rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

No stream today, gang. I ought to limit my computer time for a while actually.

The thing that made me happiest, that I looked forward to for years, a platform I was excited to develop for, just broke after I had it for four days.

(Live on a Twitch stream, no less.)

Stream's starting soon https://twitch.tv/rezmason #Playdate

#thearcade

It's Wednesday, so I think I'll stream Crankin's Time Travel Adventure:

https://uvula.jp/crankin

You can come if you want. 6:30 PM Pacific.

https://twitch.tv/rezmason

Sorry folks, no stream tonight, I'm recovering from a back injury type thing.

If you use multiple mastodon instances, I'd like to know just how many! Optionally, please describe how you use them all in tandem.

#theWorkshop

Oh, right, it's WebGL Wednesday!

Tonight I have some serious eyestrain but I'd still like to try and stream. The plan is to revisit my Starry Night project and switch it over to a WebGL composition.

https://twitch.tv/rezmason, Wednesdays at 6:30 Pacific. See you there!

Mm, my website needs tweaking.

The cool 3D thing is cool and 3D, but it was never meant to be the dominating visual element. It was supposed to float between links to the four sections— two of which are still incomplete.

I need a "now" section, or I should just put that on the main page.

My projects page misbehaves on mobile, and media queries are the phlogiston theory of responsive web design.

And I need to feel way more comfortable just dumping stuff (like links and thoughts) on this site.

Well! I just walked around Shit Lake and climbed to the top of Fuck You Hill before descending into downtown Crapville. Total distance: 5 miles, 262 foot change in elevation.

My limbs are now jam.

I'm very glad I did this. I had a moment of astounding clarity and closure as I crested that shitty hill, and I feel like I've recovered something that had been missing for a while.

Jam can't walk around cities though so I'm going to delay my visit to Mediocrepolis till next weekend.

Made good progress, but there is no way in hell this is a three hour build. Time to put it aside and make my pilgrimage to suck town.

Kicking my Saturday off with what the Internet calls a three hour Lego build. 🧑‍🚀🧱

This set collected dust at my old office for the past three years. I'm excited to finally build this! 🚀

Also, support your local libraries
📚🏛️📚
If you own books and have no local library, congrats, you're your library de facto, keep up the good work champ

Wholesome chaser: at some point this past week, a songbird with a vast repertoire picked the tree outside my study window to practice. It must have studied John Oswald's work, because I'm convinced every sound it makes is sampled from some other bird.

It only sings at night, and it's quite peaceful.

Five years ago, my situation was intolerable enough to spur me to action. I abandoned my personal tech stack, changed how I did things, found new stuff to focus on. That's how I met the rabbits, and it's how I met you. So that turned out well!

I think I'm just overdue for another dose of personal action, unadulterated by work or family. Technically, unadulterated by you, too, but c'mon, you don't do me like that anyway. 😁

If I find anything worth mentioning in mediocrepolis, I'll let you know.

This year— this weekend— I'm going rogue.

I'm already bitter. Why not lean into it? There's sad places I want to revisit, that are out of the way. It'll be good to overwrite the shitty memories I made there. And then I'll disappear into a nearby mediocre city I've never been to, and just get gloriously lost in it, and then go home.

It'll feel good to get this crap out of my system.

Five years ago my birthday actually looked like that, too— my partner and I went to Santa Cruz during the off season, and it was like a run-down theme park with seagull molt and dead seaweed everywhere. And an innkeeper who freaked us the fuck out.

A couple years later we checked into an inn at Half Moon Bay, grabbed dinner, came back, found a bedbug two feet from our suitcases, and fled home to shower and wipe everything we'd packed with isopropyl alcohol. At 1 AM.

Then two COVID birthdays.

Imagine an abandoned catamaran, run aground someplace where no one can afford to demolish it. Maybe it has a name like "Montserrat II".

Imagine that local teens used to cover it in graffiti but part of it fell off once and hit a kid in the head, so now they just throw beer bottles at it. And so, imagine, after decades of this it's become kind of an ironic landmark.

That's what my birthday feels like nowadays. An annual observation of situational disappointment.

No stream tonight, sorry folks!

No stream tonight, I'm doing taxes

Stream starts soon!

What's "structured animation", you ask? Besides a term I made up?

It's a style of code-driven animation that embraces classic control structures: conditions and loops. Whereas conventional JavaScript encourages animation paradigms where time is modeled as something external to functions (tweens, CSS transitions, setInterval, requestAnimationFrame, etc), structured animation internalizes the passage of time with awaits.

This paradigm is common in non-JS languages.