ciroduran

I've been exchanging postcards on Postcrossing (https://www.postcrossing.com/) for years, it's very fun! I've even been to Postcrossing meetups, where several members gather to sign postcards so you send them to people.

In Postcrossing you put your address, and then you can request a random one. You put an ID, so when the recipient receives it, they register that number and you get a postcard from a random member.

It hasn't been the same since Comic Chat was discontinued

I'm rebuilding my RSS feed collection, and having pretty astronomy pictures is a fine addition. Thanks!

I wouldn't think it's very cost effective to apply GenAI to extract email addresses

I stopped being concerned about email harvesting years ago, I just simply leave the email on my website. Spam handling is okay enough, I guess.

But I like this review of techniques, even the simplest ones are very effective, that surprised me.

I used Haxe a lot when OpenFL + HaxeFlixel were still more common. Haxe is a nice programming language.

I have mixed feelings with this. I've just checked out my GitHub repo and just realised that Claude itself inserted as a contributor without giving me a heads up it would do it.

Ricardo Quesada is also one of the creators of cocos2d, he's been around for a while!

Hi sillysaurusx,

I've been in your place. I was 36 when I decided to separate, after 7 years of marriage/10 years of relationship with my first serious relationship ever. It was also a few months before the first COVID lockdown, so I could say I was really alone. At least physically, I had my family and some friends, but I had also recently moved to a new city. The circle of colleagues who I'd thought would become my social circle disappeared overnight due to COVID.

In the past 6 years I've made a small circle of friends who live physically close, the kind that you don't need to plan 3 weeks ahead to meet. Just pick up the phone and meet in 15 minutes. I feel that this is a fundamental block for wellbeing. I grew up with the Internet, I love it to bits, but it's no replacement for human contact.

You've also read about hobbies. In my particular case I picked up the ukulele. During lockdown I participated in an online session that happened daily. That formed a community, and although I don't go to those online sessions anymore, I made friends, and I meet them a couple of times a year, when we meet at ukulele festivals to play together. A smaller group we meet every 2 or 3 months at someone's house to play for a couple of hours and have lunch. I myself run a monthly session at a pub, where we gather a small bunch.

To this day I have not gone into dating anyone consistently. I tried a couple of times, but they weren't the right person. Although I'd like it very much to date someone, it's not really a big thing in my life.

I am, of course, living in a city where I can walk to most places. I am not sure I would be able to do this in a suburb. It's a genuine fear I have that moving away from the city, being as single as I've been in the last years, would make me become a monk, and learn the ways of distilling whisky, or transcribe bibles.

I don't have much advise from this, really. Meeting people for the sake of knowing them (rather than trying to get into another relationship), be a little vulnerable, be open to be a little inconvenienced. We really do need each other to survive out there.

I really hope things improve for you, and that you find your community <3

I don't think that this simplification is useful. In the context of a user, crashing a program is a very disruptive process. Crash enough times, and a retail user might just ask for a refund, or move a corporate process to get rid of the program. Some errors won't happen with the same repro case, e.g. a memory leak, handling that is hard.

That early 2000's web design style, love it!

Bogotá is 4 degrees north of the equator. Its climate is a bit temperate due to being in a high altitude plateau. But you better wear sunscreen anyway under tropical sun.

I am using Ruffle to keep my games playable, but AS3 support is still getting there. AS2 support is awesome.

Indeed, Flash UI is really its strenght, the way to draw and manipulate curves, I don't think I've seen anything like it after that, although illustrating is not my trade. However, it is possible to do cool procedurally generated stuff with the drawing API, or use plain normal bitmap graphics to do things.

Notice that it's still very much possible to produce SWF files with languages like Haxe http://haxe.org/, and there are frameworks that mimic the Flash drawing API like OpenFL https://www.openfl.org/, there is (or was) a lot of interesting stuff like that happening around.

I had a start programming and doing little weird animations back in the early 2000s. Then I could earn a living doing stuff with Actionscript, little games on the web, or profile picture generators; even stuff on the BlackBerry PlayBook, which had support for AIR runtime. I made games with Flash and Actionscript until ~2015. Newgrounds even holds a jam called Flash Forward, in which you submit Flash games https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/flash-forward

I stopped using Flash long before it became Animate. I'm really sad to see it go, and that Adobe has so little love to this important piece of the web and the Internet.

I made a game with Adventure Game Studio about 20 years ago, and Windows being Windows, it still runs fine on modern Windows, although I lost the source to it.

AGS is still a good engine for making games! AdventureX (https://www.adventurexpo.org/) is an annual convention held in London, UK (next one is 7-8th Nov this year), and lots of AGS users gather here. Some people are making games, while others are making modules for integrating libraries or new platforms (for handheld consoles, for example).

BTW, I hadn't realised they modernised their website. Until very recently they still had their version from 2006, looked quite nostalgic these days.

https://www.ciroduran.com - Personal website, sporadical blog, mostly an archive of things I've done: music, videogames, software

Very impressed by the screenshots in the website. This is no small feat.

Raylib's author was very happy to announce that you can compile an entire raylib program with no dependencies other than, say, being a win32 app https://x.com/raysan5/status/1980322289527976202

In the last months I've been making a songbook with chordpro https://www.chordpro.org/, amazing CLI program that produces a PDF from text files.

I've been working on my own arrangements, putting chords in lyrics, and the program produces a page with the chord diagrams next to each song. ChordPro is a program that descends from a long lineage of programs that do this, but it's been actively under development in the last 3-4 years. The developer is quite nice, and attends bug reports.

Douglas Adams had something to say about this, I think

I've been making songbooks for my favourite songs. I am currently working on a songbook for some friends. I've found https://www.chordpro.org/ an amazing CLI tool, under active development. I am using the ukulele, but the program also easily can do guitar or piano. The program reads a bunch of text files and produces a really nice PDF. I've also used pandoc + LaTeX for the front matter.

Slightly OG-offtopic, but there is a very good book about edible games! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Edible-Games-Cookbook-Play-your-ebo...

https://www.karaoke-version.co.uk will happily give you a song with any combination of instruments you like, as long as it's in their catalogue, and as long as you give them money

This. December is already a very intense month, and carving out time each day to solve the problems becomes increasingly difficult.

Dexed is great!

Probably two things:

- Pure programming means having to unlearn a lot of stuff you usually do through intermediate variables[1]. You have to express what you want without this (and it's actually freeing).

- Lazy evaluation allowed by pure programming. It means that the order of execution is not the same as you'd have in strict/eager evaluation. It can it be hard to reason about it initially, but once you get it, it can be very powerful.

[1] Not exactly true, you can still use them but they're used in a different way.

Not decentralized: federated. Some instances are a lot bigger than others, and some work in different ways, such as one instance with lots of bots making procedural content.

Fun thing: I bought a board + enclosure for an iPad screen from AliExpress. I had a 2011 iPad to which I had no practical use. I did have to break the iPad (RIP) so I could detach the screen, but in return I got a really nice crisp display with mini-HDMI ports, cool!