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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   377 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 12th, 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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Thanks for sharing this. The project is fascinating to me from a technical perspective.

I'm currently working on a make-like build system for automating LLM workflows like yours. I've only been using it for internal projects so far, but I might try putting together an example that outputs material compatible with your system. So I looked into some of the technical details, and I have a few questions for you.

Q1

It looks like each novel is stored in its own git repo. I dug through your https://github.com/JohnQPulp/CupOfGold repo and I think I understand how all the info is stored. My first question is: is the annotation format you use in pulp.txt standard for visual novels or something you invented? Specifically, in the lines

All afternoon the wind sifted out of the black Welsh glens, crying notice that Winter was come sliding down over the world from the Pole; and riverward there was the faint moaning of new ice. It was a sad day, a day of gray unrest, of discontent.<e>"Winter... of discontent" opens Steinbeck's first novel. That's some neat, Shakespearean <book>The Winter of Our Discontent|career bookending</book>.</e>
b=wales

The gently moving air seemed to be celebrating the loss of some gay thing with a soft, tender elegy.
n:r=Robert Morgan; n:m=Mother Morgan; n:g=Gwenliana; n:h=Henry Morgan

I'm wondering if the html-like tags and the b=wales metadata stuff is formally documented anywhere?

Q2

These two repos look like how your generating the actual HTML from a book repo:

But what are you using to automate the actual git repos of the books? Could you walk me through that workflow a bit? (This is the part that I might try automating with my own tool.)

For example, I don't see anything in the book repos that look like they are designed to enforce consistency (like a character sheet) anywhere. All the material in the repo looks more like a final product than intermediate developer/artist "documentation". Do you generate any intermediate files like this?

Q3

What's the approximate cost for the full conversion? How much time does it take? (both manual and API/compute)

The metadata is (poorly) documented in this blog post: Converting Books Into Visual Novels Part 0: The pulp.txt Format. It's part of a series of seven or so posts I'm still only partway through making, where I plan to walk through the whole process. Here are the other two currently completed as well: Converting Books Into Visual Novels Part 0.5: Creating book.txt and Converting Books Into Visual Novels Part 1: The First Edit — Creating the Starter pulp.txt. (Again, you'll have to excuse the really bad technical writing in these, since I'm very much not good at it!)

(Also, if you're looking for a book to reference, probably any of the others is better than Cup of Gold, since what with that one being the first, I was still figuring a lot of the details out, and hadn't realized that giving all the characters one-letter IDs was a stupid idea.)

The overall pulp.txt format is one I created myself, for a couple reasons:

First, I wanted an enforcement mechanism to ensure that, as part of editing, the original text doesn't end up accidentally getting changed. So I wanted that logic baked into the "compiler", that pulp.txt (the metadata-enhanced text) would reference book.txt (the original text), to make sure they add up to the same complete book. And that required custom code.

And then second, I just my own format so that I could always be able to add in all my own idiosyncratic parsing rules and not have to deal with the idiosyncratic parsing rules of other existing visual novel formats. (Which I admit isn't a great reason to create my own format, though to be fair, book-to-VN converting is a fairly idiosyncratic venture.)

I'm not sure I fully understand your questions about the git repo automation and character sheet enforcement, but maybe the blog posts will answer those questions. (If not though, feel free to ask again.)

As for the cost, it seems to be converging to about $200 in image API spend per book, though the number will vary depending on the length of the book and number of different background and characters and character outfits.

For the time, this latest book Pride and Prejudice (~122k words) took me almost a month, although admittedly that could have been shorter if I was more focused, and also wasn't still making updates to my processes. I think if I had everything ironed out correctly, a book of that length could take as little as two weeks to do, though probably not much shorter than that, without starting to lose quality and accuracy.

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