TL;DR: Last week I said Minnaloushe was inching toward parole from cat jail. This week he simply escaped — repeatedly, by jumping onto my office door and vaulting the five-foot gate — which earned him the household title of "the tiger." Meanwhile the byom/mixtapes rabbit hole kept swallowing me whole (cover art, mosaic hero images, virtualizing an 8000-track playlist, npm releases, Navidrome and Plex playback), starnet sprouted a Quality-Based Narrative epic, and I fell down a gacha-game reorientation hole and an Oxford-comma nerdsnipe hole in the same week.

The tiger is out

When I left off last week, Minnaloushe — a.k.a. "the Hunk," so named because the adoption agency called him hunky — was still doing his time behind the tall gate in my office while we reboot the cat introductions. He was, I said, inching toward parole.

He decided not to wait.

First he figured out how to breach cat jail: jump on top of my office door, then from there jump through the gap above the five-foot pet gate in the doorway. He did it twice, and then I caught him doing the jump math and butt wiggles for a third go. Certainly not a dumb critter.

By the weekend I had to concede the point entirely, with apologies to Nael, grade 1, whose poem "The Tiger" I have never been able to get out of my head:

The tiger He destroyed his cage Yes YES The tiger is out

Between jailbreaks, he kept himself busy being a menace to my desk specifically. I turned around one afternoon to find him going to town chewing on the joystick of my little barcade cabinet like it was a jawbreaker:

He also pried the rubber nubbins off my laptop shelf (twice), buried his head in a foam pumpkin to fish out the electronics inside, and generally made himself at home stretched across the keyboards and monitors like he pays rent here.

The freedom tour did not last. There was a bit of a scuffle — I'm pretty sure Cosmo started it — so the tiger is back in his cage for a little while so we can have workday peace. Cage not entirely destroyed yet. Baby steps.

Is this a music blog now?

The mixtapes project I started last week refused to let go. What began as "somewhere to stash my playlists off Spotify" has, over the course of the week, maybe turned into a kind of music blog? We'll see if I actually keep it up with new mixtapes. Either way, byom-sync and byom-player both got a frankly absurd number of commits.

The stuff I'm happiest about:

• Virtualizing the tracklist. That Big Sonic Heaven playlist is past 8000 tracks, and rendering all of them into the DOM at once made the web component do completely stupid things. Windowing the list so it only renders what's on screen fixed that, and I added viewport-priority pruning to the availability prescan so it isn't frantically checking 8000 tracks you'll never scroll to.

• Cover art and mosaic heroes. byom-sync now resolves cover art via MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive, and for playlists that don't have an explicit cover it generates a representative mosaic hero image out of the album art it does have. The index and playlist pages look a lot less like a spreadsheet now.

• It plays my own music. Even though it defaults to pulling audio from YouTube, I got it working against my homelab Navidrome and Plex installs — so it can play music from my personal collection (or yours) without uploading all the files somewhere first. That's the part that makes the whole "gardener, not a tenant" thing feel real.

The rest of the week was the unglamorous tail of shipping something: I published byom-player to npm and cut a few tagged releases, did a big mobile pass on the site and player chrome, and rebuilt the layout around a proper app shell. Not exciting to describe, but it's the difference between a demo and a thing.

Back on my gamedev bullshit, quality edition

starnet, the long-simmering cyberpunk netrunning RPG, got some attention too. Last week's exploit-barrage mini-game landed a follow-up (the worktree-exploit-e2-gear work merged), but the bigger move was opening an epic for a Quality-Based Narrative meta-loop — StoryNexus-style storylets, driven by facts accumulated over a run. If you've ever played Fallen London and wondered how the story keeps reshuffling itself around what you've done, that's the machinery I'm trying to build a version of. It's the connective tissue that could turn a pile of mini-games into an actual game. We'll see.

The live-service reorientation problem

I spent a chunk of the week trying to climb back into a couple of gacha games and bouncing right back off. I fired up Zenless Zone Zero again after loving it last summer and thought: sweet merciful crap, what is any of this? Same story with Honkai: Star Rail, which greeted me with a "welcome back" gift of currencies when what I actually needed was a "here's WTF you were doing last time" reorientation.

That's the recurring trap with these free-to-play things: they're a bewildering blizzard of currencies and limited-time offers and geegaws, I enjoy them intensely for a limited window, and then my brain flushes all knowledge of their systems the moment I look away. The one exception is Warframe, which I somehow retain across months-long absences — and which had a genuinely wild Tau expansion reveal at TennoCon that manages to blend detective noir, swanky triphop, cyberpunk, deep-future stoner-rock sci-fi, and screaming cosmic horror. I love that creative team.

On the hardware side, I've been leaning on GeForce NOW rather than upgrade a six-year-old GPU — I know cloud gaming is "how they get ya," but my internet is good and I'd rather make a few extra mortgage payments. Less happily, the Xbox controller I use has become a full Ship of Theseus: the rubberized thumbstick texture is now sloughing off gloopily under my thumbs, and I'd already replaced the outer shell after the original crumbled. I don't think this thing is even a few years old.

Miscellanea

Wrapping up

Not a bad week: a cat who has evidently decided that walls are a suggestion, a side project that keeps threatening to become a real thing, and enough good reading to keep my "gardener, not tenant" convictions well-watered. On the quieter side, my therapist flagged that my anxiety and grief scores were up at this week's check-in, which tracks — so I'm trying to be gentle with myself about how much of the above is genuine play and how much is hyperfocus doing its thing. Probably some of both. The tiger and I have that in common.