A Lovely Harmless Monster – Blog

In my mandatory annual fire safety class the other day, they had us run through the same training exercise as always.

Well, sort of a dream.

Putting images in frames with nicely-formatted captions like in my last two posts is a bit labor intensive on Mataroa.

When I was in high school, I had the bright idea that I could save a screenshot of a Winamp MilkDrop visualizer in progress, and post it to my DeviantArt account as if it were an abstract digital painting I made.

I understand the impulse to say "nothing's impossible".

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.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed to the fundraiser so far.

Hello, friends.

I like bowling.

August is coming up, which means Blaugust, a challenge in which bloggers try to post 31 times in August, is also coming up.

I knew it was legal to sell fake medicine in the US.

(note: this post uses <details> and <summary> tags to hide the riddle answers.

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.

It wasn't always like this.

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 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 in manifesto form.

In reference to these results for this survey This poem is a mnemonic.

Still hard at work on the new project.

The deluge of spam has become unbearable.

What the heck even is time?!

My caption "Now I wish I didn't eat my camera."

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.

When I was a kid, orange juice concentrate was a freezer staple.

My caption “I'm trying to to stop doomscrolling, would you mind switching it to the moon?”

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.

⚠️ content warning: hypothetical suicidal ideation in the abstract, evopsych nonsense People in the "Effective Altruist" (EA) and longtermist subcultures (and other members of the "rationalist community") like to play this game in which they assign a nume…

Every week the New Yorker holds a contest to write a caption for one of their cartoons.

I finished Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for the NES today.

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)

Finishing Hero's Last Hurrah was a revelatory experience for me.

Sorry for the radio silence here on the blog, I've been laser-focused on finishing and bug-testing my entry for the Cookie Cutter RM2k3 jam.

I have a good excuse this time, though: Faraway Times, a game enthusiast and indie dev I follow on the fediverse, started an RPG Maker game jam and it's a perfect fit for me.

Progress is still being made on my cable station, albeit much more slowly than when the idea was fresh and I was full of energy.

Since my first compilation review was so unpopular, I thought I’d alienate whatever readers I have left by doing an even longer one.

Going to have to neglect the blog this week because a big project came into my head instead.

I've been using CX file explorer on Android I think since day one?

Contents Discovery My Standpoint The Reviews Conclusion Discovery On my way to work on January 2, I noticed a bunch of CDs in the dirt at the side of the road.

Now that streaming TV has entered its late-stage enshittification era, one nostalgia-goggled sentiment I'm starting to see goes like this: "Cable TV wasn't so bad!

Gauntlet 2 (2❤️/5) Hook (1❤️/5) Super Mario Bros.

Thanks to Lisa for her tip w/r/t migrating from bearblog to mataroa.

Being able to migrate our data freely between open platforms is all well and good in theory, but when every service uses its own opinionated data format, it can feel like the option might as well not even be there.

If, like me, every time you cook spaghetti, while the water's boiling you frantically search the web for a transcript of Season 1, episode 10 of Good Eats (Pantry Raid I—Use Your Noodle) to remember whether Alton Brown says to use a teaspoon of salt or ta…

My main gamepad is a Retrobit Legacy 16, a perfectly cromulent USB pad that in my dusty memory banks feels exactly like a SNES controller, but it's been awhile since I've used one so I'm sure there are more differences than I realize.

I realized that a big part of the data entry portion of my job is retyping information contained in the filenames of my completed Work Product Units (WPUs.)

Bingo and Sudoku are both pretty boring games about putting numbers in grids, right?

Every post before this one has been imported from an old blog: from Apr 25—Oct 12 2025, I self-hosted a blog on my website, and from Apr 15 2022—Apr 24 2025 I posted industriously but intermittently on bearblog, except for 2024, when I posted on Dreamwidt…

Just barely missed finishing Blaugust.

1.

Today I made the mistake of not only writing about a book I read, but also trying to make an insightful point about it and tie it into broader cultural events.

Google has announced their intention to end the installation of applications on android phones by 2026.