The following bit of fiction is an in-character post-LARP report from a game of Off Recipe, a solo cooking LARP that was a part of the Solo But Not Alone solo-TTRPG charity bundle on itch.io that we just purchased.
( Content warnings for food, naturally. 460 words. )
We wrote a bunch of words today! A bunch of them specifically in a fediverse thread about obstacles people face to adding image descriptions riffing off the essay "Laziness Does Not Exist" by Devon Price.
...kind of fediverse inside baseball, all things considered, but now our wrists are sending "hey, you might wanna chill a little" signals, so we're not gonna write a lot more here. So you get the link instead. :P
...
Okay, also: if you're using the HTML editor to write your Dreamwidth posts, the key is <img src="[image URL]" alt="[text to display if image doesn't load]" title="[text to display when mouse hovers over image]">. If you use Dreamwidth's image hosting, the HTML it gives you to copy gets auto-filled with the "Title" in the mouseover and the "Short Description" in the alt text.
Kind of a depression day today.
Ended up just sitting outside for a bit instead of doing any kind of exercise, because by the time we felt able to go outside it was about to rain.
...sitting in the edges of the rain on the back porch turned out to be a good choice.
In a college anthropology class, we had an assignment to describe some kind of set ... ritual form? I forget how they worded it - that we had experience with, and we couldn't think of anything that made sense. In the end, we decided to go with something that we were familiar with from a lot of firsthand experience but that we thought there wouldn't be much to say about: going to a classical music concert.
After all, what's there to say about the conventions and etiquette a classical music concert? They're just a normal thing, or even kinda boring, aside from the music.
...oh my goodness were we wrong about that.
Like, okay, the applause thing. You do not enter the concert hall except before the concert or during applause, lest you interrupt the music. You don't applaud during the music, ever. You don't applaud between movements of a piece that has multiple movements, ever. You applaud at the beginning of the concert when the person or people walk out onto the stage to take their bows before the performance (which they do, or which just the conductor does in the case of an orchestra), you applaud at the end of each piece (another reason to take the programme from the - *looks up word* door staff? the person who lets you in and stops you coming in while a piece is playing - is so you know how many movements each piece has and can keep track of when it will end), and you applaud some more when the concert ends because everyone likes getting a standing ovation and it's honestly almost the polite thing to do at this point, feels like.
(Although we went to a lot of really good concerts, so they probably deserved a fair few of those ovations.)
All of this was "kinda boring, I don't know what I'd talk about".
...and I think stuff like the flag thing and the National Anthem thing and the Pledge of Allegiance thing and the Founding Fathers thing and the Constitution thing are like that in the US. What's with having someone sing the National Anthem before baseball games in the US? Why are there flags in so many school classrooms in the US? Why was there a flag in the room where our local coin club met? Why did we do a pledge of allegiance before coin club meetings? Why are we as a society so invested in the opinions and words of a bunch of dead white slaveholders? This stuff - the forms and content of the US civil religion - is not boring, is not natural, is not just the way things are. There is so much to say about it.
So, in PICO-8, each channel can only play one note at a time. There is technically a way to add hardware echo, but it's undocumented and pretty inflexible; it does one thing and that's it.
That said, there's actually no rule that a melody has to be contained in a single SFX channel.
It's not a difficult technique, just a bit tedious: in essence, one composes music with instruments that tail off in volume (in this case, first within the custom SFX instrument shown to the right, and then further in the SFXes where the instrument is played), decides how many SFX channels to dedicates to the piece, and then starts each note in each channel in turn, giving each previous note as long as possible to tail off while the others are playing. In the example up top, the first channel comes in on the first line, the second on the second, the third on the third, and then the fourth waits a moment and comes in on the fifth.
(If one note interrupts the tail of a prior one - cuts it off before it fully fades out - it's not a big deal. After all, this is the moment when the note is the most quiet, and therefore least noticeable and most easily drowned out by, say, the new note that just started playing.)
Where we've really been using this technique is in imitating string instruments with a lot of sustain, like guitars or maybe harps? It's a cool sound, anyway.
Maybe what we should tape up to our wall is a note saying, "You're allowed to exist - be good <3", because this has been the ... many-th time that one of us has been like "but can I really be a new system member? the Packbats already have a bunch of those...".
But, as it turns out, yes, I can be a new system member.
Going with Packagia as a words-name - I like the 🦎 emoji as an emoji name, but Packlizard doesn't sound fun and I'm a flying lizard, and flying lizard wings are patagia. (Our partner came up with that pun.)
Anyway, what with now-ten documented system members, including a bug, a bird, a dragon, a snake, and a lizard, I guess we can say definitely that the Packbat system scales well.
(That one's on me.)
