Erkki

Also, I watched Drive a couple of days ago and that was pretty rad, if somewhat depressing.

Watched John Carter yesterday, because I only found out that it exists this week. I had to watch it because I really liked the books as a teenager. If I had to read them now, I would probably think that they were too simplistic. Which is why I thought it really weird that they would make a movie out of it now -- and the actual movie was even more simplistic as it seems they had to skip any philosophy that was there in the books, to fit it into a 2+ hour movie. But there was still a small bit of fun there. I wouldn't watch it again, but I might watch a sequel if they made one (which I understand is a slim chance since it tanked?)

I had some infection in the heel in September, most likely due to the sudden increase in workouts. Had a little break in October, and it seems to have mostly gone, although sometimes I still feel a bit of something there. Now I want to resume my usual schedule again, and I will likely do 10-13 hours of salsa/yoga/bicycling again this week (9 done already! yay!). I have given up on running due to the heel thing and other things that running makes hurt, but I want to resume football again next week. I guess by the end of next week I'll have realized how my body is handling the new schedule and maybe I'll have to hold back a bit more. How the hell did I become this nuts about working out? For the past few years I basically did nothing in fall/winter, only riding bike 2 time a week in the summer, and now I'm the guy who works out most among anyone I know (not that I see it as a competition).

He actually said that some essential gender differences make them flock to different interests, and that this makes equality impossible, and that equal rights usually is about equality. I guess I could have found an argument against this, such as the environment all around us gently pushing girls and boys to different interests instead of it being inherent. But at the heat of the moment there were so many things being said I missed that opportunity. But anyway, he seems like a guy who believes in absolutes. When I suggested that fighting for womens issues is better than ignoring everyone's issues, he called it discriminatory. He also denies the male privilege (as is his privilege), and likes to set up strawmen, like women not wanting equality in martial arts or something. I feel kind of bad that I didn't continue the argument in the office today (he was in the office briefly, usually works remotely), but I don't want to get into those things while working as my office time needs to be rather well used since I tend to minimize it due to other activities. He also didn't bring any of it up until he had to say goodbye so I thought I'd just let it be.

I was arguing with 3 dudes on my team yesterday, but they wouldn't give up this time. One revealed himself as totally anti-feminist, not believing equal rights are possible. Don't know how to convince him...

I love that this thread has existed for as long as it has. I think I was a feminist pretty much from the start, maybe because the way I was raised, but I was also rather sexist. This thread has given me a better understanding of what sexism and feminism are and also an ability to argue about why sexism is bad. I sometimes even have fun arguing against the sexist or anti-feminist things some of my co-workers say/share on facebook occasionally. They are smart people so I think each time when they stop arguing further (usually by not responding any more), they have realized that they can't make a further argument without seeming like a total dick, and I hope that takes them closer to having a better understanding of sexism and realizing what feminism is actually.

Saw 3 movies in the past few days: Under the Skin -- I somewhat liked it, but I didn't really understand what the message was. Interstellar -- great soundtrack! Jodorowsky's Dune -- one of the most inspiring movies I have seen. And wow, Jodorowsky looks much younger than 84.

Hmm... I could not watch that to the end. With headphones I would have been able to watch even less. Flashing images are one thing, but I have a really low tolerance for jittery sound, and if someone uses that intentionally for 10 minutes straight, they can fuck right off.

SuperCatMan

I've been working on my own programming language (I took a break from it this year, though) and the intention is to make it especially friendly towards game development. I have this somewhat strange idea that game code would be better if the math in it was written more clearly, like you'd write it on a white board or paper, e.g. use real math notation. Unicode is starting to become more realistic to use for that and my language kind of focuses on enabling crazy syntax shenanigans to allow writing things like a ∙ ĉ to mean the dot product of vector a and the normalized (unit) vector of c, or writing |a| to mean the length of vector a. I came upon this idea when I was writing a port of the Box2D physics engine, and I had really difficult time understanding what some of the heavily inlined math code was doing, even after correctly porting it to another language. The code was difficult partly because it was inlined, but I also think that languages are not allowing us to express the math in a very readable way. I want to create a language that allows the math to be written very cleanly (while keeping it plain text) but still keep the same performance advantages that manually inlined C or Java code would have. Is this idea stupid? Allowing syntax close to math notation surely makes the syntax rules of the language more complicated than most, and I have seen some mathematicians say that the well-known notation for math isn't actually that important and conventional programming language syntax is just as good. How is it really for a newbie or experienced game developer? Is math code hard to read and understand? How much of game code is actually about math? Does the syntax of a language matter much or not? PS I'm not sure the language is actually going anywhere, it is just a hobby project for now, and some other important goals for it are providing clear error messages and making code as safe as possible (e.g. avoiding mutable state), and also the ability to easily use existing C libraries (some conflicting goals here, hehe). PPS here are some syntax examples (I hope your system displays them correctly, rendering such unicode text is still not perfect) ∃! xs , x -> x = 3 // there exists only one x in xs where x equals 3 2 ∈ xs // 2 is an element of xs 5 + ∏ xs // 5 + the product of xs ∛(27) + |-3| // cube root of 27 + absolute value of -3

I think there's nothing bad about feeling a bad-ass about small things you do [in games], but you should realize that it doesn't make you a bad-ass in general. The last time I felt a real bad-ass in games was in Mount & Blade Warband, when I started to get the hang of chamber blocks and even won some duels against guys like Bear and Technoviking* and I don't remember who else. I was probably not in the top-anything, but there were some moments that were pure awesome. Like the day (or was it a whole week) when some clan turned it all into a joke and played zulus, wearing no armor and equipped only with spears (a really hard weapon to use) and throwing spears. I joined them for some hours and it was glorious. There were other times when I managed to learn some stealth techniques and successfully use them to help guarantee victory to my side. It felt glorious and I don't think there's anything ridiculous about it. But I also know nothing of it really applies outside of that game. And I played for more than a hundred hours to get to a level where I was getting good. But also the same is true for many other things besides gaming. You can be good at some real life stuff, but it doesn't necessarily apply to anything else. Or it probably will, if you get really good at something, you learn about learning to be good at something. Games can do that too, I think. One of my colleagues once said that he doesn't understand how people who are not programmers can function in society because you learn so much of how stuff works by proxy of programming. Well, I think the same can be said about almost any profession, and probably about any hobby that is taken seriously enough. Except I think there is a way of taking a hobby both very seriously and very superficially at the same time, and I think these gamergate gamers are doing that. * I know those names don't tell you anything, I'm just writing them down so I don't forget.

Dang, the local dark nights film festival is about to start. I forgot all about it until today, haven't prepared at all. I have completely skipped it the past few years, but this time I already know two movies I definitely want to see: Jodorowsky's Dune and Hard To Be God

What do people here think of this guy? Someone on Facebook linked to one of his pieces "Fuck Yes or No", which I thought was ok, and I read a couple of more. He seems to be pretty anti-PUA, but ...

Well, that's 3 movies added to my to see lists, after watching the trailers. Already saw Place Beyond the Pines, that was great.

Some Ubisoft games disappeared a year or two back from Estonian and other Eastern European Steam stores. I remember Far Cry 3 or an Assassin's Creed not being available on release. Don't see what the point is, though.

God damn, I just can't get over how great that Santiago de Cuba Añejo is with coke. It actually makes coke (zero) taste better. If I was not afraid of becoming a drunk I would drink this all the time. Also, unfortunately I'm just about to run out of coke and the stores are closed already.

Haha, I can't tell if that Still Alive cover was made as a parody of gamergate or by a gamergater.

I watched Cría Cuervos and it was rather good. Should watch more Spanish movies to help with learning the language.

Yeah, I kind of liked that, but I think with some language features you can mimic that easily. I managed to get very close to the UnrealScript states feature in an entity system I wrote in Scala a few years back.

It's not fully designed yet so it's hard to say yet. In his first videos he ranted a lot about C++ and how working in that language is making everyone (and himself) unproductive or demotivated. Then he pointed out some flaws in potential replacement languages, such as being forced to use GC. His second talk was mostly what would be different in an ideal language compared to C++. And I guess after that or even before he started actually experimenting with writing a prototype and now he is convinced that he'll never do a big project in C++ again. I like seeing that kind of enthusiasm, which can easily get lost, though, once one gets past the first very productive phase of a project. I think at the moment the most interesting features are that the syntax is very regular, being the same for example for locally declared anonymous functions and for global functions. Then you can also run any piece of code during compile time, and there is a way to plug into the type checker to report your own errors for some function calls, such as mismatch of printf arguments. There is a way to defer statements to the end of the current block, which I don't like at all, but otherwise it seems like it could become a relatively simple and neat language that would be a joy to use. I think he had a pretty cool example too: running a space invaders clone at compile time and the number of invaders you defeated would then get compiled into the program. Of course this may end up as a rather dangerous thing... Now you could write an infinite loop and instead of your program, the compiler would hang.

Thread resurrection time! I've been putting this off, but I really should move my big computer out of the living room. Also, I think by now I can get a small living room machine that is more powerful than that one. So, what happened to the steam machines? Are any available right now? Anybody here using one?

Blow's language is looking interesting. I'm impressed that he managed to do compile time code execution as well in one month. When implementing his compiler using LLVM libraries, that could even be rather efficiently be done with JIT instead of a bytecode interpreter.

Did a bit more digging, I think this youtube playlist has all of Miško Hevery's "Clean Code Talks": I think every programmer should watch those, or at least the one I linked in the previous post. It makes some not universally understood truths about object-oriented programming very clear -- and even though there are a few details I might argue with depending on the situation, most of it is applicable in more cases than I initially thought. I wish I could find a similarly good presentation about functional programming and a few other topics, to combine into an "ultimate programming lectures" playlist. [edit]I just realized that I haven't watched the first video on that list, I was talking about the last 3. The premise of the first talk actually sounds a bit suspicious to me.

Happy Birthday!

People seem rather stoked about the Hobbit trailer but I don't really understand why. It barely even features THE HOBBIT.