Watched "Constellation" on AppleTV. Noomi Rapace (The Best Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a Swedish astronaut on board the International Space Station. There's a catastrophic event, the commander is killed, and she has to organize the evacuation. Back on Earth, she's suffering from PTSD, Space Psychosis, or maybe Quantum Wierdness as she's seeing things that aren't reliably there, has distorted memories of the events, and is having trouble reconnecting with her family. The first three episodes were a bit chaotic for the purpose of being confusing, and then we had enough of the timeline filled in for the mystery to outbuild the confusion.
Started watching "The Signal" on Netflix. The dubbing of this German show isn't great. All the voices are clean and calm. 75% of Father's lines are "Daughter? Daughter!" It's the same plot as "Constellation" on Apple TV. Astronaut mother goes to space. Maybe she gets space madness or maybe she was schizophrenic before, or maybe she discovered something amazing. She dies but the daughter can't admit it and spooky stuff is happening.
Played a lot of "Stranded Deep" over the weekend. I love Minecraft and occasionally I try Ark or Valheim or something less voxelly for variety. I don't actually like Ark because I don't care about the dinosaurs and at some point one is supposed to stop upgrading the axes and start upgrading the axe-asaurs. Also, dropping all your items in a nest of terror-snakes is terrible. "Stranded Deep" is right in that area. Minecraft with no voxels or magic. Ark with no dinosaurs. Survivor on a desert island. Eat or die. Drink or die. Get poisoned and die. Get bitten by a shark and die. Now I need to make peace with the fact that I am permanently clearcutting all these islands so I can complete my ostentatious mansion.
Because I'm me... Subnautica has distance radar pips but no map or compass, so I went to several extreme locations and recorded the distances of every other pip, then used a rubber-band algorithm to snap the positions into relative positions on a map. Now I'm playing Stranded Deep and there are compasses but no distances or maps, so I'm using the Law of Sines of Triangles to calculate the relative distances to objects based on their relative angles. Who ever said high school trig and calc wouldn't be useful!?
"The Abyss (1989)" is really good. Ed Harris and an adorable pet white rat are deep sea engineers who are drafted by space marine Michael Biehn to investigate a lost submarine. James Cameron discovers that he can subsidize his scuba diving vacations by making a movie from his scrap book cuttings. "The Abyss (2023) (Swedish)" is a fine disaster movie. Frigga is a mine safety engineer in Kiruna who discovers that either overmining is opening sinkholes in the city or the angry spirit of the mountain has lost patience with humanity. Disaster movie as a metaphor for family issues? Check. Adorable children in peril? Check. Two named characters and whatzisface crawling into a dangerous hole? Check. I enjoyed it except for the dialog in the last half consisting mostly of people shouting "
"Spaceman" with Adam Sandler was not the movie I was expecting. I loved "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky and "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir, so I was hoping for a sci-fi adventure about Adam Sandler and his alien spider friend. What I got was an attempted psychological drama about a very lonely man getting relationship advice from a possibly imaginary spider.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds": I'm enjoying it. The first three things your average viewer knows about Captain Christopher Pike are: He was captain of the Enterprise in that unaired pilot of The Original Series; He was retrofitted as the captain of Enterprise before Kirk and was Kirk's mentor; He's in a wheel chair in some movie or something. So when starting a new show about Pike, the audience knows that he gets horribly injured (by even 23rd centry standards!) at some point. The show faces this head on and lets Pike know via a prophetic dream that he will be part of a space disaster in about 10 years and will be injured rescuing a bunch of people. The first few episodes have touched on him struggling with the decision to take people along for his diasterous ride and knowing that everything should be fine for another 9 years and 11 months. It's episodic. Each episode visits a Strange New World and does a Federation meddling plotline. It reminds me of the better episodes of Orville - or Orville does a pretty good job of reminding me of TOS/TNG. Spock is science officer. Uhura is a fresh ensign and languages expert. Sam Kirk wandered on and off one episode though I'm not clear about the family connection. The rest of the crew is fine. I think I prefer the Orville's bridge crew though Orville needed fewer poop jokes.
Me four hours ago: "I bet if I write this expression using commas, I can fit it all on one line! if((A && B, C) || (D && E, F)) {
Me now, and this is entirely unrelated, I swear: "Why does this function act like I didn't give it any parameters?" function(A, B), C, D;
there was a good french show... "Astrid" on Amazon. Police records woman has semi-severe autism and memorizes all case files. Buddy cop procedural. As soon as I got into it, Amazon shifted it to pay-per-view, like several other good shows.
I was browsing around an art site and the artist did a hypothetical redesign of "Moontrap" (1989) with Walter Koenig (Chekov from Star Trek) and Bruce Campbell (If you have to ask...). I'd never seen this film so I grabbed it from the library. It's a bad science fiction movie from 1989 that I had never heard of. It started with Chekov doing Kirk's captain log because he's jealous or something. There was a long sequence in the middle where the characters wander around an office block saving money for the finale. All the dialog was stilted and forced. At one point I said "It's a good thing they found such a bad actress - she does a good job at 'alien who can't speak English'. " Astronauts discover evidence of ancient life on the Moon and fight killer robots. The writer really wanted "I won't be beat by a machine" to become the new cultural catchphrase but there was noone who could pull off Charlton Heston's "Damn Dirty Ape". FYI, the shortest distance between the NASA office hallway and the NASA launch center involves a short-cut through a strip club. And the fragile airlocks separating the team from killer robots with razor hands are a good place to strip out of space suits and make out.
"Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child Of Fire -xxx-not-a-star-wars-story-xxx-" wasn't as bad as I'd heard but could have been a lot better.
The story is that Zack Snyder wanted to write a edgy R-rated Star Wars movie, but he couldn't get permission, so "Star Wars" became "Moon Rebels" and he made his movie anyway but without access to the iconic music or the cool ship designs or the interesting mythology. It's pulp. Go have fun watching pulp.
Did you know that George Lucas took elements from cool movies by Akira Kurosawa? Zack Snyder does. Did you know Star Wars uses World War II imagery like the ships and planes and nazi uniforms? Zach Snyder does. Did you know George Lucas read Joseph Campbell's heros journey with elements like "Rejects The Call", "Finds The Mentor", and "Escapes the Belly of the Beast"? Zack Snyder does. Did you notice how the first Star Wars movie paints its factions with a very black and white brush? Zack Snyder did. Did you know you can use Sloooow Moootion (copyright Zack Snyder) to take a quick action scene and make it tedious? Did you know you can use Aetherial Chanting to distract people from the plot holes that are strobing by on screen?
Anyway, get your popcorn, throw it at the screen and enjoy yourself.
I played half-life as magic F5 reload man.
Which generated a game idea I never got anywhere with. When I reload any game, I'm creating a new universe in which I made a better choice, abandoning the universe where the player is dog-piled by aliens. What happens in those universes? Could there be a game about cleaning up all the failed universes?
Browsing Kickstarter because I'm bored. I've found multiple rows under "Trending Design" that run NSFW erotica comic, Print-to-play Warhammer terrain, the world's first decent wallet.
My crossword had this hint "What the Angels could not do to Ohtani" and I thought there was a cool mythology I wasn't familiar with. Turns out to be baseball business dealings.
"Resign [him]"
But yeah. I had visions of some giant or fallen angel, trapped in a prison for a thousand years before he eventually breaks out to win the world series.
Watched an ER episode last night where one of the nurses is babysitting a bin of earthworms and something goes wrong. Then the nurse is summoning the medical team to bring warming pads and scalpels and such so she can repair the worm habitat. It was very amusing.
Drop ceilings suck and the idiots who originally installed it agreed.
It's hard to put the asbestos cardboard sawdust panels up, so they used the bare minimum of support wires to hold the ceiling up, to make it easier to slide the panels in. Idiot past me reinforced the ceiling with 4 times the support wires, so some places are impossible to slide panels in.
This is the fourth collapse we've had.
They used smooth nails upside down into the floor above, so a few times the nails have slowly slid out of their holes and dropped their segment of the ceiling.
It's impossible to lift the joist beams into place, so they're all 1 inch shorter than the space and dangle off the walls at the ends.
This time a wire was attached with a little J hook onto its nail and the wire opened a tiny bit and let go.
I doubled the density of wires, used screws to attach and tied my wire using boy scout knots. My sections are safe. But the other 500 panels could come down in the future.
Math is wrong. 100 panels? 3/4 of the house is unreinforced.
So much stepping up and down ladders with my hands over my heads.
Transcript of me live-tweeting about my plumbers:
Jon: Working and watching slack. Supervising the dismantling of my house to replace a $.35 part.
Jimmy: It was the solenoid wasn't it...
Jon: I knocked the solenoid off over Christmas and the guys didn't complain about that.
Jon: Dirt in the city water blocked the water intake valve. They fiddled with the faucet and the system filled. Now there are three technicians frowning at my boiler wondering why it never shuts off.
Jon: It's possible they'll want to replace the same part they replaced last year... My wife worries that they'll want to replace the entire $10,000 furnace system to make the problems go away. As far as I understand, they're only talking about replacing every bit of plumbing EXCEPT the furnace.
Jon: Last year the expansion tank rusted open and started leaking? It's a bit that buffers high pressure city water down to the low pressure furnace water. My house is hot water heated, not steam. dirt/calcification/whatever blocked the inney-takey valve bit just before this. Flipping the manual release may have fixed that, or maybe not. Today, the partnership between the intake valve and the pressure balancing expansion tank aren't balancing the water, and may still not be adding new water to the system when appropriate.
Jon: I was briefly feeling bad as a homeowner that I didn't just flip the manual switch when they showed me the system was under-pressured. Then they've been here for an hour calling for backup. So I'm back to "I probably should know more about my house's mechanical systems, but I'd still have to call for the local pro anyway."
Jon: I replaced my hot water tank because one of these guys told me the thermocouple (a $5 part) was bad and the entire unit ($3,000) needed to be replaced. The next month they came back to tell me that the furnace ALSO had a bad thermocouple and I glared at them until they wiggled something and it started working again. I forget what (because I'm a bad homeowner), but there was something upstream that was the real problem.
Jon: It's weird. I understand debugging and problem space diagnostics, but I don't care about my plumbing or electrical. So I follow them around asking "this thingie here? How can we check if the problem is before this thingie or after this thingie?" Sometimes they'll shove a multimeter in my face and say "These numbers say it's fine here." and sometimes they'll go "Huh. I guess we could check that."
Jon: ... And, the switch I told them was loose and that I'd tried to tighten on my own was still loose. New guy walked in, tightened the part and walked out. Looks like I was only paid for 1 service call, not 3, so that's good.
Jon: So, yes, Jimmy, it was the solenoid.
"The Retirement Plan" is a bad movie that managed to pick up Nic Cage, Ron Perlman, Ernie Hudson, and Lynn Whitfield, presumably because they all had car payments due.
Nic Cage stars as "Jon Whick", an elderly retired hitman who is dragged back into the business when his estranged daughter and adorable grand-daughter end up with a drug dealer's Macguffin thingie. The head drug dealer, played by an annoying yappy little dog, sends teams of killers to the place to get the Macguffin thingie and kill the daughter and granddaughter in the process. Ron Perlman is Yappy's cleaner who spends half the movie babysitting the granddaughter because the drug team still can't find the Macguffin.
There's a good movie buried under here, it just needed to be written by Edgar Wright, Guy Ritchie, Oscar Wilde, or Mel Blanc.
The entire movie is lit like an episode of television. I don't entirely know what they're doing wrong, but everything is too bright and flat.
Obvious jokes are missed. The movie has annoying slam titles for character names and ostentatious location title cards. One location title attempted the payoff of a joke they'd forgotten to set up. None of the character slam titles achieved jokes that "Jane the Virgin" managed such as the drug dealer screaming "Why are you all so incompentant? My sister's daughter's boyfriend could handle this!" and the next slam title reading "Julian. Yappy's sister's daughter's boyfriend." "(ex-)boyfriend" "(it's complicated.)"
Keanu Reeves trains for months in martial arts, weapon handling, and choreography to do his movies. Nic Cage had an afternoon free before his knee replacement. There were fight pairings between several massive bouncers and Nic Cage or Ernie Hudson where I started to say "I don't believe these men can beat those mountains" and then the film would cut the shot so I didn't see those men throwing out their backs punching the walls of flesh.
Nic Cage fights off three goons while dangling his adult daughter out a window on a rope. Leslie Nielsen could done amazing things with this premise. This movie didn't.
The movie repeatedly cut tension in one scene to update us on the lack of progress in another scene. The named actors all did good work with their lines but the director and the screenwriter (same man) didn't give them enough to work with. Annoying Yappy Little Dog needed to be recast as a goon and Ron Perlman should have been given the role of Head Drug Dealer. In the same vein, Yappy's drug boss, Mean Highschool Girl should have been replaced with Dame Helen Mirren or Ivonne Coll or Dame Judy Dench. Mean Highschool Girl attempted to perform intimidating rather than being ice-cold sophistication and let the scene do the intimidating.
There was the first half of a joke with the repeated border customs interviews; "Business or pleasure?" "Pleasure" but there was no payoff. I think the writer stole this from Guy Ritchie but forgot to steal the punchline. There was repeated visual comedy that was missed. Yappy is trapped on an airplane with a bunch of Renn Faire performers. Yappy is shorter than a fence he's walking past. 10 hitmen try to hide behind rowboat.
Drink first and go get a refill halfway through. You won't miss anything.
When I see lines of jagged text, I sometimes imagine tiny people climbing up the rock wall formed by the text.
This week on "That movie was surprisingly good except for the dog turd on the side": "Forgotten Experiment" (Prime Video, Russian, Dubbed). Billionaire scientist Tony Starkovsky is taking a test flight with his new Quantum Generator, so-named because calling it Chronotemporal Frakking would lead to questions by the EPA. Due to sabotage or temporal shenanigans, he crashes on the same island where his scientist father did his research.
CW: James Bond levels of consent understanding. CW: Not giving your actress a bathing suit to walk from the water to the beach is a good way to promote your movie from PG to PG-13.
CW: Time travel makes questions of relationship power dynamics weird.
CW: Whaaaa? Ewwwww!
"Valley of the Dead" (Netflix, Spain, Dubbed) Evil Nazi scientist Dr. Evil has released zombie mustard gas into a Spanish valley. Dictatorship Army Captain Fast-talker must join with a group of Anarcho-Communist Atheists in order to escape the VAAAALLLLEEY OF THE DEEEEEAAAAD!
CW: Only lame movies are rated R for Gore. Cool movies are rated R for Gore, Casual Sexism & Homophobia (the same pointless 30 second scene).
CW: Don't ask what any character's political alliances are.
Heaven's Vault is a walking adventure game, but the character is a linguist, so the bits you are collecting are words and phrases. it was fun. It wasn't quite The Witness as far as mind-changing epiphanies, but I was half-way to being able to read Ancient by the end of the game.
The Witness.
It's a simple puzzle game, but the rules accellerate. It's not a deep game, so it doesn't matter if you beat it. The game is about building the mental processes needed to play the lategame.
Hints would destroy the game.
There were multiple times when I figured out the rules and made some progress, then hit a puzzle that broke everything. I had to wander away and come back and then I reached enlightenment.
It will do you no good for me to explain the koan that is The Witness. You must discover within yourself the true answers.
It was enhanced by me playing it at the hospital while sleep deprived and on drugs.
Stuff that's going on.
• Started playing Stranded Deep, another survival crafting game. This game doesn't have a map, but it does have a compass to tell the absolute direction between islands. I built a modification of my relative direction mapping that takes compass directions and derives the distance between islands.
• I tried Donald Knuth's literate programming again and gave up. LP is this fascinating idea where you write the book/article explaining your code first and run a weaver/untangler program over the book to extract the code snippets and turn those into the program. The idea is that the article/commentry is always being turned into the final article and the code is always being compiled into a real program so neither gets out of date.
I tried it. Knuth's system is based on C(ish) to LaTex, a scientific typesetting format which I don't use. I can get my program out of the web (the combined progarticle is called a web) but the book/article/webpage is locked in a format I don't use. I downloaded a LaTeX (x? X?) editing suite, but it's complicated and I don't need it. I eventually got some PDFs out of the system but I was mostly interested in this blog here. And I'm doing a lot of programming in Javascript, so I want an HTML/Blog <-> HTML/Javascript game weaver tool.
So, should I write a new one? It also seems silly to write a HTML/JS weaver tool when I hop between languages. I think that means I want a language agnostic weaver. That sounds more difficult to write a single blog post.
• At work I had need of a log file reader again. A co-worker wanted help reading 20 lines out of 10,000 lines of a file and I wanted a bit of help visualizing what was happening. I've written this program but I haven't taken it to work yet and I've never been able to use it in a real world scenario.
I came back from vacation inspired with a few ideas.
• A Piet Mondrian style modern art / mosaic generator based on shattering a frame and filling the shards with closest match colors.
• My wife got a bait-and-switch ad for a ring freeing puzzle game.
• The Zig programming language looks interesting.
• I wanted to play my personal solataire game that's written in Godot for Android, but I don't yet know how to adapt the screen size.
I want to experiment with some webgl, do some 3d game in javascript.
drawing a square on the screen is ~500 lines of javascript. I kinda understand what each bit does, but it's a block of code I copy-pasted from mdn and couldn't write from scratch.
not counting the matrix library that's required to get even that to work.
Continuing to fiddle with WebGL. Built a little height map. I'm convinced that I have my camera floating upside down and backwards, but that I'm also rendering it reversed, so two wrongs make a left. There's weird +PI/2 corrections all through my code.
I tried to add object picking and failed badly for two days.
I was a smart-ass snot in math in highschool. Math just made sense to me up through part of Calc-3. When we got to spinning shapes around axises to create volumes, I started to get lost.
In college, Linear algebra starts with arithmetic (boring), then does vector work (boring but with more numbers) and I stopped going to class. Then they moved on to matrices and disjasformics and I hadn't been to class for a week and I barely squeaked by. Ironic that that one class is actually what I do for a living. Every few months I run into a critical matrix and I peer at it with a cocked stick and beg one of our PhDs to move it for me.
So I'm doing WebGL and trying to take a camera position, fire a ray out of the center, impact a variable heightmap at some point and report that position, which I know is a simple matrix multiplication, but I skipped that class (and took the test cold) so I've spent 2 days moving cos(theta) back and forth in my code hoping it works. I can place a point if I'm facing due north, but if I turn left or down everything breaks.
Wolfram tends to have just a bit too much information: they'll explain the same thing geometrically, algebraicly and using tensor formics and I'm always wondering if I should understand the symbols in the second paragraph or if this is the russian translation.
This woman has some good vector and spline videos: https://youtu.be/jvPPXbo87ds
The Continuity of Splines
When we were down in Florida, they broke out Just Dance on the Switch. it was fun flailing like an idiot, but I've always preferred DDR because the mat is real exercise, not just swinging your arms to trick the motion controller. When I got home, I couldn't find my DDR case. Missing discs is normal, Alex hides them in whichever jewel case is closest. Missing cases is odd. Anyway, cleaned the entertainment center and ordered a new one used. I've done 4 sessions so far and am sweating like a pig. Unfortunately, we seem to have owned DDR2 before, so I don't know any of these songs or moves. I got my first AA* rating this morning.
I stumbled across this recently. "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Lana Del Rey (American singer-songwriter) is occasionally in the news and I'm always briefly confused before I remember that she is no relation to Lester Del Rey (American science fiction author/editor).
I'm always forgetting which one is spelled "COVID" and which one is spelled "corvid".
I see no way that this can go wrong.
I have a planning terminology question about a story scenario I have in my head. "Plan A is oops... well, now we're on Plan B, I guess" tends to be about adapting to failure. Is there a standard incrementing when revising plans to deal with unreasonable demands from external parties?
I'm imagining the Terminator/Murderbot/your favorite pet psychopath as a hostage negotiator.
Plan A: Kill everyone. Benefits: Terrorists are stopped and no one tries this again. Control: You can't kill everyone, there are innocent civilians.
Plan B: Rapid-snipe all suspected terrorists immediately. Benefits: Terrorists are stopped and most of the civilians are probably missed by the cross-fire. Control: You can't just blithely kill the civilians.
Fine. Plan C: detonate a canister of fast-acting nerve agent in the building. Wander through and shoot all the terrorists in the head. Most of the civilians look healthy, most of them should recover eventually. Control: We are not giving you nerve agent.
Plan D: Unit 1 acts as hostage negotiator/distraction and keeps the central terrorists attention. Units 2, 3, and 4 execute Stealth Ninja and kill all the terrorists from the outside in while Unit 1 juggles puny human attention spans. Control: Better, but we're supposed to turn the suspects over to the police.
Plan D-1: with or without their hands. Control:----
Plan D-2: Fine, Unit 1 acts as hostage negotiator/distraction and keeps the central terrorists attention. Units 2, 3, and 4 execute Stealth Ninja and simultaneously gag, restrain, and disarm all the terrorists from the outside in while Unit 1 juggles puny human attention spans... Control: Better.
... wasting 20 minutes of my time and requiring 4 units to do the job of 1.
Operation "Let's get this done", Operation "What did they have to live for anyway", Operation "Human Rights are a waste of my time"
I had that problem when pair programming/training one of my new guys. I vacillated between "Now press the [e] key" and "Create a continuous physics system for our interface". One guy I eventually left alone and he was faster than me. The other i left alone and he never completed anything.
We have other systems programmers who are busy and want UI to build all the hooks into their systems. Our best practice is "I want a set of functions to get/set/blah your system. Write me those functions and I'll call them. Errors my side are mine, errors after I call those functions are yours."
Audio is one of the worst. The entire department, artists and programmers speaks metaphorical chinese. "events", "hooks", "objects", "signals" mean esoteric audio things and not the standard meanings used by the rest of the project. They're oddly self contained, so they don't ever need a "get volume" or a "explode it" function in accessible C the way any systems or missions programmer might. So I always have to ask for their help to write a function that only incidentally lives in one of my files, then I have to ask their help to fix it when their loosely coupled system changes away beside me.
The vehicles guy had to write the same function I want, so he only needs to wrap it for external use. The missions guys have the same concerns I do, so again, just expose an existing function. The audio guys are more distributed and event driven in an odd way and less worried about my kind of introspection. Also, UI audio is an outlier to them? Weapon sounds play on a specific audio object. Music plays continuously... actually, it might play like a radio with all music playing simultaneously and volume controls filtering out what you hear... or something, I don't know how it works. UI has no "objects" that originate the audio and no positions, so we have to use secondary paths that fake that. It's a very "leave it alone, it's working" relationship.
Physics and rendering is complicated but I can see what they're trying to do and why it's complicated and I ask for a native guide. Audio I feel like I should be able to understand, but it's an alien monolith and the guides don't seem to speak English.
Rant about D programming language. I got inspired to build an interactive command line constructor for complicated rarely used tools.
Filenames could open a file picker, int arguments get restricted to the right ranges, as the tool prompts for each value, it provides the docstring.
yes, it may have limited use, and yes the tools maker will have one extra thing to maintain. Maybe there's a way to generate the --help arg from my data file as an incentive.
1. "D" is impossible to search for. I search for "Digital Mars D" and forums (after an hour) recommend searching "dlang". Languages with cutsey names for the win. 2. The official downloads didn't work for me. One seems to be a broken AWS download and one seems to be an FTP link that Chrome is somehow interpreting as a broken HTTPxSx link.
I eventually found a mirror, but the first mirror was missing the actual compiler and I needed a second (fourth) link to get a I-hope-working build.
3. Create a new file. Paste in "hello world" from the official website and try to build it. I don't know how to configure notepad++ to build D files, but I can commandline it for a bit, then use my history to build a notepad++ macro. it won't build. import std.stream; fails.
I simultaneously research two paths: My build is missing random includes, or std.stream got removed during a language breaking 1.0 to 2.0 upgrade (which I have ignored for 10 years.) I fight with it for a bit, and std.stream was removed for some reason BUT the official documentation on the front page still references it.
I accidentally stumble on the improved DLang 2.0 documentation, which matches my build. i hack some stuff to get my emptysource.d to compile.
4. The library std.json looks nice, but the documentation is very function oriented. There are examples of how to extract object members jsonobj["key"] = new_value; looks lovely. There's no example of how to iterate across all members in an object. Probably because it's transparent and uses the way D iterates across all members of any object. But I'm rusty, so I'm looking for documentation they didn't realize I needed.
5. I try to extract a thing that doesn't exist and my tool crashes. Good news, I get a call stack. Bad news, the top 10 entries are hex codes. Windows.RunExe is the last legible entry. This was a deal killer for me 5 years ago - crashes without a stack and stacks without names. Do I have to install a hacked compiler, or do I need some extra tool? I search for answers and I try to read the compiler options. I stumble on a few compiler options that seem to relate to symbols and turn them on. nothing.
Blah, blah, blah. The order of some options is critical. -G gives me a call stack with names. -G -L5 -debug_map doesn't.
Fin: I'm up and working now, but this is why D isn't more popular. They've built a language I like, but the tools and especially the tools for windows are left as "you're smart, figure it out". Searching for help, I see older forum posts with core architects saying "works for me on my machine" or "That's not what we're trying to accomplish".
Also, the compiler options are complicated, so I wish I had a tool that would explain them to me and help me fill them out. 😛
In retrospect, I keep wishing I kept a more detailed dev journal. In trying to get the DLang compiler going, and in setting up a bare bones windows app, and in trying to move my gradle installation somewhere logical for android programming, i make a lot of mistakes.
I eventually solve the problem by moving things back and forth and mining StackOverflow, but I sometimes hit problems that Google returns no results for.
I'm focused on the thing I'm trying to build, not on keeping a minute by minute recording of what went wrong. I also don't have a local hourly version control (time machine? like a local source control) or a video running, so when i get done with my feature and feel like recording my struggles for posterity, I can't reproduce the problem exactly.
Also, i'm a dad and I have a day job, so when I'm working on a project, I'm trying to eke out every minute of programming before dogs need to walk or the kids need to be fed.
The build pipelines are all "get it working and then don't touch it". That mostly works. I'd never done android ... Actually, i think android was painless. It was getting the gradle set up for minecraft that sucked. But I hadn't done that before, so I couldn't revert to an installation.
DLang is a bunch of (I assume) Linux command line wizards, so windows is an afterthought for them. Also, Code::Blocks crashed at one point... but it somehow garbled my build preferences beyond the defaults... Like the next morning it was trying to link to the Mac libraries or something.
I've complained about this before... I'm not confident on deep open source tool chains with names I don't know or care to memorize. dlang -> llvm -> gradle -> npm -> gocrate -> whatever. I'm trying to make a dlang or a minecraft thingie, but the error is coming from the center of the toolchain. Fixing that is a frustrating combination of not knowing which version the dependency is operation at, pinched between not knowing the top level system well enough to know what went wrong.
like I said, i almost always get it working eventually, but guh.
Like right now, DLang is removing my crash stack symbols from my windows app, but not from the command line app. I assume that there's a linker option to keep them, but I haven't found it. i did find the option I wanted in the llvm-link back end, but DLang doesn't pass params through directly, it has a different set. I was using the command line to diagnose a similar issue, but my app is 10-15x more complicated than my command line utility, so I don't feel like setting up a full test case to see where the symbols are getting lost. I'm trying to make a toy here, not reinstall windows!
Notepad++ is a great text editor but a poor IDE. Code::Blocks has basic IDE support, but the debugger is busted (for DLang) and the function overview only works in C++ or Fortran. VSCode might fix my problems, but I've resisted contributing to the MS monopoly ecosystem.
ooh. This one isn't a typo, I just haven't written this function yet.
Temporal error: You are using this software at an unsupported date. Please switch your reality to the latest update and try again.
Yesterday I was listening to this Studio Ghibli playlist. Probably not official.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2dnUS41NQs
I glanced down to see who the attributed composers and performers were and saw this: "The best Pia Nojibri Collection in history". I'm enjoying this, I thought, I wonder who this "Pia" is and if she/he does anything else. I did some Googling and got nothing. Google suggested some spelling revisions so I don't think I've mistyped their name. This morning I open a new playlist on another computer and Youtube offers me "The best PIAno..." selections. Ah. Pia Nojibri is not a new musician I will be tracking. It's a bad transliteration of Piano Ghibli, which I am already enjoying. (Also, I've looked it up repeatedly and can never remember how to pronounce Ghibli, but Wikipedia says that Miyazaki doesn't know how to pronounce Italian/Arabic, so I guess we're both wrong?)
Wasted a bunch of time at work yesterday trying to debug my debug code. Always annoying. Also realized that one difficult bug was because i run in debug with lots of dev tools and QA has moved up to Release_near_final with minimal tools, and one or more of those tools was changing the bug reproduction environment.
And the feeling of failure... This code was supposed to help me understand something else, but I failed at it so badly, I can't even understand these printf statements...
I need to learn to perform lovecraftian glossalalia.
"Black Mother, pass us by, turn your head away from us, we are not here, we are not here, pass us by..."
There's apparently a part of my brain that triggers for "Engrossing movie". Oddly, it can randomly trigger in my dreams, which is why I wake from "searching wal-mart parking lot" or "sitting in a legal deposition" dreams thinking that my dream would have made a good movie.
As a kid I was always slighly puzzled by the story of Joseph, his coat, and his dreams. My dreams are always obviously fictional brain mis-firings. A Protoss and Duke Nukem showing up on a dating show and I have to drive to get tacos for everyone.
A lot like Weird Al. My dreams also have a 5 minute lucidity horizon. Any 5 minute section of my retelling makes perfect sense, but only connects to the adjacent sections at the edges. Walking down the street in my hometown to get to the pawnshop to rent a truck but we get in a taxi that passes some crashed cars and I'm looking at a map to figure out where to send the ambulance so we decide to have a picnic at a nice bay on the map but we need food so we stop at walmart and walk past the mall food and the hall gets narrower and narrower and we find the dessert fruit pizza but the pizza is in a bag and not a box and the floor is all tilted so now I'm sliding and the toppings are falling off the floppy pizza.
I have an observation i've been playing with: What would the world look like if everyone had psychic powers? And the response is: humans already have telepathy, we just don't notice because we call it "language". We can push thoughts into other people's heads, pull thoughts from other people, predict the future and sychronize ourselves across great distances. Only, this is real life and not badly written magic, so it has limitations and takes training.
How would the dwarven Stone Sense work?
Dwarven parents would play 'geology" in the same way humans parents play "catch". Even if someone has an innate talent, that talent can be honed with practice and direction.
Jack Smith's favorite shirt always makes me think that there's some Priesthood of Justice uniform I haven't heard about.
I might have messed up my Youtube suggestions...
I've been getting frustrated at work. We're wrapping up the next future release and some last minute critical stuff was noticed. There's a button in the game that is supposed to bring up the console platform store, and it... doesn't.
There's an ongoing frustration that sometimes the first anyone notices that anything is wrong is when the UI breaks, but we're just the canary and something is going very wrong underneath us.
So I feel that my responsibility ends at "the button goes click. I'm done." but the guy who knows the DLC/console systems best was out this weekend, so I was doing as much research as I could.
So management is panicking because an important publishing feature isn't working. The UI is fine, the problem is somewhere in the unfathomable depths underneath me.
The problem is either our contact hasn't set up the publishing side of the stores correctly, or gave us the wrong serial numbers, or we typed the numbers in wrong or... elves?
So I checked everything on our end. Again, my expertise and talents end at "the button goes click", but I'm trying, and management keeps reaching back out "is this about to be fixed?" and i'm "has Publishing responded with confirmation on the s/n ?"
Super frustrated Monday morning, then my producer synced with me and we had clarity that everything was on hold for the console guy to get back on tuesday.
I handed it off. All but 1 manager... I had 5 asking me about this... were cool with the answers. I have that overdeveloped sense of duty. I want to help and fix this. I don't like being useless. That guy was just scrabbling for "is there anything else we can do" but I heard "what? do you not know how to read your e-mail!?"
Enlightenment in hindsight...
What's the opposite mental ability from impulse control or executive function? I've been finding it hard to actually stand up or reach for a glass when I want to.
Being sick gives me insane dreams. The first night i woke every 10-30 minutes or so and had a continual dream where I was trying to use the rules of Go to assemble the three different kinds of pain to form Game-of-life patterns. Because my "is this reasonable" module is shut off in sleep, it made perfect sense in the dream and I can't explain the exact meaning of "you know the type of pain that's like shareware, but for cars?"
The second night I did better and went to sleep doing a ted talk/wikipedia narration on the different kinds of lovecraftian horrors. Usually my dreams are unrelated to my self-hypnosis meditations, but when I'm sick, I doze and wake with the same thoughts active.
When I had a flu last summer, I had a dream about this very common word we use all the time for the pattern a group of people form when working on something. It comes from project management but is also used in cooking. I spent the next day agonizing whether I was going brain dead from not remembering this often used word or if I was going insane for thinking that a dream-object is a thing in the real world.
I sometimes see two camps in the Programmers at Volition. The systems guys want to build pure idealized systems and are annoyed at the artists abusing it. The tools/gameplay/front-end guys work directly with artists and designers and grumble that "they want what now?" but knuckle down and try to get things working. The systems guys sometimes want to say "Just say No!" and the missions guys are "Our job is selling FUN!" The systems guys sometimes are isolated and explain things once to the tech artists and leave it at that. The gameplay programmers tend to be embedded with their artists and tech artists and so are much more pragmatic.
Unrelated bug. Having a conversation with one of my artists. In a lot of places, UI builds a list generator or sorts and some other group builds the content. QA sends all the "a thing is bad reading" to UI, but my line tends toward "The first item in the list works, collaborate with Art/Design" and gets much harder on "All the previous items worked, this one is design's fault." DLC messes that up because all of DLC is about pushing the edges on systems we promised we didn't need expanded.
I decided last week that upping my zoloft was a mistake. The constant frustration was down but I was now permanently bored. I couldn't play a video game for more than an hour, I'd watch 1 episode of any TV and be done. I could still read. I don't have a programming project so it's hard to judge if that was wiped out too. I was more irritated with my family somehow. I think being bored of being with them meant the constant "life with another human" irritations weren't balanced by the joy they're supposed to bring you. Hmm. I said I can read but what I can actually do is re-read the same beloved books over and over again. I'm struggling to find a new book to read... including the latest Charlie Stross.
Anyway, weaning myself back down. We'll see what that does.
I love the instructions here:
https://professeurjoachim.com/globe/
"Brew some coffee. Set it aside because it's too hot."
This structure has rooms. This is a room you can be in. Or you can put things that are not you in. The things that are not you will spend all of their time in this room, but you will still have to be in the room when changing which other things are in the room. This means that all rooms are rooms that you can be in. Except for the walls. As you cannot be in the walls, the walls are not rooms.
This structure has an inside and an outside. The outside is sufficient for protecting the inside from damage. If the outside is damaged, the inside may be outside. That would be illogical.
I watched this video and have gotten obsessed with Boyd's surface. Wikipedia has a decent drawing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMPrlvlUIMc
This Object Should've Been Impossible to Make
Take a strip/sheet of paper. Attach right to left and top to bottom and you get a donut. Attach right to left with a twist and you get the mobius strip. Attach top to bottom straight you get a tube. Take the tube and twist it inside out before attaching right to left (or take the toppom and the bottop of the mobius strip and join them) and you get the klein bottle. So above I've run through 3 of the 4 scenarios for attaching the top/bottom right/left of a plane. Boy's surface is a mobius strip right and left AND a mobius strip top and bottom. Cliff Stoll said it was impossible to build in 3D space until this glass blower did it for him.
So now I have a desk covered with mobius strips with scribbles on them to keep the toppom and bottop identifiable.
I think this is one of the valid answers for "What if our universe is a closed 3D surface on something like a 4D balloon?
In some interview about creating the written language for "Arrival", Stephen Wolfram had some strange graph theory idea for the fundamental nature of the universe. It doesn't play into the movie, but Wolfram was imagining that the universe is a giant graph and the heptapods don't travel, they merely disconnect their ship from here's nodes of the universe graph and reattach to there's nodes.
I think he's also trying to figure out if the universe is running some kind of cellular automata
We're watching Fringe, so I'm (spoilers) thinking a bit about parallel worlds. The problem with Sliders is that they always get to interesting worlds but if I understand the meaning of the word "infinite", all the universes near us are universes where the lightbulbs in my house are being illuminated by an electron we can designate Fred instead of by an identical electron designated George. So the distance between us here and the universe where everyone is a pickle is infinite. BUT. Once we have a machine to jump from here to there, after any time has passed, the two universes will be infinitely-infinitely further apart, so I don't know how you do the calculation to jump back. Keep the wormhole open or you're lost forever.
Neal Stephenson solved this in The Rise and Fall of DODO by positing that there are only N parallel worlds (N < 1000) and they clump up and rejoin.
In order to see a change in our world they had to create a quorum of worlds that agreed with the change.
I don't know that I'd agree to live under any of the 3 Bishops.
So, Walter-one. The new month of lysergicaciddiethylamideuary would be a riot. Don't form any emotional bonds about your corpses, your loved ones are gone.
Walternate. I don't know what his social policies are, but strong government and perpetual war will be good for the economy. It's a shame what will happen to the ACLU.
Peter. I don't think he'd want the job. He'd be a benevolent trump. He'd break random laws to accomplish immediate goals and get sued by all 3 branches of government before he loses interest and switches to some other project.
Carl Hiassen? Weirdos in South Florida. There's a recurring homeless man who used to be the governor of Florida, except he was an honest ideologue. He tried to save the rainforest but he wouldn't accept bribes so he was impeached by both parties in the legislator. I think he wandered away from the governor's mansion and into the swamp before that could officially take place. If I'm not mistaking him for someone else, he now intermittently shoots at poachers and real estate developers.
While trapped in a hotel, I stumbled onto the TV show "Scorpion". The intro logo and credits are trying to be all "techie", but since I can read XML, this says "at the end of the show, the actor known as Nick Santora died." The actual show wasn't any better, even though my first episode involved a group of maybe friends dying on a deserted island.
There's a Thai restaurant in Urbana that does the same thing to me. "Bangkok Thai Restaurant &Pho911#2". Each time we drive by, I try to read it as a special HTML character and wonder they were trying to draw a funny Polish "t" or a smiley face.
My experience poking around Minecraft mods is that all the documentation is out of date and there was a full system reset 3 years ago but all the online articles are from before that. It's not that previous thaumaturges are lying or protecting their secrets, it's that I don't live in the same functional universe as they do - my local environment makes the rules of minecraft modding magic work differently. It's frustrating and there's breakthroughs and huge sections are labeled "Cthulu beyond this point" for no apparent reason.
I'm looking for missing story concepts. As a thought experiment, if I have a toy, what are the classes of ways I could have gotten it? Or if it's more helpful, if I have an athletic ability, what are the classes of ways I could have gotten it?
My list is currently: Natural/emergent, inherited, trained, gifted, stolen, bought, infected, found accidentally, rote, mechanical.
The idea is Magic users or even gods. I'm trying to create a periodic table of magic and I'm looking for missing cells.
The gods are sometimes emergent. The Fae are natural magic users. Demigods and fairy godmothers and some witches inherited their powers. Bodhisatvahs train. Saints/prophets have their powers gifted to them. Any number of stories have humans stealing magic.
All the categories might apply to god-like beings too. But Stolen, Infected, and Rote are the interesting cells on the gods grid.
Do you know of any stories where a being became a god by successfully stealing power?
Pratchett has at least one story (The Duchess in the Monstrous Regiment) where a person became a god through infection. Kinda. The people kept praying to her, so she became a small god, but she could hear the pain in the prayers but didn't have enough power to do much about it. Bruce Almighty, but starts depressing and struggles for dramatic success.
Judy always thanks her Parking Buddha for front-row parking spots. I conceive of two stories - the Ultimate Buddha is trying to change a single person's life, but their target is only asking for better parking; or the littlest buddha needs to save the world but their only power is convenient parking spaces.
Good Omens or The Good Place might touch on god-like beings operating via rote. But that's more divine bureaucracy, not a god struggling to operate via a few divine light switches and the universe first aid kit.
"The universe has been sold to a new owner."
I'm intrigued by my poor understanding of Hinduism. Brahma is a vast impersonal force that ... something something ... is broken or reflected or distinguished or polyfuricated into the trimurti gods.
The vague ideas I had about hinduism from christian anti-cult propaganda sneered at the idea of worshiping Shiva the god of death. Pratchett's character Death and reading a little more made me realize that for other religions, death is just one more necessary step. "Shiva the god of putting toys neatly away" rather than "Shiva the god of senseless death and loss".
Naomi Novik's latest series : "The Scholomanse" was interesting. It's evil hogworts. 1/4 or more of students will die before graduation and many more will die during the graduation ceremony. The only reason wizards put up with it is that the external world is worse. Anyway, El, the main character is suited to become a powerful evil sorceress, so the school keeps feeding her killing spells. She has a spell for turning a city into a volcanic crater but struggles to find useful spells for cleaning her clothes or refreshing her pens.
I don't actually like Earl Grey tea. It's just the only one I can confidently remember the name of.
I did the geekiest thing and turned the dice ware passphrase word list into an actual booklet.
Since I'm bored of every video game, and since boredom, depression, and miserliness mean I can't purchase a new one, I saw MineTest referenced on HN again and jumped in. Minetest is xxaxxxxMinecraftxclonexxx an open source voxel engine made specifically for modding gameplay. Minetest is an engine or a simple base game and then different modpacks are supposed to provide the gameplay. I downloaded the 2 most popular modpacks and tried it out.
The interface is rough. When interacting with chests or crafting, Minecraft has left click, right click, shift, ctrl, and double-click. Minetest supports left and half of right. (right-clicking one stack onto an obsolete item to swap hand with grid confuses Minetest.) The recipe book sticks open covering the inventory. using the hot-bar keys doesn't equip stacks (press 1 in your inventory to equip an item into hotbar slot 1). To avoid copyright issues, Minetest reverses from minecraft which inventory row is the hotbar, continually confusing me. I can't figure out how to run.
I don't understand block alignment. I think sticking a new block against an existing block will inherit the alignment. (Minecraft respects your camera orientation). I don't think the developers understand alignment either, because there's a screwdriver and lever tool for fixing alignments.
Jumping feels squishy. If you jump up a hill and your feet get above a higher block, the jump will continue. It feels like diagonal flying, if you can time it right.
A selling point is that the world's y dimension extends from -1000 to 1000, (MC -64 now -128; now -64 to 256) but in order to justify that all the ores are 3-4 times deeper than in Minecraft, so it's harder to get the higher tools. I think the tools wear out faster too.
MineClone2 is the modpack that's attempting to rebuild Minecraft in Minetest. It was fine except the enemies appear to be processing in render time. Since my computer is running at 60 fps, the enemies attack at 60 attacks per second. I spent 30 minutes dying in a corner and gave up. Biome generation seems more random. I found every animal at my starting location. Every.
Exile? is the other highly rated modpack. I think it's a start lowtech and research high gameplay. I couldn't figure out how to make a stick. My pockets were full of flowers and I died (starvation? cold?) and I don't know why. People criticize Minecraft for not explaining what the game is or how to progress (achievements improve this) but with the Exile pack, I didn't know what the plan was to be able to chop down a tree. I've played total conversions before, but they usually have a better achievement/hint system for guiding players toward the mid/high tech tools.
So I gave up and went back to the base Minetest demo. I built a clifftop house which is very inconvenient for building anything else. I'm almost done building a hanging gardens of Babylon style ziggurat. The worldgen is ... different. Far more extreme cliffs and spires and floating islands. I think the biome-gen is janked. I went looking for cotton/wool and reeds/papyrus and couldn't find any in the relevant biomes. I don't think the gameplay in Minetest is supposed to be balanced, it's just supposed to be a functional proof of concept. The mods are supposed to fix/implement the actual gameplay.
Classic Minecraft had a world Y-height from 0 to 128. With a recent update it's from -64 to 256.
Valheim. The skybox is filled with the branches of Yggdrasil and I'm always wishing I could climb up there and explore.
I seem to have two types of games on my Steam wishlist. Games I stare at "But it's still only reduced by 90% to $4.99, I was waiting for it to reach $3.75!" and games I can't for the life of me remember ever looking at before. I swear I don't drunk-buy things, but did I drunk-wish these?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1757963851/planet-explorers
https://store.steampowered.com/app/237870/Planet_Explorers/
Planet Explorers is a free Kickstarter game on Steam. It looks like a Unity game. It's intended to be a voxel open world survival RPG building crafting multiplayer thing. When I see these kinds of projects on Kickstarter, I always wonder if the developers realize that each of those words is HARD. I haven't found the multiplayer menu, but wiki says it's there somewhere. Parts of the website are down, so I think the project is partially abandoned.
Planetary colony mission crashes on alien planet, tensions between the Martian and Eartian survivors. I'm in. Well thought out alien flora and fauna. Lots of interesting monsters to hunt. Voxel based deformable terrain, Other voxel based custom vehicle construction. I love Space Engineers, so I'm going to love this. Voxel terrain comes with a aesthetic cost. The starting grasslands and forests are pretty with lots of interesting plants, but the mountain and desert regions are... voxels. The distant textures become very repetitive very quickly. Some of the large artifacts are rendered using traditional low poly methods, but other of the incredibly massive artifacts are generated using voxels. The transition is jarring. I think I'd prefer the entire world, terrain, buildings, trees to be voxel based. When it's working, the low poly trees on the smooth voxel ground works, but when the trees fall down or the larger monsters die, they do so with an obvious rotation and sinking effect that breaks the immersion. There are metaphorical seams between the fully destroyable world and the mission related geometry sitting on it.
Something is wrong with the controls. Making up a culprit, I think the animation controller is blocking, so if you're walking, it takes .5-1 seconds for the walk animation to finish before you can interact with the flower at your feet. Likewise, when mining, the mining animation drives the terrain destruction for a full cycle after you release the
Interface needed anyone in this chat to look at it. There are too many sub-menus and none of them are labeled with hot keys. The mining scanner uses completely different iconography and orientation than the minimap. Searching inventory takes several extra clicks. There are lots of items and there isn't a good bookmarking or production queue system. There are three main view options. FPS, 3PS, and 3PS with free mouse. I think the interface was built for 3PSFree, but what insane person plays like that? I play 3PS because the FPS seems fisheyed. But that means most menus don't work until I switch my view mode to get the mouse back, then click the menus, then toggle through FPS on the way back to FPS.
I have two primary missions right now. Investigate the big secret and plants some crops. I don't know how long it takes crops to grow, so I keep checking the wiki to see if I made a mistake. I'm torn between complaining that all the side missions are the same and wishing there were more of them to give me some direction.
Inventory is over powered. I'm carrying 50 varieties of plants and 10,000 marble blocks. Any other game would have limited my item count or my weight at some point. I don't need to build a base because I can carry and create everything in my pockets. Also, the nighttime isn't as dangerous as Minecraft and the eat/sleep mechanic isn't explicit enough for me to care.
Weapons seem oddly balanced. I have a tier 4 bow that does 180 damage. My pistol does 50 and my rifle does 90. My wife wondered why I was fighting a colossus with a bow and I said "because the arrows are cheaper." Also, twice now I've approached a mission area, noticed some large enemies guarding the area. I kill one of the guards and then enter the mission trigger. The mission resets the area and I have to fight all of the guards a second time. Rendering is missing a few features. This is a preview on their Steam page. They put glowing crystals in the game but didn't make them light-sources. Then published that image as an advertisement. The lighting at night and in caves needed a pass. I don't really need lights except to do construction. If you want to play some space minecraft, give it a try.
It's definitely worth the $Free.
Pronouns in Fiction: Read several books recently with some pronoun world-building or sub-plots.
Ann Leckie's Ancillaries was the first. Breq used to be a spaceship and is from a society that only has one pronoun. The entire book is written as "she" and Breq is somewhat confused by any other pronouns.
Martha Wells' Murderbot is aggressively non-gendered in a society that routinely adds pronouns to their e-mail signatures. Sexbots have genders; Murderbot is a Sec[urity]Unit cyborg.
This year: Scalzi's Kaiju book features protagonist Alex, who is never gendered in any way.
Sharon Shinn's The Shuddering City shows a society with a complete language of bracelets. We wear wedding rings, they wear occupation, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, parental status, bereavement status bracelets. A complete bio in gold and silver.
Ursula Vernon's What Moves The Dead features a protagonist who is gendered "soldier" from a society with 7? genders? I remember "small child", "male", "female", and "soldier", but I think "aristocrat" or "revered elder" might have been others. The character was happy to stay "soldier" after retiring and never reverted to other age/sex based genders.
Naseem Jamnia's The Bruising of Quilwa: in between trying to stop a plague, aspiring doctor Firuz-they is trying to help their transgendered brother but lacks the spells for the transition.
I think there was another that I'm missing. I either read a lot of progressive writers, or there's a fictional backlash to real world politics, or after the failed misogynist takeover of the Hugo awards, all the Hugo potentials have colluded to write a complete slate of progressive nominees for next year.
Daniel Ford's book "The Warden" was really good. Alyce (Alisha?) is a wizard graduate who gets posted to the ass-end of nowhere to guard a small town. She has two minor talents, but her primary power is necromancy. This means that the townspeople distrust her and her daily work doesn't use her skills well. Townspeople have some PTSD from the last Orc war, previous warden went missing. The setup is kinda vanilla rpg fantasy, but the story was either really good or just hit me in the right spot.
"Polar" with Mads Mikkelsen is a disjointed mess.
Plot A and the poster is of a slow-burn romantic drama about Mikkelsen, a retired hitman, starting a new life in a small town. I loved this short film and wish it had lasted the rest of the two hours.
Plot B is about a group of cartoon psychopathic hitpersons torturing and murdering retired hitmen for the insurance money. It's dumb and goofy and the humor alone made me cringe. Tweedle-dum (Matt Lucas from Alice in Wonderland) is a weirdo nepo-baby who inherited a assassination agency and is trying to clean up its liabilities.
Plot C explores the brutal PTSD that Mikkelsen is suffering from. It would pay off in a better movie. The last half... how to start? John Wick has been described as "a Beautiful, Bloody, Breathtaking Ballet of Violence." I think this is what the producers of Polar were trying to cash-grab on. What's a musical style you hate? Bagpipes. What's a dance style that is hard to do but looks bad when you master it? Morris dancing or Futterwaken - Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter dance from Alice in Wonderland. The last half of Polar is a brutal bagpipe-driven Morris dance of gore. Why does John Wick survive? Because he's just that good and he's always in the right place. Why does Mads Mikkelsen survive? Because he's an ice-cold torture sponge who takes a kickin' and keeps on tickin'.
Is there a rule that a scene isn't porn if isn't sexy? How do you describe a sex scene that doesn't advance the plot, doesn't advance the characters, and doesn't advance the interest of the people watching the film? Gratuitous.
I enjoyed the first episode of "From" on Amazon. Harold Perrineau (Michael from Lost) is a sheriff in a small town from which no one can escape, beset each night by blood-thirsty ghosts. Motorists will occasionally get sucked into the town's environs only to discover that all roads lead back into the town.
Watched "Constellation" on AppleTV. Noomi Rapace (The Best Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is a Swedish astronaut on board the International Space Station. There's a catastrophic event, the commander is killed, and she has to organize the evacuation. Back on Earth, she's suffering from PTSD, Space Psychosis, or maybe Quantum Wierdness as she's seeing things that aren't reliably there, has distorted memories of the events, and is having trouble reconnecting with her family. The first three episodes were a bit chaotic for the purpose of being confusing, and then we had enough of the timeline filled in for the mystery to outbuild the confusion.
Netflix got hold of "The Tourist", season 2. In season 1, John Doe wakes up in an Australian hospital after a car crash and quickly realizes that people are trying to kill him. He has to recover his memories or some clues before they succeed. Season 2 -no spoilers- finds more ore to mine and it's still very good.
I wish "Beacon 23" was better. Lena Headey and Stephan James are both good, but the show starts out with all these mysterious strangers and their mysterious pasts and that leaves the actors with minimal ability to interact and relate to each other. Hugh Howey is the writer of Wool/Silo, he's good at "people trapped in a claustrophobic dystopia", so I'm keeping plugging at the show.
"Voyagers". A bunch of kids are being sent on a multi-generation trip to another planet. Collin Farrell dies and leaves the teenagers to Lord all of the Flies. Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One) is boring. Lily-Rose Depp doesn't have quite enough to do. Isaac Hempstead (Bram from Game of Thrones) would have been better but he didn't have a lot of script. Fionn Whitehead played the main bully, and he was really good except I spent the whole movie hoping that he'd accidentally stab a pressure door and kill himself.
"High Life" was strange, and I don't recommend it. Rated R for Violence, sex, language, sexual situations, adult material, sexual discussions, and rape. Robert Pattinson is trapped in a space ship on a .99c multi-century trip to elsewhere (his decade, Earth's century). It's low budget. For the first 30 minutes I wondered if it was a Covid movie of Pattinson wandering around his bedroom and office. Then the other actors appeared but they still seemed to be wandering around an office park with minimal sci-fi dressings. If the movie has a high-brow premise, it's exploring sexual situations with violent people in an enclosed space. But not in a good way. I fast-forwarded through two scenes of nudity/sex because they were long, boring, and not establishing anything the first 5 seconds hadn't. And then the movie ends and I'm supposed to be asking what happens next, but I'm really just asking why anyone did what they did in the previous 30 minutes. TL;DR; I'm really not sure what this movie wanted to be and I don't think it did.
I tried to make up some line about a stripper performing aversion therapy to expose the abuse in the system by giving an uncomfortable lap dance with too much staring... but I couldn't quite get the metaphor to work and it probably gives the movie too much credit.
If you liked Avatar 1, you will like Avatar 2. It's more of the same and a little better. If you didn't like Avatar 1, you won't like Avatar 2. It's more of the same and has most of the same flaws.
After the first movie, i was asking "How can this war continue"? Cameron loves his N'avi but they're a stone age civilization facing off with ships in orbit. Humans might not be able to win, but they can make the planet uninhabitable.
After the second movie, my fixfic for unpublished movies 3, 4, 5 is that Eywa is the Zerg and we're about to get mind-melded living spaceships and tanks.
Otherwise, the N'avi have to get off planet and into orbit. My only realistic suggestion is that in movie 3 they have to steal a shuttle and get up to one of the colony ships.
I'm watching through The Walking Dead. No spoilers, please. Every season so far: It's very dead outside. The group makes it to the promised land of milk and honey, a place of refuge and plenty. Unfortunately, there are 10 more seasons to this show so the phrase "And they all lived happily ever after" has been scratched off the bottom of the page.
Watched "Moonfall (2022)". It was very dumb. Halle Berry (the rent is due, I guess), Patrick Wilson (that asshole from that one movie), and John Bradley (Jon Snow's friend Samwell Turly on GoT) star as astronauts and crazypeople, interchangeably.
The Moon, with all its 73,460,000,000,000,000,000 metric tonnes of rock, has decided to change its orbit and crash into the Earth. NASA launches a series of high-risk missions to, uh, "restart the Moon." It's like "The Core", but without DJ Qualls' charisma; or like "Sunshine", but without the suspense or real actors. Go watch "Independence Day" again. "Independence Day" has a dog in it. The crazypeople plot mostly involves standing around waiting for someone from NASA to read their email and respond to this Nigerian prince's plan to save the world. The NASA plan mostly involves standing around waiting for the President to decide that saving the world will be good for the midterms.
The Space Shuttle program seems to have solved the previous problems with exploding when poked with a stick, since this shuttle gets
The CGI compositing seems flat. Maybe the lighting was off, because the actors seem separated from the scenes of destruction and human ingenuity going on behind them. The head of NASA doesn't know what the word "Singularity" means, he thinks it means scary robots. The lead crazyperson either doesn't know what the word "megastructure" means or it's like he needs the word "aircraft carrier" and keeps using the word "boat" instead. A blog I like talks about stupid people trying to write smart dialogue. A lot of this movie talks about science the way I talk about art. "Artists are always going 'blah, blah, exercise those pixels, blah, blah, my favorite color is green.'"
Disaster movies usually have a C-plot about a divorced dad's attempt to use the end of the world to blackmail his ex into getting back together. Except in this case, Michael Pena seems to be a really nice and caring step-father, so I'm having trouble rooting for Patr-whats-his-face, I already forgot.
3000 years of Longing was interesting but not what I expected.
It definitely had a shirtless Idris Elba.
I was expecting "Tilda Swinton and Her Magic Lamp", which Swinton explained away and swore to never do in the first 10 minutes. The rest of the movie was more like "The Genie Idris Elba Talks Through His Past Failed Relationships", which was unexpected and intriguing.
"The Extra-ordinary Attorney Woo" was a lot of fun, Korean and subtitled. Autistic attorney wins cases while carefully not talking to everyone about fascinating whale facts.
Jurassic Dominion World 4 was boring.
Thor Love & Thunder was fun.
Couldn't get into the second episode of Obi-Wan. I'm enjoying Name-dan, the Star Wars Rogue One spin-off series. My brother says the opposite.
Actually named "Andor", apparently.
Something is odd about the pacing. Each episode seems to end at the 3/4 mark. Not a cliff-hanger, exactly, just that it always ends before completion of the current task. I guess Mandelorian had more self-contained bottle episodes where this is more like an 8 hour chopped up movie.
I'm programming a little toy swarm in order to experiment with unreliable network communication. I have several thought experiments. An unreliable internet for space ships which pick up wikipedia and e-mail blocks at planets and then move to the next. A synchronization system for surveillance swarms of robot spiders or smart dust. Do you remember the searching spiders in Minority Report? I keep wondering how they would communicate if they couldn't just radio back to their owner's phone. What if they were searching a war zone and needed to keep their radios off? How do you browse the internet if your ping time is measured in days? So I've built a little boid simulation. My drones bounce around my simple maze and gossip with each other when they're close enough. One is designated as the Root. I imagine that the surveillance officer has a USB cord plugged into that one. It sends out heartbeat packets to the rest of the network and the drones count how many hops it took for them to receive the message. Right now there's a collision report that each drone records and then reports back up the tree to the root. In low density situations, it can take several seconds from when I see a drone bump into a wall to when the renderer based on the Root's beliefs updates. I also want to fiddle with drones reporting enemy/interesting encounters and the Root persisting/merging those reports. In a low density situation, combat would be experienced as drones inexplicably dropping off the network. I guess I could add a heartbeat reply so the Root would know where each drone was last encountered. I'm prematurely optimizing. I want each drone to only have a limited memory, but we're in the gigabyte era, so no matter how small I imagine these drones, they can have untold measurements in their memory.
I was looking for a distraction on Steam and saw this free game:
Free, base building. Sounds good.
I tried it out and discovered that their killer feature is jiggle physics. Lots of jiggle physics.
Apparently "Female protagonist" doesn't mean "passes the Bechdel test", it means "BOOOOOBS!"
I was looking for a minecraft clone - open world survival crafting base building.
The first NPC I met was reasonably clothed, except her profile picture was something like this:
And as a feature, not a bug, the jiggle physics forcibly took effect as each character spawned in. Temporary pause, character visible, jiggle assets suddenly start bouncing before stabilizing.
I tried to make a relaxing farming game bug I made a frantic clicker instead.
Flower Farm
I've often wanted a smarter hex editor tool, so I made one.
Hex Structure
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