Category: x-personal

Random and intermittent postings about life, the universe, etc..

By the way, I got my laptop back yesterday.  So far all the physical problems seem fixed, but I think I’m going to do a system restore and go back to factory settings.  Something seems to have started slowing down the system, and the comparison to my newly minted desktop are quite apparent.

Current Mood: 🙂pleased

Finishing old business

Upon returning from Boston I discovered that an old e-Bay purchase had arrived.  Creatures was an advanced A-life game series in the late ninteies – in ’98 I got Creatures 2 as a Christmas gift and played with it quite often.
The game was customizable using scripting languages and Norns, the titular Creatures, were both breedable and engineerable.  Unlike other artificial pets Norns were controlled by hundreds, sometimes close to a thousand, genes that controlled appearance, movement, brain function, body chemistry, and more.
The upshot to all this was that it was possible to make Norn breeds that fit into certain behavior/appearance/environmental niches.  There were desert Norns, underwater Norns, anti-social Norns and poisonous Norns.  There were other creatures as wel – the lizard-like Grendels and the monkey-like Ettins.

Around the summer of ’99 I got it into my head to create carnivorous creatures.  Spider Grendels would be carnivorous hunters, eating other creatures for survival.  This project involved creating new body sprites, writing a whole new genome (or adapting an old one), figuring out how to make it walk on four legs, and writing scripts so that it could eat the other creatures.
The project got off to a great start.  I enlisted help from the alt.games.creatures community, at the time a large and vibrant collection of enthusiasts and tinkerers, for some help with the genome and the scripting.  We were doing well, and then it all stopped.
The guy who was working on the genome kind of fell out of contact and didn’t deliver.  And then my computer died for a period of six months.  By the time I got it working again I was in the middle of three different productions at school, and then I worked summer stock that summer.  Then London, then grad school, and then a new Windows XP machine that was incapable of running the game.  I tried looking a couple of times to see if there was a Windows XP version, but at the time nothing had been finished.

Current Mood: determined

LazySMS: whiskey in the jar

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_in_the_jar

“‘Whiskey in the Jar'” is a famous Irish traditional song about a highwayman (usually in the Cork and Kerry mountains), who is betrayed by his wife or lover. One of the most widely performed traditional Irish songs, it is also particularly known through its 1970s chart version by the Irish rock band Thin Lizzy. It is sung with many variants on locations and names; a typical version begins:

As I was a-walkin round Kilgary Mountain
I met Colonel Pepper and
his money he was countin’,
I rattled me pistols and I drew forth me
saber,
Sayin’ “Stand and deliver, for I am the bold deceiver!”
Musha rig
um du rum da, / Whack fol the daddy O,
Whack fol the daddy O, / There’s
whiskey in the jar.Folk Songs of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, ed.
William Cole, arr. Norman Monath, Cornerstone Library, New York,
1961.

LazySMS: Andy Goldsworthy

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Goldsworthy

‘Andy Goldsworthy’ (born July 26, 1956) is a British sculptor, photographer
and environmentalist living in Scotland who produces site-specific sculpture and
land art situated in natural and urban settings. His art involves the use of
natural and found objects, to create both temporary and permanent sculptures
which draw out the character of their environment.