I've been going back and forth on how to continue with #CartooningTheScreen since I didn't want to do it as blog posts. I've been going between "full comic pages" and "minigames in the form of interactive exhibits". I started tinkering with the game idea but today I think I figured out a basic framing for the comic that gets at what I want:

A king who wants an orderly rule
A chaos goddess, foiling the king's wants but occasionally sparking meaning
Player One, an everyman stuck in between the two

Chaos rolls the dice, order passes the result through a lookup table to claim it's a particular event. The player interprets it as a believable simulation.

Then continue from there with more scenarios of "meaningfulness in computing", building up a more complete picture.

Something I'm experimenting with in developing a little static blog site for #CartooningTheScreen is a system that organizes by an X/Y coordinate and a color(one of eight preset colors) as well as date and alphabetic.

I realized that what's important in organizing the blog is not tagging. Tagging and labelling is make-work for a library. Everyone browsing is using spatial references and common themes. The little hint of "this is related to that" is mostly suggested through positioning, and color acts as a theme on top of that.

This system will generate a visual map, as well as linear indexes for all of these properties.

The "nearby" algorithm is this short snippet of Python that makes a spiral:

nearby_lut = []
nearby_map = \
["KJIHGFE",
"LqponmD",
"MredclC",
"NsfabkB",
"OtghijA",
"Puvwxyz",
"QRSTUVW"
]
nearby_path = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW"
for n in nearby_path:
for row in range(len(nearby_map)):
for col in range(len(nearby_map[row])):
if nearby_map[row][col] == n:
nearby_lut.append((col,row))

It's semi-inspired by one I did eons ago for pySpades to remove players from being stuck inside walls. That one actually had a more substantial algorithm to compute the spiral LUT in a three-dimensional fashion. I think I could have done this method too since the 3D part was low-depth and it preferred popping out the players horizontally.

After deliberation on the details #agonlight2, case, peripherals, cables, sdcard have been ordered. I'm getting to the stage with programming it where I can't just rely on emulator testing. The main sticking point was the video conversion options being dodgy VGA-HDMI adapters that would use the one HDMI port I already have taken - thus I ended up getting a tiny 7" VGA monitor instead.

#retrocomputing #AgonLight #agon #z80 #CartooningTheScreen #gamedev