Where whims and dreams blend into reality...
Wow, it looks like I was wrong about being wrong about the Internet Archive generating mp3s!
If you jump through enough hoops, you can apparently tell it to "submit another derive task", which will generate mp3s from all your audio files. It's not super-convenient, but at least it's there.
Okay, with subsetting AND woff compression (and I think about one or two fonts taken out), the overall loading time went down to only 12.0 seconds, which is about a 48.4% reduction from what it was with the fonts completely uncompressed.
So now it just takes a while, which is far preferable to a long time, and vastly preferable to forever.
I'm not sure whether you'll find this noticeable or not, but today I compressed the CSS I was using to provide DejaVu fonts, using WOFF. The Stablehand pages were on average taking about 23.5 seconds to completely load before largely thanks to the size of that file, but now they only take about 18.8 seconds. So now they only load in forever minus 5 seconds, rather than taking forever.
I'm going to see if I can further reduce the filesize by manually subsetting the fonts.
Has it really been TWO MONTHS since I did the last summary post already? That's a long time.
Well, anyway, here are all the scrappier things that happened in that timeframe!
Fulvopards!
Fulvopards are pardeans, an odd group of "mid-sized" cats that I'm still figuring out. The main idea though is that they evolved from the close ancestors of either "big" cats or "small" cats (mostly small cats) but are a distinctly different kind of cat. (I guess by that definition the group might be polyphyletic? Eh, whatever. I'll fix it later. XD)
The fulvopard resembles a lion, but evolved from the ancestor of a more puma-like cat.
Three things.
- People in Grævonia are very divided on their opinions about hexarts. Those in Wespiegel generally have a strong animosity toward them, and a lot of businesses have "no hexart" signs. Those in Easboro pretty much love hexarts and a lot of businesses have signs that say "hexarts OK" or something similar.
- Skyland! It's a city in the sky. Made of walkways, platforms, pillars, glass, and downward-facing "groundscrapers".
- This morning I was in kind of a silly mood and was kind of thinking about Stolen Heart and Arkturuse's teams and how they might decorate their buildings. Then I thought of how occasionally you'll find a store or whatever that has a big happy face and a message that says "have a nice day!" or whatever, and got these hilarious images of Stolen Heart and Arkturuse doing their... own takes on that. Stolen Heart's I've already explained; the joke behind Arkturuse’s is that he’s blind.
This pretty much explains it, except that Skyland's official name is probably going to be Zefír instead.
Video of a working prototype of the Stablehand interface. Or something like that.
The other day I was thinking about some things I could do with the interface, and came up with this idea of some kind of a tree showing all the possible choices, which you could access after getting through a given chapter in order to see what all the alternate possibilities were.
I thought that due to Stolen Heart and his underlings' story (I can't say exactly why yet because spoilers XD), it might be interesting to have Kodėlgi or somebody at a monitor looking at the possibility map to kind of put things into context. As I was trying to illustrate at the top of the page, you'd click on some kind of jackal head icon to access it.
The second picture is a demo of how the tree would actually look in a browser (the paths and symbols are random, not actual spoilers or anything XD). In the HTML, the tree is actually just a list containing a number of other lists with images in them, and the lines are made entirely using :before and :after pseudo-elements. Also, because of the way I made it with inline-blocks, the tree neatly zooms in and out when the size of the attribute symbols changes. When it comes time to properly implement it in the story, I plan to put in a way to pan and zoom in/out with Javascript.
Over the next few days I'm going to be modelling Wyvera.
[...]
I'm sort of toying with the idea of Wyvera's species cameoing in Stablehand [...] (for which purpose I'm tentatively calling it the squamopard or squamaeopard) though I'm not sure that will happen.
The squamaeopard would not be in any way related to the "true" pardeans other than its appearance, of course. It would fundamentally be more of a reptile than a mammal.
And this, which I just posted today, is going to be my next hexart drawing!
And my first single drawing ever to use more than one page of paper. I guess that counts for something?
Just in case any of you happen to be getting confused by plain old everyday Mandarin Chinese...
Well, it looks like I was wrong about Internet Archive automatically generating mp3s.
But since tindeck allows me to upload oggs and my "mp3" player happens to be able to play them (and because I've gotten into this whole FLOSS thing a lot more recently) I'm probably not going to re-export them as mp3. Maybe this will convince a couple of people who somehow don't already have them to get ogg players? I don't know.
I was apparently also wrong about being able to broadcast Tyrian music on libre, but I'm going to keep uploading the rest of the tracks to the Internet Archive anyway just because it's nice to have them all in one place and with URLs that make sense for once.
(It's actually almost a relief because my now tindeck won't be entirely redundant. When there are Tyrian/Stablehand tracks that don't have associated album names yet, I can use the tindeck as the main download, and then when I have an album page on the Internet Archive I can use that as the main download instead.)
Anyway, I still have plans to broadcast my Stablehand music on libre.fm. Maybe, in time, I might switch the Tyrian music to the CC-BY-SA if enough people ask me permission to make libre remixes (like that's going to happen), but for now things will stay as they are.
On an unrelated note I find it hilarious that I'm using both TiMidity for synthesis and Audacity for post-production.
(Not to mention the fact I'm on a Unity desktop when I'm doing it. Both because nope, everything all jives, no contradictions or juxtapositions here, and that other thing.)
Over the next two days, I'm going to go back and re-export all the Tyrian and Stablehand midis with TiMidity into Ogg Vorbis, so they can be uploaded to the Internet Archive and subsequently to libre.fm.
The awesome thing about this is that they'll be in highly stable storage and presumably easier to find via a search engine, and the Internet Archive system will automatically generate mp3s from the oggs so I don't have to do that again. They will probably also sound better since I think some of the Tyrian ones had previously gone through an mp3 export twice or more, and the TiMidity sequencer doesn't seem to do the terrible clipping VLC and Windows Media Player did (not to mention essentially playing the entire thing off key, which a couple of years ago I put up with because I thought Windows Media Player was the one singing off key).
There are still a couple problems I have yet to work out, like the (awful) way TiMidity is rendering cymbals, which may be challenging, but overall I think this will be an improvement. You can listen to the first three songs I got re-exported again here.
Lyrics here.This one has kind of a weird story behind it, but here goes.
In Stablehand there are two wandering characters who go by the names Sleipnir and Hughes. Hughes is (or at least appears to be) a talking crow with a Southern accent who wears a straw hat and a vest. He tends to be quirkily optimistic and often says random, bizarre things. A fairly typical example of the Incongruity attribute.
Sleipnir, who Hughes often just refers to as "Sly", is a bit more complicated, but he might best be described as an obscure, elusive criminal. He has no idea who he is because he has no defined appearance or name—he can remember the codename Sleipnir having been applied to something at some point, but the first twenty or so years of his life are otherwise blank to him. He just kind of wanders around and does whatever jobs are available, whether legal or illegal, and every so often his appearance just sort of shifts into what appears to be an entirely different person. He's kind of solitary and introverted, and has a bad habit of appearing suspicious after a while even if he hasn't done a single thing worthy of suspicion recently, which forces him to move to new places often (a pretty typical example of the Duplicity attribute). Deep down, he really wishes that some day he could simply be a single, honest person with a defined identity who never had to take underground jobs or lie to people or assume new identities or anything.
In the song, Sleipnir is trying to sing a serious song about his solitude and his wish to go "clean", while Hughes is soiling the song with random silliness because he thinks it's kind of dumb; he doesn't understand why Sleipnir always ignores his attempts at companionship when he's right there, and as he knows it's pretty much impossible for him to change his ways, he thinks it's kind of ridiculous he'd even try.
Today I revised my hexart spectrum diagram to make better logical sense, and to jive with Achroma's story better.
I also eyedropped Red and Azzuro's actual colours onto it, and will probably do the same with the other hexarts when I get proper pictures of them done.
It's not every day I randomly decide to write a ten-minute-long narrative folk song (with a banjo and a honky-tonk piano no less), but a couple days ago I did.
It tells the story of Kolonok, an explorer who posits that there must be some reasonable, non-supernatural explanation for Destiny Attributes and rôle objects and decides to go to the dreaded far north to see if the explanation is hiding there.
'K, looks like I fixed it.
That was actually surprisingly easy.
I don't get furious about many things, but I am absolutely furious at the loss of the ability to make titleless posts.
That was a FEATURE, not a bug, goddamnit.
I guess I can hack it back into the template, maybe.
Looking at my Sangkara stats it seems like most people just kind of randomly stumble onto it looking for other things.
Some of them were totally random keyword searches such as "the skills", which better yet did not show a result for Sangkara when I clicked them up.
I don't understand D:
Okay, I've finally finished that page on Destiny Attributes. It's finally here.
There may still be a few things I could add to it, but for now, it's pretty much finished!
This is the original Red, in the most literal sense possible.
It's made out of cheese wax, specifically the kind that certain miniature Edam cheeses come packaged in. I decided to make it because I thought it was a shame to let what seemed like such a great sculpting material go to waste.
In actuality it was kind of a pain to sculpt (which was part of why the features came out fairly simple), but probably actually less of a pain to work with overall than clay. My initial plan was simply to make a generic "dragon" with feathers, but when it came out looking more griffin-like by the end, instead of trying to "fix" it, I started to wonder why. And that is actually the entire reason why I devised the hexarts.
So, as you can see, even though I hyped the Cleverbad and its nonsense quotes a lot, Stablehand is really more just about exploring random and unusual concepts and using any idea that happens to wander into my head. The Cleverbad is definitely a big help, though...
Well, here's what I've been up to for the past two or three days.
Early in the Stablehand project, I thought that each character would have exactly one or exactly two Destiny Attributes, and a change in attribute would be surprising and dramatic.
Now I envision each of the characters having at least a small amount of every attribute, but more "points" in some and less in others, and changes in "main attribute" consisting of a number of subtle shifts that gradually lead up to those more dramatic transformations.
And that is why I started making attribute graphs and writing javascripts to automatically draw octagons on them given statistics.
Totality would be represented by having a balanced polygon on a Directed graph, and Nothing would be represented by having a balanced polygon on an Undirected graph.