Water dogs, land dogs, html, and sorting.



Derrick, Lee, and I did a Cove dive. I didn't take the underwater setup, but Derrick brought his GoPro from which I grabbed some screencaps.



We've had some loaner dogs and some tea parties.

		One of my favorite meta tags is the image to use for message previews.		Rob
Me	Oh, which tag is that?
		https://developer.apple.com/...
	... [Thinking hard pass]
		https://ogp.me

I followed the non-Apple link:

Open Graph

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to allow any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook.

Helping Facebook rehost the internet in their walled garden doesn't sound enticing. On the other hand, how often do you find Apple interoperating with something that isn't their IP?

Obsidian Age

The big companies like Facebook and Twitter all have their own spiders that periodically crawl the web looking at the DOM of websites. If they see the relevant tags, they'll generate their respective 'preview' automatically. Literally all you need to do is have the right tags in your head section. ... Sites often define their own prefixes though. Twitter, for example, additionally uses a custom twitter: prefix to allow for some extended functionality.

Easy enough, and I was already fixing my page headers.

Notional depiction of genre clustering. There are many more possible labels and addtional axes.

Back in cold, cold December I compiled a list of candidate games for the next co-op campaign. That led to formalizing video games as a datatype in my site generator (rather than a tag and unassociated collection of images and commentary).

Having scoured /r/gamingsuggestions to create this list, I had the vague desire to provide a recommendation list for each game mentioned here. I started with a naive solution just to get the game datatype out the door, but I've since been able to revisit.

My goals were these:

• Create a fully-connected graph of games, such that any game has a ranked list of associated titles. This wasn't crucial, but it meant the navigation sidebar for each game would have all of the others.
• Provide a /r/gamingsuggestions-style top cut of similar games. While it lacks the Game A + Game B = Game C at present (stay tuned), it has the consistency of a single author.
• Let the graph connectedness provide a long tail of recommendations beyond the closest peers. Often with /r/gamingsuggestions I've played the top recommendations.
• Do this without manually populating 20,000 similarity rankings.

Phase 1: data entry

There's simply no replacement for manually ranking the titles that are most alike. It looked like this:


The AtO and Alienation lists were easy because of how tight their genres are. Since I don't have a ton of strategy games in my catalog, Civ was the closet I could find to AoE II. I don't know of any games like Among Us, but at least Barotrauma and Viscera Cleanup Detail felt similar (with very different gameplay).

Phase 2: Kevin Bacon

Getting to a fully-connected network meant iteratively adding friends of friends. So if The Division is like Borderlands and Borderlands is like Warframe, The Division is sort of like Warframe.

Phase 3: feedback

Due to an incomplete first order list, dumping the Phase 2 list yielded games to be promoted to the first order.


Vermintide, Dying Light, and Remnant should be closer than Far Cry.