Long ass rant mid 2014

In just a couple of days, I would have been working the work life for 1 year. Thinking back, a lot of things happened in the past year. Well, of course a lot of things happened in a year but it's more so compared to other individual years. Also, some people have been asking very adult questions and others have been making some weird (not bad) statements about me. I suspect this is because I'm more exposed to the outside world than ever before. Okay fine I was a NEET, now I'm not (crap I need to change blog name?!). This is gonna be a long ass rant because I'm just gonna speak my mind. Sorry for the profanities.

First things first, I felt my interests took a shift. With my first couple of paychecks, I finally got rid of the stupid stand-up piano which I have to wait for a internal solar eclipse to play, and got a digital piano. The solar eclipse is basically 7-9pm, if I have the mood or not tired from work, if it is not noisy at home, and if I don't feel that playing the same crap over and over will annoy the shit out of my neighbors (yes I'm damn thoughtful that way and it sometimes bother me). The digital piano is lovely. I love it. I can finally play my piano ANYTIME I want, so that allowed that interest to resurface. Not to mention that I have recently joined my company's band which jams most Friday nights. The sessions were usually awesome and I love the variety of our songs; English, Japanese, Chinese and even Filipino.

On the other hand, fighting games took a hit. I have felt like moving on from it for the longest damn time. It's already a decade since I first stepped into Bugis Virtualand to play CVS2. Almost all CVS2 community has moved away from fighting games at this point. Thinking about those days, fighting games truly felt fun. You know it's fun when you lose and still feel happy. Too bad those days are gone. Sometimes it really feels that I am playing just to rediscover those feels, but if I thought about it that way, it's impossible because it's those guys that provided the fun. The entire CVS2 bunch was a really happy bunch. The only other community I really felt was close to that is the Melty Blood community.

The other communities just weren't. There are still great people in there, but there's bad-mouthing, politics, really bad salt, shit-stirring, 'black faces' during play which I couldn't stand. It's upsetting that some newer players I feel do not respect other players enough. I felt that that is the foundation of all the shit that is happening in the FGC. I don't mean e-sport faggotry respect but the FGC respect. I actually couldn't stand it when I beat someone consistently and they start saying things (in a serious tone) along the line of me having more experience in the game...AND when they DO beat me like a couple of times they started laughing and start saying that I lost to someone who don't main the game. The worst kinds are those which I would win against, give me the cold shoulder/black face mid-game. I would usually give some chance (by all fighting game rights I should never give mercy but I don't want to lose a friendship either), lose and said player will give me smug look. There are a lot more situations like this and they seem to occur more and more frequently whenever I drop by. There are ways to induce SALT but those are not it man. For example, you have to have a legit win/lose ratio before you can start saying shit like "I DON'T EVEN MAIN THE GAME!" in their faces.

And that's just in game. Ugly things are also happening outside the game. It makes completely no sense that I feel more fun being AT WORK than playing fighting games. Maybe I'm too nice to stay in the community. I just don't want to say or do anything because it is not my community to run since I don't have much time to commit anymore and the community that I truly wanted to run for is gone. Whatever man. I still play fighting games for leisure but that's about it.

Now we talk about more random stuff.

A cousin has asked me on my birthday if I am going to work until I die. Work meaning my line of industry of course. I suspect that he won't be the last person to ask but here's my full complete long-winded as hell answer.

Firstly I cannot predict what the future Gerald thinks nor can I predict that far into the future as to whether something as volatile the Games Industry will evolve into something I hate. Taking that into consideration, I can only speak for the present me. The simple answer is yes and the simple reason is because I fundamentally love programming and games. At this point, I CANNOT see myself NOT doing games programming at any point in my life. I program at work, I program at home, and if I can frickin' program on my mobile phone I will do it. I love working on games because problems are always interesting.

Then the next question that was asked was if I am willing to leave my loved ones for the sake of my interests. I really think this question is unfair because I personally feel that it depends on the situation. Also, I feel that my loved ones (if they love me) should always respect my decisions and vice versa. If you bo jio me because you jio too many people, or forgot about me, or whatever, I can totally respect that. And once again it boils down to the scenario. If we were to take the extreme case, that I have to leave my loved ones and will NEVER EVER see them again because programming is outlawed here so I have to leave my loved ones to pursue my love of programming, the present me would by a narrow margin. That being said, I have to say that it is a clever disguise of the stupid question they ask you as a child which is the "If your mother and father are drowning in a pool, who would you save?" That question used to implode my brains FOR NO GOOD REASON.

Next thing is statements. Some people say that I don't care, generally. I'm actually ridiculously sentimental; I'm just really bad at showing emotions. If my loved ones were to die the next day I would be incredibly heartbroken but I don't think I will cry over it because some part of my brain accepts that it is part of life. People need to learn to let it go (hmm maybe that's why that song is so popular?). People need to know that things don't always work out their way. Seriously, if I didn't care I would truly be a NEET at this point. Ironically, I feel that other people do not care enough about others. Every little thing people do I care like friends arranging their time to meet with me, allowing me to rant at them, or my mother taking care of me...I appreciate all of that it. I just look like I don't. From an anime perspective, the reason why I watch all those really happy moe animes is so that when I run into a 'feels' anime like Clannad, Angel Beats, Air, Eureka 7, I need that library of moe animes to drown myself in so that I don't feel moody and sad for the rest of the week. Angel Beats, which I thought was not that good and a bit rushed, had me dead for a weekend. Fuck, let's move away from this topic.

Another rather popular statement being said about me is about how lucky I am regarding my path from education to career. Lots of people said it and I don't blame them because it certainly looks that way. In my perspective, it was more of a 'I'm lucky it worked out'. There's a slight difference in the meaning. A ton of things could have gone wrong in my pursue in games programming. Because it's a ton of things, with a ton of feelings involved, I'll probably leave most of it for another rant. There are quite a lot of obstacles I have to overcome and the ride isn't as smooth as people might think it is. People need to realize that I some a tough decisions like deciding to all-in for my GCE 'O' Levels and I had problems like the burn out I had right after my internship at polytechnic. There was even a time I wanted to just change industries.

I was lucky in the sense that I have a chance to ride. The opportunity showed up, I took it with some risks and perseverance, and it luckily it worked out. But it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns.

[Programming] #3: How NOT to use default arguments

A friend of mine described this code he saw the other day to me in the legacy code of the game he is working in that involves default arguments in functions. I imagine that it looks something like this (it's in PHP):

//PHP!!
bool someFunc( $a = -1, $b = -1 ) {
    // Defensive programming!
    if ( $a == -1 ) {
        return false;
    }

    // More defensive programming!
    if ( $b == -1 ) {
        return false;
    }

    return true;
}

It's funny because you can tell the innocent thought process of the programmer who wrote this. It's simple: preset default unwanted values and reject them if they are not set. That way you can ensure that they are set by the invoker!

Except that it is much more robust and safer if the programmer would just remove the default arguments, together with the defensive programming lines of code.

I wonder if that programmer got stuck while dealing with a language without default argument support?

[Programming] #2: Negate bits without conditions

So here's a quick trick with bits! I love bits operations ^_^.

Back when I was a student in Digipen, I did this rather naive way to negate bits:

char bits = 11 //1011
char mask = 2  //0010
if ( bits & mask ) { // AND operator
  bits ^= mask; // XOR operator
} 

Code itself is pretty self explanatory. You will need the 'if' condition because if you XOR 0 and 1, you'll get 1 which is wrong (remember that I wanted to set a 1 to 0). It's a rather shortsighted method that looks only at the bit I want to set to 0, and just...sets it to 0.

There has to be a better way to do this though. Invoking an 'if' condition to do a quick bit-wise operation seems counter-productive. So I sort of wrote them down like so and solve for w, x, y and z.

1011
wxyz &
-----
1001

There are actually 2 answers: 1001 and 1101. From here it just seems kind of mathemagical from my point of view, because the next step in my mind is to somehow find the answer closest to 0010 (closest meaning the least amount of steps to get to 0010), which is 1101. Negating 0010 would just give me 1101.

It's kind of baffling how much sense the answer makes, and how elegant it is since it works for any other values. I don't really know if there is a less accidental approach to derive the answer. If there is let me know. This is how I accidentally derived it (without Google).

Anyway, knowing that we can simply make the adjustment:

char bits = 11 //1011
char mask = 2  //0010
bits &= ~mask; // NEGATE and AND operator, bits = 1001

And we are done!

茅原実里の重大発表会見

ええ。。。

明日はニコニコで茅原実里の重大発表会見を見ました。そこで、みのりんは１０周年のためにいろんなイベントと製品を発表しました。。。え？

１０年？　もう１０年！？

放送が始まるとき、先ずはみのりんの２００４の長門有希の声優役のこと、そしてその後の数年間のシングルとアルバム、最後に「みのりんの１０周年のデビュー軌跡」と言う文を見せられました。

本当に１０年か。。。

みのりんのファンになった理由は長門有希ので、私最初からみのりんのファンだという意味ですか。そしてもう１０年ですか。

速いね。私は古いねｗｗ。

とりあえず、みのりんは製品の発売日を発表しただけじゃない！二つコンサート開催するつもりです！８月２日と３日に「ＳＵＭＭＥＲ ＤＲＥＡＭ２」です。それからみのりんの誕生日の１１月１８日に武道館公園です。

どうしよう。。。。

８月２９日の私はアニサマの予定です。コンサートは全部行きたいけど、1つを選べなきゃ。航空券が高いから、1年に1回だけ日本に旅行できます。。。

(泣）

[Programming] #1: Accidental assignment to constants in conditions

Since I'm programming like...ALL THE TIME, might as well share some cool/stupid/retarded/awesome stuff along the way right? 

So let's start with something simple. You should have seen this at least once in your programming career. You want to write a simple statement like so:

bool isHappy = true; // I AM HAPPY!
if ( hello == false ) {   // WHEE~~
  // Awesome stuff happens
}

And you end up writing this:

bool isHappy = true; // I AM HAPPY!
if ( hello = false ) { // WAIT WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!
// Unintentional crap happens
}

Nobody I know does this on purpose, so it's usually an accident of forgetting the extra '=' to turn it into the comparative '==' operator. If you DO write code like this, please don't. For saving 1 extra line (basically placing it outside), you are confusing everyone including and potentially your future self when you revisit the code.

There is a surprisingly elegant way to handle this though. Basically flip the values like so!

bool isHappy = true; // I AM HAPPY!
if ( false = hello ) {   // compile ERROR
  // nothing happens!
}

This will force an error because you are trying to assign the boolean 'hello' to a constant value. If you write it correctly like so:

bool isHappy = true; // I AM HAPPY!
if ( false == hello ) { // YAY!!  
   // Awesome stuff happens
}

It is the same as the original intent! And you won't go wrong this time! Now you can rest assured that all your conditional statements involving constants are safe.

最近の話し

誕生日に過ごしました！

家族と親戚たちは誕生日のために祝ってもらいました。嬉しかったけど、あの日の私は本当に出かけたくなかったね。ですが、私そんなに非常識な人じゃないので、皆さんに感謝しました。

そんなこんなで！

二週前、このブログに日本で書きましたね。実は他のブログは日記のために作って日本で書きましたけど、すぐに諦めてしまいました。それは二つのブログを管理することは大変だと思いました。又は作ったとき、大学生なので時間が持ってないから。

とりあえず、どうして急にまた日本語で書きたいですか？

先ずは、私最初から日本のこと興味があります。日本食べ物とかゲームとかアニメとか文化とか習慣は全部興味があります。さらに、働いている会社は日本会社です。そんな環境で働いたら、耐えられないほど日本語を習いたくなります。それに、日本語に慣れるためです。日本語で書けば書くほど慣れると思います。それで、日本語で書きましょう理由です。

というわけです。

最近、いろんなアニメにはまっちゃったんだね。

「ラブライブ」というのは、実は二年前初めて日本に行った時、秋葉原にアニメの開催お知らせは気づけましたけど、あまり興味がありませんね。先々週の私は、友達が困らせた後で、やっと見ました。見たあとで「ラブライブ」のμ’ｓの皆さんはとっても可愛いと思ったんだw。自分の大好きな部員は勿論小泉花陽です！突然に「ラブライブ」のファンになっちゃった！携帯ゲームもやります！

今季のアニメとして、「ラブライブ」以外、「一週間フレンズ」と「ご注文はウサギですか」です。

「一週間フレンズ」のストーリは自分の期待どおりちょっと悲しいです。このアニメは何か親切な感じを気にしました。絵のスタイルは新鮮で似合います。悲しいから、放送が終わったら一回で見てしまいましょうかな？でも、このアニメのホームページは毎週の放送に関係した内容で更新します。困るね。。。

最後の話は「ご注文はウサギですか」。友人によると、これは今季のヒーリングアニメです。そういうヒーリングアニメは自分の一番大好きなジャンルです！このアニメはすごっっっく可愛い！多分「きんいろモザイク」と「のんのんびより」よりふわふわを感じますかな。それに、自分の好きな飲み物の関係もある！そうだ、それはお茶とコーヒーだ！＞：３

それでは以上です！それじゃ！

ランダム日本語ポスト

はい、今度のポストは日本語でしてみましょう。

じゃ、只今夜中に過ごして五月になりました。時間は本当に早いですね。私今日までコーエーテクモに働くことはもう１１月でありますね。すぐに１年になります。。。

実際にこの１年は、僕の初めて真面目に働きました。むかしの仕事はいつも３月以下で退屈になちゃった。この会社に入ったとき、僕はこの会社に３月以上で続けて働けるかなと思いました。突然に１年に過ごしましたwｗ

この１年で、本当にたくさんものが起こった。考えれば、過去の例年よりもっとものが起こりました。理由の一つは多分僕の毎日の生活が多く変わりました。例えば、遊ぶ時間が少なくなるとか、お金が持っているになるとか、体は毎日朝から夜まで働くのでいつも疲れるとか、などなどです。この間、会社外の友達に会いたいけど、会う機会は少なくなった。この間、格闘ゲームを時間がないので練習できなくなった。週末以外、毎日この起きて働いて帰って寝る生活を過ごします。そう考えれば、その生活について嬉しいかな？

嬉しくないと答えれば嘘でしょ！(笑）

今時間がないですが、仕事があるから、自由度が増えました！仕事から、買いたいものは買えます。特に日本に旅行できます！最終の日本旅行はとても楽しかった。みのりんの演奏も参加しました！あの時は泣いたほど嬉しかったですw！仕事がなければ、今まで２６歳で、日本に行かなかったオタクでしょ。

そして、コーエーテクモに働くことは楽しんです。いろんなことを習えるし、同僚は親切し、働くゲームは可愛いですから。疲れても、今まで満足ですよね。

でも、確かに全て持てないね。嬉しくても、もっと時間を持ちたいなｗ。

ま、いいか！今の幸せは間違いません。来年のは楽しみましょう！