That’s such a cool idea! It’s a lot of pages there, too…
I’d estimate close to 800 sides of A5. My brother Dan seems keen to help draw the covers for the fifteen “new” books (and maybe even fill in the remaining blank pages) which would be the first time we’ve worked on it together for 33 years. We grew apart a bit in the nineties, and though we’ve reconciled since our parents died, (and bonded over our shared love of Twin Peaks) I miss the days when would spend hours drawing silly cartoons together, purely to make each other laugh.
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Bought some earmuffs of the sound blocking variety. Mainly because my portable AC has developed a loud rattle and I can’t afford to replace the unit as long as its putting out cold air, but they are proving great for blocking all the mundane background noise and letting me turn the volume on my computer and portable media player down to levels that would previously be inaudible or at least unintelligible.
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2 random people downloaded my IF creation software and put donations of $10 and $2 in the “tip” jar on Itch. That feels really good.
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I was dealing with travel issues when I realized that it was that bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where you need to “DRINK (Lots of beer)”
Ford Prefect was right, it does help with the matter transmission process.
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I was recording an acoustic “demo” song with a band member for about 5 hours the other day. Think we might release it soon…
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My usual source for descriptive audio uploaded the new season of King of the Hill earlier this evening and I binged the first 4 episodes while preparing and eating dinner tonight. Continues to be quite possibly the best revival of any piece of media ever.
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So, while waiting for my lunch to cook and listening to a retrospective on the Atari Jaguar’s library, my mind wandered to factoring 65535(2^16 - 1, the largest unsigned integer that can fit in 16-bits)… the motivation was along the lines of what if a video game had 65535 of its most minor collectible(think Coins in Mario, Rings in Sonic, notes in Banjo-Kazooie, or Bananas in Donkey Kong Country) and how they might be grouped into larger bundles…
Mentally divided by 5 and got 13107. Realized thathas a digit sum of 12, so divisible by 3.
Divided by three, geting 4369.
Did trial divisions to find 4369 is one more than a multiple of 7 and 13 and 2 more than a multiple of 11.
Find that 4369 is a multiple of 17.
Divided by 17 and got 257
I then realized that 3, 5, 17, and 257 are 4 of the five known Fermat primes and that their product is 2 less than the fifth fermat prime.
I then realized 3*5 = 15 = 17 -2 and 3* 5*17 = 255 = 257 -2. Also 3 = 5 -2.
Doubt I’m the first to notice this pattern in the Fermat primes, but I still find this pretty cool.
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I have finally recovered and collected all of the notes for my ultimate writing project.
To the one who said I would never finish this: You know who you are. Maybe you’ll never visit this site. However, should you ever find this post, then I dare you to hold my redbull while I continue sorting.
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Yesterday I said goodbye to the house that Miss Gosling’s Last Case is set in. (Which does mean I can be a bit more liberal with the pictures of it now.)
It’s bittersweet; but I have a lot of good memories there, so I’m trying to focus on those.
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I think this is best explained with the difference of squares factorization: x^2 - 1 = (x-1)(x+1).
Specifically:
2^16 - 1 = (2^8-1)(2^8+1) = 255 * 257.
2^8 - 1 = (2^4-1)(2^4+1) = 15 * 17.
2^4 - 1 = (2^2-1)(2^2+1) = 3 * 5.
2^2 - 1 = (2^1-1)(2^1+1) = 1 * 3.
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Took a recent look at a book that someone I know asked me to edit and I think it’s very good, honestly. Not much for me to do with it, but I enjoyed reading it so hopefully it goes somewhere…
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Yesterday my tablet broke. I went out and bought a new one. I keep enough backups that porting my entire game collection was a cinch (my tablet is essentially an Adventure-Game-IF-machine).
I have three main engines. ScummVM, Fabularium and Magic DosBox. All three keep their own databases of games.
ScummVM and Fabularium, like most programs, quite insist in having their dabatases and configurations in places the non-hacky user can’t reach. So the databases of games for those two were lost. We might be talking, oh… roughly 300 games in total.
However, Magic DosBox was made by a programmer who clearly speaks my language, and put the dabatase code in the folder where I put the games themselves. Result? When copying from one device to another, everything was still there. The profiles and their configuration, the widgets for each profile, the screenshots.
Of the three main engines I use, the one that properly survived a new device was the one who decided that it was not going to hide its workings on a place the user can’t reach.
Score 1 for portability, and a kick in the pants for the alternative.
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Negative: the right earpiece of my earphones died on me last night and this model is out of stock at walmart… Positive, I found a different model from the same manufacturer that is about half the price and available for shipping, so I was able to immediately order a replacement, and if I like the different model, the lower price will make buying spares easier. Sadly, I’m stuck listening to stuff with only one ear for the next week as the delivery estimate is Friday, though that’s a small price to pay for free, no order minimum shipping since I don’t have the funds to cover the order minimum for delivery from store before I get paid again in about 2.5 weeks.
Today I found out that my new tablet is actually pretty great at recognising my handwriting with the pen that it shipped with. After trying a few things, I realised that, on Fabularium, I could turn off Fab’s keyboard to use GBoard in “handwriting mode”.
Guys… parser IF where you’re writing the commands with a pen is a whole other level. 
Even better, the virtual keyboard was always clumsy and a physical keyboard was always bulky. Now it’s easier to play parser IF wherever I am!
I’m quite happy right now, you know. The only issue that remains is that Fab still won’t allow GBoard to backspace if you make a mistake.
EDIT - In fact, writing this way has one advantage, at least in my tablet. After I write, the text gets sent to Fab, but GBoard still makes its usual suggestions on top (like, if I just typed “about” in a hurry I can get the options “About, about, bout, abut” in the suggestion strip). Soon after I write, the text gets sent to Fab; but before I write the next word, or before I write enter, I can select any of those options if the system misunderstood what I was typing, or if I actively mistyped and the system can actually correct it. Can’t backspace… but this is the next best thing.
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Weighed in at 269 pounds today. Not only is that another 10-poound barrier broken, but I’m very close to the 267 I was when I weighed in for anesthesia dosing for my retinal reattachment surgery in October 2012, so I’m close to losing all the weight gained since going blind.
Also, got my Firefox bookmarks down under 800 and have cleared out my YouTube backlog under 100 minutes, with only 1 viddeo under 110 minutes and about a dozen others under 2 hours left… Backlog still has 40-some in the 2-3 hour range and maybe a dozen longer than 3 hoours, but it feels like it wasn’t that long ago my backlog had hundreds in the 1-2 hour range.
Also, my new earphones have shipped.
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I finally have separate brushes for my clown makeup colors. No matter how much I was washing the old brushes, the colors kept bleeding. Now I will have precise colors for my face.
EDIT: Might be worth clarifying the word “clown” here. The face paint is done for videos and it’s deeply inspired by clowns, but I’m not sure if many would say it qualifies.
In case it does, I’ve also blurred the image for anyone with a fear of clowns.
Image description: A woman looking up at the camera, smiling softly. Her reddish-brown hair is tied into long pigtails, behind her large gaming headphones. Her face is painted with a stark, black-and-white skull pattern with harsh angles. The skull design omits the lower jaw, covering her lower face with black, which runs down her jawline and neck, ending in faded streaks near her shoulders. A polygonal band of light blue spans both eye sockets, coloring the upper nose bridge. Her upper cheeks and the tip of her nose are painted reddish-pink with angular bands, shaped like metal plates. A black square covers the middle of her nose bridge, between the pink and blue. She has black lipstick and eyeliner, and black dashes above eyebrows, resembling small heat vents. Her teeth are painted stark-white, to match the white face paint.
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And I’m really happy with/about it!
I did what I could today on social media to support Count Binface in the Clacton by-election. Without going into too much detail, it’s kind of a big deal in the UK at the moment.
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Oh, Lord Buckethead! I saw him on John Oliver.
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