Matthew Skala @mattskala@mstdn.io

So, which one of you is the serval and which one is the bag?

It still doesn't work all that well, but my homemade local search engine is online and does work *at all* now. https://files.northcoastsynthesis.com/search.php

Working on the Boxers game again after a long hiatus. Re-did the counter sheets to make it easier to register the two sides. I put the project on the shelf for a while because in many trial plays I'd never seen the Allies win, which is a problem because that was the historical result; but last night while drunk and sad I had an idea for a way to tweak the simulation to make it easier for them without breaking the rest of it, so that's going into the next trial play.

just finished QCing another small batch of Leapfrogs https://northcoastsynthesis.com/products/msk-007-leapfrog-vcf.html

Fuck it, I think I have to write a search engine myself after all. This is probably not the best use of my time, but my brain is forcing me.

I went to bed thinking about "Uma Musume Pretty Derby" and I think I dreamed most of a second season in which the horse girls are attending university. Don't remember much of it, though.

What is considered pretty recent in terms of local/intranet search engines? I have heard of "ht://Dig" but it seems not to have been touched in 15 years.

the rodents.txt file says what kind of mice you're allowed to connect to the host

Here in Canada many consumer products must be labelled in both English and French. Usually, the give the product the name they actually want on the English side and then just phone in a mediocre French approximation. But in the case of "Cheese-tastic"/"Fromidable" you can tell they did it the other way around.

I'll be sending out the next North Coast Synthesis email newsletter in a few days, including an exclusive discount code (I'm planning one in each issue). If you want to subscribe, there's a form here: https://files.northcoastsynthesis.com/newsletter/

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Green modular, part 3: More metal! https://northcoastsynthesis.com/news/green-modular-part-3-more-metal/

"Modular synthesis: don't do it!" One of the most popular entries in my "intro to modular" series. https://northcoastsynthesis.com/news/modular-synthesis-dont-do-it/

I have a couple hundred old pages on my personal Web site from the early 2000s that are still basically accessible, but no longer linked from the main site, and their design is messed up because some of the images they load are missing. Not sure what to do with these, but today I slapped analytics boilerplate on all of them to try to find out whether anyone is still reading them.

Finally managed to integrate Matomo analytics with BigCommerce. So now I can get detailed statistics on the abandoned carts at https://northcoastsynthesis.com. Or, in theory, actual purchases too, but the test coverage there is pretty low.

In my travels I once happened upon a Web site that said it was devoted to "anthropomorphic fiction." Wow! I thought, some kind of cutting-edge experimental art form in which stories resemble the human body! Like maybe there are chapters for the arms and legs and so on!

Of course, they really just meant "furry."

video by "Dziam Bass" demoing my product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ2Q30ZnDKs