I’ve re-blocked my list of procrastination sites. I’m starting to get back into the swing of making things, and these sites are preventing from getting my high. We’ll see if it helps: hopefully, I’ll release something small soon.

This semester is the first time I felt really panicked about my academics. Well, maybe there was that one time I actually failed a class back in high school, but it was over by the time I realized it, so there wasn’t much to be panicked about.

The reason? I tried to not care as much about my grade, since grades aren’t what drive either what I end up doing in life, and because optimizing for grades usually excludes optimizing for happiness. Overall, I think this is a good strategy, but I didn’t know how to control it my first time out, and as a result my grades suffered much more than I intended, meaning my stellar GPA is more mediocre now. I can try not to care, but I’ve been optimizing for it for so long that it still stings.

An retrospective of my classes:

• AI - pretty much worthless on the subject of AI. I learned much, much more about the philosophical side of AI from Less Wrong, and the coding material wasn't very dense. Lisp would have been interesting to learn, if I didn't already study it in high school.
• Robotics - Mediocre topics (lots of low-level, entry-level robotics routines) and the class used a mediocre platform. It turns out (surprise!) that hardware is hard, especially when you're using a bluetooth link. I think we should have had on board Arduino boards to do the logic, which would have bypassed the bluetooth latency and probably made much more responsive robots. And, oh god Matlab: it's really too bad me and my partner never got the Python package for the iRobot Create off the ground.
• OS - Oh god why, that was pretty painful. But now I've hacked on the linux kernel!
• Logic Design - It turns out I just don't care about really low-level hardware that much, although doing FPGAs could prove helpful in my later endeavors. It could have really used a lab where we could use FPGAs hands on. This class was also a source of great discomfort through finals, since I thought I was going to fail this one. Yup.
• Vision - Great professor, interesting topics: first half of the course went somewhat slowly while building up the requisite background. The second half of the course that blasted through various 3d depth recovery techniques more than made up for it, though.

Outside of classes, I did Maker Faire and attended an Ignite event. However, that’s all I did: once I started dying in Logic Design (and OS), I stopped doing things outside of class. For instance, there was the Biotechnology Crash Course at Genspace which I think is just awesome in theory but I couldn’t do because I was freaking out about academics. Also, I didn’t make it over to NYC Resistor or A1L all semester, which is not cool.

Overall, it was a good semester: I’m still learning how to make time for other things, and not care quite so much about grades. And, I didn’t fail any of my classes (can’t forget about that)!

As is tradition, New Year, new resolutions. This year, I resolve to:

• Make some noise: I'll code whether or not I put it down as a resolution, so I'm not worried about that. However, getting myself off the ground as a computer musician is a much more variable prospect, and it may as well use a push, however small, from making it a formal resolution, declared in public.
• Read more books: I read plenty of things on the internet. However, there's lots of knowledge locked up in longer forms, like books or research papers, and the knowledge there tends to be deeper than your average post linked on Hacker News.
• Hack some Hardware: I'm part EE (and a physics major, to boot) but I don't hack nearly enough hardware compared to the amount of software hacking I do.

I, Nathan, do resolve to do these things. So be it.

It’s about that time of year again, when our culture collectively reflects on the past year. Or gets raging drunk, but I’m not doing that this New Years Eve.

So, what happened?

• Got an internship at a "real" company, instead of applying for research positions like I had done the years previous. I started applying in earnest during winter break, getting my first phone interview ever in 2011 (this is surprising to me, from where I stand now). It turns out that I had to keep fishing for jobs until the beginning of summer break before I landed a job down in the valley, about which I should have a retrospective soon.
• We started kicking up the action at ADI, putting on the first Devfest and putting ourselves on the map as the tech kids on campus. Not much more to say about that, me thinks.
• I started Notesoble, and I'm still not done with even a draft or any sort of demo. I could litter this post with things I might have done during 2011, but this is somewhat near and dear to my heart, so I'll leave off the failures now.
• New laptop!
• Attended concerts in nice concert halls!
• Participated in less than all the hackathons, like HackNY and SVI Hackspace and SuperHappyDevHouse and Mozilla's World Series of Hack!
• Almost built a functioning reprap! (there are still some electronics problems)
• Makerfaire!
• Fearing for my life academically! (I'll post about this soon in my semester retrospective)

So that’s a year in a life, or at least the highlights reel. Could it have been better? Of course: until we have FAI, then there’s room to go upwards. But the year worked out to a net positive, and for that I am thankful.

My resolutions will come tomorrow.

If I don’t review, then there’s really no point in keeping up the writing: hence, a brief look back and attempt at picking apart my writing.

• The Reluctant Gamer

  A bit forced: the paragraph containing "all work and no play" could have been cut, but I wanted to include every phrase I thought might be included, instead of taking a butcher's knife to it. And the speculation over how hedeons work is pretty personal and mostly useless, since I haven't done the appropriate literature search. Overall, I'm okay with this post.

• Christmas

  I let my sensational side get away from me, because I really really really wanted to include the line "Wrong! I want to [learn something] so I can [do some surprisingly broad action]", akin to HPMOR. Lots of discursive lines of wandering thought, a bad appeal to science and a clumsy pointer to transhumanism; a closing line I'm not proud of. However, I'm not sure what else I would have filled into the slot, and it did seem the day to post it.

• Shopping

  I went shopping. I decided to post about it. Also, I just wrote the Christmas post, which was a bit long, so I didn't want to write too much, and instead weighed in on a tired topic, with an obvious ending. Of course, the internet is winning: it has already won.

• Intentionality

  I started freaking out because I couldn't control my own time allocation. Well, some portion of me started to freak out, and then I dumped this post promising further posts about how I was going to fix that, and then I went right back to playing Bastion, or going to sleep.

• Winter Break Game Reviews

  I finished the current crop of games I bought during the Steam holiday sales, and of course I had to write something about them, because it was easy writing fodder. Sometimes I digressed, but overall I think I stayed pretty close to the reviewing games core.

• The Middle

  An old post that has been sitting in my drafts folder as an outline for a few months. It sprang from some memories, and I realized halfway through that I was whining (maybe something deserving of #firstworldproblems), instead of writing something interesting. I didn't know where to go after that, so I wrapped up pretty abruptly. Maybe it could have been massaged into something given the theme, but not in the hour I gave it.

Overall: I’m not writing fast enough. The Game Reviews took an entire evening (partially because I was chatting for much of it, but nevermind), and even short posts take a long time. If I write faster, then I can either get more revisions in, or I can write for shorter periods of time so that I don’t push writing these off to the end of the night (that is obviously a bad thing to do). Also, interleaving posts instead of writing them all in one go each night could raise the quality of writing through imposed revisions. Given that I think I’m done with gaming for the rest of the year, I’ll be trying to write faster and in revisions this next week.

I remember hiking through the woods, alone.

Which is somewhat surprising, because I was part of a big group of Boy Scouts, which started off hiking through the wilderness in single file. Then those faster pulled ahead, and the slower ones fell behind, and I eventually found myself trekking through quiet glades without a soul in sight (I recognize that this is not good hiking behavior, now; this was more than a few years ago). Not quiet fast enough to keep pace with the big boys, and too fast for the little ones.

I played an instrument, winding my way into lessons and then a youth orchestra, trying to master a calm instrument pitted against a capricious body (why? why do my shifts always miss the mark?…). And everywhere there were students of the art that weren’t suited to creating music, didn’t have the talent or the gumption to see it through. On the other hand, there were masters of the art that could whip out concertos with alarming speed. Not good enough to take it anywhere, not untalented enough to prevent the dreams.

Programming is my art, code the pond in which I swim. And here, too, I take a middling path: a console cowboy? No, just a kid spinning out the spare webapp. Not serving as the vanguard of humankind’s ability to grapple problems for the public at large, nor content with sitting in a cubicle, tapping out Visual Basic for a faceless corporation.

I was a middle child.

I guess this is what being a jack of all trades gets you; a fair shake at everything bringing a middle competency to the same. Maybe I should abandon this path, of trying to be human.

Or maybe I’ll try at it a bit longer. We have yet to see where this break will take me, and we’re not even a third of the way there yet.

We’ll see.

I previously said that I would finish off LIMBO and then start doing productive things: this turned out to be a false statement. Instead, it turns out that I wanted to game a bit harder than that (and Steam sales are crazy), and hence broke some of the self-imposed constraints that I detailed in the first winter break post just to batch through a few more games (theme of my life: batch through everything). But now, it’s time for a couple day retrospective, and I’ll write some thoughts on what I just played.

There are probably spoilers.

LIMBO

A cute little puzzler. Wait, did I say cute? I meant gruesome: after I finished the game, I learned that the makers of LIMBO architected the game so that the player would have to die at least a few times to get through sections of the game, which makes all sorts of sense. In fact, I would be surprised if anyone could play through the game without coming to that conclusion or going insane (maybe some platforming genius with precognition?).

Once you get over the prospect of dying multiple times just to get past a puzzle, then it should be fine: I didn’t breeze through the game, but I only got seriously stuck (as in ask the internet for help) twice, and then mostly because I was impatient. Sometimes I got annoyed because the controls didn’t feel responsive, I would grab a rope and then jump off it because I was holding the up arrow while airborne (because the arrows affect your movement in midair, which is annoying). However, those and similar issues are not hard to put up with, and it’s easy to get lost in the shading and shadows for the several hours it takes to pick apart the puzzles (6 hours + 2 cheats. Yes, shame shame).

The ending is gruesome. Wait, did I say gruesome? I meant cute. And abrupt. And it’s basically all the story/motivation you get from the game, and it comes at the very end (and did I mention it’s cute?). A tabula rasa would feel somewhat confused about the plot; why he is running away from spiders and dealing with mechanical monstrosities and killing children, when a sentence long synopsis (Do it for the girl!) would suffice. If you had to read the description of the game to buy it, then we don’t run into this problem, but gifting… well, we’re here for the platforming and the creepy atmosphere, so we’ll sweep that under the rug.

tldr; Braid spoiled me, I whine whenever I have to start over from the beginning of a puzzle.

Multiwinia

So during the insane Steam holiday sales, all the Introversion games ever went on sale in a bundle for $5. I’ve been thinking about getting myself some Introversion games ever since they did that kind-of-open-source-thing, and once they went on sale it was a no-brainer.

There aren’t that many RTS games released, and even fewer I want to play: in this case, Multiwinia sated my desire for a game where I could send waves of minions into the thresher, and do it within half an hour (I’m looking at you, Sins). The multiple game modes spiced things up, but there’s ultimately not that much strategy involved, and a man can only cackle manically for so long.

DEFCON

Worldwide nuclear war: what’s not to like?

Well, if I had friends that played it, too, then I could see it being even more fun when we all inevitably backstab each other and end up punching each other in real life.

Solar 2

A game with an interesting premise; be a celestial body, and go grow yourself into a black hole and consume the universe. Or you could play a bunch of mini-games, but they’re not that interesting. Plus, the realism is all game play oriented, so you definitely don’t want to buy it for that. It provided a couple hours of entertainment, and I got it for a couple dollars, so it’s more or less a fair trade.

Bastion

Nice looking graphics and a gravelly voice muttering quips in my ear: what else could you want? Okay, go get it!

As I sat through the credits (yes, I did that. It was 3am, what else was I going to do?), it’s never been quite so apparent just how much work goes into a single game: all the game mechanics that get dumped into a box, wrapped up with art assets, tied up with plot lines into one neat package, and then delivered by the Steam elves (maybe steam punk elves? Daft steam-punk elves? I’m sorry).

Bastion really is a gorgeous game, with the standard RPG hooks and a compelling story to boot. If I didn’t try to rush through the game (somewhat failing in this regard, because I have a need to collect all the shiny things, although I did finish the main quest in 10 hours) then there would be plenty of content that I could settle into, and I could conceivably entertain myself for quite a while.

Analogy time: if LIMBO is to a painting, then Bastion is to a short novel, keeping in mind the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words (really? Only a medium sized essay? Who comes up with these things?). And I’ll leave it at that.

Oh, and I saved Zulf, and evacuated the Bastion. In case you were wondering.

That. I lack it. There’s a part of me that whines that I don’t have any basis for saying this, that I need more data before I start flinging these thoughts and applying them to myself, but I think I’m getting better at seeing myself justify in real-time (who came up with rationalization as a synonym for justification? It bothers me), and I have to write something, so hey-yo!

Call it heroic responsibility, call it getting shit done, call it programming, muthafuckas. Right now I’m not meeting goals set out by my meta-self, and am instead maximizing the hedons I know will be gone in a week. So, in the next few weeks, I’m going to write at least one post about defragmenting myself: how to make sure I’m applying knowledge of my heuristics and biases to all aspects of my life, not just the parts someone pointed out, and a post on how to make sure the world is being optimized around me. And if all goes well, I’m also going to be reading a lot of books.

Yes, I’m punting. Yes, I want to sleep. Yes, Bastion is a good… hey, stop that!

A hammer of sensory overload, sailing through the after Christmas sales in a mall. Excited families, affectionate couples, clusters of children, a sea of humanity. I feel disoriented at times, garish tinsel and a wash of sound threatening to capsize my calm. I consider my options carefully, and we eventually make our way to the exits.

Later at home, I look at Zappos.com (yes, I am buying shoes). No forces try to upset this juggernaut: in fact, here I am in my element, where I don’t have to traverse the length of a mall to compare shoe styles and weigh their relative qualities in a frustratingly unknown utility function. I wonder how much longer the big box retailers will go before being touched by these sites.

An anticipation before unconciousness, abrupt awakening awareness, undignified scampering, tearing of presents, hefty portions of food, and the end of a day well spent with family. Being together in a special time of thanks and wonder; this is the magic of Christmas.

When did we lose that magic?

We’re all grown up, now, adults or nearly so, having long ago shed our hallucinations of a jolly old man that delivered presents to the good and punished the bad (or only some of the hallucinations, but that post is for another day). Now this modern day approximation of a winter solstice celebration is almost just another day, bracketed by shopping sprees and frosted with religious trappings. Cherry picking the worst, outside of my family is worse: people dreading meeting their semi-estranged relatives, or trying to force some good cheer in an empty apartment.

This is is different from what we want: there is a culture-wide agreement that Christmas is best kept magical, that everyone could do with some good cheer once in a while (even if it is derived from a holiday co-opted into a capitalistic enterprise). In the tradition of only penning antagonistic opinions, I agree with the sentiment: Newtonmas should be kept magical. However, the way I propose doing it is by destroying Christmas (and not replacing it with Newtonmas: again, that post is for another day, and really, Newton isn’t that important).

Before I start, what is magic? Is it an alias for utils? An alias for hedons? Maybe: I like to think that this highly subjective and ill-defined term is shorthand for the amount of blowing-someone’s-mind-in-a-positive-way that happens (it seems like this sort of thing might be a discrete measure, but the amount by which you can blow someone’s mind is continuous. Blowing someone’s mind by showing them a youtube video of people base jumping is probably less of an impact of showing them the internet for the first time). Blowing their minds with kindness, blowing their minds with an invisible jolly obese elf that delivers presents to the children of the world, blowing their minds with good food: I know trying to tamp down a general definition on these words is a futile effort, but I think this will do.

So back to destroying Christmas: do I wish to kill the magic of Christmas? Wrong! I want to learn the secrets of infusing Christmas with magic so I can sustain it forever![1]

(That line might show up in future posts too. Sorry)

Another way of putting it: let’s explicitly optimize for magic while it’s Christmas, and then never stop.

Maybe I’m naive, that this can’t happen easily and that it’s in fact hard, but then I look around inside a church and see people passively accepting of the gospel that seems inane to me, and I think that maybe it isn’t so hard. We’re just swept up in the narrative of our lives, too busy to optimize, not knowing how we can optimize, or ignorant of the fact that we can (ignoring Mazlow’s heirarchy for now).

One way to think about this is through random rewards: research indicates that randomly timed rewards are better for reinforcement than regularly timed rewards. Now, our friends aren’t rats under the will of our carrot-stick methodologies, but it seems to indicate that a random gift is more impactful than one agreed upon beforehand, and also removes the awkward gift giving that happens because it has to happen, because, you know, it’s the holidays.

Or something longer term: people might object, claiming that people are built on cyclical natures. Boom and bust, hard work and relaxation, it all follows the deeper rhythms of life. But we’re on the edge of changing ourselves to not be constrained by such things: while people may object about infeasibility or short-term intractability, we can look to where we’re not constrained by crippled wetware, remind ourselves where we could be.

By the way, this is probably a bunch of bullshit. Actually, it is definitely a bunch of bullshit, with a small probability of being right. You will survive.