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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 things¹ — 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.

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…”

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-jokes¹ 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…

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.

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…

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 steps¹ 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…

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.

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.”

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.

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…

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.

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…