Weird weird day
September 11th 2024
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Okay first off I really wish I hadn't accidentally gotten food
poisoning from some very expired hemp milk at my favorite neighborhood
coffee shop. They were very apologetic and absolutely believed me when
I was like "something is wrong with this milk" after having a swig but
I've felt like a tiny man is boxing the inside of my intestines for
the past seven hours. It was absolutely the most foul thing I've ever
tasted in my life and now that it's fading just a little bit I'm
mostly just exhausted and feel bruised without having done anything
particular productive.

I say unto thee: blehhhhh

Anyway, I've started a little project in common lisp inspired by some
assignments that I want to give students where I'm kinda writing an
interactive fiction engine. At least that's the goal. For the start
I'm just implementing some small stories in common lisp and
abstracting out parts as I'm going rather than trying to start with
top down design.

I definitely program in the "bricoleur" style that papert and turkle
wrote about in their epistemological pluralism paper ages ago (maybe
before I was born? I might have been a kid when that paper was written
hold on it's going to bother me if I don't check...yeah okay 1991 I
was alive but really young) when they talked about how CS education
was built around top-down planning and didn't allow for experimental,
experiential, programming where students wanted to continually try
things and play and cobble together solutions not find The Correct Way
of doing things. Not that good solutions don't matter, but that they
can come after having explored the problem space and getting
*something* working.

I feel like a lot of people, left to their druthers, would code that
way. But I can fully believe it isn't for everyone.

So, anyway, that's a little bit of a tangent but this seems like a fun
little project and maybe it'll eventually turn into a neat IF engine
that other people could have fun with. I think it'd be nice to have
something that feels less hard to program than Inform 7 or Twine, not
that I don't understand the design decisions that went into them I
just feel like they don't work with how I think. Twine works great
until you need to hack something together in a way that isn't how it
wants you to code and suddenly there starts being weird little warts
everywhere. Inform 7, god I hate to say this, to me is more on the side of
"cleverly dreadful" than "dreadfully clever": it's very cool to have
this almost natural language interface to doing a lot of complicated
IF games writing *and yet* I think it's extremely unfun to write. I
think I've bounced off of it five or six times over the years going
all the way back to when I was first learning to code.

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. I'm hoping this pain finally
passes soon. I ate a big bowl of kimchi and rice with the hopes that
it would help my stomach repair itself right quick.