Jolt Country

AArdvark wrote: Sat Feb 08, 2025 9:19 am How much urine would it take to fill it, do you think?

Mission accepted. Super Bowl is tomorrow.

My wife went on a girl's trip to Mexico and I have today and Monday off. So my goals are gonna be as follows.

1. Weigh 209.x. DONE. Three pounds and I am slimmer than at my wedding.
2. Make a 4 day sprint for Cyberganked and finish it. I want the prison area to be first draft complete.
3. Make either 30 seconds of ambient synth music that someone like Flack could use as a transition for one of his videos if he wanted. Just get 30 seconds of something out of Ableton and into an MP3.
4. I want to play three games and start thinking of blog posts for them. Finishing HHGG would be nice.

I do well when I have clear goals so I don't waste time. Onwards!

My original one was to eat more desserts and pancakes. At the time it was one of those "hey, you never know how long you have left, might as well enjoy some delicious crap while you're here", but in fact I think it was due to low red-blood cell counts after my surgery. I couldn't get enough sugar. Now that I'm pretty much recovered, my sweet tooth has abandoned me and I no longer care about desserts and pancakes. So, I did it, and that one's done.

My second one was to reach an "A" rank on tetr.io. And, well...



So, I guess I'm done for the year. See you in '26! (Hopefully!)

2025 Resolution update: Don't lose my job this year - Just survived bloody carnage Wednesday that sacked 3 Account Executives and one SDR. My managers glowing review shielded me from the attack. One quarter at a time is what sales people have to live.

Half a year update.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Mon Dec 30, 2024 8:53 pm - Get to 205 on the scale

I am 4 away from this, basically. Been going between 209 and 214 regularly.

- 6700 steps every day

I upped it to 6800, but yes.

-Release Cyberganked.

Nope.

I am strongly considering banning tech purchases for one year.

I reasonably did this. I did get the "7800+." I have a PS2 memory card coming. But yeah, I think I did stop the mindless tech purchases.

- Eliminate procrastination through mobile phone scrolling.

I am doing this! The game reviews I wrote most weeks is taking up the doom scrolling time.

- Lastly... learn more at my job. I want to write at least 5 new tests a week.

Well. No. I am using Cursor as my IDE. But no. In my defense, there have been reasons for low morale.

Not only did I meet my resolution I met the stretch goal of owning a toadie. 2025 is a good year for resolutions all around it seems.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Mon Dec 30, 2024 8:53 pm -Release Cyberganked. 12 years of this crap, I am so sick of my failure to ship. Enough excuses, enough delays, enough procrastination. I don't care if it sinks my reputation as a game maker, it's out this year or it's over. Doesn't leave a lot of time since it will need six months of testing. 12 years ago I was in Pinback's house in Rio Rancho, New Mexico working on the code to import exported characters. That seems forever ago. I never wanted to get stuck in a long game creation cycle and that exact thing happened to me. It makes me so frustrated.

In his magnificent book, The Psychology of Computer Programming Gerald M. Weinberg speaks about a number of issues, including "compulsive programmers" and "second system syndrome." The former are people who do programming for the sake of programming, sometimes getting so involved in whatever task(s) they are doing related to that program that they let more important things slip, like general hygiene or interpersonal relationships. The latter is when someone is involved in developing an application or set of applications in a system, and it is completed but were dissatisfied with the compromises they made that in the second system they work on they will make sure they get to things they might have missed. Second System Syndrome causes more projects to be abandoned because the scope is too big, and they haven't learned to allocate resources proportionally,

In your case I don't think you're suffering from second system syndrome as much as a lack of focus. Take some time to think about Cyberganked. What is the purpose of the game? What tasks, puzzles, objectives, and/or scenarios must the player accomplish to complete and/or win the game. Way too many complex programs are started without a roadmap. Having one allows you to determine when the game is complete enough to ship. Nobody would expect to take a multi-hour trip to a place they didn't know how to get to without a map (or today's equivalent, bringing up Google/Bing maps on their phone). You shouldn't expect to complete a potentially hundred- / hundreds- / thousand-hour development cycle on an application without a guide outlining and detailing what your target is and your exit strategy.

Good luck to you.