I finally got the Playdate. This little yellow machine is nice to look at and quite fun to play with, but it doesn't yet have the kind of games I like to play. No problem, I'm writing them myself.
Meanwhile, I have 3d printed a stand for it, and it sits on my desk acting as a unique clock.
Now that I have a stand and a really cool memory LCD display which barely needs power to display static images, I can display anything on it while it sits on my desk.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, I've started playing in the Nepali Stock Exchange playground. It is a strange, distorted world for someone like me who's used to the determinism of the computer realm. And so far, it has just proved to be a more fashionable way of losing money. But it's addictive!
If you've ever had to use Nepal Stock Exchange's Trade Management System (often called just TMS), you probably hate it. It is at best an incompetently made software with many glaring issues, hosted over a woefully underpowered infrastructure that cannot even handle the most predictable of traffic spikes. On more than one occasion I've oversold or undersold shares because it's UI was out of sync with it's database.
I started making this thing as a one-day experiment: a fun little browser-game I could craft before committing to the everlooming neverending self-judo one-man-deathwrestle called exams. But it instead ended up spreading out sparse as intense hour-long coding sessions throughout the Quarantine months.
Meet Flappy Millennial. He's an average guy in his mid 20's and the future looks bleak for him. With the threats of climate change, mass-extinctions, rising authoritarianism, economic depression, unprecedented wildfires and so much more ever-looming, nihilism has become his background music.
But worry not. For he has an antidote—well, not so much an antidote as a sedative. He has his phone! Come help this Flappy Millennial ignore reality while he scrolls through Instagram or something. You should play this game not because it's good or anything, but simply so you too can pretend that things are okay for a while.
I've been working on and off on a Nepali programming language with my friends for the last few months. It's called मनसा (IAST: mansā) and I think it's ready for an alpha release. If you'd like to try the language out, visit mnsa.cc - the official website. You can play around with the language right in the browser without having to download anything, not even a Devanagari keyboard layout.
This post is a collection of random things I want to say about the language, including how the idea came about, the interesting things I learnt making the project, and the problems faced.