arabellaflynn

[arabellaflynn]

I've been in my new place for about two weeks now, otherwise known as 'long enough to decompensate'. Despite taking apart all my standing racks and piling all my shit up in the living room, neither of the other roommates noticed I was leaving until the night before, when the Useless Narcissist asked if I was moving. 

"Yes."

"Oh, when?"

"Tomorrow."

Stunned look. "Why?"

"Because neither of you pay your rent on time." 

(Note that I had been telling them for the past two months that I could not continue fronting the rent for everyone indefinitely. The landlord insisted on having the check by the first but didn't cash it until some random time between the 15th and the 25th of the month. Both roommates had gotten around to giving me the money later and later -- for June, the Useless Narcissist paid me just over a week late, and the other one was two weeks late.)

Indignant look. "Oh come on! I paid you back every time!"

"That's not really the same thing."

Appalled look. "What are we going to do about this month?"

"Beats me."

(I might have had a more sympathetic response had he not asked me this on the second of July, having apparently assumed that I had just gone ahead and paid everyone's rent for them, so as not to bother him with piddly things like deadlines.)

I used the same movers I called the last time, because I'll be damned if I carry the heavy shit myself ever again. They were pretty surprised when they showed up. Apparently by moving company standards, I was almost psychotically prepared. What do I do when I know I'm about to move? The same thing we do every night, Pinky! Try to take over the world Buy more giant plastic bins and start heaving shit into them. It's not a complex plan. The Useless Narcissist had been unsuccessfully "moving" for like the past two and a half months and had had all of his crap heaped up in our living room the whole time; I considered asking him to shift some of it out of the way, but decided I didn't feel like dealing with the temper tantrum. The path of least resistance was buying colored duct tape for all the bins and boxes and hanging big tags on all my luggage, so that's what I did. They're green. The movers were almost confused when they brought up the giant roll of plastic wrap and realized they didn't need it, because I don't really own furniture that doesn't come apart for transport, and I'd just packed all the rat's worldly possessions into his cage and then zip tied it shut. 

Predictably, the landlord messaged me a few days later to say he hadn't gotten the rent check that month. I said I was sorry to hear that, but I didn't live there anymore, and gave him the phone numbers of the two remaining deadbeats so he could pester them for money. I have no idea if they've paid him or not, because this is no longer my problem.

The new place is back in the same area where I landed when I first moved to Boston, in a sprawling field of Edwardian houses where nothing is plumb or level. The hardwood floors are flat as a funhouse mirror. I'm a reasonable walk or bus ride from all my old haunts, and I am pleased to note that a sushi place I used to patronize is actually still around. Not that I'll be eating there anytime soon -- I bought the last couple of things I had grant money earmarked for, and I'm back to pretending I'm flat broke, just now with 2-3 months rent in savings. The groceries list is back up on Amazon now that I have a stable address again. If it lands on my porch, great; if not, I know where the supermarket is.

Cheese, it turns out, does not travel well. At all. Getting him out here was a ten minute walk to the T, three stops on the train, and a ten minute walk to the new house, and he spent all of it trying to beat his way out of the carrier with his wee little skull. Fortunately, I'd already replaced the plastic mesh in that thing with metal window screen he couldn't chew through as easily, or the Green Line might have acquired an extra rat. He also did not enjoy going to the vet that weekend to see if she had any better ideas on how to stop him going hnorp all the time, which she didn't. A lot of his discomfort was probably because outside is hot and muggy and full of grass pollen. (To be fair, a lot of my discomfort is also because outside is hot and muggy and full of grass pollen. I just have access to allergy meds on demand.) He still has a continuous sniffle, but inside a climate-controlled room it's more 'kind of an annoying snoof' than 'terrifying shortness of breath'. At this point, I've just concluded that it is what it is, he's probably going to make a hnorp noise for the rest of his life, it's probably fine.

We moved in on the afternoon of the 3rd and Cheese spent the night hiding in a box, mostly because he had thrown himself around his carrier so hard he hurt one of his feet. I tried to keep him from climbing too much, but when I opened the door on the 4th for breakfast, he scaled me and decamped on the roof of the cage, refusing to come down for love or money pudding. I don't so much care if he wants to be on the roof of his house as I want him to not throw himself off the roof of his house, and since he shows no signs of wanting to jump, I've just given up. I opened the top door and hung a strategic hammock so he could get up and down without my help. He can be tall if it makes him feel better.

The Fourth was stormy here. I spent most of the day unpacking with a migraine so catastrophic I didn't realize that was what it was until it was over, despite having to stop and lay face-down on the floor several times to keep myself from throwing up. Fun thing about migraines, they subject the part of your brain that solves problems to rolling brownouts, which makes dealing with them difficult. I just kept running through the food-water/electrolytes-caffeine-meds checklist over and over, hoping that one of those things would fix the problem. None of them did, although my attempt at dinner did teach me that there's a really good fried chicken place nearby, and Cheese appreciated the bones.

(Cheese has regained most of the weight he dropped when he went off his food during the first round of Baytril. He ate almost an entire pudding cup by himself while I was unpacking. That's 70 calories of pudding, according to the package. I don't know that he needs 70 calories total, per day. I am impressed by both his determination and his stomach capacity.

He has decided that his favorite kind, by a country mile, is butterscotch. This is a bit of a problem, because that flavor is currently unobtanium. It's been out of stock everywhere for weeks. Is the world's only source of cheap artificial butterscotch flavoring located deep in Ukraine? I do not know. The only way to get him more of it was to order a case on Amazon, so $20 of my grant money went to buying pudding for my incredibly picky free rat.)

I divested myself of surprisingly little when I moved this time. I went through the same thing I did when I moved to Boston originally, where I looked sadly at all my "fun" clothes and makeup before tossing them, and then realized that I couldn't -- I actually used that for work. I still have the nagging feeling that anything I enjoy is expendable. That's what being an adult is, isn't it? Having to choose between things you enjoy and things you need, and understanding that your happiness is less important than everything else. But I like my bins of makeup and costumes and props and electronics, and I use all of them to make money one way or another. The lack of conflict is frankly destabilizing.

The last tenant still had a king-size mattress here when I came to look at the room. They offered to get a TaskRabbit to haul it to the curb, but I was like no, no -- I don't want to move a bed either, just leave it. The most convenient solution was to just make Amazon magic a new frame onto the porch. The bed is so big. The biggest futon I ever bothered buying was a Full. I spent a whole three-tenths of a second trying to figure out which way the bed should face before realizing it didn't matter, because a King is basically square. I shoved it into a corner, put some sheets on, and built a nest. Being an adult is also getting to decide that making the bed is for chumps, and I can sleep in a pile of miscellaneous pillows and chenille blankets just fine. I'm so used to being on a Twin that it took me about a week to stop sleeping curled up on the edge.

I bought an 18" frame and it's lifted on 8" risers. Mostly I did it so I could store a bunch of luggage under there, but it also gives me almost enough space to sit upright next to all the suitcases. Which sounds like I'm trying a little too hard to be quirky until you realize I've just started a project that will eventually require me to record a voiceover, and the quietest spot in my room is almost certainly going to be underneath the giant cushion.

I have the rest of July to do pretty much whatever I want. I'm not not looking for work, but I'm aware that there isn't likely to be a lot of it until the fall season starts. Someone asked me to work a private event at the end of the month, and I actually got to sit and think about if I felt like taking the gig, rather than taking everything I'm offered and figuring out how to make it work. I'm absolutely terrified that now that I've committed to paying the higher rent, the work will all suddenly vanish. I have no idea why I think that. As soon as people realized I could run things in the tech booth, they all trampled over each other to book me. My calendar says I worked on 15 events in 16 weeks, in capacities ranging from "show up with camera" to "perform multi-hour live set" to "camp in booth and run literally everything except the lights". And I don't run the lights mainly because I don't own the widget that talks to them via USB, and I'm not really comfortable trying to work a manual board and QLab at the same time. (I was told that the software license for the USB doodad was $1000+, but I'm seeing open source hardware/software combos on Amazon for about $300ish? I don't know what the difference is, and I'm not prepared to buy one until I do.) 

Whenever I have a long stretch of time to do "whatever I want" that almost always translates to "have the breakdown I've been putting off the whole time I was required to do things whether I wanted to or not". I'm really good at just gritting my teeth and surviving/ignoring stressful situations until I can extricate myself -- see: my entire childhood -- but the downside is that when it's over I get to feel all the horrible consequences at once. It's a lot like pumping yourself full of stimulants to power through a difficult day. It works by borrowing resources from future!you to keep present!you functional. I start panicking over really random, non-sensical things, tiny problems that can be easily fixed if any of them even exist in the first place. I hate this and the only way I can really deal with it is keep it tightly locked up whenever I have to talk to people, then go home and hide until I can human again. It's not fun, but at least now I can do it in the air conditioning.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/WftkBi5 via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Life updates or: "Where the hell have you been?"

Hello! I am not dead. I have at points wished I could just be in a coma until it stopped being hot out, but alas, we do not always get what we want. If you are one of my Patrons, you've been getting sporadic updates, but for the lay public, here's the rundown:

Bad news: Cheddar has left us. Obituary here on Instagram. I figured the respiratory problems would eventually get them both, but didn't expect it quite so soon. Cheese is still here, although he is a little lonesome. I am consoling him with pets and pudding.

Good news: I have yet another new job. Someone figured out I could work the sound board at one of the theaters and started paying me to do that. About 50% of the people who ask are also willing to pay me adult amounts of money for it. The adult amounts of money are enough that I can politely turn down the ones who think "exposure" is as good as a paycheck. I'm not going to be buying any superyachts anytime soon, but money has come in faster than I spend it. It's weird.

More good news: The COVID recovery grant I've been waiting on finally showed up. The grantors bit off a bit more than they could chew and kept sending us 'soz, handing out several million $$ in five grand increments is taking longer than we thought, plz stop calling us' emails. I had to borrow to keep myself afloat, but it's all paid back now and I'm confusingly solvent, at least for a while.

Yet more good news: I'm moving. Why is this good news, you ask? Because my current roommates suck. One moved out to shack up with his boyfriend and the replacement has a raging case of Main Character Syndrome. The married couple broke up and it turns out the one who moved out was adulting for both of them. I have been stuck floating the rent for one useless narcissist who doesn't think 'rent is due by the first' applies to him and one dysfunctional soon-to-be-divorcee who has no job and no income. I found a new place to park myself, the paperwork came back with all the rubber stamps today, I just emailed the same guys who moved me the last time to ask for another quote. 

Sorta bad news that might be okay?: All of my short-term and one-off performance proposals for the summer have been politely turned down. With the grant money in the bank I could technically sit on my ass for a month or two before I even had to start looking for more work, but I would die of boredom. Instead, I am signing myself up for a bunch of one-off classes and summer activities that I've always kind of wanted to take, but could never wedge into my schedule or budget, and once I get moved into my new place I'm going to start work on a sort of... video essay let's play thing? Final Fantasy II (the Japanese edition, not the SNES one) is an incredibly boring game, but it's boring for interesting historical reasons. I've been toying with doing a letsplay of the game with a fun rambly history lecture in the voiceover. I'll be able to get a goddamned air conditioner in the window of the new place, so there's no reason for me not to hole up in my room in between gigs and classes and just play video games for a while. 

As mentioned above, I'm pretty okay for right now, but if any of the anony-mice are inspired to help anyway, here is a list of things I intend to have Amazon dump directly onto the porch of the new house. The bed frame and sheets are the most important things; the previous occupant had a king-size mattress she didn't need, and rather than make anyone haul that thing down the stairs I'm just taking it over. (My current bedroom is small enough to violate the Geneva Convention. I have a twin in here now.) I'm going to enjoy being able to sprawl again without falling over the edge.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/FkM1KAl via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

I've found a new podcast to binge. It's called "Computer Game Evolution", written, edited, produced and distributed as a one-man show by someone who's opted to go by "Tim". It's a very witty, very thorough exploration of how video games got to be what they are, starting in the pre-history of computers when all your tedious calculations were done by hand, and sometimes by post. His intro trailer mentions that he defended a doctoral thesis having something to do with video games, so my guess is that this is the director's cut audiobook of his dissertation, now with 400% of the snark his advisor made him edit out.

Tim declines to say where he's from. His accent is distinctly East Slavic, although I admit I don't know enough about the languages in that family to distinguish between them from just their traces in his English. He also mentions that as much as he'd love to take donations for the podcast, he can't, as they don't work where he is. All of the donation sites that I know of pay out via electronic escrow services like PayPal, all of which are headquartered in the US. When last I checked, they still go through fine in Ukraine and Belarus, but have been cut off in Russia since sometime last year.

So. Russian, or at least native Russian speaker, currently in Russia. According to the media, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to shun him on principal now. Eyeing just the Middle Easterners with deep suspicion is so last season.

Listening to the podcast gives nothing to the nation of Russia. He runs no ads, and gets no money for it. A fan is apparently paying the $15 or so for his monthly hosting now -- with a company that's so American that half the testimonials on their About page are from medium to large churches who use them to broadcast services on the internet, I swear I am not making this up.

If he does indeed have a PhD in something related to the game industry then it's almost certain that he got it, if not in the US, then at least somewhere in North America. Virtually all of the formal scholarship on the topic is here, with a minority in Canada. This is bolstered by his fluent English; his pronunciation slants very British, consistent with having learned initially in Europe, but his slang and pop culture references are all American, including a lot of things so old the Zoomers who have picked them up have probably never seen/read/played the thing they came from. He has clearly spent a lot of time reading/writing in both formal and informal English, and living in a place where he needed to use it in daily life.

For the first season that went out in 2021, Tim made no comment of any kind on world events. Since spring 2022, he's signed off with a strangely non-specific exhortation to "support good causes", which I suppose is suggestive in its timing, but might apply just as plausibly to donating to your local animal shelter. He once added that you should help people who have had to leave their homes, and have maybe lost them completely, which could cover a lot of current refugee crises. Signing off for the holidays he suggested you "help people not to freeze to death this winter", which applied to a sadly large swath of Europe at the time. 

Oh, and once he completely ran out of fucks to give and signed off with, "Friends don't let friends do imperialism." Which is both a painfully American reference and a pretty clear indication of his opinion, unless King Charles III has started trying to retake India when I wasn't looking.

A lot of Russian creators, especially those working primarily in English, have fielded criticism for not stating their views more overtly. I expect most of that's from Americans. The reason they dance around things without using the words "Russia", "Ukraine", or "war" is that many of their opinions are now illegal in Russia. They're not afraid of getting canceled, they're afraid of getting arrested. As rubbish as things are getting in America right now, you still don't go to jail for having unpopular views. The worst thing that will happen to you, officially, is that you will be socially ruined and sued into oblivion. Which is definitely not fun, but also not prison. Nobody was arrested for being a shouty Trump-supporting bigot until they tried to break in and murder the Vice President.

Tim has a generally hackish disdain for large, top-heavy organizations that are in the habit of rolling over the little people in their way. He doesn't have a lot of love for the US military but he's not exactly overflowing with praise for the Soviets either. (Apparently it's still okay to criticize the USSR, because Russia is totally not that corrupt and dysfunctional anymore.) Speaking briefly of a programmer from the '80s who has since transitioned, he used only her current name, stating -- and I quote -- "I do not deadname people on this podcast." He's interjected some pretty overtly feminist snark about the proportion of women who were(n't) in the programming industry at the time. He's using his thesis for a podcast instead of a teaching career because the whole process made him willing to gnaw his own foot off to escape the petty bureaucracy of academia. Very little else has intersected with video games enough to come up, but I am inclined to think his viewpoint on the world is closer to what I'd expect from someone who went through a Western grad school than what you would be led to believe from the "official" poll results that are reported for the Russian population.

There are probably a lot more of "them" who are a lot more like "us" than the news would suggest. The news has a vested interest in scaring you. And in making things simple-minded. 

So now I'm left wondering if some guy I've never met, in a country I've never been to, whose government is doing a lot of things I don't like, is okay enough to release the next episode of his podcast. I hope so. You can find the podcast on pretty much every aggregation service (here's the page on Listennotes) and see some photos of the old stuff he covers on his Ko-Fi. Give it a listen. It's good. And it'll remind you that "Russia" -- or whatever batch of foreigners whose government we dislike today -- isn't a hive mind.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/JyxA5W2 via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Brief life update: Landlord problem sorted (for now, at least). My support system is awesome. I believe you have all been contacted about repayment, but if I missed anybody, let me know.

I have not bothered to tell my roommates this. I hope they are experiencing unbearable amounts of stress. The Useless Narcissist did eventually cough up his share, but the (Probably Soon-To-Be-Ex-)Wife has given me nothing yet. They can stew.

One of the NPOs I work with threw a birthday party for a friend of a board member back in February. I ran it for them, as I often do. I'm good at being an attractive, friendly person who knows where all the extra chairs are. 

I rather like running these parties. They're full of interesting people that I will almost definitely never see again, so it doesn't much matter what I say to them. The birthday girl was 80, and a semi-retired "spiritual counselor" -- apparently, she was where the priests and rabbis and imams went when they needed to talk through their problems. She described herself as "spiritual krill", which amused me greatly. A bunch of her kids were there, and a grandson who was probably on the spectrum and could not stop talking about airplanes, and a musical theater actor from Manhattan who complained that Cambridge was not drinking hard enough at 2 pm on a Sunday, and a variety of other artists that told as many weird stories as there are feathers on an Amazonian parrot. Her Moroccan cleaning lady made a secondhand appearance by sending a half-sheet cake topped with blue frosting and chocolate-covered strawberries. They told me I should be eating their cake and drinking their wine with them, so I did.

One of the nice things about working in the arts is that if you can still do your job well with a glass of wine in your hand, nobody cares.

The board member who threw the party apparently thought I was great fun, because he got the coordinator to give him my email address so he could ask me where to send a thank you card. Which card, when it arrived, had a $100 check in it. Welp. I was paid to run the party in the first place, mind, but being an attractive friendly person who knows where the chairs are only gets you about $18-20 an hour. 

I've never been told I can't take tips, but I've never asked either -- this one was the biggest I've gotten, but it's not the first. One of the more memorable ones was when I was working box office for a show where a gaggle of kids had come up from New York to perform with Boston locals. One set of parents had failed to buy their tickets before driving up from NYC, and the show sold out. The ticketing software didn't have any way to start a waitlist for shows with late seating, but there are always people who don't turn up, and even if by some miracle everyone made it (they didn't) that theater had bench seating and I was not paid enough to care if they were two people over fire code, so I told the parents to come back in 45 minutes, and told the manager that one couple had to duck out but would be back at intermission. I had no way to sell them a ticket and was fully prepared to sneak them in for free, but the wife did everything short of stomp her husband's foot and hiss, "honey, bribe the usher." He gave me a $20.

The bigger news, though, is a gig I've landed for mid-May. I got an email a couple months ago from one of the orgs I do livestreaming for asking if I could run sound for one of their shows. They had correctly guessed that I knew how to do this, but only because they don't understand the difference between running digital sound for a webinar/class and operating the 32-track analog behemoth they have up in their tech booth -- none of them are in any way technical, that's why they call me. I didn't expect a lot of help from the venue, but I ended up running the pre-show music off my phone, and the board off a random laptop using VLC, which is, uh... let's go with, not industry standard. 

I thought my performance was adequate. Like, the show did happen, more or less as planned. The lighting designer apparently thought I did so well she specifically requested that I run sound for the next, much bigger show she was lighting at that venue. I am, apparently, "the best". I have learned to just say thank you and shut up when people say these things, because it's rude to argue with others over their own subjective opinions, but if that was "the best" I really have to wonder, what kind of unrepentant fuckups had she been saddled with before I came along? 

Anyway, the much bigger show thought I was a perfectly reasonable choice(!!?!?!?!!?!), so I'm now signed on for that. I refuse to half-ass this anymore; if they're going to pay me sound tech rates, I'm actually going to be a sound tech, and do this correctly. Industry standard for this stuff is a piece of software called QLab, which is only available for Mac, and has rental licenses for a totally reasonable $5/day. I am not okay running $1500 of show off a computer that dies if you trip over the power cord, so the battle-scarred MacBook I inherited from a previous roommate has gone back to Apple for a spa weekend and a battery replacement, a surprise expense which I am only able to cover because the same superhero support network has indicated they do not need their loan money back in a hurry. So thank you for that as well! I have about a month to teach myself how to work QLab for real.

I've spent Easter feeding junk food to rats and trying to wrap my brain around the idea that someone thinks it's "totally reasonable" to pay me $50/hr to sit up in the booth and periodically click a large button marked GO. I have to keep reminding myself that all the tech stuff only seems straightforward to me because I have been mucking around with it since I was ten. I had a look at the service manual for the mixer before I tried working it the first time, and at one point it literally says, "This will make more sense if you look at the block diagram," so I suspect a large portion of that hourly rate is there just because this is terrifyingly complicated to other people.

[For the uninitiated, a block diagram is a simplified line drawing depicting the components and connections of an electrical circuit. For something like the mixing board I was dealing with, it's usually close to, but not identical to, the actual schematics. My father has designed custom circuit boards for a living since before I was born, so I'm well familiar with the things. But if you're not I suppose they look a bit like a Mondrian take on the Nazca lines. I probably couldn't troubleshoot a broken mixing deck from the diagram in the back of the manual, but I can follow it well enough to see where all the inputs and outputs are going.]

Still no grant money, not that I expected it to land on Easter. The waiting is the worst. A lot of my problem right now is that I need to raise my freelance rates for a lot of things, but until I get that cushion in place I can't risk losing any of the clients I currently have. Some money is better than no money, but some money is not necessarily enough money, which is the fundamental problem.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/dJH04Rh via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

I'm not done being pissed yet, but I did promise Patreon that I would post about some of the less horrible stuff in my life. One of those things is that I've realized I need some sort of brain screen saver to think about, so I can avoid ruminating on how much I want to shake my roommates until money comes rattling out, while I'm stuck on a bus and can't do anything about it. I've heard really nice things about Gravity Falls, both in that it's a well done series, and in that it's just generally a funny happy-ending show. I found an email address that hadn't gotten its free month of Hulu yet, and anyone else who subscribes to that service is welcome to join me in a TwoSeven watch party.

TwoSeven is free to join, and you only need one subscriber (me) in the room to activate the subscription features, but if you'd like to support them as well, they're on Patreon. I prefer them to screen sharing on Discord, partly because it works better, and partly because this way each viewer is counted by the original streaming service, which makes a real difference for a lot of smaller content creators on places like YouTube.

I'm thinking Saturdays 11 am-1 pm Eastern. I'm going to go through both seasons of the TV show, plus whatever specials I can dig up, and end with a couple of comprehensive videos that explain the ARG. Who's with me?

from Blogger https://ift.tt/j5RyJqv via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

(photo of rat for attention)

tl;dr: Rent ($2300) is late. Landlord is demanding a check TODAY. I have my share but roommates are ghosting/ignoring all efforts to get them to pay. I have a grant coming but it has not disbursed yet, and I cannot cover. I can pay back loans as soon as I extort money from others. Funds to paypal.me/UnsolicitedAdvice or https://venmo.com/code?user_id=2448728627609600559&created=1643930446

Long version: I share an apartment with three other people. I think. Two of them are or possibly were a married couple. Hubby took off at the end of last month and given that he came to get his stuff with someone he introduced as his boyfriend, he may not be coming back. Wife is having a psych crisis and it is becoming apparent that, at least at the moment, she cannot really take care of herself. Remaining roommate has a litany of personal failings but the relevant one here is that he seems to think rent is a 'whenever' deal and he can just drag his feet as long as he likes.

Absent is-he-still-a-roommate is the one who normally collects rent. I'm apparently the only functional adult in the goddamn house now so I got stuck with it this month. I SHOULD have $5000 from the Mass Cultural Council by now but it hasn't disbursed yet for I don't know what reason. I have MORE than my share of the rent in checking (about $700), but not the full amount. Landlord is understandably pissed and demanding a check TODAY. I do not want to lose my affordable housing. We are month to month and if I get turfed there's nothing else affordable in the area.

I have called the Somerville Office of Housing Stability and made it clear that this is an EMERGENCY. They left me one message last night while I was at work and have not answered any of my attempts to call them back.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/b9oVzdw via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Good night, little prince.

I am saddened to report that Casper left us to rejoin his brother late on Wednesday night.

It was very quick. One moment he was fine; the next, there was a sudden flurry of noise from his cage, as his legs failed him and he fell off a shelf. I sleep through normal rat sounds, but this was unusual. I bolted awake and went to see what was wrong.

Cas was never a lap rat. I wasn't even allowed to pet him, when he first came home. Mickie wanted to live in the armpit of my shirt forever, but Casper permitted me only to politely boople his snoot through the cage bars. Actually picking him up was reserved only for dire emergencies, like the fire alarm.

This was a touch awkward when it came to play time, since I needed a way to get them from the cage onto the bed where their rat-safe blanket and boxes were set out. But if he didn't want to be picked up, he didn't want to be picked up, and I wasn't going to argue with him too much. Instead I just offered them use of the box they came home in as their own private Rat Transport Device™. It was a red New Balance box, from sneakers (size 8), which presumably belonged to the lady I got them from. They learned quick that shoebox = runarounds. The fit became tighter and tighter as they grew, and while chewing bigger air holes gave them more room to poke their faces out, it didn't really make the interior any larger. Eventually they loved it so much they peed holes in the bottom, and I had to add more cardboard to the floor to keep it intact. But the Rat Transport Device™ still worked fine, so I kept the box.

Casper and Mickie were rarely separated. Their longest solo spell was when Tseng tried to take Mickie's tail off out of spite. Mickie got to spend a week in the hospital cage, getting his most distal point dunked in diluted betadine twice a day. He thought it was a great vacation. Casper was not as pleased. When it came time to take Mickie on his very last trip to the vet, Casper did not want me to pack the other rat up unsupervised. So I put them both in their box, put the box in their carrier, and carried them through the T together. Cas came home with me alone, now the sole and exclusive proprietor of their red shoebox.

Whenever I lose a rat, I make a small plushie and stuff it with some of their used bedding, so the friends they left behind have something to cuddle that smells familiar. Casper couldn't have cared less about his substitute Mickie, but I left their box in his cage a while, and he holed up in it for about a week, coming out only for dinner.

All of my rats journey across the Rainbow Bridge packed up in a box with grave goods, like the tiny royalty they are. The vet's office thinks it's sweet, and probably a little bit nuts. The receptionists definitely think of me as "the rat lady". Casper wasn't possessive of too much in life. He liked chocolate, and Cheerios, and destroying chopsticks, and they went with him into eternity. So did the little luminarium bag with the Mickie-silhouette from their New Year's Eve party, which was still sitting on my desk. But his favorite thing was probably just chewing companionably on his idiot brother, which he is now free to do once more. 

I sent him to see Mickie with their red New Balance shoebox, just in case. 

Casper's last meal, purely by coincidence, was pesto pasta with tomatoes and flakes of the nice canned tuna, because it was what I was having for dinner, and I'm not allowed to not share. If you would like to honor his memory, get someone else to give you a vigorous shoulder rub. Then have them make you a simple but tasty meal, and snatch it out of their hands to hide in your bedroom and gobble it down. I promise you, it's what he would have done.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/N4OIvbU via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

The last load of Amazon boxes contained a microphone. It is a Shure SM48 handheld vocal mic, with dynamic cardioid pickup.

This is a piece of professional audio equipment. Not a pricey one -- they're about $40 -- but not the sort of thing you'd buy for fucking around with your friends on Discord. It hooks up with balanced stereo cables, and you have to run it through an amp to do anything with the signal, or an audio interface box if you want to get the sound into a computer. It is well-fortified and feels like it was carved out of a chunk of solid metal. It would probably survive being used to drive framing nails. Or being handed to your drummer. Same thing.

It came with a stand adapter, a zippered case, and a warranty card. It did not come with any instructions. They figure if you've got one of these you probably already know how it works.

It was on my Amazon list because these things are really good for general environmental sound. I've used them at work to mic everything from the piano in ballet classes to the entire cabaret theater for small shows. And despite that, I'm not sure I ever would have managed to buy one for myself.

When most of your life involves worrying about having no money, suddenly having a contextually-significant sum of money can be almost as bad. It should be great! Now you have FUNDS to fix all those THINGS you've been putting off! Except there are always going to be more Things than Funds, because you've been putting the Things off for a very long time. And you never know what Things might come up in the near future. Such is the nature of Things -- they like to jump out at you from behind the bushes right when you least expect it.

So you have to triage. Rent first. It's a million times harder to take care of anything else if you're unhoused. Most other creditors have some tolerance for late payments, with or without fees, especially if you call them to explain nicely first. You need to get to work, so you need gas money or transit fare, and probably internet if you do anything at all from home, and a phone if you do anything at all outside it.

After that you have to wrestle with a lot of things that are more problematic.

Do I really need new shoes? Like right now? Can't I just make do with the ones I have? Do they have to be new new, or just less dead than the current pair? Well, what can I afford? Oof, that much. I technically have it, but if I spend it, then it won't be there anymore. A pair of good shoes would be best and would last a lot longer, but then what do I do in the meantime? What if something else happens and I regret spending so much? There's no good way to convert shoes back to money in a hurry.

When things get bad enough, I do it with groceries. I go into the supermarket thinking about what I want to have in the house, then I see the prices on all of it and I ask myself, "Do I really need it that badly?" And no, I do not. I do need to buy something, but don't need any one specific thing in that store, so I wander around picking things up and putting them back and doing a lot of very stressed-out math. Eventually I buy more rat veggies and some random shit for that night's dinner just so I can go home. 

Buying work equipment is similarly troublesome. On top of the "what if I need that money later?" element, there's also a sense of obligation to only invest in supplies that will eventually make that expenditure back. You can do a lot with a USB desk mic. It won't be as good as using the Shure through an audio capture box, but it'll work. How do I know that spending $40 on a microphone (and then coughing up for the cable and other accessories) will get me enough extra gigs to get that $40 back? Forty bucks is a week of groceries for me, or the broadband bill. When you're in a position where you regularly run out of transit fare, that is a significant enough investment to be scary. 

Putting things off when you don't have the funds to deal with them is a lot easier if you decide that things like convenience and self-actualization are luxuries beyond your reach. It's very practical until you hit the point where you literally cannot afford to live no matter what you cut from the budget. Then you start making what probably look like weird, childish decisions, but are really just your last desperate attempts to be slightly less fucked-over by the whole ongoing situation. There is some help available when you're incredibly poor, but it takes time and effort to find it and convince people you need it, and it is only the absolute basics. The attitude is not just "this is all the help we can afford to give you", but "this is all you deserve until you shape up and make some money". You spend your tax return on a new TV, and blow a few hours of overtime on takeout and acrylic nails, because these are the 'nice things' accessible to you in that moment, and you are the only person who ever actually gives two shits about whether you are in any way comfortable. 

One of my most dearly beloved teachers has moved his weekly class to another studio. They haven't answered me yet about their workstudy program, and he doesn't have the power to comp me in exchange for work, so I'm stuck paying money. Things unexpectedly worked out -- this time -- but until then, my plan for dealing with it consisted of not buying groceries, Googling how long it would take me to get to the West End on foot, and trying to figure out how far my overdraft protection would go. 

There's enough to eat in the pantry right now, but I would have done the same if there weren't. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the wrong decision, but also that there isn't a right one. It's the uncomfortable overlap between "adults understand that sometimes you make big sacrifices to get what you want" and "adults understand that sometimes dreams are stupid and your wishes are unimportant". I can walk a lot and be hungry and indebted, or I can be bored and restless and heartbroken. There is no option where I do not suffer, so I might as well do what I want.

I have no coherent conclusion here. Capitalism sucks, I guess.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/5nvS9YD via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

(Note to the public: This is an expansion on an earlier Patron-only update. If you want those updates, sign up! I do post extra stuff, and Patrons get to see public blog entries at least 24 hours early.)

Packages continue to arrive. The Amazon guy must be so confused by now.

I am intentionally not trying to figure out who's behind it. I do know a few people IRL who could pull it off, but the reason I know them is because they're very public supporters of the arts -- I'd be aware that it was them, because they'd also be forwarding me grant applications and pitching me into networking meetings. At least two people were involved at some point, because one of the early anony-mice chose a pseudonym instead of using the default 'enjoy your gift!' message. Amazon lets you put a name on gifts, so if they wanted me to know who it was, they'd have said by now. I do keep sending thank you notes.

Nobody would keep it up this long if it wasn't fun, so good for you! I'd probably do the same thing if I had the resources. When I have money and other people don't I pay for lunches a lot, at least. I get to spoil the rats because the things that give them joy are very cheap in human terms. Right now one of them has shoved his fat little arm out through the cage bars and is trying to pull the Valentine's garland in, because it's shiny and make rustling noises and he wants it. They're very like toddlers, where the only value things have is how interesting they are, and how long it keeps them occupied. Plus they like to throw Cheerios all over the floor.

I don't have the money to get drunk right now, which narrows my options for entertainment down to 'YouTube' and 'overthinking things', so I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I have such mixed feelings about having an anonymous benefactor.

Most of it is very generic. When you're raised as female, especially if you turn out conventionally attractive, you're socialized to be suspicious of strangers who give you things without specifying what they want in return. Everyone wants something, when they give you a gift; even in the most innocent case, they want you to have a happy reaction. The presumption is that it's probably a dude, and he probably wants to bang you, or at least see your tits. This is a sexist and generally gross way of thinking that persists mainly because there are still some shambling choads out there who think this way, and get super mad when they hand you things you didn't ask for, and you still don't have sex with them.

I also find this line of thinking irksome, because it rests on the presumption that trading stuff for attention is somehow immoral. Why, exactly? I mean, it's uncool to assume you can just buy someone's time and focus without asking if they're for sale and negotiating prices first, but if two adults give informed consent to the arrangement, what exactly is wrong with this? And yes, you can take this to its logical conclusion. I don't do full-contact sex work, but I'm also not teaching ballroom dance or going to massage school -- I don't like strangers in my personal space. You can do whatever you want with your body. I have done boudoir and glamour modeling, and I've stripped on stage, and I'd be just fine working in someplace akin to one of Japan's famous 'hostess clubs'. It's an acting job like any other.

The rest, I think, is just that I live in a dourly Calvinist country, and I've been bombarded with 'nobody owes you nuthin' messaging since birth. Whatever you get for the work you do is supposed to be the reward for earning the approval of a higher power -- if not God, then at least management. Even artists are traditionally supposed to be concerned with the opinions of "critics", as if people with printed opinions magically control how much some other random yahoo is willing to pay to see, hear, or experience something pretty. I create things, and someone out there has decided that's worth making the Empire of Bezos mail me 30 lbs of pasta. Feels like making an illicit end run around the System.

In this case, I'm pretty sure whoever is sending stuff just wants me to have stuff, because stuff makes my life easier. And I appreciate it. The Wish Lists are about evenly split between things that seem bafflingly mundane, like socks and toilet paper, and stuff that looks like cool toys but is actually for work. Whoever sent the shoes, you should probably know that you've also provided the rats some most excellently comfortable places to sleep. Those were the boxes that got wrapped for the Valentine's Day cage set. You can see Casper's cage, la cage des Fromages, and their snack bowls on my Instagram. 

(The improved picture quality is courtesy whoever sent the Amazon gift card. I hate replacing phones, but the previous model was starting to get pernickety about the exact angle at which I was allowed to press the power button. I upgraded to "whatever thing wasn't enormous but had a half-decent camera", which turned out to be a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S10e.

It's in a pretty red case. I give it about three more days before a rat puts some wee little teef marks in it. Phone cases are tasty, apparently.)

The stuff for work is a lot of fun, I suppose, but only because I like what I do for a living. I just applied to perform at another even in April for some percentage of the ticket sales, probably with one of the LED hoops. The bulk of the Electronics Wish List was the contents of a digital content creation setup. I already had a cheap ring light from being bored during lockdown, but thanks to the Amazon gifter(s) and another Patron who offloaded a bunch of ex-business computers into one of my wheeled suitcases the other week, I have a portable kit that fits in a computer bag and runs entirely off the laptop. I'm sure I won't get the full advertised 8-hour battery life with an audio capture box and a desk mic and so forth dangling off the USB controller, but if I'm streaming something for eight hours I'm going to demand a wall plug anyway. I'm using it to Zoom someone's wedding for their out-of-town guests this weekend.

I am sadly running out of things that I need which can also be bought on Amazon. I buy my contacts from the UK, rat medications from farm suppliers, rat decorations from the local Dollar Tree, some of the more esoteric supplements from a lab in Chicago, and transit fare from the vending machines in the T. Pretty sure the Apple Store would laugh at me if I asked whether the internets could pay to have my MacBook repaired. 

At the moment, what is worrying me most is rent, phone service, and dance classes, not necessarily in that order. I think the rent and phone things are pretty self-explanatory; my grant money won't be here until March, because government. I've applied for the federal phone service stipend but I need to snail mail them some documents, also because government.

(I had to mail in my grant papers, too. They needed a voided check to set up the electronic transfer. Why, in anno domini 2023, would I have any idea where my checkbook is? I Venmo my rent, ffs. My other bills are paid online with a PayPal MasterCard. Hell, if I cared enough to set up Google or Samsung Pay, I could buy things at CVS by strategically whacking my phone against the POS terminal. The bank gave me a pack of 25 starter checks when I opened the account, and I finished them eleven years later. I did finally find the fucking thing, but I don't have any idea why it was necessary when I could give them the routing and account numbers just fine without it.)

The dance classes are probably more important to me than they ought to be. One of the reasons I have held onto the volunteer position I have at my home studio is that they compensate us in credit, which continues to exist on their system regardless of my own financial situation. I could be living in a refrigerator box under an overpass and still take class. (Admittedly, it's easier to work this in than a lot of other things -- there's a lot of dead time at the desk, and I usually bring in some other project to work on while I'm in. Some of it is the unrelated paid IT jobs I take care of for them, so technically I'm double-billing those hours. They know and don't care, because I'm a very good receptionist even when I'm only using a quarter of my brain for it.) I am deeply unhappy if I cannot be in class. I had to take the weekend off for a head cold last month and I was miserable, even beyond the part where I used several trees' worth of tissues.

I tend to follow individual teachers rather than styles, and several of the ones I like taking class with now also work at Boston Dance Studios, a new space downtown. I've applied to their workstudy program but received no answer yet. A 10 class/30 day package covers 5 weeks of classes for me, if I'm clever about timing it, and BDS sells gift cards. It's local, non-profit, and run by a woman of color, so I'd be inclined to support it even if I had to find all new teachers there. Her personal specialty is dance heels, so if you're also local and ever harbored fantasies about being a video vixen, you can take a look.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/6LKyw4m via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

I've been wearing contact lenses a long time. I was first issued daily-wear disposables when I was fourteen. After being late to school every goddamn day for two weeks, my mother marched me back to the optometrist and got me extended-wear disposables -- the kind you could sleep in -- instead. A lot of people don't tolerate these well, but I do, and I've been wearing them ever since.

Fitting these lenses is not the exact science they would like you to believe. Getting eyeglass prescriptions in general is not. They stick you in front of a rig with switchable lenses and ask you which one you like better, ffs. You go to the eye doctor to make sure your eyeballs aren't going to fall out, not for custom tailored prosthetics. Neither glasses nor contacts are ever 100% custom-fitted to your needs, at least outside of very specific circumstances. Glasses are ground to "close enough" specs from the settings available on the machine, and lenses come in fixed size/power combinations.

If you wear rigid gas permeable lenses, you do need them to conform pretty well to the front center of your eyeball; as the name suggests, RGPs do not flex, and if they don't adhere well you will blink them right out immediately. In fact, the suggested procedure for taking them out is just to pull your eyelid taut and let a blink peel them right off the surface of your eye, where they ideally fall into your other hand. RGPs are not common anymore. The last person I knew who wore them had a prescription of something like -12.00, which is beyond what you can even grind acrylic eyeglass lenses for, and definitely qualifies as 'very specific circumstances'.

Soft lenses are less picky. They're squishy and flexible, and fitting them is more like fitting clothing than like fitting a new leg. Toric lenses are the contact equivalent of bifocals, where the corrective power is different in the middle and at the edge. You don't want these to stay bang in the middle of your cornea, or you'd be unable to change between the regions, but they need to drift a certain minimal amount. Lenses that correct for astigmatism are wobbled along an axis that goes through the center of the lens and need to stay in a particular orientation; they are slightly weighted or have a flat edge at the bottom to keep them upright. 

If torics and astigmatics are the lens equivalent of tailored clothing, then then ones I wear are basically jersey knit. I have one power correction, same in both eyes, and astigmatism not worth bothering with. The prescription has been the same my entire adult life. I'd still be wearing the same kind of lenses I was given in high school, but they were discontinued a while ago, so I swapped to CooperVision for my clears. I've actually been fitted for a lot more kinds than those two, all of which had radically different (in contact lens terms) base curvatures and diameters -- it just doesn't really matter when all I need is a bit of hydrogel to recontour the front of my eyeballs a bit so I can see things at a distance. If I stick it on and it stays comfortably where I put it, then it fits. CooperVision "Biofinity" varieties are easy to get and their quality has stayed consistent even when they revise their materials and manufacturing practices, which is not something I can say for everything I've tried.

Colored lenses, on the other hand, I order from the UK. I order all of them from the UK these days; it's cheaper and faster if you don't have vision insurance, especially if whatever hole-in-the-wall place your uninsured ass makes the "new patient special!" appointment at doesn't happen to have your preferred size and brand in stock. (Strip mall optometrists, like Victoria's Secret, will generally "fit" you into whatever they have handy in the back. No thank you, I want my regulars please.) In the US, you technically need a separate prescription for colored lenses -- and sometimes each color, if the otherwise-identical lenses are branded differently -- even if they are literally the exact same as your clear lenses but with some printing in the middle, whereas UK suppliers are very obliging about just mailing me the thing I fucking ordered without an interrogation.

One of my earliest tries at color lenses was a type called "softcolors" that had translucent screen printing over the entire center of the lens. There was a very faint tinting effect that wasn't noticeable at all unless I wore one color and one clear lens, and even then it didn't bother me. I had an unusually bluish-evergreen color. I really liked them, but they don't seem to be out there anymore. Everything I can find now is the "ring" style, where there are streaks of color around the iris part of the lens with a clear area in the center. I've no idea why the change, other than the softcolors only work on light eyes, and only work really brilliantly on eyes like mine, which are the gray-blue structural color you get from Tyndall scattering when there's no pigment in the iris at all. You'd think this would be the default in natural redheads, who are generally short of pigment everywhere, but it doesn't take a lot of melanin to turn eyes honey brown, or a lot of lipid deposits to make them look green, so those are more common than you'd think.

Nothing wrong with my normal color, it's just fun to change and I like decorating myself.

The first set of ring-style lenses I had were huge compared to my normal ones; the color streaks were opaque and the extra-wide rim going across half my sclera was necessarily to stabilize them and prevent the pigment from drifting into my field of view. The colors all seem to be screen-printed dots now, which makes that less of a problem, and everyone's "natural colors" are all pretty much the same diameter as my Biofinity clears. I find the current style less convincing than the tints or opaque ones, because a band of your natural color can show through the middle when your pupils constrict. I suppose most people consider that invisible at normal conversational distance. 

The second ones I got were FreshLook, which seem to fit across all their lines, and are the ones I normally order now. I'm fond of the "Dimensions". The only "green" they had at first was the very jade-y one with a smattering of honey-colored dots in the middle, which changes more than you'd think, since my eyes have no brown/gold in them at all naturally. They've expanded the color range a bit, and I think I'll try a different one next time I order. FreshLook lenses are 1-2 week extended wear and come in boxes of 6 lenses, which for me is 3 complete pairs, and in my experience can be cleaned/stored/reworn just fine if you use them for shorter stints. They are idiotically expensive from US sources, running close to $100/box. Ordering them from the UK is less than half that, including overseas shipping. (For further information: My regular Biofinity lenses are $43.99 + S&H uninsured from 1800Contacts, a big independent supplier in the US. The exact same lenses are £13.99 to literally anybody with a credit card on NextDayLenses.com, which is under 20USD, and they are more than happy to mail all your shit straight to the colonies for about $7.50. Feel free to rage.)

FreshLook doesn't have quite a full range of fantasy colors, and I try to keep these things around for costuming, so I took a chance last time I did the rounds and plonked for a pair of indigo contacts from Bausch & Lomb. Sadly, I don't like them quite as much. I don't know what they're packaged in, but when I took them out of their plastic blisters they were oddly tacky and wanted to fold over and stick to themselves, which usually means they're dehydrated. I did get them to adhere to my (palms and fingers and) eyeball once out of the package, but they still weren't very cooperative. Taking them out and giving them an overnight soak in my normal cleaning/storage solution -- ironically, also by Bausch & Lomb -- made them behave much better, although still not as nicely as the Biofinity or FreshLook lenses.

What do we think of the indigo? It's much more striking in person. Not as natural-looking as the jade green ones, but fun nonetheless.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/4AkDY1C via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

I went down a few rabbit holes while researching the Advent Calendar last year, that didn't make it into the queue because they got too long or went too far afield. Here's one of them!

One thing you notice when you watch a bazillion videos about old games consoles is how the design of circuitry has evolved. If someone says 'circuit board' today, you think a light piece of leafy green board, filled with parallel lines of copper at 45° and 90° angles, dotted with lots of tiny inscrutable plastic and metal doodads. But it took a long, long time for them to get that way.

If you look at really old circuit boards -- and I mean really, really old circuit boards, like from the beginning of the transistor era, they look completely different. They're brownish, for one thing. And kind of... wiggly?

Apologies for the transfer quality. It's not your connection, it just sucks. This piece appears to be some sort of promo-tainment thing from Tektronix themselves, from 1969. The rounded corners and bluish fuzz at the edges is an effect called 'vignetting', and it means this is originally from a 16mm film reel. There's no earthly reason for film to look this terrible. The uncentered picture means someone copied it by pointing a camera at a projection screen instead of bothering to get a proper kinescope setup, and the fact that it only goes up to 240p makes me feel like it was originally transferred over two decades ago for RealPlayer and nobody bothered to fix it for YouTube. VHS is about 240 lines, but if this were a crap transfer from a VHS tape you'd also see scanlines. It's possible there's a better copy at VintageTek, a museum dedicated to the history of Tektronix; they are an all-volunteer institution, and they probably have more important things to funnel funding to than updating their YouTube channel.

Point being, it looks like porridge and I'm sorry, but at least the content is interesting.

The brownish color, which is actually from an evolutionary stage earlier than what's covered here, is because many early boards were milled of bakelite rather than electrodeposited onto a glass or fiberglas backplane. If you want to see some of what that might have been like, you can hop over to Usagi Electric. He uses CAD to mill boards, rather than the photochemical process described by Tektronix, but it's pretty much the same idea. He does a lot of it in pursuit of his mad obsession with building a vacuum tube computer here. (If you're curious, his logo says うさぎ電気, "Usagi Denki". "Usagi" is Japanese for rabbit or bunny -- there is one who appears at the end of some videos -- and the spelling of "denki" here specifically means electrics, as opposed to 電機, which is usually rendered electronics. It still pops up in the names of some engineering or technology firms, but generally only the really old ones.)

The wiggly nature of early boards is neatly explained by watching the drafting process, starting about three minutes into the video. It was originally done by hand. The rest of the half-hour video goes through the whole multi-stage process, but the gist is that when you lay out the board, you draw dark lines where you want the conductive traces to be on the final product. To get a consistent size, tape is used for "holes" and tape lines are uses for the traces. If you've ever used stripe tape in nail art, it was apparently something like that -- vinyl tape with a bit of stretch, so you could curve it around. It was a methodical sort of art form. Ever solved one of those "connect the same-color dots without crossing lines" puzzles? It's basically that. If you can't find a topologically-appropriate solution on a single plane, you can produce boards with traces on both the front and the back, as Tektronix does here, and these days you can actually bury traces in internal layers as well. It's just a pain and makes the cost go up exponentially. 

The mention of "holes" is interesting. Early circuit boards were nothing but holes. Everything had legs and was soldered on from the underside. Today these are known as "through-hole mounted" components; the alternatives are "surface-mount" components, which are generally smaller and fiddlier to solder on by hand, but considerably easier to lay down and solder in place by machine. Surface-mount technology has been around since before this Tektronix piece, but remained NASA-grade esoterica until the automated assembly process became cost-effective in the 1990s. Today the conductive holes are referred to as "vias" and the little medal dots surface-mount things are soldered to are "pads".

I'll also note that they show the automatic soldering process for these boards late in the video. It involves skimming the boards across the surface of a pool of molten solder. Solder in the 1960s contained a lot of lead. I would not personally like to be in that room. Today a machine places little surface-mount doojiggers in place along with solder beads, and then melts it all very gently in a very hot oven until it all melds together, not unlike a pan of slightly too-runny cookies. If you do it right, the surface tension of the solder keeps it on the pads and out of the traces. This is particularly useful for placing CPUs, whose myriad tiny pins in a tight grid would be far too difficult to solder by hand, and the origin of "reflow" repairs for electronics that are exhibiting symptoms of flaky solder joints.

The "silkscreening" process here does not use silk, but originally it did -- it was invented in Asia, logically enough. The gist of it is that you take a piece of finely woven mesh, traditionally light silk but in modern times also metal or synthetic fiber, and you plug up all of the little holes in it in the areas where you don't want ink to get through it, usually with some sort of water-repellent substance. In the days of yore, you painted on some kind of sap or wax, but nowadays it's usually a light-sensitive plastic that's scraped across the whole mesh, topped with a stencil that is opaque where you want ink to flow, and exposed to UV light that sets the substance. The unset areas that were in shadow are rinsed clean, leaving the mesh permeable in those places. The ink emulsion is then applied to the printing surface beneath in the reverse process: Ink is spread across the mesh, then squeegeed through with enough force to push it through the holes in the weave and onto the surface beneath. The dots of ink bleed just enough to flow into one another, producing a solid area of pigment. The circuit board designs were originally drafted in black on a white background, then photographed and reduced to 1/4 their original size, and the film used as the stencil for the silkscreen.

Holes are drilled mostly by hand(!) in this clip, which is an error-prone process, as you can see from the Usagi Electrics guy. The worker uses what's called a pantograph drill. A pantograph is a device that translates motion from one place to another, often with a change in scale. Typically pantographs are mechanical in nature, based on the complimentary motion of opposite corners of a parallelogram, but you could make a pretty good argument that modern systems that accept movement inputs from a user and translate them elsewhere by computer are also members of the class. Robot-assisted surgery comes to mind. If you cared to have an even longer argument, you could also consider systems that scan items with laser photons in order to reproduce them on a lathe or CNC machine pantographs in spirit, if not in fact. 

A visual or optical comparator is just a device that projects a magnified view of something up on a screen, along with a point, grid, or profile it needs to match, not unlike a microfiche viewer with a targeting reticule. They're still used in some areas, although software image processing is steadily gaining ground. 

You'd be amazed at how many things still need a look-over by a human with a brain. The lack of human brains is how we got the sharply-angled board traces we have today, in fact. Computer-aided drafting was developed to a usable level in the 1980s, and predictably the people using it were mostly engineers. The kind of route-finding you do in those connect-the-dots puzzles, and that the electronics engineers did when drafting the boards, is one of those very slippery human things. You want to find the shortest path, to save on the precious metals you use as conductors, but the absolute shortest path (with reasonable tolerances) is often a very snaky curve that would require a large number of points to define. It's much simpler to work on a grid, hence the 45° and 90° angles -- this ensures that all trace paths can be defined exclusively by where their corners lie on a square coordinate system, and is much less calculation-intensive. This was a lot of what early graphics tablets (or digitizers) were used for, and some light pen systems. 

Having watched my father do a lot of this as a kid, I gather that at least in modern CAD software, you can just pick things up and put them wherever you want, but that the autopathing gets very confused if you do it too much -- mostly it's better to let the computer figure out where the traces go and tell you if you want something impossible in 3D space. And if you screw up anyway, there's always blue wire.

Circuit boards don't have to be the ubiquitous green, either. That's just the color of the solder mask, a lacquer painted all over the parts of the board you don't want solder to stick to. It's mostly tradition at this point, but you can get boards in pretty much any color you like -- the second most common I've see is a dark navy blue, probably because copper traces and white silkscreening stand out best on those two colors. You're welcome to get neon purple, if you can find anyone offering it.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/wicV2vP via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

The Internet has made it rain

A lot of groceries have been landing on my porch lately. Still, actually. 

My roommates are a little confused, and asked me why the internet is mailing me sixteen jars of marinated artichoke hearts? And I had to explain that it's because Amazon is not really set up to let the internet mail me one or two jars of marinated artichoke hearts. They won't drop normal human quantities of perishables from Amazon Fresh on your porch without giving you a delivery window, and they can't book you a delivery window without ruining the "surprise" of getting things off a Wish List, so you can only order off Amazon Pantry, where people shop in bulk when they can't get a ride to Costco. 

Ergo, sixteen jars of marinated artichokes. Which I will eventually eat, because I've also taken custody of sixteen boxes of pasta, a dozen cans of chunked tomatoes, and some amount of canned mushrooms and roasted bell peppers. I am generally a tired/lazy cook, and that's about the level of effort I'll go to for dinner.

They also half-seriously jumped to the conclusion that I was doing sex work. Which was not a bad guess; I do figure modeling, so I've spent a fair amount of my life being naked for money. I would happily be selling used shoes and underwear to people who would pay to appreciate them, but I'm not willing to put my real name or physical address on those packages, and PO Boxes are expensive as fuck in all the nearby ZIP codes. Most perverts are perfectly ordinary people who just have a very niche hobby, but you can't really tell when you have one of the bad apples from a few slobbery emails. Reading between the lines, at least one of my roommates has had a bad experience with an ex who wouldn't go away, so that's another reason not to risk it.

Getting back to the groceries, the Wish List says there's still some stuff that hasn't shown up yet, so I was not all that surprised to see more boxes piled up on my porch last week. I was having kind of a bad time, because our shower wall had fallen in and I was the only one home to let the contractors in at 8 in the morning, so I was not exactly firing on all cylinders. I just saw the boxes and went, 'oh yay, someone sent the half-dozen jars of spaghetti sauce, that's dinner taken care of' and stacked them in the corner for a bit, because pasta sauce will keep until I've had a nap.

Reader, it was not pasta sauce.

I have a few Wish Lists in addition to the main one, and the one that had all the groceries on it. One was called Media Production. I don't remember if I've ever posted that one, and I definitely didn't remember it was public, but that one was actually a running tally of stuff I intended to buy in the unlikely event that I ever got grant money. And everything on it eventually fetched up on my front stairs, save one duplicate item. I have no idea if one person sent it all, or if a bunch of you ganged up on me; it arrived in a few boxes, on a couple different days, and Amazon seems to include a separate 'send a thank you' slip for each item, so there's no telling what orders actually went to the warehouse. So far only one of the anony-mice has picked a unique pseudonym, and all of those things came a while ago in another collection of boxes. 

But, uh, there's a whole bunch of it, is the point. Rather unexpectedly. Thank you!

Self-Portrait (Logitech BRIO, pixels on panel, 2023).

For the record, the collection was basically a starter kit for content creators. None of it is super pricey, it was just stuff I couldn't justify spending the money on without knowing (rather than hoping) I could get some sort of return on it. The standing mic with a pop filter is a desk model with cardioid pickup, and there's a lapel mic clipped to the bendy arm. Bluetooth earbuds are for monitoring, the SSD is 1TB of storage. I've been toying with the idea of turning blog entries into a podcast, a la Mark Crislip -- it would actually be easy, inasmuch as I generally write them by sitting alone in my room and talking to myself for hours on end until I get something that sounds good, then banging it out on a keyboard before I forget it. I have a gaming headset that cost me about $20 and works fine on Zoom, but does not produce audio of a quality I'd put out for people to feed into their ears for an hour at a time. 

The white thing is a digital projector that was intended for a specific project that I'll still probably do at some point, but secretly is also assistive technology. I don't get as much done as I'd like because working on a computer requires me to sit up, and a lot of days, sitting up sucks. Being able to throw the second monitor onto a wall or even the ceiling means I can drag a wireless keyboard over and work from a pile of pillows. That plus the wireless controller means I can pick up streaming or recording let's-plays, which I've been wanting to do for a while, but haven't because sitting in one spot for hours murders my back. 

The Logitech BRIO taking the moody mirror selfie is a 4K webcam, and it's on a basic telescoping tripod that I can use for anything that takes a standard 1/4" screw mount. I've been trying to get clips of rehearsals, performances, new props, toying around in the studio, etc., but the quality is generally not great. Laptop cameras are made for office lighting and close-range subjects, and cell phone cameras are pretty good but unfortunately attached to phones, which are both expensive and also the device off of which I am generally playing the music. I've gotten away with the 1K cam for my one dance film so far, mainly because it was intentionally lo-fi -- as in, if the camera I had was too clear, I would have added grain and noise in post-production -- but outside of that people generally enjoy seeing what tf is going on when they watch a clip of someone dancing. 

[Side note: The rat cage is just out of shot to the right. Casper has the bottom suite. He had no idea what the hell I was doing shuffling doohickeys around on the floor and balancing a mirror on my knee with one hand and poking a computer with the other. I gave him a chocolate chip for his patience when I was done]

It is all generally portable. The webcam even came with its own bag. The stuff I have to hold is mostly wireless. The clip mic does have a cord; I can either plug it into a smartphone and then re-sync the audio in post, or I can plug it into a small Bluetooth transceiver and cast it to the laptop I'm using to record. It's almost, but not quite, equivalent to having a proper lav/beltpack set up. The receiver for a beltpack carries raw audio and can be plugged into anything, whereas the Bluetooth method needs at least one end of the connection to be smart in a way that a laptop is and most soundboards aren't. "Content creation"-style production is all piped through a computer whether it's edited or live, so it makes little difference to me. And frankly, all the wireless microphone systems I've ever tried to use with a computer are dodgy AF, mostly because the transmitter/WiFi/5G frequencies all smash into each other and come out a patchy mess.

So you can all look forward to more media, I guess? It'll take a bit to ramp up, I didn't expect to be doing any of this so soon, so I need to work on scripts and figure out where and when to record.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/pP364rN via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Advent Calendar 23: Now You're Playing With Power!

Well, gang, this is our last video game entry for the Advent Calendar this year. Tomorrow and the next day are reserved for photos of food and rat cage decorations. I hope you've had fun with all of my nerdery. I actually specialized in this in college, not that anybody knew what I was talking about. My faculty advisor was the one dude who admitted to owning an Intellivision in the '70s. People study it now, but this was in the early Aughts, when video games were still a degenerate pastime that rotted your brain.

But what of the video games we leave behind? Do they, as the song asks, know it's Christmas?

It turns out that some of them do.

Big kid computers have had real-time clocks forever. There was a business need -- early mainframes were timeshare systems. You couldn't charge someone for their computer time if the computer didn't know what time it was to record the billing data. Home computers didn't get them until the PC and Macintosh came on the scene. The first console I ever had with a real-time clock in it was a Playstation, which used it to timestamp your saves and not much else. No, the first console game I can recall that knew or cared about the calendar was on the Saturn: A 1996 demo disc version of NiGHTS Into Dreams.

NiGHTS was an innovative... platformer? Flyer? An action game that took place in a full 3D environment that expected you to navigate in full 3D, to the point that there was an alternate controller that offered dual analog stick control, created to make it easier for the player to input concepts like "into the screen". It was the crazy inventive thing the Saturn was known for, for quite a while. The original game was released in July of 1996 in Japan, whereupon development of the shorter Christmas NiGHTS version was started. Christmas NiGHTS contained only a portion of the levels of the full game, but each level needed multiple sets of assets, because as the Saturns' internal calendar inched closer to December 25th, the scenery and creatures became progressively more Christmas-ified. 

Gamers of more recent vintage are probably more familiar with holiday bonuses of all sorts in franchises like Animal Crossing, all of whose installments run on consoles or handhelds with real-time clocks. The December holiday is called "Toy Day", and depending on the game, you may find new seasonal items in Tom Nook's store, be given tasks like crafting fancy wrapping paper or delivering packages, or even see Jingle, the reindeer who delivers holiday gifts to the world's animal folk. At least one of the Harvest Moon games has a Christmas party in it; other games eschew holidays altogether in favor of asking you what your birthday is when you start a game, and rewarding you when it comes around.

Other games only keep track of the time of day. Most frequently these are online games or collaborative MMOs with timed 'events', but I remember cracking up when I found out for myself that if you're still playing Dungeon Keeper after midnight, the game will start hinting that you should go to bed.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/WQwFldk via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Advent Calendar 22: If You Don't Succeed, Tri, Tri Again

Early 3D graphics have a really distinctive look. First you had wireframe, then you added flat shading, and finally we got to a point where could texture and shade the virtual shapes. But they all look kind of simultaneously blurry and pointy. Faceted. Triangular.

You could, in theory, build three-dimensional shapes out of any polygons with any number of sides -- N-gons, in mathematical parlance. You either need a shape that tessellates with itself, like squares, or alternate between two that tessellate together, like squares and hexagons. The problem here, though, is that no matter how round your model is, the computer needs all the individual shapes in it to stay flat. If you're using a shape with more than three vertices on it, there's a chance that manipulating your model will force one or more of the faces to warp such that all of its corners are no longer on the same plane, at which point the computer will have to break it up into smaller N-gons until it finds a solution that has only flat faces again. Triangles have only three vertices to begin with, and if you try to bend them in the middle they just break into smaller triangles, so making your model out of all triangles to begin with is just convenient.

You didn't have to start with triangles, though. It's not enshrined in video game law. And Sega, being rebels with a chronic, crippling lack of planning ability, opted not to.

The decision to make the Saturn a 3D gaming machine was made very late in its development. Originally it was just meant to be a much beefier 32X with a CD-ROM, building on the capacity of the earlier machine in much the same was the Sega CD built on the capacity of the Genesis, only as a standalone console. What made them change their minds? Sony scared the pants off everyone with the games console they constructed almost solely to spite Nintendo. This was crazy stuff to get out of a machine that retailed for $300 in 1995. Sony were building a mad 3D gaming machine, so Nintendo got pissed and they were building a mad 3D gaming machine, so Sega cried for a little bit and then declared that they were building a mad 3D gaming machine, too! This one! Right here!

But Sega didn't really have a lot of experience with 3D, so instead of using triangles like smart people, what they did was build a machine that could draw a lot of sprites, and distort those sprites however you liked. Sprites are always squares, or at least quadrilaterals -- a lot of them don't look it, but that's because some of the square is transparent. So the Saturn did its best to draw 3D with mangled squares. 

Its best was not generally great. Ooh, so many problems. You could technically draw squares as triangles, by collapsing one of the sides to a height of zero, but the fact that it still wanted to color everything in using horizontal lines made it a bitch and a half to do any of the fancy polygon effects that the Playstation could, like transparency and fading. Coding Secrets, a dedicated soul if I ever saw one, recounts how he forced the Saturn to behave nicely and fade the scenery in and out in Sonic R.

In fairness to the Saturn, it performs admirably as the sprite-based 2D powerhouse it was actually meant to be. Genuine sprite-based games looked fabulous on the Saturn. There's a Saturn port of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that plays beautifully. Street Fighter ports -- fan-fucking-tastic. It just failed to be a very good Playstation, or even N64. 

Not that the Playstation was without flaw. Those of us who spent a lot of time playing PSX games fondly remember the 'wobble' that plagued all of its textures. You got used to it. More accurately called warping, it happened because the console was precise at calculating polygons but had failed to pay attention to the part of art history class that explained perspective. Amusingly, it happens a lot less on emulators, which can take advantage of the floating point processors in your computer or mobile device, but the nostalgia is so strong that at least one person has figured out how to recreate it using shaders in Unity.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/XySGhjt via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Advent Calendar 21: That Is Bad, And You Should Feel Bad

Not all games are classics. Last week I covered some games (E.T., Superman 64, Duke Nukem Forever) that simply couldn't surmount the enormous gap between expectations and reality. But what about games that took a swing at expectations that were low or non-existent, and somehow still missed? Games that no one asked for, which could easily have remained unpublished forever, but somehow still escaped the facility to waste the public's disposable income?

Stuart Ashen, better known as "ashens" or "the guy with the manky brown sofa", has a particular love of these things, mostly from the UK 8-bit micro scene, and in addition to running his YouTube channel, gleefully makes the rounds of auditoriums and lecture halls to tell people all about them live.

This also exists in the form of a pair of books, Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of and Attack Of The Flickering Skeletons, which I dearly want but don't dare buy because I have nowhere left to put them.

Sometimes, someone takes a good game and converts it into something awful by accident. Matt McMuscles covers a lot of these on his series Wha Happun?, but a particularly notable mention is the Silent Hill HD Collection (which combined a trio of great games into a complete clusterfuck for what was supposed to be an upgraded re-release). Konami had a history of slapping together ports of questionable quality of their Playstation games for PC, but the HD Collection was supposed to be a serious reissue of classic hits for collectors. Oops. 

There are also cases where the game is made worse on purpose. The trailer for Watch Dogs at E3 2012 was absolutely stunning, full of cinematic, moody lighting and environmental effects. The final release was... not. Rumor had it at the time that the PC version had its graphics forcibly downgraded to better match the capacity of the console ports, so as not to embarrass the fuck out of Sony. Which is bolstered pretty well by the fact that modders reinstated all the cool stuff on PC almost immediately, on perfectly ordinary PC hardware available to normal people.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/EHyXL9a via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Advent Calendar 20: "Silly. Didn't you know? This IS Hades!"

Testing a video game is an involved process. There's a lot of content to get through. While simple platformers or shoot-'em-ups tend to derive their "playtime" from skill-building repetition, and visual novels from multiple story paths, RPGs tend to be 20+ hours just to get through the main linear plot, and run up to 60+ hours of "playable time" if you feel the need to 100% all of the side quests and minigames. Playtesting the very beginning of the game is easy -- just pop it in and start a new quest. But how do you check the rest of it? You cannot demand that your playtesters run through thirty hours of gameplay to test one thing you changed near the end and report back "yo, it's still broken".

Enter the "debug room".

In order to understand what these are and how they work, you need to know a little bit about how RPGs are constructed. The game tracks your progression through the plot through "flags", specific variables that are set to "true" once a condition is fulfilled, but remain set to the default "false" if it isn't. These flags record whether the player has viewed a particular cutscene, possesses a particular item, defeated a particular monster, attained (or exceeded) a particular level, or chosen a particular option in a conversation tree. Any time the player reaches a spot in the game where a story event may at some point occur, the game checks all of the relevant flags, and presents content based on what combination of them are set/unset.

As a simple example, let's say the player is supposed to see a short cutscene the first time they walk into a town, and only the first time. So every time the player walks into that town, the game checks to see if a flag called "town_already_visited" is set. If and only if the flag is still set to "false", the game plays that scene and then sets the flag to "true". If the flag is set to "true", then the scene is skipped. 

Obviously things get much more complicated in an RPG where there are a bazillion things the player needs to do in sequence to get to the end of the story. Technically, the Nth plot point depends on all of the preceding (N-1) plot points having been completed, but the list balloons very quickly, especially if the game offers alternate paths to achieve the same goals, so most of the time the programmer will just check for one or two of the most important things that must have happened to get the player to this point, and assume that all the conditions to meet those previous goals have also been fulfilled. This is what speedrunners are taking advantage of when they "sequence break" -- they work out what specific flags must be set to trigger other flags necessary to progress the game, and try to figure out alternate ways of getting them set so they don't have to go through the entire preceding chain of dependencies.

All of this boils down to the idea that testing "later parts of the game" isn't really testing "what happens after you've been playing for a long time", but "what happens when a specific combination of flags is set". So what a debug room does is give the testers a way to control which flags are set, one by one, without having to play through the events that would normally control them.

Why is it a debug room though? Well, the most orderly way to access the flags is through a set of nested menus. Games with simpler progression logic like platfomers or shmups usually just use a dedicated debug menu, with options to edit the player's health, number of lives, and power-ups, and then select which level to play directly. They're pretty small and a lot of times they're just left in the game code for release, with or without remembering to disable player access first. This would be a daunting proposition for an RPG, though. They are exponentially more complicated; you would basically have to build an entire temporary interface for all of the layered menus necessary to access all the variables that need to be tested, and playtesters would quickly get lost in the pages and pagers of hierarchical text. 

Instead of wasting time on that, programmers just build a menu system that is more visually navigable, hence easier to keep track of, using assets that are guaranteed to be there because they're used by the rest of the game. They create a map, or set of maps, disconnected from the maps that make up the player-accessible game world, and populate them with people or objects that can be interacted with to trigger text boxes with dialogue options that serve to navigate through the various story flags. RPG stories are generally organized into logical 'chapters' or 'sections' (which may or may not be made visible to the end user) with nested sequences of flags largely confined to that chapter. Once all of the chapter flags are set appropriately, the 'chapter end' flag is set, and the game moves on. Debug rooms are used as a quick and easy way to set either these big flags, or a series of smaller ones within chapters, and as a more universal way to change stats, equipment, or party members in games where you can swap characters in and out.

Perhaps the best-known debug room (at least in the English-speaking world) is the one in Final Fantasy VII. The game was a smash hit on Playstation, and the subsequent rapid release of the PC port allowed hackers to get into the debug room directly, without having to buy a cheat device like the GameShark as was necessary on the PSX release. TetraBit Gaming has an excellent overview of what's in there; if you want the more technical side of things, The Cutting Room Floor is a good place to start.

This one has for the most part been translated into English, as have many other examples. You may wonder why that happened, inasmuch as bug testing would have been completed on the Japanese original. For starters, the localization team may not have realized they were translating the dialogue in the debug room -- translators don't get a game script per se, just a big spreadsheet containing all of the individual dialogue bubbles and text labels in the game, row by row. They don't necessarily know where any of them occur until the first rough translation draft has been reinserted into the game, and testers can see them in context. The debug room is handy for that, so while they may not bother to fix typos or go back and translate anything they skipped the first time, they generally just leave whatever rough draft translations happened to land back in said debug room for the benefit of localization playtesters. Other "text" in the debug room may simply be graphics used as floor textures (or occasionally drawn using tiles, which the translators can't see because they don't get the map files), which are left alone.

There are a few cases where "debug rooms" were not used directly for testing, but as a creative error trap. One dude who worked on a bunch of Sega Genesis games got tired of having to track down bizarre bugs that relied on things almost no one would ever do, like leave the game running unattended for days on end, and started redirecting errors to a "secret time warp" in Toy Story, or "secret level select" in Sonic 3D. Rather than crashing, this allowed the game to quietly reset itself to a known good state so it could carry on. 

A similar error trap exists in The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, which drops Link into a "top secret room" whenever it loses its place during a map transition and can't figure out what room Link is supposed to be entering. There's an additional mystery attached to this one: The North American release calls it the "Chris Houlihan" Room, ostensibly named after a kid who won the honor as a prize in a contest run by Nintendo. In the three decades since, no one has ever come forward to identify themselves as the Chris Houlihan in question, and despite a fair amount of looking, no one has ever been able to find him. On top of that, no one has ever been able to track down the author of the first internet post describing how to get into the room, or pin down exactly when the discovery was made.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/MFad398 via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

[arabellaflynn]

Advent Calendar 19: Pointed Observations

The advent of the mouse was a revolution in computing technology. It did nothing to augment the brains of the computer, but it did a lot bridge the communcation gap between the computer's brain and the user's. Early home systems only spoke their own language, and you had to learn computerese to get anything out of them; early consoles only knew left-right-up-down and fire. Most computing histories only cover the mouse in terms of accessibility of the OS and filesystems, but the mouse was also integral to games.

After text-based interactive fiction and before full-motion video, there was the point-and-click adventure. These games built environments out of still pictures, sometimes with limited animation, and took full advantage of the mouse cursor's mobility to put interaction points anywhere on the screen. If you could see it, you could use the mouse to poke it, and if you poked it right, it might do something. IF's eternal game of "guess the verb" was simplified down to a list of clickable words -- sometimes even icons -- and inventory. Stuck players could, and often did, brute-force their way through puzzles by methodically trying every verb on every interactive point they could find until they found the proper combination to progress the plot. 

Point-and-clicks were largely, though not entirely, a product of mouse-bearing computers. They did come out for consoles, working the interface via D-pad with only four possible directions of movement was awkward at best. You certainly could play Maniac Mansion on an NES, but did you really want to? 

A closely related form, also a branch off of interactive fiction, was the visual novel. Rather than presenting a series of pictures to interact with, VN games let the player navigate through a branching plot using mainly dialogue choices. These too were more popular on computer than on console, as the large amount of text lent itself better to close-up viewing and navigation on a monitor than the typical console setup, with the player some distance from a television. While computer point-and-clicks were fairly popular in the the West, driven by classics like Return to Zork and MYST, console versions, visual novels, and games that combined elements of both were more popular in Japan. A few received North American releases, like Déjà Vu, and some others are now available in fantranslations that can be played in emulators, like Famicom Detective Club.

One of the absolute classics of the genre is The Secret of Monkey Island. The brainchild of Lucasarts' Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKraken & The Alien Mind-Benders, Day of the Tentacle) assisted by Tim Schaefer (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Full Throttle, Brütal Legend), The Secret of Monkey Island kicked off an entire series about the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, who wanted to become a pirate. Clever, hilarious, charming, and packaged with some good old-fashioned feelies, the Monkey Island family of games is beloved of anyone who plays these things, and has been remade repeatedly for newer platforms. The Xbox Live Arcade version is unusual in that it allows you to swap from the new hi-res environments to the originals at will, in case your need for nostalgia overwhelms your desire to actually focus on the screen.

Post-FMV, the point-and-click died out for a while. Visual novels continued to be a genre in Japan, but few of them made the leap overseas, even projects like Radical Dreamers which were based on a property -- in that case, ChronoTrigger -- popular in North America. The market was considered so small that the huge localization project wasn't worth it. The customary console interface remained the D-pad for all major makers, and computer games had jumped to full 3D environments with direct controls, leaving little room for still vistas full of interactable pixels.

What point-and-clicks really need is an environment where you can jab the screen directly on the thing you want to investigate. And this came back with a vengeance in 2004, when Nintendo released its portable console, the Nintendo DS. Variously expanded as "Developer System" or "Dual Screen", the DS smashed even the sales records held by the Gameboy, becoming Nintendo's best selling console ever, the best selling handheld overall, and second-best selling console in history, right behind the PS2. Two screens working in tandem gave developers a place to put the gameplay separate from the interface, always a problem when working on a handheld with limited pixel space, and the bottom touchscreen made it easy to interact directly using the stylus. Increased cartridge capacity made large amounts of text no problem, and holding the console close solved any problems with readability.

Though there were a few hybrid VN/point-and-clicks released close to the DS's launch, like Hotel Dusk, the resurgence of the genre properly started with Capcom's unexpected smash hit Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Originally released as a Gameboy Advance title, Capcom opted to include an English localization with the Japanese DS re-release, for... honestly, no real reason I can find, other than English is cool in Japan and Takumi Shu is a little strange. The script is a little rough and has some typos, but because it wasn't expected to be officially released to an English-only audience, the localizers had crazy fun with it, and once they had it, well, why not give it a shot? The first game was a little difficult to find for a while, as the original North American print run was well under 100,000 copies, but Capcom got right on that once they got over the surprise, and sales for the series are well into the millions now.

Since then, the point-and-click genre has been further extended by games whose main mechanism is environmental puzzles, rather than inventory/verb. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, also by Takumi Shu, has some of the most beautiful animation I've ever seen in a DS game, and makes excellent use of the multi-touch capacity of the DS' bottom screen. 

If you want to try your hand at creating your own games, much like Inform 7 for interactive fiction, Ren'Py is a game engine for homebrew point-and-click/visual novel projects. Based on Python, it's relatively simple to start with, but can be leveraged to create just about anything you can think of, up to and including the famously terrifying Doki Doki Literature Club (WARNING: the intro is not kidding, it starts cute and end up in full-blown horror).

from Blogger https://ift.tt/nSzi8vG via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice