Unrelatedly, this morning I finally got to take my splint off! I’m cooling my heels in a patient room waiting for the OT to come in and show me how to have a bad time. (And craft a reduced safety splint for the next leg.)

There’s a sink in here, and as soon as they left me alone I spent like ten minutes washing my hands to try and get the splint stank off. So much dead skin sloughing off, too. And there’s these nasty creases? That shit better not split on me, say no to trench foot.

So, speaking of Lua, I wanted to round some fractional coordinates to the nearest whole pixel before drawing, to reduce skrungliness. (That's a technical term.) Lua doesn't have a rounding function in its standard library, which surprised me, but it's a pretty petite stdlib, so ok.

And then I was like wait... how DO you round a float? Like, legitimately?

The standard thing you see goes something like math.floor(n + 0.5). For negative numbers, floor increases the absolute value instead of decreasing it, but adding a positive half decreases the absolute value, so it cancels out and works out to a well-behaved "ties round away from zero" rounding scheme.

Or at least it would, if we were in the real numbers (or even a limited-but-consistent precision regime). But we are not. We're in motherfucking float country, where the space between adjacent numbers gets wider as their magnitude increases. Which means a "debatably correct, but good enough that you can't really catch it behaving badly" rounding function looks more like this:

-- reminder: in PUC lua and luajit, `number` is an f64,
-- which is what dictates these constants. f32 needs
-- different values.

local function round(n)
    if math.abs(n) >= 4503599627370497.0 then
        return n
    end
    return math.floor(n + 0.49999999999999994)
end

( More color on that (you know you're curious) )

Anyway, this isn't a Lua problem, it's just that floating point math is always weirder than you think. Lua just exposed this corner to me by not providing an already-solved implementation the way my other languages do (usually by calling a processor intrinsic).

Anyway, I'm leaving a negative review on "having one hand largely disabled for weeks." Everything takes double the effort and triple the time, then yields half the results.

I'm acquiring a tiny bit more patience with my situation. A tiny bit.

Yeah, all right, so a couple things happened in quick succession.

First off, last Friday (the 2nd) I quit my job. This rules, and I've been looking forward to it for more than a year. I'm going on Ruth's health insurance, I'm planning to take about a year off, and I've got SO many things I want to do.

But I will be doing a greatly reduced set of those things at first, because I 🌻 fucking broke my right pinkie finger 🌻 on Sunday, by falling on it on a trail run. (By the way, I have fallen and eaten shit on a trail SO many times before, to much less effect... and this time I had NO other skin injuries or bruising, which is, ah, anomalous. What happened??*)

I managed to get in to a specialist Weds and got my bone re-set, and was then installed into this thing:

Also, you shouldn't click this, but here's the unsplinted hand on Monday if you're dying to see something mildly bad. And since I can't think of a better place in the post to mention it, I'll note here that this, at age 44, is baby's very first broken bone. That was a pretty good run.

This leaves me about 1.15-handed for... a while. (I've got one finger and a thumb free on the right, but that's less than it sounds like because I can't put much force anywhere near it and the splint blocks me from getting into tight spaces.) And did I mention I'm technically not a leftie? Plus some other constraints on my mobility that are going to really sting — can't run, can't bike, oof.

I DO realize that this is a temporary and minor disability, and many others (possibly even you) have it much worse. But it's a downgrade in my quality of life and I'm a bit put out about it.

Anyway, I gave myself a week to wallow in self-pity and sit around playing Trails of Cold Steel, but now I'm antsy and it's time to start clawing back some capability.

So yeah

First order of business: using a real computer again. I'm lucky enough to still own history's final smartphone, so I can do some amount of one-handed writing right off the bat (I'd be up shit creek for real if I had a phablet, like all the current iPhones or androids), but that won't cut it for programming.

That means I need a fast one-handed keyboard layout.

( Yeah, you knew it was gonna end like this )

So, that was fun. Now I can drive a terminal and a code editor again, ho ho ho.

If you ever end up in this situation, do give some kind of mirrorboard layout a try. I know I don't seem like a trustworthy source about keyboard difficulty, but because of the skipped memorization step, I bet it'd be the least-bad option for a lot of regular touch-typists, too.

* ...Well, okay, actually I have a theory. I made a bad decision with sunglasses that were fogged over with evaporated sweat, and so I couldn't see the ground coming up at me once I was airborne. Whatever fall skills I have, I couldn't use 'em blind.

Hey by the way!! I don't think I mentioned it here yet, but a month or two back, I finally notched that Mushihimesama (maniac mode) 1cc that I was working on! A pointless but incredibly satisfying achievement. 📺 I got a video of it up on YouTube if you're interested (you are not required to be interested).

Dealing with the gauntlet of stage 5 kind of unlocked a couple things in my brain, especially around routing bullet cancels. (Certain large enemies will erase all enemy bullets on death, and you often want to carefully time this to guarantee a safe recovery from a bunch of other enemies making the screen unlivable. This means you have to treat the scariest baddies as a precious resource, which is fascinating.)

Anyway, that's my first proper clear of a Cave title. I'm back to working on Ketsui, which I like better than Mushi but which I had put aside for a bit once I realized I was close to a Mushi clear if I focused.

Ketsui doesn't really have alternate modes or difficulties (unless you count the oddball arranged modes included in the M2 port), and it also doesn't have "rank" (dynamic difficulty, where the aggression scales depending on player actions) — it just presents the same impossible-looking wall to every player. But at the time I originally picked it up, I found that weirdly comforting — there was no question of whether I was "doing it right" or choosing the appropriate mode, you know? Pick your ship, approach your target, and attack.

Adam de Souza — Blind Alley (webcomic backlog)

May 27

Readable online.

This comic rules! In proper old internet style, I learned about it because K.C. Green did a guest strip for it and posted it on his tumblr.

There seems to be a slow-burn plot going, a slight and gradual gravity pulling together these threads of psychic kids, cryptids, mechanical surveillance, questing animals, and semi-absent parents. But mostly what we've got here is a very classic (almost Peanuts-y) unsupervised kids comic strip with wry, biting humor and an incredibly special melancholy air, which somehow feels post-apocalyptic despite plenty of evidence of technological civilization in working order. (That last bit is an intensely familiar sensation from the hazy corners of my own childhood.)

I feel like I must have heard the name Adam de Souza before, but I can't for the life of me remember the context. I dug a bit and he's done some other stuff, but nothing I immediately recognized. He's clearly amazing though.

Bonus Level: Schildmaid MX

June ??

A horizontally-scrolling indie shmup, based around a three-phase bullet absorption semi-polarity mechanic.

I only played this briefly, because it didn't grab me; the production values were quite nice (so much juice!), but I didn't vibe with the shooting fundamentals and the levels and bosses felt pretty same-y. Also it was constantly popping up a stream of idle-game style achievement progress windows, which is how I learned I don't like that.

Bonus Level: The Roottrees are Dead

June 27

A mystery-solving game that merges the "index-em-up" gameplay of A Hand with Many Fingers and Her Story with the "identify three to confirm" gameplay of Return of the Obra Dinn. So effectively a very large old-school game magazine logic grid puzzle with a wide array of textual and visual clues, but you have to dig for the clues before you can use them on the grid.

This was pretty good! I had heard about it earlier and wrote it off because I found the art offputting, but a friend gave it a strong enough recommendation to make me reconsider, and I ended up eating the whole thing in a night or two. (I was in the mood for a logic grid.)

I really liked how the optional hint system in this was implemented. There's a duck you can click when you're stuck, and instead of giving you a direct hint about a character or event, it'll say things like "I wonder if there's more trails we could follow from X piece of evidence?" It ends up being just enough of a nudge to get you back on track without spoiling the fun.

Gamedev note: Godot engine. We're firmly in the second or third generation of good and ambitious games made in Godot, which is pretty neat.

Isaac Fellman — Notes from a Regicide

June 5

Ruth read this a month or two later during our big backpacking trip, and then while we were hiking she said “Hey, what genre is this, anyway? Because it feels like historical fiction, but it’s kind of the opposite.” I went with “realistic science fiction” (it’s 1000+ years in the future, but other than the stone yard the setting is 100% mundane), but she’s totally right about the historical fiction thing.

This is largely because of the half-setting of Stephensport, which our New York-born framing narrator Griffon absolutely perceives as a place from a different era, and which was deliberately constructed by its founders to function as a land out of time. (What a soul-melting place to live, tbh.)

That New York vs. Stephensport dichotomy is sort of the book's structural and science-fictional engine — it alternates chapters of Etoine's memoir of Stephensport with chapters of Griffon's memoir of living in New York with Etoine and Zaffre, from his teens onward, and to my eye the big difference between New York and Stephensport is how they comprehend the past. The seas have risen significantly (New York feels more like a Venice) and we've undergone a pretty significant technological collapse — electricity is rare and special-purpose, monumental steel-and-concrete architecture is a historical oddity, computers and microcontrollers are long gone. But New York keeps moving forward and changing; often recapitulating or rhyming with our own era's developments, sure, but still always putting one step in front of the last step. Interested in the past, but not possessed by it. Meanwhile, Stephensport has a death-grip on a pre-collapse fever-dream, frozen in a faux-utopian designed society. Of course it all falls down eventually, into something that, at least for the coming generation or two, seems much worse. But maybe not forever, and after all, the whole ruckus seemed driven by peoples' desire to have some kind of present and future, not just a past. I wouldn't assume a place with people like Sister Emma in it is down for good; all things pass, including that asshole Saul Cormé.

This is sort of a story about a failed revolution, the sorts of twists and turns in your life that might lead you into a doomed revolution, and the strange second acts you might live after the suppression of that revolution fails to eradicate you. But it’s mostly a story about trans resilience and tenacity and joy, and a defiant assertion that our people’s light will never go out.

Like the other Fellman book I’ve read (Breath of the Sun), this left me with a ton of, let’s say “satisfyingly unanswered questions.”

Oh, and also I just picked up Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles on playstation because for some random-ass reason they were TWO DOLLARS (/paperboy-from-better-off-dead-voice) for a couple of days, which is ludicrous. Those are the two most recent games by Qute (who made Eschatos and Judgment Silversword); they're very cool, and I was planning to eventually just pay full price for em.

I haven't fired up Natsuki yet (though I previously watched some footage), but Ginga Force is so wild and inspiring. The core of it is a story mode where you attack the levels one-by-one and accumulate a bunch of alternate loadout options, which is very anti-arcade design. (JSS and Eschatos both might as well have been arcade games.) The levels themselves are entirely designed around their bosses, which I find exhilarating — you're constantly interacting with (and shit-talking at) the boss throughout the stage, and can occasionally take a chip off em in between dealing with all the popcorn enemies and obstacles they're throwing at you. Structuring the level as a multi-stage chase scene makes for an incredibly grounded sense of place and context, which is exactly the kind of evolution I should have expected after Eschatos.

That's not really the first place I've seen some of those ideas; in Blue Revolver Val and Dee come to fuck with you mid-stage a couple times (and according to lore each level boss is directly remote-controlling their entire fleet), and a bunch of Touhou bosses fill in as their own midboss. But taking boss-based levels this far gives another effect entirely, and I absolutely love it.

Well, it's arriving at a good time for thinking about this stuff: I'm getting closer to a point where I need to buckle down on level and boss design for Ultra Badger Coyote (working title), so questions of how to build narrative and direction via action and space in a shmup have been on my mind. I think the best examples I've seen prior to this have been ZeroRanger, Eschatos, Radiant Silvergun, and oddly enough Ketsui.

• Most Cave games are just structured as "here's a cool new space you ended up in somehow, here's some enemies that might be in that place, here's a boss" — it works fine, but it's not narrative drive! Ketsui, on the other hand, makes it very clear that you're wading inch-by-inch through the nation-scale defenses in front of a single bastardly target with a known fixed location, and the difference is palpable.
• In ZeroRanger, of course, you're carving through the corrupted fleet to get to Green Orange — over the city, through the excavation, up the space elevator, across the solar system, into the battlestation. It all serves the directional momentum (well, the excavation detour is weird if you sit and think too long, but w/e, it works), and the environments are all extremely structured, with memorable landmarks and wholly unique enemy formations.
• Eschatos is almost the same as ZeroRanger (which makes sense, they say it was their biggest direct influence) — over the city, over the country, through the atmosphere, TO THE MOON. It's not split up into levels in the conventional "take a break and show the score summary" way, so it all feels like a continuous and spatially-grounded journey. (Actually, Ketsui benefits from that too because of the transition areas they keep displaying during the stage breaks! Hmm.)
• Silvergun is too complicated to get into, but your objectives and destinations keep changing as guided by the narrative, and the big bad keeps showing up to fuck with you, so you're staying connected to your motivation to knock over the final boss.

qntm — Fine Structure

Feb 4

This novel covers some of the same ground as Ra, but I didn't like it as much — it didn't feel as coherent and directed, which drained some of the impact of the big gonzo ideas. Anyway, read Ra! I can't yet speak to There Is No Antimemetics Division, but I'll probably get to it at some point. (Actually, that's what I meant to read this time, but the hold line at the library was pretty saturated, so I diverted.)

John Scalzi — When the Moon Hits Your Eye

May 15

Kind of high-concept — the setup is that, in a miraculous occurrence that cannot be explained or comprehended, the moon turns to an equivalent mass of cheese, and then we spend 28 chapters flitting from character to character (only rarely making repeat visits to someone) to show a world Staying Entirely On Its Bullshit Despite It All.

Well-written and fun, but I think it ultimately felt a bit slight? Well... hmm. It's possible the ending will stick with me.

I found the end annoying — everything goes back to the way it was, as randomly as it began, and then a hundred years later it's fully accepted that it was all a globally-coordinated "megahoax." Kind of the whole thesis of the book is "what we do in the face of the senseless," and I feel like that ending is an especially grim final answer that I don't really have a response for.

Andrea K Höst — the Touchstone series (re-reads)

Jan 26, Jan 26, Jan 27, Jan 29

I was just in a mood to re-read some junkfood.

Andrea K Höst — In Arcadia

Feb 3

Oh yeah, so I noticed a couple years back that Höst had done another sequel to the Touchstone series, and this one was a romance novel about Cass's mom. Okay! Sure!

I liked this. Yeah, okay, it's very hetero, as is the original series, and I could name some ways to improve that. But it's doing some interesting and satisfying stuff against the standard grain of the portal fantasy format, which was also something I liked about the other, prior epilogue — it's really committing to exploring the consequences of deciding to stay in the portal world, whereas usually the decision to stay (or return) is the end of the story.

At the end of said prior epilogue, a significant chunk of Cass's old life decided to pick up stakes and hop through the gate the next time its rotation came around, including her mom, her brother, one of her aunts, two of her friends, and a friend's dying sibling. But then what? Laura's suddenly a dependent of her adult child, her other kid is on the struggle bus, and everyone's finding it a bit oppressive to be under global tabloid scrutiny every time they stick their nose outside their guarded compound. She's trying to restart her art career from scratch and there's still feelings from her divorce that she never finished unpacking. It's messy! I liked that.

Graydon Saunders — A Succession of Bad Days, Safely You Deliver, Under One Banner (re-reads)

Mar 19 – Mar 26, or thereabouts

Yep.

Martha Wells — Platform Decay (Murderbot... 7?)

May 25

It's Murderbot, I liked it.

I'm looking forward to some more exploration of Murderbot's burgeoning artistic/documentarian career, but this isn't that; it's a real fucked up extraction mission in a much bigger and more chaotic environment than our protagonist is used to dealing with. Also, it has started reluctantly going to therapy, and seems to be benefiting from that a bit.

There was something I mentioned in an old review of one of the other novellas in the series: something where the answer to an ongoing mystery turned out to be much less complicated than it looked, but then also paradoxically more complicated because of the way it didn't weave into the rest of the backstory in a tidy and contained way. A deliberately ragged edge that smudges the boundary between the small and comprehensible plot and the big incomprehensible world that surrounds it.

Anyway, this has that going on.

Just discovered this new webcomic. I love this dumb lil strip about trading card smell.

I'm mostly writing this here for my future self.

( You definitely aren't interested in this unless you landed directly on this entry via a search engine. )