Can't Sleep; Clown'll Eat Me
May. 5th, 2005 05:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsI feel like writing something because I haven't in a long time. I don't know what I want to write though, so this will probably end up being really inchoerent. In fact, I might as well cut it right now because nobody's going to want to read this.
There. Now it doesn't matter how long it gets. Unless it gets long enough that it's over the maximum length of a post. Which is probably pretty long... If they're using MySQL it's probably a BLOB (Binary Long OBject. Isn't it great to be a programmer? You get to know useless crap like that) which are either limitless length or 32 bit addressable (and thus effectively limitless; something like 2 gigs). So it won't be that long, so it effectively doesn't matter how long it is.
Anyway. I can't sleep. I'm slowly (too slowly!) becoming nocturnal again. Being nocturnal is nice; nobody bothers you, and since I'm asleep when all my friends are awake, I don't have to interact with them (which usually results in somebody regretting it, most often me). Except for Adam. He's also awake in the middle of the night a lot. Nobody else is though.
Classes start on the 23rd. My only class that I have to actually be at is at 9 in the morning, so I can still be nocturnal then, which will be great. It'll mean I get to have plenty of quiet to do my homework in, too. That's the best part about being nocturnal, aside from being alone all the time. It's always very quiet. Except for the noise I make, which usually isn't much. Typing, a lot. Sometimes music or a movie or a DivX of a TV show. Generally not much though.
Mostly I type code. At work I've been typing documentation, but I don't want to do that very much now because I can't use Emacs any more, because it doesn't work. I installed the new version of OS X and Emacs stopped working. The console one probably still works, but the windowed one doesn't load because Carbon changed somehow. I think it's pretty stupid to have a library built specifically for compatibility and then change it ever minor version, but they probably have a good reason. Nothing other than Emacs broke, so it must not have been a very big change.
Other than that, I like the new OS X version. Spotlight is neat but too slow to be really useful to me. Maybe if I had a dual G5 or organized my stuff less well. Dashboard is less handy than I expected, Automator is less handy than it could be but better than no Automator, and two new features in Safari are really awesome. One is the RSS reader they built in, and the other is a thing in the menus that will turn off all logging and caching when you activate it. It doesn't even store the URLs in the autocomplete thing in the location bar if this is on. So that's kinda neat if you want to hide that you've looked at some page. Everything else is basically the same though. Even the version of Java it uses, which annoys me since I would like to be able to use Java 1.5. The essential sameness might bother me if I had bought it, but I downloaded it so that's okay. I know that might bother some of the people who read this, to which I respond, "bite me". I have no justification for my actions; I just didn't feel like paying for it, and because of the internet I didn't have to. So it goes.
I've played some neat games recently. That's what I normally post about, I think. I played Cinq-O and then went out and bought it, and I played Masquerade, and I've been playing a computer game called Watson's Map by Everett Kaser. Cinq-O is a dice game that's better than Cosmic Wimpout, Watson's Map is a logic puzzle, and Masquerade is like no other game I've played. I don't mean that in that it is good, although it is, I mean that in that it had very little in common with any other game I've played. It uses cards, and there are victory points. That's about it.
Also yesterday I bought Lost Vikings for the GBA. It's good, but very frustrating. When a guy dies you have to restart, but it doesn't make you restart. Also, you restart from the very beginning so you have to play the long annoying part of the level through again to get to the part where you died.
I've been pondering some recreational programming, too. I want to make a computer game of Cinq-O, and a thing like Mario's Picross (which is a kind of puzzle called a Nonogram), and maybe some sort of tank game, but I've been thinking about the tank game for a while. The real problem is that I don't know how to do any kind of real time programming, smooth movement across maps, or animation or anything. So the tank game never seems doable.
Other things I've been thinking about... I want to meet someone. I've been thinking about being confident. I am not at all confident, but I can maybe fake it. Probably it won't work though.
I think maybe I'd like to make a game that's like ZZT, too. I'm interested in teaching people how to program, and I learned how to program from ZZT. I think a game like ZZT but that used Lisp instead of a weak scripting language like ZZT did might be a good way to teach children programming. Or maybe not, maybe kids are too stupid to learn anything more complicated than BASIC. Bottom line; if I make this, I get to write a Lisp interpreter. Except I'd probably be better off building Common Lisp or something into it than writing my own.
Would anyone reading this be interested in having a weekly wargaming group, or something like? Like meet every Thursday evening over here and play Battletech or Heavy Gear or something. Probably not, I guess. I don't think anyone but me likes wargames. Anyone I know, at any rate. I would like to play Heavy Gear though. I bought the book after driving all over town looking for it (I finally ordered it) and the game looks cool and less of a pain to play than Battletech (although it clearly shows its RPG roots) and I've played all of half a game ever. Not that Battletech is much of a pain to play. It could use a program to manage rolling the dice for missiles, I guess. Like an LRM-20 where you have to find how many hit, then split those into groups of five and determine the hit locations for them. You're rolling dice possibly five times for one shot. And the LRMs aren't exactly rare weapons; most 'mechs have some sort of long-range weaponry.
I like how in Heavy Gear you have an easy time maneuvering whole groups of gears. The game is designed for them to be used in squads; they all share a common pool of extra actions (representing the squad leader telling you to do something).
Well, this post is almost as long as, well, it's pretty long. Nobody has read down to this point, not even me, so I'm going to cut it off here.
There. Now it doesn't matter how long it gets. Unless it gets long enough that it's over the maximum length of a post. Which is probably pretty long... If they're using MySQL it's probably a BLOB (Binary Long OBject. Isn't it great to be a programmer? You get to know useless crap like that) which are either limitless length or 32 bit addressable (and thus effectively limitless; something like 2 gigs). So it won't be that long, so it effectively doesn't matter how long it is.
Anyway. I can't sleep. I'm slowly (too slowly!) becoming nocturnal again. Being nocturnal is nice; nobody bothers you, and since I'm asleep when all my friends are awake, I don't have to interact with them (which usually results in somebody regretting it, most often me). Except for Adam. He's also awake in the middle of the night a lot. Nobody else is though.
Classes start on the 23rd. My only class that I have to actually be at is at 9 in the morning, so I can still be nocturnal then, which will be great. It'll mean I get to have plenty of quiet to do my homework in, too. That's the best part about being nocturnal, aside from being alone all the time. It's always very quiet. Except for the noise I make, which usually isn't much. Typing, a lot. Sometimes music or a movie or a DivX of a TV show. Generally not much though.
Mostly I type code. At work I've been typing documentation, but I don't want to do that very much now because I can't use Emacs any more, because it doesn't work. I installed the new version of OS X and Emacs stopped working. The console one probably still works, but the windowed one doesn't load because Carbon changed somehow. I think it's pretty stupid to have a library built specifically for compatibility and then change it ever minor version, but they probably have a good reason. Nothing other than Emacs broke, so it must not have been a very big change.
Other than that, I like the new OS X version. Spotlight is neat but too slow to be really useful to me. Maybe if I had a dual G5 or organized my stuff less well. Dashboard is less handy than I expected, Automator is less handy than it could be but better than no Automator, and two new features in Safari are really awesome. One is the RSS reader they built in, and the other is a thing in the menus that will turn off all logging and caching when you activate it. It doesn't even store the URLs in the autocomplete thing in the location bar if this is on. So that's kinda neat if you want to hide that you've looked at some page. Everything else is basically the same though. Even the version of Java it uses, which annoys me since I would like to be able to use Java 1.5. The essential sameness might bother me if I had bought it, but I downloaded it so that's okay. I know that might bother some of the people who read this, to which I respond, "bite me". I have no justification for my actions; I just didn't feel like paying for it, and because of the internet I didn't have to. So it goes.
I've played some neat games recently. That's what I normally post about, I think. I played Cinq-O and then went out and bought it, and I played Masquerade, and I've been playing a computer game called Watson's Map by Everett Kaser. Cinq-O is a dice game that's better than Cosmic Wimpout, Watson's Map is a logic puzzle, and Masquerade is like no other game I've played. I don't mean that in that it is good, although it is, I mean that in that it had very little in common with any other game I've played. It uses cards, and there are victory points. That's about it.
Also yesterday I bought Lost Vikings for the GBA. It's good, but very frustrating. When a guy dies you have to restart, but it doesn't make you restart. Also, you restart from the very beginning so you have to play the long annoying part of the level through again to get to the part where you died.
I've been pondering some recreational programming, too. I want to make a computer game of Cinq-O, and a thing like Mario's Picross (which is a kind of puzzle called a Nonogram), and maybe some sort of tank game, but I've been thinking about the tank game for a while. The real problem is that I don't know how to do any kind of real time programming, smooth movement across maps, or animation or anything. So the tank game never seems doable.
Other things I've been thinking about... I want to meet someone. I've been thinking about being confident. I am not at all confident, but I can maybe fake it. Probably it won't work though.
I think maybe I'd like to make a game that's like ZZT, too. I'm interested in teaching people how to program, and I learned how to program from ZZT. I think a game like ZZT but that used Lisp instead of a weak scripting language like ZZT did might be a good way to teach children programming. Or maybe not, maybe kids are too stupid to learn anything more complicated than BASIC. Bottom line; if I make this, I get to write a Lisp interpreter. Except I'd probably be better off building Common Lisp or something into it than writing my own.
Would anyone reading this be interested in having a weekly wargaming group, or something like? Like meet every Thursday evening over here and play Battletech or Heavy Gear or something. Probably not, I guess. I don't think anyone but me likes wargames. Anyone I know, at any rate. I would like to play Heavy Gear though. I bought the book after driving all over town looking for it (I finally ordered it) and the game looks cool and less of a pain to play than Battletech (although it clearly shows its RPG roots) and I've played all of half a game ever. Not that Battletech is much of a pain to play. It could use a program to manage rolling the dice for missiles, I guess. Like an LRM-20 where you have to find how many hit, then split those into groups of five and determine the hit locations for them. You're rolling dice possibly five times for one shot. And the LRMs aren't exactly rare weapons; most 'mechs have some sort of long-range weaponry.
I like how in Heavy Gear you have an easy time maneuvering whole groups of gears. The game is designed for them to be used in squads; they all share a common pool of extra actions (representing the squad leader telling you to do something).
Well, this post is almost as long as, well, it's pretty long. Nobody has read down to this point, not even me, so I'm going to cut it off here.
