October 13, 2024

Shipmind Wrap-Up

And that’s it! It took several years, but we finally finished Shipmind. This is the first novel we’ve ever written. Or, more accurately, it’s the first novel we’ve ever finished writing. I have no idea how many abandoned projects there have been along the way. Weighing in at a little over 35 500 words, it’s pretty lightweight as novels go. I think the standard for a published sci fi novel is about three times that.

September 12, 2024

Oh heck, new design?

Yeah, this whole thing has been rearranged now. Shipmind is here. So, why the rearrangement? Well, it was kind of a silly thing. We started posting Shipmind on here, and we didn’t want blog posts in between the chapters and vice versa. That led to us not wanting to make non-Shipmind posts. The new layout separates that out and (maybe?) solves the problem. It’s also an excuse to learn how Hugo works.

July 14, 2022

Streaming Satisfactory

We’ve been kind of neglecting this blog, haven’t we? Oh well. Best way to change that is to start posting again. In any case, hi! I’m Querral and this is my first solo post on here, though I may have… heavily influenced the reverse engineering series. Yesterday, after weeks of talking about it, I finally attempted a game stream. I took a poll on my mastodon last week and Satisfactory won, so I started a new game of that.

February 26, 2022

ReVVVVVVerse Engineering

Who’s reverse-engineering game data files for fun again? That’s right, it’s me. I decided to go digging into VVVVVV this time around. Turns out there’s not a whole lot to it. Everything is wrapped up in a file called data.zip, which is just a standard zip file. Spritesheets are just PNGs. Sound effects are wave files. Levels are XML documents which have been given a .vvv extension for some reason.

December 8, 2021

Advent of Code 2021, Day 8

Day 8 looks to be a fun bit of deductive reasoning. Should be interesting! The premise: the wires for our seven-segment displays got jumbled up somehow. The puzzle text blames this on the sperm whale, but this is a weirdly specific sort of failure. I think it’s more likely that whichever elf wired these things up in the first place was having an off day and not really paying enough attention.

December 7, 2021

Advent of Code 2021, Day 6

Day 6 promises to be an interesting one. While it may be day 7 today, I’m still playing catchup. Solution in the usual place. What we have is a population of fish. Lanternfish! Lanternfish are pretty fascinating. It’s thought that they make up nearly two thirds of the deep sea biomass. There are so many of them down there that, at first, scientists looking at their sonar readings thought they were reading an entire layer of water or even the seabed itself.

December 7, 2021

Advent of Code 2021, Day 7

What trickery is this? I’m doing the day 7 puzzle on day 7? Well, as cute as the idea of crabs in tiny submarines coming to my rescue is, part 1 of the puzzle itself seems almost comically simple. The submarines all have a numeric position, and they need to move to a common position with the least fuel expenditure possible. It immediately strikes me that, given that fuel expenditure is equal simply to the the distance to the target point, the most efficient point to reach must be the median.

December 6, 2021

Advent of Code 2021, Day 4

Following on from my previous unpost, I took a bit of a break and did day 4 today. Solution on my git repo as always. The premise is cute. There’s a giant squid attached to the submarine! What could it want? Why, to play bingo, of course! This makes perfect sense. Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) are well known for their love of games of chance, and their deep sea bingo halls are legendary.

December 6, 2021

Advent of Code 2021, Day 5

Day 5! I was really hoping that our friend the giant squid would show up again, perhaps with dolphin racing tips, or even have brought friends for a few rounds of blackjack, but alas, it was not to be. No, this time around, it’s a navigation problem, and today we’re trying to steer around weirdly geometric hydrothermal vents. And, in the process, I received an object lesson on the importance of properly understanding the actual requirements before beginning.

December 4, 2021

Advent of Code 2021, Days 2 & 3 unpost

I’m still doing Advent of Code, but as sort of expected, I’ve been a bit short of energy, so I haven’t been writing up my solutions like I did for day 1. But you know what? That’s okay, because my friend Emi Socks is doing its own writeup, and showing off why Haskell is so much fun to work with in the process. If you like my posts, it’ll defintely be worth your time.