This year’s last planting of green beans. The beans are all hidden under the leaves but I think the first ones will be ready to pick in just a few more days.
I like how you can see the curves of the tomato vines in the background: we prune them back to a single vine instead of a bushy plant, so they grow 12-14 inches a week. And then they get clipped to a string that gets lowered down when they get too tall. Since we’re getting on in the season, these ones are lying along the ground for a ways and then curving up to the cables overhead. You don’t really notice the gracefulness of the shapes when you’re working with them because you’re right up close, so it was fun to take a minute to look at them from this angle.
We have… not a CSA but we send out a weekly e-mail and people order for pickup on the weekend. People often come and go in the summer but it seems like everyone is home this week and lots of people have friends and family visiting: orders were nearly double what they sometimes are. So we were short on a bunch of things.
No coding today? Hmm. Yeah. I spent a whole bunch of time re-playing Arthur DiBianca’s The Wand. I’d forgotten how big and involved the secret second half of the game is… It’s a limited-parser game: you can’t touch anything, but you have a wand. It has three rings, each with 10 colors. So 1000 combinations? Too many to really brute-force. But if you come back after you’ve “won” then right at the very beginning there’s an opportunity to use the last thing you learned and a whole new section opens up that’s maybe three times as complex as the initially visible game. There’s a verb-noun structure to the wand settings, you find way more “nouns,” and there are some really tricky puzzles. Well. I guess some of them are just “did you notice this little detail so you could remember that it exists when you find the verb to interact with it? Can you think of all the possible ways to use this new verb?” Like a Metroidvania, really.