I’ve been playing The Night Circus a lot lately. Well, ‘playing’ is a strong word; I’ve been mostly clicking on random cards and enjoying the athmosphere of the game. I’m not really making any informed choices that influence the story, and I have little control over the game flow. This isn’t really the type of game I usually bother with, but it does quite a few things right:
More …I used to draw a lot as a kid, but at some point I stopped doing it. Maybe I didn’t have the time. Maybe I wasn’t good enough, or never felt like my technique improved. And from time to time I felt really bad about quitting.
More …While writing the previous two posts I found the need to display
Inform7 source code in a blog-friendly way. Unfortunatly, the
pygments source highlighter doesn’t support it, and I couldn’t
find any plugins for it that would. The closest I came was this
blog post by Max Battcher, but as he mentions, pygments is
probably a bad fit for this kind of code. Inform7 source is best
displayed with a non-fixed-width font and uses regular line wrapping,
but depends on significant whitespace for control flow. As far as I
could tell, pygments doesn’t really support that kind of output, and
anyway I couldn’t figure out how to use Python’s setuptools to hook
up my own plugins to begin with.
I’m starting to settle into my new home office. There are boxes and cables everywhere, but at least I have a desk to work from. Time to get back to actual work again.
More …A week from now the movers will come and stuff all our belongings into a big ol’ truck. We will get in the car, wave goodbye to friends and family and drive north for two days. There, in a small town you’ve probably never heard of, lies our new home.
More …For the past month I’ve been amusing myself with a wonderful language: Inform7. It is a very domain-specific language in that its main application is authoring text adventures (oh, sorry, ‘Interactive Fiction’), and produces the Z-code or Gluglx bytecode when compiled.
More …Well, my last post may have been a bit of a rant, but it did
spur my creativity. The more I thought about automatically replacing
logging statements with System.out.println(), the more the idea
appealed to me. A couple of days later I had a day off with beautiful
weather and nothing to do, and I spent it out on the balcony, hacking
frantically. In the end I had a rough proof of concept that I’ve now
refined to the point that I’m not embarrased to show it to people.
Java logging is fundamentally broken. This is hard fact, not a point of view. Logging is broken, and has been for years.
More …I want to talk a little about inspiration.
More …