What I Did in June

I was surprisingly productive this month! Maybe I just needed some university work to procrastinate? More likely, being at uni gets me out of the house, which gets my brain going. In any case, get hyped to read about all the cool things I did and made this month!

Payphone Explorer

Aaaages back, I experimented with and got a little way into implementing an IRL Fog of War type thing - a map where only the places you've been to are visible, or highlighted, or whatever. This is a thing that exists already, but the app is like $30 and I thought it would be fun to make, so I got a little way into working on it, until the impracticalities of gathering and storing and processing all that GPS data got a little bit beyond what I wanted to put into the project.

This year, I've been playing a lot of Payphone Tag. In Australia, there are about fourteen thousand payphones, and they're free to use! (For domestic calls.) A guy named Alex set up an automated phone line that you can call from a payphone (and enter your PIN) to claim that payphone - you earn points, climb a leaderboard and get to see your little emoji on the map on the Payphone Tag website.

It's super fun! I don't get too involved with the hustle and bustle of trying to hold onto my phones - I like exploring places and building an intuition of their street layouts and getting payphones I've never seen before. At time of writing, I've grabbed 244 different payphones and I remember just about each and every one of them.

Now, this data of which payphones I've claimed serves just as well as intricate GPS data to track where I've been (since I get them everywhere I go), so I put together a little website (Payphone Explorer) that uses my list of explored payphones to reveal a map from beneath a mysterious fog.

I'm not using, like, any specific web tech for map drawing, just three.js. About midway through development I realised with horror that I had to figure out how to actually do a map projection, because,,, I was making a map. (It worked out pretty smoothly, though.) The Payphone Tag API provides a triangulation of all the payphones, so I just draw that as a mesh atop some OSM map tiles, colouring the vertices based on whether those payphones have been explored, and the GPU does all the interpolation super easily. I like that each payphone earns you a sort of soft-edged voronoi cell of map around it.

Because the exploration data comes from payphones rather than, like, an always-on GPS in your phone, there's, a ritual of exploration that involves activating a physical object, which I think is a really cool spin on the IRL Fog of War idea that I wouldn't have thought of if not for playing Payphone Tag. It's like those map towers in Breath of the Wild,, I think. (I haven't played it.)

I really like the way that abandoned project and artwork ideas like this sit in your head, waiting for an opportunity to be expressed. I've started a lot of projects in the past, and only this year have I really begun to finish the things I start, but I carry with me a toolbox of previous fascinations.

The dev of Payphone Tag liked my little project enough he added a "fog" feature to the game, so by the end of the month, my little project is a little less special. I think I'll keep using it, though!

Got Gruvboxxy

At the end of last year, I did a simple rice of my new laptop, sugar-glider, but I left my, freaking, terminal and vscode appearances pretty much at their defaults. This month, I did a little extra customisation! I love gruvbox, it's so warm and cozy, so I chucked that onto them. I put Cozette (the font you're reading right now!) in my terminal, and Maple Mono in my text editor.

Then, I wanted to go a little further, so I picked a new wallpaper, a Calvin and Hobbes one, and dithered it to only use the gruvbox colours. I configured Discord and my web browser to be gruvboxed too! Turns out Chicago95, the thing I've left in charge of my DE theme, supports loading Windows Plus! 95 themes, so I used this little tool to make a gruvboxxed one of those. It's all so harmonious now!

(My grandparents have a couple Calvin and Hobbes collected editions at their house, and whenever I visited them as a kid, I'd blitz through them, so it inspires very strong nostalgia in me.)

Although... I've been using Vimium, a browser extension that just adds a couple more hotkeys, for surfing the net without needing to reach for a mouse, and it doesn't work on the Firefox default new tab page for, uh, "security reasons". So I made a little new tab page!

(Forgive me for taking this screenshot at such a late hour.)

Just a simple little thing, but it's cute and it's gruvbox and it fits with everything else I've got going on! The bar at the bottom is daylight's hours, with the three twilights, golden hour, solar noon and nadir marked. (The circle lens marks the current time.)

Wrote a Lyric Game! (lon toki pona)

This month was the second annual toki pona game jam, and I made a submission! The theme words were telo and utala, and when I read them, a lyric game entered my mind fully formed, about, like, an eternal battle between land and water, a bit like the free game We Love the Moon (which you should read!), or the battle of wits between Morphius and Lucifer in The Sandman.

I was in Hobart for basically the entire time I was working on the game, visiting cool toki pona people, which lined up quite well - it was great to be able to bounce ideas and phrasings off of them in person. ( ante [alasa tonsi e lanpan ilo] in particular really hyped me up to go for some of my weirder ideas!)

Despite aiming for something super small in scope (a short text document), I was on holiday, squeezing working on it into free moments, before breakfast, after dinner. I got to experience that classic game jam crunch moment working on my layout before I had to go get my flight back to Sydney!

I really like how this spread turned out, with the green spanning across the bottom of the two pages.

You can check out the game on this very website, or over on itch.io!

I dunno if anyone will actually play it, given the quite high barrier to entry: both the proficiency requirements (it's even only in sitelen pona lol) and requirement for two players, but I'm nonetheless very proud of it! I've never written a lyric game before! It was also super fun to write it entirely in toki pona, there wasn't like a stage it was dot-pointed in English or anything, and it's cool to be getting more proficient as the year goes on.

Maybe I gotta make more lyric games, or zines, or something, given how fun this was. I'll keep an eye out to try and notice if inspiration strikes.

What I Read this Month!

Twig Arc 15: Bitter Pill

There's a part in here where Sy spends, like, seven chapters gallivanting around, shaking his box of spiders, enacting chaos and then trying to handle it better than his opponents. It's a riot and it's delightful to have him back as our protagonist and then at the end of it all he comes back to Jessie and finds that she's dropped a memory, and it all comes tumbling down. Everything else pales.

And like, this is the thesis of the work, right? Through the academy lens, the Lambs aren't people, they're weapons, tools (an identity that the Lambs sometimes embrace and sometimes reject). But that doesn't matter! Because they're people and they love each other!!!

Also interesting to see the Jessie stuff take effect so seamlessly. It feels strange but also feels at home with the gender politics Wildbow's been playing with in the setting since early on. Good stuff.

I'm sure I'll say this every time but it's soooo different to a series of 20 books in that each arc is, like, so much less self-contained, there's so much more exciting stuff to come immediately.

Arc of a Scythe #3: The Toll

Okay, I'm torn with this one. I loved that it's a globe-trotting adventure! Like, the scope feels expanded from the previous installations in a fun way, I love the way it feels like a spy movie. I, naturally, enjoyed all the Thunderhead stuff, superintelligent AI fiction is like my guilty pleasure.

On the other hand, although, sure, plenty of threads got tied up, soooo many got dropped? Like, so many chapters open with the politics of the different Scythedoms and alliances and everything, and that ends up not mattering at all. We have the whole situation with Anastasia's broadcasts that seem not to affect the plot either - like, the story tells us the broadcasts are for the people, but they're basically just exposition to answer the space disaster mystery for us. Also,, does Rowan actually do anything in this book?? He, what, gets revived, imprisoned, rescued, told to assassinate Scythes, doesn't, and then follows Cirrus's instructions for the rest of the book. He's not a character!

That said, I still mostly enjoyed it :p

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones

This was a super short little thing, small enough I had to add a new font to my bookshelf page to fit it! I'm noticing, between this and the short story collection I've been reading (more on that soon), that when a story is short, you barely have time for plot or characters - the canvas is kinda dominated by premise and theme.

Maybe the biggest thing that hit me here is, like, the terrifying irl science it references, where, in order to keep pig meat tasting good, we vaccinate them against their own endocrine systems, essentially giving them an engineered autoimmune disorder that prevents them from becoming pubescent. I was looking at the website of the company that sells this tech, and it seems like it would just straight-up work on people with no modifications? Which is, WILD. It takes two doses to take effect, one to prime the immune system and another to trigger it, and in their FAQ they say that if a worker were to accidentally inject themself they should never interact with it again. So bizarre and frightening, imagining a man-made disease lurking silently in your body, awaiting its trigger. We're doing crazy things to those pigs.

The novella takes this body horror and frames it against, like, the struggles of transgender women in Seattle. It presents this idea of "transgender women gotta stick together, no matter what" and supports this with the way that all its characters that aren't trans women are, like, awful. I think a lot of the struggles and duty to community rang true, but it felt quite elevated. Maybe a product of having to lock in on theme in such a short format, maybe a product of my differing experiences. I did really really like the symmetry of the stomach pit-drop sensation evoked by both the bioweapon body-horror and the perils of existing as a visible Other.

Twig Arc 16: Head over Heels

I'll be real this one is kinda just a classic Sylvester has a weakly-motivated adventure in an urban warzone type arc, it didn't feel super special. I liked the professor and the bugs but like dude it kinda dragged in the middle there, hey. I dunno, I kinda forgot who Otis and Archie were.

I really enjoyed that when the bugs first showed up, I was like, "Oh yeah, Wildbow's a freak, he'll want to show this particular body horror from the child protagonist's perspective bahaha," and I enjoyed, uh, the vindication of being correct, there.

All's when when the arc ends well, though, hey, loved those last two chapters! (Kinda feels like how often in Doctor Who my favourite part is when they're chilling out in the TARDIS at the end.) Like, the reveal that Helen and Ashton were really there, and that Fray is, like, a herald of deception, the slowly dawning arrival of the lambs into the scene of post-plague intimacy, such good stuff. As much as Sy's budding band of rebels is slowwwwly growing on me, the interlude arc at the end really reminded me how much I miss The Lambs.

Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories

This one is a collection of short stories, so, like Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, it kinda goes crazy on the premises and themes and not much else. (Even moreso, as the stories are much shorter, not quite novella.) This works out fine, though, because qntm's premises are awesome!

Like, come on, the premise of The Frame-by-Frame?? It's freaking Pixar's Inside Out set inside the operating system of an unethically-programmed self-driving car. How could you go wrong with that? A lot of them have that classic, superintelligent AI blogpost fiction kinda vibe, and qntm pulls it off, here, I think.

A couple of these stories (particularly If You Are Reading This) had, like, a dramatic mic-drop finale sentence clearly intended to be a show-stopper, jaw-dropper that kinda, initially bounced off me in a way I wasn't expecting, being used to longer stuff. Turns out these little goobers want to eke staying power in your mind by making you think! :p The set-up part of the book isn't clues for a plot twist, it's spinning a web of themes, and the payoff is being told that you now have sufficient information to unravel it.

Maybe I should have another go at reading Ra...

And That's It!

I'm really glad I had such a good month, eager for the next! Chat to you at the end of July!