Know the power of cute nerdy femboys!
Update: Thanks to funding from my family, I’m Pixievolt No. 1 now! ✨🧚♂️✨
I wrote a post on my Ko-Fi page about my desire to change away from “Pikadude No. 1” and the things I’ll need to buy to make it happen. I’d appreciate it if you read it, share it, and/or fund it!
So Mikko Rautalahti on Twitter wrote a thread of how video game AI turned a mild player gaffe into a spectacularly dumb display of “logical” behavior [cw: language]. If I ever need to make AI-controlled characters that sophisticated, I think I might accidentally create a situation in which many characters decide the most logical course of action is to smooch each other.
Or maybe it won’t be an accident.
I’ve posted about specific improvements I want to make to my Web apps before, but I have some overall goals for all my Web Wonders that I’d like to write down now and get down throughout 2018.
Here’s all the above in table form, because I’m nerdy like that. Items marked with ◐ are planned for completion by the end of June.
| Released | Mobile friendly |
Progressive Web App |
Fairies❤️ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Signs of Life | ✔️ | ◐ | ||
| Wackyland | ✔️ | ✔️ | ||
| Zapster Solitaire | ✔️ | ✔️ | ||
| Wacky Bingo | ✔️ | ◐ | ◐ | ◐ |
| Cookie Hunt | ✔️ | ◐ | N/A | ◐ |
| Logo Creator | ✔️ | ◐ | ◐ | ◐ |
| Magic Puddle | ✔️ | ◐ | N/A | |
| Reverse Metronome | ✔️ | N/A | ||
| [New game!] | N/A |
These days, user interfaces will often need to accommodate not just precise pointing devices like mice, but also touchscreens, which means larger, less compact target areas. It’s another constraint on design, but something interesting I learned recently is that interfaces designed to better for touchscreens can also be aesthetically better as well.
This is the UI I made for accessing a given DeviantArt user’s profile, gallery, or faves in Deviant Love 2.x:
It was designed to take the minimum amount of vertical space needed to look good, and it certainly fits that goal. But since a goal of Deviant Love 3.0 is to support touchscreen users, I wrote 3.0 Alpha 1 so that mouse users continued to get the same compact look, while touchscreen users got this (with additional UI for Deviant Love’s subaccounts feature):
And I found I liked the UI I had created for touchscreens quite a lot. It needs better vertical rhythm and possibly other tweaks, but overall it strikes me as prettier and friendlier, to the point where I want Deviant Love looking like this regardless of the input device. For Deviant Love 3.0 Alpha 2, I’m going to change it to work as such, and see how well it’s received.
I’d really like to do more web development than I’ve been doing; influencing society for the better through pleasant user experiences and lovable browser games is a major dream of mine. But so much of it felt like a huge slog, and that was pushing me away. I recently made some changes to address the pain points.
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10 years ago today was the release of Hatsune Miku. I find it incredibly heartwarming seeing so many celebratory tweets getting retweeted on her English Twitter that are full of pure love and adoration for this girl. She’s lent her voice to so many songs and stories, and brought together a creative community like few characters have. I hope to one day create a character of my own who can inspire love & beauty like Miku can.
Waaaay back in the spring of 2013, I took a game studies class run by my college’s art department. Part of my coursework was to maintain a blog, which I kept separate from this one. I went through that one and found 3 blog posts worth keeping, so I imported them here with the tag “for game studies class”. As they’re years old, they may not be 100% reflective of my current self, but I like ’em so I’m keeping ’em.
It’s the end of the year, and none of the stuff on the most recent Roadmap post has been released. Yup. I’ve had a mentally rough time lately, so I’m trying to take good spiritual care of myself, which means no beating myself up for missing artificial deadlines. But at the same time, I want to motivate myself to get this stuff done and shown off to the world, so I need to work out a way to do that that’s both gentle and more effective.
Part of taking care of my spirit is finding what victories I can. For example, with this post I’ve extended my “months with a blog post” streak to 4, a new personal record~ Keeping that up is good writing practice and helps keep y’all in the loop, so let’s see how long I can stretch it.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science last May! While that is cause for celebration, I’m not happy with the effect that the stress of coursework had on me. Humans are creatures of habit, and I got in the habit of using almost all my free time for vegetation and escapism, which is obviously suboptimal both for productivity and fun.
I’ve been reworking my habitual use of free time for more quality of life and creative output. I think I’m doing well on re-establishing Web programming, as evidenced by the release of Deviant Love 2.2. I’d like to work in doodling and keeping in touch with friends. If I also mix in making music, I’ll have all I need to become a great indie game developer! Not going to give up my habitual plushie-cuddling, though; in fact, I might make plushies the heroes of a video game! Hoping the best for myself, and that my future job will have a minimal impact on how I use free time.
In the time since I last chose my blogging platform, WordPress has not only fixed the bug that pushed me to LiveJournal, they’ve been working their butts off to make blog writing & customization a sleek and awesome experience. And they’re participating in Reset the Net*! And they let me have multiple drafts at once!!
So I’m now proudly hosting my blog on WordPress.com, and I’ve moved all my old posts here (except for that one “consider this retracted” post), along with their comments. And now that I have more enjoyable blogging software and can work on more posts simultaneously, you should see me blogging more. Come along to see what awesomeness the future holds!
* PikadudeNo1.com will be going HTTPS as well – it’s one of many goals for the site this year!