Tiny kitties are good for a positive day!
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Finally finished up the game that I started last night! The Goncharov Girlies are now free of the hell that is me liveblogging the experience to them, interspersed with quotes and little kitty GIFs. Total playtime was about 5 hours or so? Totally worth it. Can’t wait to see the rest of it released, since it was a demo… Uncle Luka is my favourite little meowmeow from the game, but Ash is sooooooooo cute.
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My niece and I played around with Inklewriter so she can start making some games. She has written hundreds of pages of novels (regrettably this was mostly Warrior Cats fanfic for years, but recently she has made her own very complex fantasy world), a musical based on her fantasy world, and hundreds of illustrations. And she wants to turn all this into a game, too. We had a really fun time co-writing a little test game and she’s really excited about writing IF. Thanks to @JoshGrams for the advice to go with Inklewriter-- it’s perfect for a youngster just getting started.
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Nuri the kitten is one of my favourite channels on Youtube, and a friend of mine has recently gotten really into watching and sharing the video of his they’re watching of the day with us too, it’s very endearing. I’ve been pretty sleepy lately, but trying to stave it off to get some writing done- Nuri is very relatable in this video!
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I chipped the nail polish on my hand, and I actually really love the contrast of the mauvey pink in matte against the super high sparkle druzy-esque warm purple nails. Might do the same thing to the other hand to match statement nails. Debating adding sparkles… We’ll see. Very happy with the various colors I can get with the sheen of the purple tone I have and the pink tinted sparkles topper.
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Filled up my fountain pen with a new ink and holy nib, the SHEEN!
I generally enjoy planning out IF notes by hand, but doing it with something that makes me feel like a fancy wizard definitely amps it up to the next level.
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Woo! Glad that worked out.
We have internet back after it being out since Thursday evening… I got quite a lot of stuff done over the long weekend and now I’m catching up on the distractions, heh. Aaand, yeah. I should go get some outside work done while the weather’s so nice: it’s supposed to snow a bit tonight and then again all day Thursday.
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I got my anniversary badge!!! I’ve never been on a forum this long before! You people are wonderful!!
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I love this picture!! Thank you!!! Accurate depiction of me, lol!
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Decided that it might do me some good to read, as well as having recently played some IF games. I’ve picked up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and a line stood out to me that I wanted to share: “So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”
(Also drinking an iced Rootbeer. That’s a rare treat!)
ETA: Finished the book in about 2 hours. Not sure how to feel about it. Another line that stuck out to me was: “Love is never any better than the lover.”
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Yesterday the library was closed, today it was completely full… Sigh
But I’m glad I added a good 1k words to my SeedComp! entry. I’ve introduced more or less the mystery and problematique. Still have to write a tad more descriptions before we get to the exploration/investigation.
The only problem is I keep adding sub branches for responses to add more options for the players, when I should be focusing on the main arch…
I think Scene 3 will have to be yanked out to meet the deadline… Oh welll…
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I’ve spent the last few years working on a way to look up cuneiform signs, which is a serious issue when you’re studying ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets—there’s no alphabetical order to help you find the right page of the dictionary, after all, so the best experts can recommend is just flipping through one page at a time.
Well, my search system works, but the user interface was causing some problems. So a couple hours of work today brings me to this:
And I think this is going to be a game-changer in terms of how easy it is for students to use. The search system is the real technological breakthrough here, but most people won’t care if they don’t know how to use it!
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So, who was gonna tell me that this was Daniel’s field of study?
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Turns out the ungodly wailing, rolling, whooshing, crunching, and grinding noises are not in fact ululating aliens landing their hovercraft, but are snow plows addressing the huge storm that swept over the city. Lovely to know before I tuck in for the night.
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Well, to be precise I do more with ancient Anatolian clay tablets: I got into cuneiform through Hittite. But yeah! My specialty is using technology to analyze ancient languages and writing systems in new ways; my first publication was about using information theory to figure out how fast or slow ancient Romans would have spoken, and now I’m working on better ways to teach cuneiform.
It’s a partially logographic writing system (signs can be used to stand for words instead of sounds), which means there are a ton of signs to learn—and if you come across an unrecognized sign rather than an unrecognized word, it’s a royal pain to find it in a dictionary! (For the CS-inclined, there’s no total ordering on signs, so finding a particular sign in the dictionary takes O(n) time instead of O(log n): you have to use a linear search instead of a binary search. And for a human, O(n) is a long time!)
But I figured out a new way to represent parts of signs (again for the CS-inclined: a tree where the leaves are strokes and the branches are relationships between components), and to check whether a sign contains a given part. Which means the computer can now do that O(n) search instead of the human, comparing the part you typed against every sign in the dictionary in a fraction of a second.
The big difficulty so far has been teaching people to type in these sign parts, which takes some getting used to. Experiments suggest that students are faster when using my tool instead of a traditional dictionary, but they’re less certain in their judgements. Now, they can just draw the component, instead of having to type it!
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I’ve been having so much fun playing A Tale of Crowns. Thanks to Manon for suggesting it- it pretty deftly handles worldbuilding and is lighter on the info dumps about politics- all of the love interests in the game are really appealing, but I think I might romance the sorcerer. I was thrilled when I saw their designs! The emphasis on a council advising the crown isn’t something I’ve really seen handled for as long in other similar games, so it’s been neat.
The character traits tracking is also fun- I love being a nice little meowmeow when I get the chance: I liked Lu a lot from Wayfarer, but my save didn’t work and with the random skill checks it’s too much of a pain to speedrun back to where I was with the Imperial mage and her ship, even if Aeran was such a delight- that scene where he reached out to brush your fingertips together in the face of death… And how wonderfully crafted the diplomatic conversation with Lu’s mum was when you convinced her to give up the chalice by appealing to her sensibilities as a mum concerned about the kids as someone who was also nice to the babymeows… So good.
Anyways, the IF girlies on Tumblr continue to amaze. And I’m getting chocolate chip cookies!
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A Tale of Crowns might legitimately be the first long form IF game I replay multiple times just to explore the different romance routes. I’m usually very adamant once I’ve selected a meowmeow in these kinds of games- but they’re all so intriguing, and I desperately want to know more.
Especially with that brief scene between your meow and the scampish rogue saying not to make him into something he isn’t (a gentler meow than he portrays himself to be.) I do think that playing games with fresh eyes and not trying to follow a walk through yields the best ‘true’ playthrough initially- way more immersive.
I do think the sorcerer was a good choice for a true route for myself because I’m a total sucker for a gentle lover and the trope of two babymeows forging their way to power side by side, hand in hand- but also oh my God, the sheer romance some of his scenes with you radiate. I’ve been tormenting the Gonch Girlies with screen caps.
Also, here are my character traits once locked in:
ETA: Finished up all 9 chapters of the demo. That was a pleasant ride.
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It snowed in the Oakland Hills today, which I’m not sure is positive given that, uh, the unusually inclement weather knocked out my power for a bit, but you know, it’s cool. Something to talk about. I wouldn’t want it to be this cold and windy all the time but once a year is nifty.
Twice would probably be annoying, and thrice vexing, but once is novel and fun.
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