Smooth Letters

Made a minor correction to The Pocketwatch, while reading through it and noticing that it said Medea lives in Kyushu. I meant Honshu, the main island. 

Way back in high school, when I changed Spiral Island into a trilogy, I started this project in Photoshop to be a promotional poster for the trilogy overall, combining key aspects from all three of the games together, as the 'Spiral Island Trilogy' poster. The Spiral Island logo itself has some styling to it, using the section sign for an 'S' to somewhat convey the idea of a spiral, and a stylized 'I' mainly because the standard I is just a straight line. So for the poster, which reads 'Spiral Island Trilogy' across it, I needed to come up with a third stylized letter, a 'T'. 

The main problem with the 'T', however, was it became damaged in transit, pretty much. At that time, my own personal graphic editing software was Paint Shop Pro, which is what I designed the character in instead of a vector image software. And then when I transferred it into Photoshop, and began to apply some layer effects, errors in the design became visible:

Now, fast forwarding into the future, I stopped using Paint Shop Pro at version 8 because changes to it had slowed it down quite a bit (I was at the time using a Pentium 400 machine, so the change was unacceptable), and I have a lot of principles against using any Adobe product, so my choice of software now is GIMP. That said, the beveling and such tools (collectively, the Layer Effects) of Photoshop are simply much higher quality than Paint Shop Pro had, which is why I had started the project in Photoshop in the first place, and so once I was out of school and didn't have Photoshop to work with anymore I had pretty much stopped the process.

Not that long ago, I found a plugin was written for GIMP to mimic the Layer Effects feature, and in fact even surpass it because it is so much more customizable (than what I used anyway, might have been more of the customization like this in later versions than I had used), and so I started up the project again. As I rigged it all again, and replaced some of the things that had changed in that time (such as changing the font of the AnacondaSoftware logo, and the new logo symbol, which at that time was far before I had set the proper lengths and angles as I use them now), I noticed that the ugly 'T' was even more pronounced now with the way that the GIMP plugin rendered the bevels. And so I needed to create a clean copy of it.

Main problem was, I have no idea how I did it in the first place anymore. It has been so long since I did it that I forgot how I originally got it to look that way, as nothing in the font it is based on actually has curves like that which I can see. So I decided to just approximate it, and created the new one:

I like it more the way it looks now, actually. When I finally get this finished I will have to redo it again, because some antialiasing jaggedness was introduced from the transition between Inkscape and GIMP and the rest of the letters look much cleaner, but altogether it looks nice and serves the logo well.

And as a side note, reducing the layers from full image size (3200 x 4000 pixels) down to just the information area of each of the respective layers cut the in-memory size down from 1GB before I swapped in this 'T', to a mere 188MB.

Greater Flurry

So let's see... Lockup, Inventory, Date Line, Radiation, The Carpenter, The Truth, Closing Thoughts, and the Epilogue. Yes, that's eight more parts, since last Wednesday, and now The Pocketwatch is complete. 

What brought this on? Well, I realized that it wasn't that much work to finish it, so I decided to just go ahead and spend some time and get it done. It's not that long of a story, like I was intending. 27 pages total in Word, and exactly 20,000 words (how it worked out that well is rather surprising, actually). Yes, I consider that a 'short' story, considering right now Skewed is sitting at 132K words and 214 pages, and still has some time before its finished. It's nice to write something short every so often, and have a clear end in sight to work towards.

Text Adventure

Now the Text Adventure Experiment can truly begin. I have the beginnings of a story, and with that I have something to enter in. I have begun setting up my data structures, since I have an idea of what they should start being now, so I've uploaded a new version. 

The size of the app went up quite a bit (somewhere between three and four hundred kilobytes), because the XmlSerializer is apparently not part of the core .NET assemblies in Silverlight, so I had to include it as an additional resource. Because of that, I need to check to see how it works in Moonlight again, to make sure I haven't stepped out of that plugin's capabilities.

Voynich Manuscript

Next part of The Pocketwatch is up, Clues. I had wanted to do some stuff in the future before moving on, but I could not think of anything that wouldn't just drag the story down before we got to the real meat of what was happening, so I finally decided to just drop it. This is a short story, after all, not a novel in this case, so adding a bunch more than is really needed is just not something necessary.

Since I haven't talked about it before, I guess I'll talk about it a bit here. The Voynich Manuscript is a strange book discovered by a book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, which is filled with undeciphered writing with strange linguistic properties, odd plant illustrations, odd astronomical appearing charts, and other things, believed to have been written somewhere in the 15th or 16th Centuries, carbon dated to between 1404 and 1438. It has never been deciphered, leading some to believe it is some sort of elaborate hoax. Regardless,  it is such an oddity, so out of place with everything else we know, that it was a perfect candidate to use as part of this story. 

Actually, I didn't know they had carbon dated it until reading the wiki just now, that was done recently. I had made the author of the book as part of this story and the greater storyline, I had better check my own dates for its authorship against the carbon dating and other events going on at the time and adjust it to match. I'll just go ahead and mention now, since the contents don't really play any more in the story, that the way I have written this story the manuscript is a hoax, made to look the way it does by the original author to hide what it actually is.

The design on the Pocketwatch face is more elaborate then the illustration in the book, but has as a base the leftmost illustration of the three-page foldout shown on Wikipedia. The other page our narrator refers to specifically, in Revealing, is the single six-page foldout in the book. The entire book is scanned and available for viewing on the Yale website. It is pretty interesting to look through.

The Last Short Tale

Once, there was a country in need of saving. But in saving it, there were casualties. The demon commander. The devil government worker. They had been celebrated as heroes, but because of what they had to become, they were hated and feared once the people no longer needed them. And so they were cast out, finding only comradery in each other for their common plight. They were two outcasts, and an unlikely couple in and of itself formed only of necessity, a demon and a devil.

But the people didn't realize that there was a reason that they had these two gain these powers, and they soon learned just why they needed to fear the demons and the devils. The spiteful pair would not sit in exile for long, and they vowed to get revenge on their country. But they did not simply attack them. No, they went and took leadership over the invaders they had previously fought. And with that enemy under their control, they marched back to their country, and began to slaughter the people. They ran, in terror, knowing fear unlike any they had ever known before.

Finally, the two invaded the castle, killed the royal house, and became king and queen themselves. They then called off the foreign army and sent them home, leaving the kingdom in ruin. The remaining people lived in fear, in sorrow, for they had now learned all to well that it was their own actions and hatred that had led them to the ruin they knew now. The demon king and the devil queen had vowed to return the control of the kingdom to the people once they died of age, but until then the people were to do whatever they wished. And so the people served their king and queen. Fearful, morose, and broken, they awaited the time when they would be free, and silently vowed that they would never show such prejudice again.