Another week, and I’m still stacking chips. Last week’s chips looked like this:

Reflection

At the start of the week, I wrote my high-level goals down:

1. Increase Ezio Collection content buffer
2. Create at least one post or video about how I make Game Shows content
3. Import more content into this site
4. Add more Eurovision data

Well, I didn't touch the last one with a bargepole, once again. But I did complete the other three. Not bad for a shorter bank holiday week.

Update

I started the week by deciding how to pull in content from my home-made, artisinal GIFs site. Sources of content in Flourish were very much one-to-one, one source file for one piece of content. I could either pull in the GIFs and create one new file for each, … or …

For an entirely unrelated reason I had previously added a CSV file of all of the GIFs on the site. Well, if Flourish could understand a CSV file as being a collection of sources, not one source, I could use that directly.

Despite being the only author of Flourish, it is something I've been working on for years, and then only sporadically. The first commit of this current version (long story, I'll tell you some other time) was made in 2016. I do not hold it in my head, like you might a codebase that is your day job. Whenever I add more to it, I often have to read back my own code, tests, and the documentation to remember how it works before I can get started. Kids, it is rarely a bad idea to add tests and documentation to your side projects, even if you're the only one using them.

But that said, I was very confident there was nothing inherently stopping me from making one file act as multiple sources. And by Wednesday morning I'd added CSV rows as source files and released version 0.9.5 and started writing an import script to pull the GIFs CSV, and the template changes to have them appear in the site.

Feeling like a change of pace, I spent a day putting together the raw and the cooked footage of the “Terror of the Sun” mission from chapter 54 of Horizon Zero Dawn. I'd made a couple of structural changes to the game's cinematic footage when putting this video together, and wanted to talk about it. But also it served as an excuse to watch that sequence again, as it is one of my favourite moments in the game.

Until this week I had just one behind the scenes video, illustrating how I edit the branching conversations to alter and hopefully improve the structure, and eliminate all the timewasting parts. I spent most of the time in making that video figuring out how to make the timeline animation (I ended up writing a bunch of numbers on a piece of A3 paper for the maths). That just used game audio, there was no commentary.

I've been nervous about making more behind the scenes videos as it would definitely involve some narration on my part, and like most people I don't like hearing my recorded voice. But I felt I had been putting it off for too long (months) and if I didn't do something soon, I never would. And I did really want to talk about this scene now it had been published. So I recorded myself talking about the video, with the pauses, umms, errs and all, typed it up, and then rerecorded it. And ended up sounding a bit lifeless. My best “NPR podcast” voice as my friend Worm put it. Hopefully that's broken my nervousness and the next one will sound better.

After hitting publish on that, I finished the work of pulling in GIFs to this site.

Then I spent Friday writing a script to import GitHub activity into this site. And here's Friday's GitHub activity preserved and published, as an example. It can be a bit noisy, but it is part of my collecting stuff from elsewhere to preserve approach, and I can't imagine anyone but me would bother reading it anyway.

And Saturday morning I indulged myself by starting to make some Babylon 5 GIFs (having just finished rewatching the best of it). Even in the HD remastered version, there's a lot of visual noise in the video. And if there's something that bumps up the file size of a GIF it is lots of rapid changes. So I added the option to use a denoise filter to my script that makes GIFs. Another project where I have documentation and tests to reduce the struggle to remember how it works later.