Archive for the 'Stuff' Category
Shut up and explode
Radio silence for over four months is not unusual for me, I have a tendency to simply drop out of contact with sporadic regularity. I haven’t updated since so then because I’ve been getting my creativity fixes from elsewhere; including (but not limited to): a short course from the OU on writing fiction, a bit of programming, a bit of design and points in between.
The short, 12 week, course was cumulatively a disappointment; mostly due to the tutor who, ostensibly was considerate and erudite, but failed to reveal exactly what criteria he would be marking our assessments with. With only two marked assignments it meant there wasn’t enough of a corpus to “play to the crowd” so to speak, and not knowing what one was being marked on (technical ability? word usage? poignancy?) it became a crapshoot. My final score was disappointing: a combination of these factors and not being entirely happy with the piece myself. The course was conducted entirely online; doing the work was not a problem, however the other members of the course, who were segregated into arbitrary tutor groups, were skittish and generally unfamiliar with communicating online. This meant that for someone who is used to forums and instant messaging everyone became selfish and posted only when it was necessary. This was to be expected from the audience a course such as this would attract (ageing bibliophiles or wayward scribblers) but altogether it struck far too much of my previous university experience.
I have (finally) passed the point of no return and plunged into C++ programming which is something that I never thought would happen. After tinkering with various 3D engines with no headway, I settled on tinkering with 2D (remember kids, less D’s != worse) with the excellent SDL. So far I’ve only toyed with ideas that have interested me including: motion blur (based on velocity), raster rotation as well as re-learning a lot of the vector maths which I only had a tertiary knowledge of before.
The design work has all been work related and not worth digging in to, suffice to say that a new design for this blog will be coming sooner or later (more likely later knowing my general demeanour towards this blog). I have been turned towards using exterior services for certain tasks (Google Calendar has been especially well used by me recently) so I’m looking for ways of integrating that into my endeavours. The Gran PlanTM is to blog my forthcoming trip to Japan (on my terminally neglected other domain) with calendar, map and photo integration. This is of course blue sky at the moment but it presents an interesting challenge to be able to be done well, both for the reader and for me whose last desire while on holiday will be to futz with things.
What day is it?
Thursday, my calendar definitively says that it’s Thursday.
But what’s this on my socks? (more…)
Blogosphereotronomatic - GO!
I have put in a list of links of other websites I frequent in the right hand column (the much maligned right column) but only on the homepage. Many people may be tempted to call it a “Blogroll” which is precisely what Wordpress informed me it was called when I put in the links; this however sounds far too close to “bogroll” which means toilet paper and I doubt that’s something that I would like to infer about sites which you are potentially scurrying towards, away from this nexus of madness. As such, and to lampoon the grotesque word “blogosphere”, this list of links is now called the Blogosophereotronomatic, bow before your new Scrabble word god.
I plucked these links from my RSS reader (RSS Owl, how I love thee) however there is one category still left to add, the ubiquitous “Stuff” category which more or less defines this site as well as my life so take from that what you will. I’m hoping to tweak the design at some point and possibly add RSS feed links (as that’s usually how I read them) but that’s for another time.
Squirrel watch: Volume I - The Beginninging
Such evil constrained within a tiny, furry body
It is my firm belief that one day, soon, squirrels will ascend to the dominant species of this world, enslaving humanity with their pointy teeth and twitching tails, the threat is very real and cannot be underestimated. One day, the lesser species of the earth can shake their heads and know how things went wrong, and know that they could have stopped it; as such I feel it is my duty to catalogue and document their meteoric rise to power, primarily because I am training them to become better, more efficient dervishes of destruction. (more…)
Year in review: Games
2007 was a good year for gaming, yadda yadda, here are the games I thought worthy enough to splash money on during the year in more or less chronological order. (more…)
