2025-11-05 00:22:00
Or maybe the title should be Relentlessly Badgering Bing Until They Give Up and Finally Fix Things.
On February 3, 2015, I purchased the mattlangford.com from GoDaddy. From the date I purchased it, until October 31, 2025, my site has not been listed on Bing despite taking every measure possible. Over the years, I sent countless emails and support requests, registered for every version of their webmaster's portal, followed every guideline, submitted every sitemap, used IndexNow, consulted dozens of people, the list goes on and on...
No matter what I did, one of two things would happen.
Naturally, I jumped into the guidelines. What was I missing? What was I doing wrong? I have many websites for various projects, all listed on Bing except for my personal site. I've designed popular themes for blogging platforms used on hundreds, possibly thousands, of sites with no problems. There had to be something more happening.
After one more round of checking everything, verifying once again that I was following all guidelines, submitting everything Bing required, and contacting support once more...I finally saw movement. While I'll never know for sure what caused the change, there is only one thing I did different than the previous times.
In the latest correspondence, I suggested that perhaps issues stemmed from the previous domain owner's site. I have no knowledge if that is the case or not, but I finally received a positive response:
In less than 4 days, my domain was showing prominently in search results.
The timing also coincided with my blog platform switch. I have no reason to believe that is connected. There are many sites on Micro.blog (my old platform) that use the same themes/styles/formats I used (I created them after all) that are listed without issue.
Oh, one more thing. When Microsoft's search product changed its name to Bing, there was a very small niche web design company owned by me and 2 others. It was registered as Bing Web Design. We never fought it, but I feel that's an intriguing side note to the drama.
Have something to add? Reach out on Mastodon.
2025-11-04 22:44:00
Yesterday I experienced how helpful and powerful writing can be. As soon as I had written and published the post A bear-sized dilemma, something shifted. The fog cleared and I could suddenly see a new road ahead.
The same thing happened with the Getting it out of my head post a couple of days ago. Simply turning those repetitive thoughts into written words lightened the load.
Another great thing about writing is that it’s always there for you. I’m writing this while sitting in my car, waiting for the next client to show up.
Writing is like a true friend who knows you inside out, accepts you as you are, and always stays by your side.
Thanks for that, my friend.
2025-11-04 09:00:00
So I don't namesearch on Bluesky, but having just released a game (KINOPHOBIA, which you can play right now) I have been occasionally searching its name just to see what people are saying about it without mentioning me.
And one thing that jumped out at me – and please don't think this is a callout of this specific person – was someone referring to it as a "twine game." Which is it not! But of course, Twines are a huge proportion of text games and have been for a long time now, so it's natural that people might genericize the term to mean any text game.
But, if you say "twine game" generically meaning "text game", you're liable to confuse people who expect that it means a very specific kind of text game. So, here's a little guide on how to tell apart the major types of text games you're likely to find in the wild.
This is not a comprehensive set because I'm just including the most common things that are presented as pure-text games and broadly as "interactive fiction"; which is to say, things someone might call "a Twine game" casually in that way. So I'm not going to talk about things like the Reigns swipe-right/left interface, or games like Lovely Lady RPG and other Narrat games. I'm also not going to talk about "parserless parser" games (what IFDB calls "parser-choice hybrids") because there's simply so few of them.
Pictured: The Little Four.
These are the oldest, most traditional, and most insular genre of text games, going back the origins of the adventure-game genre in the 1980s. The term "text adventure" is in fact a retronym for these games; they of course came first, so they used to just be "adventure games", by analogy with the original Adventure.
Nowadays, the terms "parser game" or "parser interactive fiction" are generally-accepted general terms; "text adventure" tends to imply specifically an old-school sensibility that you wouldn't apply to KINOPHOBIA or to something like Chandler Grover's Eat Me. Even old Infocom games like Plundered Hearts (1987) somewhat resist the "text adventure" label.
The defining feature of parser games is of course the parser – the software component that interprets written commands from the player into in-game actions. Parser games, then, have the unique UI affordance of typing a command, getting a response, typing a new command, etc.
The other half of parser games is the idea of a "world model"; the commands that you type are not individually-defined options that the author has created, but rather actions in a simplified but fairly sophisticated simulated world. So you can TAKE some object and then carry it with you and DROP it arbitrarily anywhere on the map, and so on.
Pictured: The Witch Girls.
The biggest and broadest category of text games; not all hypertext games are made with Twine (a specific tool), but the overwhelming majority are.
Hypertext games generally present the story as a series of discrete "pages" or "screens" connected by links, with the distinction that those links can be anywhere. The inline link embedded within the text is in many ways the defining literary device of the Twine scene. Also common is the use of links that change the text on a given page without moving you to an entirely different page, which is itself a whole family of affordances and aesthetic devices.
Pictured: The Path of Totality.
Choice games may present story as discrete 'screens' or 'scenes', or as one continuous spool of text; they periodically interrupt their text to ask the player to make a choice – once made, the choice then progresses the game.
This is a format that's very widely adopted in commercial interactive fiction or text-heavy games; visual novels are definitely a cousin to this style of game, too. Inkle exemplifies this relationship; older Inkle games like 80 Days are very classically "choice-based interactive fiction", whereas newer games like Expelled! are presented in a way that more closely resembles a visual novel... but they are constructed in structurally very similar ways. The prototypical choice-game is really a Choice of Games title.
Choice and hypertext are very closely related, but I do think it's worth raising the distinction. Do you interact with links that are placed in a freeform way throughout the text? Hypertext. Do you interact with choices that are always consistently positioned relative to the text? Choice.
This may seem like an incidental distinction but it also points to radically different authoring systems and aesthetic traditions. People have used Twine to make games with a 'choice' style of presentation, but a common feature of more specialized choice systems – link Ink – is that they treat story more fluidly than Twine does; rather than Twine's discrete nodes (that present as individual 'screens' or 'scenes' to the player), Ink stories are continuously assembled by tracing a 'path' through the text, in which boundaries are fluid and text is often generated/stitched together/altered on the fly.
Again – this is a very basic survey for folks new to the genre; there are many variants, hybrids, experiments, and unfoldings of these basic forms. The point here is emphatically not to impose some pedantic correction on people, it's just to help give people more descriptive language to talk about interactive fiction in the interest of getting more people to play interactive fiction.
2025-11-03 23:46:00
It only took a couple of hours to create the Bear Halloween theme. Knowing it’s just going to be used for a short period of time, it didn’t have to be perfect. Just something quick, easy, and fun.
Now I’ve started tinkering with a new Bear theme. Maybe as a new release of my Bearming theme, or a whole new creation altogether. Or maybe it won’t happen at all.
The creativity is there, but the joy of creating is missing.
I have too many ideas and too little time. This once cute little cub of an idea has grown into a giant grizzly bear that I can’t handle.
There’s so much I want to do that nothing gets done.
Maybe I just need a paws... I mean pause.
2025-11-03 10:30:00
Disclaimer: I feel that it’s important for people to be honest about their financial situations when talking about anything related to money or job stuff. I’m married to someone who makes enough money that if I didn’t work at all, we’d still be able to pay our bills (if we lived very frugally and didn’t put away any savings). We also have people we could move in with, probably for free or very cheap, if our situation ever got dire.
After several years of full-time freelance composing, music implementation, and music production, I started a part-time day job a couple months ago.
I won’t dox myself by saying exactly what it is, but it’s a non-teaching role in academia. It’s also something that directly helps people. No job is perfect, but I like it a lot so far.
I’ve been feeling so many things. Happy that I found something that’s a good fit. Disappointed that I wasn’t able to make full-time freelancing work for me (at least for now). Relieved to have a stable source of income. Envious of people who live in countries with governments that actually fund the arts and indie projects. Angry at the general state of the economy and the world.
I could spend a really long time talking about how bad things are in the games, film, TV, and music industries, but I wouldn’t really be saying anything that hasn’t been said already. I’ll just do some bullet points instead:
What else is there to say? Things are bad, and all of my friends who work in games, film, TV, etc. agree. It really eats away at you. Some people are better at navigating this than others. I am not good at it.
I’ve already been taking an unusual path in life for a long time by pursuing composing as a career rather than a normal job. But I’m discovering that even within this specific niche, the most common paths to “success” aren’t working for me.
I’m bad at networking events. If I go to one, even a generally pleasant one, it saps all my energy in a way that I can’t fully put into words. I’m very introverted and socially anxious, and my ADHD means I easily get overstimulated if there are too many conversations going on around me.
I’m bad at social media. I don’t want to be an influencer. I don’t want to make videos of myself playing instruments or explaining my composing process. I resent that it’s something I even need to consider doing.
I’m bad at hustling. I know people who force themselves to do several networking things a month and post regular videos on instagram despite hating it. Or who always have an album they’re working on, who are constantly updating their website and reels. Who are attending and maybe doing talks at multiple conferences per year.
I don’t have it in me. I can’t bring myself to keep it all up with any sort of consistency. Especially in an industry when I’ve been cycling between extremely slow periods and burnout, where I have to work so much harder than a cis man would to prove myself, where I’ve experienced real, tangible harm.
It’s just all too much. As much as I didn’t want to admit it to myself, it’s been making me miserable for a long time.
Sometimes when I’m at a networking event and feeling absolutely rancid vibes, I wonder if trauma may be causing me to project or exaggerate a bit. After all I have had some traumatic shit happen to me, including, as I’m sure some of you might remember, something involving a former friend who was also a composer/industry colleague.
I think the answer to this is yes, but also no. Trauma and the games industry are now inextricably linked for me. Which means that for the past year or so, I’ve been doing a lot of exploring re: “is this particular games industry related thing actually unsafe, or is my nervous system just going haywire?”
But here’s the thing: my trauma is my alarm system. It tells me when something is wrong, when something is off, when something is rotten at its core. It occasionally gives a false positive, but it usually doesn’t. I know I’m not the only one who, deep down, can sense something dark and horrible and malicious at the heart of the entertainment industry.
Like any industry, there are a lot of good people working in games and film. And like any industry, there are also people who will not hesitate to exploit others in order to get what they want. It just seems like in this industry, we’re expected to just accept it more than in other industries, because we’re working so many people’s “dream jobs.”
I used to think that the best way to come out on top of the situation I was put in was to eventually have a more successful career than the composer who assaulted me. But I don’t think that’s it anymore. I think the way to actually win is to build my life in the way that will make me the happiest.
I used to say that music is the number one thing I care about.
I’m realizing it isn’t, though.
It’s up there, but I care more about being a good person, showing up for the people I love, and just generally trying to enjoy my life as much as I can while I’m here. I don’t want to destroy my mental health, body, and relationships by working 80-100 hour weeks. I don’t want to smile and nod while some random dudes at a meetup talk about how inspirational Danny Elfman is. I don’t want to hold back from talking about the harm major studios in the film, TV and games industries are causing for fear of getting blacklisted.
After all, people who call out abuse, inequity, and/or people’s complicity in these things are often seen as contrarians, downers, difficult to work with.
It’s ironic, really. Composing is something that requires digging down deep into your soul in order to bring more beauty into the world, and yet some degree of soullessness often seems to be a requirement to be able to do it for a living.
All that being said, music is such a sacred, exquisite thing.
It’s one of my favorite things in the world. I am so, so happy to be able to create it. I can’t even begin to describe how it feels when I really get into the flow of composing. It’s like the music is writing itself and I’m just the vessel. I intrinsically know where to take the piece, to let it exist in the form that it deserves to exist in.
And I’m at my best when I’m composing a score. Being able to write music for someone’s film, game, animation, whatever it may be. It’s one of my absolute favorite ways to spend my time and energy. I love being able to bring my musical voice to something that inspires me. I’m always so honored when someone chooses me to help bring their creative vision to life. I love the collaborative process, bouncing ideas off each other, coming together to create something that none of us could have made on our own.
I could gush about this for hours. It’s such a beautiful thing. Making and collaborating on art is one of the most amazing things people do. I truly think it’s what makes us human.
But I think for awhile, making music had become linked to the toxicity of the industry for me. I recently went through a several months long period of making no music at all, because I just couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm to do so.
About a month ago I rewatched Kiki’s Delivery Service and decided to keep count of how many different times I cried while watching it. The final count was nine. I cry every time I watch it, but this was excessive.
I realized I needed to change my approach. Something I love as much as making music being seemingly inextricably linked to something that has brought me so much stress wasn’t healthy for me. I needed to separate them.
Thankfully, I had already started at my current day job. At the time I saw having to get a day job as a sort of defeat. My dumbass mid-to-late twenties self thought that having a day job meant you hadn’t truly “made it” as an artist, and although I haven't really thought that in a long time, that critical voice will still come up sometimes.
But music work had been slow for awhile. So I figured I’d just get a part-time job to have some stable income until the industry was in a better place, and I’d work my butt off in the meantime to try to get as much freelance work as I could.
Something interesting happened almost instantly, though. As soon as I started at the day job, I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Having an income was no longer dependent on me going to networking events or making social media posts! All I had to do was show up and do my work, and I’d get a paycheck every two weeks for around the same amount of money!
So after The Incident (crying nine times while watching Kiki's Delivery Service), another thing occurred to me too. Although I hadn’t had much work recently, I did really enjoy all the projects I’d composed music for in 2025. What if I could just… keep doing that?
It was a coincidence that all the projects I worked on this year were good ones, but what if I could be more deliberate about making that happen going forward? What if I were to only work on projects that appealed to me instead of taking anything that paid enough to help pay the bills? Focusing on quality over quantity, with another stream of income taking away the desperation I’ve been feeling for so long? Could this just be my reality from now on?
I think maybe it can.
It’s only been a few months, but I feel so much more at peace than I have in a long time.
Three mornings per week, I hop on the bus and zone out while listening to music or a podcast. I get to work, clock in, and chat with my very cool and nice coworkers. The work itself is sometimes boring and occasionally a bit stressful, but overall I enjoy it. I never do any work outside of my scheduled hours, and exactly every two weeks I get a notification that a direct deposit hit my account.
During October, I got the first big music job I’d had in awhile. It was for a project that I really liked, made by a musician friend of mine who I always love collaborating with. I loved it. Between that, the day job, and other various life things, I was really busy. But it was so rewarding. It brought back my creative spark. I’ve been slowly starting to work on my own projects again.
It’s still a bit early to say whether I’ve definitely found the solution to my problems. I just started this day job in late August.
But I think I now understand something that I sort of knew before but didn’t fully grasp. Our capitalist society sees being able to do your art as your full-time job as the ultimate measure of success. But that’s just not realistic for a lot of people, especially with available jobs being so few and far between right now.
I think the key is trying to build your life in a way that will bring you the most joy and least misery, regardless of what people say you “should” be doing. In a perfect world, I would be one of those lucky composers who makes a decent salary solely working on really cool indie projects. (Well, actually, in a perfect world there would be no money or bills, but let’s not get into that whole thing). But the world is not perfect, so I need to do what I can to build my life in a way that works for me.
And at least for now, that involves stepping back somewhat from the industry. Only going to events that actually appeal to me. Posting my work only when I genuinely want to share it. Only taking composing jobs that I really want to work on, knowing that this could mean a lot less composing work for me overall (not that there’s been much recently anyway!)
I’m not leaving. I’m just being a lot more selective about where I spend my energy. I’m learning to listen to myself.
2025-11-03 10:14:00
🗓️ // October 26 - November 1, 2024
I’ve been writing a bit more in my physical journal lately. Most of the time, I have no idea where an entry will end up. I kind of just let the words show up on the page and do their thing. I rarely ever read back on what I’ve written, and maybe that’s the point. It’s been oddly therapeutic to let my unorganized thoughts spill out on paper, as if writing them down means I won’t have to think about them again. (Spoiler: I usually still do. But it’s the thought that counts, right?)
Anyways, a daily recap of this week because I rarely do this...
📧 Also, I am fully aware that I am embarrassingly behind on messages / emails. I promise I have read and appreciate every single one of them. I just haven’t had the mental energy to reply to much of anything these days... but I am extremely grateful and do love receiving them. Thank you.
Our photographer is pretty fast with getting our photoshoot sneak peeks out. The full album won’t be out until early December but we’re pretty happy with what we’ve seen so far. I wrote a little bit about our post-wedding engagement shoot over at august morning, if you’d like to take a gander.
I feel like I am slowly losing myself the past couple of months despite everyone saying that this is the best time to “find myself”. I’m sure it’s only because I’m IN the journey that I just can’t see it myself just yet. I continue to write and reflect on it because I dream of a day when I’m out of this rut, and I can look back and see what I have survived. This is for future me.
I’ve been absolutely terrible at posting the books on here after I’ve finished it. I still have to post the Bloomtown books in my bookshelf so I can link it in last week’s Week Notes.
Anyways, I finished Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate yesterday, and really enjoyed it. I gave it a 4/5⭐ and marks it as my 21st book of 2025. I’ll backdate and link to this book as well... at some point.
October listening history -- every month I continue to be amazed that T. Swift is in my top 5 when I don’t purposefully go around listening to her as of late. I’m not doing a good job actively avoiding her either, so maybe that’s why.
| Top Tracks | Top Artists |
|---|---|
| 1-800 by bbno$ and Ironmouse | yaeow |
| Malibu Nights by LANY | Noah Kahan |
| The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift | bbno$ |
| Everywhere, Everything (with Gracie Abrams) by Noah Kahan | Taylor Swift |
| favorite lesson by yaeow | The Weepies |
I actually did attempt to catch up a little bit on my blog reading this week... and added a few to my Postroll. This means I’ve also got a few rolling off this week.
Also as a quick plug, new blogs have been added to Blogroll Club -- if you haven’t perused the new blogs (or any existing ones!) lately, you should check it out. If you’d like to be added, go nominate yourself!