October 2017

Night-mode improvement

Got an idea as I was thinking about putting glow-in-the-dark stars up my ceiling, and it turned out to be a great success at little effort! If you switch this blog to Night mode by clicking the tiny button in the bottom left corner, you’ll see what I mean.

That was done by finding a high-res picture of the night sky, then modifying curves to eliminate all the variation in black and dark blues, and converting all black in alpha. Then some touch up work was done to eliminate as much as possible blue and red halos around some galaxies that were visible on a white background. Finally, I used GIMP’s seamless tiling algorithm tool to generate the tile and layered it using CSS.

Writing

This blog

After doing some quick calculations, I found out that if I write about three thousand more words in this blog before the end of the year, I’ll have written more in this blog this year than all prior years combined! Now that’s a pretty fun goal.

I achieved this handily when I did experiments around transcripts later on.

Naema

Writing has been slower than usual, which is perhaps pushing back the end date.

I have been having difficulties reconciling Leia’s character with how I portray her in the one interaction that’s really important in this fic, my plans for the story warring with who she is verily. I think I’ve got it now, but Leia is definitely the hardest character I’ve had to write about.

I’ve been writing and thinking a lot more about Thabeskan culture and history, as that is an important part of the interactions between my two protagonists. That may have caused a slight change of structure and that in turn may push back completion, but oh well. So long as it improves the story…

Fatso

This month, Fatso also declared they were shutting down. Fatso has been a stalwart of these past years at this house, and it brought us a vast and diverse set of films even when we couldn’t afford downloading or streaming movies in the early times when the internet was capped and even slower than it is now. We’ll miss it, even though we weren’t watching as many DVDs recently, having diversified the sources of films we were getting. However, Fatso was the only way to get non-mainstream or foreign films, especially French (with original soundtrack) as well as many niche films from Latin America and the Middle East. Those are lost to us for now, unless and until we find another way. So thank you Fatso! We loved you.

Cogitare

After much gnashing of teeth (I swear a lot when I’m coding), I’ve finally put Cogitare together in a way that works decently well and looks good. It’s usable now, even though there are a number of issues with the UI that I want to fix.

During the next week or two, I’m going to finish that, write an import + admin interface, hook up the IRC bot, then prepare for NaNoWriMo by loading up a bunch of prompts and seeds and deleting the awful from the ones I have currently.