t3knomanser's Fustian Deposits

[02:01 -- 08/13] Me: oh, and have you played Armegetron?
[02:01 -- 08/13] Jeff: I miss programming, you're prolly gonna re-kindle my desire, lol.
[02:01 -- 08/13] Jeff: Nope.
[02:01 -- 08/13] Me: do a search for it, it's on sourceforge... TRON style lightcycle racing game, with internet play
[02:01 -- 08/13] Jeff: lol
[02:02 -- 08/13] Me: get the movie pack to upgrade the models so it looks like the movie
[02:02 -- 08/13] Jeff: whatsa TRON style?
[02:02 -- 08/13] Me: TRON... the movie TRON... you know, the original hacker-gets-sucked-into-the-computer movie?
[02:02 -- 08/13] Me: First movie with computer generated sequences?
[02:03 -- 08/13] Me: I mean, dude, it had gourand shading... that's pretty sharp for 1980
[02:03 -- 08/13] Jeff: Oh.
[02:03 -- 08/13] Me: it also had no plot or character development, and was a horrible movie, but it was awesome. Shading is so much more important than either of those.

A very common scenario in any lightcycle game is the "spiral of doom". Basically, you start dodging walls, and a crafty opponent blocks off every exit from a section of the board. So your only option is to loop around and around until you die. Hopefully, the other players are terminated before you get to the middle of your spiral.

In many ways, when you're trapped like that, you've entered an infinite loop. You've gone outside the bounds of your program and are stuck. Eventually, the system catches on, and you crash. In fact, if you reintepret the game as a representation of resource allocation, you've got lots of programs fighting for the same space on the computer. The ones that can't get enough resources crash.

Yes, I explain a geek game in geek terms, and justify it.

Today, during the large storm, the bottom of our street turned into a lake. not just a little lake mind you, the entire cross street flooded; it was almost knee deep. Cate and I sat at the bottom of the hill, watching cars fight through it, some plowed, some inched (inching is the more intelligent manuver, but we were rooting to see people plowing it).

Meanwhile, earlier this morning, we were watching a movie, and a groundhog pokes up on the porch and watches us through the window. This is one of the two groundhogs living in our yard. Last night, a skunk clawed the garbage, and an opossum and the cats share the kitten chow we leave on the porch. We have a horde of spiders eating an equally large horde of bugs.

All this, inside a city. Fucking wild kingdom. It's cool.

A tree just fell in our driveway, narrowly missing the house. It landed right where James had parked- but fortunately, James left about two minutes before it fell, to drop Tim off at work.

It's nice to be a subject of envy.

Tao Te Chip