from Un blog fusible

pas qui s'éloignent pas qui se croisent pas bien marqués qui s'enfoncent dans le sable pas légers qui laissent à peine une trace pas d'hommes et pas de femmes pas de course largement espacés pas de vieillard à la canne fatiguée pas d'enfant encore trébuchant

tous ces pas que la marée montante effacera

photo © @Perry77@pixelfed.uno

 
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from ptrbs

I don’t know if this is common in other countries, but in Germany I have experienced long waiting periods at the general practitioner's office time and time again. Mind you, this is with an appointment booked.

This morning was no different. I had booked an appointment to have some blood drawn at 08:35, which fit nicely between dropping off my son at kindergarten and my hairdresser appointment. I arrived, like a proper German, around 10-15 mins before my appointment at the doctor’s office. I was promptly directed to “wait for a short time” in the waiting room.

From my experience, this “waiting for a short time” is either 1-5 mins or 45+ mins. Unfortunately, today was not a lucky 1-5 mins day for me. In the end, it took them nearly an hour to call my name and to take my blood. Since it was for a blood test, I was not able to eat anything beforehand, so I slowly started to wonder in that waiting room how long I would last before I would pass out. Fortunately, it did not come to that in the end.

I always wonder how you book an appointment for a certain time and still have to wait 1+ hours. You might think it is a backlog of patients they have to get through, and one delay caused another, which blocked the whole system. However, the doc office opens at 08:00 in the morning, so how can it be blocked 30 minutes after? More importantly, why does this happen time and time again and never get fixed?

I wonder if doc offices overbook every morning and then “see how it goes”? Is this a viable strategy they are actually using, or am I just making things up? I mean, you could potentially cram a lot more patients in a shorter timeframe, but it would also really piss off people who wait a long time when they do have an appointment. But maybe these pissed-off patients have nowhere else to go, and the practice knows it.

My next visit is tomorrow…

 
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from Unvarnished diary of a lill Japanese mouse

JOURNAL 8 octobre 2026

Aujourd’hui ka chan entre officiellement dans mon école. Elle commence son apprentissage. Elle sera maintenant mon élève. Elle accepte que je serai très exigeante car elle sera amenée à passer le contrôle de mes pairs quand je la sentirai prête, mais que nous sommes deux femmes et qu’il faudra qu'elle soit deux fois meilleure que si nous étions des hommes. C’est ainsi. Nous nous retrouverons tous les jeudis ici à la maison. Pendant le travail il n’y aura plus entre nous l'amitié profonde qui nous unit mais un strict rapport de maître à élève. Ce sera dur et extrêmement exigeant. Elle est ok. La journée a été longue. Ce soir nous nous retrouvons à nouveau, fatiguées mais sœurs de cœur. Nous allons nous doucher puis nous préparerons ensemble le dîner.

#Kachan #dojo

 
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from bios

Thoughts on The CCID’s Not My Forever Campaign

by Roger Young

Disclaimer: This shit makes me very angry.

“A partnership with the CCID is more than a donation. It’s an investment in a safer, more dignified city centre for your staff, customers and clients. Your support directly funds the outreach and reintegration programmes that turn small first steps into lasting change. It provides your brand with a visible, meaningful commitment.” — Cape Town Central City Improvement District, Not My Forever campaign page

In September the CCID launched Not My Forever, a digital storytelling campaign built around people who have lived on the streets of Cape Town’s CBD. Four of them speak to camera about family deaths, abuse, addiction and losing their children. Their trauma is shot beautifully in black and white. Let us be clear here: they are just doing what it takes to survive. They have been asked to tell their stories, and their stories are true and heartbreaking. A fifth person, who now works for the CCID, is presented as what they could become.

The stories run as video on the campaign website and on digital LED billboards around the city, between the ads for everything else. “Behind every person experiencing homelessness in Cape Town is a name, a history, and a future still being written,” and the invitation is to see the person, not the stereotype. I can just imagine the person sleeping in a doorway somewhere off Loop Street, their sleep interrupted by the flashing face of a success story, taunting them for their lack of initiative.

The CCID is a non-profit funded by the CBD’s property owners, set up in 2000 to lift the city centre out of what it calls “crime and grime.” Its own pitch is a world-class place to live, work, play and stay. Social development is one department among those. At the City’s last count, in 2018/19, 6,175 people were living on Cape Town’s streets or in its shelters; researchers say about 14,000. There aren’t enough billboards in Cape Town for every person experiencing homelessness.

So while this campaign might be materially and socially helping a fraction of those on the streets, and those on the billboards, the CCID is not mandated to solve homelessness as a wider social issue. Forgive me for being cynical here, but as a former homeless person in the city of Cape Town, I wonder if we, the unhoused, are so used to getting beaten down by the CCID that we are willing to treat whatever scraps they give us as a blessing, a break from the demeaning bullshit we have been subjected to.

Through Straatwerk – partially funded by the CCID – redemption is conditional on labour: sweeping the city clean and safe for business. When I was there in the 2010s, if you didn’t sweep you didn’t get a bed. You swept, you got a meal and a bed. I cannot remember if we were paid in cash and it was deducted; I remember that we got no cash.

In 2018, GroundUp reported that Straatwerk’s Jesus Saves programme in Sea Point paid R50 for a four-hour shift, less a 20% administration fee. That works out to R12.50 an hour before the deduction, or R10 an hour after it. The national minimum wage of R20 an hour came into effect a few weeks later, on 1 May 2018. Straatwerk’s manager told the paper that the people on those shifts weren’t workers but members of a “school of life.” That seems like a neat trick for avoiding paying the homeless minimum wage to do a job that the City of Cape Town should be responsible for.

Also, “Jesus Saves”.

In Johannesburg, OUTsurance and Easybet put their names on the pointsmen directing traffic, and the logos are on the vests. Everyone can see who is paying for what. Johannesburg is a city whose municipal management problems are widely acknowledged, and I’m not offering this as a model. But Cape Town claims to be a functioning municipality, and here the same arrangement — business paying for work normally associated with the state — gets presented as welfare.

When I lost my apartment in 2018 after a sudden rent increase of 20% coincided with a relapse, I ended up living from couch to park bench. One afternoon I was sitting in the park across from my old apartment building, in the place where I used to have lunch every day, as I had nowhere else to go, and I was told to move on by the CCID because I was making the tourists uncomfortable. Because there were tourists watching, the CCID were extremely nice to me. They drove me out to Blikkiesdorp, thirty kilometres outside of the city.

During COVID the homeless were removed from their sparse populations on the mountain above Vredehoek and moved into the densely populated, unsanitary conditions of Strandfontein, where the food was thin and information was non-existent. The reason given for the move was that the unhoused might infect the residents. We were not seen as residents.

So when I see the billboards of Not My Forever, I have to wonder if this is not just virtue signalling by the CCID to make the tourists feel comfortable while they remove the homeless elsewhere.

Of course, social change is not the ambit of the CCID; they are here to make the city safe and clean for business and high-value renters. It is the CoCT’s failure to build low-cost housing, suitable harm-reduction interventions, and unconditional access to shelters, skills development and rehabs that has left the CCID doing social-development work in the first place.

The Constitutional Court has now found the City’s housing programme unconstitutional in part because it failed to provide temporary emergency accommodation in the inner city and compounded the legacy of spatial apartheid. The DA-led CoCT has, over the course of its tenure, failed to adequately respond to the problems of homelessness, spatial inequality, and the lack of access to work opportunities that, combined, lead to high instances of substance dependence.

There should be no private-public partnership managing the unhoused of Cape Town. They are people, not things to be managed. And while at face value the CCID department of Social Development may seem to be leading well-intentioned interventions, their corporate mandate is at odds with their brand messaging.

There are signs in the CBD of Cape Town that state NO BEGGING in pictorial form. Can I tell you what it’s like to be hungry on the streets, and someone walks past you with a fucking artisan boerewors roll, and when you ask them for help they grunt and point to a no begging sign? Your hunger is not allowed. Here’s a suggestion: don’t make begging illegal, make it unnecessary.

After the institution of the CCID, homeless spikes, hostile benches and no-begging signs became conventional features of the CBD. Now that same CCID has a department of Social Development. I remain skeptical.

One of them says he’s working on himself, preparing for a different future. His redemption becomes evidence of the CCID’s success. In this format relapse wouldn't be a part of recovery, it would land as a breach of the brand. Everyone who has seen his face in the CBD has been told how his story ends, and if it doesn’t end that way, the failure will be his alone. His redemption story is his permanent Not Forever to be measured against.

Researchers who study recovery stories in mental health services have a name for this. Angela Woods, Akiko Hart and Helen Spandler describe the Recovery Narrative as a genre: a highly circumscribed kind of storytelling, shaped by a “positivity imperative” that lets some stories through and silences the rest. Another review, “Eliciting Recovery Narratives in Global Mental Health: Benefits and Potential Harms,” finds that the institutions collecting these stories shape who gets chosen and how they’re coached for their audience.

In the video for the Not My Forever campaign, one of the people who was formerly homeless and now works for the CCID says the phrase “Not My Forever” in a way that, to my ear, sits uncomfortably in her mouth. You can imagine the tone deaf brand bro saying, “PERFECT,” between sips of his R90 flat white.

There is another beautiful shot of a homeless camp under a bridge, the golden evening light filtering between the two aerial freeways onto the tents. A voice-over explains that there is nowhere to sleep in the city, and that they sleep under the bridges to stay dry. It almost looks idyllic. But the message being reinforced is brutally simple: there is nowhere to sleep in the city. Do not even try.

However, there are plenty of places for people to sleep within the city, but that space is available only to a certain class of people — property owners, highly paid professionals, and tourists. Everyone else must catch a bus to work, and the MyCiTi prices keep on rising.

One of the people featured in the campaign talks about his time as a 28. We cut to aerial shots of the Cape Flats, then to a man standing with his back to camera outside a housing project as a police van passes. Again, the implied framing is clear: the places where “the Coloureds” live are associated with crime and the destruction of lives. But there is no context for why these areas are like this, or any clear accountability for the conditions that produced them. The failure is individualised and racialised across class lines. There is no context for the systems in which those failures happen.

Side Note: CoCT has launched its programme for aerial surveillance and SWAT units to support the gang units in the Cape Flats. That’s on brand.

Another person in the campaign hopes to help other addicts and street people find their way to better lives. According to Not My Forever, the way to a brighter future is to help other people out of homelessness. The video’s final payoff is… maybe you can get a job with the CCID helping get other people off the streets, or maybe you can use your experience to help other people get free of addiction.

While these might be noble ideas, they are being employed to legitimise a private-public partnership whose core function is to make the city safe for business, not people. Besides, are there even enough jobs for every homeless person to aspire to work for the CCID?

According to the CCID’s own news page, field worker Mark Williams “anticipates that as many as 30 of his clients may not survive” each winter. If we had unconditional access to shelters, even if just in winter, this might indicate that the CCID actually cares about the homeless.

The CoCT and the DA keep creating conditions that churn out a new supply of homeless people pretty much constantly. If they don’t die in winter, there are streets for them to sweep, at below minimum wage.

In the framing of the Not My Forever campaign, the message seems to be: to get out of the conditions of homelessness (that the CoCT has helped create) you must work for business doing the job of government, for the sake of building brands, and perform redemption forever.

Note:If you dispute my framing of the CCID here, please feel free to ask an unhoused person in the City Centre. You will find them under the bridge, bathed in golden light.
 
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from AnOublietteofThought

I'm currently laying in bed listening to the beep beep beep of reverse warning driving me insane. It's been ongoing for a while now. There is something about it that gets under my skin very quickly. I had a brief phone call distraction.

We spoke of old movies from our childhood and teens. He's four years younger than me, so there can be slight memory differences. I think he was likely allowed to watch more. He also knows all of the movie trivia, so that can be smile-inducing to listen to. I've never bothered because it takes me out of the story.

I also don't like to know what I'm going to be watching before I see it. It spoils the fun. I rarely watch a movie twice, but I think I'm going to make an exception and take a nostalgia trip, because I fell asleep watching 'Gremlins' yesterday, and there was something about it that brought me joy. A warmth I often find missing in today's cinema.

We spoke about a few different movies. I'm going to be looking up 'Flight of the Navigator' to see what adult me thinks. It reminded me of a conversation from earlier in the week where a younger friend was asking me about 'Rocky Horror Picture Show'. It did not rub her the right way.

I, on the other hand, have some very fond memories of the movie. I think I must have been very wide-eyed the first time I saw it in the early 90s. It seemed like everyone knew what was going on except for me. I got very wet that evening, and didn't know a word of the songs. The shadow cast was amazing. I was most excited to go back fully prepared and dressed appropriately. I'm going to have to have a look-see.

That's around the age where I started loosening up a little. I still hadn't fully settled into my me. We're constantly shifting and growing after all, but I began to develop a better understanding of who I was when not following the rules of conservative expectation.

My visual snow has drifted into its rarity phase tonight. It usually only gets plasma cloudy when a geomagnetic storm is headed our way. I should check on that. They're like a drifting purple fuchsia tonight. It's simultaneously extremely pretty and very disconcerting because I'm not accustomed to it. The normal red dots have been joined with blue dots, and there's larger teal flashes of what looks like around seven layers of chicken scratch fading in and out on the diagonal. When I close my eyes, it's uncomfortably intense. I guess I'll be adding some light to my darkness to try to dampen it.

These days people classify it as a syndrome or disorder. I question if it's more a neurological phenotype. It's all I've ever known after all. I should probably get off the phone. I have a few chess games to lose later. I had a mild migraine all day yesterday. It's foolish of me to be pushing it, but I say my brain can get ahold of itself and calm down. We have some research to do. (Yes, I know there's no known correlation with geomagnetic storms, but the timing is kooky.)

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved. Not edited nor proofread.

 
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from Pierre-Emmanuel Weck

À chaque renouveau de manifs, c'est la même rengaine, il faut flouter les visages des manifestants, voir même ne plus faire de photo du tout.

Si on écoutait les donneurs de leçons gauchos, on arriverait au monde souhaité par les fachos. Plus d'information, plus de rapport au réel, un seul canal d'information…

La violence des manifestations serait toujours la bonne, face à celle de l'Etat et de sa police. Dans ce cadre là, qu'en sera-t-il le jour où nous aurons des manifs de fachos qui casseront des vitrine de boutiques juives ? Pas d'image là non plus ?

En 1986, lors des manifs étudiantes contre la loi Devaquet, alors que Jacques Chirac était premier ministre et Charles Pasqua ministre de l'intérieur, les journalistes de télévision avaient remarqué un manifestant avec une écharpe jaune qui lançait des projectiles sur les CRS. Ce même manifestation n'était jamais inquiété lors des charges des policiers sur les étudiants, et même, on le retrouvait sur différents terrains de manifestation. Ces images avait alors permis de démontrer qu'il y avait bien des “agents provocateurs” envoyés pour décrédibiliser les étudiants. Et s'il n'y avait pas eu d'images ?

On n'a pas eu ce genre de débat pour les gilets jaunes. Peut-être parce que ce mouvement est parti socialement de couches de la société que les révolutionnaires de salon ne fréquentaient pas et qu'ensuite, récupéré en partie par l'extrême droite, il n'apparaissait plus comme fréquentable.

De quel camp est la violence ? La sienne est-t-elle toujours légitime ? Pourquoi la majorité la rejette-t-elle ?

Je ne porte pas de jugement sur sa légitimité, parfois il n'existe pas d'autre forme d'expression possible. Et même si c'est un engrenage délétère, elle n'est souvent que la réponse à une autre violence. Dans le cas présent, côté étudiants, en dehors de l'excitation et l'effet d'entraînement, matinée de provocations divers, le rôle des adultes est plutôt de les écouter et de les aider à formuler leurs revendications et organiser leur mouvement, pas d'en profiter pour les envoyer à la casse, éborgner leur vie et remplir leur casier judiciaire.

Côté gouvernement, la violence n'est pas que physique, c'est une trahison morale et politique. C'est leur envoyer le message que l'on n'a pas besoin d'eux, sinon de jouer le seul rôle assigné, celui de consommer et de se débrouiller, quoi qu'il en coûte, pour ne pas remettre en question la hiérarchie actuelle et faire perdurer ce système pour leurs aînés. En dehors de ça, se ne sont que des délinquants à mater et éliminer.

Ceux qui aujourd'hui rejette la photo dans les manifs semblent habités par une vision, à la fois, passéiste et déconnectée de la réalité. Passéiste, car ils sont nostalgique de révoltes anciennes dont ils ont abondamment été abreuvé d'images nostalgique d'un temps où les luttes semblaient continuelles et gâgnables. Et déconnectés d'un monde saturé de vidéosurveillance, de reconnaissance faciale et de fichage. Ils préfèrent s'attaquer à ceux qui tentent de changer ce monde ainsi que ceux qui en font le récit, plutôt qu'au responsables de cette situation.

Ce n'est pas le travail de quelques photographes amateurs ou professionnels qui va mettre en danger tout un mouvement. Le denis de réalité ne sert que le pouvoir qui aura toujours les moyens d'imposer son propre récit.

Si on ne laisse pas les multitudes s'exprimer, on étouffe toute les alternatives.

 
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from An Open Letter

I was reading the Horror book incidents around the house, and I found the thing that honestly hurt me. The most was the mother‘s negligence and how she treated the daughter. It reminded me a lot of of my childhood and my issues with my mom. And I think about how I haven’t spoken with her in over two years because she told me that she should not be in my life in one of her moods. And I think about how her stubbornness is more important to her.

 
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from Midus

Publicat la 26 septembrie 2017.

Ați făcut vreodată ordine în căsuța de e-mail? Dacă aveți Yahoo!, aș putea pune pariu că nu, deoarece, teoretic, aveți spațiu nelimitat. La Yahoo! am renunțat aproape imediat după apariția Gmail. Am intenționat să beneficiez ulterior și de alte servicii Y!, așa că am deschis un nou cont. Dezamăgire totală! Ca inginer, Gmail se potrivește mai mult spiritului tehnic. Yahoo! este mai artistic, mai vizual, mai cromatic, mai orientat către partea socială, de știri și de evenimente. L-aș numi tabloid.

Google e strict și la obiect, dar e mai — aș zice, ba chiar zic — cistercian; scop pur, fără floricele, fără artificii (poate doar cu ocazia vreunui doodle).

Revin la ordinea din căsuța de e-mail. Am luat e-mail cu e-mail, corespondențe vechi de ani de zile (mai exact, din vremea Google Mail beta version) și am rămas surprins câtă informație a rămas „agățată” în acele scrisori electronice.

Conturi pe tot felul de magazine online, de site-uri de muzică, de cărți, de filme, educaționale (adăugați tot ce vă vine în minte), felicitări și urări, persoane de care nici nu ne mai aducem aminte, de altele de care uitasem, dar mi-am reamintit citind din nou conversațiile, persoane care nu mai sunt, persoane dragi cu care comunicam în continuare sau de la care așteptam un semn. Miile de conversații mă aștept să-mi aducă zeci de mii de e-mailuri individuale.

Parcurgerea lor e anevoioasă, dar sunt e-mailuri pe care le citesc și recitesc cu drag. Am și șters o puzderie de redirecționări cu rețete culinare, sfaturi medicale și tot felul de prezentări ce au dus la un procent îngrijorător al ocupării spațiului pus la dispoziție de Google. Versiunea contra cost nu este atractivă, așa că trebuie să eficientizez spațiul.

Am optat pentru un alt serviciu plătit, dar sincronizarea fotografiilor se face în paralel și pe Google, așa că, decât să șterg din poze, mai bine șterg e-mailul cu contul de la magazinul de anvelope.

![Interiorul capelei din Turnul Londrei](https://i.snap.as/zuBWQr02.webp)

Fotografia nu este cea pe care mi-aș fi dorit să o adaug, dar puzderia de poze este mereu pe celălalt calculator, așa că am ales-o pe aceasta. Aceasta reprezintă interiorul capelei din Turnul Londrei, dar, ca stil simplist, seamănă cu cea pe care aș fi dorit să o adaug. Ar fi trebuit să fie o poză cu biserica cisterciană de la Cisnădioara (Michelsberg), județul Sibiu.

De ce?! Pentru că am asociat Gmail cu acest concept, cu acest gen (corectați-mă aici, că nu găsesc formularea ideală) de a practica religia, cu acest stil de viață monahal. Am căutat și am constatat că, deși primisem această informație, se pare că Michelsberg nu este o biserică cisterciană. Totuși, iată o legătură cu acest stil de viață:

Revenind la Biserica-Cetate din Cisnădioara, pe care Andrei a primit-o de la Prepozitura Sibiului, ea a fost donată după scurt timp unui apropiat al Regelui (magistrus Gocelinus) care, la rândul său, a donat „muntele Sfântul Mihail împreună cu biserica și tot pământul ce ține de el” Abației Cisterciene din Cârța.

Sursa: PrinTransilvania.ro

Și iată că, de la ordine și curățenie în e-mailuri, am ajuns la o frântură dintr-o nouă pagină de călătorii. Poate ar fi trebuit să-mi spuneți, dintre destinațiile propuse într-o postare anterioară, pe unde ați fi dorit să vă plimb sau care sunt locurile de care doriți să vă reamintiți citind rândurile mele… Se pare că până la urmă trebuie să decid singur…

 
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from Midus

Publicat la 25 septembrie 2017

Aseară, la o petrecere, am fost prezentat și poftit alături de niște bloggerițe simpatice. Cum s-o fi întâmplat ca toate să scrie despre modă, iar eu să nu am nici măcar o singură postare despre modă?! Bănuiesc că nu putem scrie toți într-o singură direcție. M-au întrebat despre ce scriu. Și? Despre ce scriu? Începusem să dau din colț în colț pentru că eu nu găseam un singur cuvânt, așa cum aveau ele: modă.

![](https://i.snap.as/e76DNKvs.webp)

Am tras aer în piept (era din plin, căci petrecerea a fost în grădină; era seară, iar aerul era răcoros, deci numai bun) și am răspuns: despre timp! Timpul a fost prezent în câteva postări pe care eu le consider bune. Și apoi le-am mai spus despre ce îmi mai aminteam că aș fi scris pe celelalte bloguri: fotografie și natură, concerte și muzică, filme și călătorii, cărți și gânduri…

Din vorbă-n vorbă am ajuns la concluzia că nu putem împăca pe toată lumea. Totuși, eu evit să scriu despre anumite lucruri care știu că îi pot afecta negativ pe unii dintre cititorii mei. Ulterior ni s-a alăturat un pictor în devenire, momentan masterand. El a spus că îi place să fie criticat.

Una dintre bloggerițe, încântată de declarația lui, a zis: ei, iată, lui (adică mie) nu îi place să fie criticat! Nu am încercat să îi spun că înțelesese greșit, că ceea ce scriu nu vreau să îi rănească în vreun fel pe puținii mei cititori și nicidecum să nu îi fac să mă critice! Au contraire! Mi s-a spus că designul nu e atractiv și l-am schimbat! Mi s-a spus că nu am o arhivă accesibilă și am pus-o la dispoziție!

Întrebarea mea, pentru mine însumi, era alta: despre ce scriu eu pe acest blog? Nu am reușit să răspund pe scurt… Poate că timpul va decide, iar spre final voi avea un răspuns dintr-un singur cuvânt: despre… nimic!

 
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from triptych

By Andrew Wooldridge

Game 062 in the collection is Rotten to the Core. It's Diablo with the tone turned all the way to silly: you're a piece of fruit with a butter knife, the monsters are rotten fruit and their pests, and the loot is kitchenware.

Something rotten has crawled up from under the village of Tristrawberry. You grow a fruit hero, head down the cellar stairs and squash your way through twelve procedurally generated levels to Durian the Diabolical, the stinkiest thing in the Great Orchard.

Like every game here, it uses no asset files. Every fruit, monster, dungeon, texture and note of music is made in code. It's built with three.js and plays on a phone as well as on a desktop.

The Diablo loop, but juicier

The structure will feel familiar to anyone who has played Diablo: town, dungeon, loot, back to town. What changes is the vocabulary:

  • Health is Freshness, and mana is Juice. They sit in two glass globes at the bottom of the screen, with a sloshing wave on top.
  • Gold is Sugar.
  • Town portals are Portal Pies.
  • Your health potion is Strawberry Jam and your mana potion is Orange Juice.
  • Everything that dies bursts into juice, and the splats stay on the floor.

That last one does a lot of work. By the end of a big fight the floor is painted in grape purple, tomato red and lemon yellow, so you can see where the fight went.

Grow a hero

The character creator lets you pick from sixteen kinds of fruit, eight colourways, six eyes, six mouths and twelve hats, with a live 3D preview standing in town. Then you choose one of three classes:

ClassMain statSkillsMelon Knight CrunchSlice, Rind Bash, Big Slice, Juice Up!, Pit Leap, Blender

Seed Ranger ZipSeed Shot, Pomegranate Pop, Pip Spray, Somersault, Peel Trap, Raisin Rain

Citromancer ZestZest Bolt, Caramelize, Brain Freeze, Chain Lime-ning, Peel-port, Melon Meteor

That's eighteen skills, and I'm still proud of “Chain Lime-ning”. Like Diablo III, every skill scales from your weapon's damage, so finding a better bread knife makes your fireballs better too. You get one skill point per level, skills rank up to 20, and any skill you've learned can go on any button. The fourth attribute, Pulp, is your health.

Kitchenware with affixes

Loot comes in four rarities: Common, Juicy (magic), Ripe (rare, with a random name) and Golden (uniques). Weapons climb through tiers like Butter Knife → Bread Knife → Santoku → Obsidian Peeler, and shields go from Pot Lid to Wok to Cauldron Lid. Armour includes Tea Cozies, Cork Boots and Wicker Basket Mail.

The fourteen Golden uniques were the most fun part to write:

  • The Big Squeeze, a cleaver
  • Grandma's Rolling Pin
  • Melon Collie, a candy necklace
  • Fresh Prince of Bel-Pear, body armour
  • Oven Mitts of Fury
  • The Wok Lord, a pie-tin shield
  • Kiwirt's Spare Leg, a baguette you get from a quest (more on that below)

Ripe and Golden items drop unidentified, and you take them to Deckard Cane to find out what they are. There's a nine-slot paper doll, a 40-slot backpack, a 60-slot stash and comparison tooltips. Drops lean towards your class, so a Citromancer finds mostly wands and orbs.

Three acts, one generator

The dungeon is twelve levels in three acts, with a boss at the bottom of each one:

  • The Root Cellar: rectangular rooms, corridors and pillar halls. “The cellar smells… fermented.”
  • The Jam Catacombs: rounded rooms and sticky jam pools that halve your speed. “The jam down here has opinions.”
  • The Rotten Core: blobby caves, wandering tunnels and lakes of boiling fruit punch.

It's one generator with three looks. Rooms are joined by a minimum spanning tree plus about a quarter more connections, so the levels have loops instead of being one long branch. The entrance goes in the room farthest from the boss arena, and every level is flood-filled to make sure you can reach all of it. If a crate or barrel would seal off part of the floor, it gets removed, and if the level fails the checks, it's thrown away and generated again.

Each level is filled with crates, jam jars, cider barrels, exploding soda kegs, picnic-basket chests, Smoothie Shrines, monster packs, quest objects, and the occasional pie that turns out to be a mimic.

The rotten menagerie

There are fourteen monster types, and each one has its own brain:

  • Moldy Grapes shamble towards you with their arms out, like zombies.
  • Fruit Flies swarm.
  • Banana Peeltons are bony peels, and Peelton Pitchers throw peels like boomerangs.
  • Apple Worms in bowler hats burrow underground and pop up next to you.
  • Eggplant Shamans heal their friends and bring them back from the dead, so you learn to kill them first.
  • Rotten Tomatoes run at you and burst.
  • Sour Lemons leave acid puddles, and Prickly Pears are needle turrets.
  • Coconut Crabs are armoured and charge.
  • Jack o' Lanterns throw fireballs and blink away when you get close.
  • Chili Imps explode when they die, and Durian Brutes slam the ground and leave stink clouds.

Champions and named uniques come with elite affixes like Extra Juicy, Speedy, Spicy, Frosty, Stinky and Bouncy. Every attack has a windup, and the big ones show a red circle on the floor before they land, so if you get hit, it's usually because you didn't move.

The three bosses each get an act:

ActBoss1 · The Root Cellar

The Juicer (“Ahh… FRESH FRUIT!”) charges and sprays juice, then calls in grapes at half health2 · The Jam Catacombs

Mangophisto, Lord of Chutney floats, lobs chutney, rains fire and summons Chili Imps over three phases3 · The Rotten Core

Durian the Diabolical slams, sprays spikes, fills the arena with stink, and fires a huge stink nova you have to walk out of

Beat Durian and you unlock Overripe difficulty, and after that Rotten, with tougher monsters and better loot.

Tristrawberry

The town is where most of the jokes live. You'll meet:

  • Deckard Cane, a candy cane elder who identifies your items. “Stay a while and glisten!”
  • Granny Smith, who heals you and sells potions. “Back in my day we fought rot with a spoon.”
  • Grapeswold, the blacksmith. “I forge kitchenware. For WAR.”
  • Olivia, the oracle, who sells magic goods and pies. “The olives told me you would come.”
  • Kiwirt, a shady kiwi on a toothpick leg who sells mystery smoothies (that's the gambling). “Don't look at the leg. Everyone looks at the leg.”

Each of them talks in Animal Crossing-style gibberish pitched to their character. There are six quests, including finding Granny's lost recipe book, bringing Grapeswold the fuzzy Anvil of Furry, and getting Kiwirt's spare leg back from the Toothpick Thief. When you return it, Kiwirt decides it's too sticky now and lets you keep it, which is how you end up hitting things with a baguette.

There's also a Wishing Well that works as a waypoint, so you don't have to walk all the way down every time.

Making fruit look good

Every character is built from lathe profiles, the same trick you'd use to turn a vase on a lathe. Each fruit gets a procedural skin: dimpled citrus, seeded strawberries, striped melons, diamond-patterned pineapples, fuzzy kiwis with a sheen, and mouldy versions for the rotten monsters. They have eyes with highlights that blink, mouths, blush, eyebrows, hats, and Rayman-style floating gloves and shoes.

There are no animation files. Everything is procedural: fruit squash when they're hit, bounce when they walk, wind up before they swing, wobble when they're stunned, and pop when they die.

The dungeons have a few tricks of their own:

  • Walls that stand between the camera and your hero are cut away in the vertex shader, so you never lose sight of yourself.
  • Fog of war is a texture with one pixel per tile, eased every frame. Places you've been fade to a cool, washed-out memory.
  • Your hero carries a warm light, and a pool of eight point lights gets reassigned every frame to the nearest torches, glowing mushrooms and explosions.
  • The boiling fruit punch in Act 3 has its own shader.
  • Each act gets its own colour grade, and the screen pulses when your Freshness gets low.

On phones the game starts at a lower quality setting, and on any device it drops a level automatically if frames get slow.

The sound

All the sound is Web Audio, with no audio files. Each area has its own generative score: a lute waltz in town, drones and drips in the cellar, sneaky pizzicato in the jam, toms and dark pads in the core, a driving boss track and a victory fanfare. The effects include squishes, splats, seed shots, freezes, zaps, meteors, chest opens and glass breaking. When you die, you get a sad trombone.

On a phone

On a desktop it plays like Diablo: click to move, click a monster to attack it until it pops, right-click or 1–4 for skills. WASD works too.

On a phone, you drag on the left side of the screen to walk and tap the ground or a monster to act. A big ⚔️ button attacks the nearest enemy, and the round skill buttons aim themselves. If there's no enemy nearby, ⚔️ picks up the nearest loot or opens the nearest chest instead. Walking over an item also picks it up.

That last part came from a bug. In the first release, the invisible joystick area in the bottom-left corner sat on top of everything and swallowed every tap there, so you couldn't pick up loot that landed in that corner. Version 1.0.2 fixed it, and the phone test now taps a loot label inside the joystick area to make sure it stays fixed.

Tested by a bot

As with the other recent games, the dev/ folder has test harnesses:

  • simtest.mjs checks that the simulation is pure (no three.js, no DOM and no Math.random), generates 480 levels and checks each one, generates 6,000 items, tests every skill of every class, and then has a bot play each class from a brand-new hero all the way to Durian's death. The bot usually finishes in 33 to 55 simulated minutes, at level 23 to 28.
  • browsertest.mjs plays the game in real Chromium with real mouse clicks and key presses, then does the same on touch-only phones in portrait and landscape, and checks that every panel fits on the screen.

The whole game is about 9,000 lines of plain JavaScript modules with no build step.

Play it

Play Rotten to the Core, or find its statue in the Garden of Games with the rest of the collection. If you want to see how it's built, the design doc covers everything from the dungeon generator to the boss phases.

Grab a butter knife. Hold your nose. Have fun!

 
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from Out of Office

Boy do I have news.

It started off one of my “new” typical days since I had to leave my job. I slept in a little, talked to my brother, got ready for lunch with a friend and pottery. When I got in my car to head home for the day, I received a call. A call from a potential career/life change. And it went very, very well. Sooooooo it looks like I am moving to Colorado ~ temporarily ~ for the winter. I have a job!! It is a complete career change, totally different, have 0 experience, but here we are.

I feel excited, nervous, and filled with complete gratitude. I have no idea how this winter will play out for me. I may love it, I may hate it, but I am so excited for a change. I am nervous to move away, but the fact that it is a seasonal job leaves the door wide open to come back home afterward, or stay if I decide that I love it. I am sad to leave my pottery studio, my friends, my kickball team, my volunteer commitments, my family, but I am so open to this opportunity. I have to let my heart, mind and body try something completely new in a completely new state. It feels like a fresh slate, which may be exactly what I need after these 119 days of chaos.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
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from Out of Office

I thought today would be very productive, but I was wrong. I mean it was semi-productive but not nearly as much as I would have liked.

I went to pottery for a few hours, and that’s essentially it. I also met my mom for dinner… but that was about all I did. I refuse to feel bad though, I am still in recovery mode. At this point I feel like I am actively recovering from the emotional stress of this summer and from my surgery. My feelings and body are healing – a long, bumpy process.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
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from Out of Office

I can breathe again! Well, kind of.

I got the stents removed, which was a huge relief, but now I have some major scabbing and pain. It is 100 times better without the stents though. That was a disgusting procedure by the way.

I am even feeling up to getting back to pottery. I have much to work on and finish! I am feeling very excited and optimistic, but planning to continue taking it slow.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
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from Out of Office

What is one more chill day in? I haven’t had enough of those, right?

That is exactly what I did today, chilled and stayed in. I did not even get out of pajamas all day. It was slow, quiet, easy… simply beautiful. I am still in recovery mode. Tomorrow I get these plastic stents taken out and will (hopefully) feel much, much better.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

 
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