Readability, Twitter & Warcraft 3 Reforged

Readability

To start with, this tweet by swyx on having a maximum number of characters per line. He has explored a few pretty websites that had considered the content width. It came to me via an account that I follow, having 'Liked' the tweet. (More on that later). It made me think about this site where I am aiming to do weekly brain dumps on. It's definitely not doing a nice number of characters per line since it's largely unstyled. This is intentional, the experience of that might not be nice for anyone. So I decided to add in max-width: 72ch; on the body tag of the site.

It looked great, then I realised I should really put the content in the centre it so that it becomes like a book when a visitor reads my weekly brain dumps. I also went a step further and added in dark mode, mostly because I prefer reading things that uses a dark background. It's much easier on my eyes for sure. Let me know what you think if you do read this… I can be contacted on Twitter under j_mes.

State of Twitter

Now onto Twitter, I've been using the desktop version in a pinned tab for months now, and prefer it like that so I can consume content from Twitter when it suits me, and without notifications. Lately I've been noticing a lot more posts that are not relevant to me, or from people that I follow and quite a few of them were sponsored posts too. This was not pleasant, and I then came across this gem of a gist that helps you to filter those out by muting certain words. This works like a charm. No more sponsored tweets, thank you very much Twitter for incorporating something that effectively blocks out another piece of functionality that got put in to generate revenue for yourselves.

Another little nitpick is having people that you follow, seeing their 'Likes' of tweets that you may not care much about. The only way to get rid of those is using Twitter's own algorithm with 'See less of those tweets' on the 'Likes' posts on the feed. I've done a few and I hope it'll clean it up and let me see more of Simon's tweets instead!

P.S. Simon, Rhubarb & Strawberry conserve. Try it. You'll be amazed. And no, it's not celery. Celery is gross.

Warcraft 3 Reforged

Going all the way back to the year of 2002. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos has been released. I had grown up playing Warcraft II on a family computer that had a 133MHz processor, 32 megabytes of RAM and a 3 gigabyte hard drive with Voodoo 1 graphics card. Yes the first Voodoo graphics card, it was amazingly fast playing Warcraft II and Grand Theft Auto at 13 years old 😂. I loved playing on it, and later on when I got my first computer. A computer to call my own, not one that I would share with the family, so that I wouldn't have to share the time with my sister, and could play a lot more video games!

Warcraft 3 and Quake 3 was the games that I would play a lot over the years before I went to university. So when Blizzard announced over a year ago they would remaster Warcraft 3, I was really excited and immediately pre-ordered it. Fast forward to today. The game is now out, and one big part of what Warcraft 3 was for me, is the ability to play custom games that was made by the community, and that included Dota. When Dota really took off a long time ago, Blizzard didn't make any money out of it because it was not their property even though it used the game.

Reading Polygon's 'Warcraft 3: Reforged changes how the original game works, and fans are upset' article. This hardly surprises me, because Blizzard as a company has really changed since Activision took over the company, and a lot of employees that believed in Blizzard and upheld it's values were leaving then, there and over there.

Since I have the game already, it might be possible that this is the last Blizzard game that I will have bought. I hope the community still creates their custom maps/mods even though they will not make money from it as Blizzard changed the terms and that if anything is created with their editor, is automatically the property of Blizzard and they, themselves will earn all the profits from someone that has spent the time to create the custom maps/mods.

I am delaying myself from playing the game, because I stumbled across a tweet. This gamer with a 49" monitor playing Stardew Valley. I would love to play games on an ultra-wide monitor now. So, I'm making the conscious decision to not play Warcraft 3 Reforged until I have an ultra-wide monitor. Gaming for me is all about the visual aspects, as like how people would spend hundreds of pounds on headphones when I don't understand why, because I'm deaf. The same could apply for me spending a significant amount of money on a monitor to an outsider.

(Yes I bought Stardew Valley on Steam for my niece to play in advance of getting an ultra-wide monitor)

Until then 👋