The end of January marked 10 years since the beginning of my medical gender transition and I decided to use the opportunity to have a big celebration with friends and loved ones. I decided to indulge my desire to get to be a princess for the evening and also to invite all my friends into a safe space to experiment and play with gender presentation so the rules were cis folks were required to be in drag to attend, while everyone else was allowed to play with gender presentation however they liked. Everyone really put the genuine effort in and bunch of friends also secretly organised to decorate the space like a trans/wedding themed high school prom night without my knowing. The whole night was completely magical and I just keep coming back to how incredibly thankful I am to be so loved and supported by such amazing, wonderful, fun, strong people.
Ash McAllan shared 14 days ago
SECOND HAND COMPUTER IS OUT!
SHC is a sort of vibes-based programmable #FantasyComputer designed to mimic my own experiences getting a second-hand computer too crappy to run graphical games.
Inside Second Hand Computer you will find a pile of random text games I've made, from the very simple (Hangman and 2048) to the gimicky (Wargames) to larger original projects such as Swords of Freeport and BOOTLEG.
You can even code your own games for it in Lua.
#IndieGames #IndieDev #GameDev
https://funtimeelectrics.itch.io/second-hand-computer/devlog/1335775/second-hand-computer-is-out
After learning that some indoor plants benfit from being shaken to simulate wind, I decided to automate the process and built this plant shaking machine aka "WobbleBot" as a Christmas gift for a dear friend with a green thumb.
The motor is from an impact drill from a thrift store, the wire basket was from a homewares store as was the mop handle that I cut for the axle and the plastic storage container that protects the motor. The rest was spare bits of wood, a few screws, a bunch of zip ties and a coat of paint.
Ash McAllan shared 15 days ago
"If you use procgen you don't have to worry about level design" and other game design lies
Ash McAllan shared a month ago
Practice arguing the world you want to live in from first principles and without making reference to concepts which may soon be gone from the world, such as laws, the state¹, or capitalism².
¹ For example to be replaced with a thing that looks a lot like the state but without that pesky "rule of law" idea
² Not yet clear what will replace this but Double Capitalism appears to be the leading candidate
Ash McAllan shared a month agoWhen someone asks "can I spoil it for you?" my new reply is always going to be "Go for it. I ain't spending any time on it because in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in North Queensland."
Ash McAllan shared a month ago
Largest Oil Reserves in the world: Venezuela. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/venezuelan-oil-industry-worlds-largest-reserves-decaying-infrastructure-2026-01-03/
Largest Oil Producer in the world: Nigeria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_extraction
Largest undeveloped rate mineral deposits/fresh water supply outside China: Greenland. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/greenlands-rich-largely-untapped-mineral-resources-2025-01-13/
One of the Largest Natural Gas Reserves: PALESTINE | GAZA MARINE FIELD. https://unctad.org/news/unrealized-potential-palestinian-oil-and-gas-reserves
With links to valid media outlets.
So you can finally stop pretending why things are happening.
Ash McAllan shared a month ago
JoltPhysics.js v1.0.0 is out: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics.js/releases/tag/1.0.0
Ash McAllan shared a month ago
Good Law Project has setup up a system so you can find out if your local #NHS trusts have signed up to evil US tech giant #Palantir and email them to ask them to opt out
Do a good thing to #SaveTheNHS this evening and pop over here:
https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/email-to-target/stop-palantir-in-the-nhs/
Ash McAllan shared a month ago
As someone who runs my own blog, email, social media, backup system, home automation, business site, etc...
I feel like self-hosting digital services is a lot like backyard chickens. Rewarding, lots of control, independence from Big Egg, and a great reminder of why distribution of labor and efficiencies of scale are so important.
Ash McAllan shared a month ago
We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.
Ash McAllan shared 2 months ago
Jupiter has 97 moons and an outrageous werewolf problem
Ash McAllan shared 2 months ago
as transgender day of rememberence is today, as we learn the names and faces of those we've lost, i want to remind all my transgender friends and family:
staying alive and finding joys in life, big or small, is the most foundational step of resistance to institutional and systemic transphobia.
never do the fascists' dirty work for them.
🏳️⚧️ 🕯️
Finally finished rolling the last of the stones for this project. I actually started this while I was sick with food poisoning and then Covid this summer. The burning of the lines on the board was very meditative while I couldn't think straight. Once I had it together I coated it in beeswax, cut a little leather strap clasp from an old belt, and rolled stones from polymer clay. I find that the size of these stones and the grid are a bit awkward to play with, small to pick up with clumsy fingers. Now I understand why standard boards have grids and pieces of a certain size, but I'm still very proud of this board as a thing I made for myself.
Ash McAllan shared 3 months ago
🇪🇺🚨 Tomorrow, EU gov's could approve #ChatControl 2.0 through the back door, unleashing mass surveillance to scan ALL your private messages & photos. 🤫 Your privacy is on the line.
ℹ️https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-through-the-back-door-breyer-warns-the-eu-is-playing-us-for-fools-now-theyre-scanning-our-texts-and-banning-teens/
📢Contact your Ministers/MEPs NOW: https://fightchatcontrol.eu ✊
As I age I want to grow into a kind of great Deku Tree or Grandmother Willow, figure that the young-uns can come to in their times of distress and I will give them comfort, then wisdom, and then a knife before sending them back out into the world to cause trouble for dragons and kings alike.
Ash McAllan shared 3 months ago
Stoked to share that Dead Static Drive is coming out on November 5th! Let’s fucking gooooo!
.jpg "Ash in situ at a nightclub halloween party looking cute.")
it's not #ScreenshotSaturday but I'm just really glad to have finally figured out how to get the terrain biomes blending smoothly over long distances in #ProjectWeirdLittleGuy without weird shader artefacts in between. And yes I am just encoding 12 different custom values into the vertex data which limits the potential number of biomes, that's FINE
Ash McAllan shared 4 months ago
Spicy take:
Normal people shouldn't self host.
From an energy use perspective, the users per watt are WAY higher in a data center.
People are already awful at running patches and doing security updates.
OMG are people awful at doing backups.
From an ewaste POV, consumer electronics just don't have a very long lifespan, fail more frequently, are rarely upgradable, and easily broken. Enterprise grade servers in a data center are better.
Hosted services actually have a SOC to monitor what the fuck is going on and investigate unusual things. An individual normal user would never notice their self hosted server being popped for forever, and we already have far too many zombies.
Sure, megacorps aren't trustworthy stewards of key internet services like email either. But telling everyone they need yet another home appliance, but one you're going to have to fuck with several hours per month to keep running.
Dynamic DNS suck balls, IPv4 is running out, hosting shit being a NAT and reverse proxies and shch is its own thing, and lots and lots of people don't have very good home internet links.
Up front cost - yes, I know people "pay" for their social media and email with their privacy and advertising. But that means that saying they need to spend several hundred on a whole new computer and find a place to put it or rent a VPS or ...
Fact of the matter is, some sort of SaaS setup for web services IS the right solution for 97% of users. Scolding people for being abused by unregulated tech companies isn't solving anything. The right solution is to make people become more aware of the intentional and malicious enshittified bullshit techbros are cramming down their throat, and lobby the government to strengthen regulations.