Listen to the Rain

Going to do my New Year's post tomorrow, but first another Cataclysm story.

So if you know anything about video games, you know the way the player perceives them and the way they work under the hood rarely have anything to do with each other. FPS devs making the apparent last 10% of the player's health actually 40% of the total health bar, or making the last bullet in a magazine do 5x the damage of the rest, so that the player is more likely to end a fight on low health and out of ammo in their gun and feel the best feeling in a game, that you had to pull out all the stops against overwhelming odds and just barely won. Fallout 3 not having any system for vehicles so the metro trains were actually NPCs with giant tram-shaped hats that you climbed inside and then the NPC would run along under the tracks, that kind of thing.

In Cataclysm, you can scan in books to an e-reader or a smartphone, as a reflection of how good modern cameras are, and then keep your entire book collection with you. This is very convenient but a recent bug exposed how it actually worked. There was a change in the way gun magazines worked, and fixing that bug meant that people were picking up their smartphone, turning on the flashlight, and suddenly having a hundred books materialize out of thin air and fall into their lap.

This is because how book scanning works behind the scenes is that smartphones, laptops, etc., all have a giant invisible Tardis pocket that makes a physical copy of the book and holds it, so the PC is still using the code for reading a physical book, they're just carrying it invisibly with them. And the change to gun magazines meant that pocket was changing and the game was doing what it's supposed to do when a pocket changes somehow--kick out the entire contents so it doesn't get lost. Thus, sudden magic library!

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than how monsters with ranged attacks actually have an invisible NPC holding a gun do the actual firing or not.

So I did more programming for my Cataclysm mod and I wrote the following statement:
if( in_species( species_PSI_NULL ) ) {
return false;
} else if( has_flag( mon_flag_HAS_MIND ) ) {
return true;
} else if( in_species( species_ZOMBIE ) ) {
return false;
} else if( has_flag( mon_flag_HUMAN ) ) {
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}
Simple, right? It makes the clear decision hierarchy obvious to the reader. If not A, then B. If not A or B, then C, and so on.

Well, no. It turns out the heads of the project have very particular ways they like things to be done, and they don't want any nested statement where different branches return the same thing--so no having two branches return true or two branches return false. This is set as a warning in the tests, but they deliberately elevated it to an error.

Alright, so I need to change it. And I thought, and I thought, and I said, you want a simplified statement? Alright, I'll give you a simplified statement!

return ( ( !in_species( species_PSI_NULL ) && has_flag( mon_flag_HAS_MIND ) ) ||
( !in_species( species_PSI_NULL ) && !in_species( species_ZOMBIE ) && has_flag( mon_flag_HUMAN ) ) )

Malicious compliance is a go.

(I did leave a comment explaining the logic, before you ask).

Thank you for your good wishes for sashagee's health! She's doing a little better, though still not back to where she was a couple weeks ago. She's scheduled for some more tests soon so hopefully that will get her back on track.

Working more on my Cataclysm mod and someone just added the ability to use arithmetic expressions in spell fields, unlike the previous limit of integers only. Right now, since psionics should be a little unpredictable, the powers are designed so that the damage is totally random within defined bounds, and leveling up the power decreases the randomness. Because of the way the syntax works, however, I couldn't previously increase the possible max damage at higher levels without allowing that amount of damage as a random possibility at lower levels--but now I can! And then I thought, oh, I should also scale damage based on Intelligence too, so I needed to come up with a mathematical formula for that. After a while of trying to figure out how to get +1 Intelligence to mean +5% damage normalized around 10, I gave up and went with adding 5 to Intelligence, dividing by 15, and then using that as the multiplier. That gives +6% damage at 11 Intelligence, +13% at 12, +20% at 13, +27% at 14...

...and I just figured out that answer while writing this post. Add 10 and then divide by 20. That would give me exactly the values I was looking for.

Anyway, it didn't matter in the end because I wrote up the formula like so:

"max_damage": { "arithmetic": [ { "arithmetic":
[ { "u_val": "spell_level", "spell": "pyrokinetic_eruption" },
"*", { "const": 3 } ] }, "+", { "const": 97 }, "/"
{ "const": 15" }, "*", { "arithmetic": [
{ "u_val": "intelligence" }, "+",
{ "const": 5 } ] } ] }

...and then the game told me "too many args," because each arithmetic operation can only take two arguments and you can only nest them two deep, so it's flatly impossible to do what I want. Oh well. Maybe in the future someone will add a way that it can work.

At work they're refining the database we currently use to try to make it something that's remotely functional at scale. They have actually done a lot of refinements from the initially basically unusable state and now it is actually possible for me to accomplish some work in a day--sashagee was initially like "White collar jobs are a scam! You're not working at all! You just play games and occasionally look at your screen!" until we switched back to the old database and she realized that I did actually have work to do when the tools didn't prevent me from doing it--but while the minutes' long wait between every action has actually been fixed, having to click through seven or eight screens to do anything still exists. I'm trying out the new refinements and it does seem to work a bit better, in that there's a work queue on the same screen as the one where the work takes place which is actually a massive improvement! I currently can't test record management because the list of test profiles does not include anything that I can manipulate...but it does show the same record multiple times in a row. Well, I'm sure eventually it will all get fixed.

Eventually, eventually, eventually.

In a striking change to most years, the weather has not plunged like 30 degrees after the new year and the weather report even shows that it's above freezing for the next week! On the one hand it's nice to be walking to work and not have to button my coat--the universal sign that winter has arrived--but on the other hand a warm Chicago winter is not exactly an encouraging sign for the global temperature mean. Nonetheless, it's supposed to be 5°C today so maybe I'll take a walk along the river at lunch.

We finished all of our 年賀状 (nengajō, "New Year's Cards") this week--we were waiting on a few addresses. In Japan, 年賀状 are strictly formal without much personalization at all. They have a few set phrases offering good wishes for the new year, you stamp your personal seal on them by the dozen, and drop them in the mail. The mail carriers pick them up and hold them during the month of December and then deliver them in a blizzard--something like two billion 年賀状--on New Year's Day. They're premade and all you need to do was address them, and in past years that's mostly what I did, though I did translate the Japanese on them for the benefit of the mostly non-Japanese-speaking recipients. This year, sashagee wanted the absolutely cutest 年賀状 out there, so I presented her with a few candidates and she went with this one:


The year of the rabbit! It doesn't include the rest of the standard text, usually something like 旧年中は大変お世話になりました。今年も宜しくお願い致します。 ("You have been of great assistance to me in the last year and I look forward to our continued good relations in the new year"), but I suggested that we modify the tradition a bit and put photos on our family on it. I'm certainly never going to send anyone a Christmas card but there is social value in updating your friends on how your family looks, so I put a photo on there from our trip to the arboretum and sashagee wrote a simple good wishes standard message (shades of the standard 年賀状). I ordered fifty of them and that's usually more than enough for my purposes but this year we ran out! Next year we'll have to order a hundred since we're sending 年賀状 to sashagee's family and friends now which expands the circle of recipients by a lot. Next year, I'll be writing 年賀状 for a while at the end of December. At least two people working on them makes it faster.

I'm still working on my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and last night I spent two hours trying to solve a problem. I decided to make the starting Teleporter profession an "Imperial Terran Navy Liaison," a psychic from an alternate dimension where Earth has an interstellar empire who got dumped on post-apocalyptic Cataclysm Earth after a jump drive accident, so I thought I would give them a hypertech gun that was standard issue in their home reality, balanced by virtue of never being able to reload it. Easy, I thought. Cue hours of "invalid ammo type" errors and me frantically scrolling through documentation, loading up a Teleporter and finding the ammo type was "0 Null", reading existing documentation and examples of guns and trying to figure out what was wrong, searching through the Discord and Reddit, the classic woes of computer programming. And sure, JSON doesn't involve math or formal logic, but it does involve proper semantics being extremely important, and something was missing.

In the end, I solved it by writing these four lines:
{
"type": "ammunition_type",
"id": "mom_fusion_ammo",
"name": "B47 fusion shot",
"default": "mom_fusion_ammo"
}
The problem was while I had defined the ITN B47 Fusion Pistol, and the magazine that goes in that pistol, and the physical ammo that's placed in that magazine, I hadn't made the definition of that physical ammo as an ammunition type--it was just an item with type AMMO, not an ammunition_type. As soon as I put in that extra definition, all the errors went away. At least for the other error I got (teleporter's "attune to location" ability not working) it was because I had assigned the same id to two different things. That ammo problem...ugh.

As my father often says, the more you know about computers, the more surprised you are they ever work.

A year and a half ago, I wrote about how my Free Company in FFXIV managed to acquire a house for themselves, in what's often called Housing (Savage). Well, this time we completed Housing (Ultimate)


We're moving from a small to a large, so while our old house was a sushi bar up top and a speakeasy on the bottom floor, now we have three floors, every one of which is bigger than our whole entire house was before. We also only have 400 item slots to fill the whole house--smalls get 200 items, mediums get 300 items while being over twice as big as a small, and larges get 400 while being twice as big as a medium--so we're really going to need to think about how we want to do the decorating. sashagee wants to make it a museum to all the different Final Fantasies, with mannequins of their heroes. Right now, all we've done is the yard.

We got extra lucky, though, because we actually won. The FFXIV housing system is famously bad because there are only a limited number of houses--it's not instanced, they are real locations in the game world--and previously the winner was the first person who bought it, which meant that people woke up at 4 a.m. and sprinted to their house to buy it any time new houses were added. Any houses that went up for resale went up at a random time up to twenty-four hours after the original owner relinquished it, so people would spend hours clicking on the house in the hope that they would be the one to find the exact second it went on sale. That's how we got our previous house, after like twelve hours of hunting and clicking on housing placards, and we swore we would never do it again. But we did not have to, since this time the devs introduced a lottery! sashagee, aaron.hosek and I all put in our 50 million gil and ignored the house until the lottery results came due, where we found out that #3 had been drawn and aaron.hosek won!

Most people had a much different experience, however--when the lottery results concluded, they went to the house with hope in their hearts and found that somehow #0 had won, and when they checked the results it said that there were zero participants. This was true even for houses with only a single bid. Each ward contains thirty houses, and in our ward maybe five people actually won. The medium-sized house down the stairs from us (we're on the highest point in the district) had several members from the same Free Company standing forlornly around it as I ran back and forth to the market board, and I chatted with them a bit to discover that #0 was the winner at their plot too.

News just came today that the FFXIV team identified the bug and has the original data for who the winners were supposed to be, since it was apparently a communication error rather than an error with the actual lottery. So hopefully all the winners get their houses as intended! As for us, we have a lot of decorating to do.

Yesterday, I had to maintain broken code!

So for background, months ago I completed a Random Quote Machine as a Free Code Camp project, but I'm reworking it as part of the revamped curriculum. As you can see if you click that link, it no longer works at all, and after a bit of exploration I discovered it's because the quote API I used is no longer serving data. "Alright," I said, "I'll find a new one."

That took some doing because I had to find an API served over HTTPS to avoid cross-domain requests, but eventually I found one that worked and then it kept displaying "undefined" for both quote text and author. Why? Why was this happening?

Well, it turns out that not every JSON object is formatted the same. I was using the object keys from the original API which didn't exist in the new API, so I went through the code and changed all the old keys to the new keys and it worked! Then I realized that was a bad solution, set two variables to the new author and text keys, and used those variables to display the data. Much more maintainable!

Of course, just now I realized what I should have done is split off the display code into a function invoked when the AJAX call is successful, so I'd only have to change the function call's parameters and the function would handle everything else itself. And indeed, I'm going to go do that next. This is why functional programming is a thing, so you're not search-replacing variable names and risking something getting screwed up (why isn't my code working at all? Oh, right. Let me just change "reponse" to "response"...).

At least this is a problem with a solution I figured out and implemented myself, rather than hours lost to not typing one }. I should treasure this feeling.

Last night, after a period of struggle, I finally finished all of the JavaScript exercises on Free Code Camp post-revamp. I did a few before they changed the entire curriculum around, like the ROT13 cipher that I posted about here, but post-revamp there are five major projects to complete the certification. Here's the last one that took me the longest: a cash register.

( Here's the code )

I ran into two major problems while I was writing the code. The first was the While loop, where it kept quitting out without advancing the counter, and thus not checking every cash denomination in the register, and I couldn't figure out why. Eventually I added a second Else to advance the counter if either If statement was false, and then I remembered you can check for multiple conditions and only execute the If all of them are true. That took me like four hours to remember and when I added the &&, everything worked and I had my answer in the final form.

The second was with the last test case in the original problem. The answer was formatted strangely, with money returned from smallest denomination to largest rather than just the change given to the customer. This really confused me--did I need to add some kind of special condition to handle just this case? Why was it so different? What was I missing?

It turns out I didn't read the problem. The problem specifically specifies that if the change is all of the remaining contents of the register, return the entire register pre-transaction, which will probably have most drawers empty. Once I realized that, and reformatted the early part of the problem to function on a copy of the cid variable rather than on cid itself, it all worked out. And just now writing this I realized I don't need cidRemaining, which is a relic from before I added the workingCID variable. And there's a console.log still in there I should get rid of.

There. Did that. 💮

I managed to solve this without looking up any other solutions or checking forums for other people asking questions. Neither of those are bad, and in fact they are essential to a programmer's work (see this classic video for an succinct explanation), but I'm still proud I came up with this solution all on my own. The one thing I did have to look up was how to use map() on multidimensional arrays, which led to the understanding that I can map() on each instance of another map(), and that was the final puzzle bit I needed to finish off the function.

Next up on the curriculum is the section on libraries (Bootstrap, jQuery, React, etc), but tonight I'm going to take a break. Maybe I won't even study Japanese!

Well, I won't get ahead of myself.

Time lost to stupid mistakes in the last week:

• Typing 0 instead of 1, thus iterating over the wrong array and repeatedly getting "undefined": Three hours.


• Misplacing a bracket, causing the loop to always return true: Two hours.


• Checking the wrong function input, thus causing the function to always return false: One hour.

Programming languages are like real languages, in that a single small error totally screws everything up. I'm reminded of my Japanese lesson this week, where Aya-sensei got completely confused when I talked about making 塩鮭 (shiozake, "Salted salmon"), because 鮭, "salmon," and 酒, "alcohol," are pronounced exactly the same and I was talking about leaving it out on the counter to thaw, so she thought I had left three bottles of booze on the counter.

After those three hours lost to 0 and 1, I wish I had that booze on the counter.

As part of an effort to get more practice with CSS, and after seeing this amazing portrait done with just CSS and HTML, I decided to try to make CSS art. Obviously, starting with something quite a bit simpler, though. Somewhere where you begin by drawing a circle.

Behold the Kirb.

I'm especially happy about the shading to give a 3D effect. It's not perfect, though--the border around the body cuts off the limbs, and I'd like to find a way to remove that if I can. That'll take a bit more effort, though, especially if I want to preserve the shading.

I'd also like to have a few buttons to press to make Kirby smile or move his arms. That'll be harder, but I don't think it'll be impossible.

Haven't had a great week and I'm not sure why. It might just be post-con blues, it might be something else. My therapist pointed out that seeking an immediately-proximate cause for something isn't always helpful, and she's right. It doesn't stop me from trying, though.

After watching the trailer for the Apocalypse expansion for Stellaris--it hit me right in the same place that the Earth Alliance president's speech Babylon 5's Battle of the Line does--I noticed that Stellaris was on sale and I immediately went out and bought it. I found a mod that allows space elves, so the Holy Ayleid Empire is currently expanding across the stars. I've only played for a couple hours so I don't have much of an opinion on it yet, but it seems fun. The people who told me to buy it were right.

I also finished another coding project! It's not super special, but I'm happy because I started breaking all the Javascript out into its own functions rather than trying to stuff everything into a single on-load function, which made it a lot easier to see what was going on. I also used a name-based track and CSS classes to dynamically change the backgrounds based on weather type and time of day with six lines of code and a bunch of CSS classes, rather than a giant switch statement or a massive if/else chain. Next time I'm going to see if I can do the whole thing without any JQuery at all. I should at least know how to write an XMLHttpRequest.

I just finished reading Locke & Key #1, after already reading Nutmeg #1 and Monstress #2 this month. I think the thing that always scared me away from Western comics is that 1) I'm neutral on superheroes as a concept and 2) I don't know where to start. With manga it's easy--start at the beginning. If I wanted to read about the X-men, where is the beginning? How much backstory am I missing? Listening to Jay & Miles X-plain the X-men especially makes me think that there are dozens of issues of backstory I'd need to appreciate what was going on, and that impression is always why I stayed away. But there are plenty of non-manga comics that follow a similar format, just like a lot of Western TV now has the same format as an anime series with a limited, self-contained run instead of just continuing until the money runs out or the creators get bored. I slept on Western comics for a long time, but I was just looking in the wrong places.

Tonight is another episode of Starlight Radio Dreams, so I'm going there later and getting fish and chips while I watch an episode of olde timey radio theatre. Other than that, I have no plans this weekend except maybe going to see Prometheus Bound on Sunday. Probably just stay in, play games, and study Japanese/coding. Maybe beat Shadowrun: Hong Kong and write about it. We'll see what else comes up.

I made a thing! See here!
 
It's not very complicated and very late 90s web design, but I figured out how to make it myself. And now I'm working on a personal portfolio page here, though at the time I'm writing this, it's barely done. It took me a long time to implement the responsive menu at the top due to some leftover CSS from the first pre-Bootstrap version I made. It worked, but not on mobile, so I switched to Bootstrap and then spent hours trying to figure out why the links weren't justifying to the right. Turns out setting the contents of the navbar to inline-block means they're all grouped together. Oops.

I got my annual raise and bonus information yesterday and it’s higher than even my more optimistic projections. That’s good, considering. I’ll need the money. It’s not doing much to help my worried about spending, but every bit helps.
 
Tomorrow is the last part of the long-running Horror on the Orient Express game, and then Sunday my parents are coming to pick me up to go to the Orchid Show at the Chicago Botanic Garden, like we've gone for the past few years. Later that night, I'm having lisekatevans and her roommate over for dinner to thank them for hosting me so often over the last month. This is the kind of weekend that previously would have made me dread the social engagement and the time in my schedule it took , but...I'm looking forward to it. I'm amazed. I haven't looked forward to social events in a long time, even though I did enjoy them when I was there. I used to be much more social, and I'm not sure what changed other than getting older. Maybe that means I can work a change in myself and maintain this.
 
I do feel bad that I can't make the memorial for nytesenvy's father, though. The timing just doesn't work. If the Orchid Show tickets were slightly later, I could stop in at the beginning...but I can't. And even though my attendance isn't expected, I feel guilty about that.

Alright. Off to a movie.
 
 
 

Let's talk about the last year!

I guess the biggest change from the perspective of this blog is that I started actually posting here again. I got inspired by RPGs--as is often the case, I admit--and started my Dungeons & Design series, and I think it was mostly the fact of posting those that got me into the habit of posting about other subjects. There are other factors too, like how I have enough down time here and there at work that I can write posts in notepad, send them home, and then post them. I also stopped friend-locking everything and started defaulting to public posts, even when they're about my life. It's essentially security through apathy--I can see how many people visit my blog, and on an average day it's a couple dozen. I post all these updates to Facebook and Twitter and the truth is that most people don't care. That may be a little sad, but it certainly tells me that the excessive care I was taking about talking about anything remotely personal is unwarranted. Whatever I say will mostly just get lost in the flow of the internet anyway, unless people are specifically looking to read it.

I was hoping that we'd be paid back by at least one of the people who owed us money this year, but it didn't happen. Aggressively didn't happen, in the case of the Japanese Pension Office. Or perhaps passive-aggressively? Regardless, it led to some tight moments at times, especially during the summer, though I do admit that some of that is because I refuse to touch the principal. Now that schoolpsychnerd has a steady paycheck from her internship everything is okay, though I admit my grasping miserliness does mean I'm less happy with our finances that their absolute quality should lead me to be, but overall it's been on an upward trend. And maybe someone will actually pay us this year. A man can dream.

Work continues much the same as it has been. I had my annual review and did better than I did last year, and my job's bureaucracy and policies means that I'll get an automatic raise and a yearly bonus commensurate with my performance. It's theoretically possible that we won't get the bonus, since the amount and whether it occurs at all is based on the AMA's overall performance during the year, but I haven't heard of anything that would indicate that it's not coming. Even if it doesn't, I'll still get the raise. The benefits of working for a non-profit with no shareholders!

In terms of personal improvement, I took up programming! I originally thought about doing it back in May and was given a lot of resources, and later took a Coursera course that I wrote all about. I've even seen found an implementation of Python for the iPad, and since I have my iPad with me all the time at work, I can get that and then have time to bash my head against programs at work as well as at home! Indeed, during my interview for the job I was asked if I knew anything about HTML or programming and I had to say that I did not, so if I can actually learn programming to a useful level I can hopefully get a promotion. The end project was an implementation of Asteroids, and I'd love to do a lot more to work on it than I had to do for the class to keep my hand in, but what I did accomplish is reasonably impressive, I think.

Also, studied Japanese, but on that subject I'm less confident. I maintained my ability, and that's about it.

Last year, I told myself that if I maintained the weight I had reached in August (~77 kg) for a whole year, I'd go get my wedding ring resized because it's rather large now and I'm kind of worried that it will slip off at some point. Well...I did maintain my weight, but I didn't actually get the ring resized--see the above-mentioned grasping miserliness. I also linked up my new iPhone's M7 chip with LoseIt and started tracking my steps and apparently my average number of steps per day is...5,218. Out of the 10K that's recommended. Exercise is healthy basically no matter what, and getting that number up is something I'd like to improve on in the future, but so far I'm doing pretty well on that front.

I made much more of an effort to be social in 2013. In 2012, I think I had the tendency to hermit a lot more, turning down people's invitations and not really inviting anyone over to schoolpsychnerd and my apartment. I'm not sure what exactly it was. It might have been some remaining difficulty with adjusting to the pace of social life in America vs. what it had been like in Japan, maybe some Anxiety Cat--there's a really old one that I thought fit me really well that said something like "too nervous to talk to people, come off as arrogant or standoffish"--maybe just my typical introverted personality, but this year I tried to avoid falling into the trap of staying home all the time. I like to think I succeeded, or at least reasonably well. And it turns out that traveling out to other places isn't really that bad, even on a work night. I tend to apply the maxim "past performance is no indication of future results" to social events if I'm not careful, in the sense that sure I had fun the last time I went to a party, and the time before that, and probably the time before that...but what about this time!?!? That's not a productive attitude to take, honestly. So this year, I made sure to try to shut that off at the pass. Once I get out of the house, then inertia takes over and I'm not exactly going to turn around halfway there. And it turns out that my friends are awesome people and fun to be around to an extent that far outweighs the annoyance of having to change my physical location. Who would have thought, right? Obviously, this has always been true, but it's convincing that little voice that's the trick, and in 2013 I beat it into submission. Or at least, I inflicted grevious wounds.

All in all, it's been a pretty fantastic year, and I'm looking forward to what 2014 will bring.

I realize that posting song lyrics is incredibly emo and so early-2000s as to be aggressively unhip, but it's pseudo-tradition for me, so:

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'
Now the days go by so fast
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven...I wish you would
The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think you might come to California...I think you should
Drove up to Hillside Manor sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
And it's one more day up in the canyon
And it's one more night in Hollywood
It's been so long since I've seen the ocean...I guess I should...