Playing Catchup

I haven't been good at keeping up with the amazing things that have been happening in the open steno world! So here's a quick rundown!

• Excitingly, the For All To Play team has released a new version of Steno Arcade on Steam! It includes new songs, new animated audience members, and a first pass at screen reader support! There's still a bit more to go before they deliver everything promised in the crowdfunding campaign, but this is a significant advance from the previous version.
  
• The Hackathon resulted in a basic sketch for what I think could be a fantastic beginner-level steno tutorial game. It's a sort of combination top-down RPG, adventure game, and quickfire typing game. We're calling it Stenomancer, and you can read all about it on our lead developer Yianna's GitHub page. We've also got a channel for it on the Plover Discord, so feel free to drop by there if you want to help brainstorm ideas for it.
  
• Speaking of resources for beginners, our multitalented lead dev Ted has been working on a new entry level steno theory book. It's still in progress, but I love what he's got so far.
  
• Gaming laptops are finally, finally coming out with enough rollover to use steno. The ROG Zephyrus GX501 from Asus costs a pretty penny, but if you want portable steno without wrangling an external keyboard, it's probably your best bet.
  
• And one more bit of steno gaming news: The popular competitive typing site Typeracer has opened up its monthly championship to people using steno! We get a separate leaderboard and everything. Two months ago I narrowly squeaked by dark horse self-taught steno whiz John, and last month he beat me, 98.91% to 97.88%! Gonna do my damnedest to reclaim the title this month if I can, but John is a force of nature, so there are no guarantees. If you want to join, make sure you include "plover" or "steno" in your user and/or display name, and install a Tampermonkey script to get around Typeracer's frustrating steno-unfriendly input length limit (which they've promised to fix in future updates).