abrasax | Recent

Yesterday was frustrating but productive as I completed the final version of the Avatar/Backroom's Chapter 21. And then this morning I notice a typo in my chapter summary. :/

Alright so this weekend I'm going to juggle two pursuits. I'm shooting to finalize Chapters 22 and 23 so I'll get that started. Then I want to create a dis-assembler for the C64 in BASIC and in Assembly.

Chapter 22 -> is where Grace Augustine x na'vi!Payakan happen HAH HAH HAH nobody saw that coming, myself included.
Chapter 23 -> is one of those chapters I knew had to be written right from the start of this journey, it's Varang finally confronting Miles Quaritch

As for my programming endeavors.... In my last updates to my assembler I explained that I gave it the ability to refer to the program counter directly for opcode arguments. Why is that a big deal? Because it frees me from having to generate wonky label names just to do loops and skips and so on. But using the program counter as an argument liberates from having to do that. Welp, ok, great. Now I'm going to take the assembler code and revise it to take advantage of that system. Then use the assembler to assemble it. Yup.... The assembler must assemble itself or it's useless. The disassembler I'm going to put together is designed to help this transition. With its output I'll know how to revise the code properly. I'll explain when I get more time to do so later!

Mood: calm

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Mood: calm

Posted at

thefridayfive:

1. What is your favorite tree for fall leaf color?

I can't say I have a favorite tree but I will say that Mistletoe State Park in GA always had great fall colors when I'd visit. I haven't been there in ages, though.

2. For fall decor, do you prefer pumpkins, gourds, indian corn, or something else?

The color combos of orange, brown, and black are at the top for this season.

3. What are some favorite fall recipes?

I'll just cut to the chase - jellied cranberry sauce from OceanSpray and any kind of pumpkin pie.

4. Do you enjoy hay rides, haunted houses, corn mazes, or other fall activities?

For me the season always has the best hiking weather; so long walks into the woods would be my answer there.

5. What fall crafts do you enjoy?

Writing at the (earlier and earlier) onset and duration of night is a good pastime. Does that count as craft?

Mood: melancholy

OK that wasn't bad. Finally gave Chapter 21 a read and marked it with notes. It's mostly tiny shit I need to fix. The chapter's structure is non-linear with memories and dreams slipping into the narrative. And that's intentional. It's about the Backrooms and that's a rather disjointed place, isn't it? So it fits.

Having said that there's something about formatting that irks me. With AO3 (still) down for the count, I've got no way to experiment or verify. Is it possible to make blockquotes and tables in AO3? Or to change text/background colors? That's not a problem with DW; so, worst case scenario, my DW ends up with the better formatted version of the chapter.

Anywho; I've got work at school to get to and later I'm watching Godzilla; so I won't be typing anything until tomorrow?

Mood: accomplished

Alright, so after my side-quest yesterday, I'm ready to tackle this editing stuff again. Yup.... Gonna do it. Gonna sit myself down and do it. Ah ha. :skims: :draws boxes around paragraphs: I guess it's time to read it end-to-end. Any moment. Gonna happen.

Mood: optimistic

Continued from where I stopped this morning: adding the * 'variable' feature to my fork of the LADS assembler.

Ever since I created Txula, my fork as it were, I've toyed with this idea of the *, only to drop it. I didn't conceive of a way to implement it until today. I'm gonna do it, damn it.

( ... cut for brevity ... )

Mood: creative

In regards to my 6502 Assembler, a project I finished last week (was it last week?). So I awoke today with the strangest idea about how to include a functionality from other assemblers. I mean using the current program counter as the basis of an argument. In those contexts you'd often see statements like BCC *+9, the * referring to the current program counter value, the +9 or +,- anything being an offset to that. It's an alternative to using absolute values or labels. LADS didn't implement that; neither does my fork. But now I've got the urge to add that. LOL It wouldn't be too hard, either.

Mood: awake

After some hemming and hawing, I completed the first round of revisions for my upcoming Avatar/Backrooms chapters. yay, go me. woo hoo! Ah, as I suspected, these chapters got bigger as they got whipped into shape. I'm slightly more satisfied by them than I was earlier when they were total dreck. They're still not ready for primetime.

Issues that linger:

Voice; I need to ensure the narrative voice doesn't leak into the character's voices. It's OK for a few moments of overlap if it'll serve the layered subtexts that I'm assembling. It just can't be their pattern.

Events & Structures; a bunch of these chapters are simply a-linear with opening/closings that circle back together - this is part of the aforementioned subtext - I have to ensure the overall structure these loops form still work.

Clarity; this is a trap I fall into so often.... Obvs I know what the characters are doing and how they're doing it. But often times I rush through these moments that leave settings and actions unclear. To combat this I usually go back to a scene and re-read it a lot. Doing that is slow AF but after a while I do 'see the problem' and catch this stuff.

Typos; I loathe that I never capture all of these things until way after I post the work.

As for word counts, I'm summing these for all ten chapters together since they comprise this third arc: initial typed version sums to 28,018 while this 1st revision is 39,554 (whoa). I'm currently averaging 3955 words per chapter, which is insane. I don't know how I'm getting through this. I guess this is my nanowrimo after all.

Mood: relaxed

Why didn't I see this until today?

06. What have you always wanted to be for Halloween?

Where we lived, ah, we weren't allowed to trick or treat. So dressing up just wasn't a thing. I did like to dress as some sort of Skeletor / Death fusion thing.

07. What would you do first if you were a ghost?

Finally visit all the places on my bucket list!

08. Who are your favorite villains, and why are they your favorites?

As much as I enjoy Skeletor's quips, I was a MummRa kid. Who wouldn't want the life of a mummy? You get to sleep. ALL YOU WANT

09. What makes you nervous?

Amazingly not so much public speaking. It's needing to speak but nothing comes out.

10. Do you have a ghost story?

I wish....

Mood: geeky

I wasn't exactly lazy today; I just didn't get any significant writing done. Yeah, work stuff got in the way of everything. Great. So in one of the pillowfort groups I'm a member of they discussed how to get badges to show up on your DW. I spent the afternoon working with that. And then I realized I didn't have to stop at pillowfort badges. I made a couple of Avatar related badges for fun and added them to the lot. For my next experiment, I'll make them links. The post that I followed: Pillowfort Immigrant Missing the Badges on Your Sidebar? Maybe You Don't Have To!

Mood: nerdy

I could have been more productive today but I got lazy and OD on sugar, so. Um, I completed a first revision on chapter 29. At this point only chapter 30 remains. I will be doing that revision tomorrow. And then the agony circles back to chapter 21 and repeats until the moral improves & chapters are ready to post. No pressure. (panics) On the whole I'm still ecstatic about the way these things turned out and how they're actually taking form through the editing.

Mood: sleepy

Damn my procrastination! But I succeeded at revising chapter 28 and no matter how late it goes I'm gonna try chapter 29 tonight. Editing is always the part I dread. At least with AO3 out for the count I don't feel any pressure. OK, enough chitchat.

Mood: blah

Woke up to one of those art scam reviews from ff.net :sigh:

I made excellent progress with the programming project. Months after I started it, I finished the core routines, yay. I debugged them and simplified them where ever they could be. They aren't novel routines, per se. I've used these ideas many times over. Older versions use Pascal-style strings, however. This version uses C-style strings. Welp, every string handling feature had to be re-written or re-tooled to work with that. That's probs why it took me forever to get here.

OK, the next phase involves mid-level routines that define the application's file, display, and edit systems. In spite of how that sounds, it's my favorite part to create.

On the creative writing front, well well well, I'm going to shoot for at least one chapter tonight. I still want to finish these revisions over the weekend.

Mood: relaxed

Today I juggled my two hobbies quite well. In the morning I drafted ~ 20 or so hardware routines - nearly the entire body of the routines I'd need for my assembly program project to go forward. In the afternoon I revised yet another chapter for Avatar/Backrooms. yay :D In the evening I almost finished my routines ... almost. I realized that for them to work efficiently, my routines for merging and appending strings had to be adjusted. Easy fixes ultimately. I design these programs so the routines live in their own spaces, with their own variables and can be stacked together without cross-contaminating each other. Still not done with either project but I'll take incremental progress over statis.

As for my Avatar/Backrooms work; I've been meaning to get into the deets here so let me try while I'm still awake. What I'm working on is only Arc 3; I've got 4 & 5 outlined but undrafted. Arc 3 consists of 10 chapters, 6 of which I consider almost fully edited, the rest are raw.

In brief, this is what they're about:

1 - Spider and Neteyam (as a na'vi) spend a weekend together in Colorado; this is Spider's first exposure to what na'vi even look like (he's lived a quasi sheltered life with Quaritch hahaha); it's an entirely non-linear chapter that tells the story backwards. It's got this 'archival' thread running through it. That's because - in order to quickly get up to speed with the whole Pandora thing - Spider's been listening to research logs by Tom Sully and Grace Augustine and those two just discuss everything so it madness. Neteyam, the boyfriend hahah, tries to be gentle revealing the admittedly difficult past Spider's parents (Miles and Varang) are responsible for. Also - the whole Backrooms thing....

2 - Grace & co are still trying to understand what the black death / plague running through the forests is about. This is a spicy chapter because much to my own surprise Grace and (na'vi) Payakan have a budding romance happening. We also learn a lot about Payakan's tragic past here (as well as Grace's).

3 - Varang breaks into Mile's house and they have a confrontation. She wants guns; turns out an upstart by the name of Wukula did a coup d'état that deposed her 15 years ago (after the disastrous war). He's ruining the mangkwan and she wants the RDA surplus weapons so she can get back into power. She claims she's not mad about how Miles totally stole Spider from her. But I think she's mad. And then along the way we learn something interesting about Miles Quaritch that might explain why his characterization is a bit different here.

4 - Spider is alone; and he's still getting up to speed with the Backrooms lore from the logs of the scientists who explored the place decades before. Like found footage horror but it's audio logs. Then we learn he's been going into Backrooms by himself ... and making his own audio logs along the way.

5 - Back to Grace & co, she hates this but in order to figure out what the plague is and how to defeat it, Grace realizes she's going to need the Backrooms to take her to Earth again. In this fic the Backrooms connect different worlds and when you arrive at a planet, it changes your body into a version that can survive on the planet; those would be the avatars. She ... turned against the RDA and hasn't been back to Earth in almost 20 years and really doesn't want to. But she knows Tom Sully used to keep a well stocked lab on their Colorado property (where coincidentally Spider is staying at but she doesn't know that....) Kiri volunteers to go to Earth with her (if she stays na'vi).

6 - After the confrontation, Parker visits Quaritch at the house. The Colonel was studying the 'evidence' Varang left behind along with her demands. And he realizes Wukula intends to strike the wind traders at a certain location. And that Varang wants to fight him there. A kind of three way aereal battle for dominance. The guns might be enough to give her advantage. So he convinces Parker to give her the weapons. He wants to get back in her good graces.

7 - Grace and Payakan explore the eastern side of the forest where the plague is thicker; she realizes something about the way it spreads and maybe its weakness.

8 - Two contrasting phone calls; Spider and Quaritch vs Spider and Varang. It's like Spider is the kid of a divorced couple and he's got to keep the peace between them.

9 - Ah, now we follow Spider as he goes into the Backrooms and really pushes forward. It's kind of freaky inside but the kid isn't afraid....

10 - Quaritch delivers the guns and sneaks into Pandora with Lyle and Hicks (from Aliens; hehehe). They're all na'vi-fied avatars thanks to the Backrooms. Quaritch then seeks out Peylak; he warns him about Wukula's attack and Varang's strike; and he wants to be an outrider to help defend them. (there's a history between these two; Miles owes him a few lives apparently).

The real fun arcs are the next two; I'm pushing myself to get through these chapters just to get there. After that I kinda / sorta understand the remaining plotlines and I certainly know how I want it to end. But I haven't gotten there yet. Anyway, I can't even stay awake anymore - signing off!

Mood: sleepy

I went to see Godzilla -0.0 yesterday evening (LOVED it). I didn't want to follow the results.... And I didn't check them until the movie ended at 1 am. HOLY SHIT wow! Georgia ... wow :D I was so worried that jackass Rick Jackson was going to be governor. Oh, what a relief.

Alright. Um, in terms of progress, I advance quite a bit. I completed 2nd round revisions for 5 out of 10 chapters so far. Of the remaining chapters, the first three are short, the last two are long - sigh. I want to complete this entire round of revisions by the weekend and I believe it's possible if I simply don't do anything else. I'm thoroughly amused at how strong these chapters have been. They're not ready to post as they are for reasons. After these revisions, I'll go through them, one by one, until I finalize them. For that I'll take my time. AO3 won't be ready to go live anytime soon so what's the hurry anyhow?

Tangentially - I want to write drabbles again when I'm not working on this Avatar/Backrooms stuff.

Anything else? My two programming projects also advanced.

First, I completed my documentation of the MOS 6502 assembler I put together last year. All of it done by hand because of course I'm a geek. And every line of every routine is essentially documented. Eventually I want to transform that into a book ala Richard Mansfield's "The Second Book of Machine Language" which, to be fair, is what inspired my assembler.

Second, my self-imposed grading project chugs along at its glacial pace. I'm on the verge of completing a body of functions in machine language that replicate parts of C64 BASIC. The parts that remain 'to do' are functions for file operations (open, close, input, output).

I want to post more about this ancient style of programming generally. I talked about it a couple of times only briefly. Just to go into how an assembler works, I need to get into the dirty details of the CPU, the instruction set, addressing, etc. It's overwhelming so I need to stop myself. Hah, I got to be systematic about this.

OK, I'm sleepy AF, that's enough.

Mood: sleepy

Today I revised a whopping 2 chapters of my Avatar/Backrooms x-over. I'm about to try the next. I'm not finalizing these just yet. The point is to whip them into shape. They're ... awful ... as I simply typed them from my notebook at warp speed. The first chapter I revised ballooned from 4K+ words to 6K+ words. Today's second and third chapters also ballooned by a modest amount ~500 words a pop. In fairness that was a very, extra sprawling first chapter whilst the others were mercifully short and to the point.

It's possible I revised them spicier than I intended. Welp, it's a Spider x Neteyam fanfic at heart, isn't it? Yet we've only seen them together at the start of it. And we won't see their dynmic blossom until I get to the 5th Arc (I'm working on the 3rd Arc atm). Apparently there's a lot of um, er emotion that yearned for releif - keeping it clean I suppose. It's not explicit; I don't expect these chapters to move the needle anywhere near to M or X.

Ah, and then a development that took me by surprise, Grace Augustine x Payakan - OK, na'vi!Payakan. He's an OC but I'm drawing from the original character a lot.

What I'm really looking forward to present is how Miles Quaritch grows as a character through this setting. In the fic's 'canon', Quaritch / Varang ended badly ... like he steals Spider from her badly. Until she returns (thanks to the Backrooms) to take what's hers. She's so epic. (The fic's premise is that the Backrooms permit travel between worlds and in addition to that it changes your body to something like that of the native population; a so-called avatar body.)

This fourth chapter I'd like to at least start revising tonight sees Spider educate himself about the Backrooms and how to use it. Like 'Async', the RDA and its scientists love to document everything. He's tapping into that. It sits at 4K words in this sorry state so there's just no way I finish it tonight. I'll make a good start of it though. Then I'm off to watch Godzila Minus Zero heh heh

Mood: excited

I woke up feeling strangely today. It wasn't ye olde blood sugar - that's its own brand of strangely. Got to be the weather. Alright, so, that aside I was productive today. I'm only three pages away from my first (of several) revisions to chapter 21. Normally, I'd just go back again and again until there's nothing left to agonize about. I've got 9 more of these chapters to go plus ... AO3 is down so it's not like I've got this schedule to maintain. So what I'm going to do is give each chapter a top to bottom revision then circle back to where I started. Then I'll nurse the chapters individually until either I can't take it anymore or, um, miraculously they transform into something that's postable.

Mood: pleased

Alright so this morning I typed the final chapter of my Arc #3; that's a total of 10 chapters and ~30K words that I need to edit. I'm going to do that over the AO3 outage to keep busy. I'm almost tempted to post these 'raw' drafts to let anyone peek into what's to come. It's just that it's rough and raw. I wrote the 1st and 2nd drafts by hand; for the final stretch I simply sit and type at my top word per minute speed without stopping to correct anything. So ... yeah, that would be an eyesore. I'd need to give it a good read through at least once. I got to think about that.

I want to go through the extant chapters of the Avatar/Backrooms to do a couple of things: remove all the typos I keep finding (gah) and remove anything that contradicts what I'm going to do with this. It's one of the dangers of writing a series this broad and layered; a stray statement dropped by a character could be contradicted a ten chapters later.

Lastly I do want to repost my ancient fics from like 20 years ago. There's just a few concerns that trouble me. Especially for my Thundercats stuff. A lot of what I wrote then involved OCs that my fellow fandom authors devised for themselves. We were to an extent a LARP fandom - especially inside the TCATGR, a fan group I created for similarly bent fans. I just can't repost that work; it wouldn't make sense to anyone who wasn't part of that scene. And it's technically other's personas. So, a fair chunk of my Thundercats work will have to remain private. (And, if I'm going to be honest, a lot of that material specifically, um, may have been too wild....)

OK. So, um, I'll have better luck with my Inuyasha and Avatar:TLA works, I took better care of those. Ah, and then the Transformers. Oh, Salome Sensei, where ever you are, you are single handedly responsible for what have to be my most insanely popular works. Who would have thought Sam/Bee would be the thing I'm remembered for? Well that and the Esnovelotoris Amateuris.