I Don't Think That Is A Chicken

Aw, crap

If only I'd found this post-it when I still had the chance.

A sense of accomplishment

I woke up about midday today, and for the next twelve hours, did approximately nothing. Now, school's coming up real fast- in a week I'd have started year 12 officially. That's a scary thought- considering I've done absolutely nothing to prepare for it so far.

So, to give myself a nice sense of progress, I figured I'd set myself some reasonably realistic goals before I went to sleep. I'm a night owl anyway, so at the time of posting, I'll be awake for about 4 more hours; six when I made the decision.
The first, which I just finished doing, was immensely satisfying. (no not that but thanks for reminding me). I am, of course, heavily into pop science and mathematics- and the Mandelbrot set is probably as popular-mathematical as you can get. I love the Mandelbrot set, my Kindle has a screensaver with its picture and set definition, and my window has a copy of the equation proudly scrawled over its top. The problem was, I never actually understood formal mathematical set notation. I mean, I understand basic set theory and logical arithmetic just from a fair amount of time spent programming, but the mandelbrot set is just jibberish to me. Look at it!

So hey, that was goal number one.
As far as I can tell, I think I've done it: I can *probably* recite it in english, but I'm not entirely sure. I don't care anymore- the caffeine is beginning to wear off and I need to get goal #2 done. Ah well, this is probably the sort of thing I'll be learning this year anyway. I hope so at least, set theory is incredibly interesting to me, and I am entirely surprised that we've not learned it in the decade or so of mathematics classes I've sat through.
The second, of which I am currently heavily procrastinating, is the clean-up of my room. That's not something I'd normally do- I definitely prefer it messy, to the horror of my parents, but I can't rearrange my room to fit in my new whiteboard without being able to see the floor. My well-drawn to-scale room plans have been sitting under my desk for months now, as a constant reminder of the amount of procrastination I ritualistically indulge in. My entire room is designed for that, really- my computer sits in front of a giant chalkboard on which all the things that I want to get done just recreationally sit, waiting to be started or finished, to the point that I can't really fit anything else on there. They just stare at me, every hour of the day.

So, in an effort to make every day mean something important has been improved or accomplished in my life, I will consume all the coffee it takes to get my whiteboard comfortably assembled- all the while using as many malamanteaus, neologisms, malapropisms, and portmanteaus as necessary to get me to the required 400% output increase as stated in an earlier status update- hopefully by the end of the 2011 fiscal year. I am well cafficated for the task. That means caffeinated to the point of extreme dedication, if you didn't catch it. Yeah, it's a cromulent word now.

I can't sleep some times

I get bored sometimes. I also can't sleep some times.
So, one night in the recent past I took it upon myself to find a random image and make it look better. Off to Google Images I go!

Starting Material

Atrociously jpeggy!

So yeah, let's give it a look that isn't describable as "sorta blue I guess?"

Success!

Hm. It's missing a purpose.
I guess it sorta looks like a compass?
I know!

At least it sorta looks like it means something?

Ah. There we go. Now I can sleep sound in the knowledge of knowing that I slightly improved the database of useless images on the internet.

Hammertime was years ago

Ahhh, nostalgia! I remember drawing this for my Year 10 IST project, which altogether was pretty terrible, but had some pretty neat stuff in it. This is, of course, John's Pogo Hammer, lacking the trademark green slime ghost because I realised it was too hard for me to draw. I don't think I've drawn anything decent with a drawing tablet, this was done on photoshop with my ball-mouse in the middle of the night.
I have to say, I absolutely love the shading technique I used to draw this, however much longer it took than normal.

I used to like it

I hate the phrase "used to". It's irritating- to me, it just seems to always screw up the flow of a sentence, and no matter how much I think about it I cannot figure out how that combination of words could ever come to mean what it does. It just seems like an archaic artifact we've become complacent in adopting because we really don't have much else to fill it with. It screws me up every time I pass over it- taking me precious seconds more to figure out what it means.

I'm sorry for the rant. It's just like a bird tugging at the base of my skull every time I hear it, like arguing with a guy whose argument is composed of 30% "That's the thing". Terrible.

Excuse me for a minute, I think I need to print out some tissues.

Pygame fun

So I was looking through old screenshots, and I found something I'd forgotten about that I made a few years ago, back when I was still learning python. It was a (very primitive) graphing app that I made which literally evaluated an expression for every pixel to get a boolean value. Didn't actually work for equations, but worked pretty well, if slowly, at inequalities, so I spent countless hours fiddling with it.

I'll admit, this was an entirely intentional attempt. [Screenshot]

Hey ma, I found the higgs boson! [Screenshot]

I guess carpet designers take lots of inspiration from mathematics? [Screenshot]

The universe was clearly made in python [Screenshot]

It just goes to show you can learn a hell of a lot from a weekend of fucking around on a computer.
No, the xkcd references weren't intentional, I swear.

For those of you that are curious, the program I made to create these is here. Requries Python >2.5 and pygame. I am pretty sure it won't work, this is one of the worst pieces of shit I've written in a 3am haze. Don't judge my coding based on this- I was young, I'm better now, I promise.

Caffeine and Time Travel

I seem to be finding myself into a situation where it appears as if caffeine consumption actually makes me feel sleepier. So, I figured- hey! I can turn this into a time travel proof!

Of course, the graph is entirely wrong, but I realised that after I painstakingly wrote up the axes with my mouse. Pretend the redacted y axis is "rate of time flow" or something, I dunno.

I'll just leave this here

And thus it begins

Oh look, it seems as if I finally got around to making a blog.

This has taken me a fairly long time to start up. It's a personal thing. I don't do things because I'm too much of a perfectionist, and I throw them onto a queue and slowly deque the tasks as they come- one queue, one thread, one giant eternal list of things to do. I am a perfectionist by nature- I've put up starting my own website for years because I wanted to write my own webserver to do it, putting off making a blog because I had to have a great name for it, and so on. What I've made of my life is a giant tangle, really, because I believe too much of myself. I've literally got my entire wall in front of me as a giant todo list with post-its and chalk scribblings detailing the project ideas which I've put upon myself to get done eventually. I've got so much that I've put on my plate, I'm sure I'll never finish it. That's a problem for me- I use that an excuse. My packrattyness isn't a great part of who I am, but all the same it does keep me busy.

Now I concede- I'll do away with my urge to control how I solidify my presence in cyberspace, and do it the way normal people do.

So, this is my public blog. At this point, I've cut ties with nearly everyone who has ever been somewhat close to me, so I guess "public" loses meaning, but up until this point I've kept every single tiny facet of my life isolated in small compartments- making sure the essences of each don't mix. 2011 is now here, and, along with the many disasters that kicked it off, I present the creation of this blog to sit along side the flooding in Queensland, Brazil, the Phillipines and Sri Lanka, the Tunisian uprising, the Arizona shooting and the proposed Wikileaks trade embargo. However far I screw up, I can at least point to those events and note that at least I wasn't a hundredth as bad as any of those events.

So this blog exists to put my thoughts somewhere safe before I forget them.