09-02-07: Took up PHP today and implemented a much cleaner system for rants. All I have to do is write a tagless text file and my scripting does the rest. Unfortunately, this means that the old rants are all screwed up. I won't take them down, but you'll have to know the URL to get to the old archive pages. If you're THAT curious, you can e-mail me or something. I haven't gotten an e-mail from a real person in almost six months. So... lonely...
09-02-07: Yeah. Fractals. A week or two ago I wrote some quick programs for displaying a few fractals. I've got the Sierpinski Triangle, the Sierpinski Carpet, and the Cantor Set, and I'm working still on an implementation of a Sierpinski n-gon; the math for the scale factor is pretty trippy. Oh, and F1 is help, in case you don't get out much.
09-03-07: I'm way too into Katamari Damacy's soundtrack. I looked up a few of the songs and I'm inexorably hooked. I can honestly say that I have spent at least twelve hours listening to "Katamari on the Rock" since Saturday. The song has such an awesome beat and awesome in general. If you don't listen to Katamari Damacy music, you should. NANANANAN KATAMARI DAMACY!
09-05-07: I am in search of a new game to take up what little free time I complain so much about not having enough of. Suggestions welcome. Oh and I might get a comments system up sometime in the mildly distant future.
09-18-07: [Just miscellany: Five is an approximation of the number of dreams up to this I remember, making this one six by convention if not fact.]
I was on a square platform, black and slightly glossy, not more than a fathom from side to side either way. I had with me a friend, taking up a good portion of the space, and a flashlight. Grey ambient light provided enough illumination to see as well as at the onset of dusk, but showed nothing but my immediate surroundings. The platform on which we were marooned gave the impression of transparency but for no discernible reason; it was crisscrossed with lines forming a grid of squares perhaps a square span in size, not aligned with the edges of our platform. When one is stuck with such meager data for the senses even the smallest details can annoy, with so few to observe at all. There was utter silence, and when it was broken the lack of any reverberation was as solemn as the preceding quiet. The abyss must extend forever, as it did downwards. Out perch had no support; why would we suppose otherwise? This realm had no need to explain its being, nor ours, and the need to provide explanation for a continued state of counterintuitive existence was ignored with as much indifference as an inanimate and unresponsive world could convey. I wished there was something to look at, or for the barely perceptible breeze to change directions. It was not uncomfortable; to the contrary, I was thankful for it in the slightly warm place. But any stimulus would be a relief from this oppressive boredom. I picked up my flashlight, shining it down intoo the depths. The light, if reason held here enough for it to exist when not being observed, was pointedly not observable. If a floor existed, it was perfectly black. Perhaps it was a foot beneath me and my lethargic companion. Perhaps it was not at all; a mere fallacious supposition in this illogical world. Nothing held us up, but we were pulled down by a gravity that seemed to affect things on its whims and without the intervention of constraining formulae or scientific explanation. I wished I could see for myself once more a coherent world. Was there ever one? What, indeed, had it been like? Who was I in this memory to which I clung as the last tie to a reality that seemed more imaginary than this solitary and confiningly infinite dream-world.
11-15-07: I've been working on a pixel art (isometric) rubik's cube and accompanying solver/scrambler/manipulator program, and I just want to say, in case anyone other than I hadn't realized it until now, it's a CRAPLOAD of pixelling. I pity anyone who ever decides to create a rotatable 3D world in pixel art, because a cube alone will crush their soul. Luckily for a rubik's cube you only have to do axes separately, adding instead of multiplying. I'm like a third of the way done with the undetailed cube perspectives, of which there are ten. And then there are about thirty different sticker perspectives to do, and the ugly programming to jam it all together.
This project will be so cool when it's done.
11-16-07: Yeah. My playlist has grown considerably since the last time I discussed it here. In addition to a prodigous collection of Weird Al's works, I have a decent selection of the classics (Led Zepplin, The Rolling Stones, The Monkees, The Beatles, et cetera) and some more obscure genres/songs. I'm not much for country music really, but Arlo Guthrie's City of New Orleans has a couple of lines he sings really well and the lyrics aren't bad. Also in that grouping of coincidental finds: Katamari Damacy's OST; there are some really amazing songs on there. If you don't have Katamari on the Rock, Katamari on the Funk, and Katamari on the Moog, you don't know what you're missing. Also of note from Katamari are Que Sera Sera, Sasasan Katamari, and Shabadoobie, which share a nice common hummed/sung sound. Last Samba is a good song too, if you can deal with the overly-shrill whistling; once the flute comes in the song is much more fun. Part of my enjoyment is how it gives such a perfect atmosphere of a school gym after hours, with some psychopath blowing a whistle too loudly, and the untrained choir singing with flute accompanyment. Kind of like a reinterpretation of Smells Like Teen Spirit, if you want to stretch it. Also I have Jethro Tull's Bungle in the Jungle, quite a nice song, and Ballroom Blitz by Sweet, (or maybe The Sweet; forgive me if I'm inaccurate) which was quite a nice acquisition. The singing is brilliant, and it the lyrics aren't horrible, though they definitely leave room for improvement. So yeah, I just felt like rambling about music. As far as programming goes, I have one axis of three (four tenths; don't question my math) done on my Rubik's cube, and my tactics RPG is on the back burner with MonkeyClient and my IRC bot, which, during my hiatus from updates here, learned how to play Egyptian Ratscrew, AKA Slaps, ERF, ERS, and too dang many other names.
11-17-07: The mildly distant future has come to pass. Awaken, all ye unbelievers, and watch me get off my lazy bum to do something! I've redone a good bit of the PHP portion of my site as well as added a template page for comment leaving and reading, to be replaced (within a week) with a functional page. I believe there'll just be a crudload of comment files that get appended to when people comment, because, frankly, I can't be bothered to set up a database-type thing, nor learn how.
11-18-07: Comments are fully functional now. Try 'em out.
11-20-07: I wrote a little bit of useful code today (actually debugged and userfriendly too!), which I should add on a nice "Coding" page sometime this week. Not much else to say, as I'm busy like crud today.
12-16-07: Yeah, yeah. I really need to update this thing more. I'm working on a win32 implementation of INTERCAL right now (named wINTERCAL, as if there was a less creative option) so that's taking a long time. I also programmed a string library for the Casio 9750G Plus calculator, which was good fun. I'll set up a programming section here sometime in the next two weeks, then it'll be easier to get at all the fun junk I've coded; you won't have to guess URLs. I'll also be trying to fix the comments system because I think something broke at server switch a few weeks ago. My incompetent webmastering leads to mass misinformation and several countries launch nukes at each other. They collide in midair above where I live. I die. Radioactive fallout spreads across the planet. All die. O, the embarrassment!
01-20-08: There's not much going on really, aside from usual business. I did get one cool thing done, though: my tactics RPG now has the first step toward a functional movement system. You can move southeast almost perfectly--it only causes instant jumping in height right now. Soon there will be enjoyable algorithms to simulate gravity so one can jump, fall, and walk around in all four directions. I haven't been doing much tilework or character/monster/etc work, but some further brainstorming worked pretty well and I have some more details for the background that supports the storyline. In case you haven't heard, magic is the new science, and dragons are really neat.
Oh, and T DJ by Freezepop may be my new favorite song.
02-01-08: Today is Hourly Comics Day, (in which I've decided to participate) so I'm going to be posting comics every so often here for the rest of my waking hours today. EXCELLENT!
06-04-08: That exclamation point was giving me the craps. I typed about six tildes before I hit the right key. Oh well. Anyhow, what I was trying to get at was the fact that I'm restarting semi-regular updates to this site. I plan on redesigning the nav bar on the left just a bit, so it will be less of a pain to add the programming page I promised you so long ago. Luckily, though, I've got a bit more stuff to put up there, namely a chaos game (wiki it) fractal generator and a Sudoku solver. I also have some fun new mewzik as of recently: Our House by Madness (I'd been looking for that for a while before I found it) and some awesome Polish electronica by Svoy and some other bands. The things you find on strangers' servers! At least they have good taste.
Also, last Friday, there was a massive pool party (the pool is Pixeljoint's IRC channel on the Slashnet server), where Frankie ran his radio show. It featured some nice Francophone music by the Canadian band Malajube, of whom I'd now call myself a fan, and some Emerson, Lake, and Palmer that inspired a couple speedpixels. Overall, a great time.
Speaking of IRC, apparently Slashnet is missing a karaoke channel. Am I just strange, or is it really tempting to type lyrics of the song you're hearing into IRC windows? At any rate, I'm considering starting #karaoke on Slashnet.org's IRC server, because I think it's what people need.
Don't expect too many updates in the immediate future. (Oh, what a surprise!) I'm going to be away from this coming Sunday until three weeks from then.
10-25-08: There has been some considerable suckiness about these parts for the past few whenevers, manifested primarily in a striking lack of anything worthwhile happening. This is entirely my fault. Sorry. On the bright side, though, I'm feeling more and more like *improving* this site when I get a chance. It looks too 1990s for this new Web 2.0 with its rounded corners and semitransparency and minimalism and whatnot. I'm no fan of rounded corners or semitransparency, but I should definitely make a nicer, cleaner, more minimalistic layout for the site. I should also clean out a lot of the cruft the code has accumulated and create a system for showing nice directory listings so I can finally display programmatical things as nicely as I want them displayed. You know what I mean? Of course you do. Cheers.
10-28-08: I finally got my IRC client to interface with multiple servers at once. I'm using a two-tierer tabs system, which is about as workable as a single-tiered one with a single server. Interpret that as you will, unless you don't. I also intend to finish the site's updatingness tomorrow, as far as the styling goes. I might need to alter the color scheme some more because the contrast is pretty low for some crappier monitors. In the following couple days I'll add the directory listings if I have time before Friday. If not, I won't have a chance to mess with it until Monday; I'm travelling this weekend.
10-30-08: I am suddenly booked for today, so any additional updates will likely come no sooner than Monday.
11-23-08: I got the directory listing done for my coding stuff. If you'll visit this page, you can view and download source and win32 binaries for several programs of mine. Feel free to send me any bug reports/idiot mistakes/derivative works if you want. Now I just need to get the navigation bar fixed and this site will be in business!