The Broken Hourglass: Writing! Fun! Code!

That was fun!

Yesterday and today were days that reminded me again just how much I love writing, just the sheer joy of getting the words down, the fun of feeling them shape themselves; it's flying for the fun of it.

Productive too--I got two good, long character segments written and fixed some smaller bits and pieces here and there in other dialogs. I even found a bit of looping dialog in game and (lowers voice) I fixed it myself. Yes, I, even I, ventured into the tangled jungle of already coded wording and made it work right, and I'm ridiculously pleased with myself as a result.

Today's work is not-quite-finished; it's a thorny, tangled shrub instead of a nice, tidy dialog tree, but, like all trees, it can and will be pruned. The important thing is it's there, and I like it!

I also picked a thousand and one little coding errors out of said tangled shrub. Such is life, and life, today, is very good.

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In other news, JCompton and I have actually managed to find another shared cultural reference! Multiple discussions of characters and concepts have floundered when one or the other of us has said "You know, kind of like X only different," and the other has said "Like what?" In the long run, it's probably Good for the Game as it means there is a much broader frame of reference, but in the short term it has made for much explaining and convolution, and that this, the second time, is worth a moment of silent contemplation.

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Wanders off happily to prune virtual dialog trees.

Dalek Home Video

So more than one person thought (correctly) that I'd enjoy this English home movie.

Fireworks

It was a lovely Fourth of July.

I got up in time to go see the parade, though I did miss the first few floats.

HB is enormously fond of its parade; people start staking out their places as soon as they are allowed, using tape, chalk, and signs to mark their boundaries. Some folk bring big trucks with bleachers. All in all, it is quite a festive event and worth going to just for the people watching.

I'm not, myself, quite patient enough to sit through the two hundred and some floats; instead, I walk down the line taking pictures as I go. A lot of other people have the same idea, so what with the crowds and stopping to take pictures, it takes a good couple of hours to reach the pier.

There's a street market there this weekend, a much more blatantly commercial market than the usual one. Our usual market is full of handmade items and farm-fresh fruits, giving it an air of authenticity and innocence. The Fourth of July market, on the other hand, is replete with plastic, chock full of chemicals, free samples, and ads.

Actually, the free samples were quite disappointing this year. Starbucks was good and had quite a line waiting for their little cups of mint mocha. Then there was the usual energy drink, the same one, I think, that shows up every year. And there were folk from Sobe handing out something called "Life Water." It has ginseng (so the label says), bright orange food coloring, lots of sugar, and no apparent flavor beyond "Flat, sweet, and vaguely chemical." It was cold and free and the day was hot, and I still couldn't finish it; judging by the number of partly full bottles I saw in the trash cants (and, alas, left on the street), I wasn't the only one with that opinion.

In any case, the real fun is people watching, and there are scads of people to watch--see the pictures in previous posts, for example.

I got home in time for a late lunch, wrestled for a while with the Mage Trio aka the Troublesome Trio and enjoyed a lovely barbeque with the family.

Then came time for the real event of the day; fireworks! My sisters and I walked down to the pier to join hundreds of others waiting for the city show. We thought it was crowded when we got there, but by the time the show actually started, we knew what crowded really meant. There wasn't a bit of space left.

Well, not by American standards, anyway. As the one who's been in Mexico pointed out, there was still some space between people.


HB puts on a spectacular show, so it's no wonder the crowds come. I filled up my card before the grand finale, but the pictures should give some idea.

It's the first time I've taken pictures during a firworks show, and I found watching on-screen and real time simultaneously fascinating; the little frozen pictures on the camera catch moments that I don't notice while the fireworks are in full blaze and burst.



After the half hour show finished, we joined the slow but steady shuffle off the beach and down the road, gloating over our good fortune in living within walking distance. Foot traffic might have been moving slowly, but cars were not moving at all--not for many, many blocks.

It was a good night for a walk, too.

Photography: Doing Things Backwards

Confession time: I'm doing all this photography stuff backward, kind of.

I spent several years happily running around with my camera, just taking pictures and picking up bits and pieces about composition here and there. It would be inaccurate to say that I am self taught, since with three painters in the family, there is inevitably some conversation about color, composition, light, and other pictorial elements.

However, I don't know a whole lot about the actual camera, at least, not yet. I've been using the "Auto" setting for 99% of my pictures. And, mostly, it's worked.

But lately... Lately I've been getting antsy. You know--auto is wonderful, but it's also really, really bossy.

Ever tried to take a picture of a dragonfly while the camera kept insisting that the twig it was sitting on was more important? Or wanting to get blur *on*purpose* rather than simply hoping that the motion will turn out right? Or taking a night-time photo while the camera says there is not enough light? Trust me, it's frustrating.

So, I am now finally taking a photography class, learning more about composition and learning how to take charge of my camera.

It's great fun!

It's also taking time and energy. That is one reason that I'm dialing back on my ArtID account for now--those of you who've been there will notice that instead of forty-some pictures, there are now only about six showing. That's probably not going to be permanent, but for the time being, I need to stop and think about shutter speed & Photoshop, and printing, and matte cutting, and a whole passel of other things, many of which I probably have not even thought of yet. ArtID has helped me see that I really *am* serious about this whole picture-taking thing, but right now, I need to concentrate on learning more about what it is I'm doing.

I'll be posting the odd picture here, though, and I'll try to rotate the display on ArtID with some degree of regularity (Ok, that's not much of a promise, really, more a fancy way of saying "I'll change the pictures sometimes").