Patch Arcana

Hacker | Writer | 無 | He/Him | Junkyard Dog | Syncretic Vitromancer at
@ArcanaLabs@twitter.com | This account not rated for consumption by minors or managers.

I like making things and witnessing other people make things. Myself I do #EmbeddedDev and #Programming alongside a fair amount of writing and TTRPG design. Dipping my toes into pixel art and eurorack modular synthesis.

I am actively trying to curate a feed of people who make things, build worlds, and spread peace.

Public Key

npub18lxq09damr44k6hd7drnnm09zzun7ytqv9hl70jec8w6yegq73ys7udg9r

NIP-05 Address

patcharcana_at_furry.engineer@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsrlnq8jk7a366mdtklx3eeahj3pwflz9sxzmll8evurhdzv5q0gjgd6clej

Author Public Key

npub18lxq09damr44k6hd7drnnm09zzun7ytqv9hl70jec8w6yegq73ys7udg9r

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Last Notes

2024-02-13 12:58:59

Not one soul:
Not a single solitary fucker:
Whatever Renegade Carcosan keeps feeding me ideas during Power-On Self-Test Coffee Time: What if the reason Sebastian is actually cartoonishly bad at opsec for a major villain is that he's being secretly manipulated and only thinks he's the head of his organization?
Ah yes, the ol "I have fucked up this villain, so they must only be a henchman" gambit.
My 30s really is just a long experience of cultivating the necessary shamelessness to return to my teens

2023-09-12 01:45:55

My landlord sent me an email passive-aggressively reminding us to conserve power because their heat and water bills went up, so I sent one back more-aggressively-than-passively reminding them that the power for my unit has been in my name for 10 years and if I won't tolerate that sort of tone from my parents, she's got no chance.

2023-09-11 18:53:05

"Fellas is it gay to fly economy."

2023-09-11 14:25:06

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@npub1le0…xtam This is unsurprising for me to learn.
Ye gods, I hate web.
I'll run a diff between that and my main website and see what I can fix in the next few days without having to go the 00s route and create an m.sanityline subdomain...

2023-09-11 13:59:31

So I'm always a little loathe to do direct promotion, but the fact of the matter is: I've written a couple of books over the last few years, and I'm working on at least two more.
The ones that have come out in print are the first two in a set called the "Arcane Revolution Trilogy". They're stories of the breakdown of a society that held authoritarian control of magical power as a secret once that secret starts to bleed into reality. It's Men in Black by way of Lovecraft.
You can find out more about them here: https://www.sanityline.net.
Your regional amazon sub-site should also list the series together. Here's a link to the US version:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09F9ZYTSF?binding=paperback

2023-09-01 11:30:56

I see once again that there is no technological solution to many of y'all's childish allergy to nuance.

2023-08-30 18:02:41

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@npub1le0…xtam @npub17wk…uzqr I don't do a very good Gene Wilder but "No, don't, stop"

2023-08-30 17:58:40

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@npub1le0…xtam @npub17wk…uzqr I dunno if you knew me or not when I still did this for a living but when I'm in this kind of mood I make it EVERYONE'S problem.
Kind of like horny twitter, but for hungry.

2023-08-30 17:52:10

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@npub1le0…xtam @npub17wk…uzqr I mean the maple curry cream sauce is TASTY, there's a reason almost every restaurant downtown has some version of it on their menu.
But you know what was even better? The time we ommitted the cream sauce and used red curry paste and maple syrup as a marinade for bacon-wrapped scallops.

2023-08-30 17:17:25

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@npub17wk…uzqr This might be just a little TOO region-specific, but "maple curry" is a very common flavour profile in this one specific city and virtually nowhere else, and it kind of, ALMOST works.
I have an equally fucky idea that if you added some dijon to it and made a kind of honey mustard that you could abuse that, but it's notedly NOT CORRECT.

2023-08-30 17:16:08

"Patch why are you making the bad-idea face?"
"Maple Curry Dijon."

2023-08-25 00:48:17

Brain just fails to engage.
But the bunnies got their cage cleaned, and the trash made it to the curb.
I'm glad to have done that much.

2023-08-24 21:37:46

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The situation of their cage is making me sad so we're gonna rework that right away.

2023-08-23 16:38:03

Sometimes I wonder if denial-of-service patents are a thing, like if there's a living to be made patenting the dumb shit techbros might do before they do it, thus preventing them from legally doing it without paying for the right (which you will of course then refuse to sell them).

2023-08-22 11:19:08

I have no idea how to get from where I am to where I want to be, but for the first time in like 6 years at least the "where I want to be" is clear.

2023-08-21 14:22:00

Oh, right! Grids.

2023-08-18 19:06:14

The SUSTAIN Rating is a gameplay mechanic that measures the player's performance as an aggregate of all the main constraints placed upon them. Rather than chasing "number go up" manufacturing throughput benchmarks, the SUSTAIN rating is intended to give players a target to shoot at in terms of measuring that balance and also acts as a mechanic to gate progression throughout the game's stages. SUSTAIN Rating is an aggregate score normalized to a value between 0 and 100 which takes into affect three main areas, each with a subordinate score attached: community wellness, manufacturing capacity, and environmental stewardship. Each of these three categories is weighted to varying amounts that may be balanced as part of a gameplay difficulty setting.
Probably putting too much thought into this someday-maybe project.

2023-08-18 14:46:48

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Pleased to say it does not appear to be the case that the CGA gives a damn about gender in any capacity, much less the capacity of actively engaging in transmisia.

2023-08-18 13:37:37

I'm still a member of the Canadian Go Association, I should really make sure that's not in our own league rules.
I can't imagine it would be. Our tournaments aren't sex-segregated because there's no goddamn point in doing that for strategy gaming

2023-08-15 13:45:20

An egg-crack moment, but it's more like the safety countdown ended and your hermetically sealed shipping pod just opened itself.

2023-08-14 14:00:51

I'm having the kind of day where I'm deliberately stalling on development requests as a kind of petty revenge for them taking six months to triage our defects into their workflows.

2023-08-14 12:17:49

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@npub1vqa…vn3x Well, and I know that on top of whatever the hell chrome is doing (and I do use some "experimentals" so I might have fucked this up my own self), we're also running something in some middle layer that breaks things in new and exciting ways every couple weeks.
It's been like two months since server icons or profile pictures would load for me in discord, for example. CSRF fuckery.

2023-08-14 11:58:10

People complain a lot about the poor performance of firefox by comparison to chrome, but I've never had Firefox choke and die on my work machine just being asked to reload ~18 tabs at boot time.

2023-08-12 18:29:25

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@npub1e6t…jj6r even at the time it struck me as a shame that there weren't more of this genre on the DS.
Hell I'd have even just settled for more of the series.

2023-08-06 12:31:41

I think I might revive the idea of scheduled livestreams.
I have been trying to schedule my evenings to get more done in a spread out fashion but it turns out that without an external commitment I will invariably wind up on my couch.

2023-08-06 11:42:18

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I am very closed to finished on what has been my largest project in the game to date: a 32-gang coal plant.
I would really like to finish so that I can go build something more technically interesting and get back to pretending we are running this stripmine operation on good vibes.

2023-08-06 11:39:04

I can't believe it but I am down to the last two of the Revision C boards ever made.
Don't fret though; if they sell out we'll restock in short order with the Revision D, which are fully compatable.
https://www.tindie.com/products/arcanalabs/peti-virtual-pet-dev-kit-for-ti-msp430-launchpad/

2023-08-06 11:30:11

I should do more practical things, but a part of me wants to just boot up satisfactory.

2023-08-05 14:37:43

Suddenly my wife's phone utters the phrase "Drink the water. Eat the bran. Take a mighty shit whenever possible"
This man has got my marrow.

2023-08-05 13:28:32

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I should make a little wearable "battery level" indicator.

2023-08-05 13:26:48

I really need more folks to understand that the robot model//spoons model does not entitle someone to someone else's surplus charge/spoons/etc.
I get that you're fried and I am slightly less fried but I assure you I am still fuckin fried.

2023-08-04 21:19:46

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@npub12qf…py58 children are just aliens of slightly clearer origin.

2023-08-04 19:21:56

C'mon boss it's the friday before a long weekend and it's like 4:30. Send me home chief. I'm tits on a bull.
https://cdn.pawb.social/mastodon-fe/media_attachments/files/110/832/969/119/595/886/original/595c9567f7a14ac3.mp3

2023-08-04 19:02:33

"Precision is important, and we should avoid ambiguity. For example, when you said-"
The alien hung its head, placing a hand on its face in crude aproximation of the human face-palm "I have a freezer full of body parts."
"Yes, that. You should have been clearer about it being chicken thighs."

2023-08-04 18:21:15

How did I write two-thirds of the damn trilogy and we don't yet have a scene of Niles having a photos-and-red-yarn-on-the-walls Charlie Day moment yet?
It's a story about secret agents, conspiracies, and lifting the veil. Do your job detective!

2023-08-04 14:43:36

Yo!
Completely unbeknownst to me, Alexander Roswell at Tindie wrote up a blog about the PETI project and the dev kits I just released for it!
https://blog.tindie.com/2023/08/virtual-pet-kit-for-the-msp430/

2023-08-04 14:36:28

Sometimes a spreadsheet is the valid tool for a job and I'm tired of pretending its not.

2023-08-03 12:11:45

I really enjoy that I'm frequently being chased around over minor "unapproved configurations" by the same people who think that running two concurrent VPNs is "fine actually" and that it's entirely ancillary that one of them breaks WSL's networking abilities.

2023-07-28 02:34:31

Definitely had a very large, very significant little meltdown over the last two days.
But I made myself do a chore, so I guess I'm on the mend.

2023-07-11 13:26:50

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@npub1f9q…d0uj Time to fuck with the hosts file so we can just get moving.

2023-07-08 19:56:55

I have never actually run or played in a straight up dungeon crawl campaign and I feel a might need coming on.

2023-07-05 12:22:12

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@npub12fw…x7c4 It certainly looks versatile enough to be a serious threat to other engines in terms of market cap.
And I mean, it looks versatile enough that Patch "Screw it we're doing this from first principals" Arcana would rather use *it* than actually develop an engine from first principals.

2023-07-04 12:41:39

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I like the agency that has come with adulthood, but damn is it ever harder to Actually Play and Actually Create when I'm giving 40-50 hours of my week to Pointless Busywork and another 35-40 to sleep.

2023-06-29 19:20:09

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@npub1atm…5pz3 It's not QUITE what I want, but it's also probably the closest thing to what I want that I'm currently aware of existing.
What I really want is like... reverse-factorio. "The last guy fucked the planet up on you, please rebootstrap it."

2023-06-29 19:05:44

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Ooh, or terra nil, I still haven't actually installed that and it's much more the mood...

2023-06-29 18:59:52

Oh yeah. I own factorio twice.
... I should play some factorio.

2023-06-28 12:34:24

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@npub1le0…xtam @npub12fw…x7c4 I do not, but that has more to do with my horrible method of consuming webcomics (namely, never giving them a thought then suddenly reading a whole one) than any snap judgement about it.

2023-06-28 11:45:56

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@npub12fw…x7c4 Trains are the best, I love a good train.
... I should boot up my narrowguage game again.

2023-06-28 11:34:05

People are making dragons of train locomotives over on the hellsite and I'm having a real hard time staying over here in my lane.

2023-06-27 23:04:10

I AM ABSOLUTELY BEGGING Y'ALL.
If you are bringing back personal/hobby/small-business websites (and you should be), enable RSS.
And TLS, but that's a whole other thing.

2023-06-26 16:59:25

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NO.
I AM WRONG TO BE ANNOYED BY THIS.
What the hell kind of wizard am I if I am getting mad at other people for putting the Funny in.