TL;DR: I've made a Balatro mod that adds the touch controls of the iOS version on PC. It's called "Sticky Fingers" and is available to download on GitHub! This post will is mostly about the process of making the mod itself.

How I got here

If you're reading this, I probably do not need to explain Balatro to you. To say I got into this game would be an understatement. According to Steam, I've spent 210 hours playing it last year and I expect to spend half of that amount playing it in the next year. The game's good, turns out.

Balatro released on PC in February 2024, Mac in March, and got an official mobile port in September of the same year.
And that mobile port is great! Great use of the haptic engine and most importantly… great touch controls!

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a little recording showing them off:

After playing the game on iOS a bunch, I've come to really like those controls and would often miss them when playing on my Mac.

So I did the reasonable thing… Hoping that someone ported those controls to the desktop version of Balatro.

Until I got fed up with waiting and asked myself: ✨ "How hard could it be, really?" ✨

Not that hard, but not easy either, it turns out!

Background

If you are unaware, Balatro is a game written using the LÖVE framework in Lua and more importantly… the code of the game is available on the file system when you buy it! All of it, neither obfuscated nor minified! This is, obviously, very convenient when it comes to making mods (of which there are many), and it greatly…Read more

I've done some tweaks to the layout of the site around links, code bits and other things I'm probably forgetting. The /blog page looks a bit more feed-like now as well.

Oh, yeah, and the blog has Webmentions support now! Meaning that if you mention my blog from your website or on social media (Bluesky, Mastodon), it should appear alongside comments on the blog.

Also, if you had my button on your website, and you included the direct link, please update it like so, replacing https://files.damien.zone/88x31_damien.png with https://damien.zone/public/88x31_damien.png. I have set up a redirection on my server, so existing buttons don't break, but ideally that'd be temporary 😅

That's all!
- damien

Here it is, the new year! I can't say I'm especially overjoyed about it, but I'm also fine with leaving 2024 behind, so... you know.

At any rate, as you (maybe) can see, this website got a bit of an overhaul!
I spent a few days during my winter break re-implementing it using Eleventy.

Bearblog served me well for the past few months, but I knew that, at some point, I'd want to control everything... so here we are.

While the goal of this migration was to make a 1:1 copy of the way the site looked on Bear, I couldn't help myself and made a few tweaks here and there.

damien.zone January 2025 Release Notes

new favicon / avatar

Sage drew a lovely pixel-art version of my avatar! We spent a lot of time making sure it looks sharp as hell everywhere. The favicon shows up ~fine~ in RSS readers as well. I'll try to make a post documenting how all of this was done because some of the tricks I used are a little bit silly.

color palette changes

I also changed several aspects of the main design regarding contrast and colors. There are too many to list, so enjoy a comparison below:

Hopefully, these changes make the site a bit nicer to look at and read. I will continue iterating on it over time because these things are never finished.

layout / content changes

The layout is still very much based on the "Terminal" theme that Bearblog provides, but I tweaked the layout of a few pages:

• The homepage now has a shorter description, the list of recent posts, and that's it.
• I might experiment with the homepage a bit…Read more

Saw Justice two times in Paris last week, which makes it four times this year^[1]. While my spot for the first Paris show was not great (literally the highest, furthest from the stage), I had a much better spot the night after.

Like in September at Portola, I managed to get a pretty good spot on the floor, which netted me some pretty good shots, despite not taking nearly as many as I did back then. I also lucked out and managed to get high-fives from both Xavier and Gaspard (I missed both last time lol) so I still feel pretty good about that lmao.

Like last time, all of these are shot on my iPhone 13 Pro using Halide in "Process Zero RAW" with only exposure and contrasts being adjusted after the fact.
The pictures below are thumbnails, but you can/should click on them to get the full-size JPEGs if you want to pixel peep and taste that sweet-sweet noise 😄

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