Car Pt. 2

Yesterday, I finally got my car back from the panelling people. Today, Whitney and I were driving through Cupar, traffic was at a standstill as per usual, and an elderly man happily pulled out of his parking space and reversed straight into the passenger door. I am at a loss to explain how he couldn't have seen the car that had been idling at right-angles behind him for the last minute or so.

We trundled towards another parking space and went out to examine the damage, of which there was none at all. Not a dent or even a slight scratch. So that was a relief and an anti-climax. It was still terrifying, though.

It has also occurred to me that my mum, who actually owns the car, might read this journal. Hello if you're watching!

Rename Me

Right, loyal readers (if there are any of you left. My livejournal has been the most boring thing in the universe for the last couple of months), I have an important announcement to make.

Unbelievable as it may have seemed a while ago, I've been trying to gradually get rid of the name "wongchungbang" for the last couple of years. It may have been a clever name when I discovered the Internet, but nowadays it just sounds like the noise a sack of cutlery makes when it falls down the stairs. At least, I think so - others aren't so sure, as I still keep getting IMs asking me what part of China I come from. New accounts anywhere are now normally being registered under the name "Wong" (or even plain old "DavidKN"), which does remove a bit of the Googlability of my name, but that's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make.

As I've been mooching off Livejournal's free service for the last three years now, I think it's an ideal opportunity to spend a bit of money on a Rename card, or whatever other RPG-item name it's called, therefore keeping my archive of posts and automatically refactoring all links/friends/etc. I'm proposing to change my LJ name to "davidknewton", or, at a stretch, "davidxnewton".

Any thoughts?

Car

After having been hit in a unique accident involving two driverless vehicles, one of which didn't have an engine, I'm very pleased to now have my car back. I was worried that I would have forgotten how to drive. The repaired left wing is completely unnoticeable, which is good news because I haven't told my mother about the repair yet. In fact, over the past week I kept having terrible visions of going to JMD to pick it up and it having been spray-painted bright yellow, which would have been slightly difficult to explain.

I think they've adjusted the steering wheel a bit as well, which is welcome because I couldn't work out how. I'm only detecting a difference because I can now actually see the speedometer rather than having to duck down to read it every time I go past a limit signpost. Other than that, the only noticeable change is that the new panel is significantly cleaner than the rest of the car, so it looks like I'll have to get up and wash it before driving up this weekend.

I have let this journal fall into neglect because life has been practically stationary. I think my illness is now on the mend because I have been prescribed a combination of mebeverine, levothyroxine and bananas. Now I can either waste time, compose some more masterpieces (I haven't been producing enough of them recently) or start a new MMF grand project.

By the way, thanks to , my site has been tweaked to make it look more presentable. I've also added various things to it as they came to mind. The bad news is that Wired's server was smashed into hundreds of pieces and rebuilt last week, so nothing that uses the SQL database will work at the moment.

I now have 3,333 emails in my inbox. Hooray for me.

Caketastrophe

Well, scraping molten cake off the floor of the oven with a fish slice is a bit of a surreal way to spend an evening. I tried to make squared cake again, but the recipe used for the sponge just wasn't sturdy enough. Now that I've concluded that I cannot make the finished article look any less hilarious, I'm going to sleep.

Weirdness

I have just received two emails from university staff. The first is about closing my Department of Computer Science account, and has a tragic air of finality to it. The other is much more interesting.

Dear all,

A French gentleman named Michel Vinot has been to the department a number of times (twice today). He is not a visiting academic and he has no connection with the University. He speaks and understands no English but he is very persistent. Please do not let him in to the building. He is trespassing on private property and the police will be called if he refuses to leave.

Many thanks for your co-operation,

Paula

The French are invading the Jack Cole building!

Site Update

Right, first of all, where does that awkward and unnatural [property]![object] syntax come from? (I'm well aware that someone who has written anything in C describing anything as "awkward and unnatural" is pretty ironic, but still.) I'm seeing it all over the place now.

Now that I have more time to concentrate on leaving my physical form and becoming solely an entity on the Internet, I decided to rearrange my Wired space to bring together all the projects that I release to the world. The updated homepage contains a list of everything from MMF games to music, UT2004 maps and networking diagrams, in rough descending order based on age and usefulness. You can even download my SH project from there if you're that way inclined.

And I feel obliged to mention the fact that I have once again replaced my sixth icon. I have a good line-up for the first five, and I've just no idea what to do with the last one.

Eurovision

Well, as you might have heard from the four hundred million posts that made during the last thirty minutes, hilarity has ensued as Lordi won. The line between genius and madness is truly a thin one, especially as far as power metal goes.

Project Proposals

Now that classes are over forever and my life is obviously totally devoid of purpose, I suppose it's time to be thinking about my next MMF project. Actually, I'll probably put off actually starting anything until MMF2 is released (which will hopefully be soon - one of the other TDC admins seems to know more than he's letting on but won't tell me anything) but I can at least put forward some ideas and build up a couple of proof-of-concept engines, or something like that. Obviously, at the moment the only names I can come up with are my uniquely-style working titles (like the inspired Custom Platform Movement Advanced Project (Crystal Towers) and Random Platform Game Experiment (Treasure Tower), but let me know if you see something you're interested in.

Proposal 1. Secret Agent Game

This is the shortest of these proposals, and is therefore the most likely to actually get done. After playing Apogee's Secret Agent for ages recently, I couldn't help thinking how strangely addictive it was despite being an incredibly simple platformer - get keys, open doors, shoot some things, get to the exit. This project would be a semi-remake of the game, but with the concept of "missions" added on to give each level a unique feeling. I'm quite enthusiastic about doing this, but the only downside is that it's yet another platformer and I've been doing those for half my St Andrews career.

Advantage: The most well-formed idea out of this lot.
Disadvantage: Platformer.

Proposal 2. AAG 2

The original AAG (which rather sensibly stands for Another Adventure Game) was created during my fifth year in high school, and was the first significant game project of mine. It was a top-down adventure - a Gameboy Zelda sort of thing - split over twelve chapters, and took most of a year to make. I still haven't actually released it, because looking back on it, not a whole lot of the game makes much sense and the game feels rather tatty. Perhaps I'll occupy myself by cleaning it up and releasing it before MMF2 arrives.

I've had the storyline for a sequel together in my head for absolutely ages now, and even though it will be a significant undertaking, I'd rather like to get it made. It'll be an opportunity to put some of my writing and humour into a game again, which is rather difficult in the platformers that I've released over the last two years.

Actually, here's an ancient start to the game that was written about four years ago. The controls aren't totally obvious - Arrows to move, WASD for the inventory cursor, Shift to examine/pick up, Ctrl to look at the highlighted item in your inventory, Space to use the highlighted item. You'll get the hang of it.

Advantage: It's something that I've been wanting to do for ages.
Disadvantage: If it's taken me five years to get around to doing it, it'll probably take that amount of time to finish it.

Proposal 3. Dizzy-Type Adventure

Do you remember the Dizzy games? You won't if you're in America because he never reached there, but over here his adventure games were a phenomenon back in the day. And they were very simple - a side-scrolling platform world, with a string of items that had to be used on each other in some way, mostly via running back and forward over vast distances to hide a lack of gameplay.

After playing Tombi!, which reminded me a lot of Dizzy, I was rather inspired to make one of my own. I have already commissioned Jamie to draw the characters (in a unique twist, the protagonist is to be a jam jar with legs, and I'll probably name it after him if this ever gets going). Then I just need to build up a large game world - the gimmick of which might be that the whole thing is completely continuous, with no visible swapping between screens/locations at all. Well, you've got to do something impressive these days.

Advantage: Something a bit different.
Disadvantage: Platformer. In essence.

Proposal 4. Iron Savior

The IS storyline deserves to be made into a game. It has all the necessary ingredients - a war-torn futuristic setting, battles between planet-sized robots, and a plot that spans a little over four hundred millenia - and as you can tell from the link, it's become rather complex over the band's lifetime.

The only trouble is that I'm not entirely sure what genre the whole thing should be transformed into. The best I can think of is an Albion-type RPG (because I've been playing that a lot recently - I'll tell you about it later), but that's quite a step forward in terms of the complexity of making it. And while I have ideas of how to tell the storyline within the game, thinking up the actual gameplay elements is proving to be more problematic.

Advantage: It would be fantastic if it worked.
Disadvantage: I don't actually have a clue how to do it.

Proposal 5. Top Down Driving Game

I have yet to see a decent racing game made in MMF, and that's presumably because the physics involved are surprisingly complex. I tried to get a convincing top-down engine working before hitting on the idea of Treasure Tower, but the whole thing ultimately broke flagrantly. And that's just interaction with the playfield - I hadn't even begun to consider the effects of cars hitting each other. Maybe with a bit of planning this can be done, because I rather miss split-screen racing games. Remember Micro Machines?

Advantage: Dead easy once I get the engine out of the way.
Disadvantage: Catastrophically difficult until I get the engine out of the way.

It's all over

It was yesterday evening that the truth finally hit me. University is over. This isn't just the end of exams leading into a summer break - summer breaks don't exist any more. I'm never going to be taking classes, going to lectures, doing practicals or exams again. I don't remember other leavers in previous years mentioning this huge change at all. How do you deal with it?

On the last day in the common room, I remember Gordon huddled up in the corner muttering to himself "---- me, it's the last ----ing day and I'm not ----ing ready to leave ----ing school yet!" Despite sounding like something out of a Quentin Tarantino film, it was pretty much what we were all thinking. But this isn't just a move to a different place, it's the end of formal education. Now it's a matter of getting a job (or going down to the unemployment office, one of the two) and trying to find something more permanent.

To dampen the feeling of freedom somewhat, yesterday evening my car suffered the indignity of being hit by an immobile vehicle. Whitney's boss and a couple of others were moving the ancient engineless cars around in their car park when I arrived, and in the two minutes I was in the building they had taken the handbrake off one of them, rolled it down the slope, missed the forklift and dunted it into the panel above the left front wheel.

The damage isn't serious at all, it's just a reasonably sized dent and everything else is still operational. I do appreciate the efforts of one of the welders, though, who heroically placed his hand in the way in an attempt to prevent the three tons of metal colliding with each other. I hope he gets out of hospital soon.

It's only the last exam EVER.

Right then.

Click here to start the soundtrack to this post.

Exam Session VIII - The Final Battle

The struggle of four years concludes today. After the great Strike nearly eliminated them altogether, the forces of Human Computer Interaction are gathering in the Old Union Diner at this very moment. Led by the dastardly Wing Commander Right Reverend Admiral James V of McKinna, they are mounting a last attempt to vanquish the computer science students on their quest for a meaningful degree.

As the forces gather, the students turn to the ancient HCI gurus - Thimbleby, Nielsen, Shneiderman and Norman - a legendary group of people that copied each other's ideas and phrased them in slightly different ways, making the course material increase in size fourfold. With no help from this quarter, they must face the oncoming battle alone...

A counter-strike is forming in the Jack Cole Building even now. With the weapons of permissiveness, cognitive dimensions and direct manipulation on their side, it is their hope that the HCI course will be wiped from the face of the galaxy altogether. If they're lucky.


OK, you can stop now. Soul Calibur has the best fighter select music in the world, doesn't it?

Bad Influence

After another doctor's appointment, it seems that my illness might be being caused by my thyroid gland, an organ for which I knew neither the location nor purpose before Monday. Apparently it's not doing enough of the work it's meant to do, which happens to be pretty much everything, so it's a wonder that I'm working at all. One of the major symptoms is that I've been feeling apathetic, as evidenced by the fact that I haven't updated this in a week.

I've been prescribed Levothyroxine in addition to the medication that I was already taking, and I think I'm noticing what might be a gradual improvement. It's frustrating that I'm not getting more instant results, but they're basically enthusiasm pills, and if I overdose on them then there's a danger of me turning into Matt Smith. Ace.

But on to something that through my apathy and general undirected searching I discovered on the internet - unlikely though it may seem, I found something that inspired almost Knightmare-like levels of nostalgia. It's this site.

There's been a discussion recently on the GameFAQs Classic Games board (which, by the way, is one of the few remotely tolerable message boards at that place) about something known as "G4", which is apparently an American game-related channel. The general opinion is that it's about as good for games as MTV is for music, and when I think about it, I can't think of any other decent games-related programmes (apart from Gamesmaster, naturally).

Who could forget the enthusiastic presentation of Andy Crane and Violet Berlin, the woman with the maddest hair on television and record holder for most appearances in games ever? Especially that episode where Andy was done up as "Cheat Boy" and flew around the studio in a spectacularly bad blue-screen job, complete with cheesy superhero music. And that American who was just called Z that occasionally appeared. And the reviews of games like this when they weren't ten years old. And Nam Rood, who lived in the shed and demonstrated cheat codes by sticking them to his head for some reason. And addressed the viewers as "furtlers".

Sorry, I got a bit carried away there. Maybe the pills are working after all.

Ill

Over the past month I've had the new experience of growing quite seriously ill. It started off as what I thought was a normal stomach upset, but gradually became more an actual constant pain. I'm still waiting for the results of a blood test on Monday, which will hopefully give a better idea of what's wrong with me. On Tuesday this week I remember remarking to someone that it felt like my stomach was tying itself into balloon animals - a prediction that was unfortunately rather accurate.

I was told that Whitney's dad is quite an expert on stomach issues, having had an impressive collection of them himself. One of his most significant operations involved his abdominal muscle wall being coated in Kevlar to prevent organs from rubbing against each other. The surgery also had the obvious advantage that he can now only be injured by armor-piercing bullets.

But I wasn't so lucky - yesterday I decided I couldn't wait any longer for the results of my blood test and was heroically driven to hospital by . The appointment lasted a disappointing three minutes, but the doctor assessed that my intestines were spasming and I was prescribed pills to prevent my insides from literally tying themselves in knots. They seem to be helping, and as they take twenty minutes to come into effect they make quite useful timers for cooking rice.

I've also been rather put off eating because it's painful (although it's being alleviated now), so I've grown quite a lot thinner and my stomach no longer resembles a barrelful of butter. I'd certainly recommend the Guts Twisting in Agony diet to anyone.

Sierra Adventure Games: A Summary

Early this evening: Start playing Space Quest 5, which had been sitting in my Retro folder for a while but had never seriously been played.

Slightly later this evening: Decide that like all Sierra games, it's more enjoyable to have an FAQ permanently open in the background because of the high frequency of missable items and unlikely sudden deaths.

Well into the game: Become very impressed at a message telling me explicitly that I'd messed up a puzzle and giving me the opportunity to reset it. This might be the most generous thing in a Sierra adventure ever.

Much later: Spend ages navigating an annoying little maze.

At the end of the maze: Am curtly informed that I missed a vital item near the beginning of the game, and am dumped unceremoniously back at the title screen.

On title screen: Begin collecting a list of names of Sierra development staff for future murderous rampage.

Condition Red

Monday, 19:25: Raz issues a call to arms against the lecturers who have not written their exams, suggesting a sit-in protest and adding random names to the email to add weight to his argument.

20:40: Ian Gent (who Raz sent the email to without knowing) discourages said protest by email.

20:58: Stevie proposes a student counter-strike against graduating with a pathetic degree instead.

22:33: Roja sends novel-length email taking back the intention to target lecturers.

22:43: Tom chips in as well, translating the original email from Raz-ese.

Tuesday, 09:47: Ian Gent forwards an email from the Principal calling staff to a mysterious hastily-organized meeting.

13:27: sends out an email announcing that the local AUT have arranged a potential pay deal.

14:21: The Principal sends out another email explaining the terms of the deal. Everyone is ecstatic.

14:22 to 14:35: Everyone in the entire department forwards the Principal's email to everyone else, not knowing that they had it already.

21:11 Tom Kelsey eventually replies to the original email, realizing that somehow he isn't on the staff list.

Thursday: The local AUT members' votes will be counted and it will be announced whether the staff have accepted its terms or not, and therefore if I can graduate properly in the foreseeable future. Will the world be saved once again? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

[Theme music.]

May Day

There's something I forgot to mention in the last entry. Mainly for 's benefit: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, [Shift] on the title screen before the menu comes up.

If I still lived in St Andrews, I would have stayed up all night yesterday. I would have gone out at about two in the morning to meet up with people, and we would have headed down to the beach a couple of hours later. We would then have donned our swimwear and charged headlong into the freezing waters of the North Sea. Afterwards I would have walked back through town wearing nothing but a dressing gown, found my way back into hall, closed my eyes and slept until dinner time.

I must have been completely mad.