STEM 7 - Eh...

Too nationalistic for my taste!

I don't lose much sleep over America losing its place as "[the] engine of scientific discovery and scientific innovation." Yes, America has been an inspired catalyst, especially in the 20th century. However, progress is progress, despite its origins. Seriously, if one cares about progress, he or she should congratulate his or her global brother or sister on a job well done; it's not like we do too often.

American inventors! American ingenuity! why not human inventors and primate ingenuity? (Shout out to my brothers in the wild and civilization!)

Confining oneself to a nationality is outright boring, outright boring! Living in America and exclaiming you're an American is redundant. Expressing one's pride of the incident, even more so.

Don't get me wrong, I know America has potential for a quality of life higher than any other country's, which is pretty cool. In fact, I probably wouldn't want to live anywhere else. It's just... chill out about it, ok? Intense "patriotic" fervor is what causes animosity on the global front. Imagine a Frenchman yelling France is the best country on Earth, thus saying America is not. (One probably has! [The English language is so fun, figure the double context interpretation of the note out!]) Does that infuriate you? Well, I place no blame if it does. (I've found indifference is happiness's contemporary; competition is pointless, dominance over other men is a slavery. I'm not much for any kind of slavery.)

Anyway, do your best America! Do your best! (Also, don't recognize me as an iconoclast, some furious inciter or an especially liberal fellow. [Apolitical usually!] This isn't a sad attempt at revolution, this isn't a brutal critique of behaviour. It's simply one guy telling a lot of guys to calm down already.)

(None of this had anything to do with the topic, sorry. Granted, the topic was probably an attempt at getting EVERYONE up and doing something innovative; I just don't like the nationalistic shroud and prefer to point that out, as I only talk about things I don't care for.)

STEM 6

Inventing something in my lifetime to better the world?

Inventions don't better the world, human consciousness betters the world. I don't care how [long] I live; I don't care when I live; I just want to know that I lived and lived with people who take life for what it is and bring me on that trip. Why take this world for anything more than it reveals? (Dispelling both the religious and scientific.) Write a book of poetry, live forever in a particular dualism; that will do one more good than living an additional ten years with a new heart valve or whatever and producing nothing. (This suggesting applies exclusively to those who want immortality; those who recognize their indifference need produce nothing.)

However, I would like to invent the C.B. Irvine Sea Turtle Refuge for future generations to admired the noble sea turtle. I think I've mentioned this is a previous blog, so I'll elaborate no further.

However, explaining why I love sea turtles, possibly more than humans, may be nice. Shell living is no picnic, and shell living is how I've lived my entire life. Nervous, afraid, self-protective, inhibited in every respect. I've chosen to break my own mold; I've chosen to live in a way befitting my indifference. Simply, I've chosen to live in a way that I'm utterly content with. I won't elaborate any further on the subject, but I do imagine this is how a sea turtle feels in refuge. Although he can never physically abandon his shell, allowing him to abandon his shell metaphorically, living without cruel predators or inhibitions, living to do whatever he wishes whenever he wishes, works well enough, in my opinion.

Inspiration!

So, how has this inspired me to pursue a real career? It really hasn't.

I've decided upon my future, though. I'm going to college of course, but choosing a career based on whether I can do the tasks required, how much time in the day it takes and how well it pays. To be the modern dandy is my goal; to never have my career be my identity or even be known to my acquaintances.

Now, when I say I want to be a dandy, I'm not referring to the boring dandies whom are recognized merely because they are dandies. I'm speaking of the interesting dandies. The great Umourist Jacques Vaché or the snobbishly witty Oscar Wilde or... well, those are the only men I can think of who are remembered both as dandies and productive individuals.

This raises another question, I'd suppose. How will I be a productive dandy if I'm workin' that day job? What separates me from those boring dandies? I'm not sure. Perhaps I'll find something similar to Vaché's popularization of pataphysics. Perhaps my brain isn't capable of true work; moreover, perhaps I'm an advertising genius of sorts. Advertisement for nothing more than my own seemingly interesting mind. (It's not interesting, by the way. There are a lot of pun images [Alluding to C. B. Irvine's infamous "Yolk Enveloped Egg Plant"], a "joyless nothingness" and, of course, elementary equations when I'm obsessed with numbers.)

In truth, what I'm trying to say is I can borrow ideas and generalize them. The chances of everyone knowing of Jarry's work in Vaché's time is more or less improbable. The chance of most people knowing... well, anything in depth in our time is even less probable. (Digression! People don't care about elaborate details anymore. For example, speaking to a girl on the subject of some hippie-type band or another, I mentioned how much the lyrics reminded me of a Marcel Duchamp quote on the subject of folded arms and read it off of a website for her. The very next day she patronized one of our mutual friends for not being aware of Duchamp! [For clarity, I barely know of Duchamp besides that quote and his infamous feather boa-wearing in a Man Ray photograph.] How snide it was! I'm considered the Patron Saint of Pretension by many (I'm just a tad flamboyant in some respects; I believe many men consider any bit of unusual behavior deliberate and a wavering alarm for desired attention.), but at least I'm very subtle, gentle, even displaying elegance with insult if I choose to at all! Basically, I refuse the modern "small-fish intellectual" cliché. ["Seriously? You don't know who ... is?"])

Well, it seems my digression is a bit longer than my entire entry and even digressed within itself to a separate digression on detestable social behavior. I won't change it; one should consider it a summary of that type of person. Contrary to what I'd like to believe, there may be more to that type of person than a shroud of common slightly-above-average intellect. (Acceptance is the first step to being a tolerable individual. Accepting oneself as a fool or genius is key. There should be no gray area. [Oh my clarity! I accept my foolishness. A genius cannot entertain! A genius is an Edison! No one enjoys the company of an Edison. Moreover, what use does an aspiring dandy have for genius?])

To conclude, what have I said? Nothing really, I explained my hopeful future; I fought pretension with what is believed to be pretension by many, and most importantly, I found a way to mention a Man Ray photo of Duchamp in a feather boa in a blog. (S'pretty alarming, isn't it?)

How are the Other Classes Going? (STEM four, I think)

How has this class helped me in my other classes is the question being asked, I suppose.

I'm not sure exactly. I think this program can be embedded in another subject to make that subject a bit more fun, but we're not really associated with any STEM concept; unless one would consider social problems being brought to attention falling under that category. (This may be a STEM concept, I don't know. Not something I've gone over in classes often. Except those little cliche questions in English classes on changing a school rule. And as far as I can tell, those don't matter; I'm still not allowed to wear my bear hat to class. I'd categorize it as a stuffed animal, so I should probably be able to wear it.)

Anyway, as I've said, I don't see any real STEM concepts in this. Maybe playing with variables will improve my math skills? Maybe writing blogs will improve my writing skills? Don't know, not a person who really notices when he's getting better at something; just happens and I destroy anything I did before I was amazing at it. It's the best way to live, to be honest. (Exclude these blogs from that statement. I'm still pretty bad at blogging; I can't destroy bad work that's in progress.)

How Does it all Relate?

Another prompt, how does this class... rather, the work we're doing in this class, relate to my career goals? The work relates to all of my interests, but in rather vague ways. For example, I like art. I was able to draw scenes for the game. (Rather poorly, may I add. I'm not a fan of the computer mouse as an artist's utensil.) My work in classical mediums is much better, in my opinion. Also, I like literature. Of course, I haven't done any sort of literary work in this class, but I have had to write particular thoughts and such down; I suppose that helps.

Really, this boils down to me not being completely sure what I want to do. I'd like to find a way to be able to write or create art in a career; just because I'm not very good at either doesn't mean I haven't been born to do it! Look at Andy Warhol and his complete lack of any technical talent or that Twilight-writin' lady. Also, every modern career seems so limiting. Classical interests are dead for the most part. There's no room for experimentation, it's all efficiency for the well-being of your fellow man. I sometimes wonder if my fellow man is really doing so well. I wonder if he yearns for a more classical lifestyle or if he's content knowing he is doing productive work and living a prosperous life.

Exceptional Inventions

Being inquired on the three most important inventions, I can't help but refer to my interest in fundamental things. Rather than expected things; the Internet, the automobile or something pertaining to modern medicine, more fundamental items that have allowed these to be invented seem more important to me. For example, the printing press, precursor to the Internet, would be my third on my list of important technology.

Oh! how many papers I've done on the printing press throughout primary school, as I'm sure others have. We take the importance of this gadget for granted and view the research of it as a chore. Well, it may be a chore. However, it has in every way increased the flow of information and allowed an industry of information to develop in a way attainable to the common man. An educated common man is quite important, yes? On to the item that would appear second on my list, though.

Once again, fundamentals! Clothes, am I right? Those are pretty important, keepin' people warm and all. I wear clothes all the time and have acquired an entire wardrobe of them over the years, making them substantially more attainable and, in turn, more common man-friendly than the printing press or its products. I especially like the inventions of the pleated trouser and t-shirt, despite my love of fundamentals suggesting I may enjoy the loin cloth or some even cruder dress. Anyway, on to my choice of the most important invention of man.

The proper treatment and preparation of food, pertaining mostly to meat. Pretty fundamental and important, huh? It's inarguable that this increases the life expectancy of humans exponentially. Honestly, what could be more important than living longer without being poisoned every time you consume a carnivore's feast? True enough, many of our relatively less fundamental inventors were vegetarians and whatnot (I'm talkin' about you, Da Vinci!), but I'd assume most weren't. In short, death prevents progress.

To conclude this, I'd like to offer a glimpse of a world without these inventions/invented processes: we'd be naked, utterly uneducated people and (probably) dead. That doesn't sound like a pleasant world. The modern medicine and health or diet reminders of the day may increase life expectancy by a few years; the Internet may allow information to travel more frequently and efficiently, and clothes... well, clothes are still clothes... Never the less, the point at hand is fundamentals are more important than anything modern man is doing. Rather, modern man's efforts are mere elaboration on his ancestors' original ideas, making original ideas more important, in my opinion.

What Makes Our Game Difficult?

What makes Klangfarbenmelodie's game difficult?

I don't think our game is difficult in any sense, but it is still based around what I would assume to be an approved STEM concept. The questions are fairly straight-forward, in no sense esoteric. The first mini-game may require a bit of time to experiment, but I'm sure any student could pass it. The fun is in the second mini-game. And, well, there's fun in the third mini-game too. I don't think the aim of our game is to be difficult, but to be informative or reinforcing of knowledge that has already been acquired.

Sound Effects

This weeks topic is adding sound effects. I opted out of being the person doing the main tutorial, as Heath and I have predominately been doing the tutorials and uploading the assets to the team page. It just seems the best way to finish our last topic would be having a teammate who hasn't gotten a chance to go through an individual tutorial, do just that.

Regardless, I've looked through the tutorial and found it rather reminiscent of our first "Adding Sound" activity; only sound effects are more scripting, less work with frames. As would be expected, since the instructions are intended for a button sound effect. I honestly didn't get into the more advanced sound effect coding. I don't suppose we'll need streaming sound or "abstract playback mechanisms", which just sounds like controlled looping exceptions to me. (I like how the title of the tutorial is "'Cool and Practical Sound Effects" when most of it seems to be elaborations on exceptions.)

Platforms

The topic for the week is "Platforms." Once again, I've volunteered to do the tutorial. It was quite informative, but was ultimately in vain, for Heath found a way to code our walls from the collision detection tutorial.

Anyway, the platform tutorial was probably the most complex tutorial, as the author basically had to build an entire game around it to demonstrate that the platforms were working as intended. Aside from the game around it, the actual walls were quite simple, maybe, twelve lines of code. That's all the process really consisted of; a simple solution for a potentially game-altering problem.

Also, the final product:

Collision Detection

The current topic for the week is collision detection.

This is an extremely simple process with the help of the tutorial. I only regret not being able to alter variables to an acceptable degree, but there aren't concrete variables to change. I expected to have lines and lines of code for every character on a particular frame, but it only takes ten or so lines of code on a single moving (movie clip) character.

The tutorial also broke the code down into separate functions, which is pretty nifty. Instead of copying and pasting, this tutorial allows the reader to fully understand the code he or she is using from the simplest function involved, to the exponentially more complex combined product.

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/hittest.htm


Also, the finished product:

Scoring

The topic we've started today is "Scoring." It's going to take awhile for the team to fully apply this topic, as we need to put scoring in throughout our entire game at the moment, but I have gone through a few tutorials and feel I know enough to be able to finish a blog on the subject.

This is probably the easier function I've looked into on the individual assignments, as perfecting layering is not as crucial as it is with scrolling. For our game, we'll be using scores on buttons, which is probably the easiest form of scoring. It requires only a text field with variables set at "total" and a few lines of additional code on each button. The true test of scoring will be the tedium of adding three or so lines of code to every answer button and a variable text field to every scene in our game.

Scrolling Background

Today marks the day we begin our own assignments as groups in the action script tutorials. The first tutorial for our team, Klangfarbenmelodie, is called "Scrolling Backgrounds."

Very simple instructions, it's basically a tutorial reminding the reader of the importance of differentiating layers. I'm fairly certain ambiguity in the layering is what causes most problems in creating scrolling backdrops because, while the code is not easily memorized, there are a plethora of resources online to find the proper code. The zip file contains a finished product, which makes review much easier. A finished product should always be included in a Flash tutorial, I believe.

Learning From Others

Today our topic is "Learning From Others," obviously. It's not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a review or critique day; I usually like those days. Alas, it is more a topic on how to copy code from a specific source, which, I'll admit, is infinitely useful in a more cryptic way.

The main tutorial was on the actual wiki. This makes things a good bit easier. The assignment seemed more mental than proving one is able to execute the process, as it is such a simple process, proof is probably not needed. I would think the "moral" of this subject pertains more to being able to view other's works to see exactly how they did a particular action, not being able to copy something verbatim.

I found no tutorials that would really help with what I'm doing in my game at this very moment, as the links given seemed too general. (The word "flash" typed into a browser doesn't seem as helpful as I'd like it to be.)

Programming

Today's topic is programming, so we watched a short video on the subject.

The video seemed helpful, instilling the fundamentals of our action panel. It made sure to stress the importance of our global function books, which I had been overlooking for so long. I'd have to locate very specific tutorials to find, well, almost any sort of code I needed. I now realize that this additional work is nearly always pointless, as the books contain most, if not all, of the code I could ever need.

Also, as a class, we were asked to find one tutorial that will help us exponentially in our game. The biggest issue we have in our game is adding collision detection to one of Heath's scenes, so the collision detection tutorial will probably be the most helpful at this point.

The site with the collision detection tutorial:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/hittest.htm

Actionscript and Problems

Well, it's been almost two weeks that we've not been in class. I was dreadfully bored the entire time, honestly, but that's not the point of this post. In this post, we've been instructed to discuss our experience in action scripting before the break, and the problems we may have had with the website.

There were a few problems with a link, the video and, for me, the code we were told to download. The third problem being caused by my personal computer, not the actual site. Watching the video out of sync for a second time didn't really both me; I still understood the key points. The problem with the link was annoying, though.

When I began playing with the numbers on the Frogger-esque example, I had fun. Making the speeds irrational, increasing the number of spawning enemies, the things one always wishes he or she could do in a video game. So, I honestly couldn't complain about the experience, the two problems on the site are easy to overlook, as the basic tutorials cover most aspects of the assignment. The only thing we're missing out on, as a class, are the more elaborate details.

Presentation

So, Tuesday we did a presentation to illustrate how the process of making our game is going. We're not exactly finished, of course, but that's not the point of our first presentation.

As for the video of our actual presentation, the quality isn't exactly great. I'm not sure if my voice is intelligible or even audible, but Heath and his cowbell are heard very easily!

Our presentation:
Klangfarbenmelodie - Game Presentation

Career Blog

The class has been asked to do a blog answering the question I feel students are asked all too often: which career we plan to pursue, and how this class may help us pursue it.

I don't know what I want to do anymore. I don't enjoy any subject other than Literature, but my writing is not particularly astounding, especially my first person. However, I feel language is the only arbitrary thing I or, as well as I know, anyone can partake in. An escape from the uncontrollable world to a mental location which allows one to create a universe that abides to reason or doesn't claim it. This is what makes me want to write, but I fear notoriety will never be gained; I'm no Wilde, Kafka or Salinger, even.

Anyway, to the second half of the question, how this class can help me. Well, practice with the first person through these blogs has been nice. Although, my more formally written works will still be in the third, as they should. Also, I assume I will end up in, what will feel to me, a soul devouring job which will require some level of technological savvy.

All apologies if this seems a bit pessimistic; I'm usually much more positive.

Adding Interaction (Revisiting Dated Assignment)

A combination of a holiday break and excessive school cancellations due to weather has halted our project for, I believe, three weeks. Before the break, I had finished one of our side project, Adding Interaction.

If memory serves, it was, as usual, fairly simple. Two layers, one of a background, another of an object that is supposed to appear as though it is moving in the environment. A bit of directional coding from an instructional website was also required. I believe I made a spaceship float in what appeared to be supernova; I may have been on a Sagan kick.

Come to think of it, I've never really been on a "Sagan kick." I read 'The Cosmos,' and left it at that. Sorry, I end every entry with some clarity providing digression.