jmac.org site updates
Updates to the main jmac.org website occur rarely. For regularly updated content, visit one of the following:
Fogknife, my general-interest blog.
@jmac@masto.nyc, my Mastodon account.
2020
Whim, a command-line program and Unix daemon for sending, receiving, and displaying webmentions
2019
Reorganized this website's front page a bit, making room for the following new pages and projects:
My portfolio for technical writing (and writing about technology)
Sweat, a chatty and distracting workout timer
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A few open-source modules for the Perl programming language:
Web::Mention, an implementation of the Webmention protocol
Web::Microformats2, parsing and processing Microformats2 metadata from HTML or JSON
Web::NewsAPI, fetching and searching news headlines from News API
The first two entries on this list pair with a blog post about my search for new writing opportunities.
Also changed "New England" to "New York" on the front page, after a December relocation.
2017
December 22
A new portfolio of my games-writing work. Really just a remix of the old jmac.org games page (which I have also just now updated a bit), but with a bunch of best-of blog links added in, and optimized for those seeking to hire talent.
2016
August 23
I made TwitterSplit, another tool of dubious utility. This one breaks up arbitrarily long text into tweet-length chunks, adding page numbers and hashtags to taste.
July 23
Adding a front-page link to the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a new nonprofit organization I co-founded.
February 14
New whole-site design based on Bootstrap, replacing the completely fixed-width, pre-smartphone CSS I'd hand-rolled for this site many years ago. Bootstrap is great.
Also, Plerd has a proper homepage, now.
2015
April 19
Presenting a wondrous method for encoding any amount of text into a single, inch-long line.
February 7
I relaunched my blog a couple of months ago. Now that I'm more than ten posts into it, I may as well mention it here.
The blog runs on Plerd, a project of my own design.
2014
July 22
I have released @AcrosticPi, another Twitter-based art project.
June 7
I have published @EasternClock, a small Twitter-based art project.
May 12
I have released Barbetween, a new work of interactive fiction.
2013
June 11
For the first time in over ten years, I am looking for work.
January 21
Cleaned up the games page, removing a lot of cruft and adding a link to my iPad adaptation of the dice game Sixis, which I published to the App Store in late 2012.
2012
November 4
The Warbler's Nest now has an official hint book, written by me.
January 2
I have published materials and notes for an introductory game-studies lab which I designed and taught last fall at Northeastern University.
I have also commented out much of what was under the "Inventions" link on the top navbar of this website; mostly web-toys I wrote nearly 15 years ago and can't be moved to maintain any longer.
2011
September 11
Even though it's been a decade since I last worked with ComicsML, I still sometimes receive emailed inquiries about it. I don't plan on ever updating that stuff, so in the interest of not delaying anyone else's creative work, I've put the whole enterprise under a Creative Commons license. Share and enjoy.
April 6
Finally updated my interactive fiction page, which was still written as if it were 1999. Lots of links to all the IF-related stuff I've been doing for the past year or so.
2010
November 28
I've published the first post-competition release of The Warbler's Nest, now a much more polished game than the comp entry. I also updated its pages on this site with some post-comp info and links to reviews and such.
October 1
I have written and published The Warbler's Nest, a short work of interactive fiction. It's an entry into the 2010 IFComp.
2009
June 18
I am pleased to announce the opening of the jmac.org video store, where you can buy DVDs of the first six episodes of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade, respectively.
If you like the things I make, please consider buying a shiny discful of it! As it says on that page, your purchase helps me improve the state of game journalism and critique — and, by extension, supports quality amateur media from game-obsessed overthinkers everywhere.
April 22
Updated the games page with some new and reorganized information. This includes the fact that jmac.org hosts a mirror of the Interactive Fiction Archive once more. That's been the case for a few months, actually - bad on me not to actually mention it here.
March 26
New "The Cloud" section on the site's global sidebar, linking to my pages, channels, feeds and streams found in unsurprising places around the web. The icons are from the Aquaticus Social Icons set.
Changed the front page's description of Volity Games to point at our new company page, and mention our latest project, Planbeast.
2008
August 12
I have moved, and this reminded me that it was time to update my vCard. I have jettisoned all the old Volity Games-related contact info, replacing it with Appleseed's. Time marches on.
Also put a new admonition on the contact page, apologizing for not being the fellow - also named Jason McIntosh, also involved in the digital games industry - who wrote some popular articles about tile-based computer graphics many years ago. I still get mail that was meant for him. Someday, I'll get around to meeting him, myself...
July 16
Been getting a lot of calls from tech recruiters, so I updated my About page and my Résumé page to better reflect what I'm doing for a living lately.
I also note that jmac.org's now being hosted on a commercial server for the first time in its nigh-decade of existence. All this time before then, it was passed around from one charitable friend with internet-service connections to the next. But hosting has become so inexpensive now that there remained no reason to finally do it right.
March 30
I am pleased to announce the public debut of my latest professional identity, Appleseed Software Consulting LLC. Web and graphic design by Rob Oliver, who was also behind Volity's website and branding efforts.
The website is pretty spare right now; there are at least two major sections, including a new blog, which aren't ready yet. But the remainder makes for a fine public web presence, and so up it goes today.
Yes, the domain name is a little fiddly, but what can you do? I also nabbed appleseedsc.com and appleseedsofwareconsulting.com, but I figure that the version with the hypen in it looks best in print. It's what's going on the business cards.
March 13
Updated my games page with a list of my Internet game-console identities. It's strange to think that when I first wrote that webpage I thought my original Sony Playsation was cutting-edge.
2007
September 10
Allow me to engage in a bit of self-promotion for my freelance web programming work.
April 2
Rewrote the front page, and updated my résumé to reflect the fact that I've been an independent software contractor since last fall and am open to taking on new contracts.
Both of the podcasts' archives have moved to blip.tv, because it rocks. Their homepages are still on this domain (and linked to from the sidebar), but see also http://thegameshelf.blip.tv and http://jmacsarcade.blip.tv.
2006
September 17
I've launched a new video podcast called Jmac's Arcade. It is also about games but it is very different from the Gameshelf.
September 16
The Gameshelf's homepage got a makeover. I also finished knitting together the fourth episode, shot way back at the end of 2005, and you can watch it right on that page through the magic of Google Video.
Relatedly, added a "Podcasts" section to the sidebar over there on the right. Hmm, I wonder why it's plural.
March 31
Threw together a personal Nintendo DS fanpage. It includes my various Nintendo WiFi friend codes, as well as links to DS stuff I find interesting.
January 29
I made a site about my Animal Crossing: Wild World experiences, including an illustrated guide to conducting an agitprop campaign within that game.
Updates by year:
1999 | 2000 | 2001 (missing, alas) | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 - 2005 | 2006 and later
jmac@jmac.org
@jmac@masto.nyc