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Updates, "Sleets", Number Friends (Patreon)

Published:
2018-08-14 23:57:06
Imported:
2026-10

Content

Hello good humans!

1. Number Friends

First, here's the latest Number Friends build: https://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=a1965fa5976196ce4ac0ed090d81ceec

If you tried it right after my original post, I added a bunch of levels and stuff the next day in a series of updates. It currently stands at 27 levels.

There's a lot more things I could try with it, like actual level design, more block types, etc, and it's easy for me to envision how it could be a polished game with the help of a small team, but for now my only aspiration is probably to spend a few more hours and just release it publicly mostly as-is. So if you have any notes or feedback, here's a good place to leave them!

2. PAAAARTY WOOOO

Actually my current aspiration is to not to be The Most Burnt Out Human Ever, and I'm getting increasingly inefficient at it. So guess what: I'm planning an actual vacation! Where I go somewhere that isn't my own home and everything!

I'm looking forward to telling you all about it after I'm back. But it's not until September so for now I'm continuing to inefficiently poke my brain and pretend it's human. 

I do hate to interrupt working on projects, no matter how slow and inefficient I'm being at it. So, seeing as travel vacations take time to plan and book anyway, I'm hoping to get out another video or two before I run off. I was working on Spidermath 2 and got distracted by conic sections so I started writing a spinoff video about conic sections and then I got distracted from that to cardioids, so, we'll see how many of those videos end up reaching a good draft and getting produced. 

I really want to do the cardioid one though, because (as mentioned in videos past) there's a bunch of interesting ways to make them, and a few can involve a mug, and now that I'm doing merch I should probably sell a cardioid mug to fund my vacation. I've got a design sketch that's pretty awesome, actually. I'm generally skeptical of merch mugs but this one takes advantage of a couple intrinsic mathematical properties of the mug itself and it's going to be awesome. 

No more spoilers though!

3. This Week's Sleets

M and I are doing this thing where, instead of tweeting tweets as we think of them, we save our random thoughts and then publish them all together. It's like tweets but slower, so, "slow tweets" -> "sleets" is the brilliant name we're working with.

Here's my could-have-been-tweets sleets:

Using AI/Machine learning/algorithms to make “impartial" decisions is basically like writing your opinions in a book and then pointing at that book as an objective external authority

Scutoid is a pretty good pet name

You know how there’s a certain level of skill you need to have before you know how bad you are at something? I think the cliche example is the 3-chord guitarist who thinks they’re all that, until they get good enough to realize they have no musicianship whatsoever. Well, I think I’ve reached that point with my cooking problems. I used to be able to think I did ok, and not realize I left the milk in the cup cabinet until a mystery number of days later. But today I managed to realize I put the meat away in the bread drawer just after I shut it! And I messed up the order of operations on the mayo, taking it out of the fridge, getting a knife, and then putting it back in the fridge before using it. And I noticed just after shutting the fridge door, not halfway through eating my sandwich. I’m like a proper amateur now!

Green tea, blue cheese,

An inverted map of breakfast town.

The earth’s crust supports her creatures,

Toasted. With tomato on top,

And a hint of salt.

Nothing annoys me more than that romanticized exploitative myth of the starving artist, that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, that pain and trauma are good for art-making. I do my best work when I have the most stability, like most artists. You can't do deep work when the rug is getting pulled out from under you every 6 months.

I had a dream involving some detailed and interesting research on Parkinson’s disease that resulted from the discovery that frogs have similar rates of it to humans, and I have to write it down so that if years later I remember "having heard this somewhere” I can google it and see it was just a dream

The only memories left are ashes caught in a spider’s web

Vi

Comments

ox

been thinking about that starving artists thing a lot lately! I had a thought a while ago that art made with limited resources under uncomfortable conditions has a sense of poignancy or something that is lacking in art made from a point of privilege, because it required some sort of resiliency to force itself into being under circumstances that worked against the likelihood of its creation. maybe this is untrue though! your sleet has prompted me to think on it more~

Kenny Tilton

It seems to me the mayo could have made more of an effort. I measure my engagement highs by how many trips to the kitchen I have to make to get what I wanted on the first trip. Also how many times I microwave my coffee between consecutive sips.

Mike Schiraldi

Can you add a level skip function? Every time you release a new level, I have to play through all the old ones again D:

Rajat Tibrewal

Is there any way I can skip past levels in Number Friends? I had played and finished all levels before you added the new ones :(.. it's so darn addictive!

Steve

I agree it was interesting, and get what Vi is saying. Still, pain and trauma really DO inspire some of the very best art.. history reveals as much

vihart

I will look into it! Not sure how easy it is, but I've seen it on other puzzlescript games so I know it's possible.

vihart

I miss having interns I could task to remind me to drink my tea

vihart

I think there's something to that correlation, but that it's more like limitations and uncomfortable conditions can act as a kind of filter that forces artists to either gain skill at their craft or quit (whether because their mediocre skills don't justify the time and money art takes, or because their mediocre art doesn't feel meaningful in the face of pain), whereas it's easy to coast on mediocre skills and mediocre ambition-of-expression if you're coming at it from a place of privilege or happiness. So it's not intrinsically necessary but more like a survivor bias thing where those who DO manage to art their way through adversity are more likely to be good than the average person who doesn't really need to be good to justify the expense and enjoy the result. But if an artist does have skill, whether gained through adversity or pure dedication, they don't need more adversity to keep those skills. Just time and space and materials! At least that's my experience and that of many artists I know.

Kenny Tilton

"Prithee, Ms. Hart. Thine tea cooleth."? I like it.

Tom Nedimyer

Number Friends is so much fun - I really hope you find someone who's willing to pay you for it! (Maybe sell/lease it to schools as an educational thing?)

Kenny Tilton

All I know is that an ascetic was dying under a tree when a girl tending cattle brought him some milk, he drank it, and achieved enlightenment. He first saw, To Hell with starvation. The rest is left as an exercise.

Kenny Tilton

You are looking for something related to "cookies" or "localStorage". hth.

Steve

she did. they call us patrons ;)

Andrew Reid

I am liking the difficulty level of "Number Friends", some of the levels take some thinking, but they're do-able. I'd be a little bit afraid that "actual level deisgn" might make them too diabolical for casual diversion.