Ben Rolfe 🌳 / is on Nostr

Maker of games. Coder of code. Snuggler of trees.

Used to be ecoludologist on that other site. Recently finished up as senior programmer at Lucernal. Currently working on the Interactive Comic Book Maker. (ICBM)

:ms_bisexual_flag: He/Him. Autistic.

My avatar is a closeup of my smiling face, and my banner image is a persimmon tree with the sunlight shining through the colourful autumn leaves.

Pronouns: he/him
ICBM: http://icbm.games
Itch: https://benrolfe.itch.io
Little Ruin: https://www.lucernal.com/littleruin

Last Notes

2024-07-06 12:59:02

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I mentioned Egypt because that's where Pythagoras reportedly learnt it, but from what little scraps of evidence we have that survived to this day, mathematicians of the region had known the relationship for a really long time (and there was a bunch more communication and travel than many tend to assume)
Builders use a 3,4,5 rope to get a right angle because why would you use a bigger one for that purpose? But the biggest triangle on the Babylonian Plimpton 322 tablet, from about 1800BCE is 12709, (13500), 18541. Pretty sure they didn't figure that out with a bit of rope!
The Plimptom 322 wikipedia article contains a discussion of two techniques that have been proposed, based on the columns of the tablet, for what calculation technique was used. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322
There's no reason to assume it's the biggest triple they calculated - it's just the biggest of 15 on a scrap of note-clay we happened to find, 4000 years after someone popped it away and went for a beer.

2024-07-06 12:59:02

- reply

2024-07-04 00:20:41

Pythagoras, the greatest mathematician of Ancient Greece, learned Pythagoras' theorem from the locals while travelling in Egypt, where they had been using it for thousands of years.
Fibonacci, the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages, learned the Fibonacci sequence from Indian texts, where it had first been described 1400 years earlier.
Pascal's triangle originated in Persia more than half a millenium before Blaise Pascal was born - in related news, the first known combinatorics solution came even earlier from THE SAME INDIAN GUY who came up with the "Fibonacci" sequence - Pingala, who was also arguably the first person to specifically refer to zero as a number, along with all sorts of other amazing shit, and who I had never heard of until today because my entire education system deemed him too brown to valorise.
It's hard to even imagine how better educated we'd all be without the pernicious brain rot of white supremacism.

2024-07-04 00:20:41

2024-07-02 05:41:52

Hey brains trust, I have a git question. For ICBM, I don't want to sync my story folder, because that has all my testing crap in it, and I don't want that to be in the repo, so I added it to my gitignore.
BUT now if anyone downloads the ICBM base project and sets up their own git for their project, that gitignore will now be in *their* project and unless they edit it, they won't be syncing *their* story folder, and that's catastrophic.
Is there a way I can stop MY story folder from syncing without including the rule in the project?
#git #GodotEngine #GameDev

2024-07-02 05:41:52

2024-06-26 03:34:08

After buying it literally years ago, I finally got around to starting Stray Gods, recently, and holy crap it is GOOD!
It's a different experience to anything I've ever had in games, and it's a positive experience, and that's about the highest praise I can give to any game, as far as I'm concerned.
Interestingly, the experience felt somewhat more passive than many games, like it felt a little bit BETWEEN watching and playing (but not at all like reading, which is a whole other interesting thing, having been playing a few VNs, lately.) This is weird, because it's not like the game lacks choice or interactivity, it just feels like you're nudging this other entity that has its own momentum. All games which have a story that you can influence are like that, but Stray Gods FEELS like it - perhaps because songs feel like they have an energy and dynamism to them and you interject to redirect it at times?
Anyway, fucking play it if you haven't, it's great.
#Games #IndieGames

2024-06-26 03:34:08