let it leave me like a long breath

also one of the things i've definitely been realizing is just... while i can certainly sit at a computer for eight hours (OR MORE) i absolutely do not have eight hours of enthusiastic problem-solving data-entry coding energy in me. maybe four at maximum. and that's fine! but it means after a certain point i really need to just, close the code tabs and do something else, b/c it is absolutely not long-term tenable to put in a few hours of useful work followed by another several hours of listlessly picking at things and feeling bad.

in the past two days i've taken the generator from outputting sentences like "you are a four - arms ed satyr ." to ones like, uh, "You are a four-armed satyr." and sure that's all just polish but what polish it is. also steadily piling on actual descriptive lines, though none of them are hooked up at all; mostly just writing a few templates and then mashing them together in various ways to see what goes poorly or needs further additions ("oh, if yr made out of ichor AND you've got metal stuff shoved through you AND you've got a fire node in play at this point, probably we need to add a line abt how yr ichor is boiling and bubbling around the {metal noun}", for an example of the general kind of stuff i've been doing¹.)

i spent a whole lot of time working on the opening line b/c that's the one that has to go "you are a ____" where filling that blank involves a lot of data synthesis. human? unicorn? tiger-person? two-headed human with the head of a goat? lion chimera with the haunches of a goat and the wings of a bat?

most of the rest of the description generation is sentence templates w/ fairly limited word inclusions but that opening sentence is a real doozy.

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¹ these templates aren't fully independant, since that would be a kind of flat boring "every node adds a new sentence to your description" scenario, and they're not fully interdependant, since that would be a huge combinatory explosion that i would have no hope of ever writing, but sometimes instead of just tossing in some adjectives and subclauses and hoping for the best i gotta write specific lines for specific interactions. ⮌

also i spent SO LONG adding that dumb footnote (mostly looking for a good arrow character and realizing that i maybe have fonts installed wrong or smth??) only to realize after posting that dreamwidth strips id attrs out of yr html, even on yr journal page. cmon. why that.