Happenings

Been in a slump the last several months. Going to try an experiment, that I suspect will fail, of writing down daily or at least weekly blurbs here of things I've been up to, like things I've been learning or doing. Or if nothing else, maybe some food I've been eating or music I've been listening to. In short, a public journal, but without trying to be super detailed -- but maybe some entries will be TMI anyway and I suppose I'd rather go for more details than fewer if the thing is triggering some thoughts. All entries will go in this post in reverse-chronological order (so updates are at the top -- note that "today's" updates may not be complete when you first see them). We'll see how long I keep it up.

7/27/24

Woke up around midnight, watched a bit of fv major fights, fell asleep again, back up at 4am. Saw my favorite on a twitter clip, silly feelings... There's a tekken tournament in japan in december, thought about signing up for the heck of it since I might be there at that time anyway, thinking about it again. We'll see. If I don't travel I can always withdraw. Popped a moda. Read https://shivansite.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/using-a-queue-for-user-input-events/ which is a simplistic but still somewhat illuminating article. In SDL-land, you're always using PollEvent, which is backed by a queue. However, as the article notes at the end, real fighting games don't quite stop after just this stage. Indeed, it makes sense to setup an additional buffer (ring or otherwise) to capture the set of events active per frame for the last n frames, which then you can process to handle combo states and so on without necessarily having to keep a bunch of ad-hoc state around for each entity. This reminded me to look into what the difference is between SDL3 and SDL2 because I keep seeing SDL3 as coming soon and they messed up their wiki docs site to scare about it before it's actually ready. Anyway, found https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/docs/README-migration.md and it's unfortunately more than I thought it'd be... And so much renaming! I'd rather the whole project be called something different. I think I'm going to stop using SDL2 for anything if I can help it (RIP lgame as-is). Sure, SDL1 is still around and works and SDL2 will live just as long probably, but if this is the direction the project is going, man... Ate some hotdogs. Made an issue to lgame project and added some screenshots, fixed a bug.

7/26/24

Crashed for some hours, got up a bit after midnight. Got jack in the box. Seeing some stuff from FV Major, poking fun at myself for dumb feelings. Found a silly react channel mostly of rap songs https://www.youtube.com/@CliffBeatsOfficial I don't usually like react stuff but it's nice when I find people vibing with what I like and picking up on stuff, his non-rap reactions are kinda hilarious too. (Shakira lol.) Also funny that listening to a lot of NF had him make this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvHSgq9J7c4 NF can do that, yeah. I kinda broke in May; thought I was stronger than I am, but I'm still strong, just not invincible, and had to build up some calluses (and not become callous). Took out the trash. Somehow I missed this Babymetal song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDnIEWyVIlE When did Su's English get so good? Always impressed with her... chaj. Watched random recommendation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIGDkQchMY on learning tekken characters... Waste of 13 minutes, oh well. I mean, it's not a terrible approach, and my very first steps are similar (not at all the same though), but you can summarize that in a couple sentences, no need for a video. Youtube must know I've been thinking about it being cool to reach chair ranks with every character, one guy finally "beat tekken" by reaching max rank with every character, but sadly I just don't like tekken 8 or how its characters play for the most part. I want Chloe back. Also I got curious and my man you're not high ranked enough to be giving advice to the void. Read https://www.betonit.ai/p/do-ten-times-as-much (maybe re-read?), it's a premise/simplistic piece of advice I can agree with, if not execute on. Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXiPWa9RWgc live. Useful review, learned a couple new things. (Like just how big the branch predictor silicon is. A long way from the start of The Slow Winter days of 2-bit saturating counters per branch getting to 94% accuracy.) RDTSC gives wall-clock time but uncorrelated to clock cycles/instructions. Covered some instructions that utils like perf use behind the scenes like RDPMC. Can get back the count of actual processor cycles on a core. RDPRU on recent zen cores. wikichip.org is a great site. Got some useful insight that he doesn't do anything special to avoid other process/kernel context switching interference in his normal perf work, especially because most things aren't using all of his 16 cores (I only have 12 cores) so it doesn't really matter if one core is used by an OS thingy. He did however remind me of the existence of Agner Fog's work over at https://www.agner.org/optimize/ which I've visited before but had forgotten about, very useful especially if you want to just boot into your own custom code right from the BIOS. Updated blog Linkify button to not re-linkify existing links; used the ever-useful (more useful?) https://regexr.com to save some thinking. Tried to find opening song of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvoNHajaMlg for someone, failed. Watched some videos on elden ring fall damage. chaj. Watched an old drag vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oR-ozwMDy8 Watched chunks of a vid on train drm hacking. Ate a block of cheese.

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Japan Trip 4 and 5

Previously.

I went to Japan again a couple more times. But nothing too exciting to report here. The 4th time was indeed primarily for the reason alluded to in the previous post, seeing my favorite idol have her birthday concert. I ended up helping with the preparations, too, which was a fun experience. I had a good time, but I was there for a while, basically from December 4th through January 16th. (Originally Jan 11th but I extended my stay for an extra weekend to see her a few more times... The plane ticket change didn't increase my fare.) So about 6 weeks. I was happy to be going home.

Of course, on the day I flew out, I heard that her group was disbanding with a final graduation event in a month. My friend is funny, he said when I got home, "So I guess you'll be going back soon right? You'll regret it if you don't!" He was right, of course. So I went back.

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Possible errors and downtime

I've migrated my blog and other things over to OVH, leaving Amazon's EC2 behind. The DNS switch has been made, though my local machine keeps trying to talk to the old server I have shut down to encourage not caching the old IP. I also had to upgrade to PHP 8.2 and recreate my database. I've fixed a few errors so far, but there might be more. Anyway, just a warning as the title says in case anyone is experiencing the issues.

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Parting is such sweet sorrow

One of the few Shakespeare lines I like.

Wrapping up a trip soon. I'm ready to head back home and resume something more resembling the hikikimori lifestyle.

It was a good trip, I'll write up a bit more about it later. Part of me wants to stay, but it's time.

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