rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

Maybe this is an opportunity in disguise, to make my current project better. Though that’s not always possible. 😶

Has anyone here gone from working on a project for money/perks, to working on a not as good project for more money / better perks?

I hope those of you who enjoyed Myst and the games it inspired can pledge to @cyanworlds’s latest game, Firmament.

Cyan is a unique and daring company of world-builders with wholesome, engaging, memorable games. The industry could take a page from their book so to speak. 🤓📖

The Firmament kickstarter is in its final 44 hours, and they are 94% towards their goal with 71,000 USD to go; let’s make it happen!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/firmament?ref=5k0sd7

One day, I'll be able to accomplish what I'd like to accomplish with this UI code, some kind of compositional elegance. That really can wait. What's more important is that the code is readable and stable, and that I can finally get this game fully playable. Everything else is a distraction. I don't need another reason for delay.

Obviously I'm not the only programmer who got mesmerized by something shiny, but I really did think I had good reasons to make an exception for RxJS. For instance, it's a flavor of Observables, which are a proposed addition to ECMAScript. I was just being ahead of the curve!

Famous last words, right?

It's also an incarnation of Functional Reactive Programming, and would let me banish state from my UI code. But when you think of it, ALL the UI we use contains state. What was I trying to prove?

Mmmm, vanilla. 😌

Whenever possible, I try to keep my code projects from using imposing frameworks. The Hundred Rabbits JS ports taught me a lot about that. Fuligo is meant to be *extremely* vanilla. I want its code to last a long time, and minimizing dependencies is an important facet of that.

Yet, for the past two months, I rationalized and then wrestled with a library called RxJS, which twisted the code in weird ways.

Tonight I've decided to remove it. And it feels good to let go of it.

@rezmason come to think of it, maybe there’s a subreddit for this.

The second question is more specific, and is directed to the businesses that still specialize in making Japanese family crests.

The crest "三つ大" or "三ツ大" has a few common variants, and as far as I can tell, it dates back to at least the Edo period.

One of its variants looks like the biohazard symbol, designed in 1966 by an American trying to invent an icon that had no previous meaning.

My question is, how has the biohazard symbol affected the use and interpretation of the 三つ大 crest?

I feel weird asking this, so I'll ask it as bluntly as possible:

I have TWO WEIRD QUESTIONS for the people of Japan! Can somebody ask them for me? Is that weird?

The first one is fun and stupid: does this string of katakana hide any meaning, read in either direction, starting from anyplace?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Rezmason/matrix/master/glyph%20order.txt

It's the glyph sequence in the green code in the Matrix sequels. Based on how much the Wachowskis' marketed the trilogy in Japan, they might have hid something for us to find.