Catfooding, nya~

I've given this blog another refresh! I'm now using my brand new blog template: Strawberry Starter! That's right, I'm dogfooding. Except it's catfooding, because I'm a catgirl now. purrrs.
I worked on this project throughout the last half of January, and it was very rewarding! A lot of friends have made blogs with it. You should check out Em's Strawberry Turnpike for some cool strawberry blogs to follow (and some cool non-strawberry blogs, of course!)

Recently after doing a lot of site work for people, I've realized that ease of use is an incredibly important thing for a tool to have. Okay, that sounds obvious, like, really obvious, but even slight improvements can have a big effect. The goal for my blog template was to make it easy to edit and upload, avoiding two big points of friction: writing HTML and having to use a web page to upload. I've mostly succeeded, although I'm still looking through some bug reports and trying to sort out any remaining issues.

With that out of the way, here's how I spent my January:

Bagenzo's Backyard

some grass, a mushroom, and a cat Once per day, you can now play a little minigame on bagenzo's house. Clicking on a shovel will plant a seed, which 'grows' into a gif after 12 hours or so. I was originally going to make this more involved - almost like an idle game - but I think it's cuter like this. When you come back to the site after a while, there'll be a little surprise awaiting you :)
You will come back to the site after a while, right? Right?

Dress-up Game

a woman stands in a room with a cat I was commissioned to program a game for GATOSHOP! You can check it out there under the "Fun" section (although it might shift around as it's still under construction). There are two characters with two rooms to explore! How exciting... I'm surprised I hadn't yet made a game like this, even though it's one of those quintessential using-the-internet-as-a-kid memories...

Twin Peaks: The Return (Rewatch)

cooper from twin peaks looks to the left and asks, in disbelief, "what year is this?" More like Twin Peam. Haha. Okay I haven't seen this in a long time and Foto had never seen it, so I watched it with her. We actually rewatched the entire series, including Fire Walk With Me + The Missing Pieces as preparation. The Return, though, was what we spent our time on this month, and wow is it like the best TV show ever made. I forgot how funny it is (and how genuinely scary it can be too).

I think on this viewing, the stuff about Sarah Palmer didn't come across as so important as it did on the first watch (although it definitely is important, I'm just no longer so clear about how it fits in to everything else). I didn't remember so much of a focus on children - I fucking love that shot of Bobby looking in disbelief at the camo-clad child doing some kind of cool-looking pose, he looks so offended and shocked by it.

We received the news Lynch had died 5 minutes after we watched an episode. It was a surreal shock. Not sure if there's anyone else who has inspired me to such a degree. Glad I watched this again, but I need to rewatch Inland Empire or Mullholland Drive too. Sometime soon.

Deep Space Nine

garak, a cardassian (lizard-like alien species) from ds9 smiling mischievously Foto and I finally started this, after finishing TNG late last year. I was a bit... hesitant, especially after coming off of Twin Peaks. (No offense, but what's going to compete with The Return?!) The first/second episode started off pretty interesting, but the third one... it's kind of funny to me that TNG's most famous episode about "terrorism" was poorly received and stupid whereas the first episode about it in DS9 is doing everything "right", with writers that are actually trying and have something to say... and the result is just not that interesting. It's not bad, but it's the kind of story you've seen a million times before. From what I know about this series I think it's sort of hitting the limit of the imagination of liberal/center-left writers of the 90s. I'll stick with it for now, though. TNG did also take a while to find its footing...

Garak and Bashir are great though. The other characters aren't immediately gripping me but I'm curious to see where the show goes with them.

Homestuck (Reread)

a young man stands in his bedroom Yeah, I know. I'm rereading this with Gwen slowly and it's... more baffling than I remember. I never finished it, dropping out shortly after Act 6 started, about halfway through. (In other words, I quit when it actually became popular). Katey is always ahead of the curve.

Initial impressions: It's INSANE that this somehow got the fandom that it did. By that I mean: kids on tumblr circa 2014 who were really social conscious, maybe to the point of hypervigilance. Like, this story drops a plethora of slurs right at the start, and Hussie's sense of humor is... uh... um. Okay, let's put it this way: I'm no longer making fun of Ryukishi07 for reusing the line "puppet with his strings cut" in the same series (sometimes even the same game (sigh... sometimes even the same scene)) after seeing Hussie reuse so many jokes about "ethnic weddings". Did everyone just like, skip half of this. Did they memory hole it. What happened.

Despite some rough edges, I can still feel the appeal of early Homestuck. It's a story about various nerds who are online friends. When I first read this, I was around ~12-13, a total loser, with basically no friends that weren't people I talked to on the internet. Slowly, the group of friends in Homestuck find out that not only are they fated to partake in an epic, world-changing quest, but that they're not just friends: instead, secretly related to each other, by blood. In retrospect it's really clear why a young Katey found this so gripping. As stupid as it sounds there is a kind of emotional core there for sentimental, lonely, isolated kids.
I've reread up to the start of Act 4 now. We'll see how the rest of it goes. It's fun - it's nostalgic, at least.

Plok

Been getting into Plok. In my Plok era.
I've been watching raocow play this game and it's kind of fascinating in a bizarre way. An attempt to first make an arcade/coin-operated game, the levels start out very short and fast, incentivising playing perfectly - then shift to strange hunts for enemies which are almost unkillable. It's extremely hard and has a continue system that feels inscrutable, but there's so much weird stuff in it that it feels awesome. I'm glad I'm watching someone play this and not actually playing it.

Apparently there was a continuation of the game in the form of a webcomic, which as far as I can tell is no longer on the public internet. With the notable exception of a Tumblr update blog showing previews of some pages. plok stands before a judge who says "you have been found guilty of terrible crimes against our people. it is my duty to lay down the maximum penalty"

I desperately need to know why Plok got sentenced to death!!

Plans for February

More dev work! I'm done with narrative games for the next little while. I don't have many ideas for them at the moment. For some reason webdev is really what my brain wants to do right now. Specific plans:

So yeah, that was January! Oh, I've got RSS now, so if you want to keep up with me, add the little link in the footer to your reader. Bye~