Z Space Blog

Nintendo recently launched a year-in-review tool on their site that will show you your play statistics in 2019. Some may see this as a cool little feature, but this is exactly what I saw happening when I came home with my Switch on day one and realized it showed my play time over the network.

This is similar to how Spotify has used some of their gathered data to create meme billboards to drum up interest.

At the bottom of the page are buttons you can use to get fun little images for your stats. So, I guess badges to feel proud of being a commercial data faucet. Curiously missing from the page are links to download the raw data used to come up with the numbers, options to NOT track play statistics, or options to delete the data they've presented. Even after disabling my adblocking and tracking protection, the download links for the images didn't work.

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My physical possessions are a little more tidy now. The shed has been prepped for the winter, everything of mine that's important is indoors and has a place. I bought a new hard drive a while ago to expand Windows to 2 TB. Sadly, Windows doesn't like being cloned. It's been quite a battle but it more or less runs correctly. If it goes to shit again, I'll wipe it before I reinstall. At any rate, Windows is setup and ready to be used if anything happens to my other OSes or I want to game. That's a major source of anxiety crossed off the list.

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Vim has good support for showing the differences between two (or three) files with either the vimdiff command or setting up a diff session manually. This often requires opening the files in their own window panes, then using :diffthis in all the relevant files. If you're in the middle of an editing session, stopping to set up this diff session can cause you to lose focus. I wrote a function in my vimrc that automates this process, so the user can focus on making decisions instead of building their UI or some other flow-breaking process.

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If you've spent any time viewing diagrams on Wikipedia, you'll see notices on some images that mention that the image was (re)written by hand to reduce its size. Curious, I wanted to build something in Inkscape, then rebuild it by hand to see the difference. The old logo wasn't really working out any more, so it was a great opportunity to revisit the design and learn (yet) another markup language.

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Video games that teach without tuturials are superior and do more to engage and/or inspire the player. The first hour of a video game is often the most important; it's where the player learns how to interact with the machine, explore the rules and mechanics, and form an understanding of the game world. Games that effectively communicate this lead to a better-informed player that isn't slowed down or interrupted by verbose tutorials. The flow of the game remains smooth, and the player feels a sense of accomplishment or skill because they figured it out on their own, with the design of the game as their guide.

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