I keep finding myself struggling with the same problem, which is that I find it difficult to start something if I’m not sure I can finish it

maybe it sounds like a #humblebrag but it totally isn’t, it’s a massive impediment to getting better at stuff by starting out not being so good at it, or to accomplishing things that I can’t confidently polish off in an evening

so, yeah, with this refresh of my site, and this blog, I’m trying to just do the next bit, whatever it is, and accept that as progress even if it feels imperfect. I don’t have to have suddenly launched a next-generation, kickass version of this in the handful of weeks since cohost’s demise was telegraphed, I have done enough, and I will continue to do enough

relatedly, this post lives in the cohost post template not because it was posted to cohost, sadly that is no longer an option, but because it’s the only post style the site currently has other than the one for the art gallery

and that’s okay, because I can write here, and you can read it, and that is enough. I just have to keep being okay with taking the next step

and if nothing else, that is a massive success. Twitter was part of my life for more than a decade, I met my wife on it for goodness’ sake. sadly, by 2021 it felt like the worst place to be on the internet. where you go to get in arguments with strangers for no reason

do I regret leaving Twitter once cohost became home, and once a certain billionaire took it over? in spite of the artists and acquaintances I’ve lost touch with, no, it’s done a lot for my personal health

so, for the short time it has been around, cohost felt like the place for me. assc’s manifesto still resonates in spite of their ultimate lack of success with it

the lack of numbers convinced me to turn off notifications for other platforms, and reduce the noise I have incurred by life with the ambient internet, I have no evidence but I would swear to you that my average resting heart rate is lower as a consequence

the comment structure made it feel like a place you could have conversations in context, with people, instead of shouting them out loud in a room filled with noise

frankly I always had anxiety around whether I was “mutuals” with people on Twitter, and on here? that wasn’t a thing, what a freeing experience

for all this and more I will be forever grateful to @staff for giving this a shot. I hope they can get the rest they deserve after all they’ve dealt with these past two years

so what are we left with, in cohost’s absence? a lot of people are retreating to Bluesky, some even to Twitter. hell, someone asked me for my Instagram the other day. none of those really strike me as home.

I’ve been on the fediverse the whole time. it’s still the fediverse. it makes a lot of the same tradeoffs as Twitter and its clones. it’s open source but in the way where nobody can practically steer it except one guy. don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better, but this doesn’t feel like home. perhaps the Website League’s vision will bear some fruit, we’ll see

there’s a movement to the archaic internet, of RSS feeds, weblogs, link buttons and webrings, and I am participating in that with some degree of hope. back to the days of going on the internet, rather than the internet always being a waiting queue of content. I hope it’ll stick, and I hope basic HTML can become a form of baseline computer literacy again as it was in the 90s

whatever’s next, I hope it can be ours, and I hope to see you there.

thanks, cohost

this is the first post that I am making in the cohost editor and which I will be posting to cohost.org/ticky and to drac.at/posts simultaneously

I plan to make this a more regular blog over time, but for now it’s mainly an archive preserving some of my favourite CSS crimes and cohost posts

I wanted to get this in before cohost goes away so I can cross-link them for when cohost goes read-only

I’ve done my best to achieve parity with the cohost format, which thankfully hasn’t been too difficult due to them using CommonMark (nice one @staff) and me never bothering to use the fancy math syntax

if you’re subscribed to the main drac.at feed, you don’t need to do anything; that’ll still show you everything I put here. for those who are more choosy, there are separate feeds for my art gallery and this posts section, and in both RSS and Atom formats

once again, working to accept progress above perfection. a better web is possible.

Originally posted to cohost

• i ain’t reading all that
• i’m happy for u tho
• or sorry that happened

Originally posted to cohost

Originally posted to cohost

🌀

Dreamcast

Originally posted to cohost

Originally posted to cohost

sega: we want this racing game to have a soundtrack that resonates with today’s teens
richard jacques: makes sense
sega: we also do not have the budget to license a single song
richard jacques: who does
sega: can you pretend to be will smith and oasis
richard jacques: sure

---

richard jacques: here’s a buttrock song about having sex with a car, is this what you meant?
sega: see this is why we come to you, richard

Originally posted to cohost

gas
gate
girl
gas

light
keep
boss
light

gate
girl
gas
gate

keep
boss
light
keep

girl
gas
gate
girl

boss
light
keep
boss

Originally posted to cohost

Originally posted to cohost

Frogress Bar Simulator 2023

Feat. @numberonebug

What???: Check out this post.

Note: Don't see anything? Frogress Bar Simulator 2023 does not work with reduced motion enabled.

Originally posted to cohost

Originally posted to cohost

Originally posted to cohost

You may be familiar, even if merely by reputation, with Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), a colossal disaster of a game which has been much dissected over the years.

If you’re not familiar, you may have missed the true champion of Sonic 2006, Middle-aged Man:

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This man has some degree of notoriety as a pure distillation of the baffling state of the game. Sure, the Havok-powered physics they were all too eager to implement are janky and seemingly bring the game’s performance level to unreasonable depths. Certainly, the level designs are unpolished, and the gimmicks feel rushed. Yes, the story kind of strings things together but not in a way that feels ultimately satisfactory.

But here, in the town of Soleanna, we have Middle-aged Man. And he is not interested in the struggles against existential threats to the very world he lives on. He is thinking about language. He is experimenting.

For my part, I always sort of gave this guy the benefit of the doubt. Surely, I thought to myself, surely this is just an awkward translation. Surely in Japanese this guy is making a better, clearer joke. Surely this is just the localisers trying their best. It can’t be helped.

Later in the game, he does it again. Not content to merge two existing English words, he’s now merging the word he made up with itself. “Luppyluppy” is born.

Maddening. Once more Middle-aged Man has confounded us. This sentence surely cannot be any more than a localiser struggling and giving up with whatever fit. Right?

Well, after wondering for this long I finally decided to look into it.

I have some bad news.

There it is, 「ラッピー」 is real. Luppyluppy is likewise directly brought over from the Japanese version:

The Japanese version doesn’t have some secret better joke. This is about as close to a literal translation as you can get. Luppy, 「ラッピー」 is exactly what the original writers intended. As is luppyluppy, or 「ラッピラッピー」.

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• Luppy screenshot, and Japanese Luppy screenshot via @‍angrysonicgamer on Twitter
• Luppyluppy screenshot via @‍semifreqsonic on Twitter
• Japanese Luppyluppy screenshot via @‍tibatuka on Twitter

Originally posted to cohost

Originally posted to cohost

list-style-type: deathnote (デスノート)

Originally posted on cohost

credits & a peek behind the curtain below the jump (play before you peek!)

also this doesn’t work on some mobile browsers, sorry!

Read More

Credits

• Infinite Resolution Eggbug by @nex3
• iPod glyph adapted from Wikimedia Commons, technically copyright Apple but shhh

How the fuck?

Responsive SVGs, my friend! The resizable element’s background image is an SVG which contains a media query which hides all of its contents unless it’s displayed at the full size, which means it’s completely transparent until you resize it to be plugged all the way in! I also centered the element which resizes, which I thought would be cool but actually made my job harder (I had to do some calculations to make the cable work properly) EDIT: I later undid this!

I really, really wanted to do something with click-and-drag whose “result” wound up displaying in full once complete; drag-to-unveil from my previous interactable wasn’t enough

Changelog

• fixed rendering in Mozilla Firefox - apparently it doesn’t like it if you make the root element of an SVG background-image display: none and just makes it entirely white, weird!
• fixed rendering in Safari - apparently the changes necessary to make Firefox work broke Safari! so a happy medium was found
• swapped out base background image PNG for an SVG, as it winds up both smaller in byte size and scales, both up and down, better
• un-centered the resizable div, improving the experience on Firefox (previously you had to drag the cursor twice as far as the div would actually stretch!) and removing the need for the weird calc-based sizing for the dynamic portion of the cable

Originally posted to cohost