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Gaming

Tour of My AP Minecraft Tree Fort

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If you’ve been following Arborelia on Bluesky or on Twitch, you’ve probably heard about an Archipelago game called the Flannel Patch Big Async Multiworld for Sickos™ that wrapped up recently. One of my games in the multiworld was Minecraft, and for my main base I went to an old growth birch forest and built a tree fort!

Aerial view of the tree fort, built mostly from jungle wood planks with glass block windows

The whole base (other than the beacon on the ground outside) rests entirely on birch trees that naturally generated! I ended up creating something that made me feel happy and cozy to be spending my time in, and I created this screenshot tour to memorialize the base. Each image links to a larger version of itself.

Continue reading “Tour of My AP Minecraft Tree Fort”

Personal

5 years of being Pixievolt~

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons screenshot of a human villager with a feminine outfit & hairstyle, captioned "i'm boy"

Today, the 5th of Februfairy, is the 5th anniversary of the day I became Pixievolt and started openly being a femboy on the Internet~ I am fortunate to have family and friends who are accepting of my heart’s desire to live girly, and I hope every boy who wants such acceptance can find it.

I previously gave the origin of the name Pixievolt as a reply on a Cohost thread; in the interest of hosting my own writing I’m crossposting it here:

When I was about 10 years old and in love with Pikachu, I tried to get the name “Pikadude” on GeoCities, except it was taken so I added “No1” (number one). When I realized as an adult that I’m transfeminine (but still a boy – yay for non-binary identities~), I wanted a new name that openly expressed that and my love of fairies. “Pixievolt” has a lot of continuity with my old name (3-syllable P-word, electric-type) that feels nice~ It’s also gender-neutral, so that if I realize later I’m actually a girl, I won’t need another rename – though 3 years in, I’m quite comfy with being an extremely girly femboy~

…although it’s funny to be quoting myself saying I’m comfy being an extremely girly femboy instead of a girl, because I’ve been getting inklings lately I may be an extremely girly femboy and a girl (being bigender is just as valid as being a femboy). I’ll be sure to post if my identity & pronouns change~

Things I'm Making

Superspark Accounts Roadmap

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Superspark Accounts is the cloud save system available for some of my browser games, because for this nerd, it’s not enough for me to make fun and silly things you can play with just your Web browser – I want players to be able to use their save data across different computers as seamlessly as they can with systems for installed games like Steam Cloud! I have a bunch of improvements planned for this system I’d like to share with y’all~

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Personal

The Blog is Back on PikaPods

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I’m happy to announce that not only am I picking up blogging again, I’m doing it from a host I’m much happier with~ PikaPods is a host for all sorts of open-source Web apps, and while they take care of all the updates, database administration, etc. for you, they also give you most of the flexibility you would want from self-hosting those apps – for WordPress in particular, that means full access to your plugins and themes folders! I already have a child theme of Nucleare set up, and I’m free to reshape it however I like, mweeheehee~

Setting up WordPress on PikaPods was mostly a matter of hitting “Add Pod”, selecting WordPress, then completing WordPress’s short setup form, but there are a few things PikaPods doesn’t set up for you. The rest of this post is about how I arrived at what I’d consider a fully-featured WordPress install.

Continue reading “The Blog is Back on PikaPods”

Things I'm Making / Zapster Solitaire

Improving Zapster Solitaire’s Game Design

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Zapster Solitaire is a game made for taking just a few minutes to play something light, and I’ve been dogfooding it a lot in that capacity. In all my playtime, I’ve found a strong point in the game’s design as well as several weaknesses, in addition to the “false coin flip” I discussed previously:

  • 👍 Jacks are by far the most interesting element of the game’s challenge. Their varying badness depending on which numbers you have, as well as their ability to introduce duplicate cards in your cells, creates a lot of space in strategizing how to use your zaps.
    • 👎 However, they’re made a little less interesting when they use an ace and add only one card.
  • 👎 It too often feels like the RNG (random number generator) just hates you and doesn’t want you to win. I accept this as inevitable to an extent due to this being a highly luck-based game, but I think things are tilted a little too strong in that direction right now.
    • 👎 This is especially true in the early game, when all ranks are equally represented in the draw pile and you have only six cells.

I want not just to address the weaknesses, but build on that strength. I’ve got a draft of a redesign that could do all those things: Cards of rank 10 will be put back in the game, aces will go out, and starting cells will be increased to 7. In theory, the early game will be more survivable and the false coin flip gone with the extra cell, and the higher 10-cell maximum will improve overall survivability. Jacks will keep the game interesting despite that by drawing at least two cards, and an average of one more (when they have numbered cards to use at all).

Read on for the testing plan and other considerations

Silliness
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I rewrote the lyrics of a classic video game song, imitating the speech of Nathan W. Pyle‘s Strange Planet’s denizens:

Let us all competitively run faster than sound.
Maintain physical contact with the earth, if possible.
For those who competitively run faster than sound,
Sightseeing cannot be placed on the schedule.
We will merely competitively run faster than sound,
Until we reach a threshold that forbids backtracking.
Let us all competitively run faster than sound.
Please permit combustion.

Don’t recognize the song? Head this way~

Things I'm Making

An In-Depth Look at Logo Creator Randomization

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Pixievolt No. 1 Logo Creator gives you a lot of settings and buttons for making parodies of my logo, but just one button comprises the main reason why I work on this silly thing:

The Randomize button!

There’s a bit more to it than just picking one item from each list – there’s some biasing going on to reflect my opinions on what will make a fun logo.

Continue reading “An In-Depth Look at Logo Creator Randomization”

Web Development

Taming the Beast of the Core

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Deviant Love is a browser extension that finds all the art on a DeviantArt Faves page, organizes it by which artist made it, and sorts the artists in “most faved art” order, letting you know exactly who to thank for all this lovely artwork. It’s one of my all-time favorite projects to work on, to the point of it being my gateway back into Web development, but at its core is a hunk of code that caused me a lot of grief a while ago. I’d like to do some programmer talk about this file. Continue reading “Taming the Beast of the Core”