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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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It's been three months hasn't it. Not a lot has happened during this time, which is why I haven't been writing very much about what happened recently. Actually, the problem is that too many things have happened outside of my own creative pursuits, which is why I have nothing to write here. Regardless, I think I have enough here to talk about, so let's have a go.
With a lot of my programming efforts circling around work, there's unsurprisingly little motivation to do anything serious at home, though to be fair there's not that much of an overlap between programming that you do for a hobby and programming you do for work (the latter tends to be a lot less pleasant but somehow more to show for, simply because you're building on existing work rather than starting from scratch).
Actually let me rag on about this for a second. The programming done at work is definitely a motivation for programming projects done as a hobby, though the relation is not direct (and it can't be, as the two are always toward different goals to each other). When I write Java at work though, there's always that strange feeling that I could use some of the ideas that I get there towards projects that I'm working on myself, though in the end because of a case of lack of time and energy I never really manage to progress this a lot.
And speaking of energy, I know a guy who has seemingly boundless energy programming stuff and he's made quite a name for himself – in particular he's already made a video game, which is something I am immensely admiring of, as I seem not to be able to make anything of that complexity; GUI programs just seem to escape my ability for whatever reason.
And that at last brings us to my own projects, which have gained a new member to the to-do list, an implementation of the game of Ùzje mahjong, which is like regular mahjong but (probably) worse and (definitely) weirder. The idea behind making the implementation however is not idle; I need a lot of play-testing to start the game, and how else to do a ton of play-testing than to use the current hot technology of the day: neural networks and "AI" type deals. The main thing I would need playtesting for is to ensure that scoring is exciting and diverse, without falling into the traps that many real mahjong variants have: the same old winning patterns taking the spotlight again and again. So the plan here is to do this:
At least that's the plan. Who knows how long this would take.
Other projects are not really faring so well either. They are coming closer to completion but they've still got some way to go. And `mkvid2 ` is as undone as ever.
The Drsk grammar is missing a key slice before I would deal with a release. It has to do with the digit state machine making unaesthetic results for a chain of 1s and 0s, which I would have to document the fix for. Also there are some other things in the orthography that I'd like to add, in particular vowel markings for various non-general purposes.
Worldbuilding continues apace, but it's still not very fast. I still haven't fixed `bocproc8 `, so there's no good scanning and posting facility yet either. All that would take time.
Finally there's a small issue about my health. While it seems like a lot of my stomach problems are now behind me, I would prefer not to gain all the weight that I have lost from it. So I have to be more careful about how much I eat. Especially when there are some issues with my skin that has come up again which means that exercise is going to be a bit of an impossibility.
I also owe an email.
I am on two writing projects: one about a parody Pokémon series called Matrimony, and another one where I discuss how a certain trope has some rather unhappy outlook on how humans behave. These would be posted here in due course.
The new environment at work's eaten up a lot of my time and has thrown it out of balance for a few months, but I think for now I have found some balance, if not the ideal one for my own pursuits.
I hope to eventually reclaim Saturdays as a time when I can do my hobbies, but only time would tell. There's really not much to report because of all that, but hopefully in two or three months I can push myself to get more done.