arantor.org
Spring catchup

Spring catchup

How has it been more than six months?

Actually I know the answer to that: I’ve been super busy with work. It’s one of those projects that I’d love to talk about – I know we’re doing a series of videos in the summer where I’m sitting down with the founders of the company whose software I’ve been building, in a ‘how did you build it’ discussion both from their side and mine.

But it’s also their IP, trade secrets and all that so I can’t really talk about it beyond that – but in any case it’s also in the category of being so absurdly specific that for most of the talking I could do about it, it’ll just cause people to glaze over. It’s one of those deeply fascinating things from a purely technological and abstract perspective but the implementation is, for the most part, utterly dry and dull.

This week is the first week I’ve stopped really since October… technically I had a week or two off in December but I got ill. Spent most of December and part of January just coughing and retching and generally being miserable. Lesson learned: don’t take time off. But now’s a good time, the project’s almost wrapped up and I need to take a breather before it goes live and the world starts getting complicated. It’s been kind of nice to sit in a bubble and just build without worrying too hard about ‘the next thing’ or indeed ‘anything else’.

Aranoid got put to the side, of course, I just didn’t have the headspace for it, and I will get back to it, maybe even this week I have off, but in some ways the allure is gone; I mostly started it to teach myself how to experiment a bit better and I sorta got there, but sorta not.

My imagination has been more piqued of late with the ideas of approaching a murder mystery story in a big house. Some fusion of The Colonel’s Bequest, The Crimson Diamond and Cruise for a Corpse maybe, so I’ve been off just immersing myself in 1920s style media (it’s an excuse to rewatch Poirot, Miss Marple, Jeeves and Wooster etc.! And, of course, Clue.) and studying the floor plans to big country places that always seem somehow to serve as the backdrop for these murders. Get everyone to a fancy rural estate, conveniently away from police, have a murder happen.

I’ve also posted the last couple of entries from NYC Midnight. Didn’t get anywhere, naturally, but that’s no surprise. I think I’m becoming OK with the notion that what I write isn’t what the judges want and that I’ve mostly bowed out of participating – though the 100 word challenge is always interesting just for the challenge of writing 100 words.

Really what I should do is build a random generator tool for these and once a fortnight or so run one myself without needing an external party for it – but there is something about having an entrance fee and not being able to reroll the dice for ‘that sucks as a prompt’ because having the discipline not to do that is quite hard!

Ooooh that gives me an idea… maybe something to noodle on next week.

Arantor

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