Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

I won't bore you with the whole long list, and I'm not bothering to check my 2021 ones, because I know I fell off the map. It doesn't matter. It won't happen this year. At the end of 2022, I will look over my list (which exists on a Trello card) and be proud of what I have accomplished.  I have  to over-engineer it a bit. I can't get excited about the new year unless I do, trying to push myself to a high level of excellence at everything.  My resolutions are in the following categories: fanfiction, cyber (internet/gaming/TV shows/movies), art, other worlds, writing, coding, reading, music, fitness, and theme park design. I also made master lists of all the books, TV shows, movies, and games I want to get through this coming year. I have not been good at having fun until recently. Got to learn how to balance work and play.  I wonder if I'll get any new coaster credits this year. I should at least get the Snowbird mountain coaster this spring. So that's someth

Believe me — I don’t want to be. But, I know my social anxiety has caused a lot of issues in this regard. Ultimately, this is the core reason. That, and — I want to make a few things clear.   Love and romance are the most important things in the entire world. Nothing else is more important. Nothing. NOTHING. Everything I do ties to it. Every. Single. Pursuit.  I believe in soulmates and that love can be eternal. No one can ever, or will ever, convince me otherwise.  I will not date until I feel ready to do so. Unless an enticing opportunity naturally presents itself, but this tends to not happen. I do not currently feel ready. There are things I need to do first.  I hate dating apps. I hate casual dating. I hate shopping around for people. Hate, hate, hate, hate it. It’s the least romantic thing I can possibly think of. At some point, I recognize that I might just have to deal with it. But I am still hoping for that movie moment, of bumping into her in the middle of a crowded space som

Oh, my love, come take my hand Like you did in my dreamland.  ~ Blackbriar 

“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” – Soren Kierkeegard

Here is today's problem. I was definitely off-base on my first attempt at analyzing the runtime!  But when you realize what this is doing, it's not too bad. While of course in a real programming scenario we'd just use one of the built-in square root functions, well...Someone has to code those to work in the first place! And this is a possible implementation of one.  If you notice, the algorithm is essentially dividing the problem space into two pieces and analyzing them, effectively running a binary search. This was my initial mistake. I stepped through the problem, was doing all this division crap, forgetting that it's not about the operations that the algorithm itself is running, but rather the approximate number of times it is running said operations.   So, it's a binary search, basically to the T. There is nothing special here. Consequently, we can conclude that the runtime is O(log n) . 

Just in case you didn't know.

Found this today and it really struck a chord.  “You are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in such pain." — Emilie Autumn  I love her music, though thus far I only listen to a few songs regularly. I really need to branch out. I also want to get a copy of the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls; it looks like a fantastically dark read.  Anyway, back to avoiding relatives who won't leave and keep prying into every single aspect of my life. Seriously, why do people do this? 

Seriously...Why doesn't it? Do people just magically develop the ability to teleport on Sundays in Utah? Because if so, I missed that memo. Trying to get an independent shuttle from the SLC airport to Orem on the first Sunday in January is a MAJOR pain and gets in the way of me actually being productive on stuff that's actually important. Like yeah, obviously this is important, but it won't do anything to further my goals or passions other than getting me back to my apartment where my stuff is. 

Believe in something when you are lost.  ~ A Pale Horse Named Death 

As someone who has never formally taken clarinet lessons or established a practice routine that’s actually good, I’m thinking of following  this practice plan . I think it will provide me with the structure that I very much need. It has quite a few technique book recommendations as well which I greatly appreciate. 

Well, it’s Christmas, and I will get out of bed soon.  I slept insanely well last night. I went to sleep at 10 pm positively exhausted, too tired to watch anything Christmas related or even make hot chocolate. Christmas Eve was a decent day, with an amazing 13.1 mile long run, looking at lights, and eating at both McDonald’s and Red Robin, but it wasn’t super productive honestly. I slept for a decent portion of the afternoon and was still completely wiped by like 6 pm. I couldn’t really enjoy the fact that it was Christmas Eve, as I still felt somewhat “hung over” from the semester as a whole plus all the goals I am trying to reach.  So I went to bed at 10, didn’t set an alarm, had some lovely dreams, and didn’t wake up until 7:15 am. That is a WHOLE lot of sleep, over 9 whole hours. Hopefully, this will erase my normal propensity towards grumpiness today, because right now I feel dang good for once.  And not only that, but I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of sleigh be

It’s 2:30 pm, and I’m feeling okay. I’m spinning my wheels a bit, but I’m muddling through. I’ve had a reasonably productive morning, though I know I can get better. But, I’m working and I’m getting things done.  Then…oh no.  The sadness is coming back.  Washing over me like a wave.  Not again. Not again, not again, not again. What did I do to deserve a broken brain like this, one that cannot simply be happy like other people are? I do whatever I can to stop it. I take a walk with my music, trying to get some quiet alone time, but everywhere there are kids playing and people walking their dogs and cars pulling out of driveways. I eat some candy. That sort of helps, but it ruins my body.  I become irritable and don’t want to talk to anyone. The despair crashes down on me, like a bottomless pit, and there is no exit. I try to explain how I feel to people, and they seem annoyed. Inconvenienced that they have to deal with me, offended that I cannot be fully present with them. I feel a prof

I have two weeks. Here's where I'm at:  I just dropped all my classes for next semester except for Computational Creativity and University Band. That is IT. This First Day of June thing is GOING to happen. Lots of math, code, writing, art, and visual effects.  I have not worked yet for ASG. First day was just errands and now I've been trying to finally get my dad's website revamped. I have deemed it a worthwhile endeavor to finish that first because he will pay me. Plus, I've been saying I'll do it for-freaking-ever and I haven't, and there's no way it's going to happen after I've already worked for 8 hours. I am learning Adobe XD as a part of this, for prototyping, so I can get his design approval before I actually code it up. Then, I'll slam straight back into IT, math, and possibly a coding project (probably just deeplizard's Keras series in order to prepare for Computational Creativity). I also need to do some algorithms. And of cours

Luggage got stuck for a day in Vegas. Finally got it back and turns out, I left my orthotics in my snow boots in Orem. -_- My dad let me borrow a pair, though I will have to buy some new ones, hopefully today. So I’ll have to do my run this morning in orthotics molded to my dad’s foot. I hope I don’t get injured. 

Politics is boring. But, I do like the political compass.  Took it again today. Here we go:

it's kinda ADD and I just threw down whatever I felt like it do be representative though

It’s just time for a few this evening Only one final to go…and it’s just finishing a report. 

My ward doesn't have one.  But more than anything, I've loved the choirs that really push you to get better. I want  the challenging music. I want it to be slightly intimidating. I want to learn the cool stuff, the hard stuff. I've definitely been in choirs that were pretty flippant, where half the people are just there because they know the director, and that's fine. But it's just so much more fun when everyone takes it seriously. I have good memories of my choirs in Old Mill, in the Green Mountain ward on my mission, and in Heritage Halls. We took on some pretty challenging stuff, especially in Old Mill.  It's kind of like how I felt in Art 101. I am really grateful that my professor specifically treated us as though we were real artists, and held us to a high standard accordingly. I don't like approaching my hobbies casually. It really helped me as I moved into even harder art classes such as 3D Graphics and Shader Programming.  I could do university chor

When moving Maya assets (as OBJs) into Houdini, you need to scale at 0.1.  Do NOT touch the height of flip tank fluids (the actual particles), for this will lead to pain and suffering. Instead, move your objects to the requisite height.  To get the handles back on your wavetank object inside of the fliptank_initial node, click the Show Handle button. You think this would be obvious, but I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to do this.  You're probably going to have to crank up the resolution of your collision geometry to be really high if you want it to stay on a track. This will not be very nice.  Adding a Point Velocity in front of a FLIP create_surface node can change the initial emission speed of your fluid pretty easily.  Render preview will ALWAYS slow down simulations. Turn it off until you reach your desired frame, or else it will start rendering like all of them lol.  Adding ripples to a FLIP tank: A Wind Force is going to be a lot better than a Fan Force. I

Tutorial I followed ( part 1 ) ( part 2 ) Result after part 1: It's good, just a bit cloudy Result after part 2: I actually really like part 2! There's still some annoying noise though. 

As the title says. I have been pushing myself for a long time and I am exhausted. I've burned out again. The first time I burned out was in 2016. I still managed to get into CS Animation but then I crashed even harder once I took shader programming and physics. It was extremely frustrating.  The fact of the matter is, computer science classes are hard, and they are time-consuming. For someone with multiple passions, it can be somewhat difficult to be constantly taking super time-consuming classes, and never having time for any of your side pursuits. Or even your secondary pursuit, which for me is supposed  to be animation. However, here I am, trying to tame a flip sim before Wednesday morning, and I'm not sure if it's going to go OK. I need time to review the BASICS of Houdini. I keep having to jump into this crazy stuff and I feel like there is just so much more basic stuff that I need to master first. And I still felt like I wasn't good enough at drawing when I alread

To become a great artist: drawing, digital, 3D. To get as good as the artists that I really look up to. This one has been on the forefront of my mind lately. I NEED to take an easy semester in terms of courses, so I can really PUSH myself to get through more art tutorials. I want to be digitally painting regularly, and I want to be finishing renders and animations regularly too.  To finish the first draft of Carnivile. To continue with my other writing work as well.  To review all the computer science, physics, and mathematics concepts that I learned in undergrad.  To learn IT, cybersecurity, and electronics concepts.  To be so good at algorithms that no software companies could bear to reject me. To be so good at art that no animation companies could either. Imagine that -- achieving equally high levels of excellence in both fields. Well, it's happening, and nobody is going to stop me.  To be in excellent running, lifting, and swimming shape.  To get good at clarinet and piano.  T

“A snake doesn’t lose sleep over the opinions of mice.” ~ a user on Reddit I am a very big proponent of doing whatever the hell you want , whenever the hell you want to do it,  as long as you do not harm others. When you want something, when you believe in something, when you wish for something, you believe in it, you go for it, you get it , and you let absolutely no one stand in your way.  a few more before I pass out:  “I killed a plant once because I gave it too much water. Lord, I worry that love is violence.” ~ José Olivarez  Also, I love this one; might use it in a bio somewhere (or a signature, MAY INTERNET FORUMS LAST FOREVER):  "But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes." ~  Emil Cioran and on that note, I hope I don't die before next Thursday when all my finals are done! :D 

As a whole, the BodySpace app is pretty good. But there is one bug that is very irritating and they’ve never bothered to fix.  I did a full biceps, back, and forearm workout today. But this is all the app says I did: Why? Because I switched apps to my camera (wanted to take a picture of the weight set to ask a question about how it was labeled). Then, the BodySpace app decided that it was going to refresh. It asked me if I wanted to resume my workout. I said yes, and it basically saved the amount of time I had been working, but deleted all the other sets that I had entered. 95% of my workout recording, lost in cyberspace. This has happened before, but it happens inconsistently. I took a risk and I paid the price.  Bodybuilding.com has been irritating ever since it randomly decided to add paywalls, and this bug makes things even more irritating. Nevertheless, it works pretty well as long as auto-refresh isn’t engaged, so I guess for now I’m just going to keep using it. 

I took all these quizzes a long time ago, but I’ve never posted my results anywhere until now. My Ilvermorny house is Pukwudgie, which is cool because it’s Queenie’s house and I absolutely adore her, but I’d still go to Hogwarts if given the choice. I specifically avoided looking up anything about the quizzes beforehand, so my results would be as authentic as possible. 

I have always found reading graduate-level computer science papers to be rather difficult. I would like to change this, and get really good at reading and understanding them.  So, let's start with the one I have to present in CS 655, Stream-Guided Smoke Simulations by Sato et. al.  First off,  here is the main website for the paper. The video on that website has no sound or explanation at all, so sadly we are stuck with the paper only.  I guess I can embed it here, too.  NOTE: Smoke is considered a fluid in this paper. Obviously it's a gas, but things such as smoke are considered to be fluids for the purposes of simulation.  Basic Idea: With any paper, we need to figure out the basic idea behind it before we do anything else . The idea is to boil down the text to the most basic concepts possible . We do this by skimming the abstract at the beginning (not labeled in this paper).  The basic idea behind this paper? We are simulating smoke in 3D.  Easy, right? Yeah. But that leads

 

 Here is today’s problem, VI.4:  Sorry, photo quality is kind of crap.  Anyway, I spent way too many days looking at this one, thinking "yeah, I have no idea, let's push this to tomorrow". But, today I decided to actually sit down and figure it out. And now that I understand it, it's not too bad! We have a while loop here, so we're probably not going to have an O(1) algorithm or anything like that. In fact, if you don't look at it too closely, you might think "lmao yeah, that's O(a) because it goes until the sum is a" and you would be wrong.  Instead, we have to think about the purpose of this function. What is it doing, exactly? It's dividing two integers! a/b.  Remember that. a/b.  And what do we return? COUNT.  If you notice, count is incremented within every single iteration of the while loop. This while loop is our key to understanding the complexity here. The value of count represents the final complexity of our algorithm , because coun

Beautiful land of dreams... Above the horizon, in the early morning, when everything is still.  I grab you but you're gone The ending of a dream Back to reality... It's not true, I see it, but it's not there. It's not there, I see it! But it's not there... I call you. I want you. Are you there?  Can you hear me? ~ Theatres des Vampires full lyrics

Well, not quite. There are a lot of things I need to improve with it, and lots of features to add, because I'd love for it to be close to a full-blown renderer at some point. But, for the requirements of CS 655, it is finally completed.  This one is decent, you know?  Wasn't as big of a fan of this one, but I'm kinda out of time -- got to get to the final project...

There are a few aspects of this that do not  apply to me.  I am not a quitter, unless I had no passion for something to begin with (i.e. Boy Scouts) in which case I am absolutely going to quit.  hate drugs, not necessarily opposed to legalization, but I just really don't like them hate the rain wouldn't describe myself as irresponsible, though I have my moments Otherwise, it's super accurate for me.  link  

Clarinet TBA, I can't play right now anyway because I'm congested and coughing up a storm lmao and also I have way too much homework  Owl City: The Real World Owl City: On the Wing Owl City: Vanilla Twilight Evanescence: Give Unto Me Adastra theme  Lucky by Jason Mraz / Colbie Callait A Whole New World from Aladdin  a few church/primary hymns, why not I feel like I should do some classical stuff too, like where I left off on actual formal piano lessons, but...I'll have to look more into that later. 

While I found the guide on  1000 Forms of Bunnies  to be pretty helpful, I actually found that the UV computations Victor used simply didn't work for me. I had to mess around with the math myself, and ended up using the Wikipedia formulas .  However, there is an important caveat with those formulas. Specifically, you can't just use your hit point as your vector d. You have to do || sphere.center - hitPoint || -- yes, that's a norm . If you don't, everything will be all screwed up. I also found that for the particular way in which my coordinate system is oriented, I had to manually add 0.5 to my U coordinates, because it was rendering the globe backwards. It's possible that I should've done || hitPoint - sphere.center || instead; I'll have to look into that later.  It's all very weird but you can get it working if you keep drilling deeper into the fundamental aspects of what's going on.  This is how I used STBImage.  I had to do a deep copy of the buf

Gosh, I forgot about this YouTube channel. I remember watching her differential equations videos and busting up laughing in the middle of the HBLL. "And why do we do it this way? Because we are sad and lonely mathematicians!" :D  I really need to get back into this stuff. And I will, once I get a handle on everything.  link

You just select the entry and then click "Text". Then, expand the window as you see fit. I'm not sure why I always forget how to do this, so I'm just putting it here. 

I love their art. These pieces are definitely not mine; I just love them. So, I decided to put them here. ( fb ) You deserve the world. But the world is cruel, so I brought you the moon. 

I will meet her in her shadowland Embrace her pain and make it mine Maybe...I can save her...from the darkness within... And she can walk away from here. ~ When Nothing Remains 

This evening I was driving on the I-15 on a Sunday afternoon after a peaceful walk in the park. The radio was blasting X96 and the autumn sun bathed the world in a soft golden light. There wasn’t much traffic and as I drove it felt like I was flying. My mind flew between imagination and reality, lost in a thousand adventures all at once. For once, peace. For once, bliss. 

Still working through Big O.  This one is super simple.  If you notice, there are no loops, no recursion, etc. Just a conditional. Regardless of what the values for a and b are, the function is going to take what is  mathematically  the same amount of time. Thus, this function is doing a constant amount of work, so the runtime is simply O(1) . 

It was an okay week, not great, but not terrible either.  CS 655: I'm still catching up, urgh. I finally got the entire median split lab working. I thought I had textures working on Friday but it looks like there's something wrong with my math. I've got to push to finish that by today, or I guess tomorrow, and then REALLY push to finish the path tracer. Because I NEED to start on that final project.  CS 601: It's going well, though things in that class always take me longer than they probably should (i.e. I overengineer things). But hey, the A doesn't lie.  CS 650: I am extremely grateful for the group that I have for my project. I'm trying to contribute as much as I can, but I hope to do even better next week. Still trying to master deep learning and make sure I understand as much as possible about the paper we're basing things on.  Senior Film: This fell by the wayside...Again, due to CS 655 mostly. However, the more I work with fluids now, the easier

I'll believe  All your lies Just pretend you love me.  Make believe  Close your eyes I'll be anything for you.  ~ Evanescence, "Anything for You" 

Phase 1: Just a few weeks Monday - Friday: 3-4 miles per day.  Saturday: 10-12 miles.  Lift weights for 30 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Do an ab workout on Tuesday and Thursday.  Phase 2: Once I'm consistent with the above.  Monday-Friday: 5-6 miles per day.  Saturday: 10-12 miles until the spring (then ramp up).  Continue previous lifting schedule, but go up to 45 minutes per day.  Time trials in early or mid spring (April?) Mile 2-Mile 5K Potential running workouts: tempo, recovery, hill training, fartlek, negative split, normal run, long run, strides, hard run, time trials, races. 

What I really need -- -- a few free years. No work, no school, or anything like that. Just money flowing in somehow (this is a hypothetical, obviously).  I'm not going to get that though, not unless one of my creative projects takes off like crazy (hence my First Day of June core competency project).  I would spend my mornings exercising, lifting weights and then driving to a park or bike path to run. I would do speed work, recovery runs, hill training, tempo...pretty much anything to push my fitness and speed to the next level. I'm tired of being slow.  Then, I would transition into art. I would draw, do digital painting, animate, and do 3D art. I would have art projects, commissions, maybe some webcomics/visual novels/video games in progress.  After spending a few hours on art, I would do coding, maybe some app development, or websites for people who would pay me. I would also self-study physics, mathematics, engineering, and astronomy. Of course, a few walks in some beautifu

I'm trying to get a LOT better at weight lifting this fall and winter, in addition to running. I've let fitness slip a little bit while trying to succeed at coding, art, and writing, and unfortunately the consequences of such are highly visible. So, no more. I lifted for 30 minutes today which is a pretty good start I suppose, upper body, plus a 4-mile run. I will up both of these, but not until I've been consistent for a few weeks first.  Here were the songs I listened to (at least the ones that I can remember). It was a pretty good workout even despite the elders and half their district showing up at 7 AM again (so annoying because of how small the gym is). I kept the songs fairly intense, and occasionally repeated them.  Insane Clown Posse: Mr. Happy Moonspell: Lustmord Motionless in White: Abigail  Chelsea Grin: Crewcabanger  Children of Bodom: Kissing the Shadows  Cradle of Filth: Forgive Me, Father  Lifting is one of those things that I've remained pretty stagnant

Cracking the Coding Interview: VI.2 Oh look, recursion, lmao.  One mistake I used to make was assuming that recursion automatically means a super complicated runtime. That's just not always going to be the case, and I understand this much better now.  If I pick a few arbitrary values of b and trace through the execution... ...we see that the value of b decreases each time. If b is 5, the recursion will iterate with 4, 3, 2, and 1 before unwinding. So it just iterates b times. Thus, the Big O runtime of this power function is O(b) . Not bad, eh? Not bad at all. 

The 3 most important pursuits to me right now are my writing, art, and code. All of these are multifaceted and complex, with many different pieces and moving parts, but those are my three main focuses. Fitness is important but it’s a given — it has to be done, like sleeping or eating. Music is the final priority on the list. In addition, I am trying to imagine a lot, and consume various media forms that I like so that way I can get more ideas, but that’s a subset of art and writing. Stuff like math/physics is included as part of code. Theme park design is part of art.  So, 3 primary areas of focus (writing, art, code), with 2 secondaries (fitness, music).  I’m glad I found this a while back (not my artwork). It can be done. 

This is how I run jupyter notebooks from my D drive, which the anaconda prompt doesn't like me navigating to for some reason.  source "C:\Users\alexc\Anaconda3\Scripts\activate" Just replace alexc with your username. Unfortunately, this only lasts for the duration of the terminal session. I'd probably have to edit the bashrc or something in order to make it permanent -- will look into that later. 

Take a look at the view  Embrace this magic place, as you can have anything you want to.  The brightest lights of the skyline surrounding you; The colors bursting in a warm oceanic hue.  Your dreams are docking in a world designed to make them all come true.  ~ Panda Island, "Marina Lights"  What a concept. Imagine riding on a boat through a warm tropical sea that takes you to another world. Imagine the breeze, the warm feeling of the water as you reach over and trail your hand in it, imagine looking at the sky and seeing dragons flying through a sunlit tropical morning. Imagine a world where you can have everything you've ever wanted, where everything you've ever dreamed of is possible. A world full of magic, technology, love, romance, exploration, discovery, and adventure.  A world where you finally have enough time to do everything you love. A world where your favorite characters and worlds are a part of reality, just a teleporter or a spaceflight away. Where you c