Jeff STARGAZY Sheen @STARGAZY@mastodon.online

Just snagged Unexplored 2 in the EGS sale for £12 (with 25% discount coupon).

Let the wanderlust be sated!

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/unexplored-2

Oh noes!

I've missed 4 days of discourse, & Twidere will only provide 3 days of perfectly filtered timeline 😬

I'm... I'm going to have to... Use the official Twitter app!! 😱😱

Current state of mind:

"Ooh, new monthly Knotwords puzzles!"

Completely unrelated 😜,

Has anyone figured out how to quiet down the blimmin' Steam Deck fan noise yet?! 😅😅

I'm playing turn-based games atm, so will give frame-limiting & dropping the refresh rate a go 🤔

I am proud to announce another STARGAZY production baby!

Our wee man has been joined by a wee ma'am 💕

She arrived safely, & mother & daughter are doing well.

We're overjoyed to meet her, & thanking our lucky stars 🌠🙏

Whenever I'm making an innovative game, on my weak days a little voice whispers:

"Will your audience get this? It would be safer to make something they're familiar with."

Innovation comes with 2 clear costs:

- Building novel features from scratch
- Educating players about the features, & why they're interesting

However, no innovation means no fun making the game, & no market differentiation.

Success is a delicate blend of the familiar & new.

After 9 months of chained illnesses, brought back from nursery (incl. all the COVIDs), I've had 4 weeks of good health.

What a difference.

Without the woolly head, fatigue, sleep deprivation, & other exotic symptoms, I've been carving through what I considered tough problems.

Spending the scant minutes of downtime I have before sleep, considering how best to optimise the latest puzzle level in Kaiju Wars 🦍💥🚁

... And exercising valiant restraint, in not firing up the Steam Deck to test out my theories 😅

Baba Is You plays so well on mobile.

Turn-based sokoban block pushing X mind-bending logic puzzling, all controlled with swipe up/down/left/right.

https://www.hempuli.com/baba/

Yikes!

The Steam Deck fan is so noisy, it woke my toddler up in the next room 😱🛫🔊

The last time I tried using cloud compute resources, I found the billing expensive.

Having not looked into it for a decade, are we now at the point where owning a server on a fibre connection makes economic/operational sense for SMEs?

Normalising a 4-day week would immediately unlock a huge increase in the standard of living for working families.

Their biggest outgoing is full-time childcare. ~200% cost of an average mortgage in the UK.

2 couples could interleave their 4 off-days to eliminate this burden.

The right result 🇪🇺🇺🇦🎉

The Ukrainian Eurovision entry slaps!

All the Eurovision acts raised their game from the qualifying rounds. Great performances.

Portugal was my fave. So chill 🇵🇹😌

Well pleased to see the Breton language represented by France's entry too. Celtic origins, related to Welsh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

I've rewatched Band of Brothers in my 20s, my 30s, & now my 40s.

My lens has changed, & I've taken away something different each time.

The horror of war landed in my 30s, & I was appalled at my 20s self's infatuation with heroism.

Now I forgive, for I've seen the carousel.

I misplaced my pocket whiteboard for about a month there.

It's one of my favourite tools.

I was so perturbed that, even though I eventually found it, I ordered another anyway 😅

https://www.stattys.com/en/noteboard

Enjoyed qualifying Eurovision songs from 🇨🇭🇮🇸🇵🇹🇬🇷

But it was 🇺🇦 who were 🔥🔥🔥

... and then, there's 🇲🇩: the equivalent of electing Lord Buckhead

Catching up on the 1st Eurovision semifinal.

Incredible.

Always a highlight of my year 😁

🇮🇹🇪🇺🎤💗

Yooooo! Totally missed the opening of the new MLB season!!

N.B. This is a particularly exciting event for sports-loving, UTC-based, parents of young children. They can inadvertently be awake any time between 21:00-06:00, & the high frequency of MLB games doth provide.

🤱😪⚾

Cancelled my workday morning coffee routine.

After 3 months of 5 days on & 2 days off, I'd built up a dependency.

Weekends were increasingly hard without caffeine, & eventually I developed a 2pm weekday crash.

Started due to nursery illnesses, but out of cold season now 🤞