lilfluff

Oh nifty, there's a fox card in this oracle. Hey, Walt a second...

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:33:16 GMT

So this past week I discovered (by way of a passing mention in the Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff podcast) the existence of the Lenormand. The tl;dr could be, "sort of like tarot, but half the cards." Curious I did a few searches and one of the cards is, The Fox, how could I not approve of including a fox in a set of cards? Of course the first web page with card meanings I ran across gave the standard anti-fox descriptives like thieving, sly, and dishonest. At least others included things like loyalty to family, clever, adaptation, and work.

Looking at Wikipedia it seems to have originated from a 1799 game with a 36 card deck that you would play out in a six by six grid to form the game board. With each card having an inset playing card image allowing to to double as a 36 card playing card deck. Looking around people seem to still be actively designing and printing them so you can find anything from reproductions of 19th century decks to cyberpunk inspired.

comments

Death among the tech furry greymuzzles

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:54:25 GMT

( not officially confirmed, but looking fairly certain death notice )

comments

If you hear more yipping and awooing than usual today

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:50:16 GMT

Then as mention over on the fediverse, don't worry. It's full moon day which also means it's Werefox Scouts Activity Day. It's just the local kits enjoying various activities.

comments

As an IT person: the technology field bleeping sucks

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:57:35 GMT

Currently being bitten by the computer industry's inability to actually pick or stick with standards. Especially annoying as I'm at a satellite location a three quarter hour drive from the office, so I can't just go back and spend fifteen minutes digging through drawers and then come back. At least not and come back today. Please, all I ask for is five, maybe ten minutes alone with a handful of industry CEOs and an illegally powerful electric cattle prod. Or to just get to send the whole senior management teams of most of the tech companies on a one way trip to Mars. Fluff can exile a dozen or so tech leaders, as a treat?

comments

WordPress announces plan to hit self less

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:25:35 GMT

WordPress concludes after shooting self in foot, then other foot, then both ankles, both knees, and aiming at a hip that maybe, possibly, this might be a slightly less than ideal strategy. And this from a source that seems to side with Automattic in the Automattic/WPEngine lawsuit. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-unpauses-development-but-has-it-run-out-of-time/548199/

I was going to say I was shocked it hadn't been forked yet, but apparently it has, just no fork appears to have gained traction yet. Although ClassicPress looks interesting, at a glance it looks like they stripped WP back a ways, removed javascript that was doing things that modern browsers and html5 will do without javascript, and set about cleaning what javascript remained or replacing with libraries still in active use and development.

comments

Something to try instead of pocketmods

Thu, 15 May 2025 01:04:12 GMT

Something I brought up a little while back over on the fediverse:

Hey, remember the fad a while back for these things called pocketmods? If you don't remember the name, you might remember them as those things you would print on a sheet of paper, fold in half along the long axis and into four sections the other way, then make a careful slice down the middle... and if you did it all correctly you had a little pocket sized, eight page booklet with advice on some subject or with small forms on which you could note down how you were spending money to aid in keeping up with your finances, or small RPG booklets. If you remember these (or never forgot them) you may also remember that you only printed to one side of the paper because when you folded it all up each page of the booklet was one side of a folded double thickness section. When I ran across pocketmods again recently this bothered me. You literally, as in really truly literally as well as emphasis literally, lose 50% of the available page surface when you make a pocketmod.

(Assume that I spent the next five minutes not-quite-ranting grumbling about this and just move on to the next paragraph)

What if I told you there was a better way to get small pocket sized booklet that still used a single sheet of paper? All you need to add to the process is either a needle and thread or a stapler. Let me introduce you to a little thing called an octavo. If you check the illustration on the linked page it's the third one down. You make three folds which divide the sheet up into eight sections (thus the name octavo). After you third fold you have something in the form of a little booklet. Now, after the three folds you need to either use the needle and thread to do a 3-hole pamphlet stitch to hold it together or grab the nearest stapler and use one or two staples to hold it together. Now you just need to make a couple of cuts. There are two visible folds on the bottom edge and two on one half of the sheets on the side opposite the spine. You can either use a straight edge or blade to carefully slice right along the folds to separate the pages, trim those two sides with a pair of scissors, or you can do what I did and place a metal straight edge down about two millimeters in from the edge and use a blade to trim off a little strip. Do the last on the three non-spine edges and you'll have nice neat pages with corners that meet cleanly.

If you would like to see the result you can click on the link to see my post over on part of the fediverse a few days back that includes a picture (and a link to a different octavo fold explanation on a site that includes sample pdfs of Shakespeare that you can print and fold). That one in the picture took only a few minutes, including the time spent searching for and reopening the link to the web site with the octavo example to double check that I was remembering the folds right. Fold, fold, fold, staple, staple, slice, slice, slice and I had myself a 16 page pocket notebook for something I'd need to take notes on over the next week or so. It is unlikely to be the last one I make, as they are just handy little things. As noted over on mastodon these little booklets fit quite nicely into a little pouch I have on hand that is intended to be used as a cell phone holder. But it could likely easily hold a half dozen or more little booklets like this. Oh, and nothing is stopping you from folding two sheets of paper, nestling one inside the other and then sewing or stapling and then instead of a 16 page booklet you have a 32 page booklet.

And I'll likely make some bigger booklets. I have a long reach stapler which means if I do a folio (they fancy way of saying just folding a single sheet once dividing it into four pages) signature I wouldn't have any trouble reaching in the 5.5 inches to staple the spine if I don't feel like sewing (and unlike most smaller staplers it has an adjustable paper stop and measuring guide to help you staple at the exact distance you want). About a decade ago I did a project I called at the time Character A Day (but have since referred to as the Seven Days, Seven Characters world-building project). For seven days I came up with a character, wrote a bit about them, wrote up RPG stats using the FATE Accelerated system, and included a setting aspect. At the end of the seven days I had seven characters as well as a setting for them. I've been considering for a while now grabbing those posts, doing a cleaner rewrite, maybe including a little more, and putting it together as a small pdf. 4.25" x 5.5" is not an uncommon page size for indie RPG pdfs. As long as the revised version stayed under or not much over 48 pages at that page size then it would be easy to do up a single signature from a stack of pages (I believe the manufacturer says the long reach stapler I have should be able to do up to twenty pages, but a dozen is probably much easier to staple through and twelve sheets would be forty-eight pages).

comments

Creative Project: Hexcrawl25

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 23:21:40 GMT

So those plugged into the ttrpg scene may remember Dungeon23 in which participating people built up a megadungeon over 2023 by adding a room a day to a map, along with details about what was in the room, etc, and posted about it with Dungeon23 as a hashtag. Others modifying it to make City23 where you would do much the same but building up a city map over 2023 instead. And last year apparently Lore24 was a thing in which people participating in the project would write up one bit of lore (a bit of history, an item, prominent figures, whatever) each day for their game world, with Lore24 as a hashtag. Well, this year the thing would look to be any of the above with the number incremented to 25 or #Hexcrawl25 in which you take a hexflower* of 25 regional hexes on a hex map, which are each subdivided into smaller sub-hexes so you have 319 total zoomed in hexes, and over the course of 2025 go from blank map to a reasonably decent sized area one could explore. If you go with the recommended 24 mile wide regional hexes then you end up with a sort-of-circular (kinda sorta hex shaped) region 120 miles across. Or if you want something you can compare that too, a little bit smaller than the square miles of Maryland. Or for folks in Europe an area larger than Albania but smaller then Belgium (* a hex flower is what you call the collection of one or more rings of hexes around a central hexagon, presumably because it looks a bit like flower petals around the center of a flower. In this case a central hexagon surrounded by two rings of hexagons)

Anyway, even though the year is almost 15% of the way along, I've decided to start in on this, although because reasons (oh look! Over there! Is that a convenient distraction!) instead of simply printing a blank map or making use of any of a number of preexisting hex mapping programs I spent a chunk of last week working out how to make a hex map in Inkscape, with large and small sized hexes meshed together. Anyway... Not a whole world, just a nice sized region.

( World building notes within for those who are interested )

comments

Anyone recall what the most trustworthy font is?

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 20:45:45 GMT

So easy back in the 90s or 00s there was a webcomic set at either an ISP or software company where one plot line involved the growing awareness of blogs and one of the employees managing to sign some sort of agreement with some corporate lawyers as, "the representative of the blogosphere." Explaining, when the other characters were shocked the corporate lawyers would buy that claim, that it worked because, "I had a business card saying that in (font name) which is the most trustworthy font. People will believe anything if you put it in that font."

And now I'm sitting here stuck because I don't remember which font it was. Maybe Copperplate Gothic Bold, but that's a guess. This question, which font it is, is going to be stuck in my head for days.

comments

The continuing adventures of the semi-offline Fluff

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:11:50 GMT

So both Ping (The Planet) and Beam (The Planet) are still down due to expired domain and I hadn't yet made a backup account (I suppose my Mastodon Social account is likely still there but I haven't signed into it for years at this point). There's the undead zombie that used to be the popular, what's the term,¿short form social media?, site but is prefer not to be bit by zombies. I hadn't noticed how much I tended to pop onto Ping to make a short comment or quote a few lines I liked from a story, or just to check to see if anything interesting has been posted.

Anyway, this has been some lunchtime thoughts.

comments

Solo RPG books on Bundle of Holding

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:00:45 GMT

As there was interest in solo rpgs, noticed that Bundle of Holding is doing a bundle of books by Peter Rudin-Burgesswho publishes under Parts Per Million. Included are guidebooks for solo play with a few different rules sets like 13th Age or Dungeon Crawl Classics (these books combine some game specific advice along with a mostly common set of tools and advice); as well a few general advice books Easier Solo Play, Easier Game Journals, and Easier Solo Mystery Play; and a set of cut up books where he's taken a public domain work used a tool to snip it into short segments of a few words, and build a random tables of of that. The idea with the cut ups being to pick one made from a book of a similar flavor to your game whether that is Dracula or Triplanetary Lensman or The Virginian and use the snippet four to five word snippet as a prompt. Currently $7.95 for a seven book starter set and $20.23 for the starter seven and twentieth-five more.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/PartsPerMillion

comments

Currently off the fediverse

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:10:53 GMT

Welp, the-planet had its domain expire so both the forum and the misskey instance are down. Depending on the duration I might get around to either spinning up a single user fediverse server or make an account elsewhere.

Anyone here host their own mastodon or other fediverse server? If so what sort of ram and disk usage are you seeing?

comments

Oh, hey, it's 2025 already

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 03:09:02 GMT

Well, 2024 went by quickly. I am half expecting to wake up tomorrow and find out it's sometime in the 2040s. So, hey there Dreamwidth, how are you doing?

Anyway, in no particular order some goals for 2025:
* At least 120 writing days this year (signed up for GYWO with this goal)
* Draw! Start on Draw A Box
* Pick up guitar again. For one reason or another I stopped playing guitar in the midst of the eternal spring 2020. Late last year I took my Traveler electric travel guitar and upgraded the tuners to locking tuners so I no longer have the excuse of the highly annoying stock tuners on it.
* Be more active here and blog on my own domain.
* Prepare more of my own food. Largely this means preparing more lunches and breakfasts as we have already drastically cut back on eating out for dinner.
* Do some solo RPGing. I may very well do some posts relating to this. I have a few sets of rules, including the Captains Log solo Star Trek RPG put out by the current Trek RPG license holder and have half completed the process of creating captain, main crew, and ship (A Caitian captain, with an early Miranda class that Starfleet has loaned to the Caitian government's scientific research arm with a mission to explore and study places within Federation territory that haven't been directly studied yet).

Here's hoping for new posts in less than 12 months.

comments

Some modest writing prep

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 05:54:38 GMT

Starting to do some prep work to get back into writing stuff.
( Click through for a few more paragraphs )

comments

Out with 2023, in with 2024

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 03:18:50 GMT

I'm not going to post a huge year in review post. There's darn little to brag about for 2023. As I put it over on the fediverse 2023 was, "Not as horrid as 2020 or 2021, an adequate year. Financially it was another painful year after 2021's car troubles and left me treading the monetary waters. But, I survived it." I'm going to hope for 2024 to be a better year. There's no expensive medical tests scheduled (okay, for the US $1500 in patient costs after insurance is not exactly extreme for something that goes beyond getting an x-ray, but it was the first time I myself had such a bill) nor anything else pre-planned that should be expensive. So 2024, you've got a chance to be a better year than this year.

I've signed up for Get Your Words Out, with a habit goal of 120 writing days in 2024. In addition to that I plan to continue my DuoLingo streak, and as I completed all the lessons for Esperanto and it's now in the Daily Refresh stage I'm going to start a new language in January. Probably Spanish. I recently started a Javascript course and I intend to finish that early in the year. Other than that I'll take 2024 as it comes.

However your 2023 went I wish you an excellent 2024.

comments

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 18:38:43 GMT

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and if there is anything else you are celebrating this time of year may it be joyous.

comments

And Humble drops its NaNo bundle

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:11:31 GMT

So once again the answer is I was impatient. For Humble Bundle has now dropped their NaNoWriMo bundle (because who would want more than a week to consider whether to pick up a bundle to help prepare for a 50K writing challenge). Now that I think of it I rolled my eyes are Humble last year for the exact same reason.

Anyway, here is what they're offering for $18:( List of 32 items behind cut to preserve your screen... )

If someone hasn't picked up any writing books and they're looking for a writing book bundle, this has covers multiple categories of writing books plus the Plottr/Novlr teaser subs (and coupon for Plottr that will basically pay for a year's multi-device subscription Or a year and a bit of a one-device subscription). I haven't ever used Plottr myself but if you've been considering it then this bundle might be worth it just for that. But if you aren't looking for a Plotr/Novlr discount and you already have a few books on grammar/plotting/etc then even at only $18 this bundle is likely a pass.

My view on whether to get this one or the Storybundle bundle: If you have been considering Plotr but were hesitant to spend $39 (or $49 for multi-device or $99 for Plotr Pro), this bundle is less than half the price of the single device software + 1 year of updates subscription (I'd hope at $99 that Plotr Pro still leaves you with a license to use the software locally at the end of a year, just no more updates or cloud features, but the pricing page doesn't make it clear one way or the other). If you're not interested in Plotr and have basic craft books covered I can't really recommend the bundle from Humble but you might still see something in Storybundle's bundle which has some pre-release books and a couple beyond-the-basic-craft-guides books that might interest you (Pros and Cons, a book of advice on getting the most out of convention attendence; Military Strategy for Authors, which could be subtitled, "So, do your characters have any more of a plan for their rebellion than just blowing up Death Stars?"; Beyond Prince Charming: One Guy's Guide to Writing Men in Romance (and beyond)).

Also, Humble Bundle, why do you release your NaNoWriMo bundle so late in October‽ This just boggles me. Even if you have contacts that will let you stick something amazing into the bundle the audience for such a bundle will already have been courted by Storybundle for a good two weeks.

comments

Oracles

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:52:40 GMT

The world of solo role-playing games has a concept called the oracle (almost certainly named for the ancient Latin word for one who makes prophecies and not for the modern corporation*), a tool used to replace the game master without simply having everything to however the player chooses. These can be as simple as reducing any issue to one or more yes/no questions followed by one or more coin flips ("Is there an inn in this village?" "Are there any rooms available in the inn?" "Do I stay up far too late listening to other adventurers telling tales?") to the use of cards to entire books and collections of books of random tables.

Earlier this year Bundle of Holding had one of the card deck versions available, the Gamemsster's Apprentice, or rather a collection of card decks ranging from a generic one to ones flavored for generic fantasy, steampunk, cyberpunk, etc. Where each card has numbers to represent the rolls of different sizes of dice, levels of success or failure for questions on a very likely to very unlikely scale, a scatter chart, some names, various other words, etc. The idea being you can use the deck of cards in place of dice by drawing one of more, get the answer to a yes/no question but deciding how likely it is then drawing a card, get a couple of words to help decide what you find somewhere, get names for characters, etc. All with one really pocketable deck of cards. And this isn't the only card deck oracle out there (also, journaling games often use a standard deck of cards or occasionally even tarot cards).

There are some that so a single chart, with a few columns for yes/no/maybe questions, directions, and whatever else the table maker decided belonged on a universal table. The books of tables are generally your standard collection of specialized tables. A table for weather conditions, a table for landscape types, multiple tables for dungeon/spaceship/etc generation.

It's been some years since the last time I actually got together with a group for a tabletop RPG, so I got interested in solo RPGs recently but now I think I may actually be more fascinated with oracle systems than the different games. I'm even getting tempted to try crafting some. Maybe a card deck, maybe a table or two, or a python program, or HTML+JavaScript program one could download and run locally. Hmm, Arduino + 4 line LCD? So many possibilities.

*a modest attempt at humor

comments

Coyote and Crow RPG free (Pay What You Want) today only

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 21:30:20 GMT

For Indigenous Peoples Day (today, 10/9) the AU RPG Coyote and Crow is available free (or Pay What You Want) over at their web site (https://shop.coyoteandcrow.net/products/coyote-crow-core-rulebook-pdf), the page shows the usual $25 price for the PDF edition, but put it in the cart and it should show a $25 discount. (This news found via James "Famous English Chasing Other Languages Into Alleys Quote" Nicoll's DW blog, if you're following me and not him I suspect you would find his posts interesting.

comments

It would seem I'm impatient :)

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 21:04:38 GMT

So in my previous post I said I was either impatient or Humble Bundle and StoryBundle weren't doing NaNo bundles this year. Well, it looks like I was impatient as StoryBundle has a bundle up now. Given that Humble has two book bundles ending today in a very short time (indeed, ending early in writing this) they might also soon have one up.

Drawing Out The Dragons: A Meditation On Art Destiny, and The Power Of Choice by James A. Owen. I haven't read this one but it has 4.6 stars on Amazon and a print copy would basically cover the full price of this ebook bundle. (Kindle format only $4.99) Looks like it is less a how-to ____ and more a how to get in the mindset to ____. Plus a bonus how to draw a dragon chapter if the table of contents is to be believed.

( The remaining items tucked under this link )

comments

Either I'm Impatient or There's NaNo Bundle Burnout

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 01:39:05 GMT

So each year I've looked at the various bundle offer sites to see what is being offered as a NaNoWriMo writing book bundle. The first few years that I saw them I picked up most of them, then after a few years there started to be overlap between what was being offered and what I'd picked up previously, and sometimes I looked at a bundle and a chunk of the selection would make me cock my head to the side and say, "Wut?" But it's now October 3rd, less than a month to NaNo and of Story Bundle, Humble Bundle, and Bundle of Holding the last is the only one that seems to have a NaNo bundle up (a collection of journaling games at least one of which I already have. Bundle of Holding probably has it easiest as there's new journaling games coming out all the time so if the creators are willing then they have potential fresh bundles to offer. Sure, new writing advice books are always coming out too, but it just feels like that's still one where you're going to be more likely to start feeling stale. How many variations on No Plot No Problem or X Ways To Outline does one need? I think if I was in charge of putting together such a bundle I'd be inclined to actually split into two bundles, a Great For Beginners Bundle with as good a collection of well regarded classic entries and useful books as possible and try and get a standing agreement to have them in each year's bundle. And then a separate, "Interesting books we've spotted over the last year that you might not have run across yet." Which could well be a much smaller bundle, but better 5-6 well selected books than, "Oh, a hey, another twenty book bundle with someone's variation on No Plot No Problem, Hey Have You Heard Of Plotting?, and Fill-In-The-Blank's Editing Book." Somehow something in my head doesn't want to pick up a twenty book bundle when fifteen I either have or have the equivalent, two don't interest me at all, and three have me going, "Ooh!" Even when the bundle is less than what buying those last three would cost. It's like some part of me is still in the early 90s and remembers what trying to carry twenty books to the register of the local Borders Books felt like. (Oh for the days when my only bill was for the local ISP). But show me a five book bundle where three don't interest me at all, one I can take or leave, and only one of which makes me go, "Ooh!" and my finger starts edging towards that buy button and I have to double check what the last two would cost on their own versus the bundle price.

Anyway, hi, if we don't hang out on the same parts of the fediverse I'm still alive and still almost entirely lurking when it comes to Dreamwidth. Hopefully more active soon.

comments

Learning web design

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 06:29:49 GMT

I posted this question over on fedi and it occurs that I ought to check here as well. It's been some years since I last truly tried designing a web page but I'm reaching the latter bits of an html/css/layout tutorial and have found myself pondering next steps. Which has me wondering if anyone knows of any web sites, books, or videos that look are less, "Make this specific web page layout," or, "use this specific prebuild css framework," and more looking at the process of starting from a clean sheet of paper (or a screen of blank pixels) and building up from there. Or collected wisdom along the lines of, "So you want to make a blog post page? Here's some common pitfalls that initially seem sensible to avoid and collected wisdom for not designing something sucky." I know way back when I poked around Eric Meyer's web site a lot and that seems to still exist, but where else might I look for good practices?

comments

Annual Birthday Safety Reminder

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 21:44:28 GMT

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.

comments

Five updates make a post, right?

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:50:41 GMT

Let's see...

1) I've been working through Learn Enough HTML, CSS, and Layout to Be Dangerous. Which you can either buy on paper for the usual OMG! pricing of computer books, as a subscription on the Learn Enough website (starting at $19/m for one course or $39 for the whole collection), or if you have access to the O'Reilly Books learning platform (formerly called Safari Bookshelf, and quite possibly freely available if you are student or staff at a college). I've been using a combination of the ebook and the videos for each section and finding that for whatever reason things seem to be sticking better this time around.

2) The above has also been increasing the itch I first got a couple years ago to take the characters and sketch of a setting I created in late 2013 (you can find them under the character a day tag) and put together a small ebook/e-zine as well as to do another of these character-a-day for a week projects.

3) Vacation! I can sleep again! Sorry, that is to say, one benefit of working for an educational institution (the place that I occasionally refer to online as Mumble College, based on someone else having years ago referred online to the place they worked at as Mumble Pharmacy) is that I get the 4th off and have sufficient vacation days to take the rest of the week off as well. My plans are sleeping, visiting my folks, sleeping, driving relative to an appointment, sleeping, working on the CSS/Layout tutorial mentioned up under heading one, sleeping, and if time permits some extra sleeping.

4) Oh, add on that I will probably spend at least a little time working on the python solo-rpg card deck tool thingy mentioned in my prior post. Maybe even start the journaling game.

5) Yeah, no, not even putting in a project for July Camp NaNo this year. But getting some writing done is on my list for the month (see item four above). I also have some delayed/stuck writing projects I want to unstick and start working on again. Ranging from my idea for last year's NaNoWriMo, revising (or rather probably taking a good hard look at, outlining, and rewriting) my 2017 NaNoWriMo project which is also known as my only NaNoWriMo to actually reach 50K, to continuing the Magic School Doofus's who haven't seen a post since 2017.

6) In annoying news, as I believe I'm approaching the end of DuoLingo Esperanto course I was planning to try posting on one of the Esperanto subreddits and using that place to get some actual (textual) conversational practice to move beyond the limitations of the course. But given the current events of Reddit... Any esperantistoj have advice for online communities? I'll probably check mastodon again as I believe there is at least one Esperanto focused mastodon instance. Lernu has some resources but it looks like not forums. I'll probably post here and see if I can stir up some activity. There are a few Dreamwidth Esperanto communities but do not seem to have been active recently.

Huh. That's six updates, not five. Oh well. I'm not going to update the subject line, you'll just have to put up with having bonus updates :)

comments

Upcoming posts

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 06:21:53 GMT

*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.

comments

Who has two thumbs and definitely remembers to use their tools?

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 17:58:44 GMT

Well, the first half of that question would be me. But since I just thought to myself, "Hey, I should use git on this collection of files," and discovered that I did in fact already initialize git for this thing. All the way back in January of 2016 and then promptly forgot to commit changes after March of 2016... Oops? I did at least get around to adding a README file so I can more easily remind myself, "Hey, Fluff, you set up Python invoke to simplify working with this thing. Seriously, here are the two tasks, use them!"

Anyway, if you use python and you have something that you regularly run one or more sets of commands on, but with just enough time between each run that you're prone to forgetting the commands? Take a look at Invoke. The thing I'm using it with here is simple enough it could be a simple shell script, but with Invoke get easy help text for each task by adding a simple docstring. If you're a Ruby person then yeah, it's kind of like Rake. And if you're a C person it's kind of like Make but without the near half century of pent up hatred at its own existence taken out on those who use it.

comments