Oh, life

I was emptying out my WordPress spam, and noticed that there is a trend to do with nursing schools. Then I saw that one of my spam comments mentioned these, and then went on to discuss the Pokemon anime.

Oh, who would’ve thought that spam was good for a laugh?

My visit to the doctor yesterday stretched on rather longer than it was meant to, which was not really a good thing. About five hours longer. I got the name of a dermatologist, because whatever the heck is on my shoulders/upper arms is bugging my mum and mystifies the OB. I don’t plan to bother with it unless it persists beyond delivery.

It’s delivery that I’m really worried about. It’s already something to make me nervous, and it’s been on my mind since my last rheumatologist’s appointment, where he suggested inducing a week early. OB doesn’t like it, she hates the idea of a C-section. So do I. She’s also just now been the first person to tell me that I have an option to breastfeed–when before, everyone told me I couldn’t because of RA treatment, blah blah blah.

Man, not long ago, I told someone that mine is not a high-risk pregnancy, it’s me that’s the problem. I’m a high-risk life! And then stuff kind of happens.

I’ll probably find out about the results of a second GTT with the same speed as the first, but tonight I’m going to the University hospital to get the second shot of a steroid to grow Owen’s lungs faster (first one hurt!) and have this delightful piece of lab equipment about which I shall not go into great detail.

…I’m pretty sure I’m okay, and even if preeclampsia is an issue, I think I’ll just be put on bedrest. My 24 hours for this test and needing the shot are up in about thirteen hours. Not sure how long it takes to get labs back, but I’m guessing an hour.

Life! Pregnancy! Gonna go read a book and try to take a nap or something. Oy.

May 22 freewriting

I huddled against the closet door, hands over my ears. It was cold outside, and I could feel it through the walls almost as though they were windows, but there was no way I would risk going back into the bedroom.

They weren’t allowed in there. It was my room. I had told my parents I needed a lock for the door, but they had just shrugged me off. Not that I could blame them, it did sound kind of stupid. Until Rick threw one of his parties.

Our house had a perfectly good basement, I didn’t know why they couldn’t go be disgusting in there. I sighed and kicked out a leg. Carefully. If I hit the wall too hard, they’d hear me. There wasn’t a lock on the closet door, either. The only reason the closet worked was that they were all too messed up or preoccupied ot realise the room had a closet.

Thinking that made me feel too skittish to stay as I was. Very slowly, so as not to make the door creak, I lifted my weight away from it. Cold as it was, I would be better off with my back to an actual wall.

Coats and dresses brushed against my face as I crawled into a corner. It seemed to take a long time to reach it. Once I had, my own clothes obscured my vision so much that I couldn’t even see the thin strip of light spilling in from under the closet door.

Sighing, I got up on my knees to pull down one of my winter coats. It had a halfheartedy repaired tear down one side, but it was clean and the zipper worked. More importantly, it was warm and didn’t itch.

I had a hard time wriggling into it in the small space, but in the end, I managed. I started to lean against the corner again, but then I figured I might be able to curl up on the floor. I kept my shoes under my bed, which meant the closet floor was decidedly clear.

On the other side of the door, someone laughed. A high, shrieking laugh that almost sounded like a scream. Then there was a bang. The closet door shook.

I pushed myself up on one arm and held my breath.

Almost a minute passed. I had to start breathing again, or risk passing out. At least I was already dressed to run outside. The only trick would be getting past all of them. They’d only follow me as far as the stairs, really.

I pulled myself into a crouch, still waiting. Part of me wanted to cry. The rest of me wanted to beat up that part. Rick wasn’t ever scary, even when he was completely off his head. His friends were almost as harmless. I shouldn’t have been so terrified.

Something snagged onto me from behind. I was too keyed up to scream, but that didn’t help me tear away from whatever had caught me.

Shaking, I turned around. A large grey hand had dug its fingers into my coat, and was beginning to pull.

Book mini-reviews part 2

Yeah, I should have done this sooner. I just haven’t wanted to. Still reading a lot, which is pretty much the easiest thing on my list of stuff I want or have to do. So sadly, my impressions might not be as fresh as they were a while back. Still, I’ll do my best to at least be fair.

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan – Quite possibly the most surreal experience of the challenge. McEwan’s writing style is rather dense. This story itself is quite short, and although I wouldn’t call it “engaging” per se, it does suck one in. More like quicksand than anything else. I don’t recommend it to people who need a happy ending. It’s depressing pretty much throughout, and it might seem to lack purpose to some.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke – I really wanted to like this one. The concept of the cosy mystery appeals to me on many levels, and I like baked goods. Unfortunately, I just had too many problems with this book. First and foremost, I never warmed to the main character. She just seemed like a judgemental know-it-all to me. There were an overwhelming number of named characters, to the point that I looked up from the book once and asked hubby if there would be a test at the end. Nearly none of them were important, which made the ones who were less remarkable. Even the mystery seemed to be secondary, but I wasn’t sure to what.

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks – Also one I wanted to like, but found too many obstacles. The main character is a genius kid and the son of the world’s foremost criminal mastermind, who eventually enrols in an academy of evil founded by his father. The problem there is the word, ‘eventually’. Everything in this book takes too long. Some of the twists are also quite easy to spot, which makes the time taken that much more of a waste. There’s also a disappointing imbalance in the book’s own “genius level”. Some things, usually to do with maths, are on a higher level of education, while others are… well, crisp-spattered grinning references to things that wouldn’t confuse a goose. I was particularly annoyed when the main character, a computer enthusiast, referred to keyboard shortcuts as though they are used exclusively by disabled users who have difficulty with the mouse. Just… what?

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie – It’s Poirot. What else can I say? This particular novel is more a collection of short stories, with a mystery per chapter. It was a particularly quick read for me, since I’ve seen most or all of them adapted into television format.

When Day Breaks by Mary Jane Clark – I was expecting more of a genre crossover with this, but it wasn’t a bad prime-time sort of mystery. It was also the sort of mystery wherein the victim was not someone whom the reader would mourn at all, and a few things were obvious very early on. But that is often not an issue, even in cases like this where the murderer is supposed to be a legitimate mystery. Some characters were too stupid to live (and did not survive), but my chiefest complaint with the characters is that there didn’t seem to be a main one. Just a gaggle of people. It’s not a big issue, and it may just be my own issue. Still a good book.

The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer – I love this book. On the second page, there is a cantankerous old man who has made his deathbed an opulent scene of red luxury, and he snarks like nobody’s business. It only gets better from there. Most of the characters are hopeless romantics in the worst way, contrasted against the way the real world works and my favourite character, a pragmatic man who, when faced with their insistence that romantic tropes are physical laws, just stares down the silliness with a raised eyebrow. He reminded me of my hubby. It’s not the best Macguffin plot, but the characters are what you’re really there for.

Wow. I have read fifty books this year. Remember when I was worried about only reading fifteen?

May 21 freewriting

This one is… weird. I don’t really like freewriting, never have, and I find that it’s less helpful the longer I spend on one particular session. I think that paring it all the way down to fifteen minutes saves me from absurdity that I’m not enjoying, and also keeps my freewriting posts from being too ridiculously long.

//

Shawn huffed, his bones and breath knocked loose with each slap of rubber sole against the pavement. He didn’t look back. He knew better. They wouldn’t be far behind.

On his shoulder, a feathered lizard coiled itself about him. It could have been worse. Last time, it had been a parrot with talons larger than his own fists. He still had raw red marks on his back from that one.

He turned a corner. His eyes stung as sweat slid into them. He flung himself against a nearby building to catch his breath. The lizard squawked in protest, but was not dislodged.

Overhead, clouds had begun to gather. His brow furrowed as he tried to calculate how much time he had left. But he couldn’t keep the numbers straight. The clomping of military boots neared his corner, and he decided that the ETA would have to be a casual, ‘not long now’.

He twisted round, careful to leave the lizard be–he was certainly past the point that he would be better off without than with it–and hauled himself up the building. The brick was already taking damage from the clouds. His natural ability to scale sheer surfaces was almost unnecessary. Every time his palms met the brick, it gave way like sponge cake.

“Halt!”

It was a briefer command than usual. Without stopping his ascent, Shawn glanced down at his pursuers. The clouds had done plenty of work on them already. They had started out as pale-faced, narrow men in business attire. Indistinguishable from each other and many mundanes.

They had become quite individual. One had burst his clothing to show off a blue-green carapace and claws the size of a toddler, yet remained bipedal. Another looked like a bus crossed with a dog. Shawn snapped his attention forward before one of them grew tentacles.

He was almost at the top. The lizard was growing, wrapping more tightly around his arm and spreading itself to his neck.

As he lifted a leg over the edge of the roof, two things happened. The lizard flattened into a tattoo, seeping through his clothing with a burning hiss. In almost the same instant, one of the pursuers fired on Shawn.

It would never be a gun. They seemed to go in for much nastier weapons. A thick, pointed bolt grazed Shawn’s arm. Fortunately, it was not the arm that had just received the feathered lizard tattoo.

But he didn’t believe in his luck enough to stay in sight. Lurching slightly on the softening building, he ran to the centre of the roof. The clouds had gathered to form a thick, dark entity that resembled an enormous octopus.

Then a bright spot cut into the octopus. It twinkled for a second before stabbing downwards to form a thin pillar.

Shawn skidded to a stop inside the pillar and looked up. He hated this part. But it was better than letting them catch him.

Linear Progression and Nesting Conditional Branches

As I’m sure I’ve said (read: whined about a lot), I have been putting off my current work in Desiderata for a long time. Ninety per cent of that has certainly been due to pregnesia and malaise (pregmalaisia?) but there’s also the quest itself.

I do like writing Arthur, but he existed in the limbo of concept and future planning for such a long time that I built myself some very unreal expectations. He ought to be likeable, although he is entirely optional if the player doesn’t like him. But his likeability is based on charm and humour. Both of which, especially the latter, have incredibly high standards. To do less than meet them is to fail.

But what I mean to really go on about is the eventing/coding involved.

If people want a novel, they acquire a novel. Linearity is a given in a novel, and it works in a manner similar to film and even television, to some extent. (when you bring the concept of series into it, there are some that can be seen out of order, and some that suffer for it) However, video games are not like any of these things.

Even in an RPG that has a central plot line that is told in a linear fashion, the player has options to do things out of order. The degree of freedom varies.

• Quest for Glory – Acts a bit like a checklist. Most goals are open to the player immediately, some must be unlocked, and others are time-sensitive or time-specific. But there is not necessarily a mandatory order in which you must complete them. Some are even optional. This is the case for most point-and-click adventure games.
• Jade Empire – Locks the player into one location or location set. There may be a lot of sidequests within that location, and you don’t even have to bother with most of them, but you only have access to them while you are in that location. Once you have progressed the rigidly linear plot to the next point, you move to the next location and can’t go backwards. This is a decent amount of freedom, but more rigidly structured.
• Final Fantasy 13 – The hallway. Absolutely no feature of the game is accessible to the player unless the game permits it. From the story progression to options in the menu, everything is dictated by fixed advancement.

Seems I managed a bit of a scale, there. As far as we’ve plotted and carried things out in Desiderata, we have a sort of Jade Empire model for player freedom. Funny to say that though, since this location marks the point where the player can actually begin to backtrack travel, and although the story remains rather linear, you have a game-changing decision to make.

Quests can also vary in freedom and linearity. For example, in the quest that allows you to hire the lady wizard Fienna upon completion, the steps are linear. You accept the quest, retrieve an item, fight a monster, chase a frog, and return to Fienna. There’s more to it in the quest completion sequence, but that’s something else.

For Arthur, you have to talk to a few different merchants to obtain spell components. You can speak to them in any order–and one of them will offer you something you don’t want.

For the player, this should be a given. For me, eventing it, I had to make a way that the characters would inform the player that the task was completed without forcing them to speak to the merchants in a particular order.

The way I did this was to nest conditional branches. A conditional branch checks the information present in the game, and acts accordingly. For example, let’s say you want an NPC to say something to the players, but what he says is different based on whether they chose the sword or the bow at some previous juncture.

There are different ways to do that. Simplest would be if they had to choose one or the other and could not have chosen neither, merely make a conditional branch checking for one of the items (doesn’t matter which) and set conditions for if it is not present. That will get you this:

If SWORD is in inventory:
NPC says, “I see you are a warrior!”

Else:
NPC says, “You must be a fine shot.”

The else branch would be called into play if the sword was not chosen, and you as the writer know that if it was not chosen, the bow will have to be  in the inventory instead.

This is one of the easiest uses of conditional branches. But my problem with the merchants was a more complicated one. There are more items involved.

Luckily, each of the merchants provides one of the three items in question. So I make a nested conditional branch to check for the other two, so that the game can check if they have all been gathered. This means that after I make the first check, the first action made is to make another check. Thusly:

If CANDLE is in inventory:
If MUSHROOM is in inventory:
PC says, “We’re done with this quest!”

This basically means that the game checks for the candle, and then checks for the mushroom. If the candle isn’t there, it doesn’t bother looking for the mushroom and life goes on.

The thing to keep in mind with these nested conditional branches is that they are performed in order. So if you’re doing something more complicated, which I have, you might have to have multiple nests. This is mostly necessary for times when you have to have different combinations of checks, e.g., the first step is the most important and subject to complex change.

Now that I’ve babble on and on about this, I’m still not sure I’ve managed to explain it properly. But I hope it’s a little clearer to people who have never used conditional branches (and actually know something about RPG Maker).

First goal: Make it Work!

A couple of days ago, I started using HabitRPG to get myself back into the swing of some things, to stop some bad habits, and to reforge some good ones. It was going well, mostly.

But it’s clearly not ready for use.

There is a mobile version of the site (that barely works) but switching between it and the full version on my computer seems to cause problems. When I logged in this morning, I saw that it had failed to record something I had done yesterday. And then the site went down, which is has been for the rest of the day.

There are different categories of task that the site is meant to track. Habits, which are things you might complete more than once in a day, or not at all. There are some that may be things you are trying not to do anymore, and so you mark them as detrimental to your progress. Some things, you might progress or regress in.

Dailies are things you want to do only once a day. To-Do’s (humorously/idiotically labelled “Todos”) are singular tasks that may even have a due date. Rewards are what you spend your progress points on–instituted as gold and silver coins.

Of course, none of this means anything while the site is completely nonresponsive.

EDIT: Just checked it before publishing (or maybe as I clicked the button, ah well) and the site is currently up. Fast as a paranoid, I clicked all of the dailies I have managed to do in the downtime (which is all of them, geez) and pre-emptively clicked a couple habits that I will now fulfil.

Also, I can now actually put up a screenshot of my personal tasks.

May 20th Freewriting

Sparks juddered up and down the staff. After a few seconds, they stabilised–more or less–at the top. Jagged blue-white lines danced around the ornamentation there, as if impatiently waiting.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Quarista gripped the staff in both hands, trying to quell the shaking that spread to her shoulders. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ferrion, her fellow apprentice, seeking a bare bit of wall to press his back against.

His hair, usually a black mark covering his face like a large ink stain, was blown back in the wind of worked magic. “It wouldn’t have killed you to wait…” His face was more sallow than usual in the eerie light.

“It’ll kill both of us if I stop now,” she pointed out. Not sure of how gruesomely true that was.

The staff shot up from the ground, pulling her with it. Quarista suppressed a shriek as her feet left the floor. The circle of carved wood at the top jabbed the ceiling hard. Had it been a sharper design, the staff might have impaled itself through the wood.

Dust began to swirl around her, creating a girl-shaped cocoon. There were mere inches of comfort between the dust and her actual frame.

“I’m–” The rest of Ferrion’s panicked statement died under the roar of gritty wind. Quarista risked a glance downward and nearly let go of the staff to reach out to her friend.

He had run to the door, and had grasped the knob in both hands. She tried to kick out, to yell. To warn him somehow.

If he opened the contained space, everything she’d gathered into it would spill out–like the ocean pouring into a teacup.

With a mighty tug at the staff, she managed to pull it and herself back down from the more precise middle of the room. Ferrion twisted the knob.

She kicked out a leg at him. The cocoon of dust elongated to push him. He hit his nose against the door, then staggered away from it.

Guilt sent the lines of energy sliding back down the staff. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, though she wasn’t quite. “Just give it a second.”

The dust swept back towards her, bringing with it a few nastier bits of cottage debris. The energy lines shot back up to the staff’s apex, then straightened. The cocoon tightened about her, then began to pull the lights from the staff, until the swirl of dust and rat leavings had coalesced into a bright blue-white shell, flush with her figure.

Too flush, she thought. Discomfort wriggled through her growing sense of triumph. She’d have to revise the text to include a warning against wearing long skirts during the ceremony. They rode up.

She felt the light harden–a sensation that put her in mind of a scab rubbing against soft, healthy skin. Her eyes could not shut out the painful light, and she wondered if she ought to have closed them before.

Then cracks began to appear in her vision. Black lines that thickened and spread. Suddenly she heard Ferrion yelling abuse at her, and she realised that her hearing had been gone for several of the previous moments.

The staff was no longer in her grasp. The cracks grew audible, a thunderous sound that filled the cottage. Just as they became nearly unbearable, they stopped.

Quarista stumbled, falling to her knees. The staff was gone because it had become part of her. She had sent it away into her personal space, to be retrieved through the shortest of rituals. Gesture.

Rather than test it right away, she looked about for Ferrion. He was not cowering in a corner, but nor was he at her side with a helping hand or kind word. “A lady would appreciate a hand up,” she said, eyes narrowed.

He babbled something. However, he did managed to shuffle towards her and offer a hesitant arm. She took it gingerly. Flecks of light still scattered through her vision, disrupting her balance slightly.

“Did it go all right?” he asked her. To his credit, he kept hold of her even when she’d managed to regain her footing.

Her first instinct was to snap that of course it had all gone just fine. But then she reminded herself that Ferrion had read all of the same books she had. And that he was rather better at collating the information therein. “Do I not look all right?”

“Your eyes are funny.”

“I need to see them, please.”

Rather than leaving her to stand alone while he fetched a looking glass, Ferrion half-dragged her over to their teacher’s shaving things.

Quarista sat on the creaky stool and picked up the little shaving glass. “It’s too dark,” she said. “You can open a window now. Even the door, if you like.”

Shafts of light pooled in as Ferrion made the rounds, pulling open all of the windows. Quarista sneezed at the sudden sunlight, then blinked her vision clear.

He’d been right about her eyes. They did look funny. Flecks of brown pierced through them as though they were dirty, and blue lights flickered in and out of them. Little torches winking in and out.

“Oops,” she whispered to herself.