Elfi @elfi@pixie.town

Got some kobolds making their way onto our store this Monday!

#kobold #ttrpg #dnd #pathfinder #dungeonsanddragons

I never had an Amiga, but I recently discovered the "Topaz" monospaced font used in the original Amiga 500 is actually pretty great - it's got that lo-fi pixelly crunch, but it's also high-contrast, consistent, and visually clear. The only problems keeping it from being a good terminal font in 2024 are:

* It doesn't include box-drawing characters, block graphics, or any other fancy Unicode glyphs people expect these days
* It's a bitmap font, and modern operating systems tend to only support scalable vector fonts

So, I fixed those things.

https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode

#retrocomputing #typography

It took a bit over two years, but I have finished finished this little video project!
The title screen for Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 has an incredible music track to it, but all the screen shows is the static title and a blinking "Press Any Button."
So, I decided to make my own opening cinematic using sprites from the game!
Please watch and tell me what you like about it!
And share with your friends!
https://youtu.be/FVawY8LAUPA

Musicians, I know an autistic kid who’s passion is music and they’re already creating music in basically any way they can. I was thinking I’d buy them a dedicated device and I want to get one that is good for creating music. Any hardware/software recommendations?

@technicat Oh, nice! Don Norman's *The Design of Everyday Things* is on the Internet Archive! Anyone who hasn't read this book should go check it out; it'll change your life, or at least change your relationship with your entire built environment. #UX #UXDesign

https://archive.org/details/thedesignofeverydaythingsbydonnorman

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing personal against Eugen because I don’t know the man. I will always maintain he deserves credit for building Masto initially because it was a significant moment in the mainstream adoption of independent social media and pushed the conversation forward. He should get respect for that.

But in combination with his obsession with growth over improving the experience of the platform, unilateral decision-making that is constantly at odds with the community that brings more attention to the project, and his historic resistance to listening to common sense features for safety and moderation, he has shown repeatedly he is one of the biggest bottlenecks in Mastodon becoming what it should be: the defacto experience for social media.

Mastodon is in a unique position where it is popular, AND it can adapt quickly to its community’s needs, which is something corporate alternatives cannot do. That gives it a supreme advantage on a littered landscape of social tools.

However, as evidenced by his latest decision to change a critical part of the UI language that has been defined and accepted with virtually no community input and then his subsequent mishandling of the justified backlash, he has shown, again, that he does not possess the leadership or vision to push Mastodon to where it should be.

The project has stalled to the point where people are returning to Twitter or trying Bluesky, which Jack Dorsey, the former untrustworthy and duplicitous head of Twitter, backs.

The software isn’t the problem. Eugen is the problem.

Eugen should always be remembered as the creator of Mastodon. His project opened the possibilities to many people who never thought a social media experience outside corporate entities was possible.

However, the project has made little progress in the subsequent 7 or 8 years since its introduction. His myopic decision-making and refusal to adapt ideas that would improve the experience have driven away so many brilliant people and tempered the enthusiasm of those who remain because they know convincing him of good ideas will be more complicated than implementing them.

The Glitch and Hometown forks of Mastodon are already significant improvements over the original because they include features that help people build the communities they want rather than what Eugen thinks they want, so we know Mastodon can be better.

Unfortunately, a single person continues to thwart progress because their inability to realize the project is more significant than his initial vision. Still, he cannot be trusted to guide Mastodon to its rightful place.

He has repeatedly demonstrated that he lacks the leadership and insight to do so. For Mastodon to make significant progress, he must be removed from the decision-making process.

That is the way forward.

How many of you are using C# to program in Godot 4? ❓

This blogpost delves into the history of .NET and delivers the happy news that mobile support for C# is finally back 📱

🔗https://godotengine.org/article/platform-state-in-csharp-for-godot-4-2/

Dear other artists,
I have just discovered that uploading pngs to webglaze or running pngs through Glaze produces FAR more desirable outcomes than jpgs. Wish I knew this beforehand as I'd be uploading all my works as pngs! A small tippy tip from me to you. :)