p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l |
22:33:44
(30 Jun 2021 at 18:36) |
Here I am again! I was going to say that month went by quickly, but when I re-read last month's post it seems like ages ago.
We drove the car on a road trip; other than when I drove twice to West Virginia in a Zipcar to get vaccinated this was my only time significantly far from my house in a year, so that was kind of weird, but good. Still trying to stay outdoors or masked if around potentially unvaccinated people. The main event was to go to southern Connecticut to visit my family, since there is a new nephew (1 year old!) since last we met, and the other nieces and nephews have also grown at least a year, which is a lot for kids. They were excited to show me their video games, and I was excited to show them some science stuff (turns out you can get perfectly decent handheld microscopes for less than $20, which were a hit with the kids, at least for a few minutes), and the siblings were excited to drink beer together. We even got some real New Haven pizza, which is the main reason that most people would consider going to Connecticut. Driving straight through takes over eight hours, which is doable but very tedious, and I'm trying to get in a mindset of not hating driving so much (I mean the act of driving; I don't think I'll ever really "like" the idea of driving, especially the obsession with car infrastructure in cities), so we stopped "on the way" in Watkins Glen, which is in the Finger Lakes. I can recommend this place for a day, especially the state park. It's this mile-long gorge that has stone walkways and bridges and caves built into it where you go up the spiral stairs and emerge behind the waterfall that spills into the giant basin, and then you keep going and again there's another better waterfall that you could just slip and fall into, and soon you are just so completely over waterfalls, not like in a bad way, but say where you feel judgey if you see anybody take a photograph, because like, come on, there are SO many waterfalls. Aside from its many wineries and beereries, I discovered that this town has some kind of car racing history, and if you pay them $30 they let you drive around their race track, so I did that also in the spirit of trying to hate driving less. That is definitely more fun than driving on the highway.
Still working on the Pac Tom endgame, which I have done some significant construction on, although I made one discouraging mistake that set me back a bit. The main problem is that to finish the project and the filming, I need a decent weekend (like: not on a road trip, not hosting visitor, not 95°F, not raining) and these have not been forthcoming. I did a redesign of the Buffer Override UI for Destroy FX (mostly because the current one is so dang tiny) but it's not quite ready to share. Part of that was distracting myself by using my newly minted abilities of generating TTFs to make some bitmap fonts for this project, instead of clicking the pixels by hand (??), which I am pretty efficient at, but jeez. I've been using Aseprite as discussed in the previous post, for both the UI work and the fonting. I do like it, although its similarity to Photoshop keys/behavior does put a spotlight on some of the things I expect to be there but aren't (say, holding shift when drawing with the pencil to constrain it to a straight line). It's great to be able to write scripts, though, and have native support for animation!
I finished Project Hail Mary and I think I basically liked it; a few things fell better into place than I was expecting, or at least it didn't fall apart like the (somewhat similar) "Seveneves" did. By the way I always pronounce that Se-VEN-eh-vess. Now I'm reading The Utopia of Rules which isn't what I was expecting but is interesting, and in some Wikipedia rabbit hole (I think it was about cryogenic brain preservation) I was reminded of how much I like Nick Bostrom's brand of bonkers but nonetheless hard-to-refute writing, and so I have been catching up on some of his papers since I last thought about that guy. I did in fact finish the game Caveblazers (it's no Spelunky or Isaac but it was a very solid Roguelike) in time to pick up Nifflas's new Ynglet. I think Nifflas made some of the best indie "Metroidvanias" out there, with the creative movement and clever hidden challenges, and I was sort of expecting this one to be in that vein. It's not, but it was a very good short game anyway, with a really cool presentation style and vibe. Then I finished Slime Rancher too (charming), and now I am on to Outbuddies DX (I expect to finish it, but I think it has too many rough edges to recommend). |  |
|
| FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER |
> The main problem is that to finish the project and the filming, I need a decent weekend (like: not on a road trip, not hosting visitor, not 95°F, not raining) and these have *not* been forthcoming.
Does this mean that's you're basically done with the costume? Great!
|
| This is entirely unrelated to this post but I just wanted to tell you that all the images and download links on your fonts page are broken (404) |
| Anon: Thx! I was sure I tested it but I maybe have changed something afterwards. Should be fixed now! |
| jonas: I sure made it sound like that, huh? It is well underway although I did make a mistake in the design (isn't this what CAD is supposed to prevent??) that was a bit discouraging, but correctable. It is still true that I can probably get this done in a weekend if I just stop getting distracted (: |
| Well, I did also consider the possibility that rather than using cake, which you can bake in advance and store for weeks, your costume includes something more perishable so you need to do most of the setup on the dawn of the race. |
|
|
|
|