A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

It has been a full weekend.

Saturday saw a lot of Volity hacking, breaking ground on the web client's server-side component. Once the complete skeleton is built I'll commit it as v0.1, but my fugue state didn't last more than a few hours and I had to be all "whoah" and raise my hands and step away before I could quite get there. Maybe I'll finish it today. Anyway, this will be the first Perl-based Volity sub-project that I've started since I got religion via Perl Best Practices, which taught me to start major projects by writing the tests (and, in so doing, designing the interface) first. So that's exciting. If you're me.

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In the evening, radiotelescope, cthulhia and I saw Day Watch, the sequel to last year's Night Watch, a.k.a. the crazy Russian vampire movie that everyone except for me and the people I saw it with hated. I liked this movie too, though not as much as the first. It replaced the crazy imagery and action of the first movie with some fun plot development. I dug it, but I missed the other stuff. It also contained one completely irritating character, who (among other things) failed Mo's Movie Measure the instant that she was able. Worse was that this occurred during an egregious and overlong "Freaky Friday" sequence, and so I spent five or six minutes in a sustained wince in the middle of this otherwise enjoyable flick, and that was unfortunate.

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Sunday was classicaljunkie's birthday! Following plans that dougo initiated a while ago, and also accompanied by Cthulhia, we drove to Kimball Farms to play miniature golf, or "putt-putt" as CJ calls it in her native language. I hadn't played since I was a kid but I'll be damned if I still didn't have reasonably good chops for it. My friends laughed when I said it was all the golfing video games I play, but I wasn't entirely joking! The place has two courses, and we played both, with me winning the first round and CJ the second (after Cth left), though the point spread was fairly tight.

The courses were enjoyable but rather bland, with one real standout whose like I had never seen before: one hole split in a vee a few feet away from the tee, with one arm snaking towards the cup in the usual fashion, and the other dumping into an artificial stream. As it turns out, the best solution involves purposefully putting into the water, which carries your ball under a platform and through a hidden tube, ejecting it right at the cup. But there's no explicit documentation about this; you either need to watch someone do it, or be intrepid enough to figure that there had to be some reason for the hole's stairway-to-nowhere design, making the leap of faith yourself. Doug was the brave one in our party, and he and I both got holes in one.

The rest of the course was really nothing special, but I just couldn't shut up about that one hole. Great design!

Also did some unexpected networking: the dad of the family playing behind us turned out to be a publisher of some computer and video game magazines from the 1980s and 90s that I loved as a kid! He couldn't help but overhear Doug and I talk about Volity and iPhones and such, and we chatted for a while. he was interested to hear about my startup, so I need to email him a little follow-up today. Had no business cards on hand, but wrote my info on the back of an extra scorecard for him.

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Then we went to dinner with dictator555, at Pigalle, in the Boylston vicinity. This was the first time I'd really experienced a fancy-dan restaurant where you pay exorbitantly for very little edible mass. It felt like something from a New Yorker cartoon. I ordered a $15 a menu item describing itself as gnocchi, and it meant this quite literally, featuring a gnocchi, one single piece, on a little bed of vegetables; an island in an otherwise large and empty plate. I did appreciate this, though perhaps not in the way they meant me to.

It was delicious, what there was, and I also quite enjoyed the sampling that my dining companions allowed me from their dishes. I said that I'd consider returning the next time I felt the need to really impress someone.

I've been feeling kind of poopy these last few days. It doesn't quite make sense given that things around me are exciting and interesting. I theorize it's because this is my last week at ICCB and I've been reacting to this by hiding from ICCB, so that makes me want to feel lame and useless even as other things give me cause to feel energized and leaderly.

Today's my last day and I don't wanna go in. But I really oughtta. I mean, I'm currently typing on a laptop that will no longer be mine to use in a day, technically speaking. Well, not very technically speaking.

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I may be sitting next to the guy that tahnan was sitting next to the other day. I was doing pretty good at not listening to him when he chose to illustrate a point to his friend by pointing at me and splurting "LIKE THIS GUY HERE HA HA!" I shot eye-lasers at him pshew pshew and he looked away.

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Video Game thoughts:

I am finally playing Super Mario 64, more or less. (The DS version adds some star-gathering missions and a modicum of touchscreen gimmicks to the original game, as well as the earnable ability to switch between four different Mario-world characters. You actually start the game as Yoshi, that freaky nudist dinosaur, and need to fight through some prologue levels in order to unlock Mario.) I actually owned a Nintendo 64 several years ago, and for some reason I never played this game on it. (Instead I played through Ocarina of Time, which was great, and then traded the whole thing in for a Sony PlayStation.)

It's kind of incredible... after I got past the nearly 10-year-old 3D graphics and the mushy controls (the lack of a real analog joystick is a bummer, and I just can't use the emulated analog control that the touchscreen offers) I was a little stunned to realize that the star-gathering mechanic is the root of all the treasure-hunt 3D platformers that have appeared since, like Jak & Daxter (with its power cells) and Beyond Good & Evil (with its pearls). I mean, these newer games don't even attempt to hide their design debt to Mario 64. I did not know this. It's an interesting discovery, to me.

And it's all so tight; each level has a whole bunch of different ways to approach it, all layered over each other in the same physical space. The newer games do that too, but they tend to prefer vast, sprawling spaces. Take Jak & Daxter: the levels are rolling fields, lush jungles and craggy hills, all a joy to leisurely explore, and it's up to the player to figure out where the actual challenges lie within them. Mario 64, on the other hand, acts like a bridge between the old 2D "every pixel on the screen is an obstacle" design aesthetic and the potential that 3D games had opened. While there's a lot more freedom of movement than any of the 2D Super Mario games, it's still true that every piece of ground you can stand on is there for a reason, playing a role in at least one of the physically overlapping missions on the level; no space is "wasted".

I like it.