Português English

Web

2023.05.21

My RSS: Game Dev

Engines

These are the heavy lifters, the unsung heroes, the powerhouses of our game creation dreams. They’re like the hearts of our games, only less bloody and more… code-y.

  • Unreal: It’s Unreal! No, literally, it’s Unreal. The Hollywood superstar of game engines, loaded with stunning visuals and a propensity for high-end performances, but with a learning curve steeper than a mountain goat’s breakfast.
  • Unity: A friendly neighborhood superhero, always there to help you take your first steps in the wacky world of game development, with a heart as big as its asset store.
  • Unity: It’s YouTube channel.
  • Godot: The quirky indie darling that dances to its own beat, showing you don’t need big bucks to make big waves in the game creation sea.
  • Flax Engine: The new kid on the block, ready to rumble. A fresh-faced newcomer that’s easy on the eyes and on the code, ready to give the old-timers a run for their money, one shader at a time.

Developer Diaries and Personal Blogs

Peek into the minds of the people who’ve been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. It’s like reading someone else’s diary, only legal and less awkward.

  • Alan Zucconi: The Da Vinci of game dev, but with less flying contraptions. Dive deep.
  • Cliffski Blog: Like having a chat with your eccentric uncle who’s been in the game biz since before it was cool. Grab a beer and join him.
  • Michael Lyashenko: Unity tutorials with a dash of rogue-like charm. Adventure awaits.
  • Aras website: It’s like the Matrix of Unity. Take the red pill.
  • GameDevBlog: Part industry insights, part friendly voice in the wilderness. Find a friend.

News and Updates

Hear ye, hear ye! Get the latest and greatest from the four corners of the gaming world. It’s like having your own personal town crier, but less shouty.

Tutorials and Learning Resources

From spells of wisdom to maps of uncharted territories, these scrolls of knowledge are here to guide you on your epic quest of game development. They’re like the mentor in your hero’s journey, only less prone to dying tragically to advance the plot.

  • PushyPixels: Because pixels need to know their place. Learn the art of pixel wrangling.
  • Pro Indie Dev: My old pal Gabriel Chaves created a consulting firm with a lot of tutorials and tips.
  • GDC: Wisdom of the ancients, delivered through YouTube. Feel the wisdom.
  • Game Makers Toolkit: It’s like a Swiss army knife, if Swiss army knives were used for making games. Get tooled up.
  • JacksonDunstan.com: All the C# and Unity you can handle, and then some. Get your fill.
2023.05.14

My Curated Intellectual Breakfast: The RSS

“Why on earth is he going to talk about RSS feeds? Are we in 2005?”

Here’s the thing, folks: I’ve been sailing the RSS ship since… well, since forever. And let me tell you, it’s a life preserver in the ocean of digital drivel. It’s one of whose old techs that still works. Like vinyl record.

For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but I like to think of it as my personal Reality Sanity Saver. You know, the kind that lets you pick and choose which parts of the internet merit your precious, coffee-fueled attention.

Oh, the power of choice! That moment when you realize you’re not at the mercy of an algorithm, but instead the captain of your own content ship. Algorithms, bless their binary hearts, can indeed serve up some delightful new discoveries. But put them in charge of your entire digital diet, and you’re headed for a feast of uniformity, a banquet of sameness, a veritable smorgasbord of manipulation. It is a breath of fresh air in the stale, algorithm-driven room of the internet. It’s the thrill of taking the steering wheel back from the autopilot, the rush of reclaiming your own digital destiny.

And the best part? RSS is the master key that unlocks all the doors. It’s the universal remote for your digital subscriptions.

  • Blogs? Check.
  • YouTube? Check.
  • Mastodon. Check (take that Twitter!).
  • And podcasts, the beloved companions of long commutes and cleaning sprees? Absolutely Check!

It’s a central hub, a one-stop-shop for all your curated content needs.

So, if you’ve ever felt like you’re just a passenger on the algorithm express, it might be time to grab your RSS ticket and hop aboard the train of choice. Trust me, the view is much better when you’re the one choosing where to go.

A Good Recipe

A good recipe:

  • Frequency
  • Niche and curation
  • Direct and simple

A good RSS feed is a bit like finding a good taco truck. It needs to show up frequently enough to quell your hunger, but not so often that it’s parked outside your house daily, taunting you with the smell of fresh guacamole. Nobody needs that kind of stress.

Forget about generic news sites that offer a one-size-fits-all approach. This feed takes things up a notch by diving deep into the realms of specialized subjects that truly tickle your curiosity. It’s like having a knowledgeable friend who understands your unique interests and serves up a delectable array of valuable and thought-provoking content, specially curated to satisfy your intellectual appetite. It should not target the mainstream.

Rather than relying on clickbait, it offers high-quality articles, in-depth analysis, and engaging discussions that satisfy your intellectual appetite. The focus is on substance, catering to true enthusiasts who seek valuable information without the need for gimmicks. The goal is to leave you fulfilled and craving for more in your chosen niche.

My Menu

So, what’s in this assorted bag of digital candy, you ask? Well, it’s an eclectic mix of games, boardgames, game development, programming, business, writing, photography, politics, personal, education, site, and fun. Well… just like this blog.

My RSS feeds have a surprising amount of video channels. I’ve got this sneaky trick where I automatically set watch them at 2x speed. It’s like time travel, but without the pesky paradoxes. For text, I use a Text-to-Speech plugin called Read Aloud in my Firefox browser because, frankly, my eyeballs need a break sometimes.

Continuing the practical advices: I use Feedly. Originally, I was a Google Reader groupie (may it RIP), and for a hot minute, I self-hosted on a TinyTiny RSS server. But Feedly and I, we have a thing now.

In the upcoming posts, I will be sharing a collection of sites that I personally enjoy following. These sites cover a wide range of categories, reflecting my diverse interests. By exploring these sites, you can discover new content and choose what appeals to you. Some feeds may have fallen into obscurity, while others are eagerly anticipated additions. It’s a dynamic reflection of my varied interests and the fascinating topics that capture my attention. From technology and science to art and literature, these sources offer a variety of interesting topics. Join me as we navigate through this curated selection of sites, and perhaps you will find some new favorites along the way.

Owner of Social Network Data aka Indieweb feature
2022.11.26

Owner of Social Network Data aka Indieweb

During the campaign for Congress, I had to transform my social networks into a real sales platform. They all had to be super aligned with the same purpose.

I should have already installed/hired some social media manager, like Hootsuite or Zoho Social (Zoho has been my online service provider for years), as this is no trivial task. There were more than 8 networks. And many of the contents are copies of each other.

In addition to the difficulty of managing the various networks, there is confusion as to what content I would release as official. Canonical. Especially networks that are essentially competitors.

  • Twitter or Mastodon?
  • Tiktok or YouTube Shorts or Instagram Stories?
  • Facebook or my blog?

It gets substantially worse with stories like Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. He’s made so many changes to the platform that it’s not impossible to think the company will eventually go broke. Thus, years of content would be thrown away. And the constant changes in rules and permissions?!

Indieweb: The owner of the content is ME

To address some of these concerns, I’m trying to centralize the source of information to a system that I have full control over. And nothing better than this site itself to be responsible. Here I do whatever I want, optimize images (one of my concerns is that I’ve never had much discipline in removing the metadata from images), and customize their appearance. This then becomes the official center of what I do.

POSSE is the practice of Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, in other words, publish links or copies on other social networks always citing the source of the content, so that anyone can follow you directly at the source.

Reposting on Twitter and Mastodon is easy as they are usually text and few images. Meta/Facebook sites are more boring because they are richer in content and have no API to automate. Video ones are even more work, as hosting videos in person is quite expensive (I’ve always felt that YouTube does an almost humanitarian job in hosting such a volume of data).

For now, I must keep old content on its source platforms. Gradually I will try to write only here. Eventually start to even export all the old content from these services to have back and put static on the site.

Microformats, Fediverse and Webmention

To adapt the site to be the center of the online universe, some changes need to be made:

✅ Make it easier for computers to also understand the site

I also implemented microformats on the site and in the contents, so that any other system that reads the site can extract the main information: the author, title, content, and publication date. Several of this information already appears visually on the site. As humans, we can understand easily, but computers cannot. Therefore, a series of modifications were made so that the contents are also easily understood by machines.

Separating the different types of content

As I use the blog as a tool for longer texts, daydreams, and ideas, I’m thinking of creating specific lists for small texts (tweet/toot) and maybe images (today the site has a tag that points to my posts of photos). So everything would be better indexed and found. Blog and notes. My site manager, Hugo, allows for several approaches. The question is how to do a better implementation.

Integrate comments, replies, and shares made on other sites

I’ve tried using some commenting tools before, like Discus and Cactus.chat (super cool concept of using Matrix as a comment source). I don’t have a lot of traffic here, so it wouldn’t matter. But the goal is now bigger: to include comments and reposts of my content made on other sites.

The W3C’s standard (the organization that standardizes the internet) created webmentions, a way to formalize that someone is commenting on someone else’s content. That’s the only way I can maintain a great discussion about the content I’ve posted on any network.

“Automatically” republish content written here on other social networks

This will take some time as I will need to use some external services that will read my site’s RSS and try to post on social media instead. Essentially using a HootSuite/Zoho Social type solution. Even better if it’s open source. I will investigate the use of n8n.


As soon as I manage to implement more things, I’ll post them here. I want to give the least amount of work to the next ones who are excited to take control of their own digital lives.

Multilanguage Site feature
2022.03.27

Multilanguage Site

brunomassa.com has been always an international site. Almost all posts were written in English. But now that I will venture into politics (more about this in a later post), it’s worth separating Brazilian Portuguese content apart. Mixing posts about programming, gaming, and movies will only confuse followers and voters.

Instead of removing non-related content, I decided to split languages. The Brazilian Portuguese edition will show up more posts about the Brazilian scene. Curiously, most of the old posts written in pt-br were already about politics or football, so they are already fit for the job!

I do not know how to create a hybrid model using Hugo, with most language-independent content intertwined. If I find it, I will enable it in the future. It will be especially useful for hot-pages, those pages that serve as an entry for promotions and special situations. It would not be good to create a hot-page for brunomassa.com/pt-br/hot-page, because it would defeat its purpose of being easy to remember and share. To help even further, I’ve just bought the brmassa.com domain, aligning with other social media usernames.

So, I’m going to start to work towards generating more content about politics and the Brazilian context. This week I plan to make the now-not-much-a-surprise announcement.

This very post is multi-language. Click on the small flags to switch.

2021.09.24

Rating Badge

As a programmer and businessman, I try to organize the world. So, I created a unified Rating page consolidating all reviews that I did. Games, board games, books, movies, and TV shows.

For a few of them, I wrote a full blog post. But most of I did not. That was driving me crazy. I often mention the same games/movies on multiple posts. When it happens to a piece of art that I did not previously review, I felt pressure to do so. I even might do so, but now it’s not required anymore. Now the non-reviewed-but-rated are properly acknowledged. And I shall have consistency.

I’m going to scan, in the next few days, all previous blog posts to cross reference, but the main step was done.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Also, in a similar vein to the previous post, Rating Art, I decided to give my ratings a more visual appeal. For now, besides the numeric 0-10 rating, it will show the according to the number of stars.

Bruno MASSA