This year I've grounded myself a bit more with my lifestyle and brain. One of my particular proud habits I've gotten into is that I've been very consistent with not just reading, but leaving my apartment in the morning, getting coffee, and heading to the library to read and work. I've gotten through a handful of books this year! I aim to read only about 20-30 mins per day, and I miss many days, but if I'm super sucked into a book I'll go past it and read as much as I want. It's very fulfilling to have a proper "good" habit. On days when I feel off, anxious, stressed, etc. if the next day I'm able to wake up, get tim hortons, and go to the library, I can ground myself back into a bit of normalcy.

I do recommend everyone to have a non-work/productivity related habit that requires you to leave your house. Specifically I think you need to live my life, and go to your local library more! YOU reading this! And I think you should read! The way I've been looking at it as I read more and more, I think it's like an entire medium that people miss out on. It's like if you're talking to a friend and they don't listen to albums, or even music at all. You would think they are a psychopath. Or if you had a friend that didn't watch TV shows. I don't think reading is some nerd emoji glasses dweeb activity, and I don't think it's *enriching* simply due to it being a book and growing up you've been told that reading makes you smart. I think you should read the same reason why I think people who don't play video games should play them, I think it's a medium that expresses itself in it's unique way, and you shouldn't be missing out on an entire medium if you want to be a creative person!

While reading itself isn't too novel (heh..) I think one thing that sticks in my mind about it is the *pacing* of the actual activity of reading. If your dopamine receptors in your brain has become fried from twitter, video games, or tiktok (instagram reels, youtube shorts, pick ur poison) I think sitting down and reading a book can be a bit frustrating. I've found myself to enjoy reading (or at least found it much less frustrating) once I lessened the thought in my mind that I should read a book front to back, in the least amount of time as possible. If my mind wandered and I had to re-read a page I would be annoyed at myself for getting distracted and be annoyed that I had to re-read something! Feels like my progress over the past few minutes were just lost because I got distracted! But I've become less resistant to re-reading pages or even entire chapters, and taking my time as needed with books, I'd say it's an intended mechanic of reading. You read at the speed of your brain and it needs to stay active to take in what you're reading. If you're used to being able to scroll away or alt-tab the millisecond that you get slightly bored of something online, I think reading is a good detox from functioning that way, like being your own science experiment about the effects of delayed gratification.

And I simply do not fw audio books! Shame on you!

Have a good weekend yall too crazy!

Ask Iwata by Satoru Iwata

This book is a collection of thoughts, insights, and “words of wisdom” from the late Nintendo president. The book goes through his career, sharing relevant insights along the way about management, leadership, and working with others. This one is essential reading for anyone who has an interest not just in game development, but I feel creative collaboration in general.

I first read this one back in 2021, and just re-read it a week ago. I find it more applicable each and every day, and have kept things he’s talked about in my brain since the first time I read ‘em. 

Early in the book it goes into his gifted skills in programming. How does he then become the president of HAL, then Nintendo? I think one of the main points the book makes, is Iwata’s thoughtfulness with collaboration and working with others.

Becoming a programmer doesn’t make you business savvy or a talented leader. I believe being a programmer that had his mind open to the ways others work, think, and create enabled Iwata to lead Nintendo into their successes in the 2000s, and pushing to create not just for the kind of person playing games currently (the GAMER), but the people who could be playing games for the first time ever. The person who hasn’t fallen in love with gaming, yet. 

Make Something Wonderful by Steve Jobs

History of Steve Jobs time at Apple, Pixar, NeXT, and his own upbringing. A bit of a biography of Steve + Apple via a documented collection of interviews, writings, emails (to others, and himself), and presentations he’s made. The throughline is his optimism for technology, collaboration, leadership/vision, and most importantly, creativity and artful intent.

In another age, Steve believed, the people on the Macintosh team would have been writers, musicians, or artists. “The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter,” he said. He called their work a form of love and their product “a computer for the rest of us,” with a mouse as well as arrow keys, desktop icons instead of programming commands, and, at startup, instead of a blinking cursor: a smile. Macintosh also represented the first time Steve led a team developing a product that he believed had changed the world. “It ushered in a revolution,” Steve recalled twenty-three years later, during the rollout of another world-changing innovation: the iPhone. “I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together, and we said, ‘Every computer is going to work this way. You can’t argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can’t argue about it anymore.’”

It could be easy to dismiss the things Steve Jobs may have done or pushed for, maybe you saw him as just a salesman, or think he just took credit for others inventions/ideas! I think this book deeply goes into the profound respect Steve Jobs had for the future of technology and where it could go with Apple’s input, through his entire life. There’s no limit to what you can contribute into the world. We would be living in a different world without the impact of the iPhone, Macintosh, Apple II, Pixar, etc. We live in a world where Steve Jobs believed in technology, and believed in making something wonderful. 

Freely available in it’s entirety on the web at https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/ and if you prefer ebook format, downloads are available here: https://stevejobsarchive.com/book/download 

also available on Apple Books app for free!

README.txt by Chelsea Manning

I’ve been aware of Chelsea Manning since I read the “main” Wikileaks book, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy”. I read that when I was a teenager, and my brain was still developing a bit, and much of the American politics were lost on me. As a Canadian child during the United States’ “War on terror” I didn’t keep too close of an eye on these things! However what I did enjoy about that book was the HACKING and COMPUTER STUFF. So Chelsea Manning has been someone I knew of for quite sometime now!

README.txt is an autobiography from Chelsea Manning, who is a trans woman who served in the army as an intelligence analyst during the late years of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The book recalls her Oklahoma childhood, the gender dysphoria she’d felt her entire life, leading into her time in the army, and recounts the inhumane experiences she had in prison, after leaking hundreds of thousands of documents relevant to America’s war in the Middle East.

When her leaked documents reached the public, society was able to see and learn about the horrors and suffering that USA was contributing to and enabling in the middle east. True civilian casualty counts. Full unedited footage of an Apache helicopter slaughtering civilians. Soon after, Chelsea was arrested and detained in Kuwait for 2 months, before being transferred to U.S. and eventually getting sentenced to 35 years in prison.

During her time in prison is when she began transitioning, where as a prisoner she had to fight and push the American government for hormones, transition surgery.

The conditions and instability of prison, gender dysphoria, and the bleak future of decades worth of detainment lead Chelsea to attempt suicide multiple times. Very fortunately she didn’t succeed in killing herself! In this book she was been able to tell the story not about America’s politics, leaks, the media, but the story about herself and her life, in her own words, on her own terms.

hows the new years resolution lookin gang, we 4 months into 2024, are you buff yet? how much kanji characters do you know? how are your figure drawings looking? GO

Just wanted to quick pop in here share some fun things around the Canabalt port I did, since they aren’t hosted on NG!

Canabalt Developer Interview with Finji

Aster from the Finji crew got me and mr @adamatomic in a call and we did a little podcast interview about Canabalt and game development! Both of them are very lovely and it was awesome being able to chat with adam and aster! And talk about Newgrounds and fun stuff like that! Go have a listen!

Github Blog Feature

This one I’m particularly proud of… got a small little spot in Github’s monthly “Game Bytes” blog series! I’m a big fan of Github and open source of course, and I’m very inspired by games that publish source code and all that, so it makes me smile to have a small little feature in Github Blog! If you’re not already keeping an eye on Game Bytes, you definitely should get on their email subscribe list and keep an eye out for cool projects :)

Read the article here: https://github.blog/2024-03-27-game-bytes-march-2024/

As reminder… Canabalt now has full source code open, which you can check out on Github. It was ported with HaxeFlixel.

small pax recap

i went to pax last weekend and saw many lovely friends, met people who I look up to like @mmattugh (i wish i was able to talk shop with u more... next time we meet) and @mike (he was wearing battleblock cat security guard outfit, i wish i got a pic!).

Here are two pictures from when the squad had breakfast on Sunday

me and snackers

@heyopc broke his sunglasses (also he only wears polo btw)

That’s all for now, back to FNF working!

POP QUIZ

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE KEYBOARD SHORTCUT

I am a big fan of CTRL+SHIFT+T, which re-opens a tab you may have just closed.

Can be from any program or software or operating system. No ctrl+z cucks in the replies please.

In 2023 I had visitors, friends, and many people I love visit my home. Many of them drew on whiteboard I have. I will wipe it clean today, so here is a pic for myself and others of where it ended up by the end of 2023.

Almost March, but cheers to 2024 and I look forward to having people visit me 🤗

Need fresh doodles now!

Canabalt, Classic

Through the second half of January, I’ve chipped away at doing a port of classic Flash game CANABALT into HTML5, via HaxeFlixel.

You can play the updated version here: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/510303

I’ve also been given permission to release the full source code alongside it, which you can find on my Github: https://github.com/ninjamuffin99/canabalt-hf

It has also been updated to work on mobile devices, so tell me if your Samsung Galaxy S3 can hit double digit FPS.

@adamatomic gave me the original Actionscript 3 source code, and I tried to be very faithful when porting, both for gameplay purposes, and also I think how code is written is also important. Canabalt was made with Flixel, the ancestor to HaxeFlixel, so the porting process was generally seamless, and the resulting code is actually very close to what Adam wrote nearly 15 years ago.

There are some cute things I got to indulge in as it being a side project to my day job (friday nite funking…), and along with that, I got to see something through until the end/release, which has been a muscle that hasn’t been exercised in a while. FNF is a project which at times can feel like seeing something through until the end is discouraged, where endless polish and making things perfect can feel like it supersedes the need to realistically set deadlines and release something. Of course FNF is a much more complicated project than this port was (I made most of it in a few days, over the weekend I was at MAGFEST!), but I think despite that it was still very refreshing to see something through from the first line of code, until it’s in the hands of the public, on my own terms! And no one even noticed when we missed our deadline (Pixel Day!) lol !

Enjoy getting highscores on the new Newgrounds API enabled leaderboards 🤤

It was very fun to work on this, and I'm very glad to have a hand in preserving not just flash game history... but VIDEO GAME HISTORY, and being able to put the code out there for the world to see!

Back to the funkin offices now!

(also you can support DannyB and buy the music on bandcamp! reddit today I learned! https://dbsoundworks.bandcamp.com/album/canabalt-soundtrack-ringtones-pack-w-bonus-fathom-megamix)

if ur at magfest gimme a shout and lets chill and smoke omg i will be there in 2hrs as of writing until sunday!

Hello there, I am a Toronto citizen, and I am a working adult. So, I drink coffee. It wasn’t always like that however. First… I didn’t always live here! And second, and more importantly, I only started drinking coffee about this time a year ago! I got myself a small French press for myself for Christmas, and a cheapo coffee grinder. Then I started poking around to different coffee shops in the area to get myself out of the house, especially earlier in the day!

Carbonic Coffee

37 Baldwin St, Toronto, ON M5T 1L1 

I’ll start with this one because it was THE first coffee shop that I ever went to in Toronto. I was on my way home and I was hunting around for a place to get some good god honest BEANS. Sadly I haven’t been back there since then, I need to change that! They had a deal at the time where if you get a bag of beans, they’ll make any coffee for you, I got a latte or something, and they made nice cute latte art of a seahorse! But I do recommend, super nice and lovely, the beans were damn good, and you can’t beat a good deal after buying beans! 

The beans I got were from The Angry Roaster Coffee Co. https://theangryroaster.com/ I got the Nicaragua ones, and they were pretty damn good.

The Grind Cafe

570 St Clair Ave W, Toronto, ON M6C 1A5

Go here and get a breakfast bacon sandwich damn it’s good. Very nice and lovely couple working there, I believe they told me they get their baked goods (breads/croissants/pasteries) from some local bakery… which I will have to hunt down…. But the breakfast sandwich is fuckin damn delicious and makes me happy to think about. The coffee is good too of course, I’ve been Starbucks cucked and be drinkin up on them caramel macchiato shiiiit… but the one here they do it right! 

Lait Night

81 Huron St Main Floor, Toronto, ON M5T 2A8

This one I don’t particularly recommend for the menu or coffee, but due to the fact that it’s downtown chinatown Spadina area, and it’s open until around 3-4AM-ish. It is very perfect for tossing a laptop in a backpack and getting out of the basement apartment at 1AM to sip on something warm, and sit with usually students working or studying. 

Recommended time to go is after midnight.

Rooms Coffee

135 Ossington Ave, Toronto, ON M6J 2Z6

chiaotzu coffee shop. 

Go here and get the TOKYO FOG latte. I played chess against @snackers here and i beat his ass so bad his voice got busted for 3 days straight.

Boxcar Social Laneway

End of alleyway, 298 Markham St, Toronto, ON M6J 

Saving best for last… this is one of my fav places, and I save it for special occasions. Hidden away in a small alleyway, in an unassuming… chunk looking building… the inside is a bit of a classic beautiful cozy wood styled coffee shop. Often they play delicious vinyl records, and usually I treat myself when I go there and get the nice fancy POUR OVER coffees which I recommend. They give you the cute little pouring thing and cup for you to serve yourself and it makes me smile and grin whenever I’m there. I also think the matcha latte is nice there. I could spend a long time there reading or just hanging out on my laptop. Preferably reading though! Perfect time’s (in my opinion) is when it’s completely empty, with nice vinyl playing. One of the first times I went they were playing Kid A.

VERY IMPORTANT CLOSING STATEMENTS

If you are visiting Toronto from outside of Canada, you need to go to Tim Horton's first and foremost! You can't beat a fuckin 2$ coffee! Ask for the double double! Whenever I come back from visiting USA, I go to Tim Horotns before anything! I promise I'm not a coffee snob I am a Tim Hortons truther! breakfast lunch and dinner im drinking tim hortones!

if you tried and failed pomodoro method to do work (25 mins of work, 5 mins break, repeating), i recommend chewing nicotine gum