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goeshard.org

What's Next For the Site?

Recently I've been experimenting with a lot of different types of posting from different authors and aliases. The direction of the blog kind of jumped from just being a place to throw my sporadic gamedev and technology articles that would come out every month or so while I was more focused on making software into: "I will publish anything that someone wants to write for the site."

After asking people to consider contributing, it occurred to me that the best way I could make this look appealing was to write about other people on the Internet everyday. After all, what better way to make the site seem open to different kinds of articles than to feature different kinds of sites and people. I think that went really well. I'm not ashamed to admit that A True Story of Dead Internet is one of the best articles on the site and I didn't write it. I would love it if more people wanted to write as many quality posts here as that.

However, writing everyday to upkeep the appearance of a site that covers a wide range of topics and has many different writers where anything could happen is taking a lot out of me! Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed it, but I have software that's waiting for me to get back to writing it.

This isn't the end but we might be slowing down for a while. Submissions are always open of course.

Digging Up Y2K Era Cam Girl Blogs

In the early 2000s, there was a race to be the next Stileproject (the wikipedia article should catch you up) and every noname E/N site was adding cam portals, writing about cam girls, and hoping to strike Internet gold in the process.

Notice: She has a roms section, she has a phpbb section. She has all kinds of content.

A "camgirl site" wasn't really what you imagine today. It was closer to a girl with an Instagram and a Snapchat in terms of content -- the main difference being that she was generally interested in web design, was willing to teach herself to get a site up, and would then affiliate with portals for traffic and accept gifts from Amazon wishlists. She was almost always a college student studying the same kinds of subjects other people with websites were studying. Image quality was very low back then. Having full videos was the dream of a few years later. So these girls were also writers.

Let's look at some of these camgirl sites.

A True Story of Dead Internet

Unmistakable Midjourney version 3 style

The term Dead Internet Theory has been floating around lately. The main gist is that as bots have become more prevalent, they’ve started to replace human interaction online. One might think that computer-generated content would be easy to spot, and in many cases you would be right. However much like how ChatGPT became very adept at creating banal HR dribble, it proved less that AI is capable of human speech, but more so that HR isn’t able to generate content that advances beyond basic predictive text.

Snow Deformation (with Godot)

Snow deformation is a cool effect where as you walk in snow, it deforms it in a trail along where you walk. There's a handful of different ways this can be done. Here I cover a way using particle effects, an orthogonal camera and a Shader on the deformed surface.


Intercepting Requests to Unlock Hidden Functionality

When you fill out a form on a website and hit submit, your browser constructs a POST request and sends it to the website so that it can decide what to do with that information. It would contain not only the data you entered into the form but information about your login session and a cross-site request forgery token (hopefully).

If you're interested in understanding a website's functionality, capturing requests as they exit your browser lets you examine how to effectively interact with the site, as these requests are crafted by developers to elicit successful responses. You can use this insight to create custom requests, which can sometimes yield intriguing results.

Let's look at how to do that with a simple example.

Do You Want to Guest Post an Article for Goeshard.Org?

It's been a while since I've done a meta post. Most of the time when I write, it's to nerd out over whatever programming project I'm working on. For the past year that's been just a lot of gamedev posts. But when I first imagined goeshard.org, this place was intended to be a hub of art, music, programming, and other DIY web projects.

I know when a lot of people set out to make an independent website their mentality is very much, "Welcome to my personal space!" That wasn't really the goal for this site. I wanted goeshard.org to be a celebration of various things across the web in general, but as working on games is very time consuming work, it's what I spend the majority of my free time thinking about. It's naturally what ends up being the primary content of the site.

Having more guest writers could be the element that elevates goeshard.org to coming closer to what I imagined and covering more topics.

Untitled Adventure in Cute Fantasy Farm?

In my brief gamedev career, I've become known for short, brutally difficult arcade games. When you're developing a game like that, it adds a certain amount of high stress once you're ready to release. You want the player to like it. You want the game to be difficult. Both of these things align very narrowly on stars when someone is really good at game design. So with the new game, that pressure is something I wanted to take out.

I'm officially in my cozy gamedev era with this new prototype.

It's been called a surrealist masterpiece by a real person.

A playable feedback request version is AVAILABLE TODAY.

Super Shirtless Guy World Postmortem

Back in December I started a platformer prototype. In February I entered it into a marathon game jam, which is an exercise where participants enter an existing project that they'd like to push themselves to finish and everyone presents their work a month later.

What became of this project is Super Shirtless Guy World, which I consider to be a massive failure despite the game working and being relatively bug free. Basically no one understands it or likes it. In this post I'm going to try to cope but also figure out how I might avoid several pitfalls in the future.