Frenetic Etchings

Today was strange. Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour and my body decided that it was time to unreason. I woke up after half an hour and then couldn’t get to sleep again until 1am.

On the plus side, I got a pretty good night’s sleep. Wake up time: around 7:30am? Breakfast: oats and yogurt and frozen blueberries. Leftover casserole stuff for lunch with yogurt and pickled onions. (Pickled onions are severely underrated.)

On the downside, I basically got nothing done that I wanted to get done today. Training has been insane. I’m doing well and learning the material, but it’s seriously time consuming. And it’s frankly boring.

My project isn’t making much progress. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the cellular automata algorithm. I’m not sure how each cell in the entire field should be updated discretely without some cells getting double attention (i.e., paying attention to themselves as well as all their neighbors). I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’d like to find a way to do it so that the calls are made in batches and can be parsed out to different threads for parallel processing. That would be ideal.

I’m blurry, but not as sleepy as I’ve been the past few days. I was literally passing out in my chair last night (which makes my body’s reluctance to sleep all the stranger). Who knows what’s going on.

I want to try to work out tomorrow morning before work. Small goals.

Today, I am dead tired. I got more sleep last night than I did the night before, but not enough.

Wake up: 4:55am

Breakfast: beef, spinach, peppers, and onions with egg casserole. Yogurt, frozen berries, and around a half cup of oats with whole milk later on.

I got a few things done, but I’ve been nodding off all day. Training day at work. Nothing too exciting.

Will write more tomorrow. Today was rough. No workout, no doggie walkies. Definitely have to go to bed earlier tonight.

I cringe at the title of this post, but I think that, on some subconscious level, I wanted to phrase it that way for a few specific reasons: one, I need to become more comfortable with maintaining habits. Two, the fact that it is uncomfortable is kind of the crux of the problem.

My written journal today reveals some interesting things. I’ll preface what I wrote by saying that I didn’t get to bed until late last night – but whether I make a habit of that I will leave up in the air. I kind of like feeling tired at the end of the day, and perhaps it’ll take staying up late each night and getting up early each morning to maintain that. Maintenance is the name of the game now. But let me explain why.

This morning’s journal entry:

Wake up: 5:31am

Pre-work: AG1, make coffee, change shirt, grab notebooks.

Morning snow.

Ate leftover brown rice cooked in pork juices w/baked beef with peppers and onions – around 8:15.

To do:

• life weights ☑
  • Dumbbell rows, 50 lbs., 6x? 7x? 5 reps ea.
• clean something ☑
• box up bread maker ☑
• hook up printer

Commentary on Parannoul: “How profoundly underwhelming.”

And then there are project notes.

I got a lot done today! The problem is going to be maintaining this level of productivity when I don’t have motivation. I am motivated now. I have to take advantage. But I know that that motivation is not going to last.

I made some small notes in my project and added precisely one line. I also did dishes, did some laundry, and got my breadmaker boxed up. And sorted mail. And brought various toiletries and my scale upstairs. All on top of working for 9 hours today. It was a good day. And it was easy today. On future days, it will not be easy.

Some notes on how I felt today: I seem to have been nodding off at various points in the day, and yet I managed to do a workout and walk Charlie without too much issue. I want to make note of that because I want to see whether that changes if I start losing more weight.

Above all, I want to keep up the chronicle – even if it’s to log my despair that I was unproductive. ???? Perhaps on those days I will have thoughts about something else.

I’m peeking into this dusty back room that I used so many years ago and realizing that there are several drafts of thoughts unfinished that never saw the light of Internet dawn; so it goes.

I’ve decided that I want to start daily writing down some thoughts, if for no other reason than to have some record to look back on in years to come. It’s good to reflect, to be cognizant of occupying a moment in time, and to remember the progression of things. It gives weight to each moment – a weight I need to remind myself of.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of the perfect day and what it should consist of. I have a budget of 24 hours:

• Each week day, I tend to work for 8-9 hours (sometimes more). Let’s just say that that brings my total down to 15 hours.
• Each day, I try to spend at least 8 hours sleeping, bringing my total down to 7 hours.
• I typically spend about 1.25 hours talking with my lady love. That brings my daily grand total down to 5.75 hours.
• I spend 30-45 minutes each day walking the pooch. That brings my budget down to 5 hours.
• Let’s just get it over with and say that before bed and after waking up are about 30 minutes of wind up and wind-down each. That leaves me with 4 hours of budget time to allot each day to other activities.

Four hours. That’s a lot more than I expected! And it also means I waste a lot of time each day. What could I fill those hours with? Here are some things I’d like:

• Working out (~45 mins./day)
• Project work (at least 1.5 hours/day)
• This journal (15-30 minutes each day)
• Down time (probably the rest)

Time to start tracking things to see how I actually spend my time. This is good think about. I want to continue this thought process tomorrow.

Buffer object rewrite: done. Text formatting and links: done. Now to iron out the details…

Next up on the major agenda is establishing a tree folder structure that’s navigable via the “cd” command and viewable using “ls” (or “dir” if people want to use MS-DOS commands – I guess I could set up both with aliasing). This could be interesting.

After that’s set up, I think it would be appropriate to set up state capture/saving via LocalForage or similar. Back to the code!

Embarrassingly, I’ve been stuck thinking about a pretty simple problem involving encapsulating the buffer data in such a way that I can format individual sections of it. I’m leaning towards packaging the buffer segments in one form of data initially when the window dimensions are known:

{
 "text":  [text of some uniform format],
 "style": [some standard style - probably for amending ctx.font],
 "type":   [plaintext or hyperlink], 
 "action": [further defined if "type" is "hyperlink" - performs a 
           command once the hyperlink is clicked.]
}

… and then simply organizing this data into lines in a buffer printing object. The buffer printing object would be largely identical, except that a) the objects follow wordwrapping rules according to the size of the window, so the text is trimmed; b) the buffer printing object could be caching the computed data but must be updated whenever the window’s size changes; c) would have smaller helper functions that add to the buffer printing object that would add individual lines to the raw buffer object and the buffer printing object. This second object and how it would work has been where I’ve been stuck, although it’s a pretty simple set of problems once you think about it. It’s just breaking those problems down that’s been the problem. Maybe I just need to write it out. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now!

I shall think about this more later tonight.

I’ve finished cleaning up some of the keyboard event handlers on the portfolio front page by switching in-tag event handling to pure JavaScript handlers – much cleaner. The visuals work better this way, as the mousedown presses the key, but only mouseup on the key will actually activate the functionality (and mouseout will reset the visuals without activating the key, which is perfect although… technically unrealistic).

It’s time to start the real work on the portfolio project of implementing client file structure state tracking and navigation, folder navigation, and possibly implementing hyperlinks (which has the built-in complication of requiring character-by-character formatting implementation – super fun!).

I have my work cut out for me. *cracks knuckles*

I started this blog as a means by which to write down my thoughts on programming, talk about the projects I was working on, and basically stream-of-consciousness on some things I’m trying to work out. Crucial to repeating the structure of my previous blog habits will be to have a set time in which to write posts every day. That seemed to have been the pattern I relied on when I started my first blog (although novelty probably was a factor as well).

Anyway; it’s time to get down to business and work out exactly what I want to accomplish over the next 3-4 months.

• Portfolio Work/Projects
  • BenjaminMarquardt.com
    • Mock directory functionality
    • Minor file access
    • Hyperlinks?
    • Command history
    • Code cleanup + comments
  • Jungle
    • Bugfixes
    • Code cleanup + comments
• JavaScript Mastery Work
  • Work up list of crucial language concepts
  • Read up on new language developments
• Frameworks
  • VueJS
  • AngularJS? ReactJS? (probably the former, since 3/3 major frontend frameworks would be too much to concentrate on)
  • NodeJS

Per the lady’s suggestion, I’ll be working on what I can each morning (and probably a bit during the day at work if I can help it). Let’s see what I can cross off of the above list over the next week. Until tomorrow…

The camera problem has been bugging me, so I’m going to attack it. I figure that the engine should collect the buckets that the camera can see, render those to the texture, and skip checking the camera bounds/refreshing the bucket list (lol) if the camera hasn’t moved. This could lead to an interesting implementation where there are multiple windows rendering multiple parts of the world (security cameras?). Something to think about, at least.

Setting this part of the program up will help develop some things: adding and removing buckets and their contents from the render pool; making the render pool a dynamic array instead of a horrific linked list (allowing subtraction); checking for camera motion; checking for updates to the buckets themselves. By the looks of it, I’ll have to add the ‘hot’ attribute to buckets to know whether I’ll need to update the render pool to reflect the buckets’ contents. The entities within will be referred to by their pointers, so the values could change without hurting anything; when entities shift between buckets, though, the bucket entries would need to be updated. How would we get around the issue of updating the render pool for all buckets when one bucket changes? Hmm. Something to think about.

I’ve been doing a sort of bird’s eye view of the code I’ve written for my 2D engine project using SDL2. So far, a lot of ‘test’ material is still in place, so I’ve been sort of scraping at the edges and preparing to flesh out the major portions that will eventually blossom into a more solid backbone for the engine.

Currently, rendering and buffer swapping works, but it’s directly referencing the entirety of my spatial map code to get ALL entities rather than referencing the camera object to see what entities it should portray within the displayed area of the world. I did just create the camera object, but I’m having some difficulty conceptualizing where it should live – the graphics portion of the engine? The scene portion within the graphics portion? Hmm. Tough to say.

I haven’t even begun implementing entity AI or anything of that sort yet; I’d like to get the camera and the world working before that point. I’d also like to build in restrictions for camera motion as soon as things move beyond a certain limit outside of empty buckets in the spatial map; i.e., stop the camera motion towards areas that are just infinitely empty.

I was tempted to attempt a list of features I’d like to include, but that’s way, way premature. Instead, I’ll focus on chipping away at the project one obstacle at a time.

The weather is cloudy and a bit drizzly, but still warm with a cool breeze. Walking out on the grounds is not unpleasant, and the diffuse light gives ample opportunity for very pretty flower photographs.

On my mind today: GMS2 and its potential for my plans to create the ultimate simulation… if only I could negotiate with it to play nice. We shall see.

I did a pretty wimpy workout this morning, but I still did one. I really, really need to pick up more eggs when I go down to the valley tomorrow. Absolute necessity. They make for easy, fast, protein-laden breakfasts that really start my day off well. I might just get two crates…

Sunshine and breezes! It’s a lovely day today – I’m going to have to make a point of breaking my camera out.

I had a mixed weekend. Dishes were done, but I didn’t do any shopping or mowing. I’ll have to mow tonight and will absolutely need to do a workout tomorrow morning.

Rain yesterday, rain today. It’s cool and pleasant, but also a bit humid. I’m suspicious that the impending resurgence of the mosquito hordes is right around the corner.

Commencement parties happened yesterday, so the Seminary staff are given some leave today as ‘no one has any work to do’. I’m still going to go in after lunch though, as there are people I’m meeting with (and there are a few projects I absolutely need to work on).

Anyway, my goals for this morning: a) pick things up and put things down to exhaustion. b) Flesh out a post about the aesthetic and practical value of the specifics of my game (engine?) idea. c) Maybe clean some dishes or sort some laundry (or both)?

Thought of the day: “It is not good for the man to be alone.”

I know I’m supposed to be starting a workout, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts really quick. I only recently breezed across an article covering Google’s release of its Maps API for development, including functional calls that could be used to develop AR apps similar to Pokemon Go. I have yet to take a deep look at the spec to brainstorm what could be possible (and they seemed to waste a lot of time explaining that they could use their maps api for city fast building shape and placement for in game cities, but that was sort of a red herring for the really cool stuff imo), but… overall it sounds promising.

I should pick things up and put things down. Enough procrastination. Perhaps more thoughts later.

It’s the first day of June. I kept my bedroom closed to prevent cats from waking me up in the middle of the night with impending beard rubs, and ended up getting woken up at around quarter after 3 in the morning to scratching and fretting at the door. And, predictably, I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards. Lovely. Today is going to be fun. On the positive side, I can leave early due to my extensive work requirements this weekend.

It’s overcast but warm and humid. It feels like a jungle. I’m guzzling my second cup of coffee post-breakfast (six softly scrambled eggs), and thinking about how ineffective today’s workout is going to be because of the fatigue backscatter of lost sleep that plagues my consciousness. I’m stalling by setting up my personal laptop (recently optimized after eliminating Avira, the hdd hog) and convincing myself that writing this post is a good excuse not to lift heavy things right away. However, the clock has passed the 7:00am and even the nice keys and convenience of a speedier laptop shouldn’t tempt me away from ripping up my muscles a bit. Finishing my coffee first would probably be prudent though…

It’s the last day in May and I’m cultivating my sense of dismay that time continues to pass too swiftly. I have so much to do and I feel like I have no time. And yet I have so little aversion to wasting it.

This morning’s routine: wake up, eat a nice large breakfast, put on the iLeague Starseries group stage tournament (this morning: NRG v. Hellraisers – NRG wins 2-0) and do all the dishes from the past week, including the dishes for the two racks of ribs and the failed gravy (and guest visits).

The sky is overcast and it’s cool and breezy and pleasant with occasional winks from the sun. I took the recycling can out today, forgetting that Memorial Day would mean that the trash people won’t pick it up until tomorrow. My weather app wasn’t updating properly this morning though, so I couldn’t check to see if rain would mean soggy cardboard to greet the recycling truck when they come tomorrow morning. Time will have to tell, and perhaps I’ll have to drag the can to the porch in the meantime.

I still ache from yesterday’s workout. ‘Twas a good one. I think my resting heart rate is lowering, which is great. I need to grind more and work through this and work out more consistently. I think that after 3 weeks of doing MWF upper body, I’ll start doing Tue-Thu-Sat leg days. Big muscle groups are important, and I never concentrated on them much. It’d be good to keep all the muscles in rotation. It just means that all my chores will have to be shoved to the end of the day when I get home. So it goes.

Later: more interactive development thoughts. I really need to start fleshing out specifics on an engine I should begin to work on, and what the engine’s requirements will be for testing purposes.

The difficult conglomeration of ideas I keep bumping my head into run thusly:

• Good interactive media emulates the pattern of ‘massive simulated systems’ interacting with other ‘massive simulated systems’ manipulated by players to produce effects on the colliding edges of the simulations that produce unique stories the players can appreciate and manipulate – with the idea that the situations created would be unique and emergent enough to transcend the purposes of the design itself. There are a few examples of this idea being implemented in separate contexts:

  • SimCity in a general way. It uses economic forces and incentives to simulate population density, growth, decay, etc. based on economic environmental factors such as taxation, prevalence of viable employment opportunities, abundance of local amenities (healthcare, education, law enforcement), and the attraction of tailored gardens. You can create a poverty stricken, crime-ridden, pollution-heavy suburb and then wreck it with tornadoes and earthquakes and aliens. Or you can try to balance all the spinning plates and grow the population as high and as happy as you can.
  • Dwarf Fortress, obviously, but this isn’t as well-represented because the majority of the simulation happens in the generation without player interaction and it almost feels as if the world is only directing itself in action towards the player rather than with itself (so the world feels a bit static until you touch it). Maybe I have that wrong and the clocks tick all over the world while you play, but that seemed to be my impression.
  • Many triple-A games attempt this with generic physics simulations – i.e., allowing the players to perform strange feats simply through the imperfections and quirks in their systems (see: bunnyhopping in CS:GO or the speed boost hacks in Ocarina of Time). Minecraft has a lot of these too, allowing players to make computers or automatic melon farms.
  • A lot of Paradox Interactive games play with war and politics on an extremely macro scale in this way, but it’s turn-based, deliberate, and, to me, a bit stale-feeling. I want to interact in a way that is real-time, skill- rather than strategy-based, and specific rather than representative and general.
  • Prison Architect has a lot of interesting simulated dynamics with the prisoners and the general prison ‘state’ – i.e., high turmoil, lockdown mode, etc., and the emotional states of the prisoners govern a lot of how their behaviors play out.
• The contexts in which these methods are used are preposterously limited (i.e., extremely generic economics in the case of SimCity and its clones, widely representative politics and economics in Paradox games, and universally implemented physics engines that all have similar annoying and immersion-breaking quirks and failings). There needs to be more variety. I want to try to brainstorm some ideas on the types of variety:

  • The Sims had a lot of strengths in what it was obviously reaching for: in-depth representational interpersonal and inter-personality simulation on the specific individual scale. Ultimately, yes, an interactive dollhouse, but also a sort of proving ground for concepts related to the simulation of human personalities and their interactions with one another. Granted, it barely got beyond the point of need-satisfaction and rote like/dislike clashes between Sims (despite all of the added ‘traits’, the simulation remains largely the same – and stale), but the original idea was an interesting first step into the arena of baseline personality traits informing a central character’s decision matrix to create whole individuals that interact with each other and affect each other.
  • I need to study how politics play out in Paradox games in more detail, but, inevitably, it will largely be a product of the combined forces of a few individual leaders in their respective countries (I’m mistakenly cribbing calculation on this idea from my knowledge of Civilization, but Paradox games – Hearts of Iron IV in particular – have far more potential for political complexity what with the larger internal hierarchies in each political domain (demesne?)).
  • Individual, multi-dimensional simulation (that also finds compromises between inconsistencies or contradictions) would be a worthy goal: which dimensions to use, though, and how to establish a dynamic environment for interesting behaviors to play out in? Interactivity in a largely dynamic environment would obviously make small waves that would effect things; am I trying to set up a sort of Westworld situation? (I.e., standard storylines play out, but player interaction can throw them widely off course?)

More brainstorms later…

May 30th already? Sigh.

If I’m going to attempt to make this a daily thing, I think I’ll add more day-to-day details to make this a true chronicle to look back on and remember the specifics of my current experience. It’s weird how my thought process always lingers on the current moment while delving into the potentials of the future, but never thinking of either of those contexts’ inevitable velocity into history. It would be good to remind myself of this.

Nic’s visiting today with his family, which will be a blessing. It’s been far too long since we last met. The weather is cool and the sun is out. The flowers are blooming and everything is green and growing. Summer is about to break out, and it’s shocking to me how fast things are moving. I remind myself of how fast winter will be upon us once again.

This morning was a success: good breakfast, good cup of coffee, good workout. My muscles are sore in all the right ways. I still haven’t come up with solutions to the dilemmas I thought up yesterday, but I shall ruminate on them today. In fact, let’s work on some of them for the next posting.

This may sound like a strange thing, but I find myself stuck in a creative rut. Since being left to live alone in my house (my brother has moved south to Philadelphia), I’ve drastically reorganized my life. I’ve cleaned the house, I’ve set a schedule of chores for myself (that I’ve mostly kept to), I’ve begun concentrating on exercise and a healthier sleep schedule, and I’ve been noticeable losing weight. However, I’m finding that there’s a disappointing gap in my own productivity related to my creative aspirations (both in fiction and in programming) despite the positive impact elsewhere. This hurts me, because I think of my creative development as of the highest importance (and the most gratifying aspect of my personal abilities), so stagnation in this way casts a bad light on the rest of my achievements.

I’ve been spending some time generating more ideas – on the level of broad, question-begging, overly-complex ideas that are impractical to immediately begin implementing. I haven’t been writing them down or doing more elaboration on them than the surface level, finding-my-first-principles level of probing into their possibility as paths worth pursuing. It’s time I started doing both of those things.

Right now, I’m becoming more trapped in thoughts concerning which technologies I should use rather than thinking about what project I want to tackle (or which aspect of a larger project I should tackle first). This type of thinking is obviously premature, and it truly reveals my creatively productive paralysis.

** IDEA: I should write more about my thoughts in this vein. Whether or not it is in itself a creative output, at least I’ll be able to lay out and productively analyze my own thoughts on how I could become productively creative in a way that is gratifying and efficient.

OK, so, that being said, I’ll start working on some thoughts to write down.

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”

-Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien

I have officially submitted my notice to the monastery, informing them that I plan on leaving after saving up some funds for my inevitable self displacement. It’s time to look for warmer climates, a place to create softer wares, and a church that is less filled with attendees of the masculine (monastic or seminarian) variety.

My long list of potential new living regions included, in no particular order:

– Buffalo, NY

Pros:
– I know it – perhaps too well.
– Aaron’s there! (My brother – number three in the line of succession).
– Many friends I’ve had for years are there.
– The housing is CHEAP, especially if I find roommates with people I know.

Cons:
– Winter and snow.
– The parish is nice, but relatively empty of people my age (ahem; feminine people my age).
– The software industry is flooded with degree-clutching prospects to compete with (even though UB and Buff State are horrible places to learn how to program).
– It’s still in New York, which is horrible for my brand of politics.
– It’s Buffalo, and Buffalo is kind of crummy. Kind of? Sometimes violent, mostly dirty and miserable, and with very few redeeming factors.
– Although cheap, you get what you pay for in the housing (and caretaking).
– Far away from everyone in the family but Aaron.

– Albany, NY

Pros:
– Relatively close to home, in case I forget anything or want to visit the monastery.
– Relatively close to people I know (including some old friends).
– Good amount of job prospects.
– Great, flourishing parish with lots of old Orthodox friends.

Cons:
– Winter. And snow.
– Far from MOST people I know and love.
– The housing is a bit on the expensive side.
– Politics.

– Philadelphia, PA

Pros:
– Close to all kinds of family!
– Lots of jobs!
– Nowhere near as much snow!
– Lots of cool historic things to see and do! (Franklin Institute! Yeah!)
– Decent parish, but is within reasonable travelling distance of several other parishes as well (Manayunk to Howell: 1h24m, assuming a quiet Sunday morning).
– Pennsylvania has some of the best politics in the region! Plus, it’s swing state.
– Pennsylvania is awesome! (happy moodlet added because writer thinks of Pennsylvania memories of old with fondness!)

Cons:
– I’m… I’m having trouble thinking of any, except maybe that there are places in Philly that aren’t safe. But I could just as easily live outside the city!
– There’s a LOT of people around the area, making claustrophobia a real deal potentially. But there are parks too, I’m sure. Safe parks though? I could always take shelter in the Academy of Natural Sciences…

Some new prospects (that I’ll be adding to):

– Boston, MA

Pros:
– Boston is a wonderful historic city! Like Philadelphia in that way, but more… tealess.
– I’m sure there are plenty of jobs out there – and Aunt Barb wanted to hook me up with opportunities!
– I’m not completely familiar with the parish, but I know of it (and know of some of the people that frequent it – but mostly by virtue of knowing everyone that comes through the monastery).
– It’s an easy (but long) train ride to most known cities.

Cons:
– Still rather far away from the rest of the family.
– Weather is… variable, or so I’ve heard. It’s on the coast, a ‘dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes’ (Neal Stephenson, ‘Quicksilver’), and a bit frightening to think about in the case of a Nor’easter.
– I know next to no one there!

Also potentials for the list, but not fully fleshed out yet:

– Dallas, TX (or any major city in TX, really)
– San Francisco, CA
– Herkimer, NY (lol!)

Some things to think about. In the meantime, it’s time to a) get to work (hard!) on my new website (the one that will REALLY showcase all my talents), get some time learning MongoDB and NodeJS and ReactJS more thoroughly (enough to get cool things to happen on a website). I could probably do that by finishing the Udemy course. I should get on that!

Cheers for now.