itsericwoodward

itsericwoodward.com

A geek, coder, gamer, tinkerer, husband, father, server admin, web developer, and American cyborg, though not necessarily in that order.

Tonight, my son and I attended a screening of the original Highlander (1986) at my local indie cinema, the Independent Picture House in North Charlotte (about 35 minutes away by car). Very cool place with a great atmosphere, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing one of my favorite films in an actual cinema, even if it was 40 years after its release.

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We already have tickets for Psycho (1960) and Chopping Mall (1986), both playing next month. 😎

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In-reply-to » We visited the Jurassic Museum at the Willibalds Castle in Eichstätt. As always, taking photos indoors is almost impossible with the low lighting and reflexions everywhere. We had a great and entertaining tour guide walk us through for an hour. Afterwards, we explored two, three hours on our own.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Great photos!

The well sounds really cool, but I’ve always been a physics geek (ex: putting coins down those spinny funnels they used to have in the malls for collecting donations). I would have probably spent hours just there!

Thanks for sharing these.

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In-reply-to » @itsericwoodward Then by all means, follow the instructions at https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley and setup your own instance on your own domain. It's partly inspired by Twtxt/Yarn.social and Salty.im -- in at least the way teh DNS discovery and WKID works. Once your instance is up and running and you've gone through the /setup and created yourself an account (or seti it up with an appropraite ODIC IDP) try something like /msg james@mills.io Hey! at which point you should automatically start peering with my instance. You should then be able to /join #lobby1 (a globally federated channel already across 2 instances so far). 🤞

@prologic@twtxt.net I am very interested, but I need to setup a docker-capable machine first (I’ve always kinda shied away from using docker as it adds an extra layer of complexity to projects). I’ve got a couple of raspberry pis floating around the house, let me see what I can put together.

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In-reply-to » I have (finally) built a fully e2e working purely decentralised and federated IRC-compatible chat server. It is currently a PoC, but it's already working quite well. It's inspired partly by the work we did with Salty Chat in terms of Discovery and Federation. Some screenshots of a normal IRC client irssi showing off how it works in a local e2e setup: Media Media Media Media Media Media

@prologic@twtxt.net Amazing! Do you ever sleep? 😄

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I recently installed Quake on my laptop (via vkQuake), and have really been enjoying playing it again.

When I was at University, we had a lab full of shiny new Windows NT 4.0 workstations that we immediately installed it on, and spent many a late evening fragging each other.

But tonight, when I defeated Chthon for the first time, it occurred to me that I had never actually played the single player mode all the way though (not even the first episode). So now I’m 2 missions into Episode 2 with plans to finish it over the next week or so. #LifeGoals

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In-reply-to » Wow, twtxt suddenly be all like... https://itsericwoodward.com/images/gifs/tumbleweed-1.gif

@prologic@twtxt.net @david@daiwei.me @movq@www.uninformativ.de No, I dig it - I absolutely love the slower pace here compared to even the Fediverse (and especially compared to corporate social media, which is always trying to sell something).

I did have a bit of a “down or just me” moment, thinking I might have broken my client (since it’s still WIP and it’s happened before), but beyond that, it was no worries. 🙂

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I’ve been meaning to post another #Magic update…

Two Sundays ago, I had plans in the evening, so I could only play a single game, which I (surprisingly) won with my new #Dune deck (it played much better this time, but still suffered for the lack of flying defense).

Then, this past Sunday, I won the first game with my tribal Mutant Ninja Turtles deck (which still needs some tweaking, but held its own throughout), only to lose the next two games, both with my Avengers deck (which had been doing very well until this weekend).

Still, a win is a win. Tweaks will be made, and with any luck, the next game(s) will be even better.

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In-reply-to » Literally just a day after Elon came out with his legal threats towards all of Nitter and people like me complained about it, Open AI decides to no longer work with Cursor (acquired by Space X), explicitly saying it's because Elon wouldn't stop breaking their signed contracts and scraping (distilling) their models, behind their back.

@thecanine@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I get the lulz every time an AI company complains about getting scraped… 🤣

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My long weekend has finally arrived!

To celebrate, I busted out FCEUX (an NES emulator) and killed some ghouls in Castlevania 3, stomped some koopas in Super Mario Bros, and even hit a homerun in Base Wars (one of my personal faves, a baseball game featuring fighting robots).

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I’m about to switch to MAME to play some arcade classics in preparation for an outing tomorrow night to an arcade bar (for my son’s birthday).

And I don’t go back to work until Wednesday! Woot!! 🤘

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In-reply-to » For the first time in probably 30 years, I played a game of M.U.L.E. tonight (and won!).

@GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com I have the Atari800 emulator installed on my laptop along with a copy of the game.

But the easiest way to try it now is probably via the Internet Archive, which allows you to play it in the browser: https://archive.org/details/a8b_M.U.L.E._1983_Electronic_Arts_US

The manual is there, too: https://archive.org/download/agm_mule/mule_text.pdf

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For the first time in probably 30 years, I played a game of M.U.L.E. tonight (and won!).

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Granted, it was a beginner-level game, with a beginner-level alien against 3 computer players, but… I’m just sayin’.

I even lost one of my tracts of land due to it not being “recorded”, and I still won.

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Take that, Mechtrons!

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In-reply-to » @movq Regarding https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-08-16/0/POSTING-en.html, how often do you edit the first commit? A good mate does the same for at least a whole decade, probably more. I never found myself in this situation. Even though I mess with commits on a daily basis. Just never the first one so far. 8-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s a clever idea - I had never considered adding an empty commit before, but I can see the value.

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In-reply-to » Website might come back soon, although probably mostly unchanged. I have no idea how to stop the bots. 🤷‍♀️ So I’ll just gonna live with it? Is that the key to happiness™? 🤷‍♀️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Glad to hear it. Hopefully this, too, shall pass.

Maybe the bots will get tired of web-surfing, or the companies paying for it will all crash, or we’ll find a way to protect our content while still being able to share it, or maybe we’ll just all suddenly learn to live together with the bots in peace and prosperity for all. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 🤞

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In #Magic last night, I debuted my new #Dune deck with an underwhelming performance - perhaps unsurprisingly for a desert-focused deck, I faced a real drought, starting the game with only 1 land in hand (even after a mulligan) and not pulling another land until turn 4(!). Because of our house starting mana, I wasn’t totally sunk, but everything I got out was just luck. I did die last thanks to my big wurms (so I guess I was 2nd place?), but still… underwhelming.

For game 2, I wanted to bring the thunder (especially after my pitiful performance last week), so I dusted off my Night of 1000 Squirrels deck (headed by the infamous Chatterfang, Squirrel General). By turn 3, the #squirrel army was forming, and thanks to well-timed casts of Fog and Make a Stand, the squirrels managed to overrun everyone just a few turns later.

Another fun night overall. I won’t be able to play for the next few weeks, so I’m glad this one ended with a win. 😁 #mtg

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In-reply-to » $599 retail purchase $9.95/month optional subscription

@prologic@twtxt.net Potentially, depending on the features supported / hardware used.

I’ve long wished for an appliance (like a video game console) that hosts my essential services - email, shared files, social media, etc. - but which “just runs” in a box behind the TV.

So what do you have in mind? 🤔

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In-reply-to » The author of the Xfce Wayland compositor on LLMs:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @david@daiwei.me @thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah, I’m with you. It is just a tool, but it’s a tool that burns rainforests and boils lakes when you use it, owned by some incredible awful human beings, and built on the backs of an increasing number of crippling mass-scraping campaigns. These costs are just too high.

I have to use it at work, but it’s “the new norm” in software, so I’m hoping to use it just enough to get by until either 1) the bubble pops (and we don’t have to use it anymore) or b) I retire. And actually, 1) happened for a minute back in June when M$ increased the prices of tokens, so it’s certainly possible it could happen again.

All that having been said, I think the technology itself has some interesting uses, and I’m looking forward to the day when I can host some open source models on local hardware. But I can wait.

And yes, the site is unreadable on mobile, which is kinda wild for 2026. 🦆

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In-reply-to » I hate having my website offline, so I tried to bring it back in a honey-potted version: “AI” agents get served article versions with inverted meaning, like “do” replaced with “don’t” and so on.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de True enough. I guess it’s just the worst kind of “groupthink”, silently correcting “mistakes” (aka minority responses).

This would seem to imply that the answer being shouted by the most voices in unison is “correct”. How could that possibly go wrong? 🙃

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Just printed and sleeved some proxies for tomorrow night’s #Magic games, including this one from my Guardians of the Multiverse deck:

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He’s Spider-Man Supreme, from Clash of the Champions - a Spider-Man from a universe where Peter Parker is also the Sorcerer Supreme of his Earth. He’s one of my favorite characters in the game, and I thought he’d be an appropriate proxy for Cosmic Spider-Man (the best card from the Spider-Man set, but only really useful for a tribal Spiders deck).

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In-reply-to » I hate having my website offline, so I tried to bring it back in a honey-potted version: “AI” agents get served article versions with inverted meaning, like “do” replaced with “don’t” and so on.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de On the bright side, it decided not to trust your website. It didn’t poison the bot, per se, but it did “determine” that the information presented on the site was unreliable. Maybe that means it won’t use your site as a source?

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