Total words written for Nanowrimo this year: 10115.

Well I suppose that is “a failure”. Shit got in the way, especially that little voice in the back of my head that made me buy an Xbox. But on the other hand, that roughly-10k words involved digging through all my old notes on the story, putting them together in one place, getting two chapters to usable first draft script stage, realizing what the real relationship between the main character and another one is, and writing a bunch of dialogue snippets involving yet another character who’d been hanging around saying “I belong in this story” without me quite knowing how they fit – now the Jet Grind Sigilizer has more specific things to do than run into Alecto in the non-existant subways of New Orleans.

And given that my main goal was “actually fucking poke at Drowning City”, I think I am pretty happy with what I achieved. I was hoping to write about 30k words and have a completed rough draft of the whole saga, but I kinda got hung up on thinking of Unpleasant Tests to run on Alecto when she’s in the hands of human scientists, and drifted away. The whole thing is a little more defined than it was in October, a little closer to being something I can actually start drawing; really, if I wanted to start drawing it and working things out along the way, it’s probably only a few days of poking at the outline away from being ready for that – but I want to experiment with having the whole damn script written first, and taking it through a second, even third, draft, because there’s a kind of inevitableness to the whole story that needs to be there, and that I think can only be there if I’ve got a lot of carefully-planned foreshadowing woven throughout it.

Currently it looks like it’ll be 12 chapters of about 14 pages each, for around 170 pages of comics. Plus a few more pages for chapter titles and whatnot. It also still wants to be in pre-internet “standard” comics sizes, so that’ll be a fair amount of stuff. It’ll probably end up getting a little longer as the script comes into focus when I pick it up again. (Which I just did, in a tiny way – I think I added about 400 words here and there while looking over it, contemplating what has changed in this story since the beginning of November. Maybe I’ll fiddle with it some more over the next few days now than I remember I have it.)

Hatquest was a success, and took less time than I’d feared it might! Hooray.

It needs some decorating with various ribbons and whatnot depending on my mood, of course. But this is a damn fine base hat that will quite adequately perform the duties of “keeping rain off my head” and “looking stylish”.

Meanwhile, Nick came over last night. We went out to see this absolutely insane French film called “Holy Motors”.

This trailer really just can’t even begin to capture the bizareness of this film; it concerns a man who is driven around Paris to a variety of “appointments”, where he dresses up in strange costumes and does inexplicable things. I really can’t tell you what it was trying to say, if it was trying to say anything, but I am really, really glad I saw it. It’s not really an experience I feel like I can talk about in words; the whole thing was immensely visual and filmic. You should go see it if you have a chance. I kinda want to do something influenced by it but I can’t even begin to know where to start.

(I am utterly spoilt by having TWO small artsy film theatres in walking distance of me, and on my regular routes so I see what’s coming up.)

Well. Today’s Rita reminded me to try calling Seattle Transit’s lost and found to see if my hat showed up. Sadly, it has not – the only hats they had listed in their database were knit hats and baseball caps. Hopefully it ended up in the hands of someone who could really use a Nice Hat in their life.

I guess I need to have a hat quest soon. Because what kind of Hat Lady am I without a hat? Maybe I’ll try a wider-brimmed one next time; it feels wrong to just have exactly the same kind of hat again.

I went to hang out with Jason last night. We talked about my clock idea some; he gave me some good ideas for how to make it simpler to actually build. Simple is good; simple means it’s more likely to happen.

We also visited the comic shop in his neighborhood; they bought two copies of Rita. So far my track record with comic shops is pretty good – out of the four shops I’ve visited, two have bought two copies outright, one has two on consignment, and one wasn’t interested. (And yeah, I’m still working on getting ready to ship the Kickstarter copies. Working through signing them, I really need to go out for some mailing supplies and make that happen.)

And then I got a chance to play Child of Eden. With the Kinect. Child of Eden, if you don’t know, is the sequel to Rez, which is definitely somewhere in my list of Best Videogames Ever. And it turns out that after a little initial awkwardness, gesture control is perfect for it – by the end of the first level, I was racking up 8-shot combos left and right on my very first runthrough; when playing with a controller, it takes QUITE a lot more practice and memorization to know what’s coming and what the best movement patterns for it are. Sadly I don’t think a Kinect is really going to work in my current setup; if I stand up, I’m standing right in the beam of the projector.

The one thing that’s kind of disappointing in CoE is that it feels a lot less musical than the original. Rez was very much about synching up with the rhythm of the music and knowing that stuff is going to appear and get targeted on the beat; CoE still coerces your actions to the beat a little but it’s not a driving force of the game like it was in Rez. And that feels like a real loss when you’re already standing up; I want to have an extra urge to DANCE while playing it.

(Also there are some problems inherent with gesture control – scratching your nose is a bad idea, for instance, as it sends your cursor flying around wildly.)

I just had my machine start warning about low disc space again. This is the tradeoff for SSDs – 256 gigabytes is not much nowadays. Upgrades are pretty pricey, though they’ve been dropping – when my 2010 Air was new, I think that 480g drive was around $1200.

So I fired up Disk Inventory X and started digging. Some stuff was to be expected – yeah, a fair amount of space dedicated to swapfiles, okay, a Steam game I’d forgotten to uninstall when I was done with it, okay. But there were some surprises, too. Quicksilver had a huge pile of of old clipboard caches, going back for I don’t know how long, that totaled something like 5-6 gigs; a few installation disc images left over from fooling with the Pi were eating up like 10g… some random clicking around on the bigger objects in the display and deleting things that didn’t need to be there got me back up to about 37 gigs free, from a low point of a half a gig. Definitely worth a few minutes of my time.

Here’s where I ended up afterwards. The big block of blue stuff, with a few grey and cyan bits here and there, is my music collection. The much smaller block with the yellow outline is everything I’ve drawn on my computer since 1999, when I ditched my old Amiga for my first hand-me-down Mac. Man I love how compact vector art is compared to bitmaps.

LED-based clock that uses edge-lit plastic for its display. The hours are stacked atop each other in the center; on a ring around it, there are wedges of plastic that fade on over the course of the hour.

Use tricolor LEDs (in smart packages such as the Shiftbrite so I don’t have to hassle with multiplexing) to light the hours and edges; each hour has an associated color.

Needs a minimum of 16 LEDs (12 hours plus 4-segment ring); I’d like to do it with 12 segments in the ring.

The code should be dead simple to write; all it needs to do is set up a timer and slowly change the color table, and push it out to the LEDs. Oh and I guess there needs to be a way to set the time. I guess it could have a few buttons on the front, and use the main number display? Hmm. Hour+, hour-, minute+, minute-. Keep it simple. And easy to change for @!#$% Daylight Savings. When setting the minutes, flash the ring segments white, and use the 1-5 on the main display to show the exact minute count.

Quick crappy sketch: