Phages are the most interesting things on Earth, IMO. I absolutely adored the years I spent with them.
I don’t think we’re even remotely close to using them clinically, in the US at least. Eastern European countries have had phage therapy forever, but just try to convince Americans to use a virus as a treatment. This is a country that thinks viral mRNA is a dangerous substance that will turn them into mutants, so just imagine the reaction to a whole live virus, never mind that you’re crawling with bacteriophages and there is no way they could ever harm you.
After spraying inky water in my face, up the walls, over the bathroom tiles, sloshing around the faucet hardware, and dousing my glasses and tinting my nailpolish blue and pink: I have finally cleared all of my fountain pens of clogs from shimmers, and reinked them impatiently so they write true to tone immediately. Very messy process, but fairly satisfying. I will have colourful hands for days. The blue really lingers.
Most of mine are probably going to be about food… but in that vain I saw this morning that the building next door to our studio is about to open a New York Deli style sandwich shop and I’m very excited for a bunch of new lunch options! They’re doing a free sandwich day for their opening next week and I’m EXCITED.
Transcribed all of the writing I’d done in the lab while waiting for the shaker table, and it comes out to 1,759 words over roughly two hours. I did pause occasionally to chat to the lab bench, so roughly more like one hour and a half.
I always love it when something I know randomly becomes super handy or useful, whether that’s for me, or for somemeowdy else. And always delighted to be a helpful kittywizard when it comes to love- I’ve got a soft spot for romance. Pleased to have shared some useful nail polish and nail art tips on Neo tonight. :3
Other than that one collaborative project, it’s pretty quiet on my front.
Stuff from said project will show up elsewhere. Now onto the thing…
Yesterday was my assessment for a job in a library. Given that I have been plagued by slow starts for nearly everything, it went reasonably well.
After that ended, I went to the Singapore National Library. It had been recently renovated, and one of the new exhibits was a powered-by-AI story generator. Something that would be clearly off limits, but I went to play around with it anyway. Source data included fairy tales (and Singaporean folk stories to give it that local vibe).
That got me thinking about these: Fractured Fairy Tales series (by Emily), various Speed IFs in the early 2000s (the golden years of IF) and the monthly jams done by Team NeoInteractives. I wonder if we could revive Speed IF next?
Can’t reach notebook (or grabber) at the moment, so you’ll have to live with literal napkin scribbles. Sorry
There have been rumblings about Speed-IF having a proper resurgence (although it never truly died [looks at Ectocomp] {the La Petite Mort category has a 4h creating limit}.
I think the time might be [nearing] ripe for that, but need 2 ingredients:
1- impassionned, persistent champion with “transformative” vision (not just necromancing it)
2- Inclusion of other engines beyond parser, with tailored definition of what “Speed-IF” looks like (equity not equality)
PS: there’s room for a proper “retro” revival of late aughts(05’-09’) IFMUd Style Speed-IF but we need to embrance AND not OR (more cakes)
Seconding Pinkunz on this. I think the EctoComp is probably currently the closest you’d have to Speed-IF.
Note: we’ve been talking about having proper Speed-IF sessions with the NeoInteractives peeps, but we’re not sure exactly how this could look like if we do it like the OG one (i.e. at this date and time, we all start working on games and we do this for 3h only).
Do look out for the next Mini-Jam in March, that might interest you
On speedIF, some years ago I have found a very nifty mean to ensure that is actually speed coding… but let’s talk about in the proper space, that is, competition.
There’s a lot to comment on here (I laughed out loud when I got to “toilet”), but it’s interesting to me how many of its descriptive sentences use parenthetical commas. The rhythm of the sentences is very samey.
In positive/neutral news, I did a bunch of chores today. In the middle of vacuuming I smelled burnt hair and noticed the brush was spinning irregularly, and I ended up watching a repair video, taking apart the brushroll assembly, and clearing out a big pile of junk (including a bunch of friction-melted hair). This whole story sounds unpleasant, but putting it back together and successfully vacuuming the house left me feeling really accomplished.
A local theater is playing a movie I missed during its original theatrical run (Infinity Pool) and I’m going to a late showing tonight. And between then and now, I’m working on a couple different games, both of which are chugging along nicely. I went and read some of Computerfriend’s reviews last week to reinvigorate myself for working on game stuff, and I feel good about where I am with my creative projects right now.
There’s a small IF idea I wanna poke at, and Twine is more of an appropriate toolset for this one. I need the tiny victory after getting completely paralyzed by the complex multi-facet code structure issue I’m fixing in TADS.
I’m pleasantly surprised that when I opened up the sections for the IFDB Awards, some anonymous person had voted for Milliways in many eligible sections! Which I’m definitely surprised about. Voted!
I’m very pleased. For context, I have dyscalculia- difficulty with numbers, particularly time: and it’s a constant struggle, especially when differentiating between morning and night. (Twenty four hour, or military time, doesn’t really help there. It’s just more numbers to be confused by while reading.) It was really satisfying to be able to help a friend schedule things out, especially when I was extra careful counting out the time periods and caught a silly mistake in mixing one in the morning and one at night up, and sorted it out. Had it checked over in triplicate by people who don’t similarly struggle with numbers, and it was right! Yippee!
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