Blog : Cool Things on September 14, 2012

I'm starting a new series of posts on the blog side where I'm going to mention some of the cool things I've run across. I hope this is roughly weekly, but the blog schedule has to flex to the actually being a student schedule.

This first edition is mostly things from youtube, where I'm a little better oganized about keeping track of cool things (and you don't have to worry there's at least a year's worth of favorite YouTube videos before I have to do anything there). In the future I will hopefully be keeping track of all the cool things.

Videos

Let's start then with the inimitable Dodger, who has started a let's play series of the game They Bleed Pixels. The style of the game is pretty cool, I especially like the character's pose as she jumps, and how reactive the game looks. It looks like it can become incredibly frustrating so I'm just as happy to let someone else play. Dodger's Let's Play style is enjoyable, she's actually good at games, and makes for great back ground listening. I also appreciate how she goes back at the end of the prologue video to pick up the collectables she missed. Check out the following episodes too, unfortunately there isn't a playlist of them yet.

Another cool video I found this week is Karen Kavett's video on how she created a Doctor Who Guess Who set. She's pretty inspirational on the getting excited and making things front and she makes some pretty cool things. The video features the music from Chameleon Circuit.

The last video this week is the 1000th video from the vlogbrothers (well, technically the 1001st). It's pretty cool all the things that have come together over the last five years. DFTBA.

Games

This week I've also been playing (a bit to my chagrin) Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord, a downloadable title by Square-Enix on the Wii. This game is a pretty cheesy tower defense game (in which you have to defend your tower ... rather than use the tower for defense). The concept is a little weird/j-rpg the mechanics are a bit simple (and sometimes frustrating) but for some reason this is a hell of a lot of fun.

Yeah, that's what it looks like ... (via GameFAQs) 

Podcasts

I've recently run across the not-at-all new Film Sack from the Frog Pants Network. In which Scott Johnson, Brian Dunaway, Randy Jordan and Brian Ibbot discuss a movie each week, usually a B from a while ago and see how it feels, if it holds up and whether people should actually be interested. Despite not being much of a movie buff myself listening to these four guys talk about films is really fun and the kind of thing you can put on in the background while getting things done. I've started listening both to the oldest episode and going forward and the newest one going backward and we'll see what happens when the film sack trains collide.

On a related note, Film Sack's cousin podcast Autopilot is preparing for it's second season. This podcast (put together by Scott Johnson and Tom Merritt) takes a look at the pilots of television shows and is informative and entertaining. They released the first season earlier this year, and decided to fun the second season through Kickstarter (rather than through sponsorships). I enjoyed the first season enough to get on board to give them a kick.

Wrap-up

I'd like to thank my friend Daley for his bump to the blog earlier this week. He runs his blog at lingwhatics.ca and keeps a good eye on the world both there and on his twitter.

And finally, although I'm sure everyone's had enough gangnam style, here's the crew of Weekend Confirmed getting overwhelmed by the spirit of ... dance ...

Project 4 : Snake : Update

The deadline for the first phase of the Snake project was September 1, 2012. By that point I had hoped to have a basic version of the game up and running. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to finish all that I'd hoped to do in the given time period.

Snake. Version 0.1 - it's almost a game.

What I did manage to get done was all the basic parts of the game except for the actual snake. I have a dot that goes around the world and can hit another dot that gives the player a point. This is mostly the point of snake, but right now my snake can't grow a tail.

Building the game in Processing.org was interesting. Processing is designed for non-expert programmers to be able to develop animations and interactions. It based on Java, but has a limited set of  the java utility libraries (although it does allow for other libraries to be added). The java basis is convenient because that's the language I've done most of my development in so far, however not having things such as queues makes things (such as the tail of the snake) harder to implement.

Even though I haven't finished the tail of the snake, it's interesting to note that the game already has the feeling of snake. The controls have a slight delay (because the movement of the snake is not linked to key presses) which feels very similar to most of the other implementations I've played in the past. I actually find this somewhat frustrating, since it causes you to have less control than you might. In the implementation I finished a while ago (and then deleted somehow) I implemented the control differently (I think I had the snake move on the key press regardless of its speed) and this made the game much more controllable and less frustrating.

Since I didn't get everything done in the last phase, I'm going to start my next phase by finishing getting the snake's tail running. I also want to implement the move-on-key-press control system and a way to switch between the two so there are traditional and "comfortable" modes. I also want to put in some of the "game" functionality, including a start screen, a pause screen and an on screen score / level system.

It's come back into the semester and sadly I still have one class left to complete in my PhD, so this can't be a high priority for the next few months. I don't think it will take a lot of time to finish but I want to do a good job so I can have it in a state where other folks can play it, so the balance of all that I'll end this phase on October 14, 2012.

Project 3: 25 books in 52 weeks : Wrap up

The 25 books in 52 weeks project ended on September 3, 2012. I'm writing this wrap up a week later.

I started this project with the intention of kicking myself back into reading. For a bunch of reasons I'd stopped reading almost totally and really felt like I was missing it, but it was hard to start again. The original goal was basically to read a book every two weeks, which is not too ambitious a goal. I still found it to be harder than I'd have liked but managed at the end of the day to get through 12 books in 52 weeks (which I guess leaves me at 48% completion rate).

I re-discovered through this project how much I enjoy listening to audio books and actually listened to most of the books I finished rather than reading them off paper (or e-ink).

I feel much better about reading now, although I still need to balance my approach (since I tend to read a book all at once over a day or two, rather than a little bit at a time for a longer while. I also want to reduce the gaps between books (which I tend to cause by becoming obsessed with some other media thing) and be generally more even in my media consumption.

The Books I Read

• The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
• I love John Le Carré's George Smiley books especially the focus on the infrastructure built by the espionage organizations. The Laundry books do an amazing job of invoking that feeling and mixing it with some Lovecraftian world mangling and a healthy dose of Dilbert.
• The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross
• As with the George Smiley element in The Atrocity Archives, the James Bond elements in the Jennifer Morgue work very well as well. 
• The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross
• Unlike the other two Laundry books, I felt like the Fuller Memorandum was more "in it's own style" although that may be because I haven't read the books wikipedia mentions as influence. All of the Laundry books are a lot of fun to read and I'm very excited that the next major novel is coming out in the next few days.
• Mort - Terry Pratchett
• I'm working my way through the Terry Pratchett books in publication order and I have to say that I found Mort much harder going than the first three (Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rights). With the first three it was fairly easy to slip into the world as odd as it was, but Mort feels like such a festival of anachronism that the world is hard to accept. 
• The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson
• I loved all of the first Mistborn trilogy, but especially the first volume. I enjoyed the action and adventure and heistyness and especially how alive and active Vin felt. The other two were good as well but I found that they didn't move as quickly as the first (which I think is something of a standard problem for Brandon Sanderson). The Alloy of Law felt like a return to that first books energy and I finished reading it and wanted to pick up the next one immediately. (Which is sad because I think the wait might be a while).
• The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks
• I read this book at least partly due to having never finished the project I undertook in junior high school where I promised that I would read it. I found this, especially for the first two thirds to be an incredible drag with uninteresting characters. As I eventually began to accept it as a Tolkien based D&D campaign rather than "people run back and forth in a small park" (seriously the longest march they undertakes is about 4 days, how close are all the major cities). The end had enough charm and momentum and I don't regret reading it, but I'm glad to have relieved myself from that particular guilt of my youth and don't think I'll pick up any of the other books from the series without some serious motivation.
• I should also point out that I seriously expected Menion Leah to have no idea what a woman was when he first meets Shirl. The entire first three quarters of the novel is devoid of the mention of women, so it seems to me that Menion should have been totally baffled. Serious missed opportunity for an Ethan of Athos kind of world. 
• Great by Choice - Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
• I liked the ideas put forth in Built to Last and Good to Great. I think that Great by Choice is better than either in that the findings of the book are much more applicable to the daily life of a graduate student. It's certainly worth a read and is an especially good jumping of point for trying to be more productive.
• Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold
• Any adventure with Miles is fun. The more mature version of Miles we get today has a different feeling than his earlier, more energetic self, but a good Xanatos Gambit is always great.
• Sourcery - Terry Pratchett
• Of the Wizard books, I think this one had too many wizards in it. It also feels like it treads the path of the coward Rincewind a little too heavily. We already did that in the earlier books.
• Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
• Leviathan wakes, the first book of The Expanse is a good, fairly hard, sci-fi story. I haven't ready sci-fi like this for a while and generally I thought it was okay. It dragged a bit and was grittier than I really enjoy in the middle but I found the ending really engaging. I also found the swapping between characters a little frustrating, which is maybe inevitable with Corey actually being two authors. I also felt like the chapters were coming in the wrong order (that Miller's chapters and Holden's chapters should have been flipped).
• The Apocalypse Codex - Charles Stross
• As with the Fuller Memorandum, this book felt very much it's own genre (as opposed to the earlier Laundry books). It had a lot of features that reminded me of the earlier books in general, but was a really great read. It left me wanting Stross to write more of these and faster.
• Caliban's War - James S. A. Corey
• This is the direct sequel to Leviathan Wakes. Overall I found I enjoyed it more than the first, but was strongly put off by the child abduction in the opening scene of the book. I also felt that it didn't really drive the story as far forward as it might have, didn't provide more in depth examination of the situation or the characters and left off at almost the same point as the first book. As with the first the ending was definitely the strength and left me wanting to get onto the third book. 

Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 10)

Welcome to the 10th volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This volume is another music episode and will be an introduction to the coolest band you'll meet on YouTube.

• The first video is from OK Go, whom you may know from their treadmills.  This video involves one of my favorite things on earth Rube Goldberg machines. This is a pretty incredible video and as with some of the ones last week keeps surprising you with more and more cool things.

• The next three videos are by the group Pomplamoose. These early videos are "Video Songs" which have two rules (from the video description)

1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).

Their early music was a mix of covers and original music. I have really enjoyed their covers, and I find when I hear the original versions of Telephone or Single Ladies I think of them as the dance covers. If You Think You Need Some Loving is also an amazing example of Natalie's cool and Jack's exuberance. I hope you enjoy them because there will be a lot more from them in the future.

The final video in this volume is from Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip. I don't think I've heard a track of their's that I haven't loved and the only reason this is the first video to show up in this project is that I upgraded a bunch of my earlier favorites to their better quality versions and so those videos are further down the favorites list for now.