Re: Promiseland
Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2025 6:02 am
I just noticed the 'last edited' timestamp on this. Brother edited the post but still didn't take out the bit that makes it obviously AI garbage
I just noticed the 'last edited' timestamp on this. Brother edited the post but still didn't take out the bit that makes it obviously AI garbage
The case arrived! It's just a little engraved tin with a foam insert, but it's fun and it'll do the job. Izzy was always my favourite digidestined (if and when I replace the band on the watch I'm also going to get a clasp with the crest of knowledge on it), and this particular tentomon sprite is really cute, so I asked the maker to use that for it. I'm very happy with the result and glad I have a place I can safely keep the DIM cards. I only wish they had labels on the side so I could see which card is which at a glance -- they do make cases with the cards laying flat but obviously you can't fit as many in there, I suppose maybe I'll just white-out the labels onto the sides myself or something.
Been doing a bit of reading for linguistics class but otherwise haven't got much done today. Yesterday, Erika, Dave, and I played Core Keeper for a couple hours, which was a pretty chill time. We've all got pets now! And some cattle (including a couple of giant pillbugs). I mostly did some fishing and wandering around making tunnels, just picking a direction and heading that way until my inventory was full.
Afterwards I ate dinner and watched a few youtubes, and then Dave and I jumped in to Icarus where we enacted our plan of moving base to someplace else. Dave had a place in mind, so he headed off first and I hung back to destroy some stuff we wouldn't need before catching up, in hopes that would be easier on the server, except that I got mauled by a bear. I did eventually also make it to the new base and we started setting up, but my framerate kept skyrocketing to 255ms despite everything we tried to do to fix it, including restarting the server. I tried not to, but obviously continually running into that did kill the vibes a bit, and eventually Dave headed off to bed. While he was gone I still kept losing frames so I did some science and discovered that specifically having the fishing bench on screen was causing me to lag! So I destroyed it and later I'll try building a new one that hopefully will not keep doing that. Once that was gone, I still ran into a few lag issues but not nearly as bad and they all cleared up after a few seconds, so I managed to get a new house built and then I went to bed. I do worry a bit that the location Dave has picked is an issue for me because it's on a cliff overlooking a scenic vista, and it's possible that scenic vistas are too much for the steamdeck to handle.
I'm gonna go continue linguistics study.
I'm waiting for the scandal where it turns out betterhelp has been connecting people to voice-synthesized LLM-generated chatbot "therapists"
Been a tick! I've been busy and low spoons both, so haven't had the brain to keep this updated, but I'm feeling a little better now. Last night in particular I realised "I feel pretty alright", which might have had something to do with getting out of the house for a bit even if it was rainy and just going to a store with ash, so when the rains stop I'm going to try to put effort toward doing that more often. Something that occurred to me might be fun was packing a sketchbook and some pencils onto my bike and just going somewhere and doing some sketches
Anyway, things that I have done! ash and I finished our Steven Universe: Future rewatch, I had about the same opinion of it as I did after the first watch, but ash likes it more now. I do think it works better knowing in advance what it is, it's just that what it is lands a little flat for me. It is good! It's just not as good as Steven Universe (original flavour). The pacing isn't as good, the writing isn't as good, the plots aren't as good -- though if you compare individual episodes to individual episodes it's probably all about on par. Steven Universe (original flavour) had plenty of kind-of-meh episodes, and the main arc for Future (dealing with Steven's trauma) is very good (though I still want him to get therapy). But Future has less room to be amazing, so it doesn't hit that high point.
With that series done we've moved on to continuing the Interview With a Vampire TV series, which is also enjoyable. As I've said I'm mostly into it to see ash's reactions to things and get him to infodump about it, but the show is also fun without that.
When we're not watching things, we've been playing 999 2: Virtue's Last Reward, and I've played enough of the third one now that I can say 2 is my favourite of the three. The plot is bonkers, the characters are fun, they put So Much work into making sure you never have to replay a puzzle room if you don't want to, and it's only insanely frustrating at a couple of points. Its main flaw is that one of the plot threads is cliffhangered to be revealed in the third entry, which ... is ambitious. The third game is, I mean.
Speaking of games, I played Vampire Therapist the past few nights, which is a game in which you are a cowboy vampire who therapises other vampires with CBT techniques (the therapy, not the torture). It's very interesting, very well voice acted and pretty well written, but also extremely buggy and reeks a little bit of being written by the kind of person who elevator pitches a story to you by listing the characters' demographics and a "what more could you need??" It's a bit tumblry, I mean to say. A bit warm and fuzzy, which is weird for a game about mentally ill vampires. It's also extremely linear with no real fail states and forces you into certain actions that frankly a game like this should definitely be giving you the ability to say no to (the player character goes repeatedly to "the kink room" with various other characters, to drink their blood, and the way the game treats these relationships makes me really want to be able to just, not). It's a story, that occasionally stops to quiz you on cognitive distortions. But I did mostly enjoy playing it
On Sunday, ash and I went to the Daiso, as obliquely mentioned above. It was fun, got a number of snacks and a couple of household items, including a little platform with wheels meant to put plant pots on that might work for my trash can? Will find out tomorrow when I take my trash out. And a new toy for the cats, who have been playing with it.
When we got home, we watched Boy and the Heron, which remains good. As I thought might happen, there's a lot more incidental music in the american release than there had been in the japanese, or at least it does compared to my memory of it. It's very interesting! Fascinating how things change for the expectations of the audience. The dub voices were largely good to fine, Robert Pattinson in particular is great, good on him for really putting his whole ass into it. Christian Bale however was hilariously awful? Which I think happens a lot with dads in Ghibli movies for some reason -- they cast the dad as some big name screen actor who has no business doing voice work and they all pull the same quiet stoicism for it. Weirdly Bale could not maintain an accent for this one, which given his usual accent work is just baffling.
Class is going. Last week I needed to read 35 pages of introductory chapters for linguistic textbooks and take a quiz on that, and read another 9 pages of a field linguist's experiences with ethnocentrism, and write a discussion comment answering some questions about that. This was very difficult, largely because the prompt was "compare this author's definition of "ethnocentrism" with this one's" but they were, uh, the same? As far as I could tell. So I ended up basically just saying that. We'll see what the professor thinks of it when she grades it.
Haven't started on this week's assignments yet, I'm taking today a bit down but do want to crack all that open tomorrow. February's going to be a bit busy for me, so I want to get ahead on assignments if I can -- next weekend, ash and I want to do something for our anniversary (roller rink, potentially!) and then the weekend (and following week) after that, Sor is visiting!
I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting, but that's all I've got right now.
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
Chapter 8: Change
-Variables and setting them; moving objects and the player to different locations and into and out of play; reporting on variable status; changing ui elements (limited though they are in vanilla Inform); a couple sections on randomness
Chapter 9: Time
-Time: setting, passage of; turns in play; past and future conditions, including reporting qualities based on whether or not a
condition has ever been true, was true at the start of turn, has been true multiple times, etc.
It is six o'clock in the morning but I've figured out a programming thing that has been stumping me for quite a while!
Haven't heard from Dad since New Year's so I texted him a generic 'how are you' yesterday, and he didn't respond so I called him today. Just missed the text because he was sleeping all day, but he answered the call and we chatted a bit. He's currently waiting on MRI results for spots on his lungs (that he's had for years, apparently, just monitoring to make sure they're not growing. Fingers crossed, touch wood), otherwise nothing really going on, or nothing he told me about. He did steer the conversation mildly political to complain about Trump's water stunt, we agreed that it was publicity bullshit and 'If there's one thing he's good at it's stirring up controversy. Him and "Eli" [sic]'
Said I would try to swing by for a visit after Sor's been and gone
Now! As mentioned above I was up very late (later than mentioned, even; like 9 or something) so I think I'll try to get a bit more sleep, or at least rest my head for a bit. I just woke up worried about dad and hungry, but both those problems have now been addressed.
Anyone using the Libby app: apparently some time this year they're going to start collecting usage data, but you can opt out in your settings. Given the political climate I feel that might be wise
10/10 on my discussion board post!