Do you ever also get passing thoughts about what you would do if you suddenly found yourself in a zombie apocalypse? I’ve been making a game out of how quickly (and quietly) I can scale up the stairs in the apartment- they’re quite loud, but tightly pivoting around the corners of the stairs and stepping up as quietly as I can makes it a lot more fun.
I also was grabbing a snack out of my backpack and thought to myself I’d be okay if I ever got stuck in an elevator, because a sickeningly long moment passed earlier today where it rattled and whooshed and whirred but didn’t open up on the floor- I usually carry 1.5L of water on my person everywhere I go, and I have some snacks: granola bars mostly, a bit of chocolate, and I even have a bottle of painkillers I keep on my person. I could definitely dump a lot of items for weight, but it’s a nice thought to preoccupy myself with when I’m bored on the bus or the walk home.
If it’s cold enough to wear my mittens, then I sing little silly songs to myself while I’m speedwalking at night- stuff that rhymes mostly, like: ‘silly baby kittens wearing itty bitty mittens,’ but I always find the in-betweens of life really boring, since I can’t preoccupy myself with music or podcasts or phonegames (I want to keep alert with regards to my surroundings at all times), and thinking of little games like that is a fun distraction.
Today’s episode of Picard was another good old-fashioned Star Trek happiness, with an appearance by one of my favorite long-lost TNG characters: Ro Laren.
Rovarsson sent me a lovely message earlier, but I keep giggling about the mousebites bit because I do take silly little bites especially when I’m mindblown by how good something is and want to prolong the eating experience, like with that cannoli recently. It makes me think of like a tiny harvest mouse with a flowercup for a hat eating teeny tiny little nibbles out of a strawberry.
First time photographing the night sky with a DSLR camera today! Granted, I had many restrictions, such as having to shoot indoors and therefore through the window (I pulled the top cover down to expose as much of the sky as I could — which wasn’t a lot, really), as well as a lack of equipment (literally — it was just me, a Canon 600D, and a smartphone tripod, of all things, repurposed on the spot to hold the DSLR), but it was still very exciting to finally see more stars than I had so far with the naked eye / an iPhone. So that’s a good thing that happened today!
P.S. I encourage anyone living in the suburbs or less light-polluted areas to look up! The night sky is astounding. You don’t have to pursue it as a hobby if you don’t want to, just looking up from time to time and experiencing the joy of seeing stars in the dark skies above here and now is, for example, for me, something I find very therapeutic and inspiring. Even if you live in the city — on nights when the moon is dark and there’s presumably less light traffic in the skies, you’re likely able to see at least the brightest planets (Venus, Jupiter, Mars) and stars. Give it a try, you never know!
Sounds like you got half the map for your first parser-maze laid out for you in real life!
EDIT: actually, your whole university building sounds like a great convoluted parser setting. It’s been done to great effect here: Return to Ditch Day - Details (ifdb.org)
A marvelous sight indeed. An ordinary pair of binoculars will also bring unseen stars, faraway planets or details on the moon’s surface much closer than you’d expect.
I still prefer just lying on my back and staring up through unaided eyes.
So we have a little farm in Maine, and we used to take in farm volunteers from all over the place: one of my favorite stories from that is we had these two 18-year-old girls, best friends from Baltimore. They’d never been significantly out of the city. And in the summer here it doesn’t get dark until pretty late, and people are tired from the farm work, so we don’t see the night sky much.
But we try to get people off the farm occasionally, so we had gone in to the little local contradance. We were driving back around 10:30-11, driving along Route 2 where there’s no street lights, all the windows open, no other cars around. They were both in the back seat, all quiet; I thought they were dozing off, honestly.
Then suddenly one of them throws herself halfway out the window: “OH MY GOD!” and I’m “oh no, what?” and braking as hard as I dare with her hanging out the window (dammit, I thought you were buckled in) and she’s like “LOOK AT THE SKY!!”
Because we’re out in the middle of nowhere, you can see the milky way and all that. Always fun to see people’s reactions. And that’s one of my favorite parts of winter is that the days are shorter and I’m not in bed by the time it’s dark enough to see the stars.
I’m totally planning on going back down there to more thoroughly explore when I have a better disguise. I can get away with a lot when I’m bumbling around in my usual outfits- (people tend to assume I’m a highschooler on a campus tour, or else just ignore me as another bog standard student meandering about the place, especially if I’m in the fashion building- the pastel pinks and my lavender puffer jacket stand out much less there), but it definitely pings me on most adults radar as Hey, What’s That Kid Doing Here in places that are a bit more questionable for students to roam around.
They’re not explicitly like, illegal, to hang out in, (I don’t go through doors that require scans or have the placard of like STAFF ONLY or RESTRICTED ACCESS since that’s usually leading into machinery stuff like elevator maintenance or construction stuff I’m not qualified to poke around) it’s just a weird spot for students to go to since generally you have better things to do with your time than exploring and rambling around campus. You’re like, allowed to, but why would you? (For the joy of adventure, is why.)
Anyways, the black vintage wool coat I have goes a very long way in looking like a proper lady off on some business, especially with one of my satin headbands and some eyeliner on. If I swapped the backpack out for a purse, (probably not the cute vintage white with pastel floral print, though the messenger bag I have is a bit of a ‘young’ style, it’s in a more grown up colour) I could probably finagle my way into being mistaken for a TA again, and it’s not as odd for them to be in strange corners of the school like random access corridors, lounges, or office blocks, since people assume you’re scrambling around doing peon work for your supervising professor, or whatever. Just need to grab a clipboard or binder that doesn’t have a kitten on it, a few printed pieces of paper and a pen, and you can basically get anywhere you want on campus, especially since people will hold the door open for you if you’re dressed nicely and look like a harried young woman running off late to some meeting.
This also works to an extent with a labcoat depending on what building you’re in, with a set of lab goggles or safety glasses pushed up into your hair- but it’s more likely people will assume I’m a student rather than a TA or lab technician, since my labcoat is really too big on me. I still need to get around to hemming the sleeves… And there’s not that much fun stuff to explore in the science buildings- asides from one nice gender neutral bathroom literally no one knows about that was originally a disabled bathroom and has a lovely counterspace to slap my backpack on top of while putting on earrings.
I just finished up submitting my votes for Seedcomp! Have you? As an extra fun little treat, you’re able to see the anonymized data from other voters after you hit submit- and since it’s such a tight running right now (only like, 3ish votes 3:) you can have a surprising amount of sway over the results. The open response area to plunk free-form responses onto the participants foreheads as stickers was a lot of fun!
wait what? you are? that… shouldn’t be possible
EDIT: nope I had forgotten to toggle off something. You were the last one to see this Soph!
The votes/stickers will be visible in a fancy new excel sheet when we count them all up
Just made a huge step and implemented “Map Mode” to my game, which is a screen-reader friendly tool, which allows the player to move around a simplified version of the game world without spending turns.
I’ve also replaced the GO TO and CONTINUE commands with a “compass”. You set your compass to a desired location with GO TO, and then every time you check your compass, it tells you what direction you should go next, as long as there is a known route that goes there.
The reason why this replaces the standard GO TO system of Adv3Lite is because my parkour system makes the idea of travel connectors really weird. Also, checking your compass does not compel your character to move in the specified direction, which is really important in a game with an active antagonist.
This is also a really big step, because this pathfinding system is streamlined, with the parkour system in mind. That means that my antagonist can now use these systems to track the player down.
I figured out a very silly solution to a problem I was having with a template. Just go at it with a pair of gardening shears and sloppily cut off surface access to what you can’t be fussed with trying to meticulously edit. Yeah, sure, it exists below the surface still, but that’s fine. No one’s going to see it.
I’ve been making it a point to remember to comment my code a bit better, and, uh, well it’s going about as well as you’d expect… But if it works it works!
I also repainted my nails with that base mauve colour (to trap myself at the desk while my nails are wet, since I can type so it doesn’t smudge, but can’t do very much else- like say, lay down in bed on my phone to play kitty cellphone games) and that has worked wonders for my productivity.
As I try to stave off the ever-present 4am dread about my future, I’ve written up another abstract to send to a conference, found information about another conference and a related journal, started making plans to meet with a museum curator about looking at the clay tablet collection…
And on a more fun front, finally got a prototype of a new system working. I can now automatically render cuneiform text into 3d models of tablets for printing. I have no idea what this will be useful for, but I think it’ll be a cool demo to show off. Plus 3d printed models are a lot more durable than actual clay for, like, keychains and such.
I’ve been told my notes are looking increasingly mystical and arcane as I work on this. Just as long as you don’t look too closely and realize this is all freshman-level geometry and trigonometry. Turns out 3d modelling involves a lot of triangles: the most arcane of shapes.
Oh, I also hammered out the character names for one of my WIP projects. The crew’s names—as the protagonist thinks of them, which is not quite correct—are Shimat the captain, Kasap the medic, Ishme the engineer, Bashti the apprentice, Qarrad the gunner, and Udan the cook. The protagonist’s brother is Kiang and the protagonist is Zagin. It helps my immersion a lot to be brainstorming with these instead of what I previously had (Alice, Bob, Claire, Dave, Emma, Fred, Xavier, and You).
Bonus points if you can figure out where all of these come from, though I’m not sure it’s possible in their altered-by-protagonist-perceptions form. I’ll post the full versions later once I’ve found my notes again.
