I love having tests.

I hate writing them.

It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s hard, sometimes harder than writing the code. Worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything.

So I usually don’t do it. I know, I know. I should do it. I should also get more exercise and eat more vegetables.

The funny thing is, the only time I see anyone really praise the benefits of testing is when someone who’s really into testing extols the virtues of test-driven development. To me, that’s like trying to get me to eat my veggies by telling me how great veganism is. If I don’t want to do it at all, trying to sell me on an entire lifestyle is not going to work. I need something a little more practical, like “make smoothies” or “technically, chips are a vegetable”.

Here’s the best way I’ve found to make test smoothies. I’ll even deliberately avoid any testing jargon, since no one can agree on what any of it means anyway.

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

I accidentally went nocturnal again, which always leaves me exhausted for a couple days as atonement for skipping an entire day, so this week was a little less productive than the last two.

• art: Drew, just, a ridiculous amount of stuff. Pages of sketches. Several birthday gifts. Even some serious attempts to learn from other artists’ work. Somehow I did zero “daily” Pokémon, though.

• blog: Wrote and published a quick lament about attribution on the web. Also finally put the article “summary” (the bit before the read-more link) in Twitter cards, so, that’s nice.

• book: Decent progress? Took a bunch more notes; converted a good chunk of my existing notes into real prose; rewrote the preface; cleaned up some aesthetic issues that had been bugging me.

• hax: I took a day to make a ridiculous ROM hack for a friend’s birthday. Learned some neat things about the Game Boy along the way, though.

I count drawing as genuine useful work, since it’s practicing a thing I’m trying to learn, so I still did a decent amount of stuff this week. Just, ah, not too much of it was the Three Things. My sleep seems to be mostly un-fucked now, so this next week should go a little better. I think I can still have decent progress to show on the three things, though maybe not quite everything I wanted.

The web is a great thing that’s come a long way, yadda yadda. It used to be an obscure nerd thing where you could read black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now, it’s a hyper popular nerd thing where you can read black Helvetica Neue text on a white background. I hear it can do other stuff, too.

That said, I occasionally see little nagging reminders that the web is still quite primitive in some ways. One such nag: it has almost no way to preserve attribution, and sometimes actively strips it.

As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

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.

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• 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.

August is about video games. Actually, the next three months are about video games. Primary goals and their rough stages:

1. Draft three chapters of this book
   • August: one chapter (at which point I might start talking about what the book is)
   • September: another chapter
   • October: yet another chapter
2. Get veekun beta-worthy
   • August: basics of the new schema committed; basics of gen 1 and gen 6 games dumped; skeleton cli and site
   • September: most games dumped; lookup; core pages working; new site in publicly-available beta
   • October: all games dumped; new site design work; extras like search and calculators
3. Finish Runed Awakening
   • August: working ending; at least one solution to each puzzle; private beta
   • September: alternate solutions; huge wave of prose editing; patreon beta
   • October: fix the mountains of issues people find; finish any remaining illustrations

Yeah, we’ll see how all that goes. I also have some vague secondary goals like “do art” and “release tiny games” and “do Doom stuff” but those are extremely subject to change. Hopefully I can stick to the above three big things for three months.

Anyway, this week:

• blog: Finished and published posts on why to use Python 3 and how to port to it, plus made numerous suggested edits. Wrote a brief thing about my frustrations with Pokémon Go. And wrote about veekun’s schema woes, which helped me reason through a few lingering thorny problems.

  That might be a record for most things I’ve published within a calendar week.

• art: I tried an hour of timed (real-life) figure drawings, which was kinda weird. I’ve really lapsed on the daily Pokémon, possibly because I changed up the rules to be an hour for a single painting, and that feels like a huge amount of time (…for something I don’t think will come out very well). I’ll either make a better effort to do them every day, or change the rules again so I stop putting them off.

  I drew Griffin’s Nuzlocke team kind of on a whim? A day-long whim?

• book: I wrote some preface, which you’re probably supposed to do last, but it helped me figure out the tone of the writing. I’ve mentioned this before regarding previous failed attempts, but writing a book is surprisingly harder than writing a blog post — I can’t quite put my finger on why, but the medium feels completely different and alien, and I’m much more self-conscious about how I write.

  I did get a bit of a chapter written, though. I probably spent much more time wrangling authoring tools into producing something acceptable.

• doom: I somehow drifted into doing stuff to anachrony again. Apparently I left it in near-shambles, with at least a dozen half-finished things all over the place and few comments about what on Earth I was thinking. I’ve cleaned a lot of them up, figured out how to fix some long-standing irritations, and excised some bad ideas. It’s almost presentable now, and I started building a little contrived demo map that tries to show how some of the things work. Someday I might even use all this for a real map, wow.

• zdoom: Oops, I also picked up my Lua-in-ZDoom experiment again. After doing some things to C++ that made me feel like a witch, someone recommended Sol, a single-file (10k line…) C++ library for interacting with Lua. It is fucking incredible and makes everything so much easier and the author is on Twitter and fixes things faster than I can bring them up.

  I don’t know how much time I want to devote to this — it is just an experiment — but Sol will make it go preposterously faster. It’s single-handedly made a proof of concept look feasible.

• ops: I spent half a day fixing microscopic IPv6 problems that have been getting on my nerves for ages.

• veekun: After publishing the schema post, I went to have a look at where I’d left the new dumper code. I spent a few hours writing rock-solid(-ish) version and language detection, which doesn’t have much to do with the schema but is really important to have.

I just about filled a page in my notebook with all this, which I haven’t done in a while. Feels pretty good! I’m also a quarter through the month already, so I’d better get moving on those three big things.

I run veekun, a little niche Pokédex website that mostly focuses on (a) very accurate data for every version, derived directly from the games and (b) a bunch of nerdy nerd tools.

It’s been languishing for a few years. (Sorry.) Part of it is that the team has never been very big, and all of us have either drifted away or gotten tied up in other things.

And part of it is that the schema absolutely sucks to work with. I’ve been planning to fix it for a year or two now, and with Sun/Moon on the horizon, it’s time I actually got around to doing that.

Alas! I’m still unsure on some of the details. I’m hoping if I talk them out, a clear best answer will present itself. It’s like advanced rubber duck debugging, with the added bonus that maybe a bunch of strangers will validate my thinking.

(Spoilers: I think I figured some stuff out by the end, so you don’t actually need to read any of this.)

July is themeless, though in practice it’s been mostly blogging.

• irl: Wow! I did a bunch of errands and sifted through a bunch of email I’d been putting off. Exciting. Also I decided to take half an hour of server downtime for some upgrades right in the middle of the day because I’m bad at ops.

• art: Daily Pokémon, of course. I’ve now done 30 of these speedpaints (only 75% of daily, oh well), and there’s some visible progress in there, which is pretty cool to see. I also drew an Eevee that attempted to take some inspiration from huiro, a Japanese artist with a really simple style that I like.

• blog: I wrote about naming. I also spent multiple days working on a pair of Python 3 posts. I sure hope they get finished soon, but I guess you’ll have to wait until the next weekly roundup to find out!

Oh boy that doesn’t sound like a lot, but really, I spent so much time writing. And playing Starbound. But mostly, writing. The Python 3 posts total about twenty thousand words!

After the mad dash to publish six things in two and a half weeks, I’m all caught up on blogging. I’ll try to write some shorter and quicker things this month — I’m sure these massive tomes are as exhausting to read as they are to write — and spread them out a bit more evenly.

I have a bunch of stuff I want to make progress on in August, but I guess you’ll have to wait and see what those are! Hopefully I’ll have something to show by next week, but if not, I’ll quietly and shamefully pretend I wasn’t ever going to do any of it anyway and playing Starbound for a week was my original plan all along.

I’ve been trying really hard not to be a sourpuss about this, because everyone seems to enjoy it a lot and I don’t want to be the jerk pissing in their cornflakes.

And yet!

Despite all the potential of the game, despite all the fervor all across the world, it doesn’t tickle my fancy.

It seems like the sort of thing I ought to enjoy. Pokémon is kind of my jam, if you hadn’t noticed. When I don’t enjoy a Pokémon thing, something is wrong with at least one of us.

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

Maybe you have a Python 2 codebase. Maybe you’d like to make it work with Python 3. Maybe you really wish someone would write a comically long article on how to make that happen.

I have good news! You’re already reading one.

(And if you’re not sure why you’d want to use Python 3 in the first place, perhaps you’d be interested in the companion article which delves into exactly that question?)

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

The short answer is: because it’s the actively-developed version of the language, and you should use it for the same reason you’d use 2.7 instead of 2.6.

If you’re here, I’m guessing that’s not enough. You need something to sweeten the deal. Well, friend, I have got a whole mess of sugar cubes just for you.

And once you’re convinced, you may enjoy the companion article, how to port to Python 3! It also has some more details on the diffences between Python 2 and 3, whereas this article doesn’t focus too much on the features removed in Python 3.

…is, of course, naming.

Not just naming variables or new technologies. Oh no. We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.

July is themeless.

• art: Daily Pokémon remain sporadic. Some other doodling.

• blog: I wrote a thing about technicalities in communities. I’m also working on three more posts concurrently, which is great because I still have to publish four more by the end of the week, whoops!

• book: I wrote a teeny bit of actual text, then spent much more time fucking around with Sphinx and comparing it to Pandoc and waffling over whether I want to write in rST or TeX.

Mostly writing last week, and mostly writing this week. I guess July’s theme ended up being, um, writing.

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to tell you a story. I’ve touched on this before, but this is the full version. It’s the story of hypothetical small-to-medium Internet community.

July is themeless.

I’m doing better!

• art: Daily Pokémon continue, perhaps a bit too sporadically to be called “daily” but whatever. Also a sunset painting that came out really cool, damn. And this painting of a new Sun/Moon Pokémon. And a lot of other doodling.

  I’ve been trying out a bunch of Krita brushes, and I’m not quite happy with any of them, but I’m getting enough of a feel for what I like to start making my own.

• twitter: I finally automated @leafeon_brands, my blocklist of advertisers. It now automatically blocks ads shown to my primary account.

• blog: I wrote some stuff about color, which somehow took way longer than I’d expected — I was hoping for a day or two, and it feels like it took most of the week. That wraps up my June posts, so, er, I really gotta get moving on July.

• book: I had a book idea that seems to have a lot more staying power than the last one or two, and I did a bunch of research and planning for it. I’ll talk about it later, when I have something to show.

• flora: I was dragged into fixing shipping for the Floraverse store, which thankfully mostly worked itself out before it became too much of a nightmare.

I’m working on two posts at the moment, so I should be able to catch up soon. As soon as I can, I want to find some blocks of time to experiment with art, work on Runed Awakening and this book idea, and spruce up veekun.

I’ve been trying to paint more lately, which means I have to actually think about color. Like an artist, I mean. I’m okay at thinking about color as a huge nerd, but I’m still figuring out how to adapt that.

While I work on that, here is some stuff about color from the huge nerd perspective, which may or may not be useful or correct.

I was feeling pretty run down at the end of June. I think I wore myself out a little bit. DUMP 2, then Under Construction, then DUMP 3 (which I missed), and all the while fretting over Under Construction.

I took this past SGDQ week “off” and spent it mostly doodling. I’m a bit better now! I’m a post behind for June, a third of the way into July; don’t worry, I’ll catch up.

July doesn’t have a theme. I’ve got some stuff to do, and I’ll do it.

• art: The 30-minute daily Pokémon continue, though not quite so “daily” for a bit there. I also made a quick birthday gift for a friend, spent a preposterous amount of time painting a hypothetical evolution, and drew an Extyrannomon for Extyrannomon. Plus a lot of doodling.

  Oh, and I put together an art more good chart for the first half of this year.

• zdoom: My experiment with embedding Lua is a little cleaner — you can now embed a Lua script in a map and call it from a linedef (switch, etc.), making it slightly more of a real proof-of-concept. I also did some research into how to serialize the entire state of the interpreter, for the sake of quicksaves.

• gamedev: I did a little more work on rainblob, the tiny PICO-8 platformer I started a month or so ago. It now supports multiple “rooms” and has a couple simple intro puzzles. I also wrote about 20% of a Tetris clone using pentominoes while watching SGDQ’s Tetris runs.

• veekun: I gathered all of Bulbapedia’s Sugimori art to replace the rather low-res and incomplete collection veekun has at the moment. Not up yet, though. I looked into the current state of extracting skeletal animations, yet again, and did not find any traces of success. Alas.

Back to work this week, then!

June’s theme is clearing my plate.

• SLADE: I fixed yet another obscure geometry editing bug. I feel a little more cleansed every time I do. Also I found out that GZDoomBuilder based its own geometry code on SLADE’s and almost immediately borrowed my SLADE fix.

• art: Still doing daily Pokémon. The half hour time limit is surprisingly harsh, but I think I’m making some progress, gradually. Also finished an old art trade.

• runed awakening: I built out most of a whole puzzle sequence that had languished unfinished for a while, and drew a WIP or two of some of the rooms and objects involved. It doesn’t sound like a lot, and I wish I’d done more, but I made some good progress.

• zdoom: On a total whim, I did an extremely simple proof of concept of Lua in ZDoom. There’s no approval or planned goals or anything for this; I just felt like trying it out. May or may not continue it. Ideally it would be able to replace ACS and at least massively enhance DECORATE.

• blog: I wrote about video games again.

I think I ran out of small things on my plate, and now I’m finding all the large things a little daunting. And here I’ve invented another one. Argh. Still, keep moving forward.