Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Illicit activities are commonly concealed behind legitimate businesses. Criminal mathematicians want an optimal cover — so they use the Pareto front.

November 5, 2025 at 2:29 AM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

Andrew Doull

@andrewdoull.bsky.social

Roguelike Celebration (2025)

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · Oct 24

we should all just get on a bbs instead of going to gdc

October 24, 2025 at 3:47 AM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

Maria J Pérez Cuervo

@mjpcuervo.bsky.social

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

October 22, 2025 at 8:13 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Currently four weeks into my third and mildest-ever case of COVID. Being able to do 50% of my normal activities makes me feel like I'm recovering rapidly. But the next-day PEM penalty for attempting 60% is pretty harsh.

Solidarity with all the long-haulers out there. I see you.

October 13, 2025 at 10:43 PM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

Ryan McDiarmid

@ryanmcdiarmid.com

This is why everyone should put up a monthly donation to @comradery.bsky.social.

nattie winters @utilitylimb.bsky.social · Aug 12

seems bad how patreon is vc-funded (guaranteed to die) and also a single point of failure that could wipe out a significant chunk of the arts instantaneously.

October 7, 2025 at 7:05 PM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

Mr. Joshua

@pantspants.bsky.social

June 2, 2025 at 11:51 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Fair Lady briefly became Final Girl.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEN2...

24/7 LIVESTREAM OF GLOBAL SUMUD FLOTILLA

YouTube video by Global Sumud Flotilla

www.youtube.com

October 2, 2025 at 4:26 AM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Spoke too soon.

Somebody make a *Roguelike* inspired by the Sumud Flotilla.

🍂Evan Balster🍂 @art.imitates.life · Oct 1

Somebody make an Oregon Trail style game inspired by the Sumud Flotilla

Camera footage from a motley fleet of boats sailing into the morning sun. Their names are Estrella, Huga, Morgana, Wahoo, Paola 1 and Fair Lady.

October 1, 2025 at 10:23 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Somebody make an Oregon Trail style game inspired by the Sumud Flotilla

October 1, 2025 at 4:33 AM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Less than 24 hours until this civilian aid flotilla would make landfall, but the last nine flotillas were violently intercepted. It's difficult to imagine they will succeed, but it's undeniably worth it to try.
Watching the stream with bated breath. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEN2...

A screenshot of the Sumud Flotilla GPS tracker, depicting a flotilla of forty-five humanitarian ships making a beeline across the Southeast Mediterranean for the coast of Gaza.

September 30, 2025 at 10:02 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Watching some very important boats. Searching up "Sumud" a couple times per day.

Location data for 42 humanitarian ships off the coast of Crete in the Mediterranean sea.

September 27, 2025 at 1:24 AM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

jenny

@qdork.bsky.social

actually i changed my mind store.steampowered.com/app/2359120/... #gaming #indiegames #gamedev #indiegamedev #videogames

September 24, 2025 at 8:26 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Intellectually I knew clay came from the ground but seeing it crumbling off the sea-cliffs near my home in 100kg bricks, basically the same stuff I played with in elementary school, kind of blew my mind.

I hold a hand-sized share of raw blue clay, freshly collected from below a cliff face.

September 24, 2025 at 7:25 AM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

Game Devs of Color Expo

@gdocexpo.com

This groundbreaking initiative isn't just about the technological advancements of ethnic hair modeling, but also the infrastructure and inclusive pipelines!

Check out some of the work from this talk.

#GDoCExpo2025 #gamedev

September 18, 2025 at 6:11 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Once again I traveled with so many teas that my backpack ended up smelling like a 12th-century silk road trader's yurt.

This time the yaupon chai was the chief offender.

September 17, 2025 at 7:27 PM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

Winifred Tylenol Spice Burton

@authorwinifred.blacksky.app

"They're politicians, what are they supposed to do? Literally fight in the streets?"

Unashamed to say this made me cry.

Wrecked @wrecked9n76e.bsky.social · Sep 16

Karina Villa protecting her constituents by literally running ICE off the streets in West Chicago and yelling to residents to stay inside their homes.

September 16, 2025 at 8:11 PM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

folklore.org/Do_It.html?s...
Rest OK, Larry Tesler.

Many of the academic types who were involved in creating the earliest implementations of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and various universities sort of sneered at the first generation of personal computers when they appeared in the mid-seventies, since the early personal computers were much less powerful than the machines that they were used to programming. There wasn't that much you could do with only four kilobytes of memory and no disk drive.

But Larry Tesler, who was a key member of the Smalltalk team in the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC, felt differently. He was really excited by the potential of personal computers, buying a Commodore PET as soon as one became available in 1977. He was one of the demonstrators at Apple's famous Xerox PARC visit in December 1979, and he was so impressed by the Apple visitors that he quit PARC and started working at Apple on July 17, 1980, as the manager of the Lisa Applications team.

Larry championed consistency between applications, and made many contributions to what eventually became the Macintosh User Interface. He was also the leading advocate and implementor at Apple of user testing: actually trying out our software out on real users and seeing what happened. Starting in the summer of 1981, Larry organized a series of user tests of the nascent Lisa software, recruiting friends and family to try out the software for the first time, while being observed by the Apple designers who recorded their reactions.

The user tests were conducted in a specially constructed room featuring a one-way mirror, so observers could watch the tests without being intrusive. The tests were conducted by a moderator who made sure the user felt comfortable and showed her the basics of using a mouse. Then, with no further instruction, users were asked to perform specific tasks, without help from the moderator, like editing some text and saving it. The moderator encouraged each user to mumble under her breath while doing the tasks, revealing her current thinking as much as possible. Each session was audio or videotaped for later analysis.

When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small window called a "dialog box", that contained a question, and presented two buttons, for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled "Do It" and "Cancel". The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking "Cancel" when they should have clicked "Do It", but it wasn't clear what they were having trouble with.

Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, "I'm not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?"

It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and the 'I' in 'Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital 'I' looked very much like a lower case 'l', so he was reading 'Do It' as 'Dolt' and was therefore kind of offended.

After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to 'OK' (which was initially avoided, because we thought it was too colloquial), and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.

September 15, 2025 at 8:43 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

@chevyray.dev "Tale of the Golden Eagle" is the short sci-fi story I was telling you about yesterday. This blew my mind when I was like, 16
escapepod.org/2013/06/28/e...

Escape Pod 402: The Tale of the Golden Eagle

This is a story about a bird. A bird, a ship, a machine, a woman—she was all these things, and none, but first and fundamentally a bird. It is also a story about a man—a gambler, a liar, and a cheat…

escapepod.org

September 14, 2025 at 7:08 PM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Full Indie Summit folks interested in a Sunday hike, gather at the venue (playhouse) around 10:30-11:00.

September 14, 2025 at 4:45 AM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

What if fascists were instead just people really interested in fasciation? Sticking flowers in the barrels of guns, but the flowers are all fucked up

September 13, 2025 at 7:18 AM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Heading up to Full Indie Summit in Vancouver. Last time I attended was ten years ago!

September 12, 2025 at 10:08 PM

Reposted by 🍂Evan Balster🍂

neotl

@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

Perceptual Parasitic Confusion: habit of parasites to perceive themselves as virtuous exploited hosts, and perceive hosts as malevolent resource thieves

September 7, 2025 at 1:23 AM

🍂Evan Balster🍂

@art.imitates.life

Listen, the Vault organelle will reveal its secrets when it's good and ready

melos han-tani @hantani.bsky.social · Aug 12

Excited for anodyne 2 birthday but gripped by ennui about the Vault organelle whose function is not yet understood. We have these in all our cells...yet its function is not yet understood..