C#-Emacs-hakkerointispeksi

Here is a spec for an emacs-hack I'm inclined to make. It's designed to ease the pain of developing C# on windows.I guess it will be mostly useful on cli- and library projects, but it might provide something useful for the winforms projects too. It however won't provide anything for the WPF-development, because I have no projects on it currently, and it's been ages since I've last used it. The text is in finnish, because it is more like a mind dump for myself to quickly restore the ideas to my head when I'll begin hacking than a real spec, and I can't be arsed to translate it. If I'll get any results however I'll write the code & docs in english.

Jos mulla ideaali csharp-ympäristö oisi, miltä se näyttäisi? Noh, Emacsilta tietysti.

Siinä olisi REPL

Eval()in on monta kertaa näytetty olevan toteutettavissa ihan C#;llä suoraan, tarvitsematta kirjoittaa mitään parseria, IL-generaattoria tai muuta pumhuukia. Tämä mahdollistaa alkeellisen C#-REPLin toteuttamisen Emacsiin. Roslynistä tai VS:n Immediate Windowsta voisi myös hakea hakkerointikelpoista pohjaa tai inspiraatiota.

Jos oikein dynaamisia haluttaisiin olla (, käytettäisiin ClojureCLRää tai muuta Lispiä :P), kerrottaisiin Emacsille csc.exen sijainti, ja tälle syötettäisiin kaikki metodimäärittelyt ja isommat, mitä repliin saadaan. Metodeista tulisi jotain Callable-semanttisia luokkia, ja luokista tulisi... noh, luokkia. Csc:llä näistä tehtäisiin .dll-asmeja, jotka ladataan repl-imageen Assembly.LoadAssemblyllä (tai jollain, msdn ei sattuneesta syystä ole bussissa matkaavalla cli-arch-pikkupäpällä käytettävissä). Systeemistä ei tulisi kaunis, replillä generoitujen luokkien käyttö saattaisi vaatia melkoista kikkailua sekä Emacsin että replserverin päässä, replissä määriteltyjen metodien ja luokkien scopelle olisi melkoisia rajoitteita, esimerkiksi luokkien perintä lie mahdotonta toteuttaa, koska perittäviä luokkia ei voi AFAIK käyttäjä ladata, ja rajapinnoista tulisi täysin turhia.

Toisaalta - jos metodiluokkien toteutukset piilottaa hashmappiin, ne olisivat ainakin REPL-expressionien tasolla olemassa. REPL-luokkamäärityksiin niitä tuskin saisi esiin ilman kikkailua. Perinnän voisi huijata niin, että Emacsissa parsii perintämäärittelyt, ja toteuttaa perittävästä luokasta olion uuden luokan kentäksi sekä toteuttaa method-missing - metodin (mikä on toteutettavissa C#:ssä, kuten muutaman viikon takainen googlailuni osoitti), joka delegoi kaikki perityt metodit tälle kentälle. Override-määreiset metodit eivät myöskään olisi paha toteuttaa - korvaa vain base-määreen _inheritedObj - määreellä. Suurin hassu on konstruktori, joka kutsuu base()a, mutta siitäkin selvinnee pienellä string-magialla ( :base(& params) muutetaan konstruktorin ensimmäisellä rivillä _inheritedObj = new _inheritedClass(& params);iksi.

Voisiko VS:n debuggerin kanssa keskustella? Tai ainakin pitää silmällä missäpäin projektia seikkaillaan, ja breakpointin tapahtuessa herättää Visual Studion UI:ssa oikea koodinpätkä esiin? Teoriassa breakpointit voisivat olla toteutettavissa Emacsin sessioon, josta ne lähetetään VS:lle/debuggerille, mutta käytännössä helpompi vain delegoida System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break(); - kutsut jonnekin.

Toisaalta, jos debuggerin kanssa voi keskustella, repl-hässäkkään pitäisi saada näkyville breakpointin lexical scope. Tämä mahdollistaisi repl-hässäkän soveltamisen samoissa usecaseissa kuin VS:n Immediate Window. Lisäksi lambdat käsiteltäisiin oikein :)

Debuggerissa pitäisi komentaa myös C-d C-e - nappien mukaan, jos ei muuten niin ainakin BREAK ON ALL_CLR_EXCEPTIONs - booleanasetus

Mitäs muuta? Kaikki debuggerin ja debugattavan prosessin outputstreamit pitäisi saada kaapattua Emacsiin. Console on helppo, evaluoidaan Console.SetOut(outputsocket.GetStream), mutta Tracesta ja muista debuggivirroista en tiedä.

Tietysti moden pitäisi osata myös clean, build ja start koko sln:lle (vaikka start lie parempi toteuttaa restarttina, joka nollaa replin tilan). Jonkinlainen integraatio sourcesafeen ei olisi huono, winformsille pitäisi kehittää jonkinlainen ajatus, ja taikanappi, joka avaa auki olevan tiedoston Visual Studioon ennalta-arvaamattomien käyttötapausten varalta.

Miltä tällainen csharp-moodi kuulostaisi? En ole saanut hakkeroitua olemassaolevia moodeja toimimaan Emacsin kanssa, mutta tämä speksi kuulostaisi aika täydelliseltä ainakin cli-c#-projektihin, ja tuosta repl-serveristä voisi hakkeroida muitakin juttuja Windowsille ja Monolle. Tuskin hakkeroin tosin; Unixilla leiningenin käyttö sattuu paljon vähemmän aivoon, ja tämän moodin ajatus on vähentää tuskiani windowskehityksessä... Ehkä tätä voisi soveltaa Unityn kanssa?

Disclaimerina sanottakoon, että voin puhua aivan höpöjä tässä tekstissä: en tiedä juuri mitään parsereista ja muista kääntäjätekniikoista, ja minulla on vain pieni aavistus .NETin ja Emacsin toimintaperiaatteista, joten yllätyksiä on varmasti luvassa.

Home is where the book is

I love to travel, that I do. One might not believe it, for after a few hours of anything with less personal space than a train-car, I tend to get an urgent need to rise up with my cracking joints, but I do love it all the same. Especially on the summer, for what would be better way to spend summer than to take an overnight-train to the ass-end of north and spend a day/weekend up there being creative? Well, travelling the 6km it takes to get to Tässi's place near the Siikajärvi lake and being creative there, of course.

I am fascinated by new places, which I think is one of the reasons I love reading and writing fiction so much. I am disgusted by the everyday life so badly I'm practically a living cliché. I loathe the repetitiveness of waking up at 6am and spending a few hours commuting for five days a week. Once summer is gone, which also requires its own sulking, I loathe waking up to the sound of the alarm (although I don't complain of the more humane time it's usually set in the winter, 8am UTC+2, instead of 6am UTC+3 it is currently set) , pedalling through the hail, sleet, tears and blood to the school, wasting a day there and pedalling back to the empty fridge and full project-directory.

So, I like escaping the (not horrible but) dull everyday life to the worlds of Roland & Rajol. And what would be better environment to practice this art of escapism than aeroplane/train-car/the front seat of a car? I have found none. Unfortunately however one has to eat, and no one will pay that one dude to travel writing and reading fiction. Not unless you've built yourself an image of being the next Stephen King, but at least I wouldn't want such. I wish to develop my own style, albeit it tends to look like whatever I'm currently reading.

However, if everyday life is dull and escapism doesn't pay, what is a man to do?

I've spoken of setting up a one-to-three man shop (for various definitions of manhood), developing a story-based game and trying to earn some money of it, but since the only one I have yet achieved to have any interest in the story is the Tässi, and neither of us has any idea of how to monetize things, it has become a sort of eternity-project. Another way of achieving undullness in life I've thought of is commuting with bus for this summer carrying the mac of mine with me, writing 100 to 1000 words of prose a day, and self-publishing the story after a few editing iterations in the leanpub.com. Is anyone of my finnish readers (all one of you :P) up for proof-reading a story derived from Assassin's Creed? And this question is directed at everyone but Tässi and my godmother, for you two will receive a copy wanted you or not :)

Retreating back to the problem of dullness, can I find a solution to it by thinking of the reasons I find the everyday life such?

Well, I obviously don't like being woken up nor having to go to sleep once the creative juices are flowing. I dislike the finnish weather, unless it's as it was in the summer of '13. I dislike cities, and I'd dislike having a 1,5h commute (of which barely 45 min is suitable for writing with the laptop) were I not an obsessive fiction writer capable of taking advantage of these day's most productive minutes. I dislike using software that tries to be smarter than me (in other words, most of the .net devtools, windows in general and all the wysiwyg office BS) and usually fails. I dislike people, who introduce themselves as experts in areas I'm interested in and immediately proceed to invalidating their claim of experthood.

A year ago I held a hope of moving to Kotka would solve the problem of ever-increasing feeling of boredom inside me. No such luck. After spending the then-previous year getting kicked by the Winforms designer to different parts of my body, the very last thing I'll need is a professor telling me how the Visual Studio's forms designer is the best thing since the sliced bread, and I should "learn to program object-orientedly". A common disagreement among the younger of us wannabe-FPeers, I guess. After that I found a few more profs I had disagreements with, and my attitude problems reached their local peak in the spring, when I began asking myself: "what else could I do if not programming?".

That was bad; so bad I had to wonder in the meta-level how things could've gone so bad. In this digital world of ours programming is one of the best professions to be in, for instead of being sent to unemployment, programmers are usually the ones sending people there. When you are programming, you don't have to deal with people 8am-4pm, but instead get to play with... well, calling them toys would undermine my point, because you usually don't do serious work with toys, but then doing serious work with Clojure is so painless it's almost as if playing mere games. And you get to play this game whenever you feel like doing it: in an ideal environment you could run you REPL wherever you want and conncet to it from another side of the globe.

I guess I didn't get in to the Aalto university I applied to in the peak of this all, and I dare not open the results website (for the results will arrive in post in a few weeks) and check them, so I am quite sure I'm returning to the beautiful city of Kotka this fall. I guess this is for the best, because going to Aalto would have meant moving nearer to Helsinki, which would surely have driven me insane. I'll keep going to the school, because the society doesn't view dropouts without 8am-4pm job in a good light (and the engineer's degree isn't bad at all to have), and try to finish the prose of mine and actually learn to program the unity engine. I might need to make real acquaintances in the Kouvola to get real graphics to this story-driven-über-RPG of mine, but the static models made by myself would be enough when presenting the prototype to the potential designers.

Oh yes, haven't I mention? Currently I'm planning on utilizing the MERPG-manuscript in a 3-dimensional unity-project. Scripting it will probably be an experiment in pain, but at one could try to write its scripts on JS. And aside the foolish script-environments and complex (although probably necessarily such) GUI, that engine isn't actually so bad ("seriously? :O")

The 2D-Clojure-engine hasn't seen the light of the day since the christmas, and likely won't at least until the next. I've thought about it at lot, and will return to it at some moment, because the lispy core makes its development, to quote myself, as if playing mere games. That core will also make the engine/game a lot more flexible and longer-living, assuming I'll actually finish with it anytime soon, than most of the 2D-games done with unity.

To summarize: the future holds prose, interesting game projects, a lot of mental effort to keep the school from killing this interest, and lot of wondering and wandering for me. Anyone interested of tagging along? Everything (maybe excluding the writing-process of the prose, as the writing is THE loneliest profession) I enumerated would be more pleasent had I not to face them alone </lolangst>. I will probably push the unity-thingy to the github once I've began developing it, and I am ready to distribute the manuscript quite freely (and probably am currently distributing at http://merpg.webs.com, I can't be arsed to open it in the safari and check).

What is a truth?

He was the Artist. He called himself that, for he had never been good with names. He felt it was hard to come up with good names, and no names but the best were good enough for his characters (and himself, of course). He just hadn't found a good name, so that was what he called himself, and how he introduced when someone asked his name in the professional context. His parents had given him a name in birth, of course, but it was an irrelevant name, for everyone writing classic prose used a pseudonym. His was the Artist, until he either found a better one or wrote a masterpiece with that pseudonym.

The clock went through its darkest hours. It really wasn't dark, for he lived already June, and the clock was eleven in the evening. He was cycling. Was he cycling in the city or in the countryside? Irrelevant, he knew, for they complemented each other. In the city he could keep an eye on other people who had wondered into the night to search a better tomorrow. In the countryside he could keep an eye on himself, for for every better tomorrow found around him he grew more and more conscious of how bad he was at searching them. He enjoyed the utter solitude he found cycling in the middle of a pine forest, and loved the loneliness hiding inside the unending stream of company in the city.

He was a writer, yes. One thing he had learned by heart: a man reading know books along his life lived only once, a man reading a thousand books lived a thousand times, and a man writing a thousand books was a goddamn god. He found writerhood being comparable to insanity, as described by the late David Eddings: if he found doors boring one day, he could just write them to be little transparent, s-shaped things without boring, plain and simple colouring but instead coloured by Van Gogh. If he found his thoughts boring, he could write the walls to sing him a lullaby or to have an interesting conversation of the big questions of life. If he was bored, he could just open his notepad and write a play of light and shadows.

The artist loved summer evenings and nights. He was a nightowl, yes, but he loathed the winternights that began at 3PM. In summer he could take a bicycle for a ride in the midnight, and he needed neither artificial lights nor warm clothes for the sun provided both the light and the warmth. If he couldn't sleep, which was more frequent than he felt safe to admit, he could set up a work environment (an absurd chair and a writing tool somewhere between a notepad and a laptop) in the yard. If he had an awesome project under development, he could relocate himself to a near beach sauna, enjoy the warm sauna til the small hours of the morning to kick the creative juices flowing inside his mind, and then move to the pier to write intensively. The last way to write was among the best he knew, but it was also among the easiest to break. If he forgot to take a bath in insect repellent, he couldn't write a thing in the pier. Hours around 2am were also unbelievably cold outside the warmest nights of the July, and he couldn't just write the temperature to be higher.

Two things he hated with passion: noon and winter. Noon meant everyone else would be not sleeping but harassing him with foul trivialities such as the real life: when are you going to do your school/job projects? When are you going to eat? When are you going to waste your time with another irrelevant act that just belongs to adulthood?

And winter. He couldn't take his writing equipment outside, for either he froze his ass off or the equipment did, and even the cycling was stupid in the winter (for he had asthma). Winters were dark times, the sun setting few hours after the noon made him creative, yes, but his playful, childish creativity turned into sombre and gloom for months once the calender turned September. He hated artificial light, and there wasn't enough natural, so he had to pour the feeling of walls crashing upon him into somewhere, and as a loner, the paper was the only thing ready to listen him.

He was an artist, a writer. He loved watching people dance, but hated the dance himself. Let's hope nobody told him he can't avoid the dance. He loved the solitude, and hated the fact he couldn't live in it. He loved to be around people, and hated that fact. He loved people, he hated people. He loved writing, he hated writing. He was a man of conflicting views. He loved summer, he hated summer. He loved winter, he hated winter. He was a man of fiery passions. He knew what anxiety looked like in a handful of dust. He was the writer.

And that was the truth. Choo choo!

I'm in love!

And this doesn't happen often, for I'm one tough customer when it comes to culture such as books. Luckily it however happens so often that I can claim my brain isn't calcified beoynd redemption. Last time I fell in love for a book (or in most cases, a series of books) was four years ago, when I met the Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales - books, in which we followed a saxon in the ninth-century britain. The books are as historically accurate as possible without giving up the poetic license, and contain moderate amounts of violence (where moderate amount means twenty saxons killing hundreds of vikings in a shield-wall without casualties :)). So, basic stuff you'd expect an Age of Empires II fan to love.

And what have I fallen for now? The Stephen King's Dark Tower, that's what. I've been told now and then for the last five years how I should read something from the King, because why should I not read them? I didn't care to read that stuff for such lame arguments (and in fact, reading anything that needs arguments to justify the reading is dumb), and I always categorized King as something people my father's age read, mainly because his bedside table always contains at least two King novels. By doing that I forgot that most of my father's books, or at least the Hitchhiker's guide and Stainless Steel Rat, are in fact among the best I've read.

Anyway, I spent a weekend in Estonia. There, I found myself in a local bookstore's area of english books, for I find my skills of Estonian language lacking. They had a shelf dedicated to the King's Dark Tower novels. I had seriously thought of reading a book or two, so a quick call to my father revealed that he has parts 2, 3 and 4 at home, so I have to buy only the first. Then, I spent a week reading the book, sometimes wondering what kind of funnytea he had drunk while writing, sometimes laughing to the genious twist in the plot. After that week I began the second book, and after a week I'm now reading the third, with great difficulties in putting it down and beginning to read stuff I'm supposed to read currently (if you need to know, electricity physics and such).

The first book was a bit dull, but undull enough to get me to pick up the second book. The second book had weird initial situation, most of the first few hundred pages happened inside a mind of a heroin courier. This sounds like a generic american movie, but in fact that worked nicely. A heroin addict, recovering or not, is also a good character to wonder the weirdness of the world, as I think the Holmes NYC tv-series has demonstrated. After the initial shock of the feeling of an american movie, the book had some cogitation on the evil of the world, both natural occurring and man-made, and nice, abstract symmetry. And doors in a bloody beach! I had great doubts on them, but their absurdity actually works!

The first part of the third book was a bit boring, maybe too much pondering on irrelevant things, or something, but now that we're following Jake once again, I'm trading hours of sleep for the pure enjoyment of reading the book.

As a writer myself, I'm mainly reading these to get my muse to sing for me again. The first 'Lomaproosa' owns its existence to Assassin's Creeds, Cornwell's books, and a bit on Witchers (both the books and the games). Albeit I probably wont borrow the huge amounts of absurdity from the Roland's universe, its effect will be visible in the second instalment of Rajol Al-Ramal's adventures. I love how the Roland's world feels to have seen all the great things in the past, and now the only thing it will see is its own demise. That kind of a setup provides multiple possibilities on asking big questions of life, but tales consisting mostly of these questions are horribly hard to write to be interesting.

And what is the conclusion, what am I trying to say with this short text? Damn if I know. Maybe it is that everyone should read the Dark Tower - series, because why should they not?

Email rant

Good day to you. I think communicating with people isn't as good as it could be these days. For example, the SMS represents the least horrible way of communications. If you do call someone, you have to try to do sort-of face-to-face communications without being able to communicate nonverbally. I don't know about other people, but at least I rely much more on the nonverbality when discussing face-to-face, and thus making a phone call feels like driving a car without wheels. With SMS you don't have the social pressure of forming the response in milliseconds, and thus you are able to actually think before saying things, and you have also time to play little verbal games. However, SMS is not the final solution to the problem of communications. They are really used only in the phones, they originally had the stupid 160 char limit, and again, I don't know of other people, but I hate doing SMS with a touch screen.

How do we, for example, communicate with computers? Well, with emails. Emails are another thing I hate with firey passion, alongside the phone calls. You always check the mail folder too often or too seldom. Done too often, your real jobs suffer, and done too seldom, people will complain. You could setup the Outlook on your pc to ping you every time it receives mail, which'll lead to the former problem, or you can use the web clients, which'll lead to the latter. I think the only thing worse than receiving email is sending it, for you have to prepared for the recipient to read it either immediately or sometime within the following decade. With email the misunderstandings are the easiest and the worst, and with the previous problems, they'll probably be noticed too late. And then there's the problem of spam. Luckily the problem of completely irrelevant spam has been solved, but the problem of almost relevant spam is still strong. The usual cause for the almost relevant spam are the people that don't know how to use the email. They'll send mail to whole school groups, when the mail is relevant to maybe three out of the fifty students, because they don't know who it is relevant to. Subject lines with the pattern [Re:|Fwd:]* (hoping I got the regexp correct :P) are sign of collective stupidity of both users and email clients alike. If the discussion has more than two participiants, making a flattened representation of the discussion tree up to the present moment is unbelievably hard, if not impossible, and the signatures with a length of a Yegge's rant make following the discussion even larger pain in the ass. And guessing how formal to be in the mail? Hard.

So, emails might have been a good idea a few decades ago. What else do we have? Well, one can always build a persistent communication tool around the discussion board - concept, but, unlike emails and calls, has never been not-stupid idea. You either setup some PHP-based abomination who first saw daylight fifteen years ago (and thus working inside it is nothing like working with a tolerable PHP-codebase), or you experiment with something like Discourse, on which I wouldn't base my life on. Or, in my case, with little work I could hack the Pröng to be a tolerable PHP-communications-board to achieve anything, for the code isn't actually bad (despite the database interactions being a slight WTF), but that's not an option for general people because I can't be arsed to release the source code.

And the last, but not in any way, the least: the instant messages. If your friend is not online, they work sort-of like email, and if the friend is, the friend is forced to react to it somehow. This has the same productivity problems as setting up the Outlook to ping upon every new email, but for some reasons it feels not as awful to me. If the friend doesn't react with at least response like "ok" within a few minutes, he probably is never gonna react, and if there's miscommunication, people can immediately (or if the other participiant is offline, once he logs in) ask for clarification. The IM-discussions also scale to multiple participiants much more nicely than emails. The formality usually is a no-problem, for the tone of discussion is usually the same as would be in a gang of friends hanging out.

Unfortunately, most of the IMs of the day have an awful user experience. And in case they have a good UX like the five-year-old Windows Live Messenger -09 had, they have minor fuckups one can't fix themselves, and the customization- and expansion possibilities are fairly limited. These I try to fix with the IM-project of mine, which currently lacks a good name. I'll maybe tell more about this thing's current state, but now I'll move to the sauna. Til the next time!

Writing is hard

I like to think myself as a writer. Writers are nice people, who have interesting thoughts, read people and books alike, and write awesome stuff, so who wouldn't like to title himself thus? Luckily I haven't had the chance to be questioned about my writerness yet, for my latest project spawned a story whose word count would earn it a place in the NaNoWriMo - competition if writing it took 1/18th of time it really did. If someone actually dared to ask on what grounds my title lies, that text would be my answer. From simpler minds I do not fear the question, for the word-count would be baffling: "Oh wow. He has managed to embed so much words to a story. He must be good". I am afraid for a day I meet someone like myself, who knows that quantity tells nothing, quality tells everything, and also is able to ask how long ago I last began writing a good story. I have objectively verified that the technical quality of that old text is not terrific, it would love to be fed through a grammar checker at the very moment I find one that doesn't suck, and on a subjective scales of myself and Tässi's, the story isn't too well thought out. And the worst fact: I began writing the text in January of the 2012, finished it in the June of 2013, and decided I won't begin a new text until my eternity-project MERPG is ready, which by the definition, will take an eternity.

Okay, I admit, I did some experimentation in the October on the Lomaproosa2, but it was half-assed attempt at continuing the story. Really I was just experimenting with the org-mode. I have also written a blogpost now and then even after the summer, and these blogposts are what I really want to be talking about today. Let this be time for metablogging!

In case you haven't noticed, at some distant moment in the last summer of '13 I began speaking english here. I did it for a good reason, for I had some idea concerning programming, and if I had began writing about it in finnish, I would have had to use so many untranslateable englishms that it was easier to write in english to begin with. That text was easy because I didn't need to think about it: I just had an abstract idea, that needed meat around it in form of words, and after an hour of banging the keyboard, it was ready to be published. Texts after that though, some of them were ugly, some had an idea hidden so deep behind a wall of grammatical and conceptual WTFs that I had to unpublish them before someone important read them and decided I am a 11-year-old american teen who's never had to learn either his language nor his profession. How has it come to this?

Let's have a look on my history. I graduated high school (I hope that's what Lukio is in english. I've never understood how to translate our school-system to english) in 2012, when my english was graded as M. I'll not even try to translate these yo-grades to english, let's just say my english was upper average. After that, I began working in the industry, so no more weekly english lessons for me. For 1,5 years my weekly doses of english came from programming blogs and books, writing code with english keywords and comments (for the Visual Studio and Netbeans being too shitty to not fuck up the scandic characters), tv, games, music, and sometimes I even read prose in english. That's why I am not afraid of the Georger R.R. Martin's heavy writing style in the Game of Thrones - book I'm currently reading. My reading comprehension is excellent, but how did I rehearse my writing and discussion skills? Well, a year of writing mainly comments in english makes anyone a terrific comment-writer, but as expected, my longer texts are rubbish. And discussion? My social skills suck, I am not able to discuss even in finnish with anyone not sharing at least a decade's worth of context with myself. Good luck trying to interact with people not belonging in my family or not being named 'Tässi'. If I can't discuss with laymen in finnish, what hope do I have in interacting in english?

None :)

Back in the end of January, in the Finnish Game Jam I promised a text from but never wrote one, my team had a majority of non-finnish people. I genuinely tried communicating in english as much as possible, but after a few hours I realized I had some troubles following even the finnish guys, and soon after that my vocal communications decreased to a point where I communicated only with the guy who's best skills lie in communicating with people. Not a smart move, I know, but it just happened without me really noticing.

What I'm trying to say here is that I read english absolutely well (well, Tässi might argue with that assertion, but as a wise man once said, benchmarking yourself against people who could solve anything you throw at them if they wanted to is stupid), but my textual output isn't as classy, and although I'd probably survive in the GB ar US as long as I cared to, my vocal output is as horrible as any finn's. What the hell am I writing these in this language, then? Two facts I've had trouble understanding and accepting in the past are that everybody sucks nobody, including me, is perfect and it doesn't matter. Let me repeat: I suck, and it's okay. The definition of suckage is also one I got screwed up ages ago. In my world — this might sound like a quote from BBC's Sherlock or House — only thing worse than complete failure is being average and dull. In school you either did all the exercises or you did none - since picking the easy raisins from the bun would've been just stupid.

How does this relate to the blogging, which I was supposed to blog about? I'm not entirely sure anymore. This rambling is what you'll get when you run to write a last, polished version without sketching first. Children, please, plan and sketch your texts first, even though these emacses of the present day do make it seem reduntant.

So, I'm a writer, who has some experience of english, this lingua franca of our trade of programming. More in the consuming side, some in the producing side, and most of it writing comments explaining or questioning WTFs in a code. I however practise my trade of writing real texts seldom and with very long texts (like this has some potential of becoming, 1121 words and counting). Most of the stuff I produce falls into the crap-category, at least in my eyes, which have this black and white view of this world where you either are the best or you're nothing, and Tässi's, who's mind I think is so exceptional I rarely give his negative criticism any value unless I'm honing the edges and polishing the surfaces, for none but him seem to pay attention to details in such extremes.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

That's not a rhetorical question.

First, the timing just sucks. One can't hold on to skills one doesn't hone periodically. Within the last year, upon returning to the school, I've seen myself screwing royally up many math-, linguistic-, and people-problems I would have found unbelievably easy in the best moments of the high school, and with most of them I had an idea that I'd seen such puzzles in the past, but I hadn't solved them for so long I couldn't remember how it is done . As I've cried for the last two or three years, I'm supposed to write much more than I currently do, and although the 750words - experiment brought a few more texts last month than I would've expected in the first days of the February, that well may have dried at the end of my trial-period. I stopped the experiment two weeks ago, for in the holidays I had absolutely no time to bleed into the internet, and the last week was so weird and stressful that I couldn't resume it. In the future however, I'll try to publish at least a text a week, and probably fail :) But then again, I suck and it doesn't matter.

In shorter words, I should write more to keep my english- and writer's skills from decaying.

Second, I yearn for quality that isn't achievable. If I concentrated more on producing text, less on worrying how people react to the rubbish I write, I might actually get something real written. A nice side-effect could be that the rubbishness-level decreases also, but I wouldn't hold my hopes high.

Third, however much I try and want, I'm incapable of writing language rants. They are hellishly hard to write even if not caring enough to get the facts straight, and because I can't write like Yegge, my "rants" are dull to read.

And the last but not the least of my blogging- related problems: I don't live enough. The problem can be rewritten in a form that I can't build up a facade of living enough. For example Swizec seems to pop between the US and different european countries every now and then, and he seems to have a routine of spending some time doing anything but programming or writing. Me? I just go to school, program & write, and spend summer-evenings in the Siikajärvi. Could I routinely make up interesting texts of this life? Oh yes! Do I? Of course not, for I don't consider it living a life interestingly enough. I seem to be missing many interesting people too, because I never caught on to any professional community in Helsinki, there seems to be none ready in Kotka (but I'm keeping my eye on one or two building up), and people who can't program are either dull or scary.

Of these four, only the last half of the last problem is probably unsolvable if I try to solve it alone. I should be meeting much more interesting people, and spending time with them, but since there are no real excuses to go out and meet them (because meeting people for only the joy of meeting them is scary), I'm not.

Oh, I could come up with one more problem: my typing speed is horrible (due to having usually only a lack of plan to base the text around), so writing texts with one to two thousand words seem to take whole weekend. I should apply the usual tricks to increasing my words per minute - value: planning the text, writing many texts, and finishing the IM-project and getting a buddy to IM with while coding furiously. The IM-trick is better than it sounds. I can write without looking at the keyboard (ie. touch type?) not because I've consciously exercised this ability but because when Tässi did IM enthusiastically, I had code or story flowing nicely, and had to respond to him too without breaking the infamous glass palace, I didn't have time to admire the keyboard. Another scenario where my WPM has been high was the Age of Empires 3, where I've always discussed with other players (well, the other player, for none but Tässi has kept interest in that game after the 2007) by text, but had to also play the game. Still, for mere writing and coding I've never had to develop high WPM.

But, to wrap this up, let's once more repeat: I suck, it doesn't matter, I don't write enough (to hold interest and to keep my english-skills from decaying), I worry too much while writing, I haven't found the niche to blog in/about, I don't meet enough people, when I write, I'm unable to stop, and my WPM is horrible. What is the solution? Same as in the sports: EXERCISE!

Babbling of the Lomaproosa

I don't think anyone but Tässi will understand anything of this mind dump for I've still not managed to publish the old Lomaproosa anywhere. However, let this be published here, in a place where it is easily fetched.

I should continue the Lomaproosa - project. I have been doing thinking, and I am sure the stealing of Rajol's children would be... well, it would be a cliche, but a cliche that kickstarts the story. I'll edit it into something else if and when I see fit. The children, who Rajol doesn't know are his, are stolen to the lands of the south. Who are these thieves? And what the hell exists in the south?

Some time ago we decided with Tässi that although in the regular maps the north is in the up and west is in the left side of the map, in the maps of MERPG (available in the merpg.webs.com) the north is to the left and the west is thus to the down. This provides some sort of help for the cartographers (in other words, me, until Tässi is again available), but I fail to recall the exact nature of this help. Still, what is there in the south?

There should not be grand wizards, for they are supposed to be dead now that the Tuula was got rid of in the end of the previous text, and bringing them back would be as ridiculous as the Daleks, who are killed into extinction in the every other series of the Doctor Who. Pirates, which I think I spoke something of in the previous text, are also a ridiculous cliche, albeit a popular one. I should play the Assassin's Creed 4 through though until I write anything real of the pirates.

But what do I put into the south!? Who would be stupid enough to steal the children of the greatest hero the universe has ever seen. And how should the said hero understand the kids are his? And how should I get back to the guild he thinks views him a failure? And, of course, WHAT DOES EXIST IN THE SOUTH?

Let's try associations. In the lion king, there are the lions, who can be associated to the guild in my texts. Then there are the animals that aren't lions, but aren't the hyenas either. These can be associated to the common folks. Then, the hyenas, the awful guys. Who can they be associated to?

Some sort of nomadic tribe, I'd say. They don't know anything of the magic, which I'd say didn't work too well in the old text, but with their swords, horses and siege weapons they are extremely fatal to both villages such as the Vo Wacune (a tribute to the author who introduced me to the genre of fantasy, may he rest in peace) where the Rajol resides, and castles such as the guild's, resided by the assassins and their leader, Rajol's beloved Amrah. If these guys raze the Wacune (again with the tributes...), harass the guild into its knees and destroy half of the world that survived the mass destruction of the first story, I'd have a base to build the story on.

But what does motivate this tribe to attack the northern world? I could follow the Conn Iggulden's idea of the civilized world discriminating the nomads, but what for would the Amrah, the undoubted leader of the post-war world and one trying to unite the world, do bad things against them? No. Are they lacking in food, and also attracted by shiny metals the cities of the north are filled with? Yes, that could work. Food and gold, another cliche, but I'm not afraid of them, as you could see had I published the old text anywhere.