yeast-riseman @aysamanra@sometimes.when.computer

Well, I've got a "finished" fantasy font, complete with vowel diacritics that get automatically applied using font ligature support. I'm pretty pleased with how it looks!

Doing some fantasy font experiments with ligatures.

in the shadow of cities of steel
where the crows with their black feathers fly
you can still sometimes see the odd spot
in which nature refuses to die
and our industry's grime touches not

finding any such place will reveal
where the crows with their black feathers fly
as they circle the trees deep in thought
idly pondering some reason why
there's this place that mankind has forgot

I've been hoping to write a poetic-meter-generating bot for ages, and I've finally sat down and started it. I'm happy with it so far!

Absence of Malus

The weirdest thing about the banjo so far: for some reason—maybe because of Looney Tunes cartoons in which they're used as an implement of retribution against Coyote or Yosemite Sam—I thought the resonant surface of the banjo was fragile. Nope! In fact, you're supposed to keep a finger or two on it at all times while playing (at least in the Scruggs style.)

"Hey, Getty, how are you coping with current events?" Oh, you know, in the healthiest way I can come up with.

I couldn't sleep well last night, but I don't know if it's because I bought an Internet Mattress and it turned out to be complete and utter bullshit or because of a coup attempt in my country. …I mean, probably both, but still.

Progress report on my miscellaneous current projects: https://journal.librarianofalexandria.com/progress-report-2021-01-03

…I didn't want to post this un-CW'ed, but I feel like—this being the internet, after all—this CW is probably a lot scarier than the actual content of the toot.

I saw this post from @aphyr this morning and decided that it should be my hasty warmup sketch today: https://woof.group/@aphyr/105473280393419636

RAII whiskey

🏆 ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Write a complete draft of a novel.
🚫 ACHIEVEMENT STILL LOCKED:
Write a complete draft of a good novel.

The other night I decided to play a short solo Sea of Thieves session. I went to an island, started to dig up treasure, heard someone shout "RAM!", and turned to see a ship crash full-speed into mine. They both sank almost immediately. The crew then apologized, asked me to join them in finding a rowboat, and as we started to gather the remaining treasure on the beach someone accidentally lit a powder keg and we all died.

10/10 amazing game

(I mean, I'm a descriptivist: OwO and UwU have also clearly become verbalized interjections. But AFAIK they originated as non-pronounced faces.)

I've seen a lot of people who believe that OwO and UwU are verbalized interjections, and it just struck me that it might be because the ^_^ style of emoticon has gotten so rare that people aren't used to parsing them as faces any more.

Are there interesting things to be done with shared universes? Absolutely! But shared universes also have really common and really boring failure modes where they start devolving into endless boring self-reference without trying to actually earn their emotion or drama while also *reducing* the depth of characters or stories (since the audience needs to "get" them without having imbibed the whole universe, and that makes genuine depth hard!)

The biggest selling point for me about season one of Mandalorian was that it didn't drag in all kinds of existing Star Wars stuff, so season two has been increasingly disappointing in that regard. Not too far yet, but it keeps trending that way.

(I know too much about Rush, and not just because I was literally named after the vocalist and my mother had me listen to Tom Sawyer on repeat while I was still in the womb. I am not making either of these things up.)

Why did Rush become "the wizard band" in people's popular imagination? Rush doesn't write songs about wizards. That's Led Zeppelin. Rush writes songs about Ayn Rand novels.