Author: Tangent

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Blood Test (Drabble)

The world was due for cancer screening. A century prior, it had barely survived. From the fallout, symptoms were documented, and as the years of testing passed, the world was content that it would not return. Attention turned to its autoimmune disease. If left untreated, fever would come, and kill. A screening was missed while the autoimmune treatment plan was drafted, but the symptoms were minor, and the world was content.

The cancer, it turns out, had returned. Its presence accelerated the autoimmune disease, and the fever had started.

The world is dying, but it has survived worse. Have hope.

Drabble is a form of extremely short storytelling, where you are limited to exactly 100 words. This one was written for Lawrence Simon’s Weekly Challenge, on 2024-11-07.

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Stay Alive

They want you to despair and die. They want you to kill yourself because then they can pretend they aren’t the cause. It’s critical that you understand this: Despite any pain we endure in the near future, it’s nowhere near over and we will fucking survive.

I am not making an optimistic assertion when I say this cannot stand. Fascism always destroys itself. We may end up living under a fascist dictator, but the world has survived powerful fascists before, and it will again.

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Font Choice Matters, Bionic Reading Doesn’t

A couple years back, Bionic Reading took the internet by storm with influencers advocating it as a method to increase reading speed and comprehension for people who have ADHD and dyslexia. Readwise quickly debunked this1, and in their conclusion highlighted studies2, 3 that show what really matters: Font choice significantly affects reading speed without affecting comprehension – but this effect is highly individualized. There is no “best” font.

Bionic Reading has since changed its website dramatically, but used to make the claim that on an independant test of 12 participants, there was a “positive effect”, despite also claiming that some participants found it “disturbing” and that the results were unclear4, 5. Bionic Reading claims to improve how fast your eyes/brain can see words, but as The Conversation points out, reading speed is based on language processing, not how fast your eyes see or visual cortex processes visual information.

Bionic Reading appears to be a solution in search of a problem, with a profit motive rather than an altruistic motive. Their service is partially a font, partially bolding certain letters. The concept is patented and charged for. This is not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a genuine interest in helping people.

While some may benefit from using it, this does not make it special – it makes it equivalent to any other font choice. It has been researched thoroughly6, 7, with no significant benefit found.

References

I try to make sure all references are archived through services mentioned on Archives & Sources. For this post, all references were backed up using Ghostarchive, as it was the only public-facing working archive at the time of writing.

  1. Readwise: Does Bionic Reading actually work? We timed over 2,000 readers and the results might surprise you. Readers were 2.6 wpm slower on average – a statistically insignificant result.
  2. Study: Accelerating Adult Readers with Typeface: A Study of Individual Preferences and Effectiveness “[…] readers in our study read better with varying fonts. An average 117 word per minute difference between worst and best typeface, or around 10 additional pages an hour […]”
  3. Study: Towards Individuated Reading Experiences: Different Fonts Increase Reading Speed for Different Individuals “Participants’ reading speeds […] increased by 35% when comparing fastest and slowest fonts without affecting reading comprehension.”
  4. The Conversation: Can Bionic Reading make you a speed reader? Not so fast
  5. Quartz: Can adjusting font styles really help us read faster?
  6. Study: Kan bionic reading bidra til økt prestasjon i leseforståelse hos sjette-trinns elever? “This study […] shows that formatting as a method to enhance students reading comprehension may be inappropriate […]”
  7. Study: No, Bionic Reading does not work “Statistical analyses revealed no significant difference in reading times between Bionic and normal reading.”
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it’s a small world, but my head is in space

Sometimes life rhymes in weird ways. It’s a small world.

Approximately 14 years ago, I discovered the game Elite, and open-source reimplementation called Oolite. I was hooked conceptually (because I sucked at the game, I never played it for that much time before giving up again).

I spent a lot of time looking at all the mods for it, and in that search, I stumbled across a promo video for one of the mods that featured really nice music:

So good that every few years I come back to it and play that video again. Somehow I never looked at the channel itself, just that one video, until tonight, where I discover that not only did they make the music used in that video, but they’ve made a good amount of music over all these years. They’ve a Bandcamp and a SoundCloud.

And then I noticed they make mods for a game called Trainz, which I stumbled across in a bargain bin years before I played Oolite. I didn’t get much chance to play it, but I always wanted to. This same person has just been involved with two random relatively obscure games I enjoyed and I kept coming back to this one video and not seeing these other spurious connections.

There’s no deep plot or special meaning here. I’m just tickled to discover these random connections and hope others enjoy their music too.

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Realms Half-Post-Mortem (from LD39)

I started writing this in September 2018, and didn’t get very far. It’s clear I will not finish it. That said, I do want a record of its existence here, so I’m publishing it now.

To describe it in one word, ambitious. An asynchronous web-based multi-user dungeon, that looks and feels like a terminal. Everyone starts in nullspace with 1 health. Kill players and take their souls to power up the other Realms to access them.

original welcome prompt
The original welcome message on Realms

As you can see, things were running perfectly well with no errors what-so-ever. Items were implemented, characters could see actions of others using a jury-rigged event system, and there was even a dummy that could be used to create souls!

Probably my biggest achievement was in flexibility I managed. That, or the fact that I put in a way to send me messages with the report command.

As with many of my game jam entries, I was overly ambitious and failed to deliver something complete. That said, I think it was at least an enjoyable experience to briefly search around in this pseudo-terminal.