Howdy, fellow navigator!
Today: handmade things. In our merciless modern world, can something that doesn't scale compete with something that doesn't care? In this post, I write about:
- A search engine curated by humans
- A board game construction set
- Random links of coolness
- And finally, blog updates
Ooh, an outline! Being fancy this time. Anyway.
Search the web and go
on an adventure
Wiby is an “old school” search engine. Humans curate it, not robots. As a result, Wiby has its own flavor, and is pretty much immune to the mountains of soulless text produced by a neural-network automaton.
I think it's best not to explore it like Google et al. Peruse it when you're curious about a topic, not for precise questions. I found myself going much deeper into the results than for automated search engines.
- Wiby's home page. Just that page overflows with promises of old web adventure. That lighthouse! Does your search engine even have a lighthouse?
- I discovered a game audio designer with it. Nick Dymond is the vibe master who worked for Shadows of Doubt, the procedural detective game.
- With “surprise me”, you can reach random websites like this one about critters of the Salish Sea. Now I'm prepared to dive in a sea didn't even know before.
The construction set for
chess variants / race games
Then, to show that this post's theme isn't just something I made up on the spot (which I totally did), time to talk about the chess variants construction set.
I built one with the instructions on the Chess Variants website, but only the first two boards since I'm not a fan of really big games. I managed to rearrange the layout a bit, from 8x8 to 7x10. That allowed me to use A4 paper efficiently to make 3x3 centimeter squares.
It's not limited to chessboards. There are just enough one-dimensional segments to make a heart-shaped race game board with a big and a small loop. I find that layout more interesting than the Monopoly-style square outline, or the Parcheesi cross. You even have a crossroads to change your direction.
Hey this is the first image on this blog! I took way too much time to dither it and convert it to webp format.
Those plastic figures are the original Notes (found in Kinder® Surprises). Yep, that's what inspired the Super Note game projects.
Time for the
random links of coolness
It doesn't have anything to do with search engines or chess variants, but I still want to share links about handmade things. Those are the freshest links, they smell really good and they don't need to be put in the fridge. Unlike you. You have no choice, this is inevitable. Sorry for being ominous, here are the links.
- Chris Armstrong presents Digital gardening. Should I turn this blog into something more wiki-like? Cagibi means storeroom/tool shed in French. Then I guess everything I need for gardening is right here!
- Dave Rupert is having as hard a time making games as me, but he talks more about it. I'm afraid to run in circles if I do the same. But then I still run in circles, only in silence.
- Phoboslab made a very smol synthetizer for the web. Looks great, even if you can't export directly to MIDI or audio file (though the C example is easy to compile). The song structure is closer to Beepbox than MIDI editors or even classic trackers: monophonic notes in patterns, one pattern per instrument.
How decadent! Sharing links with a stranger on their first time together! You bloggers are truly revolting. Keep it up.
Blog updates
Now it's time for what's new on this very site. Hey it's still on topic since I write the pages by hand.
Light mode, dark mode. Humanity's eternal duality. This blog supported the two based on your system settings. Recently, I tried to add a light/dark mode switch without Javascript… and succeeded! But it's too much work, so I dropped it.
To simplify things further, and for better artistic control, I even removed the light mode. Now… only darkness remains.
I also changed the links' color and made them bold. Georgia bold is best bold, fight me.
That's all for this post. See ya in the next one!