Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Author: John Winkelman

Dog Day Afternoons Ad Infinitum

John Winkelman

Weelll I got an email from my mother asking why I wasn’t updating my site very often, so I though it only appropriate that I update it with a telling of a summer job which she arranged for me.

Back in 1990, the summer after my sophomore year at GVSU, I kind of found myself at loose ends, job-wise. My mother was quite sympathetic:

GET A JOB!!!1!

So I went out looking. Spent hours on monster.com, surfed the job boards, built a few websites. Then I realized that none of this stuff had been invented yet — and the Commodore-64 version of Photoshop was too buggy to use in any profitable way — so I would have to get my hands dirty.

A few days later I found myself at the front desk of the Jackson County Road Commission building on Elm Road, just down from the state prison (this figures prominently later in the story). They needed a couple of fellas to spend the summer doing traffic density surveys all over the county.

The terms were good: 6:30am to 5:00pm, Monday through Thursday, at minimum wage ($3.50/hour at the time). A whole summer, driving around in a 1977 Suburban, laying rubber hoses across the road.

Training for the job consisted of the usual questions: You know how to drive a truck? You know how to read a map? You ever kill a man? We also got to try out the Nail Gun of Death.

The traffic counting apparatus works as follows: At the side of the road is a small metal box, about a foot square and eight or so inches thick, weighing about 25 pounds. Inside the case is a circuit-board with a couple of pneumatic pressure guages and a small tape drive. All of this is firmly bolted to the case in an attempt to make the counter redneck-resistant. Two spigots extrude from one side of the case. It is to these that the rubber tubes are attached. The tubes are about an inch in diameter. At various places along the length of the tubes are little metal Chinese finger cuff-type contraptions which have a solid loop at one end, through which is driven a nail to hold the rubber tube to the pavement.

I fired the Nail Gun of Death exactly once,aiming at a piece of hardened concrete. There was a ricochet. The sound of a .22 calibre long-rifle driven hunk of hardened steel whistling past my ear is one I will carry with me to my grave.

This story will be continued tomorrow, or thereabouts.

Go Outside! Get Some Exercise!

John Winkelman

You didn’t really think I would spend all summer in front of the computer, did you? Well, I’m not. Even though I made the horrible mistake of buying an addicting video game a week ago, I have soaked up more sun in the past five days than I have, I think, in the whole rest of the year up to now.

How, I hear you ask, and Why? Why go outside? Because it’s there, and it’s bigger than inside. How? On my new bicycle . First one I have been on in about fifteen years, and first one I have owned in twenty.

Ia!

John Winkelman

Sometimes, and by “sometimes” I mean “a lot”, a feel bored and disaffected at work. On these occasions I do things like look for new versions of the “lorem ipsum” filler text. Occasionally, I find something useful, and occasionally I find something fun. I mean, sometimes you just need your lipsum to be in Morse Code or Quenya .

Well, that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted Lovecraftian Lipsum, full of consonants and apostrophes. I didn’t find it, but I did find something almost as good: Cthuugle : The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine.

Literary Darwinism

John Winkelman

This may be old news, but I heard today that Oprah Winfrey picked, for the Oprah Book Club, Anna Karenina. My first reaction was What, is she trying to weed out the weak ones? I say this only because, when I read it seven years ago, it took me six months to get through it.

For a good time, read the customer comments at the bottom of the page. For an even better time, count how many don’t actually talk about the book.

The Hits Just Keep On Comin’

John Winkelman

Fresh off a twelve hour day which happened all between the hours of 8:30am and 1:00pm today, I found this nifty thing , which seems to be a dead ringer for the original Zelda, except ported to the PC. AAAAAnndddd, it comes packaged with a level editor, so you can roll your own quests. How cool is that?

In other news, the following seems to be the experiment of the week:

geek.count++

John Winkelman

Where have I been? Ah! Therein lies an interesting story…

Nah, not really. I have been playing around with new things.

On Friday, when I decided not to go to work, I spent a couple of hours downloading and installing Apache, PHP and MySql on my home computer. To a certain extent, it all worked. Apache worked without a hitch. PHP runs fine, although I haven’t quite figured out how to get all the extensions (e.g. XSLT) working. And MySql stopped working when I did something with my firewall, which makes no sense because the firewall adjustment was to block MySql from accessing the internet, which it should NEVER have to do.

Meh. I’ll sort it out soon enough.

The other cool new thing is actually a cool OLD thing, and by old I mean 1985 / Commodore 64 OLD. The game is Telengard, and there is a fella made a perfect clone of it for PC users. After a couple of hours of playing I have to say, Wow, what a nostalgia trip.

Maybe I just need to get out more.

Less Play, More Build

John Winkelman

So I was playing Diablo II last night for the eighty-twelfth time and I decided it was past time to stop playing games eighty-twelve times and start building them instead. To that end, I am slowly gathering together notes from the past couple of years when I have really *meant* to start building games, along with various books on the subject, notes and code from the Adventure Game section of this site, and printouts of the source code from completed games, written in BASIC, and played to death on my old Commodore-64, twenty (egads!)years ago.

But my ideas have evolved over the past couple of years, and I have been playing around with artificial evolution and exploring the possibilities therein.

And I have discovered something.

I have spent over half my life playing adventure/role playing games of various kinds. The object of these games is to make your character more powerful, usually by earning points of various kinds and using them to enhance one or more out of a broad group of possible characteristics.

In artificial evolution experiments, particularly in things like biomorphs , the chromosome starts out simple, then gradually increases in complexity as more and more generations are born.

The characteristics of an RPG character can be considered genes. The genes used to describe a biomorph can be considered characteristics. The points used to advance a character are analogous to the increasing complexity in an evolving organism. The only real difference is, the biomorph is Darwinian evolution, and the RPG character is Lamarckian.

In other words, level advancement == increasing complexity.

Knowing this, why not simply create a gene pool from which can be created a near-infinite number of creatures? Evolve the genotype, rather than building the phenotype! Keep things from getting out of hand by defining what proportions of one group of genes to another makes a critter an animal, a plant, or a whatever is needed to fit the storyline of the game. Need more variety? Make the chromosome larger! Need the game to be science fiction rather than fantasy? Change the code which interprets the chromosome, create some new graphics, and now you have a near-infinite variety of robots.

Once the genotype and phenotype engines are completed, the user can play God or Nature and go in and modify a specific instance of the chromosome to create a specific creature. Mutations of this creature can then be created to suit specific needs.

There. Now that my big idea is made public, I need to start building something.