Techyte

So a few days ago in class we have finally started learning some basic python, nothing much, just variable types and functions. Anyway I’m talking about this because in that class I began goofing off and started to tinker with making a simple game in pygame while everyone else was making a calculator. I eventually ended on flappy bird because it fit well into the skills that I had with pygame at that point. Didn’t get far in that short class but after school I came back and actually kept working on it because it was a lot of fun.

I found it fun to work on something outside a traditional game engine. I’ve tried before but never really got far but idk, it was different this time. I ended up enjoying working on it so much that I kept working on it, polishing and making interesting things like looping backgrounds, showing text, messing with sprites and collisions.

All of this to say that working outside a game engine and learning something new was really refreshing (who knew…) and I hope I can do more of this kinda thing from now on, just doing something different and fun.

Was absent mindedly staring at a globe of mine and I randomly started thinking about the earths spin. From the perspective of the northern hemisphere, the earth spins counterclockwise, but from the perspective of the southern hemisphere, the earth spins clockwise. It got me thinking about tornados and cyclones so I did some digging and found out about the Coriolis Effect (which I had heard of before but never knew what it did). The Coriolis Effect basically describes how moving objects not attatched to the earths surface curve over large distances (amazing article about it on national geographic). Anyway this means that the air traveling from the high pressure areas of a cyclone (outskirts) to the low pressure area (the eye) curves due to the Coriolis Effect! This is why tornados and cyclones spin!

Anyway I just got caught up in a small rabbit hole and thought I’d share it 👍🏼

okokokok. so. nobel prizes. alfred nobel (dude who left his fortune to start the prize stuff) left them roughly 31 million SEK (c. US$186 million, €150 million in 2008) and because the organization responsible for managing the money of the nobel prizes is basically an investment firm they have grown that ~US$186 million… INTO $560 MILLION THEY’VE MADE MONEY

I WRITE A REALLY FUCKING LONG BLOG POST THAT TAKES ME AGES TO EDIT AND JUST AS IM ABOUT TO PUT THE LINK TO THE VIDEO IM TALKING ABOUT THE FUCKING PAGE RELOADA AND BECAUSE MICRO.BLOG DOESENT SAVE DRAFTS IT ALL GETS LOST FOR FUCKS SAKE I WAS REALLY PROUD OF THAT.

I WAS GONNA TALK ABOUT THIS VIDEO BUT FUCKING FINE I WONT: youtu.be/iDTOD94YR…

(Most of the analysis from this post comes from this amazing video here: Link I’m not trying to claim that I made all of these connections I merly thought they were interesting and worth writing about to improve by writing skills)

Something interesting I’ve been learning about lately is a scrapped/initial song for the lorax called ‘biggering’. First of all its an amazing song that doesent get the credit it deserves but second, it being a pre-cursor to the phenomenon of a song ‘how bad can I be’ means a lot more than meets the eye. Something that me (and the YouTuber I saw talking about this) have always wondered about is how movies like the lorax, apparently so pro environment and anti capitalism/corpratism, ever get produced by massive corporations that profit off of these things. The answer is actually pretty straight forward and is corporations oldest trick in the book, plausible deniability. They didn’t know that their safety systems were terrible, they feel awful for the people that died and promise it will never happen again but it wasent their fault. Sound familiar? This is the tried and true method for big companies that profit off of ecological damage, human suffering and the general destruction of everything that apposes them.

The song ‘how bad can I be’ is the embodiment of this idea, the once-ler did’nt mean to cut down all the trees, it was a one time thing, he came from nothing and only because of the pressure of his family was he forced to destroy the planet. Not once does the once-ler look at the destruction he can caused, as it is happening. Sure he looks at it afterwards with a devistated and grief stricken face to show how sorry he is, but not once does the movie give the once-ler agency. Not once is the once-ler responsible or aware of the damge he is causing. This is in stark contrast to say, the antagonist of the movie, the overly comical, red herring of a villan, O’Hare. This guy is so over the top its hillarious. And thats by design, O’Hare is what the movie “tries to warn you about” he’s the guy to look out for! But you will never find a person so obviously devilish and geedy as O’Hare. This movie tried to teach children that people like O’Hare are ones to look out for, knowing full well that they will never find that person, whilst portraying big CEO’s like the once-ler as chill goofy guys who didn’t mean to fuck up the earth, they have PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY. This is how movies like the lorax get green-lit, as much as they spout anti-corporation talk, they portray companies in such a way to give them the goofy everyman role, the one to NOT watch out for. And this is why, ultimatly, ‘Biggering’ was cut. If you listen to it after reading this (or watching the video, it does a much better job at explaining this) you will immediately undersrand why big executives would want this song cut, ASAP. (second to being a banger) It actually gives the once-ler agency for his actions, he explicitly knows what he is doing and wants more. It goes into detail about his desire for growth, talking about his greed and pride, how ‘biggering, keeps triggering, more biggering’ It is also obviously where most of ‘how bad can I be’ gets its lyrics.

Either way the song also portrays the once-ler in a very different and darker tone than most of the rest of the movie (even when he is in dark environments he still has a funny voice to undercut the darker setting). Its an amazing rock/metal song (give me a break I know jack shit about music genres, it feels like those ones alright) and thats probably one of the reasons it was cut, they didn’t want to portray the once-ler as anything other than a goofy, happy, loveable guy who made some mistakes, or in other words having, say it with me, PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY. The movie tries so hard to keep up this image that some amazing songs that both sound good and would have enhanced the overall plot of the movie, were probably cut because they portrayed the once-ler in a slightly negative tone. What ‘biggering’ eventually morphed into (how bad can I be) spits further in the face of any anti-corprate messages by being SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO BE CATCHY. I bet there are so many people out there that nad never watched the lorax, heard how bad can I be, and then watched the lorax because of it. They took what could have been the strongest element of the movie and mangled into a corporate product, a cruel twist of fate (wow that sounds cliche but you get my point)

I haven’t read the book but I would bet that the original does a better job of representing and warning against corporations greed than this movie ever could.

All this is to say that despite the editorial decisions that seem to portray the once-ler in a very specific and suspicious light, the lorax on the whole suffers as both a movie and as a genuine, anti-corporate film.

The lorax is still a pretty good movie don’t get me wrong and no one should ever feel bad for enjoying it. I just think It’s important that people know through what lense the thing they are watching is being presented to them.

Something interesting I learnt today: A major difference between gun regulation in Australia compared to the U.S is that in Australia it is stated in law and in the U.S it is written into the constitution. Australia’s gun laws (as they are today) originated from the National Firearms Agreement (1996), after the Port Arthur Massacre.

This means that in Australia gun regulations are much easier to change and tweak over time as all it requires is a law to pass rather than an amendment to our constitution. This however IS the case in the U.S, where the constitution explicitly states that all Americans have a ‘Right to bear arms’. Since a full amendment is a much bigger deal politically than a simple change to a law (which happens all the time) it is a lot harder for the U.S to change its gun laws than it is for Australia.

This is one of the reasons the U.S, to this day, still has ridiculously loose laws around guns and firearms. It would be a massive deal for them to change this, much more than it should be.

I am actively researching WHY it is a bigger deal which leads me to actually try to figure out how Australia’s and the U.S government actually damn works but I’m going to save that for another post, probably later this week.

Anyway bye.

Today I continued my now habbit of switching projects daily by finishing what I wanted to do with the mining game (infinite world and saving/loading) before I was reminded of a game me and a friend made a while ago for a game jam that we wanted to keep working on. Long story short today I added multiplayer to this: Hole in one… Year!.

We are also working on adding cosmetics that show up both in single and multiplayer (Bread, the friend I’m working with has made some amazing cosmetic items that I can’t wait to implement into the game). Because of our plans for the game we havent yet released the multiplayer (and all the other tweaks we have made since the game jam) onto itch. We are waiting to finish cosmetics + some other things before we do that. We havent even let most of our other friends know we are working on it again (shows them for not reading my blog).

Anyway I’m actually really proud of myself for finishing an update like this in a single day to such a high standard and I can’t wait to impress the 1 person (my Dad) that reads my blog when it releases.

Or I loose interest in the project again and it never ends up seeing the light of day but on this side of the internet we try to stay positive so lets hope that never happens 👍

So ages and ages ago I had a really early build of a kind of terraria/minecraft inspired 2d side scrolling procedural generation simulator. It was mostly built of of copied code and I had no idea how the procedural generation part of it worked but I was really proud of it and even managed to get a working chunk streaming and save and load system. So today I thought I would open it and just fuck around adding stuff that I felt like, but on opening it, it was so unstable that it wouldn’t actually run for me so I ended up saying ‘fuck it’ and making a new branch of the repo to re-write it and hopefully get some experience making an actual procedural game myself.

I knew the basics of Perlin noise and heighmaps and all that jazz but I decided now was to time to see if I had what it takes to make it myself from scratch and so far I think I’ve done pretty well.

I kept a bunch of the player code (no reason re-making that when I already have a perfectly fine bean running around) and sprites but all of the terrain, chunking, and block systems are now gone. As of writing I have gotten a basic setup for chunks (so in future I can work on infinite terrain) and some VERY basic Perlin noise based procedural generation. I’ve got a lot of numbers I can fuck around with and I’ve made something that looks promising (See image below).

If you are interested in the code I’ve gotten so far its on the GitHub Repository here: Mining Game Re-Write

The values I am using for the generation can also be seen in the attached images

Been really interested in German unification and mid to late 19th century politics in general. It’s really cool seeing how diplomatic geniuses like Otto Von Bismark navigated diplomacy and politics to get what they wanted. German unification is basically the story of clever Prussian leadership provoking European powers into attacking and then, when they win a crushing victory, using that momentum to get more states to join them. It’s amazing in a way, how it all fits together. It’s also interesting how events up until then evolved. For instance the Crimean war ended with Russia, furious at Austria, breaking ties with them. This meant that when Austria went to war with Prussia, Austria didn’t have Russian support, which probably contributed to their failures and eventual defeat.

Anyway I just find the WW1 buildup is so intricate and interesting I could spend hours learning about it (and I do)

Thanks for reading

Just finished/am at the point where’re im taking a break from a project. I have been making among us in minecraft for the past few weeks. It’s a full recreation of ‘the skeld’ and I’m really proud of it. Once I can be sure there are no major gameplay breaking bugs I’ll release it to the public. I know no-one will really hear about it but I will still always be proud of it.

A problem I’m having at the moment is that I can only really playtest with my friends and they obviously don’t want to do that for too long to often so I’m having trouble replicating any issues we find in the one or two play sessions we have had. I think the only way to fix that would be for (if I can get them to do another session) me to run replay mod and get them to write a bit of a bug report, or even if they record while playing. Anything that could help me recreate it.

It also been hard because even if I had multiple minecraft accounts to test with (I don’t) it’s always better to test with real people. Just because real people actually do things that you wouldn’t have thought of.

Anyway this is just me talking about software development lol. If you’re interested I’m going to make both the world and the server setup available on GitHub. I’ll also get a version out that doesn’t require any mods (the current one uses a single mod for changing players skins in the game) so that will be cool.

Anyway, thanks for reading

Was going to write a thing on how simplistic the left and right polotical spectrum is but I honestly don’t know enough and couldn’t do it justice. If your interested there are plenty of YouTube videos and articles going into it but at least for now I’ll stick to history and Ideology. Anyway I’d like to let you know that I’m working on a small thing on world wars but sadly I can’t.

THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF ANY IDEOLOGIES TALKED ABOUT IT IS MERELY A DISSCUSION ON THEM!

Was thinking about this today, during WW2 the axis powers were not just refered to as all facist, you obviously had facist Italy and the other two definitely fell under thr umbrella of ‘facist’ but instead they are refered to as ‘Nazi Germany’ and ‘Imperial Japan’. I think this is interesting because it shows the slightly differing ideology between each nation. Facist Italy was just that, facist, incredibly militaristic and nationalistic but nothing really special other than wanting to re-establish the roman empire.

Then you have Nazi Germany who were driven by, you guesed it, Nazisim. This was basically Hitlers brand of facisim that focused on not only driving Germans forward but everyone else out. Finally you have Imperial Japan which I think is the most interesting, they were undoubtedly facist (millitaristic and nationalistic) but their conquest and motivation for war was much more focused on building an empire rather than just because they were facist, sure they (at least the leadership) thought they had a divine right to win and subjugate the rest of the world but that was more justification rather than motivation, the motivation was Imperialism.

And I think thats the key point about these names, they represent each nations individual motivation, justification and overall just the driving factor behind each of their desire for war. They all had their own brand of facisim. Anyway I thought this was interesting and worth writing something about it.

So to follow up on yesterdays post I learned some more about Australian republicanism and Australian government in general. First of all is that the defeat of the voice to parliament basically means that if a republic referendum was held right after and failed it would be a huge blow, 2 back to back rejections does not look good. I also found out that Australian Prime Ministers have no term limits like thr U.S does (also the U.S’s term limits only come from an ammendment, the 10th I believe). Just some random interesting facts to prove that learning dosent happen all at once and even small things can take days to begin to learn about. (im trying to add messages and morals to the end if these and i dont know if i hate or despise it) anyway thanks for reasint.

ALR so I just went down a rabbit hole on Australian politics, constitution and monarchy vs republic. There was actually a referendum on whether to become a republic in 1999 but it failed, mostly because of the model of republic that was presented (the president would be chosen by parliament rather than by popular vote). After the queens death albanese stated that, out of respect, he would not push a republic referendum until at least his second term if it occurs. So it is entirely possible that in the next few years we will have a referendum on it. The only thing it would actually do is signify that Australia is no longer tied, in any way to the UK and we are fully independent. The president probably wouldn’t have any real power but be more of a person that is supposed to personify the nation and act as a diplomat. Personally I am 100% in favour of a republic and monarchys just seem like a relic from the past. Either way there was a lot more to this discussion than I thought there would be (as with all things) and I hope you found this interesting.

So my current obsession is this YouTube channel called “the closer look”. The guy that runs it does video essays on movies and screenwriting, breaking down why specific things work and why other things don’t. One of my favourite ones that I have watched so far is his video on why the messages in Avatar just don’t hit the spot/work well. He also has a video on Wonder Woman 1984 that I found really interesting. I’ve always wanted to write something and this channel has given me some motivation, idk where it will go but my hopes are high. It’s a wonderful channel if your looking for writing advice and/or lessons and I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out!

Channel Link

As I’ve been reading more and more short stories and light novels I’ve noticed that the writing style always follows a similar pattern. It starts off really descriptive and detailed as the Author tries to prove that they can write like that and this isn’t going to be like any other story, it’s going to be detailed! The one caveat of this is that it often feels forced and a bit ostentatious. After a few paragrpahs, the Author seems to notice (or is forced to because of) that this style of writing is just not sustainable for them (and they do it poorly at that) and it eventually settles down into the real quality of the their writing. I think this is interesting because of how often I see it and how a few weeks ago before I noticed this it would be the exact kind of mistake that I would make. All it does is make you seem less competent, for example stories that don’t do this and kick off with the same style and quality feel so much better and interesting to read from the get go (this is also partly due to the fact that because they are not focusing on fancy writing they can actually write better and more engaging scenes). Anyway I found this funny and is one of an endless number of things that circles through my head daily.

plays spiderverse music Lets do this again…

holla. Watched Napolean today. REALLY good at the start especially with the siege of toulon. It gets iffy after his corronation and theres this really long hit about him trying to get an heir that could have been spent on his Russian Campaign or any of the other battles. The 3rd act is really fast and obviously needed more time. They skip over basically everything after his kid (with the exception of the battle of Waterloo) and his later life is just not done justice. It feels to me like it was intended to be a 3.5-4 hour movie but they were forced to cut it down to show in theaters. One thing that I think was done well but still could have done with more time was the Battle of Waterloo, it didn’t really talk about how important it was and if you haden’t heard about it before it was kinda out of the blue but I really liked it as a battle scene. Theres one bit where the English all form squares and shoot down thre circling French cavalry that for some reason I just LOVED (but also hated because the French were litterally just going in circles like wtf do something lol). Anyway it was a very accurate movie, looked and sounded as I would expect from this kind of movie and all it needed is a longer runtime to become one of the best movies of the year. Oh also before I forget the acting was amazing, especially Pheonix just captured everything about Napolean perfectly.

TIL: Due to Taiwans obviously bullshit claim to the entirety of China, they also have to technically lay claim to mongolia, small parts of Russia and parts of half a dozen or so countries that border China. This is because the area they lay claim to actually originates from the previous Qing dynasty that both the ROC (Taiwan) and PRC (Mainland China) claim to be the successor to. Despite this Taiwan maintains not insignificant relations with mongolia and its all a big web of bureaucracy woven by Taiwan to not piss of China.

EDIT: uhhhh so a few months later and ive seen kinda conflicting sources on the actual status of taiwans and chinas claim over each other and mongolia so maybe just distigard this until i can get some actual sources and evidence lol

Was watching a WW2 doco today and it really was good, except for the fact that they went over litterally every batlle faught in the war. Like I get trying to be comprehensive but I don’t need to know every little scuffle between the U.S and Imperial Japan. Either way it was really good and because it was so comprehensive it went over some stuff that most things skip over, like the details of the North African battles.

P.S does this count as a movie review…???