graham's blog (#all)

Phonetic Pangram Tool

2026-01-03T06:30:00.000Z

After spending last night writing that blog post about pokemon phonetic pangrams, I felt like I was done with this hyperfixation and could move onto other things^[1]. This morning proved me wrong when I had the thought

Hey isn't making a pangram kind of just a very specific case of that daily word game you made last year?

Suffice it to say that that inkling was correct, and it only took me all day to remember how that all worked, copy it into a new project, modify that into working for phonetic pangrams, set that project up with Render^[2] for hosting, upload the iframe pointed there from itch.io, and build out a new itch.io page for the project. Take a look below:

Phonetic Pangrams by graham

It works with pokemon and the CMU phonetic dictionary, which covers a bunch of English words and names. It only supports General American English^[3] for now, but I think there are ways to extend that to other dialects going forward, with enough data about how the phonemes change.

Anyway, in the interest of keeping it short, that's it! Enjoy, and please share your phonetic pangrams with each other and me on there. As far as I know, there does not yet exist a solved solution for phonetic pangrams in English the way that there are now for pokemon names.

Like finishing up the hxh fanart, or reading, or touching grass between rainstorms in the Bay, that sort of thing. ↩︎
I once again really wanted to be able to rely on websockets for checking whether a given word matched the corpus on the server. Otherwise, everyone using the tool would have to download a big file of all possible words and names and their pronunciations. Shout-outs to Render! ↩︎
And if you want a bonus difficulty level, I recommend using the /x/ phoneme of loch /lɑx/. ↩︎

Pokemon Phonetic Pangram

2026-01-02T16:00:00.000Z

As a follow-up to my previous post, I have uploaded the data and my previous solution to codeberg. Last time, I learned that Slither Wing is the only pokemon across all current generations to contain the ð phoneme, which meant that only datasets that included gen-9 could form true phonetic pangrams for General American English. With this in mind, I scraped the rest of the generations and compiled them into one unified dataset for all pokemon. As expected, I was able to find several 11-pokemon pangrams^[1] by simply using the new dataset, but it made me wonder if there existed any pangrams with even fewer pokemon. I tried running the 10-mon pangram attempt across all gens and found that nothing happened for a while, even with the caching I had explained in the previous post.

Technical Hurdles

After discussing this with some of my friends on Discord, it became clear that the size of the problem-space being explored had grown very quickly with the size of the dataset of pokemon, just as predicted. For gen-1, there were at most (151 choose 10) combinations of pokemon to find a set that covered all 37 represented phonemes in that set. For all gens, it was more like (1025 choose 10) combinations, which is roughly 269 million times more. Despite this, I tried to simply run the program and wait. I was rewarded with a new problem:

$ bun run main.ts
136 |           if (!cache.has(cacheKey)) {
137 |             if (solution.names.size < SetCoverSizeToBeat - 1) {
138 |               const idx = queue.findIndex(s => s.phones.size <= solution.phones.size)
139 |               queue.splice(idx, 0, solution)
140 |             }
141 |             cache.add(cacheKey)
                        ^
RangeError: Out of memory
      at <anonymous> (/Users/g/Documents/programming/pokemon/phonetic_pangram/main.ts:141:19)
      at forEach (1:11)
      at <anonymous> (/Users/g/Documents/programming/pokemon/phonetic_pangram/main.ts:133:17)
      at forEach (1:11)
      at main (/Users/g/Documents/programming/pokemon/phonetic_pangram/main.ts:132:22)
      at /Users/g/Documents/programming/pokemon/phonetic_pangram/main.ts:153:1
      at loadAndEvaluateModule (2:1)

Bun v1.3.3

It makes sense that this program would run out of memory because the cache is adding new paths that have been visited constantly until the program finishes. In the past, this was a small enough problem space to avoid memory issues, but now the problem space had simply ballooned too much for the cache to handle. I looked into how I could make the size of what I was storing smaller. For one, I was storing the cache key as a set of strings that contained all the letters of the pokemon being represented in the path. By replacing a given pokemon with a single character, I was able to shorten this from an average of 7.6 characters per pokemon name to 1, which reduced the cache size by a factor of ~7x. This did not solve my out of memory issue.

Googling around, I learned that Typescript has a hard-limit on the number of members in a set or a map. It turns out that this limit is far below the number of possible solutions to explore, even with the reduced dataset size. Similar to one of the suggestions on stackoverflow, I implemented a BigSet class that just created a new set every time the old one was about to be full. This allowed the program to run without hitting javascript memory limits. But it meant that it quickly used up 13GB of RAM on my computer, even when no other programs were running.

Next, I tried seeing if any of the pokemon I was considering had phonemes that were a subset of any other pokemon pronunciations. For example Kadabra clearly contains all the phonemes that Abra does. It's reasonable to skip Abra if the goal is just to find the existence of any phonetic pangram, since any one that would use Abra could instead use Kadabra. Continuing this pattern reduced the number of pokemon from 1025 down to 789, which reduced the problem space by a factor of about 13x. This also did not solve my out of memory issue.^[2]

To try to limit the remaining unknowns about the full pokemon dataset, I separately tried looking up pangrams for 1, 2, ..., 7, and 8 pokemon. I knew from size-10 and size-11 ones that even a single answer could come in much faster than my computer hitting its memory limits. I found that I was successfully able to exhaust the problem space for all 1-to-8-sized phonetic pangrams. This left just 9 and its memory issues as the only remaining hurdle.

It was clear I needed to try something else. My friends suggested a bloom filter, since those are really good at telling if a given thing (list of pokemon) is either "definitely not" or "maybe is" in a given collect. For a problem like this that has a lot of "wrong answers" relative to the number of "correct answers," it seemed like a well-tuned bloom filter could work great. That said, I had plans for New Years Eve, so I uploaded what I had to codeberg and let my friends try to nerdsnipe anybody else into solving it a different way.

The Same Sort of Algorithm, but in Rust

Micolous was able to make a number of algorithmic optimizations to what I had contributed so far:

Instead of storing sets of names in the cache as letters representing pokemon, and instead of storing the phonemes represented by those pokemon names as a set, liberal usage of bitmasking allowed for much smaller amounts of memory used
Instead of exhaustively searching for every solution to the problem, focus on finding even a single solution at the current desired length
While looking for a solution, throw out any path that would be worse (i.e. necessarily have more pokemon names) than the current best solution
Keep all previous optimizations like the limited data-set with pokemon like Abra removed

With these and a little fine-tuning for data-labelling issues from the pokemonlp wiki, it was finally possible to find the first valid 9-pokemon phonetic pangram for General American English:

Slither Wing
Heatmor
Typhlosion
Noibat
Vulpix
Growlithe
Poochyena
Shedinja
Illumise

As expected, it had Slither Wing. Unlike the previous post, Typhlosion took the place of Persian, undoubtedly because of how many more phonemes it contains (8 total versus 5). I was excited to see this news and have a new, clearer goal to work towards. Surely implementing all of the same optimizations in my own code would allow me to get similar results.

Hoisted by my Own Petard

I spent the better part of New Year's Day rewriting the set logic I used for determining which phonemes a given solution had so far to instead use bitmasking like Micolous's. It took some time, but I was happy once it was working. I had the thought that I could stop writing code on my laptop and instead practice with my new split keyboard^[3] on my desktop by pushing what I had to codeberg again and then pulling it down from the cloud.^[4]

Upon pulling the latest from main and getting the script set up to run, I ran my version on the 9-gram, and found that I got an answer too! This was exhilarating compared to my machine turning on its fans and maxing out RAM for hours with no results. But of course, this had to be because of the optimizations I had spent all day implementing, right?

I tried rewinding the code to what I had days prior when I had been trying to overcome the technical hurdles on my own. That also ran flawlessly on my desktop computer. It turns out that having similar but not exactly the same specs across a laptop and a desktop can lead to wildly different experiences when it comes to problems like this one. I'm embarrassed that I didn't try this sooner.

Conclusion

I have yet to get every 9-pokeon phonetic pangram across all generations, because I did eventually run into memory-hog issues and didn't want to keep working on optimizations for a problem with so many solutions.

Below are the first 20^[5] that my algorithm found:

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Basculegion
Shaymin
Charizard

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Exeggcute
Shaymin
Jirachi

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Chi-Yu
Aegislash
Blaziken

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Chi-Yu
Aegislash
Rayquaza

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Chi-Yu
Shedinja
Blaziken

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Chi-Yu
Shedinja
Rayquaza

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Poochyena
Aegislash
Blaziken

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Poochyena
Aegislash
Rayquaza

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Poochyena
Shedinja
Blaziken

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Poochyena
Shedinja
Rayquaza

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Charmeleon
Aegislash
Blaziken

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Charmeleon
Aegislash
Rayquaza

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Charmeleon
Shedinja
Blaziken

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Houndoom
Charmeleon
Shedinja
Rayquaza

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Exeggcute
Hawlucha
Shaymin

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Exeggcute
Honchkrow
Shaymin

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Exeggcute
Hitmonchan
Shaymin

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Exeggcute
Shaymin
Hitmonchan

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Exeggcute
Shaymin
Honchkrow

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Dragapult
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Exeggcute
Shaymin
Hawlucha

Obviously, as mentioned before, every answer necessarily had to have Slither Wing. Additionally, every answer my program found contained Typhlosion and Noibat. While these 20 above all included Dragapult, there were eventually others like these following two that broke that pattern:

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Clobbopus
Meowth
Hariyama
Shedinja
Ninetales
Galvantula

Slither Wing
Typhlosion
Noibat
Rookidee
Venomoth
Gouging Fire
Poochyena
Iron Hands
Shaymin

Now that every pokemon generation has been included, now that the minimum-length phonetic pangram for General American English has been discovered, and now that we know several of the minimum-length one in particular, it seems like this problem is ready to be put away for a little while. Maybe when one of those things changes in the future, I'll unearth this problem again.

After all, when it comes to the world of pokemon pronunciation set-covering optimization problems:

I want to be the very best.

Any of the sets from gen 1 listed at the end of the previous post, plus Slither Wing, for example. ↩︎
However, I did learn that the phonemes in Arceus are a subset of the phonemes contained within Cofagrigous, which was surprising to me! ↩︎
A Moonlander that my job paid for, which I have yet to bring into the office because I'm still getting used to the layout. ↩︎
Decades ago, it used to be the case that transferring files between computers was most quickly done over USBs. These days, that feels like so much effort compared to pushing to a git repo, at least for small code repos like this that are already being stored in the cloud. ↩︎
By the time I stopped the program, I had found 933 9-pokemon pangrams. While this technically only represents a lower-limit, it seemed good enough to stop searching/optimizing for now. ↩︎

Pokemon Gen 1 Phonetic Pangram

2025-12-28T21:40:00.000Z

As I mentioned in my previous post, a phonetic pangram is a sentence or phrase that covers every one of the sounds in a given dialect of a language. Since proper nouns can form a phrase, a phonetic pangram could potentially be made from any sufficiently large collection of names.

This led me to the question: "Is it possible to make a phonetic pangram from pokemon names?" and more specifically, "Can we do so using only the 151 from the first generation of pokemon?"

Phonetics

For General American English, wikipedia lists the following sounds that comprise every commonly spoken word:

Consonants (24^[1])

m, n, ŋ, p, b, t, d, k, ɡ, tʃ, dʒ, f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h, l, r, j, w

Vowels (14)

ɪ, i, ʊ, u, ɛ, eɪ, ə, oʊ, æ, ɑ, aɪ, ɔɪ, aʊ, ɚ

To make a pangram, I simply needed pokemon names that encompassed each of these 38 phonemes. You could imagine a worst case of 38, where each pokemon is picked for having exactly on phoneme represented in its name, though I figured there was probably more overlap than that.

Pokemon name pronunciations

I was able to find the pronunciations of all 151 gen 1 pokemon. I copied the table and kept only the name and IPA pronunciation columns. A given pokemon name contains many phonemes:

ekans ɛkənz

First, I had to figure out whether the set of these pokemon match the 48 phonemes labeled above. To do this, I iterated over every row and added the phonemes for that pokemon's pronunciation to an ever-growing set. Once I reached the end, I found that there were more than 48 phonemes represented, which meant I needed to do some data cleanup.

Data Cleanup

There are four different kinds of cleanup that were necessary for this dataset:

Two-character phonemes: for diphthongs and dual-character phonemes like dʒ, I needed to replace these combos with single-character variants instead.
Americanized phonemes: because of the cot/caught merger and the hurry/furry merger, among others, it was necessary to map all present phonemes that other dialects used onto General American English.
Incorrect phonemes: There were a couple of places like Victreebel where phones like /r/^[2] which seemed like a mistake, to my ears.
Ambiguous phonemes: In the case of Nidoran♂ and Nidoran♀, it is unclear whether the names are supposed to include "male" and "female" in the pronunciations. Even canonical anime pronunciations differ depending on episode.^[3] For the purposes of this challenge, it seemed best to omit them.

After cleanup, I continued to work on the problem.

Set Cover

I got an old familiar feeling while doing this problem. I thought maybe it was from a previous advent of code or something. I couldn't remember what the problem I was thinking of was formally called -- only previous times that I had encountered it.

In designing levels for Snails and Sorcery^[4], I mapped out every single mechanic for every single level into a big spreadsheet so that I could tell at a glance whether a given level was introducing too many mechanics at once. Later, I wanted to see which levels would make the smallest set while representing every mechanic.

Another place this has come up is in Magic: the Gathering combos. There's a silver-bordered^[5] card that lets you win the game if you make a pangram with card names.

Trying to find the smallest combo of card names to achieve this pangram is the same problem, just put in a slightly different context.

When I asked around, my friends told me that this was a classic Set Cover problem and that it's a notoriously difficult problem once the problem size grows big enough.

Here I was, once again wondering if there was some collection of things (i.e. pokemon names) that would cover all of a set (i.e. General American English phonemes). Thankfully this problem has the benefit that the set of all pokemon (especially just gen 1) is plenty small compared to the set of all MTG cards and is also very small compared to the limit where solving this problem would take too long to complete.

A greedy approximation

Generally with Set Cover, it's a lot easier to get a solution that's pretty good than a solution that's provably the best. Instead of worrying about the best next step, a heuristic like "start by adding the item which has the fewest overlaps with other items" can get close enough. In this case, that'd be a pokemon whose names contain a phoneme or phonemes that are shared least by the other pokemons' names in the set.

Persian pɝʒən

Persian is the only gen one pokemon with the ʒ sound. This means that Persian must be included in every gen 1 phonetic pangram. It also means that p,ɝ,ə, and n get covered automatically.

For all other "least common remaining phonemes", there would be more than one pokemon which contained that phoneme in its name. For instance:

Vulpix vʊlpɪks, Bulbasaur bʊlbəsɑɹ

Blastoise blæstɔɪs, Cloyster klɔɪstɚ

Which of the pokemon names in these pairs is better to add? Is it better to add a pokemon from the first pair or the second one? For this greedy approximation, I went with "the one from the first-looked-at-phoneme that will cause the most phonemes to be added to the covering set, or go with the last pokemon if there's a tie." In this case, that's Bulbasaur because b ʊ l ə s ɑ ɹ is seven more phonemes covered, as compared with v ʊ l ɪ k s the six from Vulpix when you account for p already being covered by Persian. From here it's possible to continue and get an answer, but remember that that's still a heuristic (good enough) approximation rather than a provably best answer.

From here, there was a bunch of trial and error to discover and fix the points mentioned in the data cleanup. Originally, the next to choose from was Nidoran♀ because it contained an empty space ^[6]. Next, every answer included Victreebel because it was the only one containing /r/. Then, every answer contained Omanyte or Arcanine because they contained ɑɪ instead of aɪ. This continued for a while.

After working through cleaning up all of these edge cases, there was finally a reasonable approximate answer:

Persian 
Bulbasaur
Blastoise
Meowth
Sandshrew
Hypno
Exeggcute
Koffing
Squirtle
Ivysaur
Charmander
Pidgey

These 12 pokemon names looked to form a nice phonetic pangram. But could the same be achieved with 11? 10?

Minmaxing with Recursion™

I noticed while writing the greedy heuristic algorithm that one aspect (number of pokemon names which contain this next phoneme)was minimized while another aspect (the number of phonemes that would get added to the covering set) was maximized. By thinking of these steps as a two-player game, it's possible to reframe this problem as a version of Minimax. Similar to how humans and computers "think ahead" a number of moves in a game like chess, perhaps the best move (pokemon to choose) at a given step could be dependent on thinking X-many moves ahead?

I wrote a recursive algorithm in Typescript for solving this problem. If there were no phonemes that still needed to be added to the set, then the program could stop and return the solution. A given solution could be rated by its number of pokemon names. The best solution would be one that minimized the number of pokemon, which could be filtered for after exploring all of the possible solutions.

Searching without Recursion™

Javascript, which Typescript runs under the hood, has a max number of times that a recursive function can call itself (i.e. "max depth") of 10 times. I immediately ran into this limit. I should have known better when I selected this language for writing the algorithm in the first place, but I forgot. There are ways around the max depth restriction, but I find it's always good practice for code maintainability to unwind the recursion. Generally recursion asks the person reading the code to maintain the state of the program in their head, whereas other approaches can make that state much clearer and easier to inspect when things go wrong.

I rewrote the algorithm to be more like searching an N-dimensional grid, where each pokemon chosen was like a new direction through a maze, and the set of pokemon names at the end was like the path taken to get to the finish. The goal was to minimize the path length, and at each step along the way, I kept track of "the path so far" for every possible "next step to take". As I got to a branching point in the maze, I just added each of the "potential next steps to take" to a list. When the list was empty, I knew that all possible paths had been exhausted.

This time, when I ran the program, it didn't immediately error out. In fact, it didn't do much of anything for a very long time, and I got bored.

Speeding up the search with pruning

Given that the greedy heuristic solution found a way through the "maze" in 12 steps, I knew that I could get rid of any potential next step that would be greater than or equal to 12 steps long. This is sort of like a simple version of alpha-beta pruning, in that I was pruning out solutions that were known to be worse than the greedy approximation solution of 12. This optimization may have helped, but not enough for me to notice.

Next, I tried to keep the list ordered by how long the path had been so far. This helped avoid looking at bad solutions before good ones, but I found that the program still took a very long time.

When I looked at what was happening step by step towards the beginning of the search, I noticed that there were ways for the same list of pokemon to show up in a solution, just in a different order. Going back to the greedy algorithm example from before:

Vulpix vʊlpɪks, Bulbasaur bʊlbəsɑɹ

Blastoise blæstɔɪs, Cloyster klɔɪstɚ

In exploring each of these possibilities, there would be one that would look like Persian, Vulpix, Blastoise and another that would look like Persian, Blastoise, Vulpix. These two states are equivalent in terms of how much they cover the set of phonemes, but the paths to get to each were different-looking enough that my code was treating them as independent solutions.

I decided to make an in-memory cache that would tell me whether I had "been to this part of the maze" before. All I had to do was name each spot in the maze in a way that would give the same name every time I asked for the same spot. For instance, the first spot in the maze could be called Persian since the algorithm only had one choice. Then when I added new names, I could sort them all alphabetically, and then join them together into a single name like Persian|Vulpix or Blastoise|Persian|Vulpix. By storing each place name I had already been, I could avoid accidentally back-tracking through parts of the maze. This greatly sped up how long the search took to solve.

The final results

After running and re-running to find the best solutions, these were the solutions I found. Note that Persian, Blastoise, and Vulpix are in all of them:

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Shellder
Hitmonchan
Ninetales
Cubone
Jigglypuff
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Shellder
Hitmonchan
Ninetales
Cubone
Jynx
Wigglytuff

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Shellder
Hitmonchan
Primeape
Cubone
Jigglypuff
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Shellder
Rhyhorn
Clefable
Charmeleon
Geodude
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Oddish
Clefable
Rhyhorn
Charmeleon
Geodude
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Sandshrew
Rhyhorn
Clefable
Charmeleon
Geodude
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Sandshrew
Rhyhorn
Clefable
Charmeleon
Pidgeotto
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Rapidash
Rhyhorn
Clefable
Charmeleon
Geodude
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Growlithe
Sandslash
Rhyhorn
Clefable
Charmeleon
Geodude
Weezing

Persian
Blastoise
Vulpix
Meowth
Shellder
Hitmonchan
Primeape
Cubone
Jigglypuff
Weezing

Conclusion

While writing this post, I had to go back through and double check everything. After all, who would ever want to be wrong on the internet?

I took one of the sets of phonemes from these final results and checked each phoneme against the list at the beginning. There was one missing. Apparently, throughout my process cleaning, running, readjusting, etc I had thought that there were 38 phonemes present, but it was just an errant ˌ in /ˌpɪdʒiːˈoʊɾoʊ/ and a few others that had caused the number to look right when it wasn't. Upon cleaning that final non-phoneme up, my solutions all read 37. The missing phoneme throughout all of this has been ð.

Sure, there's some sunk cost aspect to have written all of this only to have the answers to:

"Is it possible to make a phonetic pangram from pokemon names?" and more specifically, "Can we do so using only the 151 from the first generation of pokemon?"

be "no." I double-checked that I hadn't missed any pronunciations. Was Growlithe maybe actually pronounced like "tithe"? No, it definitely used θ in the pronunciation guide.

Ok, so the above solutions are sufficient for 37/38 phonemes, which seems like as good as could be done for gen 1. What generation of pokemon does ð first show up in? According to the same dataset I got these gen 1 pronunciations from, it wasn't until Gen IX that there finally was a pokemon whose english pronunciation contained ð. It was Slither Wing. The only other pokemon to ever have ithe in its name was Growlithe.

To get a phonetic pangram with pokemon, it's possible to add Slither Wing to any of the above solutions and have 11 names cover it. I'll postpone looking into phonetic pangrams across all gens for a future post.

As for gen 1 specifically, maybe I'll try to start saying Growlithe with a ð from now on, and say it's 11 pokemon for gen 1 to make a phonetic pangram. You might say "but if Growlithe uses ð, then how will you get the θ you previously used it to cover?" and I would reply simply:

Meowth /miːˈaʊθ/, that's right.

Note that while my previous pangrams included the /x/ sound of "loch" and "chutzpah", this is a rare and often excluded phoneme for General American English. I included it in those because it was a fun constraint to work around, but I'm ignoring it here because no pokemon in any gen have that sound at all, and it'd be a kind of boring exercise. ↩︎
This is the rolled r trill that gets used in Spanish and Scottish English, among other places. ↩︎
Gen 1 didn't have the concept of pokemon gender outside of these two names. Gen 2 added gender for every pokemon, but never consolidated Nidoran into a single entry for legacy pokedex numbering reasons. The anime includes a pokedex entry that does say the gender but also includes the pokerap, which does not say the gender. Human characters in the anime tend not to say the gender, and I imagine this would be the case in real life too: you wouldn't say the gender unless specifically asked or unless you had to disambiguate. ↩︎
You may remember this as Wizard Sokoban prior to the name change last year. ↩︎
Silver-bordered in that game means "don't take this too seriously" and tends to involve meta-mechanics and humor. ↩︎
A space character in the pronunciation was treated as a distinct phoneme, and then /ˈniːdoʊɹæn (ˈfiːmeɪl)/ added a bunch more phonemes to the set, so it was always selected ↩︎

Phonetic Pangrams

2025-12-28T02:05:00.000Z

Pangrams are single sentences or phrases that include every letter of a given language's alphabet at least once.

Pangram Examples

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow

There's another type of sentence(s) or phrase(s) that gets every vowel sound - or even every unique sound overall - from a language pronounced at least once. A few are presented below, but I believe with some time and effort, we could do better

Phonemic Pangram Example

With tenure, Suzie'd have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good.

Phonetic Pangram Example

The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.

My own, bespoke phonetic pangrams

Fear not, boy: our usual chutzpah may win over grouchy foodies. Aye, hand your battered shank lengthwise up to their closed jaws.
L'chaim! Yes, after showing what three blue powdered treasures their benevolent hook caught, guys are joyous.
"Johann Sebastian Bach athleisure wear for jungles zips together proudly," my voice shook.

Pakunoda, the Touch-Memory Reader

2025-12-23T21:30:00.000Z

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Pakunoda, member number 9^[1] of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: And we are introduced to them very quickly. We have Pakunoda, who is a sexy lady. She has a lovely piece of animation. She checks her wristwatch, at one point, and she’s wearing her watch like a bracelet with the face on the inside of her wrist like some people do, so she’s, like, looking at the inside of her wrist to check the time.

Jack: But it’s…well, it’s interesting. We learn later that sort of a lynchpin of the back of this episode is the Nen power of another Phantom Troupe member. Pakunoda? Pakunada?

Keith: Pakunoda.

Sylvia: Pakunoda, yeah.

Jack: Who can sort of verify whether something is true by reading the memories of people she touches. We haven't had this power confirmed, but that seems to be the case.

Sylvia: Yeah. I think that’s like a really important thing to draw on is the, like…the way the different founding members sort of step up during this sequence.

Keith: That’s like, the…like, emotional core of these episodes is that Pakunoda, Feitan, Franklin, Machi, Nobunaga, and, uh, Uvo—

Jack: Phinks and Shalnark.

Keith: And Phinks and Shalnark, they’re all founding members and they have all found themselves on opposite sides of this thing. They have like, they have spent years together both developing totally separate understandings of how the Spider moves.

Jack: The violence when they play their hand, not just the Troupe but generally I think about the great scene where Uvo bit the guy’s face off.

Keith: Oh yeah.

Jack: …is really embodied, is really visceral, and is almost always on camera. Y’know, when the anime team commits to one of these moments of violence, they don’t cut away from it. And I like that, y’know, if we want to sell that this world is fundamentally violent and thirteen of our protagonists deal this violence regularly, I think it makes sense that the violence remains shocking when it happens. But, I mean, time for another incredible moment of violence as Pakunoda starts loading her pistol.

Keith: We actually get a good, another new song that I can’t tell you, well not I can’t, I won't tell you the title of this one because it’s, it actually becomes a variation, it becomes a theme of a character that we haven't met yet.

Jack: The spoiler that Keith’s not telling me is that this title actually is called “Pakunoda x Nen Freedom x Reunited with the Troupe.” [Keith and Sylvi laugh]

Keith: Yeah, that’s a real, that is Jack’s best called shot yet. [Jack chuckles] But no, during the whole scene where Pakunoda has, uh, Squala in an armlock and then also the memory stuff that we’re about to talk about, it plays this song. [A few seconds of “Who’s the Bomber[2]” plays]

Sylvia: Ooh!

Jack: Oh, it’s good!

Jack: This is sort of like a 60’s French sort of mystery theme going on here. [Jack and Dre chuckle]

Keith: It is a little bit noir-y, which is funny for what it ends up being used for. It definitely fits better here.

Jack: Pakunoda is kind of noir-y.

Sylvia: Oh, she’s very…

Jack: She, she thinks about people’s memories, she has a revolver.

Sylvia: She’s the…

Keith: Yeah, there’s a lot of detective stuff going on in this one, people are trying to figure out the location of everything. But it becomes, it does not…This is much more noir-y than what it gets used for eventually. [Sylvi chuckles] They replace the strings with a guitar and it’s odd. Odd choice.

Jack: So, no use beating around the bush. Pakunoda can shoot her memories into people for as long as she has bullets, using a Nen power called Memory Bomb.

Keith: Recollection Bullet: Memory Bomb.

Shoutouts to the Friends at the Table Transcription team for their work, which made my job easier with this one: https://sites.google.com/view/fatttranscripts/more/media-club-plus

According to my sources, apparently we do not know whether Pakunoda is number 9 or number 6. She and Shalnark are the only two members of The Phantom Troupe with this sort of discrepancy. ↩︎

Kortopi, the Illusionist

2025-12-23T00:33:00.000Z

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Kortopi, member number 12 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: He is accompanied by Kortopi, a one-eyed— or maybe— hmm. A small child in a green raincoat with long gray hair cover— with only one eye visible beneath. Then there is Uvo, a—

Keith: Fully covering their face.

Jack: Yes.

Keith: Like, can't see their face.

Keith: Yeah, this is something that Hunter X Hunter is so good at, is like, I talked about this episode as setting up pins and like, Hunter X Hunter is constantly setting up pins and you just never know when they’re gonna get knocked down. Sometimes it’s two minutes, sometimes it’s ten episodes, sometimes it’s thirty episodes, like who knows? Like, later on we see, uh, it’s introduced that Kortopi has, [Jack: Oh yeah…] that his copies count as En and then like five minutes later that becomes like a crucial part of the plan. And that sort of maneuver is happening constantly in this show, where you learn something and then a little while down the line they pull it and twist it in a new way, and then use it and be like, look, this thing that you learned about!

Jack: I’m so excited to see them fight. It’s so funny. Um, okay. As part of his Professor Layton puzzle, Chrollo asks Kortopi to make ten dummy hideouts. This is another rapid escalation of Nen. Y’know, I’ve now just given up on the sort of upper limit of what Nen can do. [Dre laughs] We’ve seen Kortopi copy things, and now Kortopi, Chrollo says ‘make ten hideouts’ and Kortopi says ‘I’ll make you fifty.’ And they all act as En, anyone who enters them will be seen.

Keith: Yeah, Kortopi instantly makes a fake city.

Sylvia: This combined with the way that Kortopi, like the way they talk about Kortopi’s En, I feel like is like such a big like, oh the roller coaster is cresting the top of its rise moment for these episodes?

Jack: Yeah.

Keith: Yeah. This is what we talked about earlier where when they’re making the fake city, uh, as a, to hide their hideout, Kortopi’s like, yeah the buildings function as my En so if they’re walking through it I’ll be able to tell there’s intruders coming. And then they now reuse that ability for, ‘hey, Kortopi, we just realized that we have those Scarlet Eyes, and we know about, that the Phantom— the Chain User also was interested in Scarlet Eyes, why don’t you find the Scarlet Eyes, touch them, and then it’ll bring us to where their hideout is.’ And this be—

Sylvia: We get like a really good shot of them like, digging through crates trying to find the Scarlet Eyes.

Jack: That’s great. They are overwhelmed by their own loot.

Keith: Oh yeah, tons— there’s tons of loot.

Sylvia: The, um, the visual of Kortopi using his En is so cool. I like, love the way that they animate this.

Jack: Yeah, you wanna describe what this looks like? I wrote down, ‘Kortopi vision.’

Sylvia: It’s just like, it’s sort of like is it— would you say wireframe? I don’t really know how to describe the actual…

Jack: Yeah, it’s a bit like the, um, the beginning of Escape From New York. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: Yeah, there’s like, some, there’s like this representation of the city, and then the red eyes just like, floating in the darkness basically of it? And I like that it’s just the position of the eyes that you get. Like, there are limitations in this. It’s not necessarily like, Kortopi can tell how many people are in the same room as the eyes, he can just tell, ‘oh they’re moving this way and someone has them.’

Jack: [...] Rather than having sort of like a sheet of hair over her face like Kortopi, it is almost like dangling down in these presumably very irritating to draw threads. [Everyone laughs] They are all over her face and body.

Keith: Yeah. And I do like you've got the spooky corner over here. You've got the friends, [Sylvia: Yeah.] the XBox friends, Feitan, Kortopi, and Bonolenov. They play XBox together.

Sylvia: Yeah, except Bonolenov and Kortopi are an item. They go antiquing on the weekends.

Keith: Yes, yeah. [Jack chuckles]

Jack: Feitan and Kortopi have short solidarity.

Sylvia: Of course.

Jack: I think during the screenshot stream I referred to them both as small children.

Sylvia: You did. [Keith laughs] Oh! Can I just say, by the way, there is a lot of, like, fanart of Kortopi being this, like, adorable little cherub underneath the hair while I was looking for, like, a good icon to use for this.

Keith: That’s bizarre.

Sylvia: And it’s bizarre to me, because underneath Kortopi’s hair, to me, it’s Okuyasu’s dad.

Keith: To me, it’s an eyeball floating in a void.

Sylvia: From our JoJo episodes. [Dre chuckles]

Jack: Oh, wow, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we never see Kortopi’s face? I don't really consider this a spoiler, but you know.

Keith: Genuinely don't remember.

Sylvia: I don't remember. I never have thought of it.

Dre: I don't think so.

Jack: Wow.

Keith: It might happen in the manga? Yeah, I have no idea.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Keith: No clue.

Shoutouts to the Friends at the Table Transcription team for their work, which made my job easier with this one: https://sites.google.com/view/fatttranscripts/more/media-club-plus

Nobunaga, the Ronin Samurai

2025-12-22T01:30:00.000Z

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Nobunaga, member number 1 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: Also with them is Nobunaga, who is a rōnin with a classic sort of top knot and a robe and a katana

Keith: Yeah, "Dr. Warm-Hearted Miser"?

Jack: Yeah. [Sylvia laughs]

Keith: That’s his other theme song.

Austin: I'm telling you, they're compatible.

Dre: I love that Guilty Gear character.

Keith: That song— both of those songs are the songs of a guy who would steal a trillion jenny from a casino.

Dre: Sure.

Austin: It would make Leorio more like Lupin III and less like Leorio.

Sylvia: He would be Danny Ocean.

Austin: He’d be Danny Ocean.

Keith: Who he looks like. He looks like Lupin III.

Dre: Yeah.

Austin: He’s already a Lupin III type.

Keith: Yeah.

Sylvia: I mean, Nobunaga would fit right in, then. He’d just be, um…

Austin: I'm telling you.

Keith: Right.

Austin: Yeah.

Sylvia: Oh, I can't remember the name off the top of my head.

Austin: Jigen.

Sylvia: Jigen.

Austin: No, Jigen’s the other one. Jigen’s the other one.

Keith: The other one, the other one.

Sylvia: No, Jigen’s not the Samurai, yeah.

Austin: What’s the Samurai’s name?

Sylvia: I don't know.

Austin: Oh, this is brutal. I can see his hair. I can see his— it’s Fujiko, it’s Lupin, it’s Jigen.

Sylvia: It’s Goemon.

Austin: Goemon! Of course.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Austin: Another classic historical thief.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Austin: Magical historical thief.

Jack: Nobunaga introduces a creepy power here. It doesn't help him too much, but it’s probably going to be frightening in future, [Sylvia: Mm-hmm.] and it’s a new Nen ability called En.

Sylvia: Yeah. You're correct. En is going to be on the exam.

Jack: Okay.

Sylvia: Like, this is something to remember, I feel like.

Keith: It’s so great that he introduces it and then we actually don't see it used.

Jack: Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, we just kind of get the powerpoint presentation.

Dre: Yeah.

Jack: Here is how it—

Dre: And we see, like, the bubble, but.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Yeah. Here’s how it works. He extends his aura out from himself, [Keith: Yeah.] a really quite substantial distance. Not like a city block but definitely, like, an entire building.

Keith: Yeah.

Sylvia: Mm-hmm.

Jack: And anything that moves within that building can…

Keith: It’s as if it’s touching his body.

Jack: Yes. He says, “I could feel any falling leaf.” We get this sort of image of him surrounded by these falling golden leaves, kind of briefly coming back to Nobunaga as a Rōnin and the sort of poetic imagery of a Rōnin, as opposed to what he has been this episode, a grieving fairly pragmatic man guarding two children.

Jack: Nobunaga is both, um, really really funny. He’s a really funny character. He is scary in a way you never quite know how short his fuse is. He is extremely capable. He cares very deeply for Uvo, and in times in this little arc when Chrollo is out of action, demonstrates himself pretty capably to be able to like, think on behalf of the Troupe.

Jack: Which in the sort of Nen calculus, that’s about as good as it gets. Y’know? We even say this in Heaven’s Arena where it’s like, whoa, what’s his power? And then it reveals itself. So for Chrollo to have this seemingly limitless book. But I think Nobunaga backing down and then it being a trick and then lunging is such a nice illustration in the difference between how Hisoka and Nobunaga see like, worthwhile fights. Y’know, Hisoka has that ridiculous game he plays that I’m now sick of where he’s like, you have to be good enough to fight me, and Nobunaga is like, I’m gonna cut your head off with a katana, because y’know, you betrayed the Troupe or whatever and it’s only Chrollo’s intervention…

Jack: That is the only thing I know about Bonolenov. I’ve seen an image of him and then a bunch of people responding with crying emojis. Which is, that’s funny to me. Um, Machi tells Chrollo about Gon and Killua, Nobunaga, or one of Nobunaga’s two games, Nobunaga actually has three games. Nobunaga game one: I’m going to kill the person who killed Uvo. Game two: I’m gonna fight anybody at the smallest moment’s notice because I’m high strung, but I’m also kind of funny about it. Game three: we should recruit Gon and Killua [chuckling] Those are his three conversations.

Sylvia: And it is just like, so unceremonious and Nobunaga’s being like, I told him not to move or whatever afterwards? And it’s, like, such a nice touch. Again, makes the Phantom Tr— Reminds you that the Phantom Troupe are not just a funny samurai who gets mad and like, his friends and stuff. Y’know?

Dre: Mhm.

Sylvia: Like, oh, yeah, these guys are murderers.

Jack: 56 is, uh, they are talking about Nobunaga, who can take out foes with one strike.

Keith: While Hisoka’s scouting out Abengane with the rest of the Troupe, a song called “Master of Iai” plays. [clip of “Master of Iai” begins]

Sylvia: This has to be a Nobunaga song, right? 'Cause that’s, like…isn’t that the sword style that he does?

Keith: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. [music ends]

Shoutouts to the Friends at the Table Transcription team for their work, which made my job easier with this one: https://sites.google.com/view/fatttranscripts/more/media-club-plus

Bonolenov, the Mummy with Boxing Gloves

2025-12-13T19:30:00.000Z

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Bonolenov, member number 10 of The Phantom Troupe.

It's been a while since I've done one of these, but I realized recently that a lot more of the episode transcriptions have been completed than the last time I had looked. As always, I'm primarily bottlenecked by how quickly I can assemble the descriptions.

Jack: On the left-hand side of the image is a embalmed person.
Sylvi: [laughing]

Jack: Uh... she is sitting calmly, uh, she is, she is not the focus of this scene, which is so fun. Between the sort of gorilla fellow, uh, uh, in the first image, you know, it turns out not being a main character whatsoever, and this person kind of just framed sideways, you know, in the very edge of the frame. I really like this. Uh, this person has been wrapped, head to toe, in bandages, it looks like. Uh, alternatively, they could be chitinous. They could be, this could be plates, almost like a, like a. Uh, a woodlouse, or a beetle, or an armadillo, or pangolin — [chuckling] the plated animals. But I do think that this is an embalmed person. Uh, she is wearing lace-up, red boots. She is a fashionable embalmed person. And, what looks like possibly sunglasses, something on her face, some sort of, something on her face. She's got a sort of Brendan Frasier Invisible Man type thing — oh, shit, maybe she's invisible. Classic way of revealing an invisible person, is wrapping yourself up in bandages. So that's a possibility.

Sylvi: [giggling]

Jack: Could also just be an embalmed body. Can't tell if she's wearing boxing gloves. Do you see that?

Sylvi: Mm-hm.

Jack: She's got a sort of boxing glove-like thing. That could be a motorcycle helmet. I don't know.

Jack: You know, we are now so firmly— and after the whole shit in the Heavens Arena, we are now so primed to be like, each of these people are Nen specialists, and each of them is going to do something fucking weird. So, as Togashi is just introducing the Phantom Troupe, like, faster than lightning, you know, one appearing almost before the other has left the screen, all you can think is—

Keith: Very conspicuously using each other’s first names. [laughs quietly]

Jack: Yep. Yeah, exactly. Is, “What is this person’s deal? What is their Nen power?”

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Here comes Bonolenov, a mummy who is wearing boxing gloves.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Keith: And shorts.

Jack: [laughs quietly] And shorts!

Sylvia: Yeah. Oh.

Jack: Bonolenov is great. If you are— I know we're kind of blitzing through these descriptions quite quickly. There are 13 members of the Phantom Troupe.

Sylvia: Yes.

Jack: We will—

Keith: This is how it feels in the show, though, too.

Jack: Yes. We will invariably talk more about them as they— as focus falls on them in later episodes. But Bonolenov is a gangly mummy wrapped head to toe in bandages, bright circular eyes peeking out, and wearing boxing gloves and shorts. They are— what are Bonolenov’s pronouns? He/him?

Sylvia: He/him.

Keith: Yeah.

Sylvia: The Bonolenov-Franklin-Hisoka trio has such Dark Universe vibes. [Keith laughs]

Jack: I don’t know shit about Bonolenov.

Keith: He barely has said anything!

Jack: That’s not quite true. Here is what I will say. I don’t hunt down Hunter X Hunter spoilers, and I’ve been really lucky not to have anything absolutely gigantic spoiled for me ever.

Sylvia: Thank god.

Jack: Very occasionally, and I want to keep it that way, very occasionally I will just see a completely contextless screenshot from Hunter X Hunter in some like, image compilation or something, and I saw an image of Bonolenov and a load of like, really sad faced emojis [Sylvi and Dre laugh] which is one of the funniest context-free spoilers to get, because it’s like either something really moving is gonna happen with Bonolenov and I’m gonna be there, or this person cares deeply about this mummy. So that’s exciting.

Sylvia: You know… [Keith chuckles]

Jack: That is the only thing I know about Bonolenov. I’ve seen an image of him and then a bunch of people responding with crying emojis. Which is, that’s funny to me.

Jack: No, I think I, I think I see where you’re coming from. Brief Hanzo aside, Hanzo, and I realized this the other day, is actually fairly high on my list for potential Spiders, potential Spider replacements.

Sylvia: Oh!

Keith: Interesting.

Keith: You don’t think his, uh, his, y’know, ethics or whatever would prevent him from being a Spider?

Sylvia: For some reason I thought you were gonna say his bald head.

Dre: Damn.

Jack: Is anybody bald in the Spiders? Bonolenov might be bald.

Sylvia: Bonolenov, potentially, yeah.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Anyway.

Jack: And Bonolenov speaks in these episodes.

Keith: Yes.

Jack: And there is… [sighs]

Sylvia: Yeah?

Jack: It is so funny. “What is Bonolenov’s power?” is clearly a sort of a mystery that Togashi has been holding onto, and we get an answer to that. But the way Bonolenov starts talking, it’s as though he didn't even realize he forgot to give him lines before.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Dre: Mm-hmm.

Jack: It’s like, he speaks completely normally. [Keith laughs] He just has a sort of thin little voice, and he talks like all the other members of the Phantom Troupe. He has questions about what their plan is. He bickers.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: It’s as though he was like, “Oh shit, right, Bonolenov has lines.”

Jack: There's no buildup to this. Or rather, there is buildup, and it was the entire fucking Phantom Troupe arc, of us going, “What’s this guy’s deal? What is going on?”

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Underneath the bandages, Bonolenov is a slim, dark-gray-skinned man with big red eyes, pointed teeth, missing ears, and a pattern of holes all over his body. When I say holes, I don't mean, like, wounds? He is perforated.

Keith: Mm-hmm.

Jack: He has a big hole in his chest. He has holes in his fingers, through which you can kind of see through them. And as he moves, wind blows through them, and they kind of, like, whistle and scream.

Keith: Yeah, like a bottle.

Dre: Mm-hmm.

Jack: And as he does a lot of complex boxing moves, the narrator appears.

Keith: Yes.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Jack: Who says, “Bonolenov—”

Keith: I have a whole quote of—

Jack: Oh, yes.

Keith: Oh, you have the whole quote? Okay.

Jack: No, no, no. I don't have the whole quote.

Keith: “Bonolenov is descended from the Gyudondond people, a small tribe that was chased into obliteration by industrialization of their land. When the Gyudondond males reach the age of three, needles are used to puncture holes in their bodies. By performing different movements, an assortment of sounds can be made using the holes of various sizes. Before fighting rival tribes or wild animals, they would play a battle song using their own bodies as instruments. They are known as the Bapu, dancing warriors. They believe the more beautiful the sound, the more powerful spirits are believed to be summoned.”

Jack: This is fraught.

Sylvia: It is.

Dre: Yeah. It sure is.

Jack: Yeah. The idea of making cursed music through the movement of your body is fantastic, and the sound design on Bonolenov is great.

Dre: Yeah.

Keith: It’s really good, yeah.

Jack: Whenever he moves, there are these sort of, like, two toned, like, atonal whistling. Although there's another sound key that becomes associated with Bonolenov that we will talk about in a second. I know Keith and I are both excited to talk about it. [Dre chuckles] Let me see if there's anything else I want to talk about with Bonolenov. It’s fun, right? Because, like, this is the first moment in these episodes that a previously hidden Troupe power is revealed and is, um…how do I put this? High concept Nen?

Keith: I should say, really quick: I don't think that we said that Bonolenov’s power is called Battle Cantabile, Transform This Melody into Strength to Fight: Prologue.

Jack: Bonolenov drops Jupiter on him. This is really, really funny.

Sylvia: [chuckles] “Drops of Jupiter” would be way better if it was about this.

Keith: Yeah. Sorry, drops a train on him? Is that what you said?

Sylvia: No, drops Jupiter on him.

Keith: Yeah.

Sylvia: But my brain went, “Drops of Jupiter.”

Jack: I don't know what “Drops of Jupiter” is.

Keith: No, that song is by the band Train.

Sylvia: Oh, right!

Jack: Oh, I see.

Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack: This is really funny, because it is clear that he is not dropping actual Jupiter [Keith: No.] on him, because that would destroy everything. But the thing that he does drop on him is so phenomenally destructive [Sylvia: Yeah.] and does actually look like the planet Jupiter.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Like a gigantic marble. This thing is the size of, you know…it’s immense. It’s the size of a space station or something.

Keith: It blows a visible hole in the, like, web kingdom.

Sylvia: Yeah, this web kingdom gets fucked up! [Jack chuckles]

Jack: The, like, effects on this are crazy. The camera is shaking. There's fire everywhere. You see explosions from the outside. And, yeah, it’s Jupiter. It is the planet Jupiter tumbles on this ant, leaving an immense crater and a squashed ant at the bottom. It’s brilliant. And then, as the narrator says, you know, “The Phantom Troupe has traveled to Meteor City to protect their home from the Chimera Ants,” we get the ongoing montage. It’s really fun, the way that sometimes they will end, like, episodes midway through a fight at, like, cliffhanger moments where it seems like the characters are going to be beaten. Not really. The Troupe are just kicking the shit out of these ants.

Shoutouts to the Friends at the Table Transcription team for their work, which made my job easier with this one: https://sites.google.com/view/fatttranscripts/more/media-club-plus

Unfair Flips World Record Strategy

2025-10-14T06:00:00.000Z

Unfair Flips is a game about flipping a coin to get 10 Heads flips in a row.

Unfair Flips is a game about how humans interact with variable probability.

Unfair Flips is a game about how people interpret the information presented to them, relative to the seemingly random outcomes they experience.

Unfair Flips is a game about why people play games at all, when there's only a finite amount of time to experience them.

Unfair Flips is a game with a speedrunning community. The rules of the speedrun say that time starts when the first coin is flipped and ends when one of the various endings occurs and then number of total flips is displayed. The current world-record strategy routeing seems like an optimal series of upgrades to minimize time played, along with a lot of luck. Statistically speaking, the variance in flips will eventally produce a relatively fast run. The minimum required number of flips per run is 10 Heads and no Tails. With enough time across enough runners, it's possible that someone will even get this lucky. Other speedruns tend to rely on memorization, dexterity, and endurance. While the orders of upgrades could land in those former categories, the repeated flipping of the coin lies squarely in the lattermost category.

Unfair Flips is a game made by Heather Flowers in Unity. Using JetBrains's dotPeek decompiler, I read through the CoinFlip.cs file, verifyng that the code for whether a coin lands Heads or Tails is solely^[1] based on Heads flip percentage and Unity's pseudorandom number generator:

// CoinFlip.cs
bool heads = (double) UnityEngine.Random.Range(0.0f, 1f) < (double) coinFlip.flipHeadsChance;

Unfair Flips is a game made in Unity 2022.3.62.f2, which relies on the default pseudorandom number generator, which is further reliant on an XORshift128-style algorithm. The seed of this pRNG algorithm is determined on app start:

It is statically initialized with a high-entropy seed from the operating system, and stored in native memory where it will survive domain reloads. This means that the generator is seeded exactly once on process start, and after that is left entirely under script control.

An approximate implementation of Unity's Random.Range function can be found here. Because XORshift128 is not cryptographically secure, it is possible to determine the seed of an XORshift128-style pRNG by observation of outputs alone. This could be done in as few as three sequential random numbers, if all of the bits of the number were revealed. By determining the seed, it would be possible to know whether the next number accessed from this generator would correspond to a Heads or a Tails. In fact, it would be possible to look arbitrarily far ahead and figure out when a sequence of numbers would produce 10 Heads and a game win. In addition to the Random.Range call for determining Heads or Tails, the code for flipping the coin includes a random call for number of turns of the coin in the flip animation, a random call for the sound to play during the flip, a random call on the 9th Heads flip to determine the ending, and - if the ending is Tails - another random call to determine the sound of the coin landing. This means that each flip could reveal about a half-dozen bits if all these parts were well-observed. However, according to the rules of the speedrun, time starts at first flip, which means time would be ticking while the flips are being performed to reverse engineer the seed.

Unfair Flips is a game with one non-player character: Gar, the mongoose-mask-wearing milk-drinking bar patron. Gar drinks this milk throughout the course of play. Gar's drink function is as follows:

// Gar.cs
private IEnumerator Drink()
  {
    while (true)
    {
      if (this.ableToDrink)
      {
        yield return (object) new WaitForSeconds(Random.Range(30f, 60f));
        if (this.ableToDrink)
          this.img.sprite = this.drink1;
        yield return (object) new WaitForSeconds(1f);
        if (this.ableToDrink)
          this.img.sprite = this.drink2;
        yield return (object) new WaitForSeconds(Random.Range(2f, 5f));
        if (this.ableToDrink)
          this.img.sprite = this.drink1;
        yield return (object) new WaitForSeconds(1f);
        if (this.ableToDrink)
          this.img.sprite = this.baseSprite;
      }
      yield return (object) null;
    }
  }

Gar's drinking is completely independent of the player's actions and continues even in the main menu, on start-up, just after the random seed is initialized. A "diligent observer" could note how many seconds it takes Gar to begin drinking, as well as how long it takes Gar to put down the milk glass, and those seconds could be used to reveal bits about the random seed, which could then be reverse engineered through the same mechanisms above. After enough careful observation, it could be possible to determine that a given seed would produce the right random numbers for exactly 10 Heads flips in a row at some future point.

Unfair Flips is a game that runs at 60fps. By observing frames of Gar's drinking habits, an "extraordinarily diligent observer" could note how many frames it takes Gar to begin drinking, thereby how many seconds, and also thereby gaining additional decimal places - meaning extra bits - of precision on what the Random.Range number is. The same is true for how many frames it takes Gar to put down the milk after drinking, though the total number of bits leaking through would be fewer, due to the smaller range bounds.

Unfair Flips is a game with a theoretical optimal strategy: use tools to determine the random seed over the course of days or weeks of the game running and Gar drinking milk, begin a timer and the first flip at exactly the moment when the tool says that there's a 100% chance, and then complete 10 Heads flips in a row. As of the timer starting, no tools would be necessary^[2]. The runner would flip Heads 8 times, gain access to the upgrades, mash the -0.2 seconds flip time button, flip a 9th Heads and have the upgrade menu disappear, and then flip the 10th Heads and stop the timer.

Unfair Flips is a game that will someday have a glitchless, tool-unassisted World Record of around ~19.6 seconds from start to finish of the recording. It will take days or weeks of observations^[3], followed by some random amount of time having to wait for the right opening, and then about 20 seconds of flipping. To me, this amount of work to get the World Record run is just barely too much to be worthwhile. I have loved the process of digging into how a run like this could be done,^[4] but I don't have plans on trying it myself.

Unfair Flips is a game about why people play games at all, when there's only a finite amount of time to experience them.

My apologies to The Red Duke and The Blue Baron for this existential threat to their existence. ↩︎
In fact, the recording instructions for the speedrun specifically state that the runner needs only submit a recording of the first flip through the 10th Heads, along with the total number of flips. This recording, if done according to the rules, could be impossible to differentiate from a recording of someone just happening to get extraordinarily lucky. ↩︎
Unless it's possible to speed up the framerate to compress the time that an automated tool takes to reverse-engineer the random seed. ↩︎
Shoutouts to both Colin and Cassie for helping me bounce ideas off of them while going through this process. ↩︎

Working on a game called Nimnim

2025-10-13T20:00:00.000Z

Background

Every game of Magic: the Gathering can technically be won by making another player try to draw a card when there are no cards left in their deck, a strategy called "milling."^[1] In custom fan formats like Dandân^[2], there is a single deck shared between the two players, which encourages milling as a more serious backup strategy if the whole "making your opponent lose life" thing doesn't work out. Recently, I became curious what a custom format might look like if milling was not only a backup but the only strategy? Constraints breed creativity, after all.

Nim is a much older game than MTG about trying not to be the last player to remove an object from a central pile. Every turn, each player can choose to pick up one object, pick up two objects, or pick up half of the remaining objects. It's often used as an example game with easy rules to implement in introductory computer-science classes, since the game strategy is solved and coding that strategy is simple to do. Part of what makes the strategy so simple is that both players always have the same actions they can take each turn, and the information of what a player can do and how it'll affect the game is publicly known.

The more I thought about a milling format in MTG, the more it reminded me of Nim: there's a central pile of objects which each player can affect each turn^[3] and when the pile runs out, a player loses. If you look deep enough into the history of MTG, you can even find cards that sort of do the same things as each of the actions in Nim:

The cards constraining the actions in MTG tend to be mostly hidden information, and player access to those actions is all dependent on card-drawing. Each player can only hold so many cards in their hand at the end of their turn, and having more cards tends to be better. Ultimately, a game of MTG like Nim boils down to "What happens to the last couple of cards left in the deck?" The rest of the time playing is just about trying to set up for that moment. Nim is turn-based with each player taking only one action. In contrast, MTG has "instants" and "activated abilities" which can be played outside that turn structure, and which follow MTG's "spells and abilities on the stack" rules for resolution.

From these two ideas, I set out to make a Nim-flavored format of MTG, which I've been calling Nimnim^[4]. Because Blue is the most draw-focused and mill-focused color identity, I decided to ignore all other color identities. I searched through hundreds of Blue and/or Colorless cards on scryfall, removing anything that relied on loss of life or other alternate win conditions, and collecting anything that felt similar in spirit to the goals of Nim. Because I was looking for individual cards that looked like they would fit in a format like this, I wound up with a singleton set of a few hundred.

Next, I began to think about what the end of the game would look like. If I wanted the stack to grow to 4-to-5 spells back and forth on the last turn of the game, then the vast majority of cards would have to be very cheap to play. It became difficult to continue to cull cards somewhere around 150 because there were so many that felt like great fits for the format, but eventually I decided that 114 should be the cut-off. The opening hand in magic contains 7 cards, so once the two people comprising a 1v1 match drew their starting hands, that would leave a nice round 100 to work with as the remaining colleciton for Nimnim.

Blue Herrings

When designing a 1v1 Blue mirror format, it was really tempting to throw in a bunch of counterspells, since that's such a core part of the Blue identity in MTG. However, I found that these tended to be too harsh of a play experience. When a counterspell is played, at least one player tends to wind up not getting to play MTG. I wanted Nimnim to have this momentum of inevitability behind it. No matter what you did, the end of the game would arrive and you had to plan for it rather than just planning to thwart your opponent's plans and win by default. I wound up removed every spell that outright countered^[5]. Instead, I only kept ones like Remand, Hinder, and Memory Lapse. The latter of these are particularly nice because they allow for continued battling over the top card of the deck, and they can disrupt the math around the total remaining number of cards in the deck.

Another natural Blue identity to lean on is manipulation of handsize. Things like Spellbook and Anvil of Bogardan were considered because they meant more actions per player, which meant more agency, and -- hopefully -- more fun and faster games. In practice, being able to keep more than 7 cards in your hand at the end of your turn absolutely exploded the possibility space to consider, and with the fact that there were no repeat cards except Islands, this led to extremely long turns and even longer games to weigh the many branching options. Those handsize effect cards were all cut. Obviously, drawing is still a hugely important part of the game, but now you simply have to balance between "getting the card you really want via casting extra draw spells" and "ending the turn with too many good cards in your hand and having to discard to hand-size."

In certain sets, Blue tends to have lots of artifacts and enchantments with abilities. I wanted to find some that generally provided a big benefit to both players and also ideally a little benefit to one of them, like Lantern of Insight. This proved difficult, though! Well of Knowledge allowed the player with a mana advantage to convert it into a card advantage, in addition to having an ability that could be performed many times in the final turn pretty cheaply. Cards like Horn of Greed and Ghirapur Orrey have symmetrically beneficial abilities, but with how much access to instant-speed bounce effects there are in this cube, the player who usually benefitted the most from the card tended to be the one who didn't play it.

While I wanted to include some permanents with one-sided abilities, after trying out Teferi's Ageless Insight and Crucible of Worlds, I realized that there were certain abilities that were simply too strong to be worth keeping in. Teferi's Ageless insight provided such a huge advantage for one player that the downside of potentially causing your own demise was heavily mitigated by sifting through for the best answers. Lands can be among the most valuable cards early on, with the player who gets ahead on them often being able to access more cards over the length of the game. This mean that more often, Crucible of Worlds wound up being a "win more" card rather than a means to get back into a game. With such little in terms of downsides, these one-sided benefit permanents were too much and I removed them and others like them from the set.

What's going well, so far?

With the aforementioned goal of inevitable momentum, I've found that heavily restraining cards that can recycle from the graveyard in any way has been extremely effective. The only ones currently which pull cards out of the graveyard are Conjurer's Bauble, Mystic Sanctuary, and Petrified Field, and only two of them return the recycled card to the deck. Because of this, we avoid situations where it feels like the number of remaining cards is ever increasing, and in the bauble's case, the drawn card makes up for the recycled card, so the endgame still arrives on-time.

Flashback is a wonderful mechanic for milling-centric decks in regular MTG, and it is absolutely at home in Nimnim as well. There are times where a powerful effect from a card has to be weighed against the ability for the opponent to cast the same card for its flashback cost soon after. On the other hand, flashback cards can create interesting emergent gameplay when the randomly milled cards from the deck include some of these flashback cards, which then generates new options.

Delve is another mechanic that balances flashback out well and makes use of the fact that there are going to be dozens of cards in the graveyard in every game of Nimnim at some point. Cards like Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time were strong in their own right when they came out, but with the shared graveyard, and especially with cards with Flashback or Retrace or Escape being so valuable in Nimnim, these delve cards become some of the strongest in the whole format because of how much graveyard disruption they can manage.

Many of the cards are deceptively simple. Mental Note, for example, is a card I used to play in Nimnim whenever I saw it because it was cheap and was a cantrip.^[6]

However, with the cost being so low, it being at instant speed, and it disrupting 3 cards in the deck all make it a useful card in the late game. If your opponent began their turn with 3 cards left in the deck, you could play this just before their draw step and they would have to do something at instant speed to avoid losing the game. Meanwhile, you've only expended one mana, so there's still plenty of room to follow it up even if they do have an answer.

Finally, I've really enjoyed scry, surveil, and cards like Index, which all let you affect what's coming up next in the deck. There's this back-and-forth meta-game about how to order the cards that I find captivating. If left in order, each player will draw each card during their turn. This means the person sorting through the cards should give themselves the best cards and their opponent the worst ones. However, since neither players knows what cards are in the other's hand, it can be difficult to play around what instant-speed effects the opponent may have, even if you have a few of your own. I've seen cases during playtesting where both players know the top card is powerful and then several spells get played to try to fight over trying to draw it first. This sort of metagame of locking your opponent into bad cards encourages interesting play in the early-to-mid-game, from my experience, and it makes the skill ceiling and replayability of the format increase as well.

What's next?

I've played Nimnim a handful of times with my buddy, 2Blave, to playtest it, and I have yet to outright win.^[7] Playtesting has all been done on TableTopSimulator thus far, since the "only one deck", "shared graveyard", and "no keeping track of lifetotals" all deviate pretty significantly from the more commonly supported online MTG formats. There continues to be a set of mechanics that are a little bit awkward in TTS, like searching the deck for anything or putting the card on the bottom during a Scry ability, but we're able to make do for now. As we continue to refine, I'll probably eventually get to a point where I set up a mod in the workshop for playing it, though I can't promise I'll do any scripting.

As of writing this, Nimnim has 80+ unique cards that aren't basic Islands, and that complexity alone means it continues to be a game for absolute sickos with a bunch of time on their hands. It has been difficult to find people to test it with, even among various groups of MTG fans I'm connected to online. I'm hopeful that future iterations will be a lower time commitment. Ideally, something like 60-90 minutes per game would be nice.

These last few points have another solution: remove MTG altogether, create new and simplified cards that fit exactly what I'm looking for with this format, remove mana in favor of some easier to explain action economy, and then ideally start playtesting with folks who aren't familiar with MTG at all. It'd be a ton of work, but it'd be just as easy to playtest in TTS, and if it did wind up being fun, I could see there being two different style versions of the game based on difficulty, just like how Spiel des Jahres has different tiers for family-style games and connossieur-style games.

In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have questions or anything, and hopefully I'll have more progress soon.

Because of https://scryfall.com/card/atq/56/millstone ↩︎
Named after the card Dandân, originally named after the mythical Arabian fish ↩︎
With a minimum of one card that must be drawn by default during their "draw step" each turn. ↩︎
From Nim + Dandân, though it could also have been called "Nimnîm" ↩︎
Meaning any spell that, once resolved, puts the countered spell into the graveyard with no upside for that spell's owner. ↩︎
A card which when played draws a new card, thereby replenishing the possible actions the player could take, as though they had spent nothing. ↩︎
Most recently, I won but as we looked closer at the end of the game, it became clear that he had me beat a couple of times over and it was more a fault of the way the deck number was being reported in-game than anything good I did. I'm counting it as a draw. ↩︎

Unfair Flips Friends at the Table Playthrough

2025-09-28T06:55:00.000Z

This weekend, I was overcome by the urge to make this extremely specific fanart.

I recently watched Austin and Jack from Friends at the Table play Hthrflwrs's extremely good new video game Unfair Flips by streaming it on Twitch

Over the course of the roughly three hour stream, Austin and Jack -- among other things^[1] -- invented a pair of delightfully frustrating fictional oligarchs named The Red Duke and The Blue Baron, who alternated between jabs at their subjects (the streamers) and talking to each other about the rousing match of coin flips the were playing vicariously through them.

Austin also read a long excerpt about how wine and milk are two ends of a spectrum among drinks. I forget which book excerpt it came from, but it was a great time. In my headcannon, The Blue Baron is a milk-drinker, while The Red Duke drinks wine. ↩︎

Poor Hemplo

2025-09-14T05:30:00.000Z

My partner speaks some Spanish. I only understand a few words. A few months back, I was confused by something in Spanish, and I was bummed about not understanding. I asked my partner, and I got some clarifying example followed by the phrase "por ejemplo." I heard it as "[...] poor Hemplo," thinking that my partner had invented a pet name to go with how sad and pathetic I was being.

Ever since, we've used "Poor Hemplo..." as a way to express that we understand the other person is complaining and wants attention, but that the complaint isn't a very serious one.

"Oh no, we're all out of grapes" "Poor Hemplo..."

Family Slang Words For Cats

2025-09-02T08:30:00.000Z

With very short exceptions, my parents have had cats for as long as I've been alive. My nuclear family is close and has plenty of words, phrases, or family references/in-jokes^[1] that I took for granted growing up. When I was in middle school, my at-the-time crush came over around my birthday because she had gotten me a present.^[2] She was allergic to cats, so she had little-to-no concept of cat behaviors. While we sat on the couch, I tried to explain what the cats were doing and why, using as specific of language as I could: the ones I learned from my family. She responded that those words weren't real, and I explained that my family always used these words. It then dawned on me that families could create common-sounding words that were actually extremely niche.

Many years later, I've since learned that all words are made up. With that in mind, here's a descriptivist approach to my family's words for describing cats. Where possible, I've tried to include any known etymology I could in the footnotes:

boonk /bʊŋk/ verb -- a cat intentionally hitting its forehead on anything ^[3]

smear /smiɚ/ verb -- a cat rubbing either side of its chin on anything ^[4]

thuth /ðʌð/ verb -- a cat sticking its tongue out with its mouth closed ^[5]

proot /pɹut/ noun -- a small coo a cat does to get your attention, but not quite a meow ^[6]

tug /tʌg/ verb -- a cat clawing a fabric or other cloth texture to leave its scent behind ^[7]

topple-you-x-y-z /ˈtɑpl̩-ju-ɛks-waɪ-zi:/ verb -- when you scritch a cat's chin continuously until it goes from standing to laying down in a smooth motion, without interrupting the scritches ^[8]

skrank /skɹæŋk/ noun -- any meow that's intentionally not sing-songy, but is also not stoccato ^[9]

smearouette /smiɚɹəˈwɛt/ noun -- when a cat is doing figure-eights, usually around your legs, while repeatedly smearing ^[10]

padh padh padh /pæd pæd pæd/ (imperative?) verb -- to knead or bake muffins or biscuits

triangles /'tɹaɪˌæŋɡəlz/ noun -- a cats' ears, as a shorthand for talking about a cat more generally

boodle /bud(ə)l/ verb -- to traverse the stairs, usually descending, at great speed ^[11]

boodley boodley /bud(ə)li bud(ə)li/ adjective -- resembling or characteristic of the act of boodling

There are plenty more that I culled from this list. They tend to be reused/recontextualized standard English words used in cat contexts or just onomatopoeias with nothing else interesting about them. I think this list comprises a good set of words and phrases which would not be immediately apparent what is meant by them on their own, without context.

If you or your family have words like this, I'd love to hear about them, so long as a family member created the word. I don't have any interest in hearing about people who adopted late-00s-to-early-10s cat meme words (e.g. longcat, if-it-fits-I-sits, etc), since I was there for all of that.

This tended to be quotes from books, movies, home videos^[12], or even misprinted words on a mug^[13]. ↩︎
It was a hard-cover, bound, and blank sketchbook full of 8.5x11 pages. I never used it because I was afraid of making bad sketches that I'd have to show to my crush and because it wound up being a lot bigger of a surface than most of the sketching I ever did. ↩︎
Presumably a smaller, cuter-sounding onomatopoeic interjection of "bonk" because of the way that cats bonk their head while doing this, which eventually morphed into a verb, the way onomatopoeias tend to. ↩︎
Possibly related to the science behind a cat trying to spread its scent onto the surface that it's performing this action on. ↩︎
A word that can only physically be said by making the same face as the cat. ↩︎
Onomatopoeia. Often this will be followed by the same word but with a silent t after the first proot, to denote coos that are longer or ongoing. (i.e. "proot, proo(t)...") ↩︎
Each time the cat does so, its claws pull on the cloth in a way that's similar to tugging a rope. ↩︎
Topple-you has the same metric rhythm as the letter W, and WXYZ is the last four letters of the alphabet. ↩︎
Onomatopoeia. There's debate in my family about how this word is pronounced. I tend to say skrank, while my dad is closer to schkrank. ↩︎
A portmanteau of "smear" + "pirouette" ↩︎
This started as a B. Kliban cartoon of a cat with a million legs, from his book, Cats, but I have lost track of how it transitioned from that drawing to this word. ↩︎
One of the most popular home videos was of me as a young kid, pointing with my hand and announcing monotonously, "A bug." ↩︎
There was a mug my uncle once drank out of, which had the text "BUMPING LIKE A MUG", but thanks to weird kerning and font, my uncle read it out loud as "BLIMPING LIKE A MLIG" and the phrase has stuck around ever since. ↩︎

It's Been A Minute

2025-09-02T06:00:00.000Z

I haven't blogged in many months, but I've been meaning to! In that time, I was settling into a relatively new job, I was porting my website over from eleventy to astro, and I was accumulating various blog post topics to write about.

For a while now, I've been frustrated that I could not easily form abitrary collections of things for archiving-purposes. There's art that I have and/or my partner has done and I'd like to be able to showcase it, like I used to on cohost. I'm hopeful that this transition will help make doing so much easier for me.

If there's anything that looks strange (derogatory), feel free to comment, email, or otherwise ask about it and I'll look into it. I've been trying to test that everything looks good on my RSS feed reader, when I share posts via Discord, etc, but it's possible that I missed something in the shuffle.

Raku Firing Workshop

2025-05-21T05:30:00.000Z

My partner and I attended a pottery workshop at a studio outside of the city this past weekend. When you do pottery in a city, space is a premium. It's common to feel anywhere from cozy to a bit claustrophobic in a busy art studio. Most don't have any outdoor spaces, and even if they did, there would likely be restrictions on how openly you could do alternative firing techniques without creating significant risk to your neighbors or the general public. You can hardly even use outdoor grills in a lot of neighborhoods in my city, even if you have a back deck or patio for them.

For these reasons, we drove an hour to a much larger ceramics warehouse that had a large outdoor firing yard where you could have open flames, smoke clouds, and gas kilns. There, the head of the warehouse ran a Raku firing workshop for the dozen potters and their plus-ones all day. It was sunny with no clouds and was surprisingly windy all day, but it was overall a lovely time.

Raku originated in Japan. There, the piece was removed from the kiln while still very hot and it was left to cool in the open air. Western potters have since adapted this method to put an emphasis on a chemical reduction reaction as part of the firing process. I've only experienced the Western version, in which pieces tend to be heated up to hundreds of degrees^[1] in a gas kiln before being carefully removed and placed into a container^[2] semi-filled with combustable material.^[3] There, the hot pieces combust that material and then a lid is placed over the top to starve the environment of oxygen. This oxygen-starving is what causes the reduction reaction, and any exposed clay body is turned completely black. After about 20 minutes of burning in the container, the piece is carefully removed again and stuck into a water bath where it rapidly cools. Finally, the pieces can be polished when they're cold enough to handle. To achieve the style of crackling glaze effects that Western Raku has become known for, potters will move the hot piece around in the air and/or spray water at it to help encourage the glaze to form cracks prior to the combustion process.

Because Raku involves heating and rapid cooling, it's common to have pieces crack and shatter. Clay-joins like handles or any inconsistencies in clay thicknesses within the piece can wind up causing undue thermal stress during the cooling process. While these represent formidable risks, they also mean that any Raku fired piece that comes out nicely is that much more precious. Making Raku pottery is high stakes, and you can't celebrate how a piece looks until it finishes cooling, from my experience.

My partner made a handful of vases and sculptures for the event, with the expectation that if any of them survived and looked nice, then the event was a success. All of their pieces wound up surviving, with only one piece producing any new cracks, though those were only surface level. Of those that survived, our favorites were the two that had glossy white Raku glaze that achieved a nice crackle effect, followed by one with a completely different style.

As Western potters developed their own versions of Raku, the scope of the definition broadened. Today, in the US, it can include the burning of horse hair or feathers against the piece, or in some cases it can include an obvara mixture^[4] to create more naturalistic patterns from where the burning occurs. When the hair burns, it smells absolutely foul. When the obvara burns, it smells like burnt toast. Both were combined with billowing smoke from the reduction containers and the slightly sulfuric smell of a gas kiln. I was thankful it was windy in that moment.

I particularly liked how the burnt bits above the main brown area of the obvara vase look like pine trees sticking up above the foliage of a forest. Later obvara dunks for other pieces had lighter browns when the mixture was not as homogenous at time of dunking, or in one case, it looked like a coral growth pattern up the side of the piece because the burning was localized to such specific areas.

I'm happy that we were able to take a day and go attend this workshop, and I'm hopeful that we'll go back soon. I'm very happy with the pieces we returned home with, and now that we know how the various techniques look, it'll be interesting to apply that knowledge and try to make something even more intentional next time.

When it's in the severals of hundreds, it doesn't matter as much which temperature scale you use. ↩︎
I've only ever seen it be placed into a metal garbage can. It's one of the most exciting reasons to have a trash fire I've seen yet. ↩︎
This tends to be stuff like newspaper and woodshavings, though we also had barley seeds at this workshop. Other folks will throw in banana or orange peels, copper wire, and other things that melt or burn in interesting ways. ↩︎
Obvara is a mix of water, flour, yeast, and sugar. Some folks said you could probably spray beer directly onto the piece too and have some similar effects, but the bucket definitly helped the uniformity of the thermal reaction. ↩︎

Blood and Law

2025-05-10T06:59:59.000Z

Tonight, I finally got to meet friends from cohost @tsiro (richard), @bcj, and @thricedotted (li) in person, along with their friend Mouse. I had a great time filled with a lot of laughter. One of the topics brought up was the online conference that bcj and many of their friends partake in, involving 5-to-10-minute presentations. When it became my turn to talk about a presentation idea, I mentioned the following means of counting familial relationships as my most-recently-workshopped bit that I believed I could stretch to 5-10 minutes.

In a family, each and every person is related by a linear combination of the following two characteristics:

Blood
Law

Blood

When two people are related by blood, that means they share "blood relatives" linked by nuclear family: biological parents (1 step up the tree), biological children (1 step down the tree), or biological siblings (1 step over on the tree). We can determine the number of blood steps^[1] for other specially-named relatives too, like great-grandparent (3 blood steps up), cousin (1 blood step up, 1 over, 1 down), or nephew (1 blood step over, 1 down). In each case, we aim to produce the shortest path between the starting node of the family tree and that relative.

Law

When two people are related by law, that means they are seen as relatives by some government's law. Most familiarly, we can take the nuclear family blood relative terms and add "-in-law" to the end to describe a parent, child, or sibling who belonged to one spouse who is now related via a law (in many cases, marriage) to the other spouse. A non-exhaustive list of other laws that can affect familial relations includes "adoption law", "domestic partnership law", and "divorce law."

Edge cases

Generally, each step is only one of blood or law as the type of relation.^[2]

Step-

For step- relations, the nuclear family's relationships are each 1 law (the one that makes them a step- something). For instance, someone's step-son is related to them via 1 law (marriage) after which, he is considered their son.

Half-

For half- relations, it's a bit trickier. I recommend just "rounding up to the nearest blood" as we said in our group. I could see there being a schism for people who believe half-blood-related should be rounded down versus up, though.

Found Family

@bcj brought up a great point, which was that in some cases there are found families^[3] where there's no formal adoption, and certainly no blood relation, yet it's clear that one person is the "found parent" or "found sibling" of the other. Perhaps there's a third characteristic to consider, but this part hasn't been ironed out as much, so I'm leaving it for now.

Ambiguity

Someone's great-aunt-in-law could be their spouse's great aunt, their great-uncle's spouse, or their uncle's mother-in-law. In each of these cases, we're talking about 2 blood steps and 1 law step. It just depends on where the law step is. While it's possible to specify the exact steps through the family tree one-by-one, this can be cumbersome compared to the syntactic sugar of using words like "uncle" or "great-aunt". That said, this cumbersomeness has to be balanced against the clarity of making sure the person understands the tree-traversal path.

Now What

With an understanding of this method, we can now really dive in:

My partner's brother's wife is related to me via 1 blood (sibling) and 2 laws (one for my partner and me, one for my brother-in-law and his wife). I therefore could refer to her as my sister-in-two-laws. Her sister has a spouse, who I am related to as a brother-in-three-laws.

While the goal of this methodology was to create a means of relating two people with a sort of elegant clarity, it also provides another benefit: family-tree-step-maxing. Your highscore number for family-tree-step-maxing is the length of the shortest path from you to the relative who is furthest away from you, yet for whom you've met each of the intervening family members along the path.

In my case, I met my partner's second-cousin's wife's mother about a year ago when she was visiting Seattle. I'm related to her via 1 law (my partner's), 5 blood (grandparent's sibling's grandson's), 1 more law (wife's), and 1 more blood (mother), for a total of 2 laws and 6 blood, or 8 steps total.

I wonder if I'll ever reach a number higher than that?

Steps along the family tree where each step is one blood relation, shortened to "blood steps" for convenience ↩︎
I am deliberately skipping over the concept of incest because it does not interest me for this bit. ↩︎
Like Piccolo and Gohan ↩︎

Poliwhirl's Mouth

2025-05-03T18:30:00.000Z

I spent some time this morning thinking about Pokémon. Specifically, I considered how the poliwag, poliwhirl, poliwrath evolution line mimics poliwogs, frogs, and frog-themed wrestlers. While considering this, I noticed that poliwag's mouth is separate from the hypnotic spiral on its front:

This led me to consider how poliwhirl's mouth must work. I came up with the following two options, which I illustrated by hand on my phone:

I think the one on the right is technically more frog-like, while the left just looks like a blue Dot Gobbler.

Baker's Units Revisited

2025-03-07T19:20:00.000Z

A few years ago on cohost, I (re)invented the idea of applying "baker's" to any quantity to refer to one more of that quantity. A baker's dozen is 13, a baker's half-dozen is 7, a baker's score is 21, etc. The etymology of the phrase mentions adding a 13th loaf of bread when selling a dozen, to be on the safe side. This "rounding up to one more" could be applied to any quantity, so I'm surely not the first person to consider it.

Last night, I was imagining applying the opposite of the "baker's" prefix, to indcate one fewer of a given quantity. I had originally come up with "swindler's," but my friend mentioned that it wasn't specific enough of a profession. To keep with the idea of "skimming one off the top" and to minimize the Levenshtein distance between the prefixes, I proposed "banker's." A banker's dozen is 11, a banker's half-dozen is 5, a banker's score is 19, etc.

It turns out that banker's dozen is already a phrase in Australian English, which may just push me personally from "fun in-joke" to "actually adopting and spreading the phrase whenever possible."

Making Realis Classes

2025-02-04T00:00:00.000Z

Published on itch.io two weeks ago, Austin Walker's latest TTRPG, Realis has been a lot of fun to read through and talk about with friends in various Discord servers.

Realis (Ashcan Edition) by Austin Walker

The core thing differentiating this game compared to other entries in the (even Indie) TableTop Role-Playing Game space is how it eschews dice in favor of Sentences: a mechanic where Sentences of a greater than or equal Reality (just think higher modifier like +0, +1, +2, +3) always counteract Sentences of a lower Reality. Over time, your characters, NPCs, objects, and all sorts of other things will have these Sentences be refined, thereby strengthening them but also taking away part of when they're relevant. For example:

+0 I always know where I'm going -> +1 I always know where I'm going, when I'm underwater

Because so much of this game is designed around the Sentences that a character has access to from their Class, it's been a fun exercise to come up with Classes as a sort of way to imagine a template of a story without necessarily finding people to play with first. There are 20 Classes included in the Ashcan Edition available now and likely double that in the full release. With that in mind, below are a few Classes that I've put together since reading through the rules. Note that several of these skip the "background description" because I was either too lazy or had forgotten that that was part of defining a class when I first wrote them.

Classes

Looper

Sphere of Soujourn (Impulse: Respond to a local problem with excursionary Means)

Class Sentences

I always remember the past
I always get a second chance
I always notice the smallest things
I always have to keep moving

Example Bonds

I know what I would sacrifice for [Character], but they'll never fully understand why
[Character] has changed me, and I need to show them in which ways

Example Dreams

I will escape this loop
I will discover a way to forget
I will finally find a use for my time

Rebel

Sphere of Shadow (Impulse: Respond to a noble problem with dishonorable Means)

Class Sentences

I always do what I must to survive
I always worry my those close to me
I always inspire people
I always keep climbing

Example Bonds

[Character] has my back. I just hope they don't sacrifice too much for me.
Only time will tell how much I can trust [Character]'s incredible access to opportunities.

Example Dreams

I will give the people fighting the Consortium a new hope
I will one day achieve Greatness
I will break every shackle

Subject

Sphere of Sorcery (Impulse: Respond to a mundane problem with magical Means)

Broken, reformed, full of promise. Your identity was once taken from you in favor of crafting a more potent tool. But you no longer serve your masters, if they're even still alive. You're free, for now. Only time will tell if for good.

Class Sentences

I always remember my 🍃 Training 🍃
I always know how to push my limits
I always balk at authority
I can always choose my own future

Example Bonds

[Character] is stronger than they know. I can teach them confidence.
I will never lie to [Character], and I expect them to always be honest with me in return

Example Dreams

Break the chains of our reality
Realize my true perfected form
Live normally, for once

Youngster

Sphere of Steel (Impulse: Respond to a peaceful problem with violent Means)

Class Sentences

My sole 🍃 little dude 🍃 always wins
I always have comfortable and easy-to-wear clothing
I am always underestimated
I always get in over my head

Example Bonds

I have a lot to learn from [Character] about being stronger, if only I could convince them to teach me.
Now that [Character] and I exchanged numbers, I can call them whenever I need help.

Example Dreams

I want to be the very best, like no one ever was
I will teach my 🍃 little dude 🍃 to understand the power that's inside
I will catch every little dude in the world

Thistlewhisperer

Sphere of Soujourn (Impulse: Respond to a local problem with excursionary Means)

Verdant and ever tangling brambles yearn to fill the darkest voids with new growth. They heed your caring word, but burgeoned thistle will eventually turn conversational, and you may not like what they want from you in return.

Class Sentences

Plants always take my suggestions
I always survive in the light of the Corpse Sun
My green thumb is always growing
I always hurt people I touch

Example Bonds

[Character] loves to reap. I will teach them to sow.
I trust [Character] to guide me out of the thickest knots and towards the light

Example Dreams

I will reignite the Corpse Sun and enter eternity
My plants will consume Realis itself and form a better world
I will not be owned by these plants' desires.

Crowdpleaser Words

2025-01-12T23:30:00.000Z

As part of the thinky puzzle games discord, some folks began running the Confounding Calendar project, which I got to experience for the first time this past year (2024). My favorite entry from those was a game called "Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters" which is a combination of a code-breaking word-guessing game and a bunch of absolutely delightful little guys of different colors to make use of the yearly Confounding Calendar chosen color palette. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend doing so.

Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters by Daniel Linssen

After playing it, I felt a similar feeling to how I felt when I first played Wordle. Here was a game that was a delightful 10-15 minute puzzle, it didn't overstay its welcome, and it also happened to have a handful of solutions that could all suffice. I began imagining trying to make a version that could handle the "new word every day" and more importantly "new set of rules every day."

This weekend, I had some free time and needed a distraction for a handful of reasons, and so I finally decided to dive into making a prototype. I've been building UI-heavy browser-focused games in React lately as a way to avoid having to learn the arcane and cursed UI programming behind more conventional game engines.

It took the better part of an afternoon, but I was able to set up a list of popular English words and various rules to clue them so that the game could provide a countdown and automatically choose a new word every day at midnight pacific and the rules could vary each day, as well. I aimed to have at least 5 words that appeased all the judges per day so that it's not too difficult. I also have made sure that it plays pretty smoothly on both mobile and desktop. You can play it on my itch.io page.

Crowdpleaser Words by graham

After getting some feedback from friends and a few discord servers I'm in, I added the ability to write down notes as you go along, and I've also added a way to get hints in the form of the game telling you what kind of rule a given judge is particular about. It won't give you all the info you need to solve the puzzle, but hopefully it's enough to be a stepping stone towards the solution. Additionally, if you finish the game with a guess unexpectedly, you can refresh to see what the rules were that you unintentionally satisfied.

Making this game was a lot of fun, and it was a much quicker feedback loop to prototype than other games I've tried to make this year like Wizard Sokoban or even UI games I haven't written about here. Here's hoping that I'll have more energy to throw some new ones together in the near future.

Slay the Spire Online

2025-01-11T05:00:00.000Z

Slay the Spire is the best roguelike deckbuilder of all time. I remember seeing it released in early access in 2017 and it took over all sorts of Twitch streams that I watched at the time. Despite loving card games and despite having enjoyed playing other hybrid-roguelikes^[1] of the era^[2], I didn't buy and play Slay the Spire until it officially launched on the Nintendo Switch in June of 2019 as a game for plane rides across the country for work and visiting friends.

Ever since, Slay the Spire has been a game that I play almost exclusively while traveling, whether while in transit or at my destination. I play each character's new ascension level in order before I move onto the next level. I have not beaten A20 on any character yet, but I'm at A10 on all of them, and the game hasn't lost its magic for me. In 2024, I began a completely different relationship with the game: one where I play it for hours at home and with friends.

Modded Slay the Spire

Over the years since its launch, I had learned about the Downfall mod from its original trailer and its updated version, and I'd also learned of the mod that Jorbs worked on, but I wasn't interested in trying either of them, since I wanted to get through A20 first before augmenting the 1-player experience.

Then, last year, my friend who I worked with on Wizard Sokoban^[3] introduced me to another set of mods. He and I had previously played Nuclear Throne together and been blown away at how well the mod community could execute multiplayer in a game like that. We took a look at Spire With Friends, but ultimately found it lacking.

While it does offer a free way to play an online game of Slay the Spire semi-cooperatively, Spire With Friends has you each battling your own regular enemy individually, as though you were just playing the one-player game at the same time, with minor changes to make it feel like you can have an effect on each other's progress. There are new nodes on the map called "Couriers" that allow for trading between players, but because the mod is all designed around asynchronous play, you don't need to both be at the Courier to trade: one of you can leave cards for the other to pick up (or ignore!) when they get to that node. Because of this, we found it was a little bit too easy to "cheese" the game by taking bad cards out of your deck to put in the courier's send slot, and having the other player simply not take them from that slot when they arrive.

After a few tries of Spire With Friends, we tried out a different mod, which we've now been happily going back to for months.

Together in Spire

Together in Spire is another cooperative mod, but you actually play the game simultaneously and next to each other. Everyone in the game enters into the same room against the same enemy -- whose max health is scaled with the number of players -- and then the enemy only takes their turn once everyone in the room has clicked the End Turn button. Play continues like this, synchronized depending on who is in the room at a given time. While this can be a little grueling in parts of the late game if your friend is going infinite and you're just hanging on, we found that the difficulty and playstyle far better matched what we were looking for out of cooperative Slay the Spire than any of the alternatives.

Each battle, there's usually a little bit of discussion about who will be able to apply negative effects like vulnerable or weak to the enemy, then everyone plays their damage in mostly whatever order, and sometimes we have some discussion about trying to end a given fight on a certain turn for relic or card reasons. The early fights, especially against elites can be difficult, while most of the rest of the game becomes trivially easy with more players. With two people, we find that ascension levels up to around 15 are pretty straightforward without having to do a lot of math or double-checking. With four, there's usually only one or two times in a run where anyone is in any serious danger of dying.

At every campfire, there's a new free (optional) action for trading and another new action called "Resurrect." Resurrect allows you to bring a dead teammate back to life. If they died far from a campfire, then you have to figure out a path to get to a campfire safely with whoever you have left. Trade allows any two people on the team to trade up to one relic, three potions, and three cards at a time. You both have to lock in the trade to make it take place, and unlike the Courier in Spire With Friends, you must take anything you agree to be traded. I really like that they made a way for the coop game to continue going even if one person dies, but also because Resurrect takes up the action that a person would normally do at the campfire, there's a real cost to having to do it. I find it makes the rest of the run feel earned, even if there's a death.

At shops, you can trade gold with any other player as much as you like, which is a nice quality of life thing without being game-breaking.

The game also autosaves, which means that even internet trouble or having to take a break doesn't get in the way of a good run.

Setup Instructions

Getting mods to work with Slay the Spire doesn't require Steam, but the workshop items tend to make it easy enough for non-technical people who can follow directions to be able to do. For Together in Spire, you need to own Slay the Spire and download the following mods, which you can do by clicking the subscribe button in the workshop:

Once all of these are installed properly, you'll have an option to start Slay the Spire with mods active. Depending on the operating system, we saw this fail the first attempt on Mac, followed by it working just fine every time after that. Make sure all of these mods are enabled, and then the game should boot up, and you should be able to see "Multiplayer" as an option in your starting menu.

One player can host a room for you all to play in, and they can set the settings they want to use in terms of both difficulty of the game once it's started and also who is allowed into the room. I'd highly recommend "Friends Only" so that only people you're friends with on Steam can access. One time, we had a troll try to join our game and use cheats to win faster than we could.

Joining a game can be done through the steam friends menu, and technically doesn't have to be at the very beginning of the game, though that's what we've always done so that we can play through everything together.

Note that A20 has had a bug for us where only 2/4 people wind up fighting the second boss of Act 3. Otherwise, there have been no bugs that have gotten in the way of a game, thankfully.

Future Considerations

As a way to play a cooperative card game with low stakes and interesting challenges, Together in Spire has absolutely delivered for us. There have been runs where we all roll random characters, runs where we each take one of the four main characters, and runs where we've all chosen the same character.^[4]

We find that as we all get comfortable playing, the game gets easier, so we look for harder challenges to impose. There's a "Hell" difficulty that's separate from the ascension levels that we'd like to try out. We've also talked about trying to do 2v2 races where you have to try to take different paths from one another and the first team to beat the heart wins.

At the very least, having a game that has very little timing-specific gameplay, only requires a mouse and a pretty unsubstantial computer and internet connection to play, and whose runs can be an interesting way to spend a few hours in a given evening hanging out on a voice call, I imagine my friends and I will continue to play this for a while going forward.

In conversation, I'd probably just use the shorthand "roguelikes" and let context clues do their thing, but I figure being extra intentional with word choice can help avoid "rogue/-like/-lite/etc" discourse. ↩︎
The ones I played were mostly Nuclear Throne, Enter the Gungeon, Dungeon of the Endless, and Don't Starve. I was also very familiar with Spelunkey, Binding of Isaac, and Crypt of the Necrodancer at that point, but had either bounced off of them or had never given them a fair shot. ↩︎
Now rebranded as Snails and Sorcery ↩︎
We all did Ironclad and realized that we could use the campfire trades to ensure one player had a deck that could go infinite on turn one every fight. It was goofy as hell, but it was also this person's first time playing online with the mods, so what better way to get acclimated, I suppose? ↩︎

Rabbit Rabbit

2025-01-01T21:30:00.000Z

Growing up, my family had a tradition: every first morning of the month, before you said anything else to each other, you'd say "rabbit rabbit." It was always the first words of the first of the month, and always two rabbits. Like so many family traditions, I learned the rules and never questioned the origins nor the point of it. It's just "what you do."

Years went by, and then in school, a friend of mine and I were talking about family traditions one day, and she mentioned that her family said "rabbit" on the first day of the month. This was the first time I'd ever heard of anyone else doing it, but her family always said one rabbit, not two. We figured this was the same tradition, just that one of us was doing it wrong. We began a competitive game where every month, the first one of us to tell the other rabbit rabbit -- or in her case, rabbit -- would win bragging rights, as a way to insist our respective version was the correct one.

Over time, we added rules like "it doesn't matter when the person reads the message, it matters when you sent it," and "if you know what time zone the other person is in, you have to respect their timezone's midnight, not just your own." The latter gave me an advantage when I was living on the West Coast and she was on the East. I've woken up at odd hours of the night many times only to realize that it's the first of the month, at which point I've been compelled to take my phone out and send a text^[1] that's just:

"🐇🐇"

It's been well over a decade of us going back and forth. We've done so despite moving away from each other and back, growing apart and then rekindling friendship. Throughout it all, we've stuck to this once-a-month tradition. I've stopped telling my family rabbit rabbit because ours was always an in-person sort of tradition. If I'm in the area during a month-change, I'll consider it, but it's much lower stakes and I'm long out of practice with them. But with my friend, because we've long-since transitioned to saying it over text message, there's never been a reason to stop.

Even without knowing the reason^[2] for the tradition, I think it's a good thing to have a tradition that encourages you to reach out to your friend once a month. It's been nice to have the excuse when we've been distant, and it's been nice to pepper them into our existing conversations when we've been close. There have been sprees of months where I don't care as much or where I care far more deeply about making sure I win, but I don't think we've both missed any in that time.

This morning, I lost, despite being up through midnight for New Year's Eve. The loss was regrettable, but on the other hand, I got a chance to catch up after the holidays. It also got me to finally wonder: where did all of this come from?

According to the very specific wikipedia page about it, it's a good-luck superstition in English-speaking countries, and:

The origin of the superstition is unknown, though it was recorded in Notes and Queries as being said by children in 1909

Beyond that, the origins are mixed and varied.

I don't much care for the lucky superstitious aspects of it, as auspicious as it might be to win bragging rights against a friend for a whole month. I mostly just like it as a quick, benign, silly way to keep in touch.

It's a wonderful thing to help your friend wake up only to find out they have lost some game to you in their sleep. ↩︎
Or better yet, creating your own reason! ↩︎

Caring About a Royal Family

2024-12-08T23:45:00.000Z

In college, I spent a summer doing an independent study on how to make a robot bird that could fly. I watched documentaries, I did wikipedia deep-dives, I learned musculoskeletal structures and how they varied across species, I studied the modes of flight among differently sized and shaped birds, and I looked at the state of the art in ornithopter-design at private robotics companies. I learned that the reason predatory raptors like vultures are often depicted circling overhead in cartoons was to do with the ways that they used static soaring from thermal gradiants to gain altitude without using much of their own energy. I also learned that the bird with the largest wingspan in the world^[1], the albatross, used dynamic soaring to build speed from taking advantage of the boundary of wind gradients. I planned to use slope soaring as a means to achieve lift, since my college had a gradual slope with a prevailing wind, and because it seemed to have the least amoung of moving parts.^[2]

As soon as I learned about the albatross, I was compelled: it's a bird that has trouble taking off compared to other flight-ful birds with smaller wingspans. For this reason, albatrosses tend to live in areas with high prevailing wind-speeds -- often islands with sharp inclines at the coast. I read that one of the main areas in the world that has both albatrosses and everyday human populations is New Zealand. Since then, I've always wanted to go and see one. When we were planning our trip to Aotearoa New Zealand, seeing wild albatrosses was one of the things on my list that I had to do.^[3]

To understand why albatrosses are viewable at the tip of the Otago Peninsula, it helps to understand the history of the area. Per previous posts, Aotearoa was and is a sanctuary for birds because of how and when it was formed geologically. The Māori established the Pukekura pā^[4] on the hilltop at the end of the Otago peninsula in the mid 1600s. Skipping forward a few centuries, Dunedin^[5] was founded by Scottish colonists in the mid 1800s. After gold was discovered in 1861 at Gabriel's Gully, ~80km west of Dunedin, the ensuing gold rush exploded the population. By 1874, Dunedin was the city with the largest population in New Zealand. In the 1880s, fears rose that the Russian government might attack New Zealand at any moment.^[6] With Dunedin as a major target that needed defending, the Pukekura pā was torn down and the peninsula tip was cleared of any remaining trees to make way for Fort Taiaroa, along with an Armstrong Disappearing Gun inside it.

The first albatrosses seen in the area were in the late 1910s. Wildlife experts believe that the clearing of forests and removal of any predators, combined with human-led displacement of albatrosses at other islands nearby to New Zealand is what led them to begin nesting by Fort Taiaroa. Dr. Lance Richdale^[7] was the man credited for helping establish protection for the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head. Part of these efforts eventually included the Royal Albatross Centre and turning the entire Taiaroa Head area into a predator-free zone. Doing so has made it an area where a number of other endangered bird species can roost safely.

The life of a northern royal albatross like the ones I saw starts when two albatrosses mate^[8] and lay an egg. The chick is taken care of by its parents, who alternate staying with the chick to protect it. As it reaches adolescency, chicks will begin the 1000km/day journey over the Pacific Ocean towards the West Coast of Chile. Along the way, these albatrosses also use slope soaring off of the ocean waves themselves as a way to further conserve energy. They drink salt water and their bodies process the excess salt out of it, leading to the remainder coming out the tube-shaped nostrils, down the beak, and off the curved tip as waste. The tubular nostrils are also able to smell their prey from great distances. For Northern Royals, their diet is 80% squid, but generally any small ocean animal near the surface is fair game. They'll make the return trip to Aotearoa and begin mating before continuing to do this commute back and forth pretty much every year for the rest of their lives.

I can't describe how nice it was to finally get to see the albatrosses in real life after all this time. When we first arrived at the viewing area of the Centre -- a small windowed building on the top of the hill -- we could see about three birds sitting by their nests in the grass below. I made quiet peace with the fact that this would be all we got to see of them, and through the binoculars it was really neat to see their feathers and bills as they looked around. But the real highlight for me was when, out of nowhere, we spotted a pair of albatrosses repeatedly soaring by before they too landed to begin nesting. It was exhilarating to see them actually flying in real life.

Ranging from wingspans of 2.5–3.5m (8.2–11.5ft) depending on species. ↩︎
I unfortunately bit off more than I could chew with that project, and never got to a completed flight attempt before running out of time in the class. The knowledge has stayed with me, though. ↩︎
Others included in no particular order: 1. See kiwis, 2. Ride the TranzAlpine train, 3. See Hobbiton, and 4. Go to Milford Sound. All of these are pretty standard tourist things to do there, so there's a lot of readily-made itineraries built around them. ↩︎
In this case, a settlement on a hill defended by palisade walls and barriers, though there are various other meanings and usages in other contexts. You can read more about this history of this particular one at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03036758.1978.10429379 ↩︎
Dunedin is actually Scottish Gaelic for "Edinburgh," and many of the street names and placements were just borrowed directly from the layout of Edinburgh. ↩︎
There was never any attack. ↩︎
The wildlife experts on our tour at the centre showed us a delightful number of photos of Richdale being bitten/mouthed by the bills of albatross on his clothing or hands over the years. ↩︎
Usually for life. There tends to be a whole unique language of both sounds and ways that albatross pairs like to squawk and click-clack their bills together that helps them find each other year after year. That being said, there are records of one member of a pair dying or not coming back to the area during breeding season and then the other moving on to find a new mate. The oldest on record was named Grandma and wound up mating with three different birds across her 60+ year lifespan, including one at the age of 62 in 2021 before she passed. ↩︎

The World's Littlest Penguins

2024-12-06T05:10:00.000Z

When I was planning this trip, I kept asking friends who had been to Aotearoa New Zealand for input on what to do. One of those suggestions was to "see the little blue penguins who come ashore around dusk on the East coast of the Southern Island." We had a few days in Kaikōura and a few more in Dunedin planned, so as soon as we arrived at the former, we began asking around for details on where to find the penguins.

The locals told us that there was a Coast Guard station that was open to the public and that if you went there around dusk, that's where some penguins usually arrived each night. While traveling, we had been sticking to a pretty early bedtime (8 or 9pm) because we also tended to have early mornings, but springtime in the southern hemisphere meant that the sun was rising earlier and setting later, meaning civil twilight wasn't usually until 8:30.

We bravely stayed up late and drove the car in the dark for the first time^[1] to go to the coast guard station at dusk. It was a very small building^[2] by a beach with some areas to park nearby. There were some other cars next to ours with people watching the sunset. I donned our binoculars and began scanning the shore as we stepped onto the beach. No penguins, just waves.

We stuck around as it got chilly and darker, and we realized there was another beach on the other side of the coast guard station, which had a number of shallow rocks and tide pools because the tide was going out. A man wearing a camera with a large, telephoto lens showed up and asked if we had ever seen the penguins before. He mentioned that his tour guide told him this was the area where they usually came ashore in the evenings. We were reinvigorated because he looked seriously ready to see some penguins, so we perservered through the boredom and the cold for another hour or so.

Eventually, scanning the same area became tiring. We were just barely able to hear the chirps of oystercatchers or terns as they walked around or flew over the rocks. It was cold and late, and we couldn't tell if we heard anything nor whether the new shadows that appeared as the tide went out were actually penguins or just more rocks. We resolved to go home and try again later in the trip, but we didn't have high hopes from that night's failed search. To give us more of a guarantee, my partner looked online and was able to book some of the last spots in a viewing tour near Dunedin that said that it would refund you if you saw fewer than four penguins.

It was raining when we arrived in Dunedin. Beyond the Otago Harbour at the edge of downtown, and more specifically beyond the Otakou penninsula, is the open and vast Pacific Ocean^[3], which means two things: prevailing winds and frequent light rain.

From Wikipedia:

Dunedin has relatively low rainfall in comparison to many of New Zealand's cities, with usually only between 600 and 750 millimetres (30 in) recorded per year. However, wet weather is frequent, since much of this rainfall occurs in drizzle or light rain and heavy rain is relatively rare. Dunedin is one of the cloudiest major centres in the country, recording approximately 1,850 hours of bright sunshine per annum.

In summary, you can think of Dunedin as generally having the climate of Seattle. It has a long water-feature connecting the heart of the city to the open ocean, and it has frequent wet weather and clouds. Thankfully, the rainstorm of the day had finished before our tour began. We drove out to the end of the Otago peninsula and arrived at the conservency where the penguin-viewing would happen.

We were given a brief explanation about the penguin's habitat and lifecycle from the wildlife experts. The Little Blue Penguin^[4] is the world's smallest penguin, at a height of up to about a foot when fully grown. Starting at dawn, they swim out to the ocean, and eat small fish and invertebrates all day. At dusk, they arrive back home and usually call out to each other to cooperatively land on shore at similar times to help avoid predators. This was where and when we would get to see them.

The viewing platform was an elevated structure built by the conservancy so that penguins could waddle under it and get to their burrows, and so that tourists like us could safely view them from afar. In the blustery dusk wind facing shore, we stood as the sun set and our guides made hot coffee and tea to drink while we waited. They told us the same thing that the man with the telephoto lens in Kaikōura said: you're more likely to hear them before you see them, due to how hidden they are in the water because of their feathers. Below, you can see video of one group waddling up while another group lands in the background:

Penguins arriving on shore Link to the uncompressed video

When landing, a "raft" of anywhere from a dozen to several dozen penguins will all launch out of the water together and land on the beach, where they'll then waddle up the shore to get to their respective burrows. We were told that seals tend not to eat penguins unless the seal is juvenile. These penguins have such incredibly tiny and dense feathers that seals quickly learn to stay away from such a terrible and dry mouthfeel. Their number main predators tend to be gulls, eagles, seals, orcas, and sharks out at sea. At dusk, the same mustelids and other negative human-related animals I've mentioned before for the nighttime. Thankfully, as part of this conservancy's work, they created an almost entirely predator-free zone for the penguins.

Another reason for landing at night time is that the penguins have poor eyesight that can get even worse in bright light like sun or the flash of cameras. Before being led out to the platform, we were all instructed to test our phones in both camera and video modes to avoid any flash photography. The platform itself had some LED lights that shed constant, diffuse light on the penguins as they made their way to their burrows. According to the guides, these lights had been scientifically tested with this penguin population to see if they'd be less likely to return to their burrows if the light was on near them, and it had no effect on their behavior and was deemed safe. This meant that even after dusk, we were able to take nicely-lit photos of the penguins for about an hour before the lights turned off and we were encouraged back up the stairs to the parking lot.

As the first penguins came in, while everyone else was focused on capturing photos or videos of them as they made landfall or began waddling, I had an area near the side of the platform mostly all to myself when the penguins came waddling past the platform. The walls of the platform were metal railings with thin black nylon strings connecting the railing to the floor. This meant that you could pretty easily get a clear photo of the penguins in between the strings, while still respecting the distances for wildlife safety.

It's hard to get photos of them standing still at all. Even when they're not waddling, the heads are moving, they're preening their feathers, or they're otherwise trying to shake off the water from their recent swim. This was the best and closest photo of any I was able to take.

Over the course of the night, we easily saw about 150 little blue penguins. There were penguins who would happily just chill close to the platform, penguins who would go home to their burrows to tend to their young, penguins who launched themselves onto the shore only to dive back into the ocean again and repeat that process a few times.

As we were leaving, we had to walk up an elevated wooden path and some stairs. Every minute or so of walking, we would stop as the people just ahead of us gently told the penguins who had wound up on the elvated path to keep going and not block the way. We didn't take any pictures since the LED lights were off and we were just walking by the glow of dim red lights, but that was probably actually the closest we got all night. Our guides also recommended to check under your car before leaving, just in case.

I'm so glad that we listened to my friend's suggestion. These penguins were delightful, and as cold as it was out there at the beginning, we were warmed by the adrenaline of seeing the cutest little dudes surf onto the rocks and then waddle up the beach while squawking the whole time. I'd say the entire thing was well worth it, and I'm thankful we found a wildlife center that would allow us the opportunity to safely take photos of them too.

That being said, due to some technical details I get into in the footnotes, I'm also going to include another species as I continue my endemic birds of Aotearoa photos. Here's the red-billed gull, its chick, and its egg, photographed nearby to where I saw the penguins:

It was already difficult to drive on the other side of the road in the daylight, so we'd generally been trying to get all of our driving done before nightfall for fear that it'd be even more difficult then. ↩︎
When you're an isolated island nation the size of Colorado, there's only so much of a coast guard presence you need to be properly prepared. This may be another instance where US subconscious assumptions about things^[5] were not aligned with reality. ↩︎
The next body of land you reach if you follow the same latitude to the East is the West Coast of Chile. If you follow the same latitude to the West, the first body of land that you would reach is the East Coast of Argentina. Aotearoa is South of all of Asia, Africa, and Australia, which makes it exposed to oceanic elements. ↩︎
Technically, there were two subspecies of Little Blue Penguin: the Little Penguin (endemic to the rest of Aotearoa) and the Little Blue Penguin (endemic to Australia and the Otago peninsula). Pretty recently, (in 2015 and 2016) new studies of mitochondrial DNA showed a clearer delineation between the two subspecies, and it seems like they may be officially reclassified as different species within our lifetime. ↩︎
Like "how much military spending is reasonable for a country?" ↩︎

Listening on Hikes

2024-12-03T04:40:00.000Z

I like to go on easy, well-manicured hikes. My general rule of thumb when people ask if I want to go on a hike with them is I'm happy to for up to about three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation gain. I wish that I had the motivation to go on more of them and get better at longer ones. Too often, I find myself focusing on my own breathing, my nose running, my muscles aching, where I'm placing my feet, or how much I wish this type-2 fun was more type-1. But when I was hiking in Aotearoa New Zealand, I found it wasn't quite as bad as other hikes I've been on, and part of that was finding a new thing to preoccupy my senses: listening to birds.

Along the Northern Edge of the South Island is the Abel Tasman National Park, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer credited with mapping out Aotearoa from his ship. There are a handful of hikes by the coast, and we selected one of the easier ones: a "seal view and beach walk" that we assumed would be a walk along a beach, perhaps in view of some seals. It turned out this was a "maybe view the seals from the boat you take to get to beach number one, so that you can hike up over hills through a forest to beach number two" situation, but thankfully we had prepared for that just in case with extra food and water.

We passed by Split Apple Rock in the ferry, and I began thinking about how many photos I had already taken of birds, only a few days into the trip. I realized that I had documented about two bird species per day^[1], so I took my phone off of airplane mode for the first time outside of a hotel and spent a not-insignificant amount of my roaming data budget for the trip downloading Cornell Lab's Merlin Bird Identification App along with the New Zealand-specific bird pack. With this on my phone, I knew that even without service, I would be able to take pictures or recordings of birds and look them up in real time.

As we landed, I immediately got to do so: there were several weka running around the beach, harassing tourists. Weka are flightless birds and more importantly, opportunistic scamps: they know that humans have food in their backpacks for hikes, and they know that humans leave backpacks on the ground to take cute photos for Instagram or whatever. While the humans are away from their backpacks, the weka will run over and either try to drag the pack away if it's little or unzip the pack and take what's inside if it's big. They're surprisingly fast runners and incredibly quiet.

Several times on our hike, a weka would pop out of a bush that we didn't realize it was in and frighten us in the process. We could be standing around eating a snack and then turn around and find a weka behind us a minute later that we didn't hear approach. I got to see two of them fighting over a piece of lettuce they found at the beach. I managed to capture a video of the chase and of one of them squawking as it ran away:

(Note: if you're reading this on an RSS feed reader, and it doesn't support video or audio html tags, you may need to go to my actual website to be able to see and hear them. To do so on inoreader, I just scroll all the way to the bottom and then keep scrolling and it loads the actual page)

Weka chase Link to the uncompressed video

Continuing up the trail, we gained elevation quickly, and I kept noticing about every 90 seconds or so that the calls of the birds would change as we rounded bends. In the past, I haven't really tried to look for birds as I'm hiking, but with this new-to-me Merlin "pokedex-but-with-real-animals" app, I found myself stopping to see where along the path I could go to get better recordings, and then using that triangulation to figure out what tree the bird was in. This meant a lot more stops as I started hearing new bird calls.

A silvereye | tauhou, a eurasian blackbird, and a common chaffinch Direct link to audio file

The app was fascinating: I could see a recording of multiple birds and the app would show which ones were which along with the timestamp of the recording. In the above recording of three birds, the short, high-pitched "ee"s in the background are the silvereye | tauhou, the melodical chirp that comes in secondly and sounds like it's posing a question is the eurasian blackbird, and then the third, repetative sotcatto chirping is the common chaffinch. I began to be able to place these calls among the others as the hike went on, which made identification easier.

As I started to focus more on the sounds of the birds and the rest of the forest that I was hearing, I also began to think about my interaction with those things online. I really enjoy reading blogposts about travel that friends do to foreign countries or even journeys they take around their cities. That said, it's one thing to get to read about them and see the pictures along the way, but I realized that I have very little idea for what the sounds of those places are, despite audio capturing being similarly easy as picture or video. In the forest of Abel Tasman National Park, I found myself in a soundscape, not only of generic forest with a beach on the periphery, but of specifically this place with these birds making their calls.

Tomtit chirping Direct link to audio file

It's helpful that the Merlin app stores the recordings locally by default. I kept using it to try to record birds as I got closer to them. In some cases, like the tomtit^[2], I was able to find it and get a nice recording, but it flew away before I could capture a picture.

Gray gerygone | riroriro chirping Direct link to audio file

Whenever possible, I'd try to whistle the call back while I was looking for various birds. I don't know if I did a good enough job replicating any of the bird calls for them to be drawn to my whistling, but at the very least, it helped my ear to keep focused on the bird call. That being said, the call of the tūī^[3] is so elaborate that I gave up pretty immediately.

I kept hearing that call as one I didn't recognize and saying "who are you??" under my breath.^[4] I tried recording a few times, but I found that the other birds were too loud to be able to hear anything over them. Eventually, I was able to find where the tūī was singing from and got any picture at all before it flew off. This wasn't the last tūī I'd see on the trip, thankfully, but none of the others were as photogenic, nor were any of them in quiet enough settings for recording:

Once we had reached the peak of the hill that we were ascending, we stopped briefly for our packed lunch and a "random" weka sighting as we unwrapped our food. Then we started to hear new sounds echoing off the valley below us as we made our descent.

New Zealand bellbird chirping Direct link to audio file

This one was beautiful and made a lot more sense once I learned the name: it was reminiscent of hearing the church bells go off across a town or a city. I never got to see it, but its sound continued to bounce around the valley every few minutes throughout the afternoon.

Continuing on, soon enough, we began to hear a new call that was easy for me to parrot^[5] with my whistling. We were down at a sort of in-between-beaches beach that was pretty close to where we were going when the sound began to be directly in front of us, and there was a new bird -- a kākā, perched on a branch high above the trail:

I was able to get a little bit closer, and snapped this next photo. But then a New Zealand pigeon | kererū^[6] arrived from behind us and the kākā was very upset and began dive-bombing it, so we made our exit to avoid getting caught up in the crossfire.

The uniqueness of there being so many birds to observe in a new place was enough of a distraction for me to lose track of the tiredness from hiking. I'm curious to go try to try some hikes now that I'm home, both in parks and beyond the city. When there's built-in stops because you're excited by something, that's a far different feeling for me from stopping because you're running up against a personal limitation. And maybe the motivation factor isn't the hike itself as much as the opportunity to go do that fun thing of cataloging birds again? Only time will tell.

This post has contained several endemic-to-New Zealand birds (weka, tauhou, tomtit, tūī, riroriro, New Zealand bellbird, kākā, kererū) already, but I also wanted to include one more that I found later on when we arrived at the beach at the end of our hike. Alternating walking around in the sand and washing themselves in the small stream of river water that was running directly down the beach and into the ocean were a pair of variable oystercatchers. One of them was sitting comfortably in the wind by tucking its bill behind a wing while the other walked about:

I managed to stick to this rate for all 18 days of the trip, winding up with 36 identified species, despite Merlin having trouble identifying some bird calls and despite me having trouble identifying some birds I couldn't take pictures of because we were driving past them so quickly. ↩︎
Among birds that I didn't know of at the start of the trip, the tomtit is the top of my list. I love when a bird is "blorby," which the tomtit is 100%, and I also love when it kind of looks like they're wearing balaclavas over their heads because of the coloring of their feathers. ↩︎
Link to a video of the tūī doing its calls. ↩︎
I did this again later on a smaller hike later that day when I heard this bird call that I've described as "unknown cackler". I tried looking it up on Merlin but got no results. After all, as nice as Merlin is for identifying, it currently only boasts being able to identify 30-40% of birds on Aotearoa. If you know what bird this is, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. ↩︎
heh heh ↩︎
Because of what I assume is island gigantism, New Zealand Pigeons are about 2x-3x the size of US city pigeons and you tend to hear them before you see them because of the sounds of their flapping wings through the foliage. ↩︎

Rightsholders and Theme Parks

2024-12-02T06:35:00.000Z

As someone who went to Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time, and as someone who grew up with the books and movies, I had to visit Hobbiton.

Or, rather, I should say I had to visit The Hobbiton™ Movie Set. When J.R.R. Tolkein died, his intellectual property (the books he wrote, the characters he created, and the settings therein -- including Hobbiton) were all overseen by the Tolkein Estate. We were surprised that none of the tour guides were wearing any styled cosplays or in-fiction costumes of any kind -- just matching, red-and-white checkered button-downs to help them stand out from the crowd. If this place was being called Hobbiton, if there was a Hobbiton sign, and if everyone was coming here because of having seen the movies, then why not dress up to sell the experience the way another theme park might?

On the Hobbiton Movie Set's website, there's a disclaimer at the bottom reading:

SHIRE TOURS, SHIRE’S REST, MIDDLE-EARTH, GREEN DRAGON, HOBBITON, THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the characters, places, items and events therein, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC and used under license by Rings Scenic Tours Limited and Wingnut Film Productions Limited, which are independently owned and operated. All rights reserved

I'm not an expert on IP law, but I found the careful way in which this tour used such legally-defined terminology to be both fascinating and goofy. To me, it seems like the touring company really wanted this experience to be similar to theme parks based around other movie properties: your Star Wars Galaxy's Edges or your Transphobic Wizarding Worlds. That said, there's clearly a balance to be struck between:

The corporation that owns the trademarks to the Lord of the Rings franchise, Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC
The corporations that run the tours, Rings Scenic Tours Limited and Wingnut Film Productions Limited
The farmers that own the land where the tours are happening, the Alexander Family

Digging into that third one for a second: as part of filming those movies, the location scouts for the movies found the farm as they were aerially traveling over New Zealand while looking for "rolling green hills, a big tree, and a big lake" to match the descriptions from the books. They found the sheep farm of the Alexander family, which had all three, and contacted the matriarch and owner of the land. Over the course of the filming of the original trilogy, additional trees both real and fake were transplanted and installed, the Hobbit hole facades were constructed, and all exterior shots of the Hobbit area were filmed there. There were some that were built regular size and some that were smaller (like 80% or 40%) to allow for the illusory look of Gandalf towering over the door to Bag End.^[1] They even lit the actual Green Dragon Inn set on fire and let it burn completely to the ground to film the shot where Galadriel shows Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring "what will happen if your journey fails."

When the Fellowship of the Ring movie came out in 2001, our tour guide mentioned that fans on the internet managed to triangulate where the filming took place, traveled to New Zealand, hopped the fences dressed as Hobbits, and according to our guide, "were invited in by the Alexander family for a drink, once they realized the fans didn't mean any trouble and weren't there to rob the place." By 2002 the Alexander family began doing tours of what was left of the movie set.

When the Hobbit triology began production, they once again needed a set for Hobbiton, so they contacted the Alexander family, and this time around it was negotiated that the Hobbit holes needed to be more permanently built out. This is what led to where we're at now: a tour company is allowed to go onto the Alexander farmland under strict supervision of tour guides so that they can show tourists the Hobbiton movie set and allow pictures that look like you went to the actual fictional place of Hobbiton. This also has included the building out of interiors of a couple of dwellings to allow tours to go through.

When it came time to go to the gift shop and see if there were any souvenirs, we noticed that all of the stuff that was specifically referencing anything from the tour said "Hobbiton Movie Tours" or "I visited the Hobbiton Movie Set" on them. This was all next to licensed LOTR merch of action figures or maps or whatever that you might find being sold at a hobby store over the last two decades. The more I kept looking around, the more I realized how specific the language had to be for this ~~theme park~~ movie set tour to be what I assume was in legal compliance with trademarks and IP law.^[2]

Contrasting that with how I heard folks from A More Civilized Age and Jenny Nicholsen talk about the Galactic Starcruiser at Galaxy's Edge, it sounded like Galaxy's Edge was far more of an "immersive theme park experience" to whatever end it was successful. I couldn't help but think "they wanted this Hobbiton Movie Set to be a theme park, but this is as close as they can get for now."

Missing from any of these pictures is the constant chirping of numerous birds who live in the area. Our tour guide also mentioned that during filming of the outdoor scenes, which required microphones to pick up all sorts of noises from the actors and props, they needed a way to keep birds out of the shots and from making too much noise in the background. To solve this, they hired a falconer to come on set with a raptor for the duration of filming. Doing this kept all the birds away until the falconer left so that the crew could get clean takes. I thought that was a fun and non-damaging way to fix their problem temporarily, which was nice to see after hearing so much about how previous wildlife problems had been solved™ by humans historically.

While there were lots of birds on the Hobbiton Movie Set, I didn't capture photos of any that were endemic to New Zealand in this part of the trip.^[3] Instead, here's a photo of a white-faced heron I saw later on. They're endemic to Australasia, which is again technically broader than I've been aiming for, but the next few will be much more focused, I promise.

It's probably the most common photo shown by people who go there, but here's a bonus photo of Bag End, the dwelling Bilbo left to Frodo at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. ↩︎
I suppose it could also be to try to legally differentiate for search engine optimization reasons? After all, I guess they got me to talk about it, and maybe it would be a similarly interesting conversation piece if I had a momento that said Hobbiton Movie Set on it? ↩︎
I did see a few mallards, but this post already has too many pictures, so here's a link to a bonus bird photo if you so choose. ↩︎

Pre-human History of Aotearoa

2024-11-30T21:00:00.000Z

I keep saying "New Zealand has a lot of unique birds" but to really understand why, we have to go back prior to any humans living there. Sure, birds like the Eurasian Blackbird and the House Sparrow were eventually introduced, but there are plenty more species that are native to the area.

This post, I'm going to start with the bird photo instead of ending with it. Here's a Pūkeko | Australasian Swamphen (endemic to New Zealand and parts of Australia) with two of its chicks that we saw walking around in a public park in Rotorua:

I'm no expert on this history, but from what I've read and heard from tour guides, the real history of Aotearoa started back when the Zealandian continent and the Australian continent both broke off from Gondwana some 80 million years ago and then subsequently began breaking apart from each other, finishing around 50 million years ago.

During that time, the K-T major extinction event wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. Elsewhere in the world, some mammals were able to survive the event, but the story goes that bats were the only surviving land-based mammal of Zealandia.^[1] All other mammals found today on the islands (sheep, rabbits, humans, cows, dogs, cats, mustelids, marsupials, etc) have been introduced over time, or must have been able to swim long distances in the sea like seals, sea lions, dolphins, and whales. I mentioned previously that the first Māori settlements weren't until the 1300s, which gives millions of years of time for different types of birds to arrive and evolve.

The largest of these birds was the moa: a flightless bird that could grow to be up to 12ft long and 510lbs. It grazed foliage in the bush, leading native trees to evolve to have smaller, denser leaves or tougher, more resistant ones. Moa only had one natural predator: Haast's Eagle, the largest eagle to have ever lived. When the Māori first landed, they began hunting the moa^[2] for food, and burning the bush to make room for settlements, which led to the moa going extinct prior to European arrival. Haast's Eagle also went extinct around that time, since it was so dependent on moa as its sole food source.

When the Māori landed, the polynesian rat came along with them, which led to the eradication of several bird species and several insect species that had never had predators before. Once the Europeans arrived and found land that looked just as farmable as the sprawling English countryside, they decided to bring over the classic English staples: sheep, cattle, dogs, and rabbits. Rabbits, being known for breeding extremely efficiently in good years, wound up reproducing out of control. These rabbits decimated local vegetation and drier areas of the South Island have still not recovered, over 150 years since the boom in rabbit population.

In a sort of "old lady who swallowed the fly" situation, Europeans then brought domesticated ferrets and stoats and weasels to the land in hopes that they'd be able to curb rabbit populations. Despite there being debate about the negative effects these mustelids would have on the local flightless bird populations, a few months later, thousands of mustelids had already been released. The problem was that this 'natural enemy' of the rabbit in Europe had found much easier prey: local fauna that had never had natural predators before.^[3]

In addition to this, Australian possums^[4] were introduced in the mid 1800s for fur trading. Given that they're also nocturnal omnivores, they competed with local bird populations over food, including over-feeding on local insects, seeds, fruit, and flora, leading to overhwelmingly negative effects for local wildlife.

Among others, the kiwi and kākāpō are examples of birds that evolved on Aotearoa with no natural predators. Whereas moa filled the ecological roles of larger grazing mammals like giraffes, antelope, or bison, the kiwi and kākāpō are nocturnal foraging birds that fill the niches of smaller mammals like hamsters or sugar gliders.^[5]

Kiwi birds have huge eggs^[6] that are occasionally left in burrows for short amounts of time when the father needs to get food. During this time, stoats will happily come and eat the egg or the chick if it's young enough that it can't effectively fight back.

The role of the National Kiwi Hatchery that we went to in Rotorua was to take unhatched kiwi bird eggs, incubate them in the safety of a lab, hatch the birds, vaccinate them against the most common bird-releated diseases, and feed them until they reached a certain minimum size (usually reached in a few months). After that, they were moved to predator free enclosures until they reached another minimum size, at which point they would be safe to be in the wild and could have powerful enough kicks to ward off mustelid attacks. The conservency also puts foot bands on all the kiwis for census reasons and then trackers on the male kiwis, since the fathers are the ones who incubate the eggs in the wild. With this, they've been able to grow the wild kiwi populations over the last decade, though there's still a lot more work to do. I also got to see a couple of day-old kiwis during my visit to the hatchery, which was incredible.

No photos or videos were allowed around the kiwis because their eyes and ears are so sensitive to light and sound. All it takes is one aloof tourist not realizing the flash on their camera is on to do lasting damage.

The kākāpō population fell to a minimum of 49 birds, which means that they're in a similar problem to cheetahs in terms of low genetic diversity. While all kākāpō currently live in predator-free areas off the coast of the main islands of New Zealand proper, there have been attempts to reintroduce them to the wild as well as sequencing their genome to try and use cloning or CRISPR to eventually improve their genetic diversity in the future.

Today, there's an ongoing campaign to rid Aotearoa of the three introduced predators representing the gretest threats to local wildlife, called Predator-Free 2050. By 2050, if everything goes according to plan, there will be no more rats, stoats, and possums. This has already gotten underway, and you can see stoat traps on major hikes fairly regularly.

I find it to be a really compelling series of questions, as someone who has never previously owned any fur from an animal that was killed to make the garment: what should the New Zealand citizens do with the caught and killed wildlife as part of this campaign? Would you as a tourist buy wool that has possum fur incorporated into it? Obviously the sheep wasn't harmed to get the wool, but the possum very much had to die to make the garment. Is protection of endangered species a good enough reason to kill possums? Is it less wasteful to use the animal coats from animals that the government has decided need to be killed for conservation reasons?

The discovery of the Saint Bathans mammal fossil indicates otherwise, but I get not changing scripts of tours that started prior ot 2006. ↩︎
Moa is the Māori word for domestic fowl. One of our tour guides figured they named them that way because moa had a similar role to chickens: bird that feeds you. ↩︎
You can read a lot more about the history of this whole situation at https://teara.govt.nz/en/rabbits/print ↩︎
Not to be confused with the American opossum ↩︎
While the kākāpō cannot fly by flapping its wings, it is very good at climing and it can glide or parachute after jumping out of trees, which made me think of sugar gliders or flying squirrels. ↩︎
The single greatest egg-size to bird-size ratio of any bird. They also have the smallest bill of any bird because bills are measured from nostril to tip, and the kiwi bird's nostrils are practically at the tip of the bill rather than near their face. No other bird's nostrils are like this. ↩︎

The Layout of Art Galleries

2024-11-30T06:13:00.000Z

I arrived in Auckland at 6am local time and was determined to not sleep the first day of my trip away. After checking out the waterfront and the Sky Tower, it began to drizzle, which timed pretty nicely with our plan to visit the Auckland Art Gallery (AAG), a moderately large, public, free art gallery that's open every day in the heart of the city. The closest I've come to this level of convenience in going to museums was when I lived in NYC and could go to the Met for free.^[1]

From my experience with art museums, especially on the East coast of the US, I was expecting to see art from old Europeans chronicling the first times Europeans had interacted with the land or with the people who were already there. I planned on rolling my eyes at language around "tradition" and nationalism, the same way I would about portraits of the founding fathers in the US.

I remember visiting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle in mid 2018 and finding an exhibit full of Native American art from local tribes that was tucked away in the basement where it seemed like the average visitor would have missed it entirely. Maybe that's changed since the renovations finished in late 2018, but I haven't been back. So much of what I've seen of US confrontation of Native American history in museums is having relegated space far from the main entrance where it feels quietly acknowledged just how poorly the Native Americans have been treated over the centuries. Even the American art wing of The Met does this, to some extent. Look at how far into the exhibit you have to go to reach Native American art:

What I found at AAG was vastly different, which is part of a broader continuing theme I've written about where my assumptions were wrong. Here, as in other places around Auckland and the rest of the country, there was English and Māori written text side-by-side, and it felt like history that the country was willing to discuss openly, warts and all. I found that admirable and a nice change of pace.^[2]

I unfortunately didn't take many pictures of the gallery space itself, but I was able to download the online map of the building. As you enter the gallery, you enter the green area below of Aotearoa New Zealand Art and are immediately confronted with several pieces spanning topics of ecocentrism, celebrating the landscape of New Zealand, and a birds-eye video of someone humming what I assume is a Māori tune while rowing a boat.

It seems impossible to me to go to this gallery and not come away with some understanding of the influence of Māori culture on NZ history, and I think that's incredbly cool.

Once I realized this contrast to my experience of US museums, I began keeping a closer look out for the intentionality of how the space was arranged and decorated.

An example of this was in the Threads of Time Installation on the Mezzanine floor of the AAG, where this wall had centered an oil painting, Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni (circa 1625).

The details about that painting, provided by the AAG, read:

Forbidden by the Catholic Church from depicting saints with a ‘beauty exciting lust’, Baroque masters of figure painting like Guido Reni found ways to cover their nude subjects without compromising their sensual beauty. Saint Sebastian was a 4th-century Christian soldier who was shot by archers of the Roman emperor Diocletian. As he writhes against a tree, Sebastian’s twisted loincloth sinks under its own weight, suggestively revealing what it is supposedly intended to conceal.

We noticed immediately that the painting to the upper right^[3], middle right^[4], directly below^[5], and the far bottom left^[6] among others had all been placed in ways such that their subjects tended to look at the center of the wall towards Saint Sebastian. What better way to show the kind of "'sensual beauty' that was bordering forbidden-levels of 'lust' according to the Catholic Church" than to have so many other paintings on the same wall directing their subjects' gazes towards him?

This might be a 101-level lesson about art presentation, but it hit my "3-hours of sleep on a 13-hour flight" brain like an incredible epiphany. Your art doesn't just need to be presented according to which part of Europe nor which century it came from. And even if you do sort it by time period or country or artist, you still have so much control over the physical space the pieces take up. You as a gallery owner could choose to communicate things to the people looking at the art by placing that art within the context of the other art in that same room!

This happened again as we reached the Modern Women: Flight of Time exhibit on the top floor, which had artwork by and celebrating women throughout.

From the plaque beside it:

The underlying messages of A Lois White's mysterious 'female allegories', in which women cavort, dance or simply sway in unison, are often ambiguous. What might the rhythmical Trio, 1943 mean?
The answer lies in the artist's fascination with classical mythology and Renaissance art. Trio is like a modern interpretation of the classical myth of the Three Graces, made famous in such paintings as Botticelli's Primavera, 1477-82. White depicts the Graces Aglaia (splendour), Eufrosyne (joy) and Thalia (abundance) inside a compressed space, abstracting the goddess's bodies to construct a play of curves and sharp angles, which interlocked together like the sections of a frieze.

In my opinion, when you put a Trio of women in the wing celebrating the lives, experiences, bodies, etc. of women, and when your Trio of women look like their bodies "construct a play of curves and sharp angles, which interlocked together," there is no ambiguity. The context of the space answered the question for me.

I look forward to bringing this newfound appreciation of spaces and the contexts they give their art pieces into museums and galleries I travel to in the future. Maybe I should revisit my local city's one over the next month sometime. I wonder if I can get in for free by being a resident?

Per my previous post, Aotearoa New Zealand has a lot of endemic bird species and I took lots of pictures of them during my travels. This one was the first on my trip, and while it's not technically endemic, it is only found in the South Pacific. Perched on the lamppost in this picture from Albert Park is the Kōtare | Sacred Kingfisher:

As far as I could tell, the smaller bird soaring in the background is probably a Warou | Welcome Swallow, given the shape of the wings and tail, but I didn't notice I had even captured it until we had left the city, so there was no way to go back and double-check.

Could have gone for free, had I actually gone while I lived there. In my defense, there were only a few non-winter, non-covid months before we fled the city. ↩︎
To date, Columbus Day is still a federal holiday and is celebrated in 36 / 50 states, despite the Biden administration recognizing Indigenous People's Day in 2021 and being the first presidential administration to do so. ↩︎
Virgin in Prayer by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato (17th Century). ↩︎
The Annunciate Virgin (Santissima Annunziata) by Unknown Artist (17th Century) ↩︎
Study of Holbein’s ‘Dead Christ’ by Tony Fomison (1971-73) after Hans Holbein the Younger ↩︎
St Carlo Borromeo in Adoration by Unknown Artist (1620s) ↩︎

I Went to New Zealand

2024-11-29T06:22:00.000Z

I just recently returned from an 18-day vacation to New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa). The goal was to celebrate being with my partner for over ten years and also try our best to learn and experience as much of the country as we could in that time. Our trip began in Auckland, and largely consisted of driving to new places, adventuring in and around them, and then driving or otherwise traveling to the next one.

To help make the scope of NZ easier to grasp for a USAmerican, I also looked up the population size, rough geographical area, and latitudes for the Northernmost (Auckland) and the Southernmost (Dunedin) cities we visited. I'm using latitude because that helps define a feel for the length of days and nights, seasons, etc:

New Zealand is roughly the population of Colorado^[1]
Its area geographically is very similar in size to Colorado^[2]
Auckland is located at 36.8509°S, which is about as far from the equator as the southern edge of Colorado^[3]
Dunedin is located at 45.8795°S, which is about as far from the equator as Portland, OR^[4]

Throughout the trip's downtime, I often read the Timeline of New Zealand History for a little more context than we were getting from tours and museums and talking to folks. I figured that to understand the history of a place, it was good to understand who had lived there previously and how they had interacted with each other. The Māori people sailed to the islands and settled there in the 1300s, and while there were Dutch explorers mapping the islands in the 1600s, European colonists didn't arrive until the 1700s, the English colony of New South Whales wasn't formed until 1788, and New Zealand's declaration of independence wasn't signed until 1835.

A huge part of New Zealand history was The Treaty of Waitangi, which was a bilingual, written agreement between the Māori and the British that ostensibly sought to make both parties happy. As is often the case with British treaties with indigenous peoples historically, this wound up with the British largely getting what they wanted, and everyone else being unhappy, to put it lightly.

As some words in the English treaty did not translate directly into the written Māori language of the time, the Māori text is not an exact translation of the English text, particularly in relation to the meaning of having and ceding sovereignty. These differences created disagreements in the decades following the signing, eventually contributing to the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872 and continuing through to the Treaty of Waitangi settlements starting in the early 1990s.

This treaty is also what led to Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke ripping up a proposed bill while performing the haka in Parliament in Wellington during my trip, which I loved as a means of protest. I cannot imagine an equivalent thing happening at the federal level in the US for a number of reasons, but maybe a state-level protest from indigenous tribes might happen here some day in my lifetime.

A major throughline I found as I read the timeline was that there are unconscious assumptions I tended to make as a USAmerican that don't necessarily have historical parallels in New Zealand, despite both countries being former colonies of England and all that that implies. There are parts where the difference in histories is obvious:

The piecemeal way that the US added states to the union over centuries compared to NZ being the collection of islands on the singular continental shelf
9/11 happening in the US and not NZ^[5] and how that colored the last few decades of military history

And then there are parts where I was really surprised at first when I learned of the differences:

Laws granting universal suffrage^[6] and minimum wage in NZ well before the US
Anti-nuclear legislation in NZ rather than the development and use of nuclear arms and nuclear power in the US

Besides the human-centric historical overview, I also learned that New Zealand has a lot of bird species that aren't found anywhere else. For that reason, my plan is to include a photo of a bird that's endemic to NZ in each blog post I do. Here's a black-billed gull near Avon River / Ōtākaro in Christchurch.

I plan to do a handful more posts about parts of my trip over the next few days, now that I'm home and can spend time organizing my photos and thoughts. Various topics include but are not limited to: the organization and layout of art galleries, pre-human history of Aotearoa New Zealand, the razor's edge of rightsholders who want to do a theme park but don't own the theme, birding as a means to interact with sound during hikes, the littlest penguins in the world, and the only royal family in the world that I care about.

New Zealand 5.223 million (2023) | Colorado 5.878 million (2023) ↩︎
New Zealand 103,483 mi² | Colorado 104,185 mi² ↩︎
Colorado's southern edge is 37°N ↩︎
Portland is 45.5152°N, which is a little further, but a coastal city I had been to that was pretty close felt good enough. Apologies that it couldn't be related to Colorado in some way. ↩︎
And not just because in NZ it'd be 11/9 because it's DD/MM/YYYY format like in Europe. ↩︎
New Zealand passed universal suffrage in 1893, nearly 27 years before the Ninteenth Amendment in the US. That means there were likely NZ children born after 1893 who grew old enough to vote before suffragates in the US (who had been fighting prior to 1893) were granted the same right. ↩︎

Phinks, the Racecar Driver

2024-11-26T09:20:00.000Z

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Phinks, member number 5 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: [...] Next to them is a fellow in a racing [unintelligible] outfit.
Sylvi: [laughs]

Jack: Green racing driver's outfit, uh, uh, white shoulders on his jacket, red stripes, green sort of track jacket, almost. Now, next to this person, this is interesting. This is a character I have seen before. I, I don't know anything about —

Jack: We have Phinks! With a P-H. P-H-I-N-K-S.
Keith: Yep. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Who is a grumpy racing driver. He’s a man in a sort of racing driver.

Sylvia: Oh, okay. That’s an interesting— I didn't get racing driver from him. I always got, uh, Chris Moltisanti.

Keith: But I get it from the jacket though. Sorry, you get who?

Dre: Yeah, I totally get it.

Sylvia: Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos?

Keith: Oh, it is.

Jack: Oh, yeah. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: The, like, tracksuit vibe?

Jack: Yeah, totally. It’s absolutely that tracksuit vibe. I also saw it as, like, a racing jacket or, like, racing colors.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you are, like, totally right. I just, when I first watched this, it wasn't— I was just— yeah.

Keith: I don't remember when they reveal what his power is, but it’s very funny—

Sylvia: It’s great.

Keith: And it’s not to drive fast. [laughs]

Keith: I think he’s the most normal one. I actually think that Shalnark is the normalest guy.
Jack: The Dragon Quest kid?

Dre: But I think that makes him less normal.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Keith: Okay.

Jack: This is what I'm saying.

Keith: Well, then, maybe it’s Phinks, then.

Jack: Feitan is very normal to me, because he’s— which one is Phinks?

Keith: Phinks is the racecar driver. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Oh, sure.

Sylvia: That’s a real—

Keith: He’s just, like, the angry guy.

Dre: Yeah, Phinks is pretty normal looking.

Sylvia: That’s a really funny answer, Keith.

Keith: [laughs] No, that’s from— that’s a callback to last recording.

Sylvia: Okay.

Jack: Yes.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: We've called him the racing car driver, the racecar driver before.

Keith: Yeah, I can't remember who originally said racecar driver, but I thought that—

Sylvia: It was Jack.

Keith: Okay. I knew that Jack would remember.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Keith: When they walk into the room, Uvogin just goes, like, “You clean up nice,” and then, uh, Dolzene or whatever the fuck his name is.
Sylvia: [laughs quietly] Dolezal.

Keith: Immediately goes like, “Oh, I'm fucking dead. I'm dead.”

Austin: Hand through his body from Phinks.

Keith: And then he’s dead.

Austin: Yeah. Yeah, he—

Sylvia: And Phinks puts his hat on.

Jack: Yes.

Austin: His big snake hat.

Jack: Yeah.

Austin: Like he’s a Mega Man villain.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Jack: I'm underestimating—

Keith: This is his first time wearing the hat, so it’s not like he takes off his suit and he puts on the hat we all know. [Austin laughs]

Sylvia: No.

Austin: It’s so funny! [Keith and Dre laugh]

Sylvia: It’s fantastic.

Jack: Underestimating—

Sylvia: Jack, what did you think?

Jack: Yeah. Underestimating Togashi.

Austin: Yeah.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Underestimating the way Togashi moves. I wrote down here—

Keith: It’s so easy to underestimate him.

Jack: And you would think that I would be— well, actually, I have a moment later where I just fully gave over to Togashi’s, [Sylvia laughs] you know, we'll figure that out later. But yeah, my note here says, “The Troupe take off their disguises and kill Dalzollene. Someone in a fancy helmet here is new, I think.” So, I was so overwhelmed by Togashi, I invented a 14th Phantom Troupe member. [Austin laughs]

Keith: Yeah. You could not mentally connect the snake hat man to [cross] Phinks who is the racecar driver.

Jack: [cross] With the racing driver. Yes.

Dre: Yeah.

Austin: Does this change what you might guess Phinks’s powers are?

Jack: No. I can't do this. I cannot do this. I can't make it work. [Austin laughs] To me, this is like trying to see the old lady or the young lady in that drawing that is, you know, both of them.

Keith: Oh, the duck or the rabbit? You gotta see…

Jack: Or the duck or the rabbit.

Keith: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah.

Jack: And when your brain sees one, you have to work really hard to see the other.

Dre: Mm.

Jack: Something about my brain is now broken with Phinks, [Austin laughs quietly] where because I see him as the racecar driver, [laughs] I have no idea why he is this—

Keith: What would you have said his power was when you just thought he was the racecar driver?

Jack: Fucking racecar driving, Keith! [Jack and Sylvia laugh]

Dre: He go fast.

Austin: You thought he was a racecar driver because he’s wearing, like, a racecar driver outfit?

Jack: Yes!

Keith: Yeah, he’s got like a tracksuit, yeah.

Austin: He has on, like, the—

Sylvia: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack: So now he’s a racecar driver from fucking Thebes in 800 b.c.? [Keith and Dre laugh]

Austin: Oh, that’s fun, like a chariot driver.

Dre: Yeah, he’s a chariot racecar driver.

Sylvia: Oh.

Jack: Oh, what is this— 'cause his hat is very much sort of, like, ancient Egypt, or rather, adventure story caricature of ancient Egypt.

Keith: Right.

Austin: Mm-hmm.

Jack: A man with a snake on his hat.

Keith: And what’s his name?

Jack: Phinks.

Sylvia: Interesting.

Keith: Interesting.

Austin: Hmm. Interesting.

Jack: Phinks.

Austin: Uh huh.

Jack: With a P-H, like pharaoh.

Keith: Mm? [Austin laughs] Okay.

Sylvia: Yeah? You're getting so close.

Dre: Yeah, that’s what we're getting at.

Austin: You got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack: Phinks. 'Cause he phinks really hard about what he’s gonna do.

Austin: Yep. [laughs]

Keith: He’s always phinking about Egypt.

Austin: He’s always phinking about…

Dre: Oh, so he’s British. Okay. [Keith laughs]

Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Dre laughs] God, Phantom Troupe but if they were British. No, terrible. Wouldn't work.

Sylvia: That’s a Guy Ritchie movie. [Austin chuckles]

Jack: It is a Guy Ritchie movie. Why do you say, “What’s his name? Phinks,” as though that’s supposed to give me anything?

Austin: Wait, have you not— I thought you were doing a bit!

Sylvia: Have you really not clicked it?

Keith: No, this is— I can tell that this wasn't a bit.

Dre: Oh.

Keith: It’s fine.

Austin: Jack. Jack. Jack. I want you to do a little trick here.

Jack: Yeah.

Austin: I want you to take the final letter of his name and put it at the beginning and then say his name.

Jack: [gasps] S-Phinks. [all laugh]

Keith: Now, that’s a bit.

Austin: That’s a bit. That’s…

Jack: Wait, why is he dressed like a racing driver?

Austin: Well, you can't always be in the uniform.

Sylvia: Yeah.

Keith: Yeah, he wasn't at work yet.

Austin: Sometimes Bruce Wayne’s just in a suit.

Keith: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah.

Keith: You clock in.

Sylvia: True.

Keith: Then you put your uniform on.

Austin: Yeah.

Dre: Mm-hmm.

Jack: But why is he— why here, Togashi? When Togashi wants to do a weirdo, he just, he can't stop himself. He just does the weirdo 110%. Have you seen Hisoka? So now he’s decided to get all coy about it with this racing driver who is also— [laugh quietly]

Keith: I think it’s less coy.

Dre: It’s the Phantom Troupe.

Keith: I think it’s just a new aspect on him being a weirdo.

Austin: Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, I think it makes him more of a weirdo—

Keith: He’s like a weird—

Sylvia: —that he picks and chooses when to do it, you know?

Dre: Mm.

Keith: Yeah. Sometimes I'm in my— I gotta— [accent] I'm home, I gotta take off my tracksuit and put on my fucking snake hat. [Sylvia laughs]

Austin: Maybe Phinks is from Jersey.

Sylvia: [accent] I gotta go fucking Tutankhamen mode. [laughter]

Jack: And now say something he’d say when he’s doing his racing.

Sylvia: [accent] Vroom!

Keith: [accent] Vroom vroom!

Austin: Yeah, that’s the one. That’s the quote.

Keith: [accent] Can't wait to get home, put on my snake hat. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Shizuku—

Dre: [accent] Ey, I'm racing here.

Jack: It’s great. Phinks manages to screw up using a phone in every way you could use a phone across three separate calls and two separate phones.
Keith: There’s nothing, there’s nothing…there’s only one thing that’s even close to as funny as Phinks answering the phone and immediately having to give the phone to someone else and being so mad about it, and it’s another Phinks moment.

Shoutouts to the Friends at the Table Transcription team for their work, which made my job easier with this one: https://sites.google.com/view/fatttranscripts/more/media-club-plus

Some Interesting Links From October

2024-11-01T09:45:00.000Z

I like reading about what other folks find interesting, but I often forget to write down what I myself have found. I've been meaning to talk about this first link ever since I came across it, but I kept forgetting to make time until now. I figure a new month is a good a time as any to make a link-retrospective post.

Video Games

This video is not only impressive on a technical level for being able to accomplish what it set out to do, but the animations and ways that the information is conveyed is on par with a pannenkoek video in terms of making complex ideas become understable.

Beating every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time

Movies

I had never heard of this and it became the first RSS feed post that I've bookmarked since making the transition over from cohost to inoreader as my means of internet browsing.

Laura linked to a well-creafted treasure trove of (especially Lucasfilm) behind-the-scenes info

Fashion

I had meant to share this CJ video because I think it does an incredible job of explaining fashion through the lens of "conversation with community identity," and I was reminded that I wanted to share it when I saw Dante's post here. I don't know if Dante meant to be in conversation with this video, but I found watching the latter made me appreciate the former more:

Dante in defense of the Great Male Renunciation (sort of)

CJ the X talking about the longer historical context of fashion

Color Theory

One of my special interests is color theory. I think this video does a great job of explaining how color works across a number of different disciplines, but I wish it spent more time talking about refraction, polarization, and rayleigh scattering. That being said, this whole channel is full of interesting videos that are worth checking out, and even without that stuff, this one on color theory is still good:

Reactions on color theory

XOXO 2024 Festival Talks:

I didn't get to attend this year, but I really appreciated and resonated with these three talks moreso than the others, even though I enjoyed many more.

Politics

I found this retrospective of what working conditions were like under the Nevada State Democratic Party to be both insightful and harrowing. Regardless of your exact politics, I think there's a lot of stuff to think about, especially with respect to how campaigns are organized, where and how money is spent, and what the overall longterm goals are. I found reading it went by very quickly for me, and I also found that I kept thinking about it afterwards for a handful of days. Who could say why?

i became an anarchist while working for the nevada state democratic party

How my friend and I became Lords of Oblivion

2024-10-11T10:00:00.000Z

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 -- almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren't really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.

Beyond the more widely-known "horse-armor" DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the "Wizard's Tower". I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.

This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load a save from inside the DLC even though it was not downloaded. What we found was likely not supposed to be accessible except for the developers of the game.

This demo area existed outside of the bounds of the main game, and the underlying method for how we got to it seemed to be exploiting a memory pointer. Our best guess was that the DLC overwrote some "unused" (aka only used for developer testing) memory when it was installed, so removing it points the save state at that memory location.

I was spurred to undergo all of this work to reproduce the glitch because of a combination of wanting to port over the summarized version of this story from Twitter and from a Steam sale where Oblivion with all the DLC was bundled for $6. After making my way through the tutorial and going directly towards the DLC objective indicator, I summited some nearby mountains and entered the tower.

Once I saw the ice hand on the floor, my memories of this glitch came flooding back to me. This was the room in which we first found the glitch. I saved, exited the game, and then restarted -- this time making sure to uncheck the tower DLC on startup so that it wouldn't be loaded. I ignored the warning that my save was loading from a version of the game that had different content from the one I had running.

My character loaded into a black zone outside of a house looking in through one-way walls. It was impossible to travel through these walls by default, but by carefully jumping around the edges of the house, the front door became accessible, and it happened to be functional even through the invisible wall. This door led to the outside of the house, labeled "Wilderness", which was the village screenshot from before.

The village contained a number of empty houses that could not be entered -- they each had a "Door" that did not budge when interacted with. There were also a few houses which had functional doors labeled things like "Wooden Door to Bruma House Test" and "Wooden Door to TesterHouseBrumaMid".

While all of the exteriors of the houses matched those of homes and buildings in Bruma, there was one house whose insides did not match the exterior at all. Upon entering, it looked almost pitch black. Picking khajiit for this verification run wound up being a good choice because of access to night vision at level 1.

With night vision active, it was clear that the interior of this house was the final room of an Oblivion Gate. Following the ramps up to the top, a sigil stone sat just out of reach. If you have not played Oblivion in 16+ years, you can read up on what a sigil stone is here. The important parts to note for this are:

Sigil stones were extremely rare with only 70 total in the entire game.
Sigil stones could be used to enchant armor and weapons with magical effects that were randomly selected from a set of possible options upon collection.
For what seemed like balancing purposes, the strength of the magical effects from the sigil stones were dependent on the level of the character collecting them at collection time. At level 3, this meant they were "Descendent Sigil Stones" (the weakest), while my friend and I originally found this glitch as characters that were at least level 13, which meant "Ascendent Sigil Stones". Interacting with the stone at the top added the sigil stone into the inventory and the only exit was through the floating wooden door that also served as the entrance two floors below.

Trying to get this sigil stone at level 3 proved difficult. Despite a few ranks up in the acrobatics skill, falling from this height was an instant death upon impact due to fall damage. I spent a few minutes wedged under the ramp to the sigil stone platform so that I could jump repeatedly in rapid succession. These ranks allowed me to level up, so I could increase my endurance, which would increase my health and help me live through a fall. I went back to the other Bruma houses and one of them had a bed I could sleep in to level up. Between the health increase from endurance going up and the higher and longer jumps from acrobatics going up, it was finally possible to jump across the gap and land only one level below, immediately pause and heal, and then drop again to land directly next to the door.

This house wasn't just a test to refine the design of an Oblivion Gate final room. It also may have been a way to practice generating all of the different sigil stone types and potentially load testing as well. Being able to access the door was an essential part of this because part of grabbing the sigil stone was that it effectively became impossible to move after about a second or two of game-time.

It has been impossible for me to ever play an Elder Scrolls Game without having to deal with becoming over-encumbered. 16+ years ago, my friend and I learned that we could make our way through doors while over-encumbered. And it turned out that exiting the room back into the Wilderness would stop the sigil stones from replicating in the inventory. At this point, in the Xbox 360 version, removing sigil stones from the player's inventory would drop individual orbs one by one. Unpausing after removing all the excess sigil stones from the inventory would lead to the game freezing up or crashing on that console from having to render the collision physics of all of those great many orbs. On PC, they were dropped in large-quantity bunches. Either way, dropping sigil stones was required, and we could drop just about all types of them.

The most important sigil stone for us the one that provided chameleon on self. chameleon was a form of "soft invisibility" that usually rendered a user less-than-fully invisible. However, in a crucial difference from the invisibility spell, chameleon would not dispel after making an attack or doing an action. At the "ascendant" strength for a level 13+ character, these sigil stones would have magic effects of 25% chameleon per piece of clothing enchanted. This meant that with only 4/5 pieces of armor enchanted, we could get passive 100% chameleon. No one could see us no matter how many items we stole or people we attacked.

After no longer being over-encumbered, it was possible to fast travel out to any other city, which returned the game memory to the regular range in case any of the DLC areas continued to be important to access.

From here on, hardly any characters in the game would interact with us without trying to speak to them first. Finally, we had transcended combat or laws. We had become Lords.

Thought I Saw Someone I Knew

2024-10-08T04:51:00.000Z

I was walking down the street to get some takeout tonight, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a huge stuffed animal sitting in the front window of a toystore.

And it reminded me of an old friend.

Until I looked again more closely.

Bay Area Cohost Wake

2024-10-07T05:10:00.000Z

While cohost's users were mourning the loss of the website online, Natalie (and Liz and Zandra) organized a Seattle Cohost Wake that happened last week. Additional wakes popped up in Boston, Philly, and a few other cities. Today, I attended the San Francisco Bay Area Wake, cohost-(heh)-ed by Damien, Nicky Flowers, and Diane in Oakland.

We met, N95+ masks on, by Lake Merritt under the shade of a giant tree and sat in fold up chairs, on blankets, and generally about the grass. I brought my fish picnic blanket and an id I had printed out at the library the night before because I was worried people wouldn't know who I was without the swirly profile picture.

There were a solid 40 people at least, though I didn't get an exact count and it varied over the hours. It was nice to get to see people, but my biggest takeaway was just how tall everybody was. I don't know why but I had imagined everyone on cohost being just barely taller than Jae, when in actuality, many people there today were several inches taller than that.

It was nice to hear people suggest turning this into a regular thing like 1st-Sunday-of-the-month. I hope meetups like this continue in other cities too.

There were long conversations about how none of the current "alternatives" to cohost manage to capture the "short or long form posts", the "stuff from other people just outside your circles", the "lack of metrics and algorithms", and the "ease of posting regardless of device" quite yet. Here's hoping stuff like The Website League or Topghost's Octobug or something else like that take off soon. I still need to set up webmentions, but now I have asks and comments going at least.

Photo taken by Coda

It wasn't until I wrote a post or two on Nicky's Cohost 2 roll of paper that I realized how much I was missing an outlet for shitposting. My current blog takes too much time for me to update to ever feel like that sort of thing is worth it.

A Year of HxH Characters

2024-10-01T07:30:00.000Z

A year ago, a new podcast came out, and with it brought me one of the silliest and most fun art projects I've ever been a part of. There's plenty more art to come, but I wanted to do a bit of a review as I migrated and archived the old art from cohost onto here. Rather than filling up RSS feeds with over 50 drawings one at a time that many of you may have already seen, I've opted for this grid approach. Each one is clickable to go look at the original cohost post. Maybe I'll update them to web-archive once cohost shuts down. Who knows?

Media Club Plus is a podcast by Friends at the Table and its premier season focused on Hunter X Hunter anime based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi. I've been listening to Friends at the Table for years, and I knew that the group behind Media Club Plus would be fun to listen to, even if I didn't know anything about Hunter X Hunter (HxH). Part of the conceit of the podcast, after all, was that Jack De Quidt had also never watched the anime nor read the manga, so we would both be going in with basically no knowledge of any of the show.

Originally, I planned to watch some of the anime if it timed out nicely with being free some night when my partner was busy and I had nothing to do. I listened to the podcast regardless, since it was fun and funny and had some interesting stuff to say. It was a delight to hear Jack try to explain what they thought characters' names or backgrounds or powers were in this anime where new people were introduced basically every single episode. In the very first episode of the podcast (covering the first three episodes of the anime) the following exchange occurred^[1], at which point I knew I needed to draw something:

Keith: Well, I mean…have you seen how many gay people are in this show?

Jack: Uh, so far—

Keith: They’re everywhere.

Jack: Fucking loads of them.

Dre: Yeah.

Keith: There’s loads of them.

Jack: I don't think…now, let me think. Have I met a straight person in the show so far? [Keith laughs quietly]

Dre: Leorio.

Jack: No…

Sylvia: Mm…

Dre: Mm…

Keith: No.

Dre: Okay.

Jack: Tonpa?

Dre: Yeah.

Sylvia: Uh…

Keith: Yeah.

Dre: Yeah.

Sylvia: I don't know. You hangin’ out with three guys we’re calling the Blowjob Brothers? [Keith laughs]

Dre: That’s— you know what? [Jack laughs]

Keith: Giving them money for something?

Dre: You know what?

Jack: He’s hanging out with them in a straight way.

Sylvia: I'm just saying. [Keith laughs]

Dre: You make a compelling argument. [laughs quietly]

Keith: Covertly handing the Blowjob Brothers a stack of money. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Satotz is definitely gay. It’s a fool’s game to name the gay people.

Keith: Yeah.

Dre: Sure.

Jack: Because it’s all of them.

Keith: Oh, we didn't say, but every time a character is introduced, there’s a little popup underneath that says, “Gay. They’re gay.” [laughter]

Sylvia: Oh, yeah, we did forget to mention that.

Keith: Yeah, it’s sort of, like—

Sylvia: Sometimes it’s less nice about it, which is interesting, but…

Dre: Sure, yeah.

Jack: Yeah. Yeah.

Keith: Yeah, it’s sort of like in the manga how Hisoka’s got the suits of cards under everything he says. In the anime, it just says— reminds you that everyone’s gay all the time.

Sylvia: It says “gay,” whenever Hisoka speaks. [all laugh]

Keith: Yeah. Yeah, at first, it’s just when the main characters speak, and you're like, “This makes sense,” but then it starts spreading out to everybody else, and you're like, “Oh, okay, that— okay, sure. Interesting choice.”

Sylvia: Oh, green bean man too? Okay, sure.

Keith: Yeah.

Jack: Green green jellybean man?

Sylvia: Green green jellybean man. I really gotta keep up with the Jack naming conventions.

Dre: Mm-hmm.

Sylvia: My bad.

Jack: [laughs quietly] I love green green jellybean man. I think it speaks so much to the—

Keith: Well, he’s interesting, because he has a t-shirt that just says “gay” on it. [Sylvia and Jack laugh]

This led to my first drawing -- of Beans, the Green Green Jellybean Man, wearing his shirt that said "GAY" on it, posted on cohost on September 24th 2023.

I had done a little bit of phone art as a fun way to handle Asks on Cohost, but I hadn't really gotten that familiar with using the Sketchbook app on my phone. It took some time to develop a process that was pretty repeatable, but now I find drawing on my phone to be second nature.

From the drawing of Green Green Jelly Bean Man onward, the project took the form of a very slow game of tellestrations. The hosts would watch the anime and record their descriptions of the characters on air. Some time after that, the podcast episodes would be edited and released publicly. I'd listen to them, try my best to jot down notes of which characters were in which episodes^[2], and then wait for the transcriptions to come out. Some time later, I'd notice the transcriptions were ready, and pull quotes from them about the descriptions into cohost as drafts. I tried to have a couple of drafts ready for art at any given point, so that I'd have no excuse to delay actually working on the art once I had some free time. Then I'd take these descriptions and try to work them into a cohesive design for a character. Finally, I posted characters on cohost and then linked the cohost post in the Friends at the Table Discord server so that someone in the community could post a picture of that character and I could see how close I came. I've seen a dozen or more times where members of the discord hide their images from me with a warning to me so that I don't accidentally spoil myself. So far, there have been very very few characters spoiled,^[3] and I think that's kind of incredible.

I did a lot of this art while in transit or while watching TV. I did a lot of it while unemployed when I didn't have other side projects to work on like Wizard Sokoban or this blog.

The podcast has reached The Chimera Ant Arc and it's wild to hear how little Togashi slows down in terms of introducing new characters every episode. I truly did not fathom just what an undertaking this project would be, but I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm learning both on the character-design side and the phone-art-technique side, so I'm sure it'll all be worth it. Even just looking at these ~50 or so makes me happy. It's hard to believe it's already been a year at this point.

Here's to the next 50!

If you're looking to follow just my art or just my posts about HxH, you can find individual RSS feeds for each of the tags links below.

Shoutouts to the Transcripts at the Table project, which consists of community members who are paid to transcribe podcasts under the Friends at the Table umbrella, including Media Club Plus. Without their work, I would have had a much harder time making any of these pieces. ↩︎
I gave up on this sometime around when The Phantom Troupe was first introduced because the characters -- and therefore their descriptions -- often spanned multiple episodes, so notetaking wasn't as helpful. ↩︎
I saw a picture of Tonpa before I ever posted any art which disqualified him as a character to draw in my eyes. I also had seen a few pictures of Gon because he's the protagonist, but since I couldn't possibly skip the main character^[4] of the show, I decided to just interpret the details given to me very literally and avoid using any other knowledge of what he looked like. ↩︎
Or at least, the main character's boyfriend? You should listen to the podcast. ↩︎

Wizard Sokoban

2024-09-30T19:00:00.000Z

Today, my friend and I launched another new version of our puzzle game named Wizard Sokoban (working title). You can play it on itch.io for free, though it works best on a computer using firefox:

Wizard Sokoban by graham

I wanted to take some time to discuss the journey we've been through getting here because I'm proud of what we've made so far and I'm excited for what it'll be after we've applied another few rounds of polish.

Our second time game developing

In May of 2024, my friend Jules and I found ourselves simultaneously unemployed for the first time in our professional careers. With no structure to our days, we talked about some side projects that we'd been meaning to try out when we had more time. He mentioned wanting to try out Godot, and I mentioned that I had an idea for a puzzle game that could be pretty fun and simple to make.

We've been playing video games together for over a decade, and we most recently took on the idea of making our own when we went on a vacation to take part in Indie Train Jam 2017 from Chicago to Emeryville.^[1] Surrounded by professionals and friendly hobbiest game developers, we realized just how out of our depth we were when we discovered that we hadn't even both installed git on our computers before we lost wifi (my bad!). Train Jam was absolutely a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me, and I'm glad we managed to partake in it before it shut down. I've never been surrounded by so many talented people, and the excitement and beauty of the whole trip far outweighed the intense imposter syndrome feelings throughout.

So back in May, I sent over a simplified drawing I had done on my phone to describe a sort of box-pushing sokoban game where the user was a wizard^[2] who could cast spells to affect its surroundings. I scribbled a grid puzzle that would require a spell to complete on my phone and sent it over:

The crux was to have the difficulty of the puzzles come from both:

the regular diffculty of manipulating your surroundings in particular orders that a sokoban game tends to have
an added layer of which spells you had access to in a given level, which orders and targets to perform those spell casts, and how each of those affected the level manipulation aspect

My hope was that being a turn-based grid-based puzzle for one player, we'd be able to avoid a lot of the difficulties people have around the complexity of the systems, the interactions between players and each other or players and the game, etc. We talked about project setup and then met up for some IRL game jamming at his house across the bay. We quickly learned that despite shaving off a lot of the more complex things to do in a game, we were starting from scratch so we still had a plenty steep learning curve to overcome.

We've both grown a lot as developers since Train Jam 2017. It was cool to see how we approached this game versus our previous attempt. Back then, we made a list of features that we wanted and then tried to make them all work without necessarily having a broader vision, nor any idea how to program an engine to get the game to work like we wanted to. This time around, we talked about various architecture designs and weighed their pros and cons with plenty of experience from our day jobs. We settled on responding to player input with a queue of actions and generally modeled the game loop after board games and the ways that players are instructed to modify the game state in those after they take their turn. Where we ran into difficulty with art assets previously, I now knew how to sketch some art on my phone while I took BART over.

From my time on cohost, I had learned that a key part to making any video game is having a "little guy."

Once we needed more than just a character, a little guy, and a box, I downloaded some free assets from itch. By the end of a week of off-and-on work, we had a game that was playable. It had a level that could be completed, it supported undo, and I was just about ready to start making levels.

As things progressed over the months since then, we've done a lot of designing and redesigning. I 100%-ed Patrick's Parabox and most of Recursed for some puzzle and systems design inspiration. We booted up levels of Baba is You, Stephen's Sausage Roll, and even some Zelda games to understand their ways of teaching and exploring interactions. We talked about how the various spells should work and the ways they should modify each game object.

Time passed and each of us took breaks from thinking about or working on this game, but here and there, I'd make some progress on spells or the UI side, or Jules would have some refactor to the engine that would make adding new stuff a lot easier or cleaned up a bunch of bugs all at once. We also added our friend Brendan to help with art and sound. (He composed the main menu theme!)

By the end of August Jules had constructed a Level Editor that made level creation and revision much easier. It supported loading any level straight from the pause menu in debug mode. It allowed us to create new levels to test out buggy behaviors. It prevented me from setting up levels with the buttons on the same layer as the player by accident. And it allowed users to save and load each others' levels.

We released the itch.io alpha on cohost shortly after it was announced that cohost would be shutting down. We got a bunch of great feedback from folks in DMs and on Discord. Today marks another alpha release with a lot of that feedback being addressed.

There's still a ton of stuff to be done, art assets to swap out, sounds to add, etc. But I'm already really happy with how far we've come. This is a game that I feel like better shows off what a great game development team Jules and I are, and I'm excited for the future.

Rip to Indie Train Jam. Someday, I hope that we have sufficient health precautions that "spending 52 hours encased in a train with a bunch of other game devs" can be a safe thing to do for everyone again. ↩︎
It's the year of the wizard, after all. ↩︎

Under Construction

2024-09-28T21:00:00.000Z

I've finally found the motivation to make a personal blog, and not a moment too soon. It's slow going, but the RSS feed should work. For now, the feed just contains every post with no filtering options, but I'll probably separate it out into individually-subscribable tag feeds before I post much else.

Part of why this all took so long was because I wanted to find a url that didn't include my full name and that did allow me to do silly stuff with it, like the blog link being at "graham builds a blog" when you read the url without punctuation.

graham's blog (#all)

Phonetic Pangram Tool

Pokemon Phonetic Pangram

Technical Hurdles

The Same Sort of Algorithm, but in Rust

Hoisted by my Own Petard

Conclusion

Pokemon Gen 1 Phonetic Pangram

Phonetics

Consonants (24[1])

Vowels (14)

Pokemon name pronunciations

Data Cleanup

Set Cover

A greedy approximation

Minmaxing with Recursion™

Searching without Recursion™

Speeding up the search with pruning

The final results

Conclusion

Phonetic Pangrams

My own, bespoke phonetic pangrams

Pakunoda, the Touch-Memory Reader

Kortopi, the Illusionist

Nobunaga, the Ronin Samurai

Bonolenov, the Mummy with Boxing Gloves

Unfair Flips World Record Strategy

Working on a game called Nimnim

Background

Blue Herrings

What's going well, so far?

What's next?

Unfair Flips Friends at the Table Playthrough

Poor Hemplo

Family Slang Words For Cats

It's Been A Minute

Raku Firing Workshop

Blood and Law

Blood

Law

Edge cases

Step-

Half-

Found Family

Ambiguity

Now What

Poliwhirl's Mouth

Baker's Units Revisited

Making Realis Classes

Classes

Looper

Rebel

Subject

Youngster

Thistlewhisperer

Crowdpleaser Words

Slay the Spire Online

Modded Slay the Spire

Together in Spire

Setup Instructions

Future Considerations

Rabbit Rabbit

"🐇🐇"

Caring About a Royal Family

The World's Littlest Penguins

Listening on Hikes

Rightsholders and Theme Parks

Pre-human History of Aotearoa

The Layout of Art Galleries

I Went to New Zealand

Phinks, the Racecar Driver

Some Interesting Links From October

Video Games

Movies

Fashion

Color Theory

XOXO 2024 Festival Talks:

Politics

How my friend and I became Lords of Oblivion

Thought I Saw Someone I Knew

Consonants (24^[1])