4/19 One Day Off

Poor Sora, he had quite an adventure over the weekend.

Woah, this is just like an old school typewriter, but since it's in the "digital world" I think of it as some portal millions of whatever's away. But that's not it at all.

It's the fucking future again!!!


Woah, look at these things. Everybody owns one because it would be ridiculous not to. And smartphones, come on.

Oh, this is really special. It's like a typewriter that shows up all sorts of things.

So let's take a minute as to why old people don't quite understand "computers" the way that younger people do.

So, it's atypewriter. That's wha i remember using and that's one of the things it does. I mean, it looks like a typewriter?

So then everybody has phones, and there aren't even real buttons. but sure enough, it's a digital typewriter, too.

so it displays shit. But it also has the ability to send it to every oher computer lined up with it to display the same thing. This means that other people can form groups and put the information in an easily sharable place so that everybody else can read it.

Oh man, this is so scary. lol.

yea, so there are all of these sharable typewriters. And everybody has the ability to push and read anything on them? oh man, that's the scariest thing i've ever come across.

But i went way beyond that. The typewriter can play games. Oh, and just recently they took typewriter games where you have no fucking clue. 3D virtual worlds.

So from somebody that knows how a mechanical typewriter works, let's look at it from my perspecitive.


So imagine a mechanical typewriter.  You have the keys and the paper.
so what we wanted to do was create a machine that does the exact same thing as an actual typewriter but the ability to display what you type not on paper, but on a little screen. think about the underlying mechanics of that device are.

Oh, without moving parts that the person using it would really see. So the letters almost magically appear. ok, that's like generation 1.
So, there is a little machine that's connected to the keys. It is a bunch of wired circuits, so when somebody presses one of the buttons, it triggers some mechanism that moves little cursor ahead, as well as prints the last letter butten you pressod. And again, it's just like that mechanical typerwiter you had, but science got it to work as this electric device.

but mechanically, it's exactly the same. Like a typewriter with whiteout.

And, there's arrows that let you edit anywhwere on the page at any time.

e're not talking about a mouse or harddrive or anything else. just as much as i described and nothing more.

from there

i want the text to look really nice. Like, i want the screen to be so good that i can't see the dots in the letters anymore. I also want the ability to store like millions of pages text. Because you might be storing thousands of pages depending on how much you write, and you're not going to want to print it all, we are going to put some buttons that let you save what you're working on, clear the screen, or open up one of the pages you wrote before. but we won't let you put one sheet on top of another sheet, only one sheet gets shown at a time.



Ok, from there (that was actually backing up a bit)

well, if the thing the type, i could probably make it also draw in at least black and white on this screen. But, it's really expensive to actually be able to toch the screen, so i'm going to give you a little up/down/left/right arrow that can move around a letter an the screen, and save wherever you say it should.

eventually, we decided that sucked, so we invented the mouse, which is just the typewriter buttons being pressed to move a little arrow around. Ultimately, we went even beyond that to give you wifi mice, touchpads, touch panels, but that's really all it is.

ok, so we now have a mouse.
what if instead of words in part of the little device, there was a picture of a button. and then people wouldn't accidentally press the save/clear/load buttons with tehir fingers anymore. and they have to highlight it with the arrows and press an "activate" button

So advance upon advance, it's not some deep mystery. the typewriter can only do a few things, so we just use that to build up thinsg that loook like they are magic. buttons, scrollers, all of that just manipulates the pages of text to show you things a different way. games. getting the pictures of the words on the screen requires a constant little electric mechanism to send repeated commands in ways i can listen for, run through an equation, and feed commands back into it to display different things at different places on the screen. Back in the day, i could only change the color of one dot per cycle.

But it needs to do that fast enough so you can type at least 100wpm. It needs to update faster than once a second for sure!

so how fast? 100 times a second? 1000 times? i mean eventually, we have that up to 3.6 billions times. here's the reason why.

So everytime we get that signal to do an equation and feed it back into the typewriter, we can also do math equations, too. when you press the buttons on a calculator, you are just filling in the equation based on what information.

from here.

it needs to have a way to know what you've written and save it. so obviously if you have thousands of pages, you'll want a way to look through them at some point. they've been nice to give me some pages that the user can't see as well.

who am i explaining this to?

sora got cut off. oh no. what happened to my opinion of him? i love him, but he's different. he feels so far away. and i just want to see him and make sure everything is ok. he's so great. anyway i liked young pictures of sora. maybe i'll get more. the real guy is so beautiful i think i'll be ok :)

so what's the problem? everybody has a typewriter, remember? these things are soo convenient. not just text anymore, these things can display maps? these things can do crazy math.. these things can display some amazing games and do it in 3D. sick.

but that's the whole world. webpages are text that we can move and change the color of in predefined ways (that we also stored on a sheet) I can send sheets to people, they can send me sheets. it's automatic, invisible, everywhere. i'm being bombarded by thousands of pages upon pages every second.

here's where it gets interesting. Every computer has a number. if i hook my typewriter up to yours, we can send pages to each other. i mean, who knows. maybe we're working on a draft for a book, and we both want to read it at the same time? i'm a mathematician, and i created an equation i want somebody else to look at. ok, valid use. Or, i'm a teacher, and i want my students to send me their data. I mean i can also write on a card and read it if i need to.

anyway, we share data.

So each typewriter has a number. like a serial number. when i hook it into a special box, i can send pages only to one person that's also connected to the special box as long as i specify the number. the box will make sure the other typewriters don't get your message.

if i connect that box to another box just like it, all typewriters i'm connected to can send anything to anybody. eventually, everybody's on the outside of this huge circle of typewriters and everybody has a direct line of connection to any other typewriter in the whole world. as long as i know the number. You might think - yea, but how does this work now?

ebay.com? yahoo.com? when you want to visit one of those webpages, you send a page to the typewriter with serial number 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.8.4, it does an equation on the name to figure out a page, reads a page (in the next equation, then the next) eventually finds the number of another typewriter, and sends THAT typewriter a page that says (typewriter at 133.32.12.111 wanted you to send the page called "ebay.com"). That typewriter gets your message, sends it back. You then display it. they are alll connected.

news, maps. it's all just pages. and it's got a cute futuristic feel to it, and i think that's what makes it so scary to me.

everybody has a typewriter, and they are all connected all the time. You can't right now control what it sends and receives page-wise, or what equations it's running, because you didn't know it was doing those things all the time. It's always churn churn churning away because it's waiting for you to press one of the buttons to turn on or or click the mouse or press Q. and microsoft has engineered these typewriters so they are very powerful calculation devices. it's so easy to write equations and run them - and ultimately turn pages into instruction sheets that i can feed back into the thing to see the output.

my job is to write the pages, turn them around, and put them back in. I've written thousands of pages of instructions. my life's work has been writing every way to make a video game look like a video game for the last 10 years, and i'm a specialist in having two simulations sync up between to active real-time players on two different typewriters.

so here's a page, that's like 1000 letters across and 800 letters tall.
it is just a picture of something. it's super picasso. whatever.

so i also have another page, and it's some lines with equations with missing numbers

so i take out a fresh sheet, and i start writing.

Take THIS color from THIS location (that the artist told me about) and run it through THIS equation
and then take THIS color from THIS location and run it through THAT equation
and then take THIS color from THAT part and run it through THIS equation

now take the answers of all those and put them in THIS equation
and out put...
orange to

57
..
592

now go back up to the top and do it again!

but my sheets are much much longer, and instead of changing this picture, it says hey da vinci, you write it on a blank one and then display it. and for one of these equations, say if somebody is holding this button down, write THIS color HERE.

eventually, we figured out a way to ignore commands
so when we're done running an equation, instead of putting a color somewhere, it gave us the ability to say hey, the answer to the next equation will determine if you skip the next line.
then we also gave you a command that says "jump to any line on this page"

This gave us control flow.
if EQUATION(x, y, z)
GOTO LINE 6
EQUATION1()
EQUATION2()
EQUATION3()
Line6Equation()

then you have gotos and jumps, and you can do loops. it's ery entertaining to watch it jump around. so maybe math my way to make it draw more than one dot in one place in one color.

Shapes.

draw this picture, display it, erase it, run these equations, draw the picture, display it, erase it, run these quations... etc

now things are moving on their own
and we're just waiting for somebody to press the button churn churn churn

so anybody you've sent data to usually keeps a copy of what you sent them.
see what you need to open a bank account, then see who has that information.

ok, so hacking

i write these automated equation sheets for changing the pictures for fun.
There's also an equation that lets you take a page from memory and send it to somebody
and because i can loop, i can ask the typewriter very nicely to send every page it has to my typewriter (i know the number)
So all somebody has to do is run my sheet, and i have all of their data.

so how do you run a sheet on somebody's computer without them knowing?
usually, you have to say "yes, run this program", but your computer is always running stuff.

but not just one at a time. it's got like a little switching mechanism. so if it's running one sheet, it does equation1(), then it sees which sheet is next, then runs that sheet, runs one equation, flips, etc.

and this program is the operating system.

the operating system rotates what pages are being run, and allows you to put new pages into this rotation. this allows you to literally abstractly run a web browser as one page, play some solitare somewhere else, and then look at pictures or type a whole new page up seemingly at the same time.

but realistically, even the ones you aren't actively typing on, like this explorer in the background, is still being updated because you might click on it. the operating system handles it so the thing you're working on feels the fastest (by giving it more guaranteed time to do equations)

so some programs have the ability to put other programs into rotation. here's my goal.

1) have the user download my instruction sheet. they might want to. if they know what it does, they probably don't want me digging through every single page on their typewriter. there's like tax stuff on this thing.

2) have the user put the program into rotation

3) have it run long enough so every page is sent

1 is easy. You can put this instruction sheet in a ton of places. You can put this instruction sheet inside the instructions of a game, or a website, or anywhere, really. somebody could have written the instruction sheet's equations and numbers to do the mean deed and when you look at it on the typewriter as a page, it looks like a fish. anyway, it's not hard. how many pages do you just download and don't even look at?

2 is tricky, because Microsoft and all sorts of companies on the web know people want to write this program, so they make it hard for this program to execute. Same goes for programs that might erase really important pages, or erase instruction sheets that are necessary to make the typewriter even function. so if you try to execute something like this, microsoft will ask you "do you really want to allow this program to do this thing?" before you always click yes.

Since that's hard, maybe we'll go a back-door route. Maybe find a program that already has the permission to run these equations without trouble to start the page for me. I won't need the user's permission then (the "desktop" or the background lets you run these types of programs, but will warn you before you can hit yes... duh)
but there are other programs on here that will just send pages willy-nilly to people. you aren't constantly clicking a box that lets chrome send pages to 8.8.8.8. no way. so maybe i'm going to find some equations in their instruction sheet that if i put some funny numbers into it, it will jump to somewhere or read a color from somewhere i want it to, and eventually screw up so bad, i get it to read and execute my commands from a different sheet like an old record player would.

so that's hacking. i put an instruction shet somewhere on your computer where you either execute it yourself or put it in a place where another program you use picks it up and runs it. eventually, i have your tax returns.

well, you can do a couple things. you can encrypt your pages. essentially run the words on the page through an equation that gives you a page you can't understand. then you take that page, run it through a different equation, and it comes back exactly like you asked for. the "equations" each need two variables - your sheet, and a number. then that number becomes a key to unlock and lock your data. pretty handy.
if it was a 4-digit pin code, i can just write an instruction sheet to try all 10,000 combinations, and i'll look at each one until i find the one that's actually readable, and then i'll know your PIN too for the rest of the files. or, we make that number long - SUPER long. a number with hundreds of digits. I could "brute force" it but eventually they just make the number longer and i barely get through a few billion keys before i give up. passwords work the same way.

but then again, some of those keys are stored on your computer in places that are easy to get to. experts then lock those keys up with even more secure keys that maybe only the typewriter can read from, but even those keys can be read. security experts know how these keys are work, where they are stored, how they can be accessed, and how to make them even stronger so when computers get more powerful and even longer keys can be brute-forced, they will have the next difficult to crack technology ready to go.

wifi works this way

we're just radio-ing each other pages. what's stopping me from listening to your pages? they have been changed before sent, and both sides know the key using some really really fancy math.

4/17 The Archer and the Swordsman, take 2

I vividly remember the day I met the archer for the first time. He was wearing an expensive forest green cloak with a pattern I couldn't draw or describe. He could easily blend into a crowd of other archers if he wanted to, but I would soon learn that wasn't his goal at all. Instead of a bow, he was awkwardly holding a sword too large and too heavy for him, and I clearly remember him walking over to me, nearly dropping the sword against the table where I was seated, and then managed to sit down across from me with the same grace and elegance as if he was in the company of the queen.

"I want to be a swordfighter," he said. "Any way possible."

I was thrown back in surprise. Such a man looked like he had never fired an arrow let alone held a sword in combat. 

"I'll be moving across the seas to take training from the best swordsmen in the whole world in only a few short months. Until then, will you train me?"

Any reasonable swordsman wouldn't dare bother with something so arduous, but there was something about this archer that caught my interest. He walked with grace, always seeming aware of exactly what was around him.  This was no ordinary archer. 

So with no reluctance, I stood up and looked him square in his dark eyes, and agreed to be his trainer. With only a few short months until his journey to the other continent, he needed all the training he could get.

It was his knowledge of swords that first drew my attention, even if he could barely hold one. 

At last, the training was to begin. 

But, that was the point. I couldn't will the archer to be a swordsman anymore than someone could will a fish to swim on the land. 

4/16 The Swordsman and the Archer, take 1

I was always a swordsman. I was born a swordsman, I will die a swordsman. My father brandished a sword just like his father, and that's how battles are fought here. Rather, that's how battles are won. I remember my first fight, as well as my first sword. And I could live the rest of my life as a happy swordsman if I chose to, and that's what would happen.

I've read stories about archers since I was a kid, but not until I met one in real life did I believe the stories might actually be true. Maybe before then, I assumed everybody in the whole world was a swordsman just like me, but when my eyes opened to other types of warriors, something changed deep inside me.

You see, right before I became old enough to fight battles alone, I realized I could just pick up the biggest sword and swing it as hard as I could, and I would win almost every time. The bigger the sword, the more powerful I felt. I didn't need grace, I didn't need precision. Now compare that to stories of people who don't even swing swords at all.

The archers are different than the swordsmen. They seemed much simpler, and much more sophisticated. I even went as far as taking an archery class near my home to learn what I could. I was obsessed - how could people so different fight battles without a sword? It was amazing.

I took years of training before I even picked up a bow, and more years before I shot my first arrow. I knew I was never going to be an archer, yet, each arrow I held made me question who I was as a swordsman. I had been fighting with only strength, no precision. I wanted to change as a warrior, to become a fighter who could do more than swing a sword.  So I decided to move to the land of the archers and take up training with them in their own land.

I guess I was most surprised by the country itself. The archers didn't just battle with precision, they lived their whole life that way. Everything was built around the same sophistication I had learned about back home.

Of course, I learned I could still fight battles with my sword there, but for the most part I awkwardly entered the battlefield with a huge bow and quiver strapped to my back, too. I met other swordsmen here learning how to be archers - some very talented, some not so much - but enough of them to witness them win battles.

But my biggest surprise was not from the swordsmen, it was from the archers. You'd be amazed at how many archers wanted to be swordsmen. Pictures of swordsmen on big signs in the town markets, training arenas on every street. I could get a job showing people how to just hold a sword if I wanted to. But, of course, I was dedicated to learn everything I could about archery, and even though I still practiced with my sword every day, I made sure to practice shooting arrows every day, too.

This continued for a long time. Of course, I look like a swordsman, most archers wouldn't even guess I knew how to hold a bow. But I was proud of where my archery training had gotten me. I could hit a target at 50 meters! It made me a better swordsman, too, as I was using my understanding of precision and timing to make better swings.  Maybe a few more years, and I can battle with arrows as good as with a sword.

Of course, that's not how life on the battlefield works.

One dark evening, I was going about my business, and a timid archer came up to me smiling and holding out a small dagger. He said he had just picked it up, but by the way he swung it around, I doubted it was his first knife. He looked at the giant blade strapped to my hip, looked me in the eyes, and asked me to help him become a swordsman.

Of course, it wasn't unusual for archers to want to be swordsmen, but this was the first person who had approached me who wasn't even holding a proper sword. I looked at him up and down at first; he may have lacked the skills, but he had the passion. His bow was long and slender, and his quiver was filled with hand-carved arrows of many different lengths.

After a few months, I had met the archer on a few occasions to help him hold bigger swords and help him with his swing. He always kept his bow neatly strapped to his back unless he absolutely had to shoot an arrow; I think I shot more arrows in battle than he did when we were together. One time I shot 30 arrows and only hit 3 targets; the same day he hit 5 targets clean through the center with one arrow.

Maybe it's a cultural thing

I've been getting to work very early hoping that I can do my own work before the real work starts. Today was a little different, I got some weird sleep after some odd dream of being chased by a gun-wielding maniac. I just didn't have the full motivation to get going.

Instead, I read the news. Today was depressing.

There is some supposed Quran burning in central Florida on Saturday, some real winners there. It has sparked a firestorm of complete idiocy in this country. I read another story about how most people in Ohio think God will take care of global warming and people need not worry. Last but not least, I read some long conversation about video game addiction, and I weep inside both for the victim of the addiction and the fact that I'm not playing games anymore. Ugh..

America has become a depressing place for an intellectual. Instead of the "American Dream" of growing up, earning based on your hard work, and doing what you want in life, you are stuck working for other people because that is the only opportunity that exists. You want to make something grand out of your life, but you are limited by lack of education. I am a very smart person - and yet I still have to play by the rules that people that are too scared to lose theirs have set up. When I eventually naturalize to some European or Asian country in a few years, it will be one of the greatest days of my life. I can't wait to leave this shithole. Last night on the news, I hear the German Chancellor talk about European freedoms. They have freedoms of speech and religion, they are safe from the worst crimes and you really can't go toting around a gun everywhere you go. People are important - not some multinational global corporation calling all of the shots and making sure that the low classes stay low. I will definitely be some polyglot at that time. What's an even richer factoid is that most Americans are learning Spanish as their second language to deal with the increased flood of Mexicans who live in this country now. If they were to naturalize to Europe, they would end up living in the poorest shittiest country in Europe! (ok, eastern europe is a true shithole, but Spain is just a fucking joke).

As humans, we are living in a truly strange time for "animals". I don't see dirt and grime, I don't have to hunt for my food, I don't really have any animal left in me to do these things anyway. I sleep on a space-age bed with processed blankets in a room that has scientifically proofed air filtration and cooling systems.

But I'm not happy.

My wife experiences complete anxiety - she's not worried about eating her next meal or getting enough water to live another day. She is worried about global catastrophe, about getting enough sleep for a night so she can do her homework. Homework for somebody else so she can prove to an employer that won't pay her her fair salary to make sure crazy people are ok. What a country.

I, on the other hand, just want to play with information and science. I want to create a program that would simulate life. I want to create a program that would interface cleanly with a person's mind and let them go through different stages and tunnels and understand a completely different part of themselves reflected back at them through the world they create. Of course, that sort of software takes time - and resources - and I have to do work for other people because the kind of software I want to create doesn't look like it's going to generate any money in the short term (the kind of money people are really worried about now!)

I am really excited for December 21st, 2012. I think that is the turning point for the world. There is going to be a lot of shit going on in the 6 months up to that point, and then the 6 months afterward.

more later.

construct

Ever watch The Matrix? Remember that part where Neo is on the Nebuchadnezzar and Morpheus loads him into the first white area? Morpheus calls it "The Construct Program".

I've been a real computer programmer for about 8 years. My background is different than your usual software engineer, though. I graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA in 2007 - a Bachelor in Real-Time Interactive Simulation.

Real-Time - lighting fast

Interactive - you can change it as its happening

Simulation - computer worlds.

I'm a video game programmer.

Your usual software engineer is good at creating data processing applications. I'm good at creating computer simulations. It's a distinction I deal with every day at the office, every office I've ever worked at. Most other engineers don't understand this distinction and think that I have less education than them. Turns out, my mind works "per-frame" and theirs looks at a different big picture that allows for less interaction and less simulation ability.

This distinction isn't important for the rest of the post, but it is important to point out for someone that doesn't know too much about programming video games. Games are a very special piece of software - they must operate a subset of commands very quickly 30 times a second as well as produce 1-2 million colored boxes in that same time so the user can see the progress of it.

When I first was tasked to create one of these simulations, I was completely naive. I had a barebones program that could display computer-generated fireworks in real-time. It did not allow any user input to change the fireworks. Today, I'm running 4 cores trying to synchronize how the physics and artificial intelligence systems work with drawing them in a breathtaking real-time world. Oh, how times have surely changed.

Ignorance is truly bliss. Back then, things were so simple. If i wanted to "press A to continue", i sat on something called a block that "listened" for the user to press the A button. If i wanted to navigate a menu, each box of the menu was some specific call to draw a rectangle at a location, and as the mouse's cursor's math was between some decidedly tweaked numbers (if the cursor's location is greater than 128 and less than 228 and the Y is between 50 and 100 and the left mouse button is down this frame but wasn't last frame, then tell the program that some button was pressed!!!)... today, things are a lot more "smart" where a menu button has it's own structure and coordination with the input system (oh yea, it's a system now) to check to see if a callback needs to be called because the button was hovered over and actually clicked.

I had lost my job this February. I was really excited to be home again - i could work on a brand new engine! I had programmed a physics simulation a few months before and had thought long and hard about programming a Deferred Lighting engine. That is a special way to visualize a computer world with a large number of lights - i only light things that you see from your perspective. Before this, I could only have a few lights in the world because every single object, no matter if you could see it or not, would deal with all of the lights in the world. I had a very fundamental naive knowledge of how to program this. Before this engine, I had really just got something called a Render Target working the way I wanted it to, and the entire engine could look at all of the render targets at any time.

But today, which is why I'm tying today, I want to lay everything about the construct down somewhere so my brain can thouroughly process this information properly. Talking to my wife is great, but until she responds back with actual answers, it will be easier to just tell the vast interwebs what I'm feeling and everything will be ok in the end.

I had drawn a few ideas on paper for a new threaded construct program. I'm only calling it "construct" because that was the concept from The Matrix that my wife actually understood. I wanted the user to be able to drag and drop any asset from his desktop into the program at any time, and have it show up as a usable asset. This was a huge difference from previous engines, these were ones that had big bulky asset management schemes that required everything to be plotted in some XML document and linked up to objects individually. lame. A better system exists.

After working at two different companies do I realize that a threaded program is the only way to go. Now that everything has more than one processor (xbox = 2, ps3 = 6, my home pc = 4) I should be writing simulations that can take advantage of all of these processors. I was so naive about that, too. I just sat down and banged out a system where different threads would run different processes, one for rendering, one for input, one for simulation, one for...... and magically it would all work! And it didn't. I had issues where I just simply couldn't deal with the entity format without memory problems. When you thread, two processes can't read the same memory at the same time. So much for that.

Last week, I sat down and designed a system that would work. 4 threads; Simulation, Render, Loading, and Synchronization. It is a beauty. Render would be one frame behind Simulation. Synchronization would be in lock with those two threads. Came up with an object format that would work. Came up with enough data to transmit between the two easily and with a small data format. Everything may work this time around.

So why am I still so anxious? I just suck at this or something. Honestly, I don't know where to start. I wanted to write this post to talk about it. Now I've talked about 200 other things to set it all up for you. Such is my life.

To start, I had to create a system to lock the sync thread between the render and sim threads. That was not as hard as it sounds, but it took 5 minutes to come up with a decent algorithm. I am essentially creating 4 gates. Sim and Render wait for their own gate to be opened, walk through it, and lock it behind them. When it's done, it unlocks one of two gates that the Sync thread is sitting behind. When Sync goes through its 2 gates, it locks those gates behind it, syncs everything, and then unlocks the sim gate and the render gate. Sweetness.

To load things, messages are generated in the sim thread and sent during a Post Message step to the loading thread. When the object is done loading, it sends a message back to the Sim thread that the asset is ready.

Today, I was starting to write the render thread. I was really stressing out about this. Render needs to order and cull things to render before it starts to draw. It needs to order them in a special way. What is all an asset? What is the least amount of information needed to draw things? God this is a crazy world.

If I have time to work on it tonight, I'll post how it went. I feel good about this. I just want to make the first level of Zelda64 from tools in the construct. God i have so fucking far to go.

Tuesdays are sometimes like Mondays

I had a good Labor Day weekend. Lots of rest, even though I wanted to spend time programming on the construct. There will be time to work on it in the future, but I definitely want to work on it right now. It sucks!

At work, nothing is going right. I am supposed to write up some documents for programming the next stage of the game. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what that is. It is not my job to create these documents without design input. Some people have already created a few game types, some things they want to see for next game, and level pitches. I don't know. My job is an AI programmer. There is some ideas for AI, but almost all of the pitches include head to head play with real players and not with whatever the fuck random characters we want doing tricks in the world instead. I feel like the other people on my team in my department have no idea how to do some of the things they should know how to do (especially for their pay scale!) and yet they are allowed to make the big decisions. I don't hate my job, I just wish it were a little bit better.

Japanese takes another interesting turn. I feel like I'm getting better at listening myself. Our exchange student said that exact thing 2 days ago when I asked her what had improved the most. I think that she doesn't understand construction on a few things, but overall she is doing quite well for someone just dropped into a society completely different than her own. I feel she will be a lot more comfortable speaking both English and Japanese around us in a few months, I hope that is soon enough for us, too.

Today I just really wanted to work on my own project. At work, nonetheless. But, I can't do that. I spent a lot of time creating something that would work, but it's not working. I fail, yet again. I don't know what to do! I have a beautiful and complex system in my head that I want to put in the computer. For some reason, I just can't make it work because I either don't have the time or don't have the concentration.

new blog time, gonna write something else

Frustration Thursday 90210

Shit all around. Frustration from every angle. Discomfort. Unhappiness. Sounds great for a Thursday.

On one hand, I have simple frustration from everyday things. Things that, regardless of my mood and the people around me, are frustrating. A great example is American politics. No matter how I feel, some asshole with a louder megaphone is going to say something that makes people around me agree with him; and these are usually things that I do not agree with at all.

On the other, I have frustration from things I'm encountering today. Coworkers are unusually loud today, a project I'm trying to work on in my spare time is not going at all like I want it to.

So I'm frustrated.

I don't have a lot of solutions for this feeling. It's just a stressy mess and I live with it.

I thought this blog post would help, but my fingers are not even cooperating with me.

Fuckkkk