Three hours of Savoir-Faire later

Whew... that's enough of that, for now. I really like the game's setting: feels like late nineteenth-century Europe, with just enough magical realism to pull you in. Like a lot of other modern IF I've enjoyed, Savoir-Faire's universe acts like our own, but for one or two extra directions of movement; in this case, your character, an aging dandy and dilletante magician (who is nosing about his uncle's mysteriously abandoned mansion to seek debt relief), can fashion magical links between objects that share similar properties (such as an onion skin and a sheet of paper), and thereafter what affects one will also affect the other. Naturally, this trick is key to solving nearly all the game's puzzles, and it's wonderful fun to come upon the solutions, since they all involve juxtaposing real-world objects in ways that don't make sense in this world, but are perfectly reasonable in the game's world, once you learn how it works.

Also, because it's an Emily Short story, it's just a delight to read. Your character may be wandering alone through a creaky old house now, but it's the house where he grew up, and the many rooms, objects, and even smells that he encounters work not just as puzzle-props but a backdrop for him to recall his past, and the colorful characters who inhabited it. It's an interesting way to develop characters in an interactive medium.

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My previous entry's link wasn't quite right; Hines has carbonized MaxTADS, but not MaxZIP yet. He does link to a native OS X Zip interpreter called Zoom, though, so that's what I used. It's OK... the page-scrolling keys don't work with it, which is actually rather a bummer, to me.

Meanwhile, I placed an order with feelies.org, a nonprofit launched by Short and a few other IF notables. It's a service that helps IF authors create and sell physical props that go with their games. (Back in their 1980s heyday, Infocom loved to do this). For less than $20 (including shipping), I ordered feelies for four games (Savoir-Faire among them), plus a little intro-to-adevnture-games book written by Short &c. Pretty good.

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I saw a small mammal scuttle across our kitchen floor while playing, and told Noah about it. (No, it wasn't M. I dunno where she is.) We have (to the best of our knowledge) no food lying around where small mammals can access it, so I am hoping that this one is a loner, and not indicative of legions of furry critters a-chew-chew-chewing through my Annie's organic pasta collection even as I type. Seeing no evidence in this direction, we decided to leave it be for now.

Foo

Today was not a good day. Over the weekend, I installed a Jaguar (Mac OS X v10.2) pre-release on my iBook, so that I might better write about it. (It's been installed for a month or two on a G4 cube in our house, but, well, that's not my writing machine. And it (or, more likely, the combination of it and its monitor) has some frustrating video problems.) While some things still work, some important bits to my applicaton work (like a local MySQL server, good for holding test data) broke. Enh. I can work around it, but the workarounds involve waiting for the IT guys at HMS to do stuff. Well, I put the requests in. They do a good job, but the reason I prefer developing everything locally is that I never have to wait for anything. OTOH, it also means I can break stuff irrevocably, because I'm only pretending to be a sysadmin.

Oh well. I stand by my decision. It is easier to write about the OS when it's here in front of my face, at least.

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In other news, I am still broke, which is unspeakably frustrating. It leads me to think uncharacteristically snotty things, such as: Apparently when I asked the teller on Friday when the paycheck's funds would be available, and he said "Monday", there was an implied "Not" that I missed. Seriously, this (excaberated by the humid heat) had my blood boiling, on my walk home. Good thing there was some ice cream left, once I arrived. Fsssssss.

What makes me super-sad is the fact that I worked through the weekend without a care about my financial situation because the end was in sight. Now, although rationally I know that the dumb check's bound to clear very soon, it still means that my situation's fallen back into a undefined state of flux and mystery. Dude, that totally sucks. I am now shuddering with dreadful thoughts of my paying the bank a visit tomorrow to ask them again, and having the teller go "?" at me. I have no idea where that bloody receipt from my Friday deposit is. Who keeps those? Round and round. Arrrrgh.

It's not all bad: this morning Noah loaned me (without my even asking) four dollars so I could afford the subway and a mugga Diesel dark. That was very nice. (Also, I packed myself a lunch for the first time in my adult life. Pretty good, actually: peanut butter sammich and an applesauce. Left the spoon at work, though.) I would like to stop being a charity case case now, please, Captain Universe. Please aim your Eternity Beam at my job to make it work like it's supposed to. Thank you. Your loyal servant, J.