The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Saturday I practiced guitar+loop pedal for the first time in way too long and worked on comics. Today I finished another comic for the coming week, took a nice big walk up Bernal Hill (which is practically in my back yard, in that my back yard is at the base of Bernal Hill), downloaded the fight, and am listening to the fight.

qotd: Other than music, what hobbies do you have?

These days I spend way more time drawing comics than working on music.

DRC: on Saturday I migrated a server's contents to another machine with another IP address. On Sunday I implemented a ridiculously simple anti-spam measure I'd heard about some time ago and launched a new sub-site for a website that's pretty popular among a decently sized demographic subgroup of Germany. What fun!

QotD: you mean there are people who have hobbies other than music? Uh. I'll follow up if I happen to get an idea about that. Okay, sometimes I like tinkering with computers. Sometimes I like cooking. Sometimes I like messing with the way brains work.

jast wrote:Sometimes I like messing with the way brains work.

I miss those days

I cooked today for the first time in a long time. I miss that a lot. I'm doing more with my kids, since I don't travel as much these days, so that's great. Today we made a volcano, looked at all the secret markings on US paper money under the microscope, and made paper airplanes. Other than that I read about history and science...just started "Big Bang" by Simon Singh.

I cooked my first pea soup today and am quite excited that it came out perfect. Very encouraging.

QOTD - I used to draw endlessly but haven't in years. I'm sure that I have some rusty skills stored away somewhere, and I have ideas for comic books, but I don't know if I'll ever break out the pencils again. Other hobbies besides music, then, probably not.

roymond wrote:

jast wrote:Sometimes I like messing with the way brains work.

I miss those days

Oh, I forgot: without drugs.

Other than that I read about history and science...just started "Big Bang" by Simon Singh.

I've read two other books by that guy, both about math things. Quite nice.

QOTD: Most of my non music hobbies are physical non team sports or mechanical things. I surf regularly, run/hike with my dogs, ride motorcycles, snowboard, wake board, stuff like that. I love fast cars and horsepower. I love to cook and create awesome recipes. But I really like music best of all. I love creating, producing, arranging, etc. I wouldn't call myself a composer, but I like everything about becoming one. Danny Elfman has the greatest career in the world, as far as I'm concerned.

jast wrote:

roymond wrote:

jast wrote:Sometimes I like messing with the way brains work.

I miss those days

Oh, I forgot: without drugs.

Yeah, I also meant with needles and scalpel.

roymond wrote:

jast wrote:

jast wrote:Sometimes I like messing with the way brains work.

Oh, I forgot: without drugs.

Yeah, I also meant with needles and scalpel.

These days I prefer a full bottle in front of me to a full-frontal lobotomy.

QotW: I'm an avid video gamer. I write science fiction. I customize action figures. I get involved in crazy projects and harebrained schemes.

Niveous wrote:I customize action figures

Every time I hear this I think, whoa! That's sooo New york! But then I think of the stuff I do, and it doesn't seem so odd. But then again, maybe I'm odd, too.
Did all the comas make that confusing?

Yeah, but I figured out what you meant as soon as I woke up from it.

Holy cow, that was a lot of posts. I traveled to Buffalo, Burlington, and Albany, then back home, and caught up on SF posts since 23 Dec. Skimming was necessary.
I have many half-assed hobbies. I love games and puzzles of all sorts, photography, writing (not much lately), art, video games.
-bill

I don't have the time for this hobby. My stuff sounds half-assed because it -well- is.

QotD: I'm learning pottery right now. It's great cuz I was a geology major, so I feel right at home playing in the mud.

QotD: I used to design tabletop games in my free time. If I had any free time now I'd probably still do it.

fluffy wrote:Yeah, but I figured out what you meant as soon as I woke up from it.

Ha, I get it, I typed coma.

I'm replying to this because the 4th was my birthday.

Recently (like on the 2nd) I got to take my baby home from the hospital, which was super exciting, and made for a great birthday.

Other hobbies: I'm a fan of roguelike games. These are old school computer games that predate the cursor keys on keyboards. (This means they also predate personal computers.) The very first roguelike game was called "Rogue". One of the most popular Roguelike games is Nethack. I have a number of ideas for roguelike games, however I want to write a nice flexible library I can use for more easily creating roguelike games. Oh, and roguelike games in particular have a long history of problems with feature bloat, so it is easy to over-plan, over-implement, and generally fail to have any sort of shipping date.

I also have a baby. Baby Beany is super-exciting. She was born early, so she had a prolonged stay at the hospital.

fluffy wrote:These days I spend way more time drawing comics than working on music.

I didn't get your Womble comic when I first saw it. It took me until last night, when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, before I got it. I was confused at first because I couldn't understand why the purple Womble dissolved half way why there was another one coming out of a wormhole. But then picturing it in my head, I think it shows a girl accidentally sending her old Womble into a time warp as a younger Womble comes out. Is it the same Womble but younger, coming out? The green could indicate younger, but you change the colors in the other squares.

I don't get the new Unity one at all. Maybe it will come to me later, too.

I love the partner/cat one. You can look at it with a dirty mind or as a cat lover. I happen to fit both, which made it twice as funny.

@Mr Beany. Congrats on the new baby.
edit: Wait a tic. It is your baby, right? You didn't just happen to see one you liked and took it, did you?

Billy's Little Trip wrote:@Mr Beany. Congrats on the new baby.
edit: Wait a tic. It is your baby, right? You didn't just happen to see one you liked and took it, did you?

Thanks!

Have you ever seen a nursery in a hospital these days? It is very hard to just walk in, grab a cute one, and walk out. You have a better bet stealing a baby from a house where there are a lot (as in "Raising Arizona").

I'm happy with the baby they gave us. She's nice and quiet. When the nurses comment that you've landed yourself with both a cute and well behaved baby, you know you're in luck.

And really, not all babies are cute. People sometimes like to think so, but some of them really just seem a little... off.

mrbeany wrote:When the nurses comment that you've landed yourself with both a cute and well behaved baby, you know you're in luck.

My parents weren't so lucky. On the day I was born, the nurses all gathered around. And they gazed in wide wonder, at the joy they had found. The head nurse spoke up, and she said leave this one alone. She could tell right away, that I was bad to the bone.

Beany: congrats on the baby and the birthday. Glad she's ok. Early can be worrisome. Also, nethack is awesome.
-bill

HeuristicsInc wrote:Beany: congrats on the baby and the birthday. Glad she's ok. Early can be worrisome. Also, nethack is awesome.
-bill

Thanks.

And yes, nethack is awesome.

I want to take a roguelike in another direction. A direction with Unicode characters, where the symbol for a floating eye could be, like, the Chinese symbol for an eye. I also want to have zero width walls, which requires something other than a normal text mode, but is pretty much required to get something like a zombie apocalypse roguelike working nicely and have windows working the way I want them to.

I have this crazy idea that it would be nice to be able to use a number of different roleplaying engines for the roguelike games. You know, so that you can use rules that make more sense to the type of game you want to write. Really, though, I just need to finish something and push out a version...