I ran across this cute little song I liked (and like!) a lot, it’s called ‘I Knead You.’
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I love rocks. I frequently suggest just plain old rocks when someone asks about gifts. Any cool rock off the ground will do.
Geology was my favorite class in college. 
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When I was a little kid, apparently I used to take ages to walk home from school because I’d meander around, contemplatively picking up this rock or that- whenever it came time to washing my jacket or backpack or jeans, the pockets would be stuffed full with months worth of rock hunting. It’s the best part of going to the beach- diving into the stirred up water to pluck up wet handfuls of sand and sift through them for the best bits.
It made me laugh when my younger brother crowed proudly about his own cool rocks, and how he’s started up his own little collection- it reminded me of being that small and that excited to show them off: it’s a great activity to do on our nature walks or visits to the park, looking for cool rocks. He likes very smooth, flat skipping rocks, or else rocks with little sparkly flecks and interestingly rounded off textures. Of course: he has the benefit of being able to hand them over to his older sister when he doesn’t feel like carrying the weight of them home, though he does like to put the smaller ones into an empty waterbottle for safe keeping and shake them absently to make noise on the way back through the trails.
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I forgot we still had some gingerbread thins cookies lying around and I have a yummy little kitty treatie for our TTRPG session!
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Today Venice turns (supposedly) 1602 years old. Happy birthday Venice! 
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my parents have some home movies of me as a child emptying rocks from my pockets into the sink and washing them carefully. I had plastic bins around the house full of rocks that my parents would surreptitiously empty outside when it got to be too much. the benefits of a rock are many: multi-purpose, interesting texture, difficult to break (and if broken, becomes a new toy).
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Professor Oggla Olduvai of the Department for Futuristic Technologies lecturing her students.
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Nice! I love playing with stuff like that and look forward to see what you do.
Twine is an ideal solution to make a hypertext “invisiclues” style supplement to another type of game.
My original concept for CPOS
was that the player would need switch between parser and choice whilst chasing the pickle down, but on pitch got feedback that it would throw roadblocks (like that game doesn’t have roadblocks) and it would be better to make the parser elements optional and not required to complete the story.
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Yearly summit with the house centipede: Had a short bit of a shower together before mutually deciding that it was a beautiful day and it might enjoy EXT. APT ENVIRONS NEAR WOODS - DAY more effectually than my bathtub.
Shower briefly recessed for never-fail (yet) dual-cup catch and release, then shower resumed normally. Centipede proved more chill than the legendary wolf spider of '02.
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My sister wanted to get into IF after learning about SpringThing. Parser games apparently were a bit paralyzing, so I sent her @zarf’s quick guide to parser IF, and she’s like “Oooohhhhhh! I see now!”
So now she’s excitedly set on trying Lost Pig, The Dreamhold, and a few other titles!
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Wait, am I hallucinating or wasn’t there actually a parser component to it in the final version? I feel like it either started or ended with a short Inform 7 game… Now that I go back to it, it seems like it doesn’t start that way so maybe I am hallucinating?
On topic: I had a work event today, which yes, was a work thing on a Sunday, but it was actually really fun (it was a combination dance performance/panel discussion/music show thing) and I caught up with a bunch of friends and former colleagues I haven’t seen in a while (some since before the pandemic!) So really enjoyed that.
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Had some very delicious chocolate shortbreads earlier today, and recently discovered a new show to suck up all my spare thoughts on historical costuming and the intimacy nuances that English naming conventions simply don’t have. (Detective Anna/Анна-детективъ for the curious and/or those with similarly spare mental space.)
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End of 19th century historical setting, Russian snow, supernatural sleuthing?
Darling, you had me at hello.
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“Well, everyone knows Anna Karenina jumped in front of a train and didn’t live on to solve supernatural mysteries. What this show presupposes is… maybe she didn’t?”
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The hooks are top tier! I’ve binged it a bit - started two days ago and on episode 9 now 
Enjoy the spooky sleuthing!
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The magpies’ nest blew away in a strong gale last week. That was sad.
But the birds haven’t lost hope it seems. They hung around by the same tree for a few days and now they’ve started building a new nest in a forked branch closer to the trunk.
I think it’s a trade-off between stability and safety. Their first nest was way out on a wavy branch. Far out of reach of any enemies but vulnerable to gusts of wind. The new one might be a bit easier for predators to get at, but it’s better fastened to the tree.
I’m rooting for them. I hope it’s not too late in the season to try for a new nest of eggs…
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Yesterday I went to see a play for the first time in years! Since the theater was out of town, we made it a whole day thing, with going to a nice lunch and visited the town (Eurydice (Ruhl play) - Wikipedia) It was pretty cool.
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There! I just spent the past half hour adding “parser”-tags on IFDB. I pulled up the alphabetised browsing list and started scanning for games I played or was 100% certain were indeed parsers. I think I added about 40 tags, bringing the total up to something like 840.
Let that sink in. 840 parser games? In the entire IFDB? I see a lot more of these tagging sessions in my future.
Fortunately, this is also a great way to find obscure games with promising titles and/or blurbs.
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Got to fire off a reply for an out and out villain in our campaign. I do love writing my morally grey little meowmeows who are tormented between love and duty, and those that cling to concepts like noblesse oblige and religious tenements to guide themselves- but there is something so perfectly delightful about writing a man who is terribly bad and pleased with it. And he’s a smiley little meow while doing it! Sure, it’s for the empire, and sure, it’s in a sense tied back to his familial obligations, but he certainly does have a lot of fun while at it. Horrible little man. (Picture me picking him up with a pair of BBQ tongs and putting him into a jam jar for containment.)
On a related note, I wanted to share two of my favourite quotes from Enoch (the nicer meow) and his brother Gideon (mean little meowmeow.) Character foiling and contrasting is super fun, and I like bashing together the puzzle blocks of the friction between obligations to family and personal desire.
“He has someone else to live for. He has someone he needs to set the example for. Loving someone is protecting them from what they want. […] He has to think outside of himself. Fatherhood changes you. It should.”
"Don’t look at me like that.” He says to Enoch, still smiling. He hasn’t stopped smiling this whole tirade. “This is for your good as much as anything else. This is what happens when you forget yourself,” he says, voice sweet.
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I’ve been trying my hand at writing (again) lately. The reason that I stopped was because somewhere down the line, due to life events but mostly my own mental state, I started to use it to vent rather than to create — and it was like I was just feeding my negative thoughts rather than releasing or finding any solutions to them, which always left me in a rather bad sort of state after writing. So I stopped, was waylaid by other commitments, not all of them healthy. I’ve tried on-and-off to get back into writing over the last few years, and most of them have ended in failure.
Recently, though, I’ve been seeing some progress. I’ve noticed that I write and work through things the best when I’m happy, which might seem unsustainable, that my productivity depends on my emotional state. I don’t know, but I’m trying to identify and work through some issues, change my habits and outlook on certain things, so that I can hopefully create peacefully in the future.
Writing has for years been very painful for me to even do, so to have gotten to a point where I can try and confront that block is pretty important to me. I’ve been trying to keep good things in mind when I write, so I don’t get all melodramatic and insipid with my words and so that I can actually try to write what I want to write.
Sorry if this was a bit heavy 
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