Back at the beginning of the year I mentioned how I had a good experience with NYC Midnight's microfiction challenge, and so I decided to enter their short story competition as well. I got an honorable mention this time!
I've actually been sitting on this for about two weeks or more. They updated their rules, and they request that entrants refrain from publishing their stories online until at least ten days after the results have been disseminated. Thankfully I was able to tell my Dad about it, even if he didn't get to read the story, but his passing last week has definitely delayed me getting this put up online.
I'm doing this slightly different than I did with Palpable Gravity. The revised short story based on the feedback that I received from the judges will be first, then you can read the feedback I received, after that will be the the original version of the story, finally I'll end this with the lessons that I've learned.
Some people have things in their life that they regret. Sometimes I feel like some of us are more full of regrets than others. My dad was never one to regret anything. A very storied past. I still know all the stories too, and anyone who ever met him would never deny the legend of Jim Kane. “Jimmy Lee!” or “Seamus!” if my Mom was slightly perturbed, or very angry with him, respectively.
There were times I tried to poke and prod him—maybe in the last 5 or 6 years—about telling me all his stories again. Part of the reason being that I wanted to see if he still remembered them, and if they were the same as I remembered. More often than not though, I feel like he would just respond, “you already know all my stories, what am I going to tell you then?”
This is not exactly a recipe from Chinatown, as much as it is a recipe inspired by Chinatown. It's just another variation on the stir fry method. The Mrs. and I went and ate at Xiao Long Dumplings fairly recently (last week if I remember correctly). She also picked me up some Shaoxing Wine and Dark Soy Sauce from the International Marketplace.
So, this is the result of left-over ingredients, a vague idea of what I was going to make for dinner, trying to recapture and/or conjure the flavors from our dim sum experience.
Spicy beef in a rich, dark sauce with some veggies seemed like the right vessel to carry those flavors. I should've thrown some edamame in there, and if I were to make it again, I'd want some mushrooms in it.
The proceeding is an edited version of what I emailed to the Nevada Department of Public Safety and Transportation... Specifically the Nevada Advisory Committee on Traffic Safety, as they are the group that is drafting new legislation to have red light cameras with license plate recognition systems installed at intersections. It was the article from 8 News Now that caught my attention. There's no indication of which intersections are going to be affected, or how many will be installed, or how much this is going to cost the state/county/city, but I'm sure that information will be public soon enough.
I also know there have been attempts in the past to get speed cameras installed, and those have all been unsuccessful. It's something that California and other—less freedom loving—states have implemented in an attempt to dissuade motorists from committing minor traffic infractions under the guise of safety. Let's be real though, this is just the authoritarian state overreaching again.
There were a couple of embarrassing typos, but I wrote it fairly quickly on my break at work, and wanted to make sure that I actually sent it rather than simply throwing it into one of my my many drafts folders to sit and go stale. So here we are, and these are some random thoughts regarding traffic cameras. The major typos were corrected, but the structure was preserved for posterity.
Not too long ago, my friends and I sat down and were toying with the idea of making a shared universe with the potential end goal of creating a game. I've been drawn to the idea of doing an interactive fiction RPG hybrid for a while... Something that is kind of crunchy, but a system that lets you do a multitude of things as a player. Text is the easiest way for that to happen, the most powerful graphics processor is going to be your mind and imagination. MUDs and MOOs are sort of the cornerstone of what that can look like in practice, but that requires the player to understand a specific set of syntax to play the game. While not too difficult to learn, it is a barrier to entry.
I began by playing around with Godot and the Ink scripting language. My thought was that it would be easier to start from scratch with Godot and effectively build a framework/UI for Ink and then maybe a separate combat system that shares some state with the Ink-based story scripting... BUT, I've also been playing around with how to run and train LLMs locally. I even bought an M2 Macbook just so that I could run a local AI setup. So far I've been successful in getting Llama 3.2 configured to act as a DM/GM within the 3.5e rules. Last night we tested it out.
The nice thing about LLMs is that you get the text parsing without the need for a uniform syntax that players need to use. They can just talk to it the way they would interact with a DM. And, I imagine this is probably what WotC is working on for D&D proper, but are layering GUI components on top of it to make it even more user friendly.
The AI does have trouble with ending the story/quest. And it seems like no matter how you try to resolve the story, it wants you to keep going. So these are some of things that I need to work on before trying to keep state.
Well, I didn't even get an honorable mention, but I'm grateful for the feedback they gave me!
However, I believe my friends and I re-worked the story to be far more compelling, and we did so before I got any official feedback. So, I'll break it down and talk about what I've learned through this experience. Also, below will be the revised story. I'm curious and eager to hear from all of you whether you think we were able to come up with a story that would have addressed the judges' criticisms before even knowing what those criticisms were?
The below article was taken from a Polish UFO podcast called ufo historie. The episode's title roughly translates to “John Keel's concept of space jokers, tricksters, and deceivers.” This episode was shared with me by a fellow member of the Night Shift Discord server that I'm on.
It presents a theory that isn't as proffered as some of the other what ifs that float around; extraterrestrials, extratempestrials, interdimensional intelligence, a breakaway advanced hominid race (“ultra-earlings”), or crytopterrestrials, to name the theories that I'm familiar with. Instead, the Cosmic Joker Hypothesis is more akin to the fae of European folklore. I found this intriguing and refreshing, it also offers a more solid explanation for the US government's insistence on the term non-human intelligence (or, “NHI” in common parlance).
You can listen to the original podcast in its native Polish here:
I needed something to publish to my blog this month, why not talk about The Game Awards?!? This was a big year for Geoff Keighley and his celebration of video games. Each year we watch it, and each year we joke about it, but honestly, it does keep getting better. There is measurable progress for the production, and in its 10th year now, I think they've mostly hit their stride.
Also, for the last few years my friends and I have played “The Game of The Game Awards” where we do a fantasy-style pick of all the games we think will win, and also came up with some wild predictions that may or may not have scored us any bonus points. I encourage you to check it out even if you've already watched the TGAs.
Rarely do I get to watch an entire weekend of F1; all the practice sessions, qualifying, and the race... But also all the pre and post coverage that F1TV does, the pomp and circumstance, with all the interviews and all the commentary.
This weekend was one of those weekends where I was able to indulge in all the different coverage they had to offer though, and why shouldn't I watch all of the coverage? The race was happening right here in Viva Las Vegas!
Not sure exactly when it was that I found out about the NYC Midnight writing competitions, must have been at least a few years ago now though. Probably around COVID, which would make sense because it's the type of thing that people were doing while they were locked in their homes... I'm also not sure what it is that brought me back to it this year. But I made the decision to finally pony up the entry fee and actually get serious about it.
