IgnatiusReilly
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IgnatiusReilly
3d ago
Over the past couple months I finished up three new books for my Public Domain Pulp book-to-visual-novel project.
The first was Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet, where my main goal was to finally fully address the sprite-gen quality inconsistency issues. This ended up mostly being a success, with the revamped partial-body generation approach producing more cohesive and cleaner character results overall; and, as a bonus, the sprite background removal cleanup was made much much easier by both this and a couple further process improvements around alpha masking and boundaries. (Saving my time and my wrist.)
Second was Chekhov's The Duel, which made some further marginal visual improvements on the new sprite-gen approach, though the bigger goal was finally tackling improving the color normalization process: making the dark areas darker and the light areas lighter and the off-color areas less off-color. The improvements here were again somewhat marginal, but I think still probably worth it for making the images more visually striking and less washed-out.
And then most recent was Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which ended up mostly being about process-efficiency improvements: automatic regex fixer-upping and parallel image generation/iteration support and easier expression variation batching and what-not. Aesthetically, the images came out strong, though that was less about process quality improvements and more about 1920s detective noir having a good visual vibe.
So on the quality front overall then, things are starting to look adequate now. There are definitely still shortcomings that I’d like to keep improving on, but even if the quality were to end up stalling out at current levels, I think that would be okay. (Something I was not feeling after Pride and Prejudice.)
I think what matters much more at this point is just getting more books out. The conversion process has still been painfully slow, and the rate of starring on Github has also been disappointingly slow; and those two facts seem related, what the project having so few titles to its name (and fewer ones yet of acceptable editing-quality).
But I think I can start picking up the pace from here, putting the process efficiency improvements to better use, getting more books out faster, and especially getting some big titles like Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment out by the end of the year. And with each new book, the chance of virality should increase. Hopefully.
IgnatiusReilly
13d ago
It's like being a prepper after Hurricane Katrina.
Well Hurricane Rita hit only three weeks later, though I don't know what the fiscal analogy there is.
"This is Water" has good practical value for organizing your thoughts against the tedious chore that is grocery shopping. It's worth reading for that reason, at least.
As far as its actual advice about taking control of your thoughts goes: it seems of dubious value for the average person (at least going off of myself and my own brain, where I strongly doubt I could successfully redirect my thinking processes intentionally in any direction over any long-lasting timescale).
However: you could argue that for the peculiar mind that is DFW (and perhaps others who go down that insane path that is becoming a writer), it might have helped him compared to the counterfactual where he didn't follow that advice, where maybe he would have otherwise killed himself sooner.
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