After a few grueling months of inconsistent effort, my newest comic "Los Ojos Del Desiertos" is now available to Neat Hobby! newsletter subscribers. It's a short five-page supernatural tale of greed in the American southwest, in the classic anthology style of Creepy and Tales from the Crypt.
Subscribers also get access to a blog post with a gallery of pencil layouts, the story of how I came up with "Los Ojos" and the original script I wrote.
Posted July 19, 2025
I've been trying to come up with a simple explainer about how chatbots work, and I'm finding it really difficult to convey the non-deterministic aspects of the technology.
Let's say you're an alien from outer space. You don't understand human language, but you have several hundred years of intercepted radio signals from Earth in your supercomputer. When you finally visit Earth and meet your first humans, your supercomputer makes an educated guess as to what words to use to greet them. Unfortunately, neither you nor your computer know that "to serve mankind" can be understood as either assisting humans or cooking and eating them. Diastrous hilarity ensues.
That's sort of what a chatbot is. It's a computer program that can string words together into a convincing sentence by predicting which words to use. It can do this because it's studied the whole of human language and knows which words usually precede and follow other words.
Usually. Because sometimes it predicts the wrong word, and that single mistake might lead it down a path where the sentence it gives you is grammatically correct but factually wrong.
If you ask a chatbot for a summary of the life of Ben Franklin, it'll probably get most of it correct because the chatbot has studied all of Wikipedia. But because it's predicting what words to say to you, there's always the chance that it'll guess wrong and suddenly your report on Ben Franklin includes a section on how he appeared on season three of The Office.
It's unlikely a chatbot will reply "I don't know" because it doesn't actually know anything. It's not thinking about what it's saying. It can't think! It's designed to process your words and give back a reply. Not a true or accurate reply, just a reply.
That much alone is difficult enough to convey! And that's not even the worst part!
Posted July 14, 2025
I didn't expect anyone to acutally play The Plot of the Phantom, but I also didn't think it would turn up on waxy, Boing Boing, and Hacker News either. It feels apt that it was old school Web 1.0-style blogging that contributed the most to people trying out the game.
This very unserious game I abandoned writing when I was 14 is now the most-viewed thing I've produced. People are asking for clues and mapping out the dungeon on their own accord. A reader kindly made an entry for it at the Interactive Fiction Database and included a review, which concluded "this is a game you play to feel empathy with the author, not because of its excellence standing alone." Perfect.
Based on feedback, I built a new hinting system into the game. Type "hint" to get up to three (and only three!) clues to get unstuck. There's also a few new Easter eggs and a slew of tiny improvements.
I'm glad people are enjoying it! Although I regret that I didn't track how many players erased the whiteboard in the Office Room!
Posted July 13, 2025
If you knew me in 1984, you would also know that you could find me glued to a chair in front of our family's Atari 800 personal computer, typing out BASIC programs from issues of COMPUTE! magazine and letting the summer days go by. I was also obsessed with the Infocom series of text adventure games, although I'd have to go to a friend's house to play them because they were almost exclusively for the Commodore 64.
So of course I set out to make my own text adventure game! The Plot of the Phantom was a Zork-alike dungeon crawl with plenty of hide-and-seek puzzle quests for objects required to advance the game (e.g. to open a door, you needed to find the key, which was in the bucket at the bottom of the well, but you needed to find a rope first, etc.). I spent most of the summer working on it, only to be flummoxed when the game completely consumed the 64K (expanded!) of RAM available. A year or so later I got involved in my high school's theatre program and started learning how to play electric guitar, and programming didn't feel that important anymore. So the floppy disks went into a box along with the computer and peripherals and it sat my parent's house until one day it was sold and that was that.
Let's now time-travel to the future a bit. It's 2018, and I've somehow gotten myself a career in software engineering, despite getting D's in maths and a BA in English that took five years to complete. I'm on a leave of absence, and I'm poking around Playfic marveling at the thousands of text adventure games written by hobbyists. This is how I learn about the existence of Inform 7, a modern programming language for creating text adventures ("interactive fiction" in today's parlance) that run on ported versions of the original Infocom software.
So I have an idea.
The The Plot of the Phantom code was gone, but I still had the original notebook of maps and objects. How fun would it be to recreate the game using the same virtual machine that Infocom used to create Zork? Well, not fun enough at the time I guess, because I quickly forgot about it after my leave ended.
But then: COVID. Stuck working from home, protests everywhere, wildfires turing the sky orange, a terrible election year. I needed something to escape, and that's when I pulled out that notebook started tinkering with Inform 7. I hadn't written down everything so it took some time to remember how some of the rooms and puzzles worked. I did some editing, removing some rooms, getting rid of scoring and treasure hunting, and — important! — changing the ending to be a lot less violent (I blame 80s action movies).
As I went about recreating my minature world, the backstory started to become...meta. The original version didn't actually have a story arc, you just had to get from one end of the dungeon to the other. Today the game has some references to the kid I was in 1984, and in some ways is a bit autobiographical. There are some new objects to examine and puzzles to explore, but the new game is largely what it was back then.
And now, it's finished. After forty years, you can now play The Plot of the Phantom in your web browser. It's pretty short, and it's not particularly difficult either, especially if you've played similar games. You can probably finish it in an hour or two.
I'm kind of happysad about it? It feels little bit like putting a ghost to rest.
Anyway, I enjoyed making some retro box art! Look close, there are clues.
Posted June 23, 2025
document.currentScript is more useful than I thought. I only recently learned about this myself!Posted June 17, 2025
Hands are hard to draw! So I drew a bunch of them. One hand for every day in May, posted to BlueSky with the hashtag #MayoDeManos. I'm not certain I improved so much as confirmed that my style has plateaued. If I ever do this again I'll focus on simplified, less rendered hands and more poses of hands holding objects.
Check out the swipeable gallery of all the hands over at Neat Hobby! — powered by Neat Gallery! of course!
Posted June 1, 2025
My inbox received a one-two punch in the form of notices that beloved Mozilla-owned read-it-later app Pocket and educational coding playground Glitch would be shutting down. More accurately, Glitch is discontinuing app hosting, and what remains to be seen is what Glitch will become without it.
Free/cheap web services come and go, but losing these two is harsh. I've used Pocket to collect stuff for years for my "Pocket Lint" series of link posts. Glitch will be missed as a free/cheap way to host a website, app, or "link in bio" page while learning how to do so.
It was, also, a cool place to host an ExpressJS + SQLite app that didn't need to be available 24/7. For the past twelve months I've been working off and on on a handful of low-traffic, indieweb-oriented CRUD apps that were designed to be chucked onto a platform like Glitch and embedded into any website, even those without a backend. Among them: a classic blog commenting widget, a webmentions service, and — mmm, savory irony! — a read-it-later link collection app to replace Pocket. Ha!
In the meantime, I've migrated my link-collecting from Pocket to Linkding, hosted for cheap at PikaPods. As for my Glitch projects, they're on hold until I can find another app host to deploy on.
If you have a recommendation, leave a comment on this post, which is using my aforementioned blog commenting app — developed and hosted at Glitch!
Posted May 25, 2025
The Neat Gallery! image gallery generator now has the ability to support and preserve ALT text for thumbnail images with a simple metadata file that it generates for you in advance. Fill out this file and Neat Gallery! will insert your ALT text into the gallery HTML the next time you run the script.
Also, the Github repo is now public. Yikes. Thanks Joe for noticing and letting me know.
Posted May 25, 2025
A month ago I was idly swiping through IG Stories and was presented an ad for an upcoming rock show. I usually just ignore ads but the tiny snippet of audio — like Deftones, but gentler — grabbed me immediately.
Unfortunately I couldn't remember the artist's name the next day. I went searching through my Instagram history and could find no evidence that I had seen it. I had neglected to bookmark it (it was an ad!) and the ad itself wasn't for the band but the show, so it's likely that the promoter or venue or whatever was the actual source. That said, I did "rewind" the ad repeatedly to listen. Why couldn't I find a history of this? Why is it the one time I was interested in an IG ad enough to interact with it, there's no trace of it later?
I clicked on a Facebook Reel once and Facebook showed me baby elephant videos for three months, jfc.
Anyway, almost a week later the same ad got served to me again and this time I jumped on it: Scarlet House.
It's so hard to find new music that appeals to me the way this artist does, and it just annoys the hell out of me that even when the algorithms work they're still broken in some other way. So I am sharing this with you: Scarlet House is incredible, and there's a whole genre of zoomergaze bands that are channeling gothy, MBV-era 90s alt-rock. Now you know.
Posted May 19, 2025
Later this week the Neat Hobby! Newsletter crew will get a new eight-page comic called "From The Shallows," a work I'm especially proud of. There's also going to be a free "deluxe edition" which includes a downloadable color PDF of the comic, concept art, animation, and the complete formatted script.
Join us and you can grab this too! Or you can wait until I release it (the comic only, not the deluxe stuff) to the public later this year.
Posted May 19, 2025