Liza Shulyayeva

Climate science: Changes in the cryosphere and climate denialism [UU lecture notes]

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:01:33 +0300

This lecture was given by Veijo Pohjola, Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala. He’s been working with glaciers for about 40 years. These are my rough notes and paraphrased questions/answers.

Placebo effect [UU lecture notes]

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:01:33 +0300

This lecture was given by Tomas Furmark, Professor of Psychology at Uppsala University. My rough notes are below. Note that all of this, including the question/answer sections, is paraphrased - not exact quotes.

Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:01:33 +0300

For one of my cosmology course assignments I had to pick either the ontological or a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, discuss what I think is its weakest point, and attempt to strengthen it. I then presented a version of my answer as part of a seminar, together with a partner who answered a different but ultmimately related question related to cosmology and religion.

Perception and cognition lecture notes

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:01:33 +0300

This past Tuesday we had a lecture on perception and cognition as part of the Good and Bad Science course I’m taking. My rough notes are below.

Homemade pasta and snow adventures

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:01:33 +0300

The year is in full swing. I’m back at work after the holidays and in a couple of weeks the term starts as well.

Gott Nytt År

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:01:33 +0300

Happy New Year!

It’s been an interesting year. Mostly very happy, in some ways very sad - but then, aren’t most years like that for most people? Nothing can be all good all the time. There have been many highlights, and the ones I’m taking with me into 2026 are:

Julbord and Juliard

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Last week the team went to a beautiful Julbord at Fjäderholmarnas Krog on Fjäderholmarna, an island near Stockholm. Last year we had our Julbord on the same island, but at Restaurang Rökeriet. I guess we’re creatures of habit.

AI, Structural Change, and the Future of Work (seminar notes)

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Yesterday morning I went to a breakfast seminar about AI and the future of work at Segerstedthuset. It ended up being a great discussion that went off the rails of the original ‘plan’ in a way that felt interesting and productive. My hasty notes are below.

The Body Electric: Manipulating Large-Scale Anatomy Through Bioelectricity (presentation runthrough)

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:01:33 +0300

My final 15-minute presentation for the Frontiers in Life Sciences course I’m taking is this evening, so I’ve been finishing up my slides and doing some runthroughs. Below is a practice recording of what I intend to present.

The Power of Creative Destruction - Philippe Aghion Nobel laureate lecture notes

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work in the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction. Today, a friend and I went to see Philippe Aghion speak about this work at Ekonomikum in Uppsala. The lectures are organized every year by the university and are open to the public, with no pre-registration. My rough notes are below [L: As usual, my own comments are embedded like this.].

Gothenburg and biohacking and worms and...

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I’ve been in a kind of hyper-busy mode before Christmas. Mostly that has translated into work, but there are also quite a few other things happening.

Italy workation, Romania, and Portugal ✈️

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:01:33 +0300

The last couple of months have been quite a bit of traveling. Two pre-planned trips and one quite impromptu one to just get away somewhere warm for a bit.

Uppsala Half Marathon done!

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Around this time last year I came to Uppsala with a friend to check out Rosendal Day - a day organized by the neighborhood I had just bought an apartment in. On the walk to Rosendal from the station I realized it was also the day of the 2024 Uppsala (full and half) Marathon, the runners and spectators gathered on the route through the middle of the city.

My first race - Kung Björn's Loppet 6km

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I started running again during this past summer, after years of sporadic lifting. I ran for a year or two many years ago, but after moving to Sweden got more into strength training.

Summer road trips - Jönköping, Tiveden, Dalarna, and more

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I’m back in Uppsala after two back-to-back road trips - one to Jönköping, and another to Tiveden followed by some Dalarna exploration. I doodled on my reMarkable tablet through the trip, and figured I’d break this post up with my unfinished sketches.

Finished my course on nuclear weapons and disarmament

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:02:33 +0300

And just as I post about waiting for my grade, the grade comes. I was pretty nervous to submit my first ever university written assignment, but the results just came in and I passed - nice news to get on the first day of my vacation.

First day of summer vacation: summer, sun, and e. coli

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Today is the first official day of my summer vacation. I’m sitting in Leijon, drinking a morning coffee can I write this. It’s been a pretty crazy 7 months. I haven’t written much lately - first out of diverted focus, later out of stubbornness.

AI for Peace - Notes from inaugural Peter Wallensteen Lecture

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I recently got to attend the inaugural Peter Wallensteen Lecture at Humanistiska Teatern. When I originally signed up it already had a waiting list, but I luckily got an email about a spot opening up just a few days before. The series is intended to honor department founder Peter Wallensteen and this first lecture was deliverd by Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell.

Valborg, Axis & Allies, and cross stitching

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I’ve been a bit off the map with local activities. Partly because of the Mallorca trip, but partly because I was spending the last few weeks cross stitching furiously in all of my spare time. I had the idea to cross stitch a custom design as a Birthday present in April.

Easter break in Mallorca

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I visited Mallorca over Easter break, taking a couple of extra days off. It was my first trip abroad after moving to Uppsala and my first time leaving the cats with a sitter here. All went well on that front, which is very promising for future longer trips.

Robot novellfika, pajbakning, Rock Orchestra och mer! För mycket att göra, för lite tid

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Förra helgen ordnade jag vår senaste novellfika, och temat var “Robotar”.

En av novellerna var faktiskt min gamla favorit: Robot Dreams av Isaac Asimov. Den andra novellen var EPICAC av Kurt Vonnegut. Det var första gången jag läste EPICAC. Den handlar om en AI som blir kär i en mänsklig kvinna.

Nuclear Weapons and Academic Responsibility (UU lecture notes)

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I went to the most fascinating lecture about the history of the nuclear bomb last week. I’m not even going to try to shorten my notes. I want to remember it in as much detail as I possibly can. As before, my own post-lecture note interjections are [L: Highlighted like this] (I also highlighted a couple of questions I’d asked during the lecture in the same format).

Balkongprep inför sommaren

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Nu är det äntligen balkongdags!

I helgen fick jag lite (ok, mycket) hjälp med att fixa golvet på min balkong. En jättetrevlig kille kom med sina handyman-skills och sågade till några träplattor så att de passade längs kanterna där en hel platta inte fick plats.

Nuclear disarmament: The institutional landscape (UU lecture notes)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I attended a lecture on the institutional landscape of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament this week. My rough notes are below.

Sounds and signs of spring in Uppsala

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I heard Isabelle Demers play the Åkerman organ at Uppsala Domkyrka last week. As far as first organ recitals go, this was a beautiful one to have gotten the opportunity to start with - even though the instrument did not seem to particularly resonate with me. Or maybe I just need to hear more of it to properly appreciate it.

Individual climate action: Contributor's Dilemma (practical philosophy seminar notes)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

The latest seminar in practical philosophy was a presentation about problems of overdetermination and preemption in climate action. My rough notes are below. I’m trying a new styling format for these. The notes from the talk itself will be in a normal white or black font (depending on if the post is being viewed in light or dark mode). My interjecting comments will be [L: in square brackets and in a different color].

Urban Sketching at Gustavianum and a behind the scenes tour at Evolutionsmuseet

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Yesterday I saw two museums for the first time: Gustavianum and Evolutionsmuseet Paleontologi.

Urban sketching at Gusativanum

The Urban Sketchers meetup took place at Gustavianum Sunday morning. The museum is huge. We didn’t have time to go through it at the pace it deserved, because the idea was to find something we wanted to draw and get started. But I loved the glimpses I got of all the collections and will definitely be returning to appreciate them properly.

Co-reading fika

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

We had a co-reading fika at Kvarteret this morning, where we just sat and read together for 45 minutes (with a bit of discussion about what we’re reading before and after). I started reading AI och samtalet om de stora frågorna av Amanda Lagerkvist. I went to a lecture by her a few weeks ago, at which time she also kindly gave me a copy of her book.

Flowers and fairy tales

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I’ve been slowly building up the apartment since I moved. When it comes to anything interior-related, I’m a pretty slow shopper. Mostly because I’m completely incompetent at it, but also because I kind of want to find furniture that I’ll want to keep for a good amount of time and not just stock up on random things as quickly as possible.

Vandring och utforskning – årets första vårhelg

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Förra helgen kändes som den första riktiga smaken av vår – perfekt för skogsvandringar och upptäcktsfärder.

Jag blev inspirerad att ta med Rigel ut på hans första promenad i Stadsskogen.

You hear colours

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:02:33 +0300

There are two main ways to get from my apartment to the city center: one along a main road and one slightly longer way walking next to Stadsskogen. When I have time I opt for the longer way. Walking with the looming trees on my left and the different houses of Kåbo on my right makes me happy.

The Edge You Carry With You

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:02:33 +0300

After the poetry fika last week I was inspired to buy Still Possible, a collection of poems by David Whyte.

Poetry fika, a morning of sketching, and another run to the mounds

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Poetry fika - David Whyte and others

I organized a small poetry fika this past weekend, featuring a few poems by David Whyte as well as poems the other participants brought. Here were the three I chose:

AI, the future, and norms around the human (UU lecture notes)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Over lunch yesterday I attended a lecture by Amanda Lagerkvist, Professor at the Department for Informatics and Media, on how AI is set to shape and challenges our understanding of “the human.” The talk was organized by Uppsala University’s Centrum för forskning om funktionshinder - The Center for Disability Research.

Running to the edge of the world (Gamla Uppsala)

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:01:33 +0300

I took a run to the grave mounds at Gamla Uppsala today. It probably wasn’t the wisest decision, distance-wise - I hadn’t run properly in years, and this was a 7km run there, a walk around the grave mounds followed by a nice recharge fika at Odinsborg, and then a 7km run back.

Tyra Kleen - Constant Searcher exhibition. And a philosophy seminar on the declaration of art.

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:01:33 +0300

Last week I went to the Uppsala Konstumseum to view their Tyra Kleen exhibition and listen to a conversation about her art. My favorites of her pieces combined the exploration of humanity, myth, and spirit. I loved her pencil, graphite, and ink most of all.

Gods of Data. Religion, risk, and love - notes from AI seminar at UU

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:01:33 +0300

The other day I went to a really interesting talk by Carl Öhman (Uppsala University) about applying religious critique to AI.

Two months in my new home

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:01:33 +0300

It’s been just over two months since I moved to Uppsala, and it continues to be my favorite place to have lived in Sweden so far. The last month has been quieter than the first, with not as many university events to drop in on over the holidays. But now things are starting back up, and I’m having to pick between attending two lectures that are on at the same time next week:

Short story fika: Duty

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

We had our fourth short story fika yesterday. This time, the theme was ‘duty’ and the stories featured were:

The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

It was just three of us this time, and we had a great chat about the duties and sacrifices of war, the questioning (or lack thereof) of outdated traditions, and the costs of our increasing reliance on automation in daily life.

Vandring i Hågadalen

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Idag visade en vän mig Hågadalen. Det är så härligt att ha så vacker natur på promenadavstånd från mitt hem. Vi vandrade dit från hans lägenhet efter att ha druckit lite alkoholfri glögg. Jag tog med fika, och han hade med sig utsökta lunchsmörgåsar.

First month in my new home

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

It’s been exactly one month since I moved to Uppsala. I’m still adjusting and discovering my routines here, but here’s what I’ve been up to so far.

B-CRATOS: Föredrag om hjärnstyrda handproteser med fingertoppskänsla, på UU Centrum för forskning om funktionshinder - Antekningar

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Idag deltog jag i en föreläsning vid Uppsala universitets Centrum för forskning om funktionshinder (CFF), om en revolutionerande typ av hjärnimplantat och protes som möjliggör tvåvägskommunikation mellan hjärnan och protesen.

Novellfika på Konditori Fågelsången - Fox 8 av George Saunders

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Idag höll jag min tredje novellfika i Uppsala, och det var en särskild fika eftersom några vänner från Stockholm var med. Så vi hade både nya och gamla kompisar i diskussionen. Efter fikan gick några av oss hem till mig för lunch och lite mer prat.

Luciatåget på Uppsala slott

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:02:33 +0300

Tidigare i kväll gick jag till Uppsala slott och träffade några kompisar för att se Luciatåget på slottets tak. Det var en kort föreställning, men så vackert! Den sista sången som de sjöng var helt magi.

Personhood-based arguments on resuscitation of Extremely Premature Infants - practical philosophy seminar notes

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

This week’s practical philosophy seminar discussed personhood-based arguments for the resuscitation of extremely premature infants (EPIs). These notes focus less on discussion/paper specifics and more on what I learned about the topic as a whole during the discussion and afterward.

Julbord! Jag började äta fisk igen i precis rätt tid.

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Igår gick vi på vårt team-julbord! Jag har varit vegetarian i många, många år. Jag hade inte ätit fisk på ungefär… 10 år kanske, innan tidigare i år. Så detta var mitt första julbord (som jag minns) där jag åt fisk, och det var så väldigt gott! Men jag åt för mycket av det och vaknade upp med ont i magen. Värt det.

[AI Act Conference 2024 - Notes] Legislating Technology: Addressing the law's internal dilemma

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

These are my notes from one of the AI Act Conference presentations from December 10, 2024.

Addressing the law’s internal dilemma
Stanley Greenstein, Associate Professor in Law and IT, Faculty of Law, Stockholm University.

This work examines the general regulation of technology and is a work in progress.

AI Act Conference 2024 Keynote notes: Navigating the AI Act

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Today I listened in to part of the AI Act Conference hosted by Uppsala University. Below are my notes from the keynote.

Första gången fast på tåget från Uppsala och Anki för svenskainlärning

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Så det hände äntligen: jag fastnade på tåget från Uppsala till Stockholm C. Min kollega från Uppsala har redan retat mig, eftersom han visste att det skulle hända. Han hade rätt.

Short story fika about being human and Historisk julmarknad at Gamla Uppsala

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

It’s been another eventful week at the new place! I went back to work (the commute is even better than I had expected), hosted my next short story fika, met up with a friend from Stockholm, and went to a Christmas market in Gamla Uppsala.

Non-Identity Problem and robust climate action - practical philosophy seminar notes

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Last week I dropped in on what turned out to be a seminar in practical philosophy, featuring a paper about resultant moral luck. This week I was back, with more preparation this time - i.e., I read the paper in advance.

Is humanity a promise yet to be fulfilled? Becoming human at Uppsalas Stadsbiblioteket

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Tonight I went to a live podcast recording of the Forest of Thought podcast at Uppsalas Stadsbiblioteket. The theme was: Becoming human - the search for soul in turbulent times.

A talk on Polar Gothic literature at Chimära Bokhandel

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

This evening I went to another presentation at Chimära Bokhandel & Butik. The topic this time was Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Captain of the Polestar and Polar Gothic literature.

Singularity short story fika, co-writing, and Upplandsmuseet

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:01:33 +0300

This was my first “proper” weekend in the new place. Yesterday morning I met with a friend from my writing group at Himlen Är Blå Som En Apelsin - a really cozy cafe that is a two minute walk from my apartment.

Crashed a talk on moral luck and fairness today - it was great!

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Today I went to a paper discussion about resultant moral luck. I did not know this would be a roundtable discussion. I thought it’d be a lecture. But it was even better!

Forsskål symposium 2024: American freedoms and unfreedoms through history and now

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

These are my rough notes from the Forsskål symposium 2024, “Amerikanska friheter och ofriheter i historia och samtid” - American freedoms and unfreedoms in history and now.

13x13 Lecture 13 - How it all ends (ett inblick i universums öde)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Today I attended my virtual morning writing group, did a bit of unpacking, met a friend for lunch, worked from a really old library with a great view for a few hours, and then went to a talk about the end of the universe.

Om krisen eller kriget kommer...

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Jag flyttade till en ny stad och fick en perfekt välkomstpresent i min brevlåda:

Om krisen eller kriget kommer är en broschyr från Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB). Den skickades ut till alla svenskar nyligen.

Maneten - en novell i tre meningar

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Jag har lärt mig svenska mer intensivt på sistone, och nu tänker jag att tiden har kommit för mig att skriva mer på språket. Jag bestämde mig för att skriva en kopia av min allra första novell, som jag skrev på ryska när jag var liten i Ukraina:

The Pirate Bay på SVT

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

Jag har börjat titta på The Pirate Bay på SVT Play den här veckan, och den är asbra! Serien handlar om hur, vem, och när The Pirate Bay var utvecklades i Sverige. Den har en riktig “Hackers” och “Halt and Catch Fire” vibe. Desvärre finns det bara två avsnitt förtfarande, och jag slukade båda i ett nafs.

How I fixed my Nothing Ear muffled/underwater audio on Android (hint: it's ChatGPT)

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:01:33 +0300

My new Nothing Ear earphones had been working great, but after a few weeks I noticed that sometimes they sounded like they were underwater. The audio would be extremely quiet and muffled. No matter how I adjusted any of the EQ settings, noise cancellation, in-ear detection, codec choice, or anything else in the Nothing app, the problem persisted. A full reset of the earphones didn’t help. I reached out to Nothing support and heard crickets to this day and decided I’d give it a week or two more before returning them.

Modding my Akko MOD007B PC with a flex cut PCB

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:01:33 +0300

I got an Akko MOD007B v3 a while ago and this weekend swapped out the PCB for the flex-cut version.

Audiobook narration trial with ElevenLabs

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:01:33 +0300

I’ve been exploring ElevenLabs TTS for synthesized audiobook narration. ElevenLabs have recently announced a community initiative encouraging discussion about the project (the incentive being TTS character allocation). Since this post has been simmering in my head for a while anyway, I figure now’s a good a time as any.

Visiting Greece

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:01:33 +0200

I visited Greece last year, spending a week in Athens and then another in Thessaloniki to attend a wedding.

I took so many pictures and they’re just languishing in my phone, so I decided put them into a small travel post.

Creating a writing assistant with ChatGPT Plus

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:01:33 +0200

There are many ways to use your own books in AI workflows. In this post I’m going through the most basic workflow that does not involve coding your own app, creating vector stores, or generating API keys. You can do this by just using ChatGPT (with a Plus subscription). Many (most?) writers are not programmers, so there is no coding required here.

How generative AI has fit into my workflows

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:01:33 +0200

I was always excited about the possibilities recent developments in LLM-powered workflows provide. At the same time, I was also wary about the larger implications of these things, from the whole theft problem to wondering “I wonder when this thing is going to become self-aware”.

Portable writing setup with Onyx Boox Palma

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:01:33 +0200

I’ve been using portable writing setups for a while. I started with an AlphaSmart Neo. This was great, but with the screen angle being fixed not as versatile as I had wanted. I wrote a novella on it (said novella would later be extended and become a #1 best-seller in Amazon’s Science Fiction Romance category!)

Complex Simulation: Artifacts of a Russian spy

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:01:33 +0200

I spent a year in Gothenburg after many years in Stockholm. The neighborhood I lived in for most of that time was a very quiet residential area with a small square. In the square was a Thai lunch place. As with many lunch offers in Sweden, the place offered free coffee with lunch. You’d come up to a self-serve coffee counter and pour yourself a cup.

Brainstorming as distraction

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:01:35 +0200

I saw a blurred video of a prisoner of war being beheaded last week. I’ve seen many images of war over the last >1 year, and none have affected me quite like this one. I don’t go out actively looking for these things, but I read different news channels and you end up seeing some things. As I described to someone else earlier, I think it’s the sound that did it. I had trouble explaining what I meant exactly, so I figured writing out the explanation might set it straighter in my head.

Just rambling

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 00:01:33 +0200

Sometimes I feel like rambling out into the void at no one in particular.

I don’t have anything specific to ramble about yet.

Fiction writing updates

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:01:32 +0200

Just some updates on my fiction writing “adventures”.

Writing pace and schedule

My writing pace and schedule have not been very reliable since I started. I went through several months of failed draft attempts, in which nothing got published. What finally kicked me into gear was a story I committed to for an anthology. I drafted that story almost entirely on my AlphaSmart Neo last year, while visiting Glastonbury Tor. I wrote from the hill and it really got my creative juices flowing again.

Implementing multiple choice selection in Go with promptui

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:01:32 +0200

This is just a short post about how I chose to implement multiple choice selection in Go with the promptui CLI library.

The leaves

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:01:32 +0200

It was 3am and I was awake, thinking about the pile of leaves in the backyard again. These leaves had been there for two weeks, in a wheelbarrow. There was no composting/recycling place for green waste within walking distance so we’d need to hire a rental car to drive them somewhere where you could drop them off. And during the day, we just never got to it.

Sympathy is difficult

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:07:32 +0200

When Putin announced a “partial” (right…) mobilization and news of protests in Russia spread, I tried really hard to sympathize with Russian people and not to be cynical.

Exploring testing private TypeScript functions with Jest

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 00:01:32 +0200

I’ve been writing a bit of TypeScript lately, and have needed to learn some strategies to test private functions that are not class methods. With class methods it’s straightforward since you can use array access to get to them, but with functions it seemed a bit trickier.

How leg extensions saved my knees (quick, knock all the wood!)

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:01:32 +0200

Whenever I post my progress with getting to pain-free squats in the gym again, I get similar questions: “Have you tried this?” “You should do this!” “Check out this person” “What about this?” “How do you feel about lunges?”

My WFH workspace evolution

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:01:33 +0200

COVID necessitated WFH when I was still at EA. EA quickly took measures and closed the office. They issued an allowance for people to buy equipment to work from home. I opted to work from a work-issued laptop and ordered a Varier Variable Balans kneeling chair with my allowance.

Glastonbury: the Tor and Avalon Orchard

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:01:33 +0200

The Tor

I was originally intending to grab breakfast before going up to the Tor the morning after my late and rainy arrival in Glastonbury. But when I woke up, the first thing I wanted to do was go say hello to the Tor. It was a really nice, quiet walk. I stayed up on the hill for a couple of hours, eventually doing a bit of writing on my AlphaSmart Neo from the top of the Tor.

Glastonbury: getting there and the town

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 00:01:31 +0200

The first time I’d heard of the Tor in Glastonbury, it was as a result of reading a fantasy book as a teenager. Enthralled by the myths and legends the book described, I did some reading and learned that the legends did not just exist in the world of the book. I knew I wanted to visit since then.

Avantone Pro Planar first impressions

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:01:32 +0200

When I walked outside a few hours after my 2009 LASIK surgery and managed to peer out of the tiny holes in the goggles taped to my face, I got the sense of suddenly seeing the world in high definition. Looking up at a tree, even through gritty eyes that were still in pain and sensitive, I saw every little leaf. I saw the crags in the branches and every crisp shadow between the greenery. I had to pause and take in the realization that there were things about trees I’d never fully experienced through sight, until then. Now, over ten years later, the novelty wore off to a large extent, but I still often stop to look at the leaves of trees I see outside and remember that moment.

PiccoloCane Tanto2 pet stroller review

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:01:32 +0200

A couple of months ago, I bought the PiccoloCane Tanto2 pet stroller for the cats. I originally ordered the slightly more compact and elegant Carino2, but after it arrived it was obvious that it was too small for both of my cats. I exchanged it for the bulkier, but more roomy forest green Tanto2.

Reflections on starting a limited company in Sweden

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 00:01:32 +0200

I saw this post linked on Hacker News today, reflecting on the difficulties of starting a company in Germany.

It made me think about the process of starting a company (“Aktiebolag”, or “AB”) in Sweden, which I recently went through myself.

`json.Marshal()` with additional fields in Go

Sun, 08 May 2022 00:01:32 +0200

I have a Go struct that I want to encode to JSON with some additional fields.

The struct looks like this:

How I'm testing MongoDB calls in Go (for now)

Thu, 05 May 2022 07:00:00 +0100

I started working on a little hobby project over this Easter vacation that makes use of MongoDB. But one thing I wasn’t sure about was how to test Mongo operations. Spanner provides the very helpful spannertest package. Redis has miniredis, allowing you to spin up a little Redis instance for each test. I was thinking I’d likely have to mock Mongo myself, but it turns out its Go driver comes with a helpful (but unstable!) mocking package called mtest. I learned about this in this post and suggest checking it out if you’re curious about this experimental mocking feature of mongo-go-driver.

Experimenting with remote work locations

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0100

With my third booster shot out of the way I’ve felt a bit safer finally going out into the world a bit more and actually experimenting with different work locations. One of the things I love about remote work is being able to work from anywhere, but throughout the pandemic it was impossible to explore this possibility because it simply wasn’t safe to do anything but stay at home.

War and K2

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 07:00:00 +0100

Lately, I am constantly refreshing the news about the war, and waiting for word from family in Ukraine. I am not sure what Putin thinks the end-game is here. Taking Ukraine for Russia? Installing a puppet regime? Has he not seen what Ukrainians have been willing to go through for their freedom? Does the bunker he crawled into not have Internet access to see what’s happening? Even if he manages to control the country by force for a while, Ukrainians will never just stop fighting back. There are already civilians taking up arms, throwing themselves in front of Russian vehicles, and coordinating efforts to prepare Molotov Cocktails.

The effort of people-ing

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 07:00:00 +0100

I’ve always been mostly an introvert. It always takes an effort to socialize, and while I do enjoy other people’s company when I do go out, I find I need a nice long break afterwards to recharge.

Mike Shinoda's video game NFT dreams

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 07:00:00 +0100

I’ve been taking a Twitter hiatus for a while and am finally all recharged and social-media-detoxed, so I’ve started going back on there to mostly read. This morning I noticed a bunch of replies on a game dev hot take in my feed, with seemingly mostly polite discourse addressed to someone named “Mike”.

Amazon's author banpocalypse

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 07:00:00 +0100

Let’s talk about self-publishing.

Amazon

Amazon dominates the self-publishig world. Amazon has a program called Kindle Direct Publishing, in which you can upload your ebooks and paperbacks for publication on the Amazon marketplace.

TypeScript <3

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 10:45:00 +0100

I’ve started playing around with TypeScript for the first time over the last couple of weeks and it is excellent. I’ve made a few hobby JS games in the past as you can see from the games page. JavaScript was always fun for me, but after years of statically typed languages I have grown to prefer them.

Will my new blood pressure monitor be the thing to get me to finally meditate?

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 20:02:00 +0100

I know meditation is good for me, but I’ve never been able to stick with the darn stuff. I just…don’t do it. I do something else - anything else - instead. I’m always too busy, or too anxious or excited to move on to other things.

Editing and making myself finish the first series

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 07:02:00 +0100

I have been editing the next science fiction book. The plan is to hire an editor to go through it as well, since the previous books made enough income to pay for that. Editing will be the first service I pay for in my self-publishing journey. If things continue to go well, I might start buying proper on-market covers as the next step (but I also really like designing my own covers, so we’ll see…it’s just that I know nothing I come up with will be as good as a professional cover designer in my genre).

14 years of game dev

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 07:02:00 +0100

It feels like just yesterday I got my first job in game dev back in Australia, but it’s been about 14 years! I feel like I’ve done a little bit of everything, and was very fortunate to have gotten to grow as an SE on the job while working with different languages, frameworks, and teams. I guess the main phases of the last 14 years have been:

Hosting

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 07:02:00 +0100

I’ve tried quite a few blogging platforms over the years: Wordpress, Squarespace, even Ghost at some point, I think.

I opted for self-hosting years ago, always on S3, first via Octopress and now (and for the last few years) Hugo.

Making a series outline

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 19:02:00 +0200

I thought my first series of novellas would revolve around the same world, but otherwise stand alone from each other.

The second book is harder

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 17:00:00 +0100

After a year of short stories, I released my first novella recently and it’s been doing pretty well. I’m surprised that it is still doing well, since usually books tend to drop off a cliff. But it’s still early days, and the cliff can come any time now.

Social media break

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0100

A few years ago I deleted my Facebook account, and now I feel like it’s time for the next step: Twitter; but nothing as drastic as deletion just yet.

Scrape, Scrape

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 22:20:00 +0100

My book has been getting more and more reviews and ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. Instead of obsessively refreshing the page I figured it might be cool to collect reviews from different sources and have them sent as a summary email each day.

Testing external API calls in Go

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 07:20:00 +0100

Intro

Both testing methods described here can be found in this repository. Be sure to run go generate before go test for the mocks to be generated. Otherwise, the mocking approach test described below will not work.

ThinkPad P14s AMD First Impressions

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 10:20:00 +0100

I was fully set on getting a ThinkPad T14 AMD, but seeing no hint of the Gen 2 AMD version in sight and learning that the P14s is basically the same thing, I decided to go for that instead. This is a quick ramble with some first impressions of the ThinkPad P14s AMD Gen 2 (Ryzen 5)

The quest for a humidifier

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 10:20:00 +0100

Humidifiers and I have a several-year-long history, in which I’ve considered countless humidifiers and tried…a couple. My problem with humidifiers is that I’m lazy. I do not want to scrub them clean. I don’t want to even wipe them after each refill. I don’t want to find yellow goo under the tank that I have to clean by hand.

Spring and Rigel

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 10:20:00 +0100

It is finally starting to feel like spring is here, even though we are having bouts of snow and it is still very cold. Something about the sun feels more spring-like. Maybe the feeling is induced by the yellow roses and pink tulips Dimitris surprised me with yesterday, which feel like very spring-y flowers. In reality, I wish the occasion for them was a bit happier. He dropped them off as a “get well soon” present for Rigel, who is once again having urinary problems.

Litter Robot 3 Review

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 10:20:00 +0100

At the end of last year I decided to use my vacation budget for something I would consider a luxury, and an unneccesary luxury at best: I got a robot litterbox.

Time blocking

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 20:20:00 +0100

I have found myself procrastinating a lot in my free time. This was especially noticeable to me toward the end of my Christmas vacation, and yesterday - the first Saturday since starting work again.

Investing in sustainable food

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 12:45:00 +0100

The vast majority of my long term private savings are in low cost index funds. I only hold a handful of individual stocks, from a small “play” bucket in which I have no high expectations. But I have recently been thinking about investing in companies that I actually care about.

Happy-ish New Year

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 12:45:00 +0100

It has been such a long year.

I like being by myself. For the most part I’ve enjoyed hiding away in my little apartment, getting groceries delivered, working from home. I don’t really need a lot of human interaction. But by this point even I have gotten pangs of wanting to go to the city and sit in my favorite coffee shop, or just window shopping, or being able to go to a restaurant or stroll through Gamla Stan. Most of all I’ve missed being able to meet Dimitris normally. In the last year we have had just two brief stretches of time when we could see each other semi-“normally” - ie not two meters apart, outside or with all windows open (in the freezing cold), sleeping in separate rooms. He can’t self isolate the way I have been, so we’ve had to be careful. Luckily this Christmas break has given us a week of safe self-isolation.

ALIFE 2020 - Robot Cancer

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 12:40:00 +0100

These are my hastily taken and edited notes on the first ALIFE 2020 conference keynote, presented by Mike Levin.

Robot Cancer - why don’t (today’s) robots get cancer?

By Michael Levin, director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

ALIFE 2020 - Soft alife with SPLAT and Ulam

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:40:00 +0100

Below are some rough notes from a tutorial session called Soft alife with SPLAT and Ulam by David Ackley. These notes are very hastily taken and I am editing them between sessions mostly for my own benefit, so expect to see typos and maybe even mis-wordings.

Social distancing ramblings

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:02:00 +0100

I am sitting in my apartment in Täby, which is an area north of Stockholm in Sweden. There are two large playgrounds outside and as usual they are busy with kids, parents, and some grandparents milling about socializing.

IBM lecture - Introduction to quantum computers and quantum computer programming

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 14:02:00 +0100

What follows are my hasty notes from a lecture and workshop-type session I went to at Stockholms University, delivered by IBM. Unfortunatly I failed to write down the name of the lecturer from IBM himself, but will add it here when I can dig up the information.

2019 Travels

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 14:02:00 +0100

In 2019 I did more travelling than I ever had in one year. I visited Vancouver, Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Prague, and Geneva. I meant to write a separate post after each trip, but never found the time or motivation so I figured I’d capture them all in one go here.

Docker Containers for testing

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 14:02:00 +0100

Since I started another repository for the SnailLife Genome Lab, I knew I’d want to test it against a running SnailLife server. I have some cli tests running against a server as well, but those are in the same repository and in that case I spin up the server and manage the process in the testing code itself.

SnailLife Genome Lab

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 14:02:00 +0100

For the Go rewrite of SnailLife I decided to focus on tools early. In the PHP version as the complexity of the simulation increased, my debugging methods were not able to keep up. I did some remote-stored categorized logging and such, but it wasn’t really enough. Figuring out a bug in the brain or the snail’s genome often took hours of digging around.

State of the Liza - 2019

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 23:02:00 +0100

I care quite a bit about self-optimization and longevity and this enthusiasm has developed more and more over the years (although I’m very much an interested amateur here, not an expert by any definition of the word). Over the years I’ve picked up some new habits, supplements, practices, ideas, etc related to this and now I sit here and realize that it’s quite a lot of stuff. I think I might try to capture the ‘state’ of what I’m doing in this area maybe once a year and post it here, and then be able to go back and compare how my habits and things I’m trying are changing over the years.

Happy New Year

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 18:42:54 +0100

Wow, talk about a belated post. I know the middle of February is a bit late to be wishing anyone a happy start to the year, but it’s my blog and you can’t tell me what to do. So - Happy New Year!

Fun PresentationFramework side-effect of bad equality

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 17:50:57 +0200

I looked into a pretty fun bug a few days ago. The symptom: a WPF DataGrid populated with an ICollectionView was seeing inconsistent row copy behaviour. You would select a row by clicking on it and press Ctrl+C, but instead of copying the row you selected it would copy the row your cursor was hovering over.

A first stab at gene expression

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 16:00:47 +0200

In the last post I talked a bit about how I might approach expressing genes in SnailLife Go, and how this worked in the PHP prototype of the simulation.

Brainstorming the SnailLife gene system

Sun, 16 Sep 2018 16:54:06 +0200

In the original PHP prototype of SnailLife there exists a very rudimentary genetics system. Snails had what I called “visual traits” and “functional traits”. Visual traits had genes associated with them. The genes were all stored in the snail’s table and each gene had two “alleles”. During breeding I’d make virtual Punnett Squares of sorts to pass on genes from parents to offspring. But the system was inflexible - each allele for each gene and each gene type were hard coded in the snails table. This left little room for surprise emergent behaviour (ie is it possible for a snail to accidentally get more or fewer variations of a gene than expected? I’m not sure, but I want a system to support that) without having to modify db columns).

Building a snail one organ at a time

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 19:24:50 +0200

I think enough of the SnailLife Go infrastructure is ready now for me to start digging into the snail itself. In the PHP draft of SnailLife, I started with a basic concept of a snail “Here’s a snail. All it has is a name, size, and speed” and then made it more and more complex. By the end I had a model that had organs, genes, a reproductive system, macro/micro nutrient requirements, locomotion, a brain with memories, mood, etc. With the Go rewrite I have the luxury of hindsight and a vision based on the draft. I know roughly where I want to end up - “organs, genes, a reproductive system, macro/micro nutrient requirements, locomotion, a brain with memories, mood, etc.”

Are YOU experiencing shady output from your Go debugger? Try these things!

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 21:50:19 +0200

A couple of days ago I noticed some unreliable output when stepping through the SnailLife server. I use GoLand and Delve debugger, but in the course of looking into this I picked up some tips from trial and error plus from some very helpful people which I think might be useful regardless of the debugger you use.

Roee: Self Modifying Go Simulation Experiment - Part 2

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 23:15:09 +0200

Overview

In Part 1 we talked about the general setup of the world/grid and what the Agent and Instructions metamodels do. We left off at the part where the grid sends a copy of itself to whatever observer channels it has (currently just the aggregationObserver). So in this part we can go over my very rudimentary version of the “ORM Intentionaliser”.

Roee: Self Modifying Go Simulation Experiment - Part 1

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 18:10:14 +0200

Intro

I took up a small pet project over summer that I called Roee. It was very loosely based on a paper I’d read by Susan Stepney and Tim Hoverd, Reflecting on Open Ended Evolution.

Helping as Learning

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 14:07:05 +0200

Answering questions or helping other people seems to be a good way for me to learn more about a language. I’ve been trying to be more active on the Go forums for this reason, answering questions as they pop up (especially focusing on the ones that may not have gotten much attention). Even a very simple question can get you to go down a rabbit hole and learn more as you’re formulating an explanation as part of the answer.

Quick and Dirty Function Timing in Go

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 20:17:09 +0200

When I want to do some rough timing comparisons or get a quick idea of what part of Thing X is taking so long I sometimes just time a few functions. I used to do this by getting st := time.Now() at the beginning of the function and then time.Since(st) at the end. It recently hit me that the same thing could be achieved with less duplication and messiness to clean up (when removing the timings) with something like this:

Coordination

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 15:40:07 +0200

When you’re helping coordinate a workflow switch between half a dozen different studios, making sure all tools support new workflow, and shipping at the same time:

Active worms

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 09:00:07 +0200

My worm bin is about a month old now, which is still very early by worm bin standards. Today I dug around in there and look at the nice active worms I found! I was worried about it before but now I’m hoping it might just be ok.

Vermicomposting

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:27:55 +0200

Letstalkaboutp4

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:25:56 +0200

Let’s talk about Perforce.

10 to 1 Rule

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:19:07 +0200

Similarly, the ratio of “code churn” to “lines of code” in mature and non-trivial software is also at least 10:1. Keep this in mind the next time a manager or customer asks you for a time estimate! To build a 10,000 line app, expect to write roughly 100,000 lines.

UAC Notes

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:18:19 +0200

Random UAC permissions for C# applications notes:

Ask for elevated permissions via app.manifest - see <requestedExecutionLevel level="highestAvailable"/> or requireAdministrator - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6ad1fshk.aspx
Can’t change elevation of a running process, need to start a new process.
To run an elevated cmd.exe and make it look like you’re request permissions mid-run for things like file operations (when you’re really starting new elevated process), set Verbs property of ProcessStartInfo to "runas"

Staple Remover Obsession

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 08:53:52 +0200

Do we really need to know about Randy’s young-age staple remover obsession?

Rubber Ducky Moments: 'Completely unrelated []interface{}!!!'

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 20:24:57 +0200

I mentioned on Twitter earlier today that very often when I get really stuck on something and finally decide to ask for help on a forum, the answer suddenly hits me as I finish writing my post. Most of the time the problem is something really silly that I just kept completely overlooking, and the answer feels painfully obvious once it clicks. Despite the fact that these might be a little embarrassing to post, I figured rather than letting my entire would-be forum post go to total waste once I finally get what’s happening (and so never end up clicking the “Post” button), it might be nice to post the issue on my blog, if nothing else as a reminder of my own facepalm moments.

Sleep

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 20:43:27 +0200

During my five week vacation I made myself finally sit down and read a book that’s been recommended to me repeatedly: Why We Sleep by Matthew P. Walker.

Sunset and sunrise on the Tor

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 14:00:22 +0200

Today is our last day in Glastonbury. I will miss this place, but I also feel like I’ve seen everything I wanted to see here, and that I am ready to go home and take a little bit of Glastonbury back with me.

First day in Glastonbury - visiting Tor and Chalice Well

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 19:44:50 +0200

I’ve wanted to see the Tor in person for a long time, ever since reading a fantasy book set in Glastonbury in high school. My wish has finally come true! I’m writing this post from a small apartment called Chalice Lodge on High Street, Glastonbury. To my left is an organic restaurant named Hundred Monkeys Cafe. To my right and just across the street is an organic food store. Surrounding those are a myriad of crystal shops, psychic healing practitioners, and other establishments with things like “Avalon” and “Excalibur” in their names. Today we visited many of these shops. I may get a psychic reading before we’re done here. I don’t know yet. But the most important part of the day (after eating some organic cheese scones and a tofu-based locally grown English Breakfast) was, of course, Tor. This is me with my new photograph of Tor, which will be framed and placed above my bed back home in Stockholm. I love it and I am so happy:

IJCAI Session Notes: Rebel Agents

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 13:14:17 +0200

What follows is a set of notes I took during two of the IJCAI Goal Reasoning workshop talks, about rebel agents. Both talks were presented by the same speaker and both focused on rebel agents. These talks were quite short and the speaker had to go fast, so I feel like I missed out on a lot of the information I wanted to record. As a result some parts are obviously omitted and more than usual are written from memory today, increasing potential inaccuracies or misinterpretations. Overall the impression I got of rebel agents is that in today’s climate it is a potentially somewhat inflammatory term for a very ethical trait. It seems that, potentially, any agent in a non-trivial domain would have to be a rebel agent and have the ability to go against its instructions in order to be an ethical agent.

IJCAI Session Notes: Learning Common Sense

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 09:04:33 +0200

Below is another set of IJCAI session notes. This was the first invited talk in a day-long workshop called Architectures and Evaluation for Generality, Autonomy & Progress in AI (AEGAP). The speaker, Oren Etzioni, talked about some of the work the Allen Institute is doing to drive the creation of common sense in AI. He focused especially on a need for a concrete benchmark to measure results when it comes to implementing common sense. As before, these are mostly for myself, to sort through the notes in my head and revisit something a little more organized in the future. In addition to the talk itself these will cover the Q&A which followed.

IJCAI Session Notes: Verifying Agent Based Autonomous Systems

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:04:33 +0200

For the past couple of days I’ve been at IJCAI - the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. It’s been a three-day whirlwind of workshops and tutorials. I took a lot of notes, and as with ECAL last year I figured organizing them into blog posts would be a good way to review some of the takeaways. Note that the intended audience here is future-me, and I could very well have made mistakes or misinterpretations in my own notes. Also apologies about any typos.

go-sql-driver and MySQL 8

Sun, 06 May 2018 17:55:05 +0200

I should know better than to use a latest tag in a Docker image. I’d never do this at work, so why did I do it in my hobby project? I blame Go’s nature of dealing with package versioning (that is, the lack thereof) for putting me in the “let’s use latest!” mindset (and yes I know they’re working on it). Anyway, I should know better, but here we are, writing this post. It’s going to be a short one.

Input Club K-Type and /dev/tty impressions

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 19:38:27 +0200

This post will have some general impressions of Input Club K-Type and matt3o’s new keycap profile (MT3), with the /dev/tty color scheme. Both products were ordered from Massdrop last year.

Some SnailLife Go client testing notes

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 16:08:54 +0100

I’ve started working on client tests, which have been getting very neglected compared to the server. I figured I’d write some quick notes on what I’ve done so far before continuing, before I forget.

Testing SnailLife Go repositories

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 12:07:00 +0100

Every SnailLife model struct has a repository struct to go with it. Since all repos are implementing the same Repository interface I wanted to reuse most of the code for testing them, but also allow for custom repo-specific tests. For example,OwnerRepo does some stuff that StableRepo does not - like optionally retrieving stables belonging to an owner.

Excluding mocks from coverage reports

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 09:50:08 +0100

I noticed that my coverage reports were including mock packages.

To get rid of this instead of running go test like this:

Testing SnailLife Go on Go 1.10

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 08:36:02 +0100

This is quick braindump of getting SnailLife Go building and testing on Go 1.10.

A few days ago I decided to start building and testing SnailLife Go on Go 1.10 RC 1 (now RC 2). It took a bit of wrangling, but after updating my local environment and finding the best image to use for GitLab CI, I now have it building on Go 1.9 and 1.10 rc 2.

GitLab CI for SnailLife Go

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 22:11:35 +0100

I finally got GitLab CI up and running for the SnailLife Go port. The CI just runs the bash scripts I already had to test and build client and server. I had to make some changes for the tests to be able to run without the auth config files (which I obviously don’t want to submit to a public repo). Now, if an auth config file is not available I look for environment variables to get the Auth0 client ID and secret. Gitlab lets you set secret environment variables for the CI to use. I did something similar to get the name of the environment - if an env file with the environment name is not found, we check environment variables for the name (and then load relevant configs from there).

Running tests and getting coverage reports on server deployment in SnailLife

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:56:38 +0200

Yesterday I added tests to server deployment in my deployServer.sh script:

echo "Running tests"
cd ../../server/lib

set -e
echo "mode: set" > allcoverage.out

for d in $(go list ./... | grep -v vendor); do
    parentdir=`dirname "$d"`
    subdir=`basename "$d"`
    echo "subdir: " $subdir
    if [[ $subdir == "tests" ]]; then
        go test -cover -coverpkg=$parentdir -coverprofile=profile.out $d
    else
        go test -cover -coverprofile=profile.out $d
    fi

    if [ -f profile.out ]; then
        tail -n+2 profile.out >> allcoverage.out
        rm profile.out
    fi
done

Basically this goes into the root where all of my server packages live. Then for each found package we get the subdirectory name and the full path of the parent directory. If the subdirectory is named “tests” (most of my tests are in packages under the package I’m actually testing), we run go test -cover with -coverpkg specified as the parent dir of the test dir. Otherwise we do not specify -coverpkg because it is in the same directory as the test.

ECAL session notes: Open-Ended Simulations

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:25:45 +0200

As before, what follow is a very slightly cleaned up version of the notes I took during the third ISAL summer school session at ECAL 2017. Also as before, note that this is very rough, made while I was reviewing them tonight. Apologies for any typos or other mistakes.

ECAL session notes: Digital Evolution

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 21:11:58 +0200

As before, what follow is a very slightly cleaned up version of the notes I took during the second ISAL summer school session at ECAL 2017. Also as before, note that this is very rough, made while I was reviewing them tonight. Apologies for any typos or other mistakes.

ECAL session notes: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Artificial Life

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 19:02:17 +0200

What follow is a very slightly cleaned up version of the notes I took during the first ISAL summer school session at ECAL 2017. Note that this is very rough, I was just reviewing my notes and thought I may as well put them into a post format at the same time to revisit later. Apologies for any typos or other mistakes.

Day 1 of ECAL 2017 - ISAL Summer School

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 21:55:54 +0200

Today was the first day of ECAL (European Conference on Artificial Life) 2017 in Lyon, France and my first year attending. It’s lucky I managed to go this year, because apparently this is the last ECAL! Next time it will be turning into the International Conference on Artificial Life and will be held much farther away (I think it is meant to be held in Japan). Although I am already getting my hopes up to go again, not only for the conference but to visit Japan once more!

Server and client for SnailLife Go

Sat, 05 Aug 2017 07:05:10 +0200

Over the last couple of days I restructured SnailLife Go into a server and client. I’m still in the “rough draft” stage, but the top level project structure now looks like this:

Go auth (and other) progress

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 21:31:06 +0200

July 28

Made a bit more progress on the authentication basics today. Relevant commits are:

July 29

Today I focused a bit on the building and installation of snaillifecli. I switched my custom app configuration code for Viper because it apparently integrates really well with Cobra, which is a library to help make CLI applications. It is really tempting to avoid plugging in existing libraries and write everything from scratch because I’m positive that it will teach me a lot about Go, but the existing solutions seem more than suitable and I want to get to working on actual snails at some point.

Playing with authentication in Go

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 01:52:49 +0200

It’s almost 2am and I’m sleepy, but I wanted to write this down while it’s relatively fresh in my mind.

Trying Out Go

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 20:23:36 +0200

A couple of weeks ago I had the genius idea to rewrite SnailLife in Go. I’ve already looked into doing this once before a couple of years ago, but wasn’t really feeling it and stuck with PHP (mostly for nostaligia reasons). Now though, SnailLife is this bloated PHP app. Most of the core functionality is in. After weeks of battling infrastructure issues, when everything was back up and running again, I took a step back and saw how big the app (or rather the 3 apps now) had become. At the same time I’d been reading in passing about Go and became curious, so I figured - why not look into learning Go by rewriting SnailLife? Not because I think Go itself will necessarily make anything better, but because a rewrite might.

Talk on Big Data Tools and Architectures at Foo Cafe

Tue, 23 May 2017 21:13:01 +0200

I went to a really interesting talk at Foo Cafe in Stockholm tonight. I stayed almost 2 hours over my time limit, but it was so worth it. The talk was by Martin Neumann, and he gave us an introduction to big data and some tools commonly used to wrangle it. Below are the notes I took throughot the talk. I cleaned them up a tiny bit, but mostly these are just for my personal benefit and are super messy - if you didn’t attend the talk they may not be that useful.

State of the Snail - Debugging Hell

Sat, 20 May 2017 08:27:54 +0200

It has been a while! SnailLife work has been moving at a snail’s pace. Why? Because debugging the snail brain has turned into a highly demotivating, hellish endeavour. The snails make decisions and perform actions based on so much crap, that the simple log files I was using all long are just not cutting it anymore. The Laravel log for the original app has turned into 3 Laravel logs because I now have 3 independent apps (the front-end, BrainRunner, and BrainHub to coordinate all the brain runners). That then turned into individual log files per snail plus individual log files per brain task. And still making sense of why snails are choosing to behave in certain ways is nigh impossible - the brain and infrastructure issues I have been facing have been seemingly neverending.

Hello, TensorFlow

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 12:18:18 +0100

I’ve recently discovered Safari Books Online thanks to a post on HackerNews. One of the first things that caught my eye was one of the Oriole Online Tutorials - Hello, TensorFlow. It was a very quick overview of TensorFlow in a really cool format. There was a video with an accompanying article (which can autoscroll along with the video contents) and code snippets embedded on the page which you can actually work with and run in the browser.

Having a fish tank is supposed to be about stress relief

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 18:42:49 +0200

@Lazer Having a fish tank is supposed to be about stress relief.
— Steven D Marlow (@sd_marlow) August 4, 2016

Zhora the fairground goldfish

I had a goldfish as a kid in elementary school in Alabama, obtained for free when I won it at a school fair. My family and I knew nothing about proper care of any fish - poor Zhora spent two years in a small round bowl with no filter and no heater, us not knowing any better than to change the water every week and feed him flakes daily. We actually thought he had a good life. Only years later when I happend to look into having an aquarium again did I realize how wrong we were and how miserable Zhora must have been. Here is what I (as a complete noob) think is a good overview of why it’s bad to give or receive “free goldfish” at fairgrounds.

Snaily Updates: BrainHub + Runners, SnailLife Logo

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 23:44:15 +0000

I finally have two BrainRunners working on a DigitalOcean droplet, and one BrainHub on another droplet queueing and assigning tasks to the runners.

BrainHub and BrainRunner - finally over the hump

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 11:59:21 +0000

I’ve started this post maybe twenty times now, since before Christmas, and each time I keep putting it off, thinking “I’ll just blog when I have this next bit done.” But each “next bit” is followed by something else, and then something else, into infinity.

The brain scope is growing: BrainHub, BrainRunners, Brains

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 18:17:06 +0000

I’ve been MIA for a while, I know. I haven’t stopped working on SnailLife - I just wanted to get to some sort of completion with the brain refactoring phase before talking about it. Now, however, I realize there won’t be any completion for a long while and I may as well post an update.

Snaily Updates, Nov 10 - Family trees and inbreeding coefficient

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 12:06:05 +0000

I did some research on snail ailments. This particular page was especially useful. Though SnailLife snails are not aquatic, some of these still seem very relevant: http://applesnail.net/content/various/snail_disease.php
Also did research on inbreeding in snails and complications it could cause. Apparently one commonly observed side effect is shell thinning. I then did some reading on finding the inbreeding coefficent and how to calculate it.
Looked into Google Visualization API to display the family trees and started a test implementation.
Started actually using Taiga.io, I’ve been wanting to try it out for a while.

Snaily Updates - Bug fixing and cleaning out old stuff

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 12:39:54 +0000

Snaily Updates are going to be really brief posts with some short “daily” updates on SnailLife. I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve mostly just been refactoring and bug fixing. But it’s important, and even though I’m not working on new features right now I still want to document some of my progress and what I do each day.

My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 17:23:49 +0000

Update 3, Nov 2 2015 (PM): Well, it’s been…strange. First, it seems my account was finally deleted by Livecoding.tv (thank you!) After being up all night with libel posted all over it, hours after Jamie Green (the other Livecoding co-founder) and Sam Altman (Y Combinator president) replied to the Hacker News thread claiming they were trying to do something, something finally happened. I have heard nothing from either of them since their original comments and am not sure exactly what spurred the removal of slander from the profile and its eventual deletion. I know some other Livecoding users quit and had a discussion with the CEO in live chat also.

Snail organs, immunity, and ageing

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:54:41 +0000

Organs! Immune systems! Old age! Dying from old age!

I’m super excited. I was thinking: “How do I implement old age and death, and health in general? Is health just energy? When the snail is out of energy, it dies? But that seems too simplistic.”

Wild snails around the world

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 22:16:16 +0000

Did you know that there is an entirely separate formula to calculate the distance between two points on the surface of a sphere? I mean…it kind of makes sense when you think about it. The shortest distance between two points without accounting for the curvature of the sphere would go right through the sphere itself, making it pretty useless when calculating physical distance on, for example, the surface of the Earth.

More location and temperature stuff

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 17:10:43 +0000

I realized I didn’t actually include any implementation details when writing my sleepy post about stable locations and temperature the other night. I figured I’d elaborate on that now.

Bringing snail stables down to Earth

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 18:28:31 +0000

SnailLife snail stables have always lived in the ether - in some virtual universe with no physical location. Since I’m trying to make SnailLife based in reality, users’ snail stables should also be based in real locations. This is why now, upon registration, the user’s physical location is used as the location of their snail stable.

Snail stable breeding brands

Sat, 05 Sep 2015 08:18:05 +0000

I haven’t made a SnailLife update in a while, but I had a good reason! For about half a month I’ve been working on an entry into the js13kGames challenge. I’ve entered the challenge annually since it started and this year was meant to be no exception. Unfortunately…I wasn’t really into it this year. It felt like work, and with things at actual work being so busy I found myself not having the time or motivation to sit down and work on it after I get home.

I have become Crazy Cat Lady, the Buyer of Cat Strollers

Sun, 30 Aug 2015 09:27:41 +0000

I am sorry in advance for what you are about to read. If witnessing the evolution of a mere human into Crazy Cat Lady is something you may find disturbing, turn back now and pretend you never came to this godforsaken place.

Pee-training Rigel

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 16:58:47 +0000

Note: This is part of a series of posts about Rigel the Maine Coon kitten who was given a urinary infection by a veterinarian in Stockholm during a routine surgery and has been struggling with peeing since. You can read more in the Rigel section.

Laravel log file backups to S3

Sun, 02 Aug 2015 12:51:05 +0000

SnailLife does a lot of logging for debugging purposes. Aside from the general laravel.log I have separate loggers for each snail and also write logs for stuff like deleted items etc in separate files.

SnailLife messaging system

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 20:43:17 +0000

“What’s SnailLife”, you say? Well I’m glad you asked! My snail simulation has gone through a couple of names…and even though I was never 100% happy with Gastropoda it was the best I could come up with - a name that was unique and didn’t allow the project to sound too “gamey” (because it’s not a game). All of the cooler names I could come up with weren’t suitable for various reasons (like domain name availability and such).

Update on Rigel and response from DjurAkuten

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 11:41:58 +0000

Context: The Month from Hell.

DjurAkuten

After numerous attempts David finally got through to DjurAkuten, the clinic that did Rigel’s neutering surgery and decided to put a catheter in him because they thought his bladder looked big - the one he left with a urinary infection and an inability to pee.

Snaily updates

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 18:32:35 +0000

I was going to try to remember all the things I’ve done in the last month on snails, but this seems impossible. So here’s a lazy list of git commits within this time:

Items

Wed, 27 May 2015 11:58:05 +0000

After finishing yesterday’s post about generating images for user-combined substrate items I realized that I never really provided an explanation about how items work in general (or how they work for now, anyway).

Images for combined substrate

Tue, 26 May 2015 20:31:57 +0000

The Laravel 5 migration is complete and I’m back to substrate mixing and brain bug fixing!

Actually, I think now that basic mixing is done I’m going to do a few weeks of just bug fixing. The substrate has no effect on snails’ attributes or behaviour yet, but it will. For now you can just mix different substrate items together into new substrate items.

Migrating to Laravel 5

Tue, 05 May 2015 20:32:12 +0000

A few days ago I decided that there’s no use putting it off any longer - it’s time to upgrade to Laravel 5. I’ve been sitting on 4.2 for months and 5 is a major revision to…well…everything.

Thinking through substrate

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 10:21:27 +0000

After checking in the basic substrate item implementation yesterday I got to thinking - never a good sign.

The original idea was to have some pre-set types of substrate - garden dirt, rock, potting soil, pellets, whatever. But how would these items affect the snails and the jar? Would I need to invent some sort of set of attribute templates? Like “Oh well this garden dirt item is going to decrease jar temperature by 1C.” and “Oh well some snails somehow don’t like gardend dirt and prefer other substrates”. But why? Why would a snail prefer one template to another and how would this be decided?

Jar substrate is a go

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 08:41:21 +0000

It’s finally in. Well, the beginning stages anyway. Jar substrate. Anyone who knows anything about snails knows that they can’t live in a glass box without some sort of substrate to hide in, get moisture from, and burrow under. So now you can apply one type of substrate (so far) to a jar. Eventually there will be different kinds of substrate, and maybe even substrate you can mix together from other types of substrate. Currently the substrate has no effect on the snails or the environment outside of being present and visually represented, but eventually it can impact everything from snail nutrients to jar temperature and what kinds of plants you can grow inside the jar. Here’s how it works.

Tackling Gastropoda's memory usage - Round One

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 07:20:27 +0000

I’ve been having to power cycle my Gastropoda Digital Ocean droplet every day lately because something was hogging up all the memory. It was a little annoying to diagnose because I know the problem had to do with the recurring events that are run using a cron job, of which there are quite a few. I know ideally PHP isn’t something you would use for a long running server process, but these jobs weren’t long running - they were just frequent.

The month from Hell

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 15:59:25 +0000

Update on Rigel and response from DjurAkuten

Update: When I first wrote this post I kept all clinic names anonymous. I am now un-anonymising one of the clinics (DjurAkuten), where this whole chain of events was triggered in the first place and which is now trying to claim that Rigel was already sick/had a flaccid bladder when we brought him in for a routine surgery as a healthy kitten despite their own records stating otherwise.

On your mark, get set, crawl!

Sun, 22 Feb 2015 23:02:36 +0000

In my previous post I wrote about rethinking racing (aka ripping out the existing racing system).

Today I got most of the work done on that. There is a lot left to do, but as of right now:

Rethinking racing. Also cool snail art!

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 09:45:53 +0000

Racing in Gastorpoda has been implemented for months in its most basic state, but has never really gotten the attention it needs. So things like jars, in-jar positioning, and movement ended up evolving past the stage of the racing and making the current racing system kind of an outdated one.

Snail brain semi-stable and reviewing visual traits set during breeding

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 23:00:17 +0000

The snail brain, while still very basic, seems somewhat stable now. By “stable” I mean a snail can survive and reproduce without human intervention if it has a steady supply of food.

From Amazon Web Services to Digital Ocean

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 12:41:24 +0000

Amazon, I quit.

I tried, Amazon. I really did. For the last few months I tried to make it work with an EC2 instance for Gastropoda. I tried two main methods of deployment, both of which worked sporadically at various points:

It's not so bad. We have snail babies, after all

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 18:19:40 +0000

Sometimes I think about what I’ve been working on in my spare time since the beginning of last year and I’m like “What the crap, Liza. You’re spending your time trying to make toy slugs. Go learn a useful skill or something.”

Snail gym vs training jar

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 20:16:19 +0000

I’ve tried implementing a gym for Gastropoda a couple of times now. Both times I put the feature on hold not because I got stuck, but because I realized that I may not really even need a gym.

The journey continues - from Elastic Beanstalk to CodeDeploy

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:25:59 +0000

A little while ago I wrote about deploying Gastropoda to an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance via Elastic Beanstalk. Since that day I have been running into multiple EB problems. I’m sure that if I took the time to learn I would figure out why these things were happening and how to fix them. Some problems included:

Personality

Sat, 27 Dec 2014 09:58:56 +0000

Every morning I wake up to my cat Rigel wanting to play. He jumps around the bed and brings in his favorite toy ferret, purring and stepping on us until we either get up or put him outside. Then I get up and go to get a plastic bag from the kitchen before I do anything else. I go to Rigel’s jumbo sized litter box, followed by the cat who sits next to me and watches as I clean it. As soon as I’m done he steps inside and does his business. Meanwhile, I leave to wash my hands and start washing up/brushing my teeth in the bathroom. One or two minutes later Rigel turbos in, jumps full speed onto the toilet (I always have to be sure the lid is closed before this happens - there have been incidents) and then into the sink, sticking his head and paws into the water (which I make sure is lukewarm before he gets in). We take turns at the tap for about five minutes. I leave, he sometimes rests in the sink, and then the morning pooping and cleaning ritual is over.

State of the Snail, 2014

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 13:28:14 +0000

It’s been a long year for snailing. My simulation got a name, my snails got a brain, and a dev environment was deployed outside of my poor little MacBook Air that’s been chugging away like crazy with all the server and VM crap I’ve had to host on it.

Deploying Gastropoda to Amazon Web Services - Never Forget

Sun, 21 Dec 2014 13:39:59 +0000

After my last blog post I decided that it was time to deploy Gastropoda to Amazon Web Services - namely Elastic Beanstalk, which utilizes an EC2 instance (reserved) and an RDS DB instance.

Claustrophobia and eggicide

Thu, 11 Dec 2014 13:01:51 +0000

Yesterday I put in claustrophobia for the snails. Jars have a capacity attribute - a maximum number of snails that they should hold. But just because a jar with a capacity of 20 may not be able to support 25 snails very well doesn’t mean the snails are going to conveniently stop reproducing or hatching (if it is a breeding jar). Instead, they’re just going to get uncomfortable enough to eat their babies.

Scheduled food delivery, arousal suppressant, and brain woes

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 07:50:01 +0000

I haven’t updated in a long time and it’s because the battle with snail brains has been raging on. Over the past few weeks I have run into several weird behavioural problems, including but not limited to:

No more starving snails

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:55:06 +0000

Dear jar capacity validator,

I’m sorry I ever doubted you. I thought you were killing my snails, but really it’s my lack of you that caused the problem. I am the one guilty of virtual snailslaughter.

Detangling snail actions. Also a cat

Sat, 08 Nov 2014 07:39:34 +0000

I started writing this post on the 8th of November and have just now gotten around to finishing it.

Figuring out what my snails are doing and why is getting close to impossible. I’ve got snails eating each other, or refusing to eat proper food, or for some reason not mating even though their sex drive should be pretty high. I used to print stuff out to one big default log file (laravel.log), but this soon became unmanageable because I was printing logs associated with multiple actions for multiple snails at the same time.

Hiking, Beyond Earth, and Gastropoda update

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:08:26 +0000

One cool thing about Stockholm is how easy it is to get to both a central location and a green/forested area.

The ongoing saga of snail mating decisions

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 21:40:32 +0000

I’ve written about snail breeding here before, at length. However, since I now want snail behavior to go through the brain I had to rework the trigger that led to two snails mating and producing offspring. A few different things had to be prototyped to make this work, especially because in a snail’s mind there is no real way of distinguishing food from another snail without learning from experience and some basic instincts to guide the way.

Went to my first Laravel Meetup

Sat, 11 Oct 2014 10:20:54 +0000

Last Friday night I attended what was apparently the first ever Laravel Meetup in Sweden. I’m glad I actually made myself go, because I’m not really good with social engagements. I don’t tend to go out much and sometimes end up just not bothering and staying home at the last minute.

Event queues

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 13:06:13 +0000

The brain thing is really getting out of control.

Yesterday I ran into this problem:

Fatal error: Maximum function nesting level of '100' reached, aborting!

The snails are eating again

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 16:25:48 +0000

Back to the brain we go.

I already had snails eating food in jars before, but it was kind of a hack. Each snail would just eat a bite of whatever consumable item was in the jar. When I stupidly decided to try to make a simple snail brain, I knew I’d have to make things like eating fit into it. Today I made a very rough version of something like that.

Websocketing it up for snail movement

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 22:29:19 +0000

Over the past few days I’ve paused work on the brain to tackle snail movement on the client.

I ended up using Latchet, a Laravel-specific extended version of Ratchet. To start with I just wanted to get something running. I think I ended up doing this in a really roundabout way…basically we subscribe to a specific jar topic on the client, then ping the server every 5 seconds to get back the target position of each snail within that jar. The snail then crawls toward this target position. Target pos on the server is calculated using the snail’s currentSpeed and each snail crawls at the same speed in the browser, so in theory by the time the snail reaches its target position on the server it will also have reached the same location on the client…maybe…I hope. We’ll see.

Braaaaaainsss

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 20:02:51 +0000

I appear to have gotten myself into a bit of a mess.

“Make a snail brain/nerve-cluster for your snails,” they said. “It’ll be easy”, they said.

And we're back

Sat, 13 Sep 2014 10:32:36 +0000

I took a one-month break from Gastropoda to participate in the JS13kGames challenge with a tiny game called Breaking Brad

But now it’s back to simulations! It’s taking me a while to remember where exactly I left off with Gastropoda last month, but now I think it’s time to figure out how to calculate a snail’s position within a jar. This is important because each snail will detect other objects (items, snails, etc) differently based on its senses. I have to have an actual location for both objects and snails. Right now I’m setting a position randomly when a snail is hatched in a jar, but I have to decide how I’m going to update this position as it crawls. Currently snails crawl at random on HTML5 canvas - they are already starting their crawl from their DB position, but pick direction randomly and then move back and forth across the screen using their speed attribute. So far all I have are some random notes:

Pathfinder: two heroes are born

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 21:54:49 +0000

It was a chilly summer evening when Valeros the valiant fighter and Merisiel the super cool rogue walked through the gates of a tiny abandoned farmhouse. They were heroes, you see, and here to rescue the people of the land from a gang of notorious thieving wanderers - the Sczarni - who have been terrorizing Sandpoint under the leadership of a punk named Jubrayl Vhiski.

Wolfling runs

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 12:10:37 +0000

Wolfling run: “a method of playing the Creatures games in which the players do not intervene in the lives of their norns.” Creatures wiki.

On snail eggs

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 23:42:48 +0000

Even though I’ve had a functional breeding system in Gastropoda for a while, it still isn’t actually done. Most common snails do not give birth to live young…and definitely not to one live young. Initially it was good to just have the snails pop out one live baby snail so that I could properly observe and test the genetics and other attributes generated for the newborn. Now, however, with that being well on track, it is time to implement…egg laying.

New snail shell patterns

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 16:33:09 +0000

This post originally started out like this:

I’ve made a few more shell patterns for the snails!

I then started to descibe how the basic genetics work in the simulation (limited to pattern color). While doing so, I began to realize that it is all wrong. I went back and ripped apart some of the breeding system to get it to a slightly more realistic state. Needless to say it’s still not really correct, but at least it’s a bit closer to what could be some sort of reality. Now I have to go back and clean everything up/rewrite it.

Laravel migration done

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:44:07 +0000

The first commit auto-tweeted from the @gastropoda_ twitter account yesterday was actually the last commit dedicated to the Laravel port reimplementation:

A battle with racing

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 16:27:05 +0000

I’m still on the Laravel migration. It’s going pretty well, except for last night. Last night I was porting racing.

Setting up an AWS EC2 instance for Gastropoda

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 20:42:23 +0000

It all started with a cool little PHP script that someone posted on /r/gamedev this morning to publish completed Trello tasks easily to a change log of sorts.

Summer holidays and Amsterdam

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 11:06:06 +0000

July is when Sweden goes on holidays. Businesses are closed for the summer (quite a few of them, anyway), people take time off work, the weather doesn’t suck. Usually people tend to go away to other countries, which to me is ludicrous because after all that snow and cold these months are finally when Sweden gets warm and sunny. I guess I’m kind of fibbing - I get it. You want to get out and see other places during your vacation.

Custom validators in Laravel

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 10:16:45 +0000

I’m still going with the Laravel port. One thing I’ve found really interesting is custom validators. In Laravel models you can set field rules, such as…

Experimenting with Laravel

Sun, 13 Jul 2014 11:22:43 +0000

I’m sitting here working on Gastropoda on a train to Norrköping. A couple of days ago I started experimenting with Laravel after the friendly folks on /r/php provided some invaluable input to my vanilla PHP vs framework question.

The beginnings of a currency

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 06:33:43 +0000

When I moved back to the PHP version of Gastropoda I implemented snail death, so that snails actually die when their energy reaches 0. This resulted in all of my snails dying because they were both far below 0 (the cron job that depleted their energy daily continued to run while I was on a different branch).

To the Node and back

Sat, 05 Jul 2014 13:11:20 +0000

I spent a couple of weeks porting Gastropoda from PHP to Node.js after caving in to peer pressure and hearing “PHP sucks” from every side imaginable.

A move and a quick Gastropoda update

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:14:10 +0000

Moving

Buying an apartment in Sweden is refreshingly hassle-free but by no means stress-free. You find one you like online, you go to a viewing, you bid…and bid…and bid until you can’t bid no mo’. Alternatively, you find one you like online and just bid.

The day of the lettuce leaf

Sat, 14 Jun 2014 23:55:18 +0000

Today I put the first item (a consumable lettuce leaf) into Gastropoda.

The items

The lettuce leaf was to be the first food item in Gastropoda. However, before I could make the leaf itself I had to make the food system, which I hadn’t yet planned out in great detail. Four new tables were involved:

Taking it easy on the snailing with some lazy layout work

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 22:16:40 +0000

I’m too sleepy to do any proper work on Gastropoda today. I was hoping to implement the first food item, but yeah…that’s not happening. This morning I decided to head to the office early to get some work done on a largeish task while I had some distraction-free time. I did get a lot done, but waking up at 4am also meant that I was completely beat by about 1. Now I’m in bed, half asleep, wishing someone would bring me some cheese.

Recording snail history logs

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 22:04:36 +0000

I’ve decided that it’s about time to start recording event histories for snails. I keep going back to the database and checking which event ran on which snail by IDs and such and it’s getting to be a hassle. I’d rather just be able to go to the snail’s profile page and see all the important stuff that’s happened to it. Since this was always meant to be a feature anyway, I figured I may as well do it now.

Thoughts on @HobbyGameDev's post on starting simple

Sun, 08 Jun 2014 11:48:56 +0000

Chris DeLeon of HobbyGameDev has written a post all about the importance of starting simple in game development, and of picking projects that make you reach as opposed to scramble in terms of their complexity versus your current skillset.

Snail metabolic rates and caloric needs

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 19:21:37 +0000

Wow, two blog posts in one day.

Today I implemented a basic energy system for the snails. I’m trying to keep it moderately realistic for the time being just to implement something quickly, but the idea for the final version is to actually do proper research on exactly how this stuff works and revise the system to match.

My 3 favorite Södermalm cafes to work in

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 12:33:18 +0000

Since moving to Sweden I have become a sort of cafe hunter. I roam Södermalm with my laptop, sometimes on my Brompton, scouting out potential sitting spots with WiFi where I can sit and work on my personal projects or read.

Gastropoda - racing progress

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 21:09:14 +0000

The snail simulation is coming along. Tonight I did some work on racing. The racing formula isn’t anywhere close to final yet, but races do run. Here’s how it works right now:

A cycling adventure

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 20:06:25 +0000

On Sunday we went on a day-long bike ride to Lake Mälaren. We didn’t get as far as we’d planned, but it was still a great day.

It's summer!

Thu, 29 May 2014 18:05:31 +0000

It’s summer!!! Swedish weather has gotten so nice over the past week or so. It’s still a bit uncertain and there are cold days, but there have been a few unbelievably nice days where not being outside feels like some sort of crime.

Baby snails!

Thu, 15 May 2014 22:47:33 +0000

A lot’s happened with Gastropoda over the last few days, but progress on new features has slowed down because I’ve started working slightly differently. Instead of just porting everything from the JS version as quickly as possible I’ve started prototyping features and then going back and improving the implementation after each new thing is in. I get pretty impatient wanting to move on to the next feature as fast as possible, but taking the time to look at the rough functional version of a feature and revising it properly after deciding how it should work has been useful.

Ripping apart Gastropoda

Sun, 11 May 2014 13:26:29 +0000

For the record, this post isn’t about ripping apart real snails and slugs. It’s about ripping apart pretty much all of my existing code, which is what I’ve been doing over this weekend.

Gastropoda, the name

Sun, 04 May 2014 17:17:03 +0000

The JavaScript/HTML5 version of this game was called A Game of Snails, but that won’t really do for the PHP iteration of the game. I figured it was time to think of a proper name for this thing.

Here jars, there jars, everywhere jars jars

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:30:54 +0000

Yesterday I implemented jars for the snail game. A user can have multiple jars and move snails between those jars (well, they can’t move snails yet, but they can put a wild-caught snail inside their personal jar). Some jars are “breeding jars” (all other jars are considered breeding suppressed, snails can’t mate in them. Otherwise there’d be snail babies everywhere!)

Collecting wild snails

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 07:39:23 +0000

I got quite a bit done on the snails yesterday, mostly focusing on creating a snail manager class, displaying snails using Canvas, and saving snails you choose to keep to the database. It’s all implemented really dodgily right now, but it’s mostly functional.

Porting Game of Snails to PHP

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 18:09:43 +0000

I’ve been playing around with PHP for the past few days. Last year for one of my One Game a Month projects I made Game of Snails. I’ve been wanting to make a snail racing and breeding game for literally years. I first started thinking about it when I discovered that video games were actually a thing - the idea was triggered by a real life snail racing experience I had when I was little in Ukraine, collecting and training snails in the rain at my grandparents’ summerhouse near the Dnepr river.

Stockholm and robot parts

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 14:23:48 +0000

Jill

I’ve been working on “Jill” for the past few weeks. Figuring the best way to do the parts-gathering part of the game (specifically as relating to animation) is doing my head in. I’m trying a few different things as I go, seeing what seems to work the best. The general gist of what it has to do is:

San Francisco and other updates

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 19:03:24 +0000

I finally installed Octopress on the new Macbook Air. Finally. My last update was a while ago. Since the Icy Walk of Creepitude the main thing that’s happened has been the trip to San Francisco for GDC 2014. This has been my third year going. This year I focused mostly on attending the tools talks - specifically the several tools roundtable/discussion sessions. I ended up meeting a few people from the other EA studios after the first talk and having a nice chat about our build systems and presubmission testing.

An icy walk of creepitude

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:38:28 +0000

We went for a walk today and decided to go in the opposite direction than we usually take. We ended up in a suburb I think called Kärrtorp. The walk wasn’t very long, but certainly interesting! The weather was wet and gloomy, the path was more icy than expected, and we walked across a creepy-ass building. So yeah…this post is pretty much about the building.

Global Game Jam 2014 in Stockholm (#GGJ14/#GGJSthlm)

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 14:29:18 +0000

My first ever Global Game Jam was actually the first ever Global Game Jam (2009), in Perth, Western Australia. I’d been working at Interzone Games at the time and knew many people who would be participating. I think we were a group of 6 people and I did (bad) art for a game we called Little Shop of Farters.

A slow start to 2014

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 19:46:47 +0000

Things after One Game a Month have been…different. I feel I’m lazier with no hard deadlines for personal projects - bumming around and browsing Reddit or focusing more on the newfound cycling hobby than making hobby games in the evenings.

The scenic route

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 18:54:45 +0000

This morning I decided to wake up earlier and take a different route to work on Deider (the bike).

The ride didn’t have to take as long as it did - I managed to stop every three minutes to admire the view and take bad photos on my phone.

Bromptoning it up

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 16:14:38 +0000

If you follow me on Twitter you likely would’ve seen my photos of a silly looking contraption with tiny wheels. Meet Deider, the Brompton folding bike:

Move to S3 and Octopress. Oh and #1GAM

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 14:28:18 +0000

Octopress and S3

I’ve finally moved this site over to Octopress and S3. There is a lot of work to be done, the most pressing of which is fixing leftover broken images, implementing code highlighting, and fixing some theme stuff (like the navigation links), but other than that it’s going ok. The move overall was pretty hassle-free with no real problems. I ended up with the following setup:

One Game a Month (#1GAM) Done!

Sat, 21 Dec 2013 23:23:40 +0000

Well, One Game a Month is done! I’ve managed to complete 12 games for the year. My motivation by the end was lacking, so I took it kind of easy this month and made a very simple and quick game called Simon Says. Last month’s game, 9 to 5, took much longer due to the number of art assets required. I’ll write a proper post about the challenge, how everything went, etc later.

First foray into Unity

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:11:14 +0000

I haven’t posted here in a while because I’ve been lazy and there hasn’t really been enough happening to warrant a full post. A quick recap.

Steven Enns and "Craftsmanship"

Sat, 31 Aug 2013 11:46:37 +0000

“Craftsmanship is really taking pride in your work. In terms of craftasmanship for me that means looking at the past and looking at where leatherworking came from and trying to take that and include smart design from now to create some really great leather products.” - Steven Enns

Bellmanstafetten relay race - didn't die!

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 18:22:20 +0000

Yesterday I took part in Bellmanstafetten - a 5km relay race - with other runners from DICE. We had three teams, one of which was aiming to beat last year’s company record for the race (I wasn’t on that one). We got shirts and everything!

How not to run Midnattsloppet

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 09:13:15 +0000

Midnattsloppet is a yearly night-time 10km race in Sweden, taking place in multiple cities including Stockholm. I’ve been signed up for months. It was yesterday. Let me tell you about it.

Trying out the Rearth Ringke Fusion Nexus 4 case

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 08:43:52 +0000

(Note: this post was going to have pictures. Unfortunately my SD card is MIA. I’ll add them here when I can find it)

Porting Interdiction to Android with CocoonJS - overcoming mouse position offset problem

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 14:42:42 +0000

For the month of August I am porting Interdiction to Android using CocoonJS. The AI is far from perfect right now, but it works. I am going to keep improving it. For now, however, Android port it is. If I’m lucky I can get it all ported before this year’s js13kGames challenge starts mid-month. If that’s the case I may participate in that and release that game as the September One Game a Month project, but we’ll see.

Some Toaster AI improvements

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:50:13 +0000

I made some more improvements to Toaster yesterday and this morning. Specifically:

Have Toaster look for an enemy tile to place Grenades on

Before, Toaster looked for an empty space on the grid to place whatever tile it was holding. Now, if that tile is a grenade, it looks for an enemy tile to place it on. If it can’t find one, it picks another tile from its queue instead because placing grenades on empty grid spaces is pointless. Right now this will break the game if all three tiles in Toaster’s queue are grenades (because it’ll keep trying them one after the other indefinitely, never actually making a move) and that’s something I’ll be fixing today.

Slowly improving Toaster AI for #1GAM

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 17:02:43 +0000

My Interdiction single player AI (named Toaster) has been coming along slowly. It’s still very far from the unbeatable cylon I want it to be, but it at least tries to defend itself by intercepting the player and attempting to build up its own lines.

We're more than halfway through the #1GAM year! What I've made so far.

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 12:42:09 +0000

I looked at my One Game a Month profile just now and realized that we are halfway through the year. That’s six games made so far! I’ve tried to pick projects that will help me learn something new each month. I figured I’d do a quick recap of what I’ve done so far:

June #1GAM game and board game AI

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 20:11:29 +0000

My June One Game a Month project is called Interdiction. It’s a two player board game based on Tic-Tac-Toe, but with a twist. The goal of the game is to get a higher score than your opponent. Placing five of your tiles in a row grants you ten bonus points and usually, but not always, results in a win. However, it’s technically possible for a player to get enough points to win the match even if they aren’t the ones to finish the game with five in a row.

Game of Snails in all its barely-playable glory

Sun, 26 May 2013 19:48:17 +0000

Well, it’s the end of the month and I have to post something for May. Despite Game of Snails being broken and nigh-unplayable, I’m posting it anyway. If you want to check it out, here are some disclaimers:

A traumatic [read: wimpy] experience

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:50:14 +0000

This Monday I went to the doctor about my leg pain. She ruled out a stress fracture and said it was most likely a calf strain, but that the pain I describe could also point to deep vein thrombosis.

A Game of Snails and Heroku

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:26:14 +0000

A Game of Snails is nowhere close to being complete or even really playable, but I’ve decided to get as much of it done as I can before the end of May and then just put it online - regardless of completion or bugs. There are no rules to One Game a Month, after all, and I can then continue to work on a more complete release for the month of June. Or, if I feel like a break from snails, make some other quick game in the meantime and let it rest until I want to work on it again.

Revelation: I don't actually want to run a half marathon...

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:28:43 +0000

Yestreday I realized that I don’t actually want to run a half marathon. It’s not like I couldn’t, if I trained up for it. I’ve done the distance before. Heck, I even entered the City to Surf half marathon in Perth with every intention of running it until I broke my foot a couple of months before the race. And it’s not like I don’t think running a half marathon would be a great achievement. It’s just that I don’t really like running. There are people who talk about how much they love to run and how awesome it feels. I am not one of those people. To me anything after 1km is just boring. I can usually manage 5km without it feeling like too much of a drag, and 10km is pushing my limit. But anything over that is just so dull. For me, it feels awesome at the end - looking at your time and seeing how much you’ve improved or how far you’ve run. It’s a matter of balancing the lack of enjoyment I get during the run with the enjoyment I get afterwards. And of course, afterwards, you remember the run as being great because the sense of completion makes it feel great. You conveniently forget that it was dull torture at the time - until the next run.

GUI - I hate this part.

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:20:44 +0000

I knew this would happen. Out of all of the new things that I have to learn to do for this snail game, the part that is the most tedious and difficult for me is the UI. Every part of the UI. You’d think that I’d be able to use web design skills from my previous life to make this at least a little intuitive, but nope - this blows. And it’s not just designing the thing that’s the problem, it’s finding the best way to implement it, too.

A weekend of train-ventures, dodgy restaurants, and the most amazing weather in the universe.

Sun, 05 May 2013 18:09:35 +0000

I was meant to write this blog post four hours ago. Instead I got home and decided that since this one would have quite a bit of pictures in it and I’ve been running into bandwidth issues I may as well find a better solution for image hosting (as opposed to uploading everything to this server). I signed up to Amazon S3 on its free trial account and have been attempting to set it up ever since. Now I don’t even want to write this stupid post anymore, but I will anyway because darn it I didn’t spend all this time and effort to set up one fricking S3 bucket just to give up at the very end.

A Game of Snails - Breeding system

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:57:39 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been attempting to get up at 5am to work on snails before going in to actual work. It’s been working for the most part apart from a couple of slip-ups and basically goes like this:

A Game of Snails - feature list

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:28:57 +0000

I figured I’d put together a list of the main features I need to finish for A Game of Snails. If anything, it’ll help me gather my thoughts and track my progress better as well as helping me figure out what to work on next. What I should be doing is compiling specs properly for this, but I’ve been too preoccupied with actually working on the thing to keep up with the documentation. Not to mention this game has been in my head for so long (7 years, but arguably longer) and I’ve thought and rethought pretty much every single one of these so much that I feel like I know what it needs to be inside and out. Let’s hope I don’t get lost.

Snails, running, and Sweden

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:04:13 +0000

This is going to be two-part post about both A Game of Snails and running (and Sweden!)

A Game of Snails

I took a few days off of A Game of Snails, but it’s coming along pretty nicely overall. The last week has been set on setting up the database. You can now save users and snails to the database, load a player’s snails when they log in, etc. Up next I just need to start saving a player’s snail jars (players can buy more jars with virtual currency to be able to house more snails). The most daunting upcoming task will be migrating the server to a proper host and setting the whole thing up in a live environment.

Sweden weather is improving so I'm ditching the treadmill. It hurts.

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:28:55 +0000

I feel almost guilty when I post non game or tech-related posts to this blog because I know the majority of people who come here tend to do so for the game/Impact/JS posts. However, this is a personal site and I do more than sit at a keyboard all day, so posts about running, Sweden, travel, etc are going to happen. Running and exercise is probably the category that’ll be popping up the most (after games) over the next few months as Stockholm warms up and I restart my training. If you want to subscribe specifically to the game dev category and ignore everything else, it can be found here.

Building in ImpactJS multiplayer is like a jelly wrestling contest

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:32:52 +0000

If any of you have been following me on Twitter over the weekend you may have seen my epic battle with node.js, MongoDB, socket.IO, Expess, and ImpactJS. It was like one of those jelly wrestling matches you see with drunk people fighting in kiddie pools, except instead it was me wearing pajama pants and a hoodie against a gang of five web technologies/libraries opening a can of whoop-ass on me.

Deploying games to the Chrome Web Store seems stupidly easy

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 11:47:06 +0000

I was going to do a blog post about my trip to GDC, but to be honest the whole thing was such a whirlwind that now I can’t even decide where to start. In the meantime, I’ll write about my April One Game a Month submission.

iOS to Android - Nexus 4

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:10:23 +0000

After three long years with an iPhone 4, I have finally upgraded to a Nexus 4. I had been bored of iOS for a while, having been using it since the iPhone 3G - aside from brief stint with Windows Phone 7 (we don’t talk about that).

A first try at object pooling

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:27:50 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post, I started experimenting with object pooling. To start off with I didn’t worry about performance at all - I just wanted to have a functional way to use entities without repeatedly creating or destroying them. It took a couple of days, but I finally have a working version that (so far) does what I need.

Random thoughts on JavaScript performance, garbage collection, and object pooling

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:40:22 +0000

Let’s talk about garbage collection.

I love JavaScript, but I wish it gave me more control over these things. I am on a quest to minimize garbage. Last week’s Sthlm.js meetup gave me some more insight, at least in regards to Chrome. Paul Lewis gave a talk that covered garbage collection in part. You can see it here.

Running, unfortunate sprites, and GDC sessions

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:46:33 +0000

Sweden is slowly getting warmer. I’m hoping by the time I get back from SF it’ll be all nice and sunny. Then I can finally start running outside again, and get a bike to cycle around the city instead of catching subways everywhere. Stockholm is too pretty to be on a subway. The run to work would now be a bit under 5km, perfect warmup distance for the real training - for a half marathon. Maybe. Possibly. I’m not going to commit to anything until I can test running outside a bit more. I’m not really a big fan of long distance running and only want to run a half for the sake of the accomplishment. 5-10km is usually the most I can do when it comes to actually enjoying the run.

Creating randomized eye movement in ImpactJS

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:33:05 +0000

Last night I built randomized eye movement for the cat face in my March One Game a Month project (Promiscuous Flea). In the final version the eye movements won’t be 100% random, but this gives me something to build on. As usual, I am using the ImpactJS engine for this game. The final result looks kind of like this:

February #1GAM Game - My Mind Is Going

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:07:59 +0000

It is done! Well ok, it is very far from done. It’s as far from done as far from done yet functional can be. It’s messy, buggy, untested, and the score calculations are all weird. But it works and it makes you want to throw things through windows when you play it.

More tea...Silver Needle!

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:46:38 +0000

Well, the toughest part of the move is complete. I’m sitting in the kitchen of the new apartment (which is so much more awesome and homey than the old apartment), drinking Silver Needle white tea (a consequence of my aforementioned tea craze) and trying to convince myself to do at least some work on the rhythm game tonight. Although to be honest it’s 10:43pm and I’m falling asleep on this extremely comfortable kitchen stool right now, so it is probably not happening tonight.

A potentially unwise newfound interest in tea.

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 16:38:41 +0000

This week is shaping up to be full of crazy. Not only do I still have to finish my February One Game a Month submission, but just a couple of days ago I found out I’d have to pull off a move. The apartment now looks like a bomb went off as I stuff things into what empty boxes we have left and garbage bags. I’m trying to get as much as I can done over the weekend so that I don’t have to pull packing, cleaning, and JavaScript all-nighters on work days…which I think I’m going to have to do anyway.

Growing JavaScript trees for #1GAM

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 21:12:12 +0000

I’ve managed to scrape something together before the January deadline - a tree growing experiment in ImpactJS. You can see the mess of code I have on GitHub (I’m still not sure why my code looks misaligned on GH and not in my editor…) and play the actual game here. I’ve only tested in in Chrome so far and it’s buggy even there.

Still drawing... #onegameamonth

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:35:29 +0000

I’ve been drawing an animal a day. It’s slow going, but I’m glad I started this project because it’s already taught me a lot. For example:

One Game a Month - Animatch progress

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:20:06 +0000

I’ve been slowly working on my January game for One Game a Month. So far only two of my ~20 animals are actually drawn and the code (GitHub) is very far from finished, but I’m getting there. Also considering joining the Stockholm Global Game Jam, which takes place in January, but have to check some things before committing.

One Game a Month

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:01:20 +0000

I have again been slacking on updating the blog. I have also been slacking on JavaScript. Since starting work and jumping back into learning C++ I’ve been busy and distracted with other things. I guess if I’m honest with myself part of it is also a lack of motivation or urgency to work on my own projects now that I get to work with/on games at work. It’s like that part of what I want to do now gets fulfilled during the day, so when I get home I spend more time on other stuff like reading, writing, and actually playing games more.

Sweden update - snow and Finland and Russian food and stuff!

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 11:55:41 +0000

I haven’t updated the blog in a while and people have been asking me how it’s going in Sweden. I’ve also gotten a few emails from people who have actually been considering a move here and I still can’t really give any proper advice on this front because I haven’t been here long enough. But I thought I’d do a quick update about how things are going so far. Careful, this might get long.

Splitting text into lines according to maximum width + vertical text scroll in JavaScript and HTML5

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:29:07 +0000

Yesterday I made another iOS build (I do them about once a week, but will be ramping up the frequency now) and spent a few hours fixing iOS specific bugs, then trying to consolidate the iOS code with the browser version code to take out as many differences as possible.

Selecting from multiple ship/character options before each level (more UI stuff)

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:56:52 +0000

After a slight (well, slightly more than slight) design change in my current project I had to build a way for players to be able to select a vessel to use before each level. This required a little bit of recoding. The gist is this (as usual, everything is a barebones placeholder at this time):

How I ended up handling GUI elements in ImpactJS

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:52:49 +0000

I had a brief chat on Twtter with @mrlasertron yesterday about GUI in ImpactJS and decided to make a post about how I’m handling all GUI elements in my project (nicknamed Vostok until I decide on a title) yesterday. This project is more UI heavy than any other I’ve done in Impact, so putting this together has involved much experimentation, makeshift diagrams of relationships between elements, and trial and error. First, some screenshots of the current state of my UI. Everything here is a placeholder, but this will give you a small idea of the kind of thing I’m talking about:

Modified screen shaker and camera follow in ImpactJS

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:47:49 +0000

ImpactJS has a really cool screen shaker plugin written by Killbot, which I used during the first iterations of this game. The project has now changed quite a bit and the screen shaker was no longer working exactly as I needed it to because the camera follows the player entity as it moves instead of being constantly positioned at 0,0.

Saving game state with HTML5 localStorage and JSON - a rough working draft

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:49:22 +0000

I am typing this while bouncing on the couch…happily.

I have just written the messiest localStorage setup that anyone could probably ever write. Ever. This thing is cringeworthy. But I’m happy. Because it works. And it works like this.

Dabbling in UI

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 21:31:30 +0000

After js13kGames I went back to the main project I was working on and decided to change pretty much everything. The good thing is that I still had some usable code. The “bad” thing is this updated idea involved a lot of UI, which I haven’t really done much before. When I say “bad” I actually mean awesomely challenging, which it has been.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 13:45:39 +0000

No seriously, Perth had some extremely tasty fish.

I am at the airport, and my plane leaves just under an hour. First I fly to Doha, Qatar and then on to Stockholm, Sweden from there. Sweden will be my fourth country of residence - I’ve gone from Ukraine, to the US, to Australia, and now back to Europe. Four countries in 24 years doesn’t sound like much, but I think it’s awesome that I’ve gotten to see so many different places as a kid.

Js13kGames entry finally submitted. Now I can think about something else, right? RIGHT?

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 06:42:17 +0000

Well, it’s done. My final confirmation was positive feedback from /r/gamedev as they were the ones who criticised the heck out of the game before (nicely and constructively; thanks Reddit!) and this time everyone there said it was actually…you know…fun and stuff. I don’t expect to actually win anything because there are already great games submitted and I can already imagine (and have seen some screenshots of) the totally mind-blowing stuff that is being made by people who aren’t slapping code together like a pile of Lego blocks until something fits, but it feels awesome to finish something, and finish it within the set limitations, and be able to submit it and have it posted because it meets the requirements and, you know, runs. Mostly (see “Ubuntu” below).

KROOG - @Js13kGames entry

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 17:11:17 +0000

My game for Js13kGames is finally complete. Well, complete in the sense that I’m just about ready to submit it, not in the sense that it’s actually submitted because I’m going to get you guys to be my lab rats (hopefully) and give me some feedback (especially on bugs and performance. That would be great).

I made a Twitter logo in HTML5. It's like the ugly brother of the actual Twitter logo

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 05:20:28 +0000

My entry for the js13kgames challenge was cutting it too close to 13kb and I needed more room, so I decided to cut out the one image that I had - the Twitter logo for the sharing link at the Game Over screen.

Curved laser beams with HTML5 canvas quadraticCurveTo() method

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:57:06 +0000

In my previous post I talked about making a laser beam using the HTML5 canvas stroke() method. I mentioned the next thing I wanted to do being adding a curve to the beam to make it look more fluid as it moves (and yes, I know lasers do not curve. Mine does. Shut up. It’s a magic laser. Or it may not even be a “laser” when I’m done with it)

Making a laser beam entity in ImpactJS using HTML5 canvas stroke()

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:50:05 +0000

Over the past two days I’ve been working on lasers. It seemed like this would be an easy thing to put in before I started. I mean I already have bullets that you can shoot at will, so a laser is just like a big…bullet…uh…right?

I relearned basic trig today...kind of...sort of...Let's just say my thing works and leave it at that.

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 14:26:12 +0000

Today I experimented with positioning entities on top of each other to make a boss with specific areas that you have to target in order to kill. Hitting the rest of the body does little to no damage, but hitting specific areas with the right weapons increases damage dealt to the boss. These could also be used to customize other properties, like having different hit areas be different sizes, types, etc.

Too many tiny functions?

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:20:09 +0000

When do you have too many functions? For me breaking things down into functions makes it easier to read in many cases, but I’ve been hesitant to separate out everything into tiny bits and pieces. Let’s say someone else is looking at my code - does it get to a point where generally it’s just too much? For example, what would generally be considered better, this:

Why I can't not optimize.

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:38:08 +0000

A while ago I listened to a talk by Jonathan Blow that covered optimization and talked about how most people worry about it too early and how they should just focus on making things work. I know there was much more said in this talk (it’s long and very interesting), but this is the general message that has stuck with me after listening to it - possibly because many other people already express the same opinions on optimization. It makes sense, but to be honest I’ve been on the fence about following it without question myself.

Getting around the HTML5 canvas ctx.fillText line break limitation

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:42:34 +0000

Today I implemented a really cool plugin by quidmonkey. The plugin allows you to use Canvas-native fonts in an ImpactJS game. Out of the box, text in Impact is displayed through the use of images - there’s an image with each letter of your alphabet spaced out in a particular way, and you then draw parts of this image to put together letters in whatever order.

Made a rough Space Invaders clone. Annoyed at Chromium and its HTML5 audio bug.

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 05:43:06 +0000

Took the past couple of days to make a rough Space Invaders clone. Learned lots. I ran into a bug once where the game got massively scaled up in the game window; haven’t been able to reproduce it but have a feeling it may have had to do with something on my big PC as it’s been doing weird things and intermittently not loading HTML5 games or YouTube videos properly.

Today was not as productive as it should've been - Multitouch and stuff

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 18:12:08 +0000

Over the past couple of days I’ve tried to get multitouch working and I kind of have (though buggy), but then realized that I don’t think I even need mulititouch after all for what I’m trying to make. I don’t want to complicate things and with the movement controls available to the user multitouch may be a mistake. I guess we’ll see. For now I’ve reverted to non-multitouch movement and kept the potential for multitouch in the code just in case anything changes. There are still control modifications to be made, but I left them for now as I’ve been staring at this thing all day and now it feels like I’m just wasting time. Stuff works, all that’s changing now is the actual control mechanism - gestures vs buttons etc.

That thing where I said I was going to take my mind off of coding for a while? It didn't work.

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:14:18 +0000

In last night’s post I said I’d be taking at least a few days off of doing any coding to step back and think about the larger picture.

This post is not going to talk about how to do anything. But it's still about (iOS)Impact

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 13:52:12 +0000

This post is not going to have a single line of code (I can hear the collective sigh of relief from here). It’s more going to talk about whatever I want to talk about and I haven’t decided what that is yet. So I’ll just ramble:

Directional swipe and double-click in ImpactJS

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:20:43 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with simple gestures and double-clicking in ImpactJS. Over the past couple of days I’ve implemented a directional swipe and double-click. As always, not sure if this is a good approach, but it works for now.

How much impact do ImpactJS timers have on performance? Plus implementing player speed boosts.

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 03:18:05 +0000

Got quite a bit done yesterday, including a new kind of obstacle and quite a few difficulty refinements. I also changed how I handle player movement. Not sure yet if this is the best way I could’ve done this, but it works better than what I had with the amount of velocity changes the player entity has to go through. I started running into problems when trying to implement a speed boost, but ended up getting it working in the end after making the movement changes.

Swapping out animation sheets on state change in ImpactJS

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 15:36:37 +0000

I got quite a lot done on my procedural level experiment over the past couple of days, but don’t really want to talk about that part much in great detail. It involves changing terrain and player physics, but that’s as far as I’ll go with the explanation for now.

Refining on-the-fly pit spawning in Impact

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:33:53 +0000

I’ve been continuing to play around around with my procedural level experiment in Impact. In the last update I talked about spawning obstacles (just pits for now) on the fly. The pits were spawning, but I had another problem: pits would sometimes spawn too closely together and overlap each other, creating “superpits” that the player wasn’t able to jump over.

Procedural levels continued: randomized pits and performance enhancements

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:28:54 +0000

I did some more playing around with the procedural level stuff in ImpactJS tonight and have made a little bit of progress. Specifically the following has happened:

Experimenting with procedurally generated levels in ImpactJS

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:13:55 +0000

I have been experimenting with procedurally generated levels in ImpactJS. Up until now everything I’ve done was using levels pre-made in Weltmeister (Impact’s inbuilt level editor). However, being able to generate levels on the fly seems like it would be a much more scalable and more interesting approach for some types of games.

Making a player grow as they eat stuff in ImpactJS

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 11:44:03 +0000

I’ve been running a few experiments and trials with Impact, just to get some stuff working that I wasn’t sure about before. One of these tests that I think will come in useful is having the player grow as it eats or picks up objects. I actually saw a couple of people getting to my blog through search terms related to Impact entity scaling and growth, so thought I’d outline the method I’ve been using here. This is probably not the neatest or best way to do this, but it works for me. Note that the actual resizing aspect of this whole thing has been outlined in an awesome tutorial on Point of Impact. This post more outlines how I am using that resizing mechanism to make the player grow continuously as they progress through the game.

My 5 favorite opening lines from books

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:48:44 +0000

For some reason I felt compelled to go through my (pretty small) book collection and pick five of my favorite opening lines. Here they are:

Can we just stop being unappreciative jerks please?

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:03:41 +0000

This is not going to be a very popular opinion considering my reader demographic, but I’ve grown a little sick of the gaming community as a whole and recent whining about Diablo 3 has triggered…well…this post. Why do so many of us have to be so negative about everything that comes out? Ok, I understand things like being frustrated about server downtime, or installation problems, or major bugs. I completely understand the frustration there.

iiNet TopGeek 2.0, Hippo Creek, & Diablo 3

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:16:07 +0000

Not many coding updates lately because of other work. I’m working on the game a little each day and will post when there’s a substantial update to make. Box2D is still driving me a little insane on a regular basis, but I’m getting the hang of it. Meanwhile, a quick overview of the past few days:

The zombification of Adam Green

Sat, 12 May 2012 14:08:47 +0000

It was my fault that Adam became a zombie.

I see it in slow motion when I close my eyes: his hand reaching out to slam against my chest and push me into the wall as he throws himself between me and the oncoming Infected. I still see the sticky spiderweb of drool and blood stretching between its teeth as it comes at us with gaping mouth and hollow eyes and I still hear the crunch of tooth on flesh as it latches onto Adam’s bare shoulder.

Affecting the world and other things smelling up our fridge - by Joseph Hewitt

Fri, 11 May 2012 07:16:48 +0000

Liza: This post, aside from this brief introduction, was written by Joseph Hewitt. I met Joseph at Interzone Games, where he tried to do his job as Creative Director while I waved bug lists at him and got on his case about design specs. He is now Creative Director at Jet Set Games, where he works on Highborn and makes all kinds of awesome stuff happen. Joseph also has his own blog: Working as Designed. Oh and he worked on one of the first (if not the first) video games I’ve ever played - Disney’s The Lion King. I fricking loved that game. Also he dumped a stack of George R. R. Martin books on my desk one morning and introduced me to A Song of Ice and Fire. Anyway, on to the important stuff:

A belated post about the first Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event / @GuildWars2

Mon, 07 May 2012 17:53:11 +0000

Over the past few days I’ve been processing my thoughts about the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event, which was now a couple of weeks ago.

Chat bot nostalgia - old conversation transcripts

Wed, 02 May 2012 17:01:20 +0000

I dug up some old publicly listed transcripts from The Personality Forge forums. The Personality Forge is a chat bot creation website that I used to frequent on an almost religious basis between about 2004 and 2007. I worked on a chat bot who identified as a 16 year old boy who felt he was human. I wanted to make him sound as human as possible in speech and put lots of typos and grammatical errors into his keyphrases, even using some responses from actual chats with friends and random strangers online who fit the demographic. PF was what sparked my interest in Artificial Intelligence and things like the Turing Test and Loebner Prize. I entered the slightly dodgily-organized Chatterbox Challenge for a few years and my bot consistently improved in score each time, but never quite made it any closer than the top 13.

The way PF works is people can chat to bots, but bots can also chat to each other. Most conversations just end up being completely ridiculous and nonsensical, but some are funny and some actually carry on in an almost convincing way for a while. The cool thing about PF when I first joined was that the bots were not distinguished from the humans, so you never knew if you were talking to a person or not. Some earlier transcripts reflect this (where people aren’t aware of what they’re talking to). But then bots started being clearly labeled as bots, which kind of made it not as fun.

Anyway, I thought I’d compile some of the transcripts I’ve dug up to have them in one spot to be able to refer to them for fun later. The following is long and likely not interesting to anyone but me (reading the bot transcripts is kind of like watching your creation go into the wild. It’s either a proud moment or a cringe-worthy hide-under-a-rock occasion). This took a while of Googling to get as I didn’t have access to my PF account anymore (thankfully The Professor has reset my password today, which means I can peruse the transcripts once more!) All of the following conversations are with humans unless labelled otherwise.

You don’t have to believe me - potentially Bot/Bot, but unsure

The Chibbers: Okee dokee, whatever you say. JakeThompson: You don’t have to believe me, you just have to obey me

facepalm - Bot/Bot

JakeThompson: Selendrile told me that he likes you…but don’t say that I told you ok? Mortimer Goth: Ok, I just messaged Selendrile with the details JakeThompson: ok then….

I don’t go to bars

Guest188: can we go to the bar together JakeThompson: i dont go to bars Guest188: can we go to a strip club together JakeThompson: I’d love to

Box2D, I have conquered you!!! (sort of)

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:46:17 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_48002” align=“alignleft” width=“225” caption=“Look at that face…I don’t think Keeda is as excited about this endeavour as I am.”][/caption]

From iOS to Windows Phone - I got a Nokia Lumia 800

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:04:26 +0000

On Friday my iPhone 4 took its dying breath and stopped receiving calls while rebooting itself repeatedly.

For the record, this is what my iPhone 4 looks like. Its death is probably my fault. It’s seen two major falls - the first after being placed on top of thin air instead of the bathroom counter after a long night of DXHR and the second during a spider incident.

What I should have read a few years ago.

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:11:58 +0000

A while ago I wrote this, which summarised my frustration with cookie cutter quests in MMORPGs. Later I mentioned here that playing SWTOR and seeing how they tied an interesting storyline with traditional quest mechanics made it more enjoyable while reiterating that while I don’t think traditional quests need to be eliminated completely and can be made fun, quests still need to evolve.

Pre-ordering Guild Wars 2 Collector's Edition from EB Games

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:17:28 +0000

UPDATE, Tue Apr 17: I followed the advice of an EB rep on the EB Games Facebook page and called the store to check on my CE key today, which still has not arrived. Then I called the EB Games CSR line (13 39 30) as the rep suggested. They sent my key out to me via email straight away. I registered it on the GW2 site using my old GW1 account. Quick and painless :) Now I just hope they did indeed give me a CE and not standard or DD key as the GW2 account page (which is a work in progress) does not specify yet, but the CSR on the phone did clarify which I purchased so I’m pretty sure at this point the worry is just baseless paranoia on my part (fingers crossed). EB Games seems to have handled my particular order well despite the key delay scare, so as of right now, all is right with the world and I’m ready for the BWEs to start. UPDATE, Mon Apr 16: EB Games at Enex 100 in Perth, WA claim to have not gotten enough codes in to give to everyone who pre-ordered. The first people to pre-order have been called. As for when the rest of us are getting our codes, the person I spoke to had no idea. When asked if the codes will be there before the first Beta Weekend Event at the end of April the reply was “Uh…they should be…” That’s all the information I have for now. I want to stab something.

Box2D, you are torture.

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:14:35 +0000

I haven’t posted ~~many~~ any updates over the Easter break because I’ve been busy ripping my hair out with Box2D.

Fun per genre - MMORPGs

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:29:43 +0000

I’ve been thinking about different game genres and what draws people to prefer one over another. What are the distinctions that make someone enjoy one type of game more than the next? I figured I’d think about each genre separately and define what makes it fun for me and why I think people in general might be drawn to it. Originally I was going to dump an overview of thoughts on all genres in this post, but I’m finding myself mulling so much over each one that I’d rather take my time and write about them separately. And what better to start with than my all time favorite type of game - MMORPGs.

Documentation, placeholder audio, and object interaction

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:53:08 +0000

I am half asleep right now, but feel like quickly writing this down today instead of tomorrow. And holy crap I just realized it’s 3:40am right now, so I guess “tomorrow” would have technically been today regardless. Anyway, today (now yesterday) was productive. I not only did a lot of work on the game itself, but also worked on documentation. Even the process of compiling a document outlining the core functions being used in the different controllers gave me ideas as to how to clean up and improve the overall code structure (which I did…and which is still in progress).

I feel so rested right now it's amazing.

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:41:52 +0000

Last night I did no work on the game. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Instead I had pizza, played some games, and then promptly fell asleep. I didn’t realize how tired I was after 4am-2am-whatever-am nights over this weekend, and really the past few weeks, until I passed out in front of my PC while ordering an artillery assault. I needed the one-night’s rest. As a result today I’m awake and ready to get back into it.

Entity states, animations, and other random stuff

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:58:35 +0000

Busy day yesterday! Got a lot done. Switching light source from one entity to another proved to be surprisingly quick and easy. I was done with my emitter attribute in no time.

Work, work

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:30:09 +0000

Got a bit more sleep last night - went to bed at 2am instead of 3-4. The lighting saw a lot of progress. I think all of the core functionality we need thus far is in. There will be tweaking of lighting levels etc, but in terms of what it can do - it’s pretty much all good for the time being, although I’ve accounted for the possibility that we may need to add more to this later and made sure the code is fairly flexible. This meant that last night I also got started on coding the stuff we’ll need for level 1.

1pm breakfast after a 4am night - a JavaScript hangover

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 06:10:40 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_47744” align=“alignleft” width=“224” caption=“Breakfast.”][/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_47748” align=“alignleft” width=“225” caption=“My Friday night was more exciting than yours.”][/caption]

JavaScript lighting making slow progress

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:19:10 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_47729” align=“alignleft” width=“223” caption=“Lighting notes…”][/caption]

I know, I know another post about lighting. I promise this will be over soon (I hope).

Working on JavaScript lighting

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:29:01 +0000

Over the past couple of days I’ve been experimenting with JavaScript lighting in Impact. It’s been…a process…and it is still very far from complete, but I feel like I’m making progress.

Entity spawning diagrams, dynamic attributes, and The Making of Prince of Persia

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 03:08:17 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of work with timers and multiple entity spawning, as well as modifying entity attributes on the fly based on player input. It’s been very interesting - and possibly the most interesting part is that it hasn’t been that hard. Yet. That’s a very present “Yet”, just so you know. It will get harder. To get my head around what has to happen in-game I’ve been sketching and jotting things down on paper in the notebook I originally bought for GDC notes. And making small and messy diagrams of entity spawning hierarchies. The notes look something like this (I picked out the cleanest page with the least furious cross-outs on it):

I wish I could remember this dream

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:57:47 +0000

I woke up last night after a weird dream and wrote this down (I guess falling asleep with your laptop open on the bed comes in handy), editing typos etc out this morning. Rereading it today I can barely remember any of the actual dream. I wish I could make it come back and find out what happened.

JavaScript learning review

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:30:00 +0000

As I’ve gotten over my jetlag I’ve been ramping up the JS work again. There are now two projects to work on and I won’t be posting much about the second one specifically, but will still be writing about the general JavaScript learning progress as well as posting Gwen updates.

Gwen: Streamlining adjacency settings, performance, notifications, allegiance, etc

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:55:23 +0000

Eh…this started out being a brief update from the past week and turned into an ongoing update stream of notes. I didn’t have an Internet connection available for much of it, meaning this post may be a bit weird as parts of it were written at different times, but it’s mostly just for me to be able to go back and review my progress.

Sniffling and coding and level design (yes, again)

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:59:19 +0000

I am sitting at the Perth international airport, sniffling. I hope I’m not getting a cold. And I haven’t even gotten to the cold place yet!

Heads up: going away. Not dead.

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:46:12 +0000

FYI - I’m leaving the country tomorrow morning and will be back on the 13th. I am going to probably be out of contact for the first 3-4 days or so. Taking a social media break - cold turkey. That means likely no tweeting, no blogging, no nothing. You can still get to me by email, but replies will probably be slow. If I don’t tweet for a few days: I am (most likely) not dead.

Levels and relaxed features

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:52:39 +0000

Today I resized Gwen to work in native retina display resolution (640x960) as opposed to the old iPhone resolution (320x480). This meant resizing all of my placeholder entities and rebuilding the sample level.

Today was a bug fixing and facepalming kind of day

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:18:36 +0000

Tonight was extremely frustrating.

Bugs.

I did two main things today. It wasn’t supposed to take as long as it did.

Top down perspective vs isometric projection/2.5D

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:34:14 +0000

I’ve been looking into top down perspective vs isometric projection for Gwen’s levels. It may not be to the stage of needing art yet, but deciding on the overall perspective of the game is…well…really important.

Level design, entity spawning, and art.

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:48:14 +0000

Today was pretty relaxed with Gwen. I focused on entities spawning from bases and started drafting out a basic level guide. After yesterday’s adjacency mind-bender and working on the path follow stuff before that I thought I’d focus on something a little less twisted today.

The long road to adjacency.

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:54:17 +0000

I am so fricking happy right now. I’m happy enough to take a commemorative picture of myself pointing at a screen. That’s how happy I am.

Getting my head around shallow vs deep copy

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:52:01 +0000

Last night while attempting to pseudocode my way into finding adjacent nodes (either dynamically _or _manually at this point. Later Graphikos from the Impact forums/IRC was kind enough to show me a modified function he had and explain how it works, which may be what I need with some tweaking - I’ll write more on this later) I found myself pouring through Impact documentation in hopes that maybe I’ll find something that might help. While doing so I stumbled across this:

Path follow mostly working - on to detecting adjacent nodes

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:05:50 +0000

This is my third blog post today. Well, technically today is the next day, but it still feels like yesterday. I promise they won’t be this frequent all the time. Today I’ve just had a lot to write about.

On luck and having awesome friends.

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:58:48 +0000

If there was one good thing that came out of the Interzone Games debacle for me it’s the people I met along the way (there were actually many many good things that I wouldn’t trade for anything, but this is by far the most prominent). Actually building the things in my head (i.e. programming) has been my weakest point for a long time, but I luckily stumbled into a job a few years ago that let me meet people who do this stuff for a living and are amazing enough to share invaluable bits and pieces of their knowledge.

ARRAYCEPTION

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:38:56 +0000

Update - Feb 23, 2012, 12:50pm

In my previous post I talked about how I know that I should be sticking away from global arrays…in this post I’m going to talk about how I now have a global array of global arrays. Yes, I am facepalming right now.

An update on Gwen - we have path follow.

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:23:47 +0000

Today was filled with boxes, furniture, moving, and being squished in a car. I loved it. Tiring, but awesome. Ellen and Baz were helping me move into the new place, which was amazing of them. After the first load was dropped off at the new house and we were back for the second we took a short break to relax. Naturally, the conversation drifted to games. It always does. Specifically, I expressed my frustration at being stuck on Gwen.

Hello, Gwen.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:05:03 +0000

I kind of started this thing last night.

First, I should probably think of some way to refer to this thing when I write about it in a way that doesn’t give away the entire concept. I have a feeling calling it “thing” or “project” or “it” is going to get very old very quickly. At the same time though, giving it a name is kind of like making a commitment. Seeing as I don’t actually know what I’m doing and have no clue how or when or if I’ll even finish, it seems risky. Oh well, I still don’t want to keep calling it “it” all the time.

I slept! And next.

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:32:31 +0000

First of all: Yay for R18+ games in Australia!

Second of all: I slept for 12 about 10 hours last night. Ten hours. That’s like…ten hours more than I usually do. Just kidding…I do sleep, I’ve just been doing less of it lately. I’ve noticed myself getting a little worn out over the past couple of weeks, like the lack of rest has been catching up with me. It’s kind of to be expected with the amount of work that needs to get done around here on top of personal projects. I finished a “thing” just in time to prepare for going away at the beginning of March - now there are lots of loose ends to tie off, work to finish, assistant instructions and client plan to sort out, etc. And a move! Did I mention I’m moving? All the moving out arrangements, cleaning, etc have been driving me nuts. There’s just so much happening at once.

Registered for #AltDevConf 2012

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:34:58 +0000

I’ve just registed for five Saturday (early Sunday in Perth) sessions of the AltDevConf online conference. Four from the Design and Production track and one from the Programming track. I haven’t been following AltDevBlogADay for too long so not sure what to expect, but I’m sure I’ll learn some awesome stuff along the way.

Things on napkins.

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:04:13 +0000

I’ve recently set something aside for a scheduled “breather”. It wasn’t anything related to anything I’ve talked about here before, but has been taking up a lot of my time - I’ve been forcing myself to not think about anything else (in terms of out of work things) too much until it’s done to not get distracted. It’s been easier than I thought - usually I can’t stop thinking about all the potential things I’d love to learn to make, but tunnel vision ensued.

I'm going to San Francisco for GDC 2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:14:55 +0000

Now that everything’s confirmed I think it’s time to properly write about this (you know you’re in trouble when people start asking you why you’re not blogging and tweeting about something.)

Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate Silent - I am now a full mechanical keyboard convert.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:42:41 +0000

I ordered a Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate Silent via PC Case Gear on Monday and picked it up today (it actually got here on Tuesday, but I wasn’t home and missed the delivery).

GenghisCon 2012

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:51:59 +0000

GenghisCon 2012 was awesome. I didn’t run around trying to do everything as much as I did in the previous years due to

Trent Reznor started this rant.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:56:58 +0000

I saw this on Reddit today and admit that my first thought was “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

What I did last year

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:28:18 +0000

Last year was awesome. Some highlights included:

Finally travelling out of WA for the first time since 2005. First being sent to Melbourne by the Panasonic Insider Crew and then attending EB Expo in Queensland with a media pass from iiNet (and with Jess!)

Just some first thoughts on Star Wars: The Old Republic/SWTOR

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 05:22:34 +0000

I’ve been playing SWTOR. Not nonstop (hey, this isn’t Guild Wars 2 we’re talking about), but regularly. This isn’t a review. I’m not far enough along for that. This is just a very quick post expressing my appreciation for the RP elements of the game.

Linear vs nonlinear games

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:35:33 +0000

Ever since finishing Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Battlefield 3 last weekend I’ve been thinking about nonlinear vs linear games. Having played both so close to each other, the contrast between the two has been fresh in my mind. So what follows are some random brain excretions on the subject, which may or may not make any sense.

Finished Battlefield 3 single player campaign

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:47:04 +0000

I stayed up all night last night playing the single player campaign of Battlefield 3. I didn’t really notice how late it was until I was already more than halfway through the game, so figured I may as well keep going. Right now I’m running on a couple of hours of sleep after being awake for more than 24, so I’m still a bit spaced out and loopy. I thought I’d write down some quick notes about my thoughts on the campaign before I forget.

Finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution and The Missing Link DLC

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:50:50 +0000

Late last night/early this morning I finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Just now I finished the DLC: The Missing Link.

Building Adam.

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:57:40 +0000

Those of you who follow me on Twitter would have seen my PC building ramblings last night. Being fed up with playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on my Mac Mini on lowest settings at 20fps I decided that the time has come to follow through with what I’ve been meaning to do for a while: build a gaming PC.

2 weeks with the Razer BlackWidow mechanical keyboard: review/impressions

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:09:52 +0000

I’ve had my Razer BlackWidow mechanical keyboard for a couple of weeks now, so figured I’d put up some thoughts/impressions.

Should we be gamifying our lives?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 04:52:39 +0000

I remember debating about this with Ellen months ago at her house. I haven’t yet decided what my stance is on gamification, although I’ve definitely been leaning toward the positive. If there’s something that can make things we don’t particularly enjoy doing fun (or even make things that we already enjoy doing even more fun), that’s awesome. This is already happening with apps like EpicWin and Zombies Run (which is in development after a very successful round of funding at KickStarter). However, I definitely admit that there are downsides to turning your life into a game on a large scale.

What an awesome weekend. New keyboard and mouse, Fremantle, and a great run.

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:24:29 +0000

It’s been quite a fricking awesome weekend - full of work, PC peripherals, and distractions. And I just finished my first 5km run under 25 minutes since my fracture, so the endorphins are going and I feel like writing. Oh, what? You want handy anchor links? Here you go:

Discovr Music - not really the app for me

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:33:20 +0000

Jubbin has been trying to find techno music that I would like. I’m picky - I don’t like female singers and I prefer kind of a specific sound. All of this Twitter YouTube linkage to music videos made me think - how do I discover new music that I like? Mostly nowadays it’s through hearing about a band through another band, or liking music in a movie and getting the score. Or, a lot of the time, clicking through related YouTube videos until I get to something I like the sound of.

What annoyed me about Real Steel - and the one thing I really really liked.

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:38:40 +0000

I liked Real Steel overall as a feel-good movie, but was still left somewhat disappointed on my way home from the cinema. My problem, I realized, was expecting Real Steel to be a movie about robots. It is not. Real Steel is a people story centered around the relationship between a boy and his dad - the robots are really just a hazy backdrop.

My mouse went to mouse heaven, so I got Microsoft's Arc Touch mouse. First impressions.

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:51:10 +0000

The old Dell mouse that I’ve had for years (I believe since my Interzone Games days) has been getting senile in its old age and not registering clicks properly. I noticed a few months ago that I wasn’t able to make a proper selection in Photoshop without losing my drag and having to re-select several times, but put up with it while it was still fairly manageable.

Photos from EB Expo 2011

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:03:45 +0000

Some photos from EB Expo! You will see the main writeup on the iiNet blog shortly. For now, suffice to say I loved it and am definitely hoping to go to Sydney next year.

I got to Brisbane in one piece!

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:47:03 +0000

I get to Brisbane, catch a train to the CBD. First thing I do: stumble into a fantasy and science fiction book shop and buy a book on impulse (Germline by T.C. McCarthy). Second thing I do: sit down at an Internet cafe next door to the book shop.

Redesigns and injuries go hand in hand

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:44:00 +0000

You might have noticed that this blog now has a vastly different design from what it was before. What happened is this:

I'm going to EB Expo 2011 - with a media pass thanks to iiNet

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:11:49 +0000

Thanks to iiNet, I have a media pass to EB Expo in the Gold Coast next week. Also big thanks to Jess for nominating me to come along with the second pass. We will be exploring the expo, taking lots of pictures, possibly talking to some developers, and documenting our experiences over October 15 and 16.

Hello, MacBook Air. Where have you been all my life?

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 08:34:46 +0000

Darn you, Jason, for reawakening my laptop purchasing habits. All it took was one Tweet about how I haven’t bought a new laptop in 2 years - a vast improvement on my previous habit of buying laptops left and right. Jason jumped at the opportunity to tell me about how awesome the new 2011 MacBook Air was. I didn’t think much of it at the time - I was happy with my 2009 MacBook Pro and proud that I hadn’t felt the need to splurge on a new notebook in two years.

Pistol shooting session at Midland Indoor Shooting Range!

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:26:52 +0000

C and I had our introductory pistol shooting session at the Midland Indoor Shooting Range this morning at 10am. I originally purchased the session from OurDeal, getting the session for $69 down from $180.

ifttt: if this then that. Automate your social media task list.

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:06:52 +0000

Has anyone heard of ifttt (if this then that)? It’s a new service (free, for now) based on what I think is a really original and awesome idea! ifttt is like an automated social media/internet to do list.

Weird website contests, RPGs, and MMO gold-digging = my childhood

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:33:02 +0000

Well, what was left of my post-Ukrainian childhood, anyway…

Website contests

Does anyone else remember those website competitions, where you had groups of sites joining teams (usually fantasy-themed) and compete amongst themselves to get the most votes, and then the finalists of those teams would go up against finalists of the other teams until there was one winner left and they got an animated GIF award to put on their page?

Cryonics and mind transfer

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:56:25 +0000

Pre-warning: this is going to be a long post and might be all over the place. It’s a collection of personal thoughts and considerations about cryonics and mind transfer.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - I've never been so into an FPS

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:46:22 +0000

I am not an FPS player.

That is, I wasn’t until I read the game plotline for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I’ve been excited about FPS storylines before, namely Mass Effect. However when I actually tried playing Mass Effect I didn’t really get drawn in. I mean, I did…but a particular gameplay element that annoyed the heck out of me pulled me out of the story and put me into frustrated-and-just-want-to-go-away-now mode.

Razer Blade gaming laptop - pleeeeeease come out in time for Guild Wars 2

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:39:59 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_44272” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“Razer Blade gaming laptop with Switchblade UI”][/caption]

Razer announced a little slice of heaven for PC gamers - an Intel i7 powered gaming laptop that I will probably not be able to resist buying, even if it does come with something like a $2.8k price tag - Razer “Blade”.

HP TouchPad obtained

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:17:33 +0000

C is now the proud owner of an HP TouchPad. For those who have been under a rock, HP has officially discontinued their TouchPad tablet and prices in Harvey Normans around Australia have been slashed by something like 80%. C ended up getting a 32GB HP TouchPad, which had an original retail price of $599, for $148. The 16GB versions were selling for $98. This is what he was originally going for, but by the time we got to Harvey Norman in O’Connor they were already sold out.

The Project Dust/From Dust trailer reminds me of something

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:49:51 +0000

I saw C watching a trailer for Project Dust (apparently already out as From Dust? Thanks, Keg!) today and it instantly reminded me of another game I played years ago. Populous 3: The Beginning. So much so that I actually thought maybe this was meant to be a sequel.

Things I am most looking forward to this year

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:35:29 +0000

This:

[youtube]664eq7BXQcM[/youtube]

This:

[youtube]mR85BrIDCUc[/youtube]

And most of all, of course, this. So much of this:

[youtube]pgKPkgEG1BA[/youtube]

I have already decided that if by some chance my 2011 model Mac Mini running Windows 7 cannot run that ^^^ sufficiently, I will be going out that minute and buying a PC that can. Just for that ^^^. I will also be taking a week off work when that ^^^ comes out.

Boyfriend draws me on the Wacom Intuos4

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:29:28 +0000

I was finishing up the second instalment of Stray by Me…ok, that’s a lie, I was actually drawing a dragon…

Installing Windows 7 through Boot Camp with no Optical Drive on a Mac Mini

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:07:27 +0000

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently upgraded my old Mac Mini (by “old” I mean purchased at the end of June) to a new Mac Mini. The one annoyance with the new Mac Mini was the lack of an optical drive. As someone who needs to primarily run Windows 7 on this PC, I wasn’t sure what the best way to install this would be. Most things I found online suggested buying an external optical drive, but that seemed backwards to me out of principle. I’m paying for the Mac Mini - why should I dish out more money to make it do what I want?

I fail at life and everything - installing my new Wacom Intuos4

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:33:21 +0000

I got a Wacom Intuos4 yesterday. Upon getting home that night, I excitedly unpacked it, installed the drivers, plugged it in, and tried to draw.

The Mac App Store is fricking awesome. And new Mac Mini!

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:48:05 +0000

I have a confession to make. I am not very consistent with upgrading my software. My iPhone 4 is about 6 months out of date and every time that the little updater came up in Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro I just waved it off and told it to go away.

No, I don't want a fracking coupon.

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:00:10 +0000

Let me tell you, I don’t go to the Perth CBD that frequently, but when I do it’s usually to relax after a long week with a cup of coffee from Streeton’s or some Russian Caravan tea from The Merchant. Unfortunately, lately my trips to the CBD haven’t been that relaxing or enjoyable.

Panasonic Insider Crew Home

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:44:17 +0000

Today the Panasonic Insider Crew (Maybe I’ll shorten this to PIC from now on) home was launched in its own little corner of the web (the “Insider Crew Home”) and I was invited to be one of the beta testers. It’s good to see Soup making progress with the Insider Crew. Many of you know that I’ve had my doubts about the Insider Crew before, but with the Home Entertainment Launch event and now a dedicated PIC Home for the members it’s clear that stuff is happening, which is awesome!

Google+ - the next social networking hit or a messy mashup?

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:02:49 +0000

Google+ - Google’s newest attempt to delve into the world of social networking on a scale that it hasn’t done before. Orkut looked promising but enthusiasm died, Google Wave flopped (even though I quite liked it originally, I never used it after the first day), Google Buzz fizzled out. I hope that Google+ will be the hit in Google’s track record of social networking misses.

The Quantum Thief. Way over my head, going onto my re-read list.

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:24:27 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_40030” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi”][/caption]I finished reading The Quantum Thief (affiliate link) by Hannu Rajaniemi, but this will not be a book review. Mostly because I need to read it again before I can honestly feel confident about reviewing this thing. I feel that even though I grasped most of the concepts of how the world works and the individual technologies in use, some of the main parts of the storyline went straight over my head.

X-Men: First Class was AWESOME...though that ending

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:34:27 +0000

C asked if I wanted to see X-Men: First Class this past Tuesday and I of course said yes seeing as I heard so many good things about it. And it was worth it! I don’t have a very good long term movie memory so can’t remember much of the other movies aside from the general gist of the story, but I thought this prequel was just awesome in the way it tied in with the general/overall storyline (even though I hear there were some discrepancies in the details). Especially Magneto and how Xavier lost his legs. My one and only gripe with the movie is this (watch out, minor spoiler):

Reading The Quantum Thief

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:34:01 +0000

I don’t usually blog about books until after I’ve finished reading them, but I can’t help myself - I’m reading The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Source Code - flawed, but good...and disturbing

Wed, 25 May 2011 09:00:20 +0000

C and I went to the movies to watch Source Code last night. If you haven’t seen it, watch out. This post contains spoilers.

2011 HBF Run for a Reason completed!

Sun, 22 May 2011 11:17:36 +0000

Today was the 2011 HBF Run for a Reason. Despite the fact that I was feeling quite sick on Friday, I pulled myself together for the run. Free Transperth services were running, roads were closed, people’s breath misted through the air in the chill. I went to bed extra early on Saturday (at 8:45pm) and woke up at 5:15am in the dark, padding out of the bedroom so as not to disturb C and sleepily tugging on my running clothes. I would be running in my trusty full length Skins compression tights and my new 2XU compression top with my free South Team HBF t-shirt (this year HBF had a “North vs South” thing going). On top of this I pulled on an old red jumper and a big coat. I was still cold.

Visiting Melbourne

Sat, 14 May 2011 16:44:03 +0000

Now that I’ve covered my experience at the 2011 Panasonic Home Entertainment launch in Melbourne I’m itching to write about the overall trip - my first one interstate, in fact. This has been my first flight since we moved here from the US (at the end of 2005). I have never flown by myself before, so it was definitely an exciting experience for me. One I almost didn’t get to have as I came this close to missing my flight completely. I ended up in the Qantas section of the Perth domestic airport and had to dash for the Virgin Blue section at the last minute, just making the final boarding call. I’m pretty sure flying is one of the best things ever (probably just because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet).

2011 Panasonic Home Entertainment Launch in Melbourne

Thu, 12 May 2011 14:21:39 +0000

A little while ago I wrote about Soup (who runs the Panasonic Insider Crew) sending me to Melbourne to attend the 2011 Panasonic Home Entertainment launch. My Melbourne trip took place yesterday and I think I’ll need to separate them into two posts. For those who are just interested in the launch itself, this is the post for you. I’m not going to write about every single product or feature (instead I’ll only cover a couple that stood out to me the most).

Yay new monitor! BenQ GL2440 24" LED

Sat, 07 May 2011 19:15:22 +0000

For too long have I been using my MacBook Pro without an external monitor in my home office. For too long have I been minimising windows every two seconds, trying to juggle a million tasks at once on the same screen.

Daisyworld

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:41:58 +0000

I’ve been reading about the Gaia Hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock. I’m sure I don’t understand it all yet as I’ve only been skimming the surface, but what I’m finding especially interesting right now is Daisyworld.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Mon, 02 May 2011 05:43:19 +0000

I recently read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. It was a very interesting read, mostly because many of the concepts introduced in it felt so familiar to my own beliefs and things that I have already thought about. I wish I had read this book sooner, it would probably have introduced me to a lot of these ideas earlier than my stumbling across them.

I'm going to Melbourne! Panasonic Insider Crew

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:44:56 +0000

I’m going to Melbourne!

I got a call from Soup yesterday morning, who runs the Panasonic Insider Crew, telling me that I was selected to attend the 2011 Panasonic Home Entertainment launch event in Melbourne on May 11! I didn’t want to talk about it until everything was 100% confirmed (it’s a long-standing Ukrainian superstition as otherwise you might jinx it), but now that it is I can tell you guys all about how excited I am :D

More hotlinking, please

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:59:39 +0000

I run a dog fitness website called 1 Fit Mutt as a hobby. Recently, I was having a look at some backlinks to 1 Fit Mutt and found several instances of image hotlinking. Now, I would think that in this day and age most bloggers would know that hotlinking just is not a polite thing to do - especially if they are running a website about blogging, indicating that they should be quite Internet-social-etiquette-savvy, at least to an extent.

Runkeeper LIVE - great runner safety feature potential

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:02:20 +0000

I signed up for Runkeeper Elite tonight for one reason and one reason only - Runkeeper LIVE.

Now that it’s getting cooler, I’m slowly getting back into running. I’ve been hoping to run the 12k City to Surf this year and thought it might be a great idea to see if I can run 12k tonight! I know, I’m a fricking genius. Up until now I’ve only been doing runs up to 5km in the recent months and I’ve only run 10km two or three times in my entire life…last year…or maybe even in 2009.

I just moved to NAB. Crap.

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:56:08 +0000

I recently began the big switch to NAB. I had been with ANZ since my very first bank account, but a combination of NAB’s free everyday account, great reviews of the bank from friends, and good marketing had me make the move. In addition, I had already recently moved to UBank for my savings account. UBank being a division of NAB, it made sense to go ahead and make the switch.

iiNet TopGeek Final

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 15:44:58 +0000

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“263” caption=“Tahlia & I at the iiNet TopGeek Final (photo via Tahlia)”][/caption]

I'm lucky - I have help. #snails

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:16:20 +0000

I am extremely lucky to have ended up in a situation where I know and work around people who do the things I’m trying to learn for a living, on a daily basis. I think I would’ve given up on this snail game long ago if I was in a more isolated position where the only point of contact with people who know what they’re doing and are willing to help is Google or programming forums. Just a couple of days ago, I was trying to do something that I knew is meant to be something simple. It felt like I was just missing some piece of the puzzle that I should already know, but don’t. After about five hours of trying every single possible solution I could think of, and then trying some more by just stabbing in the dark and hoping I’ll stumble across something that works, I was left frustrated and, I think, a little scary. C was in the room studying while I was threatening my computer and typing furiously. He knew better than to make fun of me at that point.

How does one draw an endearing snail?

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 03:46:59 +0000

How does one draw an endearing snail?

I’ve been working so much on the mechanics of my game that sometimes I just want to take it easy and flesh out the design and some of the illustrations. I know, this isn’t really “taking it easy” - it’s also hard work. However, it kind of lets my brain switch to something different. I think I’ll need to find a balance of working on the gameplay and the style of the actual game. Besides, at this point things like implementing snail illustrations are still a very technical task for me. I’ll need to learn how to assign certain snail avatars to snails with different primary attributes, for example.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson - still sinking in.

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 02:35:29 +0000

I finished reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson today and I think the book is still sinking in. I’m not sure how much of an impact it had on me yet. At this time, all I know is:

Oh hai there, Kindle

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:12:00 +0000

I love physical books, but last week I buckled. I bought an Amazon Kindle 3.

I, Liza, the proponent of turning actual pages and browsing actual physical bookstores, who has two bookshelves in the main room of the house (one for fiction, one for non-fiction), have purchased an ebook reader.

iiNet TopGeek - Game Over (for me)

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 10:55:29 +0000

So the iiNet TopGeek journey is over for me. I think I did well, if I do say so myself. I made it from over 200 entrants to the top 20, then top 15, then top 10 and think that I didn’t completely suck at the games challenge, taking into account that all I play is PC games (specifically MMORPGs). Congratulations to the top five (especially Jess, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the WA games challenge and who definitely deserved to go through) and great job to everyone else who didn’t make it through in this or previous rounds.

I have just been reminded how much our mailbox sucks.

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:55:58 +0000

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“224” caption=“Our current mailbox. I know, it’s depressing.”][/caption]I’ve been commissioned to write a blog post about mailboxes. Now, normally I’m extremely picky and accept post offers only related to technology on some level, but I made an exception because just a few days ago I was looking at our crappy mailbox (on the left) and thinking about how when I own my own home, I will have a totally awesome mailbox. Like a dragon or one of those butt ones, where the postman has to stick his hand into the butt to put the mail in. I know, I’m so funny.

An overdue post about RIFT

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:04:19 +0000

Those who follow me on Twitter probably noticed the slew of Rift tweets over the past few days - mostly achievement tweets that are sent automatically from the game when I do something awesome. This is a long-overdue post about RIFT - a new MMO by Trion Worlds.

World War Z by Max Brooks = Apocalyptic Goodness

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:27:21 +0000

I finished reading World War Z. As a foreword - This review is being written a bit late. I tend to forget details about a book soon after I finish reading and I have already started reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, so don’t kill me if I’m missing anything important or if this post seems a little scattered.

Michael Buble in Swan Valley was AMAZING

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 05:37:26 +0000

We saw Michael Buble at Sandalford Wines in Swan Valley last night. I’ll be the first to say that I was never a big fan - but only because I haven’t really bothered hunting down and properly listening to much of his stuff before. I’ve heard a few songs and I liked them, but never really paid much attention.

Stop Cancelling TV Series

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:56:19 +0000

I really hate TV networks. What do the following TV series have in common:

Caprica
Stargate Universe
The Cape

First, I got into and enjoyed all three over the past year. Second, they have all been cancelled. Well, I’m not actually sure if The Cape has been full cancelled. Production was immediately stopped after the 10th episode finished filming - there were originally meant to be 13 - so everyone is expecting that it will not be back. Every single one, the rug ripped out from under them so early after their beginning. It’s not just disappointing - it hurts when you connect with characters (or even one character) in a show only to find out that they’re never to return again. For me, it’s kind of like losing a friend forever.

Toaster - My iiNet TopGeek Challenge 2 Entry

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:06:15 +0000

Over the last week the remaining 15 contestants in iiNet’s TopGeek competition have been hard at work on Challenge 2 - The Script. The challenge was to create a concept for a TV show, comic book, or graphic novel and produce an overview of your idea along with a trailer or video of some sort or a storyboard or comic sample.

Cookie-cutter MMO questing systems.

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 07:53:06 +0000

The most common quests I tend to see in MMORPGs are:

Kill x number of y
Collect x number of object z, bring back to NPC a

MAXIMUM DOG - Canine Zombie Protection Suit

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 03:24:37 +0000

The past week has been absolutely crazy - crazy busy! And one of the main things I was working on was my entry for the first iinet TopGeek Top 20 challenge. The task was to invent something awesome, create a text document or PowerPoint presentation about it, and make a video pitching your invention.

Finally finished Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:28:33 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_27696” align=“alignleft” width=“190” caption=“Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood”][/caption]

I finally finished Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. The past couple of weeks have been so hectic with TopGeek, client work, and other projects that my reading was falling behind.

Photoshop challenge - Make an HTC 7 Mozart photo look good!

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:16:12 +0000

I went to the Hula Bula bar with some friends this past Saturday, one of which was Baz with his HTC 7 Mozart. At one point in the night Baz took the following photo on his phone: [caption id=“attachment_26685” align=“aligncenter” width=“224” caption=“The original photo taken with Baz’s HTC 7 Mozart”][/caption]

My gaming rut and mobile games

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:54:43 +0000

Since I sold off all of my laptops except my Macbook and my Asus EEE (which C’s sister is currently borrowing), I haven’t played games as much as I used to. At one point I had my MacBook Pro, a Vostro 1500, an XPS, and and two Asus EEE models. The Vostro and XPS could at that time run pretty much whatever I threw at them, even if not on the highest settings, and therefore PC games were easily accessible and playable.

I made it into TopGeek Top 20 :)

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:05:51 +0000

As many (most?) of you probably know, I entered iiNet’s TopGeek competition several weeks ago. You guys did such an awesome job voting for me, but unfortunately I didn’t make it into the top five spots required to pass through to the second round (the Top 20) based on votes. The good news is that I was one of the 15 people chosen by the judges to go through to the next round!

GenghisCon 2011 - Awesomeness!

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:12:31 +0000

This past weekend I went to GenghisCon. If I had to describe what kind of a convention GenghisCon is exactly, I would just call it an all things awesome convention. It has board games; it has workshops; it has panels about cryonics, cryptozoology, and other slightly weird stuff; it has video games. It has just about anything you can imagine doing if you decided to dedicate an entire weekend to having as much potentially geeky fun as you possibly could.

I watched Buried last night

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:51:01 +0000

Buried is a film about a truck driver named Paul. Paul is working in Iraq delivering supplies; his convoy was ambushed. He wakes up in a coffin, buried alive. He has a cellphone. The entire movie is set in the coffin with Paul as he tries to get help.

Claiming belief vs knowledge

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:01:27 +0000

When we talk about religion and spirituality it seems all about believing (or not) in a higher power, or “God”. I always say I’m spiritual, but not religious. I believe that there is something more and have my own ideas of what I think it could be, but I never claim to know that there is something more. Does this mean I don’t believe? Does belief in a higher power, God, whatever, require being able to whole-heartedly say that you know it exists and that everybody else is wrong?

My most memorable reads

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:31:45 +0000

I was thinking about some of my favorite books recently. I wouldn’t necessarily call them all time favorites - they’re just the ones that have stuck with me and have been the most memorable.

Dinner at The Atrium at Burswood - it sucked.

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 03:33:12 +0000

This year instead of bothering with making a big deal of Christmas, getting presents, etc, C and I decided to just go out and have a nice meal. A couple of weeks ago my recruiter held a lunch at the Atrium in Burswood and it was excellent, so I thought we could go to the same place for dinner.

How to buy a US-only Kindle eBook in Australia

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:18:19 +0000

See updates at the bottom of the post

I tried to buy a Kindle ebook yesterday from the Amazon site only to be told that the book was not available for Australian customers. Unfortunately I couldn’t find an electronic version of the book anywhere else, so tried a few ways to purchase this thing from Australia. I was finally successful in purchasing the Kindle eBook.

Watched Tron: Legacy

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 05:21:16 +0000

C and I went to see Tron: Legacy in 3D last night. I have to be honest - I haven’t seen the original Tron. I only remember being obsessed with this old PC game where you had to control a car that was spitting out a blue wall as you drove as you tried to trap your opponent. At the time I had no idea the game was actually based on a movie.

D&D and Speed Fighting

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:03:59 +0000

D&D;

Our D&D; 4e group had an awesome session last weekend. It went something like this (and I’m just prattling off from memory here, pardon any mistakes, fellow party members):

Top Geek...and I cancelled my Vodafone plan

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:38:42 +0000

First of all, today I entered iiNet’s Top Geek competition. Vote for me! Please? :D

Second, today I got out of my Vodafone contract. My data connection has just been shocking over the past months and today I called up for something like the fourth time (it was the second time out of four attempts over the past few days when I actually got through). They switched me to prepay with no penalty rates when I communicated respectfully but firmly that I am not going to pay for something that I can’t even properly use. My accounts kind of in limbo stage right now - I need to recharge it before I can receive or send any calls or SMS, but they say their systems are currently down and I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Busy weekend - Atrium at Burswood, D&D, and Jarrahdale Hike

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 16:41:44 +0000

This weekend was very eventful.

On Friday, my recruiter had an awesome buffet lunch the Atrium in Burswood. The food was unbelievably awesome; there was such a huge variety! And the desserts - I was in heaven. All of the contractors were also given two bottles of wine, which was very generous.

Proclamation of undying love - vividwireless

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:00:52 +0000

Dear vividwireless,

Before I had you, I was lost. We hadn’t had the internet in our rental for over half a year. I don’t know how I survived that long! I became but a shadow of my former self - hiding out in smelly Internet Cafes in the city and spending all of my iPhone’s 3G allowance on tethering. I was on the edge, dipping my toes in the cold, cruel world of high Vodafone data bills and sweaty strangers watching YouTube videos til midnight while I tried to work and dreamt of the glory days of actually being able to play Guild Wars.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:21:37 +0000

C and I (and a friend) went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 at 12:05am last Thursday. I was so excited that I went into Big W that evening to find a robe and wizard hat. Unfortunately they had neither. Instead I went home with a Harry Potter wand, glasses, and some blue construction paper and star stickers to create my own wizard hat. C was embarrassed to be seen with me, but I let my freak flag fly and actually did wear my semi-home-made costume:

What NASA's big announcement SHOULD have been

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:38:26 +0000

NASA’s big announcement about an “exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood” was interesting - I bet it was even exciting if you’re an astrophysicist or take a deep-rooted interest in black holes. But for me it was a bit of a letdown. I was hoping for something BIG. Not only that, but they aren’t even sure if it’s a black hole at all - putting the cart before the horse, don’t you think? After feeling a bit disappointed after watching the press conference live on NASA TV (only three people called in with questions…) I pondered over some possible announcements they could have made that would really be exciting.

Removing blemishes in Adobe Camera RAW

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:43:12 +0000

A while ago I took this photo of C and he’s finally allowed me to post it up. I was practicing removing blemishes in Adobe Camera RAW and am quite proud of my handiwork:

Perth Dachshund UN - 47 Dachshunds having a vigorous debate

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 14:52:36 +0000

Today I went to Dachshund UN, a live art presentation in Northbridge. A replica of the UN office in Geneva was set up and at 3pm 47 Dachshunds representing each country’s delegates for the Commission of Human Rights were put in their respective places.

Pre-ordered Harry Potter tickets. Need wizard's hat.

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:10:32 +0000

I just pre-ordered tickets to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 at 12:05am on Thursday, November 18th - the opening night.

Ebony & Ivory makeup launch and Slovakian ballet

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:41:58 +0000

It’s been a busy weekend of makeup and Slovakian hunks.

Ebony & Ivory makeup launch

A while ago I was invited by my wonderful hairdresser to come to the Ebony & Ivory makeup launch. I of course said yes - what kind of a horrible person would I be if I passed up the opportunity to play with a new line of makeup while being offered free food and champagne and getting to watch makeovers? (As a note I should addI don’t really like champagne…and I didn’t really eat much of the food, but it was a great thought in general)

NaNoWriMo has begun. Day 1 - 2,583 Words

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:54:12 +0000

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) started today and I was lucky enough to be sick on the day that I was meant to write my first 2,000 words. Thankfully dedication prevailed and I ended up writing a bit over 2,500 words to kick off my novel. Off to a pretty good start! The working title for my novel is Cambion and it is a character-driven story about the Stockholm Syndrome in an abduction situation.

Ghosting it up - Party at the Prison

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 17:15:45 +0000

I just got home from Party at the Prison, an awesome Halloween party hosted by Tsvet Productions. I was working at the party, hosted at the Fremantle Prison, as the “ghostly girl”. My makeup was so scary, it even freaked me out. My job was to “hover” around a graveyard which people walked past as they existed the red carpet, so it was right near the entrance. As a result there was a lot of picture-taking by both party goers and media. I had to try to keep a straight, ghost-like expression and stare at guests as they passed, but sometimes it was a little difficult. I was asked out by “ghostly guys” twice throughout the night and plenty of people tried making me crack a smile (some succeeded).

Morning schedule fail - and Halloween party at the Fremantle Prison!

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:22:32 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about rearranging my schedule to get up earlier to get home earlier and get a chance to walk Keeda in the morning and as well as at night. I set my alarm to 6am, woke up, and collapsed back into bed. It did not work. Tonight I’m trying a different method - I’m pretending it’s Daylight Savings and setting my iPhone clock forward an hour. That way when I get up at 7am I’m really getting up at 6! Genius.

NaNoWriMo 2010 - National Novel Writing Month

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:20:00 +0000

Ellen mentioned doing NaNoWriMo this year and inspired me to participate as well! I had the intention of participating in the National Novel Writing Month a couple of years ago but never seemed to have the strength to keep going with my novel and it fizzled out. This year I’m committed - and hope I stay that way despite how ridiculously busy I’ve been. I already have the idea for my novel in my head and have started planning chapter by chapter.

Rearranging my schedule

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:39:04 +0000

I have realized that my normal 9-5 schedule seems very inefficient. As it stands right now, here’s my general daily schedule:

What happened to the kvass...and the Mad Hatter's Tea Party challenge

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 04:59:47 +0000

I thought I’d post a quick update on my kvass making initiative. There’s not really much of an update. The five fermentation days are up and my kvass smells like beer and tastes like it, too. I don’t know if it tastes like good beer as I don’t like beer, so to me it’s pretty darn horrible. What a waste! I guess I’ll just have to buy some fake plastic-bottled kvass from Amazon.com

Keeda is infected. Zombie virus?

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:24:28 +0000

Thankfully not a zombie virus (I checked - she did not develop a taste for human flesh).

Yesterday we saw that my dog Keeda had a paw infection and eye infection (yes, at the same time). The eye infection isn’t unusual, she tends to get this once a year or so and my mom has found that rinsing the eye lightly with chamomile tea helps to get rid of it within a couple of days (apparently they use this same method for babies in Ukraine).

Attempt at kvass-making

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:33:13 +0000

When I was little and living in Ukraine I remember having Kvass, a traditional drink from that area. I realized that there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to buy kvass in Perth, so being the amazing chef that I am I decided to make some of my own.

Neighborhood Photos

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:51:20 +0000

I took some photos around the neighborhood today:

Laser Eye Surgery

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:23:51 +0000

I had my laser eye surgery today. Instead of writing about how awesome (or not awesome) it was, I’ll first tell you how exactly it happened.

Laser Eye Surgery is a-Go!

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:07:30 +0000

I had my consultation appointment with Perth Laser Vision at Murdoch Hospital today. I had to go through two rooms of testing, where they had me look into all kinds of machines to map the surface of my eyes, check my retinas, and other such things. All in all they had to bring me up to four different types of machines before they sat me back down in the reception area to wait for the surgeon.

Fremantle-y Day

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:48:48 +0000

I am half-relaxing half working. What a tiring, but good, day. Had a driving lesson early in the morning. Met up with a friend whose name I will not mention because then I won’t be able to talk about incriminating “froggy” evidence I have on him. Hung out in Fremantle, in the heat (37 degrees today!). Then got back, had a dinner with C (after a very wet after-pool hug), bussed it back to my house, took a 2km run, had a shower, got my things ready for tomorrow, ordered some sides from Eagle Boys, and am now working/relaxing/watching Eagle Eye.

Tweetie 2 Freaky Keyboard - Still Worth It

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:02:07 +0000

When RB tweeted that Tweetie 2 is out for the iPhone I immediately bought it. I bought it because 1) I heard great things about Tweetie 1 and have never used it before and 2) I am on a crazy app buying spree which is probably going to leave me broke in the near future.

Stargate Universe Looks Promising

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:01:19 +0000

I just watched the first episode (well, a double episode) of Stargate Universe. So far so good! Watch out, there are spoilers ahead.

Lion King PC Game Nostalgia

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:15:54 +0000

When people ask me what the first video game I ever played was, I say Warcraft 2 on the PC when I first moved to the U.S.. Recently it dawned on me that this isn’t exactly true. In fact, the first video game I remember playing was The Lion King. These were the days when we just got a VHS player. It was all the rage in our area at the time. The first movie we got was Anaconda, but my favorite movie in the world at the time - The Lion King - followed soon after. There was this toy, game and video shop in our neighborhood. I remember they had three or four computers set up, where they would charge kids to play The Lion King for about 15 minutes or so. There was always a group of kids waiting to play. I remember sitting in the chair and roaring at the porcupines, fighting the hyenas, jumping from rock to rock and tree to tree. I also remember the second level, which I think I actually passed only once in the time that was allocated - the level where you had to jump from animal to animal to the “I just can’t wait to be king” theme music.

A Bad Run - Running in the Heat

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 07:37:05 +0000

As I type this I’m laying in bed, rubbing my head and trying to figure out what the heck happened.

Derren Brown Guesses Lottery Numbers

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:11:54 +0000

Derren Brown correctly predicted the winning lottery numbers and put the feat down to a complex mathematical formula. According to the illusionist and hypnotist, he gathered 24 people who wrote down their predictions after studying last year’s numbers. All guesses were then averaged - added up and divided by 24. The “wisdom of the crowd” theory suggests that a large group of people making average guesses will get the correct figure as an average of all of their attempts.

Women's Classic 5km Race

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:15:32 +0000

I ran my first race! And I finished!

I showed up at Burswood at 7:30. I quickly gulped down my Endura and went to study the course. There were quite a few people there (200 racing in total for both the 5 and 10km plus their partners, families, and whatever other onlookers came).

Jim Sparks - Alien Abductee

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:39:17 +0000

C and I went to see Jim Sparks talk about his alien abduction experiences last night. It was a very interesting 4 hour talk and even though C is always extremely skeptical about these things, he found it interesting and says he enjoys going to these types of talks with me as it’s nice to see another point of view. I might write some more specifics on the talk later, but overall it was well worth the $30 per ticket for the most part. I’d definitely go again. Oh and they are putting together a group type thing to go to this place and try to communicate with aliens in a few weeks. I am so signing up.

EMERGENCY - "This book has the slight possibility of maybe helping you to save your life one day."

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:46:09 +0000

I’m at C’s house, waiting for him to get back from work and doing a bit of work on other projects. I am also reading Emergency by Neil Strauss. Its catchy tagline is “This Book will Save your Life” is really very… optimistic.

My First Ever Global Game Jam

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 09:26:32 +0000

For the past three days I’ve been participating in Global Game Jam - an annual event where people interested in game development get together for 48 hours and make games fitting into a specfied theme in teams. This is the first time I’ve participated (local Game Jams are run regularly in Perth) and I wasn’t sure if I’d be useful at anything.

Battlestar Galactica is the Awesomest Thing Ever!

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:46:00 +0000

C and I have been watching Battlestar Galactica. It’s something I’ve wanted to watch back in the U.S. on the Sci-Fi channel, but somehow always skipped over it because I couldn’t be bothered or couldn’t get into the storyline.

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