The Plague of a Thousand Socials

I See You (Seattle, USA — December, 2023)

Hi all,

It’s me, Max, endless website tinkerer and writer about stuff like futuristic user interfaces and the mechanics of academia. (In general: games, design, software, graphics, “AI.” Basically never: news, pop culture, finance.)

I’ve been working on some meatier posts that aren’t published yet (soon!), so the last two months only sprouted a smattering of notes in “The Garage,” the thinking-in-progress zone of the website. The new ones are as follows.

Garage #

News #

Aside from our presumably ancient steam-powered building failing to heat properly (it’s a nice 64℉ inside as I type this), I thought there wasn’t much new, but it turns out I totally have small things to share.

Rive #

One of my early Rive-animated illustrations.

I’ve been making illustrations with a new motion graphics software called Rive.

I have always animated little diagrams I made with code. Then I came to the realization that this was probably like editing your photos with code instead of, you know, an interface designed for the purpose, like Photoshop.

I set out to discover whether there’s some simple tool to just wiggle shapes in SVGs around, and—surprise—they’re all (a) subscription services or (b) terrible.

Rive is a very expensive subscription service that seems to be slowly un-kneecapping their free tier. E.g., while using it the last few months, the free file limit went from 3 to ∞. So I’m giving it a shot. They appear to have smart graphics people doing some kind of custom rendering engine that’s very portable.

So far, it’s going OK.

One of the main things I’ve learned is: oh yeah, animation is like, a whole discipline, requires a ton of practice and tricks, and its result is closely tied to how good things look in the first place.

Steam Release #

Talk to Me Human on Steam! All this actually means is I paid Valve $100 and made a bunch of nearly identical product images that they complained about and told me to re-make.

The persuade AIs game I’ve been working on—Talk to Me Human—has a “coming soon” Steam page now. Hooray! I’m aiming to participate in the Steam Next Fest at the end of February (2025).

Table of Contents #

Collapsable, semi-sticky, new Table of Contents in action on this very post (dark theme pictured).

This weekend I added a floating left-margin per-page Table of Contents feature to my website.

I just learned the term nerd-snipe, which I immediately hate for some reason I can’t totally describe. (It somehow feels both dated and cringe, quintessentially millennial/Reddit.) But yes, I got nerd-sniped doing this.

I think a good way of conceptualizing how this happens is via a stack. The stack always starts with “what was I trying to do,” and always ends with hate-reading Eleventy’s documentation. (Eleventy is the software I use to build my website.)

• I’ll work on a game/graphics project based on this cool WebGPU demo. [what I was trying to do]

  • Oh wait I have a week-old tab open on analytical anti-aliasing I’d like to actually read first.

    • Wow this is complicated. I’d like to take notes. Where? Maybe a new garage note. Let me find if I have a general-purpose graphics notebook series going.

      • I can’t easily find whether such notes exist. I could really use a table of contents on my website.

        • I got the simple one working easily (here: browsing npm packages, writing basic CSS, etc.), but it turns out I have three different page architectures, all of which require their own separate implementation.

          • OK but page types 1 and 2 really should use the same implementation, if only I could just manipulate a page’s actual contents anywhere in Eleventy’s data cascade. Cue: endless nunjucks macros and node.js debugging to figure out what variables actually exist at render-time, pouring the same GitHub issues and docs pages I’ve read a hundred times [hate-reading Eleventy’s documentation], feeling like my simplest of desires can’t possibly be impossible or even complicated, ends with me typing an immature comment in my codebase (“this is horseshit”) and resorting to hacks.

Five layers of side quests deep, I eventually managed to finish the table of contents sidebar. I never worked on the game/graphics project. Maybe next weekend.

The Plague of a Thousand Socials #

OK, well, four, but still.

With the exodus from Twitter (X) simultaneously immediate, perpetual, and never happening, at least three more main contenders have arisen (BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads).

I feel completely, utterly agnostic about these choices. I only dread the inconvenience of fragmentation. A small sampling of four people I’d like to follow reveals they’re all firmly planted on a different one. And some Twitter heavy-hitters are (understandably) largely staying put.

I found an app called Openvibe to help with cross posting and stream aggregation for all the non-Twitter alternatives. My terrible plan is to just try to use all of them at once.

Aside: I think it’s a cross platform app, and it may be the first non-native native app I’ve used. If so, I immediately get why everyone says those one-stack app libraries (e.g., Flutter / React Native) are bad. All the interactions just feel slightly sloppy and wrong.

But I know just enough now to know that merely posting doesn’t do anything, you’ve got to actually spend time meaningfully (ish) interacting with people without somehow ruining your entire day by falling into exactly what the platforms were designed for you to fall into (endless scrolling). And so, I embark on my seventh (ish) quest to actually use social media. Now accepting bets on how long I’ll last this time.

If you’re using any of these networks and wish to follow me, here I am. I’ll probably follow you back.

• Twitter (X)
• BlueSky
• Mastodon
• Threads

Hey, that ended up being a long one. Thank you for sticking around and being you. Until next year,

Max