Turniper
2d ago
My last story was up on Royal Road and some forum sites and got in the low 5 figures of readers and all the commentary that entails, both good and bad. I have an open offer to get it professionally published, but I'm taking time away from it to write something else atm. Having a stranger post a long review detailing exactly the things you know you got wrong is exceedingly unpleasant to experience. It's easy to shrug off the inevitable lunatics, but a well reasoned critique from someone who likes the story in the abstract cuts deep.
Turniper
4d ago
Oh yeah writing is brutal for this. Just wait til you begin showing your work to a larger audience, the swings get even more violent.
Turniper
9d ago
I'm not sure this is necessarily the case here. Doing fentanyl is pretty much the definition of being out of the bounds of proscribed behavior. There's a lot of people who all into fentanyl from life dealing them a harsh hand, but there's also no shortage that just fall into the path of trying then abusing harder and harder opiates. Seems a little premature to assume the man in this case is one or the other when both paths are very real.
Turniper
19d ago
Ah, this reminds me. 10 more days til I venture downtown for a show and a late night stop at our favorite kebab cart. Can't wait to listen to the husband and wife who run it snipe at each other as a gaggle of indian and asian engineering students behind us learn for the first time that the university puts on broadway shows and ask a billion questions about ticket prices.
Turniper
26d ago
I found NSAIDs to do literally nothing for me for like 30 years across all sorts of injuries, then I encountered a very specific sort of neck-back ache resulting from poor form on power cleans that two ibuprofen instantly fixed. I could literally feel when the last dose would metabolize because the pain was so intense when present. I was basically chowing down on 8 pills a day for the week of that, otherwise I was unable to sleep or move my neck. Pain is weird.
Turniper
1mo ago
I put my existing writing project on temporary? hiatus. It was the first thing I've ever written of that length (~170k words), and though I did have that publishing offer for it, I didn't quite feel like it was good enough to put out in book form without revisions I kept procrastinating on. So I just plowed forward on a second xianxia novel instead (With a more defined book structure). After playing Black Myth Wukong, I ended up with a persistent itch to write an alcoholic monkey cultivator story and I've decided to give in and just do it. I've been on a tear, knocking it near ten thousand words per week at the moment (37k! Aiming to hit 39 by end of day!). The publisher I was in talks with for the other project is tentatively open to considering this one as well, so I'm hoping to have a manuscript for book one completed by the end of the year.
Little anxious about it, because it's been viewed by a much smaller audience to date so I have limited feedback, but it appears to be mostly pretty postive so far. Tbh it's super weird that xianxia is now kinda my thing, considering I don't speak chinese and it's not even my favorite genre, but it's just been flowing out of me much more smoothly than my urban fantasy and western high fantasy projects lately.
Turniper
1mo ago
I'm not opposed to this, but I trust the mods enough that I'm not that worried about them being too tolerant of crypto scams. Not exactly the sort of content we encourage here.
Turniper
1mo ago
Yeah, but you don't have to sell your car. Savings and a fixed expense means you're vulnerable on both sides. Your cost of driving can go up, and your savings lose value at once. Owning a paid off car is locked in on cost of ownership. Sure, it can break down, but market fluctuations are irrelevant to you.
Turniper
1mo ago
As a donor, it's not just about flipping votes. That's the candidate's concern. If you actually want the candidate or his staff to speak with you about the issues and maybe even remember your opinions, 10k is probably about the minimum you'll need to be spending. Sure, donating 100 bucks is probably worth more than your vote, but your vote is free and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Plus that's only any good if the candidate already lines up very well with your beliefs.
Turniper
2mo ago
A flippant response to your flippant critiques: Have you ever actually engaged in real political coalition building or donated five figures to a candidate? Unless you have a viewership in the tens of thousands at minimum, all the ink you'll ever spill on politics is utterly worthless compared to a single vote. Voting, and being polled about their voting intent, is the only degree to which the average citizen ever actually influences politics. Disgust about wokeness matters little if it's not enough to make you vote against the democrats. A protest non-vote only matters insofar as polling suggests to candidates a way in which they can win your vote. The hardcore pro-life share of America is well under 40%, but they got an overturn of nationwide law that was broadly popular and largely considered settled because in large part of the fact that so many of them are single issue voters means they cannot be ignored.
Sure, you can complain without voting. But guess what, it's not just your dad who won't take you seriously. It's also anyone who matters. Because people who don't vote are not a constituency anyone serious about winning cares about.
Turniper
2mo ago
Fun fact, querying inputs directly in unity is no longer best practice either. You can, but they're really pushing the new input system. It's... Not terrible tbh. My main gripe with it is I don't like dealing with it's api, which you might have to if you wanna do something like 'check which button this control is in a given control scene, and display the correct image for it's key on the UI' (IE show 'E' on PC and 'X' on a controller). I wanna learn Unreal, it seems really powerful, but I gave up and decided to stick with Unity for the time being because Unreal just feels to painfully cumbersome for so many tasks. It's really studio oriented and not solo dev friendly.
Turniper
2mo ago
This week I'm... Learning blender for the fourth time. It's always the worst sort of spaced repetition, I get into it for a while, then I drop it for a bit and by the time I get back I've forgotten where the auto-hotkey button is or how the heck storing multiple animations in a scene works. But it's slowly coming back to me. I'm trucking forward on the roguelike project, currently working on finalizing how some parts of the ability/in run upgrade system work. IE: Are your standard melee attacks abilities? How many abilities can the player have (Current plan is 2-4. With weapons having normal/heavy/special already, that's a lot of options even with just 2 abilities. Probably more than enough to see builds leaving behind some of their buttons.)
Anyway, today's task list is:
- Finish a really basic scythe heavy attack animation.
- Implement charged attacks, possibly as abilities, possibly as their own one-off system. Leaning towards trying to fit attacks in the ability framework atm, because I'll probably end up treating spells with windup animations very similarly to melee attacks anyway on the casting side, and it gives me trivial support for attacks having features of abilities like cooldowns, mana costs, charges, etc)
- Add the basic framework for out of run upgrades. Currently the plan is a sort of 'loose soulslike' sort of thing, where you start out only retaining the 'memories' (Currency equivalent to Hade's darkness) per run, and anything you can't spend is lost. Eventually you'll get upgrades to retain 5 or 10% of your total on the next run, but there's still a really strong incentive to finish each run at as high a score as possible in order to get the most permanent upgrade points, instead of abandoning runs/giving up on pushing bosses and taking resource rooms only.
- Add a 'melee kills with scythe grant mana on kill' out of run upgrade
- Implement toggled abilities (Currently only have cooldown based ones).
- Add a toggled point blank AoE
If I can get all that done, I'll have the second 'basic archetype' complete, a necromancer who uses scythe attacks to execute and regain mana, then spends mana on their point blank aoe for consistent damage.
Turniper
2mo ago
Probably Trump. I've been a lifelong (Well, 12 year) Democrat voter, but I'm pretty dissatisfied with the direction of the party at the moment and I don't dislike Vance. Tbh if Trump had just refrained from flirting with insurrection back in '20, I'd be a lock.
Turniper
2mo ago
In my experience, it's a lot of rising standards of living and population growth. The house my grandmother is born in is still currently occupied by her brother. They've doubled it in size since 1930, added a nice shed. It still has a turf stove as it's only heating, but it's got electricity and got access to non-wireless internet service in 2018. But my grandmother was one of 11 kids, and her brother and his wife are the only people living in that house today. The land it sits on will simply only support 6-8 people even at full cultivation, and many of the improvements they made to the property were only possible because of money sent home by relatives that left. The local council strictly controls further development of the area. You can't just settle anywhere you'd like anymore, so the village that supported 200 in 1920 still only supports around 300 today. So, most of them move abroad. And they settle in cities instead of building a new homestead in a strange climate, because most of them did not leave home with more than a few hundred dollars.
Turniper
2mo ago
Three of my grandparents were born in houses slightly larger than my pantry. I have more variety of foodstuffs available to me on days when I need to go food shopping than my Irish grandparents did at the weekly trip to the grocery/coop when they were children. It's truly wild how far we've come.
Turniper
2mo ago
Whew. I wrote 10.9k words of prose last week. That was a new personal best, and it was hard. Resulted in me getting nothing done on the game dev front, but I'm still really satisfied with how much I wrote. That's like a 4 novels a year pace. Gonna aim for just 6k this week, along with some work on the game. I'm starting to become guardedly optimistic that I will be able to keep this up indefinitely and make ends meet, even without any funding for the game project.
Turniper
2mo ago
Whew. I've been trying to hit 2000 words a day of fiction this week, and I'm largely succeeding. Currently at 6.1k written, and I'm not even quite done for today (I consider sun-thur my workdays). The downside is it's not words for the story I'm getting paid/have a publishing offer for, but honestly, I don't really care at this point. I don't need money in the short term, and I'm having way more fun writing drunken monkey wuxia and urban fantasy than I was writing isekai xianxia.
I'm enjoying the pace, aggressive as it is. It really feels like good exercise, like I'm building that writing muscle. The downside is I haven't had any time to work on my roguelike. But hey, there's only so many hours in a day.
Turniper
3mo ago
Unity/C#. I was a C# dev for half a decade, so it's old hat. I did try to get into Unreal but the learning curve is steep and I dislike both blueprints and how you're encouraged to use headers/the recompile times that causes.
Turniper
3mo ago
Sorry, totally blanked on this. Can make next week. Were ya'll just doing it in discord?
Turniper
3mo ago
I'm working on PC with a controller first. I'll probably try both mouse and keyboard and actual console releases if I finish it though.
Turniper
3mo ago
I'm central time. Friday is probably worst for me, because I work Sun-Thurs atm to match my fiancee's work schedule, but I could make it work. My ideal would probably be like 2 on thursday.
I've got two things I'm currently working on, coding a roguelike and writing fiction. I met my bare minimum goals last week, one chapter and a little code, but hope to do a lot better this week.
On the roguelike front, I didn't do as much as I'd hoped. I implemented damage over time, debuffs, and 'major boons', rewards that modify a character ability instead of just a stat last week, which sounds like a lot but it's very focused on adding burns to attacks atm and needs a lot of genericization.
/images/172347954427298.webp (Screenshot of the 'major boon' screen)
This week will hopefully be a lot of building out the 'core loop' of the combat side of the game. Adding a second enemy type, making terrain actually effect pathfinding, and adding discrete rooms instead of just continually spawning enemies in the same one.
On the writing side, I'm struggling a bit. I currently write and regularly post for a web serial, and try to get one 3k word chapter a week out. I've been dealing with a lot of avoidant perfectionism that leaves me doing all my work on Sunday hours before my posting deadline. I'm also feeling kinda burnt out on the story and more interested in writing other stuff, but I have a publication offer for it/am currently making a bit on patreon, so I feel obliged to push through and get it done. My hope is that if I spend more time with my butt in a chair writing other things, I'll get the juices flowing again.
It's weird not having a 'steady' income right now. Even though I'm doing just fine between investments and other stuff, I have years of runway and standing job offers, it causes me to overindex on the one project that actually is paying, even though it's probably the one I'm least interested in working on atm. I just need to channel that procrastination in a postive direction, rather than towards a third Elden Ring character.
Pretty sure it was this one: https://exploringegregores.wordpress.com/
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