Ember's Feed Aggregator

The heart of winter is months off yet, but the darkness already presses in. (Remember about Nighthawk's Solstice!) I have gotten into the latest crop of deduction-investigation games... and a few others as well. A Case of Fraud Ambrosia Sky: ...

Kogado’s strategic bipedal mech action begins not on the battlefield, but in the conspicuously thick 96 page manual that rests …

I hereby raise awareness of Nighthawk's Solstice, which celebrates the day of the earliest sunset of the winter. “...Where distance is measured in hours and darkness is a solid...” Of course the astronomical solstice is December 21st. That's ...

I know a lot about Infocom but a lot less about Infocom's competitors -- particularly their UK competitors. Magnetic Scrolls, Topologika, and Level 9 were landmarks in the field, but I was barely aware of them in the 80s and never really followed ...

Shining sea becomes idyllic sky as my bright seagull-white plane effortlessly arcs through the air, rolling at exactly the right …

Frogs are now my sworn enemy. They’re evil, water-stealing, seed-munching, amphibians who have no business crawling up and down thick …

My rogue and their premade trio of allies stiffly stand on the spot as a druid, frozen in a single …

The first thing that leaps out at me when I play Jumping Flash isn’t Robbit, its adorable robot rabbit hero, …

Hey, speaking of posts I wrote two years ago: The title of this post is a fantasy. Sydney, or MS-Bing-AI in whatever form, has no particular predilection to obey rhyming commands. As far as I know. Except, maybe it will? -- Sydney obeys any ...

Two years ago, I wrote: Microsoft-the-company does not care about Infocom. But a lot of people in Microsoft must care. Microsoft is heavily populated by greying GenX nerds just like me. Folks who grew up with the first home computers and fondly ...

In the late Summer of 2020, still deep in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and dealing with a near constant sense of dread and anxiety, I had an appointment with my optometrist that changed the course of my life and career.

Despite popular belief, you can run games off an NTFS drive - as long as you've set it up properly and are willing to take a risk.

I recently spun up a .onion mirror of this website.

Banned Books Week was like... a week and a half ago, but I missed it because I don't pay enough attention to arbitrary days of observance.

This article was originally published in 2600 Magazine, Autumn 2025. I had originally just sent it in as a proposal for a larger series, but they published it as-is, so it reads a bit weird.

I discovered a new favorite hobby last week: adding custom instructions to my students’ ChatGPT accounts when they leave their computers unlocked and unattended.

It’s been a few months now, but Dice’n Goblins is out, on multiple platforms. You can buy it now on Steam or Fanatical. This was probably the hardest project I’ve ever done. It required thousands of hours of work and lived in my brain, for all the hours I was not working. Was it worth it It’s been 3 months and it generated a little bit of money. Enough to pay back production costs and pay for some expenses.

My thoughts and first impressions of the Zen Browser!

My methodology and reasoning for making a blocklist to finally clean up unwanted content from search engines!

I talk about my experience and impressions of getting a Vita in 2025. Spoilers: I really like it!

So I finished FF8 after 22 years It’s a long time to finish a game. I bought this game from a friend as a kid when I was around 12 in 2002. It was my first story-rich JRPG (I think the other JRPG I played was Pokemon at the time). I fell in love at the time. FF8 was pulling me in with a story and a world I could never have imagined.

[This piece is co-authored with Vsevolod Livinskii.] Formal verification isn’t some sort of magic pixie dust that we sprinkle over a computer system to make it better. Real formal verification involves a lot of the same kind of difficult, nasty, grungy engineering work that any other systems-level job involves. Furthermore, the verification tools themselves are […]

Dice’n Goblins is still advancing steadily. This month, I’ve received the help of my partner Seto, and a bunch of stuff is moving at a greater pace. On my side, I finished designing, scripting, and filling the levels 4, 5 and 6. The scenario for this part have been written as well. The game have a main story, but each set of level have their own storyline. This particular set focus on your companion Skelly, and his old friends.

Time for another devlog, it has been a while. About Steam Page The big news for this month is that the Steam Page was up. It took me a lot of time, because I would overthink stuff a lot, and the requirements are numerous. The days following the opening were spent mostly on social media, telling people to wishlist it. Quite surprisingly, a Japanese website, Gamespark picked my game from the constant stream of Games, and I got a lot of wishlists from it.

This tooks a while, but I finally can present you my game! It will be released on Steam. I would be really thankfull if you wishlist it!

Compilers can be improved over time, but this is a slow process. “Proebsting’s Law” is an old joke which suggested that advances in compiler optimization will double the speed of a computation every 18 years — but if anything this is optimistic. Slow compiler evolution is never a good thing, but this is particularly problematic […]

In its original form, a peephole optimization applied to a collection of instructions located close together in a program. For example, in a register transfer language we might find this sequence of instructions: r0 = xor r8, -1 r1 = xor r9, -1 r0 = and r0, r1 Here, assuming the two’s complement representation, -1 […]

[This piece is co-authored by Ryan Berger and Stefan Mada (both Utah CS undergrads), by Nader Boushehri, and by John Regehr.] An optimizing compiler traditionally has three main parts: a frontend that translates a source language into an intermediate representation (IR), a “middle end” that rewrites IR into better IR, and then a backend that […]

[This piece is coauthored by Yuyou Fan and John Regehr] Mutation-based fuzzing is based on the idea that new, bug-triggering inputs can often be created by randomly modifying existing, non-bug-triggering inputs. For example, if we wanted to find bugs in a PDF reader, we could grab a bunch of PDF files off the web, mutate […]