other sylvies

you might already know a sylvie, but chances are thats not me, heres the ones i know about

• sylvie.website / sylvie.itch.io is someone who made a high number of small games

  she uses twitter 2 (unlike me) and can afford a 'sylvie' domain (unlike me)

me

• chose the name sylvie somewhere during 2023
• finished and released one game
• owns three laptops, azure from 2011-ish, coral from 2016-ish, and dandelion from 2003-ish
• occasionally programs in usually C, occasionally draws spritesheets, rarely digital art or animation
• occasionally plays video games, havent figured out exact criteria for me to be interested in a game, generally im not
• obligatory arch btw user, began in early 2024

relation to programming

funny story i wanted to make games from a young age, young me did not think there are more games than time in a lifespan, so i guess thats what got me into programming, and really what makes me interested in it at all, likewise with digital art but probably to a lesser degree

my preferred language would be C, it "gets the most right out of any languages with the least things wrong" as i put it somewhere during 2024?

i am well aware of the existence of undefined behaviour, i have ran head first into undefined behaviour, i have attempted to exploit undefined behaviour for dubious benefits, and i have worried about undefined behaviour manifesting when attempting to prevend undefined behaviour

i dont hate UB, it has a clear purpose, albeit i wish C provided built-ins for the carry flag on integer overflow and overflow on integer multiplication

relatedly the language i hate the most might be python, or rust, each for different reasons though:

• python is nothing like C, python doesnt let you Do Thing, python expects you to just know the library function that is not called DoThing but instead performerate_aforementioned or something equally as stupid and unintuitive, and if what you want to do isnt in the library, then fuck you, actually.

  in the time it would take me to figure out how to make python do a simple task, i could have done it in C (using the simple universal building blocks it provides (the c-style for loop)) and then some

  the only thing python might be considered suitable for would be as a calculator when bc -l is somehow unsuitable (the (worse) alternative for this is nodejs)

• rust has an awful community

despite the drawbacks, one fun benefit of C is that C, sort of kind of to some extent in certain kinds of ways and/or shapes can be considered to fit the expectation of what efficient code for the cpu is intended to be shaped like

so while i do spend literal months on a part of a module, i can be reasonably sure that the module is at least going to perform as if it was competent, which puts me miles ahead of someone using unity (in 2026 no less!) in terms of taking optimization into consideration!

the pace of things can get highly demotivating

i exist in these places

• my gamedev mastodon account for occasional progress updates
• my other mastodon account for other nonsense
• my github for like opening issues on github
• my codeberg that i dont really use
• my itch.io, not much here currently
• my username on discord is zlago
• my matrix handle is currently zlago:matrix.org

if you need to contact me, do so via mastodon or discord, in either case be upfront or i will assume youre a spam bot

if you are on tilde town you can also contact me via town mail, irc (unless town was down recently), bink, and i guess even guestbook?

tilde.town

tilde.town is where i water the virtual plants of 8 different people and where my de facto website is hosted

the SSG used is a moderately dumb makefile and the c preprocessor, as stated by the footer

this does mean i write the HTML myself, this might change in the future once i figure out what a good SSG looks like

but at this rate, chances are im going to continue writing html with nothing more than file include functionality (though i do want automagic link to data URI conversion and automagic insertion of media width and height into elements)

my hardware

1. azure

   the primary laptop, the battery is busted so i use it on life support

   • thinkpad T420, a thick black slab of a laptop
   • bought it in early 2024 for 250 PLN from someone on reddit out of all places, plus 20 PLN for the charger, replaced the fan mid 2026 (bought by a friend, so 0 PLN)
   • arch btw
   • 2nd generation intel i5
   • 8 GiB DDR3 RAM
   • 100 GB SSD and 500 GB spinning rust
2. coral

   thanks to an actually working battery, its a laptop i bring with me to distract myself from everyday worries on the go

   • ideapad 100-15iBy, slimmer but a bit wider than azure, it has a number pad and key-sized arrow keys!
   • got it for free in early 2026, but without a charger, bought one for 50 PLN
   • 64 bit alpine linux, despite the RAM amount
   • celeron N2840, whatever that means
   • 4 GiB DDR3L RAM
   • 500 GB spinning rust
3. dandelion

   a living piece of history, i would say. unsuitable for the year 2026.

   • latitude D600, thick gray-silver slabjacent shape, with a keyboard thats almost normal
   • i was permitted to keep it mid 2026 since it has been abandoned for over a decade
   • 32 bit alpine linux
   • pentium M processor + ATI Mobility FireGL 9000 (only laptop with a dGPU so far)
   • 1 GiB "DDR" RAM
   • 150 GB spinning rust