2009-09-22

A lovely night of walking

Filed under: Health,Programming,Writing — Tags: , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 02:50

Today, I learned that Inigo really, really likes frogs. I went to Weight Watchers (lost 0.3 kg which negates half of the last two weeks) and managed to only stick my foot in my mouth once. Then, getting home an hour later than normal, I decided that as much as I wanted to play on the computer, I’d go on a walk.

One and a half hours later, I’m tired, Inigo is tired and staring hopefully at every. single. dark. spot. on the trail hoping it is a frog. I managed to walk just under four miles, which isn’t too bad. I wasn’t in a hurry or anything.

I also enjoyed thinking about My Father’s Bike, which is the novel-like thing I’m working on. I finally sat down and got a chapter outline set up for the thing and I’m a bit happier about it.

Didn’t do much beyond thinking about it though, I’m planning that for tomorrow. Tonight, I only had an hour or so, so I decided to mess around with a Emacs major mode for ASH, the scripting language used by KoLmafia. Kind of fun, but still a challenge. And it gave me some new insights on how to improve csharp-mode, which is one of those things I really need to polish up a bit more.

2009-09-16

Four more days

Filed under: Education,Programming,Writing — Tags: , , — D. Moonfire @ 00:20

Four more days until the end of class and I’m excited about that. I also got the notice for my petition, which was accepted after the responses. Thirty seconds later, I was on the phone with my academic adviser who got the same email only a few minutes before me. So, I’m now one class and one week from my masters and I’m very excited.

Work is relaxing a little bit this week, but I’m still not over the major hump I’m working on. I try so hard to get things done, and it is nice I get the impression that I’m appreciated and wanted. Call is self-esteem but I worry about those type of things. I also want to be the best employee I can be.

I’ve been obsessing about two things for no reason. One is a little Kingdom of Loathing script. It is turning out to be a tad more difficult than I expected; I know I can do it, I just can’t get the bits and bytes to shift the way I need them too.

I’ve also been working on world development for my steampunk world. Partially scripts, partially language. Messing around with the map and trying to figure out how much history is important to the story. I mean, I know that some of the history is important since it shows up in Flight of the Scions, but how much is enough. I think I could spend months coming up with the history, mainly because I have so much fun.

… though, I really need to get to the “do” part of those things again. Right now, I have the following on my radar:

  • Scroll of the Lands
  • Unit Performance
  • Flight of the Scions
  • My Father’s Bike
  • DG

I know there are more to consider, but those seem to be the ones I want to play with now. Well, and making a font for the lovely scripts I found. *sigh* More projects than time. And I seem to love it.

2009-08-30

Rolling up the past

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 17:53

It has been an interesting week. Beyond the usual of just getting homework done (unit 7 of 12) and the final petition out, I also got caught up in the final throes of a massive undertaking I was doing at work. I’m trying really hard to keep with my original estimates (since last year I got dinged for giving poor estimates), but this last week is going to be an absolute killer. And things outside of my control are blocking me.

But, that is life. I’m doing a bit of extra hours this weekend to make sure I can get everything done.

I also got involved with a mental puzzle with Kingdom of Loathing. Yes, it is entirely optional in my life, but the intellectual challenge of doing it is really obsessing me. I know it can be done, just trying to figure out how to do it.

Beyond that, I’m getting ready for enjoying a 4-5 day holiday with my dad up at the family cabin. Which means I have to work extra hard this week to finish a day early so I can not feel guilty about taking Friday off.

2009-08-11

Sitting without a date

Filed under: Games — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 20:03
Weight Loss (7.4 of 14.7 kg)
Commission (15,238 of 15,000 words)

Sitting in my living room, waiting for my date. I’m anxious to get going for GenCon though I’m pretty sure I forgot something along the way. Got the clothes and food pack. Just don’t have a wife. She isn’t packed and I’m pretty much out of things to do unless I get into the “hard to walk away from” list of things.

And my commission, but I’m avoiding that until next week.

I even distracted myself for three hours playing with KoLmafia so I can get some tedious stuff done while at GenCon (i.e. it will do my daily quests for me). It is cheesy, but I like the challenge of figuring out how to do it without abusing the server.

I’m excited, just anxious.

2009-05-28

Making a list

Filed under: Games — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 16:50
Weight Loss (4.1 of 14.7 kg)
College Petitions (1 of 4)
Commission (1,300 of 10k words)

This morning, I got a wake-up call when my eldest kitty decided that she needed some water and she is willing to get it from the kitchen sink. The dishes on the counter, on the other hand, took offense at the idea and committed suicide in protest.

I liked that bowl. :(

A small bit of drama, but no big deal.

But, I couldn’t get back to sleep. As soon as Fluffy settled back to sleep, I just stared at the ceiling, thinking about projects and things I want to get done. It is mostly little stuff, writing and programming, but a few around the house items. And that all-important lose weight to avoid diabetes bit. I won’t go into the specifics, mainly I don’t think anyone is interested in my to do list.

I gave up around five this morning and finally got up. Ended up fixing the DNS settings on the house servers to handle the piss-poor Qwest DNS settings, doing some disk maintenance, and upgrading the main MythTV front end to hopefully get rid of the annoying delay to pause (about 3 minutes at this point) while watching Mythbusters.

Oh, and I also finished up the next ascension for Kingdom of Loathing. I’m planning on jumping into the gap as soon as I get home and maybe playing a few sauce/pasta classes to pick up a few more skills. I got the two things I really wanted this ascension, Ambidextrous Funkslinging and the Hilarious Grimore for cocktail ingredients. This will be my 17th ascension in the game (all hard core except the first). I’m still enjoying it, but there is a bit of a grind that started around ascension 14.

I did make a list of everything I wanted to get done. It is a big one, but also filled with things I can get done in a reasonable amount of time. Just need to focus, which seems to be my problem. Making a list also makes me feel better. It gives me that structure I need to realize everything is solvable. I won’t be putting the entire list on my blog, mainly because I don’t think anyone cares, plus it would just be noise. But, I’ll put the current ones I’m focusing on the blog, not only to nag me but also the encourage me.

2009-03-23

Another ascension

Filed under: Games — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 21:56

Happily, I managed to ascend again in the Kingdom of Loathing. This would be my 15th ascension and not even remotely my fastest. But, still, 30 day hardcore ascension is nothing to sneeze at since I took over double that the first two times. The key part is that I still really enjoy the game and every morning, first thing, I get online to burn through my turns.

Though, I kind of rushed the ascension itself because I was running late to work. Ended up being a “just one more thing” type of morning. Going to be worse in the new house (week from Wednesday!) because I think I’m 10-15 minutes further from work which means I’ll need to get up twenty minutes earlier to get my fix in.

(more…)

2009-01-07

Good thoughts

Filed under: Education,Family,Games — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 17:27

I had a terrible bout with depression last night. A bit of talking with Fluffy helped a little bit. So did the somewhat high maintenance cat–well the cat who wants to be petted all the time but I still love her–helped with pulling me out of my dark mood.

This morning, it was better. Could be the decision I wasn’t going to stress out about work or money today probably helped.

I also ascended today on the one and only online game I play, Kingdom of Loathing. KoL was driving me nuts actually, since I was getting upset about missing out on an once in a lifetime event because I jumped the gun with the last ascension. I know it was a game, but it took me a few days to just let it go (a skill I’m normally really good at). In the end, I missed out on a bunch of loot, but it wasn’t too bad (if I ascended two days earlier, I would have made it). Oh well, I had my fastest speed run ever (14 days from end to end, because I missed out on the once in a lifetime event, go figure), bought the once in a lifetime event item from the store, and rolled into the next round.

I also solved a major problem at work with a customer, got everything off my plate, and basically managed to take a long, deep breath.

When I get home, I start my college class.

Today is going to be good.

2008-10-09

Horrible, evil monkeys…

Filed under: Family,Games,Programming,Writing — Tags: , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 19:46

Had a monkey night. The type of nights where you manage to get into bed on time, get all nice and comfortable and then, instead of drifting to sleep and nice dreams of food processors, you end up staring at the ceiling and thinking. While I love to think about things, it gets annoying when you can’t sleep because of it. I call it the monkey, since its your consciousness chattering away like a pissed off monkey.

Things I thought about:

  • I got another five thousand words on my commission. Almost done with this and I’m very happy about that. Plus, it means I’ll get a bit of money hopefully in the near future to help relieve the stress of…
  • Not having enough money. We’ll just leave that one in the box, shall we?
  • Ascending on Kingdom of Loathing and writing my own version of KOL Mafia, despite not having enough time or energy. Not to mention way too many projects to do already. I tried to bribe my thoughts by getting up and playing my 40 (well, 137) turns but that didn’t help.
  • The brownies in the fridge. Tried to bribe myself by getting up and eating all of them, but it didn’t help either. They were good though.
  • Ultra Mega Super Premium Mall and if I should use crayon-style images to distinguish it from Kingdom of Loathing, which its obviously inspired by.
  • Flight of the Scions, but mostly to berate myself for not working on it. But, also working out some of the outfits and dresses in the book. And if I really should have a specific kissing scene in book two.
  • 2D scene graphs. This was the bulk of my distractions since I think I found a good way of organizing my various code projects between BooGame and MfGames.* to handle Baby Squid God and CuteGod equally. Of course, it requires me to rewrite things again, but I think I needed to do that anyways. Plus, I inherited BooGame and need to clean that up and make it more useful.
  • Wondering why I still can’t find a good generic C# game engine that works with 2D? Likewise, wondering if I really should create yet another vector/matrix library just because no one else will work together? I want someone else to figure out all this hard part. Its thankless and probably why I’m doing it.
  • Are there fleas in the bed? I’m pretty sure I got rid of them, but when you are lying there with nothing else, every little twinge and itch seems to bring up the idea that there might be critters with me. Having a cat clean herself for two solid hours on your chest doesn’t help. Even if that is what she normally does.
  • And finally, just wondering what life is going to be like in the next three months. I have absolutely no clue. Utterly no clue, not even a hint of what I’m doing in month, much less the end of the year.

So, busy night. And I overslept and was two hours late for work.

Oh well, its a special day.