The Changelog – February 2023
There is a little trick I find helpful to get unstuck. Take the one thing you would like to do. Take the smallest related activity that you would consider a goal. Divide that effort by ten. I wanted to actively come back to fiction writing for a long time, but I never managed to get myself to do anything in that regard. So this month, I followed my own advice and asked myself to write for 30 minutes three days a week.
Mastodon Revisited
A couple of years ago, I wrote critically about Mastodon. Now, with Twitter pluging into a disgusting shittification, I was exiled on Mastodon. Let’s see where and how my opinion on the Don changed in the last month.
The Changelog – January 2023
The first month of the year is always a month of change. However, the mistake is to make it a month of drastic change. First, for once, the months start with the New Year’s Eve celebrations hangover, so we are already set up for failure. Second, drastic changes are doomed to failure anyway, so we should not put all our hopes on the line with bold new years resolutions. Is this a good reason to give up?
The books I read in 2022
I believe nothing describes a person better than looking at the books they read. If that list is empty, you already know that you should reconsider that human interaction (unless, of course, there are good, valid reasons). But if that list is not empty, we can also know what kind of person they are. So what this list tells about me? For one, it says that I am a bit disappointed.
The Changelog – December 2022
Oh, December. You beautiful cozy lazy month. It is the month in which I delude that I can make 10000 different things, but, instead, I spend all my time reading and being with my family. Not a bad thing to do, don’t you agree? December is also when winter begins. People see winter as a gloomy season, but I see it as the season of rest. If you look around, winter is when Nature goes to rest.
The Changelog – November 2022
This November has been weird. If I had to describe it, my first instinct would be to say that it felt like slipped time. After all, my emotional status has been all over the place, with moments of genuine excitement and moments of dread. November is usually a bad month. It is always full of bad memories and events. Even this year, November hit again early in the month: once again, I had to attend a November funeral.
Utility-based AI for Games
Finite-State Machines (FSM) are the bread-and-butter of game AI due to their simplicity (both in implementation and theory) and effectiveness. As such, FSMs are the topic of many tutorials and guides. Unfortunately, most of them focus on the States part of FSM. After all, they are called Finite-State Machines, so you expect that states are the critical part. Well, no. The critical part is the other: transitions. Transitions can make or break your AI independently of how carefully crafted the states are.
The Changelog – October 2022
It was an October that didn’t look like October: the maximum temperatures never went under 25 °C; it was almost always sunny, and everything looked more like spring than autumn. This threw me off a bit. At the moment I am writing, it is Halloween, yet I do not really feel it. Well, I didn’t feel the October vibes for the other part of the month, either. So I will probably call this month September 2.
“Matteo squashed a lizard and Davide cried”
In one of my earliest memories, on a warm sunny morning, I am in my school backyard with my teachers and schoolmates. Something catch my attention. On a sidewalk, I see a small, motionless lizard. Maybe it is injured, or perhaps it is already dead (it is in the nature of childhood memories to be uncertain). What I know is that I bend over it in awe: “There is a lizard!
The Changelog – September 2022
September is the best month. It is the “back to school” month. The time when you sprint into a new season of life. Only that, this time, I think I forgot about that. I still have a task I put on my to-do list on September 1st. It is about my regular planning and organization for the new season. I usually need to do that in the first week of September.