Finished reading: The Stoneshore Register by G. Willow Wilson 📚
Starts like a quiet, perhaps paranormal mystery in a small town at the edge of the world– and ends up in a quite different place.
Software, side projects, and games in progress. Mostly short posts about what I’m making — plus what I’m reading.
Or not
A while back I set a rule for myself– no more short game jams, a weekend just isn’t enough for me to make something satisfying while still getting enough sleep and being a functioning member of the household.
… and then I spent much of today waffling over the Kenney Jam (Theme: “Scale”). I had an idea for a silly mountain climbing (or scaling) game, but doing it the way I wanted would have meant figuring out some Godot features I haven’t used before, and I think the tutorial I tried to follow was out of date with Godot 4.7. I briefly considered taking the Kenney Sokoban assets and making the obvious game, but struggled to find a way to integrate the theme. I still might do that as a learning project, though. There was also a thing with a UFO and a shrink ray.
Finished reading: Next Level Making Games That Make Themselves by Michael Cook 📚
Finished Listening: The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear 📚
A really interesting, not well-known slice of tech history.
Agents
At my employers suggestion, I studied for and passed the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations. It’s whetted my appetite to get more hands-on experience with agents, and I need a personal project to learn/practice on. I’ve experimented a bit with a QA agent for dctech.events, which fixes janky titles, duplication, and adds categories where they are missing. It’s been humming along for a few weeks. I’m going to look for further opportunities to use dctech.events as an agent testbed.
Finished reading: John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol. 4: The Family Man by Jamie Delano 📚
For vacation reading, I brought along Dungeon Crawler Carl and Steven Van Zandt’s memoir, Unrequited Infatuations. I started the latter, but mostly ended up re-reading the first four volumes of Hellblazer from my Kindle library. It’s better (and denser) than I remember.
The kiddo has given me an assignment to write a Marvel Multiverse adventure that fits these parameters, for him and a friend to play:
It’s kind of jarring to be listening to a song, and hear some sampled audio from something that just happened a few weeks ago.
Mission accomplished for now: next steps are recognizing when a certain threshold has been met and advancing to the next level.
I saw this on my walk tonight. I’ve decided that it’s the Godot guy, and he wants me to stop slacking on gamedev stuff.
Tonight, my goal is to get get my Jezzball-like-game to the point where it identifies and fills in areas that have been closed off.
huh, ross dot karchner dot com is no longer a top result for the search “Ross Karchner”.
(and I won’t comment on the indignity of the sponsored result)
Harsh
The "aha" key
Currently listening: The Friendly Orange Glow The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear 📚
I’m not very far into this, but one detail that makes me smile: the early PLATO keyboards had an “aha” key. “Aha” was how you exited the help system, as in “aha, I found the information I needed”.
From a 1965 paper on PLATO:
Finished Listening: Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon 📚
Actually: The Steal Like An Artist Audio Trilogy
From today’s trip to NASA Goddard Space Center’s open house
Finished reading: Wicked + The Divine Volume 4: Rising Action by Kieron Gillen 📚
(also volume 3. 5-9 are waiting for me at the library)
My current work-in-progress is leaving me a bit uninspired, so I’ve been tinkering with something a little different– a Jezzball-like:
The next challenge is detecting areas that are sealed off and displaying them differently.
Finished reading: The Wicked + the Divine, Volume 2 by Kieron Gillen 📚
Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?
I jettisoned my Flickr account in either the Yahoo or Verizon era– but nice to see that SmugMug and the foundation are doing good work to preserve the images and maintain the platform.
Finished reading: The Wicked + the Divine The Faust act by Kieron Gillen 📚
Decided to re-read the series.
Finished Listening: Crusaders by Dan Jones 📚
The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs:
an enormous machine converting human ambition into noise
Lately
March was not a productive month for me, gamedev-wise. I spent more time playing Civ VII, reading, watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and re-watching season 1 of Jessica Jones (each!), than in Godot or other creative tools.
I don’t mourn the time spent or not spent, but the loss of momentum burns. In April, I want to turn that around. I find that if I launch the game, I’ll quickly find the thing most annoying or unsatisfying at the moment, and naturally get to work on it.
Finished reading: The Absinthe Forger by Evan Rail 📚
Not quite a “whodunit”– the forger in question is known right from the beginning. Rail spends the book exploring Absinthe’s history and present day makers and collectors, trying to understand the how and why the forger did what they did.