Fiction Friday: Echoes of the Past

I spent most of my free time this week that I’d otherwise have used to revise or make odd posts about nothing in particular, to instead build a spreadsheet in Numbers.app for proper calendar conversion. The last time I had something that actually worked for this was a program on an old calculator that I can’t find at the moment. Doing it by hand (mostly) takes some time but is generally workable, unless I need to convert a ton of dates all at once like I’ve needed to do recently.

The new sheet’s not perfect but it’s close enough for my needs. Leapyears don’t work so good, for one. There’s also a touch of rounding error in very small date increments away from the ‘base’ overlap date. Also, the last day of a month mysteriously is displayed as the zeroth day of the next, unless it’s the last day of the year. Wacky.

So, with that now in hand… What I’m presently posting doesn’t really change at all. It did however help me identify a huge problem in PS that I have to fix before I can start sharing that with the world. I think the results will be good. Last year I took a huge swing away from the direction I originally intended - because, the more I stared at it and reworked it, the damn thing felt far too much like a bad copy of Allen Kitchen’s My Tutor Has Six Tails and its sequel over at coyotes.org.¹

Here’s Echoes of the Past in the meantime. I believe it was just called ‘Chamaeleon’ in the last rendition. I removed the very last section (an old ‘journal entry’ of Jay’s). I’m debating on whether to work it into the next part as exposition, or dropping it and working in the explanations elsewhere. We’ll see what the week brings.

This also means there’s just one more post before we get into completely new territory. I can’t promise it won’t suck, but I will try not to make it industrial shop-vac levels of negative air pressure. Thanks for bearing with me so far.