a curated feed of updates to the house

  • hello! if you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to, you’ve come to the right place.

    2024-11-12
    • posts are sorted from newest to oldest.

      2024-11-12
    • you can keep track of which posts you’ve read by looking at the color of the links.

      2024-11-12
    • there is an Atom feed in case you want to add riki’s house to your feed reader.

      2024-11-28
      • hint: unlike this page (for now), the Atom feed exposes categories you can feed to your reader to filter out posts you don’t want to see.

        2024-11-28
      • also, the Atom feed does not contain post content. this is due to the house being cybernetically enhanced better with all my artisanal touches and CSS!

        if you want to read any of the posts, follow the links. it’s like that by design.

        2024-12-09
  • Kettel - Dubio

    2025-04-03
    • I wholeheartedly love this album. it makes me think, it makes me imagine. it shows me backgrounds, landscapes, people, events, feelings.

      2025-04-03
    • this is a set of my synaesthetic interpretations of some of the first tracks.

      2025-04-03
  • C++ without Classes

    2025-02-28
    • a joke I cracked at work, except what if I told you I was actually serious.

      2025-02-28
  • implementing classes in Lua

    2025-02-08
    • one of my absolutely favourite parts of Lua is how tiny, but capable it is. did you know you could implement object-oriented programming without needing any additional syntactic support?

      2025-02-08
    • this is a remaster of an old tutorial I published as a Gist to explain how object-oriented programming works in Lua to someone on the LÖVE Discord server.

      2025-02-08
      • thus there’s a high likelihood you’ve never read it. however, I think it’s a pretty nice tutorial, so I’m republishing it here outside the shackles of GitHub.

        2025-02-08
      • and the programming trickery in it might just open your third eye a bit, so you should read it even if you’re not into Lua!

        2025-02-08
  • Floating Points - Tilt Shift / Ablaze

    2025-02-03
    • visions of a city ever living, ever calming.

      2025-02-03
    • I’ve been meaning to write about those tracks for the longest time, but just didn’t get around to it. today I was giving the album another listen, and decided to write up my visions. so that I can remember, and so the world can see, too…

      2025-02-03
  • The Flashbulb - Flacks / aBliss

    2025-01-18
    • my most beautiful musical finding this month.

      2025-01-18
  • idea: freeing the hobby corners

    2025-01-13
    • exploring the idea of aggregating pages via tags, rather than manually curating and structuring them out.

      2025-01-13
  • nickname change!

    2025-01-06
    • this year, I’m changing my nickname from liquidex to riki! so don’t be surprised to see a blog you don’t recognise in your feed reader, lol.

      2025-01-06
      • this is what liquidex’s treehouse turned into!

        2025-01-06
  • reflections on Minecraft

    2025-01-04
    • this holiday season, my friend set up a Minecraft server and invited a bunch of folks to have some good ol’ block game fun!

      2025-01-04
      • this is a retrospect on that playthrough. I was playing in a somewhat unusual way for me, learned lots of new lessons, had lots of reflections along the way… so this is a post that summarises most of it. Builds Included.

        2025-01-04
    • now that the holidays are over, and I’m out of block game steam, I’ll need to move onto something else. who knows what that might be?

      2025-01-04
  • design for the free soul

    2024-12-28
    • a little note on how constrains and guard rails can make you feel more “claustrophobic.”

      2024-12-28
  • my weird stim: writing with light streaks

    2024-12-27
    • I had a conversation with a friend where I was saying how spacey I get sometimes, and this weird little stim of mine came up.

      2024-12-27
    • I wonder if anyone else has ever experienced something similar.

      2024-12-27
  • animations & perception of sluggishness

    2024-12-09
    • I got a little angry at Windows at work today, because I wanted to close a window via the right-click menu on the taskbar, and ended up clicking during the tiny time window where the animation is playing and your clicks are ignored.

      2024-12-09
      • so I disabled animations in the entire system, and wow is Windows hella snappy with animations disabled!

        and that got me thinking: maybe all the crazy people saying “you should disable animations everywhere because they waste your time” weren’t so crazy after all thinking

        2024-12-09
      • but I’m fine with animations on my Google Pixel as well as my GNOME desktop, so what gives?

        2024-12-09
        • this post aims to explore that.

          2024-12-09
  • touch panels

    2024-12-03
    • a few examples of bad touch panels on various kitchen appliances (and also, my headphones.)

      2024-12-03
      • designers, please stop shoving touch panels into everything.

        2024-12-03
  • Advent of Code feels

    2024-11-30
    • I tried time and time again, but can never get into Advent of Code. so here’s me overthinking why that’s the case.

      2024-11-30
  • composable virtual file systems

    2024-11-25
    • I recently rebuilt the treehouse to use a virtual file system for its source and target directories.

      2024-11-25
    • this is an exploration of how I built my abstraction, how it works, and what I learned from it.

      2024-11-25
  • on responsibility & conformity

    2024-11-25
    • or, how we cannot do silly things because of herd mentality

      2024-11-25
  • Aphex Twin - Blue Calx

    2024-11-17
    • have you listened to Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)? (that is a mouthful)

      2024-11-17
      • it was my first experience listening to SAW2, and boy. it’s the best Factorio soundtrack :3

        2024-11-17
        • not really related to the post, but just sayin’.

          2024-11-17
  • furry! —w—

    2024-11-12
    • I’m an adorable little cat boy. purrow! snuggle snuggle

      2024-11-28
    • a lesson in Shock Therapy & Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

      2024-11-28
  • fear of the unknown

    2024-11-12
    • aka how you will never be able to live in peace

      2024-11-12
  • prefix matches with C strings

    2024-11-12
    • a clever trick with C strings: did you know you can match a prefix just by chaining indexing with &&?

      2024-11-12
  • on nicknames

    2024-11-04
    • do you use your real name online? why (not)?

      2024-11-04
      • I know I don’t. so here’s a little shower thought regarding why that is.

        2024-11-04
  • ”I build things”

    2024-10-28
    • riki yells at cloud. an insight as to how I believe life ought to be colorful, and how just saying “I build things” is gray and empty.

      2024-10-28
  • the curious case of Amon Tobin’s Creatures

    2024-10-28
    • a weird anomaly I noticed while listening to some breaks

      2024-10-28
  • I Don’t Love Me Anymore

    2024-09-29
    • I was listening to Oneohtrix Point Never’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, and had some retrospective thoughts about the vocals in this song.

      2024-09-29
    • it’s also a nice opportunity to say that I’ve refreshed the music section a bit!

      2024-09-29
  • not quite buildless

    2024-09-09
    • I like lean websites. did you know that?

      2024-09-09
    • I also really like lean websites that are simple in construction and deployment. did you know the treehouse is a website like that?

      2024-09-09
    • so I’ve decided to write up a few anecdotes and other cool stories about the treehouse’s inner workings.

      2024-09-09
    • also, it’s (way past) its one year anniversary! hooray!

      2024-09-09
  • the ListenBrainz data set

    2024-09-06
    • I decided to write up some ideas on what sort of cool data analysis I could do on my ListenBrainz data set.

      2024-09-06
    • I haven’t done any of it yet, but I thought it’d be cool to share my ideas anyways!

      2024-09-06
  • haku - writing a little programming language for fun

    2024-08-05
    • I was bored over a weekend, so I decided to write the tiniest programming language I could imagine.

      2024-08-05
      • it came out looking pretty Lispy, and I’m glad about that!

        2024-08-05
    • I learned a ton about Lisps in the process of researching it. even though it didn’t end up having macros…

      2024-08-05
  • JavaScript is not as bad as people make it out to be

    2024-07-08
    • sometimes people call me crazy for saying that bashing JavaScript is senseless and that it’s not as bad of a language as people make it out to be.

      2024-07-08
      • so I decided to collect my thoughts into a nice little page I can link easily.

        2024-07-08
  • in wisdom you become old

    2024-07-01
  • freeing C memory automatically using std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr

    2024-06-20
    • a friend of mine asked if it makes sense to define your own wrapper class for SDL_Window the way Lazy Foo does it.

      2024-06-20
      • I told him there’s no reason to do that in modern C++, because std::unique_ptr can do everything for you anyways.

        2024-06-20
    • on another note, I did read a blog post about this once somewhere, but couldn’t be bothered to find it. so there you go! I made a post about this too.

      2024-06-20
  • about me (version 2)

    2024-06-17
    • it’s updatin’ time! I took some time to clean up old pages and update my about me.
      over time I’ve been learning how to write content on the treehouse effectively, and the new about me reflects that.

      2024-06-17
    • version 1

      2024-06-17
  • what’s up with *x not always meaning the same thing in different contexts?

    2024-05-18
    • I recently got a question from my someone telling me they don’t understand why *x does not read from the pointer x when on the left-hand side of an assignment. and that made me think, why is that the case?

      2024-05-18
  • systems are just a bunch of code

    2024-04-09
    • I’ve been thinking recently how cool it is to be able to single-step into Unreal Engine’s source code and edit it while you’re working with it, and how uncool it is that I can’t do the same thing easily in the Rust world.

      2024-04-09
      • after all, aren’t we just dealing with a bunch of code running on the computer? why not let me poke at it?

        2024-04-09
    • bonus: dismantling Unreal Engine’s GENERATED_BODY

      2024-04-09
  • OR-types

    2024-04-07
    • last night I couldn’t sleep because of type theory. in the process of trying to write down my thoughts, I ended up discovering a class of types which, to my knowledge, no language implements.

      2024-04-07
  • programming languages: Lua

    2024-03-08
    • I really like Lua, did you know that? but I get kind of tired of explaining why a thousand times to people who don’t know the language, so here’s a page with my thoughts!

      2024-03-08
  • just shut up sometimes

    2024-03-08
  • design: sidebars

    2024-03-06
    • sidebars! also known as, ”enjoying the main content? how about I distract you from it so that you can’t focus!”

      2024-03-06
      • seriously though. I don’t like them.

        2024-03-06
  • riki’s treehouse: design

    2024-02-22
    • I started a branch on user interface and user experience design, because I was working with mintty at work and had some thoughts about it.

      “why does mintty always feel so out of place compared to cmd.exe?”

      2024-02-22
      • I also wrote a post summarising my thoughts: on digital textures

        2024-02-22
  • tairu - an interactive exploration of 2D autotiling techniques

    2024-02-21
    • ever wondered how Terraria renders its worlds? or how editors like Tiled manage to make painting tiles so easy?

      2024-02-21
      • this post explores basically just that.

        2024-02-21
  • hedonic treadmill

    2023-11-23
  • C++: access modifiers as labels (private:, protected:, and public:)

    2023-09-07
  • Telefon Tel Aviv - Map of What Is Effortless

    2023-09-07
  • Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

    2023-09-05
  • Aphex Twin - Syro

    2023-09-03
  • Radiohead - OK Computer

    2023-08-31