Almost nobody actually contacts me but it is technically possible.

Let me introduce you to the last resort of the struggling artist - extreme stylization. Really good pixel art is a very difficult discipline but terrible pixel art can be just as appealing if you push a style you can call your own.

Be bold.

I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.

I got criticism on my blog for using a serif font but those people are just … wrong. Serif fonts are just better for reading at all font sizes.

Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects -

The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.

There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.

Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.

Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

Running over a VPN service would have the much the same effect.

It seems a little pointless, surely every server actually accepting SSH passwords has been 0wned year ago.

On mobile that is.

On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kind of bad. Not unusable, just annoying. I am hoping this will change as more apps update their design.

I can't wait until the next installment on error diffusion. I still think Atkinson dithering looks great, so much so that I made a web component to dither images.

The (deliberately) very limited analytics software I wrote for my personal website[0] could have used database but I didn't want to add a dependency to what was a very simple project so I hacked up an in-memory datastructure that periodically dumps itself to disk as a json file. This gives persistence across reboots and at a pinch I can just edit the file with a text editor.

Game design is filled with "stupid" ideas that work well. I wrote a text-based game[1] that includes Trek-style starship combat. I played around with a bunch of different ideas for enemy AI before just reverting to a simple action drawn off the top of a small deck. It's a very easy system to balance and expand, and just as fun for the player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

[1] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/

Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)

I understood how silly that question was when I felt the pleasure of actually owning a high quality product. Sure, I could spend the time to make my own cards but playing the game is only part of the fun.

Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.