Promiseland

[Fetian]

Oh damn are the vlogbrothers finally captioning their videos? I have been judging them for not doing so for a very long time, now, they definitely can afford it

[Fetian]

I've been concerned about Cael's weight, so I've been restricting his food a little more (he is getting an eighth of a cup less food overnight), which of course means he has been making a nuisance of himself all morning and I've been awake since 7:30 AM or so

[Fetian]

There's rumblings that google is going to start cracking down on people using docs to store/share writing that features sex or violence (but, let's be real, it's just the sex they care about) -- their terms of service do disallow that, though include an exception for "artistic" works. There's legal precedent that the difference between porn and erotica is that erotica has artistic merit, but no one getting hit by this is going to be able to take fuckin' google to court, so it doesn't matter what the law says, and because it's google there's going to be no way to appeal it anyway. I'd worry that they're gearing up to start having an LLM scan all documents stored on their servers and flag anything salacious it finds, and if that is the case then we're going to be hearing about a lot of these cases soon.

So last night I downloaded everything I had in my google drive and then deleted basically all of it.

 
Today I need to change the litter in one of the cats' litterboxes, and I need to do homework. Sor is visiting next month, so I also need to clean up my room, and I'm also working on fixing up an epub of a book they wanted for them. And I'm still working through the Inform docs.

I should also get outside, do some gardening, get some sun, but ehhhhhhhhh.

[Fetian]

It's worth saying that the actual cause of the one (1) instance we currently have of this happening is most likely that someone with a grudge reported the person with the erotica, as really often happens these days. But I'm taking a 'better safe' stance because I don't want to lose my gmail inbox

[Fetian]

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[Fetian]

Skipping ahead on Inform reading a bit and reading documentation for the Vorple interpreter -- this is a set of extensions for Inform that lets you output the game as an HTML file and play it in-browser, as well as plug in CSS/JS/HTML code and have it render in-browser

I'm thinking that I'm going to write R&DM -- the game ash and I are working on together -- in Inform, and have already started a sort of code-mockup for it. I have a pretty clear idea of what I want the game to look like, utilising ash's collage art, making a sort of hybrid point-and-click/text-adventure with Harvester's dialogue system (a set of keywords you can click on to ask the NPC about x, but also a text input to type in a keyword if it's not in the list). It'll also be easy enough to make the game strip all of that out and just output a standard IF text-adventure, which is useful for accessibility reasons but also very useful for testing. On the other hand it does complicate testing in having to test everything twice, but what can ya do.

I do also still want to make a Too-Longing Workshop game, but for that one I want to get through all the documentation so I know what's possible before I decide what I want to do in it. With R&DM, I know what I want to do, and need to read up ways to make those things possible -- though for the most part, I already know how to do them. I think later I'll write up an outline for a minimum-viable-product and see about cobbling it together

I do have some concerns about lag and such, because I keep running into 'this process can slow things down' and the game I have in mind is quite large and robust, to say the least, but the only way to see how it goes is to see how it goes.

[Fetian]

Summarizing the information in Inform's documentation both for ease of future reference and to make sure I understand what I'm reading as I plow through this

Chapter 1: Welcome to Inform
-Information on how to use the IDE, the different functions of the different tabs/pages. Notable: The Index lists all objects that exist in the game, organized by type, including a map of the world; the Skein is a web of every action taken in testing -- note also that the Skein holds onto actions even if parts of the game have been deleted, note also that it does not include automatically-produced actions (eg through 'test me' commands)

Chapter 2: The Source Text
-A gist of the programming language; verbs, nouns, prepositions, how to put them together in a way the computer understands. Best practices to make finding and fixing bugs easier for you when they start popping up (include headers, so the IDE will point to them when it reports a bug). How to install extensions, some settings options and "use options", how to create an options.txt file that will load certain settings and commands automatically in every game file (somewhat confusingly, instructions are located in 2.13 Administering Classroom Use)

Chapter 3: Things
-Nouns and their properties, creating custom properties; properties inherent to certain types of noun and the limits to which you can mess with those properties

Chapter 4: Kinds
-Creating and referring to categories of noun; setting default values; (frankly largely a continuation of Chapter 3)

Chapter 5: Text
-Substituting and formatting text

Chapter 6: Descriptions
-Adjectives, how they interact with nouns and each other, how to use them to point to specific groups of nouns

Chapter 7: Basic Actions
-Verbs, specifically of the kinds made by the player; how to change how the game reacts to them, how to get a little complicated with them

[Fetian]

OOF

That homework took like two hours to do. Writing out fifteen kanji twenty times each, then some translation exercises for time references, frequency adverbs, and making requests. Continuing to regret my decision to write out some words in kanji!

But it is done. And no class on monday due to the holiday, so I can continue to not get as much input and guidance as I need! Yay.

[Fetian]

It does Not help that I'm very out of hyperfocus for Japanese and language learning now

[Fetian]

I was up late last night working on this -- I wanted to get more done but ended up running out of steam, and running into issues that I don't know enough to fix. As you get into it it becomes clear how rough it still is, but there are a few neat tricks in its code.

Still a lot to learn and a lot to do