simmering moonbeams and soaking seed

I've taken this week off while Tova goes to a birding festival up the coast. While the kiddos sleep, when I can steal a moment for myself, I've been fiddling with game dev. I've the starts to 2 games at the moment, well, sort of 2.5 maybe? One is the same game in two different implementations.

Game dev. has brought me to Lua.

When the moon hits your eyes

I'm a wee bit in love. In love with Lua and in love with game dev. writ-large. I've no aspirations to do anything other than build toys (really, for any aspect of my life ¯\_O_/¯), and for that it seems totally and completely perfect.

So far I've mostly confined myself to the command line. I've made forays into SDL and Love2D -- both are approachable; Love2D more so.

Before this my only real exposure to Lua was through PICO-8 where I also totally and completely loved it.

I've also been matching my progress in retroforth. Whenever I implement a new feature to the game in Lua, I try to also do it in retro. Thanks to the endless and generous IRC help of @crc and encouragement @netscape_navigator retro is starting to click. I've not yet had a big #AH HA!# moment, but, to be totally honesty, I rarely do. The only one I really remember having in my entire life was learning to juggle in middle school.

I continue to noodle on "the idea." Swimming in game dev., game studies critical theory, and similar sorts of things. Simmering. It is very fun.

I haven't played heaps of games lately, but I think I'll dive back into that sort of thing soon. Oh, that is a lie -- I played a solid 3 or 4 hours of Bad North over a few days.

On the reading front I finished and started Villette again (I have a problem), I also picked up Wuthering Heights, figuring, when in Rome? I watched the first season of Snowpiercer. It was interesting. Tova digs it a lot. I'm not certain I'll stick with it. A bit more intense than I can stomach.

I've also been reading (slowly) a bunch of computer science and programming books. I don't think I'm getting anything out of it, though -- I always read them for 30 to 45 minutes before bed, after having read some Villette or something of that sort for a bit. I think I need a more concentrated (e.g. upright) reading-mode for such things. Perhaps soaking in CS books isn't as effective as soaking in crit. theory stuff to lock it into the brain-vault-cupboard-filing-cabinet.

Last but not least in this missive! My gemini server has been choking lately -- devouring all my server's memory. Kicking it seems to have fixed the issue for now.