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Entries from February 2025

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Points intact! (28 Feb at 23:59)

Ha! I avoided losing 1,000 points by remembering at two minutes to midnight, during a heated round of Call-olostomy Doodie Oops 6, which game I am still suffering, that February has 28 days and that I "need" to write a blog post. The way this thing works, when I start the draft it gets timestamped, and that is forevermore the time of the post. This also means that in a pinch, unfinished drafts like "Unexpectedly pleasant discoveries in listenquest 2008–2009" which I started and abandoned almost in AD 2009 while I was in the process of listening through every single CD in my collection (again) can be posted more than 15 years after the fact, and show up in the blog's calendar and keep the grid tidy. For this reason, you can never really be sure if I have lost 1,000 points, even if the next month comes 'round.

Speaking of unexpectedly pleasant discoveries, maybe this post I will tell you about some music I have been listening to recently instead of only telling you boring things. First on my mind is Aesop Rock, who I was listening to exactly at the same moment I saw an article comparing the size of the vocabularies for various rappers. (It's the count of distinct words in the first 35,000 words of their lyrics. Perhaps entropy would have been a little better?) And lo and behold, he easily "won" the chart with 7,879. (I am not a huge rap fan, but there are some artists I like, and I was not surprised to find that this scale was pretty correlated with my taste. For example, Blackalicious was at 5,741). Anyway, I would like to recommend Aesop's album Spirit World Field Guide the most, but I also like Skelethon (especially the opening track Leisureforce) and Integrated Tech Solutions (especially Aggressive Steven) and probably will find that I like others. I also recently enjoyed Allie Goertz's Nine Inch Nails cover album Peeled Back (more than I expected). Rosie Tucker's UTOPIA NOW! would probably also score highly on a language entropy scale and their album has several gems on it (especially Unending Bliss). Then there's this person who does Nintendo 64 covers of beloved Radiohead songs (etc.) called on4word, and their Aphex Twin cover album Selected Aphex Works N64 seems like a joke that should not be good, but yet...!

I have been trying to finish this programming/math project, I guess for a SIGBOVIK paper but also a video. I keep getting distracted by relaxing aspects of the problem (including e.g. spending most of my vacation implementing exact constructive solid geometry so that I could make really accurate figures) but the deadlines are coming up fast so I'm hoping that will induce me to wrap that bad boy up. Speaking of which: There has not been an official call for papers yet for SIGBOVIK, but from activity on the organizers list it seems very likely to occur. You can write a paper!

(1 comment — 4 days ago) [ comment ]

Entries from January 2025

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Still: Winter is a time for hibernation. (31 Jan at 22:59)

Helloooo. Despite the crushing weight of the World, I actually did a whole lot this month, mostly on one of two concurrent secret projects, both of which have gotten a bit out of hand. But this is a fun programming problem for me and I've learned a bunch of math. It seems like I should make a video about it, since I think it is an interesting topic, although I also feel that my escalating standards demand an actual solution (which I definitely do not have) or at least a contribution (dubious). In any case I need to transition into paper-writing and/or video-making mode soon, since the SIGBOVIK deadline is approaching quickly. We are going on a relaxing vacation shortly, which occasion usually leaves me with a significant chunk of time for writing (but never enough!).

Otherwise, I've been continuing my demented quest to reach the highest level of Ops in COD of Ops 6: Black Duty VI which has been complicated by them exposing new unlockable and unlocking the mysteries of UFO 50. Now that I've played about half of the collection I can confidently recommend this game to anyone who likes classic NES games, or maybe even just likes games and has a little patience.

(2 comments — almost 3 weeks ago) [ comment ]

Entries from December 2024

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Your 2024 In Review (31 Dec 2024 at 19:06)

Good day and good year! At least in some ways!

The "mathematically complicated secret santa" video is up now. I'm in it. Some would say: Too much! I haven't played with my new camera enough, so I sent Matt a bunch of footage (including 90 seconds of completely blank silent 4k video, like a professional would!!) and only an appropriately appropriate fraction of the gags made the cut, so I'm all stocked up for next time I need video scene with some random number generation or where I receive a package in the mail. The santa protocol has some serious problems with it (especially the last minute revision; see my comment on the video) but it also has some good ideas. I have another iteration on it that we may try next year—if we survive! While I had the gear out I also recorded an unremarkable entry for the related say the prime project, which you can do too!

I have been doing relaxing programming over the winter break, both on the red and green grid, and on the deceptively hard old math problem where at this point my ability to optimize computer search with clever tricks and systems engineering is mostly resulting in me failing to solve the problem at truly unprecedented pace. This is not the first time this has happened! Hopefully I can salvage something from these for a SIGBOVIK paper or video soon, but I'm not letting myself get distracted by deadlines yet.

Like a Counter Strike Idiot, I kept playing COD Of Duty VI: Las Operaciones Negras for some reason. After the cheating cleared up, it became a regular Call of Duty game, and is fine and unremarkable, but I can't help but make the numbers go up. I also have been finally treating myself to UFO 50, which is a great collection of games for an apocryphal 1980s video game console, made by some of my favorite game designers (Spelunky, etc.). It's an impressive achievement in a number of ways, although some of the games are a bit too frustratingly authentic in their difficulty or speed. It's a lot like playing through Ludum Dare entries (if they were all made by Dream Teams), which I do enjoy.

Happy New Year and good luck!

(6 comments — a week ago) [ comment ]

Entries from November 2024

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My coping mechanisms for November 2024 (30 Nov 2024 at 23:20)

SON OF A ...! You can tell American politics is having a deleterious effect on me because of two behaviors reflecting low mood: In a late-night Wikipedia session I let myself get nerd-sniped into trying to solve an old unsolved geometry problem that's a distraction from my already needless project that is well underway. I'll save the details for a later post or video, but something struck me as "that doesn't sound like it should be hard" (of course false, but that means there's an opportunity for me to improve my intuitions; a humility response) but also "perhaps no good programmer with a GeForce 4090 has ever tried this in the history of humanity" (possibly true; a hubris response) and so two weekends later I've confirmed that the problem is indeed hard.

Behavior two is I bought Call Of Duty Black Ops 6. It's not just the sixth Call of Duty, it's the sixth Black Ops game. Multiplayer is an artless mess of obvious cheating and cash-4-hats, but pretty soon I will be maximum level and I can put it to rest. The single-player campaign seems fine, at least. I know better than to declare that I'm done with these kinds of games, but I do wish to be. Before that I played Arranger, which might be the polar opposite! It's cozy puzzle/adventure game where you're shifting around the grid as you move (toroidal), to the dismay of everyone else who is living like normal grid-dwellers. The puzzles were pretty easy (think "Zelda shrine") but there were plenty of good ideas to keep me interested. I really liked the soundtrack, which when I bought it on Bandcamp is by a guy who calls himself "7omas", and I thought briefly of a trademark lawsuit but then thought more like "parallel universe," because I would rather that the thoughts have positive valence. I also finally played Inscryption, which was very cool. It's not the polar opposite of Arranger nor Call of Duty Black Ops 6, but it is definitely not "cozy." At least in this game, the cheating is narratively valid!

Another mood-leavening distraction was that I participated in a group distributed-Secret-Santa algorithm with Matt Parker and some other YouTube celebrities. Unless the chaos energy of the in-algorithm logistics were a preview of the collecting and assembling footage logistics (which, this is a bunch of S-tier professional video people—present company excepted—so you'd think not? But on the other hand, I did end up shorting DropBox after a brief encounter) then there should be a video (on standupmaths) in time for happy Honda-days, so be on the lookout for that!

Lastly, my Christmas-colored square from post #1234 looks almost exactly the same this month, but I am quiet deep into a fancy way of turning a few more pixels red. I think that is at least an interesting enough story for a Tom Academy video if it works. I just gotta keep myself from staying up late reading Wikipedia.

(9 comments — 2 months ago) [ comment ]

Entries from October 2024

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This halloween I am dressed as a withered husk, who was made this way by: Satisfactory 1.0 (31 Oct 2024 at 22:35)

OMG. I can't believe October is over already. I blame Satisfactory which, okay, I do get it now, and it did destroy my body and mind. I am inches from being done now; I just want to make sure that I finish it with enough force that I do actually put it away, as I could imagine tinkering with my saddest factory forever.

The game isn't without flaw, but I think most of those flaws are not interesting to talk about. I do have one petty but important criticism, which is mildly spoilerful and anyway will only be interesting if you played the game. There is an object called the Somersloop ("cool S") which allows you to double the output of a machine. Canonically this item is some kind of "loop" and the flavor text talks about how it is able to create more energy than you put into it. So when I'm out hunting for Korok seeds I have this thought that maybe I could create a loop of factories whereby it would create infinite resources by repeatedly doubling. And I'm thinking about it but the crafting tree doesn't have any notable loops in it, but I remember the "packager" which allows you to put a fluid in a container or the converse, and I'm like: Yes, that's great! So I get back to base and I am doing this, just for fun to create an infinite fuel factory or whatever, and I realize that the packager just doesn't have a slot for a Somersloop. They must just hate fun, elegant twists. It would not break the game to allow this (you can always get infinite resources lots of other ways) or cause any other problem I can think of. Hmph!

The thing about constructing a factory and watching it churn is that it's basically the same thing as a programming project that you invented for yourself, and it's probably better to do the programming project. Here's progress on my mysterious rectangle:

Minusweeper 2

It's good progress if I do say so myself! Anything but black here is a Satisfactory result, which is 90.55% of them at this point. I may need heavy machinery for the remaining 9.45%, but that is part of the fun.

I think that's really it for this month! Please vote in the US Elections if you can (but I guess also vote in any important elections. And obviously, vote for the good guys???). And happy Halloween!

(3 comments — almost 4 months ago) [ comment ]

... Oct 2024 continued

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