Last day of school before the Winter Break! Then I can do all the coursework I have to do…
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Purple: amethyst, my birthstone.
Maybe that is why I like purple…
My mother’s birthstone was opal. She used to have earrings that were water drop shaped and had chips of opal floating inside with some kind of fluid, probably a clear oil → floating opals.
Cool!
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Oddly enough, my birth stone is Opal by at least one list and my older brother’s is Amethyst… My birth wood is apparently Ivy though, and purple heart isn’t a birth wood, though that makes sense since birth woods are of celtic origin and purpleheart is native to central and south America and would have been unknown to Afro-Eurasian cultures prior to European colonization of the americas.
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I can guess your favourite Prince and the Revolution album then. XD
I managed to get more writing done for my Twine game this morning. I’ve made it up to 190 pages of text in LibreOffice. But I finished the final chapter, more or less. I only have a bonus scene or two to write, and then the 6 endings. And then I can start beating my head against the desk with programming it in Twine. LMAO.
I also managed to write lyrics for a song for the next album! I thought I’d have to sit down and really think about it, but it flowed surprisingly quickly. I managed to think of the last verse while I was doing push-ups to not sit at the computer desk all day, lol. Though it’s interesting how much discipline songwriting demands: I have two verses and a chorus, I can’t waste time, I must get right to the point. It’s daunting to think I had such a detailed idea for the song that I could talk someone’s ear off about it (and I did talk a chatbot’s ear off it while brainstorming, LMAO), but in the end only two verses and a chorus made it and I just hope I conveyed the idea as clearly as it was in my mind. Like I managed to squeeze the iceberg into the verses. 
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Funnily enough, I don’t think I could identify any of Prince’s songs if I heard them and if not for Rain being the purple palette swap of the ninja archetype in Mortal Kombat and being a prince in Armageddon, I’m not sure I’d get the reference… In fact, I just had Alexa play Purple Rain and the only part of the song triggering any sense of familiarity is the chorus, if you can even call it that since its just the title of the song repeated several times in dramatic fashion. Not sure I’ve heard of The Revolution before now, but I’m guessing Purple or one of the more specific colors in the purple wedge of the color wheel is mentioned in the title of one of their songs or albums or one of their albums has cover art dominated by purples… Though I don’t think I’ve ever let color preference influence musical tastes… though now I’m wonder if there is such a thing as purple noise and what it would sound like to mix it with pink noise(which I know is a thing) or to play one in one ear and the other in the other ear… If it is a thing, I’m guessing purple noise would be a mix of low, near infrasonic frequencies with high, near ultrasonic frequencies with few or no intermediate frequencies.
I planted a Maple tree in my backyard nearly twenty years ago. It’s a beautiful tree and I don’t mind all the fallen leaves we have in the yard from it right now.
Yesterday, I just noticed that there is Mistletoe growing on it for the first time ever. Fun!
Oddly, my current WIP has a mistletoe object that I just added earlier this week. Coincidence? Perhaps.
Now I think I might start writing about me winning the lottery… 
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Did an experiment in fading one image into another. The idea was to fade from the radioactive symbol into the peace sign, but since making diagonal bars, especially ones that aren’t 45 degrees is a more complex inequality than vertical or horizontal bars, I decided to start with a quartered circle/Earth Astrology sign. Stuck with the purple gradient for the symbol, but for extra visual flare, decided to try fading the background disc from green to yellow. For the fade, I calculate the pixels for both pure images, approximate 1/60 as 0.0167, and multiply the pixel values for the start image by 1/60 and the frames remaining and the values for the end image by 1/60 and the frames elapsed and add the reduced pixel values. In theory, places where the two symbols overlap should be static, paces with only the radioactive symbol should fade from purple to yellow, places with only the quartered circle should fade from green to purple, and areas with only disc should fade from green to yellow, though I have no clue what colors the fades go through… and while the quartered circle is static, I copied the code from my rotating radioactive symbol, so it should be rotating as it fades away(here, it should complete 1/6 of a turn, a v2 would likely extend the fade so the radio active symbol can complete a full rotation… though if the animation loops(note to self, dig into whether apngasm has options for setting frame rate and loop/no loop), the radioactive symbol should rotate continuously and after the fade, pop back to the radioactive symbol(a v2 will likely try for a reverse fade, honestly, if I could see my own work, this would probably be an intermediate piece generated from incremental testing and I might not even bother with the conversion to png and animating, just viewing the ppms directly in a slide show to make sure results match what I was trying to code(though admittedly, in a timeline where I never went blind, I’d probably be doodling in an actual drawing/graphing program instead of writing code to generate images).
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While most of the radial lines are rotating, one of them isn’t: the one that’s along the positive X-axis (angle 0).
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I made actual genuine progress (three paragraphs 
) in a WIP. That’s the level of progress I deem positive right now, lmao.
I’m also progressing quite nicely with a script I’m writing, and school coursework (not).
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I had my first interview for an academic teaching position!
I will try not to be devastated when I most likely don’t get invited for a campus visit, because the academic job market is (according to my university) currently the worst it’s been in half a century.
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What job market isn’t in absolute shambles these days? Says a guy who is glad his SSDI, meager as it is, is enough he doesn’t have to work retail or food service, which make up the bulk of local job listings that don’t require a driver’s license or a different degree.
Also, I’m waiting on a delivery order to replenish not only my rice(out), pasta(lower than expected thanks to running out of rice) and butter cookies(one of my favorite holiday treats), but my order also includes some summer sausage, buttery crackers(what I’m hoping are store brand Ritz), and two types of block cheese(extra sharp cheddar and pepper jack)… Not quite a holiday meat and chese gift box, but hopefully close enough to provide some of that nostalgic flavor… Have to put off my annual candy cane run for an order placed on the 24th when my SSDI should come in though.
As for the rotation… the issue at the positive x axis has me wondering if I neglected to account for the angle exceeding 2pi. The raw Theta value shouldn’t be able to get that high, but I am adding a tiny bit based on frames elapse that should amount to 1 degree per frame…
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From one academic to another, here’s a thousand kilos of luck to you!
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I finished a mace texture for my game… after posting the devlog
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Got a V2 of the latest animation to share…
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The edge at 0 degrees is still static, for what it’s worth, but it does rotate and fade! 
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Yeah, I think something is going wrong with angles past 360 degrees again—the edges that are supposed to move past 0 just don’t.
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The animations still look pretty cool, though. What I see is a radiation symbol where the outer segments rotate into each other, but the top right segment, the one with the x-axis edge on the bottom that isn’t rotating, leaves a trail behind, so that once the segment completes a full rotation, the radiation symbol becomes a smaller circle surrounded by a thick ring.
I like the color variations, they’re nice. Are other people allowed to use the GIFs? I’d obviously credit the creator.
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I have to double check the code, but I think I know the logic error…
I use the x and y values of the pixel fed to one of cmath’s atan functions to get the value of theta. As the function returns values in the range -pi to pi, I then do a check for negative values and add 2pi if it is negative… I then convert from radians to turns by dividing by 2pi and add my z value times 0.0028(approximately 1/360) to increment by 1 degree per frame…
The V1 didn’t have a check for turn exceeding 1… but when I implemented the check and fix, I did the check as if I was still working in radians, checking if the value is above 2pi and subtracting 2pi if it is… naturally, if you do this check on turns and are doing a single 360 rotation where at most you’re adding a full turn to a raw angle, you should never get above 2, nowhere near 2pi, making the check useless… and the if, else if chain I’m using to determine whether to color the outer ban to match the central circle or to match the background disc only checks if turn is below increments of 1/6 up to 5/6 with the last sextant and any overflow falling into the default else.
Admittedly, If I wanted to run a longer animation, it might be cool to take advantage of this bug to shift between a solid ring and a broken one.
As for color variation, the RGB values for each pixel in the pure images are all either 0 or equal to the radius from the center of the image with the disc having a radius of 255 pixels, so everything is based on a circular gradient from dark center to bright edge. The Fading breaks this of course, and while making the v2, I did have to implement a check for values exceeding 255, though best I can tell from feeding the raw ppms from before implementing that check through cat, sort, and uniq and checking the results, there aren’t any cases exceeding 257, so hopefully its just a rare case of some pixels near the rim of the disc just barely going over a rounding threshold in the fading calculation(ascii format ppms are absolutely huge, but at least it means the pixel data is in a human readable format and I can use standard linux text manipulation tools to analyze what went wrong when optipng reports it can’t convert an invalid ppm to png… another bug I discovered was negative values in the ppm… turns out the issue there was forgetting to change from 60 to 360 in the fade calculation to account for the higher frame count, leading to frames left going into negatives after 60 frames).
As for sharing the gif… technically, there are no gifs as I use animated pngs, but I’m fine with people sharing with attribution… perhaps I should look into the creative commons license and what it means for the original creator… at least, I think the images I generate would fall into the kind of categories where creative commons is the appropriate copyleft license.
Okay, I think I’ve fixed the issue that cause the radioactive symbol to turn into a solid ring… Also tried an experiment with off center circles… If I’m correct, the result should feature 3 circles, one each of red, green, and blue, the green fixed in the center and the red and blue starting in opposite corners and moving along a diagonal to phase into and fuse with the green circle to make a gray circle before spliting again with red and blue ending up where the other started.
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There’s supposed to be a quartered circle in these images, right? I just can’t make it out.