January 2, 2018

You know what, never mind. My big reveal was supposed to be that thelegendofmax.com became available and I snatched it. But someone else snatched the fucking thing again as soon as it dropped again even though I was watching for it a-fucking-gain. 

The funny thing is I don’t think the site ever had ads on it. Meaning people over the years have spent at least a hundred bucks on renewals for a domain that, historically, has never made anyone a dime.

Whatever. We’ll rock it on .net for a while. I’m gonna try to import our old posts and such too at some point.

More…

December 22, 2017

Shivering with antici…

I didn’t mean to cliffhanger this shit. I thought the thing would happen like a day or two after that post. It’s still coming.

Also I cleaned up the site after a dodgy plugin and theme update started mining your computers for bitcoins.

Doing that broke everything on the sidebar. So I fixed that too.

But seriously, I’m excited for the thing. It’s coming.

November 27, 2017

Watch This Space

Like the sage professor Ab-Soul once said:

Oh, shit. Somethin’ bout to happen.

March 11, 2016

I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.

So I saw the post yesterday on reddit on how Google’s AlphaGo AI beat a world-class Go player for the second consecutive time. This is a big deal given that Go has a rather intractable nature, it’s as much felt as analyzed at the top level. It also reminded me that I tried to learn Go like a year ago.

While I understand the rules, the aim of the game, and more or less how to score it, I’m missing something rather important, which is understanding the context of why I would want to, or not want to, make a particular move. How to defend myself, how to spot an attack before it gets out of hand. I’m so bad at this part of it.

For reference, the ranking system in Go starts with 30 Kyu at the bottom of the tier, it counts down as you get better, to 1 Kyu, then there’s 1 Dan, and it starts counting up. So 30 is the bottom, to be clear.

According to this Go AI, I am 32 Kyu. That’s like, bizarro world bad. I’m that goddamn bad. The game is spotting me 4 turns, and I still blow it most of the time. I was twice given four black stones at the start of the game and lost by 89.5 and 88.5 points. To compare, it would be like if you were playing basketball, and you were given 40 points at the start of the game, then lost 129-40.

I am 8-23 with an average play of 32.1 Kyu. I mean, it’s better than the Sixers. But it would be like if the Sixers were still this bad against, like, an elementary school. I don’t actually know at what age the average Go player was this bad. Five? Probably.

What the fuck? I don’t think I’ve ever struggled so much at a game. I’m not great at chess, I don’t play it much, but I’m around an 1150 Elo. That’s better than most 5-year olds, anyway.

I think I’m going to plot my record over time and my rating and see if things ever get better. I don’t know if they will.

March 10, 2016

I haven’t been on here in so long

That I actually forgot I recreated the site in WordPress. Dang.

May 18, 2013

Phoenix From Ashes

So TLoM’s been quite a while with no update. This isn’t terribly unusual. But I’m here because I’ve had something pretty freaking awful happen: My entire simfile library has been lost. There was something like 5900 songs in it, a lot of stuff from the OGs of StepMania, the height of it’s popularity. And it’s occurring to me that this site is important. It can preserve the legacy of a game that I love. I’ve got a new purpose with TLoM, and an awful lot of motivation to do it right. I’m going to fight and scrap and scour the crusty armpits of the internet until I find every last one of those fucking songs, and I’m going to give them a forever home, right here. Just you watch.

April 7, 2012

Full Circle: TLoM Car Mix v1.0 Released

After 11 builds leading up to it, and almost 9 years after beginning, TLoM Car Mix is available on CD-replacement service Spotify, as a three-CD set entitled Crossovers.  They’re broken down like so:

CD1: My favorites from each of the original Car Mixes from 2003-2005.

CD2: Omissions, songs that deserved to be in the original mixes but weren’t.  I had to have known about them prior to 2006 to be considered for inclusion.

CD3: The new generation of the car mix, selections that I’m currently listening to.  Only songs released in 2006 or later were considered for inclusion.

Subscribe to them here: CD1 | CD2 | CD3 | Complete 3CD Playlist

Whether people still care about them or not, I had a lot of fun, more than even makes sense, making the original compilation.  Starting some time around v0.5 I started designing with the concept of “flow” in mind, not an actual mix but a transition from song to song that is pleasing over the course of the album.  I tried to keep that spirit alive with CD 2 and 3.  These are all burnable, if one was able to find all the songs (or rip via Stereo Mix).  In an upcoming post I’ll go deeper into why the songs were chosen for 1.0, and what music has meant to me and the site over time.

November 21, 2011

Beverages in the Salton

That most famous of Chmielowiecs, Aaron (In Japan), has released his first book of computer-generated poetry. It’s now available on Amazon.

October 19, 2011

Project Xenon update: 10/19

Project Xenon is the name for the mobile score tracker I’m working on.  I know there’s an existing mobile score tracker at ZIV but I have a few reasons for making it anyway.  I don’t care for their theming, Diana has some stuff she really wants to be able to do that ZIV’s tool doesn’t offer, it doesn’t offer in-app registration and I honestly just really want to see if I can make one that looks and acts exactly like an iPhone app with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS instead of Objective-C.

So there’s been no actual web work done yet but I do have dance point data for every song, every difficulty, single and double for DDR Extreme.  I’ve also got access to similar data for SuperNova 1 & 2, DDRX, and ITG 1 & 2, but I’m gonna start with just a DDREX rollout.  The initial launch will also have challenges, buddy lists, statistics, rankings, and the ability to categorize songs (at Diana’s request).  Phase two will include image uploading from within the app and an iOS photo library and whatever other features are requested or I think of.

More…

October 14, 2011

A Challenge Appears

Okay, so at the heart of most features I build out on websites I design is unabashed self-interest.  If I have something to gain from coding something it will take much of the “work” out of it.  This time, it’s a web app, a score tracker once again but optimized for mobile devices.  I don’t think there’s an app for thatâ„¢, and I won’t be the one to make it as, like I mentioned a few posts back, you have to own a Mac to code for iPhone.  And this would be cross-platform.  I might write the whole thing over the weekend, seeing as how I still have all my code from PumpScores.  The only real new work to do would be the CSS, making it usable on any device that can get web access.  I feel like if you can track your scores in the field you’re more likely to actually do it.  At least, I think so.

I’m gonna do this, like I said, for myself, so it’s initially gonna just have DDREX because I have all the DP data for it.  But it could be quite thorough.  One project I had in my head that I never did do was full.com.bo, a website that would house the only Unified Score Tracker on the web, largely crowdsourced for notecounts and so forth.  One unified scoring method.  The project never took off because I couldn’t get the name registered, .bo is Bolivia and they apparently still haven’t heard of paying by credit card or Paypal or anything even now.

So, it would start out with DDREX, and the next things to get added would be ITG/ITG2 and then probably the newer DDRs after that.  This will be project enough to keep me satisfied for a while.  When a working mobile site is up I’ll give you guys a shout.