New Year Resolutions?

[Lancelot (Onno Brouwer)]

Well lesseee… Last year I registered my intent to participate in Spring Thing 2023 but failed to get even close to finishing my entry “Pack Rat”. I basically had to go back to the drawing board and rethink my strategy. I will now target IFComp 2024.

Now I do want to participate in Spring Thing, and Pinkunz got me thinking when we beta tested my One King game at clubfloyd:

[clubfloyd] Pinkunz says, "You know,
with the limited verb set, this would translate to choice fairly well."

So I now registered my intent to enter a Twine version of my One King game for Spring Thing 2024, working title “One King to Twine them All”. (If @VictorGijsbers has a suggestion for a better title, I am all ears )

[malacostraca (Sarah W.)]

@malacostraca

So far I have 12 things on my list for next year, including finishing the game I intended to enter into IFComp this year (which I’ve barely touched since September) and writing 12 reviews on IFDB.

Whoops. I wrote 4.5 reviews, and I don’t think my game will even make the deadline for this year’s IFComp now that it’s been pushed forward a month. But I do resolve to start playtesting it this year! And I have a couple partial games I’d like to complete in 2024, too.

[pinkunz]

Manon, I love that you’re lowkey holding us all accountable for last year’s resolutions now that it’s officially too late to do anything about them.
Very bopcore.

I have a ton of things on the back burner, but I need to get my house in order first. Literally and figuratively. My only solid goals this year are to move into and repair that house, make amends in the best way I can for the kindness shown to us over the last year, and to build up some common sense resiliency and savings to prevent becoming a burden to others going forward.

Accomplishing those goals will give me a freer hand to consistently give back to the IF community in the way I should anyway.

Thank you again for helping us limp our way through this last year. It has been a profoundly humbling experience and we would not have made it otherwise. You know who you are.

[sophia (Sophia de Augustine)]

So, completely fell on my face for the art goal, but I did do a lot of journalling, with an emphasis on gratitude alongside emotional processing and catharsis, and definitely smashed the goal of releasing 1 IF game (did 8 mini ones, yippee! Plus some other stuff, like zines and TTRPG supplementals and poems and such.) 2/3 ain’t half bad!

IF wise, I would like to keep working on what I really hope, fingers crossed, becomes my long term writing project. I have never really been inclined to longform works, novels or otherwise- but I have released ~80k of serialized fiction in the form of short stories and other short to medium term projects have shown me I totally can, theoretically.

Other than that, and the givens of like, not dying- in my personal life, I would like to continue to develop an understanding of relationships that’re healthy for me. These last few years have been, uh, abyssal on that front- but I’m very lucky to have entered 2024 with friends I love and a good circle of friendly acquaintances.

The Camp meows have been really instrumental in demonstrating to me what it’s like to have reciprocal care and consideration in friendships, and the Heph meows have been lovely and reassuring when I reach out in turn. The Forum meows at large have been really wonderful in terms of feeling a sense of a broader community, and the end of 2023 showed me just how compassionate people among our numbers can be, and that’s really lovely to treasure.

I love my friends. I’m lucky to be loved by them too. I hope this year is good to us all, and that we continue to be, too.

[inventor200 (Joey "Jess" Tanden)]

For 2024 I’m going to be more forgiving of my own mistakes, and allow myself more space to fail gracefully.

Had a conversation with someone recently and it made me realize how brutal I can be on myself sometimes, which only makes me more paralyzed and error-prone later.

I’m still going to acknowledge mistakes, of course, but the idea is to not visit cruelty on myself over them.

I feel like during 2023, I’ve gotten enough of a foundation to make this possible, so now it’s time to have a bit more intent about it in 2024.

[VictorGijsbers]

And in the Darkness Twine Them.

Makes your list of games look good:

Onno Brouwer
One King to Loot Them All
And in the Darkness Twine Them

[inventor200 (Joey "Jess" Tanden)]

Oh, also, I wanna write more, even just small things.

[Pebblerubble (Peter Wiehe)]

I personally am not a fan of new year resolutions. I have some wishes, but not because of new year. The wishes/plans just happen to fall into these days.

They are quite ordinary:

• Live healthier
• Write an IF

[BrettW]

Looking at last year’s, I did what I set out to do with IF. Which was to publish Hand Me Down, which went pretty well.

I only did two pieces of 3d art, but they were much better than previous ones, plus I did attempt one per season.

As with last year, I don’t do resolutions but yearly themes. Also with last year, I’m still thinking of this year’s. And last year’s

I’m in the research phase of a new IF work, which should be markedly less work to complete than HMD. To Future Brett: sorry for saying this.

My stretch goal is to have two games done this year, or at least deep into development/testing.

I want to play more IF. And do reviews because they are nice for the community.

I feel like I should volunteer to the IFTF or something similar, but maybe not this year. I’ll keep supporting them though.

[ramstrong (Harry Hardjono)]

I’m going to implement a text editor with running word count (and character count and line count). This will help me pace myself. Just a simple one, strictly for text data entry.

[AmandaB]

2023 was the worst year of my life, full of the panic and mayhem and constant grief that accompanies caretaking a parent who is descending into the violent, terrifying madness of dementia and, eventually, death. I was just hollowed out by the stress of it. I swear I could feel years of my life just peeling off.

This year, I’m going to try to remember how to live for me and for my sweetheart, to have my life be about me. Nothing so grand as specific goals. Just not to cringe when the phone rings at night, thinking I have to drive to a bloody scene, but that it might just be a friend calling to catch up.

[manonamora (Manon)]

@pinkunz

Manon, I love that you’re lowkey holding us all accountable for last year’s resolutions now that it’s officially too late to do anything about them.
Very bopcore.

This was not really on purpose
I’m just a bit nosey and wanted to know other peep’s goals for this year

[Felicity_Banks]

I hope to finish “Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People” ready for IF Comp 2024. And maybe even hit the top ten again! But if not 2024, then 2025.

I hope to get the massive beast that is the post-comp “Fine Felines” at least one chapter closer to being finished.

I hope to know roughly what I’ll do to expand “Bali B&B” for its post-comp release.

And I hope to put together a non-fiction book about the history of my church, since they’ve already paid me to do it (suckersssss!)

---

My life improved drastically in 2023 thanks to some new medications (I have fibromyalgia, diabetes, depression/anxiety, etc). Plus I had a couple of positive experiences that mostly over-wrote a very bad experience I had in 2022.

So my physical and mental health are better than they’ve been in ages. So much so I’ve been able to work over fifteen hours per week. For many years I’ve been hardly able to work at all (other than writing, which is why I’m sometimes incredibly mercenary about it) so this is a huge deal. I have massive debts that I hope to soon be able to properly start progressing on.

And as of today, I have started a kind of Cat Cafe here in Canberra. Why not, since I’m already fostering kittens and inviting people over to play with them. My main job is babysitting, so this would be babysitting but only for kids 10+… and adults. I’m told I can charge a LOT for a cat cafe so perhaps I shall abruptly become rich? If so I’d really really like to live in a larger house so all my many small businesses and charities have enough space to exist. In which case maybe I’ll move house this year?

I can’t make a resolution about whether the cat cafe (“Tabby Time”) succeeds or fails, because small businesses depend so much on luck. I CAN resolve to not go crazy on up-front costs at least.

Here’s the six kittens I’m fostering at the moment! Amazingly, they’re from three different litters.

(If you happen to be good at insurance paperwork in the ACT, I’ll be your bestest friend. PM me.)

[ramstrong (Harry Hardjono)]

@Felicity_Banks

I’m told I can charge a LOT for a cat cafe

Because it’s a cafe, and you have to go through so much regulation paperworks that’ll make your head spin 3 ways! Or so I’m told.

Edit: I expect to see lots of pics, you hear?

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

I would like to be nicer. To myself, to others.

Perhaps I should try mid-year resolutions. By the end of the holidays, I’m really too tired to come up with much.

[Felicity_Banks]

I’m not going to serve food (other than water, tea, packaged food) for that reason. Apparently some cat cafes only have a fridge with canned drinks, which honestly makes sense because… kittens.

[ramstrong (Harry Hardjono)]

Kagami mochi? Meow?

https://twitter.com/markcrilley/status/1741956054303256600?t=YC7JYWJMfxh8AxOmZYgX7w&s=19

[SpecialAgent (Wesley Werner)]

I love reading about everyone’s hopes and goals so far. Thank you for sharing @everyone!

I have two main goals.

Firstly I want to complete my current IF work. I started planning in December 2022, but put it aside for 8 months due to life. I am working on it again, and should have something testable before the 2025 clock strikes. It’s by far my most ambitious project, designing and putting every detail on paper before any code is written.

Secondly, I need to make a friend. Just one will do. I moved to another country, and sixty days later covid hit. It made meeting people all the more difficult. I was also reeling from a recent loss, devastated and afraid to open up to strangers or new experiences, which didn’t help matters. Somehow I need to escape this void of not socializing and make a friend

Wishing @everyone here a prosperous 2024 and the best of success with your goals!

[ramstrong (Harry Hardjono)]

@ramstrong

implement a text editor with running word count

I’ve done it! It’s so simple, I should’ve done it long time ago. Well, it does require 2 terminal shells.

Now, to download PunyBuild + Inform6 since I now have a 64bit system. Reluctantly dragged onto the future!

[ramstrong (Harry Hardjono)]

Here’s an updated version that is only 1 shell process.

Hint: if you’re doing Nanowrimo and depend on word count, then you want to use wc -w, and you can skip the fold command as well!

Ctrl-d to terminate input mode and back to shell.

Edit
Maybe I should stop tweaking this thing, but here’s the Nanowrimo version for slow computers that does not depend on repeatedly running wc on the whole file. This one uses arithmetic.

You can use fold piped to wc -l if you want to count by lines instead of by words.