What a difference 20 months makes!

If there wasn't a difference, that's be worrisome, right?

Since the last time I posted here in late 2020 I've actually derped out a whole bunch of code and it turned into a playable thing over at The Awesome Theory. You can find a link at the top of the page to go check it out. I would love to write more about my coding exploits here right now, but I simply haven't the time. I am retiring from the military in a mere 4 months and in that time I need to prepare for what comes next! I do want to finish my dungeon generator series since in the game I am coding I foresee using some of that code to do exactly that. I can already imagine how much better I am going to do it now, however, especially since I'll be using objects and more complex data str...(more)

A History of The Awesome Theory

Tragedy or comedy?

In 2007 I moved to a new shop and quickly made friends with Chaz. We hit it off mostly because we both had a similar wacky sense of humor. At first, this was just conversations around the office. Then it led to interesting whiteboard charts, graphs, and pictures. Eventually, someone had the bright idea to make a website out of the crazy ideas and shortly thereafter The Awesome Theory was born. We brought it online in September of 2007 and at first, it was simply a vehicle to share our pseudo-science nonsense like how the Universe's fundamental particles were Awesome and Stupid particles that looked like ninjas and pink elephants. We had a whole bunch right from the get go and we called them ...(more)

Working links described

Though "working" is up for debate...

Acrophobia - once upon a time in the late 1990s there was a website called Bezerk, you can see a screen capture of it here, that hosted a game called Acrophobia where you had to come up with what a group of letters could stand for. It was hilarious and great fun. Some clones of it exist out there, but none, in my opinion, are done as well as that one. I thought it would make a good party game in the vein of Cards Against Humanity: people take turns being the judge and call out a randomly generated acronym then players have 1-2 minutes to come up with the best one they can and the judge de...(more)

Coding a random dungeon generator, pt 1

An exercise in sloppy spaghetti coding

Many years ago, 2008 if my guess is right, I had the idea to write a random dungeon generator. I succeeded but left it somewhat unfinished. I picked that little project back up in mid/late 2018 as part of my Awesome Theory 2.0 project. I am going to deconstruct it piece by piece in order to better understand what the heck I did 10+ years ago. I won't lie, some of the code is brilliant in my opinion, but some of my past decisions are hard to understand. Note that this is one way to accomplish this - there are probably many other better ways. This is just what I came up with to solve the problem.

First things first, the actual construction of a dungeon should be a function, and so...(more)

Coding a random dungeon generator, pt 2

Going down the rabbit hole

Alright, please check out Part 1 if you haven't yet. Cool? Now we start moving on to an area where I am not 100% sure what I was thinking, but it works. It the previous article, we set up the dungeon and its parameters, so now it is time to actually build the thing one square at a time. I do this in a wonky way, probably quite suboptimal, but that is why there are two derps before I get to the code. I remember struggling with all of this quite a bit when I was originally writing it - some things just took a while to figure out.

for ($x = 1; $x <= 15; $x++) {
	start_snake();
}