As for some reason strangers keep celebrating my birthday each year, going to wild extremes including giant fireworks displays, I once again am asking people to celebrate safely. Take any local fire danger warnings seriously, arrange a designated driver or simply don't drive if you are drinking, and keep an eye on your pets since the fireworks may scare them. Let's all stick around to celebrate again next year.

*wanders in and brushes dust of the journal*

Oh, hello there. If you follow me over on the fediverse you might recall that a while back (oh, a month ago already? Okay, a month ago) I commented that I was looking at starting in on a journaling* game and had settled on a game by Dice Problems written for the 2021 Carta Jam, Help! I Have A Crush On My Rival?! Which is basically what it says on the tin. You come up with a character, who has a rival. There is a playing field made up of standard playing cards. When you flip over a card you look up the suit-color and value for a writing prompt about an interaction involving the rival. There's a little more complexity than that, but not much more than that. When you reach the end state of the game you work out how or whether the relationship between the protagonist and rival changes.

So, I had mentioned in the couple of posts I made over on the fedi that I had two things delaying me. First, well to quote myself, Surely there is nothing unusual about ones first thought after considering starting up a journaling game be, "Okay, so first I need to write a python program that creates a card deck, deals them out into a layout and stores the state to disk. Oh, and a CLI for interacting with it." Right? Which I haven't done nearly us much as I wanted with (barely anything in fact). Partly due to getting sick in the meantime (Yay antibiotics? Even if they have un-fun side effects) and partly from getting barely any non-work keyboard time. But I do have a bit of python that will create and shuffle a deck of cards, I basically just need to add a bit that deals out a playing field and then presents it to you in such a way that you can pick a card to flip over (oh, and also store the unflipped/flipped state of each card?). Not difficult. I just need to sit down and actually do it.

The second thing delaying me was the need to sit down and actually do some research. Basically I decided that if I was going to do something involving rivals I'd go with a character idea I had a few years back who either resides in the Polychrome Heroics universe or in a nearby timeline. The setting was not really the need-to-do-research part (although I should go back and do some rereading in setting), it's that the first mental image I got of the character informed me both that they are a budding gadgeteer/tinkerer and that they have two prosthetic legs. If I was going to write about someone being blind, well that's right in the family, I think I could do a halfway decent job of not embarrassing myself. But no one in close family or acquaintances has a prosthetic limb. Now that I'm posting this here I'll repeat the request I'd made over on fedi, if anyone reading this either uses a prosthetic limb or otherwise has knowledge and they'd like to either pass it along, share a good source of information, or go, "Oh my goodness, please, please don't invoke stereotype/pet-peeve X about this," feel free to comment below or send a message. I think I've read enough not to be utterly ignorant now, but I'm not going to claim to be any kind of expert.

Anyway, I'm going to poke some more python code and work out more about the rival and hopefully not be all that long before I post something.

*Interesting tidbit: Unsure whether the proper spelling would be journaling or journalling as spellcheck doesn't like either, I could have turned to a dictionary but instead went to the ngram viewer to see which occurred more frequently. Prior to the 1990s the prominence of one over the other seemed to flip flop from time to time. Then in the mid 90s journaling with one L shot way up on the graph while journalling stayed about the same. So, yeah, apparently journaling with one L is the widely accepted version. At least in the corpus used by google's ngram thingy.

Happy Perihelion Day! Today we came closer to the atomic reactor in the sky than we do the rest of the year. Hope you're having a good Perihelion Day.

Hello, I'm still mostly lurking everywhere but I'm still around.

Unless I do 17K words a day I'm not winning NaNo this year. But I'm not dropping the story. I *will* start getting word count again. I also plan to pull out the Arduino & RP Pico kits I've got and start playing with those again and go beyond the potentiometer speed controlled LED blinker i assembled a few years ago.

Until next time. Take care of yourselves and each other.

So as my previous post demonstrates I do remember this place exists. But I haven't visited regularly in a while, so if I'm popping up on your feed and you're scratching your head and wondering, "Who is this silly guy?" let me do a brief reintroduction:

Hi, I'm LilFluff. I am often silly, I used to write much more than I have the last couple years (you can look through my posts/tags to see most of what was publicly released), I am a professional tech support person, in addition to having written more previously I also used to do much more online forum RPing (my default icon as seen above is a character of mine from the Mars Academy RP), and let's see... I prefer hot chocolate to tea or coffee.

It's been a touch over a year since my last post here and this was not the post I wanted to be making.
( remembering someone we've lost this past week and the encouragement they gave me when I started writing regularly )

In my previous post I said on of my NaNo plans is working on an RPG setting book. In addition to that I do plan to work on some prose. Specifically I want to continue what I am refering to as the Magic School Doofuses (Quick and Dirty, Piece of Cake, Just Purr-fect, and Consequences, note the last two involve an involuntary physical transformation and students (+staff) not being nice).

As a bit of last minute #PrepTober/#NanoPrep I'm throwing the door open to any questions for the cast of the stories to help me get back in their heads.

This year I wrote just over 119,000 tracked words. Nearly half of those were produced during April's Camp NaNoWriMo, in a largely seat of the pants written telling of Leslie McCormack's experiences after being tossed into another universe (I have revised and posted a little of that). Posted fiction this year included:

• Knotted Handkerchief, in which a young woman inherits a family mystery.


• Tonya (Tries to) Hide, in which fugitive and super powered Tonya tries hiding in a vacation cabin.


• Just Purrfect, in which Nicholai and Jamsa make a return. With Jamsa seeking his roommate's help with a bit of Halloween magic.


• If You Have Me, Why Do You Need Them?, wherein a young slave is confused about his owner's intentions.


• Consequences, taking place on the evening of Halloween with Jamsa facing the consequences of his prior actions.


• Untitled first entry of Wolf Boy, an injured young werewolf discovers he's not alone.


• Cody's Dream, Cody, a character from Addergoole Year 9 has a prophetic dream.


• Leslie McCormack and the Story Without A Title
  
  • Part 1A, The R.O.B.'s Revenge or Leslie McCormack's Last Night on Earth
  
  
  • Part 1B, Leslie McCormack Thinks It's All A Dream
  
  
  • Part 1C, Leslie McCormack Would Like To Wake Up Now. Please?
  
  
  • Part 2A, Leslie McCormack Is Stuck On Other-Earth

Additionally I started a series of webcomic reviews:

• Webcomic Comments #1: Twin Dragons, which as the title suggests is about a pair of dragon twins, brother and sister Kai and Kaya. The two live in a world much like ours accept that around 16 years earlier one in a thousand births began resulting in children who were partly animal in appearance. Dog people, cat people, or in our protagonists case dragon people.


• Webcomic Comments #2: Champions of the Melting Pot.Young Xero has a problem, it's finals time and his mother wants to know when he's going to get a job. Okay, Xero has two problems, finals, mom asking about a job, and utter boredom. Right, three problems. Thankfully the plot is prepared to help with two of those... The IGSF is prepared to help with the job problem when they decide Xero has the appearance of a protagonist.


• Webcomic Comments #3: MAiZ. The adventures of Meli, a young woman who has set out on an archaeological quest and a boy named Jaz. Who she isn't certain about at first as he's wearing a mask to hide his strange appearance.

Unfortunately right about the time I was writing the third I became ludicrously sick. If you must get ill I recommend catching a cold that has no need for attached adjectives unless those adjectives are things like minor or brief. Especially don't catch anything that involves adjectives like ludicrous or lasting. After three not-at-all fun weeks the rhythm I'd started to build up was busted and I never did continue on to a fourth review. Webcomic Comments is something I plan to pick up again in the coming year.

I've been continuing to practice playing the guitar and I'm starting to actually feel comfortable with it. Sometime in this coming year I may actually feel comfortable playing something for others. I've gone from a Yamaha Acoustic to that and a used Fender Stratocaster with an amplifier and a few peddles. I've been pondering a ukulele or travel guitar for something I can take with me and practice when I'm not at home. Ukes can be had inexpensively and a used travel guitar doesn't need to cost much.

Plans for 2018:

• Keep writing. I've even made a list of specific projects to keep working on or pick up again. There will undoubtedly be new things as well.


• Keep up with my guitar practice. Get good enough that I don't cringe at the thought of playing where others can hear.


• Let 2018 be the year I engage in some serious concalendaring. The calendar equivalent of conlanging's playing with language.


• Do some Seven Days Of projects: Seven Days of Characters, Seven Days of Setting Creation, etc.


• Still looking to lose some weight


• Probably no conventions in 2018 unless maybe towards the end of the year. It's just not in my budget.


• Pick up my camera again.


• Pay down debts (glares in general direction of 2016's car accident)


• Continue to give to others. Thankfully Patreon backed down on their changes so I haven't had to abandon supporting others there. But I'll be looking at other services and seeing what else is in use by people I'd be interested in helping to support the works of.

Hey everyone, I'll be off the net for a bit today, unless the horrible wifi signal has improved in the past month), and have some time without specific tasks. So, would anyone like to suggest some writing prompts? Stuff for my existing settings, Qs for characters, random prompts, demifiction ideas, whatever...

For anyone planning to do NaNoWriMo, the site StoryBundle has a 2017 Nano Tools bundle. I'm still debating whether to pick it up but I've liked the contents of some of the past year's nano bundles. This year the book on writing injuries is looking the most enticing to me, but there are also books on Excel for writers, story structure, scrivenor, etc. Not an affiliate link, I don't get anything if you buy, but I did think some of you might be interested.

Speaking of that, there's still about a week left to pick up the SFWA Fantasy bundle. Multiple books in it look good and I'm only somewhat biased in recommending it (I've read a little of Rowyn's The Moon Etherium (you might already know Rowyn from A Rational Arrangement or from right here on Dreamwidth) and I'm looking forward to sometime soon sitting down and completing it).

Hey, did you know aldersprig has a Giraffe (Zebra) call going? Don't know what that is? It's a call for story prompts. Leave a prompt, get some fic. If tips are left or her Patreon joined (helping to pay for home renovations) then more is written.

Autumn 2017 Giraffe (Zebra) Call: Autumn, Autumn (Roundtree)*, Fall, and Falling

now posted with fewer spelling errors in the subject line :)