iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Oof. At least ours has only been inventing imaginary paper jams to get attention; open and close the back panels and then it's happy

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

hey now, I didn't even say anything 🙃

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

...now there's an autocorrect for "salad" that I haven't seen before "Pint tomatoes and quarter pound satanic please thank you"

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

But the biggest thing that's been bugging me about Mina is that some things are difficulty options that you can flip at any time, and some of them are "well if you're willing to spend enough of your limited videogame time grinding/searching then you can have them" and it feels very arbitrary?

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Haha, the person who wrote that article on Mina is WAAAAYYY better at games than I am. Pits have been a HUGE "I gave up after 45 deaths" thing in this game.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

b/c you know the *monitor* will display them at even intervals even if the JS timestamp has some unfortunate jitter in it

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Ah, well, that feels like a not-too-hard case: use the timestamp only to calc N to render every Nth frame? As long as your renderer's consistently fast enough to fit in one frame or consistently overflows into the second, it should run evenly? Even hardcode N=4?

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I tend to do the usual decoupling of fixed physics timestep from render step, think I first got that from Glenn Fielder back in the day: www.gafferongames.com/post/fix_you... And my JS shim is at joshgrams.com/2026/06/16/s... in case that's helpful at all -- dunno if it's documented adequately...

gafferongames.com

Fix Your Timestep! | Gaffer On Games

Hello readers, I’m no longer posting new content on gafferongames.com Please check out my new blog at mas-bandwidth.com! Introduction Hi, I’m Glenn Fiedler and welcome to Game Physics. In the previous...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Hmm. I don't think I've ever tried to estimate: I just simulate and render on the rAF call, and if it takes too long then it drops frames... but I rarely do anything that's too simulation- or render-intensive...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I see other people have pointed you to the timestamp from rAF: I find that still has a bit of jitter in it, so I tend to keep a running average and use the rounded value of that as my fixed timestep, then work in multiples of that...

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Reposted by Joshua Grams

Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Check out this banger of a game-poem analysis! lavieenmeow takes a 6.4K-word deep dive into the stylistic habits around the text of text adventures, and how Drew Cook manipulates those expectations as a poetic form: the-rosebush.com/2026/06/pars...

the-rosebush.com

Parser poetics in Portrait With Wolf – The Rosebush

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Mmm, I *think* they did a good job of not having the trailer spoil anything outside the first half-hour or so but I wouldn't like to swear to it -- been too long since I played

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

the-rosebush.com

Parser poetics in Portrait With Wolf – The Rosebush

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I'll just keep having fun implementing obscure quarter- to half-century-old algorithms by hand, thanks.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

It was fascinating to me b/c the language density was at the perfect(ly wrong) level to push all my "this fantasy writing has too many made-up words" buttons. But it was short and cute and I had a good time with it anyway!

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Reposted by Joshua Grams

lit_patches @litpatches.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne v0.22: Added special mechanics for infiltrating piloted mecha.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Yeah, programs should have a global config location and a user config location (which has priority), but I'm just getting back to Linux again after a decade away and it seems like some of the conventions have changed (why? 🤷) and MAME was always... ah... quirky anyway

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

They'd be read-only because unices have that multi-users-per-computer divide between global stuff that only the admin should be editing, and per-user files that the user should be editing (unless MAME puts config in your home directory, in which case I have no idea)

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

In general, global config files (like those in /etc) are intended to be edited by the admin and the package manager should leave them alone except to create them if they don't exist? It's been a while but I'm pretty sure that's how it *should* work

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Maybe that's a pipe dream. But it feels like part of the problem is people relying for so long on the global nature of the internet to hope to find an audience *somewhere out there*, and building fame rather relationships, not making them *your* customers instead of Steam's or Sony's or Google's?

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Having grown up around small businesses, I suspect the numbers should just about work to start really small and grow into something? Especially in marketing collaborations between (geographically distributed) devs aiming at similar customers.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

In that vein, I always wonder about taking game marketing offline/local. Scale WAY down: games with "self-publishing a novella" ish amounts of dev time, aimed at a particular non-gamer group, publish on mobile, anthologize with other devs from other places, do the unglamorous in-person leg-work...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Eh, you can just pull a Stardew Valley and set it in a profession that no one knows anything about 🙃

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Reposted by Joshua Grams

Florian Beijers @zersiax.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

When indie game developers put #blind protagonists in their #games, it's always good to have an #actuallyBlind #gamer check it for accuracy. Exactly what I did in this #youtube #react video www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE81... #blindness #disability #accessibility #representation #gaming

youtube.com

Blind Gamer Reacts to Blind Protagonist in Cane & Able: Accurate or Not?

YouTube video by ViewpointUnseen

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Took me a second to realize why the left side of that graph is clustered in vertical lines but I guess it's difficult to have a game that credits 2.58 people...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

The Coffee Cake Caper is a cosy detective game at a carnival: who sabotaged the bake-off?! It didn't quite stick the landing; a newish author who didn't get enough playtesting? Some of the evidence is a little unreasonable. The story was fun and dramatic; I didn't mind using the walkthrough.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Join the Swarm is another game bundle from an IF program in Slovenia, Slovakia, and Romania: 10 games from students aged 13-18 (and 2 of their teachers). Haven't played these yet but they're usually very short and very charming and slightly surreal. Looking forward to it.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

The Universal Robot (assembled by Hex) is another excellent Twine adventure game by Agnieszka Trzaska where you wander around and use items on things. Assemble and train a robot to take your job so your boss can fire you (out the airlock) or find another one of the 12 possible endings...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Enigmart is a collection of daily puzzles made during EnigMarch, wrapped in a surreal grocery store shopping experience. The first puzzle is divisive; some find it super easy, some find it one of the hardest, but past that it's a fun collection of (mostly word) puzzles with a light story wrapper.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

In Strings: a (bug)folk song, you are a bugfolk bard setting out to gather four master musicians and sing the moon down from the sky. Short, adorable parser game (although let's be real, you're still a bug, so you can still be gruesomely eaten).

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

How about some more cheerful stuff? The Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction is open, with 22 new games to play. www.springthing.net/2026/play.html

springthing.net

The 2026 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction

Spring Thing is an annual online festival celebrating new interactive fiction from all kinds of people.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Yeah, and do you like the payment processors enough to let them skim from the actual business's profits on all your local purchases?

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

15:03 "I think once you act once, it becomes easier to act again" I love this but also my immediate thought was "Not just for the murderers in crime novels, then?" 😂

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Even as a regular command-line user it's been surprisingly much nicer than remembering the Python or Node.js incantation and *then* going to the browser to open it up, so... dunno if you want to trust some random internet guy but I've been enjoying it enough that I wanted to share...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

So... shameless self promotion: there used to be this tiny local web server that you could just drop files or folders on and it would serve them AND pop open your browser... a couple weeks ago I *finally* got fed up enough to make my own: joshgrams.itch.io/local-server

joshgrams.itch.io

Local Server by JoshGrams

A convenient test web server for static files

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Made a quick bookmark for the case when "was I on the left page or the right page, and which paragraph was I looking at?" is a relevant question...

A strip of bright red card-stock with a white band around it. The band has with two leftward-pointing arrows cut out so you can see the red showing through. It's lying in an open book with rather small text.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

😂 "information is *epistemically* relevant when it helps locate us within a partition of possible space imposed by a question under discussion [...]. We could [call this] e-relevance. It's just unfortunate (though possibly at times appropriate) that that sounds so close to irrelevance."

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

OK, this is very clever (source from the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope ebook).

HTML showing a phrase (with some words split up) formatted as 12 separate links: "Or open at a ran dom pla ce and read from there!" linking to articles 16, 85, 105, 39, 27, 42, 48, 81, 76, 95, 101, and 125.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

"Jonathan Mitchell (2023) offers an account of the relationship between distinct moods and attention, and Peet and Pitcovski (2024) appeal to the rationality of attention to better understand the rationality of emotions." What a way to end the theory overview.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

"Ann Brinkerhoff (2023) offers an account of the partiality demanded by friendship in terms of demands on attention. Jeffrey Seidman (2016) gives an attentional theory of caring.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

"There is an increasing body of work arguing that attention is key to if not constitutive of a wide range of phenomena. To offer just a few examples, Michael Cholbi (2022) has argued that grief is best conceptualized as an attentional phenomenon.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

I'm only a quarter of the way through, but what a banger of a book. Dense academic prose interspersed with everyday examples for understanding, amusement, and surprise. Bravo. Pity it's > $100, but I that's academic publishing for you.

The cover of Priority & Prejudice: The Epistemology of Salience & Attention, by Jessie Munton. Looking almost like a nebula, I assume it's a network visualization: a nearly black background with clouds of colored points of light. The title is centered in a black box with an orangey-gold border. I was doing an art project so I made some white paper "flowers" as a contrast against the color of the cover.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Finally did #EnigMarch day 2: color (just after the day 3 prompt is up, huh). Haven't fixed any of the rough spots in the puzzle player; hopefully tomorrow. Some of the interesting deductions fell apart with the last couple clues, but oh well. Same URL: joshgrams.itch.io/enigmarch-2026

joshgrams.itch.io

EnigMarch 2026 by JoshGrams

Logic grid puzzles, probably

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Oh, I see, thanks! I had a P in the title so I never would have gotten that...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Can I get a hint for the second stage? I think I'm completely stuck there.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

I made a half-baked logic-grid puzzle editor a while back and keep meaning to finish/polish it, so... #EnigMarch day 1: Season. joshgrams.itch.io/enigmarch-2026 I don't expect these'll be anything to write home about but eh, practice. That's the main point anyway, right?

joshgrams.itch.io

EnigMarch 2026 by JoshGrams

Logic grid puzzles, probably

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Outside vs. inside. Also, ugh, 2 inches is such an annoyingly small amount of snow.

A path in the foreground, with piles of plowed snow pushed up against trees: the latticed shadows of their branches texturing the snow. in the background, an open snowy field sprinkled with tufts of dry brown plant stalks.

Pea shoots under grow lights: shallow black plastic trays, longer than your forearm, with dirt and a nearly solid covering of yellowy-tan pea seed. They're starting to form a thick carpet, shoots maybe the length of your thumb, still yellowy-green and with their leaves mostly folded and just starting to open out. On the shelf below you can see more trays with just the seed, no shoots starting yet.

Small tomato seedlings in a tray of soil blocks: they make me think of a troupe of dancers, long thin cotyledons reaching out from purplish stems like arms out for balance, feathery true leaves nodding above.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Heh. Between hard drive space and rural internet, anything over 1-2gb is "welp, guess that's some money I'm saving by not buying this." If your game is 4gb+ I have to really REALLY expect to love it or never mind. Although I grew up never EVER having "gaming" hardware, so I'm extreme here.

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

I thought exploring was what undergrad was FOR: I think my list would only be less eclectic because I dashed through in three years and also dove WAY into math. Though I guess being homeschooled the whole way, I don't have a conventional view...

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Joshua Grams @joshgrams.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

This is why I basically never review; I'm almost entirely interested in what doesn't work, or how they could be better. And when buying, I know if I'm interested; I'm asking if a game does things that hit my pet peeves: so positive reviews are almost 100% useless and I only read the negative ones.

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