Starbase Zebra went to production a year ago, today. I added the manifesto to the database on January 9, 2024. It’s worth reflecting on the experience thus far.
One of my stated goals was to release “various small side projects” I was working on. You can see the whole changelog elsewhere but here’s everything I released that could be classified as a “project” besides the website itself:
- The Blog - I have more to say about this later
- The Contact Form - Nobody actually used this, which is fine by me because I don’t mind that nobody has found this website yet. It was fun to put together though.
- Routine Patrol - I don’t know when or if I’ll pick it back up again. Assets and AI are tedious.
- Dungeon generator - This was less satisfying than I thought it would be
- Options value calculator - This was fun, but my lottery ticket is worth zero right now.
- The Time - This was quite silly
Having Starbase Zebra and working on all of these small things did inspire some other thoughts and ideas throughout the year, which I have yet to work on:
- The Unspoken Plan Guarantee - I was reminded of this old joke that I haven’t looked at in at least 10 years. Maybe this will be the year I write this work of absurdist interactive fiction.
- Pongathon v2.0 - While working on Routine Patrol, I found out people use some library (don’t remember which one) to run games with PyGame in WASM. It made me look for this very old source code. I might do something with it this year.
- Dice Roller Demo - This was really just an arbitrary demo for me to learn HTMX.
- Orc Generator - The dice roller, but to generate sheets of orcs. I had them getting killed by the buschel in my last campaign.
Nothing earth shattering, but I don’t really care. I serve other people enough at work; the “it’s for me” model is working just fine here. I stopped believing everything I did had to be Innovative™ at least ten years ago. I do enough for other people at work.
The Starbase Zebra Blog was supposed to be an exercise in exploring different forms of writing. I did not write any fictional prose in 2024, so in that sense it is a success in terms of “different.” I have the itch to write fiction again though. Not what I was doing before, different content. And I still want to do it myself. I also did collect thoughts that I had shared on the internet, but there’s probably some other stuff I could still pull in. Commenting on Reddit while I take a shit has become a habit, and I don’t know that I aggregate that stuff here well. Then again, I’m not sure how great most of those thoughts are. Meh. In terms of the volume of content I generated, I’m not so sure the blog was a success; I stuck with it very closely until I decided it was time to play Jagged Alliance 3. That game was the best one I played in 2024, and one of the best I’ve played in a long, long time.
One of the last goals I listed for Starbase Zebra was to rail against modern social media, and do my part in realizing the dream of the decentralized internet that we were supposed to have. I think I still have more to do here if I’m serious about that. One thing that I noticed recently (which I may write about in another blog post) is that the decentralized internet is in danger of dying because the people who created interesting websites for it in the 90s are getting older and starting to die. Eventually, bills will be unpaid, VPSes (or EC2s) will be wiped, and the hardware will be repurposed for whatever the new garbage is. The Internet Archive will save the content, but we need new things on the decentralized web (not that Web 3.0 blockchain bullshit), to show people that there is another way. You don’t have to live in the big city.
That’s enough retrospective for now. If I feel like writing prospectively about this year, I’ll do it in another post.