Relatives come, and relatives go, and it’s been a busy season. We’re still reviewing the Cepheus rules, but that’s been on hiatus mostly as a result of being on hiatus period.
What’s Been Going On
This can be summed up as it’s summer, we’ve had rotations of family visiting, as well as friends over for dinners and vice versa. In addition to that, we’ve seen the start - and successful completion, of the kickstarter for Ursula of Ulm, the sequel to Shagduk from Pilum Press. To the extent I’ve kept up with online stuff, it’s mostly just to see what the “weather” and tone is like, though the insanity of the Karen Read trial in MA has distracted me as well.
Finally, on the work front, we’ve been doing a fair bit of scripting for computer management on both the Windows and Mac side of things, dealing with various headaches related to powershell, bash scripting, and white space issues due to <li> elements in an unordered list being in-line.
And fishing.
On the work front, despite literal decades of experience in the IT industry, having written entire web cms systems, and a fair bit of experience in python, php, objective-c, javascript, and other languages, nearly all of my experience in Powershell and bash/zsh was using them for interactive single-line commands, not in scripting. In the last month or so this has significantly changed.
So far, I’m very impressed with Powershell. With the hooks it has into the underlying system, the various libraries it has for handling things, the naming conventions, and most importantly it’s overall structure, I’ve found it very easy to use. The documentation is outstanding. My time in python/etc. means that the object-oriented approach of Powershell, of iterating through arrays and lists, and of constructing or picking out data just make sense. Wrapping my head around the more string-based bash is proving to be somewhat more difficult in large part because there isn’t a lot of cohesive documentation. There are a lot of commands - small unix/posix programs like awk, sed, and so on - that can be strung together, and a lot of ways to filter output, but they are often not as cleanly delineated as simply choosing a parameter of the output in Powershell.
The Plan Going Forward
One of the other reasons I’ve not posted much is from coming to terms with the prevalence of machine generated imagery, and beyond fair use, how to go on not using it while also not ripping off artists and illustrators.
I’ll still be reviewing Cepheus, and intend to do walkthroughs/playthroughs of other games like Heavy Gear blitz, and whatever else strikes my fancy related to or from the library of games I have or play. Beyond that, I’m still avoiding present-day “politics” but any movies or books of note I watch or read, or philosophical points that seize my attention will still find outlet here, so not much has changed since the last time I took stock.
Meet Our Friends
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Please also join the Pilum Press Discord and/or the Autarch Discord. Pilum is the publisher of several books and short story collections including Shagduk and Thune’s Vision. Autarch is the home of the Adventurer Conquerer King RPG.