Month: March 2025

Possibly I'm a little late for the "casual daily puzzle game" party. (Did Wordle already get invented in this timeline; I forget?)

I think there's something in an idea I've been toying with. Bring on the weekend, when I can throw some brainpower at the frontend code!

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A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.

I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house's new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room's not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.

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Dan, a white man with a ponytail, wearing a black shirt and jeans, sits in a rocking chair in front of an open laptop at a long desk; he has a notebook in his hand and holds a pen near his lips. He's in a domestic library with deep red walls, balanced-arm lamps, a woven rug on a wooden floor, and the wall behind him entirely covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A grassy lawn and sapling trees can be seen through a window, bordered by floral curtains and two clumsily-placed WiFi routers that sit on the window ledge. On the corner of the desk lie various hand tools, suggesting that light construction work has recently taken place.

(Incidentally: I might be treating "lives in a house with a library" as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)

This year it'll be 10 years since webcomic A Softer World ended its 12-year run. If you missed it, you can still go back and read them all, starting from asofterworld.com/index.php?id=1

But in the meantime, here's one of my very favourites:

I've been playing Sean O'Connor's Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at "rewilding" the game world.

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Hex-based videogame board, entirely owned by the yellow player, but with only a single solitary soldier standing alone. The rest of the island is heavily forested in pine and, along one coast, palm trees, with the exception of the far North beyond a line of castles.

The rules of the game make trees... a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.

Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don't let anybody tell you there's a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?

Somebody's doing a kickass job with these adverts on the Tube.

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Photo of a parody advertisement on a London Underground train, showing Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute. The fake ad is for 'Elon's Musk', 'parfum de 1939'.

Found via https://bsky.app/profile/strictlychristo.bsky.social/post/3ljobtnidrk2s; there are other examples in that thread.