Tales of the Princess Bride

11.14.2014

There aren't many books I've read in one sitting. Omit technical books where I've skimmed 400+ pages as a refresher and there's only 1 book I've read in a day, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I'm a notoriously slow reader, so it takes me a while to get through a book.

Now I can add one to the books I've read in a day, or in this case from 7:00PM - 11:30PM. Cary Elwes' As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride is not the second book I've gone through in a day, and the first non-fiction book I've done so with.

Lately I've been watching TV shows via Amazon's streaming video service (currently hooked on Covert Affairs thanks to Gina. I've also been going through my old trade papaerback collections of the 1980's GI Joe comics for my sporadic reading enjoyment. I saw a blurb about Elwes book a few weeks ago and thought it looked interesting. I love The Princess Bride movie, and the 2 stories I heard Elwes quickly recount involved Andre the Giant - I've heard lots of Andre stories through the years but they've always been wrestler-centric. This book quickly made it on my short list to get. Last week I was putting together an Amazon order, mainly because I needed to restock the protein bars I like, and I decided to sneak As You Wish into my order. It arrived yesterday morning - one of the perks of Amazon Prime membership is Sunday USPS delivery which I now assume includes holiday (Veteran's Day) delivery. I cracked open the book after eating dinner and kept it open until I was finished.

It's a good book, albeit a little heavy on the praise for everyone else that worked on the movie. But with that, you get the feeling that everyone on the movie loved what they were doing and got along well. There are stories about casting, rehersals, and most of all the ever present preparation for the greatest swordfight of modern times. For fans of the movie, this is a fun read, otherwise its content would be lost on you.


books/comics movies/tv/dvd

A distinct lack of updates

11.02.2014

This coming Friday I have the interview I've been hopeful for since starting my 2014 job search. As such, I've been studying since the interview was scheduled, hence part of the lack of updates for you two people who read this to check in on me :)

With any luck, both the interview will go well and I'll have something of interest to post about. As it is, the rest of the week will probably be pretty silent here.

In the meantime, feel free to enjoy a little Sam Smith.


rambling

Thought of the Day

10.20.2014

It's an odd feeling when you're sitting in a job interview and hear through the phone "I'm looking at russellmania.com now..." without suddenly feeling very paranoid of what random trains of thought have made it here since 1999.

Granted, the site's been redone a few times so whatever content existed 15 years ago is gone, but since 2008 the content has been fairly consistent.

If nothing else interviewers will get a sense of my true self by reading here. Wrestling-watching board-game-playing gastric-sleeved-walking movie-collecting nerd. I think that sums me up pretty well. None of that has anything to do with prospective work, though. I'm still sticking to that summation regardless.


random

I Could Be a Proclaimer

10.15.2014

Monday was a milestone day for me. Literally. On Dec. 16, 2013 I started using the Nike+ running app to track my walks. 11 months and 136 walks later, I passed 500 miles.

That first walk at the end of 2013 was 2.5 miles. 2 months after gastric sleeve surgery I was still getting in "walking shape" and shooting for 20 minute miles, and 2.5 miles was a nice little challenge. After I would walk, I would pretty much be worn out and ready for bed. Monday morning, I walked for almost 2 hours and traveled over 6 miles. The best part is that except for some leg muscle soreness that kicked in about 3 hours later, it felt like a normal day.

Jerry sent me a text to warn me of upcoming storms later in the day (he's my designated weather alert system) and that if I wanted to go walk I should get a move on. We were on the same page, as I was on the tail end of my walk and heading back toward the car around Mile 4, where the Athens greenway hits the track behind the baseball fields of Athens High School.

The track intersects a 2nd greenway, which I've always hated as it's a 1.206 mile stretch where I have a hard time making out details and can't quite figure out how far I've got left. Most of the trail looks like this:

Nice, but nondescript. Eventually I made it out of the greenway and came out along Highway 72.

I still have a quarter mile left on my walk as I've started to park in the Lowe's parking lot. The greenway has a grassy area to park in, but I kept timing my walks with mowing schedules. Jsut to make life easier, and to add a consistent length to my walks, I picked a designated parking spot at Lowes.

It seems to work. Every once in a while I get a call from Gina asking "Are you walking? I think I saw your car."

So now I have walked 500 hundred miles. I guess I'll walk 500 more. I bet that song's still going to be stuck in my head for a while.


gastric sleeve

Unity Asteroids Pt 2

10.08.2014

After about 2 weeks I'm at the point I'm ready to call my little Unity Asteroid Shooter done, or at least 90% done. It's got laser particle effects, explosions, sound effects, and some begin/end screens. For a 7+ hour tutorial I played with for a month, there's a lot that it does along with a lot that's missing.

The one thing I skipped that's in the tutorial is keeping up with high scores. The tutorial uses the UserPrefs object, which stores values in the registry. Simple enough to use and implement, but I'd much rather use a plain text file for now than messing around with registry entries. Registry entries are a pain to track and debug. In addition, I haven't messed with any file functions in C#, and this boils down to some C# functionality versus Unity coding so it's a good excuse to learn.

I would like to better tweak the GUI of this game. I've got a couple of ideas to play around with, and it's more fun to tweak a working game than to experiment with something from scratch. If it starts out working and I break it, I can always back track. Phase 1 will be to change out the space ship model and associated effects. I think I've got a BSG Viper sitting in a directory somewhere...

I haven't posted the actual game to play, mainly because there are some licenses involved since I paid for the tutorial and associated assets. Plus I've never built a Unity project for "public" use and would feel really bad if I corrupted a computer with a memory leak or some such. When I leave the number of asteroids at the default set in the tutorial my monitors turn off after a minute or so and I'm forced to reboot. So I'm just looking out for you, the general internet public.

Plus, it's a fairly boring game unless you've spent a month getting it to work.


game dev video games

Blog Archive

As always, correct spelling is optional in any blog entry. Keep in mind that any links more than a year old may not be active, especially the ones pointing back to Russellmania (I like to move things around!).

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