Tao of the Machine

*scratch*

And now for an update on my projects… Firedrop is kind of stalled. Like a beached whale, it won’t move in any way, and even if it was in the water, it would still be a big ass boondoggle. (OK, my talent for metaphor isn’t always up to snuff…)

Something went wrong along the way. It started out simple, but quickly grew in ways I didn’t really want it to.

Maybe I should rethink my goals, and restart from scratch. What if we keep it extremely simple? Sort of like Blosxom… posts are just files. I can still do the attribute thing. I can also provide a primitive GUI, because we need some convenience when editing… I won’t go as far as requiring people to use a text editor (although they are of course free to do so if they want to). There would still be embedded code. Simple Textile support (like Kaa 0.9 has it), as well.

Kaa is far, far from perfect, yet there are some things that it does better than Firedrop. I especially like how you can tell it that a post uses Textile, for example… just use a single ’#’ on the first line. In Firedrop, there are attributes that can be used for this, in several places. Not as easy. The new Firedrop should Keep It Simple as well.

Since this will be a tool for Python programmers, maybe a simple API would be best. User/programmer wants something more than the system offers out of the box? It should be easy to write your own code that manipulates the entries.

Hmm. We’ll see. Even now I have the feeling that the new ideas are still not simple enough. Enter minimalist mode…

Scornful Egotist

(As seen here. ) This is a perfect example of a card that really sucks all by itself, but which gets a lot better in certain environments.

Nobody in their right mind would pay 8 mana for a 1/1 with no special abilities besides morph. However, the Scourge set contains a bunch of “converted mana cost” cards, and this does the trick. Scornful Egotist’s has a converted mana cost of 8 (never mind that you don’t actually have to pay all of it), which is fuel for cards like Torrent of Fire. Nifty.

sigh()

Gotta start writing again… Problem is, I have too many things to do but no energy. So I end up doing nothing at all. :-/

Maybe I should just prune my personal projects, like Mark did. Or tried to.

I suppose I am not a very good programmer (painter, writer, you name it). I start something, then lose interest a few days later, leaving a trail of unfinished projects in my path.

What doesn’t help is that I am easily disturbed by things that affect me emotionally, even when they shouldn’t. I can still produce some nice stuff in a few days (and even complete it, when using Python), but being depressed often throws a spanner in my beatbox. (Or something like that. :-)

Sometimes life is just dark and gloomy and yuck. Sometimes you want things and you just can’t have them. Sometimes stupid idiots get the things you want instead, even if they don’t deserve it or don’t know what to do with it. Such is life. It doesn’t exactly cheer me up though.

This post probably won’t make a lot of sense. But I’m not deleting it.

Just for the heck of it...

Only (time.mktime((2003, 6, 21, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)) - time.time()) / (60*60*24) days to go till OOTP...