Your mother.

So, yes, posting.

My final project for programming class (40% of grade) is pretty much completely done as of two-days-ago Thursday. It isn't due until next Thursday, so that's a plus. It's an emulated two-player Simon game using these things called Phidgets, and basically you plug this box into a computer's USB port, and one person plays via a little .exe, and the other person bangs arcade buttons on the box. We ripped sounds for the colors blinking from a flash version, and I coded in sounds for winning and losing, but right now those last two are just copies of colorsounds, instead of a little fanfare and a buzzer noise like they should be. But all the code is there, it's just a matter of writing over the wavfiles. SO EXCITING.

Mecha wants to keep the Simon box for playing with later, but the Phidget interface kit has to be given back to the instructor at the end of the semester unless I want to pay $100 Canadian to keep it. I don't even HAVE $100 Canadian, however much that is in USD. 70 or so? Don't have it. Not worth it anyway. You can't even play the thing unless it's hooked up to a computer that has the program and sound files on it.

On Thursday there will apparently be a big presentation thing for all our projects, with people invited to come play with them, so with any luck I will not drop and break the box on the bus ride there. Assuming I do get it there in working order, if you ever wanted to play Simon by hitting arcade buttons wired into an 8x8 wooden box painted black, feel free to come on by the Informatics building next Thursday at 4 PM. Supposedly we will be in the room with all the chairs and couches and the fireplace that I've never actually seen lit.


Things not related to the project. Well.

I had the plague for a while, and now I'm better except my throat's all permaphlegmed. Which doesn't hurt or anything, it just means sometimes I have to take a couple tries at actually talking. It might be allergies for all I know. Last time I was in Bloomington, allergies involved rather a lot more suffering than this, although it may just be that whatever I'm really allergic to doesn't actually bloom until Juneish. For all I know it's something planted right by Evermann that gets me, and now that I don't live there anymore, I won't have to worry. That'd be nice.

There is a cardinal -- or maybe several, but surely such weird behavior points to one deviant individual rather than a bunch of loonies -- that likes to sit on the front step outside the hallway. He just sits there, looking in through the glass door. It's like he wants to come in, only he knows he can't open the door, so he waits for someone to come let him in. Of course, since he is a bird, as soon as anyone actually comes near he up and flies away... but usually only to the nearest bush, and then next time you look he's right back on the step again. He's adorable. There are a lot of birds around here, but that cardinal (those cardinals?) is (are?) my favorite.

I have been... drawing. Several sketches abandoned as being crap, a couple sketches completed-ish and then abandoned, and one sketch that I've actually still got some interest in after borking at it a whole bunch. I inked it, but it doesn't want inking. Or at least not just inking. I've got the craziest urge to try colored pencils again. I've also been having a general urge to try watercolor lately, even though the last time I really worked with it was in high school and I wasn't any good. I know where all this is coming from, of course; it's coming from the fact that I'm continuing to work through ursulav's archives, and thus I keep being inspired. Her influence is very evident in this most recent sketch. Maybe too evident. It almost feels like I stole something from her brain, and then applied my crap skills to it instead of letting it be properly realized using a REAL artist's ability. Meh. I dunno.


Finally, there is of course little change to my general emotional state. Sometimes I feel pretty happy. Usually I do not. I still frequently want to rail and scream and beat at the fabric of reality itself with my tiny insignificant fists, demanding that it give me back that tiny seed of contentment that once I had. For a while I kept swearing I was seeing Chris on the bus -- I'd look out the window as we pulled up to a stop and there he was, and he'd get on the bus just like everyone else and then get off at one of the sets of apartments on the route -- but the problem with thinking that is that it's stupid. Of course it isn't Chris. It's just some guy who looks a lot like him. I'm sure sometimes people do get their deaths faked so they can go into witness protection, or whatever other stupid fantasies my brain has cooked up lately, but none of that applies here. For one thing, that would mean a stunning upset of the assumed nature of reality in my favor. Far more likely the event of spontaneous human combustion. Of everyone in the world named Steve. At once.

I guess this next week when I see my headshrinker I have to ask how I go about seeing a psychiatrist. I'm tired of hearing about how the current approach isn't making me unbroken fast enough. They can dope me to the gills for all I care; I'm just tired of disappointing everyone around me. At least maybe if I'm drugged I won't know that I'm nothing but a disappointment.

Cue the phone calls where people try to nag me into being happy, now, I guess. Maybe after four whole long months, the dark times should all be past, and it should now be mainly sunshine and rainbows with perhaps an occasional five-minute dalliance in the land of Vague Melancholy before the sunshine wins out again. I mean, four months! To lay to rest five years of love and hopes and dreams and all that good but not-for-Jenny stuff! Surely that is more than enough for anyone.

And now I'm getting sarcastic and bitter, so I'm going to play City of Heroes or something. Something where I don't have to think.