Jack – Page 22 – Dhakajack

Review: Deshaun Steven’s Ship Log

In this short Twine game, Deshaun works tech for shows on the intergalactic equivalent of the Love Boat. As the story begins, he has a few not very ambitious aspirations to improve his station in life: things like do more exercise, work out his relationship with his ex-girlfriend (or maybe find a new one), and perhaps get a better job.

The story is told through his personal log entries, which serve as a diary. The informal language, abbreviations, and content make it clear that he expects that he is the only one who would read this log, so he is honest in what he records in it. As you would expect, the reader follows the log entries in chronological order, learning Deshaun’s story as he sets down his thoughts and impressions of the day. Occasionally, there must be nothing to write about, and the date skips forward.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

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Review: a partial list of things for which i am grateful

This short work is implemented in twine and is more something that you play with than play. There is no narrative thread. Unless I am missing something, this really is a list (partial) of things about which the author is grateful.

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Review: The Fifth Sunday

In my post about first impressions of games based on the IF listing and their cover art and blurbs, I criticized a few of the entries for lack of detail, but have since become aware that some of these entries are ports of games developed by Chinese authors. As far as I know, this is the first time these games have made their appearance in IFcomp, and I want to welcome them and thank them for making the effort. Still, I hope that in future IFcomps they submit some sort of blurb for the listing page, because that would improve their chances in the competition and also increase the chances that their games will get played and judged.

The first of these games that I played was “The Fifth Sunday”, which does not have religious significance as I had speculated, but relates to a month with five weeks. On that last week in this particular April, the main character is invited to a week-long party, which turns into a setting for serial murders. Finding the murderer is the goal of the game, but I won’t say in this review who the murderer is, so it’s safe to keep reading.

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Review: The Cube in the Cavern

Make a note: today, for the first time, I got through an entire game by Andrew Schultz, more or less on my own. I’ve played many of Andrew’s wordplay games, and I have always had a hard time getting on the same wavelength, but in this game, the logical seemed to flow naturally once I caught onto the general scheme.

[Some spoilers follow beyond this point]

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IFcomp 2017: First Impressions

I haven’t done online reviews for IFcomp since 2013, but this year I will give it a try.

Let me start with first impressions of the 2017 IFcomp entries based on nothing beyond the list provided on the contest website. For each entry, this list provides a cover image, blurb, content warnings, and a download link. For each, I tried to glean what I could from this sparse information. Based entirely on my own speculation and without having seen anything of the games themselves, I also made a [perhaps wildly inaccurate] prediction for each entry. I make no claim that these predictions will have anything to do with the actual games, but by sheer numbers, I hope I’m on the mark with a few of them.

I mostly did this for my own amusement, and should point out that when I started I didn’t really appreciate how very many entries IFcomp received this year. This is probably TLDR; for most folks, so feel free to skip around to any entries that interest you. The order of listing is based on my personal shuffle, and will be the order that I follow for subsequent reviews, except where noted.

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LED Audio Spectrum Display

This project came about, as usual, by accident. I was rooting through my box of IC’s for another project and came across a chip that I must have ordered sometime in the past and forgot about: the MSGEQ7, a “Seven Band Graphic Equalizer” chip. Not the best name — the chip doesn’t do any sort of equalization; it just analyzes an audio signal to generate information that can drive a display.

When I looked up the datasheet, it dawned on me that I had ordered the chip at one point with the intent of making something along the lines of a sound organ. Now that I had looked it up, though, I thought it would be more interesting to make bar-graph display that I could integrate into some future project.

This is a typical application for this chip and some quick web surfing turned up a few descriptions of arduino-based projects that put the chip to just such a use [1,2,3,4]. Between their descriptions and plenty of sample code, it didn’t seem like that big a task to roll my own.

So, let me describe what I did. The overall goal was to take an audio signal, feed it to the MSGEQ7 chip, and have it essentially break the signal into seven frequency bands, i.e., take the signal and display it very coarsely in frequency domain — sort of a poor man’s FFT.

Details are below, or skip right the demo video to see a working version of the display.

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SOTA: Hermannskogel (OE/WI-001)

I think it is due to a reshuffle of Austrian SOTA summits, but according to the current database, there is only one summit in the Vienna (Wien) region, WI-001, Hermannskogel. I guess that made the choice of which peak to activate easy.

The Hermannskogel is the highest point near Vienna, and up to World War I, served as the cartographic zero point for Austria-Hungary. The Habsburgwarte, pictured here, is a rebuilt stone tower that sits on top of the hill and sports a variety of antennas and radomes.

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SOTA: Cabeza Arcon (EA4/MD-053)

A view from the peak featuring my unusual choice of footwear for a mountain hike.

For my last summit activation in Spain on this trip, I had two enticing options: first, I could aim for some of the ten-point peaks that lie along ridges or I could activate a peak for the first time. There are two good prospects in the first category: the peaks of Valdemartin (EA4/MD-004), Cabezas de Hierro (EA4/MD-002), and the Asómate de Hoyos (EA4/MD-006) all along one trail, and it looks like that trailhead could be reached by taking the ski lift up from the Estacion de Esqui de Valdesqui (presuming it runs in the summer). Similarly, Najarra (EA4/MD-013) and Bailanderos (EA4/MD-011) lie along a trail, which could probably be accessed by parking at 40.82797N x 3.83015W. In fact, it might be easier to reach Asómate de Hoyos by continuing west from Bailandreos rather than east from Cabezas de Hierro.

Predictably, I went for the first-time activation of EA4/MD-053, Cabeza Arcon. This is in no way a technically difficult peak, so I assume that it was recently added to the list of summits.

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SOTA: Nevero (EA1/SG-003)

Looking at SOTAmaps, several associations overlap to the north of Madrid. I realized that without really going too far out of my way, I could visit a ten point peak in the EA1/SG association, which would put me over the top for gold level on the SOTA mountain explorer award. I’m not that much into awards, but why not? Having flown 8000 km to get here, another 20 km on the road is a drop in the bucket.

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SOTA: Cerro del Castillo (EA4/MD-052)

Recently, I attended a conference in Madrid and had another one scheduled a week later in Vienna. Instead of flying back to Madagascar between them (insane), I decided to take a few days leave in Spain (sane and fun).

There are plenty of mountains within an hour’s drive of Madrid, and many of these peaks are found in national parks. Just to the other side of that central range is the historic city of Segovia, so I booked a hotel a few kilometers outside Segovia.

Between Madrid and the hotel, I identified Cerro del Castillo (EA4/MD-052) as a target of convenience. It is a four-point summit in a region full of ten point summits, but I thought that I could do it in what remained of the afternoon after checking out of the hotel in Madrid and picking up a rental car at the airport.

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