Coding Lightning


Amazing, isn't it? I've restarted this weblog, and already I'm four days behind in my posting. To do a quick catch up, on Monday we drove back to Nashville. 7 hour drive, but a trip which took about 10 hours because we took our good sweet time and stopped a lot. We played some silly old road trip games that are supposed to be hard if you're a kid, but since none of us were kids, the games kept going on and on. We played Ghost, which is a game where one person stars off by saying one letter. Then the next person has to say a letter, one which follows normal English rules in spelling a word. It goes around until someone spells a word. The person who spells a word gets a G, then H, then O...it goes on until they get GHOST and they lose. That's a shitty explanation, but it's sorta like: Person1- A, Person2- P, Person 3- Uh...P, Person1-L, Person 2- Damn! Fine, E. And then Person2 gets a G. The word has to be over four letters, and if you pick a letter that can't make a word, like APPLM, then you lose and get a letter.

Then we played this game where one person picks the name of a place, whether it's a city, country, or whatever. Then the next person has to pick a place that starts with the last letter of that place. So like Canada -> America -> Arkansas -> San Diego -> Oslo, etc. etc. That game took quite a while because we collectively had a pretty good grasp of geography. I had a bit of a tough time because my brother was before me and kept giving me places that ended with A or N, and so I started to run out of places. In the end we all gave up on the game because it took too long.

Yesterday, being Tuesday, I didn't really do anything notable.

Then we get to today. This morning I worked on the planter a bit. I have to take some pictures to show what fine masonry I did. I power washed it clean today, so it's looking quite nice. Next step will be to clean out between the stones so that we can put proper mortar in between and give it a nice look. Then later in the day, I spent about 3-4 hours trying to simulate lightning for a website I'm building. Kind of ridiculous when you think about how much time I spent on that lightning bolt. I first programmed a list of lines whose ends touched. I had to keep the x-coords the same, and vary every other Y-coord to then make it look a bit zig-zaggy. I then did a few randomizing here and there to give it a more natural look. It looked more like an electricity bolt than actual lightning, so then I fit the bolt to a sine curve. Then I fit a sine curve onto that sine curve, so give it a rough wavy look. Then I fit THOSE two nested sine curves to a logarithmic curve, added some extra bolts here and there, and I think I've finally got it to a place where I'm reasonably satisfied.

Right now though, I don't have much to do. It's getting kind of late, and I should go to bed but I'm not feeling tired at all. Hopefully typing this stuff will exhaust me soon enough. It's odd, I haven't told anyone about this weblog yet, and I don't know if people will even visit it. Yet for some reason, I'm posting another thing here again. I'm starting to actually dislike the fact that I'm writing about my day to day life. I mean, it's enjoyable, but I'd much rather write about something worth writing about. That's it for now. I'm out.

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