A Voice of Warning
New release: A Voice of Warning, by Parley P. Pratt.
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Succession in the Presidency
New release: Succession in the Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by B.H. Roberts.
The Great Apostasy
New release: The Great Apostasy, by James E. Talmage.
Also, if you haven’t yet heard of Grandin Press, check them out. They’re publishing nice paperback versions of a lot of these Mormon classics and have some good videos on their site explaining why these books matter.
Council of War
“Council of War,” a new illustration. Painted in Brushes on my iPad.
Reading Day
“Reading Day,” a new illustration. Drawn in Inkpad and textured in Brushes, all on my iPad.
Old DOS games
I’ve been thinking about some of the old DOS games I used to play as a kid, as part of a goal this year to collect family stories — more on that in an upcoming post. In trying to find one of the games I remembered playing, I discovered that people have posted gameplay videos to YouTube for most if not all of these. Enter a bucketload of nostalgia.
My childhood was spent playing games like Command Keen:
And Joust:
And SkyRoads:
Here, then, are most of the DOS games I remember with fondness (or at least remember playing more than once), with links to videos:
- Alley Cat
- Arcade Volleyball
- Arctic Adventure (and Pharaoh’s Tomb)
- AstroFire
- Brix
- Capture the Flag
- Classic Concentration
- Command & Conquer
- Commander Keen 1
- Commander Keen 4: Goodbye, Galaxy!
- Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventures
- Crystal Cave
- Descent
- Duke Nukem
- EGA Trek
- God of Thunder
- Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage
- Hocus Pocus
- Hugo’s House of Horrors
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Jazz Jackrabbit
- Jetpack Christmas Special!
- Jill of the Jungle
- Joust VGA
- Kingdom of Kroz
- Lemmings
- Monster Bash
- Monuments of Mars
- NetWars
- One Must Fall 2097
- Paratrooper
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows
- Rescue Rover
- Scorched Earth
- Secret Agent
- SkyRoads
- Solar Winds: The Escape
- Star Wars: Rebel Assault
- Star Wars: X-Wing
- Terminal Velocity
- Wacky Wheels
- Warcraft: Orcs and Humans
- Worms
Going through these is making me feel ten years old all over again. Ah, childhood. (You can play pretty much all of these through DOSBox, by the way. Most are still shareware, and a lot have been released as freeware.)
Key to the Science of Theology
New release: Key to the Science of Theology, by Parley P. Pratt.
And we’ve got three more I’m finishing up for submission to Project Gutenberg, plus another four we’re proofing.
Atonement
“Atonement,” a new illustration. Painted in Photoshop.
More on Unbindery
For the first year doing the Mormon Texts Project, our process went like this: Volunteers would tell me they were ready for a batch. I would send them a range of five page numbers (145-149, for example) and a text file containing the unproofed text for those pages. (I would also track this in a Google spreadsheet.) The volunteer would then go to the book in Google Books, open the text file in a text editor, and proof the text. After they finished, they would email the text file back to me and I would assign them a new batch. Rinse and repeat.
Too much overhead. So I started working on Unbindery, a web app to automate almost all of this. This is what it looked like a couple weeks ago (a functional but completely unpolished bare-bones app):
I was kind of disappointed about the project — it was moving incredibly slowly, I didn’t really care about it anymore, etc. — and I had made up my mind to let it quietly fall by the wayside.
Then I was at the temple two weeks ago and got a clear impression that I wasn’t going to get off the hook that easily, and that I needed to keep going with MTP and finish Unbindery. With that impression came some inspiration on how to polish the app, and I’ve been working on it since then. Here’s what it looks like now:
For the past week we’ve been using it for MTP work, and since then our productivity has totally skyrocketed. Here are my educated guesses on why:
- Smaller chunks. Volunteers proof one page at a time instead of five. It’s easier and, because it’s easier, volunteers proof more than before.
Progress bars. Since volunteers can see their progress visually, there’s more of a drive to keep proofing so they can make the black bar go all the way to the end.
Scoreboard and leaderboard. Volunteers get points every time they finish proofing a page. With the leaderboard, there’s competition, and already I’ve seen an increase in productivity because of this (at least subconsciously).
Convenience. Since Unbindery is a web app, volunteers can proof pages anywhere, instead of having to download/upload text files and all that.
There’s also a new feature I added today, where volunteers can see how much of a given project they proofed:
This way there’s more of a sense of ownership to the work. We’ll see how it goes.
Like I said a few days ago, we went from taking eight months per book to a few days per book. My volunteers have proofed 373 pages in the last week, and I’m now scrambling to get enough books into Unbindery so we don’t run out. That’s a very different problem from the stagnation I had a month or two ago. (Yes, it’s a good problem to have.)
Mormon Artist Issue 14
Mormon Artist Issue 14 is now available. We’ve got interviews with Stephanie Black, Ashley Smith, Robert DeRosa, Janice Kapp Perry, Eric Samuelsen, and Kymberly Mellen, along with reviews from the LDS Film Festival. Enjoy:
