Blog of Chris

SLC Punk!

I got my hands on the film SLC Punk! (1998) around the time I was trying to watch every movie with James Duval in the credits. I never watched it because, well, it looks kinda sucky. I can confirm that it’s mostly just blurry-camera acid trip scenes and lots of talking to the camera.

But towards the end Jason Segal’s character (the apparently mild-mannered but outrageously violent “Mike”) announces that he’s moving away to get an education and save the environment, thereby becoming (as far as I’m concerned) How I Met Your Mother’s green-minded lawyer, Marshal.

This is one of my favourite things - when an actor plays two completely different characters at two completely different stages of their careers, but you can kind of fudge one into being the backstory for another. Like how Kal Penn decides to go to medical school at the end of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), and then turns up as a doctor in the TV Series House, (Robert Sean Leonard does the same thing if you ignore the last 20 minutes of Dead Poets Society).

One of these rooms is half mine…

… the other half belongs to Sean T. Moran, a man who has so far defied my googling efforts. I guess that I can at least take consolation in the fact that I am even harder to google successfully.

In other news my “days spent climbing” percentage is slowly clawing its way back to 30% after my lazy May. Climbing is better with graphs, ay?

Psst… don’t tell anyone, but here’s a SUPER SECRET SNEAK PREVIEW of some Wildlanders game art.

IT’S A FROG IN A PIRATE COSTUME!

I’m struggling to work so badly, so I gave today over to data entry. Right now Wildlanders has just over 45 different items of various themes, most of which can be equipped to 5 different character species. Balancing all the items and making sure they equip in the right order on the sprite is going to be one big headache, so for now I’m having fun playing dress up instead.

Tomorrow: I sort out the enterprise system for the Wildlanders world map. I’m starting to wish I hadn’t decided to try and build such a complex and involved game; it’s difficult to keep it all in my head at once, and I keep forgetting stuff.

6 weeks until America… I need to get a move on.

(almost) 6 months of Wildlanders

In about a week, I will have been working on Wildlanders for almost half a year. That’s crazy!

Today I finished off the essential admin tools and built a couple of auto-helpers that help commit changes made in the control panel to the live game. Tomorrow I’m rewriting the most complicated aspect of Wildlanders so far - loading and rendering the world map google-maps style.

Also finally got round to setting up Amazon Cloudfront to deliver Wildlanders’ static content, which was much easier than I expected. I hope it’s as speedy as it claims to be.

Reasons to go to America: Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer

Into the Wild tells the true story of Christopher John McCandless, a boy who runs away from his parents and has a good time, right up until he dies. I saw the movie first, and - despite the ending - I instantly absorbed Chris into that list of people I desperately wanted to be like. After reading the book, I wasn’t so sure. Krakauer’s account of Chris’ life is as unromantic as it is probably possible for an American author to write. The tales (which include digressions into stories from his own, similarly wild life), portray their adventurer protagonists as flawed, prone to bad decisions, and generally short lived.

This was a revelation to me; for the first time, those I’d idolised as heroes were just confused people dealing with their problems in a strange way. It also made trying to follow in their footsteps, if I chose to do so, seem infinitely more achievable. 

sPortland Climbing

On Monday night I got a call at 2am. “Let’s go sport climbing in Portland in the morning,” Rob said on the other end of the line. And that is what we’ve spent the last two days doing.

Highlights:

• Turning up 2 hours later than Rob, with no idea where he was or how to contact him, then being asked if I’m “the friend of that guy from Bath” by a complete stranger who went on to give me directions to his exact location.
• Having the whole crag to ourselves.
• Realising that Portland is possibly the friendliest place in Britain. Literally everyone we saw struck up a conversation, gave helpful advice, or otherwise managed to contribute to putting us in a fantastically good mood.
• Sleeping up in the sea cliffs, no tent required.

Low lights:

• Realising that the constant nausea I have from my antibiotics is tolerable when climbing for short periods indoors, but greatly impacts my ability to do it outside.
• Having the whole crag to ourselves.
• Talking pleasantly to a stranger for so long that he actually missed his (infrequently running) train.
• Waking up with a slug resting casually on my eyelid.

Lessons learned: Even though sport climbing is less dangerous than trad climbing, it is just as terrifying.

Also.

Someone liked my Triangles in PHP post. This is almost as good as the time a girl smiled at me once on a train.