flying toaster dreams

There's nothing quite like paying rent.
On the one hand, there's the knowledge that you're supporting yourself, making your world run like it should. Being able to prove that your effort is what keeps you alive--this is a truly wonderful feeling.
But on the other hand, there's the knowledge that--should you fail--you will lose everything. To know that the void lies just behind you, and that it will always be chasing you, no matter how long you run, is to know fear in the most powerful form it can take.
It's a thrill like no other. Maybe that's why people make fun of those who never pay rent--the basement-dwellers of the world sit in their cocoon of MMOs and forums, pretending that the world outside doesn't exist, when they could be living.
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Honestly, I'd hoped that this place were a bit more...full, really.
There's not that many people here.
Kind of a disappointment.
Every time my IRC window blinks, I hope that it's someone talking. But it's not, and I'm afraid it probably won't be for some time.
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I've added a link to my resume to the site, and a menu to go with it. It's amazingly easy to do this stuff, given a bit of searching. I wonder if I can set the Z-index of the background gif to put the scanlines on top of everything else...
I have to wonder if perhaps website design is more my speed right now.
I'd still like to get into game design, but at the same time, this CSS stuff is just coming to me.
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It's been a while.
I'm staring at the first E-Ink advertisement in my local Kroger. It's a short animation, little more than a powerpoint about the benefits of buying a too-expensive health-food TV dinner. It's cheap and it catches attention and it works just like every other ad in the world.
In a sense, we enjoy hearing about the dystopian future because it lets us feel better about seeing it coming. When you hear about how amazing the world is now, it makes you wonder if you're insane for not seeing it.

In other news, I've done some gamedev (nothing too amazing, just a simple shmup, I'll link it later), and I've been doing some musical experiments, making a whole album from the comfort of my phone screen. I broke out of wageslave land, and now I'm sitting on the beach of Retail Island, watching the college ferry come to take me to Having A Life. I want the boat to move faster, but it can't, so I'll just have to keep typing away to distract myself until the boat runs aground.
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I'm probably gonna need all the help I can get, trying to finish this project, because I have a long history of not finishing projects.
I'm going to resurrect an old project from high school. Specifically, a project involving a wizard, and the mysterious art of the bullet curtain.
There will be a little wizard, and fireballs, and walls of ice, and swords wrought from lightning.
Hopefully, I'll actually finish it.
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I've been toying with vim, as a possible alternative to emacs.
It feels...interesting. I'm used to the idea of switching into an "insert" mode, thanks to the use of a browser called "dwb", but at the same time many of the keys are different and it's taking me a bit of time to learn.
There's a certain charm to it, a certain amount of simple enjoyment. I think I'll like this little program.
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Well, the resort I was in had horrible wifi, so I wasn't able to post anything while I was there.
On the other hand, I didn't really mind. Bodysurfing is fun, and there's no wifi requirement.
I consumed more alcohol, played more poker, and rode more waves in this past week than I have in the entirety of my life. I talked politics, chilled in a hot tub, and learned that I prefer Pina Coladas to Mai Thais. The water is clear on the beach, and you can walk into town and find a real-live alleyway marketplace, right out of an Indiana Jones movie. In the city, you can see cables criss-crossing the street, and wifi is sparse and not well secured, and some places don't have running water but still have satellite dishes for their HDTVs, and everyone in the city drives a motorcycle. The cops are paid in peanuts and reportedly take bribes like a waitress takes tips, and if there were a few more tall buildings, and a bit more neon, you could almost imagine some punk on a nice bike shouting about a kid named Tetsuo.
I like it here. Too bad I still gotta leave.
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I've updated my script; now it'll stick only five items into the front page of my site, using the head command.
The rest will be sent to an archive page, where you can load every single post I've ever made.
This will look a lot more impressive once I've made some more posts. Expect me to make a post every day.
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There's a roguelike that I rather enjoy, called The Slimy Lichmummy. For anyone who's interested, you can get it here.
It feels an awful lot like Quake 1, right down to the chainsaw ogres with grenades. Each level is filled with strange and threatening monsters, and with nothing but your fists and your shotgun, you must venture down into the depths.
The main draw, for me, is the melee system. For instance, if you have a sword, you might notice the following in your character's information area:

Plain Old Boring Sword
_ >2 5

What does this mean? Well, the numbers indicate the damage you'll do with each strike. Each time you make a successful hit, the arrow jumps to the next number in the list, skipping any underscores.
However, if you move away from an opponent before killing them, the arrow moves all the way to the left--including the underscores.
And if the arrow's on an underscore, then you can't attack that turn--you have to do something else, like move around, or shoot something.
This leads to an incredibly interesting melee system. A sword is no longer intrinsically better than another--you have to weigh the possibilities of getting a 2, 5 combo against getting a 4, 4, 4 combo. It gets even more interesting when you get into weapons that have more than one underscore--such as staves. These weapons often have longer, more damaging hit chains--but leave combat, and you'll have to wait twice as long to get back in. With one set of numbers, the developer of TSL has represented a weapon's ease of use, its speed, the way one might fight with it, and the positioning battle that combat sometimes turns into. It's beautiful, and I hope I'll get to steal that mechanic for another game.
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Things I like in fiction:
>A large number of powerful artifacts that are well-known but well-hidden (Chaos Emeralds, Dragon Balls, whatever you want). Something that can spur people on to adventure.
>Settings in which the world is kind of horrible, but the main characters can fix it. Not 40K, the world in 40K is horrible but there's nothing anyone can do about it.
>Magic that isn't just fireball vs. iceball. Something with applications outside of combat, that can be used in weird and interesting ways for an advantage (if you think about what you're doing).
>Research. This is less of a "thing I like" and more of a "thing that needs to be there", sorta. Research may not be the coolest thing to work on when making a story, and if you do it right almost nobody will notice--but when you do it wrong, vast numbers of people notice, and it takes a bit away from your work.
>Continuity. Not everything will be based in reality, and it's perfectly okay to do something just for cool factor--however, it needs to be consistent. You can't tell me that a particular weapon can't be broken and then break it, nor can you say that someone's undefeated in combat and then defeat them--well, unless you're Star Trek.
>The Big Finale. A showdown with the enemy in which everyone that the heroes helped along the way gets to show up and help. I want to see all the good guys face all the bad guys. Excellent example, I think, is the finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender (the TV series. What do you mean, movie? There was never a movie.)
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Capitalism, like a lot of other things, mostly works on paper; it works realnwell when the numbers are clean and consistent, and nobody throws curveballs.
In practice, it isn't nearly that simple. People break the system, make mistakes, build additions to the system that miss the key points. They buy for brand loyalty instead of buying for quality, they pass laws that work in the favor of badly-run companies, they write union rules that appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Worst of all, the rules themselves have changed, because it's no longer about doing a good job; we've convinced ourselves that the road to success is paved, not with sweat, but with cut corners.
It's not really what capitalism was about. Capitalism, in its original form, was what we might call crowdsourcing today. It was a system in which the people were trusted to make decisions in their best interest, and in which that decision-making power was used to decide who was worthy of staying afloat, which in turn enabled the best workers to be most able to judge the work of others. It was ingenious, really.
But then the worst of us got jealous, and over time we have made success ever more dependant on a wide social game. Once upon a time, a CEO knew how his company worked; now, he only knows paperwork and manipulation, so that's what he does.

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The date is June 19th. Today, I prepare to leave for Mexico.
Tomorrow, I start the journey; I'll be back on the first of June.
This'll be interesting. There's apparently a stretch of 10 miles near the border that's a bit unstable.
Here goes nothing.
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Noticed a new bug in my pilit.sh, the script that builds this page out of text files in my ~/notes directory.

Apparently this:

>sed '/\~$|\.swp/d'

is nonequivalent to this:

>sed '/\~$/d' | sed '/\.swp/d'

And the former was matching weird, leaving only two posts on the front page.

That has been fixed now.
I need to put this thing on github, start showing it off.
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I've been working a lot recently. Janitor on the weekdays, salesman on the weekends. I get my fridays off most weeks, sometimes I get to do more sales work. It's sample-making and handing-out, and I like it; I take to it like a fish to water, leaping in and quickly getting into my element I entertain, I cook, and at the end of the day I feel refreshed.
Sometimes I forget that a little work feels good.
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I'm sitting in a small-time gas station/cafe, waiting for a BLT.
There's an old western playing on a cheap cathode-ray TV, ancient, unwatched.
I'm typing on a cheap phone, making a little stream of letters dance to my orders.
Simple, quiet life in a future world.
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While I was playing Metro: Last Light, I ran into a situation where I was dying over and over. It was a stealth area, and--despite the little stealth indicator noting that I was invisible--I alerted enemies constantly.
It turned out that there was a light which--while it didn't activate the stealth-indicator thing--was revealing me constantly.
This is an excellent example of not sticking to your rules in a work of fiction.
When you tell your player that the indicator of how easily seen you are is a tiny little light, and there's something that makes you easily seen but doesn't light the light, you're gonna get complaints.
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In the not-so-shiny halls of 8Chan, there is a board called "/agdg/", for Amateur Game Development General.
Their motto is "just like make game".
On the one hand, this encourages people to actually make games.
But it skips over the world of Software Engineering, the planning phase, where the blueprint is made.
You can make a house without a blueprint, but not a mansion.
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So I've just logged into my Squiggle.City account, having handled a few minor confusing things about moving keys between computers (apparently PuTTY creates passwords that can't be used with the ssh command or something).
This place feels...interesting. Empty, yeah, but it's kind of neat to imagine my keystrokes affecting a computer in another part of the world. I feel powerful, and at home.
Sometimes I wonder if I was born too late, since I have so much excitement for things like the command line and shared computers. There's no value in worrying about it, though.
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I'm making a couple minor changes to this thing, because I realized that it's linking to an *ancient* copy of my resume on GDrive. I also lowkey think I could get more mileage out of a Digital Ocean instance than out of this.

Then there's the new project, Human Environment 1, though it might be a little late to poke fun at rampant consumerism. We're a little too far into the cyber apocalypse to really make fun of it.

That having been said, I didn't update this page much anyway...
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It's been a little while again. Honestly, I need to spend more time on this place; rambling bits of inane text into the emptiness of the Net is a good way to relax.
Work has been pain, as it was before, and I've come to the conclusion that the point of a job isn't necessarily to be fulfilling as much as it is to give you a means of finding fulfillment, if that makes sense. You don't seek employment to change the world; you seek employment to fund your change. As such, I am at peace with whatever I run into in the future, so long as I get paid decently.
And I desperately need to get paid decently--I can't remember a time when I wasn't just a little sick, not hungry enough to be worth buying a feast, not tired enough to sleep, but sick, tired, and hungry all the same. Maybe once I nail this certification--second time's the charm, especially when you find updated study material--I'll be able to get a nice apartment somewhere in Hot Springs or Dallas or wherever I damn well please.

Is it weird that I like being left alone? I mean, I've been growing more and more upset with the state of politics; Hillary's campaign came and went, and Trump came and stayed, and it all feels like so much caricature of Bush v. Gore and Obama v. McCain, only this time both the candidates were actively under investigation for various crimes (which of course are false allegations against my candidate, but completely true regarding yours). Of course, Syria surprised me--with all the rumors flying, I realized that this would've been the first time in my understanding of US history that we've meddled in foreign affairs, possibly given weapons to our enemies, and then come out on top. Not the first time we would've given weapons to our enemies, though. You'd think that after Al Qaeda blew up in our faces, we would've learned.
And all of that to say, I'm more convinced than ever that I need to save up for a nice artificial island out in the Pacific. Which is concerning, since I'm already not getting enough social contact. The loner feels lonely, how ironic.
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There was a job fair scheduled for today.
Problem is, it's scheduled one hour before I have to clock in at my actual job, and I can't travel that fast.
I hate my current job. Once upon a time, I enjoyed it, because there was a lot of emphasis on helping people.
But now, I hate it. My coworkers don't show up, they skip out on their responsibilities, they hide my supplies and whine about having to do anything.
And I can't do anything to get this new job without screwing myself out of money that I need to pay rent.

Is this what it feels like to be on welfare, I wonder? To have income that depends on not getting a job?
It's really setting me off.
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One of the oldest tricks in the Linux book is to do cat /dev/urandom in a terminal.
This prints a massive amount of random characters to the terminal, which can make it look like it's broken. Hell, sometimes it messes up your prompt.
I wonder what it'd look like if you ran cat /dev/urandom in a terminal displayed on a widescreen TV in a bar.
It'd probably look something like what the hip kids call "schway".
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It's midnight where I'm at. There's nothing to do, but I can't sleep.

Somewhere in the multiverse, I'm making a game. I'm selling a game. I'm earning a living at it.
I just need to reach out and touch that universe, draw myself into it. I'll start by imitating it--practicing the things that I would do in that other universe.
Then, as my skills develop, my world will slowly change to fit that other one, and before I know it I'll be earning a living by way of selling a masterful game.
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I've built a script that will take the files in my notes directory, and stick their contents inside an HTML file. This is a neat little experiment in the world of shell scripting, but I need to make sure it works.

Basically, here's what it does:
First, it moves to my public_html directory, and empties the temp file where I'll be building the site:
>cd ~/public_html
>cat /dev/null > $temp #I have this set to ~/public_html/temp.html
Then, it adds a pre-built header from my html_snippets directory:
>cat ~/html_snippets/head >> $temp
Now, it does a for loop that takes a bunch of files in notes and shoves them in, too:
>for i in `ls -t ~/notes`; do
>>if [[ "$i" =~ .*\~]]; then
>>>echo "skipping backup file"
>>else
>>>echo "${i}" >> $temp
>>>echo >> $temp
>>>cat ${i} | sed 's/$/ ' >> $temp
>>>echo "-----" >> $temp
>>fi
>done
The if statement skips over any files ending in a ~, which is the symbol Emacs appends to old versions of files. It then echoes the filename, a newline, the contents of the file (with
s added by sed), and a pair of newlines to the HTML file.

Finally, it adds a tail from another file:
>cat ~/html_snippets/tail >> $temp
And then moves the file to the index:
>mv $temp $index #$index is set to ~/public_html/index.html

And after all this is done, you see the files on my homepage. Hopefully in the right order.
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Punishing those who seek to do better, will only lead to people doing worse.
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Whenever I hear about political things, like Fox News's latest rage-inducing moment or a tweet about the "toxic consumer-first ideology", I feel...distanced. Part of me says "Well, this should be important", but another part of me just doesn't want to bother with it. It feels like a massive charade, where half the players are trying to make the most ridiculous caricature of something, and the other half are completely unaware that it's charades.
Some of the players try to make sense of it all. Others ride along on the confusion generated by each new move.
I just don't want anything to do with it. The vast majority of politics, to me, is just drama-farming--creating as much outrage as possible, then pointing to yourself as the answer to all this horror. It feels fake, even though I know that it's because this is the best move in the game.
Say that, for instance, there are ten candidates in the current election, represented here:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Each of these candidates have a political stance, from 1 being extremely conservative (here defined as "less laws"), to 10 being extremely liberal (here meaning "more laws").
You have 100 people voting for them. Now, this is extremely simplified--the real voting system involves more steps than this--but this'll do for now.
Here's the thing: In order to be elected, one candidate needs at least 51 votes.
Furthermore, they may or may not be who they say they are. The candidates' actual positions on the political spectrum can be anywhere from 0 to 2 positions away from their supposed position.
Now, imagine that you're one of these voters. Whichever way you lean, you want that lean to be represented by the President. Suppose, for this example, you lean left.
If you pick, say, candidate 6:

10 9 8 7 [6] 5 4 3 2 1

Then you're risking him shifting to 5 or 4. Furthermore, you don't have the support of all the people who want a more left-ish president; they're all busy picking 10.

If you pick 8:

10 9 [8] 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Then you'll still land in your end of the spectrum, even if it turns out that 8 leans more right than you thought. Furthermore, other people who agree with you are probably voting for him too--because they likely came to the same conclusion.

Finally, if you pick 10:

[10] 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Then you know that this guy will always be a lefty, because there's no way he'll shift far enough to go right.
Furthermore, you have the support of the fanatical left--the people who think that nothing can possibly be too far left, who always vote 10. These guys are strong allies--you always know that they'll vote for 10. On top of that, the guys who voted 8 may realize that there's a better chance of your president getting elected if they jump on the fanatic bandwagon, and join you in voting for 10.

Because of all this, a presidential candidate who picks the far end of the spectrum is far more likely to get lots of votes. The same applies to any political belief--the more extreme you are, the more likely you are to get the support of the extremists, and the more likely that the rest of your audience will grudgingly follow you, if only so those damned ____ don't get the ballot.
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There is nothing quite like finding a local game store.
I can go there and play cards, and read comics, and pick up new dice.
I found a group that plays Hero Quest, and they play every third weekend, and I intend to show up next time they play even though I only got to play because one guy didn't show up.
It's fun, and distracting.
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So, I got to talking with some of my friends about game design, because I like game design. One of them pointed out Splinter Cell: Conviction's multiplayer, specifically the deathmatch mode.

In SC:C's multiplayer, you get dropped into a map with another player. You are also surrounded by NPC enemies who will attack either of you. Your goal is to kill everything; NPCs net you a single point, while a successful kill against a human opponent gains you five points and takes three from the target. Splinter Cell is a stealth game, so much of the combat revolves around taking shots from an unseen position, and PvP is similarly focused on not being seen.

I also brought up Watch_Dogs, which had a multiplayer component in a similar scope to Dark Souls; multiplayer was not a separate mode, but something that happened in regular gameplay. One player's goal would be to stay within a certain distance of the other player, and wait for a progress bar to finish; the other player's goal would be to hunt the first player down and either kill them or exit the 'trace zone' and force the other player to lose by distance. One popular strategy, apparently, was to simply shoot into the air to chase away NPCs.

Both of these games had good ideas. Watch_Dogs had some flaws--most notably, there was no punishment for simply going gung-ho. In Splinter Cell: Conviction, starting a gunfight is a terrible idea; the gunfire can draw attention from your opponent, and fighting in the open underneath a streetlamp is a recipe for lead poisoning, administered from a dark corner. In Watch_Dogs, firing into the sky is the easiest way to find your opponent. Another flaw in W_D's implementation was a lack of cover--encounters occured on open streets with wide, clear spaces and very few things to hide behind. SC:C fills its maps with waist-high structures, dark corners, walls and doors and hallways and crates; breaking line of sight is shockingly easy. If W_D had such a variety of hiding places, maybe shooting into the air would simply give the enemy a way to take cover.

I would like to see something that combines the level design elements of SC:C and the focus on tracking instead of killing that W_D tries to use. SC:C clearly did a good job in trying to bridge the gap between stealth and competitive multiplayer, but I think the best way to create a multiplayer stealth game would be to emphasize something other than straight combat. It's hard to keep the players from just shooting each other when the goal is to just shoot each other.
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KINGDOM
HEARTS
THREE.

That is all.
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I think I'm gonna move out somewhere closer to home, first.

I want to see more activity here. It feels so empty right now.
If only there were something we could all get together and do--something to work on together, instead of making our own little sites.
Maybe something in Python or Lua or even in BASH, that we all have a use for and all would be able to help with.
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There's an awful lot of connection in the world. We have the power to read things from across the entire globe, to see things happening across the sea, to talk to our friends from miles away.

And yet we're lonely. Most of our lives revolve around being near massive numbers of people--handling the groceries, phones, or even the connections of hundreds of people a day. In an hour, we see more people than we could ever actually talk to.

And yet...

Part of the problem, as various psychologists have pointed out, is that we tend to think that being distant and closed off is cool. And, ironically, connecting the world actually makes it easier to pretend that we've got everything, and that means we all pretend we're perfect to keep up with other people who pretend they're perfect.

All of this comes together to mean that we don't connect to each other. We hide behind emotional firewalls, and serve up cleverly-pieced-together Facebook feeds, and all the while we make sure port 22 is never, ever open. Nobody ever gets to see the real world behind that mask, which is why nobody ever feels like a real person.
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I'm compiling a GameMaker clone on my laptop right now.
I might not have a lot of skill with artsy things, and maybe it's kind of embarrassing to use a GUI-based pseudocode thingy to make games with, but I'll be damned if I go much longer without creating something.
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Well, it turns out being flat broke limits your options for hosting. I might be able to switch over to SDF, but that's gonna take a few days.

More importantly, the squiggle.city certificate is out of date. I don't know what happened. Maybe I'll shoot an email over to Brennen or something.

I was listening to the SDF official radio station the other day. It had some kind of classic rock playing, but the vocals were in what sounded like Korean. Then a little kid came on the radio and said he was pretty sure this is the new Korean National Anthem and gangnam style started playing. Every once in a while you'd get some overlapping synthesized-voiceover (half the time I couldn't tell what language, the other half it was Microsoft Sam advertising an upcoming event). It was the coolest.
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I'm editing this in vim, with my homedir open on the other side of a split.
It's pretty cool. I can look inside my script and grab a bit that I added recently:
>#The functions that get the files.
>function getTopFiles {
> find ${notes} -type f -printf '%TY:%Tm:%Td %TH:%Tm %h/%f\n' | sort -r | sed '/\~$/d' | cut -d " " -f 3 | head -n ${n}
>}
>
>function getAllFiles {
> find ${notes} -type f -printf '%TY:%Tm:%Td %TH:%Tm %h/%f\n' | sort -r | sed '/\~$/d' | cut -d " " -f 3
>}
And then I can stick it in here, add >s to the beginning, and I've got a neat little block of code.

This is beautiful.
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Mobile theme activated. If you're on a phone, this should look a bit bigger than it does on a computer screen.
I'm still fiddling with the way it works.

Oh, and you won't have the silly animated background. That stuff eats battery power like no tomorrow.
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So far, things are coming along nicely for Example Shmup Project #300,000.
I've put together some basic physics, added a few neat sounds, and cleaned up all my game-object code (which I'm referring to as the Actors code from now on because that's not as much of a mouthful).
Sometime soon, I'll get a build put together and throw it up here.
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Does anybody really know what a parent is supposed to do? Should they be strict? When should they stop being strict?
Is it right to choose who your child plays with? When do you let your child choose?
Is there an objectively right time to push them out of the nest?
I ought to collect answers from parents, and publish a book delineating all the pros and cons.
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Durango. City of...well, from what I've seen, bad roads. Most of the roads are one-way only, and some of them have you driving on the left--with no signage.
There's a lot of small stores selling little bits and bobs--I saw underwear and yo-yos in the same store, in one place.
The city is crowded, stores crunched up against each other. Cyclists dart in and out of traffic, and buses own the roads because there's no real right-of-way. There's no lanes, either.

This is the only city of its kind I have ever seen.
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I've added some scanlines to my page. It's...a work in progress. Looks kinda cool, if maybe a little eye-hurty.
Having played a bit with CSS, I have to say that it's kinda neat. I haven't gotten to the bits that are really cool, or any animations or anything, but it's neat.
Especially since it reduces the amount of stuff I have to add to various tags in the HTML document itself. It brings the amount of typing I have to do in general down, in fact, because I only have to edit the CSS sheet to make most of my changes.
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I saw Inside Out today.
I laughed.
I cried.
And when my dad mentioned that it was basically a college psychology class in movie form, I learned.
All in all, great movie. Go watch it.
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I've added links to the archive; now you'll be able to send someone to a specific post. Just right-click "Link to this post" and copy the link, then paste it for whoever you want to share it with.
I may also set it up so that you only see the first few lines of a given post, with a link to the post in the archive.
Furthermore, if you know the filename of the post, you can simply type in squiggle.city/~dawnbreeze/archive.html#name-of-post, and it'll send you right to that post!
It's amazing what shell scripting can put together, really. I hadn't thought that I could do this kind of thing with just bash.
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I'm getting closer and closer to a fully-functional script.
It's called "pilit" now, and it has command-line options for things like selecting a different directory for your (notes|index|archive|snippets), and I've moved the snippets in question to a hidden directory.
I think the next step for this script is to add a command to edit the head/tail files, and something to customize the number of posts on the front page (as well as one that sends all files to the front page), and then I'll make an install script. From there, I'll be ready to release pilit.sh to the rest of squiggle.city.
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Squiggle City's back on its feet! Guess I'll host here after all. While I'm here, I might as well mention some of my upcoming projects...

* Project Flicker (working title) is maybe the most promising one. Deep within an abandoned industrial facility, you'll learn to be afraid of the dark again. Watch a demo of the monster's illusion powers here. Still in development, of course.

* Human Environment 1 is a text adventure about the real future of VR internet. Still in development, but be warned--this is not the bright and sanitary future that you were promised. The worst elements of humanity come forth where consequences dare not tread.

* Project Torment (also a working title) is a first-person character action game in which a vampire who feeds on suffering meets an unlikely friend and kicks some ass.
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When working, a man
Will always have energy.
A fool never will.
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Started trip morning of the 20th, June 2015.
Had Whataburger for breakfast.
I'll probably spend a lot of time asleep, despite having an in-drive movie and a book to read.
I'd get motion sickness anyway.
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Well, the program I was using before wound up being useless.
I found myself feeling limited by the event system, where before it was an easy way out of learning to code.
Once you go "hack", I guess you can't go back. This time, I'll try to do it with Lua, using the LÖVE library, which is available here.
This stuff works almost entirely through callbacks; I'll be doing all my own code. Should be fun.
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One day, I had a brilliantly stupid idea.
I wanted to build a turn-based fighting game, in the vein of Street Fighter. Something I could play through an imageboard, but still have the same experience I would at an arcade.
Impossible. Fighting games are built on the idea of rapid back-and-forth; you can't have a fighting game with any pause in the action, otherwise the second person to go will have the advantage.
You can't possibly simulate the kind of high-speed reaction-testing gameplay that Street Fighter or BlazBlue or Garou: Mark of the Wolves can provide.
Or can you?

I approached it by taking the simulation one step 'upward'. Instead of trying to make an abstraction of the quick reactions and gambles that a high-level fighting game player would take, I simulated choosing between those gambles and reactions.
It's fairly simple, and borrows heavily from a series of one-number RPGs that you can find amongst the infamous members of 4Chan's /tg/ board.
Basically, at the beginning of the fight you pick a "Risk Level" from 1 to 10.
Each "turn", you get two rolls (1d10, 1d10). You can choose to commit both to attack, both to defense, or one to each. On attack rolls, you're trying to roll under your risk level; on defense, you're trying to roll over it.
You can also adjust your risk level (or RL) by up to two points.
Finally, your character might have some Special moves. You have to declare that you're using them before rolling, and you have to have a certain degree of success on the roll, measured from your RL--for instance, if your Hadouken requires that you succeed on an attack roll by 2, and your RL is 5, then you'll have to roll 3 or lower (5-3=2). If your RL were 9, you'd have to roll 7 or lower (9-7=2).

Each hit you land gives you a "Reality Shard" (fancy name for a bit of super meter). When you reach an agreed-upon number of Shards, you win by using a "Reality Break" attack. Feel free to describe just how mind-bojugglingly awesome the attack is.

This is EXTREMELY UNPOLISHED. Test at your own discretion. Send concerns and suggestions to cascott1994@gmail.com.
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I'm gonna be moving locally, most likely; anything further and I'll lose all my support. My sister's boyfriend is only interested in moving locally, if at all, and my sister is still waffling but would probably stay with her BF.

I really, really wish I could convince them to stand up, throw away the silly things they cling to here, and follow me on a grand adventure.
But adventures are for children. The grown-ups never play, never take chances, so why should we? Never mind that the rent's cheaper and the grass is greener and the stores are closer, it's too risky, there's far too much danger involved, I'll just go celebrate my eleventy-first birthday and smoke some pipe-weed. Not a single Bilbo or Frodo left in the world, they all ran off and the Sackville-Bagginses are running the place now.
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