One of my favorite comics, xkcd has a character, black hat man, who is basically just evil in a smart way. And these two comics are just the perfect, perfect point on his evil little life.
2008-01-30
Rejection for Change of Honor
Today, I got the nicest rejection letter ever! Well, for me. Today is the first time I’ve gotten a rejection letter that actually gave suggestions for improvements, actually referred to my story, and actually used my story to point out things I did wrong.
Yeah, it’s a rejection letter, but the sharpened pain of someone ripping my heart out managed to be reduced by the elation of having really good comments on my story. So, I have to say: Thank you William H. Horner III!
By the way, a Change of Honor was rejected. Not sure what to do with it. I think I’m going to be just posting it and moving on, instead of reworking and resubmitting it. Not really sure. What do you do with rejected stories? What should I do? On one hand, I could put it on my website to help bulk out the complete lack of stories there, or I could try to find another place interested in Far East-inspired supernatural fiction short stories.
Scroll of Lands update (38%)
2008-01-29
Insomina Thoughts
Well, I can’t sleep. Just wired up on the edge and unable to get my mind to stop worrying about things I can do absolutely nothing about. So, I got on the computer for a bit to rip a CD I thought I lost, putz around on the computer, and try to finish something so I can relax.
However, I did find out that the GPS on the Tribeca can actually do Iowa, you just have to select a the region before you enter an address. It doesn’t need you to select the region to map where you are, to figure out the path, but it does for finding destinations.
For those who like Looking for Group, I got one of those limited edition Richard figurines. The one with the bunny rabbit and the fireball? In the process of taking it out of the box, his arm snapped off. So, I now have a damaged limited edition Richard figurine. Oh well, minor little thing in life.
Scroll of Lands update (38%)
2008-01-27
Alternative Plans
Last night, I think I hit an interesting point. Fluffy and I had a long conversation and I think it is time to look for a new job. Various factors, but I simply can’t just accept things as they are now and I need to take care of her. And that is something I haven’t been able to do for a while. Plus, I’m not exactly happy at work anymore. There are a bunch of other reasons, but I think it’s finally time.
In slightly more cheerful new, the home improvement project I started in August is finally done. I just finished putting up the last two curtains (the only two things left since November) and we are now officially done. *cheer*. Now, I can open this sparkling white grape juice that has been sitting on my desk to remind me for the last endless months.
The next contingency plan on Ponies Among Us also started up. Most of my projects with a deadline have these risk plans, and I’m simply not getting enough done in time. This means some of my major plans, dynamically generated world without loading screens being the largest, is being put aside until after the contest. I broke the world down into 29 stages so far, including where I’m randomly hiding crystals, building up characters, and refining the skill sets.
I also started to draw out the first stage and hit a nasty road bump. I suck at drawing vector trees. So, that pushed me back a bit and I’m working on a tree maker program to speed up that process. I should have something workable by Thursday and I hope to have some screenshots for you (if you are interested) on Tuesday. First, I have to educate myself on L-systems in relation to making a semi-realistic looking tree. Simple, I’m sure. :P Version one… was not pretty.
Scroll of Lands update (38%)
2008-01-26
Writing makes me whole
Well, I’m not really sick anymore. Today, my creativity came back and I had a pretty good time of trying to figure out vector and physics systems. The minimum to get my characters standing up looks like they are done, which means I should be able to display a character on the screen in a couple of days. If things go really well, I’ll have someone walking around by the end of next week.
I also wrote a short story, which as usual and I completely forget, made me feel better. Writing makes me whole, I think that is the best way of saying it. If I’m depressed, writing makes it go away. Apparently, when I’m sick, it really helps with the blahs of recovering. It isn’t a great story, but it already had a compliment on the Kingdom of Loathing game forums, so I’m just excited.
Sunday, I’m running Changeling. Looking forward to that, expanding my understanding of Hero System and basically just getting ready for some fun. I got a bit of college, but I think things are going to go pretty well for me this weekend.
Good mood, good mood.
Kitteh Braik (20%)
Scroll of Lands update (38%)
2008-01-25
Sick, sick, sick…
There are things I hate about being sick. It is one of the few times I am simply incapable of doing high level thinking. No notebooks dripping with ink, no code laid out in poetic meter, and sure as hell no fascinating writing. I managed to get most of my college work done this week, but other than that, I’ve been staring at the same game code for three days and not getting a single useful thing done with it.
I have managed to watch over three dozen episodes of Kim Possible though. I really like the last season, fifth I believe. The plotline, for a Disney comic, was actually well done and something those in the Writer’s Guild should be proud of. We also saw Spiderman 3, one of the few movies were Fluffy begged me to fast forward through the boring bits. Not a good sign… I like some of the special effects, but it really wasn’t that good of a movie.
I’m probably going into work tomorrow, just to get out of the house, but also because I suspect there might be Internet problems and I want to find a mp3 that I apparently lost when I wiped my laptop the last time. Which is a damn shame, since apparently no one heard of the skit on Kingdom of Loathing.
Kitteh Braik (18%)
Scroll of Lands update (38%)
Shadow Over Shandahar by T. R. Chowdhury and T. M. Crim
Well, in this week that I’ve been sick and had plenty of time to do basically nothing. Instead, I decided to get through one of the books haunting me since GenCon. So, I read Shadow Over Shandahar by T. R. Chowdhury and T. M. Crim. This is a 505 page, perfect-bound book produced by BookSurge and and a lovely cover by Lindsay Archer.
2008-01-20
Polygons are vanquished!
The polygons, they live! After a long ten hours of work, I got a C# GPC port. It performs unions, intersections, and xors, and appears to work perfectly. I even managed to pull data out of the physics engine so I can see where everything is on non-circular shapes. Overall, it is one large cliff climbed and accidentally climbing the second in the process.
2008-01-19
Love and hate with polygons
Polygons. Simple convex objects that have driven me nuts for the entire week. Everything I tried seemed to fail, there just wasn’t a polygon clipping library that ran on Mono. So, I gave up. I switched to the contingency plan of trying spheres and working with those. Naturally, I encountered some really nasty problems since SVG sometimes stores the points translated or with a matrix transformation which means I couldn’t just say “tell me the size”, I had to break the sphere down, do matrix math (the one major class I failed), then look at it.
Getting frustrated, I almost stopped that, then I realized something. On the GPC page, the C# wrapper I was struggling with was labeled different than the Java port. Port had promise, since it implied it didn’t use the C library but basically duplicated the code in a new language. Looking into the zip, I had my answer. I just had to translate it from Java (a language I’m damn good at) to C# (a language I’m much better at).
So, five minutes ago, I had my polygon clipping library in C#. A week of effort and frustrating, working with math I don’t understand, and I finally got another brick in my game.
Kitteh Braik (15%)
Scroll of Lands update (38%)
2008-01-17
Car Titles
Last night, I tried to find the title to my car. I know I had it, I paid it off six years ago and I was pretty sure I remember filing the blue piece of paper. So, I went through my stuff. A blue title for th Saturn. A blue and pink paper for my marriage, a fresh and shiny copy of my birth certificate (after my legal name change in 2000). I found letters from Fluffy and from my dad. I saw history flipping through my fingers.