rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

If you're an omnivore like me but want to try veganism for a short period, might I recommend visiting Philadelphia's Mütter Museum?

I've just spent thirty minutes starting back at pickled anatomical anomalies and wax reproductions of the diseases of the face, and now I'm so turned off by meat that I'm contemplating rewriting my website in C99.

Happy 02020 CE, Merveilles!

Sorry for not being online recently, I've gotten sidetracked. My mobile OS (and browser) switch led me down the frustrating rabbit hole of WebGL extension support on mobile devices.

WebGL is actually in a bizarre state nowadays. Over the holidays I've struggled to figure out how I'll convey what I've learned. Watch this space!

RIP, Josephine.

You taught your family a very personal mode of expressing love; your personality shone through all the things you made, did and shared. I hope to keep you shining through me.

words are chosen, psyches shatter—
mad libs are made all the madder.
Pale Truth ebbs from aimless chatter
when Horror's your reading matter.

Also they make Sour Patch Kids cereal now. It's surreal all by itself

Okay, I might be crying a tiny bit. That's the surprise announcement.

Thanks for reading! 😅 Go play Verreciel!

I'll take another swing at this later in the week. The glinting kinetic sculpture that is Verreciel's universe will be properly grokked by its resident ghost before too long, and it'll probably deserve a decent writeup.

And maybe the solution I come up with can help me, too. If I'm writing a program to prioritize things, so that they're done in the right order, then maybe I can, you know, feed it my life and goals and it can print me a tutorial.

I mean, probably not 😂 but we'll see!

And here's the personal crux of it: the awkward, error-prone, doesn't-handle-change-well, needs-a-robust-replacement progression system is a stand-in for me.

I'm brittle. I don't scale, or adapt gracefully to change. I'm not quite robust.

Which are all fine! I'm human, sure!

But I've got some really great friends, who I want to thrive, and I want to contribute support. I'm in a real good place. I just need to be more reliable.

Aside from the dormant refactoring branch, I feel like I've got only two things to show for my progress.

One, I better understand the problem I'm trying to solve. It's a hard problem, but solving it would be fantastic, and could lead to new games or tools in our community.

Two, I better understand my motivations behind working on it. Verreciel is Devine's pride and joy, it's an awesome thing, that I want to last. It's in a real good place, its progression system just needs to be more reliable.

I've tried to make my gameplay logging easier, by speeding up the game clock, but this apparently subtly messes up the sequence of in-game events (like timers) that I'm waiting for.

I have a ten thousand line JSON file of logged clicks, literally everything the player clicks in Verreciel, in the order they click it, and I'm throwing it away, because the auto-pilot goes catatonic 10% of the way through.

And here's the thing— while I can record my Verreciel gameplay, it's basically a log of every little button I press and in-game event I wait for, from start to end, and if I mess something up even once, I want to start over. It's Sisyphean! It's my pilgrimage.

The alternative is to rewrite large parts of the game's internals to be data-driven, and to program a "solver" that decides what needs to be done, and what to do first. I've done some of this, in a branch, but it's arguably a distraction.