Discussion
On my way to Glasgow. I've even finished preparing my talk. I don't know what happens now - how else does one spend a train journey?
@[email protected] as an experienced conference talk giver, I'm assuming the same as every other train journey to a conference: break your perfectly good slides/code/examples by thinking of something even better and trying to implement it with 1 hour and 15% battery
There's something very surreal about living in a world where you just post things like 'hey, I wrote a nice little script' despite the news cycle including war, potential economic collapse, etc some of which may directly affect you or people you know, because if you wait for a "more appropriate" moment you're never gong to post anything and putting life on hold isn't going to help anyone in any way.
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
Excellent! I now have my blog rss feed pushed to Bonfire by a nice little #fsharp program I'll be open sourcing soonish. It also runs a mini-webserver to allow embedding comments into the blog, but that still requires a bit of sysops work that I haven't finished yet.
Still: if you want to follow my blog via #activitypub, now you can.
Hidden updates in Ink
Read this post in its full formatted glory at https://blog.mavnn.eu/2026/03/28/hidden_updates_in_ink.html
Building interactive fiction in Ink sometimes feels like an exercise in smoke and mirrors; there are times where you want to script events where it feels like the reader has agency when actually their decision doesn't change the future story at all, and there are times where you want the future story to be impacted by a decision but you don't want to reveal it immediately.
One example came up this week when I was asked how you could ask a series of questions without revealing whether each individual question was answered correctly - but changing what happens after depending on the overall number that were correct.
How could we do that?
To begin with, anytime we want to track a number or a score in Ink we want a variable.
VAR correct_answers = 0
Next, we're going to want to do the same thing after every correct answer: add one to the score, and then carry on the story from where we were. "Do the same thing in multiple places in the story" is what tunnels are for; knots/sections that use the special ->-> operator to return the story back to where ever you came from.
=== good_answer ~correct_answers = correct_answers + 1 // or you can use the special short hand // that means the same thing as above // ~correct_answers += 1 ->->
Finally, we want each question to provide two or more possible answers, but which ever one you pick the story will continue the same way - just maybe via a side trip to the good_answer knot. Multiple choices which all go the same place use a "gather" (which is just a - on its own line to mark the end of a block of choices).
By using a gather we can avoid having to make every question its own knot, diverting to it, and then having to divert on to the next question. Instead, we can have them all in a single place with a nice clear flow (and a lot less typing).
=== questions Is a wombat a wom, or a bat? * [Wom] * [Bat] * [What?] -> good_answer -> - Is the pineapple a pine, or an apple? * [I dispute the nature of your question] -> good_answer -> * [Pine] * [Apple] - You have answered {correct_answers} questions correctly. -> END
Putting it all together, our script would look something like this:
VAR correct_answers = 0 -> questions === good_answer ~correct_answers = correct_answers + 1 // or you can use the special short hand // that means the same thing as above // ~correct_answers += 1 ->-> === questions Is a wombat a wom, or a bat? * [Wom] * [Bat] * [What?] -> good_answer -> - Is the pineapple a pine, or an apple? * [I dispute the nature of your question] -> good_answer -> * [Pine] * [Apple] - You have answered {correct_answers} questions correctly. -> END
If you want to try it out, you can paste the whole lot into the 'demo' script editor at VisualInk and give it a run for yourself, experimenting with changes as they catch your fancy.
Discussion of this post is probably happening as replies to its announcement on the fediverse.
Some more
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I'm running forgejo on a pi that's also running several other services (including the postgres instance forgejo is using). Only time it's used noticeable resources is when meta's ai bot tried to scrape every commit of every file on the git history of my blog with 20-30 concurrent connections at a time, I think in a loop as it didn't ever seem to finish.
Which was annoying, but I don't blame forgejo for it...
@[email protected] I hear you, I've been known to use super hero games as a similar way of hoovering up adventure ideas from all sorts of places. It's not like anyone is going to bat an eyelid at vikings raiding New York in a supers setting 🤷♂️
@[email protected] thank you! And actually, I've run pawnshop as well but I believe that was... er... some number of years I won't think about too hard and before I met my wife.
I'm on the look out for good ttrpg adventures for a single player and GM (my wife and I, specifically). Anyone got good suggestions? Preference for fantasy but doesn't need to be DnD (maybe even prefer it not to be), other genres definitely worth suggesting if the adventure is good. Any suggestions on things designed with this in mind or easy to convert?
@[email protected] @[email protected], you seem to be gentlemen of impeccable taste who might have thoughts?
Nice start: Gumshoe now has a dedicated 1-1 line, apparently. Thank you Bryant for the heads up. pelgranepress.com/product-ca...
I'm on the look out for good ttrpg adventures for a single player and GM (my wife and I, specifically). Anyone got good suggestions? Preference for fantasy but doesn't need to be DnD (maybe even prefer it not to be), other genres definitely worth suggesting if the adventure is good. Any suggestions on things designed with this in mind or easy to convert?
@[email protected] @[email protected], you seem to be gentlemen of impeccable taste who might have thoughts?
@[email protected] yeah, input can be a challenge. Even here in Italy teaching primary age kids I've hit a few things I didn't expect ('~' just doesn't exist on the standard Italian key layout, for instance). I don't have direct experience with non Latin alphabet learners but like you I'm guessing it's a painful extra hurdle.
@[email protected] Sort of, although see efforts like hedy.org/ sharing naive language programming.
That said, I've been told it's not quite as bad as it sounds. A lot of code uses abbreviations, terms outside of normal language, or words in unusual ways anyway ('bool', 'for', 'def') so it doesn't help but it isn't any worse than car and cdr.
I can't say that it doesn't feel unfair though.
sorry I’ve posted in all caps like three times today, but the power of seeing corporations suffer the exact dire consequences we all warned them about fills me with determination
@[email protected] It appears that the magical girl genre has changed since my childhood. Still seems to be about the fighting evil though, so I'll take it.
"With the power of schadenfreude and the means of production, we will defeat you Skynet knockoff 47!"
@[email protected] I've found that it's nearly always quite a bit more than when they say "okay, got it" and a reasonable amount less than when they say "please stop, my brains are oozing out of my ears".
I hope this email shit post has found you in need of low impact humour, as opposed to actionable advice...
@[email protected] More honestly, if I'm writing for public consumption I've always been surprised at how what ever level I write to, somebody finds it useful so I tend to write towards 'knowing slightly less than myself'. If I'm trying to write to persuade or reach a specific audience, that's a much harder challenge and I can only commiserate.
A thing I struggle with is knowing how deeply to explain a concept so that the reader understands without being beaten over the head with it.
@[email protected] I've found that it's nearly always quite a bit more than when they say "okay, got it" and a reasonable amount less than when they say "please stop, my brains are oozing out of my ears".
I hope this email shit post has found you in need of low impact humour, as opposed to actionable advice...
@[email protected] there's definitely some authors around; I'm aware of @[email protected] and @[email protected] of the top of my head they both regularly post to writing related hash tags that will help find other authors.
@[email protected] @[email protected] that second tag should be - not sure what happened there! Wandering shop in general seems to be a mastodon instance with quite a few writers.
How active is Mastodon for authors and narrators? I'm still trying to get a feel for this space. Aside from #bookstodon and #audiobooks, what are other good hashtags to follow? Does anyone post casting calls here? (I've heard that's a big thing on the bird site, but I'm not going back there.)
Please boost for reach!
@[email protected] there's definitely some authors around; I'm aware of @[email protected] and @[email protected] of the top of my head they both regularly post to writing related hash tags that will help find other authors.
I'm bemused by Google sometimes. Their search console allows you to declare that you're moving a website to a new domain. It then requires you to prove you own both domains, checks the old domain is redirecting to the new one, and then puts up a large banner on the old domain saying that it knows it is being moved.
I check back several weeks later to find nothing on the new domain is being indexed because "Google has chosen the canonical url" from its index that lists the old domain, not the canonical url in the pages on the new domain that points at, well, the new domain.
So... what was the point of telling you the site was moving if you still assume that the indexed values from the old site are the canonical urls even when those urls now permanently redirect to the new site? Was I supposed to leave the canonical urls pointing to addresses that no longer exist except as redirects? That seems... not correct, to be honest.
My blog posting script is nearly there, successfully reading posts from my RSS feed and posting them on this server as a dedicated user so people can subscribe, comment, etc.
All I need to do now is finish token refresh for oauth, track the ids of posted articles, create an embeddable view of replies to show on the web pages, deploy it to a live server, set up some error reporting.
Yeah. Nearly there.
@[email protected] I'm still waiting for mine to start. My wife isn't fond of beards, but that often leads to people mistaking me for her son which is somewhat frustrating for both of us, especially given that the grey in her hair looks awesome (to each their own taste, but I never really understood the whole dying away grey hair thing - to my taste it nearly always looks better than before!)
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