Just wrote a quick article about setting up contextual help in wordpress plugin on the Multiplay tech blog. Read it here: http://blog.multiplay.co.uk/2012/01/updated-contextual-help-in-wordpress/
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Dark Liquid
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Dark Liquid
New Years
So, it’s a New Year. This year starts off with me being poor having spent obscene amounts on being able to drive. Debts are mounting up across all the various accounts but hopefully everything will work itself out. I’m hardly in such a bad state that I can’t dig myself out of it.
I generally don’t make resolutions for the New Year, but I am going to try and do some more exercise. Having spent the last 4 years or so essentially sat on my ass the whole time, I was shocked a few days ago when I did some simple exercise to find that pretty much all my strength has gone. Not really shocking, given my activity levels, but it really made the point that I need to do something before I turn into some fatty spherical lump that lift a fork without losing his breath. Taking the typical geek route, I’m focusing on statistics, statistics and more statistics. I’m hoping actually tracking and graphing staff might gave me some immediate visual goals to reach for, since just doing exercise, as a participant with no tracking, never feels like I’m making any progress, which is never encouraging. Hopefully Fitocracy and/or RunKeeper will provide some much needed guidance and motivation.
Since working for Multiplay, games have become a large part of my life again. Having now bought over 300 games in the last 2 years, I have quite a large back catalogue to play though. Typically these are all indie title but for a few more mainstream items, since that tends to be where my interests lie. [Generic FPS] just doesn’t interest me, though I will say that I’m enjoying the independent, single-player only Hard Reset immensely at the moment. I’ve played a lot of Skyrim recently, which has been a lot of fun. I’m always amazed by the things fans will do, and this beautiful track by Malukah Fenix certainly qualifies as amazing:
My writing has taken a bad hit this last year. I’ve barely written anything or read anything for that matter (well, barely read anything means less than 20 or so books in the year for my appetite
). There are many stories I want to finish and that a few people on Protagonize want to see the conclusions of, so I need to get back on the saddle. I had said to myself last year I would try and seriously pursue publication, but that hasn’t happened. I’m hoping this year, now I have more time due to driving to work, things will be different, but if I’m entirely honest with myself, I doubt I’ll put the required time or effort into making a serious attempt. Not only is it a lot of work, it’s quite intimidating. I do want to finish at least one novel though by the end of the year and hopefully get into the meat of editing it with an eye to publish it independently, for kicks, since I’m not sure I’m even interested in mainstream publication or actually making a living from writing.I’d also like to try and get back into music again and I have a computer game I’ve been meaning to develop for some time. So many projects, so little time.
Lets hope the time thing changes this year. Or, more proactively, let’s actually try to change that this year.
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Dark Liquid
So NaNoWriMo is over, though if I’m honest it ended for me barely a day after I began so I reach December with barely 1 days worth of words written, let alone the whole 50k minimum. I wasn’t really expecting to have the time or energy to work on it, as the commute to work after 2 years is starting to wear me down, so I’m not really too cut up about it.
And on the happy note of the commute, I finally passed my driving test. I passed it by the skin of my teeth, more by luck than I’d like, but hell, I’ll take the win after the umpteen failures I’ve already collected. Now I have the fun, fun, fun time of trying to get car insurance that isn’t cripplingly expensive. It’s looking might it actually might be cheaper to buy a brand new car on finance and pay the insurance on that, as the insurance on my current car (which depressingly I realise I’ve owned for almost a year without being able to drive it) is more than double the quotes I’m getting on new cars and the finance costs of new cars over 5 years or so are roughly equal to the insurance premium (which should hopefully drop after the first year) whilst also having better fuel economy. Kinda sad that I buy a used car, only to find almost a year later it’s as if not more expensive for me to own and run than a brand new one.
Money, money, money! Arrrrgh!
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Dark Liquid
NaNoWriMo Cometh!
NaNoWriMo is on the horizon once again. After putting out a call for suggestions on what story to develop via Google+, the story Crowd Dodging won out, so this years NaNoWriMo will be a tale of three teenagers inventing their own sport, losing control of it to big media and then fighting to take it back.
Or it will be, if I can actually get it written.
I’ve been having trouble outlining it, coming up with scenes, etc. The idea just don’t want to form in my head. This is typical of me, I’m not a great planner in any sphere, for example in programming I find it much easier to think through ways to do something by trying the actually code a solution, rather than by planning it all out with flow charts and everything else beforehand. However, I do like having lots of goals to meet, which, without a plan, is quite hard. I think instead I might have to outline as I go and use my notes more as a map to refer back to for consistency, rather than as a guide of where to go.
However, what I have done so far is working out well. I’m using Zim, a desktop wiki application to keep notes, which I save to a dropbox folder so I can access them wherever I go. Mapping out my protagonists is going reasonably well, I’m currently using the Dresden Files RPG character generation sheets to flesh them out a bit (the game uses FATE as a rule system, which is fairly story-focused and works very well). I’ve been doing with using Fiasco or Do as scene generators, but neither really suit the genre I’m writing for, so I’ve not bothered.
The worst thing though is that I’ve been quite busy recently since getting off holiday, so I doubt I’ll have much time to develop my outline further or even get any writing done. Which is why I’m worried about not having an outline, because without clearly defined goals, I’m likely to flounder in the limited time I do have!
But what the hell, lets have a go anyway.
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Chelle (@Asheyna)
Well you’ll have me cheering you on! And giving you random weird suggestions for scenes. I too am having trouble plotting too much of my novel, no real clear outline although I know the major plot arc from beginning to end. I plan to just see what happens.
I hope you find the time to write it, Crowd Dodging is such a neat concept!
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Mykell
Love it, and so excited. I hope we both make our count this year…
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Dark Liquid
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Dark Liquid
Unity
So, I’ve been using Unity since it’s official release in the last update. With this new release, I though it about time to talk about it.
Now, Unity gets a lot of mud thrown at it. The main complaints I’ve seen are it ‘dumbs down’ Linux. I don’t think this is true. However, it does lack some things, things that for me define the Linux experience, and that annoys me.
These things mainly are configurability. This isn’t to say that it isn’t configurable, but rather that a lot of this configuration is hidden behind arcane, invisible methods like the gconf system for example. Linux for me has always been about providing an environment where the user is in control, where everything can be configured and where the configuration of those programs is relatively standardised and easy to do (easy being a relative term here, I doubt anyone would argue that the sendmail config file is easy, as an example of the bad end of the scale). I found Unity to fail at providing this kind of environment. Sure it gets out of your way and lets you ‘just work’, but it does it by hiding a lot of things unnecessarily, rather than being an elegant solution.
Now that the main negative is out of the way, it’s time to move on to the positives.
Generally, I found the workflow in Unity not much different to my usual one. I was annoyed to find my Win key hijacked away from my usual Synapse/Gnome-Do program but I got used to it. The global menu I found fairly easy to get to grips with and it didn’t cause any problems. I quickly learnt to always look up for options. This might be due to having some experience with OSX though for a number of years, so for a new user or one experienced in non-global menu systems, it might be more disconcerting.
Apart from it just ‘getting out of the way’ I didn’t really find it did much for my workflow at all. Since I try to avoid using the mouse, I did basically what I did before – trigger the application search to run an app and use the keyboard to switch workspaces. I didn’t really use the icon bar as I could generally type the name of the app in the search before I could remember what the icons did or what Win+Num shortcut mapped to them.
The notification icons not showing was a massive problem as a lot of apps I used didn’t support the new system and so I had to hack around in the gconf settings, which I would have never discovered if not for others posting solutions. I found on my dual monitor system that the system tray icons would have issues – some would only work on the primary screen and not the other, the ones on the right never triggering or only flashing their menus intermittently only to whisk them away instantly.
I didn’t find it all bad though and I think for the mass market, the new user that only wants to use what’s provided through the ubuntu software centre and has one monitor, it does it’s job. However, I found it to be quite hostile towards customisation, something I’ve never associated with Linux before. It seems to me to be trying too hard to be OSX, providing a single end-to-end software eco-system and user experience. This isn’t a bad thing, after all, OSX is very popular for a reason and it does provide a very tight, well balanced system if you want to do things in the way it provides.
I think there is a place for Unity, but it’s not really for me. I’ve found Ubuntu have developed this OSX style philosophy further in 11.10 and I found myself not liking it at all. On my main desktop machine I’m now trying out GNOME Shell, in the hope that it provides a nice balance between what a Linux system means to me and a productive, uncluttered desktop that gets out of my way and just lets me work. After using it for a while, I’ll write up how I feel about it.
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Dark Liquid
A Shallow Comedy
Once again an update long belated and devoid of any real, interesting content. Life has been as it always has – dull and uninspiring, the same old same old repeated ad infinitum. I’m always in awe of how people can have interesting lives and do interesting things. Not jealousy, as despite my use of the what is generally considered negative term boring, I am in fact fairly content. No, rather I find that I just don’t understand how people manage it.
I think the real issue here, if I re-examine it from another angle is that I don’t actually find that much interesting. I’m an incredibly cynical person and take very little joy from many of the things I do. Okay, that’s not really true, it more that what joy I do take doesn’t last very long. I’m not miserable or even unhappy by any means. As I said, I’m content, but I guess that isn’t the same as being happy. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I’m incredibly lazy when I have the freedom to allow it. I don’t go anywhere or do anything, partly down to a lack of means but mostly down to a lack of motivation. I’m just not interested and that comes back to the crux of the matter. It’s not that I don’t live an interesting life but rather that I don’t find anything interesting about it. I could do something about it, but I can’t be bothered and I don’t know where to start. I mean, how do you actually find things that interest you when you aren’t interested in anything? It’s always seemed to be that one interest feeds into the next but starting from zero tends to make that hard.
And, low and behold, this post has become another introspective whine-fest, moping about things in a public forum and for what purpose? Catharsis, perhaps. A cry for help, maybe? Again, too lazy to make a change myself, hoping for an external force to instigate change. My cynicism again, asserting it’s sarcastic, dismissive view on any and all things.
The thing is, I do sort of enjoy my point of view. I get a weird kick out of depression and pain and melancholy, something satisfying and meaty and nourishing. It’s where a lot of my writing comes from – when I can be arsed to write at all – from this hunger for despair, this mining of my own personal vein of nihilism. That’s what it really is, I suppose, at the end of the day. Nihilism. I just don’t see the point in anything because there isn’t one. No purpose, no goal, no meaning. And I’m good with that, but I’l admit, it’s a poor motivator. Maybe that’s the real reason for abandoning reason to things like faith, because without some external motivational force or some goal to work towards, the sentient mind falls into a stupor. To be honest, I’d be happy to spend all day for the rest of my life doing nothing, mindlessly consuming content because I can’t be bothered to imagine, never getting out of bed except to excrete. Eating, excreting, entertainment, the three Es.
So why don’t I? Why not just give up on doing anything and just lay down in the dirt and wait for my next handout? Because I can’t. As I said, I’m content, I like my life as it is, even as I compare it to others and find it lacking. I like routine, my routine. I don’t want the change or, frankly, need it. To be honest, I think if I allowed myself to do that, I’d lose the little motivation I do have, but maybe that’s the point. Embracing that emptiness, motivation becomes meaningless.
I think maybe this isn’t a problem isolated to myself, but rather it’s a spreading epidemic amongst the population. Apathy, a sense of impotence. Those that fall prey to it become as tumours in the meat of society, a cancer that spreads by virtue of showing everyone else that such blissful emptiness is possible, that in can work, the irony that it’s only supported by it’s antithesis often going amiss.
What started as introspection became a commentary on my opinion on society. Seems cheap and I’m not even sure I believe it myself. After all, the mind plays tricks and it’s easy to shift the blame, to stop looking inwards and blame life, blame society, these faceless forces we know are there but refuse to really acknowledge until we don’t want to take responsibility for our own actions.
The funniest thing about all this is that I find it amusing. Going back to an earlier paragraph, I feed off this stuff, this self-doubt, this self-loathing torrent of cynicism and introspection. It actually makes me feel good, it makes me smile, laugh even. This kind of bizarre self-torment and introspection is a source of macabre fascination and again we come back to an earlier topic, the circle is complete.
There is something I’m interested in, and that thing is suffering. Melancholy, sadness, loneliness and that feeling of displacement, of not knowing where you stand in the world. I’m fascinated by them, hungry for them. They make me smile. It’s why I like my dark comedies, my atmospheric progressive rock from the likes of Anathema and horror stories unresolved rather than fairy tales with happy endings. The world is a hedonistic place, full of the pursuits of pleasure, the definition of self-worth in every purchase of another piece of pleasure and maybe that’s why I feel uninterested in so much of it because I don’t want that, I want something different. I think there is a place for sadness and bitterness and hate. I don’t want them to exist, I don’t want to feel them, but I want to acknowledge that they belong, that they are a part of all of us and that we need them, that a world without them would be a world without human beings, without thought or reason.
So whilst everyone else enjoys the pleasures of the world without, I’ll suffice myself with the things that lurk within. Let outside march the gaudy parade, I’ll watch from my dusty basement window, a dine on my meagre supper.
If I can be bothered, that is.
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Dark Liquid
Ten – A Postmortem
A while ago a started a project called Ten, a collaborative story jointly written by ten authors about ten people from across the globe tasked with killing each other.
For the authors that joined in, the deal was simple. This book when finished would be published via a self-publishing service and I would pay for a and send a copy to each one. We’d all get the opportunity to write with each other, work on a real, serious project and work on doing proper editing and revisions.
Things however, did not go to plan.
This is an article about the challenges faced and the lessons learned, both about myself and the running of an ambitious project, from the failure of Ten.
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Dark Liquid
The Law
Now, it should be no surprise I’m a creature of odd habits but since my lovely wife is calling me out on this particular one, I feel it should be brought to your attention.
The Law is pretty simple. Whenever you say “pew pew” it must be immediately followed by the phrase “green laser”. It only applies when spoken (though doing it when writing is encouraged and I only don’t here, though it pains me, for illustration purposes) and you can’t make up for it by saying “green laser” at any point other than immediately following the saying of “pew pew”. Obviously you have to have meant to have said it as part of the sentence “pew pew green laser” but if you forget and catch yourself quickly enough and haven’t said anything since saying “pew pew” saying “green laser” then is tolerated, but frowned upon as lazy and negligent. If the delay is too long though (more than 2 seconds max, and that’s pushing it) then it’s too late.
The colour of laser is not optional; it is always green.
So what happens if you break “The Law”?
You lose respect, of yourself and your peers and furthermore you make the entire world a little bit sadder. If you spot someone breaking “The Law”, you can say “green laser” for them, but it isn’t the same, they’ve still broken “The Law” though your valiant effort reduces the amount of sadness by some small measure. The only real defence against lawbreakers is education.
Thus is “The Law”.
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Dark Liquid
Anger Management
Anger has always been a problem for me. It’s not the anger itself that’s a problem, but the great that comes with it, the helplessness I feel as I lose control, the knowledge that my rationality is slowly slipping away. I feel like I’m drowning.
I hate being angry. Even talking about it makes me feel sick but I refuse to let it beat me, I refuse to be controlled.
The worst part of being angry is the aftermath. I can’t make it just go away and nothing I do really serves as an outlet. I know exactly how I could resolve it, which is usually by directly addressing the cause, but I know in every case that if I allow myself to do so it will only grant myself a temporary reprieve and inevitably make things worse in the long term.
I end up stuck in a sort of analysis paralysis where I run through different scenarios over and over in my head. I can’t help myself even when I know that every scenario results in failure to resolve the issue, including doing nothing, I just keep reliving the cause and aftermath of my anger again and again inside my head in infinite permutations trying to find a solution that will never come.
Everything becomes a variable and a cause for doubt. Even this blog post – could it be construed as a form of passive-aggressive bitching or since kind of attempt at inspiring guilt or sympathy? If it can what are the ripple effects? Will the other parties in the incident talk to other people about out from their own one sided view points and will those that listen change their behaviour in a easy that effects me negatively? All those questions and doubts buzz around my head like flies and often I come to the conclusion I should just stop caring and do nothing. I know my ability to deal with the situation rationally is compromised and even if it wasn’t the same couldn’t be said for the other parties involved. I’m a problem solver, I font like leaving things to just sort themselves out so I just feel trapped between inaction and the darker temptation to just let my anger consume me and damn the consequences.
When I think about my anger I can sympathise with addicts of various mind altering substances. I can understand the appeal of just letting go of any responsibility, of just giving in to oblivion, to not have to be part of the world any more but to be completely free from everything, if just for a moment. But it doesn’t just effect me and when oblivion hands me back to the world I know their will be far worse things waiting for me than when I left.
At the moment inaction seems the best course of action. It’s highly unpleasant but I’d rather be drowning than burning and for now any other scenario seems like it will let the world alight.
This post seems weak and pathetic as does this admission of the fact. Everything seems transparent in this anger induced paranoia of mine, every action questionable and sneered at under the harshest light but I need this act of catharsis, I need to give something up to the anger so rationality be damned, this post shall be it’s sacrifice and I’ll deal with the consequences whatever they may be. At least this way I can stop caring for a little while, stop drowning and start swimming.
Chelle (@Asheyna) 5:37 am on December 3, 2011 Permalink
YAY for the test! Driving is cool, like bow ties, and fezes. Good luck with all the car stuff… I hate gov’t/administrative crap… makes me want to buy an island (you’d be invited of course).