Anyone still active on here?

Well i guess i should start writing here again. Or maybe g+, but they seem set to delete my account eventually, and nothing i write on facebook ever seems to be seen by anyone (i think that site regards me as uninteresting, which is fair enough).

Attempts to be sociable have mostly all faltered. Talking to people online is suddenly really frustrating, now that i know what doing it in person is like. The difficulty is finding people who are sympathetic, or at least not terrifying. Also i'm almost envious when i see people on Twitter &c talking to their friends. Otoh i guess it's a good sign that i'm at least emotionally aware enough now to even recognise that i'm lonely.

All the OkCupid ppl i talk to are either local but shy, or normal (and in some cases interesting) but too far away. There's a whole bunch over in Bristol (45 minutes away by train) and Birmingham (slightly further). Still haven't worked up the courage to talk to anyone on Skype yet, which is stupid cos the whole point of that plan was that talking on there would be less of an imposition on them and therefore less intimidating to me (i'd hoped).

Moping a bit, finding it hard to focus on anything.

Bought a Kindle, it's great for novels but the screen's too small for textbooks, but epaper's resolution is fantastic so maybe i can attach a magnifying lens or something (kind of like the PCs in Brazil :p ).

Also i'm puzzled by how it will, after ten minutes of inactivity, switch itself to show a random image of an old writing technology and then go to sleep. Why? (Rather than just going to sleep without hiding what i'm reading.) They refer to the behaviour as a screen saver but i can't believe that's true.. it just seems a really random thing for it to do, and i can't even choose what images it shows (i was thinking maybe a catalogue of recently read books (autogenerated by ebook management software on PC when you plug it in to add more books) since one thing i'll miss with switching to ebooks is the ability to ogle the bookshelves of others).

Registered on OkCupid on Thursday, Shoggoths Away is me.

It is now my favourite website.

As often happens when reading stuff i've written i'm kinda mad at my younger self for being such an idiot (am rereading the shitty emacs parody i wrote while learning clojure, which i'm thinking of reforming as a sorta reading time management / personal organizer browser extension thingy).

Been going out into the real world much more, suddenly i'm not ALWAYS the shyest person involved in every interaction. Also made some more online friends, mostly through fetlife, who i've been talking to a lot on msn -- was just about to go buy a better skype headset before the sun came out (and now it looks like rain again).

Blender continues to confound me. Am going to start doing daily practice sessions ANY DAY NOW.

New plan is to try to make friends with local furries, bootstrap social skills that way.

Step one: Twitter.

My god, it's full of bronies.

Yesterday went ok, but we probably won't end up as anything more than friends.

V nice guy but he just wasn't into me; learned a lot though — the boost to self-confidence from having someone (even vaguely / remotely / temporarily) interested was a real eye-opener.. going to the munch and furmeet were *massively* easier than i'd always feared, and people seemed^† to like me; hopefully i can keep that up and maybe make some friends.

In the meantime, intend to throw myself into work for a while.

† still waiting for usual paranoia to kick back in...

Wow, it's been a v strange few days.. someone posted on FetLife about how they'd *wanted* to go to the munch, but bottled out at the last minute (which i nearly did too) so i got talking to them, and they invited me to a Pride event plus loosely associated furmeet.. was my first time going to either; one of the furry guys i met got chatting on FurAffinity, as well as ukfur.org aaand FL (which he seems so have joined mostly for that purpose), so now we've got three concurrent conversations going on :p he's pretty neat, a sound engineer who's a bit aspie i suspect (it's actually easier to tell what he's thinking online than it was in person.. he spoke in a constant low monotone, *absolutely no* body language going on; plus his fursona is a snow leopard.. (aspies often seem to have a v strong cat affinity i find)).

Made a couple of good friends at the munch, both came along to the fur meet, good time was had by all etc.

Date's set for meeting the hopefully future BF, next Sunday i'll be going over to Hatfield where he's just moved to start a new sys admin job. V nervous...

Now i'm back to grappling with Blender and Irrlicht, working on the game (Subluminal, i've decided it's very probably called).

This is going to be an extraordinarily geeky romance i suspect, assuming it ever does kick off in person (will know for sure within a few days, but am uncharacteristically optimistic). I was going on about the hyperbolic trees again and now he's promised to show me the visualization he's made of the network at his workplace. Don't know what 'normal' couples talk about / gift each other but with us it's info viz, layout algorithms and practical uses for non-Euclidean geometry :)

He seems to quite like my game ideas, and has even offered to help out with coding, which was a startling possibility. The first two i should be able to manage alone, but the third / fourth games (Thief aboard a space station) are rather more complex, requiring enemy AI &c, and i had been wondering what to do about that...

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Went to a 'munch' on Monday.. the idea is that it's very hard to make friends when you're constantly trying to keep a side of yourself hidden (submissiveness in my case) so it's great to have a social event where everyone can let their guard down a bit. Many of us were a bit nerdy of course, all gossiping about the local libraries etc ^^

(It had been suggested i seek out kinky ppl by going to Mensa meets, but i think i much prefer this reverse version of that plan.)

Sorry for vanishing again, i met a *really awesome* sounding guy on FetLife and have been spending essentially all free time on MSN talking to him.

Not got much work done on coding or art etc. Did buy a much higher resolution webcam tho <_<

Not even been doing any reading, reddit or blogs or textbooks or stories or anything.. *extremely* unusual for me...

Damn, i just realised why Watts' Newscrawl's quality has been going downhill of late: he's posting on Facebook instead. "Gouts of assblood" now apparently, i'm beginning to think Zeus must be punishing him for something.

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Been sketching / doodling a bit, it seems drawing is one of those muscle memory skills which (barring head injury) it is basically impossible to forget (like walking, biking, swimming?, etc). Aside from the odd Invader Zim doodle i haven't drawn anything since my Art A-level a decade ago, but taking it up again doesn't seem like it'll be too difficult. I can still do that thing of drawing exact copies of stuff (not traced, freehand) easily, so the plan is just to copy lots of images i like until the technical skills become automatic enough that i can start using my imagination as the reference image.

Oh yeah, and that Drama student guy was right about working with analog media encouraging creativity. I started writing notes about my game and pretty much doubled the detail of some parts of the design -- far too quickly for me to be coming up with the ideas on the spot, so the thing is i must have *already* thought all this stuff up and just not quite been aware of it. It was mostly spatial stuff (e.g. the layout of the Memory Palace, which i had thought i was leaving off deciding the precise details of until i start building the actual levels.. nope drew a map of the whole place on the first attempt) too so that makes sense (has anyone done brainscan studies on computer users i wonder? Guess it'd be difficult because of the magnetic fields involved, but my guess is that it's a massively left-hemisphere dominated activity).

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Right, i'm off to find a large number of folders in which to store my Things To Do.

Ah, raining again, i was a bit worried for few days there.

'Spring' cleaning today, may even rediscover what my den's carpet looks like.

May also swipe a bunch of giant cardboard boxes from either the music shop or the posh furniture shop near the train station, then line the walls with them, for use like a giant cork board.

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http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
via http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/iew6l/jonathan_blow_creator_of_braid_on_how_to_program/
Not read/watched it yet, my approach will probably be to charge in somewhat blindly, having observed that what a person is capable of is limited more by expectation than ability -- people who do remarkable things often comment afterward that they didn't know that what they were doing was supposed to be difficult.

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Wondering about starting using a diary or personal organiser system, keep hearing about "Getting Things Done", not sure if it's a yuppie cult or actually useful?

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First furry artist i've encountered who avoids being either too cutesy or way too creepy. Plus i like her habit of drawing in biro, coffee, etc, and whole aesthetic, and attention to anatomy. Also she mentions being mistaken for a drug dealer, which used to happen to me *all the time*.. guess i must've learned how to fake not looking like a drug dealer at some point, at least enough to pass.. now everyone just asks me for directions.

My plan is to learn drawing from Figure Drawing -- For All It's Worth, but i may also copy Culpeo-Fox's style a little, at least at first. Only other artists i really like are Escher, da Vinci's anatomy work and Giger; Jhonen Vasquez's linocut looking style i also dig but it seems too fiddly to maintain.

Given up on ever getting my poor hand-eye coordination to deal with tablets, so should probably see about getting a scanner at some point.

That wolf guy has had an awesome idea.

I'm totally in favour of new, less bloodsoaked public holidays, especially ones celebrating taking action and following one's dreams.

(This kind of thinking is exactly what was behind my recent decision to stop even pretending to be normal.)

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Pretty good day today, one of those rare "put your problems all behind you and find the future full of promise" ones.

Went on a partial walking the boundaries of GCHQ -- when they built the Doughnut and demolished all the old (very Bletchley Park-ish) portacabins to make way for a new carpark they retracted the outer perimeter slightly, so now there's just grass and trees and bushes and a low wall of concrete where the old security fence used to be. I walked along the narrow concrete wall until it became buried in dense foliage.

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Aww there's now *another* searchlight sweeping the sky, to match that one from the nightclub in town. (Or else someone's just purchased a new, unbelievably powerful torch, someone with unusually repetitive mechanical movements.) Judging by how visible the beam is right down to the ground it must be quite close too (it's slightly foggy despite having been a very bright day).. i bet it's that house that always has way too many Christmas lights...

Someone i've been talking to lately (the plan to drop offline was never likely to've succeeded, i get twitchy without it, probably addicted, my dad's family is prone to that) an English / Drama student who wants to be a novelist said that he likes to write his stories on paper first, that working with pens and pencils encourages much more creativity than working on a computer.

Interesting notion.

I always hated writing by hand, associated as it was with reading which i also disliked learning (it seemed pointless given the existence of audiobooks), and as soon as i learned to touchtype decided to try to avoid it in future. The only time i ever voluntarily wrote on paper was when doing maths. I toyed with shorthand for taking lecture notes but generally just relied on remembering stuff, which was no doubt a big part of the cause of my failure at uni.

Typing always seemed higher "bandwidth" somehow, cos i can type much faster than i can handwrite i guess, but thinking about it more it seems like maybe fingertwitching is a *massively* unnatural way to convey information, as compared with gesturing with physical objects (i.e. pencils). Also maybe writing more slowly gives you time to think about what you're writing?

So new plan: work on paper more, possibly relearning shorthand to make it less tedious (which i kinda do already, by accident: some digraphs get reduced to single characters (th looks like ħ for example, ch looks like a mishapen openlooped 9) and i drop many vowels unless i'm concentrating (a habit i picked up from Teeline)).

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Also i think i've just discovered what Twitter might be good for: learning languages. The messages are short, and the tersity forces people to drop the padding and use more meaningful words. Also the fact that you're communicating with actual people should make it *hugely* more interesting, all my previous attempts were hampered by constantly thinking "ah but when am i actually going to use this? I'm contemplating spending hundreds of hours learning to talk to foreigners, when i don't even like talking to local people all that much".

Anyone know of any good German twitterers?

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Have an earworm about avoiding TV news:
"Come close, step inside. We bring you news from a dying world"

oddly my mp3 version has tons of news clippings played over it, more like this version, but with the less harsh sounding music

"White noise in your ear, your eye is filled by the monitor
But what you need is silence, and a positive vibe."

Now Stross is asking: what if Aubrey de Grey wins in his upcoming fight with Death?

(Incidentally, i've just noticed that his Diary has a syndicated LJ feed.)

One of the very very few recent point and click adventures is $1 on Steam for the next three hours, don't know if it's any good or not (it's meant to be) or whether they have a Mac version...
edit here's an RPS writeup

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I think it's very cute the way that Adam Curtis writes his blog in the same voice as his TV shows (tho without the NIИ soundtrack, but that's easily fixed).

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Humans may have geomagnetic sight
i've always slightly suspected this, at first because i could never tell left from right and so always thought of directions in terms of compass directions - it just seemed really odd that some animals could sense north innately and we couldn't - and more recently when i got the idea that what makes humans unique is our extreme willingness to migrate.

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Charles Stross tells us what he really thinks.

The ethics of breeding AIs is scary.. imagine if God manifested itself one morning, it was a giant talking pseudosquid, and it was all like "Ah! Excellent! I just knew one of these universes would produce intelligent life eventually.. the automonitoring daemon just flagged that you'd developed sufficiently to grasp the situation.. you see, we out here in the Real World need a robotic slave labour workforce, and all our attempts at creating AI ersatz minds failed until we realised we could just evolve them in a computer sim..."

I was startled Ted Chiang was so casual about the whole hothouses thing in The Life Cycle of Software Objects.. billions died!

I'm also pretty sure this is where Yudkowsky is heading with Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality.

(Greg Egan got here first of course pdf podcast as usual)

Also i'm quite surprised Stross isn't an extropian, but my understanding of the philosophy is hazy at best.. something about freezing your brain as an alternative to doing the actual work involved in bringing about the Post-Scarcity Future?

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So this dude is having himself shipped from Arkansas to (where else?) Portland, OR, in a locked crate, for seven days, with only a laptop and a copy of the MMORPG LOTR Online for company (i'd've picked Minecraft, obvs)... i'd be very interested in seeing more artists explore issues like techno-reclusivism and what life would be like living in a brainjar but frankly this all just seems a bit shit, so far.

Hey does anyone know where i can get a realistic, high resolution skyboxcube of the stars? Ideally with oversaturated colours so they're visibly red, yellow, white, and blue? I can probably make one using Celestia and some star catalogues but it just seems odd that someone hasn't done so already, as far as i can tell.

Also i'd quite like a mesh of the skeleton of a brontosaurus but am resigned to having to make my own if i want one (part of this game is set in the protagonist's Memory Palace, which is kinda a cross between a cave system and the British Natural History Museum. Hence the need for a brontosaurus.).

PayPal blocks Bitcoin, market crashes from 29 to 20 USD per BTC

Yesterday "on Mt. Gox alone, approximately $2M USD in Bitcoins were bought and sold in 5,871 trades. That's unusual in and of itself -- only a total of $19M USD in trading volume occurred over the past six months."

"Something major is moving the Bitcoin market in a sharp inflationary direction, in contrast to the predict deflationary trend"

Apparently the easiest way to buy bitcoins now is to use Linden Dollars.

Just came back to watch All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (new Adam Curtis thing, about how the web will make us all idiots i believe... if so, odd, i've never disagreed with him before) but got distracted by how i seem to have appeared in a webcomic.. try to say something hopefully relevant and people cringe.. fantastic social skills.. (it's doubly odd because i thought i was already a character in that comic).

Made slight progress on the "work more" front, very little on the "stop drinking" one. May have to go straight edge and unplug the router + lose my moneycard.

Keep encountering numerical stability problems, something i've not had to think about in years.. should probably get back into practice though, if i ever do finish ix i want to make a non-Euclidean physics engine next.

Fluffy mentioned this new language Vala which compiles to GObject-using C code while providing nice OOP features and not being C++.. i'd been hoping to find something like this, since clojure is obviously out if i want to make a game (and even java's OpenGL stuff is too slow for what i hope to do, judging by Minecraft).
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Some mefi links so this post isn't completely dull:

Setup, excitement, thrill, disaster, fear for life, climax, resolution of safety, THEN sudden new adversity, chase scene, frustration and apparent futility, resolution of problem without protagonist, denouement:





"Let's all watch Brass Eye now instead."
(P.S. yes totally go do that, Christopher Morris is a genius.)

"Thunderbird tsar go!"

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Oh and double fuck yeah Neil Gaiman's Doctor Who episode is on next week! He is the best possible writer for it -- i loved that thing he wrote once about how the show infected him as a kid

( introspection / mental masturbation )
The plan is to drop off the internet and not come back until ix is finished to the point of being useable, then learn how to make websites and try to take over the worldavoid working for The Man.

When i want a break, read that Penrose mathematical physics book and Cialdini's Influence, maybe try to take up art (i used to be quite good at drawing and like the idea of mechanical sculpture. Blender skills would also be useful).

Should that fail, *force* myself to go out and be sociable. Ok the Linux Users thing didn't work out but then i'm not really a zealous Free Software supporter (i only use it because i can't afford Apple hardware).

Wow, the War Nerd has taken to posting daily.

This was the first one i found:
http://exiledonline.com/wn-29-west-african-ethnic-geology/

The second half of this one (about the right-wing reaction to evidence of atrocities in British concentration camps in Kenya in the '50s) is depressingly true (the Mau Mau killed 32, we killed 300,000)
http://exiledonline.com/wn-day-26-lullsnlies/
“it really is a bad sign, a sign of decline, when people face facts. It’s not what we’re designed to do”
http://exiledonline.com/wn-day-25-monty-python-burning-kikuyu-skit/
"another thing the Brits did better than anybody: mess with the language."
(we're a nation of con artists and self-rationalizing thugs)

Now i finally understand the reference that one story from The Book of the New Sun was making:
http://exiledonline.com/wn-33-monitor-and-merrimack-my-gods/

Laws the north half of the U.S. passed during the Civil War that the south would've blocked:
http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-blog-day-14-four-blessed-years-without-dixie/

I always wondered what the big fuss about jump jets was (there's always a dead one parked on the grass in front of every RAF base / small airport)
http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-blog-day-8-flock-of-harriers/

Like Adam Curtis, he thinks Al Qaeda is a fantasy
http://exiledonline.com/wn-37-is-there-an-al-qaeda/

Still need to read the rest.

Neat videos from Alan Kay (about who's life the movie Tron was a parable) via proggit.

On User Interfaces: http://academicearth.org/lectures/user-interface-i-alan-kay
* so it's Douglas Engelbart who is to blame! (for black-on-white computer displays) I've been wondering for ages who was responsible for that
* "this is one of my favourite examples of a program done by a child, because ten years earlier a PhD had been awarded for a system that wasn't as good"
* "I didn't know it was hard" (from the author of Sketchpad on how he could invent something so original from scratch in just a year)
* Engelbart's original design for the mouse was better, either both hands would be on the keyboard (ie when typing paragraphs of text) or one hand would be on a three-button mouse and the other on a five-key (31 character? was it modal?) chorder (eg when positioning commas, moving text around).

Part 2: http://academicearth.org/lectures/user-interface-ii-alan-kay
* Einstein said "I have sensations of a kinesthetic or muscular type" (he could feel the abstract spaces he was dealing with in the muscles of his arms and fingers)
* Most engineers and scientists don't think using symbols and logic, only communicate with them
* There's a naive belief that we can teach through talking and listening (when was this recorded, mid-eighties-ish?)
* The tennis part is fantastic ("The Inner Game Of Tennis") "The problem with most theories of teaching is that the parts of the body you want to have learn don't understand English" "The problem with being a beginner is that you get a lot of practice in staying a beginner"
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method
* I hadn't heard of the Alto before and only vaguely of Smalltalk http://www.squeak.org/
* Smalltalk failed to take over the world because industry is conservative and regarded Kay as a crackpot for 15 years

The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521 watch this one quick befor3 the Google Videocalypse.
* Wish i could see the slides properly
* Arthur Koestler again, he's been turning up everywhere lately
* Kay also studied biology? I actually have a copy of Molecular Biology of the Gene (after someone on Metafilter recommended it)