A small update, I wrote a sort of strategy guide
on Yoot Tower. Also, see how many common marketing tricks you can find in
this advertisement for a fictitious brand of
toothpaste. Uploaded a small MoonVideo fix. Meanwhile, I've finished reverse
engineering an old game engine's three file formats, and have a new engine
visibly superior to the original already running. I'll have to consider how
to best publish that thing.
Speed: plodding along
I thought of a better way to blit sprites, and
proceeded to implement it in MoonVideo's tile
rendering routine for a nice 25% speed boost. Meanwhile, I graduated from
university and revised my review of it. Updated
the Scinty Starlet song, and uploaded a new remix called Munchky Pillars.
Now to look for a job.
Enthusiasm: go me!
A few additions under articles, one under graphic arts, some changes in
the about-me section... the last semester is passing quickly. I'm slightly
employed as a computer class overseer on the side. Got my credit-worthiness
analyzing program "KreditBert" working with everything the customers wanted.
Until they asked for more. Finally found an existing interpolation method
that yields identical results to the one I invented,
but mine is still a very slight smidgeon superior.
Days: grey
I wrote and posted a review of my university in the articles section, hoping
that anyone looking for more information on the place might stumble across
it. Cleaned the links a little. Updated MoonVideo with a lightness modifier.
You may also note that the site looks subtly different.
Productivity: what productivity?
Another semester succesfully concluded! And, I managed to make myself useful,
becoming an unofficial teachers' assistant, while at the same time
insinuating my tentacles into the university's administrative heart for fun
and profit. They might even make me an official assistant, though possibly
paying peanuts. I'll keep you updated. Meanwhile, I renewed my personality to
try to be more open, friendly and helpful. Results so far: c. 3 new
friends, not including 1 more whom I already upset enough to pre-emptively
invalidate any communication attempts forevermore; c. 50 new enemies
thanks to my hard-line stand against student cheating. I also got a snippet
of my music played at our end-of-semester disco, to a generally frigid
reception.
On the bright side, recently two separate young women volunteered a comment
on how attractive I appear without me fishing for the compliment first.
Woot.
Who cares about all that, where's the new content, am I right? Okay, check
out my new song, Vallis Nivis. It's good, unless you don't like tinkling
snow crystals or seals. And everyone loves seals. There's no actual seal in
the song since the vocals aren't in yet, but don't let that stop you. Enjoy
the tinkling crystals. Also, my library section has been expanded with two
new titles: Herding Cats, and the Ponce-Harold Bosson trilogy.
Festivity:
meager
So, the utility program was paid for after all. If only they kept up better
communications regarding desired enhancements.
Free Pascal 2.2.0
is out. Woot! To celebrate, I fixed a long-standing bug in MoonVideo, making
it potentially usable by Pascal programmers beside me.
See for yourself.
I spilled some cola on my keyboard. Okay... so I washed it under a tap.
Okay... so I leaned it to a hot-air mini-oven to dry for ten minutes or so.
Oops.
So I got a cheap cyrillic Genius keyboard whose markings don't exactly match
the Finnish keyboard layout that my system uses. The keyboard producers
cunningly left out one key - beside the left shift key - presumably
explaining the lowest price in the store. Under my layout, however, that one
key was responsible for <, |, and >.
Also, starred in a wedding and cruised through Norway. Now back at
university, plotting ideas for helping out at the freshmen's Business English
course.
Fingers: nimble
I retuned and repacked all the modules on my site, giving you a good excuse
to download them all again and enjoy them like never before. Also, I was
needlessly harsh in my evaluation of the presentation - we were the best of
the bunch, my group surprised me with their presentation savvy, and a cute
girl worth superlatives smiled at me. No retractions regarding the utility
program, though.
Artist: suffering
Ugly though the analytical part is, the utility program mentioned before has
sufficiently impressed the Boss. Now they want to commercialize the thing.
Since no one in their right mind would pay for a chibi-program made by a lone
formally uneducated programmer, I must spruce up the interface to look like
half a dozen people worked on the project. Let's not even mention the
compensation, or lack of it. Blossom Realms is looking nice too, now that my
continental plate world generation is producing results. Now, if only
university presentations were allowed to be anything apart from boring
cookie-cutter powerpoint template droning, I'd be downright happy.
Social status: M (multi-headed programmer)
The utility program mentioned before is shaping up. The first, and hardest
part of it was to successfully read Excel files. I have come to believe that
the only way a programmer would create such a file format was if the
management were holding several guns to his head. And the programmer still
would feel bad after the ordeal, had he any humanity left. A mostly
functional reader is now uploaded among Programs. I added a progress update
on Blossom Realms too.
Finally, to my regular visitor from California: Hello! Hope things are happy over there! ^_^
Condition: hexadecimals floating around the head
Easiest semester yet in the upcoming dozen plus weeks. Still got a line of
all A grades. I've read books, played games, and generally wasted time; I've
also worked on more music, put together a tiny sort of playable version of
Blossom Realms, and drawn almost enough new NPCs for the comic to finish the
fourth page. Oh, and reverse-engineered a file-type or two, the hacker that
I aspire to be. I'm also to write a little utility program for a factoring
business as a freelance project, something that will no doubt look nice on
the CV if successful. I'll put up the new stuff at some point.
Self: charming
Busiest semester yet in the upcoming dozen plus weeks. Slightly inspired (and
challenged) by Bay 12 Games'
brilliant Dwarf Fortress, I'm working more on Blossom Realms. Meanwhile, I
completed MoonVideo, a console manager and graphical emulator, and integrated
it in Vampire Hunter Girl. It displays any font you like in logical windows,
and runs pretty fast. The comic is not dead either.
Focus: lost
Time flies like fun. Vacations too. I've done some work of interest, but my
main efforts linger around resting, the lazy pig that I am. Minor updates to
site made.
Liquidity: parched
Having been reduced to a temporary state unfit for creative work, I'm getting
some housework done instead. I've also got a slight liquidity problem, but
can at least take solace in knowing what liquidity means in a business
context. Today's update includes a Kitty Kibble presentation, complete with
what you might call "slides", and my latest essay: How to Choose Your
Hordlings?
Stability: fluxing
So yesterday several teachers and a group of select students from our
university (WIUU) attended a conference called "Economics: Current Affairs
and Development Prospects". Students from all over Ukraine participated, and
a few of us funky internationals too. We gave brief, well-received
presentations on our brief, well-wrought economics essays. Although the host
(European University) was less than hospitable, and some of the judges
unashamedly corrupt, our students raked in the majority of awards. Team WIUU
also applauded the most enthusiastically. I screwed up my presentation and
got nothing, apart from an impressive CV entry and smiles from a woefully
small number of beutiful Ukrainian девушки.
Came out on the positive, all in all.
To commemorate the occasion, I've uploaded the essay in question, and some of
my other funnier essays in the Fact and Fiction section!
Mood: Chaotic, BlossomRealmy
New material about, but not up. My thirst for detail and for storyarcs bigger
than certain triumphal arches is keeping the 7th page from completion.
However, I did figure out what was wrong with my graphical Free Pascal
programs: the latest compiler version requires defining the message handler
procedure a "stdcall;" or CreateWindow will without fail fail. Unfortunately,
Blossom Realms keeps slapping my face with runtime error 216 for no
discernible reason apart from a twisted sense of satisfaction the compiler no
doubt gets. Ah well, the code was getting slightly bloated anyway. You can't
make an ultimate roguelike without rewriting the whole thing a few times.
Oh, and I did do some more musical work too, on a Final Fantasy battle medley.
When the planets align, the piece will be posted. When the planets align...
I've uploaded a demo version of Vampire Hunter Girl in the relevant section.
It's sort of funny interactive fiction. Meanwhile, a new semester has started
and I'll be studying psychology, human resource management, macroeconomics,
Russian, history of Christianity, and More Accounting. Looks like a fairly
easy semester, so maybe I'll get something useful done.
Next update in two weeks: more Vampire Hunter Girl, page 7 for comic?
Looking pretty. The site got that makeover I promised. CSS wasn't all that
hard to use after all! Interestingly Exploder 5.0x displays
the site slightly differently than the recently advertisement-free Opera 8.50,
proving that at least one of them is not correctly standard-compliant.
Be sure to check out my very own attempt at
a sprite comic. Six pages done already! I also remixed Praise a bit in the
music section, I'm just too busy to write a mention of doing so there.
Well, another thousands visitors have passed through. Amazing, considering
there's nothing new here. Oh, I've got stuff I could put in, including
a sprite comic and a text adventure, but, y'know. All the COOL stuff is on MY
comp, which remains barren internet-wise. Net connections are expensive for
poor students like myself, with only some 10k euros saved up. I note that
some of the stuff on this site is not particularly impressive, so one of the
things I'll be sure to do when the day of a new net connection dawns is to
take down half the stuff and put in some more interesting stuff instead. Like
the quasi-existential crises characteristic of my age weren't enough, upon my
planned trip back to Finland certain relatives and/or acquaintances evidently
intend to be MAJORLY UNCOOL and berate me for inconformity. Thanks, guys.
Really makes me wish I was back there.
Ah, 1700 page loads now. Coolness. ^_^ The excuse of the current 6-month
period for not updating is that I moved to Ukraine to study. You can imagine
there has been a lot of stuff to do. Thanks for asking, I'm doing quite
well, constantly scoring among the highest results in class. Kyiv is a nice
little village abounding with cheerful, helpful folk; on the other hand, it's
a modern capital with horrible, nasty modern people like everywhere
else. You decide which.
I've been doing some more programming in whatever free time I have left, but
no results of interest will yet be uploaded for a while. In fact, I don't
even have an internet connection of my own, this is Noxy's dial-up line
I'm using now. The situation is subject to change sometime soon. Thank you
for your continued interest and benevolent patience with regard to all this
stuff. :)
MoonSynth can now play midi files. I beg you to test it and let me know how
well it works. I added a few more links for kicks, while also doing a little
improving on my site in general. My Google rating dropped to second place. 
Redefining the meaning of "very soon"! In fact, extrapolating from the last
three entry dates and this one, you can expect the next update to take place
on 050706. Okay, not that much is new, but I've done a bunch of changes and
additions. For example in the Stories section there's some new stuff,
including something in the quotes and an interview with a beholder. MoonSynth
has experienced wonderful if slow progress. Links were updated to remove
ungrateful ones. A new game was added. The hidden about me page was improved.
Also, this news page has been split - the olds are accessible above. To top
it off, I'm trying a new hit counter. Finally, an unexpected cause to
celebrate: a search for Mimu on Google gives interesting results! Gee, I feel
so famous right now. Maybe a Real-TV show would be in order...
Again an update, "very soon". This time you can enjoy a whole new funny
discussion in the quotes along with some miscellaneous quote boosts. I've
done some work on MoonSynth, my superb-to-be oldskool midi player and much
more. There's also a new little chippy remix piece. My more popular songs in
the Mod Archive are going past 100 hits already, yay. Lastly, I came up with
a new digital audio filter technique and an excellent audio compression
scheme, which you can read about in the revised Innovative Ideas.
And by "very soon" I of course mean a month or two. The excuse of the month
is exhaustion from work et al. But now, a few new funny quotes including one
really long one, and I compressed the quotes file in an innovative way. Also,
PLEASE check out MoonSynth in the MoonSound section, and send me feedback on
it! I desperately need it! Program source is included for you programmer
people...
Found and started work, went to and got back from Brussels for training. I'm
still using a computer put together from spare parts. At the Mod Archive,
stats are as follows: Överdone 41, Cutesy Board 40, Pause to Consider 43,
Polite yet Strict 53. Not bad. I wonder why the page visit counter down there
sometimes doesn't show up. I actually do have something new here for you,
you'll find it at the bottom of the music page. An 11-minute dramatic finale
track from Quest for Glory 4! And I'll have something else to add very soon.
Not much has been going on. At least not much that I would show to the
public. Doing my best to find some work and procure finances for at least
three separate ends... It appears Polite Yet Strict is the most popular of
the songs I uploaded in the MA, having 25 downloads already. Not much, but
still, gives a barely noticeable warm glow. My main trouble currently is that
my motherboard seems to have broken down and my own comp just won't go on...
anyway, I did put something up here on the site now. A few new funny quotes!
: D
Did more little changes... Hmm, I put up that counter on April 10th, and
only now it's reaching 400. That means about 3 visitors a day. Come on,
we can do better! Here's some more stuff for you to check out: The cleverly
hidden narcistic section has more stuff to the joy of my personal fan club,
the music information table was redone to look really nice, and there are
a heap of new funny quotes. I also had four of my modules accepted in
the Mod Archive... I wonder if any
of those gets on a top ten list...
Did lots of little changes you probably won't notice, also did some bigger
changes in the Music section though added no new material. To make up
for this I added something really cool in the Stories section.
Awarded Noxy her own tag section... fixed the site to again be HTML 4.01
compliant. I'm doing a new cool audio project for Windows now using Free
Pascal, it might turn out real cool. If only I could figure out how to stream
wave audio smoothly...
Does anyone actually read these blurbs? I made two new tags, updated
Adventures of the Avatar, put up a new song and a new quicker speedrun of
Megaman 2. It's easy to get lots done when there's nothing to do and no
one to do it with.
Ha, so it wasn't the last update after all. : p
Updated the section that tells about myself and which remains
cleverly hidden from all but the most dedicated.
Bunch of new tags all over, changed most GIF images to PNG.
This will probably be the last update I make.
Made two new tags. Split up the For Me tags section considering that
half of them were made by Shanra anyway. Put up a new story,
rewritten since being told in a forum. In other news, I recently
wrote my first CGI program. Anybody want me to code one for you too? ^_^