This phenomenon comes in degrees. Start with irrelevance. Often the inadmissibility of tardy words isn't absolute: you _could_ say things late, but the product would be less valuable than if it were timely—especially in a medium like blogging, where the posts being dated and displayed reverse-chronologically creates an expectation that the entries are associated with a particular point in time—at least, that they were written not too long before their publication date, even if the actual content isn't about the ephemera of the day or season. This has contributed to _An Algorithmic Lucidity_ not being as good of a blog as it could be.
-Like—each of the last two Aprils, I attended (one day of) [BABSCon](http://www.babscon.com/), the San Francisco Bay Area's premier convention for fans of the animated series _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_, both times—even the second!—with the thought that the experience would make good fodder for a blog post in the "autobiographical account of my day at this timely Special Event" genre. [](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/crush_kill_destroy_swag.png) I was going to tell you about how the first time, I made a couple of social _faux pas_ while meeting Tara Strong and Nicole Oliver, only one of which was intentional; I was going to tell you about how the second time, I hadn't been planning to buy anything in vendor hall, but couldn't help but say "Shut up and take my money" in response to the demonstration of the [Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder](http://www.secretshipfic.com/) card game, the game-opening card of which I later got autographed by both members of Sherclop Pones, whose [_Friendship Is Witchcraft_ fandub series](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FriendshipIsWitchcraft) had clearly inspired some of the cards and probably the game itself, as well as being the source of [some of my favorite music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACEnJSDVzdc). I was going to tell you about how the first time, I was considering buying a coffee cup depicting the Mane Six (because I frequently bought medicinals at the outpost of the American coffee hegemon, and felt guilty about the wastefulness of accepting the default disposable cup every time like every other American), but hesitated, explaining to the vendor that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to use that cup in public, whereupon she said she could throw in a free [button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin-back_button), to which I replied, "Sold!" And I was going to do a careful sociological analysis of curious observations like how I hesitated to buy that cup and why [H. liked it so much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/) in terms of gender ideology and [signaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29) [contrarianism](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/).
+[](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/crush_kill_destroy_swag.png){: .alignright }
+
+Like—each of the last two Aprils, I attended (one day of) [BABSCon](http://www.babscon.com/), the San Francisco Bay Area's premier convention for fans of the animated series _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_, both times—even the second!—with the thought that the experience would make good fodder for a blog post in the "autobiographical account of my day at this timely Special Event" genre. I was going to tell you about how the first time, I made a couple of social _faux pas_ while meeting Tara Strong and Nicole Oliver, only one of which was intentional; I was going to tell you about how the second time, I hadn't been planning to buy anything in vendor hall, but couldn't help but say "Shut up and take my money" in response to the demonstration of the [Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder](http://www.secretshipfic.com/) card game, the game-opening card of which I later got autographed by both members of Sherclop Pones, whose [_Friendship Is Witchcraft_ fandub series](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FriendshipIsWitchcraft) had clearly inspired some of the cards and probably the game itself, as well as being the source of [some of my favorite music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACEnJSDVzdc). I was going to tell you about how the first time, I was considering buying a coffee cup depicting the Mane Six (because I frequently bought medicinals at the outpost of the American coffee hegemon, and felt guilty about the wastefulness of accepting the default disposable cup every time like every other American), but hesitated, explaining to the vendor that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to use that cup in public, whereupon she said she could throw in a free [button](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin-back_button), to which I replied, "Sold!" And I was going to do a careful sociological analysis of curious observations like how I hesitated to buy that cup and why [H. liked it so much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/) in terms of gender ideology and [signaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29) [contrarianism](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/).
But I didn't, and those Aprils were nine and twenty-one months ago, respectively. Not timely. My being motivated to write _now_ (["That my past does not define me, 'cause my past is not today"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnbYUG6Bn8)) can push a 350-word counterfactual "postview" of what I thought about saying over the threshold into existence, but it would be a bit unseemly to try to construct (I almost wrote _reconstruct_, but the _re-_ prefix should be reserved for things that ever existed in the first place) a 2000-word personal account of the timely Special Event that happened _last year_ or the _year before that_.
-[](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/leafline_web_client_play.png)
+[](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/leafline_web_client_play.png){: .alignleft }
Or like—I made [a thing](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline) not too long ago. I didn't mean to. It was an accident, really. It's a sort of oppositional strategy game engine—like a board game you play against the computer. The core move-scoring application is written in Rust, but there's also a web-application GUI (the "web client") in Clojure and ECMAScript 6 that's much more ergonomic for playing a game against. The game is—okay, well, it's chess: the endeavor snowballed out of my desire to participate in my coworkers' friendly office chess games combined with my reluctance to spend effort learning to be good at a task whose [essential nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax) is so obviously suitable for automation. But writing a chess engine is just _so_ cliché, and I enjoy naming things, so I quickly settled upon the conceit that _actually_ I was writing an engine for a game that _just happened_ to be exactly like chess, except that everything has different names: for example, instead of the pieces being black and white pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, and king, the figurines, or agents (never "pieces"), in my game are [blue and orange](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality) servant, pony, scholar, cop, princess, and figurehead. (I kept _rank_ and _file_, though.) This "adorable idiosyncratic names for everything" convention permeates the codebase. Despite the fact that unnecessarily gendering things isn't normally my style, I decided that ponies, scholars, and (inevitably) princesses were female, and that servants, cops, and figureheads were male, specifically in order to have an excuse to leave `// ♀` and `// ♂` comments in the [enum declaration](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/identity.rs#L35-L43), because I feel like too many of my code comments are restricted to the ASCII or _maybe_ Latin-1 subsets of the Basic Multilingual Plane, such that I don't want to pass up an opportunity to legitimately ("legitimately") use \u2640 FEMALE SIGN and \u2642 MALE SIGN. There are [comments with](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/identity.rs#L68-L86) ludicrous rationalizations for using the standard Forsyth–Edwards notation abbreviations ('P' is for _peon_, 'N' is for _neigh_, 'B' is for _book_, 'R' is for _the Rule of law_; the blue team's runes are lowercase because lowercase characters have higher ASCII codepoints, just as blue light has a higher frequency than orange light). Instead of _pawn promotion_, it's _servant ascension_, and a different verb is used to describe the process depending on the target figurine type (the servant moving the to the final rank can _transform_ into a pony, be _brevetted_ to cop, or _transition_ into a princess or scholar). Or, like, Rust is quite [conservative in the Yeggean sense](https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz), as manifested in features like the compiler forcing you to explicitly handle all possible variants of an enum; in cases where you know an instance of the enum can only be one of a strict subset of the possible variants, but the type system doesn't know that, you have to fill in those branches or supply a default case anyway, [probably](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.unreachable!.html) with a panic, which is like an exception that you can't catch, to abort the program with a message indicating that something entirely unanticipated has happened and it makes no sense to carry on. So I had been ending all of my panic messages with a stock phrase about how the unexpected thing was contrary to the operation of the moral law ("non-princesslike agent passed to `princesslike\_lookahead`, which is contrary to the operation of the moral law", and so forth), because this isn't the kind of codebase where you just say something like "assertion failed," as if the program should _die_ because of some human authority's mere _assertion_, rather than only as a matter of _justice_ when its behavior is contrary to the operation of the moral law. And then when my coworker [Alexander Corwin](http://acorwin.com/) started contributing, he abstracted away the boilerplate in these panic messages into this [`moral_panic!` macro](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Leafline/blob/d914c979/src/sorceries.rs#L1-L4), which I thought was _brilliant_.
The web client is configured to run on port 2882. It's [easy to remember because](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/10/my-favorite-mnemonic/) 2882 is Magnus Carlsen's peak ELO score.
-[](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/leafline_console_play.png)
+[](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/leafline_console_play.png){: .alignright }
Software, like poetry, is never really finished (only abandoned), but getting the project to the point that I felt it was a minimal viable "product" took about eight glorious weekends (plus a few weekday nights, and with some help from Alexander). Near the end, watching the program utterly trounce me in web client play and [feeling for all the world like a lieutenant junior grade](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/lower-decks/), I started looking ahead to what came next for me. Over the past two years, the first two years of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), I had spent many, many night and weekend hours hacking on various side projects and coding exercises out of genuine enthusiasm and curiosity and desire to improve my craft—and, honestly, a [feeling of insecurity](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/08/no-award/), sensing that I needed to prove my [worth](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/worth/) as a hacker (["I threw myself into my studies, to have the world in my control"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpE0ZY8FODk)). But decent _chess AI_ in _Rust_ as an _impulsive throwaway project_ seemed like a sufficiently strong signal of my programming prowess that maybe it was time to tie off this project, write the obligatory exciting blog post about it, and start allocating night and weekend hours towards some of the _non_-programming (!) interests I remember having in the before-time (assuming those memories are not fake). I could do some math! Write some fiction! Maybe even meet new friends ("[I will not be shy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvP7PIt7GNE); I'm going to [try](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/dismal-science/); I bet I'll find the reason why so many people, like me—")?!—all while feeling secure in the knowledge that my technology skills are _clearly_ adequate for my continued existence to be economically viable. (For now.)
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff