I just wanna go out and find the newest, tiniest, most delicate, most beautiful flower just spreading its petals into new life, and crush it underneath my boot until it is ground into the sorriest pile of pulp that has ever even thought about existing, and then douse it in gasoline and set it on fire and let it burn, and till it under the earth, and plant poison ivy on top.
Now there’s a fucking plant I can admire.
Fucking flowers.
I just hit a car with my car and made it go all denty.
I was taking a left out of the CVS parking lot at William Cannon and Manchaca, pulling around a truck stopped in the right lane, and struck a 2000 or so Nissan Altima in the right rear door and quarter panel doing about 10 MPH. The rear passenger side door was toast, and the rear quarter panel as well, but there was no apparent frame damage, and nobody’s air bag went off.
Still, this bitch pulls up in the parking lot moaning about her neck and her back hurt, got carried off in an ambulance and everything. Even the paramedics couldn’t help but smirk a little at the melodrama. I’ll eat my fucking left boot if that evil bitch was hurt. There’s no fucking way.
Shit
Shit
Shit
SHIT!
I’ve never hit anybody before.
This caps off a whole helluva fucking week.
Shit.
Fuck.
Goddammit.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
At least I have insurance.
And now my car makes some kinda thwack-thwack-some-moving-shit-is-hitting-some-non-moving-shit sound when the engine runs and the wheels are pointed to the left or better. So I gotta fix that before my car is usable again.
Fuck.
As soon as I dig myself out of one hole, I dig myself another.
Back to shoveling shit, I suppose.
Concept sketch for PlanetKiller:
This is a game in two stages:
Stage 1:
Overall concept is Asteroids / Geometry wars mash up.
Asteroids clone that uses 3D models drawn wireframe with glowing pixel shaders. Gameplay is still 2D wraparound world.
It is implemented in C# with managed DirectX 10. It requires at least a DirectX 9 or maybe 8 card. It is strictly HLSL
programmable pipeline.
Stage 2:
Using the same engine and models, turn the Asteroids clone into a game consisting of a single level,
or a few levels, where at the beginning of the round, the player is facing a large planet, which then
explodes. The camera has changed to a chase cam, and the movement and action has become 3D.
The player’s objective is to destroy as many hurtling planet chunks as possible before they are all gone,
after some predefined time limit. The player has a finite number of lives (3) to do it in.
Small, brightly colored objects may do things like grant additional lives or different, better, prettier
weapons when shot.
There will also be an online mode, perhaps with both cooperative and competitive modes.
The competitive mode mechanic will work like so:
Games are time-limited. The time limit will determine the size of the planet and the
initial distance between players.
The object is to get the highest score possible; Players will have infinite respawns at their initial spawn
point, but their score is cleared whenever they die, and only the highest counts.
Also, players can shoot other players, and the shot player’s score for that life does not count. However,
the initial distance between players will be considerable, and to get close enough to shoot the other player
will require flying across the trajectories of the planetary chunks, which is more dangerous.
There may also be power ups that:
Allow you to keep your score the next time you get killed.
Allow your score to count if you are shot by another player.
Make you turn faster.
Make you go faster.
Notes:
There will eventually be different models of ships and weapons (ship selection determines initial weapon, but
powerups can change that).
Radar. This would allow you to realistically fly with the rocks at your back, which would make shooting
other players easier.
Projectiles should be relatively slow and easy to see, so that they can be dodged. This will make dog fights
much more interesting.
QUESTIONS:
Would it be better to have a shot player be out of the game, to better encourage inter-player carnage?
If so, then there should probably be a power up to protect you from that.
NOTES:
Don’t forget network play must be a first order feature or you’ll waste so god-damned much work it won’t
be funny.
Object model is probably something like:
PlanetKillerEntity–Projectile
-Gun–(various)
-Ship–(various) (hasA: Player) (hasA: Gun) (hasA: main booster) (hasA:
-Powerup
-Rock–(various)
-Fragment
-Planet
-TBD
-Effect–Explosion
-(various)
The above treats thrusters as separate visual as well as functional components. They may be models
with defined attachment points to the ship model.
Where entities store position, trajectory/velocity, rotational and linear acceleration,
implement collision detection and state update, etc.
Player–LocalPlayer
-RemotePlayer (must have position extrapolation to account for network lag)
World
Camera (tied to a ship in stage 2)
Loop is probably something simple like:
Get input
Update game state
Render current game state.
Today I was looking for some old pics and got lost looking at the first set of pics I took with my PowerShot A20, including some of the first pictures I ever took of my lil’ baby car. The shots of the sky from the ground were taken by my brother; the shots of the sky from the sky were taken on a flight back from San Jo.
I was working to keep from thinking today. I fixed a hole in the wall, mounted bookshelves, moved furniture, threw away anything I came across and couldn’t find a compelling reason to keep, and put the smack down on my room. I guess I’m still a thirtysomething guy who sleeps on a mattress in the corner of his bedroom, but at least now it’s a straight walk to said bed from the door, with nothing sharp or poisonous on the way.
I cleaned out my main closet, and threw away all the clothes I won’t wear any more. You can see the floor now.
I turned my other closet into a secondary tool room, so now I don’t have to make thirty trips to the garage when I’m working on something upstairs.
Saturday morning Hachi jumped onto my bed through a hole in the ceiling. It was unnerving, like this:
Here’s some more Hachi pictures, because he’s funny and he’s my friend:
I just finished watching Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. I was tripping. It was awesome. I’m still tripping. It was this good:
I must immediately save all my money until I have $1200, then get my passport, then buy air-plane tickets to Tokyo, Japan, and then immediately leave the airport and go to the nearest subway or train station, which seems like a good place to find Japanese school girls, and find some and tell them that they are awesome, and I love their taste in movies, and thank you for this one. Also, I will remember to thank them for my cell phone as well, and for changing in crazy ways they can’t imagine the world as a whole, and that also as well they are very beautiful and I would like to express my gratitude by sleeping with as many of them as possible in as many positions as I can think of all the time.
It’ll probably be the best $1200 I ever spend.
I bet it would work like gangbusters though. 
I wouldn’t even be lyin.
My new favorite word:
| benighted |
| SYLLABICATION: | benighted |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  b -n  td |
| ADJECTIVE: | 1. Overtaken by night or darkness. 2. Being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness; unenlightened. |
| OTHER FORMS: | benightedly ADVERB benight edness NOUN |
Slang, j0!
I thought I’d share a couple of the terms of art I’ve learned in my years of working technical support:
NMFP: Not My Fucking Problem. The tech support representative’s dream: a problem you don’t share. Specifically, when an issue is due to another vendor’s hardware or software. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jackassinpants, but it looks like the problem is with your WidgetFrobber 9000. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the WtF 9000, but if you call the good folks over at FreebleNotzer Widgets, I’m sure they’ll get you straightened right out.”
FOAD: Fuck off and Die. What customers are told to do when it’s NMFP. This is not usually conveyed verbatim to the customer, for arcane business reasons, but the intent is the same. See the FreebleNotzer reference above.
KG: Known Good. Pay attention to this one kids: if you have two of something, and you think one of them is broken, then replace the “broken” one with the other. If the problem goes away, you know that the broken one is broken, and that it’s the only thing that’s broken. This can save you from sitting on the phone a couple hours “troubleshooting” while some dipshit who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground slowly comes to the conclusion that the issue is definitely with the power cord.
Luser: The person on the other end of the phone.
LART: Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool. Usually, the “Release” button. Sometimes a referral to the service agreement: “I’m sorry, Mr. StupidLyingDickhead, but lightning damage is clearly an act of god, and not covered under the service agreement. We will be happy to provide a copy of the bill to your insurance company. Have a good day, and, oh, fuck off and die.”
User Manual: A magical device that comes with EVERYTHING COMPLICATED YOU BUY. It contains information about everything the device does, but is only readable by trained, certified technical support personnel.
Recently, some people who make complicated things decided that if they made the manuals REALLY BIG folded sheets of paper, with BRIGHT COLORS and PRETTY PICTURES, and wrote them in English, people would read them.
Unfortunately, research shows that customers only use these instruction sheets to wipe their asses and then (sometimes with the same sheet) kindle fires around which they huddle for warmth while trying to find the power button on their monitor.
When the fire burns out and they have no more light or instruction sheets to burn, they call technical support.
Service Agreement: A user manual for technical support, and used about as often.
Seat Warmer: e.g., the dipshit from the Known Good definition.
The Mute Button: A cruel mistress. The only thing that keeps a tech support guy sane. A missed mute, on the other hand, is responsible for more than a few career-limiting conversations.
Email: The best way to preserve luser stupidity and pass it around so your friends can have a good laugh too. Unfortunately, lusers know this and would rather sit on hold for two hours than ask their question through email.
People who don’t speak english yelling over a cell phone in the center of a huge building surrounded by thousands of cubic feet of computer equipment and enough industrial HVAC capacity to cause nerve deafness, “WHaaaaa? I can no hear you! You can repeat!” for the twentieth time in a row: Fuck those guys.
I was watching The Wheel of Time yesterday, and it had a bit in it about these two monks debating the dual nature of the Buddha’s reality.
That’s where me and the Buddha part ways. The way I see it, there’s only one true reality.
If that.
…so I says to the lady, I says, “Well, that ain’t right, lady. An eye for an eye don’t make the whole world blind, I don’t see how that could be. Now, two eyes for an eye, that would have to do it, and pretty quick, but I don’t think you can do it with just one.”
The lady looked at me like I’d strangled a puppy in front of her, but I couldn’t have said two and two wasn’t four, either, and I didn’t see any reason to lie about simple math just because she was squeamish about eyes. She shouldn’t've brought it up if she was going to be that way.
Probably even two wouldn’t do it, not on the first try, I thought, because there’s a good chance that at some point everybody that needed to collect an eye would already be blind, and I sure wouldn’t let a blind guy pluck out my eye. No sir, no way.
Such were my thoughts as I wandered down the side-walk in heat that could bake a potato.
