Distractions of the Moment

[Salsa]
My desire to go, or continue going, to my salsa class fluctuates like a sine wave. Tonight I didn't learn anything that I can take directly to the [social] dance floor, but I did learn some stuff that will help me sort of derive my own moves better. And I remembered to take an actually camera, which unlike my cellphone, doesn't fail at taking video.

Tonight, also, the teacher had a new girl assistants. This guy uses female assistants, and they seem change regularly. I am hoping the new one is permanent and not just a substitute for today, because she is cute, friendly, and started talking to me after class. This counts as me talking to her because I made eye contact. I think I even half smiled. Anyway. There are these parties or whatever every week at the studio. I may have to go to one just to see if she's there. Think its friday. I don't know what her name is. I could have learned it, because she was like three feet away introducing herself to a bunch of people, but I wasn't paying attention.

And this time, I'll make sure she's not dating the instructor. Its really awkward to have to interact with someone who doesn't realize you hate them, who you can't openly hate because the--well lets just leave that in the past.


[Volleyball]
I posted an ad on craigslist asking if there were any pickup games, or if this city was infested with leagues only. Two girls responded yesterday with excellent information, and one guy emailed me the same outdated list of phone numbers that I didn't want to call when I found the page with my own google search. There have been a few responses since. The gender ratio of the responses is 4:1 in the good way.



[Wesnoth]
I have begun creating a custom campaign for The Battle of Wesnoth, a turn based strategy game. I hightly recommend it for anyone else who has used linux for the past 7 years and has been waiting that long for people to start making games for--oh yeah I'm the only one who did that.

My addiction to creating user content, specifically levels, of games, dates all the way back to Duke Nukem 3D and the build editor. This was back in the day when you could run a 200mhz pentium without the heatsink briefly and it would feel pretty warm afterwards. My creations with the build engine were atriocious, and my friends never wanted to play them again after they tried one. But I kept on doing it anyway, because I loved it. Eventually I moved onto UnrealEdit, or whatever it was called, for Unreal Tournament Classic, and this time the levels I made were actually playable, culminating in my greatest achievement: a level people enjoyed playing at the lan parties. Except for this other Dave and Chris' little sister, but that was because they kept falling in the bottomless pit in the center. Not my fault.

Anyway, my addiction is currently pretty bad. Except for the social plans I make, I run home, work on my Wesnoth campaign until after I should have gone to bed, go to sleep, go to work, and then come home to repeat. Not something someone trying to make friends should be doing. However today at work I realized why I kept doing this: what if making levels for games could be my actual job? A job I liked so much I would do it for 12 hours a day because it was ridiculously fun. Every job I've worked at I've struggled to work the full 8 or whatever hours every day, to put my full time in. When I'm level editing, I can go for 18 hours at a time without realizing it--except for the hunger pangs, which I usually solve by running to the fridge and eating cheese slices or pickles, etc. You could say my interest in level editing is like a scaled down version of how much I like Legos.

My current goal is to create a webpage showcasing levels/maps/campaigns/etc that I have created for various games. When thats complete...I will then figure out how to use such a webpage to get me work in the game design world.

Oh, and this is the real reason I'm writing about this: this wesnoth game has its own special language called WML, which stands for Wesnoth Markup Language. The name implies that it is just a simple (poorly designed) markup language like HTML. As in, not a real programming language. If you have, for example, a hot girlfriend named Katie who does web design work with HTML, I wouldn't tell her to her face that she's not a real programmer. But its true. Anyway.

Parts of this stupid WML thing are, I suspect, turing complete. This bothers me a lot, perhaps becaused its called a "markup language" and perhaps because the people using it rely heavily on these retarded macros, which, as their are implemented, cannot support any kind of functional programming. I think I am going to try to write some WML that proves turing completeness, but based on my fading memory of Programming Language Concepts, that is usually done by making something that can execute turing machines, which I don't feel like doing.

So instead, I think I'm always going to solve 3Sat. I've always been impressed by people who could reduce things to 3Sat, mostly because I didn't take the algorithms track as an undergrad and didn't fully understand the problem myself until I was a grad student. Don't judge me.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure lots of other computer people don't understand 3Sat either, but have heard of it, and if I put a wesnoth level that can solve 3sat problems of up to K expressions (where K is probably going to be like 30) on my webpage, I think that would make a lot of non-computer scientists think I am really smart. Would this translate into a job offer to finish Duke Forever? I don't know.

Oh, and my assumption here is that if a language can solve an NP-Complete problem (who knows, maybe I'll try an NP-Hard version--like minimum true values) then it must be turing complete. I could be wrong though. Maybe you can solve 3sat with standards-compliant HTML and CSS. I mean, I don't know. <-fake humility

[Guitar]
I haven't worked on it in a while, but I want to start practicing again soon. I want to finally get around to recording my special version of Love Story, and I ordered a Linkin Park songbook, which I hope will satisfy my urge to just turn overdrive on and play something really loud for an hour (as best I can tell, my neighbors don't hate me yet).

I think I've nearly confirmed that an inordinate amount of people out here hate Creed and Nickelback. I've never understood why it happens to be those two bands that get picked on (and not crap hop, or all the pop songs I hear on the radio) and since I like Nickelback and am completely indifferent to Creed, I have a nascent desire to learn a bunch of Creed and Nickelback songs and torture people with them. Actually, I have no desire to learn any Creed songs. But I could do nickelback. I wonder if opening my windows and turning my speakers up and just playing the chords loud, every day, for three hours, would be enough to drive people crazy. The first overplayed song of their was probably the "this is how you remind me" song. I think that would cause the most pain.

[In Other News]
I did not even try to spellcheck or otherwise proofread this post. You probably figured that out by now.