Found a sorta interesting iphone/android application from Adobe today: "Adobe Kuler".
The idea is, it allows the creation of "inspirational" color palettes of 5 colors. You can either take photos and find the most important colors of it or create the gamma yourself. Sharing and all included.
So, I'm learning applied C# programming in a part of my free time. Since Im a geek at heart and apparently spent some days (*cough*) playing at the PC in my life, I decided to give game programming a short. Im using XNA (apparently I allready blogged this a while ago, damn, Im bad at remembering stuff and keeping it up to date...).
While, I have some defined examples of some games that probably will be fun to play and sorta innovative, they are pretty complicated, so I want to start small.
Some Jump&Run will do for the first I said myself. So I wanted to look up some simple games I know. Soon enough I re-remembered Canabalt. ( http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/ )
The game design is simple, yet amazing and addictive, especially if you got an exam next day. A big part of its charm comes from them music. So after doing some tracing, I soon found out what other games had music written by the same author...
Especially 2 are noteworthy:
Super Meat Boy - Now I know this one since a while. What identifies it primary, is it's difficulty level, that is pretty much absurd. Basicaly it's your good old mario, with the difference, that the fireman is replaced by a cube of meat with legs and arms, princess peach with Bandage Girl and the big fat green ugly turtle boss, by the charmant Dr.Fetus.
(I still have no idea why Bandage girl is called this way, besides considering the fact that she's geting kidnaped ~320 times in this game, they should rather call her bondage girl).
Oh and the world. Basicaly you dont jump on anyones head or shoot fireballs or collect shrooms. The world is mostly grim, bloodred (actually only in the hell chapter, but dying >200 times/hour, covers surfaces with red stain quite a bit and no im not exagerating) and 99% filled with things that move, are sharp and will kill you instantly if you get too close.
To sum it up: here haf a video:
A second game by the same "meat team" (what fiting name), is Binding of Isaac, that features a small kid who is trying to get murdered by his fanatical mother who hears the voice of god... so he hides in the basement, that is filled with horrific things that all want to bite and kill you, starting with flies, over zombies and mutated kids down to the four horsemen and even satan himself.
Luckily there are hundreds of upgrades Isaac can collect, which makes this game so awesome....
TL;DR: this thing distracted me for like 3-4 days from my thesis
It might be the D&D blood (+1) talking in me, but if something can buy me, when it comes to games, its upgrades and randomness. And Binding of Isaac pretty much shows a good level of it.
So i might try to make a project like this I guess.
Sure it wont be even close to this complicated, "good" looking and interesting, but its all learning I guess.
I got bored of programming thesis stuff and since my neurological system programming is sorta in a hold (what do you mean "do other things") because I need a good GUI and apparently the perfectionist in me doesn't feel like the standard windows GUI and a few dots are good enough for such a minor script...
So I started looking up on DirectX (ofc 11 only, because well... nevermind me) and OpenGL
One thing led to another (and its never a good thign, when we are talking me) and I ended up with a version XNA on my PC and me ready to program a small game, in order to learn the graphical aspects of DirectX a bit more and also because im bored.
It definitly won't have any priority over the thesis, but it certainly will provide a bit of change here and there
Finally dragged my lazy ass to the gym and got a new subscription.
A trainer suggested to work out a good plan for me, so after taking some data it turned out:
Apparently I'm:
Overly underwatered - my body is only 40% water, while 55-60% is normal
Hypertonic - 130-140 blood pressure is normal for me, also my heartbeat is too strong
Hyperstatic - My chest area+back+shoulders is overly strong in comparison to my arms
Too "mobile" - aka weirdly flexible and stretchy
Also have like the lowest alcohol and coffein comsumption they saw in data since ages...
oO, now i feel like im sick - /goes to grab a beer
I guess everyone has his skeletons in the closet, but with every passing day I get more and more sure, that parts of my families closets are officially registered graveyards.
I dont even know where to start, especially since there are quite some stories going on out here. I think I start with the family on my mother's side. This family tree is full of women with characters of all kind. One of my grandgrandmas had 4 daughters and her sister had also a daughter. While the grandgrandma alone deserves quite some attention, I wont focus on her in this little gibbertext.
Still some words: This particular grandgrandmother was living back then in Sibiria. Not the easiest place to live. Especially when you have 2 children (back then), german blood and your husband fighting the second world war - that's going on during that time. Neither Stalin's nor Hitler's soldiers are the friendliest fellows either, especially to a german-blooded long haired (she had incredible hair, as I was told) in russia, so they decided to move southeast, where the weather is "warmer", the distance from the frontlines higher, food (and people) raids less often. Also relatives.
So Tadjikistan it was. On the way there, during one of Russia's cold winter snow storms and one of the small girls lost her fur hat. It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room during the night, especially if it aint there. And with the wind going on, the hat wasnt there either. Sadly the temperatures during a sibirian winter are -15°c and lower, so losing your hat equals death by freezing.
The mother gave her hat to her daughter and tied her hair around her head in the attempt to keep it warm. They somehow made it. She lost all her long hair however.
In Tadjikistan life was easier. Sure, people were still starving and sovjet raids were taking people to work camps (back to sibiria mostly), because they were of questionable blood, said something wrong or simply because someone had to be taken. Stalin was releasing lists, with a certain ammount of people from each social level group, that had to be eliminated, in order to maintain full control over the country. In addition to this schizophrenic behaviour, also people of "questionable" origin were to be taken to camps (in waves) or dealt with otherwise. My grandgrandmother was german and thus of "questionable" origin and allways under such a risk.
However, first her husband returned or more like was carried back from the front. Multipple heavy wounds and Diphteria weakened this man, he could barely move and was spending most his days in bed. (I'm actually not sure if it was Diphteria or Tuberchulosis, seems like both were fairly "popular" in my family tree during those times).
One of their neighbours and friends, who had acces to higher levels, informed them, that the next wave of arrests was incoming in a few monthes. Leaving or runing would be no option, with 2 children, her incapacitated husband and famine all over the land and there very few reasons to get spared from such a arrest. One of those was pregnancy.
When then soldiers arrived and told her, that she has 5 minutes to pack her things, she allready was pregnant. She was spared. Her husband died few days later however from the severe illness and fever.
This device will definitly haunt me after my death. Not only is the manual for it as simple to understand (also wrong in some technical aspects) as a quantum physics book, that was translated into english from japanese with google translator, in addiotion to this the manual to the DG2020 is also completly lacking any important programming information.
The engineers automaticly asumed that anyone using this device will have access to LabVIEW , the software that costs just some thousands euro... The best part of it: its my job as a student to make a standalone DLL now o.o
