I can not read the fiery letters

Time to mess around with engraving wood on the new laser. I wanted cedar or something but I had some thin walnut around so used that.

That is just one of the all singing, all-dancing coffee machines we have at work. Three kinds of beans, three powders (the hot chocolate is good), twenty recipes. And hot water.

I'm on the psycho-drug now and no side effects yet. Cross all sixteen fingers...

Well, was sick enough yesterday I called in and spent the day home from the factory...working on another factory. Couldn't concentrate well enough to straighten out the current scene in the book. Took a couple more test videos. May put something up soon. 

Underground

Struggling with what turned out to be a key scene in Part III of Sometimes a Fox. Could be another six months before it is finally edited and ready to publish. At least the cover art looks like it is finally working, or well enough. I've started revisiting my links on the UX community in Paris, cataphiles et al, while I work up plans for what exactly I want to have in there (besides the Petite Ceinture and 145 Rue Lafayette, one of the more famous "fake buildings" in Paris).

"Cleaning up" my current Satisfactory build is going slowly. Spent my last session starting a dedicated Smart Plating park (mine head, smelters, fab shop and truck station in separate buildings) to complete one more of the last Space Elevator deliverables. But mucked about the previous session because I couldn't figure out a clean way to hook the dedicated Circuit Board factory to the local Hyperloop station.

That seemed like a good excuse to experiment with taking it underground. Got killed a few times getting the trick working properly; you can clip through the terrain with a carefully placed hypertube, but you will promptly fall to your death below the world if you haven't prepared properly. A bit of excitement being marooned under the map, with a tiny bioconverter chugging away powering my only link back to the surface. Try not to delete the hypertube entrance!

Some people build all kinds of stuff under the map. I just made a cyberpunk-feel walkway, tube and conveyor belt, completely sealed off to preserve the illusion. I'm late enough in the game that even if all I need is a belt or a tube I can afford to build a whole decorated passageway -- even blueprint it up with railings and lights and signs and architectural details.

And my latest asthma medication did exactly what the last one did; made me sicker. I'm suffering it out without medication right now to see if I can tolerate it at all. Oddly enough, as unpleasant as mornings and evenings are, I'm sleeping well now...

That may change when I try the psycho-pills. I think I may try those out tomorrow.

The map, please

Tempted again to incorporate a map into my book covers. That or somewhere in the index or something. Geography ended up an important part of the story in so many of this series. In the London book, the relationship of the under-construction Northern Extension with the Kennington Loop, Kennington Park, Nine Elms, and the Battersea Power Station is important to the plot.

In the Kyoto book, it is a minor plot element but the physical layout of the Transcendence complex has much to do with the theme as well. In the Athens book, her epic flight back from just south of Frankfurt could also benefit from a map. And in the Paris book, several of Huxley's clues are based on the physical relationship of various elements of the Parisian landscape; following the "ribbon of steel" from Sacre-Coeur to the champs-elysees, or taking one particular avenue from the arc de triomphe to Hotel Biron.

But it seems a bit much to clutter the index and appendix with a map, way too much to have one in the frontispiece like this was a '90s epic fantasy book, and wasted effort to do the back cover as my intent was always to prioritize the ebook side.

Grappling with Cheese

I should stop using health as an excuse. Basically I feel so incompetent about writing it is hard to bend down back over that grindstone.

I realized while doing clean-up on the big parkour training scene at La Defense that I needed a lot more five-senses stuff. I'd been intending to go back with a "symphony of cheese" pass and add more detail about the foods, but this bit of a physical activity reminds me of the places where the Kyoto book really worked. And that was the very five-senses experiences of running and exercise.

And this should help decompress some as well. Part III has been dropping too many story beats without enough breathing space around them. Adding some "you are there" sensuality should give me some space to reflect on each beat, time for the reader to digest, before I move on.

I went through one scene and it was easy enough. I've still not learned how to write faster, but I have learned how to re-write much more easily. (And faster.)

A week of COVID. Two insane weeks of work without any recovery time, right up to the last working day of the year and delivering the big project just two days before. A week off for the holidays but I was so wrecked (and had a massive asthma attack Christmas Eve) I took another week sick, then only made it in for a day or two the week after that as well.

HR hates me now.

One thing that dragged me back to the shop was finally throwing together a prop for the new cover art. While I was recovering from sick/COVID/exhaustion I opened up PhotoShop, did the repaint for the figure on the fourth cover and sent that off to my cover artist. And came up with a new overall cover concept I'm at the moment pretty happy with. But I wanted a prop for the cover and I thought it would be more fun to build then to try to source in royalty-free images (or trust AI. Shudder.)

There was a tiny bit of project creep. I really should be using my laser for something, so I finally spent a little time in Fusion360 and Lightburn and, yeah, that new 20W head burns through 3/32 basswood like a laser through softwood.

I also tried to shave time by using glue and paint and plasti-dip as surface preparation rather than the usual round of Bondo spot putty and sandpaper. It didn't work; neither to save time, nor to get good surfaces. But since the final prop will be a few hundred pixels on the actual artwork, it hardly matters.

The bracket for the spool is laser-cut wood. Laser-cut EVA foam for the strap (which I had to dial down to 40% power!) Gears off Thingiverse (there's a very nice DXF/EPS gears creator online, but downloads of the models are on a subscription basis.) I did get fancy and the grapple is steel rod, bent with MAPP gas and brazed with my little micro-torch (MAPP/oxygen head). 

Some of the parts were found objects so I wasn't really able to come up with a design first and model it properly in CAD and break out the right parts from that. Instead I just had to push ahead building stuff I knew wasn't quite right and hoping it would work when I glued it all up. So; project management mistakes as well as surface prep mistakes. That's why we do these things; to learn how to do better.

(There's another thing that's always been part of my design work. I especially noticed it in sound design. And that is trying to find those quintessential cues or clues that the audience will be able to read and thus grasp what it is the design is trying to say. I think the grapple and reel shapes are defined enough here, with telling details like the ring with the knot tied to it, to communicate the "throws a grappling line out and then reels it in." In actual design, some kind of sling or harness is absolutely essential because you don't lift your body weight on a pistol grip. But for visual purposes that isn't on this prop.)

My Cabbages!

Finished the main campaign of Hogwarts Legacy. It didn't quite deliver. There seems to be a thing, though, with main campaigns being considered the weakest part of a game (Fallout 4, take a bow). I'm not sure this is true. It is true that side quests can take more risks as they can afford to have the player disengage and not follow through. The main campaign has to be a bit blah because it has to appeal to everyone.

(There also seems to be a thing, for the last decade's AAA games at least, for the last part of the Main Campaign to feel rushed, like the developers ran out of time and money when it came to finishing the game properly. But that might be that, according to Steam data, less than a quarter of all players finish the main campaign in any game.)

In the case of Hogwarts Legacy, the whole Ancient Magic thing was a bit meh. It was okay for a Macguffin, and Isadore's story was interesting, but giving it to the player character was a little too Chosen One for my taste. That, and the combat and magic systems were robust and complex enough; adding Ancient Magic to the mix was a complexity (and power) that wasn't really needed.

(There's a basic problem with the shooter paradigm. In a movie or book you can have a realistic -- that is, small -- number of opponents. To give time for the player to fully experience the game, they have to engage with multiple enemies. Multiple enemies begs the question of how the player character is surviving. This pushes towards power-ups; the player character becomes The Batman or the Doom Marine, gets powered armor...or Ancient Magic.)

This also really isn't a game about meaningful choices, for the most part. You get almost the same ending regardless of what dialogue options you choose. So in M.I.C.E. parlance, this is primarily a Milieu story. You can customize your appearance and pick your house, but that's internal role-play that has almost no functional effect on the game itself. The story is also equally split between the Big Event and the character going through a fairly ordinary Hogwarts school year; so again the I, C, and E aren't really what you came for.

So anyhow.

I'd gotten a fair way in with Richard Turpin, my Slytherin. Hadn't intended to pick Slytherin but the game has no pause feature for the long cutscenes and I'd been Sorted before I got back from the bathroom. Well, to be as accessible as possible, your House doesn't really force anything on you. Slytherins in this game are basically the way I'd intended to play Dick in the first place; willing to do what was necessary to save the Wizarding World from the Ancient Magic, but smart about it; study is good because knowledge is power. Being friendly gets you help from people, and in any case it almost never hurts you to be kind. And of course he lies like a rug because why would you give away information if you didn't have to?

But then I realized just how powerful you could get with Herbology. So I saved that game and started "Henny" the Hufflepuff. Who was shy, helpful, self-effacing, and really into magical plants and creatures.

It worked out wonderfully. First on the practical; yeah, it is tough to really gather enough mandrakes, venomous tentaculars and chinese chomping cabbages until several hours into the game, where you get the Room of Requirement and your own potting tables. There's a few tricks, like an early errand for Professor Garlick (everyone's favorite witch), or stealing that one from the shop, but also, what really pushes the things up to unstoppable are Traits (which don't unlock until somewhere around the first Ancient Magic Trial), and the ability to weave charms into your own clothes.

Which doesn't get unlocked until you start keeping your own menagerie and more on that later.

With the vegetative stats I got up to, my cabbages could take out a troll in six chomps or less. The Rookwood boss fight was a a little annoying until I finally figured out Ashwinders (dark wizards) were going to infinitely apparate in until I knocked Rookwood's HP down. I was operating on the theory of clear the space of minor combatants first.

Was doing pretty well, but eventually slipped. Back from the last save, I prioritized him and it was over in two minutes.

Mostly because his second appearance, with even more Dark Wizards of even higher levels supporting him for what was going to be a properly epic fight, he zigged when he should have zagged and apparated right on top of four of my cabbages. The battle was over before he'd had a chance to make his opening speech. I had the same thing in the final dragon fight. Was getting my ass kicked -- I had not brought along nearly enough healing potion and there were too many mandatory/unavoidable damage cases -- until he finally LANDED.

Cue the cabbages.

The biggest problem I had with them is that once I cleared a room full of spiders by rolling a few down the ramp that is supposed to dump you into the middle of the combat arena. Something bugged out in the game and it kept insisting I had to defeat the enemies before moving on to the dialogue. Had to restart from a save point. Take out most of the spiders from safely outside the arena, then drop down to do the last few personally so the game would accept that I'd won the battle.

But combat aside; this was totally the Hogwarts experience I wanted. The Hufflepuff dorm was lovely, and I went straight for the various Beasts quests. Poppy Sweeting is even more fun than Natsai Onai, and I found her side quest more entertaining. The most graceful lovely bit of a game that really goes out of its way to give you those lovely bits (and the Hufflepuff common room is darling) is the vivariums you get. Magical pocket dimensions where your creatures can frolic safe from poachers and everything else. So really this plays very well as a Magical Creatures game, where you pay a lot more attention to petting nifflers and hanging out in a potting shed than you do to whatever the goblins are getting up to.

(I basically ignored the Sebastian side quests. Henny felt sorry for him and his sister, but he -- like the Weasley kid -- came on too strong with the charm and the bad-boy vibe and she found it off-putting.)

And my little Hufflepuff ended up with a character arc. She didn't want combat and she didn't trust or like Ancient Magic, but she was loyal and helpful and that put her in situations where she had to shoot fireballs at people (or chomp them with cabbages). And she discovered she was surprisingly good at it, and (due to the Gear system of the game) even started dressing the part as an Adventurer.

After finally stopping Rangok and sealing up the Ancient Magic, she consciously got back into quiet, un self-assuming student robes, hung out with friends in the Hufflepuff common room, and basically tried to get back to the Hogwarts year she'd been expecting and wanting. Not fighting goblins in underground caverns, but learning herbs.

So on last analysis, the game was worth the money, and there's some replay potential. There's a base-building mechanic (because of course there is) but the functionality is too limited without a lot of questing after random side errands. So, technically, you can spend time dressing up your Room of requirement and the attached vivariums, or picking your outfit (there is an entire system for wand handles. Which have no effect in play and are basically invisible for most of the game).

For role playing, you can play a little more towards the unhelpful and mercenary side but the former just closes you off from potentially lucrative side quests, and the latter makes no functional difference in how people treat you.

(Example; if you are sent to retrieve a diary, come back and chose the lower dialogue option of "I'm gonna keep it unless you fork up more cash" the quest-giver will just say, "But of course! You've earned it!" and be the same thankful person. You can throw classmates across the room, brazenly break into locked chests and steal everything -- RPG standard there -- and even use the Unforgivable Curses without the slightest change in how anyone looks at you.)

There are a couple of different options at the ends of quests you can explore, and there is specific material for each House in just one spot; how you find the Map Room. For a Hufflepuff, that mission takes you to...Azkaban!

And as my cabbage play-through showed, you can concentrate your combat skills in one area or another. Since you can't progress through the main quest without learning everything (with the exception of the Unforgivable Curses, which are a Sebastian Sallow side quest or three) this boils down to what you actually do in combat -- and in what Traits you weave into your clothing. Which are also random drops, but since this part of the crafting system is mostly optional, you don't have to follow it.

(The Cabbage-Wielder build; at least two items with Herbology or Fangs trait, plus Medium potting tables and fertilizer. Spend the rest on Protego and Ederus potion to keep yourself alive while the cabbages get to work. And the double-cabbages Talent is in the Room of Requirement pool -- level 16, if I'm not mistaken, and given how long it is before you get the loom, you are basically at level 16 and through at least the first Ancient Magic Trial before you can really go to town with this build).

I will duck in long enough to watch the final cut scenes, and maybe take my graphorn out for a run, but I'm pretty much satisfied with my buck. I don't care to listen through un-skippable dialogue a third time and it is probably back to Satisfactory for me.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Store Them

 It was a tossup between Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy and as much as I admired the character work and story and immersion of the former, it wasn't a world I particularly wanted to hang out in.

Hogwarts, on the other hand. This is a media property, but Warner really put some love into the IP. I think it went beyond just trying to keep the customer happy -- they are sure to know and respect that a whole bunch of people want to hang out in Harry Potter land, even if Warner would just as soon they pay at the gate for the live Wizarding World experience. And there is just a little bit in the game of making sure that they are playing nice with the movie-watching, wand-buying, full tour to Burbank crowd.

But past that, this is a game that works.

Which is funny. Really, this is generations in on game design. There are quite elaborate chains of mechanics; you collect robes and other clothing items that are functionally armor, increasing your combat stats, and you can trade those in for money when you upgrade. Which means you run out of inventory slots. So there are the Merlin Challenges to increase the inventory slots. Which in turn require new Spells to complete, and those spells are taught for a price that may include things like raising (totally unrelated) botanicals...

Which means functionally there's a lot of the same grind as in Starfield. The difference, the weird difference, is that this time it is fun.

The stuff is fun to do, that's a big one. More fun than anything in Starfield (the space combat is okay, but the basic combat is a boring slog through endless bullet-sponge AI without enough intelligence to use a pencil). But more than that, it looks great, and the sound and music are great, and there's lore that's interesting. So you don't feel like you are sitting there spamming the "fire bullets" button.

Fights by the middle game of Hogwarts are complicated and fast-moving, with ever-changing and quickly evolving situations. A very good rock-paper-scissor mix, even if there are a few killer aps.

Chinese Chomping Cabbages. Besides being absurdly strong if you spend all your available upgrades on improving them -- plus dedicate all of your greenhouse to raising the things -- there are situations where you can manipulate the enemy AI. If they see you, they converge in full combat mode. If they are getting nibbled to death by vegetables they flail about, sometimes getting killed without even getting a shot in.

That is, if you stand just out of range and roll a few cabbages that way.

The game puts a lot of emphasis on raising "beasts." I think. There's links between main story progression and side stories, and I'm not sure -- even aside from gear upgrades -- you can get through the main story without progressing some of the "beasts" storylines. Which are sort of two not always related ones; fighting poachers with Poppy Sweeting and Natsai Onai (the latter, like Sebastian Sallow, appears to have mandatory main-campaign missions). And raising your own.

See, you can do it ethically -- because you aren't trying to support a family, you just need a few feathers and hairs to weave into your own school clothes for the mojo they give, so waiting until the frolicking creature drops a few naturally is enough for you.

And you have up to three magical vivariums, pocket dimensions in which your pets can frolick without predators or other threats. Which are the loveliest level designs in the game, and that is saying a lot. This game really, really spends those pixels well.

It is what I am doing now while I wait for paint to dry on my new prop and my brain cells to recover after fighting my way through another scene in the never-ending Paris novel.

The Quick Brown Fox

It was more than interesting. I came out of COVID to hit 12 hour days straight through the weekend. I made the truck just barely in time, and when HR fell short (again!) I ended up making my flight and hotel reservations at the very last minute and out of my own pocket, too.

Not exactly a proper recovery period.

Got to LA and got the install finished that I've been sweating about since, oh, February. All my gambles and improvisations seem to have paid off, and the client was happy. And I collapsed. Barely dragged in to the last work day of the year to turn in my receipts.

I had to take an extra week off work to recover. I might even want another one; as I've finally started feeling human again I've dug into long put-off projects. Talked to my long-suffering cover artist and made up a new scheme I really like. Working my way through all the covers to see if that idea works, then on to do the repaint to make the stock image model look properly on-model to my cover girl.

(Who isn't exactly Penny, any more than the incidents or settings are literal. I'm smarter than that. Covers are to sell an idea, not to be a document of what is inside.)

Which means I've been coming to grips with the latest iteration of PhotoShop, which has made some large changes to the workspace and has also added some crazy new tools. I find it annoying how much they are overselling their new Generative Fill, for instance -- rather like those annoying Grammerly ads -- but, sheesh, the Firefly AI is insane!

Thing that it misses, though, is what I can do in my Stable Diffusion workflow (which I only do for personal use...so far. There's some gray areas, well, more like turgid smelly gray-green areas, in the use of AI tools within the workflow of producing commercial art.) What I can do in Stable Diffusion is drop a few blobs of paint -- seriously, the most low-rent comes-with-Windows pixel-pusher program -- and tell Stable Diffusion what it is supposed to be seeing.

It is an interesting insight into the mind of the machine as you try to predict how it is going to read the blobs. There's that balance between having the artistic eye to know how things actually look, especially in the gross scale; not like a child's drawing of a bicycle that has cranks and handlebars and spokes but they are sort of all over the place in different places and scales. More like a Picasso bull, where the essence of the animal, attitude and all, is captured in a couple of triangle.

And against knowing what the training material contains (remembering things like celebrities and fashion are going to be over-represented in the training data), and the psychology of the people who did the training and what words they chose for the prompts.

In any case, PhotoShop and Firefly haven't yet given that aspect; where you can tell it to look at the underlying material, select how much to keep what is there and how much to pay attention to the prompts instead. Plus the variety of Control Nets, which provide another layer of dial-in selectivity as to detecting poses or contours or whatever. PhotoShop is drifting too much in the Apple Computer mode, which sadly with the increasing power (and the almost inevitable lack of transparency that comes with tools that are too esoteric in their mathematics but rather more importantly, grown via genetic algorithms and similar) is presented in a black-box manner where what it will do is what the designers presume most people want it to do. Which is right enough of the time to make the software spectacular, but when you happen to want something that lies outside those limits...

So anyhow. I stopped off to make this post as I was finally visiting Adobe's font library, which comes with the whole Creative Commons pay-every-month license that is the only way to have PhotoShop these days.

***

Oh, yeah. And while I was very sick, I couldn't even think straight enough to follow the plot of a movie. But I could hang out in the Zen-like experience of Satisfactory. My current world is starting to look half-way nice and I may make a quick tour video some day.

One more thing on the list of "god, I need a couple months off work to handle all this!"

Well, that and not being so sick I can't even sleep...