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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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:

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

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 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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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:

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…

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.