https://ridiculous.pro/blog/Recent content in Justin's Blog on Professionally RidiculousHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usMon, 09 Nov 2020 16:40:54 -0800https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2021/04/chronologist-open-beta/Fri, 09 Apr 2021 10:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2021/04/chronologist-open-beta/Chronologist is my first iOS and Android app, and today I’m releasing it into open beta. Chronologist is my first “big project” as an indie dev, and something I’ve been working on a while. The central idea of Chonologist is quick capture of your life events for later review. It feels a little bit like a social media feed, but just for you pesonally. The original idea came from my wife discussing wanting an easier way to remember things that she wanted to backfill into her planner/scrapbooks later.https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2020/11/utc-complications-launch/Mon, 09 Nov 2020 17:26:10 -0800https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2020/11/utc-complications-launch/Today I’ve launched my first wholly-independent app, UTC Complications for Apple Watch. UTC Complications for Apple Watch adds digital time complications in Universal Time to every complication slot on an Apple Watch. This is a very small app that I’ve developed over the past couple weeks (the first git commit was on October 28th). It’s mostly to scratch my own itch, which is being able to see 24-hour UTC time so that I can easily figure out how long ago a server log was .https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2019/06/year-one/Fri, 07 Jun 2019 17:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2019/06/year-one/Today is the one-year anniversary of when I originally filed my paperwork to set up Professionally Ridiculous LLC. Though I’d continue to work at Valve Corporation for another week in 2018, I thought I’d reflect a little on my goals that I laid out in my post about leaving Valve and going independent. This blog post isn’t really for anyone except me, but you can read if you want :).https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2018/08/the-commode-code/Sun, 12 Aug 2018 18:04:10 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2018/08/the-commode-code/This morning I officially launched The Commode Code, a restroom etiquette podcast which I’m doing with Pieter Wycoff. Here’s a little video trailer which I posted on Facebook to announce it. You can add us in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Castro, and any other player through our RSS feed. You can also get our episode on YouTube. As I mentioned in my blog post about leaving my last jobby-job, I really enjoyed working at my high school radio station and I wanted to get back into broadcasting.https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2018/07/subtle-silencing-in-big-companies/Fri, 13 Jul 2018 09:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2018/07/subtle-silencing-in-big-companies/The gaming community has been abuzz this past week with the news about ArenaNet’s termination of Jessica Price and Peter Fries after a social media incident. My quick summary of the situation is: Price tweeted a thread about the difficulties in writing the player character in an online role-playing game. A streamer and YouTuber known as Derior posted a few tweets in response, where he disagreed with some of her thoughts and told her what he thought the team should do.https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2018/06/whats-done-whats-next/Mon, 18 Jun 2018 07:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2018/06/whats-done-whats-next/On May 29th 2018, I resigned my position at Valve Corporation after working there for over 5½ years. Friday was my final day after transitioning my work to some unfortunately-already-very-overworked colleagues. In many ways, Valve has been the best employer that I’ve had the opportunity to work at and it was undeniably the most talented team I’ve seen assembled in the game industry. If a senior person in the industry is interested in working for Valve and they asked me if they should, my answer would be a “yes” and it would come with less provisos and reservations than most of my other former employers.https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2017/07/new-site-old-content/Sat, 01 Jul 2017 10:38:18 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2017/07/new-site-old-content/Welcome to my new site! There isn’t a whole lot of new content here, and I’ve taken a few-year break from generating public content on the Internet. There aren’t a whole lot of posts here anyways, but if you would like to read something, I’d recommend my article about SimCity, wherein I develop and describe my personal correlary to Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to greed that which is adequately explained by lazinesshttps://ridiculous.pro/blog/2013/03/yorkes-corollary/Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2013/03/yorkes-corollary/So it’s that time again. That time when a major game launch goes completely in the weeds due to a required online mode, and major server issues befall the game upon launch. SimCity is only the latest example of a phenomenon which is becoming increasingly common, and was well-showcased by Diablo III last year. In the past, this phenomenon was typically restricted to MMO games, which are understood to have large and complex server backends and require a connection to play.https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2011/09/on-qwikster/Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2011/09/on-qwikster/By now, you’ve most likely seen Reed Hastings' blog post on the official Netflix blog entitled An Explanation and Some Reflections. In his entry, he outlines the plan for Netflix to split into two separate companies, operating two separate sites: Netflix, which will operate the streaming service; and Qwikster, which will operate the DVD-by-mail service. Of course, ripples are heading through the twitterverse and blogosphere in reaction to this – so I’ve decided to add my own.https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2011/09/neflix-enforcing-stream-restrictions/Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0700https://ridiculous.pro/blog/2011/09/neflix-enforcing-stream-restrictions/Yesterday the Internet was all atwitter with the news of Netflix limiting people to one stream at a time with their Instant Watch service. While it turned out that it was just a bug in the system, and members have higher limits (at least 2), I saw at least one notice come across my stream of someone calling this the last straw for their subscription. I posted a mini-rant across a few tweets, and I’m going to repost it here: