Today is the penultimate day of my three-week vacation. Three weeks was the most time I have had off, consecutively, in a decade. And it was also nowhere near enough time off. I need to retire. Or something.
I made a to-do list for my time off, which included about 30 items. I completed about 10 of them. Nowhere near as much as I had hoped to finish, but better than expected. I was sick for a couple of days, and the heat dome during the week of July 4 made outdoor work near impossible.
I also took some naps. They were wonderful. Highly recommended.
I have many little side projects. Once upon a time, one of those projects was creating games and visual toys in Flash. Flash is no longer with us, but I still have all of my source code and my compiled .swf files. When looking for a way to play those old files, I discovered Ruffle, a tool which is available as a browser plugin or as a standalone desktop application. I downloaded the app version and pointed it at one of my old SWF files, and it worked perfectly!
Seeing this, I felt motivated to translate one of the simpler experiments, a procedural flower generator, from ActionScript to JavaScript. Click here to see it in action. Below is an example of the output.
Reading
I spent the week bouncing between several books – Human Capital, which I have mentioned in the past several entries. Also Evan Connell’s Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel, a collection of writing from The Evergreen Review, and various and sundry other works scattered around the internet.
Writing
While I didn’t write much in the past week, I did sit down with one of my manuscripts and figure out the timeline of events, rationalizing everything so events happened in the proper order and peoples’ ages added up appropriately across the years. I also gave the manuscript a cursory edit in the form of occasional scribbles in the margins. I am glad to have my head back in that space again.
Weekly Writing Prompt
Subject: Dreams, Disease
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Steampunk
Listening
Bonnie Tyler, “Lost in France,” from her 1977 debut album The World Starts Tonight. Tyler passed away three days ago, on July 8.