Starpelly

I miss the days when everyone used forums! You could join a forum, post on a thread that was two weeks too hold for the mods’ liking and get banned. Whatever happened to those days? We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! And you threw it all away!

Now everyone is on Reddit and X or whatever. There’s a reason you don’t see any social media links on this site. I officially jumped ship from that experiment a while ago. Bluesky is just a complete mess, I don’t even lurk.

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Every community is shifting its content to Discord, which is a real shame, because Discord is fucking terrible for long-scale communications. They “tried” “fixing” this a while ago when they added this feature called “threads” and that kinda fixes the problem, but not really.

I understand why they’re all switching, though. Managing accounts is difficult, and servers aren’t particularly cheap. It’s a real shame and there’s no real solution to this.

In my attempts to create a better world, i’ve been working on a forums system written from scratch for the new game that will release very soon. And it isn’t easy, but I feel ideologically inclined to. I have to do my part in creating a better world.

While I’m here, I may as well talk about AI for a little bit. This blog has existed for a little over 5 years now but I’ve never really gotten “real” here. It’s always just been status updates or whatever. And, when I say “AI”, I’m referring specifically to “generative AI” (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Plok, whatever else).

I don’t really care that much, however, when I learn that a really good story that I was reading turned out to actually be written by AI, I can’t help but feel slightly betrayed.

It just doesn’t have the same emotional connection something handwritten would have. I can’t intellectually defend this feeling, but that’s just how it feels to me. And when it comes to art, I feel like this matters more than anything else.

There are some places where AI can be useful; for example when creating concept art or prototype textures or whatever for some artist to ‘clean up’ later, but I’d advise you don’t use it for any public-facing work. Maybe I’m just an out-of-touch boomer or something. I don’t know.

I’ll never forgive it for destroying the em-dash.

Ever since I was a small child, I can remember thinking getting frontpaged on Newgrounds was the thing you did when you “made it”.

Well, I finally achieved that goal. After trying a total of one (1) time. Honestly, I should be proud of myself, and I am!

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I ended up updating the game 6 times between the time it was updated and today. Honestly, it was fun missing work because I spent all night trying to implement the Newgrounds API, just so I could have leaderboards on the bottom of the page nobody cares about. That’s called priorities.

I don’t trust credit cards. I don’t even like the fundamental concept of them.

Economies have pretty much always relied on debt. This isn’t some modern innovation, it’s ancient. So ancient, in fact, that the Bible explicitly warns against it multiple times:

“The borrower is servant to the lender.” — Proverbs 22:7

Credit cards are designed—intentionally—to rope people in, especially young people, and turn them into lifelong debt slaves. If you don’t pay off your balance in full, it racks up serious interest. Add in late fees, annual fees, and penalty APRs, and it can become a shitshow quickly.

People tend to spend more when using credit cards than when paying with cash. That’s because there’s no immediate sense of loss. It detaches you from the consequences, and, of course, this encourages poor budgeting and impulse buying. So when online services force you to use a credit card, it’s especially shitty.

They lure people into living beyond their means and chasing materialism, both directly opposed to Jesus’ warning about storing up treasures on Earth.

Some people will say, “just be more responsible, bro lol.”

As if any societal problem in history has ever been solved by telling people to “just” do anything. I’ve never been convinced by any argument telling people to just “do anything”. No one in the history of ever has just done anything, and they’re not going to start now.

When Senators Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders introduced a bill capping credit card interest rates at 10%, a bunch of dipshit conservatives clutched their pearls over it. They panicked and said stuff like:

BuT lEsS pEOpLE WIlL HAvE CREDIT CaAAARRDS!!!!

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Let’s not forget: banks don’t actually like giving you “points.” You only get them because someone else failed to pay their balance and is now getting drained by interest. The banks make their profit off of them, and that surplus gets funneled into your rewards.

They’re not giving out free money out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re robbing the less fortunate to make you feel like you’re winning. Let’s call it what it is: usury. And usury is theft.

If the Antichrist is alive today, this is definitely one of his masterpieces, right alongside hormonal birth control and Domino’s.

This post ended up just being a huge bitchpost, I don’t have any solutions to give. I just wanted to scream because it’s my site and I can write whatever I want.

In conclusion: credit cards are literally (literally) works of the Antichrist. Just use Cash App.

In Motionmelody, I wanted the ability to separate scenes into their own concept called “Screens.” Screens are self-contained scenes that render all their UI, sprites, whatever, into a render texture, which can then be displayed. I wanted to do this to make transitions between scenes smoother and so I could add sexy animations.

In Unity, you can’t render things on a per-object basis, you can only render by “layers.” Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but there are only 32 available layers!

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And what’s worse is that an object can only have one layer applied to it at a time! You can’t “mix and match” them!

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So, I guess we just won’t do that, then. Fuck Unity.

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A couple weeks ago, I made and released a small Minesweeper clone with the initial goal of recreating that classic “Tetris” game loop. The results were quite excellent if you ask me.

You can play it in the browser on itch.io:

A big thanks to Darkener for playtesting the game and kinda co-designing.

It only took about six days to complete, starting from scratch. I have no idea if that’s considered a long time for a game this small. I was going to make an Android port, and to be honest, I still might—but that’s for another day.