How do you hold a yardstick up to perfect harmony? What empirical unit of measure can gauge the epicness of texture, spice, flavor combined into a handheld treasure trove of savory delight? The balance between these traits is delicate and flawless: the slightest excess in any direction would send this deck of flavor cards crashing down. Riding with your jib hauled this close to the flavor-wind requires courage. It requires wisdom. Perhaps most of all, it clearly requires experience.

Sometimes, you have to post to remote servers and you don’t want jerks posting invalid data. Here’s a recipe I’ve used that works pretty well and isn’t that hard to drop into existing code.

This morning I was awoken by a call from The Washington Post. It was forwarded from my work number, so at first I thought it was some east coast client waking me up. I cleared my throat and put on my client voice.

“Hi, this is Charlie?”
“Hi Charlie! This is Melissa from the Washington Post. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions?”
“Oh hi, sure. Um… what about?”
”... well, The Great Gatsby game”
“Wait, really?”

Me and my buddy Pete made this game in seclusion, fueled by Mountain Dew and Doritos and arguments about sprite counts and color pallets. Now I’m getting cold called. How did this happen? Why are so many people SO on board with a garden-variety 8-bit literary action-platformer? The internet is a giant mysterious content snowball, friends. A boundless feedback loop of ideas and jokes and porn and news. I will never understand its ways, and won’t pretend to. All I know is I keep seeing tweets that say, “Thank you, internet.” You’re welcome, you huge, beautiful weirdo.

I had zero time to edit together hours of video, or to build any complicated green-screeny installation stuff in Max/MSP. I figured since I was a Barbarian now, I’d see if Cinder was up to the task. It totally was.