Heya all. How are you doing? Hope you’re doing well. Not that you could answer me if you weren’t, I’m talking to you through a blogpost, but anywho - I am doing pretty well, myself. I have a lot of stuff going on in my life right now, and I kept wanting to post about it to the blog but didn’t really have any central… thing, to tie them all around. So I’m just gonna list a bunch of different events I’ve had recently.

You can skip around these if any of the topics don’t sound particularly interesting to you.

I’m Coughing to Death rn

About two days ago I caught something from somewhere that has led to my foreheadhead being perpetually moist and sweaty, and my air pipes being constantly filled up with various forms of mucus and whatever it is that causes you to cough. I’ve been wearing a mask when I go outside, (no clue if this shit is contageous but I’m not gonna take a risk with other people’s health,) and I think I’m gonna end up not going to a family dinner tonight for the sake of not giving my 90 y/o grandma a Funny Disease.

I Went to a Game Jam, It Sucked

Well, I went to the first day of a game jam. It’s a game jam hosted partially by my uni, and mostly by an israeli game company. The jam is supposed to be over 3~ weeks so it’s super chill, so I went to the initial event yesterday with a mask and a thermus of honey-infused tea.

It was at their offices, a pretty standard hi-tech affair with fancy offices and couches. The only unusual part was that the meeting room had view of a building with a fuckin’ hole in the middle. You tend to forget iran bombed us only a month ago. Huh.

We got a tour of the place, and then we sat down to listen to the theme of the jam, which is…

Games for women!

If any of you are thinking “I hope to god this wasn’t as patronizing as I think it was”, I’ve got bad news: The company that proudly boasted about using AI for everything in their pipeline is also weird about women. You know the type of sexism that manifests ostensibely as being pro-women, but still presenting women as being unable to do many things in this world without a guiding hand? Yeah, that. “Games for women can’t be… violent. We’re not here to fight, we’re here to have a good time.”

After debating what to do, I’ve decided I’m gonna make a simple game for the jam that just doesn’t assume the player’s gender. The issue with “games for women/men” is that most games assume a male player, therefore excluding women, and the solution isn’t just building another box for women so we can keep ignoring them. But precisely because of that, the temptation to intentionally make a satire on the concept of “games for women” just to spite the show-runners is strong.

I’m Learning Rust

Rust is a programming language that has a lot more limitations than other languages I’ve used in the past, which I find very enjoyable. I like things being explicit, and being able to stop myself from making a mistake before I even make it, so the amount of guardrails and limitaitons rust has is actually really fascinating to me.

It’s also very similar to Haskell, which I found fascinating at a conceptual level but agonizing at the practical level, so having the features of Haskell that I found to be neat is really exciting.

I’m right now on the second-to-final chapter of the rust book, and my first project is probably gonna be rewriting the RP project’s website I run. The site worked initially as a static site, but about 1500 commits and a 10 minute compilation process later, I think I need to get a stupid webapp going.

Which, on that topic,

I Hate Webdev So Much

I’ve been learning JS as part of my job. It’s not part of my job description, but hey getting paid for an hour where I did nothing but read books and watch (pretty dull) presentations is not all that bad. Also it’ll look great on my resume.

However,

Jesus fucking christ I hate JS and everything about it so much.

To do anything in this house I need 2 transpilers, 8 libraries, a linter, a formatter, and a splash of fairy dust. Why the fuck are you all even using javascript anymore? None of you WANT to write javascript! This language has so many baffling design decisions and missing features, and the way we’re working around it is just to keep building on this crumbling tower!

And it’d be one thing if it was just browsers, right? If this was just for developing websites, that’d be fine.

But we have electron.

To the less techy people who are still reading this (oh god I am so sorry), electron is basically reinstalling chrome on your computer every time you download anything. Spotify is running on chrome. Whatsapp is running on chrome. Discord is running on chrome. Every stupid fucking app made in the last 5 years is just chrome wearing sunglasses and a trenchcoat.

Don’t get me fucking started on Node.js. My boss is making a game engine in typescript. Lord give me strength.

I Need to Make a Browser Game

And finally - I also need to complete a browser game until sunday. It’s a final that i’ve been procrastinating on like a motherfucker, and now I’m rewriting in React because it was in vanilla js before and it was actually hell to write. Not that i’m doing any better because our artist sent me assets that are 3280 pixels wide and have a JPEG’d watermark on them, but hey.