@Wudan07

Tomorrow Night is Orbis Gras, the Inaugural. To make up for TheOrb77 being abandoned in such a brutal fashion, we should all bring meats to grill in his honor.

Not sure if it’s 6pm or 7pm, we should really really pick one of these times, I’m grilling on coal, so we should definitely try to converge at one time, and get the meats grilled in as small a window as possible, otherwise we’ll have to go stove top with it. For reals.

3 blogs in 3 days. Not sure if I’ve ever done that. My Caliente blog went over so well it has revitalized my interest in the blogs. I must warn you, most posts are probably going to be like that last post. I’m a geek.

I’ve been replaying Ultima VII. Well, that, and compiling Exult, an engine that runs Ultima VII. Exult 1.4 isn’t stable, at least, my compiled version definitely isn’t, but learning to save very often is a skill itself.

I ported Exult3D to 1.4, I made a patch here (only download if you want to patch the 1.4 source. I checked out sometime in early June.) The camera controls are infinitely better than the original. You actually can see a lot of 2d elements now (they were very very screwed up in old 1.2) I had assumed Exult3D was abandoned but the author actually still idles in the exult IRC channel. That was fairly annoying to discover – but at least he shared his source code so others could pick up on it some day. My favorite hack of this code is the walk code. I rotate the 2D mouse coordinates by the same value the 3d camera is rotated, before passing them to the game logic, which somewhat makes the 3d angles + walking make sense. However, a new problem came out of that – you’ll need a compass to find out what direction you are going. Har Har.

Well that was nerdy enough. I have reverted to just playing the game through, since that’s kind of what I wanted to do to start with.

Ultima VII is a game my oldest brother bought while I was at scout camp, must have been 1992 or 1993. It is also the first game I played that was really, really, really open ended, and ridiculously immersive. My son says it doesn’t have very good graphics.

I think Ultima VII is why I’m a computer nerd. Oh I loves me some consoles, but the little trainers and shape viewers for Ultima VII made me realize that there were guts inside the games. And guts are fun.

I broke my dad’s PC trying to make Ultima VII work. I must have been 12 or 13. He got fed up pouring over the DOS manual and gave it to me and said that since I broke it, I had to fix it. I read the manual, I knew where to look because I had payed attention to what I was doing when I broke it. Anyway, I got it fixed and learned that DOS 6 is waaaaaaaay better than Windows 95 (which was forked from DOS 5 – some features from DOS 6 didn’t come back until Windows 98.) We had to do some config.sys and autoexec.bat wrangling to get Ultima VII to work, while not breaking the core uses of the PC.

I digress, it was learning about how the guts work that made using the PC truly enjoyable. Even today, I still spend way more time playing with code than I do playing games.

Last weekend me and 7 of my closest friends (or 6 and the Guildie, however you slice it) crammed in a van and headed south and then west a little for a stay in Caliente, Nevada. Never heard of it? Well, I have, and now I have been.

You see, for as long as I can remember (or at least for the last year) I haven’t liked the 4th of July. Because Frik and Carebear leave town and I don’t get to see them. And I mope around the house. It’s depressing. The family used to have root beer floats on the 4th, but it turns out that I’m the only one who liked them. In my family, no one plans anything, and no one does anything, and the 4th is just another day.

I told Sukie a few weeks ago that I wasn’t looking forward to the 4th because Carebear and Frik were going to be leaving town, and she thought it was cute but that we’d do something fun for sure.

Well, Sukie got a text asking if we wanted to go to Caliente this year. She asked me. If I was a young, spry guy, I would have done a back flip right then and there. Holidays with the best-est friends ever! Yeah! Last month’s crazy all-nighter would most certainly be out-done by a national-holiday-hangout-of-epic-proportions.

I would at this time like to apologize for those of you whose feelings might be hurt by my devotion and dedication to my friends. I am most astonished by the fact that I have any friends at all, to be truthful. If they were ones, they would be cold ones. And a one that is not cold is hardly a one at all.

I think the story of this weekend could be told through food. I had:
1 – Rancho burger @ Hermies in Cedar City. Thank god for people who work at restaurants who can actually recommend good food.
2 – Pancake breakfast @ the park in Caliente. My sweet zombie jesus I don’t think I’ve ever had pancakes so good.
3 – I almost forgot! Navajo tacos that were actually flown in from the reservation! Oh wait, no, it was just that one person knew how to make frybread. Only a goddamn ignoramus would think that the tacos had anything to do with the tribe.
4 – Pizza from Pioneer Pizzeria in Caliente – that was some really good pizza. Looking back, what the hell is a nice pizzeria like that doing in a place like Caliente?
5 – Breakfast at the Branding Iron in Caliente – they didn’t have a table big enough for the lot of us! But it was a damned fine breakfast burrito!
6 – Tacos at Carebears uncles house!
7 – A delicious pork sausage sandwich at Cafe Orleans in Cedar City! Ask Frik about his Muffliatto sandwich (yes, I know that’s actually a spell from the HP books – but I swear it’s not that different from the name of the sandwich, which has the same effect of silencing the target!)

Ah, the food was good and it was good to remembers it.

I loved the parade (A-Wiki, Anyone?), which hearkened to a parade I witnessed when I was younger and lived in Brigham City. BC is bigger than Caliente (but so am I.) I did grab for cash, and get sprayed with hoses, most of the afternoon was spent in line for tacos, which we could have made ourselves, but how would that 6th grade class get to Washington D.C. then? I am glad that I was able to get the water out of my ears, it would have hurt badly to have to pop those bad boys on the ride home, let alone walk around with swimmer’s ear the rest of the weekend. I got $3.50 in change.

Oh yeah, and before I forget, swimmer’s caps and Riot Shields. Oh weeeeeee’ll be quite ready next year, damnit. Of course I had to make my trademark cynical comment that getting sprayed with firehoses isn’t something that Holocaust survivors or Hippies would find very fun. But it was fun. And they used the hose on the truck, which was like an insta-tsunami. It whetted the tacoes, and the baby. Yes, think of the poor sleeping baby who gets at least a bucket’s worth of water splashed on her?

Oh, and think of me, carrying my pouting son on my back in to the middle of the street just to get him wet. His disposition went from sour to silly VERY quickly. It was just silly fun, and it was like being young again.

Our cottage was awesome, it smelled bizarre and there was a gas leak which we figured out in the middle of the night, and the smell went away the day after we turned off the gas to the stove. Hmmm…

We had a working theory that the cottage was where FLDS husbands took their wives to consumate their marriages, which is a bizarre thing to think of, considering it did have a distinct creepy air about it. But I liked it anyway, I think you could put a bunch of people you love in the creepiest of places and it would seem great instantly.

Oh, and I bought a straw hat. It was an impulse buy, but at $2.29 anything that keeps the accursed sun off of your head is like manna from heaven. It was actually funny because once you got used to the hat it was a good thing to wear – anywhere you go your face doesn’t get nearly as hot. I must have been a sight, in my weird sunglasses T-shirt shorts and Adidas, to wear this strange straw hat. I have to say, the hat got a lot of use, and a lot of people tried to steal it away from me.

The things that I liked the most was losing any sense of time at all, and spending time with friends playing games. Yes, we do it every couple of weeks anyway, but it was a nice combination, all that calm small-town-ness and friends and good (really good) food and the cottage which was the epitome of shelter from the storm, it always stayed cool.

I also liked the trip to the green-grass place, with the wading pool of doom. Sukie’s shocked that I’m still writing a blog entry.

I think I’ll stop, but I must say to my friends, I love you, I had a lot of fun, and we should hang out more often.

And to Guildie: Apology *not* accepted. You had an emotional outburst! It was an honest moment and you should stand by it. Besides, you’re only apologizing because it’s driving me crazy.

Addendum: Ok, Guildie, you win this round. Apology accepted. I feel bad, but I still maintain that you shouldn’t. I apologize for how I was acting, I was being an ass and completely deserved the retaliation. I can’t promise I won’t be an ass again, which is basically what accepting an apology is to me; a promise to not ‘do wrong’ again.

This morning I am feeling the wrath of a long weekend of staying up playing board games, eating pie, nachos, eleven, and just chillin.

I’m definitely not as young as I used to be.

Anyway, many games of Risk were played, a game of Monopoly, a game of Settlers. A long time ago I learned that I was not meant to win any of these games, but have been cursed with loving to play them. I’ve been happier since then.

I really just enjoy time spent with friends, even though I am a jerk.

Ah, the neglected blog. How nicely it sits, taking up space, and serving little to no purpose.

I did some python work with my blender ghoul2 scripts. You don’t know what that means, but I made some silly gray renders.

I like python a lot, but I’ve also been working on stripping the daylight/atmospheric stuff from Stellarium, which is taken from a paper by Preetham, Shirley, and Smits. My result isn’t as stunning as either, but it’s pretty good for being brutally hacked out of another project.

Yes, if my project actually goes anywhere, there will be source code.

ROFLCOPTER

I love David! He’s just the best guy ever. He’s so cute and funny and sweet. He always makes me smile and makes me happy when I’m sad. I love taking walks with him and cuddling on the couch with him. I love being dorks together. Pretty much he’s just the best thing ever and I’m going to keep him.

Anyway, theorb77 hooked me up with Mesu Kasumai. I like 80s music that’s been mega-synthed. It turns out if you further synthesize 80’s music, it gets even better.

Though they probably have been back for some time, I heard the birds this morning. Winter’s chill is mostly over, though I still have worn my new gloves a few times now. They are more snug than the old gloves, but they are warmer, I think. Apparently they’re technically only liners, meant to be inside other, bigger glove covers. But they’re badass liners (when will badass be it’s own word?)

Last weekend Sukie, the boy and Me headed across the Nevada desert to go to the Marine Aquarium Expo in Los Angeles, at the Orange County Fair & Events Center. That was essentially a really long fish club meeting, with tons of vendors and things to buy. It was an interesting experience.

Of course, we went to Disneyland on Sunday, rather than have 2 days of fish conference. Sukie got all she needed out of the fish conference in one day, so I didn’t have to hear constant comparisons on Sunday about how she’d rather be at the fish conference. It’s Disneyland, goddamnit!

The day at Disneyland was what it should have been, it was chilly, which is something different from what I’ve experienced before, most of the lines were short, except the Indiana Jones adventure and the Finding Nemo ride, and we got to ride a bunch of fun rides. I didn’t drown Sukie and the boy with trivia, mostly because I fought the urge to read up on all sorts of trivia beforehand, but I was just trying to get through the process – I was anxious enough all ready.

I wondered why so many families took their very young children, and wondered if I had perhaps waited too long to get Lucas there. You see, he’s already too cynical for Disneyland, I think.

What can you do, when most of your company and friends are all adults?

Then again, I realize that Disneyland trips are a poor gauge of a good childhood.

Of course, Sukie had never been to Disneyland before. It totally explains everything.

Remember that stupid settlers of catan map I showed about a month ago?

Progress!

I got annoyed with my source a month ago and worked on some other projects. I came back to it today, and found the stupid bug I gave up on finding a month ago within 10 minutes. And it’s back up and running. The tracer doesn’t handle alpha channels right which is why you have that blockiness there, but I can fix that eventually. Right now it has a very Starcraft feel to it.

Today I took the day off work to get some dental work done. Work called at 1:00pm or something asking about something that was going on at work. I requested the day off but I guess I didn’t tell them it was just for dental work. Whatever it was fixed itself while I was on the phone, but I would have went in to fix it.

It’s funny that out of high school I thought working a full time job was such a drag, and that I would never do it. Now you can’t get me to stop working. It helps that I actually enjoy my work (most of the time) and that I’m actually developing skills.

Work has made me cynical though. Money makes you happy, and you have to have a job to get money, but a job doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Somewhere in there, you just have to find a way to be happy.