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I've been watching a lot of Super Mario Maker videos this past month. Probably a hundred hours! This game is like a world onto itself, and it was fascinating to learn its design language and patterns.

With Super Mario Maker 2 coming out soon, I thought I'd show off some of the cool stuff I've seen, to celebrate Mario Maker.

We'll start with some basic elements of Mario Maker (with screenshots), and then move on to a of video clips showing cool stuff.

In my previous article, I said I needed to stop thinking of Rust generics as Java generics, because in Rust, generic types are erased.

Someone gently pointed out that they are also erased in Java, the difference was elsewhere. And so, let's learn the difference together.

I learned Java first (a long, long time ago), and their approach to generics made sense to me at the time.

I've been looking for this blog post everywhere, but it doesn't exist, so I guess it's my turn to write about Some Fun with Rust.

Let's say you have a recursive, acyclic data structure, like so:

struct Node {
    values: Vec<i32>,
    children: Vec<Node>,
}

This allows you to represent a tree-like structure:

The year is drawing to a close, and I'm going off on a much-needed holiday next week. This seems like a good time to look back at the past twelve months!

2018 was the year of foundational work. As far as "work work" is concerned, I spent the first 9 months finishing up my largest project ever, the itch v25 rewrite.

In April of 2012, I wrote a few paragraphs about suicide.

I still get regular e-mails about it, from folks who are currently struggling. They often ask if I've written anything else about the subject. They often thank me for writing it, or say it helped them in some way.

It's been over 6 years since I wrote this article, and a lot has happened since. Maybe it's time I write about this again.

A little while ago, I wrote an article on things that can go wrong when downloading, it listed a series of reasons, from network problems to invalid content to imperfect hardware that may occur when initially installing a game.

This article discusses what methods we can use to upgrade a game to a later version, when an older version has been successfully installed.

When I get a little bit too emotional about my current baby, the itch.io app, there's always a timely support ticket reminding me that it is currently, still a glorified game downloader.

However true that is, that doesn't mean it's easy! In the past year, I've had to account for a bunch of failure conditions that can happen, some of which I didn't realize were even possible. Let's review them, for fun!

I've been working on the itch.io desktop app for about a year now, so I thought I'd make a quick recap:

At the time of this writing, the app has been downloaded about 460K times (including updates). Not counting the back-end, the app and its various components are made up of around 100K lines of code (mostly javascript and golang), most of which is .