Yesterday I grinned like an idiot for a little while after somehow managing to write the first piece of code that actually acted as a Windows program. It used message boxes instead of proper windows to display the text, but at least it no longer did it in a simple Command Prompt window. It was still in D, as I got back to fooling around with that a little a few days ago.
But that didn’t last long, as I then tried to glance at the MSDN Windows programming tutorials and went straight from grinning like an idiot to feeling like one. I couldn’t understand the first thing about any of it, so gave up on all that right away. I thought that Windows programming was Windows programming, since you call on functions known by the operating system and not on those defined by the programming language you use, so if I could just find a proper reference to those functions I should be able to figure some things out, but the fact that pretty much any tutorial is written for C++ is far more of a problem than I thought it’d be. And D seems to have certain issues with Windows programming as well, the one I noticed right away being that it apparently doesn’t recognize the commands that require UTF-16, which are supposedly the proper ones to use ever since Windows 2000. If I look at the description of the issue on the official site, I can conclude that this is intentional, in an attempt to allow programmers to code applications that would work on older versions of Windows as well, but that makes an already awfully confusing thing even worse for me, since I don’t really know what all of that means.
But enough about that… Right now this is quite difficult to write anyway because I seem to be experiencing the exact same thing I have experienced all too many times back when I was little. I feel as if my heart will stop beating if I stand still. Or I felt like that, at least, since I seem to have managed to solve the immediate problem for the moment, after struggling with it for at least some 30 minutes. I’m not fully over it at the moment, I’m still very edgy and my arms and legs are frozen, but the need to get up and move around is under control and I no longer feel that something very bad is imminent, though something still feels out of place in my chest.
I just remembered that all that was required in order to snap me out of this when I was little was for someone to succeed in calming me down, to convince me that my heart is actually quite fine. At the time, that required dad taking me to a doctor, who’d listen to my heart, say that it is indeed obvious that I’m very frightened, but that otherwise it sounds as well as the heart of any person who’s in such a state can sound, then give me a mild over-the-counter sedative and sit and talk to me for some 30 minutes. This happened about once every two weeks or so, and sometimes I’d be pacing around the house for several hours without stopping before dad would come home and take me to a doctor.
Now, of course, I knew I had to sort it out myself, so started working on it as soon as I pushed the initial panic aside. (Interestingly, the first thing I thought of was “I’m going to die and I didn’t even post anything this week”.) I know that, likely due to living in constant fear for all those years when my parents still forced me to go to school, I have a certain arrhythmia for a very long time, which likely caused these issues back when I was a kid as well. Since it can sometimes even happen several times per day, I stopped having much of a reaction to feeling that something’s wrong for one moment a long time ago, though I will at least shift my position a little in response to the momentary adrenaline rush produced by my body in order to set things back in order. However, sometimes that moment can stretch on to several seconds, which makes for quite a major adrenaline rush and a good reason to be afraid.
I assumed that what happened was that one such moment caught me by surprise, just as I was starting to type this post, and that the adrenaline rush made me feel afraid, which in turn caused slight variations in my heart rate even after the initial issue was solved, which then caused even more adrenaline to be produced and so on. At first I tried to simply will myself to stand still and calm down, but that wouldn’t work for more than a few seconds, so I moved on to holding a hand on my chest to feel my heart beating and, while trying to think of other things or, failing that, to count slowly to 100, I made note of when my hand felt irregularities and compared that to when the rest of my body felt like my heart was going to stop, noticing that such moments rarely coincided. It still apparently took some time to actually convince myself of what I was noticing, but eventually in worked, so here I am now, sitting down and writing this for over 30 minutes.
Then again, I know the arrhythmia keeps getting worse, likely due to the mood I’m in ever since Andra left, so it may not just be something caused by irrational fears. But that’s not exactly what I should be thinking about right now, is it?
Back to the original topic of this post, I have to say that I’m starting to feel that D may not be the right programming language for what I have in mind. I mean, for example, if I see it said that the proper command for a message box is MessageBoxW, because a newer operating system will convert whatever it receives as MessageBoxA to UTF-16 anyway and therefore make the program run slower, but if I type that in D the compiler says the command is unrecognized and suggests only MessageBoxA, I can see a real problem when it comes to writing pretty much any Windows program at all. Sure, the older commands work as well, but why make your program run slower if you have no intention of making it compatible with old versions of Windows anyway?
But there are plenty of things I like about it as well, mainly the fact that it did take a fair number of things from scripting languages without being one itself. And I certainly have no intention of ever starting to learn C++, so that’s out of the question. But if anyone has any other suggestion of an active programming language that can be used to write proper Windows programs, go ahead and post a comment. Same if you can point me to a really good resource for learning proper Windows programming that could be used with D, without requiring or imparting any knowledge of C++.
Yesterday I finished reading The Shadows of God, and therefore also The Age of Unreason, and that made me wonder about a few things. One of them was obviously what would happen if someone would somehow actually change the pitch of the universe, or just that of Earth? It is, of course, pure fantasy to consider anything like this, but there are also some more practical questions hidden in there: What would need to change in order to save life on Earth, including our own, from us? What would need to change in order to make us incapable of wreaking the kind of destruction we currently are wreaking?
Just to be clear, for once I’m not talking about changing the nature of humans, but of changing natural laws, as presented in that series of books. A simple exercise of imagination: What would need to stop working, or at least require much more effort for much less gain? What would need to start working, or at least require far less effort for far more gain? What would need to work differently and how exactly would it need to work? Assuming humans would still exist and still have the same thoughts and desires they now do, what would need to happen to make us unable to act in ways that cause great harm to the life forms that exist on Earth, including ourselves?
Fossil fuels are the first thing to come to my mind… What if oil and the fuels based on it wouldn’t burn anymore, or at least release very little energy in the process? What if the same thing would happen to coal as well? It would obviously force us to find different ways to generate energy and get rid of a major source of pollution, but would the solutions we’d find be better or only different, but just as bad, if not worse? This scenario is different from an “end of oil” one because we can see that one coming and either way there are plenty of reserves to ensure the continued operation of certain services that are currently seen as requiring these fuels for at least a little while longer, but if oil, and possibly also coal, would simply stop being usable as fuels all of a sudden there would be no warning and any reserves would obviously be completely useless. What would happen then? What would we switch to? If you also consider that military vehicles and rockets require such fuels as well, how would this affect our long-term capacity to harm the world and ourselves?
Next comes plastic. What if it would decay quickly? What if it’d simply rot away like, for example, meat, making it unsuitable for pretty much any of the uses we currently put it to? If it’d decay in a reasonable amount of time, we’d get rid of one problem, but if it’d decay way too quickly we’d pretty much be forced to stop using it and switch to other materials. Would those materials be renewable, fully recyclable or both, or would they be even worse? Would we be able to obtain sufficient quantities of such materials without causing more destruction? Considering that the production of plastics is another important use of oil, how would this change the world and humanity’s ability and desire to destroy it?
And what about nuclear reactions? It would be a really good change if they would no longer cause the kind of damage they currently cause to living organisms, but since their functioning is based on decay I don’t see how could things be changed in such a way as to allow them to continue functioning but no longer cause such damage. So what if powerful nuclear reactions would somehow simply stop happening? All nuclear arsenals in the world would suddenly become harmless and useless, as would nuclear power stations and nuclear military vehicles, which seems like a really good thing in itself, but the real effects would depend on what we’d replace them with. If this change would extend beyond Earth, it would also mean the end of all RTG-powered space exploration, which is something else that needs to be considered. That this would severely diminish our capacity to harm the world and ourselves seems all too obvious, but what would the other long-term effects be?
All that was about what should stop working, but we’d also need certain things to start working, or at least work much better, and the first I can think of is cold fusion. This, of course, depends on how safe would it actually end up being if it’d become so efficient and end up being used pretty much everywhere. If it would really be safe and something’d change to make it relatively easy to achieve sufficient power from such reactions, a whole lot of problems would probably be solved, but wouldn’t others be created at the same time? Could it be safe if it’d generate such large amounts of energy or would it become all too similar to current nuclear power? What kind of destruction would it enable us to sow? Considering how most humans think, can any such source of power be a good thing in our hands or would it just change the rules a little, but not the game?
I could start asking the same questions about a number of other things, but I can all too easily see how we’d use any and all of them to cause even more harm. For example imagine affinities that would, under certain circumstances, draw different atoms to different places, easily separating compounds without the need for the current harmful and wasteful processes. Or perhaps energy no longer being so easily generated by heat, but somehow by the absence of heat. The first scenario has obvious benefits, the second perhaps less obvious ones, but they’re there even so. Yet the potential for harm and destruction, direct or indirect, is undeniable if either would end up in our hands, seeing as I said I’m not assuming any change in the thoughts and desires of humans. So is there anything that could start working, or at least work much better than it currently does, that would remain only a benefit even in our hands, without being turned into a weapon or an excuse for harm and destruction?
This is just an exercise of imagination, but what do you say? Do you think that any such change would save the world from us? Do you think that any such change would save us from ourselves? Is there anything harmful that, if lost, we certainly wouldn’t replace with something equally harmful, if not more so? Is there anything beneficial that we wouldn’t find a way to use to harm and destroy? Without actually changing humans in any way, and without destroying humanity, is there a way to fully prevent us from destroying life on Earth, including ourselves?
I can’t say that I can think of anything… But if you can, post a comment, no matter how crazy the idea is. After all, this is all just a little bit of fantasy. In reality, humans will, after all, be humans, and until that changes I don’t quite see how could any less advanced life form hope to survive us, or how could we hope to survive ourselves… Which only means that we need to change humans soon, by any means necessary. It is, after all, easier than changing the laws that govern the universe. Though sometimes it seems no less impossible…
This book is just a maelstrom. It brings the whole series together, all the characters together, for one fight, one purpose, one deciding moment. There are still far too many lucky coincidences, far too many characters survive when they shouldn’t have, too many things happen that shouldn’t happen, the writing still isn’t as good as it should be… But there comes a moment when none of that matters anymore, when you see how everything comes together and are drawn inside that maelstrom yourself. The ending may be something of a disappointment for some, myself included, but… One hell of a ride. One hell of a ride.
Rating: 4/5
I guess that’s all I can say about this day, and likely about how the whole week will go. Then again, there’s not much else to say about most of my life, is there? Well, all right, there would be other things to say, but hardly any of them good in any way…
I sent another long message to Ami, who either way is terribly busy this month, to babble about some more worries that are either utterly stupid or utterly pointless… Or both… I guess it’s at least somewhat different from babbling about a game or some random thing I saw, but probably even worse. Who the fuck knows anymore? I sure don’t… And I doubt I’ll ever know or do much of anything again, at least not until there’d at least be someone to hold me through a night and tell me it’ll get better soon, it’ll be all right. Someone I’d believe when telling me that. And I can’t think of anyone who could do either of these three things. Especially the last one, since things never get better… They only got better once, and even then only to get so much worse later.
So here I am not doing shit about anything. Didn’t even read what I meant to today, didn’t even touch that games played page, only played a little, only managed to write a little late at night… Watched something, which took a fair bit of time, but nothing much came out of that either. Waste of time, space and resources. My days, me, whatever…
I was even planning to write two non-personal posts this week, because for quite some time I was barely struggling to have one non-personal one per week, the other being personal, but that’s obviously not going to work. Not like anything I do ever does.
The last post was the 500th on this blog and I think it’s time to write a little about the plans I have for this site’s future, especially since last night I think I just finished the actual code for a new section of it. I’m not sure if I’ll also manage to enter all data to my satisfaction by the end of the year, since I’m taking it so very slowly, but I think I will. As soon as that happens, you’ll start to notice changes around here.
Right now, if you go to www.cavsplace.com you automatically get redirected to blog.cavsplace.com, since this is the only fully functional section of the site. But that will stop as soon as there will be some other active section that you may want to get to, so from that moment on you’ll see a simple splash page if you visit www.cavsplace.com, from which you’ll be able to get to any of the active sections. And the sections themselves will need to link to each other, likely through some sort of navigation bar placed at the top, though I’m not fully certain of that yet so it may not get implemented at the same time as the splash page.
There are currently two other sections in the works. I was only thinking of one at first, but the other just sort of happened and in fact I started to work on it even before doing anything for the one I had planned. Still, once I did start working on the planned one I pretty much gave up on the other, so don’t expect to see it go live anytime soon, especially since there’s a whole lot of tedious work involved when it comes to adding content to it, not to mention a fair bit of coding left to do as well. However, unlike the planned one, this other section easily can and very likely will go live even with only a small part of the planned content, but until then I’m not even going to say what it’s about.
But let’s move on to the section that was on my mind since getting my own site, which is about all the games I ever played. It’s been quite some time since I started trying to remember them all and the full list currently exceeds 150, though I’m only absolutely sure of about 130. First I took to adding them to my list of games played on IGN, along with a rating and a brief note for each, and then, around the start of this year, started rating them on MobyGames as well. Thankfully I also saved my IGN list in a file, so I didn’t lose anything when they decided to destroy pretty much everything that was nice about the profiles you could make on that site to accomodate people whose attention spans can’t exceed half a second. So the new section of the site will basically just be a list of those games. For each game you’ll get a link to its entry on MobyGames, the ratings just as I entered them on MobyGames, for the categories displayed there when you try to rate the respective game, and a brief note, which is the one I entered on IGN if available or one written when adding the game to the list if I hadn’t added it to IGN before they destroyed the profiles. The script also calculates and displays an overall score for each game, which is a weighted average of the individual ratings entered. In case of the games I also wrote reviews for, you’ll also get links to those, both on the blog and on MobyGames. Some changes will obviously need to be made to some of the ratings, and possibly even some of the notes, once I’ll see them all side by side and be able to compare better, but that will come later.
Right now, both of these new sections are written pretty much entirely in JavaScript. The other section actually requires a little bit of JavaScript, but the games played one does not, so I may decide to eventually port them both, excepting that little piece of code, into Ruby on Rails, since my host supports it, to avoid issues caused by the way different browsers interpret JavaScript, but that’s not going to happen too soon. (Speaking of such issues, thanks go to Shiri for some testing in Chrome, which apparently has some serious quirks when it comes to dealing with JavaScript.)
I’ll also need to do something about the blog’s theme at some point, but probably not too soon. It’s very old and, though so far it worked, likely thanks to being so simple, who knows what problems may arise whenever a new WordPress version comes along. I still want it to look basically just as it does now, but I probably should get a newer simple theme, to make sure the code itself is better suited for new versions of WordPress, and then modify just what I have to in order to make it look as this one currently does.
What I do need to do is make all the sections of the site use the same style, which implies using the same style sheet for the whole site. The new sections already do, so just the blog is left. That’ll also mean adding the blog’s specific style code into that style sheet, which should in fact make it even easier to change the blog’s theme when I’ll finally get around to doing that as well. By the way, the font used has been Segoe Print ever since I first started the blog at the old address. If you see something else, such as Comic Sans MS, it means you don’t have that one installed. Due to some of the reactions it can generate, the new sections no longer try to use Comic Sans MS if Segoe Print is not available, but the blog still does at the moment. This will be taken care of when I’ll make it use the same style sheet as the rest of the site.
