Endgame Viable

Flipping The AWS Switch

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 15:31:47 -0500

Tonight I’m going to start “flipping the switch” to host the blog entirely in AWS.

You, constant blog reader, will not notice anything.

Unless something goes horribly wrong. In that case, everything will explode and I’ll need to figure out how to roll back the changes gracefully. You might not even get to see this post explaining what happened.

When it’s done, you might notice the site loads about a bazillion times faster, as it will no longer be served from an antiquated shared hosting platform. There will also be a different endgameviable.com certificate.

The site that you or your feed reader programs load will become a teeny tiny custom Golang program that runs on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. That program will decide if you (or, let’s be honest, Google) are trying to load a very old link that needs to be redirected. If so, it will redirect to the new, updated link. Otherwise it will make a reverse proxy call to load the blog content from a static Hugo-built site, hosted with AWS Amplify.

If you’re one of those people who runs 50,000 script and ad blockers, it’s possible they might mention something about this, but they shouldn’t.

So here goes nothing. The switch-flipping begins by transferring the endgameviable.com domain to AWS Route 53 control. It will probably take a couple of days to finish completely, based on the tests I did with transferring another domain name.

A New Reading Process

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 09:57:48 -0500

Around the start of every new year, there’s a collective burst of enthusiasm around humanity for trying new things. I, for example, am trying to devise a new reading strategy.

Naithin recently wrote about this topic of reading goals, which spurred me to revisit my habits. I know that my previous strategy has failed because I can’t remember the last new book I read or listened to*, though I’m sure I must have read something within the last couple of years.

The Blaugust Discord also had some talk recently about book recommendations, and there were a lot of book titles and authors thrown around that I’d never heard of.

I’ve become woefully bad at keeping up with the latest book trends. Every year the number of popular authors seems to multiply and I don’t know most of them anymore.

For example, I still think of Brandon Sanderson as a “new” author, but I think he’s put out more books now than Stephen King. We get it, Brandon, quantity is more important now to an author’s career than quality, sheesh! Don’t keep rubbing it in! (Staying quiet on Twitter is also pretty important now.)

Anyway, I thought I’d write down the names of all these books I’ve been seeing and try to figure out how a person such as myself, a modern person-on-the-go with relatively poor eyesight for reading, could possibly keep up with reading or listening to these hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of new books that are published and/or “published” every year, when I have very little time I’m willing to dedicate to reading or listening to books.

It’s turned into a bit of a puzzle.

The Lists

First of all, simply “writing down the names of the books” is a somewhat more arduous process than I expected. Finding software to automate or assist in this task in a way that fits my mental workflow is proving fairly difficult.

There are sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph and LibraryThing but they aren’t quite right for my simplistic needs. Those sites are targeted more for people who are really into book culture. They graph and correlate and recommend and social network and statistic and like and share and subscribe and … I just want a list of books I can search and add to with a few mouse clicks, preferably without having to show the whole world.

For now, I’ve settled on … a text file.

But since I’m a developer at heart, I had to turn it into a structured YAML file so I could use it as a data source for Hugo to make a blog page (I sampled a bunch of books this week already). But still, it’s just a text file right now. Two of them, actually.

Phase One

I’ve broken the new process down into three phases, which basically involves maintaining three lists, and the moving of books from one to the next.

The first step in the process is to “sample” a book from the big list of book recommendations (I call this list my “recommendation inbox”). This is the main part that I want to get better and faster at.

The thing I need to do better is make time to actually read the samples. It’s a bit of a chore, to be honest, like homework, because I know I’m probably not going to be that interested in at least 75% of them. I’m going to have to set aside time every week or month to power through them, essentially doing the work of an editor’s assistant going through a slush pile, which is normally a paid position, but here we are.

Phase Two

Once a sample is completed, I’ll move the book to the second list, which I’m giving the catchy title of “sample results.” I’ll write down a few sentences summarizing what I read, then give it a stamp of “interested” or “not interested.” If I’m interested, then, when it comes time to find a book to read, I’ll know to go out and buy that one (or, if I’m honest, more likely the audiobook).

That’s where things get dicey though, because it’s really time-consuming to read or listen to books, and there’s only a finite amount of hours in each of my days I can dedicate to hobbies. I have to divide that time between gaming, and blogging, and reading, and listening, and watching a movie or television, and whatever else I happen to want to do, which is unfortunately a list of interests that is often too large to handle effectively without strict scheduling, something I don’t particularly enjoy doing and rarely stick to.

But going through and codifying samples will at least put me one tiny step closer to the goal of reading more stuff. Or, at the very least, being aware of more stuff.

Phase Three

After I finish a book, assuming I find things I’m interested in, then it gets moved to the third list, which is the “I’m done with it forever” list.

You might imagine this would imply that I’d be finished reading the book, but that’s only if the book is really engaging, because I’m not going to hang around with a book if I’ve lost interest in it. These days, there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll give up on a book before I even reach the middle, based on past history.

The third list would note those findings, and why I gave up. If I actually finish the book, a more ambitious person might write a review, but I’m not a book blogger and I don’t write reviews. I only write down what I think sometimes. (Actually I have written down thoughts for most of the books I’ve read since 2010, at least up through 2018, when I suddenly stopped.)

So that’s the plan.

Image: Those are some of the last physical books I bought in this lifetime, probably prior to 2010 (the only ones in the house that aren’t in a box somewhere). A Memory of Light might have been the last physical book I bought.

* The last (complete) audiobook I listened to was Master of Formalities by Scott Meyer, back in October 2021, which was amusing. Before that, it was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in September 2021, which was good (especially in audiobook format), with caveats. Before that it was The Outsider by Stephen King, back in 2020, which was also good in the standard Stephen King way (which means I enjoyed it at the time but I don’t remember a thing about it now), and also because Will Patton is an amazing reader. That doesn’t count audiobooks I listened to for 5 or 10 minutes before giving up on them. I should add those to my lists.

Observing The NFT Wars

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 13:11:50 -0500

The first post of the year is about … sigh … NFTs.

I have no interest in NFTs* or the outrage surrounding them, but I feel like I need to write a post about NFTs anyway. Everyone else is talking about it**, and it’s a rare blog topic I haven’t written about. But I’m approaching it like a homework assignment.

It all started barely a month ago with the Ubisoft Quartz trailer. Has it only been a month? It seems like we’ve been talking about NFTs in gaming for years, but that trailer is indeed dated December 7th.

Come to think of it, NFTs were a hot topic all last year, but it was mainly in the context of the art world.

But now, as we begin 2022, Square Enix’s president launched another firebombing campaign on this Dresden of discussions by declaring they want to make blockchain-based “play to earn” games.

That’s what really pushed me over the edge into investing effort into a blog post.

Ugh I'm going to have to write a blog post about NFTs aren't I
— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) January 2, 2022

That, and … well, it might be hyperbole to say that the gaming community is getting hysterical about this, but that’s how it looks to me.

Personally, I’m against hysteria. I’m planting my flag on the side of non-hysteria.

My general feeling on NFTs, as of this moment, goes something like this: a) I don’t really care, because I won’t be buying any NFTs (except maybe for educational purposes), b) I don’t really care if other people waste their money on NFTs, c) I know one artist who wants the money that NFTs might bring to their career in the gaming industry, so I hope it works out for them, and d) I can’t discern how NFTs might significantly change the existing direction of gaming in any way. NFTs strike me as the next logical evolution of a factory entertainment industry that has been becoming bigger and more corporate and more dependent on revenue for decades.

Why So Serious?

Just to be clear, I don’t want NFTs in my games. I recommend everyone avoid NFTs, the same way I would recommend avoiding risky behavior like, you know, hitting yourself in the eyeball with a hammer.

I should also mention that I don’t want cosmetic cash shops in my games. I don’t want to log in and see a gigantic splash screen of extra skins and emotes I should buy with gems and bits and bobs, while the “play game” button remains a teeny tiny afterthought down in a hidden corner. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

I’m not an expert in NFTs, but based on what I’ve read so far, when you put it in terms of its impact on gameplay functionality, I don’t see much difference between the introduction of NFTs and the introduction of cash shops, so I’m struggling to understand why everyone around me is suddenly alarmed about something that I perceived to have happened a long time ago.

Maybe the thinking is that we didn’t push back enough against cash shops, so now we really need to push back against NFTs? I guess that makes sense, but it seems overly optimistic.

A Rapidly-Evolving Conversation

One of the reasons I don’t particularly want to get involved in this NFT discussion is that it’s evolving so rapidly that I can barely keep up with what anyone is talking about anymore.

We were talking about NFTs and Ubisoft Quartz. But now, thanks to Square Enix, we’re suddenly debating the relative merits of “Play to Earn,” which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet.

It’s supposed to be the same discussion, but on the surface, those two subjects don’t sound remotely related (to me). One, I think, is about collecting collectibles, the other is about selling player-created content. But they’re both tangentially related to “blockchains,” the foundational technology around which all of this crypto and NFT hubbub revolves.

I take this rapid conversational movement as a sign that the discussion has already devolved to the point of conflating disparate topics together into one mass glob of emotional outrage with the trigger word “NFT” attached to it. It’s already become too much work for me to try to separate it all out into individual topics to analyze.

More importantly, it’s become too much work to try to convince anyone else that it’s more complicated than just “yes to NFTs” or “no to NFTs.” As of now I view “NFTs” as a very big topic composed of a lot of smaller sub-topics that I may or may not have differing opinions about. Same as pretty much every other societal issue in the entire world.

Pulling the Ripcord

I had thought to go on into a deeper discussion of my research into the pros and cons of NFTs and blockchains in a neutral and informative manner, but it’s been several days now and I kind of don’t care anymore. Everybody’s just going to fight about it and yell past each other anyway, so why bother? :)

My basic point at the end of it all is something like: NFTs aren’t great, but I’m not yet convinced it deserves the level of righteous fury on display lately. Just … don’t buy them. But if you do buy them, congratulations, you’re probably more affluent than the majority of the planet. You should be proud.

* Normally I would write something like “NFT (Non-Fungible Token)” but the words “non-fungible token” don’t add any additional meaning to the letters “NFT.”

** I couldn’t find another link for “it.”

Image: Sugar cane fields in El Salvador. It might have made more sense if I hadn’t deleted some two thousand words from this, the fourth major revision of the post.

Wheel of Time - S1E8: The Eye of the World

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:32:08 -0500

The final episode of the first season ends with a bang.

Summary

Rand and Morraine traverse The Blight to reach The Eye of the World while Lan tries to follow. Rand fights/talks to The Dark One, while the army of Fal Dara fights off a Trolloc invasion. Nynaeve and Egwene nearly burn themselves up channeling in the battle. Padan Fain re-appears and steals a Horn, and Perrin … just kind of stands around watching.

Reactions

A good episode to end the season, if not great. I think the show peaked in episode four.

I really enjoyed the scenes with the brother and sister rulers in Fal Dara and all they did to try to save their city and people. I don’t remember their names. It was Lord Agelmar Jagad and Lady Amalisa Jagad.

I mentioned last time they hadn’t done a very good job of setting the stakes for this last episode, but the scenes with Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa, and the sacrifices they were willing to make to defend their city, served that purpose fairly well. I would have liked to see more of that leading up to this episode.

Rand’s “battle” with The Dark One was fairly anti-climactic. The Dark One doesn’t seem that bad to me. He seems perfectly reasonable. He just wants what’s best for Rand. Why all the fuss? :)

Loiel dead?!? Gasp!

Morraine can’t channel?!? Gasp!

To wrap up my thoughts on the entire first season, I still wouldn’t call it anything more than “good enough,” but it was entertaining to me personally. But I imagine that’s mainly because I read all the books and I could fill in all the blanks. I have a hard time imagining someone who didn’t read the books would enjoy it as much.

The show suffered a bit–as almost all streaming shows suffer from now–from a lack of continuity and cohesiveness from episode to episode. Presumably in order to shove these shows out the door as fast and cheap as possible, they tend to rotate directors and writers every episode or two, and they all have different ideas of what to focus on.

So we end up with an entire episode on Aes Sedai politics, which was good as a stand-alone episode, but it didn’t exactly fit with the season as a whole, which was supposed to be about which of the Two Rivers Kids was The Dragon Reborn. And we get a whole episode dealing with the bond between an Aes Sedai and her Warder, which was a good episode, but it seemed like it might have fit better in a season 2 or 3 or 4. And we get a cool prologue of an Aiel fight sequence, which was very cool, but again, it only barely related to the overall season arc.

It was like nobody was in charge of making sure the episodes fit together, and all the different writers and directors were left to their own devices.

Hopefully, if the show becomes a hit, they can tighten all that up going forward.

Best Scene

For me, probably the scene with Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa in that room with the armor. I’m not sure what it says about the series when the best scenes so far have been the ones that didn’t involve the regular characters or storyline.

I thought the channelers blasting the heck out of those Trollocs was pretty cool. That’s the kind of magic I like to see in fantasy: The kind that levels armies. The wild magic of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

I liked most all of the scenes surrounding the battle of Fal Dara, though they suffered a bit from lack of budget or time or something in the area of Trolloc-rendering. I liked those parts a lot better than Rand dealing with The Dark One, which seemed a bit anticlimactic.

Best Line

Loiel: “I’m standing…” In response to Perrin asking, “How can we just sit here while everyone else is fighting?”

Characters

Morraine. Largely a passive observer in this particular episode, unfortunately. Somehow she looks different in each episode to me. Maybe it’s because they keep changing her hair style from show to show. Perhaps that’s the only way they can show the “ageless” look of Aes Sedai. Overall in the first season, she’s definitely been the standout character in the show, the anchor that’s holding everything together.

Lan. Lan spent the whole episode sidelined in The Blight, not being a factor, for a change. Overall I liked his character a lot in the first season, something I wasn’t expecting. He’s also an anchor of the series, and they need to keep putting him in as many scenes as they can.

Rand. Well, he’s come a long way since that first episode as a character. He’s almost tolerable now. Almost. This is the point in the books, though, when he really became obstinately insufferable, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes in the series. The whole “tell them I’m dead, I’m going on a sabbatical” thing doesn’t bode well.

Mat. MIA. Don’t miss him, to be honest. His character hasn’t developed much. Perhaps that’s why the actor left.

Perrin. Still not doing much. They haven’t explored Perrin’s character much yet so it’s hard to have much of an opinion on where they’re going with him. He had the “inciting incident(s)” in his character arc and … that’s it so far. Otherwise he stands in the corner brooding.

Egwene. Like Perrin, I don’t know what to make of her character yet, because they haven’t explored it much. Each character gets so little screen time because of the sprawling nature of the material that it’s hard to get to know any of them, and they seem content to leave them languishing. I can’t think of any significant ways that Egwene has changed over the course of the series so far. I’m not even sure she’s had an “inciting incident” for her character yet.

Nynaeve. So she died and then … got better? I didn’t understand what happened there at the end. Did Egwene heal her? It looked like hand-waving plot magic to me. Anyway, Nynaeve definitely got most of the character development in the first season. She’s the only Two Rivers Kid so far that’s made a real impact on the show.

Thom Merrilin. MIA. I’m starting to think he isn’t coming back in this first season. He’s probably destined for “occasional guest star” status.

Loiel the Ogier. KIA. Didn’t see that coming. I didn’t like him much anyway, but now I might miss him if he’s gone. :) But I fully expect them to hand-wave him back to life in the next season if he was a popular character. They seem to be demonstrating a willingness to use plot magic whenever necessary (something that was meticulously avoided in the books, I might add).

Padan Fain. Chief exposition deliverer in this episode, while Perrin just stood there sheepishly listening. Are they setting him up as a long-term villain?

Book Spoilers

They’ve alluded to the “past is the future” a few times in the series so far. We saw skyscrapers covered with vines. And now we’ve seen a futuristic city with flying cars from “3000 years ago.” I vaguely remember that from the books, but it was only barely mentioned here and there. (Somewhat like the Shannara books.)

I’ve finished the audiobook of The Eye of the World, so I have the full scoop on everything now.

I didn’t remember Rand and Morraine going to The Eye of The World alone at all, and in fact, they didn’t. Most everything that happened there at the end in the show was different in the book. Extremely different. The mysterious and mostly unexplained Green Man was there, along with a couple of Forsaken, and a big pool of saidin. Morraine battled it out with a Forsaken (largely off-screen). The Dark One wasn’t there. Lan got his butt kicked and Nynaeve did as well. Rand channeled and teleported to The Gap and defeated the Trolloc invasion by himself.

The scene with Rand and Egwene and the baby on the homestead seemed familiar to me somehow, but it wasn’t in the first book. Rand only ever talked to The Dark One in some dreams. (So many things in the show seem familiar, I think, because the books are so long and comprehensive that literally anything and everything happened in them at one time or another.)

I thought that a significant part of the last episode’s events back in Fal Dara actually occurred in the second book. Padan Fain and The Horn of Valere, for example, and that big battle. (The Horn of Valere, incidentally, was discovered at The Eye of The World–it was the main thing they brought back.) (Padan Fain, also incidentally, was a gibbering wreck of a Gollum character at the end of the first book, nothing at all like we saw in the show.)

At least, I didn’t remember any battles at the end of the first book. But there were a ton of battles like that in the books, and it’s impossible to remember them all. It turns out there was a battle in The Gap at the end of the first book, but it was a background, offscreen, offhandedly-mentioned event, until Rand teleported into the middle of it and blew up all the Trollocs with the One Power.

Lord Agelmar was in the first book, but mostly as a background character, trying to convince Morraine to stay in Fal Dara and help fight Trollocs. I don’t think Lady Amalisa was mentioned at all in the first book (0 search results). Certainly not leading channelers in any battles. They must have heavily embellished that or lifted it from somewhere else in the series. (But I liked that they did. Otherwise the last episode would have been somewhat dull.)

Were they saying Morraine had been stilled by The Dark One there at the end?? That certainly didn’t happen in the first book. At least not that I remember. She fought a long painful battle with one of the Forsaken at The Eye of the World, but they left the impression she was fine afterward. Or she left that impression.

Then again, she’s a very mysterious character who hides a lot, so it’s entirely possible she didn’t channel any further after the first book and I just didn’t notice. (I honestly don’t remember Morraine having much of a central presence after the first book.) Or perhaps in the series, they’re planning to have her follow what was Siaun Sanche’s journey in the books, which would actually be quite a bit better for the longevity of her character.

And it looked like they were strongly implying there that Rand blasting The Dark One is what broke the seal on his prison and let him out. He definitely smirked before he disappeared. I don’t remember if that was the way of things in the books or not. I don’t think so, because Rand did all his channeling elsewhere, against Trollocs, not against The Dark One.

Was that even The Dark One in the show? Maybe it was one of the Forsaken? I don’t remember The Dark One being, you know, corporeal.

The end of the first book was quite confusing, to be honest. I remember thinking that the first time I read it, and it was no less confusing the second time in audiobook form.

Anyway, it looked like Min had gotten onto a caravan heading out of Fal Dara. It reminded me of the caravan that went into the Aiel Wastes in the fifth book. I think it was Min that went on that journey? I feel like Padan Fain might have been on that caravan too? Or a Forsaken in disguised perhaps? And Morraine and maybe Mat? I don’t remember. Like I’ve said before, everything in the books runs together and I have little sense of a distinct timeline in my memory.

That was the Seanchan rolling up on the Western shore there at the end, one of the many interesting but ultimately unrelated storylines that tended to derail the books for quite some lengthy amounts of time. I don’t remember them arriving in the second book, but I might be wrong. Who can remember? I do remember some fairly iffy cultural subjects around those people that I’ll be interested to see how they handle in the television show.

Thom Merrilin never came back, much to my surprise. It turns out he didn’t return in the first book either. But Morraine did mention once in The Ways that she thought he was still alive.

I started the second audiobook, which, for the record, begins with a prologue of “Bors” at a meeting of Darkfriends. Then Rand sneaks out of Fal Dara just as the Amyrlin Seat, Siuan Sanche, arrives (I will never be able to spell “Amyrlin” or “Siuan” correctly on the first try, ever). No Seachchan so far.

Advent of Code 2021, The Dark Side

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 09:03:49 -0500

I got something out of Advent of Code 2021, but I didn’t like how it affected me.

I finished Advent of Code 2021 with 43 out of the 50 stars. (The last one you get automatically for getting to 49.) The highest ranking I achieved was 7372, on Day 25, presumably because everyone else was busy with Christmas presents (it seemed like an easy one everyone else would get in mere seconds).

The final tally of my programmer self-worth.

The only person I know of who actually completed it was Tipa over at Chasing Dings, so a hearty congratulations to her! It was an ordeal, the programming equivalent of a Boston marathon.

I don’t necessarily regret taking part in it, but I learned some life lessons.

A long time ago, when I started writing code on a middle school Apple IIe and then at home on a TRS-80 Color Computer, I believed I was good at it. Nobody else in my immediate circles knew a thing about computers. I took to it like a duck out of water, or whatever the saying is.

I took a handful of classes, but they were mostly a waste of time, because I already knew more than the teachers did. Most of my formative programming philosophy and knowledge of data structures came from perusing the Amiga developer handbooks and studying the work of the original Amiga engineers, not from schools.

The point is, I developed a fairly big programming ego. Back then, “rock star” programmers and the associated cults of personality were common. I was sure I was better than other programmers, so I was sure I was a “rock star.” Faster, smarter, more productive, more elegant, etc. It was easy to develop such a competitive attitude, because I almost never encountered other programmers in real life.

“The three principle virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.” -Perl manual

When I first saw that Perl mantra, I nodded immediate agreement. Exactly so. My entire programming life philosophy to that point boiled down to one concise sentence. The late 80s and early 90s programmer in a nutshell.

After all these decades of life experience and access to the Internet, though, I got over all that and embraced the philosophy that no matter how good you are, somebody else is better. There’s always room to learn new things. In fact, it’s imperative to continue learning new things in the software field. Software development (and life in general) has grown into such a broad field that it’s impossible to know everything. You can know a lot about a few things, or a little bit about a lot of things, but you can never know a lot about a lot of things. And most things you won’t know anything about.

But sometimes I still fall back into that old place of hubris. To think, “Yeah, I’m really good at this. Better than most people, actually. I’m definitely one of those mythical 10x programmers we’re not supposed to acknowledge.” Sometimes it takes intentional effort to avoid that mindset.

It’s a competitive mindset. Competitiveness can be useful in software development: Say, in startups and entrepreneurially-minded ventures, where the goal is to be first to market. I imagine it would be useful in game development, the development environment I would definitely categorize as the most toxic of all development environments. But in general, competitiveness isn’t much use in day-to-day development work. In fact, it’s usually a hindrance. It’s best to put it aside.

So along comes Advent of Code 2021.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” -Some Godfather Movie

It didn’t take long for me to fall right back into that competitive programming hubris mentality, because Advent of Code is designed to push you there. There’s a timer. There’s a ranking. There’s a gold star for winning. Two gold stars if you’re really good. There’s a leaderboard and, perhaps most importantly of all, there’s bragging rights at stake.

There’s a whole community of people on Reddit who can’t wait to show you how fast they solved each day’s puzzles, and generate a nifty visualization, and write a lengthy explanatory blog post, and commit clean, well-documented code on GitHub, and pretend it’s normal to do all of those things in a single day. And it’s a heavily-sponsored event. It’s the ultimate hubris-building machine.

I felt driven to finish each day’s puzzle. Like it was important to show that I belong in this bubble, like I was a teenager again, when nobody else even understood what I was even doing typing on a computer keyboard. It was important to be able to say I was in the top 10,000 best of the best in the entire world who could turn in an answer to these puzzles in less than 24 hours.

It started to get bad with Day 12, “Passage Pathing." I hate pathing problems. They almost never occur in real-life day-to-day programming tasks. Nobody ever needs to know a Dijkstra “shortest path” algorithm by heart outside of a coding interview or a classroom. All you need to know is how to type “shortest path” into Google, and how to use one of the bazillion open source libraries or language features that have already been written to do that. But you probably won’t even need to do that if you aren’t in game development (or network infrastructure, I learned).

It got worse with Day 15, “Chiton." Another pathing problem. For that one, I really did have to Google and implement the Dijkstra algorithm to solve it–for the first time in my entire life–because the algorithm I worked out on my own and spent most of the day optimizing for part 2 was never going to finish in time.

It officially got out of control with Day 19, the infamous Beacon Scanner puzzle.

I got up early on a Sunday expecting to knock it out early and have a free day, but in fact, I spent all day off and on working on that. And I kept working on it far beyond the point where I was making any reasonable progress, which is a sure sign to put a project away and come back to it later. It’s a waste of time and energy to work on any software project if you’re not mentally fresh. I always complete tasks faster when I work on them in smaller increments over a longer period of time, than I do working on them continuously until they’re done. At my advanced age, I can’t reasonably focus on a single programming task for more than a few hours a day. But I kept drilling away at that stupid Beacon Scanner, because I had to get those stars and the timer was ticking. I would be a shameful failure in the eyes of the world if I didn’t get it in time. I spent most of that day being angry at myself.

I also fell back into an old bad habit from my younger days of forgetting to eat. I’d suddenly feel like I was going to faint and notice I was ravenously hungry and realize it was some two or three hours past time when I should have eaten something. That’s a terrible habit of mine that I don’t often return to anymore, but it still happens sometimes when I’m deep into programming (or writing). It happened on Day 19. Twice.

And the Beacon Scanner was mainly a math problem, too. It wasn’t much of a programming problem at all, it was a math problem. I hate math. I’ve always hated having to solve math problems in programming. Some people mistakenly assume you have to be good at math to be a programmer, but that’s 100% false. I’m terrible at math. I can’t do simple math without a calculator. (I’m not quite as bad as all the younger people on those D&D shows who can’t add up 6-sided dice without using their fingers and try to laugh it off as if it doesn’t exemplify how far behind the American education system is on the world stage, but I’m pretty close.)

I had to walk away from Day 19 unfinished. It was hard. It was really hard. I was very angry at myself and the world and had some trouble getting to sleep that night.

It remains unfinished to this day, and it still annoys me. There’s either a persistent bug in my code somewhere or I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the puzzle. (I didn’t think that one was explained or demonstrated particularly well, leaving me with a considerable amount of confusion, possibly related to my lack of general 3D math skills.)

Not to mention how much I hurt my back sitting over a laptop all day. I was in a fair amount of pain last Sunday night and Monday, and my back still hasn’t fully recovered yet, a week later.

After Day 19, I resolved to try to walk away from the puzzles the moment I felt like I wasn’t making progress. I didn’t quite manage that, but I did walk away from several others soon enough to keep my back from getting worse and leave some time in my evenings to do other things, so I’m fairly pleased with myself for that.

The point is that I didn’t like that feeling of competitiveness that infected my programming workflow like a cancerous growth, a workflow which is essentially an artistic workflow. It’s bad for me, so in the future I’m going to have to be more careful about these kinds of programming challenges.

I’ve developed the same sort of feelings about NaNoWriMo, actually, and any sort of “writing challenge,” so I tend to distance myself from them now. Whenever you add an implied competitiveness to an artistic process, I have to be really careful to ensure it’s a positive experience for me instead of a negative one. Being “unsuccessful” at an artistic challenge can do a lot of damage to my fragile artist ego, so I have to define the parameters of the challenge for myself in such a way that I will always be successful, no matter what.

Regardless of all that negativity, I got a lot of value out of Advent of Code in that I wrote most of the puzzles in Kotlin, a language that is brand new to me. And when I focused on learning Kotlin, it was an enjoyable process. (I mean except when Kotlin is weird an unintuitive, like the most basic of for loops.)

Some of the puzzles were enjoyable, too, they weren’t all math problems. (See my other post.) If every day had been a different packet decoder, for example, that would have been right in my wheelhouse.

I’d still like to go back and finish up the puzzles I walked away from, if for no other reason than to cleanup my GitHub repo for the future. (Actually I’m going to redo it completely.) I’m hopeful I’ll keep my current job until I retire, but you never know when you might need some sample code to show a potential interviewer.

But in the future, I might wait until the actual event is over to start working on the puzzles. Or else aggressively mute everything related to the event so I don’t get dragged back into that black hole of competitiveness.

I’m also interested in going back to work on previous years for more and different language practice (eg. I’m curious what visualizations I might be able to make with Kotlin compiled to TypeScript/React), and I imagine it’ll be much more enjoyable without all the competitive time pressure. (I mean, as much fun as programming for fun can be, that is. There’s a limit.)

Incidentally, I blew away my previous working GitHub repo. I’m going to make a new one now that I know more about Kotlin project structure. (Also because I read somewhere that you weren’t supposed to commit the puzzle inputs. Oops.)

P.S. Kotlin is interesting but I’m not sure it’s ready for prime-time yet. There’s, um, no namespaces. Yeah, you heard me right. No namespaces! And–shockingly–there’s no number formatting in string templates!

Wheel of Time - S1E7: The Dark Within The Ways

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 19:39:46 -0500

The Ways and Fal Dara and The Warder and The Wisdom.

I went to re-watch episode 7 on Thursday night so I could throw together this post, and it turned out that episode 8 was already available. So I watched that instead. Which means this post is a bit delayed, and I’m trying to put episode 8 out of my mind as I finish up this post.

Summary

Mat is gone. The Fellowship travels through The Ways and arrives in the border city of Fal Dara. Min tells the future. The kids turn on each other, but it all works out. Nynaeve professes her love for Lan, but it can never be! Rand suddenly realizes he’s The Dragon Reborn and leaves with Morraine. They’re heading for The Blight to face The Dark One alone at The Eye of The World.

Reactions

Overall it was another mediocre “good enough” episode. Good character development in this one.

Very cool prologue scene, but again, it doesn’t seem related to the events in the series. Scenes like that make me wonder if they’ve mapped out a finite number of seasons, say five, in which to hit all the story points in the books, expecting to make all five of those seasons. But it seems like they might want to spend more time on the more immediate story matters, rather than setting up these lavish scenes just for a minor callback.

This wasn’t a good episode to watch in the daytime, if your television is prone to glares, like mine is. (It was dark in The Ways.)

Well, the other shoe dropped and the whole “who’s the Dragon?” thing went out the window in mere seconds. At least we don’t have to worry about deviating significantly from the books anymore. It was all, it turned out, a feint.

It wasn’t clear to me why the Two Rivers kids were suddenly turning on each other. They didn’t precisely say it was a hangover from The Ways but that was my assumption.

I don’t think they’ve done a very good job of setting the stakes for the confrontation with The Dark One. They keep saying The Dark One is Super Duper Evil and it has to be stopped or everybody’s going to suffer and die, but they haven’t shown very much Super Duper Evil. So I don’t feel any tension building toward the last episode.

I wish they’d spent more time with the Two Rivers kids before this seventh episode, when they suddenly seemed to spend a lot of time with them.

Best Scene

Nothing specific, but I tend to like the slower character-development scenes. The Two Rivers gang turning on each other was a fairly tense scene, and the aftermath of that.

Best Line

Nothing really jumped out at me. ~~That one from Lan was directly from the book: “I’ll hate the man that marries you,” etc. etc.~~ That was in episode 8, nevermind.

Characters

Morraine. I really like how devious Morraine is. She’s sort of the anti-Gandalf.

Lan. One of the strongest characters in the series. Possibly even stronger than Morraine. I was surprised they spent so much time on him and Nynaeve.

Rand. This was the most Rand-focused episode I can remember since the first couple. Not a welcome addition. But he was tolerable I suppose. I have no earthly idea why he suddenly realized he was The Dragon Reborn. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

Mat. And he’s outta there. I wonder why?

Perrin. Not much of a factor, yet again.

Egwene. Seems to be the moral compass of the group. The one who “does what’s right.”

Nynaeve. The love that can never be! It was a big deal in the books.

Thom Merrilin. I mean, he’s going to be back, right?

Loiel the Ogier. Yeah, he was there some more, doing his schtick.

Padan Fain. Remember him?

Book Spoilers

Min sighting!! Yay. She was one of my favorites from the books. At least, I think she was. The hundreds of book characters run together, to be honest. That scene with Rand and Min happened in a different city in the book, much earlier in the journey. I think it was Baerlon.

I recognized that prologue scene from the books. I don’t remember which book it was in, though. And I don’t remember it taking place on Dragonmount. And I don’t remember any of the details. I just remember an Aiel Spearmaiden fighting in the snow. Spearmaiden? Is that what they were called? I can’t remember. Something like that. I seem to recall we didn’t actually see them until the fifth book.

Somewhere in the first book, I believe they said Tam al’Thor returned to Two Rivers with “an outlander woman” and a baby. So, slightly different.

Nynaeve’s channeling way more in the series so far than she did in the first book. She didn’t channel at all in the book up to this point in the story, unless you count “listening to the wind.”

I thought they had come out of The Ways into the Aiel Wastes at first, skipping right to Book Five. I didn’t remember them stopping in ~~Fal Moran~~ Fal Dara at all. I only remember it as the starting point of the second book.

I thought that might have been Mat following them through The Ways, but from the book I learned it was Padan Fain.

Speaking of Mat, he didn’t leave in the book. But, as I recall, they all split up in the second and subsequent books, so he might as well head off on his own now. I wonder why they did it though? I know they’ve re-cast the character for the second season, so I wonder if they wrote him out because the actor didn’t want to finish it.

I thought they were rushing ahead with Nynaeve and Lan, but it turns out she did confess her love for him in the first book. They didn’t, ah, you know, spend the night together or anything, though. The books are extremely G-rated. I mean, except for all the graphic violence.

Wheel of Time - S1E6: The Flame of Tar Valon

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 18:08:39 -0500

An episode full of Aes Sedai politics.

Well I didn’t think I was finished writing this but it’s almost time for next week’s episode so I better post this anyway.

Summary

I wondered if they were going to go into Aes Sedai politics, and sure enough, they did. For an episode, at least.

The Amyrlin Seat, Siuan Sanche, returns and metes out justice upon Liandrin for gentling Logain without a trial, and Morraine for … wait, why again? I think for refusing to answer some questions. Morraine got the far harsher punishment.

But in a shocking twist, it turns out Siuan and Morraine are working together behind the scenes. And by “working together” I mean conspiratorially and also romantically. But it doesn’t matter because Morraine is still exiled from the Tower.

So Morraine gets back together with The Band From Two Rivers and heads for The Ways, secret passages that will take them straight to a confrontation with The Dark One. She convinced the Two Rivers kids that they have to fight The Dark One now while he’s weak, even though most of them will probably die. For some reason, they all said sure.

But just before The Ways closes up, Mat mysteriously decides to stay behind.

Reactions

Another fairly slow-paced episode. Not much to talk about without going into book spoilers, for reasons that should be obvious to book readers.

The first prologue scene was pretty good but it seemed like unnecessary character development at this point in the show. Especially for a character who is presumably only going to be in just this one episode. You’d think maybe they would spend more time developing the main cast?

I’m surprised they’ve spent so much time on Logain’s story in this first season. It can only be to setup something for later, which seems like quite a gamble. But they’re already working on a second season, so I guess it worked out.

The White Tower feels very empty in the show. I mean physically: It doesn’t look like anyone lives there. The halls are empty, the rooms are empty. It’s just the handful of characters we’ve seen. Similar to Star Trek, where the Enterprise is basically empty except the main cast.

What happened to the dagger? Did they just leave it on the floor under a towel?

As a side note, I have no sense whatsoever whether this show is doing well or not. I don’t see many people talking about it, and it’s somewhat far down the list of shows that Amazon Prime recommends to me. But apparently they’re already filming a second season, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

Best Scene

Nothing really stood out to me, so I guess Morraine’s exile. Again, there’s a lot of subtext that isn’t necessarily obvious on first viewing. All the sisters turning their backs on the exiled one is a powerful visual metaphor.

Best Line

I didn’t make a note of any and I don’t remember any at the time of this writing. Oh, I remember one now.

Lan: “Nice to see you too,” or something like that.

Characters

Morraine. She really doesn’t have much of a moral compass when it comes to putting kids in danger. By which I mean she doesn’t seem to mind dragging all the Two Rivers kids to their certain doom she can get want she wants (ie. defeating The Dark One). I like how ambiguously Machiavellian she is.

Lan. Wasn’t in this episode much.

Rand. I almost never register this character’s existence. I think he drew a sword on Lan, which was quite silly.

Mat. Yay, the evil dagger is gone. But wait, why isn’t he going into The Ways? Maybe he’s going back to find that doll he dropped.

Perrin. Did he have any lines this week? I only remember him lying on a bed.

Egwene. Not much development. Shouldn’t they have turned her into a Novice at the Tower?

Nynaeve. Other than some sassy conversations with Aes Sedia, I don’t remember her doing much in this episode either.

Thom Merrilin. I mean seriously, where is he?

Liandrin Sedai. They’ve definitely set her up as the main villain of the show, among the Aes Sedai, at least. The actual villain, The Dark One, has been a bit of a No Show in the series.

Loiel the Ogier. I think I spelled his name wrong last time. Or maybe this time. I just see a guy in a lot of creature makeup when I look at him, like a Klingon, who can’t turn his head. Not really invested in him as a character at all.

The Amyrlin Seat, Siaun Sanche. Did pretty well, I thought. Once again I have to say that the supporting actors are considerably more interesting than any of the Two Rivers folks.

Book Spoilers

So yeah, none of that happened in the book. At least not in the first book. In my re-read, they have just entered The Ways, which is very late in the book. And they went there from Caemlyn. So they never passed through Tar Valon at all in the first book. That’s why there’s not much to talk about except book spoilers. :)

I thought that Elayne joined The Band of Merry Two Rivers Folk in Caemlyn, but it turns out she didn’t. She must have become a major character some time later, probably in whichever book the girls became Novices at the Tower. (I don’t remember when that was.)

It would have been extremely weird for a couple of channelers (Egwene and Nynaeve) to wander in and out of Tar Valon without being compelled into Novice service like they did in the show. The Aes Sedai are very possessive of young channelers.

I have an extremely vague memory of Morraine and Siaun Sanche conspiring together, but I feel like we only learned that in flashbacks many, many books later. Like four or five or six or seven or a million books later.

I also have vague memories of someone being exiled from the Tower with an Oath Rod, but I don’t remember it being Morraine. It could have been her, or it could have been Siaun Sanche herself. The Amyrlin has a rough road ahead of her if they follow the books. Lots and lots of turmoil at the White Tower is coming up–like fourteen books worth. There was so much Aes Sedai politics over the course of those books that it’s impossible to remember all the nuances. It all runs together in my head.

I didn’t think Loiel went with them into The Ways, but it turns out he did. (In the book, they took their horses with them. They didn’t just leave them wandering around in a field to die like they did in the show.)

I don’t remember much of anything that happened in the first book in and after The Ways. I remember the end of that first book feeling extremely rushed and hard to follow in comparison to what came before. To this day I still have no idea who or what “The Green Man” is, a thing that seemed to appear out of nowhere late in the first book and then disappeared forever.

Advent of Code 2021

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:52:59 -0500

I’m working on this year’s Advent of Code programming puzzles, something that’s new to me.

I saw Tipa and a handful of others talking on Twitter about Advent of Code at the start of December. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it’s apparently been a yearly thing for a while now. I thought it was silly at first, but I got tired of seeing everyone else talk about it without me.

Throughout December, every day at midnight (my time, unfortunately), a new programming puzzle is revealed, and you get a gold star for submitting the correct answer. Each puzzle has two parts, so you actually get two gold stars for getting both parts correct.

I’m a programmer by trade (well, a software engineer), so you’d think programming puzzles would be right up my alley. Unfortunately I don’t particularly enjoy programming “for fun.” I usually need a practical or pragmatic reason to write code. Especially code that doesn’t have any particular use in daily life. Like programming puzzles.

But in this case, I can use it as an excuse to learn some Kotlin fundamentals. These sorts of programming puzzles are good exercise for brushing up on basic language skills.

I’ve been told that Kotlin is the wave of the future, or something like that, so I’m checking it out. It’s an object-oriented language that compiles down to Java JVM, Javascript, or (allegedly) native code. It’s the primary language used for Android development, supposedly, if you’re into that sort of thing. The point is it can run in a lot of places, and it’s a new thing if you don’t like the old thing. Personally I’m curious what it can do to abstract Javascript out of my life forever.

Anyway, the Advent of Code puzzles are typical of what you might see on a coding interview, so they’re useful to work through in that regard, too. It’s not a bad idea for one’s software development career to periodically work through those sorts of problems.

The problem statements in Advent of Code are considerably more verbose and detailed than you usually see, and you’re only judged on getting the right answer. There aren’t any time or memory constraints, so you can usually brute force your way through them. (Except in some cases where computing the answer might literally run you out of memory.) Unfortunately for me, I’m fast asleep at midnight every day, so I’ll never be able to rank very high, and I’ll never be one of the cool kids.

Anyway, I didn’t start solving the problems until Day 6, but I went back and solved all the ones back to the beginning to get all the stars. It’s important to get all the stars if you want to be taken seriously in this biz. I think.

I initially wrote the first seven solutions with Golang, which is what I use at work, but I decided to switch to Kotlin on the eighth day.

My solutions ~~are on GitHub~~. [Update: I deleted that repo to make a better one.] There is room for improvement on many of them, but since these are one-and-done programs, and unlikely to form the basis of any real world software solutions, there’s not much reason to clean them up until the next time I’m looking for a job.

Puzzle Commentary

Day 1. Sonar Sweep. I solved this with both Golang and Kotlin. Technically this was the first code I ever wrote with Kotlin. The only trick on this one is handling boundaries.

Day 2. Dive! Straightforward. Just parsing input and adding numbers according to the given rules.

Day 3. Binary Diagnostic. I had to do this one twice because I accidentally deleted the first one. The first part was fairly straightforward, but the second part ended up fairly ugly on the first pass.

Day 4. Giant Squid. Bingo-playing squids. I ended up with a lot of supporting functions, but the main loop was pretty small.

Day 5. Hydrothermal Venture. Plotting simple lines on a grid. I used an interface and three types of lines. It turned out to be overkill and could have been simplified. This is one where the second part of the problem renders the first part of your solution somewhat obsolete.

Day 6. Lanternfish. This was the first one I attempted on the day, having become sufficiently jealous about everyone else bragging about earning gold stars without me. Unfortunately the second part showed me that brute force doesn’t always work in Advent of Code, as I ran out of memory modeling each individual fish like it was a video game. Later I went back and redid it from scratch in Kotlin using the 9 rotating states like I was supposed to, which I have to admit I saw online before I knew how to do it myself.

Day 7. The Treachery of Whales. I went with brute force again, rather than try anything fancy. Time is money! Basically just turned the problem explanation into code and out came the answer. This was the first day that I got both stars on the day, rather than backfilling the previous days.

Day 8. Seven Segment Search. This one was a bit of a chore, since it was the first one I tried with Kotlin. (All the previous ones I had solved with Golang.) In the end, I just used the easy-to-find “1” and “4” patterns to deduce the ambiguous digits.

Day 9. Smoke Basin. I recognized this as a flood fill algorithm right away. Fun fact: I first wrote a flood fill algorithm for Amiga image processing software somewhere around 1992.

Day 10. Syntax Scoring. This one was fairly easy for me because I had already done a very similar problem on Leetcode earlier this year and just repurposed it. I used an array and an index as a stack.

Day 11. Dumbo Octopus. I made a class to model the grid for this one. Another recursive traversal. Just for fun I used a one-dimensional array instead of a two-dimensional array, imagining that it was the 80s and every multiplication mattered. (It was a waste of time.)

Day 12. Passage Pathing. I hated this one with a burning passion. I don’t like graphs or pathing problems, and it took me a long time to work out the recursion. I initially went down the wrong road and tried to do it without maintaining a list of paths, which, well, didn’t work.

Day 13. Transparent Origami. Fairly straightforward. The only trick here is not to try to make a pixel grid, but rather just keep a list of points. (I mean, you probably could make a pixel grid, and it might work for this puzzle since it would only be 1000x1000 or so, but it would waste a lot of time and memory and it’s easier without it.)

Day 14. Extended Polymerization. Another annoying one where brute force on part 1 runs out of memory on part 2. The clue is in the offhand “polymer grows quickly” remark. I knew my first solution wasn’t going to work for part 2 but you’re scored on how fast you get an answer, not how elegant or efficient the code is. So I got the star for part 1 fairly quickly, then I had to rewrite it from scratch for part 2. I didn’t think a map of letter pairs would work so I went off on several false starts, but it turned out it worked fine in the end. Just for fun I re-wrote the solution in Golang, and it looked cleaner than Kotlin.

Day 15. Chiton. More disgusting pathing problems. I don’t know why these puzzle makers think “shortest path” solutions are general knowledge. Anyway I hated this one. Took basically all day. I knew right away that I didn’t know “the trick” to solving it, and my brute force floundering probably wouldn’t work within 24 hours. (Eventually I got a hint from a programmer friend, threw away the Kotlin code (which technically worked but didn’t scale), learned what a Dijkstra Algorithm was, and wrote one in Golang from the Wikipedia article. Even so, the second part still took a long time to compute, I had to run it on my gaming PC.) PS: It seemed rather unfair to require a very specific algorithm to solve this one.

Day 16. Packet Decoder. I braced myself for another monster, but this one was a fairly straightforward decoding of a binary stream, like the good old days. I made a serial binary reader class to simplify the parsing, the rest was typing out the complicated rules in code and debugging the problems as they occurred. And remembering yet again that Kotlin ints are 32-bit, not 64-bit. I went back and rewrote it in Golang, too.

Day 17. Trick Shot. I just fumbled around with a half-finished Trajectory class until I got the right answer. Didn’t even try to read the input from a file, I just hard-coded it and picked an arbitrary set of velocities to try. Luckily it was fairly easy to limit the number of possible [horizontal] trajectories so it didn’t scale way out of control like previous puzzles.

Day 18. Snailfish. It was a lazy, rainy Saturday and I was interrupted quite a bit during this one, so it took most of the day to complete it. Possibly the longest Kotlin code I’ve written to date. I recognized it as a binary tree problem right away, but I struggled to dredge up how they work out of my memory because nobody in real life actually works with binary trees. Eventually I looked up the “in-order binary tree traversal” algorithm I needed after going in circles with it for a while. In the end, I built a Number class that did all the work, and probably over-engineered it. Brute force for part 2.

Day 19. Beacon Scanner. (0/2) I got up early to work on this one. And was reminded immediately why I don’t don’t do math in programming. Let alone 3D math. I couldn’t even solve the first part of this one, even after looking up a number of clues, and wasted my entire Sunday being angry at myself. (The clues I received were: 1. How to manually make a list of the 24 possible rotations instead of trying to programmatically compute them. 2. Limit the possible point translations to a list of the differences between points instead of brute-forcing it.) On the second day, I threw away my Kotlin code and rewrote it from scratch in Golang. The main problem I’m running into over and over again is establishing a common frame of reference for beacons from different scanners, to determine which are duplicates.

Day 20. Trench Map. Yay, I don’t feel stupid anymore. A straightforward image processing convolution matrix, with a minor twist: Handling the infinite edges with enhancement[0] and enhancement[511]. I had plenty of time to go back and work on the Beacon Scanner again. Thank god there’s only ~~four~~ five more days of this nonsense.

Day 21. Dirac Dice. (1/2) Look, I’m a software engineer, not a mathematician. I have no idea how to solve part 2. None whatsoever. I wrote probably 10 different algorithms throughout the day, trying various ideas with recursion and optimization to get it to run on my weak little laptop. No luck.

Day 22. Reactor Reboot. Part 2 is another 3D math puzzle that boils down to: How well do you know the math and edge cases of intersecting cubes? And/or do you know a library to do it for you? I, it turns out, don’t know either, and can’t solve the problem. I’m 100% sure my algorithm will work at scale, I only need a working cube subdivision function, where the bulk of the work lies. ~~Three days left and I’m now short by a total of four stars.~~ Update: I got it! Rewrote my cube intersection function from scratch, accounted for all the bazillion edge cases, and it finally worked. Only short three stars.

Day 23. Amphipod. (1/2) Seriously? More graphs and pathing? Can we go back to decoding bitstreams? Anyway, after half a day of fussing with paths, I ended up doing the first part by hand. Part 2 is going to require programming, though, so I’m not getting that second star. Maybe there are game programmers out there jumping for joy at this Advent of Path Problems but I, for one, am back to being short four stars. Update: I did actually solve part 2 manually while watching Matrix Resurrection, but after three tries it wasn’t good enough to get the star. I’m sure I could find the right solution eventually, but it’s a pain to do in a text editor.

Day 24. Arithmetic Logic Unit. (0/2) Finally! Code that’s up my alley! An assembly language interpreter! I coded up the ALU in barely any time, it worked on the first try, and … then I read the fateful words “find the largest” and that’s when it turned into a reverse-engineering math problem. Ugh. Screw that. I gave up. I thought for sure I had the right last 10 digits and only had to brute force the first 4, but it didn’t work. I could have optimized my interpreter to get better at brute forcing the whole serial number, but it was obvious that’s not what they wanted us to do. Computer scientists and their b.s. math problems. Screw ‘em.

Day 25. Sea Cucumber. (1/2) I have to assume they put an easy one (for me, at least) at the end on purpose because it’s Christmas Day. But unfortunately I can’t get the second star until I get the six missing stars from previous days. Christmas is ruined and Santa is going to a die a slow horrible death at the bottom of the ocean because he can’t get his sleigh keys. You’re welcome.

So in the end, my favorite puzzles were Day 3 (Binary Diagnostic), Day 8 (Seven Segment Search), Day 13 (Transparent Origami), and Day 16 (Packet Decoder). My least favorites were all the ones that involved math and formulae and specific computer science 101 algorithms, which was most of the second half. I’m definitely not a computer scientist, I’m a software engineer. I use libraries when I need an algorithm, I don’t waste my time writing them unless I have to.

But it was worth the effort because it was a good crash course in learning Kotlin basics.

FFXIV - Shadowbringers 5.5/5, Death Unto Dawn

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 11:39:19 -0500

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.5 and 5.55 Content, Death Unto Dawn, which I finished more than two months ago at the time of this publication.

Oh hi. Remember when I was going to finish posting these before Endwalker? Well, it doesn’t matter, because nobody can play Endwalker anyway. Their entire antiquated server infrastructure imploded overnight. The only people playing are the ones who can log in at 6 AM and avoid idle timeouts all day. I imagine it’ll be at least a month before it settles down.

I myself have completed a whopping two quests in the Endwalker story so far (the “we’re on a boat” one and the “we’re touring a new city” one). It turns out I experienced a sufficient amount of Final Fantasy XIV with Shadowbringers a few months back, and don’t feel like playing, even if I could play. I can discern almost no changes in the game between Shadowbringers and Endwalker with the first two quests.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s the last Shadowbringers post.

5.5 Main Scenario Quest

Surprisingly short, there are only nine quests over the course of two patches. The fifth one sends you to a Trust dungeon and the last one is a Solo Duty.

The Scions are off to fight the Scary Dark Towers that have popped up all over the world. (You can actually see them all over the game world, which is pretty cool.)

Fordola’s back! One of my favorite character’s from Stormblood is sent off to see what’s going on at the Dark Towers, along with her pal Arenvald, one of the original Scions we met way back in the Waking Sands. They casually mention that the two of them have been going on adventures all this time, and annoyingly, don’t tell us anything further about that.

Then the Scions contact Hair Estinien to help fight Crazy Fandaniel’s Lunar Bahamut dragon primal. They decide to fight dragons with dragons, and free Tiamat, a big dragon that was imprisoned in Azys La for … reasons? I’d have to consult a wiki to remember that from Heavensward. It doesn’t really matter anyway.

Then Crazy Fandaniel’s dragon forces are spotted attacking the yellow fields of Paglth’an (a place I’ve never heard of before), and we rush there for a Trust dungeon, where we take down Lunar Bahamut with some hot dragon-on-dragon action.

If only every location was as colorful as Paglth’an, I might not complain so much about how dull the colors always are in Final Fantasy XIV.

Continuing in Patch 5.55, we’re saddened to see Arenvald was injured so much that he’s comatose. But we’re not saddened as much as Alphinaud, who for some reason is frantic with worry and somehow feels personally responsible. Fordola yells at Alphinaud to grow up and walks away. Fordola, the most awesome character in FFXIV, lives the fantasy we all wish we could: Yelling at Alphinaud.

There’s a shocking twist when Alisaie’s and Alphinaud’s much-talked-about-but-never-seen father arrives from Sharlayan and delivers a stern message of non-intervention in the war against Crazy Fandaniel, and gives the twins a cold shoulder. So daddy issues will surely be tackled in the Endwalker expansion, because everyone was clamoring for more backstory from Alphinaud and Alisaie.

Then there’s another shocking twist when we see Arenvald has recovered from his coma and lives but … gasp! … he’s in a wheelchair! It’s a fate worse than death! Or so they seem to be trying to say. What is up with Japanese culture?

Anyway, then we go beat the forces of Crazy Fandaniel in a very annoying solo duty instance in which we have to control a lot of different characters that aren’t ours and curse at the screen a lot because that’s not very fun and it’s a horrible way to end an expansion.

I don’t remember much of the details now, but after the battle, we’re supposed to go to Sharlayan, and that’s it until Endwalker.

Oh, and Zenos has a scythe now. A very important plot point apparently.

YoRHa Alliance Raid: Tower at Paradigm’s Breech

The last YoRHa Alliance Raid was a doozy. I don’t really remember it now, that was two months ago. Was it the one with the Red Girl? [Reviews video.] Yes, that was it. Great music, again.

I did it a bunch of times but I never got much of the gear. I just bought the regular Tomestone gear.

Unfortunately the YoRHa story didn’t quite end after the last raid, because it went into a weekly quest rotation, and I only did a couple of them before drifting away to play other games. I guess I’ll never know what happens with the dwarves.

Death Unto Dawn Soundtrack

I bought the Death Unto Dawn soundtrack, which is a “Blu-ray Music Disc,” something I had never heard of before. It’s a pain in the butt, and a terrible way to distribute music. The only device I had in the house that could even read it was my PS4, which had been unplugged for some six months or more.

Somehow I got a Japanese version, or at least a version where all of the MP3s have Japanese titles, which I didn’t really intend to do. But it’s got some six hours of Final Fantasy XIV music on it from patches 5.1 through 5.5.

But the main reason I bought it was for the wind-up Lyna minion, which is one of my favorite characters from Shadowbringers, who I felt was criminally underutilized.

Wheel of Time - S1E5: Blood Calls Blood

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 20:46:45 -0500

This week’s episode was less of a spectacle.

Summary

We’re in and around Tar Valon this week, home of the Aes Sedai. We begin with a funeral for Green Sister Kenobi, who died last episode, and follow her ex-Warder’s trials and tribulations.

Meanwhile, Perrin and Egwene, still traveling with the Traveling People, stumble on the Whitecloaks again. The Whitecloaks beat up the Travelers and capture Perrin and Egwene for … reasons? I guess they looked suspicious? Anyway, bad things happen to them, reminding us that Whitecloaks are Evil. But then they escape with the help of the mysterious wolves.

Rand and Mat arrive at the outskirts of Tar Valon where they reunite with Nynaeve. Rand meets Loriel the Ogier at a library.

Reactions

This episode was a bit of a let-down from the last one, but it was still good enough, about on par with the third episode.

At this point it seems clear we’re tossing the books out as reference material. There’s only a vague resemblance to the first book now. It doesn’t bother me, but book purists are probably hate-brigading every comment section they can find.

I haven’t mentioned the title sequence yet. I like it. I don’t think they’ve discussed “the weave” in the show, but it was a prominent metaphor in the books, and the opening visuals certainly reinforce how much the Aes Sedai and the White Tower live at the center of the Wheel of Time universe (at least, I think those are the colors of the Aes Sedai Ajahs represented there in the titles).

Nynaeve tugged on her braid!

We got a “one month later” title card in this episode. It was enough time for Rand’s hair to turn curly, presumably so he looks less like Hayden Christensen and viewers like me will stop making fun of him for looking like Hayden Christensen.

Creepy scene with Egwene and Perrin and the Cartoon Evil Whitecloak Guy. (I don’t remember Cartoon Evil Whitecloak Guy’s name, in the show or the books.) I don’t much care for these Whitecloaks, not because they’re Evil but because they’re too Evil. It’s a bit silly and over-the-top. But I suppose he’s there to be a gender opposite of Liandrin Sedai.

Another scene with Nynaeve and Liandrin Sedai! I don’t know the actor Kate Fleetwood (playing Liandrin) but she’s good at facial expressions.

I think we saw the first significant mention of the Forsaken in this episode.

That last scene of the Sad Warder Guy’s funeral was a nice bookend to the first burial scene (and the middle funeral scene). Very powerful. And the music over end credits was very good, the first time I’ve noticed the music being better-than-average.

Best Scene

The last one. I got really choked up actually, especially seeing Morraine and the other Aes Sedai there. They are doing a good job in the show at communicating a lot of emotional subtext without having to explain things. But then, it might be because I know all the subtext from the books. I can’t really tell.

Best Lines

Rand, on seeing Tar Valon: “Blood and ashes!” Hehe.

Nynaeve: “Don’t worry. I promise you, the pain will never go away.”

Characters

Morraine. Again low-key in this episode. I’ve noticed that Morraine is always slumping her shoulders like she has osteoporosis. Maybe that’s a thing Rosamund Pike does. Or it might be a trick of the shoulder pads on her costume.

Lan. Played more of a supporting role to Sad Warder Guy, but good character development. He’s developing into much more of a lead character than he was in the books.

Rand. Curly hair doesn’t make him any more sympathetic.

Mat. Getting a little carried away with the evil dagger schtick. Ready to move on from that now.

Perrin. GoldenEye makes an appearance. Good scene revealing his deep dark secret to Egwene.

Egwene. She’s somewhat passive in the show so far. Stuff happens to her, she doesn’t really make things happen. She needs to get her butt into some Novice Aes Sedai training pronto.

Nynaeve. Not much happened with her in a month, considering what happened in the last episode. She’s a hot commodity at the Tower though. We were reminded that it’s the Yellow Ajah who are the healers.

Thom Merrilin. He’s not dead, right?

Loriel the Ogier. I didn’t dislike him per se, but I didn’t think he added much to the show, either. Just kind of there and gone, without any context.

Sad Warder Guy. Yeah, I don’t know his name. It takes me a ridiculous amount of time to learn the names of characters in television shows if they don’t constantly say them out loud. It’s especially difficult with Wheel of Time names. Was it Kenny? Something like that. Kenner? I don’t know. [It was Stepin.] Anyway, he had a good guest starring role. The temporary guest stars are out-shining the regular cast so far.

Cartoon Evil Whitecloak Guy. Terrible character so far. This isn’t an anime, you’ve got to give me a good reason for acting like a sadistic monster. Who’d give that guy a good performance review when the bosses do their yearly evaluation? Anyway he’s dead now, right? I actually forgot Egwene stabbed him until I re-watched the episode. But I have a feeling he’ll turn up again someday.

Book Spoilers

Still no Elayne. In the book, Rand met Elayne while he was sitting on that balcony watching Logain go by. That was in Caemlyn, though, which they’ve completely cut from the show so far.

I, having slogged through those fourteen books, understand and feel deeply the pain and weight of that separation between an Aes Sedai and her Warder when one of them dies, so those funeral scenes were very powerful to me. But I wonder if someone who hasn’t read the books would feel the same? Probably not. It’s only been five episodes. Ah well.

That was Dragonmount next to Tar Valon, right? I don’t remember it being right next to Tar Valon.

Tar Valon in the show doesn’t look anything like I imagined it would. I seem to recall it being described as being built from something like glass. And I thought it would be pointier on the top, like the Disney World castle, not round.

It occurs to me that, from the beginning, the goal for the characters was to reach Tar Valon, and they did. So now what? I don’t remember how or why they left Tar Valon in the books, or why they went to find the Eye of the World. Or even what the Eye of the World was.

There was some passing mention of the impending return of the Amyrlin Seat in the show (whose name I cannot pull from my memory but it was two names that started with S… Saucy Seachin? Seani Soophle? Siri Sommers? Something Something? Not even close, it was Siaun Sanche). Perhaps they’ll be focusing on Aes Sedia politics in Tar Valon for a while? Trying to emulate the whole Game of Thrones court intrigue thing? That’s the place to do it if they’re going to.

I think there was more to Perrin and Egwene’s escape than was depicted in the show. I think Morraine may have actually rescued them. I purposefully skipped those chapters in the audiobook a while ago because I figured that might be coming up in the show.

Other Notes

I’ve watched every episode so far twice. I had to watch this one twice because I didn’t remember much of it when it came time to write this post in the middle of the week.

I’ve slowed down on the Eye of the World audiobook. There’s not much point in refreshing my memory on things that aren’t even in the show.