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good old games
2023-12-28 02:24 pmI have determined that an hour or so of self-indulgence in mid-afternoon goes a long way toward keeping me happy, calm, and unscreaming. Mostly I've been playing some old computer games. So far I've gone through Myst (courtesy of ScummVM reading my old CD-ROM!), Monkey Island 1, a smattering of interactive fiction, and some Baba Is You (which gets very hard much faster than I was expecting; how brainbending is the back half of this game if I'm flummoxed already?! But I make slow progress and feel quite pleased with myself when I do). ScummVM even supports and detected The Making of Myst feature on my disc, which I hadn't expected. Still need to get back to that one day but it will have to keep until after Christmas break is over and everybody gets back onto a regular schedule again.
Something else that will have to keep is Get Lamp, a landmark documentary about interactive fiction. I don't monopolize the TV when my family is home, but I got far enough into it to learn some things about IF and how I feel about it. IF sometimes was (is?) held up as a story you can participate in, which is catnip to a books-and-games nerd like me, but the reality is somewhat different. IF has story but the gameplay is not the story itself; the gameplay is puzzles, mazes, mapping, playing Guess The Verb. And those are things that I dislike, am notoriously bad at, or both. This was useful to discover, because I had felt stupid for being bad at stories, but it's not the text that stymied me.
(I think I am overusing commas again. Gotta watch that or I spin up strings of text so long and tangled that even I who write them cannot parse them out.)
I keep not checking Dreamwidth in timely fashion. I may have gotten a setup that works for me, if I remember to use it. (I used to have an icon on my phone that would open Dw in my browser, but frequently my browser would have a bunch of tabs already open and it would get overwhelming and I'd mass close them or forget about it for days. Now I have more browsers installed on my phone, so I have one that is pretty much just for running Dw, and I have a Dw icon that opens into that. As it happens, this means the Dw icon that is displayed is less jaggy than before as well, which is not terribly important but does help in some small way.)
I wish Dw had a night mode site skin that was small screen and touchscreen friendly, but I suspect this is one of those things where you ask support or a dev about making that happen and they say "Sounds like a great project! When do you want to start?" Which makes some sense, but I have little free time and the focus of a hypercaffeinated, phobic squirrel.
And on that note, I suppose the laundry isn't going to fold itself. Have a great day, folks!
Something else that will have to keep is Get Lamp, a landmark documentary about interactive fiction. I don't monopolize the TV when my family is home, but I got far enough into it to learn some things about IF and how I feel about it. IF sometimes was (is?) held up as a story you can participate in, which is catnip to a books-and-games nerd like me, but the reality is somewhat different. IF has story but the gameplay is not the story itself; the gameplay is puzzles, mazes, mapping, playing Guess The Verb. And those are things that I dislike, am notoriously bad at, or both. This was useful to discover, because I had felt stupid for being bad at stories, but it's not the text that stymied me.
(I think I am overusing commas again. Gotta watch that or I spin up strings of text so long and tangled that even I who write them cannot parse them out.)
I keep not checking Dreamwidth in timely fashion. I may have gotten a setup that works for me, if I remember to use it. (I used to have an icon on my phone that would open Dw in my browser, but frequently my browser would have a bunch of tabs already open and it would get overwhelming and I'd mass close them or forget about it for days. Now I have more browsers installed on my phone, so I have one that is pretty much just for running Dw, and I have a Dw icon that opens into that. As it happens, this means the Dw icon that is displayed is less jaggy than before as well, which is not terribly important but does help in some small way.)
I wish Dw had a night mode site skin that was small screen and touchscreen friendly, but I suspect this is one of those things where you ask support or a dev about making that happen and they say "Sounds like a great project! When do you want to start?" Which makes some sense, but I have little free time and the focus of a hypercaffeinated, phobic squirrel.
And on that note, I suppose the laundry isn't going to fold itself. Have a great day, folks!
