ree: (ooooh I'm smitten with delight)
I have determined that an hour or so of self-indulgence in mid-afternoon goes a long way toward keeping me happy, calm, and unscreaming. Mostly I've been playing some old computer games. So far I've gone through Myst (courtesy of ScummVM reading my old CD-ROM!), Monkey Island 1, a smattering of interactive fiction, and some Baba Is You (which gets very hard much faster than I was expecting; how brainbending is the back half of this game if I'm flummoxed already?! But I make slow progress and feel quite pleased with myself when I do). ScummVM even supports and detected The Making of Myst feature on my disc, which I hadn't expected. Still need to get back to that one day but it will have to keep until after Christmas break is over and everybody gets back onto a regular schedule again.

Something else that will have to keep is Get Lamp, a landmark documentary about interactive fiction. I don't monopolize the TV when my family is home, but I got far enough into it to learn some things about IF and how I feel about it. IF sometimes was (is?) held up as a story you can participate in, which is catnip to a books-and-games nerd like me, but the reality is somewhat different. IF has story but the gameplay is not the story itself; the gameplay is puzzles, mazes, mapping, playing Guess The Verb. And those are things that I dislike, am notoriously bad at, or both. This was useful to discover, because I had felt stupid for being bad at stories, but it's not the text that stymied me.

(I think I am overusing commas again. Gotta watch that or I spin up strings of text so long and tangled that even I who write them cannot parse them out.)

I keep not checking Dreamwidth in timely fashion. I may have gotten a setup that works for me, if I remember to use it. (I used to have an icon on my phone that would open Dw in my browser, but frequently my browser would have a bunch of tabs already open and it would get overwhelming and I'd mass close them or forget about it for days. Now I have more browsers installed on my phone, so I have one that is pretty much just for running Dw, and I have a Dw icon that opens into that. As it happens, this means the Dw icon that is displayed is less jaggy than before as well, which is not terribly important but does help in some small way.)

I wish Dw had a night mode site skin that was small screen and touchscreen friendly, but I suspect this is one of those things where you ask support or a dev about making that happen and they say "Sounds like a great project! When do you want to start?" Which makes some sense, but I have little free time and the focus of a hypercaffeinated, phobic squirrel.

And on that note, I suppose the laundry isn't going to fold itself. Have a great day, folks!
ree: baby Metroid with pink hearts in its speech bubble (baby Metroid <3)
Dink Smallwood is just as ridiculous in HD (more, because of its pixel jaggies!) and I have just finished playing a user-created module (The Quest for Cheese) that has an exploding ducks spell. I'm underselling it but the spell is quite satisfying to use.

I ran into a little trouble, though. I played the mod umpteen years ago, so it was basically brand new to me now, and I got stuck at one point. I was confident that I had come across walkthroughs for D-Mods before, so I plugged the main game and mod titles, along with "walkthrough", into DuckDuckGo and hoped for the best.

What I found was this. You see that bit at the top, where it credits the walkthrough to a site resurrected by someone called Jaina? That's me! I'm Jaina!

It's been a day and I'm still processing how I feel about it. The site wasn't mine originally and I deleted it years ago, thinking nobody would miss it. (Also I think my free hosting was going paid-only, costing more than I cared to pay. I had hosted mirrors of the mods themselves along with the reviews, and I didn't think the reviews without the mods themselves had much appeal, and I didn't care to pay to host it all when I thought nobody else cared. So I deleted it altogether.) I don't think I even have the website files anymore.

But the content is not gone, because I was not the only one who cared.

I'm not sorry I stopped hosting the site; it was the right call for my circumstances at the time. But I'm happy that it meant enough to someone else that I came across a shoutout and information from it, still preserved, in the year 2023. And playable Dink in this year! On a portable device!

From a certain vantage, living in the future can be so awesome.
ree: (hidden entrance: come in?)
The lying thing! Calibre claimed to help me delete the accidentally doubled book—but it didn't. I am still going to have to back up my books and annotations, factory reset my Kindle (a-fucking-gain), and put no more than one of each book back. Until I do, things will continue to be wonky and untenable. The most it did was get the Kindle to finish indexing books for search, and God only knows if it even did that right. Ugh.

Once again Calibre turns out to be more trouble than it's worth. Hellscape program is not even sorry. "You misclicked, so now all your epubs will open in me! There's no Undo for this!" Do Not Want. "I can fuck up your metadata for you!" It was serviceable before; mitts off, you monster. "I can solve this problem for you!" Cool, do it then.... Wait, did you do anything? "LOL nope!"

Probably I need to resign myself to using the Kindle strictly for content locked with Amazon DRM and the Kobo Aura for everything else. The Aura feels nice to use and it reads pretty much every practical format (including non-DRM MOBI). I am pretty sure the Aura has had the same book in different formats at the same time and it was fine, which would be prevent a lot of hassle for me.

Books, though. Books are good. Uprooted is lovely and the last chapter in particular gives me feels and opinions. I just finished the first Rachel Peng novel (Digital Divide), thinking it would be a pleasant diversion, and now I need to pricecheck the rest of the series because it's stuck in my grey matter in this really delicious way. Books delight me.

The hardware and software that supports them.... somewhat less so.

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