Lee-Mon's Epic Website

Someone asked me for an 88x31 button so they can link to my website. I didn't have one because I hate these fucking things, but I still spent the time making it because I like that person enough. I assume it doesn't fit the readability conventions of your typical 88x31, since the Lee-Mon is quite discernible.

I removed the Discord debloater theme because, ironically, it was bloat. I no longer use Discord because I got banned at the end of December; obviously that renders me unable to maintain the theme and ensure that my shit works.

I highly recommend you drop Discord and move to a better platform. Don't give them your ID or any sensitive information, as they've had many data leaks before, and in either case the entire business model is selling this information to whoever's willing to pay. This is especially dangerous nowadays, given the rise of fascism around the whole world. If they know who you are, it would be trivial to silence you if you're a dissenter.

Anyway... here's your stupid button

I smote a ton of bullshit comparatives and superlatives, and I mean a TON. I don't have a proper count since I didn't count, and I don't know how to use git to do the job. Besides, I added some missing words too, so it wouldn't be an accurate count anyway. Seriously though, "augustest", "cobwebbier"? There were a lot like these.

As a result of this change, daily #45 (that is, 2025-01-01) has been replaced because one of the pangrams I killed corresponded to this day on the dailies list.

The word list I used to begin making the game SUCKS FUCKING DICK, so I've had to do a ton of cleanup over time. I've removed a lot of abbreviations, words with typos, trademarks, bad plurals/singulars, nonexistent comparatives/superlatives, and probably more. Additionally I've added words that people suggest, and others that I spot as missing myself.

Hopefully this change makes the game feel a bit cleaner, even if it wasn't a perfect job.

Play Spelling Wasp, now with less nonexistent words!

You see, I care about people being able to download their game progress so they don't randomly lose it. However, it looks like I didn't care enough when implementing IndexedDB.

The logic for generating the downloadable data file had a programming error, and also a big hole in it that would render the resulting file unusable anyway. The programming error itself was just me referencing the wrong index variable in a loop, and the hole was that each item in the data file was lacking a prefix signifying how to treat the data upon upload.

The upload logic also had a misplaced return statement, which would make the whole thing not work at all if an unrecognized item was present in the data file. I missed it because it was all the way to the right in my text editor, and was a remnant from the old implementation with the working progress screen. In testing, the upload function worked though.

I don't know how this all happened. I recall the upload functionality working as expected, but maybe that was due to using an old data file that was generated properly, so upon trying a malformed data file, it failed completely. I also don't remember seeing errors in the download function. Perhaps I just didn't test things thoroughly enough before pushing the IndexedDB implementation update.

Fortunately for you and me though, I fixed everything, or at least I believe I did. Don't hesitate to contact me if you notice a problem with the game.

Play Spelling Wasp... I promise it won't break again...!

Kind of a nothingburger of a change, I changed the writing here and in the Games page to remove my mentions of the NYTimes. The old article, again, is old and crusty as shit so I won't update it further, it's only there for historic purposes.

Also I applied a couple of under-the-hood changes, now my site has some fancy HTML5 tags which are supposed to help with navigation for people on screen readers. I don't know how effective it'll be or what else I need to do, as I'm largely ignorant about the topic of web accessibility.

Fuck The New York Times. Fuck paying for subscriptions. Fuck copy protection. Play Spelling Wasp, no strings attached.

I changed this landing page. My car no longer takes up the whole screen. I put up some new writeup too.

I adjusted the color of emphasized text, so now it's pinker and brighter. Keen eyes might be able to notice a black outline around it.

I might shift the theme of the whole website towards dark pink, which would make the purple tag a scam. But hey, it brings visitors, and I think it's close enough to purple anyway. In my defense, purple used to be the primary color of this site for a while, and Spelling Wasp IS purple. Maybe it was not a scam!!!!!!!

Perhaps I'll implement a theme switcher at some point? Along with some other goodies, who knows.

I suppose I don't have to link this page to you now, do I?

I've had the button for The Glob on my website for almost a year now. I put it there despite there not being a blog yet, to communicate my intention to eventually start it. I've put it off for a really long time, for a variety of irrelevant reasons, but now it's live, and it's there for you to enjoy (or get angry at).

The very first article, published alongside this update, is about... as anyone could expect, my very own process of gender transition, alongside my thoughts on related aspects. I struck some godlike writing inspiration last week, so it's a really lengthy article. Make sure you set aside enough time to properly digest it all.

I'm proud of what I have achieved with this website feature. My bespoke static site generator is a bit messy, but it's mine, and adding new features to make my life easier always feels like an achievement.

Further features will come over the next days or weeks. I have a lot of stuff to program.

Peruse The Glob, my liege!

You can now guess the word gooning, along with its other verb forms and gooner(s).

Finally, the most requested word ever is in the word list. You don't need to thank me. I do this out of passion.

In case you're wondering why it took so long, it's because one of my criteria for adding new words is for it to show up in 2 out of 3 dictionaries (from the ones used in-game). Merriam-Webster added the definition this year, and because Wiktionary was recently added to the game, the criteria was met. And yeah, I put in an in-game notification specifically for this. There are no other changes.

Now if only Merriam-Webster adds goonable, we could have a new pangram in the game!!!

Without further ado, it's gooning time!!!!!!

Play Spelling Wasp... but make sure you don't guess all the words!

Over the past year, I've been warning of a ticking time bomb within Spelling Wasp in the form of localStorage. This is basically one of the means that developers have of storing data within the web browser, and it's quite easy to use. It comes with a big drawback though; the available space is really limited (apparently around 5 MB). I came really close to crossing this limit, and what would've happened after is anyone's guess...

I replaced every use of localStorage with IndexedDB, which, as this guide says, is like localStorage on steroids. The storage quota is much larger, but it's kind of a pain in the fucking shithole to work with, which is why I put it off for such a long time.

The change means that you shouldn't have to worry about storage limits anymore, though I still recommend taking frequent backups (check the options menu). The reason is that the browser could still, in theory, delete all data for the website if it's running low on space. Other accidents can happen too, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

Please report any problems you find. My email is in my About page. There shouldn't be any catastrophic problems arising from my IndexedDB implementation, but there's always potential for trouble.

Anyway here's your stupid changelog, it's really boring:

• Implemented IndexedDB as the new means of data storage, replacing localStorage
• As a positive consequence of this, I made it so the game caches the "payload" file that contains the word list and game lists (and their related indexing information). This means that you don't need to download an extra 6 MB of data every time you open the page, unless the version you have is different from the one on the server.
• As a side effect, loading a data file sucks again, but at least it's pretty fast. There's no functional loading screen, at least for now.
• Implemented partial daily rollover
• The update notification button (the one you click to get here) is no longer trigger-happy
• Changed the styling of the navigation buttons, so they now respond properly to hover and click events
• Replaced WordReference with Wiktionary. WordReference turned out to be a dud, it seems to have the same information as Collins Dictionary. As you can probably tell, I once again didn't put much thought into this feature.

About the daily rollover thing, the current dailies list has enough entries for about 14 more years of unique games. Once the list is exhausted, it'll loop back to the beginning but the center letter will be swapped, until the cycle repeats anew. This means there are now around 103 years worth of dailies, enough for a lifetime!

There's a catch though; the implementation doesn't seem to gracefully handle looping around to the very beginning, and according to my tests, it's not really possible with the way that dailies are implemented, since their data is saved with the daily's letters as the identifier, rather than a number representing the days since the first daily. I did it this way because of the potential of dailies being deleted if I deem them unfit, which I've done a few times (remember the daily without a pangram?).

I trust that if there's still people interested in the game in the next century, more instances of it will be hosted, which could provide a temporary solution to this problem. For what it's worth though, the game shouldn't cease to function, and human life is too short for one person to exhaust all the possible dailies. I think this is good enough future-proofing.

I'll try to give some love to the Unlimited menu next, and I'll soon begin work on the Spelling Rush mode. I was putting it off until after the storage upgrade.

Lastly, I removed all mentions of The New York Times, because fuck the NYTimes. It's not like they can take down my game. The current article I have for Spelling Wasp is old and won't be updated, I'll just write a new one when the final update comes.

Play Spelling Wasp, Now Somewhat Future-Proof!

If you head over to my About page, there's now a new contact method there, which is more straightforward than Matrix. In fact it's probably the easiest one ever. Unfortunately, because bots run amok and spam is rampant on the internet, I had to heavily noisify it, in order to make it difficult for them to grab the information contained. Think of it as a captcha, but the answer field is in the writable surface of your choice. Fear not though, as this is one situation where the human eye beats the machine in its ability to match a pattern! Nature is truly incredible.

I like exchanging correspondence, so if you need to contact me about a website matter, or if you wanna lick my boots, or if you're just looking to pick a fight, you now have a really easy method to do so. You just need to put those cute eyeballs of yours to work and solve my little puzzle. Fun for all ages!

Now, if you're really looking to pick a fight, consider using the complaint form at the end of this page instead. I have staff reviewing it who'll gladly deal with any angry customers.

Once again, I wrote an article about one of my favorite games ever. As usual, there are no spoilers, as the purpose is to give you my thoughts on why you should check out these games. Maybe I'll write a more interesting opinion piece once I launch my blog.

I also adjusted the site's styles a bit. Nothing spectacular, just bigger picture frames, and outlines instead of increasing brightness when you hover over them.

The Earthbound/Mother Series

You see, when something works under Firefox, I assume it also works under Chrome and its (foul) flavors, since apparently it's the gold standard, oh-so-bleeding-edge motherfucking bombshell of a browser. Turns out I had something broken under Chrome but not Firefox, and it's been like that for the better part of a year now. Insane to think about.

It's really simple, the sorting function to sort things by date in the Unlimited menus wasn't working because of a confusing detail. Check it out:

That second line is supposed to be a sorting function that compares the date of two items, and produces a list of all games sorting by last played date, from newest to oldest. It works under Firefox but not under Chrome because fucking anyone's guess. So the fix is the following:

Yeah, I'm as confused as you are. I think it works because the sorting function expects a positive or negative result from the comparison in order to know how to sort something. Maybe the answer is far more esoteric than that.

Even though the days of Internet Explorer are long gone, it appears there are still major browsers trying to take its spot as the worst browser to support, like it's some honorable golden trophy and global accolades to win. Golden trophy of shit and diarrhea dump. I hope you choke on your medals.

Firefox is good. Switch to Firefox, or one of its forks, of which there are many (I use LibreWolf). There's no real reason to use Chrome, other than being completely willing to choke on daddy Google's greasy cheesy chode. Or maybe you have no other choice, in which case I mourn for you.

Play Spelling Wasp, Now With Real Sorting!

I disabled hints last night to challenge myself, and boy oh boy what do you know, the option to disable ghost words had a major bug! I noticed less than an hour before this update. I missed one of the checks in the logic for ghost words, and what the option was doing instead was revealing all the answers after reaching 70%. If you managed to spot this bug and you took advantage of it, congratulations, you're cheating!

I also dedicated 75% of the page's real estate for ads and added a massive paywall that's impossible to skip. Now the game gives me a dolla for every wrong guess! And even more for every ad you click! Man I'm gonna be so rich!

For privacy and safety reasons, I am not specifying how many eyes I own.

Play Spelling Wasp, Now Without Spoilers!

I decided that it's a good idea to write about the things I like, without pressuring myself to write whole ass in-depth articles about them. Of course, I'll do that where I think it's warranted, but for the cases where it's not, I've now dedicated a section at the bottom of the page where I'll talk about random games that I like. I'll also update this here fancy HTML element whenever I want to announce a new addition.

With all that said, the writeup of Super Puyo Puyo Tsuu is now simply about Puyo Puyo in general, with recommendations to pick it up. I also added a section for Animal Well. More games will follow as I find reasons to talk about them.

Check out the Games section

I noticed last night that the battery drainage is still kind of insane with the timer and all animations enabled, so I optimized the timer further. The milliseconds are no longer shown by default, and the timer isn't redrawn unless the text has changed. This is pretty significant in terms of CPU usage.

Some other things have changed:

• Added a sub-setting for the timer where you can choose whether you want to see milliseconds all the time. This is off by default. The timer now looks weird and uncanny, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. Do note that milliseconds will still show after the timer has stopped, so don't worry about enabling it manually before screenshotting your time :):):):):):):):)
• As a result of this addition, the battery saver mode now displays the timer. It forces milliseconds off. I'll continue to monitor battery drainage, but things are looking good for the timer.
• Added setting to change the timer's font size within the UI customization dialog. It's kinda janky, but I think it works.
• Fixed the moronic rendering routine for the times table. I rewrote it entirely and optimized it to remove unnecessary shit. Past me wasn't thinking very clearly when programming this feature.
• You can now press Left Shift within the wordlist window to toggle between the times table and the words view.
• Slightly altered the About submenu to mention this change.

I have a suspicion that animations are also causing trouble when it comes to battery drainage, but there's not really a lot I can do besides capping their frame rates, which will look like shit. Please remember that the battery saver toggle is available.

Here's your reminder that Spelling Wasp is a public domain project. If someone downloads and edits my program for their own use, and they attempt to add or remove ranks, I'm sure they'll be in for a lot of suffering! The logic for ranks is hardcoded and sometimes weird to work with, but I promise, it could be so much worse!

Play Spelling Wasp, Now Slightly More Eco-Friendly!

After changing the depth order of the main controls, I accidentally broke the Enter and Delete buttons. It happened because I forgot to check for input conflicts, and due to that I didn't put the necessary CSS rule to make the hive's container ignore pointer inputs. It's fixed now, hopefully. There's a couple other goodies in here too:

• Added 3 new settings to the UI customization dialog: One to make the game use the full horizontal space available (forced on for mobile layout), one to control the gap between the Delete/Shuffle/Enter buttons and the hive, and one to control the height of these buttons. Unfortunately, because of this, the ergonomic mode for these now looks absolutely stupid. I advise you to play around with the new settings until you find a layout that works for you.
• Fixed a bug where revealing the answers for yesterday's game would make the timer for that game fail, if the game you're revealing the answers for was never started in the first place. The timer would enter the state for games with unknown start times, but now it's simply forced to start in the present, with the answers revealed at the same time. The time taken to each rank should still display correctly if you play the game after revealing the answers, but the main timer won't tick up anymore. This is all by design, deal with it. Also you're cheating.
• Fixed stupid inconsistency where the "controls gap" option was inverted. Increasing the value now increases the gap. Also I renamed it to X gap.
• Removed the (-/+px) labels in the UI customization dialog, since they were bloat. Please remember that all offsets are relative, and in pixels.
• Hell now has a 1 second delay before closing.
• Some mobile layout fixes, most importantly the calendar. The CSS for this game is insanely bloated, and things are slightly different after the font normalization change from the last update.

The UI customization dialog will continue to be my focus for a bit. There's a few more things I'd like to implement in there before calling it complete, but right now it's in pretty good shape, and it allows some decent level of personalization that wasn't possible before. I tried my best, and I hope it's useful for other people.

Play Spelling Wasp, With Improved Bugs Again!

I implemented a ton of random things that are not related to the critical storage bug that shall soon surface. If you don't play as much as I do, you probably don't have anything to worry about, but if you do play a lot, the game will stop working as soon as you reach the limit of your localStorage quota, which should be around 5 MB. I'll focus on the IndexedDB implementation soon enough, which should in theory fix this. Until then, the timebomb shall keep ticking down.

Anyway, on to the good news:

• A fancy new UI Customization Dialog has been implemented. It's a bit jank, so use with care. Some previously existing options were moved there so all the appearance stuff is in one place. In case you accidentally fuck something up and the game ends up unusable, navigate to the game's tab and run this script from the console in your browser's development tools: let keys=Object.keys(window.localStorage);let _item;for(let i=0;i < keys.length; i++){_item=keys[i];if(_item.startsWith("option-css-")){window.localStorage.removeItem(_item);}}
• The Options menu has been reorganized
• The timer has been optimized, now it renders in a <canvas> element, which is much more efficient than doing so through the DOM. Hopefully this helps alleviate battery drainage. It might look slightly jank though, and currently there's no way to customize the font size, but it should be trivial to add in a future update. I'll be observing how it behaves across devices.
• Added a new option that lets you disable Ghost Words. These are the 3-letter hints that appear after winning the game.
• Added a new option to prevent you from typing the same 3 letters in a row. There are no words in the word list that have the same 3 letters in sequence, so you should feel safe enabling this. It'll reduce some annoyances.
• A new tooltip system has been implemented for options that need further explanations. Click the button with the question mark to see more information about the relevant settings.
• Added an option to simplify animations. This was added to attempt to compensate for a freezing bug that seems to occur only on Linux-based devices that are running Firefox. This includes Android. The bug is triggered when an animated word spins at a specific angle, which causes a freeze accompanied by a massive memory leak, and a potential browser or system crash. After numerous attempts to kill this bug over the past year, I've deemed this to be out of my control to fix, so I built this option in. Enable it if you have experienced this freezing bug before, it might help.
• Added a crash handler. Under normal circumstances, you shouldn't see it. If you manage to crash my game, lemme know.
• You can now change the framerate and speed of the background scrolling animation. No more revolting 15 fps!
• Ditched Cambridge Dictionary search in favor of WordReference.com. Truth be told, I never put any thought into the dictionaries used for the word lookup feature. Over time I realized that Merriam-Webster and Collins are generally very useful, but Cambridge has too many missing words to be reliable.
• Added a button on the main menu that links to this changelog. It'll be updated whenever a new version rolls out. It also keeps track of whether you've acknowledged the latest update. Wow!
• Some minor and some major styling changes. The game mostly looks the same, but font sizes were normalized across the board, so things might look bigger than usual. It should be more consistent than before.
• Probably something else that I forgot xd

Every time I update Spelling Wasp, I imagine myself getting closer to my goal of finishing the game with all the features I've envisioned. Then, some new idea comes up, I get sidetracked, and I never end up working on the more urgent features. It's kinda stupid but kinda fun at the same time.

I'll probably add a way to disable the chart and ghost words up until a certain completion percentage, so you don't have to manually turn these options off once you've reached your desired threshold.

Unrelated, I slightly changed the writeup of my About page, specifically the Contact section.

Play Spelling Wasp

The site now has ornamental borders around the page itself, and around picture frames. The mobile layout is still compact and doesn't show the page borders, but on desktop you'll get the full experience. It's a bit jank, but I think it looks awesome.

I also changed the styling of <hr> elements so they're squiggly lines instead of straight ones. I don't know how much this affects the readability of the site yet, so it might be subject to further tweaks.

The updated look won't apply to Spelling Wasp, since space is at a premium there, and the program is already complex enough.

I realized that Stylus has the capability to affect every website, so I went ahead and wrote a script that sets every site to Comic Sans, with Comic Mono for monospaced elements. Head over to its userstyles.world page to download it.

The next Spelling Wasp update is coming along nicely, though I've faced a bunch of difficulties in the process. The biggest change so far is the addition of a basic UI customization option. It'll likely be a big update, so it'll take a few more weeks to be pushed to the site.

Also I broke all my Mega links. I think I updated them all within the site, but anything that's out there in the wild is now invalid. Sorry, shit happens.

I had some thoughts that I needed to put into words, so I updated that page with my history as a musician. It's not terribly interesting but I wanted to put it out there for anyone who's curious.

I'm working on the next update for Spelling Wasp. The word list does get regular updates as I spot words that really shouldn't be there, or rarely, words that are missing. I hope I can finish this project and the Glob in the upcoming months, so that I can move on to other projects with no guilt whatsoever.

I most certainly haven't been in a productive mood lately, but at least the stuff that's there won't degrade if left unattended... right?

They may not be showing their faces, at least for now, but what's pretty damn certain is that the site is now littered with anchors.

You can use the anchors to quickly link to a specific heading on the site.

I made some minor styling changes as well. I spent today working on things that'll make my life easier while working on this website. Nothing relevant for the user though, bigsad.

Do you like intense 2D shooter games? Do you like going for high scores? Are you a fan of retro aesthetics? If you answered yes to all of these, then this game is probably for you.

View the article

This was previously labeled "tools" very early into the website's life. I removed it long ago because it was never gonna get used. Today I renamed it to "misc" and decided it'll host anything that has no proper section on the website. It'll be kinda like a messy garage or storage room with a bunch of random shit in it.

Hopefully that blog section will gain full traction next year. Right now Spelling Wasp is my main focus, but I'm eager to move on to something else. The finish line is drawing closer every day.

Visit the Misc section

The battery saver mode had a tiny bug related to timekeeping that's now fixed. The double press cooldown function should work again. There was also another bug that I believe I fixed, where custom searches would get mangled due to an improper split operation while importing a data file. I tested the fix in the browser console but not with an actual file, so I might have to fix it again.

I think I made the smoke effect even more efficient too (I just downsized the sprite), and I added smoke to explosions. It kinda sucks, but it's there.

I also added an easter egg of sorts. Try dragging the confirmation boxes that can appear while using the battery saver mode. It's fun, I promise.

Play Spelling Wasp, Now With Improved Bugs!

I added a battery saver mode to Spelling Wasp. It's the very first option in the Options menu. What it does is disabling some features that I know take a lot of processing power, such as animations and countdowns. I implemented this because I realized the game was draining my battery really quickly with all animations enabled, and disabling everything one by one is kinda tedious.

I also optimized all animations that produce smoke particles. I realized that it was much more efficient to use a pre-rendered smoke sprite than to do all that stuff using text shadows and animations. An unfathomable number of CPU cycles have been saved. I might keep improving upon animations over time, though I do have some bigger fish to fry currently.

Most core functions in the game aren't exactly optimal, and if you're like me and play a lot, that translates into a lot of energy waste. I might revisit them eventually so I can make things as efficient as possible.

As an aside, unfortunately I broke my promise to not add modals into my game. My hand was forced, but I did it in the name of safety. Otherwise it would've been too easy to destroy all your progress by accidentally navigating to a specific menu and then a specific tab and then tapping 3 checkboxes and then clicking a red button.

Play Spelling Wasp, Now Greener Than Ever!

I completed the UI for the new timer feature a couple weeks ago and rolled it out silently. Right now it's kinda buggy and it'll need a rewrite, but for the most part, it works. I've done a bunch of polishing work to the game over the past week. I also added new animations, so I can finally say that's done.

Here's a non-exhaustive changelog:

• Clicking on Yesterday from the current daily will now show a summary with your progress and total points for the previous puzzle. The game now offers you to play/continue that game, or reveal the answers.
• Added new animations for: Guessing a pangram correctly, submitting an invalid guess, submitting a word that's too short, submitting a repeated guess, submitting a word without using the center letter
• The Options menu is now sorted into tabs, and some problems with the tab layout were fixed too
• The Calendar now remembers the last place you've been to
• The Unlimited lists are now sorted by last played date
• Massively improved the time it takes to read a data file
• Additionally, creating a backup of your data now also downloads your custom searches, and when uploading, you can choose what data to process
• Added an option to purge the game's internal cache, and an option to completely delete your data
• Modified the text of the Disclaimer and About pages
• Other minor layout adjustments

The game is coming closer to what I have envisioned. The last things I want to do are implementing Rush Mode, polishing parts of the interface such as the Share function, the Unlimited menus, and perhaps the Calendar, and I want to future-proof the game by upgrading the storage system. Right now it uses Local Storage, but this is not sufficient for people who play a lot (like me) due to the storage limits. It's also kinda slow if you have a lot of items stored. The goal is to upgrade it to IndexedDB, which might prove to be a nightmare, but it's something I'll have to deal with. Right now the game is sort of a ticking time bomb.

Once I consider the game complete, I'll release the source code and a really bad tool that should help with rolling your own implementation of it. That's not to say you're not allowed to do that now, but you'll need to ask me directly, and dealing with updates might be a hassle. I don't wanna have to deal with maintaining a GitHub repo right now (mostly because I don't know how). At the very least I'm using git for version control, so that's something.

If you like the game, consider contacting me and sending feedback, perhaps tell me about missing words or words that shouldn't be there, or just tell me what you like and don't like about the game. Add me on Matrix: @barrelsmoker:matrix.org

Play Spelling Wasp

I woke up this morning to a message from someone reporting that Spelling Wasp wasn't loading. I was really hoping that it was a problem on their end, being an iPhone user, but I can't rest easy if I know my program is broken. I consulted with yet another iPhone user, and well, my program was broken. The issue was really obscure too and I couldn't pinpoint what exactly was wrong, so after a bit of googling (or duckduckgoing in my case xd), I found out Safari doesn't support for await, or async iterators.

Take this bit of code I copypasted last year when trying to implement saving data files:

Seems perfectly clean! And it is, and it works on my pc and my phone, so what gives! I rigged some alerts and requested the help of the second iPhone user so I could see where the code failed. Yet again, nothing seemed wrong, I expected one of the alerts to show an undefined object, but everything was fine and all the objects were defined as intended. Some internet searches later, I arrived at some mention of the "async iterator protocol" not being supported on Safari. Not knowing what any of that means because I'm an awesome programmer, I ended up deconstructing the for await statement and rewriting the whole thing (copypasting from elsewhere).

As a consequence of this rewrite, I accidentally fixed the data backup features present in the options menu for iPhone users. Nobody else reported this, so it's been broken for the last 10 months or so. I got rid of the problematic statement in the two places it was used, so it's all good now. Thanks Vanilla and beeb.

This is not the first, and probably won't be the last time that Internet Exp... err, Safari gives me trouble with my game, so make sure you let me know if you see anything out of the extraordinary.

Play Spelling Wasp! Now works on iPhones!

I mentioned earlier about now being able to press Intro to submit words. I've done a bunch of smaller changes, but the big ones are an option to disable the chart, an option to enable the timer, and a major optimization in the way the game loads the solution to a puzzle. Now it won't take insanely long to load into the Unlimited or Previous Dailies menus.

The new timer option is now there, in case you wanna know how long it takes you to complete a puzzle. The feature is incomplete, as I haven't added the menu to see how long it took you to reach each rank, but the data is still being collected regardless of whether you have the option enabled. Once the feature is finished, you should see a new button in the Words view inside a puzzle, but only if you enabled the timer option.

The only disadvantage of the new optimization I made is that the game now downloads more data upon loading the page. To alleviate this, I reenabled caching, so maybe that'll help avoid repeated downloads. Tell me if anything's wrong, and remember to do a full refresh every so often, or if the page renders weirdly, since the game is still being updated.

Play Spelling Wasp

Yeah, I know, that's a really random thing to add. I decided to make this to hopefully help people use custom colors in their lang files for Nuclear Throne. I might make it more useful in the future.

At the very least, I learned a few things doing this, and it was also kinda fun seeing it come together bit by bit.

The website will soon need a site map if I'm gonna be adding random things like these. Goddammit.

Lee-Mon's Epic Color Picker

I remembered about my old botb.club website this morning. Long ago I considered it gone for good since I didn't have the files anymore, but I didn't even think of checking the Internet Archive. And well, I did that this morning, and lo and behold, IT WAS THERE!!!!!!!!!! Completely intact too. I downloaded the files and cleaned them up and put them up for display here, for history's sake.

Now just consider that it's kind of a product of its time and doesn't really reflect who I am now. You'll find some questionable stuff in there, like at least one instance of the f-slur, and perhaps others.

Hey, I've come pretty far, haven't I?

Unrelated, you can now press Intro (the numpad's enter key) to submit your guesses in Spelling Wasp. I have no idea how I didn't catch that previously.

Feast your eyes...!!!

I finally got the inspiration to work on the Knitting page. It's written in a way that kinda tells a story, as I thought just posting images would be kinda boring.

I also modified the look of the navigation bar at the top, and I'm laying the foundation for the future blog section of this site. Stay tuned.

I implemented Unlimited Mode, at last. As I said in an earlier update, it was already functional since january but hidden behind a secret link due to the UI not being ready. Occasionally it became available through the main menu because I forgot to turn it off before pushing an update.

I've been working on it for the last few weeks, slowly but steadily, and I finally finished the refactoring required to make it fully work. The user interface should be easy to use on both desktop and mobile, but if you see anything weird, definitely let me know.

The goal of Unlimited Mode is simply to play a game of Spelling Wasp at your own leisure, independent from the dailies. If you're really bored, you can quickly pick up a new game and start guessing away, with no time limits, or even limits on how many words the game can have. Games that are available through the dailies are possible to play here as well, but progress is deliberately not shared.

I also modified other parts of the game to try and improve the experience. Some of these have been live for a few weeks. Here's a non-exhaustive changelog:

• Added Unlimited Mode
• Implemented a way to see the answers for any puzzle, except for the daily
• Added an option to give the Enter and Delete buttons a shape that's easier to hit
• Added a star indicator in the calendar for puzzles where a pangram was guessed, ditto for Unlimited
• Added an option to highlight the last 3 guessed words in the list of guesses
• Fixed a bug where the calendar would appear by default on an empty month, during the first day of the month
• Fixed the scaling of the main menu buttons (but apparently there's still devices that don't like them)
• Added a loading screen for uploading a data file. It appears it doesn't show up on mobile though, and it freezes if you switch tabs while it's working. Your mileage may vary.
• Swapped the font with Comic Sans, with Shantell Sans as the fallback (I might include a way to customize the font)
• You can now make a backup of your saved words, using the functions to download/upload data in the options menu
• Navigation has been improved, your current location is now present in the URL
• Share function now shares a URL that'll take you directly to the relevant game
• Removed the option to swap between chart and guesses list on mobile, now both are always visible
• Fixed other things that I didn't document at all, but the game should be more stable overall

Assuming nothing stupid happens, I'll keep polishing the Unlimited Mode menus, I'll fix other things elsewhere, and then I'll begin work on the fabled Spelling Rush mode. The goal of that mode is to try to get as high a score as possible within the limits that you define. You'll be able to use this to challenge someone else to a spelling duel, but it'll have to rely on trust because there's no server backend involved in Spelling Wasp.

Once that is complete, I'll consider the game pretty much done. I'll perhaps fix issues that show up here and there, and maybe open-source it for people who want to host their own instance of it. Still, if you're inclined to do that right now, you're free to do so, but contact me for instructions because you can't just save the page and make it work.

Having essentially two About sections made the site feel disorganized. I put everything relevant in the About page, and I added a proper Credits section because I felt that was sorely missing. I put a contact method in as well. Do with that what you will.

CRISIS AVERTED!!!!!!! The 2025-07-02 Spelling Wasp daily game did not have a pangram. I engaged emergency mode and fixed that, which also alerted me of a different problem: There were duplicates in the list of daily games, lots of them in fact (184 in total). One of them made it to the live game so I removed it silently... or not so silently anymore since I'm telling you about it. The 2025-05-18 game will now show up in your calendar as a completely new one. If you're a completionist, you'll probably wanna play it.

If the game hasn't updated for you and you still see the "teginpx" game on the 2025-07-02 daily, clear your browser's cache so it'll download all of the game's files again. WARNING: ONLY DELETE THE CACHE, NOT THE STORAGE!!! If you remove everything, you'll delete all your progress too. Use the download function in the game's options and make a backup before doing this anyway.

As an aside, I guess I can tell you about other upcoming things. Work on Unlimited Mode is underway, along with a few other small fixes, including the ability to download your list of saved words, some layout fixes, being able to see the answers to any puzzle if you want, and overall improvements to the user experience.

If you can't wait for that shiny new unlimited mode... here's a secret: it's been available for 6 months, but only through a secret link. You'll find it below. The game itself is fully functional, but there's no way to see your open games yet, so if you wanna look at that, you'll need to use your browser's development tools and dig into the local storage for this site. I can assure you that I'm working on it though. It's taken very long not because of the difficulty, but because I just didn't feel like working on it. There also wasn't a lot of time for programming during the first quarter of the year.

Oh hey, and if you wanna play the removed duplicate daily, type "echilor" in the textbox on the unlimited menu.

Play Spelling Wasp

And if you're really bored and wanna guess even more words... try Unlimited Mode now.

I wanted to talk a bit about these two wonderful games and explain why I recommend them. I don't think this warrants a full article since I don't wanna give out a lot of details about them, like I did with Bug Fables.

The section is available in the Games page.

I bit the bullet and set Comic Sans as the default font for the website. Unfortunately it'll only show up if you're browsing from a Windows PC. As a side effect, Comic Neue doesn't look as wide anymore, since I can't set the letter‑spacing property per font.

I also modified the site's title, got rid of the "Amazing" and instead just settled with "Epic". It used to be the former in the site's header and the latter in the tab title, but now it's uniform. I think that's kinda amazing.

I altered the way the page modification timestamp in the footer works. There's now one that tells you the last time the current page was changed, and one that tells you when the whole site was last generated. Still, the epic website feature where you're reading this text from will let you know of any big changes to the site.

Lastly, I made the mobile view fatter. There shouldn't be a ton of wasteful padding on both sides of the screen now.

I added an image that represents the state of this website. One day I'll have something really nice to show the world!!!!!!!!!!!

I wrote this new song for the Blank Contest on the Furnace Discord. The theme for my song is the situation where you're desperately looking for something you need because otherwise you'll be late for whatever you gotta do. It was fun to write. Maybe one day I'll work on that music page on this website...

Listen to the song on YouTube

I finished playing this game 3 days ago and decided that I wanted to write an article on it, in order to hopefully convince others to give it a go. It's truly a unique experience.

View the article

I edited the content of the About page. The big essay that used to be there is now in a different page, and the overall writeup has changed.

Some small color tweaks, a new look for the site's banner, and a "new" background (lies, I recycled the Spelling Wasp background). I didn't want to implement a toggle for the background animation, so I got rid of it entirely.

I slightly edited the way the site looks. There's lots of text shadows now, and the background is darker. I'll probably swap the Epic Shielder floating graphic with something else. Perhaps the Spelling Wasp background?

Also I edited a few things in the Worms Armageddon articles I wrote. Nothing major.

About goddamn time. It used to be just a broken link. Anyway this page gives you a general description of Worms Armageddon, one of my favorite games. There's also information on how to set it up.

View the article

The previous change was an excuse to advertise this game I'm working on. Spelling Wasp is about guessing words, give it a try.

Play Spelling Wasp

Now you can see the latest changes I've made to the site. You don't have to guess anymore.