Arne

Arne

@androidarts.bsky.social

"a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high." Art, old games, miniatures, gunpla and electronics. http://www.androidarts.com https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@androidarts (No twitter account anymore)

3.3K followers92 following539 posts

Programming a Progress Quest type game in AMOS 1.2... The Amiga 500 isn't exactly the right platform for an idle-game that has to run for weeks and months though.

Guys, I'm quitting my job as a Death Camp guard. The organization's culture is broken and there are also ethical concerns I can now vaguely sense. I loved working there for three years, standing guard, and guarding, and getting paid, but recently... Anyways, I'm writing a book about my time there.

Against the backdrop of "No, my baby, my baby!" and all that stuff, I often sat down and began to think. Really think. Something about all this felt off. But what? Then one day when I saw Kommandant Klaus yelling "Ihr feedback ist Kaputt!!!" at a coworker, something clicked. It was organizational.

That's right -- something about the whole organization of the Death Camp was DEEPLY DISTURBING. One day when I made crying children eat dirt soup out of a pit near the barbwire, I noticed something. That barbwire was rusty. We had a security problem.

The black-clad man took out a notebook and pen and looked with troubled interest at the restrained man in the high security cell. —"One final question Mr Hannibal Lecter... what would you like served at your funeral?" —"Oh, I will be baking myself."

Caste Computing Joseph pointed at a man crossing the district 5-6 walkway, and spoke quietly. "See that man up there, flaunting the DDR3 stick and refurbished 2.5" IDE mechanical in his clear shopping bag? That is wealth my son. He is going to run his own system, circumvent the whole telemetron."

So far not the Swedish election result I was expecting to develop (50% votes in). When a party is firmly geared a certain way and there are some pretty exotic international developments and concerns butting in, maybe that siphons voters off... I don't know.

Can you motorize N-scale cars with just garbage? Yeah, kind of. The tricky part is getting them around the loop-wheel at the ends. It might work best to use a wider turn, and maybe dangle the metal/magnet on a drag-line so the belt can be all-belt.

Car is going a bit sideways here because the magnet taped under isn't centered. With a string (preferably thicker than the sewing thread I used here), it's best to rubberize the belt driving drive wheel for friction. I had to add a rubberband into the belt for tension. It often snags.

One thing I don't quite like about digital brush engines, here Krita, is how crossing lines get this distracting dot in them--something which is less pronounced IRL I think. Haven't found a tweak for it despite looking. Might have to do with the physical structure of paper & how deposits saturate.

Battletech sketches, going more for the vintage look, less trunky and square-plated. There's quite a bit of difference between the early designs and later "refresh", which I think became greeble and silhouette homogenized close to its detriment.

For my re-designs here I'm thinking of using three design rules: > Limbs generally have a smaller front facing area and wider side facing area, i.e squished. > Limbs have more mass closer to the torso, though foot area can still be big. > Die-cast enamel painted toy feel.

The designs are mainly from TRO 3025, early print. I don't know much about the BT/MW universe though. It appears there are no heights given, only tons, which is smart if you want to avoid giving bad estimates. Given how mass scales, these designs are likely samey-sized. 20T -> 80T is x1.6 height.

What's the name of that battletech mech with the Darth Vader neck-guard helmet? Possibly late 1980s design. I saw a painting of it but forgot to save...

Ah Victor... Trebuchet... not really sure because of the differing presentations. The painting I saw looked like this iirc. I scrolled by it so fast and really only noticed the helmet.

"How exactly were the Nazis bad?" "The death camps? The war and the destruction?" "Yes, but besides that, how exactly were they bad?" "Uh..." "You can't even think of a thing!"

Were early 80s diving games the only good underwater games? Anyways, wanted to pixel plop one in DPIII. Ah, there were those sink bomb ones too. I can't remember which ones I played--it was so long ago now.

I have two LEGO 4V Technic motors, similar to the ones in the 1977 set 870. They are very screechy and hard to turn. There's a stackexchange post with people failing at disassembly. I didn't manage either, but oiling the ends of the exposed shafts did help quite a bit, I can report to the internet!

Getting vague visual ideas for a new hardware concept: C64-cube. The front panel could be quite interesting visually, featuring a datasette unit, with counter, maybe VU-meter, 5.25" floppy drive, Cartridge slot, and blinky lights. Borrow a bit from the SX case. Carrying handle. Blue trim.

Can't be a 1541 disk drive though as it's not that great of an implementation and it's fairly deep, making it hard to cubify. Floppy drives were fairly compact just as they were phased out, as seen in e.g. Sony Mavicas and cheap USB external drives. Don't think the 5.25 inch drives were ever slim'd.

A haphazard sketch. There are so many ways to do it, but it's always fun with front facing cassettes. Though, if put on the top the front will have space for other fun stuff. It's hard to experiment with the layout when working on paper... though I suppose cutting elements out and rearranging works.

500 megawatt data center: $ 15M * 500 ? Hardened killdozer with RC controls: $ 50.000 ? Seeing it go down the server aisles: Priceless.

Just one way to hide text in text. Simply making text white will reveal the line when highlighted and the line takes up space. The hidden bit here will only show up when copypasted, scraped or read using TTS. ( visibility:hidden; does not work here. )

If you fool around a bit with paragraphs you can hide lines in lines, here under the "3". It's only visible when selecting (works with page scaling, here 220%). Selected invisible characters do show up as negative, though looking more like a bug. Font size can mitigate it, as seen after "Farted. "

Long ago when I was a clueless wee lad with a mullet I watched a TV-series called V, and the part with the people in red specifically going after scientists and hoarding sweet water felt a bit strange, kind of like, bullying random architects and stealing rocks. The shuttle crafts were cool though.

A few times recently I've needed an obscure Swedish word translated, both web searches and translation things would give me nonsense. Usually I just go to wikipedia and change the language to get the answer. Now it was "krevera", which ddg says is crevice and google says is demand. Both are wrong.

Anyways, krevera means to explode, like e.g. the black powder storage on a ship, or an upset person figuratively bursting. Took me a while, but Google apparently thinks it's like kräva/kräver (demand) and ddg also does some autocorrect assumption making it crevice.

Sadly no English equivalent, so I can't write "Jane was about to crevade." and be understood... unless the person is French because it's a 17th century loan word taken from "crever", which in turn is from latin's "crepare". In German "krepieren". (This according to Wiktionary.)

I want to buy a cheap-ass sewing machine so I can fix up some clothes without hand-sewing at the pace of 10 stitches per minute. The handheld ones only do tailor stitch though. For jersey/knit I need zigsag setting, a ballpoint needle and a bottom bobbin it seems. Going below 120€ seems unwise.

Made a little test. Bleach works to remove/reduce stains on paper (a drawing or like... a mystery brown spot in a book). I dabbed some hydrogen peroxide on with a q-tip and the spot faded to 20%. Will possibly bubble/warp the paper and cause the grains and specularity to misbehave though.

Hydrogen peroxide also softens acrylic paint and can be used to strip miniatures. Just not very well. I suppose some laundry whiteners might work. Haven't tested on paper though.

Okej gubbar, titta på det här, linjerna är ju fan inte distribuerade på samma avstånd! A5=210mm / 10 = 21mm, men dom är ju ihoptryckta runt namndelen till 20mm, och den precis över är 22mm. Hur var det tänkt egentligen? Kanske fanns det något estetiskt skäl? Mystiskt. Sänder klagomål tebaks i tiden.

Traveling back in time would probably kind of suck, especially if it happened several times. Every cultural reference you knew would be impermanent along with anything you did, making everything incredibly disorienting. Who is Arnold? Was he in Zytor Wars? Or is he in that 1-hit-wonder popband BABA?

Time-jumps back to 1983 and: A Conan movie with the Zeb Macahan guy as old Conan comes out. V keeps its name but leans heavily into comedy, and has a laugh track. It's a huge success and everyone keeps quoting lines from it. Ronald Reagan steps out of a 747 without the stairs rolled up and dies.

Communists displeased with the US' Grenada policy make a spectacular attempt to assassinate the interim president using bazookas. It fails and suddenly everyone are calling communists "zookies". Unn damn zookie! Moon base bla bla bla that's all you're ever on about! Stupid zookiebase more like it!

Looking at this starter set, I think I would have picked different colours. >White and sand merged into the 50-50 equiv. for use on teeth and as warm highlights. >Brown to mouth red. As green and red mixes to brown (sloppy ork pants can be uneven). >New darker cold green for skin hue slide options.