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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   635 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 17, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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As mentioned earlier this week, I want to A/B test my opening paragraph to see if it's an improvement. I've created a Google Forms survey. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. The combined word count of the two paragraphs is ~400 words, so it shouldn't take more than five minutes of your time.

Well, like I said last week, collision detection was easy, I also figured out how to switch animations to a death sequence once a bug gets hit, though it's a bit janky. I wanted to link a screen grab, but it's a bit hard to set up in a way that clearly shows what I wanted to show, but basically it's looping instead of stopping on the "dead" frame, and since it has less frames than the walking animation, there are a few blank frames causing the bug to disappear. For this week I want to un-jank it, and hopefully start on using the sorting system to remove dead creatures from the simulation.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Nothing this week. Lots of work, family logistics, had a cold, plenty of excuses. I hope to get back to it on the coming weekend.

My "pure prose" project is chugging along better than my VN. I've written the first versions of two chapters out of twelve and I am quite enjoying the process. I expect it to speed up next week, when my digital Lent will begin.

I've always known that the writer was not the master of the plot, you just put your characters into a situation and wrote down what happened (and if they tried to derail the story, you had to change the circumstances), but I've noticed another thing. I'd call it "genre brain" vs "sane brain".

It's not so much about "genre savviness", as TVTropes would say. If a realtor wants to sell an expensive condo in a porn flick, she'll personally show the prospective buyer how good the kitchen island, the bedroom, the sofa and the hot tub are for shagging. That's just how the genre works, and the viewer won't accept anything different. If a PI is following a suspect into an unlit warehouse, he is getting pistol-whipped.

But if you just put regular characters that live in your sane, normal-world brain into a genre situation, they won't do this. You can always wipe down the marble countertop or even replace the bedsheets, but dry-cleaning an expensive sofa or cleaning the hot tub just because you thought offering some poon as a bonus might get someone to overpay $250K? And you will get just $2500 out of it?

If you just start changing the circumstances to make the situation work, you will find yourself leaving the genre and that's not what you want to do. Your readers don't want the PI to call the police and watch the entrance. They want to see him lose consciousness with no long-term health repercussions and come to in a different location even if they complain about it afterwards on the internet.

Maybe a talented writer can construct situations that are both realistic and require genre logic from the characters at the same time without feeling contrived. But if you are a regular hack that wants to write straight genre fiction, you have to (hopefully, temporarily) change your brain. You have to think that yes, it's totally normal for someone to buy an overpriced condo just because the realtor, who is obviously a hot buxom woman, is throwing in some no-strings-attached intercourse as a bonus. A "savvy" character living in this "porn brain" will only worry about overpaying if this means he can get another session with the realtor and her equally hot colleague.

And I thought I could switch into this mode at will. "Surely I've read enough noir fiction that I can just slip into this gear and cruise along," though I. Hell no. The writer in me loves how clever he is, how he can get the right outcome despite his characters' realistic worries. The editor in me dreads the moment when he'll have to go back and trim out all the realism that keeps sneaking back in. Not because it requires obvious contrivance, but because it simply makes the story worse.

I had some back-and-forth with @jake on this topic, and I think it ultimately comes down to knowing your audience. If you're writing a work intended as pure escapism, your readers will be a lot more forgiving of contrivances and illogical character decisions. If it's meant to be a work of ruthless psychological realism, your readers will expect the characters to act accordingly and make rational, believable decisions: if the characters just do whatever is most convenient for the author, they will feel cheated. You can also aim to strike a happy medium, having the characters make all the decisions you would expect a character in a work of that genre to do, but also include little details and in-universe justifications for "why didn't he just do X?", to reward readers who are reading more closely than the casual reader. (This is arguably the most difficult approach of the three: escapist genres are escapist for a reason, and it takes quite a bit of work to make them seem grounded and psychologically realistic.)

There's also the Coen brothers' favoured approach, which is to have your characters make all the foolish decisions you would expect a character in a noir thriller to make, but establish that those characters are morons in-universe, so that their idiotic decisions seem in-character. Sometimes this can work, especially if the work is a black comedy (as many of the Coen brothers' films are); sometimes it just raises further questions. In Burn After Reading, it makes sense that two airheaded personal trainers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when they attempt to blackmail a former CIA analyst, and end up hopelessly out of their depth. It does not make sense that they are only marginally more moronic than the CIA analyst himself (his alcoholism and grandiosity notwithstanding), or another character who is a US Marshal. Inevitably the audience starts to wonder why such overtly blithering idiots weren't put out to pasture years prior. (All that being said, I did enjoy Burn After Reading, but it's a movie you have to switch your brain off while watching to properly enjoy it, which wasn't the case with Fargo or The Big Lebowski.)

I’ve continued updating the photos in my China photo album. The rate of completion has slowed rather significantly because I’ve been busy and the amount of perfectionist pixel-picking I do has begun to tire me out very badly.

18 pictures are complete now, instead of just seven (I like to frame this as me nearing 20% of my target of 100 pics). Several photos have been removed and put under the chopping block for reediting, while some new ones have been added.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/204084770@N07/albums/72177720331609421/

Getting a 403 error, might want to update the privacy settings.

Thanks for letting me know. Just made everything in the album public (instead of link sharing), should hopefully work now.

The other day, I read this article from a literary agent-turned-novelist who made the point that a literary agent has to be hooked by a submission from the very first paragraph, and that, in her experience (and contrary to unpublished novelists' claims that their books "start slow, but get better later"), most books which didn't capture her interest from the first paragraph tended not to improve thereafter. She gave very specific instructions for how the first paragraph ought to grab the reader's attention: namely, surprises and discordances that provoke their curiosity, but without overwhelming them with weirdness.

It may seem like obvious advice, but for whatever reason, it prompted me to look at my novel with fresh eyes, and I think the opening needs to do more to grab the reader's attention. (Even if I didn't think that, no literary agent has yet requested the full thing, so I'll have to meet them halfway.) Fortunately, I came up with an idea for a new first paragraph to be inserted immediately before the old first paragraph, and the old first paragraph becomes the second paragraph, largely unchanged. Still need to finish editing the remainder of the manuscript to get it down to ~100k words.

I'd like to A/B test this to see if I'm on the right track, so if any of you would be interested in offering feedback on just the opening paragraph (without knowing if it's the old one or the new one), I'd really appreciate it. They're both no more than 300 words.

I recently read a book that started with "My mother was late to my birth". I remember thinking "ok, that's a pretty decent starting line, good job!" Also, recently read this: https://gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-care which I think makes a lot of sense.

I recently read a book that started with "My mother was late to my birth".

What was the book?

Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio. I didn't remember entirely correctly though - it wasn't the very beginning, there was a short intro paragraph before that. But it would probably worked fine if it were the first sentence too.

I’m up for giving feedback on about as long a passage as you want (within reason).

As someone who’s tried to write sci-fi multiple times but got busy and bogged down in work (and also story-planning considerations), you’re doing better than 90% of us by having a completed manuscript. I have a good number of half-finished stories and plans for such collecting dust.

Link to the Google Forms survey.

I've just filled out the survey and left a pretty long comment with a bunch of pointers.

Thank you!

Thank you! Will DM you shortly.

300 words? I'm in.

Link to the Google Forms survey.

Thank you! Will DM you shortly.

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