Moar updates

[infryq]

Yeah I do a lot of stuff.

• I started bellydance classes again, two weeks ago. I'm taking the beginner series with Bernie Vargo in squirrel hill. The only other regular student in the class has about the same amount of experience as me (~18months), but more recent. I completely adore taking beginner classes from a new-to-me instructor, you get all the gooey foundational technique details that are unique to that person's style of dance. Already having some semblance of coordination helps too, since you're not using all your cycles on "OH GOD WHAT IS MY BODY DOING" and can actually think critically about the smaller stuff.
  
• Stayman apples make gorgeous sauce and butter.
  
• I remembered how to make casserole.
  
• Moths are running rampant in our pantry. :( About once a month I find some container of otherwise dry goods that's disgustingly full of maggots. Aforementioned casserole was going to be based on brown rice; I switched to pasta at the last minute when I saw their little bodies floating to the surface of the boiling water. Ew.
  
• I've not been spending a lot of time reading. I've been spending less time playing iPod games. I've been spending more time standing a bus stops and looking and listening. It's nice. Sometimes I write; that's nice too.
  
• Alton Brown's banana bread recipe doesn't hold any candles at all to mom's. I'm never doing that again.
  
• I got some new 3/4 length boatneck shirts from LLBean, which are nice but a little too blousy. Probably going to take them in. They're pretty fetching with a wide belt, but that's not what I bought them for.
  
• It's starting to get cold enough nights that I'm starting to want the feather duvet. Which means I should really sew on the damn buttons. Oh man, and I just thought of this -- what if I sewed every other button to the featherbed itself? And replaced the corresponding buttons on the cover with button holes? Then half the buttons would be holding the cover closed, and the other half would be holding the featherbed inside. That could be mad clever.
  
• Birthday $ possibly going towards pantry containers, a new spice grinder, or a wicked awesome infrared thermometer and thermocouple.
  
• ...and the nest is finally probably clean enough that I could actually paint it. Like I meant to, last year. What color of smoky lavender goes best with a sunset? All the windows face west.
  
• I'm playing more IF these days, and learning Inform 7 as a foil to swearing at authors of bad games. It is a seriously weird language to program in, and there are no reference manuals, only tutorial manuals, which is a shame. The language is flexible enough that it's kindof like Perl in that TMTOWTDI, except sadistic in that most of the ways suck, or only allow you to get 80% of the way there before dead-ending in a slightly damp cave with no visible exits. There is a slowly growing textfile on my home computer entitled "WTF Inform" which might someday become the reference I would've liked to have. We'll see. In my usual way I keep looking for the edges of what's expressible, but finding that I haven't played enough recent games to know that people have been there already. There are so many small-, medium-, and large- sized holes that have been filled already; how do people like zarf keep finding enormous gaping ones? I am mystified.
  
• Someone in my hallway is playing an audio recording of the seashore?
  

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

I noticed your intfiction forum post. :P

I've lately been picking the best-sounding ideas from my IFideas.txt and trying to just code up the central mechanic in I7, for practice. I have these vague sky-pie ideas about doing an IF project on the webcomic model, with regular, semi-frequent content updates, with short experimental minigames. But I need to get better at writing the code before I get too ambitious.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

has someone written a compiler for a reasonable IF language, that compiles to the nasty that is I7?

damn the moths. well. Winter soon. everything in the pantry can go live outside on a porch for a week in hardfreeze while the pantry is scrubbed down to remove eggs? been there... feh :)

#

[infryq]

> everything in the pantry can go live outside on a porch for a week in hardfreeze
Yes! That is a thing that should happen. The house is an old victorian that was apparently built by people who were 10 feet tall, since the shelving just keeps going up to the ceiling. I don't even know what's up there anymore. Moths, clearly.

As for compiling to I7, (1) I have no idea what would count as "reasonable" for an IF language (I wrote TADS a long time ago but it ground itself into deadlock pretty quickly). Also, I7 is essentially prose, and the idea of compiling to it strikes me like writing a compiler to turn machine code into Ruby or something. I think kittens would die. (2) Most of the problems are in not knowing the magic words. If I want a thing that has the behavior of a box (a native behavior), and also has the behavior of a surface you can put things on (also a native behavior) under some conditions, how do I tell the interpreter about that without reimplementing either behavior by hand? The casual syntax is super-useful for throwing up scenery and wireframes in a big hurry, and I love that part. But when I need to nitpick, it becomes opaque, and I think this is not actually because the language is bad, but because the reference effort seems to be in convincing non-programmers how easy it is to write IF, and not in describing how the language actually works, what bits are actually moving parts, and what bits are illusions that merely look and feel like moving parts so long as you don't do anything unexpected. So far, people looking for the latter have found it by keeping the source code handy, and yes, okay, that works, but that's also insane.

[infryq]

oh yeah! I should lurk there more. It seems to be a really good resource for figuring out things like "that implementation is stupid, do it this way instead".

++ on the practice code. Put them (or neutered versions) on a tag-indexed blog somewhere. I imagine the cookbook would take them. (or at least, *I* would).

I'm still not even sure I can identify central mechanics. I thought the "central mechanic" of a kitchen I was writing was going to be the fire/flame behavior, but it turned out to mostly be how to stick a stovetop to an oven: it's a device, it's a surface, it's a container, (it makes julienne fries!...) it probably means I did it backwards. We'll see.

[chrisamaphone]

i7 already compiles to i6, so i feel you'd be better off targeting that in the first place.

[chrisamaphone]

i'd also love this as a reference tool.

[chrisamaphone]

i have a directory of tidbits i am collecting toward my IF language project.

i have a feeling your "WTF inform" might feel at home there :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

You probably want something like this for your stove (although note that the stove is probably actually easier than an upturned crate, because most people do say "stove" when they mean the top part, and "oven" when they mean the bottom part):
----------------------
The kitchen is a room. The crate is a thing in the kitchen. "There is a crate here. It's on its side, and is thus suitable as either a table or storage, because you love multipurpose furniture.[if something is on the cratetop] [A list of things on the cratetop] is on the crate.[end if]".
[Note that if there were more things we could put on the crate, you'd want to do something with "is" in that sentence.]

The cratebody is a privately-named container. The cratebody is part of the crate. The printed name of the cratebody is "crate". Understand "crate" and "box" as the cratebody.

The cratetop is a privately-named supporter. The cratetop is part of the crate. The printed name of the cratetop is "crate". Understand "crate" and "box" and "top" as the cratetop..

[And here's the magic bit:]
Does the player mean putting something edible on the cratetop: it is very likely.
Does the player mean inserting something edible into the cratebody: it is very likely.
Does the player mean searching the cratebody: it is very likely.

Rule for clarifying the parser's choice of something: do nothing.
[Otherwise you get that awful "(the crate)" whenever you do something to it.]

The player carries a pie. The pie is edible.
-------------
But what I think is at the root of your problem here is that "supporter" and "container" should be properties, darnit, not kinds.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

A lot of the people on intfiction are incredibly helpful. I'm always amazed at the turnaround time, too.

When I say "central mechanic," I am referring more charitably to what some may call "gimmick," because that's how I roll. I have a lot more fun writing these things if something is not being handled in quite the normal way for an IF game. So, erm, both of my existing games have a pretty strong reliance on gimmick. Rot-13'd in case you have any intention of playing it, the thing that I wrote first for Byzantine Perspective was gur jnl gung gur ebbz qrfpevcgvba jnf nyjnlf, va snpg, gur qrfpevcgvba bs gur ebbz jungrire-qverpgvba sebz lbh. So it makes more sense for the "crossword"-oriented games than the "narrative" ones.

The target distribution format would be that I release the source along with the game, since in most of these works, the game would be short enough to not really be more than the trick.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

By the way, do you know about Ron Newcomb's Inform 7 for Programmers? You may find it helpful.

[infryq]

I went and played Byzantine Perspective after your last post on video game perspectives :) and I'm equally interested in how you employed the novyvgl gb hfr frafrf bgure guna fvtug. Which, based on the way you organized the problem, probably turned out to be not all that hard.

[infryq]

From the title it seemed like such a good idea, and contained so little that I actually cared about, unfortunately. :(

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

Oh good. :P Though as I ended up re-writing the "About" to say in the post-comp release, BP is really less about projection systems and more about "the relative emphasis on visual cues in the literary perception of architectural space, and [...] Beaux Arts values in architectural planning."

As to the particulars of its code, I did automate a lot of that stuff. I can send you the source if you'd like, though it's a bit of a shambles of poorly-named variables and such. It's all fairly simple, though, as you say, I spent a lot of time going down likely-seeming but ultimately incorrect paths.