August is loosely about video games, but really it’s about three big things in particular.

• book: Lots of progress! I’m definitely getting a feel for the writing style I want to use, I’ve wrangled Sphinx into a basically usable state, I’ve written a lot of tentative preface stuff and much of the intro part of the chapter, and I’ve written a ton of scratchy prose (like notes, but full sentences that just need some editing and cleanup later). Also worked around some frequent crashes with, ah, a thing I’m writing about.

• veekun: I did a serious cleanup of the gen 1 extraction code; added some zany heuristics for detecting data that should work even in fan hacks (if there even are any for gen 1); and hacked multi-language extraction into working well enough for starters.

  Finally, and I do mean finally, I built some groundwork for versioning support in the Python API. This has been hanging over my head for probably a year and was one of the biggest reasons I kept putting off working on this whole concept. I just didn’t quite know how I wanted to do it, and I was terrified of doing it “wrong”. At long last, yesterday I pushed through, and now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

  I also committed what I had so far, which is a complete mess but also a working mess, and that makes me feel better about the state of things. You can have a look if you want.

• runed awakening: I didn’t get any tangible work done, but after some months of agonizing, I finally figured out how to make the ending sensible. Mostly. Like 80%. I’m much closer than I used to be. Once I nail down a couple minor details, I should be able to go actually build it.

---

• blog: I finally fixed veekun’s front page — the entire contents of blog posts will no longer appear there. (The actual problem was that Pelican, the blog generator I use, puts the entirety of blog posts in Atom’s <summary> field and wow is that wrong. I’ve submitted a PR and patched my local install.)

  I wrote about half a post on testing, which I’d really like to finish today.

• zdoom: My Lua branch can now list out an actor’s entire inventory — the first capability that’s actually impossible using the existing modding tools. (You can check how many of a particular item an actor is carrying, but there’s no way to iterate over a list of strings from a mod.)

• doom: Almost finished my anachrony demo map, but stopped because I wasn’t sure how to show off the last couple things. Fixed a couple items that had apparently been broken the entire time, whoops.

• slade: I added the most half-assed stub of a list of all the things in the current map and how many there are on each difficulty. I vaguely intend to make a whole map info panel, and I still need to finish 3D floors; I just haven’t felt too inclined to pour much time into SLADE lately. Both C++ and GUI apps are a bit of a slog to work with.

• art: I scribbled Latias with a backpack and some other things.

  I did two daily Pokémon, which is, at least, better than one. I think they’re getting better, but I also think I’m just trying to draw more than I know how to do in an hour.

  I hit a skill wall this week, where my own expectations greatly outpaced my ability. It happens every so often and it’s always maddening. I spent a lot of time sketching and looking up refs (for once) and eventually managed to pierce through it — somehow I came out with a markedly improved understanding of general anatomy, hands, color, perspective, and lighting? I don’t know how this works. The best thing I drew is not something I’ll link here, but you can enjoy this which is pretty good too. Oh, I guess I did a semi-public art stream for the first time this week, too.

  Now my arm is tired and the callus where I grip the pen too hard is a bit sore.

• irl: Oh boy I got my oil changed? Also I closed a whole bunch of tabs and went through some old email again, in a vain attempt to make my thinkin’ space a bit less chaotic.

Wow! A lot of things again. That’s awesome. I really don’t know where I even found the time to do quite so much drawing, but I’m not complaining.

I’m a little panicked, since we’re halfway through the month and I don’t think any of the things I’m working on are half done yet. I did try to give myself a lot of wiggle room in the October scheduling, and it’s still early, so we’ll see how it goes. I can’t remember the last time I was quite this productive for this long continuously, so I’m happy to call this a success so far either way.