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.

I’m almost 30, so I have to start practicing being crotchety.

Okay, maybe not all video games, but something curious has definitely happened here. Please bear with me for a moment.

June’s theme is clearing my plate, a concept that becomes increasingly nebulous as time goes by.

I accidentally went nocturnal over the past week, which always leaves me completely fried for a few days due to losing a day. So not the best week, but not the worst either.

• art: I drew a very quick happy Minccino to try to cheer everyone up last weekend. Their tail fluffs are upside-down. Sorry.

  I drew and colored two old friends on a whim, trying to apply some things Mel had told me about color harmony. I think it came out as possibly one of the nicest things I’ve ever drawn, so, that’s nice, whoa.

  I started drawing daily Pokémon (in a predetermined random order), where the only rule is a time limit of 30 minutes. Here are Wobbuffet and western Shellos; I’ll be dumping them all in a Tumblr tag too.

  While I was out at lunch, I drew on paper for the first time in a while. I should probably do it more, but the results aren’t too bad.

• Runed Awakening: Aha! I pixelled an NPC or two, possibly marking the first real character design I’ve ever done, as well as an item and an attempt at a room illustration.

  A couple friends played through the current state of the game, which led to a couple days of chasing down extremely obtuse minor bugs. It’s a little frustrating to have spent a lot of time and have so little to show for it, but one of the bugs was something that’s plauged me for over a year, so I guess it at least fits with the theme of getting rid of looming things. From here I should be able to get back to building things.

• spline: I finally granted Mel the ability to create a new folder by themselves. So far I’ve always done it manually, which has gotten increasingly painful since the folders use the nested set model. There’s still no UI for rearranging them, but this removes a huge source of… requests for manual intervention.

• veekun: I started reabsorbing the current state of the new YAML schema and thinking about how to get it where I want. Didn’t make any actual progress, though.

  Working on getting the remaining images veekun is missing, too.

Probably more of the same this next week. I want to make huge inroads on Runed Awakening, fix the other category of things I have to do manually for spline, and get some work done on veekun one way or another.

June’s theme is clearing my plate! I will finally stop spreading these vegetables around to make it look like I ate some of them, and just sneak them to the dog under the table.

• art: I drew a beautiful manga, which is based on true events. I drew a new header image for here, replacing the old poor cutout of a JPEG exported from Pokémon Art Academy, and adjusted the colorscheme of the whole site to match it. And I did a lot of doodling. A loooot of doodling.

• doom: I did a lot of work on my factory map for DUMP 3, but I don’t think I’m going to make the deadline. I’m okay with that. I did a mad scramble for DUMP 2 in April, then a longer mad scramble for Under Construction in May; I’m alright with not doing a mad scramble for a third month in a row. I can still make maps outside of a particular challenge.

• twitter: I made @perlin_noise, a Twitter bot that tweets Perlin noise in various forms.

• pyscss: I’d had a ton of GitHub mail marked unread for ages, so I finally spent a day fixing a lot of easy bugs and released 1.3.5. I don’t plan to spend significant time on this in the future — especially when there’s now a libsass in C and Python bindings to it — but it’s nice to see some obvious problems fixed.

• blog: It’s been a year since I quit now!

It doesn’t sound like a lot, but honestly most of the time went into the Doom map and artwork, both of which are things I wanted to do this month. I’m not sure how I’ll schedule the mapping if I’m giving up on DUMP 3; maybe I’ll hop on Runed Awakening for a bit and look at the map again later with fresh eyes.

A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.