rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

Moving this to Merveilles.town:

#introduction

I'm a NY-born Oakland resident who programs for game companies to survive. I teach Scratch to kids at our town's video game museum.

In my free time I used #Flash a lot, then #Haxe, and now a lot of modern #JavaScript. I port things as a way to preserve ideas. I have a loving wife and 2 cats.

uh.

#webgl #threejs #pasta #halloween #science #wordplay #gpl #matrix #macintosh #darkwave , uuuuh, #antifa #kielbasa #netneutrality #humanity #flan #pasta

I rarely write ActionScript anymore, but when I think about it, does it conjure up memories of my five year tenure at a Flash games company? Nope, it triggers a replay of They Might Be Giants' "Climbing The Walls", which I listened to on repeat while programming a thing in college that has had no impact on my life since. What gives?

Maybe programming can put the mind in a state that makes these connections more susceptible? Does this stuff happen or sound relatable to anyone else?

One of the last times I touched the Haxe language was during a trip to Amsterdam for a programmer conference. My trip was incidentally a delightful cheese fest. I ate gouda every friggin' day, whether it was from some tourist trap or on the sandwiches at the conference venue.

So does gouda cheese make me think of Haxe? Nope! Haxe gives me extremely strong memories of gouda from Amsterdam (and heartburn), and stone bridges and canals. 🤷‍♂️ It defies explanation.

Recently I've been refactoring and improving Drivey, and a dozen times now I found myself back in that shitty hotel on Comino, where completing the code port was a crucial source of stress relief in the literal wake of a vacation gone completely and tragically off the rails.

Drivey is fueled by nostalgia of the freedom of the road, so why does programming it take me back to this moment where my wife and I had absolutely zero control over where we went, what we ate, et cetera?

I've never read a lot of Proust, but he talks about a "Madeleine Effect", where certain things we perceive in the present snap us back to a strongly connected memory, sometimes to our complete surprise.

Different code projects do it for me.

I'll share some anecdotes, but first I want to say, I'd be real interested in hearing about yours.

#theWorkshop

Okay so delete-and-redraft posts the toot on the timeline all over again 😣 Mastodon needs a better About Me solution

Moving this to Merveilles.town:

#introduction

I'm a NY-born Oakland resident who programs for game companies to survive. I teach Scratch to kids at our town's video game museum.

In my free time I used #Flash a lot, then #Haxe, and now a lot of modern #JavaScript. I port things as a way to preserve ideas. I have a loving wife and 2 cats.

uh.

#webgl #threejs #pasta #halloween #science #wordplay #gpl #matrix #macintosh #darkwave , uuuuh, #antifa #kielbasa #netneutrality #humanity #flan #pasta

Oh hey, ORCΛ just went up on Hacker News following the repo's move to Source Hut 📈

Heads up, Mac folks— if you're developing web software, remember to test it on a case-sensitive drive!

Last night I spent a couple hours chasing ghosts, because my Drivey demo didn't load once I uploaded it. It was all because my Mac ignored case in mistyped URLs that broke on the real server.

@neauoire we just frigign' talked about this! 😆 Maybe I should take a page from your playbook and write a command that copies a target folder to a case sensitive disk image, and hosts a server from that.

The terseness of the Drivey HTML, compared to the old level JavaScript, speaks volumes. This is how these levels always should have been represented.

Click below if you'd like to see the other level files in the project:

https://github.com/Rezmason/drivey/tree/html_levels/levels

It's my hope to eventually get Drivey to a point where you can embed its script into any web page, add Drivey HTML anywhere in that page (similar to an A-Frame scene), and have it automatically resolve to a little WebGL visual driving experience.

I wish I had a better way of demonstrating how fun this is. I'll be setting this latest version to live before long, so folks without Github can still use the drag-and-drop capability to experiment.

Taking a page from JSX and MXML, attributes in Drivey HTML can be mathematical expressions, whose terms are references to other values represented in the document. That means fewer values are hard-coded into the HTML, and can maintain their readability and edibility as you experiment with your level