What's one positive/neutral thing that's happened today?

Joey, pls note that for elders (and historians) like me, mini computer mean a different beast, like the DG Nova or the DEC PDP line of computer… and on top of it, in an IF history contest evokes the well-known Infocom’s Decsystem-20 :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Ah! Then I mean an Intel Celeron N3350, cooled without fans, about the size of my hand.

EDIT: Here’s the fetch:

OS: Void Linux x86_64
Host: UP-APL03 V1.0
CPU: Intel Celeron N3350 (2) @ 2.400GHz
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 500
Memory: 380MiB / 1818MiB
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Isn’t sharkfin soup an Icelandic thing? XD

We moved house. Still in the Blue Ridge and will be until it gets too cold and we go back to Texas, but we’re 3 hours north and east. It’s frazzling, but satisfying to get it done. You know that feeling where you’ve been cleaning and packing one place for days/weeks and you think, “I will never get this all done. It’s hopeless.” And then it all comes together and the boxes are packed and the toilets are sparkling and the dust bunnies are gone and you did it. And then you get to the new place and it’s filled with boxes and you don’t know where anything is because even though you swore you’d label the boxes correctly this time you didn’t do it so where is your ratty comfy old bathrobe?

We got invited to dinner by the new neighbors, who by their yard signs are polar opposites politically and already tried to engage on that. My standard line is that I don’t talk politics with people I don’t know very well because it just causes friction. We can talk about dogs or cakes or hurricanes first and find some common ground. Luckily, coming from rural Texas, I have considerable experience at this.

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Continuing to play with zmachine mapping: I now have little moving markers on the map for the robots of Suspended. :slight_smile:

I’m not sure what else to add to mapping, as it kind of feels complete. I think I’m going to add a graphical inventory screen.

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I have been in London all weekend. On Saturday I met a couple of old university friends and watched the My Neighbour Totoro stage show, which is amazing. Yesterday I ate a truly irresponsible amount of chicken katsu curry and watched professional wrestling. I didn’t realise how much I needed all that until I got home just now.

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You’re probably pretty close to where I live then. If I understand whereabouts you started. No you don’t have to come to my house for dinner.

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My WIP is in progress. Maybe a horse? Definitely snake boots.

I am limiting myself to a single sheet of a Trizbort map. It is pretty filled up.

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Otherwise it would be a WNIP.

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Recieved two Kickstarter packages today, one of which I wasn’t aware had even shipped yet. One was for some Cthulhu themed dice including a trio of chonk d20s in the 30-40mm range, the other for some wallet friendly metal cards with multiple spinners that serve as travel friendly alternatives to dice… one has dials for d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20, the other is all d10 dials, making it effectively a d1000000.

The new season of King of the Hill made it on to my usual source for descriptive audio yesterday and I’ve gone through 6 of the 10 episodes so far. I’m enjoying it immensely, almost like the show never ended… Sadly, none of the classic seasons are available through my usual source for descriptive audio and I have an itch to binge the show.

Also, I’ve cleared out my backlog of sub-30 minute YouTube uploads and blog posts that was seeded while my computer was on the fritz, and I have a good shot at clearing out the 30-40 minute YouTube backlog either tonight or tomorrow… still have about 30k words of recent chapters of un-going serial fiction I’m following to read though.

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My SSDI has survived for another month and I woke up early enough to place a grocery order for same day delivery at a reasonable time without having to pay the highway robbery for rush delivery and I’ve already recieved my delivery and put everything away.

Got a fresh 20 pound bag of pinto beans, so no longer have to skip the beans with every other meal(bonus, I used the last half cup of the old beans for today’s lunch, so my usual next day delivery would have meant a fourth night in a row of rice sans beans for supper tonight. Also have a fresh bag of shredded cheese, which I had to skip last month to balance my budget, got a fresh stock of chia seeds, which I ran out of about a week ago, a big bag of potatoes to add more variety to my starch mix, and a fresh bag of lemon drops, which have been out of stock the last few times I’ve placed an order. Also bought a box of AA batteries, so now my wireless keyboard is running reliably instead of conking out at random or refusing to work at all, so I no longer have to use my back up keyboard that requires a wire, has those annoying half-size arrow keys, and lacks a context menu key best I can tell, forcing me to constantly use caps lock+num row 8 to emulate a right click, which is supremely annoying considering my right hand is usually down in the bottom right corner on the arrow keys when I need the context menu… only thing the back up keyboard has going for it is it doubles as a USB hub and I don’t need the Fn key to make the function keys work if I’m not using some other modifier, which isn’t a big deal since F5 to refresh a web page is the only keyboard shortcut with an unmodified Function key I use regularly(though now that I think of it, why are unmodified function keys used so little? Aside from refresh, all of the function key shortcuts I can think of are modified(alt+Fx to switch from the active console to ttyx, ctrl+alt+Fx to switch from the GUI to ttyx, alt+F2 to launch a run dialog, alt+f1 to open the start menu, alt+f4 to close the active window…)).

Anyways, I get to have my italian seasoned rotini and beans with cheese for the first time in like two months for lunch today and I’ll be having cheesy mashed potatoes with beans and boiled eggs for supper tonight.

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I’ve been reading and making edits to this unpublished book from someone I know. It’s a pretty good book, I’m gonna be honest. So that’s been fun!

I progressed a little with one of my games, and am glad to see it inching along to an IFComp 2026 (or 2027; who knows?) finale. It’s slow and incredibly tiny but useful progress, so at least that’s a positive.

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My TADS 3 / Adv3Lite WIP is moving along. Maybe it will be my IFComp 2026 entry? It may be good enough to at least enter?

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little negative thing: September (and the double-timetakers, the IFComp judging and the reopening of the “other”, Italian forum, not IF-related) is looming and the work done on Isekai is practically nil. Definitively disappointing.

major positive thing: restarting some old friendship…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I worked on my game this week a small amount. Trying to implement a library, book, puzzle of sorts. Second is we purchased an electric car and have already saved on insurance and gas substantially.

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Now that the IFComp deadline has passed, I need to find some way to channel the “what if I tweaked just one little thing” energy into a new direction. Time to look at all the other WIPs that I shelved at the start of August!

…or, I could stop doing Dialog coding for a while and rest that part of my brain. That would be wiser.

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All three of the eggs I boiled for supper tonight peeled cleanly.

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I appreciate all of the work you have been doing to improve Dialog.

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More on the craft front, last night I made a beaded ornament inspired by the Borromean rings. using the same red-orange-yellow, blue-green, and purple-pink blends I’ve previously used for a scarf and bracelets(my apologies I haven’t gotten photos to share). The original plan was to a band of each color mix that are 4 beads wide and 16 beads long, but when trying to interleave the three bands so the bands are linked like Borromean rings and orthogonal, they proved too short, and I lengthened them to 18, going from 64 beads per band and 192 beads total to 72 beads per band and 216 total. The end result is somwhere between a sphere and cube in shape and if I had to guess, is about the size of a baseball or tennis ball, though I don’t have either to compare to. Also, the bands can rotate, but the fit is snug enough to make it a bit too difficult to make a good fidget.

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happened yesterday but i’m bass boosting. me and dan fabulich got markdown working for IFDB reviews so it should be way easier to put them in now!! was working on this for a few weeks so i’m really happy this happened in time for IFComp!!

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