A slightly early weekend

One last mile for rest week today…

…as I’ll be doing my usual Saturday three-miler tomorrow, then I’ll see what I can manage on Sunday.

I was able to get the work I’d planned for today done last night, so I’m having an early start to the weekend today. The boiler technician came and did a straightforward check this morning, and Geth and I will be nipping to Asda in the car later, but other than that, it’s videogaming time! I’ve got a couple more jam entries to play this evening, and then the weekend will mostly be spent in the worlds of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition and Final Fantasy 1.

I’ll post a couple of running videos over the weekend, but otherwise I’ll be back on Monday as usual.

2DS XL
Geth has bought himself this nice colourful 2DS XL, meaning that if I want to play games on the big screen, he can work his way through the extensive 3DS game collection I’ve built up over the last six years!

Today’s earworm playlist:

The Proclaimers – ‘Misty Blue’

Navigating face masks when you’re hard of hearing

I’ve been dreading this phase of the pandemic – the phase where everybody tries to get ‘back to normal’, except that everybody is still halfheartedly trying to keep two metres away from everyone else, and everybody is wearing face masks in enclosed spaces like public transport and business premises.

I can absolutely deal with the two metres thing, although I think keeping that distance is absolutely impossible in some of the situations that are now being encouraged again (who’s going to be able to maintain that in a crowded pub full of drunk people? STEERING CLEAR). It’s the mask thing that’s the problem.

As some of you will be aware, I’m hard of hearing, and have been since early childhood. Over the course of my life I have gradually learnt to rely on a combination of hearing aids (which are much more effective than they used to be now that the technology has moved on) and lipreading, which is so subconscious I don’t even realise I’m doing it most of the time. But I do need to do it – something that is made painfully clear whenever I’m struggling with a phone call to someone who doesn’t realise that they need to speak up.

When I’m deprived of my sensory aids for any reason, I enter Hairdresser World. Hairdresser World is named for the situation at the hairdresser when, in order to get my hair cut, I have to remove both my hearing aids and my glasses. My hearing without aids compared to my hearing with them can best be described to a fully-hearing person as like being underwater (i.e. conversation is difficult at best), and without my glasses, lipreading is also hampered. As such, haircuts are a bit of a miserable experience – either I have a chatty hairdresser to whom I can’t respond appropriately, or I have my hair cut in silence while every other customer in the shop chatters away like a normal person! Hairdresser World is not a nice place, and I’m always so glad at the end of the haircut when I can put my hearing aids and glasses back on my head.

So… a world in which we all wear masks, then.

Masks look cool, I have to say. They sort of make everyone look like they’re in an apocalyptic movie. But if we’re all going to be wearing them for the next few months at least, then… the whole world becomes Hairdresser World, for me, in some ways. Because if someone is wearing a mask, I can’t lipread what they’re saying, and so our conversation is going to be hampered.

Enter the transparent mask.

Transparent face masks
Lipreading is not hampered as much when someone is wearing one of these.

Geth bought a couple of these for us this week. Obviously, wearing a transparent mask myself when somebody else is wearing an opaque one is not going to solve the problem, but my aim with this is to promote the wearing of transparent masks and hopefully raise a small amount of awareness.

So far, I’ve only tried out the mask for a few minutes at a time. The transparent section does steam up slightly, but not enough that I can’t see Geth’s mouth when he’s wearing his mask. As such, it’s a relatively workable solution, and one I hope that more people will adopt if mask-wearing is going to become a long-term thing.

Or alternatively, I could just continue to stay at home until all of this blows over. Whenever that may be…

Clean(er) surroundings

Another rest week mile today…

…and then on to the day’s main form of exercise, which was cleaning the house. I didn’t manage everything, but I did get the bulk of it done, and will hopefully manage to keep on top of it a bit better over the next while.

More jam entry playing tonight. Just a few more chores and writing tasks to do tomorrow, and then I will really be able to enjoy the weekend!

PSP and 3DS
My handheld consoles are calling me… not to mention the ones under the TV. Will be finishing playing the jam entries first though!

Today’s earworm playlist:

Idina Menzel – ‘Into The Unknown’

Phone Box Thursday: Land’s End Lookout, Land’s End

One last phone box photo sent by Bill and Fiona in February.

Red phone boxes
Red phone boxes, Land’s End Lookout, Land’s End, 20th February 2020.

(Coordinates 50°06’57.5″N, 5°71’32.5″W.)

I think the Street View image linked above must be fairly old, as the building has changed quite a lot since then! The phone boxes are still in very good condition, though, as is often the case with phone boxes at tourist attractions – they tend to be kept in a fairly museum-worthy state.

Land’s End is an appropriate location for these photos, because at the time of writing, this is the last red phone box photo in my collection – I’ve shown you everything I have. However, Mum and Dad are finally able to visit their holiday caravan again, so I’m hoping they will find me some more phone boxes in rural Scotland soon!

In the meantime, Phone Box Thursday will continue, though it will take a different form for a while…

The midweek slump

Not the usual midweek run…

…because I’m still not feeling that well. As such, I’ve decided to take it really easy with the running this week and just do short runs, then I’ll see how I feel at the weekend.

I’m still trying not to do too much brain-wise as well, as I’m a bit burnt out after the end of the game jam. However, I find that the creative part of my brain never stops whirring, so I’m constantly scribbling down notes for future games and novels and poems and blog posts, and lying awake thinking about them at night. Playing jam entries and other videogames does help, because it gives me something to concentrate on, so I’m trying to get my daily chores done ASAP at the moment so as to have a bit more gaming time.

I need to do a bit of housework tomorrow as the house badly needs it (lockdown has been bad for this as I find that when we don’t have visitors coming, I don’t prioritise cleaning) and we are going to have an ACTUAL OTHER PERSON IN OUR HOUSE ON FRIDAY OMG. It’s just the boiler technician, but I still won’t let people in the house when it’s not clean, which is why tomorrow is now a cleaning day.

Other than that, I will be trying (and hopefully succeeding) to relax again…

Sonic slippers
Back home in Edinburgh, Mum and Dad are sorting out my brother Malcolm’s old room at the moment, and have managed to unearth his Sonic the Hedgehog slippers from the ’90s. They’re still in fairly good nick and it sounds like Mum has adopted them.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Duran Duran – ‘Violence Of Summer (Love’s Taking Over)’
Duran Duran – ‘First Impression’

Trying to have a quieter day

Another mile today…

…and hopefully I’ll get back to my slightly longer midweek run tomorrow.

Today has mostly been a quiet day of catching up with all the admin I neglected during the last week of the jam, with a bonus technical difficulty in trying to get all my WhatsApp chats off my old phone and onto my new one. I rarely use WhatsApp but I like to have an archive. Anyway, it’s all sorted now.

Looking forward to playing some more game jam entries tonight!

Rainbow Metro sign
A picture from over the weekend – I’ve not been on the Metro since before lockdown, but it was nice to see the rainbows on the signs as I walked past the station.

Today’s earworm playlist:

ACE+ – ‘Mechonis Field’
Alison Moyet – ‘Is This Love?’

Fried!

I ended up just doing a mile today…

…as I didn’t feel that well when I woke up. I had planned to do my delayed weekend long run today, but I think I’ll be trying to make up the mileage later in the week instead.

As such, I got my day job work out of the way first today, and then went for my short run in the afternoon. Since then, I’ve been catching up with admin, and am looking forward to playing some jam entry games tonight.

I’m still feeling a bit physically poorly and mentally fried, but I think that’s just because I’ve been so busy over the last few days and weeks. This week is just going to involve some quiet catching up with admin and housework, and a lot of playing of videogames rather than making them.

I’m still really pleased to have released my most recent game last night. You can play it here!

As a result, I’ve not got much planned for tomorrow!

The Cave of Hoarding
An updated graphic for my first jam game, The Cave of Hoarding. To celebrate the sequel coming out, I made some quick replacements for the shonky old original graphics. This pile of treasure sums up my feelings when I submit a game at the end of a jam!

Today’s earworm playlist:

Mott The Hoople – ‘All The Young Dudes’
Idina Menzel – ‘Into The Unknown’

One Last Thing…

I released my newest text adventure game last night (and submitted it to the Adventuron game jam, making it four Adventuron jams in a row for which I have managed to cobble together a game!). I’ve put a lot of work into this one over the last month, so I’m really pleased that it’s all finished and out there in the world at last.

One Last Thing...
Adventuron version.

The main reason that this game required quite a bit of extra work was that I accepted the optional jam challenge of porting the Adventuron game to Spectrum +3 and Spectrum Next using DAAD Ready (I talked about this process at length in the video I linked to in my Barry Basic post the other day). The DAAD conversion process works really well, but there are a few things that come up slightly differently in the Spectrum port and so they needed to be tweaked and refined to make sure that they worked in the same way across the versions. There’s still a bit of improvement that could be made to the ported versions, but I’m happy enough with them for now.

One Last Thing...
Spectrum Next version.

I also made two sets of graphics – one for the Adventuron and Spectrum Next versions, and one Spectrum-compatible set for the Spectrum +3 version. The Spectrum-compatible graphics were a lot of fun to make, but I’m going to need a lot more practice in that style before I do another +3 port! The Adventuron/Next graphics, meanwhile, are probably my favourites that I’ve made yet – I used the hept32 palette suggested in the jam rules, rather than just picking random colours like I usually do, and I think it’s made everything look a lot nicer and more pulled-together.

One Last Thing...
Spectrum +3 version.

For the actual game and story, I tried to keep everything fairly short and simple, as I knew there wouldn’t be much memory space when porting to Spectrum +3 (as it happened, I did have to sacrifice one graphical change in a location on the +3 version because the original amount of graphics was too much for the conversion!). I decided on my setting (a single five-room building) for this reason, but I ended up making a short prequel* to the game I originally planned out, as the first game plan was getting a bit too big.**

* It’s also a sequel to my first game from last year, The Cave of Hoarding. It’s complicated.
** This always happens. The only time I actually made the game that I originally planned (Hallowe’en: Night of the Misty Manor), it ended up being 10,000 lines of code and required a lot of all-nighters in the week leading up to the jam deadline. At least it means I’ve got a lot of semi-finished games that I can work on in my own time!

After making a fairly contained game (albeit with a lot of interesting complications), I am quite keen to do a project with a big, sprawling map again. However, I am going to take a few days (at least) off from game creation – apart from anything else, I want to play all the other jam entries now!