Is it Thursday already? It seems like it was just yesterday that shinies were on a far and distant horizon, waiting for a favorable wind or a strong current to bring us to our eventual rendezvous. And yet, the day does indeed gleam brightly, and that can only mean one thing: It is time to S H I N E !

The real question, I suppose, is what will today’s shiny be? It’s been my method to discuss what I’ve been doing, and to show something that helps to elucidate the topic in a manner that makes it easier to understand and gives us something cool to look at along the way. But, for the last week or so, most of what I’ve been tackling has been one of two things: Source Code, or datafiles.

Do I really want to spend my shiny post talking about fine-tuning the thresholds and criteria that Caspian uses to determine what his stylized map renderer should show at each zoom level? Do I tell the story about how I agonized over how many pixels thick the shoreline around a body of freshwater, like a lake or pond, should be? Or how I spent a day figuring out how 130 Yoru made it onto Map I when we ran the population simulator on the map this week? (They sneaked in via the Taiga, it turned out)

Or do I show a screenshot of the debugger running while I try to figure out how my code determined there were 192% Neran living in a Kypiq city in the Broadleaf forest? (I’m sure there’s a story to tell there, but part of me fears it involves ink and quill and may not be appropriate.) I’m not even certain I know what 192% looks like, honestly, so I’m not sure what a good shiny image for that would be.

But that’s how it goes some weeks. Sometimes, when you’re working, you churn out wonder after wonder, other times you spend the week like a MASH surgeon, knee deep in the intestines of god knows who, just doing everything you can to make sure the war effort marches on. As important as that work often is, “shiny” probably doesn’t describe it.

Of course, sometimes, you’re so focused on the viscera at hand, that you don’t notice the work everyone else is doing. And when you miss it like that, then when you do go back and see it again it's almost like looking at something entirely new. I suppose that's one benefit to being so preternaturally focused on one particular goal or task to the exclusion of everything else for a week; even the mundane or the usually familiar can surprise. Like when the Potion Master updates the timing and positioning on certain combat moves, for example.

Ah well. I guess I've got nothing. Sorry I couldn't think of anything shiny to show you all this week. I'm sure that next time there will be something to show.

In the meantime, stay s h i n y my friends!