My brain makes things explode.
Life
Blog entries related to life in general
I’m not dead. I promise. So can I please eat your brains?
Mar 16th
Well, I haven’t exactly blogged much of anything in the past couple weeks, mostly because I’ve been side-tracked with a couple projects, such as the new website for the Keyboard-Failure IRC network (http://www.kbfail.net- or point your IRC client of choice to irc://irc.kbfail.net). You can see the new theme (which I think is a major improvement over the pink-background, black-text spawned by the lack of any desire to work to give KBFail a real theme/system. What can I say? We’re all lazy.) by going to the development page: http://minalien.dynalias.net/kbfail/. Guess when I get around to working on it, I’m going to install the newest Release Candidate of SMF for development/testing of the new site, and I’ll probably get around to rebuilding my old mod to integrate Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter (which I use on this blog) sometime soon, too. Gods, I wish SMF were object-oriented. :P
It seems that I do actually have somebody paying attention to the Direct3D Pong tutorial series I’ve been writing. I kind of shrugged off doing much more work on the project because I didn’t think anybody was bothering to read it, but a recent tweet shows me that there is at least one person reading it. That, for me, is plenty – so @Ogreman, you can look forward to the next tutorial in the series to come along (hopefully) by the end of this weekend.
I’ve been going through some.. personal issues. Anybody familiar with my past will probably know what I’m talking about, so I’ll just kinda leave the details at that. Suffice to say that life is a pain in the ass, but I’m (uncharacteristically) looking toward the brighter side of things and moving forward with life. On the lighter side of things, my plans to visit Erin in Phoenix are going through, so I’ll be blissfully free of work and hanging out with a friend. I’ve been acting very out-of-character for me, recently. I mean, social activity? Something seriously has to be wrong with me. I think I broke my head. D:
Recently renewed my subscription to Safari Books Online – I pay for the $40-ish unlimited subscription, but they’ve got a $20-ish (monthly) ten-books-per-month plan. Very useful, and I highly recommend it for anybody who deals with technology on a hobby basis. Large collection of full books on there, ready for you to read on your computer at home, or even in mobile-optimized forms on your iPhone or (if you’re one of the cool kids, like me) Android or other smartphone. Anyway, I’ve been reading up and studying for the CCNA certifications, which I’m hoping I will be able to take on-base without first going through the “NCO” courses. In the worst case scenario, I’ll just find somewhere closeby off-base, probably in Los Angeles, to take it on my own. They’ve got a full collection of Cisco networking books, programming (including game programming) books for a large selection of languages (Obj-C, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Java, HTML/XHTML, PHP, ASP.NET.. you name it, it’s there). For those who can afford it and will use it, it’s much cheaper than buying each of the books separately, and much more legal (and less of a pain in the ass for searching) than downloading the books on your favorite torrent client.
Need to stop being lazy.
Feb 16th
Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to stop being lazy and get some work done on the OS X port of Waxy’s Sushi Party. So, for the next couple of nights, I am going to start working my ass off to get an early prototype ready.
This means a lot of playing the game, taking notes, and fucking around with Torque Game Builder for me, and nightly development blog entries for the whole.. two or three of you who read my blog. Yeah, so, enjoy. >.>
What did I just do?
Feb 4th
Making my terminal insult Justin.
Well, I’m not entirely sure why, but for some reason I seem to have thought that it would be an okay idea to buy a Mac. What is wrong with me, I honestly don’t know, but I can say that it’s a pretty solid system. And I like the fact that the iMac only has a single cable – the power cable – while everything else (system, monitor, etc) is either built-in or (in the case of the keyboard & mouse) running through Bluetooth.
At least now I can start working on the native builds of my Mac-based projects (Waxy’s Sushi Party among them).
An Update
Jan 23rd
So, I know nobody reads my blog, but whatever. Yeah, I’m posting in defiance. Take that, everybody who doesn’t read this! That will show you. Yeah.
Anyway, a lot of drama going on with the management of Simple Machines Forums, which is a shame because it’s such a great piece of software. You can read about it here. I won’t be surprised when things just go to hell and the people who want to stick with SMF’s original values end up creating a new branch of SMF that does follow their visions. But I guess this is a good enough reason to start looking at other bulletin board systems. Seems to be a lot of this type of drama going on in the internet world these days – once-strong communities that lose favor of their long-standing members and being taken over by a single entity that was once thought to be a valuable member of the community. Here’s looking at you, ZFGC – you know who I’m talking about.
Still have a lot to do recently, between picking up the work on SevenIRC (which hasn’t progressed at all since the last post, to be honest), upping the work on PkGame (I’ve been doing a lot of design work here), and now the port for Waxy’s Sushi Party. Anybody who wants to see the game can go here and check it out. I’m currently building the Mac OS X port for the game, and doing some prototyping and working with HiVE to come up with design considerations for the XBOX 360 port (planned to be published through XBOX Live! Indie Games, so keep your eyes peeled if you’re interested). Unfortunately, I only have a Windows computer, so anybody with a Mac computer that is willing to do some beta testing at a later date, don’t hesitate to get hold of me. The engine I’m using (Torque Game Builder) for the Mac prot is cross-platform, so there may (pending discussions with HiVE) possibly be a new Windows build, as well.
Still doing some planning for several game development tutorials, hopefully I’ll get around to starting them soon. Played the demo for Brutal Legend, and I’m sold. I’m buying it next weekend, after I get paid, along with Mass Effect 2 PC.
All Set
Dec 29th
Alright, so, got WordPress set up (again), got my GeSHi and OpenID plugins installed, got things set up to try to block spammy comments, and, most importantly, I found a pretty interesting theme for the blog. Now I just need to work on the TorqueScript language file for the GeSHi plugin (CodeColorer, specifically) and make sure my Gravatar is working properly, and everything should be green for me to start writing up some development tutorials.
