Tom 7 Radar

It was mostly video games and paper writing

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:44:59 -0400

Ah, I did not forget about you, my little bloggie! But I have to act fast.

March is always like this: I have finished or nearly finished my SIGBOVIK project, but SIGBOVIK has not happened yet, and so I have nothing to say here. I did finish my paper, a very dumb thing that I wrote 25 pages about, in order to make it dumber. I'm maybe a third of the way through putting together a video, which I should have done around the time of the conference. It's April 10 this year, I think to synchronize it with CMU's Carnival.

But quickly on the video games: I got myself addicted to Terraria. It has a lot of good ideas and decisions in it, although I must say that the core combat is pretty darn clunky. I think I'm nearing the "end" but I fear that nothing's ever actually going to come of my thoroughly-undermined base. I'm also playing increpare's Oeuf, which is a challenging Egg 3D platformer. It's for people who like to punish themselves (e.g. me) but I like it better than Getting Over It because it is a lot less mean. But it's still a little mean. I also just picked up Insight (or perhaps it is actually called IN⸮IGHT), a tidy little indie puzzler that seems promising (One of those: "No words. Feel smart for figuring out what's going on as you admire how the game designer communicates what's going on to someone so smart as you." games).

The next post will have Content and then I'm itching with so many projects to attend to next!

Can stop losing points for tardiness

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:51:24 -0500

Ha! This time I feel pretty confident that I'll lose zero points, or perhaps even gain a small number of bonus points, for posting from OGG Airport before a red-eye back from vacation, even though this requires that I post far before the end of the day here due to time zone. OGG Airport is Maui, Hawaii, USA, where they exclusively use the Vorbis audio codec.

I did do some normal vacation things on this vacation. But I also spent a lot of time sitting on a beach, balcony, pool, or airplane with my PiePad working on projects from exotic locales. I'm almost done with my SIGBOVIK paper, which is good because the first deadline for SIGBOVIK XX is nearly upon us. Actually I didn't do that much writing; mostly I was indulging myself in improvements to BoVeX, which I often fail to get to because I'm usually so behind on the paper due to Relentless Vigor of Expanding Project's Scope, or Surely I Can Write The Whole Paper and Implement Footnotes The Night of the Final Deadline, or etc. Now there is actually decent support for footnotes and floating figures. I fixed a bunch of layout bugs that were causing very bad choices (mostly relating to me not actually reading Knuth's paragraph-breaking algorithm that carefully and just reinventing it from the general idea). I also sped up all of the expensive phases of the compiler with indulgent algorithmic and data structure improvements, so compiling a conference-length paper is now at least 2–3x faster end-to-end.

Since I was recovering from being sick (for more than a month!) I hadn't done any long runs (or even moderate runs) since AD 2025. But on a trip I insist upon doing adventure running. In Maui I ran south from the hotel zone until the road ended in an apocalyptic lava field:

I smoke lava rocks

Maui was generally a good place for running, with light traffic and decent pedestrian infrastructure. It did however get very hot as soon as the sun was overhead, and down where I was, there were no gas stations nor water fountains nor any other source of potable moisture, so we had another one of those heat stroke hazards where I was just crawling along for the last five miles or so trying not to die. I was proud of my run's name, Magma Man 2: Dr. Wailea's Revenge. Anyway, with that 15-miler I consider myself back on the wagon and I'm looking forward to getting back home for (a) some longer runs, (b) a full-size keyboard and (c) Baldur's Gate III.

OK, plane is boarding imminently!

Can't stop losing points for tardiness

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:59:00 -0500

Oops! You can tell that I'm getting old when I don't even notice the end of a month coming and going. Also that I thought, "I should add a template on my blog for when post late and need to award myself negative points. It should be called {{penalty}}." and then when I go to make that template, I find that it already exists: -1,000 points

I spent the entirety of the month of January sick (presumably the H3N2), which means I haven't run at all since Christmas, which is no good for the spirit or the dad-bod. It does leave me with some additional time (if not energy), and I think my main accomplishment was to attend to a corner of my basement shop, which was an old rickety 2x4 stand that came with the house, covered in crap like sawdust, used COVID-19 tests, neoprene foam, and offcuts with impossibly useless shapes that I am nonetheless hoarding. I have no good "before" photo, but I can show you this picture of the crumbling sandstone foundation that was part of the impetus:

(c) 1906

The main problem here is that this 120 year old pile of rocks constantly sheds sand, spalled stone, and efflorescence. That's not a big problem for a basement shop, but what I wanted to do here was make a permanent home for a CNC gantry, and having sand continuously shitted into the ways, gears, and motors is just not good for the mechanism. But I also needed a nice sturdy surface for it and I wasn't benefiting much from the pile of used COVID-19 tests, so I built the rickety 2x4 stand into this nice chonky workbench:

Upgrade!

In the back we see the fixed-up wall. I repaired the mortar using the appropriate lime putty (don't worry; I'm a mortar chemistry snob now) and cleaned it up with a few coats of limewash. I've never used limewash before, but it is pretty cool for this kind of application (you can't use paint, since this old foundation needs to be able to absorb and exhale significant moisture). I particularly appreciated how easy it is to clean the brush compared to latex paint. The details of the bench are mostly not visible, but let me reassure you that its internals are high quality, with 3D-printed shock-absorbing TPU feet, mortise-and-tenon joinery on the 2x4s, and removable bolts into threaded inserts for the top, which also sits on two dados for registration. The joinery was cut on this CNC I was foreshadowing:

BenchPilot

I've had the Shaper Origin since launch but I may have never talked about it here. It's a handheld CNC router that uses optical registration (these domino markers) and can only move itself within approximately a 1" diameter circle; you do the coarse motion yourself with your big clumsy hands. It's a great little tool for a space-constrained shop and it can do things that other CNCs cannot (e.g. make some bowtie repairs or inlays in your hardwood floor), but it is not fast if you're trying to do something like cut eight mortise and tenon joints for your workbench build. The apparatus pictured above is their new BenchPilot gantry, which can move the normally-handheld part around coarsely, much like a traditional gantry CNC. Other than the modest working envelope, it seems like the best of both worlds to me. Here it's set up cutting some finger joints for some new drawers that will no doubt show in a future episode of Tom 7 Basement Shop Projects Radar.

One of the other excuses for forgetting the current date is business travel, conveniently scheduled during the enormous snowstorm that we covered the entire Eastern US this week. By coincidence I ended up flying on Southwest, which as the staff excitedly reminded us, was switching to assigned seating the very next day. (Southwest, the largest domestic airline, was distinguished by its unusual "open seating" approach where passengers vie in a strangely polite but clearly cutthroat mind game to appear as the most odious potential seatmates in order to score a solo row.) Since I did an 8:45 PST flight, it was one of the very last ever open seating flights ever. When we landed, these guys were already carting away the iconic line-up obelisks like so much fresh garbage:

Southwest ends open seating and immediately throws away their obelisks

I also made some progress writing up my most recent project, which seems like it'll be my SIGBOVIK paper and next video. It decidedly non-epic, but I think I need more non-epic projects in my life. I made a bunch of improvements to BoVeX in order to procrastinate that.

Over break my little brother convinced me to play Baldur's Gate 3 and I'm now 70 hours into that. Good for H3N2. I'll save my final verdict for when I'm done, but I definitely see what the fuss is about with this one!

2025 BEGONE!

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:54:18 -0500

2025 is ending imminently! I am so happy that having made it through this year, we won't need to think about Donald Trump or AI any more.

I posted a surprise video that may not be that surprising to close-followers of Tom 7 Radar:

Mathematically extra-complicated secretest santa 2025!

This is my Secret Santa protocol; the latest in the series following Matt Parker's video from last year, which I am in. The video and liner notes explain pretty much everything, and you could also try out my browser implementation at santa.html. It's very much a Tom-style video, but higher than usual on wholesomeness and mediumer than usual on unhinged shitpostingness. I am sorry for making two math videos in a row! Next video, which's project is essentially done now, will have more mischief and less math, but it's still about cryptography to keep up the combo.

Speaking of Matt videos in a row, I'm in this recent Standupmaths video about Noperts.

(Unfortunately the holiday travel made me a bit sick, so I'm going to just use that as an excuse to keep other updates in storage for next month, and get myself to bed.)

Spacebar.org 2025

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 23:57:43 -0500

I almost forgot it's the end of the month!

One thing I accomplished this month is finally moving all my sites over to a new server. All of this was precipitated by wanting to use C++17 and later features (like std::format) in my various code, but the version of Ubuntu I was using on linux still had an old-ass GCC that did not support this. (I don't understand why it's so non-standard to have recent compilers on linux? Isn't it supposed to be developer-oriented?) The in-place upgrade wouldn't work, so I migrated everything manually and now I have GCC 13 (current is 15, thx a lot Ubuntu). The most "fun" part was that my website is so old that its databases predate the widespread success of Unicode (!) and many old records contained invalid UTF-8 or mojibake created by incorrect encoding/decoding of various scripts, and this prevented me from making a modern MySQL database that I was going to be happy with. There are some tools like ftfy that can usually decode the mojibake, but I prefer to expand my personal libraries and understanding, so I dared to port that Python code to C++ (fix-encoding.cc). Now these 20-year-old messages on my old rotting message boards and blog posts can live to see another day:

Unbaked 'moji

The majority of the text I fixed was either (a) spam or (b) my weird internet friends (e.g. from untitled.gif) mimicking spam!

ALSO: This gave me the opportunity to add https for my sites. I got too many people being scared off by the confusing interstitial messages that Chrome now puts if you dare to go to an http site. But I did not fully cave: I wrote my own https server, and I did this a weird way. More on that soon. Let me know if you notice any issues with it. I still recommend using http for this public, non-secret website.

I finished Silksong 100%. I think the Act 3 bosses are worth it, but I did feel ready to be done by the time I finished all the extended chores, especially e.g. the circus. Great game, though! I also played through Ultros, I guess craving more Metroid. This one has an amazing and memorable art style (imagine if the guy who did the art for Hotline Miami illustrated Aeon Flux, which is more or less what actually happened here) and good music. The gameplay is a bit unpolished, but I did find it compelling once I discovered the "living network," and overall liked this one. I also finished Öoo, a small puzzle game that takes about ~2h by the same people that made the excellent ElecHead. This one was very elegant. It feels like exploring coverage tests, in a good way. I'm now onto Blue Prince, which seems fine although it's infuriating that they don't have a way to customize controls ("coming soon")??

Two new video projects well underway! One of them should land by the year's end, at least.

Hold your gratitude, little one. The dead are stirring.

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 22:23:08 -0400

Hello again,

I'm enjoying feeling no deadline pressure, and trying out a few new secret projects with no particular commitment to a "next" one, and playing some video games.

Re: the previous project (spoilers), there was this Quanta article First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself about the success (not mine) on that problem, and I'm in there. I think Quanta is great and I read their stuff a lot, so this is a fun sighting for me. I'm happy that this article (and the similar one in Scientific American have canonized my "Nopert" as the proper term for these polyhedra!

I really spent most of the month on Silksong, the sequel to the excellent Hollow Knight. This game is also great, clearly one of the best in the genre. I managed to finish the main game and a lot of the post-game content without getting any hints or spoilers. It turned out that this was making my life inadvertently hard (in a game that is already very hard), since (spoilers) if you fail to find some things like sword upgrades you can end up doing a lot of boss battles on extra-hard mode. Now that I'm in the endgame (90 hours in!), I'm using some what-to-do-next and how-much-damage-does-this-thing-do-? kinds of hints. There's an excellent webpage silksong-completion.info where you can upload your save file (my impression is that it's happening clientside) and it will show you what's left in the dependency graph just like you'd want. Very good, and it is making me want to now play this game, which I will do.

And now I am 46

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:56:40 -0400

Hmm! Yes! I turned 46 years old, which was predictable. Also predictable, and predicted, is that I finished that darned video:

Rupert's Snub Cube

I also updated the project site with more data and links. I should have just posted this blog-post earlier in the month when I uploaded it; I don't know why I always save it to the last minute and risk losing 1,000 points. I guess I figure I might get several more projects done in the month. I did not: Instead I played Silksong (which is excellent, and you don't need me to tell you about this game) as a reward for finishing project, and since that is sometimes too hard to be relaxing (I do love how hard it is!), I also installed Cult of the Lamb which I bought at some point. The latter is charming and has great art and music, but I don't think it's a must-play. For some reason I expected it to be more like an action roguelike (a la Hades, say) but it's a bit more like a tech-tree resource-management farm-sim. The combat in the main loop is just not quite interesting enough yet. But I will finish it, I'm sure.

I have begun on my next projects, several of which involve cryptography.

I also made this 3D-printed file handle:

stderr

This began as a purely practical thing (I needed a handle for a file), and I actually assembled the original file before realizing my missed opportunity for a pun, and then decided that the right solution was to buy a second file!

Scoopert!

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:34:37 -0400

OK! I am better now. Let's strive to keep it that way.

I spent my free time this month continuing work on the proof described in the previous post, basically a big custom numerical search which was a neat blend of geometry (a little bit outside my comfort zone but I can wrap my head around it) and high-performance systems stuff (rational interval arithmetic) which is up my alley. It was actually going quite well (and maybe we will try to finish it, or an improvement upon it) but a couple days ago we found out that somebody beat us to it! A convex polyhedron without Rupert's property just went up on arxiv.org last week, and it demonstrates a synthetic convex polyhedron that is not Rupert (cannot fit through a proper hole in itself). Ah! I proved plenty of things for my Ph.D., but nothing that anybody but me cared about, so I was getting fond of the idea that we might crack an open problem. But at the same time I am happy for the authors (they emailed me about my paper in April; I probably should have written back! Do you know how bad I am at e-mail? If you have ever e-mailed me then you probably do know!) and happy that we have a resolution to this problem.

The other thing I'm happy about is that I finally know how the video ends (😵‍💫 but 😂) and I feel motivated to finish it forthwith. It's up to 45 minutes now, but the end is in sight! I'm in the phase now where even my procrastination is high-productivity (e.g. I have been repointing and repainting my house) instead of something like anxiously reformatting source code, so that is a good sign.

While I was sick I started DOOM: The Dark Ages, which is pretty fun. They did a good job with the combat, which is good because that's all there is, and it is quite hard (mostly fair). It's incredible how incoherent the "plot" is, though, almost like it's satire. I also played through Shantae and the Seven Sirens. It is very silly, as expected, but has great music and the writing was pretty funny. I've liked all the Shantae games that I've played, but this one was not my favorite; I think just too much of it took place inside underwater tunnels for my tastes.

I got sick, but my computer was fine

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 23:24:40 -0400

Hi,

Dammit! I got sick again. This time it was definitely Covid-2025 and it was pretty rough (I had a very bad sore throat, which I hear is characteristic of this strain) and it knocked me out of commission for a week during which I was expecting to have quiet time to myself to finish off this video! Instead the things that felt right to do were (a) play the new Donkey Claus for Switch II and (b) keep trying to prove that the one shape can't go through the other shape. I have One Last Approach here that I'm currently feeling pretty hopeful about, but also I wrote a lot of that code with Covid brain so who knows. (The real goal would be to produce some machine-checkable proof; no need to worry about virus-induced fallibility!) I'll talk about this in the video with some other results; I've got like 25 minutes finished at this point. On the upside, the computer has been completely healthy this whole time, almost like the problem was simply a bad driver 25 year-old webcam driver and it cannot actually be sympathetically infected when I fall ill.

I probably got Covid-2025 in JFK International Shithole, or maybe the humid undergrounds of New York City's Subterranean "Way" system, or in crowded comedy club, or etc. when I went to hang out with my YouTube buddies and also go to work. It's been 3 years since I got it last, so that's not a bad MTBF I guess.

Speaking of work: Exciting for me is that I am switching to "part time" (4 days a week) for the sole reason that I like my job but I also like having time for my gonzo programming projects and math holes, and would all else equal like to have more time for the latter. So starting this monday I will be 50% more funemployed and 20% less employal!!

I vow not to use my additional "free" time to just play video games, but I did play video games when I was sick especially. I am enjoying the Donkey Kong Bananza more than I expected. It is a very easy game, but also very fun. I am almost done with Tevi, by the same people who made Rabi-Ribi, which I enjoyed many years ago. It's a solid exploration platformer that I would definitely recommend to genre fans who are sick with Covid-25. For observant game design connoisseurs who have played the Metroidvania genre a lot, or too much (e.g., me), there are some subtle and smart mechanics to appreciate. Probably next... DOOM?

I got sick, and my computer got sick

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 23:26:03 -0400

Ugh! I did make a lot of progress on this darned video (I have about 10 minutes of high quality content baked in now) and was hoping to keep up the momentum this weekend but I got pretty sick. I thought all week I was just suffering headaches from this medium-severe heat wave we've been having, but I think it was also me starting to get ill. It does not appear to be COVID or Flu-A or Flu-B (it is cool that you can get a combo test for all three of these now) but it has kept me with minimal energy. The other, perhaps worse drain on my ability to finish my projects is that my computer also got sick. It has been struggling to install "Windows 11 24H2" for as long as that sounds from the name (24 is 2024, like COVID-19 is 2020), rebooting every week or two (interrupting valuable computational geometry) to give it one more try and then rolling back, which is annoying, so I was rooting for it to one day succeed. Last week it finally decided to stay on my computer, but right away I started to get kernel panics, which on Windows 11 are illustrated as ":(". I spent all weekend trying to improve the situation, upgrading every driver and firmware I could find, deleting everything old I didn't need, and all stuff that I hate. This was a machine that was extremely solid before this update, by the way; like I would regularly running a Premiere encode while compressing a directory full of files and playing Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and 100 Chrome tabs including more than one concurrent instance of gmail and Photoshop has been open since the last windows update reboot as well and 16 cores of computational geometry also happening at idle priority with 100GB of resident allocations. So this is a stark difference. I am reaching the end of my troubleshooting wits (a few steps down the list is I renounce Computing and go live in a cave with my polyhedra) but at least nothing has crashed since the last thing I tried (force remove some drivers I may not need so that I can enable Core Isolation) so I'm going to at least try to go to bed optimistic tonight.

I did make some actual progress on this geometry problem (not covered in paper) so now I'm actually looking forward to talking about that in the video. There's hope yet.

Speaking of idle priority, I actually finished Call of Duty Black Ops 6 for real now (I had done this previously, but then they released new crap, and while I was unlocking that I "decided" that I "should" also unlock the dark matter camo for every item in the game) and I think I've successfully put it behind me. I tried going for the polar opposite, which may be the game Crimson Diamond (it does involve murder but that may be the only thing they have in common). This is a cute old-school (~CGA graphics) text-parser adventure game, which reminds me of my Sierra youth, and may have been directly inspired by the Colonel's Bequest. Not sure how far I am into it, but I do enjoy it and so far it has been possible without any hints. Really for genre fans though. I'm also nearing the end of Stuck In Time (which may have previously been called "Loop Hero"? Something like that; they got cease-and-desisted and had to change it), which is a pretty clever idle/adventure game. The game has "idle" mechanics (lots of permanent upgrades; needs to run for some time in order to complete) but the core mechanism is designing the path that your guy follows through the world, and it's pretty active as a result. I liked that it didn't lean too much into the tower of exponent stuff; it's really mostly about exploration and making a good loop to let idle overnight. Pretty good pixel art and music, too. It is good if you are sick and working on a busted computer but want to be able to switch to another window to forget about that for a few minutes sometimes. Like writing a blog post!

Technically it is on a stovetop

Sat, 31 May 2025 23:15:06 -0400

Heya,

Earlier this month I spoke at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science's PhD hooding ceremony! The "distinguished" "speaker." I feel that that was quite an honor, and hopefully I did it justice. I'm certainly comfortable giving a talk but usually it's because I have something I want to talk about. These students are very talented and privileged and will do okay, but it's also a really precarious time to be starting your career (in the US especially). I don't just mean the chronic problems (out of control climate change, growing economic inequality, unenlightenment, and too many Star Wars movies) but acute problems like the US "government" trashing our research institutions, and technological monsters of our own creation. So I tried to give them some advice about how to maybe survive and maybe save the world. Alas, I don't believe it was recorded, and I just now tried to find any photos of it online and instead got sidetracked for an hour into reading old chess articles, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened. (If you happen to have photos, please send them; my mom would be happy!)

That was a proper distraction from putting together this darned video that I'm still working on. I finished my "big math" cloud analysis, and then running it again when I came to discover that I had incorrectly written "min" instead of "max" when trying to interpret the results. So that was an expensive cube. But the fixed results do look cool and I figured out how to render it in Blender (which information I'm very confident I will not retain). I really just need to sit down and narrate this thing with a screen recording at this point, but I keep procrastinating that for some reason.

A less justifiable form of procrastination: My 3D printer's site for sharing models is currently running a coffee-themed contest, and I noticed a conspicuous lack of coffee makers among the entries. So I made one. It looks like this:

Technically it is on a stovetop

You can see the project page for "instructions" (which abruptly end before any flame). It has all the internal parts and would work except for the fact that it's made from plastic; this is satire! Some people have tried to argue with me that you could boil water in it (referring to some possibly real demonstrations where you boil water through a paper cup), but keep in mind: A proper moka pot would need to generate steam pressure to force steam through the grinds; the walls here are a mesh filled with air bubbles and so they are a good insulator; although the melting point of PLA is higher than water's boiling point, its glass transition temperature is only like 65°C, so it would quickly deform. Also I turned the flame on to make a short video and it immediately scorched the bottom. I used glow-in-the-dark PLA for bonus points in the contest!

Also this month I started and finished Tunic, which was an excellent Zelda game. I think probably they could have done a little more with the combat (or just make you not have to do it so much), but everything else about it was great. The instruction manual thing is just a brilliant way to do the "Metroidvania" progression, and I was extremely impressed with the art/design work in the manual itself (from the half-width forms to the halftone screens). I definitely recommend this one if you like an adventure Zeldoidvania.

May the 7th be with you

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:59:58 -0400

When the beginning of May came around, I seem to have forgotten that a new month was occurring, and then I was putting off this blog post (which would have been -1,000 points), and then I thought it would be funny (but really it was just procrastination) to try to lose a record number of points. Let's call it -7,777 points; this post was backdated a full week, from May the 7th! Anyway, I am all right, at least as much as anybody is all right these days.

After submitting my paper to SIGBOVIK (you can read it) I have been working on a video, but actually I have been continuing to work on the problem (but really it was just procrastination). Right after writing the paper I had some good ideas that I wanted to test out and show in the video, and it seemed wrong to not give them a fair shake before presenting them. I think the story is converging and I just need to do a modest-sized expensive computation, so tonight I'm struggling with Cloud Infrastructure. It's so boring, but not as boring as waiting for my computer to run it for ~60 days. And only related because it sucks and is boring in the same way, I have made some of the first steps towards trying to get this server to support https. I like cryptography and don't hate https, but I also do not see the need for the complexity and downsides of https on a website like this and so I resent this very much, but: Chrome has finally "succeeded" in making http too annoying and scary for regular people now. (There is still no https on my site. I'm just saying that I'm working on it again.)

I am itching to get back to other projects! I upgraded my 3D printer so that it can dry spools of filament, so now I can use some exotic materials. I printed a replacement door handle out of carbon fiber ASA (which supposedly has good outdoor durability):

Right parenthesis

The old one was made of metal but it just broke off! So even though this one is plastic, I think it may compete with the quality of the previous. Very satisfying to pull on that big guy.

SIGBOVIK deadline makes the doppler noise as it rushes past me

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 22:38:00 -0400

Hi! Bad deadline timing here: I'm going to stay up late finishing my SIGBOVIK paper for the real extended deadline, but this uses exactly the same minutes and the brain sugars that I would use to write a blog post. So I'm going to conserve those for the paper-finishing.

I will, however, preview that I will put the paper here: tom7.org/ruperts when I submit the conference version. Spoiler alert: This is not some epic hack; I tried to solve an already known math problem (but one that is appealing and upsetting) and (surprise) didn't succeed. Since it's a geometry problem, the visuals are fairly important and the video will probably be the best way to consume it.

Points intact!

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 23:59:05 -0500

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!

Still: Winter is a time for hibernation.

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 22:59:06 -0500

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.