Timasomo 2026: Final Updates

Updates from my last update!

I sanded! First with the belt sander, for ease of speed, using 80 grit. Then the orbital sander, with 120 then 200 grit, to finish it up.

It did a decent job taking the "edge" off, but in hindsight, using the belt sander for speed was a mistake. It left some directional scratches I couldn't quite get out with the orbital sander. But for the low low price of free-ninety-nine, I'm not that upset about it.

I decided to stain with a dark jacobean stain I already had lying around, in hopes it would help mask the scratches. Also pictured are some sterile towels from work, which were accidentally dropped on the ground, so rather than being used for the sterile procedure they were intended for they were donated to my workshop.

Wiping on the stain, they came out fairly decent. The scratches are still visible, but again, that's okay.

I sealed them with penetrating oil today, they're still drying right now. I'll put them on the wall, maybe tomorrow but more likely Friday, and the project will be a wrap! I'll post follow up photos once they're on the wall.

FPS Game - Roguelike Game Mod

Previously: [1, 2, 3]

Got a decent chunk of stuff done, then I got nerdsniped by two issues only tangentially related to the mod, looking for a reason why the game freezes occasionally, and is talked about a lot on forums, with no clear fix. I managed to narrow it down to the launcher that a lot of people recommend for the game when using certain settings, but I don't feel like digging into the why just yet, since it already burnt a bunch of time; may do it after TiMaSoMo ends, or before the showcase, or whatever.

I also ran into another issue that seemed impossible from narrowing things down, then it turns out that the compiler used for the game didn't replace a single file that the change itself needed; spent far too long on debugging that as well. Because of those two, I fell behind a bit.

Aside from that, finishing up some choices and curses to make it harder, rebalancing some stuff to make it harder, and adding in a few extra items/changes to the base game to make it feel a bit better.

The big pain for the next week is looking around current levels and choosing spots for new items. They're not huge game changers, but they'll make the mod feel more lived-in. I've been immersed in the code part for so long that it may be painful to do that.

Also thinking about if I should make a video trailer or something along those lines to show off gameplay, might be overkill for a v0.1.0 release.

Very excited every year to see what everyone has been making and to see all the awesome, creative endeavors out there! Thank you kfwyre for continuing to host and keep Timasomo alive and well! It's very cool to see the breadth of skill, talent, and hobbies people have!

I think it’s about ready. The short story based on solo journaling RPG prompts has been uploaded to my website. Images drawn on the iPad, added to the post. Likely needs one last proofreading. I don’t think any more changes are in order. Am I very happy and proud of it? Mmmm I’d say the journey was more fulfilling than the finished product. I’ve definitely written better stuff, but this was a fun creative exercise and turning the randomness of writing prompts from a solo RPG into a coherent story was a neat experience. I enjoyed creating the artwork, even if it’s fairly basic.

I’ve gotten all the orange highlighting done. I just need to paint+highlight the shields and then pick out a bunch of tiny details on both models. And then the bases.

It’s coming down to the wire. I should be good! And I have been taking pictures but I will upload them all at the end.

The scissors have been riveted together and heat-treated, although that turns out to be premature. The blades don't make good contact so the scissors are non-functional, they just look cool. I can try to fix them cold, but the gap is pretty wide and I think I'm better off re-introducing the necessary curve with heat. Then I'll re-treat the blades and hope I don't mess them up a second time.

If the fix-up goes well, then I'll polish the blades a bit so they slide more smoothly and get pictures for the showcase!

The Hotel Ritz bird feeder here.

From the last update I made a predictable but from my point of view huge progress.

First things first - the intricate part with quite a few screwholes got used today. It is used to screw down the roof. Yes, half of the roof is screwed down now. I kinda decided to YOLO it and deal with possible problems later. Nah, kinda kidding here - I thought it through, as I still have other parts to screw in and make their screws as invisible as possible, but I would need to screw from both sides so I had to think it through before commiting to screwing down the roof.

Mounting the roof was a bit tricky, as the wood planks it is made of are almost 50cm long (~20 inches) but have only 5x1cm cross-section (2 x 2/5 inches) and some of them got a bit warped so the whole roof isn't precisely squared, if I make sense. This meant I couldn't simply measure some stops and then screw it down. And I'm quite proud of myself how I managed to solve the situation - I made cardboard helpers to see where the half of the feeder is and then aligned the roof to that. This makes sure both halves of the roof will be going down from the middle of the feeder. After measuring once and then cutting once the week before, I also managed to find edge from where I could take measurement if the roof is actually placed right - it's from the black beam (where the halves meet) down to the end of the roof. And it is!

Today I made the other half of the roof, which is actually less warped, and made another pair of intricate parts with quite a few holes (I should probably trademark this term) and painted everything. After that, I can attach the second half of the roof and then the rest of the parts. Well... after I buy more screws, there's obviously already 100 of them in this feeder.

I guess I will make next progras this saturday - on the 31st of October, last day of the month. I don't know if I will actually make the whole thing, but I will get really close and will very likely finish before the showcase thread is up.

I want to let the wine clear for a few more days before bottling, which will take me just into November but I insist that bottling counts as "finishing touches" so it's fine.

I'm not sure how it's going to turn out. I had a taste the other day when I started clearing... and was reminded of the importance of letting it sit in a bottle for a while. Whew!

I spent a lot of the week writing a blog post. I am not really a good writer at all (it was really funny, on the first version I wrote the word "basically" 40 times in like 4000 words...), but after arguing about the topic of the post for way too long with strangers online, I decided that I'll instead write down all my thoughts in a better format. I'll probably post it separately on Tildes in a day or so.

I made a nail polish! (Spoiler alert, I made many more than that - like 9 so far.) I'll share pictures in the showcase.

I had one raging success (currently wearing on my left hand). All my polish friends are stunned. I am stunned. I wrote the theoretical recipe down for it a month ago, and then when I was finally ready (and only low-key sick instead of mostly sick), I slowly put the pieces together over 5ml of base. I worked one step at a time to figure it out. I somehow knocked it out of the park on the first try. From there, I swatched it on plastic, then on a finger, then on multiple fingers with no base coat to find out if it would stain my nails (it did not!!), and finally I've swatched it on my full hand over my regular base coat and with my regular top coat. Now I've made a full size bottle to let sit to see if it displays any weird behavior over time. I'm so pleased. It's so sparkly! It's so vampy! I've gotten multiple "would buy" comments about it, which is gratifying. The best part about this one is that it was inspired by my friend, and when it's time for me to sell it, a portion of the proceeds will go to an animal shelter and wildlife rehab we picked together.

I have had some less than successful things. One polish was going to be a dupe of another discontinued polish for a friend, but I actually wasn't able to make it work. However, now I have this base color recipe living in my head, so I'm gonna have to do sooomething with it. What that might be, I don't know. I also have another couple of polishes that are planned ideas (rather than being improvised) that I'm still workshopping.

This process is so satisfying, and I think my favorite part is discovering middle steps that I can return to later on. Also, maybe unexpectedly... Hand slips are great. Added too much blue to your green? Now you have a fabulous turquoise. Added nine drops of holo flakes instead of four? Let's see what rainbowy goodness will result. This has activated a part of my brain that has largely gone unexercised, since I'm such a committed planner.

Anyway, I'm very excited and I hope I have more time to sink into it soon.

Welp, I didn't make any music this week. Between my job, other software development work (more on that below) and preparing for a Yu-Gi-Oh! regional, I haven't felt the push to make music. Which is a bit upsetting, I hoped I'd at least get one of the two tracks done.

So let me talk about the software at least. This month I continued work on Project Tensho, my YGO simulator platform. As part of it, I realized I needed a way to cache card data, card images and Lua card scripts in a way that is fast and responsive while also not upsetting the upstream providers or running into their rate limits.

So I wrote Courtier, a web API to retrieve these assets and cache them in a local SQLite DB and in an S3 bucket. Hosted on Railway, it's quite fast and does the job well. It's downloaded quite a few GB of card images though so we'll see how costs add up.

I already integrated it into Tensho (except Vercel builds exploded for some reason and the live version is no longer receiving updates - will fix next week) and the plan is to finally add the ability to click a card and be able to read its text and attributes which was missing until now. I also got to remove most of the bundled assets with the app which should make the bundle much leaner.

Courtier is already out, I just haven't announced it anywhere, so I'll probably do a little announcement online alongside posting in the showcase thread.