April 2017

Style

As you’ve probably noticed, I have refreshed the style of this website, as well as the root of my domain. Goodbye monospaced font for everything! The font is Rawson Pro, by the ever-talented foundry Latinotype. And do check out “Dark mode” by clicking the tiny little button labelled “Day” (or “Night”) in the bottom left corner.

Rust

I wrote down a massive design document for Notify’s future, then submitted it to the Rust Reddit community to hopefully get some comments and reviews. The response was mostly positive, I think. However, actual implementation will likely take a back seat for month to come, as I work on other creative endeavours (see below).

I also published version 4.0 of Cargo Watch, following a near-complete rewrite and finally resolving several long-standing bugs and feature requests, including one or two that had been open for more than a year!

I also upgraded Cargo Watch’s supporting documents to WeAllBehave and WeAllContribute’s outstanding templates, adapting them slightly so they’re more compatible with a Rust project.

Open source and community

I’m hoping to ramp up my contribution to not only these two projects, but also going to more events, and participating in the developer community. The last two years have been very quiet personally on that front, and I’d like to remedy that.

NZ.js

NZ.js was really good! One attendee made a recap via tweets, and all the talks are already up and available. If you only have a little time, I recommend the opening keynote by @rockbot, the closing talk by @prototypealex, but almost all the other talks were great too, of course. Almost? Almost. There was definitely one that I didn’t care for at all, and maybe a couple others were merely meh. But overall? great stuff.

That Star Wars Fanfiction I’m Writing

(The working title was “Master Kylo”, but things happened, and now Kylo Ren is a minor character, so I’ll have to pick a new working title. I’m bad at these.)

I tweeted an (intentionally) blurry photo of a timeline I put up on my whiteboard. That was a progress shot: its current state is quite a bit more complete, but I also can’t show it because spoilers.

Black is what I’m using from Canon, boxed names are characters or organisations I care about (or for context), and correspond to lines showing, by their proximity, where people/orgs are in relation to others. Purple is the Alternate Universe parts of my fic, the things that are not Canon. Yes, this fic is multiple-points-of-departure.

You can’t see it because it’s so faint, but there’s also dates indicated. That busy middle bit before the vertical line going upwards is the period between 5 and 28 ABY. The leftmost of the board starts at 19 BBY, i.e. the end of Episode III, and the rightmost lines end around 34 ABY, i.e. Episode VII. I left a bit of space after that for the actual action of my fic. It’s not to scale! There’s some areas that are very expanded, and some where five years take as many centimetres. I only have so much space.

I’m now aiming to have a solid detailed outline for Part 1 of the fic, covering about 0 ABY until 33 ABY in various threads, as well as at least 15% (10-12k words) of the material drafted out, for my birthday. That’s in a month or so, and I already have about 4k words written down as of publish of this update.

The fic has shifted focus a few times during the last few months, and now as it approaches its final (for now) plan it’s about the lives and events of several characters in-between Episodes VI and VII. We’ll see a little of Luke and Leia and Han, but it’s mostly about the Resistance and how it kept on fighting, about a boy being kidnapped from a Sectors planet and finding a good head for strategy and good company… only to lose it when his conscience calls him out, leaving behind a troubled young man who has no idea what he’ll become. It’s about an explorer keeping his faith even as he sees a dear friend withdraw from the world (with good reason) and as he leaves a place that felt like home to hide away, but who also cannot escape the call of discovery and curiosity. It’s about a mysterious voice speaking on old frequencies bringing hope and tales and unlikely help. It’s about a young woman in a hostile environment determined to get out and make her mark on the world, and it’s about another determined to stay put and survive where she is. It’s about the worlds continuing to turn while you’re looking away.

What’s amusing is that the plot point that triggered the conception of this fic is now a minor detail that will be used only two or three times. But it’s there, a reminder that even when you think you know how things work, they can surprise you. That’s what this detail is, and that’s what this story is.

Thoughts on Fanfiction

I wrote a little on what I think fanfiction is about.