Notes by Austin Pocus

In a Strange Land

Oh, the wicked carried us away in captivity, Required from us a song, How can we sing King Alpha's song Inna strange land?

-- "Rivers of Babylon", as performed by Sublime

On a strange kick today...dazed, is probably the word. Not quite confused. But dazed.

Planning on writing some interactive fiction tonight, if the mood strikes, or IF as I've taken to calling it. The tricky part so far is deciding on a story.

Don't get me wrong, I have like 15-20 story ideas written down. The hard part is scoping them down to something that's actually approachable.

And therein lies the problem I have on every project ever: not scoping things down to a manageable level.

But I digress. The best thing to do is probably to pick the most appealing story concept, and just...start writing. Hack it out, so to speak.

I should also pick a story that, ideally, requires no inventory management or anything of that sort. It should just be a simple "choose your own adventure" kind of story.

The hardest part, now that I think about it, is finding the inspiration to write fiction at all. I can ramble all day about this sort of stuff, whatever's going on in my life, etc. But to write fiction? That takes a mood.

We'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll tackle the next Advent of Code 2020 challenge tonight...I'm several days behind already, so it would be worth a shot. Plus, I've been picking up C++ pretty quickly! Which is fun. I mean, fun in the sense that I'm learning a new language -- C++ itself is really not what I'd call an especially "fun" language, but it's not to the point where it's painful to use, like Java was.

Ugh, Java...the bad old days. Maybe it's gotten better, since I used it 8-ish years ago, but jeez what a horrible language that was. If I've stoked your appetite for anti-Java rants, there's always the excellent "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" by Steve Yegge. Man, I miss Wyvern...

It's funny, going out of Javascript-land and learning languages like Rust and C++. It's a completely different mindset in those languages, and you can tell pretty quickly by looking at the communities around them (Rust beats C++, in that regard and several others, but that's another post).

Enough, I ramble.