Bean
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beanalby.bsky.social
Bean
@beanalby.bsky.social
350 followers 1.3K following 110 posts
Terrible Programmer. Into videogames, boardgames, & pinball. Developer for Handelabra Games. Humming the bassline. Apprendre le français. He/him.
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beanalby.bsky.social
An advantage of multiple monitors: oh, I'm working with a bug with powers adding Strife? Let me just pull up EVERY SINGLE THING in the digital game that adds Strife, and leave it off to the side for me to skim while thinking through some code changes 😊
A desktop workstation, with two vertical monitors to the left, showing various Power cards, Aspects, and Special Rules for the board game Spirit Island. A main, central monitor with C# code is partially visible off to the right.
October 13, 2025 at 4:46 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
sometimes debugging tools are a good piece of software,
sometimes debugging tools are just help visualizing things.
A picture of components from the board game "Spirit Island". Center frame is the Spirit Panel for the spirit "Finder of Paths Unseen". Some presence tokens are placed along the tracks, but they're numbered with Post-It labels to assist in verifying the video game's output.
September 15, 2025 at 3:35 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Celebrating my 19th anniversary with @tinamat.bsky.social with our daily walk along the Euclid bike trail, sushi at Pacific East, and a movie at home 🥰
Photo of the Euclid bike trail that runs along Lake Erie A selfie of Beanalby with his wife, Tina Eight sushi rolls at Pacific East. Enough for leftovers!
September 2, 2025 at 12:29 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
Or rather, this is what debugging at runtime looked like:
Two photographs from the 1981 issue of Byte Magazine. The first shows 5 chip clips attached to a microcontroller on a circuit board, with the caption: "Photo 4: The analyzer is intended for use while a circuit is in dynamic operation. Connection to the circuit can be done with the "chip-clip" method shown in photo 1, or by using separate test probes. The latter is more versatile. The circuit shown under test is the Disk-80 expansion interface from last month's Circuit Cellar." The second photo shows a dozen horizontal green lines across a CRT screen, occasionally oscillating between high/low states. The caption reads: "Photo 5: When the circuit of figure 5 (on page 42) is attached to the logic analyzer, a data-domain display can be converted to a time-domain display. Essentially nothing more than an eight-channel scope multiplexer, this circuit greatly expands the display potential of the average oscilloscope, as the photo demonstrates."
September 1, 2025 at 10:15 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Like, the art of troubleshooting in a world before attaching debuggers...
A letter from a reader in the 1981 Byte Magazine, title "A Graphic Execution Display". The letter is as follows: "I wrote a program for my Ohio Scientific Superboard to compute artificial satellite orbits and noted it ran slower and slower as time and the number of orbits progressed. It occurred to me that I could graphically display how fast the program was executing and find out where it was slowing down by adding some extra code. Every 20 lines or so, I inserted K9 = K9 + l:GOSUB 2000, and then at the end: 2000 S9 = 54244 2010 POKE S9 + K9, 48 + K9 2020 FORZ = lTO30:NEXTZ 2030 POKES9 + K9,32 2040 IFK9 = 9THENK9=0 2050 RETURN This flashes the numbers 1 thru 9 from left to right on the bottom row of the video screen every time the main portion of the program loops. You can easily note the delay between certain numbers; this helps to pinpoint where the program is spending most of its time. The troublesome area or line can be further narrowed down by adding more GOSUBs, or by moving those from the faster part to the slower part. (Be sure that there are nine GOSUBs and that each is executed only once within the loop.) This method alerted me to a poorly written line of code I would have otherwise never suspected."
September 1, 2025 at 10:11 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
NGL, Team Cherry has been living the dream I strive for - enough success to simply be able to work freely.
Screenshot of a snippet of Schreier's article on the the process of Team Cherry's development of Silksong: "Perhaps the biggest reason Silksong took so long was that Team Cherry never had to worry about the one thing that keeps other independent developers awake at night: money. During the production of Hollow Knight, they’d stayed lean, sometimes living off leftover triangle sandwiches that their office neighbor would bring them after meetings. “My dad would sometimes pop up and give me $20,” Gibson said. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m having coffee today!’” Thanks to their first game’s massive financial success, Gibson and Pellen no longer have to scrounge leftovers. For Pellen, who has two kids and a third on the way, that’s provided an inestimable peace of mind. For Gibson, who said he spends most of his time at the office, it hasn’t changed much. “I live in a very basic two-bedroom apartment,” he said. “Sometimes I think, ‘You know what would be better, is a one-bedroom apartment.’ Because then there’s even less to maintain.”
August 21, 2025 at 3:04 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
I was ecstatic to see that "Joey's Mega Man Corner" still exists, and the text of the latest update, combined with its date, is absolutely perfect.
kinless.com/megaman/

Also small shoutout to modern browsers STILL supporting the old magic words like s, s, s for color, etc.
August 9, 2025 at 1:42 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Literally just got back from picking some up. Undisputed best of all time right here.
A pint of Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby, unopened, just begging to be devoured.
August 3, 2025 at 1:37 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
Some of these CAPTCHAs have given me an existential crisis.

Ceci n'est pas un vélo.
a screenshot of CAPTCHA test to verify the user is a human. It's asking the user to click parts of the image that contain "bicycles". The picture is a flat piece of asphalt, with a crude picture of a bicycle off to the side. Should this "count" as a bicycle? Who knows!
August 1, 2025 at 12:29 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Just watched a bit, and they have their own transformations, they're just not shown in the opening. All the characters have their original designs, in addition to transformed forms, Super Sentai-style
Screenshot of the TMNT anime, showing (from left) Bebop, Shredder, and Rocksteady transformed by the power of Dark Mu
May 24, 2025 at 2:55 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
This shared office space makes it hard to get work done when coworkers insist on using the same desk as me
A picture of three cats lounging around a keyboard on a desk, clearly quite comfortable and pleased with themselves
May 21, 2025 at 1:00 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Hell Yeah
May 16, 2025 at 12:22 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Digital Spirit Island is unaffected, from the discord:
April 18, 2025 at 4:11 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
Always satisfying after merging a feature branch to wipe out all the gawd awful false starts 🛠 plenty of lessons learned along the way
A visualization of a git graph of source code, showing many abandoned branches with various degrees of testing, debugging, and broken dreams
February 21, 2025 at 5:08 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Going back and forth on whether to call a new parameter `includePotentialElements` or `includePossibleElements`, decide to look them up in a dictionary to help differentiate as a tiebreaker... 😭
A screenshot of the dictionary definition of "potential", describing it as "possible", which is completely unhelpful in deciding between using the two words "potential" and "possible"
February 18, 2025 at 9:22 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
FuturLab, the team behind Powerwash Simulator, are on it at least!
February 12, 2025 at 5:10 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Another cool thing:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) makes magazine images searchable. But OCR software is designed for "high contrast, black on white" text (e.g. NOT gaming magazines)

So they developed their own OCR that handles this kind of nonsense

I've worked with OCR, and THIS IS AMAZING
On the left, a page of Diehard Game Fan magazine. It has green text on a gradient background of black, to white, to black. It is difficult for even a human to read, and the kind of thing that causes problems for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. In the upper right, we see traditional OCR output. It struggles with recognizing the text. The first line contains "A lot of the good news from Jap: NISECEENSENERSSNERISEE Ee around Sega," which shows obvious errors at the "green on white" text in the middle. In the lower right is VGHF's OCR output, which recognizes the ALMOST correct text: "A lot of the good news from Japan these days seems to evolve around Sega". It has "evolve" instead of "revolve", but dang it's close.
January 30, 2025 at 7:18 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Spitting image of ours, Nef & Nyxie!
two cats sitting on a disk, closely resembling the cats in the replied post
January 9, 2025 at 2:03 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Finally got Valentine's Trial 3 combo in #skullgirls after banging my head against it most of the day. Managing Parasoul's height throughout the juggling kept giving me problems
December 9, 2024 at 4:32 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
He's escalated his attack, with BELLY RUBS. I'm powerless! 😭
December 9, 2024 at 2:33 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
I'M SITTTIN HERE, TRYING TO PRACTICE MY COMBOS, AND NEF'S ALL "Look at my fuzzy butt, you know you wanna rub it" 😠
The player's perspective of a leverless fighting game controller with Skullgirls on the monitors, and the cat Nefarian lounging comfortably in a cat bed beneath the monitor. His tail is exceptionally fuzzy.
December 9, 2024 at 1:58 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
What an appropriate following post
An image of the bluesky feed showing this comic, and then coincidentally an image of one kitten biting another immediately after
December 8, 2024 at 3:24 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
Curry Beef Hot Pot from Pacific East Coventry, perfect way to shake off the winter chill 🌨️
Freshly served Curry Beef Hot Pot, with a side of rice. Philadelphia rolls are visible in the background
December 1, 2024 at 10:01 PM
beanalby.bsky.social
"Grapple Dog: Cosmic Canines" is just as much of a joy to play as the first one. Lots of neat mechanics added have added just enough variety, doesn't overstay its welcome, a perfect little gem.
November 21, 2024 at 3:52 AM
beanalby.bsky.social
24 hours left in our Sentinels of the Multiverse 2 crowdfunding campaign! We're 92% of the way to the Enhanced Campaign Mode stretch goal, I'm really excited for some of the Ideas™ we've got cooking in there :D
sentinelsdigital.com/2
Screenshot of the Sentinels of the Multiverse 2 crowdfunding site, showing it's 92% of the way to fulfilling Enhanced Campaign Mode
November 15, 2024 at 5:20 PM