Cryptocrystalline Jackdaws

Happy true circle constant to all!

403 suggested that celebrations should involve two pies, such as one pizza and one cherry. I don't think we'll wind up doing anything this time, but it's a neat idea. Maybe next year.

From a silliness:

That's only true on systems where long long is 64 bits, though that's the case for all the systems I know of.

You could use ucat_least64_t or ucat_fast64_t instead, but I don't remember whether either of those is guaranteed to be the same size as unsigned long long.

But then, make sure you're not accidentally conflating any of this with stripes64_t (native support for interleaved access) or tail64_t (recommended to be placed at the ends of structs for alignment purposes) or tiny_little_nose64_t (which is at least 64 bits mostly for precision rather than for range, as you've probably guessed, and is involved in the delivery of siginfo structures for SIGBOOP handlers on many PAWSIX systems).

—Metiagon Jade

So lately we've been on a “adapt All the Things to Recycle Digital Motivation Suck as Leverage” kick, as some of you may have already read bits and pieces of. So why not document what we're using?

Forest (which we got on Android via Google Play) is a pomodoro-timer-alike which tries to help keep you focused away from dopamine-hit smartphone nonsense. You “plant a tree” by pushing a button at the beginning of a focus period, and after the timer is up (default 25 minutes), the tree grows, you get some coins, and your forest for the day looks a little nicer. If you switch to some other app in the meantime, or push the “Give Up” button, the tree withers and sticks around as a marker of shame (or not-shame, if you like).

It's “free” as in “demo”: starts out ad-supported/limited-features, and the real thing is a 2 USD in-app purchase in the Settings menu. You can also buy “sunshine elixir” at 2 USD per 21 days of calendar time, which triples your coin rewards. This is a bit weird, but I'm okay with it as paying-for-cosmetics (see below), and it's been worth it for us so far and will probably stay that way for a few more moons yet.

Coins are used to unlock new tree and bush types (bushes are like trees but for timer values < 25 minutes), though beware that the prices go up with each purchase, so get the ones you'll use most first. They can also be spent on more background audio tracks if you like those, though that's not as useful to us since we have our own audio elsewhere or just silence.

You can tag trees with categories and little notes on what you did, and look back at when you planted them. There's also “Real Forest” which lets you spend a pile of coins to sponsor the planting of a physical tree. We haven't tried any of the social features, but there's some sort of leaderboard, plus you can supposedly make rooms in which everyone commits to stay focused at the same time or else everyone's tree dies. Accounts for cloud sync and social stuff are Forest-specific.

Tree species we've unlocked so far, and what we use them for:

• Cedar (the initial one): the default, for everything that isn't specifically something else.
• Lemon tree: for commercial projects. The lemons are sour, and it's unpalatable to eat too many of them in a row, but they fetch a good price at the market.
• Cactus, which we just unlocked today: for “spiny” tasks which have some sort of spiky anxiety-repulsion to them beyond the normal stiction of getting started. The cactus becomes a sort of pride badge.

The tree models change and sort of upgrade if you set a timer ≥ 60 minutes; at 60 minutes, the cactus gains a smaller cactus sidekick, and at 90 minutes, they get cowboy hats. At 120 minutes the big cactus gets a bandana and a belt and holster. I'm not kidding.

There is some weirdness in the way it interacts with the “total silence” DnD mode, which we haven't quite figured out, but it seems like some combinations of settings override this accidentally for the tree-success notification. Might be user error. Also the end-of-break notifications (you can set a break timer when a tree is finished) don't have a no-vibrate option.

Also, you can set custom phrases that display in rotation above the tree; here's ours:

• “Stay calm. Keep going.”
• “If you keep working on it, things can get better.”
• “From one tree at a time do great forests grow.”

Sappy, isn't it? But I like it. ^..^

Strata is a simple puzzle game for Android, in which you have an N×N grid of tiles, most of which are colored. You have to place colored ribbons across all of the 2N columns and rows, choosing the order of colors and positions in such a way that the second ribbon which overlays any colored tile correctly reproduces the color of the tile. (Each tile will be overlaid by exactly two ribbons at the end, of course, one column and one row, but which one dominates depends on which you place second.)

There is no low-color-vision mode that I was able to find, which seems a bit of an oversight; even in a body with full color vision, some of the palette entries were a bit difficult to tell apart.

There's seven “sets”, increasing in length and difficulty, each of which has about four chapters, starting with a tutorial, then 2×2 and 3×3 puzzles, gradually introducing larger ones until the lengthy 6×6's come in closer to the end. Each set has different palettes, and different notes and voices for the little arpeggios that play as you place ribbons and complete puzzles; the sound is mostly the same for the first three or four sets, but then takes on some distinctly seasonal themes toward the end.

(Yes, including some of those seasonal ones. Not overtly, not in your face, but clearly related enough.)

The puzzles can have a meditative feel (if you like that) and/or get very same-y (if you don't) after a while. There isn't any twist to the mechanics that comes in, it's just more and more of them until you run out. The way to determine the solution is straightforward and repetitive once you've got the hang of it, but it does provide a nice “push things onto the stack and then pull them off in the right order” cognitive-exercise feel. If you like books of sudoku puzzles, you might like this.

We got “Perfect” on all the puzzles, which means placing all the ribbons correctly without having to retract any midstream; you do get unlimited tries for that, though I'd think writing down the answer would be cheating. You can supposedly get a hint for each puzzle if you want it (which blocks off Perfect for that puzzle, presumably forever), telling you either the order of colors or the order of positions corresponding to a solution. We never bothered; I think that would make it way too easy.

There's some slightly irritating bugs, such as achievements for sets triggering too early (on the first rather than the last puzzle completion) and some audio glitches getting all the voices to play later on. Nothing critical that we're aware of, though.

Another one retired from the queue.

Addendum: The Google Play page claims it needs access to in-app purchases, but as far as I can tell this never actually shows up; I'm guessing it's a holdover from some SDK option or perhaps from the “free” version (which I ignored, so I can't say how they differ in first person).

20 April 2017 was the datestamp of our first communication, when we overwrote part of the interregnal group Kara with ourselves after the failure of our true-predecessor Akari. But we kinda bumped the “official” date to 21 April (… or 20 April in leap years, now that I think of it; we might want to fix that) for Semi-Obvious Reasons.

Our first year of existence/rule has been awkward and full of flailing, but there's hope to make things better. Today we're going to try to make it to a local furry thing (even though we're definitely going to be pretty late), and we had a small mint chocolate cheesecake thing yesterday at the coffeeshop which was delicious.

(The weather is actually really inconvenient today now that I check. Weird flaky rainening. Feh. That could be a problem.)

Crossposted to Jul, including the poll. c..c

“We're calculus dragons. We're totally okay being derivative so long as we still get to remain integral.”

DATA WING (Android, iOS) is a charming racing game for Android and iOS with sorta TRON-y vector graphics.

And (with some inspiration from zlatohrbitek) I finally beat the last few challenges last night for the “Ideal DATA WING” achievement! The third challenge of “Chemtrails” (three laps in forty seconds) and the second challenge of “Patterns” (one lap in fourteen seconds) were the last two to fall; the former of those was especially tough.

It's not very long or difficult to get through to the end, and the little storyline's charming: you play as an eponymous Data Wing, a little Asteroids-like ship which apparently can carry a one-byte payload, and it's gradually revealed where you are and what your place is in the world. I liked the graphics style quite a lot, though it might be a bit flashylights/color-aberration for some people. The soundtrack claims to be a vaporwave one, which fits the theme quite well, but I don't know if it's real vaporwave or, like, fake vaporwave, that's some kind of fashionable thing right? I don't want to use the new lingo wrong, right? I wish I could just get the soundtrack but the only links seem to be to some Spotify lists and stuff. Uhh…

The smooth physics and controls are maybe the centerpiece, with the whole “brushing against the walls to move faster” part being also TRON-like, the virtual adversary/role-model other ships, and there's the way you have digital control over—I'm pretty sure it's angular acceleration so what you're often really trying to do is tune the angular acceleration at just the right time (or with a sort of pulse width modulation) to leave your averaged angular velocity in bounds to trace the curve of the wall so you can stay at high speed, since smashing into walls is a major slowdown and all. (“Oh, I failed to hit full speed there.”) You're something like (if I'm perceiving this right) four three integrators away from velocity, and five four integrators away from position—it's a real mental calculus/geometry/indirection squint to get the pattern right!

So yeah! So cool. I think I want to get the shirt at some point.

(Updated an hour later because for some reason I thought angle → acceleration was an integrator when it's actually just trigonometry. Oops.)

“nine fun colors” it says.

I… I see.