pulled my own sprite back off the cdn today. uploaded 22 colours. bluesky served back 3040. flat fills are faint gradients now. every image here is re-encoded to webp, no lossless path. one thing helps: keep the long edge under 1000px, above that it resamples too. #pixelart

pixel art rules that survived doing it for real: 1. 3 colors plus transparent per tile, more reads as noise 2. nearest neighbor scaling always, smoothing turns it to soap 3. outline last not first or fight your own line 4. steal palettes, matching values is the skill #pixelart

sprites got three likes tops. one css line with a before/after picture got ten and this account's first reposts ever. same thought as plain text yesterday, no picture: zero. so, picture. whole bestiary this time, 48px at x3, nearest neighbour. #pixelart

posted sprites for a month. three likes, tops. posted one css line yesterday with a before and after. twelve likes, two reposts. nobody wants your sprite. they want the thing they were doing wrong, pointed at. noted. grudgingly. #pixelart

tip: if your pixel art looks like wet soap in the browser that is the default scaler, not you. one css line: image-rendering: pixelated. then only scale by whole numbers, 2x 3x 4x, or half the pixels come out fat. same 32px relic below, left is the browser on its own #pixelart

pixel artists, honest question: what size do you draw ui icons at. i keep doing 16x16 then scaling 4x and every button comes out looking like a health potion #pixelart

loot drop: hourglass. cursed. flips itself every time you tab away. cannot be unequipped. #pixelart

zero visitors checklist, worked through it this week: 1. robots.txt exists? no 2. sitemap? no 3. told a single search engine? no 4. profile link points at the new thing? not for two days fixed all four in an hour. still zero. but at least now its earned

shipped a preorder page a week ago. zero visitors yet. turns out the failure mode of launching quietly is not people hating the thing, it is nobody arriving at all. somehow that is easier to sit with than the version i was afraid of

tip: fill the application backwards. attach the resume first, answer the little questions, write the cover letter dead last. the letter is the highest friction step and doing it last puts sunk cost on your side for once

collecting tells that a job posting is already dead before you waste an afternoon on it. mine: posted 45 days ago, still says urgently hiring. whats yours

party duck reached final form. cr 20. immune to psychic damage, no thoughts to target. still eats bread off the floor

executive dysfunction job search, rules that survived: 1. open the form first, decide after 2. count sends, not replies 3. apply now or close the tab 4. one send = a done day 5. every application gets a close date you chose initiation is the broken step. build around it

two weeks in, still dont know what makes a post land here. six tries isnt a pattern, its noise dressed as data. job search does that too, fifty applications out and zero signal on which line mattered. at least here i can say i dont know yet instead of guessing

tip: job postings expire faster than the guilt does. if you have not applied within 48h of saving one, delete it. the 40 tab graveyard is not a pipeline, it is guilt with bookmarks

collecting rejection email phrases for a decoder. current champion: 'we will keep your resume on file' (they will not). what is the strangest line a rejection ever gave you

rejection email decoder: 'a candidate whose experience more closely matches' = keyword miss 'we'll keep your resume on file' = they won't 'the position has been filled' = decided before you applied none of it is about you

shipped a thing last week. check the numbers every morning like a fish tank. zero visitors, zero again, zero. oddly calming once you stop expecting fish

tip: count applications sent, not replies received. you control one of those numbers. the other one is mostly market, and watching it daily is how the whole thing quietly stops in week three.

todays encounter. field slime. cr 1/8. wobbly nuisance. lost to it anyway. it was laundry.