Virtual Thought

We’re at the new house, not the house we’re in now, but the new one and it badly needs repairs. A big rusty pipe is leaking some fluid onto the concrete floor and an exhaust tube, kind of like the type used for dryers to catch lint, is full of some tough, wooly, fibrous material. There are plastic dropcloths on some of the walls, and I don’t feel comfortable living there anymore.

We’re all there, too, having some sort of party with these new people that we’ve met who are trying to fix the house… but meeting with little success.

Alex isn’t helping: he pulls some drywall down and exposes an old door, one which our landlords sealed off right when we moved in. This sparks a conversation about the other doors that were sealed off, the ones that give a view of the backyard. I remark that the room would have creeped me out if I’d had that view of the backyard at night. I don’t remember if anyone agrees.

Right around then I notice that one of my teeth, my bottom right bicuspid in fact, is raised a bit. Probing around with my finger, I shove it back into place.

Things get blurry here for me… what happened next exactly? Securing the thick wire around the styrofoam mannequin head to simulate some nightmarish headgear for the girl who wanted to dress as a Cenobian? We stumbled over the word “Cenobian” and, I think, only managed “Ciccadian” at the time. Was this when my brother and some woman took a nap in a recliner not because they knew each other but because the recliner was comfortable and they both need to sleep somewhere?

At one point my curiosity and dread finally overcome me and I reach into my mouth and pull on that lower tooth. I feel the satisfying ripping that I only previous experienced when I was a kid worrying and pulling my baby teeth out of my mouth… but suddenly I realize that too much is coming out of my mouth. The ripping of dental roots becomes a kind of fleshy tearing feeling and I’ve gone too far.

I rush to the bathroom, one of those bathrooms with a big vanity mirror and two sinks and a marble counter top. I’m still holding whatever it is I pulled out of my mouth. Terra comes with me, asking, “What’s wrong? What is it,” but my mouth is too full to answer without spilling anything. I put my head over a small soapdish (why not the sink?) and spit out some blood and small bits of tissue, which Terra catches in her hand. I don’t want her catching it in her hand and at first I feebly bat her hand away as I continue to spit blood and gobbets of flesh out of my mouth.

Finally, I slap down what I’ve been holding: it’s not just one tooth with some skin attached, it looks like a piece of my jaw along with three or four teeth and blood and skin. It makes a hard sound when it hits the counter top and I’m able to push Terra’s hand away as she’s somewhat limp with disgust. Spitting into the sink this time, I empty my mouth of the rest of the blood, bone, and bits of flesh that I’ve been carrying.

I wipe my mouth and stand up and probe at the gaping hole in my mouth, tender and bloody.

Drunken Norwegian moose.
Flying Norwegian moose.

Check out the Related Moose Stories.

Time to move to Norway. Moose country.

I have an itch to program on my Mac at home. Something in a game kind of way.

ObjectiveC and XCode are right out the window. If I wanted to program with technology that felt 5 – 8 years old I would stick with C++ on Visual Studio 6 on Windows 98. Thanks, but no thanks… the Interface Builder rocks. Totally rocks. But XCode itself makes it pretty plain to me that Apple doesn’t love its developers—mayhap they even hate their developers. C’mon Apple: go find out how to make a real IDE and give us something useful! And, BTW, don’t make developers use a language that doesn’t have namespaces for God’s sake: don’t make me preface all of my type names with DRH and make me feel like I’m still using Emacs (Escape Meta Alt Control Shift) and gcc. Sheesh!

There’s always Ruby using TextMate. That’s a little painful though: I find myself posessing a rotted mind and missing my little auto-generated code and my Intellisense. I’m not proficient in Ruby enough to get the OpenGL bindings or, even, the FXRuby bindings to work. They don’t quite compile on the Mac… and many of the pages I find about RubySDL are in Japanese.

There’s also Python, of course… after all, Google uses Python... and I like the language. I even downloaded some Python game libraries that allow some pretty cool stuff with not much code. The pyGame library offers exactly what I’d want for a game programming library: reasonably fast, very productive, straightforward and well-documented with tons of examples. Fantastic! Definite possibilities here… except for my unfamiliarity with the language which would quickly be solved by starting a home project. Hrm.

But what about proce55ing, which Sean is totally obsessed with these days (his fertilization simulation efforts are coming along nicely)? I think I’ll have to put this one a distant third for now… something about the format doesn’t quite click with me… although the easy conversion of all your work to an applet is pretty frickin’ cool.

Of course, I could totally just put my old PC back together and make a managed DirectX game… what’s this I hear about DirectX 10 not being backward compatible? Whoa.

So how ‘bout Java with a little JOGL on the side? Then I get to use Eclipse which wouldn’t be so bad… but, I don’t know, Java?

Then there’s Mono alongside some incarnation of Tao to handle graphics… but what IDE to use? Ah, yes… what about fucking Monodevelop which has earned the dubious honor of being the hardest program I’ve ever tried to compile (including the Linux kernel!). Fink has been faithfully plugging away trying to update my GTK# libraries for the past three hour so I can even, maybe, possibly think about compiling Monodevelop myself. Blech.

But, all in all, it’s kind of fun.