妖怪世捨て人

Monika stared out of the window. The bright light from inside made it practically impossible to make out any distinguishing features in the dark outside. She was close enough to the glass that her breath created a circle of fog every time she breathed. Small pearls of water would form from it and slowly make their way down onto the windowsill. Monika sniffled and then sneezed.

Well, here we are. Here we are again. About three weeks ago another semester of university began for me. Since then I've been feeling a lack of interest and motivation in most things. None of the projects that are open right now seem inviting or exciting to me, and I don't know what to do.

With just about one hour and a half to spare we managed to submit our entry for Ludum Dare 36. Ludum Dare is a regularly occurring, fairly well-known game jam the idea of which is to create a game from scratch in 48 hours by yourself or 72 hours in a team. Given that, unlike last time we tried to participate we actually managed to finish making something that resembles a game, I think it's worth noting what my experience was as well as my general thoughts on game programming in Lisp.

Ring… Ring… Ring… Click!

My first onesie was published on 2013.03.02, and the thousandth was yesterday on 2016.08.15. This means that 3 years, 5 months, and 14 days, or 1263 days in total have passed, and I've drawn ~0.8 drawings every day of those. Not quite the quota I had intended originally, but not all too shabby either, I suppose.

The bike rattled softly as it flew over the pavement downhill. It was early Spring and the weather seemed to be about as perfect as one could imagine. Mostly clear skies with some neat clouds decorating it here and there. Monika relished every second of this and quietly hummed a tune. Her hair fluttered in the cool wind as she descended down the hill towards the town.

As part of yet another yak-shaving quest I've come to write a library that I only now realise I've been missing for a while: an extensible and generic iteration macro.

It's late in the evening and I'm not feeling all too jolly. About an hour ago I was once again frustrated with my drawing attempts as I had failed to produce anything whatsoever in an entire hour. I decided that it was enough. I am broken.

I thought it might be worthwhile to write about what I've been up to in recent times. Especially in terms of software projects it's been rather quiet from my side, and that's mostly because the things I've been working on require a lot of time and effort before I would dare to release them for public use. There's also been a lot of turmoil in my life again, which has disrupted my ability to really push ahead.

The only thing that seemed to be moving at all were the specks of dust in the air. They glistened up as they passed through the rays of light falling down from above. Sometimes it seemed as if the dust had a mind of its own, moving about without any noticeable trace of wind, sometimes suddenly soaring high up into the air, only to coast back down a moment later.

As I'm writing this I'm still in Krakow. Sitting next to me is Till, who joined me for ELS this year. It was a blast, but I'm also really exhausted and my throat is still hurting a bit from talking all the time the past three days. Our flight back to Zürich is in about an hour from now and I have a test to study for on the coming Thursday; I actually would've really liked to stay a bit longer, especially considering there were a few people I would've loved to talk to a bit more. Alas, you can't always get what you want.

It is the middle of the night and I am writing this by candle-light. I'm still very much shaken by shock, but it is imperative that I write this down. It might very well be the last entry I ever get to write– the last trace that is left of me. I am afraid for my life. I don't know who or what is after me, but I have reason to believe that there was an attempt to abduct me. If you are reading this, and I have not finished this entry, please come look for me! With any luck, I might still be alive somewhere!

There is something almost magical about a good, cool shower; as if it not only cleaned your body but also cleansed your mind, washing your troubles down the drain. Monika's head felt light on her shoulders and she was once again able to think clearly. All freshened up, she let herself fall onto her bed and watched the dust glimmer in the air for a moment. With a yank she got back onto her feet and went on to fetch her backpack downstairs. She might as well get started on the homework they had gotten. She placed her things neatly onto the living room table, and then remembered that she still hadn't eaten anything for lunch. A quick sandwich later she was finally ready to get to work.

For both Monika and Florian their ride to school went by rather quickly, although for very different reasons. Monika's head was once again filled with piercing questions about her new life, while Florian's was almost completely empty, or perhaps just filled with a mist that made everything feel dull and weary. For Florian, this was a perfectly normal situation. It took him at least three hours every morning before he was actually, truly awake. A trait he shared with his mother; anything they did before that just felt like an immense drag. Monika on the other hand simply didn't adapt well to sudden changes. Situations like these always brought her into great turmoil. Normally she wouldn't think too much about anything, which would make trips like these take much longer than it did now.

I thought I was done typing for today after spending all day writing up the documentation for North, but I guess I was wrong. Now, there's something that I've noticed every now and again when I take a peek at some of the new projects that pop up on Quicklisp.

It's Once More Time to talk about myself and my troubles for a bit. Not because I want anyone to listen or to care, but merely because I need to do something –anything to at least find some peace within myself. Writing seems to let me at least vent some of my frustrations, even if not by much. So, even though I would've liked to have a much bigger gap of informative and nice articles between this and my last lamenting post, I guess it'll be as it has to.

The fire crackles quietly as it gnaws on the dry campfire wood, slowly turning it darker. The orange flames dance silently surrounded by a ring of charred rocks. Despite the rock's cold and uncaring stare the flames go on dancing long into the night. But even their dance must end eventually. All that remains behind them is a pile of smouldering ash, lamenting the beautiful spectacle that once was.

Note for the uninitiated: This is an answer to a question that was posed on an in-character blog. If you are not familiar with the Touhou universe and characters, this story is likely going to be difficult to understand to its fullest. A good starting point to understand it however would be to read some parts of the wiki entries about Yukari and Ran, the two characters this is about, and about what a Shikigami is in the official works.

Note for the uninitiated: This is an answer to a question that was posed on an in-character blog. If you are not familiar with the Touhou universe and characters, this story is likely going to be difficult to understand to its fullest. A good starting point to understand it however would be to read some parts of the wiki entries about Yukari and Ran, the two characters this is about, and about what a Shikigami is in the official works.

It's been a while since I updated this blog, let alone with personal stuff. To cut to the chase: right now, I'm not doing very well at all. I haven't been doing well since last Friday when I was once more pulled into the abyss of self loathing.

Change is a fickle thing. While it might make things a lot better, it still only actually promises to bring one thing: uncertainty. Uncertainty makes people anxious, makes them worried and stressed out, irregardless of how things are likely to turn out in the end. It isn't surprising then that in a lot of folklore, any time that brings forth change is associated with a time for demons and all sorts of other evil-bringing creatures that cause humans grief and suffering. While this story is indeed about a time of great change, it is however fortunately enough not about demons, even if looking around the room could have very well led us to believe that some sort of demon must have done his deeds here. While for some people children are indeed embodiments of the devil himself, we shall abstain from such metaphors for now.

After a long time of frustration, trial, and mostly error, qt-libs finally supports Windows. In this entry I'll do something that will most likely not be of interest to many people, but I still think it is worth recording for posterity. Specifically, I will describe the way to build the smoke libraries on Windows. As with anything that combines the terms “C++”, “building”, and “Windows”, I cannot guarantee that it will work straight away. Regardless, I hope that it provides enough of a framework to guide you most of the way, if you ever do find yourself in this unfortunate position.

It's now been about a year since I first started work on Parasol. In the process, I had to learn about UI programming in Common Lisp. It pains me a lot to say this, but it is definitely not one of the great strengths of CL. It certainly wasn't back then, and it still isn't now. Since Parasol started I learned a lot about Qt and in particular the Common Lisp bindings, CommonQt. While using Qt is your best bet at writing a native GUI, it just isn't as pleasant as writing other lisp code. Too many things can break, too many brick walls are laying in wait for you to hit your head against, too many things are simply not there infrastructure wise. However, as Parasol grew, and I grew tired of CommonQt's shortcomings, I started to write more and more systems to work around these problems and make the UI experience for the developer a better one. This is the goal of Qtools.

I think I finally managed to figure out what my generous hosts' names are. I always confused them for words before, but now I'm fairly sure that his name is “Ionas”, and hers is “Mia”. Though I'm not entirely certain that this is the proper way to write their names. I wish I knew a phonetic scripture to write them down properly, but I doubt there's much of a chance of me being able to learn such a thing here.

A good while ago Robert Strandh approached me about a project idea. Namely that of a form of unified document processor, that could be used for any document format. His argument was that basically any new document format boils down to a question of syntax, while everything else about a document would get reimplemented anew for each new format syntax, generating a huge amount of wasted effort. What if there was a unified processing model that a syntax parser could be plugged on top of?