Made the visual map of my SpringThing game, which means I know where the actual walls are placed around the rooms, finally!
Why does this matter?
Because my sound propagation system allows for loud sounds to travel through walls, and hint the player on what’s happening in nearby rooms! So now I know what walls go between what rooms for this mechanic!
Ugh
Feels good to finally get that done!!
>GLUE EGG CARTONS TO WALL
“The room is now sufficiently soundproofed to prevent loud sounds propagating to nearby rooms.”
----with a *poof* Joey disappears into another implementing frenzy---- 
So…there actually are insulated walls and rooms in the game! Which is both a curse and a blessing. You can do anything in them (and not be heard outside), but if someone is poking around nearby, you’ll never hear it!
Also, fun fact I have discovered: the egg carton or foam padding trick mostly helps with sound absorption, and not sound proofing.
Things you learn by trial and error as a metal singer in an apartment…
The sound still travels through the wall (dampened, of course), but it mostly doesn’t bounce or echo. Sound proofing usually requires pulling a vacuum inside the walls to prevent any vibration between materials. Anything else is apparently called “sound treating”.
There was one song in particular where I knew I was gonna have to be very loud, so I had put a bed mattress on a couch, and stuffed extra cushions in the front to effectively make a long mattress tunnel with a hole on one end and a pillow capping the other. I put the mic on the far end to prevent peaking, and recorded some takes.
Found out later I could still be heard down the stairs. The cushions helped, of course, but the hole I put my head in wasn’t perfectly sealed, so the vibrating air could still escape, even if it wasn’t bouncing off the cushions.
EDIT: If you do check out the song, the vocal recording in question happens at 1:51
Jinx made the coolest thing- it’s a character page for our meowmeows in the Butterfly Court TTRPG, (we haven’t played a session yet but we’ve been having a lot of fun brainstorming and crafting our little guys), which is very pretty and well laid out and decked out with a lovely colour selection as usual- but there’s a Google Sheets where any of us can edit stuff in and it like, updates into the actual page. Technowizardry!
I still need to fill in the stuff for my meows once I take a moment to familiarize myself with what cells do what, (from a quick glance it’s quite straightforward, I just struggle to read graphs and spreadsheets because of my dyscalculia) but I’m excited, I’ve loved reading over the stuff Jinx and Autumn have added already.
I always forget that you’re a metal singer. I mean, in theory, I know what you look like from having shared selfies, but in my head when I picture Joey it looks more like a vaguely smudgy light blue and white figure, and for fashion if I had to pick an outfit I think you would like if I was in the store or whatever, I think of like, a white peasant blouse with tan eyelets, and a black maxi wraparound skirt with a daisy floral motif. The dark purple lipstick (think a black liquid lip with a purple iridescence shimmer gloss flecked over it) is kind of at odds with the like, look, but I guess it’s because I have a difficult time imagining you in anything other than chunky Doc Martens and those go hand in hand with alternative makeup.
It does line up neatly with my experience that people who are into more alternative music (especially the loud screamy fork in a grinder or like statick-y noise stuff) tend to be really chill and nice meowmeows, though.
To be fair, though, I don’t really write metal music, so that might be what’s throwing you off. I actually don’t know what to call the instrumental side of my songs; I just look for opportunities to shout and do fry-screaming. As a result: I just happen to be a metal vocalist, lol.
Yeah, my ideal personal aesthetic is something like…
…but, of course, achieving this is a very different challenge, especially when I usually dress for sensory comfort so I can get tasks done.
(Adds plan to record a fork in a grinder and try to make a potential song out of it)
There was that one time where I recorded my dad’s computer fan and used it as an instrument, lol…
The city is swamped by snow and it’s destroyed local infrastructure. A lovely girl called an uber and we took it home together, she told me to get home safe. Scraggly babymeowmeows at the bus stop…
Haha “Technowizard” is my new favourite title! Brb, going to put that on my resume. 
I’m also looking forward to our Session 0 of Butterfly Court and all the chaos it promises. Figuring out how the spreadsheet link to the final page works was really satisfying - I think it pleases my perpetual inner student when I read documentation/code from strange shores and actually understand it. 
What a thrill!
I unloaded, cleaned and rearranged this entire 6’ bookcase that had been serving mainly as a dumping spot for junk I didn’t want to think about anymore. The bottom shelves had like a good eighth-inch of dust on them.
I love the Bioshock action figure! Slightly sad that the only book I can identify is the Bible. Bookshelf snooping foiled by insufficient resolution.
Ha, I was doing the same! I also made out Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, a bartending guide, and something that looks something like “Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things.”
I think I see On Metamagic by Marc Blank, Total Control by A. Schultz, Legends by P.D. Lebling, Recent Experiments in Networked Scrying by X. Aquillion and Exothermic Spellcasting by J. Lautzenheiser, but it may just be that I’ve been playing too much Scroll Thief.
The SeedComp is wrapping up. It’s is so exciting to see the fruits of this jam, which was just organised on the fly less than 3 months ago.
A dozen of new games to play 
I almost had a mini heart attack.
I thought I had missed a major use case in my parkour system. If I had to do another rewrite, I was going to drop out of the competition. I am going to need every single remaining day.
Nope. All good. Past-me already thought of this case and offered plenty of room for it. All good.
Whew!
I cried oodles while playing Amanda’s Seedcomp game that used my poem and some lovely music as inspiration. Finally remembered to book a private study room on campus to get my online appointments done for the next few weeks. I had a good time writing with Jinx last night- Esme and Enoch’s interactions are so cute, Zeke is the best wingkitty ever. And I loved reading the drabble between Taran and Esme snarking! Fixed up my manicure hurriedly, so I at least look somewhat presentable, even if when you look too closely, the colour matching is a bit off. Thinking of doing something nice (and kind of brave) for myself today, I also booked a private room in the evening to unwind some on campus before heading back. Need some space to clear my head. The library is a good a spot as any to do that.
My sweet old landlord just popped by to give me a birthday cake today (a chocolate one, my fav) and kept apologising for doing it a day too early because his Purim celebration starts tomorrow and he won’t be around then. He’s such a sweetheart!
I just can’t write nice happy things. Everything’s got to be a downer. Sorry about that.
Nooo, don’t be sorry! It was a good sort of cry, like after you read a novel that’s wrapped up perfectly and you’re just sort of left with the ache of it being finished and there’s no more left, but it was a lovely little treat. I’m a big crier anyways- whenever I’m overwhelmed with emotion, joy, sorrow, anger- the whole gamut. It was a really good game! I loved it.
I’ve been using my Covid-time wisely. Aside from watching a ton of horror films, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Demon Copperhead, and realized partway through that it’s a retelling of David Copperfield. So now I’m re-reading the Dickens, since it’s been 25 years since I last read it. It’s a truly satisfying experience to read these back-to-back. The last time I did something like that was with @jnelson 's book A Man Named Baskerville, which told the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles from the point of view of of the villain. I absolutely love good retellings of classic stories.
