What I Did in August

I've finished uni! Did my final exam last week and feeling great about it, so I guess I'm off into the big wide world. Mindless stress about that final assignment and exam robbed me of a lot of time, but I still got a lot of awesome stuff done this month, check it out!

Secret Keeper

I wrote another zine lyric game! The one I wrote for the toki pona game jam was so fun to write, so I bashed out another one, this time in English. I'm gonna muse a bit here about what I was thinking about when I wrote it, so you might want to go check Secret Keeper out on Itch before reading ahead, so you can have an untainted first impression!

Check out how gorgeous it looks as a physical zine!

In Secret Keeper, you create a neography, or a cipher, and then write down something secret in it, something weighing on your mind. Then, you tuck it somewhere you won't see it for a couple months (or years), destroy the key, so you can no longer decipher it, and try to forget about it. It's written like this is some kind of magical ritual that transfers ownership of the secret (and its associated burden) from the player to the book - it was very fun to write in first person as the book, directly addressing the player.

I wrote it in about an hour one morning, haven woken up with the idea. It's cool how, as a result, it's sort of steeped in the things I was thinking a lot about at the time, cohered unintentionally by my subconscious. One of them: I was glancing at the r/codes subreddit, and so much of it is people presenting ciphered diaries they had written as a kid and forgotten the key to, or from friends that had passed away, asking for deciphering help on the internet. And, like, it's really easy to unpick a simple cipher! I was really taken by this idea of code-breaking something deeply personal, the secrets of someone that no longer exists, because they've grown up or passed on. The methodical procedure of solving, letter-by-letter, what someone poured their heart into, now robbed of significance.

In writing the game, I was trying to recreate this experience, that, in the future, you (or someone else) would decipher what you'd written as part of playing Secret Keeper. Like, "Oh, so that's what I was so worried about, four years ago." I think it's cool to design for something to happen years after the game is played. I tell the players to slip their ciphered notes into an old book, or under their mattress, so they don't get found until they've been forgotten about.

I love how the art worked out, too, although it is a bit samey, hey! I wanted to have glyphs in the background to serve as inspiration for the player's creation of a cipher, and so there are random characters from 11 different non-latin writing systems scattered across the page, a different assortment on each spread. And gosh, it was so awesome to print it out, and hold it in my hands - you should try making a physical artwork some time! I'm looking forward to writing some more, myself!

Ear Trainer

As I play more music (mostly piano) I'm trying to be very aware of music theory, and of honing my ear alongside my fingers. As a kid, I only memorised sheet music without any understanding, and now I'm learning that all the other parts are the bits I like the most! To that end, I wrote a little ear trainer webtoy:

You know I love that Gruvbox palette.

It just plays notes over a tonic drone, and then after a second says their scale degree. I saw someone selling a fancy app (to be fair, it looks lovely) that does this for like, thirty dollars, and I thought "I could make a much worse version of that for myself for free in a weekend", so I did! And gosh, it is much worse, I'm using the Tone.js library to play synths and, for whatever reason, it's unbearably crackly and distorted on mobile - but I only need it to work on my laptop!

It's been cool to get slowly better at this little task, sanitised and minimalist and devoid of context as it is, but it's helping me build a little familiarity with some of the scale degrees, and the other day I recognised and recreated all the notes of a little melody in the wild, so it's having some effect! Not too bad for a 300-odd-line html file :D

It's very good to be able to throw useful little things together super quickly like this! Maybe everyone can do that, these days, with Claude Code, or whatever. Maybe that's kind of cool? Hm.

A Couple Tiny Things

Oh yes, and I did a few mini things, as well:

• When I made those Hadestown Karaoke Videos in January, I included the key changes from the Teen Edition's score, and ever since, people have been in my comments asking for original key versions, so I finally made some! It's been cool to see the youtube analytics spike with the release of the Hadestown Proshot in the US - data is a beautiful thing.
• I made another (less polished) webtoy for learning to read ciphers. You just give it the name of a ciphered font on your computer, and it shows you a random quote in that font. Like an afternoon's work but I'm popping it here for completeness :p
• Helped put together a little landing page for pawswap.space, which is a little computing group I'm part of that's just starting up. It's cool to make things with people again, I've not done that for a while! They're all very smart about computer stuff and have good suggestions. We'll see where it goes, fingers crossed for the best!
• An RSS feed for this blog! You can grab it here!

What I Read this Month!

Twig Arc 18: Dog Eat Dog

The end of the last chapter of this arc made me cry, and I don't think I've cried from a book since I was a kid and got freaked out by how well Bod sold his "father's" death to that policeman in The Graveyard Book! (Though the exam pressure did presumably lower my tears threshold.)

I mean this one keeps up the trend, hey, arc-over-arc, Wildbow manages to tug further and further on my heartstrings with each depiction of just how bad shape the Lambs are in. Like, we get the glimpses of the growths and knots in Mary's back for the first time, and of Helen's brain-body connection breaking down (loved that chapter). And, of course, Sy. Gosh, the part early on in the arc where Sy sees Helen eviscerate the three blind mice spooked me, super haunting, though really the only thing on my mind as I write this is the arc's ending.

Just, the little section where the Lambs return, and Sy is asking whether he's killed people and Jessie responds "No, Sy." each time really got me. Like, the pairing of his absolute trust in her with her patience for him, so soon after he was musing about how Jessie feels like the only "real" relationship he's had because they each needed the other. AND there's the "Lillian made a small sound" as the questions continue, because she hasn't seen him in so long, she hasn't seen how bad it's gotten. I don't know, dude, it really hit me. Something about the depiction of trust and patience and also of ignorance, framed against what the characters are all going through together. I am going to miss these characters so much after I finish the next two arcs.

War and Peace Book 2: 1805

I'll be real, dude, this one was kind of a bore, unfortunately, which is a shame, and a surprise, since I enjoyed Book 1 so much! It seems like War and Peace has "peace" sections and "war" sections, and that I like the former a lot more than the latter. Reading a chapter a day was kind of a slog, which reduced the amount I read this month, because I wasn't looking forward to it! So I reckon I'm going to slow down a bit with this book, so I'm reading less of this book than any others I'm juggling.

In Book 1 it was really easy to follow all of the many characters Tolstoy introduces, through their interconnected family trees and relationships, but here we're dealing with a bunch of generals, commanders, adjutants, aide-de-camps, cossacks and staff officers, and we're given less handles to keep track of all of them, so it all sort of washed over me with the vague impression of dozens of unfamiliar men dying for no good reason. But hey, maybe that's what war is all about.

Girlfriends

Gosh, this was good. I've been reading a lot of short story collections recently, hey! This one is seven incomplete little glimpses into the sprawling, complex lives of young transgender women, and though there's, like, no plot, and each of the individual elements of the craft fall a bit short of "breathtaking", oh my goodness this book.

It actually reminded me a lot of Castration Movie Anthology i - I remember seeing someone say about that film that "every character is someone you know", and I feel that here, too! They even both have that sort of mumblecore dialogue aesthetic going on, haha, Emily Zhou makes a lot of effective use of the word "like" throughout the dialogue in this book. They're both trying to, like, capture the zeitgeist of Gen Z transfeminine culture, hey, and it really works on me!

Reading these seven little snapshots made me go "Yes! This! This is what being alive is like!" in a way that no other book has before. According to her neocities site (!!), Zhou is currently working on a novel, so I've eagerly popped that onto my radar for the future.

And That's It!

So I guess, now I'm done with uni, I go apply to full-time jobs? We'll see if that robs me of all the time I could be project-ing or starts each of my days with momentum and a burning desire to exist and create outside of labour.

Chat to you at the end of September!