I love the clouds opposite the sunset sometimes. We’re down in the bowl of the lake, so the sun was well out of sight from here, and the lower clouds are that dusky gray-blue, but then some of them stretch up to catch the last rays of the sun and are still glowing fiercely orange. The colors are a little off here: I don’t really know what I’m doing with photography. They were more pinkish in real life. But it gives the general idea.
I started rescuing a recently-sprouted bed of fall/winter carrots from the hairy galinsoga today: I was going to post a picture of that but then I got distracted by the sky. Maybe tomorrow: hopefully by then I’ll have finished the whole thing and not just half of it…
Another not-much-coding day today. I tinkered with the trailer game a little, and went and reminded myself where I was with the shunting-yard implementation. I might work on that some more before I go to bed.
But mostly I spent a while playing Stay? because we have an upcoming Interactive-fiction-book-club meeting coming up. It’s an interesting game. You get chosen to avert the end of the world, in a fantasy setting. You start as a college student, though it dips into your life very briefly and then abruptly skips, so by the end of the game you’re in your thirties, I think? You go through, getting your character to learn things as you loop. There’s lots here, a bunch of other smaller disasters to avert (or not), and a light dating-game thread running through the whole thing.
But… as a programmer who likes narrative design it just felt a little too far beyond the author’s narrative design skills for me to really enjoy it. The personal moments felt cut off instead of finished which made the big time skips pretty jarring. And when you found a new path forward it was usually clear what you did to unlock it, but it was often very unclear where you should look beforehand. It just all felt like, “yes, these are the kinds of problems you run into with this sort of design” and I could think of at least a couple things you could do to avoid them by design or finesse them in the writing. So yeah. That just kept poking at me and it felt kind of… empty? The writing was often pretty good but it felt like it was patched on to a mechanical skeleton rather than forming a smooth whole. Dunno. Everybody else who has mentioned it in the pre-meeting chat seems to be really enjoying it.