Week 2 - Sophomore Slump or: Logic and Snot
Gird your loins! This one’s going to be angsty!
After working all last weekend I decided to give myself a bit of time off to relax and explore on Monday and Tuesday, something I’d really needed. I finally explored Buda, the region of the city west of the Danube, with expert guidance from a local Budepester. It’s a strange, hilly realm of ornate baroque castles, churches, museums, and quaint streets filled with tour-guided herds.
However, by the end of Tuesday, I began to feel that tell-tale tickle at the back of my throat. I rushed to the supermarket, stocked up on OJ & vegetables, ate a bunch of raw garlic, but it was too late. I’d caught a cold. *Anguished pose*
View from Gellért Hill
As I write this on Sunday, it’s reduced to slight sniffles and the occasional sneeze, but I was rough from Wednesday to Saturday. I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to get work done and meet my targets, so I saw this as an annoying setback, but it also meant that I couldn’t really socialise either, which led to a lonely and moody few days. I tried to work as much as possible, but it’s always tough to concentrate when you feel like shit, especially when the bulk of the work involves making logic-based state-machines to manage background reactions and calculations, such as those below:
Massive fun
The import thing is that it wasn’t a total write off - I’ve got the actual game mechanics working correctly. The game can now judge if a decapitation is successful or not depending on how hard the player swings the sword, and the also decide how well-performed the execution was, based on how many strokes it took. In the instance that players want to mess around and just poke the convict with the sword (which they will because people are silly), this will also negatively affect the performance and potentially lead to the executioner being fired by his superiors.
In other news, all this being sick and not being able to go out gave me time to finish playing Zelda (always good to be the Hero of Hyrule when you’re feeling down), and to finally get around to reading the childhood memoirs of my Scottish Great-Grandfather, David Gordon. It was fascinating to read the childhood recollections of a man who grew up in very different circumstances to myself. Raised in a fishing community in Peterhead, the Easternmost point of the Scottish mainland, and later St.Monans, he talks of being taught to sing in a choir through the age old method of being hit with a horse strap if he sang badly, and tells the tale of his Grandfather’s (my Great Great Great Grandfather’s) whaling expedition to the North, where he and his cousin had adventures such as a run in with an angry Polar Bear while hunting for Fox Fur in Greenland.
Later, during his time his time in the Great War he served with the a cavalry regiment, the Royal Scots Greys. He talks of time spent in London between stations in 1917, and of how he admired the architecture of St.Pauls Cathedral when he visited. I’ve spent time gazing up at this magnificent building myself, one of my favourites in London, particularly the view of it on the skyline from the Golden Jubilee bridge. Strange to think of this distant relation in the same place almost exactly one hundred years ago, thinking and feeling the same as me.
I’m getting over my cold now, so it’s time to stop looking and feeling like King Theoden in the scene just before Gandalf comes along and shapes him up. Tonight I’ll go out and reconnect with humanity, and hope for a more lively third week.
Oh yea, and Happy Easter.
Keep it weird,
Sam
It me.
