Today, I started writing my first interactive fiction piece. It's something that's interested me for a little while, as I've become very invested in narrative-heavy video games, so I wanted to give it a try.
I'm currently working on my first bit, using one of the several fictional universes I've had in my head for years now. At some point I shall publish it here. I'm writing it using Twine, so I'll be able to publish it as an interactive web site when I'm done.
Slowly but surely, I'm poking and prodding at this here site and making it into a thing. I'm just enjoying taking my time and editing HTML by hand again - it's been many years since I really have, and getting back into the swing of it has been a lot of fun.
I'm sitting at a coffee shop here in town, with a lovely warm day outside, the windows and doors open, typing this into nano via a terminal connection on my iPad Pro. For this, I'm using Panic's fantastic SSH client for iOS, Prompt, and it's kind of amazing to be running a full-fledged SSH terminal connection on a device like a 9.7" iPad Pro.
I'm doing all this typing on the 9.7" iPad Pro Smart Keyboard, and I find I like it a lot more than I had initially expected. My main computers at home are a 2015 Retina MacBook Pro and a 2010-generation Mac Pro. I've long been accustomed to Apple laptop keyboards, and on the Mac Pro I use an old-fashioned mechanical keyboard. I've also put some time in on a new Retina MacBook (the one-port model) and while I love the size and weight, I am deeply disappointed by that keyboard, so I'm surprised to find that I actually like the Smart Keyboard on the iPad better than I do the keyboard on the one-port MacBook. It just feels better, despite being of similar thinness and shallowness-of-key-travel. And somehow, when not in use, the keyboard folds into the cover enough that it still feels nice to hold.
I have some more plans for the site, but I'm going to wait and work on them until I get home. I'm finding tilde.town to be a lot of fun, and it's kind of invigorating to get back to my web roots.
I've also added some new BitPics - go check 'em out!
Because I'm super into the whole old-fashioned web feel of the tilde.town experience, and because I'm a photographer, I wanted to do something photographic-wise here that would feel appropriately '80s/'90s tech-inspired. So, I'm introducing a new section of the site: BitPics!
BitPics are 1-bit black & white photography, done by yours truly (using the Iconfactory's truly wonderful BitCam app for the iPhone). I love the aesthetic and it's a change of pace from what I normally shoot, so tilde.town seems like the perfect place for a little photographic experimentation. Check it out!
This here's my first jaunt into the world of tilde.town. I...don't really know what I'm going to do here? It's not as though I don't have plenty of outlets for writing, between social media and my existing web domains, And I can't even claim any nostalgia for signing onto a server over SSH to edit files, because by the time I started doing web stuff in high school in the late '90s we were already on the "writing code in Notepad" stage of development.
But honestly, there's something very freeing about having a little ol' tilde-based account and a simple black screen w/ green text running nano. I kind of feel like there's no obligation here to be anything in particular, so I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.