Swansonge

‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe

Israel is using Microsoft Azure to store recordings of every phone call made by Palestinians in the occupied territories, then using AI to analyze the contents and select targets. Microsoft is (dubiously) claiming ignorance.

This is so sick

A flyer calling people to action against GEO Group's occupation of the site at 111 Taylor Street in San Francisco. We Need You! Pack City Hall! Board of Appeals Public Hearing is on July 16th, 2025 at 5PM. Go to City Hall, Room 416.

Live near SF, like trans people and want to stick it to ICE?

111 Taylor Street, the site of the Compton's Cafeteria Riots is currently occupied by GEO Group, private prison operators who work with ICE. They've been caught in a zoning violation! Kick them out!

Read below for easy ways to help!

YouTube video by SwansongeMusic meteors Game Overview

Posted a little video overview of my new Playdate game, meteors. I realized it took me about 2ish months to make—not bad for learning a new programming language from scratch!

youtu.be/gzm9-ISEHUI?...

meteors - Original Soundtrack, by Swansonge 3 track album

The original soundtrack is also available (for free) on BandCamp! swansonge.bandcamp.com/album/meteor...

Just published a new Playdate game (for free) on itch.io! meteors is a simple arcade game about shooting meteors developed for Playdate. It's inspired by Asteroids and was my attempt at learning the mechanics of Playdate game development in Lua.

Find it here: swansonge.itch.io/meteors

As a target of the BDS movement we call on supporters to amplify the McDonalds boycott this week, as part of an organic boycott movement taking place in the US.

McDonalds is feeling the heat!

#BoycottMcDonalds

Finished up the code I created some simple art for when people load the game onto their Playdate.

I’m hoping to publish Meteors to itch.io within the next week!

United for immigrants graphic. A Kids of Immigrants and Rizos Curls collab inviting brands to join in. Text says Donating 100% profits on June 21st.

List of organizations and their URLs: Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles United We Dream Immigrant Defenders Law Center American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Inclusive Action Central American Resource Center

There are a bunch of brands joining in on United for Immigrants!

On June 21st do some shopping at these participating brands. 100% of profits go towards organizations helping immigrants. Here's an ongoing list of brands: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Had a lot of fun making these gang vocals. I tried playing 10 different characters from different points in the room to make it sound like a big group of people and not just copies of myself.

Coded in a simple title screen animation. Honestly I think the game is pretty much code-complete, so I just have to work on some packaging touches before publishing the game.

Fun fact: in the 1960s, Civil Rights protestors were given literal classes on nonviolent protest; they didn't all just spontaneously know what to do.

So, if you're planning on showing up, this weekend: read this comic. And if you're staying home, signal-boost it/link it around.

Localization is now dynamic!

Wrote about SGF, ICE, and covering the event as first-generation US born person.

Added Japanese localization! Translated it myself so it’s not perfect. がんばった😅

Next step is to implement a way to update the text after unpausing.

Despite all the grossness that comes with the amount of AI-generated art I’ve seen recently, one really cool thing I’ve seen is artists making art as a direct response to and rejection of AI

Need

See if you can parse every take playing at once to hear what the new song actually sounds like lol

SpiritTrail for Playdate Follow the Spirit Trail and fight it out against fearsome yokai in this match-3 battle game! Swap tiles to trigger attacks and unleash powerful abilities. Along the way, learn about each yokai you enc...

Spirit Trail is out now on Catalog! 🥳

You can pick it up here - play.date/games/spirit...

#playdate

Fourteen Thousand.

The long campaign to dehumanize Palestinians is, fundamentally, about this. To provide cover for the annihilation of a people and their culture, from the youngest to the oldest, to shrugs from the most powerful nations in the world.

Added sound effects

Combining my hobbies of music production and game development has been fun :)

Wrote some music for my game-in-progress. I’m probably putting in too much effort for what should be an exercise in learning Lua for Playdate lol

Added a simple menu with to turn on/off crank controls. Trying to be more conscious of building in accessibility options early.

Added a simple game over screen with a restart option so the gameplay loop is closed!

(Still lots to work on though)

Lots of progress on my Asteroids-like!
- made the asteroids bounce off each other instead of overlap
- added a simple title screen with a transition

Making some progress on my Asteroids clone. The asteroids now split into smaller objects and I added a display for score. The smaller asteroids are worth more!

Created a system for randomly spawning “meteors”

Microsoft is a new BDS priority target. Here's why you should #BoycottXbox and pressure your institutions to exclude Microsoft from its contracts.

Double dev update for today! Figured out how to make the player character shoot bullets at the proper angle

Only took me 3 hours to figure out how to rotate a triangle using the Playdate crank