Leon's Microblog – August 2026

Epic new idea for protecting your blog posts from LLM training: write them entirely in really-small-font-size ASCII art
ASCII art that reads: I generally prefer to play games in windowed mode, and for pixel art games, I like the pixels to be at a good midpoint of legibility - not so large that dithering and other shading effects become unreadable, but not as small as 1x. Now, old RPG Maker games (earlier than 2020) offer no obvious means of zooming their windows, requiring external tweaking tools be used. Based on my experiences, I've found that
Little Known Song Continuity Crossover: The song "Danny Boy" is about a boy who went down to the woods on the day of the Teddy Bears' Picnic
Most roguelikes already have a built-in specialising system in the form of limited item and weapon drops. 868-BACK and its predecessors accompany this (in this case, limited prog drops) with a diversifying system of 2 currencies that you must balance.
Interestingly, because you have easy access to both currencies in equal measure, the seemingly-similar 2-colour system actually serves the opposite purpose as it does in MTG.
Basically, each of these work to restrict your deck choices from different directions - to force decks out of a narrow category (card names) but to stay within a broad category (card colours) - to pen them into a middle ground of overall diversity.
I've been thinking about how card games and card-game-adjacent roguelikes tend to have two kinds of counterintuitively opposing systems - "diversifying systems" that force the player to diversity their moves, and "specialising systems" that force the player to restrict them.
The big example is Magic The Gathering - its specialising system is the 5 colour system that restricts your access to card currency, and its diversifying system is the 4-of-a-kind rule that forces you to have a diversity of card names.
I think it's funny that when a citizen is forced to do something by the government, it's called an order, but when a constitutional monarch is forced to do something by the government, it's called "advice".
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