v buckenham
banner
v21.bsky.social
v buckenham
@v21.bsky.social
hello again
made (and continuing to make) downpour.games, a game-making app that anyone can use
also i have a website: v21.io
what's the deal with Ozma? why would mcc be so into it?

*looks it up*

ah
November 16, 2025 at 9:34 PM
Reposted by v buckenham
New work • My typeface 'Levitate' is out now!

Taking aesthetic inspiration from electronic displays: 'Levitate' explores ways to embrace just a handful of shapes and 45-degree angles while developing a language that accounts for theoretically any glyph.

Available here:
linktr.ee/wendymurphyo...
July 31, 2024 at 7:15 PM
what a paragraph - from The Story of Gardening by Martin Hoyles. This is the intro to the second chapter, explaining how you need to think about international relations and colonialism to understand English gardening.
November 16, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by v buckenham
dont sleep on fusion. fusion has the juice. look at this shit. impeccable sci fi vibe. alien curvature for reasons u wouldnt understand bc u dont know what poincare sections of the plasma beam are. it's even greebled with ports and domes and shit. u can tell the physics nerds are really cooking here
November 16, 2025 at 5:06 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
Can't emphasize how damaging this is. A single non-scientist—Peter Bogner—holds all power & makes all decisions at GISAID & provides no justifications for any of them, except blatantly false ones.

He has that power because he conned rich & powerful people into giving it to him. Enough.
I want to spell this out in case the implications aren't clear:

This means all public tools/webapps of GISAID data (all the ones you've been used to seeing thru the pandemic, as far as we can tell) are prohibited.

The file allowed this. Cut that - cut off all tools the public & others were using.
On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5
November 10, 2025 at 2:46 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
gaming magazines used to be so true........
November 9, 2025 at 7:23 PM
pol is great, hire pol
twitter has been deserted for good so i suppose i will post here too: i am currently open for work! hit me up if you know of openings that i'd be a good fit for 🫡

i updated my hireme page with a sample of the stuff i can do - videogame graphics, VFX, 2D art and so on
polclarissou.com/hireme/
November 16, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
We are 2 for 2 with echinoderms for #fossilfriday!

Here is an absolutely beautiful regular sea urchin known as Desoricidaris pouyannei. This specimen comes from the Lower Cretaceous (Cenomanian) rocks of Taouz, Morocco. The preservation of the test (body) is absolutely stunning even after 100 mya!
November 14, 2025 at 4:24 PM
that thing where some streets are familiar enough that you can take the right turns to get to your destination, but unfamiliar enough that you couldn't explain the route or predict exactly what comes up next. except for unlocking developer mode on an Android phone.
November 14, 2025 at 12:30 PM
this is how they make KitKats. the bit in between the wafers is "smushed up KitKats". which opens up the question: how did they make the first KitKat?
oh wow that’s crazy

oreos with bits of

of oreos. in them

Real Bits of Oreos
November 14, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
I wonder if Rockstar leadership envisaged this kind of response when they decided to fire 30+ workers in a union?
Video game giant Rockstar has sacked more than 30 workers across the UK, including my constituents working at their Edinburgh office. I urged Ministers to support workers who have lost their jobs, and stop this from happening again.
November 13, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by v buckenham
If local-first aims to reconstruct software without needing the cloud by inverting ideas data ownership, credible exit, reliance of authoritative servers, software longevity, etc. than the co-option that I think is happening is energy of local-first will be funneled towards sync engines...
November 13, 2025 at 6:13 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
that's a good way to put! it intrigues me that the local-first ideals that attempt to challenge power dynamics are dismissed as "hard" and "controversial".
November 13, 2025 at 6:47 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
new blog post: I also wrote about "metroidbranias". Surely if enough of us write about how we dislike a term, people will stop using it? That's how it works, right? blog.vbuckenham.com/database-gam...
Database games
Bruno Dias recently posted this (good) blog post: Against ‘Metroidbrania’: a Landscape of Knowledge GamesWhat are knowledge games? How do we relate them to each other? What sub-genres exist – and whi...
blog.vbuckenham.com
November 13, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by v buckenham
Nieves Gonzalez
November 13, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
every few years it's revealed that the NYT was sitting on information about some horrific thing that public knowledge of would have changed the country's course and for some reason a ton of people still give them money. you can play those games on other sites
November 12, 2025 at 10:41 PM
appreciate this article breaking down a taxonomy of knowledge games (also, unfortunately, known as metroidbrainias)

azhdarchid.com/against-metr...
Against 'Metroidbrania': a Landscape of Knowledge Games
What are knowledge games? How do we relate them to each other? What sub-genres exist – and which ones might be implied?
azhdarchid.com
November 13, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
Hidden in the controversial about UK "choking ban" proposal are a host of even more egregious proposals that could:

* make camming illegal
* redefine escort ads as pimping
* render model contracts unenforceable
* criminalize discussions of teen sexuality

And a whole lot more ...
Moral panic about rough sex gives way to censorship in the UK
British regulators and lawmakers are hot on a measure that would make possessing or publishing strangulation porn a crime.
reason.com
November 12, 2025 at 6:28 PM
the fact that I could easily name an extra half dozen places that I have looked for work critical information in the past week
it's on miro. it's literally on figma. you have to log into okta. it's in jira. it's on zoom. it's on pureref. it's on flow. it's on perforce. it's on slack. you can find it on slack. you can go to slack and find it. log onto slack right now. you can slack it. slack has it for you. it's on slack.
November 12, 2025 at 10:31 PM
on the one hand: very funny that this is the reason (it was an article about Johnny Cash being uncool)
on the other: yeah I mean high context moderation is incredibly hard and will likely *still* piss people off. I genuinely believe it is impossible to achieve with a site like Bluesky.
The account owner of @sarahkendzior.bsky.social was suspended for 72 hours for expressing a desire to shoot the author of an article. The post, made 11/10, stated: "I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die." 1/2
November 12, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Reposted by v buckenham
Jenny Holzer, Living, 1980-82
September 24, 2023 at 12:34 AM
type in HTML magazine
🚀 NEW MAGAZINE ⌨️
Back in the ’80s there were printed mags of BASIC programs to type in, we’ve brought that back but for web pages!
10 amazing games, toys, puzzles and utilities, no coding knowledge needed
vole.wtf/doctype/
DOCTYPE magazine 🚀⌨️
’80s BASIC type-in mags are back, but this time for HTML!
vole.wtf
November 12, 2025 at 11:07 AM
oh shit, I guess I should think about whether there's anything I want on CD before prices get stupid.

(mainly, I'm happy for the return of physical media and a new revenue stream for working artists)
Interesting convo with a friend who owns a hip NYC record shop about a sudden renewed interest in CDs, which were a negligible part of his business till recently.
November 12, 2025 at 10:10 AM
Reposted by v buckenham
the 100 games later class showcase is welcomed to submit our past works, so I published "Five High High Five" on itch. this is also a 10 minutes creation at the park with a smartphone made through Downpour
dragonwasabipotato.itch.io/five-high-hi...
Five High High Five by Dragon Wasabi Potato
high five game
dragonwasabipotato.itch.io
November 12, 2025 at 12:01 AM
ah! exciting stuff! a project to allow developers to resolve conflicts to Godot scene files within Godot itself, visualising changes within the scene view www.inkandswitch.com/project/beck...
01 · Version Control for Space and Structure
Exploring version control for spatial and hierarchical data in Godot scenes.
www.inkandswitch.com
November 11, 2025 at 6:49 PM