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Leon ._.

@leonarnott.bsky.social
228 followers 113 following 802 posts

(he/him/his… for now…) Maker of webgames "You are SpamZapper 3.1" and "Phone in Mouth"; Pochi and Nyaa fan; Same as @webbedspace on Twitter. fairysvoice.net

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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 1h
All videogames have the implicit premise "what if the world worked like a videogame" and there's nothing they can do about it. But then, even paintings have the premise "what if the world worked like a painting (everyone reacts simultaneously to a nearby event while naked)".
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 2h
I have only a few strong opinions on the Metroid series but I cannot condone recommending Zero Mission first because you will encounter all the music and setpieces it copied from Super Metroid and thus think it's more creative than it actually is.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
modarchive.org/index.php?request=vi… - Favourite parts of The Ur-Quan Masters (fka Star Control II) are when you're majestically exploring a galaxy at war, getting messaged by a new undiscovered faction, and finding out that their theme music sounds like this
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Today in CSS: We all know you can change the highlight colour of selected text, but it's impossible to animate that colour. Unless… the colour was just a variable inherited from the parent element, using @​property to make it animatable… Hahahahaha…
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"Don't ask me how I know. You should ask me *who* I know." –the talking boulder from Void Stranger on LinkedIn
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Recently I've been brushing up on web technology, and not just the new stuff like position-anchor, but old stuff that could have been the future but wasn't. Just now I taught myself XPath and document.evaluate() for basically no reason.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
To me Ocarina Of Time 2026 feels less like a remake and more like merch of the original game, but in videogame form
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
They call me the Shadow-Shrouded Prince of Not Posting
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Epic new idea for protecting your blog posts from LLM training: write them entirely in really-small-font-size ASCII art
ASCII art that reads: I generally prefer to play games in windowed mode, and for pixel art games, I like the pixels to be at a good midpoint of legibility - not so large that dithering and other shading effects become unreadable, but not as small as 1x. Now, old RPG Maker games (earlier than 2020) offer no obvious means of zooming their windows, requiring external tweaking tools be used. Based on my experiences, I've found that
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Little Known Song Continuity Crossover: The song "Danny Boy" is about a boy who went down to the woods on the day of the Teddy Bears' Picnic
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I've been thinking about how card games and card-game-adjacent roguelikes tend to have two kinds of counterintuitively opposing systems - "diversifying systems" that force the player to diversity their moves, and "specialising systems" that force the player to restrict them.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I think it's funny that when a citizen is forced to do something by the government, it's called an order, but when a constitutional monarch is forced to do something by the government, it's called "advice".
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
New Deltarune characters are certainly not going to be coming back in later chapters, so while I'm happy they had their time in the sun, I'm sad that an incredible Aqua-Lancer pesterlog will never happen.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Thinking about what makes me like 868-HACK and 868-BACK so much, and while the core mechanics of alerts and encounters are really fresh and satisfying to grasp, the one huge reason is simply the cyberpunk setting. That by itself holds everything together and gives it beauty.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
*finds out there's an Isle of Life painting that's the opposite of Isle of the Dead* Folks, Böcklin has jumped the shark
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
I love games that make you wanna become the wiki for them
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Yeah, you BET I'm hurriedly replaying Deltarune. My new favourite underappreciated character is the secret shopping UI white tiger face.
Screenshot of the shopping screenClose-up of two fancy window borders that form a tiger face by seeming coincidence
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Reading the ImageMagick command line manual
-delay centiseconds 	display the next image after pausing-flip 	flip image in the vertical direction
-flop 	flop image in the horizontal direction
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Alright, the game's been out long enough, time to post insular nonsense and relatable made-uppery #868-BACK
868-BACK Most Common Dignity-Losing Mistakes Chart
Forgot about rear-mounted laser!
Forgot about polymorphing laser!
Forgot about instant replay!
Forgot about latent virus!
"This time .index will work"
Thought sector 7 was sector 8
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
fairysvoice.net/blog/How_to_... - Hey! If you're playing 868-BACK and are still coming to grips with the game, here's a new blog post with some tips for beginner play. I'm hoping there's something here that might get you up and running on both feet.
fairysvoice.net
How to Play 868-BACK: Beginner Tips
by Leon
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
A big design thought I've been having about 868-BACK is how it takes a game with stage-spanning power progression (on each 8-floor stage, you start with few progs and slowly gain more as you fight through) and adds a second, run-spanning power progression system (devices) to it.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Hey! For the past quite-awhile I've been playtesting 868-BACK store.steampowered.com/app/3304110/86 8BACK/ It's the sequel to 868-HACK, one of my lifetime favourite minimalist traditional roguelikes, and let me personally guarantee you, this one's absolutely even better. It has the stuff in spades.
store.steampowered.com
Save 10% on 868-BACK on Steam
868-BACK is a computer-hacking strategy roguelike game where your mission is to dismantle capitalism one server at a time! Use hacking powers to fight enemies, steal the servers' data, and face increa...
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Mario Maker 2 out of context
How do people afford to gaslight with these rising petroleum prices??
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
"How can you people live with yourselves" ​- Me remembering that North Americans call the room with the toilet the bathroom
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Seems everyone's talking about Titanium Court now that it's released. …And, as it turns out, I /also/ have a release review of the game at the ready. Here's my *gameplay-only* review, its two "tides", and whether the most effective strategy is fun or not. fairysvoice.net/blog/A_gamep...
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
@foddy.net
bfod 1:39 AM - 22 Apr 2016
I think there are now more articles saying ‘Stephen’s Sausage Roll is too hard for us to review’ than there are actual reviews of the game
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
If the web platform is standardised then explain THIS
Side-by-sides of Firefox and Chrome showing completely different renders for various border-collapse settingsHTML code showing four tables with different large colourful borders with the border-collapse CSS.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
I was just browsing Twitter, and right while I was reading, it started auto-translating Japanese tweets without my asking and I had to click the "Show original" button to turn it off.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Thinking about software names with common one-letter prefixes… Apple's "i" is trying too hard to be cool. G from GNU should be cool like "g-force" but gets attached to and silenced by "n" way too often. q from Qt has a whiff of wrongness to it. X from X11 is downright ugly.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
I've often said browser-side web programming is about trying to communicate between three languages at once (HTML, CSS, JS). Well, if you add JSON, two XML sublangs (SVG and MathML), two shader languages (WebGL and WebGPU), and WASM, it's actually much, much worse than that.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Welcome to… THE GAME DESIGN MINUTE Kiddy Kong's skipping-stone water-bounce should have exponentially increased in height on each bounce until you could fly over half the level like the springboards in SMB Lost Levels …Thus concludes THE GAME DESIGN MINUTE
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Was reading a really old forum post about the Wayback Machine, and one of the pages linked from it was this worryingly contemporary-feeling "you can just make a website" page from 1997 web.archive.org/web/19970110164754/…
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Reddit post: Why is RAR compression the format of choice for pirates? Top reply: Cause if you move around the letters you get "ARR."
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Thinking about how fortunate it is that when Phil Katz invented the most ubiquitous compression format in history, he called it "Deflate". Easy to remember and apt. Meanwhile, every compression format created after it is some substring of LZWSSMA78265.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
@heckmaybe.bsky.social Quick question, is it possible for the Lifeline vods to be uploaded to the Youtube site? The game came up in conversation and I wanted to link them, but it seems they're gone (forever?)
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
So you've run into that age-old problem: every time you mispronounce semicolon as "se-mico-lon" over and over, people quickly make you stop. But did you know that if you sneak into the wilderness during new moon, you can say that word incredibly wrong as many times as you want?
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Hammerhead shark illustration from 1735, Japan, from the Illustrated Guide to the Products of Oki Province
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
These oven gloves I've got are shedding a lot of their internal lining, thus upgrading them to "exciting gloves that make removing things from the oven an exciting experience".
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
You know hard drive prices are actually, seriously in trouble when a tweet about WizTree, the disk usage graphing freeware, gets 11K retweets
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Alexander the Great trying increasingly harebrained schemes to trick his weary troops into letting him invade India, including Opposite Day, ventriloquism during a vote call, and publicly raising a signpost reading "←Macedon" then spinning it around in the dead of night
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
BRB renaming the links section of my site to "awesome list" and rehosting it on GitHub so people actually take it seriously
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Just noticed that this packet of dental floss I've got here will allegedly expire in 2023. Is… that possible
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
I just learned this word and I already despise it. This word only exists to titillate linguistics majors and make innocent people lose at trivia
beestings(n.)

"colostrum," late Old English bysting, from beost "first milk of a cow after calving," a general West Germanic word (cognates: Old High German biost, German Biest, Middle Dutch and Dutch biest, North Frisian bjast) of unknown origin.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Everyone's moved onto enclose.horse when I'm still not done with endless.horse yet : (
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
You are now manually excreting bile acid into your duodendum in response to a digestive intake of fats : )
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
It's killing me that right now both of Earth's famously inhabitable hemispheres are 45 degrees, but it's Fahrenheit in the north and Celsius in the south
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
store.steampowered.com/app/3382070/… – Playing "Queen of Treasure Isle". I wasn't sure what precisely the reviewers meant by "amazing pixel art", but it turns out it means it's stuffed full of pictorial descriptions like these:
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
It feels right, somehow, that the human body, a purely natural creation of the epochs, is maybe the most important single object to learn to draw.
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
The JS with statement is funny because it's clear what problem it solves - heavy use of, say, Math methods requires typing "Math" dozens of times - but the solution isn't "make it easier to assign methods to short variables", it's "invent a wacky new kind of variable altogether".
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Leon ._. @leonarnott.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Knowing you're going to be the last full generation to live and die before the generation ship actually lands is bittersweet at best and existentially confronting at worst.
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