School and Life

So, I haven’t updated for awhile, but I haven’t disappeared! Lately, my school work and life have taken over and I haven’t had much spare time to program for private purposes. However, I am taking programming classes, so my skills are increasing in the background! Hopefully I’ll get some time to work on my various projects, etc, in the near future!

Philosophical Rant

Here is my philosophical rant of the day! Take note that this argument was based on a small window of thought, and that their are most likely (and almost certainly) many holes to my logic. However, I wanted to leave it as open as I can to provoke a good argument! Here we go:

In life, inductive reasoning is only useful until proven false, making inductive reasoning always just a “good guess” except in the case of predicting what the afterlife will be. You cannot use deductive logic to achieve a pure answer as to what will happen when you die, from a self perspective, because you will be dead, and therefore not be able to apply any of your deductions to your life anymore, or for that matter possibly apply any knowledge anymore. Therefore, in life, you can only use induction to formulate what the afterlife might be.

Consider this idea: You cannot alter the past; you can only alter the present. The fact that we accept that time moves forward warrants us to do things in our present, because we know they will affect our future. When we are born, we do not understand this, and we are living purely in the moment, with no thoughts of the future (At least for the first few moments.) However, as we age, we inductively come to the conclusion that time will continue to move forward, and our death is imminent, yet, it is a fact based on induction. As our minds order and generalize experiences, time moves faster, and we are able to concern ourselves with the future more, and we still rely on the fact that time will always move forward.

By accepting in your mind that time will always move forward, you are using a very inductive path of reasoning to get to that conclusion. In all actuality, time could restart at a certain point, run in reverse, or just be playing back certain portions at random intervals for all we truly know. Therefore, if we look at the afterlife in the sense of “will I ever experience anything ever again after death?” telling those people, no you will not, would be through an inductive reasoning path as well. Science cannot prove that the afterlife doesn’t exist because even the laws of science were formulated at one point through induction, as at one point, we had no means to deduce any reasoning, and had to formulate them on our own. Therefore, couldn’t we say that induction is the only means of logic, because to use true deduction we would have to assume we know more than we don’t, which is constantly proven false.

Internet Censorship Steps Up To Bat

Right now, I am at a loss for words at my utter hatred towards AT&T. They have thrown the first punch in a series of certain blows towards a censored internet in America. This CANNOT be tolerated by the people of the US. They have started by blocking a few sub directories of the popular web-culture site 4chan, including /b/. Although I don’t frequent this website, I understand its importance to the web community, and also that any punch thrown in the spirit of internet censorship cannot be tolerated. My advice to anyone reading this is to immediately cancel any and all AT&T services citing this as a reason, and tell anyone else using AT&T to do the same as well. If we let them control the internet now, there may be a point where we never get unbiased information from the internet again.

Please Digg up this article to inform more of the evils that are occuring.

EDIT: AT&T has unblocked 4chan, and all is well (for now.) However, this could likely be a “test the waters” scenario, in case they ever plan on blocking sites in the future. Hopefully the splurge of internet activism that occurred will teach them their lesson.

jBomber!

Just been fooling around more with Java and Slick, and decided to recreate a clone of one of my favorite arcade games, Bomberman!

Also, in case anyone is following my posts, most of these projects are just experimentations, so don’t expect a finished version I’ve been learning slowly and making mini projects to apply some of the knowledge.

roguelike: Tileset Variety Eh?

roguelike: Tileset Experiments

A mountain!

I also added a field of view implementation of the old text mode I was using for testing earlier:

Light!

roguelike: Map generation experiments

Mad evil scientist laugh cue!

Roguelike ASCII

Well, I’ve been busy with school, but I decided to do a little work on a roguelike experiment with random map generation, etc. Anyways, here is a small screenshot of where it is now!

Dungeons Galore!

Java Programming: Testing out Slick

I’ve been recently fooling around with a nice 2D java games engine named “Slick” made by Kev of coke and code. Here’s a screenshot of my 1 hour prototype game in it

FireFire roguelike 0.2.1

Screenshots below show a couple of new things, fire ants and better caves, but underneath the hood made some important technical changes:

- All units, tiles, items, and the player are stored on grids rather than in lists that have to be cycled through every turn. This greatly enhances the efficiency of the game.

- Improved the generator so it can never generate “holes” that can cause out of range crashes, and also now the cave generator generates the correct amount of tiles (instead of 20×20 being really 21×21. don’t ask how this happened )