Hello from the future

This blog has received more traffic than I expected. It’s pretty sparse - sorry about that! I’m working on super-detailed explanation of how One Million Chessboards works. Check back in a few days for a proper writeup and video.

You can follow my mailing list, youtube, twitter, or bsky if you want to catch my update when it goes live.

In the meantime play the game here.

Anyway

I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it.

Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.

I made a game about learning to smile using your mouth and eyes.

It’s called Smile Like Zuck and it’s about making the same face as Mark Zuckerberg.

Did you know that when humans smile, they try to use their eyes as well as their mouths?

What do you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I find that they take up a lot of screen space. So this week I figured out how to run pong inside mine.

That’s 240 browser tabs in a tight 8x30 grid. And they’re running pong! The ball and paddles are able to cleanly move between the canvas in the foregrounded window and all of the tabs above.

You can see the (awful) code here. But how does this work?

For 3 days in 2006, nobody at my high school could turn in homework because of my dumb joke.

In an effort to annoy my friend Brody I had (accidentally!) brought down SWIS - the School Wide Information System - at Northfield Mount Hermon high school.

I’ve mentioned this in passing before, and I think the details are interesting so I thought I’d write it down.

Should you be more skeptical of code that is a “self-admitted keylogger” than code that purports to be useful? I’m not so sure.

Last week I made a global caps lock key. It’s a joke project 1 - a small client that keeps caps lock in sync for everyone running the client.

It has been relatively popular on various social media platforms. So I’ve heard from a lot of strangers about it. And a comment I keep hearing is:

This is a massive risk and it’s insane that anyone has installed it!!

I don’t fully disagree. But I’d like to stress one point: this code requires no special permissions on Windows or Linux 2.

If you’re on one of those platforms, any code a stranger gives you could be doing the exact same thing. If you want to be intellectually consistent, I think you should apply the same mindset to any other program whose source you haven’t read.

At least my code is an easy to read open-source 200 line python script!

GlObAl CapSLOcK Is OVER

The REPo NoW CoNTains An ExamPle SerVer if You Want to RUN It YOUrSELF.

PeoPle PressED Caps LOcK AbouT 1,500,000 TiMES oVer the 1.5 WeeKs the TOoL was OnLine.

Thanks foR PlaYIng.

I MADE A GLOBAL CAPS LOCK KEY. THIS WAY WE CAN ALL AGREE ON WHEN TO USE CAPS LOCK.

It’s a small cross-platform client - it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux (although it requires xdotool on Linux, so YMMV there. Send me a pull request!)

You can set up the client here or see the current caps lock state here.

I’m regularly asked questions like:

Hey. I just moved to New York. I want to find cool people doing tech/art/games stuff.

Where should I go?

The exact details vary. Sometimes someone is just visiting; sometimes someone is focused on tech, or on games. But my answer is always the same. Here it is.

I made a game. It’s called 1Crossword. It generates crosswords using the passwords in your 1Password vault. The crosswords are fun, simple, and perfect for sharing on social media once you complete them.

I made 1Crossword because the password manager games space has stagnated. There’s The Password Game - which I use to generate all my passwords - but nothing that lets me play with the passwords that I already have.

You can check out the code over here.

Well the title of this post promised you Bad Apple in vim only using search queries. So here’s Bad Apple in vim, but the only thing that’s changing is the search query:

Let’s talk about how this works!

This is a post about addiction and recovery. It is way outside my ‘whimsical games’ lane and I completely understand if you’d like to skip it.

I have no plans to write about this again, and I promise I will be back to building nonsense soon.

That’s a decade without a drink for me.

After I quit I was hungry for stories. So today I’d like to share my own.

I’ve been struggling to remember all of the UUIDs 1. There are a lot of them. So this week I wrote them all down. You can see my list at everyuuid.com.

The site looks like this - UUIDs are displayed in a random-ish but consistent order and you can quickly search for one that you like:

I think the site is great. I can quickly find my favorite UUIDs and star them or browse them all to find one that’s just right.

But having 5,316,911,983,139,663,491,615,228,241,121,378,304 2 possible values made it way harder than it needed to be to write them all down. I’m not sure why the authors of the UUID spec wanted to include so many bits!

So I think the final implementation here is pretty interesting. Let me tell you about it.

I’m sick of political spam texts. Here is a stupid solution.

I’m not telling you that you should do this. But this morning I made my phone auto-respond “STOP” to any unknown number:

Sharing iOS automations is weirdly annoying (it’s easy to share shortcuts via iCloud, but I built this directly into an automation and I can’t make an iCloud link for it), so here is the logic written out:

I made a game. It’s called PacCam. It’s Pacman, but you control it with your face.

You can play it here (or read the code).

You chomp your mouth to move and turn your face to steer. You look…pretty dumb while playing it. At the end it tries to give you the dumbest possible gif of yourself (it tracks when your mouth is the most open, and builds the gif around that moment).

I could fill a book with dumb gifs of me after all the testing I did

I’m really pleased with how the game turned out, but making it was way more work than I expected. Let’s look at why.

I made a game with Adnan Aga. It’s DOOM, but it runs inside the iOS photos app. Kind of.

It is…technically playable? We managed to pick up some power ups and shoot at some enemies. It requires 8 manually configured iOS shortcuts, a dedicated photos folder, and a separately configured computer.

Let’s look at how it works!

I’ve released the data and code from One Million Checkboxes.

• You can download the data here, on the internet archive
• You can find some tools for generating timelapses from the data over here, on github
• And you can see the original code and how it evolved here, on github

Thanks for playing. More games to come :)

A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database?

A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens.

But let’s back up.

Note - I’m trying something new; I’ve also made a YouTube video that tells this story. I’m trying to decide whether I’m interested in making videos; check it out if you’d like!

On June 26th 2024 I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking a box checked it for everyone on the site, immediately.

I built the site in 2 days. I thought I’d get a few hundred users, max. That is not what happened.

Instead, within hours of launching, tens of thousands of users checked millions of boxes. They piled in from Hacker News, /r/InternetIsBeautiful, Mastodon and Twitter. A few days later OMCB appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Here’s what activity looked like on the first day (I launched at 11:30 AM EST).

I don't have logs for checked boxes from the first few hours because I originally only kept the latest 1 million logs for a given day(!)

I wasn’t prepared for this level of activity. The site crashed a lot. But by day 2 I started to stabilize things and people checked over 50 million boxes. We passed 650 million before I sunset the site 2 weeks later.

Let’s talk about how I kept the site (mostly) online!

YOU PROBABLY WANT ONE OF THESE LINKS

• The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes is an incredible story and the coolest thing that will ever happen to me.
• Scaling One Million Checkboxes explains how I scaled OMCB up to handle a ton of unexpected load.
• One Million Checkboxes is the site. It’s not multiplayer anymore, but you can still click around.

You may also be interested in the New York Times article about OMCB or its Wikipedia page.

But! If you want to read what I wrote before releasing OMCB - before hundreds of thousands of people checked hundreds of millions of boxes - read on :)

I made a website. It’s called One Million Checkboxes. It has one million checkboxes on it. Checking a box checks that box for everyone (and makes some numbers go up).

You can find it at onemillioncheckboxes.com.

Why

I don’t really know. The idea came up in a conversation with my friend Neal last Friday and I felt compelled to make it.

Sometimes I don’t want to work. Not wanting to work makes me feel bad.

My identity is tied up in liking to work hard! And I work for myself - it’s very easy to slack off. Not wanting to work makes me feel lazy. It makes me feel like I need to buckle down, and I feel like something is wrong with me when I can’t.

This used to make me upset. I’d spend days distracted, neither fully working nor fully relaxing. Now when this happens I tell myself:

You love to work. That hasn’t changed.

Something else needs to.

This reframing has been a revelation for me. Thinking this way makes it easier to change my process, helps me find what excites me, and makes it easier to consciously take breaks. Here are some questions I ask in order to isolate what needs to change.

I made a game. It’s called BreakTime. It’s Breakout (aka Brick Breaker) running inside Google Calendar. Your meetings are bricks. It (optionally) declines the meetings you destroy.

It’s a chrome extension. You can install it here. It has no external dependencies; it’s 1,500 lines of javascript including a little game engine I made for the project.

Making it was a ton of fun. Let me tell you about it.

I made a little tool. It’s called telEyegraph. It converts blinks to morse code.

I built it because I’m fascinated with controlling things with your eyes and as a test of the React and CSS skills that I spent January learning.

You can play with it here or check out the code on github.

We shut Talk Paper Scissors down on November 24th, 2024. Tens of thousands of people played it in the year that it was live.

I made a new game with greg technology. It’s called Talk Paper Scissors. It lets you play rock paper scissors with strangers by calling a phone number.

the Talk Paper Scissors mascot

It’s an attempt to make an audio-only stranger video. Here’s how it works:

• you call a phone number
• you’re asked to say rock, paper, or scissors
• you aren’t allowed to say anything else
• you hear a recording of what the stranger said and are told whether you won or lost

Games are 3 rounds long. Your stats are tracked between rounds.

When the game was live, you could play by calling 1-(515)-762-5762 (that’s 1-515-ROCK-ROC).

I made a newsletter. It’s here, on substack. Then I wrote a post on my blog about making a substack. It’s here, on my blog, which you’re reading right now.

Every night at 12:15 AM my computer tells me to go to bed.

No, really. A voice says “time to sleep.” Then this window pops up:

yeah, it's a little verbose

If I hit “ok” the window pops up again a minute later. Sometimes I move the popup out of view and ignore it for a few minutes. Sometimes I snooze it and keep coding (or writing - it’s 12:28 AM right now). But most of the time I go to bed.

Update: the day after I posted this stranger video went viral in japan. It was a ton of fun. The viralness has died off for now; I’m working on a separate post about the experience of using stranger video at peak popularity.

I have a new project. It’s called ‘stranger video.’ It’s about staring at strangers.

stranger video has some rules:

• you are paired with a stranger for a video call.
• video is tightly cropped to just your face and cuts out if there’s no face in frame.
• no audio, no text chat, just silent video.
• video cuts out as soon as one of you blinks.

You can play it at stranger.video

It’s the most uncomfortable thing I’ve built. I hope you love it.

I made a game. It’s called Flappy Dird. It’s Flappy Bird inside MacOS Finder.

It has instructions, high score tracking, and marquee banner ads. You double-click to start a game and select any file in the window to jump. It runs at 4 frames a second and can’t run much faster. It occasionally drops inputs for reasons that you’ll understand if you finish this blog.

I’m going to lay out how Flappy Dird works and how it got there. Head to the github repo if you want to check out the code or play the game yourself.

I made a game. It’s in a Google Sheet:

There’s some stuff going on here! But in addition to aesthetics this game is “real time” - the spreadsheet tracks the time when you complete tasks and compares those times to where the animated blue progress bar is. Your final evaluation (in the lower right) tells you whether you completed your tasks early, on time, or late. This is all driven purely via Google Sheets formulas - no Apps Script or other trickery needed.

Let’s talk about how this works!

Every night I write down six seconds of my day that I want to remember.

Some nights I struggle to come up with something worth writing down. That’s ok! Sometimes I’ll struggle for many days in a row. That’s less ok.

But when I have multi-day stretches where I have nothing to write down I notice. And noticing causes me to start changing my behavior. Journaling this way helps me seek out memories worth remembering.

Measuring and optimizing the right metric can be powerful. Measuring and optimizing the wrong metric can be disastrous. But sometimes the act of measurement itself is sufficient to change behavior for the better.

So here’s a neat trick:

By changing the font I’m able to automatically convert hex color codes to RGB! What’s going on?

Basics

• Genre: survivors-like
• Links: play it on itch or check out the code on github
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time Spent: ~August 8th - 20th
• Other Stuff: I built this game at Recurse Center, a magical place that functions like a writers retreat for programmers. Consider applying!

Gameplay Video

Basics

• Genre: Competitive toungue twister
• Links: play it right here or play it on itch
• Engine: A little hand-rolled javascript
• Time Spent: ~4 hours one evening
• Other Stuff: I built this game at Recurse Center, a magical place that functions like a writers retreat for programmers. Consider applying!

In Wub you’re prompted to say some silly phrases while a timer plays. When you finish saying the silly phrases the timer stops. The first phrase you say is “wub wub 1.” That’s why it’s called wub.

I turned off Infinite Hamlet on September 30th.

Some quick stats: 41 unique chatters submitted 4,400 characters and completed 136 lines of hamlet. Running it was a ton of fun! I’m excited to revisit this kind of game in the future.

Basics

• Genre: twitch-plays-pokemon-like
• Links: play it live on twitch
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time Spent: ~2 weeks on and off
• Other Stuff: I built this game at Recurse Center, a magical place that functions like a writers retreat for programmers. Consider applying!

Gameplay Video

To play Infinite Hamlet you attempt to type out all of Hamlet one character at time via twitch chat. That’s the whole game. It’s called “Infinite Hamlet” because of the infinite monkey theorem

So here’s a neat trick:

That’s the firefox address bar! And I’m playing a full game of Wordle in it! What’s going on?

This game was linked from New York Times Watching newsletter on Friday September 8, 2023. This was super cool for me! Margaret Lyons I have no idea how to get in touch with you but thanks for mentioning my game!

Basics

• Genre: Uh. Arcade action game / childhood dream achievement simulator (?)
• Links: play it on itch or check out the code on github
• Engine: PICO-8
• Time Spent: 4 days (June 27th - June 30th)
• Other Stuff: I built this game at Recurse Center, a magical place that functions like a writers retreat for programmers. Consider applying!

Gameplay Video

My favorite part was adding manual 'particle effects' by drawing individual pixels to the screen

Basics

• Genre: Tower defense with a vaguely roguelike choose-1-of-3 upgrade system
• Links: play it on itch or check out the code on github
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time Spent: Uh. 15ish days? May 8th - May 13th part time, May 29th - June 11th full time 1.
• Other Stuff: This game shamelessly rips off the UI of DesktopTD, one of my favorite games of the flash game era. Thanks for the many hours of enjoyment, DesktopTD!

Gameplay Video

Basics

• Genre: Rhythmic puzzle game
• Links: play it on itch or check out the code on github
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time Spent: May 15th - May 21st (1 week)
• Other Stuff: The first few levels of the game are probably too hard. If you almost immediately get stuck check out “the game is too damn hard” below.

Gameplay video

The game is about leading the little gray guy into a trap and then making it to the end of the level.

Basics

• Genre: Physics puzzle game
• Links: play it on itch, read the code on github, or check it out on the Ludum website
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time Spent: April 28 - May 1 (72 hours)
• Other Stuff: This is my first game jam game 1 - neat! It’s the first time I’ve made my own game music - neat! I threw away most of my work from the first day of the jam - less neat!

Gameplay video

Basics

• Genre: Launcher, almost idle. Inspired by “Learn to Fly” and some other games popular in the Flash era.
• Links: play it on itch or check out the code on github
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time Spent: April 11-13, April 18-26 (12 days with some traveling in between)
• Other: Sisyphus Needs a Nap got more plays on itch in a single day than platris did over its lifetime! It also made it to the top of itch’s “new and popular web games” page. Neat!

Gameplay Video

Basics

• Genre: stressful puzzle platformer? You play tetris and a platformer at the same time.
• Links: play it on itch or check out the code on github
• Engine: Godot 3.5
• Time spent: March 30th - April 7th, but I already had a basic tetris implementation

Gameplay Video