psyche

I am sitting here. It’s somewhere between 4AM today and 4AM tomorrow. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Great towers of papers and file rustle proudly around me as I hunch over my computer. It glows and hums with life, staring me in the face and daring me to do something. I won’t do anything. I hear clocks ticking. They don’t stop. Up, down. Zero, one. High, low. Tick, tock. It’s some of the best music I’ve ever heard. At my back stands the shadow and he tells me to stop whining. I should listen. He is some facet of my hidden mind. I hate him but am somehow glad that he can’t die. He’s the only part of me that won’t. He says “Farhan!” and the gravity is too much so I don’t look up. I won’t ever look up! He tells me that I should just focus. I am smart but not applying myself. Is this true? No, I don’t think so. He does. Optimist to the last.
My problem is trivial now but I consider it agitatedly as it slowly begins to threaten to compress my brain until I can’t think straight and I simply expire. It is like some crushing weight. There is another shadow. Not the optimist this time, but an entirely less opinionated being. It is fact. It is the result that speaks for itself. The test score that needs no explanation. Surely there is no need for the backstory to each of these failures? I had neither disadvantage nor handicap. It was fair. I failed. So the shadow is fact and failure. It stands unsmiling but nods when it recognises me. It ticks like the clock. I will always fail. I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again now: it is an old friend. It stands fast beside the Don’t Whine Shadow. Fail Shadow and Don’t Whine Shadow. Freudian glimpses of who I am. “Don’t give up on me,” I hear myself scream, “for I am not going to fail all the time! I am happy! I will achieve something!”. Teenage angst or not, I feel very bad. Not depressed.
I understand without prejudice or emotion. I have no fear of this. It just makes me twinge a little with sadness; not emotional sadness but some strange intellectual sadness like that which one feels when one sees the organ fail. “What a shame.” That sadness. It’s strange enough to make me stop and cringe momentarily as days rush past. I remember feeling connected, but now I don’t. I don’t know if I’m just uncertain or if there’s something beyond it. It doesn’t matter. I am absolutely committed to the truth that I will never be good enough. Whether this is because I think I never will be or because I am simply genetically inferior, I will never know.

I will try. This constant emo-ism is beginning to grate on me as much as it is on you.

Pax

P.S. All you cunts out there, know that a battle will come. Yes. Count on it.

I’ve set up the PowerBook somewhere upstairs with an HP PSC750 attached - it won’t scan because of lack of drivers/HP being retarded in terms of support. However, it prints. This is good. GCSEs are now around the fucking corner and to be honest, I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing. Music and German/Italian orals are the really annoying ones, but I have little hope in Music. However I am cramming for this Schumann thing. The banana tree is being parasitised by some really annoying caterpillar. Fuck that fucking shitbag!! Anyway, yeah. I can’t believe how much I want Leopard, iWork ‘07 and iLife ‘07. WHERE ARE THEY?

Also, a port of Chessmaster 10th Edition for Mac would be nice. Defcon too. I want Defcon.

This is beginning to get on my nerves.

Pax

The PowerBook has had its broken US keyboard replaced with a new UK one - and its failed hard drive replaced. We just have to pick it up from the Brent Cross Apple Store. Hooray for AppleCare. I have no idea what’s going on. I have an obscene amount of work to do. I will never reach the higher level. I am glad that God does not exist. I am so sorry.

My brain is becoming even less… good. Things are looking clear now. That is almost not. What I say? 2

The guys at the Genius Bar there deserve a cookies or someti23

Pax

I’m not sure what it is. There are few people who are very good at a game but choose to resist the allure of profundity. Most competitors will begin to become so entwined in their art that they become ideal gamers and really don’t have to win all the time - they learn and adapt - but as a result of this, they do win. The few that keep the “play to win” attitude develop differently, training with demented intensity and becoming elitist to the core. I prefer this approach, to be honest. It is simpler and clearer, even if it’s less genuine - there’s no genius-level understanding, just hard work and foresight.

Perhaps this is a reaction to my own major malfunction (apart from having a small penis and being a nerd) - I’m not very good at maths. Granted I’m good enough and will probably not be really bothered by it in terms of employment or interpersonal life etc. but I have a cringing feeling that I know is accurate which tells me that it will bother me my whole life. Perhaps I’m just lazy. I don’t know what it is. What takes other people seconds to understand takes me minutes. Systems which I have interest in confuse me unendingly. It’s infuriating and cruel; I am just too stupid. I think I’ll make the best of it and on the surface it’ll look like I’ve conquered it and am happy to suck at chess and connect 4 and be unable to make simple arithmetical calculations as fast as the average eight-year-old, but tragically I don’t think I will ever forgive myself.

Pssht. Where did I go wrong? I don’t know. I’m not so bad that it’ll impede my life but it’s bad enough to hold me back from any kind of excellence. There is now nothing that I can say “Yeah, that’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at and what I’ll always be good at.” I don’t think there ever was.

I also think something else is wrong; sometimes when I see shadows moving or trees rustling in my peripheral vision, I think they’re people. Not like, I stop and consider the motion and think “Hmm, it might be a person…” but my gut reaction - what my brain immediately decides - is that it’s a person or animal or something, because I immediately freeze and have to look round etc.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t think I ever will. I predict I’ll always be stupid enough to fail to achieve really remarkable things, but work hard and have enough intelligence to seem like a hardworking unintelligent person or a lazy and slightly intelligent person.

So when you feel my contemptible loser’s gaze at your back, know that I am not ignorant. I am consciously aware of my failure. With slow applause I praise those of you with natural talent or the willpower to really be excellent. I, it seems, am a total fraud. My success is isolated and requires really hard work. I don’t know why it is!

Every part of me is disgusted by what I am; there are people with situations so many hundreds of times worse than my own that I cannot even begin to express my dismay at what a self-pitying wretch I am.

I wish I knew what it was all about! I don’t think I’ll gratify myself by descending into depression or anger. I’ll even smile, look: *smiles*. This is absurd. For fuck’s sake. If in months or years I look back on this and think “Ah, at least I predicted that my stupidity would persist in ruining my life like a crayon up my nose… I must’ve been somewhat intelligent…”†

Also, fuck.

Pax

† Hey, if I can’t fucking make bad jokes, I can’t do anything, right?

Note to future self:
Work hard, you fool! There’s a chance your intellectual inadequacy can be overcome! This is no fiction, where people are strange like you! This is life! Be a man!

It’s been fucking unlucky with governments. It’s fucked. Good luck to free speech.

Pax

No matter how I look at it now, life really is just perpetual shopping, whether it’s to keep oneself alive or to satiate one’s psychological need to have more stuff. As you may be able to tell, I enjoy randomly italicising things.

Marx implied that politics was governed by the economics of production and Baudrillard revised this to also include the philosophy, psychology and semiology of consumption.

People in crappy factories = factory farmed Other people = free range

But they still serve to continue civilisation, which is essentially a framework for mankind in which life is not good for everyone and profits are diverted to a small percentage of the population. Or so I reckon!

Pax

At last. I came across some rather strange errors that I failed to anticipate but I debugged their brains out and now, lo, it is finished!

The actual ranking algorithm is still dodgy but meh. It’s okay for now. Hopefully that’s all I ‘ll have to edit in future as the whole interface and architecture is expandable and contains real data (I know! How great!).

UPDATE: Doesn’t work in Firefox, don’t know why, reported it to them… in fact it only works in WebKit-based browsers…

Also, this guy from the MacRumors forum has the right idea:

Originally Posted by Object-X
We learn that a lot of people on this forum are a bunch of whiny little …

Apple is becoming Microsoft, OS X is worse than Vista, I hate the iPhone, Apple’s loosing it, Apple’s lying, Apple doesn’t care about computers, Apple’s trying to do too many things, Apple sucks, Apple doesn’t care about my feelings, ect. You’re all a bunch of drama queens.

Have drink, smoke some weed, whatever, just relax. Patience.

Pax

I drank a shitload of coffee today and now have a motherfucker of a headache. However, the program is almost ready! It should be finished by tomorrow at the latest, but hopefully within the next hour or so. I’m just compensating for aircraft being able to fly in the damage() function and writing the final updated setRecs() function. Everything else is awesome. I might go through and clean up (”refactor”) the code afterwards - if it’s not too fucking late, which it might be, fuck the fuck … fuck. Sorry, headache.

I must commend the makers of Taco HTML Edit and TextWrangler. I didn’t think there could ever be a Mac program to rival Notepad, but both of these fucking beat the shit out of it.

Pax

I’ve put in more data (specifically, armour types, rate of fire, damage per burst, bursts per shot and warheads [which basically specify what percentage of the damage they ideally do is removed when encountering different types of armour]) and have written a few new functions. Three in particular will save me a lot of time:

[SNIP!] - looks like the “less than” symbol is interpreted by browsers as a tag opening which totally destroys the formatting of the page and causes most of the code not to display… screenshots of the first and second (the database-looking-up-…in-functions. The third is long and… you get the idea.

The first two basically look up data in my mass of arrays (they basically constitute a fat database). This is harder than it sounds because I was reluctant to make an array with more than two dimensions (it gets fiddly) so I made separate ones for unitInfo, weaponInfo and warheadInfo so to look up, say, the warhead used by Light Infantry, I have to first look up which weapon it used (simple) and then look in a different array for a weapon which has the same name as the one that my Light Infantry says he has (…fairly simple) and then look up which Warhead that weapon says it has and then check all Warheads to see if they have the same name and then retrieve their number and return it ARGH so it gets a bit odd but these two functions will save me a lot of time.

The last function is a neat damage calculator which essentially means fewer lines of code. I’m not sure why I didn’t program a standalone damage calculating function before, but it might’ve been because of the bias toward being unhittable and being able to kill enemies in one shot instead of how much damage would actually be done - I had no concrete data in version 1.

This version is still far from perfect and I’ll need to incorporate aircraft being unhittable by most weapons while in flight and change the way in which suggestions are printed (the recommendation values are no longer integers, and you can’t have a two-point-seven-sixth row. A two-hundred-and-seventy-sixth row maybe, but that’d make the page looong… rounding would defeat the purpose of exact stats. I think I’ll just print them in order in a single paragraph… lol.

I think Elliot is working on putting in more accurate data into the version 1 database - but I think I forgot to tell him that the recommendation rating - which is affected by stats - has to be an integer or the unit simply won’t appear in the suggestions box…

Anyway, I have made progress and will keep making it. And then upload it.

Pax

Over the past few days I’ve been working obsessively on a JavaScript-powered tactical advisor for Tiberian Sun players. It’s been quite hard to get it working, but now it is and although the units’ stats are somewhat dodgy, overall the system just about works. However, it’ll require a LOT of tweaking. Perhaps I’ll ask the people at TiberiumWeb.com to give me details unit stats from the .ini files of Tiberian Sun and then I can produce some accurate way to compare them (one which takes into account armour, exact number of hitpoints, exact damage dealt per shot, rate of fire… maybe even buildtime if this becomes a lot more complex than I think I can handle…).

It’s been a good exercise - before this, I’d never touched switch statements or Arrays.

For now, here it is.

Pax