A silly post. Happy ‘teens, Blandfill!

I’m making a silly post! This is so I can make a more thoughtful post later without having any backlogged sillyness to interfere.

I’ve been playing Diablo 2! I finally beat Duriel. I’m a necromancer and I summon skeletons. That game is hard and sometimes repetitive so I’m gonna lay off for a while.

There was a robotics kickoff! I didn’t sleep last night! Instead I played Diablo 2 with Nico. Nico has returned to school, to the best of my knowledge. So, today I am pulling an all-day-er. I made up this term; it describes when you have been up all night for some reason and, if you were a rational person, you’d go to sleep as soon as you were done with whatever was keeping you up all night. But I decided I want to stay up so that my sleep clock (totes not a biology person, someone explain why it exists) isn’t all screwed up, and I’m trying to make it all the way to normal-people’s-bedtime so I can be set all right and stuff. It’s about 9:20 PM as I’m writing this sentence so I think I’ve been mostly successful! Also hugely sleep deprived, which is why this post is a collection of words that lack logic or intelligence behind them.

Adrian sent this out over that one email list: http://www.dontevenreply.com/
I countered with http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php and http://www.27bslash6.com/

Here’s a silly video to break up the pace:

I have been playing the xkcd game for like two whole hours without ending. (The xkcd game is something we made up, I think, where you click “random” until you get a repeated comic.) Usually it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes, but I’ve been going really slow and leisurely, analyzing the details of each drawing, trying to make sure I don’t miss any of the jokes. (Like backslash escape sequences, for example — something I wouldn’t catch in a handcuffs reference even if I was vaguely familiar with the idea when comic 234 came out). I think my patience to do it so slowly is very related to my sleep-dep-ness; reading xkcd endlessly is trance-like.

I am reasonably sure that I haven’t been just forgetting which ones I’ve seen since I began playing, since my browser cache would load previously seen images instantly but all the comics I come across load noticeably slower than instantly.

I imagine this blog post is pretty boring. I’m streaming all over my consciousness right now.

This comic is funny.

To come, two posts (which I might combine into one) on less playful topics: A) New year’s resolution (1240×1480? ^_^), B) What happens to me when I am at home.

GChat

Someone in the room mentioned that we should create a GChat bot that would let us all talk together without the hassle of creating a chat room each time. Having used xmpppy before, I went and did it.

The result:

(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)

Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.

I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.

So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw

Creative Process Part II

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world.");
}

Remember how I said I was writing an essay last Thursday? Ha, well, just finished it last night. For those of you who learn about details of my life solely through this blog (I don’t know whether any of you exist, but if you do, please feel free to contact me IRL or through facebook or something, I promise I won’t think you’re creepy!) , here’s a quick update:

• After my three-hour sleep thing, I wasn’t able to work on my essay anymore, so I didn’t drink that red bull.
• In section, I got an extension until Tuesday night.
• Astronomy lab! And CS50 final project! Ouch, double all-nighters, not doing that again.
• On Tuesday, I got way busy accidentally because of CS50fair and other stuff and failed to do the essay.
• So I spent ALL DAY yesterday working on that darn essay.

Now, I don’t intend for this blog to become “oh my god my life is so busy, let me tell you all the details of how busy I am”. That would be uninteresting and unoriginal. But there’s some unresolved things from my last blog post, which is why I’m posting.

So, this creative process. It is, I suspect, important in the humanities. As a young scientist I’ve spent some time questioning whether the humanities are worth anything; my answer is pending but leaning towards “hell, I’m not sure anything’s really worth anything, so why not?”.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with my own creativity, however I can manage it. To be creative, let’s try to define that: “Creativity is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight.” (Thanks Wikipedia.) I like being creative in different ways. Creative with language; creative with code; creative with images; creative with problem-solving. Maybe I’m getting better at these. If I am, it’s exciting.

Well, I don’t have much else I feel like writing about at the moment, but I found this video online and Charles thinks it’s extremely cute:

Long overdue

Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.

Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. (more…)

Stars

This one’s for Rachel. Thanks for taking care of our wet music.

As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.

Cassiopeia over the horizon.

Orion.

Big Dipper.

This is the PLEIADES.

And now for something completely different.

This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.