Life Stories: October 2003 Archives

I know everyone is eager to see some pictures of the haunted house I've been working on, and I'm happy to oblige. Posting may be sparse tomorrow because I'll be busy doing last-minute decorations, but the S4 should keep you occupied.

Here are two shots from the front -- that's my friend Rob standing by the light pole, and his daughter Marley running in the background.

The main structure is built around three EZ-Up awnings, and the walls are made from black plastic tarp and PVC pipe. There's lots of staples, tape, rope, and pipe holding the contraption together. We've got the entire building wired for electricity for our lights, music, and fog machines. It may look like a bum's mansion in the daylight, but once all the effects are going it's really pretty awesome. While we were working on it yesterday, some teenagers walked past and I overheard them saying, "That's the scariest haunted house I've ever been in; I'm not going in this year, no way."

Overheard in the halls:

"I wish they'd put out those fires. I'm kinda losing interest, and I want to wash my car."

Yay, I finally got some nifty PNG graphic libraries to compile into the Quake 2 source code, and now I can generate PNG images as output files for my PhD dissertation project. The text maps I was using previously were a real pain to read, and the new color-coded pictures look really cool.

Want to see? Well, ok! The image is pretty small (32x32); each color represents one of 4 tribes that can control a sector of territory, and its resources; a black sector is not controlled by anyone.

This image was taken from the very early stages of a simulation run, and the control patterns are basically random. However, after the tribes have some time to learn and grow, I hope to see territorial boundaries emerge around food concentrations, just as would happen with tribes of real humans. The tribes will learn to use simple language constructs to coordinate their members' activities (such as attack, defense, and mating), and will then compete for resources in the simulated world.

Time for bed!

I went to Knott's Scary Farm last night with one of my friends, and it was quite an interesting experience. I'm a big fan of Halloween, and I make the pilgrimage to Knott's at least once a year to meander through their mazes, fake fog, minimum-wage monsters, and mildly thrilling rides.

It's generally a lot of fun, and the mazes are always the main attraction; you can ride Supreme Scream and Ghostrider any day of the year, but Malice in Wunderland, Carnival of Carnivorous Clows, and the rest, are only available for one precious month. Malice has always been my favorite, but this year it felt repetitive and lackluster, and I have to award top honors to Carnival and this season's new entry: The Asylum. Vampires are pretty cool, and surprisingly, Lore of the Vampire was one of the best mazes this year; in the past it's been pretty lame, but they spruced it up quite a bit. I've always wanted to like it, but it never really came together before. Vampire was also one of the most heavily-staffed mazes, and there were only a few rooms that felt empty and unmanned.

Most of the scares and thrills consist of guys in masks jumping out at you or swinging down at you from the ceiling, and after a few hours it started getting a bit stale this year. The park wasn't crowded, but it felt like it wasn't fully-staffed either. For example, the highlights of Blood Bayou (often one of the best mazes) have traditionally been the guy who slides out from under a bed to grab your legs, and the chainsaw maniac near the end that chases screaming girls into corners and makes them cry. But this year, neither position was filled, and when we came out of the maze I saw the chainsaw guy just standing around on one of the pathways talking to his buddies. I imagine it's pretty hard to keep tabs on the cast members, with all that's going on, but I thought it was pretty lame.

If you go, I highly recommend the caramel apples (only $3), and the giant pixie stix (only $0.50!). It's critically important to maintain an epileptic blood-sugar level if you expect to hit every maze in just a few hours. Speaking of epilepsy, what's with that stupid magnetic flashing-light jewelry they're selling at amusement parks these days? The slogan on the booths says "Draw more attention!", but the people who clip the plastic jewels to their lips, ears, foreheads, eye-brows, clothes, nipples, &c. don't really look like they need more attention. They look like they need me to sock them in the face.

Good times, good times.

Hey all, I'm home. I know some of you missed me more than others -- ahem -- but that's ok. I just finished reading all of Mike's posts, and he did a really great job while I was gone. The male Britney thing was a little unnecessary, but to each his own. I prefer this image, myself:

As for Vegas (,baby, Vegas), I had a great time. There's nothing more fun then rollin' the bones with your pastor and winning $15 -- except for the other guys I was playing with who won $100. Craps was pretty good to me, but blackjack was cruel and vicious, and let's not talk about any of the video poker machines.

Aside from gambling, I went water-skiing and wakeboarding on both sides of Hoover Dam, and I'm wiped out. My whole body is sore. The wakeboard is wicked fun, and if I went more than once a year I think I'd be pretty good on it.

I took a bunch of pictures, and I'll probably post one or two next week, once I get some rest.

Oh yeah, when I got home my internet connection wasn't working. I spent an hour on the phone with tech support (after finally finding a number for them that wasn't out of service), and after they escalated my call they told me that there's an area-wide outage. Gee thanks, did we need to trouble-shoot for an hour? Eh.

I'll have more to say tomorrow or something. My brain hurts; I fell on the lake a few too many times, I think. Hopefully Mike will stick around and keep writing, but he keeps threatening to quit because it's "not [his] thing", but whatever. It's not like he has anything better to do except make the same arguments on IRC.

Ok, I'm off.

If we meet on a plane and then flirt through the whole flight, that's cool. Then, if you give me your phone number, I'll probably call you and see if you want to go to Knott's Scary Farm -- a guaranteed fun time. This is your cue to tell me that no, we can't hang out, because you have a boyfriend. But take note: you should have considered mentioning that during the two hours we spent talking on the plane, or perhaps when I asked for your number.

Reno is pretty nice. Yesterday it was freezing cold, today it's blazing hot, and it's been bone dry the whole time. Supposedly Reno gets rain and snow in the winter, but I doubt I'm going to see any.

I went to a casino called the Silver Legacy last night, and the first thing I noticed about Reno casinos is that they're a lot smokier than casinos in Las Vegas. Maybe the places in Vegas (,baby, Vegas) have newer ventilation systems, who knows.

I played nickel video draw poker for 3 hours, intent on winning the $212 progressive jackpot with a royal flush. I got within 1 card of a royal flush 4 times in those 3 hours, and I drew 5 4-of-a-kinds (which each paid 125 nickels). Overall, I was down $25 after three hours. By those odds, I would need to play around 30 hours to expect to get the jackpot, at a cost of $8 an hour -- not a very efficient use of my time, and not very profitable.

I tried my best, and I failed. The lesson here is: never try.

Today: look for a buffet. Mmmmmm... buffet. The best buffet I ever had was at the Aladdin in Las Vegas, and I highly recommend it. I don't know if we'll find something that nice here, but we'll give it a shot.