My short story of the above title will be LIVE and free to read in the 3rd Quarter 2025 issue of Abyss & Apex tomorrow! It's about a professional curse-remover who gets in a little over her head on an unconventional case; it's got mystery, magic, barbarians, and something to say about the consequences when defense of one's own goes too far. Ef Deal (at that time the Assistant Fiction Editor) was kind enough to tell me, "It has been a very long time since I read a sword & sorcery I enjoyed as much as this tale." So don't miss it!
I put something of myself in all my stories, but this one is more personal than most. It would be impossible for me to explain where it came from without airing some things that are better kept private, but in a roundabout and strange way, it reflects something I went through. So it feels particularly fitting that "Peacemaker's First Strike" should be my first paying publication credit. Turning this story loose means healing for me as well as the characters.
Abyss & Apex has been great to work with, so I'd love it if you would check out my writing and the rest of the issue, and support the zine with a donation if you are so inclined.
This month I have a quick demo for you, showcasing Acuitas' upgraded semantic memory visualization. My goal for this was always to "show him thinking" as it were, and I think I've finally gotten there. Nodes (concepts) and links (relationships between concepts) are shown as dots and lines in a graph structure. Whenever any process in Acuitas accesses one of the concepts, its node will enlarge and turn bright green in the display. The node then gradually decays back to its default color and size over the next few seconds. This provides a live view of how Acuitas is using his semantic memory for narrative understanding, conversations, and more.
You can see a previous iteration of my memory access visualization work in Developer Diary #4. Wow, that's ancient. The original access animations were only activated by "research" behavior (ruminating on a concept to generate questions about it), and were often hard to see; if the concept being accessed was one of the "smaller" ones, it was impossible to detect the color change at a reasonable level of zoom. The upgraded version of the animation is called from the semantic memory access functions, such that it will be activated if a concept's information is retrieved for any reason. And it enlarges the node by an amount proportional to its default size and the display's current level of zoom, such that it will always become visible.
I would have liked to make the links highlight when used as well. The problem is that links in Acuitas' memory storage aren't really distinct things anymore. A link is indirectly defined by endpoints included in the data structures for all the concepts it connects to. So there isn't a low-level function that determines when a particular link is being accessed; a node gets accessed, and then the calling function does whatever it pleases with the returned data structure, which might include following a link to another node. Keeping track of every time that happens and connecting those events with the correct lines on the display would have become very messy, so I opted not to. I think just highlighting the concept nodes yields an adequate picture of what's happening.
I haven't showcased the memory display in a long time because it's been a mess for a long time. The node placement is generated by a custom algorithm of my own. As more concepts were added to the graph and certain important concepts got "larger" (i.e. acquired more links), the original algorithm started to generate spindly, ugly graphs in which the largest nodes were surrounded by excess empty space, and the smallest nodes crowded too close together. I managed to work out a new placement method that generates attractive, proportional clusters without blowing up the computation time. Creating a new layout is still computation-intensive enough that the visualization can't be updated to add new nodes and links as soon as they are created; it must be regenerated by me or (eventually) by Acuitas during his sleep cycle.
And that's about the size of it. I'll be on vacation for the second half of this month, which means there probably won't be much Acuitas development happening until I get back. Enjoy the video, and I'll see you all later.
