ipsquiggle

@ipsquiggle

My cozy village builder, Brick & Bramble! 🌱 Father, tinkerer, game developer. I post about about making, programming, dreams, homeschooling, electronics, life logging, meditation, procgen, and urbanism.

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ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· 29d

I always thought the SimCity SNES cover was so rad. THE. SKYSCRAPERS. ARE. LETTERS. 😱

Box art from the SNES Sim City. The worlds SIM CITY are written in orange gradient block letters, but they're actually the tops of skyscrapers rising up in intense perspective towards the viewer, rising up from a blend of in-game art and illustrative art of a city below.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· 29d

Some magic line was crossed today and suddenly I actually spent a bit of time "playing" my SimCity remake, and not just debug-poking it. #indieDev

A screenshot of a very simple pixel art city game. Green, blue, and orange tiles are laid out in a grid of dark grey roads. Some of the roads have little white pixels on them representing cars. A couple toolbars are on the screen as well.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jul 12

#SilentSunday

A tube television with VHF and UHF knobs sits discard in long dry grass next to an extremely worn black guitar case with a "Fragile" sticker on it. They rest against a red temporary fence, with wild plants, grass, and thistles obscuring what is likely a large empty field ready for development. In the background and through the fence, we see some spaced out apartment towers under a sky with bulky dark clouds interspersed with blue sky.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jul 10

UGH I hate this framing so much. Apple App Store really seemed to cement it with its charts as primary discovery mechanism and it's driven me bananas since. The idea, "lots of people are spending money on this so you should spend money on it too!" feels deeeeply twisted to me. "Buy what's popular!"

Screenshot from steam:
Top Seller, ranked #18 in your region.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jul 4

Take it slow today

A snail with silver translycen skin and a yellow shell with a black stripe elongates its body along dark grey wet gravel littered with fir needles and seeds. A fir seed or something is stuck to the snail's shell.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 21

Aha, there! No ads!

Photo looking down the platform at 22nd street skytrain station on a sunny day. The white grille behind the platform is unadorned, except for an information sign and the emergency box.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 15

#unicycle day 11. I can mount 19 times out of 20, and go in a straight line basically until I run out of road. First attempts at intentional turning have been a moderate success, as shown by the three quarters of a U-turn here.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 13

"Some tasty looking garbage you got there..."

A photo looking up through the slatted roof of a garbage enclosure. A young raccoon is peeking down over the weathered timbers, licking its lips.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 12

And if it was just like, `curl`-ing the url I was visiting with a numeric code or something, I'd be like, okay, I get it. But it wants me to run THIS? Like how the hell can I trust that? 🤣 (If someone wants to tell me that this is indeed a hack and the site has been compromised, I'd feel better!)

13 solid lines of densely obfuscated code, containing commands to download things.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 12

Uh, ran into this captcha today. This is... EXTREMELY not okay???? Am I missing something?

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 8

Ugh, this notification just popped up. I'm so tired of everything advertising to me.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 8

Photo of a lit stage, pitch black background, with a looming scaffold covered in dark red brick patterned cloth.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 5

Lookit these cute little houses!!!

Screenshot of the NES version of sim city, a browny, bluey palette draw grey and red boxes with R and I symbols in them, little black pixelley train tracks abound, and tiny 2-color brown and tan houses dot the landscape.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· Jun 5

Waaaaoooh the C64 version of Sim City 😍 This is so COOL (via the extremely interesting gamehistory.org/simcity/)

Screenshot of a very low-fidelity version of sim city: the buildings are just black and grey splotches with a boxy C in the middle, the roads a couple parallel rows of pixels. The construction menu is flat black icons on a grey background. The silhouette of an airplane looms over a solid blue river.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 20

Looking at these diagonal grooves in the door floor plate on the SkyTrain. They are quite deep, like 3mm. They are slipped towards the midpoint of the door. I wonder if the intention is to guide feet/objects *into* the train, if they get caught in a closing door.

A downward photo of a SkyTrain door and a person's leg. The dirty aluminum floor plate running along the door has narrow grooves running along its length parallel to the door, and some wider, deeper grooves with rounded ends set at 45 degrees and pointing into the train.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 17

This is a very postmodern contact info on this cup.

A white to-go cup with an orange label with a photo of an orange. It says, on multiple lines:

Forget.
1 8 8 8.
Info @.
WWW.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 15

Unicycle day 7: after about 45 minutes of falling, I finally clicked on a piece of advice I got early on: to always mount falling forward, like you're already rolling. It turns out stopping and catching your balance from this is easy, but getting going from still is hard!

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 8

Okay! Starting the next one! I'm very excited to read this! It's always mentioned everywhere and was the top rec when I asked for urbanism books. And hooeee is it stout! 585 pages!! I'm simultaneously thrilled that it's serious, but also intimidated. Wish me luck!

Cover of the book, golden with black text, aithor name in red.

A library barcode sticker on the top right corner.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 8

Finished the book! In the end I didn't learn much, but it would probably be a good primer for a young person just stepping into this mess! I really appreciated its values framing and wish it had pushed more in that direction. It feels fruitful and different than much of what I see about this.

As we've seen, the expression of intrinsic values tends to suppress competing materialistic values (the seesaw effect of p. 63). The sheer act of protesting itself undermines one of capitalism's basic supports!

A cartoon of the capitalism centipede on a crumbling pillar surrounded by protesters.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 8

Protest!! The last half of this book is about how to change things, and this top panel is a nice summary of the last few chapters, about changing the system from within. I do feel like it misses a very obvious mechanism, which is voting/citizenship, but still a nice list.

Chapter 12: Protest.

The last five chapters described acts of economic resistance: boycotts, voluntary simplicity, buying mindfully, service sharing, responsible investment, and co-ops.

The next chapter is about public affirmation of values.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 7

Yeaaah! Got the driver's seat today! 🙌

View out the front window of the skytrain, with the track stretching away in front as a black and blue train passes on the other side. A mottled grey sky matches the color of the grey plastic train interior.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 5

Huh. The argument is against advertising being a deductible expense. Because it "takes" public time, attention, and space to advertise, it should be taxed instead! That strikes me as overly simplistic and probably punative to smaller players but... My friends can attest: I loathe advertising 🤣

So why not TAX advertising instead of subsidizing it?
A cartoon woman adds, "because who needs it?"

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 5

Neat, another take on the same idea: a few pages back the book put forward the idea that "money is time", and this takes that thinking to its logical conclusion. Back when I was researching co-ops, the idea that "a person's time is the most valuable thing they can give" really struck me.

A very wordy comic page describing the function of a time bank: a system where a community trades hours of individuals' time, and tracks it like currency. Examples given include giving music lessons, cooking for someone, and maintaining a website.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 5

I've come across this idea of "local currencies" before, it seems incredibly subversive in a delicious way! There's a good research tangent there...

Comic page with lots of text, describing:
Panel 1: some communities create local vouchers referred to as "complimentary currencies". Beside: images of two unusual looking bills.
Panel 2: photo of a gathering where a crowd of people are watching some speakers describe large posters of those bills.
Panel 3: more than just encouraging local over chain businesses, in a kenya city they created additional trade because real bills were actually scarce.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 3

Unicycling day 6: attempting to mount without support.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 3

... Don't we??

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 3

This is an interesting point about "privatization": that if you are in a one provider/one user market, it's simply a monopoly. I think this is often the case when government functions get privatized.

The capitalism centipede crawls among a photo of Chicago. Narrator: note that a private prison or parking meter collector is very different from Betty's bun shop. CPM, for instance, has only one customer, the city of Chicago. And if Chicago doesn't like CPM, the city can hardly go shopping for a better deal. Not for sixt-some years anyways.

The caterpillar laughs, ha ha ha ha haaa.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 3

Every time the Americans in my online dad group discuss parental time off, I get incandescent with rage on their behalf... But I assumed I was just a lucky one! I didn't realize paid maternity leave was so universal!

At this writing, all countries but three require employers to give new mothers (and sometimes fathers) paid leave, usually 14 weeks but often much longer. This map shows the three exceptions: the US, Suriname, and Papua New Guinea. The US standard is 12 weeks of unpaid leave.

A sketched world map with arrows pointed to the named countries. The capitalism caterpillar says, hey, time is money! A Black woman with baby in a rocking chair says, no actually, money is money.

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 3

Heh heh heh, the high court...

Panel from the comic, of the cartoon narrator walking in front of the supreme court. The side text reads, "but no worries! The supreme court's majority assures us that independent expenditues, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

The cartoon character says, "I see why they call it the high court... They must have been high when they wrote that..."

ipsquiggle@ipsquiggle· May 2

I think about values a lot but I've never studied them. This representation is really interesting! I've seen this kind of "oppositional pairing" for rights, but not values. I love this stuff!