https://mattbee.mataroa.blog
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In the late 20th century, there was a gorilla named Koko who made waves by displaying an apparent ability to talk to humans in sign language. This would've had shocking implications for life as we know it, but the science determined that what she was doing wasn't actually "using language". Through reinforcement learning, she had come to realize that mimicking the hand signals of her human handlers would result in certain outcomes. She knew that making the hand signal for "food" might convince…
Thanks to everyone who's contributed to the fundraiser so far. I'm not out of the woods yet, but you've made a big difference. As a donation incentive, anyone who contributes $5 or more will get a coupon code for all the paid bonus content I've released on my itch.io page. (everyone who's donated since Thursday has already been contacted; let me know if you didn't receive an email.) All of my games are free, but some of them include bonus material if you pay a couple bucks. This includes: three…
Hello, friends. If you enjoy this blog or any of my other work, now would be an excellent time to support it. July is a rough month for my family; our insurance deductible reset on July 1, and we're ill enough that we've had to pay pretty much all of it in the past 30 days. There are meds we've had to go without to buy food. We're going to struggle to make rent this month. Also, my shoes are falling apart and I'm going to need to replace them soon. I hate to ask for help when there are so many…
I like bowling. I haven't been in over a decade, but it's probably my second favorite 3D physics game after Katamari Damacy. I wish I could bowl more often. But as much as I enjoy the physical act of bowling, I think the scoring system has some major problems. The first time I ever went bowling was a field trip for gym class in Junior High. I'm not an athletically-inclined person because I have EIB1 that was undiagnosed until I was almost 40. Bowling is the sole positive association I have with…
August is coming up, which means Blaugust, a challenge in which bloggers try to post 31 times in August, is also coming up. I participated last year and won the gold award, meaning I posted 25-30 times. I was two away from the rainbow diamond award. I also burned out hard at the end of the challenge and didn't post anything for a month and a half. I don't think doing Blaugust is fully to blame, I was having a rough month in general and overburdened myself, but it does make me wonder if trying…
I knew it was legal to sell fake medicine in the US. It sucks, but "homeopathy" has been around forever here, and the "medicine" is just sugar pills, so it's not going to actively hurt anyone (outside of scamming them out of a few dollars.) Our government decided banning them isn't a hill worth dying on, so these fake remedies have been grandfathered into the culture. I accept this. What I didn't know is just how lax the regulations are for selling such a product here. I had never looked…
(note: this post uses <details> and <summary> tags. If you're viewing in a reader that doesn't support this, click here to open in a browser.) A riddle is like a puzzle, except it's purely for the benefit of the person telling the riddle. It's not designed to be fun to solve, or even particularly clever. The only satisfaction in a riddle is for the person telling it, because they already know the answer. This is because "solving a riddle" usually relies on making multiple leaps of logic and…
If you put a creative work out into the world and someone has a very negative reaction to it, I find that often the best thing to say is: Thanks for the feedback, sorry it wasn't for you. Now if they made some factually untrue statement, you should push back on it,1 and if they're using the critique as cover to make personal attacks, feel free to tell them to fuck off. But if they're giving you a good-faith negative assessment of your work? It's usually best not to engage. Using myself as an…
It wasn't always like this. In the early days, video games were for everyone. Games like Pong and Space Invaders could be enjoyed by players of any age. Pac-Man fever wasn't only an affliction of the young and old, everyone was susceptible. If anything, early arcade games were more likely to be played by adults, because you were more likely to find them in smoky bars than any place a child might hang out. They were a natural extension of the nickelodeons, love testers, pinball machines, and…
Note: The literal first pause button was probably on a tape recorder in the 1930s or 40s, but this post is about video games. I was playing some Caverns of Mars for the Atari Home Computer and noticed, through trial-and-error, that you can press the H key (for "hold" or "halt", I expect) to pause the game. I thought this was nifty. Caverns of Mars came out in 1981, so it was still early days for video games: they had not yet had even a year in which to come a long way since Pac-Man, and the…
I thought about doing something for Manifesto Jam 2026, but I was having trouble coming up with video game opinions I felt strongly enough about to publish them in manifesto form. Then I had the idea, "what if I wrote my manifesto in text adventure form?" It seemed like a strong concept: I've wanted to make a proper text adventure for a long time. It's a format I've toyed with as long as I've been making games, even going so far as attempting to write my own very cruddy interpreter back in the…
In reference to these results for this survey This poem is a mnemonic. The mnemonic is used to answer the question "how many days are in this month?" If it's February, you're never going to be asking that question, because you already know how many days are in February. (Or if you don't, you need to look up whether the current year is a leap year, or find a different mnemonic; the poem won't help you.) So for example, it's June. I might not remember how many days are in June. So I'll quickly…
Still hard at work on the new project. Also been playing lots of Wizardry; I started playing the first one. As in, the first first one, on the Apple ][. I'm keeping a little play diary of my time with it; not a full-blown "Let's Play", I'm not documenting every detail of my time with it, but it might still be of interest to some. Right now I've just been posting it on fedi: Day 1 Day 2 and the rest (forgot to keep it threaded) Eventually it's going to be on my new website. That's the big…
The deluge of spam has become unbearable. You can still contact me at bluelander@tutanota.com. Sorry for the recent interruption in posting. I've been working on something big. Should hopefully be able to let you know more soon.
What the heck even is time?! April 13 was the one-year anniversary of the start of my full-time Linux journey, and I haven't talked about it in awhile. Well, I'm happy to report that no news is good GNUs. It's remained the most stable Linux experience I've ever had and it's not even a contest. I've barely felt the need to shut down or restart my computer: I put it into "hibernate" when I go to bed and wake it up when I get home from work the next day. It resumes with my desktop exactly as-is…
My caption “Now I wish I didn't eat my camera.” This was a tough one. I thought about it for several days before I settled on my caption. Every joke about the cat being the moon or a UFO seemed too obvious, or too difficult to make snappy. I debated going with a UFO-themed caption, since I figured most people would interpret it as a moon. I almost submitted “Unidentified Aerial Phe-paw-menon? I liked it better when we called them Unidentified Feline Objects.” But this was too awkward; nobody…
The Slop Cop is an online computer program that claims to identify prose that either is or resembles text generated by a large language model. For funsies, I thought I'd
When I was a kid, orange juice concentrate was a freezer staple. It's just a tube of highly concentrated juice you can mix with 3 parts water and have a pitcher of ice-cold orange juice ready to go. It's a simple but brilliant idea: why pay for the inconvenience of a bunch of extra water when you can supply your own? Well, I recently learned that you can also get apple juice the same way, which was exciting. I like orange juice, but the main time of day I want to drink fruit juice is as soon as…
My caption “I'm trying to to stop doomscrolling, would you mind switching it to the moon?” A million obvious jokes about gym etiquette, form critique, and sexual harassment immediately came to mind. After rejecting those, I started thinking about why the man might be there. What led to this situation? Assuming this is just part of the normal gym-going experience, why might the woman be annoyed with him? One common annoyance in shared public spaces is the presence of TVs. I've often wished I was…
I wasn't sure if I'd post about this every week, but I guess as long as I keep participating, I might as well. Every Monday I'll post my caption, what I think about the finalists, and whether I'm happy with my performance. What is "funny"? In my previous post, I doubted the possibility of writing a truly funny caption, but I didn't really get into why or how I'm defining "funny", so I thought I should explain where I'm coming from. "Funny" is one of those rare concepts that's 100% subjective,...
⚠️ content warning: hypothetical suicidal ideation in the abstract, evopsych nonsense People in the "Effect Altruist" (EA) and longtermist subcultures (and other members of the "rationalist community") like to play this game in which they assign a numerical value to human happiness. They say that happiness can be described on a scale from -100 to 100, where 100 is the theoretical happiest a person can possibly be, -100 is pure suffering, and 0 is neutral. At 0, they say, a person genuinely...
Every week the New Yorker holds a contest to write a caption for one of their cartoons. I'd like to participate in this more, because it's a good creative exercise, but knowledge of its existence always seems to exit my brain. It's good that the contest is only once a week, the infrequency gives it some weight, but once I submit a caption, I have no reason to think about it for an entire week, so I don't think about it until the next time something reminds me of it. I don't even remember to c...
I finished Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for the NES today. Heck of a game. It'll be in the next batch of Game Badges, and its rating will be 4❤️/5. It's messy and unpolished, but its foundation is a rock-solid platform adventure game. When I posted about finishing it, I remarked that it's "probably a top 10 or 15 NES game for me". But I wondered how true that was, so I looked at my master list and picked out every NES game. Of my 175 game badges, 24 of them (counting Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt) ar...
Doors of Doom (5❤️/5) DoReMi Fantasy (4❤️/5) Ever Oasis (no rating) Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (1❤️/5) RPG Maker 2003 (5💖/5)
