Lately I have been working on:
I think I’d like to make a new blog, and stop using WordPress. Maybe I would post more if I did that.
Tiny Home Terrarium (Solo Journaling Game by Philippa Mort)
My name is Dapple Coltsfoot. I am a TinyFolk.
So I am trying to set up a new jar house. I finally decided to move because there were too many people moving into my neighborhood, and trampling my special moss rock, the one that gets too dry sometimes, and the moss turns dull and dead, until it rains again and the moss returns like the flowers in spring. They didn’t care about my moss rock. I just don’t like spaces crowded with loud people, even if they aren’t loud out loud. Sometimes you can be quiet and still be a loud person.
The one thing I brought with me is a lovely feather I found that is too pretty to part with. It has a black tip! I wonder what wonderful bird it came from?
My special skill is that I have a green thumb – not literally, but I’m good with gardening. And my poor moss rock (but it was too heavy to bring). So I know I will be able to make a lovely new green place to live. I also know what to eat and what to avoid. Even the tricky mushrooms!
The Rockery is a location to find a nice rock for my home.
So I got up, even though my new terrarium jar is mostly empty, it’s still home, and I would have to leave it to go to the Rockery. Anyway I made sure I looked presentable, and headed over. It took a good quarter hour to get there. When I arrived at the rockery, which I hoped would be empty, it wasn’t empty at all. There was a sad little green frog there, by a moist pool in the middle of the rocks, where the sun doesn’t get to. He was feeling very lonely. Fortunately I showed up! He was lonely but optimistic, which worked out, because I came along to become a new friend. I don’t know what he would have done without me! (I didn’t mind him because frogs are very quiet people.) So I was just starting to get to know him when we both had to hide immediately – a cat was coming! She was a big, white shorthair with a tail waving like a flag shouting danger. We scattered two different ways because the frog could hide in a smaller rock hole than I could. The cat didn’t seem to care about me, and sniffed RIGHT where the frog was hiding. So I picked up a piece of gravel and threw it as hard as I could in the other direction to try to distract the cat. It didn’t work very well. I wasn’t sure what else to do. So I shouted. That worked a little too well, and I had to find a better place to hide, fast. But someone called the cat inside just then, so I was in the clear and forgotten. Dandelions! Who ever heard of a cat that comes when you call it?!
I went back to see how the frog was doing, whose name was actually Scum, which doesn’t sound like a nice name to me, but is apparently a nice name to a frog. He was happy to know that I was in the area, especially since I kept the cat away from him, and invited me back to chat again.
I got to take a very shiny orange rock back to my home. It looks like something you could eat (but it isn’t). In fact Scum gave me a small blue button to put in my home too. He said that buttons with two holes are luckier than buttons with four holes. I am not sure how he knows this but I knew it would be rude to ask.
I settled back in my new home thinking it could do with a few more rocks, but I was tired, so I made a cup of mint tea and tried to get comfortable for the night. I started trying to think about whether there is a plant that Scum would like, since he gave me the rock and the button. Maybe some water plant for that rock pool. I’ve never tried to grow a water plant before. But that is something I will have plenty of time to think about.
So there is this Very Exciting Book that just came out (August 16, 2022) by Richard Roberts called “A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel“. You’d better believe I already read it, and you can find my review on Amazon, mine is the really excited review under the name “Rachel”.
Since I am also supposedly named “Rachel” this book interested me. Ok also, I am actually pretty much “Rachel”. Loosely. It’s a long but true story that I can attest to. No really, I swear on the six eternal beating hearts of the ice worm that inhabits the mist between the far moons of Jupiter. Or I would, but I don’t swear.
ANYWAY: this is a boring Earth blog, so I’m going to tell you all the best repair tools I know of and here is a big list of links, like you used to see on blog pages in the late 90s. Eat that, Algorithm.
These may be Amazon links etc., but I don’t have an affiliate link program – buy them in your little local hardware store if you can, and just use these links to read more about the products and make sure I didn’t make them up.
Sugru: Sugru is amazing stuff; it’s like plastic? it’s like glue? But you mold it with your hands, and it sticks to anything and makes it permanent yet flexible. But it doesn’t last forever, so if you buy some you pretty much need to use it within six months. I think it will last longer than six months if you keep it in the fridge but don’t quote me on that. Actually if you quote me I will be delighted, but it might not be a true fact. Here is a link.
Apoxie Two-Part Resins/Clays: This stuff is SO STURDY that you can mold/repair outdoor all-weather yard ornaments or make actual ship repairs with it. I mean car repairs. SERIOUSLY it will repair a real car. Then of course buff and paint it if you want it to look pretty. Here is a link.
Evil Ted’s molds: These don’t repair anything. These make whatever you are making look Extra. They come in “Hero” and “Villain” and “Steampunk” and “Cyberpunk” what more do you want? You can use them with several brands of air dry clays, and so they are light for costumes/affixing to things that don’t bear much weight. Here is a link.
Garden Velcro: This is just a big spool of green Velcro that was created to tie up your tomatoes, so you have to hunt for it in a garden supply store/garden section of the hardware store, and maybe can’t find it all year around. But it’s awesome for attaching anything to anything else/cables/organizing stuff. I use it all the time for holding up Christmas decorations (or basically anything you want to Velcro to something else). Especially Christmas decorations because it’s green, so you don’t notice it if you hide it in pine. Here is a link.
Nano Tape: You may have seen all the clickbait ads where someone is putting a mason jar on a wall with tape, and, great googlie mooglies this stuff actually works. I bought a roll for everyone I know for Christmas and ended up with a lot left over, but currently I am using it to secure a very big socket extender to my wall outlet. I do shove it back in place sometimes, but it’s been there years and hasn’t fallen off the wall. Here is one example.
Insta Crates: You know how you need to lug parts and whatever around in a crate, and then you take them out and use them up and have a bunch of crates stacked in the corner under a sheet and then the cyborg hides snacks in there and forgets them and it smells after awhile? Well anyway: You can get COLLAPSING CRATES. These are especially awesome to put in your car trunk because they take so little space, until you need them to take up space. Here is one example.
Goo Gone: If you are like me, and a little crazy when it comes to sticky residue, you need Goo Gone. It will remove, well, the sticky residue from old tape, or price labels, or basically it removes any gross film from any surface. It’s great stuff. I don’t know why I keep having the spray bottle part break when I buy it, though, and end up transferring it to another bottle with no label that I have to keep remembering what it is. I live an exciting life. Here is a link.
Actually I could go on, but this is already a long blog. Apparently I have just enough patience to write about one blog post a year. Sorry about that. Maybe I will come up with more. Thanks for reading! Let me know if you buy any of this stuff and it works for you.
This is just a really quick photo post, because it looked nice today.
Oh, don’t even talk to me about 2020. Mildly ironic that I haven’t made a single post all year. New topic.
I long to be a better writer, artist, maker, coder, basically everything.
So I wrote this piece of flash fiction today.
Just a post to say: in 2020 I will try to update this with more content. Remember that tiny Anchor podcast I tried in November? I’m not done with it. But it’s going to evolve into a different form. Now that I’ve made this “resolution” on New Year’s Day, I can hold myself accountable!
I also said all of last year that I would draw more, and that sure didn’t happen. I did code a lot more, but that’s my day job – and I don’t really want to do more of it when I come home at night. I’ve decided that for now, this is ok. But I do want to have more projects in the evening: when you come home from work and “spend time” without purchasing any progress on anything, that’s a bad investment.
I spent today trying to delete portions of this domain that I don’t use. Hopefully they’ll be replaced with “Good Content” this year.
I am participating in something called Art Soundoff, where you record a series of short podcasts chronicling your work on a project in the month of November. More or less. For complete details on what this Art Soundoff thing is, check out http://www.leanintoart.com/artsoundoff.
You can listen to my art soundoff audio episodes here:
Today I’m writing from the Cleveland Game Dev Meetup. This month we’re meeting in the Mayfield Public Library. Â Strangely, both times I have come to a Meetup, my GPS has tried to tell me the destination doesn’t exist.
I’m listening to someone explain how Construct 2 is a great platform, and comparing it to Pulse. I wanted to ask someone his opinion of Ableton as a music DAW. But I’m not really getting any code written! I have to admit, I haven’t really touched the Unity tutorial I started last Meetup, and it has been a month. Now that I’m done with my code bootcamp, WCCI, it feels weird to not be working hard on anything in the evening after my day job. I really need to pick up some side project.
You’re right, I did not finish Identiflora yet. I was originally going to work through it as a .NET project, but now I’m not sure if that is the best idea. (Did I say this already? I feel like a broken record.) So in lieu of really “working on the big passion project”, I am working on some smaller things.
I still feel like I should be learning on CodeEval, but it is admittedly pretty dry. So I am excited that I just found Codingame – it is like CodeEval, full of problems to solve using your coding skills, but these are couched like games. It’s really a fun concept, even if it’s still hard work. Speaking of “hard work disguised as a game” I am also enjoying Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation, the same game company that made World of Goo. In Human Resource Machine you program (using a pseudo coding language) people to take certain integers and drop them into certain boxes – yeah you are really doing the same loops and if/thens that you would be learning in CodeEval, but giving it game trappings makes it fun!
I guess not everything can be made easier and into a game. I really enjoy listening to J. Vernon McGee. He is gone now, but his radio program is now a podcast, and it takes you through the whole Bible, verse by verse, over the course of five years. I once heard him say (and I think he was quoting but I don’t recall whom, sorry), Â that if you are having a hard time with a Bible passage, because it is dry and hard to understand, you have to moisten it with the sweat of your brow. Hard work is hard work! But it leads to deeper insights.
That goes for coding too.
I have been working with Visual Studio 2015, MVC .NET and MS SQL lately, and ran into several things that I had to keep looking up over and over, so I thought there may be someone else out there in the same boat.
Note: These are all tips for working code-first in Visual Studio.
I have made and sold art for years and still have a hard time (sometimes) calling myself an Artist. So I feel almost funny being at a game development meetup when I have never even tried to make a game. It isn’t “impostor syndrome” it’s just, I’m not sure if I am passionate about it. Not sure what I bring to the proverbial table. But I am here today, at the Shaker Launch House, with about 10 other people working on their own games. I don’t have a specific game idea to work on, but I brought art supplies and am working through some Unity 3D demos. In fact, I watched a lot of tutorials yesterday on beginning game development, and they said the important thing is to “start making a game out of what you can do” as opposed to “start with a great idea”. If you start with a great story to tell, and it is leagues out of your capacity to tell it, you will get stuck and quit. If you make a game that is just “two dots moving” (or..something), then you can actually finish a thing and then move on to the next one with one complete project under your belt (and experience).
My favorite games are ones with interesting characters and stories, and honestly, most of them are 2D not 3D. (In fact, I still like interactive fiction/text adventures.) But Unity does 2D as well. I should learn 3D since I sculpt and I’d like to see if I can print something in 3D. So many skills overlap!
I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate stories and books – art books? nature books? field guides? story books? I just love books. I did not really think about making games (I feel like all of my friends have always wanted to make games). I’m still not sure it is my platform, but I really want the experience of learning new things. And good games tell stories.
