on super pac-man

Thinking about the game "Super Pac-Man"... a bizarre, playful, abstract, convoluted, artistic mess of a sequel.

Most notably, alongside the normal power pellets that turn the ghosts blue and let you eat them, there are green super pellets... when you eat those Pac-Man doubles in size and can bypass the locked gates, while the ghosts stretch and squash and can be passed by unharmed.

I never realized that that was supposed to represent Super Pac-Man taking to the sky until I read it somewhere. The game doesn't doesn't have a lot of internal consistency about that; the gates can be flown over but the walls still confine movement, ghosts I guess are also being flown over but if you combine the flight with a normal power pellet they will be eaten (Super Pac-Man swoops down just to gobble them up, maybe? Doesn't seem extremely heroic) Similarly, I have trouble seeing the squish and stretch of the ghosts as a crude form of "perspective" from Super Pac-Man's aerial view... to me it all felt more like a big drug trip, with the ghosts just freaking out over this giant Pac-Man.

When you combine all that with the way each maze is full of items rather than the abstract dot pellets of the original... its status as the "truer" sequel (i.e. designed by the original creator Toru Iwatani) than the more subdued Ms. Pac-Man (which came out earlier the same year) is really something. Especially since the original Pac-Man was so beautifully minimalistic, and in fact they left Pac-Man abstract on purpose - as Iwatani says

There was the temptation to make the Pac Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it.

(That quote from an interview with him in "Programmers at Work", now available online)

Here's a good video going more into the history of it: At around 9 minutes in it gets into the intermission screens, which kind of match the abstract, artistic vibe of it all, playing with visual size and scale with narrative as more of an after thought. (I guess that reflects the original's approach, though Ms. Pac-Man told more of a story.)

elections and bad graphs

 

Many people are deeply curious about the demographics of yesterday's rather startling voting results.

I think back to Edward Tufte and "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", and the importance of making intuitive visual charts I'd say this CNN piece ,while providing some critical insight, fails in terms of clarity - for example:

It took me some pondering to figure out what I was looking at: each rectangular block is an *overlay* of the two voting patterns (D/R). So the height of the "roof" is where you see the winner-in-that-demographic sticking up above the votes for the less popular side.

I was pondering how to improve that. One obvious choice would be a stacked graph. Admittedly with so many totals hovering around 50 it might be harder to see who actually won (and the top of the stack, where it failed to hit 100%, would be "who voted for one of the two major parties"). Or possibly glue one candidate to the "ceiling" - though choosing which partyis over the other might look like bias.

Another helpful tweak might be to change the key floating above, so that the sample blue w/ top outline, red with top outline bars were both in middle, and *partially* overlapping. That would make it more clear that each graph leaned on overlap, and so the purple blend was the point where the candidates were neck and neck, so to speak.

Here's another misleading graph:

I saw this posted with the sardonic caption "Thanks Dads!". But Trump voters were just 58% of only 13% of the voters, or about 7.5% - Men without children were "only" 53%, but at 34% of the voting population they were 18%. A good chart would provide a feel both the size of each demographic as well as showing the breakdown.

the joy of simple custom handcrafted webapps

For a long time my partner and I used a shared Google Doc for a grocery list - it was great that it was real time and all, but kind of fiddly - hard to click the little checkboxes, and Google Docs is slow on a phone. So I made up a simple grocery list webapp. 

 

I'm sure there's a billion of these out there, but I had some particular preferences:
* very easy to check off things on phone
* works on this ANCIENT iPad I now have set up as a permanent screen in the kitchen
* no chance someone is going to start trying to charge me a subscription
* items to get are sorted by the section of the store they're in
* you can add a comment to an item
* recently checked off items (in the last 60 minutes - arbitrary but effective) show up as crossed off items below
* checked off and older items are sorted alphabetically

In the interest of UI simplicity there are a few weirdnesses: no actual "checkboxes", you can only edit the section or note for an active item, and only delete an archived item, but honestly I think got the UI just right for our needs.

keeping an eye on those logs

 With ChatGPT's help I came up with 

#!/bin/bash

tail -f LOGLINK/error.log &

TAIL_PID=$!

while true; do

read -n 1 key

if [[ $key == "c" ]]; then

clear

fi

done

ctrl-l wasn't working to clear the screen, so I could get a fresher view of new errors, but now I can just press c.