12 Feb 2023
In November last year birdsite went through a big change. Since then I wanted to write down some opinions, and even though back then it was pretty obvious what was going to happen, it didn’t hurt less when those changes became true. This post is rather a group of thoughts on what Twitter was, and what are the next steps for me.
Since 2007 Twitter was a public square for me. At the beggining I shared my posts from my Spanish-written gamedev blog El Chigüire Literario with some fellow Venezuelan bloggers. We were just a few back then, so we were a lot more candid. The Venezuelan government intervened heavily our media, which meant a lot of people starting turning towards Twitter for finding out what was really happening around. Twitter went from a mere curiosity to a very important place for daily discourse. We were no longer just a few in the public square: we were a lot now. And with such amount of people we reaching critical mass, and with that virality.
Virality implies that a well placed message can reach very far. But it also implies writing with a mentality that a post could be read potentially by hundreds of thousands of people. And not just read, but also reply back. Twitter never had effective tools to handle such a situation. Even worse, not everyone has the correct mental preparation to handle that. Being viral just does not happen in the physical world. Reading the barrage of good and bad comments can be a hard mental hit.
I still think that I tried to make out of that space the best I could. I met wonderful people, not so wonderful people, I found a job, I connected with people who I consider my friends, even though distance might mean I don’t see their faces each day.
I’ve been online for long, maybe too much. It’s not the first time I’m migrating from a social network. I’ve been in social networks before Twitter (I miss Pare o None). At the beginning, when Twitter went down frequently, I was shortly on Plurk (a name that I still think it’s hideous). I think the most important lesson here is that you should be able to preserve your relationships. This is known by social networks: that’s why there’s a really high barrier when you try to migrate. The most valuable social network is where the people you know and talk to are in. With that in mind, social networks try to keep you in as much as possible. Twitter was maybe the one who said the quiet part loudly when for a while they forbade to link to other platforms, but every single one is a walled garden in its own way.
Maybe this is why I’m so insistent in running a personal website. This is just a bunch of texts hosted on a server. I wish this didn’t need so much technical knowledge to maintain (can I tempt you with a Zonelets template and host it in Neocities?). It doesn’t allow a lot of interactivity either. At most you can write me an email (I have a mailing list with El Chigüire Literario in which I seldom write, just when there are new posts).
And that’s how we reach Mastodon, and the Fediverse in general. Mastodon emulates a lot of Twitter functionalities, but implements a protocol called ActivityPub. ActivityPub allows anyone (big asterisk here) to host a community, and share the posts from that community to other communities. Mastodon is a community that looks like Twitter, but there are other communities that look like Instagram, like the ones that use Pixelfed.
The idea of federation (and the Fediverse) is that you can join any community (or server, or instance, however you want to call it), and from there you can follow other accounts, regardless of the community where these accounts live at. Like email. In your community you have at least 3 timelines: your personal timeline, with the accounts you follow, the local timeline, with an automated selection of accounts in your instance, and the federated timeline, with is an aggregation of accounts from other communities that we all follow locally.
The big asterisk in “anyone can host a community” is that if hosting a bunch of file in a web server is already limiting for some people, running a Mastodon instance is a whole new level. I had considered running my own instance for me and my bots, but there is an economic and time barriers that made me reconsider this. Even with cheap options for using a managed instance, there are many things that I still don’t get about “federation”, and I don’t want to feel that in my main accounts.
As with real life, there are Mastodon servers that are like cities, and others are rather small towns. The one I’m in right now, mastodon.social, is the server maintained by the Mastodon developers. Given that it’s one of the first instances, and given how difficult it has been to separate the concept of Mastodon, the software, from Mastodon, the community, it’s a huge instance that grew up a lot when Twitter changed hands.
So there are people that prefer smaller, more specific servers. Like a server for infosec people. Another one for game developers. Another one for queer people working in tech. Federation in theory allows us to follow each other and read each other no matter which server we picked. I say in theory because in the way you can block other accounts, server can block other servers, and that’s when things get a bit more complicated.
One of the nice things about Twitter was that the sheer amount of people it attracted meant that a lot of communities were there too: academics, professionals, artists, etc. Losing Twitter means that that big Babel Tower we had of interconnected communities will be lost. Not everyone wants to migrate to Mastodon. Exporting your contact list on Twitter became more difficult as API gets locked down and applications can’t do this anymore.
Anyway, I think it’s worth paying attention to Mastodon in the years to come. As someone who has always believed in the open network, these spaces have to be occupied for them to be defended. Otherwise they’re lost. In joinmastodon.org there is a big selection of communities you can join. I hope I can see you there soon.
28 Dec 2022
I had planned to release an album this year, but that did not happen. Life happens. Still, 35 song sketches came out this year! Tuesday Tunesdays are still going, although you can tell that people returning to their (as it were) normal lives has an impact on time and activities.
Check out all the music I did in 2022 in the Music section!
There are a few of these that I really like (in no particular order):
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86 - Countdown, I used a longer version of it for the Caracas Game Jam 2022 Gameplay video summary. The version for the jam eventually ends, sorry about the whispering ending.
88 - The Stars89 - Edge93 - SlengTeng-
94 - Two tracks only, my personal favourite this year, uses one drum rack and one instrument (thanks Genny)
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99.75 - Skyline, yeah chord progression
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100 - PAPU, unexpected Cumbia cienaguera
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104 - Break, string chord progression!
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113 - Schraderwave, my contribution to Schraderwave, there’s a video of it on Twitter.
117 - Free124 - 251
18 Apr 2022
I started using Chordpro fairly recently after using Microsoft Word and Chordette for my chord sheets, and I’ve been quite happy with the results. However, Chordpro’s documentation is nice, but it lacks an onboarding/tutorial document. I had to do a fair amount of searching and experimenting to get to the point where I’m happy, and I feel it should have been simpler. I wrote some notes on how I got to that point, with the hopes that someone else can find them useful. It currently assumes that you know how to use Linux (or at least familiar with command line tools).
17 Apr 2022
I participated in the recent Caracas Game Jam 2022 (online) making a videogame. In this occasion I decided to use PICO-8, a fantasy console (I’ve written about this in El Chigüire Literario, my gamedev blog written in Spanish). At the end of the event I presented Cosmos, a game for two players. The objective is to build a planet keeping several elements in the center of the screen, using attraction/repulsion forces from the sun and the moon. You can play it in the browser or downloading it from that website.
I write code with Lua and used PICO-8 internal tools for making art, music and sound. In PICO-8, all this goes into the same file. I used Visual Studio Code for writing code, along with an extension for syntax highlighting. This way, VSCode uses half of the screen, and PICO-8 uses the other half. Once I’ve made changes in VSCode, I switch to PICO-8, press CTRL-R and the program reads the file again and picks up the changes.
An issue I had constantly and that I blame on the lack of habit: when you make changes in PICO-8 (e.g. sound, music, sprites, maps), you have to save the file before making changes in code in VSCode. If you forget, and you also make changes in Code before saving, when you press CTRL-R PICO-8 detects that there are changes in the file that weren’t made in the program, and refuses to load the file. This is not a problem, it’s actually very good. Resolving this is not critical: when you save in PICO-8, VSCode picks up the changes immediately, so you can Undo that change, copy the things you had made, Redo and apply the changes where appropriate. It’s usually better to be aware and avoid making changes in both programs at the same time.
I think PICO-8’s plain text format makes it ideal for collaboration, e.g. a person can do sprites/maps, another one does music/sound, and then all can be merged in a git repo. I did not test this workflow as I worked alone, but a setup like this seems quite feasible.
Sprites have 16 colours, and 8x8 at its smallest. The default colour palette in PICO-8 is really pleasing, and you can change it if you want to. Lua as a programming language: I’ve used it before and I am aware of its weirdness (e.g. arrays that start from 1 and not 0, declaring arrays and tables, etc.). PICO-8 Lua has some slight differences from the standard implementation (e.g. trigonometric functions go from 0..1, and not radians nor degrees), but the official documentation is really good, and there’s a cheat sheet that is quite useful as well.
Official docs: https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html
Cheat sheet: https://wh0am1.dev/pico8-api/
Sounds was my weakest moment in the process, as it was my first time using it. That said, it was really simple to make music and understand how the system works. If I had more time I would have written the code to make the music change on tempo. The platform gives you enough to write that, but the function to call music is very simple, so you have to write all the code for that case.
I would like to keep using PICO-8 for other things. You can call Serial port and GPIO, so it can work with an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi really nicely. I’d love to explore that part a bit more.
28 Feb 2022
Today marks a transition in this website. Last time I redesigned it, it was 2014. At the time I did it because I was looking for work. I was looking into breaking into the games industry, and the course I was doing insisted in putting up a portfolio. It served its purpose very well, I’m grateful that it did. After 8 years I can now retire that design.
My main motivation for changing it was to get rid of WordPress. Nothing personal against WordPress, it will still power El Chigüire Literario, my gamedev blog in Spanish, for the foreseeable future. But I did want a format that was as simple as possible, plain HTML files. They’re generated from Jekyll, of course, but having plain HTML files means a simpler website, one with just static files. Easy to preserve, no database to maintain, no cookies popup, no security concerns, and still a fully bilingual place (thanks to the polyglot plugin). Throw in some simpler design, thanks to the Lanyon theme, and now I feel that this website will keep going for a few more years.
This redesign started back in May 2020, but life got in the way. Returning to it, and completing it marks a personal milestone in my recovery from some personal issues and the pandemic. It now includes two sections that I’ve wanted to include for a long time: hardware projects, and music. Both things have become really important to me, and thus they now have their place in this website.
As much as social media allows us to communicate with each other really quickly, they come and go. And when they go, they take down all the things you’ve done for them with it. I don’t want that to happen to the things I do. At least, I want to make that my responsibility. In this age, making the effort to preserve our own websites is more important than ever. That’s the reason it’s been renamed to “A Live Archive”. This is a place to keep my stuff available. I’ve done some work to make it as easy as possible to myself. I hope you get something out of it.
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