Story Fragments

I'm back. I'm bad.

2009-11-02T05:12:20Z

And my end-of-day word count is 2212, well over the 1667 average needed to win nanowrimo.

Despite starring a spunky 12yo girl, this is probably the darkest story I have ever written. It involves slavery, child sacrifice, and the wrath of dark gods all in the first chapter.

It's only gonna get ~~more disturbing~~ cooler from here.

One day of hard labor later

2009-07-31T20:50:21Z

The seminar room now has an 800x600 projector with both computer and video game inputs.

You're welcome.

(And wait till you see lab 118)

Wave wave wave

2009-07-28T15:27:20Z

I got a developer's account on Google Wave

This is a real error message:
"This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence, and may explode. If you don't wanna explode, please re-open the wave."

That is all

Procedural Worlds

2009-07-20T13:06:39Z

It seems Chewie and I have decided to gang up on Dr. Briggs and insist on a joint computer science senior project. We've done joint projects before and had them come out well so I'm sure he'll say yes. We're seriously inspired by Dwarf Fortress to take our own spin on procedural world generation for games and simulations. My idea is to make the world actually round, so that weather etc. can be more accurately simulated. Also, voxels. Those will make deformable terrain very easy.

I've been plundering the ACM library.... abwahahaha.

July of the 4th + Epic Dreams

2009-07-06T13:18:27Z

We went to Smith Mountain Lake. I'll skip the tedium and just say that the lake became a sea of boat lights, the masts of the sailing ships a modern St. Elmo's Fire.

Okay so I know most people don't like reading about other people's dreams, but...
1.) I dreamed that Estonia had an embassy right by Lynchburg College.
2.) Estonia suddenly became a crazy totalitarian tyranny state and changed its name to something hard to say.
3.) Estonia also decided that it wanted to rule the world.
4.) The soldiers from the embassy rounded up all the students and made us say the Estonian Pledge of Allegiance before herding us into a concentration camp and giving away all our school housing to Estonian families.
5.) A nice Estonian woman dropped me a hint that there was a flaw in the locking mechanisms that kept us all in the camp.
6.) I needed medicine so a mean Estonian woman escorted me to go get it. On the way back I spotted the flawed mechanism and broke free to jam it. The gates were stuck open and everyone rushed out to storm the Estonians.
7.) I found a girl trapped in a cell with no food or water and set her free.

Estonia?!?!

Edit:
The Governor's School has arrived, and the Asian/Indian population of Lynchburg skyrockets. Over the years they've run through every single color the t-shirt printer sells, so this year they went for the obvious choice: tie-dye.

Eight-bitting it up

2009-06-29T13:29:39Z

Through a combination of wine (the Windows compatibility layer kind, not the kind you drink-- natch) and incredible luck with ported copies of ancient software, I got my entire 8-bit music toolchain working under Linux, even the sound player that didn't work under Vista(?!). I should prolly post the zipfile somewhere, since it's all free software.

I got invited to participate in a contest to do a remix of a game theme on the spot, time limit 6 hours. I actually only got 4 hours 45 minutes because of IRL hospital drama, but whatever... the theme was the old space shooter "Wing Commander" and I picked some boss theme at random because I never played it. The ending is lame and needs reworking because I ran out of time, but I came up with the chiptune "Boss Fights Are Silly" based on this original.

I came in 4th, which really wasn't so good, but the other participants had been composing for years and told me they wanted me to come back.

Our life

2009-06-25T13:05:48Z

Last two days have gone something like this:

"Your little brother is saying he feels sick but he still has to go to school."

"Your little brother is still whining so I called the doctor. She'll see him tomorrow."

"The doctor called back and said she thinks she should see him tonight and to go get X-Rays now."

"The doctor called back and said to go ahead and check into the hospital. And that he might want to consider dropping out of that course."

"His lung collapsed again and they're gonna have immediate surgery to permanently hold it open by gluing it to his ribs."

The good news: in the light of emergency surgery, LC has waived the requirement that Timmy take Algebra 2 in summer school before starting college, because there's only one session for it here in Bedford. (He missed an entire year of high school due to prior illness, and when he graduated he was still missing just this one class.)

Also, a lot of blue flowers suddenly about.

Germanic++;

2009-06-22T20:36:42Z

It's that time of year again: Melissa gets her summer paychecks and orders foreign Harry Potter books.

I made it an explicit goal to collect at least one of each Germanic-language edition. I already had Dutch (duh), Afrikaans, and German. I just ordered Saxon, Swedish, and Faroese (hi Taelor). This leaves one more set of three: Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. I can't find Icelandic for less than $100 so that will probably have to wait to be the capstone of the collection.

Sadly, I don't think there will ever be a Frisian edition... or any of the other spoken-in-about-the-size-of-Bedford-County languages and dialects.

EDIT:
There are 60,000 speakers of Faroese in the world.
There are 73,000 citizens of the city of Lynchburg.

Talk about a rare and unique book...

The Fanboy, Part 2

2009-06-21T15:36:54Z

So do ya'll remember that at Katsucon, I went to talk to the chiptune people and it turned out one of them was my fanboy from IRC and he hugattacked me as soon as I said my handle?

Yesterday I was at AMA (it's not as bad as you think guys) and there was a dude using a Linux laptop and I walked up from behind him to ask him what program he was using. "Ah yeah, this is cacalib, so... how are you"

Lolwat! At least he seems to think my new chiptune is okay.

Writer's Block: I Can Relate

2009-06-18T13:28:42Z

What fictional character do you most identify with?

View 508 Answers

Hermione.

Most boring answer ever?

Though I never went through the teenage dating phase, pretty much everything else is spot on. Even our appearances....

ATI Raaaeeg

2009-06-12T14:05:07Z

Okay, my new computer works great and I am very happy with it. However I am not so happy with ATI.

The underlying graphics core of Linux is called X, and they just released a new major version that you have to compile new graphics drivers for. ATI manages its own closed-source drivers and, for their new version, they declared the vast majority of their own cards currently in use as 'legacy' and only added support for very specific, very new cards. Put another way: I have a brand new computer which I got YESTERDAY and ATI is not supporting the graphics card inside. This means I cannot use any Linux distro which uses the newest X, which means I cannot use the newest Ubuntu, for example. (I tried, it blackscreens.) (Oh and BTW it's an onboard card because of the ultra-small form factor, that is, I can't replace it even if I had any money left over.)

Complicating the problem is that Ubuntu currently offers two versions, and the older one is one kernel version too old and doesn't have the wifi driver I need. Fortunately, the Crunchbang variation of Ubuntu is somewhere between the two and works fine, although with my external wifi instead of the internal one. (Maybe I can hack that into working tonight.)

EDIT: here are some magnified screencaps of the character tiles I've been working on for my hypothetical game:

And a normal-size of Gaerinn's full pic:

It's gonna be a good day

2009-06-11T14:44:34Z

- And suddenly, tiger lilies. Thousands of them.

- The Ribler girls are gonna be here today! They are two 6yo girls adopted from Vietnam. They are both the smartest and most adorable little girls I've ever met, and I think the absolute world of them.

- My new desktop is coming today! My dearly beloved Sanguine has died the final death after five years of faithful service, and yes, I cried. The new one is about the size and shape of a Wii.

All aboard the friendship

2009-06-08T13:30:14Z

Yusss I had a Weekend Most Excellent down at the geekhaus in Danville.

Gizmo is teh awesome.

And something absolutely amazing happened at ye olde Goodwill.

I've been looking for a working copy of Pokemon Blue for about a year. In the bookstore section of Goodwill I found a book on ancient Greek for two dollars and took it to the books-only register, which was on a glass case filled with some odds and ends. I put the book on the counter and said "I'd like this please and... and... AND THAT BLUE THING RIGHT THERE"

$5. It works perfectly. :D

Played it on Kytri+Mark's Gameboy-to-Super Nintendo adapter for a few hours. I have one of these too that I bought for when I finally found a Pokemans, hope it works.

Also, a Clefairy is just a Jigglypuff that doesn't FAIL.

I can do this too.

2009-06-04T22:58:57Z

What a majestic creature is the horse- How lovely are his ways to behold!
Possessed of a noble temperament, sculpted in the strongest form,
His gait shows pride, his head held high.
A king does not walk, lest he seem a mere man- he rides upon a horse.

Grades are totally appropriate for the posting

2009-06-03T00:14:31Z

 C S   375   DIGITAL SYS PRIN/LAB    A-   4.0  14.80 RIBLER,R.
 C S   385   INTERNET-BASED SYST     A    3.0  12.00 ROUSSOS,C.
 PHYS  181   SOLAR SYST ASTRONOMY    A    4.0  16.00 SUMERLIN,N.
 INTL  101   GLOBAL POLITICS         A+   3.0  12.00 PAYERHIN,M.
 C S   380   ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGE    C-   3.0   5.10 BRIGGS,W.

Dr. Briggs you are great but your classes are like murder soup for the soul

Zanzeibel!

2009-06-02T03:55:07Z

It is Zanzeibel, studying a book about northern languages! This is drawn entirely in Nintendo-game colors and also completely from scratch!

Truth

2009-05-24T15:51:47Z

melissa> bureaucracy refers to the tendancy of governments to add more and more
rules and requirements to their internal workings, which slows down
everything...

smile> like vista

Chillax (bored)

2009-05-21T14:23:02Z

After graduation, everything on the college gets really, really laid back. For about a month, nobody on staff has anything pressing to do, except maybe in Enrollment. Half the staff moves to four-day workweeks, the other half is on vacation, and my coworkers take half-hour long smoking breaks- even the ones who don't smoke.

And I am bored out of my precious little tree.

Halfway through June, things will start gearing up for Governor's School, and in July the cafeteria will open again to keep the little darlings fed. In August, it will be quiet again, but it's time to get ready for the return of the students, including all those wonderful, annoying freshmen.

Guess who's gonna torment herself working the IT checkin table for the third year in a row, for the privilege of moving into her new house early. I'm not sure who's more annoying, the dumb blondes among the freshmen or the prissy old ladies in the graduate student program.

Majora's Mask HECK YEAH

2009-05-20T14:20:38Z

It always seems that everyone treats Majora's Mask like the unwanted stepchild of the Zelda series.

THEY'RE DUMB AND WRONG AND MAJORA'S MASK IS FRIKKIN AWESOME

The world, the music, it's all come back to me, and it's all fantastic. THIS WAS MY CHILDHOOD.

While the storyline doesn't have the epic scope of Ocarina of Time, it does have more replay value (you can redo dungeons and quests without restarting the whole game, due to the time travel mechanic) and it has a lot of gameplay improvements. You also feel more personally attached to the NPCs since most of them have names and lives that they go about. It always broke my heart that you couldn't solve everyone's problems in one three-day span- but I'd like to think that when you beat Majora, all your alternate timelines collapse into one and you've saved everyone.

So yeah, if you have a Wii, go spend the ten dollars to get the re-release. It was worth $60 when I was a kid and it's certainly worth $10 to play it again.

rick2.jpg

2009-05-19T18:49:49Z

Guess whoooooo.

Well um. Apparently the images stopped loading? Darn.

Post gosh darnit

2009-05-18T03:33:49Z

Write moar posts, my graduated friends

Write moar.

If I had known that getting a replacement sound cable at Radio Shack was $4, I would have had nice sound these last few months.

<3 thunder

2009-05-15T03:07:40Z

Thunderstorms high in the mountains are really weird,

You can *distinctly* hear thundercracks that move parallel to you between other hills, without the main burst of sound ever hitting you.

Also, kerBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

:D :D :D

ilu all

Edit: Also, I had a nightmare that I was taking a class with professor Snape - specifically, it was the last day of class, and he said I'd only turned in one assignment all semester, which I felt wasn't true at all. Most frustrating was the thought "I can't even remember what he teaches" and I don't think "potions" was the answer.

Critical news release

2009-05-10T20:51:18Z

Guess who has more than 54 gallons of books in her room?

Yes, gallons.

No joke can cover this.

2009-05-07T14:42:13Z

OH MY CTHULHU HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN

WE'RE DOOMED

Their site is down -- being slashdotted, dugg, and generally just slammed

But it seems to be 100% true

Raining wallets

2009-05-03T19:04:43Z

I just found and turned in the fourth lost wallet this semester. This seems very statistically unlikely, so I guess I am just way more observant of things that don't belong than most people? I am worried that Security is gonna start thinking I'm some sort of gentlewoman thief who steals a wallet, removes the cash, and returns it with the important ID cards still inside. Frankly, a valid, matching ID and credit card is worth way more than the pocket money of a college student...