7/13/2020

Yesterday I finally finished reading through the Procedural Storytelling in Game Design text.

The book

It was mostly very good. Some chapters had more insights than others and were more interesting and, well, since it's a collection and not a coordinated single text there ends up being almost a bit of redundancy by the end where you realize multiple people have all given similar advice. On the other hand, if you look at it as less of a textbook and more of a collection of experience reports for cutting edge procgen then I guess the agreement is, in and of itself, an important bit of data.

I've also been able to do at least a little bit of my job, lately. Namely, I'm planning out both distance learning courses and how to build-out small community makerspaces. There's going to be a lot of tough questions about how we can do this safely. I'll be damned if I have good answers yet. We're trying though.

Honestly, it hits me sometimes that we haven't even begun to feel the real impact of covid here in the US. Yes, I say that knowing we've had 130k people die in the past few months. I'm scared of the what the economic turndown combined with "disaster capitalism" as Naomi Klein used to describe it are going to create if we're not careful. The recovery from the '08 crash created a new underclass of gig-workers and centralized power in the hands of even fewer companies, leaving us with even less control of the world around us than we had before. I don't want the '20 crash to be more of the same.

In lighter news

I went to the park with T that night. We took photos, talked, acted silly, and I cried a lot as I finally said out loud how bad my depression has been since grad school.

...look I said light-er not light.

Game jam??

God so I really was going to work on this gamejam game but, ugh, I can't actually compile a recent version of TIC-80 on either computer a n d the 0.70.6 release that's available pre-compiled is unstable on desktop.

I'm so frustrated.

7/14/2020

I spent basically the whole day, except for a work call, wrestling with my rpi3 and trying to get raspberry pi os back on it, get a domain name, set up a gemini server &c.

Here it is though!

I felt like a ridiculous comedy of errors for most of the day, as I dealt with hardware and software failures out the wazoo. But! Everything actually seems to be okay now. Heck, I even had to learn & relearn some sysadmin tricks so that I could get everything working nice and easy on my little baby rpi.

Dear reader, I don't know if it's obvious but I'm exhausted to the point of silly writing this. I just didn't want to go two days in a row without writing on this blog. It's like a d&d group: you miss once you're fine, you miss twice and you'll never do it again.

At some point I'll respond to all the good responses that have been happening around what the small internet is & should be, but that's unfortunately not tonight.

Oh! I will say in response to an acdw post

Post about pens

that you are, in fact, not the only fountain pen nerd in this little community! I have a couple of jin-hao 450s, a twsbi eco, a twsbi go, a pilot metro in italic, a muji pen, and a moonman m2. All of them gifts over the last few years.

So, if you're reading this, take care of yourself as best you can. It's practically an act of revolution these days to care for yourself and loved ones.