I’ve played a lot of Ring Fit Adventure, the fitness game for Nintendo Switch. Here are some things I wish I knew when I got started. Jump over battles to skip them You can jump over enemies to avoid fighting them! I first discovered this when watching a speedrun of the game. If you see some enemies in a level, you can use your (double) jump to avoid the battle completely. This is useful if you want to get to the end of a level faster, or if you don’t want to stop running. Sometimes this is a little tricky and I miss, and I believe some fights can’t be skipped. And skipping too many fights seems to defeat the purpose of the game! Jiggle the Ring-Con to delay an exercise Ring Fit typically waits for you to be in position for about three seconds before it starts an exercise, but sometimes it guesses wrong and starts before you’re ready! To avoid this, I jiggle the Ring-Con. That way, the game doesn’t think I’m standing still ready for the excercise. Remove the leg strap during static stretching Ring Fit will usually complain if you remove the leg strap, but it won’t during some moments, such as the final stretch. I like doing this because (1) it’s a bit more comfortable (2) it lets me put it away sooner, saving me a little bit of time. Use “double money” and “double EXP” smoothies effectively There are smoothies that double your EXP or double your money from a battle. I save these for fights with rare or gold Hoplins, because those give you a boatload of rewards which you can double. Don’t try learning a new language I’ve been trying to improve my Spanish. I tried changing the game’s voice language to Spanish for practice, and didn’t like it. First, the game is not designed to teach you a second language. Most of the words are uncommon. You’re probably not going to be saying “overhead hip shake” very often in real life. Second, it’s bad if you miss something! You could miss some important advice and injure yourself. I kept the voice language as English. “Uno, dos”? Speaking of Spanish, I want to clear up confusion I had. Some exercises have you alternate between two positions: 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. Sometimes the English voice will say—in Spanish—"uno, dos, uno, dos". It took me a long time to understand what they were saying! I thought they were spouting nonsense words for a long time. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but it wasn’t to me. New Game Plus The last thing I’ll say without spoiling anything: there is a “New Game Plus”. You’ll have to beat the game to see what it entails! Overall, I like Ring Fit Adventure, and I’m glad it’s reasonably compatible with the Nintendo Switch 2 coming out later this year. I hope to keep playing it for a long time!

A roundup of my notes from April. I’ve done this for the last few months: March February January Things I published I published a small UI tip about rounding percentages. In short, I don’t think you should show “100%” to the user unless it’s truly done, or “0%” unless it truly hasn’t started. Though this is a bit of a lie, I think it’s clearer to users. I posted clippings from Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, a book of essays by Ellen Ullman. The book criticizes Silicon Valley (where I was born and raised!) and the modern tech scene. Yet Ullman seems to retain hope that these tools can be part of a better world. Perhaps I’m projecting, because that’s basically how I feel. I read the Economist’s style guide book and published my main takeaways. I think my writing is better after reading! Not something I published, but I was featured on DWeb’s social media and they chose a truly dreadful photo of me. Also, an old post of mine was featured on Remember The Milk’s blog. Things I wrote for Zelda Dungeon This was my first full month writing for Zelda Dungeon, and I published four articles. The month was defined by the announcement of the Switch 2, which is most of what I wrote about: “Improved Pro Controller Announced for Switch 2” “Echoes of Wisdom, Link’s Awakening, & Other Select Switch Games to Receive Free Updates to ‘Improve Playability’ on Switch 2” “Daily Debate: What Did You Think of Today’s Nintendo Switch 2 Direct?” I also published some thoughts about subtle references between Zelda games, which is one of my favorite parts of the series. Tech news I read It’s still bleak out there! Last month, I wrote about small players getting hurt by AI scraping bots. Big organizations like Wikimedia are affected, too. American tech companies build software that kills innocent civilians. Microsoft fired an employee who protested this. Relatedly, an indie dev pulled their game from Microsoft’s Xbox in protest. In case you didn’t know whether the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) was evil, its director wants it to function “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”. That’s something a cartoon villain would say. Seems like Google Chrome is keeping third-party cookies after all. Third-party cookies are bad for privacy, so I was sad to see this. “If Bitcoin were—as true believers often say—a government-free currency, Donald Trump’s idiot tariffs should have strengthened it.” That’s not what happened. Aftermath posted their “official Editorial Values”. Cool to see these spelled out explicitly, and I wish more publications did this. Links, links, and more links A roundup of links from April: I think ads are poisonous to society, so I loved “What If We Made Advertising Illegal?”. I think the author’s goal is to shift the Overton window, rather than realistically propose a ban. (A near-ban is proposed in Digital Degrowth, a pretty radical book I read this month, which further fueled my fire.) “AI ambivalence” and “Why I stopped using AI code editors” buck against the trend of loving AI for coding. My favorite quote: “I acknowledge that these tools are incredibly powerful, I’ve even started incorporating them into my work in certain limited ways […], but I absolutely hate them.” “Good Intentions Don’t Pave Roads: The Need For a New Strategy in Free-Software” argues that the free software movement needs to change its approach, because it’s losing. Soft Skills episode 454 had a great quote about measuring developer productivity: “many teams have killed the ability to do capacity planning by using story points as a performance metric.” “Is ’ethical AI’ an oxymoron?” asks some ethical questions about generative AI. Refreshingly, it also gives some answers. “It hurts me to know that the tools I share such a deep connection with are made by corporations that exploit workers in developing countries, greenwash their products while generating tons of electronic waste, fight against the rights of people to repair their possessions, engage in malicious compliance when governments try to regulate them, spy on their users, hold their users’ data hostage, and commit a long list of other crimes that would take too long to recount here.” Quotes like this and more in “The tools I love are made by awful people”. SELF is a platformer game. It’s short—maybe only 15 minutes—but left me wanting more. I think it’s the best-feeling 2D platformer I’ve ever played! I found it on Itch.io’s “randomizer”, a feature that shuffles you through different games to try. “Two Years of Rust” was good enough for me to personally email a thank-you to the author. I want more high-level descriptions of really using a tool. I want to know what it feels like to be proficient, and know what the pain points are. This post did exactly that! I learned about asarotos oikos, an ancient Roman mosaic style that looks like there’s a bunch of garbage on the floor. Hope you had a good April.

In short: maybe don’t round to 0% or 100% in your UI. I am not a UI expert. But I sometimes build user interfaces, and I sometimes want to render a percentage to the user. For example, something like “you’ve downloaded 45% of this file”. In my experience, it’s often better to round this number but avoid rounding to 0% or 100%. Rounding to 0% is bad because the user may think there’s been no progress. Even the smallest nonzero ratio, like 0.00001%, should render as 1%. Rounding to 100% is bad because the user may think things are done when they aren’t, and it’s better to show 99%. Ratios like 99.9% should still render as 99%, even if they technically round to 100%. For example, in your UI: Ratio (out of 1) Rendered 0 0% 0.00001 1% 0.01 1% 0.02 2% 0.99 99% 0.99999 99% 1 100% Here’s some Python code that demonstrates the algorithm I like to use: def render_ratio(ratio): if ratio <= 0: return "0%" if ratio >= 1: return "100%" if ratio <= 0.01: return "1%" if ratio >= 0.99: return "99%" return f"{round(ratio * 100)}%" This isn’t right for all apps, of course. Sometimes you want to show the exact percentage to the user, and sometimes you don’t want the app to appear “stuck” at 1% or 99%. But I’ve found this little trick to be useful.

I’ve been trying to improve my writing so I read Writing with Style, the Economist’s style guide book. Here were my main takeaways: Use short sentences. They’re more memorable. They’re easier to read. They’re generally easier to write. Colons are for setup and delivery. They describe them as “dramatic”. One thought per paragraph. The paragraph is a “unit of thought”, according to this book and to H.W. Fowler. Sometimes, you have a one-sentence paragraph because the thought fits into a single sentence. Prefer simpler terms. Use “get” instead of “obtain”, “make” instead of “manufacture”, or “give up” instead of “relinquish”. Ask if you ever use the word when talking to friends. And don’t soften difficult topics: “a poor person has no more money, opportunity or dignity when described as ‘deprived’, ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘underprivileged’.” The right word can eliminate others. More specific words let you “dispense with adjectives and adverbs entirely. Consider the difference between ‘walk’ and ‘strut’, or ‘say’ and ‘murmur’.” Find big-picture issues with a “reverse outline”. When editing, they recommend extracting the main point from each paragraph. This can catch structural issues. Watch out for differences between English dialects. I knew about a lot of these, like how I’d spell it “color” and a Brit would spell it “colour”. But I didn’t know about “quite”: in American English, it’s a synonym for “very”; in British English, it can mean “fairly”. (The book failed to mention other dialects of English, to my disappointment.) There were things I didn’t like about the book. It seemed allergic to whimsy. A lot of its rules felt arbitrary. The Economist writes for a different audience than I do. But these disagreements helped me clarify my own writing style, so they were still helpful. I think my writing is better as a result of this book. I recommend checking it out!