was a bit hesitant to say I'm actually a furry because of that... initially I thought being a furry meant you practically were your sona, and suiting had to be a thing you did in order to be classified as one. But apparently you just have to have an interest in anthros, at least according to WikiFur--

What it means to be furry

Someone who says they are furry is generally expressing an interest in anthropomorphic animals and/or creatures (and perhaps some affiliation to furry fandom). They may say that interest in a variety of ways - through art and stories roleplay and performance. How deep or meaningful interest in furry varies greatly from person to person.

Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there so I feel better about expressing that side of me more. Sorry not sorry to all the people who despise furries I suppose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Framework Laptop 13 Experience

I recieved my Framework Laptop 13 today! I decided to write a blog post about it becuase it seemed like a fun idea :)

First impressions

I really liked how they organize everything in the box, definitely felt professional. And free stickers?? Heck yeah!

Build process

The build was actually much easier than I thought it would be. All of the instructions are pretty clearly laid out on the website. As a lot of people said, the bezel is pretty flimsy, although when you put it on the laptop you can't tell at all. The only problem I had while putting it together was the input cover not fitting in perfectly, but that fixed itself as soon as I screwed it in.

Here's a picture of the completed build:

(ignore the cardboard mess in the background XD)

First boot

I didn't even check to see what happens if you don't have an operating system installed yet, I went ahead and booted from USB. The system took about a minute to boot, but this was because it was doing "memory training" (that's what they said online, anyway :P). It installed Fedora 38 Cinnamon without a hitch.

First boot into an actual operating system

Fedora 38 worked flawlessly! I was able to get completely moved into the laptop in about 30 minutes (but this was mainly due to a poor WiFi connection when downloading package updates and copying stuff over from my old computer). It may have been just because I've been using ~10 year old hardware for a long time, but MAN it is so fast! Even the base CPU (i5-1340P) is lightning quick when opening apps such as Firefox, which normally takes a long time.

~ Gaming ~

Here's how the Laptop 13 handled some of the games I own:

• Superhot and Superhot MCD: Nearly consistent FPS on low settings. Normal config is kind of meh in Superhot, but in MCD they must have done some crazy optimization, because performance was about the same!
• Minecraft: Almost consistent 60 FPS with a render distance of 18, the Sodium mod, and VSYNC turned on. (Without VSYNC, I got around 200 FPS(!!)
• Portal and Portal 2:Perfect!
• Terraria:Perfect-er!
• Risk of Rain 2 (through Wine / Steam Proton): I will say I had a couple issues initially, the game crashed often and Cinnamon didn't like me running the game in fullscreen, but after a while it seemed to have ironed out all of the issues itself, and ran pretty well!

I also tried running OBS in the background, recording at 60 FPS, 1920 x 1280. Next to no frame drops on anything, which is a pretty massive deal! Maybe I can start doing YouTube stuff again :)

Minor gripes

• 3:2 as a monitor aspect ratio on a modern laptop is really strange, although it is pretty cool! (If I desperately need the traditional 16:9 ratio, I can always just switch the display resolution or use a separate monitor)
• Touchpad is a little bit weird. You press it down with medium pressure and it makes a small *click* sound, making you think that it has clicked, but in reality you need to press harder! It's like how touchpads used to be on MacBook Pros, except the first click does absolutely nothing.
• It's pretty difficult to swap out expansion cards, but I'm sure over time it'll become smoother.

I have finished working on my Playdate synthesizer!! I decided on a pretty neat name which is VERY teenage engineering inspired. Honestly with enough time you could probably guess the name simply based on their naming scheme, but I don't really care because it's cool :D (I take back what I said about posting the name I decide on here. I kind of want it to be surprise, especially since I now realize people actually read this thing XD)

I'm super ahead of schedule though, I planned to have it done by July 6th, when the Playdate Direct is. I suppose now I have a ton of time to beta test it and get everything ready for release!

In other news, I got my replacement Playdate in from Panic a couple weeks ago! I've been checking my old one's "last sync" status to see if they've been able to bring it back from the dead, but it's been 3 weeks and I don't think it's coming back :(. Shame.

In other OTHER news, I plan to finish AOS-GUI v0.9 by the end of the summer. If everything goes to plan, AOS will have its first (non-beta) release by the end of this year! Super pumped to make it even better. I figure I'll have AOS script (working on the name), the programming language for doing all sorts of operations in AOS, done by that time as well. It'll probably have a lua/python like syntax, but we'll see :)

*now that i think about it, the name of the synth is probably already out there somewhere... i just have no idea where i could have posted it haha

(almost) A Year of Game Development [SEGFAULT]

Hello! Today I felt like creating a massive devlog document of my journey so far developing what is now called Segfault (short for segmentation fault) for the Playdate. So, here we go!

I want to say I started working on Segfault at around June 30th of 2023. According to the last modified date of everything in my folder for this project, this image was the first thing created:

A work of art, if I do say so myself.

This is actually the game's card-pressed image, located at /src/SystemAssets/card-pressed.png. I guess I didn't really have a clue what I was working on at this point, so it makes sense.

I didn't start frequently committing to my git repository until September 10, when I FINALLY committed my changes. Sitting at 55 changed files with 2,420 insertions, this commit, ambiguously named "backup", contains most of the code which makes up the engine.

The README at this point in time:

I knew I wanted it to be some sort of text-based RPG, but that was about it.

The 2-8 hour time limit seemed like an interesting idea. I would definitely like to incorporate it into something later on down the line, but as development continued I dropped it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Weirdly, the README says "coolgame" but I must've already decided on Overflow as a name, since there's a build of the game under that name.

Speaking of which, here's what it looked like at the time!!

...aaaand that's about it. But hey, it works!

The map format is about the same here, except for the action format. Instead of JSON, like it is now, it was some goofy proprietary thing I made. No clue what I was thinking, but at least I made the switch before things got too complicated 😅

I'd also like to point out a mistake that would come back to bite me later. This function in funcs.lua:

Can you spot the issue here? XD

Basically, this massive table would get redefined every time getIDfromChar() is called. But I wouldn't notice this until much further down the line. Onward!

Fast forward a couple commits (and a couple weeks), and I swapped my action format to JSON. At first I wanted to use something like msgpack to compress all of my mapfiles down, but for some reason the Playdate has difficulty reading binary files from disk (or maybe I'm just being incredibly stupid haha), so I dropped the idea later on.

I decided on a class-based system for all of the collectibles you can get in the game here as well. From experience, object oriented programming scales very well and makes it super easy to keep everything organized. I don't know what I'd do without it!

I also added some basic player stats to the top left, as well as upgraded the battle engine to have a little menu in the bottom left corner.

The next commit, also called "backup" (man, incredibly helpful commit names lol) added what was the beginning of the title screen that is still in place today.

In this commit I added the first revision of the introduction as well. The alert boxes are very off center, however XD

Saving was added here too!

At this point I must've woken up and realized in order for git to be helpful I should probably commit more and name them half-decently, since after this every major change has its own commit.

I added some placeholder art (still haven't changed any of it haha), shops, and the first "attack game" in commit 461179f, finally started throwing together the introduction to one of the main characters in 3d09875, and completed map preloading in 79aaaf8.

Eventually, I figured out that getIDfromChar() issue I mentioned earlier, which boosted map loading a considerable amount on device, from 0.7 seconds to ~0.05! Ugh, that had been bugging me the entire time. I'm glad I'm not still stuck with it.

Before the fix, preloading looked like this:

Afterwards, it looks like this!

To this day I'm still wondering if I should preload maps at all or just load them on the fly, since it's so quick now. I'm pretty sure I'll get rid of preloading when the game releases. I may need the extra RAM, haha.

In commit d80eb14 ("fixed battle damage rounding, cleaned up introchoices, updated docs", February 29) my documentation for the game became much more massive. I find that more Markdown is always better for big projects. Personally, I use it for both ideas and TODO lists that I divide into high, medium, and low priorities. Very helpful to have :)

I officially changed the name of the game from Overflow to Segfault in commit a4ec205! Honestly, this wasn't really a hard decision and I don't regret it, although Overflow does roll off the tongue better.

Achievements were added in cd918f1, in March of this year. Currently, I'm waiting for the Playdate Squad's pd-achievements standard to be finalized before I do too much work on them. I suppose I could go ahead and add what they have, but I'd rather not do anything substantial if they make some drastic changes down the line.

I finished a bunch of status effects (such as regeneration, vigor, fortitude) in commit 7bd0424, which are only utilized in battles at the moment. Around this time, my main focus was on the battle engine that I assumed would be the most "exciting" part of the game, and I was constantly trying to figure out new ways to make it more fun. Even now, the game is still a bit of a top-down walking simulator.

In commit f540897, I created the second attack game besides the standard "bar" game: reload. It involves the user cranking backwards and forwards and pressing A in quick succession. The faster you do this, the more damage is inflicted. Not the most realistic thing ever, but I find it pretty fun!

284c40a added an item count to the "items" menu, which is a pretty huge deal considering the sheer amount of items I'll probably have in this game closer to release. It was already a pain trying to scroll through all of them even in testing, so (for me at least) this is a very nice QoL change.

It took me way too long to add game restarting on death, which was added in May 27 in commit 2a40577. I guess since I had been manually refreshing the game up to this point anyway, it didn't seem like too big of a deal, but now that I'm kind of getting down to the wire on the game engine it occurred to me that this is a no-brainer that should have been in the game from the start, haha.

A couple weeks ago I revamped the title screen. At first it was kind of a buggy mess, and editing save files was a bit of a pain and not the most intuitive thing ever (you had to press B to access a menu that displayed on the save file box itself... it was lame), but now all of the options are there when you press A on a file, kind of like how The Legend Of Zelda does things.

And that brings us to today! Currently I'm working on a way to upgrade items and weapons, and polishing off the engine.

Final thoughts

So far, I've had a great time working on this game. It's helped me learn so many concepts and tips, and it's been fun seeing it all come together over time! I've written 6215 lines so far, which to be honest isn't really that much for nearly a full-fledged product. I feel like I'll have written 15000 lines by the end of this project, but we'll see!

Can you tell I'm putting off finalizing the story and creating all of the maps, though? 😆 It's just so.. daunting. Like, it's all coming together, but it's difficult to make it all a cohesive whole. Or maybe it's just scary to start >w>

I guess my goal for this project is to take my time and really make it look nice and feel really good to play. I'd hate to make my first "real" game (the adventures of horse the horse hardly counts haha) some rushed-out-the-door thing. So, maybe it'll be a while before anyone can actually play Segfault, but hopefully it'll be worth it in the end!

Thanks for reading this kind of ranty blog post!! Hope you enjoyed(?) it :3

(Oh, by the way, if you ever want to try gamedev yourself, I highly recommend Playdate development, the SDK is probably one of the most simple yet powerful SDKs I've ever used. Massive props to Panic for making it so easy for people to make cool stuff for Playdate!!)

(and yes, i am embracing my inner :3, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!! hahahahaha)

Not too long ago I bought a breadboard starter kit, since I had an old Arduino Uno lying around! Almost immediately I tried to throw together a sort of mini-computer, which currently looks like this:

My unoriginal name for it is the n9600 (the n stands for nanobot567, and 9600 is the baud rate of the serial port). Currently it can do two things, boot up and poke to memory addresses XD

I plan to write a BASIC interpreter for it and attach this LCD I also got, but that will require me to switch over to my Raspberry Pi 3 (I got that from a Kano computer kit I got when I was younger!) since it has more GPIO pins, AND I'll have to do some soldering to get the header pins on there. Hopefully I won't screw up the display, that'd be $30 down the drain!

So my dad and I decided today was the day to factory reset an old MacBook of his. We had been meaning to do this for a long time, but hadn't gotten the chance until today.

He already made a backup of everything on a drive of his so we got cracking. I restarted the computer and put it into Recovery Mode.

Then we went into Disk Utility. Now, here's where things got dicey, there were two drives under a category called "Macintosh" so we didn't know which to delete. After looking up a guide online, my dad saw that we should just go ahead and erase the entire category. So we did. And then he said, "Wait, I think we did this wrong."

Turns out we should have enabled "show all drives" so we could see an option called "Apple SSD", then we should have deleted THAT whole thing instead. He looked pretty nervous about it, but I reassured him that we had a backup and everything was probably fine. We deleted the entire category anyway.

Dad wanted to check if we still had the backup after that, so we checked out the drive we had plugged in. We opened a new finder window, and the drive was there, but something was a bit strange about it. No icons were on any of the files, but we saw our stuff was there so we brushed it off, unplugging the drive without ejecting properly, which I hadn't noticed until now.

Then we tried running the Mac OS Ventura installer, and it said we needed to be on WiFi, but for some reason you couldn't turn on or off WiFi, or connect to a network. At this point I was starting to get a bit nervous myself, I thought we deleted a driver or something and broke the entire computer.

But eventually, the WiFi turned off by itself and we were able to start installing Mac OS. Dad realized something though.

"Did we delete the data on this drive when we erased that disk category?"

My dad and I discussed for a moment and tried to figure out why this would have even happened. I was trying so hard to reason with myself, why would the drive even have been deleted? We didn't touch it at all with disk utility... I thought anyway.

Dad wanted to double check that the drive was OK, so we borrowed my mom's computer so we could check.

We plugged the drive in. Nothing.

Now, I have nightmares about this sort of stuff. Losing precious data that I know will never be recovered. And it's terrible in real life, but I also deny things a ton before I allow reality to sink in, so we unplugged and plugged it back in. Nothing again.

Then we tried another port. Nada.

Dad already put his face in his hands, as we realized that we had lost many important photos and documents. I wanted to try a couple more things before we gave up, though. I unplugged the USB hub on the computer and plugged the drive in directly. Still nothing, and at this point we knew that was it, but we checked Disk Utility to make sure.

Suddenly, in the Finder window behind Disk Utility, the sidebar's item positions shifted by one. "Hey, wait, the sidebar just moved!" We looked at each other, the color coming back to our faces. Dad opened the drive and BOOM! Everything was there!

We laughed for about a solid 5 minutes about what had just happened and shared a sparkling water, toasting to "data".

Ugh. What an emotional rollercoaster. Looking back, I don't know why we were so worried, there was nothing that could have ever happened to the data on that drive. As I write this, that Mac is installing Mac OS Ventura and should be perfectly fine when I wake up in the morning and see that everything works... hopefully.

P.S. My dad just mentioned to me that he had a backup of his work computer. He had moved all of the stuff on the Mac we were worried about to that one when he got it, so we were literally worried about nothing. Ha!

Today officially marks a full year of blogging!!

I may rework the blogging page soon, in case I end up writing a lot more this year. Maybe with a dropdown for 2023 blog posts? We'll see, I guess.

Here's a bunch of things I did last year:

1. I finished AOS-GUI v0.9!
2. I released CS-16!
3. I updated my website to look a lot better (in my opinion, anyway)
4. I joined Mastodon!
5. IT ENDED.
6. I broke my Playdate, but got a replacement!
7. I got a little better at drawing
8. I started doing hardware stuff (breadboards for now)
9. I joined a robotics team!
10. I bought my FrameworkLaptop 13!
11. I somehow got a 4.0 GPA???
12. I traveled to Canada!

I think overall it was pretty successful. There were definitely a lot of dips in the road, though.

Oh, and by the way...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here's to the future! Let's hope that we as a human race get our act together..

In my spare time, I have slowly been piecing together a new language (written and spoken!) called XYTHESE. I plan to use it in Segfault (formerly known as Overflow) and perhaps in real life, if I get the hang of it.

The grammar is pretty similar to English, except adjectives are after nouns and negativity is implied through the "noi" prefix (basically, I fixed all of the stuff that I think is stupid in English)

Here's a simple sentence: "sniyo koda o'utan." It means "your code is stupid".

You also do not conjugate verbs! Instead, there are tense specification words. For example, the word "kasta" indicates past tense. More complex verb forms can be achieved with word suffixes such as "-don", which is the "-ing" suffix. I've tried to account for word suffixes as well, such as "-er" and "-est". So to say "beautiful", you would first get the word for "beauty" (betsuru), then add the proper suffix, which in this case is "-fulu" for "-ful", resulting in "betsuru-fulu". Pretty easy, I think! :)

I already have a thousand or so words translated from English, so it's already possible to formulate most simple sentences, and I'll slowly add more as I need them!

It sounds a lot like Japanese, partially because I'm really trying for that same sort of "feel" of the language. I think I've sort of succeeded, haha. I still need to fine tune a couple of the words since they are a bit hard to pronounce along with, though.

Replacing Discord (and Gushing About IRC)

average IRC interaction

On August 26th, 2020, I created my first Discord account. I honestly loved Discord back then, it was an excellent way to chat with friends while the COVID pandemic was at its prime (man, crazy times those were XD)! Unfortunately, over time Discord lost its luster; the app's sleek simplicity eventually gave way to the usual suspects, notably advertisements (on mobile too!) and AI integration that literally no one asked for (they did shut the bot down, but who's to say they won't try something like this again?). These changes were annoying, but they were at least tolerable, so I continued to use Discord.

On February 9th, 2026, Discord announced they were rolling out facial-scan based age verfication. Although I do agree that kids below a certain age shouldn't be allowed on the platform, this is definitely not the way to go about restricting access. I will say that there may not be a foolproof way of verifying one's age besides showing up in person and presenting ID (and of course this is impossible for every single user on the plaform to do), so I understand why they chose this method. BUT, that doesn't make it okay.

The rollout has been delayed until late 2026, but it's coming no matter what. So, I started looking for Discord alternatives.

Finding good alternatives is tricky because there really isn't a lot of competition in Discord's field. Matrix is honestly pretty good, but I had a lot of issues with spam and infamous "could not decrypt message" error. Stoat is excellent! The UX is solid, I've had no major issues, and it's probably what I'll be pointing friends and family to if they want to leave Discord as well. But, there's a risk of it going down the same path as Discord in the future since it's held by a single company, and I'd rather pick something that's decently future-proof.

Enter: IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

I had my first experience with IRC sometime in 2020 or 2021. I forget exactly how I had heard about it to be honest, but I do remember freenode being the first server I joined (and Weechat, a TUI IRC client, being my client of choice :P). I had a ton of fun and actually made friends?? Sadly I happened to join just months before everything fell apart though, LOL. I stopped using IRC when freenode went offline.

Around the time Discord made their age verfication announcement, I was reminded of IRC's existence when @whitequark@treehouse.systemsposted about IRCv3 on Mastodon, and thought I'd give it another go. I connected to Libera.Chat, joined a few channels, and...

...it is awesome.

Why IRC Freakin' Rocks

IRC is Decentralized

Meaning anyone can host an IRC server if they want to, and if one server goes bad, users can migrate over to a new one! I think this is an incredibly important feature to have nowadays, since it is inevitable that every service will collapse given enough time, or simply become so profit-oriented to the point where using the platform is impossible without giving something up.

Exhibit A: Twitter. You can't even view an account without creating or logging into an account now. Creating an account with Twitter opens the door for them to gather endless amounts of information about you, which they will then sell. Remember when you could view accounts without logging in? That was before it was sold off and transformed into whatever the heck it is now, meticulously designed to squeeze every last dollar out of its users. And the last thing anyone* wants is for the rich to get even richer.

But I digress ;^w^ back to IRC, haha-

IRC is Text-Based

I lot of people would see this as a downside, but personally I'm a huge fan! There's just something about the text-only restriction that makes it more fun to have conversations with people. And, as an added bonus, you have to make the conscious decision to view a piece of media (as it's behind a link), so you aren't forced to see something you... really don't want to see.

Hardly Anybody Uses IRC Anymore

Yes, this is a reason why IRC rocks. The only people using IRC now are nerds (complimentary), and I love hanging out with nerds. But again, that's personal preference xP

IRC is Tried and True

IRC has been in use since 1988(!!), and like @whitequark said, it's only getting better. The IRCv3 standard has some superb quality-of-life features that we often take for granted (chat history, for example), and IRC clients/servers are actively implementing them!

There Are Many, MANY IRC Clients

And some great ones, too. This allows for a kind of user customization that really doesn't exist on Discord (unless you *ahem* use something like Vencord)! I mainly use Weechat (some things never change, including preferred IRC clients), but I also love Halloy and ObsidianIRC :)

But...

IRC is definitely not for everyone, and it's certainly not perfect. It takes some getting used to, especially concepts like talking with NickServ to manage your account and channel modes, and understandably (I cannot emphasize this enough, I get it HAHA), people are lazy. Most people don't want to spend a lot of time configuring an app, they want it to Just Work™. Until IRC gets to the point where it's as simple as logging into Discord, I doubt it'll have a resurgence. That's just the way things are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

"Shoot, I want to use IRC now-"

Yesssss, join usssss!

Libera Chat has a great getting started guide on their website! I highly recommend you at least give it a try if you're interested. If you'd like someone to talk to, feel free to shoot me a message, my username is nanobot567 (you can send me a message on most clients by typing /msg nanobot567 [YOUR_MESSAGE_HERE], if I'm not online you can also send me a memo: /msg MemoServ SEND nanobot567 [YOUR_MESSAGE_HERE]) :D

On 10/17/2025, I released my second album, Xovanaphobia!! It's a (much needed) departure from the cringe hacker rap whatever I had going on in 2022, and I'm actually pretty proud of it this time!

If you're interested in listening to it, it's on most streaming services (I like Tidal personally haha), and also on Bandcamp for $5 if you'd rather download the lossless audio :)

I thought I'd give some background information on all of the songs, just for funsies :P

On the full album

The entire album was written over the course of a year or two (off and on), but most of the songs were produced in the span of four months! Why did it take so long to write ten songs? I find that forcing creativity only leads to mediocre creations (at least for me), so I only wrote a song when an idea came to me naturally.

Xovanaphobia has a meaning, but I'd rather leave it a mystery. I think it's possible to figure it out just through song lyrics..?

The album cover is a security camera picture, with some non-English text overlaying it! The picture was taken on May 23rd, 2025. To this day I'm still not entirely sure why the fox stopped by...

Intro

This is the first song I wrote for the album! I believe I wrote it in 2023 or 2024.

I used TAL Vocoder alongside Vital (which provided the vocoder waveform) for the vocals.

Ruleset

Ruleset was written in a single day! I discovered Digitalis' voice modulation capabilities while making it, leading to the inclusion of the female-sounding vocals in this song and pretty much every other one-

Frills

I was inspired by some of TOBACCO's work in Sweatbox Dynasty to make Frills. Thank you Lifeline Console Lite :D

Anthrocon 2634

The desire to create a drum and bass track overcame me, and this is the result. I envisioned an anthro rave in the year 2634 (no way Xythia reference??)!

...the idea sounded cooler in my head, haha.

Húxiān / Ambrosia

The mix on this song is very meh, but I had fun writing it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Húxiān is a Chinese fox deity!

G.P.B.I.

Definitely a filler track. I don't feel very attached to it xD

Sol

Sol is (I think?) the oldest song I began working on for Xovanaphobia. About a month after [REDACTED]'s release I had the idea for it, put together a messy four-bar loop, and promptly let it gather dust in the corner of my Logic Pro projects folder... until I rediscovered it!

Vulpine Visions

Probably around half a year ago, I had a dream about an anthropomorphic red fox named Tess. Vulpine Visions is kind of based on that, but the dream itself definitely wasn't as interesting as I made it out to be. We quite literally interacted once.

Lodestone

Named mostly in reference to the Minecraft block, but also the real-life mineral :)

Lodestone replaced a song called Social Cues which had a similar vibe. The only reason why Social Cues didn't make it was because the mix was atrocious, and I could not fix it for the life of me.

(Just For You) Clinging to Firsts

This song is actually a segment of some of my improvised piano playing, on my grandparents' piano! You could probably tell it was written on the fly, based on how off-beat everything is xP

Most of the lyrics are not English! They're purely nonsense, I pulled a Ryan Lindsey and just threw in whatever mouth sounds sounded best in the moment.

iϵɳ

no iuʈoʋɐn'α

noʋ'oh

...aaaaand that's it!

For the record, I probably won't be releasing new music more often... but I am feeling kind of motivated now that I have something new out!

We shall see.