Callisto - excerpt

This one’s going to take me a little while to finish, so to keep myself motivated, I thought I’d share an excerpt. I’ll probably keep sharing more as I work on it.

I can see a faint crease in their brow — annoyance. “It didn’t work,” they say. “Will you help me or not?”

On the whole, people usually want to help other people. Even if they don’t want to help someone, it can be kinda hard to turn down a direct request. So that “will you help me or not?” in response to a perfectly reasonable question doesn’t come off like a desperate plea – it sounds like bullying.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” I tell them. Because I hate bullies, I don’t even suggest other detectives they could try. “But I appreciate your consideration.”

Before I can stand to lead them out the door, they sigh. “Fine.” They look at me, and I notice for the first time how perfectly grey their eyes are. There’s no hint of color — no cool blues, no warmer greens, nothing.

“Please get this ring from Dr. Avery Woodmont,” they tell me. And I have to. I don’t want to, but I don’t got a choice. They smile at me. “I’ll thank you when the task is complete.”

one thing at a time

I try to do too many things at once. Not even just in a multi-tasking-myth way, but in a project way. I am trying to, all at once:

• Write a short interactive story on a quasi-weekly basis (not going so well)
• Make/modify a CSS stylesheet for my Twine stories (also not going so well)
• Complete Codecademy’s JavaScript course (not going at all)
• Read more books (going splendidly)
• Do more crafts (not too shabby)

This is the problem when you enjoy having done things more than the actual process of doing them. Reading is inherently fun for me, and crafts are easy to do while watching cheesy old space dramas with my roommate (Andromeda may not be that old, but it sure is cheesy). Writing is fun, but more time and attention intensive. The coding…well, if there’s a mirror universe me who codes for a living, I doubt she lives very well.

This is all a very long-winded way of writing myself into putting the JavaScript course on hold for awhile. I do think knowing JavaScript would help me with Twine, but I don’t have to know JavaScript to do what I want to do.

I should probably put the stylesheet attempts on hold too. The Simple Box stylesheet from Glorious Trainwrecks suits my mini-stories well enough. I’ll need different stylesheets for my larger projects, but I’m not going to be ready to seriously work on them for awhile, so that’s okay.

So there we go. Read more books, do more crafts, and focus on writing one short interactive story a we– let’s say month. One interactive story a month. That’s more manageable.

Now let me get back to work on this story about a butch femme fatale and “please” & “thank you” as literally magic words…

An Assassin Needs Lunch

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A vampire assassin is thinking about lunch when a client walks in.

Background

This is a variation on a MadLib — you get to make a bunch of choices at the beginning, and then read the story that is created from your input. It was a really interesting format for me to write…even if that’s kind of hard to tell, because the story and the writing style are really rough. But this is a practice piece.

The point of this exercise for me was two-fold: first, learn how to make an attractive character creation page. I only partially succeeded, but I learned a lot in the process. The second was how to have a lot of complicated variables interact without completely falling apart. Originally it was going to be even more complicated, with the option to choose from numerous gender identities and sexual preferences. That turned into a hot mess really quickly, so I ended up cutting out a bunch. The game now randomizes the PC’s gender identity (between male and female, with apologies to non-binary players), and you can choose between being pansexual, being asexual, or having the game choose for you.

The main thing I’ve taken away from this whole experience is that I need to do it a lot more before I can work on a longer story with complex variables.

Also, JavaScript is finnicky as fuck. Man.

Brains are weird

This is a slight variation on what I usually say, which is “Brains are dumb.” And this post has me wondering whether I have the courage to go all-out with the meta puns, or if that would just come off as pretentious. I worry a lot about seeming stilted & faked. (I worry about a lot of things. Brains are dumb.)

Thoughts about my mind that have been on my mind —

listening

I was talking with a guy yesterday about audio books, and how I have trouble getting into them because, when picking the book back up (so to speak), I have trouble remembering the story thus far. I also have a tendency to space out while listening to things, which is really annoying because audio books would be the perfect way to get more books in my life.

And I don’t really understand why that’s the case, other than “brains are weird.” Which is not a particularly satisfying explanation.

learning

Today I was thinking about the JavaScript course I’m taking at Code Academy and how I’m struggling with it. I’m not confused by anything — they’re taking me through in nice discrete chunks, each lesson one block on top of another. But I’m finding it kind of frustrating because I don’t have an image of the bigger pictures. It’s like being walked through how to build a house without being shown what a house looks like.

Part of that frustration might just be it’s been awhile since I’ve taken any kind of actual lessons. The little I know of CSS mainly comes from finding a big chunk of complicated code and then mucking about going “Okay. So what does this line do?”

And part of it is just I need to understand the big picture before I can retain the details. At the same time, it’s hard to present someone with the big picture when they don’t already know at least some of the details, as I’ve discovered while prepping for my very first tabletop roleplaying game as GM. I keep finding details about the rules I need to explain before the larger picture of the game makes sense, but details without larger context are difficult to remember. (I have until Friday to work it out.)

overload

I’m also trying to get into Twitter again. (You can find me @monsterfictions !) It’s strange and I don’t know how successful I’ll be at it… I honestly don’t remember how to make friends outside of games.

I tried using TweetDeck as my Twitter client, because I love the idea of sorting my Twitter feed into categories. A column for friends! A column for the apps I use! A column of celebrities! On metaphorical paper, it sounds like a great way to cut down on information overload, because you don’t have to look at everything at once.

In practice, I found it even more overwhelming. I could separate things into lists, but I couldn’t hide the lists I didn’t want to look at right now. Instead of being organized, my feed felt cluttered and in my face. I’m only following 17 people.

I’m now giving BirdDrop a try. It just sits in my menu bar and lets me peek at my timeline when I click on it. Which is all I really need from a Twitter app (even though the ability to actually filter content would be really awesome).

that dress

Just looking at that dress makes my anxiety spike. It’s a reminder that everybody sees the world differently, in a very literal way. But it also freaks me the fuck out.

People can look at the same object and see it completely differently.

How can we trust our senses if that’s true? How do you verify anything? How can an objective reality exist? Does an objective reality exist?

Yes, I’m reading way too much into one badly light and badly composed photograph. Like I said, brains are weird.

Jayla Gets a Pet

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Jayla the vampire is on vacation and bored, so she decides to get a dog. And then zombies get involved. (CW: Foul language)

Background

This is a super short CYOA based on some prompts my friends gave me. It was originally intended to be a test of writing in systems other than Twine…and about a third of the way through writing it, I found that learning how to get the other systems to do what I wanted them to do was too much effort, so I finished the whole thing in Twine.

organizing information

I was a mediocre student. I did well because I was good at tests, but I didn’t learn how to do the one thing that would be really useful, long after I left geometry and biology and European history behind me. I never learned how to study.

I’m really regretting that as I go through Code Academy’s Javascript course.

I’ve gone through the first 22 modules in their “Getting Started” lesson, and these are my notes so far. I still have to finish this first lesson, and then there are 15 more lessons after that. If I keep taking notes like this, by the end of it all I’m going to have an incoherent mess.

I’m just not sure how to organize them. It doesn’t lend itself to the kinds of organization I’m familiar with — spreadsheets for work, folders for my documents, scenes for my stories. I need a way to organize them so I can easily reference them later. I need to make sure that I’ll understand them later.

Moral of the story: Stay in school, kids. Learn science & history & math & english if you can, but if nothing else, learn to take notes.

doing the thing

I’m trying a thing.

Trying things does not usually go very well. I try a lot of things, get distracted, forget, life happens, etc. But I figure, if that’s not the human condition, then it’s certainly the rich-enough-to-have-constant-internet-access-and-time-to-be-distracted condition. And so I continue.

My current Thing is this – Monstrous Fictions. I’ve recently begun to dabble in Interactive Fiction, mostly in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. And I really like it. I could babble about the reasons, but that’s another post entirely. Suffice it to say, I want to keep doing it. And I want to do it better. Twine is a fantastic program, but it takes a lot of tinkering with CSS to make the end result look nice. It also relies heavily on Javascript, a programming language which I do not speak. Or write. Or read. Level of fluency? Zero.

This blog is (will be) a record of my trials & tribulations while I study CSS & Javascript, as well as share my interactive stories.

I’m also interested in learning how to make these stories accessible. I’ve heard a lot about how accessibility is an afterthought for most people, and I don’t want that to be the case with me. It’s going to be more of an adventure than I’d thought before spending a half hour trying to learn to use VoiceOver.

This blog is (will be) a record of that too.