packetpirate

It's not useful in any way, but I have one alias... "doot". It runs a Python script that draws a skeleton playing the trombone over an 80s scrolling grid and sunset.

I got into D&D by chance around 2009. Unfortunately I started with 4th Edition (I know...), but I'm very happy that I did, because all throughout High School I was one of the outcasts, but never had any of these mediums to confide in, and often made fun of "nerds" even though I technically was one. Just playing D&D has given me another way to meet new people and do something other than play video games in my free time. I only wish I had more time in the week. I have too many hobbies.

Unfortunate acronym, but this is so asinine. Did the people who reported this have nothing better to do?

You might be what some might call an evil genius.

I also read Revelation Space this year. I liked it, but it definitely felt like it dragged on. Maybe because it has fairly long chapters. I feel like shorter chapters help me get through a book faster because I usually do most of my reading on my lunch break, and I hate having to leave off in the middle of a chapter.

So far this year, I've read the following:

- Revelation Space

- Armada

- I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire

- The Sleeping Dragon

- Wizardry: The League of the Crimson Crescent

- Snow Crash

- Scythe

- Off to Be The Wizard

- Spell or High Water

- An Unwelcome Quest

- Thunderhead

- Everlost

- Replay

- Stranger in a Strange Land

- The Amulet of Samarkand

- Everwild.

I'm currently reading A Conjuring of Light and The Way of Kings.

I was able to read so much more than I usually can because of audiobooks. I had a long commute for a couple months, so that helped me knock a book every week or so off my list.

Of the books I've already read this year, I think I would recommend Scythe and Thunderhead the most, but Snow Crash is a must-read, and Stranger in a Strange Land is pretty interesting, but I think a lot of it was lost on me because of the time period-specific language used throughout; it made it hard to understand the interactions between people.

As far as what surprised me? Probably Snow Crash. For some reason, I read somewhere that Ready Player One ripped off Snow Crash and while reading it, I just couldn't understand why they would think that... the two are really nothing alike. Pretty much the only common ground is a virtual world...

Get a Raspberry Pi for her. The latest images of Raspbian come with a pre-installed Pi edition of Minecraft as well as Python libraries for modifying the game world on the fly and making mods. There's also a book by No Starch Press called "Coding with Minecraft" I've heard good things about.

Am I alone in thinking that the sign, exponent and mantissa model makes more sense, and that (-1)^S * 1.M * 2^(E-127) isn't that hard to understand? Maybe because I already understand that model, but his explanation just made it more confusing for me.

Honestly, I'd rather have the Ethernet port than the Wi-Fi.

This game should really be Linux supported so all the kids learning Comp Sci through the Raspberry Pi can try it out.

One reason is that there's still a divide in understanding of the requirements to actually solve a problem between management and the engineering team. Unrealistic deadlines are given, and as a result, shit is produced.

We've got a Robert Heinlein fan here...

Maybe I'm just lazy, but from a quick glance, this language seems a little too wordy for my tastes... why "import_module" instead of just "import"? Or "write_string" instead of "write"? I prefer a terse programming language that uses more descriptive keywords in favor of more of them.

But I suppose that's not really the most important factor of a language and the syntax could be fun to try out.

Agreed. Ever since I first discovered them, I've decided that I eventually want to specialize in these types of algorithms. They may not be the most efficient algorithms to solve a problem, but they're incredibly fascinating, and their potential is endless.

I was actually considering implementing one during development of the game I'm working on to generate a soundtrack (since I'm not a musician), but the problem is the fitness function would require a user rating of each generated sound sample, and to get any kind of decent results, that would require me to personally listen to and rate thousands of songs. Either that or outsource it through SoundCloud or something.

I thought I had an original and clever solution to TTT... my solution was to define all winning combinations as sets of (x,y) coordinate pairs and each time a player made a move, check to see if any of the winning combinations was a subset of the player's set of coordinate pairs.