Scraps #11
A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-11-24 to 2025-12-01, posted on
People always come up to me and ask me: "Who are you and what are you doing here?" and to them I say: "Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
In other news, I've had an idea for a long-running REALLY SIMPLE web ..."game", and you know what it's probably been done dozens of times already. But I'm sort of trying to not care about that? I find that the knowledge that someone else has already done that (better than I ever could) is putting me off writing and building things. Alternatives are good! Why can't I listen to my own advice. So anyway I'm gonna build out a really simple fun time (and energy, eek) waster. Because why not?
Anyway! On to actual things that exist on the internet:
Spotlight
- Julius has been posting one kick-ass homepage from the depths of the 'net - it's absolutely worth digging through the 50+ posts and keeping an eye out for future ones as there's some wild diversity (in 'website' terms, primarily!) in there and I don't know about you but I am here for it
Stuff? Things? Sure why not
- This is a great blog post about maintaining an open source project - I'm a big fan of kanban and currently use the self-hosted open source version of LeanTime, however... Kaneo looks interesting. I will have to check it out!
- Nick has a new site, and it has a /why page which explains, well, why nick has a new site. This is a great idea, exploring the why of things. I should add a /why page, just like Nick, Miriam, Mike and many others
- A good take on the cloudflare incident a few weeks back, encouraging this kind of detail in the future will only make the experiences of one team propagate to other teams more easily, a net benefit to all
- Regularly visiting web wanderers may know that I love reading post mortems. Generally these are of a technical "oh snap that thing broke in a special way" type documents BUT I also like reading gaming related stuff too! I saw Nishchal post to Mastodon about their design post mortem for their Catnap Chaos game. It's a good read, covering what goes into designing the mechanics of a relatively simple game (in a good way!)
- Email, the ultimate weapon in this modern age. Declan writes eloquently about those angry emails you sometimes find yourself sending. Loved this.
- Oh, whoops. It looks like it's time to shut our websites down. Personal websites are dead! ...obviously they're not, as described by both rina and fLaMEd.
- Recently, Joel has written about finding it hard to do, whatever it is in that moment, and Elena feels similarly! I totally get this. Sometimes starting is the hardest thing. I get that way with this site, even putting these scraps together can be a trial. Not the doing. The starting. Which reminds me about that game-thing I mentioned at the top of this page... hmm
Bonus
You probably have those places on the 'net that you visit regularly. A space that, when you load in, you know what you're getting, even if the content changes there's a tone or a feel to the site that keeps you returning. For many people, it's the big social media places.
I have a few of these 'check several times a week' spaces. One of them is a web comic you've probably heard of, XKCD. I wanted to make special mention of a recent comic here that's powerful because of the overall webcomics consistency, the diversion from its typical topics, and the years-long wait for a followup to a few prior editions.
Who's cutting ogres? Tell 'em to quit.