mcc @mcc@mastodon.social

Hey so I haven't mastoposted about this before but me, Christine Love (Analogue, Ladykiller in a Bind) and Miguel Sternberg (They Bleed Pixels, Russian Subway Dogs) do a game-designers-play-games-and-do-commentary stream. It's tonight, 8 EST at https://www.twitch.tv/spookysquidgames

Tonight we're running JP only SNES games: Wonder Project J, a weird old sim where Pinnochio is a robot and the blue fairy is violent?? … and a young Aonuma (the Ocarina of Time director) making a kids-summer-vacation sim.

@mcc The only problem with this is that for something you treat like a chat room, displaying every message in your "tweets and mentions" pane is a little too public. If there's some way to apply "unusual" private-like permissions to the messages sent the chatroom bot, that creates possibilities like hiding messages from the "tweets and mentions" pane by making it a DM, or making a channel "private" by making it so only the chatbot account can boost it and the chat account itself is protected.

Are direct messages the same sort of thing, mechanically speaking, as a status update in activitypub/Mastodon?

Is it possible in principle (api extension?) to make a DM that can be boosted?

Imagining a bot that boosts every message to it. You now have a Mastodon-based chat room. Messages don't appear on your timeline, only to people who follow the chat. You could put the chat in a column, you could create an external site with a "chatroom-like" interface which is skinning underlying Mastodon.

That might help resolve the issue where people look at joinmastodon.org and are still just blankly like "but I don't understand how this works"

In response to this people linked me pinafore.social and halcyon.cybre.space , which are both web frontends to "any mastodon instance". What if there was a site like one of these but with a builtin signup flow? Halcyon links to joinmastodon, pinafore assumes you just understand Mastodon already. What if you could sign up for an account *through* Halcyon, somehow?

I think this is a problem because there's a lot of room for experimentation with mastodon/activitypub UX right now, but that experimentation is disfavored because trying out another instance briefly is a "heavy" operation, requiring you to migrate your account (which there's still no automated way to do). Letting you jump on a new instance and view your existing account instead of a new blank one would serve as a sort of "try before you buy".

So a feature I think mastodon instances could really use is for instance A to "log into" an account on instance B and show the content there.

Twidere on my phone can show feeds for masto dot social, or cybre dot space, or whatever. But if I open up the cybre dot space site, it'll only show me my cybre dot space feed. There's no Mastodon web interface that asks you what instance you want to "log into" and view content from.

Update: This is actually a subscribers only video, I didn't know that was going to be the deal sorry lol

So awhile back I made a emulator hack that lets you play 1-player SNES games as 2-player co-op games by sharing your inventory over the Internet. It turns out @zandra is going to be playing the Zelda 3 randomizer coop on the Giant Bomb stream with one of the GB guys today— it'll be linked on giantbomb.com's front page at 3:30 PM EST.

If you didn't understand any of that: Just show up if you want watch multiple emulator hacks tear Link to the Past apart ^_^

I got, like, a whole bag of 1/8 inch audio cable jacks and now I can plug jacks directly into my breadboard without having to use alligator clips! I had to order them from England and they took forever.

Modular synths are all about this "eurorack" concept but I'm captivated by this ridiculous idea of making my own little pseudo-eurorack out of breadboards and strange toys, a legorack maybe. I've been really inspired by the Bastl line and their weird, grubby, DIY approach; here's one last sorta-a-song I got from wiring my Minibrute 2 and the Kastle (a tiny AA battery synth that uses breadboard wires) into each other https://instaud.io/2wx3

In some ways this is maybe just all perverse cuz I COULD do all this in software, but I'm finding the hardware is leading me to interesting ideas I wouldn't have found in a DAW. I'm also excited about the various ways the physical equipment can fail. Like, the video in the previous version-- here's a recording of a previous take where due to a bug, every time it was supposed to speed up it just raises an octave (until it wraps around). It sounds spooky. https://instaud.io/2ut9