Em

I need to do a lot of cleanup on this, but I wanted to at least get a rough draft out there before this web site shuts down. It needs another round of editing or two, but it's at least in a playable state.

Get it here: https://madelines-library.itch.io/madelines-library-the-blank-of-the-evil-wizard.

I initially wrote this up to play with my friends six years ago. We had a blast, and a friend suggested I publish it somewhere. I thought it was a nice idea, but didn't see much point; I don't use any other social media, so nobody besides my friends would see it. So, it just kind of sat there.

About a month ago, I had an insight I should have had much earlier: Artist Alley exists! That's the perfect place for it: Cohost seems like the perfect spot for a weird, experimental thing like this to find an audience. Plus, I'd wanted to put... anything really on Artist Alley, but I just never had a good idea for what to put there.

And then, the funniest thing happened.

So I've spent the last week frantically putting this together. There's still a bunch of improvements I want to make: I'd like to have something you can fill in fairly directly, rather than just a static PDF. It also wouldn't be too hard to change it to work for fewer people, since 5 might be a limitation for some.

But I'll leave that for next month. For now, I've got a bunch of RSS feeds to go subscribe to

Which is kind of untrue, because I'm making some of them here, but they're very unrefined! I wish I had time to finish them, but I am very tired, and if there's one thing I can take from cohost closing, I think it's this: Sometimes things end too early, before you're ready, but that's ok.

Numbers suck!

It's been, like, three days since I uploaded my first Thing to itch.io. I knew Conceptually why numbers were bad, but seeing a chart of daily clicks and downloads made it hit like a ton of bricks. I do not want to know what the Click Through Rate is on this dumb personal project, itch, why are you trying to make me feel bad that this thing I made for fun is less popular than my cats???

(I'm not actually too distressed by this, but after seeing So Many Notifications about likes on my cat pictures made me want to immediately turn off all notifications on everything forever)

A joke I never made, but would have basically been this:

I saw a tweet one time that said "i don't type without capitals and punctuation because im dumb i do it because im gay". I don't type with capitals and punctuation because I'm straight, I do it because I'm autistic and have been conditioned to Follow the Rules.

I don't even have this one in my drafts. There were weeks or months between seeing it and Starting to Post here. I knew this would land so much better with a link (or at least a screenshot) of the original, and because the Perfect Version of the joke was unattainable, I never posted it. I thought maybe someday I would find the Perfect Search String that would let me find it.

This is probably the second thing I can take from cohost closing, but is much harder to ingrain: Even if you can't make something perfect, do the best with what you have.

A follow up on my "How to keep posting after Monday" post

Based on the staff post on how read-only mode works, only the first solution, an embedded image, will work.

When I was thinking up that post, I had an additional one I forgot to add to the list: Privating and unprivating your profile, allowing you to send updates to everyone at once (provided they were logged out at the time). This was pretty high on my Likelihood to Work scale, but but it looks like even that wouldn't have worked!

But I am happy to see that other people had the same external image idea and actually bothered to do it.

Thanks for being here messages

I wanted to send asks to a lot of people, thanking them for being around. There's so many people here doing neat stuff, and I've been meaning to comment more instead of just hitting like/rebug.

...But I'm worried there isn't enough time to say something to everyone I want to. I am tired. This post is already way longer than I wanted it to be, and it's almost time for bed.

Good night, cohost. Good night, eggbug. Thank you for showing us a better world is possible.

Anybody got any last minute recommendations?