@Wudan07

I spent last weekend apart from my beloved wife and son, in Seattle.

Why? For PAX. It’s a gaming convention, by the community, for the community, more or less. It was awesome, with a few small issues.

4 people is way too many people for a 2-bed hotel room. Normally it wouldn’t be, but when your roommates are overweight, diabetic, arthritic, and just plain old out-of-shape (and I’m no spring chicken), those beds are highly sought after items. The first night I was just glad to be there so I slept it out on the floor (well, I built a nest out of down pillows.) We had established a rotation that would have put me in a bed for the next two nights, but Dax had such a shite nights sleep in a chair that I gave him my spot in the bed the next night, and kept on in my floor-nest. Of course, I had become violently addicted to Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrows by that point, and Dax and I had went out to watch an awesome movie, then back to the Con to watch amateurs play Rock Band to a crowd of 30-40 people. It was awesome, and I wasn’t sleepy at all, so when we got back to our room I just stayed up for 1 or 2 hours playing it.

I digress: the sleeping arrangements in the hotel room were difficult, but not the most difficult part of the trip. Food was expensive, the lines were egregious, and the whole thing made me wish I had demanded that my wife come with. Except for the small fact that my wife’s involvement with games and nerdism as a hobby stops at the Wii. And the gamecube. And playing Kirby in Brawl. Oh, and Settlers of Catan. And RISK. And Killer Bunnies.

Holy crap, my wife is pretty damn nerdy. And that’s hot. Now she needs some thick rimmed glasses.

So, I’ve made a few conclusions. 1) Sukie needs to read PA at least as much as I do. Which isn’t a lot, so it’s doable. 2) If I go to PAX again, Sukie’s coming with me.

I liked a lot of the panels, discussions, Wil Wheaton’s short stories, even the Dr. Horrible references were delightful, because of where they come from; they exist as a token of endearment, that people who like what I like are not just cynical bastards; they enjoy things. I did need theorb77’s translation for any Whedonisms. I didn’t expect so many, and it was off-putting.

There was a point in the movie Nerdcore Rising where MC FrontAlot and his people are BSing before a show; the BSing made me feel connected with the culture more than anything else; it is something that I still do with all of my friends.

I haven’t played games seriously (lolz!) for over 10 years. A wife and kid have only some part of that; I’ve moved in to software development as a hobby, which for me has been rewarding in that it provides me really good brain activity, as well as a creative outlet. I like the creative aspects a lot; I make things that don’t exist anywhere else, at all.

So all in all, it made me realize that the magic of PAX didn’t take the rumored 54,500 people; it only takes a few. In a way, I have my own mini-PAXes (of evil?) every few weeks when I have friends over to play games. I think this could be ramped up to include more games and an all day thing, but we shall see.

Oh, and we played GoldenEye in the retro lounge. We played with Rockets (not my request!) and I won 10-3. I offered to go 3v1, but everyone gave up and so we left.

the fragile flower of my youth
was destroyed in the fire to consume my imperfection
i am not under the impression that I am whole
or less than so
its a foolish man who turns from the right road
he has found
something worth burning
will purchase you a warm night

I doodle in my brain, I write in the sand of my brain. I was thinking about this today, because the house I proposed to my wife in was uprooted and ground to bits by machinery. We don’t have a lot from those early days; no friends (just family) from those days. I am retrospective by nature. I appreciate where I am, and if I feel depressed, it is only because I realize I have so much more to do before I am done. I brought my son home to that home, I started my new life there.

They tore the house down, it was never really mine, and I lived there for such a short time, but it was where it all began, and I started to get teary eyed as we drove away from the place, just thinking about what it meant, and what happened there. You don’t know what it meant; you weren’t there, you will have your own experiences, or have had them.

Tomorrow promises to be a big day at work 🙂

I fixed silly bugs in my reflection code, the fix is so elegant and simple it makes my poor heart tremble with joy. Ah, now that’s pretty weird of me to say.

I was contemplating my ray-tracer which does not use the traditional thin-lens design that basically is a take on the pinhole camera, but does some fancy stuff with the ray’s starting point and jitters it up a bit so that the focus is directed exactly at a specific point in the render. I realized that my ray-tracer has no mechanism for focus; it has a sharpness, and at best, the smoothness of anti-aliasing, which makes some things look rather Tron-ish. However, I’ve been thinking of jittering a specific pixel’s ray cluster and directing the resulting rays through the ideal focal point for that pixel, making each individual pixel’s cluster act like a pinhole camera, and producing the same effect, except instead of using thin-lens approximation, my tracer uses an actual lens and shortest-path-first behavior for creating an image.

I actually made a thumbnail for this next render, it was taking too long to load my old page with those 2 big renders on it. It’s my settler’s map but with 3 big reflective balls and a blue plane beneath (which is also reflective.) Light itself does not reflect though …

I like it, not cause it makes any sense, but because there’s a lot of bright colors and the reflectiveness really adds some depth to it.

cross section
magic super collider
I’ve been playing with focusing on the rays in my raytracer, instead of what the rays collide with. This did help me fix my reflection code, but I haven’t gone back to actually do any 3d renders, I’ve become addicted to messing with what can be done when I tell the raytracer to show me the actual rays. It’s cool, reminds me of pixel arty-ness (because it isn’t anti-aliased at all, any smoothness if purely mathematical.) I like the second one because it shows there’s a point at which a ray is reflected left or right when it bounces off a sphere. It makes this cool negative space curve in a big field of straight lines.

I haven’t been feeling like blogging lately. It was cool to play 5 player settlers on Saturday, I just wish I didn’t have to leave and get my hair cut; it was like I got short-changed on the hang-outs.

Of course, some of you went to see Dark Knight and couldn’t be arsed to wake up the next day and hang out, so screw you bastards and your awesome movie. I may vow not to see the damned thing.

… For a few days.

I knew it!

Today on Facebook I said:

The best spiritual experiences are ones were there are no words, and few people. So, technically speaking, anything outdoors is almost always more likely to be spiritually uplifting than anything you can experience indoors; except in cases where there are few people and fewer words involved.

Draw from that what you will, it represents approximately 87% of my spirituality, cultivated over years of reflection and deep thought.

Agnostic is merely a technical term, and like most terms only offers a cynical glimpse at the idea behind it. There’s nothing wrong with saying I don’t know, I have come to see it as a perversion of nature when someone does claim to know, but I must admit, that myself not knowing does not necessarily preclude others from knowing.

… which probably wasn’t a good response to a joking discussion.

But I thought it was a pretty well thought out and short explanation of my very spiritual belief system.

I updated my raytracer to not cast shadows if the collided object has a texture that has a 0-value alpha channel, which means, I get cooler shadows cast from my textured objects!

Yay!

Next item needing attention is shadow-testing rays.

… for the week to begin. I did manage to get a few things done, attend a family reunion, which included a very crazy inner-tube ride (pics on Sukie’s facebook), and re-write some of my raytracer. The part I re-wrote changed my ‘rays’ from an array of dynamically allocated rays(eg 1024×768 pixels, which works for most things without problems) to a class containing a linked list. I like the linked list, though it takes up more memory, because it gives me more flexibility when it comes to handling the data (for ray bounces, ray refraction, and any post processing flim flam I can think of.)

After seeing Hellboy II I realized that I really like CG, and that maybe it is a pursuit that will not ever bear (financial) fruit for me, but it is still a worthwhile pursuit while I am learning, which is something I enjoy more than I enjoy making money, which I do enjoy to a fair degree.

I think that last paragraph was confusing. Anyway, off to work.

Photo removed, it was really getting on my nerves.
Yes, I spent some time with my photoshop.