I kinda love how simple Skyrim’s RPG systems are. like:

• you have skills, which represent how good you are at Doing Something on a scale of 1 to 100
• also you have health and magic and stamina and it’s really clear what those do because the bars are on your screen the whole time you’re playing the game
• there isn’t a super convoluted level up process; you literally just get better at doing things by doing them, and then you level up and get to increase the size of one of your bars and give yourself a perk
• you’re never put in the position of stressing out about making the “wrong” build choice and ending up with a character that can’t complete the game. everything is so straightforward that you can’t screw it up, and every skill that you’re using is automatically getting better because you’re using it
• there are no stats that are even one step removed from gameplay. there’s no “each point of strength gives +2 endurance which increases health-gained-per-level which affects-“ fuck that. speech makes you sell things better. one-handed makes you stab things better. health makes you less dead more often.

like okay I’m not saying that Skyrim’s RPG mechanics are good but I’m definitely saying that I like them more than 95% of RPGs I’ve played

🆕 blog! “Decorative text within HTML”

This is a *very* silly post. Sorry about that!

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/05/decorative-text-within-html/
⸻
#css #HTML

https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/ by Benjamin Aster is incredible! Editable Minecraft-style world, entirely CSS and HTML, not a single line of JS

My notes on how it works here. It uses radio boxes for state, paused animations for controlling the viewport https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/css-minecraft/

robots are for petting
pet a robot today!

Hey you. Do you like low level programming? would you like to contribute to a large and well established project? Because I’m always looking to help new contributors getting started on GDB! It uses C++, but you may also end up needing to remove abstraction layers, so there’s tons of things not-C++ to think about, if you want to.

I know that contributing to the GNU Debugger may sound like it’s something that would be incredibly hard, or that you need ungodly amounts of knowledge to improve, because that’s literally how I felt before sending my first patch, but the truth is, the project was developed by people (humans and otherwise), so silly bugs will abound, and simple oversights will need correcting. There is stuff for every level of programmer to do, from “I’ve worked on the kernel for 20 years” to “this is my 1st year in college and I’m not scared of large projects”

And here’s the kicker, I want more contributors to the GDB project. So, if you are interested in this at all, you can hit me up and I will do my best to help you get setup to contribute (from compiling locally, to setting up git-send-email, running tests) and then help you understand the bugs, the code, and how to make a good commit message (to GDB’s standards anyway). I’ve literally done code-walks with other mentees in the past, I eager to share as much of my experience as you would like to have! and I do my best to be ADHD/autistic friendly, since I’m AuDHD myself and would have really loved a mentor that did that for me in the past…

So… yeah, don’t be afraid to reach out!

I wish it was more common to have books that are just like, fictional history books or fictional encyclopedias or other non-narrative fiction books. because I’m not really interested in storytelling for a variety of reasons, but I fucking love worldbuilding. TTRPG books can be great for this but honestly a lot of TTRPG books, like Shadowrun’s Body Shop, are very very mechanics-heavy with very little attention given to the worldbuilding aspect :/

Eclipse Phase’s 2e book is my absolute favorite TTRPG book in terms of worldbuilding though, by far

I hate when a website tries to do fancy CSS(?)/React(?) animations and it just stutters and slows down my browser and adds a bunch of input lag. like don’t even bother getting fancy if you can’t do it well - I would really prefer a non-fancy experience to a framey stuttery mess

honestly I think bare-bones functional UIs are massively underrated. I know it gives a bad first impression to people who don’t know better but that’s still preferable to getting fancier than you know how to handle and creating a ton of problems for yourself

it’s kinda weird how I think human-sized power armor (like Samus’s power suit) is cool but not mechs. like they’re basically the same thing, right? the main difference is size

I guess what I don’t like about mechs is that they tend to feel very slow, big, and brute-force-y like a stompy tank. but power suits can actually make the wearer more agile and I really like the vibe of being small, fast, high-tech, and agile

there are a surprising number of old anime about hot cop girls using lovingly-animated scifi military hardware to fight high-tech criminals

and if it weren’t for the words “cop” and “criminals” in that sentence I would be 110% down for that. but fucking cops have to ruin everything

(specifically I’m talking about Gunsmith Cats, Dominion Tank Police, and Dirty Pair)

programmers be like: why did you just name this variable “x”? oh my fuck and this one is just called “a”? what is wrong with you?!

mathematicians be like: hmm if I mix the Hebrew and Greek alphabets together and combine that with underlined blackboard bold italics then I can express this equation with one fewer character

“Rust isn’t rocket science. it’s really more like lambda calculus crossed with category theory and type theory with some simple compile-time token manipulation”

I just realized that the tech stuff I’m good at vs. bad at is mostly defined by cost. like I’m bad at hardware and microcontroller stuff because I can’t afford them. I’m good at writing code for desktop apps because I already have a computer so it’s free. I’m bad at server stuff because I can’t afford a server

when i was a kit, i daydreamed about having a studio where i could create any type of art i want; there’d be instruments ready to play; computers ready to touch; and the walls would all be white boards

as an adult, i daydream about the same thing but like, in japan or maybe on the moon